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Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1899

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Title: Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1899

Author: Various

Editor: William Jay Youmans


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, JANUARY 1899 ***

  Established by Edward L. Youmans

              APPLETONS'
           POPULAR SCIENCE
               MONTHLY

              EDITED BY
         WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS

              VOL. LIV

    NOVEMBER, 1898, TO APRIL, 1899

              NEW YORK
       D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
                1899




          COPYRIGHT, 1899,
     BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.




VOL. LIV.   ESTABLISHED BY EDWARD L. YOUMANS.   No. 3.

APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

JANUARY, 1899.

_EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS._




CONTENTS.


                                                                    PAGE

     I. The Evolution of Colonies. VI. Industrial Evolution. By
          JAMES COLLIER                                              289

    II. The Mind's Eye. By Prof. JOSEPH JASTROW. (Illustrated.)      299

   III. Nature Study in the Philadelphia Normal School. By L. L. W.
          WILSON, Ph. D.                                             313

    IV. Principles of Taxation. XX. The Diffusion of Taxes. By the
          Late Hon. DAVID A. WELLS                                   319

     V. Our Florida Alligator. By I. W. BLAKE. (Illustrated.)        330

    VI. The Racial Geography of Europe. The Jews. II. By Prof.
          WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY. (Illustrated.)                          338

   VII. True Tales of Birds and Beasts. By DAVID STARR JORDAN        352

  VIII. Glacial Geology in America. By Prof. DANIEL S. MARTIN        356

    IX. Modern Studies of Earthquakes. By GEORG GERALAND             362

     X. A Short History of Scientific Instruction. By Sir J. N.
          LOCKYER                                                    372

    XI. Should Children under Ten learn to Read and Write? By Prof.
          G. T. W. PATRICK                                           382

   XII. Soils and Fertilizers. By CHARLES MINOR BLACKFORD, Jr.,
          M. D.                                                      392

  XIII. Sketch of Friedrich August Kekulé. (With Portrait.)          401

   XIV. Editor's Table: A Voice from the Pulpit.--Lessons of
          Anthropology.--An Example of Social Decadence.--The
          Advance of Science                                         409

    XV. Scientific Literature                                        415

   XVI. Fragments of Science                                         425




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

     SINGLE NUMBER, 50 CENTS. YEARLY SUBSCRIPTION, $5.00.

     COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

     Entered at the Post Office at New York, and admitted for
     transmission through the mails at second-class rates.




[Illustration: AUGUST VON KEKULÉ.]




APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

JANUARY, 1899.




THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES.

BY JAMES COLLIER.


VI.--INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION.

The earliest nomadic stage of mankind has left traces in many of the
colonies. The first age of French Canada, of New York, of great part
of North America, was one of hunters and trappers, and it has
continued in the Northwest till recent times. The first brief period
of Rhodesia was that of the big-game hunter. The Boers of the
Transvaal are still as much hunters as farmers. The American
backwoodsman who clears a patch, then sells his improvements to the
first newcomer, and, placing his wife and children and scanty
belongings on a cart, proceeds _da capo_ elsewhere, is a nomadic
pioneer. The stage is in one way or another perpetual, for the class
never quite dies out. The drunken English quarryman who, driven by a
demon of restlessness, continually goes "on tramp," and in his
wanderings covers on foot a space equal to twice the circumference of
the globe, is a demi-savage whose nomadism is only checked by the
"abhorred approaches of old age." If he emigrates, he repeats the old,
wild life as a pick-and-shovel man in Queensland or a quarryman in New
South Wales. The soberer colonial youth, who more luxuriously canters
from farm to farm in New Zealand on the back of a scrub, is a tamer
specimen who settles down when he marries. Nay, the "restless man" who
periodically applies for leave of absence from a colonial legislature
in order to travel in India, China, and Timbuctoo, is a still milder
but not less incorrigible example of the same indestructible type.

The pastoral stage is all but universal. Wherever grass grows (and
there is wild grass almost everywhere) sheep can graze, and where
there are succulent twigs cattle will fatten on them. The South
American _estancias_ and the ranches of Colorado, the cattle runs of
Queensland and northern New Zealand, the sheep runs of Victoria and
New South Wales repeat and perpetuate this stage. The genesis of it
may even now be daily observed. A Manchester accountant who has never
before been astride a horse will in twelve months learn the mysteries
of cattle and sheep farming, then purchase a hundred acres or two from
the colonial Government, gradually clear it of timber, build of his
own trees, with no skilled assistance, a weatherboard cottage, and
take home a swiftly wooed wife to lead with him a rather desolate
existence in "the bush." Or (on a larger scale) a squatter,[1] who is
commonly a gentleman by birth and education, comes out from England
with inherited wealth, buys or leases from the Government a large
inland tract of grazing land, takes with him flocks and herds,
shepherds and stockmen, builds a bark or wooden manor house, and
settles down to the life of Abram on the plains of Mamre. In earlier
days, when the colony was in its infancy, he would not have had to
purchase or lease his "run." One country after another saw the golden
age of a would-be landed aristocracy. As Norman William parceled out
all England among his nobles and knights, rulers of conquered
countries were then mighty free with what did not belong to them.
Possessing the authority of a sovereign, Columbus made lavish grants
of land, and thus pacified his rebels. Charles II presented Carolina
to eight proprietors. Baronies of twelve thousand acres in South
Carolina, manors of twenty thousand acres in Maryland, were dwarfed by
territorial principalities of more than a million acres in New York.
The absolute governors of early Australia gave away wide tracts. When
land was not given it was taken, on Rob Roy's principle. During the
interregnum that followed the recall of the first Governor of New
South Wales, military robbers seized fifteen thousand acres, and under
subsequent administrations they continued their depredations. Land was
held on various tenures. The first American forms were varieties of
belated feudalism; of a hundred often strange and ridiculous emblems
of suzerainty perhaps a dozen repeated Old World customs.[2] Sir H. S.
Maine has proved that nearly all the feudal exactions that maddened a
whole people to mutiny in 1789 were then in force in England. How
shadowy they must have grown is shown by the fact that none of them
was transported to Botany Bay in that or later years. They were
atrophied portions of the British land system when Australia was
founded in 1788. For fully sixteen years the possession of lands
granted or seized was as absolute as the English law ever allows it to
be. Then the landholders, finding the large tracts already conceded
insufficient for the development of the pastoral industry, applied for
more, and themselves suggested in 1803 a plan of leasing crown lands
which in the following year was legalized as "the first charter of
squatterdom"; it was the beginning of a system that has brought under
pastoral occupancy territories as extensive as the largest European
countries. The land system formed part of or gave birth to a political
organization. A host of so-called _seigneurs_ imported into old Canada
as much of the _ancien régime_ as would bear the voyage. Manors in
Maryland reproduced the feudal courts-baron and courts-leet. The great
New York landowners, as inheriting both English and Dutch
institutions, presided in such courts and were at the same time
hereditary members of a powerful legislative order.[3] The courts were
dropped on the way out to Australia, but the political influence of
the English landed aristocracy inhered in their representatives at the
antipodes. As the Southern slavearchy, through its Washingtons and
Jeffersons, Clays and Calhouns, was for three quarters of a century
the driving force in American politics, the Australian squatterarchy
for one generation or more ruled the seven colonies with a sway that
waxed as the absolute power of the governor waned. It composed the
legislature, appointed the judges, controlled the executive, and if
the governor was refractory it sent him home. In both southern
countries social life reflected its tastes and was the measure of its
grandeur. It constituted "society," ran the races, gave the balls, and
kept open house; the surrounding villages lived in its sunshine. Why
could not this patriarchal state last, as it has lasted in Arabia for
thousands of years and in Europe for centuries? In the Southern States
it was brought to bankruptcy by the civil war. In Australia it
collapsed before two enemies as deadly--a succession of droughts and a
fall in the price of wool. The banker has his foot on the squatter's
neck. If one may judge from the published maps, three fourths of the
freehold land in the older colonies is in the hands of the money
lenders. The once lordly runholder, who would have excluded from his
table, or at least from his visiting circle, any one engaged in
commerce, is now the tenant of a mortgage company which began by using
him too well and ended by crushing him unmercifully.

It is also brought to a close by the rise of the agricultural stage.
The colonial _latifundia_ gets broken up for the same economic reasons
as that of the mother country. Whenever from the increase of
population wheat-growing becomes more profitable than grazing, land
rises in value, and vast sheep walks are subdivided into
two-hundred-acre farms, which are put under the plow. The transition
may be retarded in some countries and altogether arrested in others.
Nasse has shown that, in consequence of the moisture of the climate,
there was in the sixteenth century a continual tendency in England to
revert from agriculture to pasture. The light rainfall, high
temperatures, and unfertilized soil will forever keep nine tenths of
Australia under grass. Most of the mountainous north and the
glacier-shaved portions of the south of New Zealand must be perpetual
cattle runs and sheep walks. A century or perhaps centuries will pass
before much of the light soil of Tasmania, hardly enriched by the
scanty foliage of the eucalyptus, is sufficiently fertilized by
grazing to grow corn. Rich alluvial or volcanic lands are put under
the plow, without passing through the pastoral stage, as soon as
markets are created by the advent of immigrants. There is a cry for
farm lands. Companies that have bought large estates break them up
into allotments. When they or other large landholders still resist
pressure, the radical colonial legislature accelerates their
deliberations by putting on the thumbscrew of a statute which
confiscates huge cantles of their land. Or the colonial Government, if
socialist-democratic, purchases extensive properties, which it breaks
up into farms and communistic village settlements. Over wide tracts
the agriculturist, great and small, takes the place of the
pastoralist. He holds his lands under a variety of tenures. New South
Wales, in its search for an ideal form, has flowered into fifteen
varieties. Other colonies are stumbling toward it more or less blindly
through a succession of annual statutes. Where land is abundant the
tenure will be easy. In North America nominal quitrents were general;
the system was long since introduced into South Africa, and it has
lately been imported into New Zealand in spite of all previous
experience to the effect that such rents can not be collected. Mr.
Eggleston remarks that in the United States the tendency was to "a
simple and direct ownership of the soil by the occupant." Since those
days Henry George has come and (alas!) gone. A craze for the
nationalization of the land buzzes in the bonnets of all who have no
land. There is an equal reluctance on the part of colonial
legislatures to grant waste lands as freeholds and on the part of
purchasers to accept them on any other terms. Hence the constant
effort to devise a tenure which shall reserve the rights of the colony
and yet not oppress the tenant. One legislature has blasphemed into
the "eternal lease," which would seem to be almost preferable to
absolute ownership in a country subject to earthquakes! But the
tenure in the early days is unimportant. With a virgin soil yielding
at first seventy and then regularly forty bushels to the acre, and
high prices ruling, the farmer can stand any tenure. Seen at market or
cattle show, his equine or bovine features and firm footing on mother
earth suggest a sense of solidity in the commonwealth to which he
belongs. He gives it its character. The legislature consists of his
representatives. Laws are passed in his interest. He controls the
executive. His sons fill the civil service. Judges sometimes come from
his ranks, and lawyers easily fall back into them. He supports the
churches and fills them. Small towns spring up in place of the
pastoral villages to supply his wants. As the period of the Golden
Fleece was the colonial age of gold, when Jason, the wool king, made a
fortune, received a baronetcy, and, returning to the mother country,
founded a county family and intermarried with the British aristocracy,
so the agricultural stage is the colonial age of silver, in money as
in morals. It lasted in England till well into the century, in Germany
till the other day, in France till now. It is, in the main, the stage
of contemporary colonies. What brings _it_ to an end? The soil gets
exhausted, prices fall, and a succession of wet seasons in New Zealand
or of dry seasons in Australia or South Africa sends the farmer into
the money market. Nearly every province of almost every colony gets
mortgaged up to the hilt. The foot of the land agent is on the neck of
the farmer, who becomes his tenant or serf--_adscriptus glebæ_ as much
as the Old English villeins who were the ancestors of the farmer, or
the Virginia villeins who repeated in the seventeenth century the Old
English status. But tenancy does not always arise out of bankrupt
proprietorship. A capitalist may drain an extensive marsh (like that
along the valley of the Shoalhaven River in New South Wales) and
divide the rich alluvial soil into hundreds of profitable dairy farms.
More inland marshes, like the Piako Swamp in New Zealand, have been so
completely drained as to make the soil too dry to carry wheat, and so
have swamped both capitalists and banker. Where the squatter owner
keeps the land in his own hands, he may lease an unbroken-up tract for
three or five years to a farmer who plows and fences it, takes off
crops, pays a light rent of from five to fifteen bushels per acre, and
leaves it in grass. On one tenure or another the whole colony
gradually comes into cultivation.

The predominance of the agricultural interest is long threatened and
at length shaken by the rise of the industrial stage. It is partly
evolved from the pastoral and agricultural stages and partly
independent. Nor do these stages at once and necessarily give rise to
collective industry. In all young colonies where the population is
scanty and processes are simple there are no division and no
association of labor. The account that one of the best of American
historians gives of the Northwest Territory might be accepted as a
description of this primitive state, and realizes Fichte's ideal of a
_geschlossener Handelstaat_ (closed trade state). Shut in by
mountains, the people raised their own flax and sometimes grew their
own wool, which they spun and wove at home. They made their own
spinning wheels and looms, as they made their own furniture. They
tanned their own leather and cobbled rude shoes of it. Of Indian-corn
husks they spun ropes and manufactured horse collars and chair
bottoms. Barrels and beehives were formed of sawn hollow trees. They
extracted sugar from the maple and tea from the sassafras root. Their
boats were dug-out canoes. In colonies of later foundation this
self-sufficing stage, which repeats an earlier period in the mother
country than the time when the colony was given off, is dropped,
though there are traces of it everywhere to be found. Sheep countries
give birth to the woolen industry. New Zealand reduplicates the woolen
manufactures of England and, owing to protective duties, has attained
a deserved success. New South Wales, with finer wools, has not
succeeded, for no other apparent reason than that she refuses to
impose such duties. For it is to be observed that it is under
legislative protection--bounties, bonuses, drawbacks, export and
especially import duties--that almost every colonial industry has
grown up, as the industries of the mother country grew up. Sometimes
the profit in a particular undertaking is exactly equal to the amount
of the import duty, and it is seldom greater. By taking extravagant
advantage of the liberty long refused (as leave to manufacture was
long refused to the North American colonies), but at length conceded,
to impose import duties, an Australasian colony, misled as much by its
own splendid energy as by evil counselors (Carlyle among them), built
up a whole artificial system of industries which sank in ruinous
collapse when the boom had passed. Independent industries spring first
from the soil. Gold and silver mining lose their wild adventurous
character, and become regular industries, worked by companies with
extensive plants. The digging of gum in Auckland (bled from the
gigantic Kauri pine) is operated by merchants who keep the gum diggers
in a species of serfage. The discovery of coal makes native industries
possible or remunerative, but till iron has been found the system is
incomplete. All countries, and therefore all colonies, are late in
reaching this stage; the most advanced contemporary colonies have not
yet reached it. None the less have they followed England with swifter
steps, if with less momentum, into the modern age of iron--that
Brummagem epoch which has the creation of markets for its war cry,
state socialism for its gospel, Joseph of Birmingham for its prophet,
and the British Empire for its deity.

The iron age is fitly inaugurated by the most degraded relationship
that man can bear to man--that of slavery. Only the oldest of modern
colonies imitate the mother countries in passing through this stage;
in those of later foundation a mere shadow of it remains, or it takes
other shapes. Colonists first enslave the natives of the country where
they settle. In the South American colonies, where they went to find
gold, they would work for no other purpose; they therefore needed the
natives to till the soil; they needed them also as carriers. For these
purposes they were used unscrupulously. They were distributed among
the Spaniards under a system of _repartimientos_ which repeated the
provisions of Greek and Roman slavery, and was itself reduplicated
three centuries later in the convict assignment system of New South
Wales. With such savage cruelty was it worked that, according to the
testimony of Columbus, six sevenths of the population of Hispaniola
died under it in a few years. The same form of slavery, but of a very
different character, prevailed in Africa down almost to our own times.
In the British colonies it was submerged in 1834, from causes exterior
to itself, by the humanitarian wave that wrecked the West Indies; in
the French colonies it was abolished by the revolutionary government
of 1848; in the Dutch colonies it possibly subsists to this day.
Theoretically abolished or not, the relationship between civilized
whites and savage blacks must be everywhere a modified form of
slavery; and a white colonization of the African tropics can only take
place under conditions indistinguishable from a limited slavery. In
colder or younger colonies, even if a more refined sentiment had
permitted it, there could be no question of enslaving the fierce red
Indians, the warlike Maoris, or the intractable Australian blacks. The
Indians rendered some services to the northern colonists. The Maoris
worked for the first immigrants into Canterbury, but as free laborers,
and the phase soon passed away as more valuable labor arrived. Blacks
were in the early years employed by the Australian settlers, but like
nearly all savages they were found incapable of continuous industry.
The next step is to import slaves. To lighten the oppression of the
Mexicans, negroes were introduced, as they had previously been into
Europe. There, and still more in the southern colonies of North
America, they were the chief pioneers. They cut down forests, cleared
the jungles, drained the swamps, and opened up the country. For the
best part of two hundred years the world's sugar, rice, cotton,
tobacco, and indigo were grown by negro labor. The effect on the negro
himself has been to raise him one grade in the scale of being. If, as
Mr. Galton believes, he is naturally two grades below the European, a
place in the "organization of labor" will have to be found for him
midway between the white workman and the slave. It is, indeed, being
found. As a farmer the negro has totally failed. "But he is a good
laborer under supervision. He is a success in the mines. He has found
acceptance in the iron furnaces and about the coke ovens. He is in
great demand in periods of railroad construction," and he is a Western
pioneer. Above born and bred slaves for life there is the status of
imported slaves for a term. For years Kanakas, hired or captured from
the Melanesian Islands of the Pacific, were used as slaves by the
sugar planters of Queensland, until the outcry in England put a stop
to an ill-conducted traffic. It has since been resumed under humaner
conditions, which make it as defensible as slavery can ever be.
Coolies from India are imported into Fiji and Hongkong practically as
free laborers. They are also employed on board the great liners that
ply between India, China, Australia, and England, much to the
discontent of the working class and to the great satisfaction of the
well-to-do, who thus gain cheaper passages and lower freights. The
radical opposition is no more likely to prevent this form of native
labor from spreading to all suitable environments than the
conservative opposition has prevented women from filling the
employments within their improved capacities. The ubiquitous Chinaman,
again, has imported himself into most colonies, and so long as he
takes a place that the white laborer refuses to occupy, he will
present the ugly problem of the coexistence of an indestructible alien
race with a civilized people whose type of civilization and his are
irreconcilable.

European colonies have also known white slavery, as Greek and Roman
colonies knew it, and slavery of their own race and nation, as
European countries knew it. Its most degraded type has doubtless been
Spanish, English, and French convictism. The Australian-English is the
most familiar and the worst. The Australian convict was a slave for
life or a long term. Like the slave, he was at the mercy of his
master, excepting that corporal punishment could not be inflicted by
the master's hands. The lash was none the less kept going; in a single
year, in New South Wales, nearly three thousand floggings were
administered. The Roman _ergastula_ were pleasure bowers compared with
the convict hells of Parramatta, in New South Wales, and Port Arthur,
in Tasmania. Marcus Clarke's terrible fiction proves to be still more
terrible fact. Convicts were herded together like pigs; kindness was
rare, oppression general, and many fine men died inch by inch. Such
was the state of things even after the introduction of the assignment
system. According to that system, convicts were assigned as
agricultural laborers and shepherds to settlers who cried out for
them, as the American planters did for slaves. Craftsmen were allotted
to high officials in lieu of salary or to influential persons who
hired them to others (herein repeating English serfdom) or permitted
them to work for themselves, receiving a portion of their earnings
(herein repeating Greek slavery). Mechanics were employed on public
works, and hundreds of buildings were erected by convict masons,
bricklayers, and carpenters. Day laborers were employed on roads, and
hundreds of miles of solid highway are a durable monument to the
memory of the convict. They were the true pioneers of the country,
braving the dangers of the "bush," resisting the aborigines, clearing
and cultivating the land, and developing the resources of the
colonies. For themselves they did well and ill. Many reformed, and
after manumission, which was at first special and at length general,
became respectable citizens, dealers, and traders. Some grew to be
prosperous merchants, wealthy squatters, editors, legislators, and all
but ministers. Their sons are judges, legislators, solicitors,
Government officials, newspaper proprietors. After lasting for sixty
years the system of transportation was at length abolished in
consequence of the opposition of the working class, who objected to
competition, and of the respectable classes generally. The legislative
body and the large landowners were rather in favor of its perpetuity,
and there are still members of the old "slave-driving party" in
Tasmania who regret its discontinuance.

The bond servants, who were common in New England and at first more
numerous than slaves in the Southern States, repeated the status of
the English serfs. Their origin was various. Crime, debt, sale by
parents, voluntary surrender, and kidnapping all contributed their
quota. The period of indentured service was at first from seven to ten
years, and was ultimately reduced to a fixed term of four years. They
were exchanged and sold like any other commodity. Their treatment
seems to have been often harsh. Like the Australian convicts, many of
them prospered. Leading families in the United States trace their
origin to bondmen. Not a few of the Southern overseers, free laborers,
and small farmers are believed to be descended from them. The vagabond
element in all the States, the "white trash" of the South, and the
criminal and pauper inhabitants of certain regions in the North are
also affiliated on the more degraded sections of the class.[4]

The worst of modern inventions, it has been said, is the invention of
the workingman. The workingman, however, has a pedigree; he is the son
of the bondman or the serf, and the grandson of the slave, who would
have been still more discreditable "inventions" if they had not been
the outgrowth of their time and place. The servile character of the
workman long survived in European countries; it was not till the
beginning of this century that the last trades were emancipated in
England. While in North America and New South Wales the transition is
plainly traceable, all vestiges of it have disappeared in the younger
colonies. In these, almost from the first, the mechanic is master of
the situation. The carpenter who can put up a wooden cottage commands
regular work and high wages, while the preacher who builds him a house
not made with hands is starved. The anomaly is in perfect consistency
with the biological analogy; the brain is everywhere of late
development. As the colony grows, wages fall, and the position of
professional men becomes more tolerable, but, _en revanche_, the
workman acquires and at length almost monopolizes political power. The
premier and cabinet ministers are sometimes former peddlers, gold
diggers, coal miners, shepherds, etc. The legislative bodies consist
largely of labor representatives. Laws are passed in the interest of
labor. Not content with a share of political power out of all
proportion to their numbers or importance, the regimented trades,
under the command of unscrupulous leaders, deliver a pitched battle
against the employers, with the object of gaining practical possession
of the agencies of production and distribution. They are necessarily
defeated. The value of labor and the importance of the mechanic
decline with the application of machinery to all industrial processes.
Accumulated wealth, subsidizing inventions, acquires an increasing
ascendency. The industrial system is in no greater danger from the
onslaughts of labor than civilized countries from the invasion of
barbarians.

Only the beginnings of the commercial epoch, or age of bronze, are to
be found in colonies. In production we witness the same supersession
of individual enterprise by the limited liability company. This is
also the case in distribution, where many obsolete Old World stages
are recapitulated. We may still see the long, slow bullock team, the
wearied pack horse (the fur trade in Canada was carried on by
"brigades of pack horses"), the hawker, purveyor of news and gossip.
We easily trace the evolution of the shop: at first a ship, then
landed, with everything inside--groceries, meat, bread, fruit, and
vegetables, clothes, crockery, ironmongery, stationery, and tobacco;
the butcher first hives off, then the baker, the grocer; in course of
time reintegration takes place, and shops are to be found in the
colonial cities which reduplicate Whiteley's in London, where
everything may again be had as in the beginning. The processes of
exchange likewise recapitulate the past. Barter is long universal, and
is still common in colonial villages. Even then a standard is needed.
In the Old English period the "currency" consisted of cattle, named by
a facetious writer "the current _kine_ of the realm." In Virginia and
Maryland tobacco was the circulating medium for a century and a half,
supplemented in Maryland with hemp and flax; taxes were paid in
tobacco, and rent in kind. In Illinois and Canada, skins and furs,
with wampum for small coin; in New England the latter singular
currency was used far into the eighteenth century. New South Wales has
the demerit of inventing the destructive medium of rum; wages were
paid in it or in wheat; meal or spirits were taken at the doors of
theaters. Store receipts for produce were given by the Government and
passed current, not without depreciation; military officers issued
bills for all sums up to one hundred pounds; private individuals, in
the lack of specie, gave promissory notes. Fixed prices were long
unknown; extortioners in the early days of all the colonies made a
profit of a thousand per cent; and in quite recent days usurious
attorneys exacted interest at the rate of a hundred per cent.

Colonies sometimes anticipate the development of the mother country.
The communistic dreams of the forties in France and England were for a
brief while realized in old Virginia, as they are at this hour being
realized in the village settlements of South Australia; and the state
socialism rendered popular by the German victories of 1870 was perhaps
more thoroughly embodied in convict New South Wales than anywhere else
outside of Peru under the Incas, as it is now sweeping all of the
Australasian colonies onward to an unknown goal.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] In its primary American sense the word _squatter_ denotes the
backwoodsman described in the foregoing paragraph. In its secondary
Australian sense it means the large landholder now described.

[2] See an instructive article by Mr. Edward Eggleston, Social
Conditions in the Colonies. Century Magazine, 1884, pp. 849, 850.

[3] Eggleston, _op. cit._, p. 850.

[4] Eggleston, _op. cit._, p. 858.




THE MIND'S EYE.

BY JOSEPH JASTROW.

  HAMLET.--My father,--Methinks, I see my father.

  HORATIO.--O, where, my lord?

  HAMLET.--In my mind's eye, Horatio.


It is a commonplace taught from nursery to university that we see with
our eyes, hear with our ears, and feel with the fingers. This is the
truth, but not the whole truth. Indispensable as are the sense organs
in gaining an acquaintance with the world in which we live, yet they
alone do not determine how extensive or how accurate that acquaintance
shall be. There is a mind behind the eye and the ear and the finger
tips which guides them in gathering information, and gives value and
order to the exercise of the senses. This is particularly true of
vision, the most intellectual of all the senses, the one in which mere
acuteness of the sense organ counts least and the training in
observation counts most. The eagle's eye sees farther, but our eyes
tell us much more of what is seen.

The eye is often compared to a photographic camera, with its eyelid
cap, its iris shutter, its lens, and its sensitive plate--the retina;
when properly adjusted for distance and light, the image is formed on
the retina as on the glass plate, and the picture is taken. So far the
comparison is helpful; but while the camera takes a picture whenever
and wherever the plate happens to be exposed, the complete act of
seeing requires some co-operation on the part of the mind. The retina
may be exposed a thousand times and take but few pictures; or perhaps
it is better to say that the pictures may be taken, but remain
undeveloped and evanescent. The pictures that are developed are
stacked up, like the negatives in the photographer's shop, in the
pigeonholes of our mental storerooms--some faded and blurred, some
poorly arranged or mislaid, some often referred to and fresh prints
made therefrom, and some quite neglected.

In order to see, it is at once necessary that the retina be suitably
exposed toward the object to be seen, and that the mind be favorably
disposed to the assimilation of the impression. True seeing,
observing, is a double process, partly objective or outward--the thing
seen and the retina--and partly subjective or inward--the picture
mysteriously transferred to the mind's representative, the brain, and
there received and affiliated with other images. Illustrations of such
seeing "with the mind's eye" are not far to seek. Wherever the
beauties and conformations of natural scenery invite the eye of man
does he discover familiar forms and faces (Fig. 1); the forces of
Nature have rough-hewn the rocks, but the human eye detects and often
creates the resemblances. The stranger to whom such curiosities of
form are first pointed out often finds it difficult to discover the
resemblance, but once seen the face or form obtrudes itself in every
view and seems the most conspicuous feature in the outlook. The
flickering fire furnishes a fine background for the activity of the
mind's eye, and against this it projects the forms and fancies which
the leaping flames and the burning embers from time to time suggest.
Not all see these fire-pictures readily, for our mental eyes differ
more from one another than the physical ones, and perhaps no two
persons see the same picture in quite the same way. It is not quite
true, however, as many have held, that in waking hours we all have a
world in common, but in dreams each has a world of his own, for our
waking worlds are made different by the differences in what engages
our interest and our attention. It is true that our eyes when open are
opened very largely to the same views, but by no one observer are all
these views, though visible, really seen.

[Illustration: FIG. 1.[5]--The man's face in the rocks is quite
distinct, and is usually readily found when it is known that there is
a face somewhere. (For this view from the Dalles of the St. Croix,
Minn., I am indebted to the courtesy of Mr. W. H. Dudley, of Madison,
Wis.)]

This characteristic of human vision often serves as a source of
amusement. The puzzle picture with its tantalizing face, or animal, or
what not, hidden in the trees, or fantastically constructed out of
heterogeneous elements that make up the composition, is to many quite
irresistible. We turn it about in all directions, wondering where the
hidden form can be, scanning every detail of the picture, until
suddenly a chance glimpse reveals it, plainly staring us in the face.
When several persons are engaged in this occupation, it is amusing to
observe how blind each is to what the others see; their physical eyes
see alike, but their mental eyes reflect their own individualities.

[Illustration: FIG. 2.--In order to see the lion's head, hold the
dollar exactly inverted and the head will be discovered facing the
left, as above outlined. It is clearer on the dollar itself than in
this reproduction.]

Thousands upon thousands of persons handle our silver dollar, but few
happen to observe the lion's head which lies concealed in the
representation of the familiar head of Liberty; frequently even a
careful examination fails to detect this hidden emblem of British
rule; but, as before, when once found, it is quite obvious (Fig. 2).
For similar reasons it is a great aid in looking for an object to know
what to look for; to be readily found, the object, though lost to
sight, should be to memory clear. Searching is a mental process
similar to the matching of a piece of fabric in texture or color, when
one has forgotten the sample and must rely upon the remembrance of its
appearance. If the recollection is clear and distinct, recognition
takes place when the judgment decides that what the physical eye sees
corresponds to the image in the mind's eye; with an indistinct mental
image the recognition becomes doubtful or faulty. The novice in the
use of the microscope experiences considerable difficulty in observing
the appearance which his instructor sees and describes, and this
because his conception of the object to be seen is lacking in
precision. Hence his training in the use of the microscope is
distinctly aided by consulting the illustrations in the text-book, for
they enable his mental eye to realize the pictures which it should
entertain. He may be altogether too much influenced by the pictures
thus suggested to his mental vision, and draw what is really not under
his microscope at all; much as the young arithmetician will manage to
obtain the answer which the book requires even at the cost of a resort
to very unmathematical processes. For training in correct and accurate
vision it is necessary to acquire an alert mental eye that observes
all that is objectively visible, but does not permit the subjective to
add to or modify what is really present.

[Illustration: FIG. 3.--Observe the appearance of these letters at a
distance of eight to twelve feet. An interesting method of testing the
activity of the mind's eye with these letters is described in the
text.]

[Illustration: FIG. 3_a_.]

[Illustration: FIG. 3_b_.]

The importance of the mind's eye in ordinary vision is also well
illustrated in cases in which we see or seem to see what is not really
present, but what for one cause or another it is natural to suppose is
present. A very familiar instance of this process is the constant
overlooking of misprints--false letters, transposed letters, and
missing letters--unless these happen to be particularly striking. We
see only the general physiognomy of the word and the detailed features
are supplied from within; in this case it is the expected that
happens. Reading is done largely by the mental eye; and entire words,
obviously suggested by the context, are sometimes read in, when they
have been accidentally omitted. This is more apt to occur with the
irregular characters used in manuscript than in the more distinct
forms of the printed alphabet, and is particularly frequent in reading
over what one has himself written. In reading proof, however, we are
eager to detect misprints, and this change in attitude helps to make
them visible. It is difficult to illustrate this process
intentionally, because the knowledge that one's powers of observation
are about to be tested places one on one's guard, and thus suppresses
the natural activity of the mind's eye and draws unusual attention to
objective details. Let the reader at this point hold the page at some
distance off--say, eight or twelve feet--and draw an exact
reproduction of the letters shown in Fig. 3. Let him not read further
until this has been done, and _perhaps_ he may find that he has
introduced strokes which were not present in the original. If this is
not the case, let him try the test upon those who are ignorant of its
nature, and he will find that most persons will supply light lines to
complete the contours of the letters which in the original are
suggested but not really present; the original outline, Fig. 3_a_,
becomes something like Fig. 3_b_, and so on for the rest of the
letters. The physical eye sees the former, but the mental eye sees the
latter.

[Illustration: FIG. 4.--For description, see text.]

I tried this experiment with a class of over thirty university
students of Psychology, and, although they were disposed to be quite
critical and suspected some kind of an illusion, only three or four
drew the letters correctly; all the rest filled in the imaginary light
contours; some even drew them as heavily as the real strokes. I
followed this by an experiment of a similar character. I placed upon
a table a figure (Fig. 4) made of light cardboard, fastened to blocks
of wood at the base so that the pieces would easily stand upright. The
middle piece, which is rectangular and high, was placed a little in
front of the rest of the figure. The students were asked to describe
precisely what they saw, and with one exception they all described, in
different words, a semicircular piece of cardboard with a rectangular
piece in front of it. In reality there was no half-circle of
cardboard, but only parts of two quarter-circles. The students, of
course, were well aware that their physical eyes could not see what
was behind the middle cardboard, but they inferred that the two side
pieces were parts of one continuous semicircle. This they saw, so far
as they saw it at all, with their mind's eye.

[Illustration: FIG. 5.--The black and white portions of this design
are precisely alike, but the effect of looking at the figure as a
pattern in black upon a white background, or as a pattern in white
upon a black background, is quite different, although the difference
is not easily described.]

There is a further interesting class of illustrations in which a
single outward impression changes its character according as it is
viewed as representing one thing or another. In a general way we see
the same thing all the time, and the image on the retina does not
change. But as we shift the attention from one portion of the view to
another, or as we view it with a different mental conception of what
the figure represents, it assumes a different aspect, and to our
mental eye becomes quite a different thing. A slight but interesting
change takes place if we view Fig. 5 first with the conception that
the black is the pattern to be seen and the white the background, and
again try to see the white as the pattern against a black background.
I give a further illustration of such a change in Fig. 6. In our
first and natural view of this we focus the attention upon the black
lines and observe the familiar illusion, that the four vertical lines
seem far from parallel. That they are parallel can be verified by
measurement, or by covering up all of the diagram except the four main
lines. But if the white part of the diagram is conceived as the design
against a black background, then the design is no longer the same, and
with this change the illusion appears, and the four lines seem
parallel, as they really are. It may require a little effort to bring
about this change, but it is very marked when once realised.

[Illustration: FIG. 6.--When this figure is viewed as a black pattern
on a white background, the four main vertical lines seem far from
parallel; when it is viewed as a white pattern on a black background
this illusion disappears (or nearly so), and the black lines as well
as the white ones seem parallel.]

A curious optical effect which in part illustrates the change in
appearance under different aspects is reproduced in Fig. 7. In this
case the enchantment of distance is necessary to produce the
transformation. Viewed at the usual reading distance, we see nothing
but an irregular and meaningless assemblage of black and white
blotches. At a distance of fifteen to eighteen feet, however, a man's
head appears quite clearly. Also observe that after the head has once
been realized it becomes possible to obtain suggestions of it at
nearer distances.

[Illustration: FIG. 7.--This is a highly enlarged reproduction taken
from a half-tone process print of Lord Kelvin. It appeared in the
Photographic Times.]

A much larger class of ambiguous diagrams consists of those which
represent by simple outlines familiar geometrical forms or objects. We
cultivate such a use of our eyes, as indeed of all our faculties, as
will on the whole lead to the most profitable results. As a rule, the
particular impression is not so important as what it represents. Sense
impressions are simply the symbols or signs of things or ideas, and
the thing or the idea is more important than the sign. Accordingly, we
are accustomed to interpret lines, whenever we can, as the
representations of objects. We are well aware that the canvas or the
etching or the photograph before us is a flat surface in two
dimensions, but we see the picture as the representation of solid
objects in three dimensions. This is the illusion of pictorial art. So
strong is this tendency to view lines as the symbols of things that if
there is the slightest chance of so viewing them, we invariably do so;
for we have a great deal of experience with things that present their
contours as lines, and very little with mere lines or surfaces. If we
view outlines only, without shading or perspective or anything to
definitely suggest what is foreground and what background, it becomes
possible for the mind to supply these details and see foreground as
background, and _vice versa_.

[Illustration: FIG. 8.--This drawing may be viewed as the
representation of a book standing on its half-opened covers as seen
from the back of the book; or as the inside view of an open book
showing the pages.]

[Illustration: FIG. 9.--When this figure is viewed as an arrow, the
upper or feathered end seems flat; when the rest of the arrow is
covered, the feathered end may be made to project or recede like the
book cover in Fig. 8.]

[Illustration: FIG. 10.--The smaller square may be regarded as either
the nearer face of a projecting figure or as the more distant face of
a hollow figure.]

[Illustration: FIG. 11.--This represents an ordinary table-glass, the
bottom of the glass and the entire rear side, except the upper
portion, being seen through the transparent nearer side, and the rear
apparently projecting above the front. But it fluctuates in appearance
between this and a view of the glass in which the bottom is seen
directly, partly from underneath, the _whole_ of the rear side is seen
through the transparent front, and the front projects above the back.]

[Illustration: FIG. 12.--In this scroll the left half may at first
seem concave and the right convex, it then seems to roll or advance
like a wave, and the left seems convex and the right concave, as
though the trough of the wave had become the crest, and _vice versa_.]

A good example to begin with is Fig. 8. These outlines will probably
suggest at first view a book, or better a book cover, seen with its
back toward you and its sides sloping away from you; but it may also
be viewed as a book opened out toward you and presenting to you an
inside view of its contents. Should the change not come readily, it
may be facilitated by thinking persistently of the appearance of an
open book in this position. The upper portion of Fig. 9 is practically
the same as Fig. 8, and if the rest of the figure be covered up, it
will change as did the book cover; when, however, the whole figure is
viewed as an arrow, a new conception enters, and the apparently solid
book cover becomes the _flat_ feathered part of the arrow. Look at the
next figure (Fig. 10), which represents in outline a truncated pyramid
with a square base. Is the smaller square nearer to you, and are the
sides of the pyramid sloping away from you toward the larger square in
the rear? Or are you looking into the hollow of a truncated pyramid
with the smaller square in the background? Or is it now one and now
the other, according as you decide to see it? Here (Fig. 13) is a
skeleton box which you may conceive as made of wires outlining the
sides. Now the front, or side nearest to me, seems directed downward
and to the left; again, it has shifted its position and is no longer
the front, and the side which appears to be the front seems directed
upward and to the right. The presence of the diagonal line makes the
change more striking: in one position it runs from the left-hand
_rear_ upper corner to the right-hand _front_ lower corner; while in
the other it connects the left-hand _front_ upper corner with the
right-hand _rear_ lower corner.

[Illustration: FIGS. 13, 13_a_, and 13_b_.--The two methods of viewing
Fig. 13 are described in the text. Figs. 13_a_ and 13_b_ are added to
make clearer the two methods of viewing Fig. 13. The heavier lines
seem to represent the nearer surface. Fig. 13_a_ more naturally
suggests the nearer surface of the box in a position downward and to
the left, and Fig. 13_b_ makes the nearer side seem to be upward and
to the right. But in spite of the heavier outlines of the one surface,
it may be made to shift positions from foreground to background,
although not so readily as in Fig. 13.]

[Illustration: FIG. 14.--Each member of this frieze represents a
relief ornament, applied upon the background, which in cross-section
would be an isosceles triangle with a large obtuse angle, or a space
of similar shape hollowed out of the solid wood or stone. In running
the eye along the pattern, it is interesting to observe how variously
the patterns fluctuate from one of these aspects to the other.]

[Illustration: FIGS. 15, 15_a_, and 15_b_.--The two views of Fig. 15
described in the text are brought out more clearly in Figs. 15_a_ and
15_b_. The shaded portion tends to be regarded as the nearer face.
Fig. 15_a_ is more apt to suggest the steps seen as we ascend them.
Fig. 15_b_ seems to represent the hollowed-out structure underneath
the steps. But even with the shading the dual interpretation is
possible, although less obvious.]

Fig. 15 will probably seen at first glimpse to be the view of a flight
of steps which one is about to ascend from right to left. Imagine it,
however, to be a view of the under side of a series of steps; the view
representing the structure of overhanging solid masonwork seen from
underneath. At first it may be difficult to see it thus, because the
view of steps which we are about to mount is a more natural and
frequent experience than the other; but by staring at it with the
intention of seeing it differently the transition will come, and often
quite unexpectedly.

[Illustration: FIG. 16.--This interesting figure (which is reproduced
with modifications from Scripture--The New Psychology) is subject in a
striking way to interchanges between foreground and background. Most
persons find it difficult to maintain for any considerable time either
aspect of the blocks (these aspects are described in the text); some
can change them at will, others must accept the changes as they happen
to come.]

[Illustration: Fig. 17_a_.]

[Illustration: Fig. 17_b_.]

[Illustration: Fig. 17.

FIGS. 17, 17_a_, and 17_b_.--How many blocks are there in this pile?
Six or seven? Note the change in arrangement of the blocks as they
change in number from six to seven. This change is illustrated in the
text. Figs. 17_a_ and 17_b_ show the two phases of a group of any
three of the blocks. The arrangement of a pyramid of six blocks seems
the more stable and is usually first suggested; but hold the page
inverted, and you will probably see the alternate arrangement (with,
however, the black surfaces still forming the tops). And once knowing
what to look for, you will very likely be able to see either
arrangement, whether the diagram be held inverted or not. This method
of viewing the figures upside down and in other positions is also
suggested to bring out the changes indicated in Figs. 13, 13_a_,
13_b_, and in Figs. 15, 15_a_, 15_b_.]

The blocks in Fig. 16 are subject to a marked fluctuation. Now the
black surfaces represent the bottoms of the blocks, all pointing
downward and to the left, and now the black surfaces have changed and
have become the tops pointing upward and to the right. For some the
changes come at will; for others they seem to come unexpectedly, but
all are aided by anticipating mentally the nature of the
transformation. The effect here is quite striking, the blocks seeming
almost animated and moving through space. In Fig. 17 a similar
arrangement serves to create an illusion as to the real number of
blocks present. If viewed in one way--the black surface forming the
tops of the blocks--there seem to be six arranged as in Fig. 18; but
when the transformation has taken place and the black surfaces have
become the overhanging bottoms of the boxes, there are seven, arranged
as in Fig. 19. Somewhat different, but still belonging to the group of
ambiguous figures, is the ingenious conceit of the duck-rabbit shown
in Fig. 20. When it is a rabbit, the face looks to the right and a
pair of ears are conspicuous behind; when it is a duck, the face looks
to the left and the ears have been changed into the bill. Most
observers find it difficult to hold either interpretation steadily,
the fluctuations being frequent, and coming as a surprise.

[Illustration: FIG. 18.]

[Illustration: FIG. 19.]

[Illustration: FIG. 20.--Do you see a duck or a rabbit, or either?
(From Harper's Weekly, originally in Fliegende Blätter.)]

All these diagrams serve to illustrate the principle that when the
objective features are ambiguous we see one thing or another according
to the impression that is in the mind's eye; what the objective
factors lack in definiteness the subjective ones supply, while
familiarity, prepossession, as well as other circumstances influence
the result. These illustrations show conclusively that seeing is not
wholly an objective matter depending upon what there is to be seen,
but is very considerably a subjective matter depending upon the eye
that sees. To the same observer a given arrangement of lines now
appears as the representation of one object and now of another; and
from the same objective experience, especially in instances that
demand a somewhat complicated exercise of the senses, different
observers derive very different impressions.

Not only when the sense-impressions are ambiguous or defective, but
when they are vague--when the light is dim or the forms obscure--does
the mind's eye eke out the imperfections of physical vision. The vague
conformations of drapery and make-up that are identified and
recognized in spiritualistic _séances_ illustrate extreme instances of
this process. The whitewashed tree or post that momentarily startles
us in a dark country lane takes on the guise that expectancy gives it.
The mental predisposition here becomes the dominant factor, and the
timid see as ghosts what their more sturdy companions recognize as
whitewashed posts. Such experiences we ascribe to the action of
suggestion and the imagination--the cloud "that's almost in shape like
a camel," or "like a weasel," or "like a whale." But throughout our
visual experiences there runs this double strain, now mainly outward
and now mainly inward, from the simplest excitements of the retina up
to the realms where fancy soars freed from the confines of sense, and
the objective finds its occupation gone.


FOOTNOTE:

[5] In order to obtain the effects described in the various
illustrations it is necessary in several cases to regard the figures
for a considerable time and with close attention. The reader is
requested not to give up in case the first attempt to secure the
effect is not successful, but to continue the effort for a reasonable
period. Individuals differ considerably in the readiness with which
they obtain such effects; in some cases, such devices as holding the
diagrams inverted or at an angle or viewing them with the eyes half
closed are helpful.




NATURE STUDY IN THE PHILADELPHIA NORMAL SCHOOL.

BY L. L. W. WILSON, PH. D.


When it was first proposed to me to write for the Popular Science
Monthly a brief account of the biological laboratories in the
Philadelphia Normal School, and of the Nature work carried on under my
direction in the School of Observation and Practice, I felt that I
could not do justice either to the place or the work; for, in my
judgment, the equipment of the laboratories and the work done in
connection with them are finer than anything else of the kind either
in this country or abroad--a statement which it seemed to me that I
could not make with becoming modesty. But, after all, it is not great
Babylon that I have built, but a Babylon builded for me, and to fail
to express my sense of its worth is to fail to do justice to Dr. W. P.
Wilson, formerly of the University of Pennsylvania, to whom their
inception was due; to Mr. Simon Gratz, president of the Board of
Education, who from the beginning appreciated their value, and without
whose aid they never would have taken visible form; to the principals
of the two schools, and, above all, to my five assistants, whose
knowledge, zeal, and hard work have contributed more than anything
else to the rapid building up of the work.

THE LABORATORIES AND THEIR EQUIPMENT.--The rooms occupied by the
botanical and zoölogical departments of the normal school measure each
seventy by twenty feet. A small workroom for the teachers cuts off
about ten feet of this length from each room. In the middle of the
remaining space stands a demonstration table furnished with hot and
cold water. Each laboratory is lighted from the side by ten windows.
From them extend the tables for the students. These give plenty of
drawer space and closets for dissecting and compound microscopes.
Those in the zoölogical room are also provided with sinks. Each
student is furnished with the two microscopes, stage and eyepiece
micrometers, a drawing camera, a set of dissecting instruments,
glassware, note-books, text-books, and general literature.

The walls opposite the windows are in both rooms lined with cases, in
which there is a fine synoptic series.

In the botanical laboratory this systematic collection begins with
models of bacteria and ends with trees. In other cases, placed in the
adjoining corridor, are representatives, either in alcohol or by means
of models, of most of the orders of flowering plants, as well as a
series illustrating the history of the theory of cross-fertilization,
and the various devices by which it is accomplished; another, showing
the different methods of distribution of seeds and fruits; another,
of parasitic plants; and still another showing the various devices by
means of which plants catch animals.

As an example of the graphic and thorough way in which these
illustrations are worked out, the pines may be cited. There are
fossils; fine specimens of pistillate and staminate flowers in
alcohol; cones; a drawing of the pollen; large models of the flowers;
models of the seeds, showing the embryo and the various stages of
germination; cross and longitudinal sections of the wood; drawings
showing its microscopic structure; pictures of adult trees; and
samples illustrating their economic importance. For the last, the
long-leaved pine of the South is used, and samples are exhibited of
the turpentine, crude and refined; tar and the oil of tar; resin; the
leaves; the same boiled in potash; the same hatcheled into wool; yarn,
bagging and rope made from the wool; and its timber split, sawn, and
dressed.

The series illustrating the fertilization of flowers begins with a
large drawing, adapted by one of the students from Gibson, showing the
gradual evolution of the belief in cross-fertilization from 1682, when
Nehemiah Grew first declared that seed would not set unless pollen
reached the stigma, down to Darwin, who first demonstrated the
advantages of cross-fertilization and showed many of the devices of
plants by which this is accomplished. The special devices are then
illustrated with models and large drawings. First comes the dimorphic
primrose; then follows trimorphic _Lythrum_, to the beautiful model of
which is appended a copy of the letter in which Darwin wrote to Gray
of his discovery:

     "But I am almost stark, staring mad over Lythrum.... I
     should rather like seed of Mitchella. But, oh, Lythrum!

                                         "Your utterly mad friend,
                                                          "C. DARWIN."

Models of the cucumber, showing the process of its formation, and the
unisexual flowers complete this series. Supplementing this are models
and drawings of a large number of flowers, illustrating special
devices by which cross-fertilization is secured, such as the larkspur,
butter and eggs, orchids, iris, salvia, several composites, the
milkweed, and, most interesting of all, the Dutchman's pipe. This is a
flower that entices flies into its curved trumpet and keeps them there
until they become covered with the ripe pollen. Then the hairs wither,
the tube changes its position, the fly is permitted to leave, carrying
the pollen thus acquired to another flower with the same result.

Pictures and small busts of many naturalists adorn both of the rooms.
Of these the most notable is an artist proof of Mercier's beautiful
etching of Darwin. Every available inch of wall space is thus
occupied, or else, in the botanical laboratory, has on it mounted
fungi, lichens, seaweeds, leaf cards, pictures of trees, grasses, and
other botanical objects.

The windows are beautiful with hanging plants from side brackets
meeting the wealth of green on the sill. Here are found in one window
ferns, in another the century plant; in others still, specimens of
economic plants--cinnamon, olive, banana, camphor. On the tables are
magnificent specimens of palms, cycads, dracænas, and aspidistras, and
numerous aquaria filled with various water plants. Most of these
plants are four years old, and all of them are much handsomer than
when they first became the property of the laboratory. How much
intelligent and patient care this means only those who have attempted
to raise plants in city houses can know.

The zoölogical laboratory is quite as beautiful as the botanical, for
it, too, has its plants and pictures. It is perhaps more interesting
because of its living elements. Think of a schoolroom in which are
represented alive types of animals as various as these: amoeba,
vorticella, hydra, worms, muscles, snails and slugs of various kinds,
crayfish, various insects, including a hive of Italian bees, goldfish,
minnows, dace, catfish, sunfish, eels, tadpoles, frogs, newts,
salamanders, snakes, alligators, turtles, pigeons, canaries, mice,
guinea-pigs, rabbits, squirrels, and a monkey! Imagine these living
animals supplemented by models of their related antediluvian forms, or
fossils, by carefully labeled dissections, by preparations and
pictures illustrating their development and mode of life; imagine in
addition to this books, pamphlets, magazines, and teachers further to
put you in touch with this wonderful world about us, and you will then
have some idea of the environment in which it is the great privilege
of our students to live for five hours each week.

In addition to these laboratories there is a lecture room furnished
with an electric lantern. Here each week is given a lecture on general
topics, such as evolution and its problems, connected with the work of
the laboratories.

THE COURSE OF STUDY PURSUED BY THE NORMAL STUDENTS.--Botany: In
general, the plants and the phenomena of the changing seasons are
studied as they occur in Nature. In the fall there are lessons on the
composites and other autumn flowers, on fruits, on the ferns, mosses,
fungi, and other cryptogams. In the winter months the students grow
various seeds at home, carefully drawing and studying every stage in
their development. Meanwhile, in the laboratory, they examine
microscopically and macroscopically the seeds themselves and the
various food supplies stored within. By experimentation they get
general ideas of plant physiology, beginning with the absorption of
water by seeds, the change of the food supply to soluble sugar, the
method of growth, the functions, the histology, and the modifications
of stem, root, and leaves. In the spring they study the buds and
trees, particularly the conifers, and the different orders of
flowering plants.

The particular merit of the work is that it is so planned that each
laboratory lesson compels the students to reason. Having once thus
obtained their information, they are required to drill themselves out
of school hours until the facts become an integral part of their
knowledge.

For the study of fruits, for example, they are given large trays, each
divided into sixteen compartments, plainly labeled with the name of
the seed or fruit within. Then, by means of questions, the students
are made to read for themselves the story which each fruit has to
tell, to compare it with the others, and to deduce from this
comparison certain general laws.

After sufficient laboratory practice of this kind they are required to
read parts of Lubbock's Flower, Fruit, and Leaves, Kerner's Natural
History of Plants, Wallace's Tropical Nature, and Darwinism, etc.

Finally, they are each given a type-written summary of the work, and
after a week's notice are required to pass a written examination.

Zoölogy: The course begins in the fall with a rather thorough study of
the insects, partly because they are then so abundant, and partly
because a knowledge of them is particularly useful to the grade
teacher in the elementary schools.

The locust is studied in detail. Tumblers and aquaria are utilized as
vivaria, so that there is abundant opportunity for the individual
study of living specimens. Freshly killed material is used for
dissection, so that students have no difficulty in making out the
internal anatomy, which is further elucidated with large, home-made
charts, each of which shows a single system, and serves for a text to
teach them the functions of the various organs as worked out by modern
physiologists.

They then study, always with abundant material, the other insects
belonging to the same group. They are given two such insects, a bug,
and two beetles, and required to classify them, giving reasons for so
doing. While this work is going on they have visited the beehive in
small groups, sometimes seeing the queen and the drone, and always
having the opportunity to see the workers pursuing their various
occupations, and the eggs, larvæ, and pupæ in their different states
of development. Beautiful models of the bees and of the comb, together
with dry and alcoholic material, illustrate further this
metamorphosis, by contrast making clearer the exactly opposite
metamorphosis of the locust.

At least one member of each of the other orders of insects is compared
with these two type forms, and, although only important points are
considered at all, yet from one to two hours of laboratory work are
devoted to each specimen. This leisurely method of work is pursued to
give the students the opportunity, at least, to think for themselves.
When the subject is finished they are then given a searching test.
This is never directly on their required reading, but planned to show
to them and to their teachers whether they have really assimilated
what they have seen and studied.

After this the myriapods, the earthworm, and peripatus are studied,
because of their resemblance to the probable ancestors of insects. In
the meantime they have had a dozen or more fully illustrated lectures
on evolution, so that at the close of this series of lessons they are
expected to have gained a knowledge of the methods of studying
insects, whether living or otherwise, a working hypothesis for the
interpretation of facts so obtained, and a knowledge of one order,
which will serve admirably as a basis for comparison in much of their
future work.

They then take up, more briefly, the relatives of the insects, the
spiders and crustaceans, following these with the higher
invertebrates, reaching the fish in April. This, for obvious reasons,
is their last dissection. But with living material, and the beautiful
preparations and stuffed specimens with which the laboratory is
filled, they get a very general idea of the reptiles, birds, and
mammals. This work is of necessity largely done by the students out of
school hours. For example, on a stand on one of the tables are placed
the various birds in season, with accompanying nests containing the
proper quota of eggs. Books and pamphlets relating to the subject are
placed near. Each student is given a syllabus which will enable her to
study these birds intelligently indoors and out, if she wishes to do
so.

In the spring are taken up the orders of animals below the insect, and
for the last lesson a general survey of all the types studied gives
them the relationships of each to the other.

THE COURSE OF STUDY PURSUED IN THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICE.--In addition to
the plants and animals about them, the children study the weather,
keeping a daily record of their observations, and summarizing their
results at the end of the month. In connection with the weather and
plants they study somewhat carefully the soil and, in this connection,
the common rocks and minerals of Philadelphia--gneiss, mica schist,
granite, sandstone, limestones, quartz, mica, and feldspar.

As in the laboratories, so here the effort is made to teach the
children to reason, to read the story told by the individual plant, or
animal, or stone, or wind, or cloud. A special effort is made to teach
them to interpret everyday Nature as it lies around them. For this
reason frequent short excursions into the city streets are made. Those
who smile and think that there is not much of Nature to be found in a
city street are those who have never looked for it. Enough material
for study has been gathered in these excursions to make them a feature
of this work, even more than the longer ones which they take twice a
year into the country.

Last year I made not less than eighty such short excursions, each time
with classes of about thirty-five. They were children of from seven to
fourteen years of age. Without their hats, taking with them
note-books, pencils, and knives, they passed with me to the street.
The passers-by stopped to gaze at us, some with expressions of
amusement, others of astonishment; approval sometimes, quite
frequently the reverse. But I never once saw on the part of the
children a consciousness of the mild sensation that they were
creating. They went for a definite purpose, which was always
accomplished.

The children of the first and second years study nearly the same
objects. Those of the third and fourth years review this general work,
studying more thoroughly some one type. When they enter the fifth
year, they have considerable causal knowledge of the familiar plants
and animals, of the stones, and of the weather. But, what is more
precious to them, they are sufficiently trained to be able to look at
new objects with a truly "seeing eye."

The course of study now requires general ideas of physiology, and, in
consequences, the greater portion of their time for science is devoted
to this subject. I am glad to be able to say, however, that it is not
"School Physiology" which they study, but the guinea-pig and The
Wandering Jew!

In other words, I let them find out for themselves how and what the
guinea-pig eats; how and what he expires and inspires; how and why he
moves. Along with this they study also plant respiration,
transpiration, assimilation, and reproduction, comparing these
processes with those of animals, including themselves.

The children's interest is aroused and their observation stimulated by
the constant presence in the room with them of a mother guinea-pig and
her child. Nevertheless, I have not hesitated to call in outside
materials to help them to understand the work. A series of lessons on
the lime carbonates, therefore, preceded the lessons on respiration;
an elephant's tooth, which I happened to have, helped to explain the
guinea-pig's molars; and a microscope and a frog's leg made real to
them the circulation of the blood.

In spite of the time required for the physiology, the fifth-year
children have about thirty lessons on minerals; the sixth-year, the
same number on plants; and the seventh-year, on animals; and it would
be difficult to decide which of these subjects rouses their greatest
enthusiasm.




PRINCIPLES OF TAXATION.[6]

BY THE LATE HON. DAVID A. WELLS.


XX.--THE LAW OF THE DIFFUSION OF TAXES.

PART I.

No attempt ought to be made to construct or formulate an economically
correct, equitable, and efficient system of taxation which does not
give full consideration to the method or extent to which taxes diffuse
themselves after their first incidence. On this subject there is a
great difference of opinion, which has occasioned, for more than a
century, a vast and never-ending discussion on the part of economic
writers. All of this, however, has resulted in no generally accepted
practical conclusions; has been truthfully characterized by a leading
French economist (M. Parieu) as marked in no small part by the
"simplicity of ignorance," and from a somewhat complete review
(recently published[7]) of the conflicting theories advanced by
participants one rises with a feeling of weariness and disgust.

The majority of economists, legislators, and the public generally
incline to the opinion that taxes mainly rest where they are laid, and
are not shifted or diffused to an extent that requires any
recognition in the enactment of statutes for their assessment. Thus,
a tax commission of Massachusetts, as the result of their
investigations, arrived at the conclusion that "the tendency of taxes
is that they must be paid by the actual persons on whom they are
levied." But a little thought must, however, make clear that unless
the advancement of taxes and their final and actual payment are one
and the same thing, the Massachusetts statement is simply an evasion
of the main question at issue, and that its authors had no intelligent
conception of it. A better proposition, and one that may even be
regarded as an economic axiom, is that, regarding taxation as a
synonym for a force, as it really is, it follows the natural and
invariable law of all forces, and distributes itself in the line of
least resistance. It is also valuable as indicating the line of
inquiry most likely to lead to exact and practical conclusions. But
beyond this it lacks value, inasmuch as it fails to embody any
suggestions as to the best method of making the involved principle a
basis for any general system for correct taxation; inasmuch as "the
line of least resistance" is not a positive factor, and may be and
often is so arranged as to make levies on the part of the State under
the name of taxation subservient to private rather than public
interests. Under such circumstances the question naturally arises,
What is the best method for determining, at least, the approximative
truth in respect to this vexed subject? A manifestly correct answer
would be: _first_, to avoid at the outset all theoretic assumptions as
a basis for reasoning; _second_, to obtain and marshal all the facts
and conditions incident to the inquiry or deducible from experience;
_third_, recognize the interdependence of all such facts and
conclusions; _fourth_, be practical in the highest degree in accepting
things as they are, and dealing with them as they are found; and on
such a basis attention is next asked to the following line of
investigations.

It is essential at the outset to correct reasoning that the
distinction between _taxation_ and _spoliation_ be kept clearly in
view. That only is entitled to be called a tax law which levies
uniformly upon all the subjects of taxation; which does not of itself
exempt any part of the property of _the same_ class which is selected
to bear the primary burden of taxation, or by its imperfections to any
extent permits such exemptions. All levies or assessments made by the
State on the persons, property, or business of its citizens that do
not conform to such conditions are spoliations, concerning which
nothing but irregularity can be predicated; nothing positive
concerning their diffusion can be asserted; and the most complete
collection of experiences in respect to them can not be properly
dignified as "a science." And it may be properly claimed that from a
nonrecognition or lack of appreciation of the broad distinction
between taxation and spoliation, the disagreement among economists
respecting the diffusion of taxes has mainly originated.

With this premise, let us next consider what facts and experiences are
pertinent to this subject, and available to assist in reaching sound
conclusions; proceeding very carefully and cautiously in so doing,
inasmuch as territory is to be entered upon that has not been
generally or thoroughly explored.

The facts and experiences of first importance in such inquiry are that
the examination of the tax rolls in any State, city, or municipality
of the United States will show that surprisingly small numbers of
persons primarily pay or advance any kind of taxes. It is not probable
that more than one tenth of the adult population or about one
twentieth of the entire population of the United States ever come in
contact officially with a tax assessor or tax collector. It is also
estimated that less than two per cent of the total population of the
United States advance the entire customs and internal revenue of the
Federal Government.

In the investigations made in 1871, by a commission created by the
Legislature of the State of New York to revise its laws relative to
the assessment and collection of taxes, it was found that in the city
of New York, out of a population of over one million in the above
year, only 8,920 names, or less than one per cent of this great
multitude of people, had "any household furniture, money, goods,
chattels, debts due from solvent debtors, whether on account of
contract, note, bond, or mortgage, or any public stocks, or stocks in
moneyed corporations, or in general any personal property of which the
assessors could take cognizance for taxation"; and further, that not
over _four_ per cent, or, say, forty thousand persons out of the
million, were subject to any primary tax in respect to the ownership
of any property whatever, real or personal; while only a few years
subsequent, or in 1875, the regular tax commissioners of New York
estimated that of the property defined and described by the laws of
the State as personal property, an amount approximating two thousand
million dollars in value was held in New York city alone. Later
investigations show that this state of things has continued. Thus, in
1895, out of a population of about two million, it was estimated that
only seventy-nine thousand, or not over four per cent of the
inhabitants of the city, were subject to primary taxation, and that
one half the whole amount collected in that year was paid by less than
a thousand persons. In the city of Boston, where the tax laws are
executed in the most arbitrary manner, the ratio of population
directly assessed is somewhat greater, but aside from the poll tax,
which is a per capita and not a property tax, only 7.27 per cent of
residents paid a property tax in 1895 out of a population of 494,205.
In one of the smaller cities of Massachusetts, where persons and
property are capable of more thorough supervision than larger numbers
and areas--namely, the city of Springfield, with a population of about
fifty thousand--the report of its tax officials shows that for the
year 1894-'95 the number of persons and corporations assessed on
property (mainly real estate) was 7,745, or one for every 6.4 of its
citizens, while 10,560 other citizens were assessed for a poll tax of
two dollars only. Of the total amount of taxes assessed--namely,
$735,948--the above number, 10,560, paid only $21,120; and this is the
experience generally throughout the United States, as it will be in
every country under a free popular government, where arbitrary
inquisitions and arrests of persons and seizures of property are not
allowed, and where a soldier does not practically stand behind every
tax assessor and collector.

The time (1871) when the personal investigations above referred to
were made was when the masses of the city of New York were moved with
indignation at the misuse and private appropriation by a few officials
(Tweed and his associates) of the municipal revenues raised by
taxation, under cover of instituting public improvements, and which
finally led to their prosecution, imprisonment, or self-imposed exile;
and the questions which naturally suggested themselves were: If only
some forty thousand of the million in New York city paid the taxes,
what interest had the other nine hundred and sixty thousand who never
saw the face of a tax assessor or collector in opposing corruption?
What, in an honest administration of the city government and in a
reduction of taxes? Must it not be for the interest of the many that
the expenditures of the State shall always be as large as possible?
Must they not be benefited by exorbitant taxes on the owners of
property, and a distribution of the money collected, even if stolen by
corruptionists, but spent by them lavishly on enterprises that will
furnish new opportunities for employment or amusement for the masses?
Clearly, so far as any personal experience growing out of any _direct_
assessment and levy was concerned, ninety-six per cent of the
population of the city had no more cause of personal grievance by
reason of the unlawful taking of money from the city treasury than
they would have had at the taking of an equivalent amount from the
municipal treasuries of London, Paris, or any other city.

The answer to these questions is to be found in the fact, as John
Adams once remarked, that "if the Creator had given man a reason that
is fallible, he has also impressed upon him an instinct that is sure."
And this instinct teaches the masses everywhere, though they have
never read a book on political economy, or heard any one discourse
learnedly on the principles of taxation, that if taxes are increased,
either by a lawful or unlawful expenditure of public money, they can
not in any possible way avoid paying some portion of its increase; or,
in other words, that increased taxes meant increased cost of living,
through increased rents, increased price of fuel, clothing, and
provisions, and possibly diminished opportunity to labor through such
increased cost of the products of labor as would limit and restrict
markets or consumption. In short, that taxes inevitably fall upon them
through the increased price of all they consume, even if they pay
nothing to the tax collector directly. A large proportion of the
masses of the city of New York in 1871-'72, who paid no taxes
directly, accordingly and spontaneously joined hands with the
comparatively few of their fellow-citizens who did pay in resisting
extravagance and corruption.[8]

We are thus led up and forced to the recognition of two propositions,
or rather principles, in respect to taxation that can not be
invalidated. The _first_ is, that it is not necessary that a tax
assessor or collector should personally assess and levy upon every
citizen of a State or community in order that all should be compelled
to contribute of his property for the support of such State or
community; _second_, that there is an inexorable law by which every
man must bear a portion of the burden of public expenditures, even
though the official assessors take no direct cognizance of him
whatever.

The following incident may here be cited as instructive: In one of the
recent official hearings before a legislative committee of one of the
States, a strenuous advocate of the popular doctrine that there was
and could be no such thing as equality in taxation except by rigidly
taxing everybody directly for all his property, of every description,
both real and personal, and that to not tax immediately and directly
was, in at least a great degree, to exempt from taxation, expressed
himself as entirely opposed to any system of restricting assessments
to a comparatively few things, on the ground that it would be a
recognition in the United States of a system which in Great Britain
had ground down the masses into poverty. He, however, obtained some
new light on the subject of nondiffusion by being reminded that if the
masses of England had been grievously oppressed by taxation, it had
been under a system of many years' standing, which never in any way
brings the tax collector in direct contact with nineteen twentieths of
the entire population; the customs taxes of Great Britain being
practically levied on only four articles--spirits, tea, coffee, and
tobacco; and the inland revenue also on practically four--spirits,
beer, legacies and successions, and stamps (on deeds, insurance
policies, bills of exchange, receipts, drafts, etc.). Generalizing,
then, on the basis of so broad a fact, how illogical and unscientific
was the assumption that whatever persons, property, or business are
not taxed directly are exempt from taxation!--and yet the practical
exemplification of such a system, in the case of England, was a most
efficient instrumentality for grinding the masses of her people down
to poverty.

On the other hand, to generalize from the experience of an individual
or a class in place of that of a nation or community, let us take the
case of a person who passes all the year _in transitu_--moving
backward and forward, for example, in a boat on the line of the Erie
Canal, or between the head waters of the Mississippi and its mouth; a
citizen of no one State, a resident in no one town, and buying all
that he eats, drinks, and wears wherever he can buy cheapest. Does
this man escape taxation because he has no permanent _situs_
(residence as a citizen), and is unknown by any assessor? If he does,
then his occupation is more profitable to the extent of the taxes he
avoids than is that of the individual who, following analogous
occupations, resides permanently in one location, and pays taxes
regularly; or else some notable, easily discernible cause, as undue
competition to obtain situations, will account for his exemption.

Let us next consider how practical experience definitely indicates the
line of least resistance, in conformity with which those contributions
of property or service which the State requires its citizens to make
for its support, and are worthy of designation as taxes, diffuse
themselves. Let us take first that form of indirect taxation which is
known as customs, or taxes on imports, one from which the Federal
Government of the United States has derived in recent years more than
half of its revenue, and Great Britain more than one fourth of its
total receipts from all forms of imperial taxes. That all such taxes
as a rule diffuse themselves, and ultimately fall upon and are paid by
final consumers, is capable of demonstration by a great variety of
evidence. Every remission of customs duties on the imports into any
country of its staple articles of consumption is followed by a
reduction of cost approximately equal to such reduction, and a
consequent increase in consumption. On the other hand, nothing is
better settled than that an increase in customs taxes on imported
articles as a rule increases prices and tends to reduce consumption.
When Great Britain, in 1863, reduced her taxes (duties) on her imports
of tea from 1_s._ 5_d._ to 1_s._ per pound, her importation of tea
increased from 114,000,000 pounds in 1862 to 139,000,000 in 1866, and
her per capita consumption during the same period from 2.70 pounds to
3.42 pounds; and again, when the duty was further reduced in 1865 from
1_s._ to 6_d._ per pound, the annual importations increased from
139,000,000 in 1866 to 209,000,000 in 1881, and the per capita
consumption from 3.42 pounds to 4.58.

When by the act of October, 1890, the tax was removed from the imports
of crude sugars into the United States, the price of the same went
down almost immediately to an equal extent in all American markets;
while the consumption of sugar in the country increased from an
average of about fifty-four pounds per capita in 1890 to more than
sixty-seven pounds in 1892. A like result has attended a similar
experience in respect to this in other countries, and especially in
Great Britain. Thus, the aggregate consumption of sugar by the British
people in 1844 was returned at 237,143 tons. A reduction of taxes on
its importation in 1864 increased its domestic use to 528,919 tons; a
reduction of fifty per cent on existing rates in 1870 made it 695,029
tons; another reduction of fifty per cent in 1873 carried up
consumption to 779,000 tons; and when, in 1874, all taxes on the
imports of sugar were abolished, the annual domestic consumption
increased in little more than a year's period to 930,000 tons. On the
other hand, when by the tariff act of 1890 an additional tax of half a
cent per pound was imposed on the import of tin plate into the United
States, tin plate went up to an equal extent in price all over the
country; and so also on pearl buttons, linen goods, and other articles
of foreign production on the importations of which the tariff taxes
were largely increased. By the tariff act of 1890, also, eggs, which
could formerly be imported into the United States free of duty, were
made subject to a tax of five cents per dozen. Since then the price of
eggs imported from Canada into districts of the United States within
the same sphere of territorial competition has been increased to the
American consumers to almost exactly the extent of the import tax to
which they are subjected. Thus, when the price of eggs was ten and a
half cents per dozen in Toronto, they were sixteen cents in Buffalo
and sixteen and a half to seventeen cents in New York. Such a result
would be unaccountable if the Canadian farmers paid the duty on eggs
sent by them to the United States.

It is interesting to here ask attention to the opinions entertained
and expressed by those whose situation and experience have qualified
them to speak with authority: "The duty constitutes the price of the
whole mass of the article in the market. It is substantially paid on
the article of domestic manufacture, as well as that of foreign
production" (John Quincy Adams). "I said it, and I stand by it, that
as a general rule the duties paid on imports operate as a tax upon the
consumer" (John Sherman). Mr. Blaine, in his Twenty Years in
Congress, says, speaking of the increase of duties on imports by the
tariff act of July 14, 1862, that it "shut out still more conclusively
all competition from foreign fabrics. The increased cost was charged
to the consumer." Mr. McKinley, in 1890, in a report introducing a
bill for revision of the tariff of the United States, in the direction
of increased rates of duties on imports, said it was not the intent of
the bill "to further cut down prices," that the people were "already
suffering from low prices," and would not be satisfied "with
legislation which will result in lower prices." In an elaborate
opinion given by the New York Court of Appeals in 1851 (see vol. iv,
New York Reports), in which there was no suspicion of any issue of
free trade or protection, the courts, in carefully considering the
relative powers of the legislature and the judiciary in respect to
taxation, assumed the proposition that "_all duties on imported goods
are taxes on the class of consumers_" to be in the nature of a
self-evident truth or economic axiom.

Henry Clay, in a celebrated speech in the United States House of
Representatives in 1833, in advocacy of a protective tariff policy,
candidly admitted that "in general it may be taken as a rule that the
duty upon an article forms a portion of its price." But he
subsequently qualified such admission by claiming that it does not
follow that any consequent enhancement of its price is a tax on
consumers, inasmuch as "directly or indirectly, in one form or
another, all consumers of protected articles, enhanced in price," will
get an equivalent. But this may be equally affirmed of all necessary
and equitable taxation, and does not in any way antagonize the theory
that the final incidence of the class of taxes under consideration
falls on consumption.

But, notwithstanding these conclusions and the incontrovertible
evidence by which they are supported, not a few persons occupying
places of great legislative influence, and no small part of the
general public, hold to the view that taxes on imports are really in
the nature of premiums paid by foreigners for the privilege of selling
their goods in the markets of the importing country, and do not fall
on its people who consume them. That means that if the foreigner has a
yard of cloth, or other commodity, which he sells at home for one
dollar, and the United States imposes a tariff of fifty cents on it,
he will then sell it for export to America at fifty cents. There is no
instance mentioned in history where this has ever been done, but
history unfortunately is rarely taken into account by the public in
the discussion of these questions. In this connection the following
historical incident is interesting and instructive: In 1782 an attempt
by the Congress of the Confederation of the several American States to
provide a system of revenue to defray the general expenses of the
Confederation by duties on imports, which then was not permissible,
was blocked by the refusal of the State of Rhode Island to concur in
it, the Legislature of that State unanimously rejecting the measure
for three reasons--one of which was that it would bear hardest on the
few commercial States, particularly Rhode Island, which in virtue of
their relations with foreign commerce monopolize imports, and lightest
on the agricultural States, that directly imported little or nothing.
Congress appointed Alexander Hamilton to draft a reply to Rhode
Island, and in his answer he relied mainly on what he regarded as an
incontrovertible fact, that duties on imports would not prove a charge
on an importing State, but on the final consumers of imports, wherever
they may be located.

If the theory and assumption so confidently and generally asserted are
to be accepted as correct, that the foreigner pays the protective
taxes which a country levies on its imports, and that they do not fall
upon or are not paid by its people who consume them, then it must
follow that to the extent that a country taxes its imports it lives at
the expense of foreign nations; and that, as Great Britain is the
country with which the United States has the largest foreign trade, it
must pay the largest share of the customs taxes of the United States,
or a good share of its annual revenue from all sources. Attention is
further asked to the exact practical application of this theory. Thus,
the United States in 1895 imported $36,438,196 worth of woolen
manufactures, on which it assessed and collected duties (taxes) to the
amount of $20,698,264, or 56.80 per cent of the value of such imports.
Certainly this was a pretty heavy tax on foreign nations in respect to
the sales of only one class of these commodities; but it represented
but a tithe of what the tariff taxes of the United States, if paid by
foreigners, cost them. Thus they had to sell their woolens to the
people of the latter country at less than half their value in order to
compensate for the 56.8 per cent tax. But a nation engaged in foreign
trade can not as a rule have two prices for the product of its
industries; or one price for what it sells at home and another and
different price for what it sells to foreigners. So the fifty-six per
cent deducted from the cost of the woolens sold by foreigners to the
United States necessarily had to be deducted not only from so much of
their product consumed at home, but also from what they sent for sale
to all foreign countries. A further practical application of this
theory is worthy of consideration. As Great Britain imposes no
protective duties or taxes on its imports, it evidently can not
collect anything from other nations by the system of taxation under
consideration. On the other hand, the aggregate value of its exports
sent to foreign nations during the year 1892 was $1,135,000,000, and
if these several nations taxed this value at the average rate which
the United States imposed in 1894 on all its dutiable imports--namely,
fifty per cent--Great Britain obviously had to pay some $557,000,000
in that year for the support of foreign governments; and while this
has been the experience of Great Britain for more than forty years of
this century, she has as a nation been increasing in wealth during
this whole period.

Some of the recent official experiences of the Government of the
United States that are pertinent to the topic under consideration are
sufficiently curious to make them worthy of an economic record. In a
speech introducing a bill into the United States House of
Representatives, which subsequently resulted in the tariff act of
1890, the then chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means laid down
the following proposition: "The Government ought not to buy abroad
what it can buy at home. Nor should it be exempted from the laws it
imposes upon its citizens."

This would seem to warrant the characterization of a discovery that
the United States had some reliable and important source of revenue
independent of taxation,[9] and that, by compelling the application of
a part of this income to the payment of taxes to itself, the
Government is placed upon an equality with the citizens. A legitimate
criticism on this proposition is that the idea that all the income of
the Treasury is derived from the people, and that to transfer portions
of this income from one official recipient to another can have hardly
any other result than an additional cost of bookkeeping, seems never
to have entered the mind of the speaker.

Again, the United States tariff act of 1883 contained in its free list
a provision for the admittance of "articles imported for the use of
the United States, provided that the price of the same did not include
the duty" imposed on such importations. Under the tariff act of 1890
this provision was stricken out of the statute, with the result that
when the Government imported any articles for its own use which were
subject to duties (as, for example, materials to be used in the
National Bureau of Printing and Engraving), it was obliged, in virtue
of its nonexemption from the laws which it imposed on its own
citizens, to pay such duties itself. But as the Government has no
authority to expend money for any purpose without the authority of
Congress, the latter body accordingly authorized the Federal Treasury
to appropriate money from its tax receipts and make payments with the
same to the customhouse, which the customhouse was to immediately pay
back into the Treasury. Just what process was gone through with to
effect such a result the public was not informed, but probably the
collector of customs drew his warrant on the Treasury, had the amount
credited to his account, and then recredited to the Treasury. But, be
this as it may, it is clear that the Government, under the conditions
above stated, paid the tax on its imports; that the tax may be
regarded in the light of a penalty on the Government for importing
articles for its own use; and that the action of Congress in
authorizing the Treasury to appropriate money for the payment of such
taxes was a recognition or admission by that body that a tax upon
imports neither puts anything _in_ nor takes anything _from_ the
pocket of the foreigner. Does it not, moreover, invest with a degree
of comicality a law enacted by the Congress of the United States for
the purpose of taxing foreign importers, which necessitated the
enactment by it of another law appropriating money to enable the
United States to pay customs taxes every time on everything that it
may import for its own use?[10] Finally, if the foreigner and not our
citizens pays our customs taxes on imports, what is the object of
placing by specific statutes any article on the free list? Why not let
him continue to pay millions of taxes for us, as, for example, on
sugar?


FOOTNOTES:

[6] It is fortunate that Mr. Wells had practically completed his
essays on taxation before death put an end to his activity. The
manuscript of two chapters was found among his papers--one on the Best
Methods of Taxation, and the other on the Law of the Diffusion of
Taxes, begun in this number. The first manuscript has some pages
missing, and it has been thought best to postpone its publication, in
the hope that the missing pages may be found. It is evident that the
last touches were yet to be put upon the chapter on the diffusion of
taxes--a chapter that was to sum up the theory of taxation developed
by the writer. So much of that summary is contained in it as to make
the meaning of Mr. Wells unmistakable, and its publication is further
amply justified by the number of practical illustrations and happy
application of theory to fact, in the selection and explanation of
which the author excelled. The entire series, which has been running
in the Popular Science Monthly for more than three years, will now be
collected in a volume--a worthy memorial to one whose powers of
popular exposition of abstract problems placed him among the first of
economists in the United States.

[7] On the Shifting and Incidence of Taxation, by Prof. Edwin R.
Seligman, 1892.

[8] The assertion would not be warranted that the masses of New York
were wholly unanimous in condemning Tweed, for a portion of them were
undoubtedly well content with the situation. He had curried favor with
the very poor and ignorant by distributing coal and flour, and making
ostentatious presents of money; and these "charities" are remembered
to this day in the poorer parts of New York city, and Tweed is
esteemed by many as the victim of injustice, and a man who suffered
because he was the friend of the people.

[9] Of the net ordinary receipts of the Federal Government
($385,819,000) in 1893, only about $12,000,000 was derived from
sources that could not be regarded as taxes, and were mainly receipts
from the sales and surveys of public and Indian lands ($4,120,000) and
of other Government property.

[10] In 1897 the merchant tailors of the United States, who ought to
know something about the incidence of a custom tax on imported
clothing, united in a petition to Congress asking that Americans
returning from Europe be permitted to introduce only two suits of
foreign-made clothes free of duty; and in support of their request
they comment as follows on a ruling of the Treasury in respect to this
matter: "Under this ruling it was possible to enter free of duty vast
quantities of foreign-made garments which had never been actually in
use, and which were so imported solely because there exists a relative
difference of at least fifty per cent in values between the cost of
made-up garments in the United States and Europe, thus saving to the
purchaser of garments abroad one half of their actual value upon
arrival within the United States duty free." But if the foreigner who
made and sold the goods in question was liable to pay the duty on
dutiable clothing, and attended to his duty, there would be no profit
to the returning tourist in importing clothing free of duty. It is
further evident also that American tailors agree in opinion with
Alexander Hamilton that the consumers of imported articles pay the
customs taxes.

The records of the commercial relations between the United States and
Canada are exceedingly instructive on this matter. They all show that
for the products which the Canadian sends to the United States, and on
which somebody pays the duty, he receives exactly the same price as
for those products which he sends to England, on which nobody pays any
duty. This experience is exactly the same as that of the farmers of
the Northwestern States of the Federal Union, who usually get the same
price for their wheat furnished to a Minnesota flour mill, or for
shipment to free-trade England, as to countries like France and
Germany, where heavy duties are assessed upon its import. The term
"usually" is employed, for producers in the United States and Canada
alike do not always get as large a price for the articles they export
as for the same articles they sell to their fellow-countrymen. Again,
if it be true, as the advocates of extreme protection assert, that the
foreign exporter and not the consumer pays the duties on goods sent by
him for sale in this country, how does it happen that it is not true
concerning the farm produce and live stock exported from Canada? And
why should American farmers be exempt from this rule in sending their
grain to Europe? Has anybody ever known of England buying American
products any cheaper in New York than France or Germany, and is it not
also true that the French or German or Italian consumer usually pays
at least the amount of the duty levied by his Government more for
American products than his English competitor has, whose imports are
subjected to no duty? During the period from 1854 to 1866 there was,
under the reciprocity treaty, practically free trade between Canada
and the United States in live stock, wool, barley, rye, peas, oats,
and other farm products, while subsequent to 1866, when the
reciprocity treaty had been repealed, duties were imposed on all these
articles on their import from Canada into the United States. During
the first period Canadian horses, for example, sold under free trade
for shipment to the United States at from sixty-five to eighty-five
dollars each, while during the years next subsequent to 1866 the value
of the Canadian horses imported into the United States was returned at
from ninety-two to one hundred and four dollars each; thus showing
that the United States tariff did not force the Canadian horse
breeders to lower their prices in order to compensate American
purchasers for the duties exacted. And as regards the other products
mentioned, the official data show that in no case did the imposition
of duties under the United States tariff reduce the prices paid by
American purchasers to the Canadian farmers for their products. These
are very commonplace, very familiar, and very convincing facts which
ought to silence all this talk about the foreign exporter or anybody
else but the consumer paying the duty; but it is not at all probable
that they will.




OUR FLORIDA ALLIGATOR.

BY I. W. BLAKE.


An alligator is not an attractive creature. He has not a single virtue
that can be named. He is cowardly, treacherous, hideous. He is neither
graceful nor even respectable in appearance. He is not even amusing or
grotesque in his ungainliness, for as a brute--a brute unqualified--he
is always so intensely real, that one shrinks from him with loathing;
and a laugh at his expense while in his presence would seem curiously
out of place.

His personality, too, is strong. Once catch the steadfast gaze of a
free, adult alligator's wicked eyes, with their odd vertical pupils
fixed full upon your own, and the significance of the expression "evil
eye," and the mysteries of snake-charming, hypnotism, and hoodooism
will be readily understood, for his brutish, merciless, unflinching
stare is simply blood-chilling.

Zoölogically the alligator belongs to the genus _Crocodilus_, and he
has all the hideousness of that family, lacking somewhat its
bloodthirstiness, although the American alligator is carnivorous by
nature, and occasionally cannibalistic. Strictly speaking, however,
the true alligator is much less dangerous than his relatives of the
Old World, and he is correspondingly less courageous.

One would suppose the saurians, or crocodilians, from their general
appearance to be huge lizards, but the resemblance is superficial. The
whole internal structure differs widely, and, subdivided into
gavials, crocodiles, and alligators, they form a family by themselves
which is widespread, extending into considerable areas of the
temperate regions.

All crocodilians are great, ungainly reptiles, having broad, depressed
bodies, short legs, and long, powerful, and wonderfully flexible tails
which are compressed--that is, flattened sideways. Upon the upper
surface of the tail lie two jagged or saw-toothed crests, which unite
near the middle of the appendage, continuing in a single row to the
extremity.

All have thick necks and bodies protected by regular transverse rows
of long, horny plates or shields, which are elevated in the center
into keel-shaped ridges, forming an armor that is quite bullet-proof.
The throat, the under side of the neck, and belly are not thus
protected, and it is at these places, as well as at the eyes, and also
just behind the ears, that the hunter directs his aim.

The principal points of difference between a gavial and a crocodile
are these: the former has very long, slender jaws, set with
twenty-seven teeth in each side of the upper jaw and with twenty-five
teeth in the under, while at the extremity of the snout there are two
holes, through which pass upward the lower large front teeth, but all
the remaining teeth are free, and slant well outward; whereas a
crocodile has a head that is triangular, the snout being the apex; a
narrow muzzle, and canine teeth in the lower jaw, which pass freely
upward in the notches in the side of the upper jaw.

An alligator has a broad, flat muzzle, and the canine teeth of the
lower jaw fit into sockets in the under surface of the upper jaw. It
is strictly an American form of the family. Its feet being much less
webbed, its habits are also less perfectly aquatic, and, preferring
still or stagnant fresh-water courses or swamps, it is rarely found in
tide-water streams.

The crocodile, on the contrary, is commonly found in swift-running,
fresh and salt water rivers. He is a sagacious brute, and ferocious,
often attacking human beings without provocation; but the alligator,
as a rule, is not disposed to fight, although in South America, where
it goes by the name of _caiman_ or _cayman_, it grows to an enormous
size, and is said to be fully as dangerous as the crocodile. There is
also a variety of the family--that is, a true crocodile--found in
Florida, but it is very rare, and smaller than its Asiatic relative.

The mouths of all these reptiles, which are large and extend beyond
the ears, present a formidable array of sharp, conical teeth of
different sizes, set far apart in the crocodile and the alligator,
some being enlarged into tusks. All are implanted in separate sockets,
and form a single row upon each jaw. When a tooth is shed or broken,
a new one promptly comes up beneath the hollow base of the old one;
and in this way, all ready for the need, sometimes three or four
waiting teeth, packed together like a nest of thimbles, may be seen in
the jaw of a dead alligator.

[Illustration: YOUNG PET ALLIGATOR. From photograph by E. L. Russell,
Palm Beach.]

The alligator is at best an awkward brute. Slow and ungainly upon
land--although even there his powerful tail can, when necessary,
assist the scuffling paws to an astonishing extent if the creature is
in haste--he shows to better advantage in the water. There he turns
his clumsy body with wonderful dexterity and swiftness, when, at the
sight of a swimming muskrat or a wading dog, he instantly changes from
what has resembled a drifting log idly floating upon the calm surface
of the swamp, into a thing of life--fierce and horrible.

The general food of an alligator is fish, turtles, and frogs, with an
occasional heedless dog or fowl. A number of adult alligators will
quickly deplenish a small, clear-water lake of its finny inhabitants,
which statement to would-be Florida fishermen will readily account for
the lack in many localities. There is also a curious belief in the
South that the creature has an especial liking for a "darkey steak,"
and for this reason he is feared by the negroes. That he becomes
carnivorous to a dangerous extent when pressed by hunger, there is no
doubt, for, the supply of fish exhausted, he must look for larger
game.

Partially concealed by rubbish, or floating idly close to the
bank--always only a short distance from his retreat--he so closely
resembles an old and weather-worn log that no suspicion is aroused.
Presently a razorback comes down the narrow trail that meanders
through the scrub and passes close to the reptile. Let it pass between
the alligator and the water--that is, between the creature and his
_cave_--and the end has come. An alligator seldom misses, and one
spring, leap, or plunge, or whatever the swift, clumsy movement may be
called, and the wretched animal is seized and held fast, either by the
nose or leg, as a rule. Then the struggle begins, for the razorback
loves its life, despised pig of the Florida flatwoods though it is.

Alligators drown their prey. Their own nostrils and throats are so
arranged that they themselves can sink to the bottom without danger of
suffocation, although their mouths, or rather their jaws, may be
widely stretched with the body of their victim. Indeed, they can
reascend to the surface to breathe without releasing the prize; and,
as this power is so closely connected with their method of killing the
larger animals, a description of the latter, repulsive though it is,
may not be out of place.

The teeth of an alligator are better adapted for crushing and
crunching than for biting. Therefore, for him to eat a struggling
animal would be difficult. Instinct teaches him that it must first be
killed.

To dispose of a dog or a chicken is a small matter, for when the
alligator meets it upon the bank one strong, far-reaching sweep of the
powerful tail tosses it far out upon the lake. The alligator simply
follows, grasps the half-stunned creature in his jaws, and disappears
beneath the surface, where he remains until all is quiet. With a
larger animal, however, he proceeds differently, for the reason that a
yearling, a colt, or a razorback is not so easily handled. First,
therefore, a description of an alligator's cave must be given, since
it is to this grewsome retreat that the hideous brute takes his booty.

Selecting some spot where the water is deep--usually beneath some
overhanging bank--an alligator excavates what is called a "cave." Any
one, standing upon the border of a lake or swamp in Florida, may, all
unconsciously, be directly over one of these places. He makes it
sufficiently large to accommodate one or more of his kind, by dragging
out the mud and roots with the strong claws or nails that arm his fore
paws or legs. These "caves" serve in winter for hibernation, and at
other times for the purpose that will be explained.

Once in the water, then--to return to the unhappy razorback--the
alligator does not rely wholly upon his teeth and jaws to hold the
desperate animal. He can not yet sink, for the victim is too strong.
It must first be drowned, and a furious struggle for the mastery then
begins.

By degrees the brute finally succeeds in dragging the animal out into
water sufficiently deep to suit his purpose, and then he clasps it
firmly with his paws, precisely like the hugging of a bear. He then
begins to roll over and over. Now beneath the surface, now out, he
turns and turns, first the alligator uppermost, then his prey,
alternately, until the poor animal is drowned literally by inches.
Before long the razorback weakens, his struggles lessen, and then the
alligator sinks to the bottom, and when all motion has ceased he
deposits the body in his cave, well pleased with the prospect of a
full larder for some time to come.

One might naturally ask just here whether or not this scene would be
the same were a human being the victim. The reply would be--precisely.

The alligator undoubtedly prefers his food in a partly decomposed
condition, although it is an undecided point whether this preference
arises from a natural taste, or for the reason that food in that state
is softer and more easily torn apart. Whichever may be the case,
Nature unasked supplies the remedy, and the alligator takes advantage
of her assistance, and deposits his victim in his hiding place,
confident that at the proper time it will rise to the surface in the
condition best adapted to his needs.

Although by nature the alligator is amphibious, he passes the greater
part of his time upon land during the breeding season. At such times,
also, he migrates from one clear-water lake or swamp to another,
should he not find a mate in his own locality, and he may not
infrequently be met in his overland journeyings. Alligators are not
strictly gregarious, although large numbers are found in the same body
of water; while, on the contrary, there will often be but one or two
that will haunt a certain tract for a long period.

During this season the bull alligator is very noisy, and his deep
bellowing may be heard for a long distance. To state that this noise
causes the ground to vibrate may seem an exaggeration, but the fact
may easily be proved by visiting a swamp where the reptiles have
congregated. The water in the vicinity will plainly show the jarring
of the ground.

This bellow is a thundering, rumbling sound; and when it is combined
with the startling hisses, blowings, sighs, and deep-breathed snorts
which the creature can produce at will, no one will be likely to
dispute that his collection of diabolical noises is quite complete.

During the period of incubation the female alligator is a devoted
mother. She does not desert her nest from the time that the eggs are
laid until they are hatched--lying concealed in the scrub close
by--and she is naturally, at this time, most dangerous to approach,
although her vigilance does not always save a portion of her unhatched
progeny from the numerous enemies that have a fondness for alligator
omelet.

[Illustration: GROUP OF CAPTIVE ALLIGATORS. From photograph by O. P.
Hareus, Jacksonville.]

The nest is a large, well-rounded heap or mound, composed of sand and
rubbish, which she drags and pushes together with her claws.
Throughout this mound she deposits her eggs, from forty to seventy and
over. These eggs resemble those of a goose, only that they are larger;
they have a thick, tough shell, and are of about the same size at both
ends. In about sixty days, the heat of the sun, combined with the
warmth and moisture generated by the fermentation of the rubbish,
completes the process of incubation, and the little ones begin to come
forth.

Forcing their way through the sand, they hurry down the sloping sides
of the mound, straightway seeking the water by instinct. While these
baby 'gators are thus kicking and flinging off their shell overcoats
as they emerge from their incubator, perfect little duplicates of
their mother--only that they are rather pretty in their clean, glossy,
black or dark-brown skins, which have orange-colored stripes that
completely ring their miniature tails and bodies--she wanders
anxiously about, probably wondering how many of her family will
succeed in running the very uncertain gantlet of life.

For, eaten while in the egg stage by birds and animals, and swallowed
by open-mouthed, expectant fishes, and by other alligators--often led,
if the truth must be told, by the interesting father himself--as soon
as they reach the water, the early days of an alligator are full of
trouble. That enough escape to prevent extinction, however, goes
almost without saying.

Alligators are hunted for their teeth, which find a ready market when
made up into pretty ornaments; and of late years extensively for their
hides, which make a very handsome leather. For this purpose the older
specimens are not valuable, their hides being too gnarled, knotty, and
moss-grown to tan well. After ten or fifteen years the hide coarsens.
It is always the skin from the under side of the body and head which
is used, that from the back being so heavily armored with tough, horny
plates and shields as to be practically useless. The flesh for food
finds but few admirers. Like the eggs, it is permeated by a strong,
musky flavor, too rank to find appreciation from a refined palate; but
in some places the steaks from the reptile are eaten by the negroes
and pronounced good.

To successfully hunt the alligator requires experience, for quick work
is necessary, the brute disappearing at the least suspicion of danger.
Hunting by "jack" is the usual method pursued, for the light seems to
charm the creature, so that he may be more easily detained until a
properly directed bullet speedily puts an end to his existence.

A professional alligator hunter, or a "'gator man," as he is called,
leads a life full of adventure, but his business is upon the wane,
since the fad for alligator leather is being pushed aside to make way
for something later and more novel. Nevertheless, a description of his
outfit may not be uninteresting.

A most important adjunct to this outfit is the man who usually
accompanies the 'gator man upon his expeditions. He might properly be
called the silent partner, for his duty is to instantly and silently
obey the different hand signals, meaning "To the right," "To the
left," "Stop," "Back," "Hurry," "Forward," "Spurt," "Slow," given by
the hunter, while standing erect in the bow of the boat, when out with
the "jack." Indeed, upon his alertness depends much of the success or
failure of the night's work.

The other tools used by the 'gator man are a light, strong boat, a
pair of light oars and a broad-bladed paddle with a four-foot handle,
neatly coiled rope, a jack lamp furnished with a powerful reflector,
an axe, a long, keen-bladed hunting knife, two guns (twelve-bore
breech-loaders, for a heavy charge at one delivery is absolutely
necessary), bags of ammunition, some strong chains, rawhide rope, and
a 'gator pole. This last-mentioned "tool" is a stout pole about ten
feet long, armed with a heavy hook of quarter-inch iron, bearing a
barbed shank of two inches or more, and it is used for hauling the
dead alligators from the bottom, for the creatures sink as soon as
killed.

The brilliant rays from the "jack" reveal a curious and a grewsome
sight when thrown upon a bank or island upon which a group of the
creatures have congregated. The shining waters of the swamp, so still
and black at that hour of midnight; the hideous tangle of huge gray
forms, as a dozen or more alligators, fairly intoxicated by the gleam
of the mysterious light, steadfastly watch its incomprehensible
presence. Gazing intently, their evil eyes blood-red in the glare from
the powerful reflector, some lie motionless, others roar and hiss and
snort with thrilling fierceness as the mystery deepens, incessantly
arching their bodies, then alternately depressing them to the ground.
Still others, crawling from beneath their companions, scuffle angrily
to the front, and stand with jaws partly open--now and then slowly
inflating their lungs, until their throats and sides puff out like
bellows. Yet, strange to say, instinct seems to warn the mother
alligator, for there she may be seen quietly creeping away with her
young.

Then, the loud reports from the guns, and the mystery is dispelled!
The island is deserted, and the work of raising the successfully shot
saurians begins.

       *       *       *       *       *

     Boards of rural engineering, syndicates of specialists
     organized in several of the countries of northern Europe to
     look after drainage and irrigation, have rendered great
     services to the populations of the country districts. With
     their aid 591 villages in Alsace-Lorraine were provided with
     water between 1881 and 1895, and 516 communes in Baden have
     been benefited by their assistance. The expense of the
     improvement has not exceeded $6.61 (33 francs) per
     inhabitant. The Agricultural Bureau in Prussia has in the
     past five years drawn the plans and directed the work of 554
     hydraulic syndicates, covering a total surface of more than
     600,000 acres. A numerous body of these agricultural
     engineers is formed every year in Germany, 517 students
     having pursued the course of the section of rural
     engineering in 1893 in the agronomical institutes of Bonn
     and Berlin alone.

     It is generally accepted that the spider is a solitary
     animal, that will tolerate no companions, even the male
     being in danger of being devoured by his female. But a
     spider--the _Stregodyphus gregarius_--is described as living
     in the Transvaal in communities, including males and
     females, young and old. The nests are sometimes voluminous
     and have partitions and numerous passages running through
     them. The spiders usually escape observation by wrapping
     themselves in dry leaves that hang from stems.




THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE.

A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY.

(_Lowell Institute Lectures, 1896._)

BY WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY, PH. D.,

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


SUPPLEMENT.--THE JEWS (_continued_).

Tradition has long divided the Jewish people into two distinct
branches: the Sephardim, or southern, and the Ashkenazim, or north,
European. Mediæval legend among the Jews themselves traced the descent
of the first from the tribe of Judah; the second, from that of
Benjamin. The Sephardim are mainly the remnants of the former Spanish
and Portuguese Jews. They constitute in their own eyes an aristocracy
of the nation. They are found primarily to-day in Africa; in the
Balkan states, where they are known as Spagnuoli; less purely in
France and Italy. A small colony in London and Amsterdam still holds
itself aloof from all communion and intercourse with its brethren. The
Ashkenazim branch is numerically far more important, for the German,
Russian, and Polish Jews comprise over nine tenths of the people, as
we have already seen in our preceding article.

Early observers all describe these two branches of the Jews as very
different in appearance. Vogt, in his Lectures on Man, assumes the
Polish type to be descended from Hindu sources, while the Spanish
alone he held to be truly Semitic. Weisbach[11] gives us the best
description of the Sephardim Jew as to-day found at Constantinople. He
is slender in habit, he says; almost without exception the head is
"exquisitely" elongated and narrow, the face a long oval; the nose
hooked and prominent, but thin and finely chiseled; hair and eyes
generally dark, sometimes, however, tending to a reddish blond. This
rufous tendency in the Oriental Jew is emphasized by many observers.
Dr. Beddoe[12] found red hair as frequent in the Orient as in Saxon
England, although later results do not fully bear it out.[13] This
description of a reddish Oriental type corresponds certainly to the
early representations of the Saviour; it is the type, in features,
perhaps, rather than hair, painted by Rembrandt--the Sephardim in
Amsterdam being familiar to him, and appealing to the artist in
preference to the Ashkenazim type. This latter is said to be
characterized by heavier features in every way. The mouth, it is
alleged, is more apt to be large, the nose thickish at the end, less
often clearly Jewish, perhaps. The lips are full and sensual, offering
an especial contrast to the thin lips of the Sephardim. The complexion
is swarthy oftentimes, the hair and eyes very constantly dark, without
the rufous tendency which appears in the other branch. The face is at
the same time fuller, the breadth corresponding to a relatively short
and round head.

Does this contrast of the traditional Sephardim and Ashkenazim facial
types correspond to the anthropometric criteria by means of which we
have analyzed the various populations of Europe? And, first of all, is
there the difference of head form between the two which our
descriptions imply?[14] And, if so, which represents the primitive
Semitic type of Palestine? The question is a crucial one. It involves
the whole matter of the original physical derivation of the people,
and the rival claims to purity of descent of the two branches of the
nation. In preceding papers we have learned that western Asia is quite
uniformly characterized by an exceeding broad-headedness, the cephalic
index--that is to say, the breadth of the head in percentage of the
length from front to back--often rising to 86. This is especially
marked in Asia Minor, where some of the broadest and shortest crania
in the world are to be found. The Armenians, for example, are so
peculiar in this respect that their heads appear almost deformed, so
flattened are they at the back. A head of the description appears in
the case of our Jew from Ferghanah on our second portrait page, 344.
On the other hand, the peoples of African or negroid derivation form a
radical contrast, their heads being quite long and narrow, with
indices ranging from 75 to 78. This is the type of the living Arab
to-day. Its peculiarity appears in the prominence of the occipital
region in our Arab and other African portraits. Scientific research
upon these Arabs has invariably yielded harmonious results. From the
Canary Islands,[15] all across northern Africa,[16] to central Arabia
itself,[17] the cephalic indices of the nomadic Arabs agree closely.
They denote a head form closely allied to that of the long-headed
Iberian races, typified in the modern Spaniards, south Italians, and
Greeks. It was the head form of the ancient Phoenicians and Egyptians
also, as has recently been proved beyond all question.[18] Thus does
the European Mediterranean type shade off in head form, as in
complexion also, into the primitive anthropological type of the negro.
The situation being thus clearly defined, it should be relatively easy
to trace our modern Jews, if, indeed, as has so long been assumed,
they have remained a pure and undefiled race during the course of
their incessant migrations. We should be able to trace their origin if
they possess any distinctive head form, either to the one continent or
the other, with comparative certainty.

  -------------------------+--------------------+----------+------------
        AUTHORITY.         |     Place.         |  Number. | Cephalic
                           |                    |          |  Index.
  -------------------------+--------------------+----------+------------
  Lombroso, 1894 a         |Turin, Italy.       |   112    |  82.0
  Weisbach, '77            |Balkan states.      |    19    |  82.2
  Majer and Kopernicki, '77|Galicia.            |   316    |  83.6
  Blechmann, '82           |W. Russia.          |   100    |  83.2
  Stieda, '83 (Dybowski)   |Minsk, Russia.      |    67    |  82.2
  Ikof, '84                |Russia.             |   120    |  83.2
  Ikof, '84                |Constantinople.     |17 crania |  74.5
  Ikof, '84                |Crimea.             |30 crania |  83.3
                           |                    | (Karaim).|
  Majer and Kopernicki,'85 |Galicia.            |   100    |  81.7
  Jacobs, '90              |England.            |   363    |  80.0
  Jacobs, '90              |England (Sephardim).|    51    |
  Talko-Hyrncewicz, '92    |Lithuania.          |   713    |
  Chantre, '95             |Caucasia.           |    34    |  85.0
  Weissenberg, '95         |South Russia.       |   100    |  82.5
  Weissenberg, '95         |South Russia.       |50 women. |  82.4
  Glück, '96               |Bosnia (Spagnuoli). |    55    |  80.1
  Livi, '96                |Italy.              |    34    |  81.6
  Elkind, '97              |Poland.             |   325    |{Men,   81.9
                           |                    |          |{Women, 82.9
  Deniker, '98             |Daghestan.          |    19    |  87.0
  -------------------------+--------------------+----------+------------

During the last quarter of a century about twenty-five hundred Jews
have submitted their heads to scientific measurement. These have
naturally for the most part been taken from the Great Russian and
Polish branch; a few observers, as Lombroso, Ikof, Jacobs, Glück, and
Livi, have taken observations upon a more or less limited number from
southern Europe. For purposes of comparison we have reproduced in our
footnote a summary of all the results obtained thus far. Inspection of
the table shows a surprising uniformity. Ikof's limited series of
Spagnuoli from Constantinople, and that of the Jews from Caucasia and
Daghestan, are the only ones whose cephalic index lies outside the
limits of 80 to 83. In other words, the Jews, wherever found in
Europe, betray a remarkable similarity in head form, the crania being
considerably broader than among the peoples of Teutonic descent. As we
know, the extremes of head form in Europe, measured by the cephalic
index, extend from 74 to 89; we thus observe that the Jews take a
place rather high in the European series. They are about like the
northern French and southern Germans. More important still, they seem
to be generally very closely akin in head form to the people among
whom they reside. Thus, in Russia and Poland scarcely an appreciable
difference exists in this respect between Jews and Christians. The
same is true in Turin, while in the direction of Asia our Jews are as
bullet-headed as even the most typical Armenians and Caucasians round
about them.

[Illustration: ARAB. Index, 76.

MUSSULMAN, TUNIS. Index, 75.

JEW, TUNIS. Index, 75.

AFRICAN SEMITIC TYPES.]

This surprising similarity of head form between the Jews of North and
South Europe bears hard upon the long-accepted theory that the
Sephardim is dolichocephalic, thereby remaining true to the original
Semitic type borne to-day by the Arabs. It has quite universally been
accepted that the two branches of the Jews differed most materially in
head form. From the facial dissimilarity of the two a correlative
difference in head form was a gratuitous inference. Dr. Beddoe
observes that in Turkey the Spagnuoli "seemed" to him to be more
dolichocephalic. A few years later Barnard Davis (1867) "suspected" a
diversity, but had only three Italian skulls to judge from, so that
his testimony counts for little. Then Weisbach (1877) referred to the
"exquisitely" long heads of the Spagnuoli, but his data show a
different result. Ikof, with his small series of crania from
Constantinople, is the only observer who got a result which accords in
any degree with what we know of the head form of the modern Semitic
peoples. On the other hand, Glück in Bosnia and Livi in Italy find no
other sign of long-headedness than a slight drop in index of a point
or two. Jacobs, in England, whose methods, as Topinard has observed,
are radically defective, gives no averages for his Sephardim, but they
appear to include about eleven per cent less pure long-headed types
than even their Ashkenazim brethren in London. This, it will be noted,
is the exact opposite of what might normally be expected. This tedious
summary forces us inevitably to the conclusion that, while a
long-headed type of Sephardim Jews may exist, the law is very far from
being satisfactorily established.

Thus, from a study of our primary characteristic--the proportions of
the head--we find our modern Jews endowed with a relatively much
broader head than that of the average Englishman, for example: while
the best living representative of the Semitic race, the Arab, has a
head which is even longer and narrower than our own type. It is, in
short, one of the longest known, being in every way distinctly
African. The only modern Jews who even approach this type would seem
to be those who actually reside to-day in Africa, as in the case of
our two portrait types from that region. Two possible explanations are
open to us: either the great body of the Jews in Europe
to-day--certainly all the Ashkenazim, who form upward of ninety per
cent of the nation, and quite probably the Sephardim also, except
possibly those in Africa--have departed widely from the parental type
in Palestine; or else the original Semitic type was broad-headed, and,
by inference, distinctly Asiatic in derivation; in which case it is
the modern Arab which has deviated from its original pattern. Ikof is
the only authority who boldly faces this dilemma, and chooses the
Asiatic hypothesis with his eyes open.[19] Which, we leave it to the
reader to decide, would be the more likely to vary--the wandering Jew,
ever driven from place to place by constant persecution, and
constantly exposed to the vicissitudes of life in densely populated
cities, the natural habitat of the people, as we have said; or the
equally nomadic Arab, who, however, seems to be invariable in type,
whether in Algeria, Morocco, the Canary Islands, or Arabia Felix
itself? There can be but one answer, it seems to us. The original
Semitic stock must have been in origin strongly dolichocephalic--that
is to say, African as the Arabs are to-day; from which it follows,
naturally, that about nine tenths of the living Jews are as widely
different in head form from the parent stock to-day as they well could
be. The boasted purity of descent of the Jews is, then, a myth. Renan
(1883) is right, after all, in his assertion that the ethnographic
significance of the word Jew, for the Russian and Danubian branch at
least, long ago ceased to exist. Or, as Lombroso observes, the modern
Jews are physically more Aryan than Semitic, after all. They have
unconsciously taken on to a large extent the physical traits of the
people among whom their lot has been thrown. In Algiers they have
remained long-headed like their neighbors, for, even if they
intermarried, no tendency to deviation in head form would be provoked.
If, on the other hand, they settled in Piedmont, Austria, or Russia,
with their moderately round-headed populations, they became in time
assimilated to the type of these neighbors as well.

Nothing is simpler than to substantiate the argument of a constant
intercourse and intermixture of Jews with the Christians about them
all through history, from the original exodus of the forty thousand
(?) from Jerusalem after the destruction of the second temple. At this
time the Jewish nation as a political entity ceased to exist. An
important consideration to be borne in mind in this connection, as
Neubauer suggests very aptly, is that opposition to mixed marriages
was primarily a prejudice of religion and not of race. It was
dissipated on the conversion of the Gentile to Judaism. In fact, in
the early days of Judaism marriage with a nonbeliever was not
invalid at all, as it afterward became, according to the Jewish
code. Thus Josephus, speaking of the Jews at Antioch, mentions that
they made many converts, receiving them into their community. An
extraordinary number of conversions to Judaism undoubtedly took place
during the second century after Christ. As to the extent of
intermarriage which ensued during the middle ages discussion is still
rife. Renan, Neubauer, and others interpret the various rigid
prohibitions against intermarriage of Jews with Christians--as, for
example, at the church councils of 538, 589, at Toledo, and of 743 at
Rome--to mean the prevalent danger of such practices becoming general;
while Jacobs, Andree, and others are inclined to place a lower
estimate upon their importance. Two wholesale conversions are known to
have taken place: the classical one of the Khozars, in South Russia,
during the reign of Charlemagne, and that of the Falashas, who were
neighboring Arab tribes in Yemen. Jacobs has ably shown, however, the
relatively slight importance of these. It is probable that the
greatest amount of infusion of Christian blood must have taken place,
in any event, not so much through such striking conversions, as
insidiously through clandestine or irregular marriages.

[Illustration: FERGHANAH, TURKESTAN.

HÉRAULT, FRANCE.

ELIZABETHGRAD, RUSSIA.

SPAGNUOLI, BOSNIA.

ELIZABETHGRAD, RUSSIA.

JEWISH TYPES.]

We find, for example, much prohibitive legislation against the
employment of Christian servants by Jews. This was directed against
the danger of conversion to Judaism, by the master, with consequent
intermarriage. It is not likely that these prohibitions were of much
avail, for, despite stringent laws in Hungary, for example, we find
the archbishop of that country reporting in 1229 that many Jews were
illegally living with Christian wives, and that conversions by
thousands were taking place. In any case, no protection for slaves was
ever afforded. The confinement of the Jews strictly to the Ghettos
during the later centuries would naturally discourage such
intermixture of blood, as also the increasing popular hatred between
Jew and Christian; but, on the other hand, the greater degree of
tolerance enjoyed by the Israelites even during this present century
would be competent speedily to produce great results. Jacobs has
strenuously, although perhaps somewhat inconclusively, argued in favor
of a substantial purity of the Jews by means of a number of other
data--such as, for example, by a study of the relative frequency of
Jewish names, by the supposed relative infecundity of mixed marriages,
and the like. Experience and the facts of everyday observation, on the
other hand, tend to confirm us in the belief that racially no purity
of descent is to be supposed for an instant. Consider the evidence of
names, for example. We may admit a considerable purity, perhaps, to
the Cohns and Cohens, legitimate descendants of the Cohanim, the sons
of Aaron, early priests of the temple. Their marital relations were
safeguarded against infusion of foreign blood in every possible way.
The name is, perhaps, in its various forms, the most frequent among
Jews to-day. But how shall we account for the equally pure Jewish
names in origin, such as Davis, Harris, Phillips, and Hart? How did
they ever stray so far from their original ethnic and religious
significance, unless the marital bars were lowered to a large degree?
Some of them certainly claim a foremost position numerically in our
Christian English directories. We have an interesting case of
indefinite Jewish delimitation in our portraits. The middle portrait
at page 341 is certainly a Jewish type. Dr. Bertholon writes me that
all who saw it immediately asserted it to be a Jew. Yet the man was a
professed Mussulman, in fact, even though his face was against him.

There is, as we have sought to prove, no single uniform type of head
peculiar to the Jewish people which may be regarded as in any sense
racially hereditary. Is this true also of the face? Our first
statement encounters no popular disapproval, for most of us never,
perhaps, happened to think of this head form as characteristic. But
the face, the features! Is this another case of science running
counter to popular belief?

The first characteristic to impress itself upon the layman is that the
Jew is generally a brunette. All scientific observers corroborate this
impression, agreeing in that the dark hair and eyes of this people
really constitute a distinct racial trait. About two thirds of the
Ashkenazim branch in Galicia and Russia, where the general population
is relatively quite blond, is of the brunette type, this being
especially marked in the darker color of the hair. For example, Majer
and Kopernicki,[20] in Galicia, found dark hair to be about twice as
frequent as the light. Elkind,[21] in Warsaw, finds about three fifths
of the men dark. In Bosnia, Glück's observations on the Sephardim type
gave him only two light-haired men out of fifty-five. In Germany and
Austria[22] this brunette tendency is likewise strongly emphasized.
Pure brunette types are twice as frequent in the latter country, and
three times as frequent in Germany, among Jewish as among Christian
school children. Facts also seem to bear out the theory, to which we
have already alluded, that the Oriental Jews betray a slightly greater
blond tendency, thus inclining to rufous. In Germany also the blond
tendency becomes appreciably more frequent in Alsace-Lorraine, a
former center of gravity of the nation, as the map in our previous
article has shown. This comparative blondness of the Alsatian Jew is
not new, for in 1861 the origin of these same blondes was matter of
controversy. Broca believed them to be of northern derivation, while
Pruner Bey traced them from a blondish Eastern source. The English
Jews seem also to be slightly lighter than their continental brethren,
even despite their presumably greater proportion of Sephardim, who are
supposed to be peculiarly dark. As to the relative red blondness of
the Oriental Jew, the early observations of Dr. Beddoe, and those of
Langerhans (1873) as to the blue eyes and red-brown hair of the Druses
of Lebanon, do not seem to be borne out; or, as Jacobs puts it, the
"argument may be dismissed with costs." Certainly the living Semites
are dark enough in type, and the evidence of the sacred books bears
out the same theory of an original dark type. Thus "black" and "hair"
are commonly synonymous in the early Semitic languages. In any case,
whatever the color in the past, we have seen that science corroborates
the popular impression that the Jews as a people are distinctively of
a brunette type. This constitutes one of the principal traits by which
they may be almost invariably identified. It is not without interest
to notice that this brunetteness is more accentuated, oftentimes,
among the women, who are, the world over, persistent conservators of
the primitive physical characteristics of a people.[23]

Secondly, as to the nose. Popularly the humped or hook nose
constitutes the most distinctive feature of the Jewish face.
Observations among the Jews, in their most populous centers, do not,
however, bear out the theory. Thus Majer and Kopernicki (1885), in
their extended series, found only nine per cent of the hooked type--no
greater frequency than among the Poles; a fact which Weissenberg
confirms as to the relative scarcity of the convex nose in profile
among his South Russian Jews. He agrees, however, that the nose is
often large, thick, and prominent. Weisbach (1877) measured the facial
features of nineteen Jews, and found the largest noses in a long
series of people from all over the earth; exceeded in length, in fact,
by the Patagonians alone. The hooked nose is, indeed, sometimes
frequent outside the Jewish people. Olechnowicz found, for example,
over a third of the noses of the gentry in southeast Poland to be of
this hooked variety. Running the eye over our carefully chosen series
of portraits, selected for us as typical from four quarters
of Europe--Algeria, Russia, Bosnia, and the confines of
Asia--representing the African, Balkan Spagnuoli, and Russian
Ashkenazim varieties, visual impression will also confirm our
deduction. The Jewish nose is not so often truly convex in profile.
Nevertheless, it must be confessed that it gives a hooked impression.
This seems to be due to a peculiar "tucking up of the wings," as Dr.
Beddoe expresses it. Herein lies the real distinctive quality about
it, rather than in any convexity of outline. In fact, it often
renders a nose concave in profile, immediately recognizable as Jewish.
Jacobs[24] has ingeniously described this "nostrility," as he calls
it, by the following diagrams: Write, he says, a figure 6 with a long
tail (Fig. 1); now remove the turn of the twist, and much of the
Jewishness disappears; and it vanishes entirely when we draw the lower
continuation horizontally, as in Fig. 3. Behold the transformation!
The Jew has turned Roman beyond a doubt. What have we proved, then?
That there is in reality such a phenomenon as a Jewish nose, even
though it be differently constituted from our first assumption. A
moment's inspection of our series of portraits will convince the
skeptic that this trait, next to the prevalent dark hair and eyes and
the swarthy skin, is the most distinctive among the chosen people.

[Illustration: _Fig. 1._]

[Illustration: _Fig. 2._]

[Illustration: _Fig. 3._]

Another characteristic of the Jewish physiognomy is the eyes. The
eyebrows, seemingly thick because of their darkness, appear to be
nearer together than usual, arching smoothly into the lines of the
nose. The lids are rather full, the eyes large, dark, and brilliant. A
general impression of heaviness is apt to be given. In favorable cases
this imparts a dreamy, melancholy, or thoughtful expression to the
countenance; in others it degenerates into a blinking, drowsy type;
or, again, with eyes half closed, it may suggest suppressed cunning.
The particular adjective to be applied to this expression varies
greatly according to the personal equation of the observer. Quite
persistent also is a fullness of the lips, often amounting in the
lower one almost to a pout. The chin in many cases is certainly rather
pointed and receding, Jacobs to the contrary notwithstanding. A
feature of my own observation, perhaps not fully justified, is a
peculiar separation of the teeth, which seem to stand well apart from
one another. But a truce to speculations. Entering into greater
detail, the flat contradictions of different observers show that they
are vainly generalizing from an all too narrow base of observations.
Even the fancied differences in feature between the two great branches
of the Hebrew people seem to us to be of doubtful existence. Our
portraits do not bear it out. It seems rather that the two
descriptions of the Ashkenazim and Sephardim types which we have
quoted denote rather the distinction between the faces of those of the
upper and the lower classes. Enough for us to know that there is a
something Jewish in these faces which we instantly detect. We
recognize it in Rembrandt's Hermitage, or in Munkaczy's Christ before
Pilate. Not invariable are these traits. Not even to the Jew himself
are they always a sure criterion. Weissenberg gives an interesting
example of this.[25] To a friend, a Jew in Elizabethgrad, he submitted
two hundred and fifty photographs of Russian Jews and Christians in
undistinctive costume. Seventy per cent of the Jews were rightly
chosen, while but ten per cent of the Russians were wrongly classed as
Jews. Of what concern is it whether this characterization be entirely
featural, or in part a matter of expression? The first would be a
matter of direct heredity, the second hypothesis partakes more of the
nature of a characteristic acquired from the social environment. Some
one--Jacobs, I think--speaks of it as the "expression of the Ghetto."
It certainly appears in the remarkable series of composite Jewish
portraits published in his monograph. It would not be surprising to
find this true. Continued hardship, persecution, a desperate struggle
against an inexorable human environment as well as natural one, could
not but write its lines upon the face. The impression of a dreary past
is deep sunk in the bodily proportions, as we have seen. Why not in
the face as well?

We are now prepared, in conclusion, to deal with what is perhaps the
most interesting phase of our discussion. It is certainly, if true, of
profound sociological importance. We have in these pages spoken at
length of the head form--primary index of race; we have shown that
there are Jews and Jews in this respect. Yet which was the real Jew it
was not for us to decide, for the ninety-and-nine were broad-headed,
while the Semite in the East is still, as ever, a long-headed member
of the Africanoid races. This discouraged our hopes of proving the
existence of a Jewish cephalic type as the result of purity of
descent. It may indeed be affirmed with certainty that the Jews are by
hereditary descent from early times no purer than most of their
European neighbors. Then we discovered evidence that in this head form
the Jews were often closely akin to the people among whom they lived.
In long-headed Africa they were dolichocephalic. In brachycephalic
Piedmont, though supposedly of Sephardim descent, they were quite like
the Italians of Turin. And all over Slavic Europe no distinction in
head form between Jew and Christian existed. In the Caucasus also they
approximate closely the cranial characteristics of their neighbors.
Hypnotic suggestion was not needed to find a connection here,
especially since all history bore us out in our assumption of a large
degree of intermixture of Gentile blood. Close upon this disproval of
purity of type by descent came evidence of a distinct uniformity of
facial type. Even so impartial an observer as Weissenberg--certainly
not prejudiced in favor of cephalic invariability--confesses this
featural unity.

How shall we solve this enigma of ethnic purity, and yet impurity, of
type? In this very apparent contradiction lies the grain of comfort
for our sociological hypothesis. The Jew is radically mixed in the
line of _racial descent_; he is, on the other hand, the legitimate
heir to all Judaism as a matter of _choice_. It is for us a case of
purely artificial selection, operative as ever only in those physical
traits which appeal to the senses. It is precisely analogous to our
example of the Basques in France and Spain. What we have said of them
will apply with equal force here. Both Jews and Basques possessed in a
high degree a "consciousness of kind"; they were keenly sensible of
their social individuality. The Basques primarily owed theirs to
geographical isolation and a peculiar language; that of the Jews was
derived from the circumstances of social isolation, dependent upon the
dictates of religion. Another case in point occurs to us in this
connection. Chantre,[26] in a recent notable work, has shown the
remarkable uniformity in physical type among the Armenians. They are
so peculiar in head form that we in America recognize them at once by
their foreshortened and sugar-loaf skulls, almost devoid of occiput.
They too, like the Jews, have long been socially isolated in their
religion. Thus in all these cases, Basques, Armenians, and Jews, we
have a potent selective force at work. So far as in their power lay,
the individuality of all these people was encouraged and perpetuated
as one of their dearest possessions. It affected every detail of their
lives. Why should it not also react upon their ideal of physical
beauty? and why not influence their sexual preferences, as well as to
determine their choice in marriage? Its results became thus
accentuated through heredity. But all this would be accomplished, be
it especially noted, only in so far as the physical traits were
consciously or unconsciously impressed upon them by the facts of
observation. There arises at once the difference between artificial
selection in the matter of the head form and that concerning the
facial features. One is an unsuspected possession of individuality,
the other is matter of common notice and, it may be, of report. What
Jew or Christian, till he became anthropologist, ever stopped to
consider the shape of his head, any more than the addition of a number
of cubits to his stature? Who has not, on the other hand, early
acquired a distinct concept of a Jewish face and of a distinctly
Jewish type? Could such a potent fact escape observation for a moment?

We are confirmed in our belief in the potency of an artificial
selection, such as we have described, to perpetuate or to evolve a
Jewish facial type by reason of another observation. The women among
the Jews, as Jacobs[27] notes, in confirmation of our own belief,
betray far more constantly than the men the outward characteristics
peculiar to the people. We have already cited Weissenberg's testimony
that brunetteness is twice as prevalent among Russian Jewesses as
among the men. Of course this may be a matter of anabolism, pure and
simple. This would be perhaps a competent explanation of the
phenomenon for physiologists like Geddes and Thompson. For us this
other cause may be more directly responsible. Artificial selection in
a social group, wherein the active choice of mates falls to the share
of the male, would seem to tend in the direction of an accentuated
type in that more passive sex on which the selective influence
directly plays. At all events, observations from widely scattered
sources verify the law that the facial individuality of a people is
more often than otherwise expressed most clearly in the women. Thus,
for example, the women betray the Mongol type more constantly than the
men among the Asiatic tribes of eastern Russia.[28] On the other hand,
Mainof, best of authority, confirms the same tendency among those of
Finnic descent.[29] The _Setti Communi_ in northern Italy still
preserve their German language as evidence of a historic Teutonic
descent. They seem to have lost their identity entirely in respect of
the head form,[30] but Ranke[31] states that among the women the
German facial type constantly reappears. This, I confess, is not
altogether easy to understand, unless the Lombards, of whom these
colonies are supposedly the remnants, brought their native women with
them across the Alps. Perhaps, however, not bringing their women, a
new Teutonic resemblance has been evolved out of whole cloth. A better
example than this is offered among the Hamitic peoples of Africa north
of the Sahara. These peoples, from Abyssinia to Morocco, really belong
to the white races of Europe. Among nearly all their tribes the
negroid traits are far more accentuated among the women, according to
Sergi.[32] It is not necessary to cite more specific testimony. The
law occupies a respected place among anthropologists. That the Jews
confirm it, would seem to strengthen our hypothesis at every point.

Our final conclusion, then, is this: It is paradoxical, yet true, we
affirm. The Jews are not a race, but only a people, after all. In
their faces we read its confirmation, while in respect of their other
traits we are convinced that such individuality as they possess--by no
means inconsiderable--is of their own making from one generation to
the next, rather than as a product of an unprecedented purity of
physical descent.


FOOTNOTES:

[11] 1877, p. 214.

[12] 1861 b, pp. 227 and 331.

[13] Glück, 1896 a. Jacobs, 1890, p. 82, did not find a trace of it in
the Sephardim congregation in London. See Andree, 1878, in this
connection.

[14] The cephalic index by which we measure the head-form is merely
the breadth of the head in percentage of its length from front to
back. The index rises as the head becomes relatively more broad.

[15] Verneau, 1881 a, p. 500.

[16] Pruner Bey, 65 b; Gillebert d'Hercourt, 1868, p. 9; and
especially Collignon, 1887 a, pp. 326-339; Bertholon, 1892, p. 41;
also Collignon, 1896 b.

[17] Eliséev, 1883.

[18] Bertholon, 1892, p. 43; Sergi, 1897 a, chapter i, and even more
recently Fouquet, 1896 and 1897, on the basis of De Morgan's
discoveries.

[19] Compare Brinton, 1890 a, p. 132, and 1890 b, for interesting
linguistic data on the Semites.

[20] 1877, pp. 88-90; 1885, p. 84.

[21] Centralblatt für Anthropologie, vol. iii, p. 66.

[22] Virchow, 1886 b, p. 364; Schimmer, 1884, p. xxiii.

[23] Weissenberg, 1895, p. 567, finds brunettes twice as frequent
among the south Russian Jewesses as among the men.

[24] 1886 a, p. xxxii.

[25] 1895, p. 563.

[26] Recherches anthropologiques dans l'Asie Occidentale (Archives du
Museum d'histoire naturelle, Lyons, vol. vi, 1895).

[27] 1886 a, p. xxviii.

[28] Sommier, 1887, reprint, p. 116. Cf. Zograf, 1896, p. 50, on
crania from the sixteenth century in Moscow.

[29] Congrès int. des sciences géographiques, Paris, 1875, p. 268.

[30] Livi, 1896 a, pp. 137 and 146.

[31] Beiträge zur Anth. Bayerns, vol. ii, 1879, p. 75.

[32] Africa, Antropologia della stirpe Camitica, Torino, 1897, p. 263.




TRUE TALES OF BIRDS AND BEASTS.

BY DAVID STARR JORDAN.


I.--SEÑOR ALCATRAZ.

He was just a bird when he was born, and a very ugly bird at that. For
he had big splay feet, with all the toes turned forward and joined
together in one broad web, and his wings were thick and clumsy, and
underneath his long bill there was a big red sack that he could fill
with fishes, and when it was full he could hardly walk or fly, so
large the sack was and so great was his appetite.

But he kept the sack well filled and he emptied it out every day into
his stomach, and so he grew very soon to be a large bird, as big as a
turkey, though not as fat, and each day uglier than ever.

But one morning, when he was walking out on the sand flat of the
Astillero at Mazatlan, Mexico, where he lived, he saw a big fish which
had been left by the falling tide in a little pool of water. It was a
blue-colored fish with a big bony head, and no scales, and a sleek,
slippery skin. He did not know that it was a _bagre_, but he thought
that all fishes were good to eat, so he opened his mouth and slipped
the fish, tail first, down into his pouch. It went all right for a
while, but when the fish woke up and knew he was being swallowed, he
straightened out both of his arms, and there he was. For the bagre is
a kind of catfish, and each arm is a long, stiff, sharp bone, or
spine, with a saw edge the whole length of it. And all the bagre has
to do is just to put this arm out straight and twist it at the
shoulder and then it is set, and no animal can bend or break it. And
it pierced right through the skin of the bird's sack, and the bird
could not swallow it, nor make it go up nor down, and the bagre held
on tight, for he knew that if he let go once he would be swallowed,
and that would be the last of him.

So the bird tried everything he could think of, and the fish held on,
and they kept it up all day. In the afternoon a little boy came out on
the sands. His name was Inocente, and he was the son of Ygnacio, the
fisherman of Mazatlan. And Inocente took a club of mangrove and ran up
to the struggling bird and struck it on the wing with the club. The
blow broke the wing, and the bird lay down to die, for with a broken
wing and a fish that would not go up nor down, there was no hope for
him.

When Inocente saw what kind of a fish it was, he knew just what to do.
He reached down into the bird's sack and took hold of the fish's
spines. He gave each one a twist so that it rolled over in its socket,
the upper part toward the fish's head, and then they were not stiff
any more, but lay flat against the side of the fish, just as they
ought to lie. Then the fish knew that it had found a master, and lay
perfectly still. So the bird gave a great gulp, and out the bagre went
on the sand, and when the tide came up it swam away, and took care
never to go again where a bird could get hold of it. And the bird with
the broken wing had learned something about fishes, too. But he could
not fly away, so he waited to see what the boy was going to do.

The boy took the bird into his boat and brought him home. And old
Ygnacio put a splint on his wing and covered it with salve, and by and
by it healed. But the bone was set crooked, and the bird could not fly
very well. So the boys called the bird Señor Alcatraz, which is the
Spanish for Mr. Pelican, and Señor Alcatraz and all the boys and dogs
and goats became good friends, and all ran about on the streets
together. And when the boys would shout and the dogs bark, all Señor
Alcatraz could do was to squawk and hiss and open his big mouth and
show the inside of his red fish sack.

And when the boys would go fishing on the wharf, Alcatraz would go,
too, and he would stow away the fishes in his pouch as fast as the
boys could catch them. But if they caught a bagre fish, he would turn
his head the other way and then run away home just as fast as his
splay feet would take him.

And when the men drew the net on the beach Alcatraz would splash
around inside the net, catching whatever he could, and having a great
deal of fun in his clumsy pelican fashion. Then he would run along the
street with the boys, squawking and flapping his wings and thinking
that he was just like the rest of them. And if you ever go to
Mazatlan, ask for Dr. Rogers, and he will show you the way to
Ygnacio's cabin on the street they call Libertad. And there in the
front yard, in a general scramble of dogs, goats, and little Indian
boys, you will see Señor Alcatraz romping and squabbling like the best
of them. And you will know which he is by the broken wing and the red
sack under his throat. But if you say "Bagre" to him, he will run
under the doorstep and hide his face till you go away.


II.--THE LITTLE BLUE FOX.

Once there was a little blue fox, and his name was Eichkao, and he was
a thief. So he built his house down deep among the rocks under the
moss on the Mist Island, and his little fox children used to stay down
among the rocks. There they would gurgle, gurgle, gurgle, whenever
they heard anybody walking over their heads. Eichkao and his fox wife
used to run all round over the rocks to find something for them to
eat, and whenever Eichkao saw anybody coming he would go clin-n-n-g,
cling-g-g, and his voice was high and sharp, just like the voice of a
buzz saw.

One day he walked out on the rocks over the water and began to talk to
the black sea parrot, whose name is Epatka, and who sits erect on his
carelessly built nest with one egg in it, and wears a great big bill
made of red sealing wax. He has a long white quill pen stuck over each
ear, and over his face is a white mask, so that nobody can know what
kind of a face he has, and all you can see behind the mask is a pair
of little foolish twinkling white glass eyes. What the two said to
each other I don't know, but they did not talk very long, for in a few
minutes when I came back to his house among the rocks Eichkao was
gone, and there lay out on the bank a bill made of red sealing wax, a
white mask, and two little white quill pens. There were a few bones
and claws and some feathers, but they did not seem to belong to
anything in particular, and the little foxes in the rocks went gurgle,
gurgle, gurgle.

One day I lay down on the moss out by the old fox walk on the Mist
Island, and Eichkao saw me there and thought I was some new kind of
walrus which might be good to eat, and would feed all the little foxes
for a month. So he ran around me in a circle, and then he ran around
again, then again and again, always making the circle smaller, until
finally the circle was so narrow that I could reach him with my hand.
As he went around and around, all the time he looked at me with his
cold, gray, selfish eye, and not one of all the beasts has an eye as
cruel-cold as his. When he thought that he was near enough, he gave a
snap with his jaws, and tried to bite out a morsel to take home to the
little foxes; but all I offered him was a piece of rubber boot. And
when I turned around to look at him he was running away as fast as he
could, calling klin-n-g-g, klin-n-g, klin-n-g, like a scared buzz saw
all the time as he went out of sight. And I think that he is running
yet, while the little foxes still go gurgle, gurgle under the rocks.


III.-HOW THE RED FOX WENT HUNTING.

(_With acknowledgment to Mr. A. C. Bassett, of Menlo Park,
California._)

Once on a time there was a great tall rabbit, the kind the miners call
a "narrow-gauge mule"; but he was not a mule at all, and his real name
was "Jack Rabbit." His home was in Montana, and he lived by the river
they call the Silver Bow. He could run faster than any of the other
beasts, and he went lickety-clip, lickety-clip, bounding over the tops
of the sagebrush, for he had no brush of his own to carry.

And there was a red fox who lived on the Silver Bow, too, and he went
hunting because he wanted rabbit for dinner. But while he could run
very fast he could not bound over the tops of the sagebrush, for his
own brush, which he always carried with him because he was so proud of
it, would catch on the thorns of the other kinds of brush and so would
keep him back.

So he sent for his cousin, the coyote, to come and help him. Now, the
coyote lived out in the country by Emigrant Mountain. He was not proud
at all, for he hadn't much of a brush, and nobody flattered him for
his beauty. But for all that the coyote could run very fast, as he had
Indian blood in him. The only trouble was that his hind feet ran
faster than his fore feet. So he had to stop every little while and
run sidewise to unkink himself and give his fore feet a chance to
catch up.

When the coyote came up the rabbit was bounding along through the
bushes, going around in a great circle so that he always came back to
the same place, for that is the way of the rabbit-folk. So the fox lay
low and hid his brush in the sage, and the coyote followed the rabbit
around the circle. And he just kept up with the rabbit all the way,
for the rabbit wasn't scared, and didn't run very fast. And when they
had gone once around the circle the rabbit passed the hidden fox. Then
the fox got up and chased him, and was only a few feet behind. And the
coyote stopped and ran sidewise for a while to unkink himself, and
then he lay down in the bushes and waited for the rabbit to come back.
The rabbit was much scared when he saw the fox close behind him, so he
ran and bounded very fast, and the fox kept falling behind because he
had his long brush to carry. But he kept at it just the same, and when
the rabbit came around the circle to where he started there was the
coyote waiting for him. The rabbit had to make a great jump to get
over the coyote's head. Then they went around again and the coyote
kept close behind all the way, and the rabbit began to get tired. When
the coyote's hind legs got tangled up then the fox was rested, and he
took up the chase; and so they kept on, each one taking his turn,
except the rabbit, who had to keep his own turn all the time.

When the race was over there was nobody there to see how they divided
up what they caught. But I saw the coyote the next day, and he looked
so very empty that I think that the red fox must have taken all the
rabbit meat for himself. Most likely he left his cousin just the ears
for his part, with a rabbit's foot to carry in his pocket for good
luck.




GLACIAL GEOLOGY IN AMERICA.

BY PROF. DANIEL S. MARTIN.


Under this title the vice-president of Section E (Geology) of the
American Association--Prof. Herman L. Fairchild, of the University of
Rochester, New York--gave an admirable _résumé_ of the whole history,
progress, and scope of the study of ice phenomena in North America, as
the opening address before the section at the recent Boston meeting.
Apart from the interest of the subject in itself considered, this
address was a model of what such addresses should be. While strictly
scientific, without the least attempt at rhetorical effect, it was at
the same time so clear, so well arranged and so simple in language,
that any intelligent auditor could enjoy it and grasp it, and carry
away a distinct impression of the gradual development and present
status of this great department of geological study. Professor
Fairchild's choice of his subject was happy also in its fitness to the
occasion, as covering almost exactly the half century of the life of
the association, though going back indeed a few years further, into
the period of the earlier society which developed into the association
in 1848.

The great body of phenomena comprised under the term "drift," and the
smoothed and scratched surfaces of rock, etc., had been by no means
unnoticed by the early students of American geology, but they were
attributed to violent and widespread water action, and were spoken of
in general as "diluvial" formations. When the agency of ice began to
be recognized, it was regarded as that of floating and stranding
bergs; and this view for a long time contended with the theory of
glacial action, even when the latter had been adopted and advocated by
eminent students of the subject.

The first allusion to drifting ice as the agent of transportation of
bowlders, etc., appears to have been made as early as 1825, by one
Peter Dobson, of Connecticut, in a letter to Prof. Benjamin Silliman,
of Yale College. Sir Roderick Murchison, who became the great champion
of this view, credits Mr. Dobson's letter with giving him the first
suggestion of it. Twelve years later, in 1837, T. A. Conrad made the
earliest reference to land ice as the cause of our drift phenomena; he
does this in very striking words when read in the light of the studies
and determinations of later years, although of course imperfectly and
vaguely.

Meanwhile, however, Agassiz and others had been working among the
glaciers of the Alps, and their views as to a great period of former
extension, in Europe and the British Isles, were finding some
acceptance abroad. In this country, Prof. Edward Hitchcock, in his
address as retiring president of the Association of American
Geologists, in 1841, gave a broad and careful review of the drift
phenomena in eastern North America, and referred to the work of
Agassiz, Buckland, and Lyell with great interest, as having given him
"a new geological sense" in observing these phenomena, and said, with
prophetic foresight, "Henceforth, glacial action must form an
important chapter in geology."

But the time was not ripe for the understanding and acceptance of the
glacial theory as a later generation has come to know it. The studies
of Agassiz and his _confrères_ had been among glaciers upon mountain
slopes, and hence, while many of the drift phenomena were strikingly
accounted for, others were not and could not be. So it came to pass
that, while Professor Hitchcock and others in this country were
strongly impressed, they were not satisfied, and held for years an
uncertain position. The glacial indications conformed in some aspects
to the theory, but not in others; the striæ and groovings, instead of
following valleys, all had a general trend to the southward, and the
bowlders were carried across great depressions and deposited upon
heights. How could these conditions be due to glaciers? Could ice flow
uphill, or move long distances over level areas? These and other
phenomena, such as the peculiar distribution of drift material, in
"drumlin" ridges and the like, had no explanation. Hence,
notwithstanding President Hitchcock's utterances above quoted, and his
similar Postscript on the subject of drift and moraines, appended in
the same year to his volume on the Geology of Massachusetts, we find
him in 1843, when again addressing the Association of Geologists,
adopting a modified tone, dwelling upon these points of difficulty,
and seeking a compromise view, which he called "glacio-aqueous." The
great influence also of Murchison and Lyell had been thrown into the
scale in favor of the iceberg theory, and this fact doubtless had much
to do with the slow development of true conceptions. Lyell visited
America in 1842, and was present at the American Geologists' meeting,
advocating the floating-ice doctrine, to which most of our observers
already leaned; and so the views of Agassiz and the glacial school had
to wait for a decade before they found general acceptance or even
audience.

This, we may note in passing, is but one marked instance out of many
in the history of science, wherein the personal influence of eminent
leaders has obstructed and retarded the advance of true knowledge. The
whole recognition of the Cambrian system, as pre-Silurian and
distinct, was suppressed and prevented for many years by Murchison's
intense opposition to the views of Sedgwick. Similar facts might be
cited in this country, did we care to mention names. Science can not
claim, as is sometimes asserted, that it possesses or imparts any
entire exemption from the influence of authority, and bestows complete
independence from the tendency to "swear to the words of a master."

Of the New York geologists, Vanuxem alone, in his Geology of the Third
District, 1842, inclined to the glacial theory; the others--Emmons,
Mather, and Hall--advocated floating ice, the latter urging as a chief
objection the absence of any great northern highlands from which
glaciers could extend southward. Prof. Henry D. Rogers advocated De la
Beche's view, of great catastrophic waves or _débacles_ of water and
ice, produced by sudden uplifts of the floor of a circumpolar ocean,
and sweeping southward with tremendous power over the middle
latitudes. These views were presented by him in 1844, at the
Washington meeting of the geologists, and are to us a most curious
illustration of the old "cataclysmic" phase of geological conceptions.

Two years later Agassiz came to America, and at once set about
studying the ice evidences here, first in the White Mountains and then
around the Great Lakes. At the first meeting of the American
Association, in 1848, he presented his views as to the identity of our
phenomena with those studied by himself, Desor, and Guyot abroad. His
views were not very warmly received, however, and he did not attempt
their public presentation again for some years, turning his attention
more to the field of zoölogy. In 1850, in a work on Lake Superior, he
refers somewhat sharply to the prejudice that seemed to prevail in
relation to this subject.

From this time, however, the aqueous theories began to be less
strongly presented; and a new generation of geologists was coming on,
largely under the training of Guyot and Agassiz, and more open to
their observed results. C. B. Adams, in 1850, presented a view nearly
akin to that adopted by Dana a few years later, of an elevation of the
high northern latitudes, resulting in a southward-moving glacial
sheet, and a subsequent depression connected with its retreat, to
account for the stratified deposits. Professor Dana accepted this
doctrine in his presidential address before the association in 1855,
adding the "Terrace period" of partial re-elevation. From this time he
became the leader of the American glacialists, and his great Manual,
issued in 1862, carried these views into all the colleges of the
country.

In 1857 Prof. Edward Hitchcock published an important treatise on
Surface Geology, particularly of the Connecticut Valley, in the
Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. In this paper he noted the
distinction, so important and now so familiar, between local striæ and
those with the general southward course of the "drift." Two years
later his son, Prof. C. H. Hitchcock, extended this distinction
widely over New England. In 1863 the report of progress of the
Geological Survey of Canada gave an extended review of the surface
geology, by Prof. Robert Bell, in which he fully adopted the glacial
theory. Meantime, also, Professor Ramsay, in England, had abandoned
the iceberg doctrine for that of glaciers.

In 1866 and 1867 important papers appeared by Charles Whittlesey, and
one by Edward Hungerford; this last, read before the association,
adopted the general views of Agassiz, with some important limitations
now generally received. In the same year the revised edition of Dana's
Manual gave yet fuller statement and wider diffusion to the generally
accepted views as held to-day.

Professor Fairchild sums up this historical sketch as comprising four
periods--viz., prior to 1841, undisputed reign of diluvial hypotheses;
1841 to 1848, suggestion and discussion of glacial hypotheses; 1849 to
1866, gradual acceptance of the latter view; from 1867 onward,
development of glacial geology.

From this point, the address was occupied with consideration of the
various aspects of the subject as studied and wrought out during the
past twenty years by numerous observers. These are grouped under four
main heads, each with various subdivisions--viz., (1) the ice sheet,
as to its area, its thickness, its centers of dispersion, its
migration of centers, etc.; (2) the ice period, as to its cause, its
divisions, its duration, its distance in time; (3) the interpretation
of special phenomena, such as moraines, drumlins, eskers, "kettles,"
and the like, valley drift, terraces, loess, etc.; and (4) existing
glaciers, as discovered on our high mountains of the far West, and as
studied in closer relation to the ancient phenomena in the great ice
cap of Greenland and the immense glacier development in Alaska.

It is impossible to go into a detailed review of the numerous points
of interest covered in this discussion. Suffice it to say that one who
heard or who reads it finds an admirably clear and condensed account
of all the problems and phenomena that have been and that are now
encountered in the study of glacial geology on this continent, and of
their gradual interpretation and solution by the combined labors of
many students. The progress of knowledge over this wide field,
advancing step by step, amid conflicting views and perplexing
conditions, is beautifully shown, and leaves a very striking
impression on the mind, of the difficulties and the successes of
scientific research. Nor is Professor Fairchild disposed to claim too
much or assert too strongly. He recognizes that, with all that has
been met and mastered, there are still questions unsolved, and laurels
to be won by others.

Among the facts brought out, a few may be briefly alluded to. The
early abandonment of Agassiz's original view of a vast extension of
the polar snow caps, and the recognition of separate centers of
continental glaciation, now distinctly determined as three in
number--a western, a central, and an eastern--the former being the
earliest, and the others following in succession; the recognition by
the Western geologists of the twofold character of the Glacial epoch,
as also determined in western Europe, but less markedly traceable in
our Eastern States, though now generally admitted; in close relation
to this the determination of the line of the great terminal moraine,
traced by successive observers from the Atlantic seaboard to
Minnesota, and the subsequent recognition of an older, eroded, and
fragmentary morainal "fringe," marking the line of the earlier ice
sheet, somewhat beyond the later. With regard to the actual distance
of the last glacial retreat, as expressed in years, Professor
Fairchild is both cautious and frank. He notes the general consensus
of recent observers toward a much shorter period than was formerly
supposed--from five to ten or perhaps fifteen thousand years. At the
same time, there are many elements of uncertainty involved, and the
problem is by no means settled. The Niagara gorge, so long looked upon
as a possible chronometer, grows more complicated as it is further
studied; the rate of erosion has evidently varied much with the volume
of water carried by the river; and this, in turn, has varied with the
changes of level, and consequently of drainage routes, in the basin of
the Great Lakes. There have been times when only the Erie waters
flowed through the Niagara outlet, the upper lake drainage passing
eastward independently, until a gradual northern rise of the land,
which is proved to be still going on, turned the entire drainage into
the present St. Clair route from Lake Huron into Lake Erie, and so
through Niagara.

This point leads us to digress for a moment from the address under
consideration to allude to a very interesting department of study that
is now growing into prominence--to wit, the restoration of pre-glacial
geography and hydrography, and the genesis of our existing river and
lake systems throughout the northern part of the country. The
discussions and results in regard to Niagara and the Great Lakes are
somewhat familiar, but the work on the rivers and smaller lakes is not
so widely known. Professor Fairchild himself has done much in relation
to the "central lakes" of New York State; and one very interesting
paper of this kind on The Development of the Ohio River was read
before the section by Prof. William G. Light, of Granville, Ohio,
besides many papers by others on similar topics.

The work done within a few years upon the glaciers of Arctic America
has proved peculiarly fruitful in results. Here, again, the whole
subject is reviewed historically, and the name and work of each
observer are impartially noted. Much of the difficulty encountered by
the glacial theory arose, as we have seen, from the fact that only
mountain glaciers had been studied, so that many of the phenomena
produced by continental ice could not be explained. Professor
Fairchild says, as to this aspect: "More has been learned of the
structure, behavior, and work of our ancient ice sheets by the study
of the Alaskan glaciers during the last ten years, and especially by
the study of the Greenland ice cap during the last four years, than by
all the study of the Alpine glaciers for the seventy years since they
have been observed." Prominent among those who have worked in this
field are the names of Professors Chamberlain and Salisbury in
Greenland, and Professors H. F. Reid and I. C. Russell in Alaska;
other important contributors are Prof. W. P. Blake, the pioneer
geologist in Alaska, 1867; Dall and Baker, who discovered and named
the Malaspina Glacier in 1874; and John Muir, 1878, for whom the Muir
Glacier was named; Wright, Baldwin, Schwatka, Libbey, and others, and
Barton and Tarr in Greenland.

Professor Russell, in 1891, recognized and named a type of glacier
that was before unknown. In his studies on the Malaspina he found a
condition that does not occur, so far as yet observed, anywhere else
than on the northwest coast of America; this is where a number of
mountain glaciers debouch upon a low, flat coast plain, and unite to
form a great sluggishly moving sheet of ice. This particular
development he called the Piedmont type.

In closing his address, Professor Fairchild remarks that the word
"theory," as applied to the glacial origin of the drift and its
phenomena, may and should now be abandoned. The subject has passed
beyond the stage of theory, and is as well understood and as clearly
established as the volcanic origin of the cone of Vesuvius or the
sedimentary origin of stratified rocks.

       *       *       *       *       *

     In the center of the artificial platforms or platform
     mounds, characteristic of many of the ancient Peruvian
     towns, Mr. Bandelier has observed features that recall
     forcibly the New Mexican Indian custom of giving to each
     inanimate object its heart. In some instances, says Mr. F.
     W. Hodge, in his paper, round columns formed a kind of an
     interior niche; in others, a small chamber contained urns or
     jars with maize meal. A remarkable and very significant
     feature was observed by the explorer in a partly ruined
     mound at Chanchan. The core of this structure when opened
     showed two well-preserved altars of adobe. In such interior
     apartments, figurines of metal, clay, or wood are almost
     invariably found; and the materially valuable finds made in
     Peruvian ruins in earlier times came from the "heart" of one
     or the other of the artificial elevations described.




MODERN STUDIES OF EARTHQUAKES.

BY GEORG GERALAND.


The investigation of earthquakes, seismology, has become in the
present day an independent subject of scientific interest. In lands
where earthquakes are frequent, as in Italy and Japan, seismic
observations have been officially systematized over the whole country,
with central and branch stations at which the work is never still. A
net of seismic observations of all nations is being more and more
closely woven over the whole earth, and there are yearly and monthly
collations of observations of even the slightest shocks. Seismic
literature is, therefore, nearly inexhaustible, and theory and praxis
are in constant vogue; in short, seismics has grown to be a separate
branch of science, and to demand independent treatment, calling for
the energy and labor of many students. What gives it so great
importance? What is the condition of our present knowledge and its
history? What will be reached in the future through the competition of
the nations? These questions possess a high scientific as well as
culture-historical interest. We here attempt to answer them.

The first really scientific description of an earthquake--that of
Lisbon--with its far-reaching accompanying phenomena, was the work of
the greatest contemporary thinker, Kant, and it is not too much to say
that his paper opened a new epoch in the knowledge of earthquakes.
That terrible event and the extreme terror which it caused everywhere
were followed in 1783 by the likewise extremely destructive earthquake
of Calabria. The attention of the people was thus directed to this
mysterious mighty activity of the earth, and was kept especially
lively in Italy, the country of Europe most subject to earthquakes.
The newly rising science of geology therefore found in the last third
of the last century in these phenomena a problem of prominent
importance. Geologists were the first to apply themselves to seismic
studies, as the most widely current explanation of the phenomena is
still a geological one. The scientific interest of the question
prevailed over the practical. More attentive observation was given to
earthquakes, the accounts of them scattered through the ancient
chronicles were collated, and the already very numerous seismic notes
of great earthquake manifestations--such as those by Hoff, Perry,
Mallet, Volger, Fuchs, etc.--constituted a very important factor in
the study. One of the earliest results of the inquiry was to show that
directly perceptible earthquakes are not perceptible everywhere; that
they are most common on the great upfoldings of the earth's crust on
the mountain chains, such as the Andes, Alps, and Himalayas; and that,
further, they are connected with the shores of the Pacific, the
Antilles, and the Mediterranean, and with places also where great
breaches and various disturbances are evident; that they are at home
likewise in volcanoes; and that they are most frequent in the northern
hemisphere, and when the earth is nearest to the sun. The descriptions
of powerful shocks furnish us evidence of a double movement of the
earth's crust--an alternate up-and-down vibration and an often very
marked wave motion. The destruction which earthquake shocks and waves
inflict on buildings, and the remarkably rapid and wide spread of the
tremblings over the surface of the earth, have been very diligently
inquired into; and when, in 1856, Naples and Calabria were visited by
a great earthquake, an English investigator, Robert Mallet, made a
full study of it, and believed that by comparing the direction of the
rents in walls and buildings, which were assumed to correspond with
that of the tremblings, he could identify the focus of the shocks in
the earth's interior, and the course of the wave movement over its
surface--a view which has long prevailed in seismology. Still more
important was the work of the geologist Karl von Seebach, of
Göttingen, on the great earthquake in central Germany, which kept the
northern part of the plains of the upper Rhine, around Mayence,
Grossgerau, and Darmstadt, disturbed for several years after 1869. Von
Seebach's chief effort was to obtain the most exact data possible as
to the time of the beginning of the shocks from as many places as
possible, from which he might deduce the spot where the shocks began
and were strongest, the epicenter which lay directly over the point in
the earth's interior where the movement originated. From them he also
deduced a series of localities where the shocks were simultaneous and
of equal intensity, which could be connected by certain nearly
circular lines called _homoseists_. As the distance of these from the
epicenter increases, the undulations take place later and are weaker,
and facts may be thus furnished from the velocity of propagation of
the shocks can be computed. The observations are also important
because von Seebach undertook through a simple mathematical
calculation to determine from them the situation of the forces of the
subterranean point where the undulations originated.

With these investigations, the process of annihilating time and space
by steam and the applications of electricity was also going on. By the
effect of this great event, the conditions of earthquake investigation
were revolutionized. A comparative study of the phenomena, fundamental
and essential to a science of seismology, on the basis of material
furnished from all the regions of the earth, was rendered possible. An
earthquake service was organized in Japan, by J. Milne, of England;
one had already been organized for a considerable time in Italy, and
the results obtained at the two places of observation so widely
separated corresponded. Japanese, Indian, and American earthquakes
could be simultaneously studied in Italy, Russia, Germany, and
England; and thus a new, hitherto undeveloped field was gained, the
scope of which has already extended far beyond its merely geological
aspect.

This could have happened only through another advance that has been
made in our century, which has first rendered a real seismology, a
scientific knowledge of the seismic conditions of the earth, possible
through the immense development of technics, by which a system of
instrumental observation of earthquakes was established. Only through
this could the acquisitions of recent times be utilized. While
formerly observations were macroscopic and touched only earthquakes
that could be directly felt, they now cover essentially microscopic
tremors of the earth's crust, of less than a thousandth of a
millimetre, that are wholly imperceptible to human senses; and we can
read them, enlarged at our pleasure, on our photographically
registering seismometers. We already had instruments which correctly
indicated the time of the beginning and possibly the direction of a
shock; but we needed and have invented new instruments--various sorts
of horizontal and vertical pendulums--for the observation and
representation of the whole course of the movement. The vertical
indicating instruments are much used in Italy, and the horizontal ones
almost exclusively in England, Japan, and Germany. The horizontal
pendulum was invented in Germany in 1832 by Hengler, adapted to
scientific use by Professor Zöllner, of Leipsic, and afterward applied
in that form by English, German, and other observers. The most
complete shape and the one best adapted to extremely delicate seismic
observations was given to it by the late German astronomer and
geographer Dr. Ernst von Rebeur Paschnitz, of Merseburg. Having
undergone a few small changes, fixed in a threefold combination it
serves as our most sensitive and accurate seismometer. Its movements
and its very exact time markings are photographically represented. The
pendulum box is only forty centimetres in diameter. In consequence of
its convenience and cheapness, its self-action and its serviceability,
it is becoming adopted more and more generally as an international
instrument.

Microseismic investigation and its wide extension over the earth have
raised seismology another step during the last twenty years, so that
it may be said that really exact seismic research began with it.
Modern seismology has confirmed many of the older results, such as the
localization of earthquakes on the shores of the Pacific, the
Mediterranean and in the mountain chains of the earth, and also the
importance of homoseists and the epicenter. It has, on the other hand,
greatly modified the former estimates of the velocity of propagation
of the shocks. It has cast much doubt on speculations as to the
seasons in which earthquakes are more or less frequent; and it has
demonstrated the inadequacy of former methods of determining the
central focus. It has furthermore brought us much that is new. First
is the momentous fact that the earth's crust is never at rest; that it
undergoes a multitude of very diversified movements besides those of
the earthquake. Thus a periodical swelling, a flood wave, is produced
by the attraction of the moon; and other heavings are induced by the
daily and annual course of the sun's heat. But such movements and
other similar ones do not come within the scope of this article.

Real earthquakes, or movements that originate in the depths of the
earth, also appear in very different forms. First are the directly
perceptible shocks, from the powerful ones that create great
disturbances to the merely local ones often hardly remarked. Of the
immediate workings of these shocks, microscopic instruments have
taught us nothing essentially new. But very many macroscopic
movements, often continuing for several hours, but which are not felt,
have been revealed, that have been shown in many instances to be
distant effects of other strong earthquakes; effects which are
sometimes propagated over the whole surface of the earth. There is,
furthermore, another series of movements, only partly explained as
yet, of a peculiar sort: first, small, quickly passing disturbances,
which appear in the photographic reproductions of the curves as larger
or smaller knots, and which are regarded with great probability as
distant effects of minor seismic movements most likely imperceptible
anywhere. They can not be local earthquakes, for they give entirely
different curves. There also appear, with considerable regularity, at
certain seasons of the year, very slow movements of the ground, called
pulsations; and finally the multitude of vibrations called tremors,
which assume various forms. Sometimes they come as forerunners,
accompaniments, or followers in close association with th

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