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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great -
+Volume 12, by Elbert Hubbard
+
+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: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12
+       Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists
+
+Author: Elbert Hubbard
+
+Release Date: August 19, 2006 [EBook #19080]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Janet Blenkinship and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  Little
+  Journeys
+  To the Homes of Great Scientists
+
+
+  Elbert Hubbard
+
+
+  Memorial Edition
+
+
+
+
+  Printed and made into a Book by
+  The Roycrofters, who are in East
+  Aurora, Erie County, New York
+
+  Wm. H. Wise & Co.
+  New York
+
+  Copyright, 1916,
+  By The Roycrofters
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+
+  SIR ISAAC NEWTON                                                     9
+
+  GALILEO                                                             45
+
+  COPERNICUS                                                          85
+
+  HUMBOLDT                                                           121
+
+  WILLIAM HERSCHEL                                                   163
+
+  CHARLES DARWIN                                                     197
+
+  HAECKEL                                                            235
+
+  LINNĈUS                                                            263
+
+  THOMAS H. HUXLEY                                                   303
+
+  JOHN TYNDALL                                                       333
+
+  ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE                                              365
+
+  JOHN FISKE                                                         395
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: SIR ISAAC NEWTON]
+
+SIR ISAAC NEWTON
+
+     When you come into any fresh company, observe their humours. Suit
+     your own carriage thereto, by which insinuation you will make their
+     converse more free and open. Let your discourse be more in querys
+     and doubtings than peremptory assertions or disputings, it being
+     the designe of travelers to learne, not to teach. Besides, it will
+     persuade your acquaintance that you have the greater esteem of
+     them, and soe make them more ready to communicate what they know to
+     you; whereas nothing sooner occasions disrespect and quarrels than
+     peremptorinesse. You will find little or no advantage in seeming
+     wiser, or much more ignorant than your company. Seldom discommend
+     anything though never so bad, or doe it but moderately, lest you
+     bee unexpectedly forced to an unhansom retraction. It is safer to
+     commend any thing more than is due, than to discommend a thing soe
+     much as it deserves; for commendations meet not soe often with
+     oppositions, or, at least, are not usually soe ill resented by men
+     that think otherwise, as discommendations; and you will insinuate
+     into men's favour by nothing sooner than seeming to approve and
+     commend what they like; but beware of doing it by a comparison.
+
+     --_Sir Isaac Newton to one of his pupils_
+
+
+SIR ISAAC NEWTON
+
+An honest farmer, neither rich nor poor, was Isaac Newton. He was
+married to Harriet Ayscough in February, Sixteen Hundred Forty-two.
+
+Both were strong, intelligent and full of hope. Neither had any
+education to speak of; they belonged to England's middle class--that
+oft-despised and much ridiculed middle class which is the hope of the
+world. Accounts still in existence show that their income was thirty
+pounds a year. It was for them to toil all the week, go to church on
+Sunday, and twice or thrice in a year attend the village fairs or
+indulge in a holiday where hard cider played an important part.
+
+Isaac had served his two years in the army, taken a turn at sea, and got
+his discharge-papers. Now he had married the lass of his choice, and
+settled down in the little house on an estate in Lincolnshire where his
+father was born and died.
+
+Spring came and the roses clambered over the stone walls; the bobolinks
+played hide-and-seek in the waving grass of the meadows; the skylarks
+sang and poised and soared; the hedgerows grew white with
+hawthorn-blossoms and musical with the chirp of sparrows; the cattle
+ranged through the fragrant clover "knee-deep in June."
+
+Oftentimes the young wife worked with her husband in the fields, or went
+with him to market. Great plans were laid as to what they would do next
+year, and the year after, and how they would provide for coming age and
+grow old together, here among the oaks and the peace and plenty of
+Lincolnshire.
+
+In such a country, with such a climate, it seems as if one could almost
+make repair equal waste, and thus keep death indefinitely at bay. But
+all men, even the strongest, are living under a death sentence, with but
+an indefinite reprieve. And even yet, with all of our science and
+health, we can not fully account for those diseases which seemingly pick
+the very best flower of sinew and strength.
+
+Isaac Newton, the strong and rugged farmer, sickened and died in a week.
+"The result of a cold caught when sweaty and standing in a draft," the
+surgeon explained. "The act of God to warn us all of the vanity of
+life." Acute pneumonia, perhaps, is what we would call it--a fever that
+burned out the bellows in a week.
+
+In such cases the very strength of the man seems to supply fuel for the
+flames. And so just as the Autumn came with changing leaves, the young
+wife was left to fight the battle of life alone--alone, save for the
+old, old miracle that her life supported another. A wife, a widow, a
+mother--all within a year!
+
+On Christmas-Day the babe was born--born where most men die: in
+obscurity. He was so weak and frail that none but the mother believed he
+would live.
+
+The doctor quoted a line from "Richard the Third," "Sent before my time
+into this breathing world scarce half made up," and gave the infant into
+the keeping of an old nurse with an ominous shake of the head, and went
+his way, absolved. His time was too valuable to waste on such a useless
+human mite.
+
+The persistent words of the mother that the child should not, must not
+die, possibly had something to do with keeping the breath of life in the
+puny man-child. The fond mother had given him the name of his father,
+even before birth! He was to live to do the work that the man now dead
+had hoped to do; that is, live a long and honest life, and leave the
+fair acres more valuable than he found them.
+
+Such was the inauspicious beginning of what Herbert Spencer declared was
+the greatest life since Aristotle studied the starry universe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Outside of India the lot of widows is not especially to be pitied. A
+widow has beautiful dreams, while the married woman copes with the stern
+reality.
+
+Then, no phase of life is really difficult when you accept it; and the
+memory of a great love lost is always a blessing and a benediction to
+the one who endures the first cruel shock.
+
+The young widow looked after her little estate, and with perhaps some
+small assistance from her parents, lived comfortably and as happily as
+one has a right to in this vale of tears. Her baby boy had grown strong
+and well: by the time he was two years old he was quite the equal of
+most babies--and his mother thought, beyond them.
+
+It is quite often stoutly declared by callow folks that mother-love is
+the strongest and most enduring love in the world, but the wise waste no
+words on such an idle proposition. Mother-love retires into the shadow
+when the other kind appears.
+
+When the Reverend Barnabas Smith began, unconsciously, to make eyes at
+the Widow Newton over his prayer-book, the good old dames whose business
+it is to look after these things, and perform them vicariously, made
+prophecies on the way home from church as to how soon the wedding would
+occur.
+
+People go to church to watch and pray, but a man I know says that women
+go to church to watch. Young clergymen fall an easy prey to designing
+widows, he avers. I can discover no proof, however, that the Widow
+Newton made any original designs; she was below the young clergyman in
+social standing, and when the good man began to pay special attentions
+to her baby boy she never imagined that the sundry pats and caresses
+were meant for her.
+
+Little Isaac Newton was just three years old when the wedding occurred,
+and was not troubled about it. The bride went to live with her husband
+at the rectory, a mile away, and the little boy in dresses, with long
+yellow curls, was taken to the home of his grandmother. The Reverend
+Barnabas Smith didn't like babies as well as he had at first thought.
+Grandparents are inclined to be lax in their discipline. And anyway it
+is no particular difference if they are: a scarcity of discipline is
+better than too much. More boys have been ruined by the rod than saved
+by it--love is a good substitute for a cat-'o-nine-tails.
+
+There were several children born to the Reverend Barnabas Smith and his
+wife, and all were disciplined for their own good. Isaac, a few miles
+away, snuggled in the arms of his old grandmother when he was bad and
+went scot-free.
+
+Many years after, Sir Isaac Newton, in an address on education at
+Cambridge, playfully referred to the fact that in his boyhood he did not
+have to prevaricate to escape punishment, his grandmother being always
+willing to lie for him. His grandmother was his first teacher and his
+best friend as long as she lived.
+
+When he was twelve years old he was sent to the village school at
+Grantham, eight miles away. There he boarded with a family by the name
+of Clark, and at odd times helped in the apothecary-shop of Mr. Clark,
+cleaning bottles and making pills. He himself has told us that the
+working with mortar and pestle, cutting the pills in exact cubes, and
+then rolling one in each hand between thumb and finger, did him a lot of
+good, whether the patients were benefited or not.
+
+The genial apothecary also explained that pills were for those who made
+and sold them, and that if they did no harm to those who swallowed them,
+the whole transaction was then one of benefit. All of which proves to us
+that men had the essence of wisdom two hundred years ago, quite as much
+as now.
+
+The master of the school at Grantham was one Mr. Stokes, a man of
+genuine insight and tact--two things rather rare in the pedagogic
+equipment at that time. The Newton boy was small and stood low in his
+class, perhaps because book-learning had not been the bent of his
+grandmother. The fact that Isaac was neither strong nor smart, nor even
+smartly dressed, caused him to serve in the capacity of a butt for the
+bullies.
+
+One big boy in particular made it his business to punch, kick and cuff
+him on all occasions, in class or out. This continued for a month, when
+one day the little boy invited the big one out into the churchyard and
+there fell upon him tooth and claw. The big boy had strength, but the
+little one had right on his side.
+
+The schoolmaster looked over the wall and shouted, "Thrice armed is he
+who knows his cause is just!" In two minutes the bully was beaten, but
+the schoolmaster's son, who stood by as master of ceremonies, suggested
+that the big boy have his nose rubbed against the wall of the church for
+luck. This was accordingly done, not o'er-gently, and when Isaac
+returned to the schoolroom, the master, who was supposed to know nothing
+officially of the fighting, prophesied, "Young Mr. Newton will yet beat
+any boy in this school in his studies."
+
+It has been suggested that this prophecy was made after its fulfilment,
+but even so, we know that Mr. Stokes lived long enough to take great
+pride in the Newton boy, and to grow reminiscent concerning his great
+achievements.
+
+Our hearts surely go out to the late Mr. Stokes, schoolmaster at
+Grantham.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is surely something in that old idea of Indians that when they
+killed an enemy the strength of the fallen adversary entered into
+themselves.
+
+This encounter of little Isaac with the school bully was a pivotal point
+in his career. He had vanquished the rogue physically, and he now set to
+work to do as much mentally for the whole school. He had it in him--it
+was just a matter of application.
+
+Once, in after-life, in speaking of those who had benefited him most, he
+placed this unnamed chucklehead first, and added with a smile, "Our
+enemies are quite as necessary to us as our friends."
+
+In a few months Isaac stood at the head of the class. In mathematics he
+especially excelled, and the Master, who prided himself on being able to
+give problems no one could solve but himself, found that he was put to
+the strait of giving a problem nobody could solve. He was somewhat taken
+aback when little Isaac declined to work on it, and coolly pointed out
+the fallacy involved. The only thing for the teacher to do was to say he
+had purposely given the proposition to see if any one would detect the
+fallacy. This he gracefully did, and again made a prophecy to the effect
+that Isaac Newton would some day take his own place and be master of
+Grantham School.
+
+In the year Sixteen Hundred Fifty-six the schooldays of Isaac Newton
+were cut short by the death of his stepfather.
+
+His mother, twice a widow, moved back to "Woolsthorpe," a big name for a
+very small estate. Isaac was made the man of the house. The ambition of
+his mother was that he should become a farmer and stock-raiser.
+
+It seems that the boy entered upon his farm duties with an alacrity that
+was not to last. His heart was not in the work, but the desire to please
+his mother spurred him forward.
+
+On one occasion, being sent with a load of produce to Grantham, he
+stopped to visit his old school, and during his call struck a bargain
+with one of the boys for a copy of Descartes' Geometry. The purchase
+exhausted his finances, so that he was unable to buy the articles his
+mother had sent him for, but when he got home he explained that one
+might get along without such luxuries as clothing, but a good Geometry
+was a family necessity. About this time he made a water-clock, and also
+that sundial which can be seen today, carved into the stone on the
+corner of the house. He still continued his making of kites which had
+been begun at Grantham; and gave the superstitious neighbors a thrill by
+flying kites at night with lighted lanterns made from paper, attached to
+the tails. He made water-wheels and windmills, and once constructed a
+miniature mill that he ran by placing a mouse in a treadmill inside.
+
+In the meantime the cows got into the corn, and the weeds in the garden
+improved each shining hour. The fond mother was now sorely disappointed
+in her boy, and made remarks to the effect that if she had looked after
+his bringing up instead of entrusting him to an indulgent grandmother,
+affairs at this time would not be in their present state. Parents are
+apt to be fussy: they can not wait.
+
+Matters reached a climax when the sheep that Isaac had been sent to
+watch, overran the garden and demolished everything but the purslane and
+ragweed, while all the time the young man was under the hedge working
+out mathematical problems from his Descartes.
+
+At this stage the mother called in her brother, the Reverend Mr.
+Ayscough, and he advised that a boy who was so bound to study should be
+allowed to study.
+
+And the good man offered to pay the wages of a man to take Isaac's place
+on the farm.
+
+So, greatly to the surprise and pleasure of Mr. Stokes of Grantham,
+Isaac one fine day returned with his books, just as if he had only been
+gone a day instead of a year.
+
+At the home of the apothecary the lad was thrice welcome. He had
+endeared himself to the women of the household especially. He did not
+play with other boys--their games and sports were absolutely outside of
+his orbit. He was silent and so self-contained that he won from his
+schoolfellows the sobriquet of "Old Coldfeet." Nothing surprised him; he
+never lost his temper; he laughed so seldom that the incident was noted
+and told to the neighbors; his attitude was one of abstraction, and when
+he spoke it was like a judge charging a jury with soda-water.
+
+All his spare time was given up to whittling, pounding, sawing, and
+making mathematical calculations.
+
+Not all of his inventions were toys, for among other things he
+constructed a horseless carriage which was run by a crank and pumping
+device, by the occupants.
+
+The idea of the horseless carriage is a matter that has long been in the
+minds of inventors.
+
+Several men, supremely great, have tried their hands and head at it.
+Leibnitz worked at it; Swedenborg prophesied the automobile, and made a
+carriage, placing the horse inside, and did not give up the scheme until
+the horse ran away with himself and demolished a year's work. The
+government here interfered and placed an injunction against "the making
+of any more such diabolical contrivances for the disturbance of the
+public peace." All of which makes us believe that if either Edison or
+Marconi had lived two hundred years ago, the bailiffs would have looked
+after them with the butt end of the law for the regulation of wizards
+and witches--wizards at Menlo Park being as bad as witches at Salem.
+
+Newton's horseless carriage later came to grief in a similar way to
+Swedenborg's invention--it worked so well and so fast that it turned a
+complete somersault into a ditch, and its manipulation was declared to
+be a pastime more dangerous than football.
+
+Not all the things produced by Isaac about this time were failures. For
+instance, among other things he made a table, a chair and a cupboard for
+a young woman who was a fellow-boarder at the apothecary's. The
+excellence of young Newton's handiwork was shown in that the articles
+just mentioned outlasted both owner and maker.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Much of the reminiscence concerning the Grantham days of Sir Isaac
+Newton comes from the fortunate owner of that historic old table, chair
+and cupboard. This was Mary Story, who was later Mrs. Vincent.
+
+Miss Story was the same age as Isaac. She was just eighteen when the
+furniture was made roycroftie--she was a young lady, grown, and wore a
+dress with a train; moreover, she had been to London and had been
+courted by a widower, while Isaac Newton was only a lad in roundabouts.
+
+Age counts for little--it is experience and temperament that weigh in
+the scale. Isaac was only a little boy, and Mary Story treated him like
+one. And here seems a good place to quote what Doctor Charcot said, "In
+arranging the formula for a great man, make sure you delay adolescence:
+rareripes rot early."
+
+Isaac and Mary became very good chums, and used to ramble the woods
+together hand in hand, in a way that must have frightened them both had
+they been on the same psychic plane. Isaac had about the same regard for
+her that he might have had for a dear maiden aunt who would mend his old
+socks and listen patiently, pretending to be interested when he talked
+of parallelograms and prismatic spectra. But evidently Mary Story
+thought of him with a thrill, for she stoutly resented the boys calling
+him "Coldfeet."
+
+In due time Isaac gravitated to Cambridge. Mary mooed a wee, but soon
+consoled herself with a sure-enough lover, and was married to Mr.
+Vincent, a worthy man and true, but one who had not sufficient
+soul-caloric to make her forget her Isaac.
+
+This friendship with Mary Story is often spoken of as the one
+love-affair in the life of Sir Isaac Newton. It was all prosily Platonic
+on his part, but as Mary lived out her life at Grantham, and Sir Isaac
+Newton used to go there occasionally, and when he did, always called
+upon her, the relationship was certainly noteworthy.
+
+The only break in that lifelong friendship occurred when each was past
+fifty.
+
+Sir Isaac Newton was paying his little yearly call at Grantham; and was
+seated in a rustic arbor by the side of Mrs. Vincent, now grown gray,
+and the mother of a goodly brood, well grown up. As they thus sat
+talking of days agone, his thoughts wandered off upon quadratic
+equations, and to aid his mind in following the thread, he
+absent-mindedly lighted his pipe, and smoked in silence. As the tobacco
+died low, he gazed about for a convenient utensil to use in pushing the
+ashes down in the bowl of his pipe. Looking down he saw the lady's hand
+resting upon his knee, and he straightway utilized the forefinger of his
+vis-a-vis. A suppressed feminine screech followed, but the fires of
+friendship were not quenched by so slight an incident, which Mrs.
+Vincent knew grew out of temperament, and not from wrong intent.
+
+She lived to be eighty-five, and to the day of her death caressed the
+scar--the cicatrice of a love-wound. All of which seems to prove that
+old women can be quite as absurd as young ones--goodness me!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Isaac was eighteen, Master Stokes was so well impressed with his
+star scholar that he called in the young lad's uncle, the Reverend Mr.
+Ayscough, and insisted that the boy be sent to Cambridge. The uncle
+being a Cambridge man himself thought this the proper thing to do.
+
+On June Fifth, Sixteen Hundred Sixty-one, Isaac presented his
+credentials from his uncle and Mr. Stokes, and was duly entered in
+Trinity College as a subsizar, which means that he was admitted on
+suspicion. A part of the duties of a subsizar was to clean boots, scrub
+floors and perform various other delightful tasks which everybody else
+evaded.
+
+To be at Trinity College in any capacity was paradise for this boy. He
+thirsted for knowledge: to know, to do, to perform--these things were
+his desire. He had been brought up to work, anyway, and to a country boy
+toil is no punishment. "I knew that if worse came to worst I could get
+work in the town making furniture and earn a man's wage," he said.
+
+In a month he had passed his first examinations and was made a sizar.
+Before this he had been fag to everybody, but now he was fag to the
+Seniors only. He not only made their beds and cleaned their rooms, but
+also worked their examples in mathematics, and thus commanded their
+respect.
+
+Once, being called upon in class to recite from Euclid, he declined and
+shocked the professor by saying, "It is a trifling book--I have
+mastered it and thrown it aside." And it was no idle boast--he knew the
+book as the professor did not. When he arrived at Cambridge, he carried
+in his box a copy of Sanderson's Logic presented to him by his
+uncle--the uncle having no use for it. It happened to be one of the
+textbooks in use at Trinity. When Isaac heard lectures on Sanderson he
+found he knew the book a deal better than the tutor, a thing the tutor
+shortly acknowledged before the class. This caused young Mr. Newton to
+stand out as a prodigy. Usually students have to rap for admittance to
+the higher classes, but now the teachers came and sought him out. One
+professor told him he was about to take up Kepler's Optics with some
+post-graduate students--would young Mr. Newton come in? Isaac begged to
+be excused until he could examine the book. The volume was loaned to
+him. He tore the vitals out of it and digested them. When the lectures
+began, he declined to go because he had mastered the subject as far as
+Kepler carried it.
+
+Genius seems to consist in the ability to concentrate your rays and
+focus them on one point. Isaac Newton could do it. "On a Winter day I
+took a small glass and so centered the sun's rays that I burned a hole
+in my coat," he wrote in his subsizar journal.
+
+The youth possessed an imperturbable coolness: he talked little, but
+when he spoke it was very frankly and honestly. From any other his words
+would have had a presumptuous and boastful sound. As it was he was
+respected and beloved. At Cambridge his face and features commended him:
+he looked like another Cambridge man, one Milton--John Milton--only his
+face was a little more stern in its expression than that of the author
+of "Paradise Lost."
+
+In two years' time Isaac Newton was a scholar of whom all Cambridge
+knew. He had prepared able essays on the squaring of curved and crooked
+lines, on errors in grinding lenses and the methods of rectifying them,
+and in the extraction of roots where the cubes were imperfect: he had
+done things never before attempted by his teachers. When they called
+upon him to recite, it was only for the purpose of explaining truths
+which they had not mastered.
+
+In Sixteen Hundred Sixty-four, being in his twenty-second year, Isaac
+Newton was voted a free scholarship, which provided for board, books and
+tuition. On this occasion he was examined in Euclid by Doctor Barrow,
+the Head Master of Trinity.
+
+Newton could solve every problem, but could not explain why or how. His
+methods were empirical--those of his own.
+
+Many men with a modicum of mathematical genius work in this way, and in
+practical life the plan may serve all right. But now it was shown to
+Newton that a schoolman must not only know how to work out great
+problems, but also why he goes at it in a certain way; otherwise,
+colleges are vain--we must be able to pass our knowledge along. The
+really great man is one who knows the rules and then forgets them, just
+as the painter of supreme merit must be a realist before he evolves into
+an impressionist.
+
+Newton now acknowledged his mistake in reference to Euclid, and set to
+work to master the rules. This graciousness in accepting advice, and the
+willingness to admit his lapse, if he had been hasty, won for him not
+only the scholarship, but also the love of his superiors. Milton was a
+radical who made enemies, but Newton was a radical who made friends. He
+avoided iconoclasm, left all matters of theology to the specialists, and
+accepted the Church as a necessary part of society. His care not to
+offend fixed his place in Cambridge for life.
+
+It was Cambridge that fostered and encouraged his first budding
+experiments; it was there he was sustained in his mightiest hazards; and
+it was within her walls that the ripe fruit of his genius was garnered
+and gathered. When his fame had become national and he was called to
+higher offices than Cambridge supplied, Cambridge watched his career
+with the loving interest of a mother, and the debt of love he fully
+paid, for it was very largely through his name and fame that Cambridge
+first took her place as one of the great schools of the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Newton took his degree of Bachelor of Arts at Cambridge, in January, in
+the year Sixteen Hundred Sixty-five. The faculty of Trinity would not
+even consider his leaving the college: he was as valuable to them as he
+would be now if he were a famous football-player. Besides the
+scholarship, there were ways provided so he could earn money by private
+tutoring and giving lectures in the absence of the professors.
+
+He had written his essay on fluxions, described their application to
+fluents and tangents, and devised a plan for finding the radius of
+curvity in crooked lines. In August of the same year that Newton was
+given his degree, the college was dismissed on account of an epidemic,
+and Newton went home to Woolsthorpe to kill time. In September, Sixteen
+Hundred Sixty-five, he then being twenty-three, while seated in his
+mother's garden, Newton saw that storied apple fall. What pulled it
+down? Some force tugging at it, surely!
+
+Galileo had experimented with falling bodies, and had proved that the
+weight and size of a falling body had nothing to do with its velocity,
+save as its size and shape might be affected by the friction of the
+atmosphere. The first person to put into print the story of the falling
+apple was Voltaire, whose sketch of Newton is a little classic which the
+world could ill afford to lose. Adam, William Tell and Isaac Newton each
+had his little affair with an apple, but with different results.
+
+The falling apple suggested to Newton that there was some power in the
+ground that was constantly pulling things toward the center of the
+earth.
+
+This power extended straight down into the earth--he knew it--he had
+dropped a stone into a mine, and had also dropped things from steeples.
+He dropped apples from kites by an ingenious device of two strings, and
+he concluded that an apple taken a hundred miles up in the air would
+return to earth.
+
+He then began to speculate as to just what a body would do a thousand or
+ten thousand miles from the earth. So high as we could go, or as deep as
+we could dig, this drawing power was always present. The Law of
+Gravitation!
+
+If a cannon-ball was fired in a straight line at a distant target, the
+gunner had to elevate the aim if he would hit the target, for the ball
+described a curve and would keep dropping to the earth until it struck
+the ground. Something was pulling it down: what was it? The Law of
+Gravitation!
+
+The moon was attracted toward us and would surely fall into us, but for
+the fact that there were other attractions drawing her toward them. The
+movements of the planets were owing to the fact that they were obeying
+attractions. They were moving in curves, just like cannon-balls in
+motion. They had two movements, also, like the cannon-ball.
+
+Newton had noticed that the stars within a certain territory all moved
+in similar directions, and so must be acted upon by the same influences.
+The Law of Gravitation!
+
+It is held by many people in East Aurora and elsewhere that Newton's
+invention is a devilish device originated for the benefit of surgeons
+and crockery-dealers. But this is not wholly true.
+
+Without this Law of Gravitation the Earth could not retain her spherical
+shape: only through this constant drawing in toward the center could she
+exist.
+
+The other planets, too, must be round or they could not exist, and so
+they also had this same quality of gravity in common with the Earth--a
+drawing in of everything toward the center. Here was clearly a positive
+discovery--this similarity of the heavenly bodies!
+
+Every one of the heavenly bodies was exerting a constant attraction
+toward all other heavenly bodies, and this attractive power must be in
+proportion to the distance they were from the object acted upon. Thus
+were their movements and orbits accounted for.
+
+At this time Newton was perfectly familiar with Kepler's Law, that the
+squares of the periodic times of a planet were as the cubes of its
+distance from the sun. And from this, he inferred that the attraction
+varied as the square of the planet's distance from the sun.
+
+Here he was working on territory that had never been surveyed. At
+first, in his exuberance, he thought to figure out the size and weight
+of each planet quickly by measuring its attractive power. He did not
+realize that he had cut out for himself work that would require many men
+and several centuries to cover, but surely he was on the right scent--a
+finite man keen upon the secrets of the Infinite!
+
+He was still at his mother's old home in the country, without scientific
+apparatus or the stimulus of colleagues, when we find by a record in his
+journal that antique groan because there were only twenty-four hours in
+a day, and that eight were required for sleep and eight more for
+recreation!
+
+A subject a little nearer home than planetary attraction had now
+switched him off from measuring and weighing the stars. He was hard at
+work in his mother's little sitting-room, with the windows darkened,
+much to that good woman's perplexity.
+
+By shutting out all light from the windows and allowing the sun's rays
+to enter by a little, circular aperture, he had gotten the sunlight
+captured and tamed where he could study it. This ray of light he
+examined with a small hand-glass he himself had made. In looking at the
+ray, quite accidentally, he found it could be deflected and sent off at
+will in various directions. When thrown on the wall, instead of being
+simply white light it had seven distinct colors beginning with violet
+and running down to red. So white light was not a single element: it
+was made up of various rays which had to be united in order to give us
+sunlight.
+
+Eureka! He had found the secret of the rainbow--the sun's rays broken up
+and separated by the refracting agency of clouds!
+
+Well does Darwin declare that the separation of sunlight into its
+component parts, and the invention of the spectrum, have marked an
+advance in man's achievement such as the world had not seen since the
+time of wonder-working Archimedes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Cambridge University was closed until October, year of Sixteen
+Hundred Sixty-seven. Most of the intervening time Newton spent at the
+home of his mother, but from accounts of his we can see that the College
+people kept their eagle-eye upon him, for they sent remittances to him
+regularly for "commons."
+
+When he returned to Cambridge he was assigned to the "spiritual
+chamber," which was a room next to the chapel, that had formerly been
+reserved as a guest-room for visiting dignitaries.
+
+In March, Sixteen Hundred Sixty-eight, he was given the degree of Master
+of Arts. His studies now were of a very varied kind. He was required to
+give one lecture a week on any subject of his own choosing. Needless to
+say his themes were all mathematical or scientific. Just what they were
+can best be inferred by consulting his cashbook, since the lectures
+themselves were not written out and all memoranda concerning them have
+disappeared. This account-book shows that his expenditures were for a
+Gunter's Book (he who invented the Gunter's Chain), a magnet and a
+compass, glue, bulbs, putty, antimony, vinegar, white lead, salts of
+tartar, and lenses.
+
+And in addition there are a few interesting items such as one sees in
+the Diary of George Washington: "Lost at cards, five shillings."
+"Treating at tavern, ten shillings." "Binding my Bible, three
+shillings." "Spent on my cousin, one pound, two." "Expenses for wetting
+my degree, sixteen shillings."
+
+The last item shows that times have changed but little: this scientist
+and philosopher par excellence had to moisten his diploma at the tavern
+for the benefit of good fellows who little guessed with whom they drank.
+
+He also had "poor relations" come to visit him; and it is significant
+that while there are various items showing where he lost money at cards,
+there are no references to any money won at the same business, from
+which we infer that while there was no one at Cambridge who could follow
+him in his studies, there yet were those who could deal themselves
+better hands when it came to the pasteboards.
+
+Evidently he got discouraged at playing cards, for after the year
+Sixteen Hundred Sixty-eight, there are no more items of "treating at the
+tavern" or "lost at cards." The boys had tried to educate him, but had
+not succeeded. In card exploitations he fell a victim of arrested
+development.
+
+I suppose it will not cause any one a shock to be told that "the
+greatest thinker of all time" was not exactly a perfect man.
+
+So let the truth be known that throughout his life Newton had a
+well-defined strain of superstitious belief running through his
+character. He never quite relinquished the idea of transmutation of
+metals, and at times astrology was quite as interesting to him as
+astronomy.
+
+In writing to a friend who was about to pay a long visit to the mines of
+Hungary, he says, "Examine most carefully and ascertain just how and
+under what conditions Nature transforms iron into copper and copper into
+silver and gold."
+
+In his laboratory he had specimens of iron ore that contained copper,
+and also samples of copper ore that contained gold, and from this he
+argued that these metals were transmutable, and really in the act of
+transmutation when the process was interfered with by the miner's pick.
+
+He had transformed a liquid into a mass of solid crystals instantly, and
+all of the changes possible in light, which he had discovered, had
+enlarged his faith to a point where he declared, "Nothing is
+impossible."
+
+It is somewhat curious that Isaac Newton, who had no soft sex-sentiment
+in his nature, quite unlike Galileo, still believed in alchemy and
+astrology, while Galileo's cold intellect at once perceived the fallacy
+of these things.
+
+Galileo also saw at once that for the sun to stand still at Joshua's
+command would really mean that the Earth must cease her motion, since
+the object desired was to prolong the day. Sir Isaac Newton, who
+discovered the Law of Gravitation, yet believed that at the command of a
+barbaric chieftain, this Law was arrested, and that all planetary
+attraction was made to cease while he fought the Philistines for the
+possession of pasture-land to which he had no title.
+
+Galileo did not know as much as Newton about planetary attraction, but
+very early in his career he perceived that the Bible was not a book that
+could be relied upon technically.
+
+With Newton the Bible presented no difficulties. He regularly attended
+church and took part in the ritual. Religion was one thing and his daily
+work another. He kept his religion as completely separate from his life
+as did Gladstone, who believed the Mosaic account of Creation was
+literally true, and yet had a clear, cool, calculating head for facts.
+
+The greatest financial exploiter in America today is an Orthodox
+Christian, taking an active part in missionary work and the spread of
+the Gospel.
+
+In his family he is gentle, kind and tender; he is a good neighbor, a
+punctilious churchgoer, a leader in Sunday-School, and a considerate
+teacher of little children.
+
+In business relations he is as conscienceless as Tamerlane, who built a
+mountain of skulls as a monument to himself. He is cold, calculating,
+and if opposed, vindictive. On occasion he is absolutely without heart:
+compassion, mercy or generosity are not then in his make-up.
+
+The best lawyers procurable are paid princely sums to study for him the
+penal code, and legislatures have even revised it for his benefit.
+Eviction, destruction, suicide and insanity have even trod in his train.
+A picture of him makes you think of that dark and gloomy canvas where
+Cĉsar, Alexander and Napoleon ride slowly side by side through a sea of
+stiffened corpses. Bribery, coercion, violence and even murder have been
+this man's weapons. He is the richest man in America. And yet, as I said
+in the beginning, all this represents only one side of his nature: he
+reads his chapter in the Bible each evening by his family fireside, and
+tenderly kisses his grandchildren good-night.
+
+The individual who imagines that embezzlers are all riotous in nature,
+and by habit are spendthrifts, does not know humanity. The embezzler is
+one man; the model citizen another, and yet both souls reside in the one
+body.
+
+Nero had a passion for pet pigeons, and the birds used to come at his
+call, perch on his shoulder and take dainty crumbs from his lips.
+
+The natures of some men are divided up into water-tight compartments.
+Sir Isaac Newton kept his religion in one compartment, and his science
+in another--they never got together.
+
+Voltaire has said, "When Sir Isaac Newton discovered the Law of
+Gravitation he excited the envy of the learned men of the world; but
+they more than got even with him when he wrote a book on the prophecies
+of the Bible."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Newton was only twenty-seven years old he was elected the Lucasian
+Professor of Mathematics at Trinity, an office that carried with it a
+goodly salary and also very much honor. Never before had so young a man
+held this chair.
+
+Newton was a pioneer in announcing the physical properties of light.
+
+Every village photographer now fully understands this, but when Newton
+first proclaimed it he created a whirlwind of disapproval.
+
+When a man at that time put forth an unusual thought, it was regarded as
+a challenge. Teachers and professors all over Great Britain, and also in
+Germany and France, at once set about to show the fallacy of Newton's
+conclusions.
+
+Newton had issued a pamphlet with diagrams showing how to study light,
+and the apparatus was so simple and cheap that the "Newton experiments"
+were tried everywhere in schoolrooms.
+
+People always combat a new idea when first presented, and so Newton
+found himself overwhelmed with correspondence.
+
+Cheap arguments were fired into Cambridge in volleys. These were backed
+up by quibbling men--Pro Bono Publico, Veritas and Old Subscriber--men
+incapable of following Newton's scientific mind. In his great
+good-nature and patience Newton replied to his opponents at length.
+
+His explanations were construed into proof that he was not sure of his
+ground. One man challenged him to debate the matter publicly, and we
+hear of his going up to London, king that he was, to argue with a
+commoner.
+
+Such terms as "falsifier," "upstart," "pretender," were freely used, and
+poor Newton for a time was almost in despair.
+
+He had thought that the world was anxious for truth! Some of his
+fellow-professors now touched their foreheads and shook their heads
+ominously as he passed. He had gone so far beyond them that the cries of
+"whoa!" were unnoticed.
+
+It is here worth noting that the universal fame of Sir Isaac Newton was
+brought about by his rancorous enemies, and not by his loving friends.
+Gentle, honest, simple and direct as was his nature, he experienced
+notoriety before he knew fame.
+
+To the world at large he was a "wizard" and a "juggler" before he was
+acknowledged a teacher of truth--a man of science.
+
+When the dust of conflict concerning Newton's announcement of the
+qualities of light had somewhat subsided, he turned to his former
+discovery, the Law of Gravitation, and bent his mighty mind upon it. The
+influence of the moon upon the Earth, the tilt of the Earth, the
+flattening of the poles, the recurring tides, the size, weight and
+distance of the planets, now occupied Newton's attention. And to study
+these phenomena properly, he had to construct special and peculiar
+apparatus.
+
+In Sixteen Hundred Eighty-seven the results of his discoveries were
+brought together in one great book, the "Principia." Newton was
+forty-five years old then.
+
+He was still the Cambridge professor, but was well known in political
+circles in London on account of having been sent there at various times
+to represent the University in a legal way.
+
+His diplomatic success led to his being elected a member of Parliament.
+Among other great men whom he met in London was Samuel Pepys, who kept a
+diary and therein recorded various important nothings about "Mr. Isaac
+Newton of Cambridge--a schoolteacher of degree, with a great dignity of
+manner and pleasing Countenance." It seems Newton thought so well of
+Pepys that he wrote him several letters, from which Samuel gives us
+quotations. Pepys really claimed the honor of introducing Newton into
+good society.
+
+Among others with whom Newton made friends in Parliament was Mr.
+Montague, who shortly afterward became Secretary of the Exchequer.
+Montague made his friend Newton a Warden of the Mint, with pay about
+double that which he had received while at Cambridge.
+
+In this public work Newton brought such talent and diligence to bear
+that in Sixteen Hundred Ninety-seven he was made Master of the Mint, at
+a salary of fifteen hundred pounds a year--a princely sum in those days.
+
+There is no doubt that the fact that Newton was a devout Churchman and
+an upholder of the Established Order was a great, although perhaps
+unconscious, diplomatic move.
+
+His delightful personality--gracious, suave, dignified and silent--won
+for him admiration wherever he would go. In argument his fine reserve
+and excellent temper were most convincing. Had he turned his attention
+to the law he would have become Chief Justice of England.
+
+In Seventeen Hundred Three he was elected President of the Royal
+Society, an office he held continuously for twenty-five years, and which
+tenure was only terminated by his death.
+
+In Seventeen Hundred Five the Queen visited Cambridge, and there with
+much pageantry bestowed the honor of Knighthood which changed Professor
+Newton into Sir Isaac Newton.
+
+But the man himself was still the simple, modest gentleman. The title
+did not spoil him--he was a noble man from boyhood.
+
+His duties as Master of the Mint did not interfere with his studies and
+scientific investigations. He revised and rewrote his "Principia," and
+in Seventeen Hundred Thirteen the new edition was issued. One copy was
+most sumptuously bound, and Sir Isaac, who was a special favorite at
+Court, presented it in person to the Queen. Those who are interested in
+such things may, by applying to the Curator of the British Museum, see
+and turn the leaves of this book, reading the gracious inscription of
+the author, while a solemn man in brass buttons stands behind.
+
+Newton died March Twentieth, Seventeen Hundred Twenty-seven, at the age
+of eighty-five, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
+
+The verdict of humanity concerning Sir Isaac Newton has been summed up
+for us thus by Laplace: "His work was pre-eminent above all other
+products of the human intellect."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: GALILEO]
+
+GALILEO
+
+
+     I am inclined to believe that the intention of the Sacred
+     Scriptures is to give to mankind the information necessary for
+     their salvation.
+
+     But I do not hold it necessary to believe that the same God who has
+     endowed us with senses, with speech, with intellect, intended that
+     we should neglect the use of these, and seek by other means for
+     knowledge which these are sufficient to procure for us; especially
+     in a science like astronomy, of which so little notice is taken by
+     the Scriptures that none of the planets, except the sun and moon
+     and once or twice only Venus, by the name of Lucifer, are so much
+     as named at all.
+
+     This therefore being granted, methinks that in the discussion of
+     natural problems we ought not to begin at the authority of texts of
+     Scriptures but at sensible experiments and necessary
+     demonstrations.
+
+     --_Galileo_
+
+
+GALILEO
+
+With the history of Galileo and Copernicus, there is connected a
+man of such stern and withal striking individuality that the story of
+the rise and evolution of astronomy can not be told and this man's name
+left out. Giordano Bruno was born in Fifteen Hundred Forty-eight. His
+parents were obscure people, and his childhood and early education are
+enveloped in mystery. Occasional passages in his writings refer to his
+sympathy for outcast children, and he quotes the saying of Jesus,
+"Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of
+such is the Kingdom of Heaven." He then refers to himself as having been
+a waif and robbed of the love that was his due, "the lawful, legal
+heritage of every child, sent without its consent into a world of
+struggle and strife, where only love makes existence possible."
+
+Evidently, the early life of Bruno was a symbol and shadow of what Fate
+held in store for him.
+
+The first authentic knowledge we have of Bruno was when he was
+twenty-two years old. He was then a Dominican monk, and he is brought to
+our attention because he distinguished himself by incurring the
+displeasure of his superiors. His particular offense was that he had
+declared, "The infallibility of the Pope is only in matters spiritual,
+and does not apply to the science of material things."
+
+Strangely enough, these words of Bruno are almost identical with words
+recently expressed by Cardinal Satolli.
+
+The difference in their reception is owing to a mere matter of a few
+hundred years. Truth is a question of time and place. Bruno was banished
+for his temerity, and Satolli wears the red hat. Verily, yesterday's
+heresy is today's orthodoxy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The attitude of the Church toward the teachings of Copernicus, after the
+death of the man, was one of patronizing pity.
+
+Instead of putting his great book, "Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies,"
+on the "Index," the wiser plan was adopted of paying no attention to it.
+Occasionally, however, the subject was broached by some incautious
+novitiate, and then the custom was to treat the Copernican Theory as a
+mere hypothesis, and its author as a mental defective.
+
+Bruno would not have it so. To him it was a very important matter
+whether the sun revolved around the earth as the priests taught, or the
+earth revolved around the sun as set forth in the work of Copernicus. He
+came to the conclusion that Copernicus was right, and said so.
+
+It was ordered that he should cease lecturing on the subject of
+astronomy and apply himself to spiritual matters. He argued that he
+should be allowed to think and speak what he pleased about the stars,
+since the whole matter was one of opinion, and even the Pope did not
+know, positively, the final facts of astronomy, and if the Copernican
+Theory was a hypothesis, so also was the Ptolemaic Theory held by the
+Church.
+
+It will be seen that Copernicus and Bruno were very different in
+temperament: one was gentle, diplomatic, cautious; the other was
+headstrong, firm and full of argument.
+
+Bruno was given his choice: to cease the study of astronomy or to lay
+aside the Dominican frock. The hardihood of the young man was seen in
+that he unfrocked himself, thinking that once outside of the order he
+was not responsible to a superior and could teach what he pleased, so
+long as it was not "heresy."
+
+Heresy is treason to the Church, but Bruno could not see how spiritual
+dogma could cover the facts of Physical Science, since new facts were
+constantly being discovered, and the material universe could only be
+understood by being studied. He was too innocent to comprehend that a
+vast majority of the people believed that popes, cardinals and priests
+knew everything, and that when any branch of knowledge was questioned it
+placed the priests in doubt. Certainly the Church has not opposed
+Science--she has only opposed heresy. But the curious fact is that
+advancing Science has usually been to the Church heretical. When Bruno
+opposed anything that the priests taught, he opposed the Church. He was
+warned to leave Rome--his life was in danger. He fled to Geneva, the
+home of Calvin.
+
+Here he thought, surely, he could speak and write as he chose. But alas!
+Protestantism cared even less about Science than did the monks, and
+"heresy" to John Calvin was quite as serious a matter as it was to
+Calvin's competitor, the Pope of Rome.
+
+The Protestants of Geneva gave Bruno scant attention; they had never
+heard of Copernicus, and the movements of the stars were as nothing to
+them, since the world was soon to come to an end.
+
+The learned men were even then making mathematical calculations, based
+on the prophecies of the Old Testament, as to how soon the general
+destruction would take place.
+
+Bruno sought to argue them out of their childishness, with the result
+that he got himself marked as an infidel and a dangerous man.
+
+From Geneva he went to Lyons, then to Paris, where his personality made
+itself felt, and he was given a hearing at the University. Here he
+remained for several years, when he went to England, arriving there in
+Fifteen Hundred Eighty-four, the same year that a rustic by the name of
+William Shakespeare, from Stratford, reached London. Whether they ever
+met is doubtful.
+
+Bruno spoke five languages, and his polite accomplishments afforded him
+an immediate entry into the best circles of society. He was entertained
+at the home of Sir Philip Sidney, and afterward carried on an extensive
+correspondence with this prince of gentlemen. Greville presented Bruno
+to Queen Elizabeth, who invited him to lecture at the Court on his
+favorite theme.
+
+This he did, and it is quite probable that the noble lords and ladies
+left "calls" so they could be awakened when the lecture was over and
+congratulate the speaker of the evening on his effort.
+
+At Oxford there were disputations where Bruno's faultless Latin
+impressed the pedants much more than did his argument, so they offered
+him a position as Professor of Languages, but this he smilingly
+declined, excusing himself on the grounds that he had important business
+on the Continent: and he had. Already they were collecting fagots for
+his benefit.
+
+He returned to Paris and began his lecturing on Science. His arguments
+had convinced one person at least, and that was himself, that as the
+Church knew nothing of Physical Science, why, possibly it stood in a
+like position regarding spiritual truth. That is to say, the so-called
+"sacred truths" were mere assumptions piled up to satisfy the people,
+and the ignorance and superstition of the many marked high water for the
+teaching of the priests. The business of the Church was to satisfy the
+people, and not enlighten them, for if the people became enlightened
+enough they would see that they did not need the Church, and then where
+were the honors and the riches and the red hats!
+
+Bruno cleared his mind of its cobwebs by expression, just as we all
+do--that is what expression is for.
+
+The people really dictate to the priests what they shall teach;
+moreover, the people absolutely refuse to listen to anything in which
+they do not believe, and decline to pay for preaching that is not done
+to their own dictation. The business, then, of the Church is to study
+carefully the ignorance of the people and conform to it. On this one
+thing does its stability depend. Therefore it must, as a matter of
+self-preservation, suppress any chance intellect that is ahead of its
+time, lest this man honeycomb the whole structure of churchly dogma.
+
+Bruno said that, just as the world seemed to stand still and the stars
+move around us, so did the Church seem to most people a fixed fact. But
+exactly the opposite was true; the Church moves as the people move, and
+unless men outside of the Church educate the people, or the people
+educate themselves, they will forever remain in darkness.
+
+Bruno offered to debate the question publicly with the Bishop of Paris.
+That worthy was no match for Bruno in point of oratory, but when we can
+not answer a man's reasons, all is not lost, for we can at least call
+him vile names, and this is often quite as effectual as logic.
+
+The Bishop launched a fusillade of theological lyddite at Bruno,
+declaring that any Churchman who would so much as hold converse with
+such a wretch was disgraced forever, and that the propositions Bruno
+wished to argue were unthinkable to a self-respecting man. He declared
+that it was only the mercy of God that kept the lightning from striking
+Bruno dead as he wrote his heresies.
+
+Matters were getting strained, and the authorities, fearing
+insurrection, acted upon the advice of the good Bishop and expelled
+Bruno from France. He went to Wittenberg, in his innocence, intending to
+tack on the church-door there his theses. But Wittenberg had no use for
+Bruno--he believed too much, or too little, Luther could not tell which.
+
+The University of Zurich now offered to let the exile come there and
+teach what he wished. Thither he journeyed and there his restless mind
+seemed for the first time to find a home. His writings were slowly
+making head, and around him there clustered a goodly group of students
+who believed in him and loved him.
+
+In the midst of this oasis in a troubled life, word came from some of
+the old-time friends he had known in Rome. They were now in Venice, and
+wished to have him come there and lecture. Bruno thought that his little
+leaven was leavening the whole lump--he was not without ambition--he was
+flattered by the invitation. He accepted it and went to Venice.
+
+It was simply a ruse to get the man within striking distance. Very soon
+after his arrival in Venice he was arrested by agents of the Inquisition
+and secretly taken to Rome. He was lodged in a dungeon of the Castle
+Saint Angelo. Just what his experience was there we can not say--the
+horrors of it all are not ours, for no friend of Bruno's was allowed to
+approach, and what he there wrote was destroyed.
+
+We do know, however, that he was asked to recant, and we know he
+refused. We also know that he repeated his heresies and hurled back
+into the teeth of his accusers the invective they heaped upon him.
+
+Bribery, persuasion, threat and torture were tried in turn, but all in
+vain, for Bruno would not swerve. Unlike Savonarola his quivering flesh
+could not wring from his heart an apology.
+
+He scorned the rack and thumbscrew, declaring they could not reach his
+soul. He knew that death would be the end; he prayed for it, and even
+thought to hasten it by an aggravating manner and harshness of speech
+toward his captors, seemingly quite unnecessary.
+
+For seven long years he was in prison. He was burned alive on the
+Seventh of February, Sixteen Hundred, aged fifty-two.
+
+When bound to the stake he turned his face from the crucifix that was
+held before him, and sought to kiss the fagots. His ashes were thrown to
+the four winds. Thus perished Bruno.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the year Fifteen Hundred Sixty-four, Galileo Galilei was born;
+consequently, he was thirty-six years old when Bruno was executed. He
+had known Bruno, had attended many of his lectures, and had followed his
+career with interest; and while he agreed with him concerning the
+Copernican theory of the earth's revolution, he took exceptions to
+Bruno's arbitrary ways of presenting the matter, and also to his
+scathing criticisms of theology. At this time Galileo could not see that
+the extravagant words of Bruno were largely forced from him by the
+violence of the opposition he had encountered. Galileo fully believed
+that Bruno had been put to death for treason to the Church, and not on
+account of his astronomical teachings.
+
+These men had come up from totally different stations in life. Bruno was
+a man of the people--a self-made man--who bore upon his person the marks
+of the hammer. Galileo was of noble blood, and traced an ancestry to a
+Gonfalonier of Florence. From early infancy he had enjoyed association
+with polite persons, and had sat on the knees of greatness.
+
+When eighteen he was graduated from the University of Pisa; and at that
+early age his family and friends were comparing him, not without reason,
+to a Genius who had come out of Tuscany some years before, Leonardo da
+Vinci.
+
+Parents either exaggerate the talents of their children or else
+belittle them. The woman who bore George Gordon called him "that lame
+brat"; but we call him "The Poet Byron."
+
+Benjamin Franklin ran away from home, and his family thought themselves
+disgraced by his printed utterances. George Washington's mother, after
+being told that her son had been made Commander-in-Chief, laughed
+knowingly and said, "They don't know him as well as I do!" Voltaire's
+father posted his son as irresponsible, tied up a legacy so "the
+scapegrace could not waste it," invested good money in daily prayers to
+be said for the scapegrace's salvation, and then died of a broken heart,
+just as play-actors do on the stage, only this man died sure enough.
+Alfred Tennyson at thirteen wrote a poem addressed to his grandfather;
+the old gentleman gave him a guinea for it, and then wrote these words:
+"This is the first and last penny you will ever receive for writing
+poetry." The father of Shelley misquoted Job, and said, "Oh, to be
+brought down to the grave in grief through the follies of an ungrateful
+child!" And Labouchere says that one of the four brothers of Shakespeare
+used to explain that he wasn't the play-actor who wrote "Hamlet" and
+"Othello," lest, mayhap, his name should be smirched.
+
+Galileo's mother had that beautiful dream which I believe all good
+mothers have: that her son might be the savior of the world. As he grew
+to manhood, her faith in him did not relax.
+
+In childhood Galileo showed great skill in invention. He made curious
+toys with cogs and wheels and eccentrics; whittled out violins, and
+transformed simple reeds into lutes, upon which he played music of his
+own composition. In fact, so great was his skill in music that at twenty
+they wished to make him official organist and choirmaster of the
+Cathedral. His personal taste, however, ran more to painting; for some
+months he worked at his canvases with an ardor too great to last long.
+If ever a man was touched by the Spirit of the Renaissance, it was
+surely young Galileo. The Archbishop of Pisa said, "Upon him has fallen
+the mantle of Michelangelo."
+
+He gave lectures on Art, and taught Painting by actual example. One of
+his pupils, and a great artist, Lodovico Cigoli, always maintained that
+it was to the inspiration and counsel of Galileo that he owed his
+success.
+
+There are really only two things to see at Pisa: one is the Leaning
+Tower, from which Galileo with his line and plummet made some of his
+most interesting experiments; and the other is the Cathedral where the
+visitor beholds the great bronze lamp that is suspended from the vaulted
+ceiling. When he was about twenty-one, sitting in the silence of this
+church (which the passing years have only made more beautiful), he
+noticed that there was a slight swinging motion to this lamp--it was
+never still. Galileo set to work timing and measuring these
+oscillations, and he found that they were always done in exact measure
+and in perfect rhythm. This led, some years later, to perfecting an
+astronomical clock for measuring movements of the stars. And from this
+was originated the pendulum-clock, where before we had depended on
+sundials.
+
+The endeavor of Galileo's parents had been to keep him ignorant of
+mathematics and practical life, that he might blossom forth as a saint
+who would sing and play and make pictures like those of Leonardo, and
+carve statues like Michelangelo, only better.
+
+But parents plan, and Fate disposes.
+
+In Fifteen Hundred Eighty-three, Ostilio Ricci, the famous
+mathematician, chanced to be in Pisa, on his way from Rome to Milan, and
+gave a lecture at the Court, on Geometry.
+
+Galileo was not interested in the theme, but he was in the speaker, and
+so he attended the lecture.
+
+This action proved one of the pivotal points in his life.
+
+"Whether other people really teach us anything, is a question," says
+Stanley Hall; "but they do sometimes give us impulses, and make us find
+out for ourselves."
+
+Ricci made Galileo find out for himself.
+
+He turned to Archimedes from Plato. Geometry became a passion, and a
+very wise man has told us that we never accomplish anything, either good
+or bad, without passion. Passion means one hundred pounds of steam on
+the boiler, with love sitting on the safety-valve, when the blow-off is
+set for fifty.
+
+It surely is risky business, I will admit; accidents will occur
+occasionally and explosions sometimes happen, but everything is risky,
+even life, since few get out of it alive.
+
+And so, to drop back to the original proposition, nothing great and
+sublime is ever done without passion.
+
+Galileo had his mechanical whooping-cough, musical mumps, artistic
+measles, and now the hectic flush of mathematics burned on his cheeks.
+He talked and dreamed mathematics.
+
+Euclid was in the saddle.
+
+Ricci became interested in the talented young scholar and remained
+longer at Pisa than he had intended, that they might sit up all night
+and surprise the rising sun, discussing beauties of dimensions and the
+wonders of dynamics.
+
+Together they went to Florence, where Ricci introduced his pupil as a
+pedagogic sample of the goods, just as Booker Washington usually takes
+with him on his travels a few ebony homo bricks as his specimens from
+Tuskegee.
+
+The beauty and the grace of Galileo's speech and presence put the
+abstract Ricci in the shadow. The right man can make anything
+interesting, just as Dean Swift could write an entrancing essay with the
+broomstick as a central theme. The man's the thing, Hamlet to the
+contrary, notwithstanding.
+
+Galileo knew the Florentine heart, and so he gave lectures on a
+Florentine: one Dante, who loved a girl named Beatrice.
+
+The young Pisan drew diagrams of Dante's Inferno--and surely it was
+nobody's else. He gave its size, height, weight, and told how to reach
+it.
+
+He gave lectures on the Hydrostatic Balance and the Centers of Gravity,
+and then published them as serials.
+
+The Florentines crowned him with bay and enthusiastically proclaimed
+him, "The Modern Archimedes."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pisa now put forth efforts to have her gifted son come home. There was
+always rivalry between Pisa and Florence. Pisa could not afford to
+supply Florence her men of genius--let her depend upon production from
+home, or go without.
+
+Galileo became Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pisa, a
+life position, or at least one he could hold during good behavior.
+
+One of the time-honored dictums of the day was that falling bodies fell
+with a velocity proportioned to their weight. The question was first
+thrashed out in the classroom; and after Galileo had slyly gotten all of
+these scientific wiseacres to commit themselves, he invited them, with
+their students, to the Leaning Tower.
+
+Then he proved by ocular demonstrations that they were positively wrong.
+
+It is very beautiful to teach Truth, but error should not be corrected
+with too much eclat. If the love of Truth, alone, was the guiding
+impulse of Galileo, he might have secretly explained his theory to one
+of the wiseacres, and this wiseacre could have casually demonstrated it,
+so all the rest could have said, "That is what we always knew and
+taught."
+
+Instead of this, Galileo compelled the entire faculty to back water and
+dine on fricasseed crow.
+
+They got even by calling him "a scientific bastardino," and at his next
+lecture he was roundly hissed. Soon after he was bluntly informed that
+his office was to teach the young, and not to undo the old.
+
+And that is the way the troubles of Galileo began.
+
+He might then have apologized, and slipped back into peace and obscurity
+and later been tucked in by kind oblivion. But he had tasted blood, and
+the rabies of setting straight the scientific world, for its own good,
+was upon him.
+
+That he was wrong in the correction of his elders, he would not for a
+moment admit; and he was even guilty of saying, "Antiquity can not
+sanctify that which is wrong in reason and false in principle." Soon
+after he committed another forepaugh by showing that a wonderful boat
+invented by Giovanni de Medici for the purpose of fighting hostile
+ships, would not work, since there were no men on board to guide it, and
+its automatic steering apparatus would as likely run its nose into land,
+as into the hull of the enemy.
+
+He also decorated his argument with a few subtle touches as to the
+beauty of fighting battles without going to war and risking life and
+limb.
+
+Men who are not kind to the faults of royalty can hope for small favor
+in a monarchy, though the monarchy be a republic. Galileo was cut off
+the Standard Oil payroll, and forced to apply to a teachers' agency,
+that he might find employment.
+
+He did not wait long; the rival University of Padua tendered him a
+position on a silver platter; and the Paduans made much dole about how
+unfortunate it was that men could not teach Truth in Italy, save at
+Padua--alas! The Governing Board of Padua made a great stroke in
+securing Galileo, and Pisa fell back on her Leaning Tower as her chief
+attraction.
+
+From a position of mediocrity, the University of Padua gradually rose to
+one of worldwide celebrity. Galileo remained at Padua from Fifteen
+Hundred Ninety-two to Sixteen Hundred Ten, which years are famous not
+alone through the wonderful inventions of Galileo, but because in that
+same interval of time, at least thirty of Shakespeare's thirty-seven
+plays were written. Surely, God was smiling on the planet Earth!
+
+Galileo's salary was raised every year, starting at two hundred florins,
+until it reached over one thousand florins, not to mention the numerous
+gifts from grateful pupils, old and young. Students came to Padua from
+all over the world to hear Galileo's lectures.
+
+Starting with only a common classroom, the audience increased so fast
+that a special auditorium was required that would seat two thousand
+persons. It was during this time that Galileo invented the proportional
+compasses, an instrument now in use everywhere, without the slightest
+change having been made in it.
+
+He also invented the thermometer; but greatest, best and most wonderful
+of all, he produced an instrument through which he could view the stars,
+and see them much magnified. With this instrument, he saw heavenly
+bodies that had never been seen before; he beheld that Jupiter had
+satellites which moved in orbits, and that Venus revolved, showing
+different sides at different times, thus proving that which Copernicus
+declared was true, but which, for lack of apparatus, he could not prove.
+
+Galileo Galilei was getting to be more than a professor of
+mathematics--he was becoming a power in the world.
+
+The lever of his mighty mind was indeed finding a fulcrum.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The year Sixteen Hundred Nine is forever fixed in history, through the
+fact that in that year Galileo invented the telescope.
+
+Every good thing is an evolution. "Specilla," or helps to read, had been
+made, and sold privately and mysteriously, as early as the year Fourteen
+Hundred. These first magnifying-glasses were associated with magic, or
+wonder-working; the words "magnify" and "magic" having a common source
+and a similar meaning. Magicians wore big square glasses, and by their
+aid, some of them claimed to see things at a great distance; and also to
+perceive things stolen, hidden or lost. Occasionally, the magician would
+persuade his customer to try on the glasses, and then even common men
+could see for themselves that there was something in the
+scheme--goodness me! The use of spectacles was at first confined
+entirely to these wonder-workers--or men who magnified things forever.
+During the Fifteenth Century, public readers and occasionally priests
+wore spectacles. To read was a miracle to most people, and a book was a
+mysterious and sacred thing--or else a diabolical thing. The populace
+would watch the man put on his "specillum," and the idea was everywhere
+abroad that the magic glasses gave an ability to read; and that anybody
+who was inspired by angels, or devils, who could get hold of spectacles,
+could at once read from a book.
+
+We hear of one magician who, about the year Fifteen Hundred, made a box
+with a glass cover that magnified the contents. This great man would
+catch a flea and show it to the people. Then he would place the flea in
+the box and show it to them, and they would see that it had grown
+enormously in an instant. The man could make it big or little, by just
+taking off and putting on the cover of the box!
+
+This individual worked wonders for a consideration, but Fate overtook
+him and he was smothered under a feather bed for having too much wizard
+in his cosmos. A wizard, be it known, is a male witch, and the Bible
+says, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," although it does not say
+anything about wizards.
+
+But please note this: the wizard who had that magic box and flea had
+really the first microscope.
+
+Galileo bought a pair of "magic glasses," or spectacles, about the year
+Sixteen Hundred Seven; and his action, in so doing, was freely
+criticized.
+
+On a visit to Venice, where glass had been manufactured since long
+before the Flood, Galileo was looking through one of the
+glass-factories, just as visitors do now, and one of the workmen showed
+him a peculiar piece of glass which magnified the hairs on the back of
+his hand many times.
+
+In a very few days after this, Galileo heard that a Dutch
+spectacle-maker had placed certain queer-shaped pieces of glass in a
+tube, and offered to sell this tube to the Government, so by its use,
+soldiers could see the movements of an enemy many miles away.
+
+That night Galileo did not close his eyes in sleep. He thought out a
+plan by which he could place pieces of glass in a tube, and bring the
+stars close to the earth. By daylight the whole plan was clear in his
+mind, and he hastened to the shop of the glassmakers.
+
+There, two lenses were made, one plano-convex, and the other
+plano-concave, and these were placed in a tube made of sheet copper. It
+was tested on distant objects; and behold! they were magnified by three.
+Would this tube show the stars magnified? Galileo knew of no reason why
+it should not, but he paced his room in hot impatience, waiting for the
+night to come with its twinkling wonders, that he might verify his
+convictions. When the first yellow star appeared in the West, Galileo
+turned his tube upon it, and behold! instead of twinkling points of
+light, he saw a round mass--a world--moving through space, and not a
+scintillating object with five points. The twinkling spikes, or points,
+were merely an optical illusion of the unaided senses.
+
+Galileo made no secret of his invention. It was called "Galileo's Tube,"
+but some of the priests called it Galileo's "Magic Tube."
+
+Yet it marked an era in the scientific world. Galileo endeavored
+constantly to improve his instrument; and from a threefold magnifying
+power, he finally made one that magnified thirty-two times.
+
+Galileo made hundreds of telescopes, and sold them at moderate prices to
+any one who would buy. He explained minutely the construction of the
+instrument, showing clearly how it was made in accordance with the
+natural laws of optics. His desire was to dissipate the superstition
+that there was something diabolical or supernatural about the "Magic
+Tube"--that, in fact, it was not magic, and the operator had no peculiar
+powers; you had simply to comply with the laws of Nature, and any one
+could see for himself.
+
+It is hard for us, at this day, to understand the opposition that sprang
+up against the telescope. We must remember that at this time belief in
+witchcraft, fairies, sprites, ghosts, hobgoblins, magic and supernatural
+powers was common. Men who believe in miracles make rather poor
+scientists.
+
+There were books about "Magic," written by so-called scientific men,
+whose standing in the world was quite as high as that of Galileo.
+
+In Sixteen Hundred Ten, Galileo published his book entitled, "Sidera
+Medicea," wherein he described the wonders that could be seen in the
+heavens by the aid of the telescope. Among other things, he said the
+Milky Way was not a great streak of light, but was composed of a
+multitude of stars; and he made a map of the stars that could be seen
+only with the aid of the telescope.
+
+There resided in Venice at this time a scientific man by the name of
+Porta, who was much more popular than Galileo. He was a priest, whose
+piety and learning was unimpeached.
+
+The year after Galileo issued his book, Porta put out a work much more
+pretentious, called "Natural Magic." In this book Porta does not claim
+that magicians all have supernatural powers; but he goes on to prove how
+they deceive the world by the use of their peculiar apparatus, and
+intimates that they sometimes sell their souls to the Devil, and then
+are positively dangerous. He dives deep into science, history and his
+own imagination to prove things.
+
+The man was no fool--he constructed a kaleidoscope that showed an
+absolute, geometrical symmetry, where in fact there was only confusion.
+He showed how, by the use of mirrors, things could be made big, small,
+tall, short, wide, crooked or distorted. He told of how magicians, by
+the use of Galileo's Tube, could show seven stars where there was only
+one; and he even made such a tube of his own and called the priests
+together to look through it. He painted stars on the glass, and had men
+look at the heavens. He even stuck a louse on the lens and located the
+beast in the heavens, for the benefit of a doubting Cardinal. It was all
+a joke, but at the time no sober, sincere man of Science could argue him
+down. He owned "bum" telescopes that proved all kinds of things, to the
+great amusement of the enemies of Galileo. The intent of Porta was to
+expose the frauds and fallacies of Galileo. Porta also claimed that he
+had seen telescopes by which you could look over a hill and around a
+corner, but he did not recommend them, since by their use things are
+often perceived that were not there. And so we see why the priests
+positively refused to look through Galileo's Tube, or to believe
+anything he said. Porta, and a few others like him, showed a deal more
+than Galileo could and offered to locate stars anywhere on order.
+Galileo had much offended these priests by his statements that the Bible
+did not contain the final facts of Science, and now they were getting
+even with a vengeance. It was all very much like the theological guffaw
+that swept over Christendom when Darwin issued his "Origin of Species,"
+and Talmage and Spurgeon set their congregations in a roar by gently
+sarcastic references to monkey ancestry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amid the general popping of theological small-arms, Galileo moved
+steadily forward. If he had many enemies he surely had a few friends. As
+he once had proved more than Pisa could digest, so now he was bringing
+to the surface of things more truth than Padua could assimilate.
+
+Venice too was getting uncomfortable. Even the Doge said, in reply to an
+enthusiastic admirer of Galileo, "Your master is not famous: he is
+merely notorious."
+
+It was discovered that Galileo had been living with a woman by the name
+of Marina Gamba, at Venice, even while he held the professorship at
+Padua, and that they had a son, Vincenzo Gamba, and two daughters. One
+of the enemy drew a map of the heavens, showing Galileo as the sun,
+Marina Gamba as the moon, and around them circulated numerous little
+satellites, which were supposed to be their children. The picture had so
+great a vogue that the Doge issued an order that all copies of it be
+destroyed.
+
+Of Marina Gamba we know very little; but the fact that she made entries
+in Galileo's journal and kept his accounts proves that she was a person
+of considerable intelligence; and this, too, was at a time when
+semi-oriental ideas prevailed and education was supposedly beyond the
+feminine grasp.
+
+Galileo did not marry, for the reason that he was practically a priest,
+a teacher in a religious school, living with and looking after the
+pupils; and the custom then was that whoever was engaged in such an
+occupation should not wed.
+
+The stormy opposition to Galileo was not without its advantages. We are
+advertised no less by our rabid enemies than by our loving friends.
+Cosimo the Second, Grand Duke of Tuscany, had intimated that Florence
+would give the great astronomer a welcome. Galileo moved to Florence
+under the protection of Cosimo, intending to devote all his time to
+Science.
+
+In giving up schoolteaching and popular lecturing, Galileo really made a
+virtue of necessity. No orthodox lyceum course would tolerate him; he
+was neither an impersonator nor an entertainer; the stereopticon and the
+melodramatic were out of his line, and his passion for truth made him
+impossible to the many.
+
+He was treading the path of Bruno: the accusations, the taunts and
+jeers, the denials and denunciations, were urging him on to an unseemly
+earnestness.
+
+Father Clavius said that Galileo never saw the satellites of Jupiter
+until he had made an instrument that would create them; and if God had
+intended that men should see strange things in the heavens, He would
+have supplied them sufficient eyesight. The telescope was really a
+devil's instrument.
+
+Still another man declared that if the earth moved, acorns falling from
+a high tree would all fall behind the tree and not directly under it.
+
+Father Brini said that if the earth revolved, we would all fall off of
+it into the air when it was upside down; moreover, its whirling through
+space would create a wind that would sweep it bald.
+
+Father Caccini preached a sermon from the text, "Ye men of Galilee, why
+stand ye gazing up into heaven?" Only he changed the word "Galilee" to
+"Galileo," claiming it was the same thing, only different, and as reward
+for his wit he was made a bishop.
+
+Cardinal Bellarmine, a man of great energy, earnest, zealous, sincere,
+learned--the Doctor Buckley of his day--showed how that: "if the
+Copernican Theory should prevail, it would be the absolute undoing of
+the Bible, and the destruction of the Church, rendering the death of
+Christ futile. If the earth is only one of many planets, and not the
+center of the universe, and the other planets are inhabited, the whole
+plan of salvation fails, since the inhabitants of the other spheres are
+without the Bible, and Christ did not die for them." This was the
+argument of Father Lecazre, and many others who took their cue from him.
+
+Galileo was denounced as "atheist" and "infidel"--epithets that do not
+frighten us much now, since they have been applied to most of the really
+great and good men who have ever lived. But then such words set fire to
+masses of inflammable prejudices, and there were conflagrations of wrath
+and hate against which it was vain to argue.
+
+The Archbishop of Pisa especially felt it incumbent upon him "to bring
+Galileo to justice."
+
+Galileo was born at Pisa, educated there, taught in the University; and
+now he had disgraced the place and brought it into disrepute.
+
+Galileo was still in communication with teachers at Pisa, and the
+Archbishop made it his business to have letters written to Galileo
+asking certain specific questions. One man, Castelli, declined to be
+used for the purpose of entrapping Galileo, but others there were who
+loaned themselves to the plan.
+
+In Sixteen Hundred Sixteen, Galileo received a formal summons from Pope
+Paul the Fifth to come to Rome and purge himself of heresies that he had
+expressed in letters which were then in the hands of the Inquisition.
+
+Galileo appealed to his friends at Florence, but they were powerless.
+When the Pope issued an order, it could not be waived. The greatest
+thinker of his time journeyed to Rome and faced the greatest theologian
+of his day, Cardinal Bellarmine.
+
+The Cardinal firmly and clearly showed Galileo the error of his way.
+Galileo offered to prove for the Cardinal by astronomical observations
+that the Copernican Theory was true. Cardinal Bellarmine said that there
+was only one truth and that was spiritual truth. That the Bible was
+true, or it was not. If not, then was religion a fallacy and our hope of
+Heaven a delusion.
+
+Galileo contended that the death of Christ had nothing to do with the
+truth, so Science and these things should not be shuffled and confused.
+
+This attitude of mind greatly shocked the Inquisitors, and they made
+haste to inform the Pope, who at once issued an order that the
+astronomer should be placed in a dungeon until he saw fit to disavow
+that the sun was the center of the universe, and the earth moves.
+
+A sort of compromise, it seems, was here effected by Galileo's promise
+not to further teach that the earth revolves.
+
+He was kept at Rome under strict surveillance for some months, but was
+finally allowed to return to Florence, and cautioned that he must cease
+all public teaching, speaking and writing on the subject of astronomy.
+On March Fifth, Sixteen Hundred Sixteen, the consulting theologians of
+the Holy Office reiterated that the propositions of Galileo, that the
+sun is the center of the universe, and that the earth has a rotary
+motion, were "absurd in philosophy, heretical, and also contrary to
+Scripture."
+
+The works of Copernicus were then placed upon the "Index," and Pope Paul
+issued a special decree, warning all Churchmen to "abjure, shun and
+forever abstain from giving encouragement, support, succor or friendship
+to any one who believed or taught that the earth revolves."
+
+The name of Copernicus was not removed from the "Index" until the year
+Eighteen Hundred Eighteen.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Galileo made his way back to Florence, defeated and disappointed. He had
+not been tortured, except mentally, but he had heard the dungeon-key
+turned in the big lock and felt the humiliation of being made a captive.
+The instruments of torture had been shown to him, and he had heard the
+cries of the condemned.
+
+The cell that Bruno had occupied was his, and he was also taken to the
+spot where Bruno was burned: the place was there, but where was Bruno!
+
+He realized how utterly impossible it was to teach truth to those who
+did not desire truth, and the vanity of replying to men for whom a pun
+answered the purposes of fact.
+
+As he could neither teach nor lecture at Florence, his services to the
+Court were valueless. He was a disgraced and silenced man.
+
+He retired to a village a few miles from the city, and in secret
+continued his studies and observations. The Grand Duke supplied him a
+small pension and suggested that it would be increased if Galileo would
+give lectures on Poetry and Rhetoric, which were not forbidden themes,
+and try to make himself either commonplace or amusing.
+
+We can imagine the reply--Galileo had but one theme, the wonders of the
+heavens above.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So the years went by, and Galileo, sixty-seven years old, was
+impoverished and forgotten, yet in his proud heart burned the embers of
+ambition. He believed in himself; he believed in the sacredness of his
+one mission. Pope Paul had gone on his long journey, for even infallible
+popes die. Cardinal Barberini had become Pope Urban the Eighth. Years
+before, Galileo and Barberini had taught together at Padua, and when
+Galileo was silenced, a long letter of sympathy had come from his old
+colleague, and occasionally since they had exchanged friendly letters.
+Galileo thought that Urban was his friend, and he knew that Urban, in
+his heart, believed in the theory of Copernicus.
+
+Galileo then emerged from his seclusion and began teaching and speaking
+in Florence. He also fitted up an observatory and invited the scholars
+to make use of his telescope.
+
+Father Melchior hereupon put forth a general denunciation, aimed
+especially at Galileo, without mentioning his name, to this effect: "The
+opinion of the earth's motion is, of all heresies, the most abominable,
+the most pernicious, the most scandalous: the immovability of the earth
+is thrice sacred.
+
+"An argument against the existence of God and the immortality of the
+soul would be sooner tolerated than the idea that the earth moves."
+
+In reply to this fusillade, in Sixteen Hundred Thirty-two Galileo put
+forth his book entitled, "The Dialogue," which was intended to place the
+ideas of Copernicus in popular form.
+
+Galileo had endeavored to communicate with Urban, but the Pope had
+chosen to ignore him--to consider him as one dead. Galileo misconstrued
+the silence, thinking it meant that he could do and say what he wished
+and that there would be no interference.
+
+A copy of Galileo's book reaching the Pope, his silence was at once
+broken. The book was condemned and all copies found were ordered to be
+burned by the hangman in the public streets. But the book had met with a
+wide sale and many copies had been carried to Germany, England and
+France, and in these countries the work was reprinted and sent back to
+Italy.
+
+Urban ordered Galileo to present himself at Rome forthwith. A score of
+years had passed since Galileo's former visit--he had not forgotten it.
+
+He wrote to the Pope and apologized for having broken the silence
+imposed upon him by Pope Paul; he offered to go into retirement again;
+stated that he was old, infirm, without funds, and excused himself from
+obeying the order to go to Rome.
+
+But excuses and apologies were unavailing.
+
+A preventory order was issued and sent to the Papal Nuncio at Florence.
+
+This was equivalent to an arrest. Galileo must go to Rome and answer for
+having broken the promises he had made to the Inquisition. If he would
+not go willingly, he should go in chains.
+
+Arriving at Rome, he had several audiences with the Pope, who said
+nothing would answer but a specific recantation.
+
+What Barberini had once believed was one thing, and what the Pope must
+do was another. Galileo should recant in order to keep the people from
+thinking Pope Urban would allow what his predecessors would not.
+
+The matter had become a public scandal.
+
+Galileo tried to argue the question and asked for time to consider it.
+
+An order was issued that he should be imprisoned. It was done.
+
+Galileo asked for pens and paper that he might prepare his defense.
+These were refused, and an order of torture was issued. It was not a
+trial, defense was useless. Again he was asked to recant--the matter was
+all written out--he had but to sign his name. He refused. He was brought
+to the torture-chamber.
+
+Legend and fact separate here.
+
+There are denials from Churchmen that Galileo was so much as imprisoned.
+One writer has even tried to show that Galileo was a guest of the Pope
+and dined daily at his table. The other side has told us that Galileo
+was thrust into a dungeon, his eyes put out, and his old broken-down
+form tortured on the wheel.
+
+Recent careful researches reveal that neither side told the truth. We
+have official record of the case written out at the time for the
+Vatican archives. Galileo was imprisoned and the order of torture
+issued, but it was never enforced. Perhaps it was not the intention to
+enforce it: it may have been only a "war measure."
+
+Galileo was alternately taken from dungeon to palace that he might
+realize which course was best for him to pursue--oppose the Church or
+uphold it.
+
+Thus we see that there was some truth in the statement that "he dined
+daily with the Pope."
+
+That the man was subjected to much indignity, all the world now knows.
+The official records are in the Vatican, and the attempt to conceal them
+longer is out of the question. Wise Churchmen no longer deny the
+blunders of the past, but they say with Cardinal Satolli, "The enemies
+of the Church have ever been o'er-zealous Churchmen."
+
+On bended knees, Galileo, a man of threescore and ten, broken in health,
+with spirit crushed, repeated after a priest these words: "I, Galileo
+Galilei, being in my seventieth year, a prisoner, on my knees before
+your Eminences, the Cardinals of the Holy See, having before mine eyes
+the Holy Bible, which I touch with my hands and kiss with my lips, do
+abjure, curse and detest the error and heresy of the movement of the
+earth."
+
+He also was made to sign the recantation. On arising from his knees,
+legend declares that he said, "Yet the earth does move!"
+
+It is hardly probable that the words reached his lips, although they may
+have been in his mind. But we must remember the man's heart was broken,
+and he was in a mental condition where nothing really mattered. To
+complete his dishonor, all of his writings were placed on the "Index,"
+and he was made to swear that he would inform the Inquisition of any man
+whom he should hear or discover supporting the heresy of the motion of
+the earth. The old man was then released, a prisoner on parole, and
+allowed to make his way home to Florence, which he did by easy stages,
+helped along the way by friendly monks who discussed with him all
+questions but those of astronomy.
+
+Galileo's eldest daughter, a nun, whose home was near his, was so
+affected by the humiliation of her father that she fell into a nervous
+decline and died very soon after he reached home.
+
+Between these two there had been a close bond of love and tender
+sympathy, and her death seemed almost the crowning calamity.
+
+But once back in his village home at Arcetri, Galileo again went to work
+with his telescope, mapping the heavens.
+
+A goodly degree of health and animation came back to him, but his
+eyesight, so long misused, now failed him and he became blind. Thus John
+Milton found him in Sixteen Hundred Thirty-eight.
+
+Castelli, his lifelong friend, wrote to another, "The noblest eye that
+God ever made is darkened: the eye so privileged that it may in truth be
+said to have seen more wonderful things and made others to see more
+wonderful things, than were ever seen before." But blindness could not
+subdue him any more than it could John Milton. He had others look
+through the telescope and tell him what they saw and then he would
+foretell what they would see next.
+
+The policy of the Pope was that Galileo should not be disturbed so long
+as he kept to his village home and taught merely the few scholars or
+"servants," as they called themselves, who often came to him; but these
+were to be taught mathematics, not astronomy. That he was even at the
+last under suspicion is shown that concealed in the mattress of the bed
+upon which he died were records of his latest discoveries concerning the
+revolution of the planets. Legal opposition was made as to his right to
+make a will, the claim being that he was a prisoner of the Inquisition
+at his death. For the same reason his body was not allowed to be buried
+in consecrated ground. The Pope overruled the objection and he was
+buried in an obscure corner of the little cemetery of Saint Croce, the
+grave unmarked.
+
+So the last few years of Galileo's life were years of comparative peace
+and quiet. He needed but little, and this little his few faithful,
+loving friends supplied. His death came painlessly, and his last moments
+were sustained by the faith that he would soon be free from the
+trammels of the flesh--free to visit some of the worlds that his
+telescope had brought so near to him.
+
+Galileo was born the day that Michelangelo died; the year of his death
+was the year that Sir Isaac Newton, the discoverer of the law of
+gravitation, was born.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: COPERNICUS]
+
+COPERNICUS
+
+
+     To know the mighty works of God; to comprehend His wisdom and
+     majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful working
+     of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode
+     of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance can not be more
+     grateful than knowledge.
+
+     --_Copernicus_
+
+
+COPERNICUS
+
+When a prominent member of Congress, of slightly convivial turn,
+went to sleep on the floor of the House of Representatives and suddenly
+awakening, convulsed the assemblage by demanding in a loud voice, "Where
+am I at?" he propounded an inquiry that is indisputably a classic.
+
+With the very first glimmering of intelligence, and as far back as
+history goes, man has always asked that question, also three others:
+
+Where am I?
+
+Who am I?
+
+What am I here for?
+
+Where am I going?
+
+A question implies an answer and so, coeval with the questioner, we find
+a class of Volunteers springing into being, who have taken upon
+themselves the business of answering the interrogations.
+
+And as partial payment for answering these questions, the man who
+answered has exacted a living from the man who asked, also titles,
+honors, gauds, jewels and obsequies.
+
+Further than this, the Volunteer who answered has declared himself
+exempt from all useful labor. This Volunteer is our theologian.
+
+Walt Whitman has said:
+
+  I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid
+    and self-contained,
+  I stand and look at them long and long.
+  They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
+  They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
+  They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
+  Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
+    owning things,
+  Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands
+    of years ago,
+  Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
+
+But we should note this fact: Whitman merely wanted to live with
+animals--he did not desire to become one. He wasn't willing to forfeit
+knowledge; and a part of that knowledge was that man has some things yet
+to learn from the patient brute. Much of man's misery has come from his
+persistent questioning.
+
+The book of Genesis is certainly right when it tells us that man's
+troubles came from a desire to know. The fruit of the tree of knowledge
+is bitter, and man's digestive apparatus is ill-conditioned to digest
+it. But still we are grateful, and good men never forget that it was
+woman who gave the fruit to man--men learn nothing alone. In the Garden
+of Eden, with everything supplied, man was an animal, but when he was
+turned out and had to work, strive, struggle and suffer, he began to
+grow.
+
+The Volunteers of the Far East have told us that man's deliverance from
+the evils of life must come through killing desire; we will reach
+Nirvana--rest--through nothingness. But within a decade it has been
+borne in upon a vast number of the thinking men of the world that
+deliverance from sorrow and discontent was to be had not through ceasing
+to ask questions, but by asking one question more. The question is this,
+"What can I do?"
+
+When man went to work, action removed the doubt that theory could not
+solve.
+
+The rushing winds purify the air; only running water is pure; and the
+holy man, if there be such, is the one who loses himself in persistent,
+useful effort. By working for all, we secure the best results for self,
+and when we truly work for self, we work for all.
+
+In that thoughtful essay by Brooks Adams, "The Law of Civilization and
+Decay," the author says, "Thought is one of the manifestations of human
+energy, and among the earlier and simpler phases of thought, two stand
+conspicuous--Fear and Greed: Fear, which, by stimulating the
+imagination, creates a belief in an invisible world, and ultimately
+develops a priesthood."
+
+The priestly class evolves naturally into being everywhere as man
+awakens and asks questions. "Only the Unknown is terrible," says Victor
+Hugo. We can cope with the known, and at the worst we can overcome the
+unknown by accepting it. Verestchagin, the great painter who knew the
+psychology of war as few have known, and went down to his death
+gloriously, as he should, on a sinking battleship, once said, "In modern
+warfare, when man does not see his enemy, the poetry of the battle is
+gone, and man is rendered by the Unknown into a quaking coward."
+
+But when enveloped in the fog of ignorance every phenomenon of Nature
+causes man to quake and tremble--he wants to know! Fear prompts him to
+ask, and Greed--greed for power, place and pelf--answers.
+
+To succeed beyond the average is to realize a weakness in humanity and
+then bank on it. The priest who pacifies is as natural as the fear he
+seeks to assuage--as natural as man himself.
+
+So first, man is in bondage to his fear, and this bondage he exchanges
+for bondage to a priest. First, he fears the unknown; second, he fears
+the priest who has power with the unknown.
+
+Soon the priest becomes a slave to the answers he has conjured forth. He
+grows to believe what he at first pretended to know. The punishment of
+every liar is that he eventually believes his lies. The mind of man
+becomes tinted and subdued to what he works in, like the dyer's hand.
+
+So we have the formula: Man in bondage to fear. Man in bondage to a
+priest. The priest in bondage to a creed.
+
+Then the priest and his institution become an integral part and parcel
+of the State, mixed in all its affairs. The success of the State seems
+to lie in holding belief intact and stilling all further questions of
+the people, transferring all doubts to this Volunteer Class which
+answers for a consideration.
+
+Naturally, the man who does not accept the answers is regarded as an
+enemy of the State--that is, the enemy of mankind.
+
+To keep this questioner down has been the problem of every religion. And
+the great problem of progress has been to smuggle the newly-discovered
+truth past Cerberus, the priest, by preparing a sop that was to him
+palatable.
+
+From every branch of Science the priest has been routed, save in
+Sociology alone. Here he has stubbornly made his last stand, and is
+saving himself alive by slowly accepting the situation and transforming
+himself into the Promoter of a Social Club.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The attempt to ascertain the truths of physical science outside of
+theology was, in the early ages, very seldom ventured. When men wanted
+to know anything about anything, they asked the priest.
+
+Questions that the priest could not answer he declared were forbidden of
+man to know; and when men attempted to find out for themselves they were
+looked upon as heretics.
+
+The early church regarded the earth as a flat surface with four corners.
+And in proof of their position they quoted Saint Paul, who wanted the
+gospel carried to the ends of the earth.
+
+In fact, the universe was a house. The upper story was Heaven, the lower
+story was the Earth, and the cellar was Hell. God, the angels and the
+"saved" lived in Heaven, man lived on Earth, and the devils and the
+damned had Hell to themselves.
+
+"And there shall be no night there," and this was proven by the stars,
+which were regarded as peepholes through which mortals could catch
+glimpses of the wondrous light of Heaven beyond. Hell was below, as was
+clearly shown by volcanoes, when the fierce fires occasionally forced
+themselves up through. Darkness to children is always terrible, and the
+night is regarded by them as the time of evil.
+
+Later, Churchmen came to believe that the stars were jewels hung in the
+sky every night by angels whose business it was to look after them.
+
+The word "firmament" means a solid dome or roof. This firmament, the
+sky, was supposed to be the floor of Heaven. The firmament had four
+corners and rested on the mountains, as the eye could plainly see. When
+God's car was rolled across the floor we heard thunder, and his
+movements were always accompanied by lightnings, winds, black clouds and
+rain--all this so He could not be too plainly seen.
+
+Heaven was only a little way off--a few miles at the most. So there were
+attempts made at times by bad men to reach it. The Greeks had a story
+about the Aloidĉ who piled mountain upon mountain; the Bible story of
+the Tower of Babel is the same, where the masons called, "More mort,"
+and those below sent up bricks. There is also an ancient Mexican legend
+of giants who built the Pyramid of Cholula, and they would have been
+successful in their attempts if fire had not been thrown down upon them
+from Heaven. In all "Holy Writ" we find accounts of "ascensions,"
+"translations," "annunciations," and mortals caught up into the clouds.
+Many people had actually seen angels ascending and descending.
+
+"Messengers from on high" and God's secretaries were constantly coming
+down on delicate errands. Everything that man did was noted and written
+down. We were watched all the time by unseen beings. The Bible tells of
+how the Earth was eventually to be destroyed, and then there would be
+only Heaven and Hell. God, His Son and the angels were going to come
+down, and for ages men watched the heavens to see them appear.
+
+All sensitive children, born of orthodox Christian parents, who heard
+the Bible read aloud, looked fearfully into the sky for "signs and
+wonders." The Bible tells in several places of devils breaking out of
+Hell and roaming over the earth. Dante fully believed in this
+three-story-house idea, and pictures with awful exactness the details,
+which he gained from the preaching of the priests. Dante was never
+honored by having his books placed on the "Index." On the contrary, he
+got his vogue largely through the recommendation of the priests. To them
+he was a true scientist, for he corroborated their statements.
+
+The Christian Fathers ridiculed the idea of the earth being round,
+because, if this were so, how could the people on the other side see the
+Son of Man when He came in the sky? Besides that, if the earth were
+round and turned on its axis, we would all fall off into space.
+
+The idea that there was an ocean above the earth, in the heavens, was
+brought forward to show the goodness and wisdom of God. Without this
+there would be no rain and hence no vegetation, and man would soon
+perish. In Genesis we read that God said, "Let there be a firmament in
+the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters,"
+And in Psalms, "Praise Him, ye heavens of heavens and ye waters that be
+above the heavens." Then we hear, "The windows of Heaven were opened."
+So this thought of the waters above the earth was fully proved, accepted
+and fixed, and to pray for rain was quite a natural thing.
+
+The English Prayer-Book contained such prayers up to within a very few
+years ago, and in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-three the Governor of Kansas
+set apart a day upon which the people were to pray that God would open
+the windows of Heaven and send them rain. They also prayed to be
+delivered from grasshoppers, just as in Queen Elizabeth's time the
+Prayer-Book had this, "From the Turk and the Comet, good Lord deliver
+us."
+
+In the Sixth Century, Cosmos, one of the Saints, wrote a complete
+explanation of the phenomena of the heavens. To account for the movement
+of the sun, he said God had His angels push it across the firmament and
+put it behind a mountain each night, and the next morning it was brought
+out on the other side. He met every objection by citations from Job,
+Genesis, Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes and the New Testament, and wound up with
+an anathema upon any or all who doubted or questioned in this matter of
+astronomy.
+
+The whole Christian idea of the Universe was simple, plain and
+plausible. The child-mind could easily accept it, and when backed up by
+the Holy Book, written at God's dictation, word for word, infallible
+and absolutely true in every part, one does not wonder that progress was
+practically blocked for fourteen hundred years, but the real miracle is
+that it was not blocked forever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thousands of years before Christ, the Chinese had mapped the heavens and
+knew the movements of the planets so well that they correctly prophesied
+the positions of the various constellations many years in advance.
+Twenty-five hundred years before our Christian era a Chinese Governor
+put to death the astronomers Hi and Ho because they had failed to
+foretell an eclipse, quite according to the excellent Celestial plan of
+killing the doctor when the patient dies.
+
+Sir William Hamilton points out the fact that the Chinese, five thousand
+years ago, knew astronomy as well as we do, and that Christian astrology
+grew out of Chinese astronomy, in an effort to foretell the fortunes of
+men.
+
+Fear wants to know the future, and astrology and priesthood are
+synonymous terms, since the business of the priest has always been to
+prophesy, a profession he has not yet discarded. Their prophecies are at
+present innocuous and lightly heeded. They preach that perfect faith
+will move a mountain, but energetic railroad-builders of today find it
+quicker and cheaper to tunnel.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A certain type of man accepts a certain theory.
+
+The Christian view of creation was practically the conception of the
+Greeks before Thales. This wise man, in the Sixth Century before Christ,
+taught that the earth was round, and that certain stars were also
+worlds. He showed that the earth was round and proved it by the
+disappearance of the ship as it sailed away. He located the earth, moon
+and sun so perfectly that he prophesied an eclipse, and when it took
+place it so terrified the Medes and the Lydians, who were in battle with
+each other, that they threw down their arms and made peace. Thales had
+explained that Atlas carried the world on his shoulder, but he didn't
+explain what Atlas stood upon.
+
+Pythagoras, one of the pupils of Thales, following the idea still
+further, showed that the moon derived its light from the sun; that the
+earth was a globe and turned daily on its axis.
+
+He held that the sun was the center of the universe and that the planets
+revolved around it. Anaxagoras followed a few years later than
+Pythagoras, and became convinced that the sun was merely a ball of fire
+and therefore should not be worshiped; that it follows a natural law,
+that nothing ever happens by chance, and that to pray for rain is
+absurd.
+
+For his honesty in expressing what he thought was truth, the priests of
+Athens had Anaxagoras and his family exiled to perpetual banishment
+from Athens and all of his books were burned.
+
+Plato touched on Astronomy, for he touches on everything, and fully
+believed that the earth was round.
+
+His pupil, Aristotle, taught all that Anaxagoras taught, and if he also
+had not been exiled, but had been free to study, investigate and express
+himself, he would have come very close to the truth.
+
+Hipparchus, a hundred years after Aristotle, calculated the length of
+the year to within six minutes, discovered the precession of equinoxes
+and counted all the stars he could see, making a map of them.
+
+Seventy years after Christ, Ptolemy, a Greco-Egyptian, but not of the
+royal line of Ptolemies, published his great book, "The Almagest." For
+over fourteen centuries it was the textbook for the best astronomers.
+
+It taught that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the
+sun and the planets revolve around it. There were many absurdities,
+however, that had to be explained, and the priests practically rejected
+the whole book as "pagan" and taught an astronomy of their own, founded
+entirely upon the Bible. They wanted an explanation that would be
+accepted by the common people.
+
+This astronomy was not designed to be very scientific, exact or
+truthful--all they asked was, "Is it plausible?" Expediency, to
+theology, has always been much more important than truth.
+
+"Besides," said Saint Basil, "what boots it concerning all this
+conjecture about the stars, since the earth is soon to come to an end,
+as is shown by our Holy Scriptures, and man's business is to prepare his
+soul for eternity?"
+
+This was the general attitude of the Church--exact truth was a matter of
+indifference. And if Science tended to unseat men's faith in the Bible,
+and in God's most holy religion, then so much the worse for Science.
+
+It will thus plainly be seen why the Church felt compelled to fight
+Science--the very life of the Church was at stake.
+
+The Church was the vital thing--not truth. If truth could be taught
+without unseating faith, why, all right, but anything that made men
+doubt must be rooted out at any cost. And that is why priests have
+opposed Science, not that they hate Science less, but that they love the
+Church more.
+
+From the time of Ptolemy to that of Copernicus--fourteen hundred
+years--theology practically dictated the learning of the world. And to
+Copernicus must be given the credit of having really awakened the
+science of astronomy from her long and peaceful sleep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The little land that we know as Poland has produced some of the finest
+and most acute intellects the world has ever known.
+
+Tragic and blood-stained is her history, and this tragedy, perhaps, has
+been a prime factor in the evolution of her men of worth. Poland has
+been stamped upon and pushed apart; and a persecuted people produce a
+pride of race that has its outcrop in occasional genius.
+
+Recently we heard of the great Paderewski playing before the Czar, and
+His Majesty, in a speech meant to be very complimentary, congratulated
+the company that so great a genius as he was a citizen of Russia.
+
+"Your Majesty, I am not a Russian--I am a Pole!" was the proud reply.
+
+The Czar replied, smiling, "There is no such country as Poland--now
+there is only Russia!"
+
+And Paderewski replied, "Pardon my hasty remark--you speak but truth."
+And then he played Chopin's "Funeral March," a dirge not only to the
+great men of Poland gone, but to Poland herself.
+
+Nicholas Copernicus was born at the quaint old town of Thorn, in Poland,
+February Nineteen, Fourteen Hundred Seventy-three. The family name was
+Koppernigk, but Nicholas latinized it when he became of age, and
+seemingly separated from his immediate kinsmen forever.
+
+His father was a merchant, fairly prosperous, and only in the line of
+money-making was he ambitious. In the Koppernigks ran a goodly strain of
+Jewish blood, but a generation before, pressure and expediency seemed to
+combine, so that the family, as we first see them, were Christians. No
+soil can grow genius, no seed can produce it--it springs into being in
+spite of all laws and rules and regulations. "No hovel is safe from it,"
+says Whistler.
+
+The portraits of Copernicus reveal a man of most marked personality:
+proud, handsome, self-contained, intellectual. The head is massive, eyes
+full, luminous, wide apart, his nose large and bold, chin strong, the
+mouth alone revealing a trace of the feminine, as though the man were
+the child of his mother. This mother had a brother who was a bishop, and
+the mother's ambition for her boy was that he should eventually follow
+in the footsteps of this illustrious brother who was known for a hundred
+miles as a preacher of marked ability.
+
+So we hear of the young man being sent to the University of Cracow, as
+the preliminary to a great career.
+
+The father bitterly opposed the idea of taking his son out of the
+practical world of business, and this evidently led to the breach that
+caused young Nicholas to discard the family name.
+
+That Nicholas did not fully enter into his mother's plans is shown that
+while at Cracow he devoted himself mostly to medicine. He was so
+proficient in this that he secured a physician's degree; and having been
+given leave to practise he revealed his humanity by declining to do so,
+turning to mathematics with a fine frenzy.
+
+This disposition to drop on a thing, turn loose on it, concentrate, and
+reduce it to a chaos, is the true distinguishing mark of genius. The
+difference in men does not lie in the size of their heads, nor in the
+perfection of their bodies, but in this one sublime ability of
+concentration--to throw the weight with the blow, live an eternity in an
+hour--"This one thing I do!"
+
+Copernicus at twenty-one was teaching mathematics at Cracow, and by his
+extraordinary ability in this one direction had attracted the attention
+of various learned men. In fact the authorities of the college had grown
+a bit boastful of their star student, and when visiting dignitaries
+arrived, young Copernicus was given chalk and blackboard and put through
+his paces. Problems involving a dozen figures and many fractions were
+worked out by him with a directness and precision that made him the
+wonder of that particular part of the world.
+
+The science of trigonometry was invented by Copernicus, and we see that
+early in his twenties he was well on the heels of it, for he had then
+arranged a quadrant to measure the height of standing trees, steeples,
+buildings or mountains. For rest and recreation he painted pictures.
+
+A college professor from Bologna traveling through Cracow met
+Copernicus, and greatly impressed with his powers, invited him to
+return with him to Bologna and there give a course of lectures on
+mathematics.
+
+Copernicus accepted, and at Bologna met the astronomer, Novarra. This
+meeting was the turning-point of his life. Copernicus was then
+twenty-three years of age, but in intellect he was a man. He had vowed a
+year before that he would indulge in no trivial conversation about
+persons or things--only the great and noble themes should interest him
+and occupy his attention.
+
+With commonplace or ignorant people he held no converse. He had
+remarkable beauty of person and great dignity, and his presence at
+Bologna won immediate respect for him.
+
+Men accept other men at the estimate they place upon themselves.
+
+In listening to lectures by Novarra, he perceived at once how
+mathematics could be made valuable in calculating the movement of stars.
+
+Novarra taught the Ptolemaic theory of astronomy for the esoteric few.
+The Church is made up of men, and while priests for the most part are
+quite content to believe what the Church teaches, yet it has ever been
+recognized that there was one doctrine for the Few, and another for the
+Many--the esoteric and the exoteric. The esoteric is an edged tool, and
+only a very few are fit to handle it. The charge of heresy is only for
+those who are so foolish as to give out these edged tools to the
+people. You may talk about anything you want, provided you do not do it;
+and you may do anything you want, provided you do not talk about it.
+
+The proposition that the earth was flat, had four corners, and the stars
+were jewels hung in the sky as "signs," and were moved about by angels,
+was all right for the many, but now and then there were priests who were
+not content with these child-stories--they wanted truth--and these
+usually accepted the theories of Ptolemy.
+
+Novarra believed that the earth was a globe; that this globe was the
+center of the universe, and that around the earth the sun, moon and
+certain stars revolved. The fixed stars he still regarded as being hung
+against the firmament, and that this firmament was turned in some
+mysterious way, en masse.
+
+Copernicus listened silently, but his heart beat fast. He had found
+something upon which he could exercise his mathematics. He and Novarra
+sat up all night in the belfry of the cathedral and watched the stars.
+
+They saw that they moved steadily, surely and without caprice. It was
+all natural, and could be reduced, Copernicus thought, to a mathematical
+system.
+
+Astrology and astronomy were not then divorced. It was astrology that
+gave us astronomy. The angel that watched over a star looked after all
+persons who were born under that star's influence, or else appointed
+some other angel for the purpose. Every person had a guardian angel to
+protect him from the evil spirits that occasionally broke out of Hell
+and came up to earth to tempt men.
+
+Mathematics knows nothing of angels--it only knows what it can prove.
+Copernicus believed that, if certain stars did move, they moved by some
+unalterable law of their own. In riding on a boat he observed that the
+shores seemed to be moving past, and he concluded that a part, at least,
+of the seeming movements of planets might possibly be caused by the
+moving of the earth.
+
+In talking with astrologers he perceived that very seldom did they know
+anything of mathematics. And this ignorance on their part caused him to
+doubt them entirely.
+
+His faith was in mathematics--the thing that could be proved--and he
+came to the conclusion that astronomy and mathematics were one thing,
+and astrology and child-stories another.
+
+He remained at Bologna just long enough to turn the astrologers out of
+the society of astronomers.
+
+Novarra's lectures on astronomy were given in Latin, and in truth all
+learning was locked up in this tongue. But astrology and the theological
+fairy-tales of the people floated free. They were a part of the vagrant
+hagiology of the roadside preachers, who with lurid imaginations said
+the things they thought would help carry conviction home and make
+"believers."
+
+From Bologna Copernicus then moved on to Padua, where he remained two
+years, teaching and giving lectures. Here he devoted considerable time
+to chemistry, and on leaving he was honored by being given a degree by
+the University. Next we find him at Rome, a professor in mathematics and
+also giving lectures on chemistry. His lectures were not for the
+populace--they were for the learned few. But they attracted the
+attention of the best, and were commented upon and quoted by the various
+other teachers, preachers and lecturers. A daring thinker who expresses
+himself without reservation states the things that various others know
+and would like to state if they dared. It is often very convenient when
+you want a thing said to enclose the matter in quotation-marks. It
+relieves one from the responsibility of standing sponsor for it, if the
+hypothesis does not prove popular.
+
+Copernicus was only nineteen years old when Columbus discovered America,
+but it seems he did not hear of Columbus until he reached Bologna in
+Fourteen Hundred Ninety-five. At Rome he made various references to
+Columbus in his lectures; dwelt upon the truth that the earth was a
+globe; mentioned the obvious fact that in sailing westward Columbus did
+not sail his ship over the edge of the earth into Hell, as had been
+prophesied he would.
+
+He also explained that the red sky at sunset was not caused by the
+reflections from Hell, nor was the sun moved behind a mountain by giant
+angels at night. Copernicus was a Catholic, as all teachers were, but he
+had been deceived by the esoteric and the exoteric, and had really
+thought that the priests and so-called educated men actually desired,
+for themselves, to know the truth.
+
+At Padua he had learned to read Greek, and had become more or less
+familiar with Pythagoras, Hipparchus, Aristotle and Plato. He quoted
+these authors and showed how in some ways they were beyond the present.
+This was all done in the exuberance of youth, with never a doubt as to
+the value and the beauty of the Church. But he was thinking more of
+truth than of the Church, and when a cardinal from the Vatican came to
+him, and in all kindness cautioned him, and in love explained it was all
+right for a man to believe what he wished, but to teach others things
+that were not authorized was a mistake.
+
+Copernicus was abashed and depressed.
+
+He saw then that his lectures had really been for himself--he was
+endeavoring to make things plain to Copernicus, and the welfare of the
+Church had been forgotten.
+
+He ceased lecturing for a time, but private pupils came to him, and
+among them astrologers in disguise, and these went away and told
+broadcast that Copernicus was teaching that the movements of the stars
+were not caused by angels, and that "God was being dethroned by a
+tape-measure and a yardstick." Alchemy had a strong hold upon the
+popular mind, and these alchemists and astrologers were fortune-tellers
+and derived a goodly income from the people.
+
+They had their stands in front of all churches and turned in a goodly
+tithe "for the benefit of the poor."
+
+When the astrologers attacked Copernicus he tried to explain that the
+heavens were under the reign of natural law, and that so far as he knew
+there was no direct relationship between the stars and the men upon
+earth. The answer was, "You yourself foretell the eclipse, and assume to
+know when a star will be in a certain place a hundred years in advance;
+now, if you can prophesy about stars, why can't we foretell a man's
+future?"
+
+Copernicus proudly declined to answer such ignorance, but went on to say
+that alchemy was a violence to chemistry as much as astrology was to
+astronomy. In chemistry there were exact results that could be computed
+by mathematics and foretold; it was likewise so in astronomy.
+
+Copernicus was philosopher enough to know that astrology led to
+astronomy, and alchemy led to chemistry, but he said all he wished to do
+was to eliminate error and find the truth, and when we have ascertained
+the laws of God in reference to these things, we should discard the use
+of black cats, goggles, peaked hats, red fire and incantations--these
+things were sacrilege. And the enemy declared that Copernicus was guilty
+of heresy in saying they were guilty of sacrilege. Moreover, black cats
+were not as bad as blackboards.
+
+The Pope certainly had no idea of treating Copernicus harshly; in fact,
+he greatly admired him--but peace was the thing desired. Copernicus was
+creating a schism, and there was danger that the revenues would be
+affected. The Pope sent for Copernicus, received him with great honor,
+blessed him, and suggested that he return at once to his native town of
+Thorn and there await good news that would come to him soon.
+
+Copernicus was overwhelmed with gratitude--he was in difficulties.
+
+Certain priests had publicly denounced him; others had urged him on to
+unseemliness in debate; he had stated things he could not prove, even
+though he knew they were true--but the Pope was his friend! He loved the
+Church; he felt how necessary it was to the people, and at the last, the
+desire of his heart was to bless and benefit the world.
+
+He fell on his knees and attempted to kiss the Pope's foot, but the Holy
+Father offered him his hand instead, smiled on him, stroked his head,
+and an attendant was ordered to place about his neck a chain of gold
+with a crucifix that would protect him from all harm. A purse was placed
+in his hand, and he was sent upon his way relieved, happy--wondering,
+wondering!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Copernicus reached his native town of Thorn, the local clergy
+turned out in a procession to greet him, and a solemn service of
+thanksgiving was held for his safe return home.
+
+Copernicus was only twenty-seven years of age, and what he had done was
+not quite clear to his uncle, the bishop, and the other dignitaries, but
+word had come from the secretary of the Pope that he should be honored,
+and it was all so done, in faith, love and enthusiasm.
+
+Very shortly after this Copernicus was made Canon of the Cathedral at
+Frauenburg. The town of Frauenburg has now only about twenty-five
+hundred people, and it certainly was no larger then. The place is slow,
+sleepy, and quite off the beaten track of travel.
+
+When Canon Copernicus preached now, it was to a dear, stupid lot of old
+marketwomen and overworked men and mischievous children. Oratory is a
+collaboration--let him wax eloquent about the precession of the
+equinoxes, and prate of Plato and Pythagoras if he wished--no one could
+understand him! Rome is wise--the crystallized experience of centuries
+is hers. Responsibility tames a man--marriage, political office,
+churchly preferment--read history and note how these things have dulled
+the bright blade of revolution and turned the radical into a
+Presbyterian professor at Princeton, a staunch upholder of the
+Established Order!
+
+Plato said that Solar Energy found one of its forms of expression in
+man. Some men are much more highly charged with it than others; your
+genius is a man who does things. Do not think to dam up the red current
+of his life--he may die.
+
+Copernicus set to work practising medicine, and gave his services gratis
+to the poor, who came for many miles to consult him.
+
+He went from house to house and ordered his people to clean up their
+back yards, to ventilate their houses, to bathe and be decent and
+orderly. He devised a system of sewerage, and utilized the belfry of his
+church as a water-tower so as to get a water pressure from the little
+stream that ran near the town. The remains of this invention are to be
+seen there in the church-steeple even unto this day.
+
+King Sigismund of Poland had heard of the attacks made by Copernicus
+upon the alchemists, and sent for him that he might profit by his
+advice, for it seems that the King, too, had been having experience with
+alchemists. In their seeking after a way to make gold out of the baser
+metals they had actually succeeded. At least they said so, and had made
+the King believe it.
+
+They had shown the King how he could cheapen his coinage one-half, and
+"it was just as good!" The King could not tell the difference when the
+coins were new, but alas! when they went beyond the borders of Poland
+they could only be passed at one-half their face-value; travelers
+refused to accept them; and even the merchants at home were getting
+afraid.
+
+Copernicus analyzed some of this money made for the King by his
+alchemist friends and found a large alloy of tin, copper and zinc. He
+explained to the King that by mixing the metals they did not change
+their nature nor value. Gold was gold, and copper was copper--God had
+made these things and hid them in the earth and men might deceive some
+men--a part of the time--but there was always a retribution. Debase your
+currency, and soon it will cease to pass current. No law can long uphold
+a fictitious value.
+
+The King urged Copernicus to write a book on the subject of coinage.
+
+The permission of the Pope was secured, and the book written. The work
+is valuable yet, and reveals a deep insight into the heart of things.
+The man knew political economy, and foretold that a people who debased
+their currency debased themselves.
+
+"Money is character," he said, "and if you pretend it is one thing, and
+it turns out to be another, you lose your reputation and your own
+self-respect. No government can afford to deceive the governed. If the
+people lose confidence in their rulers, a new government will spring
+into being, built upon the ruins of the old. Government and commerce are
+built on confidence."
+
+Then he went on to show that German gold was valuable everywhere,
+because it was pure; but Polish gold and Russian gold were below par,
+because the money had been tampered with, and as no secrets could be
+kept long, the result was the matter exactly equalized itself, save that
+Russians and Polanders had in a large degree lost their characters
+through belief in miracles. Copernicus advocated a universal coinage, to
+be adopted by all civilized nations, and the amount of alloy should be
+known and plainly stated, and this alloy should simply be the
+seigniorage, or what was taken out to cover the cost of mintage.
+
+King Sigismund circulated this valuable book by Copernicus among all the
+courts of Europe, and it need not be stated that the suggestions made by
+Copernicus have been adopted by civilized nations everywhere.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The humdrum duties of a country clergyman did not still the intense
+longing of Copernicus to know and understand the truth. He visited the
+sick, closed the eyes of the dying, kept his parish register, but his
+heart was in mathematics, and so there is shown at Thorn an old church
+register kept by Copernicus, where, in the back, are great rows of
+figures put down by the Master as he worked at some astronomical
+problem. In the upper floor of the barn, back of the old dilapidated
+farmhouse where he lived for forty years, he cut holes in the roof, and
+also apertures in the sides of the building, through which he watched
+the movements of the stars. He lived in practical isolation and exile,
+for the Church had forbidden him to speak in public except upon themes
+that the Holy Fathers in their wisdom had authorized. None was to invite
+him to speak, read his writings or hold converse with him, except on
+strictly church matters.
+
+Copernicus knew the situation--he was a watched man. For him there was
+no preferment: he knew too much! As long as he kept near home and did
+his priestly work, all was well; but a trace of ambition or heresy, and
+he would be dealt with. The Universities and all prominent Churchmen
+were secretly ordered to leave Copernicus and his vagaries severely
+alone. But the stars were his companions--they came out for him nightly
+and moved in majesty across the sky. "They do me great honor," he said;
+"I am forbidden to converse with great men, but God has ordered for me a
+procession." When the whole town slept, Copernicus watched the heavens,
+and made minute records of his observations. He had brought with him
+from Rome copies made by himself from the works of the prominent Greek
+astronomers, and the "Almagest" of Ptolemy he knew by heart.
+
+He digested all that had been written on the subject of astronomy;
+slowly and patiently he tested every hypothesis with his rude and
+improvised instruments. "Surely God will not damn me for wanting to know
+the truth about His glorious works," he used to say.
+
+Emerson once wrote this: "If the stars came out but once in a thousand
+years, how men would adore!" But before he had written this, Copernicus
+had said: "To look up at the sky, and behold the wondrous works of God,
+must make a man bow his head and heart in silence. I have thought and
+studied, and worked for years, and I know so little--all I can do is to
+adore when I behold this unfailing regularity, this miraculous balance
+and perfect adaptation. The majesty of it all humbles me to the dust."
+
+It was ostracism and exile that gave Copernicus the leisure to pursue
+his studies in quiet, undiverted, undisturbed. He was relieved from
+financial pinch, having all he needed for his simple, homely wants. The
+mental distance that separated him from his parishioners made him free,
+and the order that he should not travel and that none should visit him
+made him master of his time. There were no interruptions--"God has set
+me apart," he wrote, "that I may study and make plain His works." But
+still, that he could not make his discoveries known was a constant,
+bitter disappointment to him.
+
+In astronomy he found a means of using his mighty mathematical genius
+for his own pleasure and amusement. The Pope had, in seeking to subdue
+him, merely supplied the exact conditions he required to do his
+work--yet neither knew it. So mighty is Destiny: we work for one thing
+and fail to get it, but in our efforts we find something better.
+
+The simple, hard-working gardeners with whom Copernicus lived, had a
+reverent awe for the great man; they guessed his worth, but still had
+suspicions of his sanity. His nightly vigils they took for a sort of
+religious ecstasy, and a wholesome fear made them quite willing not to
+do anything that might disturb him.
+
+So passed the days away, and from a light-hearted, ambitious man,
+Copernicus had grown old and bowed, and nearly blind from constant
+watching of the stars and writing at night.
+
+But his book, "The Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies," was at last
+complete. For forty years he had worked at it, and for twenty-seven
+years, he himself says, not a day or a night had passed without his
+having added something to it.
+
+He felt that he had in this book told the truth. If men wanted to know
+the facts about the heavens they would find them here. He had approached
+the subject with no preconceived ideas; he had ever been willing to
+renounce a theory when he found it wrong. He knew what all other great
+astronomers had taught, and out of them all he had built a Science of
+Astronomy that he knew would stand secure.
+
+But what should he do with all this mass of truth he had discovered? It
+was in his own brain, and it was in the three thousand pages of this
+book, which had been rewritten five times. In a few years at most, his
+brain would be stilled in death; and in five minutes, ignorance and
+malice might reduce the book to ashes, and the forty years' labor of
+Copernicus--working, dreaming, calculating, weeping, praying--would all
+go for naught and be but a tale that is told. Others might have lived
+such lives and known as much as he, and all was lost!
+
+To send the book frankly to Rome and ask the Censor for the privilege to
+publish it, was out of the question entirely--the request would be
+refused, the manuscript destroyed, and his own life might be in danger.
+
+To publish it at home without the consent of his Bishop would be equally
+dangerous. There would be a bonfire of every copy in the public square;
+for in this volume, all that the priests taught of astronomy had been
+contradicted and refuted.
+
+And then it occurred to him to send the manuscript to the free city of
+Nuremberg, the home of science, art and free speech, where men could
+print what they thought was truth--Nuremberg, the home of Albrecht
+Durer. With the book he sent a bag of gold, his savings of a lifetime,
+to pay the expense of printing the volume and putting it before the
+world.
+
+To better protect himself, Copernicus wrote a preface, dedicating the
+book to the Pope Paul, thus throwing himself upon the mercy of His
+Holiness. He would not put the work out anonymously, as his friends in
+Nuremberg, for his own safety, had advised. And neither would he flee to
+Nuremberg for protection; he would stay at home--he was too old to
+travel now--besides, he had forgotten how to talk and act with men of
+talent.
+
+How would Rome receive the book? He could only guess--he could only
+guess.
+
+The months went by, and fear, anxiety and suspense had their sway. He
+was stricken with fever. In his delirium he called aloud, "The
+book--tell me--they surely have not burned it--you know I wrote no word
+but truth--oh, how could they burn my book!"
+
+But on May Twenty-third, Fifteen Hundred Forty-three, a messenger came
+from Nuremberg.
+
+He carried a copy of the printed book--he was admitted to the sick-room,
+and placed in the hands of the stricken man the volume. A gleam of
+sanity came to Copernicus. He smiled, and taking the book gazed upon it,
+stroked its cover as though caressing it, opened it and turned the
+leaves. Then closing the book and holding it to his heart, he closed his
+eyes, and sank to sleep, to awake no more.
+
+His body was buried with simple village honors, and laid to rest beneath
+the floor of the Cathedral where he had so long ministered, side by side
+with a long line of priests. On the little slab that marked his
+resting-place no mention was made of the mighty work he had done for
+truth. There were fears that when the character of his book was known,
+the grave of Copernicus would not remain undisturbed, and so the
+inscription on the headstone was simply this: "I ask not the grace
+accorded to Paul; not that given to Peter; give me only the favor which
+Thou didst show to the thief on the cross."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: HUMBOLDT]
+
+HUMBOLDT
+
+
+     The actual miracle of the Universe is the invariableness of Law.
+     Under like conditions a like result must follow, and upon this rock
+     is the faith of the Scientists built.
+
+     --_The Cosmos_
+
+
+HUMBOLDT
+
+The Baron and Baroness von Hollwede were not happily married.
+
+The Baroness had intellect, spirit, aspiration, with an appreciation of
+all that was best in art, music and the world of thought. As to the
+Baron, he had drunk life's wine to the lees and pronounced the draft
+bitter. He was a heavy dragoon with a soul for foxhounds. Later, when
+gout got to twinging him, he contented himself with cards and cronies.
+
+And then Destiny, like a novelist who does not know what to do with a
+character, sent him on an excursion across the River Styx.
+
+This was a good move all round, and the only accommodating action in
+which the Baron ever had a part. He left a large estate, not being able
+to take it along.
+
+There are two kinds of widows, the bereaved and the relieved. In India
+no widow is allowed to remarry. The canons of the Episcopal Church
+forbid any widow or widower to remarry whose former partner is living. A
+member of the Catholic Church who makes a marital mistake is not allowed
+to rectify it. Yet Nature, sometimes, as if to prove the foolishness of
+fearsome little man, justifies that of which man hotly disapproves.
+
+To be a widow of thirty-six, fair of face and comely in form, to own a
+beautiful home and have an income greater than you can spend, and still
+not enough to burden you--what nobler ambition!
+
+The Baroness had a little encumbrance--a son aged ten. I would like to
+tell of his career, but alas, of him history is silent, save that he was
+heir to some of his father's proclivities, grew up, became an army
+officer and passed into obscurity in middle life, dishonored and unsung.
+
+Such a widow as the Baroness von Hollwede is not apt to mourn for long.
+She was courted by many, but it was Major Humboldt who found favor in
+her heart. I assume that all of my gentle readers have in them some of
+the saltness of time, so that details may safely be omitted--let
+imagination bridge the interesting gap.
+
+The Major was a few years younger than the lady, but like the gallant
+gentleman that he was, he swore i' faith before the notary that they
+were of the same age, just as Robert Browning did when officially
+interrogated as to the age of Elizabeth Barrett. Thomas Brackett Reed
+avowed that no gentleman ever weighed over two hundred pounds, and I
+also maintain no gentleman ever married a woman older than himself.
+
+The marriage of Major Humboldt and the Baroness von Hollwede was a most
+happy mating that fully justified the venture. The Major had done his
+work bravely in the Seven Years' War, and was now an attache of the
+King's Court--a man of means, of intellect, and of many strong and
+beautiful virtues. After the marriage he became known as Baron von
+Humboldt, and as to just how he succeeded to the noble title let us not
+be curious--his wife undoubtedly bestowed it on him, good and generous
+woman that she was.
+
+They lived in the romantic Castle Tegel, near Berlin, and separated from
+the city by a park, where the dark pines still tower aloft and murmur
+their secrets to the night breeze.
+
+Tegel is a most beautiful place; it was first a hunting-lodge occupied
+by Frederick the Great. It is shut out from the world by its high stone
+walls; and in its dim, dense woods, one might easily imagine he was far
+indeed from the madding crowd.
+
+Here there were two sons born to the Baron and Baroness--two years
+apart. One of these sons sleeps now beneath the turret where he first
+saw the light, and from which he made others see the light as long as he
+lived.
+
+In Goethe's "Faust" is an allusion to a mysterious legend that had its
+rise in storied Tegel. On May Eighteenth, in the year Seventeen Hundred
+Seventy-eight. Goethe came here, walking over from Berlin, dined, and
+walked on to Potsdam. But before he left he saw two beautiful boys, aged
+eight and ten, playing beneath the spreading Tegel trees. The boys
+remembered the event and wrote of it in their journal, mentioning the
+kindly pats on their heads and the prophecy that they would grow up and
+be great men.
+
+Goethe was always patting boys on the head and saying graceful things,
+and it is doubtful whether his prophecy was more than a mere
+commonplace. But Goethe always claimed it was divine prophecy. These
+boys were William and Alexander von Humboldt.
+
+History does not supply another instance of two brothers attaining the
+intellectual height reached by Alexander and William von Humboldt. This
+being so, it seems meet that we should tarry a little to inspect the
+method adopted in the education of these boys--something that the
+educated world for the most part has not done.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This world of ours, round like an orange and slightly flattened at the
+poles, has produced only five men who were educated. Of course all
+education is comparative; but these five are so beyond the rest of
+mankind that they form a class by themselves.
+
+An educated man means a developed man--a man rounded on every side of
+his nature. We are aware of no limit to which the mind of man may
+evolve; other men may appear who will surpass the Immortal Five, but
+this fact remains: none that we know have. Great men, so-called, are
+usually specialists: clever actors, individuals with a knack, talented
+comedians--who preach, carve, paint, orate, fight, manipulate, manage,
+teach, write, perform, coerce, bribe, hypnotize, accomplish, and get
+results. There are great financiers, sea-captains, mathematicians,
+football players, engineers, bishops, wrestlers, runners, boxers, and
+players on zithern-strings. But these are not necessarily very great
+men, any more than poets, painters and pianists, with wonderful hirsute
+effects and strange haberdashery are great men.
+
+For it is intellect and emotion expanded in every direction that give
+the true title to greatness. Judged in this way, how rare is the
+educated man--five in six thousand years! And yet one of these five
+educated men had a brother nearly as great as he.
+
+Alexander von Humboldt was past fifty before the world of thinking men
+realized that he had outstripped his brother William--and Alexander
+would never admit he had.
+
+These two men, handsome in face, form and feature: strong in body and
+poised in mind, with souls athirst to realize and to know--happy men,
+living long lives of useful effort--surely should be classed as educated
+persons.
+
+And in passing, let us note that all education is preparatory--it is
+life that gives the finals, not the college. The education of the von
+Humboldt boys was the Natural Method--the method advocated by
+Rousseau--the education by play and work so combined that study never
+becomes irksome nor work repulsive. Rousseau said, "Make a task
+repugnant and the worker will forever quit it as soon as the pressure
+that holds him to it is removed."
+
+The parents of Alexander and William von Humboldt carefully studied the
+new plan of education that was at that time being advocated by some of
+the best professors at Berlin. "A child must have a teacher," said Jean
+Jacques, "but a professional teacher is apt to become the slave of his
+profession, and when this occurs he has separated himself from life, and
+therefore to that degree is unfitted to teach."
+
+A school should not be a preparation for life: a school should be life.
+The Kindergarten Idea, among other things, suggests that a child should
+never know he is in school.
+
+The discipline is kept out of sight, and the youngster finds himself a
+part of the busy life. He blends in with the others, and works, plays
+and sings under the wise and loving care of his "other mother," the
+teacher. He is living, not simply preparing to live. All life should be
+joyous, spontaneous, natural. The Rousseau Idea, which was modified and
+refined by Froebel, is the utilization of the propensity to play.
+
+Major von Humboldt found a man who was saturated with the true Froebel
+spirit, although this was before Froebel was born.
+
+The man's name was Heinrich Campe. Heinrich was hired to superintend the
+education of the Humboldt boys. That is to say, he was to become
+comrade, friend, counselor, fellow-scholar, playmate and teacher.
+
+Play needs direction as well as work. Campe played with the boys. They
+lived with Nature--made lists of all the trees at Tegel, drew sketches
+of the leaves and fruit, calculated the height of trees, measured them
+at the base, and cut them down occasionally, first sitting in judgment
+on the case, and deciding why a certain tree should be removed, thus
+getting a lesson in scientific forestry.
+
+They became acquainted with the bugs, beetles, birds and squirrels. They
+cared for the horses, cattle and fowls, and best of all they learned to
+wait on themselves.
+
+Campe told them tales of history--of Achilles, Pericles and Cĉsar. Then
+they studied Greek, that they might read of Athens in the language of
+the men who made Athens great. They translated "Robinson Crusoe" into
+the German language, and Campe's translation of "Robinson Crusoe" is
+today a German classic. It was all natural--interesting, easy. The day
+was filled with work and play, and joyous tales of what had been said by
+others in days agone.
+
+"Teach only what you know, and never that which you merely believe,"
+said Rousseau.
+
+There is still a cry that religion should be taught in the public
+schools. If we ask, "What religion?" the answer is, "Ours, of course!"
+
+Religious dogma, being a matter of belief, was taught to the Humboldts
+as a part of history.
+
+So these boys very early became acquainted with the dogmas of
+Confucianism, Mohammedanism, Christianity. They separated, compared and
+analyzed, and saw for themselves that dogmatic religions were all much
+alike. To know all religions is to escape slavery to any. In studying
+the development of races these boys saw that a certain type of religion
+fits a certain man in a certain stage of his evolution, and so perhaps
+to that degree religion is necessary. An ethnologist is never a Corner
+Grocery Infidel. The C.G.I. is very apt to be converted at the first
+revival, outrivaling all other "seekers," and when warm weather comes,
+falling from grace and dropping easily into scofferdom.
+
+The Humboldts, like Thoreau, never had any quarrel with God, and they
+were never tempted to go forward to the Mourners' Bench.
+
+Origin and destiny did not trouble them; predestination and
+justification by faith were not even in their curriculum; foreordination
+and baptism were to them problems not to be taken seriously.
+
+By studying religions in groups and incidentally, they learned to
+distinguish the fetish in each. They read Greek mythology side by side
+with Judean mythology and noted similarities. The intent of Tutor Campe
+was to give these boys a scientific education. Science is only
+classified commonsense. To be truly scientific is to know
+differences--to distinguish between this and that. Every successful
+farmer has traveled a long way into science, for science deals with the
+maintenance of life. To know soils, animals and vegetation is to be
+scientific.
+
+But when the average farmer learns to transmute compost into grass and
+grain, and these into beef, he usually stops, content. To be a scientist
+in the true sense, one must love knowledge for its own sake, and not
+merely for what it will bring on market-day, and so the Humboldts were
+led on through the stage of wanting to make money, to the stage of
+wanting to know the why and wherefore. It will be seen that the
+education of the Humboldts was what the Boylston Professor of English at
+Harvard calls "faddism, or the successful effort at flabbiness." Our
+Harvard friend thinks that education should be a discipline--that it
+should be difficult and vexatious, and that happiness, spontaneity and
+exuberance are the antitheses and the foes of learning. To him grim
+earnestness, silence, sweat and lamp-smoke are preferable to sunshine
+and joyous, useful work so wisely directed that the pupil thinks it
+play. He believes that to be sincere we must be serious. In these
+latter-day objections there is nothing new. Socrates met them all;
+Rousseau heard the cry of "fad"; Heyne, Pestalozzi, Campe, Knuth and
+Froebel met the carpist and answered him reason for reason, just as
+Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo told the reason the earth revolved. The
+professional teacher who can do nothing but teach--the college professor
+who is a college professor and nothing else--hates the Natural Method
+man about as ardently as the person who wears a paste diamond hates the
+lapidary.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Heinrich Campe was the tutor of the Humboldts for two years, when he
+entered the employ of the King as Commissioner of Education.
+
+After this, however, he continued to spend one day a week at Tegel for
+some time. He loved the boys as his own, and his hope for their future
+never relaxed. Possibly his interest was not wholly disinterested--with
+the help of these lads he was working out and proving his pedagogic
+theories.
+
+When Campe resigned his immediate tutorship he was allowed to select his
+successor, and he chose a young man by the name of Christian Knuth.
+
+The mother was a member of this little university of four persons;
+Knuth, of course, was a member, for he always considered himself more of
+a student than a teacher.
+
+When Campe resigned in favor of Knuth his action was in degree prompted
+by his love and consideration for the boys. Knuth was only a little past
+twenty, and was able to enter into the out-of-door sports and work of
+the youngsters better than the older man. Knuth was their hero--together
+they rode horseback, climbed mountains, excavated tunnels, mined for
+ore, built miniature houses. "Knuth made every good thing in Berlin
+available to us," wrote William years afterward; "we visited stores,
+factories, barracks and schools, and became familiar with a thousand
+commonplace things never taught in schools and colleges."
+
+When Alexander was twelve years old, the father died. This would have
+been a severe blow to the boys were it not for Knuth, who seemed to
+stand to them more as the real parent than did Major von Humboldt.
+
+Knuth was a businessman of no mean ability. The Baroness now trusted him
+with all her financial affairs. He called on the boys to help him in the
+details of business, so the keeping of accounts and the economical
+handling of money were lessons they learned early in life.
+
+When Alexander was seventeen and William nineteen, the mother and Knuth
+decided that the boys should have the advantages of university life.
+Accordingly they were duly entered at the University of Frankfort as
+"special students."
+
+Knuth also entered as a student in the class with them. Special
+students, let it be known, are usually those who have failed to pass the
+required examinations. In this instance, Alexander and William were
+beyond many of their classmates in some things, but in others they were
+deficient. Especially had their education in the dead languages been
+"neglected," so it is quite likely they could not have passed the
+examinations had they attempted it.
+
+It should also be explained that special students are not eligible to
+diplomas or degrees.
+
+But Campe and Knuth did not believe the nerve-racking plan of
+examinations wise, any more than it is wisdom to pull up a plant and
+examine the roots to see how it prospers. Neither did they prize a
+college degree.
+
+They knew full well that a college degree is no proof of excellence of
+character; to them a degree was too cheap a thing to deviate in one's
+orbit to secure. They were after bigger game.
+
+At Frankfort, Knuth and his charges lived in the family of Professor
+Loffler, "so as to rub off a little knowledge from this learned man."
+They studied history, philosophy, law, political economy and natural
+history. We would say their method was desultory, were it not for the
+fact that they were always thorough in all that they undertook. They
+were simply three boys together, intent on getting their money's worth.
+
+William was a little better student than Alexander, and was the leader;
+he was larger in stature and seemed to have more vitality.
+
+Two years were spent at the University of Frankfort, and then our trio
+moved on to the University of Gottingen, where there were distinguished
+lecturers on Natural History and Archeology. Antiquity especially
+interested the boys, and the evolution and history of races were
+followed with animation.
+
+William took especially to philosophy as expressed in the writings of
+Kant, while Alexander developed a love for botany and what he called
+"the science of out-of-doors."
+
+Two years at Gottingen, following the bent of their minds and listening
+only to those lectures they liked, and they moved on to Jena.
+
+Here they were in the Goethe country. Soon there were overtures from
+Berlin that they enter the service of the Government. These overtures
+were set in motion by Campe, who, however, kept out of sight in the
+matter, and when accused, stoutly declared that it was every man's duty
+to help himself, and that he personally had never helped any one get a
+position and never would.
+
+William was twenty-three and Alexander twenty-one. William was gracious
+and graceful in manner and made himself at home in the best society;
+Alexander was studious, reserved and inclined to be shy.
+
+An invitation came that they should visit Weimar and spend some weeks in
+that little world of art and letters created by Goethe and Schiller. To
+William this was very tempting; but Alexander saw at Weimar scant
+opportunity to study botany and geology.
+
+Besides that, he felt that sooner or later he would drift into the
+employ of the Government, following in his father's footsteps. His
+ambition was practical mining, with a taste for finance.
+
+The brothers kissed each other good-by, and one went to Weimar to assist
+Schiller in editing a magazine that did not pay expenses, to bask in the
+sunshine of the great Goethe, and incidentally to secure a wife.
+
+The other started on a geological excursion, and this excursion was to
+continue through life, and make of the man the greatest naturalist that
+the world had seen since Aristotle lived, two thousand years before.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Humboldt's first book was on the geological formation of the Rhine,
+published when he was twenty-six years old. The work was so complete and
+painstaking that it led to his being appointed to the position of
+"Assessor of Mines" at Berlin. This was the same office that Swedenborg
+once held in Scandinavia.
+
+For the benefit of our social-science friends, it is rather interesting
+to note that at this time in Europe nearly all mines belonged to the
+Government.
+
+An individual might own the surface, and up to the sky, but his claim
+did not go to the center of the earth. Iron, coal, copper, silver and
+gold were largely mined, and the Government operated the mines direct,
+or else leased them on a percentage.
+
+I am told that in America all mining is done by individuals or private
+companies, and that four-fifths of all mining companies have no mines at
+all--merely samples of ores, blueprints, photographs and prospects. The
+genus promoter is a very modern production, and is a creation Humboldt
+never knew; the "salting" of mines was out of his province, and mining
+operations carried on exclusively in sky-scrapers was a combination he
+never guessed.
+
+Whether society will ever take a turn backward, and the whole people own
+and control the treasures deposited by Nature in the earth, is a
+question I will leave to my Marxian colleagues to determine.
+
+As a mine-manager Humboldt was hardly a success. He knew the value of
+ores, utilized various by-products that had formerly been thrown away,
+made plans for the betterment of his workers, and once sent a protest to
+the King against allowing women and children to be employed underground.
+
+But the price per ton of his product was out of proportion to the
+expenses. While other men mined the ore he wrote a book on "Subterranean
+Vegetation." The details of business were not to his liking. His own
+private financial affairs were now turned over to Knuth, his modest
+fortune resolved into cash and invested in bonds that brought a low rate
+of interest. Freedom was his passion--to come and go at will was his
+desire. The thirst for travel was upon him--travel, not for adventure,
+but for knowledge.
+
+He resigned his office and tramped with knapsack on back across the
+Alps. The habit of his mind was that of the naturalist-investigator.
+Geology, botany and zoology were his properties by divine right.
+
+These sciences really form one--geognosy, or the science of the
+formation of the earth. The plants dissolve and disintegrate the rocks;
+the animal feeds upon the plants; and animal life makes new forms of
+vegetation possible. So the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms
+evolve together, constantly tending toward a greater degree of
+refinement and complexity.
+
+The very highest form of animal life is man; and the highest type of
+man is evolved where there is a proper balance between the animal and
+the vegetable kingdoms.
+
+Humboldt discovered very early in his career that the finest flowers
+grow where there are the finest birds, and man separated from birds,
+beasts and flowers could not possibly survive.
+
+Just about this time, Humboldt, taking the cue from Goethe, said: "Man
+is a product of soil and climate, and is brother to the rocks, trees and
+animals. He is dependent on these, and all things seem to point to the
+truth that he has evolved from them. The accounts of special creation
+are interesting as archeology, but biology is distinctly the business of
+modern scientists. The scientist tells what he knows, and the theologist
+what he believes." And again we find Humboldt writing from Switzerland
+in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-six, making observations that have been
+recently unconsciously paraphrased by the United States Secretary of
+Agriculture, who said in a printed report: "Western farmers who raise
+and sell hogs and cattle, feeding them grain instead of selling it, are
+sure to acquire a competence. The farmers who sell grain are the ones
+who do not pay off their mortgages."
+
+Says Humboldt:
+
+"Here on the sides of these towering and forbidding mountains we find
+the most fertile and beautiful miniature farms, nestling in little
+valleys or on plateaus.
+
+"Indeed, I heard today of a man falling out of his farm and being
+seriously injured. He ventured too near the edge.
+
+"These Swiss gardens with their prosperous and intelligent owners are
+only possible through the fact that the owners keep all the cows and
+poultry that can comfortably exist on the acres. The peasants sell
+butter, cheese and eggs, instead of grain and vegetables exclusively.
+
+"They give back to the earth all that they take from it, so in the
+course of a hundred years a fine soil evolves that supports valuable
+animals, including valuable men; choice fruit, flowers and birds appear,
+and we have what we are pleased to call Christian civilization. It is
+not for me to quibble about terms, but civilization is not necessarily
+Christian, since it is more a matter of economics and natural science
+than religion."
+
+Where the climate is fairly propitious, but not so much so but that it
+compels watchfulness, economy and effort, man will work, and to aid him
+in his work he utilizes domestic animals. And the very act of
+domesticating the animal domesticates the man. As man improves the
+animal, he improves himself. One reason why the American Indian did not
+progress was because he had neither horses, camels, oxen, swine nor
+poultry. He had his dog, and the dog is a wolf, and always remains one,
+in that his intent is on prey. This fitted the mood of the Indian, and
+he continued to live his predaceous career without a particle of
+evolution. To stand still is to retreat, and there is evidence that long
+before the year Fourteen Hundred Ninety-two, there was a North American
+Indian that was a better Indian than the Indians who watched the
+approach of Columbus and exclaimed, "Alas! we are discovered!"
+
+In crossing the Alps, Humboldt was impressed with the truth that man was
+a necessary factor in working out "creation," just as much as the
+earthworm. When men stir the soil so as to make it produce grain that
+the family may be fed, and utilize animals in this work, civilization is
+surely at hand.
+
+Nations with a controlling desire to absorb, annex and exploit are still
+to that degree savages. Creation is still going on, and this earth is
+becoming better and more beautiful as men work in line with reason and
+allow science to become the handmaid of instinct.
+
+Humboldt, above all men, prepared the way for Darwin, Spencer and
+Tyndall--all of these built on him, all quote him. His books form a mine
+in which they constantly delved.
+
+Humboldt in boyhood formed the habit of close and accurate observation,
+and he traveled that he might gratify this controlling impulse of his
+life--the habit of seeing and knowing. His genius for classification was
+superb; he approached every subject with an open mind, willing to change
+his conclusions if it were shown that he was wrong; he had imagination
+to see the thing first with his inward eye; he had the strength to
+endure physical discomfort, and finally he had money enough so he was
+free to follow his bent.
+
+These qualifications made him the prince of scientific travelers--the
+pioneer of close, accurate and reliable explorers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before Humboldt's time travelers had been mostly of the type of Marco
+Polo and Sir John Mandeville, who discovered strange and wondrous
+things, such as horses with five legs, dogs that could talk, and
+anthropophagi with heads that grew beneath their shoulders. The
+temptation to be interesting at the expense of truth has always been
+strong upon the sailorman. Read even the history of Christopher Columbus
+and you will hear of islands off the coast of America inhabited
+exclusively by women who had only one calling-day in a year when their
+gentlemen friends from a neighboring island came to see them.
+
+The world needed accurate, scientific knowledge concerning those parts
+of the world seldom visited by man. Travel a hundred years ago was
+accompanied by great expense and more or less peril. Nations held
+themselves aloof from one another, and travelers were looked upon as
+renegades or spies.
+
+Alexander von Humboldt had explored deep mines, climbed high mountains,
+visited that strange people, the Basques of Spain, got little glimpses
+into Africa where the jungle was waiting for a Livingstone and a Stanley
+before giving up its secrets. The Corsican had thrown Europe into a
+fever of fear, and war was on in every direction, when in Seventeen
+Hundred Ninety-nine Humboldt ran the blockade and sailed out of the
+harbor of Coruna, Spain, on the little corvette "Pizarro," bound for
+the Spanish possessions in the New World. Spain had discovered America
+in the gross two hundred years before, but what this country really
+contained in way of possibilities, Spain had most certainly never
+discovered.
+
+Humboldt's mind had conceived the idea of a Scientific Survey, and in
+this he was the maker of an epoch. In this undertaking he secured the
+assistance of the Prime Minister, who secretly issued passports and
+letters of recommendation to Humboldt, first cautioning him that if the
+Court of Madrid should know anything about this proposed voyage of
+discovery it could never be made, so jealous and ignorant were the
+officials.
+
+Only one thing did Spain have in abundance, and that was religion.
+
+At that time the Spanish Colonies included Louisiana, Florida, Texas,
+California, Mexico, Cuba, Central America, most of the West Indies, and
+most of South America, not to mention the Philippines. These colonies
+covered a territory stretching over five thousand miles from North to
+South. Twice a year Spain sent out her trading-ships, convoyed by armed
+cruisers. Trade then was monopoly and extortion. The goods sent out were
+as cheap and tawdry as could be palmed off; all that were brought back
+were bartered for at the lowest possible prices.
+
+Cheating in count, weight and quality was then considered perfectly
+proper, and as the Government officials at home got a goodly grab into
+all transactions in way of perquisites, all went swimmingly--or fairly
+so.
+
+For a Spaniard to trade with any other nation was treason, and if
+caught, his property was confiscated and probably his head forfeited.
+
+No foreigners were allowed in the colonies, and exclusion was the rule.
+To hold her dependencies Spain thought she must keep them under close
+subjection; and she seemed beautifully innocent of the fact that she was
+the dependent, not they. She did not believe in Free Trade.
+
+The Government was absolutely under military rule. Of the botany,
+zoology, geology, not to mention the topography, of her American
+possessions, the officials of Spain knew nothing save from the tales of
+sailors.
+
+Such were the Spanish conditions when Humboldt got himself smuggled on
+board the "Pizarro," and sailed away, June Fourth, Seventeen Hundred
+Ninety-nine. With Humboldt was one companion, Bonpland, a Swiss by
+birth, and a rare soul.
+
+Humboldt was a naturalist and a philosopher; by nature he was a
+traveler. But he lacked that intrepid quality possessed by, say, Lewis
+and Clarke.
+
+He had too much brain--too fine a nerve-quality to face the forest
+alone. Bonpland made good all that he lacked. He used to call Bonpland
+his "Treasure." And surely such a friend is a treasure, indeed.
+Bonpland was a linguist, as most of the Swiss are. He was a
+mountain-climber, and had been a soldier and a sailor, and he knew
+enough of literature and science, so he was an interesting companion.
+
+He was small in stature, lithe, immensely strong, absolutely fearless,
+and had left behind him neither family nor friends to mourn his loss. To
+Humboldt he was guide, teacher, protector and friend. Bonpland was the
+soul of unselfishness.
+
+Perhaps a certain quality of man attracts a certain quality of friend--I
+really am not sure. But this I know, that while Alexander von Humboldt
+had few personal friends, he always had just those which his nature
+required--his friends were hands, feet, eyes and ears for him, to quote
+his own words. This voyage on the "Pizarro" occupied five years. The
+travelers visited Teneriffe, Cuba, Mexico, and skirted the coast of
+South America, making many little journeys inland.
+
+They climbed mountains that had never been scaled before; they ascended
+rivers where no white man had ever been, and pushed their way through
+jungle and forest to visit savage tribes who fled before them in terror
+thinking they were gods. On the return trip they visited the United
+States; spent some weeks in Washington, where they were the guests of
+the President, Thomas Jefferson. A firm friendship sprang up between
+Humboldt and Jefferson: they were both freethinkers, and when Humboldt
+recorded in his journal that Jefferson was by far the greatest man
+living in America, he not only recorded his personal conviction, but he
+spoke the truth.
+
+And as if not to be outdone, although he did not then know what Humboldt
+had said of him, Jefferson declared that Alexander von Humboldt was the
+greatest man he ever saw.
+
+Most of the vast number of rare specimens and natural-history
+curiosities gathered by Humboldt and Bonpland were placed on a
+homeward-bound ship that sailed from South America. This ship was lost
+and all the precious and priceless cargo went for naught. Had Humboldt
+and his companion sailed on this ship, as they had at first intended,
+instead of returning by way of the United States, the world would not
+have known the name of Alexander von Humboldt.
+
+But Fate for once was kind--the world had great need of him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Humboldt landed at Bordeaux in August, in Eighteen Hundred Four,
+after his five-year journey, he immediately set out to visit his
+brother, who was then German Ambassador at Rome. We can imagine that it
+was a most joyous meeting.
+
+Of it William said: "I could not recognize him for my tears--but beside
+this he seemed to have grown in stature and was as brown as a Malay. Was
+he really my brother? Ah, the hand was the hand of Esau, but when he
+spoke, it was the same kind, gentle, loving voice--the voice of my
+brother."
+
+A few weeks at Rome and Alexander grew restless for work. He had made
+great plans about publishing the record of his travels. This work was to
+outstrip anything in bookmaking the world had ever seen, dealing with
+similar subjects. The writing was done on shipboard, by campfires, and
+in forest and jungle, but now it had all to be gone over and revised and
+much of it translated into French, for the original notes were sometimes
+in English and sometimes in German. Only in Paris could the work of
+bookmaking be done that would fill Humboldt's ideals. In Paris were
+printers, engravers, artists, binders--Paris was then the artistic
+center of the world, as it is today.
+
+The results of this first great scientific voyage of discovery were
+written out in a work of seventeen volumes.
+
+It was entitled, "The Travels of Humboldt and Bonpland in the Interior
+of America." Humboldt wrote the book, but wanted his friend to have half
+the credit. This superb set of books, containing many engravings, was
+issued under Humboldt's supervision and almost entirely at his own
+expense. It was divided into five general parts: Zoology and Comparative
+Anatomy; Geography and the Distribution of Plants; Political Essays and
+Description of Peoples and Institutions in the Kingdom of New Spain;
+Astronomy and Magnetism; Equinoctial Vegetation. It took two years to
+issue the first volume, but the others then came along more rapidly, yet
+it was ten years before the last book of the set was published. The
+total expense of issuing this set of books was more than a million
+francs, or, to be exact, two hundred twenty-six thousand dollars.
+
+The cost of a set of these books to subscribers was two thousand five
+hundred fifty dollars, although there were a few sets containing
+hand-colored plates and original drawings that were valued at twenty
+thousand dollars. One such set can now be seen at the British Museum. In
+all, only three hundred sets of these books were issued.
+
+One set at least came to North America, for it was presented to Thomas
+Jefferson, and, if I am not mistaken, is now in the Congressional
+Library at Washington.
+
+This American Expedition forever fixed Alexander von Humboldt's place in
+history, but after it was completed and the record written out, he had
+still more than half a century to live.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At a time when few men could afford the luxury, Alexander von Humboldt
+was an atheist. Fortunately he had sufficient fortune to place him
+beyond reach of the bread-and-butter problem, and all of his books were
+written in the language of the esoteric. He did not serve as an
+iconoclast for the common people--his name was never on the tongue of
+rumor--very few, indeed, knew of his existence. His books were issued in
+deluxe, limited editions, and were for public libraries, the shelves of
+nobility or rich collectors.
+
+Humboldt was judicial in all of his statements, approaching every
+question as if nothing were known about it. He built strong, and was
+preparing the way, such as throwing up ramparts and storing ammunition
+for the first decisive battle that was to take place between Theology
+and Science.
+
+In his day Theology was supreme, the practical dictator of human
+liberties. But a World's Congress of Freethinkers has recently been held
+in Rome.
+
+There were present more than three thousand delegates, representing
+every civilized country on the globe. The deliberations of the Congress
+were held in a hall supplied by the Italian Government, and all
+courtesies and privileges were tendered the delegates. The only protest
+came from the Pope, who turned Protestant and in all the Catholic
+churches in Rome ordered special services, to partially mitigate the
+blot upon the fair record of the "Holy City." Forty years ago armed men
+would have routed this Congress by force, and a hundred years ago the
+bare thought of such a meeting would have placed a person who might have
+suggested it in imminent peril.
+
+Humboldt prophesied that the world would not forever be ruled by
+religious superstition--that science must surely win. But he did not
+expect that the change would come as quickly as it has; neither did he
+anticipate the fact that the orthodox religion would admit all the facts
+of science and still flourish. The number of Church communicants now is
+larger than it was in the time of Humboldt. The Church is a
+department-store that puts in the particular goods that the people ask
+for.
+
+Freethinkers do not leave the Church; the Church is built on a Goodyear
+patent, and its lines expand when Freethinkers get numerous, so as to
+include them.
+
+The Church would rather countenance vice, as it has in the past, than
+disband. In New York City we now have the spectacle of the Church
+operating a saloon and selling strong drink. In all country towns,
+religion, failing in being attractive, has, to keep churches alive,
+resorted to raffles, lotteries, concerts, chicken-pie socials, and
+lectures and exhortations by strange men in curious and unique garb, and
+singers of reputation.
+
+The Church, being a part of society, evolves as society evolves.
+Christianity is a totally different thing now from what it was in
+Humboldt's time; it was a different thing in Humboldt's time from what
+it was a hundred years before.
+
+Behold the spectacle of a thousand highly educated and gentle men, from
+all over the world, decorating with garlands the statue of Bruno in
+Rome, on the site where Churchmen piled high the fagots and burned his
+living body! I foretell that when the next World's Congress of
+Freethinkers occurs in Rome, the Pope will welcome the delegates, and
+their deliberations will occur by invitation in the wide basilica of
+Saint Peter's. The world moves, and the Pope and all the rest of us move
+with it.
+
+When a meeting was recently called in Jersey City to welcome Turner, the
+so-called anarchist, the Mayor forbade the meeting and then placed a
+cordon of policemen around the intended meeting-place. But, lo, in their
+extremity the "anarchists" were invited by a clergyman to come and use
+his church and he led the way to the sacred edifice, warning the police
+to neither follow nor enter. As we become better we meet better
+preachers.
+
+Humboldt could see no rift through the clouds outside of the death of
+the Church and the disbanding of her so-called sacred institutions. We
+now perceive that very rarely are religious opinions consciously
+abandoned; they change, are modified and later evolve into something
+else. Churches are now largely social clubs. In America this is true
+both of Catholic and of Protestant. Most all denominations are
+interested in social betterment, because the trend of human thought is
+in that direction.
+
+The Church is being swept along upon the tide of time. In a few
+instances churches have already evolved practical industrial
+betterments, which are conducted directly under the supervision of the
+church and in its edifice. There are hundreds of Kindergartens now being
+carried on in church buildings that a few years ago were idle and vacant
+all the week. Others have sewing-circles and boys' clubs, and these have
+metamorphosed in some instances into Manual-Training Schools where girls
+are taught Domestic Science and boys are given instruction in the
+Handicrafts. I know a church that derives its support from the sale of
+useful things that are made by its members and workers under the
+supervision of its pastor, who is a master in handicraft. So this pretty
+nearly points the ideal--a church that has evolved into an ethical and
+industrial college, where the pastor is not paid for preaching, but for
+doing.
+
+Charles Bradlaugh once said:
+
+"A paid priesthood blocks evolution. These men are really educated to
+uphold and defend the institution. They can do nothing else. Most of
+them have families dependent upon them--do you wonder that it is a fight
+to the death? It is not truth that the clergy struggles for--they may
+think it is--but the grim fact remains, it is a fight for material
+existence."
+
+We all confuse our interests with the eternal verities--the thing that
+pays us we consider righteous, or at least justifiable. This is the most
+natural thing in the world. An artist who painted very bad pictures once
+took one of his canvases to Whistler for criticism.
+
+Jimmy shrugged his shoulders and made a grimace that spoke volumes. "But
+a man must live some way!" pleaded the poor fellow in his extremity.
+
+"I do not see the necessity," was the weary reply.
+
+Preachers must live; their education and environment have unfitted them
+for useful effort; but they are a part of the great, seething struggle
+for existence. And so we have their piteous and plaintive plea for the
+obsolete and the outworn. Disraeli once in an incautious moment
+exclaimed: "If we do away with the Established Church, what is to become
+of the fourteen million prepared and pickled sermons? Think for a moment
+of the infinite labor of writing new sermons, all based upon a different
+point of view--let us then be reasonable and not subject a profession
+that is overworked to the humiliation of destroying the bulk of its
+assets."
+
+Science deals directly with the maintenance of human life and the
+bettering of every condition of existence through a wider, wiser and
+saner use of the world. Civilization is the working out and
+comprehending and proving how to live in the best way. Theology
+prepares men to die; science fits them to live.
+
+Science deals with your welfare in this world; theology in another.
+Theology has not yet proved that there is another world--its claims are
+not even based upon hearsay. It is a matter of belief and assumption.
+
+Science, too, assumes, and its assumption is this: The best preparation
+for a life to come is to live here and now as if there were no life to
+come.
+
+Your belief will not fix your place in another world--what you are, may.
+The individual who gets most out of this life is fitting himself to get
+most out of another if there is one.
+
+And this brings us up to that paragraph in the "Cosmos" where Humboldt
+says: "I perceive a period when the true priesthood will not be paid to
+defend a fixed system of so-called crystallized truth. But I believe the
+time will come when that man will be most revered who bestows most
+benefits here and now. The clergy of Christendom have stood as leaders
+of thought, but to hold this proud position they must abandon the
+intangible and devote themselves to this world and the people who are
+alive."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Most of Humboldt's time during his middle life was spent at Paris, where
+he was busily engaged in the herculean task of issuing his splendid
+books. He varied his work, however, so that several hours daily were
+devoted to study and scientific research; and from time to time he made
+journeys over Europe and Asia.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Twenty-seven a personal request came from the King
+of Prussia that Humboldt should thereafter make Berlin his home. He was
+too big a man for Germany to lose.
+
+He acceded to the King's request, moved to Berlin and was spoken of as
+"The First Citizen," although he would not consent to hold office, nor
+would he accept a title.
+
+In vexed questions of diplomacy he was often consulted by the King and
+his Cabinet, and in a great many ways he furthered the interests of
+education and civilization by his judicial and timely advice.
+
+He was always a student, always an investigator, always a tireless
+worker. He lived simply and quietly--keeping out of society and away
+from crowds, except on the rare occasions when necessity seemed to
+demand it.
+
+The quality of the man was well mirrored in those magnificent books--all
+that he did was on the scale of grandeur.
+
+His books were too high in price for the average reader, but on request
+of the King he consented to give a course of five, free, popular
+lectures for the people.
+
+No one foresaw the result of these addresses. The course was so
+successful that it extended itself into sixty-one lectures, and covered
+a period of more than ten years' time. No admittance was charged, free
+tickets being given out to applicants. Very soon after the first
+lecture, a traffic sprang up in these free tickets, carried on by our
+Semitic friends, and the tickets soared to as high as three dollars
+each. Then the strong hand of the Government stepped in: the tickets
+were canceled, and the public was admitted to the lectures without
+ceremony. Boxes, however, were set apart for royalty and foreign
+visitors, some of whom came from England, Belgium, Switzerland and
+France. The size of these audiences was limited simply by the capacity
+of the auditorium, the attendance at first being about a thousand;
+later, a larger hall was secured and the attendance ran as high as four
+thousand persons at each address.
+
+The subjects were as follows: three lectures on the History of Science;
+two on reasons why we should study Science; four on the Crust of the
+Earth, and the nature of Volcanoes and Earthquakes; two on the form of
+Earth's Surface and the elevation of the Continents; five on Physical
+Geography; five on the nature of Heat and Magnetism; sixteen on
+Astronomy; two on Mountains and how they are formed; three on the Nature
+of the Sea; three on the Distribution of Matter; ten on the Atmosphere
+as an Elastic Fluid; three on the Geography of Animals; three on Races
+of Men.
+
+Every good thing begins as something else, and what was intended for the
+common people became scientific lectures for educated people. "The man
+who was most benefited by these lectures was myself," said Humboldt.
+
+Men grow by doing things. Lectures are for the lecturer.
+
+Humboldt found out more things in giving these lectures than he knew
+before--he discovered himself. And long before they were completed he
+knew that his best work was embodied right here--in doing for others he
+had done for himself.
+
+In attempting to reveal the Universe or "Cosmos," he revealed most of
+his own comprehensive intelligence. That many of his conclusions have
+since been abandoned by the scientific world does not prove such ideas
+valueless--they helped and are helping men to find the truth.
+
+These sixty-one "popular" and free lectures make up that stupendous work
+now known to us as "Humboldt's Cosmos."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Says Robert Ingersoll in his tribute to Alexander von Humboldt:
+
+"His life was pure, his aims were lofty, his learning varied and
+profound, and his achievements vast.
+
+"We honor him because he has ennobled our race, because he has
+contributed as much as any man, living or dead, to the real prosperity
+of the world. We honor him because he has honored us--because he has
+labored for others--because he was the most learned man of the most
+learned nation of his time--because he left a legacy of glory to every
+human being. For these reasons he is honored throughout the world.
+
+"Millions are doing homage to his genius at this moment, and millions
+are pronouncing his name with reverence and recounting what he
+accomplished.
+
+"We associate the name of Humboldt with oceans, continents, mountains,
+volcanoes--with towering palms--the snow-lipped craters of the
+Andes--the wide deserts--with primeval forests and European
+capitals--with wilderness and universities--with savages and
+savants--with the lonely rivers of unpeopled wastes--with peaks, pampas,
+steppes, cliffs and crags--with the progress of the world--with every
+science known to man and with every star glittering in the immensity of
+space. Humboldt adopted none of the soul-shrinking creeds of his day; he
+wasted none of his time in the inanities, stupidities and contradictions
+of theological metaphysics; he did not endeavor to harmonize the
+astronomy and geology of a barbarous people with the science of the
+Nineteenth Century.
+
+"Never, for one moment, did he abandon the sublime standard of truth: he
+investigated, he studied, he thought, he separated the gold from the
+dross in the crucible of his brain. He was never found on his knees
+before the altar of superstition. He stood erect by the tranquil column
+of Reason. He was an admirer, a lover, an adorer of Nature, and at the
+age of ninety, bowed by the weight of nearly a century, covered with the
+insignia of honor, loved by a nation, respected by a world, with kings
+for his servants, he laid his weary head upon her bosom--upon the bosom
+of the Universal Mother--and with her loving arms about him, sank into
+that slumber which we call Death.
+
+"History added another name to the starry scroll of the immortals.
+
+"The world is his monument; upon the eternal granite of her hills he
+inscribed his name, and there, upon everlasting stone, his genius wrote
+this, the sublimest of truths: The universe is governed by law."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: WILLIAM HERSCHEL]
+
+WILLIAM HERSCHEL
+
+
+     The great number of alterations of stars that we are certain have
+     happened within the last two centuries, and the much greater number
+     that we have reason to suspect to have taken place, are curious
+     features in the history of the heavens, as curious as the slow
+     wearing away of the landmarks of our earth on mountains, on river
+     banks, on ocean shores. If we consider how little attention has
+     formerly been paid this subject, and that most of the observations
+     we have are of a very late date, it would perhaps not appear
+     extraordinary were we to admit the number of alterations that have
+     probably happened to different stars, within our own time, to be a
+     hundred.
+
+     --_William Herschel_
+
+
+WILLIAM HERSCHEL
+
+William Herschell, born Seventeen Hundred Thirty-eight, in the city
+of Hanover, was the fourth child in a family of ten. Big families, I am
+told, usually live in little houses, while little families live in big
+houses. The Herschels were no exception to the rule.
+
+Isaac Herschel, known to the world as being the father of his son, was a
+poor man, depending for support upon his meager salary as bandmaster to
+a regiment of the Hanoverian Guards.
+
+At the garrison school, taught by a retired captain, William was the
+star scholar. In mathematics he propounded problems that made the worthy
+captain pooh-pooh and change the subject.
+
+At fourteen, he was playing a hautboy in his father's band and
+practising on the violin at spare times.
+
+For music he had a veritable passion, and to have a passion for a thing
+means that you excel in it--excellence is a matter of intensity. One of
+the players in the band was a Frenchman, and William made an arrangement
+to give the "parlez vous" lessons on the violin as payment for lessons
+in French.
+
+This whole brood of Herschel children was musical, and very early in
+life the young Herschels became self-supporting as singers and players.
+"It is the only thing they can do," their father said. But his loins
+were wiser than his head.
+
+In Seventeen Hundred Fifty-five William accompanied his father's band to
+England, where they went to take part in a demonstration in honor of a
+Hanoverian, one George the Third, who later was to play a necessary part
+in a symphony that was to edify the American Colonies. America owes much
+to George the Third.
+
+Young Herschel had already learned to speak English, just as he had
+learned French. In England he spent all the money he had for three
+volumes of "Locke on the Human Understanding."
+
+These books were to remain his lifelong possession and to be passed on,
+well-thumbed, to his son more than half a century later.
+
+At the time of the breaking out of the Seven Years' War, William
+Herschel was nineteen. His regiment had been ordered to march in a week.
+Here was a pivotal point--should he go and fight for the glory of
+Prussia?
+
+Not he--by the connivance of his mother and sisters, he was secreted on
+a trading-sloop bound for England. This is what is called desertion; and
+just how the young man evaded the penalties, since the King of England
+was also Elector of Hanover, I do not know, but the House of Hanover
+made no effort toward punishment of the culprit, even when the facts
+were known.
+
+Musicians of quality were, perhaps, needed in England; and as
+sheep-stealing is looked upon lightly by priests who love mutton, so do
+kings forgive infractions if they need the man.
+
+When William Herschel landed at Dover he had in his pocket a single
+crownpiece, and his luggage consisted of the clothes he wore, and a
+violin. The violin secured him board and lodgings along the road as he
+walked to London, just as Oliver Goldsmith paid his way with a similar
+legal tender.
+
+In London, Herschel's musical skill quickly got him an engagement at one
+of the theaters. In a few months we hear of his playing solos at
+Brabandt's aristocratic concerts. Little journeys into "the provinces"
+were taken by the orchestra to which Herschel belonged. Among other
+places visited was Bath, and here the troupe was booked for a two-weeks'
+engagement. At this time Bath was run wide open.
+
+Bath was a rendezvous for the gouty dignitaries of Church and State who
+had grown swag through sloth and much travel by the gorge route. There
+were ministers of state, soldiers, admirals-of-the-sea, promoters,
+preachers, philosophers, players, poets, polite gamblers and buffoons.
+
+They idled, fiddled, danced, gabbled, gadded and gossiped. The "School
+for Scandal" was written on the spot, with models drawn from life. It
+wasn't a play--it was a cross-section of Bath Society.
+
+Bath was a clearing-house for the wit, learning and folly of all
+England--the combined Hot Springs, Coney Island, Saratoga and Old Point
+Comfort of the Kingdom. The most costly church of its size in America is
+at Saint Augustine, Florida. The repentant ones patronize it in Lent;
+the rest of the year it is closed.
+
+At Bath there was the Octagon Chapel, which had the best pipe-organ in
+England. Herschel played the organ: where he learned how nobody seemed
+to know--he himself did not know. But playing musical instruments is a
+little like learning a new language.
+
+A man who speaks three languages can take a day off and learn a fourth
+almost any time. Somebody has said that there is really only one
+language, and most of us have only a dialect. Acquire three languages
+and you perceive that there is a universal basis upon which the various
+tongues are built.
+
+Herschel could play the hautboy, the violin and the harpsichord. The
+organ came easy. When he played the organ in the Chapel at Bath, fair
+ladies forgot the Pump-Room, and the gallants followed them--naturally.
+Herschel became the rage. He was a handsome fellow, with a pride so
+supreme that it completed the circle, and people called it humility. He
+talked but little, and made himself scarce--a point every genius should
+ponder well.
+
+The disarming of the populace--confiscating canes, umbrellas and
+parasols--before allowing people to enter an art-gallery is necessary;
+although it is a peculiar comment on humanity to think people have a
+tendency to smite, punch, prod and poke beautiful things. The same
+propensity manifests itself in wishing to fumble a genius. Get your
+coarse hands on Richard Mansfield if you can! Corral Maude
+Adams--hardly. To do big things, to create, breaks down tissue awfully,
+and to mix it with society and still do big things for society is
+impossible.
+
+At Bath, Herschel was never seen in the Pump-Room, nor on the North
+Parade. People who saw him paid for the privilege. "In England about
+this time look out for a shower of genius," the almanackers might have
+said.
+
+To Bath came two Irishmen, Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
+Burke rented rooms of Doctor Nugent, and married the doctor's daughter,
+and never regretted it. Sheridan also married a Bath girl, but added the
+right touch of romance by keeping the matter secret, with the intent
+that if either party wished to back out of the agreement it would be
+allowed. This was quite Irish-like, since according to English Law a
+marriage is a marriage until Limbus congeals and is used for a
+skating-rink.
+
+With the true spirit of chivalry, Sheridan left the questions of
+publicity or secrecy to his wife: she could have her freedom if she
+wished. He was a fledgling barrister, with his future in front of him,
+the child of "strolling players"; she, the beautiful Miss Linlay, was a
+singer of note. Her father was the leader of the Bath Orchestra, and had
+a School of Oratory where young people agitated the atmosphere in
+orotund and tremolo and made the ether vibrate in glee. Doctor Linlay's
+daughter was his finest pupil, and with her were elucidated all his
+theories concerning the Sixteen Perspective Laws of Art. She also proved
+a few points in stirpiculture. She was a most beautiful girl of
+seventeen when Richard Brinsley Sheridan led her to the altar, or I
+should say to a Dissenting Pastor's back door by night. She could sing,
+recite, act, and impersonate in pantomime and Greek gown, the passions
+of Fear, Hate, Supplication, Horror, Revenge, Jealousy, Rage and Faith.
+
+Romney moved down to Bath just so as to have Miss Linlay and Lady
+Hamilton for models. He posed Miss Linlay as the Madonna, Beulah, Rena,
+Ruth, Miriam and Cecilia; and Lady Hamilton for Susannah at the Bath,
+Alicia and Andromache, and also had her illustrate the Virtues, Graces,
+Fates and Passions.
+
+When the beautiful Miss Linlay, the pride and pet of Bath, got ready to
+announce her marriage, she did it by simply changing the inscription
+beneath a Romney portrait that hung in the anteroom of the artist's
+studio, marking out the words "Miss Linlay," and writing over it, "Mrs.
+Richard Brinsley Sheridan."
+
+The Bath porchers who looked after other people's business, having none
+of their own, burbled and chortled like siphons of soda, and the marvel
+to all was that such a brilliant girl should thus throw herself away on
+a sprig of the law. "He acts, too, I believe," said Goldsmith to Doctor
+Johnson.
+
+And Doctor Johnson said, "Sir, he does nothing else," thus anticipating
+James McNeil Whistler by more than a hundred years.
+
+But alas for the luckless Linlay, the Delsarte of his day, poor man! he
+used words not to be found in Johnson's Dictionary, and outdid Cassius
+in the quarrel-scene to the Brutus of Richard Brinsley.
+
+But very soon things settled down--they always do when mixed with
+time--and all were happy, or reasonably so, forever after.
+
+Herschel resigned from Brabandt's Orchestra and remained in Bath. He
+taught music, played the organ, became first violinist for Professor
+Linlay and later led the orchestra when Linlay was on the road starring
+the one-night stands and his beautiful daughter.
+
+Things seemed to prosper with the kindly and talented German. He was
+reserved, intellectual, and was respected by the best. He was making
+money--not as London brokers might count money, but prosperous for a
+mere music-teacher.
+
+And so there came a day when he bought out the school of Professor
+Linlay, and became proprietor and leader of the famous Bath Orchestra.
+
+But the talented Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan was sorely missed--a
+woman soloist of worth was needed.
+
+Herschel thought and pondered. He tried candidates from London and a few
+from Paris. Some had voices, but no intellect. A very few had intellect,
+but were without voice. Some thought they had a voice when what they had
+was a disease. Other voices he tried and found guilty.
+
+Those who had voice and spirit had tempers like a tornado.
+
+Herschel decided to educate a soloist and assistant. To marry a woman
+for the sake of educating her was risky business--he knew of men who had
+tried it--for men have tried it since the time of the Cavemen.
+
+A bright thought came to him! He would go back to Deutschland and get
+one of his sisters, and bring her over to England to help him do his
+work--just the very thing!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a most fortunate stroke for Herschel when he went back home to
+get one of his sisters to come over into Macedonia and help him. No man
+ever did a great work unless he was backed up by a good woman. There
+were five of these Herschel girls--three were married, so they were out
+of the question, and another was engaged. This left Caroline as first,
+last and only choice. Caroline was twenty-two and could sing a little.
+
+She had appeared in concerts for her father when a child. But when the
+father died, the girl was set to work in a dressmaking and millinery
+shop, to help support the big family. The mother didn't believe that
+women should be educated--it unfitted them for domesticity, and to speak
+of a woman as educated was to suggest that she was a poor housekeeper.
+
+In Greece of old, educated women were spoken of as "companions"--and
+this meant that they were not what you would call respectable. They were
+the intellectual companions of men. The Greek term of disrespect carried
+with it a trifle of a suggestion not intended, that is, that women who
+were not educated--not intellectual--were really not companionable--but
+let that pass. It is curious how this idea that a woman is only a
+scullion and a drudge has permeated society until even the women
+themselves partake of the prejudice against themselves.
+
+Mother Herschel didn't want her daughters to become educated, nor study
+the science of music nor the science of anything. A goodly grocer of the
+Dutch School had been picked out as a husband for Caroline, and now if
+she went away her prospects were ruined--Ach, Mein Gott! or words to
+that effect. And it was only on William's promise to pay the mother a
+weekly sum equal to the wages that Caroline received in the
+dressmaking-shop that she gave consent to her daughter's going. Caroline
+arrived in England, wearing wooden shoon and hoops that were exceeding
+Dutch, but without a word of English. In order to be of positive use to
+her brother, she must acquire English and be able to sing--not only sing
+well, but remarkably well. In less than a year she was singing solo
+parts at her brother's concerts, to the great delight of the aristocrats
+of Bath.
+
+They heard her sing, but they did not take her captive and submerge her
+in their fashionable follies as they would have liked to do.
+
+The sister and the brother kept close to their own rooms. Caroline was
+the housekeeper, and took a pride in being able to dispense with all
+outside help. She was small in figure, petite, face plain but full of
+animation. All of her spare time she devoted to her music. After the
+concerts she and her brother would leave the theater, change their
+clothes and then walk off into the country, getting back as late as one
+or two o'clock in the morning. On these midnight walks they used to
+study the stars and talk of the wonderful work of Kepler and Copernicus.
+There were various requests that Caroline should go to London and sing,
+but she steadfastly refused to appear on a stage except where her
+brother led the orchestra. About this time Caroline wrote a letter home,
+which missive, by the way, is still in existence, in which she says:
+"William goes to bed early when there are no concerts or rehearsals. He
+has a bowl of milk on the stand beside him, and he reads Smith's
+'Harmonics' and Ferguson's 'Astronomy.' I sit sewing in the next room,
+and occasionally he will call to me to listen while he reads some
+passage that most pleases him. So he goes to sleep buried beneath his
+favorite authors, and his first thought in the morning is how to obtain
+instruments so we can study the harmonics of the sky." And a way was to
+open: they were to make their own telescopes--what larks! Brother and
+sister set to work studying the laws of optics. In a secondhand store
+they found a small Gregorian reflector which had an aperture of about
+two inches.
+
+This gave them a little peep into the heavens, but was really only a
+tantalization.
+
+They set to work making a telescope-tube out of pasteboard. It was about
+eighteen feet long, and the "board" was made in the genuine pasteboard
+way--by pasting sheet after sheet of paper together until the substance
+was as thick and solid as a board.
+
+So this brother and sister worked at all odd hours pasting sheet after
+sheet of paper--old letters, old books--with occasional strips of cloth
+to give extra strength. Lenses were bought in London, and at last our
+precious musical pair, with astronomy for their fad, had the
+satisfaction of getting a view of Saturn that showed the rings.
+
+It need not be explained that astronomical observations must be made out
+of doors. Further, the whole telescope must be out of doors so as to get
+an even temperature. This is a fact that the excellent astronomers of
+the Mikado of Japan did not know until very recently. It seems they
+constructed a costly telescope and housed it in a costly
+observatory-house, with an aperture barely large enough for the big
+telescope to be pointed out at the heavens. Inside, the astronomer had a
+comfortable fire, for the season was then Winter and the weather cold.
+But the wise man could see nothing and the belief was getting abroad
+that the machine was bewitched, or that their Yankee brothers had
+lawsonized the buyers, when our own David P. Todd, of Amherst, happened
+along and informed them that the heat-waves which arose from their warm
+room caused a perturbation in the atmosphere which made star-gazing
+impossible. At once they made their house over, with openings so as to
+insure an even temperature, and Prince Fusiyama Noguchi wrote to
+Professor Todd, making him a Knight of the Golden Dragon on special
+order of the heaven-born Mikado.
+
+The Herschels knew enough of the laws of heat and refraction to realize
+they must have an even temperature, but they forgot that pasteboard was
+porous.
+
+One night they left their telescope out of doors, and a sudden shower
+transformed the straight tube into the arc of a circle. All attempts to
+straighten it were vain, so they took out the lenses and went to work
+making a tube of copper. In this, brother, sister and genius--which is
+concentration and perseverance--united to overcome the innate meanness
+of animate and inanimate things. A failure was not a failure to them--it
+was an opportunity to meet a difficulty and overcome it.
+
+The partial success of the new telescope aroused the brother and the
+sister to fresh exertions. The work had been begun as a mere
+recreation--a rest from the exactions of the public which they diverted
+and amused with their warblings, concussions and vibrations.
+
+They were still amateur astronomers, and the thought that they
+would ever be anything else had not come to them. But they wanted
+to get a better view of the heavens--a view through a Newtonian
+reflecting-telescope. So they counted up their savings and decided that
+if they could get some instrument-maker in London to make them a
+reflecting-telescope six feet long, they would be perfectly willing to
+pay him fifty pounds for it. This study of the skies was their only form
+of dissipation, and even if it was a little expensive it enabled them to
+escape the Pump-Room rabble and flee boredom and introspection. A hunt
+was taken through London, but no one could be found who would make such
+an instrument as they wanted for the price they could afford to pay.
+They found, however, an amateur lens-polisher who offered to sell his
+tools, materials and instruments for a small sum. After consultation,
+the brother and sister bought him out. So at the price they expected to
+pay for a telescope they had a machine-shop on their hands.
+
+The work of grinding and polishing lenses is a most delicate business.
+Only a person of infinite patience and persistency can succeed at it.
+
+In Allegheny, Pennsylvania, lives John Brashear, who, by his own
+efforts, assisted by a noble wife, graduated from a rolling-mill and
+became a maker of telescopes.
+
+Brashear is practically the one telescope lens-maker of America since
+Alvan Clark resigned. There is no competition in this line--the
+difficulties are too appalling for the average man. The slightest
+accident or an unseen flaw, and the work of months or years goes into
+the dustbin of time, and all must be gone over again.
+
+So when we think of this brother and sister sailing away upon an unknown
+ocean--working day after day, night after night, week after week, and
+month after month, discarding scores of specula which they had worked
+upon many weary hours in order to get the glass that would serve their
+purpose--we must remove our hats in reverence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+God sends great men in groups. From Seventeen Hundred Forty for the next
+thirty-five years the intellectual sky seemed full of shooting-stars.
+Watt had watched to a purpose his mother's teakettle; Boston Harbor was
+transformed into another kind of Hyson dish; Franklin had been busy with
+kite and key; Gibbon was writing his "Decline and Fall"; Fate was
+pitting the Pitts against Fox; Hume was challenging worshipers of a
+Fetish and supplying arguments still bright with use; Voltaire and
+Rousseau were preparing the way for Madame Guillotine; Horace Walpole
+was printing marvelous books at his private press at Strawberry Hill;
+Sheridan was writing autobiographical comedies; David Garrick was
+mimicking his way to immortality; Gainsborough was working the
+apotheosis of a hat; Reynolds, Lawrence, Romney, and West, the American,
+were forming an English School of Art; George Washington and George the
+Third were linking their names preparatory to sending them down the
+ages; Boswell was penning undying gossip; Blackstone was writing his
+"Commentaries" for legal lights unborn; Thomas Paine was getting his
+name on the blacklist of orthodoxy; Burke, the Irishman, was polishing
+his brogue so that he might be known as England's greatest orator; the
+little Corsican was dreaming dreams of conquest; Wellesley was having
+presentiments of coming difficulties; Goldsmith was giving dinners with
+bailiffs for servants; Hastings was defending a suit where the chief
+participants were to die before a verdict was rendered; Captain Cook was
+giving to this world new lands; while William Herschel and his sister
+were showing the world still other worlds, till then unknown.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the brother and sister had followed the subject of astronomy as far
+as Ferguson had followed it, and knew all that he knew, they thought
+they surely would be content.
+
+Progress depends upon continually being dissatisfied. Now Ferguson
+aggravated them by his limitations.
+
+In their music they amused, animated and inspired the fashionable
+idlers.
+
+William gave lessons to his private pupils, led his orchestra, played
+the organ and harpsichord, and managed to make ends meet, and would have
+gotten reasonably rich had he not invested his spare cash in lenses,
+brass tubes, eyepieces, specula and other such trifles, and stood most
+of the night out on the lawn peering at the sky.
+
+He had been studying stars for seven years before the Bath that he
+amused awoke to the fact that there was a genius among them. And this
+genius was not the idolized Beau Nash whose statue adorned the
+Pump-Room! No, it was the man whose back they saw at the concerts.
+
+During all these years Herschel had worked alone, and he had scarcely
+ever mentioned the subject of astronomy with any one save his sister.
+
+One night, however, he had moved his telescope into the middle of the
+street to get away from the shadows of the houses. A doctor who had been
+out to answer a midnight call stopped at the unusual sight and asked if
+he might look through the instrument.
+
+Permission was courteously granted. The next day the doctor called on
+the astronomer to thank him for the privilege of looking through a
+better telescope than his own. The doctor was Sir William Watson, an
+amateur astronomer and all-round scientist, and member of the Royal
+Society of London.
+
+Herschel had held himself high--he had not gossiped of his work with the
+populace, cheapening his thought by diluting it for cheap people. Watson
+saw that Herschel, working alone, isolated, had surpassed the schools.
+
+There is a nugget of wisdom in Ibsen's remark, "The strongest man is he
+who stands alone," and Kipling's paraphrase, "He travels the fastest who
+travels alone."
+
+The chance acquaintance of Herschel and Watson soon ripened into a very
+warm friendship.
+
+Herschel amused the neurotics, Watson dosed and blistered them--both for
+a consideration. Each had a beautiful contempt for the society they
+served. Watson's father was of the purple, while Herschel's was of the
+people, but both men belonged to the aristocracy of intellect. Watson
+introduced Herschel into the select scientific circle of London, where
+his fine reserve and dignity made their due impress. Herschel's first
+paper to the Royal Society, presented by Doctor Watson, was on the
+periodical star in Collo Ceti. The members of the Society, always very
+jealous and suspicious of outsiders, saw they had a thinker to deal
+with.
+
+Some one carried the news to Bath--a great astronomer was now among
+them! About this time Horace Walpole said, "Mr. Herschel will content me
+if, instead of a million worlds, he can discover me thirteen colonies
+well inhabited by men and women, and can annex them to the Crown of
+Great Britain in lieu of those it has lost beyond the Atlantic."
+
+Bath society now took up astronomy as a fad, and fashionable ladies
+named the planets both backward and forward from a blackboard list set
+up in the Pump-House by Fanny Burney, the clever one.
+
+Herschel was invited to give popular lectures on the music of the
+spheres. Herschel's music-parlors were besieged by good people who
+wanted to make engagements with him to look through his telescope.
+
+One good woman gave the year, month, day, hour and minute of her birth
+and wanted her fortune told. Poor Herschel declined, saying he knew
+nothing of astronomy, but could give her lessons in music if desired.
+
+In answer to the law of supply and demand, thus proving the efficacy of
+prayer, an itinerant astronomer came down from London and set up a
+five-foot telescope on the Parade and solicited the curious ones at a
+tuppence a peep. This itinerant interested the populace by telling them
+a few stories about the stars that were not recorded in Ferguson, and
+passed out his cards showing where he could be consulted as a
+fortune-teller during the day. Herschel was once passing by this street
+astronomer, who was crying his wares, and a sudden impulse coming over
+him to see how bad the man's lens might be, he stopped to take a peep at
+Earth's satellite. He handed out the usual tuppence, but the owner of
+the telescope loftily passed it back saying, "I takes no fee from a
+fellow-philosopher!"
+
+This story went the rounds, and when it reached London it had been
+amended thus: Charles Fox was taking a ramble at Bath, ran across
+William Herschel at work, and mistaking him for an itinerant, the great
+statesman stopped, peeped through the aperture, and then passing out a
+tuppence moved along blissfully unaware of his error, for Herschel being
+a perfect gentleman would not embarrass the great man by refusing his
+copper.
+
+When Herschel was asked if the story was true he denied the whole
+fabric, which the knowing ones said was further proof of his gentlemanly
+instincts--for a true gentleman will always lie under two conditions:
+first, to save a woman's honor; and second, to save a friend from
+embarrassment. As a profession, astrology has proved a better investment
+than astronomy. Astronomy has nothing to offer but abstract truth, and
+those who love astronomy must do so for truth's sake.
+
+Astronomical discoveries can not be covered by copyright or patent, nor
+can any new worlds be claimed as private property and financed by stock
+companies, frenzied or otherwise. Astrology, on the other hand, relates
+to love-affairs, vital statistics, goldmines, misplaced jewels and lost
+opportunities.
+
+Yet, in this year of grace, Nineteen Hundred Five, Boston newspapers
+carry a column devoted to announcements of astrologers, while the
+Cambridge Astronomical Observatory never gets so much as a mention from
+one year's end to the other. Besides that, astronomers have to be
+supported by endowment--mendicancy--while astrologers are paid for their
+prophecies by the people whose destinies they invent. This shows us how
+far as a nation we have traveled on the stony road of Science.
+
+Science, forsooth? Oh, yes, of course--science--bang! bang! bang!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the month of March, in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-one, Herschel, by the
+discovery of Uranus, found his place as a fixed star among the world's
+great astronomers. Years before this, William and Caroline had figured
+it out that there must be another planet in our system in order to
+account plausibly for the peculiar ellipses of the others. That is to
+say, they felt the influence of this seventh planet; its attractive
+force was realized, but where it was they could not tell. Its discovery
+by Herschel was quite accidental. He was sweeping the heavens for comets
+when this star came within his vision. Others had seen it, too, but had
+classified it as "a vagrant fixed star."
+
+It was the work of Herschel to discover that it was not a fixed star,
+but had a defined and distinct orbit that could be calculated. To look
+up at the heavens and pick out a star that could only be seen with a
+telescope--pick it out of millions and ascertain its movement--seems
+like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.
+
+The present method of finding asteroids and comets by means of
+photography is simple and easy. The plate is exposed in a frame that
+moves by clockwork with the earth, so as to keep the same field of stars
+steady on the glass. After two, three or four hours' exposure, the
+photograph will show the fixed stars, but the planets, asteroids and
+comets will reveal themselves as a white streak of light, showing
+plainly where the sitters moved.
+
+Herschel had to watch each particular star in person, whereas the
+photographic lens will watch a thousand.
+
+How close and persistent an observer a man must be who, watching one
+star at a time, discovers the one in a million that moves, is apparent.
+Chance, surely, must also come to his aid and rescue if he succeeds.
+
+Herschel found his moving star, and at first mistook it for a comet.
+Later, he and Caroline were agreed that it was in very truth their
+long-looked-for planet. There are no proprietary rights in newly
+discovered worlds--the reward is in the honor of the discovery, just as
+the best recompense for a good deed lies in having done it.
+
+The Royal Society was the recording station, as Kiel, Greenwich and
+Harvard are now. Herschel made haste to get his new world on record
+through his kind neighbor, Doctor Watson.
+
+The Royal Society gave out the information, and soon various other
+telescopes corroborated the discovery made by the Bath musician.
+Herschel christened his new discovery "Georgium Sidus," in honor of the
+King; but the star belonged as much to Germany and France as to England,
+and astronomers abroad scouted the idea of peppering the heavens with
+the names of nobodies.
+
+Several astronomers suggested the name "Herschel," if the discoverer
+would consent, but this he would not do. Doctor Bode then named the new
+star "Uranus," and Uranus it is, although perhaps with any other name
+'t would shine as bright.
+
+Herschel was forty-three years old when he discovered Uranus. He was
+still a professional musician, and an amateur astronomer.
+
+But it did not require much arguing on the part of Doctor Watson when he
+presented Herschel's name for membership in the Royal Society for that
+most respectable body of scholars to at once pass favorably on the
+nomination. As one member in seconding the motion put it, "Herschel
+honors us in accepting this membership, quite as much as we do him in
+granting it."
+
+And so the next paper presented by Herschel to the Royal Society appears
+on the record signed "William Herschel, F.R.S."
+
+Some time afterwards, it was to appear, "William Herschel, F.R.S., LL.D.
+(Edinburgh)"; and then "Sir William Herschel, F.R.S., LL.D., D.C.L.
+(Oxon)."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+George the Third, in about the year Seventeen Hundred Eighty-two, had
+invited his distinguished Hanoverian countryman to become an attache of
+the Court with the title of "Astronomer to the King." The
+Astronomer-Royal, in charge of the Greenwich Observatory, was one Doctor
+Maskelyne, a man of much learning, a stickler for the fact, but with a
+mustard-seed imagination. Being asked his opinion of Herschel he assured
+the company thus: "Herschel is a great musician--a great musician!"
+Afterwards Maskelyne explained that the reason Herschel saw more than
+other astronomers was because he had made himself a better telescope.
+
+One real secret of Herschel's influence seems to have been his fine
+enthusiasm. He worked with such vim, such animation, that he radiated
+light on every side. He set others to work, and his love for astronomy
+as a science created a demand for telescopes, which he himself had to
+supply. It does not seem that he cared especially for money--all he made
+he spent for new apparatus. He had a force of about a dozen men making
+telescopes. He worked with them in blouse and overalls, and not one of
+his workmen excelled him as a machinist. The King bought several of his
+telescopes for from one hundred to three hundred pounds each, and
+presented them to universities and learned societies throughout the
+world. One fine telescope was presented to the University of Gottingen,
+and Herschel was sent in person to present it. He was received with the
+greatest honors, and scientists and musicians vied with one another to
+do him homage.
+
+In Seventeen Hundred Eighty-two Herschel and his sister gave up their
+musical work and moved from Bath to quarters provided for them near
+Windsor Castle. Herschel's salary was then the modest sum of two hundred
+pounds a year.
+
+Caroline was honored with the title "Assistant to the King's Astronomer"
+with the stipend of fifty pounds a year. It will thus be seen that the
+kingly idea of astronomy had not traveled far from what it was when
+every really respectable court had a retinue of singers, musicians,
+clowns, dancers, palmists and scientists to amuse the people somewhat
+ironically called "nobility." King George the Third paid his Cook,
+Master of the Kennels, Chaplain and Astronomer the same amount. The
+father of Richard Brinsley Sheridan was "Elocutionist to the King," and
+was paid a like sum.
+
+When Doctor Watson heard that Herschel was about to leave Bath he wrote,
+"Never bought King honor so cheap."
+
+It was nominated in the bond that Herschel should act as "Guide to the
+heavens for the diversification of visitors whenever His Majesty wills
+it."
+
+But it was also provided that the astronomer should be allowed to carry
+on the business of making and selling his telescopes.
+
+Herschel's enthusiasm for his beloved science never abated. But often
+his imagination outran his facts.
+
+Great minds divine the thing first--they see it with their inward eye.
+Yet there may be danger in this, for in one's anxiety to prove what he
+first only imagined, small proof suffices. Thus Herschel was for many
+years sure that the moon had an atmosphere and was inhabited; he thought
+that he had seen clear through the Milky Way and discovered empty space
+beyond; he calculated distances, and announced how far Castor was from
+Pollux; he even made a guess as to how long it took for a gaseous nebula
+to resolve itself into a planetary system; he believed the sun was a
+molten mass of fire--a thing that many believed until they saw the
+incandescent electric lamp--and in various other ways made daring
+prophecies which science has not only failed to corroborate, but which
+we now know to be errors.
+
+But the intensity of his nature was both his virtue and his weakness.
+Men who do nothing and say nothing are never ridiculous. Those who hope
+much, believe much, and love much, make mistakes.
+
+Constant effort and frequent mistakes are the stepping-stones of genius.
+
+In all, Herschel contributed sixty-seven important papers to the
+proceedings of the Royal Society, and in one of these, which was written
+in his eightieth year, he says, "My enthusiasm has occasionally led me
+astray, and I wish now to correct a statement which I made to you
+twenty-eight years ago." He then enumerates some particular statement
+about the height of mountains in the moon, and corrects it. Truth was
+more to Herschel than consistency. Indeed, the earnestness, purity of
+purpose, and simplicity of his mind stamp him as one of the world's
+great men.
+
+At Windsor he built a two-story observatory. In the wintertime every
+night when the stars could be seen, was sacred. No matter how cold the
+weather, he stood and watched; while down below, the faithful Caroline
+sat and recorded the observations that he called down to her.
+
+Caroline was his confidante, adviser, secretary, servant, friend. She
+had a telescope of her own, and when her brother did not need her
+services she swept the heavens on her own account for maverick comets.
+In her work she was eminently successful, and five comets at least are
+placed to her credit on the honor-roll by right of priority. Her
+discoveries were duly forwarded by her brother to the Royal Society for
+record.
+
+Later, the King of Prussia was to honor her with a gold medal, and
+several learned societies elected her an honorary member. When Herschel
+reached the discreet age of fifty he married the worthy Mrs. John Pitt,
+former wife of a London merchant. It is believed that the marriage was
+arranged by the King in person, out of his great love for both parties.
+At any rate Miss Burney thought so. Miss Burney was Keeper of the Royal
+Wardrobe at the same salary that Herschel had been receiving--two
+hundred pounds a year. She also took charge of the Court Gossip, with
+various volunteer assistants. "Gold, as well as stars, glitters for
+astronomers," said little Miss Burney. "Mrs. Pitt is very rich, meek,
+quiet, rather pretty and quite unobjectionable." But poor Caroline!
+
+It nearly broke her heart. William was her idol--she lived but for
+him--now she seemed to be replaced. She moved away into a modest cottage
+of her own, resolved that she would not be an encumbrance to any one.
+She thought she was going into a decline, and would not live long
+anyway--she was so pale and slight that Miss Burney said it took two of
+her to make a shadow.
+
+But we get a glimpse of Caroline's energy when we find her writing home
+explaining how she had just painted her house, inside and out, with her
+own hands.
+
+Things are never so bad as they seem. It was not very long before
+William was sending for Caroline to come and help him out with his
+mathematical calculations. Later, when a fine boy baby arrived in the
+Herschel solar system, Caroline forgave all and came to take care of
+what she called "the Herschel planetoid." She loved this baby as her
+own, and all the pent-up motherhood in her nature went out to the little
+"Sir John Herschel," the knighthood having been conferred on him by
+Caroline before he was a month old.
+
+Mrs. Herschel was beautiful and amiable, and she and Caroline became
+genuine sisters in spirit. Each had her own work to do; they were not in
+competition save in their love for the baby. As the boy grew, Caroline
+took upon herself the task of teaching him astronomy, quite to the
+amusement of the father and mother. Fanny Burney now comes with a little
+flung-off nebula to the effect that "Herschel is quite the happiest man
+in the kingdom." There is a most charming little biography of Caroline
+Herschel, written by the good wife of Sir John Herschel, wherein some
+very gentle foibles are laid bare, and where at the same time tribute is
+paid to a great and beautiful spirit. The idea that Caroline was not
+going to live long after the marriage of her brother was "greatly
+exaggerated"--she lived to be ninety-eight, a century lacking two years!
+Her mind was bright to the last--when ninety she sang at a concert given
+for the benefit of an old ladies' home. At ninety-six she danced a
+minuet with the King of Prussia, and requested that worthy not to
+introduce her as "the woman astronomer, because, you know, I was only
+the assistant of my brother!" William Herschel died in his eighty-fourth
+year, with his fame at full, honored, respected, beloved.
+
+Sir John Herschel, his son, was worthy to be called the son of his
+father. He was an active worker in the field of science--a strong, yet
+gentle man, with no jealousy nor whim in his nature. "His life was full
+of the docility of a sage and the innocence of a child."
+
+John Herschel died at Collingwood, May Eleventh, Eighteen Hundred
+Seventy-one, and his dust is now resting in Westminster Abbey, close by
+the grave of England's famous scholar, Sir Isaac Newton.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: CHARLES DARWIN]
+
+CHARLES DARWIN
+
+
+     I feel most deeply that this whole question of Creation is too
+     profound for human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the
+     mind of Newton! Let each man hope and believe what he can.
+
+     --_Charles Darwin to Asa Gray_
+
+     None have fought better, and none have been more fortunate, than
+     Charles Darwin. He found a great truth trodden underfoot, reviled
+     by bigots, and ridiculed by all the world; he lived long enough to
+     see it, chiefly by his own efforts, irrefragably established in
+     science, inseparably incorporated into the common thoughts of men.
+     What shall a man desire more than this?
+
+     --_Thomas Huxley, Address, April Twenty-seventh, Eighteen Hundred
+     Eighty-two_
+
+
+CHARLES DARWIN
+
+Evolution is at work everywhere, even in the matter of jokes. Once
+in the House of Commons, Benjamin Disraeli, who prided himself on his
+fine scholarship as well as on his Hyperion curl, interrupted a speaker
+and corrected him on a matter of history.
+
+"I would rather be a gentleman than a scholar!" the man replied. "My
+friend is seldom either," came the quick response.
+
+When Thomas Brackett Reed was Speaker of the House of Representatives, a
+member once took exception to a ruling of the "Czar," and having in mind
+Reed's supposed Presidential aspirations closed his protests with the
+thrust, "I would rather be right than President." "The gentleman will
+never be either," came the instant retort.
+
+But some years before the reign of the American Czar, Gladstone, Premier
+of England, said, "I would rather be right and believe in the Bible,
+than excite a body of curious, infidelic, so-called scientists to
+unbecoming wonder by tracing their ancestry to a troglodyte." And Huxley
+replied, "I, too, would rather be right--I would rather be right than
+Premier."
+
+Charles Darwin was a Gentle Man. He was the greatest naturalist of his
+time, and a more perfect gentleman never lived. His son Francis said: "I
+can not remember ever hearing my father utter an unkind or hasty word.
+If in his presence some one was being harshly criticized, he always
+thought of something to say in way of palliation and excuse."
+
+One of his companions on the "Beagle," who saw him daily for five years
+on that memorable trip, wrote: "A protracted sea-voyage is a most severe
+test of friendship, and Darwin was the only man on our ship, or that I
+ever heard of, who stood the ordeal. He never lost his temper or made an
+unkind remark."
+
+Captain Fitz-Roy of the "Beagle" was a disciplinarian, and absolute in
+his authority, as a sea-captain must be. The ship had just left one of
+the South American ports where the captain had gone ashore and been
+entertained by a coffee-planter. On this plantation all the work was
+done by slaves, who, no doubt, were very well treated.
+
+The captain thought that negroes well cared for were very much better
+off than if free. And further, he related how the owner had called up
+various slaves and had the Captain ask them if they wished their
+freedom, and the answer was always, "No."
+
+Darwin interposed by asking the Captain what he thought the answer of a
+slave was worth when being interrogated in the presence of his owner.
+
+Here Fitz-Roy flew into a passion, berating the volunteer naturalist,
+and suggested a taste of the rope's end in lieu of logic. Young Darwin
+made no reply, and seemingly did not hear the uncalled-for chidings.
+
+In a few hours a sailor handed him a note from Captain Fitz-Roy, full of
+abject apology for having so forgotten himself. Darwin was then but
+twenty-two years old, but the poise and patience of the young man won
+the respect and then the admiration and finally the affection of every
+man on board that ship. This attitude of kindness, patience and
+good-will formed the strongest attribute of Darwin's nature, and to
+these godlike qualities he was heir from a royal line of ancestry. No
+man was ever more blest--more richly endowed by his parents with love
+and intellect--than Darwin. And no man ever repaid the debt of love more
+fully--all that he had received he gave again.
+
+Darwin is the Saint of Science. He proves the possible; and when mankind
+shall have evolved to a point where such men will be the rule, not the
+exception--as one in a million--then, and not until then, can we say we
+are a civilized people.
+
+Charles Darwin was not only the greatest thinker of his time (with
+possibly one exception), but in his simplicity and earnestness, in his
+limpid love for truth--his perfect willingness to abandon his opinion if
+he were found to be wrong--in all these things he proved himself the
+greatest man of his time.
+
+Yet it is absurd to try to separate the scientist from the father,
+neighbor and friend. Darwin's love for truth as a scientist was what
+lifted him out of the fog of whim and prejudice and set him apart as a
+man.
+
+He had no time to hate. He had no time to indulge in foolish debates and
+struggle for rhetorical mastery--he had his work to do.
+
+That statesmen like Gladstone misquoted him, and churchmen like
+Wilberforce reviled him--these things were as naught to Darwin--his face
+was toward the sunrising. To be able to know the truth, and to state it,
+were vital issues: whether the truth was accepted by this man or that
+was quite immaterial, except possibly to the man himself. There was no
+resentment in Darwin's nature.
+
+Only love is immortal--hate is a negative condition. It is love that
+animates, beautifies, benefits, refines, creates. So firmly was this
+truth fixed in the heart of Darwin that throughout his long life the
+only things he feared and shunned were hate and prejudice. "They hinder
+and blind a man to truth," he said--"a scientist must only love."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emerson has been called the culminating flower of seven generations of
+New England culture. Charles Darwin seems a similar culminating product.
+
+Surely he showed rare judgment in the selection of his grandparents. His
+grandfather on his father's side was Doctor Erasmus Darwin, a poet, a
+naturalist, and a physician so discerning that he once wrote: "The
+science of medicine will some time resolve itself into a science of
+prevention rather than a matter of cure. Man was made to be well, and
+the best medicine I know of is an active and intelligent interest in the
+world of Nature."
+
+Erasmus Darwin had the felicity to have his biography written in German,
+and he also has his place in the "Encyclopedia Britannica" quite
+independent of that of his gifted grandson.
+
+Charles Darwin's grandfather on his mother's side was Josiah Wedgwood,
+one of the most versatile of men. He was as fine in spirit as those
+exquisite designs by Flaxman that you will see today on the Wedgwood
+pottery. Josiah Wedgwood was a businessman--an organizer, and he was
+beyond this, an artist, a naturalist, a sociologist and a lover of his
+race. His portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds reveals a man of rare
+intelligence, and his biography is as interesting as a novel by Kipling.
+His space in the "Encyclopedia Britannica" is even more important than
+that occupied by his dear friend and neighbor, Doctor Erasmus Darwin.
+The hand of the Potter did not shake when Josiah Wedgwood was made.
+Josiah Wedgwood and Doctor Darwin had mutually promised their children
+in marriage. Wedgwood became rich and he made numerous other men rich,
+and he enriched the heart and the intellect of England by setting before
+it beautiful things, and by living an earnest, active and beautiful
+life.
+
+Josiah Wedgwood coined the word "queensware." He married his cousin,
+Sarah Wedgwood. Their daughter, Susannah Wedgwood, married Doctor Robert
+Darwin, and Charles Darwin, their son, married Emma Wedgwood, a daughter
+of Josiah Wedgwood the Second. Caroline Darwin, a sister of Charles
+Darwin, married Josiah Wedgwood the Third. Let those who have the time
+work out this origin of species in detail and show us the relationship
+of the Darwins and Wedgwoods. And I hope we'll hear no more about the
+folly of cousins marrying, when Charles Darwin is before us as an
+example of natural selection.
+
+From his mother Darwin inherited those traits of gentleness, insight,
+purity of purpose, patience and persistency that set him apart as a
+marked man.
+
+The father of Charles Darwin, Doctor Robert Darwin, was a most
+successful physician of Shrewsbury.
+
+His marriage to Susannah Wedgwood filled his heart, and also placed him
+on a firm financial footing, and he seemed to take his choice of
+patients. Doctor Darwin was a man devoted to his family, respected by
+his neighbors, and he lived long enough to see his son recognized,
+greatly to his surprise, as one of England's foremost scientists.
+
+Charles Darwin in youth was rather slow in intellect, and in form and
+feature far from handsome. Physically he was never strong. In
+disposition he was gentle and most lovable. His mother died when he was
+eight years of age, and his three older sisters then mothered him.
+Between them all existed a tie of affection, very gentle, and very firm.
+
+The girls knew that Charles would become an eminent man--just how they
+could not guess--but he would be a leader of men: they felt it in their
+hearts. It was all the beautiful dream that the mother has for her babe
+as she sings to the man-child a lullaby as the sun goes down.
+
+In his autobiographical sketch, written when he was past sixty, Darwin
+mentions this faith and love of his sisters, and says, "Personally, I
+never had much ambition, but when at college I felt that I must work, if
+for no other reason, so as not to disappoint my sisters."
+
+At school Charles was considerable of a grubber: he worked hard because
+he felt that it was his duty. English boarding-schools have always
+taught things out of season, and very often have succeeded in making
+learning wholly repugnant. Perhaps that is the reason why nine men out
+of ten who go to college cease all study as soon as they stand on "the
+threshold," looking at life ere they seize it by the tail and snap its
+head off. To them education is one thing and life another.
+
+But with many headaches and many heartaches Charles got through
+Cambridge and then was sent to attend lectures at the University of
+Edinburgh. Of one lecturer in Scotland he says, "The good man was really
+more dull than his books, and how I escaped without all science being
+utterly distasteful to me I hardly know." To Cambridge, Darwin owed
+nothing but the association with other minds, yet this was much, and
+almost justifies the college. "Send your sons to college and the boys
+will educate them," said Emerson.
+
+The most beneficent influence for Darwin at Cambridge was the friendship
+between himself and Professor Henslow. Darwin became known as "the man
+who walks with Henslow." The professor taught botany, and took his
+classes on tramps a-field and on barge rides down the river, giving
+out-of-door lectures on the way. This commonsense way of teaching
+appealed to Darwin greatly, and although he did not at Cambridge take up
+botany as a study, yet when Henslow had an out-of-door class he usually
+managed to go along.
+
+In his autobiography Darwin gives great credit to this very gentle and
+simple soul, who, although not being great as a thinker, yet could
+animate and arouse a pleasurable interest.
+
+Henslow was once admonished by the faculty for his lack of discipline,
+and young Darwin came near getting himself into difficulty by declaring,
+"Professor Henslow teaches his pupils in love; the others think they
+know a better way!"
+
+The hope of his father and sisters was that Charles Darwin would become
+a clergyman. For the army he had no taste whatsoever, and at twenty-one
+the only thing seemed to be the Church. Not that the young man was
+filled with religious zeal--far from that--but one must, you know, do
+something. Up to this time he had studied in a desultory way; he had
+also dreamed and tramped the fields. He had done considerable
+grouse-shooting and had developed a little too much skill in that
+particular line.
+
+To paraphrase Herbert Spencer, to shoot fairly well is a manly
+accomplishment, but to shoot too well is evidence of an ill-spent youth.
+Doctor Darwin was having fears that his son was going to be an idle
+sportsman, and he was urging the divinity-school.
+
+The real fact was that sportsmanship was already becoming distasteful to
+young Darwin, and his hunting expeditions were now largely carried on
+with a botanist's drum and a geologist's hammer.
+
+But to the practical Doctor these things were no better than the gun--it
+was idling, anyway. Natural History as a pastime was excellent, and
+sportsmanship for exercise and recreation had its place, but the
+business of life must not be neglected--Charles should get himself to a
+divinity-school, and quickly, too.
+
+Things urged become repellent; and Charles was groping around for an
+excuse when a letter came from Professor Henslow, saying, among other
+things, that the Government was about to send a ship around the world on
+a scientific surveying tour, especially to map the coast of Patagonia
+and other parts of South America and Australia. A volunteer naturalist
+was wanted--board and passage free, but the volunteer was to supply his
+own clothes and instruments.
+
+The proposition gave Charles a great thrill: he gave a gulp and a gasp
+and went in search of his father. The father saw nothing in the plan
+beyond the fact that the Government was going to get several years' work
+out of some foolish young man, for nothing--gadzooks!
+
+Charles insisted--he wanted to go! He urged that on this trip he would
+be to but very little expense. "You say I have cost you much, but the
+fellow who can spend money on board ship must be very clever." "But you
+are a very clever young man, they say," the father replied. That night
+Charles again insisted on discussing the matter. The father was
+exasperated and exclaimed, "Go and find me one sane man who will endorse
+your wild-goose chase and I will give my consent."
+
+Charles said no more--he would find that "sane man." But he knew
+perfectly well that if any average person endorsed the plan his father
+would declare the man was insane, and the proof of it lay in the fact
+that he endorsed the wild-goose chase.
+
+In the morning Charles started of his own accord to see Henslow. Henslow
+would endorse the trip, but both parties knew that Doctor Darwin would
+not accept a mere college professor as sane. Charles went home and
+tramped thirty miles across the country to the home of his uncle, Josiah
+Wedgwood the Second. There he knew he had an advocate for anything he
+might wish, in the person of his fair cousin, Emma. These two laid their
+heads together, made a plan and stalked their prey.
+
+They cornered Josiah the Second after dinner and showed him how it was
+the chance of a lifetime--this trip on H.M.S. the "Beagle"! Charles
+wasn't adapted for a clergyman, anyway; he wanted to be a ship-captain,
+a traveler, a discoverer, a scientist, an author like Sir John
+Mandeville, or something else. Josiah the Second had but to speak the
+word and Doctor Darwin would be silenced, and the recommendation of so
+great a man as Josiah Wedgwood would secure the place.
+
+Josiah the Second laughed--then he looked sober. He agreed with the
+proposition--it was the chance of a lifetime. He would go back home with
+Charles and put the Doctor straight. And he did.
+
+And on the personal endorsement of Josiah Wedgwood and Professor
+Henslow, Charles Robert Darwin was duly booked as Volunteer Naturalist
+in Her Majesty's service.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Captain Fitz-Roy of the "Beagle" liked Charles Darwin until he began to
+look him over with a very professional eye. Then he declared his nose
+was too large and was not rightly shaped; besides, he was too tall for
+his weight: outside of these points the Volunteer would answer. On
+talking with young Darwin further, the Captain liked him better, and he
+waived all imperfections, although no promise was made that they would
+be remedied. In fact, Captain Fitz-Roy liked Charles so well that he
+invited him to share his own cabin and mess with him. The sailors, on
+seeing this, touched respectful forefingers to their caps and began
+addressing the Volunteer as "Sir."
+
+The "Beagle" sailed on December Twenty-seven, Eighteen Hundred
+Thirty-one, and it was fully four years and ten months before Charles
+Darwin saw England again. The trip decided the business of Darwin for
+the rest of his life, and thereby an epoch was worked in the upward and
+onward march of the race.
+
+Captain Fitz-Roy of the British Navy was but twenty-three years old. He
+was a draftsman, a geographer, a mathematician and a navigator. He had
+sailed around the world as a plain tar, and taken his kicks and cuffs
+with good grace. At the Portsmouth Naval School he had won a gold medal
+for proficiency in study, and another medal had been given him for
+heroism in leaping from a sailing-ship into the sea to save a drowning
+sailor.
+
+Let us be fair--the tight little island has produced men. To evolve
+these few good men she may have produced many millions of the spawn of
+earth, but let the fact stand--England has produced men. Here was a
+beardless youth, slight in form, silent by habit, but so well thought of
+by his Government that he was given charge of a ship, five officers, two
+surgeons and forty-one picked men to go around the world and make
+measurements of certain coral-reefs, and map the dangerous coasts of
+Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.
+
+The ship was provisioned for two years, but the orders were, "Do the
+work, no matter how long it may take, and your drafts on the Government
+will be honored."
+
+Captain Fitz-Roy was a man of decision: he knew just where he wanted to
+go, and what there was to do. He was to measure and map dreary wastes of
+tossing tide, and to do the task so accurately that it would never have
+to be done again: his maps were to remain forever a solace, a safety and
+a security to the men who go down to the sea in ships.
+
+England has certainly produced men--and Fitz-Roy was one of them.
+Fitz-Roy is now known to us, not for his maps which have passed into the
+mutual wealth of the world, but because he took on this trip, merely as
+an afterthought, a volunteer naturalist.
+
+Before the "Beagle" sailed, Captain Fitz-Roy and young Mr. Darwin went
+down to Portsmouth, and the Captain showed him the ship. The Captain
+took pains to explain the worst. It was to be at least two years of
+close, unremitting toil. It was no pleasure-excursion--there were no
+amusements provided, no cards, no wine on the table; the fare was to be
+simple in the extreme. This way of putting the matter was most
+attractive to Darwin--Fitz-Roy became a hero in his eyes at once. The
+Captain's manner inspired much confidence--he was a man who did not have
+to be amused or cajoled. "You will be left alone to do your work," said
+Fitz-Roy to Darwin, "and I must have the cabin to myself when I ask for
+it." And that settled it. Life aboard ship is like life in jail. It
+means freedom, freedom from interruption--you have your evenings to
+yourself, and the days as well. Darwin admired every man on board the
+ship, and most of all, the man who selected them, and so wrote home to
+his sisters. He admired the men because each was intent on doing his
+work, and each one seemed to assume that his own particular work was
+really the most important.
+
+Second Officer Wickham was entrusted to see that the ship was in good
+order, and so thorough was he that he once said to Darwin, who was
+constantly casting his net for specimens, "If I were the skipper, I'd
+soon have you and your beastly belittlement out of this ship with all
+your devilish, damned mess." And Darwin, much amused, wrote this down in
+his journal, and added, "Wickham is a most capital fellow." The
+discipline and system of ship-life, the necessity of working in a small
+space, and of improving the calm weather, and seizing every moment when
+on shore, all tended to work in Darwin's nature exactly the habit that
+was needed to make him the greatest naturalist of his age.
+
+Every sort of life that lived in the sea was new and wonderful to him.
+Very early on this trip Darwin began to work on the "Cirripedia"
+(barnacles), and we hear of Captain Fitz-Roy obligingly hailing
+homeward-bound ships, and putting out a small boat, rowing alongside,
+asking politely, to the astonishment of the party hailed, "Would you
+oblige us with a few barnacles off the bottom of your ship?" All this
+that the Volunteer, who was dubbed the "Flycatcher," might have
+something upon which to work.
+
+When on shore a sailor was detailed by Captain Fitz-Roy just to attend
+the "Flycatcher," with a bag to carry the specimens, geological,
+botanical and zoological, and a cabin-boy was set apart to write notes.
+This boy, who afterward became Governor of Queens and a K.C.B., used
+in after years to boast a bit, and rightfully, of his share in producing
+"The Origin of Species." When urged to smoke, Darwin replied, "I am not
+making any new necessities for myself."
+
+When the weather was rough the "Flycatcher" was sick, much to the
+delight of Wickham; but if the ship was becalmed, Darwin came out and
+gloried in the sunshine, and in his work of dissecting, labeling, and
+writing memoranda and data. The sailors might curse the weather--he did
+not. Thus passed the days. At each stop many specimens were secured, and
+these were to be sorted and sifted out at leisure.
+
+On shore the Captain had his work to do, and it was only after a year
+that Darwin accidentally discovered that the sailor who was sent to
+carry his specimens was always armed with knife and revolver, and his
+orders were not so much to carry what Wickham called, "the damned
+plunder," as to see that no harm befell the "Flycatcher."
+
+Fitz-Roy's interest in the scientific work was only general: longitude
+and latitude, his twenty-four chronometers, his maps and constant
+soundings, with minute records, kept his time occupied.
+
+For Darwin and his specimens, however, he had a constantly growing
+respect, and when the long five-year trip was ended, Darwin realized
+that the gruff and grim Captain was indeed his friend. Captain Fitz-Roy
+had trouble with everybody on board in turn, thus proving his
+impartiality; but when parting was nigh, tears came to his eyes as he
+embraced Darwin, and said, with prophetic yet broken words, "The
+'Beagle's' voyage may be remembered more through you than me--I hope it
+will be so!" And Darwin, too moved for speech, said nothing except
+through the pressure of his hand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The idea of evolution took a firm hold upon the mind of Darwin, in an
+instant, one day while on board the "Beagle." From that very hour the
+thought of the mutability of species was the one controlling impulse of
+his life.
+
+On his return from the trip around the world he found himself in
+possession of an immense mass of specimens and much data bearing
+directly upon the point that creation is still going on.
+
+That he could ever sort, sift and formulate his evidence on his own
+account, he never at this time imagined. Indeed, about all he thought he
+could do was to present his notes and specimens to some scientific
+society, in the hope that some of its members would go ahead and use the
+material.
+
+With this thought in mind he began to open correspondence with several
+of the universities and with various professors of science, and to his
+dismay found that no one was willing even to read his notes, much less
+house, prepare for preservation, and index his thousands of specimens.
+
+He read papers before different scientific societies, however, from time
+to time, and gradually in London it dawned upon the few thinkers that
+this modest and low-voiced young man was doing a little thinking on his
+own account. One man to whom he had offered the specimens bluntly
+explained to Darwin that his specimens and ideas were valuable to no one
+but himself, and it was folly to try to give such things away. Ideas
+are like children and should be cared for by their parents, and
+specimens are for the collector.
+
+Seeing the depression of the young man, this friend offered to present
+the matter to the Secretary of the Exchequer. Everything can be done
+when the right man takes hold of it: the sum of one thousand pounds was
+appropriated by the Treasury for Charles Darwin's use in bringing out a
+Government report of the voyage of the "Beagle." And Darwin set to work,
+refreshed, rejoiced and encouraged. He was living in London in modest
+quarters, solitary and alone. He was not handsome, and he lacked the
+dash and flash that make a success in society. On a trip to his old
+home, he walked across the country to see his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood the
+Second.
+
+When he left it was arranged that he should return in a month and marry
+his cousin, Emma Wedgwood. And it was all so done.
+
+One commentator said he married his cousin because he didn't know any
+other woman that would have him. But none was so unkind as to say that
+he married her in order to get rid of her, yet Henslow wondered how he
+ceased wooing science long enough to woo the lady.
+
+Doubtless the parents of both parties had a little to do with the
+arrangement, and in this instance it was beautiful and well. Darwin was
+married to his work, and no such fallacy as marrying a woman in order
+to educate her filled his mind.
+
+His wife was his mental mate, his devoted helper and friend.
+
+It is no small matter for a wife to be her husband's friend.
+
+Mrs. Darwin had no small aspirations of her own. She flew the futile
+Four-o'Clock and made no flannel nightgowns for Fijis. Twenty years
+after his marriage, Darwin wrote thus: "It is probably as you say--I
+have done an enormous amount of work. And this was only possible through
+the devotion of my wife, who, ignoring every idea of pleasure and
+comfort for herself, arranged in a thousand ways to give me joy and
+rest, peace and most valuable inspiration and assistance. If I
+occasionally lost faith in myself, she most certainly never did. Only
+two hours a day could I work, and these to her were sacred. She guarded
+me as a mother guards her babe, and I look back now and see how
+hopelessly undone I should have been without her."
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Forty-two, Darwin and his wife moved to the village
+of Down, County of Kent. The place where they lived was a rambling old
+stone house with ample garden. The country was rough and unbroken, and
+one might have imagined he was a thousand miles from London, instead of
+twenty.
+
+There were no aristocratic neighbors, no society to speak of. With the
+plain farmers and simple folk of the village Darwin was on good terms.
+He became treasurer of the local improvement society, and thereby was
+serenaded once a year by a brass band. We hear of the good old village
+rector once saying, "Mr. Darwin knows botany better than anybody this
+side of Kew; and although I am sorry to say that he seldom goes to
+church, yet he is a good neighbor and almost a model citizen." Together
+the clergyman and his neighbor discussed the merits of climbing roses,
+morning-glories and sweet-peas. Darwin met all and every one on terms of
+absolute equality, and never forced his scientific hypotheses upon any
+one. In fact, no one in the village imagined this quiet country
+gentleman in the dusty gray clothes that matched his full iron-gray
+beard was destined for a place in Westminster Abbey--no, not even
+himself!
+
+Darwin's father, seeing that the Government had recognized him, and that
+all the scientific societies of London were quite willing to do as much,
+settled on him an allowance that was ample for his simple wants.
+
+On the death of Doctor Darwin, Charles became possessed of an
+inheritance that brought him a yearly income of a little over five
+hundred pounds. Children came to bless this happy household--seven in
+all. With these Darwin was both comrade and teacher. Two hours a day
+were sacred to science, but outside of this time the children made the
+study their own, and littered the place with their collections gathered
+on heath and dale.
+
+The recognition of the "holy time" was strong in the minds of the
+children, so no prohibitions were needed. One daughter has written in
+familiar way of once wanting to go into her father's study for a
+forgotten pair of scissors. It was the "holy time," and she thought she
+could not wait, so she took off her shoes and entered in stocking feet,
+hoping to be unobserved. Her father was working at his microscope: he
+saw her, reached out one arm as she passed, drew her to him and kissed
+her forehead. The little girl never again trespassed--how could she,
+with the father that gave her only love! That there was no sternness in
+this recognition of the value of the working hours is further indicated
+in that little Francis, aged six, once put his head in the door and
+offered the father a sixpence if he would come out and play in the
+garden.
+
+For several years Darwin was village magistrate. Most of the cases
+brought before him were either for poaching or drunkenness. "He always
+seemed to be trying to find an excuse for the prisoner, and usually
+succeeded," says his son.
+
+One time, when a prosecuting attorney complained because he had
+discharged a prisoner, Darwin, who might have fined the impudent
+attorney for contempt of court, merely said: "Why, he's as good as we
+are. If tempted in the same way I am sure that I would have done as he
+has done. We can't blame a man for doing what he has to do!" This was
+poor reasoning from a legal point of view. Darwin afterward admitted
+that he didn't hear much of the evidence, as his mind was full of
+orchids, but the fellow looked sorry, and he really couldn't punish
+anybody who had simply made a mistake. The local legal lights gradually
+lost faith in Magistrate Darwin's peculiar brand of justice; he hadn't
+much respect for law, and once when a lawyer cited him the criminal code
+he said, "Tut, tut, that was made a hundred years ago!" Then he fined
+the man five shillings, and paid the fine himself, when he should have
+sent him to the workhouse for six months.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The men who have most benefited the world have, almost without
+exception, been looked down upon by the priestly class. That is to say,
+the men upon whose tombs society now carves the word Savior were
+outcasts and criminals in their day.
+
+In a society where the priest is regarded as the mouthpiece of divinity,
+and therefore the highest type of man, the artist, the inventor, the
+discoverer, the genius, the man of truth, has always been regarded as a
+criminal. Society advances as it doubts the priest, distrusts his
+oracles, and loses faith in his institution.
+
+In the priest, at first, was deposited all human knowledge, and what he
+did not know he pretended to know. He was the guardian of mind and
+morals, and the cure of souls. To question him was to die here and be
+damned for eternity.
+
+The problem of civilization has been to get the truth past the preacher
+to the people: he has forever barred and blocked the way, and until he
+was shorn of his temporal power there was no hope. The prisons were
+first made for those who doubted the priest; behind and beneath every
+episcopal residence were dungeons; the ferocious and delicate tortures
+that reached every physical and mental nerve were his. His anathemas and
+curses were always quickly turned upon the strong men of mountain or sea
+who dared live natural lives, said what they thought was truth, or did
+what they deemed was right. Science is a search for truth, but theology
+is a clutch for power.
+
+Nothing is so distasteful to a priest as freedom: a happy, exuberant,
+fearless, self-sufficient and radiant man he both feared and abhorred. A
+free soul was regarded by the Church as one to be dealt with. The priest
+has ever put a premium on pretense and hypocrisy. Nothing recommended a
+man more than humility and the acknowledgment that he was a worm of the
+dust. The ability to do and dare was in itself considered a proof of
+depravity.
+
+The education of the young has been monopolized by priests in order to
+perpetuate the fallacies of theology, and all endeavor to put education
+on a footing of usefulness and utility has been fought inch by inch.
+
+Andrew D. White, in his book, "The Warfare of Science and Religion," has
+calmly and without heat sketched the war that Science has had to make to
+reach the light. Slowly, stubbornly, insolently, theology has fought
+Truth step by step--but always retreating, taking refuge first behind
+one subterfuge, then another. When an alleged fact was found to be a
+fallacy, we were told it was not a literal fact, simply a spiritual one.
+All of theology's weapons have been taken from her and placed in the
+Museum of Horrors--all save one, namely, social ostracism. And this
+consists in a refusal to invite Science to indulge in cream-puffs.
+
+We smile, knowing that the man who now successfully defies theology is
+the only one she really, yet secretly, admires. If he does not run after
+her, she holds true the poetic unities by running after him. Mankind is
+emancipated (or partially so).
+
+Darwin's fame rests, for the most part, on two books, "The Origin of
+Species" and "The Descent of Man."
+
+Yet before these were published he had issued "A Journal of Research
+into Geology and Natural History," "The Zoology of the Voyage of the
+'Beagle,'" "A Treatise on Coral Reefs, Volcanic Islands, Geological
+Observations," and "A Monograph of the Cirripedia." Had Darwin died
+before "The Origin of Species" was published, he would have been famous
+among scientific men, although it was the abuse of theologians on the
+publication of "The Origin of Species" that really made him
+world-famous.
+
+Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin's chief competitor said that "A Monograph
+on the Cirripedia" is enough upon which to found a deathless reputation.
+Darwin was equally eminent in Geology, Botany and Zoology.
+
+On November Twenty-fourth, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, was published
+"The Origin of Species." Murray had hesitated about accepting the work,
+but on the earnest solicitation of Sir Charles Lyell, who gave his
+personal guarantee to the publisher against loss, quite unknown to
+Darwin, twelve hundred copies of the book were printed. The edition was
+sold in one day, and who was surprised most, the author or the
+publisher, it is difficult to say.
+
+Up to this time theology had stood solidly on the biblical assertion
+that mankind had sprung from one man and one woman, and that in the
+beginning every species was fixed and immutable. Aristotle, three
+hundred years before Christ, had suggested that, by cross-fertilization
+and change of environment, new species had been and were being evoked.
+But the Church had declared Aristotle a heathen, and in every school and
+college of Christendom it was taught that the world and everything in it
+was created in six days of twenty-four hours each, and that this
+occurred four thousand and four years before Christ, on May Tenth.
+
+Those who doubted or disputed this statement had no standing in society,
+and in truth, until the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, were in
+actual danger of death--heresy and treason being usually regarded as the
+same thing.
+
+Erasmus Darwin had taught that species were not immutable, but his words
+were so veiled in the language of poesy that they naturally went
+unchallenged. But now the grandson of Doctor Erasmus Darwin came forward
+with the net result of thirty years' continuous work. "The Origin of
+Species" did not attack any one's religious belief--in fact, in it the
+biblical account of Creation is not once referred to. It was a calm,
+judicial record of close study and observation, that seemed to prove
+that life began in very lowly forms, and that it has constantly
+ascended and differentiated, new forms and new species being continually
+created, and that the work of creation still goes on.
+
+In the preface to "The Origin of Species" Darwin gives Alfred Russel
+Wallace credit for coming to the same conclusion as himself, and states
+that both had been at work on the same idea for more than a score of
+years, but each working separately, unknown to the other.
+
+Andrew D. White says that the publication of Charles Darwin's book was
+like plowing into an ant-hill. The theologians, rudely awakened from
+comfort and repose, swarmed out angry, wrathful and confused. The air
+was charged with challenges; and soggy sermons, books, pamphlets,
+brochures and reviews, all were flying at the head of poor Darwin. The
+questions that he had anticipated and answered at great length were
+flung off by men who had neither read his book nor expected an answer.
+The idea that man had evolved from a lower form of animal especially was
+considered immensely funny, and jokes about "monkey ancestry" came from
+almost every pulpit, convulsing the pews with laughter.
+
+In passing, it may be well to note that Darwin nowhere says that man
+descended from a monkey. He does, however, affirm his belief that they
+had a common ancestor. One branch of the family took to the plains, and
+evolved into men, and the other branch remained in the woods and are
+monkeys still. The expression, "the missing link," is nowhere used by
+Darwin--that was a creation of one of his critics.
+
+Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, summed up the argument against Darwinism
+in the "Quarterly Review," by declaring that "Darwin was guilty of an
+attempt to limit the power of God"; that his book "contradicts the
+Bible"; that "it dishonors Nature." And in a speech before the British
+Association for the Advancement of Science, where Darwin was not
+present, the Bishop repeated his assertions, and turning to Huxley,
+asked if he were really descended from a monkey, and if so, was it on
+his father's or his mother's side!
+
+Huxley sat silent, refusing to reply, but the audience began to clamor,
+and Huxley slowly arose, and calmly but forcibly said: "I assert, and I
+repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his
+grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in
+recalling, it would be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect,
+who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges
+into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only
+to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of
+his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digression and a
+skilful appeal to religious prejudices." Captain Fitz-Roy, who was
+present at this meeting, was also called for.
+
+He was now Admiral Fitz-Roy, and felt compelled to uphold his employer,
+the State, so he upheld the State Religion and backed up the Bishop of
+Oxford in his emptiness. "I often had occasion on board the 'Beagle' to
+reprove Mr. Darwin for his disbelief in the First Chapter of Genesis,"
+solemnly said the Admiral. And Francis Darwin writes it down without
+comment, probably to show how much the Volunteer Naturalist was helped,
+aided and inspired by the Captain of the Expedition.
+
+But the reply of Huxley was a shot heard round the world, and for the
+most part the echo was passed along by the enemy.
+
+Huxley had insulted the Church, they said, and the adherents of the
+Mosaic account took the attitude of outraged and injured innocence.
+
+As for himself, Darwin said nothing. He ceased to attend the meetings of
+the scientific societies, for fear that he would be drawn into debate,
+and while he felt a sincere gratitude for Huxley's friendship, he
+deprecated the stern rebuke to the Bishop of Oxford. "It will arouse the
+opposition to greater unreason," he said. And this was exactly what
+happened.
+
+Even the English Catholics took sides with Wilberforce, the Protestant,
+and Cardinal Manning organized a society "to fight this new, so-called
+science that declares there is no God and that Adam was an ape."
+
+Even the Non-Conformists and Jews came in, and there was the very
+peculiar spectacle witnessed of the Church of England, the
+Non-Conformists, the Catholics and the Jews aroused and standing as one
+man, against one quiet villager who remained at home and said, "If my
+book can not stand the bombardment, why then it deserves to go down and
+to be forgotten."
+
+Spurgeon declared that Darwinism was more dangerous than open and avowed
+infidelity, since "the one motive of the whole book is to dethrone God."
+
+Rabbi Hirschberg wrote, "Darwin's volume is plausible to the unthinking
+person; but a deeper insight shows a mephitic desire to overthrow the
+Mosaic books and to bury Judaism under a mass of fanciful rubbish."
+
+In America Darwin had no more persistent critic than the Reverend DeWitt
+Talmage. For ten years Doctor Talmage scarcely preached a sermon without
+making reference to "monkey ancestry" and "baboon unbelievers."
+
+The New York "Christian Advocate" declared, "Darwin is endeavoring to
+becloud and befog the whole question of truth, and his book will be of
+short life."
+
+An eminent Catholic physician and writer, Doctor Constantine James,
+wrote a book of three hundred pages called "Darwinism, or the Man-Ape."
+A copy of Doctor James' book being sent to Pope Pius the Ninth, the Pope
+acknowledged it in a personal letter, thanking the author for his
+"masterly refutations of the vagaries of this man Darwin, wherein the
+Creator is left out of all things and man proclaims himself independent,
+his own king, his own priest, his own God--then degrading man to the
+level of the brute by declaring he had the same origin, and this origin
+was lifeless matter. Could folly and pride go further than to degrade
+Science into a vehicle for throwing contumely and disrespect on our holy
+religion!"
+
+This makes rather interesting reading now for those who believe in the
+infallibility of popes. So well did Doctor James' book sell, coupled
+with the approbation of the Pope, that as late as Eighteen Hundred
+Eighty-two a new and enlarged edition made its appearance, and the
+author was made a member of the Papal Order of Saint Sylvester. It is
+quite needless to add that those who read Doctor James' book refuting
+Darwin had never read Darwin, since "The Origin of Species" was placed
+on the "Index Expurgatorius" in Eighteen Hundred Sixty. Some years
+after, when it was discovered that Darwin had written other books, these
+were likewise honored.
+
+The book on barnacles being called to the attention of the Censor, that
+worthy exclaimed, "Some new heresy, I dare say--put it on the 'Index!'"
+And it was so done.
+
+The success of Doctor James' book reveals the popularity of the form of
+reasoning that digests the refutation first, and the original
+proposition not at all.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Seventy-five, Gladstone in an address at Liverpool
+said, "Upon the ground of what is called evolution, God is relieved from
+the labor of creation and of governing the universe."
+
+Herbert Spencer called Gladstone's attention to the fact that Sir Isaac
+Newton, with his law of gravitation and the physical science of
+astronomy, was open to the same charge.
+
+Gladstone then took refuge in the "Contemporary Review," and retreated
+in a cloud of words that had nothing to do with the subject.
+
+Thomas Carlyle, who has facetiously been called a liberal thinker, had
+not the patience to discuss Darwin's book seriously, but grew red in the
+face and hissed in falsetto when it was even mentioned. He wrote of
+Darwin as "the apostle of dirt," and said, "He thinks his grandfather
+was a chimpanzee, and I suppose he is right--leastwise, I am not the one
+to deprive him of the honor."
+
+Scathing criticisms were uttered on Darwin's ideas, both on the platform
+and in print, by Doctor Noah Porter of Yale, Doctor Hodge of Princeton,
+and Doctor Tayler Lewis of Union College. Agassiz, the man who was
+regarded as the foremost scientist in America, thought he had to choose
+between orthodoxy and Darwinism, and he chose orthodoxy. His gifted son
+tried to rescue his father from the grip of prejudice, and later
+endeavored to free his name from the charge that he could not change
+his mind, but alas! Louis Agassiz's words were expressed in print, and
+widely circulated.
+
+There were two men in America whose names stand out like beacon-lights
+because they had the courage to speak up loud and clear for Charles
+Darwin while the pack was baying the loudest. These men were Doctor Asa
+Gray, who influenced the Appletons to publish an American edition of
+"The Origin of Species," and Professor Edward L. Youmans, who gave up
+his own brilliant lecture work in order that he might stand by Darwin,
+Spencer, Huxley and Wallace.
+
+For the man who was known as "a Darwinian" there was no place in the
+American Lyceum. Shut out from addressing the public by word of mouth,
+Youmans founded a magazine that he might express himself, and he fired a
+monthly broadside from his "Popular Science Monthly." And it is good to
+remember that the faith of Youmans was not without its reward. He lived
+to see his periodical grow from a confessed failure--a bill of expense
+that took his monthly salary to maintain--to a paying property that made
+its owner passing rich.
+
+Gray, too, outlived the charge of infidelity, and was not forced to
+resign his position as Professor at Harvard, as was freely prophesied he
+would.
+
+As for Darwin himself, he stood the storm of misunderstanding and abuse
+without scorn or resentment.
+
+"Truth must fight its way," he said; "and this gauntlet of criticism is
+all for the best. What is true in my book will survive, and that which
+is error will be blown away as chaff." He was neither exalted by praise
+nor cast down by censure. For Huxley, Lyell, Hooker, Spencer, Wallace
+and Asa Gray he had a great and profound love--what they said affected
+him deeply, and their steadfast kindness at times touched him to tears.
+For the great, seething, outside world that had not thought along
+abstruse scientific lines, and could not, he cared little.
+
+"How can we expect them to see as we do," he wrote to Gray; "it has
+taken me thirty years of toil and research to come to these conclusions.
+To have the unthinking masses accept all that I say would be calamity:
+this opposition is a winnowing process, and all a part of the Law of
+Evolution that works for good."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For forty years Darwin lived in the same house at Down, in the same
+quiet, simple way. Here he lived and worked, and the world gradually
+came to him, figuratively and literally. Gradually it dawned upon the
+theologians that a God who could set in motion natural laws that worked
+with beneficent and absolute regularity was just as great as if He had
+made everything at once and then stopped.
+
+The miracle of evolution is just as sublime as the miracle of Adam's
+deep sleep and the making of a woman out of a man's rib. The faith of
+the scientist who sees order, regularity and unfailing law is quite as
+great as that of a preacher who believes everything he reads in a book.
+The scientist is a man with faith, plus.
+
+When Darwin died, in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-two, Darwinism and
+infidelity were words no longer synonymous.
+
+The discrepancies and inconsistencies of the theories of Darwin were
+seen by him as by his critics, and he was ever willing to admit the
+doubt. None of his disciples was as ready to modify his opinions as he.
+"We must beware of making science dogmatic," he once said to Haeckel.
+
+And at another time he said, "I would feel I had gone too far were it
+not for Wallace, who came to the same conclusions, quite independently
+of me." Darwin's mind was simple and childlike. He was a student,
+always learning, and no one was too mean or too poor for him to learn
+from. The patience, persistency and untiring industry of the man,
+combined with the daring imagination that saw the thing clearly long
+before he could prove it, and the gentle forbearance in the presence of
+unkindness and misunderstanding, won the love of a nation.
+
+He wished to be buried in the churchyard at Down, but at his death, by
+universal acclaim, the gates of Westminster swung wide to receive the
+dust of the man whom bishops, clergy and laymen alike had reviled.
+Darwin had won, not alone because he was right, but because his was a
+truly great and loving soul--a soul without the least resentment.
+
+Archdeacon Farrar, quoting Huxley, said, "I would rather be Darwin and
+be right than be Premier of England--we have had and will have many
+Premiers, but the world will never have another Darwin."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: ERNST HAECKEL]
+
+HAECKEL
+
+
+     Nothing seems to me better adapted than this monistic perspective
+     to give us the proper standard and the broad outlook which we need
+     in the solution of the vast enigmas that surround us. It not only
+     clearly indicates the true place of a man in Nature, but it
+     dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance and
+     arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable
+     universe, and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable
+     element. This boundless presumption of conceited man has misled him
+     into making himself "the image of God," claiming an "eternal life"
+     for his ephemeral personality, and imagining that he possesses
+     unlimited "freedom of will." The ridiculous imperial folly of
+     Caligula is but a special form of man's arrogant assumption of
+     divinity. Only when we have abandoned this untenable illusion, and
+     taken up the correct cosmological perspective, can we hope to reach
+     the solution of the Riddle of the Universe.
+
+     --_Haeckel_
+
+
+HAECKEL
+
+There was a man, once upon a day, who lived in East Aurora and kept
+a store. He sold everything from cough-syrup to blue ribbon; and some of
+the things he sold on time to philosophers who sat on nail-kegs every
+evening, and settled the coal strike.
+
+And in due course of time the storekeeper compromised with his
+creditors, at twenty-nine cents on the dollar.
+
+Some say the man went busted a-purpose to quit business and get out of
+East Aurora. And he himself generally allowed the opinion to gain ground
+in later years that he had planned his life throughout, from start to
+finish, thus proving the supremacy of the will. Yet others there be, and
+men of worth and social standing in the village--known for miles up the
+creek as persons of probity--who claim that it was too much confidence
+in the Genus Smart-Setter, and trotting horses at the County Fairs, that
+made it possible for our friend to avail himself of the Bankruptcy Act.
+Still others, too inert to follow the winding ways of a strange career
+and give reasons, dispose of the matter by simply saying,
+"Providence!"--rolling their eyes upward, then walking out, leaving the
+wordy contestants humiliated and undone.
+
+It will be seen that I am interested in this chapter of Ancient History:
+and in truth, I myself occasionally ornament the nail-kegs. I claim it
+was neither Providence nor astute planning that mapped this man's
+course, but Providence, Planning and Luck; and I silence the adversary,
+for the time, by citing these facts:
+
+Very shortly after Providence and the Sheriff of Erie County--whose
+name, by the way, was Grover Cleveland--had disposed of the East Aurora
+grocery, our friend met a man in Buffalo who had a sweeping scar on his
+chin, a wonderful secret, and nothing else worth mentioning.
+
+This man secured his assets in Germany; he got them while attending the
+University of Jena. The secret was gotten by an understanding with a
+professor; the scar was received through a misunderstanding with a
+student. The secret was a plan by which you could make glucose from
+corn. In Germany it was only a laboratory experiment, because there was
+no corn in Europe to speak of.
+
+Here we had corn to burn, since in that very year the farmers of Iowa
+were using corn for their fuel. Glucose is the active saccharine
+principle in maize, but it does not become active until the corn is
+treated chemically in a certain way, just as honey is not honey until a
+bee puts it through his Maeterlinck laboratory.
+
+Glucose is a food; it can be used for all purposes where sugar is
+used--in degree, at least.
+
+And every living person on earth uses sugar as food every day! Our
+ex-grocer knew all about Hambletonian Ten and Dexter; but dextrine,
+dextrose and glucose were out of his class. Yet he realized that if
+sugar could be made from corn, there was a fortune in it for somebody.
+Opportunity, we are told, knocks once at each man's door. Our David
+Harum was forty, past, and he had often thought Opportunity was tapping,
+but when he opened wide the door, darkness there, and nothing more!
+Opportunity had knocked, but was too timid to stay. This time, he heard
+the knock, and when he opened up the door, Opportunity made a rush for
+him, grabbed him by the collar--catch-as-catch-can--in a grip he could
+not shake off.
+
+Mr. Harum examined as best he could the glucose the German student had
+made, and then he watched the whole experiment worked out over again.
+What the particular ingredients were, was still a secret. The man would
+not sell out; he wanted to organize a manufactory and take a certain per
+cent of the profits. David had saved a thousand dollars out of the wreck
+at East Aurora; but he knew if he could show certain men that the scheme
+was genuine, he would be able to raise more.
+
+Five thousand dollars was secured. But the men who advanced the four
+thousand dollars demanded an insurance-policy on the life of the German
+chemist. This appealed to our David Harum as an excellent plan: if the
+man who held the secret should die, all would be lost save honor. They
+insured the life of the chemist for twenty thousand dollars. In a month
+after, he was killed in a railroad wreck on a Sunday School excursion.
+And the moral is--but never mind that now.
+
+The twenty thousand dollars' insurance was paid to David Harum. He
+repaid his friends immediately their four thousand dollars, and reserved
+for himself, very properly, the sixteen thousand dollars to cover
+expenses. He then started for Jena.
+
+Arriving there, he found that the making of glucose was no special
+secret, and to manufacture it on a large scale was simply a matter of
+evolving the right kind of system and a plant. He hired a young German
+chemist, who had just graduated, for a matter of, say, a thousand
+dollars a year and expenses, and the two started back for America.
+
+From this arose the Glucose Industry in the United States. In ten years'
+time twelve million dollars was invested in the business; and in
+Nineteen Hundred Three more than a hundred million dollars was invested.
+Our East Aurora hero sold out his interests, in Eighteen Hundred Ninety,
+for some such bagatelle as thirteen million dollars.
+
+The young German student is now back at the Jena university, taking a
+post-graduate course in chemistry--the first one is still dead.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I am told that there be folks who pooh-pooh college training and sneeze
+on mention of a University degree. Usually these good people have no
+University degrees, but have been greatly helped by those who have.
+
+Our David Harums are not college-bred--a statement which I trust will go
+unchallenged.
+
+The true type of German student is made in Germany, and when taken out
+of his native environment, often evolves into something less beautiful.
+
+His lack of worldly ambition is his chief claim to immortality. His
+wants are few; he rises early and works late; he is most practical in
+his own particular specialty, but often most impractical outside of it;
+he is plodding, patient, painstaking, and will follow a microbe you can
+not see, as Thompson-Seton's hunter followed the famous Kootenay ram.
+
+This simple reverence for the truth--this passion for an idea--this
+desire to know--these things have given to the world some of its richest
+treasures. We are aware of what the Rockfellers have done, but we seldom
+stop to think of the unknown laboratory students, who made possible such
+vast and far-reaching institutions as the Standard Oil Company, the
+Carborundum Company, the Amalgamated Copper Company, and the various
+beet-sugar factories, that give work to thousands, and lift whole
+counties, and even some States, from penury to plenty.
+
+Germany honors her scholars; and one of the strongest instincts of her
+national life is her search for genius. Initiative is originality in
+motion. Originality is too rare to flout and scout. Not all originality
+is good, but all good things, so far as humanity is concerned, were once
+original. That is to say, they were the work of Genius.
+
+Germany's sympathy for the best in thought has occasionally been broken
+in upon by pigmy rulers, who, for the moment, had a giant's power, so it
+seems hardly possible that a government which encouraged Goethe should
+have banished Wagner. The greatness of Kant was largely owing to the
+fact that he was set apart by Frederick and made free to do his work;
+and at this time, not another monarchy in the world would have had the
+insight to keep its coarse hands off this little man with the big head
+and the brain of a prophet.
+
+And as Kant was the greatest and most original thinker of his time, so
+today does a German University house the world's greatest living
+scientist. Ernst Haeckel has been Professor of Natural History at Jena
+for forty-two years. All the efforts of various other Universities to
+lure him away have failed. He even declined to listen to the siren song
+of Major Pond, and only smiled at the big baits dangled on long poles
+from Cook County, Illinois.
+
+"I have everything I want, everything I can use is right here; why
+should I think of uprooting my life?" he asked. And yet, Jena, there in
+the shadow of the Thuringian Mountains, is only a little town of less
+than ten thousand inhabitants.
+
+In Nineteen Hundred Three, there were five hundred pupils registered at
+Jena, as against four thousand at Harvard, five thousand at Ann Arbor,
+and nearly the same at Lincoln, Nebraska.
+
+It will not do to assume that those who graduate at big colleges are big
+men, any more than to imagine that folks who reside in big towns are
+bigger than those who live in little villages. Perhaps the greatest men
+have come from the small colleges: I believe the small colleges admit
+this.
+
+And surely there is plenty of good argument handy, in way of proof; for
+while Harvard has her Barrett Wendell, with his caveat on clearness,
+force and elegance; and Ann Arbor has Cicero Trueblood, Professor of
+Oratory, whose official duty it is to formulate the College Yell; yet
+Amherst, with her scant five hundred pupils, has Professor David P.
+Todd, the greatest astronomer of the New World. I really wonder
+sometimes what a University that stands in fear of Triggsology would do
+with Professor Ernst Haeckel, whose disregard for tradition is very
+decidedly Ingersollian! The actual fact is, Ernst Haeckel, the world's
+greatest thinker, belongs in the little town of Jena, in Germany. At the
+village of Coniston, you see the little hall where Ruskin read the best
+things he ever wrote, to a dozen or two people.
+
+At Hammersmith, the limit of a William Morris audience was about a
+hundred. At Jena, Ernst Haeckel sits secure in his little lecture-hall,
+and speaks or reads to fifty or sixty students, but the printed word
+goes to millions, so his thoughts here expressed in Jena are shots heard
+round the world.
+
+American pedagogic institutions are mendicant--they depend upon private
+charity and are endowed by pious pirates and beneficent buccaneers. The
+individuals who made these institutions possible very naturally have a
+controlling voice in their management. The colleges in America that are
+not supported by direct mendicancy depend upon the dole of the
+legislator, and woe betide the pedagogic principal who offends the
+orthodox vote. His supplies are cut short, and purse-strings pucker
+until his voice moderates to a monotone and he dilutes his views to a
+dull neutral tint. I do not know a University in the United States that
+would not place Ernst Haeckel on half-rations, and make him fight for
+his life, or else he would be discharged and be reduced to the sad
+necessity of tilting windmills in popular lecture courses for the
+edification of agrarians. The German Government seeks to make men free.
+It even gives them the privilege of being absurd; for pioneers sometimes
+take the wrong track. We do not scout Columbus because his domestic
+voyages were failures; nor because he sought one thing and found
+another, and died without knowing the difference.
+
+Haeckel's wants are all supplied; what he needs in the way of apparatus
+or material is his for the asking; he travels at will the round world
+over; visions of old age and yawning almshouses are not for him. He owns
+himself--he does what he wishes, he says what he thinks, and neither
+priest nor politician dare cry, hist! So we get the paradox: the only
+perfect freedom is to be found in a monarchy. "A Republic," says
+Schopenhauer, "is a land that is ruled by the many--that is to say, by
+the incompetent." But Schopenhauer, of course, knew nothing of the
+American primary, devised by altruistic Hibernians for the purpose of
+thwarting the incompetent many.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ernst Haeckel was born in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-four, hence he is just
+seventy-seven years old at this writing. His parents were plain people,
+neither rich nor poor--and of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. The
+greatest error one can make in life is not to be well born; failing in
+this, a man struggles through life under an awful handicap.
+
+Haeckel formed the habit of steady, systematic work in youth, and
+untiring effort has been the rule of his life. Man was made to be well,
+and he was made to work. It is only work--which is the constant effort
+to retain equilibrium--that makes life endurable. So we find Haeckel
+now, at near fourscore years, a model of manly vigor, with all the
+eager, curious, receptive qualities of youth--a happy man, but one who
+knows that happiness lies on the way to Heaven, and not in arriving
+there and sitting down to enjoy it.
+
+Ernst Haeckel gathers his manna fresh every day. I believe Haeckel
+enjoys his pipe and mug after the day's work is done; but for stimulants
+in a general sense, he has no use. In his book on Ceylon, he attributes
+his escape from the jungle fever, from which most of his party suffered,
+to the fact that he never used strong drink, and ate sparingly.
+
+He is jealous of the sunshine--a great walker--works daily with hoe and
+spade in his garden; and breathes deeply, pounding on his chest, when
+going from his house to the college, in a way that causes considerable
+amusement among the fledglings. Tall, spare rather than stout, bronzed,
+active, wearing shoes with thick soles, plain gray clothes, often
+accompanied by a half-dozen young men, he is a common figure on the
+roads that wind out of Jena, and lose themselves amid the mountains.
+
+The distinguishing feature of the man is his animation. He is full of
+good cheer, and acts as if he were expecting to discover something
+wonderful very soon.
+
+To find the balance between play and work has been the aim of his life;
+and surely, he has pretty nearly discovered it.
+
+Once when a caller asked him what he considered the greatest achievement
+of his life, he took out of his pocket a leather case containing a
+bronze medal, and proudly passed it around.
+
+This medal was presented to him in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine,
+in token of a running high jump--the world's record at the time, or not,
+as the case may be. Haeckel is essentially an out-of-door man, as
+opposed to the philosopher who works in a stuffy room, and grows
+round-shouldered over his microscope. "I may entrust laboratory analyses
+to others, but there is one thing I will never let another do for me,
+and that is take my daily walk a-field," he once said.
+
+While lecturing he sits at a table and simply talks in a very informal
+way; often purposely arousing a discussion, or awakening a sleepy
+student with a question. Yet on occasion he can speak to a multitude,
+and, like Huxley, rise to the occasion. Oratory, however, he considers
+rather dangerous, as the speaker is usually influenced by the opinions
+of the audience, and is apt to grow more emphatic than exact--to
+generate more heat than light.
+
+The comparison of Haeckel with Huxley is not out of place. He has been
+called the Huxley of Germany, just as Huxley was called the Haeckel of
+England. In temperament, they were much alike; although Haeckel perhaps
+does not use quite so much aqua fortis in his ink. Yet I can well
+imagine that if he were at a convention where the Bishop of Oxford would
+level at him a few theological spitballs, he would answer, unerringly,
+with a sling and a few smooth pebbles from the brook. And possibly,
+knowing himself, this is why he keeps out of society, and avoids all
+public gatherings where pseudo-science is exploited.
+
+There is a superstition that really great men are quite oblivious of
+their greatness, and that the pride of achievement is not among their
+assets. Nothing could be wider of the mark. When Ernst Haeckel was
+asked, "Who is your favorite author?" he very promptly answered, "Ernst
+Haeckel."
+
+His study is a big square room on the top floor of one of the college
+buildings; and in this room is a bookcase extending from ceiling to
+floor, given up to his own works.
+
+Copies of every edition and of all translations are here.
+
+And in a special case are the original manuscripts, solidly bound in
+boards, as carefully preserved as were the "literary remains" of William
+Morris, guarded with the instincts of a bibliophile.
+
+Of the size of this Haeckel collection one can make a guess when it is
+stated that the man has written and published over fifty different
+books. These vary in size from simple lectures to volumes of a thousand
+pages. His work entitled, "The Natural History of Creation," has been
+translated into twelve languages, and has gone through fifteen editions
+in Germany, and about half as many in England.
+
+The last book issued by Professor Haeckel was that intensely interesting
+essay, "The Riddle of the Universe," which was written in Eighteen
+Hundred Ninety-nine, in two months' time, during his summer vacation. He
+gave it out that he had gone to Italy, denied himself to all visitors
+who knew that he had not, and answered no letters. He reached his study
+every morning at six o'clock and locked himself in, and there he
+remained until eight o'clock at night. At noon one of his children
+brought him his lunch.
+
+Unlike Herbert Spencer, whose later writings were all dictated--and very
+slowly and painstakingly at that--Haeckel writes with his own hand, and
+when the fit is on, he turns off manuscript at the rate of from two to
+four thousand words a day. In writing "The Riddle of the Universe," he
+took no exercise save to go up on the roof, breathing deeply and
+pounding his chest, varying the pounding by reaching his arms above his
+head and stretching. However, after a few weeks the villagers and
+visitors got to looking for him with opera-glasses; and he ceased going
+on the roof, taking his calisthenics at the open window.
+
+This exercise of reaching and stretching until you lift yourself on
+tiptoe, he goes out of his way to recommend in his book on
+"Development," wherein he says, "There is a tendency as the years pass
+for the internal organs to drop, but the individual who will daily go
+through the motion of reaching for fruit on limbs of trees that are
+above his head, standing on tiptoe and slowly stretching up and up,
+occasionally throwing his head back and looking straight up, will of
+necessity breathe deeply, exercise the diaphragm, and I believe in most
+cases will ward off diseases and keep old age awaiting for long."
+
+Here is a little commonsense advice given by a physician who is also a
+great scientist. To try it will cost you nothing--no apparatus is
+required--just throw open the window and reach up and up and up, first
+with one arm, then the other, and then both arms. "The person who does
+this daily for five minutes as a habit will probably have no need of a
+physician," adds Haeckel, and with this sage remark he dismisses the
+subject, branching off into an earnest talk on radiolaria.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Haeckel was educated for a physician and began his career by practising
+medicine. But his heart was not really in the work; he soon arrived at
+the very sane conclusion that constant dwelling on the pathological was
+not worth while. "Hereafter I'll devote my time to the normal, not the
+abnormal and distempered. The sick should learn to keep well," he wrote
+a friend.
+
+And again, "If an individual is so lacking in will that he can not
+provide for himself, then his dissolution is no calamity to either
+himself, the State or the race." This was written in his twenties, and
+seems to sound rather sophomorish, but the idea of the boy is still with
+the old man, for in "The Riddle of the Universe" he says, "The final
+effect upon the race by the preservation of the unfit, through increased
+skill in surgery and medicine, is not yet known." In another place he
+throws in a side remark, thus: "Our almshouses, homes for imbeciles, and
+asylums where the hopelessly insane often outlive their keepers, may be
+a mistake, save as these things minister to the spirit of altruism which
+prompts their support. Let a wiser generation answer!"
+
+Doubtless Haeckel could make a good argument in favor of the doctors if
+he wished, but probably if asked to do so his answer would paraphrase
+Robert Ingersoll, when that gentleman was taken to task for unfairness
+towards Moses, "Young man, you seem to forget that I am not the attorney
+of Moses--don't worry, there are more than ten millions of men looking
+after his case." Ernst Haeckel is not the attorney for either the
+doctors or the clergy.
+
+It was Darwin and "The Origin of Species" that tipped the beam for
+Haeckel in favor of science. Very shortly after Darwin's great book was
+issued, in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, a chance copy of the
+work fell into the hands of our young physician. He read and spoke
+English, and in a general way was interested in biology.
+
+As he read of Darwin's observations and experiments the heavens seemed
+to open before him.
+
+Things he had vaguely felt, Darwin stated, and thoughts that had been
+his, Darwin expressed. "I might have written much of this book, myself,"
+he said.
+
+The love of Nature had been upon the young man almost from his babyhood.
+All children love flowers and mix easily with the wonderful things that
+are found in woods and fields. At twelve years of age Ernst had formed a
+goodly herbarium, and was making a collection of bugs, and not knowing
+their names or even that they had names, he began naming them himself.
+Later it came to him with a shock of surprise and disappointment that
+the bugs and beetles had already had the attention of scholars. But he
+got even by declaring that he would hunt out some of the tiny things the
+scholars had overlooked and classify them. Every man imagines himself
+the first man, and to think that he is Adam and that he has to go
+forth, get acquainted with things and name them, reveals the true bent
+of the scientist.
+
+Doctor Haeckel was ripe for Darwin's book. He was looking for it, and it
+took only a slight jolt to dislodge him from the medical profession and
+allow the Law of Affinity to do the rest.
+
+Wallace had written Darwin's book under another name, and if these men
+had not written it, Haeckel surely would, for it was all packed away in
+his heart and head. As Darwin had studied and classified the Cirripedia,
+so would he write an essay on Rhizopods. Luck was with him--luck is
+always with the man of purpose. He had an opportunity to travel through
+Italy as medical caretaker to a rich invalid. Sickness surely has its
+uses; and rich invalids are not wholly a mistake on the part of Setebos.
+Haeckel secured the leisure and the opportunity to round up his
+Rhizopods.
+
+He presented the work to the University of Jena, because this was the
+University that Goethe attended, and the gods of Haeckel were
+three--Goethe, Darwin and Johannes Muller.
+
+Muller was instructor in Zoology at Berlin, a man quite of the Agassiz
+type who made himself beloved by the boys because he was what he was--a
+boy in heart, with a man's head and the soul of a saint. Some one said
+of Muller, "To him every look into a microscope was a service to God."
+In his reverent attitude he was like Linnĉus, who fell on his knees on
+first beholding the English gorse in full flower, and thanked Heaven
+that such a moment of divine joy was his.
+
+Muller was a Jena man, too, and he gave Haeckel letters to the bigwigs.
+The wise men of Jena discovered that there was merit in Haeckel's
+discoveries.
+
+Original investigators are rare--most of us write about the men who have
+done things, or else we tell about what they have done, and so we reach
+greatness by hitching our wagon to a star. For the essay on Rhizopods,
+Haeckel was made Professor Extraordinary of the University of Jena. This
+was in Eighteen Hundred Sixty-two; Haeckel was then twenty-eight years
+old; there he is today, after a service of forty-nine years.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Haeckel is married, with a big brood of children and grandchildren about
+him. Some of his own children and the grandchildren are about the same
+age, for Haeckel has two broods, having had two wives, both of whom
+sympathized with the Teddine philosophy.
+
+With the whole household, including servants, the great scientist is on
+terms of absolute good camaraderie. The youngsters ride on his back; the
+older girls decorate him with garlands; the boys work with him in the
+garden, or together they tramp the fields and climb the hills.
+
+But when it comes to study he goes to his own room in the Zoology
+Building, enters in and locks the door. When he travels he travels
+alone, without companion or secretary. Travel to him means intense work;
+and intense work means to him intense pleasure. Solitude seems necessary
+to close, consecutive thinking; and in the solitude of travel, through
+jungle, forest, crowded city, or across wide oceans, Haeckel finds his
+true and best self. Then it is that he puts his soul in touch with the
+Universal and realizes most fully Goethe's oft-repeated dictum, "All is
+one." And, indeed, to Goethe must be given the credit of preparing the
+mind of Haeckel for Darwinism.
+
+In his book, "The Freedom and Science of Teaching," Haeckel applies the
+poetic monistic ideas of Goethe to biology and then to sociology. "All
+is one." And this oneness that everywhere exists is simply a
+differentiation of the original single cell.
+
+The evolution of the cell mirrors the evolution of the species: the
+evolution of the individual mirrors the evolution of the race.
+
+This law, expressed by Goethe, is the controlling shibboleth in all
+Haeckel's philosophy.
+
+In embryology he has proved it to the satisfaction of the scientific
+world. When he applies it to sociology our Bellamys are looking backward
+to Sir Thomas More, and expect a sudden transformation to a Utopia, not
+unlike the change which the good old preachers used to tell us we would
+experience "in the twinkling of an eye."
+
+Haeckel builds on Darwin and shows that as the Cirripedia which makes
+the bottom of the ocean, the coral "insect" which rears dangerous reefs
+and even mountain-ranges, and Rhizopods that make the chalk cliffs
+possible, did not change the earth's crust in the twinkling of an eye,
+so neither can the efforts of man instantly change the social condition.
+Souls do not make lightning changes. Karl Marx thought society would
+change in the twinkling of a ballot, but he was not a Monist, and
+therefore did not realize that humanity is a solidarity of souls,
+evolved from very lowly forms and still slowly ascending.
+
+And the beauty of it is that the Marxians are helping the race to
+ascend, by supplying it an Ideal, even if they fail utterly to work
+their lightning change. In the end there is no defeat for any man or any
+thing. When men deserve the Ideal they will get it. So long as they
+prefer beer, tobacco, brawls and slums, these things will be supplied.
+When they get enough of these, something better will be evolved. The
+stupidity of George the Third was a necessary factor in the evolution of
+freedom for America. All is one; all is Good; and all is God.
+
+The Marxians will eventually win, but by Fabian methods, and Socialism
+will come under another name. As opposed to Herbert Spencer, Haeckel
+does not admit the Unknowable, although, of course, he realizes the
+unknown. No man ever had a fuller faith, and if there is any such thing
+as a glorious deathbed it must come to men of this type who believe not
+only that all is well for themselves, but for every one else. How a
+deathbed could be "glorious" for a man who had perfect faith in his own
+salvation and an equally perfect faith in the damnation of most
+everybody else, is difficult to understand.
+
+A true Monist would rather be in Hell asking for water than in Heaven
+denying it.
+
+He loves humanity because he is Humanity, and he loves God because he is
+God. As a single drop of water mirrors the globe, so does a single man
+mirror the race. And the evolution, biological and sociological, of the
+man mirrors the evolution of the species.
+
+When one once grasps the beauty and splendor of the monistic idea, how
+mean and small become all those little, fearsome "schemes of salvation,"
+whereby men were to be separated and impassable gulfs fixed between
+them. Those who fix gulfs here and now are hotly intent on showing that
+God will fix gulfs hereafter; thus we see how man is continually
+creating God in his own image.
+
+His idea of God's justice is always built on his own; and as usually our
+deities are more or less inherited, heirlooms of the past, we see that
+it is not at all strange that men should be better than their religion.
+They drag their dead creeds behind them like a stagecoach, with
+preachers and priests on top; kings and nobles inside; and coffins full
+of past sins in the boot. A man is always better than his creed--unless
+he makes his creed new every day. These hand-me-down religions seldom
+fit, and professional theology, it seems to me, is mostly a dealing in
+ol' clo'.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the month of September, Nineteen Hundred Four, Haeckel was a delegate
+to the Freethinkers' Congress at Rome. To hold such a convention in the
+Eternal City, right under the eaves of the Vatican, was surely a trifle
+"indelicate," to use the words of the Pope. And it was no wonder that at
+the close of the Congress the Pope at once ordered a sacred
+housecleaning, a divine fumigation.
+
+Forty years ago he would have acted before the Congress convened, and
+not afterward. Special mass was held in every one of the Catholic
+Churches in Rome, "partially to atone for the insult done to Almighty
+God."
+
+Over three thousand delegates were present at the Congress, every
+civilized country being represented.
+
+A committee was named to decorate the statue of Bruno that stands on the
+spot where he was burned for declaring that the earth revolved, and that
+the stars were not God's jewels hung in the sky each night by angels.
+
+On this occasion, Haeckel said:
+
+"This Congress is historic. It marks a white milepost in the onward and
+upward march of Freedom.
+
+"We have met in Rome not accidentally or yet incidentally, but
+purposely. We have met here to show the world that times have changed,
+that the earth revolves, and to prove to ourselves in an impressive and
+undeniable way that the power of superstition is crippled, and at last
+Science and Free Speech need no longer cringe and crawl. We respect the
+Church for what she is, but our manhood must now realize that it is no
+longer the slave and tool of entrenched force and power that abrogates
+to itself the name of religion."
+
+The Haeckel attitude of mind is essentially one of faith--Haeckel's hope
+for the race is sublime. There are several things we do not know, but we
+may know some time, just as men know things that children do not.
+
+And yet we are only children in the kindergarten of God. And this garden
+where we work and play is our own. The boy of ten, or even the man of
+sixty, may never know, but there will come men greater than these and
+they will understand. The Monist, the man who believes in the One--the
+All--is essentially religious.
+
+Haeckel has chosen this word Monism, as opposed to theism, deism,
+materialism, spiritism.
+
+Doctor Paul Carus is today the ablest American exponent of Monism, and
+to him it is a positive religion. If Monism could make men of the superb
+mental type of Paul Carus, well might we place the subject on a
+compulsory basis and introduce it into our public schools. But Haeckel
+and Carus believe quite as much in freedom as in Monism. All violence of
+direction is contrary to growth, and delays evolution just that much.
+
+The One of which we are part and particle--single cells, if you
+please--is constantly working for its own good. We advance individually
+as we lie low in the Lord's hand and allow ourselves to be receivers and
+conveyors of the Divine Will.
+
+And we ourselves are the Divine Will. The contemplation of this divinity
+excites the religious emotions of awe, veneration, wonder and of
+worship. It is a world of correlation. The All is right here. There is
+no outside force or energy; no god or supreme being that looks on,
+interferes, dictates and decides. To admit that there is an outside
+power, something uncorrelated, is to invite fear, apprehension,
+uncertainty and terror. This undissolved residuum is the nest-egg of
+superstition. The man who believes that God is the Whole, and that every
+man is a necessary part of the Whole, has no need to placate or please
+an intangible Something. All he has to do is to be true to his own
+nature, to live his own life, to understand himself. This takes us back
+to the Socratic maxim, "Know Thyself." No man ever expressed one phase
+of Monism so well and beautifully as Emerson has in his "Essay on
+Compensation." This intelligence in which we are bathed rights every
+wrong, equalizes every injustice, balances every perversion, punishes
+the wrong and rewards the right. The Universe is self-lubricating and
+automatic. The Greeks clearly beheld the sublime truths of Compensation
+when they pictured Nemesis. It is absurd to punish--leave it to
+Nemesis--she never forgets--nothing can escape her.
+
+Our duties lie in service to ourselves, and we best serve self by
+serving humanity. This is the only religion that pays compound interest
+to both borrower and lender. Worship Humanity and you honor yourself.
+
+And the world has ever dimly perceived this, for history honors no men
+save those who have given their lives that others might live. The
+saviors of the world are only those who loved Humanity more than all
+else. All men who live honest lives are saviors--they live that others
+may live.
+
+He that saveth his life shall lose it.
+
+We grow through radiation, not by absorption or annexation. To him that
+hath shall be given. We keep things by giving them to others. The dead
+carry in their clenched hands only that which they have given away; and
+the living carry only the love in their hearts which they have bestowed
+on others.
+
+"I and my Father are one"--the thought is old, but to prove it from the
+so-called material world through the study of biology has been the
+life-work of Ernst Haeckel.
+
+Undaunted we press ever on.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: CARL VON LINNĈUS]
+
+LINNĈUS
+
+
+     When a man of genius is in full swing, never contradict him, set
+     him straight or try to reason with him. Give him a free field. A
+     listener is sure to get a greater quantity of good, no matter how
+     mixed, than if the man is thwarted. Let Pegasus bolt--he will bring
+     you up in a place you know nothing about!
+
+     --_Linnĉus_
+
+
+LINNĈUS
+
+Out of the mist and fog of time, the name of Aristotle looms up
+large. It was more than twenty-three hundred years ago that Aristotle
+lived. He might have lived yesterday, so distinctively modern was he in
+his method and manner of thought. Aristotle was the world's first
+scientist. He sought to sift the false from the true--to arrange,
+classify and systematize.
+
+Aristotle instituted the first zoological garden that history mentions,
+barring that of Noah. He formed the first herbarium, and made a
+geological collection that prophesied for Hugh Miller the testimony of
+the rocks. Very much of our scientific terminology goes back to
+Aristotle.
+
+Aristotle was born in the mountains of Macedonia. His father was a
+doctor and belonged to the retinue of King Amyntas. The King had a son
+named Philip, who was about the same age as Aristotle.
+
+Some years later, Philip had a son named Alexander, who was somewhat
+unruly, and Philip sent a Macedonian cry over to Aristotle, and
+Aristotle harkened to the call for help and went over and took charge of
+the education of Alexander.
+
+The science of medicine in Aristotle's boyhood was the science of
+simples. In surgery the world has progressed, but in medicine, doctors
+have progressed most, by consigning to the grave, that tells no tales,
+the deadly materia medica.
+
+In Aristotle's childhood, when his father was both guide and physician
+to the king, on hunting trips through the mountains, the doctor taught
+the boys to recognize sarsaparilla, stramonium, hemlock, hellebore,
+sassafras and mandrake. Then Aristotle made a list of all the plants he
+knew and wrote down the supposed properties of each.
+
+Before Aristotle was half-grown, both his father and mother died, and he
+was cared for by a Mr. and Mrs. Proxenus. This worthy couple would never
+have been known to the world were it not for the fact that they
+ministered to this orphan boy. Long years afterward he wrote a poem to
+their memory, and paid them such a tender, human compliment that their
+names have been woven into the very fabric of letters. "They loved each
+other, and still had love enough left for me," he says. And we can only
+guess whether this man and his wife with hearts illumined by divine
+passion, the only thing that yet gladdens the world, ever imagined that
+they were supplying an atmosphere in which would bud and blossom one of
+the greatest intellects the world has ever known.
+
+It was through the help of Proxenus that Aristotle was enabled to go to
+Athens and attend the School of Oratory, of which Plato was dean.
+
+The fine, receptive spirit of this slender youth evidently brought out
+from Plato's heart the best that was packed away there.
+
+Aristotle was soon the star scholar. To get much out of school you have
+to take much with you when you go there. In one particular, especially,
+Aristotle, the country boy from Macedonia, brought much to Plato--and
+this was the scientific spirit. Plato's bent was philosophy, poetry,
+rhetoric--he was an artist in expression.
+
+"Know thyself," said Socrates, the teacher of Plato.
+
+"Be thyself," said Plato. "Know the world of Nature, of which you are a
+part," said Aristotle; "and you will be yourself and know yourself
+without thought or effort. The things you see, you are."
+
+Twenty-three years Aristotle and Plato were together, and when they
+separated it was on the relative value of science and poetry. "Science
+is vital," said Aristotle; "but poetry and rhetoric are incidental." It
+was a little like the classic argument still carried on in all
+publishing-houses, as to which is the greater: the man who writes the
+text or the man who illustrates it.
+
+One is almost tempted to think that Plato's finest product was
+Aristotle, just as Sir Humphry Davy's greatest discovery was Michael
+Faraday. One fine, earnest, receptive pupil is about all any teacher
+should expect in a lifetime, but Plato had at least two, Aristotle and
+Theophrastus. And Theophrastus dated his birth from the day he met
+Aristotle.
+
+Theo-Phrastus means God's speech, or one who speaks divinely. The boy's
+real name was Ferguson. But the name given by Aristotle, who always had
+a passion for naming things, stuck, and the world knows this superbly
+great man as Theophrastus.
+
+Botany dates from Theophrastus. And Theophrastus it was who wrote that
+greatest of acknowledgments, when, in dedicating one of his books, he
+expressed his indebtedness in these words: "To Aristotle, the inspirer
+of all I am or hope to be."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Theophrastus' death the science of botany slept for three hundred
+years. During this interval was played in Palestine that immortal drama
+which so profoundly influenced the world. Twenty-three years after the
+birth of Christ, Pliny, the Naturalist, was born.
+
+He was the uncle of his nephew, and it is probable that the younger man
+would have been swallowed in oblivion, just as the body of the older one
+was covered by the eager ashes of Vesuvius, were it not for the fact
+that Pliny the Elder had made the name deathless.
+
+Pliny the Younger was about such a man as Richard Le Gallienne; Pliny
+the Elder was like Thomas A. Edison.
+
+At twenty-two, Pliny the Elder was a Captain in the Roman Army doing
+service in Germany. Here he made memoranda of the trees, shrubs and
+flowers he saw, and compared them with similar objects he knew at home.
+"Animal and vegetable life change as you go North and South; from this I
+assume that life is largely a matter of temperature and moisture." Thus
+wrote this barbaric Roman soldier, who thereby proved he was not so much
+of a barbarian after all. When he was twenty-five, his command was
+transferred to Africa, and here, in the moments stolen from sleep, he
+wrote a work in three volumes on education, entitled, "Studiosus."
+
+In writing the book he got an education--to find out about a thing,
+write a book on it. Pliny returned to Rome and began the practise of
+law, and developed into a special pleader of marked power. He still held
+his commission in the army, and was sent on various diplomatic errands
+to Spain, Africa, Germany, Gaul and Greece. If you want things done,
+call on a busy man: the man of leisure has no spare time.
+
+Pliny's jottings on natural history very soon resolved themselves into
+the most ambitious plan, which up to that time had not been attempted by
+man--he would write out and sum up all human knowledge.
+
+The next man to try the same thing was Alexander von Humboldt. We now
+have Pliny's "Natural History" in thirty-seven volumes. His other forty
+volumes are lost. The first volume of the "Natural History," which was
+written last, gives a list of the authors consulted. Aristotle and
+Theophrastus take the places of honor, and then follow a score of names
+of men whose works have perished and whom we know mostly through what
+Pliny says about them. So not only does Pliny write science as he saw
+it, but introduces us into a select circle of authors whom otherwise we
+would not know. We have the world of Nature, but we would not have this
+world of thinkers, were it not for Pliny.
+
+Pliny even quotes Sappho, who loved and sung, and whose poems reached us
+only through scattered quotations, as if Emerson's works should perish
+and we would revive him through a file of "The Philistine" magazine.
+Pliny and Paul were contemporaries. Pliny lived at Rome when Paul lived
+there in his own hired house, but Pliny never mentioned him, and
+probably never heard of him.
+
+One man was interested in this world, the other in the next.
+
+Pliny begins his great work with a plagiarism on Lyman Abbott, "There is
+but one God." The idea that there were many arose out of the thought
+that because there were many things, there must be special gods to look
+after them: gods of the harvest, gods of the household, gods of the
+rain, etc.
+
+There is but one God, says Pliny, and this God manifests Himself in
+Nature. Nature and Nature's work are one. This world and all other
+worlds we see or can think of are parts of Nature. If there are other
+Universes, they are natural; that is to say, a part of Nature. God rules
+them all according to laws which He Himself can not violate. It is vain
+to supplicate Him, and absurd to worship Him, for to do these things is
+to degrade Him with the thought that He is like us. The assumption that
+God is very much like us is not complimentary to God.
+
+God can not do an unnatural or a supernatural thing. He can not kill
+Himself. He can not make the greater less than the less. He can not make
+twice ten anything else than twenty.
+
+He can not make a stick that has but one end. He can not make the past,
+future. He can not make one who has lived never to have lived. He can
+not make the mortal, immortal; nor the immortal, mortal. He can change
+the form of things, but He can not abolish a thing. Pliny preaches the
+Unity of the Universe and his religion is the religion of Humanity.
+
+Pliny says:
+
+"We can not injure God, but we can injure man. And as man is part of
+Nature or God, the only way to serve God is to benefit man. If we love
+God, the way to reveal that love is in our conduct toward our fellows."
+
+Pliny was close upon the Law of the Correlation of Forces, and he almost
+got a glimpse of the Law of Attraction or Gravitation. He sensed these
+things, but could not prove them. Pliny touched life at an immense
+number of points. What he saw, he knew, but when he took things on the
+word of Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville (for these gentlemen
+adventurers have always lived), he fell into curious errors. For
+instance, he tells of horses in Africa that have wings, and when hard
+pressed, fly like birds; of ostriches that give milk, and of elephants
+that live on land or sea equally well; of mines where gold is found in
+solid masses and the natives dig into it for diamonds.
+
+But outside of these little lapses, Pliny writes sanely and well. Book
+Two treats of the crust of the earth, of earthquakes, meteors, volcanoes
+(these had a strange fascination for him), islands and upheavals.
+
+Books Three and Four relate of geography and give amusing information
+about the shape of the continents and the form of the earth. Then comes
+a book on man, his evolution and physical qualities, with a history of
+the races.
+
+Next is a book on Zoology, with a resume of all that was written by
+Aristotle, and with many corroborations of Thompson-Seton and Rudyard
+Kipling. Facts from the "Jungle Book" are here recited at length. Book
+Nine is on marine life--sponges, shells and coral insects. Book Ten
+treats of birds, and carries the subject further than it had ever been
+taken before, even if it does at times contradict John Burroughs. Book
+Eleven is on insects, bugs and beetles, and tells, among other things,
+of bats that make fires in caves to keep themselves warm. Book Twelve is
+on trees, their varieties, height, age, growth, qualities and
+distribution. Book Thirteen treats of fruits, juices, gums, wax, saps
+and perfumes. Book Fourteen is on grapes and the making of wine, with a
+description of the process and the various kinds of wine, their effects
+on the human system, with a goodly temperance lesson backed up by
+incidents and examples.
+
+Book Fifteen treats of pomegranates, apples, plums, peaches, figs and
+various other luscious fruits, and shows much intimate and valuable
+knowledge. And so the list runs down through, treating at great length
+of bees, fishes, woods, iron, lead, copper, gold, marble, fluids, gases,
+rivers, swamps, seas, and a thousand and one things that were familiar
+to this marvelous man. But of all subjects, Pliny shows a much greater
+love for botany than for anything else. Plants, flowers, vines, trees
+and mosses interest him always, and he breaks off other subjects to tell
+of some flower that he has just discovered.
+
+Pliny had command of the Roman fleet that was anchored in the bay off
+Pompeii, when that city was destroyed in the year Seventy-nine.
+Bulwer-Lytton tells the story, with probably a close regard for the
+facts. The sailors, obeying Pliny's orders, did their utmost to save
+human life, and rescued hundreds. Pliny himself made various trips in a
+small boat from the ship to the beach. He was safely on board the
+flag-ship, and orders had been given to weigh anchor, when the commander
+decided to make one more visit to the perishing city to see if he could
+not rescue a few more, and also to get a closer view of Nature in a
+tantrum.
+
+He rowed away into the fog. The sailors waited for their beloved
+commander, but waited in vain. He had ventured too close to the flowing
+lava, and was suffocated by the fumes, a victim to his love for humanity
+and his desire for knowledge. So died Pliny the Elder, aged but
+fifty-six years.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All children are zoologists, but a botanist appears upon the earth only
+at rare intervals.
+
+A Botanist is born--not made. From the time of Pliny, botany performed
+the Rip Van Winkle act until John Ray, the son of a blacksmith, appeared
+upon the scene in England. In the meantime, Leonardo had classified the
+rocks, recorded the birds, counted the animals and written a book of
+three thousand pages on the horse. Leonardo dissected many plants, but
+later fell back upon the rose for decorative purposes.
+
+John Ray was born in Sixteen Hundred Twenty-eight near Braintree in
+Essex. Now, as to genius--no blacksmith-shop is safe from it. We know
+where to find ginseng, but genius is the secret of God.
+
+A blacksmith's helper by day, this aproned lad with sooty face dreamed
+dreams. Evenings he studied Greek with the village parson. They read
+Aristotle and Theophrastus.
+
+Have a care there, you Macedonian miscreant, dead two thousand years,
+you are turning this boy's head!
+
+John Ray would be a botanist as great as Aristotle, and he would speak
+divinely, just as did Theophrastus. It is all a matter of desire! Young
+Ray became a Minor Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; then a Major
+Fellow; then he took the Master's degree; next he became lecturer on
+Greek; and insisted that Aristotle was the greatest man the world had
+ever seen, except none, and the Dean raised an eyebrow.
+
+The professor of mathematics resigned and Ray took his place; next he
+became Junior Dean, and then College Steward; and according to the
+custom of the times he used to preach in the chapel. One of his sermons
+was from the text, "Consider the lilies of the field." Another sermon
+that brought him more notoriety than fame was on the subject, "God in
+Creation," wherein he argued that to find God we should look for Him
+more in the world of Nature and not so much in books.
+
+Matters were getting strained. Ray was asked to subscribe to the Act of
+Uniformity, which was a promise that he would never preach anything that
+was not prescribed by the Church. Ray demurred, and begged that he be
+allowed to go free and preach anything he thought was truth--new truth
+might come to him! This shows the absurdity of Ray. He was asked to
+reconsider or resign. He resigned--resigned the year that Sir Isaac
+Newton entered.
+
+Fortunately, one particular pupil followed him, not that he
+loved college less, but that he loved Ray more. This pupil was
+Francis Willughby. Through the bounty of this pupil we get the
+scientist--otherwise, Ray would surely have been starved into
+subjection. Willughby took Ray to the home of his parents, who were rich
+people.
+
+Ray undertook the education of young Willughby, very much as Aristotle
+took charge of Alexander. Willughby and Ray traveled, studied, observed
+and wrote. They went to Spain, took trips to France, Italy and
+Switzerland, and journeyed to Scotland. Willughby devoted his life to
+Ornithology and Ichthyology and won a deathless place in science.
+
+Ray specialized on botany, and did a work in classification never done
+before. He made a catalog of the flora of England that wrung even from
+Cambridge a compliment--they offered him the degree of LL.D. Ray quietly
+declined it, saying he was only a simple countryman, and honors or
+titles would be a disadvantage, tending to separate him from the plain
+people with whom he worked. However, the Royal Society elected him a
+member, and he accepted the honor, that he might put the results of his
+work on record. His paper on the circulation of sap in trees was read
+before the Royal Society, on the request of Newton. Due credit was given
+Harvey for his discovery of the circulation of the blood; but Ray made
+the fine point that man was brother to the tree, and his life was
+derived from the same Source.
+
+When Willughby died, in Sixteen Hundred Seventy-two, he left Ray a
+yearly income of three hundred dollars. Doctor Johnson told Boswell that
+Ray had a collection of twenty thousand English bugs. Our botanical
+terminology comes more from John Ray than from any other man. Ray
+adopted wherever possible the names given by Aristotle, so loyal, loving
+and true was he to the Master. Ray died in Seventeen Hundred Five, aged
+seventy-six.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two years after the death of John Ray, in Seventeen Hundred Seven, was
+born a baby who was destined to find biology a chaos, and leave it a
+cosmos.
+
+Linnĉus did for botany what Galileo had done for astronomy. John Ray was
+only a John the Baptist.
+
+Carl von Linne, or Carolus Linnĉus as he preferred to be called, was
+born in an obscure village in the Province of Smaland, Sweden. His
+father was a clergyman, passing rich on forty pounds a year. His mother
+was only eighteen years old when she bore him, and his father had just
+turned twenty-one. It was a poor parish, and one of the deacons
+explained that they could not afford a real preacher; so they hired a
+boy.
+
+Carl tells in his journal, of remembering how, when he was but four
+years old, his father would lead his congregation out through the woods
+and, all seated on the grass, the father would tell the people about the
+plants and herbs and how to distinguish them.
+
+Back of the parsonage there was a goodly garden, where the young pastor
+and his wife worked many happy hours. When Carl was eight years of age,
+a corner of this garden was set apart for his very own.
+
+He pressed into his service several children of the neighborhood, and
+they carried flat stones from the near-by brook to wall in this
+miniature farm--this botanical garden.
+
+The child that hasn't a flowerbed or a garden of its ownest own is
+being cheated out of its birthright.
+
+The evolution of the child mirrors the evolution of the race. And as the
+race has passed through the savage, pastoral and agricultural stages, so
+should the child. As a people we are now in the commercial or
+competitive stage, but we are slowly emerging out of this into the age
+of co-operation or enlightened self-interest.
+
+It is only a very great man--one with a prophetic vision--who can see
+beyond the stage in which he is.
+
+The stage we are in seems the best and the final one--otherwise, we
+would not be in it. But to skip any of these stages in the education or
+evolution of the individual seems a sore mistake. Children hedged and
+protected from digging in the dirt develop into "third rounders," as our
+theosophic friends would say, that is, educated non-comps--vast top-head
+and small cerebellum--people who can explain the unknowable, but who do
+not pay cash. Third rounders all--fit only for the melting-pot!
+
+A tramp is one who has fallen a victim of arrested development and never
+emerged from the nomadic stage; an artistic dilettante is one who has
+jumped the round where boys dig in the dirt and has evolved into a
+missnancy.
+
+Young Carl Linnĉus skipped no round in his evolution. He began as a
+savage, robbing birds' nests, chasing butterflies, capturing bees, bugs
+and beetles. He trained goats to drive, hitched up a calf, fenced his
+little farm, and planted it with strange and curious crops.
+
+Clergymen once were the only schoolteachers, and in Sweden, when Linnĉus
+was a boy, there was a plan of farming children out among preachers that
+they might be educated. Possibly this plan of having some one besides
+the parents teach the lessons is good--I can not say. But young Carl did
+not succeed--save in disturbing the peace among the households of the
+half-dozen clergymen who in turn had him.
+
+The boy evidently was a handsome fellow, a typical Swede, with hair as
+fair as the sunshine, blue eyes, and a pink face that set off the fair
+hair and made him look like a Circassian.
+
+He had energy plus, and the way he cluttered up the parsonages where he
+lodged was a distraction to good housewives: birds' nests, feathers,
+skins, claws, fungi, leaves, flowers, roots, stalks, rocks, sticks and
+stones--and when one meddled with his treasures, there was trouble. And
+there was always trouble; for the boy possessed a temper, and usually
+had it right with him.
+
+The intent of the parents was that Carl should become a clergyman, but
+his distaste for theology did not go unexpressed. So perverse and
+persistent were his inclinations that they preyed on the mind of his
+father, who quoted King Lear and said, "How sharper than a serpent's
+tooth it is to have a thankless child!"
+
+His troubles weighed so upon the good clergyman that his nerves became
+affected and he went to the neighboring town of Wexio to consult Doctor
+Rothman, a famed medical expert.
+
+The good clergyman, in the course of his conversation with the doctor,
+told of his mortification on account of the dulness and perversity of
+his son.
+
+Doctor Rothman listened in patience and came to the conclusion that
+young Mr. Linnĉus was a good boy who did the wrong thing. All energy is
+God's, but it may be misdirected. A boy not good enough for a preacher
+might make a good doctor--an excess of virtue is not required in the
+recipe for a physician.
+
+"I'll cure you, by taking charge of your boy," said Rothman; "you want
+to make a clergyman of the youth: I'll let him be just what he wants to
+be, a naturalist and a physician." And it was so.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The year spent by Linnĉus under the roof of Doctor Rothman was a pivotal
+point in his life. He was eighteen years old. The contempt of Rothman
+for the refinements of education appealed to the young man. Rothman was
+blunt, direct, and to the point: he had a theory that people grew by
+doing what they wanted to do, not by resisting their impulses.
+
+He was both friend and comrade to the boy. They rode together, dissected
+animals and plants, and the young man assisted in operations. Linnĉus
+had the run of the Doctor's library, and without knowing it, was
+mastering physiology.
+
+"I would adopt him as my son," said Rothman; "but I love him so much
+that I am going to separate him from me. My roots have struck deep in
+the soil: I am like the human trees told of by Dante; but the boy can go
+on!"
+
+And so Rothman sent him along to the University of Lund, with letters to
+another doctor still more cranky than himself. This man was Doctor
+Kilian Stobĉus, a medical professor, physician to the king, and a
+naturalist of note. Stobĉus had a mixed-up museum of minerals, birds,
+fishes and plants.
+
+Everybody for a hundred miles who had a curious thing in the way of
+natural history sent it to Stobĉus. Into this medley of strange and
+curious things Linnĉus was plunged with orders to "straighten it up."
+There was a German student also living with the doctor, working for his
+board. Linnĉus took the lead and soon had the young German helping him
+catalog the curios.
+
+The spirit of Ray had gotten abroad in Germany, and Ray's books had been
+translated and were being used in many of the German schools. Linnĉus
+made a bargain with the German student that they should speak only
+German--he wanted to find what was locked up in those German books on
+botany.
+
+Stobĉus was lame and had but one eye, so he used to call on the boys to
+help him, not only to hitch up his horse, but to write his
+prescriptions. Linnĉus wrote very badly, and was chided because he did
+not improve his penmanship, for it seems that in the olden times
+physicians wrote legibly. Linnĉus resented the rebuke, and was shown the
+door. He was gone a week, when Stobĉus sent for him, much to his relief.
+This little comedy was played several times during the year, through
+what Linnĉus afterward acknowledged as his fault. One would hardly think
+that the man who on first seeing the English gorse in full bloom fell on
+his knees, burst into tears of joy, and thanked God that he had lived to
+see this day, would have had a fiery temper. Then further, the gentle,
+spiritual qualities that Linnĉus in his later life developed give one
+the idea that he was always of a gentle nature.
+
+In indexing the museum of Doctor Stobĉus, Linnĉus found his bent. "I
+will never be a doctor," he said; "but I can beat the world on making a
+catalog."
+
+And thus it was: his genius lay in classification. "He indexed and
+catalogued the world," a great writer has said.
+
+After a year at the University of Lund, with more learned by working for
+his board than at school, there was a visit from Doctor Rothman, who had
+just dropped in to see his old friend Stobĉus. The fact was, Rothman
+cared a deal more for Linnĉus than he did for Stobĉus. "Weeds develop
+into flowers by transplanting only," said Rothman to Linnĉus. "You need
+a different soil--get out of here before you get pot-bound."
+
+"But about Cyclops?" asked Linnĉus.
+
+"Let Cyclops go to the devil!" It was no use to ask permission of
+Stobĉus. Linnĉus was so valuable that Stobĉus would not spare him.
+
+So Linnĉus packed up and departed between the dawn and the day, leaving
+a letter stating he had gone to Upsala because it seemed best and
+begging forgiveness for such seeming ingratitude.
+
+When Linnĉus got to Upsala he found a letter from Doctor Cyclops,
+written in wrath, requesting him never again to show his face in Lund.
+Rothman also lost the friendship of Stobĉus for his share in the
+transaction.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Linnĉus arrived at Upsala he had one marked distinction, according
+to his own account--he was the poorest student that had ever knocked at
+the gates of the University for admittance. Perhaps this is a mistake,
+for even though the young man had patched his shoes with birch bark, he
+was not in debt.
+
+And the youth of twenty-one who has health, hope, ambition and animation
+is not to be pitied. Poverty is only for the people who think poverty.
+
+It is five hundred English miles from Lund to Upsala. After his long,
+weary tramp, Linnĉus sat on the edge of the hill and looked down at the
+scattered town of Upsala in the valley below. A stranger passing by
+pointed out the college buildings, where a thousand young men were being
+drilled and disciplined in the mysteries of learning. "Where is the
+Botanical Garden?" asked the newcomer.
+
+It was pointed out to him. He gazed on the site, carefully studied the
+surrounding landscape, and mentally calculated where he would move the
+Botanical Garden as soon as he had control of it. Let us anticipate here
+just long enough to explain that the Upsala Botanical Garden now is
+where Linnĉus said it should be. It is a most beautiful place, lined off
+with close-growing shrubbery. After traversing the winding paths, one
+reaches the lecture-hall, built after the Greek, with porches, peristyle
+and gently ascending marble steps. On entering the building, the first
+object that attracts the visitor is the life-size statue of Linnĉus.
+
+To the left, a half-mile away, is the old cathedral--a place that never
+much interested Linnĉus. But there now rests his dust, and in windows
+and also in storied bronze his face, form and fame endure. In the
+meantime, we have left the young man sitting on a boulder looking down
+at the town ere he goes forward to possess it.
+
+He adjusts his shoes with their gaping wounds, shakes the dust from his
+cap, and then takes from his pack a faded neckscarf, puts it on and he
+is ready.
+
+Descending the hill he forgets his lameness, waives the stone-bruises,
+and walks confidently to the Botanical Garden, which he views with a
+critical eye. Next, he inquires for the General Superintendent who lives
+near. The young man presents his credentials from Rothman, who describes
+the youth as one who knows and loves the flowers, and who can be useful
+in office or garden and is not above spade and hoe. The Superintendent
+looks at the pink face, touched with bronze from days in the open air,
+notes the long yellow hair, beholds the out-of-door look of fortitude
+that comes from hard and plain fare, and inwardly compares these things
+with the lack of them in some of his students. "But this Doctor--Doctor
+Rothman who wrote this letter--I do not have the honor of knowing him,"
+says the Superintendent.
+
+"Ah, you are unfortunate," replies the youth; "he is a very great man,
+and I myself will vouch for him in every way."
+
+Oh! this glowing confidence of youth--before there comes a surplus of
+lime in the bones, or the touch of winter in the heart! The
+Superintendent smiled. Knock in faith and the door shall be
+opened--there are those whom no one can turn away. A stray bed was found
+in the garret for the stranger, and the next morning he was earnestly at
+work cataloguing the dried plants in the herbarium, a task long delayed
+because there was no one to do it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The study of Natural History in the University of Upsala was, at this
+time, at a low ebb. It was like the Art Department in many of the
+American colleges: its existence largely confined to the school catalog.
+There were many weeks of biting poverty and neglect for Linnĉus, but he
+worked away in obscurity and silence and endured, saying all the time,
+"The sun will come out, the sun will come out!" Doctor Olaf Rudbeck had
+charge of the chair of Botany, but seldom sat in it. His business was
+medicine. He gave no lectures, but the report was that he made his
+students toil at cultivating in his garden--this to open up their
+intellectual pores. In the course of his work, Linnĉus devised a sex
+plan of classification, instead of the so-called natural method. He
+wrote out his ideas and submitted them to Rudbeck.
+
+The learned Doctor first pooh-poohed the plan, then tolerated it, and in
+a month claimed he had himself devised it. On the scheme being explained
+to others there was opposition, and Rudbeck requested Linnĉus to amplify
+his notes into a thesis, and read it as a lecture. This was done, and so
+pleased was the old man that he appointed Linnĉus his adjunctus. In the
+Spring of Seventeen Hundred Thirty, Linnĉus began to give weekly
+lectures on some topic of Natural History.
+
+Linnĉus was now fairly launched. His animation, clear thinking, handsome
+face and graceful ways made his lectures very popular. Science in his
+hands was no longer the dull and turgid thing it had before been in the
+University. He would give a lecture in the hall, and then invite the
+audience to walk with him in the woods. He seemed to know everything:
+birds, beetles, bugs, beasts, trees, weeds, flowers, rocks and stones
+were to him familiar.
+
+He showed his pupils things they had walked on all their lives and never
+seen.
+
+The old Botanical Garden that had degenerated into a kitchen-garden for
+the Commons was rearranged and furnished with many specimens gathered
+round about.
+
+A system of exchange was carried on with other schools, and Natural
+History at Upsala was fast becoming a feature. Old Doctor Rudbeck
+hobbled around with the classes, and when Linnĉus lectured sat in a
+front seat, applauding by rapping his cane on the floor and ejaculating
+words of encouragement.
+
+Linnĉus was now receiving invitations to lecture at other schools in the
+vicinity. He made excursions and reports on the Natural History of the
+country around. The Academy of Science of Upsala now selected him to go
+to Lapland and explore the resources of that country, which was then
+little known.
+
+The journey was to be a long and dangerous one. It meant four thousand
+miles of travel on foot, by sledge and on horseback, over a country that
+was for the most part mountainous, without roads, and peopled with
+semi-savages.
+
+There were two reasons why Linnĉus should make the trip:
+
+One was he had the hardihood and the fortitude to do it.
+
+And second, he was not wanted at Upsala. He was becoming too popular.
+One rival professor had gone so far as to prefer formal charges of
+scientific heresy; he also made the telling point that Linnĉus was not a
+college graduate. The rule of the University was that no lecturer,
+teacher or professor should be employed who did not have a degree from
+some foreign University.
+
+Inquiry was made and it was found that Linnĉus had left the University
+of Lund under a cloud. Linnĉus was confronted with the charge, and
+declined to answer it, thus practically pleading guilty. So, to get him
+out of Upsala seemed a desirable thing, both to friends and to foes. His
+friends secured the commission for the Lapland exploration, and his
+enemies made no objections, merely whispering, "Good riddance!" To be
+twenty-four, in good health, with hair like that of General Custer, a
+heart to appreciate Nature, a good horse under you, and a commission
+from the State to do an important work, in your left-hand
+breast-pocket--what Heaven more complete!
+
+A reception was tendered the young naturalist in the great hall, and he
+addressed the students on the necessity of doing your work as well as
+you can, and being kind. Before beginning his arduous and dangerous
+journey, Linnĉus went to Lund to visit his old patron, Doctor Stobĉus.
+Time, the great healer, had cured the Doctor of his hate, and he now
+spoke of Linnĉus as his best pupil. He had left hastily by the wan light
+of the moon, without leaving orders where his mail was to be forwarded;
+but now he was received as an honored guest. All the little
+misunderstandings they had were laughed over as jokes.
+
+From Lund, Linnĉus went to his home in Smaland to visit his parents.
+
+It is needless to say that they were very proud of him, and the
+villagers turned out in great numbers to do him honor, perhaps, in their
+simplicity, not knowing why.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The account of the Lapland trip by Linnĉus is to be found in his book,
+"Lachesis Lapponica."
+
+The journey covered over four thousand miles and took from May to
+November, Seventeen Hundred Thirty-one. The volume is in the form of a
+daily journal, and is as interesting as "Robinson Crusoe." There is no
+night there in Summer; but for all this, Lapland is not a paradise.
+
+It is a great stretch of desert, vast steppes and lofty mountains, with
+here and there fertile valleys. To be out in the wide open, with no
+companions but a horse and a dog, filled Linnĉus' heart with a wild joy.
+As he went on, the road grew so rough that he had to part with the
+horse, which he did with a pang, but the dog kept him company.
+
+To be educated is to liberate the mind from its trammels and fears--to
+set it free, new-chiseled from the rock. Linnĉus reveled in the vast
+loneliness of the steppes and took a hearty satisfaction in the hard
+fare. His gun and fishing-rod stood him in good stead; there were
+berries at times, and edible barks and watercress, and when these failed
+he had a little bag of meal and dried reindeer-tongues to fall back
+upon.
+
+The simplicity of his living is shown best in the fact that the expenses
+for the entire journey, occupying seven months, were only twenty-five
+pounds, or less than one hundred twenty-five dollars. The Academy had
+set aside sixty pounds, and their surprise at having most of the money
+returned to them, instead of a demand being made for more, won them,
+hand and heart. He had hit the sturdy old burghers in a sensitive
+spot--the pocketbook--and they passed resolutions declaring him the
+world's greatest naturalist, and voted him a medal, to be cast at his
+own expense. Fame is delightful, but as collateral it does not rank
+high.
+
+Linnĉus was without funds and without occupation. He gave a course of
+lectures at the University on his explorations, where every seat was
+taken, and even the stage and windows were filled. The sprightliness,
+grace and intellect Linnĉus brought to bear illumined his theme.
+
+When Linnĉus lectured, all classes were dismissed: none could rival him.
+His very excellence was his disadvantage. Jealousy was hot on his trail,
+for he was disturbing the balance of stupidity. A movement grew to force
+him from the college. Formal charges were made, and when the case came
+to a trial the even tenor of justice was disturbed by Linnĉus making an
+attack on Professor Rosen, his principal enemy, with intent to kill him.
+Dueling has been forbidden in all the universities of Sweden since the
+year Sixteen Hundred Eighty-two, and the diversion replaced by quartet
+singing. So when Linnĉus challenged his enemy to fight, and warned him
+he would kill him if he didn't fight, and also if he did, things were in
+a bad way for Linnĉus.
+
+The former charges were dropped to take up the more serious--just as
+when a man is believed to be guilty of murder, no mention is made of his
+crime of larceny.
+
+Poor Linnĉus was under the ban. The enemy had won: Linnĉus must leave.
+But where should he go--what could he do? No college would receive him
+after his being compelled to leave Upsala for riot. He decided that if
+disgrace were to be his on account of revenge, he would accept the
+disgrace. He would kill Rosen on sight and then either commit suicide or
+accept the consequences: it was all one! And so, laying plans to waylay
+his victim, he fell asleep and dreamed he had done the deed.
+
+He awoke in a sweat of horror!
+
+He heard the officers at the door! He staggered to his feet, and was
+making wild plans to fight the pursuers, when it occurred to him that he
+had only dreamed. He sat down, faint, but mightily relieved.
+
+Then he laughed, and it came to him that opposition was a part of the
+great game of life. To do a thing was to jostle others, and to jostle
+and be jostled was the fate of every man of power. "He that endureth
+unto the end shall be saved."
+
+The world was before him--the flowers still bloomed, and plants nodded
+their heads in the meadows; the summer winds blew across the fields of
+wheat, the branches waved. He was strong--he could plant and plow, or
+dig ditches, or hew lumber!
+
+Some one was hammering on the door; they had been knocking for fully
+five minutes--ah! There had been no murder, so surely it was not the
+officers.
+
+He arose slowly and opened the door, murmuring apologies. A letter for
+Carolus Linnĉus! The letter was from Baron Reuterholm of Dalecarlia. It
+contained a draft for twenty-five pounds, "as a token of good faith,"
+and begged that Linnĉus would accept charge of an expedition to survey
+the natural resources of Dalecarlia in the same way that he had Lapland,
+only with greater minuteness. Linnĉus read the letter again. The draft
+fluttered from his fingers to the floor.
+
+"Pick that up!" he peremptorily ordered of the messenger. He wanted to
+see if the other man saw it too.
+
+The other man did pick it up! Linnĉus was not dreaming, then, after
+all!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This second expedition had two objects: one was the better education of
+Baron Reuterholm's two sons, and the other the survey. One of these sons
+was at the University of Upsala, and he had conceived such an admiration
+for Linnĉus that he had written home about him. No man knows what he is
+doing: we succeed by the right oblique. Little did Linnĉus guess that he
+was preparing the way for great good fortune. The second excursion was
+one of luxury. It lacked all the hardships of the first, and involved
+the management of a party. Reuterholm was a rich Jewish banker, and a
+man in close touch with all Swedish affairs of State. This time Linnĉus
+was provided with ample funds.
+
+Linnĉus had a genius for system--a head for business. He classified men,
+and systematized his work like a general in the field. There were seven
+young naturalists in the party, and to each Linnĉus assigned a special
+work, with orders to hand in a written report of progress each evening.
+That the "Economist" or steward of the party was an American lends an
+especial note of interest for us. After Dalecarlia it was to be America!
+
+In money matters he was punctilious and accurate, the result of his
+early training in making both ends meet. The habits of thrift, industry,
+energy and absolute honesty had made him a marked man--there is not so
+much competition along these lines.
+
+The maps, measurements, drawings, and the exact, short, sharp, military
+reports turned in at regular intervals to the Baron won that worthy
+absolutely.
+
+Linnĉus was a businessman as well as a naturalist. It would require a
+book to tell of the glorious half-gypsy life of these eight young men,
+moving slowly through woods, across plains, over mountains and meadows,
+studying soil, rocks, birds, trees and flowers, collecting and making
+records.
+
+Camping at night by flowing streams, awakening with the dawn and cooking
+breakfast by the campfire in a silence that took up their shouts of
+laughter in surprise, and echoed them back from the neighboring hills!
+At last the journey was ended. Linnĉus had proved his ability to
+teach--his animation, good-cheer and friendly qualities brought his
+pupils very close to him. Reuterholm insisted that he should attach
+himself to the rising little college at Fahlun. There he met Doctor
+Morĉus, a man of much worth in a scientific way. At his house Linnĉus
+made his home. There was a daughter in the household, Sara Elizabeth,
+tall, slender, appreciative and studious. One of the Reuterholms had
+courted her, but in vain.
+
+There were the usual results, and when Carolus and Sara Elizabeth came
+to Doctor Morĉus hand in hand for his blessing, he granted it as good
+men always do. Then the Doctor gave Linnĉus some good advice--go to
+Holland or somewhere and get a doctor's degree. The enemies at Upsala
+called Linnĉus "the gypsy scientist." Silence them--Linnĉus was now a
+great man, and the world would yet acknowledge it. Sara Elizabeth agreed
+in all of the propositions.
+
+Love, they say, is blind, but sometimes love is a regular telescope.
+This time love saw things that the learned men of Upsala failed to
+discover--their diagnosis was wrong. Linnĉus had prepared a thesis on
+intermittent fever, and he was assured that if he presented this thesis
+at the medical school at Harderwijk, Holland, with letters from Baron
+Reuterholm and Doctor Morĉus, it would secure him the much desired M.D.
+
+A few months, at most, would suffice. He could then return to Fahlun and
+take his place as a practising physician and a professor in the college,
+marry the lady of his choice and live happy ever afterward.
+
+So he started away southward. In due time, he arrived at Harderwijk and
+read his thesis to the faculty. Instead of the callow youth, such as
+they usually dealt with, they found a practised speaker who defended his
+points with grace and confidence. The degree was at once voted, and a
+"cum laude" thrown in for good measure. Linnĉus was asked to remain
+there and give a course of lectures on natural history. This he did.
+Before going home he thought he would take a little look in on Leyden,
+at that time the bookmaking and literary center of the world. At Leyden
+he met Gronovius, the naturalist, who asked him to remain and give
+lectures at the University. He did so, and incidentally showed
+Gronovius the manuscript of his book on the new system of botanic
+classification.
+
+Gronovius was so delighted that he insisted on having the book printed
+by the Plantins at his own expense. Here was a piece of good fortune
+Linnĉus had not anticipated.
+
+Linnĉus now settled down to read the proofs and help the work through
+the presses. But he never idled an hour.
+
+He studied, wrote and lectured, and made little excursions with his
+friends through the fields. The book finished, he hastened to send
+copies back to Fahlun to Sara Elizabeth, saying he must see Amsterdam
+and then go to Antwerp to visit his new-found printer-friends there, and
+then go home!
+
+At Amsterdam he remained a whole year, living at the house of Burman,
+the naturalist.
+
+The wealthy banker, Cliffort, first among amateur botanists of his day,
+invited Linnĉus to visit him at his country-house at Hartecamp. Here he
+saw the finest garden he had ever looked upon. Cliffort had copies of
+Linnĉus' book and he now insisted that the author should remain, catalog
+his collection and issue the book with the help of the Plantins, all
+without regard to cost. It took a year to get the work out, but it yet
+remains one of the finest things ever attempted in a bookmaking way on
+the subject of botany.
+
+About the same time, with the help of Cliffort, Linnĉus published
+another big book of his own called, "Fundamenta Botanica." This book
+was taken up at Oxford and used as a textbook, in preference to Ray.
+
+Linnĉus received invitations from England and was persuaded to take a
+trip across to that country. He visited Oxford and London, and was
+received by scientific men as a conquering hero. He saw Garrick act and
+heard George Frederick Handel, where the crowd was so great that a
+notice was posted requesting gentlemen to come without swords and ladies
+without hoops. Handel composed an aria in his honor.
+
+Returning to Leyden, Linnĉus was urged by the municipality to remain and
+rearrange the public flower-gardens and catalog the rare plants at the
+University. This took a year, in which three more books were issued
+under his skilful care.
+
+He now started for home in earnest, by way of Paris, with what a
+contemporary calls "a trunkful of medals."
+
+Paris, too, had honors and employment for the great botanist, but he
+escaped and at last reached Fahlun. He had been gone nearly four years,
+and during the interval had established his place in the scientific
+world as the first botanist of the time.
+
+"It was love that sent me out of Sweden, and but for love I would never
+have returned," he wrote.
+
+Linnĉus and Sara Elizabeth were married June Twenty-six, Seventeen
+Hundred Thirty-nine.
+
+Now the unexpected happened: Upsala petitioned Linnĉus to return, and
+the man who headed the petition was the one who had driven him away and
+who came near being killed for his pains. Linnĉus and his wife went to
+Upsala, rich, honored, beloved.
+
+Linnĉus shifted the scientific center of gravity of all Europe to a
+town, practically to them obscure, a thing they themselves scarcely
+realized.
+
+Henceforth, the life of Linnĉus flowed forward like a great and mighty
+river--everything made way for him. He was invited by the King of Spain
+to come to that country and found a School of Science, and so lavish
+were the promises that they surely would have turned the head of a
+lesser man. Universities in many civilized countries honored themselves
+by giving him degrees.
+
+In Seventeen Hundred Sixty-one, the King of Sweden issued a patent of
+nobility in his honor, and thereafter he was Carl von Linne. In England
+he was known as Sir Charles Linn.
+
+Sainte-Beuve, the eminent French critic, says that the world has
+produced only about half a dozen men who deserve to be placed in the
+first class. The elements that make up this super-superior man are high
+intellect, which abandons itself to the purpose in hand, careless of
+form and precedent; indifference to obstacles and opposition; and a
+joyous, sympathetic, loving spirit that runs over and inundates
+everything it touches, all with no special thought of personal pleasure,
+gratification or gain.
+
+Linnĉus seems in every way to fill the formula.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS H. HUXLEY]
+
+THOMAS H. HUXLEY
+
+
+     That man, I think, has a liberal education whose body has been so
+     trained in youth that it is the ready servant of his will, and does
+     with ease and pleasure all that, as a mechanism, it is capable of;
+     whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts
+     of equal strength and in smooth running order, ready, like a
+     steam-engine, to be turned to any kind of work and to spin the
+     gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is
+     stored with the knowledge of the great fundamental truths of Nature
+     and the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is
+     full of life and fire, but whose passions have been trained to come
+     to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; one
+     who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to
+     hate all vileness, and to esteem others as himself.
+
+     --_Thomas Henry Huxley_
+
+
+THOMAS H. HUXLEY
+
+That was a great group of thinkers to which Huxley belonged.
+
+The Mutual Admiration Society forms the sunshine in which souls
+grow--great men come in groups. Sir Francis Galton says there were
+fourteen men in Greece in the time of Pericles who made Athens possible.
+A man alone is only a part of a man.
+
+Praxiteles by himself could have done nothing. Ictinus might have drawn
+the plans for the Parthenon, but without Pericles the noble building
+would have remained forever the stuff which dreams are made of. And they
+do say that without Aspasia Pericles would have been a mere dreamer of
+dreams, and Walter Savage Landor overheard enough of their conversation
+to prove it.
+
+William Morris and seven men working with him formed the Preraphaelite
+Brotherhood and gave the workers and doers of the world an impetus they
+yet feel.
+
+Cambridge and Concord had seven men who induced the Muses to come to
+America and take out papers.
+
+These men of the Barbizon School tinted the entire art world: Millet,
+Rousseau, Daubigny, Corot, Diaz. And the people who worked a complete
+revolution in the theological thought of Christendom were these:
+Darwin, Spencer, Mill, Tyndall, Wallace, Huxley and, yes, George Eliot,
+who bolstered the brain of Herbert Spencer when he was learning to think
+for himself.
+
+When the victory had become a rout, there were many others who joined
+forces with the evolutionists; but at first the thinkers named above
+stood together and received the rather unsavory gibes and jeers of those
+who get their episcopopagy and science from the same source.
+
+Darwin was the only man in the group who was a university graduate, and
+he once said that he owed nothing to his Alma Mater, save the stimulus
+derived from her disapproval.
+
+For the work these men had to do there was no precedent: no one had gone
+before and blazed a trail.
+
+Learning, like capital, is timid; but ignorance coupled with a desire to
+know, is bold. Do I then make a plea for ignorance? Yes, most assuredly.
+It is just as well not to know so much, as to be a theologian and know
+so many things that are not true.
+
+Learning and institutions of learning subdue men into conformity; only
+the man who belongs to nothing is free; and ignorance, as well as a
+certain indifference to what the world has said and done, is a necessary
+factor in the character of him who would do a great work. It was the
+combined ignorance and boldness of Columbus that made it possible for
+him to give the world a continent.
+
+Yet the man who has not had a college training often feels he has
+somehow missed something valuable: there is timidity and hesitation when
+he is in the presence of those who have had "advantages." And Huxley
+felt this loss, more or less, up to his thirty-fifth year, when Fate had
+him cross swords with college men, and then the truth became his that if
+he had had the regular university training, it was quite probable that
+he would have accepted the doctrines the universities taught, and would
+then have been in the camp of the "enemy," instead of with what he
+called the "blessed minority."
+
+Isolation is a great aid to the thinker. Some of the best books the
+world has ever known were written behind prison-bars; exile has done
+much for literature, and a protracted sea-voyage has allowed many a good
+man to roam the universe in imagination. Some of Macaulay's best essays
+were written on board slow-going sailing-ships that were blown by
+vagrant winds from England to India. Darwin, Hooker and Huxley, all got
+their scientific baptism on board of surveying-ships, where time was
+plentiful and anything but fleeting, and most everything else was
+scarce.
+
+Huxley was only assistant surgeon on the "Rattlesnake," and above him
+was a naturalist who much of his time lay in his bunk and read treatises
+on this and also on that.
+
+Huxley was the seventh child of a plodding schoolteacher, born on the
+seventh day of the week on a seventh-floor back, he used to say. His
+genius for work came from his mother, a tireless, ambitious woman, who
+got things done while others were discussing them. "Had she been a man,
+she would have been leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons,"
+her son used to say.
+
+College education was not for that goodly brood--a living was the first
+thing, so after a good drilling in the three R's, Thomas Huxley was
+apprenticed to a pharmacist who paid him six shillings a week, a sum
+that the boy conscientiously gave to his mother.
+
+Oh, if in our schoolteaching we could only teach this one thing: a great
+thirst for knowledge! But this desire we can not impart: it is trial,
+difficulty, obstacle, deprivation and persecution that make souls hunger
+and thirst after knowledge. Young Huxley wanted to know. His
+thoroughness in the drugstore won the admiration of the doctors whose
+prescriptions he compounded, and several of them loaned him books and
+took him to clinics; and at seventeen we find him with a Free
+Scholarship in Charing Cross Hospital, serving as nurse and assistant
+surgeon. Then came the appointment as assistant surgeon in the Navy, and
+the appointment to "H.M.S. Rattlesnake," bound on a four-year trip to
+the Antipodes, all quite as a matter of course.
+
+Life is a sequence: this happened today because you did that yesterday.
+Tomorrow will be the result of today.
+
+The general idea of evolution was strong in the mind of young Huxley. He
+realized that Nature was moving, growing, changing all things. He had
+studied embryology, and had seen how the body of a man begins as a
+single minute mass of protoplasm, without organs or dimensions.
+
+Behind the ship was his dragnet, and he worked almost constantly
+recording the different specimens of animal and vegetable life that he
+thus secured. The jellyfish attracted him most.
+
+To the ship's naturalist, jellyfish were jellyfish, but Huxley saw that
+there were many kinds, distinct, separate, peculiar. He began to dissect
+them and thus began his book on jellyfish, just as Darwin wrote his work
+on barnacles.
+
+Huxley vowed to himself that before the "Rattlesnake" got back to
+England he would know more about jellyfish than any other living man.
+That his ambition was realized no one now disputes.
+
+Among his first discoveries, it came to him with a thrill that a certain
+species of jellyfish bears a very close resemblance to the human embryo
+at a certain stage.
+
+And he remembered the dictum of Goethe, that the growth of the
+individual mirrors the growth of the race. And he paraphrased it thus:
+"The growth of the individual mirrors the growth of the species." So
+filled was he with the thought that he could not sleep, so he got up and
+paced the deck and tried to explain his great thought to the second
+mate. He was getting ready for "The Origin of Species," which he once
+said to Darwin he would himself have written, if Darwin had been a
+little more of a gentleman and had held off for a few years.
+
+It was on board the "Rattlesnake" that Huxley wrote this great truth:
+"Nature has no designs or intentions. All that live exist only because
+they have adapted themselves to the hard lines that Nature has laid
+down. We progress as we comply."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In Australia, while waiting for his ship to locate and map a dangerous
+reef, Huxley went ashore, and as he playfully expressed it, "ran upon
+another."
+
+The name of the most excellent young woman who was to become his wife
+was Henrietta Heathorn; and Julian Hawthorne has discovered that she
+belongs to the same good stock from whence came our Nathaniel of Salem.
+
+It did not take the young naturalist and this stranded waif, seven
+thousand miles from home, long to see that they had much in common. Both
+were eager for truth, both had the ability to cut the introduction and
+reach live issues directly. "I saw you were a woman with whom only
+honesty would answer," he wrote her thirty years after. He was still in
+love with her.
+
+Yet she was a proud soul, and no assistant surgeon on an insignificant
+sloop would answer her--when he got his surgeon's commission she would
+marry him. And it was seven years before she journeyed to England alone
+with that delightful object in view. He had to serve for her as Jacob
+did for Rachel, with this difference: Jacob loved several, but Thomas
+Huxley loved but one.
+
+Huxley's wife was his companion, confidante, comrade, friend. I can not
+recall another so blest, in all the annals of thinking men, save John
+Stuart Mill. "I tell her everything I know, or guess, or imagine, so as
+to get it straight in my own mind," he said to John Fiske.
+
+In that most interesting work, "Life and Lessons of Huxley," compiled by
+his son Leonard, are constant references and allusions to this most
+ideal mating. In reply to the question, Is marriage a failure? I would
+say, "No, provided the man marries a woman like Huxley's wife, and the
+woman marries a man like Huxley."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is a classic aphorism which runs about this way, "Knock and the
+world knocks with you; boost and you boost alone." Like most popular
+sayings this is truth turned wrong side out.
+
+John Fiske once called Thomas Huxley an "appreciative iconoclast." That
+is to say, Huxley was a persistent protester (which is different from a
+protestant), and at the same time, he was a friend who never faltered
+and grew faint in time of trouble. Huxley always sniffed the battle from
+afar and said, Ha! Ha!
+
+There be those who do declare that the success of Huxley was owing to
+his taking the tide at the flood, and riding into high favor on the
+Darwinian wave. To say that there would have been no Huxley had there
+been no Darwin would be one of those unkind cuts the cruelty of which
+lies in its truth.
+
+It is equally true that if there had been no Lincoln there would have
+been no Grant; but Grant was a very great man just the same--so why
+raise the issue!
+
+Darwin summed up and made nebulĉ of the truths which Huxley had, up to
+that time, held only in gaseous form.
+
+Darwin was born in the immortal year Eighteen Hundred Nine. Huxley was
+born in Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five. When "The Origin of Species" was
+published in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, Thomas Huxley was thirty-four
+years old. He had made his four years' trip around the world on the
+surveying-ship "Rattlesnake," just as Darwin had made his eventful
+voyage on the "Beagle."
+
+These men in many ways had paralleled each other; but Darwin had sixteen
+years the start, and during these years he had steadily and silently
+worked to prove the great truth that he had sensed intuitively years
+before in the South Seas.
+
+"The Origin of Species" sheds light in ten thousand ways on the fact
+that all life has evolved from very lowly forms and is still ascending:
+that species were not created by fiat, but that every species was the
+sure and necessary result of certain conditions.
+
+Until "The Origin of Species" was published, and for some years
+afterward, the Immutability of Species was taught in all colleges, and
+everywhere accepted by the so-called learned men.
+
+Goethe had somewhat dimly prophesied the discovery of the Law of
+Evolution, but his ideas on natural science were regarded by the schools
+as quite on a par with those of Dante: neither was taken seriously.
+
+Darwin proved his hypothesis. Doubtless, very many schoolmen would have
+accepted the theory, but to admit that man was not created outright,
+complete, and in his present form, or superior to it, seemed to evolve a
+contradiction of the Mosaic account of Creation, and the breaking up of
+Christianity. And these things done, many thought, would entail moral
+chaos, destruction of private interests and moral confusion being one
+and the same thing to those whose interests are involved. And so for
+conscience' sake, Darwin was bitterly assailed and opposed.
+
+Opportunity, which knocks many times at each man's door, rapped hard at
+Huxley's door in Eighteen Hundred Sixty. It was at Oxford, at a meeting
+of the British Association for the Advancement of Science: "A big
+society with a slightly ironical name," once said Huxley. The audience
+was large and fashionable, delegates being present from all parts of the
+British Empire.
+
+"The Origin of Species" had been published the year before, and tongues
+were wagging. Darwin was not present; but Huxley, who was known to be a
+personal friend of Darwin, was in his seat. The intent of the chairman
+was to keep Darwin and his pestiferous book out of all the discussions:
+Darwin was a good man to smother with silence.
+
+But Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, in the course of a speech on
+another subject began to run short of material, and so switched off upon
+a theme which he had already exploited from the pulpit with marked
+effect. All public speakers carry this boiler-plate matter for use in
+time of stress.
+
+The Bishop began to denounce "those enemies of the Church and Society
+who make covert attacks upon the Bible in the name of Science." He
+warmed to his theme, and by a specious series of misstatements and
+various appeals to the prejudices of his audience worked the assemblage
+up to a high pitch of hilarity and enthusiasm. Toward the close of his
+speech he happened to spy Huxley seated near, and pointing a pudgy
+finger at him, "begged to be informed if the learned gentleman was
+really willing to be regarded as a descendant of a monkey?"
+
+As the Bishop sat down, there was a wild burst of applause and much
+laughter, but amid the din were calls, "Huxley! Huxley!" These shouts
+increased as it came over the people that while the Bishop had made a
+great speech, he had gone a trifle too far in ridiculing a member who up
+to this time had been silent. The good English spirit of fair play was
+at work. Still Huxley sat silent. Then the enemy, thinking he was
+completely vanquished, took up the cry with intent to add to his
+discomfiture: "Huxley! Huxley!"
+
+Slowly Huxley arose. He stood still until the last buzzing whisper had
+died away. When he spoke it was in so low a tone that people leaned
+forward to catch his words.
+
+Huxley knew his business: his slowness to speak created an atmosphere.
+There was no jest in his voice or manner. The air grew tense.
+
+His quiet reserve played itself off against the florid exuberance of the
+Bishop. The Bishop was not a man given to exact statements: his
+knowledge of science was general, not specific.
+
+Huxley demolished his card house point by point, correcting the gross
+misstatements, and ending by saying that since a question of personal
+preferences had been brought into the discussion of a great scientific
+theme, he would confess that if the alternatives were a descent on the
+one hand from a respectable monkey, or on the other from a Bishop of the
+Church of England who could stoop to misrepresentation and sophistry and
+who had attempted in that presence to throw discredit upon a man who had
+given his life to the cause of science, then if forced to decide he
+would declare in favor of the monkey.
+
+When Huxley took his seat, there was a silence that could be felt.
+Several ladies fainted. There were fears that the Bishop would reply,
+and to keep down such a possible unpleasant move the audience now
+applauded Huxley roundly, and amid the din the chairman declared the
+meeting adjourned.
+
+From that time forward Huxley was famous throughout England as a man to
+let alone in public debate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is a fine thing to be a great scientist, but it is a yet finer thing
+to be a great man. The one element in Huxley's life that makes his
+character stand out clear, sharp and well defined was his steadfast
+devotion to truth. The only thing he feared was self-deception. When he
+uttered his classic cry in defense of Darwin, there was no ulterior
+motive in it; no thought that he was attaching himself to a popular
+success; no idea that he was linking his name with greatness.
+
+What he felt was true, he uttered; and the strongest desire of his soul
+was that he might never compromise with the error for the sake of mental
+ease, or accept a belief simply because it was pleasant.
+
+Huxley once wrote this terse sentence of Gladstone: "It is to me a
+serious thing that the destinies of this great country should at present
+be to a great extent in the hands of a man who, whatever he may be in
+the affairs of which I am no judge, is nothing but a copious shuffler in
+those that I do understand." Gladstone crossed swords with Huxley,
+Spencer and Robert Ingersoll, and in each case his blundering intellect
+looked like a raft of logs compared with a steamboat that responds to
+the helm. Gladstone was a man of action, and silence to such is most
+becoming.
+
+He had a belief, that was enough; he should have hugged it close, and
+never stood up to explain it. Let us vary a simile just used: Lincoln
+once referred to an opponent as being "like a certain steamboat that
+ran on the Sangamon. This boat had so big a whistle that when she blew
+it, there wasn't steam enough to make her run, and when she ran she
+couldn't whistle."
+
+Huxley, Spencer and Robert Ingersoll, all made Gladstone cut for the
+woods and cover his retreat in a cloud of words. Ingersoll once said
+that in replying to Gladstone he felt like a man who had been guilty of
+cruelty to children.
+
+If one wants to see how pitifully weak Gladstone could be in an
+argument, let him refer to the "North American Review" for Eighteen
+Hundred Eighty-two.
+
+Yet Ingersoll was surely lacking in the passion for truth that
+characterized Huxley. Ingersoll was always a prosecutor or a defender:
+the lawyer habit was strong upon him. Just a little more bias in his
+clay and he would have made a model bishop.
+
+His stock of science was almost as meager as was that of Samuel
+Wilberforce, and he seldom hesitated to turn the laugh on an adversary,
+even at the expense of truth. When brought to book for his indictment of
+Moses without giving that great man any credit for the sublime things he
+did do, or making allowances for the barbaric horde with which he had to
+deal, Bob evaded the proposition by saying, "I am not the attorney of
+Moses: he has more than three million men looking after his case."
+
+Again, in that most charming lecture on Shakespeare, Ingersoll proves
+that Bacon did not write the plays, by picking out various detached
+passages of Bacon, which no one for a moment ever claimed revealed the
+genius of the man.
+
+With equal plausibility we could prove that the author of Hamlet was a
+weakling, by selecting all the obscure and stupid passages, and parading
+these with the unexplained fact that the play opens with the spirit of a
+dead man coming back to earth, and a little later in the same play
+Shakespeare has the man who interviewed the ghost tell of "that bourne
+from whence no traveler returns." Even Shakespeare was not a genius all
+the time. And Ingersoll, the searcher for truth, borrowed from his
+friends, the priests, the cheerful habit of secreting the particular
+thing that would not help the cause in hand. But one of the best things
+in Ingersoll's character was that he realized his lapses and in private
+acknowledged them.
+
+On reading the smooth, florid and plausible sophistry of Wilberforce,
+Ingersoll once said: "Be easy on Soapy Sam! A few years ago, a little
+shifting of base on the part of my ancestors, and I would probably have
+had Soapy Sam's job."
+
+This resemblance of opposites makes a person think of that remark
+applied to Voltaire. "He was the father of all those who wear
+shovel-hats."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Thomas Huxley and his wife arrived in New York in Eighteen Hundred
+Seventy-six, on a visit to the Centennial Exhibition, this interesting
+item was flashed over the country, "Huxley and his titled bride have
+arrived in New York on their wedding-journey."
+
+This item caused Mr. and Mrs. Huxley--both of them royal democrats--more
+joy than did the most complimentary interview. At home they had left a
+charming little brood of seven children, three of them nearly grown-ups.
+
+Huxley sent Tyndall, who a few months before had married a daughter of
+Lord Hamilton, the clipping and this note: "You see how that once I am
+in a democratic country I am pulling all the honors I can in my own
+direction." The next letter the Huxleys received from Tyndall was
+addressed, "Sir Thomas and Lady Huxley." Huxley never stood in much awe
+of the nobility; he evidently felt that there was another kind of which
+he himself in degree was heir. Huxley never had a better friend than Sir
+Joseph Hooker, and we see in his letters such postscripts as this:
+
+"Dear Sir Joseph: Do come and dine with us; it is a month since we have
+seen your homely old phiz." And Sir Joseph replies that he will be on
+hand the next Sunday evening and offers this mild suggestion,
+"Scientific gents as has countenances as curdles milk should not cast
+aspersions on men made in image of Maker."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The wordy duel between Huxley and Gladstone prompted Toole, the great
+comedian, to send a box of grease-paints to Huxley with a note saying,
+"These are for you and Gladstone to use when you make up." It was a joke
+so subtle and choice that the Huxleys, always dear friends of Toole,
+laughed for a week.
+
+Poor Gladstone required a diagram when he heard of the procedure; and
+then, not being trepanned for the pleasantry, remarked that if Toole and
+Huxley collaborated on the stage, it would be eminently the proper
+thing, and in his mind there was little choice between them, both being
+fine actors.
+
+Later, we hear of Huxley saying he thought of sending the box of
+grease-paints to Gladstone, so the Premier could use them in making up
+with God; as for himself, he was like Thoreau and had never quarreled
+with Him.
+
+Huxley had many friendships with people seemingly outside of his own
+particular line of work. Henry Irving, the Reverend Doctor Parker, John
+Fiske and Hall Caine once met at one of Huxley's "Tall Teas," and Doctor
+Parker explained that he personally had no objection to visiting with
+sinners.
+
+For Parker, Huxley had a great admiration and often attended the
+Thursday noon meeting at the Temple, "to see and hear the greatest actor
+in England," a compliment which Parker much appreciated, otherwise he
+would not have repeated it. "If I ever take to the stage, I will play
+the part of Jacques or Touchstone," said Huxley.
+
+John Fiske in his delightful essay on Huxley said that in the Huxley
+home there was more jest, joke and banter than in any other place in
+London. The air was surcharged with mirth, and puns, often very bad
+ones, were tossed back and forth with great recklessness.
+
+At one time John Fiske was at the Huxleys and the dual or multiple
+nature of man came up for discussion. Huxley spoke of how very often men
+who were gentle and charming in their homes were capable of great
+crimes, and of how, on the other hand, a man might pass in the world as
+a philanthropist, and yet in his household be a veritable autocrat and
+tyrant.
+
+Fiske then incidentally mentioned the case of Doctors Parker and Webster
+of Harvard--men of intellect and worth. These men brooded over a
+misunderstanding that grew into a grudge and eventually hatched murder.
+One worthy professor killed the other, cut up the body, and tried to
+burn it in a chemist's retort. Only the great difficulty of reducing the
+human body to ashes caused the murder to out, and brought about the
+hanging of a scientist of note.
+
+"Yes, I have thought of the difficulty of disposing of a dead body,"
+said Huxley, solemnly; "and often when on the point of committing murder
+this was the only thing that made me hesitate!"
+
+"Oh, Pater, we are ashamed of you," said his three lovely daughters in
+concert. Huxley's ability to joke and his appreciation of the ludicrous
+marked him, in the mind of John Fiske, as the greatest thinker of his
+time. The humorist knows values, and that is why he laughs. Sensibility
+is, in fact, the basic element of wit.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Huxley's duties on the "Rattlesnake" were not in the line of science.
+His rank was assistant surgeon; but as sure-enough surgeons were only
+sent out on bigger craft, he was this ship's doctor.
+
+With the captain's help the men were kept busy, but not too busy, and
+the food and regulations were such that about all Huxley had to do was
+to look upon his work and pronounce it good.
+
+As a physician, Huxley practised throughout his life the science of
+prevention.
+
+"With a prophetic vision, quite unconscious, my parents named me after
+that particular apostle I was to admire most," once said Huxley. He was
+a doubter by instinct, and approached the world of Nature as if nothing
+were known about it.
+
+His work on the Medusa won him the recognition of the British Society,
+and this secured him the coveted surgeon's commission. Two tragedies
+confront man on his journey through life--one when he wants a thing and
+can not get it; the other when he gets the thing and finds he does not
+want it.
+
+Having secured his surgeon's commission, Huxley felt a strong repulsion
+toward devoting his life to the abnormal.
+
+"I am a scientist by nature, and my business is to teach," he wrote to
+his affianced wife. These were wise words which he had learned from her,
+but which he repeated, seemingly quite innocent of their source. We
+take our own wherever we find it.
+
+Miss Heathorn admired a surgeon, but loved a scientist, and Huxley being
+a man was making a heroic struggle to be what the young woman most
+wished. Love supplies an ideal--and that is the very best thing love
+does, with possibly an exception or two. So behold a ship's surgeon in
+London, full-fledged, refusing offers of position, and even declining to
+take a choice of ships, for such is the perversity of things animate and
+inanimate that, when we do not want things, Fate brings them to us on
+silver platters and begs us to accept. We win by indifference as much as
+by desire.
+
+"I have declined to ship on board the 'Cormorant' as head surgeon, and
+have applied to the University of Toronto for a position as Professor of
+Natural History."
+
+And so America had Huxley flung at her head. Toronto considered, and the
+Canadians sat on the case, and after considerable correspondence, the
+vacant chair was given to Professor Baldini of the Whitby Ladies
+College. It was a close call for Canada! Huxley had imagined that the
+New World offered special advantages to a rising young person of
+scientific bent, but now he secured a marriage-license and settled down
+as lecturer at the School of Mines. A little later he began to teach at
+the Royal College of Surgeons, with which institution he was to be
+connected the rest of his life, and fill almost any chair that happened
+to be vacant.
+
+From the time he was twenty-seven Huxley never had to look for work. He
+was known as a writer of worth, and as a lecturer his services were in
+demand.
+
+He became President of the Geological and Ethnological Society; was
+appointed Royal Commissioner for the Advancement of Science; was a
+member of the London School Board; Secretary of the Royal Society; Lord
+Rector of the University of Aberdeen; President of the Royal Society;
+and refused an offer to become Custodian of the British Museum, a life
+position, and where he had once applied for a clerkship.
+
+In letters to Darwin he occasionally signed his name with all titles
+added, thus, "Thomas Henry Huxley, M.B., M.D., Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S. of
+Her Majesty's Navy."
+
+Huxley was a forceful and epigrammatic writer, and had a command of
+English second to no scientist that England has ever produced. He was
+the only one of his group who had a distinct literary style. As a
+speaker he was quiet, deliberate, decisive, sure; and he carried enough
+reserve caloric so that he made his presence felt in any assemblage
+before he said a word. In oratory it is personality that gives ballast.
+
+Of his forty or so published books, "Man's Place in Nature," "Elementary
+Physiology" and "Classification of Animals" have been translated into
+many languages, and now serve as textbooks in various schools and
+colleges.
+
+Huxley is the founder of the so-called Agnostic School, which has the
+peculiarity of not being a school. The word "agnostic" was given its
+vogue by Huxley. To superficial people it was quite often used
+synonymously with "infidel" and "freethinker," both words of reproach.
+To Huxley it meant simply one who did not know, but wished to learn.
+
+The controlling impulse of Huxley's life was his absolute honesty. To
+pretend to believe a thing against which one's reason revolts, in order
+to better one's place in society, was to him the sum of all that was
+intellectually base.
+
+He regarded man as an undeveloped creature, and for this creature to lay
+the flattering unction to his soul that he was in special communication
+with the Infinite, and in possession of the secrets of the Creator, was
+something that in itself proved that man was as yet in the barbaric
+stage.
+
+Said Huxley: "As to the final truths of Creation and Destiny, I am an
+agnostic. I do not know, hence I neither affirm nor deny."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Humor and commonsense usually go together. Huxley had a goodly stock of
+both. When George Eliot died, there was a very earnest but ill-directed
+effort made to have her body buried in Westminster Abbey. Huxley, being
+close to the Dean, serving with him on several municipal boards, was
+importuned by Spencer to use his influence toward the desired end.
+Huxley saw the incongruity of the situation, and in a letter that
+reveals the logical mind and the direct, literary, Huxley quality, he
+placed his gentle veto on the proposition and thus saved the "enemy" the
+mortification of having to do so.
+
+Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey, but this was not to be the final
+resting-place of the dust of Mill, Tyndall, Spencer, George Eliot or
+Huxley. These had all stood in the fore of the fight against
+superstition and had both given and received blows.
+
+The Pantheon of such battle-scarred heroes was to be the hearts of those
+who prize above all that earth can bestow the benison of the God within.
+"Above all else, let me preserve my integrity of intellect," said
+Huxley. Here is Huxley's letter to Spencer:
+
+     4 Marlborough Place, Dec. 27, 1880
+
+     My Dear Spencer: Your telegram which reached me on Friday evening
+     caused me great perplexity, inasmuch as I had just been talking to
+     Morley, and agreeing with him that the proposal for a funeral in
+     Westminster Abbey had a very questionable look to us, who desired
+     nothing so much as that peace and honor should attend George Eliot
+     to her grave.
+
+     It can hardly be doubted that the proposal will be bitterly
+     opposed, possibly (as happened in Mill's case with less
+     provocation) with the raking up of past histories, about which the
+     opinion even of those who have least the desire or the right to be
+     pharisaical is strongly divided, and which had better be forgotten.
+
+     With respect to putting pressure on the Dean of Westminster, I have
+     to consider that he has some confidence in me, and before asking
+     him to do something for which he is pretty sure to be violently
+     assailed, I have to ask myself whether I really think it a right
+     thing for a man in his position to do.
+
+     Now I can not say I do. However much I may lament the circumstance,
+     Westminster Abbey is a Christian Church and not a Pantheon, and the
+     Dean thereof is officially a Christian priest, and we ask him to
+     bestow exceptional Christian honors by this burial in the Abbey.
+     George Eliot is known not only as a great writer, but as a person
+     whose life and opinions were in notorious antagonism to Christian
+     practise in regard to marriage, and Christian theory in regard to
+     dogma. How am I to tell the Dean that I think he ought to read over
+     the body of a person who did not repent of what the Church
+     considers mortal sin, a service not one solitary proposition of
+     which she would have accepted for truth while she was alive? How am
+     I to urge him to do that which, if I were in his place, I should
+     most emphatically refuse to do? You tell me that Mrs. Cross wished
+     for the funeral in the Abbey. While I desire to entertain the
+     greatest respect for her wishes, I am very sorry to hear it. I do
+     not understand the feeling which could create such a desire on any
+     personal grounds, save those of affection, and the natural yearning
+     to be near, even in death, those whom we have loved. And on public
+     grounds the wish is still less intelligible to me. One can not eat
+     one's cake and have it too. Those who elect to be free in thought
+     and deed must not hanker after the rewards, if they are to be so
+     called, which the world offers to those who put up with its
+     fetters.
+
+     Thus, however I look at the proposal, it seems to me to be a
+     profound mistake, and I can have nothing to do with it. I shall be
+     deeply grieved if this resolution is ascribed to any other motives
+     than those which I have set forth at greater length than I
+     intended.
+                             Ever yours very faithfully,
+                                                 T. H. HUXLEY
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: JOHN TYNDALL]
+
+JOHN TYNDALL
+
+
+     In my little book on Faraday, published in Eighteen Hundred
+     Sixty-eight, I have stated that he had but to will it to raise his
+     income, in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-two, to five thousand pounds a
+     year. In Eighteen Hundred Thirty-six, the sum might have been
+     doubled. Yet this son of a blacksmith, this journeyman book-binder,
+     with his proud, sensitive soul, rejecting the splendid
+     opportunities open to him--refusing even to think them splendid in
+     presence of higher aims--cheerfully accepted from the Trinity House
+     a pittance of two hundred pounds a year.
+
+     --_John Tyndall_
+
+
+JOHN TYNDALL
+
+Tyndall was of high descent and lowly birth. His father was a
+member of the Irish Constabulary, and there were intervals when the
+boy's mother took in washing. But back of this the constable swore i'
+faith, when the ale was right, that he was descended from an Irish King,
+and probably this is true, for most Irishmen are, and acknowledge it
+themselves.
+
+The father of our Tyndall spelled his name Tyndale, and traced a direct
+relationship to William Tyndale, who declared he would place a copy of
+the English Bible in the hands of every plowboy in the British Isles,
+and pretty nearly made good his vow. William Tyndale paid for his
+privileges, however. He was arrested, given an opportunity to run away,
+but wouldn't; then he was exiled. Finally he was incarcerated in a
+dungeon of the Castle Vilvoorden.
+
+His cell was beneath the level of the ground, so was cold and damp and
+dark. He petitioned the governor of the prison for a coat to keep him
+warm and a candle by which he could read. "We'll give you both light and
+heat, pretty soon," was the reply.
+
+And they did. They led Tyndale out under the blue sky and tied him to a
+stake set in the ground. Around his feet they piled brush, and also all
+of his books and papers that they could find.
+
+A chain was put around his neck and hooked tight to the post. Then the
+fagots were piled high, and the fire was lighted.
+
+"He was not burned to death," argued one of the priests who was present;
+"he was not burned to death. He just drew up his feet and hanged himself
+in the chain, and so was choked: he was that stubborn!" The father of
+John Tyndall was an Orangeman and had in a glass case a bit of the flag
+carried at the Battle of the Boyne.
+
+It is believed, with reason, that the original flag had in it about ten
+thousand square yards of material. Tyndale the Orangeman was of so
+uncompromising a type that he occasionally arrested Catholics on general
+principles, like the Irishman who beat the Jew under the mistaken idea
+that he had something to do with crucifying "Our Savior." "But that was
+two thousand years ago," protested the Jew. "Niver moind; I just heard
+av it--take that and that!"
+
+Zeal not wisely directed is a true Irish trait. It will not do to say
+that the Irish have a monopoly on stupidity, yet there have been times
+when I thought they nearly cornered the market. I once had charge of a
+gang of green Irishmen at a lumber-camp.
+
+I started a night-school for their benefit, as their schooling had
+stopped at subtraction. One evening they got it into their heads that I
+was an atheist. Things began to come my way. I concluded discretion was
+the better part of valor, and so took to the woods, literally. They
+followed me for a mile, and then gave up the chase. On the way home they
+met a man who spoke ill of me, and they fell upon him and nearly pounded
+his life out.
+
+I never had to lick any of my gang: they looked after this themselves.
+On pay-nights they all got drunk and fell upon each other--broken noses
+and black eyes were quite popular. Father Driscoll used to come around
+nearly every month and have them all sign the pledge.
+
+That story about the Irishman who ate the rind of the watermelon "and
+threw the inside away," is true. That is just what the Irish do. Very
+often they are not able to distinguish good from bad, kindness from
+wrong, love from hate. Ireland has all the freedom she can use or
+deserves, just as we all have. What would Ireland do with freedom if she
+had it? Hate for England keeps peace at home. Home rule would mean home
+rough-house--and a most beautiful argument it would be, enforced with
+shillalah logic. The spirit of Donnybrook Fair is there today as much as
+ever, and wherever you see a head, hit it, would be home rule.
+Donnybrook is a condition of mind.
+
+If England really had a grudge against Ireland and wanted to get even,
+she could not do better than to set her adrift.
+
+But then the Irish impulsiveness sometimes leads to good, else how could
+we account for such men as O'Connor, Parnell, John Tyndall, Burke,
+Goldsmith, Sheridan, Arthur Wellesley and all the other Irish poets,
+orators and thinkers who have made us vibrate with our kind?
+
+Transplanted weeds produce our finest flowers.
+
+The parents of Tyndall were intent on giving their boy an education. And
+to them, the act of committing things to memory was education. William
+Tyndale gave the Bible to the people; John Tyndall would force it upon
+them. The "Book of Martyrs," the sermons of Jeremy Taylor, and the
+Bible, little John came to know by heart. And he grew to have a fine
+distaste for all. Once, when nearly a man grown, he had the temerity to
+argue with his father that the Bible might be better appreciated, if a
+penalty were not placed upon disbelief in its divine origin. A cuff on
+the ear was the answer, and John was given until sundown to apologize.
+He did not apologize.
+
+And young Tyndale then vowed he would change his name to Tyndall and
+forever separate himself from a person whose religion was so largely
+mixed with brutality. But yet John Tyndale was not a bad man. He had
+intellect far above the average of his neighbors. He had the courage of
+his convictions. His son had the courage of his lack of convictions.
+
+And the early drilling in the Bible was a good thing for young Tyndall.
+Bible legend and allusion color the English language, and any man who
+does not know his Bible well, can never hope to speak or write English
+with grace and fluency. Tyndall always knew and acknowledged his
+indebtedness to his parents, and he also knew that his salvation
+depended upon getting away from and beyond the narrow confines of their
+beliefs and habits. Because a thing helps you in a certain period of
+your education is no reason why you should feed upon it forevermore.
+
+This way lies arrested development.
+
+Life, like heat, is a mode of motion, and progress consists in
+discarding a good thing as soon as you have found a better.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Occasionally Herbert Spencer used to spend a Sunday afternoon with the
+Carlyles at their modest home in Chelsea. At such times Jeannie Welsh
+would usually manage to pilot the conversational craft along smooth
+waters; but if she were not present, hot arguments would follow, and
+finally a point would be reached where Carlyle and Spencer would simply
+sit and glare at each other.
+
+"After such scenes I always thought less of two persons, Carlyle and
+myself," said Spencer; "and so for many years I very cautiously avoided
+Cheyne Row." Then there was another man Spencer avoided, although for a
+different reason; this individual was John Tyndall.
+
+On the death of Tyndall, Spencer wrote:
+
+"There has just died the greatest teacher of modern times: a man who
+stimulated thought in old and young, every one he met, as no one else I
+ever knew did. Once we went together for a much-needed rest to the Lake
+District. Gossip, which has its advantages in that it can be carried on
+with no tax on one's intellectual powers, had no part in our
+conversation. The discussion of great themes began at once wherever
+Tyndall was.
+
+"The atmosphere of the man was intensely stimulating: everybody seemed
+to become great and wise and good in his presence.
+
+"We walked on the shores of Windermere, climbed Rydal Mount, rowed
+across Lake Grasmere (leaving our names on the visitors' list), and all
+the time we dwelt upon high Olympus and talked.
+
+"But, alas! Tyndall's vivacity undid me: two days of his company, with
+two sleepless nights, and I fled him as I would a pestilence."
+
+But Carlyle growled out one thing in Spencer's presence which Spencer
+often quoted. "If I had my own way," said Carlyle, "I would send the
+sons of poor men to college, and the sons of rich men I would set to
+work."
+
+Manual labor in right proportion means mental development. Too much hoe
+may slant the brow, but hoe in proper proportion develops the
+cerebellum.
+
+In the past we have had one set of men do all the work, and another set
+had all the culture: one hoes and another thirsts. There are whole areas
+of brain-cells which are evolved only through the efforts of hand and
+eye, for it is the mind at last that directs all our energies. The
+development of brain and body go together--manual work is brain-work.
+Too much brain-work is just as bad as too much toil; the misuse of the
+pen carries just as severe a penalty as the misuse of the hoe. And it is
+a great satisfaction to realize that the thinking world has reached a
+point where these propositions do not have to be proven.
+
+There was a time when Spencer regretted that he had not been sent to
+college, instead of being set to work. But later he came to regard his
+experience as a practical engineer and surveyor as a very precious and
+necessary part of his education.
+
+John Tyndall and Alfred Russel Wallace had an experience almost
+identical. In childhood John attended the village school for six months
+of the year, and the rest of the time helped his parents, as children of
+poor people do. When nineteen he went to work carrying a chain in a
+surveying corps. Steady attention to the business in hand brought its
+sure reward, and in a few years he had charge of the squad, and was
+given the duty of making maps and working out complex calculations in
+engineering.
+
+In mathematics he especially excelled. Five years in the employ of the
+Irish Ordnance Survey and three years in practical railroad-building,
+and Tyndall got the Socialistic bee in his bonnet. He resigned a good
+position to take part in bringing about the millennium.
+
+That he helped the old world along toward the ideal there is no doubt;
+but Tyndall is dead and Jerusalem is not yet. When the rule of the
+barons was broken, and the stage of individualism or competition was
+ushered in, men said, "Lo! The time is at hand and now is." But it was
+not. Socialism is coming, by slow degrees, imperceptibly almost as the
+growing of Spring flowers that push their way from the damp, dark earth
+into the sunlight. And after Socialism, what? Perhaps the millennium
+will still be a long way off.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Forty-seven, when Tyndall was twenty-seven years
+old, Robert Owen, one of the greatest practical men the world has ever
+seen, cried aloud, "The time is at hand!"
+
+Owen was an enthusiast: all great men are. He had risen from the ranks
+by the absolute force of his great untiring, restless and loving spirit.
+From a day laborer in a cotton-mill he had become principal owner of a
+plant that supported five thousand people.
+
+Owen saw the difference between joyless labor and joyful work. His mills
+were cleanly, orderly, sanitary, and surrounded with lawns, trees and
+shrubbery. He was the first man in England to establish kindergartens,
+and this he did at his own expense for the benefit of his helpers. He
+established libraries, clubs, swimming-pools, night-schools,
+lecture-courses. And all this time his business prospered.
+
+To the average man it is a miracle how any one individual could bear the
+heaviest business burdens and still do what Robert Owen did.
+
+Robert Owen had vitality plus: he was a gourmet for work. William Morris
+was just such a man, only with a bias for art; but both Owen and Morris
+had the intensity and impetus which get the thing done while common
+folks are thinking about it.
+
+Owen was familiar with every detail of his vast business, and he was an
+expert in finance. Like Napoleon he said: "The finances? I will arrange
+them."
+
+Robert Owen erected schoolhouses, laid out gardens, built mills,
+constructed tenements, traveled, lectured, and wrote books. His
+enthusiasm was contagious. He was never sick--he could not spare the
+time--and a doctor once said, "If Robert Owen ever dies, it will be
+through too much Robert Owen."
+
+Owen went over to Dublin on one of his tours, and lectured on the ideal
+life, which to him was Socialism, "each for all and all for each."
+
+Fourier, the dreamer, supplied a good deal of the argument, but Robert
+Owen did the thing. Socialism always catches these two classes, doers
+and dreamers, workers and drones, honest men and rogues, those with a
+desire to give and those with a lust to get.
+
+Among others who heard Owen speak at Dublin was the young Irish
+engineer, John Tyndall. Tyndall was the type of man that must be common
+before we can have Socialism. There was not a lazy hair in his head;
+aye, nor a selfish one, either. He had a tender heart, a receptive brain
+and the spirit of obedience, the spirit that gives all without counting
+the cost, the spirit that harkens to the God within. And need I say that
+the person who gives all, gets all! The economics of God are very
+simple: We receive only that which we give. The only love we keep is the
+love we give away.
+
+These are very old truths--I did not discover nor invent them--they are
+not covered by copyright: "Cast thy bread upon the waters."
+
+John Tyndall was melted by Owen's passionate appeal of each for all and
+all for each. To live for humanity seemed the one desirable thing. His
+loving Irish heart was melted. He sought Owen out at his hotel, and they
+talked, talked till three o'clock in the morning.
+
+Owen was a judge of men; his success depended upon this one thing, as
+that of every successful business must. He saw that Tyndall was a rare
+soul and nearly fulfilled his definition of a gentleman. Tyndall had
+hope, faith and splendid courage; but best of all, he had that hunger
+for truth which classes him forever among the sacred few.
+
+During his work out of doors on surveying trips he had studied the
+strata; gotten on good terms with birds, bugs and bees; he knew the
+flowers and weeds, and loved all the animate things of Nature, so that
+he recognized their kinship to himself, and he hesitated to kill or
+destroy.
+
+Education is a matter of desire, and a man like Tyndall is getting an
+education wherever he is. All is grist that comes to his mill.
+
+Robert Owen had but recently started "Queenswood College" in Hampshire,
+and nothing would do but Tyndall should go there as a teacher of
+science.
+
+"Is he a skilled and educated teacher?" some one asked Owen. "Better
+than that," replied Owen; "he is a regular firebrand of enthusiasm."
+
+And so Tyndall resigned his position with the railroad and moved over to
+England, taking up his home at "Harmony Hall."
+
+Harmony Hall was a beautiful brick building with the letters C. M.
+carved on the cornerstone in recognition of the Commencement of the
+Millennium. The pupils were mostly workers in the Owen mills who had
+shown some special aptitude for education. The pupils and teachers all
+worked at manual labor a certain number of hours daily. There was a
+delightful feeling of comradeship about the institution. Tyndall was
+happy in his work.
+
+He gave lectures on everything, and taught the things that no one else
+could teach, and of course he got more out of the lessons than any of
+the scholars.
+
+But after a few months' experience with the ideal life, Tyndall had
+commonsense enough to see that Harmony Hall, instead of being the
+spontaneous expression of the people who shared its blessings, was
+really a charity maintained by one Robert Owen. It was a beneficent
+autocracy, a sample of one-man power, beautifully expressed.
+
+Robert Owen planned it, built it, directed it and made good any
+financial deficit. Instead of Socialism it was a kindly despotism. A few
+of the scholars did their level best to help themselves and help the
+place, but the rest didn't think and didn't care. They were passengers
+who enjoyed the cushioned seats. A few, while partaking of the
+privileges of the place, denounced it.
+
+"You can not educate people who do not want to be educated," said
+Tyndall. The value of an education lies in the struggle to get it. Do
+too much for people, and they will do nothing for themselves.
+
+Many of the students at Harmony Hall had been sent there by Owen,
+because he, in the greatness of his heart and the blindness of his zeal,
+thought they needed education. They may have needed it; but they did not
+want it: ease was their aim.
+
+The indifference and ingratitude Robert Owen met with did not discourage
+him: it only gave him an occasional pause. He thought that the bad
+example of English society was too close to his experiments: it vitiated
+the atmosphere.
+
+So he came over to America and founded the town of New Harmony, Indiana.
+The fine solid buildings he erected in Posey County, then a wilderness,
+are still there.
+
+As for the most romantic and interesting history of New Harmony, Robert
+Owen and his socialistic experiments, I must refer the gentle reader to
+the Encyclopedia Britannica, a work I have found very useful in the
+course of making my original researches.
+
+After a year at Harmony Hall, Tyndall saw that he would have to get out
+or else become a victim of arrested development, through too much
+acceptance of a strong man's bounty. "You can not afford to accept
+anything for nothing," he said. Life at Harmony Hall to him was very
+much like life in a monastery, to which stricken men flee when the old
+world seems too much for them. "When all the people live the ideal life,
+I'll live it; but until then I'm only one of the great many strugglers."
+Besides, he felt that in missing university training he had dropped
+something out of his life. Now he would go to Germany and see for
+himself what he had missed.
+
+While railroading he had saved up nearly four hundred pounds. This money
+he had offered at one time to invest in shares in the Owen mills. But
+Robert Owen said, "Wait two years and then see how you feel!"
+
+Robert Owen was not a financial exploiter. Tyndall may have differed
+with him in a philosophic way; but they never ceased to honor and
+respect each other.
+
+And so John Tyndall bade the ideal life good-by, and went out into the
+stress, strife and struggle, resolved to spend his two thousand dollars
+in bettering his education, and then to start life anew.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Robert Owen had been over to America and had met Emerson, and very
+naturally caught it. When he returned home he gave young Tyndall a copy
+of Emerson's first book, the "Essay on Nature," published anonymously.
+
+Tyndall read and re-read the book, and read it aloud to others and spoke
+of it as a "message from the gods."
+
+He also read every word that Carlyle put in print. It was Carlyle who
+introduced him to German philosophy and German literature, and fired him
+with a desire to see for himself what Germany was doing.
+
+Germany had still another mystic tie that drew him thitherward. It was
+at Marburg, Germany, that his illustrious namesake had published his
+translation of the Bible.
+
+At Marburg there was a University, small, 't was true, but its
+simplicity and the cheapness of living there were recommendations. So to
+Marburg he went. Tyndall found lodgings in a little street called
+"Heretics' Row." Possibly there be people who think that Tyndall's
+taking a room in such a street was chance, too. Chance is natural law
+not understood.
+
+Marburg is a very lovely little town that clings amid a forest of trees
+to the rocky hillside overlooking the River Lahn. Tyndall was very happy
+at Marburg, and at times very miserable. The beauty of the place
+appealed to him. He was a climber by nature, and the hills were a
+continual temptation.
+
+But the language was new; and before this his work had all been of a
+practical kind. College seems small and trivial after you have been in
+the actual world of affairs. But Tyndall did not give up. He rose every
+morning at six, took his cold bath, dressed and ran up the hill half a
+mile and back. He breakfasted with the family, that he might talk
+German. Then he dived into differential calculus and philosophical
+abstrusities. He was not sent to college: he went. And he made college
+give up all it had. On the wall of his room, as a sort of ornamental
+frieze in charcoal, he wrote this from Emerson: "High knowledge and
+great strength are within the reach of every man who unflinchingly
+enacts his best."
+
+Down in the town was a bronze bust of a man who wrote for it the
+following inscription: "This is the face of a man who has struggled
+energetically."
+
+One might almost imagine that Hawthorne had received from Tyndall the
+hint which evolved itself into that fine story, "The Great Stone Face."
+
+The bust just mentioned, attracted John Tyndall for another reason:
+Carlyle had written of the man it symboled: "Reader, to thee, thyself,
+even now, he has one counsel to give, the secret of his whole poetic
+alchemy. Think of living! Thy life, wert thou the pitifullest of all the
+sons of earth, is no idle dream, but a solemn reality. It is thine own;
+it is all thou hast with which to front eternity. Work, then, even as he
+has done--like a star, unhasting and unresting."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At Marburg, Tyndall was on good terms with the great Bunsen, and used to
+act as his assistant in making practical chemical experiments before his
+classes.
+
+These amazing things done by chemists in public are seldom of much value
+beyond giving a thrill to visitors who would otherwise drowse; it is
+like humor in an oration: it opens up the mental pores.
+
+Alexander Humboldt once attended a Bunsen lecture at Marburg and
+complimented Tyndall by saying, "When I take up sleight-of-hand work,
+consider yourself engaged as my first helper." Tyndall's way of standing
+with his back to the audience, shutting off the view of Bunsen's hands
+while he was getting ready to make an artificial peal of thunder, made
+Humboldt laugh heartily.
+
+Humboldt thought so well of the young man who spoke German with an Irish
+accent, that he presented him with an inscribed copy of one of his
+books. The volume was a most valuable one, for Humboldt published only
+in deluxe, limited editions, and Tyndall was so overcome that all he
+could say was, "I'll do as much for you some day." Not long after this,
+through loaning money to a fellow student, Tyndall found himself sadly
+in need of funds, and borrowed two pounds on the book from an 'Ebrew
+Jew.
+
+That night, he dreamed that Humboldt found the volume in a secondhand
+store. In the morning, Tyndall was waiting for the pawnbroker to open
+his shop to get the book back ere the offense was discovered.
+
+Heinrich Heine once inscribed a volume of his poems to a friend, and
+afterward discovered the volume on the counter of a secondhand dealer.
+He thereupon haggled with the bookman, bought the book and beneath his
+first inscription wrote, "With the renewed regards of H. Heine." He then
+sent the volume for the second time to his friend. 'T is possible that
+Tyndall had heard of this.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Fifty, when Tyndall was thirty years of age, he
+visited London, and of course went to the British Institution. There he
+met Faraday for the first time and was welcomed by him.
+
+The British Institution consists of a laboratory, a museum and a
+lecture-hall, and its object is scientific research. It began in a very
+simple way in one room and now occupies several buildings.
+
+It was founded by Benjamin Thompson, an American, and so it was but
+proper that its sister concern, the Smithsonian Institution, should have
+been founded by an Englishman.
+
+Sir Humphry Davy on being asked, "What is your greatest discovery?"
+replied, "Michael Faraday." But this was a mere pleasantry, the truth
+being that it was Michael Faraday who discovered Sir Humphry Davy.
+Faraday was a bookbinder's apprentice, a fact that should interest all
+good Roycrofters.
+
+Evenings, when Sir Humphry Davy lectured at the British Institution,
+the young bookbinder was there. After the lecture he would go home and
+write out what he had heard, with a few ideas of his own added. For be
+it known, taking notes at a lecture is a bad habit--good reporters carry
+no notebooks.
+
+After a year Faraday sent a bundle of his impressions and criticisms to
+Sir Humphry Davy anonymously. Great men seldom read manuscript that is
+sent to them unless it refers to themselves. At the next lecture, Sir
+Humphry began by reading from Faraday's notes, and begged that if the
+writer were present, he would make himself known at the close of the
+address.
+
+From this was to ripen a love like that of father and son. Every man who
+builds up such a work as did Sir Humphry Davy is appalled, when he finds
+Time furrowing his face and whitening his hair, to think how few indeed
+there are who can step in and carry his work on after he is gone.
+
+The love of Davy for the young bookbinder was almost feverish: he
+clutched at this bright, impressionable and intent young man who entered
+so into the heart and soul of science; nothing would do but he must
+become his assistant. "Give up all and follow me!" And Faraday did.
+
+Something of the same feeling must have swept over Faraday after his
+work of twenty-five years as director of the British Institution, when
+John Tyndall appeared, tall, thin, bronzed, animated, quoting Bunsen
+and Humboldt with an Irish accent.
+
+And so in time Tyndall became assistant to Faraday, then lecturer in
+natural history; and when Faraday died, Tyndall, by popular acclaim, was
+made Fullerian Lecturer and took Faraday's place. This was to be his
+life-work, and it so placed him before the world that all he said or did
+had a wide significance and an extended influence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tyndall was always a most intrepid mountain-climber. The Alps lured him
+like the song of the Lorelei, and the wonder was that his body was not
+left in some mountain crevasse, "the most beautiful and poetic of all
+burials," he once said.
+
+But for him this was not to be, for Fate is fond of irony. The only man
+who ever braved the full dangers of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado was
+killed by a suburban train in Chicago while on his wedding-tour. Most
+bad men die in bed, tenderly cared for by trained nurses in white caps
+and big aprons.
+
+Tyndall climbed to the summit of the Matterhorn, ascended the so-called
+inaccessible peak of the Weisshorn, scaled Mont Blanc three times, and
+once was caught in an avalanche, riding toward death at the rate of a
+mile a minute. Yet he passed away from an overdose, or a wrong dose, of
+medicine given him through mistake, by the hands of the woman he loved
+most.
+
+At one time Tyndall attempted to swim a mountain-torrent; the stream, as
+if angry at his Irish assurance, tossed him against the rocks, brought
+him back in fierce eddies, and again and again threw him against a solid
+face of stone. When he was rescued he was a mass of bruises, but
+fortunately no bones were broken. It was some days before he could get
+out, and in his sorry plight, bandaged so his face was scarcely visible,
+Spencer found him. "Herbert, do you believe in the actuality of
+matter?" was John's first question.
+
+Both Tyndall and Huxley made application to the University of Toronto
+for positions as teachers of science; but Toronto looked askance, as all
+pioneer people do, at men whose college careers have been mostly
+confined to giving college absent treatment.
+
+Herbert Spencer avowed again and again that Tyndall was the greatest
+teacher he ever knew or heard of, inspiring the pupil to discover for
+himself, to do, to become, rather than imparting prosy facts of doubtful
+pith and moment. But Herbert Spencer, not being eligible to join a
+university club himself, was possibly not competent to judge.
+
+Anyway, England was not so finical as Canada, and so she gained what
+Canada lost.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tyndall paid a visit to the United States in the year Eighteen Hundred
+Seventy-two, and lectured in most of the principal cities, and at all
+the great colleges. He was a most fascinating speaker, fluent, direct,
+easy, and his whole discourse was well seasoned with humor.
+
+Whenever he spoke, the auditorium was taxed to its utmost, and his
+reception was very cordial, even in colleges that were considered
+exceedingly orthodox.
+
+Possibly, some good people who invited him to speak did not know it was
+loaded; and so his earnest words in praise of Darwin and the doctrine of
+evolution, occasionally came like unto a rumble of his own artificial
+thunder. "I speak what I think is truth; but of course, when I express
+ungracious facts I try to do so in what will be regarded as not a nasty
+manner," said Tyndall, thus using that pet English word in a rather
+pleasing way.
+
+In his statement that the prayer of persistent effort is the only prayer
+that is ever answered, he met with a direct challenge at Oberlin. This
+gave rise to what, at the time, created quite a dust in the theological
+road, and evolved "The Tyndall Prayer Test."
+
+Tyndall proposed that one hundred clergymen be delegated to pray for the
+patients in any certain ward of Bellevue Hospital. If, after a year's
+trial, there was a marked decrease in mortality in that ward, as
+compared with previous records, we might then conclude that prayer was
+efficacious, otherwise not.
+
+One good clergyman in Pittsburgh offered publicly to debate "Darwinism"
+with Tyndall, but beyond a little scattered shrapnel of this sort, the
+lecture-tour was a great success. It netted just thirteen thousand
+dollars, the whole amount of which Tyndall generously donated as a fund
+to be used for the advancement of natural science in America.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Eighty-five, this fund had increased to thirty-two
+thousand dollars, and was divided into three equal parts and presented
+to Columbia, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. The fund was
+still further increased by others who followed Professor Tyndall's
+example, and Columbia, from her share of the Tyndall fund, I am told now
+supports two foreign scholarships for the benefit of students who show a
+special aptitude in scientific research. Professor James of Harvard once
+said: "The impetus to popular scientific study caused by Professor
+Tyndall's lectures in the United States was most helpful and fortunate.
+Speaking but for myself, I know I am a different man and a better man,
+for having heard and known John Tyndall."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When John Tyndall died, in the year Eighteen Hundred Ninety-three,
+Spencer wrote:
+
+"It never occurred to Tyndall to ask what it was politic to say, but
+simply to ask what was true. The like has of late years been shown in
+his utterances concerning political matters--shown, it may be, with too
+great frankness. This extreme frankness was displayed also in private,
+and sometimes, perhaps, too much displayed; but every one must have the
+defects of his qualities. Where absolute sincerity exists, it is certain
+now and then to cause an expression of a feeling or opinion not
+adequately restrained.
+
+"But the contrast in genuineness between him and the average citizen was
+very conspicuous. In a community of Tyndalls (to make a rather wild
+supposition), there would be none of that flabbiness characterizing
+current thought and action--no throwing overboard of principles
+elaborated by painful experience in the past, and adoption of a
+hand-to-mouth policy unguided by any principle. He was not the kind of
+man who would have voted for a bill or a clause which he secretly
+believed would be injurious, out of what is euphemistically called
+'party loyalty,' or would have endeavored to bribe each section of the
+electorate by 'ad captandum' measures, or would have hesitated to
+protect life and property for fear of losing votes. What he saw right to
+do he would have done, regardless of proximate consequences.
+
+"The ordinary tests of generosity are very defective. As rightly
+measured, generosity is great in proportion to the amount of self-denial
+entailed; and where ample means are possessed, large gifts often entail
+no self-denial. Far more self-denial may be involved in the performance,
+on another's behalf, of some act that requires time and labor. In
+addition to generosity under its ordinary form, which Professor Tyndall
+displayed in unusual degree, he displayed it under a less common form.
+
+"He was ready to take much trouble to help friends. I have had personal
+experience of this. Though he had always in hand some investigation of
+great interest to him, and though, as I have heard him say, when he bent
+his mind to the subject he could not with any facility break off and
+resume it again, yet, when I have sought scientific aid, information or
+critical opinion, I never found the slightest reluctance to give me his
+undivided attention. Much more markedly, however, was this kind of
+generosity shown in another direction. Many men, while they are eager
+for appreciation, manifest little or no appreciation of others, and
+still less go out of their way to express it.
+
+"With Tyndall it was not thus; he was eager to recognize achievement.
+Notably in the case of Michael Faraday, and less notably, though still
+conspicuously in many cases, he has bestowed much labor and sacrificed
+many weeks in setting forth the merits of others. It was evidently a
+pleasure to him to dilate on the claims of fellow workers.
+
+"But there was a derivative form of this generosity calling for still
+greater eulogy. He was not content with expressing appreciation of those
+whose merits were recognized, but he used energy unsparingly in drawing
+the attention of the public to those whose merits were unrecognized;
+time after time in championing the cause of such, he was regardless of
+the antagonism he aroused and the evil he brought upon himself. This
+chivalrous defense of the neglected and ill-used has been, I think by
+few, if any, so often repeated. I have myself more than once benefited
+by his determination, quite spontaneously shown, that justice should be
+done in the apportionment of credit; and I have with admiration watched
+like actions of his in other cases: cases in which no consideration of
+nationality or of creed interfered in the least with his insistence on
+equitable distribution of honors.
+
+"In this undertaking to fight for those who were unfairly dealt with, he
+displayed in another direction that very conspicuous trait which, as
+displayed in his Alpine feats, has made him to many persons chiefly
+known: I mean courage, passing very often into daring. And here let me,
+in closing this little sketch, indicate certain mischiefs which this
+trait brought upon him. Courage grows by success. The demonstrated
+ability to deal with dangers produces readiness to meet more dangers,
+and is self-justifying where the muscular power and the nerve habitually
+prove adequate. But the resulting habit of mind is apt to influence
+conduct in other spheres, where muscular power and nerve are of no
+avail--is apt to cause the daring of dangers which are not to be met by
+strength of limb or by skill. Nature as externally presented by
+precipice ice-slopes and crevasses may be dared by one who is adequately
+endowed; but Nature, as internally represented in the form of physical
+constitution, may not be thus dared with impunity. Prompted by high
+motives, John Tyndall tended too much to disregard the protests of his
+body.
+
+"Over-application in Germany caused absolute sleeplessness, at one time,
+I think he told me, for more than a week; and this, with kindred
+transgressions, brought on that insomnia by which his after-life was
+troubled, and by which his power for work was diminished; for, as I have
+heard him say, a sound night's sleep was followed by a marked exaltation
+of faculty.
+
+"And then, in later life, came the daring which, by its results, brought
+his active career to a close. He conscientiously desired to fulfil an
+engagement to lecture at the British Institution, and was not deterred
+by fear of consequences.
+
+"He gave the lecture, notwithstanding the protest which for days before
+his system had been making. The result was a serious illness,
+threatening, as he thought at one time, a fatal result; and
+notwithstanding a year's furlough for the recovery of health, he was
+eventually obliged to resign his position. But for this defiance of
+Nature, there might have been many more years of scientific exploration,
+pleasurable to himself and beneficial to others; and he might have
+escaped that invalid life which for a long time he had to bear.
+In his case, however, the penalties of invalid life had great
+mitigations--mitigations such as fall to the lot of few.
+
+"It is conceivable that the physical discomforts and mental weariness
+which ill-health brings may be almost, if not quite, compensated by the
+pleasurable emotions caused by unflagging attentions and sympathetic
+companionship. If this ever happens, it happened in his case. All who
+have known the household during these years of nursing are aware of the
+unmeasured kindness he has received without ceasing. I happen to have
+had special evidence of this devotion on the one side and gratitude on
+the other, which I do not think I am called upon to keep to myself, but
+rather to do the contrary. In a letter I received from him some
+half-dozen years ago, referring, among other things, to Mrs. Tyndall's
+self-sacrificing care of him, occurred this sentence: 'She has raised my
+ideal of the possibilities of human nature.'"
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE]
+
+ALFRED R. WALLACE
+
+
+     "Amok" is an innovation which I do not recommend. It consists in
+     letting go when things get too bad, and doing damage with tongue,
+     hands and feet. It is the tantrum carried to its logical
+     conclusion. I saw one instance where a henpecked husband "ran amok"
+     and killed or wounded seventeen people before he himself was
+     killed. It is the national and therefore the honorable mode of
+     committing suicide among the natives of Celebes, and is the
+     fashionable way of escaping from their difficulties. A man can not
+     pay, he is taken for a slave, or has gambled away his wife or child
+     into slavery, he sees no way of recovering what he has lost, and
+     becomes desperate. He will not put up with such cruel wrongs, but
+     will be revenged on mankind and die like a hero. He grasps his
+     knife, and the next moment draws out the weapon and stabs a man to
+     the heart. He runs on with bloody kris in his hand, stabbing every
+     one he meets. "Amok! Amok!" then resounds through the streets.
+     Spears, krises, knives, guns and clubs are brought out against him.
+     He rushes madly forward, kills all he can--men, women and
+     children--and dies, overwhelmed by numbers, amid all the excitement
+     of a battle.
+
+     --_Alfred Russel Wallace, in "The Malay Archipelago"_
+
+
+ALFRED R. WALLACE
+
+The question of how this world and all the things in it were made,
+has, so far as we know, always been asked. And volunteers have at no
+time been slow about coming forward and answering. For this service the
+volunteer has usually asked for honors and also exemption from toil more
+or less unpleasant.
+
+He has also demanded the joy of riding in a coach, being carried in a
+palanquin, and sitting on a throne clothed in purple vestments, trimmed
+with gold lace or costly furs. Very often the volunteer has also
+insisted on living in a house larger than he needed, having more food
+than his system required, and drinking decoctions that are costly, spicy
+and peculiar.
+
+All of which luxury has been paid for by the people, who are told that
+which they wish to hear.
+
+The success of the volunteer lies in keeping one large ear close to the
+turf.
+
+Religious teachers have ever given to their people a cosmogony that was
+adapted to their understanding.
+
+Who made it? God made it all. In how long a time? Six days. And then
+followed explanations of what God did each day.
+
+Over against the volunteers with a taste for power and a fine corkscrew
+discrimination, there have been at rare intervals men with a desire to
+know for the sake of knowing. They were not content to accept any man's
+explanation. The only thing that was satisfying to them was the
+consciousness that they were inwardly right. Loyalty to the God within
+was the guiding impulse of their lives.
+
+In the past, such men have been regarded as eccentric, unreliable and
+dangerous, and the volunteers have ever warned their congregations
+against them.
+
+Indeed, until a very few years ago they were not allowed to express
+themselves openly. Laws have been passed to suppress them, and dire
+penalties have been devised for their benefit. Laws against sacrilege,
+heresy and blasphemy still ornament our statute-books; but these
+invented crimes that were once punishable by death are now obsolete, or
+exist in rudimentary forms only, and manifest themselves in a refusal to
+invite the guilty party to our Four-o'Clock. This hot intent to support
+and uphold the volunteers in their explanations of how the world was
+made, is a universal manifestation of the barbaric state, and is based
+upon the assumption that God is an infinite George the Fourth.
+
+Six hundred years before Christ, Anaximander, the Greek, taught that
+animal life was engendered from the earth through the influence of
+moisture and heat, and that life thus generated gradually evolved into
+higher and different forms: all animals once lived in the water, but
+some of them becoming stranded on land put forth organs of locomotion
+and defense, through their supreme resolve to live. Anaximander also
+taught that man was only a highly developed animal, and his source of
+life was the same as that of all other animals; man's present high
+degree of development having gradually come about through growth from
+very lowly forms.
+
+Anaxagoras, the schoolmaster of Pericles, also made similar statements,
+and then we find him boldly putting forth the very startling idea that
+between the highest type of Greek and the lowest type of savage there
+was a greater difference than between the savage and the ape. He also
+taught that the earth was the universal mother of all living things,
+animal and vegetable, and that the fecundation of the earth took place
+from minute, unseen germs that floated in the air.
+
+According to modern science, Anaxagoras was very close upon the trail of
+truth. But there were only a very few who could follow him, and it took
+the combined eloquence and tact of Pericles to keep his splendid head in
+the place where Nature put it, and Pericles himself was compromised by
+his leaning toward "Darwinism."
+
+Every man who speaks, expresses himself for others. We succeed only as
+our thought is echoed back to us by others who think the same. If you
+like what I say it is only because it is already yours. Moreover,
+thought is a collaboration, and is born of parents. If a teacher does
+not get a sympathetic hearing, one of two things happens: he loses the
+thread of his thought and grows apathetic, or he arouses an opposition
+that snuffs out his life.
+
+And the dead they soon grow cold.
+
+The recipe for popularity is to hunt out a weakness of humanity and then
+bank on it. No one knows this better than your theological volunteer.
+Aristotle, the father of natural history, who early in life had a
+Pegasus killed under him, taught that the diversity in animal life was
+caused by a diversity of conditions and environment, and he declared he
+could change the nature of animals by changing their surroundings. This
+being true he argued that all animals were once different from what they
+are now, and that if we could live long enough, we would see that
+species are exceedingly variable.
+
+To explain to child-minds that a Supreme Being made things outright just
+as they are, is easy; but to study and in degree know how things
+evolved, requires infinite patience and great labor. It also means small
+sympathy from the indifferent whom the earth has spawned in swarms, and
+the hatred of the volunteers who ride in coaches, and tell the many what
+they wish to hear.
+
+The volunteers drove Aristotle into exile, and from his time they had
+their way for two thousand years, when John Ray, Linnĉus and Buffon
+appeared.
+
+In Seventeen Hundred Fifty-five, Immanuel Kant, the little man who
+stayed near home and watched the stars tumble into his net, put forth
+his theory that every animal organism in the world was developed from a
+common original germ.
+
+In Seventeen Hundred Ninety-four, Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of
+Charles Darwin, inspired by Kant and Goethe, put forth his book,
+"Zoonomia," wherein he maintained the gradual growth and evolution of
+all organisms from minute, unseen germs. These views were put forth more
+as a poetic hypothesis than as a well-grounded scientific fact, so
+little attention was paid to Erasmus Darwin's books. The fanciful
+accounts of Creation put forth by Moses three thousand years before were
+firmly maintained by the entrenched volunteers and their millions of
+devotees and followers.
+
+But Kant, Goethe, Karl von Baer and August de Sainte-Hilaire were now
+planting their outposts throughout the civilized world, honeycombing
+Christendom with doubt.
+
+In the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-two, Herbert Spencer had argued in
+public and in pamphlets that species have undergone changes and
+modifications through change of surroundings, and that the account of
+Noah and his ark, with pairs of everything that flew, crept or ran, was
+fanciful and absurd, so far as we cared to distinguish fact from
+fiction.
+
+Early in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-eight, Charles Darwin received
+from his friend, Alfred Russel Wallace, a paper entitled, "On the
+Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type." At
+this time Darwin had in the hands of the secretary of the Linnĉus
+Society a paper entitled, "On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties,
+or the Perpetuation of Species and Varieties by Means of Natural
+Selection."
+
+The similarity in title, as well as the similarity in treatment of the
+Wallace theme, startled Darwin. He had been working on the idea for
+twenty years, and had an immense mass of data bearing on the subject,
+which he some day intended to issue in book form.
+
+His paper for the Linnĉus Society simply summed up his convictions. And
+now here was a man with whom he had never discussed this particular
+subject, writing an almost identical paper and sending it to him--of all
+men!
+
+Well did he pinch his leg, and call in his wife, asking her if he were
+alive or dead. Straightway he went to see Sir Charles Lyell and Sir
+Joseph Hooker, both more eminent than he in the scientific world, and
+laid the matter before them. After a long conference it was decided that
+both papers should be read the same evening before the Linnĉus Society,
+and this was done on the evening of July First, Eighteen Hundred
+Fifty-eight.
+
+Darwin then decided to publish his "Origin of Species," which in his
+preface he modestly calls an "Abstract." The publication was hastened by
+the fact that Wallace was compiling a similar work. After giving Wallace
+full credit in his most interesting "Introduction," and reviewing all
+that others had said in coming to similar conclusions, Darwin fired his
+shot heard round the world. And no man was more delighted and pleased
+with the echoing reverberations than Alfred Russel Wallace, as he read
+the book in far-off Australia.
+
+The honor of discovering the Law of Evolution, and lifting it out of the
+hazy realms of hypothesis and poetry into the sunlight of science, will
+ever be shared between Charles Robert Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace,
+who were indeed brothers in spirit and lovers to the end of their days.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In an insignificant village of England, now famous alone because he
+began from there his explorations of the world, Alfred Russel Wallace
+was born, in the year Eighteen Hundred Twenty-two. He was one of a large
+family of the middle class, where work is as natural as life, and the
+indispensable virtues are followed as a means of self-preservation. It
+is most unfortunate to attain such a degree of success that you think
+you can waive the decalogue and give Nemesis the slip.
+
+About the year Eighteen Hundred Forty, the railroad renaissance was on
+in England, and young Wallace, alive, alert, active, did his turn as
+apprentice to a surveyor.
+
+Chance is a better schoolmaster than design. All boys have a taste for
+tent life, and healthy youngsters not quite grown, with ostrich
+digestions, passing through the nomadic stage, revel in hardships and
+count it a joy to sleep on the ground where they can look up at the
+stars, and eat out of a skillet.
+
+A little later we find Alfred working for his elder brother in an
+architect's office, gazing abstractedly out of the window betimes, and
+wishing he were a ground-squirrel, fancy free on the heath and amid the
+heather, digging holes, thus avoiding introspection. "Houses are
+prisons," he said, and sang softly to himself the song of the open road.
+
+I think I know exactly how Alfred Russel Wallace then felt, from the
+touchstone of my own experience; and I think I know how he looked, too,
+all confirmed by an East Aurora incident.
+
+Some years ago, one fine day in May, I was helping excavate for the
+foundation of a new barn. All at once I felt that some one was standing
+behind me looking at me. I turned around and there was a tall, lithe,
+slender youth in a faded college cap, blue flannel shirt, ragged
+trousers and top-boots. My first impression of him was that he was a
+fellow who slept in his clothes, a plain "Weary," but when he spoke
+there was a note of self-reliance in his low, well-modulated voice that
+told me he was no mendicant. Voice is the true index of character.
+
+"My name is Wallace, and I have a note to you from my father," and he
+began diving into pockets, and finally produced a ragged letter that was
+nearly worn out through long contact with a perspiring human form
+divine--or partially so. I seldom make haste about reading letters of
+introduction, and so I greeted the young man with a word of welcome, and
+gave him a chance to say something for himself.
+
+He was English, that was very sure--and Oxford English at that. "You
+see," he began, "I am working just now over on the Hamburg and Buffalo
+Electric Line, stringing wires. I get three dollars a day because I'm a
+fairly good climber. I wanted to learn the business, so I just hired out
+as a laborer, and they gave me the hardest job, thinking to scare me
+out, but that was what I wanted," and he smiled modestly and showed a
+set of incisors as fine and strong as a dog's teeth. "I want to remain
+with you for a week and pay for my board in work," he cautiously
+continued.
+
+"But about your father, Mr. Wallace--do I know him?"
+
+"I think so; he has written you several letters--Alfred Russel Wallace!"
+
+You could have knocked me down with a lady's-slipper. I opened the
+letter and unmistakably it was from the great scientist, "introducing my
+baby boy."
+
+I never met Alfred Russel Wallace, but I know if I should, I would find
+him very gentle, kindly and simple in all his ways--as really great men
+ever are. He would not talk to me in Latin nor throw off technical
+phrases about great nothings, and I would feel just as much at home with
+him as I did with Ol' John Burroughs the last time I saw him, leaning up
+against a country railroad-station in shirt-sleeves, chewing a straw,
+exchanging salutes with the engineer on a West Shore jerkwater. "S'
+long, John!" called the going one as he leaned out of the cab-window.
+"S' long, Bill, and good luck to you," was the cheery answer.
+
+But still, all of us have moments when we think of the world's most
+famous ones as being surely eight feet tall, and having voices like
+fog-horns.
+
+"I can do most any kind of hard work, you know"--I was aroused from my
+little mental excursion, and noticed that my visitor had hair of a
+light yellow like a Swede from Hennepin County, Minnesota, and that his
+hair was three shades lighter than his bronzed face. "I can do any kind
+of work, you know, and if you will just loan me that pick"--and I handed
+him the pickax.
+
+Young Wallace remained with us for a week, asking for nothing, doing
+everything, even to helping the girls wash dishes. That he was the son
+of a great man, no one would have ever learned from his own lips. In
+fact, I am not sure that he was impressed with his father's excellence,
+but I saw there was a tender bond between them, for he haunted the
+post-office, morning, noon and night, looking for a letter from his
+father. When it came he was as happy as a woodchuck. He showed me the
+letter: it was nine finely written pages.
+
+But to my disappointment not a word about marsupials, siamangs or
+Syndactylĉ: just news about John, William, Mary and Benjamin; with
+references to chickens and cows, and a new greenhouse, with a little
+good advice about keeping right hours and not overeating.
+
+The young man had spent three years at Oxford, and was an electrical
+engineer. He was intent on finding out just as much about the secrets of
+American railroad construction as he possibly could. As for intellect, I
+did not discover any vast amount; perhaps, for that matter, he didn't
+either. But we all greatly enjoyed his visit, and when he went away I
+presented him with a clean, secondhand flannel shirt and my blessing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From the appearance of the young man I imagine that Alfred Russel
+Wallace at twenty-one was very much such a man as his son, who did such
+good work at the Roycroft with pick and shovel. Alfred was earnest,
+intent, strong, and had a deal of quiet courage that he was as
+unconscious of as he was of his digestion.
+
+He taught school, and to interest his scholars he would take them on
+botanical excursions. Then he himself grew interested, and began to
+collect plants, bugs, beetles and birds on his own account.
+
+By Eighteen Hundred Forty-eight, the confining walls of the school had
+become intolerable to Wallace, and he started away on a wild-goose chase
+to Brazil, with a chum by the name of Henry Walter Bates, an ardent
+entomologist. Alfred had no money either, but Bates had influence, and
+he cashed it in by arranging with the Curator of the British Museum,
+that any natural-history specimens of value which they might gather and
+send to him would be paid for. And so something like a hundred pounds
+was collected from several scientific men, and handed over as advance
+payment for the wonderful things that the young men were to send back.
+
+They embarked on a sailing-vessel that was captained by a kind kinsman
+of Bates, so the fare was nil, in consideration of services rendered
+constructively.
+
+Arriving in Brazil the young men began their collecting of specimens.
+They got together a very creditable collection of birds' eggs and sent
+them back by the captain of the ship they came out on, this as an
+earnest of what was to come.
+
+Bates and Wallace were together for a year. Bates insisted on remaining
+near the white settlements; but Wallace wanted to go where white men had
+never been. So alone he went into the forests, and for two years lived
+with the natives and dared the dangers of jungle-fever, snakes,
+crocodiles and savages. For a space of ten months he did not see a
+single white person.
+
+He collected nearly ten thousand specimens of birds, which he skinned
+and carefully prepared so they could be mounted when he returned to
+England; there was also a nearly complete Brazilian herbarium, and a
+finer collection of birds' eggs than any museum of England could boast.
+
+This collection represented over three years' continuous toil. All the
+curious things were packed with great care and placed on board ship.
+
+And so the young naturalist sailed away for England, proud and happy,
+with his great collection of entomological, botanical and ornithological
+specimens.
+
+But on the way the ship took fire, and the collection was either burned
+or ruined by soaking salt water.
+
+That the crew and their sole passenger escaped alive was a wonder.
+Wallace on reaching England was in a sorry plight, being destitute of
+clothes and funds.
+
+And there were unkind ones who did not hesitate to hint that he had only
+been over to Ireland working in a peat-bog, and that his knowledge of
+Brazil was gotten out of Humboldt's books.
+
+In one way, Wallace surely paralleled Humboldt: both lost a most
+valuable collection of natural-history specimens by shipwreck.
+
+Several of the good men who had advanced money now asked that it be
+paid. Wallace set to work writing out his recollections, the only asset
+that he possessed.
+
+His book, "Travel on the Amazon and Rio Negro," had enough romance in it
+so that it floated. Royalties paid over in crisp Bank of England notes
+made things look brighter. Another book was issued, called, "Palm-Trees
+and Their Uses," and proved that the author was able to view a subject
+from every side, and say all that was to be said about it. "Wallace on
+the Palm" is still a textbook.
+
+The debts were paid, and Alfred Russel Wallace at thirty was square with
+the world, the possessor of much valuable experience. He also had five
+hundred pounds in cash, with a reputation as a writer and traveler that
+no longer caused bookworms to sneeze.
+
+Having paid off his obligations, he felt free again to leave England, a
+thing he had vowed he would not do, so long as his reputation was under
+a cloud. This time he selected for a natural-history survey a section of
+the world really less known than South America.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Early in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four, Alfred Russel Wallace
+reached Asia. He had decided that he would make the first and the best
+collection of the flora and fauna of the Malay Archipelago that it was
+possible to make.
+
+White men had skirted the coast of many of the islands, but information
+as to what there was inland was mostly conjecture and guesswork.
+
+Just how long it would take Wallace to make his Malaysian
+natural-history survey he did not know, but in a letter to Darwin he
+stated that he expected to be absent from England at least two years. He
+was gone eight years, and during this time, walked, paddled or rode
+horseback fifteen thousand miles, and visited many islands never before
+trod by the foot of a white man.
+
+The city of Singapore served him as a base or headquarters, because from
+there he could catch trading-ships that plied among the islands of the
+Archipelago; and to Singapore he could also ship and there store his
+specimens. From Singapore he made sixty separate voyages of discovery.
+In all he sent home over one hundred twenty-five thousand
+natural-history specimens, including about ten thousand birds, which,
+later on, were all stuffed and mounted under his skilful direction.
+
+On returning to England, Wallace took six years in preparation of his
+book, "The Malay Archipelago," a most stupendous literary undertaking,
+which covers the subjects of botany, geology, ornithology, entomology,
+zoology and anthropology, in a way that serves as a regular mine of
+information and suggestion for natural-history workers.
+
+The book in its original form, I believe, sold for ten pounds (fifty
+dollars), and was issued to subscribers in parts. It was bought, not
+only by students, but by a great number of general readers, there being
+enough adventure mixed up in the science to spice what otherwise might
+be rather dry reading. For instance, there is a chapter about killing
+orang-utans that must have served my old friend, Paul du Chaillu, as
+excellent raw stock in compiling his own recollections.
+
+Wallace states that the only foe for which the orang really has a hatred
+is the crocodile. It seems to share with man a shuddering fear of
+snakes, although orangs have no part in making Kentucky famous. But the
+crocodile is his natural and hereditary enemy. And as if to get even
+with this ancient foe, who occasionally snaps off a young orang in his
+prime, the orangs will often locate a big crocodile, and jumping on his
+back beat him with clubs; and when he opens his gigantic mouth, the
+female orangs will fill the cavity with sticks and stones, and keep up
+the fight until the crocodile succumbs and quits this vale of crocodile
+tears.
+
+The orang is distinct and different from the chimpanzee and gorilla,
+which are found only in Western Africa.
+
+In Borneo, the "man-ape" is quite numerous. This is the animal that has
+given rise to all those tales about "the wild man of Borneo," which that
+good man, P. T. Barnum, kept alive by exhibiting a fine specimen.
+Barnum's original "wild man" lived at Waltham, Massachusetts, and
+belonged to the Baptist Church. He recently died worth a hundred
+thousand dollars, which money he left to found a school for young
+ladies.
+
+The orang, or mias, hides in the swampy jungles, and very rarely comes
+to the ground. The natives regard them as a sort of sacred object, and
+have a great horror of killing them. Indeed, a person who kills a
+man-ape, they regard as a murderer; and so when Wallace announced to his
+attendants that he wanted to secure several specimens of these "wild men
+of the woods," they cried, "Alas! he is making a collection: it will be
+our turn next!" And they fled in terror.
+
+Wallace then hired another set of servants and resolved to make no
+confidants, but just go ahead and find his game.
+
+He had hunted for weeks through forest and jungle, but never a glimpse
+or sight of the man-ape! He had almost given up the search, and
+concluded with several English scientists that this orang-utan was a
+part of that great fabric of pseudo-science invented by imaginative
+sailormen, who took most of their inland little journeys around the
+capstan. And so musing, seated in the doorway of his bamboo house, he
+looked out upon the forest, and there only a few yards away, swinging
+from tree to tree, was a man-ape. It seemed to him to be about five
+times as large as a man.
+
+He seized his gun and approached; the beast stopped, glared, and railed
+at him in a voice of wrath. It broke off branches and threw sticks at
+him.
+
+Wallace thought of the offer made him by the South Kensington Museum:
+"One hundred pounds in gold for an adult male, skin and skeleton to be
+properly preserved and mounted; seventy-five pounds for a female."
+
+The huge animal showed its teeth, cast one glance of scornful contempt
+on the puny explorer, and started on, swinging thirty feet at a stretch
+and catching hold of the limbs with its two pairs of hands.
+
+Wallace grasped his gun and followed, lured by the demoniac shape. A
+little of the superstition of the natives had gotten into his veins: he
+dare not kill the thing unless it came toward him, and he had to shoot
+it in self-defense.
+
+It traveled in the trees about as fast as he could on the ground.
+Occasionally it would stop and chatter at him, throwing sticks in a most
+human way, as if to order him back.
+
+Finally, the instincts of the naturalist got the better of the man, and
+he shot the animal. It came tumbling to the ground with a terrific
+crash, grasping at the vines and leaves as it fell.
+
+It was quite dead, but Wallace approached it with great caution. It
+proved to be a female, of moderate size, in height about three and a
+half feet, six feet across from finger to finger. Needless to say that
+Wallace had to do the skinning and the mounting of the skeleton alone.
+His servants had chills of fear if asked to approach it. The skeleton of
+this particular orang can now be seen in the Derby Museum.
+
+In a few hours after killing his first orang, Wallace heard a peculiar
+crying in the forest, and on search found a young one, evidently the
+baby of the one he had killed. The baby did not show any fear at all,
+evidently thinking it was with one of its kind, for it clung to him
+piteously, with an almost human tenderness.
+
+Says Wallace:
+
+"When handled or nursed it was very quiet and contented, but when laid
+down by itself would invariably cry; and for the first few nights was
+very restless and noisy. I soon found it necessary to wash the little
+mias as well. After I had done so a few times it came to like the
+operation, and after rolling in the mud would begin crying, and continue
+until I took it out and carried it to the spout, when it immediately
+became quiet, although it would wince a little at the first rush of the
+cold water, and make ridiculously wry faces while the stream was running
+over its head. It enjoyed the wiping and rubbing dry amazingly, and when
+I brushed its hair seemed to be perfectly happy, lying quite still with
+its arms and legs stretched out. It was a never-failing amusement to
+observe the curious changes of countenance by which it would express its
+approval or dislike of what was given to it. The poor little thing would
+lick its lips, draw in its cheeks, and turn up its eyes with an
+expression of the most supreme satisfaction, when it had a mouthful
+particularly to its taste. On the other hand, when its food was not
+sufficiently sweet or palatable, it would turn the mouthful about with
+its tongue for a moment, as if trying to extract what flavor there was,
+and then push it all out between its lips. If the same food was
+continued, it would proceed to scream and kick about violently, exactly
+like a baby in a passion.
+
+"When I had had it about a month it began to exhibit some signs of
+learning to run alone. When laid upon the floor it would push itself
+along by its legs, or roll itself over, and thus make an unwieldy
+progression. When lying in the box it would lift itself up to the edge
+in an almost erect position, and once or twice succeeded in tumbling
+out. When left dirty or hungry, or otherwise neglected, it would scream
+violently till attended to, varied by a kind of coughing noise, very
+similar to that which is made by the adult animal.
+
+"If no one was in the house, or its cries were not attended to, it would
+be quiet after a little while; but the moment it heard a footstep would
+begin again, harder than ever. It was very human."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The most lasting result of the wanderings of Alfred Russel Wallace
+consists in his having established what is known to us as "The Wallace
+Line." This line is a boundary that divides in a geographical way that
+portion of Malaysia which belongs to the continent of Asia from that
+which belongs to the continent of Australia.
+
+The Wallace Line covers a distance of more than four thousand miles, and
+in this expanse there are three islands in which Great Britain could be
+set down without anywhere touching the sea.
+
+Even yet the knowledge of the average American or European is very hazy
+about the size and extent of the Malay Archipelago, although through our
+misunderstanding with Spain, which loaded us up with possessions we have
+no use for, we have recently gotten the geography down and dusted it off
+a bit.
+
+There is a book by Mrs. Rose Innes, wife of an English official in the
+Far East, who, among other entertaining things, tells of a head-hunter
+chief who taught her to speak Malay, and she, wishing to reciprocate,
+offered to teach him English; but the great man begged to be excused,
+saying, "Malay is spoken everywhere you go, east, west, north or south,
+but in all the world there are only twelve people who speak English,"
+and he proceeded to name them.
+
+Our assumptions are not quite so broad as this, but few of us realize
+that the Protestant Christian Religion stands fifth in the number of
+communicants, as compared with the other great religions, and that
+against our hundred millions of people in America, the Malay Archipelago
+has over two hundred millions.
+
+Wallace found marked geological, botanical and zoological differences to
+denote his line. And from these things he proved that there had been
+great changes, through subsidence and elevation of the land. At no very
+remote geologic period, Asia extended clear to Borneo, and also included
+the Philippine Islands. This is shown by the fact that animal and
+vegetable life in all of these islands is almost identical with life on
+the mainland: the same trees, the same flowers, the same birds, the same
+animals.
+
+As you go westward, however, you come to islands which have a very
+different flora and fauna, totally unlike that found in Asia, but very
+similar to that found in Australia.
+
+Australia, be it known, is totally different in all its animal and
+vegetable phenomena from Asia.
+
+In Australia, until the white man very recently carried them across,
+there were no monkeys, apes, cats, bears, tigers, wolves, elephants,
+horses, squirrels or rabbits. Instead there were found animals that are
+found nowhere else, and which seem to belong to a different and
+so-called extinct geologic age, such as the kangaroo, wombats, the
+platypus--which the sailors used to tell us was neither bird not beast,
+and yet was both. In birds, Australia has also very strange specimens,
+such as the ostrich which can not fly, but can outrun a horse and kills
+its prey by kicking forward like a man. Australia also has immense
+mound-making turkeys, honeysuckers and cockatoos, but no woodpeckers,
+quail or pheasants.
+
+Wallace was the first to discover that there are various islands, some
+of them several hundred miles from Australia, where the animal life is
+identical with that of Australia. And then there are islands, only a
+comparatively few miles away, which have all the varieties of birds and
+beasts found in Asia.
+
+But this line that once separated continents is in places but fifteen
+miles wide, and is always marked by a deep-water channel, but the seas
+that separate Borneo and Sumatra from Asia, although wide, are so
+shallow that ships can find anchorage anywhere.
+
+The Wallace Line, proving the subsidence of the sea and upheaval of the
+land, has never been seriously disputed, and is to many students the one
+great discovery by which Wallace will be remembered.
+
+Wallace's book on "The Geographical Distribution of Animals" sets forth
+in a most interesting manner, the details of how he came to discover the
+Line.
+
+It was in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-five that Wallace, alone in the wilds
+of the Malay Archipelago, became convinced of the scientific truth that
+species were an evolution from a common source, and he began making
+notes of his observations along this particular line of thought. Some
+months afterward he wrote out his belief in the form of an essay, but
+then he had no definite intention of what he would do with the paper,
+beyond keeping it for future reference when he returned to England. In
+the Fall of Eighteen Hundred Fifty-seven, however, he decided to send it
+to Darwin to be read before some scientific society, if Darwin
+considered it worthy. And this paper was read on the evening of July
+First, before the Linnĉus Society, with one by Darwin on the same
+subject, written before Wallace's paper arrived, wherein the identical
+views are set forth. Darwin and Wallace expressed what many other
+investigators had guessed or but dimly perceived.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of the six immortal modern scientists, three began life working as
+surveyors and civil engineers--Wallace, Tyndall, Spencer. From the
+number of eminent men, not forgetting Henry Thoreau, Leonardo da Vinci,
+Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Washington--aye! nor old John Brown, who
+carried a Gunter's chain and manipulated the transit--we come to the
+conclusion that there must be something in the business of surveying
+that conduces to clear thinking and strong, independent action.
+
+If I had a boy who by nature and habit was given to futilities, I would
+apprentice him to a civil engineer.
+
+When two gangs of men begin a tunnel, working toward each other from
+different sides of a mountain, dreams, poetry, hypothesis and guesswork
+had better be omitted from the equation. Here is a case where
+metaphysics has no bearing. It is a condition that confronts them, not a
+theory.
+
+Theological explanations are assumptions built upon hypotheses, and your
+theologian always insists that you shall be dead before you can know.
+
+If a bridge breaks down or a fireproof building burns to ashes, no
+explanation on the part of the architect can explain away the
+miscalculation; but your theologian always evolves his own fog, into
+which he can withdraw at will, thus making escape easy. Darwin, Huxley,
+Spencer, Tyndall and Wallace all had the mathematical mind. Nothing but
+the truth would satisfy them. In school, you remember how we sometimes
+used to work on a mathematical problem for hours or days. Many would
+give it up. A few of the class would take the answer from the book, and
+in an extremity force the figures to give the proper result. Such
+students, it is needless to say, never gained the respect of either
+class or teacher--or themselves. They had the true theological instinct.
+But a few kept on until the problem was solved, or the fallacy of it had
+been discovered. In life's school such were the men just named, and the
+distinguishing feature of their lives was that they were students and
+learners to the last.
+
+Of this group of scientific workers, Alfred Russel Wallace alone
+survives, aged eighty-nine at this writing, still studying, earnestly
+intent upon one of Nature's secrets that four of his great colleagues
+years ago labeled "Unknown," and the other two marked "Unknowable."
+
+To some it is an anomaly and contradiction that a lover of science,
+exact, cautious, intent on certitude, should accept a belief in personal
+immortality. Still, to others this is regarded as positive proof of his
+superior insight.
+
+All thinking men agree that we are surrounded by phenomena that to a
+great extent are unanalyzed; but Herbert Spencer, for one, thought it a
+lapse in judgment to attribute to spirit intervention, mysteries which
+could not be accounted for on any other grounds. It was equal to that
+sin against science which Darwin committed, and which he atoned for in
+contrite public confession, when he said: "It surely must be this,
+otherwise what is it? Hence we assume," and so on. Some recent writers
+have sought to demolish Wallace's argument concerning Spiritism by
+saying he is an old man and in his dotage. Wallace once wrote a booklet
+entitled, "Vaccination a Fallacy," which created a big dust in Doctors'
+Row, and was cited as corroborative proof, along with his faith in
+Spiritism, that the man was mentally incompetent.
+
+But this is a deal worse excuse for argument than anything Wallace ever
+put forth. The real fact is that Wallace issued a book on Spiritism in
+Eighteen Hundred Seventy-four, and in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-six
+reissued it with numerous amendments, confirming his first conclusions.
+So he has held his peculiar views on immortality for over thirty years,
+and moreover his mental vigor is still unimpaired.
+
+Whether the proof he has received as to the existence of disembodied
+spirits is sufficient for others is very uncertain; but if it suffices
+for himself, it is not for us to quibble. Wallace agrees to allow us to
+have our opinions if we will let him have his.
+
+His views are in no sense those of Christianity; rather, they might be
+called those of Theosophy, as the personal God and the dogma of
+salvation and atonement are entirely omitted.
+
+The Doctrine of Evolution he carries into the realm of spirit. His
+belief is that souls reincarnate themselves many times for the ultimate
+object of experience, growth and development. He holds that this life is
+the gateway to another, but that we should live each day as though it
+were our last.
+
+To this effect we find, in a recent article, Wallace quotes a little
+story from Tolstoy: A priest, seeing a peasant in a field plowing,
+approached him and asked, "How would you spend the rest of this day if
+you knew you were to die tonight?"
+
+The priest expected the man, who was a bit irregular in his churchgoing,
+to say, "I would spend my last hours in confession and prayer." But the
+peasant replied, "How would I spend the rest of the day if I were to die
+tonight?--why, I'd plow!"
+
+Hence, Wallace holds that it is better to plow than to pray, and that in
+fact, when rightly understood, good plowing is prayer.
+
+All useful effort is sacred, and nothing else is or ever can be. Wallace
+believes that the only fit preparation for the future lies in improving
+the present. Please pass the dotage!
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: JOHN FISKE]
+
+JOHN FISKE
+
+
+     In a sinless and painless world the moral element would be lacking;
+     the goodness would have no more significance in our conscious life
+     than that load of atmosphere which we are always carrying about
+     with us.
+
+     We are thus brought to a striking conclusion, the essential
+     soundness of which can not be gainsaid. In a happy world there must
+     be pain and sorrow, and in a moral world the knowledge of evil is
+     indispensable. The stern necessity for this has been proved to
+     inhere in the innermost constitution of the human soul. It is part
+     and parcel of the universe.
+
+     We do not find that evil has been interpolated into the universe
+     from without; we find that, on the contrary, it is an indispensable
+     part of the dramatic whole. God is the creator of evil, and from
+     the eternal scheme of things diabolism is forever excluded.
+
+     From our present standpoint we may fairly ask, what would have been
+     the worth of that primitive innocence portrayed in the myth of the
+     Garden of Eden, had it ever been realized in the life of men? What
+     would have been the moral value or significance of a race of human
+     beings ignorant of sin, and doing beneficent acts with no more
+     consciousness or volition than the deftly contrived machine that
+     picks up raw material at one end, and turns out some finished
+     product at the other? Clearly, for strong and resolute men and
+     women, an Eden would be but a fool's paradise.
+
+     "_Through Nature to God_"
+
+
+JOHN FISKE
+
+Early in life John Fiske aimed high and thought himself capable of
+great things. He also believed that the world accepted a man at the
+estimate he placed upon himself.
+
+Fiske was born at Hartford in Eighteen Hundred Forty-two. His mother's
+maiden name was Fiske and his father's name was Green, and until
+well-nigh manhood, John Fiske was called Edmund Green.
+
+His father died while Edmund was a baby, and the wee youngster was taken
+charge of by his grandmother Fiske of Middletown, Connecticut.
+
+When his mother married again, Edmund did not approve of the match.
+Parents often try to live their children's lives for them, and to hold
+the balance true, children occasionally attempt to dictate to parents in
+affairs of the heart. A young man by the name of Hamlet will be recalled
+who, having no special business of his own, became much distressed and
+had theories concerning the conduct of his mother. As a general
+proposition the person who looks after the territory directly under his
+own hat will find his time fairly well employed.
+
+They say Edmund Green made threats when his mother changed her name, but
+all he did was to follow her example and change his. Thereafter he was
+plain John Fiske. "I must have a name easy to take hold of: one that
+people can remember," he said. And they do say that John Fiske's
+reverence for John Ruskin had something to do with his choice of name.
+
+Just here some curious one of the curious sex, which by the way holds no
+monopoly on curiosity, may ask if the second venture of Mrs. Green was
+fruitful and fortunate. So I will say, yes, eminently so; and in one way
+it seemed to serve, for John Fiske's stepfather waived John's
+displeasure with his stepfather's wife, and did something toward sending
+the young man to Harvard University, and also supplied the funds to send
+him on a tour around the world.
+
+However, the second brood revealed no genius, at sight of which the
+defunct Mr. Green from his seat in Elysium must have chortled in glee,
+assuming, of course, that disembodied spirits are cognizant of the
+doings of their late partners, as John Fiske seemed to think they were.
+
+If Alexander Humboldt's mother had not married again, we would have had
+no Alexander Humboldt. Second marriages are like first ones in this:
+Sometimes they are happy and sometimes not. In any event, I occasionally
+think that mother-love has often been much exaggerated. Love is a most
+beautiful thing, and it does not seem to make very much difference who
+supplies it. Stepmother-love, Lincoln used to say, was the most precious
+thing that had ever come his way. I know a man who loves his
+mother-in-law, because she pitied him. Our Oneida friends had
+"Community Mothers," who took care of everybody's babies, just as if
+they were their own, and with marked success, for the genus hoodlum
+never evolved at Oneida. Grandmother-love served all purposes for little
+Isaac Newton, just as it did for John Fiske.
+
+John Fiske's grandmother was his first teacher, and she started out with
+the assumption that genius always skips one generation. She believed
+that she was dealing with a record-breaker, and she was. What she did
+not know about the classics was known by others whom she delegated to
+teach her grandchild.
+
+When her baby genius was just out of linsey-woolsey dresses and wore
+trousers buttoned to a calico waist, she began preparing him for
+college. The old lady had loved a college man in her youth, and she
+judged Harvard by the Harvard man she knew best. And the Harvard man she
+saw in her waking dreams, she created in her own image. Harvard requires
+perspective, and viewed over the years through a mist of melancholy it
+is very beautiful. At close range we often get a Jarrett Bumball flavor
+of cigarettes and a sight of the foam that made Milwaukee famous. To a
+great degree, Gran'ma Fiske created her Harvard out of the stuff that
+dreams are made of. When her little charge was six years old, she began
+preparing him for Harvard by teaching him to say, "amo, amas, amat."
+
+At seven years of age he was reading Cĉsar's "Commentaries" and making
+wise comments over his bowl of bread-and-milk about the Tenth Legion;
+and he also had his opinions concerning the relationship of Cĉsar with
+Cleopatra. At this time he read Josephus for rest, and discovered for
+himself that the famous passage about Jesus of Nazareth was an
+interpolation.
+
+When he was eight, he was familiar with Plato, had read all of
+Shakespeare's plays, and propounded a few hypotheses concerning the
+authorship of the "Sonnets."
+
+At nine he spoke Greek with an Attic accent. When ten he had read
+Prescott, Gibbon and Macaulay; and about this time, as a memory test he
+wrote a history of the world from the time of Moses down to the date of
+his own birth, giving a list of the greatest men who had ever lived,
+with a brief mention of what they had done, with the date of their birth
+and death.
+
+This book is still in existence and so far as I know has never been
+equaled by the performance of any infant prodigy, save possibly John
+Stuart Mill.
+
+When twelve years of age he had read Vergil, Sallust, Tacitus, Ovid,
+Juvenal and Catullus. He had also mastered trigonometry, surveying,
+navigation, geometry and differential calculus.
+
+Before his grandmother had him discard knee-breeches, he kept his diary
+in Spanish, spoke German at the table, and read German philosophy in the
+original. The year he was sixteen he wrote poems after Dante in Italian
+and translated Cervantes into English.
+
+At seventeen he read the Hebrew scriptures like a Rabbi, and was
+familiar with Sanskrit.
+
+Now, let no carpist imagine I have dealt in hyperbole, or hand-illumined
+the facts: I have merely stated some simple truths about the early
+career of John Fiske.
+
+One might imagine that with all his wonderful achievements this youth
+would be top-heavy and a most insufferable prig. The fact was, he was a
+fine, rollicking, healthy young man much given to pranks, and withal
+generous and lovable.
+
+He was admitted to Harvard without examination, for his fame had
+preceded him. Students and professors alike looked at him in wonder.
+
+At Cambridge, as if to keep good his record, he studied thirteen hours a
+day, for twelve months in the year. He ranged through every subject in
+the catalog, and all recorded knowledge was to him familiar.
+
+Prophecies were freely made that he would eclipse Sir Isaac Newton and
+Humboldt. But there were others who had a clearer vision.
+
+John Fiske made a decided success in life and left his personality
+distinctly impressed upon his time, but it is no disparagement to say of
+him that Autumn did not fulfil the promise of Spring. And Fiske himself
+in his single original contribution to the evolution crusade explains
+the reason why.
+
+Professor Santayanna of Harvard once said that John Fiske made three
+great scientific discoveries, as follows:
+
+1. As you lengthen a pigeon's bill, you increase the size of its feet.
+
+2. White tomcats with blue eyes are always deaf.
+
+3. The extent of mental development in any animal is in proportion to
+its infancy or the length of time involved in its reaching physical
+maturity.
+
+Waiving Numbers One and Two as of doubtful value, Number Three is
+Fiske's sole original discovery, according to his confession. Further,
+Huxley quotes Fiske on this theme, and adds, "The delay of adolescence
+and the prolonging of the period of infancy form a subject, as expressed
+by Mr. Fiske, which is worthy of our most careful consideration."
+
+Rareripes fall early. John Fiske's name was coupled, as we have seen,
+with those of Newton and Humboldt. Newton died at eighty-six, Humboldt
+at ninety. These men developed slowly: the hothouse methods were not for
+them. Fiske at twenty knew more than any of them did at forty. Fiske at
+twenty-five was a better man mentally and physically than he was at
+thirty-five. At forty he was refused life-insurance because his
+measurement east and west was out of proportion to his measurement north
+and south.
+
+He used often to sit at his desk for fifteen hours a day, writing and
+studying. The sedentary habit grew upon him; the vital organs got
+clogged with adipose tissue. The doctor told him that "his diaphragm was
+too close to his lungs"--a cheerful proposition, well worthy of a
+small, mouse-colored medicus who dare not run the risk of displeasing a
+big patient by telling him the truth, that is, that deep breathing and
+active exercise in the open air can never be replaced through the use of
+something poured out of a bottle.
+
+People who eat too much, drink too much, smoke too much, and do not
+exercise enough, have to pay for their privileges, even though they are
+able to work differential calculus with one hand and recite Xenophon's
+"Anabasis" backward. They all have the liver and lungs too close to the
+diaphragm, because that damnable invention of Sir Isaac Newton's
+slumbers not nor sleeps, and all the vital organs droop and drop when we
+neglect deep breathing. Inertia is a vice. The gods cultivate
+levitation, which is a different thing from levity, meaning skyey
+gravitation, uplift, aspiration expressed in bodily attitude. When
+levitation lets go, gravity doubles its grip.
+
+The Yogi of the East know vastly more about this theme than we do, and
+have made of deep breathing an art. Carry the crown of your head high,
+hold your chin in, and fill the top of your lungs by cultivating
+levitation. We are gods in the biscuit!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After four years at Harvard and the regulation two years at the Harvard
+Law School, John Fiske opened an office in Boston and gave his shingle
+to the breeze. No clients came, and this was well--for the clients.
+Also, for John. The law is a business proposition: its essence is the
+adjustment of differences between men, the lubrication of exchange,
+getting things on! Learned men very seldom make good lawyers. Law is a
+very practical matter, and as for "Law Latin," it can be learned in a
+week and then should be mostly forgotten. The lawyer who asks his client
+about the "causa sine qua non," or harangues the jury concerning the
+"ipse dixit" of "de facto" and "de jure," will probably be mulcted for
+costs on general principles.
+
+"I always rule hard against the lawyer who quotes Latin," said a
+Brooklyn judge to me the other day. Happily, Law Latin is now not used
+to any extent, except in Missouri.
+
+No more clients came to John Fiske than did to Wendell Phillips, who
+once had a law-office on the same street. So John sent letters to the
+newspapers, wrote book-reviews, and contributed essays to the "Atlantic
+Monthly." Occasionally, he would lecture for scientific clubs or
+societies.
+
+While still in the Law School he had discounted the future and married a
+charming young woman, who believed in him to an extent that would have
+made the average man pause.
+
+Marriages do not always keep pace exactly with the price of corn.
+
+Receipts in the Fiske law-office were not active. John Fiske was
+twenty-six; his grandmother was dead, and family cares were coming along
+apace, all according to the Law of Malthus.
+
+He accepted an offer to give substitute lectures at Harvard on history,
+for a professor who had gone abroad for his health. This he continued,
+speaking for any absentee on any subject, and tutoring rich laggards for
+a consideration. Good boys, low on phosphorus, used to get him to start
+their daily themes, and those overtaken in the throes of trigonometry he
+often rescued from disgrace.
+
+Darwinism was in the saddle. Asa Gray was mildly defending it. Agassiz
+stood aloof, clinging to his early Swiss parsonage teachings, and the
+Theological Department marched in solid phalanx and scoffed and scorned.
+Yale, always having more theology than Harvard, threw out challenges.
+Fiske had saturated himself with the ideas of Darwin and Wallace, and
+his intellect was great enough to perceive the vast and magnificent
+scope of "The Origin of Species." He prepared and read a lecture on the
+subject, all couched in gentle and judicial phrase, but with a finale
+that gave forth no uncertain sound.
+
+The Overseers decided to ask Fiske to amplify the subject and give a
+course of lectures on the Law of Evolution.
+
+The subject grew under his hands and the course extended itself into
+thirty-five lectures, covering the whole field of natural history, with
+many short excursions into the realms of biology, embryology, botany,
+geology and cosmogony.
+
+Fiske was made assistant librarian at a salary of one thousand dollars a
+year. It was not much money, but it gave him a fixed position, with time
+to help the erring freshman and the mentally recalcitrant sophomore
+handicapped by rich parents. For seven years Fiske held this position of
+assistant librarian, and hardly a student at Harvard during those years
+but acknowledged the personal help he received at the hands of John
+Fiske. Knowledge consists in having an assistant librarian who knows
+where to find the thing.
+
+Fiske's thirty-five lectures had evolved into that excellent book,
+"Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy." The public were buying it.
+
+Evolution was fast taking its place as a fixed fact. And John Fiske was
+moving into public favor on the flood-tide. There were demands for his
+lectures from various schools, colleges and lyceums, throughout the
+United States.
+
+He resigned his position so as to give all his time to writing and
+speaking. And Harvard, proud of her gifted son, elected him an Overseer
+of the University, which position he held until his death. John Fiske
+died in Nineteen Hundred One, suddenly, aged fifty-nine.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Next to the originator of a great thought is the man who quotes it,"
+says Ralph Waldo Emerson. Next to the discoverer of a great scientific
+truth is the man who recognizes and upholds it. The service done science
+by Fiske is beyond calculation. Fiske was not a Columbus upon the sea of
+science: he followed the course laid out by others, and was really never
+out of sight of a buoy. He comes as near being a great scientist,
+perhaps, as any man that America has ever produced.
+
+America has had but four men of unmistakable originality. These are:
+Franklin, Emerson, Whitman and Edison. Each worked in a field
+particularly his own, and the genius of each was recognized in Europe
+before we were willing to acknowledge it here. But the word "scientist"
+can hardly be properly applied to any of these men. For want of a better
+name we call John Fiske our greatest scientist. He was the most learned
+man of his day. In the realm of Physical Geography no American could
+approach him. The combined knowledge of everybody else was his: he had a
+passion for facts, a memory like a daybook, and his systematic mind was
+disciplined until it was a regular Dewey card-index.
+
+Louis Agassiz was born in Europe, but he was ours by adoption, and he
+might dispute with Fiske the title to first place in the American
+Pantheon of Science, were it not for the fact that the Law of Evolution
+was beyond his ken, being obscured by a marked, myopic, theological,
+stigmatic squint.
+
+Agassiz died in his sins, unconvinced unrepentant, refusing the rite of
+extreme unction that Asa Gray offered him, his sensitive spirit writhing
+at mention of the word "Darwin." On his tomb, Clio with moving finger
+has carved one of his own sentences, nor all your tears shall blot a
+line of it. And these are the words of Agassiz: "Darwinism seeks to
+dethrone God, and replace Him by a blind force called the Law of
+Evolution." So passed away the great soul of Louis Agassiz.
+
+Fiske has been called the Huxley of America; but Fiske was like Agassiz
+in this, he never had the felicity to achieve the ill-will of the many.
+Fiske has also been called the Drummond of America, but Fiske was really
+a Henry Drummond and a Louis Agassiz rolled into one, the mass well
+seasoned with essence of Huxley. John Fiske made the science of Darwin
+and Wallace palatable to orthodox theology, and it is to the earnest and
+eloquent words of Fiske that we owe it that Evolution is taught
+everywhere in the public schools and even in the sectarian colleges of
+America today.
+
+The almost universal opposition to Darwin's book arose from the idea
+that its acceptance would destroy the Christian religion. This was the
+plaintive plea put forth when Newton advanced his discovery of the Law
+of Gravitation, and also when Copernicus proclaimed the movements of the
+earth: these things were contrary to the Bible! Copernicus was a loyal
+Catholic; Sir Isaac Newton was a staunch Churchman; but both kept their
+religion in water-tight compartments, so that it never got mixed with
+their science. Gladstone never allowed his religion to tint his
+statesmanship, and we all know businessmen who follow the double-entry
+scheme.
+
+That famous French toast, "Here's to our wives and sweethearts--may they
+never meet!" would suit most lawyers just as well if expressed this way.
+"Here's to our religion and our business--God knows they never meet."
+
+To Sir Isaac Newton, religion was something to be believed, not
+understood. He left religion to the specialists, recognizing its value
+as a sort of police protection for the State, and as his share in the
+matter he paid tithes, and attended prayers as a matter of patriotic
+duty and habit.
+
+Voltaire recognized the greatness of Newton's intellect, but he could
+not restrain his aqua fortis, and so he said this: "All the scientists
+were jealous of Newton when he discovered the Law of Gravitation, but
+they got even with him when he wrote his book on the Hebrew Prophecies!"
+Newton wrote that book in his water-tight compartment.
+
+But Newton was no hypocrite. The attitude of the Primrose Sphinx who
+bowed his head in the Church of England Chapel--the Jew who rose to the
+highest office Christian England had to offer--and repeated Ben Ezra's
+prayer, was not the attitude of Newton. Darwin waived religion, and if
+he ever heard of the Bible no one knew it from his writings.
+
+Huxley danced on it. Tyndall and Spencer regarded the Bible as a
+valuable and more or less interesting collection of myths, fables and
+folklore tales. Wallace sees in it a strain of prophetic truth and
+regards it as gold-bearing quartz of a low grade.
+
+Fiske regarded it as the word of God, Holy Writ, expressed often
+vaguely, mystically, and in the language of poetry and symbol, but true
+when rightly understood.
+
+And so John Fiske throughout his life spoke in orthodox pulpits to the
+great delight of Christian people, and at the same time wrote books on
+science and dedicated them to Thomas Huxley, Bishop of all Agnostics.
+
+To the scientist the word "supernatural" is a contradiction. Everything
+that is in the Universe is natural; the supernatural is the natural not
+yet understood. And that which is called the supernatural is often the
+figment of a disordered, undisciplined or undeveloped imagination.
+
+Simple people think of imagination as that quality of mind which revels
+in tales of fairies and hobgoblins, but imagination of this character is
+undisciplined and undeveloped. The scientist who deals with the sternest
+of facts must be highly imaginative, or his work is vain. The engineer
+sees his structure complete, ere he draws his plans. So the scientist
+divines the thing first and then looks for it until he finds it. Were
+this not so, he would not be able to recognize things hitherto unknown,
+when he saw them; nor could he fit fact to fact, like bones in a
+skeleton, and build a complete structure, if it all did not first exist
+as a thought.
+
+To reprove and punish children for flights of imagination, John Fiske
+argued, was one of the things done only by a barbaric people.
+
+Children first play at the thing, which later they are to do well. Play
+is preparation. The man of imagination is the man of sympathy, and only
+such are those who benefit and bless mankind and help us on our way.
+
+John Fiske had imagination enough to follow closely and hold fellowship
+with the greatest minds the world has ever known. John Fiske believed
+that we live in a natural universe, and that God works through Nature,
+and that, in fact, Nature is the spirit of God at work.
+
+Doubts never disturbed John Fiske. Things that were not true technically
+and literally were true to him if taken in a spiritual or poetic way.
+God, to him, was a personal being, creating through the Law of Evolution
+because He chose to. The six days of Creation were six eons or
+geological periods.
+
+No man has ever been more in sympathy with the discoverers in Natural
+History than John Fiske. No man ever knew so much about his work as John
+Fiske. His knowledge was colossal, his memory prodigious. And in all of
+the realm of science and philosophy, from microscopy and the germ
+theory to advanced astronomy and the birth of worlds, his glowing
+imagination saw the work of a beneficent Creator who stood above and
+beyond and outside of Natural Law, and with Infinite Wisdom and Power
+did His own Divine Will.
+
+Little theologians who feared Science, on account of danger to pet
+texts, received from him kindly pats on the head, as he showed them how
+both Science and Scripture were true.
+
+He didn't do away with texts, he merely changed their interpretation.
+And often he discovered that the text which seemed to contradict science
+was really prophetic of it. John Fiske did not take anything away from
+anybody, unless he gave them something better in return.
+
+"A man's belief is a part of the man," he said. "Take it away by force
+and he will bleed to death; but if the time comes when he no longer
+needs it, he will either slough it or convert it into something more
+useful."
+
+Every good thing begins as something else. Evolution is at work on the
+creeds as well as in matter. A monkey-man will have a monkey belief.
+
+He evolves the thing he needs, and the belief that fits one man will not
+fit another. Religious opinions are never thrown away: they evolve into
+something else, and we use the old symbols and imagery to express new
+thoughts.
+
+John Fiske, unlike John Morley, considered "Compromise" a great thing.
+"Truth is a point of view: let us get together," he used to say. And so
+he worked to keep the old, as a foundation for the new.
+
+I once heard him interrupted in a lecture by a questioner who asked,
+"Why would you keep the Church intact?" The question stung him into
+impassioned speech which was better than anything in his manuscript. I
+can not attempt to reproduce his exact language; but the intent was that
+as the Church was the chief instrument in preserving for us the learning
+of Greece and Rome, so has she been the mother of art, the inspirer of
+music and the protector of the outcast. Colleges, hospitals, libraries,
+art-galleries and asylums, all come to us through the medium of
+religion.
+
+The convent was first a place of protection for oppressed womanhood.
+
+To discard religion would be like repudiating our parents because we did
+not like their manners and clothes. The religious impulse is the art
+impulse, and both are manifestations of love, and love is the basis of
+our sense of sublimity.
+
+We surely will abandon certain phases of religion. We will purify,
+refine and beautify our religion, just as we have our table etiquette
+and our housekeeping. The millennium will come only through the
+scientific acceptance of piety. When Church and State separated it was
+well, but when Science and Religion joined hands it was better. Science
+stands for the head; Religion for the heart. All things are dual, and
+through the marriage of these two principles, one the masculine and the
+other the feminine, will come a renaissance of advancement such as this
+tired old world on her zigzag journeys has never seen. Sociology is the
+religious application of economics. Demonology has been replaced by
+psychology, and the betterment of man's condition on earth is now fast
+becoming the chief solicitude of the Church.
+
+It will thus be seen that John Fiske's hope for the future was bright
+and strong. The man was an optimist by nature, and his patience and
+good-nature were always in evidence. He made friends, and he held them.
+Huxley, who of all men hated piety that was flavored with hypocrisy,
+loved John Fiske and once wrote this: "There was a man sent from God by
+the name of John Fiske. Now John holds in his great and generous heart
+the best of all the Church has to offer; hence I no longer go to
+prayers, but instead, I invite John Fiske to come and dine with us every
+Sunday, so are we made better--Amen."
+
+     SO HERE ENDETH "LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS,"
+     BEING VOLUME TWELVE OF THE SERIES, AS WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD:
+     EDITED AND ARRANGED BY FRED BANN; BORDERS AND INITIALS BY ROYCROFT
+     ARTISTS, AND PRODUCED BY THE ROYCROFTERS, AT THEIR SHOPS, WHICH ARE
+     IN EAST AURORA, ERIE COUNTY, NEW YORK, MCMXXII
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Journeys to the Homes of the
+Great - Volume 12, by Elbert Hubbard
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great -
+Volume 12, by Elbert Hubbard
+
+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: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12
+       Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists
+
+Author: Elbert Hubbard
+
+Release Date: August 19, 2006 [EBook #19080]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Janet Blenkinship and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+
+
+  <h1>Little Journeys<br />
+  To the Homes of the Great</h1>
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+  <h2>Elbert Hubbard</h2>
+
+  <h3>Memorial Edition</h3>
+
+  <p class='center'>Printed and made into a Book by<br />
+  The Roycrofters, who are in East<br />
+  Aurora, Erie County, New York<br /><br />
+
+  Wm. H. Wise &amp; Co.<br />
+  New York<br /><br />
+
+  Copyright, 1916,<br />
+  By The Roycrofters</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+
+  <h1>Little Journeys<br />
+  To the Homes<br />
+  of<br />
+  Great Scientists</h1>
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" width="65%" cellspacing="0" summary="CONTENTS">
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#SIR_ISAAC_NEWTON">SIR ISAAC NEWTON</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#GALILEO">GALILEO</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#COPERNICUS">COPERNICUS</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#HUMBOLDT">HUMBOLDT</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#WILLIAM_HERSCHEL">WILLIAM HERSCHEL</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHARLES_DARWIN">CHARLES DARWIN</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#HAECKEL">HAECKEL</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#LINNAEUS">LINN&AElig;US</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#THOMAS_H_HUXLEY">THOMAS H. HUXLEY</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#JOHN_TYNDALL">JOHN TYNDALL</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ALFRED_R_WALLACE">ALFRED R. WALLACE</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#JOHN_FISKE">JOHN FISKE</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span><br /><br /></p>
+<h2><a name="SIR_ISAAC_NEWTON" id="SIR_ISAAC_NEWTON"></a>SIR ISAAC NEWTON</h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img437.jpg" alt="NEWTON" title="NEWTON" /></div>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When you come into any fresh company, observe their humours. Suit
+your own carriage thereto, by which insinuation you will make their
+converse more free and open. Let your discourse be more in querys
+and doubtings than peremptory assertions or disputings, it being
+the designe of travelers to learne, not to teach. Besides, it will
+persuade your acquaintance that you have the greater esteem of
+them, and soe make them more ready to communicate what they know to
+you; whereas nothing sooner occasions disrespect and quarrels than
+peremptorinesse. You will find little or no advantage in seeming
+wiser, or much more ignorant than your company. Seldom discommend
+anything though never so bad, or doe it but moderately, lest you
+bee unexpectedly forced to an unhansom retraction. It is safer to
+commend any thing more than is due, than to discommend a thing soe
+much as it deserves; for commendations meet not soe often with
+oppositions, or, at least, are not usually soe ill resented by men
+that think otherwise, as discommendations; and you will insinuate
+into men's favour by nothing sooner than seeming to approve and
+commend what they like; but beware of doing it by a comparison.</p>
+
+<p class='author'>&mdash;<i>Sir Isaac Newton to one of his pupils</i></p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>SIR ISAAC NEWTON</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imga.jpg" alt="A" title="A" /></div><p>n honest farmer, neither rich nor poor, was Isaac Newton. He was
+married to Harriet Ayscough in February, Sixteen Hundred Forty-two.</p>
+
+<p>Both were strong, intelligent and full of hope. Neither had any
+education to speak of; they belonged to England's middle class&mdash;that
+oft-despised and much ridiculed middle class which is the hope of the
+world. Accounts still in existence show that their income was thirty
+pounds a year. It was for them to toil all the week, go to church on
+Sunday, and twice or thrice in a year attend the village fairs or
+indulge in a holiday where hard cider played an important part.</p>
+
+<p>Isaac had served his two years in the army, taken a turn at sea, and got
+his discharge-papers. Now he had married the lass of his choice, and
+settled down in the little house on an estate in Lincolnshire where his
+father was born and died.</p>
+
+<p>Spring came and the roses clambered over the stone walls; the bobolinks
+played hide-and-seek in the waving grass of the meadows; the skylarks
+sang and poised and soared; the hedgerows grew white with
+hawthorn-blossoms and musical with the chirp of sparrows; the cattle
+ranged through the fragrant clover "knee-deep<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> in June."</p>
+
+<p>Oftentimes the young wife worked with her husband in the fields, or went
+with him to market. Great plans were laid as to what they would do next
+year, and the year after, and how they would provide for coming age and
+grow old together, here among the oaks and the peace and plenty of
+Lincolnshire.</p>
+
+<p>In such a country, with such a climate, it seems as if one could almost
+make repair equal waste, and thus keep death indefinitely at bay. But
+all men, even the strongest, are living under a death sentence, with but
+an indefinite reprieve. And even yet, with all of our science and
+health, we can not fully account for those diseases which seemingly pick
+the very best flower of sinew and strength.</p>
+
+<p>Isaac Newton, the strong and rugged farmer, sickened and died in a week.
+"The result of a cold caught when sweaty and standing in a draft," the
+surgeon explained. "The act of God to warn us all of the vanity of
+life." Acute pneumonia, perhaps, is what we would call it&mdash;a fever that
+burned out the bellows in a week.</p>
+
+<p>In such cases the very strength of the man seems to supply fuel for the
+flames. And so just as the Autumn came with changing leaves, the young
+wife was left to fight the battle of life alone&mdash;alone, save for the
+old, old miracle that her life supported another. A wife, a widow, a
+mother&mdash;all within a year!</p>
+
+<p>On Christmas-Day the babe was born&mdash;born where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> most men die: in
+obscurity. He was so weak and frail that none but the mother believed he
+would live.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor quoted a line from "Richard the Third," "Sent before my time
+into this breathing world scarce half made up," and gave the infant into
+the keeping of an old nurse with an ominous shake of the head, and went
+his way, absolved. His time was too valuable to waste on such a useless
+human mite.</p>
+
+<p>The persistent words of the mother that the child should not, must not
+die, possibly had something to do with keeping the breath of life in the
+puny man-child. The fond mother had given him the name of his father,
+even before birth! He was to live to do the work that the man now dead
+had hoped to do; that is, live a long and honest life, and leave the
+fair acres more valuable than he found them.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the inauspicious beginning of what Herbert Spencer declared was
+the greatest life since Aristotle studied the starry universe.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgo.jpg" alt="O" title="O" /></div><p>utside of India the lot of widows is not especially to be pitied. A
+widow has beautiful dreams, while the married woman copes with the stern
+reality.</p>
+
+<p>Then, no phase of life is really difficult when you accept it; and the
+memory of a great love lost is always a blessing and a benediction to
+the one who endures the first cruel shock.</p>
+
+<p>The young widow looked after her little estate, and with perhaps some
+small assistance from her parents, lived comfortably and as happily as
+one has a right to in this vale of tears. Her baby boy had grown strong
+and well: by the time he was two years old he was quite the equal of
+most babies&mdash;and his mother thought, beyond them.</p>
+
+<p>It is quite often stoutly declared by callow folks that mother-love is
+the strongest and most enduring love in the world, but the wise waste no
+words on such an idle proposition. Mother-love retires into the shadow
+when the other kind appears.</p>
+
+<p>When the Reverend Barnabas Smith began, unconsciously, to make eyes at
+the Widow Newton over his prayer-book, the good old dames whose business
+it is to look after these things, and perform them vicariously, made
+prophecies on the way home from church as to how soon the wedding would
+occur.</p>
+
+<p>People go to church to watch and pray, but a man I know says that women
+go to church to watch. Young<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> clergymen fall an easy prey to designing
+widows, he avers. I can discover no proof, however, that the Widow
+Newton made any original designs; she was below the young clergyman in
+social standing, and when the good man began to pay special attentions
+to her baby boy she never imagined that the sundry pats and caresses
+were meant for her.</p>
+
+<p>Little Isaac Newton was just three years old when the wedding occurred,
+and was not troubled about it. The bride went to live with her husband
+at the rectory, a mile away, and the little boy in dresses, with long
+yellow curls, was taken to the home of his grandmother. The Reverend
+Barnabas Smith didn't like babies as well as he had at first thought.
+Grandparents are inclined to be lax in their discipline. And anyway it
+is no particular difference if they are: a scarcity of discipline is
+better than too much. More boys have been ruined by the rod than saved
+by it&mdash;love is a good substitute for a cat-'o-nine-tails.</p>
+
+<p>There were several children born to the Reverend Barnabas Smith and his
+wife, and all were disciplined for their own good. Isaac, a few miles
+away, snuggled in the arms of his old grandmother when he was bad and
+went scot-free.</p>
+
+<p>Many years after, Sir Isaac Newton, in an address on education at
+Cambridge, playfully referred to the fact that in his boyhood he did not
+have to prevaricate to escape punishment, his grandmother being<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> always
+willing to lie for him. His grandmother was his first teacher and his
+best friend as long as she lived.</p>
+
+<p>When he was twelve years old he was sent to the village school at
+Grantham, eight miles away. There he boarded with a family by the name
+of Clark, and at odd times helped in the apothecary-shop of Mr. Clark,
+cleaning bottles and making pills. He himself has told us that the
+working with mortar and pestle, cutting the pills in exact cubes, and
+then rolling one in each hand between thumb and finger, did him a lot of
+good, whether the patients were benefited or not.</p>
+
+<p>The genial apothecary also explained that pills were for those who made
+and sold them, and that if they did no harm to those who swallowed them,
+the whole transaction was then one of benefit. All of which proves to us
+that men had the essence of wisdom two hundred years ago, quite as much
+as now.</p>
+
+<p>The master of the school at Grantham was one Mr. Stokes, a man of
+genuine insight and tact&mdash;two things rather rare in the pedagogic
+equipment at that time. The Newton boy was small and stood low in his
+class, perhaps because book-learning had not been the bent of his
+grandmother. The fact that Isaac was neither strong nor smart, nor even
+smartly dressed, caused him to serve in the capacity of a butt for the
+bullies.</p>
+
+<p>One big boy in particular made it his business to punch, kick and cuff
+him on all occasions, in class or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> out. This continued for a month, when
+one day the little boy invited the big one out into the churchyard and
+there fell upon him tooth and claw. The big boy had strength, but the
+little one had right on his side.</p>
+
+<p>The schoolmaster looked over the wall and shouted, "Thrice armed is he
+who knows his cause is just!" In two minutes the bully was beaten, but
+the schoolmaster's son, who stood by as master of ceremonies, suggested
+that the big boy have his nose rubbed against the wall of the church for
+luck. This was accordingly done, not o'er-gently, and when Isaac
+returned to the schoolroom, the master, who was supposed to know nothing
+officially of the fighting, prophesied, "Young Mr. Newton will yet beat
+any boy in this school in his studies."</p>
+
+<p>It has been suggested that this prophecy was made after its fulfilment,
+but even so, we know that Mr. Stokes lived long enough to take great
+pride in the Newton boy, and to grow reminiscent concerning his great
+achievements.</p>
+
+<p>Our hearts surely go out to the late Mr. Stokes, schoolmaster at
+Grantham.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>here is surely something in that old idea of Indians that when they
+killed an enemy the strength of the fallen adversary entered into
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>This encounter of little Isaac with the school bully was a pivotal point
+in his career. He had vanquished the rogue physically, and he now set to
+work to do as much mentally for the whole school. He had it in him&mdash;it
+was just a matter of application.</p>
+
+<p>Once, in after-life, in speaking of those who had benefited him most, he
+placed this unnamed chucklehead first, and added with a smile, "Our
+enemies are quite as necessary to us as our friends."</p>
+
+<p>In a few months Isaac stood at the head of the class. In mathematics he
+especially excelled, and the Master, who prided himself on being able to
+give problems no one could solve but himself, found that he was put to
+the strait of giving a problem nobody could solve. He was somewhat taken
+aback when little Isaac declined to work on it, and coolly pointed out
+the fallacy involved. The only thing for the teacher to do was to say he
+had purposely given the proposition to see if any one would detect the
+fallacy. This he gracefully did, and again made a prophecy to the effect
+that Isaac Newton would some day take his own place and be master of
+Grantham School.</p>
+
+<p>In the year Sixteen Hundred Fifty-six the schooldays of Isaac Newton
+were cut short by the death of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> stepfather.</p>
+
+<p>His mother, twice a widow, moved back to "Woolsthorpe," a big name for a
+very small estate. Isaac was made the man of the house. The ambition of
+his mother was that he should become a farmer and stock-raiser.</p>
+
+<p>It seems that the boy entered upon his farm duties with an alacrity that
+was not to last. His heart was not in the work, but the desire to please
+his mother spurred him forward.</p>
+
+<p>On one occasion, being sent with a load of produce to Grantham, he
+stopped to visit his old school, and during his call struck a bargain
+with one of the boys for a copy of Descartes' Geometry. The purchase
+exhausted his finances, so that he was unable to buy the articles his
+mother had sent him for, but when he got home he explained that one
+might get along without such luxuries as clothing, but a good Geometry
+was a family necessity. About this time he made a water-clock, and also
+that sundial which can be seen today, carved into the stone on the
+corner of the house. He still continued his making of kites which had
+been begun at Grantham; and gave the superstitious neighbors a thrill by
+flying kites at night with lighted lanterns made from paper, attached to
+the tails. He made water-wheels and windmills, and once constructed a
+miniature mill that he ran by placing a mouse in a treadmill inside.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime the cows got into the corn, and the weeds in the garden
+improved each shining hour. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> fond mother was now sorely disappointed
+in her boy, and made remarks to the effect that if she had looked after
+his bringing up instead of entrusting him to an indulgent grandmother,
+affairs at this time would not be in their present state. Parents are
+apt to be fussy: they can not wait.</p>
+
+<p>Matters reached a climax when the sheep that Isaac had been sent to
+watch, overran the garden and demolished everything but the purslane and
+ragweed, while all the time the young man was under the hedge working
+out mathematical problems from his Descartes.</p>
+
+<p>At this stage the mother called in her brother, the Reverend Mr.
+Ayscough, and he advised that a boy who was so bound to study should be
+allowed to study.</p>
+
+<p>And the good man offered to pay the wages of a man to take Isaac's place
+on the farm.</p>
+
+<p>So, greatly to the surprise and pleasure of Mr. Stokes of Grantham,
+Isaac one fine day returned with his books, just as if he had only been
+gone a day instead of a year.</p>
+
+<p>At the home of the apothecary the lad was thrice welcome. He had
+endeared himself to the women of the household especially. He did not
+play with other boys&mdash;their games and sports were absolutely outside of
+his orbit. He was silent and so self-contained that he won from his
+schoolfellows the sobriquet of "Old Coldfeet." Nothing surprised him; he
+never lost his temper; he laughed so seldom that the incident was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> noted
+and told to the neighbors; his attitude was one of abstraction, and when
+he spoke it was like a judge charging a jury with soda-water.</p>
+
+<p>All his spare time was given up to whittling, pounding, sawing, and
+making mathematical calculations.</p>
+
+<p>Not all of his inventions were toys, for among other things he
+constructed a horseless carriage which was run by a crank and pumping
+device, by the occupants.</p>
+
+<p>The idea of the horseless carriage is a matter that has long been in the
+minds of inventors.</p>
+
+<p>Several men, supremely great, have tried their hands and head at it.
+Leibnitz worked at it; Swedenborg prophesied the automobile, and made a
+carriage, placing the horse inside, and did not give up the scheme until
+the horse ran away with himself and demolished a year's work. The
+government here interfered and placed an injunction against "the making
+of any more such diabolical contrivances for the disturbance of the
+public peace." All of which makes us believe that if either Edison or
+Marconi had lived two hundred years ago, the bailiffs would have looked
+after them with the butt end of the law for the regulation of wizards
+and witches&mdash;wizards at Menlo Park being as bad as witches at Salem.</p>
+
+<p>Newton's horseless carriage later came to grief in a similar way to
+Swedenborg's invention&mdash;it worked so well and so fast that it turned a
+complete somersault into a ditch, and its manipulation was declared to
+be a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> pastime more dangerous than football.</p>
+
+<p>Not all the things produced by Isaac about this time were failures. For
+instance, among other things he made a table, a chair and a cupboard for
+a young woman who was a fellow-boarder at the apothecary's. The
+excellence of young Newton's handiwork was shown in that the articles
+just mentioned outlasted both owner and maker.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgm.jpg" alt="M" title="M" /></div><p>uch of the reminiscence concerning the Grantham days of Sir Isaac
+Newton comes from the fortunate owner of that historic old table, chair
+and cupboard. This was Mary Story, who was later Mrs. Vincent.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Story was the same age as Isaac. She was just eighteen when the
+furniture was made roycroftie&mdash;she was a young lady, grown, and wore a
+dress with a train; moreover, she had been to London and had been
+courted by a widower, while Isaac Newton was only a lad in roundabouts.</p>
+
+<p>Age counts for little&mdash;it is experience and temperament that weigh in
+the scale. Isaac was only a little boy, and Mary Story treated him like
+one. And here seems a good place to quote what Doctor Charcot said, "In
+arranging the formula for a great man, make sure you delay adolescence:
+rareripes rot early."</p>
+
+<p>Isaac and Mary became very good chums, and used to ramble the woods
+together hand in hand, in a way that must have frightened them both had
+they been on the same psychic plane. Isaac had about the same regard for
+her that he might have had for a dear maiden aunt who would mend his old
+socks and listen patiently, pretending to be interested when he talked
+of parallelograms and prismatic spectra. But evidently Mary Story
+thought of him with a thrill, for she stoutly resented the boys calling
+him "Coldfeet."</p>
+
+<p>In due time Isaac gravitated to Cambridge. Mary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> mooed a wee, but soon
+consoled herself with a sure-enough lover, and was married to Mr.
+Vincent, a worthy man and true, but one who had not sufficient
+soul-caloric to make her forget her Isaac.</p>
+
+<p>This friendship with Mary Story is often spoken of as the one
+love-affair in the life of Sir Isaac Newton. It was all prosily Platonic
+on his part, but as Mary lived out her life at Grantham, and Sir Isaac
+Newton used to go there occasionally, and when he did, always called
+upon her, the relationship was certainly noteworthy.</p>
+
+<p>The only break in that lifelong friendship occurred when each was past
+fifty.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Isaac Newton was paying his little yearly call at Grantham; and was
+seated in a rustic arbor by the side of Mrs. Vincent, now grown gray,
+and the mother of a goodly brood, well grown up. As they thus sat
+talking of days agone, his thoughts wandered off upon quadratic
+equations, and to aid his mind in following the thread, he
+absent-mindedly lighted his pipe, and smoked in silence. As the tobacco
+died low, he gazed about for a convenient utensil to use in pushing the
+ashes down in the bowl of his pipe. Looking down he saw the lady's hand
+resting upon his knee, and he straightway utilized the forefinger of his
+vis-a-vis. A suppressed feminine screech followed, but the fires of
+friendship were not quenched by so slight an incident, which Mrs.
+Vincent knew grew out of temperament,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> and not from wrong intent.</p>
+
+<p>She lived to be eighty-five, and to the day of her death caressed the
+scar&mdash;the cicatrice of a love-wound. All of which seems to prove that
+old women can be quite as absurd as young ones&mdash;goodness me!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgw.jpg" alt="W" title="W" /></div><p>hen Isaac was eighteen, Master Stokes was so well impressed with his
+star scholar that he called in the young lad's uncle, the Reverend Mr.
+Ayscough, and insisted that the boy be sent to Cambridge. The uncle
+being a Cambridge man himself thought this the proper thing to do.</p>
+
+<p>On June Fifth, Sixteen Hundred Sixty-one, Isaac presented his
+credentials from his uncle and Mr. Stokes, and was duly entered in
+Trinity College as a subsizar, which means that he was admitted on
+suspicion. A part of the duties of a subsizar was to clean boots, scrub
+floors and perform various other delightful tasks which everybody else
+evaded.</p>
+
+<p>To be at Trinity College in any capacity was paradise for this boy. He
+thirsted for knowledge: to know, to do, to perform&mdash;these things were
+his desire. He had been brought up to work, anyway, and to a country boy
+toil is no punishment. "I knew that if worse came to worst I could get
+work in the town making furniture and earn a man's wage," he said.</p>
+
+<p>In a month he had passed his first examinations and was made a sizar.
+Before this he had been fag to everybody, but now he was fag to the
+Seniors only. He not only made their beds and cleaned their rooms, but
+also worked their examples in mathematics, and thus commanded their
+respect.</p>
+
+<p>Once, being called upon in class to recite from Euclid, he declined and
+shocked the professor by saying, "It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> is a trifling book&mdash;I have
+mastered it and thrown it aside." And it was no idle boast&mdash;he knew the
+book as the professor did not. When he arrived at Cambridge, he carried
+in his box a copy of Sanderson's Logic presented to him by his
+uncle&mdash;the uncle having no use for it. It happened to be one of the
+textbooks in use at Trinity. When Isaac heard lectures on Sanderson he
+found he knew the book a deal better than the tutor, a thing the tutor
+shortly acknowledged before the class. This caused young Mr. Newton to
+stand out as a prodigy. Usually students have to rap for admittance to
+the higher classes, but now the teachers came and sought him out. One
+professor told him he was about to take up Kepler's Optics with some
+post-graduate students&mdash;would young Mr. Newton come in? Isaac begged to
+be excused until he could examine the book. The volume was loaned to
+him. He tore the vitals out of it and digested them. When the lectures
+began, he declined to go because he had mastered the subject as far as
+Kepler carried it.</p>
+
+<p>Genius seems to consist in the ability to concentrate your rays and
+focus them on one point. Isaac Newton could do it. "On a Winter day I
+took a small glass and so centered the sun's rays that I burned a hole
+in my coat," he wrote in his subsizar journal.</p>
+
+<p>The youth possessed an imperturbable coolness: he talked little, but
+when he spoke it was very frankly and honestly. From any other his words
+would have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> had a presumptuous and boastful sound. As it was he was
+respected and beloved. At Cambridge his face and features commended him:
+he looked like another Cambridge man, one Milton&mdash;John Milton&mdash;only his
+face was a little more stern in its expression than that of the author
+of "Paradise Lost."</p>
+
+<p>In two years' time Isaac Newton was a scholar of whom all Cambridge
+knew. He had prepared able essays on the squaring of curved and crooked
+lines, on errors in grinding lenses and the methods of rectifying them,
+and in the extraction of roots where the cubes were imperfect: he had
+done things never before attempted by his teachers. When they called
+upon him to recite, it was only for the purpose of explaining truths
+which they had not mastered.</p>
+
+<p>In Sixteen Hundred Sixty-four, being in his twenty-second year, Isaac
+Newton was voted a free scholarship, which provided for board, books and
+tuition. On this occasion he was examined in Euclid by Doctor Barrow,
+the Head Master of Trinity.</p>
+
+<p>Newton could solve every problem, but could not explain why or how. His
+methods were empirical&mdash;those of his own.</p>
+
+<p>Many men with a modicum of mathematical genius work in this way, and in
+practical life the plan may serve all right. But now it was shown to
+Newton that a schoolman must not only know how to work out great
+problems, but also why he goes at it in a certain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> way; otherwise,
+colleges are vain&mdash;we must be able to pass our knowledge along. The
+really great man is one who knows the rules and then forgets them, just
+as the painter of supreme merit must be a realist before he evolves into
+an impressionist.</p>
+
+<p>Newton now acknowledged his mistake in reference to Euclid, and set to
+work to master the rules. This graciousness in accepting advice, and the
+willingness to admit his lapse, if he had been hasty, won for him not
+only the scholarship, but also the love of his superiors. Milton was a
+radical who made enemies, but Newton was a radical who made friends. He
+avoided iconoclasm, left all matters of theology to the specialists, and
+accepted the Church as a necessary part of society. His care not to
+offend fixed his place in Cambridge for life.</p>
+
+<p>It was Cambridge that fostered and encouraged his first budding
+experiments; it was there he was sustained in his mightiest hazards; and
+it was within her walls that the ripe fruit of his genius was garnered
+and gathered. When his fame had become national and he was called to
+higher offices than Cambridge supplied, Cambridge watched his career
+with the loving interest of a mother, and the debt of love he fully
+paid, for it was very largely through his name and fame that Cambridge
+first took her place as one of the great schools of the world.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgn.jpg" alt="N" title="N" /></div><p>ewton took his degree of Bachelor of Arts at Cambridge, in January, in
+the year Sixteen Hundred Sixty-five. The faculty of Trinity would not
+even consider his leaving the college: he was as valuable to them as he
+would be now if he were a famous football-player. Besides the
+scholarship, there were ways provided so he could earn money by private
+tutoring and giving lectures in the absence of the professors.</p>
+
+<p>He had written his essay on fluxions, described their application to
+fluents and tangents, and devised a plan for finding the radius of
+curvity in crooked lines. In August of the same year that Newton was
+given his degree, the college was dismissed on account of an epidemic,
+and Newton went home to Woolsthorpe to kill time. In September, Sixteen
+Hundred Sixty-five, he then being twenty-three, while seated in his
+mother's garden, Newton saw that storied apple fall. What pulled it
+down? Some force tugging at it, surely!</p>
+
+<p>Galileo had experimented with falling bodies, and had proved that the
+weight and size of a falling body had nothing to do with its velocity,
+save as its size and shape might be affected by the friction of the
+atmosphere. The first person to put into print the story of the falling
+apple was Voltaire, whose sketch of Newton is a little classic which the
+world could ill afford to lose. Adam, William Tell and Isaac Newton each
+had his little affair with an apple, but with different<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> results.</p>
+
+<p>The falling apple suggested to Newton that there was some power in the
+ground that was constantly pulling things toward the center of the
+earth.</p>
+
+<p>This power extended straight down into the earth&mdash;he knew it&mdash;he had
+dropped a stone into a mine, and had also dropped things from steeples.
+He dropped apples from kites by an ingenious device of two strings, and
+he concluded that an apple taken a hundred miles up in the air would
+return to earth.</p>
+
+<p>He then began to speculate as to just what a body would do a thousand or
+ten thousand miles from the earth. So high as we could go, or as deep as
+we could dig, this drawing power was always present. The Law of
+Gravitation!</p>
+
+<p>If a cannon-ball was fired in a straight line at a distant target, the
+gunner had to elevate the aim if he would hit the target, for the ball
+described a curve and would keep dropping to the earth until it struck
+the ground. Something was pulling it down: what was it? The Law of
+Gravitation!</p>
+
+<p>The moon was attracted toward us and would surely fall into us, but for
+the fact that there were other attractions drawing her toward them. The
+movements of the planets were owing to the fact that they were obeying
+attractions. They were moving in curves, just like cannon-balls in
+motion. They had two movements, also, like the cannon-ball.</p>
+
+<p>Newton had noticed that the stars within a certain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> territory all moved
+in similar directions, and so must be acted upon by the same influences.
+The Law of Gravitation!</p>
+
+<p>It is held by many people in East Aurora and elsewhere that Newton's
+invention is a devilish device originated for the benefit of surgeons
+and crockery-dealers. But this is not wholly true.</p>
+
+<p>Without this Law of Gravitation the Earth could not retain her spherical
+shape: only through this constant drawing in toward the center could she
+exist.</p>
+
+<p>The other planets, too, must be round or they could not exist, and so
+they also had this same quality of gravity in common with the Earth&mdash;a
+drawing in of everything toward the center. Here was clearly a positive
+discovery&mdash;this similarity of the heavenly bodies!</p>
+
+<p>Every one of the heavenly bodies was exerting a constant attraction
+toward all other heavenly bodies, and this attractive power must be in
+proportion to the distance they were from the object acted upon. Thus
+were their movements and orbits accounted for.</p>
+
+<p>At this time Newton was perfectly familiar with Kepler's Law, that the
+squares of the periodic times of a planet were as the cubes of its
+distance from the sun. And from this, he inferred that the attraction
+varied as the square of the planet's distance from the sun.</p>
+
+<p>Here he was working on territory that had never been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> surveyed. At
+first, in his exuberance, he thought to figure out the size and weight
+of each planet quickly by measuring its attractive power. He did not
+realize that he had cut out for himself work that would require many men
+and several centuries to cover, but surely he was on the right scent&mdash;a
+finite man keen upon the secrets of the Infinite!</p>
+
+<p>He was still at his mother's old home in the country, without scientific
+apparatus or the stimulus of colleagues, when we find by a record in his
+journal that antique groan because there were only twenty-four hours in
+a day, and that eight were required for sleep and eight more for
+recreation!</p>
+
+<p>A subject a little nearer home than planetary attraction had now
+switched him off from measuring and weighing the stars. He was hard at
+work in his mother's little sitting-room, with the windows darkened,
+much to that good woman's perplexity.</p>
+
+<p>By shutting out all light from the windows and allowing the sun's rays
+to enter by a little, circular aperture, he had gotten the sunlight
+captured and tamed where he could study it. This ray of light he
+examined with a small hand-glass he himself had made. In looking at the
+ray, quite accidentally, he found it could be deflected and sent off at
+will in various directions. When thrown on the wall, instead of being
+simply white light it had seven distinct colors beginning with violet
+and running down to red. So white light<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> was not a single element: it
+was made up of various rays which had to be united in order to give us
+sunlight.</p>
+
+<p>Eureka! He had found the secret of the rainbow&mdash;the sun's rays broken up
+and separated by the refracting agency of clouds!</p>
+
+<p>Well does Darwin declare that the separation of sunlight into its
+component parts, and the invention of the spectrum, have marked an
+advance in man's achievement such as the world had not seen since the
+time of wonder-working Archimedes.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>he Cambridge University was closed until October, year of Sixteen
+Hundred Sixty-seven. Most of the intervening time Newton spent at the
+home of his mother, but from accounts of his we can see that the College
+people kept their eagle-eye upon him, for they sent remittances to him
+regularly for "commons."</p>
+
+<p>When he returned to Cambridge he was assigned to the "spiritual
+chamber," which was a room next to the chapel, that had formerly been
+reserved as a guest-room for visiting dignitaries.</p>
+
+<p>In March, Sixteen Hundred Sixty-eight, he was given the degree of Master
+of Arts. His studies now were of a very varied kind. He was required to
+give one lecture a week on any subject of his own choosing. Needless to
+say his themes were all mathematical or scientific. Just what they were
+can best be inferred by consulting his cashbook, since the lectures
+themselves were not written out and all memoranda concerning them have
+disappeared. This account-book shows that his expenditures were for a
+Gunter's Book (he who invented the Gunter's Chain), a magnet and a
+compass, glue, bulbs, putty, antimony, vinegar, white lead, salts of
+tartar, and lenses.</p>
+
+<p>And in addition there are a few interesting items such as one sees in
+the Diary of George Washington: "Lost at cards, five shillings."
+"Treating at tavern, ten shillings." "Binding my Bible, three
+shillings."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> "Spent on my cousin, one pound, two." "Expenses for wetting
+my degree, sixteen shillings."</p>
+
+<p>The last item shows that times have changed but little: this scientist
+and philosopher par excellence had to moisten his diploma at the tavern
+for the benefit of good fellows who little guessed with whom they drank.</p>
+
+<p>He also had "poor relations" come to visit him; and it is significant
+that while there are various items showing where he lost money at cards,
+there are no references to any money won at the same business, from
+which we infer that while there was no one at Cambridge who could follow
+him in his studies, there yet were those who could deal themselves
+better hands when it came to the pasteboards.</p>
+
+<p>Evidently he got discouraged at playing cards, for after the year
+Sixteen Hundred Sixty-eight, there are no more items of "treating at the
+tavern" or "lost at cards." The boys had tried to educate him, but had
+not succeeded. In card exploitations he fell a victim of arrested
+development.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose it will not cause any one a shock to be told that "the
+greatest thinker of all time" was not exactly a perfect man.</p>
+
+<p>So let the truth be known that throughout his life Newton had a
+well-defined strain of superstitious belief running through his
+character. He never quite relinquished the idea of transmutation of
+metals,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> and at times astrology was quite as interesting to him as
+astronomy.</p>
+
+<p>In writing to a friend who was about to pay a long visit to the mines of
+Hungary, he says, "Examine most carefully and ascertain just how and
+under what conditions Nature transforms iron into copper and copper into
+silver and gold."</p>
+
+<p>In his laboratory he had specimens of iron ore that contained copper,
+and also samples of copper ore that contained gold, and from this he
+argued that these metals were transmutable, and really in the act of
+transmutation when the process was interfered with by the miner's pick.</p>
+
+<p>He had transformed a liquid into a mass of solid crystals instantly, and
+all of the changes possible in light, which he had discovered, had
+enlarged his faith to a point where he declared, "Nothing is
+impossible."</p>
+
+<p>It is somewhat curious that Isaac Newton, who had no soft sex-sentiment
+in his nature, quite unlike Galileo, still believed in alchemy and
+astrology, while Galileo's cold intellect at once perceived the fallacy
+of these things.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo also saw at once that for the sun to stand still at Joshua's
+command would really mean that the Earth must cease her motion, since
+the object desired was to prolong the day. Sir Isaac Newton, who
+discovered the Law of Gravitation, yet believed that at the command of a
+barbaric chieftain, this Law was arrested,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> and that all planetary
+attraction was made to cease while he fought the Philistines for the
+possession of pasture-land to which he had no title.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo did not know as much as Newton about planetary attraction, but
+very early in his career he perceived that the Bible was not a book that
+could be relied upon technically.</p>
+
+<p>With Newton the Bible presented no difficulties. He regularly attended
+church and took part in the ritual. Religion was one thing and his daily
+work another. He kept his religion as completely separate from his life
+as did Gladstone, who believed the Mosaic account of Creation was
+literally true, and yet had a clear, cool, calculating head for facts.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest financial exploiter in America today is an Orthodox
+Christian, taking an active part in missionary work and the spread of
+the Gospel.</p>
+
+<p>In his family he is gentle, kind and tender; he is a good neighbor, a
+punctilious churchgoer, a leader in Sunday-School, and a considerate
+teacher of little children.</p>
+
+<p>In business relations he is as conscienceless as Tamerlane, who built a
+mountain of skulls as a monument to himself. He is cold, calculating,
+and if opposed, vindictive. On occasion he is absolutely without heart:
+compassion, mercy or generosity are not then in his make-up.</p>
+
+<p>The best lawyers procurable are paid princely sums to study for him the
+penal code, and legislatures have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> even revised it for his benefit.
+Eviction, destruction, suicide and insanity have even trod in his train.
+A picture of him makes you think of that dark and gloomy canvas where
+C&aelig;sar, Alexander and Napoleon ride slowly side by side through a sea of
+stiffened corpses. Bribery, coercion, violence and even murder have been
+this man's weapons. He is the richest man in America. And yet, as I said
+in the beginning, all this represents only one side of his nature: he
+reads his chapter in the Bible each evening by his family fireside, and
+tenderly kisses his grandchildren good-night.</p>
+
+<p>The individual who imagines that embezzlers are all riotous in nature,
+and by habit are spendthrifts, does not know humanity. The embezzler is
+one man; the model citizen another, and yet both souls reside in the one
+body.</p>
+
+<p>Nero had a passion for pet pigeons, and the birds used to come at his
+call, perch on his shoulder and take dainty crumbs from his lips.</p>
+
+<p>The natures of some men are divided up into water-tight compartments.
+Sir Isaac Newton kept his religion in one compartment, and his science
+in another&mdash;they never got together.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire has said, "When Sir Isaac Newton discovered the Law of
+Gravitation he excited the envy of the learned men of the world; but
+they more than got even with him when he wrote a book on the prophecies
+of the Bible."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgw.jpg" alt="W" title="W" /></div><p>hen Newton was only twenty-seven years old he was elected the Lucasian
+Professor of Mathematics at Trinity, an office that carried with it a
+goodly salary and also very much honor. Never before had so young a man
+held this chair.</p>
+
+<p>Newton was a pioneer in announcing the physical properties of light.</p>
+
+<p>Every village photographer now fully understands this, but when Newton
+first proclaimed it he created a whirlwind of disapproval.</p>
+
+<p>When a man at that time put forth an unusual thought, it was regarded as
+a challenge. Teachers and professors all over Great Britain, and also in
+Germany and France, at once set about to show the fallacy of Newton's
+conclusions.</p>
+
+<p>Newton had issued a pamphlet with diagrams showing how to study light,
+and the apparatus was so simple and cheap that the "Newton experiments"
+were tried everywhere in schoolrooms.</p>
+
+<p>People always combat a new idea when first presented, and so Newton
+found himself overwhelmed with correspondence.</p>
+
+<p>Cheap arguments were fired into Cambridge in volleys. These were backed
+up by quibbling men&mdash;Pro Bono Publico, Veritas and Old Subscriber&mdash;men
+incapable of following Newton's scientific mind. In his great
+good-nature and patience Newton replied to his oppo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>nents at length.</p>
+
+<p>His explanations were construed into proof that he was not sure of his
+ground. One man challenged him to debate the matter publicly, and we
+hear of his going up to London, king that he was, to argue with a
+commoner.</p>
+
+<p>Such terms as "falsifier," "upstart," "pretender," were freely used, and
+poor Newton for a time was almost in despair.</p>
+
+<p>He had thought that the world was anxious for truth! Some of his
+fellow-professors now touched their foreheads and shook their heads
+ominously as he passed. He had gone so far beyond them that the cries of
+"whoa!" were unnoticed.</p>
+
+<p>It is here worth noting that the universal fame of Sir Isaac Newton was
+brought about by his rancorous enemies, and not by his loving friends.
+Gentle, honest, simple and direct as was his nature, he experienced
+notoriety before he knew fame.</p>
+
+<p>To the world at large he was a "wizard" and a "juggler" before he was
+acknowledged a teacher of truth&mdash;a man of science.</p>
+
+<p>When the dust of conflict concerning Newton's announcement of the
+qualities of light had somewhat subsided, he turned to his former
+discovery, the Law of Gravitation, and bent his mighty mind upon it. The
+influence of the moon upon the Earth, the tilt of the Earth, the
+flattening of the poles, the recurring tides, the size, weight and
+distance of the planets, now<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> occupied Newton's attention. And to study
+these phenomena properly, he had to construct special and peculiar
+apparatus.</p>
+
+<p>In Sixteen Hundred Eighty-seven the results of his discoveries were
+brought together in one great book, the "Principia." Newton was
+forty-five years old then.</p>
+
+<p>He was still the Cambridge professor, but was well known in political
+circles in London on account of having been sent there at various times
+to represent the University in a legal way.</p>
+
+<p>His diplomatic success led to his being elected a member of Parliament.
+Among other great men whom he met in London was Samuel Pepys, who kept a
+diary and therein recorded various important nothings about "Mr. Isaac
+Newton of Cambridge&mdash;a schoolteacher of degree, with a great dignity of
+manner and pleasing Countenance." It seems Newton thought so well of
+Pepys that he wrote him several letters, from which Samuel gives us
+quotations. Pepys really claimed the honor of introducing Newton into
+good society.</p>
+
+<p>Among others with whom Newton made friends in Parliament was Mr.
+Montague, who shortly afterward became Secretary of the Exchequer.
+Montague made his friend Newton a Warden of the Mint, with pay about
+double that which he had received while at Cambridge.</p>
+
+<p>In this public work Newton brought such talent and diligence to bear
+that in Sixteen Hundred Ninety-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>seven he was made Master of the Mint, at
+a salary of fifteen hundred pounds a year&mdash;a princely sum in those days.</p>
+
+<p>There is no doubt that the fact that Newton was a devout Churchman and
+an upholder of the Established Order was a great, although perhaps
+unconscious, diplomatic move.</p>
+
+<p>His delightful personality&mdash;gracious, suave, dignified and silent&mdash;won
+for him admiration wherever he would go. In argument his fine reserve
+and excellent temper were most convincing. Had he turned his attention
+to the law he would have become Chief Justice of England.</p>
+
+<p>In Seventeen Hundred Three he was elected President of the Royal
+Society, an office he held continuously for twenty-five years, and which
+tenure was only terminated by his death.</p>
+
+<p>In Seventeen Hundred Five the Queen visited Cambridge, and there with
+much pageantry bestowed the honor of Knighthood which changed Professor
+Newton into Sir Isaac Newton.</p>
+
+<p>But the man himself was still the simple, modest gentleman. The title
+did not spoil him&mdash;he was a noble man from boyhood.</p>
+
+<p>His duties as Master of the Mint did not interfere with his studies and
+scientific investigations. He revised and rewrote his "Principia," and
+in Seventeen Hundred Thirteen the new edition was issued. One copy was
+most sumptuously bound, and Sir Isaac, who was a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> special favorite at
+Court, presented it in person to the Queen. Those who are interested in
+such things may, by applying to the Curator of the British Museum, see
+and turn the leaves of this book, reading the gracious inscription of
+the author, while a solemn man in brass buttons stands behind.</p>
+
+<p>Newton died March Twentieth, Seventeen Hundred Twenty-seven, at the age
+of eighty-five, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.</p>
+
+<p>The verdict of humanity concerning Sir Isaac Newton has been summed up
+for us thus by Laplace: "His work was pre-eminent above all other
+products of the human intellect."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="GALILEO" id="GALILEO"></a>GALILEO</h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img438.jpg" alt="GALILEO" title="GALILEO" /></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I am inclined to believe that the intention of the Sacred
+Scriptures is to give to mankind the information necessary for
+their salvation.</p>
+
+<p>But I do not hold it necessary to believe that the same God who has
+endowed us with senses, with speech, with intellect, intended that
+we should neglect the use of these, and seek by other means for
+knowledge which these are sufficient to procure for us; especially
+in a science like astronomy, of which so little notice is taken by
+the Scriptures that none of the planets, except the sun and moon
+and once or twice only Venus, by the name of Lucifer, are so much
+as named at all.</p>
+
+<p>This therefore being granted, methinks that in the discussion of
+natural problems we ought not to begin at the authority of texts of
+Scriptures but at sensible experiments and necessary
+demonstrations.</p>
+
+<p class='author'>&mdash;<i>Galileo</i></p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>GALILEO</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgw.jpg" alt="W" title="W" /></div><p>ith the history of Galileo and Copernicus, there is connected a
+man of such stern and withal striking individuality that the story of
+the rise and evolution of astronomy can not be told and this man's name
+left out. Giordano Bruno was born in Fifteen Hundred Forty-eight. His
+parents were obscure people, and his childhood and early education are
+enveloped in mystery. Occasional passages in his writings refer to his
+sympathy for outcast children, and he quotes the saying of Jesus,
+"Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of
+such is the Kingdom of Heaven." He then refers to himself as having been
+a waif and robbed of the love that was his due, "the lawful, legal
+heritage of every child, sent without its consent into a world of
+struggle and strife, where only love makes existence possible."</p>
+
+<p>Evidently, the early life of Bruno was a symbol and shadow of what Fate
+held in store for him.</p>
+
+<p>The first authentic knowledge we have of Bruno was when he was
+twenty-two years old. He was then a Dominican monk, and he is brought to
+our attention because he distinguished himself by incurring the
+displeasure of his superiors. His particular offense<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> was that he had
+declared, "The infallibility of the Pope is only in matters spiritual,
+and does not apply to the science of material things."</p>
+
+<p>Strangely enough, these words of Bruno are almost identical with words
+recently expressed by Cardinal Satolli.</p>
+
+<p>The difference in their reception is owing to a mere matter of a few
+hundred years. Truth is a question of time and place. Bruno was banished
+for his temerity, and Satolli wears the red hat. Verily, yesterday's
+heresy is today's orthodoxy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>he attitude of the Church toward the teachings of Copernicus, after the
+death of the man, was one of patronizing pity.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of putting his great book, "Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies,"
+on the "Index," the wiser plan was adopted of paying no attention to it.
+Occasionally, however, the subject was broached by some incautious
+novitiate, and then the custom was to treat the Copernican Theory as a
+mere hypothesis, and its author as a mental defective.</p>
+
+<p>Bruno would not have it so. To him it was a very important matter
+whether the sun revolved around the earth as the priests taught, or the
+earth revolved around the sun as set forth in the work of Copernicus. He
+came to the conclusion that Copernicus was right, and said so.</p>
+
+<p>It was ordered that he should cease lecturing on the subject of
+astronomy and apply himself to spiritual matters. He argued that he
+should be allowed to think and speak what he pleased about the stars,
+since the whole matter was one of opinion, and even the Pope did not
+know, positively, the final facts of astronomy, and if the Copernican
+Theory was a hypothesis, so also was the Ptolemaic Theory held by the
+Church.</p>
+
+<p>It will be seen that Copernicus and Bruno were very different in
+temperament: one was gentle, diplomatic, cautious; the other was
+headstrong, firm and full of argument.</p>
+
+<p>Bruno was given his choice: to cease the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> study of astronomy or to lay
+aside the Dominican frock. The hardihood of the young man was seen in
+that he unfrocked himself, thinking that once outside of the order he
+was not responsible to a superior and could teach what he pleased, so
+long as it was not "heresy."</p>
+
+<p>Heresy is treason to the Church, but Bruno could not see how spiritual
+dogma could cover the facts of Physical Science, since new facts were
+constantly being discovered, and the material universe could only be
+understood by being studied. He was too innocent to comprehend that a
+vast majority of the people believed that popes, cardinals and priests
+knew everything, and that when any branch of knowledge was questioned it
+placed the priests in doubt. Certainly the Church has not opposed
+Science&mdash;she has only opposed heresy. But the curious fact is that
+advancing Science has usually been to the Church heretical. When Bruno
+opposed anything that the priests taught, he opposed the Church. He was
+warned to leave Rome&mdash;his life was in danger. He fled to Geneva, the
+home of Calvin.</p>
+
+<p>Here he thought, surely, he could speak and write as he chose. But alas!
+Protestantism cared even less about Science than did the monks, and
+"heresy" to John Calvin was quite as serious a matter as it was to
+Calvin's competitor, the Pope of Rome.</p>
+
+<p>The Protestants of Geneva gave Bruno scant attention;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> they had never
+heard of Copernicus, and the movements of the stars were as nothing to
+them, since the world was soon to come to an end.</p>
+
+<p>The learned men were even then making mathematical calculations, based
+on the prophecies of the Old Testament, as to how soon the general
+destruction would take place.</p>
+
+<p>Bruno sought to argue them out of their childishness, with the result
+that he got himself marked as an infidel and a dangerous man.</p>
+
+<p>From Geneva he went to Lyons, then to Paris, where his personality made
+itself felt, and he was given a hearing at the University. Here he
+remained for several years, when he went to England, arriving there in
+Fifteen Hundred Eighty-four, the same year that a rustic by the name of
+William Shakespeare, from Stratford, reached London. Whether they ever
+met is doubtful.</p>
+
+<p>Bruno spoke five languages, and his polite accomplishments afforded him
+an immediate entry into the best circles of society. He was entertained
+at the home of Sir Philip Sidney, and afterward carried on an extensive
+correspondence with this prince of gentlemen. Greville presented Bruno
+to Queen Elizabeth, who invited him to lecture at the Court on his
+favorite theme.</p>
+
+<p>This he did, and it is quite probable that the noble lords and ladies
+left "calls" so they could be awakened when the lecture was over and
+congratulate the speaker<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> of the evening on his effort.</p>
+
+<p>At Oxford there were disputations where Bruno's faultless Latin
+impressed the pedants much more than did his argument, so they offered
+him a position as Professor of Languages, but this he smilingly
+declined, excusing himself on the grounds that he had important business
+on the Continent: and he had. Already they were collecting fagots for
+his benefit.</p>
+
+<p>He returned to Paris and began his lecturing on Science. His arguments
+had convinced one person at least, and that was himself, that as the
+Church knew nothing of Physical Science, why, possibly it stood in a
+like position regarding spiritual truth. That is to say, the so-called
+"sacred truths" were mere assumptions piled up to satisfy the people,
+and the ignorance and superstition of the many marked high water for the
+teaching of the priests. The business of the Church was to satisfy the
+people, and not enlighten them, for if the people became enlightened
+enough they would see that they did not need the Church, and then where
+were the honors and the riches and the red hats!</p>
+
+<p>Bruno cleared his mind of its cobwebs by expression, just as we all
+do&mdash;that is what expression is for.</p>
+
+<p>The people really dictate to the priests what they shall teach;
+moreover, the people absolutely refuse to listen to anything in which
+they do not believe, and decline to pay for preaching that is not done
+to their own dictation. The business, then, of the Church is to study<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+carefully the ignorance of the people and conform to it. On this one
+thing does its stability depend. Therefore it must, as a matter of
+self-preservation, suppress any chance intellect that is ahead of its
+time, lest this man honeycomb the whole structure of churchly dogma.</p>
+
+<p>Bruno said that, just as the world seemed to stand still and the stars
+move around us, so did the Church seem to most people a fixed fact. But
+exactly the opposite was true; the Church moves as the people move, and
+unless men outside of the Church educate the people, or the people
+educate themselves, they will forever remain in darkness.</p>
+
+<p>Bruno offered to debate the question publicly with the Bishop of Paris.
+That worthy was no match for Bruno in point of oratory, but when we can
+not answer a man's reasons, all is not lost, for we can at least call
+him vile names, and this is often quite as effectual as logic.</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop launched a fusillade of theological lyddite at Bruno,
+declaring that any Churchman who would so much as hold converse with
+such a wretch was disgraced forever, and that the propositions Bruno
+wished to argue were unthinkable to a self-respecting man. He declared
+that it was only the mercy of God that kept the lightning from striking
+Bruno dead as he wrote his heresies.</p>
+
+<p>Matters were getting strained, and the authorities, fearing
+insurrection, acted upon the advice of the good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> Bishop and expelled
+Bruno from France. He went to Wittenberg, in his innocence, intending to
+tack on the church-door there his theses. But Wittenberg had no use for
+Bruno&mdash;he believed too much, or too little, Luther could not tell which.</p>
+
+<p>The University of Zurich now offered to let the exile come there and
+teach what he wished. Thither he journeyed and there his restless mind
+seemed for the first time to find a home. His writings were slowly
+making head, and around him there clustered a goodly group of students
+who believed in him and loved him.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of this oasis in a troubled life, word came from some of
+the old-time friends he had known in Rome. They were now in Venice, and
+wished to have him come there and lecture. Bruno thought that his little
+leaven was leavening the whole lump&mdash;he was not without ambition&mdash;he was
+flattered by the invitation. He accepted it and went to Venice.</p>
+
+<p>It was simply a ruse to get the man within striking distance. Very soon
+after his arrival in Venice he was arrested by agents of the Inquisition
+and secretly taken to Rome. He was lodged in a dungeon of the Castle
+Saint Angelo. Just what his experience was there we can not say&mdash;the
+horrors of it all are not ours, for no friend of Bruno's was allowed to
+approach, and what he there wrote was destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>We do know, however, that he was asked to recant, and we know he
+refused. We also know that he repeated<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> his heresies and hurled back
+into the teeth of his accusers the invective they heaped upon him.</p>
+
+<p>Bribery, persuasion, threat and torture were tried in turn, but all in
+vain, for Bruno would not swerve. Unlike Savonarola his quivering flesh
+could not wring from his heart an apology.</p>
+
+<p>He scorned the rack and thumbscrew, declaring they could not reach his
+soul. He knew that death would be the end; he prayed for it, and even
+thought to hasten it by an aggravating manner and harshness of speech
+toward his captors, seemingly quite unnecessary.</p>
+
+<p>For seven long years he was in prison. He was burned alive on the
+Seventh of February, Sixteen Hundred, aged fifty-two.</p>
+
+<p>When bound to the stake he turned his face from the crucifix that was
+held before him, and sought to kiss the fagots. His ashes were thrown to
+the four winds. Thus perished Bruno.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgi.jpg" alt="I" title="I" /></div><p>n the year Fifteen Hundred Sixty-four, Galileo Galilei was born;
+consequently, he was thirty-six years old when Bruno was executed. He
+had known Bruno, had attended many of his lectures, and had followed his
+career with interest; and while he agreed with him concerning the
+Copernican theory of the earth's revolution, he took exceptions to
+Bruno's arbitrary ways of presenting the matter, and also to his
+scathing criticisms of theology. At this time Galileo could not see that
+the extravagant words of Bruno were largely forced from him by the
+violence of the opposition he had encountered. Galileo fully believed
+that Bruno had been put to death for treason to the Church, and not on
+account of his astronomical teachings.</p>
+
+<p>These men had come up from totally different stations in life. Bruno was
+a man of the people&mdash;a self-made man&mdash;who bore upon his person the marks
+of the hammer. Galileo was of noble blood, and traced an ancestry to a
+Gonfalonier of Florence. From early infancy he had enjoyed association
+with polite persons, and had sat on the knees of greatness.</p>
+
+<p>When eighteen he was graduated from the University of Pisa; and at that
+early age his family and friends were comparing him, not without reason,
+to a Genius who had come out of Tuscany some years before, Leonardo da
+Vinci.</p>
+
+<p>Parents either exaggerate the talents of their children<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> or else
+belittle them. The woman who bore George Gordon called him "that lame
+brat"; but we call him "The Poet Byron."</p>
+
+<p>Benjamin Franklin ran away from home, and his family thought themselves
+disgraced by his printed utterances. George Washington's mother, after
+being told that her son had been made Commander-in-Chief, laughed
+knowingly and said, "They don't know him as well as I do!" Voltaire's
+father posted his son as irresponsible, tied up a legacy so "the
+scapegrace could not waste it," invested good money in daily prayers to
+be said for the scapegrace's salvation, and then died of a broken heart,
+just as play-actors do on the stage, only this man died sure enough.
+Alfred Tennyson at thirteen wrote a poem addressed to his grandfather;
+the old gentleman gave him a guinea for it, and then wrote these words:
+"This is the first and last penny you will ever receive for writing
+poetry." The father of Shelley misquoted Job, and said, "Oh, to be
+brought down to the grave in grief through the follies of an ungrateful
+child!" And Labouchere says that one of the four brothers of Shakespeare
+used to explain that he wasn't the play-actor who wrote "Hamlet" and
+"Othello," lest, mayhap, his name should be smirched.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo's mother had that beautiful dream which I believe all good
+mothers have: that her son might be the savior of the world. As he grew
+to manhood, her faith in him did not relax.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In childhood Galileo showed great skill in invention. He made curious
+toys with cogs and wheels and eccentrics; whittled out violins, and
+transformed simple reeds into lutes, upon which he played music of his
+own composition. In fact, so great was his skill in music that at twenty
+they wished to make him official organist and choirmaster of the
+Cathedral. His personal taste, however, ran more to painting; for some
+months he worked at his canvases with an ardor too great to last long.
+If ever a man was touched by the Spirit of the Renaissance, it was
+surely young Galileo. The Archbishop of Pisa said, "Upon him has fallen
+the mantle of Michelangelo."</p>
+
+<p>He gave lectures on Art, and taught Painting by actual example. One of
+his pupils, and a great artist, Lodovico Cigoli, always maintained that
+it was to the inspiration and counsel of Galileo that he owed his
+success.</p>
+
+<p>There are really only two things to see at Pisa: one is the Leaning
+Tower, from which Galileo with his line and plummet made some of his
+most interesting experiments; and the other is the Cathedral where the
+visitor beholds the great bronze lamp that is suspended from the vaulted
+ceiling. When he was about twenty-one, sitting in the silence of this
+church (which the passing years have only made more beautiful), he
+noticed that there was a slight swinging motion to this lamp&mdash;it was
+never still. Galileo set to work timing and measuring these
+oscillations, and he found that they were always<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> done in exact measure
+and in perfect rhythm. This led, some years later, to perfecting an
+astronomical clock for measuring movements of the stars. And from this
+was originated the pendulum-clock, where before we had depended on
+sundials.</p>
+
+<p>The endeavor of Galileo's parents had been to keep him ignorant of
+mathematics and practical life, that he might blossom forth as a saint
+who would sing and play and make pictures like those of Leonardo, and
+carve statues like Michelangelo, only better.</p>
+
+<p>But parents plan, and Fate disposes.</p>
+
+<p>In Fifteen Hundred Eighty-three, Ostilio Ricci, the famous
+mathematician, chanced to be in Pisa, on his way from Rome to Milan, and
+gave a lecture at the Court, on Geometry.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo was not interested in the theme, but he was in the speaker, and
+so he attended the lecture.</p>
+
+<p>This action proved one of the pivotal points in his life.</p>
+
+<p>"Whether other people really teach us anything, is a question," says
+Stanley Hall; "but they do sometimes give us impulses, and make us find
+out for ourselves."</p>
+
+<p>Ricci made Galileo find out for himself.</p>
+
+<p>He turned to Archimedes from Plato. Geometry became a passion, and a
+very wise man has told us that we never accomplish anything, either good
+or bad, without passion. Passion means one hundred pounds of steam on
+the boiler, with love sitting on the safety-valve,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> when the blow-off is
+set for fifty.</p>
+
+<p>It surely is risky business, I will admit; accidents will occur
+occasionally and explosions sometimes happen, but everything is risky,
+even life, since few get out of it alive.</p>
+
+<p>And so, to drop back to the original proposition, nothing great and
+sublime is ever done without passion.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo had his mechanical whooping-cough, musical mumps, artistic
+measles, and now the hectic flush of mathematics burned on his cheeks.
+He talked and dreamed mathematics.</p>
+
+<p>Euclid was in the saddle.</p>
+
+<p>Ricci became interested in the talented young scholar and remained
+longer at Pisa than he had intended, that they might sit up all night
+and surprise the rising sun, discussing beauties of dimensions and the
+wonders of dynamics.</p>
+
+<p>Together they went to Florence, where Ricci introduced his pupil as a
+pedagogic sample of the goods, just as Booker Washington usually takes
+with him on his travels a few ebony homo bricks as his specimens from
+Tuskegee.</p>
+
+<p>The beauty and the grace of Galileo's speech and presence put the
+abstract Ricci in the shadow. The right man can make anything
+interesting, just as Dean Swift could write an entrancing essay with the
+broomstick as a central theme. The man's the thing, Hamlet to the
+contrary, notwithstanding.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo knew the Florentine heart, and so he gave<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> lectures on a
+Florentine: one Dante, who loved a girl named Beatrice.</p>
+
+<p>The young Pisan drew diagrams of Dante's Inferno&mdash;and surely it was
+nobody's else. He gave its size, height, weight, and told how to reach
+it.</p>
+
+<p>He gave lectures on the Hydrostatic Balance and the Centers of Gravity,
+and then published them as serials.</p>
+
+<p>The Florentines crowned him with bay and enthusiastically proclaimed
+him, "The Modern Archimedes."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgp.jpg" alt="P" title="P" /></div><p>isa now put forth efforts to have her gifted son come home. There was
+always rivalry between Pisa and Florence. Pisa could not afford to
+supply Florence her men of genius&mdash;let her depend upon production from
+home, or go without.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo became Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pisa, a
+life position, or at least one he could hold during good behavior.</p>
+
+<p>One of the time-honored dictums of the day was that falling bodies fell
+with a velocity proportioned to their weight. The question was first
+thrashed out in the classroom; and after Galileo had slyly gotten all of
+these scientific wiseacres to commit themselves, he invited them, with
+their students, to the Leaning Tower.</p>
+
+<p>Then he proved by ocular demonstrations that they were positively wrong.</p>
+
+<p>It is very beautiful to teach Truth, but error should not be corrected
+with too much eclat. If the love of Truth, alone, was the guiding
+impulse of Galileo, he might have secretly explained his theory to one
+of the wiseacres, and this wiseacre could have casually demonstrated it,
+so all the rest could have said, "That is what we always knew and
+taught."</p>
+
+<p>Instead of this, Galileo compelled the entire faculty to back water and
+dine on fricasseed crow.</p>
+
+<p>They got even by calling him "a scientific bastardino," and at his next
+lecture he was roundly hissed. Soon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> after he was bluntly informed that
+his office was to teach the young, and not to undo the old.</p>
+
+<p>And that is the way the troubles of Galileo began.</p>
+
+<p>He might then have apologized, and slipped back into peace and obscurity
+and later been tucked in by kind oblivion. But he had tasted blood, and
+the rabies of setting straight the scientific world, for its own good,
+was upon him.</p>
+
+<p>That he was wrong in the correction of his elders, he would not for a
+moment admit; and he was even guilty of saying, "Antiquity can not
+sanctify that which is wrong in reason and false in principle." Soon
+after he committed another forepaugh by showing that a wonderful boat
+invented by Giovanni de Medici for the purpose of fighting hostile
+ships, would not work, since there were no men on board to guide it, and
+its automatic steering apparatus would as likely run its nose into land,
+as into the hull of the enemy.</p>
+
+<p>He also decorated his argument with a few subtle touches as to the
+beauty of fighting battles without going to war and risking life and
+limb.</p>
+
+<p>Men who are not kind to the faults of royalty can hope for small favor
+in a monarchy, though the monarchy be a republic. Galileo was cut off
+the Standard Oil payroll, and forced to apply to a teachers' agency,
+that he might find employment.</p>
+
+<p>He did not wait long; the rival University of Padua tendered him a
+position on a silver platter; and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> Paduans made much dole about how
+unfortunate it was that men could not teach Truth in Italy, save at
+Padua&mdash;alas! The Governing Board of Padua made a great stroke in
+securing Galileo, and Pisa fell back on her Leaning Tower as her chief
+attraction.</p>
+
+<p>From a position of mediocrity, the University of Padua gradually rose to
+one of worldwide celebrity. Galileo remained at Padua from Fifteen
+Hundred Ninety-two to Sixteen Hundred Ten, which years are famous not
+alone through the wonderful inventions of Galileo, but because in that
+same interval of time, at least thirty of Shakespeare's thirty-seven
+plays were written. Surely, God was smiling on the planet Earth!</p>
+
+<p>Galileo's salary was raised every year, starting at two hundred florins,
+until it reached over one thousand florins, not to mention the numerous
+gifts from grateful pupils, old and young. Students came to Padua from
+all over the world to hear Galileo's lectures.</p>
+
+<p>Starting with only a common classroom, the audience increased so fast
+that a special auditorium was required that would seat two thousand
+persons. It was during this time that Galileo invented the proportional
+compasses, an instrument now in use everywhere, without the slightest
+change having been made in it.</p>
+
+<p>He also invented the thermometer; but greatest, best and most wonderful
+of all, he produced an instrument through which he could view the stars,
+and see them much magnified. With this instrument, he saw heavenly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
+bodies that had never been seen before; he beheld that Jupiter had
+satellites which moved in orbits, and that Venus revolved, showing
+different sides at different times, thus proving that which Copernicus
+declared was true, but which, for lack of apparatus, he could not prove.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo Galilei was getting to be more than a professor of
+mathematics&mdash;he was becoming a power in the world.</p>
+
+<p>The lever of his mighty mind was indeed finding a fulcrum.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>he year Sixteen Hundred Nine is forever fixed in history, through the
+fact that in that year Galileo invented the telescope.</p>
+
+<p>Every good thing is an evolution. "Specilla," or helps to read, had been
+made, and sold privately and mysteriously, as early as the year Fourteen
+Hundred. These first magnifying-glasses were associated with magic, or
+wonder-working; the words "magnify" and "magic" having a common source
+and a similar meaning. Magicians wore big square glasses, and by their
+aid, some of them claimed to see things at a great distance; and also to
+perceive things stolen, hidden or lost. Occasionally, the magician would
+persuade his customer to try on the glasses, and then even common men
+could see for themselves that there was something in the
+scheme&mdash;goodness me! The use of spectacles was at first confined
+entirely to these wonder-workers&mdash;or men who magnified things forever.
+During the Fifteenth Century, public readers and occasionally priests
+wore spectacles. To read was a miracle to most people, and a book was a
+mysterious and sacred thing&mdash;or else a diabolical thing. The populace
+would watch the man put on his "specillum," and the idea was everywhere
+abroad that the magic glasses gave an ability to read; and that anybody
+who was inspired by angels, or devils, who could get hold of spectacles,
+could at once read from a book.</p>
+
+<p>We hear of one magician who, about the year Fifteen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> Hundred, made a box
+with a glass cover that magnified the contents. This great man would
+catch a flea and show it to the people. Then he would place the flea in
+the box and show it to them, and they would see that it had grown
+enormously in an instant. The man could make it big or little, by just
+taking off and putting on the cover of the box!</p>
+
+<p>This individual worked wonders for a consideration, but Fate overtook
+him and he was smothered under a feather bed for having too much wizard
+in his cosmos. A wizard, be it known, is a male witch, and the Bible
+says, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," although it does not say
+anything about wizards.</p>
+
+<p>But please note this: the wizard who had that magic box and flea had
+really the first microscope.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo bought a pair of "magic glasses," or spectacles, about the year
+Sixteen Hundred Seven; and his action, in so doing, was freely
+criticized.</p>
+
+<p>On a visit to Venice, where glass had been manufactured since long
+before the Flood, Galileo was looking through one of the
+glass-factories, just as visitors do now, and one of the workmen showed
+him a peculiar piece of glass which magnified the hairs on the back of
+his hand many times.</p>
+
+<p>In a very few days after this, Galileo heard that a Dutch
+spectacle-maker had placed certain queer-shaped pieces of glass in a
+tube, and offered to sell this tube to the Government, so by its use,
+soldiers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> could see the movements of an enemy many miles away.</p>
+
+<p>That night Galileo did not close his eyes in sleep. He thought out a
+plan by which he could place pieces of glass in a tube, and bring the
+stars close to the earth. By daylight the whole plan was clear in his
+mind, and he hastened to the shop of the glassmakers.</p>
+
+<p>There, two lenses were made, one plano-convex, and the other
+plano-concave, and these were placed in a tube made of sheet copper. It
+was tested on distant objects; and behold! they were magnified by three.
+Would this tube show the stars magnified? Galileo knew of no reason why
+it should not, but he paced his room in hot impatience, waiting for the
+night to come with its twinkling wonders, that he might verify his
+convictions. When the first yellow star appeared in the West, Galileo
+turned his tube upon it, and behold! instead of twinkling points of
+light, he saw a round mass&mdash;a world&mdash;moving through space, and not a
+scintillating object with five points. The twinkling spikes, or points,
+were merely an optical illusion of the unaided senses.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo made no secret of his invention. It was called "Galileo's Tube,"
+but some of the priests called it Galileo's "Magic Tube."</p>
+
+<p>Yet it marked an era in the scientific world. Galileo endeavored
+constantly to improve his instrument; and from a threefold magnifying
+power, he finally<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> made one that magnified thirty-two times.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo made hundreds of telescopes, and sold them at moderate prices to
+any one who would buy. He explained minutely the construction of the
+instrument, showing clearly how it was made in accordance with the
+natural laws of optics. His desire was to dissipate the superstition
+that there was something diabolical or supernatural about the "Magic
+Tube"&mdash;that, in fact, it was not magic, and the operator had no peculiar
+powers; you had simply to comply with the laws of Nature, and any one
+could see for himself.</p>
+
+<p>It is hard for us, at this day, to understand the opposition that sprang
+up against the telescope. We must remember that at this time belief in
+witchcraft, fairies, sprites, ghosts, hobgoblins, magic and supernatural
+powers was common. Men who believe in miracles make rather poor
+scientists.</p>
+
+<p>There were books about "Magic," written by so-called scientific men,
+whose standing in the world was quite as high as that of Galileo.</p>
+
+<p>In Sixteen Hundred Ten, Galileo published his book entitled, "Sidera
+Medicea," wherein he described the wonders that could be seen in the
+heavens by the aid of the telescope. Among other things, he said the
+Milky Way was not a great streak of light, but was composed of a
+multitude of stars; and he made a map of the stars that could be seen
+only with the aid of the telescope.</p>
+
+<p>There resided in Venice at this time a scientific man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> by the name of
+Porta, who was much more popular than Galileo. He was a priest, whose
+piety and learning was unimpeached.</p>
+
+<p>The year after Galileo issued his book, Porta put out a work much more
+pretentious, called "Natural Magic." In this book Porta does not claim
+that magicians all have supernatural powers; but he goes on to prove how
+they deceive the world by the use of their peculiar apparatus, and
+intimates that they sometimes sell their souls to the Devil, and then
+are positively dangerous. He dives deep into science, history and his
+own imagination to prove things.</p>
+
+<p>The man was no fool&mdash;he constructed a kaleidoscope that showed an
+absolute, geometrical symmetry, where in fact there was only confusion.
+He showed how, by the use of mirrors, things could be made big, small,
+tall, short, wide, crooked or distorted. He told of how magicians, by
+the use of Galileo's Tube, could show seven stars where there was only
+one; and he even made such a tube of his own and called the priests
+together to look through it. He painted stars on the glass, and had men
+look at the heavens. He even stuck a louse on the lens and located the
+beast in the heavens, for the benefit of a doubting Cardinal. It was all
+a joke, but at the time no sober, sincere man of Science could argue him
+down. He owned "bum" telescopes that proved all kinds of things, to the
+great amusement of the enemies of Galileo. The intent of Porta was to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>
+expose the frauds and fallacies of Galileo. Porta also claimed that he
+had seen telescopes by which you could look over a hill and around a
+corner, but he did not recommend them, since by their use things are
+often perceived that were not there. And so we see why the priests
+positively refused to look through Galileo's Tube, or to believe
+anything he said. Porta, and a few others like him, showed a deal more
+than Galileo could and offered to locate stars anywhere on order.
+Galileo had much offended these priests by his statements that the Bible
+did not contain the final facts of Science, and now they were getting
+even with a vengeance. It was all very much like the theological guffaw
+that swept over Christendom when Darwin issued his "Origin of Species,"
+and Talmage and Spurgeon set their congregations in a roar by gently
+sarcastic references to monkey ancestry.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imga.jpg" alt="A" title="A" /></div><p>mid the general popping of theological small-arms, Galileo moved
+steadily forward. If he had many enemies he surely had a few friends. As
+he once had proved more than Pisa could digest, so now he was bringing
+to the surface of things more truth than Padua could assimilate.</p>
+
+<p>Venice too was getting uncomfortable. Even the Doge said, in reply to an
+enthusiastic admirer of Galileo, "Your master is not famous: he is
+merely notorious."</p>
+
+<p>It was discovered that Galileo had been living with a woman by the name
+of Marina Gamba, at Venice, even while he held the professorship at
+Padua, and that they had a son, Vincenzo Gamba, and two daughters. One
+of the enemy drew a map of the heavens, showing Galileo as the sun,
+Marina Gamba as the moon, and around them circulated numerous little
+satellites, which were supposed to be their children. The picture had so
+great a vogue that the Doge issued an order that all copies of it be
+destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>Of Marina Gamba we know very little; but the fact that she made entries
+in Galileo's journal and kept his accounts proves that she was a person
+of considerable intelligence; and this, too, was at a time when
+semi-oriental ideas prevailed and education was supposedly beyond the
+feminine grasp.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo did not marry, for the reason that he was practically a priest,
+a teacher in a religious school, living with and looking after the
+pupils; and the custom<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> then was that whoever was engaged in such an
+occupation should not wed.</p>
+
+<p>The stormy opposition to Galileo was not without its advantages. We are
+advertised no less by our rabid enemies than by our loving friends.
+Cosimo the Second, Grand Duke of Tuscany, had intimated that Florence
+would give the great astronomer a welcome. Galileo moved to Florence
+under the protection of Cosimo, intending to devote all his time to
+Science.</p>
+
+<p>In giving up schoolteaching and popular lecturing, Galileo really made a
+virtue of necessity. No orthodox lyceum course would tolerate him; he
+was neither an impersonator nor an entertainer; the stereopticon and the
+melodramatic were out of his line, and his passion for truth made him
+impossible to the many.</p>
+
+<p>He was treading the path of Bruno: the accusations, the taunts and
+jeers, the denials and denunciations, were urging him on to an unseemly
+earnestness.</p>
+
+<p>Father Clavius said that Galileo never saw the satellites of Jupiter
+until he had made an instrument that would create them; and if God had
+intended that men should see strange things in the heavens, He would
+have supplied them sufficient eyesight. The telescope was really a
+devil's instrument.</p>
+
+<p>Still another man declared that if the earth moved, acorns falling from
+a high tree would all fall behind the tree and not directly under it.</p>
+
+<p>Father Brini said that if the earth revolved, we would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> all fall off of
+it into the air when it was upside down; moreover, its whirling through
+space would create a wind that would sweep it bald.</p>
+
+<p>Father Caccini preached a sermon from the text, "Ye men of Galilee, why
+stand ye gazing up into heaven?" Only he changed the word "Galilee" to
+"Galileo," claiming it was the same thing, only different, and as reward
+for his wit he was made a bishop.</p>
+
+<p>Cardinal Bellarmine, a man of great energy, earnest, zealous, sincere,
+learned&mdash;the Doctor Buckley of his day&mdash;showed how that: "if the
+Copernican Theory should prevail, it would be the absolute undoing of
+the Bible, and the destruction of the Church, rendering the death of
+Christ futile. If the earth is only one of many planets, and not the
+center of the universe, and the other planets are inhabited, the whole
+plan of salvation fails, since the inhabitants of the other spheres are
+without the Bible, and Christ did not die for them." This was the
+argument of Father Lecazre, and many others who took their cue from him.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo was denounced as "atheist" and "infidel"&mdash;epithets that do not
+frighten us much now, since they have been applied to most of the really
+great and good men who have ever lived. But then such words set fire to
+masses of inflammable prejudices, and there were conflagrations of wrath
+and hate against which it was vain to argue.</p>
+
+<p>The Archbishop of Pisa especially felt it incumbent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> upon him "to bring
+Galileo to justice."</p>
+
+<p>Galileo was born at Pisa, educated there, taught in the University; and
+now he had disgraced the place and brought it into disrepute.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo was still in communication with teachers at Pisa, and the
+Archbishop made it his business to have letters written to Galileo
+asking certain specific questions. One man, Castelli, declined to be
+used for the purpose of entrapping Galileo, but others there were who
+loaned themselves to the plan.</p>
+
+<p>In Sixteen Hundred Sixteen, Galileo received a formal summons from Pope
+Paul the Fifth to come to Rome and purge himself of heresies that he had
+expressed in letters which were then in the hands of the Inquisition.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo appealed to his friends at Florence, but they were powerless.
+When the Pope issued an order, it could not be waived. The greatest
+thinker of his time journeyed to Rome and faced the greatest theologian
+of his day, Cardinal Bellarmine.</p>
+
+<p>The Cardinal firmly and clearly showed Galileo the error of his way.
+Galileo offered to prove for the Cardinal by astronomical observations
+that the Copernican Theory was true. Cardinal Bellarmine said that there
+was only one truth and that was spiritual truth. That the Bible was
+true, or it was not. If not, then was religion a fallacy and our hope of
+Heaven a delusion.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo contended that the death of Christ had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> nothing to do with the
+truth, so Science and these things should not be shuffled and confused.</p>
+
+<p>This attitude of mind greatly shocked the Inquisitors, and they made
+haste to inform the Pope, who at once issued an order that the
+astronomer should be placed in a dungeon until he saw fit to disavow
+that the sun was the center of the universe, and the earth moves.</p>
+
+<p>A sort of compromise, it seems, was here effected by Galileo's promise
+not to further teach that the earth revolves.</p>
+
+<p>He was kept at Rome under strict surveillance for some months, but was
+finally allowed to return to Florence, and cautioned that he must cease
+all public teaching, speaking and writing on the subject of astronomy.
+On March Fifth, Sixteen Hundred Sixteen, the consulting theologians of
+the Holy Office reiterated that the propositions of Galileo, that the
+sun is the center of the universe, and that the earth has a rotary
+motion, were "absurd in philosophy, heretical, and also contrary to
+Scripture."</p>
+
+<p>The works of Copernicus were then placed upon the "Index," and Pope Paul
+issued a special decree, warning all Churchmen to "abjure, shun and
+forever abstain from giving encouragement, support, succor or friendship
+to any one who believed or taught that the earth revolves."</p>
+
+<p>The name of Copernicus was not removed from the "Index" until the year
+Eighteen Hundred Eighteen.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgg.jpg" alt="G" title="G" /></div><p>alileo made his way back to Florence, defeated and disappointed. He had
+not been tortured, except mentally, but he had heard the dungeon-key
+turned in the big lock and felt the humiliation of being made a captive.
+The instruments of torture had been shown to him, and he had heard the
+cries of the condemned.</p>
+
+<p>The cell that Bruno had occupied was his, and he was also taken to the
+spot where Bruno was burned: the place was there, but where was Bruno!</p>
+
+<p>He realized how utterly impossible it was to teach truth to those who
+did not desire truth, and the vanity of replying to men for whom a pun
+answered the purposes of fact.</p>
+
+<p>As he could neither teach nor lecture at Florence, his services to the
+Court were valueless. He was a disgraced and silenced man.</p>
+
+<p>He retired to a village a few miles from the city, and in secret
+continued his studies and observations. The Grand Duke supplied him a
+small pension and suggested that it would be increased if Galileo would
+give lectures on Poetry and Rhetoric, which were not forbidden themes,
+and try to make himself either commonplace or amusing.</p>
+
+<p>We can imagine the reply&mdash;Galileo had but one theme, the wonders of the
+heavens above.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgs.jpg" alt="S" title="S" /></div><p>o the years went by, and Galileo, sixty-seven years old, was
+impoverished and forgotten, yet in his proud heart burned the embers of
+ambition. He believed in himself; he believed in the sacredness of his
+one mission. Pope Paul had gone on his long journey, for even infallible
+popes die. Cardinal Barberini had become Pope Urban the Eighth. Years
+before, Galileo and Barberini had taught together at Padua, and when
+Galileo was silenced, a long letter of sympathy had come from his old
+colleague, and occasionally since they had exchanged friendly letters.
+Galileo thought that Urban was his friend, and he knew that Urban, in
+his heart, believed in the theory of Copernicus.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo then emerged from his seclusion and began teaching and speaking
+in Florence. He also fitted up an observatory and invited the scholars
+to make use of his telescope.</p>
+
+<p>Father Melchior hereupon put forth a general denunciation, aimed
+especially at Galileo, without mentioning his name, to this effect: "The
+opinion of the earth's motion is, of all heresies, the most abominable,
+the most pernicious, the most scandalous: the immovability of the earth
+is thrice sacred.</p>
+
+<p>"An argument against the existence of God and the immortality of the
+soul would be sooner tolerated than the idea that the earth moves."</p>
+
+<p>In reply to this fusillade, in Sixteen Hundred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> Thirty-two Galileo put
+forth his book entitled, "The Dialogue," which was intended to place the
+ideas of Copernicus in popular form.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo had endeavored to communicate with Urban, but the Pope had
+chosen to ignore him&mdash;to consider him as one dead. Galileo misconstrued
+the silence, thinking it meant that he could do and say what he wished
+and that there would be no interference.</p>
+
+<p>A copy of Galileo's book reaching the Pope, his silence was at once
+broken. The book was condemned and all copies found were ordered to be
+burned by the hangman in the public streets. But the book had met with a
+wide sale and many copies had been carried to Germany, England and
+France, and in these countries the work was reprinted and sent back to
+Italy.</p>
+
+<p>Urban ordered Galileo to present himself at Rome forthwith. A score of
+years had passed since Galileo's former visit&mdash;he had not forgotten it.</p>
+
+<p>He wrote to the Pope and apologized for having broken the silence
+imposed upon him by Pope Paul; he offered to go into retirement again;
+stated that he was old, infirm, without funds, and excused himself from
+obeying the order to go to Rome.</p>
+
+<p>But excuses and apologies were unavailing.</p>
+
+<p>A preventory order was issued and sent to the Papal Nuncio at Florence.</p>
+
+<p>This was equivalent to an arrest. Galileo must go to Rome and answer for
+having broken the promises he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> had made to the Inquisition. If he would
+not go willingly, he should go in chains.</p>
+
+<p>Arriving at Rome, he had several audiences with the Pope, who said
+nothing would answer but a specific recantation.</p>
+
+<p>What Barberini had once believed was one thing, and what the Pope must
+do was another. Galileo should recant in order to keep the people from
+thinking Pope Urban would allow what his predecessors would not.</p>
+
+<p>The matter had become a public scandal.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo tried to argue the question and asked for time to consider it.</p>
+
+<p>An order was issued that he should be imprisoned. It was done.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo asked for pens and paper that he might prepare his defense.
+These were refused, and an order of torture was issued. It was not a
+trial, defense was useless. Again he was asked to recant&mdash;the matter was
+all written out&mdash;he had but to sign his name. He refused. He was brought
+to the torture-chamber.</p>
+
+<p>Legend and fact separate here.</p>
+
+<p>There are denials from Churchmen that Galileo was so much as imprisoned.
+One writer has even tried to show that Galileo was a guest of the Pope
+and dined daily at his table. The other side has told us that Galileo
+was thrust into a dungeon, his eyes put out, and his old broken-down
+form tortured on the wheel.</p>
+
+<p>Recent careful researches reveal that neither side told the truth. We
+have official record of the case<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> written out at the time for the
+Vatican archives. Galileo was imprisoned and the order of torture
+issued, but it was never enforced. Perhaps it was not the intention to
+enforce it: it may have been only a "war measure."</p>
+
+<p>Galileo was alternately taken from dungeon to palace that he might
+realize which course was best for him to pursue&mdash;oppose the Church or
+uphold it.</p>
+
+<p>Thus we see that there was some truth in the statement that "he dined
+daily with the Pope."</p>
+
+<p>That the man was subjected to much indignity, all the world now knows.
+The official records are in the Vatican, and the attempt to conceal them
+longer is out of the question. Wise Churchmen no longer deny the
+blunders of the past, but they say with Cardinal Satolli, "The enemies
+of the Church have ever been o'er-zealous Churchmen."</p>
+
+<p>On bended knees, Galileo, a man of threescore and ten, broken in health,
+with spirit crushed, repeated after a priest these words: "I, Galileo
+Galilei, being in my seventieth year, a prisoner, on my knees before
+your Eminences, the Cardinals of the Holy See, having before mine eyes
+the Holy Bible, which I touch with my hands and kiss with my lips, do
+abjure, curse and detest the error and heresy of the movement of the
+earth."</p>
+
+<p>He also was made to sign the recantation. On arising from his knees,
+legend declares that he said, "Yet the earth does move!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is hardly probable that the words reached his lips, although they may
+have been in his mind. But we must remember the man's heart was broken,
+and he was in a mental condition where nothing really mattered. To
+complete his dishonor, all of his writings were placed on the "Index,"
+and he was made to swear that he would inform the Inquisition of any man
+whom he should hear or discover supporting the heresy of the motion of
+the earth. The old man was then released, a prisoner on parole, and
+allowed to make his way home to Florence, which he did by easy stages,
+helped along the way by friendly monks who discussed with him all
+questions but those of astronomy.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo's eldest daughter, a nun, whose home was near his, was so
+affected by the humiliation of her father that she fell into a nervous
+decline and died very soon after he reached home.</p>
+
+<p>Between these two there had been a close bond of love and tender
+sympathy, and her death seemed almost the crowning calamity.</p>
+
+<p>But once back in his village home at Arcetri, Galileo again went to work
+with his telescope, mapping the heavens.</p>
+
+<p>A goodly degree of health and animation came back to him, but his
+eyesight, so long misused, now failed him and he became blind. Thus John
+Milton found him in Sixteen Hundred Thirty-eight.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Castelli, his lifelong friend, wrote to another, "The noblest eye that
+God ever made is darkened: the eye so privileged that it may in truth be
+said to have seen more wonderful things and made others to see more
+wonderful things, than were ever seen before." But blindness could not
+subdue him any more than it could John Milton. He had others look
+through the telescope and tell him what they saw and then he would
+foretell what they would see next.</p>
+
+<p>The policy of the Pope was that Galileo should not be disturbed so long
+as he kept to his village home and taught merely the few scholars or
+"servants," as they called themselves, who often came to him; but these
+were to be taught mathematics, not astronomy. That he was even at the
+last under suspicion is shown that concealed in the mattress of the bed
+upon which he died were records of his latest discoveries concerning the
+revolution of the planets. Legal opposition was made as to his right to
+make a will, the claim being that he was a prisoner of the Inquisition
+at his death. For the same reason his body was not allowed to be buried
+in consecrated ground. The Pope overruled the objection and he was
+buried in an obscure corner of the little cemetery of Saint Croce, the
+grave unmarked.</p>
+
+<p>So the last few years of Galileo's life were years of comparative peace
+and quiet. He needed but little, and this little his few faithful,
+loving friends supplied. His death came painlessly, and his last moments
+were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> sustained by the faith that he would soon be free from the
+trammels of the flesh&mdash;free to visit some of the worlds that his
+telescope had brought so near to him.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo was born the day that Michelangelo died; the year of his death
+was the year that Sir Isaac Newton, the discoverer of the law of
+gravitation, was born.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="COPERNICUS" id="COPERNICUS"></a>COPERNICUS</h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img439.jpg" alt="COPERNICUS" title="COPERNICUS" /></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>To know the mighty works of God; to comprehend His wisdom and
+majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful working
+of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode
+of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance can not be more
+grateful than knowledge.</p>
+
+<p class='author'>&mdash;<i>Copernicus</i></p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>COPERNICUS</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgw.jpg" alt="W" title="W" /></div><p>hen a prominent member of Congress, of slightly convivial turn,
+went to sleep on the floor of the House of Representatives and suddenly
+awakening, convulsed the assemblage by demanding in a loud voice, "Where
+am I at?" he propounded an inquiry that is indisputably a classic.</p>
+
+<p>With the very first glimmering of intelligence, and as far back as
+history goes, man has always asked that question, also three others:</p>
+
+<p>Where am I?</p>
+
+<p>Who am I?</p>
+
+<p>What am I here for?</p>
+
+<p>Where am I going?</p>
+
+<p>A question implies an answer and so, coeval with the questioner, we find
+a class of Volunteers springing into being, who have taken upon
+themselves the business of answering the interrogations.</p>
+
+<p>And as partial payment for answering these questions, the man who
+answered has exacted a living from the man who asked, also titles,
+honors, gauds, jewels and obsequies.</p>
+
+<p>Further than this, the Volunteer who answered has declared himself
+exempt from all useful labor. This<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> Volunteer is our theologian.</p>
+
+<p>Walt Whitman has said:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I stand and look at them long and long.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">They do not sweat and whine about their condition,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But we should note this fact: Whitman merely wanted to live with
+animals&mdash;he did not desire to become one. He wasn't willing to forfeit
+knowledge; and a part of that knowledge was that man has some things yet
+to learn from the patient brute. Much of man's misery has come from his
+persistent questioning.</p>
+
+<p>The book of Genesis is certainly right when it tells us that man's
+troubles came from a desire to know. The fruit of the tree of knowledge
+is bitter, and man's digestive apparatus is ill-conditioned to digest
+it. But still we are grateful, and good men never forget that it was
+woman who gave the fruit to man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>&mdash;men learn nothing alone. In the Garden
+of Eden, with everything supplied, man was an animal, but when he was
+turned out and had to work, strive, struggle and suffer, he began to
+grow.</p>
+
+<p>The Volunteers of the Far East have told us that man's deliverance from
+the evils of life must come through killing desire; we will reach
+Nirvana&mdash;rest&mdash;through nothingness. But within a decade it has been
+borne in upon a vast number of the thinking men of the world that
+deliverance from sorrow and discontent was to be had not through ceasing
+to ask questions, but by asking one question more. The question is this,
+"What can I do?"</p>
+
+<p>When man went to work, action removed the doubt that theory could not
+solve.</p>
+
+<p>The rushing winds purify the air; only running water is pure; and the
+holy man, if there be such, is the one who loses himself in persistent,
+useful effort. By working for all, we secure the best results for self,
+and when we truly work for self, we work for all.</p>
+
+<p>In that thoughtful essay by Brooks Adams, "The Law of Civilization and
+Decay," the author says, "Thought is one of the manifestations of human
+energy, and among the earlier and simpler phases of thought, two stand
+conspicuous&mdash;Fear and Greed: Fear, which, by stimulating the
+imagination, creates a belief in an invisible world, and ultimately
+develops a priesthood."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The priestly class evolves naturally into being everywhere as man
+awakens and asks questions. "Only the Unknown is terrible," says Victor
+Hugo. We can cope with the known, and at the worst we can overcome the
+unknown by accepting it. Verestchagin, the great painter who knew the
+psychology of war as few have known, and went down to his death
+gloriously, as he should, on a sinking battleship, once said, "In modern
+warfare, when man does not see his enemy, the poetry of the battle is
+gone, and man is rendered by the Unknown into a quaking coward."</p>
+
+<p>But when enveloped in the fog of ignorance every phenomenon of Nature
+causes man to quake and tremble&mdash;he wants to know! Fear prompts him to
+ask, and Greed&mdash;greed for power, place and pelf&mdash;answers.</p>
+
+<p>To succeed beyond the average is to realize a weakness in humanity and
+then bank on it. The priest who pacifies is as natural as the fear he
+seeks to assuage&mdash;as natural as man himself.</p>
+
+<p>So first, man is in bondage to his fear, and this bondage he exchanges
+for bondage to a priest. First, he fears the unknown; second, he fears
+the priest who has power with the unknown.</p>
+
+<p>Soon the priest becomes a slave to the answers he has conjured forth. He
+grows to believe what he at first pretended to know. The punishment of
+every liar is that he eventually believes his lies. The mind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> of man
+becomes tinted and subdued to what he works in, like the dyer's hand.</p>
+
+<p>So we have the formula: Man in bondage to fear. Man in bondage to a
+priest. The priest in bondage to a creed.</p>
+
+<p>Then the priest and his institution become an integral part and parcel
+of the State, mixed in all its affairs. The success of the State seems
+to lie in holding belief intact and stilling all further questions of
+the people, transferring all doubts to this Volunteer Class which
+answers for a consideration.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally, the man who does not accept the answers is regarded as an
+enemy of the State&mdash;that is, the enemy of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>To keep this questioner down has been the problem of every religion. And
+the great problem of progress has been to smuggle the newly-discovered
+truth past Cerberus, the priest, by preparing a sop that was to him
+palatable.</p>
+
+<p>From every branch of Science the priest has been routed, save in
+Sociology alone. Here he has stubbornly made his last stand, and is
+saving himself alive by slowly accepting the situation and transforming
+himself into the Promoter of a Social Club.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>he attempt to ascertain the truths of physical science outside of
+theology was, in the early ages, very seldom ventured. When men wanted
+to know anything about anything, they asked the priest.</p>
+
+<p>Questions that the priest could not answer he declared were forbidden of
+man to know; and when men attempted to find out for themselves they were
+looked upon as heretics.</p>
+
+<p>The early church regarded the earth as a flat surface with four corners.
+And in proof of their position they quoted Saint Paul, who wanted the
+gospel carried to the ends of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, the universe was a house. The upper story was Heaven, the lower
+story was the Earth, and the cellar was Hell. God, the angels and the
+"saved" lived in Heaven, man lived on Earth, and the devils and the
+damned had Hell to themselves.</p>
+
+<p>"And there shall be no night there," and this was proven by the stars,
+which were regarded as peepholes through which mortals could catch
+glimpses of the wondrous light of Heaven beyond. Hell was below, as was
+clearly shown by volcanoes, when the fierce fires occasionally forced
+themselves up through. Darkness to children is always terrible, and the
+night is regarded by them as the time of evil.</p>
+
+<p>Later, Churchmen came to believe that the stars were jewels hung in the
+sky every night by angels whose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> business it was to look after them.</p>
+
+<p>The word "firmament" means a solid dome or roof. This firmament, the
+sky, was supposed to be the floor of Heaven. The firmament had four
+corners and rested on the mountains, as the eye could plainly see. When
+God's car was rolled across the floor we heard thunder, and his
+movements were always accompanied by lightnings, winds, black clouds and
+rain&mdash;all this so He could not be too plainly seen.</p>
+
+<p>Heaven was only a little way off&mdash;a few miles at the most. So there were
+attempts made at times by bad men to reach it. The Greeks had a story
+about the Aloid&aelig; who piled mountain upon mountain; the Bible story of
+the Tower of Babel is the same, where the masons called, "More mort,"
+and those below sent up bricks. There is also an ancient Mexican legend
+of giants who built the Pyramid of Cholula, and they would have been
+successful in their attempts if fire had not been thrown down upon them
+from Heaven. In all "Holy Writ" we find accounts of "ascensions,"
+"translations," "annunciations," and mortals caught up into the clouds.
+Many people had actually seen angels ascending and descending.</p>
+
+<p>"Messengers from on high" and God's secretaries were constantly coming
+down on delicate errands. Everything that man did was noted and written
+down. We were watched all the time by unseen beings. The Bible tells of
+how the Earth was eventually to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> destroyed, and then there would be
+only Heaven and Hell. God, His Son and the angels were going to come
+down, and for ages men watched the heavens to see them appear.</p>
+
+<p>All sensitive children, born of orthodox Christian parents, who heard
+the Bible read aloud, looked fearfully into the sky for "signs and
+wonders." The Bible tells in several places of devils breaking out of
+Hell and roaming over the earth. Dante fully believed in this
+three-story-house idea, and pictures with awful exactness the details,
+which he gained from the preaching of the priests. Dante was never
+honored by having his books placed on the "Index." On the contrary, he
+got his vogue largely through the recommendation of the priests. To them
+he was a true scientist, for he corroborated their statements.</p>
+
+<p>The Christian Fathers ridiculed the idea of the earth being round,
+because, if this were so, how could the people on the other side see the
+Son of Man when He came in the sky? Besides that, if the earth were
+round and turned on its axis, we would all fall off into space.</p>
+
+<p>The idea that there was an ocean above the earth, in the heavens, was
+brought forward to show the goodness and wisdom of God. Without this
+there would be no rain and hence no vegetation, and man would soon
+perish. In Genesis we read that God said, "Let there be a firmament in
+the midst of the waters, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> let it divide the waters from the waters,"
+And in Psalms, "Praise Him, ye heavens of heavens and ye waters that be
+above the heavens." Then we hear, "The windows of Heaven were opened."
+So this thought of the waters above the earth was fully proved, accepted
+and fixed, and to pray for rain was quite a natural thing.</p>
+
+<p>The English Prayer-Book contained such prayers up to within a very few
+years ago, and in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-three the Governor of Kansas
+set apart a day upon which the people were to pray that God would open
+the windows of Heaven and send them rain. They also prayed to be
+delivered from grasshoppers, just as in Queen Elizabeth's time the
+Prayer-Book had this, "From the Turk and the Comet, good Lord deliver
+us."</p>
+
+<p>In the Sixth Century, Cosmos, one of the Saints, wrote a complete
+explanation of the phenomena of the heavens. To account for the movement
+of the sun, he said God had His angels push it across the firmament and
+put it behind a mountain each night, and the next morning it was brought
+out on the other side. He met every objection by citations from Job,
+Genesis, Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes and the New Testament, and wound up with
+an anathema upon any or all who doubted or questioned in this matter of
+astronomy.</p>
+
+<p>The whole Christian idea of the Universe was simple, plain and
+plausible. The child-mind could easily accept it, and when backed up by
+the Holy Book, written<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> at God's dictation, word for word, infallible
+and absolutely true in every part, one does not wonder that progress was
+practically blocked for fourteen hundred years, but the real miracle is
+that it was not blocked forever.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>housands of years before Christ, the Chinese had mapped the heavens and
+knew the movements of the planets so well that they correctly prophesied
+the positions of the various constellations many years in advance.
+Twenty-five hundred years before our Christian era a Chinese Governor
+put to death the astronomers Hi and Ho because they had failed to
+foretell an eclipse, quite according to the excellent Celestial plan of
+killing the doctor when the patient dies.</p>
+
+<p>Sir William Hamilton points out the fact that the Chinese, five thousand
+years ago, knew astronomy as well as we do, and that Christian astrology
+grew out of Chinese astronomy, in an effort to foretell the fortunes of
+men.</p>
+
+<p>Fear wants to know the future, and astrology and priesthood are
+synonymous terms, since the business of the priest has always been to
+prophesy, a profession he has not yet discarded. Their prophecies are at
+present innocuous and lightly heeded. They preach that perfect faith
+will move a mountain, but energetic railroad-builders of today find it
+quicker and cheaper to tunnel.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imga.jpg" alt="A" title="A" /></div><p> certain type of man accepts a certain theory.</p>
+
+<p>The Christian view of creation was practically the conception of the
+Greeks before Thales. This wise man, in the Sixth Century before Christ,
+taught that the earth was round, and that certain stars were also
+worlds. He showed that the earth was round and proved it by the
+disappearance of the ship as it sailed away. He located the earth, moon
+and sun so perfectly that he prophesied an eclipse, and when it took
+place it so terrified the Medes and the Lydians, who were in battle with
+each other, that they threw down their arms and made peace. Thales had
+explained that Atlas carried the world on his shoulder, but he didn't
+explain what Atlas stood upon.</p>
+
+<p>Pythagoras, one of the pupils of Thales, following the idea still
+further, showed that the moon derived its light from the sun; that the
+earth was a globe and turned daily on its axis.</p>
+
+<p>He held that the sun was the center of the universe and that the planets
+revolved around it. Anaxagoras followed a few years later than
+Pythagoras, and became convinced that the sun was merely a ball of fire
+and therefore should not be worshiped; that it follows a natural law,
+that nothing ever happens by chance, and that to pray for rain is
+absurd.</p>
+
+<p>For his honesty in expressing what he thought was truth, the priests of
+Athens had Anaxagoras and his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> family exiled to perpetual banishment
+from Athens and all of his books were burned.</p>
+
+<p>Plato touched on Astronomy, for he touches on everything, and fully
+believed that the earth was round.</p>
+
+<p>His pupil, Aristotle, taught all that Anaxagoras taught, and if he also
+had not been exiled, but had been free to study, investigate and express
+himself, he would have come very close to the truth.</p>
+
+<p>Hipparchus, a hundred years after Aristotle, calculated the length of
+the year to within six minutes, discovered the precession of equinoxes
+and counted all the stars he could see, making a map of them.</p>
+
+<p>Seventy years after Christ, Ptolemy, a Greco-Egyptian, but not of the
+royal line of Ptolemies, published his great book, "The Almagest." For
+over fourteen centuries it was the textbook for the best astronomers.</p>
+
+<p>It taught that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the
+sun and the planets revolve around it. There were many absurdities,
+however, that had to be explained, and the priests practically rejected
+the whole book as "pagan" and taught an astronomy of their own, founded
+entirely upon the Bible. They wanted an explanation that would be
+accepted by the common people.</p>
+
+<p>This astronomy was not designed to be very scientific, exact or
+truthful&mdash;all they asked was, "Is it plausible?" Expediency, to
+theology, has always been much more important than truth.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Besides," said Saint Basil, "what boots it concerning all this
+conjecture about the stars, since the earth is soon to come to an end,
+as is shown by our Holy Scriptures, and man's business is to prepare his
+soul for eternity?"</p>
+
+<p>This was the general attitude of the Church&mdash;exact truth was a matter of
+indifference. And if Science tended to unseat men's faith in the Bible,
+and in God's most holy religion, then so much the worse for Science.</p>
+
+<p>It will thus plainly be seen why the Church felt compelled to fight
+Science&mdash;the very life of the Church was at stake.</p>
+
+<p>The Church was the vital thing&mdash;not truth. If truth could be taught
+without unseating faith, why, all right, but anything that made men
+doubt must be rooted out at any cost. And that is why priests have
+opposed Science, not that they hate Science less, but that they love the
+Church more.</p>
+
+<p>From the time of Ptolemy to that of Copernicus&mdash;fourteen hundred
+years&mdash;theology practically dictated the learning of the world. And to
+Copernicus must be given the credit of having really awakened the
+science of astronomy from her long and peaceful sleep.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>he little land that we know as Poland has produced some of the finest
+and most acute intellects the world has ever known.</p>
+
+<p>Tragic and blood-stained is her history, and this tragedy, perhaps, has
+been a prime factor in the evolution of her men of worth. Poland has
+been stamped upon and pushed apart; and a persecuted people produce a
+pride of race that has its outcrop in occasional genius.</p>
+
+<p>Recently we heard of the great Paderewski playing before the Czar, and
+His Majesty, in a speech meant to be very complimentary, congratulated
+the company that so great a genius as he was a citizen of Russia.</p>
+
+<p>"Your Majesty, I am not a Russian&mdash;I am a Pole!" was the proud reply.</p>
+
+<p>The Czar replied, smiling, "There is no such country as Poland&mdash;now
+there is only Russia!"</p>
+
+<p>And Paderewski replied, "Pardon my hasty remark&mdash;you speak but truth."
+And then he played Chopin's "Funeral March," a dirge not only to the
+great men of Poland gone, but to Poland herself.</p>
+
+<p>Nicholas Copernicus was born at the quaint old town of Thorn, in Poland,
+February Nineteen, Fourteen Hundred Seventy-three. The family name was
+Koppernigk, but Nicholas latinized it when he became of age, and
+seemingly separated from his immediate kinsmen forever.</p>
+
+<p>His father was a merchant, fairly prosperous, and only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> in the line of
+money-making was he ambitious. In the Koppernigks ran a goodly strain of
+Jewish blood, but a generation before, pressure and expediency seemed to
+combine, so that the family, as we first see them, were Christians. No
+soil can grow genius, no seed can produce it&mdash;it springs into being in
+spite of all laws and rules and regulations. "No hovel is safe from it,"
+says Whistler.</p>
+
+<p>The portraits of Copernicus reveal a man of most marked personality:
+proud, handsome, self-contained, intellectual. The head is massive, eyes
+full, luminous, wide apart, his nose large and bold, chin strong, the
+mouth alone revealing a trace of the feminine, as though the man were
+the child of his mother. This mother had a brother who was a bishop, and
+the mother's ambition for her boy was that he should eventually follow
+in the footsteps of this illustrious brother who was known for a hundred
+miles as a preacher of marked ability.</p>
+
+<p>So we hear of the young man being sent to the University of Cracow, as
+the preliminary to a great career.</p>
+
+<p>The father bitterly opposed the idea of taking his son out of the
+practical world of business, and this evidently led to the breach that
+caused young Nicholas to discard the family name.</p>
+
+<p>That Nicholas did not fully enter into his mother's plans is shown that
+while at Cracow he devoted himself mostly to medicine. He was so
+proficient in this that he secured a physician's degree; and having been
+given<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> leave to practise he revealed his humanity by declining to do so,
+turning to mathematics with a fine frenzy.</p>
+
+<p>This disposition to drop on a thing, turn loose on it, concentrate, and
+reduce it to a chaos, is the true distinguishing mark of genius. The
+difference in men does not lie in the size of their heads, nor in the
+perfection of their bodies, but in this one sublime ability of
+concentration&mdash;to throw the weight with the blow, live an eternity in an
+hour&mdash;"This one thing I do!"</p>
+
+<p>Copernicus at twenty-one was teaching mathematics at Cracow, and by his
+extraordinary ability in this one direction had attracted the attention
+of various learned men. In fact the authorities of the college had grown
+a bit boastful of their star student, and when visiting dignitaries
+arrived, young Copernicus was given chalk and blackboard and put through
+his paces. Problems involving a dozen figures and many fractions were
+worked out by him with a directness and precision that made him the
+wonder of that particular part of the world.</p>
+
+<p>The science of trigonometry was invented by Copernicus, and we see that
+early in his twenties he was well on the heels of it, for he had then
+arranged a quadrant to measure the height of standing trees, steeples,
+buildings or mountains. For rest and recreation he painted pictures.</p>
+
+<p>A college professor from Bologna traveling through Cracow met
+Copernicus, and greatly impressed with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> his powers, invited him to
+return with him to Bologna and there give a course of lectures on
+mathematics.</p>
+
+<p>Copernicus accepted, and at Bologna met the astronomer, Novarra. This
+meeting was the turning-point of his life. Copernicus was then
+twenty-three years of age, but in intellect he was a man. He had vowed a
+year before that he would indulge in no trivial conversation about
+persons or things&mdash;only the great and noble themes should interest him
+and occupy his attention.</p>
+
+<p>With commonplace or ignorant people he held no converse. He had
+remarkable beauty of person and great dignity, and his presence at
+Bologna won immediate respect for him.</p>
+
+<p>Men accept other men at the estimate they place upon themselves.</p>
+
+<p>In listening to lectures by Novarra, he perceived at once how
+mathematics could be made valuable in calculating the movement of stars.</p>
+
+<p>Novarra taught the Ptolemaic theory of astronomy for the esoteric few.
+The Church is made up of men, and while priests for the most part are
+quite content to believe what the Church teaches, yet it has ever been
+recognized that there was one doctrine for the Few, and another for the
+Many&mdash;the esoteric and the exoteric. The esoteric is an edged tool, and
+only a very few are fit to handle it. The charge of heresy is only for
+those who are so foolish as to give out these edged<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> tools to the
+people. You may talk about anything you want, provided you do not do it;
+and you may do anything you want, provided you do not talk about it.</p>
+
+<p>The proposition that the earth was flat, had four corners, and the stars
+were jewels hung in the sky as "signs," and were moved about by angels,
+was all right for the many, but now and then there were priests who were
+not content with these child-stories&mdash;they wanted truth&mdash;and these
+usually accepted the theories of Ptolemy.</p>
+
+<p>Novarra believed that the earth was a globe; that this globe was the
+center of the universe, and that around the earth the sun, moon and
+certain stars revolved. The fixed stars he still regarded as being hung
+against the firmament, and that this firmament was turned in some
+mysterious way, en masse.</p>
+
+<p>Copernicus listened silently, but his heart beat fast. He had found
+something upon which he could exercise his mathematics. He and Novarra
+sat up all night in the belfry of the cathedral and watched the stars.</p>
+
+<p>They saw that they moved steadily, surely and without caprice. It was
+all natural, and could be reduced, Copernicus thought, to a mathematical
+system.</p>
+
+<p>Astrology and astronomy were not then divorced. It was astrology that
+gave us astronomy. The angel that watched over a star looked after all
+persons who were born under that star's influence, or else appointed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+some other angel for the purpose. Every person had a guardian angel to
+protect him from the evil spirits that occasionally broke out of Hell
+and came up to earth to tempt men.</p>
+
+<p>Mathematics knows nothing of angels&mdash;it only knows what it can prove.
+Copernicus believed that, if certain stars did move, they moved by some
+unalterable law of their own. In riding on a boat he observed that the
+shores seemed to be moving past, and he concluded that a part, at least,
+of the seeming movements of planets might possibly be caused by the
+moving of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>In talking with astrologers he perceived that very seldom did they know
+anything of mathematics. And this ignorance on their part caused him to
+doubt them entirely.</p>
+
+<p>His faith was in mathematics&mdash;the thing that could be proved&mdash;and he
+came to the conclusion that astronomy and mathematics were one thing,
+and astrology and child-stories another.</p>
+
+<p>He remained at Bologna just long enough to turn the astrologers out of
+the society of astronomers.</p>
+
+<p>Novarra's lectures on astronomy were given in Latin, and in truth all
+learning was locked up in this tongue. But astrology and the theological
+fairy-tales of the people floated free. They were a part of the vagrant
+hagiology of the roadside preachers, who with lurid imaginations said
+the things they thought would help<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> carry conviction home and make
+"believers."</p>
+
+<p>From Bologna Copernicus then moved on to Padua, where he remained two
+years, teaching and giving lectures. Here he devoted considerable time
+to chemistry, and on leaving he was honored by being given a degree by
+the University. Next we find him at Rome, a professor in mathematics and
+also giving lectures on chemistry. His lectures were not for the
+populace&mdash;they were for the learned few. But they attracted the
+attention of the best, and were commented upon and quoted by the various
+other teachers, preachers and lecturers. A daring thinker who expresses
+himself without reservation states the things that various others know
+and would like to state if they dared. It is often very convenient when
+you want a thing said to enclose the matter in quotation-marks. It
+relieves one from the responsibility of standing sponsor for it, if the
+hypothesis does not prove popular.</p>
+
+<p>Copernicus was only nineteen years old when Columbus discovered America,
+but it seems he did not hear of Columbus until he reached Bologna in
+Fourteen Hundred Ninety-five. At Rome he made various references to
+Columbus in his lectures; dwelt upon the truth that the earth was a
+globe; mentioned the obvious fact that in sailing westward Columbus did
+not sail his ship over the edge of the earth into Hell, as had been
+prophesied he would.</p>
+
+<p>He also explained that the red sky at sunset was not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> caused by the
+reflections from Hell, nor was the sun moved behind a mountain by giant
+angels at night. Copernicus was a Catholic, as all teachers were, but he
+had been deceived by the esoteric and the exoteric, and had really
+thought that the priests and so-called educated men actually desired,
+for themselves, to know the truth.</p>
+
+<p>At Padua he had learned to read Greek, and had become more or less
+familiar with Pythagoras, Hipparchus, Aristotle and Plato. He quoted
+these authors and showed how in some ways they were beyond the present.
+This was all done in the exuberance of youth, with never a doubt as to
+the value and the beauty of the Church. But he was thinking more of
+truth than of the Church, and when a cardinal from the Vatican came to
+him, and in all kindness cautioned him, and in love explained it was all
+right for a man to believe what he wished, but to teach others things
+that were not authorized was a mistake.</p>
+
+<p>Copernicus was abashed and depressed.</p>
+
+<p>He saw then that his lectures had really been for himself&mdash;he was
+endeavoring to make things plain to Copernicus, and the welfare of the
+Church had been forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>He ceased lecturing for a time, but private pupils came to him, and
+among them astrologers in disguise, and these went away and told
+broadcast that Copernicus was teaching that the movements of the stars<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+were not caused by angels, and that "God was being dethroned by a
+tape-measure and a yardstick." Alchemy had a strong hold upon the
+popular mind, and these alchemists and astrologers were fortune-tellers
+and derived a goodly income from the people.</p>
+
+<p>They had their stands in front of all churches and turned in a goodly
+tithe "for the benefit of the poor."</p>
+
+<p>When the astrologers attacked Copernicus he tried to explain that the
+heavens were under the reign of natural law, and that so far as he knew
+there was no direct relationship between the stars and the men upon
+earth. The answer was, "You yourself foretell the eclipse, and assume to
+know when a star will be in a certain place a hundred years in advance;
+now, if you can prophesy about stars, why can't we foretell a man's
+future?"</p>
+
+<p>Copernicus proudly declined to answer such ignorance, but went on to say
+that alchemy was a violence to chemistry as much as astrology was to
+astronomy. In chemistry there were exact results that could be computed
+by mathematics and foretold; it was likewise so in astronomy.</p>
+
+<p>Copernicus was philosopher enough to know that astrology led to
+astronomy, and alchemy led to chemistry, but he said all he wished to do
+was to eliminate error and find the truth, and when we have ascertained
+the laws of God in reference to these things, we should discard the use
+of black cats, goggles, peaked hats,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> red fire and incantations&mdash;these
+things were sacrilege. And the enemy declared that Copernicus was guilty
+of heresy in saying they were guilty of sacrilege. Moreover, black cats
+were not as bad as blackboards.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope certainly had no idea of treating Copernicus harshly; in fact,
+he greatly admired him&mdash;but peace was the thing desired. Copernicus was
+creating a schism, and there was danger that the revenues would be
+affected. The Pope sent for Copernicus, received him with great honor,
+blessed him, and suggested that he return at once to his native town of
+Thorn and there await good news that would come to him soon.</p>
+
+<p>Copernicus was overwhelmed with gratitude&mdash;he was in difficulties.</p>
+
+<p>Certain priests had publicly denounced him; others had urged him on to
+unseemliness in debate; he had stated things he could not prove, even
+though he knew they were true&mdash;but the Pope was his friend! He loved the
+Church; he felt how necessary it was to the people, and at the last, the
+desire of his heart was to bless and benefit the world.</p>
+
+<p>He fell on his knees and attempted to kiss the Pope's foot, but the Holy
+Father offered him his hand instead, smiled on him, stroked his head,
+and an attendant was ordered to place about his neck a chain of gold
+with a crucifix that would protect him from all harm. A purse was placed
+in his hand, and he was sent upon his way relieved, happy&mdash;wondering,
+wondering!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgw.jpg" alt="W" title="W" /></div><p>hen Copernicus reached his native town of Thorn, the local clergy
+turned out in a procession to greet him, and a solemn service of
+thanksgiving was held for his safe return home.</p>
+
+<p>Copernicus was only twenty-seven years of age, and what he had done was
+not quite clear to his uncle, the bishop, and the other dignitaries, but
+word had come from the secretary of the Pope that he should be honored,
+and it was all so done, in faith, love and enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>Very shortly after this Copernicus was made Canon of the Cathedral at
+Frauenburg. The town of Frauenburg has now only about twenty-five
+hundred people, and it certainly was no larger then. The place is slow,
+sleepy, and quite off the beaten track of travel.</p>
+
+<p>When Canon Copernicus preached now, it was to a dear, stupid lot of old
+marketwomen and overworked men and mischievous children. Oratory is a
+collaboration&mdash;let him wax eloquent about the precession of the
+equinoxes, and prate of Plato and Pythagoras if he wished&mdash;no one could
+understand him! Rome is wise&mdash;the crystallized experience of centuries
+is hers. Responsibility tames a man&mdash;marriage, political office,
+churchly preferment&mdash;read history and note how these things have dulled
+the bright blade of revolution and turned the radical into a
+Presbyterian professor at Princeton, a staunch upholder of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
+Established Order!</p>
+
+<p>Plato said that Solar Energy found one of its forms of expression in
+man. Some men are much more highly charged with it than others; your
+genius is a man who does things. Do not think to dam up the red current
+of his life&mdash;he may die.</p>
+
+<p>Copernicus set to work practising medicine, and gave his services gratis
+to the poor, who came for many miles to consult him.</p>
+
+<p>He went from house to house and ordered his people to clean up their
+back yards, to ventilate their houses, to bathe and be decent and
+orderly. He devised a system of sewerage, and utilized the belfry of his
+church as a water-tower so as to get a water pressure from the little
+stream that ran near the town. The remains of this invention are to be
+seen there in the church-steeple even unto this day.</p>
+
+<p>King Sigismund of Poland had heard of the attacks made by Copernicus
+upon the alchemists, and sent for him that he might profit by his
+advice, for it seems that the King, too, had been having experience with
+alchemists. In their seeking after a way to make gold out of the baser
+metals they had actually succeeded. At least they said so, and had made
+the King believe it.</p>
+
+<p>They had shown the King how he could cheapen his coinage one-half, and
+"it was just as good!" The King could not tell the difference when the
+coins were new, but alas! when they went beyond the borders of Poland
+they could only be passed at one-half their face-value;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> travelers
+refused to accept them; and even the merchants at home were getting
+afraid.</p>
+
+<p>Copernicus analyzed some of this money made for the King by his
+alchemist friends and found a large alloy of tin, copper and zinc. He
+explained to the King that by mixing the metals they did not change
+their nature nor value. Gold was gold, and copper was copper&mdash;God had
+made these things and hid them in the earth and men might deceive some
+men&mdash;a part of the time&mdash;but there was always a retribution. Debase your
+currency, and soon it will cease to pass current. No law can long uphold
+a fictitious value.</p>
+
+<p>The King urged Copernicus to write a book on the subject of coinage.</p>
+
+<p>The permission of the Pope was secured, and the book written. The work
+is valuable yet, and reveals a deep insight into the heart of things.
+The man knew political economy, and foretold that a people who debased
+their currency debased themselves.</p>
+
+<p>"Money is character," he said, "and if you pretend it is one thing, and
+it turns out to be another, you lose your reputation and your own
+self-respect. No government can afford to deceive the governed. If the
+people lose confidence in their rulers, a new government will spring
+into being, built upon the ruins of the old. Government and commerce are
+built on confidence."</p>
+
+<p>Then he went on to show that German gold was valuable everywhere,
+because it was pure; but Polish gold<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> and Russian gold were below par,
+because the money had been tampered with, and as no secrets could be
+kept long, the result was the matter exactly equalized itself, save that
+Russians and Polanders had in a large degree lost their characters
+through belief in miracles. Copernicus advocated a universal coinage, to
+be adopted by all civilized nations, and the amount of alloy should be
+known and plainly stated, and this alloy should simply be the
+seigniorage, or what was taken out to cover the cost of mintage.</p>
+
+<p>King Sigismund circulated this valuable book by Copernicus among all the
+courts of Europe, and it need not be stated that the suggestions made by
+Copernicus have been adopted by civilized nations everywhere.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>he humdrum duties of a country clergyman did not still the intense
+longing of Copernicus to know and understand the truth. He visited the
+sick, closed the eyes of the dying, kept his parish register, but his
+heart was in mathematics, and so there is shown at Thorn an old church
+register kept by Copernicus, where, in the back, are great rows of
+figures put down by the Master as he worked at some astronomical
+problem. In the upper floor of the barn, back of the old dilapidated
+farmhouse where he lived for forty years, he cut holes in the roof, and
+also apertures in the sides of the building, through which he watched
+the movements of the stars. He lived in practical isolation and exile,
+for the Church had forbidden him to speak in public except upon themes
+that the Holy Fathers in their wisdom had authorized. None was to invite
+him to speak, read his writings or hold converse with him, except on
+strictly church matters.</p>
+
+<p>Copernicus knew the situation&mdash;he was a watched man. For him there was
+no preferment: he knew too much! As long as he kept near home and did
+his priestly work, all was well; but a trace of ambition or heresy, and
+he would be dealt with. The Universities and all prominent Churchmen
+were secretly ordered to leave Copernicus and his vagaries severely
+alone. But the stars were his companions&mdash;they came out for him nightly
+and moved in majesty across the sky. "They<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> do me great honor," he said;
+"I am forbidden to converse with great men, but God has ordered for me a
+procession." When the whole town slept, Copernicus watched the heavens,
+and made minute records of his observations. He had brought with him
+from Rome copies made by himself from the works of the prominent Greek
+astronomers, and the "Almagest" of Ptolemy he knew by heart.</p>
+
+<p>He digested all that had been written on the subject of astronomy;
+slowly and patiently he tested every hypothesis with his rude and
+improvised instruments. "Surely God will not damn me for wanting to know
+the truth about His glorious works," he used to say.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson once wrote this: "If the stars came out but once in a thousand
+years, how men would adore!" But before he had written this, Copernicus
+had said: "To look up at the sky, and behold the wondrous works of God,
+must make a man bow his head and heart in silence. I have thought and
+studied, and worked for years, and I know so little&mdash;all I can do is to
+adore when I behold this unfailing regularity, this miraculous balance
+and perfect adaptation. The majesty of it all humbles me to the dust."</p>
+
+<p>It was ostracism and exile that gave Copernicus the leisure to pursue
+his studies in quiet, undiverted, undisturbed. He was relieved from
+financial pinch, having all he needed for his simple, homely wants. The
+mental distance that separated him from his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> parishioners made him free,
+and the order that he should not travel and that none should visit him
+made him master of his time. There were no interruptions&mdash;"God has set
+me apart," he wrote, "that I may study and make plain His works." But
+still, that he could not make his discoveries known was a constant,
+bitter disappointment to him.</p>
+
+<p>In astronomy he found a means of using his mighty mathematical genius
+for his own pleasure and amusement. The Pope had, in seeking to subdue
+him, merely supplied the exact conditions he required to do his
+work&mdash;yet neither knew it. So mighty is Destiny: we work for one thing
+and fail to get it, but in our efforts we find something better.</p>
+
+<p>The simple, hard-working gardeners with whom Copernicus lived, had a
+reverent awe for the great man; they guessed his worth, but still had
+suspicions of his sanity. His nightly vigils they took for a sort of
+religious ecstasy, and a wholesome fear made them quite willing not to
+do anything that might disturb him.</p>
+
+<p>So passed the days away, and from a light-hearted, ambitious man,
+Copernicus had grown old and bowed, and nearly blind from constant
+watching of the stars and writing at night.</p>
+
+<p>But his book, "The Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies," was at last
+complete. For forty years he had worked at it, and for twenty-seven
+years, he himself says, not a day or a night had passed without his
+having<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> added something to it.</p>
+
+<p>He felt that he had in this book told the truth. If men wanted to know
+the facts about the heavens they would find them here. He had approached
+the subject with no preconceived ideas; he had ever been willing to
+renounce a theory when he found it wrong. He knew what all other great
+astronomers had taught, and out of them all he had built a Science of
+Astronomy that he knew would stand secure.</p>
+
+<p>But what should he do with all this mass of truth he had discovered? It
+was in his own brain, and it was in the three thousand pages of this
+book, which had been rewritten five times. In a few years at most, his
+brain would be stilled in death; and in five minutes, ignorance and
+malice might reduce the book to ashes, and the forty years' labor of
+Copernicus&mdash;working, dreaming, calculating, weeping, praying&mdash;would all
+go for naught and be but a tale that is told. Others might have lived
+such lives and known as much as he, and all was lost!</p>
+
+<p>To send the book frankly to Rome and ask the Censor for the privilege to
+publish it, was out of the question entirely&mdash;the request would be
+refused, the manuscript destroyed, and his own life might be in danger.</p>
+
+<p>To publish it at home without the consent of his Bishop would be equally
+dangerous. There would be a bonfire of every copy in the public square;
+for in this volume, all that the priests taught of astronomy had been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+contradicted and refuted.</p>
+
+<p>And then it occurred to him to send the manuscript to the free city of
+Nuremberg, the home of science, art and free speech, where men could
+print what they thought was truth&mdash;Nuremberg, the home of Albrecht
+Durer. With the book he sent a bag of gold, his savings of a lifetime,
+to pay the expense of printing the volume and putting it before the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>To better protect himself, Copernicus wrote a preface, dedicating the
+book to the Pope Paul, thus throwing himself upon the mercy of His
+Holiness. He would not put the work out anonymously, as his friends in
+Nuremberg, for his own safety, had advised. And neither would he flee to
+Nuremberg for protection; he would stay at home&mdash;he was too old to
+travel now&mdash;besides, he had forgotten how to talk and act with men of
+talent.</p>
+
+<p>How would Rome receive the book? He could only guess&mdash;he could only
+guess.</p>
+
+<p>The months went by, and fear, anxiety and suspense had their sway. He
+was stricken with fever. In his delirium he called aloud, "The
+book&mdash;tell me&mdash;they surely have not burned it&mdash;you know I wrote no word
+but truth&mdash;oh, how could they burn my book!"</p>
+
+<p>But on May Twenty-third, Fifteen Hundred Forty-three, a messenger came
+from Nuremberg.</p>
+
+<p>He carried a copy of the printed book&mdash;he was admitted to the sick-room,
+and placed in the hands of the stricken<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> man the volume. A gleam of
+sanity came to Copernicus. He smiled, and taking the book gazed upon it,
+stroked its cover as though caressing it, opened it and turned the
+leaves. Then closing the book and holding it to his heart, he closed his
+eyes, and sank to sleep, to awake no more.</p>
+
+<p>His body was buried with simple village honors, and laid to rest beneath
+the floor of the Cathedral where he had so long ministered, side by side
+with a long line of priests. On the little slab that marked his
+resting-place no mention was made of the mighty work he had done for
+truth. There were fears that when the character of his book was known,
+the grave of Copernicus would not remain undisturbed, and so the
+inscription on the headstone was simply this: "I ask not the grace
+accorded to Paul; not that given to Peter; give me only the favor which
+Thou didst show to the thief on the cross."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="HUMBOLDT" id="HUMBOLDT"></a>HUMBOLDT</h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img440.jpg" alt="HUMBOLDT" title="HUMBOLDT" /></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The actual miracle of the Universe is the invariableness of Law.
+Under like conditions a like result must follow, and upon this rock
+is the faith of the Scientists built.</p>
+
+<p class='author'>&mdash;<i>The Cosmos</i></p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>HUMBOLDT</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>he Baron and Baroness von Hollwede were not happily married.</p>
+<p>The Baroness had intellect, spirit, aspiration, with an appreciation of
+all that was best in art, music and the world of thought. As to the
+Baron, he had drunk life's wine to the lees and pronounced the draft
+bitter. He was a heavy dragoon with a soul for foxhounds. Later, when
+gout got to twinging him, he contented himself with cards and cronies.</p>
+
+<p>And then Destiny, like a novelist who does not know what to do with a
+character, sent him on an excursion across the River Styx.</p>
+
+<p>This was a good move all round, and the only accommodating action in
+which the Baron ever had a part. He left a large estate, not being able
+to take it along.</p>
+
+<p>There are two kinds of widows, the bereaved and the relieved. In India
+no widow is allowed to remarry. The canons of the Episcopal Church
+forbid any widow or widower to remarry whose former partner is living. A
+member of the Catholic Church who makes a marital mistake is not allowed
+to rectify it. Yet Nature, sometimes, as if to prove the foolishness of
+fearsome little man, justifies that of which man hotly disapproves.</p>
+
+<p>To be a widow of thirty-six, fair of face and comely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> in form, to own a
+beautiful home and have an income greater than you can spend, and still
+not enough to burden you&mdash;what nobler ambition!</p>
+
+<p>The Baroness had a little encumbrance&mdash;a son aged ten. I would like to
+tell of his career, but alas, of him history is silent, save that he was
+heir to some of his father's proclivities, grew up, became an army
+officer and passed into obscurity in middle life, dishonored and unsung.</p>
+
+<p>Such a widow as the Baroness von Hollwede is not apt to mourn for long.
+She was courted by many, but it was Major Humboldt who found favor in
+her heart. I assume that all of my gentle readers have in them some of
+the saltness of time, so that details may safely be omitted&mdash;let
+imagination bridge the interesting gap.</p>
+
+<p>The Major was a few years younger than the lady, but like the gallant
+gentleman that he was, he swore i' faith before the notary that they
+were of the same age, just as Robert Browning did when officially
+interrogated as to the age of Elizabeth Barrett. Thomas Brackett Reed
+avowed that no gentleman ever weighed over two hundred pounds, and I
+also maintain no gentleman ever married a woman older than himself.</p>
+
+<p>The marriage of Major Humboldt and the Baroness von Hollwede was a most
+happy mating that fully justified the venture. The Major had done his
+work bravely in the Seven Years' War, and was now an attache of the
+King's Court&mdash;a man of means, of intellect, and of many strong and
+beautiful virtues. After<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> the marriage he became known as Baron von
+Humboldt, and as to just how he succeeded to the noble title let us not
+be curious&mdash;his wife undoubtedly bestowed it on him, good and generous
+woman that she was.</p>
+
+<p>They lived in the romantic Castle Tegel, near Berlin, and separated from
+the city by a park, where the dark pines still tower aloft and murmur
+their secrets to the night breeze.</p>
+
+<p>Tegel is a most beautiful place; it was first a hunting-lodge occupied
+by Frederick the Great. It is shut out from the world by its high stone
+walls; and in its dim, dense woods, one might easily imagine he was far
+indeed from the madding crowd.</p>
+
+<p>Here there were two sons born to the Baron and Baroness&mdash;two years
+apart. One of these sons sleeps now beneath the turret where he first
+saw the light, and from which he made others see the light as long as he
+lived.</p>
+
+<p>In Goethe's "Faust" is an allusion to a mysterious legend that had its
+rise in storied Tegel. On May Eighteenth, in the year Seventeen Hundred
+Seventy-eight. Goethe came here, walking over from Berlin, dined, and
+walked on to Potsdam. But before he left he saw two beautiful boys, aged
+eight and ten, playing beneath the spreading Tegel trees. The boys
+remembered the event and wrote of it in their journal, mentioning the
+kindly pats on their heads and the prophecy that they would grow up and
+be great men.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Goethe was always patting boys on the head and saying graceful things,
+and it is doubtful whether his prophecy was more than a mere
+commonplace. But Goethe always claimed it was divine prophecy. These
+boys were William and Alexander von Humboldt.</p>
+
+<p>History does not supply another instance of two brothers attaining the
+intellectual height reached by Alexander and William von Humboldt. This
+being so, it seems meet that we should tarry a little to inspect the
+method adopted in the education of these boys&mdash;something that the
+educated world for the most part has not done.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>his world of ours, round like an orange and slightly flattened at the
+poles, has produced only five men who were educated. Of course all
+education is comparative; but these five are so beyond the rest of
+mankind that they form a class by themselves.</p>
+
+<p>An educated man means a developed man&mdash;a man rounded on every side of
+his nature. We are aware of no limit to which the mind of man may
+evolve; other men may appear who will surpass the Immortal Five, but
+this fact remains: none that we know have. Great men, so-called, are
+usually specialists: clever actors, individuals with a knack, talented
+comedians&mdash;who preach, carve, paint, orate, fight, manipulate, manage,
+teach, write, perform, coerce, bribe, hypnotize, accomplish, and get
+results. There are great financiers, sea-captains, mathematicians,
+football players, engineers, bishops, wrestlers, runners, boxers, and
+players on zithern-strings. But these are not necessarily very great
+men, any more than poets, painters and pianists, with wonderful hirsute
+effects and strange haberdashery are great men.</p>
+
+<p>For it is intellect and emotion expanded in every direction that give
+the true title to greatness. Judged in this way, how rare is the
+educated man&mdash;five in six thousand years! And yet one of these five
+educated men had a brother nearly as great as he.</p>
+
+<p>Alexander von Humboldt was past fifty before the world<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> of thinking men
+realized that he had outstripped his brother William&mdash;and Alexander
+would never admit he had.</p>
+
+<p>These two men, handsome in face, form and feature: strong in body and
+poised in mind, with souls athirst to realize and to know&mdash;happy men,
+living long lives of useful effort&mdash;surely should be classed as educated
+persons.</p>
+
+<p>And in passing, let us note that all education is preparatory&mdash;it is
+life that gives the finals, not the college. The education of the von
+Humboldt boys was the Natural Method&mdash;the method advocated by
+Rousseau&mdash;the education by play and work so combined that study never
+becomes irksome nor work repulsive. Rousseau said, "Make a task
+repugnant and the worker will forever quit it as soon as the pressure
+that holds him to it is removed."</p>
+
+<p>The parents of Alexander and William von Humboldt carefully studied the
+new plan of education that was at that time being advocated by some of
+the best professors at Berlin. "A child must have a teacher," said Jean
+Jacques, "but a professional teacher is apt to become the slave of his
+profession, and when this occurs he has separated himself from life, and
+therefore to that degree is unfitted to teach."</p>
+
+<p>A school should not be a preparation for life: a school should be life.
+The Kindergarten Idea, among other things, suggests that a child should
+never know he is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> in school.</p>
+
+<p>The discipline is kept out of sight, and the youngster finds himself a
+part of the busy life. He blends in with the others, and works, plays
+and sings under the wise and loving care of his "other mother," the
+teacher. He is living, not simply preparing to live. All life should be
+joyous, spontaneous, natural. The Rousseau Idea, which was modified and
+refined by Froebel, is the utilization of the propensity to play.</p>
+
+<p>Major von Humboldt found a man who was saturated with the true Froebel
+spirit, although this was before Froebel was born.</p>
+
+<p>The man's name was Heinrich Campe. Heinrich was hired to superintend the
+education of the Humboldt boys. That is to say, he was to become
+comrade, friend, counselor, fellow-scholar, playmate and teacher.</p>
+
+<p>Play needs direction as well as work. Campe played with the boys. They
+lived with Nature&mdash;made lists of all the trees at Tegel, drew sketches
+of the leaves and fruit, calculated the height of trees, measured them
+at the base, and cut them down occasionally, first sitting in judgment
+on the case, and deciding why a certain tree should be removed, thus
+getting a lesson in scientific forestry.</p>
+
+<p>They became acquainted with the bugs, beetles, birds and squirrels. They
+cared for the horses, cattle and fowls, and best of all they learned to
+wait on themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Campe told them tales of history&mdash;of Achilles, Pericles and C&aelig;sar. Then
+they studied Greek, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> they might read of Athens in the language of
+the men who made Athens great. They translated "Robinson Crusoe" into
+the German language, and Campe's translation of "Robinson Crusoe" is
+today a German classic. It was all natural&mdash;interesting, easy. The day
+was filled with work and play, and joyous tales of what had been said by
+others in days agone.</p>
+
+<p>"Teach only what you know, and never that which you merely believe,"
+said Rousseau.</p>
+
+<p>There is still a cry that religion should be taught in the public
+schools. If we ask, "What religion?" the answer is, "Ours, of course!"</p>
+
+<p>Religious dogma, being a matter of belief, was taught to the Humboldts
+as a part of history.</p>
+
+<p>So these boys very early became acquainted with the dogmas of
+Confucianism, Mohammedanism, Christianity. They separated, compared and
+analyzed, and saw for themselves that dogmatic religions were all much
+alike. To know all religions is to escape slavery to any. In studying
+the development of races these boys saw that a certain type of religion
+fits a certain man in a certain stage of his evolution, and so perhaps
+to that degree religion is necessary. An ethnologist is never a Corner
+Grocery Infidel. The C.G.I. is very apt to be converted at the first
+revival, outrivaling all other "seekers," and when warm weather comes,
+falling from grace and dropping easily into scofferdom.</p>
+
+<p>The Humboldts, like Thoreau, never had any quarrel<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> with God, and they
+were never tempted to go forward to the Mourners' Bench.</p>
+
+<p>Origin and destiny did not trouble them; predestination and
+justification by faith were not even in their curriculum; foreordination
+and baptism were to them problems not to be taken seriously.</p>
+
+<p>By studying religions in groups and incidentally, they learned to
+distinguish the fetish in each. They read Greek mythology side by side
+with Judean mythology and noted similarities. The intent of Tutor Campe
+was to give these boys a scientific education. Science is only
+classified commonsense. To be truly scientific is to know
+differences&mdash;to distinguish between this and that. Every successful
+farmer has traveled a long way into science, for science deals with the
+maintenance of life. To know soils, animals and vegetation is to be
+scientific.</p>
+
+<p>But when the average farmer learns to transmute compost into grass and
+grain, and these into beef, he usually stops, content. To be a scientist
+in the true sense, one must love knowledge for its own sake, and not
+merely for what it will bring on market-day, and so the Humboldts were
+led on through the stage of wanting to make money, to the stage of
+wanting to know the why and wherefore. It will be seen that the
+education of the Humboldts was what the Boylston Professor of English at
+Harvard calls "faddism, or the successful effort at flabbiness." Our
+Harvard friend<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> thinks that education should be a discipline&mdash;that it
+should be difficult and vexatious, and that happiness, spontaneity and
+exuberance are the antitheses and the foes of learning. To him grim
+earnestness, silence, sweat and lamp-smoke are preferable to sunshine
+and joyous, useful work so wisely directed that the pupil thinks it
+play. He believes that to be sincere we must be serious. In these
+latter-day objections there is nothing new. Socrates met them all;
+Rousseau heard the cry of "fad"; Heyne, Pestalozzi, Campe, Knuth and
+Froebel met the carpist and answered him reason for reason, just as
+Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo told the reason the earth revolved. The
+professional teacher who can do nothing but teach&mdash;the college professor
+who is a college professor and nothing else&mdash;hates the Natural Method
+man about as ardently as the person who wears a paste diamond hates the
+lapidary.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgh.jpg" alt="H" title="H" /></div><p>einrich Campe was the tutor of the Humboldts for two years, when he
+entered the employ of the King as Commissioner of Education.</p>
+
+<p>After this, however, he continued to spend one day a week at Tegel for
+some time. He loved the boys as his own, and his hope for their future
+never relaxed. Possibly his interest was not wholly disinterested&mdash;with
+the help of these lads he was working out and proving his pedagogic
+theories.</p>
+
+<p>When Campe resigned his immediate tutorship he was allowed to select his
+successor, and he chose a young man by the name of Christian Knuth.</p>
+
+<p>The mother was a member of this little university of four persons;
+Knuth, of course, was a member, for he always considered himself more of
+a student than a teacher.</p>
+
+<p>When Campe resigned in favor of Knuth his action was in degree prompted
+by his love and consideration for the boys. Knuth was only a little past
+twenty, and was able to enter into the out-of-door sports and work of
+the youngsters better than the older man. Knuth was their hero&mdash;together
+they rode horseback, climbed mountains, excavated tunnels, mined for
+ore, built miniature houses. "Knuth made every good thing in Berlin
+available to us," wrote William years afterward; "we visited stores,
+factories, barracks and schools, and became familiar with a thousand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>
+commonplace things never taught in schools and colleges."</p>
+
+<p>When Alexander was twelve years old, the father died. This would have
+been a severe blow to the boys were it not for Knuth, who seemed to
+stand to them more as the real parent than did Major von Humboldt.</p>
+
+<p>Knuth was a businessman of no mean ability. The Baroness now trusted him
+with all her financial affairs. He called on the boys to help him in the
+details of business, so the keeping of accounts and the economical
+handling of money were lessons they learned early in life.</p>
+
+<p>When Alexander was seventeen and William nineteen, the mother and Knuth
+decided that the boys should have the advantages of university life.
+Accordingly they were duly entered at the University of Frankfort as
+"special students."</p>
+
+<p>Knuth also entered as a student in the class with them. Special
+students, let it be known, are usually those who have failed to pass the
+required examinations. In this instance, Alexander and William were
+beyond many of their classmates in some things, but in others they were
+deficient. Especially had their education in the dead languages been
+"neglected," so it is quite likely they could not have passed the
+examinations had they attempted it.</p>
+
+<p>It should also be explained that special students are not eligible to
+diplomas or degrees.</p>
+
+<p>But Campe and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> Knuth did not believe the nerve-racking plan of
+examinations wise, any more than it is wisdom to pull up a plant and
+examine the roots to see how it prospers. Neither did they prize a
+college degree.</p>
+
+<p>They knew full well that a college degree is no proof of excellence of
+character; to them a degree was too cheap a thing to deviate in one's
+orbit to secure. They were after bigger game.</p>
+
+<p>At Frankfort, Knuth and his charges lived in the family of Professor
+Loffler, "so as to rub off a little knowledge from this learned man."
+They studied history, philosophy, law, political economy and natural
+history. We would say their method was desultory, were it not for the
+fact that they were always thorough in all that they undertook. They
+were simply three boys together, intent on getting their money's worth.</p>
+
+<p>William was a little better student than Alexander, and was the leader;
+he was larger in stature and seemed to have more vitality.</p>
+
+<p>Two years were spent at the University of Frankfort, and then our trio
+moved on to the University of Gottingen, where there were distinguished
+lecturers on Natural History and Archeology. Antiquity especially
+interested the boys, and the evolution and history of races were
+followed with animation.</p>
+
+<p>William took especially to philosophy as expressed in the writings of
+Kant, while Alexander developed a love for botany and what he called
+"the science of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> out-of-doors."</p>
+
+<p>Two years at Gottingen, following the bent of their minds and listening
+only to those lectures they liked, and they moved on to Jena.</p>
+
+<p>Here they were in the Goethe country. Soon there were overtures from
+Berlin that they enter the service of the Government. These overtures
+were set in motion by Campe, who, however, kept out of sight in the
+matter, and when accused, stoutly declared that it was every man's duty
+to help himself, and that he personally had never helped any one get a
+position and never would.</p>
+
+<p>William was twenty-three and Alexander twenty-one. William was gracious
+and graceful in manner and made himself at home in the best society;
+Alexander was studious, reserved and inclined to be shy.</p>
+
+<p>An invitation came that they should visit Weimar and spend some weeks in
+that little world of art and letters created by Goethe and Schiller. To
+William this was very tempting; but Alexander saw at Weimar scant
+opportunity to study botany and geology.</p>
+
+<p>Besides that, he felt that sooner or later he would drift into the
+employ of the Government, following in his father's footsteps. His
+ambition was practical mining, with a taste for finance.</p>
+
+<p>The brothers kissed each other good-by, and one went to Weimar to assist
+Schiller in editing a magazine that did not pay expenses, to bask in the
+sunshine of the great Goethe, and incidentally to secure a wife.</p>
+
+<p>The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> other started on a geological excursion, and this excursion was to
+continue through life, and make of the man the greatest naturalist that
+the world had seen since Aristotle lived, two thousand years before.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgh.jpg" alt="H" title="H" /></div><p>umboldt's first book was on the geological formation of the Rhine,
+published when he was twenty-six years old. The work was so complete and
+painstaking that it led to his being appointed to the position of
+"Assessor of Mines" at Berlin. This was the same office that Swedenborg
+once held in Scandinavia.</p>
+
+<p>For the benefit of our social-science friends, it is rather interesting
+to note that at this time in Europe nearly all mines belonged to the
+Government.</p>
+
+<p>An individual might own the surface, and up to the sky, but his claim
+did not go to the center of the earth. Iron, coal, copper, silver and
+gold were largely mined, and the Government operated the mines direct,
+or else leased them on a percentage.</p>
+
+<p>I am told that in America all mining is done by individuals or private
+companies, and that four-fifths of all mining companies have no mines at
+all&mdash;merely samples of ores, blueprints, photographs and prospects. The
+genus promoter is a very modern production, and is a creation Humboldt
+never knew; the "salting" of mines was out of his province, and mining
+operations carried on exclusively in sky-scrapers was a combination he
+never guessed.</p>
+
+<p>Whether society will ever take a turn backward, and the whole people own
+and control the treasures deposited by Nature in the earth, is a
+question I will leave to my Marxian colleagues to determine.</p>
+
+<p>As a mine-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>manager Humboldt was hardly a success. He knew the value of
+ores, utilized various by-products that had formerly been thrown away,
+made plans for the betterment of his workers, and once sent a protest to
+the King against allowing women and children to be employed underground.</p>
+
+<p>But the price per ton of his product was out of proportion to the
+expenses. While other men mined the ore he wrote a book on "Subterranean
+Vegetation." The details of business were not to his liking. His own
+private financial affairs were now turned over to Knuth, his modest
+fortune resolved into cash and invested in bonds that brought a low rate
+of interest. Freedom was his passion&mdash;to come and go at will was his
+desire. The thirst for travel was upon him&mdash;travel, not for adventure,
+but for knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>He resigned his office and tramped with knapsack on back across the
+Alps. The habit of his mind was that of the naturalist-investigator.
+Geology, botany and zoology were his properties by divine right.</p>
+
+<p>These sciences really form one&mdash;geognosy, or the science of the
+formation of the earth. The plants dissolve and disintegrate the rocks;
+the animal feeds upon the plants; and animal life makes new forms of
+vegetation possible. So the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms
+evolve together, constantly tending toward a greater degree of
+refinement and complexity.</p>
+
+<p>The very highest form of animal life is man; and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> highest type of
+man is evolved where there is a proper balance between the animal and
+the vegetable kingdoms.</p>
+
+<p>Humboldt discovered very early in his career that the finest flowers
+grow where there are the finest birds, and man separated from birds,
+beasts and flowers could not possibly survive.</p>
+
+<p>Just about this time, Humboldt, taking the cue from Goethe, said: "Man
+is a product of soil and climate, and is brother to the rocks, trees and
+animals. He is dependent on these, and all things seem to point to the
+truth that he has evolved from them. The accounts of special creation
+are interesting as archeology, but biology is distinctly the business of
+modern scientists. The scientist tells what he knows, and the theologist
+what he believes." And again we find Humboldt writing from Switzerland
+in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-six, making observations that have been
+recently unconsciously paraphrased by the United States Secretary of
+Agriculture, who said in a printed report: "Western farmers who raise
+and sell hogs and cattle, feeding them grain instead of selling it, are
+sure to acquire a competence. The farmers who sell grain are the ones
+who do not pay off their mortgages."</p>
+
+<p>Says Humboldt:</p>
+
+<p>"Here on the sides of these towering and forbidding mountains we find
+the most fertile and beautiful miniature farms, nestling in little
+valleys or on plateaus.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Indeed, I heard today of a man falling out of his farm and being
+seriously injured. He ventured too near the edge.</p>
+
+<p>"These Swiss gardens with their prosperous and intelligent owners are
+only possible through the fact that the owners keep all the cows and
+poultry that can comfortably exist on the acres. The peasants sell
+butter, cheese and eggs, instead of grain and vegetables exclusively.</p>
+
+<p>"They give back to the earth all that they take from it, so in the
+course of a hundred years a fine soil evolves that supports valuable
+animals, including valuable men; choice fruit, flowers and birds appear,
+and we have what we are pleased to call Christian civilization. It is
+not for me to quibble about terms, but civilization is not necessarily
+Christian, since it is more a matter of economics and natural science
+than religion."</p>
+
+<p>Where the climate is fairly propitious, but not so much so but that it
+compels watchfulness, economy and effort, man will work, and to aid him
+in his work he utilizes domestic animals. And the very act of
+domesticating the animal domesticates the man. As man improves the
+animal, he improves himself. One reason why the American Indian did not
+progress was because he had neither horses, camels, oxen, swine nor
+poultry. He had his dog, and the dog is a wolf, and always remains one,
+in that his intent is on prey. This fitted the mood of the Indian, and
+he continued to live his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> predaceous career without a particle of
+evolution. To stand still is to retreat, and there is evidence that long
+before the year Fourteen Hundred Ninety-two, there was a North American
+Indian that was a better Indian than the Indians who watched the
+approach of Columbus and exclaimed, "Alas! we are discovered!"</p>
+
+<p>In crossing the Alps, Humboldt was impressed with the truth that man was
+a necessary factor in working out "creation," just as much as the
+earthworm. When men stir the soil so as to make it produce grain that
+the family may be fed, and utilize animals in this work, civilization is
+surely at hand.</p>
+
+<p>Nations with a controlling desire to absorb, annex and exploit are still
+to that degree savages. Creation is still going on, and this earth is
+becoming better and more beautiful as men work in line with reason and
+allow science to become the handmaid of instinct.</p>
+
+<p>Humboldt, above all men, prepared the way for Darwin, Spencer and
+Tyndall&mdash;all of these built on him, all quote him. His books form a mine
+in which they constantly delved.</p>
+
+<p>Humboldt in boyhood formed the habit of close and accurate observation,
+and he traveled that he might gratify this controlling impulse of his
+life&mdash;the habit of seeing and knowing. His genius for classification was
+superb; he approached every subject with an open mind, willing to change
+his conclusions if it were shown that he was wrong; he had imagination
+to see the thing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> first with his inward eye; he had the strength to
+endure physical discomfort, and finally he had money enough so he was
+free to follow his bent.</p>
+
+<p>These qualifications made him the prince of scientific travelers&mdash;the
+pioneer of close, accurate and reliable explorers.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgb.jpg" alt="B" title="B" /></div><p>efore Humboldt's time travelers had been mostly of the type of Marco
+Polo and Sir John Mandeville, who discovered strange and wondrous
+things, such as horses with five legs, dogs that could talk, and
+anthropophagi with heads that grew beneath their shoulders. The
+temptation to be interesting at the expense of truth has always been
+strong upon the sailorman. Read even the history of Christopher Columbus
+and you will hear of islands off the coast of America inhabited
+exclusively by women who had only one calling-day in a year when their
+gentlemen friends from a neighboring island came to see them.</p>
+
+<p>The world needed accurate, scientific knowledge concerning those parts
+of the world seldom visited by man. Travel a hundred years ago was
+accompanied by great expense and more or less peril. Nations held
+themselves aloof from one another, and travelers were looked upon as
+renegades or spies.</p>
+
+<p>Alexander von Humboldt had explored deep mines, climbed high mountains,
+visited that strange people, the Basques of Spain, got little glimpses
+into Africa where the jungle was waiting for a Livingstone and a Stanley
+before giving up its secrets. The Corsican had thrown Europe into a
+fever of fear, and war was on in every direction, when in Seventeen
+Hundred Ninety-nine Humboldt ran the blockade and sailed out of the
+harbor of Coruna, Spain, on the little corvette<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> "Pizarro," bound for
+the Spanish possessions in the New World. Spain had discovered America
+in the gross two hundred years before, but what this country really
+contained in way of possibilities, Spain had most certainly never
+discovered.</p>
+
+<p>Humboldt's mind had conceived the idea of a Scientific Survey, and in
+this he was the maker of an epoch. In this undertaking he secured the
+assistance of the Prime Minister, who secretly issued passports and
+letters of recommendation to Humboldt, first cautioning him that if the
+Court of Madrid should know anything about this proposed voyage of
+discovery it could never be made, so jealous and ignorant were the
+officials.</p>
+
+<p>Only one thing did Spain have in abundance, and that was religion.</p>
+
+<p>At that time the Spanish Colonies included Louisiana, Florida, Texas,
+California, Mexico, Cuba, Central America, most of the West Indies, and
+most of South America, not to mention the Philippines. These colonies
+covered a territory stretching over five thousand miles from North to
+South. Twice a year Spain sent out her trading-ships, convoyed by armed
+cruisers. Trade then was monopoly and extortion. The goods sent out were
+as cheap and tawdry as could be palmed off; all that were brought back
+were bartered for at the lowest possible prices.</p>
+
+<p>Cheating in count, weight and quality was then considered perfectly
+proper, and as the Government<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> officials at home got a goodly grab into
+all transactions in way of perquisites, all went swimmingly&mdash;or fairly
+so.</p>
+
+<p>For a Spaniard to trade with any other nation was treason, and if
+caught, his property was confiscated and probably his head forfeited.</p>
+
+<p>No foreigners were allowed in the colonies, and exclusion was the rule.
+To hold her dependencies Spain thought she must keep them under close
+subjection; and she seemed beautifully innocent of the fact that she was
+the dependent, not they. She did not believe in Free Trade.</p>
+
+<p>The Government was absolutely under military rule. Of the botany,
+zoology, geology, not to mention the topography, of her American
+possessions, the officials of Spain knew nothing save from the tales of
+sailors.</p>
+
+<p>Such were the Spanish conditions when Humboldt got himself smuggled on
+board the "Pizarro," and sailed away, June Fourth, Seventeen Hundred
+Ninety-nine. With Humboldt was one companion, Bonpland, a Swiss by
+birth, and a rare soul.</p>
+
+<p>Humboldt was a naturalist and a philosopher; by nature he was a
+traveler. But he lacked that intrepid quality possessed by, say, Lewis
+and Clarke.</p>
+
+<p>He had too much brain&mdash;too fine a nerve-quality to face the forest
+alone. Bonpland made good all that he lacked. He used to call Bonpland
+his "Treasure." And surely such a friend is a treasure, indeed.
+Bonpland<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> was a linguist, as most of the Swiss are. He was a
+mountain-climber, and had been a soldier and a sailor, and he knew
+enough of literature and science, so he was an interesting companion.</p>
+
+<p>He was small in stature, lithe, immensely strong, absolutely fearless,
+and had left behind him neither family nor friends to mourn his loss. To
+Humboldt he was guide, teacher, protector and friend. Bonpland was the
+soul of unselfishness.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps a certain quality of man attracts a certain quality of friend&mdash;I
+really am not sure. But this I know, that while Alexander von Humboldt
+had few personal friends, he always had just those which his nature
+required&mdash;his friends were hands, feet, eyes and ears for him, to quote
+his own words. This voyage on the "Pizarro" occupied five years. The
+travelers visited Teneriffe, Cuba, Mexico, and skirted the coast of
+South America, making many little journeys inland.</p>
+
+<p>They climbed mountains that had never been scaled before; they ascended
+rivers where no white man had ever been, and pushed their way through
+jungle and forest to visit savage tribes who fled before them in terror
+thinking they were gods. On the return trip they visited the United
+States; spent some weeks in Washington, where they were the guests of
+the President, Thomas Jefferson. A firm friendship sprang up between
+Humboldt and Jefferson: they were both freethinkers, and when Humboldt
+recorded in his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> journal that Jefferson was by far the greatest man
+living in America, he not only recorded his personal conviction, but he
+spoke the truth.</p>
+
+<p>And as if not to be outdone, although he did not then know what Humboldt
+had said of him, Jefferson declared that Alexander von Humboldt was the
+greatest man he ever saw.</p>
+
+<p>Most of the vast number of rare specimens and natural-history
+curiosities gathered by Humboldt and Bonpland were placed on a
+homeward-bound ship that sailed from South America. This ship was lost
+and all the precious and priceless cargo went for naught. Had Humboldt
+and his companion sailed on this ship, as they had at first intended,
+instead of returning by way of the United States, the world would not
+have known the name of Alexander von Humboldt.</p>
+
+<p>But Fate for once was kind&mdash;the world had great need of him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgw.jpg" alt="W" title="W" /></div><p>hen Humboldt landed at Bordeaux in August, in Eighteen Hundred Four,
+after his five-year journey, he immediately set out to visit his
+brother, who was then German Ambassador at Rome. We can imagine that it
+was a most joyous meeting.</p>
+
+<p>Of it William said: "I could not recognize him for my tears&mdash;but beside
+this he seemed to have grown in stature and was as brown as a Malay. Was
+he really my brother? Ah, the hand was the hand of Esau, but when he
+spoke, it was the same kind, gentle, loving voice&mdash;the voice of my
+brother."</p>
+
+<p>A few weeks at Rome and Alexander grew restless for work. He had made
+great plans about publishing the record of his travels. This work was to
+outstrip anything in bookmaking the world had ever seen, dealing with
+similar subjects. The writing was done on shipboard, by campfires, and
+in forest and jungle, but now it had all to be gone over and revised and
+much of it translated into French, for the original notes were sometimes
+in English and sometimes in German. Only in Paris could the work of
+bookmaking be done that would fill Humboldt's ideals. In Paris were
+printers, engravers, artists, binders&mdash;Paris was then the artistic
+center of the world, as it is today.</p>
+
+<p>The results of this first great scientific voyage of discovery were
+written out in a work of seventeen volumes.</p>
+
+<p>It was entitled, "The Travels of Humboldt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> and Bonpland in the Interior
+of America." Humboldt wrote the book, but wanted his friend to have half
+the credit. This superb set of books, containing many engravings, was
+issued under Humboldt's supervision and almost entirely at his own
+expense. It was divided into five general parts: Zoology and Comparative
+Anatomy; Geography and the Distribution of Plants; Political Essays and
+Description of Peoples and Institutions in the Kingdom of New Spain;
+Astronomy and Magnetism; Equinoctial Vegetation. It took two years to
+issue the first volume, but the others then came along more rapidly, yet
+it was ten years before the last book of the set was published. The
+total expense of issuing this set of books was more than a million
+francs, or, to be exact, two hundred twenty-six thousand dollars.</p>
+
+<p>The cost of a set of these books to subscribers was two thousand five
+hundred fifty dollars, although there were a few sets containing
+hand-colored plates and original drawings that were valued at twenty
+thousand dollars. One such set can now be seen at the British Museum. In
+all, only three hundred sets of these books were issued.</p>
+
+<p>One set at least came to North America, for it was presented to Thomas
+Jefferson, and, if I am not mistaken, is now in the Congressional
+Library at Washington.</p>
+
+<p>This American Expedition forever fixed Alexander von Humboldt's place in
+history, but after it was completed and the record written out, he had
+still more than half a century to live.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imga.jpg" alt="A" title="A" /></div><p>t a time when few men could afford the luxury, Alexander von Humboldt
+was an atheist. Fortunately he had sufficient fortune to place him
+beyond reach of the bread-and-butter problem, and all of his books were
+written in the language of the esoteric. He did not serve as an
+iconoclast for the common people&mdash;his name was never on the tongue of
+rumor&mdash;very few, indeed, knew of his existence. His books were issued in
+deluxe, limited editions, and were for public libraries, the shelves of
+nobility or rich collectors.</p>
+
+<p>Humboldt was judicial in all of his statements, approaching every
+question as if nothing were known about it. He built strong, and was
+preparing the way, such as throwing up ramparts and storing ammunition
+for the first decisive battle that was to take place between Theology
+and Science.</p>
+
+<p>In his day Theology was supreme, the practical dictator of human
+liberties. But a World's Congress of Freethinkers has recently been held
+in Rome.</p>
+
+<p>There were present more than three thousand delegates, representing
+every civilized country on the globe. The deliberations of the Congress
+were held in a hall supplied by the Italian Government, and all
+courtesies and privileges were tendered the delegates. The only protest
+came from the Pope, who turned Protestant and in all the Catholic
+churches in Rome ordered special services, to partially mitigate the
+blot upon the fair record of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> the "Holy City." Forty years ago armed men
+would have routed this Congress by force, and a hundred years ago the
+bare thought of such a meeting would have placed a person who might have
+suggested it in imminent peril.</p>
+
+<p>Humboldt prophesied that the world would not forever be ruled by
+religious superstition&mdash;that science must surely win. But he did not
+expect that the change would come as quickly as it has; neither did he
+anticipate the fact that the orthodox religion would admit all the facts
+of science and still flourish. The number of Church communicants now is
+larger than it was in the time of Humboldt. The Church is a
+department-store that puts in the particular goods that the people ask
+for.</p>
+
+<p>Freethinkers do not leave the Church; the Church is built on a Goodyear
+patent, and its lines expand when Freethinkers get numerous, so as to
+include them.</p>
+
+<p>The Church would rather countenance vice, as it has in the past, than
+disband. In New York City we now have the spectacle of the Church
+operating a saloon and selling strong drink. In all country towns,
+religion, failing in being attractive, has, to keep churches alive,
+resorted to raffles, lotteries, concerts, chicken-pie socials, and
+lectures and exhortations by strange men in curious and unique garb, and
+singers of reputation.</p>
+
+<p>The Church, being a part of society, evolves as society evolves.
+Christianity is a totally different<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> thing now from what it was in
+Humboldt's time; it was a different thing in Humboldt's time from what
+it was a hundred years before.</p>
+
+<p>Behold the spectacle of a thousand highly educated and gentle men, from
+all over the world, decorating with garlands the statue of Bruno in
+Rome, on the site where Churchmen piled high the fagots and burned his
+living body! I foretell that when the next World's Congress of
+Freethinkers occurs in Rome, the Pope will welcome the delegates, and
+their deliberations will occur by invitation in the wide basilica of
+Saint Peter's. The world moves, and the Pope and all the rest of us move
+with it.</p>
+
+<p>When a meeting was recently called in Jersey City to welcome Turner, the
+so-called anarchist, the Mayor forbade the meeting and then placed a
+cordon of policemen around the intended meeting-place. But, lo, in their
+extremity the "anarchists" were invited by a clergyman to come and use
+his church and he led the way to the sacred edifice, warning the police
+to neither follow nor enter. As we become better we meet better
+preachers.</p>
+
+<p>Humboldt could see no rift through the clouds outside of the death of
+the Church and the disbanding of her so-called sacred institutions. We
+now perceive that very rarely are religious opinions consciously
+abandoned; they change, are modified and later evolve into something
+else. Churches are now largely social<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> clubs. In America this is true
+both of Catholic and of Protestant. Most all denominations are
+interested in social betterment, because the trend of human thought is
+in that direction.</p>
+
+<p>The Church is being swept along upon the tide of time. In a few
+instances churches have already evolved practical industrial
+betterments, which are conducted directly under the supervision of the
+church and in its edifice. There are hundreds of Kindergartens now being
+carried on in church buildings that a few years ago were idle and vacant
+all the week. Others have sewing-circles and boys' clubs, and these have
+metamorphosed in some instances into Manual-Training Schools where girls
+are taught Domestic Science and boys are given instruction in the
+Handicrafts. I know a church that derives its support from the sale of
+useful things that are made by its members and workers under the
+supervision of its pastor, who is a master in handicraft. So this pretty
+nearly points the ideal&mdash;a church that has evolved into an ethical and
+industrial college, where the pastor is not paid for preaching, but for
+doing.</p>
+
+<p>Charles Bradlaugh once said:</p>
+
+<p>"A paid priesthood blocks evolution. These men are really educated to
+uphold and defend the institution. They can do nothing else. Most of
+them have families dependent upon them&mdash;do you wonder that it is a fight
+to the death? It is not truth that the clergy struggles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> for&mdash;they may
+think it is&mdash;but the grim fact remains, it is a fight for material
+existence."</p>
+
+<p>We all confuse our interests with the eternal verities&mdash;the thing that
+pays us we consider righteous, or at least justifiable. This is the most
+natural thing in the world. An artist who painted very bad pictures once
+took one of his canvases to Whistler for criticism.</p>
+
+<p>Jimmy shrugged his shoulders and made a grimace that spoke volumes. "But
+a man must live some way!" pleaded the poor fellow in his extremity.</p>
+
+<p>"I do not see the necessity," was the weary reply.</p>
+
+<p>Preachers must live; their education and environment have unfitted them
+for useful effort; but they are a part of the great, seething struggle
+for existence. And so we have their piteous and plaintive plea for the
+obsolete and the outworn. Disraeli once in an incautious moment
+exclaimed: "If we do away with the Established Church, what is to become
+of the fourteen million prepared and pickled sermons? Think for a moment
+of the infinite labor of writing new sermons, all based upon a different
+point of view&mdash;let us then be reasonable and not subject a profession
+that is overworked to the humiliation of destroying the bulk of its
+assets."</p>
+
+<p>Science deals directly with the maintenance of human life and the
+bettering of every condition of existence through a wider, wiser and
+saner use of the world. Civilization is the working out and
+comprehending and proving how to live in the best way. Theology<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+prepares men to die; science fits them to live.</p>
+
+<p>Science deals with your welfare in this world; theology in another.
+Theology has not yet proved that there is another world&mdash;its claims are
+not even based upon hearsay. It is a matter of belief and assumption.</p>
+
+<p>Science, too, assumes, and its assumption is this: The best preparation
+for a life to come is to live here and now as if there were no life to
+come.</p>
+
+<p>Your belief will not fix your place in another world&mdash;what you are, may.
+The individual who gets most out of this life is fitting himself to get
+most out of another if there is one.</p>
+
+<p>And this brings us up to that paragraph in the "Cosmos" where Humboldt
+says: "I perceive a period when the true priesthood will not be paid to
+defend a fixed system of so-called crystallized truth. But I believe the
+time will come when that man will be most revered who bestows most
+benefits here and now. The clergy of Christendom have stood as leaders
+of thought, but to hold this proud position they must abandon the
+intangible and devote themselves to this world and the people who are
+alive."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgm.jpg" alt="M" title="M" /></div><p>ost of Humboldt's time during his middle life was spent at Paris, where
+he was busily engaged in the herculean task of issuing his splendid
+books. He varied his work, however, so that several hours daily were
+devoted to study and scientific research; and from time to time he made
+journeys over Europe and Asia.</p>
+
+<p>In Eighteen Hundred Twenty-seven a personal request came from the King
+of Prussia that Humboldt should thereafter make Berlin his home. He was
+too big a man for Germany to lose.</p>
+
+<p>He acceded to the King's request, moved to Berlin and was spoken of as
+"The First Citizen," although he would not consent to hold office, nor
+would he accept a title.</p>
+
+<p>In vexed questions of diplomacy he was often consulted by the King and
+his Cabinet, and in a great many ways he furthered the interests of
+education and civilization by his judicial and timely advice.</p>
+
+<p>He was always a student, always an investigator, always a tireless
+worker. He lived simply and quietly&mdash;keeping out of society and away
+from crowds, except on the rare occasions when necessity seemed to
+demand it.</p>
+
+<p>The quality of the man was well mirrored in those magnificent books&mdash;all
+that he did was on the scale of grandeur.</p>
+
+<p>His books were too high in price for the average reader,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> but on request
+of the King he consented to give a course of five, free, popular
+lectures for the people.</p>
+
+<p>No one foresaw the result of these addresses. The course was so
+successful that it extended itself into sixty-one lectures, and covered
+a period of more than ten years' time. No admittance was charged, free
+tickets being given out to applicants. Very soon after the first
+lecture, a traffic sprang up in these free tickets, carried on by our
+Semitic friends, and the tickets soared to as high as three dollars
+each. Then the strong hand of the Government stepped in: the tickets
+were canceled, and the public was admitted to the lectures without
+ceremony. Boxes, however, were set apart for royalty and foreign
+visitors, some of whom came from England, Belgium, Switzerland and
+France. The size of these audiences was limited simply by the capacity
+of the auditorium, the attendance at first being about a thousand;
+later, a larger hall was secured and the attendance ran as high as four
+thousand persons at each address.</p>
+
+<p>The subjects were as follows: three lectures on the History of Science;
+two on reasons why we should study Science; four on the Crust of the
+Earth, and the nature of Volcanoes and Earthquakes; two on the form of
+Earth's Surface and the elevation of the Continents; five on Physical
+Geography; five on the nature of Heat and Magnetism; sixteen on
+Astronomy; two on Mountains and how they are formed; three on the Nature
+of the Sea; three on the Distribution of Matter; ten<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> on the Atmosphere
+as an Elastic Fluid; three on the Geography of Animals; three on Races
+of Men.</p>
+
+<p>Every good thing begins as something else, and what was intended for the
+common people became scientific lectures for educated people. "The man
+who was most benefited by these lectures was myself," said Humboldt.</p>
+
+<p>Men grow by doing things. Lectures are for the lecturer.</p>
+
+<p>Humboldt found out more things in giving these lectures than he knew
+before&mdash;he discovered himself. And long before they were completed he
+knew that his best work was embodied right here&mdash;in doing for others he
+had done for himself.</p>
+
+<p>In attempting to reveal the Universe or "Cosmos," he revealed most of
+his own comprehensive intelligence. That many of his conclusions have
+since been abandoned by the scientific world does not prove such ideas
+valueless&mdash;they helped and are helping men to find the truth.</p>
+
+<p>These sixty-one "popular" and free lectures make up that stupendous work
+now known to us as "Humboldt's Cosmos."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgs.jpg" alt="S" title="S" /></div><p>ays Robert Ingersoll in his tribute to Alexander von Humboldt:</p>
+
+<p>"His life was pure, his aims were lofty, his learning varied and
+profound, and his achievements vast.</p>
+
+<p>"We honor him because he has ennobled our race, because he has
+contributed as much as any man, living or dead, to the real prosperity
+of the world. We honor him because he has honored us&mdash;because he has
+labored for others&mdash;because he was the most learned man of the most
+learned nation of his time&mdash;because he left a legacy of glory to every
+human being. For these reasons he is honored throughout the world.</p>
+
+<p>"Millions are doing homage to his genius at this moment, and millions
+are pronouncing his name with reverence and recounting what he
+accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>"We associate the name of Humboldt with oceans, continents, mountains,
+volcanoes&mdash;with towering palms&mdash;the snow-lipped craters of the
+Andes&mdash;the wide deserts&mdash;with primeval forests and European
+capitals&mdash;with wilderness and universities&mdash;with savages and
+savants&mdash;with the lonely rivers of unpeopled wastes&mdash;with peaks, pampas,
+steppes, cliffs and crags&mdash;with the progress of the world&mdash;with every
+science known to man and with every star glittering in the immensity of
+space. Humboldt adopted none of the soul-shrinking creeds of his day; he
+wasted none of his time in the inanities, stupidities and contradictions
+of theological<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> metaphysics; he did not endeavor to harmonize the
+astronomy and geology of a barbarous people with the science of the
+Nineteenth Century.</p>
+
+<p>"Never, for one moment, did he abandon the sublime standard of truth: he
+investigated, he studied, he thought, he separated the gold from the
+dross in the crucible of his brain. He was never found on his knees
+before the altar of superstition. He stood erect by the tranquil column
+of Reason. He was an admirer, a lover, an adorer of Nature, and at the
+age of ninety, bowed by the weight of nearly a century, covered with the
+insignia of honor, loved by a nation, respected by a world, with kings
+for his servants, he laid his weary head upon her bosom&mdash;upon the bosom
+of the Universal Mother&mdash;and with her loving arms about him, sank into
+that slumber which we call Death.</p>
+
+<p>"History added another name to the starry scroll of the immortals.</p>
+
+<p>"The world is his monument; upon the eternal granite of her hills he
+inscribed his name, and there, upon everlasting stone, his genius wrote
+this, the sublimest of truths: The universe is governed by law."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="WILLIAM_HERSCHEL" id="WILLIAM_HERSCHEL"></a>WILLIAM HERSCHEL</h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img441.jpg" alt="HERSCHEL" title="HERSCHEL" /></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The great number of alterations of stars that we are certain have
+happened within the last two centuries, and the much greater number
+that we have reason to suspect to have taken place, are curious
+features in the history of the heavens, as curious as the slow
+wearing away of the landmarks of our earth on mountains, on river
+banks, on ocean shores. If we consider how little attention has
+formerly been paid this subject, and that most of the observations
+we have are of a very late date, it would perhaps not appear
+extraordinary were we to admit the number of alterations that have
+probably happened to different stars, within our own time, to be a
+hundred.</p>
+
+<p class='author'>&mdash;<i>William Herschel.</i></p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>WILLIAM HERSCHEL</h2>
+
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgw.jpg" alt="W" title="W" /></div><p>illiam Herschell, born Seventeen Hundred Thirty-eight, in the city
+of Hanover, was the fourth child in a family of ten. Big families, I am
+told, usually live in little houses, while little families live in big
+houses. The Herschels were no exception to the rule.</p>
+
+<p>Isaac Herschel, known to the world as being the father of his son, was a
+poor man, depending for support upon his meager salary as bandmaster to
+a regiment of the Hanoverian Guards.</p>
+
+<p>At the garrison school, taught by a retired captain, William was the
+star scholar. In mathematics he propounded problems that made the worthy
+captain pooh-pooh and change the subject.</p>
+
+<p>At fourteen, he was playing a hautboy in his father's band and
+practising on the violin at spare times.</p>
+
+<p>For music he had a veritable passion, and to have a passion for a thing
+means that you excel in it&mdash;excellence is a matter of intensity. One of
+the players in the band was a Frenchman, and William made an arrangement
+to give the "parlez vous" lessons on the violin as payment for lessons
+in French.</p>
+
+<p>This whole brood of Herschel children was musical, and very early in
+life the young Herschels became self-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>supporting as singers and players.
+"It is the only thing they can do," their father said. But his loins
+were wiser than his head.</p>
+
+<p>In Seventeen Hundred Fifty-five William accompanied his father's band to
+England, where they went to take part in a demonstration in honor of a
+Hanoverian, one George the Third, who later was to play a necessary part
+in a symphony that was to edify the American Colonies. America owes much
+to George the Third.</p>
+
+<p>Young Herschel had already learned to speak English, just as he had
+learned French. In England he spent all the money he had for three
+volumes of "Locke on the Human Understanding."</p>
+
+<p>These books were to remain his lifelong possession and to be passed on,
+well-thumbed, to his son more than half a century later.</p>
+
+<p>At the time of the breaking out of the Seven Years' War, William
+Herschel was nineteen. His regiment had been ordered to march in a week.
+Here was a pivotal point&mdash;should he go and fight for the glory of
+Prussia?</p>
+
+<p>Not he&mdash;by the connivance of his mother and sisters, he was secreted on
+a trading-sloop bound for England. This is what is called desertion; and
+just how the young man evaded the penalties, since the King of England
+was also Elector of Hanover, I do not know, but the House of Hanover
+made no effort toward punishment of the culprit, even when the facts
+were known.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Musicians of quality were, perhaps, needed in England; and as
+sheep-stealing is looked upon lightly by priests who love mutton, so do
+kings forgive infractions if they need the man.</p>
+
+<p>When William Herschel landed at Dover he had in his pocket a single
+crownpiece, and his luggage consisted of the clothes he wore, and a
+violin. The violin secured him board and lodgings along the road as he
+walked to London, just as Oliver Goldsmith paid his way with a similar
+legal tender.</p>
+
+<p>In London, Herschel's musical skill quickly got him an engagement at one
+of the theaters. In a few months we hear of his playing solos at
+Brabandt's aristocratic concerts. Little journeys into "the provinces"
+were taken by the orchestra to which Herschel belonged. Among other
+places visited was Bath, and here the troupe was booked for a two-weeks'
+engagement. At this time Bath was run wide open.</p>
+
+<p>Bath was a rendezvous for the gouty dignitaries of Church and State who
+had grown swag through sloth and much travel by the gorge route. There
+were ministers of state, soldiers, admirals-of-the-sea, promoters,
+preachers, philosophers, players, poets, polite gamblers and buffoons.</p>
+
+<p>They idled, fiddled, danced, gabbled, gadded and gossiped. The "School
+for Scandal" was written on the spot, with models drawn from life. It
+wasn't a play&mdash;it was a cross-section of Bath Society.</p>
+
+<p>Bath<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> was a clearing-house for the wit, learning and folly of all
+England&mdash;the combined Hot Springs, Coney Island, Saratoga and Old Point
+Comfort of the Kingdom. The most costly church of its size in America is
+at Saint Augustine, Florida. The repentant ones patronize it in Lent;
+the rest of the year it is closed.</p>
+
+<p>At Bath there was the Octagon Chapel, which had the best pipe-organ in
+England. Herschel played the organ: where he learned how nobody seemed
+to know&mdash;he himself did not know. But playing musical instruments is a
+little like learning a new language.</p>
+
+<p>A man who speaks three languages can take a day off and learn a fourth
+almost any time. Somebody has said that there is really only one
+language, and most of us have only a dialect. Acquire three languages
+and you perceive that there is a universal basis upon which the various
+tongues are built.</p>
+
+<p>Herschel could play the hautboy, the violin and the harpsichord. The
+organ came easy. When he played the organ in the Chapel at Bath, fair
+ladies forgot the Pump-Room, and the gallants followed them&mdash;naturally.
+Herschel became the rage. He was a handsome fellow, with a pride so
+supreme that it completed the circle, and people called it humility. He
+talked but little, and made himself scarce&mdash;a point every genius should
+ponder well.</p>
+
+<p>The disarming of the populace&mdash;confiscating canes, umbrellas and
+parasols&mdash;before allowing people to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> enter an art-gallery is necessary;
+although it is a peculiar comment on humanity to think people have a
+tendency to smite, punch, prod and poke beautiful things. The same
+propensity manifests itself in wishing to fumble a genius. Get your
+coarse hands on Richard Mansfield if you can! Corral Maude
+Adams&mdash;hardly. To do big things, to create, breaks down tissue awfully,
+and to mix it with society and still do big things for society is
+impossible.</p>
+
+<p>At Bath, Herschel was never seen in the Pump-Room, nor on the North
+Parade. People who saw him paid for the privilege. "In England about
+this time look out for a shower of genius," the almanackers might have
+said.</p>
+
+<p>To Bath came two Irishmen, Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
+Burke rented rooms of Doctor Nugent, and married the doctor's daughter,
+and never regretted it. Sheridan also married a Bath girl, but added the
+right touch of romance by keeping the matter secret, with the intent
+that if either party wished to back out of the agreement it would be
+allowed. This was quite Irish-like, since according to English Law a
+marriage is a marriage until Limbus congeals and is used for a
+skating-rink.</p>
+
+<p>With the true spirit of chivalry, Sheridan left the questions of
+publicity or secrecy to his wife: she could have her freedom if she
+wished. He was a fledgling barrister, with his future in front of him,
+the child of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> "strolling players"; she, the beautiful Miss Linlay, was a
+singer of note. Her father was the leader of the Bath Orchestra, and had
+a School of Oratory where young people agitated the atmosphere in
+orotund and tremolo and made the ether vibrate in glee. Doctor Linlay's
+daughter was his finest pupil, and with her were elucidated all his
+theories concerning the Sixteen Perspective Laws of Art. She also proved
+a few points in stirpiculture. She was a most beautiful girl of
+seventeen when Richard Brinsley Sheridan led her to the altar, or I
+should say to a Dissenting Pastor's back door by night. She could sing,
+recite, act, and impersonate in pantomime and Greek gown, the passions
+of Fear, Hate, Supplication, Horror, Revenge, Jealousy, Rage and Faith.</p>
+
+<p>Romney moved down to Bath just so as to have Miss Linlay and Lady
+Hamilton for models. He posed Miss Linlay as the Madonna, Beulah, Rena,
+Ruth, Miriam and Cecilia; and Lady Hamilton for Susannah at the Bath,
+Alicia and Andromache, and also had her illustrate the Virtues, Graces,
+Fates and Passions.</p>
+
+<p>When the beautiful Miss Linlay, the pride and pet of Bath, got ready to
+announce her marriage, she did it by simply changing the inscription
+beneath a Romney portrait that hung in the anteroom of the artist's
+studio, marking out the words "Miss Linlay," and writing over it, "Mrs.
+Richard Brinsley Sheridan."</p>
+
+<p>The Bath porchers who looked after other people's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> business, having none
+of their own, burbled and chortled like siphons of soda, and the marvel
+to all was that such a brilliant girl should thus throw herself away on
+a sprig of the law. "He acts, too, I believe," said Goldsmith to Doctor
+Johnson.</p>
+
+<p>And Doctor Johnson said, "Sir, he does nothing else," thus anticipating
+James McNeil Whistler by more than a hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>But alas for the luckless Linlay, the Delsarte of his day, poor man! he
+used words not to be found in Johnson's Dictionary, and outdid Cassius
+in the quarrel-scene to the Brutus of Richard Brinsley.</p>
+
+<p>But very soon things settled down&mdash;they always do when mixed with
+time&mdash;and all were happy, or reasonably so, forever after.</p>
+
+<p>Herschel resigned from Brabandt's Orchestra and remained in Bath. He
+taught music, played the organ, became first violinist for Professor
+Linlay and later led the orchestra when Linlay was on the road starring
+the one-night stands and his beautiful daughter.</p>
+
+<p>Things seemed to prosper with the kindly and talented German. He was
+reserved, intellectual, and was respected by the best. He was making
+money&mdash;not as London brokers might count money, but prosperous for a
+mere music-teacher.</p>
+
+<p>And so there came a day when he bought out the school of Professor
+Linlay, and became proprietor and leader of the famous Bath Orchestra.</p>
+
+<p>But the talented<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan was sorely missed&mdash;a
+woman soloist of worth was needed.</p>
+
+<p>Herschel thought and pondered. He tried candidates from London and a few
+from Paris. Some had voices, but no intellect. A very few had intellect,
+but were without voice. Some thought they had a voice when what they had
+was a disease. Other voices he tried and found guilty.</p>
+
+<p>Those who had voice and spirit had tempers like a tornado.</p>
+
+<p>Herschel decided to educate a soloist and assistant. To marry a woman
+for the sake of educating her was risky business&mdash;he knew of men who had
+tried it&mdash;for men have tried it since the time of the Cavemen.</p>
+
+<p>A bright thought came to him! He would go back to Deutschland and get
+one of his sisters, and bring her over to England to help him do his
+work&mdash;just the very thing!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgi.jpg" alt="I" title="I" /></div><p>t was a most fortunate stroke for Herschel when he went back home to
+get one of his sisters to come over into Macedonia and help him. No man
+ever did a great work unless he was backed up by a good woman. There
+were five of these Herschel girls&mdash;three were married, so they were out
+of the question, and another was engaged. This left Caroline as first,
+last and only choice. Caroline was twenty-two and could sing a little.</p>
+
+<p>She had appeared in concerts for her father when a child. But when the
+father died, the girl was set to work in a dressmaking and millinery
+shop, to help support the big family. The mother didn't believe that
+women should be educated&mdash;it unfitted them for domesticity, and to speak
+of a woman as educated was to suggest that she was a poor housekeeper.</p>
+
+<p>In Greece of old, educated women were spoken of as "companions"&mdash;and
+this meant that they were not what you would call respectable. They were
+the intellectual companions of men. The Greek term of disrespect carried
+with it a trifle of a suggestion not intended, that is, that women who
+were not educated&mdash;not intellectual&mdash;were really not companionable&mdash;but
+let that pass. It is curious how this idea that a woman is only a
+scullion and a drudge has permeated society until even the women
+themselves partake of the prejudice against themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Mother Herschel didn't want her daughters to become<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> educated, nor study
+the science of music nor the science of anything. A goodly grocer of the
+Dutch School had been picked out as a husband for Caroline, and now if
+she went away her prospects were ruined&mdash;Ach, Mein Gott! or words to
+that effect. And it was only on William's promise to pay the mother a
+weekly sum equal to the wages that Caroline received in the
+dressmaking-shop that she gave consent to her daughter's going. Caroline
+arrived in England, wearing wooden shoon and hoops that were exceeding
+Dutch, but without a word of English. In order to be of positive use to
+her brother, she must acquire English and be able to sing&mdash;not only sing
+well, but remarkably well. In less than a year she was singing solo
+parts at her brother's concerts, to the great delight of the aristocrats
+of Bath.</p>
+
+<p>They heard her sing, but they did not take her captive and submerge her
+in their fashionable follies as they would have liked to do.</p>
+
+<p>The sister and the brother kept close to their own rooms. Caroline was
+the housekeeper, and took a pride in being able to dispense with all
+outside help. She was small in figure, petite, face plain but full of
+animation. All of her spare time she devoted to her music. After the
+concerts she and her brother would leave the theater, change their
+clothes and then walk off into the country, getting back as late as one
+or two o'clock in the morning. On these midnight walks they used to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
+study the stars and talk of the wonderful work of Kepler and Copernicus.
+There were various requests that Caroline should go to London and sing,
+but she steadfastly refused to appear on a stage except where her
+brother led the orchestra. About this time Caroline wrote a letter home,
+which missive, by the way, is still in existence, in which she says:
+"William goes to bed early when there are no concerts or rehearsals. He
+has a bowl of milk on the stand beside him, and he reads Smith's
+'Harmonics' and Ferguson's 'Astronomy.' I sit sewing in the next room,
+and occasionally he will call to me to listen while he reads some
+passage that most pleases him. So he goes to sleep buried beneath his
+favorite authors, and his first thought in the morning is how to obtain
+instruments so we can study the harmonics of the sky." And a way was to
+open: they were to make their own telescopes&mdash;what larks! Brother and
+sister set to work studying the laws of optics. In a secondhand store
+they found a small Gregorian reflector which had an aperture of about
+two inches.</p>
+
+<p>This gave them a little peep into the heavens, but was really only a
+tantalization.</p>
+
+<p>They set to work making a telescope-tube out of pasteboard. It was about
+eighteen feet long, and the "board" was made in the genuine pasteboard
+way&mdash;by pasting sheet after sheet of paper together until the substance
+was as thick and solid as a board.</p>
+
+<p>So this brother and sister worked at all odd hours<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> pasting sheet after
+sheet of paper&mdash;old letters, old books&mdash;with occasional strips of cloth
+to give extra strength. Lenses were bought in London, and at last our
+precious musical pair, with astronomy for their fad, had the
+satisfaction of getting a view of Saturn that showed the rings.</p>
+
+<p>It need not be explained that astronomical observations must be made out
+of doors. Further, the whole telescope must be out of doors so as to get
+an even temperature. This is a fact that the excellent astronomers of
+the Mikado of Japan did not know until very recently. It seems they
+constructed a costly telescope and housed it in a costly
+observatory-house, with an aperture barely large enough for the big
+telescope to be pointed out at the heavens. Inside, the astronomer had a
+comfortable fire, for the season was then Winter and the weather cold.
+But the wise man could see nothing and the belief was getting abroad
+that the machine was bewitched, or that their Yankee brothers had
+lawsonized the buyers, when our own David P. Todd, of Amherst, happened
+along and informed them that the heat-waves which arose from their warm
+room caused a perturbation in the atmosphere which made star-gazing
+impossible. At once they made their house over, with openings so as to
+insure an even temperature, and Prince Fusiyama Noguchi wrote to
+Professor Todd, making him a Knight of the Golden Dragon on special
+order of the heaven-born Mikado.</p>
+
+<p>The Herschels<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> knew enough of the laws of heat and refraction to realize
+they must have an even temperature, but they forgot that pasteboard was
+porous.</p>
+
+<p>One night they left their telescope out of doors, and a sudden shower
+transformed the straight tube into the arc of a circle. All attempts to
+straighten it were vain, so they took out the lenses and went to work
+making a tube of copper. In this, brother, sister and genius&mdash;which is
+concentration and perseverance&mdash;united to overcome the innate meanness
+of animate and inanimate things. A failure was not a failure to them&mdash;it
+was an opportunity to meet a difficulty and overcome it.</p>
+
+<p>The partial success of the new telescope aroused the brother and the
+sister to fresh exertions. The work had been begun as a mere
+recreation&mdash;a rest from the exactions of the public which they diverted
+and amused with their warblings, concussions and vibrations.</p>
+
+<p>They were still amateur astronomers, and the thought that they
+would ever be anything else had not come to them. But they wanted
+to get a better view of the heavens&mdash;a view through a Newtonian
+reflecting-telescope. So they counted up their savings and decided that
+if they could get some instrument-maker in London to make them a
+reflecting-telescope six feet long, they would be perfectly willing to
+pay him fifty pounds for it. This study of the skies was their only form
+of dissipation, and even if it was a little expensive it enabled them to
+escape the Pump-Room rabble and flee<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> boredom and introspection. A hunt
+was taken through London, but no one could be found who would make such
+an instrument as they wanted for the price they could afford to pay.
+They found, however, an amateur lens-polisher who offered to sell his
+tools, materials and instruments for a small sum. After consultation,
+the brother and sister bought him out. So at the price they expected to
+pay for a telescope they had a machine-shop on their hands.</p>
+
+<p>The work of grinding and polishing lenses is a most delicate business.
+Only a person of infinite patience and persistency can succeed at it.</p>
+
+<p>In Allegheny, Pennsylvania, lives John Brashear, who, by his own
+efforts, assisted by a noble wife, graduated from a rolling-mill and
+became a maker of telescopes.</p>
+
+<p>Brashear is practically the one telescope lens-maker of America since
+Alvan Clark resigned. There is no competition in this line&mdash;the
+difficulties are too appalling for the average man. The slightest
+accident or an unseen flaw, and the work of months or years goes into
+the dustbin of time, and all must be gone over again.</p>
+
+<p>So when we think of this brother and sister sailing away upon an unknown
+ocean&mdash;working day after day, night after night, week after week, and
+month after month, discarding scores of specula which they had worked
+upon many weary hours in order to get the glass that would serve their
+purpose&mdash;we must remove our hats in reverence.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>God sends great men in groups. From Seventeen Hundred Forty for the next
+thirty-five years the intellectual sky seemed full of shooting-stars.
+Watt had watched to a purpose his mother's teakettle; Boston Harbor was
+transformed into another kind of Hyson dish; Franklin had been busy with
+kite and key; Gibbon was writing his "Decline and Fall"; Fate was
+pitting the Pitts against Fox; Hume was challenging worshipers of a
+Fetish and supplying arguments still bright with use; Voltaire and
+Rousseau were preparing the way for Madame Guillotine; Horace Walpole
+was printing marvelous books at his private press at Strawberry Hill;
+Sheridan was writing autobiographical comedies; David Garrick was
+mimicking his way to immortality; Gainsborough was working the
+apotheosis of a hat; Reynolds, Lawrence, Romney, and West, the American,
+were forming an English School of Art; George Washington and George the
+Third were linking their names preparatory to sending them down the
+ages; Boswell was penning undying gossip; Blackstone was writing his
+"Commentaries" for legal lights unborn; Thomas Paine was getting his
+name on the blacklist of orthodoxy; Burke, the Irishman, was polishing
+his brogue so that he might be known as England's greatest orator; the
+little Corsican was dreaming dreams of conquest; Wellesley was having
+presentiments of coming difficulties; Goldsmith was giving dinners with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+bailiffs for servants; Hastings was defending a suit where the chief
+participants were to die before a verdict was rendered; Captain Cook was
+giving to this world new lands; while William Herschel and his sister
+were showing the world still other worlds, till then unknown.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgw.jpg" alt="W" title="W" /></div><p>hen the brother and sister had followed the subject of astronomy as far
+as Ferguson had followed it, and knew all that he knew, they thought
+they surely would be content.</p>
+
+<p>Progress depends upon continually being dissatisfied. Now Ferguson
+aggravated them by his limitations.</p>
+
+<p>In their music they amused, animated and inspired the fashionable
+idlers.</p>
+
+<p>William gave lessons to his private pupils, led his orchestra, played
+the organ and harpsichord, and managed to make ends meet, and would have
+gotten reasonably rich had he not invested his spare cash in lenses,
+brass tubes, eyepieces, specula and other such trifles, and stood most
+of the night out on the lawn peering at the sky.</p>
+
+<p>He had been studying stars for seven years before the Bath that he
+amused awoke to the fact that there was a genius among them. And this
+genius was not the idolized Beau Nash whose statue adorned the
+Pump-Room! No, it was the man whose back they saw at the concerts.</p>
+
+<p>During all these years Herschel had worked alone, and he had scarcely
+ever mentioned the subject of astronomy with any one save his sister.</p>
+
+<p>One night, however, he had moved his telescope into the middle of the
+street to get away from the shadows of the houses. A doctor who had been
+out to answer a midnight call stopped at the unusual sight and asked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> if
+he might look through the instrument.</p>
+
+<p>Permission was courteously granted. The next day the doctor called on
+the astronomer to thank him for the privilege of looking through a
+better telescope than his own. The doctor was Sir William Watson, an
+amateur astronomer and all-round scientist, and member of the Royal
+Society of London.</p>
+
+<p>Herschel had held himself high&mdash;he had not gossiped of his work with the
+populace, cheapening his thought by diluting it for cheap people. Watson
+saw that Herschel, working alone, isolated, had surpassed the schools.</p>
+
+<p>There is a nugget of wisdom in Ibsen's remark, "The strongest man is he
+who stands alone," and Kipling's paraphrase, "He travels the fastest who
+travels alone."</p>
+
+<p>The chance acquaintance of Herschel and Watson soon ripened into a very
+warm friendship.</p>
+
+<p>Herschel amused the neurotics, Watson dosed and blistered them&mdash;both for
+a consideration. Each had a beautiful contempt for the society they
+served. Watson's father was of the purple, while Herschel's was of the
+people, but both men belonged to the aristocracy of intellect. Watson
+introduced Herschel into the select scientific circle of London, where
+his fine reserve and dignity made their due impress. Herschel's first
+paper to the Royal Society, presented by Doctor Watson, was on the
+periodical star in Collo Ceti. The members of the Society, always very
+jealous and suspicious of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> outsiders, saw they had a thinker to deal
+with.</p>
+
+<p>Some one carried the news to Bath&mdash;a great astronomer was now among
+them! About this time Horace Walpole said, "Mr. Herschel will content me
+if, instead of a million worlds, he can discover me thirteen colonies
+well inhabited by men and women, and can annex them to the Crown of
+Great Britain in lieu of those it has lost beyond the Atlantic."</p>
+
+<p>Bath society now took up astronomy as a fad, and fashionable ladies
+named the planets both backward and forward from a blackboard list set
+up in the Pump-House by Fanny Burney, the clever one.</p>
+
+<p>Herschel was invited to give popular lectures on the music of the
+spheres. Herschel's music-parlors were besieged by good people who
+wanted to make engagements with him to look through his telescope.</p>
+
+<p>One good woman gave the year, month, day, hour and minute of her birth
+and wanted her fortune told. Poor Herschel declined, saying he knew
+nothing of astronomy, but could give her lessons in music if desired.</p>
+
+<p>In answer to the law of supply and demand, thus proving the efficacy of
+prayer, an itinerant astronomer came down from London and set up a
+five-foot telescope on the Parade and solicited the curious ones at a
+tuppence a peep. This itinerant interested the populace by telling them
+a few stories about the stars that were not recorded in Ferguson, and
+passed out his cards showing where he could be consulted as a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
+fortune-teller during the day. Herschel was once passing by this street
+astronomer, who was crying his wares, and a sudden impulse coming over
+him to see how bad the man's lens might be, he stopped to take a peep at
+Earth's satellite. He handed out the usual tuppence, but the owner of
+the telescope loftily passed it back saying, "I takes no fee from a
+fellow-philosopher!"</p>
+
+<p>This story went the rounds, and when it reached London it had been
+amended thus: Charles Fox was taking a ramble at Bath, ran across
+William Herschel at work, and mistaking him for an itinerant, the great
+statesman stopped, peeped through the aperture, and then passing out a
+tuppence moved along blissfully unaware of his error, for Herschel being
+a perfect gentleman would not embarrass the great man by refusing his
+copper.</p>
+
+<p>When Herschel was asked if the story was true he denied the whole
+fabric, which the knowing ones said was further proof of his gentlemanly
+instincts&mdash;for a true gentleman will always lie under two conditions:
+first, to save a woman's honor; and second, to save a friend from
+embarrassment. As a profession, astrology has proved a better investment
+than astronomy. Astronomy has nothing to offer but abstract truth, and
+those who love astronomy must do so for truth's sake.</p>
+
+<p>Astronomical discoveries can not be covered by copyright or patent, nor
+can any new worlds be claimed as private property and financed by stock
+companies,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> frenzied or otherwise. Astrology, on the other hand, relates
+to love-affairs, vital statistics, goldmines, misplaced jewels and lost
+opportunities.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, in this year of grace, Nineteen Hundred Five, Boston newspapers
+carry a column devoted to announcements of astrologers, while the
+Cambridge Astronomical Observatory never gets so much as a mention from
+one year's end to the other. Besides that, astronomers have to be
+supported by endowment&mdash;mendicancy&mdash;while astrologers are paid for their
+prophecies by the people whose destinies they invent. This shows us how
+far as a nation we have traveled on the stony road of Science.</p>
+
+<p>Science, forsooth? Oh, yes, of course&mdash;science&mdash;bang! bang! bang!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgi.jpg" alt="I" title="I" /></div><p>n the month of March, in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-one, Herschel, by the
+discovery of Uranus, found his place as a fixed star among the world's
+great astronomers. Years before this, William and Caroline had figured
+it out that there must be another planet in our system in order to
+account plausibly for the peculiar ellipses of the others. That is to
+say, they felt the influence of this seventh planet; its attractive
+force was realized, but where it was they could not tell. Its discovery
+by Herschel was quite accidental. He was sweeping the heavens for comets
+when this star came within his vision. Others had seen it, too, but had
+classified it as "a vagrant fixed star."</p>
+
+<p>It was the work of Herschel to discover that it was not a fixed star,
+but had a defined and distinct orbit that could be calculated. To look
+up at the heavens and pick out a star that could only be seen with a
+telescope&mdash;pick it out of millions and ascertain its movement&mdash;seems
+like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.</p>
+
+<p>The present method of finding asteroids and comets by means of
+photography is simple and easy. The plate is exposed in a frame that
+moves by clockwork with the earth, so as to keep the same field of stars
+steady on the glass. After two, three or four hours' exposure, the
+photograph will show the fixed stars, but the planets, asteroids and
+comets will reveal themselves as a white streak of light, showing
+plainly where the sitters moved.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Herschel had to watch each particular star in person, whereas the
+photographic lens will watch a thousand.</p>
+
+<p>How close and persistent an observer a man must be who, watching one
+star at a time, discovers the one in a million that moves, is apparent.
+Chance, surely, must also come to his aid and rescue if he succeeds.</p>
+
+<p>Herschel found his moving star, and at first mistook it for a comet.
+Later, he and Caroline were agreed that it was in very truth their
+long-looked-for planet. There are no proprietary rights in newly
+discovered worlds&mdash;the reward is in the honor of the discovery, just as
+the best recompense for a good deed lies in having done it.</p>
+
+<p>The Royal Society was the recording station, as Kiel, Greenwich and
+Harvard are now. Herschel made haste to get his new world on record
+through his kind neighbor, Doctor Watson.</p>
+
+<p>The Royal Society gave out the information, and soon various other
+telescopes corroborated the discovery made by the Bath musician.
+Herschel christened his new discovery "Georgium Sidus," in honor of the
+King; but the star belonged as much to Germany and France as to England,
+and astronomers abroad scouted the idea of peppering the heavens with
+the names of nobodies.</p>
+
+<p>Several astronomers suggested the name "Herschel," if the discoverer
+would consent, but this he would not do. Doctor Bode then named the new
+star "Uranus,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> and Uranus it is, although perhaps with any other name
+'t would shine as bright.</p>
+
+<p>Herschel was forty-three years old when he discovered Uranus. He was
+still a professional musician, and an amateur astronomer.</p>
+
+<p>But it did not require much arguing on the part of Doctor Watson when he
+presented Herschel's name for membership in the Royal Society for that
+most respectable body of scholars to at once pass favorably on the
+nomination. As one member in seconding the motion put it, "Herschel
+honors us in accepting this membership, quite as much as we do him in
+granting it."</p>
+
+<p>And so the next paper presented by Herschel to the Royal Society appears
+on the record signed "William Herschel, F.R.S."</p>
+
+<p>Some time afterwards, it was to appear, "William Herschel, F.R.S., LL.D.
+(Edinburgh)"; and then "Sir William Herschel, F.R.S., LL.D., D.C.L.
+(Oxon)."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgg.jpg" alt="G" title="G" /></div><p>eorge the Third, in about the year Seventeen Hundred Eighty-two, had
+invited his distinguished Hanoverian countryman to become an attache of
+the Court with the title of "Astronomer to the King." The
+Astronomer-Royal, in charge of the Greenwich Observatory, was one Doctor
+Maskelyne, a man of much learning, a stickler for the fact, but with a
+mustard-seed imagination. Being asked his opinion of Herschel he assured
+the company thus: "Herschel is a great musician&mdash;a great musician!"
+Afterwards Maskelyne explained that the reason Herschel saw more than
+other astronomers was because he had made himself a better telescope.</p>
+
+<p>One real secret of Herschel's influence seems to have been his fine
+enthusiasm. He worked with such vim, such animation, that he radiated
+light on every side. He set others to work, and his love for astronomy
+as a science created a demand for telescopes, which he himself had to
+supply. It does not seem that he cared especially for money&mdash;all he made
+he spent for new apparatus. He had a force of about a dozen men making
+telescopes. He worked with them in blouse and overalls, and not one of
+his workmen excelled him as a machinist. The King bought several of his
+telescopes for from one hundred to three hundred pounds each, and
+presented them to universities and learned societies throughout the
+world. One fine telescope was presented to the University of Gottingen,
+and Herschel was sent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> in person to present it. He was received with the
+greatest honors, and scientists and musicians vied with one another to
+do him homage.</p>
+
+<p>In Seventeen Hundred Eighty-two Herschel and his sister gave up their
+musical work and moved from Bath to quarters provided for them near
+Windsor Castle. Herschel's salary was then the modest sum of two hundred
+pounds a year.</p>
+
+<p>Caroline was honored with the title "Assistant to the King's Astronomer"
+with the stipend of fifty pounds a year. It will thus be seen that the
+kingly idea of astronomy had not traveled far from what it was when
+every really respectable court had a retinue of singers, musicians,
+clowns, dancers, palmists and scientists to amuse the people somewhat
+ironically called "nobility." King George the Third paid his Cook,
+Master of the Kennels, Chaplain and Astronomer the same amount. The
+father of Richard Brinsley Sheridan was "Elocutionist to the King," and
+was paid a like sum.</p>
+
+<p>When Doctor Watson heard that Herschel was about to leave Bath he wrote,
+"Never bought King honor so cheap."</p>
+
+<p>It was nominated in the bond that Herschel should act as "Guide to the
+heavens for the diversification of visitors whenever His Majesty wills
+it."</p>
+
+<p>But it was also provided that the astronomer should be allowed to carry
+on the business of making and selling his telescopes.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Herschel's enthusiasm for his beloved science never abated. But often
+his imagination outran his facts.</p>
+
+<p>Great minds divine the thing first&mdash;they see it with their inward eye.
+Yet there may be danger in this, for in one's anxiety to prove what he
+first only imagined, small proof suffices. Thus Herschel was for many
+years sure that the moon had an atmosphere and was inhabited; he thought
+that he had seen clear through the Milky Way and discovered empty space
+beyond; he calculated distances, and announced how far Castor was from
+Pollux; he even made a guess as to how long it took for a gaseous nebula
+to resolve itself into a planetary system; he believed the sun was a
+molten mass of fire&mdash;a thing that many believed until they saw the
+incandescent electric lamp&mdash;and in various other ways made daring
+prophecies which science has not only failed to corroborate, but which
+we now know to be errors.</p>
+
+<p>But the intensity of his nature was both his virtue and his weakness.
+Men who do nothing and say nothing are never ridiculous. Those who hope
+much, believe much, and love much, make mistakes.</p>
+
+<p>Constant effort and frequent mistakes are the stepping-stones of genius.</p>
+
+<p>In all, Herschel contributed sixty-seven important papers to the
+proceedings of the Royal Society, and in one of these, which was written
+in his eightieth year, he says, "My enthusiasm has occasionally led me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>
+astray, and I wish now to correct a statement which I made to you
+twenty-eight years ago." He then enumerates some particular statement
+about the height of mountains in the moon, and corrects it. Truth was
+more to Herschel than consistency. Indeed, the earnestness, purity of
+purpose, and simplicity of his mind stamp him as one of the world's
+great men.</p>
+
+<p>At Windsor he built a two-story observatory. In the wintertime every
+night when the stars could be seen, was sacred. No matter how cold the
+weather, he stood and watched; while down below, the faithful Caroline
+sat and recorded the observations that he called down to her.</p>
+
+<p>Caroline was his confidante, adviser, secretary, servant, friend. She
+had a telescope of her own, and when her brother did not need her
+services she swept the heavens on her own account for maverick comets.
+In her work she was eminently successful, and five comets at least are
+placed to her credit on the honor-roll by right of priority. Her
+discoveries were duly forwarded by her brother to the Royal Society for
+record.</p>
+
+<p>Later, the King of Prussia was to honor her with a gold medal, and
+several learned societies elected her an honorary member. When Herschel
+reached the discreet age of fifty he married the worthy Mrs. John Pitt,
+former wife of a London merchant. It is believed that the marriage was
+arranged by the King in person, out of his great love for both parties.
+At any rate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> Miss Burney thought so. Miss Burney was Keeper of the Royal
+Wardrobe at the same salary that Herschel had been receiving&mdash;two
+hundred pounds a year. She also took charge of the Court Gossip, with
+various volunteer assistants. "Gold, as well as stars, glitters for
+astronomers," said little Miss Burney. "Mrs. Pitt is very rich, meek,
+quiet, rather pretty and quite unobjectionable." But poor Caroline!</p>
+
+<p>It nearly broke her heart. William was her idol&mdash;she lived but for
+him&mdash;now she seemed to be replaced. She moved away into a modest cottage
+of her own, resolved that she would not be an encumbrance to any one.
+She thought she was going into a decline, and would not live long
+anyway&mdash;she was so pale and slight that Miss Burney said it took two of
+her to make a shadow.</p>
+
+<p>But we get a glimpse of Caroline's energy when we find her writing home
+explaining how she had just painted her house, inside and out, with her
+own hands.</p>
+
+<p>Things are never so bad as they seem. It was not very long before
+William was sending for Caroline to come and help him out with his
+mathematical calculations. Later, when a fine boy baby arrived in the
+Herschel solar system, Caroline forgave all and came to take care of
+what she called "the Herschel planetoid." She loved this baby as her
+own, and all the pent-up motherhood in her nature went out to the little
+"Sir John Herschel," the knighthood having been conferred on him by
+Caroline before he was a month old.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Herschel was beautiful and amiable, and she and Caroline became
+genuine sisters in spirit. Each had her own work to do; they were not in
+competition save in their love for the baby. As the boy grew, Caroline
+took upon herself the task of teaching him astronomy, quite to the
+amusement of the father and mother. Fanny Burney now comes with a little
+flung-off nebula to the effect that "Herschel is quite the happiest man
+in the kingdom." There is a most charming little biography of Caroline
+Herschel, written by the good wife of Sir John Herschel, wherein some
+very gentle foibles are laid bare, and where at the same time tribute is
+paid to a great and beautiful spirit. The idea that Caroline was not
+going to live long after the marriage of her brother was "greatly
+exaggerated"&mdash;she lived to be ninety-eight, a century lacking two years!
+Her mind was bright to the last&mdash;when ninety she sang at a concert given
+for the benefit of an old ladies' home. At ninety-six she danced a
+minuet with the King of Prussia, and requested that worthy not to
+introduce her as "the woman astronomer, because, you know, I was only
+the assistant of my brother!" William Herschel died in his eighty-fourth
+year, with his fame at full, honored, respected, beloved.</p>
+
+<p>Sir John Herschel, his son, was worthy to be called the son of his
+father. He was an active worker in the field of science&mdash;a strong, yet
+gentle man, with no jealousy nor whim in his nature. "His life was full
+of the docility<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> of a sage and the innocence of a child."</p>
+
+<p>John Herschel died at Collingwood, May Eleventh, Eighteen Hundred
+Seventy-one, and his dust is now resting in Westminster Abbey, close by
+the grave of England's famous scholar, Sir Isaac Newton.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHARLES_DARWIN" id="CHARLES_DARWIN"></a>CHARLES DARWIN</h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img442.jpg" alt="DARWIN" title="DARWIN" /></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I feel most deeply that this whole question of Creation is too
+profound for human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the
+mind of Newton! Let each man hope and believe what he can.</p>
+
+<p class='author'>&mdash;<i>Charles Darwin to Asa Gray</i></p>
+
+<p>None have fought better, and none have been more fortunate, than
+Charles Darwin. He found a great truth trodden underfoot, reviled
+by bigots, and ridiculed by all the world; he lived long enough to
+see it, chiefly by his own efforts, irrefragably established in
+science, inseparably incorporated into the common thoughts of men.
+What shall a man desire more than this?</p>
+
+<p class='author'>&mdash;<i>Thomas Huxley, Address, April Twenty-seventh, Eighteen Hundred
+Eighty-two.</i></p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHARLES DARWIN</h2>
+
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imge.jpg" alt="E" title="E" /></div><p>volution is at work everywhere, even in the matter of jokes. Once
+in the House of Commons, Benjamin Disraeli, who prided himself on his
+fine scholarship as well as on his Hyperion curl, interrupted a speaker
+and corrected him on a matter of history.</p>
+
+<p>"I would rather be a gentleman than a scholar!" the man replied. "My
+friend is seldom either," came the quick response.</p>
+
+<p>When Thomas Brackett Reed was Speaker of the House of Representatives, a
+member once took exception to a ruling of the "Czar," and having in mind
+Reed's supposed Presidential aspirations closed his protests with the
+thrust, "I would rather be right than President." "The gentleman will
+never be either," came the instant retort.</p>
+
+<p>But some years before the reign of the American Czar, Gladstone, Premier
+of England, said, "I would rather be right and believe in the Bible,
+than excite a body of curious, infidelic, so-called scientists to
+unbecoming wonder by tracing their ancestry to a troglodyte." And Huxley
+replied, "I, too, would rather be right&mdash;I would rather be right than
+Premier."</p>
+
+<p>Charles Darwin was a Gentle Man. He was the greatest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> naturalist of his
+time, and a more perfect gentleman never lived. His son Francis said: "I
+can not remember ever hearing my father utter an unkind or hasty word.
+If in his presence some one was being harshly criticized, he always
+thought of something to say in way of palliation and excuse."</p>
+
+<p>One of his companions on the "Beagle," who saw him daily for five years
+on that memorable trip, wrote: "A protracted sea-voyage is a most severe
+test of friendship, and Darwin was the only man on our ship, or that I
+ever heard of, who stood the ordeal. He never lost his temper or made an
+unkind remark."</p>
+
+<p>Captain Fitz-Roy of the "Beagle" was a disciplinarian, and absolute in
+his authority, as a sea-captain must be. The ship had just left one of
+the South American ports where the captain had gone ashore and been
+entertained by a coffee-planter. On this plantation all the work was
+done by slaves, who, no doubt, were very well treated.</p>
+
+<p>The captain thought that negroes well cared for were very much better
+off than if free. And further, he related how the owner had called up
+various slaves and had the Captain ask them if they wished their
+freedom, and the answer was always, "No."</p>
+
+<p>Darwin interposed by asking the Captain what he thought the answer of a
+slave was worth when being interrogated in the presence of his owner.</p>
+
+<p>Here Fitz-Roy flew into a passion, berating the volunteer naturalist,
+and suggested a taste of the rope's end<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> in lieu of logic. Young Darwin
+made no reply, and seemingly did not hear the uncalled-for chidings.</p>
+
+<p>In a few hours a sailor handed him a note from Captain Fitz-Roy, full of
+abject apology for having so forgotten himself. Darwin was then but
+twenty-two years old, but the poise and patience of the young man won
+the respect and then the admiration and finally the affection of every
+man on board that ship. This attitude of kindness, patience and
+good-will formed the strongest attribute of Darwin's nature, and to
+these godlike qualities he was heir from a royal line of ancestry. No
+man was ever more blest&mdash;more richly endowed by his parents with love
+and intellect&mdash;than Darwin. And no man ever repaid the debt of love more
+fully&mdash;all that he had received he gave again.</p>
+
+<p>Darwin is the Saint of Science. He proves the possible; and when mankind
+shall have evolved to a point where such men will be the rule, not the
+exception&mdash;as one in a million&mdash;then, and not until then, can we say we
+are a civilized people.</p>
+
+<p>Charles Darwin was not only the greatest thinker of his time (with
+possibly one exception), but in his simplicity and earnestness, in his
+limpid love for truth&mdash;his perfect willingness to abandon his opinion if
+he were found to be wrong&mdash;in all these things he proved himself the
+greatest man of his time.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is absurd to try to separate the scientist from the father,
+neighbor and friend. Darwin's love for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> truth as a scientist was what
+lifted him out of the fog of whim and prejudice and set him apart as a
+man.</p>
+
+<p>He had no time to hate. He had no time to indulge in foolish debates and
+struggle for rhetorical mastery&mdash;he had his work to do.</p>
+
+<p>That statesmen like Gladstone misquoted him, and churchmen like
+Wilberforce reviled him&mdash;these things were as naught to Darwin&mdash;his face
+was toward the sunrising. To be able to know the truth, and to state it,
+were vital issues: whether the truth was accepted by this man or that
+was quite immaterial, except possibly to the man himself. There was no
+resentment in Darwin's nature.</p>
+
+<p>Only love is immortal&mdash;hate is a negative condition. It is love that
+animates, beautifies, benefits, refines, creates. So firmly was this
+truth fixed in the heart of Darwin that throughout his long life the
+only things he feared and shunned were hate and prejudice. "They hinder
+and blind a man to truth," he said&mdash;"a scientist must only love."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imge.jpg" alt="E" title="E" /></div><p>merson has been called the culminating flower of seven generations of
+New England culture. Charles Darwin seems a similar culminating product.</p>
+
+<p>Surely he showed rare judgment in the selection of his grandparents. His
+grandfather on his father's side was Doctor Erasmus Darwin, a poet, a
+naturalist, and a physician so discerning that he once wrote: "The
+science of medicine will some time resolve itself into a science of
+prevention rather than a matter of cure. Man was made to be well, and
+the best medicine I know of is an active and intelligent interest in the
+world of Nature."</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus Darwin had the felicity to have his biography written in German,
+and he also has his place in the "Encyclopedia Britannica" quite
+independent of that of his gifted grandson.</p>
+
+<p>Charles Darwin's grandfather on his mother's side was Josiah Wedgwood,
+one of the most versatile of men. He was as fine in spirit as those
+exquisite designs by Flaxman that you will see today on the Wedgwood
+pottery. Josiah Wedgwood was a businessman&mdash;an organizer, and he was
+beyond this, an artist, a naturalist, a sociologist and a lover of his
+race. His portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds reveals a man of rare
+intelligence, and his biography is as interesting as a novel by Kipling.
+His space in the "Encyclopedia Britannica" is even more important than
+that occupied by his dear<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> friend and neighbor, Doctor Erasmus Darwin.
+The hand of the Potter did not shake when Josiah Wedgwood was made.
+Josiah Wedgwood and Doctor Darwin had mutually promised their children
+in marriage. Wedgwood became rich and he made numerous other men rich,
+and he enriched the heart and the intellect of England by setting before
+it beautiful things, and by living an earnest, active and beautiful
+life.</p>
+
+<p>Josiah Wedgwood coined the word "queensware." He married his cousin,
+Sarah Wedgwood. Their daughter, Susannah Wedgwood, married Doctor Robert
+Darwin, and Charles Darwin, their son, married Emma Wedgwood, a daughter
+of Josiah Wedgwood the Second. Caroline Darwin, a sister of Charles
+Darwin, married Josiah Wedgwood the Third. Let those who have the time
+work out this origin of species in detail and show us the relationship
+of the Darwins and Wedgwoods. And I hope we'll hear no more about the
+folly of cousins marrying, when Charles Darwin is before us as an
+example of natural selection.</p>
+
+<p>From his mother Darwin inherited those traits of gentleness, insight,
+purity of purpose, patience and persistency that set him apart as a
+marked man.</p>
+
+<p>The father of Charles Darwin, Doctor Robert Darwin, was a most
+successful physician of Shrewsbury.</p>
+
+<p>His marriage to Susannah Wedgwood filled his heart, and also placed him
+on a firm financial footing, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> he seemed to take his choice of
+patients. Doctor Darwin was a man devoted to his family, respected by
+his neighbors, and he lived long enough to see his son recognized,
+greatly to his surprise, as one of England's foremost scientists.</p>
+
+<p>Charles Darwin in youth was rather slow in intellect, and in form and
+feature far from handsome. Physically he was never strong. In
+disposition he was gentle and most lovable. His mother died when he was
+eight years of age, and his three older sisters then mothered him.
+Between them all existed a tie of affection, very gentle, and very firm.</p>
+
+<p>The girls knew that Charles would become an eminent man&mdash;just how they
+could not guess&mdash;but he would be a leader of men: they felt it in their
+hearts. It was all the beautiful dream that the mother has for her babe
+as she sings to the man-child a lullaby as the sun goes down.</p>
+
+<p>In his autobiographical sketch, written when he was past sixty, Darwin
+mentions this faith and love of his sisters, and says, "Personally, I
+never had much ambition, but when at college I felt that I must work, if
+for no other reason, so as not to disappoint my sisters."</p>
+
+<p>At school Charles was considerable of a grubber: he worked hard because
+he felt that it was his duty. English boarding-schools have always
+taught things out of season, and very often have succeeded in making<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>
+learning wholly repugnant. Perhaps that is the reason why nine men out
+of ten who go to college cease all study as soon as they stand on "the
+threshold," looking at life ere they seize it by the tail and snap its
+head off. To them education is one thing and life another.</p>
+
+<p>But with many headaches and many heartaches Charles got through
+Cambridge and then was sent to attend lectures at the University of
+Edinburgh. Of one lecturer in Scotland he says, "The good man was really
+more dull than his books, and how I escaped without all science being
+utterly distasteful to me I hardly know." To Cambridge, Darwin owed
+nothing but the association with other minds, yet this was much, and
+almost justifies the college. "Send your sons to college and the boys
+will educate them," said Emerson.</p>
+
+<p>The most beneficent influence for Darwin at Cambridge was the friendship
+between himself and Professor Henslow. Darwin became known as "the man
+who walks with Henslow." The professor taught botany, and took his
+classes on tramps a-field and on barge rides down the river, giving
+out-of-door lectures on the way. This commonsense way of teaching
+appealed to Darwin greatly, and although he did not at Cambridge take up
+botany as a study, yet when Henslow had an out-of-door class he usually
+managed to go along.</p>
+
+<p>In his autobiography Darwin gives great credit to this very gentle and
+simple soul, who, although not being great as a thinker, yet could
+animate and arouse<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> a pleasurable interest.</p>
+
+<p>Henslow was once admonished by the faculty for his lack of discipline,
+and young Darwin came near getting himself into difficulty by declaring,
+"Professor Henslow teaches his pupils in love; the others think they
+know a better way!"</p>
+
+<p>The hope of his father and sisters was that Charles Darwin would become
+a clergyman. For the army he had no taste whatsoever, and at twenty-one
+the only thing seemed to be the Church. Not that the young man was
+filled with religious zeal&mdash;far from that&mdash;but one must, you know, do
+something. Up to this time he had studied in a desultory way; he had
+also dreamed and tramped the fields. He had done considerable
+grouse-shooting and had developed a little too much skill in that
+particular line.</p>
+
+<p>To paraphrase Herbert Spencer, to shoot fairly well is a manly
+accomplishment, but to shoot too well is evidence of an ill-spent youth.
+Doctor Darwin was having fears that his son was going to be an idle
+sportsman, and he was urging the divinity-school.</p>
+
+<p>The real fact was that sportsmanship was already becoming distasteful to
+young Darwin, and his hunting expeditions were now largely carried on
+with a botanist's drum and a geologist's hammer.</p>
+
+<p>But to the practical Doctor these things were no better than the gun&mdash;it
+was idling, anyway. Natural History as a pastime was excellent, and
+sportsmanship for exercise and recreation had its place, but the
+business<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> of life must not be neglected&mdash;Charles should get himself to a
+divinity-school, and quickly, too.</p>
+
+<p>Things urged become repellent; and Charles was groping around for an
+excuse when a letter came from Professor Henslow, saying, among other
+things, that the Government was about to send a ship around the world on
+a scientific surveying tour, especially to map the coast of Patagonia
+and other parts of South America and Australia. A volunteer naturalist
+was wanted&mdash;board and passage free, but the volunteer was to supply his
+own clothes and instruments.</p>
+
+<p>The proposition gave Charles a great thrill: he gave a gulp and a gasp
+and went in search of his father. The father saw nothing in the plan
+beyond the fact that the Government was going to get several years' work
+out of some foolish young man, for nothing&mdash;gadzooks!</p>
+
+<p>Charles insisted&mdash;he wanted to go! He urged that on this trip he would
+be to but very little expense. "You say I have cost you much, but the
+fellow who can spend money on board ship must be very clever." "But you
+are a very clever young man, they say," the father replied. That night
+Charles again insisted on discussing the matter. The father was
+exasperated and exclaimed, "Go and find me one sane man who will endorse
+your wild-goose chase and I will give my consent."</p>
+
+<p>Charles said no more&mdash;he would find that "sane man." But he knew
+perfectly well that if any average person endorsed the plan his father
+would declare the man was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> insane, and the proof of it lay in the fact
+that he endorsed the wild-goose chase.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning Charles started of his own accord to see Henslow. Henslow
+would endorse the trip, but both parties knew that Doctor Darwin would
+not accept a mere college professor as sane. Charles went home and
+tramped thirty miles across the country to the home of his uncle, Josiah
+Wedgwood the Second. There he knew he had an advocate for anything he
+might wish, in the person of his fair cousin, Emma. These two laid their
+heads together, made a plan and stalked their prey.</p>
+
+<p>They cornered Josiah the Second after dinner and showed him how it was
+the chance of a lifetime&mdash;this trip on H.M.S. the "Beagle"! Charles
+wasn't adapted for a clergyman, anyway; he wanted to be a ship-captain,
+a traveler, a discoverer, a scientist, an author like Sir John
+Mandeville, or something else. Josiah the Second had but to speak the
+word and Doctor Darwin would be silenced, and the recommendation of so
+great a man as Josiah Wedgwood would secure the place.</p>
+
+<p>Josiah the Second laughed&mdash;then he looked sober. He agreed with the
+proposition&mdash;it was the chance of a lifetime. He would go back home with
+Charles and put the Doctor straight. And he did.</p>
+
+<p>And on the personal endorsement of Josiah Wedgwood and Professor
+Henslow, Charles Robert Darwin was duly booked as Volunteer Naturalist
+in Her Majesty's service.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgc.jpg" alt="C" title="C" /></div><p>aptain Fitz-Roy of the "Beagle" liked Charles Darwin until he began to
+look him over with a very professional eye. Then he declared his nose
+was too large and was not rightly shaped; besides, he was too tall for
+his weight: outside of these points the Volunteer would answer. On
+talking with young Darwin further, the Captain liked him better, and he
+waived all imperfections, although no promise was made that they would
+be remedied. In fact, Captain Fitz-Roy liked Charles so well that he
+invited him to share his own cabin and mess with him. The sailors, on
+seeing this, touched respectful forefingers to their caps and began
+addressing the Volunteer as "Sir."</p>
+
+<p>The "Beagle" sailed on December Twenty-seven, Eighteen Hundred
+Thirty-one, and it was fully four years and ten months before Charles
+Darwin saw England again. The trip decided the business of Darwin for
+the rest of his life, and thereby an epoch was worked in the upward and
+onward march of the race.</p>
+
+<p>Captain Fitz-Roy of the British Navy was but twenty-three years old. He
+was a draftsman, a geographer, a mathematician and a navigator. He had
+sailed around the world as a plain tar, and taken his kicks and cuffs
+with good grace. At the Portsmouth Naval School he had won a gold medal
+for proficiency in study, and another medal had been given him for
+heroism in leaping from a sailing-ship into the sea to save a drowning<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>
+sailor.</p>
+
+<p>Let us be fair&mdash;the tight little island has produced men. To evolve
+these few good men she may have produced many millions of the spawn of
+earth, but let the fact stand&mdash;England has produced men. Here was a
+beardless youth, slight in form, silent by habit, but so well thought of
+by his Government that he was given charge of a ship, five officers, two
+surgeons and forty-one picked men to go around the world and make
+measurements of certain coral-reefs, and map the dangerous coasts of
+Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.</p>
+
+<p>The ship was provisioned for two years, but the orders were, "Do the
+work, no matter how long it may take, and your drafts on the Government
+will be honored."</p>
+
+<p>Captain Fitz-Roy was a man of decision: he knew just where he wanted to
+go, and what there was to do. He was to measure and map dreary wastes of
+tossing tide, and to do the task so accurately that it would never have
+to be done again: his maps were to remain forever a solace, a safety and
+a security to the men who go down to the sea in ships.</p>
+
+<p>England has certainly produced men&mdash;and Fitz-Roy was one of them.
+Fitz-Roy is now known to us, not for his maps which have passed into the
+mutual wealth of the world, but because he took on this trip, merely as
+an afterthought, a volunteer naturalist.</p>
+
+<p>Before the "Beagle" sailed, Captain Fitz-Roy and young Mr. Darwin went
+down to Portsmouth, and the Captain showed him the ship. The Captain
+took pains<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> to explain the worst. It was to be at least two years of
+close, unremitting toil. It was no pleasure-excursion&mdash;there were no
+amusements provided, no cards, no wine on the table; the fare was to be
+simple in the extreme. This way of putting the matter was most
+attractive to Darwin&mdash;Fitz-Roy became a hero in his eyes at once. The
+Captain's manner inspired much confidence&mdash;he was a man who did not have
+to be amused or cajoled. "You will be left alone to do your work," said
+Fitz-Roy to Darwin, "and I must have the cabin to myself when I ask for
+it." And that settled it. Life aboard ship is like life in jail. It
+means freedom, freedom from interruption&mdash;you have your evenings to
+yourself, and the days as well. Darwin admired every man on board the
+ship, and most of all, the man who selected them, and so wrote home to
+his sisters. He admired the men because each was intent on doing his
+work, and each one seemed to assume that his own particular work was
+really the most important.</p>
+
+<p>Second Officer Wickham was entrusted to see that the ship was in good
+order, and so thorough was he that he once said to Darwin, who was
+constantly casting his net for specimens, "If I were the skipper, I'd
+soon have you and your beastly belittlement out of this ship with all
+your devilish, damned mess." And Darwin, much amused, wrote this down in
+his journal, and added, "Wickham is a most capital<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> fellow." The
+discipline and system of ship-life, the necessity of working in a small
+space, and of improving the calm weather, and seizing every moment when
+on shore, all tended to work in Darwin's nature exactly the habit that
+was needed to make him the greatest naturalist of his age.</p>
+
+<p>Every sort of life that lived in the sea was new and wonderful to him.
+Very early on this trip Darwin began to work on the "Cirripedia"
+(barnacles), and we hear of Captain Fitz-Roy obligingly hailing
+homeward-bound ships, and putting out a small boat, rowing alongside,
+asking politely, to the astonishment of the party hailed, "Would you
+oblige us with a few barnacles off the bottom of your ship?" All this
+that the Volunteer, who was dubbed the "Flycatcher," might have
+something upon which to work.</p>
+
+<p>When on shore a sailor was detailed by Captain Fitz-Roy just to attend
+the "Flycatcher," with a bag to carry the specimens, geological,
+botanical and zoological, and a cabin-boy was set apart to write notes.
+This boy, who afterward became Governor of Queens and a K.C.B., used
+in after years to boast a bit, and rightfully, of his share in producing
+"The Origin of Species." When urged to smoke, Darwin replied, "I am not
+making any new necessities for myself."</p>
+
+<p>When the weather was rough the "Flycatcher" was sick, much to the
+delight of Wickham; but if the ship was becalmed, Darwin came out and
+gloried in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> sunshine, and in his work of dissecting, labeling, and
+writing memoranda and data. The sailors might curse the weather&mdash;he did
+not. Thus passed the days. At each stop many specimens were secured, and
+these were to be sorted and sifted out at leisure.</p>
+
+<p>On shore the Captain had his work to do, and it was only after a year
+that Darwin accidentally discovered that the sailor who was sent to
+carry his specimens was always armed with knife and revolver, and his
+orders were not so much to carry what Wickham called, "the damned
+plunder," as to see that no harm befell the "Flycatcher."</p>
+
+<p>Fitz-Roy's interest in the scientific work was only general: longitude
+and latitude, his twenty-four chronometers, his maps and constant
+soundings, with minute records, kept his time occupied.</p>
+
+<p>For Darwin and his specimens, however, he had a constantly growing
+respect, and when the long five-year trip was ended, Darwin realized
+that the gruff and grim Captain was indeed his friend. Captain Fitz-Roy
+had trouble with everybody on board in turn, thus proving his
+impartiality; but when parting was nigh, tears came to his eyes as he
+embraced Darwin, and said, with prophetic yet broken words, "The
+'Beagle's' voyage may be remembered more through you than me&mdash;I hope it
+will be so!" And Darwin, too moved for speech, said nothing except
+through the pressure of his hand.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>he idea of evolution took a firm hold upon the mind of Darwin, in an
+instant, one day while on board the "Beagle." From that very hour the
+thought of the mutability of species was the one controlling impulse of
+his life.</p>
+
+<p>On his return from the trip around the world he found himself in
+possession of an immense mass of specimens and much data bearing
+directly upon the point that creation is still going on.</p>
+
+<p>That he could ever sort, sift and formulate his evidence on his own
+account, he never at this time imagined. Indeed, about all he thought he
+could do was to present his notes and specimens to some scientific
+society, in the hope that some of its members would go ahead and use the
+material.</p>
+
+<p>With this thought in mind he began to open correspondence with several
+of the universities and with various professors of science, and to his
+dismay found that no one was willing even to read his notes, much less
+house, prepare for preservation, and index his thousands of specimens.</p>
+
+<p>He read papers before different scientific societies, however, from time
+to time, and gradually in London it dawned upon the few thinkers that
+this modest and low-voiced young man was doing a little thinking on his
+own account. One man to whom he had offered the specimens bluntly
+explained to Darwin that his specimens and ideas were valuable to no one
+but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> himself, and it was folly to try to give such things away. Ideas
+are like children and should be cared for by their parents, and
+specimens are for the collector.</p>
+
+<p>Seeing the depression of the young man, this friend offered to present
+the matter to the Secretary of the Exchequer. Everything can be done
+when the right man takes hold of it: the sum of one thousand pounds was
+appropriated by the Treasury for Charles Darwin's use in bringing out a
+Government report of the voyage of the "Beagle." And Darwin set to work,
+refreshed, rejoiced and encouraged. He was living in London in modest
+quarters, solitary and alone. He was not handsome, and he lacked the
+dash and flash that make a success in society. On a trip to his old
+home, he walked across the country to see his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood the
+Second.</p>
+
+<p>When he left it was arranged that he should return in a month and marry
+his cousin, Emma Wedgwood. And it was all so done.</p>
+
+<p>One commentator said he married his cousin because he didn't know any
+other woman that would have him. But none was so unkind as to say that
+he married her in order to get rid of her, yet Henslow wondered how he
+ceased wooing science long enough to woo the lady.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless the parents of both parties had a little to do with the
+arrangement, and in this instance it was beautiful and well. Darwin was
+married to his work,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> and no such fallacy as marrying a woman in order
+to educate her filled his mind.</p>
+
+<p>His wife was his mental mate, his devoted helper and friend.</p>
+
+<p>It is no small matter for a wife to be her husband's friend.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Darwin had no small aspirations of her own. She flew the futile
+Four-o'Clock and made no flannel nightgowns for Fijis. Twenty years
+after his marriage, Darwin wrote thus: "It is probably as you say&mdash;I
+have done an enormous amount of work. And this was only possible through
+the devotion of my wife, who, ignoring every idea of pleasure and
+comfort for herself, arranged in a thousand ways to give me joy and
+rest, peace and most valuable inspiration and assistance. If I
+occasionally lost faith in myself, she most certainly never did. Only
+two hours a day could I work, and these to her were sacred. She guarded
+me as a mother guards her babe, and I look back now and see how
+hopelessly undone I should have been without her."</p>
+
+<p>In Eighteen Hundred Forty-two, Darwin and his wife moved to the village
+of Down, County of Kent. The place where they lived was a rambling old
+stone house with ample garden. The country was rough and unbroken, and
+one might have imagined he was a thousand miles from London, instead of
+twenty.</p>
+
+<p>There were no aristocratic neighbors, no society to speak of. With the
+plain farmers and simple folk of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> the village Darwin was on good terms.
+He became treasurer of the local improvement society, and thereby was
+serenaded once a year by a brass band. We hear of the good old village
+rector once saying, "Mr. Darwin knows botany better than anybody this
+side of Kew; and although I am sorry to say that he seldom goes to
+church, yet he is a good neighbor and almost a model citizen." Together
+the clergyman and his neighbor discussed the merits of climbing roses,
+morning-glories and sweet-peas. Darwin met all and every one on terms of
+absolute equality, and never forced his scientific hypotheses upon any
+one. In fact, no one in the village imagined this quiet country
+gentleman in the dusty gray clothes that matched his full iron-gray
+beard was destined for a place in Westminster Abbey&mdash;no, not even
+himself!</p>
+
+<p>Darwin's father, seeing that the Government had recognized him, and that
+all the scientific societies of London were quite willing to do as much,
+settled on him an allowance that was ample for his simple wants.</p>
+
+<p>On the death of Doctor Darwin, Charles became possessed of an
+inheritance that brought him a yearly income of a little over five
+hundred pounds. Children came to bless this happy household&mdash;seven in
+all. With these Darwin was both comrade and teacher. Two hours a day
+were sacred to science, but outside of this time the children made the
+study their own,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> and littered the place with their collections gathered
+on heath and dale.</p>
+
+<p>The recognition of the "holy time" was strong in the minds of the
+children, so no prohibitions were needed. One daughter has written in
+familiar way of once wanting to go into her father's study for a
+forgotten pair of scissors. It was the "holy time," and she thought she
+could not wait, so she took off her shoes and entered in stocking feet,
+hoping to be unobserved. Her father was working at his microscope: he
+saw her, reached out one arm as she passed, drew her to him and kissed
+her forehead. The little girl never again trespassed&mdash;how could she,
+with the father that gave her only love! That there was no sternness in
+this recognition of the value of the working hours is further indicated
+in that little Francis, aged six, once put his head in the door and
+offered the father a sixpence if he would come out and play in the
+garden.</p>
+
+<p>For several years Darwin was village magistrate. Most of the cases
+brought before him were either for poaching or drunkenness. "He always
+seemed to be trying to find an excuse for the prisoner, and usually
+succeeded," says his son.</p>
+
+<p>One time, when a prosecuting attorney complained because he had
+discharged a prisoner, Darwin, who might have fined the impudent
+attorney for contempt of court, merely said: "Why, he's as good as we
+are. If tempted in the same way I am sure that I would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> have done as he
+has done. We can't blame a man for doing what he has to do!" This was
+poor reasoning from a legal point of view. Darwin afterward admitted
+that he didn't hear much of the evidence, as his mind was full of
+orchids, but the fellow looked sorry, and he really couldn't punish
+anybody who had simply made a mistake. The local legal lights gradually
+lost faith in Magistrate Darwin's peculiar brand of justice; he hadn't
+much respect for law, and once when a lawyer cited him the criminal code
+he said, "Tut, tut, that was made a hundred years ago!" Then he fined
+the man five shillings, and paid the fine himself, when he should have
+sent him to the workhouse for six months.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>he men who have most benefited the world have, almost without
+exception, been looked down upon by the priestly class. That is to say,
+the men upon whose tombs society now carves the word Savior were
+outcasts and criminals in their day.</p>
+
+<p>In a society where the priest is regarded as the mouthpiece of divinity,
+and therefore the highest type of man, the artist, the inventor, the
+discoverer, the genius, the man of truth, has always been regarded as a
+criminal. Society advances as it doubts the priest, distrusts his
+oracles, and loses faith in his institution.</p>
+
+<p>In the priest, at first, was deposited all human knowledge, and what he
+did not know he pretended to know. He was the guardian of mind and
+morals, and the cure of souls. To question him was to die here and be
+damned for eternity.</p>
+
+<p>The problem of civilization has been to get the truth past the preacher
+to the people: he has forever barred and blocked the way, and until he
+was shorn of his temporal power there was no hope. The prisons were
+first made for those who doubted the priest; behind and beneath every
+episcopal residence were dungeons; the ferocious and delicate tortures
+that reached every physical and mental nerve were his. His anathemas and
+curses were always quickly turned upon the strong men of mountain or sea
+who dared live natural lives, said what they thought was truth, or did
+what they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> deemed was right. Science is a search for truth, but theology
+is a clutch for power.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is so distasteful to a priest as freedom: a happy, exuberant,
+fearless, self-sufficient and radiant man he both feared and abhorred. A
+free soul was regarded by the Church as one to be dealt with. The priest
+has ever put a premium on pretense and hypocrisy. Nothing recommended a
+man more than humility and the acknowledgment that he was a worm of the
+dust. The ability to do and dare was in itself considered a proof of
+depravity.</p>
+
+<p>The education of the young has been monopolized by priests in order to
+perpetuate the fallacies of theology, and all endeavor to put education
+on a footing of usefulness and utility has been fought inch by inch.</p>
+
+<p>Andrew D. White, in his book, "The Warfare of Science and Religion," has
+calmly and without heat sketched the war that Science has had to make to
+reach the light. Slowly, stubbornly, insolently, theology has fought
+Truth step by step&mdash;but always retreating, taking refuge first behind
+one subterfuge, then another. When an alleged fact was found to be a
+fallacy, we were told it was not a literal fact, simply a spiritual one.
+All of theology's weapons have been taken from her and placed in the
+Museum of Horrors&mdash;all save one, namely, social ostracism. And this
+consists in a refusal to invite Science to indulge in cream-puffs.</p>
+
+<p>We smile, knowing that the man who now successfully<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> defies theology is
+the only one she really, yet secretly, admires. If he does not run after
+her, she holds true the poetic unities by running after him. Mankind is
+emancipated (or partially so).</p>
+
+<p>Darwin's fame rests, for the most part, on two books, "The Origin of
+Species" and "The Descent of Man."</p>
+
+<p>Yet before these were published he had issued "A Journal of Research
+into Geology and Natural History," "The Zoology of the Voyage of the
+'Beagle,'" "A Treatise on Coral Reefs, Volcanic Islands, Geological
+Observations," and "A Monograph of the Cirripedia." Had Darwin died
+before "The Origin of Species" was published, he would have been famous
+among scientific men, although it was the abuse of theologians on the
+publication of "The Origin of Species" that really made him
+world-famous.</p>
+
+<p>Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin's chief competitor said that "A Monograph
+on the Cirripedia" is enough upon which to found a deathless reputation.
+Darwin was equally eminent in Geology, Botany and Zoology.</p>
+
+<p>On November Twenty-fourth, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, was published
+"The Origin of Species." Murray had hesitated about accepting the work,
+but on the earnest solicitation of Sir Charles Lyell, who gave his
+personal guarantee to the publisher against loss, quite unknown to
+Darwin, twelve hundred copies of the book were printed. The edition was
+sold in one day, and who was surprised most, the author or the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>
+publisher, it is difficult to say.</p>
+
+<p>Up to this time theology had stood solidly on the biblical assertion
+that mankind had sprung from one man and one woman, and that in the
+beginning every species was fixed and immutable. Aristotle, three
+hundred years before Christ, had suggested that, by cross-fertilization
+and change of environment, new species had been and were being evoked.
+But the Church had declared Aristotle a heathen, and in every school and
+college of Christendom it was taught that the world and everything in it
+was created in six days of twenty-four hours each, and that this
+occurred four thousand and four years before Christ, on May Tenth.</p>
+
+<p>Those who doubted or disputed this statement had no standing in society,
+and in truth, until the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, were in
+actual danger of death&mdash;heresy and treason being usually regarded as the
+same thing.</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus Darwin had taught that species were not immutable, but his words
+were so veiled in the language of poesy that they naturally went
+unchallenged. But now the grandson of Doctor Erasmus Darwin came forward
+with the net result of thirty years' continuous work. "The Origin of
+Species" did not attack any one's religious belief&mdash;in fact, in it the
+biblical account of Creation is not once referred to. It was a calm,
+judicial record of close study and observation, that seemed to prove
+that life began in very lowly forms,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> and that it has constantly
+ascended and differentiated, new forms and new species being continually
+created, and that the work of creation still goes on.</p>
+
+<p>In the preface to "The Origin of Species" Darwin gives Alfred Russel
+Wallace credit for coming to the same conclusion as himself, and states
+that both had been at work on the same idea for more than a score of
+years, but each working separately, unknown to the other.</p>
+
+<p>Andrew D. White says that the publication of Charles Darwin's book was
+like plowing into an ant-hill. The theologians, rudely awakened from
+comfort and repose, swarmed out angry, wrathful and confused. The air
+was charged with challenges; and soggy sermons, books, pamphlets,
+brochures and reviews, all were flying at the head of poor Darwin. The
+questions that he had anticipated and answered at great length were
+flung off by men who had neither read his book nor expected an answer.
+The idea that man had evolved from a lower form of animal especially was
+considered immensely funny, and jokes about "monkey ancestry" came from
+almost every pulpit, convulsing the pews with laughter.</p>
+
+<p>In passing, it may be well to note that Darwin nowhere says that man
+descended from a monkey. He does, however, affirm his belief that they
+had a common ancestor. One branch of the family took to the plains, and
+evolved into men, and the other branch remained<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> in the woods and are
+monkeys still. The expression, "the missing link," is nowhere used by
+Darwin&mdash;that was a creation of one of his critics.</p>
+
+<p>Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, summed up the argument against Darwinism
+in the "Quarterly Review," by declaring that "Darwin was guilty of an
+attempt to limit the power of God"; that his book "contradicts the
+Bible"; that "it dishonors Nature." And in a speech before the British
+Association for the Advancement of Science, where Darwin was not
+present, the Bishop repeated his assertions, and turning to Huxley,
+asked if he were really descended from a monkey, and if so, was it on
+his father's or his mother's side!</p>
+
+<p>Huxley sat silent, refusing to reply, but the audience began to clamor,
+and Huxley slowly arose, and calmly but forcibly said: "I assert, and I
+repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his
+grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in
+recalling, it would be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect,
+who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges
+into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only
+to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of
+his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digression and a
+skilful appeal to religious prejudices." Captain Fitz-Roy, who was
+present at this meeting, was also called for.</p>
+
+<p>He was now Admiral Fitz-Roy, and felt compelled<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> to uphold his employer,
+the State, so he upheld the State Religion and backed up the Bishop of
+Oxford in his emptiness. "I often had occasion on board the 'Beagle' to
+reprove Mr. Darwin for his disbelief in the First Chapter of Genesis,"
+solemnly said the Admiral. And Francis Darwin writes it down without
+comment, probably to show how much the Volunteer Naturalist was helped,
+aided and inspired by the Captain of the Expedition.</p>
+
+<p>But the reply of Huxley was a shot heard round the world, and for the
+most part the echo was passed along by the enemy.</p>
+
+<p>Huxley had insulted the Church, they said, and the adherents of the
+Mosaic account took the attitude of outraged and injured innocence.</p>
+
+<p>As for himself, Darwin said nothing. He ceased to attend the meetings of
+the scientific societies, for fear that he would be drawn into debate,
+and while he felt a sincere gratitude for Huxley's friendship, he
+deprecated the stern rebuke to the Bishop of Oxford. "It will arouse the
+opposition to greater unreason," he said. And this was exactly what
+happened.</p>
+
+<p>Even the English Catholics took sides with Wilberforce, the Protestant,
+and Cardinal Manning organized a society "to fight this new, so-called
+science that declares there is no God and that Adam was an ape."</p>
+
+<p>Even the Non-Conformists and Jews came in, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> there was the very
+peculiar spectacle witnessed of the Church of England, the
+Non-Conformists, the Catholics and the Jews aroused and standing as one
+man, against one quiet villager who remained at home and said, "If my
+book can not stand the bombardment, why then it deserves to go down and
+to be forgotten."</p>
+
+<p>Spurgeon declared that Darwinism was more dangerous than open and avowed
+infidelity, since "the one motive of the whole book is to dethrone God."</p>
+
+<p>Rabbi Hirschberg wrote, "Darwin's volume is plausible to the unthinking
+person; but a deeper insight shows a mephitic desire to overthrow the
+Mosaic books and to bury Judaism under a mass of fanciful rubbish."</p>
+
+<p>In America Darwin had no more persistent critic than the Reverend DeWitt
+Talmage. For ten years Doctor Talmage scarcely preached a sermon without
+making reference to "monkey ancestry" and "baboon unbelievers."</p>
+
+<p>The New York "Christian Advocate" declared, "Darwin is endeavoring to
+becloud and befog the whole question of truth, and his book will be of
+short life."</p>
+
+<p>An eminent Catholic physician and writer, Doctor Constantine James,
+wrote a book of three hundred pages called "Darwinism, or the Man-Ape."
+A copy of Doctor James' book being sent to Pope Pius the Ninth, the Pope
+acknowledged it in a personal letter, thanking the author for his
+"masterly refutations of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> the vagaries of this man Darwin, wherein the
+Creator is left out of all things and man proclaims himself independent,
+his own king, his own priest, his own God&mdash;then degrading man to the
+level of the brute by declaring he had the same origin, and this origin
+was lifeless matter. Could folly and pride go further than to degrade
+Science into a vehicle for throwing contumely and disrespect on our holy
+religion!"</p>
+
+<p>This makes rather interesting reading now for those who believe in the
+infallibility of popes. So well did Doctor James' book sell, coupled
+with the approbation of the Pope, that as late as Eighteen Hundred
+Eighty-two a new and enlarged edition made its appearance, and the
+author was made a member of the Papal Order of Saint Sylvester. It is
+quite needless to add that those who read Doctor James' book refuting
+Darwin had never read Darwin, since "The Origin of Species" was placed
+on the "Index Expurgatorius" in Eighteen Hundred Sixty. Some years
+after, when it was discovered that Darwin had written other books, these
+were likewise honored.</p>
+
+<p>The book on barnacles being called to the attention of the Censor, that
+worthy exclaimed, "Some new heresy, I dare say&mdash;put it on the 'Index!'"
+And it was so done.</p>
+
+<p>The success of Doctor James' book reveals the popularity of the form of
+reasoning that digests the refutation first, and the original
+proposition not at all.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In Eighteen Hundred Seventy-five, Gladstone in an address at Liverpool
+said, "Upon the ground of what is called evolution, God is relieved from
+the labor of creation and of governing the universe."</p>
+
+<p>Herbert Spencer called Gladstone's attention to the fact that Sir Isaac
+Newton, with his law of gravitation and the physical science of
+astronomy, was open to the same charge.</p>
+
+<p>Gladstone then took refuge in the "Contemporary Review," and retreated
+in a cloud of words that had nothing to do with the subject.</p>
+
+<p>Thomas Carlyle, who has facetiously been called a liberal thinker, had
+not the patience to discuss Darwin's book seriously, but grew red in the
+face and hissed in falsetto when it was even mentioned. He wrote of
+Darwin as "the apostle of dirt," and said, "He thinks his grandfather
+was a chimpanzee, and I suppose he is right&mdash;leastwise, I am not the one
+to deprive him of the honor."</p>
+
+<p>Scathing criticisms were uttered on Darwin's ideas, both on the platform
+and in print, by Doctor Noah Porter of Yale, Doctor Hodge of Princeton,
+and Doctor Tayler Lewis of Union College. Agassiz, the man who was
+regarded as the foremost scientist in America, thought he had to choose
+between orthodoxy and Darwinism, and he chose orthodoxy. His gifted son
+tried to rescue his father from the grip of prejudice, and later
+endeavored to free his name from the charge<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> that he could not change
+his mind, but alas! Louis Agassiz's words were expressed in print, and
+widely circulated.</p>
+
+<p>There were two men in America whose names stand out like beacon-lights
+because they had the courage to speak up loud and clear for Charles
+Darwin while the pack was baying the loudest. These men were Doctor Asa
+Gray, who influenced the Appletons to publish an American edition of
+"The Origin of Species," and Professor Edward L. Youmans, who gave up
+his own brilliant lecture work in order that he might stand by Darwin,
+Spencer, Huxley and Wallace.</p>
+
+<p>For the man who was known as "a Darwinian" there was no place in the
+American Lyceum. Shut out from addressing the public by word of mouth,
+Youmans founded a magazine that he might express himself, and he fired a
+monthly broadside from his "Popular Science Monthly." And it is good to
+remember that the faith of Youmans was not without its reward. He lived
+to see his periodical grow from a confessed failure&mdash;a bill of expense
+that took his monthly salary to maintain&mdash;to a paying property that made
+its owner passing rich.</p>
+
+<p>Gray, too, outlived the charge of infidelity, and was not forced to
+resign his position as Professor at Harvard, as was freely prophesied he
+would.</p>
+
+<p>As for Darwin himself, he stood the storm of misunderstanding and abuse
+without scorn or resentment.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Truth must fight its way," he said; "and this gauntlet of criticism is
+all for the best. What is true in my book will survive, and that which
+is error will be blown away as chaff." He was neither exalted by praise
+nor cast down by censure. For Huxley, Lyell, Hooker, Spencer, Wallace
+and Asa Gray he had a great and profound love&mdash;what they said affected
+him deeply, and their steadfast kindness at times touched him to tears.
+For the great, seething, outside world that had not thought along
+abstruse scientific lines, and could not, he cared little.</p>
+
+<p>"How can we expect them to see as we do," he wrote to Gray; "it has
+taken me thirty years of toil and research to come to these conclusions.
+To have the unthinking masses accept all that I say would be calamity:
+this opposition is a winnowing process, and all a part of the Law of
+Evolution that works for good."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgf.jpg" alt="F" title="F" /></div><p>or forty years Darwin lived in the same house at Down, in the same
+quiet, simple way. Here he lived and worked, and the world gradually
+came to him, figuratively and literally. Gradually it dawned upon the
+theologians that a God who could set in motion natural laws that worked
+with beneficent and absolute regularity was just as great as if He had
+made everything at once and then stopped.</p>
+
+<p>The miracle of evolution is just as sublime as the miracle of Adam's
+deep sleep and the making of a woman out of a man's rib. The faith of
+the scientist who sees order, regularity and unfailing law is quite as
+great as that of a preacher who believes everything he reads in a book.
+The scientist is a man with faith, plus.</p>
+
+<p>When Darwin died, in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-two, Darwinism and
+infidelity were words no longer synonymous.</p>
+
+<p>The discrepancies and inconsistencies of the theories of Darwin were
+seen by him as by his critics, and he was ever willing to admit the
+doubt. None of his disciples was as ready to modify his opinions as he.
+"We must beware of making science dogmatic," he once said to Haeckel.</p>
+
+<p>And at another time he said, "I would feel I had gone too far were it
+not for Wallace, who came to the same conclusions, quite independently
+of me." Darwin's mind was simple and childlike. He was a student,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>
+always learning, and no one was too mean or too poor for him to learn
+from. The patience, persistency and untiring industry of the man,
+combined with the daring imagination that saw the thing clearly long
+before he could prove it, and the gentle forbearance in the presence of
+unkindness and misunderstanding, won the love of a nation.</p>
+
+<p>He wished to be buried in the churchyard at Down, but at his death, by
+universal acclaim, the gates of Westminster swung wide to receive the
+dust of the man whom bishops, clergy and laymen alike had reviled.
+Darwin had won, not alone because he was right, but because his was a
+truly great and loving soul&mdash;a soul without the least resentment.</p>
+
+<p>Archdeacon Farrar, quoting Huxley, said, "I would rather be Darwin and
+be right than be Premier of England&mdash;we have had and will have many
+Premiers, but the world will never have another Darwin."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="HAECKEL" id="HAECKEL"></a>HAECKEL</h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img443.jpg" alt="HAECKEL" title="HAECKEL" /></div>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Nothing seems to me better adapted than this monistic perspective
+to give us the proper standard and the broad outlook which we need
+in the solution of the vast enigmas that surround us. It not only
+clearly indicates the true place of a man in Nature, but it
+dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance and
+arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable
+universe, and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable
+element. This boundless presumption of conceited man has misled him
+into making himself "the image of God," claiming an "eternal life"
+for his ephemeral personality, and imagining that he possesses
+unlimited "freedom of will." The ridiculous imperial folly of
+Caligula is but a special form of man's arrogant assumption of
+divinity. Only when we have abandoned this untenable illusion, and
+taken up the correct cosmological perspective, can we hope to reach
+the solution of the Riddle of the Universe.</p>
+
+<p class='author'>&mdash;<i>Haeckel</i></p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>HAECKEL</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>here was a man, once upon a day, who lived in East Aurora and kept
+a store. He sold everything from cough-syrup to blue ribbon; and some of
+the things he sold on time to philosophers who sat on nail-kegs every
+evening, and settled the coal strike.</p>
+
+<p>And in due course of time the storekeeper compromised with his
+creditors, at twenty-nine cents on the dollar.</p>
+
+<p>Some say the man went busted a-purpose to quit business and get out of
+East Aurora. And he himself generally allowed the opinion to gain ground
+in later years that he had planned his life throughout, from start to
+finish, thus proving the supremacy of the will. Yet others there be, and
+men of worth and social standing in the village&mdash;known for miles up the
+creek as persons of probity&mdash;who claim that it was too much confidence
+in the Genus Smart-Setter, and trotting horses at the County Fairs, that
+made it possible for our friend to avail himself of the Bankruptcy Act.
+Still others, too inert to follow the winding ways of a strange career
+and give reasons, dispose of the matter by simply saying,
+"Providence!"&mdash;rolling their eyes upward, then walking out, leaving the
+wordy contestants humiliated and undone.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It will be seen that I am interested in this chapter of Ancient History:
+and in truth, I myself occasionally ornament the nail-kegs. I claim it
+was neither Providence nor astute planning that mapped this man's
+course, but Providence, Planning and Luck; and I silence the adversary,
+for the time, by citing these facts:</p>
+
+<p>Very shortly after Providence and the Sheriff of Erie County&mdash;whose
+name, by the way, was Grover Cleveland&mdash;had disposed of the East Aurora
+grocery, our friend met a man in Buffalo who had a sweeping scar on his
+chin, a wonderful secret, and nothing else worth mentioning.</p>
+
+<p>This man secured his assets in Germany; he got them while attending the
+University of Jena. The secret was gotten by an understanding with a
+professor; the scar was received through a misunderstanding with a
+student. The secret was a plan by which you could make glucose from
+corn. In Germany it was only a laboratory experiment, because there was
+no corn in Europe to speak of.</p>
+
+<p>Here we had corn to burn, since in that very year the farmers of Iowa
+were using corn for their fuel. Glucose is the active saccharine
+principle in maize, but it does not become active until the corn is
+treated chemically in a certain way, just as honey is not honey until a
+bee puts it through his Maeterlinck laboratory.</p>
+
+<p>Glucose is a food; it can be used for all purposes where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> sugar is
+used&mdash;in degree, at least.</p>
+
+<p>And every living person on earth uses sugar as food every day! Our
+ex-grocer knew all about Hambletonian Ten and Dexter; but dextrine,
+dextrose and glucose were out of his class. Yet he realized that if
+sugar could be made from corn, there was a fortune in it for somebody.
+Opportunity, we are told, knocks once at each man's door. Our David
+Harum was forty, past, and he had often thought Opportunity was tapping,
+but when he opened wide the door, darkness there, and nothing more!
+Opportunity had knocked, but was too timid to stay. This time, he heard
+the knock, and when he opened up the door, Opportunity made a rush for
+him, grabbed him by the collar&mdash;catch-as-catch-can&mdash;in a grip he could
+not shake off.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Harum examined as best he could the glucose the German student had
+made, and then he watched the whole experiment worked out over again.
+What the particular ingredients were, was still a secret. The man would
+not sell out; he wanted to organize a manufactory and take a certain per
+cent of the profits. David had saved a thousand dollars out of the wreck
+at East Aurora; but he knew if he could show certain men that the scheme
+was genuine, he would be able to raise more.</p>
+
+<p>Five thousand dollars was secured. But the men who advanced the four
+thousand dollars demanded an insurance-policy on the life of the German
+chemist. This appealed to our David Harum as an excellent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> plan: if the
+man who held the secret should die, all would be lost save honor. They
+insured the life of the chemist for twenty thousand dollars. In a month
+after, he was killed in a railroad wreck on a Sunday School excursion.
+And the moral is&mdash;but never mind that now.</p>
+
+<p>The twenty thousand dollars' insurance was paid to David Harum. He
+repaid his friends immediately their four thousand dollars, and reserved
+for himself, very properly, the sixteen thousand dollars to cover
+expenses. He then started for Jena.</p>
+
+<p>Arriving there, he found that the making of glucose was no special
+secret, and to manufacture it on a large scale was simply a matter of
+evolving the right kind of system and a plant. He hired a young German
+chemist, who had just graduated, for a matter of, say, a thousand
+dollars a year and expenses, and the two started back for America.</p>
+
+<p>From this arose the Glucose Industry in the United States. In ten years'
+time twelve million dollars was invested in the business; and in
+Nineteen Hundred Three more than a hundred million dollars was invested.
+Our East Aurora hero sold out his interests, in Eighteen Hundred Ninety,
+for some such bagatelle as thirteen million dollars.</p>
+
+<p>The young German student is now back at the Jena university, taking a
+post-graduate course in chemistry&mdash;the first one is still dead.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgi.jpg" alt="I" title="I" /></div><p> am told that there be folks who pooh-pooh college training and sneeze
+on mention of a University degree. Usually these good people have no
+University degrees, but have been greatly helped by those who have.</p>
+
+<p>Our David Harums are not college-bred&mdash;a statement which I trust will go
+unchallenged.</p>
+
+<p>The true type of German student is made in Germany, and when taken out
+of his native environment, often evolves into something less beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>His lack of worldly ambition is his chief claim to immortality. His
+wants are few; he rises early and works late; he is most practical in
+his own particular specialty, but often most impractical outside of it;
+he is plodding, patient, painstaking, and will follow a microbe you can
+not see, as Thompson-Seton's hunter followed the famous Kootenay ram.</p>
+
+<p>This simple reverence for the truth&mdash;this passion for an idea&mdash;this
+desire to know&mdash;these things have given to the world some of its richest
+treasures. We are aware of what the Rockfellers have done, but we seldom
+stop to think of the unknown laboratory students, who made possible such
+vast and far-reaching institutions as the Standard Oil Company, the
+Carborundum Company, the Amalgamated Copper Company, and the various
+beet-sugar factories, that give work to thousands, and lift whole
+counties, and even some States, from penury to plenty.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Germany honors her scholars; and one of the strongest instincts of her
+national life is her search for genius. Initiative is originality in
+motion. Originality is too rare to flout and scout. Not all originality
+is good, but all good things, so far as humanity is concerned, were once
+original. That is to say, they were the work of Genius.</p>
+
+<p>Germany's sympathy for the best in thought has occasionally been broken
+in upon by pigmy rulers, who, for the moment, had a giant's power, so it
+seems hardly possible that a government which encouraged Goethe should
+have banished Wagner. The greatness of Kant was largely owing to the
+fact that he was set apart by Frederick and made free to do his work;
+and at this time, not another monarchy in the world would have had the
+insight to keep its coarse hands off this little man with the big head
+and the brain of a prophet.</p>
+
+<p>And as Kant was the greatest and most original thinker of his time, so
+today does a German University house the world's greatest living
+scientist. Ernst Haeckel has been Professor of Natural History at Jena
+for forty-two years. All the efforts of various other Universities to
+lure him away have failed. He even declined to listen to the siren song
+of Major Pond, and only smiled at the big baits dangled on long poles
+from Cook County, Illinois.</p>
+
+<p>"I have everything I want, everything I can use is right here; why
+should I think of uprooting my life?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> he asked. And yet, Jena, there in
+the shadow of the Thuringian Mountains, is only a little town of less
+than ten thousand inhabitants.</p>
+
+<p>In Nineteen Hundred Three, there were five hundred pupils registered at
+Jena, as against four thousand at Harvard, five thousand at Ann Arbor,
+and nearly the same at Lincoln, Nebraska.</p>
+
+<p>It will not do to assume that those who graduate at big colleges are big
+men, any more than to imagine that folks who reside in big towns are
+bigger than those who live in little villages. Perhaps the greatest men
+have come from the small colleges: I believe the small colleges admit
+this.</p>
+
+<p>And surely there is plenty of good argument handy, in way of proof; for
+while Harvard has her Barrett Wendell, with his caveat on clearness,
+force and elegance; and Ann Arbor has Cicero Trueblood, Professor of
+Oratory, whose official duty it is to formulate the College Yell; yet
+Amherst, with her scant five hundred pupils, has Professor David P.
+Todd, the greatest astronomer of the New World. I really wonder
+sometimes what a University that stands in fear of Triggsology would do
+with Professor Ernst Haeckel, whose disregard for tradition is very
+decidedly Ingersollian! The actual fact is, Ernst Haeckel, the world's
+greatest thinker, belongs in the little town of Jena, in Germany. At the
+village of Coniston, you see the little hall where Ruskin read the best
+things he ever wrote, to a dozen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> or two people.</p>
+
+<p>At Hammersmith, the limit of a William Morris audience was about a
+hundred. At Jena, Ernst Haeckel sits secure in his little lecture-hall,
+and speaks or reads to fifty or sixty students, but the printed word
+goes to millions, so his thoughts here expressed in Jena are shots heard
+round the world.</p>
+
+<p>American pedagogic institutions are mendicant&mdash;they depend upon private
+charity and are endowed by pious pirates and beneficent buccaneers. The
+individuals who made these institutions possible very naturally have a
+controlling voice in their management. The colleges in America that are
+not supported by direct mendicancy depend upon the dole of the
+legislator, and woe betide the pedagogic principal who offends the
+orthodox vote. His supplies are cut short, and purse-strings pucker
+until his voice moderates to a monotone and he dilutes his views to a
+dull neutral tint. I do not know a University in the United States that
+would not place Ernst Haeckel on half-rations, and make him fight for
+his life, or else he would be discharged and be reduced to the sad
+necessity of tilting windmills in popular lecture courses for the
+edification of agrarians. The German Government seeks to make men free.
+It even gives them the privilege of being absurd; for pioneers sometimes
+take the wrong track. We do not scout Columbus because his domestic
+voyages were failures; nor because he sought one thing and found
+another, and died without knowing the difference.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Haeckel's wants are all supplied; what he needs in the way of apparatus
+or material is his for the asking; he travels at will the round world
+over; visions of old age and yawning almshouses are not for him. He owns
+himself&mdash;he does what he wishes, he says what he thinks, and neither
+priest nor politician dare cry, hist! So we get the paradox: the only
+perfect freedom is to be found in a monarchy. "A Republic," says
+Schopenhauer, "is a land that is ruled by the many&mdash;that is to say, by
+the incompetent." But Schopenhauer, of course, knew nothing of the
+American primary, devised by altruistic Hibernians for the purpose of
+thwarting the incompetent many.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imge.jpg" alt="E" title="E" /></div><p>rnst Haeckel was born in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-four, hence he is just
+seventy-seven years old at this writing. His parents were plain people,
+neither rich nor poor&mdash;and of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. The
+greatest error one can make in life is not to be well born; failing in
+this, a man struggles through life under an awful handicap.</p>
+
+<p>Haeckel formed the habit of steady, systematic work in youth, and
+untiring effort has been the rule of his life. Man was made to be well,
+and he was made to work. It is only work&mdash;which is the constant effort
+to retain equilibrium&mdash;that makes life endurable. So we find Haeckel
+now, at near fourscore years, a model of manly vigor, with all the
+eager, curious, receptive qualities of youth&mdash;a happy man, but one who
+knows that happiness lies on the way to Heaven, and not in arriving
+there and sitting down to enjoy it.</p>
+
+<p>Ernst Haeckel gathers his manna fresh every day. I believe Haeckel
+enjoys his pipe and mug after the day's work is done; but for stimulants
+in a general sense, he has no use. In his book on Ceylon, he attributes
+his escape from the jungle fever, from which most of his party suffered,
+to the fact that he never used strong drink, and ate sparingly.</p>
+
+<p>He is jealous of the sunshine&mdash;a great walker&mdash;works daily with hoe and
+spade in his garden; and breathes deeply, pounding on his chest, when
+going from his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> house to the college, in a way that causes considerable
+amusement among the fledglings. Tall, spare rather than stout, bronzed,
+active, wearing shoes with thick soles, plain gray clothes, often
+accompanied by a half-dozen young men, he is a common figure on the
+roads that wind out of Jena, and lose themselves amid the mountains.</p>
+
+<p>The distinguishing feature of the man is his animation. He is full of
+good cheer, and acts as if he were expecting to discover something
+wonderful very soon.</p>
+
+<p>To find the balance between play and work has been the aim of his life;
+and surely, he has pretty nearly discovered it.</p>
+
+<p>Once when a caller asked him what he considered the greatest achievement
+of his life, he took out of his pocket a leather case containing a
+bronze medal, and proudly passed it around.</p>
+
+<p>This medal was presented to him in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine,
+in token of a running high jump&mdash;the world's record at the time, or not,
+as the case may be. Haeckel is essentially an out-of-door man, as
+opposed to the philosopher who works in a stuffy room, and grows
+round-shouldered over his microscope. "I may entrust laboratory analyses
+to others, but there is one thing I will never let another do for me,
+and that is take my daily walk a-field," he once said.</p>
+
+<p>While lecturing he sits at a table and simply talks in a very informal
+way; often purposely arousing a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> discussion, or awakening a sleepy
+student with a question. Yet on occasion he can speak to a multitude,
+and, like Huxley, rise to the occasion. Oratory, however, he considers
+rather dangerous, as the speaker is usually influenced by the opinions
+of the audience, and is apt to grow more emphatic than exact&mdash;to
+generate more heat than light.</p>
+
+<p>The comparison of Haeckel with Huxley is not out of place. He has been
+called the Huxley of Germany, just as Huxley was called the Haeckel of
+England. In temperament, they were much alike; although Haeckel perhaps
+does not use quite so much aqua fortis in his ink. Yet I can well
+imagine that if he were at a convention where the Bishop of Oxford would
+level at him a few theological spitballs, he would answer, unerringly,
+with a sling and a few smooth pebbles from the brook. And possibly,
+knowing himself, this is why he keeps out of society, and avoids all
+public gatherings where pseudo-science is exploited.</p>
+
+<p>There is a superstition that really great men are quite oblivious of
+their greatness, and that the pride of achievement is not among their
+assets. Nothing could be wider of the mark. When Ernst Haeckel was
+asked, "Who is your favorite author?" he very promptly answered, "Ernst
+Haeckel."</p>
+
+<p>His study is a big square room on the top floor of one of the college
+buildings; and in this room is a bookcase extending from ceiling to
+floor, given up to his own works.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Copies of every edition and of all translations are here.</p>
+
+<p>And in a special case are the original manuscripts, solidly bound in
+boards, as carefully preserved as were the "literary remains" of William
+Morris, guarded with the instincts of a bibliophile.</p>
+
+<p>Of the size of this Haeckel collection one can make a guess when it is
+stated that the man has written and published over fifty different
+books. These vary in size from simple lectures to volumes of a thousand
+pages. His work entitled, "The Natural History of Creation," has been
+translated into twelve languages, and has gone through fifteen editions
+in Germany, and about half as many in England.</p>
+
+<p>The last book issued by Professor Haeckel was that intensely interesting
+essay, "The Riddle of the Universe," which was written in Eighteen
+Hundred Ninety-nine, in two months' time, during his summer vacation. He
+gave it out that he had gone to Italy, denied himself to all visitors
+who knew that he had not, and answered no letters. He reached his study
+every morning at six o'clock and locked himself in, and there he
+remained until eight o'clock at night. At noon one of his children
+brought him his lunch.</p>
+
+<p>Unlike Herbert Spencer, whose later writings were all dictated&mdash;and very
+slowly and painstakingly at that&mdash;Haeckel writes with his own hand, and
+when the fit is on, he turns off manuscript at the rate of from two to
+four thousand words a day. In writing "The Riddle of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> the Universe," he
+took no exercise save to go up on the roof, breathing deeply and
+pounding his chest, varying the pounding by reaching his arms above his
+head and stretching. However, after a few weeks the villagers and
+visitors got to looking for him with opera-glasses; and he ceased going
+on the roof, taking his calisthenics at the open window.</p>
+
+<p>This exercise of reaching and stretching until you lift yourself on
+tiptoe, he goes out of his way to recommend in his book on
+"Development," wherein he says, "There is a tendency as the years pass
+for the internal organs to drop, but the individual who will daily go
+through the motion of reaching for fruit on limbs of trees that are
+above his head, standing on tiptoe and slowly stretching up and up,
+occasionally throwing his head back and looking straight up, will of
+necessity breathe deeply, exercise the diaphragm, and I believe in most
+cases will ward off diseases and keep old age awaiting for long."</p>
+
+<p>Here is a little commonsense advice given by a physician who is also a
+great scientist. To try it will cost you nothing&mdash;no apparatus is
+required&mdash;just throw open the window and reach up and up and up, first
+with one arm, then the other, and then both arms. "The person who does
+this daily for five minutes as a habit will probably have no need of a
+physician," adds Haeckel, and with this sage remark he dismisses the
+subject, branching off into an earnest talk on radiolaria.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgh.jpg" alt="H" title="H" /></div><p>aeckel was educated for a physician and began his career by practising
+medicine. But his heart was not really in the work; he soon arrived at
+the very sane conclusion that constant dwelling on the pathological was
+not worth while. "Hereafter I'll devote my time to the normal, not the
+abnormal and distempered. The sick should learn to keep well," he wrote
+a friend.</p>
+
+<p>And again, "If an individual is so lacking in will that he can not
+provide for himself, then his dissolution is no calamity to either
+himself, the State or the race." This was written in his twenties, and
+seems to sound rather sophomorish, but the idea of the boy is still with
+the old man, for in "The Riddle of the Universe" he says, "The final
+effect upon the race by the preservation of the unfit, through increased
+skill in surgery and medicine, is not yet known." In another place he
+throws in a side remark, thus: "Our almshouses, homes for imbeciles, and
+asylums where the hopelessly insane often outlive their keepers, may be
+a mistake, save as these things minister to the spirit of altruism which
+prompts their support. Let a wiser generation answer!"</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless Haeckel could make a good argument in favor of the doctors if
+he wished, but probably if asked to do so his answer would paraphrase
+Robert Ingersoll, when that gentleman was taken to task for unfairness
+towards Moses, "Young man, you seem to forget that I am not the attorney
+of Moses&mdash;don't worry, there are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> more than ten millions of men looking
+after his case." Ernst Haeckel is not the attorney for either the
+doctors or the clergy.</p>
+
+<p>It was Darwin and "The Origin of Species" that tipped the beam for
+Haeckel in favor of science. Very shortly after Darwin's great book was
+issued, in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, a chance copy of the
+work fell into the hands of our young physician. He read and spoke
+English, and in a general way was interested in biology.</p>
+
+<p>As he read of Darwin's observations and experiments the heavens seemed
+to open before him.</p>
+
+<p>Things he had vaguely felt, Darwin stated, and thoughts that had been
+his, Darwin expressed. "I might have written much of this book, myself,"
+he said.</p>
+
+<p>The love of Nature had been upon the young man almost from his babyhood.
+All children love flowers and mix easily with the wonderful things that
+are found in woods and fields. At twelve years of age Ernst had formed a
+goodly herbarium, and was making a collection of bugs, and not knowing
+their names or even that they had names, he began naming them himself.
+Later it came to him with a shock of surprise and disappointment that
+the bugs and beetles had already had the attention of scholars. But he
+got even by declaring that he would hunt out some of the tiny things the
+scholars had overlooked and classify them. Every man imagines himself
+the first man, and to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> think that he is Adam and that he has to go
+forth, get acquainted with things and name them, reveals the true bent
+of the scientist.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Haeckel was ripe for Darwin's book. He was looking for it, and it
+took only a slight jolt to dislodge him from the medical profession and
+allow the Law of Affinity to do the rest.</p>
+
+<p>Wallace had written Darwin's book under another name, and if these men
+had not written it, Haeckel surely would, for it was all packed away in
+his heart and head. As Darwin had studied and classified the Cirripedia,
+so would he write an essay on Rhizopods. Luck was with him&mdash;luck is
+always with the man of purpose. He had an opportunity to travel through
+Italy as medical caretaker to a rich invalid. Sickness surely has its
+uses; and rich invalids are not wholly a mistake on the part of Setebos.
+Haeckel secured the leisure and the opportunity to round up his
+Rhizopods.</p>
+
+<p>He presented the work to the University of Jena, because this was the
+University that Goethe attended, and the gods of Haeckel were
+three&mdash;Goethe, Darwin and Johannes Muller.</p>
+
+<p>Muller was instructor in Zoology at Berlin, a man quite of the Agassiz
+type who made himself beloved by the boys because he was what he was&mdash;a
+boy in heart, with a man's head and the soul of a saint. Some one said
+of Muller, "To him every look into a microscope was a service to God."
+In his reverent attitude he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> like Linn&aelig;us, who fell on his knees on
+first beholding the English gorse in full flower, and thanked Heaven
+that such a moment of divine joy was his.</p>
+
+<p>Muller was a Jena man, too, and he gave Haeckel letters to the bigwigs.
+The wise men of Jena discovered that there was merit in Haeckel's
+discoveries.</p>
+
+<p>Original investigators are rare&mdash;most of us write about the men who have
+done things, or else we tell about what they have done, and so we reach
+greatness by hitching our wagon to a star. For the essay on Rhizopods,
+Haeckel was made Professor Extraordinary of the University of Jena. This
+was in Eighteen Hundred Sixty-two; Haeckel was then twenty-eight years
+old; there he is today, after a service of forty-nine years.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgh.jpg" alt="H" title="H" /></div><p>aeckel is married, with a big brood of children and grandchildren about
+him. Some of his own children and the grandchildren are about the same
+age, for Haeckel has two broods, having had two wives, both of whom
+sympathized with the Teddine philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>With the whole household, including servants, the great scientist is on
+terms of absolute good camaraderie. The youngsters ride on his back; the
+older girls decorate him with garlands; the boys work with him in the
+garden, or together they tramp the fields and climb the hills.</p>
+
+<p>But when it comes to study he goes to his own room in the Zoology
+Building, enters in and locks the door. When he travels he travels
+alone, without companion or secretary. Travel to him means intense work;
+and intense work means to him intense pleasure. Solitude seems necessary
+to close, consecutive thinking; and in the solitude of travel, through
+jungle, forest, crowded city, or across wide oceans, Haeckel finds his
+true and best self. Then it is that he puts his soul in touch with the
+Universal and realizes most fully Goethe's oft-repeated dictum, "All is
+one." And, indeed, to Goethe must be given the credit of preparing the
+mind of Haeckel for Darwinism.</p>
+
+<p>In his book, "The Freedom and Science of Teaching," Haeckel applies the
+poetic monistic ideas of Goethe to biology and then to sociology. "All
+is one." And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> this oneness that everywhere exists is simply a
+differentiation of the original single cell.</p>
+
+<p>The evolution of the cell mirrors the evolution of the species: the
+evolution of the individual mirrors the evolution of the race.</p>
+
+<p>This law, expressed by Goethe, is the controlling shibboleth in all
+Haeckel's philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>In embryology he has proved it to the satisfaction of the scientific
+world. When he applies it to sociology our Bellamys are looking backward
+to Sir Thomas More, and expect a sudden transformation to a Utopia, not
+unlike the change which the good old preachers used to tell us we would
+experience "in the twinkling of an eye."</p>
+
+<p>Haeckel builds on Darwin and shows that as the Cirripedia which makes
+the bottom of the ocean, the coral "insect" which rears dangerous reefs
+and even mountain-ranges, and Rhizopods that make the chalk cliffs
+possible, did not change the earth's crust in the twinkling of an eye,
+so neither can the efforts of man instantly change the social condition.
+Souls do not make lightning changes. Karl Marx thought society would
+change in the twinkling of a ballot, but he was not a Monist, and
+therefore did not realize that humanity is a solidarity of souls,
+evolved from very lowly forms and still slowly ascending.</p>
+
+<p>And the beauty of it is that the Marxians are helping the race to
+ascend, by supplying it an Ideal, even if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> they fail utterly to work
+their lightning change. In the end there is no defeat for any man or any
+thing. When men deserve the Ideal they will get it. So long as they
+prefer beer, tobacco, brawls and slums, these things will be supplied.
+When they get enough of these, something better will be evolved. The
+stupidity of George the Third was a necessary factor in the evolution of
+freedom for America. All is one; all is Good; and all is God.</p>
+
+<p>The Marxians will eventually win, but by Fabian methods, and Socialism
+will come under another name. As opposed to Herbert Spencer, Haeckel
+does not admit the Unknowable, although, of course, he realizes the
+unknown. No man ever had a fuller faith, and if there is any such thing
+as a glorious deathbed it must come to men of this type who believe not
+only that all is well for themselves, but for every one else. How a
+deathbed could be "glorious" for a man who had perfect faith in his own
+salvation and an equally perfect faith in the damnation of most
+everybody else, is difficult to understand.</p>
+
+<p>A true Monist would rather be in Hell asking for water than in Heaven
+denying it.</p>
+
+<p>He loves humanity because he is Humanity, and he loves God because he is
+God. As a single drop of water mirrors the globe, so does a single man
+mirror the race. And the evolution, biological and sociological, of the
+man mirrors the evolution of the species.</p>
+
+<p>When one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> once grasps the beauty and splendor of the monistic idea, how
+mean and small become all those little, fearsome "schemes of salvation,"
+whereby men were to be separated and impassable gulfs fixed between
+them. Those who fix gulfs here and now are hotly intent on showing that
+God will fix gulfs hereafter; thus we see how man is continually
+creating God in his own image.</p>
+
+<p>His idea of God's justice is always built on his own; and as usually our
+deities are more or less inherited, heirlooms of the past, we see that
+it is not at all strange that men should be better than their religion.
+They drag their dead creeds behind them like a stagecoach, with
+preachers and priests on top; kings and nobles inside; and coffins full
+of past sins in the boot. A man is always better than his creed&mdash;unless
+he makes his creed new every day. These hand-me-down religions seldom
+fit, and professional theology, it seems to me, is mostly a dealing in
+ol' clo'.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgi.jpg" alt="I" title="I" /></div><p>n the month of September, Nineteen Hundred Four, Haeckel was a delegate
+to the Freethinkers' Congress at Rome. To hold such a convention in the
+Eternal City, right under the eaves of the Vatican, was surely a trifle
+"indelicate," to use the words of the Pope. And it was no wonder that at
+the close of the Congress the Pope at once ordered a sacred
+housecleaning, a divine fumigation.</p>
+
+<p>Forty years ago he would have acted before the Congress convened, and
+not afterward. Special mass was held in every one of the Catholic
+Churches in Rome, "partially to atone for the insult done to Almighty
+God."</p>
+
+<p>Over three thousand delegates were present at the Congress, every
+civilized country being represented.</p>
+
+<p>A committee was named to decorate the statue of Bruno that stands on the
+spot where he was burned for declaring that the earth revolved, and that
+the stars were not God's jewels hung in the sky each night by angels.</p>
+
+<p>On this occasion, Haeckel said:</p>
+
+<p>"This Congress is historic. It marks a white milepost in the onward and
+upward march of Freedom.</p>
+
+<p>"We have met in Rome not accidentally or yet incidentally, but
+purposely. We have met here to show the world that times have changed,
+that the earth revolves, and to prove to ourselves in an impressive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> and
+undeniable way that the power of superstition is crippled, and at last
+Science and Free Speech need no longer cringe and crawl. We respect the
+Church for what she is, but our manhood must now realize that it is no
+longer the slave and tool of entrenched force and power that abrogates
+to itself the name of religion."</p>
+
+<p>The Haeckel attitude of mind is essentially one of faith&mdash;Haeckel's hope
+for the race is sublime. There are several things we do not know, but we
+may know some time, just as men know things that children do not.</p>
+
+<p>And yet we are only children in the kindergarten of God. And this garden
+where we work and play is our own. The boy of ten, or even the man of
+sixty, may never know, but there will come men greater than these and
+they will understand. The Monist, the man who believes in the One&mdash;the
+All&mdash;is essentially religious.</p>
+
+<p>Haeckel has chosen this word Monism, as opposed to theism, deism,
+materialism, spiritism.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Paul Carus is today the ablest American exponent of Monism, and
+to him it is a positive religion. If Monism could make men of the superb
+mental type of Paul Carus, well might we place the subject on a
+compulsory basis and introduce it into our public schools. But Haeckel
+and Carus believe quite as much in freedom as in Monism. All violence of
+direction is contrary to growth, and delays evolution just that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> much.</p>
+
+<p>The One of which we are part and particle&mdash;single cells, if you
+please&mdash;is constantly working for its own good. We advance individually
+as we lie low in the Lord's hand and allow ourselves to be receivers and
+conveyors of the Divine Will.</p>
+
+<p>And we ourselves are the Divine Will. The contemplation of this divinity
+excites the religious emotions of awe, veneration, wonder and of
+worship. It is a world of correlation. The All is right here. There is
+no outside force or energy; no god or supreme being that looks on,
+interferes, dictates and decides. To admit that there is an outside
+power, something uncorrelated, is to invite fear, apprehension,
+uncertainty and terror. This undissolved residuum is the nest-egg of
+superstition. The man who believes that God is the Whole, and that every
+man is a necessary part of the Whole, has no need to placate or please
+an intangible Something. All he has to do is to be true to his own
+nature, to live his own life, to understand himself. This takes us back
+to the Socratic maxim, "Know Thyself." No man ever expressed one phase
+of Monism so well and beautifully as Emerson has in his "Essay on
+Compensation." This intelligence in which we are bathed rights every
+wrong, equalizes every injustice, balances every perversion, punishes
+the wrong and rewards the right. The Universe is self-lubricating and
+automatic. The Greeks clearly beheld the sublime truths of Compensation
+when they pictured Nemesis. It is absurd to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> punish&mdash;leave it to
+Nemesis&mdash;she never forgets&mdash;nothing can escape her.</p>
+
+<p>Our duties lie in service to ourselves, and we best serve self by
+serving humanity. This is the only religion that pays compound interest
+to both borrower and lender. Worship Humanity and you honor yourself.</p>
+
+<p>And the world has ever dimly perceived this, for history honors no men
+save those who have given their lives that others might live. The
+saviors of the world are only those who loved Humanity more than all
+else. All men who live honest lives are saviors&mdash;they live that others
+may live.</p>
+
+<p>He that saveth his life shall lose it.</p>
+
+<p>We grow through radiation, not by absorption or annexation. To him that
+hath shall be given. We keep things by giving them to others. The dead
+carry in their clenched hands only that which they have given away; and
+the living carry only the love in their hearts which they have bestowed
+on others.</p>
+
+<p>"I and my Father are one"&mdash;the thought is old, but to prove it from the
+so-called material world through the study of biology has been the
+life-work of Ernst Haeckel.</p>
+
+<p>Undaunted we press ever on.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="LINNAEUS" id="LINNAEUS"></a>LINN&AElig;US</h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img444.jpg" alt="LINNAEUS" title="LINNAEUS" /></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When a man of genius is in full swing, never contradict him, set
+him straight or try to reason with him. Give him a free field. A
+listener is sure to get a greater quantity of good, no matter how
+mixed, than if the man is thwarted. Let Pegasus bolt&mdash;he will bring
+you up in a place you know nothing about!</p>
+
+<p class='author'>&mdash;<i>Linn&aelig;us</i></p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>LINN&AElig;US</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgb.jpg" alt="B" title="B" /></div><p>ut of the mist and fog of time, the name of Aristotle looms up
+large. It was more than twenty-three hundred years ago that Aristotle
+lived. He might have lived yesterday, so distinctively modern was he in
+his method and manner of thought. Aristotle was the world's first
+scientist. He sought to sift the false from the true&mdash;to arrange,
+classify and systematize.</p>
+
+<p>Aristotle instituted the first zoological garden that history mentions,
+barring that of Noah. He formed the first herbarium, and made a
+geological collection that prophesied for Hugh Miller the testimony of
+the rocks. Very much of our scientific terminology goes back to
+Aristotle.</p>
+
+<p>Aristotle was born in the mountains of Macedonia. His father was a
+doctor and belonged to the retinue of King Amyntas. The King had a son
+named Philip, who was about the same age as Aristotle.</p>
+
+<p>Some years later, Philip had a son named Alexander, who was somewhat
+unruly, and Philip sent a Macedonian cry over to Aristotle, and
+Aristotle harkened to the call for help and went over and took charge of
+the education of Alexander.</p>
+
+<p>The science of medicine in Aristotle's boyhood was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> the science of
+simples. In surgery the world has progressed, but in medicine, doctors
+have progressed most, by consigning to the grave, that tells no tales,
+the deadly materia medica.</p>
+
+<p>In Aristotle's childhood, when his father was both guide and physician
+to the king, on hunting trips through the mountains, the doctor taught
+the boys to recognize sarsaparilla, stramonium, hemlock, hellebore,
+sassafras and mandrake. Then Aristotle made a list of all the plants he
+knew and wrote down the supposed properties of each.</p>
+
+<p>Before Aristotle was half-grown, both his father and mother died, and he
+was cared for by a Mr. and Mrs. Proxenus. This worthy couple would never
+have been known to the world were it not for the fact that they
+ministered to this orphan boy. Long years afterward he wrote a poem to
+their memory, and paid them such a tender, human compliment that their
+names have been woven into the very fabric of letters. "They loved each
+other, and still had love enough left for me," he says. And we can only
+guess whether this man and his wife with hearts illumined by divine
+passion, the only thing that yet gladdens the world, ever imagined that
+they were supplying an atmosphere in which would bud and blossom one of
+the greatest intellects the world has ever known.</p>
+
+<p>It was through the help of Proxenus that Aristotle was enabled to go to
+Athens and attend the School of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> Oratory, of which Plato was dean.</p>
+
+<p>The fine, receptive spirit of this slender youth evidently brought out
+from Plato's heart the best that was packed away there.</p>
+
+<p>Aristotle was soon the star scholar. To get much out of school you have
+to take much with you when you go there. In one particular, especially,
+Aristotle, the country boy from Macedonia, brought much to Plato&mdash;and
+this was the scientific spirit. Plato's bent was philosophy, poetry,
+rhetoric&mdash;he was an artist in expression.</p>
+
+<p>"Know thyself," said Socrates, the teacher of Plato.</p>
+
+<p>"Be thyself," said Plato. "Know the world of Nature, of which you are a
+part," said Aristotle; "and you will be yourself and know yourself
+without thought or effort. The things you see, you are."</p>
+
+<p>Twenty-three years Aristotle and Plato were together, and when they
+separated it was on the relative value of science and poetry. "Science
+is vital," said Aristotle; "but poetry and rhetoric are incidental." It
+was a little like the classic argument still carried on in all
+publishing-houses, as to which is the greater: the man who writes the
+text or the man who illustrates it.</p>
+
+<p>One is almost tempted to think that Plato's finest product was
+Aristotle, just as Sir Humphry Davy's greatest discovery was Michael
+Faraday. One fine, earnest, receptive pupil is about all any teacher
+should expect in a lifetime, but Plato had at least two, Aristotle and
+Theophrastus. And Theophrastus dated his birth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> from the day he met
+Aristotle.</p>
+
+<p>Theo-Phrastus means God's speech, or one who speaks divinely. The boy's
+real name was Ferguson. But the name given by Aristotle, who always had
+a passion for naming things, stuck, and the world knows this superbly
+great man as Theophrastus.</p>
+
+<p>Botany dates from Theophrastus. And Theophrastus it was who wrote that
+greatest of acknowledgments, when, in dedicating one of his books, he
+expressed his indebtedness in these words: "To Aristotle, the inspirer
+of all I am or hope to be."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imga.jpg" alt="A" title="A" /></div><p>fter Theophrastus' death the science of botany slept for three hundred
+years. During this interval was played in Palestine that immortal drama
+which so profoundly influenced the world. Twenty-three years after the
+birth of Christ, Pliny, the Naturalist, was born.</p>
+
+<p>He was the uncle of his nephew, and it is probable that the younger man
+would have been swallowed in oblivion, just as the body of the older one
+was covered by the eager ashes of Vesuvius, were it not for the fact
+that Pliny the Elder had made the name deathless.</p>
+
+<p>Pliny the Younger was about such a man as Richard Le Gallienne; Pliny
+the Elder was like Thomas A. Edison.</p>
+
+<p>At twenty-two, Pliny the Elder was a Captain in the Roman Army doing
+service in Germany. Here he made memoranda of the trees, shrubs and
+flowers he saw, and compared them with similar objects he knew at home.
+"Animal and vegetable life change as you go North and South; from this I
+assume that life is largely a matter of temperature and moisture." Thus
+wrote this barbaric Roman soldier, who thereby proved he was not so much
+of a barbarian after all. When he was twenty-five, his command was
+transferred to Africa, and here, in the moments stolen from sleep, he
+wrote a work in three volumes on education, entitled, "Studiosus."</p>
+
+<p>In writing the book he got an education&mdash;to find out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> about a thing,
+write a book on it. Pliny returned to Rome and began the practise of
+law, and developed into a special pleader of marked power. He still held
+his commission in the army, and was sent on various diplomatic errands
+to Spain, Africa, Germany, Gaul and Greece. If you want things done,
+call on a busy man: the man of leisure has no spare time.</p>
+
+<p>Pliny's jottings on natural history very soon resolved themselves into
+the most ambitious plan, which up to that time had not been attempted by
+man&mdash;he would write out and sum up all human knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>The next man to try the same thing was Alexander von Humboldt. We now
+have Pliny's "Natural History" in thirty-seven volumes. His other forty
+volumes are lost. The first volume of the "Natural History," which was
+written last, gives a list of the authors consulted. Aristotle and
+Theophrastus take the places of honor, and then follow a score of names
+of men whose works have perished and whom we know mostly through what
+Pliny says about them. So not only does Pliny write science as he saw
+it, but introduces us into a select circle of authors whom otherwise we
+would not know. We have the world of Nature, but we would not have this
+world of thinkers, were it not for Pliny.</p>
+
+<p>Pliny even quotes Sappho, who loved and sung, and whose poems reached us
+only through scattered quotations, as if Emerson's works should perish
+and we would revive him through a file of "The Philistine"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> magazine.
+Pliny and Paul were contemporaries. Pliny lived at Rome when Paul lived
+there in his own hired house, but Pliny never mentioned him, and
+probably never heard of him.</p>
+
+<p>One man was interested in this world, the other in the next.</p>
+
+<p>Pliny begins his great work with a plagiarism on Lyman Abbott, "There is
+but one God." The idea that there were many arose out of the thought
+that because there were many things, there must be special gods to look
+after them: gods of the harvest, gods of the household, gods of the
+rain, etc.</p>
+
+<p>There is but one God, says Pliny, and this God manifests Himself in
+Nature. Nature and Nature's work are one. This world and all other
+worlds we see or can think of are parts of Nature. If there are other
+Universes, they are natural; that is to say, a part of Nature. God rules
+them all according to laws which He Himself can not violate. It is vain
+to supplicate Him, and absurd to worship Him, for to do these things is
+to degrade Him with the thought that He is like us. The assumption that
+God is very much like us is not complimentary to God.</p>
+
+<p>God can not do an unnatural or a supernatural thing. He can not kill
+Himself. He can not make the greater less than the less. He can not make
+twice ten anything else than twenty.</p>
+
+<p>He can not make a stick that has but one end. He can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> not make the past,
+future. He can not make one who has lived never to have lived. He can
+not make the mortal, immortal; nor the immortal, mortal. He can change
+the form of things, but He can not abolish a thing. Pliny preaches the
+Unity of the Universe and his religion is the religion of Humanity.</p>
+
+<p>Pliny says:</p>
+
+<p>"We can not injure God, but we can injure man. And as man is part of
+Nature or God, the only way to serve God is to benefit man. If we love
+God, the way to reveal that love is in our conduct toward our fellows."</p>
+
+<p>Pliny was close upon the Law of the Correlation of Forces, and he almost
+got a glimpse of the Law of Attraction or Gravitation. He sensed these
+things, but could not prove them. Pliny touched life at an immense
+number of points. What he saw, he knew, but when he took things on the
+word of Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville (for these gentlemen
+adventurers have always lived), he fell into curious errors. For
+instance, he tells of horses in Africa that have wings, and when hard
+pressed, fly like birds; of ostriches that give milk, and of elephants
+that live on land or sea equally well; of mines where gold is found in
+solid masses and the natives dig into it for diamonds.</p>
+
+<p>But outside of these little lapses, Pliny writes sanely and well. Book
+Two treats of the crust of the earth, of earthquakes, meteors, volcanoes
+(these had a strange fascination for him), islands and upheavals.</p>
+
+<p>Books<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> Three and Four relate of geography and give amusing information
+about the shape of the continents and the form of the earth. Then comes
+a book on man, his evolution and physical qualities, with a history of
+the races.</p>
+
+<p>Next is a book on Zoology, with a resume of all that was written by
+Aristotle, and with many corroborations of Thompson-Seton and Rudyard
+Kipling. Facts from the "Jungle Book" are here recited at length. Book
+Nine is on marine life&mdash;sponges, shells and coral insects. Book Ten
+treats of birds, and carries the subject further than it had ever been
+taken before, even if it does at times contradict John Burroughs. Book
+Eleven is on insects, bugs and beetles, and tells, among other things,
+of bats that make fires in caves to keep themselves warm. Book Twelve is
+on trees, their varieties, height, age, growth, qualities and
+distribution. Book Thirteen treats of fruits, juices, gums, wax, saps
+and perfumes. Book Fourteen is on grapes and the making of wine, with a
+description of the process and the various kinds of wine, their effects
+on the human system, with a goodly temperance lesson backed up by
+incidents and examples.</p>
+
+<p>Book Fifteen treats of pomegranates, apples, plums, peaches, figs and
+various other luscious fruits, and shows much intimate and valuable
+knowledge. And so the list runs down through, treating at great length
+of bees, fishes, woods, iron, lead, copper, gold, marble, fluids, gases,
+rivers, swamps, seas, and a thousand and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> one things that were familiar
+to this marvelous man. But of all subjects, Pliny shows a much greater
+love for botany than for anything else. Plants, flowers, vines, trees
+and mosses interest him always, and he breaks off other subjects to tell
+of some flower that he has just discovered.</p>
+
+<p>Pliny had command of the Roman fleet that was anchored in the bay off
+Pompeii, when that city was destroyed in the year Seventy-nine.
+Bulwer-Lytton tells the story, with probably a close regard for the
+facts. The sailors, obeying Pliny's orders, did their utmost to save
+human life, and rescued hundreds. Pliny himself made various trips in a
+small boat from the ship to the beach. He was safely on board the
+flag-ship, and orders had been given to weigh anchor, when the commander
+decided to make one more visit to the perishing city to see if he could
+not rescue a few more, and also to get a closer view of Nature in a
+tantrum.</p>
+
+<p>He rowed away into the fog. The sailors waited for their beloved
+commander, but waited in vain. He had ventured too close to the flowing
+lava, and was suffocated by the fumes, a victim to his love for humanity
+and his desire for knowledge. So died Pliny the Elder, aged but
+fifty-six years.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imga.jpg" alt="A" title="A" /></div><p>ll children are zoologists, but a botanist appears upon the earth only
+at rare intervals.</p>
+
+<p>A Botanist is born&mdash;not made. From the time of Pliny, botany performed
+the Rip Van Winkle act until John Ray, the son of a blacksmith, appeared
+upon the scene in England. In the meantime, Leonardo had classified the
+rocks, recorded the birds, counted the animals and written a book of
+three thousand pages on the horse. Leonardo dissected many plants, but
+later fell back upon the rose for decorative purposes.</p>
+
+<p>John Ray was born in Sixteen Hundred Twenty-eight near Braintree in
+Essex. Now, as to genius&mdash;no blacksmith-shop is safe from it. We know
+where to find ginseng, but genius is the secret of God.</p>
+
+<p>A blacksmith's helper by day, this aproned lad with sooty face dreamed
+dreams. Evenings he studied Greek with the village parson. They read
+Aristotle and Theophrastus.</p>
+
+<p>Have a care there, you Macedonian miscreant, dead two thousand years,
+you are turning this boy's head!</p>
+
+<p>John Ray would be a botanist as great as Aristotle, and he would speak
+divinely, just as did Theophrastus. It is all a matter of desire! Young
+Ray became a Minor Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; then a Major
+Fellow; then he took the Master's degree; next he became lecturer on
+Greek; and insisted that Aristotle was the greatest man the world had
+ever seen, except none, and the Dean raised an eyebrow.</p>
+
+<p>The professor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> of mathematics resigned and Ray took his place; next he
+became Junior Dean, and then College Steward; and according to the
+custom of the times he used to preach in the chapel. One of his sermons
+was from the text, "Consider the lilies of the field." Another sermon
+that brought him more notoriety than fame was on the subject, "God in
+Creation," wherein he argued that to find God we should look for Him
+more in the world of Nature and not so much in books.</p>
+
+<p>Matters were getting strained. Ray was asked to subscribe to the Act of
+Uniformity, which was a promise that he would never preach anything that
+was not prescribed by the Church. Ray demurred, and begged that he be
+allowed to go free and preach anything he thought was truth&mdash;new truth
+might come to him! This shows the absurdity of Ray. He was asked to
+reconsider or resign. He resigned&mdash;resigned the year that Sir Isaac
+Newton entered.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately, one particular pupil followed him, not that he
+loved college less, but that he loved Ray more. This pupil was
+Francis Willughby. Through the bounty of this pupil we get the
+scientist&mdash;otherwise, Ray would surely have been starved into
+subjection. Willughby took Ray to the home of his parents, who were rich
+people.</p>
+
+<p>Ray undertook the education of young Willughby, very much as Aristotle
+took charge of Alexander. Willughby and Ray traveled, studied, observed
+and wrote. They went to Spain, took trips to France, Italy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> and
+Switzerland, and journeyed to Scotland. Willughby devoted his life to
+Ornithology and Ichthyology and won a deathless place in science.</p>
+
+<p>Ray specialized on botany, and did a work in classification never done
+before. He made a catalog of the flora of England that wrung even from
+Cambridge a compliment&mdash;they offered him the degree of LL.D. Ray quietly
+declined it, saying he was only a simple countryman, and honors or
+titles would be a disadvantage, tending to separate him from the plain
+people with whom he worked. However, the Royal Society elected him a
+member, and he accepted the honor, that he might put the results of his
+work on record. His paper on the circulation of sap in trees was read
+before the Royal Society, on the request of Newton. Due credit was given
+Harvey for his discovery of the circulation of the blood; but Ray made
+the fine point that man was brother to the tree, and his life was
+derived from the same Source.</p>
+
+<p>When Willughby died, in Sixteen Hundred Seventy-two, he left Ray a
+yearly income of three hundred dollars. Doctor Johnson told Boswell that
+Ray had a collection of twenty thousand English bugs. Our botanical
+terminology comes more from John Ray than from any other man. Ray
+adopted wherever possible the names given by Aristotle, so loyal, loving
+and true was he to the Master. Ray died in Seventeen Hundred Five, aged
+seventy-six.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>wo years after the death of John Ray, in Seventeen Hundred Seven, was
+born a baby who was destined to find biology a chaos, and leave it a
+cosmos.</p>
+
+<p>Linn&aelig;us did for botany what Galileo had done for astronomy. John Ray was
+only a John the Baptist.</p>
+
+<p>Carl von Linne, or Carolus Linn&aelig;us as he preferred to be called, was
+born in an obscure village in the Province of Smaland, Sweden. His
+father was a clergyman, passing rich on forty pounds a year. His mother
+was only eighteen years old when she bore him, and his father had just
+turned twenty-one. It was a poor parish, and one of the deacons
+explained that they could not afford a real preacher; so they hired a
+boy.</p>
+
+<p>Carl tells in his journal, of remembering how, when he was but four
+years old, his father would lead his congregation out through the woods
+and, all seated on the grass, the father would tell the people about the
+plants and herbs and how to distinguish them.</p>
+
+<p>Back of the parsonage there was a goodly garden, where the young pastor
+and his wife worked many happy hours. When Carl was eight years of age,
+a corner of this garden was set apart for his very own.</p>
+
+<p>He pressed into his service several children of the neighborhood, and
+they carried flat stones from the near-by brook to wall in this
+miniature farm&mdash;this botanical garden.</p>
+
+<p>The child that hasn't a flowerbed or a garden of its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> ownest own is
+being cheated out of its birthright.</p>
+
+<p>The evolution of the child mirrors the evolution of the race. And as the
+race has passed through the savage, pastoral and agricultural stages, so
+should the child. As a people we are now in the commercial or
+competitive stage, but we are slowly emerging out of this into the age
+of co-operation or enlightened self-interest.</p>
+
+<p>It is only a very great man&mdash;one with a prophetic vision&mdash;who can see
+beyond the stage in which he is.</p>
+
+<p>The stage we are in seems the best and the final one&mdash;otherwise, we
+would not be in it. But to skip any of these stages in the education or
+evolution of the individual seems a sore mistake. Children hedged and
+protected from digging in the dirt develop into "third rounders," as our
+theosophic friends would say, that is, educated non-comps&mdash;vast top-head
+and small cerebellum&mdash;people who can explain the unknowable, but who do
+not pay cash. Third rounders all&mdash;fit only for the melting-pot!</p>
+
+<p>A tramp is one who has fallen a victim of arrested development and never
+emerged from the nomadic stage; an artistic dilettante is one who has
+jumped the round where boys dig in the dirt and has evolved into a
+missnancy.</p>
+
+<p>Young Carl Linn&aelig;us skipped no round in his evolution. He began as a
+savage, robbing birds' nests, chasing butterflies, capturing bees, bugs
+and beetles. He trained goats to drive, hitched up a calf, fenced his
+little farm,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> and planted it with strange and curious crops.</p>
+
+<p>Clergymen once were the only schoolteachers, and in Sweden, when Linn&aelig;us
+was a boy, there was a plan of farming children out among preachers that
+they might be educated. Possibly this plan of having some one besides
+the parents teach the lessons is good&mdash;I can not say. But young Carl did
+not succeed&mdash;save in disturbing the peace among the households of the
+half-dozen clergymen who in turn had him.</p>
+
+<p>The boy evidently was a handsome fellow, a typical Swede, with hair as
+fair as the sunshine, blue eyes, and a pink face that set off the fair
+hair and made him look like a Circassian.</p>
+
+<p>He had energy plus, and the way he cluttered up the parsonages where he
+lodged was a distraction to good housewives: birds' nests, feathers,
+skins, claws, fungi, leaves, flowers, roots, stalks, rocks, sticks and
+stones&mdash;and when one meddled with his treasures, there was trouble. And
+there was always trouble; for the boy possessed a temper, and usually
+had it right with him.</p>
+
+<p>The intent of the parents was that Carl should become a clergyman, but
+his distaste for theology did not go unexpressed. So perverse and
+persistent were his inclinations that they preyed on the mind of his
+father, who quoted King Lear and said, "How sharper than a serpent's
+tooth it is to have a thankless child!"</p>
+
+<p>His troubles weighed so upon the good clergyman that his nerves became
+affected and he went to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> neighboring town of Wexio to consult Doctor
+Rothman, a famed medical expert.</p>
+
+<p>The good clergyman, in the course of his conversation with the doctor,
+told of his mortification on account of the dulness and perversity of
+his son.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Rothman listened in patience and came to the conclusion that
+young Mr. Linn&aelig;us was a good boy who did the wrong thing. All energy is
+God's, but it may be misdirected. A boy not good enough for a preacher
+might make a good doctor&mdash;an excess of virtue is not required in the
+recipe for a physician.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll cure you, by taking charge of your boy," said Rothman; "you want
+to make a clergyman of the youth: I'll let him be just what he wants to
+be, a naturalist and a physician." And it was so.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>he year spent by Linn&aelig;us under the roof of Doctor Rothman was a pivotal
+point in his life. He was eighteen years old. The contempt of Rothman
+for the refinements of education appealed to the young man. Rothman was
+blunt, direct, and to the point: he had a theory that people grew by
+doing what they wanted to do, not by resisting their impulses.</p>
+
+<p>He was both friend and comrade to the boy. They rode together, dissected
+animals and plants, and the young man assisted in operations. Linn&aelig;us
+had the run of the Doctor's library, and without knowing it, was
+mastering physiology.</p>
+
+<p>"I would adopt him as my son," said Rothman; "but I love him so much
+that I am going to separate him from me. My roots have struck deep in
+the soil: I am like the human trees told of by Dante; but the boy can go
+on!"</p>
+
+<p>And so Rothman sent him along to the University of Lund, with letters to
+another doctor still more cranky than himself. This man was Doctor
+Kilian Stob&aelig;us, a medical professor, physician to the king, and a
+naturalist of note. Stob&aelig;us had a mixed-up museum of minerals, birds,
+fishes and plants.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody for a hundred miles who had a curious thing in the way of
+natural history sent it to Stob&aelig;us. Into this medley of strange and
+curious things Linn&aelig;us was plunged with orders to "straighten it up."
+There<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> was a German student also living with the doctor, working for his
+board. Linn&aelig;us took the lead and soon had the young German helping him
+catalog the curios.</p>
+
+<p>The spirit of Ray had gotten abroad in Germany, and Ray's books had been
+translated and were being used in many of the German schools. Linn&aelig;us
+made a bargain with the German student that they should speak only
+German&mdash;he wanted to find what was locked up in those German books on
+botany.</p>
+
+<p>Stob&aelig;us was lame and had but one eye, so he used to call on the boys to
+help him, not only to hitch up his horse, but to write his
+prescriptions. Linn&aelig;us wrote very badly, and was chided because he did
+not improve his penmanship, for it seems that in the olden times
+physicians wrote legibly. Linn&aelig;us resented the rebuke, and was shown the
+door. He was gone a week, when Stob&aelig;us sent for him, much to his relief.
+This little comedy was played several times during the year, through
+what Linn&aelig;us afterward acknowledged as his fault. One would hardly think
+that the man who on first seeing the English gorse in full bloom fell on
+his knees, burst into tears of joy, and thanked God that he had lived to
+see this day, would have had a fiery temper. Then further, the gentle,
+spiritual qualities that Linn&aelig;us in his later life developed give one
+the idea that he was always of a gentle nature.</p>
+
+<p>In indexing the museum of Doctor Stob&aelig;us, Linn&aelig;us found his bent. "I
+will never be a doctor," he said;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> "but I can beat the world on making a
+catalog."</p>
+
+<p>And thus it was: his genius lay in classification. "He indexed and
+catalogued the world," a great writer has said.</p>
+
+<p>After a year at the University of Lund, with more learned by working for
+his board than at school, there was a visit from Doctor Rothman, who had
+just dropped in to see his old friend Stob&aelig;us. The fact was, Rothman
+cared a deal more for Linn&aelig;us than he did for Stob&aelig;us. "Weeds develop
+into flowers by transplanting only," said Rothman to Linn&aelig;us. "You need
+a different soil&mdash;get out of here before you get pot-bound."</p>
+
+<p>"But about Cyclops?" asked Linn&aelig;us.</p>
+
+<p>"Let Cyclops go to the devil!" It was no use to ask permission of
+Stob&aelig;us. Linn&aelig;us was so valuable that Stob&aelig;us would not spare him.</p>
+
+<p>So Linn&aelig;us packed up and departed between the dawn and the day, leaving
+a letter stating he had gone to Upsala because it seemed best and
+begging forgiveness for such seeming ingratitude.</p>
+
+<p>When Linn&aelig;us got to Upsala he found a letter from Doctor Cyclops,
+written in wrath, requesting him never again to show his face in Lund.
+Rothman also lost the friendship of Stob&aelig;us for his share in the
+transaction.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgw.jpg" alt="W" title="W" /></div><p>hen Linn&aelig;us arrived at Upsala he had one marked distinction, according
+to his own account&mdash;he was the poorest student that had ever knocked at
+the gates of the University for admittance. Perhaps this is a mistake,
+for even though the young man had patched his shoes with birch bark, he
+was not in debt.</p>
+
+<p>And the youth of twenty-one who has health, hope, ambition and animation
+is not to be pitied. Poverty is only for the people who think poverty.</p>
+
+<p>It is five hundred English miles from Lund to Upsala. After his long,
+weary tramp, Linn&aelig;us sat on the edge of the hill and looked down at the
+scattered town of Upsala in the valley below. A stranger passing by
+pointed out the college buildings, where a thousand young men were being
+drilled and disciplined in the mysteries of learning. "Where is the
+Botanical Garden?" asked the newcomer.</p>
+
+<p>It was pointed out to him. He gazed on the site, carefully studied the
+surrounding landscape, and mentally calculated where he would move the
+Botanical Garden as soon as he had control of it. Let us anticipate here
+just long enough to explain that the Upsala Botanical Garden now is
+where Linn&aelig;us said it should be. It is a most beautiful place, lined off
+with close-growing shrubbery. After traversing the winding paths, one
+reaches the lecture-hall, built after the Greek, with porches, peristyle
+and gently ascending marble steps.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> On entering the building, the first
+object that attracts the visitor is the life-size statue of Linn&aelig;us.</p>
+
+<p>To the left, a half-mile away, is the old cathedral&mdash;a place that never
+much interested Linn&aelig;us. But there now rests his dust, and in windows
+and also in storied bronze his face, form and fame endure. In the
+meantime, we have left the young man sitting on a boulder looking down
+at the town ere he goes forward to possess it.</p>
+
+<p>He adjusts his shoes with their gaping wounds, shakes the dust from his
+cap, and then takes from his pack a faded neckscarf, puts it on and he
+is ready.</p>
+
+<p>Descending the hill he forgets his lameness, waives the stone-bruises,
+and walks confidently to the Botanical Garden, which he views with a
+critical eye. Next, he inquires for the General Superintendent who lives
+near. The young man presents his credentials from Rothman, who describes
+the youth as one who knows and loves the flowers, and who can be useful
+in office or garden and is not above spade and hoe. The Superintendent
+looks at the pink face, touched with bronze from days in the open air,
+notes the long yellow hair, beholds the out-of-door look of fortitude
+that comes from hard and plain fare, and inwardly compares these things
+with the lack of them in some of his students. "But this Doctor&mdash;Doctor
+Rothman who wrote this letter&mdash;I do not have the honor of knowing him,"
+says the Superintendent.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you are unfortunate," replies the youth; "he is a very great man,
+and I myself will vouch for him in every way."</p>
+
+<p>Oh! this glowing confidence of youth&mdash;before there comes a surplus of
+lime in the bones, or the touch of winter in the heart! The
+Superintendent smiled. Knock in faith and the door shall be
+opened&mdash;there are those whom no one can turn away. A stray bed was found
+in the garret for the stranger, and the next morning he was earnestly at
+work cataloguing the dried plants in the herbarium, a task long delayed
+because there was no one to do it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>he study of Natural History in the University of Upsala was, at this
+time, at a low ebb. It was like the Art Department in many of the
+American colleges: its existence largely confined to the school catalog.
+There were many weeks of biting poverty and neglect for Linn&aelig;us, but he
+worked away in obscurity and silence and endured, saying all the time,
+"The sun will come out, the sun will come out!" Doctor Olaf Rudbeck had
+charge of the chair of Botany, but seldom sat in it. His business was
+medicine. He gave no lectures, but the report was that he made his
+students toil at cultivating in his garden&mdash;this to open up their
+intellectual pores. In the course of his work, Linn&aelig;us devised a sex
+plan of classification, instead of the so-called natural method. He
+wrote out his ideas and submitted them to Rudbeck.</p>
+
+<p>The learned Doctor first pooh-poohed the plan, then tolerated it, and in
+a month claimed he had himself devised it. On the scheme being explained
+to others there was opposition, and Rudbeck requested Linn&aelig;us to amplify
+his notes into a thesis, and read it as a lecture. This was done, and so
+pleased was the old man that he appointed Linn&aelig;us his adjunctus. In the
+Spring of Seventeen Hundred Thirty, Linn&aelig;us began to give weekly
+lectures on some topic of Natural History.</p>
+
+<p>Linn&aelig;us was now fairly launched. His animation, clear thinking, handsome
+face and graceful ways made his lectures very popular. Science in his
+hands was no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> longer the dull and turgid thing it had before been in the
+University. He would give a lecture in the hall, and then invite the
+audience to walk with him in the woods. He seemed to know everything:
+birds, beetles, bugs, beasts, trees, weeds, flowers, rocks and stones
+were to him familiar.</p>
+
+<p>He showed his pupils things they had walked on all their lives and never
+seen.</p>
+
+<p>The old Botanical Garden that had degenerated into a kitchen-garden for
+the Commons was rearranged and furnished with many specimens gathered
+round about.</p>
+
+<p>A system of exchange was carried on with other schools, and Natural
+History at Upsala was fast becoming a feature. Old Doctor Rudbeck
+hobbled around with the classes, and when Linn&aelig;us lectured sat in a
+front seat, applauding by rapping his cane on the floor and ejaculating
+words of encouragement.</p>
+
+<p>Linn&aelig;us was now receiving invitations to lecture at other schools in the
+vicinity. He made excursions and reports on the Natural History of the
+country around. The Academy of Science of Upsala now selected him to go
+to Lapland and explore the resources of that country, which was then
+little known.</p>
+
+<p>The journey was to be a long and dangerous one. It meant four thousand
+miles of travel on foot, by sledge and on horseback, over a country that
+was for the most part mountainous, without roads, and peopled with
+semi-savages.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There were two reasons why Linn&aelig;us should make the trip:</p>
+
+<p>One was he had the hardihood and the fortitude to do it.</p>
+
+<p>And second, he was not wanted at Upsala. He was becoming too popular.
+One rival professor had gone so far as to prefer formal charges of
+scientific heresy; he also made the telling point that Linn&aelig;us was not a
+college graduate. The rule of the University was that no lecturer,
+teacher or professor should be employed who did not have a degree from
+some foreign University.</p>
+
+<p>Inquiry was made and it was found that Linn&aelig;us had left the University
+of Lund under a cloud. Linn&aelig;us was confronted with the charge, and
+declined to answer it, thus practically pleading guilty. So, to get him
+out of Upsala seemed a desirable thing, both to friends and to foes. His
+friends secured the commission for the Lapland exploration, and his
+enemies made no objections, merely whispering, "Good riddance!" To be
+twenty-four, in good health, with hair like that of General Custer, a
+heart to appreciate Nature, a good horse under you, and a commission
+from the State to do an important work, in your left-hand
+breast-pocket&mdash;what Heaven more complete!</p>
+
+<p>A reception was tendered the young naturalist in the great hall, and he
+addressed the students on the necessity of doing your work as well as
+you can, and being kind. Before beginning his arduous and dangerous
+journey, Linn&aelig;us went to Lund to visit his old patron,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> Doctor Stob&aelig;us.
+Time, the great healer, had cured the Doctor of his hate, and he now
+spoke of Linn&aelig;us as his best pupil. He had left hastily by the wan light
+of the moon, without leaving orders where his mail was to be forwarded;
+but now he was received as an honored guest. All the little
+misunderstandings they had were laughed over as jokes.</p>
+
+<p>From Lund, Linn&aelig;us went to his home in Smaland to visit his parents.</p>
+
+<p>It is needless to say that they were very proud of him, and the
+villagers turned out in great numbers to do him honor, perhaps, in their
+simplicity, not knowing why.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>he account of the Lapland trip by Linn&aelig;us is to be found in his book,
+"Lachesis Lapponica."</p>
+
+<p>The journey covered over four thousand miles and took from May to
+November, Seventeen Hundred Thirty-one. The volume is in the form of a
+daily journal, and is as interesting as "Robinson Crusoe." There is no
+night there in Summer; but for all this, Lapland is not a paradise.</p>
+
+<p>It is a great stretch of desert, vast steppes and lofty mountains, with
+here and there fertile valleys. To be out in the wide open, with no
+companions but a horse and a dog, filled Linn&aelig;us' heart with a wild joy.
+As he went on, the road grew so rough that he had to part with the
+horse, which he did with a pang, but the dog kept him company.</p>
+
+<p>To be educated is to liberate the mind from its trammels and fears&mdash;to
+set it free, new-chiseled from the rock. Linn&aelig;us reveled in the vast
+loneliness of the steppes and took a hearty satisfaction in the hard
+fare. His gun and fishing-rod stood him in good stead; there were
+berries at times, and edible barks and watercress, and when these failed
+he had a little bag of meal and dried reindeer-tongues to fall back
+upon.</p>
+
+<p>The simplicity of his living is shown best in the fact that the expenses
+for the entire journey, occupying seven months, were only twenty-five
+pounds, or less than one hundred twenty-five dollars. The Academy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> had
+set aside sixty pounds, and their surprise at having most of the money
+returned to them, instead of a demand being made for more, won them,
+hand and heart. He had hit the sturdy old burghers in a sensitive
+spot&mdash;the pocketbook&mdash;and they passed resolutions declaring him the
+world's greatest naturalist, and voted him a medal, to be cast at his
+own expense. Fame is delightful, but as collateral it does not rank
+high.</p>
+
+<p>Linn&aelig;us was without funds and without occupation. He gave a course of
+lectures at the University on his explorations, where every seat was
+taken, and even the stage and windows were filled. The sprightliness,
+grace and intellect Linn&aelig;us brought to bear illumined his theme.</p>
+
+<p>When Linn&aelig;us lectured, all classes were dismissed: none could rival him.
+His very excellence was his disadvantage. Jealousy was hot on his trail,
+for he was disturbing the balance of stupidity. A movement grew to force
+him from the college. Formal charges were made, and when the case came
+to a trial the even tenor of justice was disturbed by Linn&aelig;us making an
+attack on Professor Rosen, his principal enemy, with intent to kill him.
+Dueling has been forbidden in all the universities of Sweden since the
+year Sixteen Hundred Eighty-two, and the diversion replaced by quartet
+singing. So when Linn&aelig;us challenged his enemy to fight, and warned him
+he would kill him if he didn't fight, and also if he did, things were in
+a bad way for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> Linn&aelig;us.</p>
+
+<p>The former charges were dropped to take up the more serious&mdash;just as
+when a man is believed to be guilty of murder, no mention is made of his
+crime of larceny.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Linn&aelig;us was under the ban. The enemy had won: Linn&aelig;us must leave.
+But where should he go&mdash;what could he do? No college would receive him
+after his being compelled to leave Upsala for riot. He decided that if
+disgrace were to be his on account of revenge, he would accept the
+disgrace. He would kill Rosen on sight and then either commit suicide or
+accept the consequences: it was all one! And so, laying plans to waylay
+his victim, he fell asleep and dreamed he had done the deed.</p>
+
+<p>He awoke in a sweat of horror!</p>
+
+<p>He heard the officers at the door! He staggered to his feet, and was
+making wild plans to fight the pursuers, when it occurred to him that he
+had only dreamed. He sat down, faint, but mightily relieved.</p>
+
+<p>Then he laughed, and it came to him that opposition was a part of the
+great game of life. To do a thing was to jostle others, and to jostle
+and be jostled was the fate of every man of power. "He that endureth
+unto the end shall be saved."</p>
+
+<p>The world was before him&mdash;the flowers still bloomed, and plants nodded
+their heads in the meadows; the summer winds blew across the fields of
+wheat, the branches waved. He was strong&mdash;he could plant and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> plow, or
+dig ditches, or hew lumber!</p>
+
+<p>Some one was hammering on the door; they had been knocking for fully
+five minutes&mdash;ah! There had been no murder, so surely it was not the
+officers.</p>
+
+<p>He arose slowly and opened the door, murmuring apologies. A letter for
+Carolus Linn&aelig;us! The letter was from Baron Reuterholm of Dalecarlia. It
+contained a draft for twenty-five pounds, "as a token of good faith,"
+and begged that Linn&aelig;us would accept charge of an expedition to survey
+the natural resources of Dalecarlia in the same way that he had Lapland,
+only with greater minuteness. Linn&aelig;us read the letter again. The draft
+fluttered from his fingers to the floor.</p>
+
+<p>"Pick that up!" he peremptorily ordered of the messenger. He wanted to
+see if the other man saw it too.</p>
+
+<p>The other man did pick it up! Linn&aelig;us was not dreaming, then, after
+all!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>his second expedition had two objects: one was the better education of
+Baron Reuterholm's two sons, and the other the survey. One of these sons
+was at the University of Upsala, and he had conceived such an admiration
+for Linn&aelig;us that he had written home about him. No man knows what he is
+doing: we succeed by the right oblique. Little did Linn&aelig;us guess that he
+was preparing the way for great good fortune. The second excursion was
+one of luxury. It lacked all the hardships of the first, and involved
+the management of a party. Reuterholm was a rich Jewish banker, and a
+man in close touch with all Swedish affairs of State. This time Linn&aelig;us
+was provided with ample funds.</p>
+
+<p>Linn&aelig;us had a genius for system&mdash;a head for business. He classified men,
+and systematized his work like a general in the field. There were seven
+young naturalists in the party, and to each Linn&aelig;us assigned a special
+work, with orders to hand in a written report of progress each evening.
+That the "Economist" or steward of the party was an American lends an
+especial note of interest for us. After Dalecarlia it was to be America!</p>
+
+<p>In money matters he was punctilious and accurate, the result of his
+early training in making both ends meet. The habits of thrift, industry,
+energy and absolute honesty had made him a marked man&mdash;there is not so
+much competition along these lines.</p>
+
+<p>The maps, measurements, drawings, and the exact,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> short, sharp, military
+reports turned in at regular intervals to the Baron won that worthy
+absolutely.</p>
+
+<p>Linn&aelig;us was a businessman as well as a naturalist. It would require a
+book to tell of the glorious half-gypsy life of these eight young men,
+moving slowly through woods, across plains, over mountains and meadows,
+studying soil, rocks, birds, trees and flowers, collecting and making
+records.</p>
+
+<p>Camping at night by flowing streams, awakening with the dawn and cooking
+breakfast by the campfire in a silence that took up their shouts of
+laughter in surprise, and echoed them back from the neighboring hills!
+At last the journey was ended. Linn&aelig;us had proved his ability to
+teach&mdash;his animation, good-cheer and friendly qualities brought his
+pupils very close to him. Reuterholm insisted that he should attach
+himself to the rising little college at Fahlun. There he met Doctor
+Mor&aelig;us, a man of much worth in a scientific way. At his house Linn&aelig;us
+made his home. There was a daughter in the household, Sara Elizabeth,
+tall, slender, appreciative and studious. One of the Reuterholms had
+courted her, but in vain.</p>
+
+<p>There were the usual results, and when Carolus and Sara Elizabeth came
+to Doctor Mor&aelig;us hand in hand for his blessing, he granted it as good
+men always do. Then the Doctor gave Linn&aelig;us some good advice&mdash;go to
+Holland or somewhere and get a doctor's degree. The enemies at Upsala
+called Linn&aelig;us "the gypsy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> scientist." Silence them&mdash;Linn&aelig;us was now a
+great man, and the world would yet acknowledge it. Sara Elizabeth agreed
+in all of the propositions.</p>
+
+<p>Love, they say, is blind, but sometimes love is a regular telescope.
+This time love saw things that the learned men of Upsala failed to
+discover&mdash;their diagnosis was wrong. Linn&aelig;us had prepared a thesis on
+intermittent fever, and he was assured that if he presented this thesis
+at the medical school at Harderwijk, Holland, with letters from Baron
+Reuterholm and Doctor Mor&aelig;us, it would secure him the much desired M.D.</p>
+
+<p>A few months, at most, would suffice. He could then return to Fahlun and
+take his place as a practising physician and a professor in the college,
+marry the lady of his choice and live happy ever afterward.</p>
+
+<p>So he started away southward. In due time, he arrived at Harderwijk and
+read his thesis to the faculty. Instead of the callow youth, such as
+they usually dealt with, they found a practised speaker who defended his
+points with grace and confidence. The degree was at once voted, and a
+"cum laude" thrown in for good measure. Linn&aelig;us was asked to remain
+there and give a course of lectures on natural history. This he did.
+Before going home he thought he would take a little look in on Leyden,
+at that time the bookmaking and literary center of the world. At Leyden
+he met Gronovius, the naturalist, who asked him to remain and give
+lectures at the University. He did so, and incidentally<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> showed
+Gronovius the manuscript of his book on the new system of botanic
+classification.</p>
+
+<p>Gronovius was so delighted that he insisted on having the book printed
+by the Plantins at his own expense. Here was a piece of good fortune
+Linn&aelig;us had not anticipated.</p>
+
+<p>Linn&aelig;us now settled down to read the proofs and help the work through
+the presses. But he never idled an hour.</p>
+
+<p>He studied, wrote and lectured, and made little excursions with his
+friends through the fields. The book finished, he hastened to send
+copies back to Fahlun to Sara Elizabeth, saying he must see Amsterdam
+and then go to Antwerp to visit his new-found printer-friends there, and
+then go home!</p>
+
+<p>At Amsterdam he remained a whole year, living at the house of Burman,
+the naturalist.</p>
+
+<p>The wealthy banker, Cliffort, first among amateur botanists of his day,
+invited Linn&aelig;us to visit him at his country-house at Hartecamp. Here he
+saw the finest garden he had ever looked upon. Cliffort had copies of
+Linn&aelig;us' book and he now insisted that the author should remain, catalog
+his collection and issue the book with the help of the Plantins, all
+without regard to cost. It took a year to get the work out, but it yet
+remains one of the finest things ever attempted in a bookmaking way on
+the subject of botany.</p>
+
+<p>About the same time, with the help of Cliffort, Linn&aelig;us published
+another big book of his own called,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> "Fundamenta Botanica." This book
+was taken up at Oxford and used as a textbook, in preference to Ray.</p>
+
+<p>Linn&aelig;us received invitations from England and was persuaded to take a
+trip across to that country. He visited Oxford and London, and was
+received by scientific men as a conquering hero. He saw Garrick act and
+heard George Frederick Handel, where the crowd was so great that a
+notice was posted requesting gentlemen to come without swords and ladies
+without hoops. Handel composed an aria in his honor.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to Leyden, Linn&aelig;us was urged by the municipality to remain and
+rearrange the public flower-gardens and catalog the rare plants at the
+University. This took a year, in which three more books were issued
+under his skilful care.</p>
+
+<p>He now started for home in earnest, by way of Paris, with what a
+contemporary calls "a trunkful of medals."</p>
+
+<p>Paris, too, had honors and employment for the great botanist, but he
+escaped and at last reached Fahlun. He had been gone nearly four years,
+and during the interval had established his place in the scientific
+world as the first botanist of the time.</p>
+
+<p>"It was love that sent me out of Sweden, and but for love I would never
+have returned," he wrote.</p>
+
+<p>Linn&aelig;us and Sara Elizabeth were married June Twenty-six, Seventeen
+Hundred Thirty-nine.</p>
+
+<p>Now the unexpected happened: Upsala petitioned Linn&aelig;us to return, and
+the man who headed the petition<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> was the one who had driven him away and
+who came near being killed for his pains. Linn&aelig;us and his wife went to
+Upsala, rich, honored, beloved.</p>
+
+<p>Linn&aelig;us shifted the scientific center of gravity of all Europe to a
+town, practically to them obscure, a thing they themselves scarcely
+realized.</p>
+
+<p>Henceforth, the life of Linn&aelig;us flowed forward like a great and mighty
+river&mdash;everything made way for him. He was invited by the King of Spain
+to come to that country and found a School of Science, and so lavish
+were the promises that they surely would have turned the head of a
+lesser man. Universities in many civilized countries honored themselves
+by giving him degrees.</p>
+
+<p>In Seventeen Hundred Sixty-one, the King of Sweden issued a patent of
+nobility in his honor, and thereafter he was Carl von Linne. In England
+he was known as Sir Charles Linn.</p>
+
+<p>Sainte-Beuve, the eminent French critic, says that the world has
+produced only about half a dozen men who deserve to be placed in the
+first class. The elements that make up this super-superior man are high
+intellect, which abandons itself to the purpose in hand, careless of
+form and precedent; indifference to obstacles and opposition; and a
+joyous, sympathetic, loving spirit that runs over and inundates
+everything it touches, all with no special thought of personal pleasure,
+gratification or gain.</p>
+
+<p>Linn&aelig;us seems in every way to fill the formula.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THOMAS_H_HUXLEY" id="THOMAS_H_HUXLEY"></a>THOMAS H. HUXLEY</h2>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img445.jpg" alt="HUXLEY" title="HUXLEY" /></div>
+
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>That man, I think, has a liberal education whose body has been so
+trained in youth that it is the ready servant of his will, and does
+with ease and pleasure all that, as a mechanism, it is capable of;
+whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts
+of equal strength and in smooth running order, ready, like a
+steam-engine, to be turned to any kind of work and to spin the
+gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is
+stored with the knowledge of the great fundamental truths of Nature
+and the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is
+full of life and fire, but whose passions have been trained to come
+to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; one
+who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to
+hate all vileness, and to esteem others as himself.</p>
+
+<p class='author'>&mdash;<i>Thomas Henry Huxley</i></p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THOMAS H. HUXLEY</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>hat was a great group of thinkers to which Huxley belonged.</p>
+<p>The Mutual Admiration Society forms the sunshine in which souls
+grow&mdash;great men come in groups. Sir Francis Galton says there were
+fourteen men in Greece in the time of Pericles who made Athens possible.
+A man alone is only a part of a man.</p>
+
+<p>Praxiteles by himself could have done nothing. Ictinus might have drawn
+the plans for the Parthenon, but without Pericles the noble building
+would have remained forever the stuff which dreams are made of. And they
+do say that without Aspasia Pericles would have been a mere dreamer of
+dreams, and Walter Savage Landor overheard enough of their conversation
+to prove it.</p>
+
+<p>William Morris and seven men working with him formed the Preraphaelite
+Brotherhood and gave the workers and doers of the world an impetus they
+yet feel.</p>
+
+<p>Cambridge and Concord had seven men who induced the Muses to come to
+America and take out papers.</p>
+
+<p>These men of the Barbizon School tinted the entire art world: Millet,
+Rousseau, Daubigny, Corot, Diaz. And the people who worked a complete
+revolution in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> the theological thought of Christendom were these:
+Darwin, Spencer, Mill, Tyndall, Wallace, Huxley and, yes, George Eliot,
+who bolstered the brain of Herbert Spencer when he was learning to think
+for himself.</p>
+
+<p>When the victory had become a rout, there were many others who joined
+forces with the evolutionists; but at first the thinkers named above
+stood together and received the rather unsavory gibes and jeers of those
+who get their episcopopagy and science from the same source.</p>
+
+<p>Darwin was the only man in the group who was a university graduate, and
+he once said that he owed nothing to his Alma Mater, save the stimulus
+derived from her disapproval.</p>
+
+<p>For the work these men had to do there was no precedent: no one had gone
+before and blazed a trail.</p>
+
+<p>Learning, like capital, is timid; but ignorance coupled with a desire to
+know, is bold. Do I then make a plea for ignorance? Yes, most assuredly.
+It is just as well not to know so much, as to be a theologian and know
+so many things that are not true.</p>
+
+<p>Learning and institutions of learning subdue men into conformity; only
+the man who belongs to nothing is free; and ignorance, as well as a
+certain indifference to what the world has said and done, is a necessary
+factor in the character of him who would do a great work. It was the
+combined ignorance and boldness of Columbus that made it possible for
+him to give the world a continent.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Yet the man who has not had a college training often feels he has
+somehow missed something valuable: there is timidity and hesitation when
+he is in the presence of those who have had "advantages." And Huxley
+felt this loss, more or less, up to his thirty-fifth year, when Fate had
+him cross swords with college men, and then the truth became his that if
+he had had the regular university training, it was quite probable that
+he would have accepted the doctrines the universities taught, and would
+then have been in the camp of the "enemy," instead of with what he
+called the "blessed minority."</p>
+
+<p>Isolation is a great aid to the thinker. Some of the best books the
+world has ever known were written behind prison-bars; exile has done
+much for literature, and a protracted sea-voyage has allowed many a good
+man to roam the universe in imagination. Some of Macaulay's best essays
+were written on board slow-going sailing-ships that were blown by
+vagrant winds from England to India. Darwin, Hooker and Huxley, all got
+their scientific baptism on board of surveying-ships, where time was
+plentiful and anything but fleeting, and most everything else was
+scarce.</p>
+
+<p>Huxley was only assistant surgeon on the "Rattlesnake," and above him
+was a naturalist who much of his time lay in his bunk and read treatises
+on this and also on that.</p>
+
+<p>Huxley was the seventh child of a plodding schoolteacher, born on the
+seventh day of the week on a seventh-floor back, he used to say. His
+genius<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> for work came from his mother, a tireless, ambitious woman, who
+got things done while others were discussing them. "Had she been a man,
+she would have been leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons,"
+her son used to say.</p>
+
+<p>College education was not for that goodly brood&mdash;a living was the first
+thing, so after a good drilling in the three R's, Thomas Huxley was
+apprenticed to a pharmacist who paid him six shillings a week, a sum
+that the boy conscientiously gave to his mother.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, if in our schoolteaching we could only teach this one thing: a great
+thirst for knowledge! But this desire we can not impart: it is trial,
+difficulty, obstacle, deprivation and persecution that make souls hunger
+and thirst after knowledge. Young Huxley wanted to know. His
+thoroughness in the drugstore won the admiration of the doctors whose
+prescriptions he compounded, and several of them loaned him books and
+took him to clinics; and at seventeen we find him with a Free
+Scholarship in Charing Cross Hospital, serving as nurse and assistant
+surgeon. Then came the appointment as assistant surgeon in the Navy, and
+the appointment to "H.M.S. Rattlesnake," bound on a four-year trip to
+the Antipodes, all quite as a matter of course.</p>
+
+<p>Life is a sequence: this happened today because you did that yesterday.
+Tomorrow will be the result of today.</p>
+
+<p>The general idea of evolution was strong in the mind of young Huxley. He
+realized that Nature<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> was moving, growing, changing all things. He had
+studied embryology, and had seen how the body of a man begins as a
+single minute mass of protoplasm, without organs or dimensions.</p>
+
+<p>Behind the ship was his dragnet, and he worked almost constantly
+recording the different specimens of animal and vegetable life that he
+thus secured. The jellyfish attracted him most.</p>
+
+<p>To the ship's naturalist, jellyfish were jellyfish, but Huxley saw that
+there were many kinds, distinct, separate, peculiar. He began to dissect
+them and thus began his book on jellyfish, just as Darwin wrote his work
+on barnacles.</p>
+
+<p>Huxley vowed to himself that before the "Rattlesnake" got back to
+England he would know more about jellyfish than any other living man.
+That his ambition was realized no one now disputes.</p>
+
+<p>Among his first discoveries, it came to him with a thrill that a certain
+species of jellyfish bears a very close resemblance to the human embryo
+at a certain stage.</p>
+
+<p>And he remembered the dictum of Goethe, that the growth of the
+individual mirrors the growth of the race. And he paraphrased it thus:
+"The growth of the individual mirrors the growth of the species." So
+filled was he with the thought that he could not sleep, so he got up and
+paced the deck and tried to explain his great thought to the second
+mate. He was getting ready for "The Origin of Species," which he once
+said to Darwin<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> he would himself have written, if Darwin had been a
+little more of a gentleman and had held off for a few years.</p>
+
+<p>It was on board the "Rattlesnake" that Huxley wrote this great truth:
+"Nature has no designs or intentions. All that live exist only because
+they have adapted themselves to the hard lines that Nature has laid
+down. We progress as we comply."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgi.jpg" alt="I" title="I" /></div><p>n Australia, while waiting for his ship to locate and map a dangerous
+reef, Huxley went ashore, and as he playfully expressed it, "ran upon
+another."</p>
+
+<p>The name of the most excellent young woman who was to become his wife
+was Henrietta Heathorn; and Julian Hawthorne has discovered that she
+belongs to the same good stock from whence came our Nathaniel of Salem.</p>
+
+<p>It did not take the young naturalist and this stranded waif, seven
+thousand miles from home, long to see that they had much in common. Both
+were eager for truth, both had the ability to cut the introduction and
+reach live issues directly. "I saw you were a woman with whom only
+honesty would answer," he wrote her thirty years after. He was still in
+love with her.</p>
+
+<p>Yet she was a proud soul, and no assistant surgeon on an insignificant
+sloop would answer her&mdash;when he got his surgeon's commission she would
+marry him. And it was seven years before she journeyed to England alone
+with that delightful object in view. He had to serve for her as Jacob
+did for Rachel, with this difference: Jacob loved several, but Thomas
+Huxley loved but one.</p>
+
+<p>Huxley's wife was his companion, confidante, comrade, friend. I can not
+recall another so blest, in all the annals of thinking men, save John
+Stuart Mill. "I tell her everything I know, or guess, or imagine, so as
+to get<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> it straight in my own mind," he said to John Fiske.</p>
+
+<p>In that most interesting work, "Life and Lessons of Huxley," compiled by
+his son Leonard, are constant references and allusions to this most
+ideal mating. In reply to the question, Is marriage a failure? I would
+say, "No, provided the man marries a woman like Huxley's wife, and the
+woman marries a man like Huxley."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>here is a classic aphorism which runs about this way, "Knock and the
+world knocks with you; boost and you boost alone." Like most popular
+sayings this is truth turned wrong side out.</p>
+
+<p>John Fiske once called Thomas Huxley an "appreciative iconoclast." That
+is to say, Huxley was a persistent protester (which is different from a
+protestant), and at the same time, he was a friend who never faltered
+and grew faint in time of trouble. Huxley always sniffed the battle from
+afar and said, Ha! Ha!</p>
+
+<p>There be those who do declare that the success of Huxley was owing to
+his taking the tide at the flood, and riding into high favor on the
+Darwinian wave. To say that there would have been no Huxley had there
+been no Darwin would be one of those unkind cuts the cruelty of which
+lies in its truth.</p>
+
+<p>It is equally true that if there had been no Lincoln there would have
+been no Grant; but Grant was a very great man just the same&mdash;so why
+raise the issue!</p>
+
+<p>Darwin summed up and made nebul&aelig; of the truths which Huxley had, up to
+that time, held only in gaseous form.</p>
+
+<p>Darwin was born in the immortal year Eighteen Hundred Nine. Huxley was
+born in Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five. When "The Origin of Species" was
+published in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, Thomas Huxley was thirty-four
+years old. He had made his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> four years' trip around the world on the
+surveying-ship "Rattlesnake," just as Darwin had made his eventful
+voyage on the "Beagle."</p>
+
+<p>These men in many ways had paralleled each other; but Darwin had sixteen
+years the start, and during these years he had steadily and silently
+worked to prove the great truth that he had sensed intuitively years
+before in the South Seas.</p>
+
+<p>"The Origin of Species" sheds light in ten thousand ways on the fact
+that all life has evolved from very lowly forms and is still ascending:
+that species were not created by fiat, but that every species was the
+sure and necessary result of certain conditions.</p>
+
+<p>Until "The Origin of Species" was published, and for some years
+afterward, the Immutability of Species was taught in all colleges, and
+everywhere accepted by the so-called learned men.</p>
+
+<p>Goethe had somewhat dimly prophesied the discovery of the Law of
+Evolution, but his ideas on natural science were regarded by the schools
+as quite on a par with those of Dante: neither was taken seriously.</p>
+
+<p>Darwin proved his hypothesis. Doubtless, very many schoolmen would have
+accepted the theory, but to admit that man was not created outright,
+complete, and in his present form, or superior to it, seemed to evolve a
+contradiction of the Mosaic account of Creation, and the breaking up of
+Christianity. And these things done, many thought, would entail moral
+chaos,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> destruction of private interests and moral confusion being one
+and the same thing to those whose interests are involved. And so for
+conscience' sake, Darwin was bitterly assailed and opposed.</p>
+
+<p>Opportunity, which knocks many times at each man's door, rapped hard at
+Huxley's door in Eighteen Hundred Sixty. It was at Oxford, at a meeting
+of the British Association for the Advancement of Science: "A big
+society with a slightly ironical name," once said Huxley. The audience
+was large and fashionable, delegates being present from all parts of the
+British Empire.</p>
+
+<p>"The Origin of Species" had been published the year before, and tongues
+were wagging. Darwin was not present; but Huxley, who was known to be a
+personal friend of Darwin, was in his seat. The intent of the chairman
+was to keep Darwin and his pestiferous book out of all the discussions:
+Darwin was a good man to smother with silence.</p>
+
+<p>But Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, in the course of a speech on
+another subject began to run short of material, and so switched off upon
+a theme which he had already exploited from the pulpit with marked
+effect. All public speakers carry this boiler-plate matter for use in
+time of stress.</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop began to denounce "those enemies of the Church and Society
+who make covert attacks upon the Bible in the name of Science." He
+warmed to his theme, and by a specious series of misstatements<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> and
+various appeals to the prejudices of his audience worked the assemblage
+up to a high pitch of hilarity and enthusiasm. Toward the close of his
+speech he happened to spy Huxley seated near, and pointing a pudgy
+finger at him, "begged to be informed if the learned gentleman was
+really willing to be regarded as a descendant of a monkey?"</p>
+
+<p>As the Bishop sat down, there was a wild burst of applause and much
+laughter, but amid the din were calls, "Huxley! Huxley!" These shouts
+increased as it came over the people that while the Bishop had made a
+great speech, he had gone a trifle too far in ridiculing a member who up
+to this time had been silent. The good English spirit of fair play was
+at work. Still Huxley sat silent. Then the enemy, thinking he was
+completely vanquished, took up the cry with intent to add to his
+discomfiture: "Huxley! Huxley!"</p>
+
+<p>Slowly Huxley arose. He stood still until the last buzzing whisper had
+died away. When he spoke it was in so low a tone that people leaned
+forward to catch his words.</p>
+
+<p>Huxley knew his business: his slowness to speak created an atmosphere.
+There was no jest in his voice or manner. The air grew tense.</p>
+
+<p>His quiet reserve played itself off against the florid exuberance of the
+Bishop. The Bishop was not a man given to exact statements: his
+knowledge of science was general, not specific.</p>
+
+<p>Huxley demolished his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> card house point by point, correcting the gross
+misstatements, and ending by saying that since a question of personal
+preferences had been brought into the discussion of a great scientific
+theme, he would confess that if the alternatives were a descent on the
+one hand from a respectable monkey, or on the other from a Bishop of the
+Church of England who could stoop to misrepresentation and sophistry and
+who had attempted in that presence to throw discredit upon a man who had
+given his life to the cause of science, then if forced to decide he
+would declare in favor of the monkey.</p>
+
+<p>When Huxley took his seat, there was a silence that could be felt.
+Several ladies fainted. There were fears that the Bishop would reply,
+and to keep down such a possible unpleasant move the audience now
+applauded Huxley roundly, and amid the din the chairman declared the
+meeting adjourned.</p>
+
+<p>From that time forward Huxley was famous throughout England as a man to
+let alone in public debate.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgi.jpg" alt="I" title="I" /></div><p>t is a fine thing to be a great scientist, but it is a yet finer thing
+to be a great man. The one element in Huxley's life that makes his
+character stand out clear, sharp and well defined was his steadfast
+devotion to truth. The only thing he feared was self-deception. When he
+uttered his classic cry in defense of Darwin, there was no ulterior
+motive in it; no thought that he was attaching himself to a popular
+success; no idea that he was linking his name with greatness.</p>
+
+<p>What he felt was true, he uttered; and the strongest desire of his soul
+was that he might never compromise with the error for the sake of mental
+ease, or accept a belief simply because it was pleasant.</p>
+
+<p>Huxley once wrote this terse sentence of Gladstone: "It is to me a
+serious thing that the destinies of this great country should at present
+be to a great extent in the hands of a man who, whatever he may be in
+the affairs of which I am no judge, is nothing but a copious shuffler in
+those that I do understand." Gladstone crossed swords with Huxley,
+Spencer and Robert Ingersoll, and in each case his blundering intellect
+looked like a raft of logs compared with a steamboat that responds to
+the helm. Gladstone was a man of action, and silence to such is most
+becoming.</p>
+
+<p>He had a belief, that was enough; he should have hugged it close, and
+never stood up to explain it. Let us vary a simile just used: Lincoln
+once referred to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> an opponent as being "like a certain steamboat that
+ran on the Sangamon. This boat had so big a whistle that when she blew
+it, there wasn't steam enough to make her run, and when she ran she
+couldn't whistle."</p>
+
+<p>Huxley, Spencer and Robert Ingersoll, all made Gladstone cut for the
+woods and cover his retreat in a cloud of words. Ingersoll once said
+that in replying to Gladstone he felt like a man who had been guilty of
+cruelty to children.</p>
+
+<p>If one wants to see how pitifully weak Gladstone could be in an
+argument, let him refer to the "North American Review" for Eighteen
+Hundred Eighty-two.</p>
+
+<p>Yet Ingersoll was surely lacking in the passion for truth that
+characterized Huxley. Ingersoll was always a prosecutor or a defender:
+the lawyer habit was strong upon him. Just a little more bias in his
+clay and he would have made a model bishop.</p>
+
+<p>His stock of science was almost as meager as was that of Samuel
+Wilberforce, and he seldom hesitated to turn the laugh on an adversary,
+even at the expense of truth. When brought to book for his indictment of
+Moses without giving that great man any credit for the sublime things he
+did do, or making allowances for the barbaric horde with which he had to
+deal, Bob evaded the proposition by saying, "I am not the attorney of
+Moses: he has more than three million men looking after his case."</p>
+
+<p>Again, in that most charming lecture on Shakespeare,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> Ingersoll proves
+that Bacon did not write the plays, by picking out various detached
+passages of Bacon, which no one for a moment ever claimed revealed the
+genius of the man.</p>
+
+<p>With equal plausibility we could prove that the author of Hamlet was a
+weakling, by selecting all the obscure and stupid passages, and parading
+these with the unexplained fact that the play opens with the spirit of a
+dead man coming back to earth, and a little later in the same play
+Shakespeare has the man who interviewed the ghost tell of "that bourne
+from whence no traveler returns." Even Shakespeare was not a genius all
+the time. And Ingersoll, the searcher for truth, borrowed from his
+friends, the priests, the cheerful habit of secreting the particular
+thing that would not help the cause in hand. But one of the best things
+in Ingersoll's character was that he realized his lapses and in private
+acknowledged them.</p>
+
+<p>On reading the smooth, florid and plausible sophistry of Wilberforce,
+Ingersoll once said: "Be easy on Soapy Sam! A few years ago, a little
+shifting of base on the part of my ancestors, and I would probably have
+had Soapy Sam's job."</p>
+
+<p>This resemblance of opposites makes a person think of that remark
+applied to Voltaire. "He was the father of all those who wear
+shovel-hats."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgw.jpg" alt="W" title="W" /></div><p>hen Thomas Huxley and his wife arrived in New York in Eighteen Hundred
+Seventy-six, on a visit to the Centennial Exhibition, this interesting
+item was flashed over the country, "Huxley and his titled bride have
+arrived in New York on their wedding-journey."</p>
+
+<p>This item caused Mr. and Mrs. Huxley&mdash;both of them royal democrats&mdash;more
+joy than did the most complimentary interview. At home they had left a
+charming little brood of seven children, three of them nearly grown-ups.</p>
+
+<p>Huxley sent Tyndall, who a few months before had married a daughter of
+Lord Hamilton, the clipping and this note: "You see how that once I am
+in a democratic country I am pulling all the honors I can in my own
+direction." The next letter the Huxleys received from Tyndall was
+addressed, "Sir Thomas and Lady Huxley." Huxley never stood in much awe
+of the nobility; he evidently felt that there was another kind of which
+he himself in degree was heir. Huxley never had a better friend than Sir
+Joseph Hooker, and we see in his letters such postscripts as this:</p>
+
+<p>"Dear Sir Joseph: Do come and dine with us; it is a month since we have
+seen your homely old phiz." And Sir Joseph replies that he will be on
+hand the next Sunday evening and offers this mild suggestion,
+"Scientific gents as has countenances as curdles milk should not cast
+aspersions on men made in image of Maker."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>he wordy duel between Huxley and Gladstone prompted Toole, the great
+comedian, to send a box of grease-paints to Huxley with a note saying,
+"These are for you and Gladstone to use when you make up." It was a joke
+so subtle and choice that the Huxleys, always dear friends of Toole,
+laughed for a week.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Gladstone required a diagram when he heard of the procedure; and
+then, not being trepanned for the pleasantry, remarked that if Toole and
+Huxley collaborated on the stage, it would be eminently the proper
+thing, and in his mind there was little choice between them, both being
+fine actors.</p>
+
+<p>Later, we hear of Huxley saying he thought of sending the box of
+grease-paints to Gladstone, so the Premier could use them in making up
+with God; as for himself, he was like Thoreau and had never quarreled
+with Him.</p>
+
+<p>Huxley had many friendships with people seemingly outside of his own
+particular line of work. Henry Irving, the Reverend Doctor Parker, John
+Fiske and Hall Caine once met at one of Huxley's "Tall Teas," and Doctor
+Parker explained that he personally had no objection to visiting with
+sinners.</p>
+
+<p>For Parker, Huxley had a great admiration and often attended the
+Thursday noon meeting at the Temple, "to see and hear the greatest actor
+in England," a compliment which Parker much appreciated, otherwise he
+would not have repeated it. "If I ever take to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span> stage, I will play
+the part of Jacques or Touchstone," said Huxley.</p>
+
+<p>John Fiske in his delightful essay on Huxley said that in the Huxley
+home there was more jest, joke and banter than in any other place in
+London. The air was surcharged with mirth, and puns, often very bad
+ones, were tossed back and forth with great recklessness.</p>
+
+<p>At one time John Fiske was at the Huxleys and the dual or multiple
+nature of man came up for discussion. Huxley spoke of how very often men
+who were gentle and charming in their homes were capable of great
+crimes, and of how, on the other hand, a man might pass in the world as
+a philanthropist, and yet in his household be a veritable autocrat and
+tyrant.</p>
+
+<p>Fiske then incidentally mentioned the case of Doctors Parker and Webster
+of Harvard&mdash;men of intellect and worth. These men brooded over a
+misunderstanding that grew into a grudge and eventually hatched murder.
+One worthy professor killed the other, cut up the body, and tried to
+burn it in a chemist's retort. Only the great difficulty of reducing the
+human body to ashes caused the murder to out, and brought about the
+hanging of a scientist of note.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I have thought of the difficulty of disposing of a dead body,"
+said Huxley, solemnly; "and often when on the point of committing murder
+this was the only thing that made me hesitate!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Pater, we are ashamed of you," said his three<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> lovely daughters in
+concert. Huxley's ability to joke and his appreciation of the ludicrous
+marked him, in the mind of John Fiske, as the greatest thinker of his
+time. The humorist knows values, and that is why he laughs. Sensibility
+is, in fact, the basic element of wit.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgh.jpg" alt="H" title="H" /></div><p>uxley's duties on the "Rattlesnake" were not in the line of science.
+His rank was assistant surgeon; but as sure-enough surgeons were only
+sent out on bigger craft, he was this ship's doctor.</p>
+
+<p>With the captain's help the men were kept busy, but not too busy, and
+the food and regulations were such that about all Huxley had to do was
+to look upon his work and pronounce it good.</p>
+
+<p>As a physician, Huxley practised throughout his life the science of
+prevention.</p>
+
+<p>"With a prophetic vision, quite unconscious, my parents named me after
+that particular apostle I was to admire most," once said Huxley. He was
+a doubter by instinct, and approached the world of Nature as if nothing
+were known about it.</p>
+
+<p>His work on the Medusa won him the recognition of the British Society,
+and this secured him the coveted surgeon's commission. Two tragedies
+confront man on his journey through life&mdash;one when he wants a thing and
+can not get it; the other when he gets the thing and finds he does not
+want it.</p>
+
+<p>Having secured his surgeon's commission, Huxley felt a strong repulsion
+toward devoting his life to the abnormal.</p>
+
+<p>"I am a scientist by nature, and my business is to teach," he wrote to
+his affianced wife. These were wise words which he had learned from her,
+but which he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> repeated, seemingly quite innocent of their source. We
+take our own wherever we find it.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Heathorn admired a surgeon, but loved a scientist, and Huxley being
+a man was making a heroic struggle to be what the young woman most
+wished. Love supplies an ideal&mdash;and that is the very best thing love
+does, with possibly an exception or two. So behold a ship's surgeon in
+London, full-fledged, refusing offers of position, and even declining to
+take a choice of ships, for such is the perversity of things animate and
+inanimate that, when we do not want things, Fate brings them to us on
+silver platters and begs us to accept. We win by indifference as much as
+by desire.</p>
+
+<p>"I have declined to ship on board the 'Cormorant' as head surgeon, and
+have applied to the University of Toronto for a position as Professor of
+Natural History."</p>
+
+<p>And so America had Huxley flung at her head. Toronto considered, and the
+Canadians sat on the case, and after considerable correspondence, the
+vacant chair was given to Professor Baldini of the Whitby Ladies
+College. It was a close call for Canada! Huxley had imagined that the
+New World offered special advantages to a rising young person of
+scientific bent, but now he secured a marriage-license and settled down
+as lecturer at the School of Mines. A little later he began to teach at
+the Royal College of Surgeons, with which institution he was to be
+connected the rest of his life, and fill almost any chair that happened
+to be vacant.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>From the time he was twenty-seven Huxley never had to look for work. He
+was known as a writer of worth, and as a lecturer his services were in
+demand.</p>
+
+<p>He became President of the Geological and Ethnological Society; was
+appointed Royal Commissioner for the Advancement of Science; was a
+member of the London School Board; Secretary of the Royal Society; Lord
+Rector of the University of Aberdeen; President of the Royal Society;
+and refused an offer to become Custodian of the British Museum, a life
+position, and where he had once applied for a clerkship.</p>
+
+<p>In letters to Darwin he occasionally signed his name with all titles
+added, thus, "Thomas Henry Huxley, M.B., M.D., Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S. of
+Her Majesty's Navy."</p>
+
+<p>Huxley was a forceful and epigrammatic writer, and had a command of
+English second to no scientist that England has ever produced. He was
+the only one of his group who had a distinct literary style. As a
+speaker he was quiet, deliberate, decisive, sure; and he carried enough
+reserve caloric so that he made his presence felt in any assemblage
+before he said a word. In oratory it is personality that gives ballast.</p>
+
+<p>Of his forty or so published books, "Man's Place in Nature," "Elementary
+Physiology" and "Classification of Animals" have been translated into
+many languages, and now serve as textbooks in various schools and
+colleges.</p>
+
+<p>Huxley is the founder of the so-called Agnostic School,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> which has the
+peculiarity of not being a school. The word "agnostic" was given its
+vogue by Huxley. To superficial people it was quite often used
+synonymously with "infidel" and "freethinker," both words of reproach.
+To Huxley it meant simply one who did not know, but wished to learn.</p>
+
+<p>The controlling impulse of Huxley's life was his absolute honesty. To
+pretend to believe a thing against which one's reason revolts, in order
+to better one's place in society, was to him the sum of all that was
+intellectually base.</p>
+
+<p>He regarded man as an undeveloped creature, and for this creature to lay
+the flattering unction to his soul that he was in special communication
+with the Infinite, and in possession of the secrets of the Creator, was
+something that in itself proved that man was as yet in the barbaric
+stage.</p>
+
+<p>Said Huxley: "As to the final truths of Creation and Destiny, I am an
+agnostic. I do not know, hence I neither affirm nor deny."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgh.jpg" alt="H" title="H" /></div><p>umor and commonsense usually go together. Huxley had a goodly stock of
+both. When George Eliot died, there was a very earnest but ill-directed
+effort made to have her body buried in Westminster Abbey. Huxley, being
+close to the Dean, serving with him on several municipal boards, was
+importuned by Spencer to use his influence toward the desired end.
+Huxley saw the incongruity of the situation, and in a letter that
+reveals the logical mind and the direct, literary, Huxley quality, he
+placed his gentle veto on the proposition and thus saved the "enemy" the
+mortification of having to do so.</p>
+
+<p>Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey, but this was not to be the final
+resting-place of the dust of Mill, Tyndall, Spencer, George Eliot or
+Huxley. These had all stood in the fore of the fight against
+superstition and had both given and received blows.</p>
+
+<p>The Pantheon of such battle-scarred heroes was to be the hearts of those
+who prize above all that earth can bestow the benison of the God within.
+"Above all else, let me preserve my integrity of intellect," said
+Huxley. Here is Huxley's letter to Spencer:<br /><br /></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>4 Marlborough Place, Dec. 27, 1880</p>
+
+<p>My Dear Spencer: Your telegram which reached me on Friday evening
+caused me great perplexity, inasmuch as I had just been talking to
+Morley, and agreeing with him that the proposal for a funeral in
+Westminster Abbey had a very questionable look to us, who desired<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span>
+nothing so much as that peace and honor should attend George Eliot
+to her grave.</p>
+
+<p>It can hardly be doubted that the proposal will be bitterly
+opposed, possibly (as happened in Mill's case with less
+provocation) with the raking up of past histories, about which the
+opinion even of those who have least the desire or the right to be
+pharisaical is strongly divided, and which had better be forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>With respect to putting pressure on the Dean of Westminster, I have
+to consider that he has some confidence in me, and before asking
+him to do something for which he is pretty sure to be violently
+assailed, I have to ask myself whether I really think it a right
+thing for a man in his position to do.</p>
+
+<p>Now I can not say I do. However much I may lament the circumstance,
+Westminster Abbey is a Christian Church and not a Pantheon, and the
+Dean thereof is officially a Christian priest, and we ask him to
+bestow exceptional Christian honors by this burial in the Abbey.
+George Eliot is known not only as a great writer, but as a person
+whose life and opinions were in notorious antagonism to Christian
+practise in regard to marriage, and Christian theory in regard to
+dogma. How am I to tell the Dean that I think he ought to read over
+the body of a person who did not repent of what the Church
+considers mortal sin, a service not one solitary proposition of
+which she would have accepted for truth while she was alive? How am
+I to urge him to do that which, if I were in his place, I should
+most emphatically refuse to do? You tell me that Mrs. Cross wished
+for the funeral in the Abbey. While I desire to entertain the
+greatest respect for her wishes, I am very sorry to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> hear it. I do
+not understand the feeling which could create such a desire on any
+personal grounds, save those of affection, and the natural yearning
+to be near, even in death, those whom we have loved. And on public
+grounds the wish is still less intelligible to me. One can not eat
+one's cake and have it too. Those who elect to be free in thought
+and deed must not hanker after the rewards, if they are to be so
+called, which the world offers to those who put up with its
+fetters.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, however I look at the proposal, it seems to me to be a
+profound mistake, and I can have nothing to do with it. I shall be
+deeply grieved if this resolution is ascribed to any other motives
+than those which I have set forth at greater length than I
+intended.</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 16em;">Ever yours very faithfully,</span></p>
+
+<p class='author'>T. H. HUXLEY</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="JOHN_TYNDALL" id="JOHN_TYNDALL"></a>JOHN TYNDALL</h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img446.jpg" alt="TYNDALL" title="TYNDALL" /></div>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In my little book on Faraday, published in Eighteen Hundred
+Sixty-eight, I have stated that he had but to will it to raise his
+income, in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-two, to five thousand pounds a
+year. In Eighteen Hundred Thirty-six, the sum might have been
+doubled. Yet this son of a blacksmith, this journeyman book-binder,
+with his proud, sensitive soul, rejecting the splendid
+opportunities open to him&mdash;refusing even to think them splendid in
+presence of higher aims&mdash;cheerfully accepted from the Trinity House
+a pittance of two hundred pounds a year.</p>
+
+<p class='author'>&mdash;<i>John Tyndall</i></p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>JOHN TYNDALL</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>yndall was of high descent and lowly birth. His father was a
+member of the Irish Constabulary, and there were intervals when the
+boy's mother took in washing. But back of this the constable swore i'
+faith, when the ale was right, that he was descended from an Irish King,
+and probably this is true, for most Irishmen are, and acknowledge it
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The father of our Tyndall spelled his name Tyndale, and traced a direct
+relationship to William Tyndale, who declared he would place a copy of
+the English Bible in the hands of every plowboy in the British Isles,
+and pretty nearly made good his vow. William Tyndale paid for his
+privileges, however. He was arrested, given an opportunity to run away,
+but wouldn't; then he was exiled. Finally he was incarcerated in a
+dungeon of the Castle Vilvoorden.</p>
+
+<p>His cell was beneath the level of the ground, so was cold and damp and
+dark. He petitioned the governor of the prison for a coat to keep him
+warm and a candle by which he could read. "We'll give you both light and
+heat, pretty soon," was the reply.</p>
+
+<p>And they did. They led Tyndale out under the blue sky and tied him to a
+stake set in the ground. Around<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span> his feet they piled brush, and also all
+of his books and papers that they could find.</p>
+
+<p>A chain was put around his neck and hooked tight to the post. Then the
+fagots were piled high, and the fire was lighted.</p>
+
+<p>"He was not burned to death," argued one of the priests who was present;
+"he was not burned to death. He just drew up his feet and hanged himself
+in the chain, and so was choked: he was that stubborn!" The father of
+John Tyndall was an Orangeman and had in a glass case a bit of the flag
+carried at the Battle of the Boyne.</p>
+
+<p>It is believed, with reason, that the original flag had in it about ten
+thousand square yards of material. Tyndale the Orangeman was of so
+uncompromising a type that he occasionally arrested Catholics on general
+principles, like the Irishman who beat the Jew under the mistaken idea
+that he had something to do with crucifying "Our Savior." "But that was
+two thousand years ago," protested the Jew. "Niver moind; I just heard
+av it&mdash;take that and that!"</p>
+
+<p>Zeal not wisely directed is a true Irish trait. It will not do to say
+that the Irish have a monopoly on stupidity, yet there have been times
+when I thought they nearly cornered the market. I once had charge of a
+gang of green Irishmen at a lumber-camp.</p>
+
+<p>I started a night-school for their benefit, as their schooling had
+stopped at subtraction. One evening<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> they got it into their heads that I
+was an atheist. Things began to come my way. I concluded discretion was
+the better part of valor, and so took to the woods, literally. They
+followed me for a mile, and then gave up the chase. On the way home they
+met a man who spoke ill of me, and they fell upon him and nearly pounded
+his life out.</p>
+
+<p>I never had to lick any of my gang: they looked after this themselves.
+On pay-nights they all got drunk and fell upon each other&mdash;broken noses
+and black eyes were quite popular. Father Driscoll used to come around
+nearly every month and have them all sign the pledge.</p>
+
+<p>That story about the Irishman who ate the rind of the watermelon "and
+threw the inside away," is true. That is just what the Irish do. Very
+often they are not able to distinguish good from bad, kindness from
+wrong, love from hate. Ireland has all the freedom she can use or
+deserves, just as we all have. What would Ireland do with freedom if she
+had it? Hate for England keeps peace at home. Home rule would mean home
+rough-house&mdash;and a most beautiful argument it would be, enforced with
+shillalah logic. The spirit of Donnybrook Fair is there today as much as
+ever, and wherever you see a head, hit it, would be home rule.
+Donnybrook is a condition of mind.</p>
+
+<p>If England really had a grudge against Ireland and wanted to get even,
+she could not do better than to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span> set her adrift.</p>
+
+<p>But then the Irish impulsiveness sometimes leads to good, else how could
+we account for such men as O'Connor, Parnell, John Tyndall, Burke,
+Goldsmith, Sheridan, Arthur Wellesley and all the other Irish poets,
+orators and thinkers who have made us vibrate with our kind?</p>
+
+<p>Transplanted weeds produce our finest flowers.</p>
+
+<p>The parents of Tyndall were intent on giving their boy an education. And
+to them, the act of committing things to memory was education. William
+Tyndale gave the Bible to the people; John Tyndall would force it upon
+them. The "Book of Martyrs," the sermons of Jeremy Taylor, and the
+Bible, little John came to know by heart. And he grew to have a fine
+distaste for all. Once, when nearly a man grown, he had the temerity to
+argue with his father that the Bible might be better appreciated, if a
+penalty were not placed upon disbelief in its divine origin. A cuff on
+the ear was the answer, and John was given until sundown to apologize.
+He did not apologize.</p>
+
+<p>And young Tyndale then vowed he would change his name to Tyndall and
+forever separate himself from a person whose religion was so largely
+mixed with brutality. But yet John Tyndale was not a bad man. He had
+intellect far above the average of his neighbors. He had the courage of
+his convictions. His son had the courage of his lack of convictions.</p>
+
+<p>And the early drilling in the Bible was a good thing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> for young Tyndall.
+Bible legend and allusion color the English language, and any man who
+does not know his Bible well, can never hope to speak or write English
+with grace and fluency. Tyndall always knew and acknowledged his
+indebtedness to his parents, and he also knew that his salvation
+depended upon getting away from and beyond the narrow confines of their
+beliefs and habits. Because a thing helps you in a certain period of
+your education is no reason why you should feed upon it forevermore.</p>
+
+<p>This way lies arrested development.</p>
+
+<p>Life, like heat, is a mode of motion, and progress consists in
+discarding a good thing as soon as you have found a better.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgo.jpg" alt="O" title="O" /></div><p>ccasionally Herbert Spencer used to spend a Sunday afternoon with the
+Carlyles at their modest home in Chelsea. At such times Jeannie Welsh
+would usually manage to pilot the conversational craft along smooth
+waters; but if she were not present, hot arguments would follow, and
+finally a point would be reached where Carlyle and Spencer would simply
+sit and glare at each other.</p>
+
+<p>"After such scenes I always thought less of two persons, Carlyle and
+myself," said Spencer; "and so for many years I very cautiously avoided
+Cheyne Row." Then there was another man Spencer avoided, although for a
+different reason; this individual was John Tyndall.</p>
+
+<p>On the death of Tyndall, Spencer wrote:</p>
+
+<p>"There has just died the greatest teacher of modern times: a man who
+stimulated thought in old and young, every one he met, as no one else I
+ever knew did. Once we went together for a much-needed rest to the Lake
+District. Gossip, which has its advantages in that it can be carried on
+with no tax on one's intellectual powers, had no part in our
+conversation. The discussion of great themes began at once wherever
+Tyndall was.</p>
+
+<p>"The atmosphere of the man was intensely stimulating: everybody seemed
+to become great and wise and good in his presence.</p>
+
+<p>"We walked on the shores of Windermere, climbed Rydal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> Mount, rowed
+across Lake Grasmere (leaving our names on the visitors' list), and all
+the time we dwelt upon high Olympus and talked.</p>
+
+<p>"But, alas! Tyndall's vivacity undid me: two days of his company, with
+two sleepless nights, and I fled him as I would a pestilence."</p>
+
+<p>But Carlyle growled out one thing in Spencer's presence which Spencer
+often quoted. "If I had my own way," said Carlyle, "I would send the
+sons of poor men to college, and the sons of rich men I would set to
+work."</p>
+
+<p>Manual labor in right proportion means mental development. Too much hoe
+may slant the brow, but hoe in proper proportion develops the
+cerebellum.</p>
+
+<p>In the past we have had one set of men do all the work, and another set
+had all the culture: one hoes and another thirsts. There are whole areas
+of brain-cells which are evolved only through the efforts of hand and
+eye, for it is the mind at last that directs all our energies. The
+development of brain and body go together&mdash;manual work is brain-work.
+Too much brain-work is just as bad as too much toil; the misuse of the
+pen carries just as severe a penalty as the misuse of the hoe. And it is
+a great satisfaction to realize that the thinking world has reached a
+point where these propositions do not have to be proven.</p>
+
+<p>There was a time when Spencer regretted that he had not been sent to
+college, instead of being set to work. But later he came to regard his
+experience as a practical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> engineer and surveyor as a very precious and
+necessary part of his education.</p>
+
+<p>John Tyndall and Alfred Russel Wallace had an experience almost
+identical. In childhood John attended the village school for six months
+of the year, and the rest of the time helped his parents, as children of
+poor people do. When nineteen he went to work carrying a chain in a
+surveying corps. Steady attention to the business in hand brought its
+sure reward, and in a few years he had charge of the squad, and was
+given the duty of making maps and working out complex calculations in
+engineering.</p>
+
+<p>In mathematics he especially excelled. Five years in the employ of the
+Irish Ordnance Survey and three years in practical railroad-building,
+and Tyndall got the Socialistic bee in his bonnet. He resigned a good
+position to take part in bringing about the millennium.</p>
+
+<p>That he helped the old world along toward the ideal there is no doubt;
+but Tyndall is dead and Jerusalem is not yet. When the rule of the
+barons was broken, and the stage of individualism or competition was
+ushered in, men said, "Lo! The time is at hand and now is." But it was
+not. Socialism is coming, by slow degrees, imperceptibly almost as the
+growing of Spring flowers that push their way from the damp, dark earth
+into the sunlight. And after Socialism, what? Perhaps the millennium
+will still be a long way off.</p>
+
+<p>In Eighteen Hundred Forty-seven, when Tyndall was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> twenty-seven years
+old, Robert Owen, one of the greatest practical men the world has ever
+seen, cried aloud, "The time is at hand!"</p>
+
+<p>Owen was an enthusiast: all great men are. He had risen from the ranks
+by the absolute force of his great untiring, restless and loving spirit.
+From a day laborer in a cotton-mill he had become principal owner of a
+plant that supported five thousand people.</p>
+
+<p>Owen saw the difference between joyless labor and joyful work. His mills
+were cleanly, orderly, sanitary, and surrounded with lawns, trees and
+shrubbery. He was the first man in England to establish kindergartens,
+and this he did at his own expense for the benefit of his helpers. He
+established libraries, clubs, swimming-pools, night-schools,
+lecture-courses. And all this time his business prospered.</p>
+
+<p>To the average man it is a miracle how any one individual could bear the
+heaviest business burdens and still do what Robert Owen did.</p>
+
+<p>Robert Owen had vitality plus: he was a gourmet for work. William Morris
+was just such a man, only with a bias for art; but both Owen and Morris
+had the intensity and impetus which get the thing done while common
+folks are thinking about it.</p>
+
+<p>Owen was familiar with every detail of his vast business, and he was an
+expert in finance. Like Napoleon he said: "The finances? I will arrange
+them."</p>
+
+<p>Robert Owen erected schoolhouses, laid out gardens,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> built mills,
+constructed tenements, traveled, lectured, and wrote books. His
+enthusiasm was contagious. He was never sick&mdash;he could not spare the
+time&mdash;and a doctor once said, "If Robert Owen ever dies, it will be
+through too much Robert Owen."</p>
+
+<p>Owen went over to Dublin on one of his tours, and lectured on the ideal
+life, which to him was Socialism, "each for all and all for each."</p>
+
+<p>Fourier, the dreamer, supplied a good deal of the argument, but Robert
+Owen did the thing. Socialism always catches these two classes, doers
+and dreamers, workers and drones, honest men and rogues, those with a
+desire to give and those with a lust to get.</p>
+
+<p>Among others who heard Owen speak at Dublin was the young Irish
+engineer, John Tyndall. Tyndall was the type of man that must be common
+before we can have Socialism. There was not a lazy hair in his head;
+aye, nor a selfish one, either. He had a tender heart, a receptive brain
+and the spirit of obedience, the spirit that gives all without counting
+the cost, the spirit that harkens to the God within. And need I say that
+the person who gives all, gets all! The economics of God are very
+simple: We receive only that which we give. The only love we keep is the
+love we give away.</p>
+
+<p>These are very old truths&mdash;I did not discover nor invent them&mdash;they are
+not covered by copyright: "Cast thy bread upon the waters."</p>
+
+<p>John Tyndall was melted by Owen's passionate appeal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> of each for all and
+all for each. To live for humanity seemed the one desirable thing. His
+loving Irish heart was melted. He sought Owen out at his hotel, and they
+talked, talked till three o'clock in the morning.</p>
+
+<p>Owen was a judge of men; his success depended upon this one thing, as
+that of every successful business must. He saw that Tyndall was a rare
+soul and nearly fulfilled his definition of a gentleman. Tyndall had
+hope, faith and splendid courage; but best of all, he had that hunger
+for truth which classes him forever among the sacred few.</p>
+
+<p>During his work out of doors on surveying trips he had studied the
+strata; gotten on good terms with birds, bugs and bees; he knew the
+flowers and weeds, and loved all the animate things of Nature, so that
+he recognized their kinship to himself, and he hesitated to kill or
+destroy.</p>
+
+<p>Education is a matter of desire, and a man like Tyndall is getting an
+education wherever he is. All is grist that comes to his mill.</p>
+
+<p>Robert Owen had but recently started "Queenswood College" in Hampshire,
+and nothing would do but Tyndall should go there as a teacher of
+science.</p>
+
+<p>"Is he a skilled and educated teacher?" some one asked Owen. "Better
+than that," replied Owen; "he is a regular firebrand of enthusiasm."</p>
+
+<p>And so Tyndall resigned his position with the railroad and moved over to
+England, taking up his home at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span> "Harmony Hall."</p>
+
+<p>Harmony Hall was a beautiful brick building with the letters C. M.
+carved on the cornerstone in recognition of the Commencement of the
+Millennium. The pupils were mostly workers in the Owen mills who had
+shown some special aptitude for education. The pupils and teachers all
+worked at manual labor a certain number of hours daily. There was a
+delightful feeling of comradeship about the institution. Tyndall was
+happy in his work.</p>
+
+<p>He gave lectures on everything, and taught the things that no one else
+could teach, and of course he got more out of the lessons than any of
+the scholars.</p>
+
+<p>But after a few months' experience with the ideal life, Tyndall had
+commonsense enough to see that Harmony Hall, instead of being the
+spontaneous expression of the people who shared its blessings, was
+really a charity maintained by one Robert Owen. It was a beneficent
+autocracy, a sample of one-man power, beautifully expressed.</p>
+
+<p>Robert Owen planned it, built it, directed it and made good any
+financial deficit. Instead of Socialism it was a kindly despotism. A few
+of the scholars did their level best to help themselves and help the
+place, but the rest didn't think and didn't care. They were passengers
+who enjoyed the cushioned seats. A few, while partaking of the
+privileges of the place, denounced it.</p>
+
+<p>"You can not educate people who do not want to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> educated," said
+Tyndall. The value of an education lies in the struggle to get it. Do
+too much for people, and they will do nothing for themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the students at Harmony Hall had been sent there by Owen,
+because he, in the greatness of his heart and the blindness of his zeal,
+thought they needed education. They may have needed it; but they did not
+want it: ease was their aim.</p>
+
+<p>The indifference and ingratitude Robert Owen met with did not discourage
+him: it only gave him an occasional pause. He thought that the bad
+example of English society was too close to his experiments: it vitiated
+the atmosphere.</p>
+
+<p>So he came over to America and founded the town of New Harmony, Indiana.
+The fine solid buildings he erected in Posey County, then a wilderness,
+are still there.</p>
+
+<p>As for the most romantic and interesting history of New Harmony, Robert
+Owen and his socialistic experiments, I must refer the gentle reader to
+the Encyclopedia Britannica, a work I have found very useful in the
+course of making my original researches.</p>
+
+<p>After a year at Harmony Hall, Tyndall saw that he would have to get out
+or else become a victim of arrested development, through too much
+acceptance of a strong man's bounty. "You can not afford to accept
+anything for nothing," he said. Life at Harmony Hall to him was very
+much like life in a monastery, to which stricken<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span> men flee when the old
+world seems too much for them. "When all the people live the ideal life,
+I'll live it; but until then I'm only one of the great many strugglers."
+Besides, he felt that in missing university training he had dropped
+something out of his life. Now he would go to Germany and see for
+himself what he had missed.</p>
+
+<p>While railroading he had saved up nearly four hundred pounds. This money
+he had offered at one time to invest in shares in the Owen mills. But
+Robert Owen said, "Wait two years and then see how you feel!"</p>
+
+<p>Robert Owen was not a financial exploiter. Tyndall may have differed
+with him in a philosophic way; but they never ceased to honor and
+respect each other.</p>
+
+<p>And so John Tyndall bade the ideal life good-by, and went out into the
+stress, strife and struggle, resolved to spend his two thousand dollars
+in bettering his education, and then to start life anew.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgr.jpg" alt="R" title="R" /></div><p>obert Owen had been over to America and had met Emerson, and very
+naturally caught it. When he returned home he gave young Tyndall a copy
+of Emerson's first book, the "Essay on Nature," published anonymously.</p>
+
+<p>Tyndall read and re-read the book, and read it aloud to others and spoke
+of it as a "message from the gods."</p>
+
+<p>He also read every word that Carlyle put in print. It was Carlyle who
+introduced him to German philosophy and German literature, and fired him
+with a desire to see for himself what Germany was doing.</p>
+
+<p>Germany had still another mystic tie that drew him thitherward. It was
+at Marburg, Germany, that his illustrious namesake had published his
+translation of the Bible.</p>
+
+<p>At Marburg there was a University, small, 't was true, but its
+simplicity and the cheapness of living there were recommendations. So to
+Marburg he went. Tyndall found lodgings in a little street called
+"Heretics' Row." Possibly there be people who think that Tyndall's
+taking a room in such a street was chance, too. Chance is natural law
+not understood.</p>
+
+<p>Marburg is a very lovely little town that clings amid a forest of trees
+to the rocky hillside overlooking the River Lahn. Tyndall was very happy
+at Marburg, and at times very miserable. The beauty of the place
+appealed to him. He was a climber by nature, and the hills were a
+continual temptation.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But the language was new; and before this his work had all been of a
+practical kind. College seems small and trivial after you have been in
+the actual world of affairs. But Tyndall did not give up. He rose every
+morning at six, took his cold bath, dressed and ran up the hill half a
+mile and back. He breakfasted with the family, that he might talk
+German. Then he dived into differential calculus and philosophical
+abstrusities. He was not sent to college: he went. And he made college
+give up all it had. On the wall of his room, as a sort of ornamental
+frieze in charcoal, he wrote this from Emerson: "High knowledge and
+great strength are within the reach of every man who unflinchingly
+enacts his best."</p>
+
+<p>Down in the town was a bronze bust of a man who wrote for it the
+following inscription: "This is the face of a man who has struggled
+energetically."</p>
+
+<p>One might almost imagine that Hawthorne had received from Tyndall the
+hint which evolved itself into that fine story, "The Great Stone Face."</p>
+
+<p>The bust just mentioned, attracted John Tyndall for another reason:
+Carlyle had written of the man it symboled: "Reader, to thee, thyself,
+even now, he has one counsel to give, the secret of his whole poetic
+alchemy. Think of living! Thy life, wert thou the pitifullest of all the
+sons of earth, is no idle dream, but a solemn reality. It is thine own;
+it is all thou hast with which to front eternity. Work, then, even as he
+has done&mdash;like a star, unhasting and unresting."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imga.jpg" alt="A" title="A" /></div><p>t Marburg, Tyndall was on good terms with the great Bunsen, and used to
+act as his assistant in making practical chemical experiments before his
+classes.</p>
+
+<p>These amazing things done by chemists in public are seldom of much value
+beyond giving a thrill to visitors who would otherwise drowse; it is
+like humor in an oration: it opens up the mental pores.</p>
+
+<p>Alexander Humboldt once attended a Bunsen lecture at Marburg and
+complimented Tyndall by saying, "When I take up sleight-of-hand work,
+consider yourself engaged as my first helper." Tyndall's way of standing
+with his back to the audience, shutting off the view of Bunsen's hands
+while he was getting ready to make an artificial peal of thunder, made
+Humboldt laugh heartily.</p>
+
+<p>Humboldt thought so well of the young man who spoke German with an Irish
+accent, that he presented him with an inscribed copy of one of his
+books. The volume was a most valuable one, for Humboldt published only
+in deluxe, limited editions, and Tyndall was so overcome that all he
+could say was, "I'll do as much for you some day." Not long after this,
+through loaning money to a fellow student, Tyndall found himself sadly
+in need of funds, and borrowed two pounds on the book from an 'Ebrew
+Jew.</p>
+
+<p>That night, he dreamed that Humboldt found the volume in a secondhand
+store. In the morning, Tyndall<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span> was waiting for the pawnbroker to open
+his shop to get the book back ere the offense was discovered.</p>
+
+<p>Heinrich Heine once inscribed a volume of his poems to a friend, and
+afterward discovered the volume on the counter of a secondhand dealer.
+He thereupon haggled with the bookman, bought the book and beneath his
+first inscription wrote, "With the renewed regards of H. Heine." He then
+sent the volume for the second time to his friend. 'T is possible that
+Tyndall had heard of this.</p>
+
+<p>In Eighteen Hundred Fifty, when Tyndall was thirty years of age, he
+visited London, and of course went to the British Institution. There he
+met Faraday for the first time and was welcomed by him.</p>
+
+<p>The British Institution consists of a laboratory, a museum and a
+lecture-hall, and its object is scientific research. It began in a very
+simple way in one room and now occupies several buildings.</p>
+
+<p>It was founded by Benjamin Thompson, an American, and so it was but
+proper that its sister concern, the Smithsonian Institution, should have
+been founded by an Englishman.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Humphry Davy on being asked, "What is your greatest discovery?"
+replied, "Michael Faraday." But this was a mere pleasantry, the truth
+being that it was Michael Faraday who discovered Sir Humphry Davy.
+Faraday was a bookbinder's apprentice, a fact that should interest all
+good Roycrofters.</p>
+
+<p>Evenings,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span> when Sir Humphry Davy lectured at the British Institution,
+the young bookbinder was there. After the lecture he would go home and
+write out what he had heard, with a few ideas of his own added. For be
+it known, taking notes at a lecture is a bad habit&mdash;good reporters carry
+no notebooks.</p>
+
+<p>After a year Faraday sent a bundle of his impressions and criticisms to
+Sir Humphry Davy anonymously. Great men seldom read manuscript that is
+sent to them unless it refers to themselves. At the next lecture, Sir
+Humphry began by reading from Faraday's notes, and begged that if the
+writer were present, he would make himself known at the close of the
+address.</p>
+
+<p>From this was to ripen a love like that of father and son. Every man who
+builds up such a work as did Sir Humphry Davy is appalled, when he finds
+Time furrowing his face and whitening his hair, to think how few indeed
+there are who can step in and carry his work on after he is gone.</p>
+
+<p>The love of Davy for the young bookbinder was almost feverish: he
+clutched at this bright, impressionable and intent young man who entered
+so into the heart and soul of science; nothing would do but he must
+become his assistant. "Give up all and follow me!" And Faraday did.</p>
+
+<p>Something of the same feeling must have swept over Faraday after his
+work of twenty-five years as director of the British Institution, when
+John Tyndall appeared,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span> tall, thin, bronzed, animated, quoting Bunsen
+and Humboldt with an Irish accent.</p>
+
+<p>And so in time Tyndall became assistant to Faraday, then lecturer in
+natural history; and when Faraday died, Tyndall, by popular acclaim, was
+made Fullerian Lecturer and took Faraday's place. This was to be his
+life-work, and it so placed him before the world that all he said or did
+had a wide significance and an extended influence.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>yndall was always a most intrepid mountain-climber. The Alps lured him
+like the song of the Lorelei, and the wonder was that his body was not
+left in some mountain crevasse, "the most beautiful and poetic of all
+burials," he once said.</p>
+
+<p>But for him this was not to be, for Fate is fond of irony. The only man
+who ever braved the full dangers of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado was
+killed by a suburban train in Chicago while on his wedding-tour. Most
+bad men die in bed, tenderly cared for by trained nurses in white caps
+and big aprons.</p>
+
+<p>Tyndall climbed to the summit of the Matterhorn, ascended the so-called
+inaccessible peak of the Weisshorn, scaled Mont Blanc three times, and
+once was caught in an avalanche, riding toward death at the rate of a
+mile a minute. Yet he passed away from an overdose, or a wrong dose, of
+medicine given him through mistake, by the hands of the woman he loved
+most.</p>
+
+<p>At one time Tyndall attempted to swim a mountain-torrent; the stream, as
+if angry at his Irish assurance, tossed him against the rocks, brought
+him back in fierce eddies, and again and again threw him against a solid
+face of stone. When he was rescued he was a mass of bruises, but
+fortunately no bones were broken. It was some days before he could get
+out, and in his sorry plight, bandaged so his face was scarcely visible,
+Spencer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span> found him. "Herbert, do you believe in the actuality of
+matter?" was John's first question.</p>
+
+<p>Both Tyndall and Huxley made application to the University of Toronto
+for positions as teachers of science; but Toronto looked askance, as all
+pioneer people do, at men whose college careers have been mostly
+confined to giving college absent treatment.</p>
+
+<p>Herbert Spencer avowed again and again that Tyndall was the greatest
+teacher he ever knew or heard of, inspiring the pupil to discover for
+himself, to do, to become, rather than imparting prosy facts of doubtful
+pith and moment. But Herbert Spencer, not being eligible to join a
+university club himself, was possibly not competent to judge.</p>
+
+<p>Anyway, England was not so finical as Canada, and so she gained what
+Canada lost.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>yndall paid a visit to the United States in the year Eighteen Hundred
+Seventy-two, and lectured in most of the principal cities, and at all
+the great colleges. He was a most fascinating speaker, fluent, direct,
+easy, and his whole discourse was well seasoned with humor.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever he spoke, the auditorium was taxed to its utmost, and his
+reception was very cordial, even in colleges that were considered
+exceedingly orthodox.</p>
+
+<p>Possibly, some good people who invited him to speak did not know it was
+loaded; and so his earnest words in praise of Darwin and the doctrine of
+evolution, occasionally came like unto a rumble of his own artificial
+thunder. "I speak what I think is truth; but of course, when I express
+ungracious facts I try to do so in what will be regarded as not a nasty
+manner," said Tyndall, thus using that pet English word in a rather
+pleasing way.</p>
+
+<p>In his statement that the prayer of persistent effort is the only prayer
+that is ever answered, he met with a direct challenge at Oberlin. This
+gave rise to what, at the time, created quite a dust in the theological
+road, and evolved "The Tyndall Prayer Test."</p>
+
+<p>Tyndall proposed that one hundred clergymen be delegated to pray for the
+patients in any certain ward of Bellevue Hospital. If, after a year's
+trial, there was a marked decrease in mortality in that ward, as
+compared with previous records, we might then conclude<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span> that prayer was
+efficacious, otherwise not.</p>
+
+<p>One good clergyman in Pittsburgh offered publicly to debate "Darwinism"
+with Tyndall, but beyond a little scattered shrapnel of this sort, the
+lecture-tour was a great success. It netted just thirteen thousand
+dollars, the whole amount of which Tyndall generously donated as a fund
+to be used for the advancement of natural science in America.</p>
+
+<p>In Eighteen Hundred Eighty-five, this fund had increased to thirty-two
+thousand dollars, and was divided into three equal parts and presented
+to Columbia, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. The fund was
+still further increased by others who followed Professor Tyndall's
+example, and Columbia, from her share of the Tyndall fund, I am told now
+supports two foreign scholarships for the benefit of students who show a
+special aptitude in scientific research. Professor James of Harvard once
+said: "The impetus to popular scientific study caused by Professor
+Tyndall's lectures in the United States was most helpful and fortunate.
+Speaking but for myself, I know I am a different man and a better man,
+for having heard and known John Tyndall."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgw.jpg" alt="W" title="W" /></div><p>hen John Tyndall died, in the year Eighteen Hundred Ninety-three,
+Spencer wrote:</p>
+
+<p>"It never occurred to Tyndall to ask what it was politic to say, but
+simply to ask what was true. The like has of late years been shown in
+his utterances concerning political matters&mdash;shown, it may be, with too
+great frankness. This extreme frankness was displayed also in private,
+and sometimes, perhaps, too much displayed; but every one must have the
+defects of his qualities. Where absolute sincerity exists, it is certain
+now and then to cause an expression of a feeling or opinion not
+adequately restrained.</p>
+
+<p>"But the contrast in genuineness between him and the average citizen was
+very conspicuous. In a community of Tyndalls (to make a rather wild
+supposition), there would be none of that flabbiness characterizing
+current thought and action&mdash;no throwing overboard of principles
+elaborated by painful experience in the past, and adoption of a
+hand-to-mouth policy unguided by any principle. He was not the kind of
+man who would have voted for a bill or a clause which he secretly
+believed would be injurious, out of what is euphemistically called
+'party loyalty,' or would have endeavored to bribe each section of the
+electorate by 'ad captandum' measures, or would have hesitated to
+protect life and property for fear of losing votes. What he saw right to
+do he would have done, regardless of proximate consequences.</p>
+
+<p>"The ordinary tests<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span> of generosity are very defective. As rightly
+measured, generosity is great in proportion to the amount of self-denial
+entailed; and where ample means are possessed, large gifts often entail
+no self-denial. Far more self-denial may be involved in the performance,
+on another's behalf, of some act that requires time and labor. In
+addition to generosity under its ordinary form, which Professor Tyndall
+displayed in unusual degree, he displayed it under a less common form.</p>
+
+<p>"He was ready to take much trouble to help friends. I have had personal
+experience of this. Though he had always in hand some investigation of
+great interest to him, and though, as I have heard him say, when he bent
+his mind to the subject he could not with any facility break off and
+resume it again, yet, when I have sought scientific aid, information or
+critical opinion, I never found the slightest reluctance to give me his
+undivided attention. Much more markedly, however, was this kind of
+generosity shown in another direction. Many men, while they are eager
+for appreciation, manifest little or no appreciation of others, and
+still less go out of their way to express it.</p>
+
+<p>"With Tyndall it was not thus; he was eager to recognize achievement.
+Notably in the case of Michael Faraday, and less notably, though still
+conspicuously in many cases, he has bestowed much labor and sacrificed
+many weeks in setting forth the merits of others. It was evidently a
+pleasure to him to dilate on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span> claims of fellow workers.</p>
+
+<p>"But there was a derivative form of this generosity calling for still
+greater eulogy. He was not content with expressing appreciation of those
+whose merits were recognized, but he used energy unsparingly in drawing
+the attention of the public to those whose merits were unrecognized;
+time after time in championing the cause of such, he was regardless of
+the antagonism he aroused and the evil he brought upon himself. This
+chivalrous defense of the neglected and ill-used has been, I think by
+few, if any, so often repeated. I have myself more than once benefited
+by his determination, quite spontaneously shown, that justice should be
+done in the apportionment of credit; and I have with admiration watched
+like actions of his in other cases: cases in which no consideration of
+nationality or of creed interfered in the least with his insistence on
+equitable distribution of honors.</p>
+
+<p>"In this undertaking to fight for those who were unfairly dealt with, he
+displayed in another direction that very conspicuous trait which, as
+displayed in his Alpine feats, has made him to many persons chiefly
+known: I mean courage, passing very often into daring. And here let me,
+in closing this little sketch, indicate certain mischiefs which this
+trait brought upon him. Courage grows by success. The demonstrated
+ability to deal with dangers produces readiness to meet more dangers,
+and is self-justifying where the muscular power and the nerve habitually
+prove adequate. But the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span> resulting habit of mind is apt to influence
+conduct in other spheres, where muscular power and nerve are of no
+avail&mdash;is apt to cause the daring of dangers which are not to be met by
+strength of limb or by skill. Nature as externally presented by
+precipice ice-slopes and crevasses may be dared by one who is adequately
+endowed; but Nature, as internally represented in the form of physical
+constitution, may not be thus dared with impunity. Prompted by high
+motives, John Tyndall tended too much to disregard the protests of his
+body.</p>
+
+<p>"Over-application in Germany caused absolute sleeplessness, at one time,
+I think he told me, for more than a week; and this, with kindred
+transgressions, brought on that insomnia by which his after-life was
+troubled, and by which his power for work was diminished; for, as I have
+heard him say, a sound night's sleep was followed by a marked exaltation
+of faculty.</p>
+
+<p>"And then, in later life, came the daring which, by its results, brought
+his active career to a close. He conscientiously desired to fulfil an
+engagement to lecture at the British Institution, and was not deterred
+by fear of consequences.</p>
+
+<p>"He gave the lecture, notwithstanding the protest which for days before
+his system had been making. The result was a serious illness,
+threatening, as he thought at one time, a fatal result; and
+notwithstanding a year's furlough for the recovery of health, he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span>
+eventually obliged to resign his position. But for this defiance of
+Nature, there might have been many more years of scientific exploration,
+pleasurable to himself and beneficial to others; and he might have
+escaped that invalid life which for a long time he had to bear.
+In his case, however, the penalties of invalid life had great
+mitigations&mdash;mitigations such as fall to the lot of few.</p>
+
+<p>"It is conceivable that the physical discomforts and mental weariness
+which ill-health brings may be almost, if not quite, compensated by the
+pleasurable emotions caused by unflagging attentions and sympathetic
+companionship. If this ever happens, it happened in his case. All who
+have known the household during these years of nursing are aware of the
+unmeasured kindness he has received without ceasing. I happen to have
+had special evidence of this devotion on the one side and gratitude on
+the other, which I do not think I am called upon to keep to myself, but
+rather to do the contrary. In a letter I received from him some
+half-dozen years ago, referring, among other things, to Mrs. Tyndall's
+self-sacrificing care of him, occurred this sentence: 'She has raised my
+ideal of the possibilities of human nature.'"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="ALFRED_R_WALLACE" id="ALFRED_R_WALLACE"></a>ALFRED R. WALLACE</h2>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img447.jpg" alt="WALLACE" title="WALLACE" /></div>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Amok" is an innovation which I do not recommend. It consists in
+letting go when things get too bad, and doing damage with tongue,
+hands and feet. It is the tantrum carried to its logical
+conclusion. I saw one instance where a henpecked husband "ran amok"
+and killed or wounded seventeen people before he himself was
+killed. It is the national and therefore the honorable mode of
+committing suicide among the natives of Celebes, and is the
+fashionable way of escaping from their difficulties. A man can not
+pay, he is taken for a slave, or has gambled away his wife or child
+into slavery, he sees no way of recovering what he has lost, and
+becomes desperate. He will not put up with such cruel wrongs, but
+will be revenged on mankind and die like a hero. He grasps his
+knife, and the next moment draws out the weapon and stabs a man to
+the heart. He runs on with bloody kris in his hand, stabbing every
+one he meets. "Amok! Amok!" then resounds through the streets.
+Spears, krises, knives, guns and clubs are brought out against him.
+He rushes madly forward, kills all he can&mdash;men, women and
+children&mdash;and dies, overwhelmed by numbers, amid all the excitement
+of a battle.</p>
+
+<p class='author'>&mdash;<i>Alfred Russel Wallace, in "The Malay Archipelago"</i></p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ALFRED R. WALLACE</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>he question of how this world and all the things in it were made,
+has, so far as we know, always been asked. And volunteers have at no
+time been slow about coming forward and answering. For this service the
+volunteer has usually asked for honors and also exemption from toil more
+or less unpleasant.</p>
+
+<p>He has also demanded the joy of riding in a coach, being carried in a
+palanquin, and sitting on a throne clothed in purple vestments, trimmed
+with gold lace or costly furs. Very often the volunteer has also
+insisted on living in a house larger than he needed, having more food
+than his system required, and drinking decoctions that are costly, spicy
+and peculiar.</p>
+
+<p>All of which luxury has been paid for by the people, who are told that
+which they wish to hear.</p>
+
+<p>The success of the volunteer lies in keeping one large ear close to the
+turf.</p>
+
+<p>Religious teachers have ever given to their people a cosmogony that was
+adapted to their understanding.</p>
+
+<p>Who made it? God made it all. In how long a time? Six days. And then
+followed explanations of what God did each day.</p>
+
+<p>Over against the volunteers with a taste for power<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span> and a fine corkscrew
+discrimination, there have been at rare intervals men with a desire to
+know for the sake of knowing. They were not content to accept any man's
+explanation. The only thing that was satisfying to them was the
+consciousness that they were inwardly right. Loyalty to the God within
+was the guiding impulse of their lives.</p>
+
+<p>In the past, such men have been regarded as eccentric, unreliable and
+dangerous, and the volunteers have ever warned their congregations
+against them.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, until a very few years ago they were not allowed to express
+themselves openly. Laws have been passed to suppress them, and dire
+penalties have been devised for their benefit. Laws against sacrilege,
+heresy and blasphemy still ornament our statute-books; but these
+invented crimes that were once punishable by death are now obsolete, or
+exist in rudimentary forms only, and manifest themselves in a refusal to
+invite the guilty party to our Four-o'Clock. This hot intent to support
+and uphold the volunteers in their explanations of how the world was
+made, is a universal manifestation of the barbaric state, and is based
+upon the assumption that God is an infinite George the Fourth.</p>
+
+<p>Six hundred years before Christ, Anaximander, the Greek, taught that
+animal life was engendered from the earth through the influence of
+moisture and heat, and that life thus generated gradually evolved into
+higher and different forms: all animals once lived in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span> the water, but
+some of them becoming stranded on land put forth organs of locomotion
+and defense, through their supreme resolve to live. Anaximander also
+taught that man was only a highly developed animal, and his source of
+life was the same as that of all other animals; man's present high
+degree of development having gradually come about through growth from
+very lowly forms.</p>
+
+<p>Anaxagoras, the schoolmaster of Pericles, also made similar statements,
+and then we find him boldly putting forth the very startling idea that
+between the highest type of Greek and the lowest type of savage there
+was a greater difference than between the savage and the ape. He also
+taught that the earth was the universal mother of all living things,
+animal and vegetable, and that the fecundation of the earth took place
+from minute, unseen germs that floated in the air.</p>
+
+<p>According to modern science, Anaxagoras was very close upon the trail of
+truth. But there were only a very few who could follow him, and it took
+the combined eloquence and tact of Pericles to keep his splendid head in
+the place where Nature put it, and Pericles himself was compromised by
+his leaning toward "Darwinism."</p>
+
+<p>Every man who speaks, expresses himself for others. We succeed only as
+our thought is echoed back to us by others who think the same. If you
+like what I say it is only because it is already yours. Moreover,
+thought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span> is a collaboration, and is born of parents. If a teacher does
+not get a sympathetic hearing, one of two things happens: he loses the
+thread of his thought and grows apathetic, or he arouses an opposition
+that snuffs out his life.</p>
+
+<p>And the dead they soon grow cold.</p>
+
+<p>The recipe for popularity is to hunt out a weakness of humanity and then
+bank on it. No one knows this better than your theological volunteer.
+Aristotle, the father of natural history, who early in life had a
+Pegasus killed under him, taught that the diversity in animal life was
+caused by a diversity of conditions and environment, and he declared he
+could change the nature of animals by changing their surroundings. This
+being true he argued that all animals were once different from what they
+are now, and that if we could live long enough, we would see that
+species are exceedingly variable.</p>
+
+<p>To explain to child-minds that a Supreme Being made things outright just
+as they are, is easy; but to study and in degree know how things
+evolved, requires infinite patience and great labor. It also means small
+sympathy from the indifferent whom the earth has spawned in swarms, and
+the hatred of the volunteers who ride in coaches, and tell the many what
+they wish to hear.</p>
+
+<p>The volunteers drove Aristotle into exile, and from his time they had
+their way for two thousand years, when John Ray, Linn&aelig;us and Buffon
+appeared.</p>
+
+<p>In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span> Seventeen Hundred Fifty-five, Immanuel Kant, the little man who
+stayed near home and watched the stars tumble into his net, put forth
+his theory that every animal organism in the world was developed from a
+common original germ.</p>
+
+<p>In Seventeen Hundred Ninety-four, Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of
+Charles Darwin, inspired by Kant and Goethe, put forth his book,
+"Zoonomia," wherein he maintained the gradual growth and evolution of
+all organisms from minute, unseen germs. These views were put forth more
+as a poetic hypothesis than as a well-grounded scientific fact, so
+little attention was paid to Erasmus Darwin's books. The fanciful
+accounts of Creation put forth by Moses three thousand years before were
+firmly maintained by the entrenched volunteers and their millions of
+devotees and followers.</p>
+
+<p>But Kant, Goethe, Karl von Baer and August de Sainte-Hilaire were now
+planting their outposts throughout the civilized world, honeycombing
+Christendom with doubt.</p>
+
+<p>In the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-two, Herbert Spencer had argued in
+public and in pamphlets that species have undergone changes and
+modifications through change of surroundings, and that the account of
+Noah and his ark, with pairs of everything that flew, crept or ran, was
+fanciful and absurd, so far as we cared to distinguish fact from
+fiction.</p>
+
+<p>Early in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-eight,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span> Charles Darwin received
+from his friend, Alfred Russel Wallace, a paper entitled, "On the
+Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type." At
+this time Darwin had in the hands of the secretary of the Linn&aelig;us
+Society a paper entitled, "On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties,
+or the Perpetuation of Species and Varieties by Means of Natural
+Selection."</p>
+
+<p>The similarity in title, as well as the similarity in treatment of the
+Wallace theme, startled Darwin. He had been working on the idea for
+twenty years, and had an immense mass of data bearing on the subject,
+which he some day intended to issue in book form.</p>
+
+<p>His paper for the Linn&aelig;us Society simply summed up his convictions. And
+now here was a man with whom he had never discussed this particular
+subject, writing an almost identical paper and sending it to him&mdash;of all
+men!</p>
+
+<p>Well did he pinch his leg, and call in his wife, asking her if he were
+alive or dead. Straightway he went to see Sir Charles Lyell and Sir
+Joseph Hooker, both more eminent than he in the scientific world, and
+laid the matter before them. After a long conference it was decided that
+both papers should be read the same evening before the Linn&aelig;us Society,
+and this was done on the evening of July First, Eighteen Hundred
+Fifty-eight.</p>
+
+<p>Darwin then decided to publish his "Origin of Species,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span> which in his
+preface he modestly calls an "Abstract." The publication was hastened by
+the fact that Wallace was compiling a similar work. After giving Wallace
+full credit in his most interesting "Introduction," and reviewing all
+that others had said in coming to similar conclusions, Darwin fired his
+shot heard round the world. And no man was more delighted and pleased
+with the echoing reverberations than Alfred Russel Wallace, as he read
+the book in far-off Australia.</p>
+
+<p>The honor of discovering the Law of Evolution, and lifting it out of the
+hazy realms of hypothesis and poetry into the sunlight of science, will
+ever be shared between Charles Robert Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace,
+who were indeed brothers in spirit and lovers to the end of their days.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgi.jpg" alt="I" title="I" /></div><p>n an insignificant village of England, now famous alone because he
+began from there his explorations of the world, Alfred Russel Wallace
+was born, in the year Eighteen Hundred Twenty-two. He was one of a large
+family of the middle class, where work is as natural as life, and the
+indispensable virtues are followed as a means of self-preservation. It
+is most unfortunate to attain such a degree of success that you think
+you can waive the decalogue and give Nemesis the slip.</p>
+
+<p>About the year Eighteen Hundred Forty, the railroad renaissance was on
+in England, and young Wallace, alive, alert, active, did his turn as
+apprentice to a surveyor.</p>
+
+<p>Chance is a better schoolmaster than design. All boys have a taste for
+tent life, and healthy youngsters not quite grown, with ostrich
+digestions, passing through the nomadic stage, revel in hardships and
+count it a joy to sleep on the ground where they can look up at the
+stars, and eat out of a skillet.</p>
+
+<p>A little later we find Alfred working for his elder brother in an
+architect's office, gazing abstractedly out of the window betimes, and
+wishing he were a ground-squirrel, fancy free on the heath and amid the
+heather, digging holes, thus avoiding introspection. "Houses are
+prisons," he said, and sang softly to himself the song of the open road.</p>
+
+<p>I think I know exactly how Alfred Russel Wallace<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span> then felt, from the
+touchstone of my own experience; and I think I know how he looked, too,
+all confirmed by an East Aurora incident.</p>
+
+<p>Some years ago, one fine day in May, I was helping excavate for the
+foundation of a new barn. All at once I felt that some one was standing
+behind me looking at me. I turned around and there was a tall, lithe,
+slender youth in a faded college cap, blue flannel shirt, ragged
+trousers and top-boots. My first impression of him was that he was a
+fellow who slept in his clothes, a plain "Weary," but when he spoke
+there was a note of self-reliance in his low, well-modulated voice that
+told me he was no mendicant. Voice is the true index of character.</p>
+
+<p>"My name is Wallace, and I have a note to you from my father," and he
+began diving into pockets, and finally produced a ragged letter that was
+nearly worn out through long contact with a perspiring human form
+divine&mdash;or partially so. I seldom make haste about reading letters of
+introduction, and so I greeted the young man with a word of welcome, and
+gave him a chance to say something for himself.</p>
+
+<p>He was English, that was very sure&mdash;and Oxford English at that. "You
+see," he began, "I am working just now over on the Hamburg and Buffalo
+Electric Line, stringing wires. I get three dollars a day because I'm a
+fairly good climber. I wanted to learn the business, so I just hired out
+as a laborer, and they gave me the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span> hardest job, thinking to scare me
+out, but that was what I wanted," and he smiled modestly and showed a
+set of incisors as fine and strong as a dog's teeth. "I want to remain
+with you for a week and pay for my board in work," he cautiously
+continued.</p>
+
+<p>"But about your father, Mr. Wallace&mdash;do I know him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think so; he has written you several letters&mdash;Alfred Russel Wallace!"</p>
+
+<p>You could have knocked me down with a lady's-slipper. I opened the
+letter and unmistakably it was from the great scientist, "introducing my
+baby boy."</p>
+
+<p>I never met Alfred Russel Wallace, but I know if I should, I would find
+him very gentle, kindly and simple in all his ways&mdash;as really great men
+ever are. He would not talk to me in Latin nor throw off technical
+phrases about great nothings, and I would feel just as much at home with
+him as I did with Ol' John Burroughs the last time I saw him, leaning up
+against a country railroad-station in shirt-sleeves, chewing a straw,
+exchanging salutes with the engineer on a West Shore jerkwater. "S'
+long, John!" called the going one as he leaned out of the cab-window.
+"S' long, Bill, and good luck to you," was the cheery answer.</p>
+
+<p>But still, all of us have moments when we think of the world's most
+famous ones as being surely eight feet tall, and having voices like
+fog-horns.</p>
+
+<p>"I can do most any kind of hard work, you know"&mdash;I was aroused from my
+little mental excursion, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span> noticed that my visitor had hair of a
+light yellow like a Swede from Hennepin County, Minnesota, and that his
+hair was three shades lighter than his bronzed face. "I can do any kind
+of work, you know, and if you will just loan me that pick"&mdash;and I handed
+him the pickax.</p>
+
+<p>Young Wallace remained with us for a week, asking for nothing, doing
+everything, even to helping the girls wash dishes. That he was the son
+of a great man, no one would have ever learned from his own lips. In
+fact, I am not sure that he was impressed with his father's excellence,
+but I saw there was a tender bond between them, for he haunted the
+post-office, morning, noon and night, looking for a letter from his
+father. When it came he was as happy as a woodchuck. He showed me the
+letter: it was nine finely written pages.</p>
+
+<p>But to my disappointment not a word about marsupials, siamangs or
+Syndactyl&aelig;: just news about John, William, Mary and Benjamin; with
+references to chickens and cows, and a new greenhouse, with a little
+good advice about keeping right hours and not overeating.</p>
+
+<p>The young man had spent three years at Oxford, and was an electrical
+engineer. He was intent on finding out just as much about the secrets of
+American railroad construction as he possibly could. As for intellect, I
+did not discover any vast amount; perhaps, for that matter, he didn't
+either. But we all greatly enjoyed his visit, and when he went away I
+presented him with a clean, secondhand flannel shirt and my blessing.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgf.jpg" alt="F" title="F" /></div><p>rom the appearance of the young man I imagine that Alfred Russel
+Wallace at twenty-one was very much such a man as his son, who did such
+good work at the Roycroft with pick and shovel. Alfred was earnest,
+intent, strong, and had a deal of quiet courage that he was as
+unconscious of as he was of his digestion.</p>
+
+<p>He taught school, and to interest his scholars he would take them on
+botanical excursions. Then he himself grew interested, and began to
+collect plants, bugs, beetles and birds on his own account.</p>
+
+<p>By Eighteen Hundred Forty-eight, the confining walls of the school had
+become intolerable to Wallace, and he started away on a wild-goose chase
+to Brazil, with a chum by the name of Henry Walter Bates, an ardent
+entomologist. Alfred had no money either, but Bates had influence, and
+he cashed it in by arranging with the Curator of the British Museum,
+that any natural-history specimens of value which they might gather and
+send to him would be paid for. And so something like a hundred pounds
+was collected from several scientific men, and handed over as advance
+payment for the wonderful things that the young men were to send back.</p>
+
+<p>They embarked on a sailing-vessel that was captained by a kind kinsman
+of Bates, so the fare was nil, in consideration of services rendered
+constructively.</p>
+
+<p>Arriving in Brazil the young men began their collecting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span> of specimens.
+They got together a very creditable collection of birds' eggs and sent
+them back by the captain of the ship they came out on, this as an
+earnest of what was to come.</p>
+
+<p>Bates and Wallace were together for a year. Bates insisted on remaining
+near the white settlements; but Wallace wanted to go where white men had
+never been. So alone he went into the forests, and for two years lived
+with the natives and dared the dangers of jungle-fever, snakes,
+crocodiles and savages. For a space of ten months he did not see a
+single white person.</p>
+
+<p>He collected nearly ten thousand specimens of birds, which he skinned
+and carefully prepared so they could be mounted when he returned to
+England; there was also a nearly complete Brazilian herbarium, and a
+finer collection of birds' eggs than any museum of England could boast.</p>
+
+<p>This collection represented over three years' continuous toil. All the
+curious things were packed with great care and placed on board ship.</p>
+
+<p>And so the young naturalist sailed away for England, proud and happy,
+with his great collection of entomological, botanical and ornithological
+specimens.</p>
+
+<p>But on the way the ship took fire, and the collection was either burned
+or ruined by soaking salt water.</p>
+
+<p>That the crew and their sole passenger escaped alive was a wonder.
+Wallace on reaching England was in a sorry plight, being destitute of
+clothes and funds.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And there were unkind ones who did not hesitate to hint that he had only
+been over to Ireland working in a peat-bog, and that his knowledge of
+Brazil was gotten out of Humboldt's books.</p>
+
+<p>In one way, Wallace surely paralleled Humboldt: both lost a most
+valuable collection of natural-history specimens by shipwreck.</p>
+
+<p>Several of the good men who had advanced money now asked that it be
+paid. Wallace set to work writing out his recollections, the only asset
+that he possessed.</p>
+
+<p>His book, "Travel on the Amazon and Rio Negro," had enough romance in it
+so that it floated. Royalties paid over in crisp Bank of England notes
+made things look brighter. Another book was issued, called, "Palm-Trees
+and Their Uses," and proved that the author was able to view a subject
+from every side, and say all that was to be said about it. "Wallace on
+the Palm" is still a textbook.</p>
+
+<p>The debts were paid, and Alfred Russel Wallace at thirty was square with
+the world, the possessor of much valuable experience. He also had five
+hundred pounds in cash, with a reputation as a writer and traveler that
+no longer caused bookworms to sneeze.</p>
+
+<p>Having paid off his obligations, he felt free again to leave England, a
+thing he had vowed he would not do, so long as his reputation was under
+a cloud. This time he selected for a natural-history survey a section of
+the world really less known than South America.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imge.jpg" alt="E" title="E" /></div><p>arly in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four, Alfred Russel Wallace
+reached Asia. He had decided that he would make the first and the best
+collection of the flora and fauna of the Malay Archipelago that it was
+possible to make.</p>
+
+<p>White men had skirted the coast of many of the islands, but information
+as to what there was inland was mostly conjecture and guesswork.</p>
+
+<p>Just how long it would take Wallace to make his Malaysian
+natural-history survey he did not know, but in a letter to Darwin he
+stated that he expected to be absent from England at least two years. He
+was gone eight years, and during this time, walked, paddled or rode
+horseback fifteen thousand miles, and visited many islands never before
+trod by the foot of a white man.</p>
+
+<p>The city of Singapore served him as a base or headquarters, because from
+there he could catch trading-ships that plied among the islands of the
+Archipelago; and to Singapore he could also ship and there store his
+specimens. From Singapore he made sixty separate voyages of discovery.
+In all he sent home over one hundred twenty-five thousand
+natural-history specimens, including about ten thousand birds, which,
+later on, were all stuffed and mounted under his skilful direction.</p>
+
+<p>On returning to England, Wallace took six years in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span> preparation of his
+book, "The Malay Archipelago," a most stupendous literary undertaking,
+which covers the subjects of botany, geology, ornithology, entomology,
+zoology and anthropology, in a way that serves as a regular mine of
+information and suggestion for natural-history workers.</p>
+
+<p>The book in its original form, I believe, sold for ten pounds (fifty
+dollars), and was issued to subscribers in parts. It was bought, not
+only by students, but by a great number of general readers, there being
+enough adventure mixed up in the science to spice what otherwise might
+be rather dry reading. For instance, there is a chapter about killing
+orang-utans that must have served my old friend, Paul du Chaillu, as
+excellent raw stock in compiling his own recollections.</p>
+
+<p>Wallace states that the only foe for which the orang really has a hatred
+is the crocodile. It seems to share with man a shuddering fear of
+snakes, although orangs have no part in making Kentucky famous. But the
+crocodile is his natural and hereditary enemy. And as if to get even
+with this ancient foe, who occasionally snaps off a young orang in his
+prime, the orangs will often locate a big crocodile, and jumping on his
+back beat him with clubs; and when he opens his gigantic mouth, the
+female orangs will fill the cavity with sticks and stones, and keep up
+the fight until the crocodile succumbs and quits this vale of crocodile
+tears.</p>
+
+<p>The orang is distinct and different from the chimpanzee<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span> and gorilla,
+which are found only in Western Africa.</p>
+
+<p>In Borneo, the "man-ape" is quite numerous. This is the animal that has
+given rise to all those tales about "the wild man of Borneo," which that
+good man, P. T. Barnum, kept alive by exhibiting a fine specimen.
+Barnum's original "wild man" lived at Waltham, Massachusetts, and
+belonged to the Baptist Church. He recently died worth a hundred
+thousand dollars, which money he left to found a school for young
+ladies.</p>
+
+<p>The orang, or mias, hides in the swampy jungles, and very rarely comes
+to the ground. The natives regard them as a sort of sacred object, and
+have a great horror of killing them. Indeed, a person who kills a
+man-ape, they regard as a murderer; and so when Wallace announced to his
+attendants that he wanted to secure several specimens of these "wild men
+of the woods," they cried, "Alas! he is making a collection: it will be
+our turn next!" And they fled in terror.</p>
+
+<p>Wallace then hired another set of servants and resolved to make no
+confidants, but just go ahead and find his game.</p>
+
+<p>He had hunted for weeks through forest and jungle, but never a glimpse
+or sight of the man-ape! He had almost given up the search, and
+concluded with several English scientists that this orang-utan was a
+part of that great fabric of pseudo-science invented by imaginative
+sailormen, who took most of their inland little journeys around the
+capstan. And so musing, seated in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[Pg 403]</a></span> the doorway of his bamboo house, he
+looked out upon the forest, and there only a few yards away, swinging
+from tree to tree, was a man-ape. It seemed to him to be about five
+times as large as a man.</p>
+
+<p>He seized his gun and approached; the beast stopped, glared, and railed
+at him in a voice of wrath. It broke off branches and threw sticks at
+him.</p>
+
+<p>Wallace thought of the offer made him by the South Kensington Museum:
+"One hundred pounds in gold for an adult male, skin and skeleton to be
+properly preserved and mounted; seventy-five pounds for a female."</p>
+
+<p>The huge animal showed its teeth, cast one glance of scornful contempt
+on the puny explorer, and started on, swinging thirty feet at a stretch
+and catching hold of the limbs with its two pairs of hands.</p>
+
+<p>Wallace grasped his gun and followed, lured by the demoniac shape. A
+little of the superstition of the natives had gotten into his veins: he
+dare not kill the thing unless it came toward him, and he had to shoot
+it in self-defense.</p>
+
+<p>It traveled in the trees about as fast as he could on the ground.
+Occasionally it would stop and chatter at him, throwing sticks in a most
+human way, as if to order him back.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, the instincts of the naturalist got the better of the man, and
+he shot the animal. It came tumbling to the ground with a terrific
+crash, grasping at the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[Pg 404]</a></span> vines and leaves as it fell.</p>
+
+<p>It was quite dead, but Wallace approached it with great caution. It
+proved to be a female, of moderate size, in height about three and a
+half feet, six feet across from finger to finger. Needless to say that
+Wallace had to do the skinning and the mounting of the skeleton alone.
+His servants had chills of fear if asked to approach it. The skeleton of
+this particular orang can now be seen in the Derby Museum.</p>
+
+<p>In a few hours after killing his first orang, Wallace heard a peculiar
+crying in the forest, and on search found a young one, evidently the
+baby of the one he had killed. The baby did not show any fear at all,
+evidently thinking it was with one of its kind, for it clung to him
+piteously, with an almost human tenderness.</p>
+
+<p>Says Wallace:</p>
+
+<p>"When handled or nursed it was very quiet and contented, but when laid
+down by itself would invariably cry; and for the first few nights was
+very restless and noisy. I soon found it necessary to wash the little
+mias as well. After I had done so a few times it came to like the
+operation, and after rolling in the mud would begin crying, and continue
+until I took it out and carried it to the spout, when it immediately
+became quiet, although it would wince a little at the first rush of the
+cold water, and make ridiculously wry faces while the stream was running
+over its head. It enjoyed the wiping and rubbing dry amazingly, and when
+I brushed its hair seemed to be perfectly happy,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span> lying quite still with
+its arms and legs stretched out. It was a never-failing amusement to
+observe the curious changes of countenance by which it would express its
+approval or dislike of what was given to it. The poor little thing would
+lick its lips, draw in its cheeks, and turn up its eyes with an
+expression of the most supreme satisfaction, when it had a mouthful
+particularly to its taste. On the other hand, when its food was not
+sufficiently sweet or palatable, it would turn the mouthful about with
+its tongue for a moment, as if trying to extract what flavor there was,
+and then push it all out between its lips. If the same food was
+continued, it would proceed to scream and kick about violently, exactly
+like a baby in a passion.</p>
+
+<p>"When I had had it about a month it began to exhibit some signs of
+learning to run alone. When laid upon the floor it would push itself
+along by its legs, or roll itself over, and thus make an unwieldy
+progression. When lying in the box it would lift itself up to the edge
+in an almost erect position, and once or twice succeeded in tumbling
+out. When left dirty or hungry, or otherwise neglected, it would scream
+violently till attended to, varied by a kind of coughing noise, very
+similar to that which is made by the adult animal.</p>
+
+<p>"If no one was in the house, or its cries were not attended to, it would
+be quiet after a little while; but the moment it heard a footstep would
+begin again, harder than ever. It was very human."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgt.jpg" alt="T" title="T" /></div><p>he most lasting result of the wanderings of Alfred Russel Wallace
+consists in his having established what is known to us as "The Wallace
+Line." This line is a boundary that divides in a geographical way that
+portion of Malaysia which belongs to the continent of Asia from that
+which belongs to the continent of Australia.</p>
+
+<p>The Wallace Line covers a distance of more than four thousand miles, and
+in this expanse there are three islands in which Great Britain could be
+set down without anywhere touching the sea.</p>
+
+<p>Even yet the knowledge of the average American or European is very hazy
+about the size and extent of the Malay Archipelago, although through our
+misunderstanding with Spain, which loaded us up with possessions we have
+no use for, we have recently gotten the geography down and dusted it off
+a bit.</p>
+
+<p>There is a book by Mrs. Rose Innes, wife of an English official in the
+Far East, who, among other entertaining things, tells of a head-hunter
+chief who taught her to speak Malay, and she, wishing to reciprocate,
+offered to teach him English; but the great man begged to be excused,
+saying, "Malay is spoken everywhere you go, east, west, north or south,
+but in all the world there are only twelve people who speak English,"
+and he proceeded to name them.</p>
+
+<p>Our assumptions are not quite so broad as this, but few of us realize
+that the Protestant Christian Religion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span> stands fifth in the number of
+communicants, as compared with the other great religions, and that
+against our hundred millions of people in America, the Malay Archipelago
+has over two hundred millions.</p>
+
+<p>Wallace found marked geological, botanical and zoological differences to
+denote his line. And from these things he proved that there had been
+great changes, through subsidence and elevation of the land. At no very
+remote geologic period, Asia extended clear to Borneo, and also included
+the Philippine Islands. This is shown by the fact that animal and
+vegetable life in all of these islands is almost identical with life on
+the mainland: the same trees, the same flowers, the same birds, the same
+animals.</p>
+
+<p>As you go westward, however, you come to islands which have a very
+different flora and fauna, totally unlike that found in Asia, but very
+similar to that found in Australia.</p>
+
+<p>Australia, be it known, is totally different in all its animal and
+vegetable phenomena from Asia.</p>
+
+<p>In Australia, until the white man very recently carried them across,
+there were no monkeys, apes, cats, bears, tigers, wolves, elephants,
+horses, squirrels or rabbits. Instead there were found animals that are
+found nowhere else, and which seem to belong to a different and
+so-called extinct geologic age, such as the kangaroo, wombats, the
+platypus&mdash;which the sailors used to tell us was neither bird not beast,
+and yet was both. In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span> birds, Australia has also very strange specimens,
+such as the ostrich which can not fly, but can outrun a horse and kills
+its prey by kicking forward like a man. Australia also has immense
+mound-making turkeys, honeysuckers and cockatoos, but no woodpeckers,
+quail or pheasants.</p>
+
+<p>Wallace was the first to discover that there are various islands, some
+of them several hundred miles from Australia, where the animal life is
+identical with that of Australia. And then there are islands, only a
+comparatively few miles away, which have all the varieties of birds and
+beasts found in Asia.</p>
+
+<p>But this line that once separated continents is in places but fifteen
+miles wide, and is always marked by a deep-water channel, but the seas
+that separate Borneo and Sumatra from Asia, although wide, are so
+shallow that ships can find anchorage anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>The Wallace Line, proving the subsidence of the sea and upheaval of the
+land, has never been seriously disputed, and is to many students the one
+great discovery by which Wallace will be remembered.</p>
+
+<p>Wallace's book on "The Geographical Distribution of Animals" sets forth
+in a most interesting manner, the details of how he came to discover the
+Line.</p>
+
+<p>It was in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-five that Wallace, alone in the wilds
+of the Malay Archipelago, became convinced of the scientific truth that
+species were an evolution from a common source, and he began making<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[Pg 409]</a></span>
+notes of his observations along this particular line of thought. Some
+months afterward he wrote out his belief in the form of an essay, but
+then he had no definite intention of what he would do with the paper,
+beyond keeping it for future reference when he returned to England. In
+the Fall of Eighteen Hundred Fifty-seven, however, he decided to send it
+to Darwin to be read before some scientific society, if Darwin
+considered it worthy. And this paper was read on the evening of July
+First, before the Linn&aelig;us Society, with one by Darwin on the same
+subject, written before Wallace's paper arrived, wherein the identical
+views are set forth. Darwin and Wallace expressed what many other
+investigators had guessed or but dimly perceived.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[Pg 410]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgo.jpg" alt="O" title="O" /></div><p>f the six immortal modern scientists, three began life working as
+surveyors and civil engineers&mdash;Wallace, Tyndall, Spencer. From the
+number of eminent men, not forgetting Henry Thoreau, Leonardo da Vinci,
+Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Washington&mdash;aye! nor old John Brown, who
+carried a Gunter's chain and manipulated the transit&mdash;we come to the
+conclusion that there must be something in the business of surveying
+that conduces to clear thinking and strong, independent action.</p>
+
+<p>If I had a boy who by nature and habit was given to futilities, I would
+apprentice him to a civil engineer.</p>
+
+<p>When two gangs of men begin a tunnel, working toward each other from
+different sides of a mountain, dreams, poetry, hypothesis and guesswork
+had better be omitted from the equation. Here is a case where
+metaphysics has no bearing. It is a condition that confronts them, not a
+theory.</p>
+
+<p>Theological explanations are assumptions built upon hypotheses, and your
+theologian always insists that you shall be dead before you can know.</p>
+
+<p>If a bridge breaks down or a fireproof building burns to ashes, no
+explanation on the part of the architect can explain away the
+miscalculation; but your theologian always evolves his own fog, into
+which he can withdraw at will, thus making escape easy. Darwin, Huxley,
+Spencer, Tyndall and Wallace all had the mathematical mind. Nothing but
+the truth would satisfy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span> them. In school, you remember how we sometimes
+used to work on a mathematical problem for hours or days. Many would
+give it up. A few of the class would take the answer from the book, and
+in an extremity force the figures to give the proper result. Such
+students, it is needless to say, never gained the respect of either
+class or teacher&mdash;or themselves. They had the true theological instinct.
+But a few kept on until the problem was solved, or the fallacy of it had
+been discovered. In life's school such were the men just named, and the
+distinguishing feature of their lives was that they were students and
+learners to the last.</p>
+
+<p>Of this group of scientific workers, Alfred Russel Wallace alone
+survives, aged eighty-nine at this writing, still studying, earnestly
+intent upon one of Nature's secrets that four of his great colleagues
+years ago labeled "Unknown," and the other two marked "Unknowable."</p>
+
+<p>To some it is an anomaly and contradiction that a lover of science,
+exact, cautious, intent on certitude, should accept a belief in personal
+immortality. Still, to others this is regarded as positive proof of his
+superior insight.</p>
+
+<p>All thinking men agree that we are surrounded by phenomena that to a
+great extent are unanalyzed; but Herbert Spencer, for one, thought it a
+lapse in judgment to attribute to spirit intervention, mysteries which
+could not be accounted for on any other grounds. It was equal to that
+sin against science which Darwin<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span> committed, and which he atoned for in
+contrite public confession, when he said: "It surely must be this,
+otherwise what is it? Hence we assume," and so on. Some recent writers
+have sought to demolish Wallace's argument concerning Spiritism by
+saying he is an old man and in his dotage. Wallace once wrote a booklet
+entitled, "Vaccination a Fallacy," which created a big dust in Doctors'
+Row, and was cited as corroborative proof, along with his faith in
+Spiritism, that the man was mentally incompetent.</p>
+
+<p>But this is a deal worse excuse for argument than anything Wallace ever
+put forth. The real fact is that Wallace issued a book on Spiritism in
+Eighteen Hundred Seventy-four, and in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-six
+reissued it with numerous amendments, confirming his first conclusions.
+So he has held his peculiar views on immortality for over thirty years,
+and moreover his mental vigor is still unimpaired.</p>
+
+<p>Whether the proof he has received as to the existence of disembodied
+spirits is sufficient for others is very uncertain; but if it suffices
+for himself, it is not for us to quibble. Wallace agrees to allow us to
+have our opinions if we will let him have his.</p>
+
+<p>His views are in no sense those of Christianity; rather, they might be
+called those of Theosophy, as the personal God and the dogma of
+salvation and atonement are entirely omitted.</p>
+
+<p>The Doctrine of Evolution he carries into the realm of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span> spirit. His
+belief is that souls reincarnate themselves many times for the ultimate
+object of experience, growth and development. He holds that this life is
+the gateway to another, but that we should live each day as though it
+were our last.</p>
+
+<p>To this effect we find, in a recent article, Wallace quotes a little
+story from Tolstoy: A priest, seeing a peasant in a field plowing,
+approached him and asked, "How would you spend the rest of this day if
+you knew you were to die tonight?"</p>
+
+<p>The priest expected the man, who was a bit irregular in his churchgoing,
+to say, "I would spend my last hours in confession and prayer." But the
+peasant replied, "How would I spend the rest of the day if I were to die
+tonight?&mdash;why, I'd plow!"</p>
+
+<p>Hence, Wallace holds that it is better to plow than to pray, and that in
+fact, when rightly understood, good plowing is prayer.</p>
+
+<p>All useful effort is sacred, and nothing else is or ever can be. Wallace
+believes that the only fit preparation for the future lies in improving
+the present. Please pass the dotage!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[Pg 415]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="JOHN_FISKE" id="JOHN_FISKE"></a>JOHN FISKE</h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img448.jpg" alt="FISKE" title="FISKE" /></div>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In a sinless and painless world the moral element would be lacking;
+the goodness would have no more significance in our conscious life
+than that load of atmosphere which we are always carrying about
+with us.</p>
+
+<p>We are thus brought to a striking conclusion, the essential
+soundness of which can not be gainsaid. In a happy world there must
+be pain and sorrow, and in a moral world the knowledge of evil is
+indispensable. The stern necessity for this has been proved to
+inhere in the innermost constitution of the human soul. It is part
+and parcel of the universe.</p>
+
+<p>We do not find that evil has been interpolated into the universe
+from without; we find that, on the contrary, it is an indispensable
+part of the dramatic whole. God is the creator of evil, and from
+the eternal scheme of things diabolism is forever excluded.</p>
+
+<p>From our present standpoint we may fairly ask, what would have been
+the worth of that primitive innocence portrayed in the myth of the
+Garden of Eden, had it ever been realized in the life of men? What
+would have been the moral value or significance of a race of human
+beings ignorant of sin, and doing beneficent acts with no more
+consciousness or volition than the deftly contrived machine that
+picks up raw material at one end, and turns out some finished
+product at the other? Clearly, for strong and resolute men and
+women, an Eden would be but a fool's paradise.</p>
+
+<p class='author'>"<i>Through Nature to God</i>"</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[Pg 416]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[Pg 418]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[Pg 417]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>JOHN FISKE</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imge.jpg" alt="E" title="E" /></div><p>arly in life John Fiske aimed high and thought himself capable of
+great things. He also believed that the world accepted a man at the
+estimate he placed upon himself.</p>
+
+<p>Fiske was born at Hartford in Eighteen Hundred Forty-two. His mother's
+maiden name was Fiske and his father's name was Green, and until
+well-nigh manhood, John Fiske was called Edmund Green.</p>
+
+<p>His father died while Edmund was a baby, and the wee youngster was taken
+charge of by his grandmother Fiske of Middletown, Connecticut.</p>
+
+<p>When his mother married again, Edmund did not approve of the match.
+Parents often try to live their children's lives for them, and to hold
+the balance true, children occasionally attempt to dictate to parents in
+affairs of the heart. A young man by the name of Hamlet will be recalled
+who, having no special business of his own, became much distressed and
+had theories concerning the conduct of his mother. As a general
+proposition the person who looks after the territory directly under his
+own hat will find his time fairly well employed.</p>
+
+<p>They say Edmund Green made threats when his mother changed her name, but
+all he did was to follow her example and change his. Thereafter he was
+plain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[Pg 419]</a></span> John Fiske. "I must have a name easy to take hold of: one that
+people can remember," he said. And they do say that John Fiske's
+reverence for John Ruskin had something to do with his choice of name.</p>
+
+<p>Just here some curious one of the curious sex, which by the way holds no
+monopoly on curiosity, may ask if the second venture of Mrs. Green was
+fruitful and fortunate. So I will say, yes, eminently so; and in one way
+it seemed to serve, for John Fiske's stepfather waived John's
+displeasure with his stepfather's wife, and did something toward sending
+the young man to Harvard University, and also supplied the funds to send
+him on a tour around the world.</p>
+
+<p>However, the second brood revealed no genius, at sight of which the
+defunct Mr. Green from his seat in Elysium must have chortled in glee,
+assuming, of course, that disembodied spirits are cognizant of the
+doings of their late partners, as John Fiske seemed to think they were.</p>
+
+<p>If Alexander Humboldt's mother had not married again, we would have had
+no Alexander Humboldt. Second marriages are like first ones in this:
+Sometimes they are happy and sometimes not. In any event, I occasionally
+think that mother-love has often been much exaggerated. Love is a most
+beautiful thing, and it does not seem to make very much difference who
+supplies it. Stepmother-love, Lincoln used to say, was the most precious
+thing that had ever come his way. I know a man who loves his
+mother-in-law, because<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[Pg 420]</a></span> she pitied him. Our Oneida friends had
+"Community Mothers," who took care of everybody's babies, just as if
+they were their own, and with marked success, for the genus hoodlum
+never evolved at Oneida. Grandmother-love served all purposes for little
+Isaac Newton, just as it did for John Fiske.</p>
+
+<p>John Fiske's grandmother was his first teacher, and she started out with
+the assumption that genius always skips one generation. She believed
+that she was dealing with a record-breaker, and she was. What she did
+not know about the classics was known by others whom she delegated to
+teach her grandchild.</p>
+
+<p>When her baby genius was just out of linsey-woolsey dresses and wore
+trousers buttoned to a calico waist, she began preparing him for
+college. The old lady had loved a college man in her youth, and she
+judged Harvard by the Harvard man she knew best. And the Harvard man she
+saw in her waking dreams, she created in her own image. Harvard requires
+perspective, and viewed over the years through a mist of melancholy it
+is very beautiful. At close range we often get a Jarrett Bumball flavor
+of cigarettes and a sight of the foam that made Milwaukee famous. To a
+great degree, Gran'ma Fiske created her Harvard out of the stuff that
+dreams are made of. When her little charge was six years old, she began
+preparing him for Harvard by teaching him to say, "amo, amas, amat."</p>
+
+<p>At seven years of age he was reading C&aelig;sar's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[Pg 421]</a></span> "Commentaries" and making
+wise comments over his bowl of bread-and-milk about the Tenth Legion;
+and he also had his opinions concerning the relationship of C&aelig;sar with
+Cleopatra. At this time he read Josephus for rest, and discovered for
+himself that the famous passage about Jesus of Nazareth was an
+interpolation.</p>
+
+<p>When he was eight, he was familiar with Plato, had read all of
+Shakespeare's plays, and propounded a few hypotheses concerning the
+authorship of the "Sonnets."</p>
+
+<p>At nine he spoke Greek with an Attic accent. When ten he had read
+Prescott, Gibbon and Macaulay; and about this time, as a memory test he
+wrote a history of the world from the time of Moses down to the date of
+his own birth, giving a list of the greatest men who had ever lived,
+with a brief mention of what they had done, with the date of their birth
+and death.</p>
+
+<p>This book is still in existence and so far as I know has never been
+equaled by the performance of any infant prodigy, save possibly John
+Stuart Mill.</p>
+
+<p>When twelve years of age he had read Vergil, Sallust, Tacitus, Ovid,
+Juvenal and Catullus. He had also mastered trigonometry, surveying,
+navigation, geometry and differential calculus.</p>
+
+<p>Before his grandmother had him discard knee-breeches, he kept his diary
+in Spanish, spoke German at the table, and read German philosophy in the
+original. The year he was sixteen he wrote poems after Dante in Italian
+and translated Cervantes into English.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[Pg 422]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At seventeen he read the Hebrew scriptures like a Rabbi, and was
+familiar with Sanskrit.</p>
+
+<p>Now, let no carpist imagine I have dealt in hyperbole, or hand-illumined
+the facts: I have merely stated some simple truths about the early
+career of John Fiske.</p>
+
+<p>One might imagine that with all his wonderful achievements this youth
+would be top-heavy and a most insufferable prig. The fact was, he was a
+fine, rollicking, healthy young man much given to pranks, and withal
+generous and lovable.</p>
+
+<p>He was admitted to Harvard without examination, for his fame had
+preceded him. Students and professors alike looked at him in wonder.</p>
+
+<p>At Cambridge, as if to keep good his record, he studied thirteen hours a
+day, for twelve months in the year. He ranged through every subject in
+the catalog, and all recorded knowledge was to him familiar.</p>
+
+<p>Prophecies were freely made that he would eclipse Sir Isaac Newton and
+Humboldt. But there were others who had a clearer vision.</p>
+
+<p>John Fiske made a decided success in life and left his personality
+distinctly impressed upon his time, but it is no disparagement to say of
+him that Autumn did not fulfil the promise of Spring. And Fiske himself
+in his single original contribution to the evolution crusade explains
+the reason why.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Santayanna of Harvard once said that John Fiske made three
+great scientific discoveries, as follows:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[Pg 423]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>1. As you lengthen a pigeon's bill, you increase the size of its feet.</p>
+
+<p>2. White tomcats with blue eyes are always deaf.</p>
+
+<p>3. The extent of mental development in any animal is in proportion to
+its infancy or the length of time involved in its reaching physical
+maturity.</p>
+
+<p>Waiving Numbers One and Two as of doubtful value, Number Three is
+Fiske's sole original discovery, according to his confession. Further,
+Huxley quotes Fiske on this theme, and adds, "The delay of adolescence
+and the prolonging of the period of infancy form a subject, as expressed
+by Mr. Fiske, which is worthy of our most careful consideration."</p>
+
+<p>Rareripes fall early. John Fiske's name was coupled, as we have seen,
+with those of Newton and Humboldt. Newton died at eighty-six, Humboldt
+at ninety. These men developed slowly: the hothouse methods were not for
+them. Fiske at twenty knew more than any of them did at forty. Fiske at
+twenty-five was a better man mentally and physically than he was at
+thirty-five. At forty he was refused life-insurance because his
+measurement east and west was out of proportion to his measurement north
+and south.</p>
+
+<p>He used often to sit at his desk for fifteen hours a day, writing and
+studying. The sedentary habit grew upon him; the vital organs got
+clogged with adipose tissue. The doctor told him that "his diaphragm was
+too close to his lungs"&mdash;a cheerful proposition, well worthy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[Pg 424]</a></span> of a
+small, mouse-colored medicus who dare not run the risk of displeasing a
+big patient by telling him the truth, that is, that deep breathing and
+active exercise in the open air can never be replaced through the use of
+something poured out of a bottle.</p>
+
+<p>People who eat too much, drink too much, smoke too much, and do not
+exercise enough, have to pay for their privileges, even though they are
+able to work differential calculus with one hand and recite Xenophon's
+"Anabasis" backward. They all have the liver and lungs too close to the
+diaphragm, because that damnable invention of Sir Isaac Newton's
+slumbers not nor sleeps, and all the vital organs droop and drop when we
+neglect deep breathing. Inertia is a vice. The gods cultivate
+levitation, which is a different thing from levity, meaning skyey
+gravitation, uplift, aspiration expressed in bodily attitude. When
+levitation lets go, gravity doubles its grip.</p>
+
+<p>The Yogi of the East know vastly more about this theme than we do, and
+have made of deep breathing an art. Carry the crown of your head high,
+hold your chin in, and fill the top of your lungs by cultivating
+levitation. We are gods in the biscuit!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[Pg 425]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imga.jpg" alt="A" title="A" /></div><p>fter four years at Harvard and the regulation two years at the Harvard
+Law School, John Fiske opened an office in Boston and gave his shingle
+to the breeze. No clients came, and this was well&mdash;for the clients.
+Also, for John. The law is a business proposition: its essence is the
+adjustment of differences between men, the lubrication of exchange,
+getting things on! Learned men very seldom make good lawyers. Law is a
+very practical matter, and as for "Law Latin," it can be learned in a
+week and then should be mostly forgotten. The lawyer who asks his client
+about the "causa sine qua non," or harangues the jury concerning the
+"ipse dixit" of "de facto" and "de jure," will probably be mulcted for
+costs on general principles.</p>
+
+<p>"I always rule hard against the lawyer who quotes Latin," said a
+Brooklyn judge to me the other day. Happily, Law Latin is now not used
+to any extent, except in Missouri.</p>
+
+<p>No more clients came to John Fiske than did to Wendell Phillips, who
+once had a law-office on the same street. So John sent letters to the
+newspapers, wrote book-reviews, and contributed essays to the "Atlantic
+Monthly." Occasionally, he would lecture for scientific clubs or
+societies.</p>
+
+<p>While still in the Law School he had discounted the future and married a
+charming young woman, who believed in him to an extent that would have
+made the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[Pg 426]</a></span> average man pause.</p>
+
+<p>Marriages do not always keep pace exactly with the price of corn.</p>
+
+<p>Receipts in the Fiske law-office were not active. John Fiske was
+twenty-six; his grandmother was dead, and family cares were coming along
+apace, all according to the Law of Malthus.</p>
+
+<p>He accepted an offer to give substitute lectures at Harvard on history,
+for a professor who had gone abroad for his health. This he continued,
+speaking for any absentee on any subject, and tutoring rich laggards for
+a consideration. Good boys, low on phosphorus, used to get him to start
+their daily themes, and those overtaken in the throes of trigonometry he
+often rescued from disgrace.</p>
+
+<p>Darwinism was in the saddle. Asa Gray was mildly defending it. Agassiz
+stood aloof, clinging to his early Swiss parsonage teachings, and the
+Theological Department marched in solid phalanx and scoffed and scorned.
+Yale, always having more theology than Harvard, threw out challenges.
+Fiske had saturated himself with the ideas of Darwin and Wallace, and
+his intellect was great enough to perceive the vast and magnificent
+scope of "The Origin of Species." He prepared and read a lecture on the
+subject, all couched in gentle and judicial phrase, but with a finale
+that gave forth no uncertain sound.</p>
+
+<p>The Overseers decided to ask Fiske to amplify the subject and give a
+course of lectures on the Law of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[Pg 427]</a></span> Evolution.</p>
+
+<p>The subject grew under his hands and the course extended itself into
+thirty-five lectures, covering the whole field of natural history, with
+many short excursions into the realms of biology, embryology, botany,
+geology and cosmogony.</p>
+
+<p>Fiske was made assistant librarian at a salary of one thousand dollars a
+year. It was not much money, but it gave him a fixed position, with time
+to help the erring freshman and the mentally recalcitrant sophomore
+handicapped by rich parents. For seven years Fiske held this position of
+assistant librarian, and hardly a student at Harvard during those years
+but acknowledged the personal help he received at the hands of John
+Fiske. Knowledge consists in having an assistant librarian who knows
+where to find the thing.</p>
+
+<p>Fiske's thirty-five lectures had evolved into that excellent book,
+"Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy." The public were buying it.</p>
+
+<p>Evolution was fast taking its place as a fixed fact. And John Fiske was
+moving into public favor on the flood-tide. There were demands for his
+lectures from various schools, colleges and lyceums, throughout the
+United States.</p>
+
+<p>He resigned his position so as to give all his time to writing and
+speaking. And Harvard, proud of her gifted son, elected him an Overseer
+of the University, which position he held until his death. John Fiske
+died in Nineteen Hundred One, suddenly, aged fifty-nine.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[Pg 428]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/imgn.jpg" alt="N" title="N" /></div><p>ext to the originator of a great thought is the man who quotes it,"
+says Ralph Waldo Emerson. Next to the discoverer of a great scientific
+truth is the man who recognizes and upholds it. The service done science
+by Fiske is beyond calculation. Fiske was not a Columbus upon the sea of
+science: he followed the course laid out by others, and was really never
+out of sight of a buoy. He comes as near being a great scientist,
+perhaps, as any man that America has ever produced.</p>
+
+<p>America has had but four men of unmistakable originality. These are:
+Franklin, Emerson, Whitman and Edison. Each worked in a field
+particularly his own, and the genius of each was recognized in Europe
+before we were willing to acknowledge it here. But the word "scientist"
+can hardly be properly applied to any of these men. For want of a better
+name we call John Fiske our greatest scientist. He was the most learned
+man of his day. In the realm of Physical Geography no American could
+approach him. The combined knowledge of everybody else was his: he had a
+passion for facts, a memory like a daybook, and his systematic mind was
+disciplined until it was a regular Dewey card-index.</p>
+
+<p>Louis Agassiz was born in Europe, but he was ours by adoption, and he
+might dispute with Fiske the title to first place in the American
+Pantheon of Science, were it not for the fact that the Law of Evolution
+was beyond his ken, being obscured by a marked, myopic, theological,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[Pg 429]</a></span>
+stigmatic squint.</p>
+
+<p>Agassiz died in his sins, unconvinced unrepentant, refusing the rite of
+extreme unction that Asa Gray offered him, his sensitive spirit writhing
+at mention of the word "Darwin." On his tomb, Clio with moving finger
+has carved one of his own sentences, nor all your tears shall blot a
+line of it. And these are the words of Agassiz: "Darwinism seeks to
+dethrone God, and replace Him by a blind force called the Law of
+Evolution." So passed away the great soul of Louis Agassiz.</p>
+
+<p>Fiske has been called the Huxley of America; but Fiske was like Agassiz
+in this, he never had the felicity to achieve the ill-will of the many.
+Fiske has also been called the Drummond of America, but Fiske was really
+a Henry Drummond and a Louis Agassiz rolled into one, the mass well
+seasoned with essence of Huxley. John Fiske made the science of Darwin
+and Wallace palatable to orthodox theology, and it is to the earnest and
+eloquent words of Fiske that we owe it that Evolution is taught
+everywhere in the public schools and even in the sectarian colleges of
+America today.</p>
+
+<p>The almost universal opposition to Darwin's book arose from the idea
+that its acceptance would destroy the Christian religion. This was the
+plaintive plea put forth when Newton advanced his discovery of the Law
+of Gravitation, and also when Copernicus proclaimed the movements of the
+earth: these things were contrary to the Bible! Copernicus was a loyal
+Catholic; Sir Isaac<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[Pg 430]</a></span> Newton was a staunch Churchman; but both kept their
+religion in water-tight compartments, so that it never got mixed with
+their science. Gladstone never allowed his religion to tint his
+statesmanship, and we all know businessmen who follow the double-entry
+scheme.</p>
+
+<p>That famous French toast, "Here's to our wives and sweethearts&mdash;may they
+never meet!" would suit most lawyers just as well if expressed this way.
+"Here's to our religion and our business&mdash;God knows they never meet."</p>
+
+<p>To Sir Isaac Newton, religion was something to be believed, not
+understood. He left religion to the specialists, recognizing its value
+as a sort of police protection for the State, and as his share in the
+matter he paid tithes, and attended prayers as a matter of patriotic
+duty and habit.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire recognized the greatness of Newton's intellect, but he could
+not restrain his aqua fortis, and so he said this: "All the scientists
+were jealous of Newton when he discovered the Law of Gravitation, but
+they got even with him when he wrote his book on the Hebrew Prophecies!"
+Newton wrote that book in his water-tight compartment.</p>
+
+<p>But Newton was no hypocrite. The attitude of the Primrose Sphinx who
+bowed his head in the Church of England Chapel&mdash;the Jew who rose to the
+highest office Christian England had to offer&mdash;and repeated Ben Ezra's
+prayer, was not the attitude of Newton. Darwin waived<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[Pg 431]</a></span> religion, and if
+he ever heard of the Bible no one knew it from his writings.</p>
+
+<p>Huxley danced on it. Tyndall and Spencer regarded the Bible as a
+valuable and more or less interesting collection of myths, fables and
+folklore tales. Wallace sees in it a strain of prophetic truth and
+regards it as gold-bearing quartz of a low grade.</p>
+
+<p>Fiske regarded it as the word of God, Holy Writ, expressed often
+vaguely, mystically, and in the language of poetry and symbol, but true
+when rightly understood.</p>
+
+<p>And so John Fiske throughout his life spoke in orthodox pulpits to the
+great delight of Christian people, and at the same time wrote books on
+science and dedicated them to Thomas Huxley, Bishop of all Agnostics.</p>
+
+<p>To the scientist the word "supernatural" is a contradiction. Everything
+that is in the Universe is natural; the supernatural is the natural not
+yet understood. And that which is called the supernatural is often the
+figment of a disordered, undisciplined or undeveloped imagination.</p>
+
+<p>Simple people think of imagination as that quality of mind which revels
+in tales of fairies and hobgoblins, but imagination of this character is
+undisciplined and undeveloped. The scientist who deals with the sternest
+of facts must be highly imaginative, or his work is vain. The engineer
+sees his structure complete, ere he draws his plans. So the scientist
+divines the thing first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[Pg 432]</a></span> and then looks for it until he finds it. Were
+this not so, he would not be able to recognize things hitherto unknown,
+when he saw them; nor could he fit fact to fact, like bones in a
+skeleton, and build a complete structure, if it all did not first exist
+as a thought.</p>
+
+<p>To reprove and punish children for flights of imagination, John Fiske
+argued, was one of the things done only by a barbaric people.</p>
+
+<p>Children first play at the thing, which later they are to do well. Play
+is preparation. The man of imagination is the man of sympathy, and only
+such are those who benefit and bless mankind and help us on our way.</p>
+
+<p>John Fiske had imagination enough to follow closely and hold fellowship
+with the greatest minds the world has ever known. John Fiske believed
+that we live in a natural universe, and that God works through Nature,
+and that, in fact, Nature is the spirit of God at work.</p>
+
+<p>Doubts never disturbed John Fiske. Things that were not true technically
+and literally were true to him if taken in a spiritual or poetic way.
+God, to him, was a personal being, creating through the Law of Evolution
+because He chose to. The six days of Creation were six eons or
+geological periods.</p>
+
+<p>No man has ever been more in sympathy with the discoverers in Natural
+History than John Fiske. No man ever knew so much about his work as John
+Fiske. His knowledge was colossal, his memory prodigious. And in all of
+the realm of science and philosophy, from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[Pg 433]</a></span> microscopy and the germ
+theory to advanced astronomy and the birth of worlds, his glowing
+imagination saw the work of a beneficent Creator who stood above and
+beyond and outside of Natural Law, and with Infinite Wisdom and Power
+did His own Divine Will.</p>
+
+<p>Little theologians who feared Science, on account of danger to pet
+texts, received from him kindly pats on the head, as he showed them how
+both Science and Scripture were true.</p>
+
+<p>He didn't do away with texts, he merely changed their interpretation.
+And often he discovered that the text which seemed to contradict science
+was really prophetic of it. John Fiske did not take anything away from
+anybody, unless he gave them something better in return.</p>
+
+<p>"A man's belief is a part of the man," he said. "Take it away by force
+and he will bleed to death; but if the time comes when he no longer
+needs it, he will either slough it or convert it into something more
+useful."</p>
+
+<p>Every good thing begins as something else. Evolution is at work on the
+creeds as well as in matter. A monkey-man will have a monkey belief.</p>
+
+<p>He evolves the thing he needs, and the belief that fits one man will not
+fit another. Religious opinions are never thrown away: they evolve into
+something else, and we use the old symbols and imagery to express new
+thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>John Fiske, unlike John Morley, considered "Compromise" a great thing.
+"Truth is a point of view: let us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[Pg 434]</a></span> get together," he used to say. And so
+he worked to keep the old, as a foundation for the new.</p>
+
+<p>I once heard him interrupted in a lecture by a questioner who asked,
+"Why would you keep the Church intact?" The question stung him into
+impassioned speech which was better than anything in his manuscript. I
+can not attempt to reproduce his exact language; but the intent was that
+as the Church was the chief instrument in preserving for us the learning
+of Greece and Rome, so has she been the mother of art, the inspirer of
+music and the protector of the outcast. Colleges, hospitals, libraries,
+art-galleries and asylums, all come to us through the medium of
+religion.</p>
+
+<p>The convent was first a place of protection for oppressed womanhood.</p>
+
+<p>To discard religion would be like repudiating our parents because we did
+not like their manners and clothes. The religious impulse is the art
+impulse, and both are manifestations of love, and love is the basis of
+our sense of sublimity.</p>
+
+<p>We surely will abandon certain phases of religion. We will purify,
+refine and beautify our religion, just as we have our table etiquette
+and our housekeeping. The millennium will come only through the
+scientific acceptance of piety. When Church and State separated it was
+well, but when Science and Religion joined hands it was better. Science
+stands for the head; Religion for the heart. All things are dual, and
+through the marriage<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[Pg 435]</a></span> of these two principles, one the masculine and the
+other the feminine, will come a renaissance of advancement such as this
+tired old world on her zigzag journeys has never seen. Sociology is the
+religious application of economics. Demonology has been replaced by
+psychology, and the betterment of man's condition on earth is now fast
+becoming the chief solicitude of the Church.</p>
+
+<p>It will thus be seen that John Fiske's hope for the future was bright
+and strong. The man was an optimist by nature, and his patience and
+good-nature were always in evidence. He made friends, and he held them.
+Huxley, who of all men hated piety that was flavored with hypocrisy,
+loved John Fiske and once wrote this: "There was a man sent from God by
+the name of John Fiske. Now John holds in his great and generous heart
+the best of all the Church has to offer; hence I no longer go to
+prayers, but instead, I invite John Fiske to come and dine with us every
+Sunday, so are we made better&mdash;Amen."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">[Pg 436]</a></span><br /><br /></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>SO HERE ENDETH "LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS,"
+BEING VOLUME TWELVE OF THE SERIES, AS WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD:
+EDITED AND ARRANGED BY FRED BANN; BORDERS AND INITIALS BY ROYCROFT
+ARTISTS, AND PRODUCED BY THE ROYCROFTERS, AT THEIR SHOPS, WHICH ARE
+IN EAST AURORA, ERIE COUNTY, NEW YORK, MCMXXII</p></div>
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Journeys to the Homes of the
+Great - Volume 12, by Elbert Hubbard
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great -
+Volume 12, by Elbert Hubbard
+
+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: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12
+       Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists
+
+Author: Elbert Hubbard
+
+Release Date: August 19, 2006 [EBook #19080]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Janet Blenkinship and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  Little
+  Journeys
+  To the Homes of Great Scientists
+
+
+  Elbert Hubbard
+
+
+  Memorial Edition
+
+
+
+
+  Printed and made into a Book by
+  The Roycrofters, who are in East
+  Aurora, Erie County, New York
+
+  Wm. H. Wise & Co.
+  New York
+
+  Copyright, 1916,
+  By The Roycrofters
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+
+  SIR ISAAC NEWTON                                                     9
+
+  GALILEO                                                             45
+
+  COPERNICUS                                                          85
+
+  HUMBOLDT                                                           121
+
+  WILLIAM HERSCHEL                                                   163
+
+  CHARLES DARWIN                                                     197
+
+  HAECKEL                                                            235
+
+  LINNAEUS                                                            263
+
+  THOMAS H. HUXLEY                                                   303
+
+  JOHN TYNDALL                                                       333
+
+  ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE                                              365
+
+  JOHN FISKE                                                         395
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: SIR ISAAC NEWTON]
+
+SIR ISAAC NEWTON
+
+     When you come into any fresh company, observe their humours. Suit
+     your own carriage thereto, by which insinuation you will make their
+     converse more free and open. Let your discourse be more in querys
+     and doubtings than peremptory assertions or disputings, it being
+     the designe of travelers to learne, not to teach. Besides, it will
+     persuade your acquaintance that you have the greater esteem of
+     them, and soe make them more ready to communicate what they know to
+     you; whereas nothing sooner occasions disrespect and quarrels than
+     peremptorinesse. You will find little or no advantage in seeming
+     wiser, or much more ignorant than your company. Seldom discommend
+     anything though never so bad, or doe it but moderately, lest you
+     bee unexpectedly forced to an unhansom retraction. It is safer to
+     commend any thing more than is due, than to discommend a thing soe
+     much as it deserves; for commendations meet not soe often with
+     oppositions, or, at least, are not usually soe ill resented by men
+     that think otherwise, as discommendations; and you will insinuate
+     into men's favour by nothing sooner than seeming to approve and
+     commend what they like; but beware of doing it by a comparison.
+
+     --_Sir Isaac Newton to one of his pupils_
+
+
+SIR ISAAC NEWTON
+
+An honest farmer, neither rich nor poor, was Isaac Newton. He was
+married to Harriet Ayscough in February, Sixteen Hundred Forty-two.
+
+Both were strong, intelligent and full of hope. Neither had any
+education to speak of; they belonged to England's middle class--that
+oft-despised and much ridiculed middle class which is the hope of the
+world. Accounts still in existence show that their income was thirty
+pounds a year. It was for them to toil all the week, go to church on
+Sunday, and twice or thrice in a year attend the village fairs or
+indulge in a holiday where hard cider played an important part.
+
+Isaac had served his two years in the army, taken a turn at sea, and got
+his discharge-papers. Now he had married the lass of his choice, and
+settled down in the little house on an estate in Lincolnshire where his
+father was born and died.
+
+Spring came and the roses clambered over the stone walls; the bobolinks
+played hide-and-seek in the waving grass of the meadows; the skylarks
+sang and poised and soared; the hedgerows grew white with
+hawthorn-blossoms and musical with the chirp of sparrows; the cattle
+ranged through the fragrant clover "knee-deep in June."
+
+Oftentimes the young wife worked with her husband in the fields, or went
+with him to market. Great plans were laid as to what they would do next
+year, and the year after, and how they would provide for coming age and
+grow old together, here among the oaks and the peace and plenty of
+Lincolnshire.
+
+In such a country, with such a climate, it seems as if one could almost
+make repair equal waste, and thus keep death indefinitely at bay. But
+all men, even the strongest, are living under a death sentence, with but
+an indefinite reprieve. And even yet, with all of our science and
+health, we can not fully account for those diseases which seemingly pick
+the very best flower of sinew and strength.
+
+Isaac Newton, the strong and rugged farmer, sickened and died in a week.
+"The result of a cold caught when sweaty and standing in a draft," the
+surgeon explained. "The act of God to warn us all of the vanity of
+life." Acute pneumonia, perhaps, is what we would call it--a fever that
+burned out the bellows in a week.
+
+In such cases the very strength of the man seems to supply fuel for the
+flames. And so just as the Autumn came with changing leaves, the young
+wife was left to fight the battle of life alone--alone, save for the
+old, old miracle that her life supported another. A wife, a widow, a
+mother--all within a year!
+
+On Christmas-Day the babe was born--born where most men die: in
+obscurity. He was so weak and frail that none but the mother believed he
+would live.
+
+The doctor quoted a line from "Richard the Third," "Sent before my time
+into this breathing world scarce half made up," and gave the infant into
+the keeping of an old nurse with an ominous shake of the head, and went
+his way, absolved. His time was too valuable to waste on such a useless
+human mite.
+
+The persistent words of the mother that the child should not, must not
+die, possibly had something to do with keeping the breath of life in the
+puny man-child. The fond mother had given him the name of his father,
+even before birth! He was to live to do the work that the man now dead
+had hoped to do; that is, live a long and honest life, and leave the
+fair acres more valuable than he found them.
+
+Such was the inauspicious beginning of what Herbert Spencer declared was
+the greatest life since Aristotle studied the starry universe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Outside of India the lot of widows is not especially to be pitied. A
+widow has beautiful dreams, while the married woman copes with the stern
+reality.
+
+Then, no phase of life is really difficult when you accept it; and the
+memory of a great love lost is always a blessing and a benediction to
+the one who endures the first cruel shock.
+
+The young widow looked after her little estate, and with perhaps some
+small assistance from her parents, lived comfortably and as happily as
+one has a right to in this vale of tears. Her baby boy had grown strong
+and well: by the time he was two years old he was quite the equal of
+most babies--and his mother thought, beyond them.
+
+It is quite often stoutly declared by callow folks that mother-love is
+the strongest and most enduring love in the world, but the wise waste no
+words on such an idle proposition. Mother-love retires into the shadow
+when the other kind appears.
+
+When the Reverend Barnabas Smith began, unconsciously, to make eyes at
+the Widow Newton over his prayer-book, the good old dames whose business
+it is to look after these things, and perform them vicariously, made
+prophecies on the way home from church as to how soon the wedding would
+occur.
+
+People go to church to watch and pray, but a man I know says that women
+go to church to watch. Young clergymen fall an easy prey to designing
+widows, he avers. I can discover no proof, however, that the Widow
+Newton made any original designs; she was below the young clergyman in
+social standing, and when the good man began to pay special attentions
+to her baby boy she never imagined that the sundry pats and caresses
+were meant for her.
+
+Little Isaac Newton was just three years old when the wedding occurred,
+and was not troubled about it. The bride went to live with her husband
+at the rectory, a mile away, and the little boy in dresses, with long
+yellow curls, was taken to the home of his grandmother. The Reverend
+Barnabas Smith didn't like babies as well as he had at first thought.
+Grandparents are inclined to be lax in their discipline. And anyway it
+is no particular difference if they are: a scarcity of discipline is
+better than too much. More boys have been ruined by the rod than saved
+by it--love is a good substitute for a cat-'o-nine-tails.
+
+There were several children born to the Reverend Barnabas Smith and his
+wife, and all were disciplined for their own good. Isaac, a few miles
+away, snuggled in the arms of his old grandmother when he was bad and
+went scot-free.
+
+Many years after, Sir Isaac Newton, in an address on education at
+Cambridge, playfully referred to the fact that in his boyhood he did not
+have to prevaricate to escape punishment, his grandmother being always
+willing to lie for him. His grandmother was his first teacher and his
+best friend as long as she lived.
+
+When he was twelve years old he was sent to the village school at
+Grantham, eight miles away. There he boarded with a family by the name
+of Clark, and at odd times helped in the apothecary-shop of Mr. Clark,
+cleaning bottles and making pills. He himself has told us that the
+working with mortar and pestle, cutting the pills in exact cubes, and
+then rolling one in each hand between thumb and finger, did him a lot of
+good, whether the patients were benefited or not.
+
+The genial apothecary also explained that pills were for those who made
+and sold them, and that if they did no harm to those who swallowed them,
+the whole transaction was then one of benefit. All of which proves to us
+that men had the essence of wisdom two hundred years ago, quite as much
+as now.
+
+The master of the school at Grantham was one Mr. Stokes, a man of
+genuine insight and tact--two things rather rare in the pedagogic
+equipment at that time. The Newton boy was small and stood low in his
+class, perhaps because book-learning had not been the bent of his
+grandmother. The fact that Isaac was neither strong nor smart, nor even
+smartly dressed, caused him to serve in the capacity of a butt for the
+bullies.
+
+One big boy in particular made it his business to punch, kick and cuff
+him on all occasions, in class or out. This continued for a month, when
+one day the little boy invited the big one out into the churchyard and
+there fell upon him tooth and claw. The big boy had strength, but the
+little one had right on his side.
+
+The schoolmaster looked over the wall and shouted, "Thrice armed is he
+who knows his cause is just!" In two minutes the bully was beaten, but
+the schoolmaster's son, who stood by as master of ceremonies, suggested
+that the big boy have his nose rubbed against the wall of the church for
+luck. This was accordingly done, not o'er-gently, and when Isaac
+returned to the schoolroom, the master, who was supposed to know nothing
+officially of the fighting, prophesied, "Young Mr. Newton will yet beat
+any boy in this school in his studies."
+
+It has been suggested that this prophecy was made after its fulfilment,
+but even so, we know that Mr. Stokes lived long enough to take great
+pride in the Newton boy, and to grow reminiscent concerning his great
+achievements.
+
+Our hearts surely go out to the late Mr. Stokes, schoolmaster at
+Grantham.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is surely something in that old idea of Indians that when they
+killed an enemy the strength of the fallen adversary entered into
+themselves.
+
+This encounter of little Isaac with the school bully was a pivotal point
+in his career. He had vanquished the rogue physically, and he now set to
+work to do as much mentally for the whole school. He had it in him--it
+was just a matter of application.
+
+Once, in after-life, in speaking of those who had benefited him most, he
+placed this unnamed chucklehead first, and added with a smile, "Our
+enemies are quite as necessary to us as our friends."
+
+In a few months Isaac stood at the head of the class. In mathematics he
+especially excelled, and the Master, who prided himself on being able to
+give problems no one could solve but himself, found that he was put to
+the strait of giving a problem nobody could solve. He was somewhat taken
+aback when little Isaac declined to work on it, and coolly pointed out
+the fallacy involved. The only thing for the teacher to do was to say he
+had purposely given the proposition to see if any one would detect the
+fallacy. This he gracefully did, and again made a prophecy to the effect
+that Isaac Newton would some day take his own place and be master of
+Grantham School.
+
+In the year Sixteen Hundred Fifty-six the schooldays of Isaac Newton
+were cut short by the death of his stepfather.
+
+His mother, twice a widow, moved back to "Woolsthorpe," a big name for a
+very small estate. Isaac was made the man of the house. The ambition of
+his mother was that he should become a farmer and stock-raiser.
+
+It seems that the boy entered upon his farm duties with an alacrity that
+was not to last. His heart was not in the work, but the desire to please
+his mother spurred him forward.
+
+On one occasion, being sent with a load of produce to Grantham, he
+stopped to visit his old school, and during his call struck a bargain
+with one of the boys for a copy of Descartes' Geometry. The purchase
+exhausted his finances, so that he was unable to buy the articles his
+mother had sent him for, but when he got home he explained that one
+might get along without such luxuries as clothing, but a good Geometry
+was a family necessity. About this time he made a water-clock, and also
+that sundial which can be seen today, carved into the stone on the
+corner of the house. He still continued his making of kites which had
+been begun at Grantham; and gave the superstitious neighbors a thrill by
+flying kites at night with lighted lanterns made from paper, attached to
+the tails. He made water-wheels and windmills, and once constructed a
+miniature mill that he ran by placing a mouse in a treadmill inside.
+
+In the meantime the cows got into the corn, and the weeds in the garden
+improved each shining hour. The fond mother was now sorely disappointed
+in her boy, and made remarks to the effect that if she had looked after
+his bringing up instead of entrusting him to an indulgent grandmother,
+affairs at this time would not be in their present state. Parents are
+apt to be fussy: they can not wait.
+
+Matters reached a climax when the sheep that Isaac had been sent to
+watch, overran the garden and demolished everything but the purslane and
+ragweed, while all the time the young man was under the hedge working
+out mathematical problems from his Descartes.
+
+At this stage the mother called in her brother, the Reverend Mr.
+Ayscough, and he advised that a boy who was so bound to study should be
+allowed to study.
+
+And the good man offered to pay the wages of a man to take Isaac's place
+on the farm.
+
+So, greatly to the surprise and pleasure of Mr. Stokes of Grantham,
+Isaac one fine day returned with his books, just as if he had only been
+gone a day instead of a year.
+
+At the home of the apothecary the lad was thrice welcome. He had
+endeared himself to the women of the household especially. He did not
+play with other boys--their games and sports were absolutely outside of
+his orbit. He was silent and so self-contained that he won from his
+schoolfellows the sobriquet of "Old Coldfeet." Nothing surprised him; he
+never lost his temper; he laughed so seldom that the incident was noted
+and told to the neighbors; his attitude was one of abstraction, and when
+he spoke it was like a judge charging a jury with soda-water.
+
+All his spare time was given up to whittling, pounding, sawing, and
+making mathematical calculations.
+
+Not all of his inventions were toys, for among other things he
+constructed a horseless carriage which was run by a crank and pumping
+device, by the occupants.
+
+The idea of the horseless carriage is a matter that has long been in the
+minds of inventors.
+
+Several men, supremely great, have tried their hands and head at it.
+Leibnitz worked at it; Swedenborg prophesied the automobile, and made a
+carriage, placing the horse inside, and did not give up the scheme until
+the horse ran away with himself and demolished a year's work. The
+government here interfered and placed an injunction against "the making
+of any more such diabolical contrivances for the disturbance of the
+public peace." All of which makes us believe that if either Edison or
+Marconi had lived two hundred years ago, the bailiffs would have looked
+after them with the butt end of the law for the regulation of wizards
+and witches--wizards at Menlo Park being as bad as witches at Salem.
+
+Newton's horseless carriage later came to grief in a similar way to
+Swedenborg's invention--it worked so well and so fast that it turned a
+complete somersault into a ditch, and its manipulation was declared to
+be a pastime more dangerous than football.
+
+Not all the things produced by Isaac about this time were failures. For
+instance, among other things he made a table, a chair and a cupboard for
+a young woman who was a fellow-boarder at the apothecary's. The
+excellence of young Newton's handiwork was shown in that the articles
+just mentioned outlasted both owner and maker.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Much of the reminiscence concerning the Grantham days of Sir Isaac
+Newton comes from the fortunate owner of that historic old table, chair
+and cupboard. This was Mary Story, who was later Mrs. Vincent.
+
+Miss Story was the same age as Isaac. She was just eighteen when the
+furniture was made roycroftie--she was a young lady, grown, and wore a
+dress with a train; moreover, she had been to London and had been
+courted by a widower, while Isaac Newton was only a lad in roundabouts.
+
+Age counts for little--it is experience and temperament that weigh in
+the scale. Isaac was only a little boy, and Mary Story treated him like
+one. And here seems a good place to quote what Doctor Charcot said, "In
+arranging the formula for a great man, make sure you delay adolescence:
+rareripes rot early."
+
+Isaac and Mary became very good chums, and used to ramble the woods
+together hand in hand, in a way that must have frightened them both had
+they been on the same psychic plane. Isaac had about the same regard for
+her that he might have had for a dear maiden aunt who would mend his old
+socks and listen patiently, pretending to be interested when he talked
+of parallelograms and prismatic spectra. But evidently Mary Story
+thought of him with a thrill, for she stoutly resented the boys calling
+him "Coldfeet."
+
+In due time Isaac gravitated to Cambridge. Mary mooed a wee, but soon
+consoled herself with a sure-enough lover, and was married to Mr.
+Vincent, a worthy man and true, but one who had not sufficient
+soul-caloric to make her forget her Isaac.
+
+This friendship with Mary Story is often spoken of as the one
+love-affair in the life of Sir Isaac Newton. It was all prosily Platonic
+on his part, but as Mary lived out her life at Grantham, and Sir Isaac
+Newton used to go there occasionally, and when he did, always called
+upon her, the relationship was certainly noteworthy.
+
+The only break in that lifelong friendship occurred when each was past
+fifty.
+
+Sir Isaac Newton was paying his little yearly call at Grantham; and was
+seated in a rustic arbor by the side of Mrs. Vincent, now grown gray,
+and the mother of a goodly brood, well grown up. As they thus sat
+talking of days agone, his thoughts wandered off upon quadratic
+equations, and to aid his mind in following the thread, he
+absent-mindedly lighted his pipe, and smoked in silence. As the tobacco
+died low, he gazed about for a convenient utensil to use in pushing the
+ashes down in the bowl of his pipe. Looking down he saw the lady's hand
+resting upon his knee, and he straightway utilized the forefinger of his
+vis-a-vis. A suppressed feminine screech followed, but the fires of
+friendship were not quenched by so slight an incident, which Mrs.
+Vincent knew grew out of temperament, and not from wrong intent.
+
+She lived to be eighty-five, and to the day of her death caressed the
+scar--the cicatrice of a love-wound. All of which seems to prove that
+old women can be quite as absurd as young ones--goodness me!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Isaac was eighteen, Master Stokes was so well impressed with his
+star scholar that he called in the young lad's uncle, the Reverend Mr.
+Ayscough, and insisted that the boy be sent to Cambridge. The uncle
+being a Cambridge man himself thought this the proper thing to do.
+
+On June Fifth, Sixteen Hundred Sixty-one, Isaac presented his
+credentials from his uncle and Mr. Stokes, and was duly entered in
+Trinity College as a subsizar, which means that he was admitted on
+suspicion. A part of the duties of a subsizar was to clean boots, scrub
+floors and perform various other delightful tasks which everybody else
+evaded.
+
+To be at Trinity College in any capacity was paradise for this boy. He
+thirsted for knowledge: to know, to do, to perform--these things were
+his desire. He had been brought up to work, anyway, and to a country boy
+toil is no punishment. "I knew that if worse came to worst I could get
+work in the town making furniture and earn a man's wage," he said.
+
+In a month he had passed his first examinations and was made a sizar.
+Before this he had been fag to everybody, but now he was fag to the
+Seniors only. He not only made their beds and cleaned their rooms, but
+also worked their examples in mathematics, and thus commanded their
+respect.
+
+Once, being called upon in class to recite from Euclid, he declined and
+shocked the professor by saying, "It is a trifling book--I have
+mastered it and thrown it aside." And it was no idle boast--he knew the
+book as the professor did not. When he arrived at Cambridge, he carried
+in his box a copy of Sanderson's Logic presented to him by his
+uncle--the uncle having no use for it. It happened to be one of the
+textbooks in use at Trinity. When Isaac heard lectures on Sanderson he
+found he knew the book a deal better than the tutor, a thing the tutor
+shortly acknowledged before the class. This caused young Mr. Newton to
+stand out as a prodigy. Usually students have to rap for admittance to
+the higher classes, but now the teachers came and sought him out. One
+professor told him he was about to take up Kepler's Optics with some
+post-graduate students--would young Mr. Newton come in? Isaac begged to
+be excused until he could examine the book. The volume was loaned to
+him. He tore the vitals out of it and digested them. When the lectures
+began, he declined to go because he had mastered the subject as far as
+Kepler carried it.
+
+Genius seems to consist in the ability to concentrate your rays and
+focus them on one point. Isaac Newton could do it. "On a Winter day I
+took a small glass and so centered the sun's rays that I burned a hole
+in my coat," he wrote in his subsizar journal.
+
+The youth possessed an imperturbable coolness: he talked little, but
+when he spoke it was very frankly and honestly. From any other his words
+would have had a presumptuous and boastful sound. As it was he was
+respected and beloved. At Cambridge his face and features commended him:
+he looked like another Cambridge man, one Milton--John Milton--only his
+face was a little more stern in its expression than that of the author
+of "Paradise Lost."
+
+In two years' time Isaac Newton was a scholar of whom all Cambridge
+knew. He had prepared able essays on the squaring of curved and crooked
+lines, on errors in grinding lenses and the methods of rectifying them,
+and in the extraction of roots where the cubes were imperfect: he had
+done things never before attempted by his teachers. When they called
+upon him to recite, it was only for the purpose of explaining truths
+which they had not mastered.
+
+In Sixteen Hundred Sixty-four, being in his twenty-second year, Isaac
+Newton was voted a free scholarship, which provided for board, books and
+tuition. On this occasion he was examined in Euclid by Doctor Barrow,
+the Head Master of Trinity.
+
+Newton could solve every problem, but could not explain why or how. His
+methods were empirical--those of his own.
+
+Many men with a modicum of mathematical genius work in this way, and in
+practical life the plan may serve all right. But now it was shown to
+Newton that a schoolman must not only know how to work out great
+problems, but also why he goes at it in a certain way; otherwise,
+colleges are vain--we must be able to pass our knowledge along. The
+really great man is one who knows the rules and then forgets them, just
+as the painter of supreme merit must be a realist before he evolves into
+an impressionist.
+
+Newton now acknowledged his mistake in reference to Euclid, and set to
+work to master the rules. This graciousness in accepting advice, and the
+willingness to admit his lapse, if he had been hasty, won for him not
+only the scholarship, but also the love of his superiors. Milton was a
+radical who made enemies, but Newton was a radical who made friends. He
+avoided iconoclasm, left all matters of theology to the specialists, and
+accepted the Church as a necessary part of society. His care not to
+offend fixed his place in Cambridge for life.
+
+It was Cambridge that fostered and encouraged his first budding
+experiments; it was there he was sustained in his mightiest hazards; and
+it was within her walls that the ripe fruit of his genius was garnered
+and gathered. When his fame had become national and he was called to
+higher offices than Cambridge supplied, Cambridge watched his career
+with the loving interest of a mother, and the debt of love he fully
+paid, for it was very largely through his name and fame that Cambridge
+first took her place as one of the great schools of the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Newton took his degree of Bachelor of Arts at Cambridge, in January, in
+the year Sixteen Hundred Sixty-five. The faculty of Trinity would not
+even consider his leaving the college: he was as valuable to them as he
+would be now if he were a famous football-player. Besides the
+scholarship, there were ways provided so he could earn money by private
+tutoring and giving lectures in the absence of the professors.
+
+He had written his essay on fluxions, described their application to
+fluents and tangents, and devised a plan for finding the radius of
+curvity in crooked lines. In August of the same year that Newton was
+given his degree, the college was dismissed on account of an epidemic,
+and Newton went home to Woolsthorpe to kill time. In September, Sixteen
+Hundred Sixty-five, he then being twenty-three, while seated in his
+mother's garden, Newton saw that storied apple fall. What pulled it
+down? Some force tugging at it, surely!
+
+Galileo had experimented with falling bodies, and had proved that the
+weight and size of a falling body had nothing to do with its velocity,
+save as its size and shape might be affected by the friction of the
+atmosphere. The first person to put into print the story of the falling
+apple was Voltaire, whose sketch of Newton is a little classic which the
+world could ill afford to lose. Adam, William Tell and Isaac Newton each
+had his little affair with an apple, but with different results.
+
+The falling apple suggested to Newton that there was some power in the
+ground that was constantly pulling things toward the center of the
+earth.
+
+This power extended straight down into the earth--he knew it--he had
+dropped a stone into a mine, and had also dropped things from steeples.
+He dropped apples from kites by an ingenious device of two strings, and
+he concluded that an apple taken a hundred miles up in the air would
+return to earth.
+
+He then began to speculate as to just what a body would do a thousand or
+ten thousand miles from the earth. So high as we could go, or as deep as
+we could dig, this drawing power was always present. The Law of
+Gravitation!
+
+If a cannon-ball was fired in a straight line at a distant target, the
+gunner had to elevate the aim if he would hit the target, for the ball
+described a curve and would keep dropping to the earth until it struck
+the ground. Something was pulling it down: what was it? The Law of
+Gravitation!
+
+The moon was attracted toward us and would surely fall into us, but for
+the fact that there were other attractions drawing her toward them. The
+movements of the planets were owing to the fact that they were obeying
+attractions. They were moving in curves, just like cannon-balls in
+motion. They had two movements, also, like the cannon-ball.
+
+Newton had noticed that the stars within a certain territory all moved
+in similar directions, and so must be acted upon by the same influences.
+The Law of Gravitation!
+
+It is held by many people in East Aurora and elsewhere that Newton's
+invention is a devilish device originated for the benefit of surgeons
+and crockery-dealers. But this is not wholly true.
+
+Without this Law of Gravitation the Earth could not retain her spherical
+shape: only through this constant drawing in toward the center could she
+exist.
+
+The other planets, too, must be round or they could not exist, and so
+they also had this same quality of gravity in common with the Earth--a
+drawing in of everything toward the center. Here was clearly a positive
+discovery--this similarity of the heavenly bodies!
+
+Every one of the heavenly bodies was exerting a constant attraction
+toward all other heavenly bodies, and this attractive power must be in
+proportion to the distance they were from the object acted upon. Thus
+were their movements and orbits accounted for.
+
+At this time Newton was perfectly familiar with Kepler's Law, that the
+squares of the periodic times of a planet were as the cubes of its
+distance from the sun. And from this, he inferred that the attraction
+varied as the square of the planet's distance from the sun.
+
+Here he was working on territory that had never been surveyed. At
+first, in his exuberance, he thought to figure out the size and weight
+of each planet quickly by measuring its attractive power. He did not
+realize that he had cut out for himself work that would require many men
+and several centuries to cover, but surely he was on the right scent--a
+finite man keen upon the secrets of the Infinite!
+
+He was still at his mother's old home in the country, without scientific
+apparatus or the stimulus of colleagues, when we find by a record in his
+journal that antique groan because there were only twenty-four hours in
+a day, and that eight were required for sleep and eight more for
+recreation!
+
+A subject a little nearer home than planetary attraction had now
+switched him off from measuring and weighing the stars. He was hard at
+work in his mother's little sitting-room, with the windows darkened,
+much to that good woman's perplexity.
+
+By shutting out all light from the windows and allowing the sun's rays
+to enter by a little, circular aperture, he had gotten the sunlight
+captured and tamed where he could study it. This ray of light he
+examined with a small hand-glass he himself had made. In looking at the
+ray, quite accidentally, he found it could be deflected and sent off at
+will in various directions. When thrown on the wall, instead of being
+simply white light it had seven distinct colors beginning with violet
+and running down to red. So white light was not a single element: it
+was made up of various rays which had to be united in order to give us
+sunlight.
+
+Eureka! He had found the secret of the rainbow--the sun's rays broken up
+and separated by the refracting agency of clouds!
+
+Well does Darwin declare that the separation of sunlight into its
+component parts, and the invention of the spectrum, have marked an
+advance in man's achievement such as the world had not seen since the
+time of wonder-working Archimedes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Cambridge University was closed until October, year of Sixteen
+Hundred Sixty-seven. Most of the intervening time Newton spent at the
+home of his mother, but from accounts of his we can see that the College
+people kept their eagle-eye upon him, for they sent remittances to him
+regularly for "commons."
+
+When he returned to Cambridge he was assigned to the "spiritual
+chamber," which was a room next to the chapel, that had formerly been
+reserved as a guest-room for visiting dignitaries.
+
+In March, Sixteen Hundred Sixty-eight, he was given the degree of Master
+of Arts. His studies now were of a very varied kind. He was required to
+give one lecture a week on any subject of his own choosing. Needless to
+say his themes were all mathematical or scientific. Just what they were
+can best be inferred by consulting his cashbook, since the lectures
+themselves were not written out and all memoranda concerning them have
+disappeared. This account-book shows that his expenditures were for a
+Gunter's Book (he who invented the Gunter's Chain), a magnet and a
+compass, glue, bulbs, putty, antimony, vinegar, white lead, salts of
+tartar, and lenses.
+
+And in addition there are a few interesting items such as one sees in
+the Diary of George Washington: "Lost at cards, five shillings."
+"Treating at tavern, ten shillings." "Binding my Bible, three
+shillings." "Spent on my cousin, one pound, two." "Expenses for wetting
+my degree, sixteen shillings."
+
+The last item shows that times have changed but little: this scientist
+and philosopher par excellence had to moisten his diploma at the tavern
+for the benefit of good fellows who little guessed with whom they drank.
+
+He also had "poor relations" come to visit him; and it is significant
+that while there are various items showing where he lost money at cards,
+there are no references to any money won at the same business, from
+which we infer that while there was no one at Cambridge who could follow
+him in his studies, there yet were those who could deal themselves
+better hands when it came to the pasteboards.
+
+Evidently he got discouraged at playing cards, for after the year
+Sixteen Hundred Sixty-eight, there are no more items of "treating at the
+tavern" or "lost at cards." The boys had tried to educate him, but had
+not succeeded. In card exploitations he fell a victim of arrested
+development.
+
+I suppose it will not cause any one a shock to be told that "the
+greatest thinker of all time" was not exactly a perfect man.
+
+So let the truth be known that throughout his life Newton had a
+well-defined strain of superstitious belief running through his
+character. He never quite relinquished the idea of transmutation of
+metals, and at times astrology was quite as interesting to him as
+astronomy.
+
+In writing to a friend who was about to pay a long visit to the mines of
+Hungary, he says, "Examine most carefully and ascertain just how and
+under what conditions Nature transforms iron into copper and copper into
+silver and gold."
+
+In his laboratory he had specimens of iron ore that contained copper,
+and also samples of copper ore that contained gold, and from this he
+argued that these metals were transmutable, and really in the act of
+transmutation when the process was interfered with by the miner's pick.
+
+He had transformed a liquid into a mass of solid crystals instantly, and
+all of the changes possible in light, which he had discovered, had
+enlarged his faith to a point where he declared, "Nothing is
+impossible."
+
+It is somewhat curious that Isaac Newton, who had no soft sex-sentiment
+in his nature, quite unlike Galileo, still believed in alchemy and
+astrology, while Galileo's cold intellect at once perceived the fallacy
+of these things.
+
+Galileo also saw at once that for the sun to stand still at Joshua's
+command would really mean that the Earth must cease her motion, since
+the object desired was to prolong the day. Sir Isaac Newton, who
+discovered the Law of Gravitation, yet believed that at the command of a
+barbaric chieftain, this Law was arrested, and that all planetary
+attraction was made to cease while he fought the Philistines for the
+possession of pasture-land to which he had no title.
+
+Galileo did not know as much as Newton about planetary attraction, but
+very early in his career he perceived that the Bible was not a book that
+could be relied upon technically.
+
+With Newton the Bible presented no difficulties. He regularly attended
+church and took part in the ritual. Religion was one thing and his daily
+work another. He kept his religion as completely separate from his life
+as did Gladstone, who believed the Mosaic account of Creation was
+literally true, and yet had a clear, cool, calculating head for facts.
+
+The greatest financial exploiter in America today is an Orthodox
+Christian, taking an active part in missionary work and the spread of
+the Gospel.
+
+In his family he is gentle, kind and tender; he is a good neighbor, a
+punctilious churchgoer, a leader in Sunday-School, and a considerate
+teacher of little children.
+
+In business relations he is as conscienceless as Tamerlane, who built a
+mountain of skulls as a monument to himself. He is cold, calculating,
+and if opposed, vindictive. On occasion he is absolutely without heart:
+compassion, mercy or generosity are not then in his make-up.
+
+The best lawyers procurable are paid princely sums to study for him the
+penal code, and legislatures have even revised it for his benefit.
+Eviction, destruction, suicide and insanity have even trod in his train.
+A picture of him makes you think of that dark and gloomy canvas where
+Caesar, Alexander and Napoleon ride slowly side by side through a sea of
+stiffened corpses. Bribery, coercion, violence and even murder have been
+this man's weapons. He is the richest man in America. And yet, as I said
+in the beginning, all this represents only one side of his nature: he
+reads his chapter in the Bible each evening by his family fireside, and
+tenderly kisses his grandchildren good-night.
+
+The individual who imagines that embezzlers are all riotous in nature,
+and by habit are spendthrifts, does not know humanity. The embezzler is
+one man; the model citizen another, and yet both souls reside in the one
+body.
+
+Nero had a passion for pet pigeons, and the birds used to come at his
+call, perch on his shoulder and take dainty crumbs from his lips.
+
+The natures of some men are divided up into water-tight compartments.
+Sir Isaac Newton kept his religion in one compartment, and his science
+in another--they never got together.
+
+Voltaire has said, "When Sir Isaac Newton discovered the Law of
+Gravitation he excited the envy of the learned men of the world; but
+they more than got even with him when he wrote a book on the prophecies
+of the Bible."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Newton was only twenty-seven years old he was elected the Lucasian
+Professor of Mathematics at Trinity, an office that carried with it a
+goodly salary and also very much honor. Never before had so young a man
+held this chair.
+
+Newton was a pioneer in announcing the physical properties of light.
+
+Every village photographer now fully understands this, but when Newton
+first proclaimed it he created a whirlwind of disapproval.
+
+When a man at that time put forth an unusual thought, it was regarded as
+a challenge. Teachers and professors all over Great Britain, and also in
+Germany and France, at once set about to show the fallacy of Newton's
+conclusions.
+
+Newton had issued a pamphlet with diagrams showing how to study light,
+and the apparatus was so simple and cheap that the "Newton experiments"
+were tried everywhere in schoolrooms.
+
+People always combat a new idea when first presented, and so Newton
+found himself overwhelmed with correspondence.
+
+Cheap arguments were fired into Cambridge in volleys. These were backed
+up by quibbling men--Pro Bono Publico, Veritas and Old Subscriber--men
+incapable of following Newton's scientific mind. In his great
+good-nature and patience Newton replied to his opponents at length.
+
+His explanations were construed into proof that he was not sure of his
+ground. One man challenged him to debate the matter publicly, and we
+hear of his going up to London, king that he was, to argue with a
+commoner.
+
+Such terms as "falsifier," "upstart," "pretender," were freely used, and
+poor Newton for a time was almost in despair.
+
+He had thought that the world was anxious for truth! Some of his
+fellow-professors now touched their foreheads and shook their heads
+ominously as he passed. He had gone so far beyond them that the cries of
+"whoa!" were unnoticed.
+
+It is here worth noting that the universal fame of Sir Isaac Newton was
+brought about by his rancorous enemies, and not by his loving friends.
+Gentle, honest, simple and direct as was his nature, he experienced
+notoriety before he knew fame.
+
+To the world at large he was a "wizard" and a "juggler" before he was
+acknowledged a teacher of truth--a man of science.
+
+When the dust of conflict concerning Newton's announcement of the
+qualities of light had somewhat subsided, he turned to his former
+discovery, the Law of Gravitation, and bent his mighty mind upon it. The
+influence of the moon upon the Earth, the tilt of the Earth, the
+flattening of the poles, the recurring tides, the size, weight and
+distance of the planets, now occupied Newton's attention. And to study
+these phenomena properly, he had to construct special and peculiar
+apparatus.
+
+In Sixteen Hundred Eighty-seven the results of his discoveries were
+brought together in one great book, the "Principia." Newton was
+forty-five years old then.
+
+He was still the Cambridge professor, but was well known in political
+circles in London on account of having been sent there at various times
+to represent the University in a legal way.
+
+His diplomatic success led to his being elected a member of Parliament.
+Among other great men whom he met in London was Samuel Pepys, who kept a
+diary and therein recorded various important nothings about "Mr. Isaac
+Newton of Cambridge--a schoolteacher of degree, with a great dignity of
+manner and pleasing Countenance." It seems Newton thought so well of
+Pepys that he wrote him several letters, from which Samuel gives us
+quotations. Pepys really claimed the honor of introducing Newton into
+good society.
+
+Among others with whom Newton made friends in Parliament was Mr.
+Montague, who shortly afterward became Secretary of the Exchequer.
+Montague made his friend Newton a Warden of the Mint, with pay about
+double that which he had received while at Cambridge.
+
+In this public work Newton brought such talent and diligence to bear
+that in Sixteen Hundred Ninety-seven he was made Master of the Mint, at
+a salary of fifteen hundred pounds a year--a princely sum in those days.
+
+There is no doubt that the fact that Newton was a devout Churchman and
+an upholder of the Established Order was a great, although perhaps
+unconscious, diplomatic move.
+
+His delightful personality--gracious, suave, dignified and silent--won
+for him admiration wherever he would go. In argument his fine reserve
+and excellent temper were most convincing. Had he turned his attention
+to the law he would have become Chief Justice of England.
+
+In Seventeen Hundred Three he was elected President of the Royal
+Society, an office he held continuously for twenty-five years, and which
+tenure was only terminated by his death.
+
+In Seventeen Hundred Five the Queen visited Cambridge, and there with
+much pageantry bestowed the honor of Knighthood which changed Professor
+Newton into Sir Isaac Newton.
+
+But the man himself was still the simple, modest gentleman. The title
+did not spoil him--he was a noble man from boyhood.
+
+His duties as Master of the Mint did not interfere with his studies and
+scientific investigations. He revised and rewrote his "Principia," and
+in Seventeen Hundred Thirteen the new edition was issued. One copy was
+most sumptuously bound, and Sir Isaac, who was a special favorite at
+Court, presented it in person to the Queen. Those who are interested in
+such things may, by applying to the Curator of the British Museum, see
+and turn the leaves of this book, reading the gracious inscription of
+the author, while a solemn man in brass buttons stands behind.
+
+Newton died March Twentieth, Seventeen Hundred Twenty-seven, at the age
+of eighty-five, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
+
+The verdict of humanity concerning Sir Isaac Newton has been summed up
+for us thus by Laplace: "His work was pre-eminent above all other
+products of the human intellect."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: GALILEO]
+
+GALILEO
+
+
+     I am inclined to believe that the intention of the Sacred
+     Scriptures is to give to mankind the information necessary for
+     their salvation.
+
+     But I do not hold it necessary to believe that the same God who has
+     endowed us with senses, with speech, with intellect, intended that
+     we should neglect the use of these, and seek by other means for
+     knowledge which these are sufficient to procure for us; especially
+     in a science like astronomy, of which so little notice is taken by
+     the Scriptures that none of the planets, except the sun and moon
+     and once or twice only Venus, by the name of Lucifer, are so much
+     as named at all.
+
+     This therefore being granted, methinks that in the discussion of
+     natural problems we ought not to begin at the authority of texts of
+     Scriptures but at sensible experiments and necessary
+     demonstrations.
+
+     --_Galileo_
+
+
+GALILEO
+
+With the history of Galileo and Copernicus, there is connected a
+man of such stern and withal striking individuality that the story of
+the rise and evolution of astronomy can not be told and this man's name
+left out. Giordano Bruno was born in Fifteen Hundred Forty-eight. His
+parents were obscure people, and his childhood and early education are
+enveloped in mystery. Occasional passages in his writings refer to his
+sympathy for outcast children, and he quotes the saying of Jesus,
+"Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of
+such is the Kingdom of Heaven." He then refers to himself as having been
+a waif and robbed of the love that was his due, "the lawful, legal
+heritage of every child, sent without its consent into a world of
+struggle and strife, where only love makes existence possible."
+
+Evidently, the early life of Bruno was a symbol and shadow of what Fate
+held in store for him.
+
+The first authentic knowledge we have of Bruno was when he was
+twenty-two years old. He was then a Dominican monk, and he is brought to
+our attention because he distinguished himself by incurring the
+displeasure of his superiors. His particular offense was that he had
+declared, "The infallibility of the Pope is only in matters spiritual,
+and does not apply to the science of material things."
+
+Strangely enough, these words of Bruno are almost identical with words
+recently expressed by Cardinal Satolli.
+
+The difference in their reception is owing to a mere matter of a few
+hundred years. Truth is a question of time and place. Bruno was banished
+for his temerity, and Satolli wears the red hat. Verily, yesterday's
+heresy is today's orthodoxy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The attitude of the Church toward the teachings of Copernicus, after the
+death of the man, was one of patronizing pity.
+
+Instead of putting his great book, "Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies,"
+on the "Index," the wiser plan was adopted of paying no attention to it.
+Occasionally, however, the subject was broached by some incautious
+novitiate, and then the custom was to treat the Copernican Theory as a
+mere hypothesis, and its author as a mental defective.
+
+Bruno would not have it so. To him it was a very important matter
+whether the sun revolved around the earth as the priests taught, or the
+earth revolved around the sun as set forth in the work of Copernicus. He
+came to the conclusion that Copernicus was right, and said so.
+
+It was ordered that he should cease lecturing on the subject of
+astronomy and apply himself to spiritual matters. He argued that he
+should be allowed to think and speak what he pleased about the stars,
+since the whole matter was one of opinion, and even the Pope did not
+know, positively, the final facts of astronomy, and if the Copernican
+Theory was a hypothesis, so also was the Ptolemaic Theory held by the
+Church.
+
+It will be seen that Copernicus and Bruno were very different in
+temperament: one was gentle, diplomatic, cautious; the other was
+headstrong, firm and full of argument.
+
+Bruno was given his choice: to cease the study of astronomy or to lay
+aside the Dominican frock. The hardihood of the young man was seen in
+that he unfrocked himself, thinking that once outside of the order he
+was not responsible to a superior and could teach what he pleased, so
+long as it was not "heresy."
+
+Heresy is treason to the Church, but Bruno could not see how spiritual
+dogma could cover the facts of Physical Science, since new facts were
+constantly being discovered, and the material universe could only be
+understood by being studied. He was too innocent to comprehend that a
+vast majority of the people believed that popes, cardinals and priests
+knew everything, and that when any branch of knowledge was questioned it
+placed the priests in doubt. Certainly the Church has not opposed
+Science--she has only opposed heresy. But the curious fact is that
+advancing Science has usually been to the Church heretical. When Bruno
+opposed anything that the priests taught, he opposed the Church. He was
+warned to leave Rome--his life was in danger. He fled to Geneva, the
+home of Calvin.
+
+Here he thought, surely, he could speak and write as he chose. But alas!
+Protestantism cared even less about Science than did the monks, and
+"heresy" to John Calvin was quite as serious a matter as it was to
+Calvin's competitor, the Pope of Rome.
+
+The Protestants of Geneva gave Bruno scant attention; they had never
+heard of Copernicus, and the movements of the stars were as nothing to
+them, since the world was soon to come to an end.
+
+The learned men were even then making mathematical calculations, based
+on the prophecies of the Old Testament, as to how soon the general
+destruction would take place.
+
+Bruno sought to argue them out of their childishness, with the result
+that he got himself marked as an infidel and a dangerous man.
+
+From Geneva he went to Lyons, then to Paris, where his personality made
+itself felt, and he was given a hearing at the University. Here he
+remained for several years, when he went to England, arriving there in
+Fifteen Hundred Eighty-four, the same year that a rustic by the name of
+William Shakespeare, from Stratford, reached London. Whether they ever
+met is doubtful.
+
+Bruno spoke five languages, and his polite accomplishments afforded him
+an immediate entry into the best circles of society. He was entertained
+at the home of Sir Philip Sidney, and afterward carried on an extensive
+correspondence with this prince of gentlemen. Greville presented Bruno
+to Queen Elizabeth, who invited him to lecture at the Court on his
+favorite theme.
+
+This he did, and it is quite probable that the noble lords and ladies
+left "calls" so they could be awakened when the lecture was over and
+congratulate the speaker of the evening on his effort.
+
+At Oxford there were disputations where Bruno's faultless Latin
+impressed the pedants much more than did his argument, so they offered
+him a position as Professor of Languages, but this he smilingly
+declined, excusing himself on the grounds that he had important business
+on the Continent: and he had. Already they were collecting fagots for
+his benefit.
+
+He returned to Paris and began his lecturing on Science. His arguments
+had convinced one person at least, and that was himself, that as the
+Church knew nothing of Physical Science, why, possibly it stood in a
+like position regarding spiritual truth. That is to say, the so-called
+"sacred truths" were mere assumptions piled up to satisfy the people,
+and the ignorance and superstition of the many marked high water for the
+teaching of the priests. The business of the Church was to satisfy the
+people, and not enlighten them, for if the people became enlightened
+enough they would see that they did not need the Church, and then where
+were the honors and the riches and the red hats!
+
+Bruno cleared his mind of its cobwebs by expression, just as we all
+do--that is what expression is for.
+
+The people really dictate to the priests what they shall teach;
+moreover, the people absolutely refuse to listen to anything in which
+they do not believe, and decline to pay for preaching that is not done
+to their own dictation. The business, then, of the Church is to study
+carefully the ignorance of the people and conform to it. On this one
+thing does its stability depend. Therefore it must, as a matter of
+self-preservation, suppress any chance intellect that is ahead of its
+time, lest this man honeycomb the whole structure of churchly dogma.
+
+Bruno said that, just as the world seemed to stand still and the stars
+move around us, so did the Church seem to most people a fixed fact. But
+exactly the opposite was true; the Church moves as the people move, and
+unless men outside of the Church educate the people, or the people
+educate themselves, they will forever remain in darkness.
+
+Bruno offered to debate the question publicly with the Bishop of Paris.
+That worthy was no match for Bruno in point of oratory, but when we can
+not answer a man's reasons, all is not lost, for we can at least call
+him vile names, and this is often quite as effectual as logic.
+
+The Bishop launched a fusillade of theological lyddite at Bruno,
+declaring that any Churchman who would so much as hold converse with
+such a wretch was disgraced forever, and that the propositions Bruno
+wished to argue were unthinkable to a self-respecting man. He declared
+that it was only the mercy of God that kept the lightning from striking
+Bruno dead as he wrote his heresies.
+
+Matters were getting strained, and the authorities, fearing
+insurrection, acted upon the advice of the good Bishop and expelled
+Bruno from France. He went to Wittenberg, in his innocence, intending to
+tack on the church-door there his theses. But Wittenberg had no use for
+Bruno--he believed too much, or too little, Luther could not tell which.
+
+The University of Zurich now offered to let the exile come there and
+teach what he wished. Thither he journeyed and there his restless mind
+seemed for the first time to find a home. His writings were slowly
+making head, and around him there clustered a goodly group of students
+who believed in him and loved him.
+
+In the midst of this oasis in a troubled life, word came from some of
+the old-time friends he had known in Rome. They were now in Venice, and
+wished to have him come there and lecture. Bruno thought that his little
+leaven was leavening the whole lump--he was not without ambition--he was
+flattered by the invitation. He accepted it and went to Venice.
+
+It was simply a ruse to get the man within striking distance. Very soon
+after his arrival in Venice he was arrested by agents of the Inquisition
+and secretly taken to Rome. He was lodged in a dungeon of the Castle
+Saint Angelo. Just what his experience was there we can not say--the
+horrors of it all are not ours, for no friend of Bruno's was allowed to
+approach, and what he there wrote was destroyed.
+
+We do know, however, that he was asked to recant, and we know he
+refused. We also know that he repeated his heresies and hurled back
+into the teeth of his accusers the invective they heaped upon him.
+
+Bribery, persuasion, threat and torture were tried in turn, but all in
+vain, for Bruno would not swerve. Unlike Savonarola his quivering flesh
+could not wring from his heart an apology.
+
+He scorned the rack and thumbscrew, declaring they could not reach his
+soul. He knew that death would be the end; he prayed for it, and even
+thought to hasten it by an aggravating manner and harshness of speech
+toward his captors, seemingly quite unnecessary.
+
+For seven long years he was in prison. He was burned alive on the
+Seventh of February, Sixteen Hundred, aged fifty-two.
+
+When bound to the stake he turned his face from the crucifix that was
+held before him, and sought to kiss the fagots. His ashes were thrown to
+the four winds. Thus perished Bruno.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the year Fifteen Hundred Sixty-four, Galileo Galilei was born;
+consequently, he was thirty-six years old when Bruno was executed. He
+had known Bruno, had attended many of his lectures, and had followed his
+career with interest; and while he agreed with him concerning the
+Copernican theory of the earth's revolution, he took exceptions to
+Bruno's arbitrary ways of presenting the matter, and also to his
+scathing criticisms of theology. At this time Galileo could not see that
+the extravagant words of Bruno were largely forced from him by the
+violence of the opposition he had encountered. Galileo fully believed
+that Bruno had been put to death for treason to the Church, and not on
+account of his astronomical teachings.
+
+These men had come up from totally different stations in life. Bruno was
+a man of the people--a self-made man--who bore upon his person the marks
+of the hammer. Galileo was of noble blood, and traced an ancestry to a
+Gonfalonier of Florence. From early infancy he had enjoyed association
+with polite persons, and had sat on the knees of greatness.
+
+When eighteen he was graduated from the University of Pisa; and at that
+early age his family and friends were comparing him, not without reason,
+to a Genius who had come out of Tuscany some years before, Leonardo da
+Vinci.
+
+Parents either exaggerate the talents of their children or else
+belittle them. The woman who bore George Gordon called him "that lame
+brat"; but we call him "The Poet Byron."
+
+Benjamin Franklin ran away from home, and his family thought themselves
+disgraced by his printed utterances. George Washington's mother, after
+being told that her son had been made Commander-in-Chief, laughed
+knowingly and said, "They don't know him as well as I do!" Voltaire's
+father posted his son as irresponsible, tied up a legacy so "the
+scapegrace could not waste it," invested good money in daily prayers to
+be said for the scapegrace's salvation, and then died of a broken heart,
+just as play-actors do on the stage, only this man died sure enough.
+Alfred Tennyson at thirteen wrote a poem addressed to his grandfather;
+the old gentleman gave him a guinea for it, and then wrote these words:
+"This is the first and last penny you will ever receive for writing
+poetry." The father of Shelley misquoted Job, and said, "Oh, to be
+brought down to the grave in grief through the follies of an ungrateful
+child!" And Labouchere says that one of the four brothers of Shakespeare
+used to explain that he wasn't the play-actor who wrote "Hamlet" and
+"Othello," lest, mayhap, his name should be smirched.
+
+Galileo's mother had that beautiful dream which I believe all good
+mothers have: that her son might be the savior of the world. As he grew
+to manhood, her faith in him did not relax.
+
+In childhood Galileo showed great skill in invention. He made curious
+toys with cogs and wheels and eccentrics; whittled out violins, and
+transformed simple reeds into lutes, upon which he played music of his
+own composition. In fact, so great was his skill in music that at twenty
+they wished to make him official organist and choirmaster of the
+Cathedral. His personal taste, however, ran more to painting; for some
+months he worked at his canvases with an ardor too great to last long.
+If ever a man was touched by the Spirit of the Renaissance, it was
+surely young Galileo. The Archbishop of Pisa said, "Upon him has fallen
+the mantle of Michelangelo."
+
+He gave lectures on Art, and taught Painting by actual example. One of
+his pupils, and a great artist, Lodovico Cigoli, always maintained that
+it was to the inspiration and counsel of Galileo that he owed his
+success.
+
+There are really only two things to see at Pisa: one is the Leaning
+Tower, from which Galileo with his line and plummet made some of his
+most interesting experiments; and the other is the Cathedral where the
+visitor beholds the great bronze lamp that is suspended from the vaulted
+ceiling. When he was about twenty-one, sitting in the silence of this
+church (which the passing years have only made more beautiful), he
+noticed that there was a slight swinging motion to this lamp--it was
+never still. Galileo set to work timing and measuring these
+oscillations, and he found that they were always done in exact measure
+and in perfect rhythm. This led, some years later, to perfecting an
+astronomical clock for measuring movements of the stars. And from this
+was originated the pendulum-clock, where before we had depended on
+sundials.
+
+The endeavor of Galileo's parents had been to keep him ignorant of
+mathematics and practical life, that he might blossom forth as a saint
+who would sing and play and make pictures like those of Leonardo, and
+carve statues like Michelangelo, only better.
+
+But parents plan, and Fate disposes.
+
+In Fifteen Hundred Eighty-three, Ostilio Ricci, the famous
+mathematician, chanced to be in Pisa, on his way from Rome to Milan, and
+gave a lecture at the Court, on Geometry.
+
+Galileo was not interested in the theme, but he was in the speaker, and
+so he attended the lecture.
+
+This action proved one of the pivotal points in his life.
+
+"Whether other people really teach us anything, is a question," says
+Stanley Hall; "but they do sometimes give us impulses, and make us find
+out for ourselves."
+
+Ricci made Galileo find out for himself.
+
+He turned to Archimedes from Plato. Geometry became a passion, and a
+very wise man has told us that we never accomplish anything, either good
+or bad, without passion. Passion means one hundred pounds of steam on
+the boiler, with love sitting on the safety-valve, when the blow-off is
+set for fifty.
+
+It surely is risky business, I will admit; accidents will occur
+occasionally and explosions sometimes happen, but everything is risky,
+even life, since few get out of it alive.
+
+And so, to drop back to the original proposition, nothing great and
+sublime is ever done without passion.
+
+Galileo had his mechanical whooping-cough, musical mumps, artistic
+measles, and now the hectic flush of mathematics burned on his cheeks.
+He talked and dreamed mathematics.
+
+Euclid was in the saddle.
+
+Ricci became interested in the talented young scholar and remained
+longer at Pisa than he had intended, that they might sit up all night
+and surprise the rising sun, discussing beauties of dimensions and the
+wonders of dynamics.
+
+Together they went to Florence, where Ricci introduced his pupil as a
+pedagogic sample of the goods, just as Booker Washington usually takes
+with him on his travels a few ebony homo bricks as his specimens from
+Tuskegee.
+
+The beauty and the grace of Galileo's speech and presence put the
+abstract Ricci in the shadow. The right man can make anything
+interesting, just as Dean Swift could write an entrancing essay with the
+broomstick as a central theme. The man's the thing, Hamlet to the
+contrary, notwithstanding.
+
+Galileo knew the Florentine heart, and so he gave lectures on a
+Florentine: one Dante, who loved a girl named Beatrice.
+
+The young Pisan drew diagrams of Dante's Inferno--and surely it was
+nobody's else. He gave its size, height, weight, and told how to reach
+it.
+
+He gave lectures on the Hydrostatic Balance and the Centers of Gravity,
+and then published them as serials.
+
+The Florentines crowned him with bay and enthusiastically proclaimed
+him, "The Modern Archimedes."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pisa now put forth efforts to have her gifted son come home. There was
+always rivalry between Pisa and Florence. Pisa could not afford to
+supply Florence her men of genius--let her depend upon production from
+home, or go without.
+
+Galileo became Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pisa, a
+life position, or at least one he could hold during good behavior.
+
+One of the time-honored dictums of the day was that falling bodies fell
+with a velocity proportioned to their weight. The question was first
+thrashed out in the classroom; and after Galileo had slyly gotten all of
+these scientific wiseacres to commit themselves, he invited them, with
+their students, to the Leaning Tower.
+
+Then he proved by ocular demonstrations that they were positively wrong.
+
+It is very beautiful to teach Truth, but error should not be corrected
+with too much eclat. If the love of Truth, alone, was the guiding
+impulse of Galileo, he might have secretly explained his theory to one
+of the wiseacres, and this wiseacre could have casually demonstrated it,
+so all the rest could have said, "That is what we always knew and
+taught."
+
+Instead of this, Galileo compelled the entire faculty to back water and
+dine on fricasseed crow.
+
+They got even by calling him "a scientific bastardino," and at his next
+lecture he was roundly hissed. Soon after he was bluntly informed that
+his office was to teach the young, and not to undo the old.
+
+And that is the way the troubles of Galileo began.
+
+He might then have apologized, and slipped back into peace and obscurity
+and later been tucked in by kind oblivion. But he had tasted blood, and
+the rabies of setting straight the scientific world, for its own good,
+was upon him.
+
+That he was wrong in the correction of his elders, he would not for a
+moment admit; and he was even guilty of saying, "Antiquity can not
+sanctify that which is wrong in reason and false in principle." Soon
+after he committed another forepaugh by showing that a wonderful boat
+invented by Giovanni de Medici for the purpose of fighting hostile
+ships, would not work, since there were no men on board to guide it, and
+its automatic steering apparatus would as likely run its nose into land,
+as into the hull of the enemy.
+
+He also decorated his argument with a few subtle touches as to the
+beauty of fighting battles without going to war and risking life and
+limb.
+
+Men who are not kind to the faults of royalty can hope for small favor
+in a monarchy, though the monarchy be a republic. Galileo was cut off
+the Standard Oil payroll, and forced to apply to a teachers' agency,
+that he might find employment.
+
+He did not wait long; the rival University of Padua tendered him a
+position on a silver platter; and the Paduans made much dole about how
+unfortunate it was that men could not teach Truth in Italy, save at
+Padua--alas! The Governing Board of Padua made a great stroke in
+securing Galileo, and Pisa fell back on her Leaning Tower as her chief
+attraction.
+
+From a position of mediocrity, the University of Padua gradually rose to
+one of worldwide celebrity. Galileo remained at Padua from Fifteen
+Hundred Ninety-two to Sixteen Hundred Ten, which years are famous not
+alone through the wonderful inventions of Galileo, but because in that
+same interval of time, at least thirty of Shakespeare's thirty-seven
+plays were written. Surely, God was smiling on the planet Earth!
+
+Galileo's salary was raised every year, starting at two hundred florins,
+until it reached over one thousand florins, not to mention the numerous
+gifts from grateful pupils, old and young. Students came to Padua from
+all over the world to hear Galileo's lectures.
+
+Starting with only a common classroom, the audience increased so fast
+that a special auditorium was required that would seat two thousand
+persons. It was during this time that Galileo invented the proportional
+compasses, an instrument now in use everywhere, without the slightest
+change having been made in it.
+
+He also invented the thermometer; but greatest, best and most wonderful
+of all, he produced an instrument through which he could view the stars,
+and see them much magnified. With this instrument, he saw heavenly
+bodies that had never been seen before; he beheld that Jupiter had
+satellites which moved in orbits, and that Venus revolved, showing
+different sides at different times, thus proving that which Copernicus
+declared was true, but which, for lack of apparatus, he could not prove.
+
+Galileo Galilei was getting to be more than a professor of
+mathematics--he was becoming a power in the world.
+
+The lever of his mighty mind was indeed finding a fulcrum.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The year Sixteen Hundred Nine is forever fixed in history, through the
+fact that in that year Galileo invented the telescope.
+
+Every good thing is an evolution. "Specilla," or helps to read, had been
+made, and sold privately and mysteriously, as early as the year Fourteen
+Hundred. These first magnifying-glasses were associated with magic, or
+wonder-working; the words "magnify" and "magic" having a common source
+and a similar meaning. Magicians wore big square glasses, and by their
+aid, some of them claimed to see things at a great distance; and also to
+perceive things stolen, hidden or lost. Occasionally, the magician would
+persuade his customer to try on the glasses, and then even common men
+could see for themselves that there was something in the
+scheme--goodness me! The use of spectacles was at first confined
+entirely to these wonder-workers--or men who magnified things forever.
+During the Fifteenth Century, public readers and occasionally priests
+wore spectacles. To read was a miracle to most people, and a book was a
+mysterious and sacred thing--or else a diabolical thing. The populace
+would watch the man put on his "specillum," and the idea was everywhere
+abroad that the magic glasses gave an ability to read; and that anybody
+who was inspired by angels, or devils, who could get hold of spectacles,
+could at once read from a book.
+
+We hear of one magician who, about the year Fifteen Hundred, made a box
+with a glass cover that magnified the contents. This great man would
+catch a flea and show it to the people. Then he would place the flea in
+the box and show it to them, and they would see that it had grown
+enormously in an instant. The man could make it big or little, by just
+taking off and putting on the cover of the box!
+
+This individual worked wonders for a consideration, but Fate overtook
+him and he was smothered under a feather bed for having too much wizard
+in his cosmos. A wizard, be it known, is a male witch, and the Bible
+says, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," although it does not say
+anything about wizards.
+
+But please note this: the wizard who had that magic box and flea had
+really the first microscope.
+
+Galileo bought a pair of "magic glasses," or spectacles, about the year
+Sixteen Hundred Seven; and his action, in so doing, was freely
+criticized.
+
+On a visit to Venice, where glass had been manufactured since long
+before the Flood, Galileo was looking through one of the
+glass-factories, just as visitors do now, and one of the workmen showed
+him a peculiar piece of glass which magnified the hairs on the back of
+his hand many times.
+
+In a very few days after this, Galileo heard that a Dutch
+spectacle-maker had placed certain queer-shaped pieces of glass in a
+tube, and offered to sell this tube to the Government, so by its use,
+soldiers could see the movements of an enemy many miles away.
+
+That night Galileo did not close his eyes in sleep. He thought out a
+plan by which he could place pieces of glass in a tube, and bring the
+stars close to the earth. By daylight the whole plan was clear in his
+mind, and he hastened to the shop of the glassmakers.
+
+There, two lenses were made, one plano-convex, and the other
+plano-concave, and these were placed in a tube made of sheet copper. It
+was tested on distant objects; and behold! they were magnified by three.
+Would this tube show the stars magnified? Galileo knew of no reason why
+it should not, but he paced his room in hot impatience, waiting for the
+night to come with its twinkling wonders, that he might verify his
+convictions. When the first yellow star appeared in the West, Galileo
+turned his tube upon it, and behold! instead of twinkling points of
+light, he saw a round mass--a world--moving through space, and not a
+scintillating object with five points. The twinkling spikes, or points,
+were merely an optical illusion of the unaided senses.
+
+Galileo made no secret of his invention. It was called "Galileo's Tube,"
+but some of the priests called it Galileo's "Magic Tube."
+
+Yet it marked an era in the scientific world. Galileo endeavored
+constantly to improve his instrument; and from a threefold magnifying
+power, he finally made one that magnified thirty-two times.
+
+Galileo made hundreds of telescopes, and sold them at moderate prices to
+any one who would buy. He explained minutely the construction of the
+instrument, showing clearly how it was made in accordance with the
+natural laws of optics. His desire was to dissipate the superstition
+that there was something diabolical or supernatural about the "Magic
+Tube"--that, in fact, it was not magic, and the operator had no peculiar
+powers; you had simply to comply with the laws of Nature, and any one
+could see for himself.
+
+It is hard for us, at this day, to understand the opposition that sprang
+up against the telescope. We must remember that at this time belief in
+witchcraft, fairies, sprites, ghosts, hobgoblins, magic and supernatural
+powers was common. Men who believe in miracles make rather poor
+scientists.
+
+There were books about "Magic," written by so-called scientific men,
+whose standing in the world was quite as high as that of Galileo.
+
+In Sixteen Hundred Ten, Galileo published his book entitled, "Sidera
+Medicea," wherein he described the wonders that could be seen in the
+heavens by the aid of the telescope. Among other things, he said the
+Milky Way was not a great streak of light, but was composed of a
+multitude of stars; and he made a map of the stars that could be seen
+only with the aid of the telescope.
+
+There resided in Venice at this time a scientific man by the name of
+Porta, who was much more popular than Galileo. He was a priest, whose
+piety and learning was unimpeached.
+
+The year after Galileo issued his book, Porta put out a work much more
+pretentious, called "Natural Magic." In this book Porta does not claim
+that magicians all have supernatural powers; but he goes on to prove how
+they deceive the world by the use of their peculiar apparatus, and
+intimates that they sometimes sell their souls to the Devil, and then
+are positively dangerous. He dives deep into science, history and his
+own imagination to prove things.
+
+The man was no fool--he constructed a kaleidoscope that showed an
+absolute, geometrical symmetry, where in fact there was only confusion.
+He showed how, by the use of mirrors, things could be made big, small,
+tall, short, wide, crooked or distorted. He told of how magicians, by
+the use of Galileo's Tube, could show seven stars where there was only
+one; and he even made such a tube of his own and called the priests
+together to look through it. He painted stars on the glass, and had men
+look at the heavens. He even stuck a louse on the lens and located the
+beast in the heavens, for the benefit of a doubting Cardinal. It was all
+a joke, but at the time no sober, sincere man of Science could argue him
+down. He owned "bum" telescopes that proved all kinds of things, to the
+great amusement of the enemies of Galileo. The intent of Porta was to
+expose the frauds and fallacies of Galileo. Porta also claimed that he
+had seen telescopes by which you could look over a hill and around a
+corner, but he did not recommend them, since by their use things are
+often perceived that were not there. And so we see why the priests
+positively refused to look through Galileo's Tube, or to believe
+anything he said. Porta, and a few others like him, showed a deal more
+than Galileo could and offered to locate stars anywhere on order.
+Galileo had much offended these priests by his statements that the Bible
+did not contain the final facts of Science, and now they were getting
+even with a vengeance. It was all very much like the theological guffaw
+that swept over Christendom when Darwin issued his "Origin of Species,"
+and Talmage and Spurgeon set their congregations in a roar by gently
+sarcastic references to monkey ancestry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Amid the general popping of theological small-arms, Galileo moved
+steadily forward. If he had many enemies he surely had a few friends. As
+he once had proved more than Pisa could digest, so now he was bringing
+to the surface of things more truth than Padua could assimilate.
+
+Venice too was getting uncomfortable. Even the Doge said, in reply to an
+enthusiastic admirer of Galileo, "Your master is not famous: he is
+merely notorious."
+
+It was discovered that Galileo had been living with a woman by the name
+of Marina Gamba, at Venice, even while he held the professorship at
+Padua, and that they had a son, Vincenzo Gamba, and two daughters. One
+of the enemy drew a map of the heavens, showing Galileo as the sun,
+Marina Gamba as the moon, and around them circulated numerous little
+satellites, which were supposed to be their children. The picture had so
+great a vogue that the Doge issued an order that all copies of it be
+destroyed.
+
+Of Marina Gamba we know very little; but the fact that she made entries
+in Galileo's journal and kept his accounts proves that she was a person
+of considerable intelligence; and this, too, was at a time when
+semi-oriental ideas prevailed and education was supposedly beyond the
+feminine grasp.
+
+Galileo did not marry, for the reason that he was practically a priest,
+a teacher in a religious school, living with and looking after the
+pupils; and the custom then was that whoever was engaged in such an
+occupation should not wed.
+
+The stormy opposition to Galileo was not without its advantages. We are
+advertised no less by our rabid enemies than by our loving friends.
+Cosimo the Second, Grand Duke of Tuscany, had intimated that Florence
+would give the great astronomer a welcome. Galileo moved to Florence
+under the protection of Cosimo, intending to devote all his time to
+Science.
+
+In giving up schoolteaching and popular lecturing, Galileo really made a
+virtue of necessity. No orthodox lyceum course would tolerate him; he
+was neither an impersonator nor an entertainer; the stereopticon and the
+melodramatic were out of his line, and his passion for truth made him
+impossible to the many.
+
+He was treading the path of Bruno: the accusations, the taunts and
+jeers, the denials and denunciations, were urging him on to an unseemly
+earnestness.
+
+Father Clavius said that Galileo never saw the satellites of Jupiter
+until he had made an instrument that would create them; and if God had
+intended that men should see strange things in the heavens, He would
+have supplied them sufficient eyesight. The telescope was really a
+devil's instrument.
+
+Still another man declared that if the earth moved, acorns falling from
+a high tree would all fall behind the tree and not directly under it.
+
+Father Brini said that if the earth revolved, we would all fall off of
+it into the air when it was upside down; moreover, its whirling through
+space would create a wind that would sweep it bald.
+
+Father Caccini preached a sermon from the text, "Ye men of Galilee, why
+stand ye gazing up into heaven?" Only he changed the word "Galilee" to
+"Galileo," claiming it was the same thing, only different, and as reward
+for his wit he was made a bishop.
+
+Cardinal Bellarmine, a man of great energy, earnest, zealous, sincere,
+learned--the Doctor Buckley of his day--showed how that: "if the
+Copernican Theory should prevail, it would be the absolute undoing of
+the Bible, and the destruction of the Church, rendering the death of
+Christ futile. If the earth is only one of many planets, and not the
+center of the universe, and the other planets are inhabited, the whole
+plan of salvation fails, since the inhabitants of the other spheres are
+without the Bible, and Christ did not die for them." This was the
+argument of Father Lecazre, and many others who took their cue from him.
+
+Galileo was denounced as "atheist" and "infidel"--epithets that do not
+frighten us much now, since they have been applied to most of the really
+great and good men who have ever lived. But then such words set fire to
+masses of inflammable prejudices, and there were conflagrations of wrath
+and hate against which it was vain to argue.
+
+The Archbishop of Pisa especially felt it incumbent upon him "to bring
+Galileo to justice."
+
+Galileo was born at Pisa, educated there, taught in the University; and
+now he had disgraced the place and brought it into disrepute.
+
+Galileo was still in communication with teachers at Pisa, and the
+Archbishop made it his business to have letters written to Galileo
+asking certain specific questions. One man, Castelli, declined to be
+used for the purpose of entrapping Galileo, but others there were who
+loaned themselves to the plan.
+
+In Sixteen Hundred Sixteen, Galileo received a formal summons from Pope
+Paul the Fifth to come to Rome and purge himself of heresies that he had
+expressed in letters which were then in the hands of the Inquisition.
+
+Galileo appealed to his friends at Florence, but they were powerless.
+When the Pope issued an order, it could not be waived. The greatest
+thinker of his time journeyed to Rome and faced the greatest theologian
+of his day, Cardinal Bellarmine.
+
+The Cardinal firmly and clearly showed Galileo the error of his way.
+Galileo offered to prove for the Cardinal by astronomical observations
+that the Copernican Theory was true. Cardinal Bellarmine said that there
+was only one truth and that was spiritual truth. That the Bible was
+true, or it was not. If not, then was religion a fallacy and our hope of
+Heaven a delusion.
+
+Galileo contended that the death of Christ had nothing to do with the
+truth, so Science and these things should not be shuffled and confused.
+
+This attitude of mind greatly shocked the Inquisitors, and they made
+haste to inform the Pope, who at once issued an order that the
+astronomer should be placed in a dungeon until he saw fit to disavow
+that the sun was the center of the universe, and the earth moves.
+
+A sort of compromise, it seems, was here effected by Galileo's promise
+not to further teach that the earth revolves.
+
+He was kept at Rome under strict surveillance for some months, but was
+finally allowed to return to Florence, and cautioned that he must cease
+all public teaching, speaking and writing on the subject of astronomy.
+On March Fifth, Sixteen Hundred Sixteen, the consulting theologians of
+the Holy Office reiterated that the propositions of Galileo, that the
+sun is the center of the universe, and that the earth has a rotary
+motion, were "absurd in philosophy, heretical, and also contrary to
+Scripture."
+
+The works of Copernicus were then placed upon the "Index," and Pope Paul
+issued a special decree, warning all Churchmen to "abjure, shun and
+forever abstain from giving encouragement, support, succor or friendship
+to any one who believed or taught that the earth revolves."
+
+The name of Copernicus was not removed from the "Index" until the year
+Eighteen Hundred Eighteen.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Galileo made his way back to Florence, defeated and disappointed. He had
+not been tortured, except mentally, but he had heard the dungeon-key
+turned in the big lock and felt the humiliation of being made a captive.
+The instruments of torture had been shown to him, and he had heard the
+cries of the condemned.
+
+The cell that Bruno had occupied was his, and he was also taken to the
+spot where Bruno was burned: the place was there, but where was Bruno!
+
+He realized how utterly impossible it was to teach truth to those who
+did not desire truth, and the vanity of replying to men for whom a pun
+answered the purposes of fact.
+
+As he could neither teach nor lecture at Florence, his services to the
+Court were valueless. He was a disgraced and silenced man.
+
+He retired to a village a few miles from the city, and in secret
+continued his studies and observations. The Grand Duke supplied him a
+small pension and suggested that it would be increased if Galileo would
+give lectures on Poetry and Rhetoric, which were not forbidden themes,
+and try to make himself either commonplace or amusing.
+
+We can imagine the reply--Galileo had but one theme, the wonders of the
+heavens above.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So the years went by, and Galileo, sixty-seven years old, was
+impoverished and forgotten, yet in his proud heart burned the embers of
+ambition. He believed in himself; he believed in the sacredness of his
+one mission. Pope Paul had gone on his long journey, for even infallible
+popes die. Cardinal Barberini had become Pope Urban the Eighth. Years
+before, Galileo and Barberini had taught together at Padua, and when
+Galileo was silenced, a long letter of sympathy had come from his old
+colleague, and occasionally since they had exchanged friendly letters.
+Galileo thought that Urban was his friend, and he knew that Urban, in
+his heart, believed in the theory of Copernicus.
+
+Galileo then emerged from his seclusion and began teaching and speaking
+in Florence. He also fitted up an observatory and invited the scholars
+to make use of his telescope.
+
+Father Melchior hereupon put forth a general denunciation, aimed
+especially at Galileo, without mentioning his name, to this effect: "The
+opinion of the earth's motion is, of all heresies, the most abominable,
+the most pernicious, the most scandalous: the immovability of the earth
+is thrice sacred.
+
+"An argument against the existence of God and the immortality of the
+soul would be sooner tolerated than the idea that the earth moves."
+
+In reply to this fusillade, in Sixteen Hundred Thirty-two Galileo put
+forth his book entitled, "The Dialogue," which was intended to place the
+ideas of Copernicus in popular form.
+
+Galileo had endeavored to communicate with Urban, but the Pope had
+chosen to ignore him--to consider him as one dead. Galileo misconstrued
+the silence, thinking it meant that he could do and say what he wished
+and that there would be no interference.
+
+A copy of Galileo's book reaching the Pope, his silence was at once
+broken. The book was condemned and all copies found were ordered to be
+burned by the hangman in the public streets. But the book had met with a
+wide sale and many copies had been carried to Germany, England and
+France, and in these countries the work was reprinted and sent back to
+Italy.
+
+Urban ordered Galileo to present himself at Rome forthwith. A score of
+years had passed since Galileo's former visit--he had not forgotten it.
+
+He wrote to the Pope and apologized for having broken the silence
+imposed upon him by Pope Paul; he offered to go into retirement again;
+stated that he was old, infirm, without funds, and excused himself from
+obeying the order to go to Rome.
+
+But excuses and apologies were unavailing.
+
+A preventory order was issued and sent to the Papal Nuncio at Florence.
+
+This was equivalent to an arrest. Galileo must go to Rome and answer for
+having broken the promises he had made to the Inquisition. If he would
+not go willingly, he should go in chains.
+
+Arriving at Rome, he had several audiences with the Pope, who said
+nothing would answer but a specific recantation.
+
+What Barberini had once believed was one thing, and what the Pope must
+do was another. Galileo should recant in order to keep the people from
+thinking Pope Urban would allow what his predecessors would not.
+
+The matter had become a public scandal.
+
+Galileo tried to argue the question and asked for time to consider it.
+
+An order was issued that he should be imprisoned. It was done.
+
+Galileo asked for pens and paper that he might prepare his defense.
+These were refused, and an order of torture was issued. It was not a
+trial, defense was useless. Again he was asked to recant--the matter was
+all written out--he had but to sign his name. He refused. He was brought
+to the torture-chamber.
+
+Legend and fact separate here.
+
+There are denials from Churchmen that Galileo was so much as imprisoned.
+One writer has even tried to show that Galileo was a guest of the Pope
+and dined daily at his table. The other side has told us that Galileo
+was thrust into a dungeon, his eyes put out, and his old broken-down
+form tortured on the wheel.
+
+Recent careful researches reveal that neither side told the truth. We
+have official record of the case written out at the time for the
+Vatican archives. Galileo was imprisoned and the order of torture
+issued, but it was never enforced. Perhaps it was not the intention to
+enforce it: it may have been only a "war measure."
+
+Galileo was alternately taken from dungeon to palace that he might
+realize which course was best for him to pursue--oppose the Church or
+uphold it.
+
+Thus we see that there was some truth in the statement that "he dined
+daily with the Pope."
+
+That the man was subjected to much indignity, all the world now knows.
+The official records are in the Vatican, and the attempt to conceal them
+longer is out of the question. Wise Churchmen no longer deny the
+blunders of the past, but they say with Cardinal Satolli, "The enemies
+of the Church have ever been o'er-zealous Churchmen."
+
+On bended knees, Galileo, a man of threescore and ten, broken in health,
+with spirit crushed, repeated after a priest these words: "I, Galileo
+Galilei, being in my seventieth year, a prisoner, on my knees before
+your Eminences, the Cardinals of the Holy See, having before mine eyes
+the Holy Bible, which I touch with my hands and kiss with my lips, do
+abjure, curse and detest the error and heresy of the movement of the
+earth."
+
+He also was made to sign the recantation. On arising from his knees,
+legend declares that he said, "Yet the earth does move!"
+
+It is hardly probable that the words reached his lips, although they may
+have been in his mind. But we must remember the man's heart was broken,
+and he was in a mental condition where nothing really mattered. To
+complete his dishonor, all of his writings were placed on the "Index,"
+and he was made to swear that he would inform the Inquisition of any man
+whom he should hear or discover supporting the heresy of the motion of
+the earth. The old man was then released, a prisoner on parole, and
+allowed to make his way home to Florence, which he did by easy stages,
+helped along the way by friendly monks who discussed with him all
+questions but those of astronomy.
+
+Galileo's eldest daughter, a nun, whose home was near his, was so
+affected by the humiliation of her father that she fell into a nervous
+decline and died very soon after he reached home.
+
+Between these two there had been a close bond of love and tender
+sympathy, and her death seemed almost the crowning calamity.
+
+But once back in his village home at Arcetri, Galileo again went to work
+with his telescope, mapping the heavens.
+
+A goodly degree of health and animation came back to him, but his
+eyesight, so long misused, now failed him and he became blind. Thus John
+Milton found him in Sixteen Hundred Thirty-eight.
+
+Castelli, his lifelong friend, wrote to another, "The noblest eye that
+God ever made is darkened: the eye so privileged that it may in truth be
+said to have seen more wonderful things and made others to see more
+wonderful things, than were ever seen before." But blindness could not
+subdue him any more than it could John Milton. He had others look
+through the telescope and tell him what they saw and then he would
+foretell what they would see next.
+
+The policy of the Pope was that Galileo should not be disturbed so long
+as he kept to his village home and taught merely the few scholars or
+"servants," as they called themselves, who often came to him; but these
+were to be taught mathematics, not astronomy. That he was even at the
+last under suspicion is shown that concealed in the mattress of the bed
+upon which he died were records of his latest discoveries concerning the
+revolution of the planets. Legal opposition was made as to his right to
+make a will, the claim being that he was a prisoner of the Inquisition
+at his death. For the same reason his body was not allowed to be buried
+in consecrated ground. The Pope overruled the objection and he was
+buried in an obscure corner of the little cemetery of Saint Croce, the
+grave unmarked.
+
+So the last few years of Galileo's life were years of comparative peace
+and quiet. He needed but little, and this little his few faithful,
+loving friends supplied. His death came painlessly, and his last moments
+were sustained by the faith that he would soon be free from the
+trammels of the flesh--free to visit some of the worlds that his
+telescope had brought so near to him.
+
+Galileo was born the day that Michelangelo died; the year of his death
+was the year that Sir Isaac Newton, the discoverer of the law of
+gravitation, was born.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: COPERNICUS]
+
+COPERNICUS
+
+
+     To know the mighty works of God; to comprehend His wisdom and
+     majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful working
+     of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode
+     of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance can not be more
+     grateful than knowledge.
+
+     --_Copernicus_
+
+
+COPERNICUS
+
+When a prominent member of Congress, of slightly convivial turn,
+went to sleep on the floor of the House of Representatives and suddenly
+awakening, convulsed the assemblage by demanding in a loud voice, "Where
+am I at?" he propounded an inquiry that is indisputably a classic.
+
+With the very first glimmering of intelligence, and as far back as
+history goes, man has always asked that question, also three others:
+
+Where am I?
+
+Who am I?
+
+What am I here for?
+
+Where am I going?
+
+A question implies an answer and so, coeval with the questioner, we find
+a class of Volunteers springing into being, who have taken upon
+themselves the business of answering the interrogations.
+
+And as partial payment for answering these questions, the man who
+answered has exacted a living from the man who asked, also titles,
+honors, gauds, jewels and obsequies.
+
+Further than this, the Volunteer who answered has declared himself
+exempt from all useful labor. This Volunteer is our theologian.
+
+Walt Whitman has said:
+
+  I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid
+    and self-contained,
+  I stand and look at them long and long.
+  They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
+  They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
+  They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
+  Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
+    owning things,
+  Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands
+    of years ago,
+  Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
+
+But we should note this fact: Whitman merely wanted to live with
+animals--he did not desire to become one. He wasn't willing to forfeit
+knowledge; and a part of that knowledge was that man has some things yet
+to learn from the patient brute. Much of man's misery has come from his
+persistent questioning.
+
+The book of Genesis is certainly right when it tells us that man's
+troubles came from a desire to know. The fruit of the tree of knowledge
+is bitter, and man's digestive apparatus is ill-conditioned to digest
+it. But still we are grateful, and good men never forget that it was
+woman who gave the fruit to man--men learn nothing alone. In the Garden
+of Eden, with everything supplied, man was an animal, but when he was
+turned out and had to work, strive, struggle and suffer, he began to
+grow.
+
+The Volunteers of the Far East have told us that man's deliverance from
+the evils of life must come through killing desire; we will reach
+Nirvana--rest--through nothingness. But within a decade it has been
+borne in upon a vast number of the thinking men of the world that
+deliverance from sorrow and discontent was to be had not through ceasing
+to ask questions, but by asking one question more. The question is this,
+"What can I do?"
+
+When man went to work, action removed the doubt that theory could not
+solve.
+
+The rushing winds purify the air; only running water is pure; and the
+holy man, if there be such, is the one who loses himself in persistent,
+useful effort. By working for all, we secure the best results for self,
+and when we truly work for self, we work for all.
+
+In that thoughtful essay by Brooks Adams, "The Law of Civilization and
+Decay," the author says, "Thought is one of the manifestations of human
+energy, and among the earlier and simpler phases of thought, two stand
+conspicuous--Fear and Greed: Fear, which, by stimulating the
+imagination, creates a belief in an invisible world, and ultimately
+develops a priesthood."
+
+The priestly class evolves naturally into being everywhere as man
+awakens and asks questions. "Only the Unknown is terrible," says Victor
+Hugo. We can cope with the known, and at the worst we can overcome the
+unknown by accepting it. Verestchagin, the great painter who knew the
+psychology of war as few have known, and went down to his death
+gloriously, as he should, on a sinking battleship, once said, "In modern
+warfare, when man does not see his enemy, the poetry of the battle is
+gone, and man is rendered by the Unknown into a quaking coward."
+
+But when enveloped in the fog of ignorance every phenomenon of Nature
+causes man to quake and tremble--he wants to know! Fear prompts him to
+ask, and Greed--greed for power, place and pelf--answers.
+
+To succeed beyond the average is to realize a weakness in humanity and
+then bank on it. The priest who pacifies is as natural as the fear he
+seeks to assuage--as natural as man himself.
+
+So first, man is in bondage to his fear, and this bondage he exchanges
+for bondage to a priest. First, he fears the unknown; second, he fears
+the priest who has power with the unknown.
+
+Soon the priest becomes a slave to the answers he has conjured forth. He
+grows to believe what he at first pretended to know. The punishment of
+every liar is that he eventually believes his lies. The mind of man
+becomes tinted and subdued to what he works in, like the dyer's hand.
+
+So we have the formula: Man in bondage to fear. Man in bondage to a
+priest. The priest in bondage to a creed.
+
+Then the priest and his institution become an integral part and parcel
+of the State, mixed in all its affairs. The success of the State seems
+to lie in holding belief intact and stilling all further questions of
+the people, transferring all doubts to this Volunteer Class which
+answers for a consideration.
+
+Naturally, the man who does not accept the answers is regarded as an
+enemy of the State--that is, the enemy of mankind.
+
+To keep this questioner down has been the problem of every religion. And
+the great problem of progress has been to smuggle the newly-discovered
+truth past Cerberus, the priest, by preparing a sop that was to him
+palatable.
+
+From every branch of Science the priest has been routed, save in
+Sociology alone. Here he has stubbornly made his last stand, and is
+saving himself alive by slowly accepting the situation and transforming
+himself into the Promoter of a Social Club.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The attempt to ascertain the truths of physical science outside of
+theology was, in the early ages, very seldom ventured. When men wanted
+to know anything about anything, they asked the priest.
+
+Questions that the priest could not answer he declared were forbidden of
+man to know; and when men attempted to find out for themselves they were
+looked upon as heretics.
+
+The early church regarded the earth as a flat surface with four corners.
+And in proof of their position they quoted Saint Paul, who wanted the
+gospel carried to the ends of the earth.
+
+In fact, the universe was a house. The upper story was Heaven, the lower
+story was the Earth, and the cellar was Hell. God, the angels and the
+"saved" lived in Heaven, man lived on Earth, and the devils and the
+damned had Hell to themselves.
+
+"And there shall be no night there," and this was proven by the stars,
+which were regarded as peepholes through which mortals could catch
+glimpses of the wondrous light of Heaven beyond. Hell was below, as was
+clearly shown by volcanoes, when the fierce fires occasionally forced
+themselves up through. Darkness to children is always terrible, and the
+night is regarded by them as the time of evil.
+
+Later, Churchmen came to believe that the stars were jewels hung in the
+sky every night by angels whose business it was to look after them.
+
+The word "firmament" means a solid dome or roof. This firmament, the
+sky, was supposed to be the floor of Heaven. The firmament had four
+corners and rested on the mountains, as the eye could plainly see. When
+God's car was rolled across the floor we heard thunder, and his
+movements were always accompanied by lightnings, winds, black clouds and
+rain--all this so He could not be too plainly seen.
+
+Heaven was only a little way off--a few miles at the most. So there were
+attempts made at times by bad men to reach it. The Greeks had a story
+about the Aloidae who piled mountain upon mountain; the Bible story of
+the Tower of Babel is the same, where the masons called, "More mort,"
+and those below sent up bricks. There is also an ancient Mexican legend
+of giants who built the Pyramid of Cholula, and they would have been
+successful in their attempts if fire had not been thrown down upon them
+from Heaven. In all "Holy Writ" we find accounts of "ascensions,"
+"translations," "annunciations," and mortals caught up into the clouds.
+Many people had actually seen angels ascending and descending.
+
+"Messengers from on high" and God's secretaries were constantly coming
+down on delicate errands. Everything that man did was noted and written
+down. We were watched all the time by unseen beings. The Bible tells of
+how the Earth was eventually to be destroyed, and then there would be
+only Heaven and Hell. God, His Son and the angels were going to come
+down, and for ages men watched the heavens to see them appear.
+
+All sensitive children, born of orthodox Christian parents, who heard
+the Bible read aloud, looked fearfully into the sky for "signs and
+wonders." The Bible tells in several places of devils breaking out of
+Hell and roaming over the earth. Dante fully believed in this
+three-story-house idea, and pictures with awful exactness the details,
+which he gained from the preaching of the priests. Dante was never
+honored by having his books placed on the "Index." On the contrary, he
+got his vogue largely through the recommendation of the priests. To them
+he was a true scientist, for he corroborated their statements.
+
+The Christian Fathers ridiculed the idea of the earth being round,
+because, if this were so, how could the people on the other side see the
+Son of Man when He came in the sky? Besides that, if the earth were
+round and turned on its axis, we would all fall off into space.
+
+The idea that there was an ocean above the earth, in the heavens, was
+brought forward to show the goodness and wisdom of God. Without this
+there would be no rain and hence no vegetation, and man would soon
+perish. In Genesis we read that God said, "Let there be a firmament in
+the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters,"
+And in Psalms, "Praise Him, ye heavens of heavens and ye waters that be
+above the heavens." Then we hear, "The windows of Heaven were opened."
+So this thought of the waters above the earth was fully proved, accepted
+and fixed, and to pray for rain was quite a natural thing.
+
+The English Prayer-Book contained such prayers up to within a very few
+years ago, and in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-three the Governor of Kansas
+set apart a day upon which the people were to pray that God would open
+the windows of Heaven and send them rain. They also prayed to be
+delivered from grasshoppers, just as in Queen Elizabeth's time the
+Prayer-Book had this, "From the Turk and the Comet, good Lord deliver
+us."
+
+In the Sixth Century, Cosmos, one of the Saints, wrote a complete
+explanation of the phenomena of the heavens. To account for the movement
+of the sun, he said God had His angels push it across the firmament and
+put it behind a mountain each night, and the next morning it was brought
+out on the other side. He met every objection by citations from Job,
+Genesis, Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes and the New Testament, and wound up with
+an anathema upon any or all who doubted or questioned in this matter of
+astronomy.
+
+The whole Christian idea of the Universe was simple, plain and
+plausible. The child-mind could easily accept it, and when backed up by
+the Holy Book, written at God's dictation, word for word, infallible
+and absolutely true in every part, one does not wonder that progress was
+practically blocked for fourteen hundred years, but the real miracle is
+that it was not blocked forever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thousands of years before Christ, the Chinese had mapped the heavens and
+knew the movements of the planets so well that they correctly prophesied
+the positions of the various constellations many years in advance.
+Twenty-five hundred years before our Christian era a Chinese Governor
+put to death the astronomers Hi and Ho because they had failed to
+foretell an eclipse, quite according to the excellent Celestial plan of
+killing the doctor when the patient dies.
+
+Sir William Hamilton points out the fact that the Chinese, five thousand
+years ago, knew astronomy as well as we do, and that Christian astrology
+grew out of Chinese astronomy, in an effort to foretell the fortunes of
+men.
+
+Fear wants to know the future, and astrology and priesthood are
+synonymous terms, since the business of the priest has always been to
+prophesy, a profession he has not yet discarded. Their prophecies are at
+present innocuous and lightly heeded. They preach that perfect faith
+will move a mountain, but energetic railroad-builders of today find it
+quicker and cheaper to tunnel.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A certain type of man accepts a certain theory.
+
+The Christian view of creation was practically the conception of the
+Greeks before Thales. This wise man, in the Sixth Century before Christ,
+taught that the earth was round, and that certain stars were also
+worlds. He showed that the earth was round and proved it by the
+disappearance of the ship as it sailed away. He located the earth, moon
+and sun so perfectly that he prophesied an eclipse, and when it took
+place it so terrified the Medes and the Lydians, who were in battle with
+each other, that they threw down their arms and made peace. Thales had
+explained that Atlas carried the world on his shoulder, but he didn't
+explain what Atlas stood upon.
+
+Pythagoras, one of the pupils of Thales, following the idea still
+further, showed that the moon derived its light from the sun; that the
+earth was a globe and turned daily on its axis.
+
+He held that the sun was the center of the universe and that the planets
+revolved around it. Anaxagoras followed a few years later than
+Pythagoras, and became convinced that the sun was merely a ball of fire
+and therefore should not be worshiped; that it follows a natural law,
+that nothing ever happens by chance, and that to pray for rain is
+absurd.
+
+For his honesty in expressing what he thought was truth, the priests of
+Athens had Anaxagoras and his family exiled to perpetual banishment
+from Athens and all of his books were burned.
+
+Plato touched on Astronomy, for he touches on everything, and fully
+believed that the earth was round.
+
+His pupil, Aristotle, taught all that Anaxagoras taught, and if he also
+had not been exiled, but had been free to study, investigate and express
+himself, he would have come very close to the truth.
+
+Hipparchus, a hundred years after Aristotle, calculated the length of
+the year to within six minutes, discovered the precession of equinoxes
+and counted all the stars he could see, making a map of them.
+
+Seventy years after Christ, Ptolemy, a Greco-Egyptian, but not of the
+royal line of Ptolemies, published his great book, "The Almagest." For
+over fourteen centuries it was the textbook for the best astronomers.
+
+It taught that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the
+sun and the planets revolve around it. There were many absurdities,
+however, that had to be explained, and the priests practically rejected
+the whole book as "pagan" and taught an astronomy of their own, founded
+entirely upon the Bible. They wanted an explanation that would be
+accepted by the common people.
+
+This astronomy was not designed to be very scientific, exact or
+truthful--all they asked was, "Is it plausible?" Expediency, to
+theology, has always been much more important than truth.
+
+"Besides," said Saint Basil, "what boots it concerning all this
+conjecture about the stars, since the earth is soon to come to an end,
+as is shown by our Holy Scriptures, and man's business is to prepare his
+soul for eternity?"
+
+This was the general attitude of the Church--exact truth was a matter of
+indifference. And if Science tended to unseat men's faith in the Bible,
+and in God's most holy religion, then so much the worse for Science.
+
+It will thus plainly be seen why the Church felt compelled to fight
+Science--the very life of the Church was at stake.
+
+The Church was the vital thing--not truth. If truth could be taught
+without unseating faith, why, all right, but anything that made men
+doubt must be rooted out at any cost. And that is why priests have
+opposed Science, not that they hate Science less, but that they love the
+Church more.
+
+From the time of Ptolemy to that of Copernicus--fourteen hundred
+years--theology practically dictated the learning of the world. And to
+Copernicus must be given the credit of having really awakened the
+science of astronomy from her long and peaceful sleep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The little land that we know as Poland has produced some of the finest
+and most acute intellects the world has ever known.
+
+Tragic and blood-stained is her history, and this tragedy, perhaps, has
+been a prime factor in the evolution of her men of worth. Poland has
+been stamped upon and pushed apart; and a persecuted people produce a
+pride of race that has its outcrop in occasional genius.
+
+Recently we heard of the great Paderewski playing before the Czar, and
+His Majesty, in a speech meant to be very complimentary, congratulated
+the company that so great a genius as he was a citizen of Russia.
+
+"Your Majesty, I am not a Russian--I am a Pole!" was the proud reply.
+
+The Czar replied, smiling, "There is no such country as Poland--now
+there is only Russia!"
+
+And Paderewski replied, "Pardon my hasty remark--you speak but truth."
+And then he played Chopin's "Funeral March," a dirge not only to the
+great men of Poland gone, but to Poland herself.
+
+Nicholas Copernicus was born at the quaint old town of Thorn, in Poland,
+February Nineteen, Fourteen Hundred Seventy-three. The family name was
+Koppernigk, but Nicholas latinized it when he became of age, and
+seemingly separated from his immediate kinsmen forever.
+
+His father was a merchant, fairly prosperous, and only in the line of
+money-making was he ambitious. In the Koppernigks ran a goodly strain of
+Jewish blood, but a generation before, pressure and expediency seemed to
+combine, so that the family, as we first see them, were Christians. No
+soil can grow genius, no seed can produce it--it springs into being in
+spite of all laws and rules and regulations. "No hovel is safe from it,"
+says Whistler.
+
+The portraits of Copernicus reveal a man of most marked personality:
+proud, handsome, self-contained, intellectual. The head is massive, eyes
+full, luminous, wide apart, his nose large and bold, chin strong, the
+mouth alone revealing a trace of the feminine, as though the man were
+the child of his mother. This mother had a brother who was a bishop, and
+the mother's ambition for her boy was that he should eventually follow
+in the footsteps of this illustrious brother who was known for a hundred
+miles as a preacher of marked ability.
+
+So we hear of the young man being sent to the University of Cracow, as
+the preliminary to a great career.
+
+The father bitterly opposed the idea of taking his son out of the
+practical world of business, and this evidently led to the breach that
+caused young Nicholas to discard the family name.
+
+That Nicholas did not fully enter into his mother's plans is shown that
+while at Cracow he devoted himself mostly to medicine. He was so
+proficient in this that he secured a physician's degree; and having been
+given leave to practise he revealed his humanity by declining to do so,
+turning to mathematics with a fine frenzy.
+
+This disposition to drop on a thing, turn loose on it, concentrate, and
+reduce it to a chaos, is the true distinguishing mark of genius. The
+difference in men does not lie in the size of their heads, nor in the
+perfection of their bodies, but in this one sublime ability of
+concentration--to throw the weight with the blow, live an eternity in an
+hour--"This one thing I do!"
+
+Copernicus at twenty-one was teaching mathematics at Cracow, and by his
+extraordinary ability in this one direction had attracted the attention
+of various learned men. In fact the authorities of the college had grown
+a bit boastful of their star student, and when visiting dignitaries
+arrived, young Copernicus was given chalk and blackboard and put through
+his paces. Problems involving a dozen figures and many fractions were
+worked out by him with a directness and precision that made him the
+wonder of that particular part of the world.
+
+The science of trigonometry was invented by Copernicus, and we see that
+early in his twenties he was well on the heels of it, for he had then
+arranged a quadrant to measure the height of standing trees, steeples,
+buildings or mountains. For rest and recreation he painted pictures.
+
+A college professor from Bologna traveling through Cracow met
+Copernicus, and greatly impressed with his powers, invited him to
+return with him to Bologna and there give a course of lectures on
+mathematics.
+
+Copernicus accepted, and at Bologna met the astronomer, Novarra. This
+meeting was the turning-point of his life. Copernicus was then
+twenty-three years of age, but in intellect he was a man. He had vowed a
+year before that he would indulge in no trivial conversation about
+persons or things--only the great and noble themes should interest him
+and occupy his attention.
+
+With commonplace or ignorant people he held no converse. He had
+remarkable beauty of person and great dignity, and his presence at
+Bologna won immediate respect for him.
+
+Men accept other men at the estimate they place upon themselves.
+
+In listening to lectures by Novarra, he perceived at once how
+mathematics could be made valuable in calculating the movement of stars.
+
+Novarra taught the Ptolemaic theory of astronomy for the esoteric few.
+The Church is made up of men, and while priests for the most part are
+quite content to believe what the Church teaches, yet it has ever been
+recognized that there was one doctrine for the Few, and another for the
+Many--the esoteric and the exoteric. The esoteric is an edged tool, and
+only a very few are fit to handle it. The charge of heresy is only for
+those who are so foolish as to give out these edged tools to the
+people. You may talk about anything you want, provided you do not do it;
+and you may do anything you want, provided you do not talk about it.
+
+The proposition that the earth was flat, had four corners, and the stars
+were jewels hung in the sky as "signs," and were moved about by angels,
+was all right for the many, but now and then there were priests who were
+not content with these child-stories--they wanted truth--and these
+usually accepted the theories of Ptolemy.
+
+Novarra believed that the earth was a globe; that this globe was the
+center of the universe, and that around the earth the sun, moon and
+certain stars revolved. The fixed stars he still regarded as being hung
+against the firmament, and that this firmament was turned in some
+mysterious way, en masse.
+
+Copernicus listened silently, but his heart beat fast. He had found
+something upon which he could exercise his mathematics. He and Novarra
+sat up all night in the belfry of the cathedral and watched the stars.
+
+They saw that they moved steadily, surely and without caprice. It was
+all natural, and could be reduced, Copernicus thought, to a mathematical
+system.
+
+Astrology and astronomy were not then divorced. It was astrology that
+gave us astronomy. The angel that watched over a star looked after all
+persons who were born under that star's influence, or else appointed
+some other angel for the purpose. Every person had a guardian angel to
+protect him from the evil spirits that occasionally broke out of Hell
+and came up to earth to tempt men.
+
+Mathematics knows nothing of angels--it only knows what it can prove.
+Copernicus believed that, if certain stars did move, they moved by some
+unalterable law of their own. In riding on a boat he observed that the
+shores seemed to be moving past, and he concluded that a part, at least,
+of the seeming movements of planets might possibly be caused by the
+moving of the earth.
+
+In talking with astrologers he perceived that very seldom did they know
+anything of mathematics. And this ignorance on their part caused him to
+doubt them entirely.
+
+His faith was in mathematics--the thing that could be proved--and he
+came to the conclusion that astronomy and mathematics were one thing,
+and astrology and child-stories another.
+
+He remained at Bologna just long enough to turn the astrologers out of
+the society of astronomers.
+
+Novarra's lectures on astronomy were given in Latin, and in truth all
+learning was locked up in this tongue. But astrology and the theological
+fairy-tales of the people floated free. They were a part of the vagrant
+hagiology of the roadside preachers, who with lurid imaginations said
+the things they thought would help carry conviction home and make
+"believers."
+
+From Bologna Copernicus then moved on to Padua, where he remained two
+years, teaching and giving lectures. Here he devoted considerable time
+to chemistry, and on leaving he was honored by being given a degree by
+the University. Next we find him at Rome, a professor in mathematics and
+also giving lectures on chemistry. His lectures were not for the
+populace--they were for the learned few. But they attracted the
+attention of the best, and were commented upon and quoted by the various
+other teachers, preachers and lecturers. A daring thinker who expresses
+himself without reservation states the things that various others know
+and would like to state if they dared. It is often very convenient when
+you want a thing said to enclose the matter in quotation-marks. It
+relieves one from the responsibility of standing sponsor for it, if the
+hypothesis does not prove popular.
+
+Copernicus was only nineteen years old when Columbus discovered America,
+but it seems he did not hear of Columbus until he reached Bologna in
+Fourteen Hundred Ninety-five. At Rome he made various references to
+Columbus in his lectures; dwelt upon the truth that the earth was a
+globe; mentioned the obvious fact that in sailing westward Columbus did
+not sail his ship over the edge of the earth into Hell, as had been
+prophesied he would.
+
+He also explained that the red sky at sunset was not caused by the
+reflections from Hell, nor was the sun moved behind a mountain by giant
+angels at night. Copernicus was a Catholic, as all teachers were, but he
+had been deceived by the esoteric and the exoteric, and had really
+thought that the priests and so-called educated men actually desired,
+for themselves, to know the truth.
+
+At Padua he had learned to read Greek, and had become more or less
+familiar with Pythagoras, Hipparchus, Aristotle and Plato. He quoted
+these authors and showed how in some ways they were beyond the present.
+This was all done in the exuberance of youth, with never a doubt as to
+the value and the beauty of the Church. But he was thinking more of
+truth than of the Church, and when a cardinal from the Vatican came to
+him, and in all kindness cautioned him, and in love explained it was all
+right for a man to believe what he wished, but to teach others things
+that were not authorized was a mistake.
+
+Copernicus was abashed and depressed.
+
+He saw then that his lectures had really been for himself--he was
+endeavoring to make things plain to Copernicus, and the welfare of the
+Church had been forgotten.
+
+He ceased lecturing for a time, but private pupils came to him, and
+among them astrologers in disguise, and these went away and told
+broadcast that Copernicus was teaching that the movements of the stars
+were not caused by angels, and that "God was being dethroned by a
+tape-measure and a yardstick." Alchemy had a strong hold upon the
+popular mind, and these alchemists and astrologers were fortune-tellers
+and derived a goodly income from the people.
+
+They had their stands in front of all churches and turned in a goodly
+tithe "for the benefit of the poor."
+
+When the astrologers attacked Copernicus he tried to explain that the
+heavens were under the reign of natural law, and that so far as he knew
+there was no direct relationship between the stars and the men upon
+earth. The answer was, "You yourself foretell the eclipse, and assume to
+know when a star will be in a certain place a hundred years in advance;
+now, if you can prophesy about stars, why can't we foretell a man's
+future?"
+
+Copernicus proudly declined to answer such ignorance, but went on to say
+that alchemy was a violence to chemistry as much as astrology was to
+astronomy. In chemistry there were exact results that could be computed
+by mathematics and foretold; it was likewise so in astronomy.
+
+Copernicus was philosopher enough to know that astrology led to
+astronomy, and alchemy led to chemistry, but he said all he wished to do
+was to eliminate error and find the truth, and when we have ascertained
+the laws of God in reference to these things, we should discard the use
+of black cats, goggles, peaked hats, red fire and incantations--these
+things were sacrilege. And the enemy declared that Copernicus was guilty
+of heresy in saying they were guilty of sacrilege. Moreover, black cats
+were not as bad as blackboards.
+
+The Pope certainly had no idea of treating Copernicus harshly; in fact,
+he greatly admired him--but peace was the thing desired. Copernicus was
+creating a schism, and there was danger that the revenues would be
+affected. The Pope sent for Copernicus, received him with great honor,
+blessed him, and suggested that he return at once to his native town of
+Thorn and there await good news that would come to him soon.
+
+Copernicus was overwhelmed with gratitude--he was in difficulties.
+
+Certain priests had publicly denounced him; others had urged him on to
+unseemliness in debate; he had stated things he could not prove, even
+though he knew they were true--but the Pope was his friend! He loved the
+Church; he felt how necessary it was to the people, and at the last, the
+desire of his heart was to bless and benefit the world.
+
+He fell on his knees and attempted to kiss the Pope's foot, but the Holy
+Father offered him his hand instead, smiled on him, stroked his head,
+and an attendant was ordered to place about his neck a chain of gold
+with a crucifix that would protect him from all harm. A purse was placed
+in his hand, and he was sent upon his way relieved, happy--wondering,
+wondering!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Copernicus reached his native town of Thorn, the local clergy
+turned out in a procession to greet him, and a solemn service of
+thanksgiving was held for his safe return home.
+
+Copernicus was only twenty-seven years of age, and what he had done was
+not quite clear to his uncle, the bishop, and the other dignitaries, but
+word had come from the secretary of the Pope that he should be honored,
+and it was all so done, in faith, love and enthusiasm.
+
+Very shortly after this Copernicus was made Canon of the Cathedral at
+Frauenburg. The town of Frauenburg has now only about twenty-five
+hundred people, and it certainly was no larger then. The place is slow,
+sleepy, and quite off the beaten track of travel.
+
+When Canon Copernicus preached now, it was to a dear, stupid lot of old
+marketwomen and overworked men and mischievous children. Oratory is a
+collaboration--let him wax eloquent about the precession of the
+equinoxes, and prate of Plato and Pythagoras if he wished--no one could
+understand him! Rome is wise--the crystallized experience of centuries
+is hers. Responsibility tames a man--marriage, political office,
+churchly preferment--read history and note how these things have dulled
+the bright blade of revolution and turned the radical into a
+Presbyterian professor at Princeton, a staunch upholder of the
+Established Order!
+
+Plato said that Solar Energy found one of its forms of expression in
+man. Some men are much more highly charged with it than others; your
+genius is a man who does things. Do not think to dam up the red current
+of his life--he may die.
+
+Copernicus set to work practising medicine, and gave his services gratis
+to the poor, who came for many miles to consult him.
+
+He went from house to house and ordered his people to clean up their
+back yards, to ventilate their houses, to bathe and be decent and
+orderly. He devised a system of sewerage, and utilized the belfry of his
+church as a water-tower so as to get a water pressure from the little
+stream that ran near the town. The remains of this invention are to be
+seen there in the church-steeple even unto this day.
+
+King Sigismund of Poland had heard of the attacks made by Copernicus
+upon the alchemists, and sent for him that he might profit by his
+advice, for it seems that the King, too, had been having experience with
+alchemists. In their seeking after a way to make gold out of the baser
+metals they had actually succeeded. At least they said so, and had made
+the King believe it.
+
+They had shown the King how he could cheapen his coinage one-half, and
+"it was just as good!" The King could not tell the difference when the
+coins were new, but alas! when they went beyond the borders of Poland
+they could only be passed at one-half their face-value; travelers
+refused to accept them; and even the merchants at home were getting
+afraid.
+
+Copernicus analyzed some of this money made for the King by his
+alchemist friends and found a large alloy of tin, copper and zinc. He
+explained to the King that by mixing the metals they did not change
+their nature nor value. Gold was gold, and copper was copper--God had
+made these things and hid them in the earth and men might deceive some
+men--a part of the time--but there was always a retribution. Debase your
+currency, and soon it will cease to pass current. No law can long uphold
+a fictitious value.
+
+The King urged Copernicus to write a book on the subject of coinage.
+
+The permission of the Pope was secured, and the book written. The work
+is valuable yet, and reveals a deep insight into the heart of things.
+The man knew political economy, and foretold that a people who debased
+their currency debased themselves.
+
+"Money is character," he said, "and if you pretend it is one thing, and
+it turns out to be another, you lose your reputation and your own
+self-respect. No government can afford to deceive the governed. If the
+people lose confidence in their rulers, a new government will spring
+into being, built upon the ruins of the old. Government and commerce are
+built on confidence."
+
+Then he went on to show that German gold was valuable everywhere,
+because it was pure; but Polish gold and Russian gold were below par,
+because the money had been tampered with, and as no secrets could be
+kept long, the result was the matter exactly equalized itself, save that
+Russians and Polanders had in a large degree lost their characters
+through belief in miracles. Copernicus advocated a universal coinage, to
+be adopted by all civilized nations, and the amount of alloy should be
+known and plainly stated, and this alloy should simply be the
+seigniorage, or what was taken out to cover the cost of mintage.
+
+King Sigismund circulated this valuable book by Copernicus among all the
+courts of Europe, and it need not be stated that the suggestions made by
+Copernicus have been adopted by civilized nations everywhere.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The humdrum duties of a country clergyman did not still the intense
+longing of Copernicus to know and understand the truth. He visited the
+sick, closed the eyes of the dying, kept his parish register, but his
+heart was in mathematics, and so there is shown at Thorn an old church
+register kept by Copernicus, where, in the back, are great rows of
+figures put down by the Master as he worked at some astronomical
+problem. In the upper floor of the barn, back of the old dilapidated
+farmhouse where he lived for forty years, he cut holes in the roof, and
+also apertures in the sides of the building, through which he watched
+the movements of the stars. He lived in practical isolation and exile,
+for the Church had forbidden him to speak in public except upon themes
+that the Holy Fathers in their wisdom had authorized. None was to invite
+him to speak, read his writings or hold converse with him, except on
+strictly church matters.
+
+Copernicus knew the situation--he was a watched man. For him there was
+no preferment: he knew too much! As long as he kept near home and did
+his priestly work, all was well; but a trace of ambition or heresy, and
+he would be dealt with. The Universities and all prominent Churchmen
+were secretly ordered to leave Copernicus and his vagaries severely
+alone. But the stars were his companions--they came out for him nightly
+and moved in majesty across the sky. "They do me great honor," he said;
+"I am forbidden to converse with great men, but God has ordered for me a
+procession." When the whole town slept, Copernicus watched the heavens,
+and made minute records of his observations. He had brought with him
+from Rome copies made by himself from the works of the prominent Greek
+astronomers, and the "Almagest" of Ptolemy he knew by heart.
+
+He digested all that had been written on the subject of astronomy;
+slowly and patiently he tested every hypothesis with his rude and
+improvised instruments. "Surely God will not damn me for wanting to know
+the truth about His glorious works," he used to say.
+
+Emerson once wrote this: "If the stars came out but once in a thousand
+years, how men would adore!" But before he had written this, Copernicus
+had said: "To look up at the sky, and behold the wondrous works of God,
+must make a man bow his head and heart in silence. I have thought and
+studied, and worked for years, and I know so little--all I can do is to
+adore when I behold this unfailing regularity, this miraculous balance
+and perfect adaptation. The majesty of it all humbles me to the dust."
+
+It was ostracism and exile that gave Copernicus the leisure to pursue
+his studies in quiet, undiverted, undisturbed. He was relieved from
+financial pinch, having all he needed for his simple, homely wants. The
+mental distance that separated him from his parishioners made him free,
+and the order that he should not travel and that none should visit him
+made him master of his time. There were no interruptions--"God has set
+me apart," he wrote, "that I may study and make plain His works." But
+still, that he could not make his discoveries known was a constant,
+bitter disappointment to him.
+
+In astronomy he found a means of using his mighty mathematical genius
+for his own pleasure and amusement. The Pope had, in seeking to subdue
+him, merely supplied the exact conditions he required to do his
+work--yet neither knew it. So mighty is Destiny: we work for one thing
+and fail to get it, but in our efforts we find something better.
+
+The simple, hard-working gardeners with whom Copernicus lived, had a
+reverent awe for the great man; they guessed his worth, but still had
+suspicions of his sanity. His nightly vigils they took for a sort of
+religious ecstasy, and a wholesome fear made them quite willing not to
+do anything that might disturb him.
+
+So passed the days away, and from a light-hearted, ambitious man,
+Copernicus had grown old and bowed, and nearly blind from constant
+watching of the stars and writing at night.
+
+But his book, "The Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies," was at last
+complete. For forty years he had worked at it, and for twenty-seven
+years, he himself says, not a day or a night had passed without his
+having added something to it.
+
+He felt that he had in this book told the truth. If men wanted to know
+the facts about the heavens they would find them here. He had approached
+the subject with no preconceived ideas; he had ever been willing to
+renounce a theory when he found it wrong. He knew what all other great
+astronomers had taught, and out of them all he had built a Science of
+Astronomy that he knew would stand secure.
+
+But what should he do with all this mass of truth he had discovered? It
+was in his own brain, and it was in the three thousand pages of this
+book, which had been rewritten five times. In a few years at most, his
+brain would be stilled in death; and in five minutes, ignorance and
+malice might reduce the book to ashes, and the forty years' labor of
+Copernicus--working, dreaming, calculating, weeping, praying--would all
+go for naught and be but a tale that is told. Others might have lived
+such lives and known as much as he, and all was lost!
+
+To send the book frankly to Rome and ask the Censor for the privilege to
+publish it, was out of the question entirely--the request would be
+refused, the manuscript destroyed, and his own life might be in danger.
+
+To publish it at home without the consent of his Bishop would be equally
+dangerous. There would be a bonfire of every copy in the public square;
+for in this volume, all that the priests taught of astronomy had been
+contradicted and refuted.
+
+And then it occurred to him to send the manuscript to the free city of
+Nuremberg, the home of science, art and free speech, where men could
+print what they thought was truth--Nuremberg, the home of Albrecht
+Durer. With the book he sent a bag of gold, his savings of a lifetime,
+to pay the expense of printing the volume and putting it before the
+world.
+
+To better protect himself, Copernicus wrote a preface, dedicating the
+book to the Pope Paul, thus throwing himself upon the mercy of His
+Holiness. He would not put the work out anonymously, as his friends in
+Nuremberg, for his own safety, had advised. And neither would he flee to
+Nuremberg for protection; he would stay at home--he was too old to
+travel now--besides, he had forgotten how to talk and act with men of
+talent.
+
+How would Rome receive the book? He could only guess--he could only
+guess.
+
+The months went by, and fear, anxiety and suspense had their sway. He
+was stricken with fever. In his delirium he called aloud, "The
+book--tell me--they surely have not burned it--you know I wrote no word
+but truth--oh, how could they burn my book!"
+
+But on May Twenty-third, Fifteen Hundred Forty-three, a messenger came
+from Nuremberg.
+
+He carried a copy of the printed book--he was admitted to the sick-room,
+and placed in the hands of the stricken man the volume. A gleam of
+sanity came to Copernicus. He smiled, and taking the book gazed upon it,
+stroked its cover as though caressing it, opened it and turned the
+leaves. Then closing the book and holding it to his heart, he closed his
+eyes, and sank to sleep, to awake no more.
+
+His body was buried with simple village honors, and laid to rest beneath
+the floor of the Cathedral where he had so long ministered, side by side
+with a long line of priests. On the little slab that marked his
+resting-place no mention was made of the mighty work he had done for
+truth. There were fears that when the character of his book was known,
+the grave of Copernicus would not remain undisturbed, and so the
+inscription on the headstone was simply this: "I ask not the grace
+accorded to Paul; not that given to Peter; give me only the favor which
+Thou didst show to the thief on the cross."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: HUMBOLDT]
+
+HUMBOLDT
+
+
+     The actual miracle of the Universe is the invariableness of Law.
+     Under like conditions a like result must follow, and upon this rock
+     is the faith of the Scientists built.
+
+     --_The Cosmos_
+
+
+HUMBOLDT
+
+The Baron and Baroness von Hollwede were not happily married.
+
+The Baroness had intellect, spirit, aspiration, with an appreciation of
+all that was best in art, music and the world of thought. As to the
+Baron, he had drunk life's wine to the lees and pronounced the draft
+bitter. He was a heavy dragoon with a soul for foxhounds. Later, when
+gout got to twinging him, he contented himself with cards and cronies.
+
+And then Destiny, like a novelist who does not know what to do with a
+character, sent him on an excursion across the River Styx.
+
+This was a good move all round, and the only accommodating action in
+which the Baron ever had a part. He left a large estate, not being able
+to take it along.
+
+There are two kinds of widows, the bereaved and the relieved. In India
+no widow is allowed to remarry. The canons of the Episcopal Church
+forbid any widow or widower to remarry whose former partner is living. A
+member of the Catholic Church who makes a marital mistake is not allowed
+to rectify it. Yet Nature, sometimes, as if to prove the foolishness of
+fearsome little man, justifies that of which man hotly disapproves.
+
+To be a widow of thirty-six, fair of face and comely in form, to own a
+beautiful home and have an income greater than you can spend, and still
+not enough to burden you--what nobler ambition!
+
+The Baroness had a little encumbrance--a son aged ten. I would like to
+tell of his career, but alas, of him history is silent, save that he was
+heir to some of his father's proclivities, grew up, became an army
+officer and passed into obscurity in middle life, dishonored and unsung.
+
+Such a widow as the Baroness von Hollwede is not apt to mourn for long.
+She was courted by many, but it was Major Humboldt who found favor in
+her heart. I assume that all of my gentle readers have in them some of
+the saltness of time, so that details may safely be omitted--let
+imagination bridge the interesting gap.
+
+The Major was a few years younger than the lady, but like the gallant
+gentleman that he was, he swore i' faith before the notary that they
+were of the same age, just as Robert Browning did when officially
+interrogated as to the age of Elizabeth Barrett. Thomas Brackett Reed
+avowed that no gentleman ever weighed over two hundred pounds, and I
+also maintain no gentleman ever married a woman older than himself.
+
+The marriage of Major Humboldt and the Baroness von Hollwede was a most
+happy mating that fully justified the venture. The Major had done his
+work bravely in the Seven Years' War, and was now an attache of the
+King's Court--a man of means, of intellect, and of many strong and
+beautiful virtues. After the marriage he became known as Baron von
+Humboldt, and as to just how he succeeded to the noble title let us not
+be curious--his wife undoubtedly bestowed it on him, good and generous
+woman that she was.
+
+They lived in the romantic Castle Tegel, near Berlin, and separated from
+the city by a park, where the dark pines still tower aloft and murmur
+their secrets to the night breeze.
+
+Tegel is a most beautiful place; it was first a hunting-lodge occupied
+by Frederick the Great. It is shut out from the world by its high stone
+walls; and in its dim, dense woods, one might easily imagine he was far
+indeed from the madding crowd.
+
+Here there were two sons born to the Baron and Baroness--two years
+apart. One of these sons sleeps now beneath the turret where he first
+saw the light, and from which he made others see the light as long as he
+lived.
+
+In Goethe's "Faust" is an allusion to a mysterious legend that had its
+rise in storied Tegel. On May Eighteenth, in the year Seventeen Hundred
+Seventy-eight. Goethe came here, walking over from Berlin, dined, and
+walked on to Potsdam. But before he left he saw two beautiful boys, aged
+eight and ten, playing beneath the spreading Tegel trees. The boys
+remembered the event and wrote of it in their journal, mentioning the
+kindly pats on their heads and the prophecy that they would grow up and
+be great men.
+
+Goethe was always patting boys on the head and saying graceful things,
+and it is doubtful whether his prophecy was more than a mere
+commonplace. But Goethe always claimed it was divine prophecy. These
+boys were William and Alexander von Humboldt.
+
+History does not supply another instance of two brothers attaining the
+intellectual height reached by Alexander and William von Humboldt. This
+being so, it seems meet that we should tarry a little to inspect the
+method adopted in the education of these boys--something that the
+educated world for the most part has not done.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This world of ours, round like an orange and slightly flattened at the
+poles, has produced only five men who were educated. Of course all
+education is comparative; but these five are so beyond the rest of
+mankind that they form a class by themselves.
+
+An educated man means a developed man--a man rounded on every side of
+his nature. We are aware of no limit to which the mind of man may
+evolve; other men may appear who will surpass the Immortal Five, but
+this fact remains: none that we know have. Great men, so-called, are
+usually specialists: clever actors, individuals with a knack, talented
+comedians--who preach, carve, paint, orate, fight, manipulate, manage,
+teach, write, perform, coerce, bribe, hypnotize, accomplish, and get
+results. There are great financiers, sea-captains, mathematicians,
+football players, engineers, bishops, wrestlers, runners, boxers, and
+players on zithern-strings. But these are not necessarily very great
+men, any more than poets, painters and pianists, with wonderful hirsute
+effects and strange haberdashery are great men.
+
+For it is intellect and emotion expanded in every direction that give
+the true title to greatness. Judged in this way, how rare is the
+educated man--five in six thousand years! And yet one of these five
+educated men had a brother nearly as great as he.
+
+Alexander von Humboldt was past fifty before the world of thinking men
+realized that he had outstripped his brother William--and Alexander
+would never admit he had.
+
+These two men, handsome in face, form and feature: strong in body and
+poised in mind, with souls athirst to realize and to know--happy men,
+living long lives of useful effort--surely should be classed as educated
+persons.
+
+And in passing, let us note that all education is preparatory--it is
+life that gives the finals, not the college. The education of the von
+Humboldt boys was the Natural Method--the method advocated by
+Rousseau--the education by play and work so combined that study never
+becomes irksome nor work repulsive. Rousseau said, "Make a task
+repugnant and the worker will forever quit it as soon as the pressure
+that holds him to it is removed."
+
+The parents of Alexander and William von Humboldt carefully studied the
+new plan of education that was at that time being advocated by some of
+the best professors at Berlin. "A child must have a teacher," said Jean
+Jacques, "but a professional teacher is apt to become the slave of his
+profession, and when this occurs he has separated himself from life, and
+therefore to that degree is unfitted to teach."
+
+A school should not be a preparation for life: a school should be life.
+The Kindergarten Idea, among other things, suggests that a child should
+never know he is in school.
+
+The discipline is kept out of sight, and the youngster finds himself a
+part of the busy life. He blends in with the others, and works, plays
+and sings under the wise and loving care of his "other mother," the
+teacher. He is living, not simply preparing to live. All life should be
+joyous, spontaneous, natural. The Rousseau Idea, which was modified and
+refined by Froebel, is the utilization of the propensity to play.
+
+Major von Humboldt found a man who was saturated with the true Froebel
+spirit, although this was before Froebel was born.
+
+The man's name was Heinrich Campe. Heinrich was hired to superintend the
+education of the Humboldt boys. That is to say, he was to become
+comrade, friend, counselor, fellow-scholar, playmate and teacher.
+
+Play needs direction as well as work. Campe played with the boys. They
+lived with Nature--made lists of all the trees at Tegel, drew sketches
+of the leaves and fruit, calculated the height of trees, measured them
+at the base, and cut them down occasionally, first sitting in judgment
+on the case, and deciding why a certain tree should be removed, thus
+getting a lesson in scientific forestry.
+
+They became acquainted with the bugs, beetles, birds and squirrels. They
+cared for the horses, cattle and fowls, and best of all they learned to
+wait on themselves.
+
+Campe told them tales of history--of Achilles, Pericles and Caesar. Then
+they studied Greek, that they might read of Athens in the language of
+the men who made Athens great. They translated "Robinson Crusoe" into
+the German language, and Campe's translation of "Robinson Crusoe" is
+today a German classic. It was all natural--interesting, easy. The day
+was filled with work and play, and joyous tales of what had been said by
+others in days agone.
+
+"Teach only what you know, and never that which you merely believe,"
+said Rousseau.
+
+There is still a cry that religion should be taught in the public
+schools. If we ask, "What religion?" the answer is, "Ours, of course!"
+
+Religious dogma, being a matter of belief, was taught to the Humboldts
+as a part of history.
+
+So these boys very early became acquainted with the dogmas of
+Confucianism, Mohammedanism, Christianity. They separated, compared and
+analyzed, and saw for themselves that dogmatic religions were all much
+alike. To know all religions is to escape slavery to any. In studying
+the development of races these boys saw that a certain type of religion
+fits a certain man in a certain stage of his evolution, and so perhaps
+to that degree religion is necessary. An ethnologist is never a Corner
+Grocery Infidel. The C.G.I. is very apt to be converted at the first
+revival, outrivaling all other "seekers," and when warm weather comes,
+falling from grace and dropping easily into scofferdom.
+
+The Humboldts, like Thoreau, never had any quarrel with God, and they
+were never tempted to go forward to the Mourners' Bench.
+
+Origin and destiny did not trouble them; predestination and
+justification by faith were not even in their curriculum; foreordination
+and baptism were to them problems not to be taken seriously.
+
+By studying religions in groups and incidentally, they learned to
+distinguish the fetish in each. They read Greek mythology side by side
+with Judean mythology and noted similarities. The intent of Tutor Campe
+was to give these boys a scientific education. Science is only
+classified commonsense. To be truly scientific is to know
+differences--to distinguish between this and that. Every successful
+farmer has traveled a long way into science, for science deals with the
+maintenance of life. To know soils, animals and vegetation is to be
+scientific.
+
+But when the average farmer learns to transmute compost into grass and
+grain, and these into beef, he usually stops, content. To be a scientist
+in the true sense, one must love knowledge for its own sake, and not
+merely for what it will bring on market-day, and so the Humboldts were
+led on through the stage of wanting to make money, to the stage of
+wanting to know the why and wherefore. It will be seen that the
+education of the Humboldts was what the Boylston Professor of English at
+Harvard calls "faddism, or the successful effort at flabbiness." Our
+Harvard friend thinks that education should be a discipline--that it
+should be difficult and vexatious, and that happiness, spontaneity and
+exuberance are the antitheses and the foes of learning. To him grim
+earnestness, silence, sweat and lamp-smoke are preferable to sunshine
+and joyous, useful work so wisely directed that the pupil thinks it
+play. He believes that to be sincere we must be serious. In these
+latter-day objections there is nothing new. Socrates met them all;
+Rousseau heard the cry of "fad"; Heyne, Pestalozzi, Campe, Knuth and
+Froebel met the carpist and answered him reason for reason, just as
+Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo told the reason the earth revolved. The
+professional teacher who can do nothing but teach--the college professor
+who is a college professor and nothing else--hates the Natural Method
+man about as ardently as the person who wears a paste diamond hates the
+lapidary.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Heinrich Campe was the tutor of the Humboldts for two years, when he
+entered the employ of the King as Commissioner of Education.
+
+After this, however, he continued to spend one day a week at Tegel for
+some time. He loved the boys as his own, and his hope for their future
+never relaxed. Possibly his interest was not wholly disinterested--with
+the help of these lads he was working out and proving his pedagogic
+theories.
+
+When Campe resigned his immediate tutorship he was allowed to select his
+successor, and he chose a young man by the name of Christian Knuth.
+
+The mother was a member of this little university of four persons;
+Knuth, of course, was a member, for he always considered himself more of
+a student than a teacher.
+
+When Campe resigned in favor of Knuth his action was in degree prompted
+by his love and consideration for the boys. Knuth was only a little past
+twenty, and was able to enter into the out-of-door sports and work of
+the youngsters better than the older man. Knuth was their hero--together
+they rode horseback, climbed mountains, excavated tunnels, mined for
+ore, built miniature houses. "Knuth made every good thing in Berlin
+available to us," wrote William years afterward; "we visited stores,
+factories, barracks and schools, and became familiar with a thousand
+commonplace things never taught in schools and colleges."
+
+When Alexander was twelve years old, the father died. This would have
+been a severe blow to the boys were it not for Knuth, who seemed to
+stand to them more as the real parent than did Major von Humboldt.
+
+Knuth was a businessman of no mean ability. The Baroness now trusted him
+with all her financial affairs. He called on the boys to help him in the
+details of business, so the keeping of accounts and the economical
+handling of money were lessons they learned early in life.
+
+When Alexander was seventeen and William nineteen, the mother and Knuth
+decided that the boys should have the advantages of university life.
+Accordingly they were duly entered at the University of Frankfort as
+"special students."
+
+Knuth also entered as a student in the class with them. Special
+students, let it be known, are usually those who have failed to pass the
+required examinations. In this instance, Alexander and William were
+beyond many of their classmates in some things, but in others they were
+deficient. Especially had their education in the dead languages been
+"neglected," so it is quite likely they could not have passed the
+examinations had they attempted it.
+
+It should also be explained that special students are not eligible to
+diplomas or degrees.
+
+But Campe and Knuth did not believe the nerve-racking plan of
+examinations wise, any more than it is wisdom to pull up a plant and
+examine the roots to see how it prospers. Neither did they prize a
+college degree.
+
+They knew full well that a college degree is no proof of excellence of
+character; to them a degree was too cheap a thing to deviate in one's
+orbit to secure. They were after bigger game.
+
+At Frankfort, Knuth and his charges lived in the family of Professor
+Loffler, "so as to rub off a little knowledge from this learned man."
+They studied history, philosophy, law, political economy and natural
+history. We would say their method was desultory, were it not for the
+fact that they were always thorough in all that they undertook. They
+were simply three boys together, intent on getting their money's worth.
+
+William was a little better student than Alexander, and was the leader;
+he was larger in stature and seemed to have more vitality.
+
+Two years were spent at the University of Frankfort, and then our trio
+moved on to the University of Gottingen, where there were distinguished
+lecturers on Natural History and Archeology. Antiquity especially
+interested the boys, and the evolution and history of races were
+followed with animation.
+
+William took especially to philosophy as expressed in the writings of
+Kant, while Alexander developed a love for botany and what he called
+"the science of out-of-doors."
+
+Two years at Gottingen, following the bent of their minds and listening
+only to those lectures they liked, and they moved on to Jena.
+
+Here they were in the Goethe country. Soon there were overtures from
+Berlin that they enter the service of the Government. These overtures
+were set in motion by Campe, who, however, kept out of sight in the
+matter, and when accused, stoutly declared that it was every man's duty
+to help himself, and that he personally had never helped any one get a
+position and never would.
+
+William was twenty-three and Alexander twenty-one. William was gracious
+and graceful in manner and made himself at home in the best society;
+Alexander was studious, reserved and inclined to be shy.
+
+An invitation came that they should visit Weimar and spend some weeks in
+that little world of art and letters created by Goethe and Schiller. To
+William this was very tempting; but Alexander saw at Weimar scant
+opportunity to study botany and geology.
+
+Besides that, he felt that sooner or later he would drift into the
+employ of the Government, following in his father's footsteps. His
+ambition was practical mining, with a taste for finance.
+
+The brothers kissed each other good-by, and one went to Weimar to assist
+Schiller in editing a magazine that did not pay expenses, to bask in the
+sunshine of the great Goethe, and incidentally to secure a wife.
+
+The other started on a geological excursion, and this excursion was to
+continue through life, and make of the man the greatest naturalist that
+the world had seen since Aristotle lived, two thousand years before.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Humboldt's first book was on the geological formation of the Rhine,
+published when he was twenty-six years old. The work was so complete and
+painstaking that it led to his being appointed to the position of
+"Assessor of Mines" at Berlin. This was the same office that Swedenborg
+once held in Scandinavia.
+
+For the benefit of our social-science friends, it is rather interesting
+to note that at this time in Europe nearly all mines belonged to the
+Government.
+
+An individual might own the surface, and up to the sky, but his claim
+did not go to the center of the earth. Iron, coal, copper, silver and
+gold were largely mined, and the Government operated the mines direct,
+or else leased them on a percentage.
+
+I am told that in America all mining is done by individuals or private
+companies, and that four-fifths of all mining companies have no mines at
+all--merely samples of ores, blueprints, photographs and prospects. The
+genus promoter is a very modern production, and is a creation Humboldt
+never knew; the "salting" of mines was out of his province, and mining
+operations carried on exclusively in sky-scrapers was a combination he
+never guessed.
+
+Whether society will ever take a turn backward, and the whole people own
+and control the treasures deposited by Nature in the earth, is a
+question I will leave to my Marxian colleagues to determine.
+
+As a mine-manager Humboldt was hardly a success. He knew the value of
+ores, utilized various by-products that had formerly been thrown away,
+made plans for the betterment of his workers, and once sent a protest to
+the King against allowing women and children to be employed underground.
+
+But the price per ton of his product was out of proportion to the
+expenses. While other men mined the ore he wrote a book on "Subterranean
+Vegetation." The details of business were not to his liking. His own
+private financial affairs were now turned over to Knuth, his modest
+fortune resolved into cash and invested in bonds that brought a low rate
+of interest. Freedom was his passion--to come and go at will was his
+desire. The thirst for travel was upon him--travel, not for adventure,
+but for knowledge.
+
+He resigned his office and tramped with knapsack on back across the
+Alps. The habit of his mind was that of the naturalist-investigator.
+Geology, botany and zoology were his properties by divine right.
+
+These sciences really form one--geognosy, or the science of the
+formation of the earth. The plants dissolve and disintegrate the rocks;
+the animal feeds upon the plants; and animal life makes new forms of
+vegetation possible. So the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms
+evolve together, constantly tending toward a greater degree of
+refinement and complexity.
+
+The very highest form of animal life is man; and the highest type of
+man is evolved where there is a proper balance between the animal and
+the vegetable kingdoms.
+
+Humboldt discovered very early in his career that the finest flowers
+grow where there are the finest birds, and man separated from birds,
+beasts and flowers could not possibly survive.
+
+Just about this time, Humboldt, taking the cue from Goethe, said: "Man
+is a product of soil and climate, and is brother to the rocks, trees and
+animals. He is dependent on these, and all things seem to point to the
+truth that he has evolved from them. The accounts of special creation
+are interesting as archeology, but biology is distinctly the business of
+modern scientists. The scientist tells what he knows, and the theologist
+what he believes." And again we find Humboldt writing from Switzerland
+in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-six, making observations that have been
+recently unconsciously paraphrased by the United States Secretary of
+Agriculture, who said in a printed report: "Western farmers who raise
+and sell hogs and cattle, feeding them grain instead of selling it, are
+sure to acquire a competence. The farmers who sell grain are the ones
+who do not pay off their mortgages."
+
+Says Humboldt:
+
+"Here on the sides of these towering and forbidding mountains we find
+the most fertile and beautiful miniature farms, nestling in little
+valleys or on plateaus.
+
+"Indeed, I heard today of a man falling out of his farm and being
+seriously injured. He ventured too near the edge.
+
+"These Swiss gardens with their prosperous and intelligent owners are
+only possible through the fact that the owners keep all the cows and
+poultry that can comfortably exist on the acres. The peasants sell
+butter, cheese and eggs, instead of grain and vegetables exclusively.
+
+"They give back to the earth all that they take from it, so in the
+course of a hundred years a fine soil evolves that supports valuable
+animals, including valuable men; choice fruit, flowers and birds appear,
+and we have what we are pleased to call Christian civilization. It is
+not for me to quibble about terms, but civilization is not necessarily
+Christian, since it is more a matter of economics and natural science
+than religion."
+
+Where the climate is fairly propitious, but not so much so but that it
+compels watchfulness, economy and effort, man will work, and to aid him
+in his work he utilizes domestic animals. And the very act of
+domesticating the animal domesticates the man. As man improves the
+animal, he improves himself. One reason why the American Indian did not
+progress was because he had neither horses, camels, oxen, swine nor
+poultry. He had his dog, and the dog is a wolf, and always remains one,
+in that his intent is on prey. This fitted the mood of the Indian, and
+he continued to live his predaceous career without a particle of
+evolution. To stand still is to retreat, and there is evidence that long
+before the year Fourteen Hundred Ninety-two, there was a North American
+Indian that was a better Indian than the Indians who watched the
+approach of Columbus and exclaimed, "Alas! we are discovered!"
+
+In crossing the Alps, Humboldt was impressed with the truth that man was
+a necessary factor in working out "creation," just as much as the
+earthworm. When men stir the soil so as to make it produce grain that
+the family may be fed, and utilize animals in this work, civilization is
+surely at hand.
+
+Nations with a controlling desire to absorb, annex and exploit are still
+to that degree savages. Creation is still going on, and this earth is
+becoming better and more beautiful as men work in line with reason and
+allow science to become the handmaid of instinct.
+
+Humboldt, above all men, prepared the way for Darwin, Spencer and
+Tyndall--all of these built on him, all quote him. His books form a mine
+in which they constantly delved.
+
+Humboldt in boyhood formed the habit of close and accurate observation,
+and he traveled that he might gratify this controlling impulse of his
+life--the habit of seeing and knowing. His genius for classification was
+superb; he approached every subject with an open mind, willing to change
+his conclusions if it were shown that he was wrong; he had imagination
+to see the thing first with his inward eye; he had the strength to
+endure physical discomfort, and finally he had money enough so he was
+free to follow his bent.
+
+These qualifications made him the prince of scientific travelers--the
+pioneer of close, accurate and reliable explorers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before Humboldt's time travelers had been mostly of the type of Marco
+Polo and Sir John Mandeville, who discovered strange and wondrous
+things, such as horses with five legs, dogs that could talk, and
+anthropophagi with heads that grew beneath their shoulders. The
+temptation to be interesting at the expense of truth has always been
+strong upon the sailorman. Read even the history of Christopher Columbus
+and you will hear of islands off the coast of America inhabited
+exclusively by women who had only one calling-day in a year when their
+gentlemen friends from a neighboring island came to see them.
+
+The world needed accurate, scientific knowledge concerning those parts
+of the world seldom visited by man. Travel a hundred years ago was
+accompanied by great expense and more or less peril. Nations held
+themselves aloof from one another, and travelers were looked upon as
+renegades or spies.
+
+Alexander von Humboldt had explored deep mines, climbed high mountains,
+visited that strange people, the Basques of Spain, got little glimpses
+into Africa where the jungle was waiting for a Livingstone and a Stanley
+before giving up its secrets. The Corsican had thrown Europe into a
+fever of fear, and war was on in every direction, when in Seventeen
+Hundred Ninety-nine Humboldt ran the blockade and sailed out of the
+harbor of Coruna, Spain, on the little corvette "Pizarro," bound for
+the Spanish possessions in the New World. Spain had discovered America
+in the gross two hundred years before, but what this country really
+contained in way of possibilities, Spain had most certainly never
+discovered.
+
+Humboldt's mind had conceived the idea of a Scientific Survey, and in
+this he was the maker of an epoch. In this undertaking he secured the
+assistance of the Prime Minister, who secretly issued passports and
+letters of recommendation to Humboldt, first cautioning him that if the
+Court of Madrid should know anything about this proposed voyage of
+discovery it could never be made, so jealous and ignorant were the
+officials.
+
+Only one thing did Spain have in abundance, and that was religion.
+
+At that time the Spanish Colonies included Louisiana, Florida, Texas,
+California, Mexico, Cuba, Central America, most of the West Indies, and
+most of South America, not to mention the Philippines. These colonies
+covered a territory stretching over five thousand miles from North to
+South. Twice a year Spain sent out her trading-ships, convoyed by armed
+cruisers. Trade then was monopoly and extortion. The goods sent out were
+as cheap and tawdry as could be palmed off; all that were brought back
+were bartered for at the lowest possible prices.
+
+Cheating in count, weight and quality was then considered perfectly
+proper, and as the Government officials at home got a goodly grab into
+all transactions in way of perquisites, all went swimmingly--or fairly
+so.
+
+For a Spaniard to trade with any other nation was treason, and if
+caught, his property was confiscated and probably his head forfeited.
+
+No foreigners were allowed in the colonies, and exclusion was the rule.
+To hold her dependencies Spain thought she must keep them under close
+subjection; and she seemed beautifully innocent of the fact that she was
+the dependent, not they. She did not believe in Free Trade.
+
+The Government was absolutely under military rule. Of the botany,
+zoology, geology, not to mention the topography, of her American
+possessions, the officials of Spain knew nothing save from the tales of
+sailors.
+
+Such were the Spanish conditions when Humboldt got himself smuggled on
+board the "Pizarro," and sailed away, June Fourth, Seventeen Hundred
+Ninety-nine. With Humboldt was one companion, Bonpland, a Swiss by
+birth, and a rare soul.
+
+Humboldt was a naturalist and a philosopher; by nature he was a
+traveler. But he lacked that intrepid quality possessed by, say, Lewis
+and Clarke.
+
+He had too much brain--too fine a nerve-quality to face the forest
+alone. Bonpland made good all that he lacked. He used to call Bonpland
+his "Treasure." And surely such a friend is a treasure, indeed.
+Bonpland was a linguist, as most of the Swiss are. He was a
+mountain-climber, and had been a soldier and a sailor, and he knew
+enough of literature and science, so he was an interesting companion.
+
+He was small in stature, lithe, immensely strong, absolutely fearless,
+and had left behind him neither family nor friends to mourn his loss. To
+Humboldt he was guide, teacher, protector and friend. Bonpland was the
+soul of unselfishness.
+
+Perhaps a certain quality of man attracts a certain quality of friend--I
+really am not sure. But this I know, that while Alexander von Humboldt
+had few personal friends, he always had just those which his nature
+required--his friends were hands, feet, eyes and ears for him, to quote
+his own words. This voyage on the "Pizarro" occupied five years. The
+travelers visited Teneriffe, Cuba, Mexico, and skirted the coast of
+South America, making many little journeys inland.
+
+They climbed mountains that had never been scaled before; they ascended
+rivers where no white man had ever been, and pushed their way through
+jungle and forest to visit savage tribes who fled before them in terror
+thinking they were gods. On the return trip they visited the United
+States; spent some weeks in Washington, where they were the guests of
+the President, Thomas Jefferson. A firm friendship sprang up between
+Humboldt and Jefferson: they were both freethinkers, and when Humboldt
+recorded in his journal that Jefferson was by far the greatest man
+living in America, he not only recorded his personal conviction, but he
+spoke the truth.
+
+And as if not to be outdone, although he did not then know what Humboldt
+had said of him, Jefferson declared that Alexander von Humboldt was the
+greatest man he ever saw.
+
+Most of the vast number of rare specimens and natural-history
+curiosities gathered by Humboldt and Bonpland were placed on a
+homeward-bound ship that sailed from South America. This ship was lost
+and all the precious and priceless cargo went for naught. Had Humboldt
+and his companion sailed on this ship, as they had at first intended,
+instead of returning by way of the United States, the world would not
+have known the name of Alexander von Humboldt.
+
+But Fate for once was kind--the world had great need of him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Humboldt landed at Bordeaux in August, in Eighteen Hundred Four,
+after his five-year journey, he immediately set out to visit his
+brother, who was then German Ambassador at Rome. We can imagine that it
+was a most joyous meeting.
+
+Of it William said: "I could not recognize him for my tears--but beside
+this he seemed to have grown in stature and was as brown as a Malay. Was
+he really my brother? Ah, the hand was the hand of Esau, but when he
+spoke, it was the same kind, gentle, loving voice--the voice of my
+brother."
+
+A few weeks at Rome and Alexander grew restless for work. He had made
+great plans about publishing the record of his travels. This work was to
+outstrip anything in bookmaking the world had ever seen, dealing with
+similar subjects. The writing was done on shipboard, by campfires, and
+in forest and jungle, but now it had all to be gone over and revised and
+much of it translated into French, for the original notes were sometimes
+in English and sometimes in German. Only in Paris could the work of
+bookmaking be done that would fill Humboldt's ideals. In Paris were
+printers, engravers, artists, binders--Paris was then the artistic
+center of the world, as it is today.
+
+The results of this first great scientific voyage of discovery were
+written out in a work of seventeen volumes.
+
+It was entitled, "The Travels of Humboldt and Bonpland in the Interior
+of America." Humboldt wrote the book, but wanted his friend to have half
+the credit. This superb set of books, containing many engravings, was
+issued under Humboldt's supervision and almost entirely at his own
+expense. It was divided into five general parts: Zoology and Comparative
+Anatomy; Geography and the Distribution of Plants; Political Essays and
+Description of Peoples and Institutions in the Kingdom of New Spain;
+Astronomy and Magnetism; Equinoctial Vegetation. It took two years to
+issue the first volume, but the others then came along more rapidly, yet
+it was ten years before the last book of the set was published. The
+total expense of issuing this set of books was more than a million
+francs, or, to be exact, two hundred twenty-six thousand dollars.
+
+The cost of a set of these books to subscribers was two thousand five
+hundred fifty dollars, although there were a few sets containing
+hand-colored plates and original drawings that were valued at twenty
+thousand dollars. One such set can now be seen at the British Museum. In
+all, only three hundred sets of these books were issued.
+
+One set at least came to North America, for it was presented to Thomas
+Jefferson, and, if I am not mistaken, is now in the Congressional
+Library at Washington.
+
+This American Expedition forever fixed Alexander von Humboldt's place in
+history, but after it was completed and the record written out, he had
+still more than half a century to live.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At a time when few men could afford the luxury, Alexander von Humboldt
+was an atheist. Fortunately he had sufficient fortune to place him
+beyond reach of the bread-and-butter problem, and all of his books were
+written in the language of the esoteric. He did not serve as an
+iconoclast for the common people--his name was never on the tongue of
+rumor--very few, indeed, knew of his existence. His books were issued in
+deluxe, limited editions, and were for public libraries, the shelves of
+nobility or rich collectors.
+
+Humboldt was judicial in all of his statements, approaching every
+question as if nothing were known about it. He built strong, and was
+preparing the way, such as throwing up ramparts and storing ammunition
+for the first decisive battle that was to take place between Theology
+and Science.
+
+In his day Theology was supreme, the practical dictator of human
+liberties. But a World's Congress of Freethinkers has recently been held
+in Rome.
+
+There were present more than three thousand delegates, representing
+every civilized country on the globe. The deliberations of the Congress
+were held in a hall supplied by the Italian Government, and all
+courtesies and privileges were tendered the delegates. The only protest
+came from the Pope, who turned Protestant and in all the Catholic
+churches in Rome ordered special services, to partially mitigate the
+blot upon the fair record of the "Holy City." Forty years ago armed men
+would have routed this Congress by force, and a hundred years ago the
+bare thought of such a meeting would have placed a person who might have
+suggested it in imminent peril.
+
+Humboldt prophesied that the world would not forever be ruled by
+religious superstition--that science must surely win. But he did not
+expect that the change would come as quickly as it has; neither did he
+anticipate the fact that the orthodox religion would admit all the facts
+of science and still flourish. The number of Church communicants now is
+larger than it was in the time of Humboldt. The Church is a
+department-store that puts in the particular goods that the people ask
+for.
+
+Freethinkers do not leave the Church; the Church is built on a Goodyear
+patent, and its lines expand when Freethinkers get numerous, so as to
+include them.
+
+The Church would rather countenance vice, as it has in the past, than
+disband. In New York City we now have the spectacle of the Church
+operating a saloon and selling strong drink. In all country towns,
+religion, failing in being attractive, has, to keep churches alive,
+resorted to raffles, lotteries, concerts, chicken-pie socials, and
+lectures and exhortations by strange men in curious and unique garb, and
+singers of reputation.
+
+The Church, being a part of society, evolves as society evolves.
+Christianity is a totally different thing now from what it was in
+Humboldt's time; it was a different thing in Humboldt's time from what
+it was a hundred years before.
+
+Behold the spectacle of a thousand highly educated and gentle men, from
+all over the world, decorating with garlands the statue of Bruno in
+Rome, on the site where Churchmen piled high the fagots and burned his
+living body! I foretell that when the next World's Congress of
+Freethinkers occurs in Rome, the Pope will welcome the delegates, and
+their deliberations will occur by invitation in the wide basilica of
+Saint Peter's. The world moves, and the Pope and all the rest of us move
+with it.
+
+When a meeting was recently called in Jersey City to welcome Turner, the
+so-called anarchist, the Mayor forbade the meeting and then placed a
+cordon of policemen around the intended meeting-place. But, lo, in their
+extremity the "anarchists" were invited by a clergyman to come and use
+his church and he led the way to the sacred edifice, warning the police
+to neither follow nor enter. As we become better we meet better
+preachers.
+
+Humboldt could see no rift through the clouds outside of the death of
+the Church and the disbanding of her so-called sacred institutions. We
+now perceive that very rarely are religious opinions consciously
+abandoned; they change, are modified and later evolve into something
+else. Churches are now largely social clubs. In America this is true
+both of Catholic and of Protestant. Most all denominations are
+interested in social betterment, because the trend of human thought is
+in that direction.
+
+The Church is being swept along upon the tide of time. In a few
+instances churches have already evolved practical industrial
+betterments, which are conducted directly under the supervision of the
+church and in its edifice. There are hundreds of Kindergartens now being
+carried on in church buildings that a few years ago were idle and vacant
+all the week. Others have sewing-circles and boys' clubs, and these have
+metamorphosed in some instances into Manual-Training Schools where girls
+are taught Domestic Science and boys are given instruction in the
+Handicrafts. I know a church that derives its support from the sale of
+useful things that are made by its members and workers under the
+supervision of its pastor, who is a master in handicraft. So this pretty
+nearly points the ideal--a church that has evolved into an ethical and
+industrial college, where the pastor is not paid for preaching, but for
+doing.
+
+Charles Bradlaugh once said:
+
+"A paid priesthood blocks evolution. These men are really educated to
+uphold and defend the institution. They can do nothing else. Most of
+them have families dependent upon them--do you wonder that it is a fight
+to the death? It is not truth that the clergy struggles for--they may
+think it is--but the grim fact remains, it is a fight for material
+existence."
+
+We all confuse our interests with the eternal verities--the thing that
+pays us we consider righteous, or at least justifiable. This is the most
+natural thing in the world. An artist who painted very bad pictures once
+took one of his canvases to Whistler for criticism.
+
+Jimmy shrugged his shoulders and made a grimace that spoke volumes. "But
+a man must live some way!" pleaded the poor fellow in his extremity.
+
+"I do not see the necessity," was the weary reply.
+
+Preachers must live; their education and environment have unfitted them
+for useful effort; but they are a part of the great, seething struggle
+for existence. And so we have their piteous and plaintive plea for the
+obsolete and the outworn. Disraeli once in an incautious moment
+exclaimed: "If we do away with the Established Church, what is to become
+of the fourteen million prepared and pickled sermons? Think for a moment
+of the infinite labor of writing new sermons, all based upon a different
+point of view--let us then be reasonable and not subject a profession
+that is overworked to the humiliation of destroying the bulk of its
+assets."
+
+Science deals directly with the maintenance of human life and the
+bettering of every condition of existence through a wider, wiser and
+saner use of the world. Civilization is the working out and
+comprehending and proving how to live in the best way. Theology
+prepares men to die; science fits them to live.
+
+Science deals with your welfare in this world; theology in another.
+Theology has not yet proved that there is another world--its claims are
+not even based upon hearsay. It is a matter of belief and assumption.
+
+Science, too, assumes, and its assumption is this: The best preparation
+for a life to come is to live here and now as if there were no life to
+come.
+
+Your belief will not fix your place in another world--what you are, may.
+The individual who gets most out of this life is fitting himself to get
+most out of another if there is one.
+
+And this brings us up to that paragraph in the "Cosmos" where Humboldt
+says: "I perceive a period when the true priesthood will not be paid to
+defend a fixed system of so-called crystallized truth. But I believe the
+time will come when that man will be most revered who bestows most
+benefits here and now. The clergy of Christendom have stood as leaders
+of thought, but to hold this proud position they must abandon the
+intangible and devote themselves to this world and the people who are
+alive."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Most of Humboldt's time during his middle life was spent at Paris, where
+he was busily engaged in the herculean task of issuing his splendid
+books. He varied his work, however, so that several hours daily were
+devoted to study and scientific research; and from time to time he made
+journeys over Europe and Asia.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Twenty-seven a personal request came from the King
+of Prussia that Humboldt should thereafter make Berlin his home. He was
+too big a man for Germany to lose.
+
+He acceded to the King's request, moved to Berlin and was spoken of as
+"The First Citizen," although he would not consent to hold office, nor
+would he accept a title.
+
+In vexed questions of diplomacy he was often consulted by the King and
+his Cabinet, and in a great many ways he furthered the interests of
+education and civilization by his judicial and timely advice.
+
+He was always a student, always an investigator, always a tireless
+worker. He lived simply and quietly--keeping out of society and away
+from crowds, except on the rare occasions when necessity seemed to
+demand it.
+
+The quality of the man was well mirrored in those magnificent books--all
+that he did was on the scale of grandeur.
+
+His books were too high in price for the average reader, but on request
+of the King he consented to give a course of five, free, popular
+lectures for the people.
+
+No one foresaw the result of these addresses. The course was so
+successful that it extended itself into sixty-one lectures, and covered
+a period of more than ten years' time. No admittance was charged, free
+tickets being given out to applicants. Very soon after the first
+lecture, a traffic sprang up in these free tickets, carried on by our
+Semitic friends, and the tickets soared to as high as three dollars
+each. Then the strong hand of the Government stepped in: the tickets
+were canceled, and the public was admitted to the lectures without
+ceremony. Boxes, however, were set apart for royalty and foreign
+visitors, some of whom came from England, Belgium, Switzerland and
+France. The size of these audiences was limited simply by the capacity
+of the auditorium, the attendance at first being about a thousand;
+later, a larger hall was secured and the attendance ran as high as four
+thousand persons at each address.
+
+The subjects were as follows: three lectures on the History of Science;
+two on reasons why we should study Science; four on the Crust of the
+Earth, and the nature of Volcanoes and Earthquakes; two on the form of
+Earth's Surface and the elevation of the Continents; five on Physical
+Geography; five on the nature of Heat and Magnetism; sixteen on
+Astronomy; two on Mountains and how they are formed; three on the Nature
+of the Sea; three on the Distribution of Matter; ten on the Atmosphere
+as an Elastic Fluid; three on the Geography of Animals; three on Races
+of Men.
+
+Every good thing begins as something else, and what was intended for the
+common people became scientific lectures for educated people. "The man
+who was most benefited by these lectures was myself," said Humboldt.
+
+Men grow by doing things. Lectures are for the lecturer.
+
+Humboldt found out more things in giving these lectures than he knew
+before--he discovered himself. And long before they were completed he
+knew that his best work was embodied right here--in doing for others he
+had done for himself.
+
+In attempting to reveal the Universe or "Cosmos," he revealed most of
+his own comprehensive intelligence. That many of his conclusions have
+since been abandoned by the scientific world does not prove such ideas
+valueless--they helped and are helping men to find the truth.
+
+These sixty-one "popular" and free lectures make up that stupendous work
+now known to us as "Humboldt's Cosmos."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Says Robert Ingersoll in his tribute to Alexander von Humboldt:
+
+"His life was pure, his aims were lofty, his learning varied and
+profound, and his achievements vast.
+
+"We honor him because he has ennobled our race, because he has
+contributed as much as any man, living or dead, to the real prosperity
+of the world. We honor him because he has honored us--because he has
+labored for others--because he was the most learned man of the most
+learned nation of his time--because he left a legacy of glory to every
+human being. For these reasons he is honored throughout the world.
+
+"Millions are doing homage to his genius at this moment, and millions
+are pronouncing his name with reverence and recounting what he
+accomplished.
+
+"We associate the name of Humboldt with oceans, continents, mountains,
+volcanoes--with towering palms--the snow-lipped craters of the
+Andes--the wide deserts--with primeval forests and European
+capitals--with wilderness and universities--with savages and
+savants--with the lonely rivers of unpeopled wastes--with peaks, pampas,
+steppes, cliffs and crags--with the progress of the world--with every
+science known to man and with every star glittering in the immensity of
+space. Humboldt adopted none of the soul-shrinking creeds of his day; he
+wasted none of his time in the inanities, stupidities and contradictions
+of theological metaphysics; he did not endeavor to harmonize the
+astronomy and geology of a barbarous people with the science of the
+Nineteenth Century.
+
+"Never, for one moment, did he abandon the sublime standard of truth: he
+investigated, he studied, he thought, he separated the gold from the
+dross in the crucible of his brain. He was never found on his knees
+before the altar of superstition. He stood erect by the tranquil column
+of Reason. He was an admirer, a lover, an adorer of Nature, and at the
+age of ninety, bowed by the weight of nearly a century, covered with the
+insignia of honor, loved by a nation, respected by a world, with kings
+for his servants, he laid his weary head upon her bosom--upon the bosom
+of the Universal Mother--and with her loving arms about him, sank into
+that slumber which we call Death.
+
+"History added another name to the starry scroll of the immortals.
+
+"The world is his monument; upon the eternal granite of her hills he
+inscribed his name, and there, upon everlasting stone, his genius wrote
+this, the sublimest of truths: The universe is governed by law."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: WILLIAM HERSCHEL]
+
+WILLIAM HERSCHEL
+
+
+     The great number of alterations of stars that we are certain have
+     happened within the last two centuries, and the much greater number
+     that we have reason to suspect to have taken place, are curious
+     features in the history of the heavens, as curious as the slow
+     wearing away of the landmarks of our earth on mountains, on river
+     banks, on ocean shores. If we consider how little attention has
+     formerly been paid this subject, and that most of the observations
+     we have are of a very late date, it would perhaps not appear
+     extraordinary were we to admit the number of alterations that have
+     probably happened to different stars, within our own time, to be a
+     hundred.
+
+     --_William Herschel_
+
+
+WILLIAM HERSCHEL
+
+William Herschell, born Seventeen Hundred Thirty-eight, in the city
+of Hanover, was the fourth child in a family of ten. Big families, I am
+told, usually live in little houses, while little families live in big
+houses. The Herschels were no exception to the rule.
+
+Isaac Herschel, known to the world as being the father of his son, was a
+poor man, depending for support upon his meager salary as bandmaster to
+a regiment of the Hanoverian Guards.
+
+At the garrison school, taught by a retired captain, William was the
+star scholar. In mathematics he propounded problems that made the worthy
+captain pooh-pooh and change the subject.
+
+At fourteen, he was playing a hautboy in his father's band and
+practising on the violin at spare times.
+
+For music he had a veritable passion, and to have a passion for a thing
+means that you excel in it--excellence is a matter of intensity. One of
+the players in the band was a Frenchman, and William made an arrangement
+to give the "parlez vous" lessons on the violin as payment for lessons
+in French.
+
+This whole brood of Herschel children was musical, and very early in
+life the young Herschels became self-supporting as singers and players.
+"It is the only thing they can do," their father said. But his loins
+were wiser than his head.
+
+In Seventeen Hundred Fifty-five William accompanied his father's band to
+England, where they went to take part in a demonstration in honor of a
+Hanoverian, one George the Third, who later was to play a necessary part
+in a symphony that was to edify the American Colonies. America owes much
+to George the Third.
+
+Young Herschel had already learned to speak English, just as he had
+learned French. In England he spent all the money he had for three
+volumes of "Locke on the Human Understanding."
+
+These books were to remain his lifelong possession and to be passed on,
+well-thumbed, to his son more than half a century later.
+
+At the time of the breaking out of the Seven Years' War, William
+Herschel was nineteen. His regiment had been ordered to march in a week.
+Here was a pivotal point--should he go and fight for the glory of
+Prussia?
+
+Not he--by the connivance of his mother and sisters, he was secreted on
+a trading-sloop bound for England. This is what is called desertion; and
+just how the young man evaded the penalties, since the King of England
+was also Elector of Hanover, I do not know, but the House of Hanover
+made no effort toward punishment of the culprit, even when the facts
+were known.
+
+Musicians of quality were, perhaps, needed in England; and as
+sheep-stealing is looked upon lightly by priests who love mutton, so do
+kings forgive infractions if they need the man.
+
+When William Herschel landed at Dover he had in his pocket a single
+crownpiece, and his luggage consisted of the clothes he wore, and a
+violin. The violin secured him board and lodgings along the road as he
+walked to London, just as Oliver Goldsmith paid his way with a similar
+legal tender.
+
+In London, Herschel's musical skill quickly got him an engagement at one
+of the theaters. In a few months we hear of his playing solos at
+Brabandt's aristocratic concerts. Little journeys into "the provinces"
+were taken by the orchestra to which Herschel belonged. Among other
+places visited was Bath, and here the troupe was booked for a two-weeks'
+engagement. At this time Bath was run wide open.
+
+Bath was a rendezvous for the gouty dignitaries of Church and State who
+had grown swag through sloth and much travel by the gorge route. There
+were ministers of state, soldiers, admirals-of-the-sea, promoters,
+preachers, philosophers, players, poets, polite gamblers and buffoons.
+
+They idled, fiddled, danced, gabbled, gadded and gossiped. The "School
+for Scandal" was written on the spot, with models drawn from life. It
+wasn't a play--it was a cross-section of Bath Society.
+
+Bath was a clearing-house for the wit, learning and folly of all
+England--the combined Hot Springs, Coney Island, Saratoga and Old Point
+Comfort of the Kingdom. The most costly church of its size in America is
+at Saint Augustine, Florida. The repentant ones patronize it in Lent;
+the rest of the year it is closed.
+
+At Bath there was the Octagon Chapel, which had the best pipe-organ in
+England. Herschel played the organ: where he learned how nobody seemed
+to know--he himself did not know. But playing musical instruments is a
+little like learning a new language.
+
+A man who speaks three languages can take a day off and learn a fourth
+almost any time. Somebody has said that there is really only one
+language, and most of us have only a dialect. Acquire three languages
+and you perceive that there is a universal basis upon which the various
+tongues are built.
+
+Herschel could play the hautboy, the violin and the harpsichord. The
+organ came easy. When he played the organ in the Chapel at Bath, fair
+ladies forgot the Pump-Room, and the gallants followed them--naturally.
+Herschel became the rage. He was a handsome fellow, with a pride so
+supreme that it completed the circle, and people called it humility. He
+talked but little, and made himself scarce--a point every genius should
+ponder well.
+
+The disarming of the populace--confiscating canes, umbrellas and
+parasols--before allowing people to enter an art-gallery is necessary;
+although it is a peculiar comment on humanity to think people have a
+tendency to smite, punch, prod and poke beautiful things. The same
+propensity manifests itself in wishing to fumble a genius. Get your
+coarse hands on Richard Mansfield if you can! Corral Maude
+Adams--hardly. To do big things, to create, breaks down tissue awfully,
+and to mix it with society and still do big things for society is
+impossible.
+
+At Bath, Herschel was never seen in the Pump-Room, nor on the North
+Parade. People who saw him paid for the privilege. "In England about
+this time look out for a shower of genius," the almanackers might have
+said.
+
+To Bath came two Irishmen, Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
+Burke rented rooms of Doctor Nugent, and married the doctor's daughter,
+and never regretted it. Sheridan also married a Bath girl, but added the
+right touch of romance by keeping the matter secret, with the intent
+that if either party wished to back out of the agreement it would be
+allowed. This was quite Irish-like, since according to English Law a
+marriage is a marriage until Limbus congeals and is used for a
+skating-rink.
+
+With the true spirit of chivalry, Sheridan left the questions of
+publicity or secrecy to his wife: she could have her freedom if she
+wished. He was a fledgling barrister, with his future in front of him,
+the child of "strolling players"; she, the beautiful Miss Linlay, was a
+singer of note. Her father was the leader of the Bath Orchestra, and had
+a School of Oratory where young people agitated the atmosphere in
+orotund and tremolo and made the ether vibrate in glee. Doctor Linlay's
+daughter was his finest pupil, and with her were elucidated all his
+theories concerning the Sixteen Perspective Laws of Art. She also proved
+a few points in stirpiculture. She was a most beautiful girl of
+seventeen when Richard Brinsley Sheridan led her to the altar, or I
+should say to a Dissenting Pastor's back door by night. She could sing,
+recite, act, and impersonate in pantomime and Greek gown, the passions
+of Fear, Hate, Supplication, Horror, Revenge, Jealousy, Rage and Faith.
+
+Romney moved down to Bath just so as to have Miss Linlay and Lady
+Hamilton for models. He posed Miss Linlay as the Madonna, Beulah, Rena,
+Ruth, Miriam and Cecilia; and Lady Hamilton for Susannah at the Bath,
+Alicia and Andromache, and also had her illustrate the Virtues, Graces,
+Fates and Passions.
+
+When the beautiful Miss Linlay, the pride and pet of Bath, got ready to
+announce her marriage, she did it by simply changing the inscription
+beneath a Romney portrait that hung in the anteroom of the artist's
+studio, marking out the words "Miss Linlay," and writing over it, "Mrs.
+Richard Brinsley Sheridan."
+
+The Bath porchers who looked after other people's business, having none
+of their own, burbled and chortled like siphons of soda, and the marvel
+to all was that such a brilliant girl should thus throw herself away on
+a sprig of the law. "He acts, too, I believe," said Goldsmith to Doctor
+Johnson.
+
+And Doctor Johnson said, "Sir, he does nothing else," thus anticipating
+James McNeil Whistler by more than a hundred years.
+
+But alas for the luckless Linlay, the Delsarte of his day, poor man! he
+used words not to be found in Johnson's Dictionary, and outdid Cassius
+in the quarrel-scene to the Brutus of Richard Brinsley.
+
+But very soon things settled down--they always do when mixed with
+time--and all were happy, or reasonably so, forever after.
+
+Herschel resigned from Brabandt's Orchestra and remained in Bath. He
+taught music, played the organ, became first violinist for Professor
+Linlay and later led the orchestra when Linlay was on the road starring
+the one-night stands and his beautiful daughter.
+
+Things seemed to prosper with the kindly and talented German. He was
+reserved, intellectual, and was respected by the best. He was making
+money--not as London brokers might count money, but prosperous for a
+mere music-teacher.
+
+And so there came a day when he bought out the school of Professor
+Linlay, and became proprietor and leader of the famous Bath Orchestra.
+
+But the talented Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan was sorely missed--a
+woman soloist of worth was needed.
+
+Herschel thought and pondered. He tried candidates from London and a few
+from Paris. Some had voices, but no intellect. A very few had intellect,
+but were without voice. Some thought they had a voice when what they had
+was a disease. Other voices he tried and found guilty.
+
+Those who had voice and spirit had tempers like a tornado.
+
+Herschel decided to educate a soloist and assistant. To marry a woman
+for the sake of educating her was risky business--he knew of men who had
+tried it--for men have tried it since the time of the Cavemen.
+
+A bright thought came to him! He would go back to Deutschland and get
+one of his sisters, and bring her over to England to help him do his
+work--just the very thing!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a most fortunate stroke for Herschel when he went back home to
+get one of his sisters to come over into Macedonia and help him. No man
+ever did a great work unless he was backed up by a good woman. There
+were five of these Herschel girls--three were married, so they were out
+of the question, and another was engaged. This left Caroline as first,
+last and only choice. Caroline was twenty-two and could sing a little.
+
+She had appeared in concerts for her father when a child. But when the
+father died, the girl was set to work in a dressmaking and millinery
+shop, to help support the big family. The mother didn't believe that
+women should be educated--it unfitted them for domesticity, and to speak
+of a woman as educated was to suggest that she was a poor housekeeper.
+
+In Greece of old, educated women were spoken of as "companions"--and
+this meant that they were not what you would call respectable. They were
+the intellectual companions of men. The Greek term of disrespect carried
+with it a trifle of a suggestion not intended, that is, that women who
+were not educated--not intellectual--were really not companionable--but
+let that pass. It is curious how this idea that a woman is only a
+scullion and a drudge has permeated society until even the women
+themselves partake of the prejudice against themselves.
+
+Mother Herschel didn't want her daughters to become educated, nor study
+the science of music nor the science of anything. A goodly grocer of the
+Dutch School had been picked out as a husband for Caroline, and now if
+she went away her prospects were ruined--Ach, Mein Gott! or words to
+that effect. And it was only on William's promise to pay the mother a
+weekly sum equal to the wages that Caroline received in the
+dressmaking-shop that she gave consent to her daughter's going. Caroline
+arrived in England, wearing wooden shoon and hoops that were exceeding
+Dutch, but without a word of English. In order to be of positive use to
+her brother, she must acquire English and be able to sing--not only sing
+well, but remarkably well. In less than a year she was singing solo
+parts at her brother's concerts, to the great delight of the aristocrats
+of Bath.
+
+They heard her sing, but they did not take her captive and submerge her
+in their fashionable follies as they would have liked to do.
+
+The sister and the brother kept close to their own rooms. Caroline was
+the housekeeper, and took a pride in being able to dispense with all
+outside help. She was small in figure, petite, face plain but full of
+animation. All of her spare time she devoted to her music. After the
+concerts she and her brother would leave the theater, change their
+clothes and then walk off into the country, getting back as late as one
+or two o'clock in the morning. On these midnight walks they used to
+study the stars and talk of the wonderful work of Kepler and Copernicus.
+There were various requests that Caroline should go to London and sing,
+but she steadfastly refused to appear on a stage except where her
+brother led the orchestra. About this time Caroline wrote a letter home,
+which missive, by the way, is still in existence, in which she says:
+"William goes to bed early when there are no concerts or rehearsals. He
+has a bowl of milk on the stand beside him, and he reads Smith's
+'Harmonics' and Ferguson's 'Astronomy.' I sit sewing in the next room,
+and occasionally he will call to me to listen while he reads some
+passage that most pleases him. So he goes to sleep buried beneath his
+favorite authors, and his first thought in the morning is how to obtain
+instruments so we can study the harmonics of the sky." And a way was to
+open: they were to make their own telescopes--what larks! Brother and
+sister set to work studying the laws of optics. In a secondhand store
+they found a small Gregorian reflector which had an aperture of about
+two inches.
+
+This gave them a little peep into the heavens, but was really only a
+tantalization.
+
+They set to work making a telescope-tube out of pasteboard. It was about
+eighteen feet long, and the "board" was made in the genuine pasteboard
+way--by pasting sheet after sheet of paper together until the substance
+was as thick and solid as a board.
+
+So this brother and sister worked at all odd hours pasting sheet after
+sheet of paper--old letters, old books--with occasional strips of cloth
+to give extra strength. Lenses were bought in London, and at last our
+precious musical pair, with astronomy for their fad, had the
+satisfaction of getting a view of Saturn that showed the rings.
+
+It need not be explained that astronomical observations must be made out
+of doors. Further, the whole telescope must be out of doors so as to get
+an even temperature. This is a fact that the excellent astronomers of
+the Mikado of Japan did not know until very recently. It seems they
+constructed a costly telescope and housed it in a costly
+observatory-house, with an aperture barely large enough for the big
+telescope to be pointed out at the heavens. Inside, the astronomer had a
+comfortable fire, for the season was then Winter and the weather cold.
+But the wise man could see nothing and the belief was getting abroad
+that the machine was bewitched, or that their Yankee brothers had
+lawsonized the buyers, when our own David P. Todd, of Amherst, happened
+along and informed them that the heat-waves which arose from their warm
+room caused a perturbation in the atmosphere which made star-gazing
+impossible. At once they made their house over, with openings so as to
+insure an even temperature, and Prince Fusiyama Noguchi wrote to
+Professor Todd, making him a Knight of the Golden Dragon on special
+order of the heaven-born Mikado.
+
+The Herschels knew enough of the laws of heat and refraction to realize
+they must have an even temperature, but they forgot that pasteboard was
+porous.
+
+One night they left their telescope out of doors, and a sudden shower
+transformed the straight tube into the arc of a circle. All attempts to
+straighten it were vain, so they took out the lenses and went to work
+making a tube of copper. In this, brother, sister and genius--which is
+concentration and perseverance--united to overcome the innate meanness
+of animate and inanimate things. A failure was not a failure to them--it
+was an opportunity to meet a difficulty and overcome it.
+
+The partial success of the new telescope aroused the brother and the
+sister to fresh exertions. The work had been begun as a mere
+recreation--a rest from the exactions of the public which they diverted
+and amused with their warblings, concussions and vibrations.
+
+They were still amateur astronomers, and the thought that they
+would ever be anything else had not come to them. But they wanted
+to get a better view of the heavens--a view through a Newtonian
+reflecting-telescope. So they counted up their savings and decided that
+if they could get some instrument-maker in London to make them a
+reflecting-telescope six feet long, they would be perfectly willing to
+pay him fifty pounds for it. This study of the skies was their only form
+of dissipation, and even if it was a little expensive it enabled them to
+escape the Pump-Room rabble and flee boredom and introspection. A hunt
+was taken through London, but no one could be found who would make such
+an instrument as they wanted for the price they could afford to pay.
+They found, however, an amateur lens-polisher who offered to sell his
+tools, materials and instruments for a small sum. After consultation,
+the brother and sister bought him out. So at the price they expected to
+pay for a telescope they had a machine-shop on their hands.
+
+The work of grinding and polishing lenses is a most delicate business.
+Only a person of infinite patience and persistency can succeed at it.
+
+In Allegheny, Pennsylvania, lives John Brashear, who, by his own
+efforts, assisted by a noble wife, graduated from a rolling-mill and
+became a maker of telescopes.
+
+Brashear is practically the one telescope lens-maker of America since
+Alvan Clark resigned. There is no competition in this line--the
+difficulties are too appalling for the average man. The slightest
+accident or an unseen flaw, and the work of months or years goes into
+the dustbin of time, and all must be gone over again.
+
+So when we think of this brother and sister sailing away upon an unknown
+ocean--working day after day, night after night, week after week, and
+month after month, discarding scores of specula which they had worked
+upon many weary hours in order to get the glass that would serve their
+purpose--we must remove our hats in reverence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+God sends great men in groups. From Seventeen Hundred Forty for the next
+thirty-five years the intellectual sky seemed full of shooting-stars.
+Watt had watched to a purpose his mother's teakettle; Boston Harbor was
+transformed into another kind of Hyson dish; Franklin had been busy with
+kite and key; Gibbon was writing his "Decline and Fall"; Fate was
+pitting the Pitts against Fox; Hume was challenging worshipers of a
+Fetish and supplying arguments still bright with use; Voltaire and
+Rousseau were preparing the way for Madame Guillotine; Horace Walpole
+was printing marvelous books at his private press at Strawberry Hill;
+Sheridan was writing autobiographical comedies; David Garrick was
+mimicking his way to immortality; Gainsborough was working the
+apotheosis of a hat; Reynolds, Lawrence, Romney, and West, the American,
+were forming an English School of Art; George Washington and George the
+Third were linking their names preparatory to sending them down the
+ages; Boswell was penning undying gossip; Blackstone was writing his
+"Commentaries" for legal lights unborn; Thomas Paine was getting his
+name on the blacklist of orthodoxy; Burke, the Irishman, was polishing
+his brogue so that he might be known as England's greatest orator; the
+little Corsican was dreaming dreams of conquest; Wellesley was having
+presentiments of coming difficulties; Goldsmith was giving dinners with
+bailiffs for servants; Hastings was defending a suit where the chief
+participants were to die before a verdict was rendered; Captain Cook was
+giving to this world new lands; while William Herschel and his sister
+were showing the world still other worlds, till then unknown.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the brother and sister had followed the subject of astronomy as far
+as Ferguson had followed it, and knew all that he knew, they thought
+they surely would be content.
+
+Progress depends upon continually being dissatisfied. Now Ferguson
+aggravated them by his limitations.
+
+In their music they amused, animated and inspired the fashionable
+idlers.
+
+William gave lessons to his private pupils, led his orchestra, played
+the organ and harpsichord, and managed to make ends meet, and would have
+gotten reasonably rich had he not invested his spare cash in lenses,
+brass tubes, eyepieces, specula and other such trifles, and stood most
+of the night out on the lawn peering at the sky.
+
+He had been studying stars for seven years before the Bath that he
+amused awoke to the fact that there was a genius among them. And this
+genius was not the idolized Beau Nash whose statue adorned the
+Pump-Room! No, it was the man whose back they saw at the concerts.
+
+During all these years Herschel had worked alone, and he had scarcely
+ever mentioned the subject of astronomy with any one save his sister.
+
+One night, however, he had moved his telescope into the middle of the
+street to get away from the shadows of the houses. A doctor who had been
+out to answer a midnight call stopped at the unusual sight and asked if
+he might look through the instrument.
+
+Permission was courteously granted. The next day the doctor called on
+the astronomer to thank him for the privilege of looking through a
+better telescope than his own. The doctor was Sir William Watson, an
+amateur astronomer and all-round scientist, and member of the Royal
+Society of London.
+
+Herschel had held himself high--he had not gossiped of his work with the
+populace, cheapening his thought by diluting it for cheap people. Watson
+saw that Herschel, working alone, isolated, had surpassed the schools.
+
+There is a nugget of wisdom in Ibsen's remark, "The strongest man is he
+who stands alone," and Kipling's paraphrase, "He travels the fastest who
+travels alone."
+
+The chance acquaintance of Herschel and Watson soon ripened into a very
+warm friendship.
+
+Herschel amused the neurotics, Watson dosed and blistered them--both for
+a consideration. Each had a beautiful contempt for the society they
+served. Watson's father was of the purple, while Herschel's was of the
+people, but both men belonged to the aristocracy of intellect. Watson
+introduced Herschel into the select scientific circle of London, where
+his fine reserve and dignity made their due impress. Herschel's first
+paper to the Royal Society, presented by Doctor Watson, was on the
+periodical star in Collo Ceti. The members of the Society, always very
+jealous and suspicious of outsiders, saw they had a thinker to deal
+with.
+
+Some one carried the news to Bath--a great astronomer was now among
+them! About this time Horace Walpole said, "Mr. Herschel will content me
+if, instead of a million worlds, he can discover me thirteen colonies
+well inhabited by men and women, and can annex them to the Crown of
+Great Britain in lieu of those it has lost beyond the Atlantic."
+
+Bath society now took up astronomy as a fad, and fashionable ladies
+named the planets both backward and forward from a blackboard list set
+up in the Pump-House by Fanny Burney, the clever one.
+
+Herschel was invited to give popular lectures on the music of the
+spheres. Herschel's music-parlors were besieged by good people who
+wanted to make engagements with him to look through his telescope.
+
+One good woman gave the year, month, day, hour and minute of her birth
+and wanted her fortune told. Poor Herschel declined, saying he knew
+nothing of astronomy, but could give her lessons in music if desired.
+
+In answer to the law of supply and demand, thus proving the efficacy of
+prayer, an itinerant astronomer came down from London and set up a
+five-foot telescope on the Parade and solicited the curious ones at a
+tuppence a peep. This itinerant interested the populace by telling them
+a few stories about the stars that were not recorded in Ferguson, and
+passed out his cards showing where he could be consulted as a
+fortune-teller during the day. Herschel was once passing by this street
+astronomer, who was crying his wares, and a sudden impulse coming over
+him to see how bad the man's lens might be, he stopped to take a peep at
+Earth's satellite. He handed out the usual tuppence, but the owner of
+the telescope loftily passed it back saying, "I takes no fee from a
+fellow-philosopher!"
+
+This story went the rounds, and when it reached London it had been
+amended thus: Charles Fox was taking a ramble at Bath, ran across
+William Herschel at work, and mistaking him for an itinerant, the great
+statesman stopped, peeped through the aperture, and then passing out a
+tuppence moved along blissfully unaware of his error, for Herschel being
+a perfect gentleman would not embarrass the great man by refusing his
+copper.
+
+When Herschel was asked if the story was true he denied the whole
+fabric, which the knowing ones said was further proof of his gentlemanly
+instincts--for a true gentleman will always lie under two conditions:
+first, to save a woman's honor; and second, to save a friend from
+embarrassment. As a profession, astrology has proved a better investment
+than astronomy. Astronomy has nothing to offer but abstract truth, and
+those who love astronomy must do so for truth's sake.
+
+Astronomical discoveries can not be covered by copyright or patent, nor
+can any new worlds be claimed as private property and financed by stock
+companies, frenzied or otherwise. Astrology, on the other hand, relates
+to love-affairs, vital statistics, goldmines, misplaced jewels and lost
+opportunities.
+
+Yet, in this year of grace, Nineteen Hundred Five, Boston newspapers
+carry a column devoted to announcements of astrologers, while the
+Cambridge Astronomical Observatory never gets so much as a mention from
+one year's end to the other. Besides that, astronomers have to be
+supported by endowment--mendicancy--while astrologers are paid for their
+prophecies by the people whose destinies they invent. This shows us how
+far as a nation we have traveled on the stony road of Science.
+
+Science, forsooth? Oh, yes, of course--science--bang! bang! bang!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the month of March, in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-one, Herschel, by the
+discovery of Uranus, found his place as a fixed star among the world's
+great astronomers. Years before this, William and Caroline had figured
+it out that there must be another planet in our system in order to
+account plausibly for the peculiar ellipses of the others. That is to
+say, they felt the influence of this seventh planet; its attractive
+force was realized, but where it was they could not tell. Its discovery
+by Herschel was quite accidental. He was sweeping the heavens for comets
+when this star came within his vision. Others had seen it, too, but had
+classified it as "a vagrant fixed star."
+
+It was the work of Herschel to discover that it was not a fixed star,
+but had a defined and distinct orbit that could be calculated. To look
+up at the heavens and pick out a star that could only be seen with a
+telescope--pick it out of millions and ascertain its movement--seems
+like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.
+
+The present method of finding asteroids and comets by means of
+photography is simple and easy. The plate is exposed in a frame that
+moves by clockwork with the earth, so as to keep the same field of stars
+steady on the glass. After two, three or four hours' exposure, the
+photograph will show the fixed stars, but the planets, asteroids and
+comets will reveal themselves as a white streak of light, showing
+plainly where the sitters moved.
+
+Herschel had to watch each particular star in person, whereas the
+photographic lens will watch a thousand.
+
+How close and persistent an observer a man must be who, watching one
+star at a time, discovers the one in a million that moves, is apparent.
+Chance, surely, must also come to his aid and rescue if he succeeds.
+
+Herschel found his moving star, and at first mistook it for a comet.
+Later, he and Caroline were agreed that it was in very truth their
+long-looked-for planet. There are no proprietary rights in newly
+discovered worlds--the reward is in the honor of the discovery, just as
+the best recompense for a good deed lies in having done it.
+
+The Royal Society was the recording station, as Kiel, Greenwich and
+Harvard are now. Herschel made haste to get his new world on record
+through his kind neighbor, Doctor Watson.
+
+The Royal Society gave out the information, and soon various other
+telescopes corroborated the discovery made by the Bath musician.
+Herschel christened his new discovery "Georgium Sidus," in honor of the
+King; but the star belonged as much to Germany and France as to England,
+and astronomers abroad scouted the idea of peppering the heavens with
+the names of nobodies.
+
+Several astronomers suggested the name "Herschel," if the discoverer
+would consent, but this he would not do. Doctor Bode then named the new
+star "Uranus," and Uranus it is, although perhaps with any other name
+'t would shine as bright.
+
+Herschel was forty-three years old when he discovered Uranus. He was
+still a professional musician, and an amateur astronomer.
+
+But it did not require much arguing on the part of Doctor Watson when he
+presented Herschel's name for membership in the Royal Society for that
+most respectable body of scholars to at once pass favorably on the
+nomination. As one member in seconding the motion put it, "Herschel
+honors us in accepting this membership, quite as much as we do him in
+granting it."
+
+And so the next paper presented by Herschel to the Royal Society appears
+on the record signed "William Herschel, F.R.S."
+
+Some time afterwards, it was to appear, "William Herschel, F.R.S., LL.D.
+(Edinburgh)"; and then "Sir William Herschel, F.R.S., LL.D., D.C.L.
+(Oxon)."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+George the Third, in about the year Seventeen Hundred Eighty-two, had
+invited his distinguished Hanoverian countryman to become an attache of
+the Court with the title of "Astronomer to the King." The
+Astronomer-Royal, in charge of the Greenwich Observatory, was one Doctor
+Maskelyne, a man of much learning, a stickler for the fact, but with a
+mustard-seed imagination. Being asked his opinion of Herschel he assured
+the company thus: "Herschel is a great musician--a great musician!"
+Afterwards Maskelyne explained that the reason Herschel saw more than
+other astronomers was because he had made himself a better telescope.
+
+One real secret of Herschel's influence seems to have been his fine
+enthusiasm. He worked with such vim, such animation, that he radiated
+light on every side. He set others to work, and his love for astronomy
+as a science created a demand for telescopes, which he himself had to
+supply. It does not seem that he cared especially for money--all he made
+he spent for new apparatus. He had a force of about a dozen men making
+telescopes. He worked with them in blouse and overalls, and not one of
+his workmen excelled him as a machinist. The King bought several of his
+telescopes for from one hundred to three hundred pounds each, and
+presented them to universities and learned societies throughout the
+world. One fine telescope was presented to the University of Gottingen,
+and Herschel was sent in person to present it. He was received with the
+greatest honors, and scientists and musicians vied with one another to
+do him homage.
+
+In Seventeen Hundred Eighty-two Herschel and his sister gave up their
+musical work and moved from Bath to quarters provided for them near
+Windsor Castle. Herschel's salary was then the modest sum of two hundred
+pounds a year.
+
+Caroline was honored with the title "Assistant to the King's Astronomer"
+with the stipend of fifty pounds a year. It will thus be seen that the
+kingly idea of astronomy had not traveled far from what it was when
+every really respectable court had a retinue of singers, musicians,
+clowns, dancers, palmists and scientists to amuse the people somewhat
+ironically called "nobility." King George the Third paid his Cook,
+Master of the Kennels, Chaplain and Astronomer the same amount. The
+father of Richard Brinsley Sheridan was "Elocutionist to the King," and
+was paid a like sum.
+
+When Doctor Watson heard that Herschel was about to leave Bath he wrote,
+"Never bought King honor so cheap."
+
+It was nominated in the bond that Herschel should act as "Guide to the
+heavens for the diversification of visitors whenever His Majesty wills
+it."
+
+But it was also provided that the astronomer should be allowed to carry
+on the business of making and selling his telescopes.
+
+Herschel's enthusiasm for his beloved science never abated. But often
+his imagination outran his facts.
+
+Great minds divine the thing first--they see it with their inward eye.
+Yet there may be danger in this, for in one's anxiety to prove what he
+first only imagined, small proof suffices. Thus Herschel was for many
+years sure that the moon had an atmosphere and was inhabited; he thought
+that he had seen clear through the Milky Way and discovered empty space
+beyond; he calculated distances, and announced how far Castor was from
+Pollux; he even made a guess as to how long it took for a gaseous nebula
+to resolve itself into a planetary system; he believed the sun was a
+molten mass of fire--a thing that many believed until they saw the
+incandescent electric lamp--and in various other ways made daring
+prophecies which science has not only failed to corroborate, but which
+we now know to be errors.
+
+But the intensity of his nature was both his virtue and his weakness.
+Men who do nothing and say nothing are never ridiculous. Those who hope
+much, believe much, and love much, make mistakes.
+
+Constant effort and frequent mistakes are the stepping-stones of genius.
+
+In all, Herschel contributed sixty-seven important papers to the
+proceedings of the Royal Society, and in one of these, which was written
+in his eightieth year, he says, "My enthusiasm has occasionally led me
+astray, and I wish now to correct a statement which I made to you
+twenty-eight years ago." He then enumerates some particular statement
+about the height of mountains in the moon, and corrects it. Truth was
+more to Herschel than consistency. Indeed, the earnestness, purity of
+purpose, and simplicity of his mind stamp him as one of the world's
+great men.
+
+At Windsor he built a two-story observatory. In the wintertime every
+night when the stars could be seen, was sacred. No matter how cold the
+weather, he stood and watched; while down below, the faithful Caroline
+sat and recorded the observations that he called down to her.
+
+Caroline was his confidante, adviser, secretary, servant, friend. She
+had a telescope of her own, and when her brother did not need her
+services she swept the heavens on her own account for maverick comets.
+In her work she was eminently successful, and five comets at least are
+placed to her credit on the honor-roll by right of priority. Her
+discoveries were duly forwarded by her brother to the Royal Society for
+record.
+
+Later, the King of Prussia was to honor her with a gold medal, and
+several learned societies elected her an honorary member. When Herschel
+reached the discreet age of fifty he married the worthy Mrs. John Pitt,
+former wife of a London merchant. It is believed that the marriage was
+arranged by the King in person, out of his great love for both parties.
+At any rate Miss Burney thought so. Miss Burney was Keeper of the Royal
+Wardrobe at the same salary that Herschel had been receiving--two
+hundred pounds a year. She also took charge of the Court Gossip, with
+various volunteer assistants. "Gold, as well as stars, glitters for
+astronomers," said little Miss Burney. "Mrs. Pitt is very rich, meek,
+quiet, rather pretty and quite unobjectionable." But poor Caroline!
+
+It nearly broke her heart. William was her idol--she lived but for
+him--now she seemed to be replaced. She moved away into a modest cottage
+of her own, resolved that she would not be an encumbrance to any one.
+She thought she was going into a decline, and would not live long
+anyway--she was so pale and slight that Miss Burney said it took two of
+her to make a shadow.
+
+But we get a glimpse of Caroline's energy when we find her writing home
+explaining how she had just painted her house, inside and out, with her
+own hands.
+
+Things are never so bad as they seem. It was not very long before
+William was sending for Caroline to come and help him out with his
+mathematical calculations. Later, when a fine boy baby arrived in the
+Herschel solar system, Caroline forgave all and came to take care of
+what she called "the Herschel planetoid." She loved this baby as her
+own, and all the pent-up motherhood in her nature went out to the little
+"Sir John Herschel," the knighthood having been conferred on him by
+Caroline before he was a month old.
+
+Mrs. Herschel was beautiful and amiable, and she and Caroline became
+genuine sisters in spirit. Each had her own work to do; they were not in
+competition save in their love for the baby. As the boy grew, Caroline
+took upon herself the task of teaching him astronomy, quite to the
+amusement of the father and mother. Fanny Burney now comes with a little
+flung-off nebula to the effect that "Herschel is quite the happiest man
+in the kingdom." There is a most charming little biography of Caroline
+Herschel, written by the good wife of Sir John Herschel, wherein some
+very gentle foibles are laid bare, and where at the same time tribute is
+paid to a great and beautiful spirit. The idea that Caroline was not
+going to live long after the marriage of her brother was "greatly
+exaggerated"--she lived to be ninety-eight, a century lacking two years!
+Her mind was bright to the last--when ninety she sang at a concert given
+for the benefit of an old ladies' home. At ninety-six she danced a
+minuet with the King of Prussia, and requested that worthy not to
+introduce her as "the woman astronomer, because, you know, I was only
+the assistant of my brother!" William Herschel died in his eighty-fourth
+year, with his fame at full, honored, respected, beloved.
+
+Sir John Herschel, his son, was worthy to be called the son of his
+father. He was an active worker in the field of science--a strong, yet
+gentle man, with no jealousy nor whim in his nature. "His life was full
+of the docility of a sage and the innocence of a child."
+
+John Herschel died at Collingwood, May Eleventh, Eighteen Hundred
+Seventy-one, and his dust is now resting in Westminster Abbey, close by
+the grave of England's famous scholar, Sir Isaac Newton.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: CHARLES DARWIN]
+
+CHARLES DARWIN
+
+
+     I feel most deeply that this whole question of Creation is too
+     profound for human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the
+     mind of Newton! Let each man hope and believe what he can.
+
+     --_Charles Darwin to Asa Gray_
+
+     None have fought better, and none have been more fortunate, than
+     Charles Darwin. He found a great truth trodden underfoot, reviled
+     by bigots, and ridiculed by all the world; he lived long enough to
+     see it, chiefly by his own efforts, irrefragably established in
+     science, inseparably incorporated into the common thoughts of men.
+     What shall a man desire more than this?
+
+     --_Thomas Huxley, Address, April Twenty-seventh, Eighteen Hundred
+     Eighty-two_
+
+
+CHARLES DARWIN
+
+Evolution is at work everywhere, even in the matter of jokes. Once
+in the House of Commons, Benjamin Disraeli, who prided himself on his
+fine scholarship as well as on his Hyperion curl, interrupted a speaker
+and corrected him on a matter of history.
+
+"I would rather be a gentleman than a scholar!" the man replied. "My
+friend is seldom either," came the quick response.
+
+When Thomas Brackett Reed was Speaker of the House of Representatives, a
+member once took exception to a ruling of the "Czar," and having in mind
+Reed's supposed Presidential aspirations closed his protests with the
+thrust, "I would rather be right than President." "The gentleman will
+never be either," came the instant retort.
+
+But some years before the reign of the American Czar, Gladstone, Premier
+of England, said, "I would rather be right and believe in the Bible,
+than excite a body of curious, infidelic, so-called scientists to
+unbecoming wonder by tracing their ancestry to a troglodyte." And Huxley
+replied, "I, too, would rather be right--I would rather be right than
+Premier."
+
+Charles Darwin was a Gentle Man. He was the greatest naturalist of his
+time, and a more perfect gentleman never lived. His son Francis said: "I
+can not remember ever hearing my father utter an unkind or hasty word.
+If in his presence some one was being harshly criticized, he always
+thought of something to say in way of palliation and excuse."
+
+One of his companions on the "Beagle," who saw him daily for five years
+on that memorable trip, wrote: "A protracted sea-voyage is a most severe
+test of friendship, and Darwin was the only man on our ship, or that I
+ever heard of, who stood the ordeal. He never lost his temper or made an
+unkind remark."
+
+Captain Fitz-Roy of the "Beagle" was a disciplinarian, and absolute in
+his authority, as a sea-captain must be. The ship had just left one of
+the South American ports where the captain had gone ashore and been
+entertained by a coffee-planter. On this plantation all the work was
+done by slaves, who, no doubt, were very well treated.
+
+The captain thought that negroes well cared for were very much better
+off than if free. And further, he related how the owner had called up
+various slaves and had the Captain ask them if they wished their
+freedom, and the answer was always, "No."
+
+Darwin interposed by asking the Captain what he thought the answer of a
+slave was worth when being interrogated in the presence of his owner.
+
+Here Fitz-Roy flew into a passion, berating the volunteer naturalist,
+and suggested a taste of the rope's end in lieu of logic. Young Darwin
+made no reply, and seemingly did not hear the uncalled-for chidings.
+
+In a few hours a sailor handed him a note from Captain Fitz-Roy, full of
+abject apology for having so forgotten himself. Darwin was then but
+twenty-two years old, but the poise and patience of the young man won
+the respect and then the admiration and finally the affection of every
+man on board that ship. This attitude of kindness, patience and
+good-will formed the strongest attribute of Darwin's nature, and to
+these godlike qualities he was heir from a royal line of ancestry. No
+man was ever more blest--more richly endowed by his parents with love
+and intellect--than Darwin. And no man ever repaid the debt of love more
+fully--all that he had received he gave again.
+
+Darwin is the Saint of Science. He proves the possible; and when mankind
+shall have evolved to a point where such men will be the rule, not the
+exception--as one in a million--then, and not until then, can we say we
+are a civilized people.
+
+Charles Darwin was not only the greatest thinker of his time (with
+possibly one exception), but in his simplicity and earnestness, in his
+limpid love for truth--his perfect willingness to abandon his opinion if
+he were found to be wrong--in all these things he proved himself the
+greatest man of his time.
+
+Yet it is absurd to try to separate the scientist from the father,
+neighbor and friend. Darwin's love for truth as a scientist was what
+lifted him out of the fog of whim and prejudice and set him apart as a
+man.
+
+He had no time to hate. He had no time to indulge in foolish debates and
+struggle for rhetorical mastery--he had his work to do.
+
+That statesmen like Gladstone misquoted him, and churchmen like
+Wilberforce reviled him--these things were as naught to Darwin--his face
+was toward the sunrising. To be able to know the truth, and to state it,
+were vital issues: whether the truth was accepted by this man or that
+was quite immaterial, except possibly to the man himself. There was no
+resentment in Darwin's nature.
+
+Only love is immortal--hate is a negative condition. It is love that
+animates, beautifies, benefits, refines, creates. So firmly was this
+truth fixed in the heart of Darwin that throughout his long life the
+only things he feared and shunned were hate and prejudice. "They hinder
+and blind a man to truth," he said--"a scientist must only love."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emerson has been called the culminating flower of seven generations of
+New England culture. Charles Darwin seems a similar culminating product.
+
+Surely he showed rare judgment in the selection of his grandparents. His
+grandfather on his father's side was Doctor Erasmus Darwin, a poet, a
+naturalist, and a physician so discerning that he once wrote: "The
+science of medicine will some time resolve itself into a science of
+prevention rather than a matter of cure. Man was made to be well, and
+the best medicine I know of is an active and intelligent interest in the
+world of Nature."
+
+Erasmus Darwin had the felicity to have his biography written in German,
+and he also has his place in the "Encyclopedia Britannica" quite
+independent of that of his gifted grandson.
+
+Charles Darwin's grandfather on his mother's side was Josiah Wedgwood,
+one of the most versatile of men. He was as fine in spirit as those
+exquisite designs by Flaxman that you will see today on the Wedgwood
+pottery. Josiah Wedgwood was a businessman--an organizer, and he was
+beyond this, an artist, a naturalist, a sociologist and a lover of his
+race. His portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds reveals a man of rare
+intelligence, and his biography is as interesting as a novel by Kipling.
+His space in the "Encyclopedia Britannica" is even more important than
+that occupied by his dear friend and neighbor, Doctor Erasmus Darwin.
+The hand of the Potter did not shake when Josiah Wedgwood was made.
+Josiah Wedgwood and Doctor Darwin had mutually promised their children
+in marriage. Wedgwood became rich and he made numerous other men rich,
+and he enriched the heart and the intellect of England by setting before
+it beautiful things, and by living an earnest, active and beautiful
+life.
+
+Josiah Wedgwood coined the word "queensware." He married his cousin,
+Sarah Wedgwood. Their daughter, Susannah Wedgwood, married Doctor Robert
+Darwin, and Charles Darwin, their son, married Emma Wedgwood, a daughter
+of Josiah Wedgwood the Second. Caroline Darwin, a sister of Charles
+Darwin, married Josiah Wedgwood the Third. Let those who have the time
+work out this origin of species in detail and show us the relationship
+of the Darwins and Wedgwoods. And I hope we'll hear no more about the
+folly of cousins marrying, when Charles Darwin is before us as an
+example of natural selection.
+
+From his mother Darwin inherited those traits of gentleness, insight,
+purity of purpose, patience and persistency that set him apart as a
+marked man.
+
+The father of Charles Darwin, Doctor Robert Darwin, was a most
+successful physician of Shrewsbury.
+
+His marriage to Susannah Wedgwood filled his heart, and also placed him
+on a firm financial footing, and he seemed to take his choice of
+patients. Doctor Darwin was a man devoted to his family, respected by
+his neighbors, and he lived long enough to see his son recognized,
+greatly to his surprise, as one of England's foremost scientists.
+
+Charles Darwin in youth was rather slow in intellect, and in form and
+feature far from handsome. Physically he was never strong. In
+disposition he was gentle and most lovable. His mother died when he was
+eight years of age, and his three older sisters then mothered him.
+Between them all existed a tie of affection, very gentle, and very firm.
+
+The girls knew that Charles would become an eminent man--just how they
+could not guess--but he would be a leader of men: they felt it in their
+hearts. It was all the beautiful dream that the mother has for her babe
+as she sings to the man-child a lullaby as the sun goes down.
+
+In his autobiographical sketch, written when he was past sixty, Darwin
+mentions this faith and love of his sisters, and says, "Personally, I
+never had much ambition, but when at college I felt that I must work, if
+for no other reason, so as not to disappoint my sisters."
+
+At school Charles was considerable of a grubber: he worked hard because
+he felt that it was his duty. English boarding-schools have always
+taught things out of season, and very often have succeeded in making
+learning wholly repugnant. Perhaps that is the reason why nine men out
+of ten who go to college cease all study as soon as they stand on "the
+threshold," looking at life ere they seize it by the tail and snap its
+head off. To them education is one thing and life another.
+
+But with many headaches and many heartaches Charles got through
+Cambridge and then was sent to attend lectures at the University of
+Edinburgh. Of one lecturer in Scotland he says, "The good man was really
+more dull than his books, and how I escaped without all science being
+utterly distasteful to me I hardly know." To Cambridge, Darwin owed
+nothing but the association with other minds, yet this was much, and
+almost justifies the college. "Send your sons to college and the boys
+will educate them," said Emerson.
+
+The most beneficent influence for Darwin at Cambridge was the friendship
+between himself and Professor Henslow. Darwin became known as "the man
+who walks with Henslow." The professor taught botany, and took his
+classes on tramps a-field and on barge rides down the river, giving
+out-of-door lectures on the way. This commonsense way of teaching
+appealed to Darwin greatly, and although he did not at Cambridge take up
+botany as a study, yet when Henslow had an out-of-door class he usually
+managed to go along.
+
+In his autobiography Darwin gives great credit to this very gentle and
+simple soul, who, although not being great as a thinker, yet could
+animate and arouse a pleasurable interest.
+
+Henslow was once admonished by the faculty for his lack of discipline,
+and young Darwin came near getting himself into difficulty by declaring,
+"Professor Henslow teaches his pupils in love; the others think they
+know a better way!"
+
+The hope of his father and sisters was that Charles Darwin would become
+a clergyman. For the army he had no taste whatsoever, and at twenty-one
+the only thing seemed to be the Church. Not that the young man was
+filled with religious zeal--far from that--but one must, you know, do
+something. Up to this time he had studied in a desultory way; he had
+also dreamed and tramped the fields. He had done considerable
+grouse-shooting and had developed a little too much skill in that
+particular line.
+
+To paraphrase Herbert Spencer, to shoot fairly well is a manly
+accomplishment, but to shoot too well is evidence of an ill-spent youth.
+Doctor Darwin was having fears that his son was going to be an idle
+sportsman, and he was urging the divinity-school.
+
+The real fact was that sportsmanship was already becoming distasteful to
+young Darwin, and his hunting expeditions were now largely carried on
+with a botanist's drum and a geologist's hammer.
+
+But to the practical Doctor these things were no better than the gun--it
+was idling, anyway. Natural History as a pastime was excellent, and
+sportsmanship for exercise and recreation had its place, but the
+business of life must not be neglected--Charles should get himself to a
+divinity-school, and quickly, too.
+
+Things urged become repellent; and Charles was groping around for an
+excuse when a letter came from Professor Henslow, saying, among other
+things, that the Government was about to send a ship around the world on
+a scientific surveying tour, especially to map the coast of Patagonia
+and other parts of South America and Australia. A volunteer naturalist
+was wanted--board and passage free, but the volunteer was to supply his
+own clothes and instruments.
+
+The proposition gave Charles a great thrill: he gave a gulp and a gasp
+and went in search of his father. The father saw nothing in the plan
+beyond the fact that the Government was going to get several years' work
+out of some foolish young man, for nothing--gadzooks!
+
+Charles insisted--he wanted to go! He urged that on this trip he would
+be to but very little expense. "You say I have cost you much, but the
+fellow who can spend money on board ship must be very clever." "But you
+are a very clever young man, they say," the father replied. That night
+Charles again insisted on discussing the matter. The father was
+exasperated and exclaimed, "Go and find me one sane man who will endorse
+your wild-goose chase and I will give my consent."
+
+Charles said no more--he would find that "sane man." But he knew
+perfectly well that if any average person endorsed the plan his father
+would declare the man was insane, and the proof of it lay in the fact
+that he endorsed the wild-goose chase.
+
+In the morning Charles started of his own accord to see Henslow. Henslow
+would endorse the trip, but both parties knew that Doctor Darwin would
+not accept a mere college professor as sane. Charles went home and
+tramped thirty miles across the country to the home of his uncle, Josiah
+Wedgwood the Second. There he knew he had an advocate for anything he
+might wish, in the person of his fair cousin, Emma. These two laid their
+heads together, made a plan and stalked their prey.
+
+They cornered Josiah the Second after dinner and showed him how it was
+the chance of a lifetime--this trip on H.M.S. the "Beagle"! Charles
+wasn't adapted for a clergyman, anyway; he wanted to be a ship-captain,
+a traveler, a discoverer, a scientist, an author like Sir John
+Mandeville, or something else. Josiah the Second had but to speak the
+word and Doctor Darwin would be silenced, and the recommendation of so
+great a man as Josiah Wedgwood would secure the place.
+
+Josiah the Second laughed--then he looked sober. He agreed with the
+proposition--it was the chance of a lifetime. He would go back home with
+Charles and put the Doctor straight. And he did.
+
+And on the personal endorsement of Josiah Wedgwood and Professor
+Henslow, Charles Robert Darwin was duly booked as Volunteer Naturalist
+in Her Majesty's service.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Captain Fitz-Roy of the "Beagle" liked Charles Darwin until he began to
+look him over with a very professional eye. Then he declared his nose
+was too large and was not rightly shaped; besides, he was too tall for
+his weight: outside of these points the Volunteer would answer. On
+talking with young Darwin further, the Captain liked him better, and he
+waived all imperfections, although no promise was made that they would
+be remedied. In fact, Captain Fitz-Roy liked Charles so well that he
+invited him to share his own cabin and mess with him. The sailors, on
+seeing this, touched respectful forefingers to their caps and began
+addressing the Volunteer as "Sir."
+
+The "Beagle" sailed on December Twenty-seven, Eighteen Hundred
+Thirty-one, and it was fully four years and ten months before Charles
+Darwin saw England again. The trip decided the business of Darwin for
+the rest of his life, and thereby an epoch was worked in the upward and
+onward march of the race.
+
+Captain Fitz-Roy of the British Navy was but twenty-three years old. He
+was a draftsman, a geographer, a mathematician and a navigator. He had
+sailed around the world as a plain tar, and taken his kicks and cuffs
+with good grace. At the Portsmouth Naval School he had won a gold medal
+for proficiency in study, and another medal had been given him for
+heroism in leaping from a sailing-ship into the sea to save a drowning
+sailor.
+
+Let us be fair--the tight little island has produced men. To evolve
+these few good men she may have produced many millions of the spawn of
+earth, but let the fact stand--England has produced men. Here was a
+beardless youth, slight in form, silent by habit, but so well thought of
+by his Government that he was given charge of a ship, five officers, two
+surgeons and forty-one picked men to go around the world and make
+measurements of certain coral-reefs, and map the dangerous coasts of
+Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.
+
+The ship was provisioned for two years, but the orders were, "Do the
+work, no matter how long it may take, and your drafts on the Government
+will be honored."
+
+Captain Fitz-Roy was a man of decision: he knew just where he wanted to
+go, and what there was to do. He was to measure and map dreary wastes of
+tossing tide, and to do the task so accurately that it would never have
+to be done again: his maps were to remain forever a solace, a safety and
+a security to the men who go down to the sea in ships.
+
+England has certainly produced men--and Fitz-Roy was one of them.
+Fitz-Roy is now known to us, not for his maps which have passed into the
+mutual wealth of the world, but because he took on this trip, merely as
+an afterthought, a volunteer naturalist.
+
+Before the "Beagle" sailed, Captain Fitz-Roy and young Mr. Darwin went
+down to Portsmouth, and the Captain showed him the ship. The Captain
+took pains to explain the worst. It was to be at least two years of
+close, unremitting toil. It was no pleasure-excursion--there were no
+amusements provided, no cards, no wine on the table; the fare was to be
+simple in the extreme. This way of putting the matter was most
+attractive to Darwin--Fitz-Roy became a hero in his eyes at once. The
+Captain's manner inspired much confidence--he was a man who did not have
+to be amused or cajoled. "You will be left alone to do your work," said
+Fitz-Roy to Darwin, "and I must have the cabin to myself when I ask for
+it." And that settled it. Life aboard ship is like life in jail. It
+means freedom, freedom from interruption--you have your evenings to
+yourself, and the days as well. Darwin admired every man on board the
+ship, and most of all, the man who selected them, and so wrote home to
+his sisters. He admired the men because each was intent on doing his
+work, and each one seemed to assume that his own particular work was
+really the most important.
+
+Second Officer Wickham was entrusted to see that the ship was in good
+order, and so thorough was he that he once said to Darwin, who was
+constantly casting his net for specimens, "If I were the skipper, I'd
+soon have you and your beastly belittlement out of this ship with all
+your devilish, damned mess." And Darwin, much amused, wrote this down in
+his journal, and added, "Wickham is a most capital fellow." The
+discipline and system of ship-life, the necessity of working in a small
+space, and of improving the calm weather, and seizing every moment when
+on shore, all tended to work in Darwin's nature exactly the habit that
+was needed to make him the greatest naturalist of his age.
+
+Every sort of life that lived in the sea was new and wonderful to him.
+Very early on this trip Darwin began to work on the "Cirripedia"
+(barnacles), and we hear of Captain Fitz-Roy obligingly hailing
+homeward-bound ships, and putting out a small boat, rowing alongside,
+asking politely, to the astonishment of the party hailed, "Would you
+oblige us with a few barnacles off the bottom of your ship?" All this
+that the Volunteer, who was dubbed the "Flycatcher," might have
+something upon which to work.
+
+When on shore a sailor was detailed by Captain Fitz-Roy just to attend
+the "Flycatcher," with a bag to carry the specimens, geological,
+botanical and zoological, and a cabin-boy was set apart to write notes.
+This boy, who afterward became Governor of Queens and a K.C.B., used
+in after years to boast a bit, and rightfully, of his share in producing
+"The Origin of Species." When urged to smoke, Darwin replied, "I am not
+making any new necessities for myself."
+
+When the weather was rough the "Flycatcher" was sick, much to the
+delight of Wickham; but if the ship was becalmed, Darwin came out and
+gloried in the sunshine, and in his work of dissecting, labeling, and
+writing memoranda and data. The sailors might curse the weather--he did
+not. Thus passed the days. At each stop many specimens were secured, and
+these were to be sorted and sifted out at leisure.
+
+On shore the Captain had his work to do, and it was only after a year
+that Darwin accidentally discovered that the sailor who was sent to
+carry his specimens was always armed with knife and revolver, and his
+orders were not so much to carry what Wickham called, "the damned
+plunder," as to see that no harm befell the "Flycatcher."
+
+Fitz-Roy's interest in the scientific work was only general: longitude
+and latitude, his twenty-four chronometers, his maps and constant
+soundings, with minute records, kept his time occupied.
+
+For Darwin and his specimens, however, he had a constantly growing
+respect, and when the long five-year trip was ended, Darwin realized
+that the gruff and grim Captain was indeed his friend. Captain Fitz-Roy
+had trouble with everybody on board in turn, thus proving his
+impartiality; but when parting was nigh, tears came to his eyes as he
+embraced Darwin, and said, with prophetic yet broken words, "The
+'Beagle's' voyage may be remembered more through you than me--I hope it
+will be so!" And Darwin, too moved for speech, said nothing except
+through the pressure of his hand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The idea of evolution took a firm hold upon the mind of Darwin, in an
+instant, one day while on board the "Beagle." From that very hour the
+thought of the mutability of species was the one controlling impulse of
+his life.
+
+On his return from the trip around the world he found himself in
+possession of an immense mass of specimens and much data bearing
+directly upon the point that creation is still going on.
+
+That he could ever sort, sift and formulate his evidence on his own
+account, he never at this time imagined. Indeed, about all he thought he
+could do was to present his notes and specimens to some scientific
+society, in the hope that some of its members would go ahead and use the
+material.
+
+With this thought in mind he began to open correspondence with several
+of the universities and with various professors of science, and to his
+dismay found that no one was willing even to read his notes, much less
+house, prepare for preservation, and index his thousands of specimens.
+
+He read papers before different scientific societies, however, from time
+to time, and gradually in London it dawned upon the few thinkers that
+this modest and low-voiced young man was doing a little thinking on his
+own account. One man to whom he had offered the specimens bluntly
+explained to Darwin that his specimens and ideas were valuable to no one
+but himself, and it was folly to try to give such things away. Ideas
+are like children and should be cared for by their parents, and
+specimens are for the collector.
+
+Seeing the depression of the young man, this friend offered to present
+the matter to the Secretary of the Exchequer. Everything can be done
+when the right man takes hold of it: the sum of one thousand pounds was
+appropriated by the Treasury for Charles Darwin's use in bringing out a
+Government report of the voyage of the "Beagle." And Darwin set to work,
+refreshed, rejoiced and encouraged. He was living in London in modest
+quarters, solitary and alone. He was not handsome, and he lacked the
+dash and flash that make a success in society. On a trip to his old
+home, he walked across the country to see his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood the
+Second.
+
+When he left it was arranged that he should return in a month and marry
+his cousin, Emma Wedgwood. And it was all so done.
+
+One commentator said he married his cousin because he didn't know any
+other woman that would have him. But none was so unkind as to say that
+he married her in order to get rid of her, yet Henslow wondered how he
+ceased wooing science long enough to woo the lady.
+
+Doubtless the parents of both parties had a little to do with the
+arrangement, and in this instance it was beautiful and well. Darwin was
+married to his work, and no such fallacy as marrying a woman in order
+to educate her filled his mind.
+
+His wife was his mental mate, his devoted helper and friend.
+
+It is no small matter for a wife to be her husband's friend.
+
+Mrs. Darwin had no small aspirations of her own. She flew the futile
+Four-o'Clock and made no flannel nightgowns for Fijis. Twenty years
+after his marriage, Darwin wrote thus: "It is probably as you say--I
+have done an enormous amount of work. And this was only possible through
+the devotion of my wife, who, ignoring every idea of pleasure and
+comfort for herself, arranged in a thousand ways to give me joy and
+rest, peace and most valuable inspiration and assistance. If I
+occasionally lost faith in myself, she most certainly never did. Only
+two hours a day could I work, and these to her were sacred. She guarded
+me as a mother guards her babe, and I look back now and see how
+hopelessly undone I should have been without her."
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Forty-two, Darwin and his wife moved to the village
+of Down, County of Kent. The place where they lived was a rambling old
+stone house with ample garden. The country was rough and unbroken, and
+one might have imagined he was a thousand miles from London, instead of
+twenty.
+
+There were no aristocratic neighbors, no society to speak of. With the
+plain farmers and simple folk of the village Darwin was on good terms.
+He became treasurer of the local improvement society, and thereby was
+serenaded once a year by a brass band. We hear of the good old village
+rector once saying, "Mr. Darwin knows botany better than anybody this
+side of Kew; and although I am sorry to say that he seldom goes to
+church, yet he is a good neighbor and almost a model citizen." Together
+the clergyman and his neighbor discussed the merits of climbing roses,
+morning-glories and sweet-peas. Darwin met all and every one on terms of
+absolute equality, and never forced his scientific hypotheses upon any
+one. In fact, no one in the village imagined this quiet country
+gentleman in the dusty gray clothes that matched his full iron-gray
+beard was destined for a place in Westminster Abbey--no, not even
+himself!
+
+Darwin's father, seeing that the Government had recognized him, and that
+all the scientific societies of London were quite willing to do as much,
+settled on him an allowance that was ample for his simple wants.
+
+On the death of Doctor Darwin, Charles became possessed of an
+inheritance that brought him a yearly income of a little over five
+hundred pounds. Children came to bless this happy household--seven in
+all. With these Darwin was both comrade and teacher. Two hours a day
+were sacred to science, but outside of this time the children made the
+study their own, and littered the place with their collections gathered
+on heath and dale.
+
+The recognition of the "holy time" was strong in the minds of the
+children, so no prohibitions were needed. One daughter has written in
+familiar way of once wanting to go into her father's study for a
+forgotten pair of scissors. It was the "holy time," and she thought she
+could not wait, so she took off her shoes and entered in stocking feet,
+hoping to be unobserved. Her father was working at his microscope: he
+saw her, reached out one arm as she passed, drew her to him and kissed
+her forehead. The little girl never again trespassed--how could she,
+with the father that gave her only love! That there was no sternness in
+this recognition of the value of the working hours is further indicated
+in that little Francis, aged six, once put his head in the door and
+offered the father a sixpence if he would come out and play in the
+garden.
+
+For several years Darwin was village magistrate. Most of the cases
+brought before him were either for poaching or drunkenness. "He always
+seemed to be trying to find an excuse for the prisoner, and usually
+succeeded," says his son.
+
+One time, when a prosecuting attorney complained because he had
+discharged a prisoner, Darwin, who might have fined the impudent
+attorney for contempt of court, merely said: "Why, he's as good as we
+are. If tempted in the same way I am sure that I would have done as he
+has done. We can't blame a man for doing what he has to do!" This was
+poor reasoning from a legal point of view. Darwin afterward admitted
+that he didn't hear much of the evidence, as his mind was full of
+orchids, but the fellow looked sorry, and he really couldn't punish
+anybody who had simply made a mistake. The local legal lights gradually
+lost faith in Magistrate Darwin's peculiar brand of justice; he hadn't
+much respect for law, and once when a lawyer cited him the criminal code
+he said, "Tut, tut, that was made a hundred years ago!" Then he fined
+the man five shillings, and paid the fine himself, when he should have
+sent him to the workhouse for six months.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The men who have most benefited the world have, almost without
+exception, been looked down upon by the priestly class. That is to say,
+the men upon whose tombs society now carves the word Savior were
+outcasts and criminals in their day.
+
+In a society where the priest is regarded as the mouthpiece of divinity,
+and therefore the highest type of man, the artist, the inventor, the
+discoverer, the genius, the man of truth, has always been regarded as a
+criminal. Society advances as it doubts the priest, distrusts his
+oracles, and loses faith in his institution.
+
+In the priest, at first, was deposited all human knowledge, and what he
+did not know he pretended to know. He was the guardian of mind and
+morals, and the cure of souls. To question him was to die here and be
+damned for eternity.
+
+The problem of civilization has been to get the truth past the preacher
+to the people: he has forever barred and blocked the way, and until he
+was shorn of his temporal power there was no hope. The prisons were
+first made for those who doubted the priest; behind and beneath every
+episcopal residence were dungeons; the ferocious and delicate tortures
+that reached every physical and mental nerve were his. His anathemas and
+curses were always quickly turned upon the strong men of mountain or sea
+who dared live natural lives, said what they thought was truth, or did
+what they deemed was right. Science is a search for truth, but theology
+is a clutch for power.
+
+Nothing is so distasteful to a priest as freedom: a happy, exuberant,
+fearless, self-sufficient and radiant man he both feared and abhorred. A
+free soul was regarded by the Church as one to be dealt with. The priest
+has ever put a premium on pretense and hypocrisy. Nothing recommended a
+man more than humility and the acknowledgment that he was a worm of the
+dust. The ability to do and dare was in itself considered a proof of
+depravity.
+
+The education of the young has been monopolized by priests in order to
+perpetuate the fallacies of theology, and all endeavor to put education
+on a footing of usefulness and utility has been fought inch by inch.
+
+Andrew D. White, in his book, "The Warfare of Science and Religion," has
+calmly and without heat sketched the war that Science has had to make to
+reach the light. Slowly, stubbornly, insolently, theology has fought
+Truth step by step--but always retreating, taking refuge first behind
+one subterfuge, then another. When an alleged fact was found to be a
+fallacy, we were told it was not a literal fact, simply a spiritual one.
+All of theology's weapons have been taken from her and placed in the
+Museum of Horrors--all save one, namely, social ostracism. And this
+consists in a refusal to invite Science to indulge in cream-puffs.
+
+We smile, knowing that the man who now successfully defies theology is
+the only one she really, yet secretly, admires. If he does not run after
+her, she holds true the poetic unities by running after him. Mankind is
+emancipated (or partially so).
+
+Darwin's fame rests, for the most part, on two books, "The Origin of
+Species" and "The Descent of Man."
+
+Yet before these were published he had issued "A Journal of Research
+into Geology and Natural History," "The Zoology of the Voyage of the
+'Beagle,'" "A Treatise on Coral Reefs, Volcanic Islands, Geological
+Observations," and "A Monograph of the Cirripedia." Had Darwin died
+before "The Origin of Species" was published, he would have been famous
+among scientific men, although it was the abuse of theologians on the
+publication of "The Origin of Species" that really made him
+world-famous.
+
+Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin's chief competitor said that "A Monograph
+on the Cirripedia" is enough upon which to found a deathless reputation.
+Darwin was equally eminent in Geology, Botany and Zoology.
+
+On November Twenty-fourth, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, was published
+"The Origin of Species." Murray had hesitated about accepting the work,
+but on the earnest solicitation of Sir Charles Lyell, who gave his
+personal guarantee to the publisher against loss, quite unknown to
+Darwin, twelve hundred copies of the book were printed. The edition was
+sold in one day, and who was surprised most, the author or the
+publisher, it is difficult to say.
+
+Up to this time theology had stood solidly on the biblical assertion
+that mankind had sprung from one man and one woman, and that in the
+beginning every species was fixed and immutable. Aristotle, three
+hundred years before Christ, had suggested that, by cross-fertilization
+and change of environment, new species had been and were being evoked.
+But the Church had declared Aristotle a heathen, and in every school and
+college of Christendom it was taught that the world and everything in it
+was created in six days of twenty-four hours each, and that this
+occurred four thousand and four years before Christ, on May Tenth.
+
+Those who doubted or disputed this statement had no standing in society,
+and in truth, until the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, were in
+actual danger of death--heresy and treason being usually regarded as the
+same thing.
+
+Erasmus Darwin had taught that species were not immutable, but his words
+were so veiled in the language of poesy that they naturally went
+unchallenged. But now the grandson of Doctor Erasmus Darwin came forward
+with the net result of thirty years' continuous work. "The Origin of
+Species" did not attack any one's religious belief--in fact, in it the
+biblical account of Creation is not once referred to. It was a calm,
+judicial record of close study and observation, that seemed to prove
+that life began in very lowly forms, and that it has constantly
+ascended and differentiated, new forms and new species being continually
+created, and that the work of creation still goes on.
+
+In the preface to "The Origin of Species" Darwin gives Alfred Russel
+Wallace credit for coming to the same conclusion as himself, and states
+that both had been at work on the same idea for more than a score of
+years, but each working separately, unknown to the other.
+
+Andrew D. White says that the publication of Charles Darwin's book was
+like plowing into an ant-hill. The theologians, rudely awakened from
+comfort and repose, swarmed out angry, wrathful and confused. The air
+was charged with challenges; and soggy sermons, books, pamphlets,
+brochures and reviews, all were flying at the head of poor Darwin. The
+questions that he had anticipated and answered at great length were
+flung off by men who had neither read his book nor expected an answer.
+The idea that man had evolved from a lower form of animal especially was
+considered immensely funny, and jokes about "monkey ancestry" came from
+almost every pulpit, convulsing the pews with laughter.
+
+In passing, it may be well to note that Darwin nowhere says that man
+descended from a monkey. He does, however, affirm his belief that they
+had a common ancestor. One branch of the family took to the plains, and
+evolved into men, and the other branch remained in the woods and are
+monkeys still. The expression, "the missing link," is nowhere used by
+Darwin--that was a creation of one of his critics.
+
+Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, summed up the argument against Darwinism
+in the "Quarterly Review," by declaring that "Darwin was guilty of an
+attempt to limit the power of God"; that his book "contradicts the
+Bible"; that "it dishonors Nature." And in a speech before the British
+Association for the Advancement of Science, where Darwin was not
+present, the Bishop repeated his assertions, and turning to Huxley,
+asked if he were really descended from a monkey, and if so, was it on
+his father's or his mother's side!
+
+Huxley sat silent, refusing to reply, but the audience began to clamor,
+and Huxley slowly arose, and calmly but forcibly said: "I assert, and I
+repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his
+grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in
+recalling, it would be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect,
+who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges
+into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only
+to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of
+his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digression and a
+skilful appeal to religious prejudices." Captain Fitz-Roy, who was
+present at this meeting, was also called for.
+
+He was now Admiral Fitz-Roy, and felt compelled to uphold his employer,
+the State, so he upheld the State Religion and backed up the Bishop of
+Oxford in his emptiness. "I often had occasion on board the 'Beagle' to
+reprove Mr. Darwin for his disbelief in the First Chapter of Genesis,"
+solemnly said the Admiral. And Francis Darwin writes it down without
+comment, probably to show how much the Volunteer Naturalist was helped,
+aided and inspired by the Captain of the Expedition.
+
+But the reply of Huxley was a shot heard round the world, and for the
+most part the echo was passed along by the enemy.
+
+Huxley had insulted the Church, they said, and the adherents of the
+Mosaic account took the attitude of outraged and injured innocence.
+
+As for himself, Darwin said nothing. He ceased to attend the meetings of
+the scientific societies, for fear that he would be drawn into debate,
+and while he felt a sincere gratitude for Huxley's friendship, he
+deprecated the stern rebuke to the Bishop of Oxford. "It will arouse the
+opposition to greater unreason," he said. And this was exactly what
+happened.
+
+Even the English Catholics took sides with Wilberforce, the Protestant,
+and Cardinal Manning organized a society "to fight this new, so-called
+science that declares there is no God and that Adam was an ape."
+
+Even the Non-Conformists and Jews came in, and there was the very
+peculiar spectacle witnessed of the Church of England, the
+Non-Conformists, the Catholics and the Jews aroused and standing as one
+man, against one quiet villager who remained at home and said, "If my
+book can not stand the bombardment, why then it deserves to go down and
+to be forgotten."
+
+Spurgeon declared that Darwinism was more dangerous than open and avowed
+infidelity, since "the one motive of the whole book is to dethrone God."
+
+Rabbi Hirschberg wrote, "Darwin's volume is plausible to the unthinking
+person; but a deeper insight shows a mephitic desire to overthrow the
+Mosaic books and to bury Judaism under a mass of fanciful rubbish."
+
+In America Darwin had no more persistent critic than the Reverend DeWitt
+Talmage. For ten years Doctor Talmage scarcely preached a sermon without
+making reference to "monkey ancestry" and "baboon unbelievers."
+
+The New York "Christian Advocate" declared, "Darwin is endeavoring to
+becloud and befog the whole question of truth, and his book will be of
+short life."
+
+An eminent Catholic physician and writer, Doctor Constantine James,
+wrote a book of three hundred pages called "Darwinism, or the Man-Ape."
+A copy of Doctor James' book being sent to Pope Pius the Ninth, the Pope
+acknowledged it in a personal letter, thanking the author for his
+"masterly refutations of the vagaries of this man Darwin, wherein the
+Creator is left out of all things and man proclaims himself independent,
+his own king, his own priest, his own God--then degrading man to the
+level of the brute by declaring he had the same origin, and this origin
+was lifeless matter. Could folly and pride go further than to degrade
+Science into a vehicle for throwing contumely and disrespect on our holy
+religion!"
+
+This makes rather interesting reading now for those who believe in the
+infallibility of popes. So well did Doctor James' book sell, coupled
+with the approbation of the Pope, that as late as Eighteen Hundred
+Eighty-two a new and enlarged edition made its appearance, and the
+author was made a member of the Papal Order of Saint Sylvester. It is
+quite needless to add that those who read Doctor James' book refuting
+Darwin had never read Darwin, since "The Origin of Species" was placed
+on the "Index Expurgatorius" in Eighteen Hundred Sixty. Some years
+after, when it was discovered that Darwin had written other books, these
+were likewise honored.
+
+The book on barnacles being called to the attention of the Censor, that
+worthy exclaimed, "Some new heresy, I dare say--put it on the 'Index!'"
+And it was so done.
+
+The success of Doctor James' book reveals the popularity of the form of
+reasoning that digests the refutation first, and the original
+proposition not at all.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Seventy-five, Gladstone in an address at Liverpool
+said, "Upon the ground of what is called evolution, God is relieved from
+the labor of creation and of governing the universe."
+
+Herbert Spencer called Gladstone's attention to the fact that Sir Isaac
+Newton, with his law of gravitation and the physical science of
+astronomy, was open to the same charge.
+
+Gladstone then took refuge in the "Contemporary Review," and retreated
+in a cloud of words that had nothing to do with the subject.
+
+Thomas Carlyle, who has facetiously been called a liberal thinker, had
+not the patience to discuss Darwin's book seriously, but grew red in the
+face and hissed in falsetto when it was even mentioned. He wrote of
+Darwin as "the apostle of dirt," and said, "He thinks his grandfather
+was a chimpanzee, and I suppose he is right--leastwise, I am not the one
+to deprive him of the honor."
+
+Scathing criticisms were uttered on Darwin's ideas, both on the platform
+and in print, by Doctor Noah Porter of Yale, Doctor Hodge of Princeton,
+and Doctor Tayler Lewis of Union College. Agassiz, the man who was
+regarded as the foremost scientist in America, thought he had to choose
+between orthodoxy and Darwinism, and he chose orthodoxy. His gifted son
+tried to rescue his father from the grip of prejudice, and later
+endeavored to free his name from the charge that he could not change
+his mind, but alas! Louis Agassiz's words were expressed in print, and
+widely circulated.
+
+There were two men in America whose names stand out like beacon-lights
+because they had the courage to speak up loud and clear for Charles
+Darwin while the pack was baying the loudest. These men were Doctor Asa
+Gray, who influenced the Appletons to publish an American edition of
+"The Origin of Species," and Professor Edward L. Youmans, who gave up
+his own brilliant lecture work in order that he might stand by Darwin,
+Spencer, Huxley and Wallace.
+
+For the man who was known as "a Darwinian" there was no place in the
+American Lyceum. Shut out from addressing the public by word of mouth,
+Youmans founded a magazine that he might express himself, and he fired a
+monthly broadside from his "Popular Science Monthly." And it is good to
+remember that the faith of Youmans was not without its reward. He lived
+to see his periodical grow from a confessed failure--a bill of expense
+that took his monthly salary to maintain--to a paying property that made
+its owner passing rich.
+
+Gray, too, outlived the charge of infidelity, and was not forced to
+resign his position as Professor at Harvard, as was freely prophesied he
+would.
+
+As for Darwin himself, he stood the storm of misunderstanding and abuse
+without scorn or resentment.
+
+"Truth must fight its way," he said; "and this gauntlet of criticism is
+all for the best. What is true in my book will survive, and that which
+is error will be blown away as chaff." He was neither exalted by praise
+nor cast down by censure. For Huxley, Lyell, Hooker, Spencer, Wallace
+and Asa Gray he had a great and profound love--what they said affected
+him deeply, and their steadfast kindness at times touched him to tears.
+For the great, seething, outside world that had not thought along
+abstruse scientific lines, and could not, he cared little.
+
+"How can we expect them to see as we do," he wrote to Gray; "it has
+taken me thirty years of toil and research to come to these conclusions.
+To have the unthinking masses accept all that I say would be calamity:
+this opposition is a winnowing process, and all a part of the Law of
+Evolution that works for good."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For forty years Darwin lived in the same house at Down, in the same
+quiet, simple way. Here he lived and worked, and the world gradually
+came to him, figuratively and literally. Gradually it dawned upon the
+theologians that a God who could set in motion natural laws that worked
+with beneficent and absolute regularity was just as great as if He had
+made everything at once and then stopped.
+
+The miracle of evolution is just as sublime as the miracle of Adam's
+deep sleep and the making of a woman out of a man's rib. The faith of
+the scientist who sees order, regularity and unfailing law is quite as
+great as that of a preacher who believes everything he reads in a book.
+The scientist is a man with faith, plus.
+
+When Darwin died, in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-two, Darwinism and
+infidelity were words no longer synonymous.
+
+The discrepancies and inconsistencies of the theories of Darwin were
+seen by him as by his critics, and he was ever willing to admit the
+doubt. None of his disciples was as ready to modify his opinions as he.
+"We must beware of making science dogmatic," he once said to Haeckel.
+
+And at another time he said, "I would feel I had gone too far were it
+not for Wallace, who came to the same conclusions, quite independently
+of me." Darwin's mind was simple and childlike. He was a student,
+always learning, and no one was too mean or too poor for him to learn
+from. The patience, persistency and untiring industry of the man,
+combined with the daring imagination that saw the thing clearly long
+before he could prove it, and the gentle forbearance in the presence of
+unkindness and misunderstanding, won the love of a nation.
+
+He wished to be buried in the churchyard at Down, but at his death, by
+universal acclaim, the gates of Westminster swung wide to receive the
+dust of the man whom bishops, clergy and laymen alike had reviled.
+Darwin had won, not alone because he was right, but because his was a
+truly great and loving soul--a soul without the least resentment.
+
+Archdeacon Farrar, quoting Huxley, said, "I would rather be Darwin and
+be right than be Premier of England--we have had and will have many
+Premiers, but the world will never have another Darwin."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: ERNST HAECKEL]
+
+HAECKEL
+
+
+     Nothing seems to me better adapted than this monistic perspective
+     to give us the proper standard and the broad outlook which we need
+     in the solution of the vast enigmas that surround us. It not only
+     clearly indicates the true place of a man in Nature, but it
+     dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance and
+     arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable
+     universe, and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable
+     element. This boundless presumption of conceited man has misled him
+     into making himself "the image of God," claiming an "eternal life"
+     for his ephemeral personality, and imagining that he possesses
+     unlimited "freedom of will." The ridiculous imperial folly of
+     Caligula is but a special form of man's arrogant assumption of
+     divinity. Only when we have abandoned this untenable illusion, and
+     taken up the correct cosmological perspective, can we hope to reach
+     the solution of the Riddle of the Universe.
+
+     --_Haeckel_
+
+
+HAECKEL
+
+There was a man, once upon a day, who lived in East Aurora and kept
+a store. He sold everything from cough-syrup to blue ribbon; and some of
+the things he sold on time to philosophers who sat on nail-kegs every
+evening, and settled the coal strike.
+
+And in due course of time the storekeeper compromised with his
+creditors, at twenty-nine cents on the dollar.
+
+Some say the man went busted a-purpose to quit business and get out of
+East Aurora. And he himself generally allowed the opinion to gain ground
+in later years that he had planned his life throughout, from start to
+finish, thus proving the supremacy of the will. Yet others there be, and
+men of worth and social standing in the village--known for miles up the
+creek as persons of probity--who claim that it was too much confidence
+in the Genus Smart-Setter, and trotting horses at the County Fairs, that
+made it possible for our friend to avail himself of the Bankruptcy Act.
+Still others, too inert to follow the winding ways of a strange career
+and give reasons, dispose of the matter by simply saying,
+"Providence!"--rolling their eyes upward, then walking out, leaving the
+wordy contestants humiliated and undone.
+
+It will be seen that I am interested in this chapter of Ancient History:
+and in truth, I myself occasionally ornament the nail-kegs. I claim it
+was neither Providence nor astute planning that mapped this man's
+course, but Providence, Planning and Luck; and I silence the adversary,
+for the time, by citing these facts:
+
+Very shortly after Providence and the Sheriff of Erie County--whose
+name, by the way, was Grover Cleveland--had disposed of the East Aurora
+grocery, our friend met a man in Buffalo who had a sweeping scar on his
+chin, a wonderful secret, and nothing else worth mentioning.
+
+This man secured his assets in Germany; he got them while attending the
+University of Jena. The secret was gotten by an understanding with a
+professor; the scar was received through a misunderstanding with a
+student. The secret was a plan by which you could make glucose from
+corn. In Germany it was only a laboratory experiment, because there was
+no corn in Europe to speak of.
+
+Here we had corn to burn, since in that very year the farmers of Iowa
+were using corn for their fuel. Glucose is the active saccharine
+principle in maize, but it does not become active until the corn is
+treated chemically in a certain way, just as honey is not honey until a
+bee puts it through his Maeterlinck laboratory.
+
+Glucose is a food; it can be used for all purposes where sugar is
+used--in degree, at least.
+
+And every living person on earth uses sugar as food every day! Our
+ex-grocer knew all about Hambletonian Ten and Dexter; but dextrine,
+dextrose and glucose were out of his class. Yet he realized that if
+sugar could be made from corn, there was a fortune in it for somebody.
+Opportunity, we are told, knocks once at each man's door. Our David
+Harum was forty, past, and he had often thought Opportunity was tapping,
+but when he opened wide the door, darkness there, and nothing more!
+Opportunity had knocked, but was too timid to stay. This time, he heard
+the knock, and when he opened up the door, Opportunity made a rush for
+him, grabbed him by the collar--catch-as-catch-can--in a grip he could
+not shake off.
+
+Mr. Harum examined as best he could the glucose the German student had
+made, and then he watched the whole experiment worked out over again.
+What the particular ingredients were, was still a secret. The man would
+not sell out; he wanted to organize a manufactory and take a certain per
+cent of the profits. David had saved a thousand dollars out of the wreck
+at East Aurora; but he knew if he could show certain men that the scheme
+was genuine, he would be able to raise more.
+
+Five thousand dollars was secured. But the men who advanced the four
+thousand dollars demanded an insurance-policy on the life of the German
+chemist. This appealed to our David Harum as an excellent plan: if the
+man who held the secret should die, all would be lost save honor. They
+insured the life of the chemist for twenty thousand dollars. In a month
+after, he was killed in a railroad wreck on a Sunday School excursion.
+And the moral is--but never mind that now.
+
+The twenty thousand dollars' insurance was paid to David Harum. He
+repaid his friends immediately their four thousand dollars, and reserved
+for himself, very properly, the sixteen thousand dollars to cover
+expenses. He then started for Jena.
+
+Arriving there, he found that the making of glucose was no special
+secret, and to manufacture it on a large scale was simply a matter of
+evolving the right kind of system and a plant. He hired a young German
+chemist, who had just graduated, for a matter of, say, a thousand
+dollars a year and expenses, and the two started back for America.
+
+From this arose the Glucose Industry in the United States. In ten years'
+time twelve million dollars was invested in the business; and in
+Nineteen Hundred Three more than a hundred million dollars was invested.
+Our East Aurora hero sold out his interests, in Eighteen Hundred Ninety,
+for some such bagatelle as thirteen million dollars.
+
+The young German student is now back at the Jena university, taking a
+post-graduate course in chemistry--the first one is still dead.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I am told that there be folks who pooh-pooh college training and sneeze
+on mention of a University degree. Usually these good people have no
+University degrees, but have been greatly helped by those who have.
+
+Our David Harums are not college-bred--a statement which I trust will go
+unchallenged.
+
+The true type of German student is made in Germany, and when taken out
+of his native environment, often evolves into something less beautiful.
+
+His lack of worldly ambition is his chief claim to immortality. His
+wants are few; he rises early and works late; he is most practical in
+his own particular specialty, but often most impractical outside of it;
+he is plodding, patient, painstaking, and will follow a microbe you can
+not see, as Thompson-Seton's hunter followed the famous Kootenay ram.
+
+This simple reverence for the truth--this passion for an idea--this
+desire to know--these things have given to the world some of its richest
+treasures. We are aware of what the Rockfellers have done, but we seldom
+stop to think of the unknown laboratory students, who made possible such
+vast and far-reaching institutions as the Standard Oil Company, the
+Carborundum Company, the Amalgamated Copper Company, and the various
+beet-sugar factories, that give work to thousands, and lift whole
+counties, and even some States, from penury to plenty.
+
+Germany honors her scholars; and one of the strongest instincts of her
+national life is her search for genius. Initiative is originality in
+motion. Originality is too rare to flout and scout. Not all originality
+is good, but all good things, so far as humanity is concerned, were once
+original. That is to say, they were the work of Genius.
+
+Germany's sympathy for the best in thought has occasionally been broken
+in upon by pigmy rulers, who, for the moment, had a giant's power, so it
+seems hardly possible that a government which encouraged Goethe should
+have banished Wagner. The greatness of Kant was largely owing to the
+fact that he was set apart by Frederick and made free to do his work;
+and at this time, not another monarchy in the world would have had the
+insight to keep its coarse hands off this little man with the big head
+and the brain of a prophet.
+
+And as Kant was the greatest and most original thinker of his time, so
+today does a German University house the world's greatest living
+scientist. Ernst Haeckel has been Professor of Natural History at Jena
+for forty-two years. All the efforts of various other Universities to
+lure him away have failed. He even declined to listen to the siren song
+of Major Pond, and only smiled at the big baits dangled on long poles
+from Cook County, Illinois.
+
+"I have everything I want, everything I can use is right here; why
+should I think of uprooting my life?" he asked. And yet, Jena, there in
+the shadow of the Thuringian Mountains, is only a little town of less
+than ten thousand inhabitants.
+
+In Nineteen Hundred Three, there were five hundred pupils registered at
+Jena, as against four thousand at Harvard, five thousand at Ann Arbor,
+and nearly the same at Lincoln, Nebraska.
+
+It will not do to assume that those who graduate at big colleges are big
+men, any more than to imagine that folks who reside in big towns are
+bigger than those who live in little villages. Perhaps the greatest men
+have come from the small colleges: I believe the small colleges admit
+this.
+
+And surely there is plenty of good argument handy, in way of proof; for
+while Harvard has her Barrett Wendell, with his caveat on clearness,
+force and elegance; and Ann Arbor has Cicero Trueblood, Professor of
+Oratory, whose official duty it is to formulate the College Yell; yet
+Amherst, with her scant five hundred pupils, has Professor David P.
+Todd, the greatest astronomer of the New World. I really wonder
+sometimes what a University that stands in fear of Triggsology would do
+with Professor Ernst Haeckel, whose disregard for tradition is very
+decidedly Ingersollian! The actual fact is, Ernst Haeckel, the world's
+greatest thinker, belongs in the little town of Jena, in Germany. At the
+village of Coniston, you see the little hall where Ruskin read the best
+things he ever wrote, to a dozen or two people.
+
+At Hammersmith, the limit of a William Morris audience was about a
+hundred. At Jena, Ernst Haeckel sits secure in his little lecture-hall,
+and speaks or reads to fifty or sixty students, but the printed word
+goes to millions, so his thoughts here expressed in Jena are shots heard
+round the world.
+
+American pedagogic institutions are mendicant--they depend upon private
+charity and are endowed by pious pirates and beneficent buccaneers. The
+individuals who made these institutions possible very naturally have a
+controlling voice in their management. The colleges in America that are
+not supported by direct mendicancy depend upon the dole of the
+legislator, and woe betide the pedagogic principal who offends the
+orthodox vote. His supplies are cut short, and purse-strings pucker
+until his voice moderates to a monotone and he dilutes his views to a
+dull neutral tint. I do not know a University in the United States that
+would not place Ernst Haeckel on half-rations, and make him fight for
+his life, or else he would be discharged and be reduced to the sad
+necessity of tilting windmills in popular lecture courses for the
+edification of agrarians. The German Government seeks to make men free.
+It even gives them the privilege of being absurd; for pioneers sometimes
+take the wrong track. We do not scout Columbus because his domestic
+voyages were failures; nor because he sought one thing and found
+another, and died without knowing the difference.
+
+Haeckel's wants are all supplied; what he needs in the way of apparatus
+or material is his for the asking; he travels at will the round world
+over; visions of old age and yawning almshouses are not for him. He owns
+himself--he does what he wishes, he says what he thinks, and neither
+priest nor politician dare cry, hist! So we get the paradox: the only
+perfect freedom is to be found in a monarchy. "A Republic," says
+Schopenhauer, "is a land that is ruled by the many--that is to say, by
+the incompetent." But Schopenhauer, of course, knew nothing of the
+American primary, devised by altruistic Hibernians for the purpose of
+thwarting the incompetent many.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ernst Haeckel was born in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-four, hence he is just
+seventy-seven years old at this writing. His parents were plain people,
+neither rich nor poor--and of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. The
+greatest error one can make in life is not to be well born; failing in
+this, a man struggles through life under an awful handicap.
+
+Haeckel formed the habit of steady, systematic work in youth, and
+untiring effort has been the rule of his life. Man was made to be well,
+and he was made to work. It is only work--which is the constant effort
+to retain equilibrium--that makes life endurable. So we find Haeckel
+now, at near fourscore years, a model of manly vigor, with all the
+eager, curious, receptive qualities of youth--a happy man, but one who
+knows that happiness lies on the way to Heaven, and not in arriving
+there and sitting down to enjoy it.
+
+Ernst Haeckel gathers his manna fresh every day. I believe Haeckel
+enjoys his pipe and mug after the day's work is done; but for stimulants
+in a general sense, he has no use. In his book on Ceylon, he attributes
+his escape from the jungle fever, from which most of his party suffered,
+to the fact that he never used strong drink, and ate sparingly.
+
+He is jealous of the sunshine--a great walker--works daily with hoe and
+spade in his garden; and breathes deeply, pounding on his chest, when
+going from his house to the college, in a way that causes considerable
+amusement among the fledglings. Tall, spare rather than stout, bronzed,
+active, wearing shoes with thick soles, plain gray clothes, often
+accompanied by a half-dozen young men, he is a common figure on the
+roads that wind out of Jena, and lose themselves amid the mountains.
+
+The distinguishing feature of the man is his animation. He is full of
+good cheer, and acts as if he were expecting to discover something
+wonderful very soon.
+
+To find the balance between play and work has been the aim of his life;
+and surely, he has pretty nearly discovered it.
+
+Once when a caller asked him what he considered the greatest achievement
+of his life, he took out of his pocket a leather case containing a
+bronze medal, and proudly passed it around.
+
+This medal was presented to him in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine,
+in token of a running high jump--the world's record at the time, or not,
+as the case may be. Haeckel is essentially an out-of-door man, as
+opposed to the philosopher who works in a stuffy room, and grows
+round-shouldered over his microscope. "I may entrust laboratory analyses
+to others, but there is one thing I will never let another do for me,
+and that is take my daily walk a-field," he once said.
+
+While lecturing he sits at a table and simply talks in a very informal
+way; often purposely arousing a discussion, or awakening a sleepy
+student with a question. Yet on occasion he can speak to a multitude,
+and, like Huxley, rise to the occasion. Oratory, however, he considers
+rather dangerous, as the speaker is usually influenced by the opinions
+of the audience, and is apt to grow more emphatic than exact--to
+generate more heat than light.
+
+The comparison of Haeckel with Huxley is not out of place. He has been
+called the Huxley of Germany, just as Huxley was called the Haeckel of
+England. In temperament, they were much alike; although Haeckel perhaps
+does not use quite so much aqua fortis in his ink. Yet I can well
+imagine that if he were at a convention where the Bishop of Oxford would
+level at him a few theological spitballs, he would answer, unerringly,
+with a sling and a few smooth pebbles from the brook. And possibly,
+knowing himself, this is why he keeps out of society, and avoids all
+public gatherings where pseudo-science is exploited.
+
+There is a superstition that really great men are quite oblivious of
+their greatness, and that the pride of achievement is not among their
+assets. Nothing could be wider of the mark. When Ernst Haeckel was
+asked, "Who is your favorite author?" he very promptly answered, "Ernst
+Haeckel."
+
+His study is a big square room on the top floor of one of the college
+buildings; and in this room is a bookcase extending from ceiling to
+floor, given up to his own works.
+
+Copies of every edition and of all translations are here.
+
+And in a special case are the original manuscripts, solidly bound in
+boards, as carefully preserved as were the "literary remains" of William
+Morris, guarded with the instincts of a bibliophile.
+
+Of the size of this Haeckel collection one can make a guess when it is
+stated that the man has written and published over fifty different
+books. These vary in size from simple lectures to volumes of a thousand
+pages. His work entitled, "The Natural History of Creation," has been
+translated into twelve languages, and has gone through fifteen editions
+in Germany, and about half as many in England.
+
+The last book issued by Professor Haeckel was that intensely interesting
+essay, "The Riddle of the Universe," which was written in Eighteen
+Hundred Ninety-nine, in two months' time, during his summer vacation. He
+gave it out that he had gone to Italy, denied himself to all visitors
+who knew that he had not, and answered no letters. He reached his study
+every morning at six o'clock and locked himself in, and there he
+remained until eight o'clock at night. At noon one of his children
+brought him his lunch.
+
+Unlike Herbert Spencer, whose later writings were all dictated--and very
+slowly and painstakingly at that--Haeckel writes with his own hand, and
+when the fit is on, he turns off manuscript at the rate of from two to
+four thousand words a day. In writing "The Riddle of the Universe," he
+took no exercise save to go up on the roof, breathing deeply and
+pounding his chest, varying the pounding by reaching his arms above his
+head and stretching. However, after a few weeks the villagers and
+visitors got to looking for him with opera-glasses; and he ceased going
+on the roof, taking his calisthenics at the open window.
+
+This exercise of reaching and stretching until you lift yourself on
+tiptoe, he goes out of his way to recommend in his book on
+"Development," wherein he says, "There is a tendency as the years pass
+for the internal organs to drop, but the individual who will daily go
+through the motion of reaching for fruit on limbs of trees that are
+above his head, standing on tiptoe and slowly stretching up and up,
+occasionally throwing his head back and looking straight up, will of
+necessity breathe deeply, exercise the diaphragm, and I believe in most
+cases will ward off diseases and keep old age awaiting for long."
+
+Here is a little commonsense advice given by a physician who is also a
+great scientist. To try it will cost you nothing--no apparatus is
+required--just throw open the window and reach up and up and up, first
+with one arm, then the other, and then both arms. "The person who does
+this daily for five minutes as a habit will probably have no need of a
+physician," adds Haeckel, and with this sage remark he dismisses the
+subject, branching off into an earnest talk on radiolaria.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Haeckel was educated for a physician and began his career by practising
+medicine. But his heart was not really in the work; he soon arrived at
+the very sane conclusion that constant dwelling on the pathological was
+not worth while. "Hereafter I'll devote my time to the normal, not the
+abnormal and distempered. The sick should learn to keep well," he wrote
+a friend.
+
+And again, "If an individual is so lacking in will that he can not
+provide for himself, then his dissolution is no calamity to either
+himself, the State or the race." This was written in his twenties, and
+seems to sound rather sophomorish, but the idea of the boy is still with
+the old man, for in "The Riddle of the Universe" he says, "The final
+effect upon the race by the preservation of the unfit, through increased
+skill in surgery and medicine, is not yet known." In another place he
+throws in a side remark, thus: "Our almshouses, homes for imbeciles, and
+asylums where the hopelessly insane often outlive their keepers, may be
+a mistake, save as these things minister to the spirit of altruism which
+prompts their support. Let a wiser generation answer!"
+
+Doubtless Haeckel could make a good argument in favor of the doctors if
+he wished, but probably if asked to do so his answer would paraphrase
+Robert Ingersoll, when that gentleman was taken to task for unfairness
+towards Moses, "Young man, you seem to forget that I am not the attorney
+of Moses--don't worry, there are more than ten millions of men looking
+after his case." Ernst Haeckel is not the attorney for either the
+doctors or the clergy.
+
+It was Darwin and "The Origin of Species" that tipped the beam for
+Haeckel in favor of science. Very shortly after Darwin's great book was
+issued, in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, a chance copy of the
+work fell into the hands of our young physician. He read and spoke
+English, and in a general way was interested in biology.
+
+As he read of Darwin's observations and experiments the heavens seemed
+to open before him.
+
+Things he had vaguely felt, Darwin stated, and thoughts that had been
+his, Darwin expressed. "I might have written much of this book, myself,"
+he said.
+
+The love of Nature had been upon the young man almost from his babyhood.
+All children love flowers and mix easily with the wonderful things that
+are found in woods and fields. At twelve years of age Ernst had formed a
+goodly herbarium, and was making a collection of bugs, and not knowing
+their names or even that they had names, he began naming them himself.
+Later it came to him with a shock of surprise and disappointment that
+the bugs and beetles had already had the attention of scholars. But he
+got even by declaring that he would hunt out some of the tiny things the
+scholars had overlooked and classify them. Every man imagines himself
+the first man, and to think that he is Adam and that he has to go
+forth, get acquainted with things and name them, reveals the true bent
+of the scientist.
+
+Doctor Haeckel was ripe for Darwin's book. He was looking for it, and it
+took only a slight jolt to dislodge him from the medical profession and
+allow the Law of Affinity to do the rest.
+
+Wallace had written Darwin's book under another name, and if these men
+had not written it, Haeckel surely would, for it was all packed away in
+his heart and head. As Darwin had studied and classified the Cirripedia,
+so would he write an essay on Rhizopods. Luck was with him--luck is
+always with the man of purpose. He had an opportunity to travel through
+Italy as medical caretaker to a rich invalid. Sickness surely has its
+uses; and rich invalids are not wholly a mistake on the part of Setebos.
+Haeckel secured the leisure and the opportunity to round up his
+Rhizopods.
+
+He presented the work to the University of Jena, because this was the
+University that Goethe attended, and the gods of Haeckel were
+three--Goethe, Darwin and Johannes Muller.
+
+Muller was instructor in Zoology at Berlin, a man quite of the Agassiz
+type who made himself beloved by the boys because he was what he was--a
+boy in heart, with a man's head and the soul of a saint. Some one said
+of Muller, "To him every look into a microscope was a service to God."
+In his reverent attitude he was like Linnaeus, who fell on his knees on
+first beholding the English gorse in full flower, and thanked Heaven
+that such a moment of divine joy was his.
+
+Muller was a Jena man, too, and he gave Haeckel letters to the bigwigs.
+The wise men of Jena discovered that there was merit in Haeckel's
+discoveries.
+
+Original investigators are rare--most of us write about the men who have
+done things, or else we tell about what they have done, and so we reach
+greatness by hitching our wagon to a star. For the essay on Rhizopods,
+Haeckel was made Professor Extraordinary of the University of Jena. This
+was in Eighteen Hundred Sixty-two; Haeckel was then twenty-eight years
+old; there he is today, after a service of forty-nine years.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Haeckel is married, with a big brood of children and grandchildren about
+him. Some of his own children and the grandchildren are about the same
+age, for Haeckel has two broods, having had two wives, both of whom
+sympathized with the Teddine philosophy.
+
+With the whole household, including servants, the great scientist is on
+terms of absolute good camaraderie. The youngsters ride on his back; the
+older girls decorate him with garlands; the boys work with him in the
+garden, or together they tramp the fields and climb the hills.
+
+But when it comes to study he goes to his own room in the Zoology
+Building, enters in and locks the door. When he travels he travels
+alone, without companion or secretary. Travel to him means intense work;
+and intense work means to him intense pleasure. Solitude seems necessary
+to close, consecutive thinking; and in the solitude of travel, through
+jungle, forest, crowded city, or across wide oceans, Haeckel finds his
+true and best self. Then it is that he puts his soul in touch with the
+Universal and realizes most fully Goethe's oft-repeated dictum, "All is
+one." And, indeed, to Goethe must be given the credit of preparing the
+mind of Haeckel for Darwinism.
+
+In his book, "The Freedom and Science of Teaching," Haeckel applies the
+poetic monistic ideas of Goethe to biology and then to sociology. "All
+is one." And this oneness that everywhere exists is simply a
+differentiation of the original single cell.
+
+The evolution of the cell mirrors the evolution of the species: the
+evolution of the individual mirrors the evolution of the race.
+
+This law, expressed by Goethe, is the controlling shibboleth in all
+Haeckel's philosophy.
+
+In embryology he has proved it to the satisfaction of the scientific
+world. When he applies it to sociology our Bellamys are looking backward
+to Sir Thomas More, and expect a sudden transformation to a Utopia, not
+unlike the change which the good old preachers used to tell us we would
+experience "in the twinkling of an eye."
+
+Haeckel builds on Darwin and shows that as the Cirripedia which makes
+the bottom of the ocean, the coral "insect" which rears dangerous reefs
+and even mountain-ranges, and Rhizopods that make the chalk cliffs
+possible, did not change the earth's crust in the twinkling of an eye,
+so neither can the efforts of man instantly change the social condition.
+Souls do not make lightning changes. Karl Marx thought society would
+change in the twinkling of a ballot, but he was not a Monist, and
+therefore did not realize that humanity is a solidarity of souls,
+evolved from very lowly forms and still slowly ascending.
+
+And the beauty of it is that the Marxians are helping the race to
+ascend, by supplying it an Ideal, even if they fail utterly to work
+their lightning change. In the end there is no defeat for any man or any
+thing. When men deserve the Ideal they will get it. So long as they
+prefer beer, tobacco, brawls and slums, these things will be supplied.
+When they get enough of these, something better will be evolved. The
+stupidity of George the Third was a necessary factor in the evolution of
+freedom for America. All is one; all is Good; and all is God.
+
+The Marxians will eventually win, but by Fabian methods, and Socialism
+will come under another name. As opposed to Herbert Spencer, Haeckel
+does not admit the Unknowable, although, of course, he realizes the
+unknown. No man ever had a fuller faith, and if there is any such thing
+as a glorious deathbed it must come to men of this type who believe not
+only that all is well for themselves, but for every one else. How a
+deathbed could be "glorious" for a man who had perfect faith in his own
+salvation and an equally perfect faith in the damnation of most
+everybody else, is difficult to understand.
+
+A true Monist would rather be in Hell asking for water than in Heaven
+denying it.
+
+He loves humanity because he is Humanity, and he loves God because he is
+God. As a single drop of water mirrors the globe, so does a single man
+mirror the race. And the evolution, biological and sociological, of the
+man mirrors the evolution of the species.
+
+When one once grasps the beauty and splendor of the monistic idea, how
+mean and small become all those little, fearsome "schemes of salvation,"
+whereby men were to be separated and impassable gulfs fixed between
+them. Those who fix gulfs here and now are hotly intent on showing that
+God will fix gulfs hereafter; thus we see how man is continually
+creating God in his own image.
+
+His idea of God's justice is always built on his own; and as usually our
+deities are more or less inherited, heirlooms of the past, we see that
+it is not at all strange that men should be better than their religion.
+They drag their dead creeds behind them like a stagecoach, with
+preachers and priests on top; kings and nobles inside; and coffins full
+of past sins in the boot. A man is always better than his creed--unless
+he makes his creed new every day. These hand-me-down religions seldom
+fit, and professional theology, it seems to me, is mostly a dealing in
+ol' clo'.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the month of September, Nineteen Hundred Four, Haeckel was a delegate
+to the Freethinkers' Congress at Rome. To hold such a convention in the
+Eternal City, right under the eaves of the Vatican, was surely a trifle
+"indelicate," to use the words of the Pope. And it was no wonder that at
+the close of the Congress the Pope at once ordered a sacred
+housecleaning, a divine fumigation.
+
+Forty years ago he would have acted before the Congress convened, and
+not afterward. Special mass was held in every one of the Catholic
+Churches in Rome, "partially to atone for the insult done to Almighty
+God."
+
+Over three thousand delegates were present at the Congress, every
+civilized country being represented.
+
+A committee was named to decorate the statue of Bruno that stands on the
+spot where he was burned for declaring that the earth revolved, and that
+the stars were not God's jewels hung in the sky each night by angels.
+
+On this occasion, Haeckel said:
+
+"This Congress is historic. It marks a white milepost in the onward and
+upward march of Freedom.
+
+"We have met in Rome not accidentally or yet incidentally, but
+purposely. We have met here to show the world that times have changed,
+that the earth revolves, and to prove to ourselves in an impressive and
+undeniable way that the power of superstition is crippled, and at last
+Science and Free Speech need no longer cringe and crawl. We respect the
+Church for what she is, but our manhood must now realize that it is no
+longer the slave and tool of entrenched force and power that abrogates
+to itself the name of religion."
+
+The Haeckel attitude of mind is essentially one of faith--Haeckel's hope
+for the race is sublime. There are several things we do not know, but we
+may know some time, just as men know things that children do not.
+
+And yet we are only children in the kindergarten of God. And this garden
+where we work and play is our own. The boy of ten, or even the man of
+sixty, may never know, but there will come men greater than these and
+they will understand. The Monist, the man who believes in the One--the
+All--is essentially religious.
+
+Haeckel has chosen this word Monism, as opposed to theism, deism,
+materialism, spiritism.
+
+Doctor Paul Carus is today the ablest American exponent of Monism, and
+to him it is a positive religion. If Monism could make men of the superb
+mental type of Paul Carus, well might we place the subject on a
+compulsory basis and introduce it into our public schools. But Haeckel
+and Carus believe quite as much in freedom as in Monism. All violence of
+direction is contrary to growth, and delays evolution just that much.
+
+The One of which we are part and particle--single cells, if you
+please--is constantly working for its own good. We advance individually
+as we lie low in the Lord's hand and allow ourselves to be receivers and
+conveyors of the Divine Will.
+
+And we ourselves are the Divine Will. The contemplation of this divinity
+excites the religious emotions of awe, veneration, wonder and of
+worship. It is a world of correlation. The All is right here. There is
+no outside force or energy; no god or supreme being that looks on,
+interferes, dictates and decides. To admit that there is an outside
+power, something uncorrelated, is to invite fear, apprehension,
+uncertainty and terror. This undissolved residuum is the nest-egg of
+superstition. The man who believes that God is the Whole, and that every
+man is a necessary part of the Whole, has no need to placate or please
+an intangible Something. All he has to do is to be true to his own
+nature, to live his own life, to understand himself. This takes us back
+to the Socratic maxim, "Know Thyself." No man ever expressed one phase
+of Monism so well and beautifully as Emerson has in his "Essay on
+Compensation." This intelligence in which we are bathed rights every
+wrong, equalizes every injustice, balances every perversion, punishes
+the wrong and rewards the right. The Universe is self-lubricating and
+automatic. The Greeks clearly beheld the sublime truths of Compensation
+when they pictured Nemesis. It is absurd to punish--leave it to
+Nemesis--she never forgets--nothing can escape her.
+
+Our duties lie in service to ourselves, and we best serve self by
+serving humanity. This is the only religion that pays compound interest
+to both borrower and lender. Worship Humanity and you honor yourself.
+
+And the world has ever dimly perceived this, for history honors no men
+save those who have given their lives that others might live. The
+saviors of the world are only those who loved Humanity more than all
+else. All men who live honest lives are saviors--they live that others
+may live.
+
+He that saveth his life shall lose it.
+
+We grow through radiation, not by absorption or annexation. To him that
+hath shall be given. We keep things by giving them to others. The dead
+carry in their clenched hands only that which they have given away; and
+the living carry only the love in their hearts which they have bestowed
+on others.
+
+"I and my Father are one"--the thought is old, but to prove it from the
+so-called material world through the study of biology has been the
+life-work of Ernst Haeckel.
+
+Undaunted we press ever on.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: CARL VON LINNAEUS]
+
+LINNAEUS
+
+
+     When a man of genius is in full swing, never contradict him, set
+     him straight or try to reason with him. Give him a free field. A
+     listener is sure to get a greater quantity of good, no matter how
+     mixed, than if the man is thwarted. Let Pegasus bolt--he will bring
+     you up in a place you know nothing about!
+
+     --_Linnaeus_
+
+
+LINNAEUS
+
+Out of the mist and fog of time, the name of Aristotle looms up
+large. It was more than twenty-three hundred years ago that Aristotle
+lived. He might have lived yesterday, so distinctively modern was he in
+his method and manner of thought. Aristotle was the world's first
+scientist. He sought to sift the false from the true--to arrange,
+classify and systematize.
+
+Aristotle instituted the first zoological garden that history mentions,
+barring that of Noah. He formed the first herbarium, and made a
+geological collection that prophesied for Hugh Miller the testimony of
+the rocks. Very much of our scientific terminology goes back to
+Aristotle.
+
+Aristotle was born in the mountains of Macedonia. His father was a
+doctor and belonged to the retinue of King Amyntas. The King had a son
+named Philip, who was about the same age as Aristotle.
+
+Some years later, Philip had a son named Alexander, who was somewhat
+unruly, and Philip sent a Macedonian cry over to Aristotle, and
+Aristotle harkened to the call for help and went over and took charge of
+the education of Alexander.
+
+The science of medicine in Aristotle's boyhood was the science of
+simples. In surgery the world has progressed, but in medicine, doctors
+have progressed most, by consigning to the grave, that tells no tales,
+the deadly materia medica.
+
+In Aristotle's childhood, when his father was both guide and physician
+to the king, on hunting trips through the mountains, the doctor taught
+the boys to recognize sarsaparilla, stramonium, hemlock, hellebore,
+sassafras and mandrake. Then Aristotle made a list of all the plants he
+knew and wrote down the supposed properties of each.
+
+Before Aristotle was half-grown, both his father and mother died, and he
+was cared for by a Mr. and Mrs. Proxenus. This worthy couple would never
+have been known to the world were it not for the fact that they
+ministered to this orphan boy. Long years afterward he wrote a poem to
+their memory, and paid them such a tender, human compliment that their
+names have been woven into the very fabric of letters. "They loved each
+other, and still had love enough left for me," he says. And we can only
+guess whether this man and his wife with hearts illumined by divine
+passion, the only thing that yet gladdens the world, ever imagined that
+they were supplying an atmosphere in which would bud and blossom one of
+the greatest intellects the world has ever known.
+
+It was through the help of Proxenus that Aristotle was enabled to go to
+Athens and attend the School of Oratory, of which Plato was dean.
+
+The fine, receptive spirit of this slender youth evidently brought out
+from Plato's heart the best that was packed away there.
+
+Aristotle was soon the star scholar. To get much out of school you have
+to take much with you when you go there. In one particular, especially,
+Aristotle, the country boy from Macedonia, brought much to Plato--and
+this was the scientific spirit. Plato's bent was philosophy, poetry,
+rhetoric--he was an artist in expression.
+
+"Know thyself," said Socrates, the teacher of Plato.
+
+"Be thyself," said Plato. "Know the world of Nature, of which you are a
+part," said Aristotle; "and you will be yourself and know yourself
+without thought or effort. The things you see, you are."
+
+Twenty-three years Aristotle and Plato were together, and when they
+separated it was on the relative value of science and poetry. "Science
+is vital," said Aristotle; "but poetry and rhetoric are incidental." It
+was a little like the classic argument still carried on in all
+publishing-houses, as to which is the greater: the man who writes the
+text or the man who illustrates it.
+
+One is almost tempted to think that Plato's finest product was
+Aristotle, just as Sir Humphry Davy's greatest discovery was Michael
+Faraday. One fine, earnest, receptive pupil is about all any teacher
+should expect in a lifetime, but Plato had at least two, Aristotle and
+Theophrastus. And Theophrastus dated his birth from the day he met
+Aristotle.
+
+Theo-Phrastus means God's speech, or one who speaks divinely. The boy's
+real name was Ferguson. But the name given by Aristotle, who always had
+a passion for naming things, stuck, and the world knows this superbly
+great man as Theophrastus.
+
+Botany dates from Theophrastus. And Theophrastus it was who wrote that
+greatest of acknowledgments, when, in dedicating one of his books, he
+expressed his indebtedness in these words: "To Aristotle, the inspirer
+of all I am or hope to be."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Theophrastus' death the science of botany slept for three hundred
+years. During this interval was played in Palestine that immortal drama
+which so profoundly influenced the world. Twenty-three years after the
+birth of Christ, Pliny, the Naturalist, was born.
+
+He was the uncle of his nephew, and it is probable that the younger man
+would have been swallowed in oblivion, just as the body of the older one
+was covered by the eager ashes of Vesuvius, were it not for the fact
+that Pliny the Elder had made the name deathless.
+
+Pliny the Younger was about such a man as Richard Le Gallienne; Pliny
+the Elder was like Thomas A. Edison.
+
+At twenty-two, Pliny the Elder was a Captain in the Roman Army doing
+service in Germany. Here he made memoranda of the trees, shrubs and
+flowers he saw, and compared them with similar objects he knew at home.
+"Animal and vegetable life change as you go North and South; from this I
+assume that life is largely a matter of temperature and moisture." Thus
+wrote this barbaric Roman soldier, who thereby proved he was not so much
+of a barbarian after all. When he was twenty-five, his command was
+transferred to Africa, and here, in the moments stolen from sleep, he
+wrote a work in three volumes on education, entitled, "Studiosus."
+
+In writing the book he got an education--to find out about a thing,
+write a book on it. Pliny returned to Rome and began the practise of
+law, and developed into a special pleader of marked power. He still held
+his commission in the army, and was sent on various diplomatic errands
+to Spain, Africa, Germany, Gaul and Greece. If you want things done,
+call on a busy man: the man of leisure has no spare time.
+
+Pliny's jottings on natural history very soon resolved themselves into
+the most ambitious plan, which up to that time had not been attempted by
+man--he would write out and sum up all human knowledge.
+
+The next man to try the same thing was Alexander von Humboldt. We now
+have Pliny's "Natural History" in thirty-seven volumes. His other forty
+volumes are lost. The first volume of the "Natural History," which was
+written last, gives a list of the authors consulted. Aristotle and
+Theophrastus take the places of honor, and then follow a score of names
+of men whose works have perished and whom we know mostly through what
+Pliny says about them. So not only does Pliny write science as he saw
+it, but introduces us into a select circle of authors whom otherwise we
+would not know. We have the world of Nature, but we would not have this
+world of thinkers, were it not for Pliny.
+
+Pliny even quotes Sappho, who loved and sung, and whose poems reached us
+only through scattered quotations, as if Emerson's works should perish
+and we would revive him through a file of "The Philistine" magazine.
+Pliny and Paul were contemporaries. Pliny lived at Rome when Paul lived
+there in his own hired house, but Pliny never mentioned him, and
+probably never heard of him.
+
+One man was interested in this world, the other in the next.
+
+Pliny begins his great work with a plagiarism on Lyman Abbott, "There is
+but one God." The idea that there were many arose out of the thought
+that because there were many things, there must be special gods to look
+after them: gods of the harvest, gods of the household, gods of the
+rain, etc.
+
+There is but one God, says Pliny, and this God manifests Himself in
+Nature. Nature and Nature's work are one. This world and all other
+worlds we see or can think of are parts of Nature. If there are other
+Universes, they are natural; that is to say, a part of Nature. God rules
+them all according to laws which He Himself can not violate. It is vain
+to supplicate Him, and absurd to worship Him, for to do these things is
+to degrade Him with the thought that He is like us. The assumption that
+God is very much like us is not complimentary to God.
+
+God can not do an unnatural or a supernatural thing. He can not kill
+Himself. He can not make the greater less than the less. He can not make
+twice ten anything else than twenty.
+
+He can not make a stick that has but one end. He can not make the past,
+future. He can not make one who has lived never to have lived. He can
+not make the mortal, immortal; nor the immortal, mortal. He can change
+the form of things, but He can not abolish a thing. Pliny preaches the
+Unity of the Universe and his religion is the religion of Humanity.
+
+Pliny says:
+
+"We can not injure God, but we can injure man. And as man is part of
+Nature or God, the only way to serve God is to benefit man. If we love
+God, the way to reveal that love is in our conduct toward our fellows."
+
+Pliny was close upon the Law of the Correlation of Forces, and he almost
+got a glimpse of the Law of Attraction or Gravitation. He sensed these
+things, but could not prove them. Pliny touched life at an immense
+number of points. What he saw, he knew, but when he took things on the
+word of Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville (for these gentlemen
+adventurers have always lived), he fell into curious errors. For
+instance, he tells of horses in Africa that have wings, and when hard
+pressed, fly like birds; of ostriches that give milk, and of elephants
+that live on land or sea equally well; of mines where gold is found in
+solid masses and the natives dig into it for diamonds.
+
+But outside of these little lapses, Pliny writes sanely and well. Book
+Two treats of the crust of the earth, of earthquakes, meteors, volcanoes
+(these had a strange fascination for him), islands and upheavals.
+
+Books Three and Four relate of geography and give amusing information
+about the shape of the continents and the form of the earth. Then comes
+a book on man, his evolution and physical qualities, with a history of
+the races.
+
+Next is a book on Zoology, with a resume of all that was written by
+Aristotle, and with many corroborations of Thompson-Seton and Rudyard
+Kipling. Facts from the "Jungle Book" are here recited at length. Book
+Nine is on marine life--sponges, shells and coral insects. Book Ten
+treats of birds, and carries the subject further than it had ever been
+taken before, even if it does at times contradict John Burroughs. Book
+Eleven is on insects, bugs and beetles, and tells, among other things,
+of bats that make fires in caves to keep themselves warm. Book Twelve is
+on trees, their varieties, height, age, growth, qualities and
+distribution. Book Thirteen treats of fruits, juices, gums, wax, saps
+and perfumes. Book Fourteen is on grapes and the making of wine, with a
+description of the process and the various kinds of wine, their effects
+on the human system, with a goodly temperance lesson backed up by
+incidents and examples.
+
+Book Fifteen treats of pomegranates, apples, plums, peaches, figs and
+various other luscious fruits, and shows much intimate and valuable
+knowledge. And so the list runs down through, treating at great length
+of bees, fishes, woods, iron, lead, copper, gold, marble, fluids, gases,
+rivers, swamps, seas, and a thousand and one things that were familiar
+to this marvelous man. But of all subjects, Pliny shows a much greater
+love for botany than for anything else. Plants, flowers, vines, trees
+and mosses interest him always, and he breaks off other subjects to tell
+of some flower that he has just discovered.
+
+Pliny had command of the Roman fleet that was anchored in the bay off
+Pompeii, when that city was destroyed in the year Seventy-nine.
+Bulwer-Lytton tells the story, with probably a close regard for the
+facts. The sailors, obeying Pliny's orders, did their utmost to save
+human life, and rescued hundreds. Pliny himself made various trips in a
+small boat from the ship to the beach. He was safely on board the
+flag-ship, and orders had been given to weigh anchor, when the commander
+decided to make one more visit to the perishing city to see if he could
+not rescue a few more, and also to get a closer view of Nature in a
+tantrum.
+
+He rowed away into the fog. The sailors waited for their beloved
+commander, but waited in vain. He had ventured too close to the flowing
+lava, and was suffocated by the fumes, a victim to his love for humanity
+and his desire for knowledge. So died Pliny the Elder, aged but
+fifty-six years.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All children are zoologists, but a botanist appears upon the earth only
+at rare intervals.
+
+A Botanist is born--not made. From the time of Pliny, botany performed
+the Rip Van Winkle act until John Ray, the son of a blacksmith, appeared
+upon the scene in England. In the meantime, Leonardo had classified the
+rocks, recorded the birds, counted the animals and written a book of
+three thousand pages on the horse. Leonardo dissected many plants, but
+later fell back upon the rose for decorative purposes.
+
+John Ray was born in Sixteen Hundred Twenty-eight near Braintree in
+Essex. Now, as to genius--no blacksmith-shop is safe from it. We know
+where to find ginseng, but genius is the secret of God.
+
+A blacksmith's helper by day, this aproned lad with sooty face dreamed
+dreams. Evenings he studied Greek with the village parson. They read
+Aristotle and Theophrastus.
+
+Have a care there, you Macedonian miscreant, dead two thousand years,
+you are turning this boy's head!
+
+John Ray would be a botanist as great as Aristotle, and he would speak
+divinely, just as did Theophrastus. It is all a matter of desire! Young
+Ray became a Minor Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; then a Major
+Fellow; then he took the Master's degree; next he became lecturer on
+Greek; and insisted that Aristotle was the greatest man the world had
+ever seen, except none, and the Dean raised an eyebrow.
+
+The professor of mathematics resigned and Ray took his place; next he
+became Junior Dean, and then College Steward; and according to the
+custom of the times he used to preach in the chapel. One of his sermons
+was from the text, "Consider the lilies of the field." Another sermon
+that brought him more notoriety than fame was on the subject, "God in
+Creation," wherein he argued that to find God we should look for Him
+more in the world of Nature and not so much in books.
+
+Matters were getting strained. Ray was asked to subscribe to the Act of
+Uniformity, which was a promise that he would never preach anything that
+was not prescribed by the Church. Ray demurred, and begged that he be
+allowed to go free and preach anything he thought was truth--new truth
+might come to him! This shows the absurdity of Ray. He was asked to
+reconsider or resign. He resigned--resigned the year that Sir Isaac
+Newton entered.
+
+Fortunately, one particular pupil followed him, not that he
+loved college less, but that he loved Ray more. This pupil was
+Francis Willughby. Through the bounty of this pupil we get the
+scientist--otherwise, Ray would surely have been starved into
+subjection. Willughby took Ray to the home of his parents, who were rich
+people.
+
+Ray undertook the education of young Willughby, very much as Aristotle
+took charge of Alexander. Willughby and Ray traveled, studied, observed
+and wrote. They went to Spain, took trips to France, Italy and
+Switzerland, and journeyed to Scotland. Willughby devoted his life to
+Ornithology and Ichthyology and won a deathless place in science.
+
+Ray specialized on botany, and did a work in classification never done
+before. He made a catalog of the flora of England that wrung even from
+Cambridge a compliment--they offered him the degree of LL.D. Ray quietly
+declined it, saying he was only a simple countryman, and honors or
+titles would be a disadvantage, tending to separate him from the plain
+people with whom he worked. However, the Royal Society elected him a
+member, and he accepted the honor, that he might put the results of his
+work on record. His paper on the circulation of sap in trees was read
+before the Royal Society, on the request of Newton. Due credit was given
+Harvey for his discovery of the circulation of the blood; but Ray made
+the fine point that man was brother to the tree, and his life was
+derived from the same Source.
+
+When Willughby died, in Sixteen Hundred Seventy-two, he left Ray a
+yearly income of three hundred dollars. Doctor Johnson told Boswell that
+Ray had a collection of twenty thousand English bugs. Our botanical
+terminology comes more from John Ray than from any other man. Ray
+adopted wherever possible the names given by Aristotle, so loyal, loving
+and true was he to the Master. Ray died in Seventeen Hundred Five, aged
+seventy-six.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two years after the death of John Ray, in Seventeen Hundred Seven, was
+born a baby who was destined to find biology a chaos, and leave it a
+cosmos.
+
+Linnaeus did for botany what Galileo had done for astronomy. John Ray was
+only a John the Baptist.
+
+Carl von Linne, or Carolus Linnaeus as he preferred to be called, was
+born in an obscure village in the Province of Smaland, Sweden. His
+father was a clergyman, passing rich on forty pounds a year. His mother
+was only eighteen years old when she bore him, and his father had just
+turned twenty-one. It was a poor parish, and one of the deacons
+explained that they could not afford a real preacher; so they hired a
+boy.
+
+Carl tells in his journal, of remembering how, when he was but four
+years old, his father would lead his congregation out through the woods
+and, all seated on the grass, the father would tell the people about the
+plants and herbs and how to distinguish them.
+
+Back of the parsonage there was a goodly garden, where the young pastor
+and his wife worked many happy hours. When Carl was eight years of age,
+a corner of this garden was set apart for his very own.
+
+He pressed into his service several children of the neighborhood, and
+they carried flat stones from the near-by brook to wall in this
+miniature farm--this botanical garden.
+
+The child that hasn't a flowerbed or a garden of its ownest own is
+being cheated out of its birthright.
+
+The evolution of the child mirrors the evolution of the race. And as the
+race has passed through the savage, pastoral and agricultural stages, so
+should the child. As a people we are now in the commercial or
+competitive stage, but we are slowly emerging out of this into the age
+of co-operation or enlightened self-interest.
+
+It is only a very great man--one with a prophetic vision--who can see
+beyond the stage in which he is.
+
+The stage we are in seems the best and the final one--otherwise, we
+would not be in it. But to skip any of these stages in the education or
+evolution of the individual seems a sore mistake. Children hedged and
+protected from digging in the dirt develop into "third rounders," as our
+theosophic friends would say, that is, educated non-comps--vast top-head
+and small cerebellum--people who can explain the unknowable, but who do
+not pay cash. Third rounders all--fit only for the melting-pot!
+
+A tramp is one who has fallen a victim of arrested development and never
+emerged from the nomadic stage; an artistic dilettante is one who has
+jumped the round where boys dig in the dirt and has evolved into a
+missnancy.
+
+Young Carl Linnaeus skipped no round in his evolution. He began as a
+savage, robbing birds' nests, chasing butterflies, capturing bees, bugs
+and beetles. He trained goats to drive, hitched up a calf, fenced his
+little farm, and planted it with strange and curious crops.
+
+Clergymen once were the only schoolteachers, and in Sweden, when Linnaeus
+was a boy, there was a plan of farming children out among preachers that
+they might be educated. Possibly this plan of having some one besides
+the parents teach the lessons is good--I can not say. But young Carl did
+not succeed--save in disturbing the peace among the households of the
+half-dozen clergymen who in turn had him.
+
+The boy evidently was a handsome fellow, a typical Swede, with hair as
+fair as the sunshine, blue eyes, and a pink face that set off the fair
+hair and made him look like a Circassian.
+
+He had energy plus, and the way he cluttered up the parsonages where he
+lodged was a distraction to good housewives: birds' nests, feathers,
+skins, claws, fungi, leaves, flowers, roots, stalks, rocks, sticks and
+stones--and when one meddled with his treasures, there was trouble. And
+there was always trouble; for the boy possessed a temper, and usually
+had it right with him.
+
+The intent of the parents was that Carl should become a clergyman, but
+his distaste for theology did not go unexpressed. So perverse and
+persistent were his inclinations that they preyed on the mind of his
+father, who quoted King Lear and said, "How sharper than a serpent's
+tooth it is to have a thankless child!"
+
+His troubles weighed so upon the good clergyman that his nerves became
+affected and he went to the neighboring town of Wexio to consult Doctor
+Rothman, a famed medical expert.
+
+The good clergyman, in the course of his conversation with the doctor,
+told of his mortification on account of the dulness and perversity of
+his son.
+
+Doctor Rothman listened in patience and came to the conclusion that
+young Mr. Linnaeus was a good boy who did the wrong thing. All energy is
+God's, but it may be misdirected. A boy not good enough for a preacher
+might make a good doctor--an excess of virtue is not required in the
+recipe for a physician.
+
+"I'll cure you, by taking charge of your boy," said Rothman; "you want
+to make a clergyman of the youth: I'll let him be just what he wants to
+be, a naturalist and a physician." And it was so.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The year spent by Linnaeus under the roof of Doctor Rothman was a pivotal
+point in his life. He was eighteen years old. The contempt of Rothman
+for the refinements of education appealed to the young man. Rothman was
+blunt, direct, and to the point: he had a theory that people grew by
+doing what they wanted to do, not by resisting their impulses.
+
+He was both friend and comrade to the boy. They rode together, dissected
+animals and plants, and the young man assisted in operations. Linnaeus
+had the run of the Doctor's library, and without knowing it, was
+mastering physiology.
+
+"I would adopt him as my son," said Rothman; "but I love him so much
+that I am going to separate him from me. My roots have struck deep in
+the soil: I am like the human trees told of by Dante; but the boy can go
+on!"
+
+And so Rothman sent him along to the University of Lund, with letters to
+another doctor still more cranky than himself. This man was Doctor
+Kilian Stobaeus, a medical professor, physician to the king, and a
+naturalist of note. Stobaeus had a mixed-up museum of minerals, birds,
+fishes and plants.
+
+Everybody for a hundred miles who had a curious thing in the way of
+natural history sent it to Stobaeus. Into this medley of strange and
+curious things Linnaeus was plunged with orders to "straighten it up."
+There was a German student also living with the doctor, working for his
+board. Linnaeus took the lead and soon had the young German helping him
+catalog the curios.
+
+The spirit of Ray had gotten abroad in Germany, and Ray's books had been
+translated and were being used in many of the German schools. Linnaeus
+made a bargain with the German student that they should speak only
+German--he wanted to find what was locked up in those German books on
+botany.
+
+Stobaeus was lame and had but one eye, so he used to call on the boys to
+help him, not only to hitch up his horse, but to write his
+prescriptions. Linnaeus wrote very badly, and was chided because he did
+not improve his penmanship, for it seems that in the olden times
+physicians wrote legibly. Linnaeus resented the rebuke, and was shown the
+door. He was gone a week, when Stobaeus sent for him, much to his relief.
+This little comedy was played several times during the year, through
+what Linnaeus afterward acknowledged as his fault. One would hardly think
+that the man who on first seeing the English gorse in full bloom fell on
+his knees, burst into tears of joy, and thanked God that he had lived to
+see this day, would have had a fiery temper. Then further, the gentle,
+spiritual qualities that Linnaeus in his later life developed give one
+the idea that he was always of a gentle nature.
+
+In indexing the museum of Doctor Stobaeus, Linnaeus found his bent. "I
+will never be a doctor," he said; "but I can beat the world on making a
+catalog."
+
+And thus it was: his genius lay in classification. "He indexed and
+catalogued the world," a great writer has said.
+
+After a year at the University of Lund, with more learned by working for
+his board than at school, there was a visit from Doctor Rothman, who had
+just dropped in to see his old friend Stobaeus. The fact was, Rothman
+cared a deal more for Linnaeus than he did for Stobaeus. "Weeds develop
+into flowers by transplanting only," said Rothman to Linnaeus. "You need
+a different soil--get out of here before you get pot-bound."
+
+"But about Cyclops?" asked Linnaeus.
+
+"Let Cyclops go to the devil!" It was no use to ask permission of
+Stobaeus. Linnaeus was so valuable that Stobaeus would not spare him.
+
+So Linnaeus packed up and departed between the dawn and the day, leaving
+a letter stating he had gone to Upsala because it seemed best and
+begging forgiveness for such seeming ingratitude.
+
+When Linnaeus got to Upsala he found a letter from Doctor Cyclops,
+written in wrath, requesting him never again to show his face in Lund.
+Rothman also lost the friendship of Stobaeus for his share in the
+transaction.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Linnaeus arrived at Upsala he had one marked distinction, according
+to his own account--he was the poorest student that had ever knocked at
+the gates of the University for admittance. Perhaps this is a mistake,
+for even though the young man had patched his shoes with birch bark, he
+was not in debt.
+
+And the youth of twenty-one who has health, hope, ambition and animation
+is not to be pitied. Poverty is only for the people who think poverty.
+
+It is five hundred English miles from Lund to Upsala. After his long,
+weary tramp, Linnaeus sat on the edge of the hill and looked down at the
+scattered town of Upsala in the valley below. A stranger passing by
+pointed out the college buildings, where a thousand young men were being
+drilled and disciplined in the mysteries of learning. "Where is the
+Botanical Garden?" asked the newcomer.
+
+It was pointed out to him. He gazed on the site, carefully studied the
+surrounding landscape, and mentally calculated where he would move the
+Botanical Garden as soon as he had control of it. Let us anticipate here
+just long enough to explain that the Upsala Botanical Garden now is
+where Linnaeus said it should be. It is a most beautiful place, lined off
+with close-growing shrubbery. After traversing the winding paths, one
+reaches the lecture-hall, built after the Greek, with porches, peristyle
+and gently ascending marble steps. On entering the building, the first
+object that attracts the visitor is the life-size statue of Linnaeus.
+
+To the left, a half-mile away, is the old cathedral--a place that never
+much interested Linnaeus. But there now rests his dust, and in windows
+and also in storied bronze his face, form and fame endure. In the
+meantime, we have left the young man sitting on a boulder looking down
+at the town ere he goes forward to possess it.
+
+He adjusts his shoes with their gaping wounds, shakes the dust from his
+cap, and then takes from his pack a faded neckscarf, puts it on and he
+is ready.
+
+Descending the hill he forgets his lameness, waives the stone-bruises,
+and walks confidently to the Botanical Garden, which he views with a
+critical eye. Next, he inquires for the General Superintendent who lives
+near. The young man presents his credentials from Rothman, who describes
+the youth as one who knows and loves the flowers, and who can be useful
+in office or garden and is not above spade and hoe. The Superintendent
+looks at the pink face, touched with bronze from days in the open air,
+notes the long yellow hair, beholds the out-of-door look of fortitude
+that comes from hard and plain fare, and inwardly compares these things
+with the lack of them in some of his students. "But this Doctor--Doctor
+Rothman who wrote this letter--I do not have the honor of knowing him,"
+says the Superintendent.
+
+"Ah, you are unfortunate," replies the youth; "he is a very great man,
+and I myself will vouch for him in every way."
+
+Oh! this glowing confidence of youth--before there comes a surplus of
+lime in the bones, or the touch of winter in the heart! The
+Superintendent smiled. Knock in faith and the door shall be
+opened--there are those whom no one can turn away. A stray bed was found
+in the garret for the stranger, and the next morning he was earnestly at
+work cataloguing the dried plants in the herbarium, a task long delayed
+because there was no one to do it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The study of Natural History in the University of Upsala was, at this
+time, at a low ebb. It was like the Art Department in many of the
+American colleges: its existence largely confined to the school catalog.
+There were many weeks of biting poverty and neglect for Linnaeus, but he
+worked away in obscurity and silence and endured, saying all the time,
+"The sun will come out, the sun will come out!" Doctor Olaf Rudbeck had
+charge of the chair of Botany, but seldom sat in it. His business was
+medicine. He gave no lectures, but the report was that he made his
+students toil at cultivating in his garden--this to open up their
+intellectual pores. In the course of his work, Linnaeus devised a sex
+plan of classification, instead of the so-called natural method. He
+wrote out his ideas and submitted them to Rudbeck.
+
+The learned Doctor first pooh-poohed the plan, then tolerated it, and in
+a month claimed he had himself devised it. On the scheme being explained
+to others there was opposition, and Rudbeck requested Linnaeus to amplify
+his notes into a thesis, and read it as a lecture. This was done, and so
+pleased was the old man that he appointed Linnaeus his adjunctus. In the
+Spring of Seventeen Hundred Thirty, Linnaeus began to give weekly
+lectures on some topic of Natural History.
+
+Linnaeus was now fairly launched. His animation, clear thinking, handsome
+face and graceful ways made his lectures very popular. Science in his
+hands was no longer the dull and turgid thing it had before been in the
+University. He would give a lecture in the hall, and then invite the
+audience to walk with him in the woods. He seemed to know everything:
+birds, beetles, bugs, beasts, trees, weeds, flowers, rocks and stones
+were to him familiar.
+
+He showed his pupils things they had walked on all their lives and never
+seen.
+
+The old Botanical Garden that had degenerated into a kitchen-garden for
+the Commons was rearranged and furnished with many specimens gathered
+round about.
+
+A system of exchange was carried on with other schools, and Natural
+History at Upsala was fast becoming a feature. Old Doctor Rudbeck
+hobbled around with the classes, and when Linnaeus lectured sat in a
+front seat, applauding by rapping his cane on the floor and ejaculating
+words of encouragement.
+
+Linnaeus was now receiving invitations to lecture at other schools in the
+vicinity. He made excursions and reports on the Natural History of the
+country around. The Academy of Science of Upsala now selected him to go
+to Lapland and explore the resources of that country, which was then
+little known.
+
+The journey was to be a long and dangerous one. It meant four thousand
+miles of travel on foot, by sledge and on horseback, over a country that
+was for the most part mountainous, without roads, and peopled with
+semi-savages.
+
+There were two reasons why Linnaeus should make the trip:
+
+One was he had the hardihood and the fortitude to do it.
+
+And second, he was not wanted at Upsala. He was becoming too popular.
+One rival professor had gone so far as to prefer formal charges of
+scientific heresy; he also made the telling point that Linnaeus was not a
+college graduate. The rule of the University was that no lecturer,
+teacher or professor should be employed who did not have a degree from
+some foreign University.
+
+Inquiry was made and it was found that Linnaeus had left the University
+of Lund under a cloud. Linnaeus was confronted with the charge, and
+declined to answer it, thus practically pleading guilty. So, to get him
+out of Upsala seemed a desirable thing, both to friends and to foes. His
+friends secured the commission for the Lapland exploration, and his
+enemies made no objections, merely whispering, "Good riddance!" To be
+twenty-four, in good health, with hair like that of General Custer, a
+heart to appreciate Nature, a good horse under you, and a commission
+from the State to do an important work, in your left-hand
+breast-pocket--what Heaven more complete!
+
+A reception was tendered the young naturalist in the great hall, and he
+addressed the students on the necessity of doing your work as well as
+you can, and being kind. Before beginning his arduous and dangerous
+journey, Linnaeus went to Lund to visit his old patron, Doctor Stobaeus.
+Time, the great healer, had cured the Doctor of his hate, and he now
+spoke of Linnaeus as his best pupil. He had left hastily by the wan light
+of the moon, without leaving orders where his mail was to be forwarded;
+but now he was received as an honored guest. All the little
+misunderstandings they had were laughed over as jokes.
+
+From Lund, Linnaeus went to his home in Smaland to visit his parents.
+
+It is needless to say that they were very proud of him, and the
+villagers turned out in great numbers to do him honor, perhaps, in their
+simplicity, not knowing why.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The account of the Lapland trip by Linnaeus is to be found in his book,
+"Lachesis Lapponica."
+
+The journey covered over four thousand miles and took from May to
+November, Seventeen Hundred Thirty-one. The volume is in the form of a
+daily journal, and is as interesting as "Robinson Crusoe." There is no
+night there in Summer; but for all this, Lapland is not a paradise.
+
+It is a great stretch of desert, vast steppes and lofty mountains, with
+here and there fertile valleys. To be out in the wide open, with no
+companions but a horse and a dog, filled Linnaeus' heart with a wild joy.
+As he went on, the road grew so rough that he had to part with the
+horse, which he did with a pang, but the dog kept him company.
+
+To be educated is to liberate the mind from its trammels and fears--to
+set it free, new-chiseled from the rock. Linnaeus reveled in the vast
+loneliness of the steppes and took a hearty satisfaction in the hard
+fare. His gun and fishing-rod stood him in good stead; there were
+berries at times, and edible barks and watercress, and when these failed
+he had a little bag of meal and dried reindeer-tongues to fall back
+upon.
+
+The simplicity of his living is shown best in the fact that the expenses
+for the entire journey, occupying seven months, were only twenty-five
+pounds, or less than one hundred twenty-five dollars. The Academy had
+set aside sixty pounds, and their surprise at having most of the money
+returned to them, instead of a demand being made for more, won them,
+hand and heart. He had hit the sturdy old burghers in a sensitive
+spot--the pocketbook--and they passed resolutions declaring him the
+world's greatest naturalist, and voted him a medal, to be cast at his
+own expense. Fame is delightful, but as collateral it does not rank
+high.
+
+Linnaeus was without funds and without occupation. He gave a course of
+lectures at the University on his explorations, where every seat was
+taken, and even the stage and windows were filled. The sprightliness,
+grace and intellect Linnaeus brought to bear illumined his theme.
+
+When Linnaeus lectured, all classes were dismissed: none could rival him.
+His very excellence was his disadvantage. Jealousy was hot on his trail,
+for he was disturbing the balance of stupidity. A movement grew to force
+him from the college. Formal charges were made, and when the case came
+to a trial the even tenor of justice was disturbed by Linnaeus making an
+attack on Professor Rosen, his principal enemy, with intent to kill him.
+Dueling has been forbidden in all the universities of Sweden since the
+year Sixteen Hundred Eighty-two, and the diversion replaced by quartet
+singing. So when Linnaeus challenged his enemy to fight, and warned him
+he would kill him if he didn't fight, and also if he did, things were in
+a bad way for Linnaeus.
+
+The former charges were dropped to take up the more serious--just as
+when a man is believed to be guilty of murder, no mention is made of his
+crime of larceny.
+
+Poor Linnaeus was under the ban. The enemy had won: Linnaeus must leave.
+But where should he go--what could he do? No college would receive him
+after his being compelled to leave Upsala for riot. He decided that if
+disgrace were to be his on account of revenge, he would accept the
+disgrace. He would kill Rosen on sight and then either commit suicide or
+accept the consequences: it was all one! And so, laying plans to waylay
+his victim, he fell asleep and dreamed he had done the deed.
+
+He awoke in a sweat of horror!
+
+He heard the officers at the door! He staggered to his feet, and was
+making wild plans to fight the pursuers, when it occurred to him that he
+had only dreamed. He sat down, faint, but mightily relieved.
+
+Then he laughed, and it came to him that opposition was a part of the
+great game of life. To do a thing was to jostle others, and to jostle
+and be jostled was the fate of every man of power. "He that endureth
+unto the end shall be saved."
+
+The world was before him--the flowers still bloomed, and plants nodded
+their heads in the meadows; the summer winds blew across the fields of
+wheat, the branches waved. He was strong--he could plant and plow, or
+dig ditches, or hew lumber!
+
+Some one was hammering on the door; they had been knocking for fully
+five minutes--ah! There had been no murder, so surely it was not the
+officers.
+
+He arose slowly and opened the door, murmuring apologies. A letter for
+Carolus Linnaeus! The letter was from Baron Reuterholm of Dalecarlia. It
+contained a draft for twenty-five pounds, "as a token of good faith,"
+and begged that Linnaeus would accept charge of an expedition to survey
+the natural resources of Dalecarlia in the same way that he had Lapland,
+only with greater minuteness. Linnaeus read the letter again. The draft
+fluttered from his fingers to the floor.
+
+"Pick that up!" he peremptorily ordered of the messenger. He wanted to
+see if the other man saw it too.
+
+The other man did pick it up! Linnaeus was not dreaming, then, after
+all!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This second expedition had two objects: one was the better education of
+Baron Reuterholm's two sons, and the other the survey. One of these sons
+was at the University of Upsala, and he had conceived such an admiration
+for Linnaeus that he had written home about him. No man knows what he is
+doing: we succeed by the right oblique. Little did Linnaeus guess that he
+was preparing the way for great good fortune. The second excursion was
+one of luxury. It lacked all the hardships of the first, and involved
+the management of a party. Reuterholm was a rich Jewish banker, and a
+man in close touch with all Swedish affairs of State. This time Linnaeus
+was provided with ample funds.
+
+Linnaeus had a genius for system--a head for business. He classified men,
+and systematized his work like a general in the field. There were seven
+young naturalists in the party, and to each Linnaeus assigned a special
+work, with orders to hand in a written report of progress each evening.
+That the "Economist" or steward of the party was an American lends an
+especial note of interest for us. After Dalecarlia it was to be America!
+
+In money matters he was punctilious and accurate, the result of his
+early training in making both ends meet. The habits of thrift, industry,
+energy and absolute honesty had made him a marked man--there is not so
+much competition along these lines.
+
+The maps, measurements, drawings, and the exact, short, sharp, military
+reports turned in at regular intervals to the Baron won that worthy
+absolutely.
+
+Linnaeus was a businessman as well as a naturalist. It would require a
+book to tell of the glorious half-gypsy life of these eight young men,
+moving slowly through woods, across plains, over mountains and meadows,
+studying soil, rocks, birds, trees and flowers, collecting and making
+records.
+
+Camping at night by flowing streams, awakening with the dawn and cooking
+breakfast by the campfire in a silence that took up their shouts of
+laughter in surprise, and echoed them back from the neighboring hills!
+At last the journey was ended. Linnaeus had proved his ability to
+teach--his animation, good-cheer and friendly qualities brought his
+pupils very close to him. Reuterholm insisted that he should attach
+himself to the rising little college at Fahlun. There he met Doctor
+Moraeus, a man of much worth in a scientific way. At his house Linnaeus
+made his home. There was a daughter in the household, Sara Elizabeth,
+tall, slender, appreciative and studious. One of the Reuterholms had
+courted her, but in vain.
+
+There were the usual results, and when Carolus and Sara Elizabeth came
+to Doctor Moraeus hand in hand for his blessing, he granted it as good
+men always do. Then the Doctor gave Linnaeus some good advice--go to
+Holland or somewhere and get a doctor's degree. The enemies at Upsala
+called Linnaeus "the gypsy scientist." Silence them--Linnaeus was now a
+great man, and the world would yet acknowledge it. Sara Elizabeth agreed
+in all of the propositions.
+
+Love, they say, is blind, but sometimes love is a regular telescope.
+This time love saw things that the learned men of Upsala failed to
+discover--their diagnosis was wrong. Linnaeus had prepared a thesis on
+intermittent fever, and he was assured that if he presented this thesis
+at the medical school at Harderwijk, Holland, with letters from Baron
+Reuterholm and Doctor Moraeus, it would secure him the much desired M.D.
+
+A few months, at most, would suffice. He could then return to Fahlun and
+take his place as a practising physician and a professor in the college,
+marry the lady of his choice and live happy ever afterward.
+
+So he started away southward. In due time, he arrived at Harderwijk and
+read his thesis to the faculty. Instead of the callow youth, such as
+they usually dealt with, they found a practised speaker who defended his
+points with grace and confidence. The degree was at once voted, and a
+"cum laude" thrown in for good measure. Linnaeus was asked to remain
+there and give a course of lectures on natural history. This he did.
+Before going home he thought he would take a little look in on Leyden,
+at that time the bookmaking and literary center of the world. At Leyden
+he met Gronovius, the naturalist, who asked him to remain and give
+lectures at the University. He did so, and incidentally showed
+Gronovius the manuscript of his book on the new system of botanic
+classification.
+
+Gronovius was so delighted that he insisted on having the book printed
+by the Plantins at his own expense. Here was a piece of good fortune
+Linnaeus had not anticipated.
+
+Linnaeus now settled down to read the proofs and help the work through
+the presses. But he never idled an hour.
+
+He studied, wrote and lectured, and made little excursions with his
+friends through the fields. The book finished, he hastened to send
+copies back to Fahlun to Sara Elizabeth, saying he must see Amsterdam
+and then go to Antwerp to visit his new-found printer-friends there, and
+then go home!
+
+At Amsterdam he remained a whole year, living at the house of Burman,
+the naturalist.
+
+The wealthy banker, Cliffort, first among amateur botanists of his day,
+invited Linnaeus to visit him at his country-house at Hartecamp. Here he
+saw the finest garden he had ever looked upon. Cliffort had copies of
+Linnaeus' book and he now insisted that the author should remain, catalog
+his collection and issue the book with the help of the Plantins, all
+without regard to cost. It took a year to get the work out, but it yet
+remains one of the finest things ever attempted in a bookmaking way on
+the subject of botany.
+
+About the same time, with the help of Cliffort, Linnaeus published
+another big book of his own called, "Fundamenta Botanica." This book
+was taken up at Oxford and used as a textbook, in preference to Ray.
+
+Linnaeus received invitations from England and was persuaded to take a
+trip across to that country. He visited Oxford and London, and was
+received by scientific men as a conquering hero. He saw Garrick act and
+heard George Frederick Handel, where the crowd was so great that a
+notice was posted requesting gentlemen to come without swords and ladies
+without hoops. Handel composed an aria in his honor.
+
+Returning to Leyden, Linnaeus was urged by the municipality to remain and
+rearrange the public flower-gardens and catalog the rare plants at the
+University. This took a year, in which three more books were issued
+under his skilful care.
+
+He now started for home in earnest, by way of Paris, with what a
+contemporary calls "a trunkful of medals."
+
+Paris, too, had honors and employment for the great botanist, but he
+escaped and at last reached Fahlun. He had been gone nearly four years,
+and during the interval had established his place in the scientific
+world as the first botanist of the time.
+
+"It was love that sent me out of Sweden, and but for love I would never
+have returned," he wrote.
+
+Linnaeus and Sara Elizabeth were married June Twenty-six, Seventeen
+Hundred Thirty-nine.
+
+Now the unexpected happened: Upsala petitioned Linnaeus to return, and
+the man who headed the petition was the one who had driven him away and
+who came near being killed for his pains. Linnaeus and his wife went to
+Upsala, rich, honored, beloved.
+
+Linnaeus shifted the scientific center of gravity of all Europe to a
+town, practically to them obscure, a thing they themselves scarcely
+realized.
+
+Henceforth, the life of Linnaeus flowed forward like a great and mighty
+river--everything made way for him. He was invited by the King of Spain
+to come to that country and found a School of Science, and so lavish
+were the promises that they surely would have turned the head of a
+lesser man. Universities in many civilized countries honored themselves
+by giving him degrees.
+
+In Seventeen Hundred Sixty-one, the King of Sweden issued a patent of
+nobility in his honor, and thereafter he was Carl von Linne. In England
+he was known as Sir Charles Linn.
+
+Sainte-Beuve, the eminent French critic, says that the world has
+produced only about half a dozen men who deserve to be placed in the
+first class. The elements that make up this super-superior man are high
+intellect, which abandons itself to the purpose in hand, careless of
+form and precedent; indifference to obstacles and opposition; and a
+joyous, sympathetic, loving spirit that runs over and inundates
+everything it touches, all with no special thought of personal pleasure,
+gratification or gain.
+
+Linnaeus seems in every way to fill the formula.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS H. HUXLEY]
+
+THOMAS H. HUXLEY
+
+
+     That man, I think, has a liberal education whose body has been so
+     trained in youth that it is the ready servant of his will, and does
+     with ease and pleasure all that, as a mechanism, it is capable of;
+     whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts
+     of equal strength and in smooth running order, ready, like a
+     steam-engine, to be turned to any kind of work and to spin the
+     gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is
+     stored with the knowledge of the great fundamental truths of Nature
+     and the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is
+     full of life and fire, but whose passions have been trained to come
+     to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; one
+     who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to
+     hate all vileness, and to esteem others as himself.
+
+     --_Thomas Henry Huxley_
+
+
+THOMAS H. HUXLEY
+
+That was a great group of thinkers to which Huxley belonged.
+
+The Mutual Admiration Society forms the sunshine in which souls
+grow--great men come in groups. Sir Francis Galton says there were
+fourteen men in Greece in the time of Pericles who made Athens possible.
+A man alone is only a part of a man.
+
+Praxiteles by himself could have done nothing. Ictinus might have drawn
+the plans for the Parthenon, but without Pericles the noble building
+would have remained forever the stuff which dreams are made of. And they
+do say that without Aspasia Pericles would have been a mere dreamer of
+dreams, and Walter Savage Landor overheard enough of their conversation
+to prove it.
+
+William Morris and seven men working with him formed the Preraphaelite
+Brotherhood and gave the workers and doers of the world an impetus they
+yet feel.
+
+Cambridge and Concord had seven men who induced the Muses to come to
+America and take out papers.
+
+These men of the Barbizon School tinted the entire art world: Millet,
+Rousseau, Daubigny, Corot, Diaz. And the people who worked a complete
+revolution in the theological thought of Christendom were these:
+Darwin, Spencer, Mill, Tyndall, Wallace, Huxley and, yes, George Eliot,
+who bolstered the brain of Herbert Spencer when he was learning to think
+for himself.
+
+When the victory had become a rout, there were many others who joined
+forces with the evolutionists; but at first the thinkers named above
+stood together and received the rather unsavory gibes and jeers of those
+who get their episcopopagy and science from the same source.
+
+Darwin was the only man in the group who was a university graduate, and
+he once said that he owed nothing to his Alma Mater, save the stimulus
+derived from her disapproval.
+
+For the work these men had to do there was no precedent: no one had gone
+before and blazed a trail.
+
+Learning, like capital, is timid; but ignorance coupled with a desire to
+know, is bold. Do I then make a plea for ignorance? Yes, most assuredly.
+It is just as well not to know so much, as to be a theologian and know
+so many things that are not true.
+
+Learning and institutions of learning subdue men into conformity; only
+the man who belongs to nothing is free; and ignorance, as well as a
+certain indifference to what the world has said and done, is a necessary
+factor in the character of him who would do a great work. It was the
+combined ignorance and boldness of Columbus that made it possible for
+him to give the world a continent.
+
+Yet the man who has not had a college training often feels he has
+somehow missed something valuable: there is timidity and hesitation when
+he is in the presence of those who have had "advantages." And Huxley
+felt this loss, more or less, up to his thirty-fifth year, when Fate had
+him cross swords with college men, and then the truth became his that if
+he had had the regular university training, it was quite probable that
+he would have accepted the doctrines the universities taught, and would
+then have been in the camp of the "enemy," instead of with what he
+called the "blessed minority."
+
+Isolation is a great aid to the thinker. Some of the best books the
+world has ever known were written behind prison-bars; exile has done
+much for literature, and a protracted sea-voyage has allowed many a good
+man to roam the universe in imagination. Some of Macaulay's best essays
+were written on board slow-going sailing-ships that were blown by
+vagrant winds from England to India. Darwin, Hooker and Huxley, all got
+their scientific baptism on board of surveying-ships, where time was
+plentiful and anything but fleeting, and most everything else was
+scarce.
+
+Huxley was only assistant surgeon on the "Rattlesnake," and above him
+was a naturalist who much of his time lay in his bunk and read treatises
+on this and also on that.
+
+Huxley was the seventh child of a plodding schoolteacher, born on the
+seventh day of the week on a seventh-floor back, he used to say. His
+genius for work came from his mother, a tireless, ambitious woman, who
+got things done while others were discussing them. "Had she been a man,
+she would have been leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons,"
+her son used to say.
+
+College education was not for that goodly brood--a living was the first
+thing, so after a good drilling in the three R's, Thomas Huxley was
+apprenticed to a pharmacist who paid him six shillings a week, a sum
+that the boy conscientiously gave to his mother.
+
+Oh, if in our schoolteaching we could only teach this one thing: a great
+thirst for knowledge! But this desire we can not impart: it is trial,
+difficulty, obstacle, deprivation and persecution that make souls hunger
+and thirst after knowledge. Young Huxley wanted to know. His
+thoroughness in the drugstore won the admiration of the doctors whose
+prescriptions he compounded, and several of them loaned him books and
+took him to clinics; and at seventeen we find him with a Free
+Scholarship in Charing Cross Hospital, serving as nurse and assistant
+surgeon. Then came the appointment as assistant surgeon in the Navy, and
+the appointment to "H.M.S. Rattlesnake," bound on a four-year trip to
+the Antipodes, all quite as a matter of course.
+
+Life is a sequence: this happened today because you did that yesterday.
+Tomorrow will be the result of today.
+
+The general idea of evolution was strong in the mind of young Huxley. He
+realized that Nature was moving, growing, changing all things. He had
+studied embryology, and had seen how the body of a man begins as a
+single minute mass of protoplasm, without organs or dimensions.
+
+Behind the ship was his dragnet, and he worked almost constantly
+recording the different specimens of animal and vegetable life that he
+thus secured. The jellyfish attracted him most.
+
+To the ship's naturalist, jellyfish were jellyfish, but Huxley saw that
+there were many kinds, distinct, separate, peculiar. He began to dissect
+them and thus began his book on jellyfish, just as Darwin wrote his work
+on barnacles.
+
+Huxley vowed to himself that before the "Rattlesnake" got back to
+England he would know more about jellyfish than any other living man.
+That his ambition was realized no one now disputes.
+
+Among his first discoveries, it came to him with a thrill that a certain
+species of jellyfish bears a very close resemblance to the human embryo
+at a certain stage.
+
+And he remembered the dictum of Goethe, that the growth of the
+individual mirrors the growth of the race. And he paraphrased it thus:
+"The growth of the individual mirrors the growth of the species." So
+filled was he with the thought that he could not sleep, so he got up and
+paced the deck and tried to explain his great thought to the second
+mate. He was getting ready for "The Origin of Species," which he once
+said to Darwin he would himself have written, if Darwin had been a
+little more of a gentleman and had held off for a few years.
+
+It was on board the "Rattlesnake" that Huxley wrote this great truth:
+"Nature has no designs or intentions. All that live exist only because
+they have adapted themselves to the hard lines that Nature has laid
+down. We progress as we comply."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In Australia, while waiting for his ship to locate and map a dangerous
+reef, Huxley went ashore, and as he playfully expressed it, "ran upon
+another."
+
+The name of the most excellent young woman who was to become his wife
+was Henrietta Heathorn; and Julian Hawthorne has discovered that she
+belongs to the same good stock from whence came our Nathaniel of Salem.
+
+It did not take the young naturalist and this stranded waif, seven
+thousand miles from home, long to see that they had much in common. Both
+were eager for truth, both had the ability to cut the introduction and
+reach live issues directly. "I saw you were a woman with whom only
+honesty would answer," he wrote her thirty years after. He was still in
+love with her.
+
+Yet she was a proud soul, and no assistant surgeon on an insignificant
+sloop would answer her--when he got his surgeon's commission she would
+marry him. And it was seven years before she journeyed to England alone
+with that delightful object in view. He had to serve for her as Jacob
+did for Rachel, with this difference: Jacob loved several, but Thomas
+Huxley loved but one.
+
+Huxley's wife was his companion, confidante, comrade, friend. I can not
+recall another so blest, in all the annals of thinking men, save John
+Stuart Mill. "I tell her everything I know, or guess, or imagine, so as
+to get it straight in my own mind," he said to John Fiske.
+
+In that most interesting work, "Life and Lessons of Huxley," compiled by
+his son Leonard, are constant references and allusions to this most
+ideal mating. In reply to the question, Is marriage a failure? I would
+say, "No, provided the man marries a woman like Huxley's wife, and the
+woman marries a man like Huxley."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is a classic aphorism which runs about this way, "Knock and the
+world knocks with you; boost and you boost alone." Like most popular
+sayings this is truth turned wrong side out.
+
+John Fiske once called Thomas Huxley an "appreciative iconoclast." That
+is to say, Huxley was a persistent protester (which is different from a
+protestant), and at the same time, he was a friend who never faltered
+and grew faint in time of trouble. Huxley always sniffed the battle from
+afar and said, Ha! Ha!
+
+There be those who do declare that the success of Huxley was owing to
+his taking the tide at the flood, and riding into high favor on the
+Darwinian wave. To say that there would have been no Huxley had there
+been no Darwin would be one of those unkind cuts the cruelty of which
+lies in its truth.
+
+It is equally true that if there had been no Lincoln there would have
+been no Grant; but Grant was a very great man just the same--so why
+raise the issue!
+
+Darwin summed up and made nebulae of the truths which Huxley had, up to
+that time, held only in gaseous form.
+
+Darwin was born in the immortal year Eighteen Hundred Nine. Huxley was
+born in Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five. When "The Origin of Species" was
+published in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, Thomas Huxley was thirty-four
+years old. He had made his four years' trip around the world on the
+surveying-ship "Rattlesnake," just as Darwin had made his eventful
+voyage on the "Beagle."
+
+These men in many ways had paralleled each other; but Darwin had sixteen
+years the start, and during these years he had steadily and silently
+worked to prove the great truth that he had sensed intuitively years
+before in the South Seas.
+
+"The Origin of Species" sheds light in ten thousand ways on the fact
+that all life has evolved from very lowly forms and is still ascending:
+that species were not created by fiat, but that every species was the
+sure and necessary result of certain conditions.
+
+Until "The Origin of Species" was published, and for some years
+afterward, the Immutability of Species was taught in all colleges, and
+everywhere accepted by the so-called learned men.
+
+Goethe had somewhat dimly prophesied the discovery of the Law of
+Evolution, but his ideas on natural science were regarded by the schools
+as quite on a par with those of Dante: neither was taken seriously.
+
+Darwin proved his hypothesis. Doubtless, very many schoolmen would have
+accepted the theory, but to admit that man was not created outright,
+complete, and in his present form, or superior to it, seemed to evolve a
+contradiction of the Mosaic account of Creation, and the breaking up of
+Christianity. And these things done, many thought, would entail moral
+chaos, destruction of private interests and moral confusion being one
+and the same thing to those whose interests are involved. And so for
+conscience' sake, Darwin was bitterly assailed and opposed.
+
+Opportunity, which knocks many times at each man's door, rapped hard at
+Huxley's door in Eighteen Hundred Sixty. It was at Oxford, at a meeting
+of the British Association for the Advancement of Science: "A big
+society with a slightly ironical name," once said Huxley. The audience
+was large and fashionable, delegates being present from all parts of the
+British Empire.
+
+"The Origin of Species" had been published the year before, and tongues
+were wagging. Darwin was not present; but Huxley, who was known to be a
+personal friend of Darwin, was in his seat. The intent of the chairman
+was to keep Darwin and his pestiferous book out of all the discussions:
+Darwin was a good man to smother with silence.
+
+But Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, in the course of a speech on
+another subject began to run short of material, and so switched off upon
+a theme which he had already exploited from the pulpit with marked
+effect. All public speakers carry this boiler-plate matter for use in
+time of stress.
+
+The Bishop began to denounce "those enemies of the Church and Society
+who make covert attacks upon the Bible in the name of Science." He
+warmed to his theme, and by a specious series of misstatements and
+various appeals to the prejudices of his audience worked the assemblage
+up to a high pitch of hilarity and enthusiasm. Toward the close of his
+speech he happened to spy Huxley seated near, and pointing a pudgy
+finger at him, "begged to be informed if the learned gentleman was
+really willing to be regarded as a descendant of a monkey?"
+
+As the Bishop sat down, there was a wild burst of applause and much
+laughter, but amid the din were calls, "Huxley! Huxley!" These shouts
+increased as it came over the people that while the Bishop had made a
+great speech, he had gone a trifle too far in ridiculing a member who up
+to this time had been silent. The good English spirit of fair play was
+at work. Still Huxley sat silent. Then the enemy, thinking he was
+completely vanquished, took up the cry with intent to add to his
+discomfiture: "Huxley! Huxley!"
+
+Slowly Huxley arose. He stood still until the last buzzing whisper had
+died away. When he spoke it was in so low a tone that people leaned
+forward to catch his words.
+
+Huxley knew his business: his slowness to speak created an atmosphere.
+There was no jest in his voice or manner. The air grew tense.
+
+His quiet reserve played itself off against the florid exuberance of the
+Bishop. The Bishop was not a man given to exact statements: his
+knowledge of science was general, not specific.
+
+Huxley demolished his card house point by point, correcting the gross
+misstatements, and ending by saying that since a question of personal
+preferences had been brought into the discussion of a great scientific
+theme, he would confess that if the alternatives were a descent on the
+one hand from a respectable monkey, or on the other from a Bishop of the
+Church of England who could stoop to misrepresentation and sophistry and
+who had attempted in that presence to throw discredit upon a man who had
+given his life to the cause of science, then if forced to decide he
+would declare in favor of the monkey.
+
+When Huxley took his seat, there was a silence that could be felt.
+Several ladies fainted. There were fears that the Bishop would reply,
+and to keep down such a possible unpleasant move the audience now
+applauded Huxley roundly, and amid the din the chairman declared the
+meeting adjourned.
+
+From that time forward Huxley was famous throughout England as a man to
+let alone in public debate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is a fine thing to be a great scientist, but it is a yet finer thing
+to be a great man. The one element in Huxley's life that makes his
+character stand out clear, sharp and well defined was his steadfast
+devotion to truth. The only thing he feared was self-deception. When he
+uttered his classic cry in defense of Darwin, there was no ulterior
+motive in it; no thought that he was attaching himself to a popular
+success; no idea that he was linking his name with greatness.
+
+What he felt was true, he uttered; and the strongest desire of his soul
+was that he might never compromise with the error for the sake of mental
+ease, or accept a belief simply because it was pleasant.
+
+Huxley once wrote this terse sentence of Gladstone: "It is to me a
+serious thing that the destinies of this great country should at present
+be to a great extent in the hands of a man who, whatever he may be in
+the affairs of which I am no judge, is nothing but a copious shuffler in
+those that I do understand." Gladstone crossed swords with Huxley,
+Spencer and Robert Ingersoll, and in each case his blundering intellect
+looked like a raft of logs compared with a steamboat that responds to
+the helm. Gladstone was a man of action, and silence to such is most
+becoming.
+
+He had a belief, that was enough; he should have hugged it close, and
+never stood up to explain it. Let us vary a simile just used: Lincoln
+once referred to an opponent as being "like a certain steamboat that
+ran on the Sangamon. This boat had so big a whistle that when she blew
+it, there wasn't steam enough to make her run, and when she ran she
+couldn't whistle."
+
+Huxley, Spencer and Robert Ingersoll, all made Gladstone cut for the
+woods and cover his retreat in a cloud of words. Ingersoll once said
+that in replying to Gladstone he felt like a man who had been guilty of
+cruelty to children.
+
+If one wants to see how pitifully weak Gladstone could be in an
+argument, let him refer to the "North American Review" for Eighteen
+Hundred Eighty-two.
+
+Yet Ingersoll was surely lacking in the passion for truth that
+characterized Huxley. Ingersoll was always a prosecutor or a defender:
+the lawyer habit was strong upon him. Just a little more bias in his
+clay and he would have made a model bishop.
+
+His stock of science was almost as meager as was that of Samuel
+Wilberforce, and he seldom hesitated to turn the laugh on an adversary,
+even at the expense of truth. When brought to book for his indictment of
+Moses without giving that great man any credit for the sublime things he
+did do, or making allowances for the barbaric horde with which he had to
+deal, Bob evaded the proposition by saying, "I am not the attorney of
+Moses: he has more than three million men looking after his case."
+
+Again, in that most charming lecture on Shakespeare, Ingersoll proves
+that Bacon did not write the plays, by picking out various detached
+passages of Bacon, which no one for a moment ever claimed revealed the
+genius of the man.
+
+With equal plausibility we could prove that the author of Hamlet was a
+weakling, by selecting all the obscure and stupid passages, and parading
+these with the unexplained fact that the play opens with the spirit of a
+dead man coming back to earth, and a little later in the same play
+Shakespeare has the man who interviewed the ghost tell of "that bourne
+from whence no traveler returns." Even Shakespeare was not a genius all
+the time. And Ingersoll, the searcher for truth, borrowed from his
+friends, the priests, the cheerful habit of secreting the particular
+thing that would not help the cause in hand. But one of the best things
+in Ingersoll's character was that he realized his lapses and in private
+acknowledged them.
+
+On reading the smooth, florid and plausible sophistry of Wilberforce,
+Ingersoll once said: "Be easy on Soapy Sam! A few years ago, a little
+shifting of base on the part of my ancestors, and I would probably have
+had Soapy Sam's job."
+
+This resemblance of opposites makes a person think of that remark
+applied to Voltaire. "He was the father of all those who wear
+shovel-hats."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Thomas Huxley and his wife arrived in New York in Eighteen Hundred
+Seventy-six, on a visit to the Centennial Exhibition, this interesting
+item was flashed over the country, "Huxley and his titled bride have
+arrived in New York on their wedding-journey."
+
+This item caused Mr. and Mrs. Huxley--both of them royal democrats--more
+joy than did the most complimentary interview. At home they had left a
+charming little brood of seven children, three of them nearly grown-ups.
+
+Huxley sent Tyndall, who a few months before had married a daughter of
+Lord Hamilton, the clipping and this note: "You see how that once I am
+in a democratic country I am pulling all the honors I can in my own
+direction." The next letter the Huxleys received from Tyndall was
+addressed, "Sir Thomas and Lady Huxley." Huxley never stood in much awe
+of the nobility; he evidently felt that there was another kind of which
+he himself in degree was heir. Huxley never had a better friend than Sir
+Joseph Hooker, and we see in his letters such postscripts as this:
+
+"Dear Sir Joseph: Do come and dine with us; it is a month since we have
+seen your homely old phiz." And Sir Joseph replies that he will be on
+hand the next Sunday evening and offers this mild suggestion,
+"Scientific gents as has countenances as curdles milk should not cast
+aspersions on men made in image of Maker."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The wordy duel between Huxley and Gladstone prompted Toole, the great
+comedian, to send a box of grease-paints to Huxley with a note saying,
+"These are for you and Gladstone to use when you make up." It was a joke
+so subtle and choice that the Huxleys, always dear friends of Toole,
+laughed for a week.
+
+Poor Gladstone required a diagram when he heard of the procedure; and
+then, not being trepanned for the pleasantry, remarked that if Toole and
+Huxley collaborated on the stage, it would be eminently the proper
+thing, and in his mind there was little choice between them, both being
+fine actors.
+
+Later, we hear of Huxley saying he thought of sending the box of
+grease-paints to Gladstone, so the Premier could use them in making up
+with God; as for himself, he was like Thoreau and had never quarreled
+with Him.
+
+Huxley had many friendships with people seemingly outside of his own
+particular line of work. Henry Irving, the Reverend Doctor Parker, John
+Fiske and Hall Caine once met at one of Huxley's "Tall Teas," and Doctor
+Parker explained that he personally had no objection to visiting with
+sinners.
+
+For Parker, Huxley had a great admiration and often attended the
+Thursday noon meeting at the Temple, "to see and hear the greatest actor
+in England," a compliment which Parker much appreciated, otherwise he
+would not have repeated it. "If I ever take to the stage, I will play
+the part of Jacques or Touchstone," said Huxley.
+
+John Fiske in his delightful essay on Huxley said that in the Huxley
+home there was more jest, joke and banter than in any other place in
+London. The air was surcharged with mirth, and puns, often very bad
+ones, were tossed back and forth with great recklessness.
+
+At one time John Fiske was at the Huxleys and the dual or multiple
+nature of man came up for discussion. Huxley spoke of how very often men
+who were gentle and charming in their homes were capable of great
+crimes, and of how, on the other hand, a man might pass in the world as
+a philanthropist, and yet in his household be a veritable autocrat and
+tyrant.
+
+Fiske then incidentally mentioned the case of Doctors Parker and Webster
+of Harvard--men of intellect and worth. These men brooded over a
+misunderstanding that grew into a grudge and eventually hatched murder.
+One worthy professor killed the other, cut up the body, and tried to
+burn it in a chemist's retort. Only the great difficulty of reducing the
+human body to ashes caused the murder to out, and brought about the
+hanging of a scientist of note.
+
+"Yes, I have thought of the difficulty of disposing of a dead body,"
+said Huxley, solemnly; "and often when on the point of committing murder
+this was the only thing that made me hesitate!"
+
+"Oh, Pater, we are ashamed of you," said his three lovely daughters in
+concert. Huxley's ability to joke and his appreciation of the ludicrous
+marked him, in the mind of John Fiske, as the greatest thinker of his
+time. The humorist knows values, and that is why he laughs. Sensibility
+is, in fact, the basic element of wit.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Huxley's duties on the "Rattlesnake" were not in the line of science.
+His rank was assistant surgeon; but as sure-enough surgeons were only
+sent out on bigger craft, he was this ship's doctor.
+
+With the captain's help the men were kept busy, but not too busy, and
+the food and regulations were such that about all Huxley had to do was
+to look upon his work and pronounce it good.
+
+As a physician, Huxley practised throughout his life the science of
+prevention.
+
+"With a prophetic vision, quite unconscious, my parents named me after
+that particular apostle I was to admire most," once said Huxley. He was
+a doubter by instinct, and approached the world of Nature as if nothing
+were known about it.
+
+His work on the Medusa won him the recognition of the British Society,
+and this secured him the coveted surgeon's commission. Two tragedies
+confront man on his journey through life--one when he wants a thing and
+can not get it; the other when he gets the thing and finds he does not
+want it.
+
+Having secured his surgeon's commission, Huxley felt a strong repulsion
+toward devoting his life to the abnormal.
+
+"I am a scientist by nature, and my business is to teach," he wrote to
+his affianced wife. These were wise words which he had learned from her,
+but which he repeated, seemingly quite innocent of their source. We
+take our own wherever we find it.
+
+Miss Heathorn admired a surgeon, but loved a scientist, and Huxley being
+a man was making a heroic struggle to be what the young woman most
+wished. Love supplies an ideal--and that is the very best thing love
+does, with possibly an exception or two. So behold a ship's surgeon in
+London, full-fledged, refusing offers of position, and even declining to
+take a choice of ships, for such is the perversity of things animate and
+inanimate that, when we do not want things, Fate brings them to us on
+silver platters and begs us to accept. We win by indifference as much as
+by desire.
+
+"I have declined to ship on board the 'Cormorant' as head surgeon, and
+have applied to the University of Toronto for a position as Professor of
+Natural History."
+
+And so America had Huxley flung at her head. Toronto considered, and the
+Canadians sat on the case, and after considerable correspondence, the
+vacant chair was given to Professor Baldini of the Whitby Ladies
+College. It was a close call for Canada! Huxley had imagined that the
+New World offered special advantages to a rising young person of
+scientific bent, but now he secured a marriage-license and settled down
+as lecturer at the School of Mines. A little later he began to teach at
+the Royal College of Surgeons, with which institution he was to be
+connected the rest of his life, and fill almost any chair that happened
+to be vacant.
+
+From the time he was twenty-seven Huxley never had to look for work. He
+was known as a writer of worth, and as a lecturer his services were in
+demand.
+
+He became President of the Geological and Ethnological Society; was
+appointed Royal Commissioner for the Advancement of Science; was a
+member of the London School Board; Secretary of the Royal Society; Lord
+Rector of the University of Aberdeen; President of the Royal Society;
+and refused an offer to become Custodian of the British Museum, a life
+position, and where he had once applied for a clerkship.
+
+In letters to Darwin he occasionally signed his name with all titles
+added, thus, "Thomas Henry Huxley, M.B., M.D., Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S. of
+Her Majesty's Navy."
+
+Huxley was a forceful and epigrammatic writer, and had a command of
+English second to no scientist that England has ever produced. He was
+the only one of his group who had a distinct literary style. As a
+speaker he was quiet, deliberate, decisive, sure; and he carried enough
+reserve caloric so that he made his presence felt in any assemblage
+before he said a word. In oratory it is personality that gives ballast.
+
+Of his forty or so published books, "Man's Place in Nature," "Elementary
+Physiology" and "Classification of Animals" have been translated into
+many languages, and now serve as textbooks in various schools and
+colleges.
+
+Huxley is the founder of the so-called Agnostic School, which has the
+peculiarity of not being a school. The word "agnostic" was given its
+vogue by Huxley. To superficial people it was quite often used
+synonymously with "infidel" and "freethinker," both words of reproach.
+To Huxley it meant simply one who did not know, but wished to learn.
+
+The controlling impulse of Huxley's life was his absolute honesty. To
+pretend to believe a thing against which one's reason revolts, in order
+to better one's place in society, was to him the sum of all that was
+intellectually base.
+
+He regarded man as an undeveloped creature, and for this creature to lay
+the flattering unction to his soul that he was in special communication
+with the Infinite, and in possession of the secrets of the Creator, was
+something that in itself proved that man was as yet in the barbaric
+stage.
+
+Said Huxley: "As to the final truths of Creation and Destiny, I am an
+agnostic. I do not know, hence I neither affirm nor deny."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Humor and commonsense usually go together. Huxley had a goodly stock of
+both. When George Eliot died, there was a very earnest but ill-directed
+effort made to have her body buried in Westminster Abbey. Huxley, being
+close to the Dean, serving with him on several municipal boards, was
+importuned by Spencer to use his influence toward the desired end.
+Huxley saw the incongruity of the situation, and in a letter that
+reveals the logical mind and the direct, literary, Huxley quality, he
+placed his gentle veto on the proposition and thus saved the "enemy" the
+mortification of having to do so.
+
+Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey, but this was not to be the final
+resting-place of the dust of Mill, Tyndall, Spencer, George Eliot or
+Huxley. These had all stood in the fore of the fight against
+superstition and had both given and received blows.
+
+The Pantheon of such battle-scarred heroes was to be the hearts of those
+who prize above all that earth can bestow the benison of the God within.
+"Above all else, let me preserve my integrity of intellect," said
+Huxley. Here is Huxley's letter to Spencer:
+
+     4 Marlborough Place, Dec. 27, 1880
+
+     My Dear Spencer: Your telegram which reached me on Friday evening
+     caused me great perplexity, inasmuch as I had just been talking to
+     Morley, and agreeing with him that the proposal for a funeral in
+     Westminster Abbey had a very questionable look to us, who desired
+     nothing so much as that peace and honor should attend George Eliot
+     to her grave.
+
+     It can hardly be doubted that the proposal will be bitterly
+     opposed, possibly (as happened in Mill's case with less
+     provocation) with the raking up of past histories, about which the
+     opinion even of those who have least the desire or the right to be
+     pharisaical is strongly divided, and which had better be forgotten.
+
+     With respect to putting pressure on the Dean of Westminster, I have
+     to consider that he has some confidence in me, and before asking
+     him to do something for which he is pretty sure to be violently
+     assailed, I have to ask myself whether I really think it a right
+     thing for a man in his position to do.
+
+     Now I can not say I do. However much I may lament the circumstance,
+     Westminster Abbey is a Christian Church and not a Pantheon, and the
+     Dean thereof is officially a Christian priest, and we ask him to
+     bestow exceptional Christian honors by this burial in the Abbey.
+     George Eliot is known not only as a great writer, but as a person
+     whose life and opinions were in notorious antagonism to Christian
+     practise in regard to marriage, and Christian theory in regard to
+     dogma. How am I to tell the Dean that I think he ought to read over
+     the body of a person who did not repent of what the Church
+     considers mortal sin, a service not one solitary proposition of
+     which she would have accepted for truth while she was alive? How am
+     I to urge him to do that which, if I were in his place, I should
+     most emphatically refuse to do? You tell me that Mrs. Cross wished
+     for the funeral in the Abbey. While I desire to entertain the
+     greatest respect for her wishes, I am very sorry to hear it. I do
+     not understand the feeling which could create such a desire on any
+     personal grounds, save those of affection, and the natural yearning
+     to be near, even in death, those whom we have loved. And on public
+     grounds the wish is still less intelligible to me. One can not eat
+     one's cake and have it too. Those who elect to be free in thought
+     and deed must not hanker after the rewards, if they are to be so
+     called, which the world offers to those who put up with its
+     fetters.
+
+     Thus, however I look at the proposal, it seems to me to be a
+     profound mistake, and I can have nothing to do with it. I shall be
+     deeply grieved if this resolution is ascribed to any other motives
+     than those which I have set forth at greater length than I
+     intended.
+                             Ever yours very faithfully,
+                                                 T. H. HUXLEY
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: JOHN TYNDALL]
+
+JOHN TYNDALL
+
+
+     In my little book on Faraday, published in Eighteen Hundred
+     Sixty-eight, I have stated that he had but to will it to raise his
+     income, in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-two, to five thousand pounds a
+     year. In Eighteen Hundred Thirty-six, the sum might have been
+     doubled. Yet this son of a blacksmith, this journeyman book-binder,
+     with his proud, sensitive soul, rejecting the splendid
+     opportunities open to him--refusing even to think them splendid in
+     presence of higher aims--cheerfully accepted from the Trinity House
+     a pittance of two hundred pounds a year.
+
+     --_John Tyndall_
+
+
+JOHN TYNDALL
+
+Tyndall was of high descent and lowly birth. His father was a
+member of the Irish Constabulary, and there were intervals when the
+boy's mother took in washing. But back of this the constable swore i'
+faith, when the ale was right, that he was descended from an Irish King,
+and probably this is true, for most Irishmen are, and acknowledge it
+themselves.
+
+The father of our Tyndall spelled his name Tyndale, and traced a direct
+relationship to William Tyndale, who declared he would place a copy of
+the English Bible in the hands of every plowboy in the British Isles,
+and pretty nearly made good his vow. William Tyndale paid for his
+privileges, however. He was arrested, given an opportunity to run away,
+but wouldn't; then he was exiled. Finally he was incarcerated in a
+dungeon of the Castle Vilvoorden.
+
+His cell was beneath the level of the ground, so was cold and damp and
+dark. He petitioned the governor of the prison for a coat to keep him
+warm and a candle by which he could read. "We'll give you both light and
+heat, pretty soon," was the reply.
+
+And they did. They led Tyndale out under the blue sky and tied him to a
+stake set in the ground. Around his feet they piled brush, and also all
+of his books and papers that they could find.
+
+A chain was put around his neck and hooked tight to the post. Then the
+fagots were piled high, and the fire was lighted.
+
+"He was not burned to death," argued one of the priests who was present;
+"he was not burned to death. He just drew up his feet and hanged himself
+in the chain, and so was choked: he was that stubborn!" The father of
+John Tyndall was an Orangeman and had in a glass case a bit of the flag
+carried at the Battle of the Boyne.
+
+It is believed, with reason, that the original flag had in it about ten
+thousand square yards of material. Tyndale the Orangeman was of so
+uncompromising a type that he occasionally arrested Catholics on general
+principles, like the Irishman who beat the Jew under the mistaken idea
+that he had something to do with crucifying "Our Savior." "But that was
+two thousand years ago," protested the Jew. "Niver moind; I just heard
+av it--take that and that!"
+
+Zeal not wisely directed is a true Irish trait. It will not do to say
+that the Irish have a monopoly on stupidity, yet there have been times
+when I thought they nearly cornered the market. I once had charge of a
+gang of green Irishmen at a lumber-camp.
+
+I started a night-school for their benefit, as their schooling had
+stopped at subtraction. One evening they got it into their heads that I
+was an atheist. Things began to come my way. I concluded discretion was
+the better part of valor, and so took to the woods, literally. They
+followed me for a mile, and then gave up the chase. On the way home they
+met a man who spoke ill of me, and they fell upon him and nearly pounded
+his life out.
+
+I never had to lick any of my gang: they looked after this themselves.
+On pay-nights they all got drunk and fell upon each other--broken noses
+and black eyes were quite popular. Father Driscoll used to come around
+nearly every month and have them all sign the pledge.
+
+That story about the Irishman who ate the rind of the watermelon "and
+threw the inside away," is true. That is just what the Irish do. Very
+often they are not able to distinguish good from bad, kindness from
+wrong, love from hate. Ireland has all the freedom she can use or
+deserves, just as we all have. What would Ireland do with freedom if she
+had it? Hate for England keeps peace at home. Home rule would mean home
+rough-house--and a most beautiful argument it would be, enforced with
+shillalah logic. The spirit of Donnybrook Fair is there today as much as
+ever, and wherever you see a head, hit it, would be home rule.
+Donnybrook is a condition of mind.
+
+If England really had a grudge against Ireland and wanted to get even,
+she could not do better than to set her adrift.
+
+But then the Irish impulsiveness sometimes leads to good, else how could
+we account for such men as O'Connor, Parnell, John Tyndall, Burke,
+Goldsmith, Sheridan, Arthur Wellesley and all the other Irish poets,
+orators and thinkers who have made us vibrate with our kind?
+
+Transplanted weeds produce our finest flowers.
+
+The parents of Tyndall were intent on giving their boy an education. And
+to them, the act of committing things to memory was education. William
+Tyndale gave the Bible to the people; John Tyndall would force it upon
+them. The "Book of Martyrs," the sermons of Jeremy Taylor, and the
+Bible, little John came to know by heart. And he grew to have a fine
+distaste for all. Once, when nearly a man grown, he had the temerity to
+argue with his father that the Bible might be better appreciated, if a
+penalty were not placed upon disbelief in its divine origin. A cuff on
+the ear was the answer, and John was given until sundown to apologize.
+He did not apologize.
+
+And young Tyndale then vowed he would change his name to Tyndall and
+forever separate himself from a person whose religion was so largely
+mixed with brutality. But yet John Tyndale was not a bad man. He had
+intellect far above the average of his neighbors. He had the courage of
+his convictions. His son had the courage of his lack of convictions.
+
+And the early drilling in the Bible was a good thing for young Tyndall.
+Bible legend and allusion color the English language, and any man who
+does not know his Bible well, can never hope to speak or write English
+with grace and fluency. Tyndall always knew and acknowledged his
+indebtedness to his parents, and he also knew that his salvation
+depended upon getting away from and beyond the narrow confines of their
+beliefs and habits. Because a thing helps you in a certain period of
+your education is no reason why you should feed upon it forevermore.
+
+This way lies arrested development.
+
+Life, like heat, is a mode of motion, and progress consists in
+discarding a good thing as soon as you have found a better.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Occasionally Herbert Spencer used to spend a Sunday afternoon with the
+Carlyles at their modest home in Chelsea. At such times Jeannie Welsh
+would usually manage to pilot the conversational craft along smooth
+waters; but if she were not present, hot arguments would follow, and
+finally a point would be reached where Carlyle and Spencer would simply
+sit and glare at each other.
+
+"After such scenes I always thought less of two persons, Carlyle and
+myself," said Spencer; "and so for many years I very cautiously avoided
+Cheyne Row." Then there was another man Spencer avoided, although for a
+different reason; this individual was John Tyndall.
+
+On the death of Tyndall, Spencer wrote:
+
+"There has just died the greatest teacher of modern times: a man who
+stimulated thought in old and young, every one he met, as no one else I
+ever knew did. Once we went together for a much-needed rest to the Lake
+District. Gossip, which has its advantages in that it can be carried on
+with no tax on one's intellectual powers, had no part in our
+conversation. The discussion of great themes began at once wherever
+Tyndall was.
+
+"The atmosphere of the man was intensely stimulating: everybody seemed
+to become great and wise and good in his presence.
+
+"We walked on the shores of Windermere, climbed Rydal Mount, rowed
+across Lake Grasmere (leaving our names on the visitors' list), and all
+the time we dwelt upon high Olympus and talked.
+
+"But, alas! Tyndall's vivacity undid me: two days of his company, with
+two sleepless nights, and I fled him as I would a pestilence."
+
+But Carlyle growled out one thing in Spencer's presence which Spencer
+often quoted. "If I had my own way," said Carlyle, "I would send the
+sons of poor men to college, and the sons of rich men I would set to
+work."
+
+Manual labor in right proportion means mental development. Too much hoe
+may slant the brow, but hoe in proper proportion develops the
+cerebellum.
+
+In the past we have had one set of men do all the work, and another set
+had all the culture: one hoes and another thirsts. There are whole areas
+of brain-cells which are evolved only through the efforts of hand and
+eye, for it is the mind at last that directs all our energies. The
+development of brain and body go together--manual work is brain-work.
+Too much brain-work is just as bad as too much toil; the misuse of the
+pen carries just as severe a penalty as the misuse of the hoe. And it is
+a great satisfaction to realize that the thinking world has reached a
+point where these propositions do not have to be proven.
+
+There was a time when Spencer regretted that he had not been sent to
+college, instead of being set to work. But later he came to regard his
+experience as a practical engineer and surveyor as a very precious and
+necessary part of his education.
+
+John Tyndall and Alfred Russel Wallace had an experience almost
+identical. In childhood John attended the village school for six months
+of the year, and the rest of the time helped his parents, as children of
+poor people do. When nineteen he went to work carrying a chain in a
+surveying corps. Steady attention to the business in hand brought its
+sure reward, and in a few years he had charge of the squad, and was
+given the duty of making maps and working out complex calculations in
+engineering.
+
+In mathematics he especially excelled. Five years in the employ of the
+Irish Ordnance Survey and three years in practical railroad-building,
+and Tyndall got the Socialistic bee in his bonnet. He resigned a good
+position to take part in bringing about the millennium.
+
+That he helped the old world along toward the ideal there is no doubt;
+but Tyndall is dead and Jerusalem is not yet. When the rule of the
+barons was broken, and the stage of individualism or competition was
+ushered in, men said, "Lo! The time is at hand and now is." But it was
+not. Socialism is coming, by slow degrees, imperceptibly almost as the
+growing of Spring flowers that push their way from the damp, dark earth
+into the sunlight. And after Socialism, what? Perhaps the millennium
+will still be a long way off.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Forty-seven, when Tyndall was twenty-seven years
+old, Robert Owen, one of the greatest practical men the world has ever
+seen, cried aloud, "The time is at hand!"
+
+Owen was an enthusiast: all great men are. He had risen from the ranks
+by the absolute force of his great untiring, restless and loving spirit.
+From a day laborer in a cotton-mill he had become principal owner of a
+plant that supported five thousand people.
+
+Owen saw the difference between joyless labor and joyful work. His mills
+were cleanly, orderly, sanitary, and surrounded with lawns, trees and
+shrubbery. He was the first man in England to establish kindergartens,
+and this he did at his own expense for the benefit of his helpers. He
+established libraries, clubs, swimming-pools, night-schools,
+lecture-courses. And all this time his business prospered.
+
+To the average man it is a miracle how any one individual could bear the
+heaviest business burdens and still do what Robert Owen did.
+
+Robert Owen had vitality plus: he was a gourmet for work. William Morris
+was just such a man, only with a bias for art; but both Owen and Morris
+had the intensity and impetus which get the thing done while common
+folks are thinking about it.
+
+Owen was familiar with every detail of his vast business, and he was an
+expert in finance. Like Napoleon he said: "The finances? I will arrange
+them."
+
+Robert Owen erected schoolhouses, laid out gardens, built mills,
+constructed tenements, traveled, lectured, and wrote books. His
+enthusiasm was contagious. He was never sick--he could not spare the
+time--and a doctor once said, "If Robert Owen ever dies, it will be
+through too much Robert Owen."
+
+Owen went over to Dublin on one of his tours, and lectured on the ideal
+life, which to him was Socialism, "each for all and all for each."
+
+Fourier, the dreamer, supplied a good deal of the argument, but Robert
+Owen did the thing. Socialism always catches these two classes, doers
+and dreamers, workers and drones, honest men and rogues, those with a
+desire to give and those with a lust to get.
+
+Among others who heard Owen speak at Dublin was the young Irish
+engineer, John Tyndall. Tyndall was the type of man that must be common
+before we can have Socialism. There was not a lazy hair in his head;
+aye, nor a selfish one, either. He had a tender heart, a receptive brain
+and the spirit of obedience, the spirit that gives all without counting
+the cost, the spirit that harkens to the God within. And need I say that
+the person who gives all, gets all! The economics of God are very
+simple: We receive only that which we give. The only love we keep is the
+love we give away.
+
+These are very old truths--I did not discover nor invent them--they are
+not covered by copyright: "Cast thy bread upon the waters."
+
+John Tyndall was melted by Owen's passionate appeal of each for all and
+all for each. To live for humanity seemed the one desirable thing. His
+loving Irish heart was melted. He sought Owen out at his hotel, and they
+talked, talked till three o'clock in the morning.
+
+Owen was a judge of men; his success depended upon this one thing, as
+that of every successful business must. He saw that Tyndall was a rare
+soul and nearly fulfilled his definition of a gentleman. Tyndall had
+hope, faith and splendid courage; but best of all, he had that hunger
+for truth which classes him forever among the sacred few.
+
+During his work out of doors on surveying trips he had studied the
+strata; gotten on good terms with birds, bugs and bees; he knew the
+flowers and weeds, and loved all the animate things of Nature, so that
+he recognized their kinship to himself, and he hesitated to kill or
+destroy.
+
+Education is a matter of desire, and a man like Tyndall is getting an
+education wherever he is. All is grist that comes to his mill.
+
+Robert Owen had but recently started "Queenswood College" in Hampshire,
+and nothing would do but Tyndall should go there as a teacher of
+science.
+
+"Is he a skilled and educated teacher?" some one asked Owen. "Better
+than that," replied Owen; "he is a regular firebrand of enthusiasm."
+
+And so Tyndall resigned his position with the railroad and moved over to
+England, taking up his home at "Harmony Hall."
+
+Harmony Hall was a beautiful brick building with the letters C. M.
+carved on the cornerstone in recognition of the Commencement of the
+Millennium. The pupils were mostly workers in the Owen mills who had
+shown some special aptitude for education. The pupils and teachers all
+worked at manual labor a certain number of hours daily. There was a
+delightful feeling of comradeship about the institution. Tyndall was
+happy in his work.
+
+He gave lectures on everything, and taught the things that no one else
+could teach, and of course he got more out of the lessons than any of
+the scholars.
+
+But after a few months' experience with the ideal life, Tyndall had
+commonsense enough to see that Harmony Hall, instead of being the
+spontaneous expression of the people who shared its blessings, was
+really a charity maintained by one Robert Owen. It was a beneficent
+autocracy, a sample of one-man power, beautifully expressed.
+
+Robert Owen planned it, built it, directed it and made good any
+financial deficit. Instead of Socialism it was a kindly despotism. A few
+of the scholars did their level best to help themselves and help the
+place, but the rest didn't think and didn't care. They were passengers
+who enjoyed the cushioned seats. A few, while partaking of the
+privileges of the place, denounced it.
+
+"You can not educate people who do not want to be educated," said
+Tyndall. The value of an education lies in the struggle to get it. Do
+too much for people, and they will do nothing for themselves.
+
+Many of the students at Harmony Hall had been sent there by Owen,
+because he, in the greatness of his heart and the blindness of his zeal,
+thought they needed education. They may have needed it; but they did not
+want it: ease was their aim.
+
+The indifference and ingratitude Robert Owen met with did not discourage
+him: it only gave him an occasional pause. He thought that the bad
+example of English society was too close to his experiments: it vitiated
+the atmosphere.
+
+So he came over to America and founded the town of New Harmony, Indiana.
+The fine solid buildings he erected in Posey County, then a wilderness,
+are still there.
+
+As for the most romantic and interesting history of New Harmony, Robert
+Owen and his socialistic experiments, I must refer the gentle reader to
+the Encyclopedia Britannica, a work I have found very useful in the
+course of making my original researches.
+
+After a year at Harmony Hall, Tyndall saw that he would have to get out
+or else become a victim of arrested development, through too much
+acceptance of a strong man's bounty. "You can not afford to accept
+anything for nothing," he said. Life at Harmony Hall to him was very
+much like life in a monastery, to which stricken men flee when the old
+world seems too much for them. "When all the people live the ideal life,
+I'll live it; but until then I'm only one of the great many strugglers."
+Besides, he felt that in missing university training he had dropped
+something out of his life. Now he would go to Germany and see for
+himself what he had missed.
+
+While railroading he had saved up nearly four hundred pounds. This money
+he had offered at one time to invest in shares in the Owen mills. But
+Robert Owen said, "Wait two years and then see how you feel!"
+
+Robert Owen was not a financial exploiter. Tyndall may have differed
+with him in a philosophic way; but they never ceased to honor and
+respect each other.
+
+And so John Tyndall bade the ideal life good-by, and went out into the
+stress, strife and struggle, resolved to spend his two thousand dollars
+in bettering his education, and then to start life anew.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Robert Owen had been over to America and had met Emerson, and very
+naturally caught it. When he returned home he gave young Tyndall a copy
+of Emerson's first book, the "Essay on Nature," published anonymously.
+
+Tyndall read and re-read the book, and read it aloud to others and spoke
+of it as a "message from the gods."
+
+He also read every word that Carlyle put in print. It was Carlyle who
+introduced him to German philosophy and German literature, and fired him
+with a desire to see for himself what Germany was doing.
+
+Germany had still another mystic tie that drew him thitherward. It was
+at Marburg, Germany, that his illustrious namesake had published his
+translation of the Bible.
+
+At Marburg there was a University, small, 't was true, but its
+simplicity and the cheapness of living there were recommendations. So to
+Marburg he went. Tyndall found lodgings in a little street called
+"Heretics' Row." Possibly there be people who think that Tyndall's
+taking a room in such a street was chance, too. Chance is natural law
+not understood.
+
+Marburg is a very lovely little town that clings amid a forest of trees
+to the rocky hillside overlooking the River Lahn. Tyndall was very happy
+at Marburg, and at times very miserable. The beauty of the place
+appealed to him. He was a climber by nature, and the hills were a
+continual temptation.
+
+But the language was new; and before this his work had all been of a
+practical kind. College seems small and trivial after you have been in
+the actual world of affairs. But Tyndall did not give up. He rose every
+morning at six, took his cold bath, dressed and ran up the hill half a
+mile and back. He breakfasted with the family, that he might talk
+German. Then he dived into differential calculus and philosophical
+abstrusities. He was not sent to college: he went. And he made college
+give up all it had. On the wall of his room, as a sort of ornamental
+frieze in charcoal, he wrote this from Emerson: "High knowledge and
+great strength are within the reach of every man who unflinchingly
+enacts his best."
+
+Down in the town was a bronze bust of a man who wrote for it the
+following inscription: "This is the face of a man who has struggled
+energetically."
+
+One might almost imagine that Hawthorne had received from Tyndall the
+hint which evolved itself into that fine story, "The Great Stone Face."
+
+The bust just mentioned, attracted John Tyndall for another reason:
+Carlyle had written of the man it symboled: "Reader, to thee, thyself,
+even now, he has one counsel to give, the secret of his whole poetic
+alchemy. Think of living! Thy life, wert thou the pitifullest of all the
+sons of earth, is no idle dream, but a solemn reality. It is thine own;
+it is all thou hast with which to front eternity. Work, then, even as he
+has done--like a star, unhasting and unresting."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At Marburg, Tyndall was on good terms with the great Bunsen, and used to
+act as his assistant in making practical chemical experiments before his
+classes.
+
+These amazing things done by chemists in public are seldom of much value
+beyond giving a thrill to visitors who would otherwise drowse; it is
+like humor in an oration: it opens up the mental pores.
+
+Alexander Humboldt once attended a Bunsen lecture at Marburg and
+complimented Tyndall by saying, "When I take up sleight-of-hand work,
+consider yourself engaged as my first helper." Tyndall's way of standing
+with his back to the audience, shutting off the view of Bunsen's hands
+while he was getting ready to make an artificial peal of thunder, made
+Humboldt laugh heartily.
+
+Humboldt thought so well of the young man who spoke German with an Irish
+accent, that he presented him with an inscribed copy of one of his
+books. The volume was a most valuable one, for Humboldt published only
+in deluxe, limited editions, and Tyndall was so overcome that all he
+could say was, "I'll do as much for you some day." Not long after this,
+through loaning money to a fellow student, Tyndall found himself sadly
+in need of funds, and borrowed two pounds on the book from an 'Ebrew
+Jew.
+
+That night, he dreamed that Humboldt found the volume in a secondhand
+store. In the morning, Tyndall was waiting for the pawnbroker to open
+his shop to get the book back ere the offense was discovered.
+
+Heinrich Heine once inscribed a volume of his poems to a friend, and
+afterward discovered the volume on the counter of a secondhand dealer.
+He thereupon haggled with the bookman, bought the book and beneath his
+first inscription wrote, "With the renewed regards of H. Heine." He then
+sent the volume for the second time to his friend. 'T is possible that
+Tyndall had heard of this.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Fifty, when Tyndall was thirty years of age, he
+visited London, and of course went to the British Institution. There he
+met Faraday for the first time and was welcomed by him.
+
+The British Institution consists of a laboratory, a museum and a
+lecture-hall, and its object is scientific research. It began in a very
+simple way in one room and now occupies several buildings.
+
+It was founded by Benjamin Thompson, an American, and so it was but
+proper that its sister concern, the Smithsonian Institution, should have
+been founded by an Englishman.
+
+Sir Humphry Davy on being asked, "What is your greatest discovery?"
+replied, "Michael Faraday." But this was a mere pleasantry, the truth
+being that it was Michael Faraday who discovered Sir Humphry Davy.
+Faraday was a bookbinder's apprentice, a fact that should interest all
+good Roycrofters.
+
+Evenings, when Sir Humphry Davy lectured at the British Institution,
+the young bookbinder was there. After the lecture he would go home and
+write out what he had heard, with a few ideas of his own added. For be
+it known, taking notes at a lecture is a bad habit--good reporters carry
+no notebooks.
+
+After a year Faraday sent a bundle of his impressions and criticisms to
+Sir Humphry Davy anonymously. Great men seldom read manuscript that is
+sent to them unless it refers to themselves. At the next lecture, Sir
+Humphry began by reading from Faraday's notes, and begged that if the
+writer were present, he would make himself known at the close of the
+address.
+
+From this was to ripen a love like that of father and son. Every man who
+builds up such a work as did Sir Humphry Davy is appalled, when he finds
+Time furrowing his face and whitening his hair, to think how few indeed
+there are who can step in and carry his work on after he is gone.
+
+The love of Davy for the young bookbinder was almost feverish: he
+clutched at this bright, impressionable and intent young man who entered
+so into the heart and soul of science; nothing would do but he must
+become his assistant. "Give up all and follow me!" And Faraday did.
+
+Something of the same feeling must have swept over Faraday after his
+work of twenty-five years as director of the British Institution, when
+John Tyndall appeared, tall, thin, bronzed, animated, quoting Bunsen
+and Humboldt with an Irish accent.
+
+And so in time Tyndall became assistant to Faraday, then lecturer in
+natural history; and when Faraday died, Tyndall, by popular acclaim, was
+made Fullerian Lecturer and took Faraday's place. This was to be his
+life-work, and it so placed him before the world that all he said or did
+had a wide significance and an extended influence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tyndall was always a most intrepid mountain-climber. The Alps lured him
+like the song of the Lorelei, and the wonder was that his body was not
+left in some mountain crevasse, "the most beautiful and poetic of all
+burials," he once said.
+
+But for him this was not to be, for Fate is fond of irony. The only man
+who ever braved the full dangers of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado was
+killed by a suburban train in Chicago while on his wedding-tour. Most
+bad men die in bed, tenderly cared for by trained nurses in white caps
+and big aprons.
+
+Tyndall climbed to the summit of the Matterhorn, ascended the so-called
+inaccessible peak of the Weisshorn, scaled Mont Blanc three times, and
+once was caught in an avalanche, riding toward death at the rate of a
+mile a minute. Yet he passed away from an overdose, or a wrong dose, of
+medicine given him through mistake, by the hands of the woman he loved
+most.
+
+At one time Tyndall attempted to swim a mountain-torrent; the stream, as
+if angry at his Irish assurance, tossed him against the rocks, brought
+him back in fierce eddies, and again and again threw him against a solid
+face of stone. When he was rescued he was a mass of bruises, but
+fortunately no bones were broken. It was some days before he could get
+out, and in his sorry plight, bandaged so his face was scarcely visible,
+Spencer found him. "Herbert, do you believe in the actuality of
+matter?" was John's first question.
+
+Both Tyndall and Huxley made application to the University of Toronto
+for positions as teachers of science; but Toronto looked askance, as all
+pioneer people do, at men whose college careers have been mostly
+confined to giving college absent treatment.
+
+Herbert Spencer avowed again and again that Tyndall was the greatest
+teacher he ever knew or heard of, inspiring the pupil to discover for
+himself, to do, to become, rather than imparting prosy facts of doubtful
+pith and moment. But Herbert Spencer, not being eligible to join a
+university club himself, was possibly not competent to judge.
+
+Anyway, England was not so finical as Canada, and so she gained what
+Canada lost.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tyndall paid a visit to the United States in the year Eighteen Hundred
+Seventy-two, and lectured in most of the principal cities, and at all
+the great colleges. He was a most fascinating speaker, fluent, direct,
+easy, and his whole discourse was well seasoned with humor.
+
+Whenever he spoke, the auditorium was taxed to its utmost, and his
+reception was very cordial, even in colleges that were considered
+exceedingly orthodox.
+
+Possibly, some good people who invited him to speak did not know it was
+loaded; and so his earnest words in praise of Darwin and the doctrine of
+evolution, occasionally came like unto a rumble of his own artificial
+thunder. "I speak what I think is truth; but of course, when I express
+ungracious facts I try to do so in what will be regarded as not a nasty
+manner," said Tyndall, thus using that pet English word in a rather
+pleasing way.
+
+In his statement that the prayer of persistent effort is the only prayer
+that is ever answered, he met with a direct challenge at Oberlin. This
+gave rise to what, at the time, created quite a dust in the theological
+road, and evolved "The Tyndall Prayer Test."
+
+Tyndall proposed that one hundred clergymen be delegated to pray for the
+patients in any certain ward of Bellevue Hospital. If, after a year's
+trial, there was a marked decrease in mortality in that ward, as
+compared with previous records, we might then conclude that prayer was
+efficacious, otherwise not.
+
+One good clergyman in Pittsburgh offered publicly to debate "Darwinism"
+with Tyndall, but beyond a little scattered shrapnel of this sort, the
+lecture-tour was a great success. It netted just thirteen thousand
+dollars, the whole amount of which Tyndall generously donated as a fund
+to be used for the advancement of natural science in America.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Eighty-five, this fund had increased to thirty-two
+thousand dollars, and was divided into three equal parts and presented
+to Columbia, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. The fund was
+still further increased by others who followed Professor Tyndall's
+example, and Columbia, from her share of the Tyndall fund, I am told now
+supports two foreign scholarships for the benefit of students who show a
+special aptitude in scientific research. Professor James of Harvard once
+said: "The impetus to popular scientific study caused by Professor
+Tyndall's lectures in the United States was most helpful and fortunate.
+Speaking but for myself, I know I am a different man and a better man,
+for having heard and known John Tyndall."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When John Tyndall died, in the year Eighteen Hundred Ninety-three,
+Spencer wrote:
+
+"It never occurred to Tyndall to ask what it was politic to say, but
+simply to ask what was true. The like has of late years been shown in
+his utterances concerning political matters--shown, it may be, with too
+great frankness. This extreme frankness was displayed also in private,
+and sometimes, perhaps, too much displayed; but every one must have the
+defects of his qualities. Where absolute sincerity exists, it is certain
+now and then to cause an expression of a feeling or opinion not
+adequately restrained.
+
+"But the contrast in genuineness between him and the average citizen was
+very conspicuous. In a community of Tyndalls (to make a rather wild
+supposition), there would be none of that flabbiness characterizing
+current thought and action--no throwing overboard of principles
+elaborated by painful experience in the past, and adoption of a
+hand-to-mouth policy unguided by any principle. He was not the kind of
+man who would have voted for a bill or a clause which he secretly
+believed would be injurious, out of what is euphemistically called
+'party loyalty,' or would have endeavored to bribe each section of the
+electorate by 'ad captandum' measures, or would have hesitated to
+protect life and property for fear of losing votes. What he saw right to
+do he would have done, regardless of proximate consequences.
+
+"The ordinary tests of generosity are very defective. As rightly
+measured, generosity is great in proportion to the amount of self-denial
+entailed; and where ample means are possessed, large gifts often entail
+no self-denial. Far more self-denial may be involved in the performance,
+on another's behalf, of some act that requires time and labor. In
+addition to generosity under its ordinary form, which Professor Tyndall
+displayed in unusual degree, he displayed it under a less common form.
+
+"He was ready to take much trouble to help friends. I have had personal
+experience of this. Though he had always in hand some investigation of
+great interest to him, and though, as I have heard him say, when he bent
+his mind to the subject he could not with any facility break off and
+resume it again, yet, when I have sought scientific aid, information or
+critical opinion, I never found the slightest reluctance to give me his
+undivided attention. Much more markedly, however, was this kind of
+generosity shown in another direction. Many men, while they are eager
+for appreciation, manifest little or no appreciation of others, and
+still less go out of their way to express it.
+
+"With Tyndall it was not thus; he was eager to recognize achievement.
+Notably in the case of Michael Faraday, and less notably, though still
+conspicuously in many cases, he has bestowed much labor and sacrificed
+many weeks in setting forth the merits of others. It was evidently a
+pleasure to him to dilate on the claims of fellow workers.
+
+"But there was a derivative form of this generosity calling for still
+greater eulogy. He was not content with expressing appreciation of those
+whose merits were recognized, but he used energy unsparingly in drawing
+the attention of the public to those whose merits were unrecognized;
+time after time in championing the cause of such, he was regardless of
+the antagonism he aroused and the evil he brought upon himself. This
+chivalrous defense of the neglected and ill-used has been, I think by
+few, if any, so often repeated. I have myself more than once benefited
+by his determination, quite spontaneously shown, that justice should be
+done in the apportionment of credit; and I have with admiration watched
+like actions of his in other cases: cases in which no consideration of
+nationality or of creed interfered in the least with his insistence on
+equitable distribution of honors.
+
+"In this undertaking to fight for those who were unfairly dealt with, he
+displayed in another direction that very conspicuous trait which, as
+displayed in his Alpine feats, has made him to many persons chiefly
+known: I mean courage, passing very often into daring. And here let me,
+in closing this little sketch, indicate certain mischiefs which this
+trait brought upon him. Courage grows by success. The demonstrated
+ability to deal with dangers produces readiness to meet more dangers,
+and is self-justifying where the muscular power and the nerve habitually
+prove adequate. But the resulting habit of mind is apt to influence
+conduct in other spheres, where muscular power and nerve are of no
+avail--is apt to cause the daring of dangers which are not to be met by
+strength of limb or by skill. Nature as externally presented by
+precipice ice-slopes and crevasses may be dared by one who is adequately
+endowed; but Nature, as internally represented in the form of physical
+constitution, may not be thus dared with impunity. Prompted by high
+motives, John Tyndall tended too much to disregard the protests of his
+body.
+
+"Over-application in Germany caused absolute sleeplessness, at one time,
+I think he told me, for more than a week; and this, with kindred
+transgressions, brought on that insomnia by which his after-life was
+troubled, and by which his power for work was diminished; for, as I have
+heard him say, a sound night's sleep was followed by a marked exaltation
+of faculty.
+
+"And then, in later life, came the daring which, by its results, brought
+his active career to a close. He conscientiously desired to fulfil an
+engagement to lecture at the British Institution, and was not deterred
+by fear of consequences.
+
+"He gave the lecture, notwithstanding the protest which for days before
+his system had been making. The result was a serious illness,
+threatening, as he thought at one time, a fatal result; and
+notwithstanding a year's furlough for the recovery of health, he was
+eventually obliged to resign his position. But for this defiance of
+Nature, there might have been many more years of scientific exploration,
+pleasurable to himself and beneficial to others; and he might have
+escaped that invalid life which for a long time he had to bear.
+In his case, however, the penalties of invalid life had great
+mitigations--mitigations such as fall to the lot of few.
+
+"It is conceivable that the physical discomforts and mental weariness
+which ill-health brings may be almost, if not quite, compensated by the
+pleasurable emotions caused by unflagging attentions and sympathetic
+companionship. If this ever happens, it happened in his case. All who
+have known the household during these years of nursing are aware of the
+unmeasured kindness he has received without ceasing. I happen to have
+had special evidence of this devotion on the one side and gratitude on
+the other, which I do not think I am called upon to keep to myself, but
+rather to do the contrary. In a letter I received from him some
+half-dozen years ago, referring, among other things, to Mrs. Tyndall's
+self-sacrificing care of him, occurred this sentence: 'She has raised my
+ideal of the possibilities of human nature.'"
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE]
+
+ALFRED R. WALLACE
+
+
+     "Amok" is an innovation which I do not recommend. It consists in
+     letting go when things get too bad, and doing damage with tongue,
+     hands and feet. It is the tantrum carried to its logical
+     conclusion. I saw one instance where a henpecked husband "ran amok"
+     and killed or wounded seventeen people before he himself was
+     killed. It is the national and therefore the honorable mode of
+     committing suicide among the natives of Celebes, and is the
+     fashionable way of escaping from their difficulties. A man can not
+     pay, he is taken for a slave, or has gambled away his wife or child
+     into slavery, he sees no way of recovering what he has lost, and
+     becomes desperate. He will not put up with such cruel wrongs, but
+     will be revenged on mankind and die like a hero. He grasps his
+     knife, and the next moment draws out the weapon and stabs a man to
+     the heart. He runs on with bloody kris in his hand, stabbing every
+     one he meets. "Amok! Amok!" then resounds through the streets.
+     Spears, krises, knives, guns and clubs are brought out against him.
+     He rushes madly forward, kills all he can--men, women and
+     children--and dies, overwhelmed by numbers, amid all the excitement
+     of a battle.
+
+     --_Alfred Russel Wallace, in "The Malay Archipelago"_
+
+
+ALFRED R. WALLACE
+
+The question of how this world and all the things in it were made,
+has, so far as we know, always been asked. And volunteers have at no
+time been slow about coming forward and answering. For this service the
+volunteer has usually asked for honors and also exemption from toil more
+or less unpleasant.
+
+He has also demanded the joy of riding in a coach, being carried in a
+palanquin, and sitting on a throne clothed in purple vestments, trimmed
+with gold lace or costly furs. Very often the volunteer has also
+insisted on living in a house larger than he needed, having more food
+than his system required, and drinking decoctions that are costly, spicy
+and peculiar.
+
+All of which luxury has been paid for by the people, who are told that
+which they wish to hear.
+
+The success of the volunteer lies in keeping one large ear close to the
+turf.
+
+Religious teachers have ever given to their people a cosmogony that was
+adapted to their understanding.
+
+Who made it? God made it all. In how long a time? Six days. And then
+followed explanations of what God did each day.
+
+Over against the volunteers with a taste for power and a fine corkscrew
+discrimination, there have been at rare intervals men with a desire to
+know for the sake of knowing. They were not content to accept any man's
+explanation. The only thing that was satisfying to them was the
+consciousness that they were inwardly right. Loyalty to the God within
+was the guiding impulse of their lives.
+
+In the past, such men have been regarded as eccentric, unreliable and
+dangerous, and the volunteers have ever warned their congregations
+against them.
+
+Indeed, until a very few years ago they were not allowed to express
+themselves openly. Laws have been passed to suppress them, and dire
+penalties have been devised for their benefit. Laws against sacrilege,
+heresy and blasphemy still ornament our statute-books; but these
+invented crimes that were once punishable by death are now obsolete, or
+exist in rudimentary forms only, and manifest themselves in a refusal to
+invite the guilty party to our Four-o'Clock. This hot intent to support
+and uphold the volunteers in their explanations of how the world was
+made, is a universal manifestation of the barbaric state, and is based
+upon the assumption that God is an infinite George the Fourth.
+
+Six hundred years before Christ, Anaximander, the Greek, taught that
+animal life was engendered from the earth through the influence of
+moisture and heat, and that life thus generated gradually evolved into
+higher and different forms: all animals once lived in the water, but
+some of them becoming stranded on land put forth organs of locomotion
+and defense, through their supreme resolve to live. Anaximander also
+taught that man was only a highly developed animal, and his source of
+life was the same as that of all other animals; man's present high
+degree of development having gradually come about through growth from
+very lowly forms.
+
+Anaxagoras, the schoolmaster of Pericles, also made similar statements,
+and then we find him boldly putting forth the very startling idea that
+between the highest type of Greek and the lowest type of savage there
+was a greater difference than between the savage and the ape. He also
+taught that the earth was the universal mother of all living things,
+animal and vegetable, and that the fecundation of the earth took place
+from minute, unseen germs that floated in the air.
+
+According to modern science, Anaxagoras was very close upon the trail of
+truth. But there were only a very few who could follow him, and it took
+the combined eloquence and tact of Pericles to keep his splendid head in
+the place where Nature put it, and Pericles himself was compromised by
+his leaning toward "Darwinism."
+
+Every man who speaks, expresses himself for others. We succeed only as
+our thought is echoed back to us by others who think the same. If you
+like what I say it is only because it is already yours. Moreover,
+thought is a collaboration, and is born of parents. If a teacher does
+not get a sympathetic hearing, one of two things happens: he loses the
+thread of his thought and grows apathetic, or he arouses an opposition
+that snuffs out his life.
+
+And the dead they soon grow cold.
+
+The recipe for popularity is to hunt out a weakness of humanity and then
+bank on it. No one knows this better than your theological volunteer.
+Aristotle, the father of natural history, who early in life had a
+Pegasus killed under him, taught that the diversity in animal life was
+caused by a diversity of conditions and environment, and he declared he
+could change the nature of animals by changing their surroundings. This
+being true he argued that all animals were once different from what they
+are now, and that if we could live long enough, we would see that
+species are exceedingly variable.
+
+To explain to child-minds that a Supreme Being made things outright just
+as they are, is easy; but to study and in degree know how things
+evolved, requires infinite patience and great labor. It also means small
+sympathy from the indifferent whom the earth has spawned in swarms, and
+the hatred of the volunteers who ride in coaches, and tell the many what
+they wish to hear.
+
+The volunteers drove Aristotle into exile, and from his time they had
+their way for two thousand years, when John Ray, Linnaeus and Buffon
+appeared.
+
+In Seventeen Hundred Fifty-five, Immanuel Kant, the little man who
+stayed near home and watched the stars tumble into his net, put forth
+his theory that every animal organism in the world was developed from a
+common original germ.
+
+In Seventeen Hundred Ninety-four, Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of
+Charles Darwin, inspired by Kant and Goethe, put forth his book,
+"Zoonomia," wherein he maintained the gradual growth and evolution of
+all organisms from minute, unseen germs. These views were put forth more
+as a poetic hypothesis than as a well-grounded scientific fact, so
+little attention was paid to Erasmus Darwin's books. The fanciful
+accounts of Creation put forth by Moses three thousand years before were
+firmly maintained by the entrenched volunteers and their millions of
+devotees and followers.
+
+But Kant, Goethe, Karl von Baer and August de Sainte-Hilaire were now
+planting their outposts throughout the civilized world, honeycombing
+Christendom with doubt.
+
+In the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-two, Herbert Spencer had argued in
+public and in pamphlets that species have undergone changes and
+modifications through change of surroundings, and that the account of
+Noah and his ark, with pairs of everything that flew, crept or ran, was
+fanciful and absurd, so far as we cared to distinguish fact from
+fiction.
+
+Early in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-eight, Charles Darwin received
+from his friend, Alfred Russel Wallace, a paper entitled, "On the
+Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type." At
+this time Darwin had in the hands of the secretary of the Linnaeus
+Society a paper entitled, "On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties,
+or the Perpetuation of Species and Varieties by Means of Natural
+Selection."
+
+The similarity in title, as well as the similarity in treatment of the
+Wallace theme, startled Darwin. He had been working on the idea for
+twenty years, and had an immense mass of data bearing on the subject,
+which he some day intended to issue in book form.
+
+His paper for the Linnaeus Society simply summed up his convictions. And
+now here was a man with whom he had never discussed this particular
+subject, writing an almost identical paper and sending it to him--of all
+men!
+
+Well did he pinch his leg, and call in his wife, asking her if he were
+alive or dead. Straightway he went to see Sir Charles Lyell and Sir
+Joseph Hooker, both more eminent than he in the scientific world, and
+laid the matter before them. After a long conference it was decided that
+both papers should be read the same evening before the Linnaeus Society,
+and this was done on the evening of July First, Eighteen Hundred
+Fifty-eight.
+
+Darwin then decided to publish his "Origin of Species," which in his
+preface he modestly calls an "Abstract." The publication was hastened by
+the fact that Wallace was compiling a similar work. After giving Wallace
+full credit in his most interesting "Introduction," and reviewing all
+that others had said in coming to similar conclusions, Darwin fired his
+shot heard round the world. And no man was more delighted and pleased
+with the echoing reverberations than Alfred Russel Wallace, as he read
+the book in far-off Australia.
+
+The honor of discovering the Law of Evolution, and lifting it out of the
+hazy realms of hypothesis and poetry into the sunlight of science, will
+ever be shared between Charles Robert Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace,
+who were indeed brothers in spirit and lovers to the end of their days.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In an insignificant village of England, now famous alone because he
+began from there his explorations of the world, Alfred Russel Wallace
+was born, in the year Eighteen Hundred Twenty-two. He was one of a large
+family of the middle class, where work is as natural as life, and the
+indispensable virtues are followed as a means of self-preservation. It
+is most unfortunate to attain such a degree of success that you think
+you can waive the decalogue and give Nemesis the slip.
+
+About the year Eighteen Hundred Forty, the railroad renaissance was on
+in England, and young Wallace, alive, alert, active, did his turn as
+apprentice to a surveyor.
+
+Chance is a better schoolmaster than design. All boys have a taste for
+tent life, and healthy youngsters not quite grown, with ostrich
+digestions, passing through the nomadic stage, revel in hardships and
+count it a joy to sleep on the ground where they can look up at the
+stars, and eat out of a skillet.
+
+A little later we find Alfred working for his elder brother in an
+architect's office, gazing abstractedly out of the window betimes, and
+wishing he were a ground-squirrel, fancy free on the heath and amid the
+heather, digging holes, thus avoiding introspection. "Houses are
+prisons," he said, and sang softly to himself the song of the open road.
+
+I think I know exactly how Alfred Russel Wallace then felt, from the
+touchstone of my own experience; and I think I know how he looked, too,
+all confirmed by an East Aurora incident.
+
+Some years ago, one fine day in May, I was helping excavate for the
+foundation of a new barn. All at once I felt that some one was standing
+behind me looking at me. I turned around and there was a tall, lithe,
+slender youth in a faded college cap, blue flannel shirt, ragged
+trousers and top-boots. My first impression of him was that he was a
+fellow who slept in his clothes, a plain "Weary," but when he spoke
+there was a note of self-reliance in his low, well-modulated voice that
+told me he was no mendicant. Voice is the true index of character.
+
+"My name is Wallace, and I have a note to you from my father," and he
+began diving into pockets, and finally produced a ragged letter that was
+nearly worn out through long contact with a perspiring human form
+divine--or partially so. I seldom make haste about reading letters of
+introduction, and so I greeted the young man with a word of welcome, and
+gave him a chance to say something for himself.
+
+He was English, that was very sure--and Oxford English at that. "You
+see," he began, "I am working just now over on the Hamburg and Buffalo
+Electric Line, stringing wires. I get three dollars a day because I'm a
+fairly good climber. I wanted to learn the business, so I just hired out
+as a laborer, and they gave me the hardest job, thinking to scare me
+out, but that was what I wanted," and he smiled modestly and showed a
+set of incisors as fine and strong as a dog's teeth. "I want to remain
+with you for a week and pay for my board in work," he cautiously
+continued.
+
+"But about your father, Mr. Wallace--do I know him?"
+
+"I think so; he has written you several letters--Alfred Russel Wallace!"
+
+You could have knocked me down with a lady's-slipper. I opened the
+letter and unmistakably it was from the great scientist, "introducing my
+baby boy."
+
+I never met Alfred Russel Wallace, but I know if I should, I would find
+him very gentle, kindly and simple in all his ways--as really great men
+ever are. He would not talk to me in Latin nor throw off technical
+phrases about great nothings, and I would feel just as much at home with
+him as I did with Ol' John Burroughs the last time I saw him, leaning up
+against a country railroad-station in shirt-sleeves, chewing a straw,
+exchanging salutes with the engineer on a West Shore jerkwater. "S'
+long, John!" called the going one as he leaned out of the cab-window.
+"S' long, Bill, and good luck to you," was the cheery answer.
+
+But still, all of us have moments when we think of the world's most
+famous ones as being surely eight feet tall, and having voices like
+fog-horns.
+
+"I can do most any kind of hard work, you know"--I was aroused from my
+little mental excursion, and noticed that my visitor had hair of a
+light yellow like a Swede from Hennepin County, Minnesota, and that his
+hair was three shades lighter than his bronzed face. "I can do any kind
+of work, you know, and if you will just loan me that pick"--and I handed
+him the pickax.
+
+Young Wallace remained with us for a week, asking for nothing, doing
+everything, even to helping the girls wash dishes. That he was the son
+of a great man, no one would have ever learned from his own lips. In
+fact, I am not sure that he was impressed with his father's excellence,
+but I saw there was a tender bond between them, for he haunted the
+post-office, morning, noon and night, looking for a letter from his
+father. When it came he was as happy as a woodchuck. He showed me the
+letter: it was nine finely written pages.
+
+But to my disappointment not a word about marsupials, siamangs or
+Syndactylae: just news about John, William, Mary and Benjamin; with
+references to chickens and cows, and a new greenhouse, with a little
+good advice about keeping right hours and not overeating.
+
+The young man had spent three years at Oxford, and was an electrical
+engineer. He was intent on finding out just as much about the secrets of
+American railroad construction as he possibly could. As for intellect, I
+did not discover any vast amount; perhaps, for that matter, he didn't
+either. But we all greatly enjoyed his visit, and when he went away I
+presented him with a clean, secondhand flannel shirt and my blessing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From the appearance of the young man I imagine that Alfred Russel
+Wallace at twenty-one was very much such a man as his son, who did such
+good work at the Roycroft with pick and shovel. Alfred was earnest,
+intent, strong, and had a deal of quiet courage that he was as
+unconscious of as he was of his digestion.
+
+He taught school, and to interest his scholars he would take them on
+botanical excursions. Then he himself grew interested, and began to
+collect plants, bugs, beetles and birds on his own account.
+
+By Eighteen Hundred Forty-eight, the confining walls of the school had
+become intolerable to Wallace, and he started away on a wild-goose chase
+to Brazil, with a chum by the name of Henry Walter Bates, an ardent
+entomologist. Alfred had no money either, but Bates had influence, and
+he cashed it in by arranging with the Curator of the British Museum,
+that any natural-history specimens of value which they might gather and
+send to him would be paid for. And so something like a hundred pounds
+was collected from several scientific men, and handed over as advance
+payment for the wonderful things that the young men were to send back.
+
+They embarked on a sailing-vessel that was captained by a kind kinsman
+of Bates, so the fare was nil, in consideration of services rendered
+constructively.
+
+Arriving in Brazil the young men began their collecting of specimens.
+They got together a very creditable collection of birds' eggs and sent
+them back by the captain of the ship they came out on, this as an
+earnest of what was to come.
+
+Bates and Wallace were together for a year. Bates insisted on remaining
+near the white settlements; but Wallace wanted to go where white men had
+never been. So alone he went into the forests, and for two years lived
+with the natives and dared the dangers of jungle-fever, snakes,
+crocodiles and savages. For a space of ten months he did not see a
+single white person.
+
+He collected nearly ten thousand specimens of birds, which he skinned
+and carefully prepared so they could be mounted when he returned to
+England; there was also a nearly complete Brazilian herbarium, and a
+finer collection of birds' eggs than any museum of England could boast.
+
+This collection represented over three years' continuous toil. All the
+curious things were packed with great care and placed on board ship.
+
+And so the young naturalist sailed away for England, proud and happy,
+with his great collection of entomological, botanical and ornithological
+specimens.
+
+But on the way the ship took fire, and the collection was either burned
+or ruined by soaking salt water.
+
+That the crew and their sole passenger escaped alive was a wonder.
+Wallace on reaching England was in a sorry plight, being destitute of
+clothes and funds.
+
+And there were unkind ones who did not hesitate to hint that he had only
+been over to Ireland working in a peat-bog, and that his knowledge of
+Brazil was gotten out of Humboldt's books.
+
+In one way, Wallace surely paralleled Humboldt: both lost a most
+valuable collection of natural-history specimens by shipwreck.
+
+Several of the good men who had advanced money now asked that it be
+paid. Wallace set to work writing out his recollections, the only asset
+that he possessed.
+
+His book, "Travel on the Amazon and Rio Negro," had enough romance in it
+so that it floated. Royalties paid over in crisp Bank of England notes
+made things look brighter. Another book was issued, called, "Palm-Trees
+and Their Uses," and proved that the author was able to view a subject
+from every side, and say all that was to be said about it. "Wallace on
+the Palm" is still a textbook.
+
+The debts were paid, and Alfred Russel Wallace at thirty was square with
+the world, the possessor of much valuable experience. He also had five
+hundred pounds in cash, with a reputation as a writer and traveler that
+no longer caused bookworms to sneeze.
+
+Having paid off his obligations, he felt free again to leave England, a
+thing he had vowed he would not do, so long as his reputation was under
+a cloud. This time he selected for a natural-history survey a section of
+the world really less known than South America.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Early in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four, Alfred Russel Wallace
+reached Asia. He had decided that he would make the first and the best
+collection of the flora and fauna of the Malay Archipelago that it was
+possible to make.
+
+White men had skirted the coast of many of the islands, but information
+as to what there was inland was mostly conjecture and guesswork.
+
+Just how long it would take Wallace to make his Malaysian
+natural-history survey he did not know, but in a letter to Darwin he
+stated that he expected to be absent from England at least two years. He
+was gone eight years, and during this time, walked, paddled or rode
+horseback fifteen thousand miles, and visited many islands never before
+trod by the foot of a white man.
+
+The city of Singapore served him as a base or headquarters, because from
+there he could catch trading-ships that plied among the islands of the
+Archipelago; and to Singapore he could also ship and there store his
+specimens. From Singapore he made sixty separate voyages of discovery.
+In all he sent home over one hundred twenty-five thousand
+natural-history specimens, including about ten thousand birds, which,
+later on, were all stuffed and mounted under his skilful direction.
+
+On returning to England, Wallace took six years in preparation of his
+book, "The Malay Archipelago," a most stupendous literary undertaking,
+which covers the subjects of botany, geology, ornithology, entomology,
+zoology and anthropology, in a way that serves as a regular mine of
+information and suggestion for natural-history workers.
+
+The book in its original form, I believe, sold for ten pounds (fifty
+dollars), and was issued to subscribers in parts. It was bought, not
+only by students, but by a great number of general readers, there being
+enough adventure mixed up in the science to spice what otherwise might
+be rather dry reading. For instance, there is a chapter about killing
+orang-utans that must have served my old friend, Paul du Chaillu, as
+excellent raw stock in compiling his own recollections.
+
+Wallace states that the only foe for which the orang really has a hatred
+is the crocodile. It seems to share with man a shuddering fear of
+snakes, although orangs have no part in making Kentucky famous. But the
+crocodile is his natural and hereditary enemy. And as if to get even
+with this ancient foe, who occasionally snaps off a young orang in his
+prime, the orangs will often locate a big crocodile, and jumping on his
+back beat him with clubs; and when he opens his gigantic mouth, the
+female orangs will fill the cavity with sticks and stones, and keep up
+the fight until the crocodile succumbs and quits this vale of crocodile
+tears.
+
+The orang is distinct and different from the chimpanzee and gorilla,
+which are found only in Western Africa.
+
+In Borneo, the "man-ape" is quite numerous. This is the animal that has
+given rise to all those tales about "the wild man of Borneo," which that
+good man, P. T. Barnum, kept alive by exhibiting a fine specimen.
+Barnum's original "wild man" lived at Waltham, Massachusetts, and
+belonged to the Baptist Church. He recently died worth a hundred
+thousand dollars, which money he left to found a school for young
+ladies.
+
+The orang, or mias, hides in the swampy jungles, and very rarely comes
+to the ground. The natives regard them as a sort of sacred object, and
+have a great horror of killing them. Indeed, a person who kills a
+man-ape, they regard as a murderer; and so when Wallace announced to his
+attendants that he wanted to secure several specimens of these "wild men
+of the woods," they cried, "Alas! he is making a collection: it will be
+our turn next!" And they fled in terror.
+
+Wallace then hired another set of servants and resolved to make no
+confidants, but just go ahead and find his game.
+
+He had hunted for weeks through forest and jungle, but never a glimpse
+or sight of the man-ape! He had almost given up the search, and
+concluded with several English scientists that this orang-utan was a
+part of that great fabric of pseudo-science invented by imaginative
+sailormen, who took most of their inland little journeys around the
+capstan. And so musing, seated in the doorway of his bamboo house, he
+looked out upon the forest, and there only a few yards away, swinging
+from tree to tree, was a man-ape. It seemed to him to be about five
+times as large as a man.
+
+He seized his gun and approached; the beast stopped, glared, and railed
+at him in a voice of wrath. It broke off branches and threw sticks at
+him.
+
+Wallace thought of the offer made him by the South Kensington Museum:
+"One hundred pounds in gold for an adult male, skin and skeleton to be
+properly preserved and mounted; seventy-five pounds for a female."
+
+The huge animal showed its teeth, cast one glance of scornful contempt
+on the puny explorer, and started on, swinging thirty feet at a stretch
+and catching hold of the limbs with its two pairs of hands.
+
+Wallace grasped his gun and followed, lured by the demoniac shape. A
+little of the superstition of the natives had gotten into his veins: he
+dare not kill the thing unless it came toward him, and he had to shoot
+it in self-defense.
+
+It traveled in the trees about as fast as he could on the ground.
+Occasionally it would stop and chatter at him, throwing sticks in a most
+human way, as if to order him back.
+
+Finally, the instincts of the naturalist got the better of the man, and
+he shot the animal. It came tumbling to the ground with a terrific
+crash, grasping at the vines and leaves as it fell.
+
+It was quite dead, but Wallace approached it with great caution. It
+proved to be a female, of moderate size, in height about three and a
+half feet, six feet across from finger to finger. Needless to say that
+Wallace had to do the skinning and the mounting of the skeleton alone.
+His servants had chills of fear if asked to approach it. The skeleton of
+this particular orang can now be seen in the Derby Museum.
+
+In a few hours after killing his first orang, Wallace heard a peculiar
+crying in the forest, and on search found a young one, evidently the
+baby of the one he had killed. The baby did not show any fear at all,
+evidently thinking it was with one of its kind, for it clung to him
+piteously, with an almost human tenderness.
+
+Says Wallace:
+
+"When handled or nursed it was very quiet and contented, but when laid
+down by itself would invariably cry; and for the first few nights was
+very restless and noisy. I soon found it necessary to wash the little
+mias as well. After I had done so a few times it came to like the
+operation, and after rolling in the mud would begin crying, and continue
+until I took it out and carried it to the spout, when it immediately
+became quiet, although it would wince a little at the first rush of the
+cold water, and make ridiculously wry faces while the stream was running
+over its head. It enjoyed the wiping and rubbing dry amazingly, and when
+I brushed its hair seemed to be perfectly happy, lying quite still with
+its arms and legs stretched out. It was a never-failing amusement to
+observe the curious changes of countenance by which it would express its
+approval or dislike of what was given to it. The poor little thing would
+lick its lips, draw in its cheeks, and turn up its eyes with an
+expression of the most supreme satisfaction, when it had a mouthful
+particularly to its taste. On the other hand, when its food was not
+sufficiently sweet or palatable, it would turn the mouthful about with
+its tongue for a moment, as if trying to extract what flavor there was,
+and then push it all out between its lips. If the same food was
+continued, it would proceed to scream and kick about violently, exactly
+like a baby in a passion.
+
+"When I had had it about a month it began to exhibit some signs of
+learning to run alone. When laid upon the floor it would push itself
+along by its legs, or roll itself over, and thus make an unwieldy
+progression. When lying in the box it would lift itself up to the edge
+in an almost erect position, and once or twice succeeded in tumbling
+out. When left dirty or hungry, or otherwise neglected, it would scream
+violently till attended to, varied by a kind of coughing noise, very
+similar to that which is made by the adult animal.
+
+"If no one was in the house, or its cries were not attended to, it would
+be quiet after a little while; but the moment it heard a footstep would
+begin again, harder than ever. It was very human."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The most lasting result of the wanderings of Alfred Russel Wallace
+consists in his having established what is known to us as "The Wallace
+Line." This line is a boundary that divides in a geographical way that
+portion of Malaysia which belongs to the continent of Asia from that
+which belongs to the continent of Australia.
+
+The Wallace Line covers a distance of more than four thousand miles, and
+in this expanse there are three islands in which Great Britain could be
+set down without anywhere touching the sea.
+
+Even yet the knowledge of the average American or European is very hazy
+about the size and extent of the Malay Archipelago, although through our
+misunderstanding with Spain, which loaded us up with possessions we have
+no use for, we have recently gotten the geography down and dusted it off
+a bit.
+
+There is a book by Mrs. Rose Innes, wife of an English official in the
+Far East, who, among other entertaining things, tells of a head-hunter
+chief who taught her to speak Malay, and she, wishing to reciprocate,
+offered to teach him English; but the great man begged to be excused,
+saying, "Malay is spoken everywhere you go, east, west, north or south,
+but in all the world there are only twelve people who speak English,"
+and he proceeded to name them.
+
+Our assumptions are not quite so broad as this, but few of us realize
+that the Protestant Christian Religion stands fifth in the number of
+communicants, as compared with the other great religions, and that
+against our hundred millions of people in America, the Malay Archipelago
+has over two hundred millions.
+
+Wallace found marked geological, botanical and zoological differences to
+denote his line. And from these things he proved that there had been
+great changes, through subsidence and elevation of the land. At no very
+remote geologic period, Asia extended clear to Borneo, and also included
+the Philippine Islands. This is shown by the fact that animal and
+vegetable life in all of these islands is almost identical with life on
+the mainland: the same trees, the same flowers, the same birds, the same
+animals.
+
+As you go westward, however, you come to islands which have a very
+different flora and fauna, totally unlike that found in Asia, but very
+similar to that found in Australia.
+
+Australia, be it known, is totally different in all its animal and
+vegetable phenomena from Asia.
+
+In Australia, until the white man very recently carried them across,
+there were no monkeys, apes, cats, bears, tigers, wolves, elephants,
+horses, squirrels or rabbits. Instead there were found animals that are
+found nowhere else, and which seem to belong to a different and
+so-called extinct geologic age, such as the kangaroo, wombats, the
+platypus--which the sailors used to tell us was neither bird not beast,
+and yet was both. In birds, Australia has also very strange specimens,
+such as the ostrich which can not fly, but can outrun a horse and kills
+its prey by kicking forward like a man. Australia also has immense
+mound-making turkeys, honeysuckers and cockatoos, but no woodpeckers,
+quail or pheasants.
+
+Wallace was the first to discover that there are various islands, some
+of them several hundred miles from Australia, where the animal life is
+identical with that of Australia. And then there are islands, only a
+comparatively few miles away, which have all the varieties of birds and
+beasts found in Asia.
+
+But this line that once separated continents is in places but fifteen
+miles wide, and is always marked by a deep-water channel, but the seas
+that separate Borneo and Sumatra from Asia, although wide, are so
+shallow that ships can find anchorage anywhere.
+
+The Wallace Line, proving the subsidence of the sea and upheaval of the
+land, has never been seriously disputed, and is to many students the one
+great discovery by which Wallace will be remembered.
+
+Wallace's book on "The Geographical Distribution of Animals" sets forth
+in a most interesting manner, the details of how he came to discover the
+Line.
+
+It was in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-five that Wallace, alone in the wilds
+of the Malay Archipelago, became convinced of the scientific truth that
+species were an evolution from a common source, and he began making
+notes of his observations along this particular line of thought. Some
+months afterward he wrote out his belief in the form of an essay, but
+then he had no definite intention of what he would do with the paper,
+beyond keeping it for future reference when he returned to England. In
+the Fall of Eighteen Hundred Fifty-seven, however, he decided to send it
+to Darwin to be read before some scientific society, if Darwin
+considered it worthy. And this paper was read on the evening of July
+First, before the Linnaeus Society, with one by Darwin on the same
+subject, written before Wallace's paper arrived, wherein the identical
+views are set forth. Darwin and Wallace expressed what many other
+investigators had guessed or but dimly perceived.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of the six immortal modern scientists, three began life working as
+surveyors and civil engineers--Wallace, Tyndall, Spencer. From the
+number of eminent men, not forgetting Henry Thoreau, Leonardo da Vinci,
+Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Washington--aye! nor old John Brown, who
+carried a Gunter's chain and manipulated the transit--we come to the
+conclusion that there must be something in the business of surveying
+that conduces to clear thinking and strong, independent action.
+
+If I had a boy who by nature and habit was given to futilities, I would
+apprentice him to a civil engineer.
+
+When two gangs of men begin a tunnel, working toward each other from
+different sides of a mountain, dreams, poetry, hypothesis and guesswork
+had better be omitted from the equation. Here is a case where
+metaphysics has no bearing. It is a condition that confronts them, not a
+theory.
+
+Theological explanations are assumptions built upon hypotheses, and your
+theologian always insists that you shall be dead before you can know.
+
+If a bridge breaks down or a fireproof building burns to ashes, no
+explanation on the part of the architect can explain away the
+miscalculation; but your theologian always evolves his own fog, into
+which he can withdraw at will, thus making escape easy. Darwin, Huxley,
+Spencer, Tyndall and Wallace all had the mathematical mind. Nothing but
+the truth would satisfy them. In school, you remember how we sometimes
+used to work on a mathematical problem for hours or days. Many would
+give it up. A few of the class would take the answer from the book, and
+in an extremity force the figures to give the proper result. Such
+students, it is needless to say, never gained the respect of either
+class or teacher--or themselves. They had the true theological instinct.
+But a few kept on until the problem was solved, or the fallacy of it had
+been discovered. In life's school such were the men just named, and the
+distinguishing feature of their lives was that they were students and
+learners to the last.
+
+Of this group of scientific workers, Alfred Russel Wallace alone
+survives, aged eighty-nine at this writing, still studying, earnestly
+intent upon one of Nature's secrets that four of his great colleagues
+years ago labeled "Unknown," and the other two marked "Unknowable."
+
+To some it is an anomaly and contradiction that a lover of science,
+exact, cautious, intent on certitude, should accept a belief in personal
+immortality. Still, to others this is regarded as positive proof of his
+superior insight.
+
+All thinking men agree that we are surrounded by phenomena that to a
+great extent are unanalyzed; but Herbert Spencer, for one, thought it a
+lapse in judgment to attribute to spirit intervention, mysteries which
+could not be accounted for on any other grounds. It was equal to that
+sin against science which Darwin committed, and which he atoned for in
+contrite public confession, when he said: "It surely must be this,
+otherwise what is it? Hence we assume," and so on. Some recent writers
+have sought to demolish Wallace's argument concerning Spiritism by
+saying he is an old man and in his dotage. Wallace once wrote a booklet
+entitled, "Vaccination a Fallacy," which created a big dust in Doctors'
+Row, and was cited as corroborative proof, along with his faith in
+Spiritism, that the man was mentally incompetent.
+
+But this is a deal worse excuse for argument than anything Wallace ever
+put forth. The real fact is that Wallace issued a book on Spiritism in
+Eighteen Hundred Seventy-four, and in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-six
+reissued it with numerous amendments, confirming his first conclusions.
+So he has held his peculiar views on immortality for over thirty years,
+and moreover his mental vigor is still unimpaired.
+
+Whether the proof he has received as to the existence of disembodied
+spirits is sufficient for others is very uncertain; but if it suffices
+for himself, it is not for us to quibble. Wallace agrees to allow us to
+have our opinions if we will let him have his.
+
+His views are in no sense those of Christianity; rather, they might be
+called those of Theosophy, as the personal God and the dogma of
+salvation and atonement are entirely omitted.
+
+The Doctrine of Evolution he carries into the realm of spirit. His
+belief is that souls reincarnate themselves many times for the ultimate
+object of experience, growth and development. He holds that this life is
+the gateway to another, but that we should live each day as though it
+were our last.
+
+To this effect we find, in a recent article, Wallace quotes a little
+story from Tolstoy: A priest, seeing a peasant in a field plowing,
+approached him and asked, "How would you spend the rest of this day if
+you knew you were to die tonight?"
+
+The priest expected the man, who was a bit irregular in his churchgoing,
+to say, "I would spend my last hours in confession and prayer." But the
+peasant replied, "How would I spend the rest of the day if I were to die
+tonight?--why, I'd plow!"
+
+Hence, Wallace holds that it is better to plow than to pray, and that in
+fact, when rightly understood, good plowing is prayer.
+
+All useful effort is sacred, and nothing else is or ever can be. Wallace
+believes that the only fit preparation for the future lies in improving
+the present. Please pass the dotage!
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: JOHN FISKE]
+
+JOHN FISKE
+
+
+     In a sinless and painless world the moral element would be lacking;
+     the goodness would have no more significance in our conscious life
+     than that load of atmosphere which we are always carrying about
+     with us.
+
+     We are thus brought to a striking conclusion, the essential
+     soundness of which can not be gainsaid. In a happy world there must
+     be pain and sorrow, and in a moral world the knowledge of evil is
+     indispensable. The stern necessity for this has been proved to
+     inhere in the innermost constitution of the human soul. It is part
+     and parcel of the universe.
+
+     We do not find that evil has been interpolated into the universe
+     from without; we find that, on the contrary, it is an indispensable
+     part of the dramatic whole. God is the creator of evil, and from
+     the eternal scheme of things diabolism is forever excluded.
+
+     From our present standpoint we may fairly ask, what would have been
+     the worth of that primitive innocence portrayed in the myth of the
+     Garden of Eden, had it ever been realized in the life of men? What
+     would have been the moral value or significance of a race of human
+     beings ignorant of sin, and doing beneficent acts with no more
+     consciousness or volition than the deftly contrived machine that
+     picks up raw material at one end, and turns out some finished
+     product at the other? Clearly, for strong and resolute men and
+     women, an Eden would be but a fool's paradise.
+
+     "_Through Nature to God_"
+
+
+JOHN FISKE
+
+Early in life John Fiske aimed high and thought himself capable of
+great things. He also believed that the world accepted a man at the
+estimate he placed upon himself.
+
+Fiske was born at Hartford in Eighteen Hundred Forty-two. His mother's
+maiden name was Fiske and his father's name was Green, and until
+well-nigh manhood, John Fiske was called Edmund Green.
+
+His father died while Edmund was a baby, and the wee youngster was taken
+charge of by his grandmother Fiske of Middletown, Connecticut.
+
+When his mother married again, Edmund did not approve of the match.
+Parents often try to live their children's lives for them, and to hold
+the balance true, children occasionally attempt to dictate to parents in
+affairs of the heart. A young man by the name of Hamlet will be recalled
+who, having no special business of his own, became much distressed and
+had theories concerning the conduct of his mother. As a general
+proposition the person who looks after the territory directly under his
+own hat will find his time fairly well employed.
+
+They say Edmund Green made threats when his mother changed her name, but
+all he did was to follow her example and change his. Thereafter he was
+plain John Fiske. "I must have a name easy to take hold of: one that
+people can remember," he said. And they do say that John Fiske's
+reverence for John Ruskin had something to do with his choice of name.
+
+Just here some curious one of the curious sex, which by the way holds no
+monopoly on curiosity, may ask if the second venture of Mrs. Green was
+fruitful and fortunate. So I will say, yes, eminently so; and in one way
+it seemed to serve, for John Fiske's stepfather waived John's
+displeasure with his stepfather's wife, and did something toward sending
+the young man to Harvard University, and also supplied the funds to send
+him on a tour around the world.
+
+However, the second brood revealed no genius, at sight of which the
+defunct Mr. Green from his seat in Elysium must have chortled in glee,
+assuming, of course, that disembodied spirits are cognizant of the
+doings of their late partners, as John Fiske seemed to think they were.
+
+If Alexander Humboldt's mother had not married again, we would have had
+no Alexander Humboldt. Second marriages are like first ones in this:
+Sometimes they are happy and sometimes not. In any event, I occasionally
+think that mother-love has often been much exaggerated. Love is a most
+beautiful thing, and it does not seem to make very much difference who
+supplies it. Stepmother-love, Lincoln used to say, was the most precious
+thing that had ever come his way. I know a man who loves his
+mother-in-law, because she pitied him. Our Oneida friends had
+"Community Mothers," who took care of everybody's babies, just as if
+they were their own, and with marked success, for the genus hoodlum
+never evolved at Oneida. Grandmother-love served all purposes for little
+Isaac Newton, just as it did for John Fiske.
+
+John Fiske's grandmother was his first teacher, and she started out with
+the assumption that genius always skips one generation. She believed
+that she was dealing with a record-breaker, and she was. What she did
+not know about the classics was known by others whom she delegated to
+teach her grandchild.
+
+When her baby genius was just out of linsey-woolsey dresses and wore
+trousers buttoned to a calico waist, she began preparing him for
+college. The old lady had loved a college man in her youth, and she
+judged Harvard by the Harvard man she knew best. And the Harvard man she
+saw in her waking dreams, she created in her own image. Harvard requires
+perspective, and viewed over the years through a mist of melancholy it
+is very beautiful. At close range we often get a Jarrett Bumball flavor
+of cigarettes and a sight of the foam that made Milwaukee famous. To a
+great degree, Gran'ma Fiske created her Harvard out of the stuff that
+dreams are made of. When her little charge was six years old, she began
+preparing him for Harvard by teaching him to say, "amo, amas, amat."
+
+At seven years of age he was reading Caesar's "Commentaries" and making
+wise comments over his bowl of bread-and-milk about the Tenth Legion;
+and he also had his opinions concerning the relationship of Caesar with
+Cleopatra. At this time he read Josephus for rest, and discovered for
+himself that the famous passage about Jesus of Nazareth was an
+interpolation.
+
+When he was eight, he was familiar with Plato, had read all of
+Shakespeare's plays, and propounded a few hypotheses concerning the
+authorship of the "Sonnets."
+
+At nine he spoke Greek with an Attic accent. When ten he had read
+Prescott, Gibbon and Macaulay; and about this time, as a memory test he
+wrote a history of the world from the time of Moses down to the date of
+his own birth, giving a list of the greatest men who had ever lived,
+with a brief mention of what they had done, with the date of their birth
+and death.
+
+This book is still in existence and so far as I know has never been
+equaled by the performance of any infant prodigy, save possibly John
+Stuart Mill.
+
+When twelve years of age he had read Vergil, Sallust, Tacitus, Ovid,
+Juvenal and Catullus. He had also mastered trigonometry, surveying,
+navigation, geometry and differential calculus.
+
+Before his grandmother had him discard knee-breeches, he kept his diary
+in Spanish, spoke German at the table, and read German philosophy in the
+original. The year he was sixteen he wrote poems after Dante in Italian
+and translated Cervantes into English.
+
+At seventeen he read the Hebrew scriptures like a Rabbi, and was
+familiar with Sanskrit.
+
+Now, let no carpist imagine I have dealt in hyperbole, or hand-illumined
+the facts: I have merely stated some simple truths about the early
+career of John Fiske.
+
+One might imagine that with all his wonderful achievements this youth
+would be top-heavy and a most insufferable prig. The fact was, he was a
+fine, rollicking, healthy young man much given to pranks, and withal
+generous and lovable.
+
+He was admitted to Harvard without examination, for his fame had
+preceded him. Students and professors alike looked at him in wonder.
+
+At Cambridge, as if to keep good his record, he studied thirteen hours a
+day, for twelve months in the year. He ranged through every subject in
+the catalog, and all recorded knowledge was to him familiar.
+
+Prophecies were freely made that he would eclipse Sir Isaac Newton and
+Humboldt. But there were others who had a clearer vision.
+
+John Fiske made a decided success in life and left his personality
+distinctly impressed upon his time, but it is no disparagement to say of
+him that Autumn did not fulfil the promise of Spring. And Fiske himself
+in his single original contribution to the evolution crusade explains
+the reason why.
+
+Professor Santayanna of Harvard once said that John Fiske made three
+great scientific discoveries, as follows:
+
+1. As you lengthen a pigeon's bill, you increase the size of its feet.
+
+2. White tomcats with blue eyes are always deaf.
+
+3. The extent of mental development in any animal is in proportion to
+its infancy or the length of time involved in its reaching physical
+maturity.
+
+Waiving Numbers One and Two as of doubtful value, Number Three is
+Fiske's sole original discovery, according to his confession. Further,
+Huxley quotes Fiske on this theme, and adds, "The delay of adolescence
+and the prolonging of the period of infancy form a subject, as expressed
+by Mr. Fiske, which is worthy of our most careful consideration."
+
+Rareripes fall early. John Fiske's name was coupled, as we have seen,
+with those of Newton and Humboldt. Newton died at eighty-six, Humboldt
+at ninety. These men developed slowly: the hothouse methods were not for
+them. Fiske at twenty knew more than any of them did at forty. Fiske at
+twenty-five was a better man mentally and physically than he was at
+thirty-five. At forty he was refused life-insurance because his
+measurement east and west was out of proportion to his measurement north
+and south.
+
+He used often to sit at his desk for fifteen hours a day, writing and
+studying. The sedentary habit grew upon him; the vital organs got
+clogged with adipose tissue. The doctor told him that "his diaphragm was
+too close to his lungs"--a cheerful proposition, well worthy of a
+small, mouse-colored medicus who dare not run the risk of displeasing a
+big patient by telling him the truth, that is, that deep breathing and
+active exercise in the open air can never be replaced through the use of
+something poured out of a bottle.
+
+People who eat too much, drink too much, smoke too much, and do not
+exercise enough, have to pay for their privileges, even though they are
+able to work differential calculus with one hand and recite Xenophon's
+"Anabasis" backward. They all have the liver and lungs too close to the
+diaphragm, because that damnable invention of Sir Isaac Newton's
+slumbers not nor sleeps, and all the vital organs droop and drop when we
+neglect deep breathing. Inertia is a vice. The gods cultivate
+levitation, which is a different thing from levity, meaning skyey
+gravitation, uplift, aspiration expressed in bodily attitude. When
+levitation lets go, gravity doubles its grip.
+
+The Yogi of the East know vastly more about this theme than we do, and
+have made of deep breathing an art. Carry the crown of your head high,
+hold your chin in, and fill the top of your lungs by cultivating
+levitation. We are gods in the biscuit!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After four years at Harvard and the regulation two years at the Harvard
+Law School, John Fiske opened an office in Boston and gave his shingle
+to the breeze. No clients came, and this was well--for the clients.
+Also, for John. The law is a business proposition: its essence is the
+adjustment of differences between men, the lubrication of exchange,
+getting things on! Learned men very seldom make good lawyers. Law is a
+very practical matter, and as for "Law Latin," it can be learned in a
+week and then should be mostly forgotten. The lawyer who asks his client
+about the "causa sine qua non," or harangues the jury concerning the
+"ipse dixit" of "de facto" and "de jure," will probably be mulcted for
+costs on general principles.
+
+"I always rule hard against the lawyer who quotes Latin," said a
+Brooklyn judge to me the other day. Happily, Law Latin is now not used
+to any extent, except in Missouri.
+
+No more clients came to John Fiske than did to Wendell Phillips, who
+once had a law-office on the same street. So John sent letters to the
+newspapers, wrote book-reviews, and contributed essays to the "Atlantic
+Monthly." Occasionally, he would lecture for scientific clubs or
+societies.
+
+While still in the Law School he had discounted the future and married a
+charming young woman, who believed in him to an extent that would have
+made the average man pause.
+
+Marriages do not always keep pace exactly with the price of corn.
+
+Receipts in the Fiske law-office were not active. John Fiske was
+twenty-six; his grandmother was dead, and family cares were coming along
+apace, all according to the Law of Malthus.
+
+He accepted an offer to give substitute lectures at Harvard on history,
+for a professor who had gone abroad for his health. This he continued,
+speaking for any absentee on any subject, and tutoring rich laggards for
+a consideration. Good boys, low on phosphorus, used to get him to start
+their daily themes, and those overtaken in the throes of trigonometry he
+often rescued from disgrace.
+
+Darwinism was in the saddle. Asa Gray was mildly defending it. Agassiz
+stood aloof, clinging to his early Swiss parsonage teachings, and the
+Theological Department marched in solid phalanx and scoffed and scorned.
+Yale, always having more theology than Harvard, threw out challenges.
+Fiske had saturated himself with the ideas of Darwin and Wallace, and
+his intellect was great enough to perceive the vast and magnificent
+scope of "The Origin of Species." He prepared and read a lecture on the
+subject, all couched in gentle and judicial phrase, but with a finale
+that gave forth no uncertain sound.
+
+The Overseers decided to ask Fiske to amplify the subject and give a
+course of lectures on the Law of Evolution.
+
+The subject grew under his hands and the course extended itself into
+thirty-five lectures, covering the whole field of natural history, with
+many short excursions into the realms of biology, embryology, botany,
+geology and cosmogony.
+
+Fiske was made assistant librarian at a salary of one thousand dollars a
+year. It was not much money, but it gave him a fixed position, with time
+to help the erring freshman and the mentally recalcitrant sophomore
+handicapped by rich parents. For seven years Fiske held this position of
+assistant librarian, and hardly a student at Harvard during those years
+but acknowledged the personal help he received at the hands of John
+Fiske. Knowledge consists in having an assistant librarian who knows
+where to find the thing.
+
+Fiske's thirty-five lectures had evolved into that excellent book,
+"Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy." The public were buying it.
+
+Evolution was fast taking its place as a fixed fact. And John Fiske was
+moving into public favor on the flood-tide. There were demands for his
+lectures from various schools, colleges and lyceums, throughout the
+United States.
+
+He resigned his position so as to give all his time to writing and
+speaking. And Harvard, proud of her gifted son, elected him an Overseer
+of the University, which position he held until his death. John Fiske
+died in Nineteen Hundred One, suddenly, aged fifty-nine.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Next to the originator of a great thought is the man who quotes it,"
+says Ralph Waldo Emerson. Next to the discoverer of a great scientific
+truth is the man who recognizes and upholds it. The service done science
+by Fiske is beyond calculation. Fiske was not a Columbus upon the sea of
+science: he followed the course laid out by others, and was really never
+out of sight of a buoy. He comes as near being a great scientist,
+perhaps, as any man that America has ever produced.
+
+America has had but four men of unmistakable originality. These are:
+Franklin, Emerson, Whitman and Edison. Each worked in a field
+particularly his own, and the genius of each was recognized in Europe
+before we were willing to acknowledge it here. But the word "scientist"
+can hardly be properly applied to any of these men. For want of a better
+name we call John Fiske our greatest scientist. He was the most learned
+man of his day. In the realm of Physical Geography no American could
+approach him. The combined knowledge of everybody else was his: he had a
+passion for facts, a memory like a daybook, and his systematic mind was
+disciplined until it was a regular Dewey card-index.
+
+Louis Agassiz was born in Europe, but he was ours by adoption, and he
+might dispute with Fiske the title to first place in the American
+Pantheon of Science, were it not for the fact that the Law of Evolution
+was beyond his ken, being obscured by a marked, myopic, theological,
+stigmatic squint.
+
+Agassiz died in his sins, unconvinced unrepentant, refusing the rite of
+extreme unction that Asa Gray offered him, his sensitive spirit writhing
+at mention of the word "Darwin." On his tomb, Clio with moving finger
+has carved one of his own sentences, nor all your tears shall blot a
+line of it. And these are the words of Agassiz: "Darwinism seeks to
+dethrone God, and replace Him by a blind force called the Law of
+Evolution." So passed away the great soul of Louis Agassiz.
+
+Fiske has been called the Huxley of America; but Fiske was like Agassiz
+in this, he never had the felicity to achieve the ill-will of the many.
+Fiske has also been called the Drummond of America, but Fiske was really
+a Henry Drummond and a Louis Agassiz rolled into one, the mass well
+seasoned with essence of Huxley. John Fiske made the science of Darwin
+and Wallace palatable to orthodox theology, and it is to the earnest and
+eloquent words of Fiske that we owe it that Evolution is taught
+everywhere in the public schools and even in the sectarian colleges of
+America today.
+
+The almost universal opposition to Darwin's book arose from the idea
+that its acceptance would destroy the Christian religion. This was the
+plaintive plea put forth when Newton advanced his discovery of the Law
+of Gravitation, and also when Copernicus proclaimed the movements of the
+earth: these things were contrary to the Bible! Copernicus was a loyal
+Catholic; Sir Isaac Newton was a staunch Churchman; but both kept their
+religion in water-tight compartments, so that it never got mixed with
+their science. Gladstone never allowed his religion to tint his
+statesmanship, and we all know businessmen who follow the double-entry
+scheme.
+
+That famous French toast, "Here's to our wives and sweethearts--may they
+never meet!" would suit most lawyers just as well if expressed this way.
+"Here's to our religion and our business--God knows they never meet."
+
+To Sir Isaac Newton, religion was something to be believed, not
+understood. He left religion to the specialists, recognizing its value
+as a sort of police protection for the State, and as his share in the
+matter he paid tithes, and attended prayers as a matter of patriotic
+duty and habit.
+
+Voltaire recognized the greatness of Newton's intellect, but he could
+not restrain his aqua fortis, and so he said this: "All the scientists
+were jealous of Newton when he discovered the Law of Gravitation, but
+they got even with him when he wrote his book on the Hebrew Prophecies!"
+Newton wrote that book in his water-tight compartment.
+
+But Newton was no hypocrite. The attitude of the Primrose Sphinx who
+bowed his head in the Church of England Chapel--the Jew who rose to the
+highest office Christian England had to offer--and repeated Ben Ezra's
+prayer, was not the attitude of Newton. Darwin waived religion, and if
+he ever heard of the Bible no one knew it from his writings.
+
+Huxley danced on it. Tyndall and Spencer regarded the Bible as a
+valuable and more or less interesting collection of myths, fables and
+folklore tales. Wallace sees in it a strain of prophetic truth and
+regards it as gold-bearing quartz of a low grade.
+
+Fiske regarded it as the word of God, Holy Writ, expressed often
+vaguely, mystically, and in the language of poetry and symbol, but true
+when rightly understood.
+
+And so John Fiske throughout his life spoke in orthodox pulpits to the
+great delight of Christian people, and at the same time wrote books on
+science and dedicated them to Thomas Huxley, Bishop of all Agnostics.
+
+To the scientist the word "supernatural" is a contradiction. Everything
+that is in the Universe is natural; the supernatural is the natural not
+yet understood. And that which is called the supernatural is often the
+figment of a disordered, undisciplined or undeveloped imagination.
+
+Simple people think of imagination as that quality of mind which revels
+in tales of fairies and hobgoblins, but imagination of this character is
+undisciplined and undeveloped. The scientist who deals with the sternest
+of facts must be highly imaginative, or his work is vain. The engineer
+sees his structure complete, ere he draws his plans. So the scientist
+divines the thing first and then looks for it until he finds it. Were
+this not so, he would not be able to recognize things hitherto unknown,
+when he saw them; nor could he fit fact to fact, like bones in a
+skeleton, and build a complete structure, if it all did not first exist
+as a thought.
+
+To reprove and punish children for flights of imagination, John Fiske
+argued, was one of the things done only by a barbaric people.
+
+Children first play at the thing, which later they are to do well. Play
+is preparation. The man of imagination is the man of sympathy, and only
+such are those who benefit and bless mankind and help us on our way.
+
+John Fiske had imagination enough to follow closely and hold fellowship
+with the greatest minds the world has ever known. John Fiske believed
+that we live in a natural universe, and that God works through Nature,
+and that, in fact, Nature is the spirit of God at work.
+
+Doubts never disturbed John Fiske. Things that were not true technically
+and literally were true to him if taken in a spiritual or poetic way.
+God, to him, was a personal being, creating through the Law of Evolution
+because He chose to. The six days of Creation were six eons or
+geological periods.
+
+No man has ever been more in sympathy with the discoverers in Natural
+History than John Fiske. No man ever knew so much about his work as John
+Fiske. His knowledge was colossal, his memory prodigious. And in all of
+the realm of science and philosophy, from microscopy and the germ
+theory to advanced astronomy and the birth of worlds, his glowing
+imagination saw the work of a beneficent Creator who stood above and
+beyond and outside of Natural Law, and with Infinite Wisdom and Power
+did His own Divine Will.
+
+Little theologians who feared Science, on account of danger to pet
+texts, received from him kindly pats on the head, as he showed them how
+both Science and Scripture were true.
+
+He didn't do away with texts, he merely changed their interpretation.
+And often he discovered that the text which seemed to contradict science
+was really prophetic of it. John Fiske did not take anything away from
+anybody, unless he gave them something better in return.
+
+"A man's belief is a part of the man," he said. "Take it away by force
+and he will bleed to death; but if the time comes when he no longer
+needs it, he will either slough it or convert it into something more
+useful."
+
+Every good thing begins as something else. Evolution is at work on the
+creeds as well as in matter. A monkey-man will have a monkey belief.
+
+He evolves the thing he needs, and the belief that fits one man will not
+fit another. Religious opinions are never thrown away: they evolve into
+something else, and we use the old symbols and imagery to express new
+thoughts.
+
+John Fiske, unlike John Morley, considered "Compromise" a great thing.
+"Truth is a point of view: let us get together," he used to say. And so
+he worked to keep the old, as a foundation for the new.
+
+I once heard him interrupted in a lecture by a questioner who asked,
+"Why would you keep the Church intact?" The question stung him into
+impassioned speech which was better than anything in his manuscript. I
+can not attempt to reproduce his exact language; but the intent was that
+as the Church was the chief instrument in preserving for us the learning
+of Greece and Rome, so has she been the mother of art, the inspirer of
+music and the protector of the outcast. Colleges, hospitals, libraries,
+art-galleries and asylums, all come to us through the medium of
+religion.
+
+The convent was first a place of protection for oppressed womanhood.
+
+To discard religion would be like repudiating our parents because we did
+not like their manners and clothes. The religious impulse is the art
+impulse, and both are manifestations of love, and love is the basis of
+our sense of sublimity.
+
+We surely will abandon certain phases of religion. We will purify,
+refine and beautify our religion, just as we have our table etiquette
+and our housekeeping. The millennium will come only through the
+scientific acceptance of piety. When Church and State separated it was
+well, but when Science and Religion joined hands it was better. Science
+stands for the head; Religion for the heart. All things are dual, and
+through the marriage of these two principles, one the masculine and the
+other the feminine, will come a renaissance of advancement such as this
+tired old world on her zigzag journeys has never seen. Sociology is the
+religious application of economics. Demonology has been replaced by
+psychology, and the betterment of man's condition on earth is now fast
+becoming the chief solicitude of the Church.
+
+It will thus be seen that John Fiske's hope for the future was bright
+and strong. The man was an optimist by nature, and his patience and
+good-nature were always in evidence. He made friends, and he held them.
+Huxley, who of all men hated piety that was flavored with hypocrisy,
+loved John Fiske and once wrote this: "There was a man sent from God by
+the name of John Fiske. Now John holds in his great and generous heart
+the best of all the Church has to offer; hence I no longer go to
+prayers, but instead, I invite John Fiske to come and dine with us every
+Sunday, so are we made better--Amen."
+
+     SO HERE ENDETH "LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS,"
+     BEING VOLUME TWELVE OF THE SERIES, AS WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD:
+     EDITED AND ARRANGED BY FRED BANN; BORDERS AND INITIALS BY ROYCROFT
+     ARTISTS, AND PRODUCED BY THE ROYCROFTERS, AT THEIR SHOPS, WHICH ARE
+     IN EAST AURORA, ERIE COUNTY, NEW YORK, MCMXXII
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Journeys to the Homes of the
+Great - Volume 12, by Elbert Hubbard
+
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