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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Health and Education, by Charles Kingsley
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Health and Education
+
+
+Author: Charles Kingsley
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 31, 2005  [eBook #17437]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEALTH AND EDUCATION***
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1874 W. Isbister & Co. edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+HEALTH AND EDUCATION
+
+
+BY THE
+REV. CHARLES KINGSLEY, F.L.S., F.G.S.
+CANON OF WESTMINSTER
+
+W. ISBISTER & CO.
+56, LUDGATE HILL, LONDON
+1874
+
+[_All rights reserved_]
+
+
+
+
+THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH
+
+
+Whether the British race is improving or degenerating?  What, if it seem
+probably degenerating, are the causes of so great an evil?  How they can
+be, if not destroyed, at least arrested?--These are questions worthy the
+attention, not of statesmen only and medical men, but of every father and
+mother in these isles.  I shall say somewhat about them in this Essay;
+and say it in a form which ought to be intelligible to fathers and
+mothers of every class, from the highest to the lowest, in hopes of
+convincing some of them at least that the science of health, now so
+utterly neglected in our curriculum of so-called education, ought to be
+taught--the rudiments of it at least--in every school, college, and
+university.
+
+We talk of our hardy forefathers; and rightly.  But they were hardy, just
+as the savage is usually hardy, because none but the hardy lived.  They
+may have been able to say of themselves--as they do in a state paper of
+1515, now well known through the pages of Mr. Froude--"What comyn folk of
+all the world may compare with the comyns of England, in riches, freedom,
+liberty, welfare, and all prosperity?  What comyn folk is so mighty, and
+so strong in the felde, as the comyns of England?"  They may have been
+fed on "great shins of beef," till they became, as Benvenuto Cellini
+calls them, "the English wild beasts."  But they increased in numbers
+slowly, if at all, for centuries.  Those terrible laws of natural
+selection, which issue in "the survival of the fittest," cleared off the
+less fit, in every generation, principally by infantile disease, often by
+wholesale famine and pestilence; and left, on the whole, only those of
+the strongest constitutions to perpetuate a hardy, valiant, and
+enterprising race.
+
+At last came a sudden and unprecedented change.  In the first years of
+the century, steam and commerce produced an enormous increase in the
+population.  Millions of fresh human beings found employment, married,
+brought up children who found employment in their turn, and learnt to
+live more or less civilised lives.  An event, doubtless, for which God is
+to be thanked.  A quite new phase of humanity, bringing with it new vices
+and new dangers: but bringing, also, not merely new comforts, but new
+noblenesses, new generosities, new conceptions of duty, and of how that
+duty should be done.  It is childish to regret the old times, when our
+soot-grimed manufacturing districts were green with lonely farms.  To
+murmur at the transformation would be, I believe, to murmur at the will
+of Him without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground.
+
+   "The old order changeth, yielding place to the new,
+   And God fulfils himself in many ways,
+   Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."
+
+Our duty is, instead of longing for the good old custom, to take care of
+the good new custom, lest it should corrupt the world in like wise.  And
+it may do so thus:--
+
+The rapid increase of population during the first half of this century
+began at a moment when the British stock was specially exhausted; namely,
+about the end of the long French war.  There may have been periods of
+exhaustion, at least in England, before that.  There may have been one
+here, as there seems to have been on the Continent, after the Crusades;
+and another after the Wars of the Roses.  There was certainly a period of
+severe exhaustion at the end of Elizabeth's reign, due both to the long
+Spanish and Irish wars and to the terrible endemics introduced from
+abroad; an exhaustion which may have caused, in part, the national
+weakness which hung upon us during the reign of the Stuarts.  But after
+none of these did the survival of the less fit suddenly become more easy;
+or the discovery of steam power, and the acquisition of a colonial
+empire, create at once a fresh demand for human beings and a fresh supply
+of food for them.  Britain, at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
+was in an altogether new social situation.
+
+At the beginning of the great French war; and, indeed, ever since the
+beginning of the war with Spain in 1739--often snubbed as the "war about
+Jenkins's ear"--but which was, as I hold, one of the most just, as it was
+one of the most popular, of all our wars; after, too, the once famous
+"forty fine harvests" of the eighteenth century, the British people, from
+the gentleman who led to the soldier or sailor who followed, were one of
+the mightiest and most capable races which the world has ever seen,
+comparable best to the old Roman, at his mightiest and most capable
+period.  That, at least, their works testify.  They created--as far as
+man can be said to create anything--the British Empire.  They won for us
+our colonies, our commerce, the mastery of the seas of all the world.  But
+at what a cost--
+
+   "Their bones are scattered far and wide,
+   By mount, and stream, and sea."
+
+Year after year, till the final triumph of Waterloo, not battle only, but
+worse destroyers than shot and shell--fatigue and disease--had been
+carrying off our stoutest, ablest, healthiest young men, each of whom
+represented, alas! a maiden left unmarried at home, or married, in
+default, to a less able man.  The strongest went to the war; each who
+fell left a weaklier man to continue the race; while of those who did not
+fall, too many returned with tainted and weakened constitutions, to
+injure, it may be, generations yet unborn.  The middle classes, being
+mostly engaged in peaceful pursuits, suffered less of this decimation of
+their finest young men; and to that fact I attribute much of their
+increasing preponderance, social, political, and intellectual, to this
+very day.  One cannot walk the streets of any of our great commercial
+cities without seeing plenty of men, young and middle-aged, whose whole
+bearing and stature shows that the manly vigour of our middle class is
+anything but exhausted.  In Liverpool, especially, I have been much
+struck not only with the vigorous countenance, but with the bodily size
+of the mercantile men on 'Change.  But it must be remembered always,
+first, that these men are the very elite of their class; the cleverest
+men; the men capable of doing most work; and next, that they are, almost
+all of them, from the great merchant who has his villa out of town, and
+perhaps his moor in the Highlands, down to the sturdy young volunteer who
+serves in the haberdasher's shop, country-bred men; and that the question
+is, not what they are like now, but what their children and
+grand-children, especially the fine young volunteer's, will be like?  And
+a very serious question I hold that to be; and for this reason:
+
+War is, without doubt, the most hideous physical curse which fallen man
+inflicts upon himself; and for this simple reason, that it reverses the
+very laws of nature, and is more cruel even than pestilence.  For instead
+of issuing in the survival of the fittest, it issues in the survival of
+the less fit: and therefore, if protracted, must deteriorate generations
+yet unborn.  And yet a peace such as we now enjoy, prosperous, civilised,
+humane, is fraught, though to a less degree, with the very same ill
+effect.
+
+In the first place, tens of thousands--Who knows it not?--lead sedentary
+and unwholesome lives, stooping, asphyxiated, employing as small a
+fraction of their bodies as of their minds.  And all this in dwellings,
+workshops, what not?--the influences, the very atmosphere of which tend
+not to health, but to unhealth, and to drunkenness as a solace under the
+feeling of unhealth and depression.  And that such a life must tell upon
+their offspring, and if their offspring grow up under similar
+circumstances, upon their offspring's offspring, till a whole population
+may become permanently degraded, who does not know?  For who that walks
+through the by-streets of any great city does not see?  Moreover, and
+this is one of the most fearful problems with which modern civilisation
+has to deal--we interfere with natural selection by our conscientious
+care of life, as surely as does war itself.  If war kills the most fit to
+live, we save alive those who--looking at them from a merely physical
+point of view--are most fit to die.  Everything which makes it more easy
+to live; every sanatory reform, prevention of pestilence, medical
+discovery, amelioration of climate, drainage of soil, improvement in
+dwelling-houses, workhouses, gaols; every reformatory school, every
+hospital, every cure of drunkenness, every influence, in short, which
+has--so I am told--increased the average length of life in these islands,
+by nearly one-third, since the first establishment of life insurances,
+one hundred and fifty years ago; every influence of this kind, I say,
+saves persons alive who would otherwise have died; and the great majority
+of these will be, even in surgical and zymotic cases, those of least
+resisting power; who are thus preserved to produce in time a still less
+powerful progeny.
+
+Do I say that we ought not to save these people, if we can?  God forbid.
+The weakly, the diseased, whether infant or adult, is here on earth; a
+British citizen; no more responsible for his own weakness than for his
+own existence.  Society, that is, in plain English, we and our ancestors,
+are responsible for both; and we must fulfil the duty, and keep him in
+life; and, if we can, heal, strengthen, develop him to the utmost; and
+make the best of that which "fate and our own deservings" have given us
+to deal with.  I do not speak of higher motives still; motives which to
+every minister of religion must be paramount and awful.  I speak merely
+of physical and social motives, such as appeal to the conscience of every
+man--the instinct which bids every human-hearted man or woman to save
+life, alleviate pain, like Him who causes His sun to shine on the evil
+and on the good, and His rain to fall on the just and on the unjust.
+
+But it is palpable, that in so doing we must, year by year, preserve a
+large percentage of weakly persons, who, marrying freely in their own
+class, must produce weaklier children, and they weaklier children still.
+Must, did I say?  There are those who are of opinion--and I, after
+watching and comparing the histories of many families, indeed, of every
+one with whom I have come in contact for now five-and-thirty years, in
+town and country, can only fear that their opinion is but too well
+founded on fact--that in the great majority of cases, in all classes
+whatsoever, the children are not equal to their parents, nor they, again,
+to their grandparents of the beginning of the century; and that this
+degrading process goes on most surely, and most rapidly, in our large
+towns, and in proportion to the antiquity of those towns, and therefore
+in proportion to the number of generations during which the degrading
+influences have been at work.
+
+This and cognate dangers have been felt more and more deeply, as the
+years have rolled on, by students of human society.  To ward them off,
+theory after theory has been put on paper, especially in France, which
+deserve high praise for their ingenuity, less for their morality, and, I
+fear, still less for their common-sense.  For the theorist in his closet
+is certain to ignore, as inconvenient to the construction of his Utopia,
+certain of those broad facts of human nature which every active parish
+priest, medical man, or poor-law guardian has to face every day of his
+life.
+
+Society and British human nature are what they have become by the
+indirect influences of long ages, and we can no more reconstruct the one
+than we can change the other.  We can no more mend men by theories than
+we can by coercion--to which, by the by, almost all these theorists look
+longingly as their final hope and mainstay.  We must teach men to mend
+their own matters, of their own reason, and their own free-will.  We must
+teach them that they are the arbiters of their own destinies; and, to a
+fearfully great degree, of their children's destinies after them.  We
+must teach them not merely that they ought to be free, but that they are
+free, whether they know it or not, for good and for evil.  And we must do
+that in this case, by teaching them sound practical science; the science
+of physiology, as applied to health.  So, and so only, can we check--I do
+not say stop entirely--though I believe even that to be ideally possible;
+but at least check the process of degradation which I believe to be
+surely going on, not merely in these islands, but in every civilised
+country in the world, in proportion to its civilisation.
+
+It is still a question whether science has fully discovered those laws of
+hereditary health, the disregard of which causes so many marriages
+disastrous to generations yet unborn.  But much valuable light has been
+thrown on this most mysterious and most important subject during the last
+few years.  That light--and I thank God for it--is widening and deepening
+rapidly.  And I doubt not that, in a generation or two more, enough will
+be known to be thrown into the shape of practical and proveable rules;
+and that, if not a public opinion, yet at least, what is more useful far,
+a wide-spread private opinion, will grow up, especially among educated
+women, which will prevent many a tragedy and save many a life.
+
+But, as to the laws of personal health: enough, and more than enough, is
+known already, to be applied safely and easily by any adults, however
+unlearned, to the preservation not only of their own health, but of that
+of their children.
+
+The value of healthy habitations, of personal cleanliness, of pure air
+and pure water, of various kinds of food, according as each tends to make
+bone, fat, or muscle, provided only--provided only--that the food be
+unadulterated; the value of various kinds of clothing, and physical
+exercise, of a free and equal development of the brain-power, without
+undue overstrain in any one direction; in one word, the method of
+producing, as far as possible, the mentem sanam in corpore sano, and the
+wonderful and blessed effects of such obedience to those laws of nature,
+which are nothing but the good will of God expressed in facts--their
+wonderful and blessed tendency, I say, to eliminate the germs of
+hereditary disease, and to actually regenerate the human system--all this
+is known; known as fully and clearly as any human knowledge need be
+known; it is written in dozens of popular books and pamphlets.  And why
+should this divine voice, which cries to man, tending to sink into
+effeminate barbarism through his own hasty and partial civilisation,--"It
+is not too late.  For your bodies, as for your spirits, there is an
+upward, as well as a downward path.  You, or if not you, at least the
+children whom you have brought into the world, for whom you toil, for
+whom you hoard, for whom you pray, for whom you would give your
+lives,--they still may be healthy, strong, it may be beautiful, and have
+all the intellectual and social, as well as the physical advantages,
+which health, strength, and beauty give."--Ah, why is this divine voice
+now, as of old, Wisdom crying in the streets, and no man regarding her?  I
+appeal to women, who are initiated, as we men can never be, into the
+stern mysteries of pain, and sorrow, and self-sacrifice;--they who bring
+forth children, weep over children, slave for children, and, if they have
+none of their own, then slave, with the holy instinct of the sexless bee,
+for the children of others--Let them say, shall this thing be?
+
+Let my readers pardon me if I seem to write too earnestly.  That I speak
+neither more nor less than the truth, every medical man knows full well.
+Not only as a very humble student of physiology, but as a parish priest
+of thirty years' standing, I have seen so much unnecessary misery; and I
+have in other cases seen similar misery so simply avoided; that the sense
+of the vastness of the evil is intensified by my sense of the easiness of
+the cure.
+
+Why, then--to come to practical suggestions--should there not be opened
+in every great town in these realms a public school of health?  It might
+connect itself with--I hold that it should form an integral part of--some
+existing educational institute.  But it should at least give practical
+lectures, for fees small enough to put them within the reach of any
+respectable man or woman, however poor.  I cannot but hope that such
+schools of health, if opened in the great manufacturing towns of England
+and Scotland, and, indeed, in such an Irish town as Belfast, would obtain
+pupils in plenty, and pupils who would thoroughly profit by what they
+hear.  The people of these towns are, most of them, specially accustomed
+by their own trades to the application of scientific laws.  To them,
+therefore, the application of any fresh physical laws to a fresh set of
+facts, would have nothing strange in it.  They have already something of
+that inductive habit of mind which is the groundwork of all rational
+understanding or action.  They would not turn the deaf and contemptuous
+ear with which the savage and the superstitious receive the revelation of
+nature's mysteries.  Why should not, with so hopeful an audience, the
+experiment be tried far and wide, of giving lectures on health, as
+supplementary to those lectures on animal physiology which are, I am
+happy to say, becoming more and more common?  Why should not people be
+taught--they are already being taught at Birmingham--something about the
+tissues of the body, their structure and uses, the circulation of the
+blood, respiration, chemical changes in the air respired, amount
+breathed, digestion, nature of food, absorption, secretion, structure of
+the nervous system,--in fact, be taught something of how their own bodies
+are made and how they work?  Teaching of this kind ought to, and will, in
+some more civilised age and country, be held a necessary element in the
+school-course of every child, just as necessary as reading, writing, and
+arithmetic; for it is after all the most necessary branch of that
+"technical education" of which we hear so much just now, namely, the
+technic, or art, of keeping oneself alive and well.
+
+But we can hardly stop there.  After we have taught the condition of
+health, we must teach also the condition of disease; of those diseases
+specially which tend to lessen wholesale the health of townsfolk, exposed
+to an artificial mode of life.  Surely young men and women should be
+taught something of the causes of zymotic disease, and of scrofula,
+consumption, rickets, dipsomania, cerebral derangement, and such like.
+They should be shown the practical value of pure air, pure water,
+unadulterated food, sweet and dry dwellings.  Is there one of them, man
+or woman, who would not be the safer and happier, and the more useful to
+his or her neighbours, if they had acquired some sound notions about
+those questions of drainage on which their own lives and the lives of
+their children may every day depend?  I say--women as well as men.  I
+should have said women rather than men.  For it is the women who have the
+ordering of the household, the bringing up of the children; the women who
+bide at home, while the men are away, it may be at the other end of the
+earth.
+
+And if any say, as they have a right to say--"But these are subjects
+which can hardly be taught to young women in public lectures;" I
+rejoin,--Of course not, unless they are taught by women,--by women, of
+course, duly educated and legally qualified.  Let such teach to women,
+what every woman ought to know, and what her parents will very properly
+object to her hearing from almost any man.  This is one of the main
+reasons why I have, for twenty years past, advocated the training of
+women for the medical profession; and one which countervails, in my mind,
+all possible objections to such a movement.  And now, thank God, I am
+seeing the common sense of Great Britain, and indeed of every civilised
+nation, gradually coming round to that which seemed to me, when I first
+conceived of it, a dream too chimerical to be cherished save in
+secret--the restoring woman to her natural share in that sacred office of
+healer, which she held in the Middle Ages, and from which she was thrust
+out during the sixteenth century.
+
+I am most happy to see, for instance, that the National Health Society,
+{15} which I earnestly recommend to the attention of my readers,
+announces a "Course of Lectures for Ladies on Elementary Physiology and
+Hygiene, by Miss Chessar," to which I am also most happy to see,
+governesses are admitted at half-fees.  Alas! how much misery, disease,
+and even death, might have been prevented, had governesses been taught
+such matters thirty years ago, I, for one, know too well.  May the day
+soon come when there will be educated women enough to give such lectures
+throughout these realms, to rich as well as poor,--for the rich, strange
+to say, need them often as much as the poor do,--and that we may live to
+see, in every great town, health classes for women as well as for men,
+sending forth year by year more young women and young men taught, not
+only to take care of themselves and of their families, but to exercise
+moral influence over their fellow-citizens, as champions in the battle
+against dirt and drunkenness, disease and death.
+
+There may be those who would answer--or rather, there would certainly
+have been those who would have so answered thirty years ago, before the
+so-called materialism of advanced science had taught us some practical
+wisdom about education, and reminded people that they have bodies as well
+as minds and souls--"You say, we are likely to grow weaklier,
+unhealthier.  And if it were so, what matter?  Mind makes the man, not
+body.  We do not want our children to be stupid giants and bravos; but
+clever, able, highly educated, however weakly Providence or the laws of
+nature may have chosen to make them.  Let them overstrain their brains a
+little; let them contract their chests, and injure their digestion and
+their eyesight, by sitting at desks, poring over books.  Intellect is
+what we want.  Intellect makes money.  Intellect makes the world.  We
+would rather see our son a genius than an athlete."  Well: and so would
+I.  But what if intellect alone does not even make money, save as Messrs.
+Dodson & Fogg, Sampson Brass, and Montagu Tigg were wont to make it,
+unless backed by an able, enduring, healthy physique, such as I have
+seen, almost without exception, in those successful men of business whom
+I have had the honour and the pleasure of knowing?  What if intellect, or
+what is now called intellect, did not make the world, or the smallest
+wheel or cog of it?  What if, for want of obeying the laws of nature,
+parents bred up neither a genius nor an athlete, but only an incapable
+unhappy personage, with a huge upright forehead, like that of a Byzantine
+Greek, filled with some sort of pap instead of brains, and tempted
+alternately to fanaticism and strong drink?  We must, in the great
+majority of cases have the corpus sanem if we want the mentem sanem; and
+healthy bodies are the only trustworthy organs for healthy minds.  Which
+is cause and which is effect, I shall not stay to debate here.  But
+wherever we find a population generally weakly, stunted, scrofulous, we
+find in them a corresponding type of brain, which cannot be trusted to do
+good work; which is capable more or less of madness, whether solitary or
+epidemic.  It may be very active; it may be very quick at catching at new
+and grand ideas--all the more quick, perhaps, on account of its own
+secret _malaise_ and self-discontent: but it will be irritable,
+spasmodic, hysterical.  It will be apt to mistake capacity of talk for
+capacity of action, excitement for earnestness, virulence for force, and,
+too often, cruelty for justice.  It will lose manful independence,
+individuality, originality; and when men act, they will act, from the
+consciousness of personal weakness, like sheep rushing over a hedge,
+leaning against each other, exhorting each other to be brave, and swaying
+about in mobs and masses.  These were the intellectual weaknesses which,
+as I read history, followed on physical degradation in Imperial Rome, in
+Alexandria, in Byzantium.  Have we not seen them reappear, under fearful
+forms, in Paris but the other day?
+
+I do not blame; I do not judge.  My theory, which I hold, and shall hold,
+to be fairly founded on a wide induction, forbids me to blame and to
+judge: because it tells me that these defects are mainly physical; that
+those who exhibit them are mainly to be pitied, as victims of the sins or
+ignorance of their forefathers.  But it tells me too, that those who,
+professing to be educated men, and therefore bound to know better, treat
+these physical phenomena as spiritual, healthy, and praiseworthy; who
+even exasperate them, that they may make capital out of the weaknesses of
+fallen man, are the most contemptible and yet the most dangerous of
+public enemies, let them cloak their quackery under whatsoever patriotic,
+or scientific, or even sacred words.
+
+There are those again honest, kindly, sensible, practical men, many of
+them; men whom I have no wish to offend; whom I had rather ask to teach
+me some of their own experience and common sense, which has learned to
+discern, like good statesmen, not only what ought to be done, but what
+can be done--there are those, I say, who would sooner see this whole
+question let alone.  Their feeling, as far as I can analyse it, seems to
+be, that the evils of which I have been complaining, are on the whole
+inevitable: or, if not, that we can mend so very little of them, that it
+is wisest to leave them alone altogether, lest, like certain sewers, "the
+more you stir them, the more they smell."  They fear lest we should
+unsettle the minds of the many for whom these evils will never be mended;
+lest we make them discontented; discontented with their houses, their
+occupations, their food, their whole social arrangements; and all in
+vain.
+
+I should answer, in all courtesy and humility--for I sympathise deeply
+with such men and women, and respect them deeply likewise--But are not
+people discontented already, from the lowest to the highest?  And ought a
+man, in such a piecemeal, foolish, greedy, sinful world as this is, and
+always has been, to be anything but discontented?  If he thinks that
+things are going all right, must he not have a most beggarly conception
+of what going right means?  And if things are not going right, can it be
+anything but good for him to see that they are not going right?  Can
+truth and fact harm any human being?  I shall not believe so, as long as
+I have a Bible wherein to believe.  For my part, I should like to make
+every man, woman, and child whom I meet discontented with themselves,
+even as I am discontented with myself.  I should like to awaken in them,
+about their physical, their intellectual, their moral condition, that
+divine discontent which is the parent, first of upward aspiration and
+then of self-control, thought, effort to fulfil that aspiration even in
+part.  For to be discontented with the divine discontent, and to be
+ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and first upgrowth of all
+virtue.  Men begin at first, as boys begin when they grumble at their
+school and their schoolmasters, to lay the blame on others; to be
+discontented with their circumstances--the things which stand around
+them; and to cry, "Oh that I had this!"  "Oh that I had that!"  But that
+way no deliverance lies.  That discontent only ends in revolt and
+rebellion, social or political; and that, again, still in the same
+worship of circumstances--but this time desperate--which ends, let it
+disguise itself under what fine names it will, in what the old Greeks
+called a tyranny; in which--as in the Spanish republics of America, and
+in France more than once--all have become the voluntary slaves of one
+man, because each man fancies that the one man can improve his
+circumstances for him.
+
+But the wise man will learn, like Epictetus the heroic slave, the slave
+of Epaphroditus, Nero's minion--and in what baser and uglier
+circumstances could human being find himself?--to find out the secret of
+being truly free; namely, to be discontented with no man and no thing
+save himself.  To say not--"Oh that I had this and that!" but "Oh that I
+were this and that!"  Then, by God's help--and that heroic slave, heathen
+though he was, believed and trusted in God's help--"I will make myself
+that which God has shown me that I ought to be and can be."
+
+Ten thousand a-year, or ten million a-year, as Epictetus saw full well,
+cannot mend that vulgar discontent with circumstances, which he had
+felt--and who with more right?--and conquered, and despised.  For that is
+the discontent of children, wanting always more holidays and more sweets.
+But I wish my readers to have, and to cherish, the discontent of men and
+women.
+
+Therefore I would make men and women discontented, with the divine and
+wholesome discontent, at their own physical frame, and at that of their
+children.  I would accustom their eyes to those precious heirlooms of the
+human race, the statues of the old Greeks; to their tender grandeur,
+their chaste healthfulness, their unconscious, because perfect, might:
+and say--There; these are tokens to you, and to all generations yet
+unborn, of what man could be once; of what he can be again if he will
+obey those laws of nature which are the voice of God.  I would make them
+discontented with the ugliness and closeness of their dwellings; I would
+make the men discontented with the fashion of their garments, and still
+more just now the women, of all ranks, with the fashion of theirs; and
+with everything around them which they have the power of improving, if it
+be at all ungraceful, superfluous, tawdry, ridiculous, unwholesome.  I
+would make them discontented with what they call their education, and say
+to them--You call the three Royal R's education?  They are not education:
+no more is the knowledge which would enable you to take the highest
+prizes given by the Society of Arts, or any other body.  They are not
+education: they are only instruction; a necessary groundwork, in an age
+like this, for making practical use of your education: but not the
+education itself.
+
+And if they asked me, What then education meant? I should point them,
+first, I think, to noble old Lilly's noble old 'Euphues,' of three
+hundred years ago, and ask them to consider what it says about education,
+and especially this passage concerning that mere knowledge which is now-a-
+days strangely miscalled education.  "There are two principal and
+peculiar gifts in the nature of man, knowledge and reason.  The one"--that
+is reason--"commandeth, and the other"--that is knowledge--"obeyeth.
+These things neither the whirling wheel of fortune can change, nor the
+deceitful cavillings of worldlings separate, neither sickness abate, nor
+age abolish."  And next I should point them to those pages in Mr.
+Gladstone's 'Juventus Mundi,' where he describes the ideal training of a
+Greek youth in Homer's days; and say,--There: that is an education fit
+for a really civilised man, even though he never saw a book in his life;
+the full, proportionate, harmonious educing--that is, bringing out and
+developing--of all the faculties of his body, mind, and heart, till he
+becomes at once a reverent yet a self-assured, a graceful and yet a
+valiant, an able and yet an eloquent personage.
+
+And if any should say to me--"But what has this to do with science?
+Homer's Greeks knew no science;" I should rejoin--But they had,
+pre-eminently above all ancient races which we know, the scientific
+instinct; the teachableness and modesty; the clear eye and quick ear; the
+hearty reverence for fact and nature, and for the human body, and mind,
+and spirit; for human nature, in a word, in its completeness, as the
+highest fact upon this earth.  Therefore they became in after years, not
+only the great colonisers and the great civilisers of the old world--the
+most practical people, I hold, which the world ever saw; but the parents
+of all sound physics as well as of all sound metaphysics.  Their very
+religion, in spite of its imperfections, helped forward their education,
+not in spite of, but by means of, that anthropomorphism which we
+sometimes too hastily decry.  As Mr. Gladstone says in a passage which I
+must quote at length--"As regarded all other functions of our nature,
+outside the domain of the life to Godward--all those functions which are
+summed up in what St. Paul calls the flesh and the mind, the psychic and
+bodily life, the tendency of the system was to exalt the human element,
+by proposing a model of beauty, strength, and wisdom, in all their
+combinations, so elevated that the effort to attain them required a
+continual upward strain.  It made divinity attainable; and thus it
+effectually directed the thought and aim of man
+
+   'Along the line of limitless desires.'
+
+Such a scheme of religion, though failing grossly in the government of
+the passions, and in upholding the standard of moral duties, tended
+powerfully to produce a lofty self-respect, and a large, free, and varied
+conception of humanity.  It incorporated itself in schemes of notable
+discipline for mind and body, indeed of a lifelong education; and these
+habits of mind and action had their marked results (to omit many other
+greatnesses) in a philosophy, literature, and art, which remain to this
+day unrivalled or unsurpassed."
+
+So much those old Greeks did for their own education, without science and
+without Christianity.  We who have both: what might we not do, if we
+would be true to our advantages, and to ourselves?
+
+
+
+
+THE TWO BREATHS.  A LECTURE DELIVERED AT WINCHESTER, MAY 31, 1869.
+
+
+Ladies,--I have been honoured by a second invitation to address you here,
+from the lady to whose public spirit the establishment of these lectures
+is due.  I dare not refuse it: because it gives me an opportunity of
+speaking on a matter, knowledge and ignorance about which may seriously
+affect your health and happiness, and that of the children with whom you
+may have to do.  I must apologize if I say many things which are well
+known to many persons in this room: they ought to be well known to all;
+and it is generally best to assume total ignorance in one's hearers, and
+to begin from the beginning.
+
+I shall try to be as simple as possible; to trouble you as little as
+possible with scientific terms; to be practical; and at the same time, if
+possible, interesting.
+
+I should wish to call this lecture "The Two Breaths:" not merely "The
+Breath;" and for this reason: every time you breathe, you breathe two
+different breaths; you take in one, you give out another.  The
+composition of those two breaths is different.  Their effects are
+different.  The breath which has been breathed out must not be breathed
+in again.  To tell you why it must not would lead me into anatomical
+details, not quite in place here as yet: though the day will come, I
+trust, when every woman entrusted with the care of children will be
+expected to know something about them.  But this I may say--Those who
+habitually take in fresh breath will probably grow up large, strong,
+ruddy, cheerful, active, clear-headed, fit for their work.  Those who
+habitually take in the breath which has been breathed out by themselves,
+or any other living creature, will certainly grow up, if they grow up at
+all, small, weak, pale, nervous, depressed, unfit for work, and tempted
+continually to resort to stimulants, and become drunkards.
+
+If you want to see how different the breath breathed out is from the
+breath taken in, you have only to try a somewhat cruel experiment, but
+one which people too often try upon themselves, their children, and their
+work-people.  If you take any small animal with lungs like your own--a
+mouse, for instance--and force it to breathe no air but what you have
+breathed already; if you put it in a close box, and while you take in
+breath from the outer air, send out your breath through a tube, into that
+box, the animal will soon faint; if you go on long with this process, it
+will die.
+
+Take a second instance, which I beg to press most seriously on the notice
+of mothers, governesses, and nurses: If you allow a child to get into the
+habit of sleeping with its head under the bed-clothes, and thereby
+breathing its own breath over and over again, that child will assuredly
+grow pale, weak, and ill.  Medical men have cases on record of scrofula
+appearing in children previously healthy, which could only be accounted
+for from this habit, and which ceased when the habit stopped.  Let me
+again entreat your attention to this undoubted fact.
+
+Take another instance, which is only too common: If you are in a crowded
+room, with plenty of fire and lights and company, doors and windows all
+shut tight, how often you feel faint--so faint, that you may require
+smelling-salts or some other stimulant.  The cause of your faintness is
+just the same as that of the mouse's fainting in the box: you and your
+friends, and, as I shall show you presently, the fire and the candles
+likewise, having been all breathing each other's breaths, over and over
+again, till the air has become unfit to support life.  You are doing your
+best to enact over again the Highland tragedy, of which Sir James Simpson
+tells in his lectures to the working-classes of Edinburgh, when at a
+Christmas meeting thirty-six persons danced all night in a small room
+with a low ceiling, keeping the doors and windows shut.  The atmosphere
+of the room was noxious beyond description; and the effect was, that
+seven of the party were soon after seized with typhus fever, of which two
+died.  You are inflicting on yourselves the torments of the poor dog, who
+is kept at the Grotto del Cane, near Naples, to be stupified, for the
+amusement of visitors, by the carbonic acid gas of the Grotto, and
+brought to life again by being dragged into the fresh air; nay, you are
+inflicting upon yourselves the torments of the famous Black Hole of
+Calcutta; and, if there was no chimney in the room, by which some fresh
+air could enter, the candles would soon burn blue--as they do, you know,
+when ghosts appear; your brains become disturbed; and you yourselves run
+the risk of becoming ghosts, and the candles of actually going out.
+
+Of this last fact there is no doubt; for if, instead of putting a mouse
+into the box, you will put a lighted candle, and breathe into the tube,
+as before, however gently, you will in a short time put the candle out.
+
+Now, how is this?  First, what is the difference between the breath you
+take in and the breath you give out?  And next, why has it a similar
+effect on animal life and a lighted candle?
+
+The difference is this.  The breath which you take in is, or ought to be,
+pure air, composed, on the whole, of oxygen and nitrogen, with a minute
+portion of carbonic acid.
+
+The breath which you give out is an impure air, to which has been added,
+among other matters which will not support life, an excess of carbonic
+acid.
+
+That this is the fact you can prove for yourselves by a simple
+experiment.  Get a little lime water at the chemist's, and breathe into
+it through a glass tube; your breath will at once make the lime-water
+milky.  The carbonic acid of your breath has laid hold of the lime, and
+made it visible as white carbonate of lime--in plain English, as common
+chalk.
+
+Now, I do not wish, as I said, to load your memories with scientific
+terms: but I beseech you to remember at least these two--oxygen gas and
+carbonic acid gas; and to remember that, as surely as oxygen feeds the
+fire of life, so surely does carbonic acid put it out.
+
+I say, "the fire of life."  In that expression lies the answer to our
+second question: Why does our breath produce a similar effect upon the
+mouse and the lighted candle?  Every one of us is, as it were, a living
+fire.  Were we not, how could we be always warmer than the air outside
+us?  There is a process going on perpetually in each of us, similar to
+that by which coals are burnt in the fire, oil in a lamp, wax in a
+candle, and the earth itself in a volcano.  To keep each of those fires
+alight, oxygen is needed; and the products of combustion, as they are
+called, are more or less the same in each case--carbonic acid and steam.
+
+These facts justify the expression I just made use of--which may have
+seemed to some of you fantastical--that the fire and the candles in the
+crowded room were breathing the same breath as you were.  It is but too
+true.  An average fire in the grate requires, to keep it burning, as much
+oxygen as several human beings do; each candle or lamp must have its
+share of oxygen likewise, and that a very considerable one; and an
+average gas-burner--pray attend to this, you who live in rooms lighted
+with gas--consumes as much oxygen as several candles.  All alike are
+making carbonic acid.  The carbonic acid of the fire happily escapes up
+the chimney in the smoke: but the carbonic acid from the human beings and
+the candles remains to poison the room, unless it be ventilated.
+
+Now, I think you may understand one of the simplest, and yet most
+terrible, cases of want of ventilation--death by the fumes of charcoal.  A
+human being shut up in a room, of which every crack is closed, with a pan
+of burning charcoal, falls asleep, never to wake again.  His inward fire
+is competing with the fire of the charcoal for the oxygen of the room;
+both are making carbonic acid out of it: but the charcoal, being the
+stronger of the two, gets all the oxygen to itself, and leaves the human
+being nothing to inhale but the carbonic acid which it has made.  The
+human being, being the weaker, dies first: but the charcoal dies also.
+When it has exhausted all the oxygen of the room, it cools, goes out, and
+is found in the morning half-consumed beside its victim.  If you put a
+giant or an elephant, I should conceive, into that room, instead of a
+human being, the case would be reversed for a time: the elephant would
+put out the burning charcoal by the carbonic acid from his mighty lungs;
+and then, when he had exhausted all the air in the room, die likewise of
+his own carbonic acid.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Now, I think, we may see what ventilation means, and why it is needed.
+
+Ventilation means simply letting out the foul air, and letting in the
+fresh air; letting out the air which has been breathed by men or by
+candles, and letting in the air which has not.  To understand how to do
+that, we must remember a most simple chemical law, that a gas as it is
+warmed expands, and therefore becomes lighter; as it cools, it contracts,
+and becomes heavier.
+
+Now the carbonic acid in the breath which comes out of our mouth is warm,
+lighter than the air, and rises to the ceiling; and therefore in any
+unventilated room full of people, there is a layer of foul air along the
+ceiling.  You might soon test that for yourselves, if you could mount a
+ladder and put your heads there aloft.  You do test it for yourselves
+when you sit in the galleries of churches and theatres, where the air is
+palpably more foul, and therefore more injurious, than down below.
+
+Where, again, work-people are employed in a crowded house of many
+storeys, the health of those who work on the upper floors always suffers
+most.
+
+In the old monkey-house of the Zoological Gardens, when the cages were on
+the old plan, tier upon tier, the poor little fellows in the uppermost
+tier--so I have been told--always died first of the monkey's
+constitutional complaint, consumption, simply from breathing the warm
+breath of their friends below.  But since the cages have been altered,
+and made to range side by side from top to bottom, consumption--I
+understand--has vastly diminished among them.
+
+The first question in ventilation, therefore, is to get this carbonic
+acid safe out of the room, while it is warm and light and close to the
+ceiling; for if you do not, this happens--The carbonic acid gas cools and
+becomes heavier; for carbonic acid, at the same temperature as common
+air, is so much heavier than common air, that you may actually--if you
+are handy enough--turn it from one vessel to another, and pour out for
+your enemy a glass of invisible poison.  So down to the floor this heavy
+carbonic acid comes, and lies along it, just as it lies often in the
+bottom of old wells, or old brewers' vats, as a stratum of poison,
+killing occasionally the men who descend into it.  Hence, as foolish a
+practice as I know is that of sleeping on the floor; for towards the
+small hours, when the room gets cold, the sleeper on the floor is
+breathing carbonic acid.
+
+And here one word to those ladies who interest themselves with the poor.
+The poor are too apt in times of distress to pawn their bedsteads and
+keep their beds.  Never, if you have influence, let that happen.  Keep
+the bedstead, whatever else may go, to save the sleeper from the carbonic
+acid on the floor.
+
+How, then, shall we get rid of the foul air at the top of the room?  After
+all that has been written and tried on ventilation, I know no simpler
+method than putting into the chimney one of Arnott's ventilators, which
+may be bought and fixed for a few shillings; always remembering that it
+must be fixed into the chimney as near the ceiling as possible.  I can
+speak of these ventilators from twenty-five years' experience.  Living in
+a house with low ceilings, liable to become overcharged with carbonic
+acid, which produces sleepiness in the evening, I have found that these
+ventilators keep the air fresh and pure; and I consider the presence of
+one of these ventilators in a room more valuable than three or four feet
+additional height of ceiling.  I have found, too, that their working
+proves how necessary they are, from this simple fact:--You would suppose
+that, as the ventilator opens freely into the chimney, the smoke would be
+blown down through it in high winds, and blacken the ceiling: but this is
+just what does not happen.  If the ventilator be at all properly poised,
+so as to shut with a violent gust of wind, it will at all other moments
+keep itself permanently open; proving thereby that there is an up-draught
+of heated air continually escaping from the ceiling up the chimney.
+Another very simple method of ventilation is employed in those excellent
+cottages which Her Majesty has built for her labourers round Windsor.
+Over each door a sheet of perforated zinc, some 18 inches square, is
+fixed; allowing the foul air to escape into the passage; and in the
+ceiling of the passage a similar sheet of zinc, allowing it to escape
+into the roof.  Fresh air, meanwhile, should be obtained from outside, by
+piercing the windows, or otherwise.  And here let me give one hint to all
+builders of houses.  If possible, let bedroom windows open at the top as
+well as at the bottom.
+
+Let me impress the necessity of using some such contrivances, not only on
+parents and educators, but on those who employ work-people, and above all
+on those who employ young women in shops or in work-rooms.  What their
+condition may be in this city I know not; but most painful it has been to
+me in other places, when passing through warehouses or work-rooms, to see
+the pale, sodden, and, as the French would say "etiolated" countenances
+of the girls who were passing the greater part of the day in them; and
+painful, also, to breathe an atmosphere of which habit had, alas! made
+them unconscious, but which to one coming out of the open air was
+altogether noxious, and shocking also; for it was fostering the seeds of
+death, not only in the present but in future generations.
+
+Why should this be?  Every one will agree that good ventilation is
+necessary in a hospital, because people cannot get well without fresh
+air.  Do they not see that by the same reasoning good ventilation is
+necessary everywhere, because people cannot remain well without fresh
+air?  Let me entreat those who employ women in work-rooms, if they have
+no time to read through such books as Dr. Andrew Combe's 'Physiology
+applied to Health and Education,' and Madame de Wahl's 'Practical Hints
+on the Moral, Mental, and Physical Training of Girls,' to procure certain
+tracts published by Messrs. Jarrold, Paternoster Row, for the Ladies'
+Sanitary Association; especially one which bears on this subject, 'The
+Black-Hole in our own Bedrooms;' Dr. Lankester's 'School Manual of
+Health;' or a manual on ventilation, published by the Metropolitan
+Working Classes Association for the Improvement of Public Health.
+
+I look forward--I say it openly--to some period of higher civilisation,
+when the Acts of Parliament for the ventilation of factories and
+workshops shall be largely extended, and made far more stringent; when
+officers of public health shall be empowered to enforce the ventilation
+of every room in which persons are employed for hire; and empowered also
+to demand a proper system of ventilation for every new house, whether in
+country or in town.  To that, I believe, we must come: but I had sooner
+far see these improvements carried out, as befits the citizens of a free
+country, in the spirit of the Gospel rather than in that of the Law;
+carried out, not compulsorily and from fear of fines, but voluntarily,
+from a sense of duty, honour, and humanity.  I appeal, therefore, to the
+good feeling of all whom it may concern, whether the health of those whom
+they employ, and therefore the supply of fresh air which they absolutely
+need, are not matters for which they are not, more or less, responsible
+to their country and their God.
+
+And if any excellent person of the old school should answer me--"Why make
+all this fuss about ventilation?  Our forefathers got on very well
+without it"--I must answer that, begging their pardons, our ancestors did
+nothing of the kind.  Our ancestors got on usually very ill in these
+matters: and when they got on well, it was because they had good
+ventilation in spite of themselves.
+
+First.  They got on very ill.  To quote a few remarkable instances of
+longevity, or to tell me that men were larger and stronger on the average
+in old times, is to yield to the old fallacy of fancying that savages
+were peculiarly healthy, because those who were seen were active and
+strong.  The simple answer is, that the strong alone survived, while the
+majority died from the severity of the training.  Savages do not increase
+in number; and our ancestors increased but very slowly for many
+centuries.  I am not going to disgust my audience with statistics of
+disease: but knowing something, as I happen to do, of the social state
+and of the health of the Middle and Elizabethan Ages, I have no
+hesitation in saying that the average of disease and death was far
+greater then than it is now.  Epidemics of many kinds, typhus, ague,
+plague--all diseases which were caused more or less by bad air--devastated
+this land and Europe in those days with a horrible intensity, to which
+even the choleras of our times are mild.  The back streets, the
+hospitals, the gaols, the barracks, the camps--every place in which any
+large number of persons congregated, were so many nests of pestilence,
+engendered by uncleanliness, which denied alike the water which was drunk
+and the air which was breathed; and as a single fact, of which the tables
+of insurance companies assure us, the average of human life in England
+has increased twenty-five per cent. since the reign of George I., owing
+simply to our more rational and cleanly habits of life.
+
+But secondly, I said that when our ancestors got on well, they did so
+because they got ventilation in spite of themselves.  Luckily for them,
+their houses were ill-built; their doors and windows would not shut.  They
+had lattice-windowed houses, too; to live in one of which, as I can
+testify from long experience, is as thoroughly ventilating as living in a
+lantern with the horn broken out.  It was because their houses were full
+of draughts, and still more, in the early middle age, because they had no
+glass, and stopped out the air only by a shutter at night, that they
+sought for shelter rather than for fresh air, of which they sometimes had
+too much; and, to escape the wind, built their houses in holes, such as
+that in which the old city of Winchester stands.  Shelter, I believe, as
+much as the desire to be near fish in Lent, and to occupy the rich
+alluvium of the valleys, made the monks of Old England choose the river-
+banks for the sites of their abbeys.  They made a mistake therein, which,
+like most mistakes, did not go unpunished.  These low situations,
+especially while the forests were yet thick on the hills around, were the
+perennial haunts of fever and ague, produced by subtle vegetable poisons,
+carried in the carbonic acid given off by rotting vegetation.  So there,
+again, they fell in with man's old enemy--bad air.
+
+Still, as long as the doors and windows did not shut, some free
+circulation of air remained.  But now, our doors and windows shut only
+too tight.  We have plate-glass instead of lattices; and we have replaced
+the draughty and smoky, but really wholesome open chimney, with its wide
+corners and settles, by narrow registers, and even by stoves.  We have
+done all we can, in fact, to seal ourselves up hermetically from the
+outer air, and to breathe our own breaths over and over again; and we pay
+the penalty of it in a thousand ways unknown to our ancestors, through
+whose rooms all the winds of heaven whistled, and who were glad enough to
+shelter themselves from draughts in the sitting-room by the high screen
+round the fire, and in the sleeping-room by the thick curtains of the
+four-post bedstead, which is now rapidly disappearing before a higher
+civilisation.  We therefore absolutely require to make for ourselves the
+very ventilation from which our ancestors tried to escape.
+
+But, ladies, there is an old and true proverb, that you may bring a horse
+to the water, but you cannot make him drink.  And in like wise it is too
+true, that you may bring people to the fresh air, but you cannot make
+them breathe it.  Their own folly, or the folly of their parents and
+educators, prevents their lungs being duly filled and duly emptied.
+Therefore, the blood is not duly oxygenated, and the whole system goes
+wrong.
+
+Paleness, weakness, consumption, scrofula, and too many other ailments,
+are the consequences of ill-filled lungs.  For without well-filled lungs,
+robust health is impossible.
+
+And if any one shall answer--"We do not want robust health so much as
+intellectual attainment.  The mortal body, being the lower organ, must
+take its chance, and be even sacrificed, if need be, to the higher
+organ--the immortal mind:"--To such I reply, You cannot do it.  The laws
+of nature, which are the express will of God, laugh such attempts to
+scorn.  Every organ of the body is formed out of the blood; and if the
+blood be vitiated, every organ suffers in proportion to its delicacy; and
+the brain, being the most delicate and highly specialised of all organs,
+suffers most of all and soonest of all, as every one knows who has tried
+to work his brain when his digestion was the least out of order.  Nay,
+the very morals will suffer.  From ill-filled lungs, which signify ill-
+repaired blood, arise year by year an amount not merely of disease, but
+of folly, temper, laziness, intemperance, madness, and, let me tell you
+fairly, crime--the sum of which will never be known till that great day
+when men shall be called to account for all deeds done in the body,
+whether they be good or evil.
+
+I must refer you on this subject again to Andrew Combe's 'Physiology,'
+especially chapters iv. and vii.; and also to chapter x. of Madame de
+Wahl's excellent book.  I will only say this shortly, that the three most
+common causes of ill-filled lungs, in children and in young ladies, are
+stillness, silence, and stays.
+
+First, stillness; a sedentary life, and want of exercise.  A girl is kept
+for hours sitting on a form writing or reading, to do which she must lean
+forward; and if her schoolmistress cruelly attempts to make her sit
+upright, and thereby keep the spine in an attitude for which Nature did
+not intend it, she is thereby doing her best to bring on that disease, so
+fearfully common in girls' schools, lateral curvature of the spine.  But
+practically the girl will stoop forward.  And what happens?  The lower
+ribs are pressed into the body, thereby displacing more or less something
+inside.  The diaphragm in the meantime, which is the very bellows of the
+lungs, remains loose; the lungs are never properly filled or emptied; and
+an excess of carbonic acid accumulates at the bottom of them.  What
+follows?  Frequent sighing to get rid of it; heaviness of head;
+depression of the whole nervous system under the influence of the poison
+of the lungs; and when the poor child gets up from her weary work, what
+is the first thing she probably does?  She lifts up her chest, stretches,
+yawns, and breathes deeply--Nature's voice, Nature's instinctive cure,
+which is probably regarded as ungraceful, as what is called "lolling" is.
+As if sitting upright was not an attitude in itself essentially
+ungraceful, and such as no artist would care to draw.  As if "lolling,"
+which means putting the body in the attitude of the most perfect ease
+compatible with a fully expanded chest, was not in itself essentially
+graceful, and to be seen in every reposing figure in Greek bas-reliefs
+and vases; graceful, and like all graceful actions, healthful at the same
+time.  The only tolerably wholesome attitude of repose, which I see
+allowed in average school-rooms, is lying on the back on the floor, or on
+a sloping board, in which case the lungs must be fully expanded.  But
+even so, a pillow, or some equivalent, ought to be placed under the small
+of the back: or the spine will be strained at its very weakest point.
+
+I now go on to the second mistake--enforced silence.  Moderate reading
+aloud is good: but where there is any tendency to irritability of throat
+or lungs, too much moderation cannot be used.  You may as well try to
+cure a diseased lung by working it, as to cure a lame horse by galloping
+him.  But where the breathing organs are of average health, let it be
+said once and for all, that children and young people cannot make too
+much noise.  The parents who cannot bear the noise of their children have
+no right to have brought them into the world.  The schoolmistress who
+enforces silence on her pupils is committing--unintentionally no doubt,
+but still committing--an offence against reason, worthy only of a
+convent.  Every shout, every burst of laughter, every song--nay, in the
+case of infants, as physiologists well know, every moderate fit of
+crying--conduces to health, by rapidly filling and emptying the lung, and
+changing the blood more rapidly from black to red, that is, from death to
+life.  Andrew Combe tells a story of a large charity school, in which the
+young girls were, for the sake of their health, shut up in the hall and
+school-room during play hours, from November till March, and no romping
+or noise allowed.  The natural consequences were, the great majority of
+them fell ill; and I am afraid that a great deal of illness has been from
+time to time contracted in certain school-rooms, simply through this one
+cause of enforced silence.  Some cause or other there must be for the
+amount of ill-health and weakliness which prevails especially among girls
+of the middle classes in towns, who have not, poor things, the
+opportunities which richer girls have, of keeping themselves in strong
+health by riding, skating, archery--that last quite an admirable exercise
+for the chest and lungs, and far preferable to croquet, which involves
+too much unwholesome stooping.--Even playing at ball, if milliners and
+shop-girls had room to indulge in one after their sedentary work, might
+bring fresh spirits to many a heart, and fresh colour to many a cheek.  I
+spoke just now of the Greeks.  I suppose you will all allow that the
+Greeks were, as far as we know, the most beautiful race which the world
+ever saw.  Every educated man knows that they were also the cleverest of
+all races; and, next to his Bible, thanks God for Greek literature.
+
+Now, these people had made physical as well as intellectual education a
+science as well as a study.  Their women practised graceful, and in some
+cases even athletic, exercises.  They developed, by a free and healthy
+life, those figures which remain everlasting and unapproachable models of
+human beauty: but--to come to my third point--they wore no stays.  The
+first mention of stays that I have ever found is in the letters of dear
+old Synesius, Bishop of Cyrene, on the Greek coast of Africa, about four
+hundred years after the Christian era.  He tells us how, when he was
+shipwrecked on a remote part of the coast, and he and the rest of the
+passengers were starving on cockles and limpets, there was among them a
+slave girl out of the far East, who had a pinched wasp-waist, such as you
+may see on the old Hindoo sculptures, and such as you may see in any
+street in a British town.  And when the Greek ladies of the neighbourhood
+found her out, they sent for her from house to house, to behold, with
+astonishment and laughter, this new and prodigious waist, with which it
+seemed to them it was impossible for a human being to breathe or live;
+and they petted the poor girl, and fed her, as they might a dwarf or a
+giantess, till she got quite fat and comfortable, while her owners had
+not enough to eat.  So strange and ridiculous seemed our present fashion
+to the descendants of those who, centuries before, had imagined, because
+they had seen living and moving, those glorious statues which we pretend
+to admire, but refuse to imitate.
+
+It seems to me that a few centuries hence, when mankind has learnt to
+fear God more, and therefore to obey more strictly those laws of nature
+and of science which are the will of God--it seems to me, I say, that in
+those days the present fashion of tight lacing will be looked back upon
+as a contemptible and barbarous superstition, denoting a very low level
+of civilisation in the peoples which have practised it.  That for
+generations past women should have been in the habit--not to please men,
+who do not care about the matter as a point of beauty--but simply to vie
+with each other in obedience to something called fashion--that they
+should, I say, have been in the habit of deliberately crushing that part
+of the body which should be specially left free, contracting and
+displacing their lungs, their heart, and all the most vital and important
+organs, and entailing thereby disease, not only on themselves but on
+their children after them; that for forty years past physicians should
+have been telling them of the folly of what they have been doing: and
+that they should as yet, in the great majority of cases, not only turn a
+deaf ear to all warnings, but actually deny the offence, of which one
+glance of the physician or the sculptor, who know what shape the human
+body ought to be, brings them in guilty: this, I say, is an instance
+of--what shall I call it?--which deserves at once the lash, not merely of
+the satirist, but of any theologian who really believes that God made the
+physical universe.  Let me, I pray you, appeal to your common sense for a
+moment.  When any one chooses a horse or a dog, whether for strength, for
+speed, or for any other useful purpose, the first thing almost to be
+looked at is the girth round the ribs; the room for heart and lungs.
+Exactly in proportion to that will be the animal's general healthiness,
+power of endurance, and value in many other ways.  If you will look at
+eminent lawyers and famous orators, who have attained a healthy old age,
+you will see that in every case they are men, like the late Lord
+Palmerston, and others whom I could mention, of remarkable size, not
+merely in the upper, but in the lower part of the chest; men who had,
+therefore, a peculiar power of using the diaphragm to fill and to clear
+the lungs, and therefore to oxygenate the blood of the whole body.  Now,
+it is just these lower ribs, across which the diaphragm is stretched like
+the head of a drum, which stays contract to a minimum.  If you advised
+owners of horses and hounds to put their horses or their hounds into
+stays, and lace them up tight, in order to increase their beauty, you
+would receive, I doubt not, a very courteous, but certainly a very
+decided, refusal to do that which would spoil not merely the animals
+themselves, but the whole stud or the whole kennel for years to come.  And
+if you advised an orator to put himself into tight stays, he, no doubt,
+again would give a courteous answer; but he would reply--if he was a
+really educated man--that to comply with your request would involve his
+giving up public work, under the probable penalty of being dead within
+the twelvemonth.
+
+And how much work of every kind, intellectual as well as physical, is
+spoiled or hindered; how many deaths occur from consumption and other
+complaints which are the result of this habit of tight lacing, is known
+partly to the medical men, who lift up their voices in vain, and known
+fully to Him who will not interfere with the least of His own physical
+laws to save human beings from the consequences of their own wilful
+folly.
+
+And now--to end this lecture with more pleasing thoughts--What becomes of
+this breath which passes from your lips?  Is it merely harmful; merely
+waste?  God forbid!  God has forbidden that anything should be merely
+harmful or merely waste in this so wise and well-made world.  The
+carbonic acid which passes from your lips at every breath--ay, even that
+which oozes from the volcano crater when the eruption is past--is a
+precious boon to thousands of things of which you have daily need.  Indeed
+there is a sort of hint at physical truth in the old fairy tale of the
+girl, from whose lips, as she spoke, fell pearls and diamonds; for the
+carbonic acid of your breath may help hereafter to make the pure
+carbonate of lime of a pearl, or the still purer carbon of a diamond.
+Nay, it may go--in such a world of transformations do we live--to make
+atoms of coal strata, which shall lie buried for ages beneath deep seas,
+shall be upheaved in continents which are yet unborn, and there be burnt
+for the use of a future race of men, and resolved into their original
+elements.  Coal, wise men tell us, is on the whole breath and sunlight;
+the breath of living creatures who have lived in the vast swamps and
+forests of some primaeval world, and the sunlight which transmuted that
+breath into the leaves and stems of trees, magically locked up for ages
+in that black stone, to become, when it is burnt at last, light and
+carbonic acid, as it was at first.  For though you must not breathe your
+breath again, you may at least eat your breath, if you will allow the sun
+to transmute it for you into vegetables; or you may enjoy its fragrance
+and its colour in the shape of a lily or a rose.  When you walk in a
+sunlit garden, every word you speak, every breath you breathe, is feeding
+the plants and flowers around.  The delicate surface of the green leaves
+absorbs the carbonic acid, and parts it into its elements, retaining the
+carbon to make woody fibre, and courteously returning you the oxygen to
+mingle with the fresh air, and be inhaled by your lungs once more.  Thus
+do you feed the plants; just as the plants feed you; while the great life-
+giving sun feeds both; and the geranium standing in the sick child's
+window does not merely rejoice his eye and mind by its beauty and
+freshness, but repays honestly the trouble spent on it; absorbing the
+breath which the child needs not, and giving to him the breath which he
+needs.
+
+So are the services of all things constituted according to a Divine and
+wonderful order, and knit together in mutual dependence and mutual
+helpfulness.--A fact to be remembered with hope and comfort; but also
+with awe and fear.  For as in that which is above nature, so in nature
+itself; he that breaks one physical law is guilty of all.  The whole
+universe, as it were, takes up arms against him; and all nature, with her
+numberless and unseen powers, is ready to avenge herself on him, and on
+his children after him, he knows not when nor where.  He, on the other
+hand, who obeys the laws of nature with his whole heart and mind, will
+find all things working together to him for good.  He is at peace with
+the physical universe.  He is helped and befriended alike by the sun
+above his head and the dust beneath his feet: because he is obeying the
+will and mind of Him who made sun, and dust, and all things; and who has
+given them a law which cannot be broken.
+
+
+
+
+THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.
+
+
+The more I have contemplated that ancient story of the Fall, the more it
+has seemed to me within the range of probability, and even of experience.
+It must have happened somewhere for the first time; for it has happened
+only too many times since.  It has happened, as far as I can ascertain,
+in every race, and every age, and every grade of civilisation.  It is
+happening round us now in every region of the globe.  Always and
+everywhere, it seems to me, have poor human beings been tempted to eat of
+some "tree of knowledge," that they may be, even for an hour, as gods;
+wise, but with a false wisdom; careless, but with a frantic carelessness;
+and happy, but with a happiness which, when the excitement is past,
+leaves too often--as with that hapless pair in Eden--depression, shame,
+and fear.  Everywhere, and in all ages, as far as I can ascertain, has
+man been inventing stimulants and narcotics to supply that want of
+vitality of which he is so painfully aware; and has asked nature, and not
+God, to clear the dull brain, and comfort the weary spirit.
+
+This has been, and will be perhaps for many a century to come, almost the
+most fearful failing of this poor, exceptional, over-organised, diseased,
+and truly fallen being called man, who is in doubt daily whether he be a
+god or an ape; and in trying wildly to become the former, ends but too
+often in becoming the latter.
+
+For man, whether savage or civilised, feels, and has felt in every age,
+that there is something wrong with him.  He usually confesses this
+fact--as is to be expected--of his fellow-men, rather than of himself;
+and shows his sense that there is something wrong with them by
+complaining of, hating, and killing them.  But he cannot always conceal
+from himself the fact that he, too, is wrong, as well as they; and as he
+will not usually kill himself, he tries wild ways to make himself at
+least feel--if not to be--somewhat "better."  Philosophers may bid him be
+content; and tell him that he is what he ought to be, and what nature has
+made him.  But he cares nothing for the philosophers.  He knows, usually,
+that he is not what he ought to be; that he carries about with him, in
+most cases, a body more or less diseased and decrepit, incapable of doing
+all the work which he feels that he himself could do, or expressing all
+the emotions which he himself longs to express; a dull brain and dull
+senses, which cramp the eager infinity within him; as--so Goethe once
+said with pity--the horse's single hoof cramps the fine intelligence and
+generosity of his nature, and forbids him even to grasp an object, like
+the more stupid cat, and baser monkey.  And man has a self, too, within,
+from which he longs too often to escape, as from a household ghost; who
+pulls out, at unfortunately rude and unwelcome hours, the ledger of
+memory.  And so when the tempter--be he who he may--says to him "Take
+this, and you will 'feel better'--Take this, and you shall be as gods,
+knowing good and evil:" then, if the temptation was, as the old story
+says, too much for man while healthy and unfallen, what must it be for
+his unhealthy and fallen children?  In vain we say to man--
+
+   "'Tis life, not death, for which you pant;
+   'Tis life, whereof your nerves are scant;
+   More life, and fuller, that you want."
+
+And your tree of knowledge is not the tree of life: it is, in every case,
+the tree of death; of decrepitude, madness, misery.  He prefers the voice
+of the tempter--"Thou shalt not surely die."  Nay, he will say at
+last,--"Better be as gods awhile, and die: than be the crawling,
+insufficient thing I am; and live."
+
+He--did I say?  Alas!  I must say she likewise.  The sacred story is only
+too true to fact, when it represents the woman as falling, not merely at
+the same time as the man, but before the man.  Only let us remember that
+it represents the woman as tempted; tempted, seemingly, by a rational
+being, of lower race, and yet of superior cunning; who must, therefore,
+have fallen before the woman.  Who or what the being was, who is called
+the Serpent in our translation of Genesis, it is not for me to say.  We
+have absolutely, I think, no facts from which to judge; and Rabbinical
+traditions need trouble no man much.  But I fancy that a missionary,
+preaching on this story to Negroes; telling them plainly that the
+"Serpent" meant the first Obeah man; and then comparing the experiences
+of that hapless pair in Eden, with their own after certain orgies not yet
+extinct in Africa and elsewhere, would be only too well understood: so
+well, indeed, that he might run some risk of eating himself, not of the
+tree of life, but of that of death.  The sorcerer or sorceress tempting
+the woman; and then the woman tempting the man; this seems to be,
+certainly among savage peoples, and, alas! too often among civilised
+peoples also, the usual course of the world-wide tragedy.
+
+But--paradoxical as it may seem--the woman's yielding before the man is
+not altogether to her dishonour, as those old monks used to allege who
+hated, and too often tortured, the sex whom they could not enjoy.  It is
+not to the woman's dishonour, if she felt, before her husband, higher
+aspirations than those after mere animal pleasure.  To be as gods,
+knowing good and evil, is a vain and foolish, but not a base and brutal,
+wish.  She proved herself thereby--though at an awful cost--a woman, and
+not an animal.  And indeed the woman's more delicate organisation, her
+more vivid emotions, her more voluble fancy, as well as her mere physical
+weakness and weariness, have been to her, in all ages, a special source
+of temptation which it is to her honour that she has resisted so much
+better than the physically stronger, and therefore more culpable, man.
+
+As for what the tree of knowledge was, there really is no need for us to
+waste our time in guessing.  If it was not one plant, then it was
+another.  It may have been something which has long since perished off
+the earth.  It may have been--as some learned men have guessed--the
+sacred Soma, or Homa, of the early Brahmin race; and that may have been a
+still existing narcotic species of Asclepias.  It certainly was not the
+vine.  The language of the Hebrew Scripture concerning it, and the sacred
+use to which it is consecrated in the Gospels, forbid that notion
+utterly; at least to those who know enough of antiquity to pass by, with
+a smile, the theory that the wines mentioned in Scripture were not
+intoxicating.  And yet--as a fresh corroboration of what I am trying to
+say--how fearfully has that noble gift to man been abused for the same
+end as a hundred other vegetable products, ever since those mythic days
+when Dionusos brought the vine from the far East, amid troops of human
+Maenads and half-human Satyrs; and the Bacchae tore Pentheus in pieces on
+Cithaeron, for daring to intrude upon their sacred rites; and since those
+historic days, too, when, less than two hundred years before the
+Christian era, the Bacchic rites spread from Southern Italy into Etruria,
+and thence to the matrons of Rome; and under the guidance of Poenia
+Annia, a Campanian lady, took at last shapes of which no man must speak,
+but which had to be put down with terrible but just severity, by the
+Consuls and the Senate.
+
+But it matters little, I say, what this same tree of knowledge was.  Was
+every vine on earth destroyed to-morrow, and every vegetable also from
+which alcohol is now distilled, man would soon discover something else
+wherewith to satisfy the insatiate craving.  Has he not done so already?
+Has not almost every people had its tree of knowledge, often more deadly
+than any distilled liquor, from the absinthe of the cultivated Frenchman,
+and the opium of the cultivated Chinese, down to the bush-poisons
+wherewith the tropic sorcerer initiates his dupes into the knowledge of
+good and evil, and the fungus from which the Samoiede extracts in autumn
+a few days of brutal happiness, before the setting in of the long six
+months' night?  God grant that modern science may not bring to light
+fresh substitutes for alcohol, opium, and the rest; and give the white
+races, in that state of effeminate and godless quasi-civilisation which I
+sometimes fear is creeping upon them, fresh means of destroying
+themselves delicately and pleasantly off the face of the earth.
+
+It is said by some that drunkenness is on the increase in this island.  I
+have no trusty proof of it: but I can believe it possible; for every
+cause of drunkenness seems on the increase.  Overwork of body and mind;
+circumstances which depress health; temptation to drink, and drink again,
+at every corner of the streets; and finally, money, and ever more money,
+in the hands of uneducated people, who have not the desire, and too often
+not the means, of spending it in any save the lowest pleasures.  These,
+it seems to me, are the true causes of drunkenness, increasing or not.
+And if we wish to become a more temperate nation, we must lessen them, if
+we cannot eradicate them.
+
+First, overwork.  We all live too fast, and work too hard.  "All things
+are full of labour, man cannot utter it."  In the heavy struggle for
+existence which goes on all around us, each man is tasked more and
+more--if he be really worth buying and using--to the utmost of his powers
+all day long.  The weak have to compete on equal terms with the strong;
+and crave, in consequence, for artificial strength.  How we shall stop
+that I know not, while every man is "making haste to be rich, and
+piercing himself through with many sorrows, and falling into foolish and
+hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition."  How we
+shall stop that, I say, I know not.  The old prophet may have been right
+when he said, "Surely it is not of the Lord that the people shall labour
+in the very fire, and weary themselves for very vanity;" and in some
+juster, wiser, more sober system of society--somewhat more like the
+Kingdom of The Father come on earth--it may be that poor human beings
+will not need to toil so hard, and to keep themselves up to their work by
+stimulants, but will have time to sit down, and look around them, and
+think of God, and of God's quiet universe, with something of quiet in
+themselves; something of rational leisure, and manful sobriety of mind,
+as well as of body.
+
+But it seems to me also, that in such a state of society, when--as it was
+once well put--"every one has stopped running about like rats:"--that
+those who work hard, whether with muscle or with brain, would not be
+surrounded, as now, with every circumstance which tempts toward drink; by
+every circumstance which depresses the vital energies, and leaves them an
+easy prey to pestilence itself; by bad light, bad air, bad food, bad
+water, bad smells, bad occupations, which weaken the muscles, cramp the
+chest, disorder the digestion.  Let any rational man, fresh from the
+country--in which I presume God, having made it, meant all men, more or
+less, to live--go through the back streets of any city, or through whole
+districts of the "black countries" of England: and then ask himself--Is
+it the will of God that His human children should live and toil in such
+dens, such deserts, such dark places of the earth?  Let him ask
+himself--Can they live and toil there without contracting a probably
+diseased habit of body; without contracting a certainly dull, weary,
+sordid habit of mind, which craves for any pleasure, however brutal, to
+escape from its own stupidity and emptiness?  When I run through, by
+rail, certain parts of the iron-producing country--streets of furnaces,
+collieries, slag heaps, mud, slop, brick house-rows, smoke, dirt--and
+that is all; and when I am told, whether truly or falsely, that the main
+thing which the well-paid and well-fed men of those abominable wastes
+care for is--good fighting-dogs: I can only answer, that I am not
+surprised.
+
+I say--as I have said elsewhere, and shall do my best to say again--that
+the craving for drink and narcotics, especially that engendered in our
+great cities, is not a disease, but a symptom of disease; of a far deeper
+disease than any which drunkenness can produce; namely, of the growing
+degeneracy of a population striving in vain by stimulants and narcotics
+to fight against those slow poisons with which our greedy barbarism,
+miscalled civilisation, has surrounded them from the cradle to the grave.
+I may be answered that the old German, Angle, Dane, drank heavily.  I
+know it: but why did they drink, save for the same reason that the fenman
+drank, and his wife took opium, at least till the fens were drained? why
+but to keep off the depressing effects of the malaria of swamps and new
+clearings, which told on them--who always settled in the lowest
+grounds--in the shape of fever and ague?  Here it may be answered again,
+that stimulants have been, during the memory of man, the destruction of
+the Red Indian race in America.  I reply boldly, that I do not believe
+it.  There is evidence enough in Jaques Cartier's 'Voyages to the Rivers
+of Canada;' and evidence more than enough in Strachey's 'Travaile in
+Virginia'--to quote only two authorities out of many--to prove that the
+Red Indians, when the white man first met with them, were, in North and
+South alike, a diseased, decaying, and, as all their traditions confess,
+decreasing race.  Such a race would naturally crave for "the water of
+life," the "usque-bagh," or whisky, as we have contracted the old name
+now.  But I should have thought that the white man, by introducing among
+these poor creatures iron, fire-arms, blankets, and above all horses
+wherewith to follow the buffalo-herds which they could never follow on
+foot, must have done ten times more towards keeping them alive, than he
+has done towards destroying them by giving them the chance of a week's
+drunkenness twice a year, when they came in to his forts to sell the
+skins which, without his gifts, they would never have got.
+
+Such a race would, of course, if wanting vitality, crave for stimulants.
+But if the stimulants, and not the original want of vitality, combined
+with morals utterly detestable, and worthy only of the gallows--and here
+I know what I say, and dare not tell what I know, from eye-witnesses--have
+been the cause of the Red Indians' extinction: then how is it, let me
+ask, that the Irishman and the Scotsman have, often to their great harm,
+been drinking as much whisky--and usually very bad whisky--not merely
+twice a year, but as often as they could get it, during the whole "iron
+age;" and, for aught any one can tell, during the "bronze age," and the
+"stone age" before that: and yet are still the most healthy, able,
+valiant, and prolific races in Europe?  Had they drunk less whisky they
+would, doubtless, have been more healthy, able, valiant, and perhaps even
+more prolific, than they are now.  They show no sign, however, as yet, of
+going the way of the Red Indian.
+
+But if the craving for stimulants and narcotics is a token of deficient
+vitality: then the deadliest foe of that craving, and all its miserable
+results, is surely the Sanatory Reformer; the man who preaches, and--as
+far as ignorance and vested interests will allow him, procures--for the
+masses, pure air, pure sunlight, pure water, pure dwelling-houses, pure
+food.  Not merely every fresh drinking-fountain: but every fresh public
+bath and wash-house, every fresh open space, every fresh growing tree,
+every fresh open window, every fresh flower in that window--each of these
+is so much, as the old Persians would have said, conquered for Ormuzd,
+the god of light and life, out of the dominion of Ahriman, the king of
+darkness and of death; so much taken from the causes of drunkenness and
+disease, and added to the causes of sobriety and health.
+
+Meanwhile one thing is clear: that if this present barbarism and anarchy
+of covetousness, miscalled modern civilisation, were tamed and drilled
+into something more like a Kingdom of God on earth: then we should not
+see the reckless and needless multiplication of liquor shops, which
+disgraces this country now.
+
+As a single instance: in one country parish of nine hundred inhabitants,
+in which the population has increased only one-ninth in the last fifty
+years, there are now practically eight public-houses, where fifty years
+ago there were but two.  One, that is, for every hundred and ten--or
+rather, omitting children, farmers, shopkeepers, gentlemen, and their
+households, one for every fifty of the inhabitants.  In the face of the
+allurements, often of the basest kind, which these dens offer, the
+clergyman and the schoolmaster struggle in vain to keep up night-schools
+and young men's clubs, and to inculcate habits of providence.
+
+The young labourers over a great part of the south and east, at least, of
+England,--though never so well off, for several generations, as they are
+now--are growing up thriftless, shiftless; inferior, it seems to me, to
+their grandfathers in everything, save that they can usually read and
+write, and their grandfathers could not; and that they wear smart cheap
+cloth clothes, instead of their grandfathers' smock-frocks.
+
+And if it be so in the country: how must it be in towns?  There must come
+a thorough change in the present licensing system, in spite of all the
+"pressure" which certain powerful vested interests may bring to bear on
+governments.  And it is the duty of every good citizen, who cares for his
+countrymen, and for their children after them, to help in bringing about
+that change as speedily as possible.
+
+Again: I said just now that a probable cause of increasing drunkenness
+was the increasing material prosperity of thousands who knew no
+recreation beyond low animal pleasure.  If I am right--and I believe that
+I am right--I must urge on those who wish drunkenness to decrease, the
+necessity of providing more, and more refined recreation for the people.
+
+Men drink, and women too, remember, not merely to supply exhaustion; not
+merely to drive away care: but often simply to drive away dulness.  They
+have nothing to do save to think over what they have done in the day, or
+what they expect to do to-morrow; and they escape from that dreary round
+of business thought, in liquor or narcotics.  There are still those, by
+no means of the hand-working class, but absorbed all day by business, who
+drink heavily at night in their own comfortable homes, simply to recreate
+their overburdened minds.  Such cases, doubtless, are far less common
+than they were fifty years ago: but why?  Is not the decrease of drinking
+among the richer classes certainly due to the increased refinement and
+variety of their tastes and occupations?  In cultivating the aesthetic
+side of man's nature; in engaging him with the beautiful, the pure, the
+wonderful, the truly natural; with painting, poetry, music, horticulture,
+physical science--in all this lies recreation, in the true and literal
+sense of that word, namely, the recreating and mending of the exhausted
+mind and feelings, such as no rational man will now neglect, either for
+himself, his children, or his work-people.
+
+But how little of all this is open to the masses, all should know but too
+well.  How little opportunity the average hand-worker, or his wife, has
+of eating of any tree of knowledge, save of the very basest kind, is but
+too palpable.  We are mending, thank God, in this respect.  Free
+libraries and museums have sprung up of late in other cities beside
+London.  God's blessing rest upon them all.  And the Crystal Palace, and
+still later, the Bethnal Green Museum, have been, I believe, of far more
+use than many average sermons and lectures from many average orators.
+
+But are we not still far behind the old Greeks, and the Romans of the
+Empire likewise, in the amount of amusement and instruction, and even of
+shelter, which we provide for the people?  Recollect the--to
+me--disgraceful fact; that there is not, as far as I am aware, throughout
+the whole of London, a single portico or other covered place, in which
+the people can take refuge during a shower: and this in the climate of
+England!  Where they do take refuge on a wet day the publican knows but
+too well; as he knows also where thousands of the lower classes, simply
+for want of any other place to be in, save their own sordid dwellings,
+spend as much as they are permitted of the Sabbath day.  Let us put down
+"Sunday drinking" by all means, if we can.  But let us remember that by
+closing the public-house on Sunday, we prevent no man or woman from
+carrying home as much poison as they choose on Saturday night, to
+brutalise themselves therewith, perhaps for eight-and-forty hours.  And
+let us see--in the name of Him who said that He had made the Sabbath for
+man, and not man for the Sabbath--let us see, I say, if we cannot do
+something to prevent the townsman's Sabbath being, not a day of rest, but
+a day of mere idleness; the day of most temptation, because of most
+dulness, of the whole seven.
+
+And here, perhaps, some sweet soul may look up reprovingly and say--He
+talks of rest.  Does he forget, and would he have the working man forget,
+that all these outward palliatives will never touch the seat of the
+disease, the unrest of the soul within?  Does he forget, and would he
+have the working man forget, who it was who said--who only has the right
+to say--"Come unto Me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will
+give you rest"?  Ah no, sweet soul.  I know your words are true.  I know
+that what we all want is inward rest; rest of heart and brain; the calm,
+strong, self-contained, self-denying character; which needs no
+stimulants, for it has no fits of depression; which needs no narcotics,
+for it has no fits of excitement; which needs no ascetic restraints, for
+it is strong enough to use God's gifts without abusing them; the
+character, in a word, which is truly temperate, not in drink or food
+merely, but in all desires, thoughts, and actions; freed from the wild
+lusts and ambitions to which that old Adam yielded, and, seeking for
+light and life by means forbidden, found thereby disease and death.  Yes;
+I know that; and know, too, that that rest is found, only where you have
+already found it.
+
+And yet: in such a world as this; governed by a Being who has made
+sunshine, and flowers, and green grass, and the song of birds, and happy
+human smiles; and who would educate by them--if we would let Him--His
+human children from the cradle to the grave; in such a world as this,
+will you grudge any particle of that education, even any harmless
+substitute for it, to those spirits in prison, whose surroundings too
+often tempt them, from the cradle to the grave, to fancy that the world
+is composed of bricks and iron, and governed by inspectors and policemen?
+Preach to those spirits in prison, as you know far better than we parsons
+how to preach: but let them have besides some glimpses of the splendid
+fact, that outside their prison-house is a world which God, not man, has
+made; wherein grows everywhere that tree of knowledge which is likewise
+the tree of life; and that they have a right to some small share of its
+beauty, and its wonder, and its rest, for their own health of soul and
+body, and for the health of their children after them.
+
+
+
+
+NAUSICAA IN LONDON: OR, THE LOWER EDUCATION OF WOMAN.
+
+
+Fresh from the Marbles of the British Museum, I went my way through
+London streets.  My brain was still full of fair and grand forms; the
+forms of men and women whose every limb and attitude betokened perfect
+health, and grace, and power, and a self-possession and self-restraint so
+habitual and complete that it had become unconscious, and
+undistinguishable from the native freedom of the savage.  For I had been
+up and down the corridors of those Greek sculptures, which remain as a
+perpetual sermon to rich and poor, amid our artificial, unwholesome, and
+it may be decaying pseudo-civilisation; saying with looks more expressive
+than all words--Such men and women can be; for such they have been; and
+such you may be yet, if you will use that science of which you too often
+only boast.  Above all, I had been pondering over the awful and yet
+tender beauty of the maiden figures from the Parthenon and its kindred
+temples.  And these, or such as these, I thought to myself, were the
+sisters of the men who fought at Marathon and Salamis; the mothers of
+many a man among the ten thousand whom Xenophon led back from Babylon to
+the Black Sea shore; the ancestresses of many a man who conquered the
+East in Alexander's host, and fought with Porus in the far Punjab.  And
+were these women mere dolls?  These men mere gladiators?  Were they not
+the parents of philosophy, science, poetry, the plastic arts?  We talk of
+education now.  Are we more educated than were the ancient Greeks?  Do we
+know anything about education, physical, intellectual, or aesthetic, and
+I may say moral likewise--religious education, of course, in our sense of
+the word, they had none--but do we know anything about education of which
+they have not taught us at least the rudiments?  Are there not some
+branches of education which they perfected, once and for ever; leaving us
+northern barbarians to follow, or else not to follow, their example?  To
+produce health, that is, harmony and sympathy, proportion and grace, in
+every faculty of mind and body--that was their notion of education.  To
+produce that, the text-book of their childhood was the poetry of Homer,
+and not of--But I am treading on dangerous ground.  It was for this that
+the seafaring Greek lad was taught to find his ideal in Ulysses; while
+his sister at home found hers, it may be, in Nausicaa.  It was for this,
+that when perhaps the most complete and exquisite of all the Greeks,
+Sophocles the good, beloved by gods and men, represented on the Athenian
+stage his drama of Nausicaa, and, as usual, could not--for he had no
+voice--himself take a speaking part, he was content to do one thing in
+which he specially excelled; and dressed and masked as a girl, to play at
+ball amid the chorus of Nausicaa's maidens.
+
+That drama of Nausicaa is lost; and if I dare say so of any play of
+Sophocles', I scarce regret it.  It is well, perhaps, that we have no
+second conception of the scene, to interfere with the simplicity, so
+grand, and yet so tender, of Homer's idyllic episode.
+
+Nausicaa, it must be remembered, is the daughter of a king.  But not of a
+king in the exclusive modern European or old Eastern sense.  Her father,
+Alcinous, is simply "primus inter pares" among a community of merchants,
+who are called "kings" likewise; and Mayor for life--so to speak--of a
+new trading city, a nascent Genoa or Venice, on the shore of the
+Mediterranean.  But the girl Nausicaa, as she sleeps in her "carved
+chamber," is "like the immortals in form and face;" and two handmaidens
+who sleep on each side of the polished door "have beauty from the
+Graces."
+
+To her there enters, in the shape of some maiden friend, none less than
+Pallas Athene herself, intent on saving worthily her favourite, the
+shipwrecked Ulysses; and bids her in a dream go forth--and wash the
+clothes. {72}
+
+   "Nausicaa, wherefore doth thy mother bear
+   Child so forgetful?  This long time doth rest,
+   Like lumber in the house, much raiment fair.
+   Soon must thou wed, and be thyself well-drest,
+   And find thy bridegroom raiment of the best.
+   These are the things whence good repute is born,
+   And praises that make glad a parent's breast.
+   Come, let us both go washing with the morn;
+   So shalt thou have clothes becoming to be worn.
+
+   "Know that thy maidenhood is not for long,
+   Whom the Phoeacian chiefs already woo,
+   Lords of the land whence thou thyself art sprung.
+   Soon as the shining dawn comes forth anew,
+   For wain and mules thy noble father sue,
+   Which to the place of washing shall convey
+   Girdles and shawls and rugs of splendid hue.
+   This for thyself were better than essay
+   Thither to walk: the place is distant a long way."
+
+Startled by her dream, Nausicaa awakes, and goes to find her parents--
+
+   "One by the hearth sat, with the maids around,
+   And on the skeins of yarn, sea-purpled, spent
+   Her morning toil.  Him to the council bound,
+   Called by the honoured kings, just going forth she found."
+
+And calling him, as she might now, "Pappa phile," Dear Papa, asks for the
+mule waggon: but it is her father's and her five brothers' clothes she
+fain would wash,--
+
+   "Ashamed to name her marriage to her father dear."
+
+But he understood all--and she goes forth in the mule waggon, with the
+clothes, after her mother has put in "a chest of all kinds of delicate
+food, and meat, and wine in a goatskin;" and last but not least, the
+indispensable cruse of oil for anointing after the bath, to which both
+Jews, Greeks, and Romans owed so much health and beauty.  And then we
+read in the simple verse of a poet too refined, like the rest of his
+race, to see anything mean or ridiculous in that which was not ugly and
+unnatural, how she and her maids got into the "polished waggon," "with
+good wheels," and she "took the whip and the studded reins," and "beat
+them till they started;" and how the mules "rattled" away, and "pulled
+against each other," till
+
+   "When they came to the fair flowing river
+   Which feeds good lavatories all the year,
+   Fitted to cleanse all sullied robes soever,
+   They from the wain the mules unharnessed there,
+   And chased them free, to crop their juicy fare
+   By the swift river, on the margin green;
+   Then to the waters dashed the clothes they bare
+   And in the stream-filled trenches stamped them clean.
+
+   "Which, having washed and cleansed, they spread before
+   The sunbeams, on the beach, where most did lie
+   Thick pebbles, by the sea-wave washed ashore.
+   So, having left them in the heat to dry,
+   They to the bath went down, and by-and-by,
+   Rubbed with rich oil, their midday meal essay,
+   Couched in green turf, the river rolling nigh.
+   Then, throwing off their veils, at ball they play,
+   While the white-armed Nausicaa leads the choral lay."
+
+The mere beauty of this scene all will feel, who have the sense of beauty
+in them.  Yet it is not on that aspect which I wish to dwell, but on its
+healthfulness.  Exercise is taken, in measured time, to the sound of
+song, as a duty almost, as well as an amusement.  For this game of ball,
+which is here mentioned for the first time in human literature, nearly
+three thousand years ago, was held by the Greeks and by the Romans after
+them, to be an almost necessary part of a liberal education; principally,
+doubtless, from the development which it produced in the upper half of
+the body, not merely to the arms, but to the chest, by raising and
+expanding the ribs, and to all the muscles of the torso, whether
+perpendicular or oblique.  The elasticity and grace which it was believed
+to give were so much prized, that a room for ball-play, and a teacher of
+the art, were integral parts of every gymnasium; and the Athenians went
+so far as to bestow on one famous ballplayer, Aristonicus of Carystia, a
+statue and the rights of citizenship.  The rough and hardy young
+Spartans, when passing from boyhood into manhood, received the title of
+ball-players, seemingly from the game which it was then their special
+duty to learn.  In the case of Nausicaa and her maidens, the game would
+just bring into their right places all that is liable to be contracted
+and weakened in women, so many of whose occupations must needs be
+sedentary and stooping; while the song which accompanied the game at once
+filled the lungs regularly and rhythmically, and prevented violent
+motion, or unseemly attitude.  We, the civilised, need physiologists to
+remind us of these simple facts, and even then do not act on them.  Those
+old half-barbarous Greeks had found them out for themselves, and,
+moreover, acted on them.
+
+But fair Nausicaa must have been--some will say--surely a mere child of
+nature, and an uncultivated person?
+
+So far from it, that her whole demeanour and speech show culture of the
+very highest sort, full of "sweetness and light."--Intelligent and
+fearless, quick to perceive the bearings of her strange and sudden
+adventure, quick to perceive the character of Ulysses, quick to answer
+his lofty and refined pleading by words as lofty and refined, and pious
+withal;--for it is she who speaks to her handmaids the once so famous
+words:
+
+   "Strangers and poor men all are sent from Zeus;
+      And alms, though small, are sweet"
+
+Clear of intellect, prompt of action, modest of demeanour, shrinking from
+the slightest breath of scandal; while she is not ashamed, when Ulysses,
+bathed and dressed, looks himself again, to whisper to her maidens her
+wish that the Gods might send her such a spouse.--This is Nausicaa as
+Homer draws her; and as many a scholar and poet since Homer has accepted
+her for the ideal of noble maidenhood.  I ask my readers to study for
+themselves her interview with Ulysses, in Mr. Worsley's translation, or
+rather in the grand simplicity of the original Greek, {76} and judge
+whether Nausicaa is not as perfect a lady as the poet who imagined
+her--or, it may be, drew her from life--must have been a perfect
+gentleman; both complete in those "manners" which, says the old proverb,
+"make the man:" but which are the woman herself; because with her--who
+acts more by emotion than by calculation--manners are the outward and
+visible tokens of her inward and spiritual grace, or disgrace; and flow
+instinctively, whether good or bad, from the instincts of her inner
+nature.
+
+True, Nausicaa could neither read nor write.  No more, most probably,
+could the author of the Odyssey.  No more, for that matter, could
+Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, though they were plainly, both in mind and
+manners, most highly-cultivated men.  Reading and writing, of course,
+have now become necessaries of humanity; and are to be given to every
+human being, that he may start fair in the race of life.  But I am not
+aware that Greek women improved much, either in manners, morals, or
+happiness, by acquiring them in after centuries.  A wise man would sooner
+see his daughter a Nausicaa than a Sappho, an Aspasia, a Cleopatra, or
+even an Hypatia.
+
+Full of such thoughts, I went through London streets, among the Nausicaas
+of the present day; the girls of the period; the daughters and hereafter
+mothers of our future rulers, the great Demos or commercial middle class
+of the greatest mercantile city in the world: and noted what I had noted
+with fear and sorrow, many a day, for many a year; a type, and an
+increasing type, of young women who certainly had not had the
+"advantages," "educational" and other, of that Greek Nausicaa of old.
+
+Of course, in such a city as London, to which the best of everything,
+physical and other, gravitates, I could not but pass, now and then,
+beautiful persons, who made me proud of those "grandes Anglaises aux
+joues rouges," whom the Parisiennes ridicule--and envy.  But I could not
+help suspecting that their looks showed them to be either country-bred,
+or born of country parents; and this suspicion was strengthened by the
+fact, that when compared with their mothers, the mother's physique was,
+in the majority of cases, superior to the daughters'.  Painful it was, to
+one accustomed to the ruddy well-grown peasant girl, stalwart, even when,
+as often, squat and plain, to remark the exceedingly small size of the
+average young woman; by which I do not mean mere want of height--that is
+a little matter--but want of breadth likewise; a general want of those
+large frames, which indicate usually a power of keeping strong and
+healthy not merely the muscles, but the brain itself.
+
+Poor little things.  I passed hundreds--I pass hundreds every day--trying
+to hide their littleness by the nasty mass of false hair--or what does
+duty for it; and by the ugly and useless hat which is stuck upon it,
+making the head thereby look ridiculously large and heavy; and by the
+high heels on which they totter onward, having forgotten, or never
+learnt, the simple art of walking; their bodies tilted forward in that
+ungraceful attitude which is called--why that name of all others?--a
+"Grecian bend;" seemingly kept on their feet, and kept together at all,
+in that strange attitude, by tight stays which prevented all graceful and
+healthy motion of the hips or sides; their raiment, meanwhile, being
+purposely misshapen in this direction and in that, to hide--it must be
+presumed--deficiencies of form.  If that chignon and those heels had been
+taken off, the figure which would have remained would have been that too
+often of a puny girl of sixteen.  And yet there was no doubt that these
+women were not only full grown, but some of them, alas! wives and
+mothers.
+
+Poor little things.--And this they have gained by so-called civilisation:
+the power of aping the "fashions" by which the worn-out Parisienne hides
+her own personal defects; and of making themselves, by innate want of
+that taste which the Parisienne possesses, only the cause of something
+like a sneer from many a cultivated man; and of something like a sneer,
+too, from yonder gipsy woman who passes by, with bold bright face, and
+swinging hip, and footstep stately and elastic; far better dressed,
+according to all true canons of taste, than most town-girls; and thanking
+her fate that she and her "Rom" are no house-dwellers and
+gaslight-sightseers, but fatten on free air upon the open moor.
+
+But the face which is beneath that chignon and that hat?  Well--it is
+sometimes pretty: but how seldom handsome, which is a higher quality by
+far.  It is not, strange to say, a well-fed face.  Plenty of money, and
+perhaps too much, is spent on those fine clothes.  It had been better, to
+judge from the complexion, if some of that money had been spent in solid
+wholesome food.  She looks as if she lived--as she too often does, I
+hear--on tea and bread-and-butter, or rather on bread with the minimum of
+butter.  For as the want of bone indicates a deficiency of phosphatic
+food, so does the want of flesh about the cheeks indicate a deficiency of
+hydrocarbon.  Poor little Nausicaa:--that is not her fault.  Our boasted
+civilisation has not even taught her what to eat, as it certainly has not
+increased her appetite; and she knows not--what every country fellow
+knows--that without plenty of butter and other fatty matters, she is not
+likely to keep even warm.  Better to eat nasty fat bacon now, than to
+supply the want of it some few years hence by nastier cod-liver oil.  But
+there is no one yet to tell her that, and a dozen other equally simple
+facts, for her own sake, and for the sake of that coming Demos which she
+is to bring into the world; a Demos which, if we can only keep it healthy
+in body and brain, has before it so splendid a future: but which, if body
+and brain degrade beneath the influence of modern barbarism, is but too
+likely to follow the Demos of ancient Byzantium, or of modern Paris.
+
+Ay, but her intellect.  She is so clever, and she reads so much, and she
+is going to be taught to read so much more.
+
+Ah, well--there was once a science called physiognomy.  The Greeks, from
+what I can learn, knew more of it than any people since: though the
+Italian painters and sculptors must have known much; far more than we.  In
+a more scientific civilisation there will be such a science once more:
+but its laws, though still in the empiric stage, are not altogether
+forgotten by some.  Little children have often a fine and clear instinct
+of them.  Many cultivated and experienced women have a fine and clear
+instinct of them likewise.  And some such would tell us that there is
+intellect in plenty in the modern Nausicaa: but not of the quality which
+they desire for their country's future good.  Self-consciousness,
+eagerness, volubility, petulance, in countenance, in gesture, and in
+voice--which last is too often most harsh and artificial, the breath
+being sent forth through the closed teeth, and almost entirely at the
+corners of the mouth--and, with all this, a weariness often about the
+wrinkling forehead and the drooping lids;--all these, which are growing
+too common, not among the Demos only, nor only in the towns, are signs,
+they think, of the unrest of unhealth, physical, intellectual, spiritual.
+At least they are as different as two types of physiognomy in the same
+race can be, from the expression both of face and gesture, in those old
+Greek sculptures, and in the old Italian painters; and, it must be said,
+in the portraits of Reynolds, and Gainsborough, Copley, and Romney.  Not
+such, one thinks, must have been the mothers of Britain during the latter
+half of the last century and the beginning of the present; when their
+sons, at times, were holding half the world at bay.
+
+And if Nausicaa has become such in town: what is she when she goes to the
+seaside, not to wash the clothes in fresh-water, but herself in salt--the
+very salt-water, laden with decaying organisms, from which, though not
+polluted further by a dozen sewers, Ulysses had to cleanse himself,
+anointing, too, with oil, ere he was fit to appear in the company of
+Nausicaa of Greece?  She dirties herself with the dirty salt-water; and
+probably chills and tires herself by walking thither and back, and
+staying in too long; and then flaunts on the pier, bedizened in garments
+which, for monstrosity of form and disharmony of colours, would have set
+that Greek Nausicaa's teeth on edge, or those of any average Hindoo woman
+now.  Or, even sadder still, she sits on chairs and benches all the weary
+afternoon, her head drooped on her chest, over some novel from the
+"Library;" and then returns to tea and shrimps, and lodgings of which the
+fragrance is not unsuggestive, sometimes not unproductive, of typhoid
+fever.  Ah, poor Nausicaa of England!  That is a sad sight to some who
+think about the present, and have read about the past.  It is not a sad
+sight to see your old father--tradesman, or clerk, or what not--who has
+done good work in his day, and hopes to do some more, sitting by your old
+mother, who has done good work in her day--among the rest, that heaviest
+work of all, the bringing you into the world and keeping you in it till
+now--honest, kindly, cheerful folk enough, and not inefficient in their
+own calling; though an average Northumbrian, or Highlander, or Irish
+Easterling, beside carrying a brain of five times the intellectual force,
+could drive five such men over the cliff with his bare hands.  It is not
+a sad sight, I say, to see them sitting about upon those seaside benches,
+looking out listlessly at the water, and the ships, and the sunlight, and
+enjoying, like so many flies upon a wall, the novel act of doing nothing.
+It is not the old for whom wise men are sad: but for you.  Where is your
+vitality?  Where is your "Lebensgluckseligkeit," your enjoyment of
+superfluous life and power?  Why can you not even dance and sing, till
+now and then, at night, perhaps, when you ought to be safe in bed, but
+when the weak brain, after receiving the day's nourishment, has roused
+itself a second time into a false excitement of gaslight pleasure?  What
+there is left of it is all going into that foolish book, which the
+womanly element in you, still healthy and alive, delights in; because it
+places you in fancy in situations in which you will never stand, and
+inspires you with emotions, some of which, it may be, you had better
+never feel.  Poor Nausicaa--old, some men think, before you have been
+ever young.
+
+And now they are going to "develop" you; and let you have your share in
+"the higher education of women," by making you read more books, and do
+more sums, and pass examinations, and stoop over desks at night after
+stooping over some other employment all day; and to teach you Latin, and
+even Greek.
+
+Well, we will gladly teach you Greek, if you learn thereby to read the
+history of Nausicaa of old, and what manner of maiden she was, and what
+was her education.  You will admire her, doubtless.  But do not let your
+admiration limit itself to drawing a meagre half-mediaevalized design of
+her--as she never looked.  Copy in your own person; and even if you do
+not descend as low--or rise as high--as washing the household clothes, at
+least learn to play at ball; and sing, in the open air and sunshine, not
+in theatres and concert-rooms by gaslight; and take decent care of your
+own health; and dress not like a "Parisienne"--nor, of course, like
+Nausicaa of old, for that is to ask too much:--but somewhat more like an
+average Highland lassie; and try to look like her, and be like her, of
+whom Wordsworth sang--
+
+      "A mien and face
+   In which full plainly I can trace
+   Benignity and home-bred sense,
+   Ripening in perfect innocence.
+   Here scattered, like a random seed,
+   Remote from men, thou dost not need
+   The embarrassed look of shy distress
+   And maidenly shamefacedness.
+   Thou wear'st upon thy forehead clear
+   The freedom of a mountaineer.
+   A face with gladness overspread,
+   Soft smiles, by human kindness bred,
+   And seemliness complete, that sways
+   Thy courtesies, about thee plays.
+   With no restraint, save such as springs
+   From quick and eager visitings
+   Of thoughts that lie beyond the reach
+   Of thy few words of English speech.
+   A bondage sweetly brooked, a strife
+   That gives thy gestures grace and life."
+
+Ah, yet unspoilt Nausicaa of the North; descendant of the dark tender-
+hearted Celtic girl, and the fair deep-hearted Scandinavian Viking, thank
+God for thy heather and fresh air, and the kine thou tendest, and the
+wool thou spinnest; and come not to seek thy fortune, child, in wicked
+London town; nor import, as they tell me thou art doing fast, the ugly
+fashions of that London town, clumsy copies of Parisian cockneydom, into
+thy Highland home; nor give up the healthful and graceful, free and
+modest dress of thy mother and thy mother's mother, to disfigure the
+little kirk on Sabbath days with crinoline and corset, high-heeled boots,
+and other women's hair.
+
+It is proposed, just now, to assimilate the education of girls more and
+more to that of boys.  If that means that girls are merely to learn more
+lessons, and to study what their brothers are taught, in addition to what
+their mothers were taught; then it is to be hoped, at least by
+physiologists and patriots, that the scheme will sink into that limbo
+whither, in a free and tolerably rational country, all imperfect and ill-
+considered schemes are sure to gravitate.  But if the proposal be a bona
+fide one: then it must be borne in mind that in the public schools of
+England, and in all private schools, I presume, which take their tone
+from them, cricket and football are more or less compulsory, being
+considered integral parts of an Englishman's education; and that they are
+likely to remain so, in spite of all reclamations: because masters and
+boys alike know that games do not, in the long run, interfere with a
+boy's work; that the same boy will very often excel in both; that the
+games keep him in health for his work; that the spirit with which he
+takes to his games when in the lower school, is a fair test of the spirit
+with which he will take to his work when he rises into the higher school;
+and that nothing is worse for a boy than to fall into that loafing, tuck-
+shop-haunting set, who neither play hard nor work hard, and are usually
+extravagant, and often vicious.  Moreover, they know well that games
+conduce, not merely to physical, but to moral health; that in the playing-
+field boys acquire virtues which no books can give them; not merely
+daring and endurance, but, better still, temper, self-restraint,
+fairness, honour, unenvious approbation of another's success, and all
+that "give and take" of life which stand a man in such good stead when he
+goes forth into the world, and without which, indeed, his success is
+always maimed and partial.
+
+Now: if the promoters of higher education for women will compel girls to
+any training analogous to our public school games; if, for instance, they
+will insist on that most natural and wholesome of all exercises, dancing,
+in order to develop the lower half of the body; on singing, to expand the
+lungs and regulate the breath; and on some games--ball or what not--which
+will ensure that raised chest, and upright carriage, and general strength
+of the upper torso, without which full oxygenation of the blood, and
+therefore general health, is impossible; if they will sternly forbid
+tight stays, high heels, and all which interferes with free growth and
+free motion; if they will consider carefully all which has been written
+on the "half-time system" by Mr. Chadwick and others; and accept the
+certain physical law that, in order to renovate the brain day by day, the
+growing creature must have plenty of fresh air and play, and that the
+child who learns for four hours and plays for four hours, will learn
+more, and learn it more easily, than the child who learns for the whole
+eight hours; if, in short, they will teach girls not merely to understand
+the Greek tongue, but to copy somewhat of the Greek physical training, of
+that "music and gymnastic" which helped to make the cleverest race of the
+old world the ablest race likewise: then they will earn the gratitude of
+the patriot and the physiologist, by doing their best to stay the
+downward tendencies of the physique, and therefore ultimately of the
+morale, in the coming generation of English women.
+
+I am sorry to say that, as yet, I hear of but one movement in this
+direction among the promoters of the "higher education of women." {88}  I
+trust that the subject will be taken up methodically by those gifted
+ladies; who have acquainted themselves, and are labouring to acquaint
+other women, with the first principles of health; and that they may avail
+to prevent the coming generations, under the unwholesome stimulant of
+competitive examinations, and so forth, from "developing" into so many
+Chinese-dwarfs--or idiots.
+
+
+
+
+THE AIR-MOTHERS.
+
+
+   "Die Natur ist die Bewegung."
+
+Who are these who follow us softly over the moor in the autumn eve?  Their
+wings brush and rustle in the fir-boughs, and they whisper before us and
+behind, as if they called gently to each other, like birds flocking
+homeward to their nests.
+
+The woodpecker on the pine-stems knows them, and laughs aloud for joy as
+they pass.  The rooks above the pasture know them, and wheel round and
+tumble in their play.  The brown leaves on the oak trees know them, and
+flutter faintly, and beckon as they pass.  And in the chattering of the
+dry leaves there is a meaning, and a cry of weary things which long for
+rest.
+
+"Take us home, take us home, you soft air-mothers, now our fathers the
+sunbeams are grown dull.  Our green summer beauty is all draggled, and
+our faces are grown wan and wan; and the buds, the children whom we
+nourished, thrust us off, ungrateful, from our seats.  Waft us down, you
+soft air-mothers, upon your wings to the quiet earth, that we may go to
+our home, as all things go, and become air and sunlight once again."
+
+And the bold young fir-seeds know them, and rattle impatient in their
+cones.  "Blow stronger, blow fiercer, slow air-mothers, and shake us from
+our prisons of dead wood, that we may fly and spin away north-eastward,
+each on his horny wing.  Help us but to touch the moorland yonder, and we
+will take good care of ourselves henceforth; we will dive like arrows
+through the heather, and drive our sharp beaks into the soil, and rise
+again as green trees toward the sunlight, and spread out lusty boughs."
+
+They never think, bold fools, of what is coming, to bring them low in the
+midst of their pride; of the reckless axe which will fell them, and the
+saw which will shape them into logs; and the trains which will roar and
+rattle over them, as they lie buried in the gravel of the way, till they
+are ground and rotted into powder, and dug up and flung upon the fire,
+that they too may return home, like all things, and become air and
+sunlight once again.
+
+And the air-mothers hear their prayers, and do their bidding: but
+faintly; for they themselves are tired and sad.
+
+Tired and sad are the air-mothers, and their garments rent and wan.  Look
+at them as they stream over the black forest, before the dim
+south-western sun; long lines and wreaths of melancholy grey, stained
+with dull yellow or dead dun.  They have come far across the seas, and
+done many a wild deed upon their way; and now that they have reached the
+land, like shipwrecked sailors, they will lie down and weep till they can
+weep no more.
+
+Ah, how different were those soft air-mothers when, invisible to mortal
+eyes, they started on their long sky-journey, five thousand miles across
+the sea!  Out of the blazing caldron which lies between the two New
+Worlds, they leapt up when the great sun called them, in whirls and
+spouts of clear hot steam; and rushed of their own passion to the
+northward, while the whirling earth-ball whirled them east.  So north-
+eastward they rushed aloft, across the gay West Indian isles, leaving
+below the glitter of the flying-fish, and the sidelong eyes of cruel
+sharks; above the cane-fields and the plaintain-gardens, and the cocoa-
+groves which fringe the shores; above the rocks which throbbed with
+earthquakes, and the peaks of old volcanoes, cinder-strewn; while, far
+beneath, the ghosts of their dead sisters hurried home upon the north-
+east breeze.
+
+Wild deeds they did as they rushed onward, and struggled and fought among
+themselves, up and down, and round and backward, in the fury of their
+blind hot youth.  They heeded not the tree as they snapped it, nor the
+ship as they whelmed it in the waves; nor the cry of the sinking sailor,
+nor the need of his little ones on shore; hasty and selfish even as
+children, and, like children, tamed by their own rage.  For they tired
+themselves by struggling with each other, and by tearing the heavy water
+into waves; and their wings grew clogged with sea-spray, and soaked more
+and more with steam.  But at last the sea grew cold beneath them, and
+their clear steam shrank to mist; and they saw themselves and each other
+wrapped in dull rain-laden clouds.  They then drew their white
+cloud-garments round them, and veiled themselves for very shame; and
+said, "We have been wild and wayward: and, alas! our pure bright youth is
+gone.  But we will do one good deed yet ere we die, and so we shall not
+have lived in vain.  We will glide onward to the land, and weep there;
+and refresh all things with soft warm rain; and make the grass grow, the
+buds burst; quench the thirst of man and beast, and wash the soiled world
+clean."
+
+So they are wandering past us, the air-mothers, to weep the leaves into
+their graves; to weep the seeds into their seed-beds, and weep the soil
+into the plains; to get the rich earth ready for the winter, and then
+creep northward to the ice-world, and there die.
+
+Weary, and still more weary, slowly, and more slowly still, they will
+journey on far northward, across fast-chilling seas.  For a doom is laid
+upon them, never to be still again, till they rest at the North Pole
+itself, the still axle of the spinning world; and sink in death around
+it, and become white snow-clad ghosts.
+
+But will they live again, those chilled air-mothers?  Yes, they must live
+again.  For all things move for ever; and not even ghosts can rest.  So
+the corpses of their sisters, piling on them from above, press them
+outward, press them southward toward the sun once more; across the floes
+and round the icebergs, weeping tears of snow and sleet, while men hate
+their wild harsh voices, and shrink before their bitter breath.  They
+know not that the cold bleak snow-storms, as they hurtle from the black
+north-east, bear back the ghosts of the soft air-mothers, as penitents,
+to their father, the great sun.
+
+But as they fly southwards, warm life thrills them, and they drop their
+loads of sleet and snow; and meet their young live sisters from the
+south, and greet them with flash and thunder-peal.  And, please God,
+before many weeks are over, as we run Westward Ho, we shall overtake the
+ghosts of these air-mothers, hurrying back toward their father, the great
+sun.  Fresh and bright under the fresh bright heaven, they will race with
+us toward our home, to gain new heat, new life, new power, and set forth
+about their work once more.  Men call them the south-west wind, those air-
+mothers; and their ghosts the north-east trade; and value them, and
+rightly, because they bear the traders out and home across the sea.  But
+wise men, and little children, should look on them with more seeing eyes;
+and say, "May not these winds be living creatures?  They, too, are
+thoughts of God, to whom all live."
+
+For is not our life like their life?  Do we not come and go as they?  Out
+of God's boundless bosom, the fount of life, we came; through selfish,
+stormy youth, and contrite tears--just not too late; through manhood not
+altogether useless; through slow and chill old age, we return from Whence
+we came; to the Bosom of God once more--to go forth again, it may be,
+with fresh knowledge, and fresh powers, to nobler work.  Amen.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Such was the prophecy which I learnt, or seemed to learn, from the south-
+western wind off the Atlantic, on a certain delectable evening.  And it
+was fulfilled at night, as far as the gentle air-mothers could fulfil it,
+for foolish man.
+
+   "There was a roaring in the woods all night;
+   The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
+   But now the sun is rising calm and bright,
+   The birds are singing in the distant woods;
+   Over his own sweet voice the stock-dove broods,
+   The jay makes answer as the magpie chatters,
+   And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters"
+
+But was I a gloomy and distempered man, if, upon such a morn as that, I
+stood on the little bridge across a certain brook, and watched the water
+run, with something of a sigh?  Or if, when the schoolboy beside me
+lamented that the floods would surely be out, and his day's fishing
+spoiled, I said to him--"Ah, my boy, that is a little matter.  Look at
+what you are seeing now, and understand what barbarism and waste mean.
+Look at all that beautiful water which God has sent us hither off the
+Atlantic, without trouble or expense to us.  Thousands, and tens of
+thousands, of gallons will run under this bridge to-day; and what shall
+we do with it?  Nothing.  And yet: think only of the mills which that
+water would have turned.  Think how it might have kept up health and
+cleanliness in poor creatures packed away in the back streets of the
+nearest town, or even in London itself.  Think even how country folk, in
+many parts of England, in three months' time, may be crying out for rain,
+and afraid of short crops, and fever, and scarlatina, and cattle-plague,
+for want of the very water which we are now letting run back, wasted,
+into the sea from whence it came.  And yet we call ourselves a civilised
+people."
+
+It is not wise, I know, to preach to boys.  And yet, sometimes, a man
+must speak his heart; even, like Midas' slave, to the reeds by the river
+side.  And I had so often, fishing up and down full many a stream,
+whispered my story to those same river-reeds; and told them that my Lord
+the Sovereign Demos had, like old Midas, asses' ears in spite of all his
+gold, that I thought I might for once tell it the boy likewise, in hope
+that he might help his generation to mend that which my own generation
+does not seem like to mend.
+
+I might have said more to him: but did not.  For it is not well to
+destroy too early the child's illusion, that people must be wise because
+they are grown up, and have votes, and rule--or think they rule--the
+world.  The child will find out how true that is soon enough for himself.
+If the truth be forced on him by the hot words of those with whom he
+lives, it is apt to breed in him that contempt, stormful and therefore
+barren, which makes revolutions; and not that pity, calm and therefore
+helpful, which makes reforms.
+
+So I might have said to him, but did not--
+
+And then men pray for rain:
+
+My boy, did you ever hear the old Eastern legend about the Gipsies?  How
+they were such good musicians, that some great Indian Sultan sent for the
+whole tribe, and planted them near his palace, and gave them land, and
+ploughs to break it up, and seed to sow it, that they might dwell there,
+and play and sing to him.
+
+But when the winter arrived, the Gipsies all came to the Sultan, and
+cried that they were starving.  "But what have you done with the seed-
+corn which I gave you?"  "O Light of the Age, we ate it in the summer."
+"And what have you done with the ploughs which I gave you?"  "O Glory of
+the Universe, we burnt them to bake the corn withal."
+
+Then said that great Sultan--"Like the butterflies you have lived; and
+like the butterflies you shall wander."  So he drove them out.  And that
+is how the Gipsies came hither from the East.
+
+Now suppose that the Sultan of all Sultans, who sends the rain, should
+make a like answer to us foolish human beings, when we prayed for rain:
+"But what have you done with the rain which I gave you six months since?"
+"We have let it run into the sea."  "Then, ere you ask for more rain,
+make places wherein you can keep it when you have it."  "But that would
+be, in most cases, too expensive.  We can employ our capital more
+profitably in other directions."
+
+It is not for me to say what answer might be made to such an excuse.  I
+think a child's still unsophisticated sense of right and wrong would soon
+supply one; and probably one--considering the complexity, and difficulty,
+and novelty, of the whole question--somewhat too harsh; as children's
+judgments are wont to be.
+
+But would it not be well if our children, without being taught to blame
+anyone for what is past, were taught something about what ought to be
+done now, what must be done soon, with the rainfall of these islands; and
+about other and kindred health-questions, on the solution of which
+depends, and will depend more and more, the life of millions?  One would
+have thought that those public schools and colleges which desire to
+monopolise the education of the owners of the soil; of the great
+employers of labour; of the clergy; and of all, indeed, who ought to be
+acquainted with the duties of property, the conditions of public health,
+and, in a word, with the general laws of what is now called Social
+Science--one would have thought, I say, that these public schools and
+colleges would have taught their scholars somewhat at least about such
+matters, that they might go forth into life with at least some rough
+notions of the causes which make people healthy or unhealthy, rich or
+poor, comfortable or wretched, useful or dangerous to the State.  But as
+long as our great educational institutions, safe, or fancying themselves
+safe, in some enchanted castle, shut out by ancient magic from the living
+world, put a premium on Latin and Greek verses: a wise father will,
+during the holidays, talk now and then, I hope, somewhat after this
+fashion:--
+
+You must understand, my boy, that all the water in the country comes out
+of the sky, and from nowhere else; and that, therefore, to save and store
+the water when it falls is a question of life and death to crops, and
+man, and beast; for with or without water is life or death.  If I took,
+for instance, the water from the moors above and turned it over yonder
+field, I could double, and more than double, the crops in that field
+henceforth.
+
+Then why do I not do it?
+
+Only because the field lies higher than the house; and if--now here is
+one thing which you and every civilised man should know--if you have
+water-meadows, or any "irrigated" land, as it is called, above a house,
+or even on a level with it, it is certain to breed not merely cold and
+damp, but fever or ague.  Our forefathers did not understand this; and
+they built their houses, as this is built, in the lowest places they
+could find: sometimes because they wished to be near ponds, from whence
+they could get fish in Lent; but more often, I think, because they wanted
+to be sheltered from the wind.  They had no glass, as we have, in their
+windows; or, at least, only latticed casements, which let in the wind and
+cold; and they shrank from high and exposed, and therefore really
+healthy, spots.  But now that we have good glass, and sash windows, and
+doors that will shut tight, we can build warm houses where we like.  And
+if you ever have to do with the building of cottages, remember that it is
+your duty to the people who will live in them, and therefore to the
+State, to see that they stand high and dry, where no water can drain down
+into their foundations, and where fog, and the poisonous gases which are
+given out by rotting vegetables, cannot drain down either.  You will
+learn more about all that when you learn, as every civilised lad should
+in these days, something about chemistry, and the laws of fluids and
+gases.  But you know already that flowers are cut off by frost in the low
+grounds sooner than in the high; and that the fog at night always lies
+along the brooks; and that the sour moor-smell which warns us to shut our
+windows at sunset, comes down from the hill, and not up from the valley.
+Now all these things are caused by one and the same law; that cold air is
+heavier than warm; and, therefore, like so much water, must run down
+hill.
+
+But what about the rainfall?
+
+Well, I have wandered a little from the rainfall: though not as far as
+you fancy; for fever and ague and rheumatism usually mean--rain in the
+wrong place.  But if you knew how much illness, and torturing pain, and
+death, and sorrow arise, even to this very day, from ignorance of these
+simple laws, then you would bear them carefully in mind, and wish to know
+more about them.  But now for water being life to the beasts.  Do you
+remember--though you are hardly old enough--the cattle-plague?  How the
+beasts died, or had to be killed and buried, by tens of thousands; and
+how misery and ruin fell on hundreds of honest men and women over many of
+the richest counties of England: but how we in this vale had no cattle-
+plague; and how there was none--as far as I recollect--in the uplands of
+Devon and Cornwall, nor of Wales, nor of the Scotch Highlands?  Now, do
+you know why that was?  Simply because we here, like those other
+uplanders, are in such a country as Palestine was before the foolish Jews
+cut down all their timber, and so destroyed their own rainfall--a "land
+of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys
+and hills."  There is hardly a field here that has not, thank God, its
+running brook, or its sweet spring, from which our cattle were drinking
+their health and life, while in the clay-lands of Cheshire, and in the
+Cambridgeshire fens--which were drained utterly dry--the poor things
+drank no water, too often, save that of the very same putrid ponds in
+which they had been standing all day long, to cool themselves, and to
+keep off the flies.  I do not say, of course, that bad water caused the
+cattle-plague.  It came by infection from the East of Europe.  But I say
+that bad water made the cattle ready to take it, and made it spread over
+the country; and when you are old enough I will give you plenty of
+proof--some from the herds of your own kinsmen--that what I say is true.
+
+And as for pure water being life to human beings: why have we never fever
+here, and scarcely ever diseases like fever--zymotics, as the doctors
+call them?  Or, if a case comes into our parish from outside, why does
+the fever never spread?  For the very same reason that we had no cattle-
+plague.  Because we have more pure water close to every cottage than we
+need.  And this I tell you: that the only two outbreaks of deadly disease
+which we have had here for thirty years, were both of them, as far as I
+could see, to be traced to filthy water having got into the poor folk's
+wells.  Water, you must remember, just as it is life when pure, is death
+when foul.  For it can carry, unseen to the eye, and even when it looks
+clear and sparkling, and tastes soft and sweet, poisons which have
+perhaps killed more human beings than ever were killed in battle.  You
+have read, perhaps, how the Athenians, when they were dying of the
+plague, accused the Lacedaemonians outside the walls of poisoning their
+wells; or how, in some of the pestilences of the middle ages, the common
+people used to accuse the poor harmless Jews of poisoning the wells, and
+set upon them and murdered them horribly.  They were right, I do not
+doubt, in their notion that the well-water was giving them the
+pestilence: but they had not sense to see that they were poisoning the
+wells themselves by their dirt and carelessness; or, in the case of poor
+besieged Athens, probably by mere overcrowding, which has cost many a
+life ere now, and will cost more.  And I am sorry to tell you, my little
+man, that even now too many people have no more sense than they had, and
+die in consequence.  If you could see a battle-field, and men shot down,
+writhing and dying in hundreds by shell and bullet, would not that seem
+to you a horrid sight?  Then--I do not wish to make you sad too early,
+but this is a fact which everyone should know--that more people, and not
+strong men only, but women and little children too, are killed and
+wounded in Great Britain every year by bad water and want of water
+together, than were killed and wounded in any battle which has been
+fought since you were born.  Medical men know this well.  And when you
+are older, you may see it for yourself in the Registrar-General's
+reports, blue-books, pamphlets, and so on, without end.
+
+But why do not people stop such a horrible loss of life?
+
+Well, my dear boy, the true causes of it have only been known for the
+last thirty or forty years; and we English are, as good King Alfred found
+us to his sorrow a thousand years ago, very slow to move, even when we
+see a thing ought to be done.  Let us hope that in this matter--we have
+been so in most matters as yet--we shall be like the tortoise in the
+fable, and not the hare; and by moving slowly, but surely, win the race
+at last.  But now think for yourself: and see what you would do to save
+these people from being poisoned by bad water.  Remember that the plain
+question is this--The rainwater comes down from heaven as water, and
+nothing but water.  Rainwater is the only pure water, after all.  How
+would you save that for the poor people who have none?  There; run away
+and hunt rabbits on the moor: but look, meanwhile, how you would save
+some of this beautiful and precious water which is roaring away into the
+sea.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Well?  What would you do?  Make ponds, you say, like the old monks'
+ponds, now all broken down.  Dam all the glens across their mouths, and
+turn them into reservoirs.
+
+"Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings"--Well, that will have to be
+done.  That is being done more and more, more or less well.  The good
+people of Glasgow did it first, I think; and now the good people of
+Manchester, and of other northern towns, have done it, and have saved
+many a human life thereby already.  But it must be done, some day, all
+over England and Wales, and great part of Scotland.  For the mountain
+tops and moors, my boy, by a beautiful law of nature, compensate for
+their own poverty by yielding a wealth which the rich lowlands cannot
+yield.  You do not understand?  Then see.  Yon moor above can grow
+neither corn nor grass.  But one thing it can grow, and does grow,
+without which we should have no corn nor grass, and that is--water.  Not
+only does far more rain fall up there than falls here down below, but
+even in drought the high moors condense the moisture into dew, and so
+yield some water, even when the lowlands are burnt up with drought.  The
+reason of that you must learn hereafter.  That it is so, you should know
+yourself.  For on the high chalk downs, you know, where farmers make a
+sheep-pond, they never, if they are wise, make it in a valley or on a
+hill-side, but on the bleakest top of the very highest down; and there,
+if they can once get it filled with snow and rain in winter, the blessed
+dews of night will keep some water in it all the summer through, while
+the ponds below are utterly dried up.  And even so it is, as I know, with
+this very moor.  Corn and grass it will not grow, because there is too
+little "staple," that is, soluble minerals, in the sandy soil.  But how
+much water it might grow, you may judge roughly for yourself, by
+remembering how many brooks like this are running off it now to carry
+mere dirt into the river, and then into the sea.
+
+But why should we not make dams at once; and save the water?
+
+Because we cannot afford it.  No one would buy the water when we had
+stored it.  The rich in town and country will always take care--and quite
+right they are--to have water enough for themselves, and for their
+servants too, whatever it may cost them.  But the poorer people are--and
+therefore usually, alas! the more ignorant--the less water they get; and
+the less they care to have water; and the less they are inclined to pay
+for it; and the more, I am sorry to say, they waste what little they do
+get; and I am still more sorry to say, spoil, and even steal and sell--in
+London at least--the stop-cocks and lead-pipes which bring the water into
+their houses.  So that keeping a water-shop is a very troublesome and
+uncertain business; and one which is not likely to pay us or any one
+round here.
+
+But why not let some company manage it, as they manage railways, and gas,
+and other things?
+
+Ah--you have been overhearing a good deal about companies of late, I see.
+But this I will tell you; that when you grow up, and have a vote and
+influence, it will be your duty, if you intend to be a good citizen, not
+only not to put the water-supply of England into the hands of fresh
+companies, but to help to take out of their hands what water-supply they
+manage already, especially in London; and likewise the gas-supply; and
+the railroads; and everything else, in a word, which everybody uses, and
+must use.  For you must understand--at least as soon as you can--that
+though the men who make up companies are no worse than other men, and
+some of them, as you ought to know, very good men; yet what they have to
+look to is their profits; and the less water they supply, and the worse
+it is, the more profit they make.  For most water, I am sorry to say, is
+fouled before the water companies can get to it, as this water which runs
+past us will be, and as the Thames water above London is.  Therefore it
+has to be cleansed, or partly cleansed, at a very great expense.  So
+water companies have to be inspected--in plain English, watched--at a
+very heavy expense to the nation, by government officers; and compelled
+to do their best, and take their utmost care.  And so it has come to pass
+that the London water is not now nearly as bad as some of it was thirty
+years ago, when it was no more fit to drink than that in the cattle yard
+tank.  But still we must have more water, and better, in London; for it
+is growing year by year.  There are more than three millions of people
+already in what we call London; and ere you are an old man there may be
+between four and five millions.  Now to supply all these people with
+water is a duty which we must not leave to any private companies.  It
+must be done by a public authority, as is fit and proper in a free self-
+governing country.  In this matter, as in all others, we will try to do
+what the Royal Commission told us four years ago we ought to do.  I hope
+that you will see, though I may not, the day when what we call London,
+but which is really, nine-tenths of it, only a great nest of separate
+villages huddled together, will be divided into three great
+self-governing cities, London, Westminster, and Southwark; each with its
+own corporation, like that of the venerable and well-governed City of
+London; each managing its own water-supply, gas-supply, and sewage, and
+other matters besides; and managing them, like Dublin, Glasgow,
+Manchester, Liverpool, and other great northern towns, far more cheaply
+and far better than any companies can do it for them.
+
+But where shall we get water enough for all these millions of people?
+There are no mountains near London.  But we might give them the water off
+our moors.
+
+No, no, my boy.
+
+   "He that will not when he may,
+   When he will, he shall have nay."
+
+Some fifteen years ago the Londoners might have had water from us; and I
+was one of those who did my best to get it for them: but the water
+companies did not choose to take it; and now this part of England is
+growing so populous and so valuable that it wants all its little rainfall
+for itself.  So there is another leaf torn out of the Sibylline books for
+the poor old water companies.  You do not understand: you will some day.
+But you may comfort yourself about London.  For it happens to be, I
+think, the luckiest city in the world; and if it had not been, we should
+have had pestilence on pestilence in it, as terrible as the great plague
+of Charles II.'s time.  The old Britons, without knowing in the least
+what they were doing, settled old London city in the very centre of the
+most wonderful natural reservoir in this island, or perhaps in all
+Europe; which reaches from Kent into Wiltshire, and round again into
+Suffolk; and that is, the dear old chalk downs.
+
+Why, they are always dry.
+
+Yes.  But the turf on them never burns up, and the streams which flow
+through them never run dry, and seldom or never flood either.  Do you not
+know, from Winchester, that that is true?  Then where is all the rain and
+snow gone, which falls on them year by year, but into the chalk itself,
+and into the greensands, too, below the chalk?  There it is, soaked up as
+by a sponge, in quantity incalculable; enough, some think, to supply
+London, let it grow as huge as it may.  I wish I too were sure of that.
+But the Commission has shown itself so wise and fair, and brave
+likewise--too brave, I am sorry to say, for some who might have supported
+them--that it is not for me to gainsay their opinion.
+
+But if there was not water enough in the chalk, are not the Londoners
+rich enough to bring it from any distance?
+
+My boy, in this also we will agree with the Commission--that we ought not
+to rob Peter to pay Paul, and take water to a distance which other people
+close at hand may want.  Look at the map of England and southern
+Scotland; and see for yourself what is just, according to geography and
+nature.  There are four mountain-ranges; four great water-fields.  First,
+the hills of the Border.  Their rainfall ought to be stored for the
+Lothians and the extreme north of England.  Then the Yorkshire and
+Derbyshire hills--the central chine of England.  Their rainfall is being
+stored already, to the honour of the shrewd northern men, for the
+manufacturing counties east and west of the hills.  Then come the lake
+mountains--the finest water-field of all, because more rain by far falls
+there than in any place in England.  But they will be wanted to supply
+Lancashire, and some day Liverpool itself; for Liverpool is now using
+rain which belongs more justly to other towns; and besides, there are
+plenty of counties and towns, down into Cheshire, which would be glad of
+what water Lancashire does not want.  And last come the Snowdon
+mountains, a noble water-field, which I know well; for an old dream of
+mine has been, that ere I died I should see all the rain of the Carnedds,
+and the Glyders, and Siabod, and Snowdon itself, carried across the
+Conway river to feed the mining districts of North Wales, where the
+streams are now all foul with oil and lead; and then on into the western
+coal and iron fields, to Wolverhampton and Birmingham itself: and if I
+were the engineer who got that done, I should be happier--prouder I dare
+not say--than if I had painted nobler pictures than Raffaelle, or written
+nobler plays than Shakespeare.  I say that, boy, in most deliberate
+earnest.  But meanwhile, do you not see that in districts where coal and
+iron may be found, and fresh manufactures may spring up any day in any
+place, each district has a right to claim the nearest rainfall for
+itself?  And now, when we have got the water into its proper place, let
+us see what we shall do with it.
+
+But why do you say we?  Can you and I do all this?
+
+My boy, are not you and I free citizens; part of the people, the
+Commons--as the good old word runs--of this country?  And are we not--or
+ought we not to be in time--beside that, educated men?  By the people,
+remember, I mean, not only the hand-working man who has just got a vote;
+I mean the clergy of all denominations; and the gentlemen of the press;
+and last, but not least, the scientific men.  If those four classes
+together were to tell every government--"Free water we will have, and as
+much as we reasonably choose;" and tell every candidate for the House of
+Commons,--"Unless you promise to get us as much free water as we
+reasonably choose, we will not return you to Parliament:" then, I think,
+we four should put such a "pressure" on government as no water companies,
+or other vested interests, could long resist.  And if any of those four
+classes should hang back, and waste their time and influence over matters
+far less important and less pressing, the other three must laugh at them,
+and more than laugh at them; and ask them--"Why have you education, why
+have you influence, why have you votes, why are you freemen and not
+slaves, if not to preserve the comfort, the decency, the health, the
+lives of men, women, and children--most of those latter your own wives
+and your own children?"
+
+But what shall we do with the water?
+
+Well, after all, that is a more practical matter than speculations
+grounded on the supposition that all classes will do their duty.  But the
+first thing we will do will be to give to the very poorest houses a
+constant supply, at high pressure; so that everybody may take as much
+water as he likes, instead of having to keep the water in little
+cisterns, where it gets foul and putrid only too often.
+
+But will they not waste it then?
+
+So far from it, wherever the water has been laid on at high pressure, the
+waste, which is terrible now--some say that in London one-third of the
+water is wasted--begins to lessen; and both water and expense are saved.
+If you will only think, you will see one reason why.  If a woman leaves a
+high-pressure tap running, she will flood her place and her neighbour's
+too.  She will be like the magician's servant, who called up the demon to
+draw water for him; and so he did: but when he had begun he would not
+stop, and if the magician had not come home, man and house would have
+been washed away.
+
+But if it saves money, why do not the water companies do it?
+
+Because--and really here there are many excuses for the poor old water
+companies, when so many of them swerve and gib at the very mention of
+constant water-supply, like a poor horse set to draw a load which he
+feels is too heavy for him--because, to keep everything in order among
+dirty, careless, and often drunken people, there must be officers with
+lawful authority--water-policemen we will call them--who can enter
+people's houses when they will, and if they find anything wrong with the
+water, set it to rights with a high hand, and even summon the people who
+have set it wrong.  And that is a power which, in a free country, must
+never be given to the servants of any private company, but only to the
+officers of a corporation or of the government.
+
+And what shall we do with the rest of the water?
+
+Well, we shall have, I believe, so much to spare that we may at least do
+this--In each district of each city, and the centre of each town, we may
+build public baths and lavatories, where poor men and women may get their
+warm baths when they will; for now they usually never bathe at all,
+because they will not--and ought not, if they be hard-worked folk--bathe
+in cold water during nine months of the year.  And there they shall wash
+their clothes, and dry them by steam; instead of washing them as now, at
+home, either under back sheds, where they catch cold and rheumatism, or
+too often, alas! in their own living rooms, in an atmosphere of foul
+vapour, which drives the father to the public-house and the children into
+the streets; and which not only prevents the clothes from being
+thoroughly dried again, but is, my dear boy, as you will know when you
+are older, a very hot-bed of disease.  And they shall have other
+comforts, and even luxuries, these public lavatories; and be made, in
+time, graceful and refining, as well as merely useful.  Nay, we will
+even, I think, have in front of each of them a real fountain; not like
+the drinking-fountains--though they are great and needful boons--which
+you see here and there about the streets, with a tiny dribble of water to
+a great deal of expensive stone: but real fountains, which shall leap,
+and sparkle, and plash, and gurgle; and fill the place with life, and
+light, and coolness; and sing in the people's ears the sweetest of all
+earthly songs--save the song of a mother over her child--the song of "The
+Laughing Water."
+
+But will not that be a waste?
+
+Yes, my boy.  And for that very reason, I think we, the people, will have
+our fountains; if it be but to make our governments, and corporations,
+and all public bodies and officers, remember that they all--save Her
+Majesty the Queen--are our servants; and not we theirs; and that we
+choose to have water, not only to wash with, but to play with, if we
+like.  And I believe--for the world, as you will find, is full not only
+of just but of generous souls--that if the water-supply were set really
+right, there would be found, in many a city, many a generous man who,
+over and above his compulsory water-rate, would give his poor
+fellow-townsmen such a real fountain as those which ennoble the great
+square at Carcasonne and the great square at Nismes; to be "a thing of
+beauty and a joy for ever."
+
+And now, if you want to go back to your Latin and Greek, you shall
+translate for me into Latin--I do not expect you to do it into Greek,
+though it would turn very well into Greek, for the Greeks knew all about
+the matter long before the Romans--what follows here; and you shall
+verify the facts and the names, &c., in it from your dictionaries of
+antiquity and biography, that you may remember all the better what it
+says.  And by that time, I think, you will have learnt something more
+useful to yourself, and, I hope, to your country hereafter, than if you
+had learnt to patch together the neatest Greek and Latin verses which
+have appeared since the days of Mr. Canning.
+
+* * * * *
+
+I have often amused myself, by fancying one question which an old Roman
+emperor would ask, were he to rise from his grave and visit the sights of
+London under the guidance of some minister of state.  The august shade
+would, doubtless, admire, our railroads and bridges, our cathedrals and
+our public parks, and much more of which we need not be ashamed.  But
+after a while, I think, he would look round, whether in London or in most
+of our great cities, inquiringly and in vain, for one class of buildings,
+which in his empire were wont to be almost as conspicuous and as
+splendid, because, in public opinion, almost as necessary, as the
+basilicas and temples--"And where," he would ask, "are your public
+baths?"  And if the minister of state who was his guide should answer--"O
+great Caesar, I really do not know.  I believe there are some somewhere
+at the back of that ugly building which we call the National Gallery; and
+I think there have been some meetings lately in the East End, and an
+amateur concert at the Albert Hall, for restoring, by private
+subscriptions, some baths and wash-houses in Bethnal Green, which had
+fallen to decay.  And there may be two or three more about the
+metropolis; for parish vestries have powers by Act of Parliament to
+establish such places, if they think fit, and choose to pay for them out
+of the rates:"--Then, I think, the august shade might well make
+answer--"We used to call you, in old Rome, northern barbarians.  It seems
+that you have not lost all your barbarian habits.  Are you aware that, in
+every city in the Roman empire, there were, as a matter of course, public
+baths open, not only to the poorest freeman, but to the slave, usually
+for the payment of the smallest current coin, and often gratuitously?  Are
+you aware that in Rome itself, millionaire after millionaire, emperor
+after emperor, from Menenius Agrippa and Nero down to Diocletian and
+Constantine, built baths, and yet more baths; and connected with them
+gymnasia for exercise, lecture-rooms, libraries, and porticos, wherein
+the people might have shade and shelter, and rest?--I remark, by-the-by,
+that I have not seen in all your London a single covered place in which
+the people may take shelter during a shower--Are you aware that these
+baths were of the most magnificent architecture, decorated with marbles,
+paintings, sculptures, fountains, what not?  And yet I had heard, in
+Hades down below, that you prided yourselves here on the study of the
+learned languages; and, indeed, taught little but Greek and Latin at your
+public schools?"
+
+Then, if the minister should make reply--"Oh yes, we know all this.  Even
+since the revival of letters in the end of the fifteenth century a whole
+literature has been written--a great deal of it, I fear, by pedants who
+seldom washed even their hands and faces--about your Greek and Roman
+baths.  We visit their colossal ruins in Italy and elsewhere with awe and
+admiration; and the discovery of a new Roman bath in any old city of our
+isles sets all our antiquaries buzzing with interest."
+
+"Then why," the shade might ask, "do you not copy an example which you so
+much admire?  Surely England must be much in want, either of water, or of
+fuel to heat it with?"
+
+"On the contrary, our rainfall is almost too great; our soil so damp that
+we have had to invent a whole art of subsoil drainage unknown to you;
+while, as for fuel, our coal-mines make us the great fuel-exporting
+people of the world."
+
+What a quiet sneer might curl the lip of a Constantine as he replied--"Not
+in vain, as I said, did we call you, some fifteen hundred years ago, the
+barbarians of the north.  But tell me, good barbarian, whom I know to be
+both brave and wise--for the fame of your young British empire has
+reached us even in the realms below, and we recognise in you, with all
+respect, a people more like us Romans than any which has appeared on
+earth for many centuries--how is it you have forgotten that sacred duty
+of keeping the people clean, which you surely at one time learnt from us?
+When your ancestors entered our armies, and rose, some of them, to be
+great generals, and even emperors, like those two Teuton peasants, Justin
+and Justinian, who, long after my days, reigned in my own Constantinople:
+then, at least, you saw baths, and used them; and felt, after the bath,
+that you were civilised men, and not 'sordidi ac foetentes,' as we used
+to call you when fresh out of your bullock-waggons and cattle-pens.  How
+is it that you have forgotten that lesson?"
+
+The minister, I fear, would have to answer that our ancestors were
+barbarous enough, not only to destroy the Roman cities, and temples, and
+basilicas, and statues, but the Roman baths likewise; and then retired,
+each man to his own freehold in the country, to live a life not much more
+cleanly or more graceful than that of the swine which were his favourite
+food.  But he would have a right to plead, as an excuse, that not only in
+England, but throughout the whole of the conquered Latin empire, the
+Latin priesthood, who, in some respects, were--to their honour--the
+representatives of Roman civilisation and the protectors of its remnants,
+were the determined enemies of its cleanliness; that they looked on
+personal dirt--like the old hermits of the Thebaid--as a sign of
+sanctity; and discouraged--as they are said to do still in some of the
+Romance countries of Europe--the use of the bath, as not only luxurious,
+but also indecent.
+
+At which answer, it seems to me, another sneer might curl the lip of the
+august shade, as he said to himself--"This, at least, I did not expect,
+when I made Christianity the state religion of my empire.  But you, good
+barbarian, look clean enough.  You do not look on dirt as a sign of
+sanctity?"
+
+"On the contrary, sire, the upper classes of our empire boast of being
+the cleanliest--perhaps the only perfectly cleanly--people in the world:
+except, of course, the savages of the South Seas.  And dirt is so far
+from being a thing which we admire, that our scientific men--than whom
+the world has never seen wiser--have proved to us, for a whole generation
+past, that dirt is the fertile cause of disease and drunkenness, misery
+and recklessness."
+
+"And, therefore," replies the shade, ere he disappears, "of discontent
+and revolution; followed by a tyranny endured, as in Rome and many
+another place, by men once free; because tyranny will at least do for
+them what they are too lazy, and cowardly, and greedy to do for
+themselves.  Farewell, and prosper; as you seem likely to prosper, on the
+whole.  But if you wish me to consider you a civilised nation: let me
+hear that you have brought a great river from the depths of the earth, be
+they a thousand fathoms deep, or from your nearest mountains, be they
+five hundred miles away; and have washed out London's dirt--and your own
+shame.  Till then, abstain from judging too harshly a Constantine, or
+even a Caracalla; for they, whatever were their sins, built baths, and
+kept their people clean.  But do your gymnasia--your schools and
+universities, teach your youth nought about all this?"
+
+
+
+
+THRIFT.  A LECTURE DELIVERED AT WINCHESTER, MARCH 17, 1869.
+
+
+Ladies,--I have chosen for the title of this lecture a practical and
+prosaic word, because I intend the lecture itself to be as practical and
+prosaic as I can make it, without becoming altogether dull.
+
+The question of the better or worse education of women is one far too
+important for vague sentiment, wild aspirations, or Utopian dreams.
+
+It is a practical question, on which depends not merely money or comfort,
+but too often health and life, as the consequences of a good education,
+or disease and death--I know too well of what I speak--as the
+consequences of a bad one.
+
+I beg you, therefore, to put out of your minds at the outset any fancy
+that I wish for a social revolution in the position of women; or that I
+wish to see them educated by exactly the same methods, and in exactly the
+same subjects, as men.  British lads, on an average, are far too
+ill-taught still, in spite of all recent improvements, for me to wish
+that British girls should be taught in the same way.
+
+Moreover, whatever defects there may have been--and defects there must be
+in all things human--in the past education of British women, it has been
+most certainly a splendid moral success.  It has made, by the grace of
+God, British women the best wives, mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters,
+that the world, as far as I can discover, has yet seen.
+
+Let those who will sneer at the women of England.  We who have to do the
+work and to fight the battle of life know the inspiration which we derive
+from their virtue, their counsel, their tenderness, and--but too
+often--from their compassion and their forgiveness.  There is, I doubt
+not, still left in England many a man with chivalry and patriotism enough
+to challenge the world to show so perfect a specimen of humanity as a
+cultivated British woman.
+
+But just because a cultivated British woman is so perfect a personage;
+therefore I wish to see all British women cultivated.  Because the
+womanhood of England is so precious a treasure; I wish to see none of it
+wasted.  It is an invaluable capital, or material, out of which the
+greatest possible profit to the nation must be made.  And that can only
+be done by thrift; and that, again, can only be attained by knowledge.
+
+Consider that word thrift.  If you will look at Dr. Johnson's Dictionary,
+or if you know your Shakespeare, you will see that thrift signified
+originally profits, gain, riches gotten--in a word, the marks of a man's
+thriving.
+
+How, then, did the word thrift get to mean parsimony, frugality, the
+opposite of waste?  Just in the same way as economy--which first, of
+course, meant the management of a household--got to mean also the
+opposite of waste.
+
+It was found that in commerce, in husbandry, in any process, in fact, men
+throve in proportion as they saved their capital, their material, their
+force.
+
+Now this is a great law which runs through life; one of those laws of
+nature--call them, rather, laws of God--which apply not merely to
+political economy, to commerce, and to mechanics; but to physiology, to
+society; to the intellect, to the heart, of every person in this room.
+
+The secret of thriving is thrift; saving of force; to get as much work as
+possible done with the least expenditure of power, the least jar and
+obstruction, the least wear and tear.
+
+And the secret of thrift is knowledge.  In proportion as you know the
+laws and nature of a subject, you will be able to work at it easily,
+surely, rapidly, successfully; instead of wasting your money or your
+energies in mistaken schemes, irregular efforts, which end in
+disappointment and exhaustion.
+
+The secret of thrift, I say, is knowledge.  The more you know, the more
+you can save yourself and that which belongs to you; and can do more work
+with less effort.
+
+A knowledge of the laws of commercial credit, we all know, saves capital,
+enabling a less capital to do the work of a greater.  Knowledge of the
+electric telegraph saves time; knowledge of writing saves human speech
+and locomotion; knowledge of domestic economy saves income; knowledge of
+sanitary laws saves health and life; knowledge of the laws of the
+intellect saves wear and tear of brain; and knowledge of the laws of the
+spirit--what does it not save?
+
+A well-educated moral sense, a well-regulated character, saves from
+idleness and ennui, alternating with sentimentality and excitement, those
+tenderer emotions, those deeper passions, those nobler aspirations of
+humanity, which are the heritage of the woman far more than of the man;
+and which are potent in her, for evil or for good, in proportion as they
+are left to run wild and undisciplined, or are trained and developed into
+graceful, harmonious, self-restraining strength, beautiful in themselves,
+and a blessing to all who come under their influence.
+
+What, therefore, I recommend to ladies in this lecture is thrift; thrift
+of themselves and of their own powers: and knowledge as the parent of
+thrift.
+
+And because it is well to begin with the lower applications of thrift,
+and to work up to the higher, I am much pleased to hear that the first
+course of the proposed lectures to women in this place will be one on
+domestic economy.
+
+I presume that the learned gentleman who will deliver these lectures will
+be the last to mean by that term the mere saving of money; that he will
+tell you, as--being a German--he will have good reason to know, that the
+young lady who learns thrift in domestic economy is also learning thrift
+of the very highest faculties of her immortal spirit.  He will tell you,
+I doubt not--for he must know--how you may see in Germany young ladies
+living in what we more luxurious British would consider something like
+poverty; cooking, waiting at table, and performing many a household
+office which would be here considered menial; and yet finding time for a
+cultivation of the intellect, which is, unfortunately, too rare in Great
+Britain.
+
+The truth is, that we British are too wealthy.  We make money, if not too
+rapidly for the good of the nation at large, yet too rapidly, I fear, for
+the good of the daughters of those who make it.  Their temptation--I do
+not, of course, say they all yield to it--but their temptation is, to
+waste of the very simplest--I had almost said, if I may be pardoned the
+expression, of the most barbaric--kind; to an oriental waste of money,
+and waste of time; to a fondness for mere finery, pardonable enough, but
+still a waste; and to the mistaken fancy that it is the mark of a lady to
+sit idle and let servants do everything for her.
+
+Such women may well take a lesson by contrast from the pure and noble,
+useful and cultivated thrift of an average German young lady--for ladies
+these German women are, in every possible sense of the word.
+
+But it is not of this sort of waste of which I wish to speak to-day.  I
+only mention the matter in passing, to show that high intellectual
+culture is not incompatible with the performance of homely household
+duties, and that the moral success of which I spoke just now need not be
+injured, any more than it is in Germany, by intellectual success
+likewise.  I trust that these words may reassure those parents, if any
+such there be here, who may fear that these lectures will withdraw women
+from their existing sphere of interest and activity.  That they should
+entertain such a fear is not surprising, after the extravagant opinions
+and schemes which have been lately broached in various quarters.
+
+The programme to these lectures expressly disclaims any such intentions;
+and I, as a husband and a father, expressly disclaim any such intention
+likewise.
+
+"To fit women for the more enlightened performance of their special
+duties;" to help them towards learning how to do better what we doubt not
+they are already doing well; is, I honestly believe, the only object of
+the promoters of this scheme.
+
+Let us see now how some of these special duties can be better performed
+by help of a little enlightenment as to the laws which regulate them.
+
+Now, no man will deny--certainly no man who is past forty-five, and whose
+digestion is beginning to quail before the lumps of beef and mutton which
+are the boast of a British kitchen, and to prefer, with Justice Shallow,
+and, I presume, Sir John Falstaff also, "any pretty little tiny
+kickshaws"--no man, I say, who has reached that age, but will feel it a
+practical comfort to him to know that the young ladies of his family are
+at all events good cooks; and understand, as the French do, thrift in the
+matter of food.
+
+Neither will any parent who wishes, naturally enough, that his daughters
+should cost him as little as possible; and wishes, naturally enough also,
+that they should be as well dressed as possible, deny that it would be a
+good thing for them to be practical milliners and mantua-makers; and, by
+making their own clothes gracefully and well, exercise thrift in
+clothing.
+
+But, beside this thrift in clothing, I am not alone, I believe, in
+wishing for some thrift in the energy which produces it.  Labour
+misapplied, you will agree, is labour wasted; and as dress, I presume, is
+intended to adorn the person of the wearer, the making a dress which only
+disfigures her may be considered as a plain case of waste.  It would be
+impertinent in me to go into any details: but it is impossible to walk
+about the streets now without passing young people who must be under a
+deep delusion as to the success of their own toilette.  Instead of
+graceful and noble simplicity of form, instead of combinations of colour
+at once rich and delicate, because in accordance with the chromatic laws
+of nature, one meets with phenomena more and more painful to the eye, and
+startling to common sense, till one would be hardly more astonished, and
+certainly hardly more shocked, if in a year or two one should pass some
+one going about like a Chinese lady, with pinched feet, or like a savage
+of the Amazons, with a wooden bung through her lower lip.  It is easy to
+complain of these monstrosities: but impossible to cure them, it seems to
+me, without an education of the taste, an education in those laws of
+nature which produce beauty in form and beauty in colour.  For that the
+cause of these failures lies in want of education is patent.  They are
+most common in--I had almost said they are confined to--those classes of
+well-to-do persons who are the least educated; who have no standard of
+taste of their own; and who do not acquire any from cultivated friends
+and relations: who, in consequence, dress themselves blindly according to
+what they conceive to be the Paris fashions, conveyed at third-hand
+through an equally uneducated dressmaker; in innocent ignorance of the
+fact--for fact I believe it to be--that Paris fashions are invented now
+not in the least for the sake of beauty, but for the sake of producing,
+through variety, increased expenditure, and thereby increased employment;
+according to the strange system which now prevails in France of
+compelling, if not prosperity, at least the signs of it; and like
+schoolboys before a holiday, nailing up the head of the weather glass to
+insure fine weather.
+
+Let British ladies educate themselves in those laws of beauty which are
+as eternal as any other of nature's laws; which may be seen fulfilled, as
+Mr. Ruskin tells us, so eloquently in every flower and every leaf, in
+every sweeping down and rippling wave: and they will be able to invent
+graceful and economical dresses for themselves, without importing tawdry
+and expensive ugliness from France.
+
+Let me now go a step further, and ask you to consider this.--There are in
+England now a vast number, and an increasing number, of young women who,
+from various circumstances which we all know, must in after life be
+either the mistresses of their own fortunes, or the earners of their own
+bread.  And, to do that wisely and well, they must be more or less women
+of business; and to be women of business, they must know something of the
+meaning of the words capital, profit, price, value, labour, wages, and of
+the relation between those two last.  In a word, they must know a little
+political economy.  Nay, I sometimes think that the mistress of every
+household might find, not only thrift of money, but thrift of brain;
+freedom from mistakes, anxieties, worries of many kinds, all of which eat
+out the health as well as the heart, by a little sound knowledge of the
+principles of political economy.
+
+When we consider that every mistress of a household is continually
+buying, if not selling; that she is continually hiring and employing
+labour in the form of servants; and very often, into the bargain, keeping
+her husband's accounts: I cannot but think that her hard-worked brain
+might be clearer, and her hard-tried desire to do her duty by every
+subject in her little kingdom, might be more easily satisfied, had she
+read something of what Mr. John Stuart Mill has written, especially on
+the duties of employer and employed.  A capitalist, a commercialist, an
+employer of labour, and an accountant--every mistress of a household is
+all these, whether she likes it or not; and it would be surely well for
+her, in so very complicated a state of society as this, not to trust
+merely to that mother-wit, that intuitive sagacity and innate power of
+ruling her fellow-creatures, which carries women so nobly through their
+work in simpler and less civilised societies.
+
+And here I stop to answer those who may say--as I have heard it said--That
+a woman's intellect is not fit for business; that when a woman takes to
+business, she is apt to do it ill, and unpleasantly likewise; to be more
+suspicious, more irritable, more grasping, more unreasonable, than
+regular men of business would be; that--as I have heard it put--"a woman
+does not fight fair."  The answer is simple.  That a woman's intellect is
+eminently fitted for business is proved by the enormous amount of
+business she gets through without any special training for it: but those
+faults in a woman of which some men complain are simply the results of
+her not having had a special training.  She does not know the laws of
+business.  She does not know the rules of the game she is playing; and
+therefore she is playing it in the dark, in fear and suspicion, apt to
+judge of questions on personal grounds, often offending those with whom
+she has to do, and oftener still making herself miserable over matters of
+law or of business, on which a little sound knowledge would set her head
+and her heart at rest.
+
+When I have seen widows, having the care of children, of a great
+household, of a great estate, of a great business, struggling heroically,
+and yet often mistakenly; blamed severely for selfishness and ambition,
+while they were really sacrificing themselves with the divine instinct of
+a mother for their children's interest: I have stood by with mingled
+admiration and pity, and said to myself--"How nobly she is doing the work
+without teaching!  How much more nobly would she have done it had she
+been taught!  She is now doing the work at the most enormous waste of
+energy and of virtue: had she had knowledge, thrift would have followed
+it; she would have done more work with far less trouble.  She will
+probably kill herself if she goes on: sound knowledge would have saved
+her health, saved her heart, saved her friends, and helped the very loved
+ones for whom she labours, not always with success."
+
+A little political economy, therefore, will at least do no harm to a
+woman; especially if she have to take care of herself in after life;
+neither, I think, will she be much harmed by some sound knowledge of
+another subject, which I see promised in these lectures,--"Natural
+philosophy, in its various branches, such as the chemistry of common
+life, light, heat, electricity, &c., &c."
+
+A little knowledge of the laws of light, for instance, would teach many
+women that by shutting themselves up day after day, week after week, in
+darkened rooms, they are as certainly committing a waste of health,
+destroying their vital energy, and diseasing their brains, as if they
+were taking so much poison the whole time.
+
+A little knowledge of the laws of heat would teach women not to clothe
+themselves and their children after foolish and insufficient fashions,
+which in this climate sow the seeds of a dozen different diseases, and
+have to be atoned for by perpetual anxieties, and by perpetual doctors'
+bills; and as for a little knowledge of the laws of electricity, one
+thrift I am sure it would produce--thrift to us men, of having to answer
+continual inquiries as to what the weather is going to be, when a slight
+knowledge of the barometer, or of the form of the clouds and the
+direction of the wind, would enable many a lady to judge for herself, and
+not, after inquiry on inquiry, disregard all warnings, go out on the
+first appearance of a strip of blue sky, and come home wet through, with
+what she calls "only a chill," but which really means a nail driven into
+her coffin--a probable shortening, though it may be a very small one, of
+her mortal life; because the food of the next twenty-four hours, which
+should have gone to keep the vital heat at its normal standard, will have
+to be wasted in raising it up to that standard, from which it has fallen
+by a chill.
+
+Ladies; these are subjects on which I must beg to speak a little more at
+length, premising them by one statement, which may seem jest, but is
+solemn earnest--that, if the medical men of this or any other city were
+what the world now calls "alive to their own interests"--that is, to the
+mere making of money; instead of being, what medical men are, the most
+generous, disinterested, and high-minded class in these realms, then they
+would oppose by all means in their power the delivery of lectures on
+natural philosophy to women.  For if women act upon what they learn in
+those lectures--and having women's hearts, they will act upon it--there
+ought to follow a decrease of sickness and an increase of health,
+especially among children; a thrift of life, and a thrift of expense
+besides, which would very seriously affect the income of medical men.
+
+For let me ask you, ladies, with all courtesy, but with all
+earnestness--Are you aware of certain facts, of which every one of those
+excellent medical men is too well aware?  Are you aware that more human
+beings are killed in England every year by unnecessary and preventable
+diseases than were killed at Waterloo or at Sadowa?  Are you aware that
+the great majority of those victims are children?  Are you aware that the
+diseases which carry them off are for the most part such as ought to be
+specially under the control of the women who love them, pet them, educate
+them, and would in many cases, if need be, lay down their lives for them?
+Are you aware, again, of the vast amount of disease which, so both wise
+mothers and wise doctors assure me, is engendered in the sleeping-room
+from simple ignorance of the laws of ventilation, and in the school-room
+likewise, from simple ignorance of the laws of physiology? from an
+ignorance of which I shall mention no other case here save one--that too
+often from ignorance of signs of approaching disease, a child is punished
+for what is called idleness, listlessness, wilfulness, sulkiness; and
+punished, too, in the unwisest way--by an increase of tasks and
+confinement to the house, thus overtasking still more a brain already
+overtasked, and depressing still more, by robbing it of oxygen and of
+exercise, a system already depressed?  Are you aware, I ask again, of all
+this?  I speak earnestly upon this point, because I speak with
+experience.  As a single instance: a medical man, a friend of mine,
+passing by his own school-room, heard one of his own little girls
+screaming and crying, and went in.  The governess, an excellent woman,
+but wholly ignorant of the laws of physiology, complained that the child
+had of late become obstinate and would not learn; and that therefore she
+must punish her by keeping her indoors over the unlearnt lessons.  The
+father, who knew that the child was usually a very good one, looked at
+her carefully for a little while; sent her out of the school-room; and
+then said, "That child must not open a book for a month."  "If I had not
+acted so," he said to me, "I should have had that child dead of brain-
+disease within the year."
+
+Now, in the face of such facts as these, is it too much to ask of
+mothers, sisters, aunts, nurses, governesses--all who may be occupied in
+the care of children, especially of girls--that they should study thrift
+of human health and human life, by studying somewhat the laws of life and
+health?  There are books--I may say a whole literature of books--written
+by scientific doctors on these matters, which are in my mind far more
+important to the school-room than half the trashy accomplishments, so-
+called, which are expected to be known by governesses.  But are they
+bought?  Are they even to be bought, from most country booksellers?  Ah,
+for a little knowledge of the laws to the neglect of which is owing so
+much fearful disease, which, if it does not produce immediate death, too
+often leaves the constitution impaired for years to come.  Ah the waste
+of health and strength in the young; the waste, too, of anxiety and
+misery in those who love and tend them.  How much of it might be saved by
+a little rational education in those laws of nature which are the will of
+God about the welfare of our bodies, and which, therefore, we are as much
+bound to know and to obey, as we are bound to know and obey the spiritual
+laws whereon depends the welfare of our souls.
+
+Pardon me, ladies, if I have given a moment's pain to any one here: but I
+appeal to every medical man in the room whether I have not spoken the
+truth; and having such an opportunity as this, I felt that I must speak
+for the sake of children, and of women likewise, or else for ever
+hereafter hold my peace.
+
+Let me pass on from this painful subject--for painful it has been to me
+for many years--to a question of intellectual thrift--by which I mean
+just now thrift of words; thrift of truth; restraint of the tongue;
+accuracy and modesty in statement.
+
+Mothers complain to me that girls are apt to be--not intentionally
+untruthful--but exaggerative, prejudiced, incorrect, in repeating a
+conversation or describing an event; and that from this fault arise, as
+is to be expected, misunderstandings, quarrels, rumours, slanders,
+scandals, and what not.
+
+Now, for this waste of words there is but one cure: and if I be told that
+it is a natural fault of women; that they cannot take the calm judicial
+view of matters which men boast, and often boast most wrongly, that they
+can take; that under the influence of hope, fear, delicate antipathy,
+honest moral indignation, they will let their eyes and ears be governed
+by their feelings; and see and hear only what they wish to see and hear:
+I answer, that it is not for me as a man to start such a theory; but that
+if it be true, it is an additional argument for some education which will
+correct this supposed natural defect.  And I say deliberately that there
+is but one sort of education which will correct it; one which will teach
+young women to observe facts accurately, judge them calmly, and describe
+them carefully, without adding or distorting: and that is, some training
+in natural science.
+
+I beg you not to be startled: but if you are, then test the truth of my
+theory by playing to-night at the game called "Russian Scandal;" in which
+a story, repeated in secret by one player to the other, comes out at the
+end of the game, owing to the inaccurate and--forgive me if I say
+it--uneducated brains through which it has passed, utterly unlike its
+original; not only ludicrously maimed and distorted, but often with the
+most fantastic additions of events, details, names, dates, places, which
+each player will aver that he received from the player before him.  I am
+afraid that too much of the average gossip of every city, town, and
+village is little more than a game of "Russian Scandal;" with this
+difference, that while one is but a game, the other is but too
+mischievous earnest.
+
+But now, if among your party there shall be an average lawyer, medical
+man, or man of science, you will find that he, and perhaps he alone, will
+be able to retail accurately the story which has been told him.  And why?
+Simply because his mind has been trained to deal with facts; to ascertain
+exactly what he does see or hear, and to imprint its leading features
+strongly and clearly on his memory.
+
+Now, you certainly cannot make young ladies barristers or attorneys; nor
+employ their brains in getting up cases, civil or criminal; and as for
+chemistry, they and their parents may have a reasonable antipathy to
+smells, blackened fingers, and occasional explosions and poisonings.  But
+you may make them something of botanists, zoologists, geologists.
+
+I could say much on this point: allow me at least to say this: I verily
+believe that any young lady who would employ some of her leisure time in
+collecting wild flowers, carefully examining them, verifying them, and
+arranging them; or who would in her summer trip to the sea-coast do the
+same by the common objects of the shore, instead of wasting her holiday,
+as one sees hundreds doing, in lounging on benches on the esplanade,
+reading worthless novels, and criticizing dresses--that such a young
+lady, I say, would not only open her own mind to a world of wonder,
+beauty, and wisdom, which, if it did not make her a more reverent and
+pious soul, she cannot be the woman which I take for granted she is; but
+would save herself from the habit--I had almost said the necessity--of
+gossip; because she would have things to think of and not merely persons;
+facts instead of fancies; while she would acquire something of accuracy,
+of patience, of methodical observation and judgment, which would stand
+her in good stead in the events of daily life, and increase her power of
+bridling her tongue and her imagination.  "God is in heaven, and thou
+upon earth; therefore let thy words be few;" is the lesson which those
+are learning all day long who study the works of God with reverent
+accuracy, lest by misrepresenting them they should be tempted to say that
+God has done that which He has not; and in that wholesome discipline I
+long that women as well as men should share.
+
+And now I come to a thrift of the highest kind, as contrasted with a
+waste the most deplorable and ruinous of all; thrift of those faculties
+which connect us with the unseen and spiritual world; with humanity, with
+Christ, with God; thrift of the immortal spirit.  I am not going now to
+give you a sermon on duty.  You hear such, I doubt not, in church every
+Sunday, far better than I can preach to you.  I am going to speak rather
+of thrift of the heart, thrift of the emotions.  How they are wasted in
+these days in reading what are called sensation novels, all know but too
+well; how British literature--all that the best hearts and intellects
+among our forefathers have bequeathed to us--is neglected for light
+fiction, the reading of which is, as a lady well said, "the worst form of
+intemperance--dram-drinking and opium-eating, intellectual and moral."
+
+I know that the young will delight--they have delighted in all ages, and
+will to the end of time--in fictions which deal with that "oldest tale
+which is for ever new."  Novels will be read: but that is all the more
+reason why women should be trained, by the perusal of a higher, broader,
+deeper literature, to distinguish the good novel from the bad, the moral
+from the immoral, the noble from the base, the true work of art from the
+sham which hides its shallowness and vulgarity under a tangled plot and
+melodramatic situations.  She should learn--and that she can only learn
+by cultivation--to discern with joy, and drink in with reverence, the
+good, the beautiful, and the true; and to turn with the fine scorn of a
+pure and strong womanhood from the bad, the ugly, and the false.
+
+And if any parent should be inclined to reply--"Why lay so much stress
+upon educating a girl in British literature?  Is it not far more
+important to make our daughters read religious books?"  I answer--Of
+course it is.  I take for granted that that is done in a Christian land.
+But I beg you to recollect that there are books and books; and that in
+these days of a free press it is impossible, in the long run, to prevent
+girls reading books of very different shades of opinion, and very
+different religious worth.  It may be, therefore, of the very highest
+importance to a girl to have her intellect, her taste, her emotions, her
+moral sense, in a word, her whole womanhood, so cultivated and regulated
+that she shall herself be able to discern the true from the false, the
+orthodox from the unorthodox, the truly devout from the merely
+sentimental, the Gospel from its counterfeits.
+
+I should have thought that there never had been in Britain, since the
+Reformation, a crisis at which young Englishwomen required more careful
+cultivation on these matters; if at least they are to be saved from
+making themselves and their families miserable; and from ending--as I
+have known too many end--with broken hearts, broken brains, broken
+health, and an early grave.
+
+Take warning by what you see abroad.  In every country where the women
+are uneducated, unoccupied; where their only literature is French novels
+or translations of them--in every one of those countries the women, even
+to the highest, are the slaves of superstition, and the puppets of
+priests.  In proportion as, in certain other countries--notably, I will
+say, in Scotland--the women are highly educated, family life and family
+secrets are sacred, and the woman owns allegiance and devotion to no
+confessor or director, but to her own husband or to her own family.
+
+I say plainly, that if any parents wish their daughters to succumb at
+last to some quackery or superstition, whether calling itself scientific,
+or calling itself religious--and there are too many of both just now--they
+cannot more certainly effect their purpose than by allowing her to grow
+up ignorant, frivolous, luxurious, vain; with her emotions excited, but
+not satisfied, by the reading of foolish and even immoral novels.
+
+In such a case the more delicate and graceful the organization, the more
+noble and earnest the nature, which has been neglected, the more certain
+it is--I know too well what I am saying--to go astray.
+
+The time of depression, disappointment, vacuity, all but despair, must
+come.  The immortal spirit, finding no healthy satisfaction for its
+highest aspirations, is but too likely to betake itself to an unhealthy
+and exciting superstition.  Ashamed of its own long self-indulgence, it
+is but too likely to flee from itself into a morbid asceticism.  Not
+having been taught its God-given and natural duties in the world, it is
+but too likely to betake itself, from the mere craving for action, to
+self-invented and unnatural duties out of the world.  Ignorant of true
+science, yet craving to understand the wonders of nature and of spirit,
+it is but too likely to betake itself to nonscience--nonsense as it is
+usually called--whether of spirit-rapping and mesmerism, or of miraculous
+relics and winking pictures.  Longing for guidance and teaching, and
+never having been taught to guide and teach itself, it is but too likely
+to deliver itself up in self-despair to the guidance and teaching of
+those who, whether they be quacks or fanatics, look on uneducated women
+as their natural prey.
+
+You will see, I am sure, from what I have said, that it is not my wish
+that you should become mere learned women; mere female pedants, as
+useless and unpleasing as male pedants are wont to be.  The education
+which I set before you is not to be got by mere hearing lectures or
+reading books: for it is an education of your whole character; a self-
+education; which really means a committing of yourself to God, that He
+may educate you.  Hearing lectures is good, for it will teach you how
+much there is to be known, and how little you know.  Reading books is
+good, for it will give you habits of regular and diligent study.  And
+therefore I urge on you strongly private study, especially in case a
+library should be formed here of books on those most practical subjects
+of which I have been speaking.  But, after all, both lectures and books
+are good, mainly in as far as they furnish matter for reflection: while
+the desire to reflect and the ability to reflect must come, as I believe,
+from above.  The honest craving after light and power, after knowledge,
+wisdom, active usefulness, must come--and may it come to you--by the
+inspiration of the Spirit of God.
+
+One word more, and I have done.  Let me ask women to educate themselves,
+not for their own sakes merely, but for the sake of others.  For, whether
+they will or not, they must educate others.  I do not speak merely of
+those who may be engaged in the work of direct teaching; that they ought
+to be well taught themselves, who can doubt?  I speak of those--and in so
+doing I speak of every woman, young and old--who exercises as wife, as
+mother, as aunt, as sister, or as friend, an influence, indirect it may
+be, and unconscious, but still potent and practical, on the minds and
+characters of those about them, especially of men.  How potent and
+practical that influence is, those know best who know most of the world
+and most of human nature.  There are those who consider--and I agree with
+them--that the education of boys under the age of twelve years ought to
+be entrusted as much as possible to women.  Let me ask--of what period of
+youth and of manhood does not the same hold true?  I pity the ignorance
+and conceit of the man who fancies that he has nothing left to learn from
+cultivated women.  I should have thought that the very mission of woman
+was to be, in the highest sense, the educator of man from infancy to old
+age; that that was the work towards which all the God-given capacities of
+women pointed; for which they were to be educated to the highest pitch.  I
+should have thought that it was the glory of woman that she was sent into
+the world to live for others, rather than for herself; and therefore I
+should say--Let her smallest rights be respected, her smallest wrongs
+redressed: but let her never be persuaded to forget that she is sent into
+the world to teach man--what, I believe, she has been teaching him all
+along, even in the savage state--namely, that there is something more
+necessary than the claiming of rights, and that is, the performing of
+duties; to teach him specially, in these so-called intellectual days,
+that there is something more than intellect, and that is--purity and
+virtue.  Let her never be persuaded to forget that her calling is not the
+lower and more earthly one of self-assertion, but the higher and the
+diviner calling of self-sacrifice; and let her never desert that higher
+life, which lives in others and for others, like her Redeemer and her
+Lord.
+
+And if any should answer that this doctrine would keep woman a dependant
+and a slave, I rejoin--Not so: it would keep her what she should be--the
+mistress of all around her, because mistress of herself.  And more, I
+should express a fear that those who made that answer had not yet seen
+into the mystery of true greatness and true strength; that they did not
+yet understand the true magnanimity, the true royalty of that spirit, by
+which the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and
+to give His life a ransom for many.
+
+Surely that is woman's calling--to teach man: and to teach him what?  To
+teach him, after all, that his calling is the same as hers, if he will
+but see the things which belong to his peace.  To temper his fiercer,
+coarser, more self-assertive nature, by the contact of her gentleness,
+purity, self-sacrifice.  To make him see that not by blare of trumpets,
+not by noise, wrath, greed, ambition, intrigue, puffery, is good and
+lasting work to be done on earth: but by wise self-distrust, by silent
+labour, by lofty self-control, by that charity which hopeth all things,
+believeth all things, endureth all things; by such an example, in short,
+as women now in tens of thousands set to those around them; such as they
+will show more and more, the more their whole womanhood is educated to
+employ its powers without waste and without haste in harmonious unity.
+Let the woman begin in girlhood, if such be her happy lot--to quote the
+words of a great poet, a great philosopher, and a great Churchman,
+William Wordsworth--let her begin, I say--
+
+   "With all things round about her drawn
+   From May-time and the cheerful dawn;
+   A dancing shape, an image gay,
+   To haunt, to startle, and waylay."
+
+Let her develop onwards--
+
+   "A spirit, yet a woman too,
+   With household motions light and free,
+   And steps of virgin liberty.
+   A countenance in which shall meet
+   Sweet records, promises as sweet;
+   A creature not too bright and good
+   For human nature's daily food;
+   For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
+   Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.
+
+But let her highest and her final development be that which not nature,
+but self-education alone can bring--that which makes her once and for
+ever--
+
+   "A being breathing thoughtful breath;
+   A traveller betwixt life and death.
+   With reason firm, with temperate will,
+   Endurance, foresight, strength and skill.
+   A perfect woman, nobly planned,
+   To warn, to comfort and command.
+   And yet a spirit still and bright
+   With something of an angel light."
+
+
+
+
+THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY.
+A LECTURE DELIVERED TO THE OFFICERS OF THE ROYAL ARTILLERY, WOOLWICH.
+
+
+Gentlemen:--When I accepted the honour of lecturing here, I took for
+granted that so select an audience would expect from me not mere
+amusement, but somewhat of instruction; or, if that be too ambitious a
+word for me to use, at least some fresh hint--if I were able to give
+one--as to how they should fulfil the ideal of military men in such an
+age as this.
+
+To touch on military matters, even had I been conversant with them,
+seemed to me an impertinence.  I am bound to take for granted that every
+man knows his own business best; and I incline more and more to the
+opinion that military men should be left to work out the problems of
+their art for themselves, without the advice or criticism of civilians.
+But I hold--and I am sure that you will agree with me--that if the
+soldier is to be thus trusted by the nation, and left to himself to do
+his own work his own way, he must be educated in all practical matters as
+highly as the average of educated civilians.  He must know all that they
+know, and his own art beside.  Just as a clergyman, being a man plus a
+priest, is bound to be a man, and a good man, over and above his
+priesthood, so is the soldier bound to be a civilian, and a
+highly-educated civilian, plus his soldierly qualities and acquirements.
+
+It seemed to me, therefore, that I might, without impertinence, ask you
+to consider a branch of knowledge which is becoming yearly more and more
+important in the eyes of well-educated civilians; of which, therefore,
+the soldier ought at least to know something, in order to put him on a
+par with the general intelligence of the nation.  I do not say that he is
+to devote much time to it, or to follow it up into specialities: but that
+he ought to be well grounded in its principles and methods; that he ought
+to be aware of its importance and its usefulness; that so, if he comes
+into contact--as he will more and more--with scientific men, he may
+understand them, respect them, befriend them, and be befriended by them
+in turn; and how desirable this last result is, I shall tell you
+hereafter.
+
+There are those, I doubt not, among my audience who do not need the
+advice which I shall presume to give to-night; who belong to that fast
+increasing class among officers of whom I have often said--and I have
+found scientific men cordially agree with me--that they are the most
+modest and the most teachable of men.  But even in their case there can
+be no harm in going over deliberately a question of such importance; in
+putting it, as it were, into shape; and insisting on arguments which may
+perhaps not have occurred to some of them.
+
+Let me, in the first place, reassure those--if any such there be--who may
+suppose, from the title of my lecture, that I am only going to recommend
+them to collect weeds and butterflies, "rats and mice, and such small
+deer."  Far from it.  The honourable title of Natural History has, and
+unwisely, been restricted too much of late years to the mere study of
+plants and animals.  I desire to restore the words to their original and
+proper meaning--the History of Nature; that is, of all that is born, and
+grows in time; in short, of all natural objects.
+
+If anyone shall say--By that definition you make not only geology and
+chemistry branches of natural history, but meteorology and astronomy
+likewise--I cannot deny it.  They deal, each of them, with realms of
+Nature.  Geology is, literally, the natural history of soils and lands;
+chemistry the natural history of compounds, organic and inorganic;
+meteorology the natural history of climates; astronomy the natural
+history of planetary and solar bodies.  And more, you cannot now study
+deeply any branch of what is popularly called Natural History--that is,
+plants and animals--without finding it necessary to learn something, and
+more and more as you go deeper, of those very sciences.  As the
+marvellous interdependence of all natural objects and forces unfolds
+itself more and more, so the once separate sciences, which treated of
+different classes of natural objects, are forced to interpenetrate, as it
+were; and to supplement themselves by knowledge borrowed from each other.
+Thus--to give a single instance--no man can now be a first-rate botanist
+unless he be also no mean meteorologist, no mean geologist, and--as Mr.
+Darwin has shown in his extraordinary discoveries about the fertilisation
+of plants by insects--no mean entomologist likewise.
+
+It is difficult, therefore, and indeed somewhat unwise and unfair, to put
+any limit to the term Natural History, save that it shall deal only with
+nature and with matter; and shall not pretend--as some would have it to
+do just now--to go out of its own sphere to meddle with moral and
+spiritual matters.  But, for practical purposes, we may define the
+natural history of any given spot as the history of the causes which have
+made it what it is, and filled it with the natural objects which it
+holds.  And if anyone would know how to study the natural history of a
+place, and how to write it, let him read--and if he has read its
+delightful pages in youth, read once again--that hitherto unrivalled
+little monograph, White's 'Natural History of Selborne;' and let him then
+try, by the light of improved science, to do for any district where he
+may be stationed, what White did for Selborne nearly one hundred years
+ago.  Let him study its plants, its animals, its soils and rocks; and
+last, but not least, its scenery, as the total outcome of what the soils,
+and plants, and animals have made it.  I say, have made it.  How far the
+nature of the soils and the rocks will affect the scenery of a district
+may be well learnt from a very clever and interesting little book of
+Professor Geikie's, on 'The Scenery of Scotland, as affected by its
+Geological Structure.'  How far the plants and trees affect not merely
+the general beauty, the richness or barrenness of a country, but also its
+very shape; the rate at which the hills are destroyed and washed into the
+lowland; the rate at which the seaboard is being removed by the action of
+waves--all these are branches of study which is becoming more and more
+important.
+
+And even in the study of animals and their effects on the vegetation,
+questions of really deep interest will arise.  You will find that certain
+plants and trees cannot thrive in a district, while others can, because
+the former are browsed down by cattle, or their seeds eaten by birds, and
+the latter are not; that certain seeds are carried in the coats of
+animals, or wafted abroad by winds--others are not; certain trees
+destroyed wholesale by insects, while others are not; that in a hundred
+ways the animal and vegetable life of a district act and react upon each
+other, and that the climate, the average temperature, the maximum and
+minimum temperatures, the rainfall, act on them, and in the case of the
+vegetation, are reacted on again by them.  The diminution of rainfall by
+the destruction of forests, its increase by replanting them, and the
+effect of both on the healthiness or unhealthiness of a place--as in the
+case of the Mauritius, where a once healthy island has become
+pestilential, seemingly from the clearing away of the vegetation on the
+banks of streams--all this, though to study it deeply requires a fair
+knowledge of meteorology, and even of a science or two more, is surely
+well worth the attention of any educated man who is put in charge of the
+health and lives of human beings.
+
+You will surely agree with me that the habit of mind required for such a
+study as this, is the very same as is required for successful military
+study.  In fact, I should say that the same intellect which would develop
+into a great military man, would develop also into a great naturalist.  I
+say, intellect.  The military man would require--what the naturalist
+would not--over and above his intellect, a special force of will, in
+order to translate his theories into fact, and make his campaigns in the
+field and not merely on paper.  But I am speaking only of the habit of
+mind required for study; of that inductive habit of mind which works,
+steadily and by rule, from the known to the unknown; that habit of mind
+of which it has been said:--"The habit of seeing; the habit of knowing
+what we see; the habit of discerning differences and likenesses; the
+habit of classifying accordingly; the habit of searching for hypotheses
+which shall connect and explain those classified facts; the habit of
+verifying these hypotheses by applying them to fresh facts; the habit of
+throwing them away bravely if they will not fit; the habit of general
+patience, diligence, accuracy, reverence for facts for their own sake,
+and love of truth for its own sake; in one word, the habit of reverent
+and implicit obedience to the laws of Nature, whatever they may be--these
+are not merely intellectual, but also moral habits, which will stand men
+in practical good stead in every affair of life, and in every question,
+even the most awful, which may come before them as rational and social
+beings."  And specially valuable are they, surely, to the military man,
+the very essence of whose study, to be successful, lies first in
+continuous and accurate observation, and then in calm and judicious
+arrangement.
+
+Therefore it is that I hold, and hold strongly, that the study of
+physical science, far from interfering with an officer's studies, much
+less unfitting for them, must assist him in them, by keeping his mind
+always in the very attitude and the very temper which they require.  If
+any smile at this theory of mine, let them recollect one curious fact:
+that perhaps the greatest captain of the old world was trained by perhaps
+the greatest philosopher of the old world--the father of Natural History;
+that Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander of Macedon.  I do not fancy, of
+course, that Aristotle taught Alexander any Natural History.  But this we
+know, that he taught him to use those very faculties by which Aristotle
+became a natural historian, and many things beside; that he called out in
+his pupil somewhat of his own extraordinary powers of observation,
+extraordinary powers of arrangement.  He helped to make him a great
+general: but he helped to make him more--a great politician, coloniser,
+discoverer.  He instilled into him such a sense of the importance of
+Natural History, that Alexander helped him nobly in his researches; and,
+if Athenaeus is to be believed, gave him 800 talents towards perfecting
+his history of animals.  Surely it is not too much to say that this close
+friendship between the natural philosopher and the soldier has changed
+the whole course of civilisation to this very day.  Do not consider me
+Utopian when I tell you, that I should like to see the study of physical
+science an integral part of the curriculum of every military school.  I
+would train the mind of the lad who was to become hereafter an officer in
+the army--and in the navy like wise--by accustoming him to careful
+observation of, and sound thought about, the face of nature; of the
+commonest objects under his feet, just as much as of the stars above his
+head; provided always that he learnt, not at second-hand from books, but
+where alone he can really learn either war or nature--in the field; by
+actual observation, actual experiment.  A laboratory for chemical
+experiment is a good thing, it is true, as far as it goes; but I should
+prefer to the laboratory a naturalists' field club, such as are
+prospering now at several of the best public schools, certain that the
+boys would get more of sound inductive habits of mind, as well as more
+health, manliness, and cheerfulness, amid scenes to remember which will
+be a joy for ever, than they ever can by bending over retorts and
+crucibles, amid smells even to remember which is a pain for ever.
+
+But I would, whether a field club existed or not, require of every young
+man entering the army or navy--indeed of every young man entering any
+liberal profession whatsoever--a fair knowledge, such as would enable him
+to pass an examination, in what the Germans call
+_Erd-kunde_--earth-lore--in that knowledge of the face of the earth and
+of its products, for which we English have as yet cared so little that we
+have actually no English name for it, save the clumsy and questionable
+one of physical geography; and, I am sorry to say, hardly any readable
+school books about it, save Keith Johnston's 'Physical Atlas'--an
+acquaintance with which last I should certainly require of young men.
+
+It does seem most strange--or rather will seem most strange 100 years
+hence--that we, the nation of colonists, the nation of sailors, the
+nation of foreign commerce, the nation of foreign military stations, the
+nation of travellers for travelling's sake, the nation of which one man
+here and another there--as Schleiden sets forth in his book, 'The Plant,'
+in a charming ideal conversation at the Travellers' Club--has seen and
+enjoyed more of the wonders and beauties of this planet than the men of
+any nation, not even excepting the Germans--that this nation, I say,
+should as yet have done nothing, or all but nothing, to teach in her
+schools a knowledge of that planet, of which she needs to know more, and
+can if she will know more, than any other nation upon it.
+
+As for the practical utility of such studies to a soldier, I only need, I
+trust, to hint at it to such an assembly as this.  All must see of what
+advantage a rough knowledge of the botany of a district would be to an
+officer leading an exploring party, or engaged in bush warfare.  To know
+what plants are poisonous; what plants, too, are eatable--and many more
+are eatable than is usually supposed; what plants yield oleaginous
+substances, whether for food or for other uses; what plants yield
+vegetable acids, as preventives of scurvy; what timbers are available for
+each of many different purposes; what will resist wet, salt-water, and
+the attacks of insects; what, again, can be used, at a pinch, for
+medicine or for styptics--and be sure, as a wise West Indian doctor once
+said to me, that there is more good medicine wild in the bush than there
+is in all the druggists' shops--surely all this is a knowledge not
+beneath the notice of any enterprising officer, above all of an officer
+of engineers.  I only ask anyone who thinks that I may be in the right,
+to glance through the lists of useful vegetable products given in
+Lindley's 'Vegetable Kingdom'--a miracle of learning--and see the vast
+field open still to a thoughtful and observant man, even while on
+service; and not to forget that such knowledge, if he should hereafter
+leave the service and settle, as many do, in a distant land, may be a
+solid help to his future prosperity.  So strongly do I feel on this
+matter, that I should like to see some knowledge at least of Dr. Oliver's
+excellent little 'First Book of Indian Botany' required of all officers
+going to our Indian Empire: but as that will not be, at least for many a
+year to come, I recommend any gentlemen going to India to get that book,
+and wile away the hours of the outward voyage by acquiring knowledge
+which will be a continual source of interest, and it may be now and then
+of profit, to them during their stay abroad.
+
+And for geology, again.  As I do not expect you all, or perhaps any of
+you, to become such botanists as General Monro, whose recent 'Monograph
+of the Bamboos' is an honour to British botanists, and a proof of the
+scientific power which is to be found here and there among British
+officers: so I do not expect you to become such geologists as Sir
+Roderick Murchison, or even to add such a grand chapter to the history of
+extinct animals as Major Cautley did by his discoveries in the Sewalik
+Hills.  Nevertheless, you can learn--and I should earnestly advise you to
+learn--geology and mineralogy enough to be of great use to you in your
+profession, and of use, too, should you relinquish your profession
+hereafter.  It must be profitable for any man, and specially for you, to
+know how and where to find good limestone, building stone, road metal; it
+must be good to be able to distinguish ores and mineral products; it must
+be good to know--as a geologist will usually know, even in a country
+which he sees for the first time--where water is likely to be found, and
+at what probable depth; it must be good to know whether the water is fit
+for drinking or not, whether it is unwholesome or merely muddy; it must
+be good to know what spots are likely to be healthy, and what unhealthy,
+for encamping.  The two last questions depend, doubtless, on
+meteorological as well as geological accidents: but the answers to them
+will be most surely found out by the scientific man, because the facts
+connected with them are, like all other facts, determined by natural
+laws.  After what one has heard, in past years, of barracks built in
+spots plainly pestilential; of soldiers encamped in ruined cities,
+reeking with the dirt and poison of centuries; of--but it is not my place
+to find fault; all I will say is, that the wise and humane officer, when
+once his eyes are opened to the practical value of physical science, will
+surely try to acquaint himself somewhat with those laws of drainage and
+of climate, geological, meteorological, chemical, which influence, often
+with terrible suddenness and fury, the health of whole armies.  He will
+not find it beyond his province to ascertain the amount and period of
+rainfalls, the maxima of heat and of cold which his troops may have to
+endure, and many another point on which their health and efficiency--nay,
+their very life may depend, but which are now too exclusively delegated
+to the doctor, to whose province they do not really belong.  For cure, I
+take the liberty of believing, is the duty of the medical officer;
+prevention, that of the military.
+
+Thus much I can say just now--and there is much more to be said--on the
+practical uses of the study of Natural History.  But let me remind you,
+on the other side, if Natural History will help you, you in return can
+help her; and would, I doubt not, help her, and help scientific men at
+home, if once you looked fairly and steadily at the immense importance of
+Natural History--of the knowledge of the "face of the earth."  I believe
+that all will one day feel, more or less, that to know the earth _on_
+which we live, and the laws of it _by_ which we live, is a sacred duty to
+ourselves, to our children after us, and to all whom we may have to
+command and to influence; aye, and a duty to God likewise.  For is it not
+a duty of common reverence and faith towards Him, if He has put us into a
+beautiful and wonderful place, and given us faculties by which we can
+see, and enjoy, and use that place--is it not a duty of reverence and
+faith towards Him to use these faculties, and to learn the lessons which
+He has laid open for us?  If you feel that, as I think you all will some
+day feel, then you will surely feel likewise that it will be a good
+deed--I do not say a necessary duty, but still a good deed and
+praiseworthy--to help physical science forward; and to add your
+contributions, however small, to our general knowledge of the earth.  And
+how much may be done for science by British officers, especially on
+foreign stations, I need not point out.  I know that much has been done,
+chivalrously and well, by officers; and that men of science owe them, and
+give them, hearty thanks for their labours.  But I should like, I
+confess, to see more done still.  I should like to see every foreign
+station, what one or two highly-educated officers might easily make it,
+an advanced post of physical science, in regular communication with our
+scientific societies at home, sending to them accurate and methodic
+details of the natural history of each district--details 99/100ths of
+which might seem worthless in the eyes of the public, but which would all
+be precious in the eyes of scientific men, who know that no fact is
+really unimportant; and more, that while plodding patiently through
+seemingly unimportant facts, you may stumble on one of infinite
+importance, both scientific and practical.  For the student of nature,
+gentlemen, if he will be but patient, diligent, methodical, is liable at
+any moment to the same good fortune as befel Saul of old, when he went
+out to seek his father's asses, and found a kingdom.
+
+There are those, lastly, who have neither time nor taste for the
+technicalities, and nice distinctions, of formal Natural History; who
+enjoy Nature, but as artists or as sportsmen, and not as men of science.
+Let them follow their bent freely: but let them not suppose that in
+following it they can do nothing towards enlarging our knowledge of
+Nature, especially when on foreign stations.  So far from it, drawings
+ought always to be valuable, whether of plants, animals, or scenery,
+provided only they are accurate; and the more spirited and full of genius
+they are, the more accurate they are certain to be; for Nature being
+alive, a lifeless copy of her is necessarily an untrue copy.  Most
+thankful to any officer for a mere sight of sketches will be the closet
+botanist, who, to his own sorrow, knows three-fourths of his plants only
+from dried specimens; or the closet zoologist, who knows his animals from
+skins and bones.  And if anyone answers--But I cannot draw.  I rejoin,
+You can at least photograph.  If a young officer, going out to foreign
+parts, and knowing nothing at all about physical science, did me the
+honour to ask me what he could do for science, I should tell him--Learn
+to photograph; take photographs of every strange bit of rock-formation
+which strikes your fancy, and of every widely extended view which may
+give a notion of the general lie of the country.  Append, if you can, a
+note or two, saying whether a plain is rich or barren; whether the rock
+is sandstone, limestone, granitic, metamorphic, or volcanic lava; and if
+there be more rocks than one, which of them lies on the other; and send
+them to be exhibited at a meeting of the Geological Society.  I doubt not
+that the learned gentlemen there will find in your photographs a valuable
+hint or two, for which they will be much obliged.  I learnt, for
+instance, what seemed to me most valuable geological lessons, from mere
+glances at drawings--I believe from photographs--of the Abyssinian ranges
+about Magdala.
+
+Or again, let a man, if he knows nothing of botany, not trouble himself
+with collecting and drying specimens; let him simply photograph every
+strange and new tree or plant he sees, to give a general notion of its
+species, its look; let him append, where he can, a photograph of its
+leafage, flower, fruit; and send them to Dr. Hooker, or any distinguished
+botanist: and he will find that, though he may know nothing of botany, he
+will have pretty certainly increased the knowledge of those who do know.
+
+The sportsman, again--I mean the sportsman of that type which seems
+peculiar to these islands, who loves toil and danger for their own sakes;
+he surely is a naturalist, ipso facto, though he knows it not.  He has
+those very habits of keen observation on which all sound knowledge of
+nature is based; and he, if he will--as he may do without interfering
+with his sport--can study the habits of the animals among whom he spends
+wholesome and exciting days.  You have only to look over such good old
+books as Williams's 'Wild Sports of the East,' Campbell's 'Old Forest
+Ranger,' Lloyd's 'Scandinavian Adventures,' and last, but not least,
+Waterton's 'Wanderings,' to see what valuable additions to true
+zoology--the knowledge of live creatures, not merely dead ones--British
+sportsmen have made, and still can make.  And as for the employment of
+time, which often hangs so heavily on a soldier's hands, really I am
+ready to say, if you are neither men of science, nor draughtsmen, nor
+sportsmen, why go and collect beetles.  It is not very dignified, I know,
+nor exciting: but it will be something to do.  It cannot harm you, if you
+take, as beetle-hunters do, an india-rubber sheet to lie on; and it will
+certainly benefit science.  Moreover, there will be a noble humility in
+the act.  You will confess to the public that you consider yourself only
+fit to catch beetles; by which very confession you will prove yourself
+fit for much finer things than catching beetles: and meanwhile, as I said
+before, you will be at least out of harm's way.  At a foreign barrack
+once, the happiest officer I met, because the most regularly employed,
+was one who spent his time in collecting butterflies.  He knew nothing
+about them scientifically--not even their names.  He took them simply for
+their wonderful beauty and variety; and in the hope, too--in which he was
+really scientific--that if he carefully kept every form which he saw, his
+collection might be of use some day to entomologists at home.  A most
+pleasant gentleman he was; and, I doubt not, none the worse soldier for
+his butterfly catching.  Commendable, also, in my eyes, was another
+officer--whom I have not the pleasure of knowing--who, on a remote
+foreign station, used wisely to escape from the temptations of the world
+into an entirely original and most pleasant hermitage.  For finding--so
+the story went--that many of the finest insects kept to the tree-tops,
+and never came to ground at all, he used to settle himself among the
+boughs of some tree in the tropic forests, with a long-handled net and
+plenty of cigars, and pass his hours in that airy flower garden, making
+dashes every now and then at some splendid monster as it fluttered round
+his head.  His example need not be followed by everyone; but it must be
+allowed that--at least as long as he was in his tree--he was neither
+dawdling, grumbling, spending money, nor otherwise harming himself, and
+perhaps his fellow creatures, from sheer want of employment.
+
+One word more, and I have done.  If I was allowed to give one special
+piece of advice to a young officer, whether of the army or navy, I would
+say--Respect scientific men; associate with them; learn from them; find
+them to be, as you will usually, the most pleasant and instructive of
+companions: but always respect them.  Allow them chivalrously, you who
+have an acknowledged rank, their yet unacknowledged rank; and treat them
+as all the world will treat them, in a higher and truer state of
+civilisation.  They do not yet wear the Queen's uniform; they are not yet
+accepted servants of the State; as they will be in some more perfectly
+organised and civilised land: but they are soldiers nevertheless, and
+good soldiers and chivalrous, fighting their nation's battle, often on
+even less pay than you,--and with still less chance of promotion and of
+fame, against most real and fatal enemies--against ignorance of the laws
+of this planet, and all the miseries which that ignorance begets.  Honour
+them for their work; sympathise in it; give them a helping hand in it
+whenever you have an opportunity--and what opportunities you have, I have
+been trying to sketch for you to-night; and more, work at it yourselves
+whenever and wherever you can.  Show them that the spirit which animates
+them--the hatred of ignorance and disorder, and of their bestial
+consequences--animates you likewise; show them that the habit of mind
+which they value in themselves--the habit of accurate observation and
+careful judgment--is your habit likewise; show them that you value
+science, not merely because it gives better weapons of destruction and of
+defence, but because it helps you to become clear-headed, large-minded,
+able to take a just and accurate view of any subject which comes before
+you, and to cast away every old prejudice and every hasty judgment in the
+face of truth and of duty: and it will be better for you and for them.
+
+But why?  What need for the soldier and the man of science to fraternise
+just now?  This need:--The two classes which will have an increasing, it
+may be a preponderating, influence on the fate of the human race for some
+time, will be the pupils of Aristotle and those of Alexander--the men of
+science and the soldiers.  In spite of all appearances, and all
+declamations to the contrary, that is my firm conviction.  They, and they
+alone, will be left to rule; because they alone, each in his own sphere,
+have learnt to obey.  It is therefore most needful for the welfare of
+society that they should pull with, and not against each other; that they
+should understand each other, respect each other, take counsel with each
+other, supplement each other's defects, bring out each other's higher
+tendencies, counteract each other's lower ones.  The scientific man has
+something to learn of you, gentlemen, which I doubt not that he will
+learn in good time.  You, again, have--as I have been hinting to you to-
+night--something to learn of him, which you, I doubt not, will learn in
+good time likewise.  Repeat, each of you according to his powers, the old
+friendship between Aristotle and Alexander; and so, from the sympathy and
+co-operation of you two, a class of thinkers and actors may yet arise
+which can save this nation, and the other civilised nations of the world,
+from that of which I had rather not speak; and wish that I did not think,
+too often and too earnestly.
+
+I may be a dreamer: and I may consider, in my turn, as wilder dreamers
+than myself, certain persons who fancy that their only business in life
+is to make money, the scientific man's only business is to show them how
+to make money, and the soldier's only business to guard their money for
+them.  Be that as it may, the finest type of civilised man which we are
+likely to see for some generations to come, will be produced by a
+combination of the truly military with the truly scientific man.  I say--I
+may be a dreamer: but you at least, as well as my scientific friends,
+will bear with me; for my dream is to your honour.
+
+
+
+
+ON BIO-GEOLOGY.
+AN ADDRESS GIVEN TO THE SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY OF WINCHESTER.
+
+
+I am not sure that the subject of my address is rightly chosen.  I am not
+sure that I ought not to have postponed a question of mere natural
+history, to speak to you, as scientific men, on the questions of life and
+death, which have been forced upon us by the awful warning of an
+illustrious personage's illness; of preventible disease, its frightful
+prevalency; of the 200,000 persons who are said to have died of fever
+alone since the Prince Consort's death, ten years ago; of the remedies;
+of drainage; of sewage disinfection and utilisation; and of the
+assistance which you, as a body of scientific men, can give to any effort
+towards saving the lives and health of our fellow-citizens from those
+unseen poisons which lurk like wild beasts couched in the jungle, ready
+to spring at any moment on the unsuspecting, the innocent, the helpless.
+Of all this I longed to speak: but I thought it best only to hint at it,
+and leave the question to your common sense and your humanity; taking for
+granted that your minds, like the minds of all right-minded Englishmen,
+have been of late painfully awakened to its importance.  It seemed to me
+almost an impertinence to say more in a city of whose local circumstances
+I know little or nothing.  As an old sanitary reformer, practical, as
+well as theoretical, I am but too well aware of the difficulties which
+beset any complete scheme of drainage, especially in an ancient city like
+this; where men are paying the penalty of their predecessors' ignorance;
+and dwelling, whether they choose or not, over fifteen centuries of
+accumulated dirt.
+
+And, therefore, taking for granted that there is energy and intellect
+enough in Winchester to conquer these difficulties in due time, I go on
+to ask you to consider, for a time, a subject which is growing more and
+more important and interesting, a subject the study of which will do much
+towards raising the field naturalist from a mere collector of
+specimens--as he was twenty years ago--to a philosopher elucidating some
+of the grandest problems.  I mean the infant science of Bio-geology--the
+science which treats of the distribution of plants and animals over the
+globe, and the causes of that distribution.
+
+I doubt not that there are many here who know far more about the subject
+than I; who are far better read than I am in the works of Forbes, Darwin,
+Wallace, Hooker, Moritz Wagner, and the other illustrious men who have
+written on it.  But I may, perhaps, give a few hints which will be of use
+to the younger members of this Society, and will point out to them how to
+get a new relish for the pursuit of field science.
+
+Bio-geology, then, begins with asking every plant or animal you meet,
+large or small, not merely--What is your name?  That is the collector and
+classifier's duty; and a most necessary duty it is, and one to be
+performed with the most conscientious patience and accuracy, so that a
+sound foundation may be built for future speculations.  But young
+naturalists should act not merely as Nature's registrars and
+census-takers, but as her policemen and gamekeepers; and ask everything
+they meet--How did you get here?  By what road did you come?  What was
+your last place of abode?  And now you are here, how do you get your
+living?  Are you and your children thriving, like decent people who can
+take care of themselves, or growing pauperised and degraded, and dying
+out?  Not that we have a fear of your becoming a dangerous class.  Madam
+Nature allows no dangerous classes, in the modern sense.  She has,
+doubtless for some wise reason, no mercy for the weak.  She rewards each
+organism according to its works; and if anything grows too weak or stupid
+to take care of itself, she gives it its due deserts by letting it die
+and disappear.  So, you plant or you animal, are you among the strong,
+the successful, the multiplying, the colonising?  Or are you among the
+weak, the failing, the dwindling, the doomed?
+
+These questions may seem somewhat rude: but you may comfort yourself by
+the thought that plants and animals, though they deserve all kindness,
+all admiration, deserve no courtesy--at least in this respect.  For they
+are, one and all, wherever you find them, vagrants and landloupers,
+intruders and conquerors, who have got where they happen to be simply by
+the law of the strongest--generally not without a little robbery and
+murder.  They have no right save that of possession; the same by which
+the puffin turns out the old rabbits, eats the young ones, and then lays
+her eggs in the rabbit burrow--simply because she can.
+
+Now, you will see at once that such a course of questioning will call out
+a great many curious and interesting answers, if you can only get the
+things to tell you their story; as you always may, if you will
+cross-examine them long enough; and will lead you into many subjects
+beside mere botany or entomology.  So various, indeed, are the subjects
+which you will thus start, that I can only hint at them now in the most
+cursory fashion.
+
+At the outset you will soon find yourself involved in chemical and
+meteorological questions: as, for instance, when you ask--How is it that
+I find one flora on the sea-shore, another on the sandstone, another on
+the chalk, and another on the peat-making gravelly strata?  The usual
+answer would be, I presume--if we could work it out by twenty years'
+experiment, such as Mr. Lawes, of Rothampsted, has been making on the
+growth of grasses and leguminous plants in different soils and under
+different manures--the usual answer, I say, would be--Because we plants
+want such and such mineral constituents in our woody fibre; again,
+because we want a certain amount of moisture at a certain period of the
+year: or, perhaps, simply because the mechanical arrangement of the
+particles of a certain soil happens to suit the shape of our roots and of
+their stomata.  Sometimes you will get an answer quickly enough;
+sometimes not.  If you ask, for instance, _Asplenium viride_ how it
+contrives to grow plentifully in the Craven of Yorkshire down to 600 or
+800 feet above the sea, while in Snowdon it dislikes growing lower than
+2000 feet, and is not plentiful even there?--it will reply--Because in
+the Craven I can get as much carbonic acid as I want from the decomposing
+limestone: while on the Snowdon Silurian I get very little; and I have to
+make it up by clinging to the mountain tops, for the sake of the greater
+rainfall.  But if you ask _Polopodium calcareum_--How is it you choose
+only to grow on limestone, while _Polypodium Dryopteris_, of which, I
+suspect, you are only a variety, is ready to grow anywhere?--_Polypodium
+calcareum_ will refuse, as yet, to answer a word.
+
+Again--I can only give you the merest string of hints--you will find in
+your questionings that many plants and animals have no reason at all to
+show why they should be in one place and not in another, save the very
+sound reason for the latter which was suggested to me once by a great
+naturalist.  I was asking--Why don't I find such and such a species in my
+parish, while it is plentiful a few miles off in exactly the same
+soil?--and he answered--For the same reason that you are not in America.
+Because you have not got there.  Which answer threw to me a flood of
+light on this whole science.  Things are often where they are, simply
+because they happen to have got there, and not elsewhere.  But they must
+have got there by some means: and those means I want young naturalists to
+discover; at least to guess at.
+
+A species, for instance--and I suspect it is a common case with
+insects--may abound in a single spot, simply because, long years ago, a
+single brood of eggs happened to hatch at a time when eggs of other
+species, who would have competed against them for food, did not hatch;
+and they may remain confined to that spot, though there is plenty of good
+food for them outside it, simply because they do not increase fast enough
+to require to spread out in search of more food.  Thus I should explain a
+case which I heard of lately of _Anthocera trifolii_, abundant for years
+in one corner of a certain field, and only there; while there was just as
+much trefoil all round for its larvae as there was in the selected spot.
+I can, I say, only give hints: but they will suffice, I hope, to show the
+path of thought into which I want young naturalists to turn their minds.
+
+Or, again, you will have to inquire whether the species has not been
+prevented from spreading by some natural barrier.  Mr. Wallace, whom you
+all of course know, has shown in his 'Malay Archipelago' that a strait of
+deep sea can act as such a barrier between species.  Moritz Wagner has
+shown that, in the case of insects, a moderately broad river may divide
+two closely allied species of beetles, or a very narrow snow-range two
+closely allied species of moths.
+
+Again, another cause, and a most common one is: that the plants cannot
+spread because they find the ground beyond them already occupied by other
+plants, who will not tolerate a fresh mouth, having only just enough to
+feed themselves.  Take the case of _Saxifraga hypnoides_ and _S.
+umbrosa_, "London pride."  They are two especially strong species.  They
+show that, _S. hypnoides_ especially, by their power of sporting, of
+diverging into varieties; they show it equally by their power of thriving
+anywhere, if they can only get there.  They will both grow in my sandy
+garden, under a rainfall of only 23 inches, more luxuriantly than in
+their native mountains under a rainfall of 50 or 60 inches.  Then how is
+it that _S. hypnoides_ cannot get down off the mountains; and that _S.
+umbrosa_, though in Kerry it has got off the mountains and down to the
+sea level, exterminating, I suspect, many species in its progress, yet
+cannot get across county Cork?  The only answer is, I believe: that both
+species are continually trying to go ahead; but that the other plants
+already in front of them are too strong for them, and massacre their
+infants as soon as born.
+
+And this brings us to another curious question: the sudden and abundant
+appearance of plants, like the foxglove and _Epilobium angustifolium_, in
+spots where they have never been seen before.  Are their seeds, as some
+think, dormant in the ground; or are the seeds which have germinated
+fresh ones wafted thither by wind or otherwise, and only able to
+germinate in that one spot, because there the soil is clear?  General
+Monro, now famous for his unequalled memoir on the bamboos, holds to the
+latter theory.  He pointed out to me that the _Epilobium_ seeds, being
+feathered, could travel with the wind; that the plant always made its
+appearance first on new banks, landslips, clearings, where it had nothing
+to compete against; and that the foxglove did the same.  True, and most
+painfully true, in the case of thistles and groundsels: but foxglove
+seeds, though minute, would hardly be carried by the wind any more than
+those of the white clover, which comes up so abundantly in drained fens.
+Adhuc sub judice lis est, and I wish some young naturalists would work
+carefully at the solution; by experiment, which is the most sure way to
+find out anything.
+
+But in researches in this direction they will find puzzles enough.  I
+will give them one which I shall be most thankful to hear they have
+solved within the next seven years--How is it that we find certain
+plants, namely, the thrift and the scurvy grass, abundant on the
+sea-shore and common on certain mountain-tops, but nowhere between the
+two?  Answer me that.  For I have looked at the fact for years--before,
+behind, sideways, upside down, and inside out--and I cannot understand
+it.
+
+But all these questions, and specially, I suspect, that last one, ought
+to lead the young student up to the great and complex question--How were
+these islands re-peopled with plants and animals, after the long and
+wholesale catastrophe of the glacial epoch?
+
+I presume you all know, and will agree, that the whole of these islands,
+north of the Thames, save certain ice-clad mountain-tops, were buried for
+long ages under an icy sea.  From whence did vegetable and animal life
+crawl back to the land, as it rose again; and cover its mantle of glacial
+drift with fresh life and verdure?
+
+Now let me give you a few prolegomena on this matter.  You must study the
+plants of course, species by species.  Take Watson's 'Cybele Britannica,'
+and Moore's 'Cybele Hibernica;' and let--as Mr. Matthew Arnold would
+say--"your thought play freely about them."  Look carefully, too, in the
+case of each species, at the note on its distribution, which you will
+find appended in Bentham's 'Handbook,' and in Hooker's 'Student's Flora.'
+Get all the help you can, if you wish to work the subject out, from
+foreign botanists, both European and American; and I think that, on the
+whole, you will come to some such theory as this for a general starting
+platform.  We do not owe our flora--I must keep to the flora just now--to
+so many different regions, or types, as Mr. Watson conceives, but to
+three, namely: an European or Germanic flora, from the south-east; an
+Atlantic flora, from the south-west; a Northern flora from the north.
+These three invaded us after the glacial epoch; and our general flora is
+their result.
+
+But this will cause you much trouble.  Before you go a step further you
+will have to eliminate from all your calculations most of the plants
+which Watson calls glareal, _i.e_. found in cultivated ground about
+habitations.  And what their limit may be I think we never shall know.
+But of this we may be sure; that just as invading armies always bring
+with them, in forage or otherwise, some plants from their own
+country--just as the Cossacks, in 1815, brought more than one Russian
+plant through Germany into France--just as you have already a crop of
+North German plants upon the battle-fields of France--thus do conquering
+races bring new plants.  The Romans, during their 300 or 400 years of
+occupation and civilisation, must have brought more species, I believe,
+than I dare mention.  I suspect them of having brought, not merely the
+common hedge elm of the south, not merely the three species of nettle,
+but all our red poppies, and a great number of the weeds which are common
+in our cornfields; and when we add to them the plants which may have been
+brought by returning crusaders and pilgrims; by monks from every part of
+Europe, by Flemings or other dealers in foreign wool; we have to cut a
+huge cantle out of our indigenous flora: only, having no records, we
+hardly know where and what to cut out; and can only, we elder ones,
+recommend the subject to the notice of the younger botanists, that they
+may work it out after our work is done.
+
+Of course these plants introduced by man, if they are cut out, must be
+cut out of only one of the floras, namely, the European; for they,
+probably, came from the south-east, by whatever means they came.
+
+That European flora invaded us, I presume, immediately after the glacial
+epoch, at a time when France and England were united, and the German
+Ocean a mere network of rivers, which emptied into the deep sea between
+Scotland and Scandinavia.  And here I must add, that endless questions of
+interest will arise to those who will study, not merely the invasion of
+that truly European flora, but the invasion of reptiles, insects, and
+birds, especially birds of passage, which must have followed it as soon
+as the land was sufficiently covered with vegetation to support life.
+Whole volumes remain to be written on this subject.  I trust that some of
+your younger members may live to write one of them.  The way to begin
+will be: to compare the flora and fauna of this part of England very
+carefully with that of the southern and eastern counties; and then to
+compare them again with the fauna and flora of France, Belgium, and
+Holland.
+
+As for the Atlantic flora, you will have to decide for yourselves whether
+you accept or not the theory of a sunken Atlantic continent.  I confess
+that all objections to that theory, however astounding it may seem, are
+outweighed in my mind by a host of facts which I can explain by no other
+theory.  But you must judge for yourselves; and to do so you must study
+carefully the distribution of heaths, both in Europe and at the Cape; and
+their non-appearance beyond the Ural Mountains, and in America, save in
+Labrador, where the common ling, an older and less specialised form,
+exists.  You must consider, too, the plants common to the Azores,
+Portugal, the West of England, Ireland, and the Western Hebrides.  In so
+doing young naturalists will at least find proofs of a change in the
+distribution of land and water, which will utterly astound them when they
+face it for the first time.
+
+As for the Northern flora, the question whence it came is puzzling
+enough.  It seems difficult to conceive how any plants could have
+survived when Scotland was an archipelago in the same ice-covered
+condition as Greenland is now; and we have no proof that there existed
+after the glacial epoch any northern continent from which the plants and
+animals could have come back to us.  The species of plants and animals
+common to Britain, Scandinavia, and North America, must have spread in
+pre-glacial times, when a continent joining them did exist.
+
+But some light has been thrown on this question by an article, as
+charming as it is able, on "The Physics of the Arctic Ice," by Dr. Brown,
+of Campster.  You will find it in the 'Quarterly Journal of the
+Geological Society' for February 1870.  He shows there that even in
+Greenland peaks and crags are left free enough from ice to support a
+vegetation of between 300 or 400 species of flowering plants; and,
+therefore, he well says, we must be careful to avoid concluding that the
+plant and animal life on the dreary shores or mountain-tops of the old
+glacial Scotland was poor.  The same would hold good of our mountains;
+and, if so, we may look with respect, even with awe, on the Alpine plants
+of Wales, Scotland, and the Lake mountains, as organisms stunted, it may
+be, and even degraded, by their long battle with the elements; but
+venerable from their age, historic from their endurance.  Relics of an
+older temperate world, they have lived through thousands of centuries of
+frost and fog, to sun themselves in a temperate climate once more.  I can
+never pick one of them without a tinge of shame; and to exterminate one
+of them is to destroy for the mere pleasure of collecting the last of a
+family which God has taken the trouble to preserve for thousands of
+centuries.
+
+I trust that these hints--for I can call them nothing more--will at least
+awaken any young naturalist who has hitherto only collected natural
+objects, to study the really important and interesting question--How did
+these things get here?
+
+Now hence arise questions which may puzzle the mind of a Hampshire
+naturalist.  You have in this neighbourhood, as you well know, two, or
+rather three, soils, each carrying its peculiar vegetation.  First, you
+have the clay lying on the chalk, and carrying vast woodlands, seemingly
+primeval.  Next, you have the chalk, with its peculiar, delicate, and
+often fragrant crop of lime-loving plants; and next you have the poor
+sands and clays of the New Forest basin, saturated with iron, and
+therefore carrying a moorland or peat-loving vegetation, in many respects
+quite different from the others.  And this moorland soil, and this
+vegetation, with a few singular exceptions, repeats itself, as I daresay
+you know, in the north of the county, in the Bagshot basin, as it is
+called--the moors of Aldershot, Hartford Bridge, and Windsor Forest.
+
+Now what a variety of interesting questions are opened up by these simple
+facts.  How did these three floras get each to its present place?  Where
+did each come from?  How did it get past or through the other, till each
+set of plants, after long internecine competition, settled itself down in
+the sheet of land most congenial to it?  And when did each come hither?
+Which is the oldest?  Will any one tell me whether the heathy flora of
+the moors, or the thymy flora of the chalk downs, were the earlier
+inhabitants of these isles?  To these questions I cannot get any answer;
+and they cannot be answered without first--a very careful study of the
+range of each species of plant on the continent of Europe; and next,
+without careful study of those stupendous changes in the shape of this
+island which have taken place at a very late geological epoch.  The
+composition of the flora of our moorlands is as yet to me an utter
+puzzle.  We have Lycopodiums--three species--enormously ancient forms
+which have survived the age of ice: but did they crawl downward hither
+from the northern mountains, or upward hither from the Pyrenees?  We have
+the beautiful bog asphodel again--an enormously ancient form; for it is,
+strange to say, common to North America and to Northern Europe, but does
+not enter Asia--almost an unique instance.  It must, surely, have come
+from the north; and points--as do many species of plants and animals--to
+the time when North Europe and North America were joined.  We have,
+sparingly, in North Hampshire, though, strangely, not on the Bagshot
+moors, the Common or Northern Butterwort (_Pinguicula vulgaris_); and
+also, in the south, the New Forest part of the county, the delicate
+little _Pinguicula lusitanica_, the only species now found in Devon and
+Cornwall, marking the New Forest as the extreme eastern limit of the
+Atlantic flora.  We have again the heaths, which, as I have just said,
+are found neither in America nor in Asia, and must, I believe, have come
+from some south-western land long since submerged beneath the sea.  But
+more, we have in the New Forest two plants which are members of the South
+Europe, or properly, the Atlantic flora; which must have come from the
+south and south-east; and which are found in no other spots in these
+islands.  I mean the lovely _Gladiolus_, which grows abundantly under the
+ferns near Lyndhurst, certainly wild but it does not approach England
+elsewhere nearer than the Loire and the Rhine; and next, that delicate
+orchid, the _Spiranthes aestivalis_, which is known only in a bog near
+Lyndhurst and in the Channel Islands, while on the Continent it extends
+from southern Europe all through France.  Now, what do these two plants
+mark?  They give us a point in botany, though not in time, to determine
+when the south of England was parted from the opposite shores of France;
+and whenever that was, it was just after the Gladiolus and Spiranthes got
+hither.  Two little colonies of these lovely flowers arrived just before
+their retreat was cut off.  They found the country already occupied with
+other plants; and, not being reinforced by fresh colonists from the
+south, have not been able to spread farther north than Lyndhurst.  Thus,
+in the New Forest, and, I may say, in the Bagshot moors, you find plants
+which you do not expect, and do not find plants which you do expect; and
+you are, or ought to be, puzzled, and I hope also interested, and stirred
+up to find out more.
+
+I spoke just now of the time when England was joined to France, as
+bearing on Hampshire botany.  It bears no less on Hampshire zoology.  In
+insects, for instance, the presence of the purple emperor and the white
+admiral in our Hampshire woods, as well as the abundance of the great
+stag-beetle, point to a time when the two countries were joined, at
+least, as far west as Hampshire; while the absence of these insects
+farther to the westward shows that the countries, if ever joined, were
+already parted; and that those insects have not yet had time to spread
+westward.  The presence of these two butterflies, and partly of the stag-
+beetle, along the south-east coast of England as far as the primeval
+forests of South Lincolnshire, points--as do a hundred other facts--to a
+time when the Straits of Dover either did not exist, or were the bed of a
+river running from the west; and when, as I told you just now, all the
+rivers which now run into the German Ocean, from the Humber on the west
+to the Elbe on the east, discharged themselves into the sea between
+Scotland and Norway, after wandering through a vast lowland, covered with
+countless herds of mammoth, rhinoceros, gigantic ox, and other mammals
+now extinct; while the birds, as far as we know; the insects; the fresh-
+water fish; and even, as my friend Mr. Brady has proved, the
+_Entomostraca_ of the rivers, were the same in what is now Holland as in
+what is now our Eastern counties.  I could dwell long on this matter.  I
+could talk long about how certain species of _Lepidoptera_--moths and
+butterflies--like _Papilio Machaon_ and _P. Podalirius_, swarm through
+France, reach up to the British Channel, and have not crossed it; with
+the exception of one colony of _Machaon_ in the Cambridgeshire fens.  I
+could talk long about a similar phenomenon in the case of our migratory
+and singing birds: how many exquisite species--notably those two glorious
+songsters, the Orphean Warbler and Hippolais, which delight our ears
+everywhere on the other side of the Channel--follow our nightingales,
+blackcaps, and warblers northward every spring almost to the Straits of
+Dover: but dare not cross, simply because they have been, as it were,
+created since the gulf was opened, and have never learnt from their
+parents how to fly over it.
+
+In the case of fishes, again, I might say much on the curious fact that
+the Cyprinidae, or white fish--carp, &c.--and their natural enemy, the
+pike, are indigenous, I believe, only to the rivers, English or
+continental, on the eastern side of the Straits of Dover; while the
+rivers on the western side were originally tenanted, like our Hampshire
+streams, as now, almost entirely by trout, their only Cyprinoid being the
+minnow--if it, too, be not an interloper; and I might ask you to consider
+the bearing of this curious fact on the former junction of England and
+France.
+
+But I have only time to point out to you a few curious facts with regard
+to reptiles, which should be specially interesting to a Hampshire bio-
+geologist.  You know, of course, that in Ireland there are no reptiles,
+save the little common lizard, _Lacerta agilis_, and a few frogs on the
+mountain-tops--how they got there I cannot conceive.  And you will, of
+course, guess, and rightly, that the reason of the absence of reptiles
+is: that Ireland was parted off from England before the creatures, which
+certainly spread from southern and warmer climates, had time to get
+there.  You know, of course, that we have a few reptiles in England.  But
+you may not be aware that, as soon as you cross the Channel, you find
+many more species of reptiles than here, as well as those which you find
+here.  The magnificent green lizard which rattles about like a rabbit in
+a French forest, is never found here; simply because it had not worked
+northward till after the Channel was formed.  But there are three
+reptiles peculiar to this part of England which should be most
+interesting to a Hampshire zoologist.  The one is the sand lizard (_L.
+stirpium_), found on Bourne-heath, and, I suspect, in the South Hampshire
+moors likewise--a North European and French species.  Another, the
+_Coronella laevis_, a harmless French and Austrian snake, which has been
+found about me, in North Hants and South Berks, now about fifteen or
+twenty times.  I have had three specimens from my own parish.  I believe
+it not to be uncommon; and most probably to be found, by those who will
+look, both in the New Forest and Woolmer.  The third is the Natterjack,
+or running toad (_Bufo Rubeta_), a most beautifully spotted animal, with
+a yellow stripe down his back, which is common with me at Eversley, and
+common also in many moorlands of Hants and Surrey; and, according to
+Fleming, on heaths near London, and as far north-east as Lincolnshire; in
+which case it will belong to the Germanic fauna.  Now, here again we have
+cases of animals which have just been able to get hither before the
+severance of England and France; and which, not being reinforced from the
+rear, have been forced to stop, in small and probably decreasing
+colonies, on the spots nearest the coast which were fit for them.
+
+I trust that I have not kept you too long over these details.  What I
+wish to impress upon you is that Hampshire is a county specially fitted
+for the study of important bio-geological questions.
+
+To work them out, you must trace the geology of Hampshire, and, indeed,
+of East Dorset.  You must try to form a conception of how the land was
+shaped in miocene times, before that tremendous upheaval which reared the
+chalk cliffs at Freshwater upright, lifting the tertiary beds upon their
+northern slopes.  You must ask--Was there not land to the south of the
+Isle of Wight in those ages, and for ages after; and what was its extent
+and shape?  You must ask--When was the gap between the Isle of Wight and
+the Isle of Purbeck sawn through, leaving the Needles as remnants on one
+side, and Old Harry on the opposite?  And was it sawn asunder merely by
+the age-long gnawing of the waves?  You must ask--Where did the great
+river which ran from the west, where Poole Harbour is now, and probably
+through what is now the Solent, depositing brackish water-beds right and
+left--where, I say, did it run into the sea?  Where the Straits of Dover
+are now?  Or, if not there, where?  What, too, is become of the land to
+the Westward, composed of ancient metamorphic rocks, out of which it ran,
+and deposited on what are now the Haggerstone Moors of Poole, vast beds
+of grit?  What was the climate on its banks when it washed down the
+delicate leaves of broad-leaved trees, akin to our modern English ones,
+which are found in the fine mud-sand strata of Bournemouth?  When,
+finally, did it dwindle down to the brook which now runs through Wareham
+town?  Was its bed sea, or dry land, or under an ice sheet, during the
+long ages of the glacial epoch?  And if you say--Who is sufficient for
+these things?--Who can answer these questions?  I answer--Who but you, or
+your pupils after you, if you will but try?
+
+And if any shall reply--And what use if I do try?  What use, if I do try?
+What use if I succeed in answering every question which you have
+propounded to-night?  Shall I be the happier for it?  Shall I be the
+wiser?
+
+My friends, whether you will be the happier for it, or for any knowledge
+of physical science, or for any other knowledge whatsoever, I cannot
+tell: that lies in the decision of a Higher Power than I; and, indeed, to
+speak honestly, I do not think that bio-geology or any other branch of
+physical science is likely, at first at least, to make you happy.  Neither
+is the study of your fellow-men.  Neither is religion itself.  We were
+not sent into the world to be happy, but to be right; at least, poor
+creatures that we are, as right as we can be; and we must be content with
+being right, and not happy.  For I fear, or rather I hope, that most of
+us are not capable of carrying out Talleyrand's recipe for perfect
+happiness on earth--namely, a hard heart and a good digestion.  Therefore,
+as our hearts are, happily, not always hard, and our digestions,
+unhappily, not always good, we will be content to be made wise by
+physical science, even though we be not made happy.
+
+And we shall be made truly wise if we be made content; content, too, not
+only with what we can understand, but, content with what we do not
+understand--the habit of mind which theologians call--and rightly--faith
+in God; the true and solid faith, which comes often out of sadness, and
+out of doubt, such as bio-geology may well stir in us at first sight.  For
+our first feeling will be--I know mine was when I began to look into
+these matters--one somewhat of dread and of horror.
+
+Here were all these creatures, animal and vegetable, competing against
+each other.  And their competition was so earnest and complete, that it
+did not mean--as it does among honest shopkeepers in a civilised
+country--I will make a little more money than you; but--I will crush you,
+enslave you, exterminate you, eat you up.  "Woe to the weak," seems to be
+Nature's watchword.  The Psalmist says, "The righteous shall inherit the
+land."  If you go to a tropical forest, or, indeed, if you observe
+carefully a square acre of any English land, cultivated or uncultivated,
+you will find that Nature's text at first sight looks a very different
+one.  She seems to say--Not the righteous, but the strong, shall inherit
+the land.  Plant, insect, bird, what not--Find a weaker plant, insect,
+bird, than yourself, and kill it, and take possession of its little
+vineyard, and no Naboth's curse shall follow you: but you shall inherit,
+and thrive therein, you, and your children after you, if they will be
+only as strong and as cruel as you are.  That is Nature's law: and is it
+not at first sight a fearful law?  Internecine competition, ruthless
+selfishness, so internecine and so ruthless that, as I have wandered in
+tropic forests, where this temper is shown more quickly and fiercely,
+though not in the least more evilly, than in our slow and cold temperate
+one, I have said--Really these trees and plants are as wicked as so many
+human beings.
+
+Throughout the great republic of the organic world, the motto of the
+majority is, and always has been as far back as we can see, what it is,
+and always has been, with the majority of human beings, "Every one for
+himself, and the devil take the hindmost."  Over-reaching tyranny; the
+temper which fawns, and clings, and plays the parasite as long as it is
+down, and when it has risen, fattens on its patron's blood and
+life--these, and the other works of the flesh, are the works of average
+plants and animals, as far as they can practise them.  At least, so says
+at first sight the science of bio-geology; till the naturalist, if he be
+also human and humane, is glad to escape from the confusion and darkness
+of the universal battle-field of selfishness into the order and light of
+Christmas-tide.
+
+For then there comes to him the thought--And are these all the facts?  And
+is this all which the facts mean?  That mutual competition is one law of
+Nature, we see too plainly.  But is there not, besides that law, a law of
+mutual help?  True it is, as the wise man has said, that the very hyssop
+on the wall grows there because all the forces of the universe could not
+prevent its growing.  All honour to the hyssop.  A brave plant, it has
+fought a brave fight, and has its just deserts--as everything in Nature
+has--and so has won.  But did all the powers of the universe combine to
+prevent it growing?  Is not that a one-sided statement of facts?  Did not
+all the powers of the universe also combine to make it grow, if only it
+had valour and worth wherewith to grow?  Did not the rains feed it, the
+very mortar in the wall give lime to its roots?  Were not electricity,
+gravitation, and I know not what of chemical and mechanical forces, busy
+about the little plant, and every cell of it, kindly and patiently ready
+to help it, if it would only help itself?  Surely this is true; true of
+every organic thing, animal and vegetable, and mineral, too, for aught I
+know: and so we must soften our sadness at the sight of the universal
+mutual war by the sight of an equally universal mutual help.
+
+But more.  It is true--too true if you will--that all things live on each
+other.  But is it not, therefore, equally true that all things live for
+each other?--that self-sacrifice, and not selfishness, is at the bottom
+the law of Nature, as it is the law of Grace; and the law of bio-geology,
+as it is the law of all religion and virtue worthy of the name?  Is it
+not true that everything has to help something else to live, whether it
+knows it or not?--that not a plant or an animal can turn again to its
+dust without giving food and existence to other plants, other
+animals?--that the very tiger, seemingly the most useless tyrant of all
+tyrants, is still of use, when, after sending out of the world suddenly,
+and all but painlessly, many an animal which would without him have
+starved in misery through a diseased old age, he himself dies, and, in
+dying, gives, by his own carcase, the means of life and of enjoyment to a
+thousandfold more living creatures than ever his paws destroyed?
+
+And so, the longer one watches the great struggle for existence, the more
+charitable, the more hopeful, one becomes; as one sees that, consciously
+or unconsciously, the law of Nature is, after all, self-sacrifice;
+unconscious in plants and animals, as far as we know; save always those
+magnificent instances of true self-sacrifice shown by the social insects,
+by ants, bees, and others, which put to shame by a civilization truly
+noble--why should I not say divine, for God ordained it?--the selfishness
+and barbarism of man.  But be that as it may, in man the law of
+self-sacrifice--whether unconscious or not in the animals--rises into
+consciousness just as far as he is a man; and the crowning lesson of bio-
+geology may be, when we have worked it out, after all, the lesson of
+Christmas-tide--of the infinite self-sacrifice of God for man; and Nature
+as well as religion may say to us--
+
+   "Ah, could you crush that ever craving lust
+   For bliss, which kills all bliss, and lose your life,
+   Your barren unit life, to find again
+   A thousand times in those for whom you die--
+   So were you men and women, and should hold
+   Your rightful rank in God's great universe,
+   Wherein, in heaven or earth, by will or nature,
+   Naught lives for self.  All, all, from crown to base--
+   The Lamb, before the world's foundation slain--
+   The angels, ministers to God's elect--
+   The sun, who only shines to light the worlds--
+   The clouds, whose glory is to die in showers--
+   The fleeting streams, who in their ocean graves
+   Flee the decay of stagnant self-content--
+   The oak, ennobled by the shipwright's axe--
+   The soil, which yields its marrow to the flower--
+   The flower, which feeds a thousand velvet worms
+   Born only to be prey to every bird--
+   All spend themselves on others: and shall man,
+   Whose two-fold being is the mystic knot
+   Which couples earth with heaven, doubly bound,
+   As being both worm and angel, to that service
+   By which both worms and angels hold their life,
+   Shall he, whose every breath is debt on debt,
+   Refuse, forsooth, to be what God has made him?
+   No; let him show himself the creatures' Lord
+   By free-will gift of that self-sacrifice
+   Which they, perforce, by Nature's laws endure."
+
+My friends, scientific and others, if the study of bio-geology shall help
+to teach you this, or anything like this; I think that though it may not
+make you more happy, it may yet make you more wise; and, therefore, what
+is better than being more happy, namely, more blessed.
+
+
+
+
+HEROISM
+
+
+It is an open question whether the policeman is not demoralizing us; and
+that in proportion as he does his duty well; whether the perfection of
+justice and safety, the complete "preservation of body and goods," may
+not reduce the educated and comfortable classes into that lap-dog
+condition in which not conscience, but comfort, doth make cowards of us
+all.  Our forefathers had, on the whole, to take care of themselves; we
+find it more convenient to hire people to take care of us.  So much the
+better for us, in some respects: but, it may be, so much the worse in
+others.  So much the better; because, as usually results from the
+division of labour, these people, having little or nothing to do save to
+take care of us, do so far better than we could; and so prevent a vast
+amount of violence and wrong, and therefore of misery, especially to the
+weak: for which last reason we will acquiesce in the existence of
+policemen and lawyers, as we do in the results of arbitration, as the
+lesser of two evils.  The odds in war are in favour of the bigger bully;
+in arbitration, in favour of the bigger rogue; and it is a question
+whether the lion or the fox be the safer guardian of human interests.  But
+arbitration prevents war: and that, in three cases out of four, is full
+reason for employing it.
+
+On the other hand, the lap-dog condition, whether in dogs or in men, is
+certainly unfavourable to the growth of the higher virtues.  Safety and
+comfort are good, indeed, for the good; for the brave, the
+self-originating, the earnest.  They give to such a clear stage and no
+favour wherein to work unhindered for their fellow-men.  But for the
+majority, who are neither brave, self-originating, nor earnest, but the
+mere puppets of circumstance, safety and comfort may, and actually do,
+merely make their lives mean and petty, effeminate and dull.  Therefore
+their hearts must be awakened, as often as possible, to take exercise
+enough for health; and they must be reminded, perpetually and
+importunately, of what a certain great philosopher called "whatsoever
+things are true, honourable, just, pure, lovely, and of good report;" "if
+there be any manhood, and any just praise, to think of such things."
+
+This pettiness and dulness of our modern life is just what keeps alive
+our stage, to which people go to see something a little less petty, a
+little less dull, than what they see at home.  It is, too, the cause of--I
+had almost said the excuse for--the modern rage for sensational novels.
+Those who read them so greedily are conscious, poor souls, of capacities
+in themselves of passion and action, for good and evil, for which their
+frivolous humdrum daily life gives no room, no vent.  They know too well
+that human nature can be more fertile, whether in weeds and poisons, or
+in flowers and fruits, than it is usually in the streets and houses of a
+well-ordered and tolerably sober city.  And because the study of human
+nature is, after all, that which is nearest to every one and most
+interesting to every one, therefore they go to fiction, since they cannot
+go to fact, to see what they themselves might be had they the chance; to
+see what fantastic tricks before high heaven men and women like
+themselves can play; and how they play them.
+
+Well: it is not for me to judge, for me to blame.  I will only say that
+there are those who cannot read sensational novels, or, indeed, any
+novels at all, just because they see so many sensational novels being
+enacted round them in painful facts of sinful flesh and blood.  There are
+those, too, who have looked in the mirror too often to wish to see their
+own disfigured visage in it any more; who are too tired of themselves and
+ashamed of themselves to want to hear of people like themselves; who want
+to hear of people utterly unlike themselves, more noble, and able, and
+just, and sweet, and pure; who long to hear of heroism and to converse
+with heroes; and who, if by chance they meet with an heroic act, bathe
+their spirits in that, as in May-dew, and feel themselves thereby, if but
+for an hour, more fair.
+
+If any such shall chance to see these words, let me ask them to consider
+with me that one word Hero, and what it means.
+
+Hero; Heroic; Heroism.  These words point to a phase of human nature, the
+capacity for which we all have in ourselves, which is as startling and as
+interesting in its manifestations as any, and which is always beautiful,
+always ennobling, and therefore always attractive to those whose hearts
+are not yet seared by the world or brutalized by self-indulgence.
+
+But let us first be sure what the words mean.  There is no use talking
+about a word till we have got at its meaning.  We may use it as a cant
+phrase, as a party cry on platforms; we may even hate and persecute our
+fellow-men for the sake of it: but till we have clearly settled in our
+own minds what a word means, it will do for fighting with, but not for
+working with.  Socrates of old used to tell the young Athenians that the
+ground of all sound knowledge was--to understand the true meaning of the
+words which were in their mouths all day long; and Socrates was a wiser
+man than we shall ever see.  So, instead of beginning an oration in
+praise of heroism, I shall ask my readers to think with me what heroism
+is.
+
+Now, we shall always get most surely at the meaning of a word by getting
+at its etymology--that is, at what it meant at first.  And if heroism
+means behaving like a hero, we must find out, it seems to me, not merely
+what a hero may happen to mean just now, but what it meant in the
+earliest human speech in which we find it.
+
+A hero or a heroine, then, among the old Homeric Greeks, meant a man or
+woman who was like the gods; and who, from that likeness, stood superior
+to his or her fellow-creatures.  Gods, heroes, and men, is a threefold
+division of rational beings, with which we meet more than once or twice.
+Those grand old Greeks felt deeply the truth of the poet's saying--
+
+      "Unless above himself he can
+   Exalt himself, how poor a thing is man."
+
+But more: the Greeks supposed these heroes to be, in some way or other,
+partakers of a divine nature; akin to the gods; usually, either they, or
+some ancestor of theirs, descended from a god or goddess.  Those who have
+read Mr. Gladstone's 'Juventus Mundi' will remember the section (cap. ix.
+section 6) on the modes of the approximation between the divine and the
+human natures; and whether or not they agree with the author altogether,
+all will agree, I think, that the first idea of a hero or a heroine was a
+godlike man or godlike woman.
+
+A godlike man.  What varied, what infinite forms of nobleness that word
+might include, ever increasing, as men's notions of the gods became purer
+and loftier, or, alas! decreasing, as their notions became degraded.  The
+old Greeks, with that intense admiration of beauty which made them, in
+after ages, the master sculptors and draughtsmen of their own, and,
+indeed, of any age, would, of course, require in their hero, their
+godlike man, beauty and strength, manners, too, and eloquence, and all
+outward perfections of humanity, and neglect his moral qualities.
+Neglect, I say, but not ignore.  The hero, by virtue of his kindred with
+the gods, was always expected to be a better man than common men, as
+virtue was then understood.  And how better?  Let us see.
+
+The hero was at least expected to be more reverent than other men to
+those divine beings of whose nature he partook, whose society he might
+enjoy even here on earth.  He might be unfaithful to his own high
+lineage; he might misuse his gifts by selfishness and self-will; he
+might, like Ajax, rage with mere jealousy and wounded pride till his rage
+ended in shameful madness and suicide.  He might rebel against the very
+gods, and all laws of right and wrong, till he perished in his [Greek
+text],
+
+   "Smitten down, blind in his pride, for a sign and a terror to
+   mortals."
+
+But he ought to have, he must have, to be true to his name of Hero,
+justice, self-restraint, and [Greek text]--that highest form of modesty,
+for which we have, alas! no name in the English tongue; that perfect
+respect for the feelings of others which springs out of perfect
+self-respect.  And he must have, too--if he were to be a hero of the
+highest type--the instinct of helpfulness; the instinct that, if he were
+a kinsman of the gods, he must fight on their side, through toil and
+danger, against all that was unlike them, and therefore hateful to them.
+Who loves not the old legends, unsurpassed for beauty in the literature
+of any race, in which the hero stands out as the deliverer, the destroyer
+of evil?  Theseus ridding the land of robbers, and delivering it from the
+yearly tribute of boys and maidens to be devoured by the Minotaur;
+Perseus slaying the Gorgon, and rescuing Andromeda from the sea-beast;
+Heracles with his twelve famous labours against giants and monsters; and
+all the rest--
+
+   "Who dared, in the god-given might of their manhood
+   Greatly to do and to suffer, and far in the fens and the forests
+   Smite the devourers of men, heaven-hated, brood of the giants;
+   Transformed, strange, without like, who obey not the golden-haired
+   rulers"--
+
+These are figures whose divine moral beauty has sunk into the hearts, not
+merely of poets or of artists, but of men and women who suffered and who
+feared; the memory of them, fables though they may have been, ennobled
+the old Greek heart; they ennobled the heart of Europe in the fifteenth
+century, at the rediscovery of Greek literature.  So far from
+contradicting the Christian ideal, they harmonised with--I had almost
+said they supplemented--that more tender and saintly ideal of heroism
+which had sprung up during the earlier Middle Ages.  They justified, and
+actually gave a new life to, the old noblenesses of chivalry, which had
+grown up in the later Middle Ages as a necessary supplement of active and
+manly virtue to the passive and feminine virtue of the cloister.  They
+inspired, mingling with these two other elements, a literature, both in
+England, France, and Italy, in which the three elements, the saintly, the
+chivalrous, and the Greek heroic, have become one and undistinguishable,
+because all three are human, and all three divine; a literature which
+developed itself in Ariosto, in Tasso, in the Hypnerotomachia, the
+Arcadia, the Euphues, and other forms, sometimes fantastic, sometimes
+questionable, but which reached its perfection in our own Spenser's
+'Fairy Queen'--perhaps the most admirable poem which has ever been penned
+by mortal man.
+
+And why?  What has made these old Greek myths live, myths though they be,
+and fables, and fair dreams?  What, though they have no body, and,
+perhaps, never had, has given them an immortal soul, which can speak to
+the immortal souls of all generations to come?
+
+What but this, that in them--dim it may be and undeveloped, but still
+there--lies the divine idea of self-sacrifice as the perfection of
+heroism; of self-sacrifice, as the highest duty and the highest joy of
+him who claims a kindred with the gods?
+
+Let us say, then, that true heroism must involve self-sacrifice.  Those
+stories certainly involve it, whether ancient or modern, which the
+hearts, not of philosophers merely, or poets, but of the poorest and the
+most ignorant, have accepted instinctively as the highest form of moral
+beauty--the highest form, and yet one possible to all.
+
+Grace Darling rowing out into the storm toward the wreck.--The "drunken
+private of the Buffs," who, prisoner among the Chinese, and commanded to
+prostrate himself and kotoo, refused in the name of his country's
+honour--"He would not bow to any Chinaman on earth:" and so was knocked
+on the head, and died surely a hero's death.--Those soldiers of the
+'Birkenhead,' keeping their ranks to let the women and children escape,
+while they watched the sharks who in a few minutes would be tearing them
+limb from limb.--Or, to go across the Atlantic--for there are heroes in
+the Far West--Mr. Bret Harte's "Flynn of Virginia," on the Central
+Pacific Railway--the place is shown to travellers--who sacrificed his
+life for his married comrade,--
+
+   "There, in the drift,
+   Back to the wall,
+   He held the timbers
+   Ready to fall.
+   Then in the darkness
+   I heard him call,--
+   'Run for your life, Jake!
+   Run for your wife's sake!
+   Don't wait for me.'
+
+   "And that was all
+   Heard in the din--
+   Heard of Tom Flynn,
+   Flynn of Virginia."
+
+Or the engineer, again, on the Mississippi, who, when the steamer caught
+fire, held, as he had sworn he would, her bow against the bank till every
+soul save he got safe on shore,--
+
+   "Through the hot black breath of the burning boat
+      Jim Bludso's voice was heard;
+   And they all had trust in his cussedness,
+      And knew he would keep his word.
+   And sure's you're born, they all got off
+      Afore the smokestacks fell,--
+   And Bludso's ghost went up alone
+      In the smoke of the 'Prairie Belle.'
+
+   "He weren't no saint--but at judgment
+      I'd run my chance with Jim
+   'Longside of some pious gentlemen
+      That wouldn't shake hands with him.
+   He'd seen his duty--a dead sure thing--
+      And went for it there and then;
+   And Christ is not going to be too hard
+      On a man that died for men."
+
+To which gallant poem of Colonel John Hay's--and he has written many
+gallant and beautiful poems--I have but one demurrer: Jim Bludso did not
+merely do his duty, but more than his duty.  He did a voluntary deed, to
+which he was bound by no code or contract, civil or moral; just as he who
+introduced me to that poem won his Victoria Cross--as many a cross,
+Victoria and other, has been won--by volunteering for a deed to which he,
+too, was bound by no code or contract, military or moral.  And it is of
+the essence of self-sacrifice, and, therefore, of heroism, that it should
+be voluntary; a work of supererogation, at least towards society and man:
+an act to which the hero or heroine is not bound by duty, but which is
+above though not against duty.
+
+Nay, on the strength of that same element of self-sacrifice, I will not
+grudge the epithet heroic, which my revered friend Mr. Darwin justly
+applies to the poor little monkey, who once in his life did that which
+was above his duty; who lived in continual terror of the great baboon,
+and yet, when the brute had sprung upon his friend the keeper, and was
+tearing out his throat, conquered his fear by love, and, at the risk of
+instant death, sprang in turn upon his dreaded enemy, and bit and
+shrieked till help arrived.
+
+Some would now-a-days use that story merely to prove that the monkey's
+nature and the man's nature are, after all, one and the same.  Well: I,
+at least, have never denied that there is a monkey-nature in man as there
+is a peacock-nature, and a swine-nature, and a wolf-nature--of all which
+four I see every day too much.  The sharp and stern distinction between
+men and animals, as far as their natures are concerned, is of a more
+modern origin than people fancy.  Of old the Assyrian took the eagle, the
+ox, and the lion--and not unwisely--as the three highest types of human
+capacity.  The horses of Homer might be immortal, and weep for their
+master's death.  The animals and monsters of Greek myth--like the Ananzi
+spider of Negro fable--glide insensibly into speech and reason.  Birds--the
+most wonderful of all animals in the eyes of a man of science or a
+poet--are sometimes looked on as wiser, and nearer to the gods, than man.
+The Norseman--the noblest and ablest human being, save the Greek, of whom
+history can tell us--was not ashamed to say of the bear of his native
+forests that he had "ten men's strength and eleven men's wisdom."  How
+could Reinecke Fuchs have gained immortality, in the Middle Ages and
+since, save by the truth of its too solid and humiliating theorem--that
+the actions of the world of men were, on the whole, guided by passions
+but too exactly like those of the lower animals?  I have said, and say
+again, with good old Vaughan--
+
+      "Unless above himself he can
+   Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man."
+
+But I cannot forget that many an old Greek poet or sage, and many a
+sixteenth and seventeenth century one, would have interpreted the
+monkey's heroism from quite a different point of view; and would have
+said that the poor little creature had been visited suddenly by some
+"divine afflatus"--an expression quite as philosophical and quite as
+intelligible as most philosophic formulas which I read now-a-days--and
+had been thus raised for the moment above his abject selfish
+monkey-nature, just as man requires to be raised above his.  But that
+theory belongs to a philosophy which is out of date and out of fashion,
+and which will have to wait a century or two before it comes into fashion
+again.
+
+And now: if self-sacrifice and heroism be, as I believe, identical, I
+must protest against a use of the word sacrifice which is growing too
+common in newspaper-columns, in which we are told of an "enormous
+sacrifice of life;" an expression which means merely that a great many
+poor wretches have been killed, quite against their own will, and for no
+purpose whatsoever: no sacrifice at all, unless it be one to the demons
+of ignorance, cupidity or mismanagement.
+
+The stout Whig undergraduate understood better the meaning of such words,
+who, when asked, "In what sense might Charles the First be said to be a
+martyr?" answered, "In the same sense that a man might be said to be a
+martyr to the gout."
+
+And I must protest, in like wise, against a misuse of the words hero,
+heroism, heroic, which is becoming too common, namely, applying them to
+mere courage.  We have borrowed the misuse, I believe, as we have more
+than one beside, from the French press.  I trust that we shall neither
+accept it, nor the temper which inspires it.  It may be convenient for
+those who flatter their nation, and especially the military part of it,
+into a ruinous self-conceit, to frame some such syllogism as
+this--"Courage is heroism: every Frenchman is naturally courageous:
+therefore every Frenchman is a hero."  But we, who have been trained at
+once in a sounder school of morals, and in a greater respect for facts,
+and for language as the expression of facts, shall be careful, I hope,
+not to trifle thus with that potent and awful engine--human speech.  We
+shall eschew likewise, I hope, a like abuse of the word moral, which has
+crept from the French press now and then, not only into our own press,
+but into the writings of some of our military men, who, as Englishmen,
+should have known better.  We were told again and again, during the late
+war, that the moral effect of such a success had been great; that the
+morale of the troops was excellent; or again, that the morale of the
+troops had suffered, or even that they were somewhat demoralised.  But
+when one came to test what was really meant by these fine words, one
+discovered that morals had nothing to do with the facts which they
+expressed; that the troops were in the one case actuated simply by the
+animal passion of hope, in the other simply by the animal passion of
+fear.  This abuse of the word moral has crossed, I am sorry to say, the
+Atlantic; and a witty American, whom we must excuse, though we must not
+imitate, when some one had been blazing away at him with a revolver, he
+being unarmed, is said to have described his very natural emotions on the
+occasion, by saying that he felt dreadfully demoralised.  We, I hope,
+shall confine the word demoralisation, as our generals of the last
+century would have done, when applied to soldiers, to crime, including,
+of course, the neglect of duty or of discipline; and we shall mean by the
+word heroism in like manner, whether applied to a soldier or to any human
+being, not mere courage; not the mere doing of duty: but the doing of
+something beyond duty; something which is not in the bond; some
+spontaneous and unexpected act of self-devotion.
+
+I am glad, but not surprised, to see that Miss Yonge has held to this
+sound distinction in her golden little book of 'Golden Deeds;' and said,
+"Obedience, at all costs and risks, is the very essence of a soldier's
+life.  It has the solid material, but it has hardly the exceptional
+brightness, of a golden deed."
+
+I know that it is very difficult to draw the line between mere obedience
+to duty and express heroism.  I know also that it would be both invidious
+and impertinent in an utterly unheroic personage like me, to try to draw
+that line; and to sit at home at ease, analysing and criticising deeds
+which I could not do myself: but--to give an instance or two of what I
+mean--
+
+To defend a post as long as it is tenable is not heroic.  It is simple
+duty.  To defend it after it has become untenable, and even to die in so
+doing, is not heroic, but a noble madness, unless an advantage is to be
+gained thereby for one's own side.  Then, indeed, it rises towards, if
+not into, the heroism of self-sacrifice.
+
+Who, for example, will not endorse the verdict of all ages on the conduct
+of those Spartans at Thermopylae, when they sat "combing their yellow
+hair for death" on the sea-shore?  They devoted themselves to hopeless
+destruction: but why?  They felt--I must believe that, for they behaved
+as if they felt--that on them the destinies of the Western World might
+hang; that they were in the forefront of the battle between civilisation
+and barbarism, between freedom and despotism; and that they must teach
+that vast mob of Persian slaves, whom the officers of the Great King were
+driving with whips up to their lance-points, that the spirit of the old
+heroes was not dead; and that the Greek, even in defeat and death, was a
+mightier and a nobler man than they.  And they did their work.  They
+produced, if you will, a "moral" effect, which has lasted even to this
+very day.  They struck terror into the heart, not only of the Persian
+host, but of the whole Persian empire.  They made the event of that war
+certain, and the victories of Salamis and Plataea comparatively easy.
+They made Alexander's conquest of the East, 150 years afterwards, not
+only possible at all, but permanent when it came; and thus helped to
+determine the future civilisation of the whole world.
+
+They did not, of course, foresee all this.  No great or inspired man can
+foresee all the consequences of his deeds: but these men were, as I hold,
+inspired to see somewhat at least of the mighty stake for which they
+played; and to count their lives worthless, if Sparta had sent them
+thither to help in that great game.
+
+Or shall we refuse the name of heroic to those three German cavalry
+regiments who, in the battle of Mars La Tour, were bidden to hurl
+themselves upon the chassepots and mitrailleuses of the unbroken French
+infantry, and went to almost certain death, over the corpses of their
+comrades, on and in and through, reeling man over horse, horse over man,
+and clung like bull-dogs to their work, and would hardly leave, even at
+the bugle-call, till in one regiment thirteen officers out of nineteen
+were killed or wounded?  And why?
+
+Because the French army must be stopped, if it were but for a quarter of
+an hour.  A respite must be gained for the exhausted Third Corps.  And
+how much might be done, even in a quarter of an hour, by men who knew
+when, and where, and why to die.  Who will refuse the name of heroes to
+these men?  And yet they, probably, would have utterly declined the
+honour.  They had but done that which was in the bond.  They were but
+obeying orders after all.  As Miss Yonge well says of all heroic
+persons--"'I have but done that which it was my duty to do,' is the
+natural answer of those capable of such actions.  They have been
+constrained to them by duty or pity; have never deemed it possible to act
+otherwise; and did not once think of themselves in the matter at all."
+
+These last true words bring us to another element in heroism: its
+simplicity.  Whatsoever is not simple; whatsoever is affected, boastful,
+wilful, covetous, tarnishes, even destroys, the heroic character of a
+deed; because all these faults spring out of self.  On the other hand,
+wherever you find a perfectly simple, frank, unconscious character, there
+you have the possibility, at least, of heroic action.  For it is nobler
+far to do the most commonplace duty in the household, or behind the
+counter, with a single eye to duty, simply because it must be done--nobler
+far, I say, than to go out of your way to attempt a brilliant deed, with
+a double mind, and saying to yourself not only--"This will be a brilliant
+deed," but also--"and it will pay me, or raise me, or set me off, into
+the bargain."  Heroism knows no "into the bargain."  And therefore,
+again, I must protest against applying the word heroic to any deeds,
+however charitable, however toilsome, however dangerous, performed for
+the sake of what certain French ladies, I am told, call "faire son
+salut"--saving one's soul in the world to come.  I do not mean to judge.
+Other and quite unselfish motives may be, and doubtless often are, mixed
+up with that selfish one: womanly pity and tenderness; love for, and
+desire to imitate, a certain incarnate ideal of self-sacrifice, who is at
+once human and divine.  But that motive of saving the soul, which is too
+often openly proposed and proffered, is utterly unheroic.  The desire to
+escape pains and penalties hereafter by pains and penalties here; the
+balance of present loss against future gain--what is this but selfishness
+extended out of this world into eternity?  "Not worldliness," indeed, as
+a satirist once said with bitter truth, "but other-worldliness."
+
+Moreover--and the young and the enthusiastic should also bear this in
+mind--though heroism means the going beyond the limits of strict duty, it
+never means the going out of the path of strict duty.  If it is your duty
+to go to London, go thither: you may go as much further as you choose
+after that.  But you must go to London first.  Do your duty first; it
+will be time after that to talk of being heroic.
+
+And therefore one must seriously warn the young, lest they mistake for
+heroism and self-sacrifice what is merely pride and self-will, discontent
+with the relations by which God has bound them, and the circumstances
+which God has appointed for them.  I have known girls think they were
+doing a fine thing by leaving uncongenial parents or disagreeable
+sisters, and cutting out for themselves, as they fancied, a more useful
+and elevated line of life than that of mere home duties; while, after
+all, poor things, they were only saying, with the Pharisees of old,
+"Corban, it is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me;"
+and in the name of God, neglecting the command of God to honour their
+father and mother.
+
+There are men, too, who will neglect their households and leave their
+children unprovided for, and even uneducated, while they are spending
+their money on philanthropic or religious hobbies of their own.  It is
+ill to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs; or even to the
+angels.  It is ill, I say, trying to make God presents, before we have
+tried to pay God our debts.  The first duty of every man is to the wife
+whom he has married, and to the children whom she has brought into the
+world; and to neglect them is not heroism, but self-conceit; the conceit
+that a man is so necessary to Almighty God, that God will actually allow
+him to do wrong, if He can only thereby secure the man's invaluable
+services.  Be sure that every motive which comes not from the single eye;
+every motive which springs from self; is by its very essence unheroic,
+let it look as gaudy or as beneficent as it may.
+
+But I cannot go so far as to say the same of the love of approbation--the
+desire for the love and respect of our fellow-men.
+
+That must not be excluded from the list of heroic motives.  I know that
+it is, or may be proved to be, by victorious analysis, an emotion common
+to us and the lower animals.  And yet no man excludes it less than that
+true hero, St. Paul.  If those brave Spartans, if those brave Germans, of
+whom I spoke just now, knew that their memories would be wept over and
+worshipped by brave men and fair women, and that their names would become
+watchwords to children in their fatherland: what is that to us, save that
+it should make us rejoice, if we be truly human, that they had that
+thought with them in their last moments to make self-devotion more easy,
+and death more sweet?
+
+And yet--and yet--is not the highest heroism that which is free even from
+the approbation of our fellow-men, even from the approbation of the best
+and wisest?  The heroism which is known only to our Father who seeth in
+secret?  The Godlike deeds alone in the lonely chamber?  The Godlike
+lives lived in obscurity?--a heroism rare among us men, who live perforce
+in the glare and noise of the outer world: more common among women; women
+of whom the world never hears; who, if the world discovered them, would
+only draw the veil more closely over their faces and their hearts, and
+entreat to be left alone with God.  True, they cannot always hide.  They
+must not always hide; or their fellow-creatures would lose the golden
+lesson.  But, nevertheless, it is of the essence of the perfect and
+womanly heroism, in which, as in all spiritual forces, woman transcends
+the man, that it would hide if it could.
+
+And it was a pleasant thought to me, when I glanced lately at the golden
+deeds of woman in Miss Yonge's book--it was a pleasant thought to me,
+that I could say to myself--Ah! yes.  These heroines are known, and their
+fame flies through the mouths of men.  But if so, how many thousands of
+heroines there must have been, how many thousands there may be now, of
+whom we shall never know.  But still they are there.  They sow in secret
+the seed of which we pluck the flower and eat the fruit, and know not
+that we pass the sower daily in the street; perhaps some humble ill-drest
+woman, earning painfully her own small sustenance.  She who nurses a
+bedridden mother, instead of sending her to the workhouse.  She who
+spends her heart and her money on a drunken father, a reckless brother,
+on the orphans of a kinsman or a friend.  She who--But why go on with the
+long list of great little heroisms, with which a clergyman at least comes
+in contact daily--and it is one of the most ennobling privileges of a
+clergyman's high calling that he does come in contact with them--why go
+on, I say, save to commemorate one more form of great little heroism--the
+commonest, and yet the least remembered of all--namely, the heroism of an
+average mother?  Ah, when I think of that last broad fact, I gather hope
+again for poor humanity; and this dark world looks bright, this diseased
+world looks wholesome to me once more--because, whatever else it is or is
+not full of, it is at least full of mothers.
+
+While the satirist only sneers, as at a stock butt for his ridicule, at
+the managing mother trying to get her daughters married off her hands by
+chicaneries and meannesses, which every novelist knows too well how to
+draw--would to heaven he, or rather, alas! she, would find some more
+chivalrous employment for his or her pen--for were they not, too, born of
+woman?--I only say to myself--having had always a secret fondness for
+poor Rebecca, though I love Esau more than Jacob--Let the poor thing
+alone.  With pain she brought these girls into the world.  With pain she
+educated them according to her light.  With pain she is trying to obtain
+for them the highest earthly blessing of which she can conceive, namely,
+to be well married; and if in doing that last, she manoeuvres a little,
+commits a few basenesses, even tells a few untruths, what does all that
+come to, save this--that in the confused intensity of her motherly self-
+sacrifice, she will sacrifice for her daughters even her own conscience
+and her own credit?  We may sneer, if we will, at such a poor hard-driven
+soul when we meet her in society: our duty, both as Christians and ladies
+and gentlemen, seems to me to be--to do for her something very different
+indeed.
+
+But to return.  Looking at the amount of great little heroisms, which are
+being, as I assert, enacted around us every day, no one has a right to
+say, what we are all tempted to say at times--"How can I be heroic?  This
+is no heroic age, setting me heroic examples.  We are growing more and
+more comfortable, frivolous, pleasure-seeking, money-making; more and
+more utilitarian; more and more mercenary in our politics, in our morals,
+in our religion; thinking less and less of honour and duty, and more and
+more of loss and gain.  I am born into an unheroic time.  You must not
+ask me to become heroic in it."
+
+I do not deny that it is more difficult to be heroic, while circumstances
+are unheroic round us.  We are all too apt to be the puppets of
+circumstance; all too apt to follow the fashion; all too apt, like so
+many minnows, to take our colour from the ground on which we lie, in
+hopes, like them, of comfortable concealment, lest the new tyrant deity,
+called public opinion, should spy us out, and, like Nebuchadnezzar of
+old, cast us into a burning fiery furnace--which public opinion can make
+very hot--for daring to worship any god or man save the will of the
+temporary majority.
+
+Yes, it is difficult to be anything but poor, mean, insufficient,
+imperfect people, as like each other as so many sheep; and, like so many
+sheep, having no will or character of our own, but rushing altogether
+blindly over the same gap, in foolish fear of the same dog, who, after
+all, dare not bite us; and so it always was and always will be.
+
+For the third time I say,--
+
+      "Unless above himself he can
+   Exalt himself, how poor a thing is man."
+
+But, nevertheless, any man or woman who will, in any age and under any
+circumstances, can live the heroic life and exercise heroic influences.
+
+If any ask proof of this, I shall ask them, in return, to read two
+novels; novels, indeed, but, in their method and their moral, partaking
+of that heroic and ideal element, which will make them live, I trust,
+long after thousands of mere novels have returned to their native dust.  I
+mean Miss Muloch's 'John Halifax, Gentleman,' and Mr. Thackeray's
+'Esmond,' two books which no man or woman ought to read without being the
+nobler for them.
+
+'John Halifax, Gentleman,' is simply the history of a poor young clerk,
+who rises to be a wealthy mill-owner in the manufacturing districts, in
+the early part of this century.  But he contrives to be an heroic and
+ideal clerk, and an heroic and ideal mill-owner; and that without doing
+anything which the world would call heroic or ideal, or in anywise
+stepping out of his sphere, minding simply his own business, and doing
+the duty which lies nearest him.  And how?  By getting into his head from
+youth the strangest notion, that in whatever station or business he may
+be, he can always be what he considers a gentleman; and that if he only
+behaves like a gentleman, all must go right at last.  A beautiful book.
+As I said before, somewhat of an heroic and ideal book.  A book which did
+me good when first I read it; which ought to do any young man good who
+will read it, and then try to be, like John Halifax, a gentleman, whether
+in the shop, the counting-house, the bank, or the manufactory.
+
+The other--an even more striking instance of the possibility, at least,
+of heroism anywhere and everywhere--is Mr. Thackeray's 'Esmond.'  On the
+meaning of that book I can speak with authority.  For my dear and
+regretted friend told me himself that my interpretation of it was the
+true one; that this was the lesson which he meant men to learn therefrom.
+
+Esmond is a man of the first half of the eighteenth century; living in a
+coarse, drunken, ignorant, profligate, and altogether unheroic age.  He
+is--and here the high art and the high morality of Mr. Thackeray's genius
+is shown--altogether a man of his own age.  He is not a sixteenth-century
+or a nineteenth-century man born out of time.  His information, his
+politics, his religion, are no higher than of those round him.  His
+manners, his views of human life, his very prejudices and faults, are
+those of his age.  The temptations which he conquers are just those under
+which the men around him fall.  But how does he conquer them?  By holding
+fast throughout to honour, duty, virtue.  Thus, and thus alone, he
+becomes an ideal eighteenth-century gentleman, an eighteenth-century
+hero.  This was what Mr. Thackeray meant--for he told me so himself, I
+say--that it was possible, even in England's lowest and foulest times, to
+be a gentleman and a hero, if a man would but be true to the light within
+him.
+
+But I will go further.  I will go from ideal fiction to actual, and yet
+ideal, fact; and say that, as I read history, the most unheroic age which
+the civilized world ever saw was also the most heroic; that the spirit of
+man triumphed most utterly over his circumstances, at the very moment
+when those circumstances were most against him.
+
+How and why he did so is a question for philosophy in the highest sense
+of that word.  The fact of his having done so is matter of history.  Shall
+I solve my own riddle?
+
+Then, have we not heard of the early Christian martyrs?  Is there a doubt
+that they, unlettered men, slaves, weak women, even children, did
+exhibit, under an infinite sense of duty, issuing in infinite
+self-sacrifice, a heroism such as the world had never seen before; did
+raise the ideal of human nobleness a whole stage--rather say, a whole
+heaven--higher than before; and that wherever the tale of their great
+deeds spread, men accepted, even if they did not copy, those martyrs as
+ideal specimens of the human race, till they were actually worshipped by
+succeeding generations, wrongly, it may be, but pardonably, as a choir of
+lesser deities?
+
+But is there, on the other hand, a doubt that the age in which they were
+heroic was the most unheroic of all ages; that they were bred, lived, and
+died, under the most debasing of materialist tyrannies, with art,
+literature, philosophy, family and national life dying or dead around
+them, and in cities the corruption of which cannot be told for very
+shame--cities, compared with which Paris is the abode of Arcadian
+simplicity and innocence?  When I read Petronius and Juvenal, and
+recollect that they were the contemporaries of the Apostles; when--to
+give an instance which scholars, and perhaps, happily, only scholars, can
+appreciate--I glance once more at Trimalchio's feast, and remember that
+within a mile of that feast St. Paul may have been preaching to a
+Christian congregation, some of whom--for St. Paul makes no secret of
+that strange fact--may have been, ere their conversion, partakers in just
+such vulgar and bestial orgies as those which were going on in the rich
+freedman's halls: after that, I say, I can put no limit to the
+possibility of man's becoming heroic, even though he be surrounded by a
+hell on earth; no limit to the capacities of any human being to form for
+himself or herself a high and pure ideal of human character; and, without
+"playing fantastic tricks before high heaven," to carry out that ideal in
+every-day life; and in the most commonplace circumstances, and the most
+menial occupations, to live worthy of--as I conceive--our heavenly
+birthright, and to imitate the heroes, who were the kinsmen of the gods.
+
+
+
+
+SUPERSTITION.  A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION, LONDON.
+
+
+Having accepted the very great honour of being allowed to deliver here
+two lectures, I have chosen as my subject Superstition and Science.  It
+is with Superstition that this first lecture will deal.
+
+The subject seems to me especially fit for a clergyman; for he should,
+more than other men, be able to avoid trenching on two subjects rightly
+excluded from this Institution; namely, Theology--that is, the knowledge
+of God; and Religion--that is, the knowledge of Duty.  If he knows, as he
+should, what is Theology, and what is Religion, then he should best know
+what is not Theology, and what is not Religion.
+
+For my own part, I entreat you at the outset to keep in mind that these
+lectures treat of matters entirely physical; which have in reality, and
+ought to have in our minds, no more to do with Theology and Religion than
+the proposition that theft is wrong, has to do with the proposition that
+the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles.
+
+It is necessary to premise this, because many are of opinion that
+superstition is a corruption of religion; and though they would agree
+that as such, "corruptio optimi pessima," yet they would look on religion
+as the state of spiritual health, and superstition as one of spiritual
+disease.
+
+Others, again, holding the same notion, but not considering that
+corruptio optimi pessima, have been in all ages somewhat inclined to be
+merciful to superstition, as a child of reverence; as a mere accidental
+misdirection of one of the noblest and most wholesome faculties of man.
+
+This is not the place wherein to argue with either of these parties; and
+I shall simply say that superstition seems to me altogether a physical
+affection, as thoroughly material and corporeal as those of eating or
+sleeping, remembering or dreaming.
+
+After this, it will be necessary to define superstition, in order to have
+some tolerably clear understanding of what we are talking about.  I beg
+leave to define it as--Fear of the unknown.
+
+Johnson, who was no dialectician, and, moreover, superstitious enough
+himself, gives eight different definitions of the word; which is
+equivalent to confessing his inability to define it at all:--
+
+"1.  Unnecessary fear or scruples in religion; observance of unnecessary
+and uncommanded rites or practices; religion without morality.
+
+"2.  False religion; reverence of beings not proper objects of reverence;
+false worship.
+
+"3.  Over nicety; exactness too scrupulous."
+
+Eight meanings; which, on the principle that eight eighths, or indeed
+800, do not make one whole, may be considered as no definition.  His
+first thought, as often happens, is the best--"Unnecessary fear."  But
+after that he wanders.  The root-meaning of the word is still to seek.
+But, indeed, the popular meaning, thanks to popular common sense, will
+generally be found to contain in itself the root-meaning.
+
+Let us go back to the Latin word Superstitio.  Cicero says that the
+superstitious element consists in "a certain empty dread of the gods"--a
+purely physical affection, if you will remember three things:--
+
+1.  That dread is in itself a physical affection.
+
+2.  That the gods who were dreaded were, with the vulgar, who alone
+dreaded them, merely impersonations of the powers of nature.
+
+3.  That it was physical injury which these gods were expected to
+inflict.
+
+But he himself agrees with this theory of mine; for he says shortly
+after, that not only philosophers, but even the ancient Romans, had
+separated superstition from religion; and that the word was first applied
+to those who prayed all day ut liberi sui sibi superstites essent--might
+survive them.  On the etymology no one will depend who knows the
+remarkable absence of any etymological instinct in the ancients, in
+consequence of their weak grasp of that sound inductive method which has
+created modern criticism.  But if it be correct, it is a natural and
+pathetic form for superstition to take in the minds of men who saw their
+children fade and die; probably the greater number of them beneath
+diseases which mankind could neither comprehend nor cure.
+
+The best exemplification of what the ancients meant by superstition is to
+be found in the lively and dramatic words of Aristotle's great pupil,
+Theophrastus.
+
+The superstitious man, according to him, after having washed his hands
+with lustral water--that is, water in which a torch from the altar had
+been quenched, goes about with a laurel-leaf in his mouth, to keep off
+evil influences, as the pigs in Devonshire used, in my youth, to go about
+with a withe of mountain ash round their necks to keep off the evil eye.
+If a weasel crosses his path, he stops, and either throws three pebbles
+into the road, or, with the innate selfishness of fear, lets some one
+else go before him, and attract to himself the harm which may ensue.  He
+has a similar dread of a screech-owl, whom he compliments in the name of
+its mistress, Pallas Athene.  If he finds a serpent in his house, he sets
+up an altar to it.  If he pass at a four-cross-way an anointed stone, he
+pours oil on it, kneels down, and adores it.  If a rat has nibbled one of
+his sacks he takes it for a fearful portent--a superstition which Cicero
+also mentions.  He dare not sit on a tomb, because it would be assisting
+at his own funeral.  He purifies endlessly his house, saying that
+Hecate--that is, the moon--has exercised some malign influence on it; and
+many other purifications he observes, of which I shall only say that they
+are by their nature plainly, like the last, meant as preservatives
+against unseen malarias or contagions, possible or impossible.  He
+assists every month with his children at the mysteries of the Orphic
+priests; and finally, whenever he sees an epileptic patient, he spits in
+his own bosom to avert the evil omen.
+
+I have quoted, I believe, every fact given by Theophrastus; and you will
+agree, I am sure, that the moving and inspiring element of such a
+character is mere bodily fear of unknown evil.  The only superstition
+attributed to him which does not at first sight seem to have its root in
+dread is that of the Orphic mysteries.  But of them Muller says that the
+Dionusos whom they worshipped "was an infernal deity, connected with
+Hades, and was the personification, not merely of rapturous pleasure, but
+of a deep sorrow for the miseries of human life."  The Orphic societies
+of Greece seem to have been peculiarly ascetic, taking no animal food
+save raw flesh from the sacrificed ox of Dionusos.  And Plato speaks of a
+lower grade of Orphic priests, Orpheotelestai, "who used to come before
+the doors of the rich, and promise, by sacrifices and expiatory songs, to
+release them from their own sins, and those of their forefathers;" and
+such would be but too likely to get a hearing from the man who was afraid
+of a weasel or an owl.
+
+Now, this same bodily fear, I verily believe, will be found at the root
+of all superstition whatsoever.
+
+But be it so.  Fear is a natural passion, and a wholesome one.  Without
+the instinct of self-preservation, which causes the sea-anemone to
+contract its tentacles, or the fish to dash into its hover, species would
+be extermined wholesale by involuntary suicide.
+
+Yes; fear is wholesome enough, like all other faculties, as long as it is
+controlled by reason.  But what if the fear be not rational, but
+irrational?  What if it be, in plain homely English, blind fear; fear of
+the unknown, simply because it is unknown?  Is it not likely, then, to be
+afraid of the wrong object? to be hurtful, ruinous to animals as well as
+to man?  Any one will confess that, who has ever seen a horse inflict on
+himself mortal injuries, in his frantic attempts to escape from a quite
+imaginary danger.  I have good reasons for believing that not only
+animals here and there, but whole flocks and swarms of them, are often
+destroyed, even in the wild state, by mistaken fear; by such panics, for
+instance, as cause a whole herd of buffalos to rush over a bluff, and be
+dashed to pieces.  And remark that this capacity of panic, fear--of
+superstition, as I should call it--is greatest in those animals, the dog
+and the horse for instance, which have the most rapid and vivid fancy.
+Does not the unlettered Highlander say all that I want to say, when he
+attributes to his dog and his horse, on the strength of these very
+manifestations of fear, the capacity of seeing ghosts and fairies before
+he can see them himself?
+
+But blind fear not only causes evil to the coward himself: it makes him a
+source of evil to others; for it is the cruellest of all human states.  It
+transforms the man into the likeness of the cat, who, when she is caught
+in a trap, or shut up in a room, has too low an intellect to understand
+that you wish to release her; and, in the madness of terror, bites and
+tears at the hand which tries to do her good.  Yes; very cruel is blind
+fear.  When a man dreads he knows not what, he will do he cares not what.
+When he dreads desperately, he will act desperately.  When he dreads
+beyond all reason, he will behave beyond all reason.  He has no law of
+guidance left, save the lowest selfishness.  No law of guidance: and yet
+his intellect, left unguided, may be rapid and acute enough to lead him
+into terrible follies.  Infinitely more imaginative than the lowest
+animals, he is for that very reason capable of being infinitely more
+foolish, more cowardly, more superstitious.  He can--what the lower
+animals, happily for them, cannot--organise his folly; erect his
+superstitions into a science; and create a whole mythology out of his
+blind fear of the unknown.  And when he has done that--Woe to the weak!
+For when he has reduced his superstition to a science, then he will
+reduce his cruelty to a science likewise, and write books like the
+Malleus Maleficarum, and the rest of the witch-literature of the
+fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries; of which Mr. Lecky has
+of late told the world so much, and told it most faithfully and most
+fairly.
+
+But, fear of the unknown?  Is not that fear of the unseen world?  And is
+not that fear of the spiritual world?  Pardon me: a great deal of that
+fear--all of it, indeed, which is superstition--is simply not fear of the
+spiritual, but of the material; and of nothing else.
+
+The spiritual world--I beg you to fix this in your minds--is not merely
+an invisible world which may become visible, but an invisible world which
+is by its essence invisible; a moral world, a world of right and wrong.
+And spiritual fear--which is one of the noblest of all affections, as
+bodily fear is one of the basest--is, if properly defined, nothing less
+or more than the fear of doing wrong; of becoming a worse man.
+
+But what has that to do with mere fear of the unseen?  The fancy which
+conceives the fear is physical, not spiritual.  Think for yourselves.
+What difference is there between a savage's fear of a demon, and a
+hunter's fear of a fall?  The hunter sees a fence.  He does not know what
+is on the other side: but he has seen fences like it with a great ditch
+on the other side, and suspects one here likewise.  He has seen horses
+fall at such, and men hurt thereby.  He pictures to himself his horse
+falling at that fence, himself rolling in the ditch, with possibly a
+broken limb; and he recoils from the picture he himself has made; and
+perhaps with very good reason.  His picture may have its counterpart in
+fact; and he may break his leg.  But his picture, like the previous
+pictures from which it was compounded, is simply a physical impression on
+the brain, just as much as those in dreams.
+
+Now, does the fact of the ditch, the fall, and the broken leg, being
+unseen and unknown, make them a spiritual ditch, a spiritual fall, a
+spiritual broken leg?  And does the fact of the demon and his doings,
+being as yet unseen and unknown, make them spiritual, or the harm that he
+may do, a spiritual harm?  What does the savage fear?  Lest the demon
+should appear; that is, become obvious to his physical senses, and
+produce an unpleasant physical effect on them.  He fears lest the fiend
+should entice him into the bog, break the hand-bridge over the brook,
+turn into a horse and ride away with him, or jump out from behind a tree
+and wring his neck--tolerably hard physical facts, all of them; the
+children of physical fancy, regarded with physical dread.  Even if the
+superstition proved true; even if the demon did appear; even if he wrung
+the traveller's neck in sound earnest, there would be no more spiritual
+agency or phenomenon in the whole tragedy than there is in the parlour
+table, when spiritual somethings make spiritual raps upon spiritual wood;
+and human beings, who are really spirits--and would to heaven they would
+remember that fact, and what it means--believe that anything has happened
+beyond a clumsy juggler's trick.
+
+You demur?  Do you not see that the demon, by the mere fact of having
+produced physical consequences, would have become himself a physical
+agent, a member of physical Nature, and therefore to be explained, he and
+his doings, by physical laws?  If you do not see that conclusion at first
+sight, think over it till you do.
+
+It may seem to some that I have founded my theory on a very narrow basis;
+that I am building up an inverted pyramid; or that, considering the
+numberless, complex, fantastic shapes which superstition has assumed,
+bodily fear is too simple to explain them all.
+
+But if those persons will think a second time, they must agree that my
+base is as broad as the phenomena which it explains; for every man is
+capable of fear.  And they will see, too, that the cause of superstition
+must be something like fear, which is common to all men: for all, at
+least as children, are capable of superstition; and that it must be
+something which, like fear, is of a most simple, rudimentary, barbaric
+kind; for the lowest savage, of whatever he is not capable, is still
+superstitious, often to a very ugly degree.  Superstition seems, indeed,
+to be, next to the making of stone-weapons, the earliest method of
+asserting his superiority to the brutes which has occurred to that
+utterly abnormal and fantastic lusus naturae called man.
+
+Now let us put ourselves awhile, as far as we can, in the place of that
+same savage; and try whether my theory will not justify itself; whether
+or not superstition, with all its vagaries, may have been, indeed must
+have been, the result of that ignorance and fear which he carried about
+with him, every time he prowled for food through the primeval forest.
+
+A savage's first division of nature would be, I should say, into things
+which he can eat, and things which can eat him; including, of course, his
+most formidable enemy, and most savoury food--his fellow-man.  In finding
+out what he can eat, we must remember, he will have gone through much
+experience which will have inspired him with a serious respect for the
+hidden wrath of nature; like those Himalayan folk, of whom Hooker says,
+that as they know every poisonous plant, they must have tried them
+all--not always with impunity.
+
+So he gets at a third class of objects--things which he cannot eat, and
+which will not eat him; but will only do him harm, as it seems to him,
+out of pure malice, like poisonous plants and serpents.  There are
+natural accidents, too, which fall into the same category, stones,
+floods, fires, avalanches.  They hurt him or kill him, surely for ends of
+their own.  If a rock falls from the cliff above him, what more natural
+than to suppose that there is some giant up there who threw it at him?  If
+he had been up there, and strong enough, and had seen a man walking
+underneath, he would certainly have thrown the stone at him and killed
+him.  For first, he might have eaten the man after; and even if he were
+not hungry, the man might have done him a mischief; and it was prudent to
+prevent that, by doing him a mischief first.  Besides, the man might have
+a wife; and if he killed the man, then the wife would, by a very ancient
+law common to man and animals, become the prize of the victor.  Such is
+the natural man, the carnal man, the soulish man, the [Greek text] of St.
+Paul, with five tolerably acute senses, which are ruled by five very
+acute animal passions--hunger, sex, rage, vanity, fear.  It is with the
+working of the last passion, fear, that this lecture has to do.
+
+So the savage concludes that there must be a giant living in the cliff,
+who threw stones at him, with evil intent; and he concludes in like wise
+concerning most other natural phenomena.  There is something in them
+which will hurt him, and therefore likes to hurt him: and if he cannot
+destroy them, and so deliver himself, his fear of them grows quite
+boundless.  There are hundreds of natural objects on which he learns to
+look with the same eyes as the little boys of Teneriffe look on the
+useless and poisonous _Euphorbia canariensis_.  It is to them--according
+to Mr. Piazzi Smyth--a demon who would kill them, if it could only run
+after them; but as it cannot, they shout Spanish curses at it, and pelt
+it with volleys of stones, "screeching with elfin joy, and using worse
+names than ever, when the poisonous milk spurts out from its bruised
+stalks."
+
+And if such be the attitude of the uneducated man towards the permanent
+terrors of nature, what will it be towards those which are sudden and
+seemingly capricious?--towards storms, earthquakes, floods, blights,
+pestilences?  We know too well what it has been--one of blind, and
+therefore often cruel, fear.  How could it be otherwise?  Was
+Theophrastus's superstitious man so very foolish for pouring oil on every
+round stone?  I think there was a great deal to be said for him.  This
+worship of Baetyli was rational enough.  They were aerolites, fallen from
+heaven.  Was it not as well to be civil to such messengers from above?--to
+testify by homage to them due awe of the being who had thrown them at
+men, and who though he had missed his shot that time, might not miss it
+the next?  I think if we, knowing nothing of either gunpowder, astronomy,
+or Christianity, saw an Armstrong bolt fall within five miles of London,
+we should be inclined to be very respectful to it indeed.  So the
+aerolites, or glacial boulders, or polished stone weapons of an extinct
+race, which looked like aerolites, were the children of Ouranos the
+heaven, and had souls in them.  One, by one of those strange
+transformations in which the logic of unreason indulges, the image of
+Diana of the Ephesians, which fell down from Jupiter; another was the
+Ancile, the holy shield which fell from the same place in the days of
+Numa Pompilius, and was the guardian genius of Rome; and several more
+became notable for ages.
+
+Why not?  The uneducated man of genius, unacquainted alike with
+metaphysics and with biology, sees, like a child, a personality in every
+strange and sharply-defined object.  A cloud like an angel may be an
+angel; a bit of crooked root like a man may be a man turned into
+wood--perhaps to be turned back again at its own will.  An erratic block
+has arrived where it is by strange unknown means.  Is not that an
+evidence of its personality?  Either it has flown hither itself, or some
+one has thrown it.  In the former case, it has life, and is
+proportionally formidable; in the latter, he who had thrown it is
+formidable.
+
+I know two erratic blocks of porphyry--I believe there are three--in
+Cornwall, lying one on serpentine, one, I think, on slate, which--so I
+was always informed as a boy--were the stones which St. Kevern threw
+after St. Just when the latter stole his host's chalice and paten, and
+ran away with them to the Land's End.  Why not?  Before we knew anything
+about the action of icebergs and glaciers, that is, until the last eighty
+years, that was as good a story as any other; while how lifelike these
+boulders are, let a great poet testify; for the fact has not escaped the
+delicate eye of Wordsworth:
+
+   "As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
+   Couched on the bald top of an eminence;
+   Wonder to all who do the same espy,
+   By what means it could thither come, and whence,
+   So that it seems a thing endued with sense;
+   Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf
+   Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself."
+
+To the civilised poet, the fancy becomes a beautiful simile; to a savage
+poet, it would have become a material and a very formidable fact.  He
+stands in the valley, and looks up at the boulder on the far-off fells.
+He is puzzled by it.  He fears it.  At last he makes up his mind.  It is
+alive.  As the shadows move over it, he sees it move.  May it not sleep
+there all day, and prowl for prey all night?  He had been always afraid
+of going up those fells; now he will never go.  There is a monster there.
+
+Childish enough, no doubt.  But remember that the savage is always a
+child.  So, indeed, are millions, as well clothed, housed, and policed as
+ourselves--children from the cradle to the grave.  But of them I do not
+talk; because, happily for the world, their childishness is so overlaid
+by the result of other men's manhood; by an atmosphere of civilisation
+and Christianity which they have accepted at second-hand as the
+conclusions of minds wiser than their own, that they do all manner of
+reasonable things for bad reasons, or for no reason at all, save the
+passion of imitation.  Not in them, but in the savage, can we see man as
+he is by nature, the puppet of his senses and his passions, the natural
+slave of his own fears.
+
+But has the savage no other faculties, save his five senses and five
+passions?  I do not say that.  I should be most unphilosophical if I said
+it; for the history of mankind proves that he has infinitely more in him
+than that.  Yes: but in him that infinite more, which is not only the
+noblest part of humanity; but, it may be, humanity itself, is not to be
+counted as one of the roots of superstition.  For in the savage man, in
+whom superstition certainly originates, that infinite more is still
+merely in him; inside him; a faculty: but not yet a fact.  It has not
+come out of him into consciousness, purpose, and act; and is to be
+treated as non-existent: while what has come out, his passions and
+senses, is enough to explain all the vagaries of superstition; a vera
+causa for all its phenomena.  And if we seem to have found a sufficient
+explanation already, it is unphilosophical to look further, at least till
+we have tried whether our explanation fits the facts.
+
+Nevertheless, there is another faculty in the savage, to which I have
+already alluded, common to him and to at least the higher
+vertebrates--fancy; the power of reproducing internal images of external
+objects, whether in its waking form of physical memory--if, indeed, all
+memory be not physical--or in its sleeping form of dreaming.  Upon this
+last, which has played so very important a part in superstition in all
+ages, I beg you to think a moment.  Recollect your own dreams during
+childhood; and recollect again that the savage is always a child.
+Recollect how difficult it was for you in childhood, how difficult it
+must be always for the savage, to decide whether dreams are phantasms or
+realities.  To the savage, I doubt not, the food he eats, the foes he
+grapples with, in dreams, are as real as any waking impressions.  But,
+moreover, these dreams will be very often, as children's dreams are wont
+to be, of a painful and terrible kind.  Perhaps they will be always
+painful; perhaps his dull brain will never dream, save under the
+influence of indigestion, or hunger, or an uncomfortable attitude.  And
+so, in addition to his waking experience of the terrors of nature, he
+will have a whole dream-experience besides, of a still more terrific
+kind.  He walks by day past a black cavern mouth, and thinks, with a
+shudder--Something ugly may live in that ugly hole: what if it jumped out
+upon me?  He broods over the thought with the intensity of a narrow and
+unoccupied mind; and a few nights after, he has eaten--but let us draw a
+veil before the larder of a savage--his chin is pinned down on his chest,
+a slight congestion of the brain comes on; and behold he finds himself
+again at that cavern's mouth, and something ugly does jump out upon him:
+and the cavern is a haunted spot henceforth to him and to all his tribe.
+It is in vain that his family tell him that he has been lying asleep at
+home all the while.  He has the evidence of his senses to prove the
+contrary.  He must have got out of himself, and gone into the woods.  When
+we remember that certain wise Greek philosophers could find no better
+explanation of dreaming than that the soul left the body, and wandered
+free, we cannot condemn the savage for his theory.  Now, I submit that in
+these simple facts we have a group of "true causes" which are the roots
+of all the superstitions of the world.
+
+And if any one shall complain that I am talking materialism: I shall
+answer, that I am doing exactly the opposite.  I am trying to eliminate
+and get rid of that which is material, animal, and base; in order that
+that which is truly spiritual may stand out, distinct and clear, in its
+divine and eternal beauty.
+
+To explain, and at the same time, as I think, to verify my hypothesis,
+let me give you an example--fictitious, it is true, but probable fact
+nevertheless; because it is patched up of many fragments of actual fact:
+and let us see how, in following it out, we shall pass through almost
+every possible form of superstition.
+
+Suppose a great hollow tree, in which the formidable wasps of the tropics
+have built for ages.  The average savage hurries past the spot in mere
+bodily fear; for if they come out against him, they will sting him to
+death; till at last there comes by a savage wiser than the rest, with
+more observation, reflection, imagination, independence of will--the
+genius of his tribe.
+
+The awful shade of the great tree, added to his terror of the wasps,
+weighs on him, and excites his brain.  Perhaps, too, he has had a wife or
+a child stung to death by these same wasps.  These wasps, so small, yet
+so wise, far wiser than he: they fly, and they sting.  Ah, if he could
+fly and sting; how he would kill and eat, and live right merrily.  They
+build great towns; they rob far and wide; they never quarrel with each
+other: they must have some one to teach them, to lead them--they must
+have a king.  And so he gets the fancy of a Wasp-King; as the western
+Irish still believe in the Master Otter; as the Red Men believe in the
+King of the Buffalos, and find the bones of his ancestors in the Mammoth
+remains of Big-bone Lick; as the Philistines of Ekron--to quote a
+notorious instance--actually worshipped Baal-zebub, lord of the flies.
+
+If they have a king, he must be inside that tree, of course.  If he, the
+savage, were a king, he would not work for his bread, but sit at home and
+make others feed him; and so, no doubt, does the wasp-king.
+
+And when he goes home he will brood over this wonderful discovery of the
+wasp-king; till, like a child, he can think of nothing else.  He will go
+to the tree, and watch for him to come out.  The wasps will get
+accustomed to his motionless figure, and leave him unhurt; till the new
+fancy will rise in his mind that he is a favourite of this wasp-king: and
+at last he will find himself grovelling before the tree, saying--"Oh
+great wasp-king, pity me, and tell your children not to sting me, and I
+will bring you honey, and fruit, and flowers to eat, and I will flatter
+you, and worship you, and you shall be my king."
+
+And then he would gradually boast of his discovery; of the new mysterious
+bond between him and the wasp-king; and his tribe would believe him, and
+fear him; and fear him still more when he began to say, as he surely
+would, not merely--"I can ask the wasp-king, and he will tell his
+children not to sting you:" but--"I can ask the wasp-king, and he will
+send his children, and sting you all to death."  Vanity and ambition will
+have prompted the threat: but it will not be altogether a lie.  The man
+will more than half believe his own words; he will quite believe them
+when he has repeated them a dozen times.
+
+And so he will become a great man, and a king, under the protection of
+the king of the wasps; and he will become, and it may be his children
+after him, priest of the wasp-king, who will be their fetish, and the
+fetish of their tribe.
+
+And they will prosper, under the protection of the wasp-king.  The wasp
+will become their moral ideal, whose virtues they must copy.  The new
+chief will preach to them wild eloquent words.  They must sting like
+wasps, revenge like wasps, hold all together like wasps, build like
+wasps, work hard like wasps, rob like wasps; then, like the wasps, they
+will be the terror of all around, and kill and eat all their enemies.
+Soon they will call themselves The Wasps.  They will boast that their
+king's father or grandfather, and soon that the ancestor of the whole
+tribe, was an actual wasp; and the wasp will become at once their eponym
+hero, their deity, their ideal, their civiliser; who has taught them to
+build a kraal of huts, as he taught his children to build a hive.
+
+Now, if there should come to any thinking man of this tribe, at this
+epoch, the new thought--Who made the world? he will be sorely puzzled.
+The conception of a world has never crossed his mind before.  He never
+pictured to himself anything beyond the nearest ridge of mountains; and
+as for a Maker, that will be a greater puzzle still.  What makers or
+builders more cunning than those wasps of whom his foolish head is full?
+Of course, he sees it now.  A Wasp made the world; which to him entirely
+new guess might become an integral part of his tribe's creed.  That would
+be their cosmogony.  And if, a generation or two after, another savage
+genius should guess that the world was a globe hanging in the heavens, he
+would, if he had imagination enough to take the thought in at all, put it
+to himself in a form suited to his previous knowledge and conceptions.  It
+would seem to him that The Wasp flew about the skies with the world in
+his mouth, as he carries a bluebottle fly; and that would be the
+astronomy of his tribe henceforth.  Absurd enough; but--as every man who
+is acquainted with old mythical cosmogonies must know--no more absurd
+than twenty similar guesses on record.  Try to imagine the gradual
+genesis of such myths as the Egyptian scarabaeus and egg, or the Hindoo
+theory that the world stood on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise,
+the tortoise on that infinite note of interrogation which, as some one
+expresses it, underlies all physical speculations, and judge: must they
+not have arisen in some such fashion as that which I have pointed out?
+
+This, I say, would be the culminating point of the wasp-worship, which
+had sprung up out of bodily fear of being stung.
+
+But times might come for it in which it would go through various changes,
+through which every superstition in the world, I suppose, has passed or
+is doomed to pass.
+
+The wasp-men might be conquered, and possibly eaten, by a stronger tribe
+than themselves.  What would be the result?  They would fight valiantly
+at first, like wasps.  But what if they began to fail?  Was not the wasp-
+king angry with them?  Had not he deserted them?  He must be appeased; he
+must have his revenge.  They would take a captive, and offer him to the
+wasps.  So did a North American tribe, in their need, some forty years
+ago; when, because their maize-crops failed, they roasted alive a captive
+girl, cut her to pieces, and sowed her with their corn.  I would not tell
+the story, for the horror of it, did it not bear with such fearful force
+on my argument.  What were those Red Men thinking of?  What chain of
+misreasoning had they in their heads when they hit on that as a device
+for making the crops grow?  Who can tell?  Who can make the crooked
+straight, or number that which is wanting?  As said Solomon of old, so
+must we--"The foolishness of fools is folly."  One thing only we can say
+of them, that they were horribly afraid of famine, and took that means of
+ridding themselves of their fear.
+
+But what if the wasp-tribe had no captives?  They would offer slaves.
+What if the agony and death of slaves did not appease the wasps?  They
+would offer their fairest, their dearest, their sons and their daughters,
+to the wasps; as the Carthaginians, in like strait, offered in one day
+200 noble boys to Moloch, the volcano-god, whose worship they had brought
+out of Syria; whose original meaning they had probably forgotten; of whom
+they only knew that he was a dark and devouring being, who must be
+appeased with the burning bodies of their sons and daughters.  And so the
+veil of fancy would be lifted again, and the whole superstition stand
+forth revealed as the mere offspring of bodily fear.
+
+But more; the survivors of the conquest might, perhaps, escape, and carry
+their wasp-fetish into a new land.  But if they became poor and weakly,
+their brains and imagination, degenerating with their bodies, would
+degrade their wasp-worship till they knew not what it meant.  Away from
+the sacred tree, in a country the wasps of which were not so large or
+formidable, they would require a remembrancer of the wasp-king; and they
+would make one--a wasp of wood, or what not.  After a while, according to
+that strange law of fancy, the root of all idolatry, which you may see at
+work in every child who plays with a doll, the symbol would become
+identified with the thing symbolised; they would invest the wooden wasp
+with all the terrible attributes which had belonged to the live wasps of
+the tree; and after a few centuries, when all remembrance of the tree,
+the wasp-prophet and chieftain, and his descent from the divine wasp--aye,
+even of their defeat and flight--had vanished from their songs and
+legends, they would be found bowing down in fear and trembling to a
+little ancient wooden wasp, which came from they knew not whence, and
+meant they knew not what, save that it was a very "old fetish," a "great
+medicine," or some such other formula for expressing their own ignorance
+and dread.  Just so do the half-savage natives of Thibet, and the
+Irishwomen of Kerry, by a strange coincidence--unless the ancient Irish
+were Buddhists, like the Himalayans--tie just the same scraps of rag on
+arise, and show men that they are not the puppets of Nature, but her
+lords; and that they are to fear God, and fear naught else.
+
+And so ends my true myth of the wasp-tree.  No, it need not end there; it
+may develop into a yet darker and more hideous form of superstition,
+which Europe has often seen; which is common now among the Negros; {256}
+which, we may hope, will soon be exterminated.
+
+This might happen.  For it, or something like it, has happened too many
+times already.
+
+That to the ancient women who still kept up the irrational remnant of the
+wasp-worship, beneath the sacred tree, other women might resort; not
+merely from curiosity, or an excited imagination, but from jealousy and
+revenge.  Oppressed, as woman has always been under the reign of brute
+force; beaten, outraged, deserted, at best married against her will, she
+has too often gone for comfort and help--and those of the very darkest
+kind--to the works of darkness; and there never were wanting--there are
+not wanting, even now, in remote parts of these isles--wicked old women
+who would, by help of the old superstitions, do for her what she wished.
+Soon would follow mysterious deaths of rivals, of husbands, of babes;
+then rumours of dark rites connected with the sacred tree, with poison,
+with the wasp and his sting, with human sacrifices; lies mingled with
+truth, more and more confused and frantic, the more they were
+misinvestigated by men mad with fear: till there would arise one of those
+witch-manias, which are too common still among the African Negros, which
+were too common of old among the men of our race.
+
+I say, among the men.  To comprehend a witch-mania, you must look at it
+as--what the witch-literature confesses it unblushingly to be--man's
+dread of Nature excited to its highest form, as dread of woman.
+
+She is to the barbarous man--she should be more and more to the civilised
+man--not only the most beautiful and precious, but the most wonderful and
+mysterious of all natural objects, if it be only as the author of his
+physical being.  She is to the savage a miracle to be alternately adored
+and dreaded.  He dreads her more delicate nervous organisation, which
+often takes shapes to him demoniacal and miraculous; her quicker
+instincts, her readier wit, which seem to him to have in them somewhat
+prophetic and superhuman, which entangle him as in an invisible net, and
+rule him against his will.  He dreads her very tongue, more crushing than
+his heaviest club, more keen than his poisoned arrows.  He dreads those
+habits of secresy and falsehood, the weapons of the weak, to which savage
+and degraded woman always has recourse.  He dreads the very medicinal
+skill which she has learnt to exercise, as nurse, comforter, and slave.
+He dreads those secret ceremonies, those mysterious initiations which no
+man may witness, which he has permitted to her in all ages, in so many--if
+not all--barbarous and semi-barbarous races, whether Negro, American,
+Syrian, Greek, or Roman, as a homage to the mysterious importance of her
+who brings him into the world.  If she turn against him--she, with all
+her unknown powers, she who is the sharer of his deepest secrets, who
+prepares his very food day by day--what harm can she not, may she not do?
+And that she has good reason to turn against him, he knows too well.  What
+deliverance is there from this mysterious house-fiend, save brute force?
+Terror, torture, murder, must be the order of the day.  Woman must be
+crushed, at all price, by the blind fear of the man.
+
+I shall say no more.  I shall draw a veil, for very pity and shame, over
+the most important and most significant facts of this, the most hideous
+of all human follies.  I have, I think, given you hints enough to show
+that it, like all other superstitions, is the child--the last born and
+the ugliest child--of blind dread of the unknown.
+
+
+
+
+SCIENCE: A lecture delivered at the Royal Institution.
+
+
+I said, that Superstition was the child of Fear, and Fear the child of
+Ignorance; and you might expect me to say antithetically, that Science
+was the child of Courage, and Courage the child of Knowledge.
+
+But these genealogies--like most metaphors--do not fit exactly, as you
+may see for yourselves.
+
+If fear be the child of ignorance, ignorance is also the child of fear;
+the two react on, and produce each other.  The more men dread Nature, the
+less they wish to know about her.  Why pry into her awful secrets?  It is
+dangerous; perhaps impious.  She says to them, as in the Egyptian temple
+of old--"I am Isis, and my veil no mortal yet hath lifted."  And why
+should they try or wish to lift it?  If she will leave them in peace,
+they will leave her in peace.  It is enough that she does not destroy
+them.  So as ignorance bred fear, fear breeds fresh and willing
+ignorance.
+
+And courage?  We may say, and truly, that courage is the child of
+knowledge.  But we may say as truly, that knowledge is the child of
+courage.  Those Egyptian priests in the temple of Isis would have told
+you that knowledge was the child of mystery, of special illumination, of
+reverence, and what not; hiding under grand words their purpose of
+keeping the masses ignorant, that they might be their slaves.  Reverence?
+I will yield to none in reverence for reverence.  I will all but agree
+with the wise man who said that reverence is the root of all virtues.  But
+which child reverences his father most?  He who comes joyfully and
+trustfully to meet him, that he may learn his father's mind, and do his
+will: or he who at his father's coming runs away and hides, lest he
+should be beaten for he knows not what?  There is a scientific reverence,
+a reverence of courage, which is surely one of the highest forms of
+reverence.  That, namely, which so reveres every fact, that it dare not
+overlook or falsify it, seem it never so minute; which feels that because
+it is a fact, it cannot be minute, cannot be unimportant; that it must be
+a fact of God; a message from God; a voice of God, as Bacon has it,
+revealed in things; and which therefore, just because it stands in solemn
+awe of such paltry facts as the Scolopax feather in a snipe's pinion, or
+the jagged leaves which appear capriciously in certain honeysuckles,
+believes that there is likely to be some deep and wide secret underlying
+them, which is worth years of thought to solve.  That is reverence; a
+reverence which is growing, thank God, more and more common; which will
+produce, as it grows more common still, fruit which generations yet
+unborn shall bless.
+
+But as for that other reverence, which shuts its eyes and ears in pious
+awe--what is it but cowardice decked out in state robes, putting on the
+sacred Urim and Thummim, not that men may ask counsel of the Deity, but
+that they may not?  What is it but cowardice, very pitiable when
+unmasked; and what is its child but ignorance as pitiable, which would be
+ludicrous were it not so injurious?  If a man comes up to Nature as to a
+parrot or a monkey, with this prevailing thought in his head--Will it
+bite me?--will he not be pretty certain to make up his mind that it may
+bite him, and had therefore best be left alone?  It is only the man of
+courage--few and far between--who will stand the chance of a first bite,
+in the hope of teaching the parrot to talk, or the monkey to fire off a
+gun.  And it is only the man of courage--few and far between--who will
+stand the chance of a first bite from Nature, which may kill him for
+aught he knows--for her teeth, though clumsy, are very strong--in order
+that he may tame her and break her in to his use by the very same method
+by which that admirable inductive philosopher, Mr. Rarey, used to break
+in his horses; first, by not being afraid of them; and next, by trying to
+find out what they were thinking of.  But after all, as with animals, so
+with Nature; cowardice is dangerous.  The surest method of getting bitten
+by an animal is to be afraid of it; and the surest method of being
+injured by Nature is to be afraid of it.  Only as far as we understand
+Nature are we safe from it; and those who in any age counsel mankind not
+to pry into the secrets of the universe, counsel them not to provide for
+their own life and well-being, or for their children after them.  But how
+few there have been in any age who have not been afraid of Nature.  How
+few have set themselves, like Rarey, to tame her by finding out what she
+is thinking of.  The mass are glad to have the results of science, as
+they are to buy Mr. Rarey's horses after they are tamed: but for want of
+courage or of wit, they had rather leave the taming process to some one
+else.  And therefore we may say that what knowledge of Nature we have--and
+we have very little--we owe to the courage of those men--and they have
+been very few--who have been inspired to face Nature boldly; and say--or,
+what is better, act as if they were saying--"I find something in me which
+I do not find in you; which gives me the hope that I can grow to
+understand you, though you may not understand me; that I may become your
+master, and not as now, you mine.  And if not, I will know: or die in the
+search."
+
+It is to those men, the few and far between, in a very few ages and very
+few countries, who have thus risen in rebellion against Nature, and
+looked it in the face with an unquailing glance, that we owe what we call
+Physical Science.
+
+There have been four races--or rather a very few men of each four
+races--who have faced Nature after this gallant wise.
+
+First, the old Jews.  I speak of them, be it remembered, exclusively from
+an historical, and not a religious point of view.
+
+These people, at a very remote epoch, emerged from a country highly
+civilised, but sunk in the superstitions of nature-worship.  They invaded
+and mingled with tribes whose superstitions were even more debased,
+silly, and foul than those of the Egyptians from whom they escaped.  Their
+own masses were for centuries given up to nature-worship.  Now among
+those Jews arose men--a very few--sages--prophets--call them what you
+will, the men were inspired heroes and philosophers--who assumed towards
+nature an attitude utterly different from the rest of their countrymen
+and the rest of the then world; who denounced superstition and the dread
+of nature as the parent of all manner of vice and misery; who for
+themselves said boldly that they discerned in the universe an order, a
+unity, a permanence of law, which gave them courage instead of fear.  They
+found delight and not dread in the thought that the universe obeyed a law
+which could not be broken; that all things continued to that day
+according to a certain ordinance.  They took a view of Nature totally new
+in that age; healthy, human, cheerful, loving, trustful, and yet
+reverent--identical with that which happily is beginning to prevail in
+our own day.  They defied those very volcanic and meteoric phenomena of
+their land, to which their countrymen were slaying their own children in
+the clefts of the rocks, and, like Theophrastus' superstitious man,
+pouring their drink-offerings on the smooth stones of the valley; and
+declared that, for their part, they would not fear, though the earth was
+moved, and though the hills were carried into the midst of the sea;
+though the waters raged and swelled, and the mountains shook at the
+tempest.
+
+The fact is indisputable.  And you must pardon me if I express my belief
+that these men, if they had felt it their business to found a school of
+inductive physical science, would, owing to that temper of mind, have
+achieved a very signal success.  I ground that opinion on the remarkable,
+but equally indisputable fact, that no nation has ever succeeded in
+perpetuating a school of inductive physical science, save those whose
+minds have been saturated with this same view of Nature, which they
+have--as an historic fact--slowly but thoroughly learnt from the writings
+of these Jewish sages.
+
+Such is the fact.  The founders of inductive physical science were not
+the Jews: but first the Chaldaeans, next the Greeks, next their pupils
+the Romans--or rather a few sages among each race.  But what success had
+they?  The Chaldaean astronomers made a few discoveries concerning the
+motions of the heavenly bodies, which, rudimentary as they were, still
+prove them to have been men of rare intellect.  For a great and a patient
+genius must he have been, who first distinguished the planets from the
+fixed stars, or worked out the earliest astronomical calculation.  But
+they seem to have been crushed, as it were, by their own discoveries.
+They stopped short.  They gave way again to the primeval fear of Nature.
+They sank into planet-worship.  They invented, it would seem, that
+fantastic pseudo-science of astrology, which lay for ages after as an
+incubus on the human intellect and conscience.  They became the magicians
+and quacks of the old world; and mankind owed them thenceforth nothing
+but evil.  Among the Greeks and Romans, again, those sages who dared face
+Nature like reasonable men, were accused by the superstitious mob as
+irreverent, impious, atheists.  The wisest of them all, Socrates, was
+actually put to death on that charge; and finally, they failed.  School
+after school, in Greece and Rome, struggled to discover, and to get a
+hearing for, some theory of the universe which was founded on something
+like experience, reason, common sense.  They were not allowed to
+prosecute their attempt.  The mud-ocean of ignorance and fear in which
+they struggled so manfully was too strong for them; the mud-waves closed
+over their heads finally, as the age of the Antonines expired; and the
+last effort of Graeco-Roman thought to explain the universe was
+Neoplatonism--the muddiest of the muddy--an attempt to apologise for, and
+organise into a system, all the nature-dreading superstitions of the
+Roman world.  Porphyry, Plotinus, Proclus, poor Hypatia herself, and all
+her school--they may have had themselves no bodily fear of Nature; for
+they were noble souls.  Yet they spent their time in justifying those who
+had; in apologising for the superstitions of the very mob which they
+despised: just as--it sometimes seems to me--some folk in these days are
+like to end in doing; begging that the masses might be allowed to believe
+in anything, however false, lest they should believe in nothing at all:
+as if believing in lies could do anything but harm to any human being.
+And so died the science of the old world, in a true second childhood,
+just where it began.
+
+The Jewish sages, I hold, taught that science was probable; the Greeks
+and Romans proved that it was possible.  It remained for our race, under
+the teaching of both, to bring science into act and fact.
+
+Many causes contributed to give them this power.  They were a personally
+courageous race.  This earth has yet seen no braver men than the
+forefathers of Christian Europe, whether Scandinavian or Teuton, Angle or
+Frank.  They were a practical hard-headed race, with a strong
+appreciation of facts, and a strong determination to act on them.  Their
+laws, their society, their commerce, their colonisation, their migrations
+by land and sea, proved that they were such.  They were favoured,
+moreover, by circumstances, or--as I should rather put it--by that divine
+Providence which determined their times, and the bounds of their
+habitation.  They came in as the heritors of the decaying civilisation of
+Greece and Rome; they colonised territories which gave to man special
+fair play, but no more, in the struggle for existence, the battle with
+the powers of Nature; tolerably fertile, tolerably temperate; with
+boundless means of water communication; freer than most parts of the
+world from those terrible natural phenomena, like the earthquake and the
+hurricane, before which man lies helpless and astounded, a child beneath
+the foot of a giant.  Nature was to them not so inhospitable as to starve
+their brains and limbs, as it has done for the Esquimaux or Fuegian; and
+not so bountiful as to crush them by its very luxuriance, as it has
+crushed the savages of the tropics.  They saw enough of its strength to
+respect it; not enough to cower before it: and they and it have fought it
+out; and it seems to me, standing either on London Bridge or on a Holland
+fen-dyke, that they are winning at last.  But they had a sore battle: a
+battle against their own fear of the unseen.  They brought with them, out
+of the heart of Asia, dark and sad nature-superstitions, some of which
+linger among our peasantry till this day, of elves, trolls, nixes, and
+what not.  Their Thor and Odin were at first, probably, only the thunder
+and the wind: but they had to be appeased in the dark marches of the
+forest, where hung rotting on the sacred oaks, amid carcases of goat and
+horse, the carcases of human victims.  No one acquainted with the early
+legends and ballads of our race, but must perceive throughout them all
+the prevailing tone of fear and sadness.  And to their own superstitions,
+they added those of the Rome which they conquered.  They dreaded the
+Roman she-poisoners and witches, who, like Horace's Canidia, still
+performed horrid rites in grave-yards and dark places of the earth.  They
+dreaded as magical the delicate images engraved on old Greek gems.  They
+dreaded the very Roman cities they had destroyed.  They were the work of
+enchanters.  Like the ruins of St. Albans here in England, they were all
+full of devils, guarding the treasures which the Romans had hidden.  The
+Caesars became to them magical man-gods.  The poet Virgil became the
+prince of necromancers.  If the secrets of Nature were to be known, they
+were to be known by unlawful means, by prying into the mysteries of the
+old heathen magicians, or of the Mohammedan doctors of Cordova and
+Seville; and those who dared to do so were respected and feared, and
+often came to evil ends.  It needed moral courage, then, to face and
+interpret fact.  Such brave men as Pope Gerbert, Roger Bacon, Galileo,
+even Kepler, did not lead happy lives; some of them found themselves in
+prison.  All the medieval sages--even Albertus Magnus--were stigmatised
+as magicians.  One wonders that more of them did not imitate poor
+Paracelsus, who, unable to get a hearing for his coarse common sense,
+took--vain and sensual--to drinking the laudanum which he himself had
+discovered, and vaunted as a priceless boon to men; and died as the fool
+dieth, in spite of all his wisdom.  For the "Romani nominis umbra," the
+shadow of the mighty race whom they had conquered, lay heavy on our
+forefathers for centuries.  And their dread of the great heathens was
+really a dread of Nature, and of the powers thereof.  For when the
+authority of great names has reigned unquestioned for many centuries,
+those names become, to the human mind, integral and necessary parts of
+Nature itself.  They are, as it were, absorbed into it; they become its
+laws, its canons, its demiurges, and guardian spirits; their words become
+regarded as actual facts; in one word, they become a superstition, and
+are feared as parts of the vast unknown; and to deny what they have said
+is, in the minds of the many, not merely to fly in the face of reverent
+wisdom, but to fly in the face of facts.  During a great part of the
+middle ages, for instance, it was impossible for an educated man to think
+of Nature itself, without thinking first of what Aristotle had said of
+her.  Aristotle's dicta were Nature; and when Benedetti, at Venice,
+opposed in 1585 Aristotle's opinions on violent and natural motion, there
+were hundreds, perhaps, in the universities of Europe--as there certainly
+were in the days of the immortal 'Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum'--who were
+ready, in spite of all Benedetti's professed reverence for Aristotle, to
+accuse him of outraging not only the father of philosophy, but Nature
+itself and its palpable and notorious facts.  For the restoration of
+letters in the fifteenth century had not at first mended matters, so
+strong was the dread of Nature in the minds of the masses.  The minds of
+men had sported forth, not toward any sound investigation of facts, but
+toward an eclectic resuscitation of Neoplatonism; which endured, not
+without a certain beauty and use--as let Spenser's 'Faery Queen' bear
+witness--till the latter half of the seventeenth century.
+
+After that time a rapid change began.  It is marked by--it has been
+notably assisted by--the foundation of our own Royal Society.  Its causes
+I will not enter into; they are so inextricably mixed, I hold, with
+theological questions, that they cannot be discussed here.  I will only
+point out to you these facts: that, from the latter part of the
+seventeenth century, the noblest heads and the noblest hearts of Europe
+concentrated themselves more and more on the brave and patient
+investigation of physical facts, as the source of priceless future
+blessings to mankind; that the eighteenth century, which it has been the
+fashion of late to depreciate, did more for the welfare of mankind, in
+every conceivable direction, than the whole fifteen centuries before it;
+that it did this good work by boldly observing and analysing facts; that
+this boldness toward facts increased in proportion as Europe became
+indoctrinated with the Jewish literature; and that, notably, such men as
+Kepler, Newton, Berkeley, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Descartes, in whatsoever
+else they differed, agreed in this, that their attitude towards Nature
+was derived from the teaching of the Jewish sages.  I believe that we are
+not yet fully aware how much we owe to the Jewish mind, in the gradual
+emancipation of the human intellect.  The connection may not, of course,
+be one of cause and effect; it may be a mere coincidence.  I believe it
+to be a cause; one of course of very many causes: but still an integral
+cause.  At least the coincidence is too remarkable a fact not to be
+worthy of investigation.
+
+I said, just now--The emancipation of the human intellect.  I did not
+say--Of science, or of the scientific intellect; and for this reason:
+
+That the emancipation of science is the emancipation of the common mind
+of all men.  All men can partake of the gains of free scientific thought,
+not merely by enjoying its physical results, but by becoming more
+scientific men themselves.
+
+Therefore it was, that though I began my first lecture by defining
+superstition, I did not begin my second by defining its antagonist,
+science.  For the word science defines itself.  It means simply
+knowledge; that is, of course, right knowledge, or such an approximation
+as can be obtained; knowledge of any natural object, its classification,
+its causes, its effects; or in plain English, what it is, how it came
+where it is, and what can be done with it.
+
+And scientific method, likewise, needs no definition; for it is simply
+the exercise of common sense.  It is not a peculiar, unique,
+professional, or mysterious process of the understanding: but the same
+which all men employ, from the cradle to the grave, in forming correct
+conclusions.
+
+Every one who knows the philosophic writings of Mr. John Stuart Mill,
+will be familiar with this opinion.  But to those who have no leisure to
+study him, I should recommend the reading of Professor Huxley's third
+lecture on the origin of species.
+
+In that he shows, with great logical skill, as well as with some humour,
+how the man who, on rising in the morning, finds the parlour window open,
+the spoons and teapot gone, the mark of a dirty hand on the window-sill,
+and that of a hob-nailed boot outside, and comes to the conclusion that
+some one has broken open the window and stolen the plate, arrives at that
+hypothesis--for it is nothing more--by a long and complex train of
+inductions and deductions, of just the same kind as those which,
+according to the Baconian philosophy, are to be used for investigating
+the deepest secrets of Nature.
+
+This is true, even of those sciences which involve long mathematical
+calculations.  In fact, the stating of the problem to be solved is the
+most important element in the calculation; and that is so thoroughly a
+labour of common sense that an utterly uneducated man may, and often
+does, state an abstruse problem clearly and correctly; seeing what ought
+to be proved, and perhaps how to prove it, though he may be unable to
+work the problem out, for want of mathematical knowledge.
+
+But that mathematical knowledge is not--as all Cambridge men are surely
+aware--the result of any special gift.  It is merely the development of
+those conceptions of form and number which every human being possesses;
+and any person of average intellect can make himself a fair mathematician
+if he will only pay continuous attention; in plain English, think enough
+about the subject.
+
+There are sciences, again, which do not involve mathematical calculation;
+for instance, botany, zoology, geology, which are just now passing from
+their old stage of classificatory sciences into the rank of organic ones.
+These are, without doubt, altogether within the scope of the merest
+common sense.  Any man or woman of average intellect, if they will but
+observe and think for themselves, freely, boldly, patiently, accurately,
+may judge for themselves of the conclusions of these sciences, may add to
+these conclusions fresh and important discoveries; and if I am asked for
+a proof of what I assert, I point to 'Rain and Rivers,' written by no
+professed scientific man, but by a colonel in the Guards, known to fame
+only as one of the most perfect horsemen in the world.
+
+Let me illustrate my meaning by an example.  A man--I do not say a
+geologist, but simply a man, squire or ploughman--sees a small valley,
+say one of the side-glens which open into the larger valleys in the
+Windsor forest district.  He wishes to ascertain its age.
+
+He has, at first sight, a very simple measure--that of denudation.  He
+sees that the glen is now being eaten out by a little stream, the product
+of innumerable springs which arise along its sides, and which are fed
+entirely by the rain on the moors above.  He finds, on observation, that
+this stream brings down some ten cubic yards of sand and gravel, on an
+average, every year.  The actual quantity of earth which has been removed
+to make the glen may be several million cubic yards.  Here is an easy sum
+in arithmetic.  At the rate of ten cubic yards a year, the stream has
+taken several hundred thousand years to make the glen.
+
+You will observe that this result is obtained by mere common sense.  He
+has a right to assume that the stream originally began the glen, because
+he finds it in the act of enlarging it; just as much right as he has to
+assume, if he finds a hole in his pocket, and his last coin in the act of
+falling through it, that the rest of his money has fallen through the
+same hole.  It is a sufficient cause, and the simplest.  A number of
+observations as to the present rate of denudation, and a sum which any
+railroad contractor can do in his head, to determine the solid contents
+of the valley, are all that are needed.  The method is that of science:
+but it is also that of simple common sense.  You will remember,
+therefore, that this is no mere theory or hypothesis, but a pretty fair
+and simple conclusion from palpable facts; that the probability lies with
+the belief that the glen is some hundreds of thousands of years old; that
+it is not the observer's business to prove it further, but other persons'
+to disprove it, if they can.
+
+But does the matter end here?  No.  And, for certain reasons, it is good
+that it should not end here.
+
+The observer, if he be a cautious man, begins to see if he can disprove
+his own conclusion; moreover, being human, he is probably somewhat awed,
+if not appalled, by his own conclusion.  Hundreds of thousands of years
+spent in making that little glen!  Common sense would say that the longer
+it took to make, the less wonder there was in its being made at last: but
+the instinctive human feeling is the opposite.  There is in men, and
+there remains in them, even after they are civilised, and all other forms
+of the dread of Nature have died out in them, a dread of size, of vast
+space, of vast time; that latter, mind, being always imagined as space,
+as we confess when we speak instinctively of a space of time.  They will
+not understand that size is merely a relative, not an absolute term; that
+if we were a thousand times larger than we are, the universe would be a
+thousand times smaller than it is; that if we could think a thousand
+times faster than we do, time would be a thousand times longer than it
+is; that there is One in whom we live, and move, and have our being, to
+whom one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.  I
+believe this dread of size to be merely, like all other superstitions, a
+result of bodily fear; a development of the instinct which makes a little
+dog run away from a big dog.  Be that as it may, every observer has it;
+and so the man's conclusion seems to him strange, doubtful: he will
+reconsider it.
+
+Moreover, if he be an experienced man, he is well aware that first
+guesses, first hypotheses, are not always the right ones; and if he be a
+modest man, he will consider the fact that many thousands of thoughtful
+men in all ages, and many thousands still, would say, that the glen can
+only be a few thousand, or possibly a few hundred, years old.  And he
+will feel bound to consider their opinion; as far as it is, like his own,
+drawn from facts, but no further.
+
+So he casts about for all other methods by which the glen may have been
+produced, to see if any one of them will account for it in a shorter
+time.
+
+1.  Was it made by an earthquake?  No; for the strata on both sides are
+identical, at the same level, and in the same plane.
+
+2.  Or by a mighty current?  If so, the flood must have run in at the
+upper end, before it ran out at the lower.  But nothing has run in at the
+upper end.  All round above are the undisturbed gravel beds of the
+horizontal moor, without channel or depression.
+
+3.  Or by water draining off a vast flat as it was upheaved out of the
+sea?  That is a likely guess.  The valley at its upper end spreads out
+like the fingers of a hand, as the gullies in tide-muds do.
+
+But that hypothesis will not stand.  There is no vast unbroken flat
+behind the glen.  Right and left of it are other similar glens, parted
+from it by long narrow ridges: these also must be explained on the same
+hypothesis; but they cannot.  For there could not have been
+surface-drainage to make them all, or a tenth of them.  There are no
+other possible hypotheses; and so he must fall back on the original
+theory--the rain, the springs, the brook; they have done it all, even as
+they are doing it this day.
+
+But is not that still a hasty assumption?  May not their denuding power
+have been far greater in old times than now?
+
+Why should it?  Because there was more rain then than now?  That he must
+put out of court; there is no evidence of it whatsoever.
+
+Because the land was more friable originally?  Well, there is a great
+deal to be said for that.  The experience of every countryman tells him
+that bare or fallow land is more easily washed away than land under
+vegetation.  And no doubt, when these gravels and sands rose from the
+sea, they were barren for hundreds of years.  He has some measure of the
+time required, because he can tell roughly how long it takes for sands
+and shingles left by the sea to become covered with vegetation.  But he
+must allow that the friability of the land must have been originally much
+greater than now, for hundreds of years.
+
+But again, does that fact really cut off any great space of time from his
+hundreds of thousands of years?  For when the land first rose from the
+sea, that glen was not there.  Some slight bay or bend in the shore
+determined its site.  That stream was not there.  It was split up into a
+million little springs, oozing side by side from the shore, and having
+each a very minute denuding power, which kept continually increasing by
+combination as the glen ate its way inwards, and the rainfall drained by
+all these little springs was collected into the one central stream.  So
+that when the ground being bare was most liable to be denuded, the water
+was least able to do it; and as the denuding power of the water
+increased, the land, being covered with vegetation, became more and more
+able to resist it.  All this he has seen, going on at the present day, in
+the similar gullies worn in the soft strata of the South Hampshire coast;
+especially round Bournemouth.
+
+So the two disturbing elements in the calculation may be fairly set off
+against each other, as making a difference of only a few thousands or
+tens of thousands of years either way; and the age of the glen may fairly
+be, if not a million years, yet such a length of years as mankind still
+speak of with bated breath, as if forsooth it would do them some harm.
+
+I trust that every scientific man in this room will agree with me, that
+the imaginary squire or ploughman would have been conducting his
+investigation strictly according to the laws of the Baconian philosophy.
+You will remark, meanwhile, that he has not used a single scientific
+term, or referred to a single scientific investigation; and has observed
+nothing and thought nothing which might not have been observed and
+thought by any one who chose to use his common sense, and not to be
+afraid.
+
+But because he has come round, after all this further investigation, to
+something very like his first conclusion, was all that further
+investigation useless?  No--a thousand times, no.  It is this very
+verification of hypotheses which makes the sound ones safe, and destroys
+the unsound.  It is this struggle with all sorts of superstitions which
+makes science strong and sure, and her march irresistible, winning ground
+slowly, but never receding from it.  It is this buffeting of adversity
+which compels her not to rest dangerously upon the shallow sand of first
+guesses, and single observations; but to strike her roots down, deep,
+wide, and interlaced into the solid ground of actual facts.
+
+It is very necessary to insist on this point.  For there have been men in
+all past ages--I do not say whether there are any such now, but I am
+inclined to think that there will be hereafter--men who have tried to
+represent scientific method as something difficult, mysterious, peculiar,
+unique, not to be attained by the unscientific mass; and this not for the
+purpose of exalting science, but rather of discrediting her.  For as long
+as the masses, educated or uneducated, are ignorant of what scientific
+method is, they will look on scientific men, as the middle age looked on
+necromancers, as a privileged, but awful and uncanny caste, possessed of
+mighty secrets; who may do them great good, but may also do them great
+harm.
+
+Which belief on the part of the masses will enable these persons to
+instal themselves as the critics of science, though not scientific men
+themselves: and--as Shakespeare has it--to talk of Robin Hood, though
+they never shot in his bow.  Thus they become mediators to the masses
+between the scientific and the unscientific worlds.  They tell them--You
+are not to trust the conclusions of men of science at first hand.  You
+are not fit judges of their facts or of their methods.  It is we who
+will, by a cautious eclecticism, choose out for you such of their
+conclusions as are safe for you; and them we will advise you to believe.
+To the scientific man, on the other hand, as often as anything is
+discovered unpleasing to them, they will say, imperiously and e
+cathedra--Your new theory contradicts the established facts of science.
+For they will know well that whatever the men of science think of their
+assertion, the masses will believe it; totally unaware that the speakers
+are by their very terms showing their ignorance of science; and that what
+they call established facts scientific men call merely provisional
+conclusions, which they would throw away to-morrow without a pang were
+the known facts explained better by a fresh theory, or did fresh facts
+require one.
+
+This has happened too often.  It is in the interest of superstition that
+it should happen again; and the best way to prevent it surely is to tell
+the masses--Scientific method is no peculiar mystery, requiring a
+peculiar initiation.  It is simply common sense, combined with uncommon
+courage, which includes uncommon honesty and uncommon patience; and if
+you will be brave, honest, patient, and rational, you will need no
+mystagogues to tell you what in science to believe and what not to
+believe; for you will be just as good judges of scientific facts and
+theories as those who assume the right of guiding your convictions.  You
+are men and women: and more than that you need not be.
+
+And let me say that the man of our days whose writings exemplify most
+thoroughly what I am going to say is the justly revered Mr. Thomas
+Carlyle.
+
+As far as I know he has never written on any scientific subject.  For
+aught I am aware of, he may know nothing of mathematics or chemistry, of
+comparative anatomy or geology.  For aught I am aware of, he may know a
+great deal about them all, and, like a wise man, hold his tongue, and
+give the world merely the results in the form of general thought.  But
+this I know; that his writings are instinct with the very spirit of
+science; that he has taught men, more than any living man, the meaning
+and end of science; that he has taught men moral and intellectual
+courage; to face facts boldly, while they confess the divineness of
+facts; not to be afraid of Nature, and not to worship nature; to believe
+that man can know truth; and that only in as far as he knows truth can he
+live worthily on this earth.  And thus he has vindicated, as no other man
+in our days has done, at once the dignity of Nature and the dignity of
+spirit.  That he would have made a distinguished scientific man, we may
+be as certain from his writings as we may be certain, when we see a fine
+old horse of a certain stamp, that he would have made a first-class
+hunter, though he has been unfortunately all his life in harness.
+Therefore, did I try to train a young man of science to be true, devout,
+and earnest, accurate and daring, I should say--Read what you will: but
+at least read Carlyle.  It is a small matter to me--and I doubt not to
+him--whether you will agree with his special conclusions: but his
+premises and his method are irrefragable; for they stand on the
+"voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatam"--on fact and common sense.
+
+And Mr. Carlyle's writings, if I am correct in my estimate of them, will
+afford a very sufficient answer to those who think that the scientific
+habit of mind tends to irreverence.
+
+Doubtless this accusation will always be brought against science by those
+who confound reverence with fear.  For from blind fear of the unknown,
+science does certainly deliver man.  She does by man as he does by an
+unbroken colt.  The colt sees by the road side some quite new object--a
+cast-away boot, an old kettle, or what not.  What a fearful monster!  What
+unknown terrific powers may it not possess!  And the colt shies across
+the road, runs up the bank, rears on end; putting itself thereby, as many
+a man does, in real danger.  What cure is there?  But one; experience.  So
+science takes us, as we should take the colt, gently by the halter; and
+makes us simply smell at the new monster; till after a few trembling
+sniffs, we discover, like the colt, that it is not a monster, but a
+kettle.  Yet I think, if we sum up the loss and gain, we shall find the
+colt's character has gained, rather than lost, by being thus disabused.
+He learns to substitute a very rational reverence for the man who is
+breaking him in, for a totally irrational reverence for the kettle; and
+becomes thereby a much wiser and more useful member of society, as does
+the man when disabused of his superstitions.
+
+From which follows one result.  That if science proposes--as she does--to
+make men brave, wise, and independent, she must needs excite unpleasant
+feelings in all who desire to keep men cowardly, ignorant, and slavish.
+And that too many such persons have existed in all ages is but too
+notorious.  There have been from all time, goetai, quacks, powwow men,
+rain-makers, and necromancers of various sorts, who having for their own
+purposes set forth partial, ill-grounded, fantastic, and frightful
+interpretations of nature, have no love for those who search after a
+true, exact, brave, and hopeful one.  And therefore it is to be feared,
+or hoped, science and superstition will to the world's end remain
+irreconcilable and internecine foes.
+
+Conceive the feelings of an old Lapland witch, who has had for the last
+fifty years all the winds in a sealskin bag, and has been selling fair
+breezes to northern skippers at so much a puff, asserting her powers so
+often, poor old soul, that she has got to half believe them
+herself,--conceive, I say, her feelings at seeing her customers watch the
+Admiralty storm-signals, and con the weather reports in the 'Times.'
+Conceive the feelings of Sir Samuel Baker's African friend, Katchiba, the
+rain-making chief, who possessed a whole housefull of thunder and
+lightning--though he did not, he confessed, keep it in a bottle as they
+do in England--if Sir Samuel had had the means, and the will, of giving
+to Katchiba's Negros a course of lectures on electricity, with
+appropriate experiments, and a real bottle full of real lightning among
+the foremost.
+
+It is clear that only two methods of self-defence would have been open to
+the rain-maker: namely, either to kill Sir Samuel, or to buy his real
+secret of bottling the lightning, that he might use it for his own ends.
+The former method--that of killing the man of science--was found more
+easy in ancient times; the latter in these modern ones.  And there have
+been always those who, too good-natured to kill the scientific man, have
+patronised knowledge, not for its own sake, but for the use which may be
+made of it; who would like to keep a tame man of science, as they would a
+tame poet, or a tame parrot; who say--Let us have science by all means,
+but not too much of it.  It is a dangerous thing; to be doled out to the
+world, like medicine, in small and cautious doses.  You, the scientific
+man, will of course freely discover what you choose.  Only do not talk
+too loudly about it: leave that to us.  We understand the world, and are
+meant to guide and govern it.  So discover freely: and meanwhile hand
+over your discoveries to us, that we may instruct and edify the populace
+with so much of them as we think safe, while we keep our position
+thereby, and in many cases make much money by your science.  Do that, and
+we will patronise you, applaud you, ask you to our houses; and you shall
+be clothed in purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously with us every
+day.  I know not whether these latter are not the worst enemies which
+science has.  They are often such excellent, respectable, orderly, well-
+meaning persons.  They desire so sincerely that everyone should be wise:
+only not too wise.  They are so utterly unaware of the mischief they are
+doing.  They would recoil with horror if they were told they were so many
+Iscariots, betraying Truth with a kiss.
+
+But science, as yet, has withstood both terrors and blandishments.  In
+old times, she endured being imprisoned and slain.  She came to life
+again.  Perhaps it was the will of Him in whom all things live, that she
+should live.  Perhaps it was His spirit which gave her life.
+
+She can endure, too, being starved.  Her votaries have not as yet cared
+much for purple and fine linen, and sumptuous fare.  There are a very few
+among them who, joining brilliant talents to solid learning, have risen
+to deserved popularity, to titles, and to wealth.  But even their
+labours, it seems to me, are never rewarded in any proportion to the time
+and the intellect spent on them, nor to the benefits which they bring to
+mankind; while the great majority, unpaid and unknown, toil on, and have
+to find in science her own reward.  Better, perhaps, that it should be
+so.  Better for science that she should be free, in holy poverty, to go
+where she will and say what she knows, than that she should be hired out
+at so much a year to say things pleasing to the many, and to those who
+guide the many.  And so, I verily believe, the majority of scientific men
+think.  There are those among them who have obeyed very faithfully St.
+Paul's precept, "No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs
+of this life."  For they have discovered that they are engaged in a war--a
+veritable war--against the rulers of darkness, against ignorance and its
+twin children, fear and cruelty.  Of that war they see neither the end
+nor even the plan.  But they are ready to go on; ready, with Socrates,
+"to follow reason withersoever it leads;" and content, meanwhile, like
+good soldiers in a campaign, if they can keep tolerably in line, and use
+their weapons, and see a few yards ahead of them through the smoke and
+the woods.  They will come out somewhere at last; they know not where nor
+when: but they will come out at last, into the daylight and the open
+field; and be told then--perhaps to their own astonishment--as many a
+gallant soldier has been told, that by simply walking straight on, and
+doing the duty which lay nearest them, they have helped to win a great
+battle, and slay great giants, earning the thanks of their country and of
+mankind.
+
+And, meanwhile, if they get their shilling a day of fighting-pay, they
+are content.  I had almost said, they ought to be content.  For science
+is, I verily believe, like virtue, its own exceeding great reward.  I can
+conceive few human states more enviable than that of the man to whom,
+panting in the foul laboratory, or watching for his life under the tropic
+forest, Isis shall for a moment lift her sacred veil, and show him, once
+and for ever, the thing he dreamed not of; some law, or even mere hint of
+a law, explaining one fact; but explaining with it a thousand more,
+connecting them all with each other and with the mighty whole, till order
+and meaning shoots through some old Chaos of scattered observations.
+
+Is not that a joy, a prize, which wealth cannot give, nor poverty take
+away?  What it may lead to, he knows not.  Of what use it may become, he
+knows not.  But this he knows, that somewhere it must lead; of some use
+it will be.  For it is a truth; and having found a truth, he has
+exorcised one more of the ghosts which haunt humanity.  He has left one
+object less for man to fear; one object more for man to use.  Yes, the
+scientific man may have this comfort, that whatever he has done, he has
+done good; that he is following a mistress who has never yet conferred
+aught but benefits on the human race.
+
+What physical science may do hereafter I know not; but as yet she has
+done this:
+
+She has enormously increased the wealth of the human race; and has
+therefore given employment, food, existence, to millions who, without
+science, would either have starved or have never been born.  She has
+shown that the dictum of the early political economists, that population
+has a tendency to increase faster than the means of subsistence, is no
+law of humanity, but merely a tendency of the barbaric and ignorant man,
+which can be counteracted by increasing manifold by scientific means his
+powers of producing food.  She has taught men, during the last few years,
+to foresee and elude the most destructive storms; and there is no reason
+for doubting, and many reasons for hoping, that she will gradually teach
+men to elude other terrific forces of nature, too powerful and too
+seemingly capricious for them to conquer.  She has discovered innumerable
+remedies and alleviations for pains and disease.  She has thrown such
+light on the causes of epidemics, that we are able to say now that the
+presence of cholera--and probably of all zymotic diseases--in any place,
+is usually a sin and a shame, for which the owners and authorities of
+that place ought to be punishable by law, as destroyers of their fellow-
+men; while for the weak, for those who, in the barbarous and
+semi-barbarous state--and out of that last we are only just emerging--how
+much has she done; an earnest of much more which she will do?  She has
+delivered the insane--I may say by the scientific insight of one man,
+more worthy of titles and pensions than nine-tenths of those who earn
+them--I mean the great and good Pinel--from hopeless misery and torture
+into comparative peace and comfort, and at least the possibility of cure.
+For children, she has done much, or rather might do, would parents read
+and perpend such books as Andrew Combe's and those of other writers on
+physical education.  We should not then see the children, even of the
+rich, done to death piecemeal by improper food, improper clothes, neglect
+of ventilation and the commonest measures for preserving health.  We
+should not see their intellects stunted by Procrustean attempts to teach
+them all the same accomplishments, to the neglect, most often, of any
+sound practical training of their faculties.  We should not see slight
+indigestion, or temporary rushes of blood to the head, condemned and
+punished as sins against Him who took up little children in His arms and
+blessed them.
+
+But we may have hope.  When we compare education now with what it was
+even forty years ago, much more with the stupid brutality of the monastic
+system, we may hail for children, as well as for grown people, the advent
+of the reign of common sense.
+
+And for woman--What might I not say on that point?  But most of it would
+be fitly discussed only among physicians and biologists: here I will say
+only this--Science has exterminated, at least among civilised nations,
+witch-manias.  Women--at least white women--are no longer tortured or
+burnt alive from man's blind fear of the unknown.  If science had done no
+more than that, she would deserve the perpetual thanks and the perpetual
+trust, not only of the women whom she has preserved from agony, but the
+men whom she has preserved from crime.
+
+These benefits have already accrued to civilised men, because they have
+lately allowed a very few of their number peaceably to imitate Mr. Rarey,
+and find out what nature--or rather, to speak at once reverently and
+accurately, He who made nature--is thinking of; and obey the "voluntatem
+Dei in rebus revelatam."  This science has done, while yet in her
+infancy.  What she will do in her maturity, who dare predict?  At least,
+in the face of such facts as these, those who bid us fear, or restrain,
+or mutilate science, bid us commit an act of folly, as well as of
+ingratitude, which can only harm ourselves.  For science has as yet done
+nothing but good.  Will any one tell me what harm it has ever done?  When
+any one will show me a single result of science, of the knowledge of and
+use of physical facts, which has not tended directly to the benefit of
+mankind, moral and spiritual, as well as physical and economic--then I
+shall be tempted to believe that Solomon was wrong when he said that the
+one thing to be sought after on earth, more precious than all treasure,
+she who has length of days in her right hand, and in her left hand riches
+and honour, whose ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are
+peace, who is a tree of life to all who lay hold on her, and makes happy
+every one who retains her, is--as you will see if you will yourselves
+consult the passage--that very Wisdom--by which God has founded the
+earth; and that very Understanding--by which He has established the
+heavens.
+
+
+
+
+GROTS AND GROVES
+
+
+I wish this lecture to be suggestive, rather that didactic; to set you
+thinking and inquiring for yourselves, rather than learning at second-
+hand from me.  Some among my audience, I doubt not, will neither need to
+be taught by me, nor to be stirred up to inquiry for themselves.  They
+are already, probably, antiquarians; already better acquainted with the
+subject than I am.  They come hither, therefore, as critics; I trust not
+as unkindly critics.  They will, I hope, remember that I am trying to
+excite a general interest in that very architecture in which they
+delight, and so to make the public do justice to their labours.  They
+will therefore, I trust,
+
+   "Be to my faults a little blind,
+   Be to my virtues very kind;"
+
+and if my architectural theories do not seem to them correct in all
+details--well-founded I believe them myself to be--remember that it is a
+slight matter to me, or to the audience, whether any special and pet
+fancy of mine should be exactly true or not: but it is not a light matter
+that my hearers should be awakened--and too many just now need an actual
+awakening--to a right, pure, and wholesome judgment on questions of art,
+especially when the soundness of that judgment depends, as in this case,
+on sound judgments about human history, as well as about natural objects.
+
+Now, it befel me that, fresh from the Tropic forests, and with their
+forms hanging always, as it were, in the background of my eye, I was
+impressed more and more vividly the longer I looked, with the likeness of
+those forest forms to the forms of our own Cathedral of Chester.  The
+grand and graceful Chapter-house transformed itself into one of those
+green bowers, which, once seen, and never to be seen again, make one at
+once richer and poorer for the rest of life.  The fans of groining sprang
+from the short columns, just as do the feathered boughs of the far more
+beautiful Maximiliana palm, and just of the same size and shape: and met
+overhead, as I have seen them meet, in aisles longer by far than our
+cathedral nave.  The free upright shafts, which give such strength, and
+yet such lightness, to the mullions of each window, pierced upward
+through those curving lines, as do the stems of young trees through the
+fronds of palm; and, like them, carried the eye and the fancy up into the
+infinite, and took off a sense of oppression and captivity which the
+weight of the roof might have produced.  In the nave, in the choir the
+same vision of the Tropic forest haunted me.  The fluted columns not only
+resembled, but seemed copied from the fluted stems beneath which I had
+ridden in the primeval woods; their bases, their capitals, seemed copied
+from the bulgings at the collar of the root, and at the spring of the
+boughs, produced by a check of the redundant sap; and were garlanded
+often enough like the capitals of the columns, with delicate tracery of
+parasite leaves and flowers; the mouldings of the arches seemed copied
+from the parallel bundles of the curving bamboo shoots; and even the
+flatter roof of the nave and transepts had its antitype in that highest
+level of the forest aisles, where the trees, having climbed at last to
+the light-food which they seek, care no longer to grow upward, but spread
+out in huge limbs, almost horizontal, reminding the eye of the
+four-centred arch which marks the period of Perpendicular Gothic.
+
+Nay, to this day there is one point in our cathedral which, to me, keeps
+up the illusion still.  As I enter the choir, and look upward toward the
+left, I cannot help seeing, in the tabernacle work of the stalls, the
+slender and aspiring forms of the "rastrajo;" the delicate second growth
+which, as it were, rushes upward from the earth wherever the forest is
+cleared; and above it, in the tall lines of the north-west pier of the
+tower--even though defaced, along the inner face of the western arch, by
+ugly and needless perpendicular panelling--I seem to see the stems of
+huge Cedars, or Balatas, or Ceibas, curving over, as they would do, into
+the great beams of the transept roof, some seventy feet above the ground.
+
+Nay, so far will the fancy lead, that I have seemed to see, in the
+stained glass between the tracery of the windows, such gorgeous sheets of
+colour as sometimes flash on the eye, when, far aloft, between high stems
+and boughs, you catch sight of some great tree ablaze with flowers,
+either its own or those of a parasite; yellow or crimson, white or
+purple; and over them again the cloudless blue.
+
+Now, I know well that all these dreams are dreams; that the men who built
+our northern cathedrals never saw these forest forms; and that the
+likeness of their work to those of Tropic nature is at most only a
+corroboration of Mr. Ruskin's dictum, that "the Gothic did not arise out
+of, but developed itself into, a resemblance to vegetation. . . .  It was
+no chance suggestion of the form of an arch from the bending of a bough,
+but the gradual and continual discovery of a beauty in natural forms
+which could be more and more transferred into those of stone, which
+influenced at once the hearts of the people and the form of the edifice."
+So true is this, that by a pure and noble copying of the vegetable beauty
+which they had seen in their own clime, the medieval craftsmen went so
+far--as I have shown you--as to anticipate forms of vegetable beauty
+peculiar to Tropic climes, which they had not seen: a fresh proof, if
+proof were needed, that beauty is something absolute and independent of
+man; and not, as some think, only relative, and what happens to be
+pleasant to the eye of this man or that.
+
+But thinking over this matter, and reading over, too, that which Mr.
+Ruskin has written thereon in his 'Stones of Venice,' vol. ii. cap. vi.,
+on the nature of Gothic, I came to certain further conclusions--or at
+least surmises--which I put before you to-night, in hopes that if they
+have no other effect on you, they will at least stir some of you up to
+read Mr. Ruskin's works.
+
+Now Mr. Ruskin says, "That the original conception of Gothic architecture
+has been derived from vegetation, from the symmetry of avenues and the
+interlacing of branches, is a strange and vain supposition.  It is a
+theory which never could have existed for a moment in the mind of any
+person acquainted with early Gothic: but, however idle as a theory, it is
+most valuable as a testimony to the character of the perfected style."
+
+Doubtless so.  But you must remember always that the subject of my
+lecture is Grots and Groves; that I am speaking not of Gothic
+architecture in general, but of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture; and
+more, almost exclusively of the ecclesiastical architecture of the
+Teutonic or northern nations; because in them, as I think, the
+resemblance between the temple and the forest reached the fullest
+exactness.
+
+Now the original idea of a Christian church was that of a grot; a cave.
+That is a historic fact.  The Christianity which was passed on to us
+began to worship, hidden and persecuted, in the catacombs of Rome, it may
+be often around the martyrs' tombs, by the dim light of candle or of
+torch.  The candles on the Roman altars, whatever they have been made to
+symbolise since then, are the hereditary memorials of that fact.
+Throughout the North, in these isles as much as in any land, the idea of
+the grot was, in like wise, the idea of a church.  The saint or hermit
+built himself a cell; dark, massive, intended to exclude light as well as
+weather; or took refuge in a cave.  There he prayed and worshipped, and
+gathered others to pray and worship round him, during his life.  There
+he, often enough, became an object of worship, in his turn, after his
+death.  In after ages his cave was ornamented, like that of the hermit of
+Montmajour by Arles; or his cell-chapel enlarged, as those of the Scotch
+and Irish saints have been, again and again; till at last a stately
+minster rose above it.  Still, the idea that the church was to be a grot
+haunted the minds of builders.
+
+But side by side with the Christian grot there was throughout the North
+another form of temple, dedicated to very different gods; namely, the
+trees from whose mighty stems hung the heads of the victims of Odin or of
+Thor, the horse, the goat, and in time of calamity or pestilence, of men.
+Trees and not grots were the temples of our forefathers.
+
+Scholars know well--but they must excuse my quoting it for the sake of
+those who are not scholars--the famous passage of Tacitus which tells how
+our forefathers "held it beneath the dignity of the gods to coop them
+within walls, or liken them to any human countenance: but consecrated
+groves and woods, and called by the name of gods that mystery which they
+held by faith alone;" and the equally famous passage of Claudian, about
+"the vast silence of the Black Forest, and groves awful with ancient
+superstition; and oaks, barbarian deities;" and Lucan's "groves inviolate
+from all antiquity, and altars stained with human blood."
+
+To worship in such spots was an abomination to the early Christian.  It
+was as much a test of heathendom as the eating of horse-flesh, sacred to
+Odin, and therefore unclean to Christian men.  The Lombard laws and
+others forbid expressly the lingering remnants of grove worship.  St.
+Boniface and other early missionaries hewed down in defiance the sacred
+oaks, and paid sometimes for their valour with their lives.
+
+It is no wonder, then, if long centuries elapsed ere the likeness of
+vegetable forms began to reappear in the Christian churches of the North.
+And yet both grot and grove were equally the natural temples which the
+religious instinct of all deep-hearted peoples, conscious of sin, and
+conscious, too, of yearnings after a perfection not to be found on earth,
+chooses from the earliest stage of awakening civilisation.  In them,
+alone, before he had strength and skill to build nobly for himself, could
+man find darkness, the mother of mystery and awe, in which he is reminded
+perforce of his own ignorance and weakness; in which he learns first to
+remember unseen powers, sometimes to his comfort and elevation, sometimes
+only to his terror and debasement; darkness; and with it silence and
+solitude, in which he can collect himself, and shut out the noise and
+glare, the meanness and the coarseness, of the world; and be alone a
+while with his own thoughts, his own fancy, his own conscience, his own
+soul.
+
+But for a while, as I have said, that darkness, solitude, and silence
+were to be sought in the grot, not in the grove.
+
+Then Christianity conquered the Empire.  It adapted, not merely its
+architecture, but its very buildings, to its worship.  The Roman Basilica
+became the Christian church; a noble form of building enough, though one
+in which was neither darkness, solitude, nor silence, but crowded
+congregations, clapping--or otherwise--the popular preacher; or fighting
+about the election of a bishop or a pope, till the holy place ran with
+Christian blood.  The deep-hearted Northern turned away, in weariness and
+disgust, from those vast halls, fitted only for the feverish superstition
+of a profligate and worn-out civilisation; and took himself, amid his own
+rocks and forests, moors and shores, to a simpler and sterner
+architecture, which should express a creed, sterner; and at heart far
+simpler; though dogmatically the same.
+
+And this is, to my mind, the difference, and the noble difference,
+between the so-called Norman architecture, which came hither about the
+time of the Conquest; and that of Romanized Italy.
+
+But the Normans were a conquering race; and one which conquered, be it
+always remembered, in England at least, in the name and by the authority
+of Rome.  Their ecclesiastics, like the ecclesiastics on the Continent,
+were the representatives of Roman civilisation, of Rome's right,
+intellectual and spiritual, to rule the world.
+
+Therefore their architecture, like their creed, was Roman.  They took the
+massive towering Roman forms, which expressed domination; and piled them
+one on the other, to express the domination of Christian Rome over the
+souls, as they had represented the domination of heathen Rome over the
+bodies, of men.  And so side by side with the towers of the Norman keep
+rose the towers of the Norman cathedral--the two signs of a double
+servitude.
+
+But, with the thirteenth century, there dawned an age in Northern Europe,
+which I may boldly call an heroic age; heroic in its virtues and in its
+crimes; an age of rich passionate youth, or rather of early manhood; full
+of aspirations, of chivalry, of self-sacrifice as strange and terrible as
+it was beautiful and noble, even when most misguided.  The Teutonic
+nations of Europe--our own forefathers most of all--having absorbed all
+that heathen Rome could teach them, at least for the time being, began to
+think for themselves; to have poets, philosophers, historians,
+architects, of their own.  The thirteenth century was especially an age
+of aspiration; and its architects expressed, in buildings quite unlike
+those of the preceding centuries, the aspirations of the time.
+
+The Pointed Arch had been introduced half a century before.  It may be
+that the Crusaders saw it in the East and brought it home.  It may be
+that it originated from the quadripartite vaulting of the Normans, the
+segmental groins of which, crossing diagonally, produced to appearance
+the pointed arch.  It may be that it was derived from that mystical
+figure of a pointed oval form, the vesica piscis.  It may be, lastly,
+that it was suggested simply by the intersection of semicircular arches,
+so frequently found in ornamental arcades.  The last cause may perhaps be
+the true one: but it matters little whence the pointed arch came.  It
+matters much what it meant to those who introduced it.  And at the
+beginning of the Transition or semi-Norman period, it seems to have meant
+nothing.  It was not till the thirteenth century that it had gradually
+received, as it were, a soul, and had become the exponent of a great
+idea.  As the Norman architecture and its forms had signified domination,
+so the Early English, as we call it, signified aspiration; an idea which
+was perfected, as far as it could be, in what we call the Decorated
+style.
+
+There is an evident gap, I had almost said a gulf, between the
+architectural mind of the eleventh and that of the thirteenth century.  A
+vertical tendency, a longing after lightness and freedom, appears; and
+with them a longing to reproduce the graces of nature and art.  And here
+I ask you to look for yourselves at the buildings of this new era--there
+is a beautiful specimen in yonder arcade {304}--and judge for yourselves
+whether they, and even more than they the Decorated style into which they
+developed, do not remind you of the forest shapes?
+
+And if they remind you: must they not have reminded those who shaped
+them?  Can it have been otherwise?  We know that the men who built were
+earnest.  The carefulness, the reverence, of their work have given a
+subject for some of Mr. Ruskin's noblest chapters, a text for some of his
+noblest sermons.  We know that they were students of vegetable form.  That
+is proved by the flowers, the leaves, even the birds, with which they
+enwreathed their capitals and enriched their mouldings.  Look up there,
+and see.
+
+You cannot look at any good church-work from the thirteenth to the middle
+of the fifteenth century, without seeing that leaves and flowers were
+perpetually in the workman's mind.  Do you fancy that stems and boughs
+were never in his mind?  He kept, doubtless, in remembrance the
+fundamental idea, that the Christian church should symbolise a grot or
+cave.  He could do no less; while he again and again saw hermits around
+him dwelling and worshipping in caves, as they had done ages before in
+Egypt and Syria; while he fixed, again and again, the site of his convent
+and his minster in some secluded valley guarded by cliffs and rocks, like
+Vale Crucis in North Wales.  But his minster stood often not among rocks
+only, but amid trees; in some clearing in the primeval forest, as Vale
+Crucis was then.  At least he could not pass from minster to minster,
+from town to town, without journeying through long miles of forest.  Do
+you think that the awful shapes and shadows of that forest never haunted
+his imagination as he built?  He would have cut down ruthlessly, as his
+predecessors the early missionaries did, the sacred trees amid which Thor
+and Odin had been worshipped by the heathen Saxons; amid which still
+darker deities were still worshipped by the heathen tribes of Eastern
+Europe.  But he was the descendant of men who had worshipped in those
+groves; and the glamour of them was upon him still.  He peopled the wild
+forest with demons and fairies: but that did not surely prevent his
+feeling its ennobling grandeur, its chastening loneliness.  His ancestors
+had held the oaks for trees of God, even as the Jews held the Cedar, and
+the Hindoos likewise; for the Deodara pine is not only, botanists tell
+us, the same as the Cedar of Lebanon: but its very name--the
+Deodara--signifies nought else but "The tree of God."
+
+His ancestors, I say, had held the oaks for trees of God.  It may be that
+as the monk sat beneath their shade with his Bible on his knee, like good
+St. Boniface in the Fulda forest, he found that his ancestors were right.
+
+To understand what sort of trees they were from which he got his
+inspiration: you must look, not at an average English wood, perpetually
+thinned out as the trees arrive at middle age.  Still less must you look
+at the pines, oaks, beeches, of an English park, where each tree has had
+space to develop itself freely into a more or less rounded form.  You
+must not even look at the tropic forests.  For there, from the immense
+diversity of forms, twenty varieties of tree will grow beneath each
+other, forming a close-packed heap of boughs and leaves, from the ground
+to a hundred feet and more aloft.
+
+You should look at the North American forests of social trees--especially
+of pines and firs, where trees of one species, crowded together, and
+competing with equal advantages for the air and light, form themselves
+into one wilderness of straight smooth shafts, surmounted by a flat sheet
+of foliage, held up by boughs like the ribs of a groined roof; while
+underneath the ground is bare as a cathedral floor.
+
+You all know, surely, the Hemlock spruce of America; which, while growing
+by itself in open ground, is the most wilful and fantastic, as well as
+the most graceful, of all the firs; imitating the shape, not of its
+kindred, but of an enormous tuft of fern.
+
+Yet if you look at the same tree, when it has struggled long for life
+from its youth amid other trees of its own kind and its own age; you find
+that the lower boughs have died off from want of light, leaving not a
+scar behind.  The upper boughs have reached at once the light, and their
+natural term of years.  They are content to live, and little more.  The
+central trunk no longer sends up each year a fresh perpendicular shoot to
+aspire above the rest: but as weary of struggling ambition as they are,
+is content to become more and more their equal as the years pass by.  And
+this is a law of social forest trees, which you must bear in mind,
+whenever I speak of the influence of tree-forms on Gothic architecture.
+
+Such forms as these are rare enough in Europe now.  I never understood
+how possible, how common, they must have been in medieval Europe, till I
+saw in the forest of Fontainebleau a few oaks like the oak of
+Charlemagne, and the Bouquet du Roi, at whose age I dare not guess, but
+whose size and shape showed them to have once formed part of a continuous
+wood, the like whereof remains not in these isles--perhaps not east of
+the Carpathian Mountains.  In them a clear shaft of at least sixty, it
+may be eighty feet, carries a flat head of boughs, each in itself a tree.
+In such a grove, I thought, the heathen Gaul, even the heathen Frank,
+worshipped, beneath "trees of God."  Such trees, I thought, centuries
+after, inspired the genius of every builder of Gothic aisles and roofs.
+
+Thus, at least, we can explain that rigidity, which Mr. Ruskin tells us,
+"is a special element of Gothic architecture.  Greek and Egyptian
+buildings," he says--and I should have added, Roman buildings also, in
+proportion to their age, _i.e_., to the amount of the Roman elements in
+them--"stand for the most part, by their own weight and mass, one stone
+passively incumbent on another: but in the Gothic vaults and traceries
+there is a stiffness analogous to that of the bones of a limb, or fibres
+of a tree; an elastic tension and communication of force from part to
+part; and also a studious expression of this throughout every part of the
+building."  In a word, Gothic vaulting and tracery have been studiously
+made like to boughs of trees.  Were those boughs present to the mind of
+the architect?  Or is the coincidence merely fortuitous?  You know
+already how I should answer.  The cusped arch, too, was it actually not
+intended to imitate vegetation?  Mr. Ruskin seems to think so.  He says
+that it is merely the special application to the arch of the great
+ornamental system of foliation, which, "whether simple as in the cusped
+arch, or complicated as in tracery, arose out of the love of leafage.  Not
+that the form of the arch is intended to imitate a leaf, but to be
+invested with the same characters of beauty which the designer had
+discovered in the leaf."  Now I differ from Mr. Ruskin with extreme
+hesitation.  I agree that the cusped arch is not meant to imitate a leaf.
+I think with Mr. Ruskin, that it was probably first adopted on account of
+its superior strength; and that it afterwards took the form of a bough.
+But I cannot as yet believe that it was not at last intended to imitate a
+bough; a bough of a very common form, and one in which "active rigidity"
+is peculiarly shown.  I mean a bough which has forked.  If the lower fork
+has died off, for want of light, we obtain something like the simply
+cusped arch.  If it be still living--but short and stunted in comparison
+with the higher fork--we obtain, it seems to me, something like the
+foliated cusp; both likenesses being near enough to those of common
+objects to make it possible that those objects may have suggested them.
+And thus, more and more boldly, the mediaeval architect learnt to copy
+boughs, stems, and, at last, the whole effect, as far always as stone
+would allow, of a combination of rock and tree, of grot and grove.
+
+So he formed his minsters, as I believe, upon the model of those leafy
+minsters in which he walked to meditate, amid the aisles which God, not
+man, has built.  He sent their columns aloft like the boles of ancient
+trees.  He wreathed their capitals, sometimes their very shafts, with
+flowers and creeping shoots.  He threw their arches out, and interwove
+the groinings of their vaults, like the bough-roofage overhead.  He
+decked with foliage and fruit the bosses above and the corbels below.  He
+sent up out of those corbels upright shafts along the walls, in the
+likeness of the trees which sprang out of the rocks above his head.  He
+raised those walls into great cliffs.  He pierced them with the arches of
+the triforium, as with hermits' cells.  He represented in the horizontal
+sills of his windows, and in his horizontal string-courses, the
+horizontal strata of the rocks.  He opened the windows into high and
+lofty glades, broken, as in the forest, by the tracery of stems and
+boughs, through which was seen, not merely the outer, but the upper
+world.  For he craved, as all true artists crave, for light and colour;
+and had the sky above been one perpetual blue, he might have been content
+with it, and left his glass transparent.  But in that dark dank northern
+clime, rain and snowstorm, black cloud and grey mist, were all that he
+was like to see outside for nine months in the year.  So he took such
+light and colour as nature gave in her few gayer moods; and set aloft his
+stained glass windows the hues of the noonday and the rainbow, and the
+sunrise and the sunset, and the purple of the heather, and the gold of
+the gorse, and the azure of the bugloss, and the crimson of the poppy;
+and among them, in gorgeous robes, the angels and the saints of heaven,
+and the memories of heroic virtues and heroic sufferings, that he might
+lift up his own eyes and heart for ever out of the dark, dank, sad world
+of the cold north, with all its coarsenesses and its crimes, toward a
+realm of perpetual holiness, amid a perpetual summer of beauty and of
+light; as one who--for he was true to nature, even in that--from between
+the black jaws of a narrow glen, or from beneath the black shade of
+gnarled trees, catches a glimpse of far lands gay with gardens and
+cottages, and purple mountain ranges, and the far off sea, and the hazy
+horizon melting into the hazy sky; and finds his heart carried out into
+an infinite at once of freedom and of repose.
+
+And so out of the cliffs and the forests he shaped the inside of his
+church.  And how did he shape the outside?  Look for yourselves, and
+judge.  But look: not at Chester, but at Salisbury.  Look at those
+churches which carry not mere towers, but spires, or at least pinnacled
+towers approaching the pyrmidal form.  The outside form of every Gothic
+cathedral must be considered imperfect if it does not culminate in
+something pyramidal.
+
+The especial want of all Greek and Roman buildings with which we are
+acquainted is the absence--save in a few and unimportant cases--of the
+pyramidal form.  The Egyptians knew at least the worth of the obelisk:
+but the Greeks and Romans hardly knew even that: their buildings are flat-
+topped.  Their builders were contented with the earth as it was.  There
+was a great truth involved in that; which I am the last to deny.  But
+religions which, like the Buddhist or the Christian, nurse a noble self-
+discontent, are sure to adopt sooner or later an upward and aspiring form
+of building.  It is not merely that, fancying heaven to be above earth,
+they point towards heaven.  There is a deeper natural language in the
+pyramidal form of a growing tree.  It symbolises growth, or the desire of
+growth.  The Norman tower does nothing of the kind.  It does not aspire
+to grow.  Look--I mention an instance with which I am most familiar--at
+the Norman tower of Bury St. Edmund's.  It is graceful--awful, if you
+will--but there is no aspiration in it.  It is stately: but self-content.
+Its horizontal courses; circular arches; above all, its flat sky-line,
+seem to have risen enough: and wish to rise no higher.  For it has no
+touch of that unrest of soul, which is expressed by the spire, and still
+more by the compound spire, with its pinnacles, crockets, finials, which
+are finials only in name; for they do not finish, and are really terminal
+buds, as it were, longing to open and grow upward, even as the crockets
+are bracts and leaves thrown off as the shoot has grown.
+
+You feel, surely, the truth of these last words.  You cannot look at the
+canopy work or the pinnacle work of this cathedral without seeing that
+they do not merely suggest buds and leaves, but that the buds and leaves
+are there carven before your eyes.  I myself cannot look at the
+tabernacle work of our stalls without being reminded of the young pine
+forests which clothe the Hampshire moors.  But if the details are copied
+from vegetable forms, why not the whole?  Is not a spire like a growing
+tree, a tabernacle like a fir-tree, a compound spire like a group of
+firs?  And if we can see that: do you fancy that the man who planned the
+spire did not see it as clearly as we do; and perhaps more clearly still?
+
+I am aware, of course, that Norman architecture had sometimes its
+pinnacle, a mere conical or polygonal capping.  I am aware that this
+form, only more and more slender, lasted on in England during the
+thirteenth and the early part of the fourteenth century; and on the
+Continent, under many modifications, one English kind whereof is usually
+called a "broach," of which you have a beautiful specimen in the new
+church at Hoole.
+
+Now, no one will deny that that broach is beautiful.  But it would be
+difficult to prove that its form was taken from a North European tree.
+The cypress was unknown, probably, to our northern architects.  The
+Lombardy poplar--which has wandered hither, I know not when, all the way
+from Cashmere--had not wandered then, I believe, further than North
+Italy.  The form is rather that of mere stone; of the obelisk, or of the
+mountain peak; and they, in fact, may have at first suggested the spire.
+The grandeur of an isolated mountain, even of a dolmen or single upright
+stone, is evident to all.
+
+But it is the grandeur, not of aspiration, but of defiance; not of the
+Christian; not even of the Stoic: but rather of the Epicurean.  It says--I
+cannot rise.  I do not care to rise.  I will be contentedly and valiantly
+that which I am; and face circumstances, though I cannot conquer them.
+But it is defiance under defeat.  The mountain-peak does not grow, but
+only decays.  Fretted by rains, peeled by frost, splintered by lightning,
+it must down at last; and crumble into earth, were it as old, as hard, as
+lofty as the Matterhorn itself.  And while it stands, it wants not only
+aspiration, it wants tenderness; it wants humility; it wants the unrest
+which tenderness and humility must breed, and which Mr. Ruskin so clearly
+recognises in the best Gothic art.  And, meanwhile, it wants naturalness.
+The mere smooth spire or broach--I had almost said, even the spire of
+Salisbury--is like no tall or commanding object in Nature.  It is merely
+the caricature of one; it may be of the mountain-peak.  The outline must
+be broken, must be softened, before it can express the soul of a creed
+which, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries far more than now, was
+one of penitence as well as of aspiration, of passionate emotion as well
+as of lofty faith.  But a shape which will express that soul must be
+sought, not among mineral, but among vegetable, forms.  And remember
+always, if we feel thus even now, how much more must those medieval men
+of genius have felt thus, whose work we now dare only copy line by line?
+
+So--as it seems to me--they sought among vegetable forms for what they
+needed: and they found it at once in the pine, or rather the fir,--the
+spruce and silver firs of their own forests.  They are not, of course,
+indigenous to England.  But they are so common through all the rest of
+Europe, that not only would the form suggest itself to a Continental
+architect, but to any English clerk who travelled, as all did who could,
+across the Alps to Rome.  The fir-tree, not growing on level ground, like
+the oaks of Fontainebleau, into one flat roof of foliage, but clinging to
+the hill-side and the crag, old above young, spire above spire, whorl
+above whorl--for the young shoots of each whorl of boughs point upward in
+the spring; and now and then a whole bough, breaking away, as it were,
+into free space, turns upward altogether, and forms a secondary spire on
+the same tree--this surely was the form which the mediaeval architect
+seized, to clothe with it the sides and roof of the stone mountain which
+he had built; piling up pinnacles and spires, each crocketed at the
+angles; that, like a group of firs upon an isolated rock, every point of
+the building might seem in act to grow toward heaven, till his idea
+culminated in that glorious Minster of Cologne, which, if it ever be
+completed, will be the likeness of one forest-clothed group of cliffs,
+surmounted by three enormous pines.
+
+One feature of the Norman temple he could keep; for it was copied from
+the same nature which he was trying to copy--namely, the high-pitched
+roof and gables.  Mr. Ruskin lays it down as a law, that the acute angle
+in roofs, gables, spires, is the distinguishing mark of northern Gothic.
+It was adopted, most probably, at first from domestic buildings.  A
+northern house or barn must have a high-pitched roof: or the snow will
+not slip off it.  But that fact was not discovered by man; it was copied
+by him from the rocks around.  He saw the mountain peak jut black and
+bare above the snows of winter; he saw those snows slip down in sheets,
+rush down in torrents under the sun, from the steep slabs of rock which
+coped the hill-side; and he copied, in his roofs, the rocks above his
+town.  But as the love for decoration arose, he would deck his roofs as
+nature had decked hers, till the grey sheets of the cathedral slates
+should stand out amid pinnacles and turrets rich with foliage, as the
+grey mountain sides stood out amid knolls of feathery birch and towering
+pine.
+
+He failed, though he failed nobly.  He never succeeded in attaining a
+perfectly natural style.
+
+The medieval architects were crippled to the last by the tradition of
+artificial Roman forms.  They began improving them into naturalness,
+without any clear notion of what they wanted; and when that notion became
+clear, it was too late.  Take, as an instance, the tracery of their
+windows.  It is true, as Mr. Ruskin says, that they began by piercing
+holes in a wall of the form of a leaf, which developed, in the rose
+window, into the form of a star inside, and of a flower outside.  Look at
+such aloft there.  Then, by introducing mullions and traceries into the
+lower part of the window, they added stem and bough forms to those flower
+forms.  But the two did not fit.  Look at the west window of our choir,
+and you will see what I mean.  The upright mullions break off into bough
+curves graceful enough: but these are cut short--as I hold, spoiled--by
+circular and triangular forms of rose and trefoil resting on them as such
+forms never rest in Nature; and the whole, though beautiful, is only half
+beautiful.  It is fragmentary, unmeaning, barbaric, because unnatural.
+
+They failed, too, it may be, from the very paucity of the vegetable forms
+they could find to copy among the flora of this colder clime; and so,
+stopped short in drawing from nature, ran off into mere purposeless
+luxuriance.  Had they been able to add to their stock of memories a
+hundred forms which they would have seen in the Tropics, they might have
+gone on for centuries copying Nature without exhausting her.
+
+And yet, did they exhaust even the few forms of beauty which they saw
+around them?  It must be confessed that they did not.  I believe that
+they could not, because they dared not.  The unnaturalness of the creed
+which they expressed always hampered them.  It forbade them to look
+Nature freely and lovingly in the face.  It forbade them--as one glaring
+example--to know anything truly of the most beautiful of all natural
+objects--the human form.  They were tempted perpetually to take Nature as
+ornament, not as basis; and they yielded at last to the temptation; till,
+in the age of Perpendicular architecture, their very ornament became
+unnatural again; because conventional, untrue, meaningless.
+
+But the creed for which they worked was dying by that time, and therefore
+the art which expressed it must needs die too.  And even that death, or
+rather the approach of it, was symbolised truly in the flatter roof, the
+four-centred arch, the flat-topped tower of the fifteenth-century church.
+The creed had ceased to aspire: so did the architecture.  It had ceased
+to grow: so did the temple.  And the arch sank lower; and the rafters
+grew more horizontal; and the likeness to the old tree, content to grow
+no more, took the place of the likeness to the young tree struggling
+toward the sky.
+
+And now--unless you are tired of listening to me--a few practical words.
+
+We are restoring our old cathedral stone by stone after its ancient
+model.  We are also trying to build a new church.  We are building it--as
+most new churches in England are now built--in a pure Gothic style.
+
+Are we doing right?  I do not mean morally right.  It is always morally
+right to build a new church, if needed, whatever be its architecture.  It
+is always morally right to restore an old church, if it be beautiful and
+noble, as an heirloom handed down to us by our ancestors, which we have
+no right--I say, no right--for the sake of our children, and of our
+children's children, to leave to ruin.
+
+But are we artistically, aesthetically right?  Is the best Gothic fit for
+our worship?  Does it express our belief?  Or shall we choose some other
+style?
+
+I say that it is; and that it is so because it is a style which, if not
+founded on Nature, has taken into itself more of Nature, of Nature
+beautiful and healthy, than any other style.
+
+With greater knowledge of Nature, both geographical and scientific, fresh
+styles of architecture may and will arise, as much more beautiful, and as
+much more natural, than the Gothic, as Gothic is more beautiful and
+natural than the Norman.  Till then we must take the best models which we
+have; use them; and, as it were, use them up and exhaust them.  By that
+time we may have learnt to improve on them; and to build churches more
+Gothic than Gothic itself, more like grot and grove than even a northern
+cathedral.
+
+That is the direction in which we must work.  And if any shall say to us,
+as it has been said ere now--"After all, your new Gothic churches are but
+imitations, shams, borrowed symbols, which to you symbolise nothing.  They
+are Romish churches, meant to express Romish doctrine, built for a
+Protestant creed which they do not express, and for a Protestant worship
+which they will not fit."  Then we shall answer--Not so.  The objection
+might be true if we built Norman or Romanesque churches; for we should
+then be returning to that very foreign and unnatural style which Rome
+taught our forefathers, and from which they escaped gradually into the
+comparative freedom, the comparative naturalness of that true Gothic of
+which Mr. Ruskin says so well:--
+
+   "It is gladdening to remember that, in its utmost nobleness, the very
+   temper which has been thought most averse to it, the Protestant temper
+   of self-dependence and inquiry, were expressed in every case.  Faith
+   and aspiration there were in every Christian ecclesiastical building
+   from the first century to the fifteenth: but the moral habits to which
+   England in this age owes the kind of greatness which she has--the
+   habits of philosophical investigation, of accurate thought, of
+   domestic seclusion and independence, of stern self-reliance, and
+   sincere upright searching into religious truth,--were only traceable
+   in the features which were the distinctive creations of the Gothic
+   schools, in the varied foliage and thorny fretwork, and shadowy niche,
+   and buttressed pier, and fearless height of subtle pinnacle and
+   crested tower, sent 'like an unperplexed question up to heaven.'"
+
+So says Mr. Ruskin.  I, for one, endorse his gallant words.  And I think
+that a strong proof of their truth is to be found in two facts, which
+seem at first paradoxical.  First, that the new Roman Catholic churches
+on the Continent--I speak especially of France, which is the most highly
+cultivated Romanist country--are, like those which the Jesuits built in
+the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, less and less Gothic.  The
+former were sham-classic; the latter are rather of a new fantastic
+Romanesque, or rather Byzantinesque style, which is a real retrogression
+from Gothic towards earlier and less natural schools.  Next, that the
+Puritan communions, the Kirk of Scotland and the English Nonconformists,
+as they are becoming more cultivated--and there are now many highly
+cultivated men among them--are introducing Gothic architecture more and
+more into their churches.  There are elements in it, it seems, which do
+not contradict their Puritanism; elements which they can adapt to their
+own worship; namely, the very elements which Mr. Ruskin has discerned.
+
+But if they can do so, how much more can we of the Church of England?  As
+long as we go on where our medieval forefathers left off; as long as we
+keep to the most perfect types of their work, in waiting for the day when
+we shall be able to surpass them, by making our work even more
+naturalistic than theirs, more truly expressive of the highest
+aspirations of humanity: so long we are reverencing them, and that latent
+Protestantism in them, which produced at last the Reformation.
+
+And if any should say--"Nevertheless, your Protestant Gothic church,
+though you made it ten times more beautiful, and more symbolic, than
+Cologne Minster itself, would still be a sham.  For where would be your
+images?  And still more, where would be your Host?  Do you not know that
+in the medieval church the vistas of its arcades, the alternations of its
+lights and shadows, the gradations of its colouring, and all its
+carefully subordinated wealth of art, pointed to, were concentrated
+round, one sacred spot, as a curve, however vast its sweep though space,
+tends at every moment toward a single focus?  And that spot, that focus,
+was, and is still, in every Romish church, the body of God, present upon
+the altar in the form of bread?  Without Him, what is all your building?
+Your church is empty: your altar bare; a throne without a king; an eye-
+socket without an eye."
+
+My friends, if we be true children of those old worthies, whom Tacitus
+saw worshipping beneath the German oaks; we shall have but one answer to
+that scoff:--
+
+We know it; and we glory in the fact.  We glory in it, as the old Jews
+gloried in it, when the Roman soldiers, bursting through the Temple, and
+into the Holy of Holies itself, paused in wonder and in awe when they
+beheld neither God, nor image of God, but blank yet all-suggestive--the
+empty mercy-seat.
+
+Like theirs, our altar is an empty throne.  For it symbolises our worship
+of Him who dwelleth not in temples made with hands; whom the heaven and
+the heaven of heavens cannot contain.  Our eye-socket holds no eye.  For
+it symbolises our worship of that Eye which is over all the earth; which
+is about our path, and about our bed, and spies out all our ways.  We
+need no artificial and material presence of Deity.  For we believe in
+That One Eternal and Universal Real Presence--of which it is written "He
+is not far from any one of us; for in God we live, and move, and have our
+being;" and again, "Lo, I am with you, even to the End of the World;" and
+again--"Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in My Name, there
+am I in the midst of them."
+
+He is the God of nature, as well as the God of grace.  For ever He looks
+down on all things which He has made: and behold, they are very good.
+And, therefore, we dare offer to Him, in our churches, the most perfect
+works of naturalistic art, and shape them into copies of whatever beauty
+He has shown us, in man or woman, in cave or mountain peak, in tree or
+flower, even in bird or butterfly.
+
+But Himself?--Who can see Him?  Except the humble and the contrite heart,
+to whom He reveals Himself as a Spirit to be worshipped in spirit and in
+truth, and not in bread, nor wood, nor stone, nor gold, nor
+quintessential diamond.
+
+So we shall obey the sound instinct of our Christian forefathers, when
+they shaped their churches into forest aisles, and decked them with the
+boughs of the woodland, and the flowers of the field: but we shall obey
+too, that sounder instinct of theirs, which made them at last cast out of
+their own temples, as misplaced and unnatural things, the idols which
+they had inherited from Rome.
+
+So we shall obey the sound instinct of our heathen forefathers, when they
+worshipped the unknown God beneath the oaks of the primeval forest: but
+we shall obey, too, that sounder instinct of theirs, which taught them
+this, at least, concerning God--That it was beneath His dignity to coop
+Him within walls; and that the grandest forms of nature, as well as the
+deepest consciousnesses of their own souls, revealed to them a mysterious
+Being, who was to be beheld by faith alone.
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR
+
+
+The scholar, in the sixteenth century, was a far more important personage
+than now.  The supply of learned men was very small, the demand for them
+very great.  During the whole of the fifteenth, and a great part of the
+sixteenth century, the human mind turned more and more from the
+scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages to that of the Romans and the
+Greeks; and found more and more in old Pagan Art an element which
+Monastic Art had not, and which was yet necessary for the full
+satisfaction of their craving after the Beautiful.  At such a crisis of
+thought and taste, it was natural that the classical scholar, the man who
+knew old Rome, and still more old Greece, should usurp the place of the
+monk, as teacher of mankind; and that scholars should form, for a while,
+a new and powerful aristocracy, limited and privileged, and all the more
+redoubtable, because its power lay in intellect, and had been won by
+intellect alone.
+
+Those who, whether poor or rich, did not fear the monk and priest, at
+least feared the "scholar," who held, so the vulgar believed, the keys of
+that magic lore by which the old necromancers had built cities like Rome,
+and worked marvels of mechanical and chemical skill, which the degenerate
+modern could never equal.
+
+If the "scholar" stopped in a town, his hostess probably begged of him a
+charm against toothache or rheumatism.  The penniless knight discoursed
+with him on alchemy, and the chances of retrieving his fortune by the art
+of transmuting metals into gold.  The queen or bishop worried him in
+private about casting their nativities, and finding their fates among the
+stars.  But the statesman, who dealt with more practical matters, hired
+him as an advocate and rhetorician, who could fight his master's enemies
+with the weapons of Demosthenes and Cicero.  Wherever the scholar's steps
+were turned, he might be master of others, as long as he was master of
+himself.  The complaints which he so often uttered concerning the cruelty
+of fortune, the fickleness of princes, and so forth, were probably no
+more just then than such complaints are now.  Then, as now, he got his
+deserts; and the world bought him at his own price.  If he chose to sell
+himself to this patron and to that, he was used and thrown away: if he
+chose to remain in honourable independence, he was courted and feared.
+
+Among the successful scholars of the sixteenth century, none surely is
+more notable than George Buchanan.  The poor Scotch widow's son, by force
+of native wit, and, as I think, by force of native worth, fights his way
+upward, through poverty and severest persecution, to become the
+correspondent and friend of the greatest literary celebrities of the
+Continent, comparable, in their opinion, to the best Latin poets of
+antiquity; the preceptor of princes; the counsellor and spokesman of
+Scotch statesmen in the most dangerous of times; and leaves behind him
+political treatises, which have influenced not only the history of his
+own country, but that of the civilised world.
+
+Such a success could not be attained without making enemies, perhaps
+without making mistakes.  But the more we study George Buchanan's
+history, the less we shall be inclined to hunt out his failings, the more
+inclined to admire his worth.  A shrewd, sound-hearted, affectionate man,
+with a strong love of right and scorn of wrong, and a humour withal which
+saved him--except on really great occasions--from bitterness, and helped
+him to laugh where narrower natures would have only snarled,--he is, in
+many respects, a type of those Lowland Scots, who long preserved his
+jokes, genuine or reputed, as a common household book. {328}  A
+schoolmaster by profession, and struggling for long years amid the
+temptations which, in those days, degraded his class into cruel and
+sordid pedants, he rose from the mere pedagogue to be, in the best sense
+of the word, a courtier; "One," says Daniel Heinsius, "who seemed not
+only born for a court, but born to amend it.  He brought to his queen
+that at which she could not wonder enough.  For, by affecting a certain
+liberty in censuring morals, he avoided all offence, under the cloak of
+simplicity."  Of him and his compeers, Turnebus, and Muretus, and their
+friend Andrea Govea, Ronsard, the French court poet, said that they had
+nothing of the pedagogue about them but the gown and cap.  "Austere in
+face, and rustic in his looks," says David Buchanan, "but most polished
+in style and speech; and continually, even in serious conversation,
+jesting most wittily."  "Roughhewn, slovenly, and rude," says Peacham, in
+his 'Compleat Gentleman,' speaking of him, probably, as he appeared in
+old age, "in his person, behaviour, and fashion; seldom caring for a
+better outside than a rugge-gown girt close about him: yet his inside and
+conceipt in poesie was most rich, and his sweetness and facilitie in
+verse most excellent."  A typical Lowland Scot, as I said just now, he
+seems to have absorbed all the best culture which France could afford
+him, without losing the strength, honesty, and humour which he inherited
+from his Stirlingshire kindred.
+
+The story of his life is easily traced.  When an old man, he himself
+wrote down the main events of it, at the request of his friends; and his
+sketch has been filled out by commentators, if not always favourable, at
+least erudite.  Born in 1506, at the Moss, in Killearn--where an obelisk
+to his memory, so one reads, has been erected in this century--of a
+family "rather ancient than rich," his father dead in the prime of
+manhood, his grandfather a spendthrift, he and his seven brothers and
+sisters were brought up by a widowed mother, Agnes Heriot--of whom one
+wishes to know more; for the rule that great sons have great mothers
+probably holds good in her case.  George gave signs, while at the village
+school, of future scholarship; and when he was only fourteen, his uncle
+James sent him to the University of Paris.  Those were hard times; and
+the youths, or rather boys, who meant to become scholars, had a cruel
+life of it, cast desperately out on the wide world to beg and starve,
+either into self-restraint and success, or into ruin of body and soul.
+And a cruel life George had.  Within two years he was down in a severe
+illness, his uncle dead, his supplies stopped; and the boy of sixteen got
+home, he does not tell how.  Then he tried soldiering; and was with
+Albany's French Auxiliaries at the ineffectual attack on Wark Castle.
+Marching back through deep snow, he got a fresh illness, which kept him
+in bed all winter.  Then he and his brother were sent to St. Andrew's,
+where he got his B.A. at nineteen.  The next summer he went to France
+once more; and "fell," he says, "into the flames of the Lutheran sect,
+which was then spreading far and wide."  Two years of penury followed;
+and then three years of schoolmastering in the College of St. Barbe,
+which he has immortalised--at least for the few who care to read modern
+Latin poetry--in his elegy on 'The Miseries of a Parisian Teacher of the
+Humanities.'  The wretched regent master, pale and suffering, sits up all
+night preparing his lecture, biting his nails, and thumping his desk; and
+falls asleep for a few minutes, to start up at the sound of the four
+o'clock bell, and be in school by five, his Virgil in one hand, and his
+rod in the other, trying to do work on his own account at old
+manuscripts, and bawling all the while at his wretched boys, who cheat
+him, and pay each other to answer to truants' names.  The class is all
+wrong.  "One is barefoot, another's shoe is burst, another cries, another
+writes home.  Then comes the rod, the sound of blows and howls; and the
+day passes in tears."  "Then mass, then another lesson, then more blows;
+there is hardly time to eat."--I have no space to finish the picture of
+the stupid misery which, Buchanan says, was ruining his intellect, while
+it starved his body.  However, happier days came.  Gilbert Kennedy, Earl
+of Cassilis, who seems to have been a noble young gentleman, took him as
+his tutor for the next five years; and with him he went back to Scotland.
+
+But there his plain speaking got him, as it did more than once afterward,
+into trouble.  He took it into his head to write, in imitation of Dunbar,
+a Latin poem, in which St. Francis asks him in a dream to become a Grey
+Friar, and Buchanan answered in language which had the unpleasant fault
+of being too clever, and--to judge from contemporary evidence--only too
+true.  The friars said nothing at first: but when King James made
+Buchanan tutor to one of his natural sons, they, "men professing
+meekness, took the matter somewhat more angrily than befitted men so
+pious in the opinion of the people."  So Buchanan himself puts it: but,
+to do the poor friars justice, they must have been angels, not men, if
+they did not writhe somewhat under the scourge which he had laid on them.
+To be told that there was hardly a place in heaven for monks, was hard to
+hear and bear.  They accused him to the king of heresy: but not being
+then in favour with James, they got no answer, and Buchanan was commanded
+to repeat the castigation.  Having found out that the friars were not to
+be touched with impunity, he wrote, he says, a short and ambiguous poem.
+But the king, who loved a joke, demanded something sharp and stinging,
+and Buchanan obeyed by writing, but not publishing, the 'Franciscans,' a
+long satire, compared to which the 'Somnium' was bland and merciful.  The
+storm rose.  Cardinal Beaton, Buchanan says, wanted to buy him of the
+king, and then, of course, burn him, as he had just burnt five poor
+souls: so, knowing James's avarice, he fled to England, through
+freebooters and pestilence.
+
+There he found, he says, "men of both factions being burned on the same
+day and in the same fire"--a pardonable exaggeration--"by Henry VIII., in
+his old age more intent on his own safety than on the purity of
+religion."  So to his beloved France he went again, to find his enemy
+Beaton ambassador at Paris.  The capital was too hot to hold him; and he
+fled south to Bourdeaux, to Andrea Govea, the Portuguese principal of the
+College of Gruienne.  As Professor of Latin at Bourdeaux, we find him
+presenting a Latin poem to Charles V.; and indulging that fancy of his
+for Latin poetry which seems to us now-a-days a childish pedantry; which
+was then--when Latin was the vernacular tongue of all scholars--a
+serious, if not altogether a useful, pursuit.  Of his tragedies, so
+famous in their day--the 'Baptist,' the 'Medea,' the 'Jephtha,' and the
+'Alcestis'--there is neither space nor need to speak here, save to notice
+the bold declamations in the 'Baptist' against tyranny and priestcraft;
+and to notice also that these tragedies gained for the poor Scotsman, in
+the eyes of the best scholars of Europe, a credit amounting almost to
+veneration.  When he returned to Paris, he found occupation at once;
+and--as his Scots biographers love to record--"three of the most learned
+men in the world taught humanity in the same college," viz., Turnebus,
+Muretus, and Buchanan.
+
+Then followed a strange episode in his life.  A university had been
+founded at Coimbra, in Portugal, and Andrea Govea had been invited to
+bring thither what French savans he could collect.  Buchanan went to
+Portugal with his brother Patrick; two more Scotsmen, Dempster and
+Ramsay: and a goodly company of French scholars, whose names and
+histories may be read in the erudite pages of Dr. Irving, went likewise.
+All prospered in the new Temple of the Muses for a year or so.  Then its
+high-priest, Govea, died; and, by a peripeteia too common in those days
+and countries, Buchanan and two of his friends migrated, unwillingly,
+from the Temple of the Muses for that of Moloch, and found themselves in
+the Inquisition.
+
+Buchanan, it seems, had said that St. Augustine was more of a Lutheran
+than a Catholic on the question of the mass.  He and his friends had
+eaten flesh in Lent; which, he says, almost everyone in Spain did.  But
+he was suspected, and with reason, as a heretic; the Grey Friars formed
+but one brotherhood throughout Europe; and news among them travelled
+surely if not fast: so that the story of the satire written in Scotland
+had reached Portugal.  The culprits were imprisoned, examined,
+bullied--but not tortured--for a year and a half.  At the end of that
+time, the proofs of heresy, it seems, were insufficient; but lest--says
+Buchanan with honest pride--"they should get the reputation of having
+vainly tormented a man not altogether unknown," they sent him for some
+months to a monastery, to be instructed by the monks.  "The men," he
+says, "were neither inhuman nor bad, but utterly ignorant of religion;"
+and Buchanan solaced himself during the intervals of their instructions,
+by beginning his Latin translation of the Psalms.
+
+At last he got free, and begged leave to return to France; but in vain.
+Wearied out at last, he got on board a Candian ship at Lisbon, and
+escaped to England.  But England, he says, during the anarchy of Edward
+VI.'s reign, was not a land which suited him; and he returned to his
+beloved France, to fulfil the hopes which he had expressed in his
+charming 'Desiderium Lutitiae,' and the still more charming, because more
+simple, 'Adventus in Galliam,' in which he bids farewell, in most
+melodious verse, to "the hungry moors of wretched Portugal, and her clods
+fertile in naught but penury."
+
+Some seven years succeeded of schoolmastering and verse-writing:--The
+Latin paraphrase of the Psalms; another of the 'Alcestis' of Euripides;
+an Epithalamium on the marriage of poor Mary Stuart, noble and sincere,
+however fantastic and pedantic, after the manner of the times; "Pomps,"
+too, for her wedding, and for other public ceremonies, in which all the
+heathen gods and goddesses figure; epigrams, panegyrics, satires, much of
+which latter productions he would have consigned to the dust-heap in his
+old age, had not his too fond friends persuaded him to republish the
+follies and coarsenesses of his youth.  He was now one of the most famous
+scholars in Europe, and the intimate friend of all the great literary
+men.  Was he to go on to the end, die, and no more?  Was he to sink into
+the mere pedant; or, if he could not do that, into the mere court
+versifier?
+
+The wars of religion saved him, as they saved many another noble soul,
+from that degradation.  The events of 1560-1-2 forced Buchanan, as they
+forced many a learned man besides, to choose whether he would be a child
+of light or a child of darkness; whether he would be a dilettante
+classicist, or a preacher--it might be a martyr--of the Gospel.  Buchanan
+may have left France in "the troubles" merely to enjoy in his own country
+elegant and learned repose.  He may have fancied that he had found it,
+when he saw himself, in spite of his public profession of adherence to
+the Reformed Kirk, reading Livy every afternoon with his exquisite young
+sovereign; master, by her favour, of the temporalities of Crossraguel
+Abbey, and by the favour of Murray, Principal of St. Leonard's College in
+St. Andrew's.  Perhaps he fancied at times that "to-morrow was to be as
+to-day, and much more abundant;" that thenceforth he might read his
+folio, and write his epigram, and joke his joke, as a lazy comfortable
+pluralist, taking his morning stroll out to the corner where poor Wishart
+had been burned, above the blue sea and the yellow sands, and looking up
+to the castle tower from whence his enemy Beaton's corpse had been hung
+out; with the comfortable reflection that quietier times had come, and
+that whatever evil deeds Archbishop Hamilton might dare, he would not
+dare to put the Principal of St. Leonard's into the "bottle dungeon."
+
+If such hopes ever crossed Geordie's keen fancy, they were disappointed
+suddenly and fearfully.  The fire which had been kindled in France was to
+reach to Scotland likewise.  "Revolutions are not made with rose-water;"
+and the time was at hand when all good spirits in Scotland, and George
+Buchanan among them, had to choose, once and for all, amid danger,
+confusion, terror, whether they would serve God or Mammon; for to serve
+both would be soon impossible.
+
+Which side, in that war of light and darkness, George Buchanan took, is
+notorious.  He saw then, as others have seen since, that the two men in
+Scotland who were capable of being her captains in the strife were Knox
+and Murray; and to them he gave in his allegiance heart and soul.
+
+This is the critical epoch in Buchanan's life.  By his conduct to Queen
+Mary he must stand or fall.  It is my belief that he will stand.  It is
+not my intention to enter into the details of a matter so painful, so
+shocking, so prodigious; and now that that question is finally set at
+rest, by the writings both of Mr. Froude and Mr. Burton, there is no need
+to allude to it further, save where Buchanan's name is concerned.  One
+may now have every sympathy with Mary Stuart; one may regard with awe a
+figure so stately, so tragic, in one sense so heroic,--for she reminds
+one rather of the heroine of an old Greek tragedy, swept to her doom by
+some irresistible fate, than of a being of our own flesh and blood, and
+of our modern and Christian times.  One may sympathise with the great
+womanhood which charmed so many while she was alive; which has charmed,
+in later years, so many noble spirits who have believed in her innocence,
+and have doubtless been elevated and purified by their devotion to one
+who seemed to them an ideal being.  So far from regarding her as a
+hateful personage, one may feel oneself forbidden to hate a woman whom
+God may have loved, and may have pardoned, to judge from the punishment
+so swift, and yet so enduring, which He inflicted.  At least, he must so
+believe who holds that punishment is a sign of mercy; that the most
+dreadful of all dooms is impunity.  Nay, more, those "casket" letters and
+sonnets may be a relief to the mind of one who believes in her guilt on
+other grounds; a relief when one finds in them a tenderness, a sweetness,
+a delicacy, a magnificent self-sacrifice, however hideously misplaced,
+which shows what a womanly heart was there; a heart which, joined to that
+queenly brain, might have made her a blessing and a glory to Scotland,
+had not the whole character been warped and ruinate from childhood, by an
+education so abominable, that any one who knows what words she must have
+heard, what scenes she must have beheld in France, from her youth up,
+will wonder that she sinned so little: not that she sinned so much.  One
+may feel, in a word, that there is every excuse for those who have
+asserted Mary's innocence, because their own high-mindedness shrank from
+believing her guilty: but yet Buchanan, in his own place and time, may
+have felt as deeply that he could do no otherwise than he did.
+
+The charges against him, as all readers of Scotch literature know well,
+may be reduced to two heads.  1st. The letters and sonnets were
+forgeries.  Maitland of Lethington may have forged the letters; Buchanan,
+according to some, the sonnets.  Whoever forged them, Buchanan made use
+of them in his Detection, knowing them to be forged.  2nd. Whether Mary
+was innocent or not, Buchanan acted a base and ungrateful part in putting
+himself in the forefront amongst her accusers.  He had been her tutor,
+her pensioner.  She had heaped him with favours; and, after all, she was
+his queen, and a defenceless woman: and yet he returned her kindness, in
+the hour of her fall, by invectives fit only for a rancorous and reckless
+advocate, determined to force a verdict by the basest arts of oratory.
+
+Now as to the "casket" letters.  I should have thought they bore in
+themselves the best evidence of being genuine.  I can add nothing to the
+arguments of Mr. Froude and Mr. Burton, save this: that no one clever
+enough to be a forger, would have put together documents so incoherent,
+and so incomplete.  For the evidence of guilt which they contain is,
+after all, slight and indirect, and, moreover, superfluous altogether;
+seeing that Mary's guilt was open and palpable, before the supposed
+discovery of the letters, to every person at home and abroad who had any
+knowledge of the facts.  As for the alleged inconsistency of the letters
+with proven facts: the answer is, that whosoever wrote the letters would
+be more likely to know facts which were taking place around them than any
+critic could be one hundred or three hundred years afterwards.  But if
+these mistakes as to facts actually exist in them, they are only a fresh
+argument for their authenticity.  Mary, writing in agony and confusion,
+might easily make a mistake: forgers would only take too good care to
+make none.
+
+But the strongest evidence in favour of the letters and sonnets, in spite
+of the arguments of good Dr. Whittaker and other apologists for Mary, is
+to be found in their tone.  A forger in those coarse days would have made
+Mary write in some Semiramis or Roxana vein, utterly alien to the
+tenderness, the delicacy, the pitiful confusion of mind, the conscious
+weakness, the imploring and most feminine trust which makes the letters,
+to those who--as I do--believe in them, more pathetic than any fictitious
+sorrows which poets could invent.  More than one touch, indeed, of utter
+self-abasement, in the second letter, is so unexpected, so subtle, and
+yet so true to the heart of woman, that--as has been well said--if it was
+invented there must have existed in Scotland an earlier Shakespeare; who
+yet has died without leaving any other sign, for good or evil, of his
+dramatic genius.
+
+As for the theory (totally unsupported) that Buchanan forged the poem
+usually called the Sonnets; it is paying old Geordie's genius, however
+versatile it may have been, too high a compliment to believe that he
+could have written both them and the Detection; while it is paying his
+shrewdness too low a compliment to believe that he could have put into
+them, out of mere carelessness or stupidity, the well-known line, which
+seems incompatible with the theory both of the letters and of his own
+Detection; and which has ere now been brought forward as a fresh proof of
+Mary's innocence.
+
+And, as with the letters, so with the sonnets: their delicacy, their
+grace, their reticence, are so many arguments against their having been
+forged by any Scot of the sixteenth century, and least of all by one in
+whose character--whatever his other virtues may have been--delicacy was
+by no means the strongest point.
+
+As for the complaint that Buchanan was ungrateful to Mary, it must be
+said: That even if she, and not Murray, had bestowed on him the
+temporalities of Crossraguel Abbey four years before, it was merely fair
+pay for services fairly rendered; and I am not aware that payment, or
+even favours, however gracious, bind any man's soul and conscience in
+questions of highest morality and highest public importance.  And the
+importance of that question cannot be exaggerated.  At a moment when
+Scotland seemed struggling in death-throes of anarchy, civil and
+religious, and was in danger of becoming a prey either to England or to
+France, if there could not be formed out of the heart of her a people,
+steadfast, trusty, united, strong politically because strong in the fear
+of God and the desire of righteousness--at such a moment as this, a crime
+had been committed, the like of which had not been heard in Europe since
+the tragedy of Joan of Naples.  All Europe stood aghast.  The honour of
+the Scottish nation was at stake.  More than Mary or Bothwell were known
+to be implicated in the deed; and--as Buchanan puts it in the opening of
+his 'De Jure Regni'--"The fault of some few was charged upon all; and the
+common hatred of a particular person did redound to the whole nation; so
+that even such as were remote from any suspicion were inflamed by the
+infamy of men's crimes." {343}
+
+To vindicate the national honour, and to punish the guilty, as well as to
+save themselves from utter anarchy, the great majority of the Scotch
+nation had taken measures against Mary which required explicit
+justification in the sight of Europe, as Buchanan frankly confesses in
+the opening of his "De Jure Regni."  The chief authors of those measures
+had been summoned, perhaps unwisely and unjustly, to answer for their
+conduct to the Queen of England.  Queen Elizabeth--a fact which was
+notorious enough then, though it has been forgotten till the last few
+years--was doing her utmost to shield Mary.  Buchanan was deputed, it
+seems, to speak out for the people of Scotland; and certainly never
+people had an abler apologist.  If he spoke fiercely, savagely, it must
+be remembered that he spoke of a fierce and savage matter; if he used--and
+it may be abused--all the arts of oratory, it must be remembered that he
+was fighting for the honour, and it may be for the national life, of his
+country, and striking--as men in such cases have a right to strike--as
+hard as he could.  If he makes no secret of his indignation, and even
+contempt, it must be remembered that indignation and contempt may well
+have been real with him, while they were real with the soundest part of
+his countrymen; with that reforming middle class, comparatively untainted
+by French profligacy, comparatively undebauched by feudal subservience,
+which has been the leaven which has leavened the whole Scottish people in
+the last three centuries with the elements of their greatness.  If,
+finally, he heaps up against the unhappy Queen charges which Mr. Burton
+thinks incredible, it must be remembered that, as he well says, these
+charges give the popular feeling about Queen Mary; and it must be
+remembered also, that that popular feeling need not have been altogether
+unfounded.  Stories which are incredible, thank God, in these milder
+days, were credible enough then, because, alas! they were so often true.
+Things more ugly than any related of poor Mary, were possible enough--as
+no one knew better than Buchanan--in that very French court in which Mary
+had been brought up; things as ugly were possible in Scotland then, and
+for at least a century later; and while we may hope that Buchanan has
+overstated his case, we must not blame him too severely for yielding to a
+temptation common to all men of genius when their creative power is
+roused to its highest energy by a great cause and a great indignation.
+
+And that the genius was there, no man can doubt; one cannot read that
+"hideously eloquent" description of Kirk o' Field, which Mr. Burton has
+well chosen as a specimen of Buchanan's style, without seeing that we are
+face to face with a genius of a very lofty order: not, indeed, of the
+loftiest--for there is always in Buchanan's work, it seems to me, a want
+of unconsciousness, and a want of tenderness--but still a genius worthy
+to be placed beside those ancient writers from whom he took his manner.
+Whether or not we agree with his contemporaries, who say that he equalled
+Virgil in Latin poetry, we may place him fairly as a prose writer by the
+side of Demosthenes, Cicero, or Tacitus.  And so I pass from this painful
+subject; only quoting--if I may be permitted to quote--Mr. Burton's wise
+and gentle verdict on the whole.  "Buchanan," he says, "though a zealous
+Protestant, had a good deal of the Catholic and sceptical spirit of
+Erasmus, and an admiring eye for everything that was great and beautiful.
+Like the rest of his countrymen, he bowed himself in presence of the
+lustre that surrounded the early career of his mistress.  More than once
+he expressed his pride and reverence in the inspiration of a genius
+deemed by his contemporaries to be worthy of the theme.  There is not,
+perhaps, to be found elsewhere in literature so solemn a memorial of
+shipwrecked hopes, of a sunny opening and a stormy end, as one finds in
+turning the leaves of the volume which contains the beautiful epigram
+'Nympha Caledoniae' in one part, the 'Detectio Mariae Reginae' in
+another; and this contrast is, no doubt, a faithful parallel of the
+reaction in the popular mind.  This reaction seems to have been general,
+and not limited to the Protestant party; for the conditions under which
+it became almost a part of the creed of the Church of Rome to believe in
+her innocence had not arisen."
+
+If Buchanan, as some of his detractors have thought, raised himself by
+subserviency to the intrigues of the Regent Murray, the best heads in
+Scotland seem to have been of a different opinion.  The murder of Murray
+did not involve Buchanan's fall.  He had avenged it, as far as pen could
+do it, by that 'Admonition Direct to the Trew Lordis,' in which he showed
+himself as great a master of Scottish, as he was of Latin, prose.  His
+satire of the 'Chameleon,' though its publication was stopped by
+Maitland, must have been read in manuscript by many of those same "True
+Lords;" and though there were nobler instincts in Maitland than any
+Buchanan gave him credit for, the satire breathed an honest indignation
+against that wily turncoat's misdoings, which could not but recommend the
+author to all honest men.  Therefore it was, I presume, and not because
+he was a rogue, and a hired literary spadassin, that to the best heads in
+Scotland he seemed so useful, it may be so worthy, a man, that he be
+provided with continually increasing employment.  As tutor to James I.;
+as director, for a short time, of the chancery; as keeper of the privy
+seal, and privy councillor; as one of the commissioners for codifying the
+laws, and again--for in the semi-anarchic state of Scotland, government
+had to do everything in the way of organisation--in the committee for
+promulgating a standard Latin grammar; in the committee for reforming the
+University of St. Andrew's: in all these Buchanan's talents were again
+and again called for; and always ready.  The value of his work,
+especially that for the reform of St. Andrew's, must be judged by
+Scotchmen, rather than by an Englishman: but all that one knows of it
+justifies Melville's sentence in the well-known passage in his memoirs,
+wherein he describes the tutors and household of the young King.  "Mr.
+George was a Stoic philosopher, who looked not far before him;" in plain
+words, a high-minded and right-minded man, bent on doing the duty which
+lay nearest him.  The worst that can be said against him during these
+times is, that his name appears with the sum of 100 pounds against it, as
+one of those "who were to be entertained in Scotland by pensions out of
+England"; and Ruddiman, of course, comments on the fact by saying that
+Buchanan "was at length to act under the threefold character of
+malcontent, reformer, and pensioner:" but it gives no proof whatsoever
+that Buchanan ever received any such bribe; and in the very month,
+seemingly, in which that list was written--10th March, 1579--Buchanan had
+given a proof to the world that he was not likely to be bribed or bought,
+by publishing a book, as offensive probably to Queen Elizabeth as it was
+to his own royal pupil; namely, his famous 'De Jure Regni apud Scotos,'
+the very primer, according to many great thinkers, of constitutional
+liberty.  He dedicates that book to King James, "not only as his monitor,
+but also an importunate and bold exactor, which in these his tender and
+flexible years may conduct him in safety past the rocks of flattery."  He
+has complimented James already on his abhorrence of flattery, "his
+inclination far above his years for undertaking all heroical and noble
+attempts, his promptitude in obeying his instructors and governors, and
+all who give him sound admonition, and his judgment and diligence in
+examining affairs, so that no man's authority can have much weight with
+him unless it be confirmed by probable reasons."  Buchanan may have
+thought that nine years of his stern rule had eradicated some of James's
+ill conditions; the petulance which made him kill the Master of Mar's
+sparrow, in trying to wrest it out of his hand; the carelessness with
+which--if the story told by Chytraeus, on the authority of Buchanan's
+nephew, be true--James signed away his crown to Buchanan for fifteen
+days, and only discovered his mistake by seeing Buchanan act in open
+court the character of King of Scots.  Buchanan had at last made him a
+scholar; he may have fancied that he had made him likewise a manful man:
+yet he may have dreaded that, as James grew up, the old inclinations
+would return in stronger and uglier shapes, and that flattery might be,
+as it was after all, the cause of James's moral ruin.  He at least will
+be no flatterer.  He opens the dialogue which he sends to the king, with
+a calm but distinct assertion of his mother's guilt, and a justification
+of the conduct of men who were now most of them past helping Buchanan,
+for they were laid in their graves; and then goes on to argue fairly, but
+to lay down firmly, in a sort of Socratic dialogue, those very principles
+by loyalty to which the House of Hanover has reigned, and will reign,
+over these realms.  So with his History of Scotland; later antiquarian
+researches have destroyed the value of the earlier portions of it: but
+they have surely increased the value of those later portions, in which
+Buchanan inserted so much which he had already spoken out in his
+Detection of Mary.  In that book also, "liberavit animam suam;" he spoke
+his mind, fearless of consequences, in the face of a king who he must
+have known--for Buchanan was no dullard--regarded him with deep dislike,
+who might in a few years be able to work his ruin.
+
+But those few years were not given to Buchanan.  He had all but done his
+work, and he hastened to get it over before the night should come wherein
+no man can work.  One must be excused for telling--one would not tell it
+in a book intended to be read only by Scotchmen, who know or ought to
+know the tale already--how the two Melvilles and Buchanan's nephew Thomas
+went to see him in Edinburgh, in September, 1581, hearing that he was
+ill, and his History still in the press; and how they found the old sage,
+true to his schoolmaster's instincts, teaching the Hornbook to his
+servant-lad; and how he told them that doing that was "better than
+stealing sheep, or sitting idle, which was as bad," and showed them that
+dedication to James I., in which he holds up to his imitation as a hero
+whose equal was hardly to be found in history, that very King David whose
+liberality to the Romish Church provoked James's witticism that "David
+was a sair saint for the crown."  Andrew Melville, so James Melville
+says, found fault with the style.  Buchanan replied that he could do no
+more for thinking of another thing, which was to die.  They then went to
+Arbuthnot's printing-house, and inspected the history, as far as that
+terrible passage concerning Rizzio's burial, where Mary is represented as
+"laying the miscreant almost in the arms of Maud de Valois, the late
+queen."  Alarmed, and not without reason, at such plain speaking, they
+stopped the press, and went back to Buchanan's house.  Buchanan was in
+bed.  "He was going," he said, "the way of welfare."  They asked him to
+soften the passage; the king might prohibit the whole work.  "Tell me,
+man," said Buchanan, "if I have told the truth."  They could not, or
+would not, deny it.  "Then I will abide his feud, and all his kin's;
+pray, pray to God for me, and let Him direct all."  "So," says Melville,
+"by the printing of his chronicle was ended, this most learned, wise, and
+godly man ended his mortal life."
+
+Camden has a hearsay story--written, it must be remembered, in James I.'s
+time--that Buchanan, on his death-bed repented of his harsh words against
+Queen Mary; and an old Lady Rosyth is said to have said that when she was
+young a certain David Buchanan recollected hearing some such words from
+George Buchanan's own mouth.  Those who will, may read what Ruddiman and
+Love have said, and oversaid, on both sides of the question: whatever
+conclusion they come to, it will probably not be that to which George
+Chalmers comes in his life of Ruddiman: that "Buchanan, like other liars,
+who by the repetition of falsehoods are induced to consider the fiction
+as truth, had so often dwelt with complacency on the forgeries of his
+Detections, and the figments of his History, that he at length regarded
+his fictions and his forgeries as most authentic facts."
+
+At all events his fictions and his forgeries had not paid him in that
+coin which base men generally consider the only coin worth having,
+namely, the good things of this life.  He left nothing behind him--if at
+least Dr. Irving has rightly construed the "Testament Dative" which he
+gives in his appendix--save arrears to the sum of 100_l_. of his
+Crossraguel pension.  We may believe as we choose the story in
+Mackenzie's 'Scotch Writers,' that when he felt himself dying, he asked
+his servant Young about the state of his funds, and finding he had not
+enough to bury himself withal, ordered what he had to be given to the
+poor, and said that if they did not choose to bury him they might let him
+lie where he was, or cast him in a ditch, the matter was very little to
+him.  He was buried, it seems, at the expense of the city of Edinburgh,
+in the Greyfriars' Churchyard--one says in a plain turf grave--among the
+marble monuments which covered the bones of worse or meaner men; and
+whether or not the "Throughstone" which, "sunk under the ground in the
+Greyfriars," was raised and cleaned by the Council of Edinburgh in 1701,
+was really George Buchanan's, the reigning powers troubled themselves
+little for several generations where he lay.
+
+For Buchanan's politics were too advanced for his age.  Not only Catholic
+Scotsmen, like Blackwood, Winzet, and Ninian, but Protestants, like Sir
+Thomas Craig and Sir John Wemyss, could not stomach the 'De Jure Regni.'
+They may have had some reason on their side.  In the then anarchic state
+of Scotland, organisation and unity under a common head may have been
+more important than the assertion of popular rights.  Be that as it may,
+in 1584, only two years after his death, the Scots Parliament condemned
+his Dialogue and History as untrue, and commanded all possessors of
+copies to deliver them up, that they might be purged of "the offensive
+and extraordinary matters" which they contained.  The 'De Jure Regni' was
+again prohibited in Scotland, in 1664, even in manuscript; and in 1683,
+the whole of Buchanan's political works had the honour of being burned by
+the University of Oxford, in company with those of Milton, Languet, and
+others, as "pernicious books, and damnable doctrines, destructive to the
+sacred persons of Princes, their state and government, and of all human
+society."  And thus the seed which Buchanan had sown, and Milton had
+watered--for the allegation that Milton borrowed from Buchanan is
+probably true, and equally honourable to both--lay trampled into the
+earth, and seemingly lifeless, till it tillered out, and blossomed, and
+bore fruit to a good purpose, in the Revolution of 1688.
+
+To Buchanan's clear head and stout heart, Scotland owes, as England owes
+likewise, much of her modern liberty.  But Scotland's debt to him, it
+seems to me, is even greater on the count of morality, public and
+private.  What the morality of the Scotch upper classes was like, in
+Buchanan's early days, is too notorious; and there remains proof
+enough--in the writings, for instance, of Sir David Lindsay--that the
+morality of the populace which looked up to the nobles as its example and
+its guide, was not a whit better.  As anarchy increased, immorality was
+likely to increase likewise; and Scotland was in serious danger of
+falling into such a state as that into which Poland fell, to its ruin,
+within a hundred and fifty years after; in which the savagery of
+feudalism, without its order or its chivalry, would be varnished over by
+a thin coating of French "civilisation," and, as in the case of Bothwell,
+the vices of the court of Paris should be added to those of the Northern
+freebooter.  To deliver Scotland from that ruin, it was needed that she
+should be united into one people, strong, not in mere political, but in
+moral ideas; strong by the clear sense of right and wrong, by the belief
+in the government and the judgments of a living God.  And the tone which
+Buchanan, like Knox, adopted concerning the great crimes of their day,
+helped notably that national salvation.  It gathered together, organised,
+strengthened, the scattered and wavering elements of public morality.  It
+assured the hearts of all men who loved the right and hated the wrong;
+and taught a whole nation to call acts by their just names, whoever might
+be the doers of them.  It appealed to the common conscience of men.  It
+proclaimed a universal and God-given morality, a bar at which all, from
+the lowest to the highest, must alike be judged.
+
+The tone was stern: but there was need of sternness.  Moral life and
+death were in the balance.  If the Scots people were to be told that the
+crimes which roused their indignation were excusable, or beyond
+punishment, or to be hushed up and slipped over in any way, there was an
+end of morality among them.  Every man, from the greatest to the least,
+would go and do likewise, according to his powers of evil.  That method
+was being tried in France, and in Spain likewise, during those very
+years.  Notorious crimes were hushed up under pretence of loyalty;
+excused as political necessities; smiled away as natural and pardonable
+weaknesses.  The result was the utter demoralisation, both of France and
+Spain.  Knox and Buchanan, the one from the stand-point of an old Hebrew
+prophet, the other rather from that of a Juvenal or a Tacitus, tried the
+other method, and called acts by their just names, appealing alike to
+conscience and to God.  The result was virtue and piety, and that manly
+independence of soul which is thought compatible with hearty loyalty, in
+a country labouring under heavy disadvantages, long divided almost into
+two hostile camps, two rival races.
+
+And the good influence was soon manifest, not only in those who sided
+with Buchanan and his friends, but in those who most opposed them.  The
+Roman Catholic preachers, who at first asserted Mary's right to impunity,
+while they allowed her guilt, grew silent for shame, and set themselves
+to assert her entire innocence; while the Scots who have followed their
+example have, to their honour, taken up the same ground.  They have
+fought Buchanan on the ground of fact, not on the ground of morality:
+they have alleged--as they had a fair right to do--the probability of
+intrigue and forgery in an age so profligate: the improbability that a
+Queen so gifted by nature and by fortune, and confessedly for a long
+while so strong and so spotless, should as it were by a sudden insanity
+have proved so untrue to herself.  Their noblest and purest sympathies
+have been enlisted--and who can blame them?--in loyalty to a Queen,
+chivalry to a woman, pity for the unfortunate and--as they conceived--the
+innocent; but whether they have been right or wrong in their view of
+facts, the Scotch partisans of Mary have always--as far as I know--been
+right in their view of morals; they have never deigned to admit Mary's
+guilt, and then to palliate it by those sentimental, or rather sensual,
+theories of human nature, too common in a certain school of French
+literature,--too common, alas! in a certain school of modern English
+novels.  They have not said, "She did it; but after all, was the deed so
+very inexcusable?"  They have said, "The deed was inexcusable: but she
+did not do it."  And so the Scotch admirers of Mary, who have numbered
+among them many a pure and noble, as well as many a gifted spirit, have
+kept at least themselves unstained; and have shown, whether consciously
+or not, that they too share in that sturdy Scotch moral sense which has
+been so much strengthened--as I believe--by the plain speech of good old
+George Buchanan.
+
+
+
+
+RONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST {358}
+
+
+"Apollo, god of medicine, exiled from the rest of the earth, was straying
+once across the Narbonnaise in Gaul, seeking to fix his abode there.
+Driven from Asia, from Africa, and from the rest of Europe, he wandered
+through all the towns of the province in search of a place propitious for
+him and for his disciples.  At last he perceived a new city, constructed
+from the ruins of Maguelonne, of Lattes, and of Substantion.  He
+contemplated long its site, its aspect, its neighbourhood, and resolved
+to establish on this hill of Montpellier a temple for himself and his
+priests.  All smiled on his desires.  By the genius of the soil, by the
+character of the inhabitants, no town is more fit for the culture of
+letters, and above all of medicine.  What site is more delicious and more
+lovely?  A heaven pure and smiling; a city built with magnificence; men
+born for all the labours of the intellect.  All around vast horizons and
+enchanting sites--meadows, vines, olives, green champaigns; mountains and
+hills, rivers, brooks, lagoons, and the sea.  Everywhere a luxuriant
+vegetation--everywhere the richest production of the land and the water.
+Hail to thee, sweet and dear city!  Hail, happy abode of Apollo, who
+spreadest afar the light of the glory of thy name!"
+
+"This fine tirade," says Dr. Maurice Raynaud--from whose charming book on
+the 'Doctors of the Time of Moliere' I quote--"is not, as one might
+think, the translation of a piece of poetry.  It is simply part of a
+public oration by Francois Fanchon, one of the most illustrious
+chancellors of the faculty of medicine of Montpellier in the seventeenth
+century."  "From time immemorial," he says, "'the faculty' of Montpellier
+had made itself remarkable by a singular mixture of the sacred and the
+profane.  The theses which were sustained there began by an invocation to
+God, the Blessed Virgin, and St. Luke, and ended by these words:--'This
+thesis will be sustained in the sacred Temple of Apollo.'"
+
+But however extravagant Chancellor Fanchon's praises of his native city
+may seem, they are really not exaggerated.  The Narbonnaise, or
+Languedoc, is perhaps the most charming district of charming France.  In
+the far north-east gleam the white Alps; in the far south-west the white
+Pyrenees; and from the purple glens and yellow downs of the Cevennes on
+the northwest, the Herault slopes gently down towards the "Etangs," or
+great salt-water lagoons, and the vast alluvial flats of the Camargue,
+the field of Caius Marius, where still run herds of half-wild horses,
+descended from some ancient Roman stock; while beyond all glitters the
+blue Mediterranean.  The great almond orchards, each one sheet of rose-
+colour in spring; the mulberry orchards, the oliveyards, the vineyards,
+cover every foot of available upland soil: save where the rugged and arid
+downs are sweet with a thousand odoriferous plants, from which the bees
+extract the famous white honey of Narbonne.  The native flowers and
+shrubs, of a beauty and richness rather Eastern than European, have made
+the 'Flora Monspeliensis,' and with it the names of Rondelet and his
+disciples, famous among botanists; and the strange fish and shells upon
+its shores afforded Rondelet materials for his immortal work upon the
+'Animals of the Sea.'  The innumerable wild fowl of the "Bouches du
+Rhone;" the innumerable songsters and other birds of passage, many of
+them unknown in these islands, and even in the north of France itself,
+which haunt every copse of willow and aspen along the brook sides; the
+gaudy and curious insects which thrive beneath that clear, fierce, and
+yet bracing sunlight; all these have made the district of Montpellier a
+home prepared by Nature for those who study and revere her.
+
+Neither was Chancellor Fanchon misled by patriotism, when he said the
+pleasant people who inhabit that district are fit for all the labours of
+the intellect.  They are a very mixed race, and like most mixed races,
+quick-witted, and handsome also.  There is probably much Roman blood
+among them, especially in the towns; for Languedoc, or Gallia
+Narbonnensis, as it was called of old, was said to be more Roman than
+Rome itself.  The Roman remains are more perfect and more interesting--so
+the late Dr. Whewell used to say--than any to be seen now in Italy; and
+the old capital, Narbonne itself, was a complete museum of Roman
+antiquities ere Francis I. destroyed it, in order to fortify the city
+upon a modern system against the invading armies of Charles V.  There
+must be much Visigothic blood likewise in Languedoc; for the Visigothic
+Kings held their courts there from the fifth century, until the time that
+they were crushed by the invading Moors.  Spanish blood, likewise, there
+may be; for much of Languedoc was held in the early Middle Age by those
+descendants of Eudes of Acquitaine who established themselves as kings of
+Majorca and Arragon; and Languedoc did not become entirely French till
+1349, when Philip le Bel bought Montpellier of those potentates.  The
+Moors, too, may have left some traces of their race behind.  They held
+the country from about A.D. 713 to 758, when they were finally expelled
+by Charles Martel and Eudes.  One sees to this day their towers of meagre
+stone-work, perched on the grand Roman masonry of those old
+amphitheatres, which they turned into fortresses.  One may see, too--so
+tradition holds--upon those very amphitheatres the stains of the fires
+with which Charles Martel smoked them out; and one may see, too, or fancy
+that one sees, in the aquiline features, the bright black eyes, the lithe
+and graceful gestures, which are so common in Languedoc, some touch of
+the old Mahommedan race, which passed like a flood over that Christian
+land.
+
+Whether or not the Moors left behind any traces of their blood, they left
+behind, at least, traces of their learning; for the university of
+Montpellier claimed to have been founded by Moors at a date of altogether
+abysmal antiquity.  They looked upon the Arabian physicians of the Middle
+Age, on Avicenna and Averrhoes, as modern innovators, and derived their
+parentage from certain mythic doctors of Cordova, who, when the Moors
+were expelled from Spain in the eighth century, fled to Montpellier,
+bringing with them traditions of that primeval science which had been
+revealed to Adam while still in Paradise; and founded Montpellier, the
+mother of all the universities in Europe.  Nay, some went further still,
+and told of Bengessaus and Ferragius, the physicians of Charlemagne, and
+of Marilephus, chief physician of King Chilperic, and even--if a letter
+of St. Bernard's was to be believed--of a certain bishop who went as
+early as the second century to consult the doctors of Montpellier; and it
+would have been in vain to reply to them that in those days, and long
+after them, Montpellier was not yet built.  The facts are said to be:
+that as early as the beginning of the thirteenth century Montpellier had
+its schools of law, medicine, and arts, which were erected into a
+university by Pope Nicholas IV. in 1289.
+
+The university of Montpellier, like--I believe--most foreign ones,
+resembled more a Scotch than an English university.  The students lived,
+for the most part, not in colleges, but in private lodgings, and
+constituted a republic of their own, ruled by an abbe of the scholars,
+one of themselves, chosen by universal suffrage.  A terror they were
+often to the respectable burghers, for they had all the right to carry
+arms; and a plague likewise, for, if they ran in debt, their creditors
+were forbidden to seize their books, which, with their swords, were
+generally all the property they possessed.  If, moreover, any one set up
+a noisy or unpleasant trade near their lodgings, the scholars could
+compel the town authorities to turn him out.  They were most of them,
+probably, mere boys of from twelve to twenty, living poorly, working
+hard, and--those at least of them who were in the colleges--cruelly
+beaten daily, after the fashion of those times; but they seem to have
+comforted themselves under their troubles by a good deal of wild life out
+of school, by rambling into the country on the festivals of the saints,
+and now and then by acting plays; notably, that famous one which Rabelais
+wrote for them in 1531: "The moral comedy of the man who had a dumb
+wife;" which "joyous patelinage" remains unto this day in the shape of a
+well-known comic song.  That comedy young Rondelet must have seen acted.
+The son of a druggist, spicer, and grocer--the three trades were then
+combined--in Montpellier, and born in 1507, he had been destined for the
+cloister, being a sickly lad.  His uncle, one of the canons of
+Maguelonne, near by, had even given him the revenues of a small chapel--a
+job of nepotism which was common enough in those days.  But his heart was
+in science and medicine.  He set off, still a mere boy, to Paris to study
+there; and returned to Montpellier, at the age of eighteen, to study
+again.
+
+The next year, 1530, while still a scholar himself, he was appointed
+procurator of the scholars--a post which brought him in a small fee on
+each matriculation--and that year he took a fee, among others, from one
+of the most remarkable men of that or of any age, Francois Rabelais
+himself.
+
+And what shall I say of him?--who stands alone, like Shakespeare, in his
+generation; possessed of colossal learning--of all science which could be
+gathered in his days--of practical and statesmanlike wisdom--of knowledge
+of languages, ancient and modern, beyond all his compeers--of eloquence,
+which when he speaks of pure and noble things becomes heroic, and, as it
+were, inspired--of scorn for meanness, hypocrisy, ignorance--of esteem,
+genuine and earnest, for the Holy Scriptures, and for the more moderate
+of the Reformers who were spreading the Scriptures in Europe,--and all
+this great light wilfully hidden, not under a bushel, but under a
+dunghill.  He is somewhat like Socrates in face, and in character
+likewise; in him, as in Socrates, the demigod and the satyr, the man and
+the ape, are struggling for the mastery.  In Socrates, the true man
+conquers, and comes forth high and pure; in Rabelais, alas! the victor is
+the ape, while the man himself sinks down in cynicism, sensuality,
+practical jokes, foul talk.  He returns to Paris, to live an idle,
+luxurious life; to die--says the legend--saying, "I go to seek a great
+perhaps," and to leave behind him little save a school of
+Pantagruelists--careless young gentlemen, whose ideal was to laugh at
+everything, to believe in nothing, and to gratify their five senses like
+the brutes which perish.  There are those who read his books to make them
+laugh; the wise man, when he reads them, will be far more inclined to
+weep.  Let any young man who may see these words remember, that in him,
+as in Rabelais, the ape and the man are struggling for the mastery.  Let
+him take warning by the fate of one who was to him as a giant to a pigmy;
+and think of Tennyson's words:--
+
+      "Arise, and fly
+   The reeling faun, the sensual feast;
+   Strive upwards, working out the beast,
+   And let the ape and tiger die."
+
+But to return.  Down among them there at Montpellier, like a brilliant
+meteor, flashed this wonderful Rabelais, in the year 1530.  He had fled,
+some say, for his life.  Like Erasmus, he had no mind to be a martyr, and
+he had been terrified at the execution of poor Louis de Berquin, his
+friend, and the friend of Erasmus likewise.  This Louis de Berquin, a man
+well known in those days, was a gallant young gentleman and scholar,
+holding a place in the court of Francis I., who had translated into
+French the works of Erasmus, Luther, and Melancthon, and had asserted
+that it was heretical to invoke the Virgin Mary instead of the Holy
+Spirit, or to call her our Hope and our Life, which titles--Berquin
+averred--belonged alone to God.  Twice had the doctors of the Sorbonne,
+with that terrible persecutor, Noel Beda, at their head, seized poor
+Berquin, and tried to burn his books and him; twice had that angel in
+human form, Marguerite d'Angouleme, sister of Francis I., saved him from
+their clutches; but when Francis--taken prisoner at the battle of
+Pavia--at last returned from his captivity in Spain, the suppression of
+heresy and the burning of heretics seemed to him and to his mother,
+Louise of Savoy, a thank-offering so acceptable to God, that Louis
+Berquin--who would not, in spite of the entreaties of Erasmus, purchase
+his life by silence--was burnt at last on the Place de Greve, being first
+strangled, because he was of gentle blood.
+
+Montpellier received its famous guest joyfully.  Rabelais was now forty-
+two years old, and a distinguished savant; so they excused him his three
+years' undergraduate's career, and invested him at once with the red gown
+of the bachelors.  That red gown--or, rather, the ragged phantom of it--is
+still shown at Montpellier, and must be worn by each bachelor when he
+takes his degree.  Unfortunately, antiquarians assure us that the
+precious garment has been renewed again and again--the students having
+clipped bits of it away for relics, and clipped as earnestly from the new
+gowns as their predecessors had done from the authentic original.
+
+Doubtless the coming of such a man among them to lecture on the Aphorisms
+of Hippocrates, and the Ars Parva of Galen, not from the Latin
+translations then in use, "but from original Greek texts, with comments
+and corrections of his own, must have had a great influence on the minds
+of the Montpellier students; and still more influence--and that not
+altogether a good one--must Rabelais' lighter talk have had, as he
+lounged--so the story goes--in his dressing-gown upon the public place,
+picking up quaint stories from the cattle-drivers off the Cevennes, and
+the villagers who came in to sell their olives and their grapes, their
+vinegar and their vine-twig faggots, as they do unto this day.  To him
+may be owing much of the sound respect for natural science, and much,
+too, of the contempt for the superstition around them, which is notable
+in that group of great naturalists who were boys in Montpellier at that
+day.  Rabelais seems to have liked Rondelet, and no wonder: he was a
+cheery, lovable, honest little fellow, very fond of jokes, a great
+musician and player on the violin, and who, when he grew rich, liked
+nothing so well as to bring into his house any buffoon or strolling
+player to make fun for him.  Vivacious he was, hot-tempered, forgiving,
+and with a power of learning and a power of work which were prodigious,
+even in those hard-working days.  Rabelais chaffs Rondelet, under the
+name of Rondibilis; for, indeed, Rondelet grew up into a very round, fat,
+little man; but Rabelais puts excellent sense into his mouth, cynical
+enough, and too cynical, but both learned and humorous; and, if he laughs
+at him for being shocked at the offer of a fee, and taking it,
+nevertheless, kindly enough, Rondelet is not the first doctor who has
+done that, neither will he be the last.
+
+Rondelet, in his turn, put on the red robe of the bachelor, and received,
+on taking his degree, his due share of fisticuffs from his dearest
+friends, according to the ancient custom of the University of
+Montpellier.  He then went off to practise medicine in a village at the
+foot of the Alps, and, half-starved, to teach little children.  Then he
+found he must learn Greek; went off to Paris a second time, and
+alleviated his poverty there somewhat by becoming tutor to a son of the
+Viscomte de Turenne.  There he met Gonthier of Andernach, who had taught
+anatomy at Louvain to the great Vesalius, and learned from him to
+dissect.  We next find him setting up as a medical man amid the wild
+volcanic hills of the Auvergne, struggling still with poverty, like
+Erasmus, like George Buchanan, like almost every great scholar in those
+days; for students then had to wander from place to place, generally on
+foot, in search of new teachers, in search of books, in search of the
+necessaries of life; undergoing such an amount of bodily and mental toil
+as makes it wonderful that all of them did not--as some of them doubtless
+did--die under the hard training, or, at best, desert the penurious Muses
+for the paternal shop or plough.
+
+Rondelet got his doctorate in 1537, and next year fell in love with and
+married a beautiful young girl called Jeanne Sandre, who seems to have
+been as poor as he.
+
+But he had gained, meanwhile, a powerful patron and the patronage of the
+great was then as necessary to men of letters as the patronage of the
+public is now.  Guillaume Pellicier, Bishop of Maguelonne--or rather then
+of Montpellier itself, whither he had persuaded Paul II. to transfer the
+ancient see--was a model of the literary gentleman of the sixteenth
+century; a savant, a diplomat, a collector of books and manuscripts,
+Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac, which formed the original nucleus of the
+present library of the Louvre; a botanist, too, who loved to wander with
+Rondelet collecting plants and flowers.  He retired from public life to
+peace and science at Montpellier, when to the evil days of his master,
+Francis I., succeeded the still worse days of Henry II., and Diana of
+Poitiers.  That Jezebel of France could conceive no more natural or easy
+way of atoning for her own sins than that of hunting down heretics, and
+feasting her wicked eyes--so it is said--upon their dying torments.
+Bishop Pellicier fell under suspicion of heresy: very probably with some
+justice.  He fell, too, under suspicion of leading a life unworthy of a
+celibate churchman, a fault which--if it really existed--was, in those
+days, pardonable enough in an orthodox prelate, but not so in one whose
+orthodoxy was suspected.  And for a while Pellicier was in prison.  After
+his release he gave himself up to science, with Rondelet, and the school
+of disciples who were growing up around him.  They rediscovered together
+the Garum, that classic sauce, whose praises had been sung of old by
+Horace, Martial, and Ausonius; and so childlike, superstitious if you
+will, was the reverence in the sixteenth century for classic antiquity,
+that when Pellicier and Rondelet discovered that the Garum was made from
+the fish called Picarel--called Garon by the fishers of Antibes, and
+Giroli at Venice, both these last names corruptions of the Latin
+Gerres--then did the two fashionable poets of France, Etienne Dolet and
+Clement Marot, think it not unworthy of their muse to sing the praises of
+the sauce which Horace had sung of old.  A proud day, too, was it for
+Pellicier and Rondelet, when wandering somewhere in the marshes of the
+Camargue, a scent of garlic caught the nostrils of the gentle bishop, and
+in the lovely pink flowers of the water-germander he recognised the
+Scordium of the ancients.  "The discovery," says Professor Planchon,
+"made almost as much noise as that of the famous Garum; for at that
+moment of naive fervour on behalf of antiquity, to rediscover a plant of
+Dioscorides or of Pliny was a good fortune and almost an event."
+
+I know not whether, after his death, the good bishop's bones reposed
+beneath some gorgeous tomb, bedizened with the incongruous half-Pagan
+statues of the Renaissance: but this, at least, is certain, that
+Rondelet's disciples imagined for him a monument more enduring than of
+marble or of brass, more graceful and more curiously wrought than all the
+sculptures of Torrigiano or Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli or Michael Angelo
+himself.  For they named a lovely little lilac snapdragon, _Linaria
+Domini Pellicerii_,--"Lord Pellicier's toad-flax;" and that name it will
+keep, we may believe, as long as winter and summer shall endure.
+
+But to return.  To this good patron--who was the Ambassador at Venice--the
+newly-married Rondelet determined to apply for employment; and to Venice
+he would have gone, leaving his bride behind, had he not been stayed by
+one of those angels who sometimes walk the earth in women's shape.  Jeanne
+Sandre had an elder sister, Catherine, who had brought her up.  She was
+married to a wealthy man, but she had no children of her own.  For four
+years she and her good husband had let the Rondelets lodge with them, and
+now she was a widow, and to part with them was more than she could bear.
+She carried Rondelet off from the students who were seeing him safe out
+of the city, brought him back, settled on him the same day half her
+fortune, and soon after settled on him the whole, on the sole condition
+that she should live with him and her sister.  For years afterwards she
+watched over the pretty young wife and her two girls and three boys--the
+three boys, alas! all died young--and over Rondelet himself, who,
+immersed in books and experiments, was utterly careless about money; and
+was to them all a mother, advising, guiding, managing, and regarded by
+Rondelet with genuine gratitude as his guardian angel.
+
+Honour and good fortune, in the worldly sense, now poured in upon the
+druggist's son.  Pellicier, his own bishop, stood godfather to his first-
+born daughter.  Montluc, Bishop of Valence, and that wise and learned
+statesman, the Cardinal of Tournon, stood godfathers a few years later to
+his twin boys; and what was of still more solid worth to him, Cardinal
+Tournon took him to Antwerp, Bordeaux, Bayonne, and more than once to
+Rome; and in these Italian journeys of his he collected many facts for
+the great work of his life, that 'History of Fishes' which he dedicated,
+naturally enough, to the cardinal.  This book with its plates is, for the
+time, a masterpiece of accuracy.  Those who are best acquainted with the
+subject say, that it is up to the present day a key to the whole
+ichthyology of the Mediterranean.  Two other men, Belon and Salviani,
+were then at work on the same subject, and published their books almost
+at the same time; a circumstance which caused, as was natural, a three-
+cornered duel between the supporters of the three naturalists, each party
+accusing the other of plagiarism.  The simple fact seems to be that the
+almost simultaneous appearance of the three books in 1554-5 is one of
+those coincidences inevitable at moments when many minds are stirred in
+the same direction by the same great thoughts--coincidences which have
+happened in our own day on questions of geology, biology, and astronomy;
+and which, when the facts have been carefully examined, and the first
+flush of natural jealousy has cooled down, have proved only that there
+were more wise men than one in the world at the same time.
+
+And this sixteenth century was an age in which the minds of men were
+suddenly and strangely turned to examine the wonders of nature with an
+earnestness, with a reverence, and therefore with an accuracy, with which
+they had never been investigated before.  "Nature," says Professor
+Planchon, "long veiled in mysticism and scholasticism, was opening up
+infinite vistas.  A new superstition, the exaggerated worship of the
+ancients, was nearly hindering this movement of thought towards facts.
+Nevertheless learning did her work.  She rediscovered, reconstructed,
+purified, commented on the texts of ancient authors.  Then came in
+observation, which showed that more was to be seen in one blade of grass
+than in any page of Pliny.  Rondelet was in the middle of this crisis a
+man of transition, while he was one of progress.  He reflected the past;
+he opened and prepared the future.  If he commented on Dioscorides, if he
+remained faithful to the theories of Galen, he founded in his 'History of
+Fishes' a monument which our century respects.  He is above all an
+inspirer, an initiator; and if he wants one mark of the leader of a
+school, the foundation of certain scientific doctrines, there is in his
+speech what is better than all systems, the communicative power which
+urges a generation of disciples along the path of independent research,
+with Reason for guide, and Faith for aim."
+
+Around Rondelet, in those years, sometimes indeed in his house--for
+professors in those days took private pupils as lodgers--worked the group
+of botanists whom Linnaeus calls "the Fathers," the authors of the
+descriptive botany of the sixteenth century.  Their names, and those of
+their disciples and their disciples again, are household words in the
+mouth of every gardener, immortalised, like good Bishop Pellicier, in the
+plants which have been named after them.  The Lobelia commemorates Lobel,
+one of Rondelet's most famous pupils, who wrote those 'Adversaria' which
+contain so many curious sketches of Rondelet's botanical expeditions, and
+who inherited his botanical (as Joubert his biographer inherited his
+anatomical) manuscripts.  The Magnolia commemorates the Magnols; the
+Sarracenia, Sarrasin of Lyons; the Bauhinia, Jean Bauhin; the Fuchsia,
+Bauhin's earlier German master, Leonard Fuchs; and the Clusia--the
+received name of that terrible "Matapalo," or "Scotch attorney," of the
+West Indies, which kills the hugest tree, to become as huge a tree
+itself--immortalizes the great Clusius, Charles de l'Escluse, citizen of
+Arras, who after studying civil law at Louvain, philosophy at Marburg,
+and theology at Wittemberg under Melancthon, came to Montpellier in 1551,
+to live in Rondelet's own house, and become the greatest botanist of his
+age.
+
+These were Rondelet's palmy days.  He had got a theatre of anatomy built
+at Montpellier, where he himself dissected publicly.  He had, says
+tradition, a little botanic garden, such as were springing up then in
+several universities, specially in Italy.  He had a villa outside the
+city, whose tower, near the modern railway station, still bears the name
+of the "Mas de Rondelet."  There, too, may be seen the remnants of the
+great tanks, fed with water brought through earthen pipes from the
+Fountain of Albe, wherein he kept the fish whose habits he observed.
+Professor Planchon thinks that he had salt-water tanks likewise; and thus
+he may have been the father of all "Aquariums."  He had a large and
+handsome house in the city itself, a large practice as physician in the
+country round; money flowed in fast to him, and flowed out fast likewise.
+He spent much upon building, pulling down, rebuilding, and sent the bills
+in seemingly to his wife and to his guardian angel Catherine.  He himself
+had never a penny in his purse: but earned the money, and let his ladies
+spend it; an equitable and pleasant division of labour which most married
+men would do well to imitate.  A generous, affectionate, careless little
+man, he gave away, says his pupil and biographer, Joubert, his valuable
+specimens to any savant who begged for them, or left them about to be
+stolen by visitors, who, like too many collectors in all ages, possessed
+light fingers and lighter consciences.  So pacific was he meanwhile, and
+so brave withal, that even in the fearful years of the troubles, he would
+never carry sword, nor even tuck or dagger; but went about on the most
+lonesome journeys as one who wore a charmed life, secure in God and in
+his calling, which was to heal, and not to kill.
+
+These were the golden years of Rondelet's life; but trouble was coming on
+him, and a stormy sunset after a brilliant day.  He lost his sister-in-
+law, to whom he owed all his fortunes, and who had watched ever since
+over him and his wife like a mother; then he lost his wife herself under
+most painful circumstances; then his best-beloved daughter.  Then he
+married again, and lost the son who was born to him; and then came, as to
+many of the best in those days, even sorer trials, trials of the
+conscience, trials of faith.
+
+For in the mean time Rondelet had become a Protestant, like many of the
+wisest men round him; like, so it would seem from the event, the majority
+of the university and the burghers of Montpellier.  It is not to be
+wondered at.  Montpellier was a sort of half-way resting-place for
+Protestant preachers, whether fugitive or not, who were passing from
+Basle, Geneva, or Lyons, to Marguerite of Navarre's little Protestant
+court at Pau or at Nerac, where all wise and good men, and now and then
+some foolish and fanatical ones, found shelter and hospitality.  Thither
+Calvin himself had been, passing probably through Montpellier, and
+leaving--as such a man was sure to leave--the mark of his foot behind
+him.  At Lyons, no great distance up the Rhone, Marguerite had helped to
+establish an organised Protestant community; and when in 1536 she herself
+had passed through Montpellier, to visit her brother at Valence, and
+Montmorency's camp at Avignon, she took with her doubtless Protestant
+chaplains of her own, who spoke wise words--it may be that she spoke wise
+words herself--to the ardent and inquiring students of Montpellier.
+Moreover, Rondelet and his disciples had been for years past in constant
+communication with the Protestant savants of Switzerland and Germany,
+among whom the knowledge of nature was progressing as it never had
+progressed before.  For--it is a fact always to be remembered--it was
+only in the free air of Protestant countries the natural sciences could
+grow and thrive.  They sprung up, indeed, in Italy after the restoration
+of Greek literature in the fifteenth century; but they withered there
+again only too soon under the blighting upas shade of superstition.
+Transplanted to the free air of Switzerland, of Germany, of Britain, and
+of Montpellier, then half Protestant, they developed rapidly and surely,
+simply because the air was free; to be checked again in France by the
+return of superstition with despotism super-added, until the eve of the
+great French Revolution.
+
+So Rondelet had been for some years Protestant.  He had hidden in his
+house for a long while a monk who had left his monastery.  He had himself
+written theological treatises: but when his Bishop Pellicier was
+imprisoned on a charge of heresy, Rondelet burnt his manuscripts, and
+kept his opinions to himself.  Still he was a suspected heretic, at last
+seemingly a notorious one; for only the year before his death, going to
+visit patients at Perpignan, he was waylaid by the Spaniards, and had to
+get home through bypasses of the Pyrenees, to avoid being thrown into the
+Inquisition.
+
+And those were times in which it was necessary for a man to be careful,
+unless he had made up his mind to be burned.  For more than thirty years
+of Rondelet's life the burning had gone on in his neighbourhood;
+intermittently it is true: the spasms of superstitious fury being
+succeeded, one may charitably hope, by pity and remorse: but still the
+burnings had gone on.  The Benedictine monk of St. Maur, who writes the
+history of Languedoc, says, quite _en passant_, how some one was burnt at
+Toulouse in 1553, luckily only in effigy, for he had escaped to Geneva:
+but he adds, "next year they burned several heretics," it being not worth
+while to mention their names.  In 1556 they burned alive at Toulouse Jean
+Escalle, a poor Franciscan monk, who had found his order intolerable;
+while one Pierre de Lavaur, who dared preach Calvinism in the streets of
+Nismes, was hanged and burnt.  So had the score of judicial murders been
+increasing year by year, till it had to be, as all evil scores have to be
+in this world, paid off with interest, and paid off especially against
+the ignorant and fanatic monks who for a whole generation, in every
+university and school in France, had been howling down sound science, as
+well as sound religion; and at Montpellier in 1560-1, their debt was paid
+them in a very ugly way.  News came down to the hot southerners of
+Languedoc of the so-called conspiracy of Amboise.--How the Duc de Guise
+and the Cardinal de Lorraine had butchered the best blood in France under
+the pretence of a treasonable plot; how the King of Navarre and the
+Prince de Conde had been arrested; then how Conde and Coligny were ready
+to take up arms at the head of all the Huguenots of France, and try to
+stop this lifelong torturing, by sharp shot and cold steel; then how in
+six months' time the king would assemble a general council to settle the
+question between Catholics and Huguenots.  The Huguenots, guessing how
+that would end, resolved to settle the question for themselves.  They
+rose in one city after another, sacked the churches, destroyed the
+images, put down by main force superstitious processions and dances; and
+did many things only to be excused by the exasperation caused by thirty
+years of cruelty.  At Montpellier there was hard fighting, murders--so
+say the Catholic historians--of priests and monks, sack of the new
+cathedral, destruction of the noble convents which lay in a ring round
+Montpellier.  The city and the university were in the hands of the
+Huguenots, and Montpellier became Protestant on the spot.
+
+Next year came the counter blow.  There were heavy battles with the
+Catholics all round the neighbourhood, destruction of the suburbs,
+threatened siege and sack, and years of misery and poverty for
+Montpellier and all who were therein.
+
+Horrible was the state of France in those times of the wars of religion
+which began in 1562; the times which are spoken of usually as "The
+Troubles," as if men did not wish to allude to them too openly.  Then,
+and afterwards in the wars of the League, deeds were done for which
+language has no name.  The population decreased.  The land lay untilled.
+The fair face of France was blackened with burnt homesteads and ruined
+towns.  Ghastly corpses dangled in rows upon the trees, or floated down
+the blood-stained streams.  Law and order were at an end.  Bands of
+robbers prowled in open day, and bands of wolves likewise.  But all
+through the horrors of the troubles we catch sight of the little fat
+doctor riding all unarmed to see his patients throughout Languedoc; going
+vast distances, his biographers say, by means of regular relays of
+horses, till he too broke down.  Well for him, perhaps, that he broke
+down when he did; for capture and recapture, massacre and pestilence,
+were the fate of Montpellier and the surrounding country, till the better
+times of Henry IV. and the Edict of Nantes in 1598, when liberty of
+worship was given to the Protestants for a while.
+
+In the burning summer of 1566 Rondeletius went a long journey to
+Toulouse, seemingly upon an errand of charity, to settle some law affairs
+for his relations.  The sanitary state of the southern cities is bad
+enough still.  It must have been horrible in those days of barbarism and
+misrule.  Dysentery was epidemic at Toulouse then, and Rondelet took it.
+He knew from the first that he should die.  He was worn out, it is said,
+by over-exertion; by sorrow for the miseries of the land; by fruitless
+struggles to keep the peace, and to strive for moderation in days when
+men were all immoderate.  But he rode away a day's journey--he took two
+days over it, so weak he was--in the blazing July sun, to a friend's sick
+wife at Realmont, and there took to his bed, and died a good man's death.
+The details of his death and last illness were written and published by
+his cousin Claude Formy; and well worth reading they are to any man who
+wishes to know how to die.  Rondelet would have no tidings of his illness
+sent to Montpellier.  He was happy, he said, in dying away from the tears
+of his household, and "safe from insult."  He dreaded, one may suppose,
+lest priests and friars should force their way to his bedside, and try to
+extort some recantation from the great savant, the honour and glory of
+their city.  So they sent for no priest to Realmont: but round his bed a
+knot of Calvinist gentlemen and ministers read the Scriptures, and sang
+David's psalms, and prayed; and Rondelet prayed with them through long
+agonies, and so went home to God.
+
+The Benedictine monk-historian of Languedoc, in all his voluminous
+folios, never mentions, as far as I can find, Rondelet's existence.  Why
+should he?  The man was only a druggist's son and a heretic, who healed
+diseases, and collected plants, and wrote a book on fish.  But the
+learned men of Montpellier, and of all Europe, had a very different
+opinion of him.  His body was buried at Realmont: but before the schools
+of Toulouse they set up a white marble slab, and an inscription thereon
+setting forth his learning and his virtues; and epitaphs on him were
+composed by the learned throughout Europe, not only in French and Latin,
+but in Greek, Hebrew, and even Chaldee.
+
+So lived and so died a noble man; more noble--to my mind--than many a
+victorious warrior, or successful statesman, or canonised saint.  To know
+facts, and to heal diseases, were the two objects of his life.  For them
+he toiled, as few men have toiled; and he died in harness, at his
+work--the best death any man can die.
+
+
+
+
+VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST
+
+
+I cannot begin a sketch of the life of this great man better than by
+trying to describe a scene so picturesque, so tragic in the eyes of those
+who are wont to mourn over human follies, so comic in the eyes of those
+who prefer to laugh over them, that the reader will not be likely to
+forget either it or the actors in it.
+
+It is a darkened chamber in the College of Alcala, in the year 1562,
+where lies, probably in a huge four-post bed, shrouded in stifling
+hangings, the heir-apparent of the greatest empire in the then world, Don
+Carlos, only son of Philip II., and heir-apparent of Spain, the
+Netherlands, and all the Indies.  A short sickly boy of sixteen, with a
+bull head, a crooked shoulder, a short leg, and a brutal temper, he will
+not be missed by the world if he should die.  His profligate career seems
+to have brought its own punishment.  To the scandal of his father, who
+tolerated no one's vices save his own, as well as to the scandal of the
+university authorities of Alcala, he has been scouring the streets at the
+head of the most profligate students, insulting women, even ladies of
+rank, and amenable only to his lovely young stepmother, Elizabeth of
+Valois, Isabel de la Paz, as the Spaniards call her, the daughter of
+Catherine de Medicis, and sister of the King of France.  Don Carlos
+should have married her, had not his worthy father found it more
+advantageous for the crown of Spain, as well as more pleasant for him
+Philip, to marry her himself.  Whence came heart-burnings, rage,
+jealousies, romances, calumnies, of which two last--in as far at least as
+they concern poor Elizabeth--no wise man now believes a word.
+
+Going on some errand on which he had no business--there are two stories,
+neither of them creditable nor necessary to repeat--Don Carlos has fallen
+down stairs and broken his head.  He comes, by his Portuguese mother's
+side, of a house deeply tainted with insanity; and such an injury may
+have serious consequences.  However, for nine days the wound goes on
+well, and Don Carlos, having had a wholesome fright, is, according to
+Doctor Olivarez, the _medico de camara_, a very good lad, and lives on
+chicken broth and dried plums.  But on the tenth day comes on numbness of
+the left side, acute pains in the head, and then gradually shivering,
+high fever, erysipelas.  His head and neck swell to an enormous size;
+then comes raging delirium, then stupefaction, and Don Carlos lies as one
+dead.
+
+A modern surgeon would, probably, thanks to that training of which
+Vesalius may be almost called the father, have had little difficulty in
+finding out what was the matter with the luckless lad, and little
+difficulty in removing the evil, if it had not gone too far.  But the
+Spanish physicians were then, as many of them are said to be still, as
+far behind the world in surgery as in other things; and indeed surgery
+itself was then in its infancy, because men, ever since the early Greek
+schools of Alexandria had died out, had been for centuries feeding their
+minds with anything rather than with facts.  Therefore the learned
+morosophs who were gathered round Don Carlos's sick bed had become,
+according to their own confession, utterly confused, terrified, and at
+their wits' end.
+
+It is the 7th of May, the eighteenth day after the accident, according to
+Olivarez' story: he and Dr. Vega have been bleeding the unhappy prince,
+enlarging the wound twice, and torturing him seemingly on mere guesses.
+"I believe," says Olivarez, "that all was done well: but as I have said,
+in wounds in the head there are strange labyrinths."  So on the 7th they
+stand round the bed in despair.  Don Garcia de Toledo, the prince's
+faithful governor, is sitting by him, worn out with sleepless nights, and
+trying to supply to the poor boy that mother's tenderness which he has
+never known.  Alva too is there, stern, self-compressed, most terrible,
+and yet most beautiful.  He has a God on earth, and that is Philip his
+master; and though he has borne much from Don Carlos already, and will
+have to bear more, yet the wretched lad is to him as a son of God, a
+second deity, who will by right divine succeed to the inheritance of the
+first; and he watches this lesser deity struggling between life and death
+with an intensity of which we, in these less loyal days, can form no
+notion.  One would be glad to have a glimpse of what passed through that
+mind, so subtle and so ruthless, so disciplined and so loyal withal: but
+Alva was a man who was not given to speak his mind, but to act it.
+
+One would wish, too, for a glimpse of what was passing through the mind
+of another man, who has been daily in that sick chamber, according to
+Olivarez' statement, since the first of the month: but he is one who has
+had, for some years past, even more reason than Alva for not speaking his
+mind.  What he looked like we know well, for Titian has painted him from
+the life--a tall, bold, well-dressed man, with a noble brain, square and
+yet lofty, short curling locks and beard, an eye which looks as though it
+feared neither man nor fiend--and it has had good reason to fear both--and
+features which would be exceeding handsome, but for the defiant
+snub-nose.  That is Andreas Vesalius, of Brussels, dreaded and hated by
+the doctors of the old school--suspect, moreover, it would seem, to
+inquisitors and theologians, possibly to Alva himself; for he has dared
+to dissect human bodies; he has insulted the medievalists at Paris,
+Padua, Bologna, Pisa, Venice, in open theatre; he has turned the heads of
+all the young surgeons in Italy and France; he has written a great book,
+with prints in it, designed, some say, by Titian--they were actually done
+by another Netherlander, John of Calcar, near Cleves--in which he has
+dared to prove that Galen's anatomy was at fault throughout, and that he
+had been describing a monkey's inside when he had pretended to be
+describing a man's; and thus, by impudence and quackery, he has wormed
+himself--this Netherlander, a heretic at heart, as all Netherlanders are,
+to God as well as to Galen--into the confidence of the late Emperor
+Charles V., and gone campaigning with him as one of his physicians,
+anatomising human bodies even on the battle-field, and defacing the
+likeness of Deity; and worse than that, the most religious King Philip is
+deceived by him likewise, and keeps him in Madrid in wealth and honour;
+and now, in the prince's extreme danger, the king has actually sent for
+him, and bidden him try his skill--a man who knows nothing save about
+bones and muscles and the outside of the body, and is unworthy the name
+of a true physician.
+
+One can conceive the rage of the old Spanish pedants at the
+Netherlander's appearance, and still more at what followed, if we are to
+believe Hugo Bloet of Delft, his countryman and contemporary. {390}
+Vesalius, he says, saw that the surgeons had bound up the wound so tight
+that an abscess had formed outside the skull, which could not break: he
+asserted that the only hope lay in opening it; and did so, Philip having
+given leave, "by two cross-cuts.  Then the lad returned to himself, as if
+awakened from a profound sleep, affirming that he owed his restoration to
+life to the German doctor."
+
+Dionysius Daza, who was there with the other physicians and surgeons,
+tells a different story: "The most learned, famous, and rare Baron
+Vesalius," he says, advised that the skull should be trepanned; but his
+advice was not followed.
+
+Olivarez' account agrees with that of Daza.  They had opened the wounds,
+he says, down to the skull before Vesalius came.  Vesalius insisted that
+the injury lay inside the skull, and wished to pierce it.  Olivarez
+spends much labour in proving that Vesalius had "no great foundation for
+his opinion:" but confesses that he never changed that opinion to the
+last, though all the Spanish doctors were against him.  Then on the 6th,
+he says, the Bachelor Torres came from Madrid, and advised that the skull
+should be laid bare once more; and on the 7th, there being still doubt
+whether the skull was not injured, the operation was performed--by whom
+it is not said--but without any good result, or, according to Olivarez,
+any discovery, save that Vesalius was wrong, and the skull uninjured.
+
+"Whether this second operation of the 7th of May was performed by
+Vesalius, and whether it was that of which Bloet speaks, is an open
+question.  Olivarez' whole relation is apologetic, written to justify
+himself and his seven Spanish colleagues, and to prove Vesalius in the
+wrong.  Public opinion, he confesses, had been very fierce against him.
+The credit of Spanish medicine was at stake: and we are not bound to
+believe implicitly a paper drawn up under such circumstances for Philip's
+eye.  This, at least, we gather: that Don Carlos was never trepanned, as
+is commonly said; and this, also, that whichever of the two stories is
+true, equally puts Vesalius into direct, and most unpleasant, antagonism
+to the Spanish doctors. {392}
+
+But Don Carlos still lay senseless; and yielding to popular clamour, the
+doctors called in the aid of a certain Moorish doctor, from Valencia,
+named Priotarete, whose unguents, it was reported, had achieved many
+miraculous cures.  The unguent, however, to the horror of the doctors,
+burned the skull till the bone was as black as the colour of ink; and
+Olivarez declares he believes it to have been a preparation of pure
+caustic.  On the morning of the 9th of May, the Moor and his unguents
+were sent away, "and went to Madrid, to send to heaven Hernando de Vega,
+while the prince went back to our method of cure."
+
+Considering what happened on the morning of the 10th of May, we should
+now presume that the second opening of the abscess, whether by Vesalius
+or someone else, relieved the pressure on the brain; that a critical
+period of exhaustion followed, probably prolonged by the Moor's premature
+caustic, which stopped the suppuration: but that God's good handiwork,
+called nature, triumphed at last; and that therefore it came to pass that
+the prince was out of danger within three days of the operation.  But he
+was taught, it seems, to attribute his recovery to a very different
+source from that of a German knife.  For on the morning of the 9th, when
+the Moor was gone, and Don Carlos lay seemingly lifeless, there descended
+into his chamber a Deus e machina, or rather a whole pantheon of greater
+or lesser deities, who were to effect that which medical skill seemed not
+to have effected.  Philip sent into the prince's chamber several of the
+precious relics which he usually carried about with him.  The miraculous
+image of the Virgin of Atocha, in embroidering garments for whom, Spanish
+royalty, male and female, has spent so many an hour ere now, was brought
+in solemn procession and placed on an altar at the foot of the prince's
+bed; and in the afternoon there entered, with a procession likewise, a
+shrine containing the bones of a holy anchorite, one Fray Diego, "whose
+life and miracles," says Olivarez, "are so notorious;" and the bones of
+St. Justus and St. Pastor, the tutelar saints of the university of
+Alcala.  Amid solemn litanies the relics of Fray Diego were laid upon the
+prince's pillow, and the sudarium, or mortuary cloth, which had covered
+his face, was placed upon the prince's forehead.
+
+Modern science might object that the presence of so many personages,
+however pious or well intentioned, in a sick chamber on a hot Spanish May
+day, especially as the bath had been, for some generations past, held in
+religious horror throughout Spain, as a sign of Moorish and Mussulman
+tendencies, might have somewhat interfered with the chances of the poor
+boy's recovery.  Nevertheless the event seems to have satisfied Philip's
+highest hopes; for that same night (so Don Carlos afterwards related) the
+holy monk Diego appeared to him in a vision, wearing the habit of St.
+Francis, and bearing in his hand a cross of reeds tied with a green band.
+The prince stated that he first took the apparition to be that of the
+blessed St. Francis; but not seeing the stigmata, he exclaimed, "How?
+Dost thou not bear the marks of the wounds?"  What he replied Don Carlos
+did not recollect; save that he consoled him, and told him that he should
+not die of that malady.
+
+Philip had returned to Madrid, and shut himself up in grief in the great
+Jeronymite monastery.  Elizabeth was praying for her step-son before the
+miraculous images of the same city.  During the night of the 9th of May
+prayers went up for Don Carlos in all the churches of Toledo, Alcala, and
+Madrid.  Alva stood all that night at the bed's foot.  Don Garcia de
+Toledo sat in the arm-chair, where he had now sat night and day for more
+than a fortnight.  The good preceptor, Honorato Juan, afterwards Bishop
+of Osma, wrestled in prayer for the lad the whole night through.  His
+prayer was answered: probably it had been answered already, without his
+being aware of it.  Be that as it may, about dawn Don Carlos' heavy
+breathing ceased; he fell into a quiet sleep; and when he awoke all
+perceived at once that he was saved.
+
+He did not recover his sight, seemingly on account of the erysipelas, for
+a week more.  He then opened his eyes upon the miraculous image of
+Atocha, and vowed that, if he recovered, he would give to the Virgin, at
+four different shrines in Spain, gold plate of four times his weight; and
+silver plate of seven times his weight, when he should rise from his
+couch.  So on the 6th of June he rose, and was weighed in a fur coat and
+a robe of damask, and his weight was three arrobas and one pound--seventy-
+six pounds in all.  On the 14th of June he went to visit his father at
+the episcopal palace; then to all the churches and shrines in Alcala, and
+of course to that of Fray Diego, whose body it is said he contemplated
+for some time with edifying devotion.  The next year saw Fray Diego
+canonised as a saint, at the intercession of Philip and his son; and thus
+Don Carlos re-entered the world, to be a terror and a torment to all
+around him, and to die--not by Philip's cruelty, as his enemies reported
+too hastily indeed, yet excusably, for they knew him to be capable of any
+wickedness--but simply of constitutional insanity.
+
+And now let us go back to the history of "that most learned, famous, and
+rare Baron Vesalius," who had stood by and seen all these things done;
+and try if we cannot, after we have learned the history of his early
+life, guess at some of his probable meditations on this celebrated
+clinical case; and guess also how those meditations may have affected
+seriously the events of his after life.
+
+Vesalius (as I said) was a Netherlander, born at Brussels in 1513 or
+1514.  His father and grandfather had been medical men of the highest
+standing in a profession which then, as now, was commonly hereditary.  His
+real name was Wittag, an ancient family of Wesel, on the Rhine, from
+which town either he or his father adopted the name of Vesalius,
+according to the classicising fashion of those days.  Young Vesalius was
+sent to college at Louvain, where he learned rapidly.  At sixteen or
+seventeen he knew not only Latin, but Greek enough to correct the proofs
+of Galen, and Arabic enough to become acquainted with the works of the
+Mussulman physicians.  He was a physicist, too, and a mathematician,
+according to the knowledge of those times; but his passion--the study to
+which he was destined to devote his life--was anatomy.
+
+Little or nothing (it must be understood) had been done in anatomy since
+the days of Galen of Pergamos, in the second century after Christ, and
+very little even by him.  Dissection was all but forbidden among the
+ancients.  The Egyptians, Herodotus tells us, used to pursue with stones
+and curses the embalmers as soon as they had performed their unpleasant
+office; and though Herophilus and Erasistratus are said to have dissected
+many subjects under the protection of Ptolemy Soter in Alexandria itself:
+yet the public feeling of the Greeks as well as of the Romans continued
+the same as that of the ancient Egyptians; and Galen was fain--as
+Vesalius proved--to supplement his ignorance of the human frame by
+describing that of an ape.  Dissection was equally forbidden among the
+Mussulmans; and the great Arabic physicians could do no more than comment
+on Galen.  The same prejudice extended through the middle age.  Medical
+men were all clerks, clerici, and as such forbidden to shed blood.  The
+only dissection, as far as I am aware, made during the middle age was one
+by Mundinus in 1306; and his subsequent commentaries on Galen--for he
+dare allow his own eyes to see no more than Galen had seen before
+him--constituted the best anatomical manual in Europe till the middle of
+the fifteenth century.
+
+Then, in Italy at least, the classic Renaissance gave fresh life to
+anatomy as to all other sciences.  Especially did the improvements in
+painting and sculpture stir men up to a closer study of the human frame.
+Leonardo da Vinci wrote a treatise on muscular anatomy: the artist and
+the sculptor often worked together, and realised that sketch of Michael
+Angelo's in which he himself is assisting Fallopius, Vesalius' famous
+pupil, to dissect.  Vesalius soon found that his thirst for facts could
+not be slaked by the theories of the middle age; so in 1530 he went off
+to Montpellier, where Francis I. had just founded a medical school, and
+where the ancient laws of the city allowed the faculty each year the body
+of a criminal.  From thence, after becoming the fellow-pupil and the
+friend of Rondelet, and probably also of Rabelais and those other
+luminaries of Montpellier, of whom I spoke in my essay on Rondelet, he
+returned to Paris to study under old Sylvius, whose real name was Jacques
+Dubois, _alias_ Jock o' the Wood; and to learn less--as he complains
+himself--in an anatomical theatre than a butcher might learn in his shop.
+
+Were it not that the whole question of dissection is one over which it is
+right to draw a reverent veil, as a thing painful, however necessary and
+however innocent, it would be easy to raise ghastly laughter in many a
+reader by the stories which Vesalius himself tells of his struggles to
+learn anatomy.--How old Sylvius tried to demonstrate the human frame from
+a bit of a dog, fumbling in vain for muscles which he could not find, or
+which ought to have been there, according to Galen, and were not; while
+young Vesalius, as soon as the old pedant's back was turned, took his
+place, and, to the delight of the students, found for him--provided it
+were there--what he could not find himself;--how he went body-snatching
+and gibbet-robbing, often at the danger of his life, as when he and his
+friend were nearly torn to pieces by the cannibal dogs who haunted the
+Butte de Montfaucon, or place of public execution;--how he acquired, by a
+long and dangerous process, the only perfect skeleton then in the world,
+and the hideous story of the robber to whom it had belonged--all these
+horrors those who list may read for themselves elsewhere.  I hasten past
+them with this remark--that to have gone through the toils, dangers, and
+disgusts which Vesalius faced, argued in a superstitious and cruel age
+like his, no common physical and moral courage, and a deep conscience
+that he was doing right, and must do it at all risks in the face of a
+generation which, peculiarly reckless of human life and human agony,
+allowed that frame which it called the image of God to be tortured,
+maimed, desecrated in every way while alive; and yet--straining at the
+gnat after having swallowed the camel--forbade it to be examined when
+dead, though for the purpose of alleviating the miseries of mankind.
+
+The breaking out of war between Francis I. and Charles V. drove Vesalius
+back to his native country and Louvain; and in 1535 we hear of him as a
+surgeon in Charles V.'s army.  He saw, most probably, the Emperor's
+invasion of Provence, and the disastrous retreat from before
+Montmorency's fortified camp at Avignon, through a country in which that
+crafty general had destroyed every article of human food, except the half-
+ripe grapes.  He saw, perhaps, the Spanish soldiers, poisoned alike by
+the sour fruit and by the blazing sun, falling in hundreds along the
+white roads which led back into Savoy, murdered by the peasantry whose
+homesteads had been destroyed, stifled by the weight of their own armour,
+or desperately putting themselves, with their own hands, out of a world
+which had become intolerable.  Half the army perished.  Two thousand
+corpses lay festering between Aix and Frejus alone.  If young Vesalius
+needed "subjects," the ambition and the crime of man found enough for him
+in those blazing September days.
+
+He went to Italy, probably with the remnants of the army.  Where could he
+have rather wished to find himself?  He was at last in the country where
+the human mind seemed to be growing young once more; the country of
+revived arts, revived sciences, learning, languages; and--though, alas,
+only for a while--of revived free thought, such as Europe had not seen
+since the palmy days of Greece.  Here at least he would be appreciated;
+here at least he would be allowed to think and speak: and he was
+appreciated.  The Italian cities, who were then, like the Athenians of
+old, "spending their time in nothing else save to hear or to tell
+something new," welcomed the brave young Fleming and his novelties.
+Within two years he was professor of anatomy at Padua, then the first
+school in the world; then at Bologna and at Pisa at the same time; last
+of all at Venice, where Titian painted that portrait of him which remains
+unto this day.
+
+These years were for him a continual triumph; everywhere, as he
+demonstrated on the human body, students crowded his theatre, or hung
+round him as he walked the streets; professors left their own
+chairs--their scholars having deserted them already--to go and listen
+humbly or enviously to the man who could give them what all brave souls
+throughout half Europe were craving for, and craving in vain: facts.  And
+so, year after year, was realised that scene which stands engraved in the
+frontispiece of his great book--where, in the little quaint Cinquecento
+theatre, saucy scholars, reverend doctors, gay gentlemen, and even cowled
+monks, are crowding the floor, peeping over each other's shoulders,
+hanging on the balustrades; while in the centre, over his "subject"--which
+one of those same cowled monks knew but too well--stands young Vesalius,
+upright, proud, almost defiant, as one who knows himself safe in the
+impregnable citadel of fact; and in his hand the little blade of steel,
+destined--because wielded in obedience to the laws of nature, which are
+the laws of God--to work more benefit for the human race than all the
+swords which were drawn in those days, or perhaps in any other, at the
+bidding of most Catholic Emperors and most Christian Kings.
+
+Those were indeed days of triumph for Vesalius; of triumph deserved,
+because earned by patient and accurate toil in a good cause: but
+Vesalius, being but a mortal man, may have contracted in those same days
+a temper of imperiousness and self-conceit, such as he showed afterwards
+when his pupil Fallopius dared to add fresh discoveries to those of his
+master.  And yet, in spite of all Vesalius knew, how little he knew!  How
+humbling to his pride it would have been had he known then--perhaps he
+does know now--that he had actually again and again walked, as it were,
+round and round the true theory of the circulation of the blood, and yet
+never seen it; that that discovery which, once made, is intelligible, as
+far as any phenomenon is intelligible, to the merest peasant, was
+reserved for another century, and for one of those Englishmen on whom
+Vesalius would have looked as semi-barbarians.
+
+To make a long story short: three years after the publication of his
+famous book, 'De Corporis Humani Fabrica,' he left Venice to cure Charles
+V., at Regensburg, and became one of the great Emperor's physicians.
+
+This was the crisis of Vesalius' life.  The medicine with which he had
+worked the cure was China--Sarsaparilla, as we call it now--brought home
+from the then newly-discovered banks of the Paraguay and Uruguay, where
+its beds of tangled vine, they say, tinge the clear waters a dark brown
+like that of peat, and convert whole streams into a healthful and
+pleasant tonic.  On the virtues of this China (then supposed to be a
+root) Vesalius wrote a famous little book, into which he contrived to
+interweave his opinions on things in general, as good Bishop Berkeley did
+afterwards into his essay on the virtues of tar-water.  Into this book,
+however, Vesalius introduced--as Bishop Berkeley did not--much, and
+perhaps too much, about himself; and much, though perhaps not too much,
+about poor old Galen, and his substitution of an ape's inside for that of
+a human being.  The storm which had been long gathering burst upon him.
+The old school, trembling for their time-honoured reign, bespattered,
+with all that pedantry, ignorance, and envy could suggest, the man who
+dared not only to revolutionise surgery, but to interfere with the
+privileged mysteries of medicine; and, over and above, to become a
+favourite at the court of the greatest of monarchs.  While such as
+Eustachius, himself an able discoverer, could join in the cry, it is no
+wonder if a lower soul, like that of Sylvius, led it open-mouthed.  He
+was a mean, covetous, bad man, as George Buchanan well knew; and,
+according to his nature, he wrote a furious book, 'Ad Vesani calumnias
+depulsandas.'  The punning change of Vesalius into Vesanus (madman) was
+but a fair and gentle stroke for a polemic, in days in which those who
+could not kill their enemies with steel or powder, held themselves
+justified in doing so, if possible, by vituperation, culumny, and every
+engine of moral torture.  But a far more terrible weapon, and one which
+made Vesalius rage, and it may be for once in his life tremble, was the
+charge of impiety and heresy.  The Inquisition was a very ugly place.  It
+was very easy to get into it, especially for a Netherlander: but not so
+easy to get out.  Indeed Vesalius must have trembled, when he saw his
+master, Charles V., himself take fright, and actually call on the
+theologians of Salamanca to decide whether it was lawful to dissect a
+human body.  The monks, to their honour, used their common sense, and
+answered Yes.  The deed was so plainly useful, that it must be lawful
+likewise.  But Vesalius did not feel that he had triumphed.  He dreaded,
+possibly, lest the storm should only have blown over for a time.  He
+fell, possibly, into hasty disgust at the folly of mankind, and despair
+of arousing them to use their common sense, and acknowledge their true
+interest and their true benefactors.  At all events, he threw into the
+fire--so it is said--all his unpublished manuscripts, the records of long
+years of observation, and renounced science thenceforth.
+
+We hear of him after this at Brussels, and at Basle likewise--in which
+latter city, in the company of physicians, naturalists, and Grecians, he
+must have breathed awhile a freer air.  But he seems to have returned
+thence to his old master Charles V., and to have finally settled at
+Madrid as a court surgeon to Philip II., who sent him, but too late, to
+extract the lance splinters from the eye of the dying Henry II.
+
+He was now married to a lady of rank from Brussels, Anne van Hamme by
+name; and their daughter married in time Philip II.'s grand falconer, who
+was doubtless a personage of no small social rank.  He was well off in
+worldly things; somewhat fond, it is said, of good living and of luxury;
+inclined, it may be, to say, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
+die," and to sink more and more into the mere worldling, unless some
+shock awoke him from his lethargy.
+
+And the awakening shock did come.  After eight years of court life, he
+resolved early in the year 1564 to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
+
+The reasons for so strange a determination are wrapped in mystery and
+contradiction.  The common story was that he had opened a corpse to
+ascertain the cause of death, and that, to the horror of the bystanders,
+the heart was still seen to beat; that his enemies accused him to the
+Inquisition, and that he was condemned to death, a sentence which was
+commuted to that of going on pilgrimage.  But here, at the very outset,
+accounts differ.  One says that the victim was a nobleman, name not
+given; another that it was a lady's maid, name not given.  It is most
+improbable, if not impossible, that Vesalius, of all men, should have
+mistaken a living body for a dead one; while it is most probable, on the
+other hand, that his medical enemies would gladly raise such a calumny
+against him, when he was no longer in Spain to contradict it.  Meanwhile
+Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, makes no mention of Vesalius
+having been brought before its tribunal, while he does mention Vesalius'
+residence at Madrid.  Another story is, that he went abroad to escape the
+bad temper of his wife; another that he wanted to enrich himself.  Another
+story--and that not an unlikely one--is, that he was jealous of the
+rising reputation of his pupil Fallopius, then professor of anatomy at
+Venice.  This distinguished surgeon, as I said before, had written a
+book, in which he had added to Vesalius' discoveries, and corrected
+certain errors of his.  Vesalius had answered him hastily and angrily,
+quoting his anatomy from memory; for, as he himself complained, he could
+not in Spain obtain a subject for dissection; not even, he said, a single
+skull.  He had sent his book to Venice to be published, and had heard,
+seemingly, nothing of it.
+
+He may have felt that he was falling behind in the race of science, and
+that it was impossible for him to carry on his studies in Madrid; and so,
+angry with his own laziness and luxury, he may have felt the old sacred
+fire flash up in him, and have determined to go to Italy and become a
+student and a worker once more.
+
+The very day that he set out, Clusius of Arras, then probably the best
+botanist in the world, arrived at Madrid; and, asking the reason of
+Vesalius' departure, was told by their fellow-countryman, Charles de
+Tisnacq, procurator for the affairs of the Netherlands, that Vesalius had
+gone of his own free will, and with all facilities which Philip could
+grant him, in performance of a vow which he had made during a dangerous
+illness.  Here, at least, we have a drop of information, which seems
+taken from the stream sufficiently near to the fountain-head: but it must
+be recollected that De Tisnacq lived in dangerous times, and may have
+found it necessary to walk warily in them; that through him had been
+sent, only the year before, that famous letter from William of Orange,
+Horn, and Egmont, the fate whereof may be read in Mr. Motley's fourth
+chapter; that the crisis of the Netherlands which sprung out of that
+letter was coming fast; and that, as De Tisnacq was on friendly terms
+with Egmont, he may have felt his head at times somewhat loose on his
+shoulders; especially if he had heard Alva say, as he wrote, "that every
+time he saw the despatches of those three senors, they moved his choler
+so, that if he did not take much care to temper it, he would seem a
+frenzied man."  In such times, De Tisnacq may have thought good to return
+a diplomatic answer to a fellow-countryman concerning a third
+fellow-countryman, especially when that countryman, as a former pupil of
+Melancthon at Wittemberg, might himself be under suspicion of heresy, and
+therefore of possible treason.
+
+Be this as it may, one cannot but suspect some strain of truth in the
+story about the Inquisition; perhaps in that, also, of his wife's
+unkindness; for, whether or not Vesalius operated on Don Carlos, he had
+seen with his own eyes that miraculous Virgin of Atocha at the bed's foot
+of the prince.  He had heard his recovery attributed, not to the
+operation, but to the intercession of Fray, now Saint, Diego; {408} and
+he must have had his thoughts thereon, and may, in an unguarded moment,
+have spoken them.
+
+For he was, be it always remembered, a Netherlander.  The crisis of his
+country was just at hand.  Rebellion was inevitable, and, with rebellion,
+horrors unutterable; and, meanwhile, Don Carlos had set his mad brain on
+having the command of the Netherlands.  In his rage at not having it, as
+all the world knows, he nearly killed Alva with his own hands, some two
+years after.  If it be true that Don Carlos felt a debt of gratitude to
+Vesalius, he may (after his wont) have poured out to him some wild
+confidence about the Netherlands, to have even heard which would be a
+crime in Philip's eyes.  And if this be but a fancy, still Vesalius was,
+as I just said, a Netherlander, and one of a brain and a spirit to which
+Philip's doings, and the air of the Spanish court, must have been growing
+even more and more intolerable.  Hundreds of his country folk, perhaps
+men and women whom he had known, were being racked, burnt alive, buried
+alive, at the bidding of a jocular ruffian, Peter Titelmann, the chief
+inquisitor.  The "day of the _mau-brulez_," and the wholesale massacre
+which followed it, had happened but two years before; and, by all the
+signs of the times, these murders and miseries were certain to increase.
+And why were all these poor wretches suffering the extremity of horror,
+but because they would not believe in miraculous images, and bones of
+dead friars, and the rest of that science of unreason and unfact, against
+which Vesalius had been fighting all his life, consciously or not, by
+using reason and observing fact?  What wonder if, in some burst of noble
+indignation and just contempt, he forgot a moment that he had sold his
+soul, and his love of science likewise, to be a luxurious, yet uneasy,
+hanger-on at the tyrant's court; and spoke unadvisedly some word worthy
+of a German man?
+
+As to the story of his unhappy quarrels with his wife, there may be a
+grain of truth in it likewise.  Vesalius' religion must have sat very
+lightly on him.  The man who had robbed churchyards and gibbets from his
+youth was not likely to be much afraid of apparitions and demons.  He had
+handled too many human bones to care much for those of saints.  He was
+probably, like his friends of Basle, Montpellier, and Paris, somewhat of
+a heretic at heart, probably somewhat of a pagan.  His lady, Anne van
+Hamme, was probably a strict Catholic, as her father, being a councillor
+and master of the exchequer at Brussels, was bound to be; and
+freethinking in the husband, crossed by superstition in the wife, may
+have caused in them that wretched vie a part, that want of any true
+communion of soul, too common to this day in Catholic countries.
+
+Be these things as they may--and the exact truth of them will now be
+never known--Vesalius set out to Jerusalem in the spring of 1564.  On his
+way he visited his old friends at Venice to see about his book against
+Fallopius.  The Venetian republic received the great philosopher with
+open arms.  Fallopius was just dead; and the senate offered their guest
+the vacant chair of anatomy.  He accepted it: but went on to the East.
+
+He never occupied that chair; wrecked upon the Isle of Zante, as he was
+sailing back from Palestine, he died miserably of fever and want, as
+thousands of pilgrims returning from the Holy Land had died before him.  A
+goldsmith recognised him; buried him in a chapel of the Virgin; and put
+up over him a simple stone, which remained till late years; and may
+remain, for aught I know, even now.
+
+So perished, in the prime of life, "a martyr to his love of science," to
+quote the words of M. Burggraeve of Ghent, his able biographer and
+commentator, "the prodigious man, who created a science at an epoch when
+everything was still an obstacle to his progress; a man whose whole life
+was a long struggle of knowledge against ignorance, of truth against
+lies."
+
+Plaudite: Exeat: with Rondelet and Buchanan.  And whensoever this poor
+foolish world needs three such men, may God of his great mercy send them.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes
+
+
+{15}  9, Adam Street, Adelphi, London.
+
+{72}  I quote from the translation of the late lamented Philip Stanhope
+Worsley, of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
+
+{76}  Odyssey, book vi. 127-315; vol. i. pp. 143-150 of Mr. Worsley's
+translation.
+
+{88}  Since this essay was written, I have been sincerely delighted to
+find that my wishes had been anticipated at Girton College, near
+Cambridge, and previously at Hitchin, whence the college was removed: and
+that the wise ladies who superintend that establishment propose also that
+most excellent institution--a swimming bath.  A paper, moreover, read
+before the London Association of Schoolmistresses in 1866, on "Physical
+Exercises and Recreation for Girls," deserves all attention.  May those
+who promote such things prosper as they deserve.
+
+{256}  For an account of Sorcery and Fetishism among the African Negros,
+see Burton's 'Lake Regions of Central Africa,' vol. ii. pp. 341-360.
+
+{304}  An arcade in the King's School, Chester.
+
+{328}  So says Dr. Irving, writing in 1817.  I have, however, tried in
+vain to get a sight of this book.  I need not tell Scotch scholars how
+much I am indebted throughout this article to Dr. David living's erudite
+second edition of Buchanan's Life.
+
+{343}  From the quaint old translation of 1721, by "A Person of Honour of
+the Kingdom of Scotland."
+
+{358}  A Life of Rondelet, by his pupil Laurent Joubert, is to be found
+appended to his works; and with it an account of his illness and death,
+by his cousin, Claude Formy, which is well worth the perusal of any man,
+wise or foolish.  Many interesting details beside, I owe to the courtesy
+of Professor Planchon, of Montpellier, author of a discourse on 'Rondelet
+et ses Disciples,' which appeared, with a learned and curious Appendice,
+in the 'Montpellier Medical' for 1866.
+
+{390}  I owe this account of Bloet's--which appears to me the only one
+trustworthy--to the courtesy and erudition of Professor Henry Morley, who
+finds it quoted from Bloet's 'Acroama,' in the 'Observationum Medicarum
+Rariorum, lib. vii.,' of John Theodore Schenk.  Those who wish to know
+several curious passages of Vesalius' life, which I have not inserted in
+this article, would do well to consult one by Professor Morley, 'Anatomy
+in Long Clothes,' in 'Fraser's Magazine' for November, 1853.  May I
+express a hope, which I am sure will be shared by all who have read
+Professor Morley's biographies of Jerome Cardan and of Cornelius Agrippa,
+that he will find leisure to return to the study of Vesalius' life; and
+will do for him what he has done for the two just-mentioned writers?
+
+{392}  Olivarez' 'Relacion' is to be found in the Granvelle State Papers.
+For the general account of Don Carlos' illness, and of the miraculous
+agencies by which his cure was said to have been effected, the general
+reader should consult Miss Frere's 'Biography of Elizabeth of Valois,'
+vol. i. pp. 307-19.
+
+{408}  In justice to poor Doctor Olivarez, it must be said, that while he
+allows all force to the intercession of the Virgin and of Fray Diego, and
+of "many just persons," he cannot allow that there was any "miracle
+properly so called," because the prince was cured according to "natural
+order," and by "experimented remedies" of the physicians.
+
+
+
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