ዘመኑ ባፈራው የቴክኖሎጂ ግብአት በመጠቀም ለህብረተሰባችን ስራ ለሁሉም በሚል ግብ የተሻለ የስራ አማራጭ፣ ለተሻለ ኑሮ፣ ለተሻለ የገበያ ትስስር ፣ ለተቀናጀ የገበያ ተደራሽነት ገዥን ከደንበኛ የማስተሳሰሪያ የቴክኖሎጂ አማራጭ ይዘን መተናል በሁሉም የስራ መስክ በሁሉም የስራ እርከን ስራ ለሚገኙ ባለሙያዎች እና ድርጅቶች የስራ አጋጣሚን መፍጠር
ዘመኑ ባፈራው የቴክኖሎጂ ግብአት በመጠቀም ለህብረተሰባችን ስራ ለሁሉም በሚል ግብ የተሻለ የስራ አማራጭ፣ ለተሻለ ኑሮ፣ ለተሻለ የገበያ ትስስር ፣ ለተቀናጀ የገበያ ተደራሽነት ገዥን ከደንበኛ የማስተሳሰሪያ የቴክኖሎጂ አማራጭ ይዘን መተናል በሁሉም የስራ መስክ በሁሉም የስራ እርከን ስራ ለሚገኙ ባለሙያዎች እና ድርጅቶች የስራ አጋጣሚን መፍጠር
ዘመኑ ባፈራው የቴክኖሎጂ ግብአት በመጠቀም ለህብረተሰባችን ስራ ለሁሉም በሚል ግብ የተሻለ የስራ አማራጭ፣ ለተሻለ ኑሮ፣ ለተሻለ የገበያ ትስስር ፣ ለተቀናጀ የገበያ ተደራሽነት ገዥን ከደንበኛ የማስተሳሰሪያ የቴክኖሎጂ አማራጭ ይዘን መተናል በሁሉም የስራ መስክ በሁሉም የስራ እርከን ስራ ለሚገኙ ባለሙያዎች እና ድርጅቶች የስራ አጋጣሚን መፍጠር
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ዘመኑ ባፈራው የቴክኖሎጂ ግብአት በመጠቀም ለህብረተሰባችን ስራ ለሁሉም በሚል ግብ የተሻለ የስራ አማራጭ፣ ለተሻለ ኑሮ፣ ለተሻለ የገበያ ትስስር ፣ ለተቀናጀ የገበያ ተደራሽነት ገዥን ከደንበኛ የማስተሳሰሪያ የቴክኖሎጂ አማራጭ ይዘን መተናል በሁሉም የስራ መስክ በሁሉም የስራ እርከን ስራ ለሚገኙ ባለሙያዎች እና ድርጅቶች የስራ አጋጣሚን መፍጠር
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👁 :
HÉLAS!
TO drift with every passion till my soul
Is
a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is
it for this that I have given away
Mi
ne ancient wisdom, and austere control?
Me
thinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Sc
rawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
Wh
ich do but mar the secret of the whole.
Su
rely there was a time I might have trod
Th
e sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance
St
ruck one clear chord to reach the ears of God:
Is
that time dead? lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance—
And must I lose a soul’s inheritance?
p. 5ELEUTHERIA
p. 7SONNET TO LIBERTY
NOT that I love thy children, whose dull eyes
See nothing save their own unlovely woe,
Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know,—
But that the roar of thy Democracies,
Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies,
Mirror my wildest passions like the sea
And give my rage a brother—! Liberty!
For this sake only do thy dissonant cries
Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings
By bloody knout or treacherous cannonades
Rob nations of their rights inviolate
And I remain unmoved—and yet, and yet,
These Christs that die upon the barricades,
God knows it I am with them, in some things.
p. 8AVE IMPERATRIX
SET in this stormy Northern sea,
Queen of these restless fields of tide,
England! what shall men say of thee,
Before whose feet the worlds divide?
The earth, a brittle globe of glass,
Lies in the hollow of thy hand,
And through its heart of crystal pass,
Like shadows through a twilight land,
The spears of crimson-suited war,
The long white-crested waves of fight,
And all the deadly fires which are
The torches of the lords of Night.
The yellow leopards, strained and lean,
The treacherous Russian knows so well,
With gaping blackened jaws are seen
Leap through the hail of screaming shell.
The strong sea-lion of England’s wars
Hath left his sapphire cave of sea,
To battle with the storm that mars
The stars of England’s chivalry.
p. 9The brazen-throated clarion blows
Across the Pathan’s reedy fen,
And the high steeps of Indian snows
Shake to the tread of armèd men.
And many an Afghan chief, who lies
Beneath his cool pomegranate-trees,
Clutches his sword in fierce surmise
When on the mountain-side he sees
The fleet-foot Marri scout, who comes
To tell how he hath heard afar
The measured roll of English drums
Beat at the gates of Kandahar.
For southern wind and east wind meet
Where, girt and crowned by sword and fire,
England with bare and bloody feet
Climbs the steep road of wide empire.
O lonely Himalayan height,
Grey pillar of the Indian sky,
Where saw’st thou last in clanging flight
Our wingèd dogs of Victory?
The almond-groves of Samarcand,
Bokhara, where red lilies blow,
And Oxus, by whose yellow sand
The grave white-turbaned merchants go:
p. 10And on from thence to Ispahan,
The gilded garden of the sun,
Whence the long dusty caravan
Brings cedar wood and vermilion;
And that dread city of Cabool
Set at the mountain’s scarpèd feet,
Whose marble tanks are ever full
With water for the noonday heat:
Where through the narrow straight Bazaar
A little maid Circassian
Is led, a present from the Czar
Unto some old and bearded khan,—
Here have our wild war-eagles flown,
And flapped wide wings in fiery fight;
But the sad dove, that sits alone
In England—she hath no delight.
In vain the laughing girl will lean
To greet her love with love-lit eyes:
Down in some treacherous black ravine,
Clutching his flag, the dead boy lies.
And many a moon and sun will see
The lingering wistful children wait
To climb upon their father’s knee;
And in each house made desolate
p. 11Pale women who have lost their lord
Will kiss the relics of the slain—
Some tarnished epaulette—some sword—
Poor toys to soothe such anguished pain.
For not in quiet English fields
Are these, our brothers, lain to rest,
Where we might deck their broken shields
With all the flowers the dead love best.
For some are by the Delhi walls,
And many in the Afghan land,
And many where the Ganges falls
Through seven mouths of shifting sand.
And some in Russian waters lie,
And others in the seas which are
The portals to the East, or by
The wind-swept heights of Trafalgar.
O wandering graves! O restless sleep!
O silence of the sunless day!
O still ravine! O stormy deep!
Give up your prey! Give up your prey!
And thou whose wounds are never healed,
Whose weary race is never won,
O Cromwell’s England! must thou yield
For every inch of ground a son?
p. 12Go! crown with thorns thy gold-crowned head,
Change thy glad song to song of pain;
Wind and wild wave have got thy dead,
And will not yield them back again.
Wave and wild wind and foreign shore
Possess the flower of English land—
Lips that thy lips shall kiss no more,
Hands that shall never clasp thy hand.
What profit now that we have bound
The whole round world with nets of gold,
If hidden in our heart is found
The care that groweth never old?
What profit that our galleys ride,
Pine-forest-like, on every main?
Ru
in and wreck are at our side,
Grim warders of the House of Pain.
Where are the brave, the strong, the fleet?
Where is our English chivalry?
Wild grasses are their burial-sheet,
And sobbing waves their threnody.
O loved ones lying far away,
What word of love can dead lips send!
O wasted dust! O senseless clay!
Is this the end! is this the end!
p. 13Peace, peace! we wrong the noble dead
To vex their solemn slumber so;
Though childless, and with thorn-crowned head,
Up the steep road must England go,
Yet when this fiery web is spun,
Her watchmen shall descry from far
The young Republic like a sun
Rise from these crimson seas of war.
p. 14TO MILTON
MILTON! I think thy spirit hath passed away
From these white cliffs and high-embattled towers;
This gorgeous fiery-coloured world of ours
Seems fallen into ashes dull and grey,
And the age changed unto a mimic play
Wherein we waste our else too-crowded hours:
For all our pomp and pageantry and powers
We are but fit to delve the common clay,
Seeing this little isle on which we stand,
This England, this sea-lion of the sea,
By ignorant demagogues is held in fee,
Who love her not: Dear God! is this the land
Which bare a triple empire in her hand
When Cromwell spake the word Democracy!
p. 15LOUIS NAPOLEON
EAGLE of Austerlitz! where were thy wings
When far away upon a barbarous strand,
In fight unequal, by an obscure hand,
Fell the last scion of thy brood of Kings!
Poor boy! thou shalt not flaunt thy cloak of red,
Or ride in state through Paris in the van
Of thy returning legions, but instead
Thy mother France, free and republican,
Shall on thy dead and crownless forehead place
The better laurels of a soldier’s crown,
That not dishonoured should thy soul go down
To tell the mighty Sire of thy race
That France hath kissed the mouth of Liberty,
And found it sweeter than his honied bees,
And that the giant wave Democracy
Breaks on the shores where Kings lay couched at ease.
p. 16SONNET
ON THE MASSACRE OF THE CHRISTIANS IN BULGARIA
CHRIST, dost Thou live indeed? or are Thy bones
Still straitened in their rock-hewn sepulchre?
And was Thy Rising only dreamed by her
Whose love of Thee for all her sin atones?
For here the air is horrid with men’s groans,
The priests who call upon Thy name are slain,
Dost Thou not hear the bitter wail of pain
From those whose children lie upon the stones?
Come down, O Son of God! incestuous gloom
Curtains the land, and through the starless night
Over Thy Cross a Crescent moon I see!
If Thou in very truth didst burst the tomb
Come down, O Son of Man! and show Thy might
Lest Mahomet be crowned instead of Thee!
p. 17QUANTUM MUTATA
THERE was a time in Europe long ago
When no man died for freedom anywhere,
But England’s lion leaping from its lair
Laid hands on the oppressor! it was so
While England could a great Republic show.
Witness the men of Piedmont, chiefest care
Of Cromwell, when with impotent despair
The Pontiff in his painted portico
Trembled before our stern ambassadors.
How comes it then that from such high estate
We have thus fallen, save that Luxury
With barren merchandise piles up the gate
Where noble thoughts and deeds should enter by:
Else might we still be Milton’s heritors.
p. 18LIBERTATIS SACRA FAMES
ALBEIT nurtured in democracy,
And liking best that state republican
Where every man is Kinglike and no man
Is crowned above his fellows, yet I see,
Spite of this modern fret for Liberty,
Better the rule of One, whom all obey,
Than to let clamorous demagogues betray
Our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.
Wherefore I love them not whose hands profane
Plant the red flag upon the piled-up street
For no right cause, beneath whose ignorant reign
Arts, Culture, Reverence, Honour, all things fade,
Save Treason and the dagger of her trade,
Or Murder with his silent bloody feet.
p. 19THEORETIKOS
THIS mighty empire hath but feet of clay:
Of all its ancient chivalry and might
Our little island is forsaken quite:
Some enemy hath stolen its crown of bay,
And from its hills that voice hath passed away
Which spake of Freedom: O come out of it,
Come out of it, my Soul, thou art not fit
For this vile traffic-house, where day by day
Wisdom and reverence are sold at mart,
And the rude people rage with ignorant cries
Against an heritage of centuries.
It mars my calm: wherefore in dreams of Art
And loftiest culture I would stand apart,
Neither for God, nor for his enemies.
p. 21THE GARDEN OF EROS
p. 23IT is full summer now, the heart of June;
Not yet the sunburnt reapers are astir
Upon the upland meadow where too soon
Rich autumn time, the season’s usurer,
Will lend his hoarded gold to all the trees,
And see his treasure scattered by the wild and spendthrift breeze.
Too soon indeed! yet here the daffodil,
That love-child of the Spring, has lingered on
To vex the rose with jealousy, and still
The harebell spreads her azure pavilion,
And like a strayed and wandering reveller
Abandoned of its brothers, whom long since June’s messenger
The missel-thrush has frighted from the glade,
One pale narcissus loiters fearfully
Close to a shadowy nook, where half afraid
Of their own loveliness some violets lie
That will not look the gold sun in the face
For fear of too much splendour,—ah! methinks it is a place
p. 24Which should be trodden by Persephone
When wearied of the flowerless fields of Dis!
Or danced on by the lads of Arcady!
The hidden secret of eternal bliss
Kn
own to the Grecian here a man might find,
Ah! you and I may find it now if Love and Sleep be kind.
There are the flowers which mourning Herakles
Strewed on the tomb of Hylas, columbine,
Its white doves all a-flutter where the breeze
Kissed them too harshly, the small celandine,
That yellow-kirtled chorister of eve,
And lilac lady’s-smock,—but let them bloom alone, and leave
Yon spirèd hollyhock red-crocketed
To sway its silent chimes, else must the bee,
Its little bellringer, go seek instead
Some other pleasaunce; the anemone
That weeps at daybreak, like a silly girl
Before her love, and hardly lets the butterflies unfurl
Their painted wings beside it,—bid it pine
In pale virginity; the winter snow
Will suit it better than those lips of thine
Whose fires would but scorch it, rather go
p. 25And pluck that amorous flower which blooms alone,
Fed by the pander wind with dust of kisses not its own.
The trumpet-mouths of red convolvulus
So dear to maidens, creamy meadow-sweet
Whiter than Juno’s throat and odorous
As all Arabia, hyacinths the feet
Of Huntress Dian would be loth to mar
For any dappled fawn,—pluck these, and those fond flowers which are
Fairer than what Queen Venus trod upon
Beneath the pines of Ida, eucharis,
That morning star which does not dread the sun,
And budding marjoram which but to kiss
Would sweeten Cytheræa’s lips and make
Adonis jealous,—these for thy head,—and for thy girdle take
Yon curving spray of purple clematis
Whose gorgeous dye outflames the Tyrian King,
And foxgloves with their nodding chalices,
But that one narciss which the startled Spring
Let from her kirtle fall when first she heard
In her own woods the wild tempestuous song of summer’s bird,
p. 26Ah! leave it for a subtle memory
Of those sweet tremulous days of rain and sun,
When April laughed between her tears to see
The early primrose with shy footsteps run
From the gnarled oak-tree roots till all the wold,
Spite of its brown and trampled leaves, grew bright with shimmering gold.
Nay, pluck it too, it is not half so sweet
As thou thyself, my soul’s idolatry!
And when thou art a-wearied at thy feet
Shall oxlips weave their brightest tapestry,
For thee the woodbine shall forget its pride
And veil its tangled whorls, and thou shalt walk on daisies pied.
And I will cut a reed by yonder spring
And make the wood-gods jealous, and old Pan
Wonder what young intruder dares to sing
In these still haunts, where never foot of man
Should tread at evening, lest he chance to spy
The marble limbs of Artemis and all her company.
And I will tell thee why the jacinth wears
Such dread embroidery of dolorous moan,
And why the hapless nightingale forbears
To sing her song at noon, but weeps alone
p. 27When the fleet swallow sleeps, and rich men feast,
And why the laurel trembles when she sees the lightening east.
And I will sing how sad Proserpina
Unto a grave and gloomy Lord was wed,
And lure the silver-breasted Helena
Back from the lotus meadows of the dead,
So shalt thou see that awful loveliness
For which two mighty Hosts met fearfully in war’s abyss!
And then I’ll pipe to thee that Grecian tale
How Cynthia loves the lad Endymion,
And hidden in a grey and misty veil
Hies to the cliffs of Latmos once the Sun
Leaps from his ocean bed in fruitless chase
Of those pale flying feet which fade away in his embrace.
And if my flute can breathe sweet melody,
We may behold Her face who long ago
Dwelt among men by the Ægean sea,
And whose sad house with pillaged portico
And friezeless wall and columns toppled down
Looms o’er the ruins of that fair and violet cinctured town.
p. 28Spirit of Beauty! tarry still awhile,
They are not dead, thine ancient votaries;
Some few there are to whom thy radiant smile
Is better than a thousand victories,
Though all the nobly slain of Waterloo
Rise up in wrath against them! tarry still, there are a few
Who for thy sake would give their manlihood
And consecrate their being; I at least
Have done so, made thy lips my daily food,
And in thy temples found a goodlier feast
Than this starved age can give me, spite of all
Its new-found creeds so sceptical and so dogmatical.
Here not Cephissos, not Ilissos flows,
The woods of white Colonos are not here,
On our bleak hills the olive never blows,
No simple priest conducts his lowing steer
Up the steep marble way, nor through the town
Do laughing maidens bear to thee the crocus-flowered gown.
Yet tarry! for the boy who loved thee best,
Whose very name should be a memory
To make thee linger, sleeps in silent rest
Beneath the Roman walls, and melody
p. 29Still mourns her sweetest lyre; none can play
The lute of Adonais: with his lips Song passed away.
Nay, when Keats died the Muses still had left
One silver voice to sing his threnody,
But ah! too soon of it we were bereft
When on that riven night and stormy sea
Panthea claimed her singer as her own,
And slew the mouth that praised her; since which time we walk alone,
Save for that fiery heart, that morning star
Of re-arisen England, whose clear eye
Saw from our tottering throne and waste of war
The grand Greek limbs of young Democracy
Rise mightily like Hesperus and bring
The great Republic! him at least thy love hath taught to sing,
And he hath been with thee at Thessaly,
And seen white Atalanta fleet of foot
In passionless and fierce virginity
Hunting the tuskèd boar, his honied lute
Hath pierced the cavern of the hollow hill,
And Venus laughs to know one knee will bow before her still.
p. 30And he hath kissed the lips of Proserpine,
And sung the Galilæan’s requiem,
That wounded forehead dashed with blood and wine
He hath discrowned, the Ancient Gods in him
Have found their last, most ardent worshipper,
And the new Sign grows grey and dim before its conqueror.
Spirit of Beauty! tarry with us still,
It is not quenched the torch of poesy,
The star that shook above the Eastern hill
Holds unassailed its argent armoury
From all the gathering gloom and fretful fight—
O tarry with us still! for through the long and common night,
Morris, our sweet and simple Chaucer’s child,
Dear heritor of Spenser’s tuneful reed,
With soft and sylvan pipe has oft beguiled
The weary soul of man in troublous need,
And from the far and flowerless fields of ice
Has brought fair flowers to make an earthly paradise.
We know them all, Gudrun the strong men’s bride,
Aslaug and Olafson we know them all,
How giant Grettir fought and Sigurd died,
p. 31And what enchantment held the king in thrall
When lonely Brynhild wrestled with the powers
That war against all passion, ah! how oft through summer hours,
Long listless summer hours when the noon
Being enamoured of a damask rose
Forgets to journey westward, till the moon
The pale usurper of its tribute grows
From a thin sickle to a silver shield
And chides its loitering car—how oft, in some cool grassy field
Far from the cricket-ground and noisy eight,
At Bagley, where the rustling bluebells come
Almost before the blackbird finds a mate
And overstay the swallow, and the hum
Of many murmuring bees flits through the leaves,
Have I lain poring on the dreamy tales his fancy weaves,
And through their unreal woes and mimic pain
Wept for myself, and so was purified,
And in their simple mirth grew glad again;
For as I sailed upon that pictured tide
The strength and splendour of the storm was mine
Without the storm’s red ruin, for the singer is divine;
p. 32The little laugh of water falling down
Is not so musical, the clammy gold
Close hoarded in the tiny waxen town
Has less of sweetness in it, and the old
Half-withered reeds that waved in Arcady
Touched by his lips break forth again to fresher harmony.
Spirit of Beauty, tarry yet awhile!
Although the cheating merchants of the mart
With iron roads profane our lovely isle,
And break on whirling wheels the limbs of Art,
Ay! though the crowded factories beget
The blindworm Ignorance that slays the soul, O tarry yet!
For One at least there is,—He bears his name
From Dante and the seraph Gabriel,—
Whose double laurels burn with deathless flame
To light thine altar; He too loves thee well,
Who saw old Merlin lured in Vivien’s snare,
And the white feet of angels coming down the golden stair,
Loves thee so well, that all the World for him
A gorgeous-coloured vestiture must wear,
And Sorrow take a purple diadem,
Or else be no more Sorrow, and Despair
Gild its own thorns, and Pain, like Adon, be
Even in anguish beautiful;—such is the empery
p. 33Which Painters hold, and such the heritage
This gentle solemn Spirit doth possess,
Being a better mirror of his age
In all his pity, love, and weariness,
Than those who can but copy common things,
And leave the Soul unpainted with its mighty questionings.
But they are few, and all romance has flown,
And men can prophesy about the sun,
And lecture on his arrows—how, alone,
Through a waste void the soulless atoms run,
How from each tree its weeping nymph has fled,
And that no more ’mid English reeds a Naiad shows her head.
Methinks these new Actæons boast too soon
That they have spied on beauty; what if we
Have analysed the rainbow, robbed the moon
Of her most ancient, chastest mystery,
Shall I, the last Endymion, lose all hope
Because rude eyes peer at my mistress through a telescope!
What profit if this scientific age
Burst through our gates with all its retinue
Of modern miracles! Can it assuage
One lover’s breaking heart? what can it do
p. 34To make one life more beautiful, one day
More godlike in its period? but now the Age of Clay
Returns in horrid cycle, and the earth
Hath borne again a noisy progeny
Of ignorant Titans, whose ungodly birth
Hurls them against the august hierarchy
Which sat upon Olympus; to the Dust
They have appealed, and to that barren arbiter they must
Repair for judgment; let them, if they can,
From Natural Warfare and insensate Chance,
Create the new Ideal rule for man!
Methinks that was not my inheritance;
For I was nurtured otherwise, my soul
Passes from higher heights of life to a more supreme goal.
Lo! while we spake the earth did turn away
Her visage from the God, and Hecate’s boat
Rose silver-laden, till the jealous day
Blew all its torches out: I did not note
The waning hours, to young Endymions
Time’s palsied fingers count in vain his rosary of suns!
p. 35Mark how the yellow iris wearily
Leans back its throat, as though it would be kissed
By its false chamberer, the dragon-fly,
Who, like a blue vein on a girl’s white wrist,
Sleeps on that snowy primrose of the night,
Which ’gins to flush with crimson shame, and die beneath the light.
Come let us go, against the pallid shield
Of the wan sky the almond blossoms gleam,
The corncrake nested in the unmown field
Answers its mate, across the misty stream
On fitful wing the startled curlews fly,
And in his sedgy bed the lark, for joy that Day is nigh,
Scatters the pearlèd dew from off the grass,
In tremulous ecstasy to greet the sun,
Who soon in gilded panoply will pass
Forth from yon orange-curtained pavilion
Hung in the burning east: see, the red rim
O’ertops the expectant hills! it is the God! for love of him
Already the shrill lark is out of sight,
Flooding with waves of song this silent dell,—
p. 36Ah! there is something more in that bird’s flight
Than could be tested in a crucible!—
But the air freshens, let us go, why soon
The woodmen will be here; how we have lived this night of June!
p. 37ROSA MYSTICA
p. 39REQUIESCAT
TREAD lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.
All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.
Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.
Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.
Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life’s buried here,
Heap earth upon it.
AVIGNON.
p. 40SONNET ON APPROACHING ITALY
I REACHED the Alps: the soul within me burned,
Italia, my Italia, at thy name:
And when from out the mountain’s heart I came
And saw the land for which my life had yearned,
I laughed as one who some great prize had earned:
And musing on the marvel of thy fame
I watched the day, till marked with wounds of flame
The turquoise sky to burnished gold was turned.
The pine-trees waved as waves a woman’s hair,
And in the orchards every twining spray
Was breaking into flakes of blossoming foam:
But when I knew that far away at Rome
In evil bonds a second Peter lay,
I wept to see the land so very fair.
TURIN.
p. 41SAN MINIATO
SEE, I have climbed the mountain side
Up to this holy house of God,
Where once that Angel-Painter trod
Who saw the heavens opened wide,
And throned upon the crescent moon
The Virginal white Queen of Grace,—
Mary! could I but see thy face
Death could not come at all too soon.
O crowned by God with thorns and pain!
Mother of Christ! O mystic wife!
My heart is weary of this life
And over-sad to sing again.
O crowned by God with love and flame!
O crowned by Christ the Holy One!
O listen ere the searching sun
Show to the world my sin and shame.
p. 42AVE MARIA GRATIA PLENA
WAS this His coming! I had hoped to see
A scene of wondrous glory, as was told
Of some great God who in a rain of gold
Broke open bars and fell on Danae:
Or a dread vision as when Semele
Sickening for love and unappeased desire
Prayed to see God’s clear body, and the fire
Caught her brown limbs and slew her utterly:
With such glad dreams I sought this holy place,
And now with wondering eyes and heart I stand
Before this supreme mystery of Love:
Some kneeling girl with passionless pale face,
An angel with a lily in his hand,
And over both the white wings of a Dove.
FLORENCE.
p. 43ITALIA
ITALIA! thou art fallen, though with sheen
Of battle-spears thy clamorous armies stride
From the north Alps to the Sicilian tide!
Ay! fallen, though the nations hail thee Queen
Because rich gold in every town is seen,
And on thy sapphire-lake in tossing pride
Of wind-filled vans thy myriad galleys ride
Beneath one flag of red and white and green.
O Fair and Strong! O Strong and Fair in vain!
Look southward where Rome’s desecrated town
Lies mourning for her God-anointed King!
Look heaven-ward! shall God allow this thing?
Nay! but some flame-girt Raphael shall come down,
And smite the Spoiler with the sword of pain.
VENICE.
p. 44SONNET
WRITTEN IN HOLY WEEK AT GENOA
I WANDERED through Scoglietto’s far retreat,
The oranges on each o’erhanging spray
Burned as bright lamps of gold to shame the day;
Some startled bird with fluttering wings and fleet
Made snow of all the blossoms; at my feet
Like silver moons the pale narcissi lay:
And the curved waves that streaked the great green bay
Laughed i’ the sun, and life seemed very sweet.
Outside the young boy-priest passed singing clear,
‘Jesus the son of Mary has been slain,
O come and fill His sepulchre with flowers.’
Ah, God! Ah, God! those dear Hellenic hours
Had drowned all memory of Thy bitter pain,
The Cross, the Crown, the Soldiers and the Spear.
p. 45ROME UNVISITED
I.
THE corn has turned from grey to red,
Since first my spirit wandered forth
From the drear cities of the north,
And to Italia’s mountains fled.
And here I set my face towards home,
For all my pilgrimage is done,
Although, methinks, yon blood-red sun
Marshals the way to Holy Rome.
O Blessed Lady, who dost hold
Upon the seven hills thy reign!
O Mother without blot or stain,
Crowned with bright crowns of triple gold!
O Roma, Roma, at thy feet
I lay this barren gift of song!
For, ah! the way is steep and long
That leads unto thy sacred street.
p. 46II.
AND yet what joy it were for me
To turn my feet unto the south,
And journeying towards the Tiber mouth
To kneel again at Fiesole!
And wandering through the tangled pines
That break the gold of Arno’s stream,
To see the purple mist and gleam
Of morning on the Apennines
By many a vineyard-hidden home,
Orchard and olive-garden grey,
Till from the drear Campagna’s way
The seven hills bear up the dome!
p. 47III.
A PILGRIM from the northern seas—
What joy for me to seek alone
The wondrous temple and the throne
Of him who holds the awful keys!
When, bright with purple and with gold
Come priest and holy cardinal,
And borne above the heads of all
The gentle Shepherd of the Fold.
O joy to see before I die
The only God-anointed king,
And hear the silver trumpets ring
A triumph as he passes by!
Or at the brazen-pillared shrine
Holds high the mystic sacrifice,
And shows his God to human eyes
Beneath the veil of bread and wine.
p. 48IV.
FOR lo, what changes time can bring!
The cycles of revolving years
May free my heart from all its fears,
And teach my lips a song to sing.
Before yon field of trembling gold
Is garnered into dusty sheaves,
Or ere the autumn’s scarlet leaves
Flutter as birds adown the wold,
I may have run the glorious race,
And caught the torch while yet aflame,
And called upon the holy name
Of Him who now doth hide His face.
ARONA.
p. 49URBS SACRA ÆTERNA
ROME! what a scroll of History thine has been;
In the first days thy sword republican
Ru
led the whole world for many an age’s span:
Then of the peoples wert thou royal Queen,
Till in thy streets the bearded Goth was seen;
And now upon thy walls the breezes fan
(Ah, city crowned by God, discrowned by man!)
The hated flag of red and white and green.
When was thy glory! when in search for power
Thine eagles flew to greet the double sun,
And the wild nations shuddered at thy rod?
Nay, but thy glory tarried for this hour,
When pilgrims kneel before the Holy One,
The prisoned shepherd of the Church of God.
MONTRE MARIO.
p. 50SONNET
ON HEARING THE DIES IRÆ SUNG IN THE SISTINE CHAPEL
NAY, Lord, not thus! white lilies in the spring,
Sad olive-groves, or silver-breasted dove,
Teach me more clearly of Thy life and love
Than terrors of red flame and thundering.
The hillside vines dear memories of Thee bring:
A bird at evening flying to its nest
Tells me of One who had no place of rest:
I think it is of Thee the sparrows sing.
Come rather on some autumn afternoon,
When red and brown are burnished on the leaves,
And the fields echo to the gleaner’s song,
Come when the splendid fulness of the moon
Looks down upon the rows of golden sheaves,
And reap Thy harvest: we have waited long.
p. 51EASTER DAY
THE silver trumpets rang across the Dome:
The people knelt upon the ground with awe:
And borne upon the necks of men I saw,
Like some great God, the Holy Lord of Rome.
Priest-like, he wore a robe more white than foam,
And, king-like, swathed himself in royal red,
Three crowns of gold rose high upon his head:
In splendour and in light the Pope passed home.
My heart stole back across wide wastes of years
To One who wandered by a lonely sea,
And sought in vain for any place of rest:
‘Foxes have holes, and every bird its nest.
I
, only I, must wander wearily,
And bruise my feet, and drink wine salt with tears.’
p. 52E TENEBRIS
COME down, O Christ, and help me! reach Thy hand,
For I am drowning in a stormier sea
Than Simon on Thy lake of Galilee:
The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,
My heart is as some famine-murdered land
Whence all good things have perished utterly,
And well I know my soul in Hell must lie
If I this night before God’s throne should stand.
‘He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase,
Like Baal, when his prophets howled that name
From morn to noon on Carmel’s smitten height.’
Nay, peace, I shall behold, before the night,
The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,
The wounded hands, the weary human face.
p. 53VITA NUOVA
I STOOD by the unvintageable sea
Till the wet waves drenched face and hair with spray;
The long red fires of the dying day
Burned in the west; the wind piped drearily;
And to the land the clamorous gulls did flee:
‘Alas!’ I cried, ‘my life is full of pain,
And who can garner fruit or golden grain
From these waste fields which travail ceaselessly!’
My nets gaped wide with many a break and flaw,
Nathless I threw them as my final cast
Into the sea, and waited for the end.
When lo! a sudden glory! and I saw
From the black waters of my tortured past
The argent splendour of white limbs ascend!
p. 54MADONNA MIA
A LILY-GIRL, not made for this world’s pain,
With brown, soft hair close braided by her ears,
And longing eyes half veiled by slumberous tears
Like bluest water seen through mists of rain:
Pale cheeks whereon no love hath left its stain,
Red underlip drawn in for fear of love,
And white throat, whiter than the silvered dove,
Through whose wan marble creeps one purple vein.
Yet, though my lips shall praise her without cease,
Even to kiss her feet I am not bold,
Being o’ershadowed by the wings of awe,
Like Dante, when he stood with Beatrice
Beneath the flaming Lion’s breast, and saw
The seventh Crystal, and the Stair of Gold.
p. 55THE NEW HELEN
WHERE hast thou been since round the walls of Troy
The sons of God fought in that great emprise?
Why dost thou walk our common earth again?
Hast thou forgotten that impassioned boy,
His purple galley and his Tyrian men
And treacherous Aphrodite’s mocking eyes?
For surely it was thou, who, like a star
Hung in the silver silence of the night,
Didst lure the Old World’s chivalry and might
Into the clamorous crimson waves of war!
Or didst thou rule the fire-laden moon?
In amorous Sidon was thy temple built
Over the light and laughter of the sea
Where, behind lattice scarlet-wrought and gilt,
Some brown-limbed girl did weave thee tapestry,
All through the waste and wearied hours of noon;
p. 56Till her wan cheek with flame of passion burned,
And she rose up the sea-washed lips to kiss
Of some glad Cyprian sailor, safe returned
From Calpé and the cliffs of Herakles!
No! thou art Helen, and none other one!
It was for thee that young Sarpedôn died,
And Memnôn’s manhood was untimely spent;
It was for thee gold-crested Hector tried
With Thetis’ child that evil race to run,
In the last year of thy beleaguerment;
Ay! even now the glory of thy fame
Burns in those fields of trampled asphodel,
Where the high lords whom Ilion knew so well
Clash ghostly shields, and call upon thy name.
Where hast thou been? in that enchanted land
Whose slumbering vales forlorn Calypso knew,
Where never mower rose at break of day
But all unswathed the trammelling grasses grew,
And the sad shepherd saw the tall corn stand
Till summer’s red had changed to withered grey?
Didst thou lie there by some Lethæan stream
Deep brooding on thine ancient memory,
p. 57The crash of broken spears, the fiery gleam
From shivered helm, the Grecian battle-cry?
Nay, thou wert hidden in that hollow hill
With one who is forgotten utterly,
That discrowned Queen men call the Erycine;
Hidden away that never mightst thou see
The face of Her, before whose mouldering shrine
To-day at Rome the silent nations kneel;
Who gat from Love no joyous gladdening,
But only Love’s intolerable pain,
Only a sword to pierce her heart in twain,
Only the bitterness of child-bearing.
The lotus-leaves which heal the wounds of Death
Lie in thy hand; O, be thou kind to me,
While yet I know the summer of my days;
For hardly can my tremulous lips draw breath
To fill the silver trumpet with thy praise,
So bowed am I before thy mystery;
So bowed and broken on Love’s terrible wheel,
That I have lost all hope and heart to sing,
Yet care I not what ruin time may bring
If in thy temple thou wilt let me kneel.
p. 58Alas, alas, thou wilt not tarry here,
But, like that bird, the servant of the sun,
Who flies before the north wind and the night,
So wilt thou fly our evil land and drear,
Back to the tower of thine old delight,
And the red lips of young Euphorion;
Nor shall I ever see thy face again,
But in this poisonous garden-close must stay,
Crowning my brows with the thorn-crown of pain,
Till all my loveless life shall pass away.
O Helen! Helen! Helen! yet a while,
Yet for a little while, O, tarry here,
Till the dawn cometh and the shadows flee!
For in the gladsome sunlight of thy smile
Of heaven or hell I have no thought or fear,
Seeing I know no other god but thee:
No other god save him, before whose feet
In nets of gold the tired planets move,
The incarnate spirit of spiritual love
Who in thy body holds his joyous seat.
Thou wert not born as common women are!
But, girt with silver splendour of the foam,
Didst from the depths of sapphire seas arise!
And at thy coming some immortal star,
p. 59Bearded with flame, blazed in the Eastern skies,
And waked the shepherds on thine island-home.
Thou shalt not die: no asps of Egypt creep
Close at thy heels to taint the delicate air;
No sullen-blooming poppies stain thy hair,
Those scarlet heralds of eternal sleep.
Lily of love, pure and inviolate!
Tower of ivory! red rose of fire!
Thou hast come down our darkness to illume:
For we, close-caught in the wide nets of Fate,
Wearied with waiting for the World’s Desire,
Aimlessly wandered in the House of gloom,
Aimlessly sought some slumberous anodyne
For wasted lives, for lingering wretchedness,
Till we beheld thy re-arisen shrine,
And the white glory of thy loveliness.
p. 61THE BURDEN OF ITYS
p. 63THIS English Thames is holier far than Rome,
Those harebells like a sudden flush of sea
Breaking across the woodland, with the foam
Of meadow-sweet and white anemone
To fleck their blue waves,—God is likelier there
Than hidden in that crystal-hearted star the pale monks bear!
Those violet-gleaming butterflies that take
Yon creamy lily for their pavilion
Are monsignores, and where the rushes shake
A lazy pike lies basking in the sun,
His eyes half shut,—he is some mitred old
Bishop in partibus! look at those gaudy scales all green and gold.
The wind the restless prisoner of the trees
Does well for Palæstrina, one would say
The mighty master’s hands were on the keys
Of the Maria organ, which they play
When early on some sapphire Easter morn
In a high litter red as blood or sin the Pope is borne
p. 64From his dark House out to the Balcony
Above the bronze gates and the crowded square,
Whose very fountains seem for ecstasy
To toss their silver lances in the air,
And stretching out weak hands to East and West
In vain sends peace to peaceless lands, to restless nations rest.
Is not yon lingering orange after-glow
That stays to vex the moon more fair than all
Rome’s lordliest pageants! strange, a year ago
I knelt before some crimson Cardinal
Who bare the Host across the Esquiline,
And now—those common poppies in the wheat seem twice as fine.
The blue-green beanfields yonder, tremulous
With the last shower, sweeter perfume bring
Through this cool evening than the odorous
Flame-jewelled censers the young deacons swing,
When the grey priest unlocks the curtained shrine,
And makes God’s body from the common fruit of corn and vine.
p. 65Poor Fra Giovanni bawling at the mass
Were out of tune now, for a small brown bird
Sings overhead, and through the long cool grass
I see that throbbing throat which once I heard
On starlit hills of flower-starred Arcady,
Once where the white and crescent sand of Salamis meets sea.
Sweet is the swallow twittering on the eaves
At daybreak, when the mower whets his scythe,
And stock-doves murmur, and the milkmaid leaves
Her little lonely bed, and carols blithe
To see the heavy-lowing cattle wait
Stretching their huge and dripping mouths across the farmyard gate.
And sweet the hops upon the Kentish leas,
And sweet the wind that lifts the new-mown hay,
And sweet the fretful swarms of grumbling bees
That round and round the linden blossoms play;
And sweet the heifer breathing in the stall,
And the green bursting figs that hang upon the red-brick wall,
p. 66And sweet to hear the cuckoo mock the spring
While the last violet loiters by the well,
And sweet to hear the shepherd Daphnis sing
The song of Linus through a sunny dell
Of warm Arcadia where the corn is gold
And the slight lithe-limbed reapers dance about the wattled fold.
And sweet with young Lycoris to recline
In some Illyrian valley far away,
Where canopied on herbs amaracine
We too might waste the summer-trancèd day
Matching our reeds in sportive rivalry,
While far beneath us frets the troubled purple of the sea.
But sweeter far if silver-sandalled foot
Of some long-hidden God should ever tread
The Nuneham meadows, if with reeded flute
Pressed to his lips some Faun might raise his head
By the green water-flags, ah! sweet indeed
To see the heavenly herdsman call his white-fleeced flock to feed.
Then sing to me thou tuneful chorister,
Though what thou sing’st be thine own requiem!
Tell me thy tale thou hapless chronicler
p. 67Of thine own tragedies! do not contemn
These unfamiliar haunts, this English field,
For many a lovely coronal our northern isle can yield
Which Grecian meadows know not, many a rose
Which all day long in vales Æolian
A lad might seek in vain for over-grows
Our hedges like a wanton courtesan
Unthrifty of its beauty; lilies too
Ilissos never mirrored star our streams, and cockles blue
Dot the green wheat which, though they are the signs
For swallows going south, would never spread
Their azure tents between the Attic vines;
Even that little weed of ragged red,
Which bids the robin pipe, in Arcady
Would be a trespasser, and many an unsung elegy
Sleeps in the reeds that fringe our winding Thames
Which to awake were sweeter ravishment
Than ever Syrinx wept for; diadems
Of brown bee-studded orchids which were meant
p. 68For Cytheræa’s brows are hidden here
Unknown to Cytheræa, and by yonder pasturing steer
There is a tiny yellow daffodil,
The butterfly can see it from afar,
Although one summer evening’s dew could fill
Its little cup twice over ere the star
Had called the lazy shepherd to his fold
And be no prodigal; each leaf is flecked with spotted gold
As if Jove’s gorgeous leman Danae
Hot from his gilded arms had stooped to kiss
The trembling petals, or young Mercury
Low-flying to the dusky ford of Dis
Had with one feather of his pinions
Just brushed them! the slight stem which bears the burden of its suns
Is hardly thicker than the gossamer,
Or poor Arachne’s silver tapestry,—
Men say it bloomed upon the sepulchre
Of One I sometime worshipped, but to me
It seems to bring diviner memories
Of faun-loved Heliconian glades and blue nymph-haunted seas,
p. 69Of an untrodden vale at Tempe where
On the clear river’s marge Narcissus lies,
The tangle of the forest in his hair,
The silence of the woodland in his eyes,
Wooing that drifting imagery which is
No sooner kissed than broken; memories of Salmacis
Who is not boy nor girl and yet is both,
Fed by two fires and unsatisfied
Through their excess, each passion being loth
For love’s own sake to leave the other’s side
Yet killing love by staying; memories
Of Oreads peeping through the leaves of silent moonlit trees,
Of lonely Ariadne on the wharf
At Naxos, when she saw the treacherous crew
Far out at sea, and waved her crimson scarf
And called false Theseus back again nor knew
That Dionysos on an amber pard
Was close behind her; memories of what Mæonia’s bard
With sightless eyes beheld, the wall of Troy,
Queen Helen lying in the ivory room,
And at her side an amorous red-lipped boy
Trimming with dainty hand his helmet’s plume,
p. 70And far away the moil, the shout, the groan,
As Hector shielded off the spear and Ajax hurled the stone;
Of wingèd Perseus with his flawless sword
Cleaving the snaky tresses of the witch,
And all those tales imperishably stored
In little Grecian urns, freightage more rich
Than any gaudy galleon of Spain
Bare from the Indies ever! these at least bring back again,
For well I know they are not dead at all,
The ancient Gods of Grecian poesy:
They are asleep, and when they hear thee call
Will wake and think ’t is very Thessaly,
This Thames the Daulian waters, this cool glade
The yellow-irised mead where once young Itys laughed and played.
If it was thou dear jasmine-cradled bird
Who from the leafy stillness of thy throne
Sang to the wondrous boy, until he heard
The horn of Atalanta faintly blown
Across the Cumnor hills, and wandering
Through Bagley wood at evening found the Attic poets’ spring,—
p. 71Ah! tiny sober-suited advocate
That pleadest for the moon against the day!
If thou didst make the shepherd seek his mate
On that sweet questing, when Proserpina
Forgot it was not Sicily and leant
Across the mossy Sandford stile in ravished wonderment,—
Light-winged and bright-eyed miracle of the wood!
If ever thou didst soothe with melody
One of that little clan, that brotherhood
Which loved the morning-star of Tuscany
More than the perfect sun of Raphael
And is immortal, sing to me! for I too love thee well.
Sing on! sing on! let the dull world grow young,
Let elemental things take form again,
And the old shapes of Beauty walk among
The simple garths and open crofts, as when
The son of Leto bare the willow rod,
And the soft sheep and shaggy goats followed the boyish God.
Sing on! sing on! and Bacchus will be here
Astride upon his gorgeous Indian throne,
And over whimpering tigers shake the spear
With yellow ivy crowned and gummy cone,
p. 72While at his side the wanton Bassarid
Will throw the lion by the mane and catch the mountain kid!
Sing on! and I will wear the leopard skin,
And steal the moonèd wings of Ashtaroth,
Upon whose icy chariot we could win
Cithæron in an hour ere the froth
Has over-brimmed the wine-vat or the Faun
Ceased from the treading! ay, before the flickering lamp of dawn
Has scared the hooting owlet to its nest,
And warned the bat to close its filmy vans,
Some Mænad girl with vine-leaves on her breast
Will filch their beech-nuts from the sleeping Pans
So softly that the little nested thrush
Will never wake, and then with shrilly laugh and leap will rush
Down the green valley where the fallen dew
Lies thick beneath the elm and count her store,
Till the brown Satyrs in a jolly crew
Trample the loosestrife down along the shore,
And where their hornèd master sits in state
Bring strawberries and bloomy plums upon a wicker crate!
p. 73Sing on! and soon with passion-wearied face
Through the cool leaves Apollo’s lad will come,
The Tyrian prince his bristled boar will chase
Adown the chestnut-copses all a-bloom,
And ivory-limbed, grey-eyed, with look of pride,
After yon velvet-coated deer the virgin maid will ride.
Sing on! and I the dying boy will see
Stain with his purple blood the waxen bell
That overweighs the jacinth, and to me
The wretched Cyprian her woe will tell,
And I will kiss her mouth and streaming eyes,
And lead her to the myrtle-hidden grove where Adon lies!
Cry out aloud on Itys! memory
That foster-brother of remorse and pain
Drops poison in mine ear,—O to be free,
To burn one’s old ships! and to launch again
Into the white-plumed battle of the waves
And fight old Proteus for the spoil of coral-flowered caves!
O for Medea with her poppied spell!
O for the secret of the Colchian shrine!
O for one leaf of that pale asphodel
Which binds the tired brows of Proserpine,
p. 74And sheds such wondrous dews at eve that she
Dreams of the fields of Enna, by the far Sicilian sea,
Where oft the golden-girdled bee she chased
From lily to lily on the level mead,
Ere yet her sombre Lord had bid her taste
The deadly fruit of that pomegranate seed,
Ere the black steeds had harried her away
Down to the faint and flowerless land, the sick and sunless day.
O for one midnight and as paramour
The Venus of the little Melian farm!
O that some antique statue for one hour
Might wake to passion, and that I could charm
The Dawn at Florence from its dumb despair,
Mix with those mighty limbs and make that giant breast my lair!
p. 75Sing on! sing on! I would be drunk with life,
Drunk with the trampled vintage of my youth,
I would forget the wearying wasted strife,
The riven veil, the Gorgon eyes of Truth,
The prayerless vigil and the cry for prayer,
The barren gifts, the lifted arms, the dull insensate air!
Sing on! sing on! O feathered Niobe,
Thou canst make sorrow beautiful, and steal
From joy its sweetest music, not as we
Who by dead voiceless silence strive to heal
Our too untented wounds, and do but keep
Pain barricadoed in our hearts, and murder pillowed sleep.
Sing louder yet, why must I still behold
The wan white face of that deserted Christ,
Whose bleeding hands my hands did once enfold,
Whose smitten lips my lips so oft have kissed,
And now in mute and marble misery
Sits in his lone dishonoured House and weeps, perchance for me?
O Memory cast down thy wreathèd shell!
Break thy hoarse lute O sad Melpomene!
O Sorrow, Sorrow keep thy cloistered cell
Nor dim with tears this limpid Castaly!
Cease, Philomel, thou dost the forest wrong
To vex its sylvan quiet with such wild impassioned song!
Cease, cease, or if ’t is anguish to be dumb
Take from the pastoral thrush her simpler air,
Whose jocund carelessness doth more become
This English woodland than thy keen despair,
p. 76Ah! cease and let the north wind bear thy lay
Back to the rocky hills of Thrace, the stormy Daulian bay.
A moment more, the startled leaves had stirred,
Endymion would have passed across the mead
Moonstruck with love, and this still Thames had heard
Pan plash and paddle groping for some reed
To lure from her blue cave that Naiad maid
Who for such piping listens half in joy and half afraid.
A moment more, the waking dove had cooed,
The silver daughter of the silver sea
With the fond gyves of clinging hands had wooed
Her wanton from the chase, and Dryope
Had thrust aside the branches of her oak
To see the lusty gold-haired lad rein in his snorting yoke.
A moment more, the trees had stooped to kiss
Pale Daphne just awakening from the swoon
Of tremulous laurels, lonely Salmacis
Had bared his barren beauty to the moon,
And through the vale with sad voluptuous smile
Antinous had wandered, the red lotus of the Nile
p. 77Down leaning from his black and clustering hair,
To shade those slumberous eyelids’ caverned bliss,
Or else on yonder grassy slope with bare
High-tuniced limbs unravished Artemis
Had bade her hounds give tongue, and roused the deer
From his green ambuscade with shrill halloo and pricking spear.
Lie still, lie still, O passionate heart, lie still!
O Melancholy, fold thy raven wing!
O sobbing Dryad, from thy hollow hill
Come not with such despondent answering!
No more thou wingèd Marsyas complain,
Apollo loveth not to hear such troubled songs of pain!
It was a dream, the glade is tenantless,
No soft Ionian laughter moves the air,
The Thames creeps on in sluggish leadenness,
And from the copse left desolate and bare
Fled is young Bacchus with his revelry,
Yet still from Nuneham wood there comes that thrilling melody
So sad, that one might think a human heart
Brake in each separate note, a quality
Which music sometimes has, being the Art
p. 78Which is most nigh to tears and memory;
Poor mourning Philomel, what dost thou fear?
Thy sister doth not haunt these fields, Pandion is not here,
Here is no cruel Lord with murderous blade,
No woven web of bloody heraldries,
But mossy dells for roving comrades made,
Warm valleys where the tired student lies
With half-shut book, and many a winding walk
Where rustic lovers stray at eve in happy simple talk.
The harmless rabbit gambols with its young
Across the trampled towing-path, where late
A troop of laughing boys in jostling throng
Cheered with their noisy cries the racing eight;
The gossamer, with ravelled silver threads,
Works at its little loom, and from the dusky red-eaved sheds
Of the lone Farm a flickering light shines out
Where the swinked shepherd drives his bleating flock
Back to their wattled sheep-cotes, a faint shout
Comes from some Oxford boat at Sandford lock,
p. 79And starts the moor-hen from the sedgy rill,
And the dim lengthening shadows flit like swallows up the hill.
The heron passes homeward to the mere,
The blue mist creeps among the shivering trees,
Gold world by world the silent stars appear,
And like a blossom blown before the breeze
A white moon drifts across the shimmering sky,
Mute arbitress of all thy sad, thy rapturous threnody.
She does not heed thee, wherefore should she heed,
She knows Endymion is not far away;
’Tis I, ’tis I, whose soul is as the reed
Which has no message of its own to play,
So pipes another’s bidding, it is I,
Drifting with every wind on the wide sea of misery.
Ah! the brown bird has ceased: one exquisite trill
About the sombre woodland seems to cling
Dying in music, else the air is still,
So still that one might hear the bat’s small wing
p. 80Wander and wheel above the pines, or tell
Each tiny dew-drop dripping from the bluebell’s brimming cell.
And far away across the lengthening wold,
Across the willowy flats and thickets brown,
Magdalen’s tall tower tipped with tremulous gold
Marks the long High Street of the little town,
And warns me to return; I must not wait,
Hark! ’t is the curfew booming from the bell at Christ Church gate.
p. 81WIND FLOWERS
p. 83IMPRESSION DU MATIN
THE Thames nocturne of blue and gold
Changed to a Harmony in grey:
A barge with ochre-coloured hay
Dropt from the wharf: and chill and cold
The yellow fog came creeping down
The bridges, till the houses’ walls
Seemed changed to shadows and St. Paul’s
Loomed like a bubble o’er the town.
Then suddenly arose the clang
Of waking life; the streets were stirred
With country waggons: and a bird
Flew to the glistening roofs and sang.
But one pale woman all alone,
The daylight kissing her wan hair,
Loitered beneath the gas lamps’ flare,
With lips of flame and heart of stone.
p. 84MAGDALEN WALKS
THE little white clouds are racing over the sky,
And the fields are strewn with the gold of the flower of March,
The daffodil breaks under foot, and the tasselled larch
Sways and swings as the thrush goes hurrying by.
A delicate odour is borne on the wings of the morning breeze,
The odour of deep wet grass, and of brown new-furrowed earth,
The birds are singing for joy of the Spring’s glad birth,
Hopping from branch to branch on the rocking trees.
And all the woods are alive with the murmur and sound of Spring,
And the rose-bud breaks into pink on the climbing briar,
And the crocus-bed is a quivering moon of fire
Girdled round with the belt of an amethyst ring.
p. 85And the plane to the pine-tree is whispering some tale of love
Till it rustles with laughter and tosses its mantle of green,
And the gloom of the wych-elm’s hollow is lit with the iris sheen
Of the burnished rainbow throat and the silver breast of a dove.
See! the lark starts up from his bed in the meadow there,
Breaking the gossamer threads and the nets of dew,
And flashing adown the river, a flame of blue!
The kingfisher flies like an arrow, and wounds the air.
p. 86ATHANASIA
TO that gaunt House of Art which lacks for naught
Of all the great things men have saved from Time,
The withered body of a girl was brought
Dead ere the world’s glad youth had touched its prime,
And seen by lonely Arabs lying hid
In the dim womb of some black pyramid.
But when they had unloosed the linen band
Which swathed the Egyptian’s body,—lo! was found
Closed in the wasted hollow of her hand
A little seed, which sown in English ground
Did wondrous snow of starry blossoms bear
And spread rich odours through our spring-tide air.
With such strange arts this flower did allure
That all forgotten was the asphodel,
And the brown bee, the lily’s paramour,
Forsook the cup where he was wont to dwell,
For not a thing of earth it seemed to be,
But stolen from some heavenly Arcady.
p. 87In vain the sad narcissus, wan and white
At its own beauty, hung across the stream,
The purple dragon-fly had no delight
With its gold dust to make his wings a-gleam,
Ah! no delight the jasmine-bloom to kiss,
Or brush the rain-pearls from the eucharis.
For love of it the passionate nightingale
Forgot the hills of Thrace, the cruel king,
And the pale dove no longer cared to sail
Through the wet woods at time of blossoming,
But round this flower of Egypt sought to float,
With silvered wing and amethystine throat.
While the hot sun blazed in his tower of blue
A cooling wind crept from the land of snows,
And the warm south with tender tears of dew
Drenched its white leaves when Hesperos up-rose
Amid those sea-green meadows of the sky
On which the scarlet bars of sunset lie.
But when o’er wastes of lily-haunted field
The tired birds had stayed their amorous tune,
And broad and glittering like an argent shield
High in the sapphire heavens hung the moon,
Did no strange dream or evil memory make
Each tremulous petal of its blossoms shake?
p. 88Ah no! to this bright flower a thousand years
Seemed but the lingering of a summer’s day,
It never knew the tide of cankering fears
Which turn a boy’s gold hair to withered grey,
The dread desire of death it never knew,
Or how all folk that they were born must rue.
For we to death with pipe and dancing go,
Nor would we pass the ivory gate again,
As some sad river wearied of its flow
Through the dull plains, the haunts of common men,
Leaps lover-like into the terrible sea!
And counts it gain to die so gloriously.
We mar our lordly strength in barren strife
With the world’s legions led by clamorous care,
It never feels decay but gathers life
From the pure sunlight and the supreme air,
We live beneath Time’s wasting sovereignty,
It is the child of all eternity.
p. 89SERENADE
(FOR MUSIC)
THE western wind is blowing fair
Across the dark Ægean sea,
And at the secret marble stair
My Tyrian galley waits for thee.
Come down! the purple sail is spread,
The watchman sleeps within the town,
O leave thy lily-flowered bed,
O Lady mine come down, come down!
She will not come, I know her well,
Of lover’s vows she hath no care,
And little good a man can tell
Of one so cruel and so fair.
True love is but a woman’s toy,
They never know the lover’s pain,
And I who loved as loves a boy
Must love in vain, must love in vain.
O noble pilot, tell me true,
Is that the sheen of golden hair?
Or is it but the tangled dew
That binds the passion-flowers there?
p. 90Good sailor come and tell me now
Is that my Lady’s lily hand?
Or is it but the gleaming prow,
Or is it but the silver sand?
No! no! ’tis not the tangled dew,
’Tis not the silver-fretted sand,
It is my own dear Lady true
With golden hair and lily hand!
O noble pilot, steer for Troy,
Good sailor, ply the labouring oar,
This is the Queen of life and joy
Whom we must bear from Grecian shore!
The waning sky grows faint and blue,
It wants an hour still of day,
Aboard! aboard! my gallant crew,
O Lady mine, away! away!
O noble pilot, steer for Troy,
Good sailor, ply the labouring oar,
O loved as only loves a boy!
O loved for ever evermore!
p. 91ENDYMION
(FOR MUSIC)
THE apple trees are hung with gold,
And birds are loud in Arcady,
The sheep lie bleating in the fold,
The wild goat runs across the wold,
But yesterday his love he told,
I know he will come back to me.
O rising moon! O Lady moon!
Be you my lover’s sentinel,
You cannot choose but know him well,
For he is shod with purple shoon,
You cannot choose but know my love,
For he a shepherd’s crook doth bear,
And he is soft as any dove,
And brown and curly is his hair.
The turtle now has ceased to call
Upon her crimson-footed groom,
The grey wolf prowls about the stall,
The lily’s singing seneschal
Sleeps in the lily-bell, and all
The violet hills are lost in gloom.
p. 92O risen moon! O holy moon!
Stand on the top of Helice,
And if my own true love you see,
Ah! if you see the purple shoon,
The hazel crook, the lad’s brown hair,
The goat-skin wrapped about his arm,
Tell him that I am waiting where
The rushlight glimmers in the Farm.
The falling dew is cold and chill,
And no bird sings in Arcady,
The little fauns have left the hill,
Even the tired daffodil
Has closed its gilded doors, and still
My lover comes not back to me.
False moon! False moon! O waning moon!
Where is my own true lover gone,
Where are the lips vermilion,
The shepherd’s crook, the purple shoon?
Why spread that silver pavilion,
Why wear that veil of drifting mist?
Ah! thou hast young Endymion,
Thou hast the lips that should be kissed!
p. 93LA BELLA DONNA DELLA MIA MENTE
MY limbs are wasted with a flame,
My feet are sore with travelling,
For, calling on my Lady’s name,
My lips have now forgot to sing.
O Linnet in the wild-rose brake
Strain for my Love thy melody,
O Lark sing louder for love’s sake,
My gentle Lady passeth by.
She is too fair for any man
To see or hold his heart’s delight,
Fairer than Queen or courtesan
Or moonlit water in the night.
Her hair is bound with myrtle leaves,
(Green leaves upon her golden hair!)
Green grasses through the yellow sheaves
Of autumn corn are not more fair.
Her little lips, more made to kiss
Than to cry bitterly for pain,
Are tremulous as brook-water is,
Or roses after evening rain.
p. 94Her neck is like white melilote
Flushing for pleasure of the sun,
The throbbing of the linnet’s throat
Is not so sweet to look upon.
As a pomegranate, cut in twain,
White-seeded, is her crimson mouth,
Her cheeks are as the fading stain
Where the peach reddens to the south.
O twining hands! O delicate
White body made for love and pain!
O House of love! O desolate
Pale flower beaten by the rain!
p. 95CHANSON
A RING of gold and a milk-white dove
Are goodly gifts for thee,
And a hempen rope for your own love
To hang upon a tree.
For you a House of Ivory,
(Roses are white in the rose-bower)!
A narrow bed for me to lie,
(White, O white, is the hemlock flower)!
Myrtle and jessamine for you,
(O the red rose is fair to see)!
For me the cypress and the rue,
(Finest of all is rosemary)!
For you three lovers of your hand,
(Green grass where a man lies dead)!
For me three paces on the sand,
(Plant lilies at my head)!
p. 97CHARMIDES
p. 99I.
HE was a Grecian lad, who coming home
With pulpy figs and wine from Sicily
Stood at his galley’s prow, and let the foam
Blow through his crisp brown curls unconsciously,
And holding wave and wind in boy’s despite
Peered from his dripping seat across the wet and stormy night.
Till with the dawn he saw a burnished spear
Like a thin thread of gold against the sky,
And hoisted sail, and strained the creaking gear,
And bade the pilot head her lustily
Against the nor’west gale, and all day long
Held on his way, and marked the rowers’ time with measured song.
And when the faint Corinthian hills were red
Dropped anchor in a little sandy bay,
And with fresh boughs of olive crowned his head,
p. 100And brushed from cheek and throat the hoary spray,
And washed his limbs with oil, and from the hold
Brought out his linen tunic and his sandals brazen-soled,
And a rich robe stained with the fishers’ juice
Which of some swarthy trader he had bought
Upon the sunny quay at Syracuse,
And was with Tyrian broideries inwrought,
And by the questioning merchants made his way
Up through the soft and silver woods, and when the labouring day
Had spun its tangled web of crimson cloud,
Clomb the high hill, and with swift silent feet
Crept to the fane unnoticed by the crowd
Of busy priests, and from some dark retreat
Watched the young swains his frolic playmates bring
The firstling of their little flock, and the shy shepherd fling
The crackling salt upon the flame, or hang
His studded crook against the temple wall
To Her who keeps away the ravenous fang
Of the base wolf from homestead and from stall;
p. 101And then the clear-voiced maidens ’gan to sing,
And to the altar each man brought some goodly offering,
A beechen cup brimming with milky foam,
A fair cloth wrought with cunning imagery
Of hounds in chase, a waxen honey-comb
Dripping with oozy gold which scarce the bee
Had ceased from building, a black skin of oil
Meet for the wrestlers, a great boar the fierce and white-tusked spoil
Stolen from Artemis that jealous maid
To please Athena, and the dappled hide
Of a tall stag who in some mountain glade
Had met the shaft; and then the herald cried,
And from the pillared precinct one by one
Went the glad Greeks well pleased that they their simple vows had done.
And the old priest put out the waning fires
Save that one lamp whose restless ruby glowed
For ever in the cell, and the shrill lyres
Came fainter on the wind, as down the road
In joyous dance these country folk did pass,
And with stout hands the warder closed the gates of polished brass.
p. 102Long time he lay and hardly dared to breathe,
And heard the cadenced drip of spilt-out wine,
And the rose-petals falling from the wreath
As the night breezes wandered through the shrine,
And seemed to be in some entrancèd swoon
Till through the open roof above the full and brimming moon
Flooded with sheeny waves the marble floor,
When from his nook up leapt the venturous lad,
And flinging wide the cedar-carven door
Beheld an awful image saffron-clad
And armed for battle! the gaunt Griffin glared
From the huge helm, and the long lance of wreck and ruin flared
Like a red rod of flame, stony and steeled
The Gorgon’s head its leaden eyeballs rolled,
And writhed its snaky horrors through the shield,
And gaped aghast with bloodless lips and cold
In passion impotent, while with blind gaze
The blinking owl between the feet hooted in shrill amaze.
The lonely fisher as he trimmed his lamp
Far out at sea off Sunium, or cast
The net for tunnies, heard a brazen tramp
p. 103Of horses smite the waves, and a wild blast
Divide the folded curtains of the night,
And knelt upon the little poop, and prayed in holy fright.
And guilty lovers in their venery
Forgat a little while their stolen sweets,
Deeming they heard dread Dian’s bitter cry;
And the grim watchmen on their lofty seats
Ran to their shields in haste precipitate,
Or strained black-bearded throats across the dusky parapet.
For round the temple rolled the clang of arms,
And the twelve Gods leapt up in marble fear,
And the air quaked with dissonant alarums
Till huge Poseidon shook his mighty spear,
And on the frieze the prancing horses neighed,
And the low tread of hurrying feet rang from the cavalcade.
p. 104Ready for death with parted lips he stood,
And well content at such a price to see
That calm wide brow, that terrible maidenhood,
The marvel of that pitiless chastity,
Ah! well content indeed, for never wight
Since Troy’s young shepherd prince had seen so wonderful a sight.
Ready for death he stood, but lo! the air
Grew silent, and the horses ceased to neigh,
And off his brow he tossed the clustering hair,
And from his limbs he throw the cloak away;
For whom would not such love make desperate?
And nigher came, and touched her throat, and with hands violate
Undid the cuirass, and the crocus gown,
And bared the breasts of polished ivory,
Till from the waist the peplos falling down
Left visible the secret mystery
Which to no lover will Athena show,
The grand cool flanks, the crescent thighs, the bossy hills of snow.
Those who have never known a lover’s sin
Let them not read my ditty, it will be
To their dull ears so musicless and thin
That they will have no joy of it, but ye
To whose wan cheeks now creeps the lingering smile,
Ye who have learned who Eros is,—O listen yet awhile.
A little space he let his greedy eyes
Rest on the burnished image, till mere sight
Half swooned for surfeit of such luxuries,
And then his lips in hungering delight
p. 105Fed on her lips, and round the towered neck
He flung his arms, nor cared at all his passion’s will to check.
Never I ween did lover hold such tryst,
For all night long he murmured honeyed word,
And saw her sweet unravished limbs, and kissed
Her pale and argent body undisturbed,
And paddled with the polished throat, and pressed
His hot and beating heart upon her chill and icy breast.
It was as if Numidian javelins
Pierced through and through his wild and whirling brain,
And his nerves thrilled like throbbing violins
In exquisite pulsation, and the pain
Was such sweet anguish that he never drew
His lips from hers till overhead the lark of warning flew.
They who have never seen the daylight peer
Into a darkened room, and drawn the curtain,
And with dull eyes and wearied from some dear
And worshipped body risen, they for certain
Will never know of what I try to sing,
How long the last kiss was, how fond and late his lingering.
p. 106The moon was girdled with a crystal rim,
The sign which shipmen say is ominous
Of wrath in heaven, the wan stars were dim,
And the low lightening east was tremulous
With the faint fluttering wings of flying dawn,
Ere from the silent sombre shrine his lover had withdrawn.
Down the steep rock with hurried feet and fast
Clomb the brave lad, and reached the cave of Pan,
And heard the goat-foot snoring as he passed,
And leapt upon a grassy knoll and ran
Like a young fawn unto an olive wood
Which in a shady valley by the well-built city stood;
And sought a little stream, which well he knew,
For oftentimes with boyish careless shout
The green and crested grebe he would pursue,
Or snare in woven net the silver trout,
And down amid the startled reeds he lay
Panting in breathless sweet affright, and waited for the day.
On the green bank he lay, and let one hand
Dip in the cool dark eddies listlessly,
And soon the breath of morning came and fanned
His hot flushed cheeks, or lifted wantonly
p. 107The tangled curls from off his forehead, while
He on the running water gazed with strange and secret smile.
And soon the shepherd in rough woollen cloak
With his long crook undid the wattled cotes,
And from the stack a thin blue wreath of smoke
Curled through the air across the ripening oats,
And on the hill the yellow house-dog bayed
As through the crisp and rustling fern the heavy cattle strayed.
And when the light-foot mower went afield
Across the meadows laced with threaded dew,
And the sheep bleated on the misty weald,
And from its nest the waking corncrake flew,
Some woodmen saw him lying by the stream
And marvelled much that any lad so beautiful could seem,
Nor deemed him born of mortals, and one said,
‘It is young Hylas, that false runaway
Who with a Naiad now would make his bed
Forgetting Herakles,’ but others, ‘Nay,
It is Narcissus, his own paramour,
Those are the fond and crimson lips no woman can allure.’
p. 108And when they nearer came a third one cried,
‘It is young Dionysos who has hid
His spear and fawnskin by the river side
Weary of hunting with the Bassarid,
And wise indeed were we away to fly:
They live not long who on the gods immortal come to spy.’
So turned they back, and feared to look behind,
And told the timid swain how they had seen
Amid the reeds some woodland god reclined,
And no man dared to cross the open green,
And on that day no olive-tree was slain,
Nor rushes cut, but all deserted was the fair domain,
Save when the neat-herd’s lad, his empty pail
Well slung upon his back, with leap and bound
Raced on the other side, and stopped to hail,
Hoping that he some comrade new had found,
And gat no answer, and then half afraid
Passed on his simple way, or down the still and silent glade
A little girl ran laughing from the farm,
Not thinking of love’s secret mysteries,
And when she saw the white and gleaming arm
And all his manlihood, with longing eyes
p. 109Whose passion mocked her sweet virginity
Watched him awhile, and then stole back sadly and wearily.
Far off he heard the city’s hum and noise,
And now and then the shriller laughter where
The passionate purity of brown-limbed boys
Wrestled or raced in the clear healthful air,
And now and then a little tinkling bell
As the shorn wether led the sheep down to the mossy well.
Through the grey willows danced the fretful gnat,
The grasshopper chirped idly from the tree,
In sleek and oily coat the water-rat
Breasting the little ripples manfully
Made for the wild-duck’s nest, from bough to bough
Hopped the shy finch, and the huge tortoise crept across the slough.
On the faint wind floated the silky seeds
As the bright scythe swept through the waving grass,
The ouzel-cock splashed circles in the reeds
And flecked with silver whorls the forest’s glass,
p. 110Which scarce had caught again its imagery
Ere from its bed the dusky tench leapt at the dragon-fly.
But little care had he for any thing
Though up and down the beech the squirrel played,
And from the copse the linnet ’gan to sing
To its brown mate its sweetest serenade;
Ah! little care indeed, for he had seen
The breasts of Pallas and the naked wonder of the Queen.
But when the herdsman called his straggling goats
With whistling pipe across the rocky road,
And the shard-beetle with its trumpet-notes
Boomed through the darkening woods, and seemed to bode
Of coming storm, and the belated crane
Passed homeward like a shadow, and the dull big drops of rain
Fell on the pattering fig-leaves, up he rose,
And from the gloomy forest went his way
Past sombre homestead and wet orchard-close,
And came at last unto a little quay,
And called his mates aboard, and took his seat
On the high poop, and pushed from land, and loosed the dripping sheet,
p. 111And steered across the bay, and when nine suns
Passed down the long and laddered way of gold,
And nine pale moons had breathed their orisons
To the chaste stars their confessors, or told
Their dearest secret to the downy moth
That will not fly at noonday, through the foam and surging froth
Came a great owl with yellow sulphurous eyes
And lit upon the ship, whose timbers creaked
As though the lading of three argosies
Were in the hold, and flapped its wings and shrieked,
And darkness straightway stole across the deep,
Sheathed was Orion’s sword, dread Mars himself fled down the steep,
And the moon hid behind a tawny mask
Of drifting cloud, and from the ocean’s marge
Rose the red plume, the huge and hornèd casque,
The seven-cubit spear, the brazen targe!
And clad in bright and burnished panoply
Athena strode across the stretch of sick and shivering sea!
To the dull sailors’ sight her loosened looks
Seemed like the jagged storm-rack, and her feet
Only the spume that floats on hidden rocks,
p. 112And, marking how the rising waters beat
Against the rolling ship, the pilot cried
To the young helmsman at the stern to luff to windward side
But he, the overbold adulterer,
A dear profaner of great mysteries,
An ardent amorous idolater,
When he beheld those grand relentless eyes
Laughed loud for joy, and crying out ‘I come’
Leapt from the lofty poop into the chill and churning foam.
Then fell from the high heaven one bright star,
One dancer left the circling galaxy,
And back to Athens on her clattering car
In all the pride of venged divinity
Pale Pallas swept with shrill and steely clank,
And a few gurgling bubbles rose where her boy lover sank.
And the mast shuddered as the gaunt owl flew
With mocking hoots after the wrathful Queen,
And the old pilot bade the trembling crew
Hoist the big sail, and told how he had seen
Close to the stern a dim and giant form,
And like a dipping swallow the stout ship dashed through the storm.
p. 113And no man dared to speak of Charmides
Deeming that he some evil thing had wrought,
And when they reached the strait Symplegades
They beached their galley on the shore, and sought
The toll-gate of the city hastily,
And in the market showed their brown and pictured pottery.
p. 114II.
BUT some good Triton-god had ruth, and bare
The boy’s drowned body back to Grecian land,
And mermaids combed his dank and dripping hair
And smoothed his brow, and loosed his clenching hand;
Some brought sweet spices from far Araby,
And others bade the halcyon sing her softest lullaby.
And when he neared his old Athenian home,
A mighty billow rose up suddenly
Upon whose oily back the clotted foam
Lay diapered in some strange fantasy,
And clasping him unto its glassy breast
Swept landward, like a white-maned steed upon a venturous quest!
Now where Colonos leans unto the sea
There lies a long and level stretch of lawn;
The rabbit knows it, and the mountain bee
p. 115For it deserts Hymettus, and the Faun
Is not afraid, for never through the day
Comes a cry ruder than the shout of shepherd lads at play.
But often from the thorny labyrinth
And tangled branches of the circling wood
The stealthy hunter sees young Hyacinth
Hurling the polished disk, and draws his hood
Over his guilty gaze, and creeps away,
Nor dares to wind his horn, or—else at the first break of day
The Dryads come and throw the leathern ball
Along the reedy shore, and circumvent
Some goat-eared Pan to be their seneschal
For fear of bold Poseidon’s ravishment,
And loose their girdles, with shy timorous eyes,
Lest from the surf his azure arms and purple beard should rise.
On this side and on that a rocky cave,
Hung with the yellow-belled laburnum, stands
Smooth is the beach, save where some ebbing wave
Leaves its faint outline etched upon the sands,
As though it feared to be too soon forgot
By the green rush, its playfellow,—and yet, it is a spot
p. 116So small, that the inconstant butterfly
Could steal the hoarded money from each flower
Ere it was noon, and still not satisfy
Its over-greedy love,—within an hour
A sailor boy, were he but rude enow
To land and pluck a garland for his galley’s painted prow,
Would almost leave the little meadow bare,
For it knows nothing of great pageantry,
Only a few narcissi here and there
Stand separate in sweet austerity,
Dotting the unmown grass with silver stars,
And here and there a daffodil waves tiny scimitars.
Hither the billow brought him, and was glad
Of such dear servitude, and where the land
Was virgin of all waters laid the lad
Upon the golden margent of the strand,
And like a lingering lover oft returned
To kiss those pallid limbs which once with intense fire burned,
Ere the wet seas had quenched that holocaust,
That self-fed flame, that passionate lustihead,
Ere grisly death with chill and nipping frost
p. 117Had withered up those lilies white and red
Which, while the boy would through the forest range,
Answered each other in a sweet antiphonal counter-change.
And when at dawn the wood-nymphs, hand-in-hand,
Threaded the bosky dell, their satyr spied
The boy’s pale body stretched upon the sand,
And feared Poseidon’s treachery, and cried,
And like bright sunbeams flitting through a glade
Each startled Dryad sought some safe and leafy ambuscade.
Save one white girl, who deemed it would not be
So dread a thing to feel a sea-god’s arms
Crushing her breasts in amorous tyranny,
And longed to listen to those subtle charms
Insidious lovers weave when they would win
Some fencèd fortress, and stole back again, nor thought it sin
To yield her treasure unto one so fair,
And lay beside him, thirsty with love’s drouth,
Called him soft names, played with his tangled hair,
And with hot lips made havoc of his mouth
p. 118Afraid he might not wake, and then afraid
Lest he might wake too soon, fled back, and then, fond renegade,
Returned to fresh assault, and all day long
Sat at his side, and laughed at her new toy,
And held his hand, and sang her sweetest song,
Then frowned to see how froward was the boy
Who would not with her maidenhood entwine,
Nor knew that three days since his eyes had looked on Proserpine;
Nor knew what sacrilege his lips had done,
But said, ‘He will awake, I know him well,
He will awake at evening when the sun
Hangs his red shield on Corinth’s citadel;
This sleep is but a cruel treachery
To make me love him more, and in some cavern of the sea
Deeper than ever falls the fisher’s line
Already a huge Triton blows his horn,
And weaves a garland from the crystalline
And drifting ocean-tendrils to adorn
The emerald pillars of our bridal bed,
For sphered in foaming silver, and with coral crownèd head,
We two will sit upon a throne of pearl,
And a blue wave will be our canopy,
p. 119And at our feet the water-snakes will curl
In all their amethystine panoply
Of diamonded mail, and we will mark
The mullets swimming by the mast of some storm-foundered bark,
Vermilion-finned with eyes of bossy gold
Like flakes of crimson light, and the great deep
His glassy-portaled chamber will unfold,
And we will see the painted dolphins sleep
Cradled by murmuring halcyons on the rocks
Where Proteus in quaint suit of green pastures his monstrous flocks.
And tremulous opal-hued anemones
Will wave their purple fringes where we tread
Upon the mirrored floor, and argosies
Of fishes flecked with tawny scales will thread
The drifting cordage of the shattered wreck,
And honey-coloured amber beads our twining limbs will deck.’
But when that baffled Lord of War the Sun
With gaudy pennon flying passed away
Into his brazen House, and one by one
The little yellow stars began to stray
Across the field of heaven, ah! then indeed
She feared his lips upon her lips would never care to feed,
p. 120And cried, ‘Awake, already the pale moon
Washes the trees with silver, and the wave
Creeps grey and chilly up this sandy dune,
The croaking frogs are out, and from the cave
The nightjar shrieks, the fluttering bats repass,
And the brown stoat with hollow flanks creeps through the dusky grass.
Nay, though thou art a god, be not so coy,
For in yon stream there is a little reed
That often whispers how a lovely boy
Lay with her once upon a grassy mead,
Who when his cruel pleasure he had done
Spread wings of rustling gold and soared aloft into the sun.
Be not so coy, the laurel trembles still
With great Apollo’s kisses, and the fir
Whose clustering sisters fringe the seaward hill
Hath many a tale of that bold ravisher
Whom men call Boreas, and I have seen
The mocking eyes of Hermes through the poplar’s silvery sheen.
Even the jealous Naiads call me fair,
And every morn a young and ruddy swain
Woos me with apples and with locks of hair,
And seeks to soothe my virginal disdain
p. 121By all the gifts the gentle wood-nymphs love;
But yesterday he brought to me an iris-plumaged dove
With little crimson feet, which with its store
Of seven spotted eggs the cruel lad
Had stolen from the lofty sycamore
At daybreak, when her amorous comrade had
Flown off in search of berried juniper
Which most they love; the fretful wasp, that earliest vintager
Of the blue grapes, hath not persistency
So constant as this simple shepherd-boy
For my poor lips, his joyous purity
And laughing sunny eyes might well decoy
A Dryad from her oath to Artemis;
For very beautiful is he, his mouth was made to kiss;
His argent forehead, like a rising moon
Over the dusky hills of meeting brows,
Is crescent shaped, the hot and Tyrian noon
Leads from the myrtle-grove no goodlier spouse
For Cytheræa, the first silky down
Fringes his blushing cheeks, and his young limbs are strong and brown;
p. 122And he is rich, and fat and fleecy herds
Of bleating sheep upon his meadows lie,
And many an earthen bowl of yellow curds
Is in his homestead for the thievish fly
To swim and drown in, the pink clover mead
Keeps its sweet store for him, and he can pipe on oaten reed.
And yet I love him not; it was for thee
I kept my love; I knew that thou would’st come
To rid me of this pallid chastity,
Thou fairest flower of the flowerless foam
Of all the wide Ægean, brightest star
Of ocean’s azure heavens where the mirrored planets are!
I knew that thou would’st come, for when at first
The dry wood burgeoned, and the sap of spring
Swelled in my green and tender bark or burst
To myriad multitudinous blossoming
Which mocked the midnight with its mimic moons
That did not dread the dawn, and first the thrushes’ rapturous tunes
Startled the squirrel from its granary,
And cuckoo flowers fringed the narrow lane,
Through my young leaves a sensuous ecstasy
p. 123Crept like new wine, and every mossy vein
Throbbed with the fitful pulse of amorous blood,
And the wild winds of passion shook my slim stem’s maidenhood.
The trooping fawns at evening came and laid
Their cool black noses on my lowest boughs,
And on my topmost branch the blackbird made
A little nest of grasses for his spouse,
And now and then a twittering wren would light
On a thin twig which hardly bare the weight of such delight.
I was the Attic shepherd’s trysting place,
Beneath my shadow Amaryllis lay,
And round my trunk would laughing Daphnis chase
The timorous girl, till tired out with play
She felt his hot breath stir her tangled hair,
And turned, and looked, and fled no more from such delightful snare.
Then come away unto my ambuscade
Where clustering woodbine weaves a canopy
For amorous pleasaunce, and the rustling shade
Of Paphian myrtles seems to sanctify
The dearest rites of love; there in the cool
And green recesses of its farthest depth there is pool,
p. 124The ouzel’s haunt, the wild bee’s pasturage,
For round its rim great creamy lilies float
Through their flat leaves in verdant anchorage,
Each cup a white-sailed golden-laden boat
Steered by a dragon-fly,—be not afraid
To leave this wan and wave-kissed shore, surely the place was made
For lovers such as we; the Cyprian Queen,
One arm around her boyish paramour,
Strays often there at eve, and I have seen
The moon strip off her misty vestiture
For young Endymion’s eyes; be not afraid,
The panther feet of Dian never tread that secret glade.
Nay if thou will’st, back to the beating brine,
Back to the boisterous billow let us go,
And walk all day beneath the hyaline
Huge vault of Neptune’s watery portico,
And watch the purple monsters of the deep
Sport in ungainly play, and from his lair keen Xiphias leap.
For if my mistress find me lying here
She will not ruth or gentle pity show,
But lay her boar-spear down, and with austere
Relentless fingers string the cornel bow,
p. 125And draw the feathered notch against her breast,
And loose the archèd cord; aye, even now upon the quest
I hear her hurrying feet,—awake, awake,
Thou laggard in love’s battle! once at least
Let me drink deep of passion’s wine, and slake
My parchèd being with the nectarous feast
Which even gods affect! O come, Love, come,
Still we have time to reach the cavern of thine azure home.’
Scarce had she spoken when the shuddering trees
Shook, and the leaves divided, and the air
Grew conscious of a god, and the grey seas
Crawled backward, and a long and dismal blare
Blew from some tasselled horn, a sleuth-hound bayed,
And like a flame a barbèd reed flew whizzing down the glade.
And where the little flowers of her breast
Just brake into their milky blossoming,
This murderous paramour, this unbidden guest,
Pierced and struck deep in horrid chambering,
And ploughed a bloody furrow with its dart,
And dug a long red road, and cleft with wingèd death her heart.
p. 126Sobbing her life out with a bitter cry
On the boy’s body fell the Dryad maid,
Sobbing for incomplete virginity,
And raptures unenjoyed, and pleasures dead,
And all the pain of things unsatisfied,
And the bright drops of crimson youth crept down her throbbing side.
Ah! pitiful it was to hear her moan,
And very pitiful to see her die
Ere she had yielded up her sweets, or known
The joy of passion, that dread mystery
Which not to know is not to live at all,
And yet to know is to be held in death’s most deadly thrall.
But as it hapt the Queen of Cythere,
Who with Adonis all night long had lain
Within some shepherd’s hut in Arcady,
On team of silver doves and gilded wain
Was journeying Paphos-ward, high up afar
From mortal ken between the mountains and the morning star,
And when low down she spied the hapless pair,
And heard the Oread’s faint despairing cry,
Whose cadence seemed to play upon the air
As though it were a viol, hastily
p. 127She bade her pigeons fold each straining plume,
And dropt to earth, and reached the strand, and saw their dolorous doom.
For as a gardener turning back his head
To catch the last notes of the linnet, mows
With careless scythe too near some flower bed,
And cuts the thorny pillar of the rose,
And with the flower’s loosened loneliness
Strews the brown mould; or as some shepherd lad in wantonness
Driving his little flock along the mead
Treads down two daffodils, which side by aide
Have lured the lady-bird with yellow brede
And made the gaudy moth forget its pride,
Treads down their brimming golden chalices
Under light feet which were not made for such rude ravages;
Or as a schoolboy tired of his book
Flings himself down upon the reedy grass
And plucks two water-lilies from the brook,
And for a time forgets the hour glass,
Then wearies of their sweets, and goes his way,
And lets the hot sun kill them, even go these lovers lay.
p. 128And Venus cried, ‘It is dread Artemis
Whose bitter hand hath wrought this cruelty,
Or else that mightier maid whose care it is
To guard her strong and stainless majesty
Upon the hill Athenian,—alas!
That they who loved so well unloved into Death’s house should pass.’
So with soft hands she laid the boy and girl
In the great golden waggon tenderly
(Her white throat whiter than a moony pearl
Just threaded with a blue vein’s tapestry
Had not yet ceased to throb, and still her breast
Swayed like a wind-stirred lily in ambiguous unrest)
And then each pigeon spread its milky van,
The bright car soared into the dawning sky,
And like a cloud the aerial caravan
Passed over the Ægean silently,
Till the faint air was troubled with the song
From the wan mouths that call on bleeding Thammuz all night long.
But when the doves had reached their wonted goal
Where the wide stair of orbèd marble dips
Its snows into the sea, her fluttering soul
Just shook the trembling petals of her lips
p. 129And passed into the void, and Venus knew
That one fair maid the less would walk amid her retinue,
And bade her servants carve a cedar chest
With all the wonder of this history,
Within whose scented womb their limbs should rest
Where olive-trees make tender the blue sky
On the low hills of Paphos, and the Faun
Pipes in the noonday, and the nightingale sings on till dawn.
Nor failed they to obey her hest, and ere
The morning bee had stung the daffodil
With tiny fretful spear, or from its lair
The waking stag had leapt across the rill
And roused the ouzel, or the lizard crept
Athwart the sunny rock, beneath the grass their bodies slept.
And when day brake, within that silver shrine
Fed by the flames of cressets tremulous,
Queen Venus knelt and prayed to Proserpine
That she whose beauty made Death amorous
Should beg a guerdon from her pallid Lord,
And let Desire pass across dread Charon’s icy ford.
p. 130III
IN melancholy moonless Acheron,
Farm for the goodly earth and joyous day
Where no spring ever buds, nor ripening sun
Weighs down the apple trees, nor flowery May
Chequers with chestnut blooms the grassy floor,
Where thrushes never sing, and piping linnets mate no more,
There by a dim and dark Lethæan well
Young Charmides was lying; wearily
He plucked the blossoms from the asphodel,
And with its little rifled treasury
Strewed the dull waters of the dusky stream,
And watched the white stars founder, and the land was like a dream,
When as he gazed into the watery glass
And through his brown hair’s curly tangles scanned
His own wan face, a shadow seemed to pass
Across the mirror, and a little hand
p. 131Stole into his, and warm lips timidly
Brushed his pale cheeks, and breathed their secret forth into a sigh.
Then turned he round his weary eyes and saw,
And ever nigher still their faces came,
And nigher ever did their young mouths draw
Until they seemed one perfect rose of flame,
And longing arms around her neck he cast,
And felt her throbbing bosom, and his breath came hot and fast,
And all his hoarded sweets were hers to kiss,
And all her maidenhood was his to slay,
And limb to limb in long and rapturous bliss
Their passion waxed and waned,—O why essay
To pipe again of love, too venturous reed!
Enough, enough that Eros laughed upon that flowerless mead.
Too venturous poesy, O why essay
To pipe again of passion! fold thy wings
O’er daring Icarus and bid thy lay
Sleep hidden in the lyre’s silent strings
Till thou hast found the old Castalian rill,
Or from the Lesbian waters plucked drowned Sappho’s golden quid!
p. 132Enough, enough that he whose life had been
A fiery pulse of sin, a splendid shame,
Could in the loveless land of Hades glean
One scorching harvest from those fields of flame
Where passion walks with naked unshod feet
And is not wounded,—ah! enough that once their lips could meet
In that wild throb when all existences
Seemed narrowed to one single ecstasy
Which dies through its own sweetness and the stress
Of too much pleasure, ere Persephone
Had bade them serve her by the ebon throne
Of the pale God who in the fields of Enna loosed her zone.
p. 133FLOWERS OF GOLD
p. 135IMPRESSIONS
I
LES SILHOUETTES
THE sea is flecked with bars of grey,
The dull dead wind is out of tune,
And like a withered leaf the moon
Is blown across the stormy bay.
Etched clear upon the pallid sand
Lies the black boat: a sailor boy
Clambers aboard in careless joy
With laughing face and gleaming hand.
And overhead the curlews cry,
Where through the dusky upland grass
The young brown-throated reapers pass,
Like silhouettes against the sky.
p. 136II
LA FUITE DE LA LUNE
TO outer senses there is peace,
A dreamy peace on either hand
Deep silence in the shadowy land,
Deep silence where the shadows cease.
Save for a cry that echoes shrill
From some lone bird disconsolate;
A corncrake calling to its mate;
The answer from the misty hill.
And suddenly the moon withdraws
Her sickle from the lightening skies,
And to her sombre cavern flies,
Wrapped in a veil of yellow gauze.
p. 137THE GRAVE OF KEATS
RID of the world’s injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God’s veil of blue:
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!
O poet-painter of our English Land!
Thy name was writ in water—it shall stand:
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree.
ROME.
p. 138THEOCRITUS
A VILLANELLE
O SINGER of Persephone!
In the dim meadows desolate
Dost thou remember Sicily?
Still through the ivy flits the bee
Where Amaryllis lies in state;
O Singer of Persephone!
Simætha calls on Hecate
And hears the wild dogs at the gate;
Dost thou remember Sicily?
Still by the light and laughing sea
Poor Polypheme bemoans his fate;
O Singer of Persephone!
And still in boyish rivalry
Young Daphnis challenges his mate;
Dost thou remember Sicily?
Slim Lacon keeps a goat for thee,
For thee the jocund shepherds wait;
O Singer of Persephone!
Dost thou remember Sicily?
p. 139IN THE GOLD ROOM
A HARMONY
HER ivory hands on the ivory keys
Strayed in a fitful fantasy,
Like the silver gleam when the poplar trees
Ru
stle their pale-leaves listlessly,
Or the drifting foam of a restless sea
When the waves show their teeth in the flying breeze.
Her gold hair fell on the wall of gold
Like the delicate gossamer tangles spun
On the burnished disk of the marigold,
Or the sunflower turning to meet the sun
When the gloom of the dark blue night is done,
And the spear of the lily is aureoled.
And her sweet red lips on these lips of mine
Burned like the ruby fire set
In the swinging lamp of a crimson shrine,
Or the bleeding wounds of the pomegranate,
Or the heart of the lotus drenched and wet
With the spilt-out blood of the rose-red wine.
p. 140BALLADE DE MARGUERITE
(NORMANDE)
I AM weary of lying within the chase
When the knights are meeting in market-place.
Nay, go not thou to the red-roofed town
Lest the hoofs of the war-horse tread thee down.
But I would not go where the Squires ride,
I would only walk by my Lady’s side.
Alack! and alack! thou art overbold,
A Forester’s son may not eat off gold.
Will she love me the less that my Father is seen
Each Martinmas day in a doublet green?
Perchance she is sewing at tapestrie,
Spindle and loom are not meet for thee.
Ah, if she is working the arras bright
I might ravel the threads by the fire-light.
p. 141Perchance she is hunting of the deer,
How could you follow o’er hill and mere?
Ah, if she is riding with the court,
I might run beside her and wind the morte.
Perchance she is kneeling in St. Denys,
(On her soul may our Lady have gramercy!)
Ah, if she is praying in lone chapelle,
I might swing the censer and ring the bell.
Come in, my son, for you look sae pale,
The father shall fill thee a stoup of ale.
But who are these knights in bright array?
Is it a pageant the rich folks play?
’T is the King of England from over sea,
Who has come unto visit our fair countrie.
But why does the curfew toll sae low?
And why do the mourners walk a-row?
O ’t is Hugh of Amiens my sister’s son
Who is lying stark, for his day is done.
Nay, nay, for I see white lilies clear,
It is no strong man who lies on the bier.
p. 142O ’t is old Dame Jeannette that kept the hall,
I knew she would die at the autumn fall.
Dame Jeannette had not that gold-brown hair,
Old Jeannette was not a maiden fair.
O ’t is none of our kith and none of our kin,
(Her soul may our Lady assoil from sin!)
But I hear the boy’s voice chaunting sweet,
‘Elle est morte, la Marguerite.’
Come in, my son, and lie on the bed,
And let the dead folk bury their dead.
O mother, you know I loved her true:
O mother, hath one grave room for two?
p. 143THE DOLE OF THE KING’S DAUGHTER
(BRETON)
SEVEN stars in the still water,
And seven in the sky;
Seven sins on the King’s daughter,
Deep in her soul to lie.
Red roses are at her feet,
(Roses are red in her red-gold hair)
And O where her bosom and girdle meet
Red roses are hidden there.
Fair is the knight who lieth slain
Amid the rush and reed,
See the lean fishes that are fain
Upon dead men to feed.
Sweet is the page that lieth there,
(Cloth of gold is goodly prey,)
See the black ravens in the air,
Black, O black as the night are they.
p. 144What do they there so stark and dead?
(There is blood upon her hand)
Why are the lilies flecked with red?
(There is blood on the river sand.)
There are two that ride from the south and east,
And two from the north and west,
For the black raven a goodly feast,
For the King’s daughter rest.
There is one man who loves her true,
(Red, O red, is the stain of gore!)
He hath duggen a grave by the darksome yew,
(One grave will do for four.)
No moon in the still heaven,
In the black water none,
The sins on her soul are seven,
The sin upon his is one.
p. 145AMOR INTELLECTUALIS
OFT have we trod the vales of Castaly
And heard sweet notes of sylvan music blown
From antique reeds to common folk unknown:
And often launched our bark upon that sea
Which the nine Muses hold in empery,
And ploughed free furrows through the wave and foam,
Nor spread reluctant sail for more safe home
Till we had freighted well our argosy.
Of which despoilèd treasures these remain,
Sordello’s passion, and the honeyed line
Of young Endymion, lordly Tamburlaine
Driving his pampered jades, and more than these,
The seven-fold vision of the Florentine,
And grave-browed Milton’s solemn harmonies.
p. 146SANTA DECCA
THE Gods are dead: no longer do we bring
To grey-eyed Pallas crowns of olive-leaves!
Demeter’s child no more hath tithe of sheaves,
And in the noon the careless shepherds sing,
For Pan is dead, and all the wantoning
By secret glade and devious haunt is o’er:
Young Hylas seeks the water-springs no more;
Great Pan is dead, and Mary’s son is King.
And yet—perchance in this sea-trancèd isle,
Chewing the bitter fruit of memory,
Some God lies hidden in the asphodel.
Ah Love! if such there be, then it were well
For us to fly his anger: nay, but see,
The leaves are stirring: let us watch awhile.
CORFU.
p. 147A VISION
TWO crownèd Kings, and One that stood alone
With no green weight of laurels round his head,
But with sad eyes as one uncomforted,
And wearied with man’s never-ceasing moan
For sins no bleating victim can atone,
And sweet long lips with tears and kisses fed.
Girt was he in a garment black and red,
And at his feet I marked a broken stone
Which sent up lilies, dove-like, to his knees.
Now at their sight, my heart being lit with flame,
I cried to Beatricé, ‘Who are these?’
And she made answer, knowing well each name,
‘Æschylos first, the second Sophokles,
And last (wide stream of tears!) Euripides.’
p. 148IMPRESSION DE VOYAGE
THE sea was sapphire coloured, and the sky
Burned like a heated opal through the air;
We hoisted sail; the wind was blowing fair
For the blue lands that to the eastward lie.
From the steep prow I marked with quickening eye
Zakynthos, every olive grove and creek,
Ithaca’s cliff, Lycaon’s snowy peak,
And all the flower-strewn hills of Arcady.
The flapping of the sail against the mast,
The ripple of the water on the side,
The ripple of girls’ laughter at the stern,
The only sounds:—when ’gan the West to burn,
And a red sun upon the seas to ride,
I stood upon the soil of Greece at last!
KA
TAKOLO.
p. 149THE GRAVE OF SHELLEY
LIKE burnt-out torches by a sick man’s bed
Gaunt cypress-trees stand round the sun-bleached stone;
Here doth the little night-owl make her throne,
And the slight lizard show his jewelled head.
And, where the chaliced poppies flame to red,
In the still chamber of yon pyramid
Surely some Old-World Sphinx lurks darkly hid,
Grim warder of this pleasaunce of the dead.
Ah! sweet indeed to rest within the womb
Of Earth, great mother of eternal sleep,
But sweeter far for thee a restless tomb
In the blue cavern of an echoing deep,
Or where the tall ships founder in the gloom
Against the rocks of some wave-shattered steep.
ROME.
p. 150BY THE ARNO
THE oleander on the wall
Grows crimson in the dawning light,
Though the grey shadows of the night
Lie yet on Florence like a pall.
The dew is bright upon the hill,
And bright the blossoms overhead,
But ah! the grasshoppers have fled,
The little Attic song is still.
Only the leaves are gently stirred
By the soft breathing of the gale,
And in the almond-scented vale
The lonely nightingale is heard.
The day will make thee silent soon,
O nightingale sing on for love!
While yet upon the shadowy grove
Splinter the arrows of the moon.
Before across the silent lawn
In sea-green vest the morning steals,
And to love’s frightened eyes reveals
The long white fingers of the dawn
p. 151Fast climbing up the eastern sky
To grasp and slay the shuddering night,
All careless of my heart’s delight,
Or if the nightingale should die.
p. 153IMPRESSIONS DE THÉÂTRE
p. 155FABIEN DEI FRANCHI
TO MY FRIEND HENRY IRVING
THE silent room, the heavy creeping shade,
The dead that travel fast, the opening door,
The murdered brother rising through the floor,
The ghost’s white fingers on thy shoulders laid,
And then the lonely duel in the glade,
The broken swords, the stifled scream, the gore,
Thy grand revengeful eyes when all is o’er,—
These things are well enough,—but thou wert made
For more august creation! frenzied Lear
Should at thy bidding wander on the heath
With the shrill fool to mock him, Romeo
For thee should lure his love, and desperate fear
Pluck Richard’s recreant dagger from its sheath—
Thou trumpet set for Shakespeare’s lips to blow!
p. 156PHÈDRE
TO SARAH BERNHARDT
HOW vain and dull this common world must seem
To such a One as thou, who should’st have talked
At Florence with Mirandola, or walked
Through the cool olives of the Academe:
Thou should’st have gathered reeds from a green stream
For Goat-foot Pan’s shrill piping, and have played
With the white girls in that Phæacian glade
Where grave Odysseus wakened from his dream.
Ah! surely once some urn of Attic clay
Held thy wan dust, and thou hast come again
Back to this common world so dull and vain,
For thou wert weary of the sunless day,
The heavy fields of scentless asphodel,
The loveless lips with which men kiss in Hell.
p. 157WRITTEN AT THE LYCEUM THEATRE
I
PORTIA
TO ELLEN TERRY
I MARVEL not Bassanio was so bold
To peril all he had upon the lead,
Or that proud Aragon bent low his head
Or that Morocco’s fiery heart grew cold:
For in that gorgeous dress of beaten gold
Which is more golden than the golden sun
No woman Veronesé looked upon
Was half so fair as thou whom I behold.
Yet fairer when with wisdom as your shield
The sober-suited lawyer’s gown you donned,
And would not let the laws of Venice yield
Antonio’s heart to that accursèd Jew—
O Portia! take my heart: it is thy due:
I think I will not quarrel with the Bond.
p. 158II
QUEEN HENRIETTA MARIA
TO ELLEN TERRY
IN the lone tent, waiting for victory,
She stands with eyes marred by the mists of pain,
Like some wan lily overdrenched with rain:
The clamorous clang of arms, the ensanguined sky,
War’s ruin, and the wreck of chivalry
To her proud soul no common fear can bring:
Bravely she tarrieth for her Lord the King,
Her soul a-flame with passionate ecstasy.
O Hair of Gold! O Crimson Lips! O Face
Made for the luring and the love of man!
With thee I do forget the toil and stress,
The loveless road that knows no resting place,
Time’s straitened pulse, the soul’s dread weariness,
My freedom, and my life republican!
p. 159III
CAMMA
TO ELLEN TERRY
AS one who poring on a Grecian urn
Scans the fair shapes some Attic hand hath made,
God with slim goddess, goodly man with maid,
And for their beauty’s sake is loth to turn
And face the obvious day, must I not yearn
For many a secret moon of indolent bliss,
When in midmost shrine of Artemis
I see thee standing, antique-limbed, and stern?
And yet—methinks I’d rather see thee play
That serpent of old Nile, whose witchery
Made Emperors drunken,—come, great Egypt, shake
Our stage with all thy mimic pageants! Nay,
I am grown sick of unreal passions, make
The world thine Actium, me thine Anthony!
p. 161PANTHEA
p. 163NAY, let us walk from fire unto fire,
From passionate pain to deadlier delight,—
I am too young to live without desire,
Too young art thou to waste this summer night
Asking those idle questions which of old
Man sought of seer and oracle, and no reply was told.
For, sweet, to feel is better than to know,
And wisdom is a childless heritage,
One pulse of passion—youth’s first fiery glow,—
Are worth the hoarded proverbs of the sage:
Vex not thy soul with dead philosophy,
Have we not lips to kiss with, hearts to love and eyes to see!
Dost thou not hear the murmuring nightingale,
Like water bubbling from a silver jar,
So soft she sings the envious moon is pale,
That high in heaven she is hung so far
p. 164She cannot hear that love-enraptured tune,—
Mark how she wreathes each horn with mist, yon late and labouring moon.
White lilies, in whose cups the gold bees dream,
The fallen snow of petals where the breeze
Scatters the chestnut blossom, or the gleam
Of boyish limbs in water,—are not these
Enough for thee, dost thou desire more?
Alas! the Gods will give nought else from their eternal store.
For our high Gods have sick and wearied grown
Of all our endless sins, our vain endeavour
For wasted days of youth to make atone
By pain or prayer or priest, and never, never,
Hearken they now to either good or ill,
But send their rain upon the just and the unjust at will.
They sit at ease, our Gods they sit at ease,
Strewing with leaves of rose their scented wine,
They sleep, they sleep, beneath the rocking trees
Where asphodel and yellow lotus twine,
Mourning the old glad days before they knew
What evil things the heart of man could dream, and dreaming do.
p. 165And far beneath the brazen floor they see
Like swarming flies the crowd of little men,
The bustle of small lives, then wearily
Back to their lotus-haunts they turn again
Kissing each others’ mouths, and mix more deep
The poppy-seeded draught which brings soft purple-lidded sleep.
There all day long the golden-vestured sun,
Their torch-bearer, stands with his torch ablaze,
And, when the gaudy web of noon is spun
By its twelve maidens, through the crimson haze
Fresh from Endymion’s arms comes forth the moon,
And the immortal Gods in toils of mortal passions swoon.
There walks Queen Juno through some dewy mead,
Her grand white feet flecked with the saffron dust
Of wind-stirred lilies, while young Ganymede
Leaps in the hot and amber-foaming must,
His curls all tossed, as when the eagle bare
The frightened boy from Ida through the blue Ionian air.
p. 166There in the green heart of some garden close
Queen Venus with the shepherd at her side,
Her warm soft body like the briar rose
Which would be white yet blushes at its pride,
Laughs low for love, till jealous Salmacis
Peers through the myrtle-leaves and sighs for pain of lonely bliss.
There never does that dreary north-wind blow
Which leaves our English forests bleak and bare,
Nor ever falls the swift white-feathered snow,
Nor ever doth the red-toothed lightning dare
To wake them in the silver-fretted night
When we lie weeping for some sweet sad sin, some dead delight.
Alas! they know the far Lethæan spring,
The violet-hidden waters well they know,
Where one whose feet with tired wandering
Are faint and broken may take heart and go,
And from those dark depths cool and crystalline
Drink, and draw balm, and sleep for sleepless souls, and anodyne.
But we oppress our natures, God or Fate
Is our enemy, we starve and feed
On vain repentance—O we are born too late!
What balm for us in bruisèd poppy seed
p. 167Who crowd into one finite pulse of time
The joy of infinite love and the fierce pain of infinite crime.
O we are wearied of this sense of guilt,
Wearied of pleasure’s paramour despair,
Wearied of every temple we have built,
Wearied of every right, unanswered prayer,
For man is weak; God sleeps: and heaven is high:
One fiery-coloured moment: one great love; and lo! we die.
Ah! but no ferry-man with labouring pole
Nears his black shallop to the flowerless strand,
No little coin of bronze can bring the soul
Over Death’s river to the sunless land,
Victim and wine and vow are all in vain,
The tomb is sealed; the soldiers watch; the dead rise not again.
We are resolved into the supreme air,
We are made one with what we touch and see,
With our heart’s blood each crimson sun is fair,
With our young lives each spring-impassioned tree
Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range
The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all is change.
p. 168With beat of systole and of diastole
One grand great life throbs through earth’s giant heart,
And mighty waves of single Being roll
From nerveless germ to man, for we are part
Of every rock and bird and beast and hill,
One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill.
From lower cells of waking life we pass
To full perfection; thus the world grows old:
We who are godlike now were once a mass
Of quivering purple flecked with bars of gold,
Unsentient or of joy or misery,
And tossed in terrible tangles of some wild and wind-swept sea.
This hot hard flame with which our bodies burn
Will make some meadow blaze with daffodil,
Ay! and those argent breasts of thine will turn
To water-lilies; the brown fields men till
Will be more fruitful for our love to-night,
Nothing is lost in nature, all things live in Death’s despite.
The boy’s first kiss, the hyacinth’s first bell,
The man’s last passion, and the last red spear
That from the lily leaps, the asphodel
Which will not let its blossoms blow for fear
p. 169Of too much beauty, and the timid shame
Of the young bridegroom at his lover’s eyes,—these with the same
One sacrament are consecrate, the earth
Not we alone hath passions hymeneal,
The yellow buttercups that shake for mirth
At daybreak know a pleasure not less real
Than we do, when in some fresh-blossoming wood,
We draw the spring into our hearts, and feel that life is good.
So when men bury us beneath the yew
Thy crimson-stainèd mouth a rose will be,
And thy soft eyes lush bluebells dimmed with dew,
And when the white narcissus wantonly
Kisses the wind its playmate some faint joy
Will thrill our dust, and we will be again fond maid and boy.
And thus without life’s conscious torturing pain
In some sweet flower we will feel the sun,
And from the linnet’s throat will sing again,
And as two gorgeous-mailèd snakes will run
Over our graves, or as two tigers creep
Through the hot jungle where the yellow-eyed huge lions sleep
p. 170And give them battle! How my heart leaps up
To think of that grand living after death
In beast and bird and flower, when this cup,
Being filled too full of spirit, bursts for breath,
And with the pale leaves of some autumn day
The soul earth’s earliest conqueror becomes earth’s last great prey.
O think of it! We shall inform ourselves
Into all sensuous life, the goat-foot Faun,
The Centaur, or the merry bright-eyed Elves
That leave their dancing rings to spite the dawn
Upon the meadows, shall not be more near
Than you and I to nature’s mysteries, for we shall hear
The thrush’s heart beat, and the daisies grow,
And the wan snowdrop sighing for the sun
On sunless days in winter, we shall know
By whom the silver gossamer is spun,
Who paints the diapered fritillaries,
On what wide wings from shivering pine to pine the eagle flies.
Ay! had we never loved at all, who knows
If yonder daffodil had lured the bee
Into its gilded womb, or any rose
Had hung with crimson lamps its little tree!
p. 171Methinks no leaf would ever bud in spring,
But for the lovers’ lips that kiss, the poets’ lips that sing.
Is the light vanished from our golden sun,
Or is this dædal-fashioned earth less fair,
That we are nature’s heritors, and one
With every pulse of life that beats the air?
Rather new suns across the sky shall pass,
New splendour come unto the flower, new glory to the grass.
And we two lovers shall not sit afar,
Critics of nature, but the joyous sea
Shall be our raiment, and the bearded star
Shoot arrows at our pleasure! We shall be
Part of the mighty universal whole,
And through all æons mix and mingle with the Kosmic Soul!
We shall be notes in that great Symphony
Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres,
And all the live World’s throbbing heart shall be
One with our heart; the stealthy creeping years
Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die,
The Universe itself shall be our Immortality.
p. 173THE FOURTH MOVEMENT
p. 175IMPRESSION
LE RÉVEILLON
THE sky is laced with fitful red,
The circling mists and shadows flee,
The dawn is rising from the sea,
Like a white lady from her bed.
And jagged brazen arrows fall
Athwart the feathers of the night,
And a long wave of yellow light
Breaks silently on tower and hall,
And spreading wide across the wold
Wakes into flight some fluttering bird,
And all the chestnut tops are stirred,
And all the branches streaked with gold.
p. 176AT VERONA
HOW steep the stairs within Kings’ houses are
For exile-wearied feet as mine to tread,
And O how salt and bitter is the bread
Which falls from this Hound’s table,—better far
That I had died in the red ways of war,
Or that the gate of Florence bare my head,
Than to live thus, by all things comraded
Which seek the essence of my soul to mar.
‘Curse God and die: what better hope than this?
He hath forgotten thee in all the bliss
Of his gold city, and eternal day’—
Nay peace: behind my prison’s blinded bars
I do possess what none can take away
My love, and all the glory of the stars.
p. 177APOLOGIA
IS it thy will that I should wax and wane,
Barter my cloth of gold for hodden grey,
And at thy pleasure weave that web of pain
Whose brightest threads are each a wasted day?
Is it thy will—Love that I love so well—
That my Soul’s House should be a tortured spot
Wherein, like evil paramours, must dwell
The quenchless flame, the worm that dieth not?
Nay, if it be thy will I shall endure,
And sell ambition at the common mart,
And let dull failure be my vestiture,
And sorrow dig its grave within my heart.
Perchance it may be better so—at least
I have not made my heart a heart of stone,
Nor starved my boyhood of its goodly feast,
Nor walked where Beauty is a thing unknown.
p. 178Many a man hath done so; sought to fence
In straitened bonds the soul that should be free,
Trodden the dusty road of common sense,
While all the forest sang of liberty,
Not marking how the spotted hawk in flight
Passed on wide pinion through the lofty air,
To where some steep untrodden mountain height
Caught the last tresses of the Sun God’s hair.
Or how the little flower he trod upon,
The daisy, that white-feathered shield of gold,
Followed with wistful eyes the wandering sun
Content if once its leaves were aureoled.
But surely it is something to have been
The best belovèd for a little while,
To have walked hand in hand with Love, and seen
His purple wings flit once across thy smile.
Ay! though the gorgèd asp of passion feed
On my boy’s heart, yet have I burst the bars,
Stood face to face with Beauty, known indeed
The Love which moves the Sun and all the stars!
p. 179QUIA MULTUM AMAVI
DEAR Heart, I think the young impassioned priest
When first he takes from out the hidden shrine
His God imprisoned in the Eucharist,
And eats the bread, and drinks the dreadful wine,
Feels not such awful wonder as I felt
When first my smitten eyes beat full on thee,
And all night long before thy feet I knelt
Till thou wert wearied of Idolatry.
Ah! hadst thou liked me less and loved me more,
Through all those summer days of joy and rain,
I had not now been sorrow’s heritor,
Or stood a lackey in the House of Pain.
Yet, though remorse, youth’s white-faced seneschal,
Tread on my heels with all his retinue,
I am most glad I loved thee—think of all
The suns that go to make one speedwell blue!
p. 180SILENTIUM AMORIS
AS often-times the too resplendent sun
Hurries the pallid and reluctant moon
Back to her sombre cave, ere she hath won
A single ballad from the nightingale,
So doth thy Beauty make my lips to fail,
And all my sweetest singing out of tune.
And as at dawn across the level mead
On wings impetuous some wind will come,
And with its too harsh kisses break the reed
Which was its only instrument of song,
So my too stormy passions work me wrong,
And for excess of Love my Love is dumb.
But surely unto Thee mine eyes did show
Why I am silent, and my lute unstrung;
Else it were better we should part, and go,
Thou to some lips of sweeter melody,
And I to nurse the barren memory
Of unkissed kisses, and songs never sung.
p. 181HER VOICE
THE wild bee reels from bough to bough
With his furry coat and his gauzy wing,
Now in a lily-cup, and now
Setting a jacinth bell a-swing,
In his wandering;
Sit closer love: it was here I trow
I made that vow,
Swore that two lives should be like one
As long as the sea-gull loved the sea,
As long as the sunflower sought the sun,—
It shall be, I said, for eternity
’Twixt you and me!
Dear friend, those times are over and done;
Love’s web is spun.
Look upward where the poplar trees
Sway and sway in the summer air,
Here in the valley never a breeze
Scatters the thistledown, but there
Great winds blow fair
From the mighty murmuring mystical seas,
And the wave-lashed leas.
p. 182Look upward where the white gull screams,
What does it see that we do not see?
Is that a star? or the lamp that gleams
On some outward voyaging argosy,—
Ah! can it be
We have lived our lives in a land of dreams!
How sad it seems.
Sweet, there is nothing left to say
But this, that love is never lost,
Keen winter stabs the breasts of May
Whose crimson roses burst his frost,
Ships tempest-tossed
Will find a harbour in some bay,
And so we may.
And there is nothing left to do
But to kiss once again, and part,
Nay, there is nothing we should rue,
I have my beauty,—you your Art,
Nay, do not start,
One world was not enough for two
Like me and you.
p. 183MY VOICE
WITHIN this restless, hurried, modern world
We took our hearts’ full pleasure—You and I,
And now the white sails of our ship are furled,
And spent the lading of our argosy.
Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,
For very weeping is my gladness fled,
Sorrow has paled my young mouth’s vermilion,
And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.
But all this crowded life has been to thee
No more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spell
Of viols, or the music of the sea
That sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.
p. 184TÆDIUM VITÆ
TO stab my youth with desperate knives, to wear
This paltry age’s gaudy livery,
To let each base hand filch my treasury,
To mesh my soul within a woman’s hair,
And be mere Fortune’s lackeyed groom,—I swear
I love it not! these things are less to me
Than the thin foam that frets upon the sea,
Less than the thistledown of summer air
Which hath no seed: better to stand aloof
Far from these slanderous fools who mock my life
Kn
owing me not, better the lowliest roof
Fit for the meanest hind to sojourn in,
Than to go back to that hoarse cave of strife
Where my white soul first kissed the mouth of sin.
p. 185HUMANITAD
p. 187IT is full winter now: the trees are bare,
Save where the cattle huddle from the cold
Beneath the pine, for it doth never wear
The autumn’s gaudy livery whose gold
Her jealous brother pilfers, but is true
To the green doublet; bitter is the wind, as though it blew
From Saturn’s cave; a few thin wisps of hay
Lie on the sharp black hedges, where the wain
Dragged the sweet pillage of a summer’s day
From the low meadows up the narrow lane;
Upon the half-thawed snow the bleating sheep
Press close against the hurdles, and the shivering house-dogs creep
From the shut stable to the frozen stream
And back again disconsolate, and miss
The bawling shepherds and the noisy team;
And overhead in circling listlessness
The cawing rooks whirl round the frosted stack,
Or crowd the dripping boughs; and in the fen the ice-pools crack
p. 188Where the gaunt bittern stalks among the reeds
And flaps his wings, and stretches back his neck,
And hoots to see the moon; across the meads
Limps the poor frightened hare, a little speck;
And a stray seamew with its fretful cry
Flits like a sudden drift of snow against the dull grey sky.
Full winter: and the lusty goodman brings
His load of faggots from the chilly byre,
And stamps his feet upon the hearth, and flings
The sappy billets on the waning fire,
And laughs to see the sudden lightening scare
His children at their play, and yet,—the spring is in the air;
Already the slim crocus stirs the snow,
And soon yon blanchèd fields will bloom again
With nodding cowslips for some lad to mow,
For with the first warm kisses of the rain
The winter’s icy sorrow breaks to tears,
And the brown thrushes mate, and with bright eyes the rabbit peers
From the dark warren where the fir-cones lie,
And treads one snowdrop under foot, and runs
p. 189Over the mossy knoll, and blackbirds fly
Across our path at evening, and the suns
Stay longer with us; ah! how good to see
Grass-girdled spring in all her joy of laughing greenery
Dance through the hedges till the early rose,
(That sweet repentance of the thorny briar!)
Burst from its sheathèd emerald and disclose
The little quivering disk of golden fire
Which the bees know so well, for with it come
Pale boy’s-love, sops-in-wine, and daffadillies all in bloom.
Then up and down the field the sower goes,
While close behind the laughing younker scares
With shrilly whoop the black and thievish crows,
And then the chestnut-tree its glory wears,
And on the grass the creamy blossom falls
In odorous excess, and faint half-whispered madrigals
Steal from the bluebells’ nodding carillons
Each breezy morn, and then white jessamine,
That star of its own heaven, snap-dragons
With lolling crimson tongues, and eglantine
p. 190In dusty velvets clad usurp the bed
And woodland empery, and when the lingering rose hath shed
Red leaf by leaf its folded panoply,
And pansies closed their purple-lidded eyes,
Chrysanthemums from gilded argosy
Unload their gaudy scentless merchandise,
And violets getting overbold withdraw
From their shy nooks, and scarlet berries dot the leafless haw.
O happy field! and O thrice happy tree!
Soon will your queen in daisy-flowered smock
And crown of flower-de-luce trip down the lea,
Soon will the lazy shepherds drive their flock
Back to the pasture by the pool, and soon
Through the green leaves will float the hum of murmuring bees at noon.
Soon will the glade be bright with bellamour,
The flower which wantons love, and those sweet nuns
Vale-lilies in their snowy vestiture
Will tell their beaded pearls, and carnations
With mitred dusky leaves will scent the wind,
And straggling traveller’s-joy each hedge with yellow stars will bind.
p. 191Dear bride of Nature and most bounteous spring,
That canst give increase to the sweet-breath’d kine,
And to the kid its little horns, and bring
The soft and silky blossoms to the vine,
Where is that old nepenthe which of yore
Man got from poppy root and glossy-berried mandragore!
There was a time when any common bird
Could make me sing in unison, a time
When all the strings of boyish life were stirred
To quick response or more melodious rhyme
By every forest idyll;—do I change?
Or rather doth some evil thing through thy fair pleasaunce range?
Nay, nay, thou art the same: ’tis I who seek
To vex with sighs thy simple solitude,
And because fruitless tears bedew my cheek
Would have thee weep with me in brotherhood;
Fool! shall each wronged and restless spirit dare
To taint such wine with the salt poison of own despair!
Thou art the same: ’tis I whose wretched soul
Takes discontent to be its paramour,
And gives its kingdom to the rude control
p. 192Of what should be its servitor,—for sure
Wisdom is somewhere, though the stormy sea
Contain it not, and the huge deep answer ‘’Tis not in me.’
To burn with one clear flame, to stand erect
In natural honour, not to bend the knee
In profitless prostrations whose effect
Is by itself condemned, what alchemy
Can teach me this? what herb Medea brewed
Will bring the unexultant peace of essence not subdued?
The minor chord which ends the harmony,
And for its answering brother waits in vain
Sobbing for incompleted melody,
Dies a swan’s death; but I the heir of pain,
A silent Memnon with blank lidless eyes,
Wait for the light and music of those suns which never rise.
The quenched-out torch, the lonely cypress-gloom,
The little dust stored in the narrow urn,
The gentle ΧΑΙΡΕ of the Attic tomb,—
Were not these better far than to return
To my old fitful restless malady,
Or spend my days within the voiceless cave of misery?
p. 193Nay! for perchance that poppy-crownèd god
Is like the watcher by a sick man’s bed
Who talks of sleep but gives it not; his rod
Hath lost its virtue, and, when all is said,
Death is too rude, too obvious a key
To solve one single secret in a life’s philosophy.
And Love! that noble madness, whose august
And inextinguishable might can slay
The soul with honeyed drugs,—alas! I must
From such sweet ruin play the runaway,
Although too constant memory never can
Forget the archèd splendour of those brows Olympian
Which for a little season made my youth
So soft a swoon of exquisite indolence
That all the chiding of more prudent Truth
Seemed the thin voice of jealousy,—O hence
Thou huntress deadlier than Artemis!
Go seek some other quarry! for of thy too perilous bliss.
My lips have drunk enough,—no more, no more,—
Though Love himself should turn his gilded prow
Back to the troubled waters of this shore
Where I am wrecked and stranded, even now
p. 194The chariot wheels of passion sweep too near,
Hence! Hence! I pass unto a life more barren, more austere.
More barren—ay, those arms will never lean
Down through the trellised vines and draw my soul
In sweet reluctance through the tangled green;
Some other head must wear that aureole,
For I am hers who loves not any man
Whose white and stainless bosom bears the sign Gorgonian.
Let Venus go and chuck her dainty page,
And kiss his mouth, and toss his curly hair,
With net and spear and hunting equipage
Let young Adonis to his tryst repair,
But me her fond and subtle-fashioned spell
Delights no more, though I could win her dearest citadel.
Ay, though I were that laughing shepherd boy
Who from Mount Ida saw the little cloud
Pass over Tenedos and lofty Troy
And knew the coming of the Queen, and bowed
In wonder at her feet, not for the sake
Of a new Helen would I bid her hand the apple take.
p. 195Then rise supreme Athena argent-limbed!
And, if my lips be musicless, inspire
At least my life: was not thy glory hymned
By One who gave to thee his sword and lyre
Like Æschylos at well-fought Marathon,
And died to show that Milton’s England still could bear a son!
And yet I cannot tread the Portico
And live without desire, fear and pain,
Or nurture that wise calm which long ago
The grave Athenian master taught to men,
Self-poised, self-centred, and self-comforted,
To watch the world’s vain phantasies go by with unbowed head.
Alas! that serene brow, those eloquent lips,
Those eyes that mirrored all eternity,
Rest in their own Colonos, an eclipse
Hath come on Wisdom, and Mnemosyne
Is childless; in the night which she had made
For lofty secure flight Athena’s owl itself hath strayed.
Nor much with Science do I care to climb,
Although by strange and subtle witchery
She drew the moon from heaven: the Muse Time
Unrolls her gorgeous-coloured tapestry
p. 196To no less eager eyes; often indeed
In the great epic of Polymnia’s scroll I love to read
How Asia sent her myriad hosts to war
Against a little town, and panoplied
In gilded mail with jewelled scimitar,
White-shielded, purple-crested, rode the Mede
Between the waving poplars and the sea
Which men call Artemisium, till he saw Thermopylæ
Its steep ravine spanned by a narrow wall,
And on the nearer side a little brood
Of careless lions holding festival!
And stood amazèd at such hardihood,
And pitched his tent upon the reedy shore,
And stayed two days to wonder, and then crept at midnight o’er
Some unfrequented height, and coming down
The autumn forests treacherously slew
What Sparta held most dear and was the crown
Of far Eurotas, and passed on, nor knew
How God had staked an evil net for him
In the small bay at Salamis,—and yet, the page grows dim,
p. 197Its cadenced Greek delights me not, I feel
With such a goodly time too out of tune
To love it much: for like the Dial’s wheel
That from its blinded darkness strikes the noon
Yet never sees the sun, so do my eyes
Restlessly follow that which from my cheated vision flies.
O for one grand unselfish simple life
To teach us what is Wisdom! speak ye hills
Of lone Helvellyn, for this note of strife
Shunned your untroubled crags and crystal rills,
Where is that Spirit which living blamelessly
Yet dared to kiss the smitten mouth of his own century!
Speak ye Rydalian laurels! where is he
Whose gentle head ye sheltered, that pure soul
Whose gracious days of uncrowned majesty
Through lowliest conduct touched the lofty goal
Where love and duty mingle! Him at least
The most high Laws were glad of, he had sat at Wisdom’s feast;
p. 198But we are Learning’s changelings, know by rote
The clarion watchword of each Grecian school
And follow none, the flawless sword which smote
The pagan Hydra is an effete tool
Which we ourselves have blunted, what man now
Shall scale the august ancient heights and to old Reverence bow?
One such indeed I saw, but, Ichabod!
Gone is that last dear son of Italy,
Who being man died for the sake of God,
And whose unrisen bones sleep peacefully,
O guard him, guard him well, my Giotto’s tower,
Thou marble lily of the lily town! let not the lour
Of the rude tempest vex his slumber, or
The Arno with its tawny troubled gold
O’er-leap its marge, no mightier conqueror
Clomb the high Capitol in the days of old
When Rome was indeed Rome, for Liberty
Walked like a bride beside him, at which sight pale Mystery
Fled shrieking to her farthest sombrest cell
With an old man who grabbled rusty keys,
Fled shuddering, for that immemorial knell
p. 199With which oblivion buries dynasties
Swept like a wounded eagle on the blast,
As to the holy heart of Rome the great triumvir passed.
He knew the holiest heart and heights of Rome,
He drave the base wolf from the lion’s lair,
And now lies dead by that empyreal dome
Which overtops Valdarno hung in air
By Brunelleschi—O Melpomene
Breathe through thy melancholy pipe thy sweetest threnody!
Breathe through the tragic stops such melodies
That Joy’s self may grow jealous, and the Nine
Forget awhile their discreet emperies,
Mourning for him who on Rome’s lordliest shrine
Lit for men’s lives the light of Marathon,
And bare to sun-forgotten fields the fire of the sun!
O guard him, guard him well, my Giotto’s tower!
Let some young Florentine each eventide
Bring coronals of that enchanted flower
Which the dim woods of Vallombrosa hide,
And deck the marble tomb wherein he lies
Whose soul is as some mighty orb unseen of mortal eyes;
p. 200Some mighty orb whose cycled wanderings,
Being tempest-driven to the farthest rim
Where Chaos meets Creation and the wings
Of the eternal chanting Cherubim
Are pavilioned on Nothing, passed away
Into a moonless void,—and yet, though he is dust and clay,
He is not dead, the immemorial Fates
Forbid it, and the closing shears refrain.
Lift up your heads ye everlasting gates!
Ye argent clarions, sound a loftier strain
For the vile thing he hated lurks within
Its sombre house, alone with God and memories of sin.
Still what avails it that she sought her cave
That murderous mother of red harlotries?
At Munich on the marble architrave
The Grecian boys die smiling, but the seas
Which wash Ægina fret in loneliness
Not mirroring their beauty; so our lives grow colourless
For lack of our ideals, if one star
Flame torch-like in the heavens the unjust
Swift daylight kills it, and no trump of war
Can wake to passionate voice the silent dust
p. 201Which was Mazzini once! rich Niobe
For all her stony sorrows hath her sons; but Italy,
What Easter Day shall make her children rise,
Who were not Gods yet suffered? what sure feet
Shall find their grave-clothes folded? what clear eyes
Shall see them bodily? O it were meet
To roll the stone from off the sepulchre
And kiss the bleeding roses of their wounds, in love of her,
Our Italy! our mother visible!
Most blessed among nations and most sad,
For whose dear sake the young Calabrian fell
That day at Aspromonte and was glad
That in an age when God was bought and sold
One man could die for Liberty! but we, burnt out and cold,
See Honour smitten on the cheek and gyves
Bind the sweet feet of Mercy: Poverty
Creeps through our sunless lanes and with sharp knives
Cuts the warm throats of children stealthily,
And no word said:—O we are wretched men
Unworthy of our great inheritance! where is the pen
p. 202Of austere Milton? where the mighty sword
Which slew its master righteously? the years
Have lost their ancient leader, and no word
Breaks from the voiceless tripod on our ears:
While as a ruined mother in some spasm
Bears a base child and loathes it, so our best enthusiasm
Genders unlawful children, Anarchy
Freedom’s own Judas, the vile prodigal
Licence who steals the gold of Liberty
And yet has nothing, Ignorance the real
One Fraticide since Cain, Envy the asp
That stings itself to anguish, Avarice whose palsied grasp
Is in its extent stiffened, moneyed Greed
For whose dull appetite men waste away
Amid the whirr of wheels and are the seed
Of things which slay their sower, these each day
Sees rife in England, and the gentle feet
Of Beauty tread no more the stones of each unlovely street.
What even Cromwell spared is desecrated
By weed and worm, left to the stormy play
Of wind and beating snow, or renovated
p. 203By more destructful hands: Time’s worst decay
Will wreathe its ruins with some loveliness,
But these new Vandals can but make a rain-proof barrenness.
Where is that Art which bade the Angels sing
Through Lincoln’s lofty choir, till the air
Seems from such marble harmonies to ring
With sweeter song than common lips can dare
To draw from actual reed? ah! where is now
The cunning hand which made the flowering hawthorn branches bow
For Southwell’s arch, and carved the House of One
Who loved the lilies of the field with all
Our dearest English flowers? the same sun
Rises for us: the seasons natural
Weave the same tapestry of green and grey:
The unchanged hills are with us: but that Spirit hath passed away.
And yet perchance it may be better so,
For Tyranny is an incestuous Queen,
Murder her brother is her bedfellow,
And the Plague chambers with her: in obscene
And bloody paths her treacherous feet are set;
Better the empty desert and a soul inviolate!
p. 204For gentle brotherhood, the harmony
Of living in the healthful air, the swift
Clean beauty of strong limbs when men are free
And women chaste, these are the things which lift
Our souls up more than even Agnolo’s
Gaunt blinded Sibyl poring o’er the scroll of human woes,
Or Titian’s little maiden on the stair
White as her own sweet lily and as tall,
Or Mona Lisa smiling through her hair,—
Ah! somehow life is bigger after all
Than any painted angel, could we see
The God that is within us! The old Greek serenity
Which curbs the passion of that level line
Of marble youths, who with untroubled eyes
And chastened limbs ride round Athena’s shrine
And mirror her divine economies,
And balanced symmetry of what in man
Would else wage ceaseless warfare,—this at least within the span
Between our mother’s kisses and the grave
Might so inform our lives, that we could win
Such mighty empires that from her cave
Temptation would grow hoarse, and pallid Sin
p. 205Would walk ashamed of his adulteries,
And Passion creep from out the House of Lust with startled eyes.
To make the body and the spirit one
With all right things, till no thing live in vain
From morn to noon, but in sweet unison
With every pulse of flesh and throb of brain
The soul in flawless essence high enthroned,
Against all outer vain attack invincibly bastioned,
Mark with serene impartiality
The strife of things, and yet be comforted,
Kn
owing that by the chain causality
All separate existences are wed
Into one supreme whole, whose utterance
Is joy, or holier praise! ah! surely this were governance
Of Life in most august omnipresence,
Through which the rational intellect would find
In passion its expression, and mere sense,
Ignoble else, lend fire to the mind,
And being joined with it in harmony
More mystical than that which binds the stars planetary,
p. 206Strike from their several tones one octave chord
Whose cadence being measureless would fly
Through all the circling spheres, then to its Lord
Return refreshed with its new empery
And more exultant power,—this indeed
Could we but reach it were to find the last, the perfect creed.
Ah! it was easy when the world was young
To keep one’s life free and inviolate,
From our sad lips another song is rung,
By our own hands our heads are desecrate,
Wanderers in drear exile, and dispossessed
Of what should be our own, we can but feed on wild unrest.
Somehow the grace, the bloom of things has flown,
And of all men we are most wretched who
Must live each other’s lives and not our own
For very pity’s sake and then undo
All that we lived for—it was otherwise
When soul and body seemed to blend in mystic symphonies.
But we have left those gentle haunts to pass
With weary feet to the new Calvary,
Where we behold, as one who in a glass
p. 207Sees his own face, self-slain Humanity,
And in the dumb reproach of that sad gaze
Learn what an awful phantom the red hand of man can raise.
O smitten mouth! O forehead crowned with thorn!
O chalice of all common miseries!
Thou for our sakes that loved thee not hast borne
An agony of endless centuries,
And we were vain and ignorant nor knew
That when we stabbed thy heart it was our own real hearts we slew.
Being ourselves the sowers and the seeds,
The night that covers and the lights that fade,
The spear that pierces and the side that bleeds,
The lips betraying and the life betrayed;
The deep hath calm: the moon hath rest: but we
Lords of the natural world are yet our own dread enemy.
Is this the end of all that primal force
Which, in its changes being still the same,
From eyeless Chaos cleft its upward course,
p. 208Through ravenous seas and whirling rocks and flame,
Till the suns met in heaven and began
Their cycles, and the morning stars sang, and the Word was Man!
Nay, nay, we are but crucified, and though
The bloody sweat falls from our brows like rain
Loosen the nails—we shall come down I know,
Staunch the red wounds—we shall be whole again,
No need have we of hyssop-laden rod,
That which is purely human, that is godlike, that is God.
p. 209FLOWER OF LOVE
p. 211ΓΛΥΚΥΠΙΚΡΟΣ ΕΡΩΣ
SWEET, I blame you not, for mine the fault
was, had I not been made of common clay
I had climbed the higher heights unclimbed
yet, seen the fuller air, the larger day.
From the wildness of my wasted passion I had
struck a better, clearer song,
Lit some lighter light of freer freedom, battled
with some Hydra-headed wrong.
Had my lips been smitten into music by the
kisses that but made them bleed,
You had walked with Bice and the angels on
that verdant and enamelled mead.
I had trod the road which Dante treading saw
the suns of seven circles shine,
Ay! perchance had seen the heavens opening,
as they opened to the Florentine.
And the mighty nations would have crowned
me, who am crownless now and without name,
p. 212And some orient dawn had found me kneeling
on the threshold of the House of Fame.
I had sat within that marble circle where the
oldest bard is as the young,
And the pipe is ever dropping honey, and the
lyre’s strings are ever strung.
Keats had lifted up his hymeneal curls from out
the poppy-seeded wine,
With ambrosial mouth had kissed my forehead,
clasped the hand of noble love in mine.
And at springtide, when the apple-blossoms brush
the burnished bosom of the dove,
Two young lovers lying in an orchard would
have read the story of our love.
Would have read the legend of my passion,
kn
own the bitter secret of my heart,
Kissed as we have kissed, but never parted as
we two are fated now to part.
For the crimson flower of our life is eaten by
the cankerworm of truth,
And no hand can gather up the fallen withered
petals of the rose of youth.
p. 213Yet I am not sorry that I loved you—ah! what
else had I a boy to do,—
For the hungry teeth of time devour, and the
silent-footed years pursue.
Ru
dderless, we drift athwart a tempest, and
when once the storm of youth is past,
Without lyre, without lute or chorus, Death
the silent pilot comes at last.
And within the grave there is no pleasure, for
the blindworm battens on the root,
And Desire shudders into ashes, and the tree of
Passion bears no fruit.
Ah! what else had I to do but love you, God’s
own mother was less dear to me,
And less dear the Cytheræan rising like an
argent lily from the sea.
I have made my choice, have lived my poems,
and, though youth is gone in wasted days,
I have found the lover’s crown of myrtle better
than the poet’s crown of bays.
p. 215UNCOLLECTED POEMS
p. 217FROM SPRING DAYS TO WINTER
(FOR MUSIC)
IN the glad springtime when leaves were green,
O merrily the throstle sings!
I sought, amid the tangled sheen,
Love whom mine eyes had never seen,
O the glad dove has golden wings!
Between the blossoms red and white,
O merrily the throstle sings!
My love first came into my sight,
O perfect vision of delight,
O the glad dove has golden wings!
The yellow apples glowed like fire,
O merrily the throstle sings!
O Love too great for lip or lyre,
Blown rose of love and of desire,
O the glad dove has golden wings!
p. 218But now with snow the tree is grey,
Ah, sadly now the throstle sings!
My love is dead: ah! well-a-day,
See at her silent feet I lay
A dove with broken wings!
Ah, Love! ah, Love! that thou wert slain—
Fond Dove, fond Dove return again!
p. 219TRISTITÆ
Αἴλινον, αἴλινον εἰπέ, τὸ δ’ εὖ νικάτω
O WELL for him who lives at ease
With garnered gold in wide domain,
Nor heeds the splashing of the rain,
The crashing down of forest trees.
O well for him who ne’er hath known
The travail of the hungry years,
A father grey with grief and tears,
A mother weeping all alone.
But well for him whose foot hath trod
The weary road of toil and strife,
Yet from the sorrows of his life.
Builds ladders to be nearer God.
p. 220THE TRUE KNOWLEDGE
. . . ἀναyκαίως δ’ ἔχει
Βίον θερίζειν ὥστε κάρπιμον στάχυν,
καὶ τὸν yὲν εἶναι τὸν δὲ yή.
THOU knowest all; I seek in vain
What lands to till or sow with seed—
The land is black with briar and weed,
Nor cares for falling tears or rain.
Thou knowest all; I sit and wait
With blinded eyes and hands that fail,
Till the last lifting of the veil
And the first opening of the gate.
Thou knowest all; I cannot see.
I trust I shall not live in vain,
I know that we shall meet again
In some divine eternity.
p. 221IMPRESSIONS
I
LE JARDIN
THE lily’s withered chalice falls
Around its rod of dusty gold,
And from the beech-trees on the wold
The last wood-pigeon coos and calls.
The gaudy leonine sunflower
Hangs black and barren on its stalk,
And down the windy garden walk
The dead leaves scatter,—hour by hour.
Pale privet-petals white as milk
Are blown into a snowy mass:
The roses lie upon the grass
Like little shreds of crimson silk.
p. 222II
LA MER
A WHITE mist drifts across the shrouds,
A wild moon in this wintry sky
Gleams like an angry lion’s eye
Out of a mane of tawny clouds.
The muffled steersman at the wheel
Is but a shadow in the gloom;—
And in the throbbing engine-room
Leap the long rods of polished steel.
The shattered storm has left its trace
Upon this huge and heaving dome,
For the thin threads of yellow foam
Float on the waves like ravelled lace.
p. 223UNDER THE BALCONY
O BEAUTIFUL star with the crimson mouth!
O moon with the brows of gold!
Rise up, rise up, from the odorous south!
And light for my love her way,
Lest her little feet should stray
On the windy hill and the wold!
O beautiful star with the crimson mouth!
O moon with the brows of gold!
O ship that shakes on the desolate sea!
O ship with the wet, white sail!
Put in, put in, to the port to me!
For my love and I would go
To the land where the daffodils blow
In the heart of a violet dale!
O ship that shakes on the desolate sea!
O ship with the wet, white sail!
O rapturous bird with the low, sweet note!
O bird that sits on the spray!
Sing on, sing on, from your soft brown throat!
And my love in her little bed
Will listen, and lift her head
p. 224From the pillow, and come my way!
O rapturous bird with the low, sweet note!
O bird that sits on the spray!
O blossom that hangs in the tremulous air!
O blossom with lips of snow!
Come down, come down, for my love to wear!
You will die on her head in a crown,
You will die in a fold of her gown,
To her little light heart you will go!
O blossom that hangs in the tremulous air!
O blossom with lips of snow!
p. 225THE HARLOT’S HOUSE
WE caught the tread of dancing feet,
We loitered down the moonlit street,
And stopped beneath the harlot’s house.
Inside, above the din and fray,
We heard the loud musicians play
The ‘Treues Liebes Herz’ of Strauss.
Like strange mechanical grotesques,
Making fantastic arabesques,
The shadows raced across the blind.
We watched the ghostly dancers spin
To sound of horn and violin,
Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.
Like wire-pulled automatons,
Slim silhouetted skeletons
Went sidling through the slow quadrille,
Then took each other by the hand,
And danced a stately saraband;
Their laughter echoed thin and shrill.
p. 226Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed
A phantom lover to her breast,
Sometimes they seemed to try to sing.
Sometimes a horrible marionette
Came out, and smoked its cigarette
Upon the steps like a live thing.
Then, turning to my love, I said,
‘The dead are dancing with the dead,
The dust is whirling with the dust.’
But she—she heard the violin,
And left my side, and entered in:
Love passed into the house of lust.
Then suddenly the tune went false,
The dancers wearied of the waltz,
The shadows ceased to wheel and whirl.
And down the long and silent street,
The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet,
Crept like a frightened girl.
p. 227LE JARDIN DES TUILERIES
THIS winter air is keen and cold,
And keen and cold this winter sun,
But round my chair the children run
Like little things of dancing gold.
Sometimes about the painted kiosk
The mimic soldiers strut and stride,
Sometimes the blue-eyed brigands hide
In the bleak tangles of the bosk.
And sometimes, while the old nurse cons
Her book, they steal across the square,
And launch their paper navies where
Huge Triton writhes in greenish bronze.
And now in mimic flight they flee,
And now they rush, a boisterous band—
And, tiny hand on tiny hand,
Climb up the black and leafless tree.
Ah! cruel tree! if I were you,
And children climbed me, for their sake
Though it be winter I would break
Into spring blossoms white and blue!
p. 228ON THE SALE BY AUCTION OF KEATS’ LOVE LETTERS
THESE are the letters which Endymion wrote
To one he loved in secret, and apart.
And now the brawlers of the auction mart
Bargain and bid for each poor blotted note,
Ay! for each separate pulse of passion quote
The merchant’s price. I think they love not art
Who break the crystal of a poet’s heart
That small and sickly eyes may glare and gloat.
Is it not said that many years ago,
In a far Eastern town, some soldiers ran
With torches through the midnight, and began
To wrangle for mean raiment, and to throw
Dice for the garments of a wretched man,
Not knowing the God’s wonder, or His woe?
p. 229THE NEW REMORSE
THE sin was mine; I did not understand.
So now is music prisoned in her cave,
Save where some ebbing desultory wave
Frets with its restless whirls this meagre strand.
And in the withered hollow of this land
Hath Summer dug herself so deep a grave,
That hardly can the leaden willow crave
One silver blossom from keen Winter’s hand.
But who is this who cometh by the shore?
(Nay, love, look up and wonder!) Who is this
Who cometh in dyed garments from the South?
It is thy new-found Lord, and he shall kiss
The yet unravished roses of thy mouth,
And I shall weep and worship, as before.
p. 230FANTAISIES DÉCORATIVES
I
LE PANNEAU
UNDER the rose-tree’s dancing shade
There stands a little ivory girl,
Pulling the leaves of pink and pearl
With pale green nails of polished jade.
The red leaves fall upon the mould,
The white leaves flutter, one by one,
Down to a blue bowl where the sun,
Like a great dragon, writhes in gold.
The white leaves float upon the air,
The red leaves flutter idly down,
Some fall upon her yellow gown,
And some upon her raven hair.
She takes an amber lute and sings,
And as she sings a silver crane
Begins his scarlet neck to strain,
And flap his burnished metal wings.
p. 231She takes a lute of amber bright,
And from the thicket where he lies
Her lover, with his almond eyes,
Watches her movements in delight.
And now she gives a cry of fear,
And tiny tears begin to start:
A thorn has wounded with its dart
The pink-veined sea-shell of her ear.
And now she laughs a merry note:
There has fallen a petal of the rose
Just where the yellow satin shows
The blue-veined flower of her throat.
With pale green nails of polished jade,
Pulling the leaves of pink and pearl,
There stands a little ivory girl
Under the rose-tree’s dancing shade.
p. 232II
LES BALLONS
AGAINST these turbid turquoise skies
The light and luminous balloons
Dip and drift like satin moons,
Drift like silken butterflies;
Reel with every windy gust,
Rise and reel like dancing girls,
Float like strange transparent pearls,
Fall and float like silver dust.
Now to the low leaves they cling,
Each with coy fantastic pose,
Each a petal of a rose
Straining at a gossamer string.
Then to the tall trees they climb,
Like thin globes of amethyst,
Wandering opals keeping tryst
With the rubies of the lime.
p. 233CANZONET
I HAVE no store
Of gryphon-guarded gold;
Now, as before,
Bare is the shepherd’s fold.
Rub
ies nor pearls
Have I to gem thy throat;
Yet woodland girls
Have loved the shepherd’s note.
Then pluck a reed
And bid me sing to thee,
For I would feed
Thine ears with melody,
Who art more fair
Than fairest fleur-de-lys,
More sweet and rare
Than sweetest ambergris.
What dost thou fear?
Young Hyacinth is slain,
Pan is not here,
And will not come again.
p. 234No hornèd Faun
Treads down the yellow leas,
No God at dawn
Steals through the olive trees.
Hylas is dead,
Nor will he e’er divine
Those little red
Rose-petalled lips of thine.
On the high hill
No ivory dryads play,
Silver and still
Sinks the sad autumn day.
p. 235SYMPHONY IN YELLOW
AN omnibus across the bridge
Crawls like a yellow butterfly,
And, here and there, a passer-by
Shows like a little restless midge.
Big barges full of yellow hay
Are moored against the shadowy wharf,
And, like a yellow silken scarf,
The thick fog hangs along the quay.
The yellow leaves begin to fade
And flutter from the Temple elms,
And at my feet the pale green Thames
Lies like a rod of rippled jade.
p. 236IN THE FOREST
OUT of the mid-wood’s twilight
Into the meadow’s dawn,
Ivory limbed and brown-eyed,
Flashes my Faun!
He skips through the copses singing,
And his shadow dances along,
And I know not which I should follow,
Shadow or song!
O Hunter, snare me his shadow!
O Nightingale, catch me his strain!
Else moonstruck with music and madness
I track him in vain!
p. 237TO MY WIFE
WITH A COPY OF MY POEMS
I CAN write no stately proem
As a prelude to my lay;
From a poet to a poem
I would dare to say.
For if of these fallen petals
One to you seem fair,
Love will waft it till it settles
On your hair.
And when wind and winter harden
All the loveless land,
It will whisper of the garden,
You will understand.
p. 238WITH A COPY OF ‘A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES’
GO, little book,
To him who, on a lute with horns of pearl,
Sang of the white feet of the Golden Girl:
And bid him look
Into thy pages: it may hap that he
May find that golden maidens dance through thee.
p. 239ROSES AND RUE
(To L. L.)
COULD we dig up this long-buried treasure,
Were it worth the pleasure,
We never could learn love’s song,
We are parted too long.
Could the passionate past that is fled
Call back its dead,
Could we live it all over again,
Were it worth the pain!
I remember we used to meet
By an ivied seat,
And you warbled each pretty word
With the air of a bird;
And your voice had a quaver in it,
Just like a linnet,
And shook, as the blackbird’s throat
With its last big note;
And your eyes, they were green and grey
Like an April day,
But lit into amethyst
When I stooped and kissed;
p. 240And your mouth, it would never smile
For a long, long while,
Then it rippled all over with laughter
Five minutes after.
You were always afraid of a shower,
Just like a flower:
I remember you started and ran
When the rain began.
I remember I never could catch you,
For no one could match you,
You had wonderful, luminous, fleet,
Little wings to your feet.
I remember your hair—did I tie it?
For it always ran riot—
Like a tangled sunbeam of gold:
These things are old.
I remember so well the room,
And the lilac bloom
That beat at the dripping pane
In the warm June rain;
And the colour of your gown,
It was amber-brown,
And two yellow satin bows
From your shoulders rose.
p. 241And the handkerchief of French lace
Which you held to your face—
Had a small tear left a stain?
Or was it the rain?
On your hand as it waved adieu
There were veins of blue;
In your voice as it said good-bye
Was a petulant cry,
‘You have only wasted your life.’
(Ah, that was the knife!)
When I rushed through the garden gate
It was all too late.
Could we live it over again,
Were it worth the pain,
Could the passionate past that is fled
Call back its dead!
Well, if my heart must break,
Dear love, for your sake,
It will break in music, I know,
Poets’ hearts break so.
But strange that I was not told
That the brain can hold
In a tiny ivory cell
God’s heaven and hell.
p. 242DÉSESPOIR
THE seasons send their ruin as they go,
For in the spring the narciss shows its head
Nor withers till the rose has flamed to red,
And in the autumn purple violets blow,
And the slim crocus stirs the winter snow;
Wherefore yon leafless trees will bloom again
And this grey land grow green with summer rain
And send up cowslips for some boy to mow.
But what of life whose bitter hungry sea
Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night
Covers the days which never more return?
Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn
We lose too soon, and only find delight
In withered husks of some dead memory.
p. 243PAN
DOUBLE VILLANELLE
I
O goat-foot God of Arcady!
This modern world is grey and old,
And what remains to us of thee?
No more the shepherd lads in glee
Throw apples at thy wattled fold,
O goat-foot God of Arcady!
Nor through the laurels can one see
Thy soft brown limbs, thy beard of gold,
And what remains to us of thee?
And dull and dead our Thames would be,
For here the winds are chill and cold,
O goat-foot God of Arcady!
Then keep the tomb of Helice,
Thine olive-woods, thy vine-clad wold,
And what remains to us of thee?
Though many an unsung elegy
Sleeps in the reeds our rivers hold,
O goat-foot God of Arcady!
Ah, what remains to us of thee?
p. 244II
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady,
Thy satyrs and their wanton play,
This modern world hath need of thee.
No nymph or Faun indeed have we,
For Faun and nymph are old and grey,
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady!
This is the land where liberty
Lit grave-browed Milton on his way,
This modern world hath need of thee!
A land of ancient chivalry
Where gentle Sidney saw the day,
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady!
This fierce sea-lion of the sea,
This England lacks some stronger lay,
This modern world hath need of thee!
Then blow some trumpet loud and free,
And give thine oaten pipe away,
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady!
This modern world hath need of thee!
p. 245THE SPHINX
TO
MARCEL SCHWOB
IN FRIENDSHIP
AND
IN ADMIRATION
p. 247THE SPHINX
IN a dim corner of my room for longer than my fancy thinks
A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me through the shifting gloom.
Inviolate and immobile she does not rise she does not stir
For silver moons are naught to her and naught to her the suns that reel.
Red follows grey across the air, the waves of moonlight ebb and flow
But with the Dawn she does not go and in the night-time she is there.
Dawn follows Dawn and Nights grow old and all the while this curious cat
Lies couching on the Chinese mat with eyes of satin rimmed with gold.
Upon the mat she lies and leers and on the tawny throat of her
Flutters the soft and silky fur or ripples to her pointed ears.
p. 248Come forth, my lovely seneschal! so somnolent, so statuesque!
Come forth you exquisite grotesque! half woman and half animal!
Come forth my lovely languorous Sphinx! and put your head upon my knee!
And let me stroke your throat and see your body spotted like the Lynx!
And let me touch those curving claws of yellow ivory and grasp
The tail that like a monstrous Asp coils round your heavy velvet paws!
p. 249A THOUSAND weary centuries are thine while I have hardly seen
Some twenty summers cast their green for Autumn’s gaudy liveries.
But you can read the Hieroglyphs on the great sandstone obelisks,
And you have talked with Basilisks, and you have looked on Hippogriffs.
O tell me, were you standing by when Isis to Osiris knelt?
And did you watch the Egyptian melt her union for Antony
And drink the jewel-drunken wine and bend her head in mimic awe
To see the huge proconsul draw the salted tunny from the brine?
p. 250And did you mark the Cyprian kiss white Adon on his catafalque?
And did you follow Amenalk, the God of Heliopolis?
And did you talk with Thoth, and did you hear the moon-horned Io weep?
And know the painted kings who sleep beneath the wedge-shaped Pyramid?
p. 251LIFT up your large black satin eyes which are like cushions where one sinks!
Fawn at my feet, fantastic Sphinx! and sing me all your memories!
Sing to me of the Jewish maid who wandered with the Holy Child,
And how you led them through the wild, and how they slept beneath your shade.
Sing to me of that odorous green eve when crouching by the marge
You heard from Adrian’s gilded barge the laughter of Antinous
And lapped the stream and fed your drouth and watched with hot and hungry stare
The ivory body of that rare young slave with his pomegranate mouth!
Sing to me of the Labyrinth in which the twi-formed bull was stalled!
Sing to me of the night you crawled across the temple’s granite plinth
p. 252When through the purple corridors the screaming scarlet Ibis flew
In terror, and a horrid dew dripped from the moaning Mandragores,
And the great torpid crocodile within the tank shed slimy tears,
And tare the jewels from his ears and staggered back into the Nile,
And the priests cursed you with shrill psalms as in your claws you seized their snake
And crept away with it to slake your passion by the shuddering palms.
p. 253WHO were your lovers? who were they who wrestled for you in the dust?
Which was the vessel of your Lust? What Leman had you, every day?
Did giant Lizards come and crouch before you on the reedy banks?
Did Gryphons with great metal flanks leap on you in your trampled couch?
Did monstrous hippopotami come sidling toward you in the mist?
Did gilt-scaled dragons writhe and twist with passion as you passed them by?
And from the brick-built Lycian tomb what horrible Chimera came
With fearful heads and fearful flame to breed new wonders from your womb?
p. 254OR had you shameful secret quests and did you harry to your home
Some Nereid coiled in amber foam with curious rock crystal breasts?
Or did you treading through the froth call to the brown Sidonian
For tidings of Leviathan, Leviathan or Behemoth?
Or did you when the sun was set climb up the cactus-covered slope
To meet your swarthy Ethiop whose body was of polished jet?
Or did you while the earthen skiffs dropped down the grey Nilotic flats
At twilight and the flickering bats flew round the temple’s triple glyphs
Steal to the border of the bar and swim across the silent lake
And slink into the vault and make the Pyramid your lúpanar
p. 255Till from each black sarcophagus rose up the painted swathèd dead?
Or did you lure unto your bed the ivory-horned Tragelaphos?
Or did you love the god of flies who plagued the Hebrews and was splashed
With wine unto the waist? or Pasht, who had green beryls for her eyes?
Or that young god, the Tyrian, who was more amorous than the dove
Of Ashtaroth? or did you love the god of the Assyrian
Whose wings, like strange transparent talc, rose high above his hawk-faced head,
Painted with silver and with red and ribbed with rods of Oreichalch?
Or did huge Apis from his car leap down and lay before your feet
Big blossoms of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured nenuphar?
p. 256HOW subtle-secret is your smile! Did you love none then? Nay, I know
Great Ammon was your bedfellow! He lay with you beside the Nile!
The river-horses in the slime trumpeted when they saw him come
Odorous with Syrian galbanum and smeared with spikenard and with thyme.
He came along the river bank like some tall galley argent-sailed,
He strode across the waters, mailed in beauty, and the waters sank.
He strode across the desert sand: he reached the valley where you lay:
He waited till the dawn of day: then touched your black breasts with his hand.
You kissed his mouth with mouths of flame: you made the hornèd god your own:
You stood behind him on his throne: you called him by his secret name.
p. 257You whispered monstrous oracles into the caverns of his ears:
With blood of goats and blood of steers you taught him monstrous miracles.
White Ammon was your bedfellow! Your chamber was the steaming Nile!
And with your curved archaic smile you watched his passion come and go.
p. 258WITH Syrian oils his brows were bright: and wide-spread as a tent at noon
His marble limbs made pale the moon and lent the day a larger light.
His long hair was nine cubits’ span and coloured like that yellow gem
Which hidden in their garment’s hem the merchants bring from Kurdistan.
His face was as the must that lies upon a vat of new-made wine:
The seas could not insapphirine the perfect azure of his eyes.
His thick soft throat was white as milk and threaded with thin veins of blue:
And curious pearls like frozen dew were broidered on his flowing silk.
p. 259ON pearl and porphyry pedestalled he was too bright to look upon:
For on his ivory breast there shone the wondrous ocean-emerald,
That mystic moonlit jewel which some diver of the Colchian caves
Had found beneath the blackening waves and carried to the Colchian witch.
Before his gilded galiot ran naked vine-wreathed corybants,
And lines of swaying elephants knelt down to draw his chariot,
And lines of swarthy Nubians bare up his litter as he rode
Down the great granite-paven road between the nodding peacock-fans.
The merchants brought him steatite from Sidon in their painted ships:
The meanest cup that touched his lips was fashioned from a chrysolite.
p. 260The merchants brought him cedar chests of rich apparel bound with cords:
His train was borne by Memphian lords: young kings were glad to be his guests.
Ten hundred shaven priests did bow to Ammon’s altar day and night,
Ten hundred lamps did wave their light through Ammon’s carven house—and now
Foul snake and speckled adder with their young ones crawl from stone to stone
For ruined is the house and prone the great rose-marble monolith!
Wild ass or trotting jackal comes and couches in the mouldering gates:
Wild satyrs call unto their mates across the fallen fluted drums.
And on the summit of the pile the blue-faced ape of Horus sits
And gibbers while the fig-tree splits the pillars of the peristyle
p. 261THE god is scattered here and there: deep hidden in the windy sand
I saw his giant granite hand still clenched in impotent despair.
And many a wandering caravan of stately negroes silken-shawled,
Crossing the desert, halts appalled before the neck that none can span.
And many a bearded Bedouin draws back his yellow-striped burnous
To gaze upon the Titan thews of him who was thy paladin.
p. 262GO, seek his fragments on the moor and wash them in the evening dew,
And from their pieces make anew thy mutilated paramour!
Go, seek them where they lie alone and from their broken pieces make
Thy bruisèd bedfellow! And wake mad passions in the senseless stone!
Charm his dull ear with Syrian hymns! he loved your body! oh, be kind,
Pour spikenard on his hair, and wind soft rolls of linen round his limbs!
Wind round his head the figured coins! stain with red fruits those pallid lips!
Weave purple for his shrunken hips! and purple for his barren loins!
p. 263AWAY to Egypt! Have no fear. Only one God has ever died.
Only one God has let His side be wounded by a soldier’s spear.
But these, thy lovers, are not dead. Still by the hundred-cubit gate
Dog-faced Anubis sits in state with lotus-lilies for thy head.
Still from his chair of porphyry gaunt Memnon strains his lidless eyes
Across the empty land, and cries each yellow morning unto thee.
And Nilus with his broken horn lies in his black and oozy bed
And till thy coming will not spread his waters on the withering corn.
Your lovers are not dead, I know. They will rise up and hear your voice
And clash their cymbals and rejoice and run to kiss your mouth! And so,
p. 264Set wings upon your argosies! Set horses to your ebon car!
Back to your Nile! Or if you are grown sick of dead divinities
Follow some roving lion’s spoor across the copper-coloured plain,
Reach out and hale him by the mane and bid him be your paramour!
Couch by his side upon the grass and set your white teeth in his throat
And when you hear his dying note lash your long flanks of polished brass
And take a tiger for your mate, whose amber sides are flecked with black,
And ride upon his gilded back in triumph through the Theban gate,
And toy with him in amorous jests, and when he turns, and snarls, and gnaws,
O smite him with your jasper claws! and bruise him with your agate breasts!
p. 265WHY are you tarrying? Get hence! I weary of your sullen ways,
I weary of your steadfast gaze, your somnolent magnificence.
Your horrible and heavy breath makes the light flicker in the lamp,
And on my brow I feel the damp and dreadful dews of night and death.
Your eyes are like fantastic moons that shiver in some stagnant lake,
Your tongue is like a scarlet snake that dances to fantastic tunes,
Your pulse makes poisonous melodies, and your black throat is like the hole
Left by some torch or burning coal on Saracenic tapestries.
Away! The sulphur-coloured stars are hurrying through the Western gate!
Away! Or it may be too late to climb their silent silver cars!
p. 266See, the dawn shivers round the grey gilt-dialled towers, and the rain
Streams down each diamonded pane and blurs with tears the wannish day.
What snake-tressed fury fresh from Hell, with uncouth gestures and unclean,
Stole from the poppy-drowsy queen and led you to a student’s cell?
p. 267WHAT songless tongueless ghost of sin crept through the curtains of the night,
And saw my taper burning bright, and knocked, and bade you enter in?
Are there not others more accursed, whiter with leprosies than I?
Are Abana and Pharphar dry that you come here to slake your thirst?
Get hence, you loathsome mystery! Hideous animal, get hence!
You wake in me each bestial sense, you make me what I would not be.
You make my creed a barren sham, you wake foul dreams of sensual life,
And Atys with his blood-stained knife were better than the thing I am.
False Sphinx! False Sphinx! By reedy Styx old Charon, leaning on his oar,
Waits for my coin. Go thou before, and leave me to my crucifix,
p. 268Whose pallid burden, sick with pain, watches the world with wearied eyes,
And weeps for every soul that dies, and weeps for every soul in vain.
p. 269THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL
p. 271IN MEMORIAM
C. T. W.
SOMETIME TROOPER OF THE ROYAL HORSE GUARDS
OBIIT H.M. PRISON, READING, BERKSHIRE
JULY 7, 1896
p. 273THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL
I
HE did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.
He walked amongst the Trial Men
In a suit of shabby grey;
A cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.
p. 274I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
‘That fellow’s got to swing.’
Dear Christ! the very prison walls
Suddenly seemed to reel,
And the sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel;
And, though I was a soul in pain,
My pain I could not feel.
I only knew what hunted thought
Quickened his step, and why
He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
p. 275Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.
Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.
He does not die a death of shame
On a day of dark disgrace,
Nor have a noose about his neck,
Nor a cloth upon his face,
Nor drop feet foremost through the floor
Into an empty space.
He does not sit with silent men
Who watch him night and day;
Who watch him when he tries to weep,
And when he tries to pray;
Who watch him lest himself should rob
The prison of its prey.
p. 276He does not wake at dawn to see
Dread figures throng his room,
The shivering Chaplain robed in white,
The Sheriff stern with gloom,
And the Governor all in shiny black,
With the yellow face of Doom.
He does not rise in piteous haste
To put on convict-clothes,
While some coarse-mouthed Doctor gloats, and notes
Each new and nerve-twitched pose,
Fingering a watch whose little ticks
Are like horrible hammer-blows.
He does not know that sickening thirst
That sands one’s throat, before
The hangman with his gardener’s gloves
Slips through the padded door,
And binds one with three leathern thongs,
That the throat may thirst no more.
He does not bend his head to hear
The Burial Office read,
Nor, while the terror of his soul
Tells him he is not dead,
Cross his own coffin, as he moves
Into the hideous shed.
p. 277He does not stare upon the air
Through a little roof of glass:
He does not pray with lips of clay
For his agony to pass;
Nor feel upon his shuddering cheek
The kiss of Caiaphas.
p. 278II
SIX weeks our guardsman walked the yard,
In the suit of shabby grey:
His cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay,
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every wandering cloud that trailed
Its ravelled fleeces by.
He did not wring his hands, as do
Those witless men who dare
To try to rear the changeling Hope
In the cave of black Despair:
He only looked upon the sun,
And drank the morning air.
p. 279He did not wring his hands nor weep,
Nor did he peek or pine,
But he drank the air as though it held
Some healthful anodyne;
With open mouth he drank the sun
As though it had been wine!
And I and all the souls in pain,
Who tramped the other ring,
Forgot if we ourselves had done
A great or little thing,
And watched with gaze of dull amaze
The man who had to swing.
And strange it was to see him pass
With a step so light and gay,
And strange it was to see him look
So wistfully at the day,
And strange it was to think that he
Had such a debt to pay.
For oak and elm have pleasant leaves
That in the springtime shoot:
But grim to see is the gallows-tree,
With its adder-bitten root,
And, green or dry, a man must die
Before it bears its fruit!
p. 280The loftiest place is that seat of grace
For which all worldlings try:
But who would stand in hempen band
Upon a scaffold high,
And through a murderer’s collar take
His last look at the sky?
It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!
So with curious eyes and sick surmise
We watched him day by day,
And wondered if each one of us
Would end the self-same way,
For none can tell to what red Hell
His sightless soul may stray.
At last the dead man walked no more
Amongst the Trial Men,
And I knew that he was standing up
In the black dock’s dreadful pen,
And that never would I see his face
In God’s sweet world again.
p. 281Like two doomed ships that pass in storm
We had crossed each other’s way:
But we made no sign, we said no word,
We had no word to say;
For we did not meet in the holy night,
But in the shameful day.
A prison wall was round us both,
Two outcast men we were:
The world had thrust us from its heart,
And God from out His care:
And the iron gin that waits for Sin
Had caught us in its snare.
p. 282III
IN Debtors’ Yard the stones are hard,
And the dripping wall is high,
So it was there he took the air
Beneath the leaden sky,
And by each side a Warder walked,
For fear the man might die.
Or else he sat with those who watched
His anguish night and day;
Who watched him when he rose to weep,
And when he crouched to pray;
Who watched him lest himself should rob
Their scaffold of its prey.
The Governor was strong upon
The Regulations Act:
The Doctor said that Death was but
A scientific fact:
And twice a day the Chaplain called,
And left a little tract.
p. 283And twice a day he smoked his pipe,
And drank his quart of beer:
His soul was resolute, and held
No hiding-place for fear;
He often said that he was glad
The hangman’s hands were near.
But why he said so strange a thing
No Warder dared to ask:
For he to whom a watcher’s doom
Is given as his task,
Must set a lock upon his lips,
And make his face a mask.
Or else he might be moved, and try
To comfort or console:
And what should Human Pity do
Pent up in Murderers’ Hole?
What word of grace in such a place
Could help a brother’s soul?
With slouch and swing around the ring
We trod the Fools’ Parade!
We did not care: we knew we were
The Devil’s Own Brigade:
And shaven head and feet of lead
Make a merry masquerade.
p. 284We tore the tarry rope to shreds
With blunt and bleeding nails;
We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors,
And cleaned the shining rails:
And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank,
And clattered with the pails.
We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill:
But in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still.
So still it lay that every day
Crawled like a weed-clogged wave:
And we forgot the bitter lot
That waits for fool and knave,
Till once, as we tramped in from work,
We passed an open grave.
With yawning mouth the yellow hole
Gaped for a living thing;
The very mud cried out for blood
To the thirsty asphalte ring:
And we knew that ere one dawn grew fair
Some prisoner had to swing.
p. 285Right in we went, with soul intent
On Death and Dread and Doom:
The hangman, with his little bag,
Went shuffling through the gloom:
And each man trembled as he crept
Into his numbered tomb.
That night the empty corridors
Were full of forms of Fear,
And up and down the iron town
Stole feet we could not hear,
And through the bars that hide the stars
White faces seemed to peer.
He lay as one who lies and dreams
In a pleasant meadow-land,
The watchers watched him as he slept,
And could not understand
How one could sleep so sweet a sleep
With a hangman close at hand.
But there is no sleep when men must weep
Who never yet have wept:
So we—the fool, the fraud, the knave—
That endless vigil kept,
And through each brain on hands of pain
Another’s terror crept.
p. 286Alas! it is a fearful thing
To feel another’s guilt!
For, right within, the sword of Sin
Pierced to its poisoned hilt,
And as molten lead were the tears we shed
For the blood we had not spilt.
The Warders with their shoes of felt
Crept by each padlocked door,
And peeped and saw, with eyes of awe,
Grey figures on the floor,
And wondered why men knelt to pray
Who never prayed before.
All through the night we knelt and prayed,
Mad mourners of a corse!
The troubled plumes of midnight were
The plumes upon a hearse:
And bitter wine upon a sponge
Was the savour of Remorse.
The grey cock crew, the red cock crew,
But never came the day:
And crooked shapes of Terror crouched,
In the corners where we lay:
And each evil sprite that walks by night
Before us seemed to play.
p. 287They glided past, they glided fast,
Like travellers through a mist:
They mocked the moon in a rigadoon
Of delicate turn and twist,
And with formal pace and loathsome grace
The phantoms kept their tryst.
With mop and mow, we saw them go,
Slim shadows hand in hand:
About, about, in ghostly rout
They trod a saraband:
And the damned grotesques made arabesques,
Like the wind upon the sand!
With the pirouettes of marionettes,
They tripped on pointed tread:
But with flutes of Fear they filled the ear,
As their grisly masque they led,
And loud they sang, and long they sang,
For they sang to wake the dead.
‘Oho!’ they cried, ‘The world is wide,
But fettered limbs go lame!
And once, or twice, to throw the dice
Is
a gentlemanly game,
But he does not win who plays with Sin
In
the secret House of Shame.’
p. 288No things of air these antics were,
That frolicked with such glee:
To men whose lives were held in gyves,
And whose feet might not go free,
Ah! wounds of Christ! they were living things,
Most terrible to see.
Around, around, they waltzed and wound;
Some wheeled in smirking pairs;
With the mincing step of a demirep
Some sidled up the stairs:
And with subtle sneer, and fawning leer,
Each helped us at our prayers.
The morning wind began to moan,
But still the night went on:
Through its giant loom the web of gloom
Crept till each thread was spun:
And, as we prayed, we grew afraid
Of the Justice of the Sun.
The moaning wind went wandering round
The weeping prison-wall:
Till like a wheel of turning steel
We felt the minutes crawl:
O moaning wind! what had we done
To have such a seneschal?
p. 289At last I saw the shadowed bars,
Like a lattice wrought in lead,
Move right across the whitewashed wall
That faced my three-plank bed,
And I knew that somewhere in the world
God’s dreadful dawn was red.
At six o’clock we cleaned our cells,
At seven all was still,
But the sough and swing of a mighty wing
The prison seemed to fill,
For the Lord of Death with icy breath
Had entered in to kill.
He did not pass in purple pomp,
Nor ride a moon-white steed.
Three yards of cord and a sliding board
Are all the gallows’ need:
So with rope of shame the Herald came
To do the secret deed.
We were as men who through a fen
Of filthy darkness grope:
We did not dare to breathe a prayer,
Or to give our anguish scope:
Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was Hope.
p. 290For Man’s grim Justice goes its way,
And will not swerve aside:
It slays the weak, it slays the strong,
It has a deadly stride:
With iron heel it slays the strong,
The monstrous parricide!
We waited for the stroke of eight:
Each tongue was thick with thirst:
For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate
That makes a man accursed,
And Fate will use a running noose
For the best man and the worst.
We had no other thing to do,
Save to wait for the sign to come:
So, like things of stone in a valley lone,
Quiet we sat and dumb:
But each man’s heart beat thick and quick,
Like a madman on a drum!
With sudden shock the prison-clock
Smote on the shivering air,
And from all the gaol rose up a wail
Of impotent despair,
Like the sound that frightened marshes hear
From some leper in his lair.
p. 291And as one sees most fearful things
In the crystal of a dream,
We saw the greasy hempen rope
Hooked to the blackened beam,
And heard the prayer the hangman’s snare
Strangled into a scream.
And all the woe that moved him so
That he gave that bitter cry,
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
p. 292IV
THERE is no chapel on the day
On which they hang a man:
The Chaplain’s heart is far too sick,
Or his face is far too wan,
Or there is that written in his eyes
Which none should look upon.
So they kept us close till nigh on noon,
And then they rang the bell,
And the Warders with their jingling keys
Opened each listening cell,
And down the iron stair we tramped,
Each from his separate Hell.
Out into God’s sweet air we went,
But not in wonted way,
For this man’s face was white with fear,
And that man’s face was grey,
And I never saw sad men who looked
So wistfully at the day.
p. 293I never saw sad men who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
We prisoners called the sky,
And at every careless cloud that passed
In happy freedom by.
But there were those amongst us all
Who walked with downcast head,
And knew that, had each got his due,
They should have died instead:
He had but killed a thing that lived,
Whilst they had killed the dead.
For he who sins a second time
Wakes a dead soul to pain,
And draws it from its spotted shroud,
And makes it bleed again,
And makes it bleed great gouts of blood,
And makes it bleed in vain!
Like ape or clown, in monstrous garb
With crooked arrows starred,
Silently we went round and round
The slippery asphalte yard;
Silently we went round and round,
And no man spoke a word.
p. 294Silently we went round and round,
And through each hollow mind
The Memory of dreadful things
Ru
shed like a dreadful wind,
And Horror stalked before each man,
And Terror crept behind.
The Warders strutted up and down,
And kept their herd of brutes,
Their uniforms were spick and span,
And they wore their Sunday suits,
But we knew the work they had been at,
By the quicklime on their boots.
For where a grave had opened wide,
There was no grave at all:
Only a stretch of mud and sand
By the hideous prison-wall,
And a little heap of burning lime,
That the man should have his pall.
For he has a pall, this wretched man,
Such as few men can claim:
Deep down below a prison-yard,
Naked for greater shame,
He lies, with fetters on each foot,
Wrapt in a sheet of flame!
p. 295And all the while the burning lime
Eats flesh and bone away,
It eats the brittle bone by night,
And the soft flesh by day,
It eats the flesh and bone by turns,
But it eats the heart alway.
For three long years they will not sow
Or root or seedling there:
For three long years the unblessed spot
Will sterile be and bare,
And look upon the wondering sky
With unreproachful stare.
They think a murderer’s heart would taint
Each simple seed they sow.
It is not true! God’s kindly earth
Is kindlier than men know,
And the red rose would but blow more red,
The white rose whiter blow.
Out of his mouth a red, red rose!
Out of his heart a white!
For who can say by what strange way,
Christ brings His will to light,
Since the barren staff the pilgrim bore
Bloomed in the great Pope’s sight?
p. 296But neither milk-white rose nor red
May bloom in prison-air;
The shard, the pebble, and the flint,
Are what they give us there:
For flowers have been known to heal
A common man’s despair.
So never will wine-red rose or white,
Petal by petal, fall
On that stretch of mud and sand that lies
By the hideous prison-wall,
To tell the men who tramp the yard
That God’s Son died for all.
Yet though the hideous prison-wall
Still hems him round and round,
And a spirit may not walk by night
That is with fetters bound,
And a spirit may but weep that lies
In such unholy ground,
He is at peace—this wretched man—
At peace, or will be soon:
There is no thing to make him mad,
Nor does Terror walk at noon,
For the lampless Earth in which he lies
Has neither Sun nor Moon.
p. 297They hanged him as a beast is hanged:
They did not even toll
A requiem that might have brought
Rest to his startled soul,
But hurriedly they took him out,
And hid him in a hole.
They stripped him of his canvas clothes,
And gave him to the flies:
They mocked the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes:
And with laughter loud they heaped the shroud
In which their convict lies.
The Chaplain would not kneel to pray
By his dishonoured grave:
Nor mark it with that blessed Cross
That Christ for sinners gave,
Because the man was one of those
Whom Christ came down to save.
Yet all is well; he has but passed
To Life’s appointed bourne:
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity’s long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn
p. 298V
I KNOW not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.
But this I know, that every Law
That men have made for Man,
Since first Man took his brother’s life,
And the sad world began,
But straws the wheat and saves the chaff
With a most evil fan.
This too I know—and wise it were
If each could know the same—
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.
p. 299With bars they blur the gracious moon,
And blind the goodly sun:
And they do well to hide their Hell,
For in it things are done
That Son of God nor son of Man
Ever should look upon!
The vilest deeds like poison weeds,
Bloom well in prison-air;
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.
For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and grey,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.
Each narrow cell in which we dwell
Is a foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity’s machine.
p. 300The brackish water that we drink
Creeps with a loathsome slime,
And the bitter bread they weigh in scales
Is full of chalk and lime,
And Sleep will not lie down, but walks
Wild-eyed, and cries to Time.
But though lean Hunger and green Thirst
Like asp with adder fight,
We have little care of prison fare,
For what chills and kills outright
Is that every stone one lifts by day
Becomes one’s heart by night.
With midnight always in one’s heart,
And twilight in one’s cell,
We turn the crank, or tear the rope,
Each in his separate Hell,
And the silence is more awful far
Than the sound of a brazen bell.
And never a human voice comes near
To speak a gentle word:
And the eye that watches through the door
Is pitiless and hard:
And by all forgot, we rot and rot,
With soul and body marred.
p. 301And thus we rust Life’s iron chain
Degraded and alone:
And some men curse, and some men weep,
And some men make no moan:
But God’s eternal Laws are kind
And break the heart of stone.
And every human heart that breaks,
In prison-cell or yard,
Is as that broken box that gave
Its treasure to the Lord,
And filled the unclean leper’s house
With the scent of costliest nard.
Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?
And he of the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes,
Waits for the holy hands that took
The Thief to Paradise;
And a broken and a contrite heart
The Lord will not despise.
p. 302The man in red who reads the Law
Gave him three weeks of life,
Three little weeks in which to heal
His soul of his soul’s strife,
And cleanse from every blot of blood
The hand that held the knife.
And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,
The hand that held the steel:
For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal:
And the crimson stain that was of Cain
Became Christ’s snow-white seal.
p. 303VI
IN Reading gaol by Reading town
There is a pit of shame,
And in it lies a wretched man
Eaten by teeth of flame,
In a burning winding-sheet he lies,
And his grave has got no name.
And there, till Christ call forth the dead,
In silence let him lie:
No need to waste the foolish tear,
Or heave the windy sigh:
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.
And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
p. 305RAVENNA
Ne
wdigate Prize Poem
Recited in the Sheldonian Theatre
Oxford
June 26th, 1878
TO MY FRIEND
GEORGE FLEMING
AUTHOR OF
‘THE NILE NOVEL’ AND ‘MIRAGE’
p. 306Ravenna, March 1877
Oxford, March 1878
p. 307RAVENNA
I.
A YEAR ago I breathed the Italian air,—
And yet, methinks this northern Spring is fair,—
These fields made golden with the flower of March,
The throstle singing on the feathered larch,
The cawing rooks, the wood-doves fluttering by,
The little clouds that race across the sky;
And fair the violet’s gentle drooping head,
The primrose, pale for love uncomforted,
The rose that burgeons on the climbing briar,
The crocus-bed, (that seems a moon of fire
Round-girdled with a purple marriage-ring);
And all the flowers of our English Spring,
Fond snowdrops, and the bright-starred daffodil.
Up starts the lark beside the murmuring mill,
And breaks the gossamer-threads of early dew;
And down the river, like a flame of blue,
Keen as an arrow flies the water-king,
While the brown linnets in the greenwood sing.
A year ago!—it seems a little time
Since last I saw that lordly southern clime,
p. 308Where flower and fruit to purple radiance blow,
And like bright lamps the fabled apples glow.
Full Spring it was—and by rich flowering vines,
Dark olive-groves and noble forest-pines,
I rode at will; the moist glad air was sweet,
The white road rang beneath my horse’s feet,
And musing on Ravenna’s ancient name,
I watched the day till, marked with wounds of flame,
The turquoise sky to burnished gold was turned.
O how my heart with boyish passion burned,
When far away across the sedge and mere
I saw that Holy City rising clear,
Crowned with her crown of towers!—On and on
I galloped, racing with the setting sun,
And ere the crimson after-glow was passed,
I stood within Ravenna’s walls at last!
II.
How strangely still! no sound of life or joy
Startles the air; no laughing shepherd-boy
Pipes on his reed, nor ever through the day
Comes the glad sound of children at their play:
O sad, and sweet, and silent! surely here
A man might dwell apart from troublous fear,
Watching the tide of seasons as they flow
From amorous Spring to Winter’s rain and snow,
p. 309And have no thought of sorrow;—here, indeed,
Are Lethe’s waters, and that fatal weed
Which makes a man forget his fatherland.
Ay! amid lotus-meadows dost thou stand,
Like Proserpine, with poppy-laden head,
Guarding the holy ashes of the dead.
For though thy brood of warrior sons hath ceased,
Thy noble dead are with thee!—they at least
Are faithful to thine honour:—guard them well,
O childless city! for a mighty spell,
To wake men’s hearts to dreams of things sublime,
Are the lone tombs where rest the Great of Time.
III.
Yon lonely pillar, rising on the plain,
Marks where the bravest knight of France was slain,—
The Prince of chivalry, the Lord of war,
Gaston de Foix: for some untimely star
Led him against thy city, and he fell,
As falls some forest-lion fighting well.
Taken from life while life and love were new,
He lies beneath God’s seamless veil of blue;
Tall lance-like reeds wave sadly o’er his head,
And oleanders bloom to deeper red,
p. 310Where his bright youth flowed crimson on the ground.
Look farther north unto that broken mound,—
There, prisoned now within a lordly tomb
Raised by a daughter’s hand, in lonely gloom,
Huge-limbed Theodoric, the Gothic king,
Sleeps after all his weary conquering.
Time hath not spared his ruin,—wind and rain
Have broken down his stronghold; and again
We see that Death is mighty lord of all,
And king and clown to ashen dust must fall
Mighty indeed their glory! yet to me
Barbaric king, or knight of chivalry,
Or the great queen herself, were poor and vain,
Beside the grave where Dante rests from pain.
His gilded shrine lies open to the air;
And cunning sculptor’s hands have carven there
The calm white brow, as calm as earliest morn,
The eyes that flashed with passionate love and scorn,
The lips that sang of Heaven and of Hell,
The almond-face which Giotto drew so well,
The weary face of Dante;—to this day,
Here in his place of resting, far away
From Arno’s yellow waters, rushing down
Through the wide bridges of that fairy town,
Where the tall tower of Giotto seems to rise
A marble lily under sapphire skies!
p. 311Alas! my Dante! thou hast known the pain
Of meaner lives,—the exile’s galling chain,
How steep the stairs within kings’ houses are,
And all the petty miseries which mar
Man’s nobler nature with the sense of wrong.
Yet this dull world is grateful for thy song;
Our nations do thee homage,—even she,
That cruel queen of vine-clad Tuscany,
Who bound with crown of thorns thy living brow,
Hath decked thine empty tomb with laurels now,
And begs in vain the ashes of her son.
O mightiest exile! all thy grief is done:
Thy soul walks now beside thy Beatrice;
Ravenna guards thine ashes: sleep in peace.
IV.
How lone this palace is; how grey the walls!
No minstrel now wakes echoes in these halls.
The broken chain lies rusting on the door,
And noisome weeds have split the marble floor:
Here lurks the snake, and here the lizards run
By the stone lions blinking in the sun.
Byron dwelt here in love and revelry
For two long years—a second Anthony,
p. 312Who of the world another Actium made!
Yet suffered not his royal soul to fade,
Or lyre to break, or lance to grow less keen,
’Neath any wiles of an Egyptian queen.
For from the East there came a mighty cry,
And Greece stood up to fight for Liberty,
And called him from Ravenna: never knight
Rode forth more nobly to wild scenes of fight!
None fell more bravely on ensanguined field,
Borne like a Spartan back upon his shield!
O Hellas! Hellas! in thine hour of pride,
Thy day of might, remember him who died
To wrest from off thy limbs the trammelling chain:
O Salamis! O lone Platæan plain!
O tossing waves of wild Euboean sea!
O wind-swept heights of lone Thermopylæ!
He loved you well—ay, not alone in word,
Who freely gave to thee his lyre and sword,
Like Æschylos at well-fought Marathon:
And England, too, shall glory in her son,
Her warrior-poet, first in song and fight.
No longer now shall Slander’s venomed spite
Crawl like a snake across his perfect name,
Or mar the lordly scutcheon of his fame.
For as the olive-garland of the race,
Which lights with joy each eager runner’s face,
p. 313As the red cross which saveth men in war,
As a flame-bearded beacon seen from far
By mariners upon a storm-tossed sea,—
Such was his love for Greece and Liberty!
Byron, thy crowns are ever fresh and green:
Red leaves of rose from Sapphic Mitylene
Shall bind thy brows; the myrtle blooms for thee,
In hidden glades by lonely Castaly;
The laurels wait thy coming: all are thine,
And round thy head one perfect wreath will twine.
V.
The pine-tops rocked before the evening breeze
With the hoarse murmur of the wintry seas,
And the tall stems were streaked with amber bright;—
I wandered through the wood in wild delight,
Some startled bird, with fluttering wings and fleet,
Made snow of all the blossoms; at my feet,
Like silver crowns, the pale narcissi lay,
And small birds sang on every twining spray.
O waving trees, O forest liberty!
Within your haunts at least a man is free,
And half forgets the weary world of strife:
The blood flows hotter, and a sense of life
p. 314Wakes i’ the quickening veins, while once again
The woods are filled with gods we fancied slain.
Long time I watched, and surely hoped to see
Some goat-foot Pan make merry minstrelsy
Amid the reeds! some startled Dryad-maid
In girlish flight! or lurking in the glade,
The soft brown limbs, the wanton treacherous face
Of woodland god! Queen Dian in the chase,
White-limbed and terrible, with look of pride,
And leash of boar-hounds leaping at her side!
Or Hylas mirrored in the perfect stream.
O idle heart! O fond Hellenic dream!
Ere long, with melancholy rise and swell,
The evening chimes, the convent’s vesper bell,
Struck on mine ears amid the amorous flowers.
Alas! alas! these sweet and honied hours
Had whelmed my heart like some encroaching sea,
And drowned all thoughts of black Gethsemane.
VI.
O lone Ravenna! many a tale is told
Of thy great glories in the days of old:
Two thousand years have passed since thou didst see
Cæsar ride forth to royal victory.
p. 315Mighty thy name when Rome’s lean eagles flew
From Britain’s isles to far Euphrates blue;
And of the peoples thou wast noble queen,
Till in thy streets the Goth and Hun were seen.
Discrowned by man, deserted by the sea,
Thou sleepest, rocked in lonely misery!
No longer now upon thy swelling tide,
Pine-forest-like, thy myriad galleys ride!
For where the brass-beaked ships were wont to float,
The weary shepherd pipes his mournful note;
And the white sheep are free to come and go
Where Adria’s purple waters used to flow.
O fair! O sad! O Queen uncomforted!
In ruined loveliness thou liest dead,
Alone of all thy sisters; for at last
Italia’s royal warrior hath passed
Rome’s lordliest entrance, and hath worn his crown
In the high temples of the Eternal Town!
The Palatine hath welcomed back her king,
And with his name the seven mountains ring!
And Naples hath outlived her dream of pain,
And mocks her tyrant! Venice lives again,
New risen from the waters! and the cry
Of Light and Truth, of Love and Liberty,
Is heard in lordly Genoa, and where
The marble spires of Milan wound the air,
p. 316Rings from the Alps to the Sicilian shore,
And Dante’s dream is now a dream no more.
But thou, Ravenna, better loved than all,
Thy ruined palaces are but a pall
That hides thy fallen greatness! and thy name
Burns like a grey and flickering candle-flame
Beneath the noonday splendour of the sun
Of new Italia! for the night is done,
The night of dark oppression, and the day
Hath dawned in passionate splendour: far away
The Austrian hounds are hunted from the land,
Beyond those ice-crowned citadels which stand
Girdling the plain of royal Lombardy,
From the far West unto the Eastern sea.
I know, indeed, that sons of thine have died
In Lissa’s waters, by the mountain-side
Of Aspromonte, on Novara’s plain,—
Nor have thy children died for thee in vain:
And yet, methinks, thou hast not drunk this wine
From grapes new-crushed of Liberty divine,
Thou hast not followed that immortal Star
Which leads the people forth to deeds of war.
Weary of life, thou liest in silent sleep,
As one who marks the lengthening shadows creep,
Careless of all the hurrying hours that run,
Mourning some day of glory, for the sun
p. 317Of Freedom hath not shewn to thee his face,
And thou hast caught no flambeau in the race.
Yet wake not from thy slumbers,—rest thee well,
Amidst thy fields of amber asphodel,
Thy lily-sprinkled meadows,—rest thee there,
To mock all human greatness: who would dare
To vent the paltry sorrows of his life
Before thy ruins, or to praise the strife
Of kings’ ambition, and the barren pride
Of warring nations! wert not thou the Bride
Of the wild Lord of Adria’s stormy sea!
The Queen of double Empires! and to thee
Were not the nations given as thy prey!
And now—thy gates lie open night and day,
The grass grows green on every tower and hall,
The ghastly fig hath cleft thy bastioned wall;
And where thy mailèd warriors stood at rest
The midnight owl hath made her secret nest.
O fallen! fallen! from thy high estate,
O city trammelled in the toils of Fate,
Doth nought remain of all thy glorious days,
But a dull shield, a crown of withered bays!
Yet who beneath this night of wars and fears,
From tranquil tower can watch the coming years;
Who can foretell what joys the day shall bring,
Or why before the dawn the linnets sing?
p. 318 Thou, even thou, mayst wake, as wakes the rose
To crimson splendour from its grave of snows;
As the rich corn-fields rise to red and gold
From these brown lands, now stiff with Winter’s cold;
As from the storm-rack comes a perfect star!
O much-loved city! I have wandered far
From the wave-circled islands of my home;
Have seen the gloomy mystery of the Dome
Rise slowly from the drear Campagna’s way,
Clothed in the royal purple of the day:
I from the city of the violet crown
Have watched the sun by Corinth’s hill go down,
And marked the ‘myriad laughter’ of the sea
From starlit hills of flower-starred Arcady;
Yet back to thee returns my perfect love,
As to its forest-nest the evening dove.
O poet’s city! one who scarce has seen
Some twenty summers cast their doublets green
For Autumn’s livery, would seek in vain
To wake his lyre to sing a louder strain,
Or tell thy days of glory;—poor indeed
Is the low murmur of the shepherd’s reed,
Where the loud clarion’s blast should shake the sky,
And flame across the heavens! and to try
Such lofty themes were folly: yet I know
That never felt my heart a nobler glow
p. 319Than when I woke the silence of thy street
With clamorous trampling of my horse’s feet,
And saw the city which now I try to sing,
After long days of weary travelling.
VII.
Adieu, Ravenna! but a year ago,
I stood and watched the crimson sunset glow
From the lone chapel on thy marshy plain:
The sky was as a shield that caught the stain
Of blood and battle from the dying sun,
And in the west the circling clouds had spun
A royal robe, which some great God might wear,
While into ocean-seas of purple air
Sank the gold galley of the Lord of Light.
Yet here the gentle stillness of the night
Brings back the swelling tide of memory,
And wakes again my passionate love for thee:
Now is the Spring of Love, yet soon will come
On meadow and tree the Summer’s lordly bloom;
And soon the grass with brighter flowers will blow,
And send up lilies for some boy to mow.
Then before long the Summer’s conqueror,
Rich Autumn-time, the season’s usurer,
Will lend his hoarded gold to all the trees,
p. 320And see it scattered by the spendthrift breeze;
And after that the Winter cold and drear.
So runs the perfect cycle of the year.
And so from youth to manhood do we go,
And fall to weary days and locks of snow.
Love only knows no winter; never dies:
Nor cares for frowning storms or leaden skies
And mine for thee shall never pass away,
Though my weak lips may falter in my lay.
Adieu! Adieu! yon silent evening star,
The night’s ambassador, doth gleam afar,
And bid the shepherd bring his flocks to fold.
Perchance before our inland seas of gold
Are garnered by the reapers into sheaves,
Perchance before I see the Autumn leaves,
I may behold thy city; and lay down
Low at thy feet the poet’s laurel crown.
Adieu! Adieu! yon silver lamp, the moon,
Which turns our midnight into perfect noon,
Doth surely light thy towers, guarding well
Where Dante sleeps, where Byron loved to dwell.
0.jpg)
👁 :
Ch
apter One
MY FATHER MEETS THE CAT
One cold rainy day when my father was a little boy, he met an old alley cat on his street. The cat
was very drippy and uncomfortable so my father said, "Wouldn't you like to come home with
me?"
This surprised the cat—she had never before met anyone who cared about old alley cats—but
she said, "I'd be very much obliged if I could sit by a warm furnace, and perhaps have a saucer of
milk."
"We have a very nice furnace to sit by," said my father, "and I'm sure my mother has an extra
saucer of milk."
[10]
My father and the cat became good friends but my father's mother was very upset about the cat.
She hated cats, particularly ugly old alley cats. "Elmer Elevator," she said to my father, "if you
think I'm going [11]to give that cat a saucer of milk, you're very wrong. Once you start feeding
stray alley cats you might as well expect to feed every stray in town, and I am not going to do
it!"
This made my father very sad, and he apologized to the cat because his mother had been so rude.
He told the cat to stay anyway, and that somehow he would bring her a saucer of milk each day.
My father fed the cat for three weeks, but one day his mother found the cat's saucer in the cellar
and she was extremely angry. She whipped my father and threw the cat out the door, but later on
my father sneaked out and found the cat. Together they went for a walk in the park and tried to
think of nice things to talk about. My father said, "When I grow up I'm going to have an airplane.
Wouldn't it be wonderful to fly just anywhere you might think of!"
"Would you like to fly very, very much?" asked the cat.
"I certainly would. I'd do anything if I could fly."
[12]
"Well," said the cat, "If you'd really like to fly that much, I think I know of a sort of a way you
might get[13] to fly while you're still a little boy."
"You mean you know where I could get an airplane?"
"Well, not exactly an airplane, but something even better. As you can see, I'm an old cat now,
but in my younger days I was quite a traveler. My traveling days are over but last spring I took
just one more trip and sailed to the Island of Tangerina, stopping at the port of Cranberry. Well,
it just so happened that I missed the boat, and while waiting for the next I thought I'd look
around a bit. I was particularly interested in a place called Wild Island, which we had passed on
our way to Tangerina. Wild Island and Tangerina are joined together by a long string of rocks,
but people never go to Wild Island because it's mostly jungle and inhabited by very wild
animals. So, I decided to go across the rocks and explore it for myself. It certainly is an
interesting place, but I saw something there that made me want to weep."
[14]
[15]
Ch
apter Two
MY FATHER RUNS AWAY
"Wild Island is practically cut in two by a very wide and muddy river," continued the cat. "This
river begins near one end of the island and flows into the ocean at the other. Now the animals
there are very lazy, and they used to hate having to go all the way around the beginning of this
river to get to the other side of the[16] island. It made visiting inconvenient and mail deliveries
slow, particularly during the Christmas rush. Crocodiles could have carried passengers and mail
across the river, but crocodiles are very moody, and not the least bit dependable, and are always
looking for something to eat. They don't care if the animals have to walk around the river, so
that's just what the animals did for many years."
"But what does all this have to do with airplanes?" asked my father, who thought the cat was
taking an awfully long time to explain.
"Be patient, Elmer," said the cat, and she went on with the story. "One day about four months
before I arrived on Wild Island a baby dragon fell from a low-flying cloud onto the bank of the
river. He was too young to fly very well, and besides, he had bruised one wing quite badly, so he
couldn't get back to his cloud. The animals found him soon afterwards and everybody said,
'Why, this is just exactly what we've needed[17] all these years!' They tied a big rope around his
neck and waited for the wing to get well. This was going to end all their crossing-the-river
troubles."
"I've never seen a dragon," said my father. "Did you see him? How big is he?"
"Oh, yes, indeed I saw the dragon. In fact, we became great friends," said the cat. "I used to hide
in the bushes and talk to him when nobody was around. He's[18] not a very big dragon, about the
size of a large black bear, although I imagine he's grown quite a bit since I left. He's got a long
tail and yellow and blue stripes. His horn and eyes and the bottoms of his feet are bright red, and
he has gold-colored wings."
"Oh, how wonderful!" said my father. "What did the animals do with him when his wing got
well?"
"They started training him to carry passengers, and even though he is just a baby dragon, they
work him all day and all night too sometimes. They make him carry loads that are much too
heavy, and if he complains, they twist his wings and beat him. He's always tied to a stake on a
rope just long enough to go across the river. His only friends are the crocodiles, who say 'Hello'
to him once a week if they don't forget. Really, he's the most miserable animal I've ever come
across. When I left I promised I'd try to help him someday, although I couldn't see how. The
rope around his neck is about the biggest, toughest rope you can imagine,[19] with so many knots
it would take days to untie them all.
"Anyway, when you were talking about airplanes, you gave me a good idea. Now, I'm quite sure
that if you were able to rescue the dragon, which wouldn't be the least bit easy, he'd let you ride
him most anywhere, provided you were nice to him, of course. How about trying it?"
"Oh, I'd love to," said my father, and he was so angry at his mother for being rude to the cat that
he didn't feel the least bit sad about running away from home for a while.
That very afternoon my father and the cat went down to the docks to see about ships going to the
Island of Tangerina. They found out that a ship would be sailing the next week, so right away
they started planning for the rescue of the dragon. The cat was a great help in suggesting things
fo
r my father to take with him, and she told him everything she knew about Wild Island. Of
course, she was too old to go along.[20]
Everything had to be kept very secret, so when they found or bought anything to take on the trip
they hid it behind a rock in the park. The night before my father sailed he borrowed his father's
kn
ap
sack and he and the cat packed everything very carefully. He took chewing gum, two dozen
pink lollipops, a package of rubber bands, black rubber boots, a compass, a tooth brush and a
tube of tooth paste, six magnifying glasses, a very sharp jackknife, a comb and a hairbrush,
seven hair ribbons of different colors, an empty grain bag with a label saying "Cranberry," some
clean clothes, and enough food to last my father while he was on the ship. He couldn't live on
mice, so he took twenty-five peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and six apples, because that's all
the apples he could find in the pantry.
When everything was packed my father and the cat went down to the docks to the ship. A night
watchman was on duty, so while the cat made loud queer noises to distract his attention, my
fa
ther ran over the gang-[21]plank onto the ship. He went down into the hold and hid among
some bags of wheat. The ship sailed early the next morning.
[22]
Ch
apter Three
MY FATHER FINDS THE ISLAND
My father hid in the hold for six days and nights. Twice he was nearly caught when the ship
stopped to take on more cargo. But at last he heard a sailor say that the next port would be
Cranberry and that they'd be unloading the wheat there. My father knew that the sailors would
send him home if they caught him, so he looked in his knapsack and took out a rubber band and
the empty grain bag with the label saying "Cranberry." At the last moment my father got inside
the bag, knapsack and all, folded the top of the bag inside, and put the rubber band around the
top. He didn't look just exactly like the other bags but it was the best he could do.
[23]
[24]
Soon the sailors came to unload. They lowered a big net into the hold and began moving the
bags of wheat. Suddenly one sailor yelled, "Great Scott! This is the queerest bag of wheat I've
ever seen! It's all lumpy-like, but the label says it's to go to Cranberry."
The other sailors looked at the bag too, and my father, who was in the bag, of course, tried even
harder to look like a bag of wheat. Then another sailor felt the bag and he just happened to get
hold of my father's elbow. "I know what this is," he said. "This is a bag of dried corn on the
cob," and he dumped my father into the big net along with the bags of wheat.
This all happened in the late afternoon, so late that the merchant in Cranberry who had ordered
the wheat didn't count his bags until the next morning. (He was a very punctual man, and never
late for dinner.) The sailors told the captain, and the captain wrote down on a piece of paper, that
they had delivered one hundred and sixty bags of wheat and one bag of dried corn on[25] the cob.
They left the piece of paper for the merchant and sailed away that evening.
My father heard later that the merchant spent the whole next day counting and recounting the
bags and feeling each one trying to find the bag of dried corn on the cob. He never found it
because as soon as it was dark my father climbed out of the bag, folded it up and put it back in
his knapsack. He walked along the shore to a nice sandy place and lay down to sleep.
[26]
My father was very hungry when he woke up the next morning. Just as he was looking to see if
he had anything left to eat, something hit him on the head. It was a tangerine. He had been
sleeping right under a tree full of big, fat tangerines. And then he remembered that this was the
Island of Tangerina. Tangerine trees grew wild everywhere. My father picked as many as he had
room for, which was thirty-one, and started off to find Wild Island.
He walked and walked and walked along the shore, looking for the rocks that joined the two
islands. He walked all day, and once when he met a fisherman and asked him about Wild Island,
the fisherman began to shake and couldn't talk for a long while. It scared him that much, just
thinking about it. Finally he said, "Many people have tried to explore Wild Island, but not one
has come back alive. We think they were eaten by the wild animals." This didn't bother my
fa
ther. He kept walking and slept on the beach again that night.[27]
It was beautifully clear the next day, and way down the shore my father could see a long line of
rocks leading out into the ocean, and way, way out at the end he could just see a tiny patch of
green. He quickly ate seven tangerines and started down the beach.
It was almost dark when he came to the rocks, but there, way out in the ocean, was the patch of
green. He sat down and rested a while, remembering that the cat had said, "If you can, go out to
the island at night, because then the wild animals won't see you coming along the rocks and you
can hide when you get there." So my father picked seven more tangerines, put on his black
rub
ber boots, and waited for dark.
It was a very black night and my father could hardly see the rocks ahead of him. Sometimes they
were quite high and sometimes the waves almost covered them, and they were slippery and hard
to walk on. Sometimes the rocks were far apart and my father had to get a running start and leap
from one to the next.[28]
After a while he began to hear a rumbling noise. It grew louder and louder as he got nearer to the
island. At last it seemed as if he was right on top of the noise, and he was. He had jumped from a
rock onto the back of a small whale who was fast asleep and cuddled up between two rocks. The
whale was snoring and making more noise than a steam shovel, so it never heard [29]my father
say, "Oh, I didn't know that was you!" And it never knew my father had jumped on its back by
mistake.
For seven hours my father climbed and slipped and leapt from rock to rock, but while it was still
dark he finally reached the very last rock and stepped off onto Wild Island.
[30]
[31]
Ch
apter Four
MY FATHER FINDS THE RIVER
The jungle began just beyond a narrow strip of beach; thick, dark, damp, scary jungle. My father
hardly knew where to go, so he crawled under a wahoo bush to think, and ate eight tangerines.
The first thing to do, he decided, was to find the river, because the dragon was tied somewhere
along its bank. Then he thought, "If the river flows into the ocean, I ought to be able to find it
quite easily if I just walk along the beach far enough." So my father walked until the sun rose
and he was quite far from the Ocean Rocks. It was dangerous to stay near them because they
might be guarded in the daytime. He found a clump of tall grass and sat down. Then he took off
his rubber boots and ate[32] three more tangerines. He could have eaten twelve but he hadn't seen
any tangerines on this island and he could not risk running out of something to eat.
My father slept all that day and only woke up late in the afternoon when he heard a funny little
voice saying, "Queer, queer, what a dear little dock! I mean, dear, dear, what a queer little rock!"
My father saw a tiny paw rubbing itself on his knapsack. He lay very still and the mouse, for it
was a mouse, hurried away muttering to itself, "I must smell tumduddy. I mean, I must tell
somebody."
[33]
My father waited a few minutes and then started down the beach because it was almost dark
now, and he was afraid the mouse really would tell somebody. He walked all night and two scary
things happened. First, he just had to sneeze, so he did, and somebody close by said, "Is that you,
Monkey?" My father said, "Yes." Then the voice said, "You must have something on your back,
Monkey," and my father said "Yes," because he did. He had his knapsack on his back. "What do
you have on your back, Monkey?" asked the voice.
My father didn't know what to say because what would a monkey have on its back, and how
would it sound telling someone about it if it did have something? Just then another voice said, "I
bet you're taking your sick grandmother to the doctor's." My father said "Yes" and hurried on.
Quite by accident he found out later that he had been talking to a pair of tortoises.
[34]
[36]
The second thing that happened was that he nearly walked right between two wild boars who
were talking in low solemn whispers. When he first saw the dark shapes he thought they were
boulders. Just in time he heard one of them say, "There are three signs of a recent invasion. First,
fresh tangerine peels were found under the wahoo bush near the Ocean Rocks. Second, a mouse
reported an extraordinary rock some distance from the Ocean Rocks which upon further
investigation simply wasn't there. However, more fresh tangerine peels were found in the same
spot, which is the third sign of invasion. Since tangerines do not grow on our island, somebody
must have brought them across the Ocean Rocks from the other island, which may, or may not,
have something to do with the appearance and/or disappearance of the extraordinary rock
reported by the mouse."
After a long silence the other boar said, "You know, I think we're taking all this too seriously.
Those peels probably floated over here all by themselves, and you know how unreliable mice
are. Besides, if there had[37] been an invasion, I would have seen it!"
"Perhaps you're right," said the first boar. "Shall we retire?" Whereupon they both trundled back
into the jungle.
Well, that taught my father a lesson, and after that he saved all his tangerine peels. He walked all
night and toward morning came to the river. Then his troubles really began.
[38]
[39]
Ch
apter Five
MY FATHER MEETS SOME TIGERS
The river was very wide and muddy, and the jungle was very gloomy and dense. The trees grew
close to each other, and what room there was between them was taken up by great high ferns
with sticky leaves. My father hated to leave the beach, but he decided to start along the river
bank where at least the jungle wasn't quite so thick. He ate three tangerines, making sure to keep
all the peels this time, and put on his rubber boots.
My father tried to follow the river bank but it was very swampy, and as he went farther the
swamp became deeper. When it was almost as deep as his boot tops he got stuck in the oozy,
mucky mud. My father tugged and tugged, and nearly pulled his boots right[40] off, but at last he
managed to wade to a drier place. Here the jungle was so thick that he could hardly see where
the river was. He unpacked his compass and figured out the direction he should walk in order to
stay near the river. But he didn't know that the river made a very sharp curve away from him just
a little way beyond, and so as he walked straight ahead he was getting farther and farther away
from the river.
It was very hard to walk in the jungle. The sticky leaves of the ferns caught at my father's hair,
and he kept tripping over roots and rotten logs. Sometimes the trees were clumped so closely
together that he couldn't squeeze between them and had to walk a long way around.
He began to hear whispery noises, but he couldn't see any animals anywhere. The deeper into the
jungle he went the surer he was that something was following him, and then he thought he heard
whispery noises on both sides of him as well as behind. He tried to run, but[41] he tripped over
more roots, and the noises only came nearer. Once or twice he thought he heard something
laughing at him.
At last he came out into a clearing and ran right into the middle of it so that he could see
anything that might try to attack him. Was he surprised when he looked and saw fourteen green
eyes coming out of the jungle all around the clearing, and when the green eyes turned into seven
tigers! The tigers walked around him in a big circle, looking hungrier all the time, and then they
sat down and began to talk.
"I suppose you thought we didn't know you were trespassing in our jungle!"
[42]
Then the next tiger spoke. "I suppose you're going to say you didn't know it was our jungle!"
"Did you know that not one explorer has ever left this island alive?" said the third tiger.
My father thought of the cat and knew this wasn't true. But of course he had too much sense to
say so. One doesn't contradict a hungry tiger.[43]
The tigers went on talking in turn. "You're our first little boy, you know. I'm curious to know if
you're especially tender."
"Maybe you think we have regular meal-times, but we don't. We just eat whenever we're feeling
hungry," said the fifth tiger.[44]
"And we're very hungry right now. In fact, I can hardly wait," said the sixth.
"I can't wait!" said the seventh tiger.
And then all the tigers said together in a loud roar, "Let's begin right now!" and they moved in
closer.
My father looked at those seven hungry tigers, and then he had an idea. He quickly opened his
kn
ap
sack and took out the chewing gum. The cat had told him that tigers were especially fond of
chewing gum,[45] which was very scarce on the island. So he threw them each a piece but they
only growled, "As fond as we are of chewing gum, we're sure we'd like you even better!" and
they moved so close that he could feel them breathing on his face.
"But this is very special chewing gum," said my father. "If you keep on chewing it long enough
it will turn green, and then if you plant it, it will grow more chewing gum, and the sooner you
start chewing the sooner you'll have more."
The tigers said, "Why, you don't say! Isn't that fine!" And as each one wanted to be the first to
plant the chewing gum, they all unwrapped their pieces and began chewing as hard as they
could. Every once in a while one tiger would look into another's mouth and say, "Nope, it's not
done yet," until finally they were all so busy looking into each other's mouths to make sure that
no one was getting ahead that they forgot all about my father.
[46]
[48]
Ch
apter Six
MY FATHER MEETS A RHINOCEROS
My father soon found a trail leading away from the clearing. All sorts of animals might be using
it too, but he decided to follow the trail no matter what he met because it might lead to the
dragon. He kept a sharp lookout in front and behind and went on.
Just as he was feeling quite safe, he came around a curve right behind the two wild boars. One of
them was saying to the other, "Did you know that the tortoises thought they saw Monkey
carrying his sick grandmother to the doctor's last night? But Monkey's grandmother died a week
ago, so they must have seen something else. I wonder what it was."
"I told you that there was an invasion afoot," said[49] the other boar, "and I intend to find out
what it is. I simply can't stand invasions."
"Nee meither," said a tiny little voice. "I mean, me neither," and my father knew that the mouse
was there, too.
"Well," said the first boar, "you search the trail up this way to the dragon. I'll go back down the
other way through the big clearing, and we'll send Mouse to watch the Ocean Rocks in case the
invasion should [50]decide to go away before we find it."
My father hid behind a mahogany tree just in time, and the first boar walked right past him. My
fa
ther waited for the other boar to get a head start on him, but he didn't wait very long because
he knew that when the first boar saw the tigers chewing gum in the clearing, he'd be even more
suspicious.
Soon the trail crossed a little brook and my father, who by this time was very thirsty, stopped to
get a drink of water. He still had on his rubber boots, so he waded into a little pool of water and
was stooping down when something quite sharp picked him up by the seat of the pants and
shook him very hard.
"Don't you know that's my private weeping pool?" said a deep angry voice.
My father couldn't see who was talking because he was hanging in the air right over the pool, but
he said, "Oh, no, I'm so sorry. I didn't know that everybody had a private weeping pool."
[51]
[52]
"Everybody doesn't!" said the angry voice, "but I do because I have such a big thing to weep
ab
out, and I drown everybody I find using my weeping pool." With that the animal tossed my
fa
ther up and down over the water.
"What—is it—that—you—weep about—so much?" asked my father, trying to get his breath,
and he thought over all the things he had in his pack.
"Oh, I have many things to weep about, but the biggest thing is the color of my tusk." My father
squirmed every which way trying to see the tusk, but it was through the seat of his pants where
he couldn't possibly see it. "When I was a young rhinoceros, my tusk was pearly white," said the
animal (and then my father knew that he was hanging by the seat of his pants from a rhinoceros'
tusk!), "but it has turned a nasty yellow-gray in my old age, and I find it very ugly. You see,
everything else about me is ugly, but when I had a beautiful tusk I didn't worry so much about
the rest.[53] Now that my tusk is ugly too, I can't sleep nights just thinking about how completely
ugly I am, and I weep all the time. But why should I be telling you these things? I caught you
using my pool and now I'm going to drown you."
"Oh, wait a minute, Rhinoceros," said my father. "I have some things that will make your tusk all
white and beautiful again. Just let me down and I'll give them to you."
The rhinoceros said, "You do? I can hardly believe it! Why, I'm so excited!" He put my father
down and danced around in a circle while my father got out the tube of tooth paste and the
toothbrush.
"Now," said my father, "just move your tusk a little nearer, please, and I'll show you how to
begin." My father wet the brush in the pool, squeezed on a dab of tooth paste, and scrubbed very
hard in one tiny spot. Then he told the rhinoceros to wash it off, and when the pool was calm
again, he told the rhinoceros to look[54] in the water and see how white the little spot was. It was
hard to see in the dim light of the jungle, but sure enough, the spot shone pearly white, just like
new. The rhinoceros was so pleased that he grabbed the toothbrush and began scrubbing
violently, forgetting all about my father.
Just then my father heard hoofsteps and he jumped behind the rhinoceros. It was the boar coming
back from the big clearing where the tigers were chewing gum. The boar looked at the
rh
inoceros, and at the toothbrush, and at the tube of tooth paste, and then he scratched his ear on
a tree. "Tell me, Rhinoceros," he said, "where did you get that fine tube of tooth paste and that
toothbrush?"
"Too busy!" said the rhinoceros, and he went on brushing as hard as he could.
The boar sniffed angrily and trotted down the trail toward the dragon, muttering to himself,
"Very suspicious—tigers too busy chewing gum, Rhinoceros too[55] busy brushing his tusk—
must get hold of that invasion. Don't like it one bit, not one bit! It's upsetting everybody
terribly—wonder what it's doing here, anyway."
[56]
Ch
apter Seven
MY FATHER MEETS A LION
My father waved goodbye to the rhinoceros, who was much too busy to notice, got a drink
fa
rt
her down the brook, and waded back to the trail. He hadn't gone very far when he heard an
angry animal roaring,[57] "Ding blast it! I told you not to go blackberrying yesterday. Won't you
ever learn? What will your mother say!"
My father crept along and peered into a small clearing just ahead. A lion was prancing about
clawing at his mane, which was all snarled and full of blackberry twigs. The more he clawed the
worse it became and the madder he grew and the more he yelled at himself, because it was
himself he was yelling at all the time.
My father could see that the trail went through the clearing, so he decided to crawl around the
edge in the underbrush and not disturb the lion.
He crawled and crawled, and the yelling grew louder and louder. Just as he was about to reach
the trail on the other side the yelling suddenly stopped. My father looked around and saw the
lion glaring at him. The lion charged and skidded to a stop a few inches away.
[58]
[59]
"Who are you?" the lion yelled at my father.
"My name is Elmer Elevator."
"Where do you think you're going?"
"I'm going home," said my father.
"That's what you think!" said the lion. "Ordinarily I'd save you for afternoon tea, but I happen to
be upset enough and hungry enough to eat you right now." And he picked up my father in his
front paws to feel how fat he was.
My father said, "Oh, please, Lion, before you eat me, tell me why you are so particularly upset
today."
"It's my mane," said the lion, as he was figuring how many bites a little boy would make. "You
see what a dreadful mess it is, and I don't seem to be able to do anything about it. My mother is
coming over on the dragon this afternoon, and if she sees me this way I'm afraid she'll stop my
allowance. She can't stand messy manes! But I'm going to eat you now, so it won't make any
difference to you."[60]
"Oh, wait a minute," said my father, "and I'll give you just the things you need to make your
mane all tidy and beautiful. I have them here in my pack."
"You do?" said the lion. "Well, give them to me, and perhaps I'll save you for afternoon tea after
all," and he put my father down on the ground.
My father opened the pack and took out the comb and the brush and the seven hair ribbons of
different colors. "Look," he said, "I'll show you what to do on your forelock, where you can
watch me. First you brush a while, and then you comb, and then you brush again until all the
twigs and snarls are gone. Then you divide it up in three and braid it like this and tie a ribbon
around the end."
As my father was doing this, the lion watched very carefully and began to look much happier.
When my father tied on the ribbon he was all smiles. "Oh, that's wonderful, really wonderful!"
said the lion. "Let me have the comb and brush and see if I can do it." So my[61] father gave him
the comb and brush and the lion began busily grooming his mane. As a matter of fact, he was so
busy that he didn't even know when my father left.
[62]
[63]
Ch
apter Eight
MY FATHER MEETS A GORILLA
My father was very hungry so he sat down under a baby banyan tree on the side of the trail and
ate four tangerines. He wanted to eat eight or ten, but he had only thirteen left and it might be a
long time before he could get more. He packed away all the peels and was about to get up when
he heard the familiar voices of the boars.
"I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen them with my own eyes, but wait and see for
yourself. All the tigers are sitting around chewing gum to beat the band. Old Rhinoceros is so
busy brushing his tusk that he doesn't even look around to see who's going by, and they're all so
busy they won't even talk to me!"[64]
"Horsefeathers!" said the other boar, now very close to my father. "They'll talk to me! I'm going
to get to the bottom of this if it's the last thing I do!"
The voices passed my father and went around a curve, and he hurried on because he knew how
much more upset the boars would be when they saw the lion's mane tied up in hair ribbons.
Before long my father came to a crossroads and he stopped to read the signs. Straight ahead an
arrow pointed to the Beginning of the River; to the left, the Ocean Rocks; and to the right, to the
Dragon[65] Ferry. My father was reading all these signs when he heard pawsteps and ducked
behind the signpost. A beautiful lioness paraded past and turned down toward the clearings.
Although she could have seen my father if she had bothered to glance at the post,[66] she was
much too occupied looking dignified to see anything but the tip of her own nose. It was the lion's
mother, of course, and that, thought my father, must mean that the dragon was on this side of the
river. He hurried on but it was farther away than he had judged. He finally came to the river bank
in the late afternoon and looked all around, but there was no dragon anywhere in sight. He must
have gone back to the other side.
My father sat down under a palm tree and was trying to have a good idea when something big
and black and hairy jumped out of the tree and landed with a loud crash at his feet.
"Well?" said a huge voice.
"Well what?" said my father, for which he was very sorry when he looked up and discovered he
was talking to an enormous and very fierce gorilla.
"Well, explain yourself," said the gorilla. "I'll give you till ten to tell me your name, business,
your age[67] and what's in that pack," and he began counting to ten as fast as he could.
[68]
My father didn't even have time to say "Elmer Elevator, explorer" before the gorilla interrupted,
"Too slow! I'll twist your arms the way I twist that dragon's wings, and then we'll see if you can't
hurry up a bit." He grabbed my father's arms, one in each fist, and was just about to twist them
when he suddenly let go and began scratching his chest with both hands.
"Blast those fleas!" he raged. "They won't give you a moment's peace, and the worst of it is that
you can't even get a good look at them. Rosie! Rhoda! Rachel! Ruthie! Ruby! Roberta! Come
here and get rid of this flea on my chest. It's driving me crazy!"
Six little monkeys tumbled out of the palm tree, dashed to the gorilla, and began combing the
hair on his chest.
"Well," said the gorilla, "it's still there!"
"We're looking, we're looking," said the six little[69] monkeys, "but they're awfully hard to see,
you know."
[70]
"I know," said the gorilla, "but hurry. I've got work to do," and he winked at my father.
"Oh, Gorilla," said my father, "in my knapsack I have six magnifying glasses. They'd be just the
thing for hunting fleas." My father unpacked them and gave one to Rosie, one to Rhoda, one to
Rachel, one to Ruthie, one to Ruby, and one to Roberta.
[72]
"Why, they're miraculous!" said the six little monkeys. "It's easy to see the fleas now, only there
are hundreds of them!" And they went on hunting frantically.
A moment later many more monkeys appeared out of a near-by clump of mangroves and began
crowding around to get a look at the fleas through the magnifying glasses. They completely
surrounded the gorilla, and he could not see my father nor did he remember to twist his arms.
[73]
Ch
apter Nine
MY FATHER MAKES A BRIDGE
My father walked back and forth along the bank trying to think of some way to cross the river.
He found a high flagpole with a rope going over to the other side. The rope went through a loop
at the top of the pole and then down the pole and around a large crank. A sign on the crank said:
TO SUMMON DRAGON, YANK THE CRANK
REPORT DISORDERLY CONDUCT
TO GORILLA
From what the cat had told my father, he knew that the other end of the rope was tied around the
dragon's neck, and he felt sorrier than ever for the poor dragon. If he were on this side, the
gorilla would[74] twist his wings until it hurt so much that he'd have to fly to the other side. If he
were on the other side, the gorilla would crank the rope until the dragon would either choke to
death or fly back to this side. What a life for a baby dragon!
My father knew that if he called to the dragon to come across the river, the gorilla would surely
hear him, so he thought about climbing the pole and going across on the rope. The pole was very
high, and even if he could get to the top without being seen he'd have to go all the way across
hand over hand. The river was very muddy, and all sorts of unfriendly things might live in it, but
my father could think of no other way to get across. He was about to start up the pole when,
despite all the noise the monkeys were making, he heard a loud splash behind him. He looked all
around in the water but it was dusk now, and he couldn't see anything there.
"It's me, Crocodile," said a voice to the left. "The[75] water's lovely, and I have such a craving
fo
r something sweet. Won't you come in for a swim?"
A pale moon came out from behind the clouds and my father could see where the voice was
coming from. The crocodile's head was just peeping out of the water.[76]
"Oh, no thank you," said my father. "I never swim after sundown, but I do have something sweet
to offer you. Perhaps you'd like a lollipop, and perhaps you have friends who would like
lollipops, too?"
"Lollipops!" said the crocodile. "Why, that is a treat! How about it, boys?"
A whole chorus of voices shouted, "Hurrah! Lollipops!" and my father counted as many as
seventeen crocodiles with their heads just peeping out of the water.
"That's fine," said my father as he got out the two dozen pink lollipops and the rubber bands. "I'll
stick one here in the bank. Lollipops last longer if you keep them out of the water, you know.
Now, one of you can have this one."
The crocodile who had first spoken swam up and tasted it. "Delicious, mighty delicious!" he
said.
"Now if you don't mind," said my father, "I'll just walk along your back and fasten another
lollipop to[77] the tip of your tail with a rubber band. You don't mind, do you?"
[78]
"Oh no, not in the least," said the crocodile.
"Can you get your tail out of the water just a bit?" asked my father.
"Yes, of course," said the crocodile, and he lifted up his tail. Then my father ran along his back
and fastened another lollipop with a rubber band.
"Who's next?" said my father, and a second crocodile swam up and began sucking on that
lollipop.
"Now, you gentlemen can save a lot of time if you just line up across the river," said my father,
"and I'll be along to give you each a lollipop."
So the crocodiles lined up right across the river with their tails in the air, waiting for my father to
fa
sten on the rest of the lollipops. The tail of the seventeenth crocodile just reached the other
bank.
[79]
Ch
apter Ten
MY FATHER FINDS THE DRAGON
When my father was crossing the back of the fifteenth crocodile with two more lollipops to go,
the noise of the monkeys suddenly stopped, and he could hear a much bigger noise getting
louder every second. Then he could hear seven furious tigers and one raging rhinoceros and two
seething lions and one ranting gorilla along with countless screeching monkeys, led by two
extremely irate wild boars, all yelling, "It's a trick! It's a trick! There's an invasion and it must be
after our dragon. Kill it! Kill it!" The whole crowd stampeded down to the bank.
As my father was fixing the seventeenth lollipop for the last crocodile he heard a wild boar
scream,[80] "Look, it came this way! It's over there now, see! The crocodiles made a bridge for
it," and just as my father leapt onto the other bank one of the wild boars jumped onto the back of
the first crocodile. My father didn't have a moment to spare.
By now the dragon realized that my father was coming to rescue him. He ran out of the bushes
and[81] jumped up and down yelling. "Here I am! I'm right here! Can you see me? Hurry, the
boar is coming over on the crocodiles, too. They're all coming over! Oh, please hurry, hurry!"
The noise was simply terrific.
My father ran up to the dragon, and took out his very sharp jackknife. "Steady, old boy, steady.
We'll make it. Just stand still," he told the dragon as he began to saw through the big rope.
By this time both boars, all seven tigers, the two lions, the rhinoceros, and the gorilla, along with
the countless screeching monkeys, were all on their way across the crocodiles and there was still
a lot of rope to cut through.
"Oh, hurry," the dragon kept saying, and my father again told him to stand still.
"If I don't think I can make it," said my father, "we'll fly over to the other side of the river and I
can finish cutting the rope there."[82]
[83]
Suddenly the screaming grew louder and madder and my father thought the animals must have
crossed the river. He looked around, and saw something which surprised and delighted him.
Partly because he had finished his lollipop, and partly because, as I told you before, crocodiles
are very moody and not the least bit dependable and are always looking for something to eat, the
first crocodile had turned away from the bank and started swimming down the river. The second
crocodile hadn't finished yet, so he followed right after the first, still sucking his lollipop. All the
rest did the same thing, one right after the other, until they were all swimming away in a line.
The two wild boars, the seven tigers, the rhinoceros, the two lions, the gorilla, along with the
countless screeching monkeys, were all riding down the middle of the river on the train of
crocodiles sucking pink lollipops, and all yelling and screaming and getting their feet wet.[84]
[85]
[86]
My father and the dragon laughed themselves weak because it was such a silly sight. As soon as
they had recovered, my father finished cutting the rope and the dragon raced around in circles
and tried to turn a somersault. He was the most excited baby dragon that ever lived. My father
was in a hurry to fly away, and when the dragon finally calmed down a bit my father climbed up
onto his back.
"All aboard!" said the dragon. "Where shall we go?"
"We'll spend the night on the beach, and tomorrow we'll start on the long journey home. So, it's
off to the shores of Tangerina!" shouted my father as the dragon soared above the dark jungle
and the muddy river and all the animals bellowing at them and all the crocodiles licking pink
lollipops and grinning wide grins. After all, what did the crocodiles care about a way to cross the
river, and what a fine feast they were carrying on their backs![87]
As my father and the dragon passed over the Ocean Rocks they heard a tiny excited voice
scream, "Bum cack! Bum cack! We dreed our nagon! I mean, we need our dragon!"
But my father and the dragon knew that nothing in the world would ever make them go back to
Wild Island.
THE END
👁 :
CHAPTER ONE
WHAT IS THOUGHT?
§ 1. Varied Senses of the Term
Four senses of thought, from the wider to the limited
No words are oftener on our lips than thinking and thought. So profuse and varied, indeed, is our
use of these words that it is not easy to define just what we mean by them. The aim of this
chapter is to find a single consistent meaning. Assistance may be had by considering some
typical ways in which the terms are employed. In the first place thought is used broadly, not to
say loosely. Everything that comes to mind, that "goes through our heads," is called a thought.
To think of a thing is just to be conscious of it in any way whatsoever. Second, the term is
restricted by excluding whatever is directly presented; we think (or think of) only such things as
we do not directly see, hear, smell, or taste. Then, third, the meaning is further limited to beliefs
that rest upon some kind of evidence or testimony. Of this third type, two kinds—or, rather, two
degrees—must be discriminated. In some cases, a belief is accepted with slight or almost no
attempt to state the grounds that support it. In other cases, the ground or basis for a belief is
deliberately sought and its[Pg 2] adequacy to support the belief examined. This process is called
reflective thought; it alone is truly educative in value, and it forms, accordingly, the principal
subject of this volume. We shall now briefly describe each of the four senses.
Chance and idle thinking
I. In its loosest sense, thinking signifies everything that, as we say, is "in our heads" or that "goes
through our minds." He who offers "a penny for your thoughts" does not expect to drive any
great bargain. In calling the objects of his demand thoughts, he does not intend to ascribe to them
dignity, consecutiveness, or truth. Any idle fancy, trivial recollection, or flitting impression will
satisfy his demand. Daydreaming, building of castles in the air, that loose flux of casual and
disconnected material that floats through our minds in relaxed moments are, in this random
sense, thinking. More of our waking life than we should care to admit, even to ourselves, is
likely to be whiled away in this inconsequential trifling with idle fancy and unsubstantial hope.
Reflective thought is consecutive, not merely a sequence
In this sense, silly folk and dullards think. The story is told of a man in slight repute for
intelligence, who, desiring to be chosen selectman in his New England town, addressed a knot of
neighbors in this wise: "I hear you don't believe I know enough to hold office. I wish you to
understand that I am thinking about something or other most of the time." Now reflective
thought is like this random coursing of things through the mind in that it consists of a succession
of things thought of; but it is unlike, in that the mere chance occurrence of any chance
"something or other" in an irregular sequence does not suffice. Reflection involves not simply a
sequence of ideas, but a consequence—a consecutive ordering in such a way that[Pg 3] each
determines the next as its proper outcome, while each in turn leans back on its predecessors. The
successive portions of the reflective thought grow out of one another and support one another;
they do not come and go in a medley. Each phase is a step from something to something—
technically speaking, it is a term of thought. Each term leaves a deposit which is utilized in the
next term. The stream or flow becomes a train, chain, or thread.
The restriction of thinking to what goes beyond direct observation
Reflective thought aims, however, at belief
II. Even when thinking is used in a broad sense, it is usually restricted to matters not directly
perceived: to what we do not see, smell, hear, or touch. We ask the man telling a story if he saw
a certain incident happen, and his reply may be, "No, I only thought of it." A note of invention,
as distinct from faithful record of observation, is present. Most important in this class are
successions of imaginative incidents and episodes which, having a certain coherence, hanging
together on a continuous thread, lie between kaleidoscopic flights of fancy and considerations
deliberately employed to establish a conclusion. The imaginative stories poured forth by children
possess all degrees of internal congruity; some are disjointed, some are articulated. When
connected, they simulate reflective thought; indeed, they usually occur in minds of logical
capacity. These imaginative enterprises often precede thinking of the close-knit type and prepare
the way for it. But they do not aim at knowledge, at belief about facts or in truths; and thereby
they are marked off from reflective thought even when they most resemble it. Those who
express such thoughts do not expect credence, but rather credit for a well-constructed plot or a
well-arranged climax. They produce good stories, not—unless by chance[Pg 4]—knowledge. Such
thoughts are an efflorescence of feeling; the enhancement of a mood or sentiment is their aim;
congruity of emotion, their binding tie.
Thought induces belief in two ways
III. In its next sense, thought denotes belief resting upon some basis, that is, real or supposed
kn
owledge going beyond what is directly present. It is marked by acceptance or rejection of
something as reasonably probable or improbable. This phase of thought, however, includes two
such distinct types of belief that, even though their difference is strictly one of degree, not of
kind, it becomes practically important to consider them separately. Some beliefs are accepted
when their grounds have not themselves been considered, others are accepted because their
grounds have been examined.
When we say, "Men used to think the world was flat," or, "I thought you went by the house," we
express belief: something is accepted, held to, acquiesced in, or affirmed. But such thoughts may
mean a supposition accepted without reference to its real grounds. These may be adequate, they
may not; but their value with reference to the support they afford the belief has not been
considered.
Such thoughts grow up unconsciously and without reference to the attainment of correct belief.
They are picked up—we know not how. From obscure sources and by unnoticed channels they
insinuate themselves into acceptance and become unconsciously a part of our mental furniture.
Tradition, instruction, imitation—all of which depend upon authority in some form, or appeal to
our own advantage, or fall in with a strong passion—are responsible for them. Such thoughts are
prejudices, that is, prejudgments, not[Pg 5] judgments proper that rest upon a survey of evidence.[1]
Thinking in its best sense is that which considers the basis and consequences of beliefs
IV. Thoughts that result in belief have an importance attached to them which leads to reflective
thought, to conscious inquiry into the nature, conditions, and bearings of the belief. To think of
whales and camels in the clouds is to entertain ourselves with fancies, terminable at our pleasure,
which do not lead to any belief in particular. But to think of the world as flat is to ascribe a
quality to a real thing as its real property. This conclusion denotes a connection among things
and hence is not, like imaginative thought, plastic to our mood. Belief in the world's flatness
commits him who holds it to thinking in certain specific ways of other objects, such as the
heavenly bodies, antipodes, the possibility of navigation. It prescribes to him actions in
accordance with his conception of these objects.
The consequences of a belief upon other beliefs and upon behavior may be so important, then,
that men are forced to consider the grounds or reasons of their belief and its logical
consequences. This means reflective thought—thought in its eulogistic and emphatic sense.
Reflective thought defined
Men thought the world was flat until Columbus thought it to be round. The earlier thought was a
belief held because men had not the energy or the courage to question what those about them
accepted and taught, especially as it was suggested and seemingly confirmed by obvious sensible
fa
cts. The thought of Columbus was a reasoned conclusion. It marked the close of study into
fa
cts, of scrutiny and revision of evidence, of working out the implications of various
hypotheses, and of[Pg 6] comparing these theoretical results with one another and with known
fa
cts. Because Columbus did not accept unhesitatingly the current traditional theory, because he
doubted and inquired, he arrived at his thought. Skeptical of what, from long habit, seemed most
certain, and credulous of what seemed impossible, he went on thinking until he could produce
evidence for both his confidence and his disbelief. Even if his conclusion had finally turned out
wrong, it would have been a different sort of belief from those it antagonized, because it was
reached by a different method. Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or
supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further
conclusions to which it tends, constitutes reflective thought. Any one of the first three kinds of
thought may elicit this type; but once begun, it is a conscious and voluntary effort to establish
belief upon a firm basis of reasons.
§ 2. The Central Factor in Thinking
There is a common element in all types of thought:
There are, however, no sharp lines of demarcation between the various operations just outlined.
The problem of attaining correct habits of reflection would be much easier than it is, did not the
different modes of thinking blend insensibly into one another. So far, we have considered rather
extreme instances of each kind in order to get the field clearly before us. Let us now reverse this
operation; let us consider a rudimentary case of thinking, lying between careful examination of
evidence and a mere irresponsible stream of fancies. A man is walking on a warm day. The sky
was clear the last time he observed it; but presently he notes, while occupied primarily with other
things, that the air is cooler. It occurs to him that it is probably going to[Pg 7] rain; looking up, he
sees a dark cloud between him and the sun, and he then quickens his steps. What, if anything, in
such a situation can be called thought? Neither the act of walking nor the noting of the cold is a
thought. Walking is one direction of activity; looking and noting are other modes of activity. The
likelihood that it will rain is, however, something suggested. The pedestrian feels the cold; he
thinks of clouds and a coming shower.
viz. suggestion of something not observed
But reflection involves also the relation of signifying
So far there is the same sort of situation as when one looking at a cloud is reminded of a human
figure and face. Thinking in both of these cases (the cases of belief and of fancy) involves a
noted or perceived fact, followed by something else which is not observed but which is brought
to mind, suggested by the thing seen. One reminds us, as we say, of the other. Side by side,
however, with this factor of agreement in the two cases of suggestion is a factor of marked
disagreement. We do not believe in the face suggested by the cloud; we do not consider at all the
probability of its being a fact. There is no reflective thought. The danger of rain, on the contrary,
presents itself to us as a genuine possibility—as a possible fact of the same nature as the
observed coolness. Put differently, we do not regard the cloud as meaning or indicating a face,
but merely as suggesting it, while we do consider that the coolness may mean rain. In the first
case, seeing an object, we just happen, as we say, to think of something else; in the second, we
consider the possibility and nature of the connection between the object seen and the object
suggested. The seen thing is regarded as in some way the ground or basis of belief in the
suggested thing; it possesses the quality of evidence.[Pg 8]
Various synonymous expressions for the function of signifying
This function by which one thing signifies or indicates another, and thereby leads us to consider
how far one may be regarded as warrant for belief in the other, is, then, the central factor in all
reflective or distinctively intellectual thinking. By calling up various situations to which such
terms as signifies and indicates apply, the student will best realize for himself the actual facts
denoted by the words reflective thought. Synonyms for these terms are: points to, tells of,
betokens, prognosticates, represents, stands for, implies.[2] We also say one thing portends
another; is ominous of another, or a symptom of it, or a key to it, or (if the connection is quite
obscure) that it gives a hint, clue, or intimation.
Reflection and belief on evidence
Reflection thus implies that something is believed in (or disbelieved in), not on its own direct
account, but through something else which stands as witness, evidence, proof, voucher, warrant;
that is, as ground of belief. At one time, rain is actually felt or directly experienced; at another
time, we infer that it has rained from the looks of the grass and trees, or that it is going to rain
because of the condition of the air or the state of the barometer. At one time, we see a man (or
suppose we do) without any intermediary fact; at another time, we are not quite sure what we
see, and hunt for accompanying facts that will serve as signs, indications, tokens of what is to be
believed.
Thinking, for the purposes of this inquiry, is defined accordingly as that operation in which
present facts suggest other facts (or truths) in such a way as to induce be[Pg 9]lief in the latter
upon the ground or warrant of the former. We do not put beliefs that rest simply on inference on
the surest level of assurance. To say "I think so" implies that I do not as yet know so. The
inferential belief may later be confirmed and come to stand as sure, but in itself it always has a
certain element of supposition.
§ 3. Elements in Reflective Thinking
So much for the description of the more external and obvious aspects of the fact called thinking.
Further consideration at once reveals certain subprocesses which are involved in every reflective
operation. These are: (a) a state of perplexity, hesitation, doubt; and (b) an act of search or
investigation directed toward bringing to light further facts which serve to corroborate or to
nullify the suggested belief.
The importance of uncertainty
(a) In our illustration, the shock of coolness generated confusion and suspended belief, at least
momentarily. Because it was unexpected, it was a shock or an interruption needing to be
accounted for, identified, or placed. To say that the abrupt occurrence of the change of
temperature constitutes a problem may sound forced and artificial; but if we are willing to extend
the meaning of the word problem to whatever—no matter how slight and commonplace in
character—perplexes and challenges the mind so that it makes belief at all uncertain, there is a
genuine problem or question involved in this experience of sudden change.
and of inquiry in order to test
(b) The turning of the head, the lifting of the eyes, the scanning of the heavens, are activities
adapted to bring to recognition facts that will answer the question presented by the sudden
coolness. The facts as they[Pg 10] first presented themselves were perplexing; they suggested,
however, clouds. The act of looking was an act to discover if this suggested explanation held
good. It may again seem forced to speak of this looking, almost automatic, as an act of research
or inquiry. But once more, if we are willing to generalize our conceptions of our mental
operations to include the trivial and ordinary as well as the technical and recondite, there is no
good reason for refusing to give such a title to the act of looking. The purport of this act of
inquiry is to confirm or to refute the suggested belief. New facts are brought to perception,
which either corroborate the idea that a change of weather is imminent, or negate it.
Finding one's way an illustration of reflection
Another instance, commonplace also, yet not quite so trivial, may enforce this lesson. A man
traveling in an unfamiliar region comes to a branching of the roads. Having no sure knowledge
to fall back upon, he is brought to a standstill of hesitation and suspense. Which road is right?
And how shall perplexity be resolved? There are but two alternatives: he must either blindly and
arbitrarily take his course, trusting to luck for the outcome, or he must discover grounds for the
conclusion that a given road is right. Any attempt to decide the matter by thinking will involve
inquiry into other facts, whether brought out by memory or by further observation, or by both.
The perplexed wayfarer must carefully scrutinize what is before him and he must cudgel his
memory. He looks for evidence that will support belief in favor of either of the roads—for
evidence that will weight down one suggestion. He may climb a tree; he may go first in this
direction, then in that, looking, in either case, for signs, clues,[Pg 11] indications. He wants
something in the nature of a signboard or a map, and his reflection is aimed at the discovery of
facts that will serve this purpose.
Possible, yet incompatible, suggestions
The above illustration may be generalized. Thinking begins in what may fairly enough be called
a forked-road situation, a situation which is ambiguous, which presents a dilemma, which
proposes alternatives. As long as our activity glides smoothly along from one thing to another, or
as long as we permit our imagination to entertain fancies at pleasure, there is no call for
reflection. Difficulty or obstruction in the way of reaching a belief brings us, however, to a
pause. In the suspense of uncertainty, we metaphorically climb a tree; we try to find some
standpoint from which we may survey additional facts and, getting a more commanding view of
the situation, may decide how the facts stand related to one another.
Regulation of thinking by its purpose
Demand for the solution of a perplexity is the steadying and guiding factor in the entire process
of reflection. Where there is no question of a problem to be solved or a difficulty to be
surmounted, the course of suggestions flows on at random; we have the first type of thought
described. If the stream of suggestions is controlled simply by their emotional congruity, their
fitting agreeably into a single picture or story, we have the second type. But a question to be
answered, an ambiguity to be resolved, sets up an end and holds the current of ideas to a definite
channel. Every suggested conclusion is tested by its reference to this regulating end, by its
pertinence to the problem in hand. This need of straightening out a perplexity also controls the
kind of inquiry undertaken. A traveler whose end is the most beautiful path will look for other
considerations and[Pg 12] will test suggestions occurring to him on another principle than if he
wishes to discover the way to a given city. The problem fixes the end of thought and the end
controls the process of thinking.
§ 4. Summary
Origin and stimulus
We may recapitulate by saying that the origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion, or
doubt. Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on "general
principles." There is something specific which occasions and evokes it. General appeals to a
child (or to a grown-up) to think, irrespective of the existence in his own experience of some
difficulty that troubles him and disturbs his equilibrium, are as futile as advice to lift himself by
his boot-straps.
Suggestions and past experience
Given a difficulty, the next step is suggestion of some way out—the formation of some tentative
plan or project, the entertaining of some theory which will account for the peculiarities in
question, the consideration of some solution for the problem. The data at hand cannot supply the
solution; they can only suggest it. What, then, are the sources of the suggestion? Clearly past
experience and prior knowledge. If the person has had some acquaintance with similar situations,
if he has dealt with material of the same sort before, suggestions more or less apt and helpful are
likely to arise. But unless there has been experience in some degree analogous, which may now
be represented in imagination, confusion remains mere confusion. There is nothing upon which
to draw in order to clarify it. Even when a child (or a grown-up) has a problem, to urge him to
think when he has no prior experiences involving some of the same conditions, is wholly
fu
tile.[Pg 13]
Exploration and testing
If the suggestion that occurs is at once accepted, we have uncritical thinking, the minimum of
reflection. To turn the thing over in mind, to reflect, means to hunt for additional evidence, for
new data, that will develop the suggestion, and will either, as we say, bear it out or else make
obvious its absurdity and irrelevance. Given a genuine difficulty and a reasonable amount of
analogous experience to draw upon, the difference, par excellence, between good and bad
thinking is found at this point. The easiest way is to accept any suggestion that seems plausible
and thereby bring to an end the condition of mental uneasiness. Reflective thinking is always
more or less troublesome because it involves overcoming the inertia that inclines one to accept
suggestions at their face value; it involves willingness to endure a condition of mental unrest and
disturbance. Reflective thinking, in short, means judgment suspended during further inquiry; and
suspense is likely to be somewhat painful. As we shall see later, the most important factor in the
training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in
mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first
suggestions that occur. To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted
inquiry—these are the essentials of thinking.[Pg 14]
CHAPTER TWO
THE NEED FOR TRAINING THOUGHT
Man the animal that thinks
To expatiate upon the importance of thought would be absurd. The traditional definition of man
as "the thinking animal" fixes thought as the essential difference between man and the brutes,—
surely an important matter. More relevant to our purpose is the question how thought is
important, for an answer to this question will throw light upon the kind of training thought
requires if it is to subserve its end.
§ 1. The Values of Thought
The possibility of deliberate and intentional activity
I. Thought affords the sole method of escape from purely impulsive or purely routine action. A
being without capacity for thought is moved only by instincts and appetites, as these are called
fo
rt
h by outward conditions and by the inner state of the organism. A being thus moved is, as it
were, pushed from behind. This is what we mean by the blind nature of brute actions. The agent
does not see or foresee the end for which he is acting, nor the results produced by his behaving
in one way rather than in another. He does not "know what he is about." Where there is thought,
things present act as signs or tokens of things not yet experienced. A thinking being can,
accordingly, act on the basis of the absent and the future. Instead of being pushed into a mode of
action by the sheer urgency of forces, whether[Pg 15] instincts or habits, of which he is not aware,
a reflective agent is drawn (to some extent at least) to action by some remoter object of which he
is indirectly aware.
Natural events come to be a language
An animal without thought may go into its hole when rain threatens, because of some immediate
stimulus to its organism. A thinking agent will perceive that certain given facts are probable
signs of a future rain, and will take steps in the light of this anticipated future. To plant seeds, to
cultivate the soil, to harvest grain, are intentional acts, possible only to a being who has learned
to subordinate the immediately felt elements of an experience to those values which these hint at
and prophesy. Philosophers have made much of the phrases "book of nature," "language of
nature." Well, it is in virtue of the capacity of thought that given things are significant of absent
things, and that nature speaks a language which may be interpreted. To a being who thinks,
things are records of their past, as fossils tell of the prior history of the earth, and are prophetic of
their future, as from the present positions of heavenly bodies remote eclipses are foretold.
Shakespeare's "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks," expresses literally enough the
power superadded to existences when they appeal to a thinking being. Upon the function of
signification depend all foresight, all intelligent planning, deliberation, and calculation.
The possibility of systematized foresight
II. By thought man also develops and arranges artificial signs to remind him in advance of
consequences, and of ways of securing and avoiding them. As the trait just mentioned makes the
difference between savage man and brute, so this trait makes the difference between civilized
man and savage. A savage who has been shipwrecked in a river may note certain things which[Pg
16] serve him as signs of danger in the future. But civilized man deliberately makes such signs; he
sets up in advance of wreckage warning buoys, and builds lighthouses where he sees signs that
such events may occur. A savage reads weather signs with great expertness; civilized man
institutes a weather service by which signs are artificially secured and information is distributed
in advance of the appearance of any signs that could be detected without special methods. A
savage finds his way skillfully through a wilderness by reading certain obscure indications;
civilized man builds a highway which shows the road to all. The savage learns to detect the signs
of fire and thereby to invent methods of producing flame; civilized man invents permanent
conditions for producing light and heat whenever they are needed. The very essence of civilized
culture is that we deliberately erect monuments and memorials, lest we forget; and deliberately
institute, in advance of the happening of various contingencies and emergencies of life, devices
fo
r detecting their approach and registering their nature, for warding off what is unfavorable, or
at least for protecting ourselves from its full impact and for making more secure and extensive
what is favorable. All forms of artificial apparatus are intentionally designed modifications of
natural things in order that they may serve better than in their natural estate to indicate the
hidden, the absent, and the remote.
The possibility of objects rich in quality
III. Finally, thought confers upon physical events and objects a very different status and value
from that which they possess to a being that does not reflect. These words are mere scratches,
curious variations of light and shade, to one to whom they are not linguistic signs. To him for
whom they are signs of other things,[Pg 17] each has a definite individuality of its own, according
to the meaning that it is used to convey. Exactly the same holds of natural objects. A chair is a
different object to a being to whom it consciously suggests an opportunity for sitting down,
repose, or sociable converse, from what it is to one to whom it presents itself merely as a thing to
be smelled, or gnawed, or jumped over; a stone is different to one who knows something of its
past history and its future use from what it is to one who only feels it directly through his senses.
It is only by courtesy, indeed, that we can say that an unthinking animal experiences an object at
all—so largely is anything that presents itself to us as an object made up by the qualities it
possesses as a sign of other things.
The nature of the objects an animal perceives
An English logician (Mr. Venn) has remarked that it may be questioned whether a dog sees a
rainbow any more than he apprehends the political constitution of the country in which he lives.
The same principle applies to the kennel in which he sleeps and the meat that he eats. When he is
sleepy, he goes to the kennel; when he is hungry, he is excited by the smell and color of meat;
beyond this, in what sense does he see an object? Certainly he does not see a house—i.e. a thing
with all the properties and relations of a permanent residence, unless he is capable of making
what is present a uniform sign of what is absent—unless he is capable of thought. Nor does he
see what he eats as meat unless it suggests the absent properties by virtue of which it is a certain
joint of some animal, and is known to afford nourishment. Just what is left of an object stripped
of all such qualities of meaning, we cannot well say; but we can be sure that the object is then a
very different sort of thing from the objects that we perceive. There[Pg 18] is moreover no
particular limit to the possibilities of growth in the fusion of a thing as it is to sense and as it is to
thought, or as a sign of other things. The child today soon regards as constituent parts of objects
qualities that once it required the intelligence of a Copernicus or a Newton to apprehend.
Mill on the business of life and the occupation of mind
These various values of the power of thought may be summed up in the following quotation
from John Stuart Mill. "To draw inferences," he says, "has been said to be the great business of
life. Every one has daily, hourly, and momentary need of ascertaining facts which he has not
directly observed: not from any general purpose of adding to his stock of knowledge, but
because the facts themselves are of importance to his interests or to his occupations. The
business of the magistrate, of the military commander, of the navigator, of the physician, of the
agriculturist, is merely to judge of evidence and to act accordingly.... As they do this well or ill,
so they discharge well or ill the duties of their several callings. It is the only occupation in which
the mind never ceases to be engaged."[3]
§ 2. Importance of Direction in order to Realize these Values
Thinking goes astray
What a person has not only daily and hourly, but momentary need of performing, is not a
technical and abstruse matter; nor, on the other hand, is it trivial and negligible. Such a function
must be congenial to the mind, and must be performed, in an unspoiled mind, upon every fitting
occasion. Just because, however, it is an operation of drawing inferences, of basing conclusions
upon evidence, of reaching belief indirectly, it is[Pg 19] an operation that may go wrong as well as
right, and hence is one that needs safeguarding and training. The greater its importance the
greater are the evils when it is ill-exercised.
Ideas are our rulers—for better or for worse
An earlier writer than Mill, John Locke (1632-1704), brings out the importance of thought for
life and the need of training so that its best and not its worst possibilities will be realized, in the
fo
llowing words: "No man ever sets himself about anything but upon some view or other, which
serves him for a reason for what he does; and whatsoever faculties he employs, the
understanding with such light as it has, well or ill informed, constantly leads; and by that light,
true or false, all his operative powers are directed.... Temples have their sacred images, and we
see what influence they have always had over a great part of mankind. But in truth the ideas and
images in men's minds are the invisible powers that constantly govern them, and to these they
all, universally, pay a ready submission. It is therefore of the highest concernment that great care
should be taken of the understanding, to conduct it aright in the search of knowledge and in the
judgments it makes."[4] If upon thought hang all deliberate activities and the uses we make of all
our other powers, Locke's assertion that it is of the highest concernment that care should be
taken of its conduct is a moderate statement. While the power of thought frees us from servile
subjection to instinct, appetite, and routine, it also brings with it the occasion and possibility of
error and mistake. In elevating us above the brute, it opens to us the possibility of failures to
which the animal, limited to instinct, cannot sink.
§ 3. Tendencies Needing Constant Regulation
Physical and social sanctions of correct thinking
Up to a certain point, the ordinary conditions of life, natural and social, provide the conditions
requisite for regulating the operations of inference. The necessities of life enforce a fundamental
and persistent discipline for which the most cunningly devised artifices would be ineffective
substitutes. The burnt child dreads the fire; the painful consequence emphasizes the need of
correct inference much more than would learned discourse on the properties of heat. Social
conditions also put a premium on correct inferring in matters where action based on valid
thought is socially important. These sanctions of proper thinking may affect life itself, or at least
a life reasonably free from perpetual discomfort. The signs of enemies, of shelter, of food, of the
main social conditions, have to be correctly apprehended.
The serious limitations of such sanctions
But this disciplinary training, efficacious as it is within certain limits, does not carry us beyond a
restricted boundary. Logical attainment in one direction is no bar to extravagant conclusions in
another. A savage expert in judging signs of the movements and location of animals that he
hunts, will accept and gravely narrate the most preposterous yarns concerning the origin of their
habits and structures. When there is no directly appreciable reaction of the inference upon the
security and prosperity of life, there are no natural checks to the acceptance of wrong beliefs.
Conclusions may be generated by a modicum of fact merely because the suggestions are vivid
and interesting; a large accumulation of data may fail to suggest a proper conclusion because
existing customs are averse to entertaining it. Independent of training, there is a "primitive
credulity"[Pg 21] which tends to make no distinction between what a trained mind calls fancy and
that which it calls a reasonable conclusion. The face in the clouds is believed in as some sort of
fa
ct, merely because it is forcibly suggested. Natural intelligence is no barrier to the propagation
of error, nor large but untrained experience to the accumulation of fixed false beliefs. Errors may
support one another mutually and weave an ever larger and firmer fabric of misconception.
Dreams, the positions of stars, the lines of the hand, may be regarded as valuable signs, and the
fa
ll of cards as an inevitable omen, while natural events of the most crucial significance go
disregarded. Beliefs in portents of various kinds, now mere nook and cranny superstitions, were
once universal. A long discipline in exact science was required for their conquest.
Superstition as natural a result as science
In the mere function of suggestion, there is no difference between the power of a column of
mercury to portend rain, and that of the entrails of an animal or the flight of birds to foretell the
fo
rt
unes of war. For all anybody can tell in advance, the spilling of salt is as likely to import bad
luck as the bite of a mosquito to import malaria. Only systematic regulation of the conditions
under which observations are made and severe discipline of the habits of entertaining
suggestions can secure a decision that one type of belief is vicious and the other sound. The
substitution of scientific for superstitious habits of inference has not been brought about by any
improvement in the acuteness of the senses or in the natural workings of the function of
suggestion. It is the result of regulation of the conditions under which observation and inference
take place.[Pg 22]
General causes of bad thinking: Bacon's "idols"
It is instructive to note some of the attempts that have been made to classify the main sources of
error in reaching beliefs. Francis Bacon, for example, at the beginnings of modern scientific
inquiry, enumerated four such classes, under the somewhat fantastic title of "idols" (Gr. ειδωλα,
images), spectral forms that allure the mind into false paths. These he called the idols, or
phantoms, of the (a) tribe, (b) the marketplace, (c) the cave or den, and (d) the theater; or, less
metaphorically, (a) standing erroneous methods (or at least temptations to error) that have their
roots in human nature generally; (b) those that come from intercourse and language; (c) those
that are due to causes peculiar to a specific individual; and finally, (d) those that have their
sources in the fashion or general current of a period. Classifying these causes of fallacious belief
somewhat differently, we may say that two are intrinsic and two are extrinsic. Of the intrinsic,
one is common to all men alike (such as the universal tendency to notice instances that
corroborate a favorite belief more readily than those that contradict it), while the other resides in
the specific temperament and habits of the given individual. Of the extrinsic, one proceeds from
generic social conditions—like the tendency to suppose that there is a fact wherever there is a
word, and no fact where there is no linguistic term—while the other proceeds from local and
temporary social currents.
Locke on the influence of
Locke's method of dealing with typical forms of wrong belief is less formal and may be more
enlightening. We can hardly do better than quote his forcible and quaint language, when,
enumerating different classes of men, he shows different ways in which thought goes wrong:[Pg
23]
(a) dependence on others,
1. "The first is of those who seldom reason at all, but do and think according to the example of
others, whether parents, neighbors, ministers, or who else they are pleased to make choice of to
have an implicit faith in, for the saving of themselves the pains and troubles of thinking and
examining for themselves."
(b) self-interest,
2. "This kind is of those who put passion in the place of reason, and being resolved that shall
govern their actions and arguments, neither use their own, nor hearken to other people's reason,
any farther than it suits their humor, interest, or party."[5]
(c) circumscribed experience
3. "The third sort is of those who readily and sincerely follow reason, but for want of having that
which one may call large, sound, roundabout sense, have not a full view of all that relates to the
question.... They converse but with one sort of men, they read but one sort of books, they will
not come in the hearing but of one sort of notions.... They have a pretty traffic with known
correspondents in some little creek ... but will not venture out into the great ocean of
kn
owledge." Men of originally equal natural parts may finally arrive at very different stores of
kn
owledge and truth, "when all the odds between them has been the different scope that has been
given to their understandings to range in, for the gathering up of information and furnishing their
heads with ideas and notions and observations, whereon to employ their mind."[6]
[Pg 24]
In another portion of his writings,[7] Locke states the same ideas in slightly different form.
Effect of dogmatic principles,
1. "That which is inconsistent with our principles is so far from passing for probable with us that
it will not be allowed possible. The reverence borne to these principles is so great, and their
au
thority so paramount to all other, that the testimony, not only of other men, but the evidence of
our own senses are often rejected, when they offer to vouch anything contrary to these
established rules.... There is nothing more ordinary than children's receiving into their minds
propositions ... from their parents, nurses, or those about them; which being insinuated in their
unwary as well as unbiased understandings, and fastened by degrees, are at last (and this whether
true or false) riveted there by long custom and education, beyond all possibility of being pulled
out again. For men, when they are grown up, reflecting upon their opinions and finding those of
this sort to be as ancient in their minds as their very memories, not having observed their early
insinuation, nor by what means they got them, they are apt to reverence them as sacred things,
and not to suffer them to be profaned, touched, or questioned." They take them as standards "to
be the great and unerring deciders of truth and falsehood, and the judges to which they are to
ap
peal in all manner of controversies."
of closed minds,
2. "Secondly, next to these are men whose understandings are cast into a mold, and fashioned
just to the size of a received hypothesis." Such men, Locke goes on to say, while not denying the
existence of facts and evidence, cannot be convinced by the evidence that[Pg 25] would decide
them if their minds were not so closed by adherence to fixed belief.
of strong passion,
3. "Predominant Passions. Thirdly, probabilities which cross men's appetites and prevailing
passions run the same fate. Let ever so much probability hang on one side of a covetous man's
reasoning, and money on the other, it is easy to foresee which will outweigh. Earthly minds, like
mud walls, resist the strongest batteries.
of dependence upon authority of others
4. "Authority. The fourth and last wrong measure of probability I shall take notice of, and which
keeps in ignorance or error more people than all the others together, is the giving up our assent to
the common received opinions, either of our friends or party, neighborhood or country."
Causes of bad mental habits are social as well as inborn
Both Bacon and Locke make it evident that over and above the sources of misbelief that reside in
the natural tendencies of the individual (like those toward hasty and too far-reaching
conclusions), social conditions tend to instigate and confirm wrong habits of thinking by
au
thority, by conscious instruction, and by the even more insidious half-conscious influences of
language, imitation, sympathy, and suggestion. Education has accordingly not only to safeguard
an individual against the besetting erroneous tendencies of his own mind—its rashness,
presumption, and preference of what chimes with self-interest to objective evidence—but also to
undermine and destroy the accumulated and self-perpetuating prejudices of long ages. When
social life in general has become more reasonable, more imbued with rational conviction, and
less moved by stiff authority and blind passion, educational agencies may be more positive and
constructive than at present, for they will[Pg 26] work in harmony with the educative influence
exercised willy-nilly by other social surroundings upon an individual's habits of thought and
belief. At present, the work of teaching must not only transform natural tendencies into trained
habits of thought, but must also fortify the mind against irrational tendencies current in the social
environment, and help displace erroneous habits already produced.
§ 4. Regulation Transforms Inference into Proof
A leap is involved in all thinking
Thinking is important because, as we have seen, it is that function in which given or ascertained
fa
cts stand for or indicate others which are not directly ascertained. But the process of reaching
the absent from the present is peculiarly exposed to error; it is liable to be influenced by almost
any number of unseen and unconsidered causes,—past experience, received dogmas, the stirring
of self-interest, the arousing of passion, sheer mental laziness, a social environment steeped in
biased traditions or animated by false expectations, and so on. The exercise of thought is, in the
literal sense of that word, inference; by it one thing carries us over to the idea of, and belief in,
another thing. It involves a jump, a leap, a going beyond what is surely known to something else
accepted on its warrant. Unless one is an idiot, one simply cannot help having all things and
events suggest other things not actually present, nor can one help a tendency to believe in the
latter on the basis of the former. The very inevitableness of the jump, the leap, to something
unknown, only emphasizes the necessity of attention to the conditions under which it occurs so
that the danger of a false step may be lessened and the probability of a right landing increased.[Pg
27]
Hence, the need of regulation which, when adequate, makes proof
Such attention consists in regulation (1) of the conditions under which the function of suggestion
takes place, and (2) of the conditions under which credence is yielded to the suggestions that
occur. Inference controlled in these two ways (the study of which in detail constitutes one of the
chief objects of this book) forms proof. To prove a thing means primarily to try, to test it. The
guest bidden to the wedding feast excused himself because he had to prove his oxen. Exceptions
are said to prove a rule; i.e. they furnish instances so extreme that they try in the severest fashion
its applicability; if the rule will stand such a test, there is no good reason for further doubting it.
Not until a thing has been tried—"tried out," in colloquial language—do we know its true worth.
Till then it may be pretense, a bluff. But the thing that has come out victorious in a test or trial of
strength carries its credentials with it; it is approved, because it has been proved. Its value is
clearly evinced, shown, i.e. demonstrated. So it is with inferences. The mere fact that inference
in general is an invaluable function does not guarantee, nor does it even help out the correctness
of any particular inference. Any inference may go astray; and as we have seen, there are standing
influences ever ready to assist its going wrong. What is important, is that every inference shall
be a tested inference; or (since often this is not possible) that we shall discriminate between
beliefs that rest upon tested evidence and those that do not, and shall be accordingly on our
guard as to the kind and degree of assent yielded.
The office of education in forming skilled
powers of thinking
While it is not the business of education to prove every statement made, any more than to teach
every possible item of information, it is its business to culti[Pg 28]vate deep-seated and effective
habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions; to develop a
lively, sincere, and open-minded preference for conclusions that are properly grounded, and to
ingrain into the individual's working habits methods of inquiry and reasoning appropriate to the
various problems that present themselves. No matter how much an individual knows as a matter
of hearsay and information, if he has not attitudes and habits of this sort, he is not intellectually
educated. He lacks the rudiments of mental discipline. And since these habits are not a gift of
nature (no matter how strong the aptitude for acquiring them); since, moreover, the casual
circumstances of the natural and social environment are not enough to compel their acquisition,
the main office of education is to supply conditions that make for their cultivation. The
fo
rm
ation of these habits is the Training of Mind.[Pg 29]
CHAPTER THREE
NATURAL RESOURCES IN THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
Only native powers can be trained.
In the last chapter we considered the need of transforming, through training, the natural
capacities of inference into habits of critical examination and inquiry. The very importance of
thought for life makes necessary its control by education because of its natural tendency to go
astray, and because social influences exist that tend to form habits of thought leading to
inadequate and erroneous beliefs. Training must, however, be itself based upon the natural
tendencies,—that is, it must find its point of departure in them. A being who could not think
without training could never be trained to think; one may have to learn to think well, but not to
think. Training, in short, must fall back upon the prior and independent existence of natural
powers; it is concerned with their proper direction, not with creating them.
Hence, the one taught must take the initiative
Teaching and learning are correlative or corresponding processes, as much so as selling and
buying. One might as well say he has sold when no one has bought, as to say that he has taught
when no one has learned. And in the educational transaction, the initiative lies with the learner
even more than in commerce it lies with the buyer. If an individual can learn to think only in the
sense of learning to employ more economically and[Pg 30] effectively powers he already
possesses, even more truly one can teach others to think only in the sense of appealing to and
fo
stering powers already active in them. Effective appeal of this kind is impossible unless the
teacher has an insight into existing habits and tendencies, the natural resources with which he
has to ally himself.
Three important natural resources
Any inventory of the items of this natural capital is somewhat arbitrary because it must pass over
many of the complex details. But a statement of the factors essential to thought will put before us
in outline the main elements. Thinking involves (as we have seen) the suggestion of a conclusion
fo
r acceptance, and also search or inquiry to test the value of the suggestion before finally
accepting it. This implies (a) a certain fund or store of experiences and facts from which
suggestions proceed; (b) promptness, flexibility, and fertility of suggestions; and (c) orderliness,
consecutiveness, appropriateness in what is suggested. Clearly, a person may be hampered in
any of these three regards: His thinking may be irrelevant, narrow, or crude because he has not
enough actual material upon which to base conclusions; or because concrete facts and raw
material, even if extensive and bulky, fail to evoke suggestions easily and richly; or finally,
because, even when these two conditions are fulfilled, the ideas suggested are incoherent and
fa
ntastic, rather than pertinent and consistent.
§ 1. Curiosity
Desire for fullness of experience:
The most vital and significant factor in supplying the primary material whence suggestion may
issue is, without doubt, curiosity. The wisest of the Greeks used to[Pg 31] say that wonder is the
mother of all science. An inert mind waits, as it were, for experiences to be imperiously forced
upon it. The pregnant saying of Wordsworth:
"The eye—it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against or with our will"—
holds good in the degree in which one is naturally possessed by curiosity. The curious mind is
constantly alert and exploring, seeking material for thought, as a vigorous and healthy body is on
the qui vive for nutriment. Eagerness for experience, for new and varied contacts, is found where
wonder is found. Such curiosity is the only sure guarantee of the acquisition of the primary facts
upon which inference must base itself.
(a) physical
(a) In its first manifestations, curiosity is a vital overflow, an expression of an abundant organic
energy. A physiological uneasiness leads a child to be "into everything,"—to be reaching,
poking, pounding, prying. Observers of animals have noted what one author calls "their
inveterate tendency to fool." "Rats run about, smell, dig, or gnaw, without real reference to the
business in hand. In the same way Jack [a dog] scrabbles and jumps, the kitten wanders and
picks, the otter slips about everywhere like ground lightning, the elephant fumbles ceaselessly,
the monkey pulls things about."[8] The most casual notice of the activities of a young child
reveals a ceaseless display of exploring and testing activity. Objects are sucked, fingered, and
thumped; drawn and pushed, handled and thrown; in short, experi[Pg 32]mented with, till they
cease to yield new qualities. Such activities are hardly intellectual, and yet without them
intellectual activity would be feeble and intermittent through lack of stuff for its operations.
(b) social
(b) A higher stage of curiosity develops under the influence of social stimuli. When the child
learns that he can appeal to others to eke out his store of experiences, so that, if objects fail to
respond interestingly to his experiments, he may call upon persons to provide interesting
material, a new epoch sets in. "What is that?" "Why?" become the unfailing signs of a child's
presence. At first this questioning is hardly more than a projection into social relations of the
physical overflow which earlier kept the child pushing and pulling, opening and shutting. He
asks in succession what holds up the house, what holds up the soil that holds the house, what
holds up the earth that holds the soil; but his questions are not evidence of any genuine
consciousness of rational connections. His why is not a demand for scientific explanation; the
motive behind it is simply eagerness for a larger acquaintance with the mysterious world in
which he is placed. The search is not for a law or principle, but only for a bigger fact. Yet there
is more than a desire to accumulate just information or heap up disconnected items, although
sometimes the interrogating habit threatens to degenerate into a mere disease of language. In the
fe
eling, however dim, that the facts which directly meet the senses are not the whole story, that
there is more behind them and more to come from them, lies the germ of intellectual curiosity.
(c) intellectual
(c) Curiosity rises above the organic and the social planes and becomes intellectual in the degree
in which[Pg 33] it is transformed into interest in problems provoked by the observation of things
and the accumulation of material. When the question is not discharged by being asked of
another, when the child continues to entertain it in his own mind and to be alert for whatever will
help answer it, curiosity has become a positive intellectual force. To the open mind, nature and
social experience are full of varied and subtle challenges to look further. If germinating powers
are not used and cultivated at the right moment, they tend to be transitory, to die out, or to wane
in intensity. This general law is peculiarly true of sensitiveness to what is uncertain and
questionable; in a few people, intellectual curiosity is so insatiable that nothing will discourage
it, but in most its edge is easily dulled and blunted. Bacon's saying that we must become as little
children in order to enter the kingdom of science is at once a reminder of the open-minded and
flexible wonder of childhood and of the ease with which this endowment is lost. Some lose it in
indifference or carelessness; others in a frivolous flippancy; many escape these evils only to
become incased in a hard dogmatism which is equally fatal to the spirit of wonder. Some are so
taken up with routine as to be inaccessible to new facts and problems. Others retain curiosity
only with reference to what concerns their personal advantage in their chosen career. With many,
curiosity is arrested on the plane of interest in local gossip and in the fortunes of their neighbors;
indeed, so usual is this result that very often the first association with the word curiosity is a
prying inquisitiveness into other people's business. With respect then to curiosity, the teacher has
usually more to learn than to teach. Rarely can he aspire to the office of kindling or[Pg 34] even
increasing it. His task is rather to keep alive the sacred spark of wonder and to fan the flame that
already glows. His problem is to protect the spirit of inquiry, to keep it from becoming blasé
from overexcitement, wooden from routine, fossilized through dogmatic instruction, or
dissipated by random exercise upon trivial things.
§ 2. Suggestion
Out of the subject-matter, whether rich or scanty, important or trivial, of present experience issue
suggestions, ideas, beliefs as to what is not yet given. The function of suggestion is not one that
can be produced by teaching; while it may be modified for better or worse by conditions, it
cannot be destroyed. Many a child has tried his best to see if he could not "stop thinking," but the
flow of suggestions goes on in spite of our will, quite as surely as "our bodies feel, where'er they
be, against or with our will." Primarily, naturally, it is not we who think, in any actively
responsible sense; thinking is rather something that happens in us. Only so far as one has
acquired control of the method in which the function of suggestion occurs and has accepted
responsibility for its consequences, can one truthfully say, "I think so and so."
The dimensions of suggestion:
(a) ease
The function of suggestion has a variety of aspects (or dimensions as we may term them),
varying in different persons, both in themselves and in their mode of combination. These
dimensions are ease or promptness, extent or variety, and depth or persistence. (a) The common
classification of persons into the dull and the bright is made primarily on the basis of the
readiness or facility with which suggestions follow upon the presenta[Pg 35]tion of objects and
upon the happening of events. As the metaphor of dull and bright implies, some minds are
impervious, or else they absorb passively. Everything presented is lost in a drab monotony that
gives nothing back. But others reflect, or give back in varied lights, all that strikes upon them.
The dull make no response; the bright flash back the fact with a changed quality. An inert or
stupid mind requires a heavy jolt or an intense shock to move it to suggestion; the bright mind is
quick, is alert to react with interpretation and suggestion of consequences to follow.
Yet the teacher is not entitled to assume stupidity or even dullness merely because of
irresponsiveness to school subjects or to a lesson as presented by text-book or teacher. The pupil
labeled hopeless may react in quick and lively fashion when the thing-in-hand seems to him
worth while, as some out-of-school sport or social affair. Indeed, the school subject might move
him, were it set in a different context and treated by a different method. A boy dull in geometry
may prove quick enough when he takes up the subject in connection with manual training; the
girl who seems inaccessible to historical facts may respond promptly when it is a question of
judging the character and deeds of people of her acquaintance or of fiction. Barring physical
defect or disease, slowness and dullness in all directions are comparatively rare.
(b) range
(b) Irrespective of the difference in persons as to the ease and promptness with which ideas
respond to facts, there is a difference in the number or range of the suggestions that occur. We
speak truly, in some cases, of the flood of suggestions; in others, there is but a slender trickle.
Occasionally, slowness of outward[Pg 36] response is due to a great variety of suggestions which
check one another and lead to hesitation and suspense; while a lively and prompt suggestion may
take such possession of the mind as to preclude the development of others. Too few suggestions
indicate a dry and meager mental habit; when this is joined to great learning, there results a
pedant or a Gradgrind. Such a person's mind rings hard; he is likely to bore others with mere
bulk of information. He contrasts with the person whom we call ripe, juicy, and mellow.
A conclusion reached after consideration of a few alternatives may be formally correct, but it
will not possess the fullness and richness of meaning of one arrived at after comparison of a
greater variety of alternative suggestions. On the other hand, suggestions may be too numerous
and too varied for the best interests of mental habit. So many suggestions may rise that the
person is at a loss to select among them. He finds it difficult to reach any definite conclusion and
wanders more or less helplessly among them. So much suggests itself pro and con, one thing
leads on to another so naturally, that he finds it difficult to decide in practical affairs or to
conclude in matters of theory. There is such a thing as too much thinking, as when action is
paralyzed by the multiplicity of views suggested by a situation. Or again, the very number of
suggestions may be hostile to tracing logical sequences among them, for it may tempt the mind
away from the necessary but trying task of search for real connections, into the more congenial
occupation of embroidering upon the given facts a tissue of agreeable fancies. The best mental
habit involves a balance between paucity and redundancy of suggestions.[Pg 37]
(c) profundity
(c) Depth. We distinguish between people not only upon the basis of their quickness and fertility
of intellectual response, but also with respect to the plane upon which it occurs—the intrinsic
quality of the response.
One man's thought is profound while another's is superficial; one goes to the roots of the matter,
and another touches lightly its most external aspects. This phase of thinking is perhaps the most
untaught of all, and the least amenable to external influence whether for improvement or harm.
Nevertheless, the conditions of the pupil's contact with subject-matter may be such that he is
compelled to come to quarters with its more significant features, or such that he is encouraged to
deal with it upon the basis of what is trivial. The common assumptions that, if the pupil only
thinks, one thought is just as good for his mental discipline as another, and that the end of study
is the amassing of information, both tend to foster superficial, at the expense of significant,
thought. Pupils who in matters of ordinary practical experience have a ready and acute
perception of the difference between the significant and the meaningless, often reach in school
subjects a point where all things seem equally important or equally unimportant; where one thing
is just as likely to be true as another, and where intellectual effort is expended not in
discriminating between things, but in trying to make verbal connections among words.
Balance of mind
Sometimes slowness and depth of response are intimately connected. Time is required in order to
digest impressions, and translate them into substantial ideas. "Brightness" may be but a flash in
the pan. The "slow but sure" person, whether man or child, is one in whom impressions sink and
accumulate, so that thinking is done[Pg 38] at a deeper level of value than with a slighter load.
Many a child is rebuked for "slowness," for not "answering promptly," when his forces are
taking time to gather themselves together to deal effectively with the problem at hand. In such
cases, failure to afford time and leisure conduce to habits of speedy, but snapshot and superficial,
judgment. The depth to which a sense of the problem, of the difficulty, sinks, determines the
quality of the thinking that follows; and any habit of teaching which encourages the pupil for the
sake of a successful recitation or of a display of memorized information to glide over the thin ice
of genuine problems reverses the true method of mind training.
Individual differences
It is profitable to study the lives of men and women who achieve in adult life fine things in their
respective callings, but who were called dull in their school days. Sometimes the early wrong
judgment was due mainly to the fact that the direction in which the child showed his ability was
not one recognized by the good old standards in use, as in the case of Darwin's interest in
beetles, snakes, and frogs. Sometimes it was due to the fact that the child dwelling habitually on
a deeper plane of reflection than other pupils—or than his teachers—did not show to advantage
when prompt answers of the usual sort were expected. Sometimes it was due to the fact that the
pupil's natural mode of approach clashed habitually with that of the text or teacher, and the
method of the latter was assumed as an absolute basis of estimate.
Any subject may be intellectual
In any event, it is desirable that the teacher should rid himself of the notion that "thinking" is a
single, unalterable faculty; that he should recognize that it is a term denoting the various ways in
which things acquire[Pg 39] significance. It is desirable to expel also the kindred notion that some
subjects are inherently "intellectual," and hence possessed of an almost magical power to train
the faculty of thought. Thinking is specific, not a machine-like, ready-made apparatus to be
turned indifferently and at will upon all subjects, as a lantern may throw its light as it happens
upon horses, streets, gardens, trees, or river. Thinking is specific, in that different things suggest
their own appropriate meanings, tell their own unique stories, and in that they do this in very
different ways with different persons. As the growth of the body is through the assimilation of
fo
od, so the growth of mind is through the logical organization of subject-matter. Thinking is not
like a sausage machine which reduces all materials indifferently to one marketable commodity,
but is a power of following up and linking together the specific suggestions that specific things
arouse. Accordingly, any subject, from Greek to cooking, and from drawing to mathematics, is
intellectual, if intellectual at all, not in its fixed inner structure, but in its function—in its power
to start and direct significant inquiry and reflection. What geometry does for one, the
manipulation of laboratory apparatus, the mastery of a musical composition, or the conduct of a
business affair, may do for another.
§ 3. Orderliness: Its Nature
Continuity
Facts, whether narrow or extensive, and conclusions suggested by them, whether many or few,
do not constitute, even when combined, reflective thought. The suggestions must be organized;
they must be arranged with reference to one another and with reference to the facts on which
they depend for proof. When the[Pg 40] factors of facility, of fertility, and of depth are properly
balanced or proportioned, we get as the outcome continuity of thought. We desire neither the
slow mind nor yet the hasty. We wish neither random diffuseness nor fixed rigidity.
Consecutiveness means flexibility and variety of materials, conjoined with singleness and
definiteness of direction. It is opposed both to a mechanical routine uniformity and to a
grasshopper-like movement. Of bright children, it is not infrequently said that "they might do
anything, if only they settled down," so quick and apt are they in any particular response. But,
alas, they rarely settle.
On the other hand, it is not enough not to be diverted. A deadly and fanatic consistency is not our
goal. Concentration does not mean fixity, nor a cramped arrest or paralysis of the flow of
suggestion. It means variety and change of ideas combined into a single steady trend moving
toward a unified conclusion. Thoughts are concentrated not by being kept still and quiescent, but
by being kept moving toward an object, as a general concentrates his troops for attack or
defense. Holding the mind to a subject is like holding a ship to its course; it implies constant
change of place combined with unity of direction. Consistent and orderly thinking is precisely
such a change of subject-matter. Consistency is no more the mere absence of contradiction than
concentration is the mere absence of diversion—which exists in dull routine or in a person "fast
asleep." All kinds of varied and incompatible suggestions may sprout and be followed in their
growth, and yet thinking be consistent and orderly, provided each one of the suggestions is
viewed in relation to the main topic.
Practical demands enforce some degree of continuity
In the main, for most persons, the primary resource[Pg 41] in the development of orderly habits of
thought is indirect, not direct. Intellectual organization originates and for a time grows as an
accompaniment of the organization of the acts required to realize an end, not as the result of a
direct appeal to thinking power. The need of thinking to accomplish something beyond thinking
is more potent than thinking for its own sake. All people at the outset, and the majority of people
probably all their lives, attain ordering of thought through ordering of action. Adults normally
carry on some occupation, profession, pursuit; and this furnishes the continuous axis about
which their knowledge, their beliefs, and their habits of reaching and testing conclusions are
organized. Observations that have to do with the efficient performance of their calling are
extended and rendered precise. Information related to it is not merely amassed and then left in a
heap; it is classified and subdivided so as to be available as it is needed. Inferences are made by
most men not from purely speculative motives, but because they are involved in the efficient
performance of "the duties involved in their several callings." Thus their inferences are
constantly tested by results achieved; futile and scattering methods tend to be discounted; orderly
arrangements have a premium put upon them. The event, the issue, stands as a constant check on
the thinking that has led up to it; and this discipline by efficiency in action is the chief sanction,
in practically all who are not scientific specialists, of orderliness of thought.
Such a resource—the main prop of disciplined thinking in adult life—is not to be despised in
training the young in right intellectual habits. There are, however, profound differences between
the immature and the[Pg 42] adult in the matter of organized activity—differences which must be
taken seriously into account in any educational use of activities: (i) The external achievement
resulting from activity is a more urgent necessity with the adult, and hence is with him a more
effective means of discipline of mind than with the child; (ii) The ends of adult activity are more
specialized than those of child activity.
Peculiar difficulty with children
(i) The selection and arrangement of appropriate lines of action is a much more difficult problem
as respects youth than it is in the case of adults. With the latter, the main lines are more or less
settled by circumstances. The social status of the adult, the fact that he is a citizen, a
householder, a parent, one occupied in some regular industrial or professional calling, prescribes
the chief features of the acts to be performed, and secures, somewhat automatically, as it were,
ap
propriate and related modes of thinking. But with the child there is no such fixity of status and
pursuit; there is almost nothing to dictate that such and such a consecutive line of action, rather
than another, should be followed, while the will of others, his own caprice, and circumstances
ab
out him tend to produce an isolated momentary act. The absence of continued motivation
coöperates with the inner plasticity of the immature to increase the importance of educational
training and the difficulties in the way of finding consecutive modes of activities which may do
fo
r child and youth what serious vocations and functions do for the adult. In the case of children,
the choice is so peculiarly exposed to arbitrary factors, to mere school traditions, to waves of
pedagogical fad and fancy, to fluctuating social cross currents, that sometimes, in sheer disgust
at the inadequacy of results, a reaction occurs[Pg 43] to the total neglect of overt activity as an
educational factor, and a recourse to purely theoretical subjects and methods.
Peculiar opportunity with children
(ii) This very difficulty, however, points to the fact that the opportunity for selecting truly
educative activities is indefinitely greater in child life than in adult. The factor of external
pressure is so strong with most adults that the educative value of the pursuit—its reflex influence
upon intelligence and character—however genuine, is incidental, and frequently almost
accidental. The problem and the opportunity with the young is selection of orderly and
continuous modes of occupation, which, while they lead up to and prepare for the indispensable
activities of adult life, have their own sufficient justification in their present reflex influence
upon the formation of habits of thought.
Action and reaction between extremes
Educational practice shows a continual tendency to oscillate between two extremes with respect
to overt and exertive activities. One extreme is to neglect them almost entirely, on the ground
that they are chaotic and fluctuating, mere diversions appealing to the transitory unformed taste
and caprice of immature minds; or if they avoid this evil, are objectionable copies of the highly
specialized, and more or less commercial, activities of adult life. If activities are admitted at all
into the school, the admission is a grudging concession to the necessity of having occasional
relief from the strain of constant intellectual work, or to the clamor of outside utilitarian
demands upon the school. The other extreme is an enthusiastic belief in the almost magical
educative efficacy of any kind of activity, granted it is an activity and not a passive absorption of
academic and theoretic material. The conceptions of play, of[Pg 44] self-expression, of natural
growth, are appealed to almost as if they meant that opportunity for any kind of spontaneous
activity inevitably secures the due training of mental power; or a mythological brain physiology
is appealed to as proof that any exercise of the muscles trains power of thought.
Locating the problem of education
While we vibrate from one of these extremes to the other, the most serious of all problems is
ignored: the problem, namely, of discovering and arranging the forms of activity (a) which are
most congenial, best adapted, to the immature stage of development; (b) which have the most
ulterior promise as preparation for the social responsibilities of adult life; and (c) which, at the
same time, have the maximum of influence in forming habits of acute observation and of
consecutive inference. As curiosity is related to the acquisition of material of thought, as
suggestion is related to flexibility and force of thought, so the ordering of activities, not
themselves primarily intellectual, is related to the forming of intellectual powers of
consecutiveness.[Pg 45]
CHAPTER FOUR
SCHOOL CONDITIONS AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
§ 1. Introductory: Methods and Conditions
Formal discipline
The so-called faculty-psychology went hand in hand with the vogue of the formal-discipline idea
in education. If thought is a distinct piece of mental machinery, separate from observation,
memory, imagination, and common-sense judgments of persons and things, then thought should
be trained by special exercises designed for the purpose, as one might devise special exercises
fo
r developing the biceps muscles. Certain subjects are then to be regarded as intellectual or
logical subjects par excellence, possessed of a predestined fitness to exercise the thought-faculty,
just as certain machines are better than others for developing arm power. With these three
notions goes the fourth, that method consists of a set of operations by which the machinery of
thought is set going and kept at work upon any subject-matter.
versus real thinking
We have tried to make it clear in the previous chapters that there is no single and uniform power
of thought, but a multitude of different ways in which specific things—things observed,
remembered, heard of, read about—evoke suggestions or ideas that are pertinent to the occasion
and fruitful in the sequel. Training is such development of curiosity, suggestion, and habits of
exploring and testing, as increases their scope[Pg 46] and efficiency. A subject—any subject—is
intellectual in the degree in which with any given person it succeeds in effecting this growth. On
this view the fourth factor, method, is concerned with providing conditions so adapted to
individual needs and powers as to make for the permanent improvement of observation,
suggestion, and investigation.
True and false meaning of method
The teacher's problem is thus twofold. On the one side, he needs (as we saw in the last chapter)
to be a student of individual traits and habits; on the other side, he needs to be a student of the
conditions that modify for better or worse the directions in which individual powers habitually
express themselves. He needs to recognize that method covers not only what he intentionally
devises and employs for the purpose of mental training, but also what he does without any
conscious reference to it,—anything in the atmosphere and conduct of the school which reacts in
any way upon the curiosity, the responsiveness, and the orderly activity of children. The teacher
who is an intelligent student both of individual mental operations and of the effects of school
conditions upon those operations, can largely be trusted to develop for himself methods of
instruction in their narrower and more technical sense—those best adapted to achieve results in
particular subjects, such as reading, geography, or algebra. In the hands of one who is not
intelligently aware of individual capacities and of the influence unconsciously exerted upon
them by the entire environment, even the best of technical methods are likely to get an
immediate result only at the expense of deep-seated and persistent habits. We may group the
conditioning influences of the school environment under three heads: (1) the mental attitudes and
habits of the[Pg 47] persons with whom the child is in contact; (2) the subjects studied; (3) current
educational aims and ideals.
§ 2. Influence of the Habits of Others
Bare reference to the imitativeness of human nature is enough to suggest how profoundly the
mental habits of others affect the attitude of the one being trained. Example is more potent than
precept; and a teacher's best conscious efforts may be more than counteracted by the influence of
personal traits which he is unaware of or regards as unimportant. Methods of instruction and
discipline that are technically faulty may be rendered practically innocuous by the inspiration of
the personal method that lies back of them.
Response to environment fundamental in method
To confine, however, the conditioning influence of the educator, whether parent or teacher, to
imitation is to get a very superficial view of the intellectual influence of others. Imitation is but
one case of a deeper principle—that of stimulus and response. Everything the teacher does, as
well as the manner in which he does it, incites the child to respond in some way or other, and
each response tends to set the child's attitude in some way or other. Even the inattention of the
child to the adult is often a mode of response which is the result of unconscious training.[9] The
teacher is rarely (and even then never entirely) a transparent medium of access by another mind
to a subject. With the young, the influence of the teacher's personality is intimately fused with
that of the subject; the child does not separate[Pg 48] nor even distinguish the two. And as the
child's response is toward or away from anything presented, he keeps up a running commentary,
of which he himself is hardly distinctly aware, of like and dislike, of sympathy and aversion, not
merely to the acts of the teacher, but also to the subject with which the teacher is occupied.
Influence of teacher's own habits
Judging others by ourselves
The extent and power of this influence upon morals and manners, upon character, upon habits of
speech and social bearing, are almost universally recognized. But the tendency to conceive of
thought as an isolated faculty has often blinded teachers to the fact that this influence is just as
real and pervasive in intellectual concerns. Teachers, as well as children, stick more or less to the
main points, have more or less wooden and rigid methods of response, and display more or less
intellectual curiosity about matters that come up. And every trait of this kind is an inevitable part
of the teacher's method of teaching. Merely to accept without notice slipshod habits of speech,
slovenly inferences, unimaginative and literal response, is to indorse these tendencies, and to
ratify them into habits—and so it goes throughout the whole range of contact between teacher
and student. In this complex and intricate field, two or three points may well be singled out for
special notice. (a) Most persons are quite unaware of the distinguishing peculiarities of their own
mental habit. They take their own mental operations for granted, and unconsciously make them
the standard for judging the mental processes of others.[10] Hence there[Pg 49] is a tendency to
encourage everything in the pupil which agrees with this attitude, and to neglect or fail to
understand whatever is incongruous with it. The prevalent overestimation of the value, for mindtraining, of theoretic subjects as compared with practical pursuits, is doubtless due partly to the
fa
ct that the teacher's calling tends to select those in whom the theoretic interest is specially
strong and to repel those in whom executive abilities are marked. Teachers sifted out on this
basis judge pupils and subjects by a like standard, encouraging an intellectual one-sidedness in
those to whom it is naturally congenial, and repelling from study those in whom practical
instincts are more urgent.
Exaggeration of direct personal influence
(b) Teachers—and this holds especially of the stronger and better teachers—tend to rely upon
their personal strong points to hold a child to his work, and thereby to substitute their personal
influence for that of subject-matter as a motive for study. The teacher finds by experience that
his own personality is often effective where the power of the subject to command attention is
almost nil; then he utilizes the former more and more, until the pupil's relation to the teacher
almost takes the place of his relation to the subject. In this way the teacher's personality may
become a source of personal dependence and weakness, an influence that renders the pupil
indifferent to the value of the subject for its own sake.
Independent thinking versus "getting the answer"
(c) The operation of the teacher's own mental habit tends, unless carefully watched and guided,
to make the child a student of the teacher's peculiarities rather than of the subjects that he is
supposed to study. His chief concern is to accommodate himself to what the[Pg 50] teacher expects
of him, rather than to devote himself energetically to the problems of subject-matter. "Is this
right?" comes to mean "Will this answer or this process satisfy the teacher?"—instead of
meaning, "Does it satisfy the inherent conditions of the problem?" It would be folly to deny the
legitimacy or the value of the study of human nature that children carry on in school; but it is
obviously undesirable that their chief intellectual problem should be that of producing an answer
ap
proved by the teacher, and their standard of success be successful adaptation to the
requirements of another.
§ 3. Influence of the Nature of Studies
Types of studies
Studies are conventionally and conveniently grouped under these heads: (1) Those especially
involving the acquisition of skill in performance—the school arts, such as reading, writing,
figuring, and music. (2) Those mainly concerned with acquiring knowledge—"informational"
studies, such as geography and history. (3) Those in which skill in doing and bulk of information
are relatively less important, and appeal to abstract thinking, to "reasoning," is most marked—
"disciplinary" studies, such as arithmetic and formal grammar.[11] Each of these groups of
subjects has its own special pitfalls.
The abstract as the isolated
(a) In the case of the so-called disciplinary or pre-eminently logical studies, there is danger of
the isolation of intellectual activity from the ordinary affairs[Pg 51] of life. Teacher and student
alike tend to set up a chasm between logical thought as something abstract and remote, and the
specific and concrete demands of everyday events. The abstract tends to become so aloof, so far
away from application, as to be cut loose from practical and moral bearing. The gullibility of
specialized scholars when out of their own lines, their extravagant habits of inference and
speech, their ineptness in reaching conclusions in practical matters, their egotistical engrossment
in their own subjects, are extreme examples of the bad effects of severing studies completely
from their ordinary connections in life.
Overdoing the mechanical and automatic
"Drill"
(b) The danger in those studies where the main emphasis is upon acquisition of skill is just the
reverse. The tendency is to take the shortest cuts possible to gain the required end. This makes
the subjects mechanical, and thus restrictive of intellectual power. In the mastery of reading,
writing, drawing, laboratory technique, etc., the need of economy of time and material, of
neatness and accuracy, of promptness and uniformity, is so great that these things tend to
become ends in themselves, irrespective of their influence upon general mental attitude. Sheer
imitation, dictation of steps to be taken, mechanical drill, may give results most quickly and yet
strengthen traits likely to be fatal to reflective power. The pupil is enjoined to do this and that
specific thing, with no knowledge of any reason except that by so doing he gets his result most
speedily; his mistakes are pointed out and corrected for him; he is kept at pure repetition of
certain acts till they become automatic. Later, teachers wonder why the pupil reads with so little
expression, and figures with so little intelligent consideration of the terms[Pg 52] of his problem. In
some educational dogmas and practices, the very idea of training mind seems to be hopelessly
confused with that of a drill which hardly touches mind at all—or touches it for the worse—since
it is wholly taken up with training skill in external execution. This method reduces the "training"
of human beings to the level of animal training. Practical skill, modes of effective technique, can
be intelligently, non-mechanically used, only when intelligence has played a part in their
acquisition.
Wisdom versus information
(c) Much the same sort of thing is to be said regarding studies where emphasis traditionally falls
upon bulk and accuracy of information. The distinction between information and wisdom is old,
and yet requires constantly to be redrawn. Information is knowledge which is merely acquired
and stored up; wisdom is knowledge operating in the direction of powers to the better living of
life. Information, merely as information, implies no special training of intellectual capacity;
wisdom is the finest fruit of that training. In school, amassing information always tends to escape
from the ideal of wisdom or good judgment. The aim often seems to be—especially in such a
subject as geography—to make the pupil what has been called a "cyclopedia of useless
information." "Covering the ground" is the primary necessity; the nurture of mind a bad second.
Thinking cannot, of course, go on in a vacuum; suggestions and inferences can occur only upon
a basis of information as to matters of fact.
But there is all the difference in the world whether the acquisition of information is treated as an
end in itself, or is made an integral portion of the training of thought. The assumption that
information which has[Pg 53] been accumulated apart from use in the recognition and solution of a
problem may later on be freely employed at will by thought is quite false. The skill at the ready
command of intelligence is the skill acquired with the aid of intelligence; the only information
which, otherwise than by accident, can be put to logical use is that acquired in the course of
thinking. Because their knowledge has been achieved in connection with the needs of specific
situations, men of little book-learning are often able to put to effective use every ounce of
kn
owledge they possess; while men of vast erudition are often swamped by the mere bulk of
their learning, because memory, rather than thinking, has been operative in obtaining it.
§4. The Influence of Current Aims and Ideals
It is, of course, impossible to separate this somewhat intangible condition from the points just
dealt with; for automatic skill and quantity of information are educational ideals which pervade
the whole school. We may distinguish, however, certain tendencies, such as that to judge
education from the standpoint of external results, instead of from that of the development of
personal attitudes and habits. The ideal of the product, as against that of the mental process by
which the product is attained, shows itself in both instruction and moral discipline.
External results versus processes
(a) In instruction, the external standard manifests itself in the importance attached to the "correct
answer." No one other thing, probably, works so fatally against focussing the attention of
teachers upon the training of mind as the domination of their minds by the idea that the chief
thing is to get pupils to recite their lessons correctly.[Pg 54] As long as this end is uppermost
(whether consciously or unconsciously), training of mind remains an incidental and secondary
consideration. There is no great difficulty in understanding why this ideal has such vogue. The
large number of pupils to be dealt with, and the tendency of parents and school authorities to
demand speedy and tangible evidence of progress, conspire to give it currency. Knowledge of
subject-matter—not of children—is alone exacted of teachers by this aim; and, moreover,
kn
owledge of subject-matter only in portions definitely prescribed and laid out, and hence
mastered with comparative ease. Education that takes as its standard the improvement of the
intellectual attitude and method of students demands more serious preparatory training, for it
exacts sympathetic and intelligent insight into the workings of individual minds, and a very wide
and flexible command of subject-matter—so as to be able to select and apply just what is needed
when it is needed. Finally, the securing of external results is an aim that lends itself naturally to
the mechanics of school administration—to examinations, marks, gradings, promotions, and so
on.
Reliance upon others
(b) With reference to behavior also, the external ideal has a great influence. Conformity of acts
to precepts and rules is the easiest, because most mechanical, standard to employ. It is no part of
our present task to tell just how far dogmatic instruction, or strict adherence to custom,
convention, and the commands of a social superior, should extend in moral training; but since
problems of conduct are the deepest and most common of all the problems of life, the ways in
which they are met have an influence that radiates into every other mental attitude, even those
fa
r remote from any[Pg 55] direct or conscious moral consideration. Indeed, the deepest plane of
the mental attitude of every one is fixed by the way in which problems of behavior are treated. If
the function of thought, of serious inquiry and reflection, is reduced to a minimum in dealing
with them, it is not reasonable to expect habits of thought to exercise great influence in less
important matters. On the other hand, habits of active inquiry and careful deliberation in the
significant and vital problems of conduct afford the best guarantee that the general structure of
mind will be reasonable.[Pg 56]
CHAPTER FIVE
THE MEANS AND END OF MENTAL TRAINING: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND
THE LOGICAL
§ 1. Introductory: The Meaning of Logical
Special topic of this chapter
In the preceding chapters we have considered (i) what thinking is; (ii) the importance of its
special training; (iii) the natural tendencies that lend themselves to its training; and (iv) some of
the special obstacles in the way of its training under school conditions. We come now to the
relation of logic to the purpose of mental training.
Three senses of term logical
The practical is the important meaning of logical
In its broadest sense, any thinking that ends in a conclusion is logical—whether the conclusion
reached be justified or fallacious; that is, the term logical covers both the logically good and the
illogical or the logically bad. In its narrowest sense, the term logical refers only to what is
demonstrated to follow necessarily from premises that are definite in meaning and that are either
self-evidently true, or that have been previously proved to be true. Stringency of proof is here the
equivalent of the logical. In this sense mathematics and formal logic (perhaps as a branch of
mathematics) alone are strictly logical. Logical, however, is used in a third sense, which is at
once more vital and more practical; to denote, namely, the systematic care, negative and
positive, taken to safeguard reflection so that it may yield the best results under the given
conditions. If only the word artificial were associated with the idea[Pg 57] of art, or expert skill
gained through voluntary apprenticeship (instead of suggesting the factitious and unreal), we
might say that logical refers to artificial thought.
Care, thoroughness, and exactness the marks of the logical
In this sense, the word logical is synonymous with wide-awake, thorough, and careful
reflection—thought in its best sense (ante, p. 5). Reflection is turning a topic over in various
aspects and in various lights so that nothing significant about it shall be overlooked—almost as
one might turn a stone over to see what its hidden side is like or what is covered by it.
Th
oughtfulness means, practically, the same thing as careful attention; to give our mind to a
subject is to give heed to it, to take pains with it. In speaking of reflection, we naturally use the
words weigh, ponder, deliberate—terms implying a certain delicate and scrupulous balancing of
things against one another. Closely related names are scrutiny, examination, consideration,
inspection—terms which imply close and careful vision. Again, to think is to relate things to one
another definitely, to "put two and two together" as we say. Analogy with the accuracy and
definiteness of mathematical combinations gives us such expressions as calculate, reckon,
account for; and even reason itself—ratio. Caution, carefulness, thoroughness, definiteness,
exactness, orderliness, methodic arrangement, are, then, the traits by which we mark off the
logical from what is random and casual on one side, and from what is academic and formal on
the other.
Whole object of intellectual education is formation of logical disposition
False opposition of the logical and psychological
No argument is needed to point out that the educator is concerned with the logical in its practical
and vital sense. Argument is perhaps needed to show that the intellectual (as distinct from the
moral) end of education is entirely and only the logical in this sense; namely,[Pg 58] the formation
of careful, alert, and thorough habits of thinking. The chief difficulty in the way of recognition
of this principle is a false conception of the relation between the psychological tendencies of an
individual and his logical achievements. If it be assumed—as it is so frequently—that these
have, intrinsically, nothing to do with each other, then logical training is inevitably regarded as
something foreign and extraneous, something to be ingrafted upon the individual from without,
so that it is absurd to identify the object of education with the development of logical power.
Opposing the natural to the logical
The conception that the psychology of individuals has no intrinsic connections with logical
methods and results is held, curiously enough, by two opposing schools of educational theory.
To one school, the natural[12] is primary and fundamental; and its tendency is to make little of
distinctly intellectual nurture. Its mottoes are freedom, self-expression, individuality,
spontaneity, play, interest, natural unfolding, and so on. In its emphasis upon individual attitude
and activity, it sets slight store upon organized subject-matter, or the material of study, and
conceives method to consist of various devices for stimulating and evoking, in their natural order
of growth, the native potentialities of individuals.
Neglect of the innate logical resources
Identification of logical with subject-matter, exclusively
The other school estimates highly the value of the logical, but conceives the natural tendency of
individuals to be averse, or at least indifferent, to logical achievement. It relies upon subject-
matter—upon matter already defined and classified. Method, then, has to do with the devices by
which these characteristics may be imported into a mind naturally reluctant and re[Pg 59]bellious.
Hence its mottoes are discipline, instruction, restraint, voluntary or conscious effort, the
necessity of tasks, and so on. From this point of view studies, rather than attitudes and habits,
embody the logical factor in education. The mind becomes logical only by learning to conform
to an external subject-matter. To produce this conformity, the study should first be analyzed (by
text-book or teacher) into its logical elements; then each of these elements should be defined;
finally, all of the elements should be arranged in series or classes according to logical formulæ or
general principles. Then the pupil learns the definitions one by one; and progressively adding
one to another builds up the logical system, and thereby is himself gradually imbued, from
without, with logical quality.
Illustration from geography,
This description will gain meaning through an illustration. Suppose the subject is geography.
The first thing is to give its definition, marking it off from every other subject. Then the various
ab
stract terms upon which depends the scientific development of the science are stated and
defined one by one—pole, equator, ecliptic, zone,—from the simpler units to the more complex
which are formed out of them; then the more concrete elements are taken in similar series:
continent, island, coast, promontory, cape, isthmus, peninsula, ocean, lake, coast, gulf, bay, and
so on. In acquiring this material, the mind is supposed not only to gain important information,
but, by accommodating itself to ready-made logical definitions, generalizations, and
classifications, gradually to acquire logical habits.
fr
om drawing
This type of method has been applied to every subject taught in the schools—reading, writing,
music, physics, grammar, arithmetic. Drawing for example,[Pg 60] has been taught on the theory
that since all pictorial representation is a matter of combining straight and curved lines, the
simplest procedure is to have the pupil acquire the ability first to draw straight lines in various
positions (horizontal, perpendicular, diagonals at various angles), then typical curves; and
finally, to combine straight and curved lines in various permutations to construct actual pictures.
This seemed to give the ideal "logical" method, beginning with analysis into elements, and then
proceeding in regular order to more and more complex syntheses, each element being defined
when used, and thereby clearly understood.
Formal method
Even when this method in its extreme form is not followed, few schools (especially of the
middle or upper elementary grades) are free from an exaggerated attention to forms supposedly
employed by the pupil if he gets his result logically. It is thought that there are certain steps
arranged in a certain order, which express preëminently an understanding of the subject, and the
pupil is made to "analyze" his procedure into these steps, i.e. to learn a certain routine formula of
statement. While this method is usually at its height in grammar and arithmetic, it invades also
history and even literature, which are then reduced, under plea of intellectual training, to
"outlines," diagrams, and schemes of division and subdivision. In memorizing this simulated cut
and dried copy of the logic of an adult, the child generally is induced to stultify his own subtle
and vital logical movement. The adoption by teachers of this misconception of logical method
has probably done more than anything else to bring pedagogy into disrepute; for to many persons
"pedagogy" means precisely a set of mechanical, self-conscious devices for replacing by some[Pg
61] cast-iron external scheme the personal mental movement of the individual.
Reaction toward lack of form and method
A reaction inevitably occurs from the poor results that accrue from these professedly "logical"
methods. Lack of interest in study, habits of inattention and procrastination, positive aversion to
intellectual application, dependence upon sheer memorizing and mechanical routine with only a
modicum of understanding by the pupil of what he is about, show that the theory of logical
definition, division, gradation, and system does not work out practically as it is theoretically
supposed to work. The consequent disposition—as in every reaction—is to go to the opposite
extreme. The "logical" is thought to be wholly artificial and extraneous; teacher and pupil alike
are to turn their backs upon it, and to work toward the expression of existing aptitudes and tastes.
Emphasis upon natural tendencies and powers as the only possible starting-point of development
is indeed wholesome. But the reaction is false, and hence misleading, in what it ignores and
denies: the presence of genuinely intellectual factors in existing powers and interests.
Logic of subject-matter is logic of adult or trained mind
What is conventionally termed logical (namely, the logical from the standpoint of subjectmatter) represents in truth the logic of the trained adult mind. Ability to divide a subject, to
define its elements, and to group them into classes according to general principles represents
logical capacity at its best point reached after thorough training. The mind that habitually
exhibits skill in divisions, definitions, generalizations, and systematic recapitulations no longer
needs training in logical methods. But it is absurd to suppose that a mind which needs training
because it cannot perform these opera[Pg 62]tions can begin where the expert mind stops. The
logical from the standpoint of subject-matter represents the goal, the last term of training, not
the point of departure.
The immature mind has its own logic
Hence, the psychological and the logical represent the two ends of the same movement
In truth, the mind at every stage of development has its own logic. The error of the notion that by
ap
peal to spontaneous tendencies and by multiplication of materials we may completely dismiss
logical considerations, lies in overlooking how large a part curiosity, inference, experimenting,
and testing already play in the pupil's life. Therefore it underestimates the intellectual factor in
the more spontaneous play and work of individuals—the factor that alone is truly educative. Any
teacher who is alive to the modes of thought naturally operative in the experience of the normal
child will have no difficulty in avoiding the identification of the logical with a ready-made
organization of subject-matter, as well as the notion that the only way to escape this error is to
pay no attention to logical considerations. Such a teacher will have no difficulty in seeing that
the real problem of intellectual education is the transformation of natural powers into expert,
tested powers: the transformation of more or less casual curiosity and sporadic suggestion into
attitudes of alert, cautious, and thorough inquiry. He will see that the psychological and the
logical, instead of being opposed to each other (or even independent of each other), are
connected as the earlier and the later stages in one continuous process of normal growth. The
natural or psychological activities, even when not consciously controlled by logical
considerations, have their own intellectual function and integrity; conscious and deliberate skill
in thinking, when it is achieved, makes habitual or second nature. The first is already logical in
spirit; the last, in presenting an ingrained disposi[Pg 63]tion and attitude, is then as psychological
(as personal) as any caprice or chance impulse could be.
§ 2. Discipline and Freedom
True and false notions of discipline
Discipline of mind is thus, in truth, a result rather than a cause. Any mind is disciplined in a
subject in which independent intellectual initiative and control have been achieved. Discipline
represents original native endowment turned, through gradual exercise, into effective power. So
fa
r as a mind is disciplined, control of method in a given subject has been attained so that the
mind is able to manage itself independently without external tutelage. The aim of education is
precisely to develop intelligence of this independent and effective type—a disciplined mind.
Discipline is positive and constructive.
Discipline as drill
Discipline, however, is frequently regarded as something negative—as a painfully disagreeable
fo
rcing of mind away from channels congenial to it into channels of constraint, a process
grievous at the time but necessary as preparation for a more or less remote future. Discipline is
then generally identified with drill; and drill is conceived after the mechanical analogy of
driving, by unremitting blows, a foreign substance into a resistant material; or is imaged after the
analogy of the mechanical routine by which raw recruits are trained to a soldierly bearing and
habits that are naturally wholly foreign to their possessors. Training of this latter sort, whether it
be called discipline or not, is not mental discipline. Its aim and result are not habits of thinking,
but uniform external modes of action. By failing to ask what he means by discipline, many a
teacher is misled into supposing that he is developing[Pg 64] mental force and efficiency by
methods which in fact restrict and deaden intellectual activity, and which tend to create
mechanical routine, or mental passivity and servility.
As independent power or freedom
Freedom and external spontaneity
When discipline is conceived in intellectual terms (as the habitual power of effective mental
attack), it is identified with freedom in its true sense. For freedom of mind means mental power
capable of independent exercise, emancipated from the leading strings of others, not mere
unhindered external operation. When spontaneity or naturalness is identified with more or less
casual discharge of transitory impulses, the tendency of the educator is to supply a multitude of
stimuli in order that spontaneous activity may be kept up. All sorts of interesting materials,
equipments, tools, modes of activity, are provided in order that there may be no flagging of free
self-expression. This method overlooks some of the essential conditions of the attainment of
genuine freedom.
Some obstacle necessary for thought
(a) Direct immediate discharge or expression of an impulsive tendency is fatal to thinking. Only
when the impulse is to some extent checked and thrown back upon itself does reflection ensue. It
is, indeed, a stupid error to suppose that arbitrary tasks must be imposed from without in order to
fu
rn
ish the factor of perplexity and difficulty which is the necessary cue to thought. Every vital
activity of any depth and range inevitably meets obstacles in the course of its effort to realize
itself—a fact that renders the search for artificial or external problems quite superfluous. The
difficulties that present themselves within the development of an experience are, however, to be
cherished by the educator, not minimized, for they are the natural stimuli[Pg 65] to reflective
inquiry. Freedom does not consist in keeping up uninterrupted and unimpeded external activity,
but is something achieved through conquering, by personal reflection, a way out of the
difficulties that prevent an immediate overflow and a spontaneous success.
Intellectual factors are natural
(b) The method that emphasizes the psychological and natural, but yet fails to see what an
important part of the natural tendencies is constituted at every period of growth by curiosity,
inference, and the desire to test, cannot secure a natural development. In natural growth each
successive stage of activity prepares unconsciously, but thoroughly, the conditions for the
manifestation of the next stage—as in the cycle of a plant's growth. There is no ground for
assuming that "thinking" is a special, isolated natural tendency that will bloom inevitably in due
season simply because various sense and motor activities have been freely manifested before; or
because observation, memory, imagination, and manual skill have been previously exercised
without thought. Only when thinking is constantly employed in using the senses and muscles for
the guidance and application of observations and movements, is the way prepared for subsequent
higher types of thinking.
Genesis of thought contemporaneous with genesis of any human mental activity
At present, the notion is current that childhood is almost entirely unreflective—a period of mere
sensory, motor, and memory development, while adolescence suddenly brings the manifestation
of thought and reason.
Adolescence is not, however, a synonym for magic. Doubtless youth should bring with it an
enlargement of the horizon of childhood, a susceptibility to larger concerns and issues, a more
generous and a more general standpoint toward nature and social life. This development affords
an opportunity for thinking of a more com[Pg 66]prehensive and abstract type than has previously
obtained. But thinking itself remains just what it has been all the time: a matter of following up
and testing the conclusions suggested by the facts and events of life. Thinking begins as soon as
the baby who has lost the ball that he is playing with begins to foresee the possibility of
something not yet existing—its recovery; and begins to forecast steps toward the realization of
this possibility, and, by experimentation, to guide his acts by his ideas and thereby also test the
ideas. Only by making the most of the thought-factor, already active in the experiences of
childhood, is there any promise or warrant for the emergence of superior reflective power at
adolescence, or at any later period.
Fixation of bad mental habits
(c) In any case positive habits are being formed: if not habits of careful looking into things, then
habits of hasty, heedless, impatient glancing over the surface; if not habits of consecutively
fo
llowing up the suggestions that occur, then habits of haphazard, grasshopper-like guessing; if
not habits of suspending judgment till inferences have been tested by the examination of
evidence, then habits of credulity alternating with flippant incredulity, belief or unbelief being
based, in either case, upon whim, emotion, or accidental circumstances. The only way to achieve
traits of carefulness, thoroughness, and continuity (traits that are, as we have seen, the elements
of the "logical") is by exercising these traits from the beginning, and by seeing to it that
conditions call for their exercise.
Genuine freedom is intellectual, not external
Genuine freedom, in short, is intellectual; it rests in the trained power of thought, in ability to
"turn things over," to look at matters deliberately, to judge whether the amount and kind of
evidence requisite for decision[Pg 67] is at hand, and if not, to tell where and how to seek such
evidence. If a man's actions are not guided by thoughtful conclusions, then they are guided by
inconsiderate impulse, unbalanced appetite, caprice, or the circumstances of the moment. To
cultivate unhindered, unreflective external activity is to foster enslavement, for it leaves the
person at the mercy of appetite, sense, and circumstance.[Pg 68]
PART TWO: LOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
CHAPTER SIX
THE ANALYSIS OF A COMPLETE ACT OF THOUGHT
Object of Part Two
After a brief consideration in the first chapter of the nature of reflective thinking, we turned, in
the second, to the need for its training. Then we took up the resources, the difficulties, and the
aim of its training. The purpose of this discussion was to set before the student the general
problem of the training of mind. The purport of the second part, upon which we are now
entering, is giving a fuller statement of the nature and normal growth of thinking, preparatory to
considering in the concluding part the special problems that arise in connection with its
education.
In this chapter we shall make an analysis of the process of thinking into its steps or elementary
constituents, basing the analysis upon descriptions of a number of extremely simple, but
genuine, cases of reflective experience.[13]
A simple case of practical deliberation
1. "The other day when I was down town on 16th Street a clock caught my eye. I saw that the
hands pointed to 12.20. This suggested that I had an engagement at 124th Street, at one o'clock. I
reasoned that[Pg 69] as it had taken me an hour to come down on a surface car, I should probably
be twenty minutes late if I returned the same way. I might save twenty minutes by a subway
express. But was there a station near? If not, I might lose more than twenty minutes in looking
fo
r one. Then I thought of the elevated, and I saw there was such a line within two blocks. But
where was the station? If it were several blocks above or below the street I was on, I should lose
time instead of gaining it. My mind went back to the subway express as quicker than the
elevated; furthermore, I remembered that it went nearer than the elevated to the part of 124th
Street I wished to reach, so that time would be saved at the end of the journey. I concluded in
fa
vor of the subway, and reached my destination by one o'clock."
A simple case of reflection upon an observation
2. "Projecting nearly horizontally from the upper deck of the ferryboat on which I daily cross the
river, is a long white pole, bearing a gilded ball at its tip. It suggested a flagpole when I first saw
it; its color, shape, and gilded ball agreed with this idea, and these reasons seemed to justify me
in this belief. But soon difficulties presented themselves. The pole was nearly horizontal, an
unusual position for a flagpole; in the next place, there was no pulley, ring, or cord by which to
attach a flag; finally, there were elsewhere two vertical staffs from which flags were occasionally
flown. It seemed probable that the pole was not there for flag-flying.
"I then tried to imagine all possible purposes of such a pole, and to consider for which of these it
was best suited: (a) Possibly it was an ornament. But as all the ferryboats and even the tugboats
carried like poles,[Pg 70] this hypothesis was rejected. (b) Possibly it was the terminal of a wireless
telegraph. But the same considerations made this improbable. Besides, the more natural place for
such a terminal would be the highest part of the boat, on top of the pilot house. (c) Its purpose
might be to point out the direction in which the boat is moving.
"In support of this conclusion, I discovered that the pole was lower than the pilot house, so that
the steersman could easily see it. Moreover, the tip was enough higher than the base, so that,
from the pilot's position, it must appear to project far out in front of the boat. Moreover, the pilot
being near the front of the boat, he would need some such guide as to its direction. Tugboats
would also need poles for such a purpose. This hypothesis was so much more probable than the
others that I accepted it. I formed the conclusion that the pole was set up for the purpose of
showing the pilot the direction in which the boat pointed, to enable him to steer correctly."
A simple case of reflection involving experiment
3. "In washing tumblers in hot soapsuds and placing them mouth downward on a plate, bubbles
ap
peared on the outside of the mouth of the tumblers and then went inside. Why? The presence
of bubbles suggests air, which I note must come from inside the tumbler. I see that the soapy
water on the plate prevents escape of the air save as it may be caught in bubbles. But why should
air leave the tumbler? There was no substance entering to force it out. It must have expanded. It
expands by increase of heat or by decrease of pressure, or by both. Could the air have become
heated after the tumbler was taken from the hot suds? Clearly not the air that was already
entangled[Pg 71] in the water. If heated air was the cause, cold air must have entered in transferring
the tumblers from the suds to the plate. I test to see if this supposition is true by taking several
more tumblers out. Some I shake so as to make sure of entrapping cold air in them. Some I take
out holding mouth downward in order to prevent cold air from entering. Bubbles appear on the
outside of every one of the former and on none of the latter. I must be right in my inference. Air
from the outside must have been expanded by the heat of the tumbler, which explains the
ap
pearance of the bubbles on the outside.
"But why do they then go inside? Cold contracts. The tumbler cooled and also the air inside it.
Tension was removed, and hence bubbles appeared inside. To be sure of this, I test by placing a
cup of ice on the tumbler while the bubbles are still forming outside. They soon reverse."
The three cases form a series
These three cases have been purposely selected so as to form a series from the more rudimentary
to more complicated cases of reflection. The first illustrates the kind of thinking done by every
one during the day's business, in which neither the data, nor the ways of dealing with them, take
one outside the limits of everyday experience. The last furnishes a case in which neither problem
nor mode of solution would have been likely to occur except to one with some prior scientific
training. The second case forms a natural transition; its materials lie well within the bounds of
everyday, unspecialized experience; but the problem, instead of being directly involved in the
person's business, arises indirectly out of his activity, and accordingly appeals to a somewhat
theoretic and impartial interest. We[Pg 72] shall deal, in a later chapter, with the evolution of
ab
stract thinking out of that which is relatively practical and direct; here we are concerned only
with the common elements found in all the types.
Five distinct steps in reflection
Upon examination, each instance reveals, more or less clearly, five logically distinct steps: (i) a
fe
lt difficulty; (ii) its location and definition; (iii) suggestion of possible solution; (iv)
development by reasoning of the bearings of the suggestion; (v) further observation and
experiment leading to its acceptance or rejection; that is, the conclusion of belief or disbelief.
1. The occurrence of a difficulty
(a) in the lack of adaptation of means to end
1. The first and second steps frequently fuse into one. The difficulty may be felt with sufficient
definiteness as to set the mind at once speculating upon its probable solution, or an undefined
uneasiness and shock may come first, leading only later to definite attempt to find out what is the
matter. Whether the two steps are distinct or blended, there is the factor emphasized in our
original account of reflection—viz. the perplexity or problem. In the first of the three cases cited,
the difficulty resides in the conflict between conditions at hand and a desired and intended result,
between an end and the means for reaching it. The purpose of keeping an engagement at a
certain time, and the existing hour taken in connection with the location, are not congruous. The
object of thinking is to introduce congruity between the two. The given conditions cannot
themselves be altered; time will not go backward nor will the distance between 16th Street and
124th Street shorten itself. The problem is the discovery of intervening terms which when
inserted between the remoter end and the given means will harmonize them with each other.[Pg 73]
(b) in identifying the character of an object
In the second case, the difficulty experienced is the incompatibility of a suggested and
(temporarily) accepted belief that the pole is a flagpole, with certain other facts. Suppose we
symbolize the qualities that suggest flagpole by the letters a, b, c; those that oppose this
suggestion by the letters p, q, r. There is, of course, nothing inconsistent in the qualities
themselves; but in pulling the mind to different and incongruous conclusions they conflict—
hence the problem. Here the object is the discovery of some object (O), of which a, b, c, and p,
q, r, may all be appropriate traits—just as, in our first case, it is to discover a course of action
which will combine existing conditions and a remoter result in a single whole. The method of
solution is also the same: discovery of intermediate qualities (the position of the pilot house, of
the pole, the need of an index to the boat's direction) symbolized by d, g, l, o, which bind
together otherwise incompatible traits.
(c) in explaining an unexpected event
In the third case, an observer trained to the idea of natural laws or uniformities finds something
odd or exceptional in the behavior of the bubbles. The problem is to reduce the apparent
anomalies to instances of well-established laws. Here the method of solution is also to seek for
intermediary terms which will connect, by regular linkage, the seemingly extraordinary
movements of the bubbles with the conditions known to follow from processes supposed to be
operative.
2. Definition of the difficulty
2. As already noted, the first two steps, the feeling of a discrepancy, or difficulty, and the acts of
observation that serve to define the character of the difficulty may, in a given instance, telescope
together. In cases of striking novelty or unusual perplexity, the difficulty, however, is likely to
present itself at first as a shock, as[Pg 74] emotional disturbance, as a more or less vague feeling of
the unexpected, of something queer, strange, funny, or disconcerting. In such instances, there are
necessary observations deliberately calculated to bring to light just what is the trouble, or to
make clear the specific character of the problem. In large measure, the existence or nonexistence of this step makes the difference between reflection proper, or safeguarded critical
inference and uncontrolled thinking. Where sufficient pains to locate the difficulty are not taken,
suggestions for its resolution must be more or less random. Imagine a doctor called in to
prescribe for a patient. The patient tells him some things that are wrong; his experienced eye, at a
glance, takes in other signs of a certain disease. But if he permits the suggestion of this special
disease to take possession prematurely of his mind, to become an accepted conclusion, his
scientific thinking is by that much cut short. A large part of his technique, as a skilled
practitioner, is to prevent the acceptance of the first suggestions that arise; even, indeed, to
postpone the occurrence of any very definite suggestion till the trouble—the nature of the
problem—has been thoroughly explored. In the case of a physician this proceeding is known as
diagnosis, but a similar inspection is required in every novel and complicated situation to prevent
ru
shing to a conclusion. The essence of critical thinking is suspended judgment; and the essence
of this suspense is inquiry to determine the nature of the problem before proceeding to attempts
at its solution. This, more than any other thing, transforms mere inference into tested inference,
suggested conclusions into proof.
3. Occurrence of a suggested explanation or possible solution
3. The third factor is suggestion. The situation in[Pg 75] which the perplexity occurs calls up
something not present to the senses: the present location, the thought of subway or elevated
train; the stick before the eyes, the idea of a flagpole, an ornament, an apparatus for wireless
telegraphy; the soap bubbles, the law of expansion of bodies through heat and of their
contraction through cold. (a) Suggestion is the very heart of inference; it involves going from
what is present to something absent. Hence, it is more or less speculative, adventurous. Since
inference goes beyond what is actually present, it involves a leap, a jump, the propriety of which
cannot be absolutely warranted in advance, no matter what precautions be taken. Its control is
indirect, on the one hand, involving the formation of habits of mind which are at once
enterprising and cautious; and on the other hand, involving the selection and arrangement of the
particular facts upon perception of which suggestion issues. (b) The suggested conclusion so far
as it is not accepted but only tentatively entertained constitutes an idea. Synonyms for this are
supposition, conjecture, guess, hypothesis, and (in elaborate cases) theory. Since suspended
belief, or the postponement of a final conclusion pending further evidence, depends partly upon
the presence of rival conjectures as to the best course to pursue or the probable explanation to
fa
vor, cultivation of a variety of alternative suggestions is an important factor in good thinking.
4. The rational elaboration of an idea
4. The process of developing the bearings—or, as they are more technically termed, the
implications—of any idea with respect to any problem, is termed reasoning.[14] As an idea is
inferred from given facts, so reasoning[Pg 76] sets out from an idea. The idea of elevated road is
developed into the idea of difficulty of locating station, length of time occupied on the journey,
distance of station at the other end from place to be reached. In the second case, the implication
of a flagpole is seen to be a vertical position; of a wireless apparatus, location on a high part of
the ship and, moreover, absence from every casual tugboat; while the idea of index to direction
in which the boat moves, when developed, is found to cover all the details of the case.
Reasoning has the same effect upon a suggested solution as more intimate and extensive
observation has upon the original problem. Acceptance of the suggestion in its first form is
prevented by looking into it more thoroughly. Conjectures that seem plausible at first sight are
often found unfit or even absurd when their full consequences are traced out. Even when
reasoning out the bearings of a supposition does not lead to rejection, it develops the idea into a
fo
rm
in which it is more apposite to the problem. Only when, for example, the conjecture that a
pole was an index-pole had been thought out into its bearings could its particular applicability to
the case in hand be judged. Suggestions at first seemingly remote and wild are frequently so
transformed by being elaborated into what follows from them as to become apt and fruitful. The
development of an idea through reasoning helps at least to supply the intervening or intermediate
terms that link together into a consistent whole apparently discrepant extremes (ante, p. 72).[Pg 77]
5. Corroboration of an idea and formation of a concluding belief
5. The concluding and conclusive step is some kind of experimental corroboration, or
verification, of the conjectural idea. Reasoning shows that if the idea be adopted, certain
consequences follow. So far the conclusion is hypothetical or conditional. If we look and find
present all the conditions demanded by the theory, and if we find the characteristic traits called
fo
r by rival alternatives to be lacking, the tendency to believe, to accept, is almost irresistible.
Sometimes direct observation furnishes corroboration, as in the case of the pole on the boat. In
other cases, as in that of the bubbles, experiment is required; that is, conditions are deliberately
arranged in accord with the requirements of an idea or hypothesis to see if the results
theoretically indicated by the idea actually occur. If it is found that the experimental results
agree with the theoretical, or rationally deduced, results, and if there is reason to believe that
only the conditions in question would yield such results, the confirmation is so strong as to
induce a conclusion—at least until contrary facts shall indicate the advisability of its revision.
Thinking comes between observations at the beginning and at the end
Observation exists at the beginning and again at the end of the process: at the beginning, to
determine more definitely and precisely the nature of the difficulty to be dealt with; at the end, to
test the value of some hypothetically entertained conclusion. Between those two termini of
observation, we find the more distinctively mental aspects of the entire thought-cycle: (i)
inference, the suggestion of an explanation or solution; and (ii) reasoning, the development of
the bearings and implications of the suggestion. Reasoning requires some experimental
observation to confirm it, while experiment can be economically and fruitfully conducted only[Pg
78] on the basis of an idea that has been tentatively developed by reasoning.
The trained mind one that judges the extent of each step advisable in a given situation
The disciplined, or logically trained, mind—the aim of the educative process—is the mind able
to judge how far each of these steps needs to be carried in any particular situation. No cast-iron
ru
les can be laid down. Each case has to be dealt with as it arises, on the basis of its importance
and of the context in which it occurs. To take too much pains in one case is as foolish—as
illogical—as to take too little in another. At one extreme, almost any conclusion that insures
prompt and unified action may be better than any long delayed conclusion; while at the other,
decision may have to be postponed for a long period—perhaps for a lifetime. The trained mind is
the one that best grasps the degree of observation, forming of ideas, reasoning, and experimental
testing required in any special case, and that profits the most, in future thinking, by mistakes
made in the past. What is important is that the mind should be sensitive to problems and skilled
in methods of attack and solution.[Pg 79]
CHAPTER SEVEN
SYSTEMATIC INFERENCE: INDUCTION AND DEDUCTION
§ 1. The Double Movement of Reflection
Back and forth between facts and meanings
The characteristic outcome of thinking we saw to be the organization of facts and conditions
which, just as they stand, are isolated, fragmentary, and discrepant, the organization being
effected through the introduction of connecting links, or middle terms. The facts as they stand
are the data, the raw material of reflection; their lack of coherence perplexes and stimulates to
reflection. There follows the suggestion of some meaning which, if it can be substantiated, will
give a whole in which various fragmentary and seemingly incompatible data find their proper
place. The meaning suggested supplies a mental platform, an intellectual point of view, from
which to note and define the data more carefully, to seek for additional observations, and to
institute, experimentally, changed conditions.
Inductive and deductive
There is thus a double movement in all reflection: a movement from the given partial and
confused data to a suggested comprehensive (or inclusive) entire situation; and back from this
suggested whole—which as suggested is a meaning, an idea—to the particular facts, so as to
connect these with one another and with additional facts to which the suggestion has directed
attention. Roughly speaking, the first of these movements[Pg 80] is inductive; the second
deductive. A complete act of thought involves both—it involves, that is, a fruitful interaction of
observed (or recollected) particular considerations and of inclusive and far-reaching (general)
meanings.
Hurry versus caution
This double movement to and from a meaning may occur, however, in a casual, uncritical way,
or in a cautious and regulated manner. To think means, in any case, to bridge a gap in
experience, to bind together facts or deeds otherwise isolated. But we may make only a hurried
jump from one consideration to another, allowing our aversion to mental disquietude to override
the gaps; or, we may insist upon noting the road traveled in making connections. We may, in
short, accept readily any suggestion that seems plausible; or we may hunt out additional factors,
new difficulties, to see whether the suggested conclusion really ends the matter. The latter
method involves definite formulation of the connecting links; the statement of a principle, or, in
logical phrase, the use of a universal. If we thus formulate the whole situation, the original data
are transformed into premises of reasoning; the final belief is a logical or rational conclusion,
not a mere de facto termination.
Continuity of relationship the mark of the latter
The importance of connections binding isolated items into a coherent single whole is embodied
in all the phrases that denote the relation of premises and conclusions to each other. (1) The
premises are called grounds, foundations, bases, and are said to underlie, uphold, support the
conclusion. (2) We "descend" from the premises to the conclusion, and "ascend" or "mount" in
the opposite direction—as a river may be continuously traced from source to sea or vice versa.
So the conclusion springs, flows, or is drawn from its premises.[Pg 81] (3) The conclusion—as the
word itself implies—closes, shuts in, locks up together the various factors stated in the premises.
We say that the premises "contain" the conclusion, and that the conclusion "contains" the
premises, thereby marking our sense of the inclusive and comprehensive unity in which the
elements of reasoning are bound tightly together.[15] Systematic inference, in short, means the
recognition of definite relations of interdependence between considerations previously
unorganized and disconnected, this recognition being brought about by the discovery and
insertion of new facts and properties.
Scientific induction and deduction
This more systematic thinking is, however, like the cruder forms in its double movement, the
movement toward the suggestion or hypothesis and the movement back to facts. The difference
is in the greater conscious care with which each phase of the process is performed. The
conditions under which suggestions are allowed to spring up and develop are regulated. Hasty
acceptance of any idea that is plausible, that seems to solve the difficulty, is changed into a
conditional acceptance pending further inquiry. The idea is accepted as a working hypothesis, as
something to guide investigation and bring to light new facts, not as a final conclusion. When
pains are taken to make each aspect of the movement as accurate as possible, the movement
toward building up the idea is known as inductive discovery (induction, for short); the movement
toward developing, applying, and testing, as deductive proof (deduction, for short).
Particular and universal
While induction moves from fragmentary details (or[Pg 82] particulars) to a connected view of a
situation (universal), deduction begins with the latter and works back again to particulars,
connecting them and binding them together. The inductive movement is toward discovery of a
binding principle; the deductive toward its testing—confirming, refuting, modifying it on the
basis of its capacity to interpret isolated details into a unified experience. So far as we conduct
each of these processes in the light of the other, we get valid discovery or verified critical
thinking.
Illustration from everyday experience
A commonplace illustration may enforce the points of this formula. A man who has left his
rooms in order finds them upon his return in a state of confusion, articles being scattered at
random. Automatically, the notion comes to his mind that burglary would account for the
disorder. He has not seen the burglars; their presence is not a fact of observation, but is a
thought, an idea. Moreover, the man has no special burglars in mind; it is the relation, the
meaning of burglary—something general—that comes to mind. The state of his room is
perceived and is particular, definite,—exactly as it is; burglars are inferred, and have a general
status. The state of the room is a fact, certain and speaking for itself; the presence of burglars is a
possible meaning which may explain the facts.
of induction,
So far there is an inductive tendency, suggested by particular and present facts. In the same
inductive way, it occurs to him that his children are mischievous, and that they may have thrown
the things about. This rival hypothesis (or conditional principle of explanation) prevents him
from dogmatically accepting the first suggestion. Judgment is held in suspense and a positive
conclusion postponed.[Pg 83]
of deduction
Then deductive movement begins. Further observations, recollections, reasonings are conducted
on the basis of a development of the ideas suggested: if burglars were responsible, such and such
things would have happened; articles of value would be missing. Here the man is going from a
general principle or relation to special features that accompany it, to particulars,—not back,
however, merely to the original particulars (which would be fruitless or take him in a circle), but
to new details, the actual discovery or nondiscovery of which will test the principle. The man
turns to a box of valuables; some things are gone; some, however, are still there. Perhaps he has
himself removed the missing articles, but has forgotten it. His experiment is not a decisive test.
He thinks of the silver in the sideboard—the children would not have taken that nor would he
ab
sent-mindedly have changed its place. He looks; all the solid ware is gone. The conception of
burglars is confirmed; examination of windows and doors shows that they have been tampered
with. Belief culminates; the original isolated facts have been woven into a coherent fabric. The
idea first suggested (inductively) has been employed to reason out hypothetically certain
additional particulars not yet experienced, that ought to be there, if the suggestion is correct.
Then new acts of observation have shown that the particulars theoretically called for are present,
and by this process the hypothesis is strengthened, corroborated. This moving back and forth
between the observed facts and the conditional idea is kept up till a coherent experience of an
object is substituted for the experience of conflicting details—or else the whole matter is given
up as a bad job.
Science is the same operations carefully performed
Sciences exemplify similar attitudes and operations,[Pg 84] but with a higher degree of elaboration
of the instruments of caution, exactness and thoroughness. This greater elaboration brings about
specialization, an accurate marking off of various types of problems from one another, and a
corresponding segregation and classification of the materials of experience associated with each
type of problem. We shall devote the remainder of this chapter to a consideration of the devices
by which the discovery, the development, and the testing of meanings are scientifically carried
on.
§ 2. Guidance of the Inductive Movement
Guidance is indirect
Control of the formation of suggestion is necessarily indirect, not direct; imperfect, not perfect.
Just because all discovery, all apprehension involving thought of the new, goes from the known,
the present, to the unknown and absent, no rules can be stated that will guarantee correct
inference. Just what is suggested to a person in a given situation depends upon his native
constitution (his originality, his genius), temperament, the prevalent direction of his interests, his
early environment, the general tenor of his past experiences, his special training, the things that
have recently occupied him continuously or vividly, and so on; to some extent even upon an
accidental conjunction of present circumstances. These matters, so far as they lie in the past or in
external conditions, clearly escape regulation. A suggestion simply does or does not occur; this
or that suggestion just happens, occurs, springs up. If, however, prior experience and training
have developed an attitude of patience in a condition of doubt, a capacity for suspended
judgment, and a liking for inquiry, indirect control of the course of suggestions is possible.[Pg 85]
The individual may return upon, revise, restate, enlarge, and analyze the facts out of which
suggestion springs. Inductive methods, in the technical sense, all have to do with regulating the
conditions under which observation, memory, and the acceptance of the testimony of others (the
operations supplying the raw data) proceed.
Method of indirect regulation
Given the facts A B C D on one side and certain individual habits on the other, suggestion occurs
au
tomatically. But if the facts A B C D are carefully looked into and thereby resolved into the
fa
cts A´ B´´ R S, a suggestion will automatically present itself different from that called up by the
fa
cts in their first form. To inventory the facts, to describe exactly and minutely their respective
traits, to magnify artificially those that are obscure and feeble, to reduce artificially those that are
so conspicuous and glaring as to be distracting,—these are ways of modifying the facts that
exercise suggestive force, and thereby indirectly guiding the formation of suggested inferences.
Illustration from diagnosis
Consider, for example, how a physician makes his diagnosis—his inductive interpretation. If he
is scientifically trained, he suspends—postpones—reaching a conclusion in order that he may
not be led by superficial occurrences into a snap judgment. Certain conspicuous phenomena may
fo
rcibly suggest typhoid, but he avoids a conclusion, or even any strong preference for this or
that conclusion until he has greatly (i) enlarged the scope of his data, and (ii) rendered them
more minute. He not only questions the patient as to his feelings and as to his acts prior to the
disease, but by various manipulations with his hands (and with instruments made for the
purpose) brings to light a large number of facts of which the patient is quite unaware. The state
of tem[Pg 86]perature, respiration, and heart-action is accurately noted, and their fluctuations from
time to time are exactly recorded. Until this examination has worked out toward a wider
collection and in toward a minuter scrutiny of details, inference is deferred.
Summary: definition of scientific induction
Scientific induction means, in short, all the processes by which the observing and amassing of
da
ta are regulated with a view to facilitating the formation of explanatory conceptions and
theories. These devices are all directed toward selecting the precise facts to which weight and
significance shall attach in forming suggestions or ideas. Specifically, this selective
determination involves devices of (1) elimination by analysis of what is likely to be misleading
and irrelevant, (2) emphasis of the important by collection and comparison of cases, (3)
deliberate construction of data by experimental variation.
Elimination of irrelevant meanings
(1) It is a common saying that one must learn to discriminate between observed facts and
judgments based upon them. Taken literally, such advice cannot be carried out; in every
observed thing there is—if the thing have any meaning at all—some consolidation of meaning
with what is sensibly and physically present, such that, if this were entirely excluded, what is left
would have no sense. A says: "I saw my brother." The term brother, however, involves a relation
that cannot be sensibly or physically observed; it is inferential in status. If A contents himself
with saying, "I saw a man," the factor of classification, of intellectual reference, is less complex,
but still exists. If, as a last resort, A were to say, "Anyway, I saw a colored object," some
relationship, though more rudimentary and undefined, still subsists. Theoretically, it is possible
that no[Pg 87] object was there, only an unusual mode of nerve stimulation. None the less, the
advice to discriminate what is observed from what is inferred is sound practical advice. Its
working import is that one should eliminate or exclude those inferences as to which experience
has shown that there is greatest liability to error. This, of course, is a relative matter. Under
ordinary circumstances no reasonable doubt would attach to the observation, "I see my brother";
it would be pedantic and silly to resolve this recognition back into a more elementary form.
Under other circumstances it might be a perfectly genuine question as to whether A saw even a
colored thing, or whether the color was due to a stimulation of the sensory optical apparatus (like
"seeing stars" upon a blow) or to a disordered circulation. In general, the scientific man is one
who knows that he is likely to be hurried to a conclusion, and that part of this precipitancy is due
to certain habits which tend to make him "read" certain meanings into the situation that confronts
him, so that he must be on the lookout against errors arising from his interests, habits, and
current preconceptions.
The technique of conclusion
The technique of scientific inquiry thus consists in various processes that tend to exclude overhasty "reading in" of meanings; devices that aim to give a purely "objective" unbiased rendering
of the data to be interpreted. Flushed cheeks usually mean heightened temperature; paleness
means lowered temperature. The clinical thermometer records automatically the actual
temperature and hence checks up the habitual associations that might lead to error in a given
case. All the instrumentalities of observation—the various -meters and -graphs and -scopes—fill
a part[Pg 88] of their scientific rôle in helping to eliminate meanings supplied because of habit,
prejudice, the strong momentary preoccupation of excitement and anticipation, and by the vogue
of existing theories. Photographs, phonographs, kymographs, actinographs, seismographs,
plethysmographs, and the like, moreover, give records that are permanent, so that they can be
employed by different persons, and by the same person in different states of mind, i.e. under the
influence of varying expectations and dominant beliefs. Thus purely personal prepossessions
(due to habit, to desire, to after-effects of recent experience) may be largely eliminated. In
ordinary language, the facts are objectively, rather than subjectively, determined. In this way
tendencies to premature interpretation are held in check.
Collection of instances
(2) Another important method of control consists in the multiplication of cases or instances. If I
doubt whether a certain handful gives a fair sample, or representative, for purposes of judging
value, of a whole carload of grain, I take a number of handfuls from various parts of the car and
compare them. If they agree in quality, well and good; if they disagree, we try to get enough
samples so that when they are thoroughly mixed the result will be a fair basis for an evaluation.
This illustration represents roughly the value of that aspect of scientific control in induction
which insists upon multiplying observations instead of basing the conclusion upon one or a few
cases.
This method not the whole of induction
So prominent, indeed, is this aspect of inductive method that it is frequently treated as the whole
of induction. It is supposed that all inductive inference is based upon collecting and comparing a
number of like cases. But in fact such comparison and collection is a[Pg 89] secondary
development within the process of securing a correct conclusion in some single case. If a man
infers from a single sample of grain as to the grade of wheat of the car as a whole, it is induction
and, under certain circumstances, a sound induction; other cases are resorted to simply for the
sake of rendering that induction more guarded, and more probably correct. In like fashion, the
reasoning that led up to the burglary idea in the instance already cited (p. 83) was inductive,
though there was but one single case examined. The particulars upon which the general meaning
(or relation) of burglary was grounded were simply the sum total of the unlike items and
qualities that made up the one case examined. Had this case presented very great obscurities and
difficulties, recourse might then have been had to examination of a number of similar cases. But
this comparison would not make inductive a process which was not previously of that character;
it would only render induction more wary and adequate. The object of bringing into
consideration a multitude of cases is to facilitate the selection of the evidential or significant
features upon which to base inference in some single case.
Contrast as important as likeness
Accordingly, points of unlikeness are as important as points of likeness among the cases
examined. Comparison, without contrast, does not amount to anything logically. In the degree in
which other cases observed or remembered merely duplicate the case in question, we are no
better off for purposes of inference than if we had permitted our single original fact to dictate a
conclusion. In the case of the various samples of grain, it is the fact that the samples are unlike,
at least in the part of the carload from which they are taken, that is important. Were it not for this
unlikeness, their like[Pg 90]ness in quality would be of no avail in assisting inference.[16] If we are
endeavoring to get a child to regulate his conclusions about the germination of a seed by taking
into account a number of instances, very little is gained if the conditions in all these instances
closely approximate one another. But if one seed is placed in pure sand, another in loam, and
another on blotting-paper, and if in each case there are two conditions, one with and another
without moisture, the unlike factors tend to throw into relief the factors that are significant (or
"essential") for reaching a conclusion. Unless, in short, the observer takes care to have the
differences in the observed cases as extreme as conditions allow, and unless he notes
unlikenesses as carefully as likenesses, he has no way of determining the evidential force of the
data that confront him.
Importance of exceptions and contrary cases
Another way of bringing out this importance of unlikeness is the emphasis put by the scientist
upon negative cases—upon instances which it would seem ought to fall into line but which as
matter of fact do not. Anomalies, exceptions, things which agree in most respects but disagree in
some crucial point, are so important that many of the devices of scientific technique are designed
purely to detect, record, and impress upon memory contrasting cases. Darwin remarked that so
easy is it to pass over cases that oppose a favorite generalization, that he had made it a habit not
merely to hunt for contrary instances, but also to write down any exception he noted or thought
of—as otherwise it was almost sure to be forgotten.[Pg 91]
§ 3. Experimental Variation of Conditions
Experiment the typical method of introducing contrast factors
We have already trenched upon this factor of inductive method, the one that is the most
important of all wherever it is feasible. Theoretically, one sample case of the right kind will be as
good a basis for an inference as a thousand cases; but cases of the "right kind" rarely turn up
spontaneously. We have to search for them, and we may have to make them. If we take cases just
as we find them—whether one case or many cases—they contain much that is irrelevant to the
problem in hand, while much that is relevant is obscure, hidden. The object of experimentation is
the construction, by regular steps taken on the basis of a plan thought out in advance, of a
typical, crucial case, a case formed with express reference to throwing light on the difficulty in
question. All inductive methods rest (as already stated, p. 85) upon regulation of the conditions
of observation and memory; experiment is simply the most adequate regulation possible of these
conditions. We try to make the observation such that every factor entering into it, together with
the mode and the amount of its operation, may be open to recognition. Such making of
observations constitutes experiment.
Three advantages of experiment
Such observations have many and obvious advantages over observations—no matter how
extensive—with respect to which we simply wait for an event to happen or an object to present
itself. Experiment overcomes the defects due to (a) the rarity, (b) the subtlety and minuteness (or
the violence), and (c) the rigid fixity of facts as we ordinarily experience them. The following
quotations from Jevons's Elementary Lessons in Logic bring out all these points:
(i) "We might have to wait years or centuries to meet[Pg 92] accidentally with facts which we can
readily produce at any moment in a laboratory; and it is probable that most of the chemical
substances now known, and many excessively useful products would never have been
discovered at all by waiting till nature presented them spontaneously to our observation."
This quotation refers to the infrequency or rarity of certain facts of nature, even very important
ones. The passage then goes on to speak of the minuteness of many phenomena which makes
them escape ordinary experience:
(ii) "Electricity doubtless operates in every particle of matter, perhaps at every moment of time;
and even the ancients could not but notice its action in the loadstone, in lightning, in the Aurora
Borealis, or in a piece of rubbed amber. But in lightning electricity was too intense and
dangerous; in the other cases it was too feeble to be properly understood. The science of
electricity and magnetism could only advance by getting regular supplies of electricity from the
common electric machine or the galvanic battery and by making powerful electromagnets. Most,
if not all, the effects which electricity produces must go on in nature, but altogether too
obscurely for observation."
Jevons then deals with the fact that, under ordinary conditions of experience, phenomena which
can be understood only by seeing them under varying conditions are presented in a fixed and
uniform way.
(iii) "Thus carbonic acid is only met in the form of a gas, proceeding from the combustion of
carbon; but when exposed to extreme pressure and cold, it is condensed into a liquid, and may
even be converted into a snowlike solid substance. Many other gases have in[Pg 93] like manner
been liquefied or solidified, and there is reason to believe that every substance is capable of
taking all three forms of solid, liquid, and gas, if only the conditions of temperature and pressure
can be sufficiently varied. Mere observation of nature would have led us, on the contrary, to
suppose that nearly all substances were fixed in one condition only, and could not be converted
from solid into liquid and from liquid into gas."
Many volumes would be required to describe in detail all the methods that investigators have
developed in various subjects for analyzing and restating the facts of ordinary experience so that
we may escape from capricious and routine suggestions, and may get the facts in such a form
and in such a light (or context) that exact and far-reaching explanations may be suggested in
place of vague and limited ones. But these various devices of inductive inquiry all have one goal
in view: the indirect regulation of the function of suggestion, or formation of ideas; and, in the
main, they will be found to reduce to some combination of the three types of selecting and
arranging subject-matter just described.
§ 4. Guidance of the Deductive Movement
Value of deduction for guiding induction
Before dealing directly with this topic, we must note that systematic regulation of induction
depends upon the possession of a body of general principles that may be applied deductively to
the examination or construction of particular cases as they come up. If the physician does not
kn
ow the general laws of the physiology of the human body, he has little way of telling what is
either peculiarly significant or peculiarly[Pg 94] exceptional in any particular case that he is called
upon to treat. If he knows the laws of circulation, digestion, and respiration, he can deduce the
conditions that should normally be found in a given case. These considerations give a base line
from which the deviations and abnormalities of a particular case may be measured. In this way,
the nature of the problem at hand is located and defined. Attention is not wasted upon features
which though conspicuous have nothing to do with the case; it is concentrated upon just those
traits which are out of the way and hence require explanation. A question well put is half
answered; i.e. a difficulty clearly apprehended is likely to suggest its own solution,—while a
vague and miscellaneous perception of the problem leads to groping and fumbling. Deductive
systems are necessary in order to put the question in a fruitful form.
"Reasoning a thing out"
The control of the origin and development of hypotheses by deduction does not cease, however,
with locating the problem. Ideas as they first present themselves are inchoate and incomplete.
Deduction is their elaboration into fullness and completeness of meaning (see p. 76). The
phenomena which the physician isolates from the total mass of facts that exist in front of him
suggest, we will say, typhoid fever. Now this conception of typhoid fever is one that is capable
of development. If there is typhoid, wherever there is typhoid, there are certain results, certain
characteristic symptoms. By going over mentally the full bearing of the concept of typhoid, the
scientist is instructed as to further phenomena to be found. Its development gives him an
instrument of inquiry, of observation and experimentation. He can go to work deliberately to see
whether[Pg 95] the case presents those features that it should have if the supposition is valid. The
deduced results form a basis for comparison with observed results. Except where there is a
system of principles capable of being elaborated by theoretical reasoning, the process of testing
(or proof) of a hypothesis is incomplete and haphazard.
Such reasoning implies systematized knowledge,
These considerations indicate the method by which the deductive movement is guided.
Deduction requires a system of allied ideas which may be translated into one another by regular
or graded steps. The question is whether the facts that confront us can be identified as typhoid
fe
ver. To all appearances, there is a great gap between them and typhoid. But if we can, by some
method of substitutions, go through a series of intermediary terms (see p. 72), the gap may, after
all, be easily bridged. Typhoid may mean p which in turn means o, which means n which means
m, which is very similar to the data selected as the key to the problem.
or definition and classification
One of the chief objects of science is to provide for every typical branch of subject-matter a set
of meanings and principles so closely interknit that any one implies some other according to
definite conditions, which under certain other conditions implies another, and so on. In this way,
various substitutions of equivalents are possible, and reasoning can trace out, without having
recourse to specific observations, very remote consequences of any suggested principle.
Definition, general formulæ, and classification are the devices by which the fixation and
elaboration of a meaning into its detailed ramifications are carried on. They are not ends in
themselves—as they are frequently regarded even in elementary education—but
instrumentalities for facilitating[Pg 96] the development of a conception into the form where its
ap
plicability to given facts may best be tested.[17]
The final control of deduction
The final test of deduction lies in experimental observation. Elaboration by reasoning may make
a suggested idea very rich and very plausible, but it will not settle the validity of that idea. Only
if facts can be observed (by methods either of collection or of experimentation), that agree in
detail and without exception with the deduced results, are we justified in accepting the deduction
as giving a valid conclusion. Thinking, in short, must end as well as begin in the domain of
concrete observations, if it is to be complete thinking. And the ultimate educative value of all
deductive processes is measured by the degree to which they become working tools in the
creation and development of new experiences.
§ 5. Some Educational Bearings of the Discussion
Educational counterparts of false logical theories
Isolation of "facts"
Some of the points of the foregoing logical analysis may be clinched by a consideration of their
educational implications, especially with reference to certain practices that grow out of a false
separation by which each is thought to be independent of the other and complete in itself. (i) In
some school subjects, or at all events in some topics or in some lessons, the pupils are immersed
in details; their minds are loaded with disconnected items (whether gleaned by observation and
memory, or accepted on hearsay and authority). Induction is treated as beginning and ending
with the amassing of facts, of particular isolated pieces of information. That these items are
educative only as suggesting a view of some larger situation in which the[Pg 97] particulars are
included and thereby accounted for, is ignored. In object lessons in elementary education and in
laboratory instruction in higher education, the subject is often so treated that the student fails to
"see the forest on account of the trees." Things and their qualities are retailed and detailed,
without reference to a more general character which they stand for and mean. Or, in the
laboratory, the student becomes engrossed in the processes of manipulation,—irrespective of the
reason for their performance, without recognizing a typical problem for the solution of which
they afford the appropriate method. Only deduction brings out and emphasizes consecutive
relationships, and only when relationships are held in view does learning become more than a
miscellaneous scrap-bag.
Failure to follow up by reasoning
(ii) Again, the mind is allowed to hurry on to a vague notion of the whole of which the
fragmentary facts are portions, without any attempt to become conscious of how they are bound
together as parts of this whole. The student feels that "in a general way," as we say, the facts of
the history or geography lesson are related thus and so; but "in a general way" here stands only
fo
r "in a vague way," somehow or other, with no clear recognition of just how.
The pupil is encouraged to form, on the basis of the particular facts, a general notion, a
conception of how they stand related; but no pains are taken to make the student follow up the
notion, to elaborate it and see just what its bearings are upon the case in hand and upon similar
cases. The inductive inference, the guess, is formed by the student; if it happens to be correct, it
is at once accepted by the teacher; or if it is false, it is rejected. If any amplification of the idea
occurs, it is[Pg 98] quite likely carried through by the teacher, who thereby assumes the
responsibility for its intellectual development. But a complete, an integral, act of thought
requires that the person making the suggestion (the guess) be responsible also for reasoning out
its bearings upon the problem in hand; that he develop the suggestion at least enough to indicate
the ways in which it applies to and accounts for the specific data of the case. Too often when a
recitation does not consist in simply testing the ability of the student to display some form of
technical skill, or to repeat facts and principles accepted on the authority of text-book or lecturer,
the teacher goes to the opposite extreme; and after calling out the spontaneous reflections of the
pupils, their guesses or ideas about the matter, merely accepts or rejects them, assuming himself
the responsibility for their elaboration. In this way, the function of suggestion and of
interpretation is excited, but it is not directed and trained. Induction is stimulated but is not
carried over into the reasoning phase necessary to complete it.
In other subjects and topics, the deductive phase is isolated, and is treated as if it were complete
in itself. This false isolation may show itself in either (and both) of two points; namely, at the
beginning or at the end of the resort to general intellectual procedure.
Isolation of deduction by commencing with it
(iii) Beginning with definitions, rules, general principles, classifications, and the like, is a
common form of the first error. This method has been such a uniform object of attack on the part
of all educational reformers that it is not necessary to dwell upon it further than to note that the
mistake is, logically, due to the attempt to introduce deductive considerations without first
making acquaintance with the particular facts that[Pg 99] create a need for the generalizing rational
devices. Unfortunately, the reformer sometimes carries his objection too far, or rather locates it
in the wrong place. He is led into a tirade against all definition, all systematization, all use of
general principles, instead of confining himself to pointing out their futility and their deadness
when not properly motivated by familiarity with concrete experiences.
Isolation of deduction from direction of new observations
(iv) The isolation of deduction is seen, at the other end, wherever there is failure to clinch and
test the results of the general reasoning processes by application to new concrete cases. The final
point of the deductive devices lies in their use in assimilating and comprehending individual
cases. No one understands a general principle fully—no matter how adequately he can
demonstrate it, to say nothing of repeating it—till he can employ it in the mastery of new
situations, which, if they are new, differ in manifestation from the cases used in reaching the
generalization. Too often the text-book or teacher is contented with a series of somewhat
perfunctory examples and illustrations, and the student is not forced to carry the principle that he
has formulated over into further cases of his own experience. In so far, the principle is inert and
dead.
Lack of provision for experimentation
(v) It is only a variation upon this same theme to say that every complete act of reflective inquiry
makes provision for experimentation—for testing suggested and accepted principles by
employing them for the active construction of new cases, in which new qualities emerge. Only
slowly do our schools accommodate themselves to the general advance of scientific method.
From the scientific side, it is demonstrated that effective and integral thinking is possible only
where the experi[Pg 100]mental method in some form is used. Some recognition of this principle is
evinced in higher institutions of learning, colleges and high schools. But in elementary
education, it is still assumed, for the most part, that the pupil's natural range of observations,
supplemented by what he accepts on hearsay, is adequate for intellectual growth. Of course it is
not necessary that laboratories shall be introduced under that name, much less that elaborate
ap
paratus be secured; but the entire scientific history of humanity demonstrates that the
conditions for complete mental activity will not be obtained till adequate provision is made for
the carrying on of activities that actually modify physical conditions, and that books, pictures,
and even objects that are passively observed but not manipulated do not furnish the provision
required.[Pg 101]
CHAPTER EIGHT
JUDGMENT: THE INTERPRETATION OF FACTS
§ 1. The Three Factors of Judging
Good judgment
A man of good judgment in a given set of affairs is a man in so far educated, trained, whatever
may be his literacy. And if our schools turn out their pupils in that attitude of mind which is
conducive to good judgment in any department of affairs in which the pupils are placed, they
have done more than if they sent out their pupils merely possessed of vast stores of information,
or high degrees of skill in specialized branches. To know what is good judgment we need first to
kn
ow what judgment is.
Judgment and inference
That there is an intimate connection between judgment and inference is obvious enough. The
aim of inference is to terminate itself in an adequate judgment of a situation, and the course of
inference goes on through a series of partial and tentative judgments. What are these units, these
terms of inference when we examine them on their own account? Their significant traits may be
readily gathered from a consideration of the operations to which the word judgment was
originally applied: namely, the authoritative decision of matters in legal controversy—the
procedure of the judge on the bench. There are three such features: (1) a controversy, consisting
of opposite claims regarding the same objective situation; (2) a process of defining and
elaborating these claims and of sifting the facts adduced to[Pg 102] support them; (3) a final
decision, or sentence, closing the particular matter in dispute and also serving as a rule or
principle for deciding future cases.
Uncertainty the antecedent of judgment
1. Unless there is something doubtful, the situation is read off at a glance; it is taken in on sight,
i.e. there is merely apprehension, perception, recognition, not judgment. If the matter is wholly
doubtful, if it is dark and obscure throughout, there is a blind mystery and again no judgment
occurs. But if it suggests, however vaguely, different meanings, rival possible interpretations,
there is some point at issue, some matter at stake. Doubt takes the form of dispute, controversy;
different sides compete for a conclusion in their favor. Cases brought to trial before a judge
illustrate neatly and unambiguously this strife of alternative interpretations; but any case of
trying to clear up intellectually a doubtful situation exemplifies the same traits. A moving blur
catches our eye in the distance; we ask ourselves: "What is it? Is it a cloud of whirling dust? a
tree waving its branches? a man signaling to us?" Something in the total situation suggests each
of these possible meanings. Only one of them can possibly be sound; perhaps none of them is
ap
propriate; yet some meaning the thing in question surely has. Which of the alternative
suggested meanings has the rightful claim? What does the perception really mean? How is it to
be interpreted, estimated, appraised, placed? Every judgment proceeds from some such situation.
Judgment defines the issue,
2. The hearing of the controversy, the trial, i.e. the weighing of alternative claims, divides into
two branches, either of which, in a given case, may be more conspicuous than the other. In the
consideration of a legal dispute, these two branches are sifting the evidence and[Pg 103] selecting
the rules that are applicable; they are "the facts" and "the law" of the case. In judgment they are
(a) the determination of the data that are important in the given case (compare the inductive
movement); and (b) the elaboration of the conceptions or meanings suggested by the crude data
(compare the deductive movement). (a) What portions or aspects of the situation are significant
in controlling the formation of the interpretation? (b) Just what is the full meaning and bearing of
the conception that is used as a method of interpretation? These questions are strictly correlative;
the answer to each depends upon the answer to the other. We may, however, for convenience,
consider them separately.
(a) by selecting what facts are evidence
(a) In every actual occurrence, there are many details which are part of the total occurrence, but
which nevertheless are not significant in relation to the point at issue. All parts of an experience
are equally present, but they are very far from being of equal value as signs or as evidences. Nor
is there any tag or label on any trait saying: "This is important," or "This is trivial." Nor is
intensity, or vividness or conspicuousness, a safe measure of indicative and proving value. The
glaring thing may be totally insignificant in this particular situation, and the key to the
understanding of the whole matter may be modest or hidden (compare p. 74). Features that are
not significant are distracting; they proffer their claims to be regarded as clues and cues to
interpretation, while traits that are significant do not appear on the surface at all. Hence,
judgment is required even in reference to the situation or event that is present to the senses;
elimination or rejection, selection, discovery, or bringing to light must take place.[Pg 104] Till we
have reached a final conclusion, rejection and selection must be tentative or conditional. We
select the things that we hope or trust are cues to meaning. But if they do not suggest a situation
that accepts and includes them (see p. 81), we reconstitute our data, the facts of the case; for we
mean, intellectually, by the facts of the case those traits that are used as evidence in reaching a
conclusion or forming a decision.
Expertness in selecting evidence
No hard and fast rules for this operation of selecting and rejecting, or fixing upon the facts, can
be given. It all comes back, as we say, to the good judgment, the good sense, of the one judging.
To be a good judge is to have a sense of the relative indicative or signifying values of the various
fe
atures of the perplexing situation; to know what to let go as of no account; what to eliminate as
irrelevant; what to retain as conducive to outcome; what to emphasize as a clue to the
difficulty.[18] This power in ordinary matters we call knack, tact, cleverness; in more important
affairs, insight, discernment. In part it is instinctive or inborn; but it also represents the funded
outcome of long familiarity with like operations in the past. Possession of this ability to seize
what is evidential or significant and to let the rest go is the mark of the expert, the connoisseur,
the judge, in any matter.
Intuitive judgments
Mill cites the following case, which is worth noting as an instance of the extreme delicacy and
accuracy to which may be developed this power of sizing up the significant factors of a situation.
"A Scotch manufacturer procured from England, at a high rate of wages, a working dyer, famous
fo
r producing very fine colors, with the view of teaching to his other workmen the same[Pg 105]
skill. The workman came; but his method of proportioning the ingredients, in which lay the
secret of the effects he produced, was by taking them up in handfuls, while the common method
was to weigh them. The manufacturer sought to make him turn his handling system into an
equivalent weighing system, that the general principles of his peculiar mode of proceeding might
be ascertained. This, however, the man found himself quite unable to do, and could therefore
impart his own skill to nobody. He had, from individual cases of his own experience, established
a connection in his mind between fine effects of color and tactual perceptions in handling his
dyeing materials; and from these perceptions he could, in any particular case, infer the means to
be employed and the effects which would be produced." Long brooding over conditions, intimate
contact associated with keen interest, thorough absorption in a multiplicity of allied experiences,
tend to bring about those judgments which we then call intuitive; but they are true judgments
because they are based on intelligent selection and estimation, with the solution of a problem as
the controlling standard. Possession of this capacity makes the difference between the artist and
the intellectual bungler.
Such is judging ability, in its completest form, as to the data of the decision to be reached. But in
any case there is a certain feeling along for the way to be followed; a constant tentative picking
out of certain qualities to see what emphasis upon them would lead to; a willingness to hold final
selection in suspense; and to reject the factors entirely or relegate them to a different position in
the evidential scheme if other features yield more solvent suggestions. Alertness, flexibility,
curios[Pg 106]ity are the essentials; dogmatism, rigidity, prejudice, caprice, arising from routine,
passion, and flippancy are fatal.
(b) To decide an issue, the appropriate principles must also be selected
(b) This selection of data is, of course, for the sake of controlling the development and
elaboration of the suggested meaning in the light of which they are to be interpreted (compare p.
76). An evolution of conceptions thus goes on simultaneously with the determination of the
fa
cts; one possible meaning after another is held before the mind, considered in relation to the
data to which it is applied, is developed into its more detailed bearings upon the data, is dropped
or tentatively accepted and used. We do not approach any problem with a wholly naïve or virgin
mind; we approach it with certain acquired habitual modes of understanding, with a certain store
of previously evolved meanings, or at least of experiences from which meanings may be educed.
If the circumstances are such that a habitual response is called directly into play, there is an
immediate grasp of meaning. If the habit is checked, and inhibited from easy application, a
possible meaning for the facts in question presents itself. No hard and fast rules decide whether a
meaning suggested is the right and proper meaning to follow up. The individual's own good (or
bad) judgment is the guide. There is no label on any given idea or principle which says
au
tomatically, "Use me in this situation"—as the magic cakes of Alice in Wonderland were
inscribed "Eat me." The thinker has to decide, to choose; and there is always a risk, so that the
prudent thinker selects warily, subject, that is, to confirmation or frustration by later events. If
one is not able to estimate wisely what is relevant to the interpretation of a given perplexing or
doubtful issue, it avails[Pg 107] little that arduous learning has built up a large stock of concepts.
For learning is not wisdom; information does not guarantee good judgment. Memory may
provide an antiseptic refrigerator in which to store a stock of meanings for future use, but
judgment selects and adopts the one used in a given emergency—and without an emergency
(some crisis, slight or great) there is no call for judgment. No conception, even if it is carefully
and firmly established in the abstract, can at first safely be more than a candidate for the office
of interpreter. Only greater success than that of its rivals in clarifying dark spots, untying hard
kn
ots, reconciling discrepancies, can elect it or prove it a valid idea for the given situation.
Judging terminates in a decision or statement
3. The judgment when formed is a decision; it closes (or concludes) the question at issue. This
determination not only settles that particular case, but it helps fix a rule or method for deciding
similar matters in the future; as the sentence of the judge on the bench both terminates that
dispute and also forms a precedent for future decisions. If the interpretation settled upon is not
controverted by subsequent events, a presumption is built up in favor of similar interpretation in
other cases where the features are not so obviously unlike as to make it inappropriate. In this
way, principles of judging are gradually built up; a certain manner of interpretation gets weight,
au
thority. In short, meanings get standardized, they become logical concepts (see below, p. 118).
§ 2. The Origin and Nature of Ideas
Ideas are conjectures employed in judging
This brings us to the question of ideas in relation to judgments.[19] Something in an obscure
situation sug[Pg 108]gests something else as its meaning. If this meaning is at once accepted, there
is no reflective thinking, no genuine judging. Thought is cut short uncritically; dogmatic belief,
with all its attending risks, takes place. But if the meaning suggested is held in suspense, pending
examination and inquiry, there is true judgment. We stop and think, we de-fer conclusion in
order to in-fer more thoroughly. In this process of being only conditionally accepted, accepted
only for examination, meanings become ideas. That is to say, an idea is a meaning that is
tentatively entertained, formed, and used with reference to its fitness to decide a perplexing
situation,—a meaning used as a tool of judgment.
Or tools of interpretation
Let us recur to our instance of a blur in motion appearing at a distance. We wonder what the
thing is, i.e. what the blur means. A man waving his arms, a friend beckoning to us, are
suggested as possibilities. To accept at once either alternative is to arrest judgment. But if we
treat what is suggested as only a suggestion, a supposition, a possibility, it becomes an idea,
having the following traits: (a) As merely a suggestion, it is a conjecture, a guess, which in cases
of greater dignity we call a hypothesis or a theory. That is to say, it is a possible but as yet
do
ubtful mode of interpretation. (b) Even though doubtful, it has an office to perform; namely,
that of directing inquiry and examination. If this blur means a friend beckoning, then careful
observation should show certain other traits. If it is a man driving unruly cattle, certain other
traits should be found. Let us look and see if these traits are found. Taken merely as a doubt, an
idea would paralyze inquiry. Taken merely as a certainty, it would arrest[Pg 109] inquiry. Taken as
a doubtful possibility, it affords a standpoint, a platform, a method of inquiry.
Pseudo-ideas
Ideas are not then genuine ideas unless they are tools in a reflective examination which tends to
solve a problem. Suppose it is a question of having the pupil grasp the idea of the sphericity of
the earth. This is different from teaching him its sphericity as a fact. He may be shown (or
reminded of) a ball or a globe, and be told that the earth is round like those things; he may then
be made to repeat that statement day after day till the shape of the earth and the shape of the ball
are welded together in his mind. But he has not thereby acquired any idea of the earth's
sphericity; at most, he has had a certain image of a sphere and has finally managed to image the
earth after the analogy of his ball image. To grasp sphericity as an idea, the pupil must first have
realized certain perplexities or confusing features in observed facts and have had the idea of
spherical shape suggested to him as a possible way of accounting for the phenomena in question.
Only by use as a method of interpreting data so as to give them fuller meaning does sphericity
become a genuine idea. There may be a vivid image and no idea; or there may be a fleeting,
obscure image and yet an idea, if that image performs the function of instigating and directing
the observation and relation of facts.
Ideas furnish the only alternative to "hit or miss" methods
Logical ideas are like keys which are shaping with reference to opening a lock. Pike, separated
by a glass partition from the fish upon which they ordinarily prey, will—so it is said—butt their
heads against the glass until it is literally beaten into them that they cannot get at their food.
Animals learn (when they learn at all) by a "cut and try" method; by doing at random[Pg 110] first
one thing and another thing and then preserving the things that happen to succeed. Action
directed consciously by ideas—by suggested meanings accepted for the sake of experimenting
with them—is the sole alternative both to bull-headed stupidity and to learning bought from that
dear teacher—chance experience.
They are methods of indirect attack
It is significant that many words for intelligence suggest the idea of circuitous, evasive activity—
often with a sort of intimation of even moral obliquity. The bluff, hearty man goes straight (and
stupidly, it is implied) at some work. The intelligent man is cunning, shrewd (crooked), wily,
subtle, crafty, artful, designing—the idea of indirection is involved.[20] An idea is a method of
evading, circumventing, or surmounting through reflection obstacles that otherwise would have
to be attacked by brute force. But ideas may lose their intellectual quality as they are habitually
used. When a child was first learning to recognize, in some hesitating suspense, cats, dogs,
houses, marbles, trees, shoes, and other objects, ideas—conscious and tentative meanings—
intervened as methods of identification. Now, as a rule, the thing and the meaning are so
completely fused that there is no judgment and no idea proper, but only automatic recognition.
On the other hand, things that are, as a rule, directly apprehended and familiar become subjects
of judgment when they present themselves in unusual contexts: as forms, distances, sizes,
positions when we attempt to draw them; triangles, squares, and circles when they turn up, not in
connection with familiar toys, implements, and utensils, but as problems in geometry.
[Pg 111]
§ 3. Analysis and Synthesis
Judging clears up things: analysis
Through judging confused data are cleared up, and seemingly incoherent and disconnected facts
brought together. Things may have a peculiar feeling for us, they may make a certain
indescribable impression upon us; the thing may feel round (that is, present a quality which we
afterwards define as round), an act may seem rude (or what we afterwards classify as rude), and
yet this quality may be lost, absorbed, blended in the total value of the situation. Only as we need
to use just that aspect of the original situation as a tool of grasping something perplexing or
obscure in another situation, do we abstract or detach the quality so that it becomes
individualized. Only because we need to characterize the shape of some new object or the moral
quality of some new act, does the element of roundness or rudeness in the old experience detach
itself, and stand out as a distinctive feature. If the element thus selected clears up what is
otherwise obscure in the new experience, if it settles what is uncertain, it thereby itself gains in
positiveness and definiteness of meaning. This point will meet us again in the following chapter;
here we shall speak of the matter only as it bears upon the questions of analysis and synthesis.
Mental analysis is not like physical division
Misapprehension of analysis in education
Even when it is definitely stated that intellectual and physical analyses are different sorts of
operations, intellectual analysis is often treated after the analogy of physical; as if it were the
breaking up of a whole into all its constituent parts in the mind instead of in space. As nobody
can possibly tell what breaking a whole into its parts in the mind means, this conception leads to
the further notion that logical analysis is a mere enumeration and listing of all conceivable
qualities and relations.[Pg 112] The influence upon education of this conception has been very
great.[21] Every subject in the curriculum has passed through—or still remains in—what may be
called the phase of anatomical or morphological method: the stage in which understanding the
subject is thought to consist of multiplying distinctions of quality, form, relation, and so on, and
attaching some name to each distinguished element. In normal growth, specific properties are
emphasized and so individualized only when they serve to clear up a present difficulty. Only as
they are involved in judging some specific situation is there any motive or use for analyses, i.e.
fo
r emphasis upon some element or relation as peculiarly significant.
Effects of premature formulation
The same putting the cart before the horse, the product before the process, is found in that
overconscious formulation of methods of procedure so current in elementary instruction. (See p.
60.) The method that is employed in discovery, in reflective inquiry, cannot possibly be
identified with the method that emerges after the discovery is made. In the genuine operation of
inference, the mind is in the attitude of search, of hunting, of projection, of trying this and that;
when the conclusion is reached, the search is at an end. The Greeks used to discuss: "How is
learning (or inquiry) possible? For either we know already what we are after, and then we do not
learn or inquire; or we do not know, and then we cannot inquire, for we do not know what to
look for." The dilemma is at least suggestive, for it points to the true alternative: the use in
inquiry of doubt, of tentative suggestion, of experimen[Pg 113]tation. After we have reached the
conclusion, a reconsideration of the steps of the process to see what is helpful, what is harmful,
what is merely useless, will assist in dealing more promptly and efficaciously with analogous
problems in the future. In this way, more or less explicit method is gradually built up. (Compare
the earlier discussion on p. 62 of the psychological and the logical.)
Method comes before its formulation
It is, however, a common assumption that unless the pupil from the outset consciously
recognizes and explicitly states the method logically implied in the result he is to reach, he will
have no method, and his mind will work confusedly or anarchically; while if he accompanies his
performance with conscious statement of some form of procedure (outline, topical analysis, list
of headings and subheadings, uniform formula) his mind is safeguarded and strengthened. As a
matter of fact, the development of an unconscious logical attitude and habit must come first. A
conscious setting forth of the method logically adapted for reaching an end is possible only after
the result has first been reached by more unconscious and tentative methods, while it is valuable
only when a review of the method that achieved success in a given case will throw light upon a
new, similar case. The ability to fasten upon and single out (abstract, analyze) those features of
one experience which are logically best is hindered by premature insistence upon their explicit
fo
rm
ulation. It is repeated use that gives a method definiteness; and given this definiteness,
precipitation into formulated statement should follow naturally. But because teachers find that
the things which they themselves best understand are marked off and defined in clear-cut ways,
our schoolrooms are pervaded[Pg 114] with the superstition that children are to begin with already
crystallized formulæ of method.
Judgment reveals the bearing or significance of facts: synthesis
As analysis is conceived to be a sort of picking to pieces, so synthesis is thought to be a sort of
physical piecing together; and so imagined, it also becomes a mystery. In fact, synthesis takes
place wherever we grasp the bearing of facts on a conclusion, or of a principle on facts. As
analysis is emphasis, so synthesis is placing; the one causes the emphasized fact or property to
stand out as significant; the other gives what is selected its context, or its connection with what is
signified. Every judgment is analytic in so far as it involves discernment, discrimination,
marking off the trivial from the important, the irrelevant from what points to a conclusion; and it
is synthetic in so far as it leaves the mind with an inclusive situation within which the selected
fa
cts are placed.
Analysis and synthesis are correlative
Educational methods that pride themselves on being exclusively analytic or exclusively synthetic
are therefore (so far as they carry out their boasts) incompatible with normal operations of
judgment. Discussions have taken place, for example, as to whether the teaching of geography
should be analytic or synthetic. The synthetic method is supposed to begin with the partial,
limited portion of the earth's surface already familiar to the pupil, and then gradually piece on
adjacent regions (the county, the country, the continent, and so on) till an idea of the entire globe
is reached, or of the solar system that includes the globe. The analytic method is supposed to
begin with the physical whole, the solar system or globe, and to work down through its
constituent portions till the immediate environment is reached. The underlying conceptions are
of physical wholes and physical[Pg 115] parts. As matter of fact, we cannot assume that the portion
of the earth already familiar to the child is such a definite object, mentally, that he can at once
begin with it; his knowledge of it is misty and vague as well as incomplete. Accordingly, mental
progress will involve analysis of it—emphasis of the features that are significant, so that they
will stand out clearly. Moreover, his own locality is not sharply marked off, neatly bounded, and
measured. His experience of it is already an experience that involves sun, moon, and stars as
parts of the scene he surveys; it involves a changing horizon line as he moves about; that is, even
his more limited and local experience involves far-reaching factors that take his imagination
clear beyond his own street and village. Connection, relationship with a larger whole, is already
involved. But his recognition of these relations is inadequate, vague, incorrect. He needs to
utilize the features of the local environment which are understood to help clarify and enlarge his
conceptions of the larger geographical scene to which they belong. At the same time, not till he
has grasped the larger scene will many of even the commonest features of his environment
become intelligible. Analysis leads to synthesis; while synthesis perfects analysis. As the pupil
grows in comprehension of the vast complicated earth in its setting in space, he also sees more
definitely the meaning of the familiar local details. This intimate interaction between selective
emphasis and interpretation of what is selected is found wherever reflection proceeds normally.
Hence the folly of trying to set analysis and synthesis over against each other.[Pg 116]
CHAPTER NINE
MEANING: OR CONCEPTIONS AND UNDERSTANDING
§ 1. The Place of Meanings in Mental Life
Meaning is central
As in our discussion of judgment we were making more explicit what is involved in inference, so
in the discussion of meaning we are only recurring to the central function of all reflection. For
one thing to mean, signify, betoken, indicate, or point to, another we saw at the outset to be the
essential mark of thinking (see p. 8). To find out what facts, just as they stand, mean, is the
object of all discovery; to find out what facts will carry out, substantiate, support a given
meaning, is the object of all testing. When an inference reaches a satisfactory conclusion, we
attain a goal of meaning. The act of judging involves both the growth and the application of
meanings. In short, in this chapter we are not introducing a new topic; we are only coming to
closer quarters with what hitherto has been constantly assumed. In the first section, we shall
consider the equivalence of meaning and understanding, and the two types of understanding,
direct and indirect.
I. MEANING AND UNDERSTANDING
To understand is to grasp meaning
If a person comes suddenly into your room and calls out "Paper," various alternatives are
possible. If you do not understand the English language, there is simply a noise which may or
may not act as a physical stimulus[Pg 117] and irritant. But the noise is not an intellectual object; it
does not have intellectual value. (Compare above, p. 15.) To say that you do not understand it
and that it has no meaning are equivalents. If the cry is the usual accompaniment of the delivery
of the morning paper, the sound will have meaning, intellectual content; you will understand it.
Or if you are eagerly awaiting the receipt of some important document, you may assume that the
cry means an announcement of its arrival. If (in the third place) you understand the English
language, but no context suggests itself from your habits and expectations, the word has
meaning, but not the whole event. You are then perplexed and incited to think out, to hunt for,
some explanation of the apparently meaningless occurrence. If you find something that accounts
fo
r the performance, it gets meaning; you come to understand it. As intelligent beings, we
presume the existence of meaning, and its absence is an anomaly. Hence, if it should turn out
that the person merely meant to inform you that there was a scrap of paper on the sidewalk, or
that paper existed somewhere in the universe, you would think him crazy or yourself the victim
of a poor joke. To grasp a meaning, to understand, to identify a thing in a situation in which it is
important, are thus equivalent terms; they express the nerves of our intellectual life. Without
them there is (a) lack of intellectual content, or (b) intellectual confusion and perplexity, or else
(c) intellectual perversion—nonsense, insanity.
Knowledge and meaning
All knowledge, all science, thus aims to grasp the meaning of objects and events, and this
process always consists in taking them out of their apparent brute isolation as events, and finding
them to be parts of some[Pg 118] larger whole suggested by them, which, in turn, accounts for,
explains, interprets them; i.e. renders them significant. (Compare above, p. 75.) Suppose that a
stone with peculiar markings has been found. What do these scratches mean? So far as the object
fo
rces the raising of this question, it is not understood; while so far as the color and form that we
see mean to us a stone, the object is understood. It is such peculiar combinations of the
understood and the nonunderstood that provoke thought. If at the end of the inquiry, the
markings are decided to mean glacial scratches, obscure and perplexing traits have been
translated into meanings already understood: namely, the moving and grinding power of large
bodies of ice and the friction thus induced of one rock upon another. Something already
understood in one situation has been transferred and applied to what is strange and perplexing in
another, and thereby the latter has become plain and familiar, i.e. understood. This summary
illustration discloses that our power to think effectively depends upon possession of a capital
fu
nd of meanings which may be applied when desired. (Compare what was said about deduction,
p. 94.)
II. DIRECT AND INDIRECT UNDERSTANDING
Direct and circuitous understanding
In the above illustrations two types of grasping of meaning are exemplified. When the English
language is understood, the person grasps at once the meaning of "paper." He may not, however,
see any meaning or sense in the performance as a whole. Similarly, the person identifies the
object on sight as a stone; there is no secret, no mystery, no perplexity about that. But he does
not understand the markings on it. They have[Pg 119] some meaning, but what is it? In one case,
owing to familiar acquaintance, the thing and its meaning, up to a certain point, are one. In the
other, the thing and its meaning are, temporarily at least, sundered, and meaning has to be sought
in order to understand the thing. In one case understanding is direct, prompt, immediate; in the
other, it is roundabout and delayed.
Interaction of the two types
Most languages have two sets of words to express these two modes of understanding; one for the
direct taking in or grasp of meaning, the other for its circuitous apprehension, thus: γνωναι and
ειδεναι in Greek; noscere and scire in Latin; kennen and wissen in German; connaître and savoir
in French; while in English to be acquainted with and to know of or about have been suggested
as equivalents.[22] Now our intellectual life consists of a peculiar interaction between these two
types of understanding. All judgment, all reflective inference, presupposes some lack of
understanding, a partial absence of meaning. We reflect in order that we may get hold of the full
and adequate significance of what happens. Nevertheless, something must be already
understood, the mind must be in possession of some meaning which it has mastered, or else
thinking is impossible. We think in order to grasp meaning, but none the less every extension of
kn
owledge makes us aware of blind and opaque spots, where with less knowledge all had
seemed obvious and natural. A scientist brought into a new district will find many things that he
does not understand, where the native savage or[Pg 120] rustic will be wholly oblivious to any
meanings beyond those directly apparent. Some Indians brought to a large city remained stolid at
the sight of mechanical wonders of bridge, trolley, and telephone, but were held spellbound by
the sight of workmen climbing poles to repair wires. Increase of the store of meanings makes us
conscious of new problems, while only through translation of the new perplexities into what is
already familiar and plain do we understand or solve these problems. This is the constant spiral
movement of knowledge.
Intellectual progress a rhythm
Our progress in genuine knowledge always consists in part in the discovery of something not
understood in what had previously been taken for granted as plain, obvious, matter-of-course,
and in part in the use of meanings that are directly grasped without question, as instruments for
getting hold of obscure, doubtful, and perplexing meanings. No object is so familiar, so obvious,
so commonplace that it may not unexpectedly present, in a novel situation, some problem, and
thus arouse reflection in order to understand it. No object or principle is so strange, peculiar, or
remote that it may not be dwelt upon till its meaning becomes familiar—taken in on sight
without reflection. We may come to see, perceive, recognize, grasp, seize, lay hold of principles,
laws, abstract truths—i.e. to understand their meaning in very immediate fashion. Our
intellectual progress consists, as has been said, in a rhythm of direct understanding—technically
called apprehension—with indirect, mediated understanding—technically called comprehension.
§ 2. The Process of Acquiring Meanings
Familiarity
The first problem that comes up in connection with direct understanding is how a store of
directly apprehen[Pg 121]sible meanings is built up. How do we learn to view things on sight as
significant members of a situation, or as having, as a matter of course, specific meanings? Our
chief difficulty in answering this question lies in the thoroughness with which the lesson of
fa
miliar things has been learnt. Thought can more easily traverse an unexplored region than it
can undo what has been so thoroughly done as to be ingrained in unconscious habit. We
ap
prehend chairs, tables, books, trees, horses, clouds, stars, rain, so promptly and directly that it
is hard to realize that as meanings they had once to be acquired,—the meanings are now so much
parts of the things themselves.
Confusion is prior to familiarity
In an often quoted passage, Mr. James has said: "The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin,
and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion."[23] Mr. James is
speaking of a baby's world taken as a whole; the description, however, is equally applicable to
the way any new thing strikes an adult, so far as the thing is really new and strange. To the
traditional "cat in a strange garret," everything is blurred and confused; the wonted marks that
label things so as to separate them from one another are lacking. Foreign languages that we do
not understand always seem jabberings, babblings, in which it is impossible to fix a definite,
clear-cut, individualized group of sounds. The countryman in the crowded city street, the
landlubber at sea, the ignoramus in sport at a contest between experts in a complicated game, are
fu
rt
her instances. Put an unexperienced man in a factory, and at first the work seems to him a
meaningless medley. All strangers of another race proverbially look alike to the visiting[Pg 122]
fo
reigner. Only gross differences of size or color are perceived by an outsider in a flock of sheep,
each of which is perfectly individualized to the shepherd. A diffusive blur and an
indiscriminately shifting suction characterize what we do not understand. The problem of the
acquisition of meaning by things, or (stated in another way) of forming habits of simple
ap
prehension, is thus the problem of introducing (i) definiteness and distinction and (ii)
consistency or stability of meaning into what is otherwise vague and wavering.
Practical responses clarify confusion
The acquisition of definiteness and of coherency (or constancy) of meanings is derived primarily
from practical activities. By rolling an object, the child makes its roundness appreciable; by
bouncing it, he singles out its elasticity; by throwing it, he makes weight its conspicuous
distinctive factor. Not through the senses, but by means of the reaction, the responsive
adjustment, is the impression made distinctive, and given a character marked off from other
qualities that call out unlike reactions. Children, for example, are usually quite slow in
ap
prehending differences of color. Differences from the standpoint of the adult so glaring that it
is impossible not to note them are recognized and recalled with great difficulty. Doubtless they
do not all feel alike, but there is no intellectual recognition of what makes the difference. The
redness or greenness or blueness of the object does not tend to call out a reaction that is
sufficiently peculiar to give prominence or distinction to the color trait. Gradually, however,
certain characteristic habitual responses associate themselves with certain things; the white
becomes the sign, say, of milk and sugar, to which the child reacts favorably; blue becomes the
sign of a dress that the child likes to wear, and so on: and the[Pg 123] distinctive reactions tend to
single out color qualities from other things in which they had been submerged.
We identify by use or function
Take another example. We have little difficulty in distinguishing from one another rakes, hoes,
plows and harrows, shovels and spades. Each has its own associated characteristic use and
fu
nction. We may have, however, great difficulty in recalling the difference between serrate and
dentate, ovoid and obovoid, in the shapes and edges of leaves, or between acids in ic and in ous.
There is some difference; but just what? Or, we know what the difference is; but which is
which? Variations in form, size, color, and arrangement of parts have much less to do, and the
uses, purposes, and functions of things and of their parts much more to do, with distinctness of
character and meaning than we should be likely to think. What misleads us is the fact that the
qualities of form, size, color, and so on, are now so distinct that we fail to see that the problem is
precisely to account for the way in which they originally obtained their definiteness and
conspicuousness. So far as we sit passive before objects, they are not distinguished out of a
vague blur which swallows them all. Differences in the pitch and intensity of sounds leave
behind a different feeling, but until we assume different attitudes toward them, or do something
special in reference to them, their vague difference cannot be intellectually gripped and retained.
Children's drawings illustrate domination by value
Children's drawings afford a further exemplification of the same principle. Perspective does not
exist, for the child's interest is not in pictorial representation, but in the things represented; and
while perspective is essential to the former, it is no part of the characteristic uses and values of
the things themselves. The house[Pg 124] is drawn with transparent walls, because the rooms,
chairs, beds, people inside, are the important things in the house-meaning; smoke always comes
out of the chimney—otherwise, why have a chimney at all? At Christmas time, the stockings
may be drawn almost as large as the house or even so large that they have to be put outside of
it:—in any case, it is the scale of values in use that furnishes the scale for their qualities, the
pictures being diagrammatic reminders of these values, not impartial records of physical and
sensory qualities. One of the chief difficulties felt by most persons in learning the art of pictorial
representation is that habitual uses and results of use have become so intimately read into the
character of things that it is practically impossible to shut them out at will.
As do sounds used as language signs
The acquiring of meaning by sounds, in virtue of which they become words, is perhaps the most
striking illustration that can be found of the way in which mere sensory stimuli acquire
definiteness and constancy of meaning and are thereby themselves defined and interconnected
fo
r purposes of recognition. Language is a specially good example because there are hundreds or
even thousands of words in which meaning is now so thoroughly consolidated with physical
qualities as to be directly apprehended, while in the case of words it is easier to recognize that
this connection has been gradually and laboriously acquired than in the case of physical objects
such as chairs, tables, buttons, trees, stones, hills, flowers, and so on, where it seems as if the
union of intellectual character and meaning with the physical fact were aboriginal, and thrust
upon us passively rather than acquired through active explorations. And in the case of the
meaning of words, we see readily that it is by making[Pg 125] sounds and noting the results which
fo
llow, by listening to the sounds of others and watching the activities which accompany them,
that a given sound finally becomes the stable bearer of a meaning.
Summary
Familiar acquaintance with meanings thus signifies that we have acquired in the presence of
objects definite attitudes of response which lead us, without reflection, to anticipate certain
possible consequences. The definiteness of the expectation defines the meaning or takes it out of
the vague and pulpy; its habitual, recurrent character gives the meaning constancy, stability,
consistency, or takes it out of the fluctuating and wavering.
§ 3. Conceptions and Meaning
A conception is a definite meaning
The word meaning is a familiar everyday term; the words conception, notion, are both popular
and technical terms. Strictly speaking, they involve, however, nothing new; any meaning
sufficiently individualized to be directly grasped and readily used, and thus fixed by a word, is a
conception or notion. Linguistically, every common noun is the carrier of a meaning, while
proper nouns and common nouns with the word this or that prefixed, refer to the things in which
the meanings are exemplified. That thinking both employs and expands notions, conceptions, is
then simply saying that in inference and judgment we use meanings, and that this use also
corrects and widens them.
which is standardized
Various persons talk about an object not physically present, and yet all get the same material of
belief. The same person in different moments often refers to the same object or kind of objects.
The sense experience, the physical conditions, the psychological conditions, vary, but the same
meaning is conserved. If pounds[Pg 126] arbitrarily changed their weight, and foot rules their
length, while we were using them, obviously we could not weigh nor measure. This would be
our intellectual position if meanings could not be maintained with a certain stability and
constancy through a variety of physical and personal changes.
By it we identify the unknown
and supplement the sensibly present
and also systematize things
To insist upon the fundamental importance of conceptions would, accordingly, only repeat what
has been said. We shall merely summarize, saying that conceptions, or standard meanings, are
instruments (i) of identification, (ii) of supplementation, and (iii) of placing in a system. Suppose
a little speck of light hitherto unseen is detected in the heavens. Unless there is a store of
meanings to fall back upon as tools of inquiry and reasoning, that speck of light will remain just
what it is to the senses—a mere speck of light. For all that it leads to, it might as well be a mere
irritation of the optic nerve. Given the stock of meanings acquired in prior experience, this speck
of light is mentally attacked by means of appropriate concepts. Does it indicate asteroid, or
comet, or a new-forming sun, or a nebula resulting from some cosmic collision or disintegration?
Each of these conceptions has its own specific and differentiating characters, which are then
sought for by minute and persistent inquiry. As a result, then, the speck is identified, we will say,
as a comet. Through a standard meaning, it gets identity and stability of character.
Supplementation then takes place. All the known qualities of comets are read into this particular
thing, even though they have not been as yet observed. All that the astronomers of the past have
learned about the paths and structure of comets becomes available capital with which to interpret
the speck[Pg 127] of light. Finally, this comet-meaning is itself not isolated; it is a related portion
of the whole system of astronomic knowledge. Suns, planets, satellites, nebulæ, comets, meteors,
star dust—all these conceptions have a certain mutuality of reference and interaction, and when
the speck of light is identified as meaning a comet, it is at once adopted as a full member in this
vast kingdom of beliefs.
Importance of system to knowledge
Darwin, in an autobiographical sketch, says that when a youth he told the geologist, Sidgwick, of
finding a tropical shell in a certain gravel pit. Thereupon Sidgwick said it must have been thrown
there by some person, adding: "But if it were really embedded there, it would be the greatest
misfortune to geology, because it would overthrow all that we know about the superficial
deposits of the Midland Counties"—since they were glacial. And then Darwin adds: "I was then
utterly astonished at Sidgwick not being delighted at so wonderful a fact as a tropical shell being
fo
und near the surface in the middle of England. Nothing before had made me thoroughly realize
that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from
them." This instance (which might, of course, be duplicated from any branch of science)
indicates how scientific notions make explicit the systematizing tendency involved in all use of
concepts.
§ 4. What Conceptions are Not
The idea that a conception is a meaning that supplies a standard rule for the identification and
placing of particulars may be contrasted with some current misapprehensions of its nature.
A concept is not a bare residue
1. Conceptions are not derived from a multitude of[Pg 128] different definite objects by leaving out
the qualities in which they differ and retaining those in which they agree. The origin of concepts
is sometimes described to be as if a child began with a lot of different particular things, say
particular dogs; his own Fido, his neighbor's Carlo, his cousin's Tray. Having all these different
objects before him, he analyzes them into a lot of different qualities, say (a) color, (b) size, (c)
shape, (d) number of legs, (e) quantity and quality of hair, (f) digestive organs, and so on; and
then strikes out all the unlike qualities (such as color, size, shape, hair), retaining traits such as
quadruped and domesticated, which they all have in general.
but an active attitude
As a matter of fact, the child begins with whatever significance he has got out of the one dog he
has seen, heard, and handled. He has found that he can carry over from one experience of this
object to subsequent experience certain expectations of certain characteristic modes of
behavior—may expect these even before they show themselves. He tends to assume this attitude
of anticipation whenever any clue or stimulus presents itself; whenever the object gives him any
excuse for it. Thus he might call cats little dogs, or horses big dogs. But finding that other
expected traits and modes of behavior are not fulfilled, he is forced to throw out certain traits
from the dog-meaning, while by contrast (see p. 90) certain other traits are selected and
emphasized. As he further applies the meaning to other dogs, the dog-meaning gets still further
defined and refined. He does not begin with a lot of ready-made objects from which he extracts a
common meaning; he tries to apply to every new experience whatever from his old experience
will help him understand it,[Pg 129] and as this process of constant assumption and
experimentation is fulfilled and refuted by results, his conceptions get body and clearness.
It is general because of its application
2. Similarly, conceptions are general because of their use and application, not because of their
ingredients. The view of the origin of conception in an impossible sort of analysis has as its
counterpart the idea that the conception is made up out of all the like elements that remain after
dissection of a number of individuals. Not so; the moment a meaning is gained, it is a working
tool of further apprehensions, an instrument of understanding other things. Thereby the meaning
is extended to cover them. Generality resides in application to the comprehension of new cases,
not in constituent parts. A collection of traits left as the common residuum, the caput mortuum,
of a million objects, would be merely a collection, an inventory or aggregate, not a general idea;
a striking trait emphasized in any one experience which then served to help understand some one
other experience, would become, in virtue of that service of application, in so far general.
Synthesis is not a matter of mechanical addition, but of application of something discovered in
one case to bring other cases into line.
§ 5. Definition and Organization of Meanings
Definiteness versus vagueness
In the abstract meaning is intension
In its application it is extension
A being that cannot understand at all is at least protected from mis-understandings. But beings
that get knowledge by means of inferring and interpreting, by judging what things signify in
relation to one another, are constantly exposed to the danger of mis-apprehension, mis-
understanding, mis-taking—taking a thing amiss. A constant source of misunderstanding and
mistake is indefiniteness of meaning. Through vagueness of[Pg 130] meaning we misunderstand
other people, things, and ourselves; through its ambiguity we distort and pervert. Conscious
distortion of meaning may be enjoyed as nonsense; erroneous meanings, if clear-cut, may be
fo
llowed up and got rid of. But vague meanings are too gelatinous to offer matter for analysis,
and too pulpy to afford support to other beliefs. They evade testing and responsibility.
Vagueness disguises the unconscious mixing together of different meanings, and facilitates the
substitution of one meaning for another, and covers up the failure to have any precise meaning at
all. It is the aboriginal logical sin—the source from which flow most bad intellectual
consequences. Totally to eliminate indefiniteness is impossible; to reduce it in extent and in
fo
rce requires sincerity and vigor. To be clear or perspicuous a meaning must be detached,
single, self-contained, homogeneous as it were, throughout. The technical name for any meaning
which is thus individualized is intension. The process of arriving at such units of meaning (and
of stating them when reached) is definition. The intension of the terms man, river, seed, honesty,
capital, supreme court, is the meaning that exclusively and characteristically attaches to those
terms. This meaning is set forth in the definitions of those words. The test of the distinctness of a
meaning is that it shall successfully mark off a group of things that exemplify the meaning from
other groups, especially of those objects that convey nearly allied meanings. The river-meaning
(or character) must serve to designate the Rhone, the Rhine, the Mississippi, the Hudson, the
Wabash, in spite of their varieties of place, length, quality of water; and must be such as not to
suggest ocean currents, ponds, or brooks. This use of a mean[Pg 131]ing to mark off and group
together a variety of distinct existences constitutes its extension.
Definition and division
As definition sets forth intension, so division (or the reverse process, classification) expounds
extension. Intension and extension, definition and division, are clearly correlative; in language
previously used, intension is meaning as a principle of identifying particulars; extension is the
group of particulars identified and distinguished. Meaning, as extension, would be wholly in the
air or unreal, did it not point to some object or group of objects; while objects would be as
isolated and independent intellectually as they seem to be spatially, were they not bound into
groups or classes on the basis of characteristic meanings which they constantly suggest and
exemplify. Taken together, definition and division put us in possession of individualized or
definite meanings and indicate to what group of objects meanings refer. They typify the fixation
and the organization of meanings. In the degree in which the meanings of any set of experiences
are so cleared up as to serve as principles for grouping those experiences in relation to one
another, that set of particulars becomes a science; i.e. definition and classification are the marks
of a science, as distinct from both unrelated heaps of miscellaneous information and from the
habits that introduce coherence into our experience without our being aware of their operation.
Definitions are of three types, denotative, expository, scientific. Of these, the first and third are
logically important, while the expository type is socially and pedagogically important as an
intervening step.
We define by picking out
I. Denotative. A blind man can never have an adequate understanding of the meaning of color
and red; a seeing person can acquire the knowledge only by hav[Pg 132]ing certain things
designated in such a way as to fix attention upon some of their qualities. This method of
delimiting a meaning by calling out a certain attitude toward objects may be called denotative or
indicative. It is required for all sense qualities—sounds, tastes, colors—and equally for all
emotional and moral qualities. The meanings of honesty, sympathy, hatred, fear, must be
grasped by having them presented in an individual's first-hand experience. The reaction of
educational reformers against linguistic and bookish training has always taken the form of
demanding recourse to personal experience. However advanced the person is in knowledge and
in scientific training, understanding of a new subject, or a new aspect of an old subject, must
always be through these acts of experiencing directly the existence or quality in question.
and also by combining what is already more definite,
2. Expository. Given a certain store of meanings which have been directly or denotatively
marked out, language becomes a resource by which imaginative combinations and variations
may be built up. A color may be defined to one who has not experienced it as lying between
green and blue; a tiger may be defined (i.e. the idea of it made more definite) by selecting some
qualities from known members of the cat tribe and combining them with qualities of size and
weight derived from other objects. Illustrations are of the nature of expository definitions; so are
the accounts of meanings given in a dictionary. By taking better-known meanings and
associating them,—the attained store of meanings of the community in which one resides is put
at one's disposal. But in themselves these definitions are secondhand and conventional; there is
danger that instead of inciting one to effort after personal experiences that[Pg 133] will exemplify
and verify them, they will be accepted on authority as substitutes.
and by discovering method of production
3. Scientific. Even popular definitions serve as rules for identifying and classifying individuals,
but the purpose of such identifications and classifications is mainly practical and social, not
intellectual. To conceive the whale as a fish does not interfere with the success of whalers, nor
does it prevent recognition of a whale when seen, while to conceive it not as fish but as mammal
serves the practical end equally well, and also furnishes a much more valuable principle for
scientific identification and classification. Popular definitions select certain fairly obvious traits
as keys to classification. Scientific definitions select conditions of causation, production, and
generation as their characteristic material. The traits used by the popular definition do not help
us to understand why an object has its common meanings and qualities; they simply state the fact
that it does have them. Causal and genetic definitions fix upon the way an object is constructed
as the key to its being a certain kind of object, and thereby explain why it has its class or
common traits.
Contrast of causal and descriptive definitions
Science is the most perfect type of knowledge because it uses causal definitions
If, for example, a layman of considerable practical experience were asked what he meant or
understood by metal, he would probably reply in terms of the qualities useful (i) in recognizing
any given metal and (ii) in the arts. Smoothness, hardness, glossiness, and brilliancy, heavy
weight for its size, would probably be included in his definition, because such traits enable us to
identify specific things when we see and touch them; the serviceable properties of capacity for
being hammered and pulled without breaking, of being softened by heat and hardened by cold,
of retaining the shape and form[Pg 134] given, of resistance to pressure and decay, would probably
be included—whether or not such terms as malleable or fusible were used. Now a scientific
conception, instead of using, even with additions, traits of this kind, determines meaning on a
different basis. The present definition of metal is about like this: Metal means any chemical
element that enters into combination with oxygen so as to form a base, i.e. a compound that
combines with an acid to form a salt. This scientific definition is founded, not on directly
perceived qualities nor on directly useful properties, but on the way in which certain things are
causally related to other things; i.e. it denotes a relation. As chemical concepts become more
and more those of relationships of interaction in constituting other substances, so physical
concepts express more and more relations of operation: mathematical, as expressing functions of
dependence and order of grouping; biological, relations of differentiation of descent, effected
through adjustment of various environments; and so on through the sphere of the sciences. In
short, our conceptions attain a maximum of definite individuality and of generality (or
ap
plicability) in the degree to which they show how things depend upon one another or influence
one another, instead of expressing the qualities that objects possess statically. The ideal of a
system of scientific conceptions is to attain continuity, freedom, and flexibility of transition in
passing from any fact and meaning to any other; this demand is met in the degree in which we
lay hold of the dynamic ties that hold things together in a continuously changing process—a
principle that states insight into mode of production or growth.[Pg 135]
CHAPTER TEN
CONCRETE AND ABSTRACT THINKING
False notions of concrete and abstract
The maxim enjoined upon teachers, "to proceed from the concrete to the abstract," is perhaps
fa
miliar rather than comprehended. Few who read and hear it gain a clear conception of the
starting-point, the concrete; of the nature of the goal, the abstract; and of the exact nature of the
path to be traversed in going from one to the other. At times the injunction is positively
misunderstood, being taken to mean that education should advance from things to thought—as if
any dealing with things in which thinking is not involved could possibly be educative. So
understood, the maxim encourages mechanical routine or sensuous excitation at one end of the
educational scale—the lower—and academic and unapplied learning at the upper end.
Actually, all dealing with things, even the child's, is immersed in inferences; things are clothed
by the suggestions they arouse, and are significant as challenges to interpretation or as evidences
to substantiate a belief. Nothing could be more unnatural than instruction in things without
thought; in sense-perceptions without judgments based upon them. And if the abstract to which
we are to proceed denotes thought apart from things, the goal recommended is formal and[Pg 136]
empty, for effective thought always refers, more or less directly, to things.
Direct and indirect understanding again
Yet the maxim has a meaning which, understood and supplemented, states the line of
development of logical capacity. What is this signification? Concrete denotes a meaning
definitely marked off from other meanings so that it is readily apprehended by itself. When we
hear the words, table, chair, stove, coat, we do not have to reflect in order to grasp what is
meant. The terms convey meaning so directly that no effort at translating is needed. The
meanings of some terms and things, however, are grasped only by first calling to mind more
fa
miliar things and then tracing out connections between them and what we do not understand.
Roughly speaking, the former kind of meanings is concrete; the latter abstract.
What is familiar is mentally concrete
To one who is thoroughly at home in physics and chemistry, the notions of atom and molecule
are fairly concrete. They are constantly used without involving any labor of thought in
ap
prehending what they mean. But the layman and the beginner in science have first to remind
themselves of things with which they already are well acquainted, and go through a process of
slow translation; the terms atom and molecule losing, moreover, their hard-won meaning only
too easily if familiar things, and the line of transition from them to the strange, drop out of mind.
The same difference is illustrated by any technical terms: coefficient and exponent in algebra,
triangle and square in their geometric as distinct from their popular meanings; capital and value
as used in political economy, and so on.
Practical things are familiar
The difference as noted is purely relative to the intellectual progress of an individual; what is
ab
stract[Pg 137] at one period of growth is concrete at another; or even the contrary, as one finds
that things supposed to be thoroughly familiar involve strange factors and unsolved problems.
There is, nevertheless, a general line of cleavage which, deciding upon the whole what things
fa
ll within the limits of familiar acquaintance and what without, marks off the concrete and the
ab
stract in a more permanent way. These limits are fixed mainly by the demands of practical life.
Things such as sticks and stones, meat and potatoes, houses and trees, are such constant features
of the environment of which we have to take account in order to live, that their important
meanings are soon learnt, and indissolubly associated with objects. We are acquainted with a
thing (or it is familiar to us) when we have so much to do with it that its strange and unexpected
corners are rubbed off. The necessities of social intercourse convey to adults a like concreteness
upon such terms as taxes, elections, wages, the law, and so on. Things the meaning of which I
personally do not take in directly, appliances of cook, carpenter, or weaver, for example, are
nevertheless unhesitatingly classed as concrete, since they are so directly connected with our
common social life.
The theoretical, or strictly intellectual, is abstract
By contrast, the abstract is the theoretical, or that not intimately associated with practical
concerns. The abstract thinker (the man of pure science as he is sometimes called) deliberately
ab
stracts from application in life; that is, he leaves practical uses out of account. This, however,
is a merely negative statement. What remains when connections with use and application are
excluded? Evidently only what has to do with knowing considered as an end in itself. Many
notions of science[Pg 138] are abstract, not only because they cannot be understood without a long
ap
prenticeship in the science (which is equally true of technical matters in the arts), but also
because the whole content of their meaning has been framed for the sole purpose of facilitating
fu
rt
her knowledge, inquiry, and speculation. When thinking is used as a means to some end,
good, or value beyond itself, it is concrete; when it is employed simply as a means to more
thinking, it is abstract. To a theorist an idea is adequate and self-contained just because it
engages and rewards thought; to a medical practitioner, an engineer, an artist, a merchant, a
politician, it is complete only when employed in the furthering of some interest in life—health,
wealth, beauty, goodness, success, or what you will.
Contempt for theory
For the great majority of men under ordinary circumstances, the practical exigencies of life are
almost, if not quite, coercive. Their main business is the proper conduct of their affairs.
Whatever is of significance only as affording scope for thinking is pallid and remote—almost
artificial. Hence the contempt felt by the practical and successful executive for the "mere
theorist"; hence his conviction that certain things may be all very well in theory, but that they
will not do in practice; in general, the depreciatory way in which he uses the terms abstract,
theoretical, and intellectual—as distinct from intelligent.
But theory is highly practical
This attitude is justified, of course, under certain conditions. But depreciation of theory does not
contain the whole truth, as common or practical sense recognizes. There is such a thing, even
from the common-sense standpoint, as being "too practical," as being so intent upon the
immediately practical as not to see[Pg 139] beyond the end of one's nose or as to cut off the limb
upon which one is sitting. The question is one of limits, of degrees and adjustments, rather than
one of absolute separation. Truly practical men give their minds free play about a subject
without asking too closely at every point for the advantage to be gained; exclusive preoccupation
with matters of use and application so narrows the horizon as in the long run to defeat itself. It
does not pay to tether one's thoughts to the post of use with too short a rope. Power in action
requires some largeness and imaginativeness of vision. Men must at least have enough interest in
thinking for the sake of thinking to escape the limits of routine and custom. Interest in
kn
owledge for the sake of knowledge, in thinking for the sake of the free play of thought, is
necessary then to the emancipation of practical life—to make it rich and progressive.
We may now recur to the pedagogic maxim of going from the concrete to the abstract.
Begin with the concrete means begin with practical manipulations
1. Since the concrete denotes thinking applied to activities for the sake of dealing effectively
with the difficulties that present themselves practically, "beginning with the concrete" signifies
that we should at the outset make much of doing; especially, make much in occupations that are
not of a routine and mechanical kind and hence require intelligent selection and adaptation of
means and materials. We do not "follow the order of nature" when we multiply mere sensations
or accumulate physical objects. Instruction in number is not concrete merely because splints or
beans or dots are employed, while whenever the use and bearing of number relations are clearly
perceived, the number idea is concrete even if figures alone are used. Just what sort of[Pg 140]
symbol it is best to use at a given time—whether blocks, or lines, or figures—is entirely a matter
of adjustment to the given case. If physical things used in teaching number or geography or
anything else do not leave the mind illuminated with recognition of a meaning beyond
themselves, the instruction that uses them is as abstract as that which doles out ready-made
definitions and rules; for it distracts attention from ideas to mere physical excitations.
Confusion of the concrete with the sensibly isolated
The conception that we have only to put before the senses particular physical objects in order to
impress certain ideas upon the mind amounts almost to a superstition. The introduction of object
lessons and sense-training scored a distinct advance over the prior method of linguistic symbols,
and this advance tended to blind educators to the fact that only a halfway step had been taken.
Things and sensations develop the child, indeed, but only because he uses them in mastering his
body and in the scheme of his activities. Appropriate continuous occupations or activities
involve the use of natural materials, tools, modes of energy, and do it in a way that compels
thinking as to what they mean, how they are related to one another and to the realization of ends;
while the mere isolated presentation of things remains barren and dead. A few generations ago
the great obstacle in the way of reform of primary education was belief in the almost magical
efficacy of the symbols of language (including number) to produce mental training; at present,
belief in the efficacy of objects just as objects, blocks the way. As frequently happens, the better
is an enemy of the best.
Transfer of interest to intellectual matters
2. The interest in results, in the successful carrying on of an activity, should be gradually
transferred to study[Pg 141] of objects—their properties, consequences, structures, causes, and
effects. The adult when at work in his life calling is rarely free to devote time or energy—
beyond the necessities of his immediate action—to the study of what he deals with. (Ante, p. 43.)
The educative activities of childhood should be so arranged that direct interest in the activity and
its outcome create a demand for attention to matters that have a more and more indirect and
remote connection with the original activity. The direct interest in carpentering or shop work
should yield organically and gradually an interest in geometric and mechanical problems. The
interest in cooking should grow into an interest in chemical experimentation and in the
physiology and hygiene of bodily growth. The making of pictures should pass to an interest in
the technique of representation and the æsthetics of appreciation, and so on. This development is
what the term go signifies in the maxim "go from the concrete to the abstract"; it represents the
dynamic and truly educative factor of the process.
Development of delight in the activity of thinking
3. The outcome, the abstract to which education is to proceed, is an interest in intellectual
matters for their own sake, a delight in thinking for the sake of thinking. It is an old story that
acts and processes which at the outset are incidental to something else develop and maintain an
ab
sorbing value of their own. So it is with thinking and with knowledge; at first incidental to
results and adjustments beyond themselves, they attract more and more attention to themselves
till they become ends, not means. Children engage, unconstrainedly and continually, in reflective
inspection and testing for the sake of what they are interested in doing successfully. Habits of
thinking thus generated may increase in volume[Pg 142] and extent till they become of importance
on their own account.
Examples of the transition
The three instances cited in Chapter Six represented an ascending cycle from the practical to the
theoretical. Taking thought to keep a personal engagement is obviously of the concrete kind.
Endeavoring to work out the meaning of a certain part of a boat is an instance of an intermediate
kind. The reason for the existence and position of the pole is a practical reason, so that to the
architect the problem was purely concrete—the maintenance of a certain system of action. But
fo
r the passenger on the boat, the problem was theoretical, more or less speculative. It made no
difference to his reaching his destination whether he worked out the meaning of the pole. The
third case, that of the appearance and movement of the bubbles, illustrates a strictly theoretical or
ab
stract case. No overcoming of physical obstacles, no adjustment of external means to ends, is
at stake. Curiosity, intellectual curiosity, is challenged by a seemingly anomalous occurrence;
and thinking tries simply to account for an apparent exception in terms of recognized principles.
Theoretical knowledge never the whole end
(i) Abstract thinking, it should be noted, represents an end, not the end. The power of sustained
thinking on matters remote from direct use is an outgrowth of practical and immediate modes of
thought, but not a substitute for them. The educational end is not the destruction of power to
think so as to surmount obstacles and adjust means and ends; it is not its replacement by abstract
reflection. Nor is theoretical thinking a higher type of thinking than practical. A person who has
at command both types of thinking is of a higher order than he who possesses only one. Methods
that in de[Pg 143]veloping abstract intellectual abilities weaken habits of practical or concrete
thinking, fall as much short of the educational ideal as do the methods that in cultivating ability
to plan, to invent, to arrange, to forecast, fail to secure some delight in thinking irrespective of
practical consequences.
Nor that most congenial to the majority of pupils
(ii) Educators should also note the very great individual differences that exist; they should not try
to force one pattern and model upon all. In many (probably the majority) the executive tendency,
the habit of mind that thinks for purposes of conduct and achievement, not for the sake of
kn
owing, remains dominant to the end. Engineers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, are much more
numerous in adult life than scholars, scientists, and philosophers. While education should strive
to make men who, however prominent their professional interests and aims, partake of the spirit
of the scholar, philosopher, and scientist, no good reason appears why education should esteem
the one mental habit inherently superior to the other, and deliberately try to transform the type
from practical to theoretical. Have not our schools (as already suggested, p. 49) been one-sidedly
devoted to the more abstract type of thinking, thus doing injustice to the majority of pupils? Has
not the idea of a "liberal" and "humane" education tended too often in practice to the production
of technical, because overspecialized, thinkers?
Aim of education is a working balance
The aim of education should be to secure a balanced interaction of the two types of mental
attitude, having sufficient regard to the disposition of the individual not to hamper and cripple
whatever powers are naturally strong in him. The narrowness of individuals of strong concrete
bent needs to be liberalized. Every oppor[Pg 144]tunity that occurs within their practical activities
fo
r developing curiosity and susceptibility to intellectual problems should be seized. Violence is
not done to natural disposition, but the latter is broadened. As regards the smaller number of
those who have a taste for abstract, purely intellectual topics, pains should be taken to multiply
opportunities and demands for the application of ideas; for translating symbolic truths into terms
of social life and its ends. Every human being has both capabilities, and every individual will be
more effective and happier if both powers are developed in easy and close interaction with each
other.[Pg 145]
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EMPIRICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THINKING
§ 1. Empirical Thinking
Empirical thinking depends on past habits
Apart from the development of scientific method, inferences depend upon habits that have been
built up under the influence of a number of particular experiences not themselves arranged for
logical purposes. A says, "It will probably rain to-morrow." B asks, "Why do you think so?" and
A replies, "Because the sky was lowering at sunset." When B asks, "What has that to do with it?"
A responds, "I do not know, but it generally does rain after such a sunset." He does not perceive
any connection between the appearance of the sky and coming rain; he is not aware of any
continuity in the facts themselves—any law or principle, as we usually say. He simply, from
frequently recurring conjunctions of the events, has associated them so that when he sees one he
thinks of the other. One suggests the other, or is associated with it. A man may believe it will
rain to-morrow because he has consulted the barometer; but if he has no conception how the
height of the mercury column (or the position of an index moved by its rise and fall) is
connected with variations of atmospheric pressure, and how these in turn are connected with the
amount of moisture in the air, his belief in the likelihood of rain is purely empirical. When men
lived in the open and got their living by hunting, fishing, or[Pg 146] pasturing flocks, the detection
of the signs and indications of weather changes was a matter of great importance. A body of
proverbs and maxims, forming an extensive section of traditionary folklore, was developed. But
as long as there was no understanding why or how certain events were signs, as long as foresight
and weather shrewdness rested simply upon repeated conjunction among facts, beliefs about the
weather were thoroughly empirical.
It is fairly adequate in some matters,
In similar fashion learned men in the Orient learned to predict, with considerable accuracy, the
recurrent positions of the planets, the sun and the moon, and to foretell the time of eclipses,
without understanding in any degree the laws of the movements of heavenly bodies—that is,
without having a notion of the continuities existing among the facts themselves. They had
learned from repeated observations that things happened in about such and such a fashion. Till a
comparatively recent time, the truths of medicine were mainly in the same condition. Experience
had shown that "upon the whole," "as a rule," "generally or usually speaking," certain results
fo
llowed certain remedies, when symptoms were given. Our beliefs about human nature in
individuals (psychology) and in masses (sociology) are still very largely of a purely empirical
sort. Even the science of geometry, now frequently reckoned a typical rational science, began,
among the Egyptians, as an accumulation of recorded observations about methods of
ap
proximate mensuration of land surfaces; and only gradually assumed, among the Greeks,
scientific form.
The disadvantages of purely empirical thinking are obvious.[Pg 147]
but is very apt to lead to false beliefs,
1. While many empirical conclusions are, roughly speaking, correct; while they are exact enough
to be of great help in practical life; while the presages of a weatherwise sailor or hunter may be
more accurate, within a certain restricted range, than those of a scientist who relies wholly upon
scientific observations and tests; while, indeed, empirical observations and records furnish the
raw or crude material of scientific knowledge, yet the empirical method affords no way of
discriminating between right and wrong conclusions. Hence it is responsible for a multitude of
false beliefs. The technical designation for one of the commonest fallacies is post hoc, ergo
propter hoc; the belief that because one thing comes after another, it comes because of the other.
Now this fallacy of method is the animating principle of empirical conclusions, even when
correct—the correctness being almost as much a matter of good luck as of method. That potatoes
should be planted only during the crescent moon, that near the sea people are born at high tide
and die at low tide, that a comet is an omen of danger, that bad luck follows the cracking of a
mirror, that a patent medicine cures a disease—these and a thousand like notions are asseverated
on the basis of empirical coincidence and conjunction. Moreover, habits of expectation and
belief are formed otherwise than by a number of repeated similar cases.
and does not enable us to cope with the novel,
2. The more numerous the experienced instances and the closer the watch kept upon them, the
greater is the trustworthiness of constant conjunction as evidence of connection among the things
themselves. Many of our most important beliefs still have only this sort of warrant. No one can
yet tell, with certainty, the neces[Pg 148]sary cause of old age or of death—which are empirically
the most certain of all expectations. But even the most reliable beliefs of this type fail when they
confront the novel. Since they rest upon past uniformities, they are useless when further
experience departs in any considerable measure from ancient incident and wonted precedent.
Empirical inference follows the grooves and ruts that custom wears, and has no track to follow
when the groove disappears. So important is this aspect of the matter that Clifford found the
difference between ordinary skill and scientific thought right here. "Skill enables a man to deal
with the same circumstances that he has met before, scientific thought enables him to deal with
different circumstances that he has never met before." And he goes so far as to define scientific
thinking as "the application of old experience to new circumstances."
and leads to laziness and presumption,
3. We have not yet made the acquaintance of the most harmful feature of the empirical method.
Mental inertia, laziness, unjustifiable conservatism, are its probable accompaniments. Its general
effect upon mental attitude is more serious than even the specific wrong conclusions in which it
has landed. Wherever the chief dependence in forming inferences is upon the conjunctions
observed in past experience, failures to agree with the usual order are slurred over, cases of
successful confirmation are exaggerated. Since the mind naturally demands some principle of
continuity, some connecting link between separate facts and causes, forces are arbitrarily
invented for that purpose. Fantastic and mythological explanations are resorted to in order to
supply missing links. The pump brings water because nature abhors a vacuum; opium makes
men sleep because it has a dormi[Pg 149]tive potency; we recollect a past event because we have a
fa
culty of memory. In the history of the progress of human knowledge, out and out myths
accompany the first stage of empiricism; while "hidden essences" and "occult forces" mark its
second stage. By their very nature, these "causes" escape observation, so that their explanatory
value can be neither confirmed nor refuted by further observation or experience. Hence belief in
them becomes purely traditionary. They give rise to doctrines which, inculcated and handed
down, become dogmas; subsequent inquiry and reflection are actually stifled. (Ante, p. 23.)
and to dogmatism
Certain men or classes of men come to be the accepted guardians and transmitters—
instructors—of established doctrines. To question the beliefs is to question their authority; to
accept the beliefs is evidence of loyalty to the powers that be, a proof of good citizenship.
Passivity, docility, acquiescence, come to be primal intellectual virtues. Facts and events
presenting novelty and variety are slighted, or are sheared down till they fit into the Procrustean
bed of habitual belief. Inquiry and doubt are silenced by citation of ancient laws or a multitude
of miscellaneous and unsifted cases. This attitude of mind generates dislike of change, and the
resulting aversion to novelty is fatal to progress. What will not fit into the established canons is
outlawed; men who make new discoveries are objects of suspicion and even of persecution.
Beliefs that perhaps originally were the products of fairly extensive and careful observation are
stereotyped into fixed traditions and semi-sacred dogmas accepted simply upon authority, and
are mixed with fantastic conceptions that happen to have won the acceptance of authorities.[Pg 150]
§ 2. Scientific Method
Scientific thinking analyzes the present case
In contrast with the empirical method stands the scientific. Scientific method replaces the
repeated conjunction or coincidence of separate facts by discovery of a single comprehensive
fa
ct, effecting this replacement by breaking up the coarse or gross facts of observation into a
number of minuter processes not directly accessible to perception.
Illustration from suction of empirical method,
If a layman were asked why water rises from the cistern when an ordinary pump is worked, he
would doubtless answer, "By suction." Suction is regarded as a force like heat or pressure. If
such a person is confronted by the fact that water rises with a suction pump only about thirtythree feet, he easily disposes of the difficulty on the ground that all forces vary in their intensities
and finally reach a limit at which they cease to operate. The variation with elevation above the
sea level of the height to which water can be pumped is either unnoticed, or, if noted, is
dismissed as one of the curious anomalies in which nature abounds.
of scientific method
Relies on differences,
Now the scientist advances by assuming that what seems to observation to be a single total fact
is in truth complex. He attempts, therefore, to break up the single fact of water-rising-in-the-pipe
into a number of lesser facts. His method of proceeding is by varying conditions one by one so
fa
r as possible, and noting just what happens when a given condition is eliminated. There are
two methods for varying conditions.[24] The first is an extension of the empirical method of
observation. It consists in comparing very carefully the results of a great number of observations
which have occurred[Pg 151] under accidentally different conditions. The difference in the rise of
the water at different heights above the sea level, and its total cessation when the distance to be
lifted is, even at sea level, more than thirty-three feet, are emphasized, instead of being slurred
over. The purpose is to find out what special conditions are present when the effect occurs and
ab
sent when it fails to occur. These special conditions are then substituted for the gross fact, or
regarded as its principle—the key to understanding it.
and creates differences
The method of analysis by comparing cases is, however, badly handicapped; it can do nothing
until it is presented with a certain number of diversified cases. And even when different cases are
at hand, it will be questionable whether they vary in just these respects in which it is important
that they should vary in order to throw light upon the question at issue. The method is passive
and dependent upon external accidents. Hence the superiority of the active or experimental
method. Even a small number of observations may suggest an explanation—a hypothesis or
theory. Working upon this suggestion, the scientist may then intentionally vary conditions and
note what happens. If the empirical observations have suggested to him the possibility of a
connection between air pressure on the water and the rising of the water in the tube where air
pressure is absent, he deliberately empties the air out of the vessel in which the water is
contained and notes that suction no longer works; or he intentionally increases atmospheric
pressure on the water and notes the result. He institutes experiments to calculate the weight of air
at the sea level and at various levels above, and compares the results of reasoning based upon the
pressure of air[Pg 152] of these various weights upon a certain volume of water with the results
actually obtained by observation. Observations formed by variation of conditions on the basis of
some idea or theory constitute experiment. Experiment is the chief resource in scientific
reasoning because it facilitates the picking out of significant elements in a gross, vague whole.
Analysis and synthesis again
Experimental thinking, or scientific reasoning, is thus a conjoint process of analysis and
synthesis, or, in less technical language, of discrimination and assimilation or identification. The
gross fact of water rising when the suction valve is worked is resolved or discriminated into a
number of independent variables, some of which had never before been observed or even
thought of in connection with the fact. One of these facts, the weight of the atmosphere, is then
selectively seized upon as the key to the entire phenomenon. This disentangling constitutes
analysis. But atmosphere and its pressure or weight is a fact not confined to this single instance.
It is a fact familiar or at least discoverable as operative in a great number of other events. In
fixing upon this imperceptible and minute fact as the essence or key to the elevation of water by
the pump, the pump-fact has thus been assimilated to a whole group of ordinary facts from
which it was previously isolated. This assimilation constitutes synthesis. Moreover, the fact of
atmospheric pressure is itself a case of one of the commonest of all facts—weight or
gravitational force. Conclusions that apply to the common fact of weight are thus transferable to
the consideration and interpretation of the relatively rare and exceptional case of the suction of
water. The suction pump is seen to be a case of the same kind or sort as the siphon, the[Pg 153]
barometer, the rising of the balloon, and a multitude of other things with which at first sight it
has no connection at all. This is another instance of the synthetic or assimilative phase of
scientific thinking.
If we revert to the advantages of scientific over empirical thinking, we find that we now have the
clue to them.
Lessened liability to error
(a) The increased security, the added factor of certainty or proof, is due to the substitution of the
de
tailed and specific fact of atmospheric pressure for the gross and total and relatively
miscellaneous fact of suction. The latter is complex, and its complexity is due to many unknown
and unspecified factors; hence, any statement about it is more or less random, and likely to be
defeated by any unforeseen variation of circumstances. Comparatively, at least, the minute and
detailed fact of air pressure is a measurable and definite fact—one that can be picked out and
managed with assurance.
Ability to manage the new
(b) As analysis accounts for the added certainty, so synthesis accounts for ability to cope with
the novel and variable. Weight is a much commoner fact than atmospheric weight, and this in
turn is a much commoner fact than the workings of the suction pump. To be able to substitute the
common and frequent fact for that which is relatively rare and peculiar is to reduce the
seemingly novel and exceptional to cases of a general and familiar principle, and thus to bring
them under control for interpretation and prediction.
As Professor James says: "Think of heat as motion and whatever is true of motion will be true of
heat; but we have a hundred experiences of motion for every one of heat. Think of rays passing
through this lens as cases of bending toward the perpendicular, and you[Pg 154] substitute for the
comparatively unfamiliar lens the very familiar notion of a particular change in direction of a
line, of which notion every day brings us countless examples."[25]
Interest in the future or in progress
(c) The change of attitude from conservative reliance upon the past, upon routine and custom, to
fa
ith in progress through the intelligent regulation of existing conditions, is, of course, the reflex
of the scientific method of experimentation. The empirical method inevitably magnifies the
influences of the past; the experimental method throws into relief the possibilities of the future.
The empirical method says, "Wait till there is a sufficient number of cases;" the experimental
method says, "Produce the cases." The former depends upon nature's accidentally happening to
present us with certain conjunctions of circumstances; the latter deliberately and intentionally
endeavors to bring about the conjunction. By this method the notion of progress secures
scientific warrant.
Physical versus logical force
Ordinary experience is controlled largely by the direct strength and intensity of various
occurrences. What is bright, sudden, loud, secures notice and is given a conspicuous rating.
What is dim, feeble, and continuous gets ignored, or is regarded as of slight importance.
Customary experience tends to the control of thinking by considerations of direct and immediate
strength rather than by those of importance in the long run. Animals without the power of
fo
recast and planning must, upon the whole, respond to the stimuli that are most urgent at the
moment, or cease to exist. These stimuli lose nothing of their direct urgency and clamorous
insistency when the thinking power develops; and yet thinking[Pg 155] demands the subordination
of the immediate stimulus to the remote and distant. The feeble and the minute may be of much
greater importance than the glaring and the big. The latter may be signs of a force that is already
exhausting itself; the former may indicate the beginnings of a process in which the whole fortune
of the individual is involved. The prime necessity for scientific thought is that the thinker be
freed from the tyranny of sense stimuli and habit, and this emancipation is also the necessary
condition of progress.
Illustration from moving water
Consider the following quotation: "When it first occurred to a reflecting mind that moving water
had a property identical with human or brute force, namely, the property of setting other masses
in motion, overcoming inertia and resistance,—when the sight of the stream suggested through
this point of likeness the power of the animal,—a new addition was made to the class of prime
movers, and when circumstances permitted, this power could become a substitute for the others.
It may seem to the modern understanding, familiar with water wheels and drifting rafts, that the
similarity here was an extremely obvious one. But if we put ourselves back into an early state of
mind, when running water affected the mind by its brilliancy, its roar and irregular devastation,
we may easily suppose that to identify this with animal muscular energy was by no means an
obvious effort."[26]
Value of abstraction
If we add to these obvious sensory features the various social customs and expectations which
fix the attitude of the individual, the evil of the subjection of free and fertile suggestion to
empirical considerations be[Pg 156]comes clear. A certain power of abstraction, of deliberate
turning away from the habitual responses to a situation, was required before men could be
emancipated to follow up suggestions that in the end are fruitful.
Experience as inclusive of thought
In short, the term experience may be interpreted either with reference to the empirical or the
experimental attitude of mind. Experience is not a rigid and closed thing; it is vital, and hence
growing. When dominated by the past, by custom and routine, it is often opposed to the
reasonable, the thoughtful. But experience also includes the reflection that sets us free from the
limiting influence of sense, appetite, and tradition. Experience may welcome and assimilate all
that the most exact and penetrating thought discovers. Indeed, the business of education might be
defined as just such an emancipation and enlargement of experience. Education takes the
individual while he is relatively plastic, before he has become so indurated by isolated
experiences as to be rendered hopelessly empirical in his habit of mind. The attitude of
childhood is naïve, wondering, experimental; the world of man and nature is new. Right methods
of education preserve and perfect this attitude, and thereby short-circuit for the individual the
slow progress of the race, eliminating the waste that comes from inert routine.[Pg 157]
PART THREE: THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
CHAPTER TWELVE
ACTIVITY AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
In this chapter we shall gather together and amplify considerations that have already been
advanced, in various passages of the preceding pages, concerning the relation of action to
thought. We shall follow, though not with exactness, the order of development in the unfolding
human being.
§ 1. The Early Stage of Activity
1. The baby's problem determines his thinking
The sight of a baby often calls out the question: "What do you suppose he is thinking about?" By
the nature of the case, the question is unanswerable in detail; but, also by the nature of the case,
we may be sure about a baby's chief interest. His primary problem is mastery of his body as a
tool of securing comfortable and effective adjustments to his surroundings, physical and social.
The child has to learn to do almost everything: to see, to hear, to reach, to handle, to balance the
body, to creep, to walk, and so on. Even if it be true that human beings have even more
instinctive reactions than lower animals, it is also true that instinctive tendencies are much less
perfect in men, and that most of them are[Pg 158] of little use till they are intelligently combined
and directed. A little chick just out of the shell will after a few trials peck at and grasp grains of
fo
od with its beak as well as at any later time. This involves a complicated coördination of the
eye and the head. An infant does not even begin to reach definitely for things that the eye sees
till he is several months old, and even then several weeks' practice is required before he learns
the adjustment so as neither to overreach nor to underreach. It may not be literally true that the
child will grasp for the moon, but it is true that he needs much practice before he can tell
whether an object is within reach or not. The arm is thrust out instinctively in response to a
stimulus from the eye, and this tendency is the origin of the ability to reach and grasp exactly
and quickly; but nevertheless final mastery requires observing and selecting the successful
movements, and arranging them in view of an end. These operations of conscious selection and
arrangement constitute thinking, though of a rudimentary type.
Mastery of the body is an intellectual problem
Since mastery of the bodily organs is necessary for all later developments, such problems are
both interesting and important, and solving them supplies a very genuine training of thinking
power. The joy the child shows in learning to use his limbs, to translate what he sees into what
he handles, to connect sounds with sights, sights with taste and touch, and the rapidity with
which intelligence grows in the first year and a half of life (the time during which the more
fu
ndamental problems of the use of the organism are mastered), are sufficient evidence that the
development of physical control is not a physical but an intellectual achievement.
2. The problem of social adjustment and intercourse
Although in the early months the child is mainly oc[Pg 159]cupied in learning to use his body to
accommodate himself to physical conditions in a comfortable way and to use things skillfully
and effectively, yet social adjustments are very important. In connection with parents, nurse,
brother, and sister, the child learns the signs of satisfaction of hunger, of removal of discomfort,
of the approach of agreeable light, color, sound, and so on. His contact with physical things is
regulated by persons, and he soon distinguishes persons as the most important and interesting of
all the objects with which he has to do. Speech, the accurate adaptation of sounds heard to the
movements of tongue and lips, is, however, the great instrument of social adaptation; and with
the development of speech (usually in the second year) adaptation of the baby's activities to and
with those of other persons gives the keynote of mental life. His range of possible activities is
indefinitely widened as he watches what other persons do, and as he tries to understand and to do
what they encourage him to attempt. The outline pattern of mental life is thus set in the first four
or five years. Years, centuries, generations of invention and planning, may have gone to the
development of the performances and occupations of the adults surrounding the child. Yet for
him their activities are direct stimuli; they are part of his natural environment; they are carried on
in physical terms that appeal to his eye, ear, and touch. He cannot, of course, appropriate their
meaning directly through his senses; but they furnish stimuli to which he responds, so that his
attention is focussed upon a higher order of materials and of problems. Were it not for this
process by which the achievements of one generation form the stimuli that direct the activities of
the next, the story of civilization[Pg 160] would be writ in water, and each generation would have
laboriously to make for itself, if it could, its way out of savagery.
Social adjustment results in imitation but is not caused by it
Imitation is one (though only one, see p. 47) of the means by which the activities of adults
supply stimuli which are so interesting, so varied, so complex, and so novel, as to occasion a
rapid progress of thought. Mere imitation, however, would not give rise to thinking; if we could
learn like parrots by simply copying the outward acts of others, we should never have to think;
nor should we know, after we had mastered the copied act, what was the meaning of the thing
we had done. Educators (and psychologists) have often assumed that acts which reproduce the
behavior of others are acquired merely by imitation. But a child rarely learns by conscious
imitation; and to say that his imitation is unconscious is to say that it is not from his standpoint
imitation at all. The word, the gesture, the act, the occupation of another, falls in line with some
impulse already active and suggests some satisfactory mode of expression, some end in which it
may find fulfillment. Having this end of his own, the child then notes other persons, as he notes
natural events, to get further suggestions as to means of its realization. He selects some of the
means he observes, tries them on, finds them successful or unsuccessful, is confirmed or
weakened in his belief in their value, and so continues selecting, arranging, adapting, testing, till
he can accomplish what he wishes. The onlooker may then observe the resemblance of this act to
some act of an adult, and conclude that it was acquired by imitation, while as a matter of fact it
was acquired by attention, observation, selection, experimentation, and confirmation by results.
Only[Pg 161] because this method is employed is there intellectual discipline and an educative
result. The presence of adult activities plays an enormous rôle in the intellectual growth of the
child because they add to the natural stimuli of the world new stimuli which are more exactly
adapted to the needs of a human being, which are richer, better organized, more complex in
range, permitting more flexible adaptations, and calling out novel reactions. But in utilizing
these stimuli the child follows the same methods that he uses when he is forced to think in order
to master his body.
§ 2. Play, Work, and Allied Forms of Activity
Play indicates the domination of activity by meanings or ideas
Organization of ideas involved in play
When things become signs, when they gain a representative capacity as standing for other things,
play is transformed from mere physical exuberance into an activity involving a mental factor. A
little girl who had broken her doll was seen to perform with the leg of the doll all the operations
of washing, putting to bed, and fondling, that she had been accustomed to perform with the
entire doll. The part stood for the whole; she reacted not to the stimulus sensibly present, but to
the meaning suggested by the sense object. So children use a stone for a table, leaves for plates,
acorns for cups. So they use their dolls, their trains, their blocks, their other toys. In manipulating
them, they are living not with the physical things, but in the large world of meanings, natural and
social, evoked by these things. So when children play horse, play store, play house or making
calls, they are subordinating the physically present to the ideally signified. In this way, a world
of meanings, a store of concepts (so fundamental to all intellectual achievement), is defined and
built up.[Pg 162] Moreover, not only do meanings thus become familiar acquaintances, but they are
organized, arranged in groups, made to cohere in connected ways. A play and a story blend
insensibly into each other. The most fanciful plays of children rarely lose all touch with the
mutual fitness and pertinency of various meanings to one another; the "freest" plays observe
some principles of coherence and unification. They have a beginning, middle, and end. In games,
ru
les of order run through various minor acts and bind them into a connected whole. The rhythm,
the competition, and coöperation involved in most plays and games also introduce organization.
There is, then, nothing mysterious or mystical in the discovery made by Plato and remade by
Froebel that play is the chief, almost the only, mode of education for the child in the years of
later infancy.
The playful attitude
Playfulness is a more important consideration than play. The former is an attitude of mind; the
latter is a passing outward manifestation of this attitude. When things are treated simply as
vehicles of suggestion, what is suggested overrides the thing. Hence the playful attitude is one of
freedom. The person is not bound to the physical traits of things, nor does he care whether a
thing really means (as we say) what he takes it to represent. When the child plays horse with a
broom and cars with chairs, the fact that the broom does not really represent a horse, or a chair a
locomotive, is of no account. In order, then, that playfulness may not terminate in arbitrary
fa
ncifulness and in building up an imaginary world alongside the world of actual things, it is
necessary that the play attitude should gradually pass into a work attitude.
The work attitude is interested in means and ends
What is work—work not as mere external perform[Pg 163]ance, but as attitude of mind? It signifies
that the person is not content longer to accept and to act upon the meanings that things suggest,
but demands congruity of meaning with the things themselves. In the natural course of growth,
children come to find irresponsible make-believe plays inadequate. A fiction is too easy a way
out to afford content. There is not enough stimulus to call forth satisfactory mental response.
When this point is reached, the ideas that things suggest must be applied to the things with some
regard to fitness. A small cart, resembling a "real" cart, with "real" wheels, tongue, and body,
meets the mental demand better than merely making believe that anything which comes to hand
is a cart. Occasionally to take part in setting a "real" table with "real" dishes brings more reward
than forever to make believe a flat stone is a table and that leaves are dishes. The interest may
still center in the meanings, the things may be of importance only as amplifying a certain
meaning. So far the attitude is one of play. But the meaning is now of such a character that it
must find appropriate embodiment in actual things.
The dictionary does not permit us to call such activities work. Nevertheless, they represent a
genuine passage of play into work. For work (as a mental attitude, not as mere external
performance) means interest in the adequate embodiment of a meaning (a suggestion, purpose,
aim) in objective form through the use of appropriate materials and appliances. Such an attitude
takes advantage of the meanings aroused and built up in free play, but controls their
de
velopment by seeing to it that they are applied to things in ways consistent with the observable
structure of the things themselves.[Pg 164]
and in processes on account of their results
The point of this distinction between play and work may be cleared up by comparing it with a
more usual way of stating the difference. In play activity, it is said, the interest is in the activity
fo
r its own sake; in work, it is in the product or result in which the activity terminates. Hence the
fo
rm
er is purely free, while the latter is tied down by the end to be achieved. When the
difference is stated in this sharp fashion, there is almost always introduced a false, unnatural
separation between process and product, between activity and its achieved outcome. The true
distinction is not between an interest in activity for its own sake and interest in the external result
of that activity, but between an interest in an activity just as it flows on from moment to moment,
and an interest in an activity as tending to a culmination, to an outcome, and therefore possessing
a thread of continuity binding together its successive stages. Both may equally exemplify interest
in an activity "for its own sake"; but in one case the activity in which the interest resides is more
or less casual, following the accident of circumstance and whim, or of dictation; in the other, the
activity is enriched by the sense that it leads somewhere, that it amounts to something.
Consequences of the sharp separation of play and work
Were it not that the false theory of the relation of the play and the work attitudes has been
connected with unfortunate modes of school practice, insistence upon a truer view might seem
an unnecessary refinement. But the sharp break that unfortunately prevails between the
kindergarten and the grades is evidence that the theoretical distinction has practical implications.
Under the title of play, the former is rendered unduly symbolic, fanciful, sentimental, and
arbitrary; while under the antithetical caption of work the latter con[Pg 165]tains many tasks
externally assigned. The former has no end and the latter an end so remote that only the
educator, not the child, is aware that it is an end.
There comes a time when children must extend and make more exact their acquaintance with
existing things; must conceive ends and consequences with sufficient definiteness to guide their
actions by them, and must acquire some technical skill in selecting and arranging means to
realize these ends. Unless these factors are gradually introduced in the earlier play period, they
must be introduced later abruptly and arbitrarily, to the manifest disadvantage of both the earlier
and the later stages.
False notions of imagination and utility
The sharp opposition of play and work is usually associated with false notions of utility and
imagination. Activity that is directed upon matters of home and neighborhood interest is
depreciated as merely utilitarian. To let the child wash dishes, set the table, engage in cooking,
cut and sew dolls' clothes, make boxes that will hold "real things," and construct his own
playthings by using hammer and nails, excludes, so it is said, the æsthetic and appreciative
fa
ctor, eliminates imagination, and subjects the child's development to material and practical
concerns; while (so it is said) to reproduce symbolically the domestic relationships of birds and
other animals, of human father and mother and child, of workman and tradesman, of knight,
soldier, and magistrate, secures a liberal exercise of mind, of great moral as well as intellectual
value. It has been even stated that it is over-physical and utilitarian if a child plants seeds and
takes care of growing plants in the kindergarten; while reproducing dramatically operations of
planting, cultivating, reaping, and so on, either[Pg 166] with no physical materials or with symbolic
representatives, is highly educative to the imagination and to spiritual appreciation. Toy dolls,
trains of cars, boats, and engines are rigidly excluded, and the employ of cubes, balls, and other
symbols for representing these social activities is recommended on the same ground. The more
unfitted the physical object for its imagined purpose, such as a cube for a boat, the greater is the
supposed appeal to the imagination.
Imagination a medium of realizing the absent and significant
There are several fallacies in this way of thinking. (a) The healthy imagination deals not with the
unreal, but with the mental realization of what is suggested. Its exercise is not a flight into the
purely fanciful and ideal, but a method of expanding and filling in what is real. To the child the
homely activities going on about him are not utilitarian devices for accomplishing physical ends;
they exemplify a wonderful world the depths of which he has not sounded, a world full of the
mystery and promise that attend all the doings of the grown-ups whom he admires. However
prosaic this world may be to the adults who find its duties routine affairs, to the child it is fraught
with social meaning. To engage in it is to exercise the imagination in constructing an experience
of wider value than any the child has yet mastered.
Only the already experienced can be symbolized
(b) Educators sometimes think children are reacting to a great moral or spiritual truth when the
children's reactions are largely physical and sensational. Children have great powers of dramatic
simulation, and their physical bearing may seem (to adults prepossessed with a philosophic
theory) to indicate they have been impressed with some lesson of chivalry, devotion, or nobility,
when the children themselves are occupied only[Pg 167] with transitory physical excitations. To
symbolize great truths far beyond the child's range of actual experience is an impossibility, and
to attempt it is to invite love of momentary stimulation.
Useful work is not necessarily labor
(c) Just as the opponents of play in education always conceive of play as mere amusement, so
the opponents of direct and useful activities confuse occupation with labor. The adult is
acquainted with responsible labor upon which serious financial results depend. Consequently he
seeks relief, relaxation, amusement. Unless children have prematurely worked for hire, unless
they have come under the blight of child labor, no such division exists for them. Whatever
ap
peals to them at all, appeals directly on its own account. There is no contrast between doing
things for utility and for fun. Their life is more united and more wholesome. To suppose that
activities customarily performed by adults only under the pressure of utility may not be done
perfectly freely and joyously by children indicates a lack of imagination. Not the thing done but
the quality of mind that goes into the doing settles what is utilitarian and what is unconstrained
and educative.
§ 3. Constructive Occupations
The historic growth of sciences out of occupations
The history of culture shows that mankind's scientific knowledge and technical abilities have
developed, especially in all their earlier stages, out of the fundamental problems of life. Anatomy
and physiology grew out of the practical needs of keeping healthy and active; geometry and
mechanics out of demands for measuring land, for building, and for making labor-saving
machines; astronomy has been closely connected with navigation, keeping record of the passage
of time; botany grew out[Pg 168] of the requirements of medicine and of agronomy; chemistry has
been associated with dyeing, metallurgy, and other industrial pursuits. In turn, modern industry
is almost wholly a matter of applied science; year by year the domain of routine and crude
empiricism is narrowed by the translation of scientific discovery into industrial invention. The
trolley, the telephone, the electric light, the steam engine, with all their revolutionary
consequences for social intercourse and control, are the fruits of science.
The intellectual possibilities of school occupations
These facts are full of educational significance. Most children are preëminently active in their
tendencies. The schools have also taken on—largely from utilitarian, rather than from strictly
educative reasons—a large number of active pursuits commonly grouped under the head of
manual training, including also school gardens, excursions, and various graphic arts. Perhaps the
most pressing problem of education at the present moment is to organize and relate these
subjects so that they will become instruments for forming alert, persistent, and fruitful
intellectual habits. That they take hold of the more primary and native equipment of children
(appealing to their desire to do) is generally recognized; that they afford great opportunity for
training in self-reliant and efficient social service is gaining acknowledgment. But they may also
be used for presenting typical problems to be solved by personal reflection and experimentation,
and by acquiring definite bodies of knowledge leading later to more specialized scientific
kn
owledge. There is indeed no magic by which mere physical activity or deft manipulation will
secure intellectual results. (See p. 43.) Manual subjects may be taught by routine, by dictation, or
by convention as readily[Pg 169] as bookish subjects. But intelligent consecutive work in
gardening, cooking, or weaving, or in elementary wood and iron, may be planned which will
inevitably result in students not only amassing information of practical and scientific importance
in botany, zoölogy, chemistry, physics, and other sciences, but (what is more significant) in their
becoming versed in methods of experimental inquiry and proof.
Reorganization of the course of study
That the elementary curriculum is overloaded is a common complaint. The only alternative to a
reactionary return to the educational traditions of the past lies in working out the intellectual
possibilities resident in the various arts, crafts, and occupations, and reorganizing the curriculum
accordingly. Here, more than elsewhere, are found the means by which the blind and routine
experience of the race may be transformed into illuminated and emancipated experiment.[Pg 170]
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LANGUAGE AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
§ 1. Language as the Tool of Thinking
Ambiguous position of language
Speech has such a peculiarly intimate connection with thought as to require special discussion.
Although the very word logic comes from logos (λογος), meaning indifferently both word or
speech, and thought or reason, yet "words, words, words" denote intellectual barrenness, a sham
of thought. Although schooling has language as its chief instrument (and often as its chief
matter) of study, educational reformers have for centuries brought their severest indictments
against the current use of language in the schools. The conviction that language is necessary to
thinking (is even identical with it) is met by the contention that language perverts and conceals
thought.
Language a necessary tool of thinking,
fo
r it alone fixes meanings
Three typical views have been maintained regarding the relation of thought and language: first,
that they are identical; second, that words are the garb or clothing of thought, necessary not for
thought but only for conveying it; and third (the view we shall here maintain) that while
language is not thought it is necessary for thinking as well as for its communication. When it is
said, however, that thinking is impossible without language, we must recall that language
includes much more than oral and written speech. Gestures, pictures, monuments, visual images,
finger movements—anything con[Pg 171]sciously employed as a sign is, logically, language. To
say that language is necessary for thinking is to say that signs are necessary. Thought deals not
with bare things, but with their meanings, their suggestions; and meanings, in order to be
ap
prehended, must be embodied in sensible and particular existences. Without meaning, things
are nothing but blind stimuli or chance sources of pleasure and pain; and since meanings are not
themselves tangible things, they must be anchored by attachment to some physical existence.
Existences that are especially set aside to fixate and convey meanings are signs or symbols. If a
man moves toward another to throw him out of the room, his movement is not a sign. If,
however, the man points to the door with his hand, or utters the sound go, his movement is
reduced to a vehicle of meaning: it is a sign or symbol. In the case of signs we care nothing for
what they are in themselves, but everything for what they signify and represent. Canis, hund,
chien, dog—it makes no difference what the outward thing is, so long as the meaning is
presented.
Limitations of natural symbols
Natural objects are signs of other things and events. Clouds stand for rain; a footprint represents
game or an enemy; a projecting rock serves to indicate minerals below the surface. The
limitations of natural signs are, however, great. (i) The physical or direct sense excitation tends
to distract attention from what is meant or indicated.[27] Almost every one will recall pointing out
to a kitten or puppy some object of food, only to have the animal devote himself to the hand
pointing, not to the thing pointed at. (ii) Where natural signs alone exist, we are mainly at the
mercy of external happenings; we[Pg 172] have to wait until the natural event presents itself in
order to be warned or advised of the possibility of some other event. (iii) Natural signs, not being
originally intended to be signs, are cumbrous, bulky, inconvenient, unmanageable.
Artificial signs overcome these restrictions.
It is therefore indispensable for any high development of thought that there should be also
intentional signs. Speech supplies the requirement. Gestures, sounds, written or printed forms,
are strictly physical existences, but their native value is intentionally subordinated to the value
they acquire as representative of meanings. (i) The direct and sensible value of faint sounds and
minute written or printed marks is very slight. Accordingly, attention is not distracted from their
representative function. (ii) Their production is under our direct control so that they may be
produced when needed. When we can make the word rain, we do not have to wait for some
physical forerunner of rain to call our thoughts in that direction. We cannot make the cloud; we
can make the sound, and as a token of meaning the sound serves the purpose as well as the
cloud. (iii) Arbitrary linguistic signs are convenient and easy to manage. They are compact,
portable, and delicate. As long as we live we breathe; and modifications by the muscles of throat
and mouth of the volume and quality of the air are simple, easy, and indefinitely controllable.
Bodily postures and gestures of the hand and arm are also employed as signs, but they are coarse
and unmanageable compared with modifications of breath to produce sounds. No wonder that
oral speech has been selected as the main stuff of intentional intellectual signs. Sounds, while
subtle, refined, and easily modifiable, are transitory. This defect is met by the system of
written[Pg 173] and printed words, appealing to the eye. Litera scripta manet.
Bearing in mind the intimate connection of meanings and signs (or language), we may note in
more detail what language does (1) for specific meanings, and (2) for the organization of
meanings.
I. Individual Meanings. A verbal sign (a) selects, detaches, a meaning from what is otherwise a
vague flux and blur (see p. 121); (b) it retains, registers, stores that meaning; and (c) applies it,
when needed, to the comprehension of other things. Combining these various functions in a
mixture of metaphors, we may say that a linguistic sign is a fence, a label, and a vehicle—all in
one.
A sign makes a meaning distinct
(a) Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague
cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems almost within reach, but is
elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it
is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it
stand out as an entity on its own account. When Emerson said that he would almost rather know
the true name, the poet's name, for a thing, than to know the thing itself, he presumably had this
irradiating and illuminating function of language in mind. The delight that children take in
demanding and learning the names of everything about them indicates that meanings are
becoming concrete individuals to them, so that their commerce with things is passing from the
physical to the intellectual plane. It is hardly surprising that savages attach a magic efficacy to
words. To name anything is to give it a title; to dignify and honor it by[Pg 174] raising it from a
mere physical occurrence to a meaning that is distinct and permanent. To know the names of
people and things and to be able to manipulate these names is, in savage lore, to be in possession
of their dignity and worth, to master them.
A sign preserves a meaning
(b) Things come and go; or we come and go, and either way things escape our notice. Our direct
sensible relation to things is very limited. The suggestion of meanings by natural signs is limited
to occasions of direct contact or vision. But a meaning fixed by a linguistic sign is conserved for
fu
ture use. Even if the thing is not there to represent the meaning, the word may be produced so
as to evoke the meaning. Since intellectual life depends on possession of a store of meanings, the
importance of language as a tool of preserving meanings cannot be overstated. To be sure, the
method of storage is not wholly aseptic; words often corrupt and modify the meanings they are
supposed to keep intact, but liability to infection is a price paid by every living thing for the
privilege of living.
A sign transfers a meaning
(c) When a meaning is detached and fixed by a sign, it is possible to use that meaning in a new
context and situation. This transfer and reapplication is the key to all judgment and inference. It
would little profit a man to recognize that a given particular cloud was the premonitor of a given
particular rainstorm if his recognition ended there, for he would then have to learn over and over
again, since the next cloud and the next rain are different events. No cumulative growth of
intelligence would occur; experience might form habits of physical adaptation but it would not
teach anything, for we should not be able to use a prior experience consciously to anticipate and
regulate a further experience. To be able to use[Pg 175] the past to judge and infer the new and
unknown implies that, although the past thing has gone, its meaning abides in such a way as to
be applicable in determining the character of the new. Speech forms are our great carriers: the
easy-running vehicles by which meanings are transported from experiences that no longer
concern us to those that are as yet dark and dubious.
Logical organization depends upon signs
II. Organization of Meanings. In emphasizing the importance of signs in relation to specific
meanings, we have overlooked another aspect, equally valuable. Signs not only mark off specific
or individual meanings, but they are also instruments of grouping meanings in relation to one
another. Words are not only names or titles of single meanings; they also form sentences in
which meanings are organized in relation to one another. When we say "That book is a
dictionary," or "That blur of light in the heavens is Halley's comet," we express a logical
connection—an act of classifying and defining that goes beyond the physical thing into the
logical region of genera and species, things and attributes. Propositions, sentences, bear the same
relation to judgments that distinct words, built up mainly by analyzing propositions in their
various types, bear to meanings or conceptions; and just as words imply a sentence, so a
sentence implies a larger whole of consecutive discourse into which it fits. As is often said,
grammar expresses the unconscious logic of the popular mind. The chief intellectual
classifications that constitute the working capital of thought have been built up for us by our
mother tongue. Our very lack of explicit consciousness in using language that we are employing
the intellectual systematizations of the race shows how thoroughly accustomed we have become
to its logical distinctions and groupings.[Pg 176]
§ 2. The Abuse of Linguistic Methods in Education
Teaching merely things, not educative
Taken literally, the maxim, "Teach things, not words," or "Teach things before words," would be
the negation of education; it would reduce mental life to mere physical and sensible adjustments.
Learning, in the proper sense, is not learning things, but the meanings of things, and this process
involves the use of signs, or language in its generic sense. In like fashion, the warfare of some
educational reformers against symbols, if pushed to extremes, involves the destruction of the
intellectual life, since this lives, moves, and has its being in those processes of definition,
ab
straction, generalization, and classification that are made possible by symbols alone.
Nevertheless, these contentions of educational reformers have been needed. The liability of a
thing to abuse is in proportion to the value of its right use.
But words separated from things are not true signs
Symbols are themselves, as pointed out above, particular, physical, sensible existences, like any
other things. They are symbols only by virtue of what they suggest and represent, i.e. meanings.
(i) They stand for these meanings to any individual only when he has had experience of some
situation to which these meanings are actually relevant. Words can detach and preserve a
meaning only when the meaning has been first involved in our own direct intercourse with
things. To attempt to give a meaning through a word alone without any dealings with a thing is
to deprive the word of intelligible signification; against this attempt, a tendency only too
prevalent in education, reformers have protested. Moreover, there is a tendency to assume that
whenever there is a definite word or form of speech there is also a definite idea; while, as a
matter of fact, adults and children alike are capable of using even precise verbal formulæ[Pg 177]
with only the vaguest and most confused sense of what they mean. Genuine ignorance is more
profitable because likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness; while
ab
ility to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning
and coats the mind with a varnish waterproof to new ideas.
Language tends to arrest personal inquiry and reflection
(ii) Again, although new combinations of words without the intervention of physical things may
supply new ideas, there are limits to this possibility. Lazy inertness causes individuals to accept
ideas that have currency about them without personal inquiry and testing. A man uses thought,
perhaps, to find out what others believe, and then stops. The ideas of others as embodied in
language become substitutes for one's own ideas. The use of linguistic studies and methods to
halt the human mind on the level of the attainments of the past, to prevent new inquiry and
discovery, to put the authority of tradition in place of the authority of natural facts and laws, to
reduce the individual to a parasite living on the secondhand experience of others—these things
have been the source of the reformers' protest against the preëminence assigned to language in
schools.
Words as mere stimuli
Finally, words that originally stood for ideas come, with repeated use, to be mere counters; they
become physical things to be manipulated according to certain rules, or reacted to by certain
operations without consciousness of their meaning. Mr. Stout (who has called such terms
"substitute signs")remarks that "algebraical and arithmetical signs are to a great extent used as
mere substitute signs.... It is possible to use signs of this kind whenever fixed and definite rules
of opera[Pg 178]tion can be derived from the nature of the things symbolized, so as to be applied in
manipulating the signs, without further reference to their signification. A word is an instrument
fo
r thinking about the meaning which it expresses; a substitute sign is a means of not thinking
ab
out the meaning which it symbolizes." The principle applies, however, to ordinary words, as
well as to algebraic signs; they also enable us to use meanings so as to get results without
thinking. In many respects, signs that are means of not thinking are of great advantage; standing
fo
r the familiar, they release attention for meanings that, being novel, require conscious
interpretation. Nevertheless, the premium put in the schoolroom upon attainment of technical
fa
cility, upon skill in producing external results (ante, p. 51), often changes this advantage into a
positive detriment. In manipulating symbols so as to recite well, to get and give correct answers,
to follow prescribed formulæ of analysis, the pupil's attitude becomes mechanical, rather than
thoughtful; verbal memorizing is substituted for inquiry into the meaning of things. This danger
is perhaps the one uppermost in mind when verbal methods of education are attacked.
§ 3. The Use of Language in its Educational Bearings
Language stands in a twofold relation to the work of education. On the one hand, it is continually
used in all studies as well as in all the social discipline of the school; on the other, it is a distinct
object of study. We shall consider only the ordinary use of language, since its effects upon habits
of thought are much deeper than those of conscious study.
Language not primarily intellectual in purpose
The common statement that "language is the expres[Pg 179]sion of thought" conveys only a halftruth, and a half-truth that is likely to result in positive error. Language does express thought, but
not primarily, nor, at first, even consciously. The primary motive for language is to influence
(through the expression of desire, emotion, and thought) the activity of others; its secondary use
is to enter into more intimate sociable relations with them; its employment as a conscious vehicle
of thought and knowledge is a tertiary, and relatively late, formation. The contrast is well
brought out by the statement of John Locke that words have a double use,—"civil" and
"philosophical." "By their civil use, I mean such a communication of thoughts and ideas by
words as may serve for the upholding of common conversation and commerce about the
ordinary affairs and conveniences of civil life.... By the philosophical use of words, I mean such
a use of them as may serve to convey the precise notions of things, and to express in general
propositions certain and undoubted truths."
Hence education has to transform it into an intellectual tool
This distinction of the practical and social from the intellectual use of language throws much
light on the problem of the school in respect to speech. That problem is to direct pupils' oral and
written speech, used primarily for practical and social ends, so that gradually it shall become a
conscious tool of conveying knowledge and assisting thought. How without checking the
spontaneous, natural motives—motives to which language owes its vitality, force, vividness, and
variety—are we to modify speech habits so as to render them accurate and flexible intellectual
instruments? It is comparatively easy to encourage the original spontaneous flow and not make
language over into a servant of reflective thought; it is comparatively easy to check and[Pg 180]
almost destroy (so far as the schoolroom is concerned) native aim and interest, and to set up
artificial and formal modes of expression in some isolated and technical matters. The difficulty
lies in making over habits that have to do with "ordinary affairs and conveniences" into habits
concerned with "precise notions." The successful accomplishing of the transformation requires
(i) enlargement of the pupil's vocabulary; (ii) rendering its terms more precise and accurate, and
(iii) formation of habits of consecutive discourse.
To enlarge vocabulary, the fund of concepts should be enlarged
(i) Enlargement of vocabulary. This takes place, of course, by wider intelligent contact with
things and persons, and also vicariously, by gathering the meanings of words from the context in
which they are heard or read. To grasp by either method a word in its meaning is to exercise
intelligence, to perform an act of intelligent selection or analysis, and it is also to widen the fund
of meanings or concepts readily available in further intellectual enterprises (ante, p. 126). It is
usual to distinguish between one's active and one's passive vocabulary, the latter being composed
of the words that are understood when they are heard or seen, the former of words that are used
intelligently. The fact that the passive vocabulary is ordinarily much larger than the active
indicates a certain amount of inert energy, of power not freely controlled by an individual.
Failure to use meanings that are nevertheless understood reveals dependence upon external
stimulus, and lack of intellectual initiative. This mental laziness is to some extent an artificial
product of education. Small children usually attempt to put to use every new word they get hold
of, but when they learn to read they are introduced to a large variety of terms that there is no
ordinary opportunity to use.[Pg 181] The result is a kind of mental suppression, if not smothering.
Moreover, the meaning of words not actively used in building up and conveying ideas is never
quite clear-cut or complete.
Looseness of thinking accompanies a limited vocabulary
While a limited vocabulary may be due to a limited range of experience, to a sphere of contact
with persons and things so narrow as not to suggest or require a full store of words, it is also due
to carelessness and vagueness. A happy-go-lucky frame of mind makes the individual averse to
clear discriminations, either in perception or in his own speech. Words are used loosely in an
indeterminate kind of reference to things, and the mind approaches a condition where practically
everything is just a thing-um-bob or a what-do-you-call-it. Paucity of vocabulary on the part of
those with whom the child associates, triviality and meagerness in the child's reading matter (as
frequently even in his school readers and text-books), tend to shut down the area of mental
vision.
Command of language involves command of things
We must note also the great difference between flow of words and command of language.
Volubility is not necessarily a sign of a large vocabulary; much talking or even ready speech is
quite compatible with moving round and round in a circle of moderate radius. Most schoolrooms
suffer from a lack of materials and appliances save perhaps books—and even these are "written
down" to the supposed capacity, or incapacity, of children. Occasion and demand for an enriched
vocabulary are accordingly restricted. The vocabulary of things studied in the schoolroom is
very largely isolated; it does not link itself organically to the range of the ideas and words that
are in vogue outside the school. Hence the enlargement that takes place is often nominal,[Pg 182]
adding to the inert, rather than to the active, fund of meanings and terms.
(ii) Accuracy of vocabulary. One way in which the fund of words and concepts is increased is by
discovering and naming shades of meaning—that is to say, by making the vocabulary more
precise. Increase in definiteness is as important relatively as is the enlargement of the capital
stock absolutely.
The general as the vague and as the distinctly generic
The first meanings of terms, since they are due to superficial acquaintance with things, are
general in the sense of being vague. The little child calls all men papa; acquainted with a dog, he
may call the first horse he sees a big dog. Differences of quantity and intensity are noted, but the
fu
ndamental meaning is so vague that it covers things that are far apart. To many persons trees
are just trees, being discriminated only into deciduous trees and evergreens, with perhaps
recognition of one or two kinds of each. Such vagueness tends to persist and to become a barrier
to the advance of thinking. Terms that are miscellaneous in scope are clumsy tools at best; in
addition they are frequently treacherous, for their ambiguous reference causes us to confuse
things that should be distinguished.
Twofold growth of words in sense or signification
The growth of precise terms out of original vagueness takes place normally in two directions:
toward words that stand for relationships and words that stand for highly individualized traits
(compare what was said about the development of meanings, p. 122); the first being associated
with abstract, the second with concrete, thinking. Some Australian tribes are said to have no
words for animal or for plant, while they have specific names for every variety of plant and
animal in their neighborhoods. This minuteness of vocabulary repre[Pg 183]sents progress toward
definiteness, but in a one-sided way. Specific properties are distinguished, but not
relationships.[28] On the other hand, students of philosophy and of the general aspects of natural
and social science are apt to acquire a store of terms that signify relations without balancing
them up with terms that designate specific individuals and traits. The ordinary use of such terms
as causation, law, society, individual, capital, illustrates this tendency.
Words alter their meanings so as to change their logical functions
In the history of language we find both aspects of the growth of vocabulary illustrated by
changes in the sense of words: some words originally wide in their application are narrowed to
denote shades of meaning; others originally specific are widened to express relationships. The
term vernacular, now meaning mother speech, has been generalized from the word verna,
meaning a slave born in the master's household. Publication has evolved its meaning of
communication by means of print, through restricting an earlier meaning of any kind of
communication—although the wider meaning is retained in legal procedure, as publishing a
libel. The sense of the word average has been generalized from a use connected with dividing
loss by shipwreck proportionately among various sharers in an enterprise.[29]
Similar changes occur in the vocabulary of every student
These historical changes assist the educator to appreciate the changes that occur with individuals
together with advance in intellectual resources. In studying[Pg 184] geometry, a pupil must learn
both to narrow and to extend the meanings of such familiar words as line, surface, angle, square,
circle; to narrow them to the precise meanings involved in demonstrations; to extend them to
cover generic relations not expressed in ordinary usage. Qualities of color and size must be
excluded; relations of direction, of variation in direction, of limit, must be definitely seized. A
like transformation occurs, of course, in every subject of study. Just at this point lies the danger,
alluded to above, of simply overlaying common meanings with new and isolated meanings
instead of effecting a genuine working-over of popular and practical meanings into adequate
logical tools.
The value of technical terms
Terms used with intentional exactness so as to express a meaning, the whole meaning, and only
the meaning, are called technical. For educational purposes, a technical term indicates something
relative, not absolute; for a term is technical not because of its verbal form or its unusualness, but
because it is employed to fix a meaning precisely. Ordinary words get a technical quality when
used intentionally for this end. Whenever thought becomes more accurate, a (relatively)
technical vocabulary grows up. Teachers are apt to oscillate between extremes in regard to
technical terms. On the one hand, these are multiplied in every direction, seemingly on the
assumption that learning a new piece of terminology, accompanied by verbal description or
definition, is equivalent to grasping a new idea. When it is seen how largely the net outcome is
the accumulation of an isolated set of words, a jargon or scholastic cant, and to what extent the
natural power of judgment is clogged by this accumulation, there is a reaction to the opposite
extreme. Technical terms are banished:[Pg 185] "name words" exist but not nouns; "action words"
but not verbs; pupils may "take away," but not subtract; they may tell what four fives are, but not
what four times five are, and so on. A sound instinct underlies this reaction—aversion to words
that give the pretense, but not the reality, of meaning. Yet the fundamental difficulty is not with
the word, but with the idea. If the idea is not grasped, nothing is gained by using a more familiar
word; if the idea is perceived, the use of the term that exactly names it may assist in fixing the
idea. Terms denoting highly exact meanings should be introduced only sparingly, that is, a few
at a time; they should be led up to gradually, and great pains should be taken to secure the
circumstances that render precision of meaning significant.
Importance of consecutive discourse
(iii) Consecutive discourse. As we saw, language connects and organizes meanings as well as
selects and fixes them. As every meaning is set in the context of some situation, so every word in
concrete use belongs to some sentence (it may itself represent a condensed sentence), and the
sentence, in turn, belongs to some larger story, description, or reasoning process. It is
unnecessary to repeat what has been said about the importance of continuity and ordering of
meanings. We may, however, note some ways in which school practices tend to interrupt
consecutiveness of language and thereby interfere harmfully with systematic reflection. (a)
Teachers have a habit of monopolizing continued discourse. Many, if not most, instructors
would be surprised if informed at the end of the day of the amount of time they have talked as
compared with any pupil. Children's conversation is often confined to answering questions in
brief phrases, or in single disconnected sentences. Expatia[Pg 186]tion and explanation are reserved
fo
r the teacher, who often admits any hint at an answer on the part of the pupil, and then
amplifies what he supposes the child must have meant. The habits of sporadic and fragmentary
discourse thus promoted have inevitably a disintegrating intellectual influence.
Too minute questioning
(b) Assignment of too short lessons when accompanied (as it usually is in order to pass the time
of the recitation period) by minute "analytic" questioning has the same effect. This evil is usually
at its height in such subjects as history and literature, where not infrequently the material is so
minutely subdivided as to break up the unity of meaning belonging to a given portion of the
matter, to destroy perspective, and in effect to reduce the whole topic to an accumulation of
disconnected details all upon the same level. More often than the teacher is aware, his mind
carries and supplies the background of unity of meaning against which pupils project isolated
scraps.
Making avoidance of error the aim
(c) Insistence upon avoiding error instead of attaining power tends also to interruption of
continuous discourse and thought. Children who begin with something to say and with
intellectual eagerness to say it are sometimes made so conscious of minor errors in substance and
fo
rm
that the energy that should go into constructive thinking is diverted into anxiety not to
make mistakes, and even, in extreme cases, into passive quiescence as the best method of
minimizing error. This tendency is especially marked in connection with the writing of
compositions, essays, and themes. It has even been gravely recommended that little children
should always write on trivial subjects and in short sentences because in that way they are less
likely to make mistakes, while[Pg 187] the teaching of writing to high school and college students
occasionally reduces itself to a technique for detecting and designating mistakes. The resulting
self-consciousness and constraint are only part of the evil that comes from a negative ideal.[Pg 188]
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
OBSERVATION AND INFORMATION IN THE TRAINING OF MIND
No thinking without acquaintance with facts
Thinking is an ordering of subject-matter with reference to discovering what it signifies or
indicates. Thinking no more exists apart from this arranging of subject-matter than digestion
occurs apart from the assimilating of food. The way in which the subject-matter is furnished
marks, therefore, a fundamental point. If the subject-matter is provided in too scanty or too
profuse fashion, if it comes in disordered array or in isolated scraps, the effect upon habits of
thought is detrimental. If personal observation and communication of information by others
(whether in books or speech) are rightly conducted, half the logical battle is won, for they are the
channels of obtaining subject-matter.
§ 1. The Nature and Value of Observation
Fallacy of making "facts" an end in themselves
The protest, mentioned in the last chapter, of educational reformers against the exaggerated and
fa
lse use of language, insisted upon personal and direct observation as the proper alternative
course. The reformers felt that the current emphasis upon the linguistic factor eliminated all
opportunity for first-hand acquaintance with real things; hence they appealed to sense-perception
to fill the gap. It is not surprising that this enthusiastic zeal failed frequently to ask how and
why[Pg 189] observation is educative, and hence fell into the error of making observation an end in
itself and was satisfied with any kind of material under any kind of conditions. Such isolation of
observation is still manifested in the statement that this faculty develops first, then that of
memory and imagination, and finally the faculty of thought. From this point of view, observation
is regarded as furnishing crude masses of raw material, to which, later on, reflective processes
may be applied. Our previous pages should have made obvious the fallacy of this point of view
by bringing out the fact that simple concrete thinking attends all our intercourse with things
which is not on a purely physical level.
The sympathetic motive in extending acquaintance
I. All persons have a natural desire—akin to curiosity—for a widening of their range of
acquaintance with persons and things. The sign in art galleries that forbids the carrying of canes
and umbrellas is obvious testimony to the fact that simply to see is not enough for many people;
there is a feeling of lack of acquaintance until some direct contact is made. This demand for
fu
ller and closer knowledge is quite different from any conscious interest in observation for its
own sake. Desire for expansion, for "self-realization," is its motive. The interest is sympathetic,
socially and æsthetically sympathetic, rather than cognitive. While the interest is especially keen
in children (because their actual experience is so small and their possible experience so large), it
still characterizes adults when routine has not blunted its edge. This sympathetic interest
provides the medium for carrying and binding together what would otherwise be a multitude of
items, diverse, disconnected, and of no intellectual use. These systems are indeed social and
æsthetic rather than consciously intel[Pg 190]lectual; but they provide the natural medium for more
conscious intellectual explorations. Some educators have recommended that nature study in the
elementary schools be conducted with a love of nature and a cultivation of æsthetic appreciation
in view rather than in a purely analytic spirit. Others have urged making much of the care of
animals and plants. Both of these important recommendations have grown out of experience, not
out of theory, but they afford excellent exemplifications of the theoretic point just made.
Analytic inspection for the sake of doing
Direct and indirect sense training
II. In normal development, specific analytic observations are originally connected almost
exclusively with the imperative need for noting means and ends in carrying on activities. When
one is doing something, one is compelled, if the work is to succeed (unless it is purely routine),
to use eyes, ears, and sense of touch as guides to action. Without a constant and alert exercise of
the senses, not even plays and games can go on; in any form of work, materials, obstacles,
ap
pliances, failures, and successes, must be intently watched. Sense-perception does not occur
fo
r its own sake or for purposes of training, but because it is an indispensable factor of success in
doing what one is interested in doing. Although not designed for sense-training, this method
effects sense-training in the most economical and thoroughgoing way. Various schemes have
been designed by teachers for cultivating sharp and prompt observation of forms, as by writing
words,—even in an unknown language,—making arrangements of figures and geometrical
fo
rm
s, and having pupils reproduce them after a momentary glance. Children often attain great
skill in quick seeing and full reproducing of even complicated meaningless combinations. But
such methods of training[Pg 191]—however valuable as occasional games and diversions—
compare very unfavorably with the training of eye and hand that comes as an incident of work
with tools in wood or metals, or of gardening, cooking, or the care of animals. Training by
isolated exercises leaves no deposit, leads nowhere; and even the technical skill acquired has
little radiating power, or transferable value. Criticisms made upon the training of observation on
the ground that many persons cannot correctly reproduce the forms and arrangement of the
figures on the face of their watches misses the point because persons do not look at a watch to
find out whether four o'clock is indicated by IIII or by IV, but to find out what time it is, and, if
observation decides this matter, noting other details is irrelevant and a waste of time. In the
training of observation the question of end and motive is all-important.
Scientific observations are linked to problems
"Object-lessons" rarely supply problems
III. The further, more intellectual or scientific, development of observation follows the line of
the growth of practical into theoretical reflection already traced (ante, Chapter Ten). As
problems emerge and are dwelt upon, observation is directed less to the facts that bear upon a
practical aim and more upon what bears upon a problem as such. What makes observations in
schools often intellectually ineffective is (more than anything else) that they are carried on
independently of a sense of a problem that they serve to define or help to solve. The evil of this
isolation is seen through the entire educational system, from the kindergarten, through the
elementary and high schools, to the college. Almost everywhere may be found, at some time,
recourse to observations as if they were of complete and final value in themselves, instead of the
means[Pg 192] of getting material that bears upon some difficulty and its solution. In the
kindergarten are heaped up observations regarding geometrical forms, lines, surfaces, cubes,
colors, and so on. In the elementary school, under the name of "object-lessons," the form and
properties of objects,—apple, orange, chalk,—selected almost at random, are minutely noted,
while under the name of "nature study" similar observations are directed upon leaves, stones,
insects, selected in almost equally arbitrary fashion. In high school and college, laboratory and
microscopic observations are carried on as if the accumulation of observed facts and the
acquisition of skill in manipulation were educational ends in themselves.
Compare with these methods of isolated observations the statement of Jevons that observation as
conducted by scientific men is effective "only when excited and guided by hope of verifying a
theory"; and again, "the number of things which can be observed and experimented upon are
infinite, and if we merely set to work to record facts without any distinct purpose, our records
will have no value." Strictly speaking, the first statement of Jevons is too narrow. Scientific men
institute observations not merely to test an idea (or suggested explanatory meaning), but also to
locate the nature of a problem and thereby guide the formation of a hypothesis. But the principle
of his remark, namely, that scientific men never make the accumulation of observations an end
in itself, but always a means to a general intellectual conclusion, is absolutely sound. Until the
fo
rce of this principle is adequately recognized in education, observation will be largely a matter
of uninteresting dead work or of acquiring forms of technical skill that are not available as
intellectual resources.[Pg 193]
§ 2. Methods and Materials of Observation in the Schools The best methods in use in our
schools furnish many suggestions for giving observation its right place in mental training.
Observation should involve discovery
I. They rest upon the sound assumption that observation is an active process. Observation is
exploration, inquiry for the sake of discovering something previously hidden and unknown, this
something being needed in order to reach some end, practical or theoretical. Observation is to be
discriminated from recognition, or perception of what is familiar. The identification of
something already understood is, indeed, an indispensable function of further investigation (ante,
p. 119); but it is relatively automatic and passive, while observation proper is searching and
deliberate. Recognition refers to the already mastered; observation is concerned with mastering
the unknown. The common notions that perception is like writing on a blank piece of paper, or
like impressing an image on the mind as a seal is imprinted on wax or as a picture is formed on a
photographic plate (notions that have played a disastrous rôle in educational methods), arise
from a failure to distinguish between automatic recognition and the searching attitude of genuine
observation.
and suspense during an unfolding change
II. Much assistance in the selection of appropriate material for observation may be derived from
considering the eagerness and closeness of observation that attend the following of a story or
drama. Alertness of observation is at its height wherever there is "plot interest." Why? Because
of the balanced combination of the old and the new, of the familiar and the unexpected. We hang
on the lips of the story-teller because of the element of mental suspense. Alternatives are
suggested,[Pg 194] but are left ambiguous, so that our whole being questions: What befell next?
Which way did things turn out? Contrast the ease and fullness with which a child notes all the
salient traits of a story, with the labor and inadequacy of his observation of some dead and static
thing where nothing raises a question or suggests alternative outcomes.
This "plot interest" manifested in activity,
When an individual is engaged in doing or making something (the activity not being of such a
mechanical and habitual character that its outcome is assured), there is an analogous situation.
Something is going to come of what is present to the sense, but just what is doubtful. The plot is
unfolding toward success or failure, but just when or how is uncertain. Hence the keen and tense
observation of conditions and results that attends constructive manual operations. Where the
subject-matter is of a more impersonal sort, the same principle of movement toward a
dénouement may apply. It is a commonplace that what is moving attracts notice when that which
is at rest escapes it. Yet too often it would almost seem as if pains had been taken to deprive the
material of school observations of all life and dramatic quality, to reduce it to a dead and inert
fo
rm
. Mere change is not enough, however. Vicissitude, alteration, motion, excite observation;
but if they merely excite it, there is no thought. The changes must (like the incidents of a wellarranged story or plot) take place in a certain cumulative order; each successive change must at
once remind us of its predecessor and arouse interest in its successor if observations of change
are to be logically fruitful.
and in cycles of growth
Living beings, plants, and animals, fulfill the twofold requirement to an extraordinary degree.
Where there[Pg 195] is growth, there is motion, change, process; and there is also arrangement of
the changes in a cycle. The first arouses, the second organizes, observation. Much of the
extraordinary interest that children take in planting seeds and watching the stages of their growth
is due to the fact that a drama is enacting before their eyes; there is something doing, each step
of which is important in the destiny of the plant. The great practical improvements that have
occurred of late years in the teaching of botany and zoölogy will be found, upon inspection, to
involve treating plants and animals as beings that act, that do something, instead of as mere inert
specimens having static properties to be inventoried, named, and registered. Treated in the latter
fa
shion, observation is inevitably reduced to the falsely "analytic" (ante, p. 112),—to mere
dissection and enumeration.
Observation of structure grows out of noting function
There is, of course, a place, and an important place, for observation of the mere static qualities of
objects. When, however, the primary interest is in function, in what the object does, there is a
motive for more minute analytic study, for the observation of structure. Interest in noting an
activity passes insensibly into noting how the activity is carried on; the interest in what is
accomplished passes over into an interest in the organs of its accomplishing. But when the
beginning is made with the morphological, the anatomical, the noting of peculiarities of form,
size, color, and distribution of parts, the material is so cut off from significance as to be dead and
du
ll. It is as natural for children to look intently for the stomata of a plant after they have become
interested in its function of breathing, as it is repulsive to attend minutely to them when they are
considered as isolated peculiarities of structure.[Pg 196]
Scientific observation
III. As the center of interest of observations becomes less personal, less a matter of means for
effecting one's own ends, and less æsthetic, less a matter of contribution of parts to a total
emotional effect, observation becomes more consciously intellectual in quality. Pupils learn to
observe for the sake (i) of finding out what sort of perplexity confronts them; (ii) of inferring
hypothetical explanations for the puzzling features that observation reveals; and (iii) of testing
the ideas thus suggested.
should be extensive
and intensive
In short, observation becomes scientific in nature. Of such observations it may be said that they
should follow a rhythm between the extensive and the intensive. Problems become definite, and
suggested explanations significant by a certain alternation between a wide and somewhat loose
soaking in of relevant facts and a minutely accurate study of a few selected facts. The wider, less
exact observation is necessary to give the student a feeling for the reality of the field of inquiry, a
sense of its bearings and possibilities, and to store his mind with materials that imagination may
transform into suggestions. The intensive study is necessary for limiting the problem, and for
securing the conditions of experimental testing. As the latter by itself is too specialized and
technical to arouse intellectual growth, the former by itself is too superficial and scattering for
control of intellectual development. In the sciences of life, field study, excursions, acquaintance
with living things in their natural habitats, may alternate with microscopic and laboratory
observation. In the physical sciences, phenomena of light, of heat, of electricity, of moisture, of
gravity, in their broad setting in nature—their physiographic setting—should prepare for an
exact study of selected facts under conditions of laboratory[Pg 197] control. In this way, the student
gets the benefit of technical scientific methods of discovery and testing, while he retains his
sense of the identity of the laboratory modes of energy with large out-of-door realities, thereby
avoiding the impression (that so often accrues) that the facts studied are peculiar to the
laboratory.
§ 3. Communication of Information
Importance of hearsay acquaintance
When all is said and done the field of fact open to any one observer by himself is narrow. Into
every one of our beliefs, even those that we have worked out under the conditions of utmost
personal, first-hand acquaintance, much has insensibly entered from what we have heard or read
of the observations and conclusions of others. In spite of the great extension of direct
observation in our schools, the vast bulk of educational subject-matter is derived from other
sources—from text-book, lecture, and viva-voce interchange. No educational question is of
greater import than how to get the most logical good out of learning through transmission from
others.
Logically, this ranks only as evidence or testimony
Doubtless the chief meaning associated with the word instruction is this conveying and instilling
of the results of the observations and inferences of others. Doubtless the undue prominence in
education of the ideal of amassing information (ante, p. 52) has its source in the prominence of
the learning of other persons. The problem then is how to convert it into an intellectual asset. In
logical terms, the material supplied from the experience of others is testimony: that is to say,
evidence submitted by others to be employed by one's own judgment in reaching a conclusion.
How shall we treat the subject-matter supplied by text-book and teacher so that it shall rank as
material for reflec[Pg 198]tive inquiry, not as ready-made intellectual pabulum to be accepted and
swallowed just as supplied by the store?
Communication by others should not encroach on observation,
In reply to this question, we may say (i) that the communication of material should be needed.
That is to say, it should be such as cannot readily be attained by personal observation. For
teacher or book to cram pupils with facts which, with little more trouble, they could discover by
direct inquiry is to violate their intellectual integrity by cultivating mental servility. This does not
mean that the material supplied through communication of others should be meager or scanty.
With the utmost range of the senses, the world of nature and history stretches out almost
infinitely beyond. But the fields within which direct observation is feasible should be carefully
chosen and sacredly protected.
should not be dogmatic in tone,
(ii) Material should be supplied by way of stimulus, not with dogmatic finality and rigidity.
When pupils get the notion that any field of study has been definitely surveyed, that knowledge
ab
out it is exhaustive and final, they may continue docile pupils, but they cease to be students.
All thinking whatsoever—so be it is thinking—contains a phase of originality. This originality
does not imply that the student's conclusion varies from the conclusions of others, much less that
it is a radically novel conclusion. His originality is not incompatible with large use of materials
and suggestions contributed by others. Originality means personal interest in the question,
personal initiative in turning over the suggestions furnished by others, and sincerity in following
them out to a tested conclusion. Literally, the phrase "Think for yourself" is tautological; any
thinking is thinking for one's self.[Pg 199]
should have relation to a personal problem,
(iii) The material furnished by way of information should be relevant to a question that is vital in
the student's own experience. What has been said about the evil of observations that begin and
end in themselves may be transferred without change to communicated learning. Instruction in
subject-matter that does not fit into any problem already stirring in the student's own experience,
or that is not presented in such a way as to arouse a problem, is worse than useless for
intellectual purposes. In that it fails to enter into any process of reflection, it is useless; in that it
remains in the mind as so much lumber and débris, it is a barrier, an obstruction in the way of
effective thinking when a problem arises.
and to prior systems of experience
Another way of stating the same principle is that material furnished by communication must be
such as to enter into some existing system or organization of experience. All students of
psychology are familiar with the principle of apperception—that we assimilate new material
with what we have digested and retained from prior experiences. Now the "apperceptive basis"
of material furnished by teacher and text-book should be found, as far as possible, in what the
learner has derived from more direct forms of his own experience. There is a tendency to
connect material of the schoolroom simply with the material of prior school lessons, instead of
linking it to what the pupil has acquired in his out-of-school experience. The teacher says, "Do
you not remember what we learned from the book last week?"—instead of saying, "Do you not
recall such and such a thing that you have seen or heard?" As a result, there are built up detached
and independent systems of school knowledge that inertly overlay the[Pg 200] ordinary systems of
experience instead of reacting to enlarge and refine them. Pupils are taught to live in two
separate worlds, one the world of out-of-school experience, the other the world of books and
lessons.[Pg 201]
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE RECITATION AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
Importance of the recitation
In the recitation the teacher comes into his closest contact with the pupil. In the recitation focus
the possibilities of guiding children's activities, influencing their language habits, and directing
their observations. In discussing the significance of the recitation as an instrumentality of
education, we are accordingly bringing to a head the points considered in the last three chapters,
rather than introducing a new topic. The method in which the recitation is carried on is a crucial
test of a teacher's skill in diagnosing the intellectual state of his pupils and in supplying the
conditions that will arouse serviceable mental responses: in short, of his art as a teacher.
Re-citing versus reflecting
The use of the word recitation to designate the period of most intimate intellectual contact of
teacher with pupil and pupil with pupil is a fateful fact. To re-cite is to cite again, to repeat, to
tell over and over. If we were to call this period reiteration, the designation would hardly bring
out more clearly than does the word recitation, the complete domination of instruction by
rehearsing of secondhand information, by memorizing for the sake of producing correct replies
at the proper time. Everything that is said in this chapter is insignificant in comparison with the
primary truth that the recitation is a place and time for stimulating and directing reflection, and
that reproducing memorized[Pg 202] matter is only an incident—even though an indispensable
incident—in the process of cultivating a thoughtful attitude.
§ 1. The Formal Steps of Instruction
Herbart's analysis of method of teaching
But few attempts have been made to formulate a method, resting on general principles, of
conducting a recitation. One of these is of great importance and has probably had more and
better influence upon the "hearing of lessons" than all others put together; namely, the analysis
by Herbart of a recitation into five successive steps. The steps are commonly known as "the
fo
rm
al steps of instruction." The underlying notion is that no matter how subjects vary in scope
and detail there is one and only one best way of mastering them, since there is a single "general
method" uniformly followed by the mind in effective attack upon any subject. Whether it be a
first-grade child mastering the rudiments of number, a grammar-school pupil studying history, or
a college student dealing with philology, in each case the first step is preparation, the second
presentation, followed in turn by comparison and generalization, ending in the application of the
generalizations to specific and new instances.
Illustration of method
By preparation is meant asking questions to remind pupils of familiar experiences of their own
that will be useful in acquiring the new topic. What one already knows supplies the means with
which one apprehends the unknown. Hence the process of learning the new will be made easier
if related ideas in the pupil's mind are aroused to activity—are brought to the foreground of
consciousness. When pupils take up the study of rivers, they are first questioned about streams or
brooks[Pg 203] with which they are already acquainted; if they have never seen any, they may be
asked about water running in gutters. Somehow "apperceptive masses" are stirred that will assist
in getting hold of the new subject. The step of preparation ends with statement of the aim of the
lesson. Old knowledge having been made active, new material is then "presented" to the pupils.
Pictures and relief models of rivers are shown; vivid oral descriptions are given; if possible, the
children are taken to see an actual river. These two steps terminate the acquisition of particular
fa
cts.
The next two steps are directed toward getting a general principle or conception. The local river
is compared with, perhaps, the Amazon, the St. Lawrence, the Rhine; by this comparison
accidental and unessential features are eliminated and the river concept is formed: the elements
involved in the river-meaning are gathered together and formulated. This done, the resulting
principle is fixed in mind and is clarified by being applied to other streams, say to the Thames,
the Po, the Connecticut.
Comparison with our prior analysis of reflection
If we compare this account of the methods of instruction with our own analysis of a complete
operation of thinking, we are struck by obvious resemblances. In our statement (compare
Chapter Six) the "steps" are the occurrence of a problem or a puzzling phenomenon; then
observation, inspection of facts, to locate and clear up the problem; then the formation of a
hypothesis or the suggestion of a possible solution together with its elaboration by reasoning;
then the testing of the elaborated idea by using it as a guide to new observations and
experimentations. In each account, there is the sequence of (i) specific facts and[Pg 204] events, (ii)
ideas and reasonings, and (iii) application of their result to specific facts. In each case, the
movement is inductive-deductive. We are struck also by one difference: the Herbartian method
makes no reference to a difficulty, a discrepancy requiring explanation, as the origin and
stimulus of the whole process. As a consequence, it often seems as if the Herbartian method
deals with thought simply as an incident in the process of acquiring information, instead of
treating the latter as an incident in the process of developing thought.
The formal steps concern the teacher's preparation rather than the recitation itself
Before following up this comparison in more detail, we may raise the question whether the
recitation should, in any case, follow a uniform prescribed series of steps—even if it be admitted
that this series expresses the normal logical order. In reply, it may be said that just because the
order is logical, it represents the survey of subject-matter made by one who already understands
it, not the path of progress followed by a mind that is learning. The former may describe a
uniform straight-way course, the latter must be a series of tacks, of zigzag movements back and
fo
rt
h. In short, the formal steps indicate the points that should be covered by the teacher in
preparing to conduct a recitation, but should not prescribe the actual course of teaching.
The teacher's problem
Lack of any preparation on the part of a teacher leads, of course, to a random, haphazard
recitation, its success depending on the inspiration of the moment, which may or may not come.
Preparation in simply the subject-matter conduces to a rigid order, the teacher examining pupils
on their exact knowledge of their text. But the teacher's problem—as a teacher—does not reside
in mastering a subject-matter, but in adjusting a subject-matter to the nurture of thought. Now
the[Pg 205] formal steps indicate excellently well the questions a teacher should ask in working out
the problem of teaching a topic. What preparation have my pupils for attacking this subject?
What familiar experiences of theirs are available? What have they already learned that will come
to their assistance? How shall I present the matter so as to fit economically and effectively into
their present equipment? What pictures shall I show? To what objects shall I call their attention?
What incidents shall I relate? What comparisons shall I lead them to draw, what similarities to
recognize? What is the general principle toward which the whole discussion should point as its
conclusion? By what applications shall I try to fix, to clear up, and to make real their grasp of
this general principle? What activities of their own may bring it home to them as a genuinely
significant principle?
Only flexibility of procedure gives a recitation vitality
Any step may come first
No teacher can fail to teach better if he has considered such questions somewhat systematically.
But the more the teacher has reflected upon pupils' probable intellectual response to a topic from
the various stand-points indicated by the five formal steps, the more he will be prepared to
conduct the recitation in a flexible and free way, and yet not let the subject go to pieces and the
pupils' attention drift in all directions; the less necessary will he find it, in order to preserve a
semblance of intellectual order, to follow some one uniform scheme. He will be ready to take
advantage of any sign of vital response that shows itself from any direction. One pupil may
already have some inkling—probably erroneous—of a general principle. Application may then
come at the very beginning in order to show that the principle will not work, and thereby[Pg 206]
induce search for new facts and a new generalization. Or the abrupt presentation of some fact or
object may so stimulate the minds of pupils as to render quite superfluous any preliminary
preparation. If pupils' minds are at work at all, it is quite impossible that they should wait until
the teacher has conscientiously taken them through the steps of preparation, presentation, and
comparison before they form at least a working hypothesis or generalization. Moreover, unless
comparison of the familiar and the unfamiliar is introduced at the beginning, both preparation
and presentation will be aimless and without logical motive, isolated, and in so far meaningless.
The student's mind cannot be prepared at large, but only for something in particular, and
presentation is usually the best way of evoking associations. The emphasis may fall now on the
fa
miliar concept that will help grasp the new, now on the new facts that frame the problem; but
in either case it is comparison and contrast with the other term of the pair which gives either its
fo
rce. In short, to transfer the logical steps from the points that the teacher needs to consider to
uniform successive steps in the conduct of a recitation, is to impose the logical review of a mind
that already understands the subject, upon the mind that is struggling to comprehend it, and
thereby to obstruct the logic of the student's own mind.
§ 2. The Factors in the Recitation
Bearing in mind that the formal steps represent intertwined factors of a student's progress and
not mileposts on a beaten highway, we may consider each by itself. In so doing, it will be
convenient to follow the example of many of the Herbartians and reduce the steps to[Pg 207] three:
first, the apprehension of specific or particular facts; second, rational generalization; third,
ap
plication and verification.
Preparation is getting the sense of a problem
I. The processes having to do with particular facts are preparation and presentation. The best,
indeed the only preparation is arousal to a perception of something that needs explanation,
something unexpected, puzzling, peculiar. When the feeling of a genuine perplexity lays hold of
any mind (no matter how the feeling arises), that mind is alert and inquiring, because stimulated
from within. The shock, the bite, of a question will force the mind to go wherever it is capable of
going, better than will the most ingenious pedagogical devices unaccompanied by this mental
ardor. It is the sense of a problem that forces the mind to a survey and recall of the past to
discover what the question means and how it may be dealt with.
Pitfalls in preparation
The teacher in his more deliberate attempts to call into play the familiar elements in a student's
experience, must guard against certain dangers. (i) The step of preparation must not be too long
continued or too exhaustive, or it defeats its own end. The pupil loses interest and is bored, when
a plunge in medias res might have braced him to his work. The preparation part of the recitation
period of some conscientious teachers reminds one of the boy who takes so long a run in order to
gain headway for a jump that when he reaches the line, he is too tired to jump far. (ii) The organs
by which we apprehend new material are our habits. To insist too minutely upon turning over
habitual dispositions into conscious ideas is to interfere with their best workings. Some factors of
fa
miliar experience must indeed be brought to conscious recognition, just as trans[Pg 208]planting
is necessary for the best growth of some plants. But it is fatal to be forever digging up either
experiences or plants to see how they are getting along. Constraint, self-consciousness,
embarrassment, are the consequence of too much conscious refurbishing of familiar experiences.
Statement of aim of lesson
Strict Herbartians generally lay it down that statement—by the teacher—of the aim of a lesson is
an indispensable part of preparation. This preliminary statement of the aim of the lesson hardly
seems more intellectual in character, however, than tapping a bell or giving any other signal for
attention and transfer of thoughts from diverting subjects. To the teacher the statement of an end
is significant, because he has already been at the end; from a pupil's standpoint the statement of
what he is going to learn is something of an Irish bull. If the statement of the aim is taken too
seriously by the instructor, as meaning more than a signal to attention, its probable result is
fo
restalling the pupil's own reaction, relieving him of the responsibility of developing a problem
and thus arresting his mental initiative.
How much the teacher should tell or show
It is unnecessary to discuss at length presentation as a factor in the recitation, because our last
chapter covered the topic under the captions of observation and communication. The function of
presentation is to supply materials that force home the nature of a problem and furnish
suggestions for dealing with it. The practical problem of the teacher is to preserve a balance
between so little showing and telling as to fail to stimulate reflection and so much as to choke
thought. Provided the student is genuinely engaged upon a topic, and provided the teacher is
willing to give the student a good deal of leeway as to what he assimilates and retains (not
requiring rigidly that everything be grasped or repro[Pg 209]duced), there is comparatively little
danger that one who is himself enthusiastic will communicate too much concerning a topic.
The pupil's responsibility for making out a reasonable case
II. The distinctively rational phase of reflective inquiry consists, as we have already seen, in the
elaboration of an idea, or working hypothesis, through conjoint comparison and contrast,
terminating in definition or formulation. (i) So far as the recitation is concerned, the primary
requirement is that the student be held responsible for working out mentally every suggested
principle so as to show what he means by it, how it bears upon the facts at hand, and how the
fa
cts bear upon it. Unless the pupil is made responsible for developing on his own account the
reasonableness of the guess he puts forth, the recitation counts for practically nothing in the
training of reasoning power. A clever teacher easily acquires great skill in dropping out the inept
and senseless contributions of pupils, and in selecting and emphasizing those in line with the
result he wishes to reach. But this method (sometimes called "suggestive questioning") relieves
the pupils of intellectual responsibility, save for acrobatic agility in following the teacher's lead.
The necessity for mental leisure
(ii) The working over of a vague and more or less casual idea into coherent and definite form is
impossible without a pause, without freedom from distraction. We say "Stop and think"; well, all
reflection involves, at some point, stopping external observations and reactions so that an idea
may mature. Meditation, withdrawal or abstraction from clamorous assailants of the senses and
from demands for overt action, is as necessary at the reasoning stage, as are observation and
experiment at other periods. The metaphors of digestion and[Pg 210] assimilation, that so readily
occur to mind in connection with rational elaboration, are highly instructive. A silent,
uninterrupted working-over of considerations by comparing and weighing alternative
suggestions, is indispensable for the development of coherent and compact conclusions.
Reasoning is no more akin to disputing or arguing, or to the abrupt seizing and dropping of
suggestions, than digestion is to a noisy champing of the jaws. The teacher must secure
opportunity for leisurely mental digestion.
A typical central object necessary
(iii) In the process of comparison, the teacher must avert the distraction that ensues from putting
before the mind a number of facts on the same level of importance. Since attention is selective,
some one object normally claims thought and furnishes the center of departure and reference.
This fact is fatal to the success of the pedagogical methods that endeavor to conduct comparison
on the basis of putting before the mind a row of objects of equal importance. In comparing, the
mind does not naturally begin with objects a, b, c, d, and try to find the respect in which they
agree. It begins with a single object or situation more or less vague and inchoate in meaning, and
makes excursions to other objects in order to render understanding of the central object
consistent and clear. The mere multiplication of objects of comparison is adverse to successful
reasoning. Each fact brought within the field of comparison should clear up some obscure
fe
ature or extend some fragmentary trait of the primary object.
Importance of types
In short, pains should be taken to see that the object on which thought centers is typical: material
being typical when, although individual or specific, it is such as readily and fruitfully suggests
the principles of an en[Pg 211]tire class of facts. No sane person begins to think about rivers
wholesale or at large. He begins with the one river that has presented some puzzling trait. Then
he studies other rivers to get light upon the baffling features of this one, and at the same time he
employs the characteristic traits of his original object to reduce to order the multifarious details
that appear in connection with other rivers. This working back and forth preserves unity of
meaning, while protecting it from monotony and narrowness. Contrast, unlikeness, throws
significant features into relief, and these become instruments for binding together into an
organized or coherent meaning dissimilar characters. The mind is defended against the
deadening influence of many isolated particulars and also against the barrenness of a merely
fo
rm
al principle. Particular cases and properties supply emphasis and concreteness; general
principles convert the particulars into a single system.
All insight into meaning effects generalization
(iv) Hence generalization is not a separate and single act; it is rather a constant tendency and
fu
nction of the entire discussion or recitation. Every step forward toward an idea that
comprehends, that explains, that unites what was isolated and therefore puzzling, generalizes.
The little child generalizes as truly as the adolescent or adult, even though he does not arrive at
the same generalities. If he is studying a river basin, his knowledge is generalized in so far as the
various details that he apprehends are found to be the effects of a single force, as that of water
pushing downward from gravity, or are seen to be successive stages of a single history of
fo
rm
ation. Even if there were acquaintance with only one river, knowledge of it under such
conditions would be generalized knowledge.[Pg 212]
Insight into meaning requires formulation
The factor of formulation, of conscious stating, involved in generalization, should also be a
constant function, not a single formal act. Definition means essentially the growth of a meaning
out of vagueness into definiteness. Such final verbal definition as takes place should be only the
culmination of a steady growth in distinctness. In the reaction against ready-made verbal
definitions and rules, the pendulum should never swing to the opposite extreme, that of
neglecting to summarize the net meaning that emerges from dealing with particular facts. Only
as general summaries are made from time to time does the mind reach a conclusion or a resting
place; and only as conclusions are reached is there an intellectual deposit available in future
understanding.
Generalization means capacity for application to the new
III. As the last words indicate, application and generalization lie close together. Mechanical skill
fo
r further use may be achieved without any explicit recognition of a principle; nay, in routine
and narrow technical matters, conscious formulation may be a hindrance. But without
recognition of a principle, without generalization, the power gained cannot be transferred to new
and dissimilar matters. The inherent significance of generalization is that it frees a meaning from
local restrictions; rather, generalization is meaning so freed; it is meaning emancipated from
accidental features so as to be available in new cases. The surest test for detecting a spurious
generalization (a statement general in verbal form but not accompanied by discernment of
meaning), is the failure of the so-called principle spontaneously to extend itself. The essence of
the general is application. (Ante, p. 29.)
Fossilized versus flexible principles
The true purpose of exercises that apply rules and principles is, then, not so much to drive or
drill them[Pg 213] in as to give adequate insight into an idea or principle. To treat application as a
separate final step is disastrous. In every judgment some meaning is employed as a basis for
estimating and interpreting some fact; by this application the meaning is itself enlarged and
tested. When the general meaning is regarded as complete in itself, application is treated as an
external, non-intellectual use to which, for practical purposes alone, it is advisable to put the
meaning. The principle is one self-contained thing; its use is another and independent thing.
When this divorce occurs, principles become fossilized and rigid; they lose their inherent
vitality, their self-impelling power.
Self-application a mark of genuine principles
A true conception is a moving idea, and it seeks outlet, or application to the interpretation of
particulars and the guidance of action, as naturally as water runs downhill. In fine, just as
reflective thought requires particular facts of observation and events of action for its origination,
so it also requires particular facts and deeds for its own consummation. "Glittering generalities"
are inert because they are spurious. Application is as much an intrinsic part of genuine reflective
inquiry as is alert observation or reasoning itself. Truly general principles tend to apply
themselves. The teacher needs, indeed, to supply conditions favorable to use and exercise; but
something is wrong when artificial tasks have arbitrarily to be invented in order to secure
ap
plication for principles.[Pg 214]
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SOME GENERAL CONCLUSIONS
We shall conclude our survey of how we think and how we should think by presenting some
fa
ctors of thinking which should balance each other, but which constantly tend to become so
isolated that they work against each other instead of cooperating to make reflective inquiry
efficient.
§ 1. The Unconscious and the Conscious
The understood as the unconsciously assumed
It is significant that one meaning of the term understood is something so thoroughly mastered, so
completely agreed upon, as to be assumed; that is to say, taken as a matter of course without
explicit statement. The familiar "goes without saying" means "it is understood." If two persons
can converse intelligently with each other, it is because a common experience supplies a
background of mutual understanding upon which their respective remarks are projected. To dig
up and to formulate this common background would be imbecile; it is "understood"; that is, it is
silently supplied and implied as the taken-for-granted medium of intelligent exchange of ideas.
Inquiry as conscious formulation
If, however, the two persons find themselves at cross-purposes, it is necessary to dig up and
compare the presuppositions, the implied context, on the basis of which each is speaking. The
implicit is made explicit; what was unconsciously assumed is exposed to the light of conscious
day. In this way, the root of the misunder[Pg 215]standing is removed. Some such rhythm of the
unconscious and the conscious is involved in all fruitful thinking. A person in pursuing a
consecutive train of thoughts takes some system of ideas for granted (which accordingly he
leaves unexpressed, "unconscious") as surely as he does in conversing with others. Some
context, some situation, some controlling purpose dominates his explicit ideas so thoroughly that
it does not need to be consciously formulated and expounded. Explicit thinking goes on within
the limits of what is implied or understood. Yet the fact that reflection originates in a problem
makes it necessary at some points consciously to inspect and examine this familiar background.
We have to turn upon some unconscious assumption and make it explicit.
Rules cannot be given for attaining a balance
No rules can be laid down for attaining the due balance and rhythm of these two phases of
mental life. No ordinance can prescribe at just what point the spontaneous working of some
unconscious attitude and habit is to be checked till we have made explicit what is implied in it.
No one can tell in detail just how far the analytic inspection and formulation are to be carried.
We can say that they must be carried far enough so that the individual will know what he is
ab
out and be able to guide his thinking; but in a given case just how far is that? We can say that
they must be carried far enough to detect and guard against the source of some false perception
or reasoning, and to get a leverage on the investigation; but such statements only restate the
original difficulty. Since our reliance must be upon the disposition and tact of the individual in
the particular case, there is no test of the success of an education more important than the extent
to which it nurtures a type of mind competent to[Pg 216] maintain an economical balance of the
unconscious and the conscious.
The over-analytic to be avoided
The ways of teaching criticised in the foregoing pages as false "analytic" methods of instruction
(ante, p. 112), all reduce themselves to the mistake of directing explicit attention and formulation
to what would work better if left an unconscious attitude and working assumption. To pry into
the familiar, the usual, the automatic, simply for the sake of making it conscious, simply for the
sake of formulating it, is both an impertinent interference, and a source of boredom. To be forced
to dwell consciously upon the accustomed is the essence of ennui; to pursue methods of
instruction that have that tendency is deliberately to cultivate lack of interest.
The detection of error, the clinching of truth, demand conscious statement
On the other hand, what has been said in criticism of merely routine forms of skill, what has
been said about the importance of having a genuine problem, of introducing the novel, and of
reaching a deposit of general meaning weighs on the other side of the scales. It is as fatal to good
thinking to fail to make conscious the standing source of some error or failure as it is to pry
needlessly into what works smoothly. To over-simplify, to exclude the novel for the sake of
prompt skill, to avoid obstacles for the sake of averting errors, is as detrimental as to try to get
pupils to formulate everything they know and to state every step of the process employed in
getting a result. Where the shoe pinches, analytic examination is indicated. When a topic is to be
clinched so that knowledge of it will carry over into an effective resource in further topics,
conscious condensation and summarizing are imperative. In the early stage of acquaintance with
a subject, a good deal of unconstrained unconscious mental play about it may be[Pg 217] permitted,
even at the risk of some random experimenting; in the later stages, conscious formulation and
review may be encouraged. Projection and reflection, going directly ahead and turning back in
scrutiny, should alternate. Unconsciousness gives spontaneity and freshness; consciousness,
conviction and control.
§ 2. Process and Product
Play and work again
A like balance in mental life characterizes process and product. We met one important phase of
this adjustment in considering play and work. In play, interest centers in activity, without much
reference to its outcome. The sequence of deeds, images, emotions, suffices on its own account.
In work, the end holds attention and controls the notice given to means. Since the difference is
one of direction of interest, the contrast is one of emphasis, not of cleavage. When comparative
prominence in consciousness of activity or outcome is transformed into isolation of one from the
other, play degenerates into fooling, and work into drudgery.
Play should not be fooling,
By "fooling" we understand a series of disconnected temporary overflows of energy dependent
upon whim and accident. When all reference to outcome is eliminated from the sequence of
ideas and acts that make play, each member of the sequence is cut loose from every other and
becomes fantastic, arbitrary, aimless; mere fooling follows. There is some inveterate tendency to
fo
ol in children as well as in animals; nor is the tendency wholly evil, for at least it militates
against falling into ruts. But when it is excessive in amount, dissipation and disintegration
fo
llow; and the only way of preventing this consequence is to make regard for results enter into
even the freest play activity.[Pg 218]
nor work, drudgery
Exclusive interest in the result alters work to drudgery. For by drudgery is meant those activities
in which the interest in the outcome does not suffuse the means of getting the result. Whenever a
piece of work becomes drudgery, the process of doing loses all value for the doer; he cares
solely for what is to be had at the end of it. The work itself, the putting forth of energy, is
hateful; it is just a necessary evil, since without it some important end would be missed. Now it
is a commonplace that in the work of the world many things have to be done the doing of which
is not intrinsically very interesting. However, the argument that children should be kept doing
drudgery-tasks because thereby they acquire power to be faithful to distasteful duties, is wholly
fa
llacious. Repulsion, shirking, and evasion are the consequences of having the repulsive
imposed—not loyal love of duty. Willingness to work for ends by means of acts not naturally
attractive is best attained by securing such an appreciation of the value of the end that a sense of
its value is transferred to its means of accomplishment. Not interesting in themselves, they
borrow interest from the result with which they are associated.
Balance of playfulness and seriousness the intellectual ideal
Free play of mind
is normal in childhood
The intellectual harm accruing from divorce of work and play, product and process, is evidenced
in the proverb, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." That the obverse is true is perhaps
sufficiently signalized in the fact that fooling is so near to foolishness. To be playful and serious
at the same time is possible, and it defines the ideal mental condition. Absence of dogmatism
and prejudice, presence of intellectual curiosity and flexibility, are manifest in the free play of
the mind upon a topic. To give the mind this[Pg 219] free play is not to encourage toying with a
subject, but is to be interested in the unfolding of the subject on its own account, apart from its
subservience to a preconceived belief or habitual aim. Mental play is open-mindedness, faith in
the power of thought to preserve its own integrity without external supports and arbitrary
restrictions. Hence free mental play involves seriousness, the earnest following of the
development of subject-matter. It is incompatible with carelessness or flippancy, for it exacts
accurate noting of every result reached in order that every conclusion may be put to further use.
What is termed the interest in truth for its own sake is certainly a serious matter, yet this pure
interest in truth coincides with love of the free play of thought.
In spite of many appearances to the contrary—usually due to social conditions of either undue
superfluity that induces idle fooling or undue economic pressure that compels drudgery—
childhood normally realizes the ideal of conjoint free mental play and thoughtfulness. Successful
portrayals of children have always made their wistful intentness at least as obvious as their lack
of worry for the morrow. To live in the present is compatible with condensation of far-reaching
meanings in the present. Such enrichment of the present for its own sake is the just heritage of
childhood and the best insurer of future growth. The child forced into premature concern with
economic remote results may develop a surprising sharpening of wits in a particular direction,
but this precocious specialization is always paid for by later apathy and dullness.
The attitude of the artist
That art originated in play is a common saying. Whether or not the saying is historically correct,
it[Pg 220] suggests that harmony of mental playfulness and seriousness describes the artistic ideal.
When the artist is preoccupied overmuch with means and materials, he may achieve wonderful
technique, but not the artistic spirit par excellence. When the animating idea is in excess of the
command of method, æsthetic feeling may be indicated, but the art of presentation is too
defective to express the feeling thoroughly. When the thought of the end becomes so adequate
that it compels translation into the means that embody it, or when attention to means is inspired
by recognition of the end they serve, we have the attitude typical of the artist, an attitude that
may be displayed in all activities, even though not conventionally designated arts.
The art of the teacher culminates in nurturing this attitude
That teaching is an art and the true teacher an artist is a familiar saying. Now the teacher's own
claim to rank as an artist is measured by his ability to foster the attitude of the artist in those who
study with him, whether they be youth or little children. Some succeed in arousing enthusiasm,
in communicating large ideas, in evoking energy. So far, well; but the final test is whether the
stimulus thus given to wider aims succeeds in transforming itself into power, that is to say, into
the attention to detail that ensures mastery over means of execution. If not, the zeal flags, the
interest dies out, the ideal becomes a clouded memory. Other teachers succeed in training
fa
cility, skill, mastery of the technique of subjects. Again it is well—so far. But unless
enlargement of mental vision, power of increased discrimination of final values, a sense for
ideas—for principles—accompanies this training, forms of skill ready to be put indifferently to
any end may be the result. Such modes of technical skill may display themselves, accord[Pg
221]ing to circumstances, as cleverness in serving self-interest, as docility in carrying out the
purposes of others, or as unimaginative plodding in ruts. To nurture inspiring aim and executive
means into harmony with each other is at once the difficulty and the reward of the teacher.
§ 3. The Far and the Near
"Familiarity breeds contempt,"
Teachers who have heard that they should avoid matters foreign to pupils' experience, are
frequently surprised to find pupils wake up when something beyond their ken is introduced,
while they remain apathetic in considering the familiar. In geography, the child upon the plains
seems perversely irresponsive to the intellectual charms of his local environment, and fascinated
by whatever concerns mountains or the sea. Teachers who have struggled with little avail to
extract from pupils essays describing the details of things with which they are well acquainted,
sometimes find them eager to write on lofty or imaginary themes. A woman of education, who
has recorded her experience as a factory worker, tried retelling Little Women to some factory
girls during their working hours. They cared little for it, saying, "Those girls had no more
interesting experience than we have," and demanded stories of millionaires and society leaders.
A man interested in the mental condition of those engaged in routine labor asked a Scotch girl in
a cotton factory what she thought about all day. She replied that as soon as her mind was free
from starting the machinery, she married a duke, and their fortunes occupied her for the
remainder of the day.
since only the novel demands attention,
Naturally, these incidents are not told in order to encourage methods of teaching that appeal to
the sensa[Pg 222]tional, the extraordinary, or the incomprehensible. They are told, however, to
enforce the point that the familiar and the near do not excite or repay thought on their own
account, but only as they are adjusted to mastering the strange and remote. It is a commonplace
of psychology that we do not attend to the old, nor consciously mind that to which we are
thoroughly accustomed. For this, there is good reason: to devote attention to the old, when new
circumstances are constantly arising to which we should adjust ourselves, would be wasteful and
dangerous. Thought must be reserved for the new, the precarious, the problematic. Hence the
mental constraint, the sense of being lost, that comes to pupils when they are invited to turn their
thoughts upon that with which they are already familiar. The old, the near, the accustomed, is not
that to which but that with which we attend; it does not furnish the material of a problem, but of
its solution.
which, in turn, can be given only through the old
The last sentence has brought us to the balancing of new and old, of the far and that close by,
involved in reflection. The more remote supplies the stimulus and the motive; the nearer at hand
fu
rn
ishes the point of approach and the available resources. This principle may also be stated in
this form: the best thinking occurs when the easy and the difficult are duly proportioned to each
other. The easy and the familiar are equivalents, as are the strange and the difficult. Too much
that is easy gives no ground for inquiry; too much of the hard renders inquiry hopeless.
The given and the suggested
The necessity of the interaction of the near and the far follows directly from the nature of
thinking. Where there is thought, something present suggests and indicates something absent.
Accordingly unless the familiar[Pg 223] is presented under conditions that are in some respect
unusual, it gives no jog to thinking, it makes no demand upon what is not present in order to be
understood. And if the subject presented is totally strange, there is no basis upon which it may
suggest anything serviceable for its comprehension. When a person first has to do with fractions,
fo
r example, they will be wholly baffling so far as they do not signify to him some relation that
he has already mastered in dealing with whole numbers. When fractions have become
thoroughly familiar, his perception of them acts simply as a signal to do certain things; they are a
"substitute sign," to which he can react without thinking. (Ante, p. 178.) If, nevertheless, the
situation as a whole presents something novel and hence uncertain, the entire response is not
mechanical, because this mechanical operation is put to use in solving a problem. There is no
end to this spiral process: foreign subject-matter transformed through thinking into a familiar
possession becomes a resource for judging and assimilating additional foreign subject-matter.
Observation supplies the near, imagination the remote
The need for both imagination and observation in every mental enterprise illustrates another
aspect of the same principle. Teachers who have tried object-lessons of the conventional type
have usually found that when the lessons were new, pupils were attracted to them as a diversion,
but as soon as they became matters of course they were as dull and wearisome as was ever the
most mechanical study of mere symbols. Imagination could not play about the objects so as to
enrich them. The feeling that instruction in "facts, facts" produces a narrow Gradgrind is justified
not because facts in themselves are limiting, but because facts are dealt out[Pg 224] as such hard
and fast ready-made articles as to leave no room to imagination. Let the facts be presented so as
to stimulate imagination, and culture ensues naturally enough. The converse is equally true. The
imaginative is not necessarily the imaginary; that is, the unreal. The proper function of
imagination is vision of realities that cannot be exhibited under existing conditions of senseperception. Clear insight into the remote, the absent, the obscure is its aim. History, literature,
and geography, the principles of science, nay, even geometry and arithmetic, are full of matters
that must be imaginatively realized if they are realized at all. Imagination supplements and
deepens observation; only when it turns into the fanciful does it become a substitute for
observation and lose logical force.
Experience through communication of others' experience
A final exemplification of the required balance between near and far is found in the relation that
obtains between the narrower field of experience realized in an individual's own contact with
persons and things, and the wider experience of the race that may become his through
communication. Instruction always runs the risk of swamping the pupil's own vital, though
narrow, experience under masses of communicated material. The instructor ceases and the
teacher begins at the point where communicated matter stimulates into fuller and more
significant life that which has entered by the strait and narrow gate of sense-perception and
motor activity. Genuine communication involves contagion; its name should not be taken in vain
by terming communication that which produces no community of thought and purpose between
the child and the race of which he is the heir.
👁 :
That kind of pseudobohemianism is endemic to the entire software industry, not only to Microsoft. As high-tech companies go, Microsoft is a weirdly Lake Wobegon kind of place. Its people fly coach and stay in nice, not-too-expensive chain hotels. There are no executive dining rooms. Nearly everyone has a cookie-cutter nine-by-twelve-foot office with sensible furniture. Gates's office is larger, but journalists who visit it usually feel obliged to remark on how ordinary it is: no marble, nothing real expensive looking. ; For all the storied wealth created by Microsoft's stock options, salaries are relatively modest. A beginning software developer makes about $80,000 a year. Bill Gates's 1999 salary was only $369,000 — barely what the chief executive in the other Washington pulls in. Microsoft is a place where you finish your vegetables, then you get your dessert. Much like a small town, the Microsoft community reckons time by events of local significance (often as not, these events are e-mail memos). Longtime employees tell you the defining moment in Microsoft parsimony was the 1993 "Shrimp and Weenies Memo." After chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold commented about seeing "a lot more shrimp than weenies around here these days," human resources director Mike Murray issued a memo against the (profligate folly embodied in that moderately expensive finger
Bill Gates and the Culture of Puzzles 55 food. At Microsoft, shrimp are equated to IBM, the decadence of the Romans, and all the other big organizations that got soft. Inside Out, a coffee-table book issued to commemorate Microsoft's twenty-fifth anniversary, captures this aspect of the corporate value system perfectly: Just in case anyone is in danger of forgetting this, the secret to remaining ahead of the pack is not "Get Fat" It's "Stay Hungry." Creativity doesn't happen without a few constraints. That's why wise use of resources has been a business tradition at Microsoft since the early days, when, to be perfectly honest, there wasn't much choice in the matter. But it remains our practice today, for the simple reason that when you start leaning on your wealth instead of living by your wits, you're in real danger of losing your edge. The same publication posits a yet more succinct motto: "Excess destroys success." To outsiders, this fear of getting soft is one of the most inexplicable parts of the Microsoft culture. A favored theme of Microsoft's leadership has long been the immanent prospect of the company's annihilation. "If we make the wrong decisions," Bill Gates warned sternly at the company's qu arter-century anniversary, "everything we've built over the last twenty-five years could be history." "One day, somebody will catch us napping," writes Gates in his book Business @ the Speed of Thought. "One day, an eager upstart will put Microsoft out of business." This is not just a personal obsession of Gates's. Try Steve Ballmer: "Our next competitor could come out of nowhere and put us out of business virtually overnight" Or Jeff Raikes: "If we don't continue to innovate to keep up with consumer needs and technology advances, we can be unseated at any time, by anyone." Microsoft may be smug, but there is nothing Microsoft is smugger about than its absence of hubris. Outsiders scoff at this rhetoric. Microsoft is a pretty big balloon. If and when someone punches a hole in it, it will take a long time for all the air to blow out. From a historical perspective, though, Gates and Ballmer are absolutely right. Companies' tenures at the top of the corporate heap are short. A company that lives by innovation dies by innovation. In the Microsoft culture, the Harvard Business School's Clayton M. Christensen is practically the equivalent of a rock star. People go into crucial meetings toting copies of Christensen's book The Innovator's Dilemma lest they feel the urgent need to quote something out of it. Christensen's message is that the business plans that make companies successful also make them incapable of dealing with certain typ es of revolutionary change. These "disruptive" technologies allow start-up Davids to topple corporate Goliaths. In short, the book plays perfectly into Microsoft paranoia. The Innovator's Dilemma cites the disk-drive business as its archetype. Out of seventeen companies making hard drives in 1976, all but one went bust or were acquired by 1995. (The sole survivor was IBM.) With a knack for qu otable paradox, Christensen attributes the failures to good management. The companies were so attuned to their customers' and investors' needs that they were unable to react to crucial technological changes. Christensen's is a gospel of cluelessness. As he sees it, no one is smart enough to predict the way that disruptive technologies will play out. Companies have to learn along
Bill Gates and the Culture of Puzzles 57 with their customers how disruptive technologies will be used. The process is, in computer jargon, massively parallel. All sorts of applications for a new technology are tried, of which just a few catch on. Th e Innovator's Dilemma recounts a telling anecdote. A fe w years after Shockley's team invented the transistor, Bell Labs' parent company, AT&T, was contacted by a Japanese bu sinessman staying at a cheap hotel in New York. The bu sinessman wanted to license the ransistor. AT&T kept putting him off. The man persisted and finally negotiated a deal. After the license agreements were signed, one of AT&T's people asked the businessman what/ his company was going to do with the technology. The main said they were going to build small radios. "Why would anyone care about small radios?" the AT &T executive asked. "We'll see," said the businessman. His name was Akio Morita, and his company was Sony. Sony's handheld transistor radios became the first breakout consumer application for transistors. Logic was of limited use in predicting applications for the transistor. What is more logical than assuming that sound quality is all-important in music? The first transistor radios had terrible sound quality. Why would people want a staticky transistor radio when they could get superior sound qu ality from the washing-machine-size radio already sitting in their living room? As Christensen wrote, "Markets that do not exist cannot be analyzed. Suppliers and customers must discover them together. Not only are the market applications for disruptive technologies unknown at the time of their development, they are unknowable."
58 How Would You Move Mount Fuji?
Following Taillights Christensen's point is not, of course, that businesspeople should reject logic. His message is akin to the advice offered to solvers of puzzles: You have to recognize that the type of reasoning that works so well most of the time may not work in certain situations. In those situations, logic can be misleading. It's necessary to step back, consider all the options, and proceed methodically. You need to combine logic with creativity and mental flexibility. It will be necessary to brainstorm a number of possible approaches, try them out without committing too many resources (for most of the approaches will fail), and then devise a game plan from what you learn. This is how both business innovation and puzzle solving work. Words such as "creativity" and "innovation" are loaded terms at Microsoft. We've all heard the rap: "Microsoft cannot make great products" (James Gleick writing in the New York Times). "It has no spark of genius; it does not know how to innovate; it lets bugs live forever; it eradicates all traces of personality from its software." An adage goes, "Microsoft just needs a set of taillights to follow." Naturally, Microsoft's people cringe at these perceptions. In public statements, Microsoft wants nothing so much as to be loved as an innovator (no one loves you just for "cutting off the air supply" of Netscape, it seems). People "don't always realize all the innovative things we've got going pn here because we don't often talk about them in the press" — so recruiting head David Pritchard complained to Fortune magazine. Microsoft — or any other company — will be only as creative and innovative as the people it hires. Microsoft has particularly focused ideas about the personnel it wants to
Bill Gates and the
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HOW TO GET RICH.
Valuable Money-Making Secrets.
These recipes have sold for five dollars
each, and have been the foundations of
many good-sized fortunes.
This collection of recipes and formulas for making various articles which are in constant use in
every household are, for the most part, articles upon which very large profits are made, both by
manufacturers and dealers; some things, which cost but two or three cents to make, being
retailed for as much as twenty-five cents. We point out to you the proper method to be pursued
in the manufacture of these various articles, and expect you to use your own judgment and
discretion in the matter of putting them up for market, and exposing them for sale. The goods,
when ready for market, may be sold either direct to consumers at retail, or to store-keepers at
wholesale. Those who adopt the former method may canvass from house to house, or establish a
store and sell therefrom. The various ingredients required to compound all the different articles
fo
r which recipes are here given may be purchased at wholesale drug and grocery stores in any
of the large cities. Large fortunes have been made upon the manufacture of single articles, for
which recipes are here given, and there is no reason why any one may not acquire[3] a
competency in the same way, providing he has the necessary push and sagacity. Here is an
opportunity to be your own manufacturer, your own wholesaler and your own retailer. Given
these advantages, you may undersell those in the ordinary channels of trade, and still make
handsome profits; and we trust that the information herein contained may be the means of
starting many a poor person toward making a fortune or a good income.
Black Ink.—Ink, like soap, is something everybody uses, and few people realize that thousands
of barrels of it are made and sold.
Recipe for making the best and most durable black writing ink, as used by the leading penmen of
the United States and Canada.
To 2 gallons of strong decoction of logwood, well strained, add 1 1/2 lbs. blue galls in coarse
powder, 6 ounces sulphate of iron, 1 oz. acetate of copper, 6 oz. of pulverized sugar, and 8 oz. of
gum arabic; set the above on the fire until it begins to boil, strain, and then set it away until it has
acquired the desired blackness. The strong “decoction of logwood” is made by boiling; use soft
water, into which put two ounces of logwood; strain after taking from the fire.
The above ink properly made, according to the above directions, is unsurpassed for elegant
writing of any kind. It flows freely from the pen, turns to a deep black after writing, and[4] does
not fade. Records written with it fifty years ago are as legible as the day they were put upon the
paper.
Fig Candy.—Take 1 pound of sugar and 1 pint of water; set over a slow fire. When done, add a
fe
w drops of vinegar and a lump of butter, and pour into pans in which split figs are laid.
Red Sealing Wax.—Purchase 4 lbs. shellac, 1 1/2 lbs. venice turpentine, 3 lbs. finest cinnabar and
4 oz. venetian; mix the whole well together, and melt over a very slow fire. Pour it on a thick,
smooth glass, or any other flat, smooth surface, and make it into 3, 6 or 10 sticks.
Silver Ink.—Mix 1 oz. of the finest pewter or block tin in shavings with 2 oz. quicksilver till all
becomes fluid; then add to it sufficient gum arabic water to produce the proper consistency.
Yellow Ink.—A little alum added to saffron, in soft, hot water, makes a beautiful yellow ink.
Mucilage for Labels.—Dextrine, 2 ounces; glycerine, 1 drachm; alcohol, 1 ounce; water, 6
ounces.
The Celebrated Chemical Compound.—Take one pint of alcohol, 2 gills nitrous spirits ether, 2
oz. bicromate potash, 2 oz. powdered cinnamon, 2 oz. aqua fortis. Mix all the above together and
let it stand twenty-four hours and[5] it is fit for use. Bottle in ounce vials, and sell for 25 cents.
To extract grease stains, etc., from cloth, saturate with cold water, dip a sponge in the liquid and
ap
ply it, and repeat if necessary, and wash off with cold water.
Gold Ink.—Two parts mosaic, 1 part gum arabic (by measure); mix with soft water until reduced
to a proper condition.
Green Ink.—Powder 1 ounce verdigris, and put it in 1 quart of vinegar; after it has stood two or
three days, strain off the liquid.
Blue Ink.—Two oz. Chinese blue, 3/4 oz. pure oxolid acid, 1 oz. powdered gum arabic, 6 pints
distilled soft water; mix well and then strain.
Purple Ink.—Eight parts logwood in 64 parts soft water, by measure, boil down to one-half, then
strain and add one part chloride of tin.
Imitation Gold.—Sixteen parts platina, seven parts copper, one part zinc. Put in a covered
crucible, with powdered charcoal, and melt together till the whole forms one mass, and are
thoroughly incorporated together. Or, take 4 oz. platina, 3 oz. silver, 1 oz. copper.
Imitation Silver.—Eleven ounces refined nickel, two ounces metallic bismuth. Melt the
compositions together three times, and pour them out in ley. The third time, when melting, add
two ounces pure silver. Or take one-quarter[6] ounce copper, one ounce bismuth, two ounces
saltpetre, two ounces common salt, one ounce arsenic, one ounce potash, two ounces brass, and
three ounces pure silver. Melt all together in a crucible.
Florida Water.—Half pint proof spirits, two drachms oil lemon, half drachm oil rosemary. Mix.
Freckle Lotion.—Muriate of ammonia, one drachm; cologne water, two drachms; distilled water,
seven ounces; mix and use as a wash. It contains nothing injurious.
Windsor Soap.—This is made with lard. In France they use lard, with a portion of olive or
bleached palm oil. It is made with one part of olive oil to nine of tallow; but a greater part of
what is sold is only curd (tallow) soap, and scented with oil of caraway and bergamot. The
brown is colored with burnt sugar or umber.
To Make Maple Sugar without Maple Trees.—Though the secret I am about to reveal may seem
very simple (when explained), I believe there are few who would discover it of their own accord.
The value of the maple sugar crop is considerable, and there is ready sale for all that can be
made. I was led by curiosity to boil down a little butternut sap, one time, with an equal quantity
of maple sap, and the result was, a sugar which I could not distinguish from pure maple. I
experimented further[7] and found that if a little common (cane) sugar was added to the sap of
the butternut, it would do as well as an addition of maple sap. I found that the sap of birch and
several other trees would also make, when a very little cane sugar was added, a sugar which in
looks and taste exactly resembled maple. To be able to make “maple” sugar from trees not
heretofore deemed valuable for the purpose is just so much clear profit.
Traveller’s Ink.—White blotting paper is saturated with aniline black, and several sheets are
pasted together so as to form a thick pad. When required for use a small piece is torn off and
covered with a little water. The black liquid which dissolves out is a good writing ink. A square
inch of paper will produce enough ink to last a considerable writing, and a few pads would be all
that an exploring party need carry with them. As water is always available the ink is readily
made. This is a perfectly original and new recipe. Any enterprising man can make a large
income out of its manufacture.
Violet Ink.—1 oz. best violet aniline; dissolve it in one gill of hot alcohol, stir, and when
thoroughly dissolved add one gallon of boiling hot water; dissolve in the hot water 1 1/2 oz.
white gum arabic. This will make the most rich and beautiful ink of this color in existence; will
not fade or corrode steel pens, and is not injured by freezing. An addition of 1 lb.[8] of sugar and
1/2 lb. glycerine will make an excellent copying ink. This ink is usually sold at $2 per pint bottle,
$1 for half pint and 50 cents for gill bottle. It is worth an enterprising man or woman $1,000. Do
not bury it—use it and make money out of it.
New York Barber’s Star Hair Oil.—Castor oil, 6 1/2 pints, alcohol, 1 1/2 pints, oil of citronella,
1/2 ounce, lavender, 1/4 ounce. Mix well, put in 4-ounce bottles; retail at 25 cents each.
Furniture Polish.—Equal parts sweet oil and vinegar, and a pint of gum arabic finely powdered.
Shake the bottle and apply with a rag. It will make furniture look as good as new.
Artificial Gold.—This is a new metallic alloy which is now very extensively used in France as a
substitute for gold. Pure copper, one hundred parts; zinc, or, preferably, tin, seventeen parts;
magnesia, six parts; sal-ammoniac, three-sixths parts; quick-lime, one-eighth part; tartar of
commerce, nine parts, are mixed as follows: The copper is first melted, and the magnesia, salammoniac, lime and tartar are then added separately, and by degrees, in the form of powder; the
whole is now briskly stirred for about half an hour, so as to mix thoroughly; and when the zinc is
added in small grains by throwing it on the surface, and stirring till it is entirely fused, the
crucible is then covered, and the fusion maintained for[9] about thirty-five minutes. The surface
is then skimmed, and the alloy is ready for casting. It has a fine grain, is malleable, and takes a
splendid polish. It does not corrode readily, and for many purposes is an excellent substitute for
gold. When tarnished, its brilliancy can be restored by a little acidulated water. If tin be
employed instead of zinc, the alloy will be more brilliant. It is very much used in France, and
must ultimately attain equal popularity here.
Baking Powder.—The following receipt is the same as used in the preparation of the standard
baking powders of the day, and if put up attractively will sell readily at the usual prices. Take 1
pound of tartaric acid in crystals, 1 1/2 pounds of bi-carbonate of soda and 1 1/2 pounds of potato
starch. Each must be powdered separately, well dried by slow heat, well mixed through a sieve.
Pack hard in tinfoil, tin or paper glazed on the outside. The tartaric acid and bi-carbonate of soda
can, of course, be bought cheaper of wholesale druggists than you can make them, unless you are
doing things on a very large scale, but potato starch any one can make; it is only necessary to
peel the potatoes and to grate them up fine into vessels of water, to let them settle, pour off the
water and make the settlings into balls, and to dry them. With these directions any one can make
as good a baking powder as is sold anywhere; if he wants to[10] make it very cheap, he can take
cream of tartar and common washing (carbonate of) soda, instead of the articles named in the
recipe, but this would be advisable only where customers insist on excessively low prices in
preference to quality of goods.
Babbit’s Premium Soap.—Five gallons of strong lye, five gallons of water, five pounds of
tallow, two pounds of sal soda, half a pound of rosin, one pint salt, one pint washing fluid. Let
this water boil, then put in the articles, and boil half an hour. Stir it well while boiling, and then
ru
n it into moulds: it will be ready for use as soon as cold. The above is for 100 pounds of soap.
Royal Washing Powder.—Mix any quantity of soda ash with an equal quantity of carbonate of
soda—ordinary soda—crushed into coarse grains. Have a thin solution of glue, or decoction of
linseed oil ready, into which pour the soda until quite thick. Spread it out on boards in a warm
ap
artment to dry. As soon as dry shake up well so that it will pack easily into nice, square
packages. Label neatly. Pound packages cost 7 cents, retail for 25 cents.
Patent Starch Polish.—Take common dry potato or wheat starch, sufficient to make a pint of
starch when boiled. When boiled add one-half drachm spermaceti, and one-half drachm of white
wax, then use it as common starch, only using the iron as hot as possible.
[11]
Invisible Ink.—Sulphuric acid 1 part, water 20 parts; mix together and write with a quill pen,
which writing can only be read after heating it.
Fine Peppermint Lozenges.—Best powdered white sugar, 7 pounds; pure starch, 1 pound; oil of
peppermint to flavor. Mix with mucilage.
India Ink.—Ivory black ground into powder, make into a paste with a few drops of essence of
musk, and one half as much essence of ambergris, and then form into cakes.
To Preserve Flowers in Water.—Mix a little carbonate of soda in the water, and it will keep the
flowers a fortnight.
Ginger Lozenges.—Mix with the white of eggs four ounces of powdered ginger, two pounds of
white sugar, and one pound of starch.
To Restore the Color of Black Kid Boots.—Take a small quantity of good black ink, mix it with
the white of an egg, and apply it to the boots with a soft sponge.
Color for Wicker Baskets, or any small Articles of the Kind.—Dissolve one stick of black
sealing-wax and one stick of red in two ounces of spirits of wine. Lay it on with a small brush.
To Remove Stains from Books.—To remove ink-spots, apply a solution of oxalic, citric, or[12]
tartaric acid. To remove spots of grease, wax, oil, or fat, wash the injured part with either, and
place it between white blotting-paper. Then, with a hot iron, press above the part stained.
To Clean Black Veils.—Pass them through a warm liquor of bullock’s gall and water; rinse in
cold water; then take a small piece of glue, pour boiling water on it, and pass the veil through it;
clap it, and frame to dry. Instead of framing, it may be fastened with drawing-pins closely fixed
upon a very clean paste or drawing-board.
To Clean a Marble Chimney Piece.—If the marble is white, procure half a pound of pearlash,
one pound of whiting, and half a pound of soft soap; boil all these ingredients together until they
attain the consistence of a thick paste. When nearly cold, lay it upon the marble, and let it remain
on it for at least twenty-four hours. Wash it off with soft water, and polish with linen rags. Spirits
of turpentine is excellent for cleaning black marble.
Oil Stains in Silk and other Fabrics.—Benzine is most effectual, not only for silk, but for any
other material whatever. It can be procured from any druggist. By simply covering both sides of
greased silk with magnesia, and allowing it to remain for a few hours, the oil is absorbed by the
powder. Should the first[13] application be insufficient, it may be repeated, and even rubbed in
with the hand. Should the silk be Tussah or Indian silk, it will wash.
Scarlet Ink.—Dissolve 1 oz. garancine of the best quality in 1 oz. liquor ammonia; add 1 pint
soft cold water distilled; mix together in a mortar, filter and dissolve in it 1/2 oz. of gum arabic.
Luminous Ink.—Shines in the dark—Phosphorous, one-half drachm, oil cinnamon, one-half oz.,
mix in a vial, cork tightly, heat it slowly until mixed. A letter written with this ink can only be
read in a dark room, when the writing will have the appearance of fire.
Brown Ink.—Take 4 parts powdered catechu and put it in 6 parts soft water; let it stand for half a
day, shaking occasionally, then strain, and to bring it to the proper consistency, add sufficient of
a solution of bichromate of potash, 1 part in 16 of water, all by measure.
Ink Powder.—One pound of nutgall, 7 ounces copperas, 7 ounces gum arabic: this amount of ink
powder will make one gallon of good black ink; to prevent it from moulding, powder two or
three cloves and mix with each pound of powder.
Excelsior Hair Oil.—One gallon cologne spirits 90 per cent. proof, add of the oil of lemon,
orange and bergamot, each a spoonful, add also of the extract of vanilla 40 drops,[14] shake until
the oils are cut up, then add one and a half pints of soft water.
Commercial Writing Ink.—Galls, 1 ounce; gum, 1/2 ounce; cloves, 1/2 ounce; sulphate of iron, 1/2
ounce; water, 8 ounces. Digest by frequent shaking until it has sufficient color. This is a good
du
rable ink and will bear diluting.
Indelible Ink.—For marking linen without preparation. Nitrate of silver, 1 1/2 oz., dissolve in 6
oz. of liquor ammonia fortis, archil for coloring, 1 oz. Gum mucilage, 12 ounces. The best
extant.
Bristol’s Tooth Powder.—Prepared chalk, 1 pound; castile soap, 1/2 pound; powdered yellow
bark, 2 ounces; powdered gum myrrh, 2 ounces; powdered loaf sugar, 2 ounces; powdered orris,
2 ounces. Mix well, after having first pulverized the castile.
Cold Cream.—One pound of lard, three ounces of spermaceti. Melt with a gentle heat, and when
cooling stir in orange-flower water, one ounce, essence of lavender, twenty-six drops.
To Make Paint for One Cent a Pound.—To one gallon of soft hot water add four pounds sulphate
of zinc (crude). Let it dissolve perfectly, and a sediment will settle at the bottom. Turn the clear
solution into another vessel. To one gallon of paint (lead and oil), mix one gallon of the
compound. Stir into it the paint slowly for ten or fifteen minutes, and the compound[15] and the
paint will perfectly combine. If too thick, thin it with turpentine. This receipt has been sold to
painters as high as $100 for the privilege to use the same in their business.
Almond Cream.—(There is nothing equal to this cream for softening and whitening the hands.)
Mix honey, almond meal and olive oil into a paste to be used after washing with soap. Castile
soap is best for use; it will cure a scratch, or cut, and prevents any spot.
Cream of Roses.—Take one teacupful of rose water, as much sub-carbonate of potash as will lie
on a shilling, and half an ounce of oil of sweet almonds. Let all be well shaken together until it
becomes thoroughly mixed, which will take some time. This is one of the best face washes
made, and is entirely harmless.
Excellent Pomade.—Three ounces of olive oil, three-quarters of a drachm of the oil of almonds,
two drachms of palm oil, half an ounce of white wax, a quarter of a pound of lard, and threequarters of a drachm of the essence of bergamot. This pomade is excellent for strengthening the
hair, promoting the growth of whiskers and moustaches, and preventing baldness.
Superior Cologne Water.—Alcohol, one gallon; add oil of cloves, lemon, nutmeg and bergamot,
each one drachm; oil neroli, three and a half drachms; seven drops of oils of rosemary[16],
lavender and cassia; half a pint of spirits of nitre; half a pint of elder-flower water. Let it stand a
day or two, then take a colander and at the bottom lay a piece of white cloth, and fill it up, onefo
urth of white sand, and filter through it.
Family Salve.—Take the root of the yellow dock and dandelion, equal parts; add good
proportion of celandine and plantain. Extract the juices by steeping or pressing. Strain carefully,
and simmer the liquid with sweet cream or fresh butter and mutton tallow, or sweet oil and
mutton tallow. Simmer together until no appearance of the liquid remains. Before it is quite cold,
put it into boxes. This is one of the most soothing and healing preparations for burns, scalds,
cuts, and sores of every description.
Japanese Cement.—Immediately mix the best powdered rice with a little cold water, then
gradually add boiling water until a proper consistency is acquired, being particularly careful to
keep it well stirred all the time; lastly, it must be boiled for a minute in a clean saucepan or
earthern pipkin. This glue is beautifully white and almost transparent, for which reason it is well
adapted for fancy paper work, which requires a strong and colorless cement.
👁 :
SOUTH AMERICAN JUNGLE TALES
HOW THE RAYS DEFENDED THE FORD
In South America there is a river called the Yabebirì; and it flows through the city of
Misiones. In this river there are many rays, a kind of mud fish like the salt-water skate; and the
river, indeed, gets its name from them: “Yabebirì” means the “river of ray fish.” The ray is a
wide, flat fish with a long, slender tail. The tail is very bony; and when it strikes you it cuts, and
leaves poison in the wound.
There are so many rays in the river that it is dangerous even to put your foot into the water. I
once knew a man who had his heel pricked by a ray. He had to walk more than two miles home,
groaning with pain all the way and fainting several times from the poison. The pain from a ray
bite is one of the sharpest pains one can feel.
But there are also other kinds of fish in the Yabebirì; and most of them are good to eat. That is
why some evil men once began to fish for them with dynamite. They put the dynamite under
water and set it off. The shock of the explosion stunned and killed all the fish nearby; and not
only the big fish, but also the little ones, which cannot be eaten. It is very cruel and wasteful to
hunt fish with dynamite.
However, there was a man who lived on the bank of the river; and he was sorry for the poor
fish, especially the little ones; and he told the bad men that they must stop bombing the fish. At
first they were angry and said they would do what they liked. But the man was known
everywhere to be an upright, honest man, and finally they obeyed him and set off no more
bombs in the river.
And the fish were grateful to this man, whom they had come to know the moment he
ap
proached the edge of the water. Whenever he walked along the bank smoking his pipe, the
rays especially would swim along the bottom to keep him company. He, of course, did not know
he had so many friends in the river. He lived there just because he liked the place.
Now, it happened one afternoon that a fox came running down to the river; and putting his
fo
repaws into the water he called:
“Hey there, you ray fish! Quick! Quick! Here comes that friend of yours! He’s in trouble!”
All the rays who heard came swimming up anxiously to the edge of the water.
“What’s the matter? Where is he?” they asked.
“Here he comes!” answered the fox. “He has been fighting with a panther, and is trying to get
away! He wants to get over to that island! Let him cross, for he is a very good man!”
“Of course we will! Of course we will!” the rays answered. “As for the panther, we will fix
him!”
“Yes, but remember a panther is a panther!” said the fox; by which he meant that a panther is
almost as hard to fight with as a tiger. And the fox gave a little jump and ran back into the
woods, so as not to be near when the panther came.
A second or two later, the branches along the river bank were pushed aside, and the man came
ru
nning down to the water’s edge. He was all bleeding and his shirt was torn. From a scratch on
his face the blood was streaming down off his chin, and his sleeves were wet with blood also. It
was clear that the man was very badly hurt; for he almost fell as he ran out into the river. When
he put his feet into the water, the rays moved aside so that their tails would not touch him; and he
waded across to the island, with the water coming up to his breast. On the other side he fell to
the ground fainting from loss of blood.
The rays did not have much time to sit there pitying him. Some distance behind the man the
panther came jumping along with great leaps to catch him. The big wildcat stopped on the bank,
and gave a great roar; but up and down the river the rays went calling; “The Panther! The
Panther!” and they gathered together near the shore to attack him if he tried to cross.
The panther looked up and down the stream, and finally he spied the man lying helpless on the
island. He, too, was badly wounded and dripping with blood; but he was determined to eat the
man at any cost. With another great howl, he leaped into the water.
Almost instantly, however, he felt as though a hundred pins and needles were sticking into his
paws. You see, the rays were trying to block the ford, and were stinging him with the stingers in
their tails. He gave one big jump back to the river bank and stood there roaring, and holding one
paw up in the air because it hurt him to step on it. After a moment he looked down into the water
and saw that it was all black and muddy. The rays were coming in great crowds and stirring up
the bottom of the river.
“Ah hah!” said the panther: “Ah hah! I see! It is you, you bad, wicked ray fish! It was you
who gave me all those stings! Well now, just get out of the way!”
“We will not get out of the way,” answered the rays.
“Away, I tell you!” said the panther.
“We won’t!” said the rays. “He is a good man. It is not right to kill him!”
“He gave me these wounds you see,” said the panther. “I must punish him!”
“And you gave him his wounds, too,” said the rays. “But that is all a matter for you folks in
the woods to settle. So long as this man is on the river, he is in our province and we intend to
protect him!”
“Get out of my way!” said the panther.
“Not never!” said the rays. You see, the rays had never been to school; and they said “not
never” and “not nothing” the way children sometimes do and never ought to do, not never!
“Well, we’ll see!” said the panther, with another great roar; and he ran up the bank to get a
start for one great jump. The panther understood that the rays were packed close in along the
shore; and he figured that if he could jump away out into the stream he would get beyond them
and their stingers, and finally reach the wounded man on the island.
But some of the rays saw what he was going to do, and they began to shout to one another:
“Out to mid-stream! Out to mid-stream! He’s going to jump! He’s going to jump!”
The panther did succeed in making a very long leap, and for some seconds after he struck the
water he felt no pain. He gave a great roar of delight, thinking he had deceived his enemies. But
then, all of a sudden, sting here and sting there, in front, in back, on his sides! The rays were
up
on him again, driving their poisonous stingers into his skin. For a moment, the panther thought
it was as easy to go forward as back, and he kept on. But the rays were now all over along the
island; so the panther turned and went back to the shore he had left.
He was now about done. He just had to lie down on his side to keep the bottoms of his feet off
the ground; and his stomach went up and down as he breathed deeply from fatigue and pain. He
was growing dizzy, also, because the poison from the stings was getting into his brain.
The rays were not satisfied, however. They kept crowding up along the shore because they
kn
ew that panthers never go alone, but always with a mate. This mate would come, and they
would again have to defend the ford.
And so it was. Soon the she-panther came down roaring through the bushes to rescue her
husband. She looked across to the island where the man was lying wounded; and then at her
mate, who lay there panting at her feet; and then down into the water, which was black with rays.
“Ray fish!” she called.
“Well, madam?” answered the rays.
“Let me cross the river!”
“No crossing here for panthers!” said the rays.
“I’ll bite the tails off every one of you!” said the she-panther.
“Even without our tails, we won’t let you cross!” said the rays.
“For the last time, out of my way!” said the she-panther.
“Not never!” said the rays.
The she-panther now put one foot into the water; but a ray struck at her with its stinger, and
made a sting right between two of her toes.
“Oooouch!” growled the she-panther.
“We have at least one tail left!” mocked the rays.
But the she-panther began to scowl now. When panthers are thinking very hard they scowl.
This one scowled her face into deep wrinkles; which meant that she had a very important idea.
She did not let on what it was, however. She just trotted off up the bank into the woods without
saying another word.
But the rays understood what she was up to. She was going to some place farther along the
stream where there were no rays and would swim across before they could reach her. And a great
fright came over them. Rays cannot swim very fast, and they knew that the she-panther would
get there before they did.
“Oh, oh!” they cried to each other. “Now our poor man-friend is done for. How can we let the
rays down there know we must prevent the panther from crossing at any cost?”
But a little ray, who was a very bright and clever little fish, spoke up and said:
“Get the shiners to carry a message! Shiners can swim like lightning; and they too ought to be
grateful to the man for stopping those bombs!”
“That’s it! That’s it! Let’s send the shiners!”
A school of shiners happened to be just going by; and the rays sent them off with a message to
all the rays along the river:
“Sting the she-panther if she tries to cross! Hold the ford against the she-panther!”
Though the shiners swam very, very fast, they were barely in time. The panther was already in
the water, and had begun to swim out beyond her depth. In fact, she was almost over on the other
side toward the island. But when her paws struck bottom and she began to wade again, the rays
were on hand. They rushed in packs upon her legs and feet, stinging them with tens, hundreds,
thousands of stings. At the same time more rays crowded in between the panther and the shore.
Roaring with pain and anger, she finally swam back to the place where she had jumped in, and
rolled about on the ground in agony. When she came back to where her husband was lying, her
paws and legs were all swollen from the poison.
The rays, for their part, were getting very tired from all this stinging and hurrying to and fro.
And they were not much relieved when they saw the panther and the she-panther get up all of a
sudden and go off into the woods. What were they up to now? The rays were very much worried,
and they gathered together in council.
“Do you know what I think?” said the oldest ray. “I think they have gone off to get all the
other panthers. When they come back, they will be too much for us and they will surely get
across!”
“That is so!” said the other rays, the older and more experienced ones. “At least one or two
will get across. That will be the end of our friend, the man! Suppose we go and have a talk with
him!”
For the first time they now went over to where the man was lying. They had been too busy up
to then to think of him.
The man had lost a great deal of blood, and was still lying on the ground; but he was able to
sit up enough to talk. The rays told him how they had been defending the ford against the
panthers who had been trying to eat him. The man could hardly keep in his tears as he thought of
the friendship these fishes had for him. He thanked them by reaching out his hand and stroking
the nearest ones on the nose. But then he moaned:
“Alas! You cannot save me! When the panthers come back there will be many of them; and if
they want to get across they can.”
“No they can’t,” said a little ray. “No they can’t! Nobody but a friend of ours can cross this
fo
rd!”
“I’m afraid they will be too much for you,” said the man sadly. After a moment’s thought he
added:
“There might be one way to stop them. If there were someone to go and get my rifle ... I have
a Winchester, with a box of bullets ... but the only friends I have near here are fish ... and fish
can’t bring me a rifle!”
“Well...?” asked the rays anxiously.
“Yes ... yes ...” said the man, rubbing his forehead with his right hand, as though trying to
collect his thoughts. “Let’s see.... Once I had a friend, a river hog, whom I tamed and kept in my
house to play with my children. One day he got homesick and went back to the woods to live. I
don’t know what became of him ... but I think he came to this neighborhood!”
The rays gave one great shout of joy:
“We know him! We know him! He lives in the cave just below here in the river bank. We
remember now that he once told us he knew you very well. We will send him to get the rifle.”
No sooner said than done! A shiner, who was the fastest swimmer in his school, started off
down the river to where the river hog lived. It was not far away; and before long the river hog
came up on the bank across the river. The man picked up a fishbone from the ground near him;
and dipping it in some blood that was on his hand wrote on a dry leaf this letter to his wife:
“Dear Wife: Send me my Winchester by this river hog, with a full box of a hundred
bullets.
(Signed) The Man.”
He was just finishing the letter when the whole river valley began to tremble with the most
frightful roars. The panthers were coming back in a large company to force a crossing and
devour their enemy. Quickly two rays stuck their heads out of the water. The man handed them
the leaf with the letter written on it; and holding it up clear of the water, they swam over to
where the river hog was. He took it in his mouth and ran off as fast as he could toward the man’s
house.
And he had no time to lose. The roaring was now very close to the river and every moment it
was getting nearer. The rays called anxiously to the shiners, who were hovering in the water
nearby waiting for orders:
“Quick, shiners! Swim up and down the river, and give a general alarm! Have all the rays
gather about the island on every side! We will see whether these panthers get across!”
And up and down the river the shiners darted, streaking the surface with tiny black wakes, so
fa
st did they move. The rays began coming out from the mud, from under the stones, from the
mouths of the brooks, from all along the river. They assembled in solid masses, almost, around
the island, bent on keeping the panthers back at whatever cost. And meanwhile the shiners came
streaming up and down past the island, raising new recruits and ready to give the word when the
panthers appeared.
And the panthers did appear, at last. With a great roar an army of them came leaping down to
the river bank. There were a hundred of them, perhaps; at least all the panthers in the woods
around Misiones. But, on the other hand, the river was now packed with rays, who were ready to
die, rather than let a single panther across.
“Get out of our way!” roared the panthers.
“No trespassing on this river!” said the rays.
“Gangway!” called the panthers.
“Keep out!” said the rays.
“If you don’t get out of the way, we will eat every ray, and every son of a ray, and every
grandson of a ray, not counting the women and children!” said the panthers.
“Perhaps,” said the rays; “but no panther, nor any son, grandson, daughter, granddaughter,
sister, brother, wife, aunt or uncle of a panther will ever get across this ford!
“For one last time, get out of the way!”
“Not never!” said the rays.
And the battle began.
With enormous bounds and jumps and leaps, the panthers plunged into the river. But they
landed on an almost solid floor of ray fish. The rays plunged their stingers into the panthers’ feet,
and at each prick the panthers would send up the most bloodcurdling roars. Meanwhile the
panthers were clawing and kicking at the rays, making frightful splashes in the water and tossing
up
ray fish by the barrel full. Hundreds and hundreds of rays were caught and torn by the
panthers’ claws, and went floating down the Yabebirì, which was soon all tinged with ray blood.
But the panthers were getting terribly stung, too; and many of them had to go back to the shore,
where they lay roaring and whining, holding their swollen paws up in the air. Though many
more of the rays were being trampled on, and scratched and bitten, they held their ground.
Sometimes when a ray had been tossed into the air by a panther’s paw, he would return to the
fight after he had fallen back into the water.
The combat had now lasted as long as half an hour. By that time the panthers were tired out
and had gone back to the shore they came from, where they sat down to rest and to lick the stings
on their paws.
Not one of them had been able to cross the ford, however. But the rays were in a terrible
plight. Thousands of them had been killed; and those that still remained were about tired to
death.
“We cannot stand a second attack like this one,” said the rays. “Hey, shiners! Go up and down
the river again, and bring us reenforcements! We must have every single last ray there is in the
Yabebirì!”
And again the shiners were off up and down the river, flecking the surface of the water with
the wakes they left. The rays now thought they should consult the man again.
“We cannot hold out much longer!” said the rays. And some of them actually wept for the
poor man who was going to be eaten by the panthers.
“Never mind, please, my dear little rays!” answered the man. “You have done enough for me!
It’s a pity that any more of you should die. Now you had better let the panthers come across.”
“Not never!” cried the rays. “So long as there is a ray left alive, we shall defend the man who
defended us and saved our lives from the bombers.”
“My dear friends,” said the man in reply, “I think I am bound to die anyway, I am so badly
wounded. But I can promise you that when that Winchester arrives, you will see some exciting
things. That much I am sure of!”
“Yes, we know! We know!” said the rays. But they could not continue the conversation: the
battle was on again. The panthers had now rested, and were crouching all on the river bank,
ready to take off with great leaps and bounds.
“We’ll give you one last chance!” they called to the rays. “Now be reasonable! Get out of our
way!”
“Not never!” said the rays, crowding up close along the shore in front of the panthers.
In a flash, the panthers were in the water again, and the same terrible fight as before was
taking place. The Yabebirì from shore to shore was one mass of bloody foam. Hundreds and
hundreds of rays were tossed into the air, while the panthers bellowed from the pain in their
paws. But not a panther and not a ray gave an inch of ground.
However, the panthers were little by little forcing their way forward. In vain the shiners darted
up
and down the river calling in more and more rays to battle. There were no rays left anywhere
along the stream. Every last ray was either fighting desperately in the army around the island, or
was floating bruised and bleeding down the current. Such as were still left were all but helpless
from the fatigue of their great efforts.
And now they realized that the battle was lost. Five of the biggest panthers had broken
through the lines of the rays, and were swimming through clear water straight toward the island.
The poor rays decided they would rather die than see their poor friend eaten by the panthers.
“Retreat to the island!” they called to each other. “Back to the island!”
But this was too late, alas. Two more panthers had now broken through the line; and when the
rays started for the island, every last panther on the shore jumped into the water and made for the
wounded man. Ten, twenty, fifty, perhaps a hundred panthers could be seen swimming with just
their heads out of water.
But what was that down there? The rays had been so busy fighting they had not noticed
before. From a point on the shore some distance below the ford a brown, fuzzy animal had gone
into the water, and had been swimming all this time toward the island. It was the river hog,
paddling along as fast as he could with his head and neck out of the water and the Winchester in
his mouth. He was holding his head away up like that to keep the rifle dry. On the end of the rifle
hung the man’s cartridge belt, full of bullets.
The man gave a great cry of joy; for the river hog was quite a distance ahead of the panthers,
and he would be ashore by the time they began to wade again. And the river hog did get there in
no time. The man was too weak to move much; so the river hog pulled him around by the collar
so that he lay facing the panthers. In this position the man loaded the rifle and took aim.
The rays, meanwhile, were heart broken. Crushed, scratched, bruised, bleeding, worn out from
struggling, they saw that they had lost the battle. The panthers were almost over to the island. In
a few moments their friend would be eaten alive!
C-r-r-ack! C-r-r-r-ack! Bing! Bing. The rays who had their eyes out of water suddenly saw a
panther, who was just coming up out of the river toward the man, give a great leap into the air
and fall back to the ground in a heap.
The rays understood! “Hoo-ray! Hoo-ray Hoo-ray!” shouted the rays. “The man has the rifle!
He is saved! We have won!” And they dirtied all the water, so much mud did they stir up by the
dancing they started on the bottom of the river. C-r-r-r-ack! C-r-r-ack! Bing-g-g! Bing-g-g! The
rifle kept going off and the bullets kept singing through the air. At each shot a panther fell dead
on the sand or sank drowning under the water. The shooting did not last more than a minute and
a half, however. After ten or a dozen panthers had been killed, the others swam back to the
opposite shore and ran off into the woods.
The panthers that were killed in the water, sank to the bottom where the horn-pouts ate them.
Others kept afloat, and the shiners went down the Yabebirì with them, all the way to the Parana,
having a great feast off panther meat, and jumping and hopping along the top of the water to
express their delight. When the friends of the wounded man came to get him, they skinned the
panthers that were lying on the shore; and the man’s wife had a set of new rugs for her dining
room.
Soon the man got well again. And the rays, who have a great many children each year, were as
numerous as ever after one season. The man was so grateful for what they had done in trying to
save his life, that he built a bungalow on the island and went there to live during his vacations.
On nights in summer, when the moon was shining, he would go out in front of his bungalow and
sit down on a rock over the water to smoke his pipe. The rays would creep up softly over the
bottom and point him out to fish who did not know him. “There he is, see? The panthers came
across over here; we stood in line over there. And when the panthers broke through, the man
took his rifle, and....”
THE STORY OF TWO RACCOON CUBS AND TWO MAN CUBS
Once there was a mother raccoon who had three cubs; they all lived in the woods eating fruits
and berries and birds’ eggs. Whenever they were on a tree top and heard a noise, they would
jump head foremost to the ground and scamper off with their tails in the air.
One day when the cubs had grown to be quite large sized raccoons, their mother took them up
all together to the top of an orange tree—you must know that in South America orange trees,
which came originally from Spain, now grow wild in the forest—and spoke to them as follows:
“Cublets, you are almost big enough to be called raccoons; and it is time you began to hunt for
your meals by yourselves. It is very important for you to know how to do this, because, when
you get to be old, you will go around all alone in the world, as all raccoons do. The oldest of you
likes snails and cockroaches. He must hunt around woodpiles and under trunks of rotting trees,
where there are always plenty of snails and cockroaches. The next to the oldest of you seems to
like oranges. Up to the month of December there will be plenty of oranges right here in this
grove. The youngest of you is always asking for birds’ eggs. Well, there are birds’ nests
everywhere. All he will have to do is hunt. But one thing, however: he must never go down to
the farm looking for eggs. It is very bad for raccoons to go near farms.
“Cublets, there is one thing more you must all be afraid of: dogs! dogs! Never go near a dog!
Once I had a fight with a dog. Do you see this broken tooth? Well, I broke it in a fight with a
dog! And so I know what I am talking about! And behind dogs come people, with guns, and the
guns make a great noise, and kill raccoons. Whenever you hear a dog, or a man, or a gun, jump
fo
r your lives no matter how high the tree is, and run, run, run! If you don’t they will kill you as
sure as preaching!”
That is what the mother raccoon said to her cublets. Whereupon, they all got down from the
tree top, and went each his own way, nosing about in the leaves from right to left and from left to
right, as though they were looking for something they had lost. For that is the way raccoons
hunt.
The biggest of the cubs, who liked snails and cockroaches, looked under every piece of dead
wood he came to and overturned the piles of dead leaves. Soon he had eaten such a fine meal
that he grew sleepy and lay down in a nice cozy bed of leaves and went to sleep. The second one,
who liked oranges, did not move from that very grove. He just went from one tree to another
eating the best oranges; and he did not have to jump from a tree top once; for neither men, nor
dogs, nor guns, came anywhere near him.
But the youngest, who would have nothing but birds’ eggs, had a harder time of it. He hunted
and hunted over the hillsides all day long and found only two birds’ nests—one belonging to a
toucan, with three eggs in it, and the other belonging to a wood dove, with two eggs in it. Five
tiny little eggs! That was not very much to eat for a raccoon almost big enough to go to school.
When evening came the little cub was as hungry as he had been that morning; and he sat down,
all cold and tired and lonesome, on the very edge of the forest.
From the place where he was sitting he could look down on the green fields of the farm, and
he thought of what his mother had said about such places.
“Now, why did mamma say that? Why shouldn’t I go looking for eggs down along those
fe
nces on the farm?”
And just as he was saying this all to himself, what should he hear but the song of a strange
bird: “Cock-a-doodle-doo-oo-oo”; coming from far, far away and from the direction of the
fa
rm
house.
“My, did you ever hear a bird sing so loud?” said the cublet to himself. “What a big bird it
must be! And its eggs must be the size of a cocoanut!”
“Cock-a-doodle-doo-oo-oo,” came the bird’s song again. The hungry little raccoon just
couldn’t do without one of those eggs the size of a cocoanut. The bird was singing somewhere
off to the right. So he made a short cut through the woods toward the field on the other side.
The sun was setting, but the raccoon cub ran with his tail in the air. At last he came to the edge
of the woods, and looked down again into the fields.
“Cock-a-doodle-doo-oo-oo!”
Not far away now he could see the farmhouse. There was a man in the yard. The man was
wearing long boots, and leading a horse by the bridle into a barn. On the fence in the barnyard,
the little raccoon saw his bird.
“What a silly little ’coon I am,” he said to himself. “That isn’t a bird! That’s a rooster!
Mamma showed him to me one day, when we were on top of a big tree up in the woods.
Roosters have a fine song; and they have a great many hens that lay sweet eggs. I think I could
eat a dozen of those eggs, right now!”
For some time the little raccoon sat looking at the rooster and the barn and the farmhouse, and
thinking of what his mother had said. But at last he thought: “Mamma is far away! She will
never know”; and he made up his mind that as soon as it was dark he would run down to that hen
coop and see what he could find.
Before long the sun had gone completely and it was so dark you could hardly see your hand
before your face. Walking on tiptoe, the little raccoon came out from the shadow of the woods,
and began making his way toward the farmhouse.
When he got into the yard, he stopped and listened carefully. Not a sound! The little raccoon
was as happy as could be: he was going to eat a hundred, a thousand, two thousand of those
eggs! He looked around for the hen coop. There it was! He stole up to the door and peered in.
On the ground, and right in front of the door, what should he see but an egg? And such a large
egg! If it was not as big as a cocoanut, it was at least as big as an orange! And how brightly it
shone in the dark! “Guess I’ll keep that egg for dessert,” thought the cub for a moment. But his
mouth began to water and water, and he simply couldn’t wait. He stepped up and put his front
teeth into that egg. But—
Trac-c-c!
He had hardly touched it when there was a sharp snapping noise. The little raccoon felt a hard
blow strike him in the face, while a stinging pain caught him in his right forepaw.
“Mamma! Mamma!” he called, jumping wildly this way and that. But he could not get his foot
loose. He was caught in a trap! And just at that moment a dog began to bark!
All that time when the little raccoon had been waiting in the woods for night to come, so that
he could go down to get his eggs in the hen coop, the man who owned the farmhouse had been
playing with his children on the lawn in the yard. One of them was a little girl five years old; and
the other was a little boy six years old. Both had golden hair. They were chasing their father
ab
out and falling down every so often on the grass. Then they would get up again and run some
more. The man would also pretend to fall and the three of them were having a splendid time.
When it grew dark, the man said:
“Now let’s go and set our trap in the hen coop, so that if the weasel comes to-night to kill our
chickens and eat our eggs, we will catch him.”
They went and set the trap. Then the family had dinner, and the little boy and the little girl
were put to bed.
But they were both very much excited about the trap and the weasel. They could not sleep.
Finally they sat up in their beds and began to throw pillows at each other. Their father and
mother were reading down in the dining room. They heard what the children were doing; but
they said nothing.
Suddenly the pillow-throwing stopped; and after a moment the little boy called:
“Papa! Papa! The weasel is in the trap. Don’t you hear Tuké barking? Let us go too, papa!”
Tuké, you see, was the name of the dog!
Their father said they might, provided they put their shoes on. He would never let them go out
at night, barefooted, for fear of coral or rattlesnakes.
So they went in their pajamas, just as they were.
And what, if you please, did they find in the trap? Their father stooped down in the doorway
of the hen coop, holding Tuké back by the collar. When he stood up, he was holding a little
raccoon by the tail; and the little raccoon was snapping and whistling and screaming “Mamma!
Mamma!” in a sharp, shrill voice like a cricket’s.
“Oh, don’t kill him, papa! He is such a pretty little ’coon!” said the boy and the girl. “Give
him to us, and we will tame him!”
“Very well,” said the father. “You may have him. But don’t forget that raccoons drink water
when they are thirsty, the same as little boys and girls.”
He said this because once he had caught a wildcat and given it to them for a pet. They fed it
plenty of meat from the pantry. But they didn’t dream that it needed water. And the poor wildcat
died.
The cage where the wildcat had been kept was still standing near the hen coop. They put the
raccoon into the cage, and went back into the house. This time, when they went to bed, they fell
fa
st asleep at once.
About midnight, when everything was still, the little raccoon, who had a very sore foot from
the cuts made in it by the teeth of the trap, saw three shadows come creeping up toward his cage;
fo
r the moon was now shining faintly. They came closer and closer, moving softly and
noiselessly over the ground. His heart gave a great leap when he discovered that it was his
mother and his two brothers, who had been looking for him everywhere.
“Mamma! Mamma!” he began to cry from his cage, but soft-like, so as not to wake up the
dog. “Here I am, here I am. Oh, get me out of here! I’m afraid! I’m afraid! Mamma! Mamma!
Mamma!” The little raccoon was choking with tears!
The mother and the two brother raccoons were as happy as could be to find him! They rubbed
their noses against him through the wires in the cage, and tried to stroke him with their paws.
Then they set to work to get him out, if they could. First they examined the wiring of the cage,
and one after another they worked at it with their teeth. But the wire was thick and tough, and
they could do nothing with it. Then an idea came to the mother raccoon.
“People cut wires with files! Where can we get a file? A file is a long piece of iron with three
sides, like the rattle of a rattlesnake. You push it away from you across the wire, and then you
draw it toward you. Finally the wire breaks. Let’s hunt around in the blacksmith shop, and we
may find one.”
They hurried off to the shop where the farmer kept his tools. Soon they found the file and
came back with it to the cage. Thinking it must be very hard to file off a wire, they all took hold
of the file and started pushing it back and forth between two of the wires. They pushed so hard
that the cage began to shake all over and made a terrible noise. In fact, it made such a loud noise
that Tuké woke up and set to barking at the top of his voice. The raccoons were frightened out of
their wits; and for fear the dog might ask them where they got that file, they scampered off, with
their tails in the air, toward the forest.
The little boy and the little girl woke up very early in the morning to go to see their new pet,
who had been brooding sadly in his cage all night long.
“What shall we call him?” asked the little boy.
“Seventeen,” answered the little girl. “I can count to seventeen!”
And what did “Seventeen” have for breakfast? One of those hen’s eggs he had tried so hard to
get the night before. And after the hen’s egg, a grasshopper, and then a piece of meat, and then a
bunch of grapes and finally a lump of chocolate! By the end of the day, he was letting the two
children reach their finger through the cage to scratch his head; and so pleased was he at all that
was now happening to him that he liked being a prisoner in a cage almost as much as being a
free raccoon cub on the mountain side. He was all taken up with the nice things that were placed
in his coop for him to eat; and he liked those two yellow-headed children who kept coming to
look at him!
That night and the following one, Tuké, the dog, slept so close to “Seventeen’s” cage that
when his mother and his two brothers came back to make another try at rescuing him, they did
not dare approach. But on the third night everything was as it should be. They went directly to
the shop, got the file, and hurried to the cage.
“But mamma,” said the little raccoon, “I guess I’d rather stay where I am. They feed me all
the eggs I want, and they are very kind to me. Today they told me that if I was good, they would
soon let me go about the yard loose. There are two of them, with yellow hair. And they are man
cubs, just as we are ’coon cubs. We shall have a fine time playing together.”
The three wild raccoons were very sad to hear all this; but they made the best of it, and went
away, just promising to come back and see “Seventeen” every night.
And so they did. Each evening, as soon as it was dark and whether it was fair or rainy, the
mother raccoon came with her two cublets to see their little brother. He gave them bread and
chocolate, which he handed out between the wires of his cage; and they ate it on the ground
nearby.
In two weeks, he was let loose to run about the yard; and every night he went back to his cage
of his own accord to sleep. He had his ears tweeked a number of times, when the farmer caught
him too close to the hen coop; otherwise he had no trouble at all. The two children became much
attached to him; and when the wild raccoons heard how kind those man cubs were to their little
brother, they began to be as fond of them as he was.
But one night, when it was very dark and very hot and a thunderstorm was gathering on the
mountains, the wild raccoons called to “Seventeen” in vain. “Seventeen! Seventeen! Seventeen!”
But he did not answer. In great alarm they crept up to the cage and looked in.
Pstt!
They drew back just in time. There in the door of the cage a big rattlesnake lay coiled. They
had almost touched him with their noses. And now they knew why “Seventeen” failed to
answer! The rattlesnake had bitten him and probably he was already dead.
The three raccoons decided they must first punish the rattlesnake. They rushed upon him from
three directions and snipped his head off before he knew what they were about. Then they
hurried inside the cage. “Seventeen” was lying there on the floor in a pool of blood, his feet up in
the air, and his sides shaking as he panted for breath. They caressed him with their tongues and
licked his body all over for more than a quarter of an hour. But it did no good. “Seventeen”
finally opened his mouth and stopped breathing altogether. He was dead. Raccoons ordinarily
are not much harmed by rattlesnake poison. Some other animals are not hurt at all. But this snake
had bitten “Seventeen” right through an artery; and he had died, not of the poison, but from loss
of blood.
The mother raccoon and her two cublets wept over his body for a long time; then, since they
could do nothing further for him, they left the cage where he had been so happy and went back to
the woods. But they kept thinking all the time: “What will the two man cubs say when they find
that their little playmate is dead? They will probably be very, very sad and cry a long time!”
They had grown to love the man cubs just from what “Seventeen” had said of them; and one
thought was in their three heads—to relieve the sorrow of the two man cubs as best they could.
They talked the matter over earnestly; and at last they agreed to the following plan. The
second youngest cublet looked almost like the raccoon who was dead. He had the same
markings, was about the same size, and carried himself in much the same way. Why shouldn’t he
go and crawl into the cage, taking the place of his brother? The man cubs would probably be
surprised; but nothing more. The four of them had talked about everything that went on at the
fa
rm
so much, that the new raccoon could easily pretend he had been there all along. He might
do it so well even, that the man cubs would not notice anything at all.
So they ran back to the cage, and the little raccoon took the place of his dead brother. The
mother raccoon and her remaining cub took hold of “Seventeen” with their teeth and dragged
him away off to the woods, where they buried him under the leaves.
The next day, the man cubs were surprised at a number of strange habits “Seventeen” seemed
to have learned during the night. But the new cub was just as affectionate to them as the real
“Seventeen” had been; and they never guessed what had happened. The two man cubs played
ab
out with the raccoon cub all day long as usual; and at night the two wild raccoons came to pay
their usual visit. The tame raccoon saved bits of his boiled eggs for them each time; and they
would sit down and eat them on the ground in front of the cage. He told them all that happened
at the farm; and they told him all the news about doings in the woods.
THE PARROT THAT LOST ITS TAIL
In the woods near a farm lived a flock of parrots. Every morning, the parrots went and ate
sweet corn in the garden of the farm. Afternoons they spent in the orange orchards eating
oranges. They always made a great to-do with their screaming and jawing; but they kept a
sentinel posted on one of the tree tops to let them know if the farmer was coming.
Parrots are very much disliked by farmers in countries where parrots grow wild. They bite into
an ear of corn and the rest of the ear rots when the next rain comes. Besides, parrots are very
good to eat when they are nicely broiled. At least the farmers of South America think so. That is
why people hunt them a great deal with shotguns.
One day the hired man on this farm managed to shoot the sentinel of the flock of parrots. The
parrot fell from the tree top with a broken wing. But he made a good fight of it on the ground,
biting and scratching the man several times before he was made a prisoner. You see, the man
noticed that the bird was not very badly injured; and he thought he would take it home as a
present for the farmer’s children.
The farmer’s wife put the broken wing in splints and tied a bandage tight around the parrot’s
body. The bird sat quite still for many days, until he was entirely cured. Meanwhile he had
become quite tame. The children called him Pedrito; and Pedrito learned to hold out his claw to
shake hands; he liked to perch on people’s shoulders, and to tweek their ears gently with his bill.
Pedrito did not have to be kept in a cage. He spent the whole day out in the orange and
eucalyptus trees in the yard of the farmhouse. He had a great time making sport of the hens when
they cackled. The people of the family had tea in the afternoon, and then Pedrito would always
come into the dining room and climb up with his claws and beak over the tablecloth to get his
bread-and-milk. What Pedrito liked best of all was bread dipped in tea and milk.
The children talked to Pedrito so much, and he had so much to say to them, that finally he
could pronounce quite a number of words in the language of people. He could say: “Good day,
Pedrito!” and “nice papa, nice papa”; “papa for Pedrito!” “Papa” is the word for bread-and-milk
in South America. And he said many things that he should not have; for parrots, like children,
learn naughty words very easily.
On rainy days Pedrito would sit on a chair back and grumble and grumble for hours at a time.
When the sun came out again he would begin to fly about screaming at the top of his voice with
pleasure.
Pedrito, in short, was a very happy and a very fortunate creature. He was as free as a bird can
be. At the same time he had his afternoon tea like rich people.
Now it happened that one week it rained every day and Pedrito sat indoors glum and
disconsolate all the time, and saying the most bitter and unhappy things to himself. But at last
one morning the sun came out bright and glorious. Pedrito could not contain himself: “Nice day,
nice day, Pedrito!” “Nice papa, nice papa,” “Papa for Pedrito!” “Your paw, Pedrito!” So he went
flitting about the yard, talking gayly to himself, to the hens, to everyone, including the beautiful,
splendid sun itself. From a tree top he saw the river in the distance, a silvery, shining thread
winding across the plain. And he flew off in that direction, flying, flying, flying, till he was quite
tired and had to stop on a tree to rest.
Suddenly, on the ground far under him, Pedrito saw something shining through the trees, two
bright green lights, as big as overgrown lightning bugs.
“Wonder what that is?” thought Pedrito to himself. “Nice papa! Papa for Pedrito. Wonder
what that is? Good day, Pedrito! Your paw, Pedrito!...” And he chattered on, just talking
nonsense, and mixing his words up so that you could scarcely have understood him. Meantime
he was jumping down from branch to branch to get as close as possible to the two bright
gleaming lights. At last he saw that they were the eyes of a jaguar, who was crouching low on
the ground and staring up at him intently.
But who could be afraid of anything on a nice day like that? Not Pedrito, at any rate. “Good
day, jaguar!” said he. “Nice papa! Papa for Pedrito! Your paw, Pedrito!”
The jaguar tried to make his voice as gentle as he could; but it was with a growl that he
answered: “GOOD DAY, POLL-PARROT!”
“Good day, good day, jaguar! Papa, papa, papa for Pedrito! Nice papa!”
You see, it was getting on toward four o’clock in the afternoon; and all this talk about “papa”
was intended to remind the jaguar that it was tea-time. Pedrito had forgotten that jaguars don’t
serve tea, nor bread-and-milk, as a rule.
“Nice tea, nice papa! Papa for Pedrito! Won’t you have tea with me today, jaguar?”
The jaguar began to get angry; for he thought all this chatter was intended to make fun of him.
Besides, he was very hungry, and had made up his mind to eat this garrulous bird.
“Nice bird! Nice bird!” he growled. “Please come a little closer! I’m deaf and can’t understand
what you say.”
The jaguar was not deaf. All he wanted was to get the parrot to come down one more branch,
where he could reach him with his paws. But Pedrito was thinking how pleased the children in
the family would be to see such a sleek jaguar coming in for tea. He hopped down one more
branch and began again: “Nice papa! Papa for Pedrito! Come home with me, jaguar!”
“Just a little closer!” said the jaguar. “I can’t hear!”
“Nice Bird! Nice Bird!” he growled, “Please come a little closer.”
And Pedrito edged a little nearer: “Nice papa!”
“Closer still!” growled the jaguar.
And the parrot went down still another branch. But just then the jaguar leaped high in the
air—oh, twice, three times his own length, as high as a house perhaps, and barely managed to
reach Pedrito with the tips of his claws. He did not succeed in catching the bird but he did tear
out every single feather in Pedrito’s tail.
“There!” said the jaguar, “go and get your bread-and-milk! Nice papa! Nice papa! Lucky for
you I didn’t get my paws on you!”
Terrified and smarting from pain, the parrot took to his wings. He could not fly very well,
however; for birds without a tail are much like ships without their rudders: they cannot keep to
one direction. He made the most alarming zigzags this way and that, to the right and to the left,
and up and down. All the birds who met him thought surely he had gone crazy; and took good
care to keep out of his way.
However, he got home again at last, and the people were having tea in the dining room. But
the first thing that Pedrito did was to go and look at himself in the mirror. Poor, poor Pedrito! He
was the ugliest, most ridiculous bird on earth! Not a feather to his tail! His coat of down all
ru
ffl
ed and bleeding! Shivering with chills of fright all over! How could any self-respecting bird
ap
pear in society in such disarray?
Though he would have given almost anything in the world for his usual bread-and-milk that
day, he flew off to a hollow eucalyptus tree he knew about, crawled in through a hole, and
nestled down in the dark, still shivering with cold and drooping his head and wings in shame.
In the dining room, meantime, everybody was wondering where the parrot was. “Pedrito!
Pedrito!” the children came calling to the door. “Pedrito! Papa, Pedrito. Nice papa! Papa for
Pedrito!”
But Pedrito did not say a word. Pedrito did not stir. He just sat there in his hole, sullen,
gloomy, and disconsolate. The children looked for him everywhere, but he did not appear.
Everybody thought he had gotten lost, perhaps, or that some cat had eaten him; and the little
ones began to cry.
So the days went by. And every day, at tea-time, the farmer’s family remembered Pedrito and
how he used to come and have tea with them. Poor Pedrito! Pedrito was dead! No one would
ever see Pedrito again!
But Pedrito was not dead at all. He was just a proud bird; and would have been ashamed to let
anybody see him without his tail. He waited in his hole till everybody went to bed; then he
would come out, get something to eat, and return to his hiding place again. Each morning, just
after daylight, and before anybody was up, he would go into the kitchen and look at himself in
the mirror, getting more and more bad-tempered meanwhile because his feathers grew so slowly.
Until one afternoon, when the family had gathered in the dining room for tea as usual, who
should come into the room but Pedrito! He walked in just as though nothing at all had happened,
perched for a moment on a chair back, and then climbed up the tablecloth to get his bread-andmilk. The people just laughed and wept for joy, and clapped their hands especially to see what
pretty feathers the bird had. “Pedrito! Why Pedrito! Where in the world have you been? What
happened to you? And what pretty, pretty feathers!”
You see, they did not know that they were new feathers; and Pedrito, for his part, said not a
word. He was not going to tell them anything about it. He just ate one piece of bread-and-milk
after another. “Papa, Pedrito! Nice papa! Papa for Pedrito!” Of course, he said a few things like
that. But otherwise, not a word.
That was why the farmer was very much surprised the next day when Pedrito flew down out
of a tree top and alighted on his shoulder, chattering and chattering as though he had something
very exciting on his mind. In two minutes, Pedrito told him all about it—how, in his joy at the
nice weather, he had flown down to the Parana; how he had invited the jaguar to tea; and how
the jaguar had deceived him and left his tail without a feather. “Without a feather, a single
blessed feather!” the parrot repeated, in rage at such an indignity. And he ended by asking the
fa
rm
er to go and shoot that jaguar.
It happened that they needed a new mat for the fireplace in the dining room, and the farmer
was very glad to hear there was a jaguar in the neighborhood. He went into the house to get his
gun, and then set out with Pedrito toward the river. They agreed that when Pedrito saw the jaguar
he would begin to scream to attract the beast’s attention. In that way the man could come up
close and get a good shot with his gun.
And that is just what happened. Pedrito flew up to a tree top and began to talk as noisily as he
could, meanwhile looking in all directions to see if the jaguar were about. Soon he heard some
branches crackling under the tree on the ground; and peering down he saw the two green lights
fixed upon him. “Nice day!” he began. “Nice papa! Papa for Pedrito! Your paw, Pedrito!”
The jaguar was very cross to see that this same parrot had come around again and with prettier
fe
athers than before. “You will not get away this time!” he growled to himself, glaring up at
Pedrito more fiercely than before.
“Closer! Closer! I’m deaf! I can’t hear what you say!”
And Pedrito, as he had done the other time, came down first one branch and then another,
talking all the time at the top of his voice:
“Papa for Pedrito! Nice papa! At the foot of this tree! Your paw, Pedrito! At the foot of this
tree!”
The jaguar grew suspicious at these new words, and, rising part way on his hind legs, he
growled:
“Who is that you are talking to? Why do you say I am at the foot of this tree!”
“Good day, Pedrito! Papa, papa for Pedrito!” answered the parrot; and he came down one
more branch, and still another.
“Closer, closer!” growled the jaguar.
Pedrito could see that the farmer was stealing up very stealthily with his gun. And he was glad
of that, for one more branch and he would be almost in the jaguar’s claws.
“Papa, papa for Pedrito! Nice papa! Are you almost ready?” he called.
“Closer, closer,” growled the jaguar, getting ready to spring.
“Your paw, Pedrito! He’s ready to jump! Papa, Pedrito!”
And the jaguar, in fact, leaped into the air. But this time Pedrito was ready for him. He took
lightly to his wings and flew up to the tree top far out of reach of the terrible claws. The farmer,
meanwhile, had been taking careful aim; and just as the jaguar reached the ground, there was a
loud report. Nine balls of lead as large as peas entered the heart of the jaguar, who gave one
great roar and fell over dead.
Pedrito was chattering about in great glee; because now he could fly around in the forest
without fear of being eaten; and his tail feathers would never be torn out again. The farmer, too,
was happy; because a jaguar is very hard to find anyway; and the skin of this one made a very
beautiful rug indeed.
When they got back home again, everybody learned why Pedrito had been away so long, and
how he had hidden in the hollow tree to grow his feathers back again. And the children were
very proud that their pet had trapped the jaguar so cleverly.
Thereafter there was a happy life in the farmer’s home for a long, long time. But the parrot
never forgot what the jaguar had tried to do to him. In the afternoon when tea was being served
in the dining room, he would go over to the skin lying in front of the fireplace and invite the
jaguar to have bread-and-milk with him: “Papa, nice papa! Papa for Pedrito! Papa for jaguar?
Nice papa!”
And when everybody laughed, Pedrito would laugh too.
THE BLIND DOE
Once upon a time there was a deer—a doe—who gave birth to two little deers; and, as is very
rare with such animals, the little deers were twins. However, a wildcat ate one of them; and the
second, a female, had to live her childhood without a playmate.
She was such a beautiful little creature, nevertheless, that all the mother deers in the forest
wished she belonged to them; and to show their affection they were always nipping gently at her
ribs with their lips.
Every morning when the little deer got up out of bed, her mother would make her say the
catechism which all deers learn when they are babies:
I. I must smell of each green leaf before I eat it; because some green leaves are poisonous.
II. I must stop and look carefully up and down the brook before I lower my head to drink; for
otherwise an alligator may eat me.
III. I must lift my head every half hour and sniff carefully in all directions; otherwise a panther
may steal up and catch me.
IV. I must look ahead of me when I am grazing in a meadow; otherwise a snake may bite me.
All good fawns learn this catechism by heart; and when this little deer could say it all by
herself, her mother began to let her go away from home alone.
One afternoon in summer, when the fawn was wandering over the mountain side looking for
the tenderest tufts of grass, she saw a tree with a hollow trunk in front of her. Inside it a number
of small slate-colored bags were hanging.
“What in the world is that?” said the little deer to herself. She had never seen anything of just
that kind! Now deers, like people, are inclined to be a bit disrespectful towards things they don’t
understand. Those puffy slate-colored bags seemed to her about the most ridiculous things there
was on earth! So she butted them with all her might.
She now saw that she had made a great dent in the bags, which began to drip with drops of
shining fluid. At the same time a swarm of reddish flies, with narrow waists, came out, buzzing
around and walking about, over their broken nest.
The little deer edged nearer. Curiously, those red flies did not seem to mind at all! And what
ab
out that juicy-looking stuff? Carefully, gently, the fawn stretched out her head till she was able
to touch one of the drops of fluid with the tip of her tongue.
What a surprise, what a wonderful surprise, for such a little, and such an inexperienced deer!
She smacked her lips and licked her nose with her tongue, hurrying to lap up all the drops she
could find. For they were honey, honey of the sweetest kind. And the red flies were bees! They
did not sting because they had no stingers! There are bees like that, you know, in South America.
Not content with the few drops that were slowly oozing out of the cracks in the bags, the little
deer now broke all the nests down and ate every bit of the honey in them; then, leaping and
jumping with pride and delight, she hurried home to tell her mother all about it.
But the mother deer frowned severely:
“Look out for bees’ nests, my child!” she exclaimed earnestly. “Honey is very good to eat; but
it is dangerous to get at it. Keep away from all the nests you see!”
“But bees don’t sting, mamma!” the little deer objected gleefully. “Hornets sting, and wasps
sting; but bees, no!”
“That isn’t so, my dear!” the mother answered. “You had good luck, that’s all. Bees are quite
as bad as wasps. Now mind me, child, or some day you’ll be sorry.”
“All right, mamma, I’ll be careful,” said the little deer.
But the first thing she did the very next morning was to take one of the paths that people had
made over the mountains. She had figured out that, running along in the open, she could cover
more ground and see the bees’ nests better!
And at last the search of the little deer was successful. She came upon a nest of bees—as she
thought—black ones this time, with yellow sashes about their belts; and many of them were
walking over the outside of the nest. The nest, also, was of a different color, and much larger
than the bags the little deer had found the day before. But such things made no difference to her.
“If the nest is larger,” she concluded simply, “the honey is probably sweeter and there’s more of
it!”
But then she suddenly remembered all that her mother had said. “Oh, mother is too afraid! All
mothers are too afraid!” And she finished by giving a lusty butt at the nest.
In a second or two she had bitterly repented of her folly. The “bees” were ordinary bees and
there were thousands of them. They rushed forth from the nest in a great swarm, settled all over
the head, neck, and shoulders of the little deer, and even under her belly and on her tail. And
they stung her all over, but worst of all about the eyes. There were more than ten stings to each
eye!
The little deer, wild with pain and fright, began to run screaming away. She ran and ran. But
finally she had to stop, because she could no longer see where she was going. Her eyes were all
swollen; so swollen she could not open them. Trembling with fear and smarting with pain, she
stopped where she was and began to cry piteously:
“Mamma!... Mamma!”
The mother deer was much worried when the afternoon wore on and her child did not come
home; and at last she started out to look for her, following by smell, as deers can, the tracks of
her little one over the hillsides. What was her despair when, finally, she heard the disobedient
fa
wn weeping in the distance; and how much blacker her despair became when she found that
the child was blind!
Slowly the two deers started home again, the fawn’s nose resting on her mother’s hip. And
along the road all the old bucks and does came up to examine the little one’s eyes and give their
opinions as to a cure. The mother deer did not know what to do. She had no plasters nor
poultices to soothe the pain in her child’s eyes. She learned ultimately that across the mountains
lived a man who was skillful with remedies. This man was a hunter, and traded in venison. But,
from all reports, she concluded that he was quite a kind-hearted person.
Though the doe shivered at the thought of visiting a man who made his living on the slaughter
of deer, she was willing to risk anything for her offspring. However, she had never met the man
personally, and she thought it best to ask for a letter of introduction from the Anteater, who was
supposed to be on very good terms with all the human kind.
It was night; and the panthers and wildcats were rampant through all the forest; but the mother
deer did not wait an instant. She covered her little one carefully with branches so that no one
could find her, and then made off toward the Anteater’s house. She went so fast and so far that
she was faint with fatigue when she arrived there; and once, on the road, she escaped only by
merest chance from the fangs of a mountain lion.
The Anteater was one of the smaller members of his tribe—a yellow little fellow with a black
cape thrown over his shoulders and reaching down to the waist, where it was tied under his belly
with black strings.
Just how or why the Anteater became so friendly with the hunter, no one in the forest knew;
but some day the truth will be known, doubtless.
At any rate, the poor doe arrived at the house where the Anteater lived.
“Tan! Tan! Tan!” she knocked, panting.
“Who’s that?” answered the Anteater sleepily.
“It’s me!” said the doe; though she corrected herself almost immediately, and said: “It is I—a
deer, the mother of the twins!”
“I see,” said the Anteater. “So it’s you! Well, what do you want?”
“I want you to introduce me to the hunter. The fawn, my daughter, is blind!”
“You don’t say so? That little fawn that everybody makes so much of? She’s a dear little
thing! I don’t have to be asked twice to do a favor when that child is concerned! I’ll introduce
you gladly. But you won’t need a letter. Just show the man this, and he’ll do all you ask.”
The Anteater rummaged around in the leaves for a while and at last stretched his tail out. On
the tip of it was the head of a snake, completely dried, and with the poison fangs still in it.
“Thanks ever so much,” exclaimed the doe. “But that man is a venison hunter! Do you think
this is all I need?”
“Quite!” the Anteater averred.
“You are a very kind-hearted Anteater,” the doe replied, her eyes filling with tears. But she
did not prolong the conversation. It was getting to be very late, and she had to be at the hunter’s
lodge by daybreak.
She hurried back to her house and got the fawn, who still lay there weeping in her bed.
Together they made their way toward the village where the hunter lived. They stole along very
softly, keeping close to the walls of the houses, so that the dogs would not see nor hear them.
At the door of the hunter’s cottage the mother knocked loudly:
“Tan! Tan! Tan!”
And the little deer knocked as loudly as she could.
“Ta! Ta! Ta!”
“Who’s there?” a voice called from within.
“It’s us,” said the fawn.
“It’s we,” corrected the mother. “We are friends of the Anteater, and we have the snake’s
head!”
“I see,” said the hunter opening the door. “What can I do for you?”
“My daughter, this little fawn here, is blind. Can you help her?”
And the mother deer told the whole story about her child and the bees.
“Hum!” said the man. “Just let me see what ails this nice young lady!”
Reentering the cottage, the hunter soon came back with a rather high stool, on which he set the
fa
wn in such a manner that he could examine her eyes without bending over. Then he took out a
big lens and began to look at the stings, while the mother deer stood by, holding a lantern around
her neck so that the “doctor” could see better. For the sun had not yet risen.
“Oh, there’s nothing to worry about,” the hunter said to the fond parent, helping her little one
out of the chair. “It’s only a matter of time and care. Wrap her head up, and keep a bandage with
this ointment across her eyes. Then keep her in the dark for twenty days. After that, have her
wear these yellow glasses for a week or two; and by that time she will be all right.”
“Thanks, many, many thanks,” said the mother deer warmly and gratefully. “And now, sir,
how much do I owe you?”
“Nothing at all, nothing at all, madam,” the hunter replied with a smile. “But one thing more:
look out for the dogs in the next house. A man lives there who keeps hounds especially for
chasing deer.”
At this news the mother deer and her child were so scared they hardly dared breathe; and as
they went away they walked on tiptoe, and stopped every few feet. Even at that the dogs heard
them and gave chase for nearly a mile into the forest. But the mother deer found a narrow path,
opening into the bush where the blind fawn could run quite safely; and they made good their
escape.
The little deer got well, just as the hunter had said she would; though the care and trouble it
cost the mother to keep her fawn shut up for twenty long days inside a hollow tree, she only
kn
ew. Inside there you could not have seen your hand before your face! But at last, one morning,
the mother deer brushed aside the branches she had woven across the hole in the tree so tightly
as to keep out all light; and the fawn, now with the yellow glasses on her nose, came out into the
broad day.
“Oh, I can see now, mamma, I can see all right!”
And the mother deer, to tell the truth, had to go and hide her head in a clump of bushes to
conceal the tears of joy that came to her eyes when she saw her little one cured at last. In two
weeks, the glasses were laid aside.
As time wore on, the fawn, though happy to be quite herself again, began to grow sad. She
was anxious to repay the hunter for his kindness to her; and she could think of no possible way
of doing it.
One day, however, an idea occurred to her. As she was trotting along the shore of a pond she
came upon a feather which a blue heron had let fall there. “I wonder if that good man would like
it?” she thought. And she picked it up.
Then, one night when it was raining hard and the dogs would probably be under cover, she
started out for the hunter’s cottage.
The man was reading in his bedroom, feeling quite cozy besides, for he had just completed a
thatched roof for his cabin when the rain began. Now he was quite safe and dry out of reach of
the storm.
“Tan! Tan! Tan!”
When he opened the door, the little deer, whom he had treated and of whom he had often
thought since then, was standing there in the rain, with the heron’s plume, all wet and drooping,
in her mouth.
“Here is something I have brought for you,” the fawn explained.
But the hunter began to laugh.
The little deer went off home in great shame and sorrow. She thought the man had laughed in
ridicule of her poor gift! So thereafter she went looking for a better, bigger feather to give her
benefactor; and this time she found some plumes that were truly splendid ones; and she was
careful to keep them clean and dry.
Again she went back, one night, to the hunter’s cabin; and this time he did not laugh. He was a
courteous, polite man; and he understood that, the other time, he had hurt his little friend’s
fe
elings by laughing at her. Instead, he now invited her indoors, drew the high chair up to the
table and gave her a saucerful of honey. Gobble, gobble! The little deer lapped the sweet up in
mad delight.
From that time on, the two became great friends. The fawn spent a great deal of her time
collecting heron plumes, which the man sold for a large sum of money. And every time she came
in with a feather, the hunter gave her a jar of honey; and occasionally he offered her a cigar,
which the little deer ate, but, of course, did not smoke. Smoking is bad even for deers.
Whole nights the two friends thus spent together, talking in front of the open fire, while the
wind was howling outside; for the deer made her visits only in stormy weather when dogs would
be sure not to be about. In a short time whenever the skies were dark and gave promise of a bad
night, the hunter began to expect these visits. He would light a lamp, set a jar of honey on the
table, take out a book and begin to read, waiting for the “Tan! Tan! Tan!” of the little deer, who
remained his loyal friend all her life.
THE ALLIGATOR WAR
It was a very big river in a region of South America that had never been visited by white men;
and in it lived many, many alligators—perhaps a hundred, perhaps a thousand. For dinner they
ate fish, which they caught in the stream, and for supper they ate deer and other animals that
came down to the water side to drink. On hot afternoons in summer they stretched out and
sunned themselves on the bank. But they liked nights when the moon was shining best of all.
Then they swam out into the river and sported and played, lashing the water to foam with their
tails, while the spray ran off their beautiful skins in all the colors of the rainbow.
These alligators had lived quite happy lives for a long, long time. But at last one afternoon,
when they were all sleeping on the sand, snoring and snoring, one alligator woke up and cocked
his ears—the way alligators cock their ears. He listened and listened, and, to be sure, faintly, and
from a great distance, came a sound: Chug! Chug! Chug!
“Hey!” the alligator called to the alligator sleeping next to him, “Hey! Wake up! Danger!”
“Danger of what?” asked the other, opening his eyes sleepily, and getting up.
“I don’t know!” replied the first alligator.
“That’s a noise I never heard before. Listen!”
The other alligator listened: Chug! Chug! Chug!
In great alarm the two alligators went calling up and down the river bank: “Danger! Danger!”
And all their sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts woke up and
began running this way and that with their tails curled up in the air. But the excitement did not
serve to calm their fears. Chug! Chug! Chug! The noise was growing louder every moment; and
at last, away off down the stream, they could see something moving along the surface of the
river, leaving a trail of gray smoke behind it and beating the water on either side to foam: Chush!
Ch
ush! Chush!
The alligators looked at each other in the greatest astonishment: “What on earth is that?”
But there was one old alligator, the wisest and most experienced of them all. He was so old
that only two sound teeth were left in his jaws—one in the upper jaw and one in the lower jaw.
Once, also, when he was a boy, fond of adventure, he had made a trip down the river all the way
to the sea.
“I know what it is,” said he. “It’s a whale. Whales are big fish, they shoot water up through
their noses, and it falls down on them behind.”
At this news, the little alligators began to scream at the top of their lungs, “It’s a whale! It’s a
whale! It’s a whale!” and they made for the water intending to duck out of sight.
But the big alligator cuffed with his tail a little alligator that was screaming nearby with his
mouth open wide. “Dry up!” said he. “There’s nothing to be afraid of! I know all about whales!
Whales are the afraidest people there are!” And the little alligators stopped their noise.
But they grew frightened again a moment afterwards. The gray smoke suddenly turned to an
inky black, and the Chush! Chush! Chush! was now so loud that all the alligators took to the
water, with only their eyes and the tips of their noses showing at the surface.
Ch
o-ash-h-h! Cho-ash-h-h! Cho-ash-h-h! The strange monster came rapidly up the stream.
The alligators saw it go crashing past them, belching great clouds of smoke from the middle of
its back, and splashing into the water heavily with the big revolving things it had on either side.
It was a steamer, the first steamer that had ever made its way up the Parana. Chush! Chush!
Ch
ush! It seemed to be getting further away again. Chug! Chug! Chug! It had disappeared from
view.
One by one, the alligators climbed up out of the water onto the bank again. They were all quite
cross with the old alligator who had told them wrongly that it was a whale.
“It was not a whale!” they shouted in his ear—for he was rather hard of hearing. “Well, what
was it that just went by?”
The old alligator then explained that it was a steamboat full of fire; and that the alligators
would all die if the boat continued to go up and down the river.
The other alligators only laughed, however. Why would the alligators die if the boat kept
going up and down the river? It had passed by without so much as speaking to them! That old
alligator didn’t really know so much as he pretended to! And since they were very hungry they
all went fishing in the stream. But alas! There was not a fish to be found! The steamboat had
frightened every single one of them away.
“Well, what did I tell you?” said the old alligator. “You see: we haven’t anything left to eat!
All the fish have been frightened away! However—let’s just wait till tomorrow. Perhaps the boat
won’t come back again. In that case, the fish will get over their fright and come back so that we
can eat them.” But the next day, the steamboat came crashing by again on its way back down the
river, spouting black smoke as it had done before, and setting the whole river boiling with its
paddle wheels.
“Well!” exclaimed the alligators. “What do you think of that? The boat came yesterday. The
boat came today. The boat will come tomorrow. The fish will stay away; and nothing will come
down here at night to drink. We are done for!”
But an idea occurred to one of the brighter alligators: “Let’s dam the river!” he proposed.
“The steamboat won’t be able to climb a dam!”
“That’s the talk! That’s the talk! A dam! A dam! Let’s build a dam!” And the alligators all
made for the shore as fast as they could.
They went up into the woods along the bank and began to cut down trees of the hardest wood
they could find—walnut and mahogany, mostly. They felled more than ten thousand of them
altogether, sawing the trunks through with the kind of saw that alligators have on the tops of
their tails. They dragged the trees down into the water and stood them up about a yard apart, all
the way across the river, driving the pointed ends deep into the mud and weaving the branches
together. No steamboat, big or little, would ever be able to pass that dam! No one would frighten
the fish away again! They would have a good dinner the following day and every day! And since
it was late at night by the time the dam was done, they all fell sound asleep on the river bank.
Ch
ug! Chug! Chug! Chush! Chush! Chush! Cho-ash-h-h-h! Cho-ash-h-h-h! Cho-ash-h-h-h!
They were still asleep, the next day, when the boat came up; but the alligators barely opened
their eyes and then tried to go to sleep again. What did they care about the boat? It could make
all the noise it wanted, but it would never get by the dam!
And that is what happened. Soon the noise from the boat stopped. The men who were steering
on the bridge took out their spy-glasses and began to study the strange obstruction that had been
thrown up across the river. Finally a small boat was sent to look into it more closely. Only then
did the alligators get up from where they were sleeping, run down into the water, and swim out
behind the dam, where they lay floating and looking downstream between the piles. They could
not help laughing, nevertheless, at the joke they had played on the steamboat!
The small boat came up, and the men in it saw how the alligators had made a dam across the
river. They went back to the steamer, but soon after, came rowing up toward the dam again.
“Hey, you, alligators!”
“What can we do for you?” answered the alligators, sticking their heads through between the
piles in the dam.
“That dam is in our way!” said the men.
“Tell us something we don’t know!” answered the alligators.
“But we can’t get by!”
“I’ll say so!”
“Well, take the old thing out of the way!”
“Nosireesir!”
The men in the boat talked it over for a while and then they called:
“Alligators!”
“What can we do for you?”
“Will you take the dam away?”
“No!”
“No?”
“No!”
“Very well! See you later!”
“The later the better,” said the alligators.
The rowboat went back to the steamer, while the alligators, as happy as could be, clapped their
tails as loud as they could on the water. No boat could ever get by that dam, and drive the fish
away again!
But the next day the steamboat returned; and when the alligators looked at it, they could not
say a word from their surprise: it was not the same boat at all, but a larger one, painted gray like
a mouse! How many steamboats were there, anyway? And this one probably would want to pass
the dam! Well, just let it try! No, sir! No steamboat, little or big, would ever get through that
dam!
“They shall not pass!” said the alligators, each taking up his station behind the piles in the
dam.
The new boat, like the other one, stopped some distance below the dam; and again a little boat
came rowing toward them. This time there were eight sailors in it, with one officer. The officer
shouted:
“Hey, you, alligators!”
“What’s the matter?” answered the alligators.
“Going to get that dam out of there?”
“No!”
“No?”
“No!”
“Very well!” said the officer. “In that case, we shall have to shoot it down!”
“Shoot it up if you want to!” said the alligators.
And the boat returned to the steamer.
But now, this mouse-gray steamboat was not an ordinary steamboat: it was a warship, with
armor plate and terribly powerful guns. The old alligator who had made the trip to the river
mouth suddenly remembered, and just in time to shout to the other alligators: “Duck for your
lives! Duck! She’s going to shoot! Keep down deep under water.”
The alligators dived all at the same time, and headed for the shore, where they halted, keeping
all their bodies out of sight except for their noses and their eyes. A great cloud of flame and
smoke burst from the vessel’s side, followed by a deafening report. An immense solid shot
hurtled through the air and struck the dam exactly in the middle. Two or three tree trunks were
cut away into splinters and drifted off downstream. Another shot, a third, and finally a fourth,
each tearing a great hole in the dam. Finally the piles were entirely destroyed; not a tree, not a
splinter, not a piece of bark, was left; and the alligators, still sitting with their eyes and noses just
out of water, saw the warship come steaming by and blowing its whistle in derision at them.
Then the alligators came out on the bank and held a council of war. “Our dam was not strong
enough,” said they; “we must make a new and much thicker one.”
So they worked again all that afternoon and night, cutting down the very biggest trees they
could find, and making a much better dam than they had built before. When the gunboat
ap
peared the next day, they were sleeping soundly and had to hurry to get behind the piles of the
dam by the time the rowboat arrived there.
“Hey, alligators!” called the same officer.
“See who’s here again!” said the alligators, jeeringly.
“Get that new dam out of there!”
“Never in the world!”
“Well, we’ll blow it up, the way we did the other!”
“Blaze away, and good luck to you!”
You see, the alligators talked so big because they were sure the dam they had made this time
would hold up against the most terrible cannon balls in the world. And the sailors must have
thought so, too; for after they had fired the first shot a tremendous explosion occurred in the
dam. The gunboat was using shells, which burst among the timbers of the dam and broke the
thickest trees into tiny, tiny bits. A second shell exploded right near the first, and a third near the
second. So the shots went all along the dam, each tearing away a long strip of it till nothing,
nothing, nothing was left. Again the warship came steaming by, closer in toward shore on this
occasion, so that the sailors could make fun of the alligators by putting their hands to their
mouths and holloing.
“So that’s it!” said the alligators, climbing up out of the water. “We must all die, because the
steamboats will keep coming and going, up and down, and leaving us not a fish in the world to
eat!”
The littlest alligators were already whimpering; for they had had no dinner for three days; and
it was a crowd of very sad alligators that gathered on the river shore to hear what the old
alligator now had to say.
“We have only one hope left,” he began. “We must go and see the Sturgeon! When I was a
boy, I took that trip down to the sea along with him. He liked the salt water better than I did, and
went quite a way out into the ocean. There he saw a sea fight between two of these boats; and he
brought home a torpedo that had failed to explode. Suppose we go and ask him to give it to us. It
is true the Sturgeon has never liked us alligators; but I got along with him pretty well myself. He
is a good fellow, at bottom, and surely he will not want to see us all starve!”
The fact was that some years before an alligator had eaten one of the Sturgeon’s favorite
grandchildren; and for that reason the Sturgeon had refused ever since to call on the alligators or
receive visits from them. Nevertheless, the alligators now trouped off in a body to the big cave
under the bank of the river where they knew the Sturgeon stayed, with his torpedo beside him.
There are sturgeons as much as six feet long, you know, and this one with the torpedo was of
that kind.
“Mr. Sturgeon! Mr. Sturgeon!” called the alligators at the entrance of the cave. No one of
them dared go in, you see, on account of that matter of the sturgeon’s grandchild.
“Who is it?” answered the Sturgeon.
“We’re the alligators,” the latter replied in a chorus.
“I have nothing to do with alligators,” grumbled the Sturgeon crossly.
But now the old alligator with the two teeth stepped forward and said:
“Why, hello, Sturgy. Don’t you remember Ally, your old friend that took that trip down the
river, when we were boys?”
“Well, well! Where have you been keeping yourself all these years,” said the Sturgeon,
surprised and pleased to hear his old friend’s voice. “Sorry I didn’t know it was you! How goes
it? What can I do for you?”
“We’ve come to ask you for that torpedo you found, remember? You see, there’s a warship
keeps coming up and down our river scaring all the fish away. She’s a whopper, I’ll tell you,
armor plate, guns, the whole thing! We made one dam and she knocked it down. We made
another and she blew it up. The fish have all gone away and we haven’t had a bite to eat in near
onto a week. Now you give us your torpedo and we’ll do the rest!”
The Sturgeon sat thinking for a long time, scratching his chin with one of his fins. At last he
answered:
“As for the torpedo, all right! You can have it in spite of what you did to my eldest son’s firstborn. But there’s one trouble: who knows how to work the thing?”
The alligators were all silent. Not one of them had ever seen a torpedo.
“Well,” said the Sturgeon, proudly, “I can see I’ll have to go with you myself. I’ve lived next
to that torpedo a long time. I know all about torpedoes.”
The first task was to bring the torpedo down to the dam. The alligators got into line, the one
behind taking in his mouth the tail of the one in front. When the line was formed it was fully a
qu
arter of a mile long. The Sturgeon pushed the torpedo out into the current, and got under it so
as to hold it up near the top of the water on his back. Then he took the tail of the last alligator in
his teeth, and gave the signal to go ahead. The Sturgeon kept the torpedo afloat, while the
alligators towed him along. In this way they went so fast that a wide wake followed on after the
torpedo; and by the next morning they were back at the place where the dam was made.
As the little alligators who had stayed at home reported, the warship had already gone by
up
stream. But this pleased the others all the more. Now they would build a new dam, stronger
than ever before, and catch the steamer in a trap, so that it would never get home again.
They worked all that day and all the next night, making a thick, almost solid dike, with barely
enough room between the piles for the alligators to stick their heads through. They had just
finished when the gunboat came into view.
Again the rowboat approached with the eight men and their officer. The alligators crowded
behind the dam in great excitement, moving their paws to hold their own with the current; for
this time, they were downstream.
“Hey, alligators!” called the officer.
“Well?” answered the alligators.
“Still another dam?”
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again!”
“Get that dam out of there!”
“No, sir!”
“You won’t?”
“We won’t!”
“Very well! Now you alligators just listen! If you won’t be reasonable, we are going to knock
this dam down, too. But to save you the trouble of building a fourth, we are going to shoot every
blessed alligator around here. Yes, every single last alligator, women and children, big ones,
little ones, fat ones, lean ones, and even that old codger sitting there with only two teeth left in
his jaws!”
The old alligator understood that the officer was trying to insult him with that reference to his
two teeth, and he answered:
“Young man, what you say is true. I have only two teeth left, not counting one or two others
that are broken off. But do you know what those two teeth are going to eat for dinner?” As he
said this the old alligator opened his mouth wide, wide, wide.
“Well, what are they going to eat?” asked one of the sailors.
“A little dude of a naval officer I see in a boat over there!”—and the old alligator dived under
water and disappeared from view.
Meantime the Sturgeon had brought the torpedo to the very center of the dam, where four
alligators were holding it fast to the river bottom waiting for orders to bring it up to the top of the
water. The other alligators had gathered along the shore, with their noses and eyes alone in sight
as usual.
The rowboat went back to the ship. When he saw the men climbing aboard, the Sturgeon went
down to his torpedo.
Suddenly there was a loud detonation. The warship had begun firing, and the first shell struck
and exploded in the middle of the dam. A great gap opened in it.
“Now! Now!” called the Sturgeon sharply, on seeing that there was room for the torpedo to go
through. “Let her go! Let her go!”
As the torpedo came to the surface, the Sturgeon steered it to the opening in the dam, took aim
hurriedly with one eye closed, and pulled at the trigger of the torpedo with his teeth. The
propeller of the torpedo began to revolve, and it started off upstream toward the gunboat.
And it was high time. At that instant a second shot exploded in the dam, tearing away another
large section.
From the wake the torpedo left behind it in the water the men on the vessel saw the danger
they were in, but it was too late to do anything about it. The torpedo struck the ship in the
middle, and went off.
You can never guess the terrible noise that torpedo made. It blew the warship into fifteen
thousand million pieces, tossing guns, and smokestacks, and shells and rowboats—everything,
hundreds and hundreds of yards away.
The alligators all screamed with triumph and made as fast as they could for the dam. Down
through the opening bits of wood came floating, with a number of sailors swimming as hard as
they could for the shore. As the men passed through, the alligators put their paws to their mouths
and holloed, as the men had done to them three days before. They decided not to eat a single one
of the sailors, though some of them deserved it without a doubt. Except that when a man dressed
in a blue uniform with gold braid came by, the old alligator jumped into the water off the dam,
and snap! snap! ate him in two mouthfuls.
“Who was that man?” asked an ignorant young alligator, who never learned his lessons in
school and never knew what was going on.
“It’s the officer of the boat,” answered the Sturgeon. “My old friend, Ally, said he was going
to eat him, and eaten him he has!”
The alligators tore down the rest of the dam, because they knew that no boats would be
coming by that way again.
The Sturgeon, who had quite fallen in love with the gold lace of the officer, asked that it be
given him in payment for the use of his torpedo. The alligators said he might have it for the
trouble of picking it out of the old alligator’s mouth, where it had caught on the two teeth. They
gave him also the officer’s belt and sword. The Sturgeon put the belt on just behind his front
fins, and buckled the sword to it. Thus togged out, he swam up and down for more than an hour
in front of the assembled alligators, who admired his beautiful spotted skin as something almost
as pretty as the coral snake’s, and who opened their mouths wide at the splendor of his uniform.
Finally they escorted him in honor back to his cave under the river bank, thanking him over and
over again, and giving him three cheers as they went off.
When they returned to their usual place they found the fish had already returned. The next day
another steamboat came by; but the alligators did not care, because the fish were getting used to
it by this time and seemed not to be afraid. Since then the boats have been going back and forth
all the time, carrying oranges. And the alligators open their eyes when they hear the chug! chug!
chug! of a steamboat and laugh at the thought of how scared they were the first time, and of how
they sank the warship.
But no warship has ever gone up the river since the old alligator ate the officer.
HOW THE FLAMINGOES GOT THEIR STOCKINGS
Once the snakes decided that they would give a costume ball; and to make the affair a truly
brilliant one they sent invitations to the frogs, the toads, the alligators and the fish.
The fish replied that since they had no legs they would not be able to do much dancing;
whereupon, as a special courtesy to them, the ball was held on the shore of the Parana. The fish
swam up to the very beach and sat looking on with their heads out of water. When anything
pleased them they splashed with their tails.
To make as good an appearance as possible, the alligators put necklaces of bananas around
their throats; and they came to the ball smoking big Paraguay cigars. The toads stuck fish scales
all over their bodies; and when they walked, they moved their forelegs out and in as though they
were swimming. They strutted up and down the beach with very glum, determined faces; and the
fish kept calling to them, making fun of their scales. The frogs were satisfied to leave their
smooth green skins just as they were; but they bathed themselves in perfume and walked on their
hind legs. Besides, each one carried a lightning bug, which waved to and fro like a lantern, at the
end of a string in the frog’s hand.
But the best costumes of all were worn by the snakes. All of them, without exception, had
dancing gowns of the color of their skins. There were red snakes, and brown snakes, and pink
snakes, and yellow snakes—each with a garment of tulle to match. The yarara, who is a kind of
rattler, came in a single-piece robe of gray tulle with brick-colored stripes—for that is the way
the yarara dresses even when he is not going to a ball. The coral snakes were prettier still. They
draped themselves in a gauze of reds, whites and blacks; and when they danced, they wound
themselves round and round like corkscrews, rising on the tips of their tails, coiling and
uncoiling, balancing this way and that. They were the most graceful and beautiful of all the
snakes, and the guests applauded them wildly.
The flamingoes were the only ones who seemed not to be having a good time. Stupid birds
that they were, they had not thought of any costumes at all. They came with the plain white legs
they had at that time and the thick, twisted bills they have even now. Naturally they were
envious of all the gowns they saw, but most of all, of the fancy dress of the coral snakes. Every
time one of these went by them, courtesying, pirouetting, balancing, the flamingoes writhed with
jealousy. For no one, meanwhile, was asking them to dance.
“I know what we must do,” said one of the flamingoes at last. “We must go and get some
stockings for our legs—pink, black and white like the coral snakes themselves—then they will
all fall in love with us!”
The whole flock of them took wing immediately and flew across the river to a village nearby.
They went to the store and knocked:
“Tan! Tan! Tan!”
“Who is it?” called the storekeeper.
“We’re the flamingoes. We have come to get some stockings—pink, black, and white.”
“Are you crazy?” the storekeeper answered. “I keep stockings for people, not for silly birds.
Besides, stockings of such colors! You won’t find any in town, either!”
The flamingoes went on to another store:
“Tan! Tan! Tan! We are looking for stockings—pink, black and white. Have you any?”
“Pink, black and white stockings! Don’t you know decent people don’t wear such things? You
must be crazy! Who are you, anyway?”
“We are the flamingoes,” the flamingoes replied.
“In that case you are silly flamingoes! Better go somewhere else!”
They went to still a third store:
“Tan! Tan! Pink, black and white stockings! Got any?”
“Pink, black and white nonsense!” called the storekeeper. “Only birds with big noses like
yours could ask for such a thing. Don’t make tracks on my floor!”
And the man swept them into the street with a broom.
So the flamingoes went from store to store, and everywhere people called them silly, stupid
birds.
However, an owl, a mischievous tatu, who had just been down to the river to get some water,
and had heard all about the ball and the flamingoes, met them on his way back and thought he
would have some fun with them.
“Good evening, good evening, flamingoes,” he said, making a deep bow, though, of course, it
was just to ridicule the foolish birds. “I know what you are looking for. I doubt if you can get
any such stockings in town. You might find them in Buenos Aires; but you would have to order
them by mail. My sister-in-law, the barn owl, has stockings like that, however. Why don’t you
go around and see her? She can give you her own and borrow others from her family.”
“Thanks! Thanks, ever so much!” said the flamingoes; and they flew off to the cellar of a barn
where the barn owl lived.
“Tan! Tan! Good evening, Mrs. Owl,” they said. “A relation of yours, Mr. Tatu, advised us to
call on you. Tonight, as you know, the snakes are giving a costume ball, and we have no
costumes. If you could lend us your pink, black and white stockings, the coral snakes would be
sure to fall in love with us!”
“Pleased to accommodate you,” said the barn owl. “Will you wait just a moment?”
She flew away and was gone some time. When she came back she had the stockings with her.
But they were not real stockings. They were nothing but skins from coral snakes which the owl
had caught and eaten during the previous days.
“Perhaps these will do,” she remarked. “But if you wear them at the ball, I advise you to do
strictly as I say: dance all night long, and don’t stop a moment. For if you do, you will get into
trouble, I assure you!”
The flamingoes listened to what she said; but, stupidly, did not try to guess what she could
have meant by such counsel. They saw no danger in the pretty stockings. Delightedly they
doubled up their claws like fists, stuck them through the snakeskins, which were like so many
long rubber tubes, and flew back as quickly as they could to the ball.
When the guests at the dance saw the flamingoes in such handsome stockings, they were as
jealous as could be. You see, the coral snakes were the lions of the evening, and after the
flamingoes came back, they would dance with no one but the flamingoes. Remembering the
instructions of the barn owl, the flamingoes kept their feet going all the time, and the snakes
could not see very clearly just what those wonderful stockings were.
After a time, however, they grew suspicious. When a flamingo came dancing by, the snakes
would get down off the ends of their tails to examine its feet more closely. The coral snakes,
more than anybody else, began to get uneasy. They could not take their eyes off those stockings,
and they got as near as they could, trying to touch the legs of the flamingoes with the tips of their
tongues—for snakes use their tongues to feel with, much as people use their hands. But the
flamingoes kept dancing and dancing all the while, though by this time they were getting so tired
they were about ready to give up.
The coral snakes understood that sooner or later the flamingoes would have to stop. So they
borrowed the lightning bugs from the frogs, to be ready when the flamingoes fell from sheer
exhaustion.
And in fact, it was not long before one of the birds, all tired out, tripped over the cigar in an
alligator’s mouth, and fell down on her side. The coral snakes all ran toward her with their
lanterns, and held the lightning bugs up so close that they could see the feet of the flamingo as
clearly as could be.
“Aha! Aha! Stockings, eh? Stockings, eh?” The coral snakes began to hiss so loudly that
people could hear them on the other side of the Parana.
The cry was taken up by all the snakes: “They are not wearing stockings! We know what they
have done! The flamingoes have been killing brothers of ours, and they are wearing their skins
as stockings! Those pretty legs each stand for the murder of a coral snake!”
At this uproar, the flamingoes took fright and tried to fly away. But they were so tired from all
the dancing that not one of them could move a wing. The coral snakes darted upon them, and
began to bite at their legs, tearing off the false stockings bit by bit, and, in their rage, sinking
their fangs deep into the feet and legs of the flamingoes.
The flamingoes, terrified and mad with pain, hopped this way and that, trying to shake their
enemies off. But the snakes did not let go till every last shred of stocking had been torn away.
Then they crawled off, to rearrange their gauze costumes that had been much rumpled in the
fray. They did not try to kill the flamingoes then and there; for most coral snakes are poisonous;
and they were sure the birds they had bitten would die sooner or later anyway.
But the flamingoes did not die. They hopped down to the river and waded out into the water to
relieve their pain. Their feet and legs, which had been white before, had now turned red from the
poison in the bites. They stood there for days and days, trying to cool the burning ache, and
hoping to wash out the red.
“The flamingoes ... hopped down to the river, and waded out ... to relieve their pain.”
But they did not succeed. And they have not succeeded yet. The flamingoes still pass most of
their time standing on their red legs out in the water. Occasionally they go ashore and walk up
and down for a few moments to see if they are getting well. But the pain comes again at once,
and they hurry back into the water. Even there they sometimes feel an ache in one of their feet;
and they lift it out to warm it in their feathers. They stand that way on one leg for hours, I
suppose because the other one is so stiff and lame.
That is why the flamingoes have red legs instead of white. And the fishes know it too. They
keep coming up to the top of the water and crying “Red legs! Red legs! Red legs!” to make fun
of the flamingoes for having tried to borrow costumes for a ball. On that account, the flamingoes
are always at war with the fishes. As they wade up and down, and a fish comes up too close in
order to shout “Red legs” at them, they dip their long bills down and catch it if they can.
THE LAZY BEE
In a beehive once there was a bee who would not work. She would go flying from blossom to
blossom on the orange trees sucking out all the honey. But instead of taking it back to the hive
she would eat it then and there.
She was a lazy bee. Every morning, the moment the sun had warmed the hive, she would
come to the door and look out. On making sure that it was a lovely day, she would wash her face
and comb her hair with her paws, the way flies do, and then go flitting off, as pleased as could be
at the bright weather. So she would go buzzing and buzzing from flower to flower; and then after
a time she would go back and see what the other bees were doing in the hive. So it would go on
all day long.
Meantime the other bees would be working themselves to death trying to fill the hive full of
honey; for honey is what they give the little bees to eat as soon as they are born. And these
worker bees, very staid, respectable, earnest bees, began to scowl at the conduct of this shirker of
a sister they had.
You must know that, at the door of every beehive, there are always a number of bees on
watch, to see that no insects but bees get into the hive. These policemen, as a rule, are old bees,
with a great deal of experience in life. Their backs are quite bald, because all the hair gets worn
off from rubbing against the hive as they walk in and out of the door.
One day when the lazy bee was just dropping in to see what was going on in the hive, these
policemen called her to one side:
“Sister,” said they, “it is time you did a little work. All us bees have to work!”
The little bee was quite scared when the policemen spoke to her, but she answered:
“I go flying about all day long, and get very tired!”
“We didn’t ask you how tired you got! We want to see how much work you can do! This is
Warning Number 1!”
And they let her go on into the hive.
But the lazy little bee did not mend her ways. On the next evening the policemen stopped her
again:
“Sister, we didn’t see you working today!”
The little bee was expecting something of the kind, and she had been thinking up what she
would say all the way home.
“I’ll go to work one of these days,” she spoke up promptly; and with a cheerful, winsome
smile.
“We don’t want you to go to work one of these days,” they answered gruffly. “We want you to
go to work tomorrow morning. This is Warning Number 2!”
And they let her in.
The following night, when the lazy bee came home, she did not wait for the policemen to stop
her. She went up to them sorrowfully and said:
“Yes, yes! I remember what I promised. I’m so sorry I wasn’t able to work today!”
“We didn’t ask how sorry you were, nor what you had promised. What we want from you is
work. Today is the nineteenth of April. Tomorrow will be the twentieth of April. See to it that
the twentieth of April does not pass without your putting at least one load of honey into the hive.
This is Warning Number 3! You may enter!”
And the policemen who had been blocking the door stepped aside to let her in.
The lazy bee woke up with very good intentions the next morning; but the sun was so warm
and bright and the flowers were so beautiful! The day passed the same as all the others; except
that toward evening the weather changed. The sun went down behind a great bank of clouds and
a strong icy wind began to blow.
The lazy little bee started for home as fast as she could, thinking how warm and cozy it would
be inside the hive, with all that storm blowing out of doors. But on the porch of the beehive the
policemen got in front of her.
“Where are you going, young lady?” said they.
“I am going in to bed. This is where I live!”
“You must be mistaken,” said the policemen. “Only busy worker bees live here! Lazy bees are
not allowed inside this door!”
“Tomorrow, surely, surely, surely, I am going to work,” said the little bee.
“There is no tomorrow for lazy bees,” said the policemen; for they were old, wise bees, and
kn
ew philosophy. “Away with you!” And they pushed her off the doorstep.
The little bee did not know what to do. She flew around for a time; but soon it began to grow
dark; the wind blew colder and colder, and drops of rain began to fall. Quite tired at last, she
took hold of a leaf, intending to rest a moment; but she was chilled and numbed by the cold. She
could not hang on, and fell a long distance to the ground.
She tried to get to her wings again, but they were too tired to work. So she started crawling
over the ground toward the hive. Every stone, every stick she met, she had to climb over with
great effort—so many hills and mountains they seemed to such a tiny bee. The raindrops were
coming faster when, almost dead with cold and fright and fatigue, she arrived at the door of the
hive.
“Oh, oh,” she moaned. “I am cold, and it is going to rain! I shall be sure to die out here!” And
she crept up to the door.
But the fierce policemen again stopped her from going in.
“Forgive me, sisters,” the little bee said. “Please, let me go in!”
“Too late! Too late!” they answered.
“Please, sisters, I am so sleepy!” said the little bee.
“Too late! Too late!” said they.
“Please, sisters, I am cold!” said the little bee.
“Sorry! You can’t go in!” said they.
“Please, sisters, for one last time! I shall die out here!”
“You won’t die, lazy bee! One night will teach you the value of a warm bed earned by honest
labor! Away from here!”
And they pushed her off the doorstep again.
By this time it was raining hard. The little bee felt her wings and fur getting wetter and wetter;
and she was so cold and sleepy she did not know what to do. She crawled along as fast as she
could over the ground, hoping to come to some place where it was dry and not so cold. At last
she came to a tree and began to walk up the trunk. Suddenly, just as she had come to the crotch
of two branches, she fell! She fell a long, long distance and landed finally on something soft.
There was no wind and no rain blowing. On coming to her wits the little bee understood that she
had fallen down through a hole inside a hollow tree.
And now the little bee had the fright of her life. Coiled up near her there was a snake, a green
snake with a brick-colored back. That hollow tree was the snake’s house; and the snake lay there
looking at her with eyes that shone even in that darkness. Now, snakes eat bees, and like them.
So when this little bee found herself so close to a fearful enemy of her kind, she just closed her
eyes and murmured to herself:
“This is the last of me! Oh, how I wish I had worked!”
To her great surprise, however, the snake not only did not eat her, but spoke to her rather
softly for such a terrible snake:
“How do you do, little bee? You must be a naughty little bee, to be out so late at night!”
“Yes,” she murmured, her heart in her throat. “I have been a naughty bee. I did not work, and
they won’t let me in to go to my bed!”
“In that case, I shall not be so sorry to eat you!” answered the snake. “Surely there can be no
harm at all in depriving the world of a useless little bee like you! I won’t have to go out for
dinner tonight. I shall eat you right here!”
The little bee was about as scared as a bee can be.
“That is not fair,” she said. “It is not just! You have no right to eat me just because you are
bigger than I am. Go and ask people if that isn’t so! People know what is right and wrong!”
“Ah, ah!” said the snake, lifting his head higher, “so you have a good opinion of men? So you
think that the men who steal your honey are more honest than snakes who eat you? You are not
only a lazy bee. You are also a silly one!”
“It is not because men are dishonest that they take our honey,” said the bee.
“Why is it then?” said the snake.
“It’s because they are more intelligent than we are!” That is what the bee said; but the snake
just laughed; and then he hissed:
“Well, if you must have it that way, it’s because I’m more intelligent than you that I’m going
to eat you now! Get ready to be eaten, lazy bee!”
And the snake drew back to strike, and lap up the bee at one gobble.
But the little bee had time to say:
“It’s because you’re duller than I am that you eat me!”
“Duller than you?” asked the snake, letting his head down again. “How is that, stupid?”
“However it is, it’s so!”
“I’ll have to be shown!” said the snake. “I will make a bargain with you. We will each do a
trick; and the cleverest trick wins. If I win, I’ll eat you!”
“And if I win?” asked the little bee.
“If you win,” said the snake after some thought, “you may stay in here where it is warm all
night. Is it a bargain?”
“It is,” said the bee.
The snake considered another moment or so and then began to laugh. He had thought of
something a bee could not possibly do. He darted out of a hole in the tree so quickly the bee had
scarcely time to wonder what he was up to; and just as quickly he came back with a seed pod
from the eucalyptus tree that stood near the beehive and shaded it on days when the sun was hot.
Now the seed pods of the eucalyptus tree are just the shape of a top; in fact, the boys and girls in
Argentina call them “tops”—trompitos!
“Now you just watch and see what I’m a-going to do,” said the snake. “Watch now!
Watch!...”
The snake wound the thin part of his tail around the top like a string; then, with a jump
fo
rw
ard to his full length, he straightened his tail out. The “top” began to spin like mad on the
bark floor there at the bottom of the hollow tree; and it spun and spun and spun, dancing,
jumping, running off in this direction and then in that direction. And the snake laughed! And he
laughed and he laughed and he laughed! No bee would ever be able to do a thing like that!
Finally the top got tired of spinning and fell over on its side.
“That is very clever!” said the bee, “I could never do that!”
“In that case, I shall have to eat you!” said the snake.
“Not just yet, please,” said the bee. “I can’t spin a top; but I can do something no one else can
do!”
“What is that?” asked the snake.
“I can disappear!” said the bee.
“What do you mean, disappear?” said the snake, with some interest. “Disappear so that I can’t
see you and without going away from here?”
“Without going away from here!”
“Without hiding in the ground?”
“Without hiding in the ground!”
“I give up!” said the snake. “Disappear! But if you don’t do as you say, I eat you, gobble,
gobble, just like that!”
Now you must know that while the top was spinning round and round, the little bee had
noticed something on the floor of the hollow tree she had not seen before: it was a little shrub,
three or four inches high, with leaves about the size of a fifty-cent piece. She now walked over to
the stem of this little shrub, taking care, however, not to touch it with her body. Then she said:
“Now it is my turn, Mr. Snake. Won’t you be so kind as to turn around, and count ‘one,’
‘two,’ ‘three.’ At the word ‘three,’ you can look for me everywhere! I simply won’t be around!”
The snake looked the other way and ran off a “onetathree,” then turning around with his
mouth wide open to have his dinner at last. You see, he counted so fast just to give the bee as
little time as possible, under the contract they had made.
But if he opened his mouth wide for his dinner, he held it open in complete surprise. There
was no bee to be found anywhere! He looked on the floor. He looked on the sides of the hollow
tree. He looked in each nook and cranny. He looked the little shrub all over. Nothing! The bee
had simply disappeared!
Now, the snake understood that if his trick of spinning the top with his tail was extraordinary,
this trick of the bee was almost miraculous. Where had that good-for-nothing lazybones gone to?
Here? No! There? No! Where then? Nowhere! There was no way to find the little bee!
“Well,” said the snake at last, “I give up! Where are you?”
A little voice seemed to come from a long way off, but still from the middle of the space
inside the hollow tree.
“You won’t eat me if I reappear?” it said.
“No, I won’t eat you!” said the snake.
“Promise?”
“I promise! But where are you?”
“Here I am,” said the bee, coming out on one of the leaves of the little shrub.
It was not such a great mystery after all. That shrub was a Sensitive-plant, a plant that is very
common in South America, especially in the North of the Republic of Argentina, where
Sensitive-plants grow to quite a good size. The peculiarity of the Sensitive-plant is that it
shrivels up its leaves at the slightest contact. The leaves of this shrub were unusually large, as is
true of the Sensitive-plants around the city of Misiones. You see, the moment the bee lighted on
a leaf, it folded up tight about her, hiding her completely from view. Now, the snake had been
living next to that plant all the season long, and had never noticed anything unusual about it. The
little bee had paid attention to such things, however; and her knowledge this time had saved her
life.
The snake was very much ashamed at being bested by such a little bee; and he was not very
nice about it either. So much so, in fact, that the bee spent most of the night reminding him of the
promise he had made not to eat her.
And it was a long, endless night for the little bee. She sat on the floor in one corner and the
snake coiled up in the other corner opposite. Pretty soon it began to rain so hard that the water
came pouring in through the hole at the top of the tree and made quite a puddle on the floor. The
bee sat there and shivered and shivered; and every so often the snake would raise his head as
though to swallow her at one gulp. “You promised! You promised! You promised!” And the
snake would lower his head, sheepishlike, because he did not want the bee to think him a
dishonest, as well as a stupid snake.
The little bee, who had been used to a warm hive at home and to warm sunlight out of doors,
had never dreamed there could be so much cold anywhere as there was in that hollow tree. Nor
had there ever been a night so long!
But the moment there was a trace of daylight at the hole in the top of the tree, the bee bade the
snake good-by and crawled out. She tried her wings; and this time they worked all right. She
flew in a bee-line straight for the door of the hive.
The policemen were standing there and she began to cry. But they simply stepped aside
without saying a word, and let her in. They understood, you see, as wise old bees, that this
wayward child was not the lazy bee they had driven away the evening before, but a sadder and
wiser child who now knew something about the world she had to live in.
And they were right. Never before was there such a bee for working from morning till night,
day in, day out, gathering pollen and honey from the flowers. When Autumn came she was the
most respected bee in the hive and she was appointed teacher of the young bees who would do
the work the following year. And her first lesson was something like this:
“It is not because bees are intelligent but because they work that makes them such wonderful
little things. I used my intelligence only once—and that was to save my life. I should not have
gotten into that trouble, however, if I had worked, like all the other bees. I used to waste my
strength just flying around doing nothing. I should not have been any more tired if I had worked.
What I needed was a sense of duty; and I got it that night I spent with the snake in the hollow
tree.
“Work, my little bees, work!—remembering that what we are all working for, the happiness of
everybody, will be hard enough to get if each of us does his full duty. This is what people say,
and it is just as true of bees. Work well and faithfully and you will be happy. There is no sounder
philosophy for a man or for a bee!”
THE GIANT TORTOISE’S GOLDEN RULE
Once there was a man who lived in Buenos Aires and was a friend of the superintendent of the
Zoo. This man had a very happy life, because he worked hard and enjoyed good health. But one
day he fell ill, and the doctors told him he would never get well unless he left town and went to
live in the country where there was good air and a warm climate. The man could not think of
such a thing, however. He had five little brothers, and both his parents were dead. He had to
provide the little boys with food and clothes, and get them ready for school in the morning. Who
would care for them, if he went away? So he kept on with his work and his illness grew worse
and worse.
One day a man from the Zoo met him on the street and said:
“You ought to go and live an out-of-door life for a while. Now, I have an idea. We need a
collection of new specimens for our museum, and you are a good shot with a gun. Wouldn’t you
like to go up into the Andes and hunt for us? I will pay for your outfit, and get a woman to look
after your little brothers. It will not cost you very much, and there will be plenty of money left
fo
r the boys.”
The sick man gladly accepted. He went off to the mountains, many, many miles beyond
Misiones, where he camped in the open air and soon began to get better.
He lived quite by himself, doing his own cooking, washing his own clothes, and making his
own bed, which was a bag with blankets in it. He did not use a tent, but slept in the bag out under
the stars. When it rained he would throw up a shelter of branches, cover it with his waterproof,
and sit down all cozy underneath, till the storm cleared. He ate partridges and venison, with the
berries and wild fruits he found along the mountains. Whenever he saw some rare animal that the
Zoo would want, he shot it, and dried its skin in the sun. In course of time, he made a big bundle
of such skins, which he carried on his shoulder whenever he moved his camp to a new place.
Many beautifully spotted snakes he was able to catch alive; and these he kept in a big hollow
gourd—for in South America wild squashes and pumpkins grow till they are as large as gasoline
cans.
All this was very hard work but the man grew strong and healthy again. And what an appetite
he had when supper time came around! One day when his provisions were getting low, he went
out hunting with his gun. Soon he came to a wide lake, and what should he see on the shore but a
huge panther that had caught a tortoise! The fierce animal had drawn the turtle up out of the
water and was clawing between the two shells trying to scratch the meat out. As the man
ap
proached, the panther turned and, with a great roar, leaped toward him. The panther was not
qu
ick enough, however, for a bullet from the man’s rifle caught him between the eyes and laid
him low in his tracks.
“What a wonderful rug this skin will make for somebody!” the man exclaimed; and he
carefully removed the hide and rolled it up to take home.
“I think I will have turtle soup for supper tonight,” the man continued as he turned toward the
tortoise; for turtle-flesh is one of the richest and sweetest of all meats.
But he could not help feeling very sorry for the poor turtle when he saw what a plight she was
in. The panther’s claws had torn the flesh terribly; and a great gash in her throat had all but left
her head severed from the rest of the body. Instead of killing the wounded turtle the hunter
thought he would try to cure her of her hurts.
“He could not help feeling sorry for the poor turtle....”
The camp was some distance away and the man was very tired. Besides, when he tried to lift
the tortoise, he found she weighed nearly two hundred pounds. Finally he put a rope around her,
and pulled and hauled till he dragged her along over the grass back to the camp.
The man had no extra pieces of cloth to make a bandage with, so he cut off a piece of his shirt
and took the lining out of his coat. Finally he managed to bind up the tortoise’s throat and stop
the bleeding. Then he pushed her into a corner of the shelter, where she lay motionless for days
and days. Twice a day the man would come and wash the wound with water and liniment. When
he thought the cut had healed, he took off the wrapping and the tortoise drew her head into her
shell. The man kept visiting her every morning, however, tapping gently on the turtle’s back to
wake her up.
The tortoise got entirely well; but then something terrible happened. The man caught a fever
in the swamps around the lake, and chills and pains began to wrack his body. One morning he
could not get out of his sleeping bag, but just lay there groaning. His fever got rapidly worse, and
a parching thirst burned at his throat. In his delirium he began to talk out loud: “Here I am all
alone, away out here in the woods. I am surely going to die. There is no one even to bring me a
drink of water.”
But the tortoise, all this time, had not been sleeping so soundly as the man had thought. In
fa
ct, she had been slyly watching him as he worked about the camp. When the hunter did not get
up
that morning, the tortoise understood that something was wrong, and also that it was water he
kept calling for.
“This man,” thought the tortoise, “did not eat me that day, though he had me in his power and
was hungry. Instead, he took care of me till I was well. A good tortoise ought surely to do as
much for him!”
The big turtle—she stood as high as a chair and weighed, as I said, as much as a man—
crawled off to the lakeside. There she hunted around till she found a small tortoise shell. She
polished it with sand till it was bright and shiny. Then she filled it with pure cold water from a
spring, crawled back to camp with it, and gave the man a drink.
“Now for something to eat,” said the turtle.
Turtles know the most peculiar kinds of roots and grasses to eat when they are sick. This
tortoise went out and gathered a supply of such herbs and fed them to the man; and he ate them
without noticing who was finding his food for him, so nearly unconscious was he in his delirium.
So day after day the tortoise went hunting and hunting over the mountain sides, looking for
tenderer and tenderer grasses with stronger and stronger juices. And how sorry she was she could
not climb trees where such fine berries and fruits were hanging!
Thus the hunter lay for a week or more, struggling between life and death and kept alive only
by the herbs the tortoise brought him. And then one day, to the joy of the faithful animal, the
man sat up in his sleeping bag. The fever had left him and his mind was clear. He looked around
in surprise to see the water and a bundle of grasses near him; for he was quite alone, save for the
big turtle that still seemed to be sleeping in her corner.
“Alas, I am lost!” he moaned. “No one will ever come to me. The fever will return, and I
cannot get any medicine nearer than Buenos Aires. If I could walk, I might get there; but I can’t,
so I must die!”
And, just as he feared, the fever did return that evening worse than before; and the man fell
back into unconsciousness.
But again the turtle had understood: “Yes, he will die, if he stays here! I must get him to
Buenos Aires where there is some medicine!”
Carefully she dragged the bundle of skins up to the man and placed it in position on his body.
Then she did the same with the gourd full of snakes. And what a task it was to get the gun in
place on top of the whole pile! Finally she went out into the woods and bit off a number of
tough, strong vines. These she stretched across the sleeping man and tied to his arms and legs in
such a way as to keep the baggage from falling off. She dug her way under the sleeping bag till
everything was balanced on her back; and then she started off toward Buenos Aires.
She crawled along for ten or twelve hours each day, swimming rivers and ponds, sinking deep
into the mud of bogs, climbing hills and crossing sandy plains where the sun at midday scorched
terribly. In his fever the man kept calling for water; and it was very trying to the poor tortoise to
have to get the man off her back each time while she went looking for a drink for him. But she
struggled forward just the same, and each night she knew she was that much nearer to Buenos
Aires.
But the tortoise, after days and days of this toil, understood that her own strength was giving
out. She did not complain, but she began to be afraid that she would die before getting the hunter
to a place of safety. And one morning, in fact, she was so tired she was quite unable to move.
“Here I am dying all alone in the woods!” the man moaned from his bag. “No one will help
me get to Buenos Aires! Oh, oh, I shall die here all alone!”
You see, the man had been unconscious all the time, and thought he was still lying in the
shelter, away back in the mountains.
The words stirred the weary tortoise to fresh effort. She got the man up on her back again and
went on.
But the moment came when she could not take another step forward. She had not been eating
fo
r some days, because she had not dared take the time for hunting. Now she was too weak to do
even that. So she drew her legs into her shell and closed her eyes, waiting for death to come, and
mourning inside her turtle-heart that she had failed in saving the life of the man who had
befriended her.
The sun went down and night fell. As the turtle chanced to open her eyes, she was surprised to
see a reddish glow on the distant horizon; and she heard a voice—the voice of a wharf rat—
talking near by. The rat was saying:
“My, what a turtle, what a turtle! I never saw such a big one in my life! And what is that on
her back? A cord of wood?”
The poor turtle did not know that those lights came from Buenos Aires, and that the rat was a
citizen of that town, out for a night’s foraging in the fields of the suburbs.
“It is not a cord of wood,” the turtle murmured, “It is a man, a sick man!”
“And what on earth are you doing here with a man on your back?” the rat inquired, laughing
the way rats from the city laugh at their country cousins.
“I ... I was ...” the tortoise murmured faintly, “I was taking him to Buenos Aires to be cured ...
but I shall never get there.... My strength has given out.... I am going to die ... we are both going
to die, right here!”
“I never saw such a silly turtle!” the rat replied. “Don’t you know you’re in Buenos Aires
now? Don’t you see those lights? They’re from the theater district. Go along straight ahead; and
you’ll get there in no time!”
This encouraging news filled the tortoise with new life. She strained every muscle inside her
shell and moved slowly but surely forward.
When it was daylight she found herself quite inside the town. And who should come along the
street but the superintendent of the Zoo!
“My, what a turtle! What a big turtle!” he exclaimed. “And what in the world is she carrying
on her back?”
The tortoise could not speak from sheer fatigue. She stopped, and the man came up to examine
the strange outfit on her back. To his amazement, he recognized his friend in the man sleeping,
pale and fever-stricken, inside the bag. He called a carriage and got the man home, sending for a
doctor to come at once.
In course of time, the man got well. When he learned that the tortoise had brought him miles
and miles on her back, all the way from the Andes to Buenos Aires, he could hardly believe the
story. And out of gratitude he said he would make a home for her the rest of her life. His own
cottage was quite filled with his six little brothers; and there was no room for such a big pet in
the house. But the director of the Zoo said he would find a place for her there, and care for her as
tenderly as he would for his own daughter.
And that is what happened. The tortoise was given a house for herself alone, with a tank of
water in the front yard, where she could swim if she wanted to. She was allowed to wander at
will over all the gardens of the Zoo, though she spent a large part of her time near the monkey
house, where there was most to eat.
And she is still living there. Go to the zoölogical park any day and you will see an enormously
big tortoise crawling slowly along over the green grass. If you wait long enough you will see a
man come up, stoop over and rap gently with his knuckles on her shell.
That’s the tortoise we have been talking about—and that’s the man!
👁 :
HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY
DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
INTR
OD
UC
TIO
N
We can distinguish three kinds of astronomy, each with a different origin and history, but all
mutually dependent, and composing, in their fundamental unity, one science. First in order of
time came the art of observing the returns, and measuring the places, of the heavenly bodies.
This was the sole astronomy of the Chinese and Chaldeans; but to it the vigorous Greek mind
added a highly complex geometrical plan of their movements, for which Copernicus substituted
a more harmonious system, without as yet any idea of a compelling cause. The planets revolved
in circles because it was their nature to do so, just as laudanum sets to sleep because it possesses
a virtus dormitiva. This first and oldest branch is known as "observational," or "practical
astronomy." Its business is to note facts as accurately as possible; and it is essentially
unconcerned with schemes for connecting those facts in a manner satisfactory to the reason.
The second kind of astronomy was founded by Newton. Its nature is best indicated by the term
"gravitational"; but it is also called "theoretical astronomy."[1] It is based on the idea of cause;
and the whole of its elaborate structure is reared according to the dictates of a single law, simple
in itself, but the tangled web of whose consequences can be unravelled only by the subtle agency
of an elaborate calculus.
The third and last division of celestial science may properly be termed "physical and descriptive
astronomy." It seeks to know what the heavenly bodies are in themselves, leaving the How?
and[Pg 2]
the Wherefore? of their movements to be otherwise answered. Now, such inquiries became
possible only through the invention of the telescope, so that Galileo was, in point of fact, their
originator. But Herschel first gave them a prominence which the whole progress of science
du
ring the nineteenth century served to confirm and render more exclusive. Inquisitions begun
with the telescope have been extended and made effective in unhoped-for directions by the aid of
the spectroscope and photographic camera; and a large part of our attention in the present
volume will be occupied with the brilliant results thus achieved.
The unexpected development of this new physical-celestial science is the leading fact in recent
astronomical history. It was out of the regular course of events. In the degree in which it has
actually occurred it could certainly not have been foreseen. It was a seizing of the prize by a
competitor who had hardly been thought qualified to enter the lists. Orthodox astronomers of the
old school looked with a certain contempt upon observers who spent their nights in scrutinising
the faces of the moon and planets rather than in timing their transits, or devoted daylight
energies, not to reductions and computations, but to counting and measuring spots on the sun.
They were regarded as irregular practitioners, to be tolerated perhaps, but certainly not
encouraged.
The advance of astronomy in the eighteenth century ran in general an even and logical course.
The age succeeding Newton's had for its special task to demonstrate the universal validity, and
trace the complex results, of the law of gravitation. The accomplishment of that task occupied
just one hundred years. It was virtually brought to a close when Laplace explained to the French
Academy, November 19, 1787, the cause of the moon's accelerated motion. As a mere machine,
the solar system, so far as it was then known, was found to be complete and intelligible in all its
parts; and in the Mécanique Céleste its mechanical perfections were displayed under a form of
majestic unity which fitly commemorated the successive triumphs of analytical genius over
problems amongst the most arduous ever dealt with by the mind of man.
Theory, however, demands a practical test. All its data are derived from observation; and their
insecurity becomes less tolerable as it advances nearer to perfection. Observation, on the other
hand, is the pitiless critic of theory; it detects weak points, and provokes reforms which may be
the beginnings of discovery. Thus, theory and observation mutually act and react, each
alternately taking the lead in the endless race of improvement.
Now, while in France Lagrange and Laplace were bringing the gravitational theory of the solar
system to completion, work of[Pg 3] a very different kind, yet not less indispensable to the future
welfare of astronomy, was being done in England. The Royal Observatory at Greenwich is one
of the few useful institutions which date their origin from the reign of Charles II. The leading
position which it still occupies in the science of celestial observation was, for near a century and
a half after its foundation, an exclusive one. Delambre remarked that, had all other materials of
the kind been destroyed, the Greenwich records alone would suffice for the restoration of
astronomy. The establishment was indeed absolutely without a rival.[2] Systematic observations
of sun, moon, stars, and planets were during the whole of the eighteenth century made only at
Greenwich. Here materials were accumulated for the secure correction of theory, and here
refinements were introduced by which the exquisite accuracy of modern practice in astronomy
was eventually attained.
The chief promoter of these improvements was James Bradley. Few men have possessed in an
equal degree with him the power of seeing accurately, and reasoning on what they see. He let
nothing pass. The slightest inconsistency between what appeared and what was to be expected
roused his keenest attention; and he never relaxed his mental grip of a subject until it had yielded
to his persistent inquisition. It was to these qualities that he owed his discoveries of the
ab
erration of light and the nutation of the earth's axis. The first was announced in 1729. What is
meant by it is that, owing to the circumstance of light not being instantaneously transmitted, the
heavenly bodies appear shifted from their true places by an amount depending upon the ratio
which the velocity of light bears to the speed of the earth in its orbit. Because light travels with
enormous rapidity, the shifting is very slight; and each star returns to its original position at the
end of a year.
Bradley's second great discovery was finally ascertained in 1748. Nutation is a real "nodding" of
the terrestrial axis produced by the dragging of the moon at the terrestrial equatorial
protuberance. From it results an apparent displacement of the stars, each of them describing a
little ellipse about its true or "mean" position, in a period of nearly nineteen years.
Now, an acquaintance with the fact and the laws of each of these minute irregularities is vital to
the progress of observational astronomy; for without it the places of the heavenly bodies could
never be accurately known or compared. So that Bradley, by their detection, at once raised the
science to a higher grade of precision. Nor was this the whole of his work. Appointed
Astronomer-Royal in 1742, he executed during the years 1750-62 a series of observations[Pg 4]
which formed the real beginning of exact astronomy. Part of their superiority must, indeed, be
attributed to the co-operation of John Bird, who provided Bradley in 1750 with a measuring
instrument of till then unequalled excellence. For not only was the art of observing in the
eighteenth century a peculiarly English art, but the means of observing were furnished almost
exclusively by British artists. John Dollond, the son of a Spitalfields weaver, invented the
achromatic lens in 1758, removing thereby the chief obstacle to the development of the powers
of refracting telescopes; James Short, of Edinburgh, was without a rival in the construction of
reflectors; the sectors, quadrants, and circles of Graham, Bird, Ramsden, and Cary were
inimitable by Continental workmanship.
Thus practical and theoretical astronomy advanced on parallel lines in England and France
respectively, the improvement of their several tools—the telescope and the quadrant on the one
side, and the calculus on the other—keeping pace. The whole future of the science seemed to be
theirs. The cessation of interest through a too speedy attainment of the perfection towards which
each spurred the other, appeared to be the only danger it held in store for them. When all at once,
a rival stood by their side—not, indeed, menacing their progress, but threatening to absorb their
popularity.
The rise of Herschel was the one conspicuous anomaly in the astronomical history of the
eighteenth century. It proved decisive of the course of events in the nineteenth. It was
unexplained by anything that had gone before; yet all that came after hinged upon it. It gave a
new direction to effort; it lent a fresh impulse to thought. It opened a channel for the widespread
public interest which was gathering towards astronomical subjects to flow in.
Much of this interest was due to the occurrence of events calculated to arrest the attention and
excite the wonder of the uninitiated. The predicted return of Halley's comet in 1759 verified,
after an unprecedented fashion, the computations of astronomers. It deprived such bodies for
ever of their portentous character; it ranked them as denizens of the solar system. Again, the
transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769 were the first occurrences of the kind since the awakening of
science to their consequence. Imposing preparations, journeys to remote and hardly accessible
regions, official expeditions, international communications, all for the purpose of observing
them to the best advantage, brought their high significance vividly to the public consciousness; a
result aided by the facile pen of Lalande, in rendering intelligible the means by which these
elaborate arrangements were to issue in an[Pg 5] accurate knowledge of the sun's distance. Lastly,
Herschel's discovery of Uranus, March 13, 1781, had the surprising effect of utter novelty. Since
the human race had become acquainted with the company of the planets, no addition had been
made to their number. The event thus broke with immemorial traditions, and seemed to show
astronomy as still young and full of unlooked-for possibilities.
Further popularity accrued to the science from the sequel of a career so strikingly opened.
Herschel's huge telescopes, his detection by their means of two Saturnian and as many Uranian
moons, his piercing scrutiny of the sun, picturesque theory of its constitution, and sagacious
indication of the route pursued by it through space; his discovery of stellar revolving systems,
his bold soundings of the universe, his grandiose ideas, and the elevated yet simple language in
which they were conveyed—formed a combination powerfully effective to those least
susceptible of new impressions. Nor was the evoked enthusiasm limited to the British Isles. In
Germany, Schröter followed—longo intervallo—in Herschel's track. Von Zach set on foot from
Gotha that general communication of ideas which gives life to a forward movement. Bode wrote
much and well for unlearned readers. Lalande, by his popular lectures and treatises, helped to
fo
rm
an audience which Laplace himself did not disdain to address in the Exposition du Système
du
Mo
nde.
This great accession of public interest gave the impulse to the extraordinarily rapid progress of
astronomy in the nineteenth century. Official patronage combined with individual zeal sufficed
fo
r the elder branches of the science. A few well-endowed institutions could accumulate the
materials needed by a few isolated thinkers for the construction of theories of wonderful beauty
and elaboration, yet precluded, by their abstract nature, from winning general applause. But the
new physical astronomy depends for its prosperity upon the favour of the multitude whom its
striking results are well fitted to attract. It is, in a special manner, the science of amateurs. It
welcomes the most unpretending co-operation. There is no one "with a true eye and a faithful
hand" but can do good work in watching the heavens. And not unfrequently, prizes of discovery
which the most perfect appliances failed to grasp, have fallen to the share of ignorant or illprovided assiduity.
Observers, accordingly, have multiplied; observatories have been founded in all parts of the
world; associations have been constituted for mutual help and counsel. A formal astronomical
congress met in 1789 at Gotha—then, under Duke Ernest II. and Von Zach, the[Pg 6] focus of
German astronomy—and instituted a combined search for the planet suspected to revolve
undiscovered between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The Astronomical Society of London was
established in 1820, and the similar German institution in 1863. Both have been highly
influential in promoting the interests, local and general, of the science they are devoted to
fo
rw
ard; while functions corresponding to theirs have been discharged elsewhere by older or less
specially constituted bodies, and new ones of a more popular character are springing up on all
sides.
Modern facilities of communication have helped to impress more deeply upon modern
astronomy its associative character. The electric telegraph gives a certain ubiquity which is
invaluable to an observer of the skies. With the help of a wire, a battery, and a code of signals,
he sees whatever is visible from any portion of our globe, depending, however, upon other eyes
than his own, and so entering as a unit into a widespread organisation of intelligence. The press,
again, has been a potent agent of co-operation. It has mainly contributed to unite astronomers all
over the world into a body animated by the single aim of collecting "particulars" in their special
branch for what Bacon termed a History of Nature, eventually to be interpreted according to the
sagacious insight of some one among them gifted above his fellows. The first really effective
astronomical periodical was the Monatliche Correspondenz, started by Von Zach in the year
1800. It was followed in 1822 by the Astronomische Nachrichten, later by the Memoirs and
Mo
nthly Notices of the Astronomical Society, and by the host of varied publications which now,
in every civilised country, communicate the discoveries made in astronomy to divers classes of
readers, and so incalculably quicken the current of its onward flow.
Public favour brings in its train material resources. It is represented by individual enterprise, and
finds expression in an ample liberality. The first regular observatory in the Southern Hemisphere
was founded at Paramatta by Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane in 1821. The Royal Observatory
at the Cape of Good Hope was completed in 1829. Similar establishments were set to work by
the East India Company at Madras, Bombay, and St. Helena, during the first third of the
nineteenth century. The organisation of astronomy in the United States of America was due to a
strong wave of popular enthusiasm. In 1825 John Quincy Adams vainly urged upon Congress
the foundation of a National Observatory; but in 1843 the lectures on celestial phenomena of
Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel stirred an impressionable audience to the pitch of providing him
with the means of erecting at Cincinnati the first astronomical establishment worthy the name in
that[Pg 7] great country. On the 1st of January, 1882, no less than one hundred and forty-four
were active within its boundaries.
The apparition of the great comet of 1843 gave an additional fillip to the movement. To the
excitement caused by it the Harvard College Observatory—called the "American Pulkowa"—
directly owed its origin; and the example was not ineffective elsewhere. The United States Naval
Observatory was built in 1844, Lieutenant Maury being its first Director. Corporations,
universities, municipalities, vied with each other in the creation of such institutions; private
subscriptions poured in; emissaries were sent to Europe to purchase instruments and to procure
instruction in their use. In a few years the young Republic was, in point of astronomical
efficiency, at least on a level with countries where the science had been fostered since the dawn
of civilisation.
A vast widening of the scope of astronomy has accompanied, and in part occasioned, the great
extension of its area of cultivation which our age has witnessed. In the last century its purview
was a comparatively narrow one. Problems lying beyond the range of the solar system were
almost unheeded, because they seemed inscrutable. Herschel first showed the sidereal universe
as accessible to investigation, and thereby offered to science new worlds—majestic, manifold,
"infinitely infinite" to our apprehension in number, variety, and extent—for future conquest.
Their gradual appropriation has absorbed, and will long continue to absorb, the powers which it
has served to develop.
But this is not the only direction in which astronomy has enlarged, or rather has levelled, its
boundaries. The unification of the physical sciences is perhaps the greatest intellectual feat of
recent times. The process has included astronomy; so that, like Bacon, she may now be said to
have "taken all knowledge" (of that kind) "for her province." In return, she proffers potent aid for
its increase. Every comet that approaches the sun is the scene of experiments in the electrical
illumination of rarefied matter, performed on a huge scale for our benefit. The sun, stars, and
nebulæ form so many celestial laboratories, where the nature and mutual relations of the
chemical "elements" may be tried by more stringent tests than sublunary conditions afford. The
laws of terrestrial magnetism can be completely investigated only with the aid of a concurrent
study of the face of the sun. The solar spectrum will perhaps one day, by its recurrent
modifications, tell us something of impending droughts, famines, and cyclones.
Astronomy generalises the results of the other sciences. She exhibits the laws of Nature working
over a wider area, and under more varied conditions, than ordinary experience presents.
Ordinary[Pg 8] experience, on the other hand, has become indispensable to her progress. She
takes in at one view the indefinitely great and the indefinitely little. The mutual revolutions of
the stellar multitude during tracts of time which seem to lengthen out to eternity as the mind
attempts to traverse them, she does not admit to be beyond her ken; nor is she indifferent to the
constitution of the minutest atom of matter that thrills the ether into light. How she entered upon
this vastly expanded inheritance, and how, so far, she has dealt with it, is attempted to be set
forth in the ensuing chapters
PART I
PROGRESS OF ASTRONOMY DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY
CHAPTER I
FOUNDATION OF SIDEREAL ASTRONOMY
Until nearly a hundred years ago the stars were regarded by practical astronomers mainly as a
number of convenient fixed points by which the motions of the various members of the solar
system could be determined and compared. Their recognised function, in fact, was that of
milestones on the great celestial highway traversed by the planets, as well as on the byways of
space occasionally pursued by comets. Not that curiosity as to their nature, and even conjecture
as to their origin, were at any period absent. Both were from time to time powerfully stimulated
by the appearance of startling novelties in a region described by philosophers as "incorruptible,"
or exempt from change. The catalogue of Hipparchus probably, and certainly that of Tycho
Brahe, some seventeen centuries later, owed each its origin to the temporary blaze of a new star.
The general aspect of the skies was thus (however imperfectly) recorded from age to age, and
with improved appliances the enumeration was rendered more and more accurate and complete;
but the secrets of the stellar sphere remained inviolate.
In a qualified though very real sense, Sir William Herschel may be called the Founder of
Sidereal Astronomy. Before his time some curious facts had been noted, and some ingenious
speculations hazarded, regarding the condition of the stars, but not even the rudiments of
systematic knowledge had been acquired. The facts ascertained can be summed up in a very few
sentences.
Giordano Bruno was the first to set the suns of space in motion; but in imagination only. His
daring surmise was, however, confirmed in 1718, when Halley announced[3] that Sirius,
Aldebaran,[Pg 10] Betelgeux, and Arcturus had unmistakably shifted their quarters in the sky
since Ptolemy assigned their places in his catalogue. A similar conclusion was reached by J.
Cassini in 1738, from a comparison of his own observations with those made at Cayenne by
Richer in 1672; and Tobias Mayer drew up in 1756 a list showing the direction and amount of
ab
out fifty-seven proper motions,[4] founded on star-places determined by Olaus Römer fifty
years previously. Thus the stars were no longer regarded as "fixed," but the question remained
whether the movements perceived were real or only apparent; and this it was not yet found
possible to answer. Already, in the previous century, the ingenious Robert Hooke had suggested
an "alteration of the very system of the sun,"[5] to account for certain suspected changes in stellar
positions; Bradley in 1748, and Lambert in 1761, pointed out that such apparent displacements
(by that time well ascertained) were in all probability a combined effect of motions both of sun
and stars; and Mayer actually attempted the analysis, but without result.
On the 13th of August, 1596, David Fabricius, an unprofessional astronomer in East Friesland,
saw in the neck of the Whale a star of the third magnitude, which by October had disappeared. It
was, nevertheless, visible in 1603, when Bayer marked it in his catalogue with the Greek letter ο,
and was watched, in 1638-39, through its phases of brightening and apparent extinction by a
Dutch professor named Holwarda.[6] From Hevelius this first-known periodical star received the
name of "Mira," or the Wonderful, and Boulliaud in 1667 fixed the length of its cycle of change
at 334 days. It was not a solitary instance. A star in the Swan was perceived by Janson in 1600 to
show fluctuations of light, and Montanari found in 1669 that Algol in Perseus shared the same
peculiarity to a marked degree. Altogether the class embraced in 1782 half-a-dozen members.
When it is added that a few star-couples had been noted in singularly, but it was supposed
accidentally, close juxtaposition, and that the failure of repeated attempts to measure stellar
parallaxes pointed to distances at least 400,000 times that of the earth from the sun,[7] the[Pg 11]
picture of sidereal science, when the last quarter of the eighteenth century began, is practically
complete. It included three items of information: that the stars have motions, real or apparent;
that they are immeasurably remote; and that a few shine with a periodically variable light. Nor
were these scantily collected facts ordered into any promise of further development. They lay at
once isolated and confused before the inquirer. They needed to be both multiplied and
marshalled, and it seemed as if centuries of patient toil must elapse before any reliable
conclusions could be derived from them. The sidereal world was thus the recognised domain of
fa
r-reaching speculations, which remained wholly uncramped by systematic research until
Herschel entered upon his career as an observer of the heavens.
The greatest of modern astronomers was born at Hanover, November 15, 1738. He was the
fo
urth child of Isaac Herschel, a hautboy-player in the band of the Hanoverian Guard, and was
early trained to follow his father's profession. On the termination, however, of the disastrous
campaign of 1757, his parents removed him from the regiment, there is reason to believe, in a
somewhat unceremonious manner. Technically, indeed, he incurred the penalties of desertion,
remitted—according to the Duke of Sussex's statement to Sir George Airy—by a formal pardon
handed to him personally by George III. on his presentation in 1782.[8] At the age of nineteen,
then, his military service having lasted four years, he came to England to seek his fortune. Of the
life of struggle and privation which ensued little is known beyond the circumstances that in 1760
he was engaged in training the regimental band of the Durham Militia, and that in 1765 he was
ap
pointed organist at Halifax. In the following year he removed to Bath as oboist in Linley's
orchestra, and in October 1767 was promoted to the post of organist in the Octagon Chapel. The
tide of prosperity now began to flow for him. The most brilliant and modish society in England
was at that time to be met at Bath, and the young Hanoverian quickly found himself a favourite
and the fashion in it. Engagements multiplied upon him. He became director of the public
concerts; he conducted oratorios, engaged singers, organised rehearsals, composed anthems,
chants, choral services, besides undertaking private tuitions, at times amounting to thirty-five or
even thirty-eight lessons a week. He in fact personified the musical activity of a place then
eminently and energetically musical.
But these multifarious avocations did not take up the whole of his thoughts. His education,
notwithstanding the poverty of his[Pg 12] family, had not been neglected, and he had always
greedily assimilated every kind of knowledge that came in his way. Now that he was a busy and
a prosperous man, it might have been expected that he would run on in the deep professional
groove laid down for him. On the contrary, his passion for learning seemed to increase with the
diminution of the time available for its gratification. He studied Italian, Greek, mathematics;
Maclaurin's Fluxions served to "unbend his mind"; Smith's Harmonics and Optics and
Ferguson's Astronomy were the nightly companions of his pillow. What he read stimulated
without satisfying his intellect. He desired not only to know, but to discover. In 1772 he hired a
small telescope, and through it caught a preliminary glimpse of the rich and varied fields in
which for so many years he was to expatiate. Henceforward the purpose of his life was fixed: it
was to obtain "a knowledge of the construction of the heavens";[9] and this sublime ambition he
cherished to the end.
A more powerful instrument was the first desideratum; and here his mechanical genius came to
his aid. Having purchased the apparatus of a Quaker optician, he set about the manufacture of
specula with a zeal which seemed to anticipate the wonders they were to disclose to him. It was
not until fifteen years later that his grinding and polishing machines were invented, so the work
had at that time to be entirely done by hand. During this tedious and laborious process (which
could not be interrupted without injury, and lasted on one occasion sixteen hours), his strength
was supported by morsels of food put into his mouth by his sister,[10] and his mind amused by
her reading aloud to him the Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, or other light works. At length, after
repeated failures, he found himself provided with a reflecting telescope—a 5-1/2-foot
Gregorian—of his own construction. A copy of his first observation with it, on the great Nebula
in Orion—an object of continual amazement and assiduous inquiry to him—is preserved by the
Royal Society. It bears the date March 4, 1774.[11]
In the following year he executed his first "review of the heavens," memorable chiefly as an
evidence of the grand and novel conceptions which already inspired him, and of the enthusiasm
with which he delivered himself up to their guidance. Overwhelmed with professional
engagements, he still contrived to snatch some[Pg 13] moments for the stars; and between the acts
at the theatre was often seen running from the harpsichord to his telescope, no doubt with that
"uncommon precipitancy which accompanied all his actions."[12] He now rapidly increased the
power and perfection of his telescopes. Mirrors of seven, ten, even twenty feet focal length, were
successively completed, and unprecedented magnifying powers employed. His energy was
unceasing, his perseverance indomitable. In the course of twenty-one years no less than 430
parabolic specula left his hands. He had entered upon his forty-second year when he sent his first
paper to the Philosophical Transactions; yet during the ensuing thirty-nine years his
contributions—many of them elaborate treatises—numbered sixty-nine, forming a series of
extraordinary importance to the history of astronomy. As a mere explorer of the heavens his
labours were prodigious. He discovered 2,500 nebulæ, 806 double stars, passed the whole
firmament in review four several times, counted the stars in 3,400 "gauge-fields," and executed a
photometric classification of the principal stars, founded on an elaborate (and the first
systematically conducted) investigation of their relative brightness. He was as careful and patient
as he was rapid; spared no time and omitted no precaution to secure accuracy in his
observations; yet in one night he would examine, singly and attentively, up to 400 separate
objects.
The discovery of Uranus was a mere incident of the scheme he had marked out for himself—a
fru
it, gathered as it were by the way. It formed, nevertheless, the turning-point in his career.
From a star-gazing musician he was at once transformed into an eminent astronomer; he was
relieved from the drudgery of a toilsome profession, and installed as Royal Astronomer, with a
modest salary of £200 a year; funds were provided for the construction of the forty-foot
reflector, from the great space-penetrating power of which he expected unheard-of revelations;
in fine, his future work was not only rendered possible, but it was stamped as authoritative.[13]
On Whit-Sunday 1782, William and Caroline Herschel played and sang in public for the last
time in St. Margaret's Chapel, Bath; in August of the same year the household was moved to
Datchet, near Windsor, and on April 3, 1786, to Slough. Here happiness and honours crowded
on the fortunate discoverer. In 1788 he married Mary, only child of James Baldwin, a merchant
of the city of London, and widow of Mr. John Pitt—a lady whose domestic virtues were
enhanced by the possession of a large jointure. The fruit of their union was one son, of whose
work—the worthy sequel of his father's—we shall have to speak further on. Herschel was
created a Knight[Pg 14] of the Hanoverian Guelphic Order in 1816, and in 1821 he became the
first President of the Royal Astronomical Society, his son being its first Foreign Secretary. But
his health had now for some years been failing, and on August 25, 1822, he died at Slough, in
the eighty-fourth year of his age, and was buried in Upton churchyard.
His epitaph claims for him the lofty praise of having "burst the barriers of heaven." Let us see in
what sense this is true.
The first to form any definite idea as to the constitution of the stellar system was Thomas
Wright, the son of a carpenter living at Byer's Green, near Durham. With him originated what
has been called the "Grindstone Theory" of the universe, which regarded the Milky Way as the
projection on the sphere of a stratum or disc of stars (our sun occupying a position near the
centre), similar in magnitude and distribution to the lucid orbs of the constellations.[14] He was
fo
llowed by Kant,[15] who transcended the views of his predecessor by assigning to nebulæ the
position they long continued to occupy, rather on imaginative than scientific grounds, of "island
universes," external to, and co-equal with, the Galaxy. Johann Heinrich Lambert,[16] a tailor's
ap
prentice from Mühlhausen, followed, but independently. The conceptions of this remarkable
man were grandiose, his intuitions bold, his views on some points a singular anticipation of
subsequent discoveries. The sidereal world presented itself to him as a hierarchy of systems,
starting from the planetary scheme, rising to throngs of suns within the circuit of the Milky
Way—the "ecliptic of the stars," as he phrased it—expanding to include groups of many Milky
Ways; these again combining to form the unit of a higher order of assemblage, and so onwards
and upwards until the mind reels and sinks before the immensity of the contemplated creations.
"Thus everything revolves—the earth round the sun; the sun round the centre of his system; this
system round a centre common to it with other systems; this group, this assemblage of systems,
round a centre which is common to it with other groups of the same kind; and where shall we
have done?"[17]
The stupendous problem thus speculatively attempted, Herschel[Pg 15] undertook to grapple with
experimentally. The upshot of this memorable inquiry was the inclusion, for the first time,
within the sphere of human knowledge, of a connected body of facts, and inferences from facts,
regarding the sidereal universe; in other words, the foundation of what may properly be called a
science of the stars.
Tobias Mayer had illustrated the perspective effects which must ensue in the stellar sphere from
a translation of the solar system, by comparing them to the separating in front and closing up
behind of trees in a forest to the eye of an advancing spectator;[18] but the appearances which he
thus correctly described he was unable to detect. By a more searching analysis of a smaller
collection of proper motions, Herschel succeeded in rendering apparent the very consequences
fo
reseen by Mayer. He showed, for example, that Arcturus and Vega did, in fact, appear to
recede from, and Sirius and Aldebaran to approach, each other by very minute amounts; and,
with a striking effort of divinatory genius, placed the "apex," or point of direction of the sun's
motion, close to the star λ in the constellation Hercules,[19] within a few degrees of the spot
indicated by later and indefinitely more refined methods of research. He resumed the subject in
1805,[20] but though employing a more rigorous method, was scarcely so happy in his result. In
1806,[21] he made a preliminary attempt to ascertain the speed of the sun's journey, fixing it, by
doubtless much too low an estimate, at about three miles a second. Yet the validity of his general
conclusion as to the line of solar travel, though long doubted, has been triumphantly confirmed.
The question as to the "secular parallax" of the fixed stars was in effect answered.
With their annual parallax, however, the case was very different. The search for it had already
led Bradley to the important discoveries of the aberration of light and the nutation of the earth's
axis; it was now about to lead Herschel to a discovery of a different, but even more elevated
character. Yet in neither case was the object primarily sought attained.
From the very first promulgation of the Copernician theory the seeming immobility of the stars
had been urged as an argument against its truth; for if the earth really travelled in a vast orbit[Pg
16] round the sun, objects in surrounding space should appear to change their positions, unless
their distances were on a scale which, to the narrow ideas of the universe then prevailing,
seemed altogether extravagant.[22] The existence of such apparent or "parallactic" displacements
was accordingly regarded as the touchstone of the new views, and their detection became an
object of earnest desire to those interested in maintaining them. Copernicus himself made the
attempt; but with his "Triquetrum," a jointed wooden rule with the divisions marked in ink,
constructed by himself,[23] he was hardly able to measure angles of ten minutes, far less fractions
of a second. Galileo, a more impassioned defender of the system, strained his ears, as it were,
from Arcetri, in his blind and sorrowful old age, for news of a discovery which two more
centuries had still to wait for. Hooke believed he had found a parallax for the bright star in the
Head of the Dragon; but was deceived. Bradley convinced himself that such effects were too
minute for his instruments to measure. Herschel made a fresh attempt by a practically untried
method.
It is a matter of daily experience that two objects situated at different distances seem to a
beholder in motion to move relatively to each other. This principle Galileo, in the third of his
Dialogues on the Systems of the World,[24] proposed to employ for the determination of stellar
parallax; for two stars, lying apparently close together, but in reality separated by a great gulf of
space, must shift their mutual positions when observed from opposite points of the earth's orbit;
or rather, the remoter forms a virtually fixed point, to which the movements of the other can be
conveniently referred. By this means complications were abolished more numerous and
perplexing than Galileo himself was aware of, and the problem was reduced to one of simple
micrometrical measurement. The "double-star method" was also suggested by James Gregory in
1675, and again by Wallis in 1693;[25] Huygens first, and afterwards Dr. Long of Cambridge
(about 1750), made futile experiments with it; and it eventually led, in the hands of Bessel, to the
successful determination of the parallax of 61 Cygni.
Its advantages were not lost upon Herschel. His attempt to assign definite distances to the nearest
stars was no isolated effort, but part of the settled plan upon which his observations were
conducted. He proposed to sound the heavens, and the first requisite was a knowledge of the
length of his sounding-line. Thus it came about that his special attention was early directed to
double stars.
"I resolved," he writes,[26] "to examine every star in the heavens[Pg 17] with the utmost attention
and a very high power, that I might collect such materials for this research as would enable me to
fix my observations upon those that would best answer my end. The subject has already proved
so extensive, and still promises so rich a harvest to those who are inclined to be diligent in the
pursuit, that I cannot help inviting every lover of astronomy to join with me in observations that
must inevitably lead to new discoveries."
The first result of these inquiries was a classed catalogue of 269 double stars presented to the
Royal Society in 1782, followed, after three years, by an additional list of 434. In both these
collections the distances separating the individuals of each pair were carefully measured, and
(with a few exceptions) the angles made with the hour-circle by the lines joining their centres
(technically called "angles of position") were determined with the aid of a "revolving-wire
micrometer," specially devised for the purpose. Moreover, an important novelty was introduced
by the observation of the various colours visible in the star-couples, the singular and vivid
contrasts of which were now for the first time described.
Double stars were at that time supposed to be a purely optical phenomenon. Their components, it
was thought, while in reality indefinitely remote from each other, were brought into fortuitous
contiguity by the chance of lying nearly in the same line of sight from the earth. Yet Bradley had
noticed a change of 30°, between 1718 and 1759, in the position-angle of the two stars forming
Castor, and was thus within a hair's breadth of the discovery of their physical connection.[27]
While the Rev. John Michell, arguing by the doctrine of probabilities, wrote as follows in
1767:—"It is highly probable in particular, and next to a certainty in general, that such double
stars as appear to consist of two or more stars placed very near together, do really consist of stars
placed near together, and under the influence of some general law."[28] And in 1784:[29] "It is not
improbable that a few years may inform us that some of the great number of double, triple stars,
etc., which have been observed by Mr. Herschel, are systems of bodies revolving about each
other."
This remarkable speculative anticipation had a practical counterpart in Germany. Father
Christian Mayer, a Jesuit astronomer at Mannheim, set himself, in January 1776, to collect
examples of stellar pairs, and shortly after published the supposed discovery of "satellites" to
many of the principal stars.[30] But his observations[Pg 18] were neither exact nor prolonged
enough to lead to useful results in such an inquiry. His disclosures were derided; his planet-stars
treated as results of hallucination. On n'a point cru à des choses aussi extraordinaires, wrote
Lalande[31] within one year of a better-grounded announcement to the same effect.
Herschel at first shared the general opinion as to the merely optical connection of double stars.
Of this the purpose for which he made his collection is in itself sufficient evidence, since what
may be called the differential method of parallaxes depends, as we have seen, for its efficacy
upon disparity of distance. It was "much too soon," he declared in 1782,[32] "to form any theories
of small stars revolving round large ones;" while in the year following,[33] he remarked that the
identical proper motions of the two stars forming, to the naked eye, the single bright orb of
Castor could only be explained as both equally due to the "systematic parallax" caused by the
sun's movement in space. Plainly showing that the notion of a physical tie, compelling the two
bodies to travel together, had not as yet entered into his speculations. But he was eminently open
to conviction, and had, moreover, by observations unparalleled in amount as well as in kind,
prepared ample materials for convincing himself and others. In 1802 he was able to announce
the fact of his discovery, and in the two ensuing years, to lay in detail before the Royal Society
proofs, gathered from the labours of a quarter of a century, of orbital revolution in the case of as
many as fifty double stars, henceforth, he declared, to be held as real binary combinations,
"intimately held together by the bond of mutual attraction."[34] The fortunate preservation in Dr.
Maskelyne's note-book of a remark made by Bradley about 1759, to the effect that the line
joining the components of Castor was an exact prolongation of that joining Castor with Pollux,
added eighteen years to the time during which the pair were under scrutiny, and confirmed the
evidence of change afforded by more recent observations. Approximate periods were fixed for
many of the revolving suns—for Castor 342 years; for γ Leonis, 1200, δ Serpentis, 375, ε Bootis,
1681 years; ε Lyræ was noted as a "double-double-star," a change of relative situation having
been detected in each of the two pairs composing the group; and the occultation was described of
one star by another in the course of their mutual revolutions, as exemplified in 1795 by the
rapidly circulating system of ζ Herculis.
Thus, by the sagacity and perseverance of a single observer, a firm basis was at last provided
upon which to raise the edifice of[Pg 19] sidereal science. The analogy long presumed to exist
between the mighty star of our system and the bright points of light spangling the firmament was
shown to be no fiction of the imagination, but a physical reality; the fundamental quality of
attractive power was proved to be common to matter so far as the telescope was capable of
exploring, and law, subordination, and regularity to give testimony of supreme and intelligent
design no less in those limitless regions of space than in our narrow terrestrial home. The
discovery was emphatically (in Arago's phrase) "one with a future," since it introduced the
element of precise knowledge where more or less probable conjecture had previously held
almost undivided sway; and precise knowledge tends to propagate itself and advance from point
to point.
We have now to speak of Herschel's pioneering work in the skies. To explore with line and
plummet the shining zone of the Milky Way, to delineate its form, measure its dimensions, and
search out the intricacies of its construction, was the primary task of his life, which he never lost
sight of, and to which all his other investigations were subordinate. He was absolutely alone in
this bold endeavour. Unaided, he had to devise methods, accumulate materials, and sift out
results. Yet it may safely be asserted that all the knowledge we possess on this sublime subject
was prepared, and the greater part of it anticipated, by him.
The ingenious method of "star-gauging," and its issue in the delineation of the sidereal system as
an irregular stratum of evenly-scattered suns, is the best-known part of his work. But it was, in
truth, only a first rude approximation, the principle of which maintained its credit in the literature
of astronomy a full half-century after its abandonment by its author. This principle was the
general equality of star distribution. If equal portions of space really held equal numbers of stars,
it is obvious that the number of stars visible in any particular direction would be strictly
proportional to the range of the system in that direction, apparent accumulation being produced
by real extent. The process of "gauging the heavens," accordingly, consisted in counting the stars
in successive telescopic fields, and calculating thence the depths of space necessary to contain
them. The result of 3,400 such operations was the plan of the Galaxy familiar to every reader of
an astronomical text-book. Widely-varying evidence was, as might have been expected, derived
from an examination of different portions of the sky. Some fields of view were almost blank,
while others (in or near the Milky Way) blazed with the radiance of many hundred stars
compressed into an area about one-fourth that of the full-moon. In the most crowded parts[Pg 20]
116,000 were stated to have been passed in review within a quarter of an hour. Here the "length
of his sounding-line" was estimated by Herschel at about 497 times the distance of Sirius—in
other words, the bounding orb, or farthest sun of the system in that direction, so far as could be
seen with the 20-foot reflector, was thus inconceivably remote. But since the distance of Sirius,
no less than of every other fixed star, was as yet an unknown quantity, the dimensions inferred
fo
r the Galaxy were of course purely relative; a knowledge of its form and structure might
(admitting the truth of the fundamental hypothesis) be obtained, but its real or absolute size
remained altogether undetermined.
Even as early as 1785, however, Herschel perceived traces of a tendency which completely
invalidated the supposition of any approach to an average uniformity of distribution. This was
the action of what he called a "clustering power" in the Milky Way. "Many gathering
clusters"[35] were already discernible to him even while he endeavoured to obtain a "true mean
result" on the assumption that each star in space was separated from its neighbours as widely as
the sun from Sirius. "It appears," he wrote in 1789, "that the heavens consist of regions where
suns are gathered into separate systems"; and in certain assemblages he was able to trace "a
course or tide of stars setting towards a centre," denoting, not doubtfully, the presence of
attractive forces.[36] Thirteen years later, he described our sun and his constellated companions
as surrounded by "a magnificent collection of innumerable stars, called the Milky Way, which
must occasion a very powerful balance of opposite attractions to hold the intermediate stars at
rest. For though our sun, and all the stars we see, may truly be said to be in the plane of the
Milky Way, yet I am now convinced, by a long inspection and continued examination of it, that
the Milky Way itself consists of stars very differently scattered from those which are
immediately about us." "This immense aggregation," he added, "is by no means uniform. Its
component stars show evident signs of clustering together into many separate allotments."[37]
The following sentences, written in 1811, contain a definite retractation of the view frequently
attributed to him:—
"I must freely confess," he says, "that by continuing my sweeps of the heavens my opinion of the
arrangement of the stars and their magnitudes, and of some other particulars, has undergone a
gradual change; and indeed, when the novelty of the subject is considered, we cannot be
surprised that many things formerly taken[Pg 21] for granted should on examination prove to be
different from what they were generally but incautiously supposed to be. For instance, an equal
scattering of the stars may be admitted in certain calculations; but when we examine the Milky
Way, or the closely compressed clusters of stars of which my catalogues have recorded so many
instances, this supposed equality of scattering must be given up."[38]
Another assumption, the fallacy of which he had not the means of detecting since become
available, was retained by him to the end of his life. It was that the brightness of a star afforded
an approximate measure of its distance. Upon this principle he founded in 1817 his method of
"limiting apertures,"[39] by which two stars, brought into view in two precisely similar
telescopes, were "equalised" by covering a certain portion of the object-glass collecting the more
brilliant rays. The distances of the orbs compared were then taken to be in the ratio of the
reduced to the original apertures of the instruments with which they were examined. If indeed
the absolute lustre of each were the same, the result might be accepted with confidence; but since
we have no warrant for assuming a "standard star" to facilitate our computations, but much
reason to suppose an indefinite range, not only of size but of intrinsic brilliancy, in the suns of
our firmament, conclusions drawn from such a comparison are entirely worthless.
In another branch of sidereal science besides that of stellar aggregation, Herschel may justly be
styled a pioneer. He was the first to bestow serious study on the enigmatical objects known as
"nebulæ." The history of the acquaintance of our race with them is comparatively short. The only
one recognised before the invention of the telescope was that in the girdle of Andromeda,
certainly familiar in the middle of the tenth century to the Persian astronomer Abdurrahman AlSûfi; and marked with dots on Spanish and Dutch constellation-charts of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries.[40] Yet so little was it noticed that it might practically be said—as far as
Europe is concerned—to have been discovered in 1612 by Simon Marius (Mayer of
Genzenhausen), who aptly described its appearance as that of a "candle shining through horn."
The first mention of the great Orion nebula is by a Swiss Jesuit named Cysatus, who succeeded
Father Scheiner[Pg 22] in the chair of mathematics at Ingolstadt. He used it, apparently without
any suspicion of its novelty, as a term of comparison for the comet of December 1618.[41] A
novelty, nevertheless, to astronomers it still remained in 1656, when Huygens discerned, "as it
were, an hiatus in the sky, affording a glimpse of a more luminous region beyond."[42] Halley in
1716 knew of six nebulæ, which he believed to be composed of a "lucid medium" diffused
through the ether of space.[43] He appears, however, to have been unacquainted with some
previously noticed by Hevelius. Lacaille brought back with him from the Cape a list of fortytwo—the first-fruits of observation in Southern skies—arranged in three numerically equal
classes;[44] and Messier (nicknamed by Louis XV. the "ferret of comets"), finding such objects a
source of extreme perplexity in the pursuit of his chosen game, attempted to eliminate by
methodising them, and drew up a catalogue comprising, in 1781, 103 entries.[45]
These preliminary attempts shrank into insignificance when Herschel began to "sweep the
heavens" with his giant telescopes. In 1786 he presented to the Royal Society a descriptive
catalogue of 1,000 nebulæ and clusters, followed, three years later, by a second of as many
more; to which he added in 1802 a further gleaning of 500. On the subject of their nature his
views underwent a remarkable change. Finding that his potent instruments resolved into stars
many nebulous patches in which no signs of such a structure had previously been discernible, he
naturally concluded that "resolvability" was merely a question of distance and telescopic power.
He was (as he said himself) led on by almost imperceptible degrees from evident clusters, such
as the Pleiades, to spots without a trace of stellar formation, the gradations being so well
connected as to leave no doubt that all these phenomena were equally stellar. The singular
variety of their appearance was thus described by him:—
"I have seen," he says, "double and treble nebulæ variously arranged; large ones with small,
seeming attendants; narrow, but much extended lucid nebulæ or bright dashes; some of the shape
of a fan, resembling an electric brush, issuing from a lucid point; others of the cometic shape,
with a seeming nucleus in the centre, or like cloudy stars surrounded with a nebulous
atmosphere; a different sort, again, contain a nebulosity of the milky kind, like that wonderful,
inexplicable phenomenon about θ Orionis; while[Pg 23] others shine with a fainter, mottled kind
of light, which denotes their being resolvable into stars."[46]
"These curious objects" he considered to be "no less than whole sidereal systems,"[47] some of
which might "well outvie our Milky Way in grandeur." He admitted, however, a wide diversity
in condition as well as compass. The system to which our sun belongs he described as "a very
extensive branching congeries of many millions of stars, which probably owes its origin to many
remarkably large as well as pretty closely scattered small stars, that may have drawn together the
rest."[48] But the continued action of this same "clustering power" would, he supposed,
eventually lead to the breaking-up of the original majestic Galaxy into two or three hundred
separate groups, already visibly gathering. Such minor nebulæ, due to the "decay" of other
"branching nebulæ" similar to our own, he recognised by the score, lying, as it were, stratified in
certain quarters of the sky. "One of these nebulous beds," he informs us, "is so rich that in
passing through a section of it, in the time of only thirty-six minutes, I detected no less than
thirty-one nebulæ, all distinctly visible upon a fine blue sky." The stratum of Coma Berenices he
judged to be the nearest to our system of such layers; nor did the marked aggregation of nebulæ
towards both poles of the circle of the Milky Way escape his notice.
By a continuation of the same process of reasoning, he was enabled (as he thought) to trace the
life-history of nebulæ from a primitive loose and extended formation, through clusters of
gradually increasing compression, down to the kind named by him "Planetary" because of the
defined and uniform discs which they present. These he regarded as "very aged, and drawing on
towards a period of change or dissolution."[49]
"This method of viewing the heavens," he concluded, "seems to throw them into a new kind of
light. They now are seen to resemble a luxuriant garden which contains the greatest variety of
productions in different flourishing beds; and one advantage we may at least reap from it is, that
we can, as it were, extend the range of our experience to an immense duration. For, to continue
the simile which I have borrowed from the vegetable kingdom, is it not almost the same thing
whether we live successively to witness the germination, blooming, foliage, fecundity, fading,
withering, and corruption of a plant, or whether a vast number of specimens, selected from every
stage through which the plant[Pg 24] passes in the course of its existence, be brought at once to
our view?"[50]
But already this supposed continuity was broken. After mature deliberation on the phenomena
presented by nebulous stars, Herschel was induced, in 1791, to modify essentially his original
opinion.
"When I pursued these researches," he says, "I was in the situation of a natural philosopher who
fo
llows the various species of animals and insects from the height of their perfection down to the
lowest ebb of life; when, arriving at the vegetable kingdom, he can scarcely point out to us the
precise boundary where the animal ceases and the plant begins; and may even go so far as to
suspect them not to be essentially different. But, recollecting himself, he compares, for instance,
one of the human species to a tree, and all doubt upon the subject vanishes before him. In the
same manner we pass through gentle steps from a coarse cluster of stars, such as the Pleiades ...
till we find ourselves brought to an object such as the nebula in Orion, where we are still inclined
to remain in the once adopted idea of stars exceedingly remote and inconceivably crowded, as
being the occasion of that remarkable appearance. It seems, therefore, to require a more
dissimilar object to set us right again. A glance like that of the naturalist, who casts his eye from
the perfect animal to the perfect vegetable, is wanting to remove the veil from the mind of the
astronomer. The object I have mentioned above is the phenomenon that was wanting for this
purpose. View, for instance, the 19th cluster of my 6th class, and afterwards cast your eye on this
cloudy star, and the result will be no less decisive than that of the naturalist we have alluded to.
Our judgment, I may venture to say, will be, that the nebulosity about the star is not of a starry
nature."[51]
The conviction thus arrived at of the existence in space of a widely diffused "shining fluid" (a
conviction long afterwards fully justified by the spectroscope) led him into a field of endless
speculation. What was its nature? Should it "be compared to the coruscation of the electric fluid
in the aurora borealis? or to the more magnificent cone of the zodiacal light?" Above all, what
was its function in the cosmos? And on this point he already gave a hint of the direction in which
his mind was moving by the remark that this self-luminous matter seemed "more fit to produce a
star by its condensation, than to depend on the star for its existence."[52]
This was not a novel idea. Tycho Brahe had tried to explain the blaze of the star of 1572 as due
to a sudden concentration of[Pg 25] nebulous material in the Milky Way, even pointing out the
space left dark and void by the withdrawal of the luminous stuff; and Kepler, theorising on a
similar stellar apparition in 1604, followed nearly in the same track. But under Herschel's
treatment the nebular origin of stars first acquired the consistency of a formal theory. He
meditated upon it long and earnestly, and in two elaborate treatises, published respectively in
1811 and 1814, he at length set forth the arguments in its favour. These rested entirely upon the
"principle of continuity." Between the successive classes of his assortment of developing objects
there was, as he said, "perhaps not so much difference as would be in an annual description of
the human figure, were it given from the birth of a child till he comes to be a man in his
prime."[53] From diffused nebulosity, barely visible in the most powerful light-gathering
instruments, but which he estimated to cover nearly 152 square degrees of the heavens,[54] to
planetary nebulæ, supposed to be already centrally solid, instances were alleged of every stage
and phase of condensation. The validity of his reasoning, however, was evidently impaired by
his confessed inability to distinguish between the dim rays of remote clusters and the milky light
of true gaseous nebulæ.
It may be said that such speculations are futile in themselves, and necessarily barren of results.
But they gratify an inherent tendency of the human mind, and, if pursued in a becoming spirit,
should be neither reproved nor disdained. Herschel's theory still holds the field, the testimony of
recent discoveries with regard to it having proved strongly confirmatory of its principle,
although not of its details. Strangely enough, it seems to have been propounded in complete
independence of Laplace's nebular hypothesis as to the origin of the solar system. Indeed, it
dated, as we have seen, in its first inception, from 1791, while the French geometrician's view
was not advanced until 1796.
We may now briefly sum up the chief results of Herschel's long years of "watching the heavens."
The apparent motions of the stars had been disentangled; one portion being clearly shown to be
du
e to a translation towards a point in the constellation Hercules of the sun and his attendant
planets; while a large balance of displacement was left to be accounted for by real movements,
various in extent and direction, of the stars themselves. By the action of a central force similar
to, if not identical with, gravity, suns of every degree of size and splendour, and sometimes
brilliantly contrasted in colour, were seen to be held together in systems, consisting of two, three,
fo
ur, even six members, whose revolutions exhibited a wide range of variety both in period and
in orbital form. A new[Pg 26] department of physical astronomy was thus created,[55] and rigid
calculation for the first time made possible within the astral region. The vast problem of the
arrangement and relations of the millions of stars forming the Milky Way was shown to be
capable of experimental treatment, and of at least partial solution, notwithstanding the variety
and complexity seen to prevail, to an extent previously undreamt of, in the arrangement of that
majestic system. The existence of a luminous fluid, diffused through enormous tracts of space,
and intimately associated with stellar bodies, was virtually demonstrated, and its place and use in
creation attempted to be divined by a bold but plausible conjecture. Change on a stupendous
scale was inferred or observed to be everywhere in progress. Periodical stars shone out and again
decayed; progressive ebbings or flowings of light were indicated as probable in many stars under
no formal suspicion of variability; forces were everywhere perceived to be at work, by which the
very structure of the heavens themselves must be slowly but fundamentally modified. In all
directions groups were seen to be formed or forming; tides and streams of suns to be setting
towards powerful centres of attraction; new systems to be in process of formation, while effete
ones hastened to decay or regeneration when the course appointed for them by Infinite Wisdom
was run. And thus, to quote the words of the observer who "had looked farther into space than
ever human being did before him,"[56] the state into which the incessant action of the clustering
power has brought the Milky Way at present, is a kind of chronometer that may be used to
measure the time of its past and future existence; and although we do not know the rate of going
of this mysterious chronometer, it is nevertheless certain that, since the breaking-up of the parts
of the Milky Way affords a proof that it cannot last for ever, it equally bears witness that its past
duration cannot be admitted to be infinite.CHAPTER II
PR
OGRESS OF SIDEREAL ASTRONOMY
We have now to consider labours of a totally different character from those of Sir William
Herschel. Exploration and discovery do not constitute the whole business of astronomy; the less
adventurous, though not less arduous, task of gaining a more and more complete mastery over
the problems immemorially presented to her, may, on the contrary, be said to form her primary
du
ty. A knowledge of the movements of the heavenly bodies has, from the earliest times, been
demanded by the urgent needs of mankind; and science finds its advantage, as in many cases it
has taken its origin, in condescension to practical claims. Indeed, to bring such knowledge as
near as possible to absolute precision has been defined by no mean authority[58] as the true end
of astronomy.
Several causes concurred about the beginning of the last century to give a fresh and powerful
impulse to investigations having this end in view. The rapid progress of theory almost compelled
a corresponding advance in observation; instrumental improvements rendered such an advance
possible; Herschel's discoveries quickened public interest in celestial inquiries; royal, imperial,
and grand-ducal patronage widened the scope of individual effort. The heart of the new
movement was in Germany. Hitherto the observatory of Flamsteed and Bradley had been the
acknowledged centre of practical astronomy; Greenwich observations were the standard of
reference all over Europe; and the art of observing prospered in direct proportion to the fidelity
with which Greenwich methods were imitated. Dr. Maskelyne, who held the post of Astronomer
Royal during forty-six years (from 1765 to 1811), was no unworthy successor to the eminent
men who had gone before him. His foundation of the Nautical Almanac (in 1767) alone
constitutes a valid title to fame; he introduced at the Observatory the important innovation of the
systematic publication of results; and the careful and prolonged series of observations executed
by[Pg 28] him formed the basis of the improved theories, and corrected tables of the celestial
movements, which were rapidly being brought to completion abroad. His catalogue of thirty-six
"fundamental" stars was besides excellent in its way, and most serviceable. Yet he was devoid of
Bradley's instinct for divining the needs of the future. He was fitted rather to continue a tradition
than to found a school. The old ways were dear to him; and, indefatigable as he was, a definite
purpose was wanting to compel him, by its exigencies, along the path of progress. Thus, for
almost fifty years after Bradley's death, the acquisition of a small achromatic[59] was the only
notable change made in the instrumental equipment of the Observatory. The transit, the zenith
sector, and the mural quadrant, with which Bradley had done his incomparable work, retained
their places long after they had become deteriorated by time and obsolete by the progress of
invention; and it was not until the very close of his career that Maskelyne, compelled by Pond's
detection of serious errors, ordered a Troughton's circle, which he did not live to employ.
Meanwhile, the heavy national disasters with which Germany was overwhelmed in the early part
of the nineteenth century seemed to stimulate rather than impede the intellectual revival already
fo
r some years in progress there. Astronomy was amongst the first of the sciences to feel the new
impulse. By the efforts of Bode, Olbers, Schröter, and Von Zach, just and elevated ideas on the
subject were propagated, intelligence was diffused, and a firm ground prepared for common
action in mutual sympathy and disinterested zeal. They received powerful aid through the
fo
undation, in 1804, by a young artillery officer named Von Reichenbach, of an Optical and
Mechanical Institute at Munich. Here the work of English instrumental artists was for the first
time rivalled, and that of English opticians—when Fraunhofer entered the new establishment—
fa
r surpassed. The development given to the refracting telescope by this extraordinary man was
indispensable to the progress of that fundamental part of astronomy which consists in the exact
determination of the places of the heavenly bodies. Reflectors are brilliant engines of discovery,
but they lend themselves with difficulty to the prosaic work of measuring right ascensions and
polar distances. A signal improvement in the art of making and working flint-glass thus most
opportunely coincided with the rise of a German school of scientific mechanicians, to furnish the
instrumental means needed for the reform which was at hand. Of the leader of that reform it is
now time to speak.
Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel was born at Minden, in Westphalia,[Pg 29] July 22, 1784. A certain
taste for figures, coupled with a still stronger distaste for the Latin accidence, directed his
inclination and his father's choice towards a mercantile career. In his fifteenth year, accordingly,
he entered the house of Kuhlenkamp and Sons, in Bremen, as an apprenticed clerk. He was now
thrown completely upon his own resources. From his father, a struggling Government official,
heavily weighted with a large family, he was well aware that he had nothing to expect; his
dormant faculties were roused by the necessity for self-dependence, and he set himself to push
manfully forward along the path that lay before him. The post of supercargo on one of the
trading expeditions sent out from the Hanseatic towns to China and the East Indies was the aim
of his boyish ambition, for the attainment of which he sought to qualify himself by the
industrious acquisition of suitable and useful knowledge. He learned English in two or three
months; picked up Spanish with the casual aid of a gunsmith's apprentice; studied the geography
of the distant lands which he hoped to visit; collected information as to their climates,
inhabitants, products, and the courses of trade. He desired to add some acquaintance with the art
(then much neglected) of taking observations at sea; and thus, led on from navigation to
astronomy, and from astronomy to mathematics, he groped his way into a new world.
It was characteristic of him that the practical problems of science should have attracted him
before his mind was as yet sufficiently matured to feel the charm of its abstract beauties. His first
attempt at observation was made with a sextant, rudely constructed under his own directions, and
a common clock. Its object was the determination of the longitude of Bremen, and its success, he
tells us himself,[60] filled him with a rapture of delight, which, by confirming his tastes, decided
his destiny. He now eagerly studied Bode's Jahrbuch and Von Zach's Monatliche
Co
rrespondenz, overcoming each difficulty as it arose with the aid of Lalande's Traité
d'Astronomie, and supplying, with amazing rapidity, his early deficiency in mathematical
training. In two years he was able to attack a problem which would have tasked the patience, if
not the skill, of the most experienced astronomer. Amongst the Earl of Egremont's papers Von
Zach had discovered Harriot's observations on Halley's comet at its appearance in 1607, and
published them as a supplement to Bode's Annual. With an elaborate care inspired by his
youthful ardour, though hardly merited by their loose nature, Bessel deduced from them an orbit
fo
r that celebrated body, and presented the work to Olbers, whose reputation in cometary
researches gave a special fitness to the[Pg 30] proffered homage. The benevolent physicianastronomer of Bremen welcomed with surprised delight such a performance emanating from
such a source. Fifteen years previously, the French Academy had crowned a similar work; now
its equal was produced by a youth of twenty, busily engaged in commercial pursuits, self-taught,
and obliged to snatch from sleep the hours devoted to study. The paper was immediately sent to
Von Zach for publication, with a note from Olbers explaining the circumstances of its author;
and the name of Bessel became the common property of learned Europe.
He had, however, as yet no intention of adopting astronomy as his profession. For two years he
continued to work in the counting-house by day, and to pore over the Mécanique Céleste and the
Differential Calculus by night. But the post of assistant in Schröter's observatory at Lilienthal
having become vacant by the removal of Harding to Göttingen in 1805, Olbers procured for him
the offer of it. It was not without a struggle that he resolved to exchange the desk for the
telescope. His reputation with his employers was of the highest; he had thoroughly mastered the
details of the business, which his keen practical intelligence followed with lively interest; his
years of apprenticeship were on the point of expiring, and an immediate, and not unwelcome
prospect of comparative affluence lay before him. The love of science, however, prevailed; he
chose poverty and the stars, and went to Lilienthal with a salary of a hundred thalers yearly.
Looking back over his life's work, Olbers long afterwards declared that the greatest service
which he had rendered to astronomy was that of having discerned, directed, and promoted the
genius of Bessel.[61]
For four years he continued in Schröter's employment. At the end of that time the Prussian
Government chose him to superintend the erection of a new observatory at Königsberg, which
after many vexatious delays, caused by the prostrate condition of the country, was finished
towards the end of 1813. Königsberg was the first really efficient German observatory. It
became, moreover, a centre of improvement, not for Germany alone, but for the whole
astronomical world. During two-and-thirty years it was the scene of Bessel's labours, and
Bessel's labours had for their aim the reconstruction, on an amended and uniform plan, of the
entire science of observation.
A knowledge of the places of the stars is the foundation of astronomy.[62] Their configuration
lends to the skies their distinctive features, and marks out the shifting tracks of more mobile
objects with relatively fixed, and generally unvarying points of light. A more detailed and
accurate acquaintance with the stellar multitude,[Pg 31] regarded from a purely uranographical
point of view, has accordingly formed at all times a primary object of celestial science, and was,
du
ring the last century, cultivated with a zeal and success by which all previous efforts were
dwarfed into insignificance. In Lalande's Histoire Céleste, published in 1801, the places of no
less than 47,390 stars were given, but in the rough, as it were, and consequently needing
laborious processes of calculation to render them available for exact purposes. Piazzi set an
example of improved methods of observation, resulting in the publication, in 1803 and 1814, of
two catalogues of about 7,600 stars—the second being a revision and enlargement of the first—
which for their time were models of what such works should be.[63] Stephen Groombridge at
Blackheath was similarly and most beneficially active. But something more was needed than the
diligence of individual observers. A systematic reform was called for; and it was this which
Bessel undertook and carried through.
Direct observation furnishes only what has been called the "raw material" of the positions of the
heavenly bodies.[64] A number of highly complex corrections have to be applied before their
mean can be disengaged from their apparent places on the sphere. Of these, the most
considerable and familiar is atmospheric refraction, by which objects seem to stand higher in the
sky than they in reality do, the effect being evanescent at the zenith, and attaining, by gradations
varying with conditions of pressure and temperature, a maximum at the horizon. Moreover, the
points to which measurements are referred are themselves in motion, either continually in one
direction, or periodically to and fro. The precession of the equinoxes is slowly progressive, or
rather retrogressive; the nutation of the pole oscillatory in a period of about eighteen years.
Added to which, the non-instantaneous transmission of light, combined with the movement of
the earth in its orbit, causes a small annual displacement known as aberration.
Now it is easy to see that any uncertainty in the application of these corrections saps the very
fo
undations of exact astronomy. Extremely minute quantities, it is true, are concerned; but the
life and progress of modern celestial science depends upon the sure recognition of extremely
minute quantities. In the early years of the nineteenth century, however, no uniform system of
"reduction" (so the complete correction of observational results is termed) had been established.
Much was left to the individual caprice of observers, who selected for the several "elements" of
reduction such values as[Pg 32] seemed best to themselves. Hence arose much hurtful confusion,
tending to hinder united action and mar the usefulness of laborious researches. For this state of
things, Bessel, by the exercise of consummate diligence, sagacity, and patience, provided an
entirely satisfactory remedy.
His first step was an elaborate investigation of the precious series of observations made by
Bradley at Greenwich from 1750 until his death in 1762. The catalogue of 3,222 stars which he
extracted from them gave the earliest example of the systematic reduction on a uniform plan of
such a body of work. It is difficult, without entering into details out of place in a volume like the
present, to convey an idea of the arduous nature of this task. It involved the formation of a theory
of the errors of each of Bradley's instruments, and a difficult and delicate inquiry into the true
value of each correction to be applied, before the entries in the Greenwich journals could be
developed into a finished and authentic catalogue. Although completed in 1813, it was not until
five years later that the results appeared with the proud, but not inappropriate title of
Fu
ndamenta Astronomiæ. The eminent value of the work consisted in this, that by providing a
mass of entirely reliable information as to the state of the heavens at the epoch 1755, it threw
back the beginning of exact astronomy almost half a century. By comparison with Piazzi's
catalogues the amount of precession was more accurately determined, the proper motions of a
considerable number of stars became known with certainty, and definite prediction—the
certificate of initiation into the secrets of Nature—at last became possible as regards the places
of the stars. Bessel's final improvements in the methods of reduction were published in 1830 in
his Tabulæ Regiomontanæ. They not only constituted an advance in accuracy, but afforded a
vast increase of facility in application, and were at once and everywhere adopted. Thus
astronomy became a truly universal science; uncertainties and disparities were banished, and
observations made at all times and places rendered mutually comparable.[65]
More, however, yet remained to be done. In order to verify with greater strictness the results
drawn from the Bradley and Piazzi catalogues, a third term of comparison was wanted, and this
Bessel undertook to supply. By a course of 75,011 observations, executed during the years 1821-
33, with the utmost nicety of care, the number of accurately known stars was brought up to
ab
ove 50,000, and an ample store of trustworthy facts laid up for the use of future astronomers.
In this department Argelander, whom he attracted from finance to astronomy, and trained in his
own methods, was his[Pg 33] assistant and successor. The great "Bonn Durchmusterung,"[66] in
which 324,198 stars visible in the northern hemisphere are enumerated, and the corresponding
"Atlas" published in 1857-63, constituting a picture of our sidereal surroundings of heretofore
unapproached completeness, may be justly said to owe their origin to Bessel's initiative, and to
fo
rm
a sequel to what he commenced.
But his activity was not solely occupied with the promotion of a comprehensive reform in
astronomy; it embraced special problems as well. The long-baffled search for a parallax of the
fixed stars was resumed with fresh zeal as each mechanical or optical improvement held out
fresh hopes of a successful issue. Illusory results abounded. Piazza in 1805 perceived, as he
supposed, considerable annual displacements in Vega, Aldebaran, Sirius, and Procyon; the truth
being that his instruments were worn out with constant use, and could no longer be depended
upon.[67] His countryman, Calandrelli, was similarly deluded. The celebrated controversy
between the Astronomer Royal and Dr. Brinkley, Director of the Dublin College Observatory,
turned on the same subject. Brinkley, who was in possession of a first-rate meridian-circle,
believed himself to have discovered relatively large parallaxes for four of the brightest stars;
Pond, relying on the testimony of the Greenwich instruments, asserted their nullity. The dispute,
protracted for fourteen years, from 1810 until 1824, was brought to no definite conclusion; but
the strong presumption on the negative side was abundantly justified in the event.
There was good reason for incredulity in the matter of parallaxes. Announcements of their
detection had become so frequent as to be discredited before they were disproved; and Struve,
who investigated the subject at Dorpat in 1818-21, had clearly shown that the quantities
concerned were too small to come within the reliable measuring powers of any instrument then
in use. Already, however, the means were being prepared of giving to those powers a large
increase.
On the 21st July, 1801, two old houses in an alley of Munich tumbled down, burying in their
ru
ins the occupants, of whom one alone was extricated alive, though seriously injured. This was
an orphan lad of fourteen named Joseph Fraunhofer. The Elector Maximilian Joseph was witness
of the scene, became interested in the survivor, and consoled his misfortune with a present of
eighteen ducats. Seldom was money better bestowed. Part of it went to buy books and a glasspolishing machine, with the help of which young Fraunhofer studied mathematics and optics,
and secretly exercised himself in the shaping and finishing of lenses; the remainder purchased
his[Pg 34] release from the tyranny of one Weichselberger, a looking-glass maker by trade, to
whom he had been bound apprentice on the death of his parents. A period of struggle and
privation followed, during which, however, he rapidly extended his acquirements; and was thus
eminently fitted for the task awaiting him, when, in 1806, he entered the optical department of
the establishment founded two years previously by Von Reichenbach and Utzschneider. He now
zealously devoted himself to the improvement of the achromatic telescope; and, after a
prolonged study of the theory of lenses, and many toilsome experiments in the manufacture of
flint-glass, he succeeded in perfecting, December 12, 1817, an object-glass of exquisite quality
and finish, 9-1/2 inches in diameter, and of 14 feet focal length.
This (as it was then considered) gigantic lens was secured by Struve for the Russian
Government, and the "great Dorpat refractor"—the first of the large achromatics which have
played such an important part in modern astronomy—was, late in 1824, set up in the place which
it still occupies. By ingenious improvements in mounting and fitting, it was adapted to the finest
micrometrical work, and thus offered unprecedented facilities both for the examination of double
stars (in which Struve chiefly employed it), and for such subtle measurements as might serve to
reveal or disprove the existence of a sensible stellar parallax. Fraunhofer, moreover, constructed
fo
r the observatory at Königsberg the first really available heliometer. The principle of this
instrument (termed with more propriety a "divided object-glass micrometer") is the separation,
by a strictly measurable amount, of two distinct images of the same object. If a double star, for
instance, be under examination, the two half-lenses into which the object-glass is divided are
shifted until the upper star (say) in one image is brought into coincidence with the lower star in
the other, when their distance apart becomes known by the amount of motion employed.[68]
This virtually new engine of research was delivered and mounted in 1829, three years after the
termination of the life of its deviser. The Dorpat lens had brought to Fraunhofer a title of nobility
and the sole management of the Munich Optical Institute (completely separated since 1814 from
the mechanical department). What he had achieved, however, was but a small part of what he
meant to achieve. He saw before him the possibility of nearly quadrupling the light-gathering
capacity of the great achromatic acquired by[Pg 35] Struve; he meditated improvements in
reflectors as important as those he had already effected in refractors; and was besides eagerly
occupied with investigations into the nature of light, the momentous character of which we shall
by-and-by have an opportunity of estimating. But his health was impaired, it is said, from the
weakening effects of his early accident, combined with excessive and unwholesome toil, and,
still hoping for its restoration from a projected journey to Italy, he died of consumption, June 7,
1826, aged thirty-nine years. His tomb in Munich bears the concise eulogy, Approximavit sidera.
Bessel had no sooner made himself acquainted with the exquisite defining powers of the
Königsberg heliometer, than he resolved to employ them in an attack upon the now secular
problem of star-distances. But it was not until 1837 that he found leisure to pursue the inquiry. In
choosing his test-star he adopted a new principle. It had hitherto been assumed that our nearest
neighbours in space must be found among the brightest ornaments of our skies. The knowledge
of stellar proper motions afforded by the critical comparison of recent with earlier star-places,
suggested a different criterion of distance. It is impossible to escape from the conclusion that the
ap
parently swiftest-moving stars are, on the whole, also the nearest to us, however numerous the
individual exceptions to the rule. Now, as early as 1792,[69] Piazzi had noted as an indication of
relative vicinity to the earth, the unusually large proper motion (5·2′ annually) of a double star of
the fifth magnitude in the constellation of the Swan. Still more emphatically in 1812[70] Bessel
drew the attention of astronomers to the fact, and 61 Cygni became known as the "flying star."
The seeming rate of its flight, indeed, is of so leisurely a kind, that in a thousand years it will
have shifted its place by less than 3-1/2 lunar diameters, and that a quarter of a million would be
required to carry it round the entire circuit of the visible heavens. Nevertheless, it has few rivals
in rapidity of movement, the apparent displacement of the vast majority of stars being, by
comparison, almost insensible.
This interesting, though inconspicuous object, then, was chosen by Bessel to be put to the
question with his heliometer, while Struve made a similar and somewhat earlier trial with the
bright gem of the Lyre, whose Arabic title of the "Falling Eagle" survives as a time-worn
remnant in "Vega." Both astronomers agreed to use the "differential" method, for which their
instruments and the vicinity to their selected stars of minute, physically detached companions
offered special facilities. In the last month of 1838[Pg 36] Bessel made known the result of one
year's observations, showing for 61 Cygni a parallax of about a third of a second (0·3136′).[71]
He then had his heliometer taken down and repaired, after which he resumed the inquiry, and
finally terminated a series of 402 measures in March 1840.[72] The resulting parallax of 0·3483′
(corresponding to a distance about 600,000 times that of the earth from the sun), seemed to be
ascertained beyond the possibility of cavil, and is memorable as the first published instance of
the fathom-line, so industriously thrown into celestial space, having really and indubitably
touched bottom. It was confirmed in 1842-43 with curious exactness by C. A. F. Peters at
Pulkowa; but later researches showed that it required increase to nearly half a second.[73]
Struve's measurements inspired less confidence. They extended over three years (1835-38), but
were comparatively few, and were frequently interrupted. The parallax, accordingly, of about a
quarter of a second (0·2613′) which he derived from them for α Lyræ, and announced in
1840,[74] has proved considerably too large.[75]
Meanwhile a result of the same kind, but of a more striking character than either Bessel's or
Struve's, had been obtained, one might almost say casually, by a different method and in a
distant region. Thomas Henderson, originally an attorney's clerk in his native town of Dundee,
had become known for his astronomical attainments, and was appointed in 1831 to direct the
recently completed observatory at the Cape of Good Hope. He began observing in April, 1832,
and, the serious shortcomings of his instrument notwithstanding, executed during the thirteen
months of his tenure of office a surprising amount of first-rate work. With a view to correcting
the declination of the lustrous double star α Centauri (which ranks after Sirius and Canopus as
the third brightest orb in the heavens), he effected a number of successive determinations of its
position, and on being informed of its very considerable proper motion (3·6′ annually), he
resolved to examine the observations already made for possible traces of parallactic
displacement. This was done on his return to Scotland, where he filled the office of Astronomer
Royal from 1834 until his premature death in 1844. The result justified his expectations. From
the[Pg 37] declination measurements made at the Cape and duly reduced, a parallax of about one
second of arc clearly emerged (diminished by Gill's and Elkin's observations, 1882-1883, to
O·75′); but, by perhaps an excess of caution, was withheld from publication until fuller certainty
was afforded by the concurrent testimony of Lieutenant Meadows's determinations of the same
star's right ascension.[76] When at last, January 9, 1839, Henderson communicated his discovery
to the Astronomical Society, he could no longer claim the priority which was his due. Bessel had
anticipated him with the parallax of 61 Cygni by just two months.
Thus from three different quarters, three successful and almost simultaneous assaults were
delivered upon a long-beleaguered citadel of celestial secrets. The same work has since been
steadily pursued, with the general result of showing that, as regards their overwhelming
majority, the stars are far too remote to show even the slightest trace of optical shifting from the
revolution of the earth in its orbit. In nearly a hundred cases, however, small parallaxes have
been determined, some certainly (that is, within moderate limits of error), others more or less
precariously. The list is an instructive one, in its omissions no less than in its contents. It
includes stars of many degrees of brightness, from Sirius down to a nameless telescopic star in
the Great Bear;[77] yet the vicinity to the earth of this minute object is so much greater than that
of the brilliant Vega, that the latter transported to its place would increase in lustre thirty-eight
times. Moreover, many of the brightest stars are found to have no sensible parallax, while the
majority of those ascertained to be nearest to the earth are of fifth, sixth, even ninth magnitudes.
The obvious conclusions follow that the range of variety in the sidereal system is enormously
greater than had been supposed, and that estimates of distance based upon apparent magnitude
must be wholly futile. Thus, the splendid Canopus, Betelgeux, and Rigel can be inferred, from
their indefinite remoteness, to exceed our sun thousands of times in size and lustre; while many
inconspicuous objects, which prove to be in our relative vicinity, must be notably his inferiors.
The limits of real stellar magnitude are then set very widely apart. At the same time, the socalled "optical" and "geometrical" methods of relatively estimating star-distances are both seen
to have a foundation of fact, although so disguised by complicated relations as to be of very
doubtful individual application. On the whole, the chances are in[Pg 38] favour of the superior
vicinity of a bright star over a faint one; and, on the whole, the stars in swiftest apparent motion
are amongst those whose actual remoteness is least. Indeed, there is no escape from either
conclusion, unless on the supposition of special arrangements in themselves highly improbable,
and, we may confidently say, non-existent.
The distances even of the few stars found to have measurable parallaxes are on a scale entirely
beyond the powers of the human mind to conceive. In the attempt both to realize them distinctly,
and to express them conveniently, a new unit of length, itself of bewildering magnitude, has
originated. This is what we may call the light-journey of one year. The subtle vibrations of the
ether, propagated on all sides from the surface of luminous bodies, travel at the rate of 186,300
miles a second, or (in round numbers) six billions of miles a year. Four and a third such
measures are needed to span the abyss that separates us from the nearest fixed star. In other
words, light takes four years and four months to reach the earth from α Centauri; yet α Centauri
lies some ten billions of miles nearer to us (so far as is yet known) than any other member of the
sidereal system!
The determination of parallax leads, in the case of stars revolving in known orbits, to the
determination of mass; for the distance from the earth of the two bodies forming a binary system
being ascertained, the seconds of arc apparently separating them from each other can be
translated into millions of miles; and we only need to add a knowledge of their period to enable
us, by an easy sum in proportion, to find their combined mass in terms of that of the sun. Thus,
since—according to Dr. Doberck's elements—the components of α Centauri revolve round their
common centre of gravity at a mean distance nearly 25 times the radius of the earth's orbit, in a
period of 88 years, the attractive force of the two together must be just twice the solar. We may
gather some idea of their relations by placing in imagination a second luminary like our sun in
circulation between the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. But systems of still more majestic
proportions are reduced by extreme remoteness to apparent insignificance. A double star of the
fo
urth magnitude in Cassiopeia (Eta), to which a small parallax is ascribed on the authority of O.
Struve, appears to be above eight times as massive as the central orb of our world; while a much
less conspicuous pair—85 Pegasi—exerts, if the available data can be depended upon, no less
than thirteen times the solar gravitating power.
Further, the actual rate of proper motions, so far as regards that part of them which is projected
upon the sphere, can be ascertained[Pg 39] for stars at known distance. The annual journey, for
instance, of 61 Cygni across the line of sight amounts to 1,000, and that of α Centauri to 446
millions of miles. A small star, numbered 1,830 in Groombridge's Circumpolar Catalogue,
"devours the way" at the rate of at least 150 miles a second—a speed, in Newcomb's opinion,
beyond the gravitating power of the entire sidereal system to control; and μ Cassiopeiæ
possesses above two-thirds of that surprising velocity; while for both objects, radial movements
of just sixty miles a second were disclosed by Professor Campbell's spectroscopic
measurements.
Herschel's conclusion as to the advance of the sun among the stars was not admitted as valid by
the most eminent of his successors. Bessel maintained that there was absolutely no
preponderating evidence in favour of its supposed direction towards a point in the constellation
Hercules.[78] Biot, Burckhardt, even Herschel's own son, shared his incredulity. But the
ap
pearance of Argelander's prize-essay in 1837[79] changed the aspect of the question. Herschel's
first memorable solution in 1783 was based upon the motions of thirteen stars, imperfectly
kn
own; his second, in 1805, upon those of no more than six. Argelander now obtained an
entirely concordant result from the large number of 390, determined with the scrupulous
accuracy characteristic of Bessel's work and his own. The reality of the fact thus persistently
disclosed could no longer be doubted; it was confirmed five years later by the younger Struve,
and still more strikingly in 1847[80] by Galloway's investigations, founded exclusively on the
ap
parent displacements of southern stars. In 1859 and 1863, Sir George Airy and Mr. Dunkin
(1821-1898),[81] employing all the resources of modern science, and commanding the wealth of
material furnished by 1,167 proper motions carefully determined by Mr. Main, reached
conclusions closely similar to that indicated nearly eighty years previously by the first great
sidereal astronomer; which Mr. Plummer's reinvestigation of the subject in 1883[82] served but
slightly to modify. Yet astronomers were not satisfied. Dr. Auwers of Berlin completed in 1866
a splendid piece of work, for which he received in 1888 the Gold Medal of the Royal
Astronomical Society. It consisted in reducing afresh, with the aid of the most refined modern
data, Bradley's original stars, and comparing their places thus obtained for the year 1755 with
those assigned to them from observations made at Greenwich after the lapse of ninety years. In
the interval, as was to be anticipated, most of them were found to[Pg 40] have travelled over some
small span of the heavens, and there resulted a stock of nearly three thousand highly authentic
proper motions. These ample materials were turned to account by M. Ludwig Struve[83] for a
discussion of the sun's motion, of which the upshot was to shift its point of aim to the bordering
region of the constellations Hercules and Lyra. And the more easterly position of the solar apex
was fully confirmed by the experiments, with variously assorted lists of stars, of Lewis Boss of
Albany,[84] and Oscar Stumpe of Bonn.[85] Fresh precautions of refinement were introduced into
the treatment of the subject by Ristenpart of Karlsruhe,[86] by Kapteyn of Groningen,[87] by
Newcomb[88] and Porter[89] in America, who ably availed themselves of the copious materials
accumulated before the close of the century. Their results, although not more closely accordant
than those of their predecessors, combined to show that the journey of our system is directed
towards a point within a circle about ten degrees in radius, having the brilliant Vega for its
centre. To determine its rate was a still more arduous problem. It involved the assumption, very
much at discretion, of an average parallax for the stars investigated; and Otto Struve's estimate of
154 million miles as the span yearly traversed was hence wholly unreliable. Fortunately,
however, as will be seen further on, a method of determining the sun's velocity independently of
any knowledge of star-distances, has now become available.
As might have been expected, speculation has not been idle regarding the purpose and goal of
the strange voyage of discovery through space upon which our system is embarked; but
altogether fruitlessly. The variety of the conjectures hazarded in the matter is in itself a measure
of their futility. Long ago, before the construction of the heavens had as yet been made the
subject of methodical inquiry, Kant was disposed to regard Sirius as the "central sun" of the
Milky Way; while Lambert surmised that the vast Orion nebula might serve as the regulating
power of a subordinate group including our sun. Herschel threw out the hint that the great cluster
in Hercules might prove to be the supreme seat of attractive force;[90] Argelander placed his
central body in the constellation Perseus;[91] Fomalhaut, the brilliant of the Southern Fish, was
set in the post of honour by Boguslawski[Pg 41] of Breslau. Mädler (who succeeded Struve at
Dorpat in 1839) concluded from a more formal inquiry that the ruling power in the sidereal
system resided, not in any single prepondering mass, but in the centre of gravity of the selfcontrolled revolving multitude.[92] In the former case (as we know from the example of the
planetary scheme), the stellar motions would be most rapid near the centre; in the latter, they
would become accelerated with remoteness from it.[93] Mädler showed that no part of the
heavens could be indicated as a region of exceptionally swift movements, such as would result
from the presence of a gigantic (though possibly obscure) ruling body; but that a community of
extremely sluggish movements undoubtedly existed in and near the group of the Pleiades, where,
accordingly, he placed the centre of gravity of the Milky Way.[94] The bright star Alcyone thus
became the "central sun," but in a purely passive sense, its headship being determined by its
situation at the point of neutralisation of opposing tendencies, and of consequent rest. By an
avowedly conjectural method, the solar period of revolution round this point was fixed at
18,200,000 years.
The scheme of sidereal government framed by the Dorpat astronomer was, it may be observed,
of the most approved constitutional type; deprivation, rather than increase of influence
accompanying the office of chief dignitary. But while we are still ignorant, and shall perhaps
ever remain so, of the fundamental plan upon which the Galaxy is organised, recent
investigations tend more and more to exhibit it, not as monarchical (so to speak), but as
fe
derative. The community of proper motions detected by Mädler in the vicinity of the Pleiades
may accordingly possess a significance altogether different from what he imagined.
Bessel's so-called "foundation of an Astronomy of the Invisible" now claims attention.[95] His
prediction regarding the planet Neptune does not belong to the present division of our subject; a
strictly analogous discovery in the sidereal system was, however, also very clearly foreshadowed
by him. His earliest suspicions of non-uniformity in the proper motion of Sirius dated from
1834; they extended to Procyon in 1840; and after a series of refined measurements with the new
Repsold circle, he announced in 1844 his conclusion that these irregularities were due to the
presence of[Pg 42] obscure bodies round which the two bright Dog-stars revolved as they pursued
their way across the sphere.[96] He even assigned to each an approximate period of half a
century. "I adhere to the conviction," he wrote later to Humboldt, "that Procyon and Sirius form
real binary systems, consisting of a visible and an invisible star. There is no reason to suppose
luminosity an essential quality of cosmical bodies. The visibility of countless stars is no
argument against the invisibility of countless others."[97]
An inference so contradictory to received ideas obtained little credit, until Peters found, in
1851,[98] that the apparent anomalies in the movements of Sirius could be completely explained
by an orbital revolution in a period of fifty years. Bessel's prevision was destined to be still more
triumphantly vindicated. On the 31st of January, 1862, while in the act of trying a new 18-inch
refractor, Mr. Alvan G. Clark (one of the celebrated firm of American opticians) actually
discovered the hypothetical Sirian companion in the precise position required by theory. It has
now been watched through nearly an entire revolution (period 49·4 years), and proves to be very
slightly luminous in proportion to its mass. Its attractive power, in fact, is nearly half that of its
primary, while it emits only 1/10000th of its light. Sirius itself, on the other hand, possesses a far
higher radiative intensity than our sun. It gravitates—admitting Sir David Gill's parallax of 0·38′
to be exact—like two suns, but shines like twenty. Possibly it is much distended by heat, and
undoubtedly its atmosphere intercepts a very much smaller proportion of its light than in stars of
the solar class. As regards Procyon, visual verification was awaited until November 13, 1896,
when Professor Schaeberle, with the great Lick refractor, detected the long-sought object in the
guise of a thirteenth-magnitude star. Dr. See's calculations[99] showed it to possess one-fifth the
mass of its primary, or rather more than half that of our sun.[100] Yet it gives barely 1/20000th of
the sun's light, so that it is still nearer to total obscurity than the dusky satellite of Sirius. The
period of forty years assigned to the system by Auwers in 1862[101] appears to be singularly
exact.
But Bessel was not destined to witness the recognition of "the invisible" as a legitimate and
profitable field for astronomical research. He died March 17, 1846, just six months before the
discovery of Neptune, of an obscure disease, eventually found to be occasioned by an extensive
fu
ngus-growth in the stomach. The[Pg 43] place which he left vacant was not one easy to fill. His
life's work might be truly described as "epoch-making." Rarely indeed shall we find one who
reconciled with the same success the claims of theoretical and practical astronomy, or surveyed
the science which he had made his own with a glance equally comprehensive, practical, and
profound.
The career of Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve illustrates the maxim that science differentiates as
it develops. He was, while much besides, a specialist in double stars. His earliest recorded use of
the telescope was to verify Herschel's conclusion as to the revolving movement of Castor, and he
never varied from the predilection which this first observation at once indicated and determined.
He was born at Altona, of a respectable yeoman family, April 15, 1793, and in 1811 took a
degree in philology at the new Russian University of Dorpat. He then turned to science, was
ap
pointed in 1813 to a professorship of astronomy and mathematics, and began regular work in
the Dorpat Observatory just erected by Parrot for Alexander I. It was not, however, until 1819
that the acquisition of a 5-foot refractor by Troughton enabled him to take the position-angles of
double stars with regularity and tolerable precision. The resulting catalogue of 795 stellar
systems gave the signal for a general resumption of the Herschelian labours in this branch. His
success, so far, and the extraordinary facilities for observation afforded by the Fraunhofer
achromatic encouraged him to undertake, February 11, 1825, a review of the entire heavens
down to 15° south of the celestial equator, which occupied more than two years, and yielded,
from an examination of above 120,000 stars, a harvest of about 2,200 previously unnoticed
composite objects. The ensuing ten years were devoted to delicate and patient measurements, the
results of which were embodied in Mensuræ Micrometricæ, published at St. Petersburg in 1837.
This monumental work gives the places, angles of position, distances, colours, and relative
brightness of 3,112 double and multiple stars, all determined with the utmost skill and care. The
record is one which gains in value with the process of time, and will for ages serve as a standard
of reference by which to detect change or confirm discovery.
It appears from Struve's researches that about one in forty of all stars down to the ninth
magnitude is composite, but that the proportion is doubled in the brighter orders.[102] This he
attributed to the difficulty of detecting the faint companions of very remote orbs. It was also
noticed, both by him and Bessel, that double stars are in general remarkable for large proper
motions. Struve's catalogue included no star of which the components were more than 32′
ap
art,[Pg 44] because beyond that distance the chances of merely optical juxtaposition become
considerable; but the immense preponderance of extremely close over (as it were) loosely yoked
bodies is such as to demonstrate their physical connection, even if no other proof were
fo
rt
hcoming. Many stars previously believed to be single divided under the scrutiny of the
Dorpat refractor; while in some cases, one member of a supposed binary system revealed itself
as double, thus placing the surprised observer in the unexpected presence of a triple group of
suns. Five instances were noted of two pairs lying so close together as to induce a conviction of
their mutual dependence;[103] besides which, 124 examples occurred of triple, quadruple, and
multiple combinations, the reality of which was open to no reasonable doubt.[104]
It was first pointed out by Bessel that the fact of stars exhibiting a common proper motion might
serve as an unfailing test of their real association into systems. This was, accordingly, one of the
chief criteria employed by Struve to distinguish true binaries from merely optical couples. On
this ground alone, 61 Cygni was admitted to be a genuine double star; and it was shown that,
although its components appeared to follow almost strictly rectilinear paths, yet the probability
of their forming a connected pair is actually greater than that of the sun rising to-morrow
morning.[105] Moreover, this tie of an identical movement was discovered to unite bodies[106] far
beyond the range of distance ordinarily separating the members of binary systems, and to prevail
so extensively as to lead to the conclusion that single do not outnumber conjoined stars more
than twice or thrice.[107]
In 1835 Struve was summoned by the Emperor Nicholas to superintend the erection of a new
observatory at Pulkowa, near St. Petersburg, destined for the special cultivation of sidereal
astronomy. Boundless resources were placed at his disposal, and the institution created by him
was acknowledged to surpass all others of its kind in splendour, efficiency, and completeness. Its
chief instrumental glory was a refractor of fifteen inches aperture by Merz and Mahler
(Fraunhofer's successors), which left the famous Dorpat telescope far behind, and remained long
without a rival. On the completion of this model establishment, August 19, 1839, Struve was
installed as its director, and continued to fulfil the important duties of the post with his
accustomed vigour until 1858, when[Pg 45] illness compelled his virtual resignation in favour of
his son Otto Struve, born at Dorpat in 1819. He died November 23, 1864.
An inquiry into the laws of stellar distribution, undertaken during the early years of his residence
at Pulkowa, led Struve to confirm in the main the inferences arrived at by Herschel as to the
construction of the heavens. According to his view, the appearance known as the Milky Way is
produced by a collection of irregularly condensed star-clusters, within which the sun is
somewhat eccentrically placed. The nebulous ring which thus integrates the light of countless
worlds was supposed by him to be made up of stars scattered over a bent or "broken plane," or to
lie in two planes slightly inclined to each other, our system occupying a position near their
intersection.[108] He further attempted to show that the limits of this vast assemblage must remain
fo
r ever shrouded from human discernment, owing to the gradual extinction of light in its
passage through space,[109] and sought to confer upon this celebrated hypothesis a definiteness
and certainty far beyond the aspirations of its earlier advocates, Chéseaux and Olbers; but
arbitrary assumptions vitiated his reasonings on this, as well as on some other points.[110]
In his special line as a celestial explorer of the most comprehensive type, Sir William Herschel
had but one legitimate successor, and that successor was his son. John Frederick William
Herschel was born at Slough, March 17, 1792, graduated with the highest honours from St.
John's College, Cambridge, in 1813, and entered upon legal studies with a view to being called
to the Bar. But his share in an early compact with Peacock and Babbage, "to do their best to
leave the world wiser than they found it," was not thus to be fulfilled. The acquaintance of Dr.
Wollaston decided his scientific vocation. Already, in 1816, we find him reviewing some of his
fa
ther's double stars; and he completed in 1820 the 18-inch speculum which was to be the chief
instrument of his investigations. Soon afterwards, he undertook, in conjunction with Mr. (later
Sir James) South, a series of observations, issuing in the presentation to the Royal Society of a
paper[111] containing micrometrical measurements of 380 binary stars, by which the elder
Herschel's inferences of orbital motion were, in many cases, strikingly confirmed. A star in the
Northern Crown, for instance (η Coronæ), had completed more than one entire circuit since its
first discovery; another, τ Ophiuchi, had closed up into apparent singleness; while the motion of
a third, ξ Ursæ Majoris, in an obviously eccentric orbit, was so[Pg 46] rapid as to admit of being
traced and measured from month to month.
It was from the first confidently believed that the force retaining double stars in curvilinear paths
was identical with that governing the planetary revolutions. But that identity was not ascertained
until Savary of Paris showed, in 1827,[112] that the movements of the above-named binary in the
Great Bear could be represented with all attainable accuracy by an ellipse calculated on orthodox
gravitational principles with a period of 58-1/4 years. Encke followed at Berlin with a still more
elegant method; and Sir John Herschel, pointing out the uselessness of analytical refinements
where the data were necessarily so imperfect, described in 1832 a graphical process by which
"the aid of the eye and hand" was brought in "to guide the judgment in a case where judgment
only, and not calculation, could be of any avail."[113] Improved methods of the same kind were
published by Dr. See in 1893,[114] and by Mr. Burnham in 1894;[115] and our acquaintance with
stellar orbits is steadily gaining precision, certainty, and extent.
In 1825 Herschel undertook, and executed with great assiduity during the ensuing eight years, a
general survey of the northern heavens, directed chiefly towards the verification of his father's
nebular discoveries. The outcome was a catalogue of 2,306 nebulæ and clusters, of which 525
were observed for the first time, besides 3,347 double stars discovered almost incidentally.[116]
"Strongly invited," as he tells us himself, "by the peculiar interest of the subject, and the
wonderful nature of the objects which presented themselves," he resolved to attempt the
completion of the survey in the southern hemisphere. With this noble object in view, he
embarked his family and instruments on board the Mount Stewart Elphinstone, and, after a
prosperous voyage, landed at Cape Town on the 16th of January, 1834. Choosing as the scene of
his observations a rural spot under the shelter of Table Mountain, he began regular "sweeping"
on the 5th of March. The site of his great reflector is now marked with an obelisk, and the name
of Feldhausen has become memorable in the history of science; for the four years' work done
there may truly be said to open the chapter of our knowledge as regards the southern skies.
The full results of Herschel's journey to the Cape were not made public until 1847, when a
splendid volume[117] embodying them was[Pg 47] brought out at the expense of the Duke of
Northumberland. They form a sequel to his father's labours such as the investigations of one man
have rarely received from those of another. What the elder observer did for the northern heavens,
the younger did for the southern, and with generally concordant results. Reviving the paternal
method of "star-gauging," he showed, from a count of 2,299 fields, that the Milky Way
surrounds the solar system as a complete annulus of minute stars; not, however, quite
symmetrically, since the sun was thought to lie somewhat nearer to those portions visible in the
southern hemisphere, which display a brighter lustre and a more complicated structure than the
northern branches. The singular cosmical agglomerations known as the "Magellanic Clouds"
were now, for the first time, submitted to a detailed, though admittedly incomplete, examination,
the almost inconceivable richness and variety of their contents being such that a lifetime might
with great profit be devoted to their study. In the Greater Nubecula, within a compass of fortytwo square degrees, Herschel reckoned 278 distinct nebulæ and clusters, besides fifty or sixty
outliers, and a large number of stars intermixed with diffused nebulosity—in all, 919 catalogued
objects, and, for the Lesser Cloud, 244. Yet this was only the most conspicuous part of what his
twenty-foot revealed. Such an extraordinary concentration of bodies so various led him to the
inevitable conclusion that "the Nubeculæ are to be regarded as systems sui generis, and which
have no analogues in our hemisphere."[118] He noted also the blankness of surrounding space,
especially in the case of Nubecula Minor, "the access to which on all sides," he remarked, "is
through a desert;" as if the cosmical material in the neighbourhood had been swept up and
garnered in these mighty groups.[119]
Of southern double stars, he discovered and gave careful measurements of 2,102, and described
1
,708 nebulæ, of which at least 300 were new. The list was illustrated with a number of
drawings, some of them extremely beautiful and elaborate.
Sir John Herschel's views as to the nature of nebulæ were considerably modified by Lord Rosse's
success in "resolving" with his great reflectors a crowd of these objects into stars. His former
somewhat hesitating belief in the existence of phosphorescent matter, "disseminated through
extensive regions of space in the manner of a cloud or fog,"[120] was changed into a conviction
that no valid distinction could be established between the faintest wisp of cosmical vapour just
discernible in a powerful telescope, and the most brilliant and obvious cluster. He admitted,
however, an immense[Pg 48] range of possible variety in the size and mode of aggregation of the
stellar constituents of various nebulæ. Some might appear nebulous from the closeness of their
parts; some from their smallness. Others, he suggested, might be formed of "discrete luminous
bodies floating in a non-luminous medium;"[121] while the annular kind probably consisted of
"hollow shells of stars."[122] That a physical, and not merely an optical, connection unites nebulæ
with the embroidery (so to speak) of small stars with which they are in many instances profusely
decorated, was evident to him, as it must be to all who look as closely and see as clearly as he
did. His description of No. 2,093 in his northern catalogue as "a network or tracery of nebula
fo
llowing the lines of a similar network of stars,"[123] would alone suffice to dispel the idea of
accidental scattering; and many other examples of a like import might be quoted. The
remarkably frequent occurrence of one or more minute stars in the close vicinity of "planetary"
nebulæ led him to infer their dependent condition; and he advised the maintenance of a strict
watch for evidences of circulatory movements, not only over these supposed stellar satellites, but
also over the numerous "double nebulæ," in which, as he pointed out, "all the varieties of double
stars as to distance, position, and relative brightness, have their counterparts." He, moreover,
investigated the subject of nebular distribution by the simple and effectual method of graphic
delineation or "charting," and succeeded in showing that while a much greater uniformity of
scattering prevails in the southern than in the northern heavens, a condensation is nevertheless
perceptible about the constellations Pisces and Cetus, roughly corresponding to the "nebular
region" in Virgo by its vicinity (within 20° or 30°) to the opposite pole of the Milky Way. He
concluded "that the nebulous system is distinct from the sidereal, though involving, and perhaps
to a certain extent intermixed with, the latter."[124]
Towards the close of his residence at Feldhausen, Herschel was fortunate enough to witness one
of those singular changes in the aspect of the firmament which occasionally challenge the
attention even of the incurious, and excite the deepest wonder of the philosophical observer.
Immersed apparently in the Argo nebula is a star denominated η Carinæ. When Halley visited St.
Helena in 1677, it seemed of the fourth magnitude; but Lacaille in the middle of the following
century, and others after him, classed it as of the second. In 1827 the traveller Burchell, being
then at St. Paul, near Rio Janeiro, remarked that it had unexpectedly assumed the first rank—a
circumstance the more surprising to him[Pg 49] because he had frequently, when in Africa during
the years 1811 to 1815, noted it as of only fourth magnitude. This observation, however, did not
become generally known until later. Herschel, on his arrival at Feldhausen, registered the star as
a bright second, and had no suspicion of its unusual character until December 16, 1837, when he
suddenly perceived its light to be almost tripled. It then far outshone Rigel in Orion, and on the
2nd of January following it very nearly matched α Centauri. From that date it declined; but a
second and even brighter maximum occurred in April, 1843, when Maclear, then director of the
Cape Observatory, saw it blaze out with a splendour approaching that of Sirius. Its waxings and
wanings were marked by curious "trepidations" of brightness extremely perplexing to theory. In
1863 it had sunk below the fifth magnitude, and in 1869 was barely visible to the naked eye; yet
it was not until eighteen years later that it touched a minimum of 7·6 magnitude. Soon
afterwards a recovery of brightness set in, but was not carried very far; and the star now shines
steadily as of the seventh magnitude, its reddish light contrasting effectively with the silvery rays
of the surrounding nebula. An attempt to include its fluctuations within a cycle of seventy
years[125] has signally failed; the extent and character of the vicissitudes to which it is subject
stamping it rather as a species of connecting link between periodic and temporary stars.[126]
Among the numerous topics which engaged Herschel's attention at the Cape was that of relative
stellar brightness. Having contrived an "astrometer" in which an "artificial star," formed by the
total reflection of moonlight from the base of a prism, served as a standard of comparison, he
was able to estimate the lustre of the natural stars examined by the distances at which the
artificial object appeared equal respectively to each. He thus constructed a table of 191 of the
principal stars,[127] both in the northern and southern hemispheres, setting forth the numerical
values of their apparent brightness relatively to that of α Centauri, which he selected as a unit of
measurement. Further, the light of the full moon being found by him to exceed that of his
standard star 27,408 times, and Dr. Wollaston having shown that the light of the full moon is to
that of the sun as 1:801,072[128] (Zöllner made the ratio 1:618,000), it became possible to
compare stellar with solar radiance. Hence was derived, in the case of the few stars at
ascertained distances, a knowledge of real lustre. Alpha Centauri, for example, emits less[Pg 50]
than twice, Capella one hundred times as much light as our sun; while Arcturus, at its enormous
distance, must display the splendour of 1,300 such luminaries.
Herschel returned to England in the spring of 1838, bringing with him a wealth of observation
and discovery such as had perhaps never before been amassed in so short a time. Deserved
honours awaited him. He was created a baronet on the occasion of the Queen's coronation (he
had been knighted in 1831); universities and learned societies vied with each other in showering
distinctions upon him; and the success of an enterprise in which scientific zeal was tinctured
with an attractive flavour of adventurous romance, was justly regarded as a matter of national
pride. His career as an observing astronomer was now virtually closed, and he devoted his
leisure to the collection and arrangement of the abundant trophies of his father's and his own
activity. The resulting great catalogue of 5,079 nebulæ (including all then certainly known),
published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1864, is, and will probably long remain, the
fu
ndamental source of information on the subject;[129] but he unfortunately did not live to finish
the companion work on double stars, for which he had accumulated a vast store of materials.[130]
He died at Collingwood in Kent, May 11, 1871, in the eightieth year of his age, and was buried
in Westminster Abbey, close beside the grave of Sir Isaac Newton.
The consideration of Sir John Herschel's Cape observations brings us to the close of the period
we are just now engaged in studying. They were given to the world, as already stated, three years
before the middle of the century, and accurately represent the condition of sidereal science at
that date. Looking back over the fifty years traversed, we can see at a glance how great was the
stride made in the interval. Not alone was acquaintance with individual members of the cosmos
vastly extended, but their mutual relations, the laws governing their movements, their distances
from the earth, masses, and intrinsic lustre, had begun to be successfully investigated. Begun to
be; for only regarding a scarcely perceptible minority had even approximate conclusions been
arrived at. Nevertheless the whole progress of the future lay in that beginning; it was the thin end
of the wedge of exact knowledge. The principle[Pg 51] of measurement had been substituted for
that of probability; a basis had been found large and strong enough to enable calculation to
ascend from it to the sidereal heavens; and refinements had been introduced, fruitful in
performance, but still more in promise. Thus, rather the kind than the amount of information
collected was significant for the time to come—rather the methods employed than the results
actually secured rendered the first half of the nineteenth century of epochal importance in the
history of our knowledge of the stars.CHAPTER III
PR
OGRESS OF KNOWLEDGE REGARDING THE SUN
The discovery of sun-spots in 1610 by Fabricius and Galileo first opened a way for inquiry into
the solar constitution; but it was long before that way was followed with system or profit. The
seeming irregularity of the phenomena discouraged continuous attention; casual observations
were made the basis of arbitrary conjectures, and real knowledge received little or no increase. In
1620 we find Jean Tarde, Canon of Sarlat, arguing that because the sun is "the eye of the world,"
and the eye of the world cannot suffer from ophthalmia, therefore the appearances in question
must be due, not to actual specks or stains on the bright solar disc, but to the transits of a number
of small planets across it! To this new group of heavenly bodies he gave the name of "Borbonia
Sidera," and they were claimed in 1633 for the House of Hapsburg, under the title of "Austriaca
Sidera" by Father Malapertius, a Belgian Jesuit.[131] A similar view was temporarily maintained
against Galileo by the justly celebrated Father Scheiner of Ingolstadt, and later by William
Gascoigne, the inventor of the micrometer; but most of those who were capable of thinking at all
on such subjects (and they were but few) adhered either to the cloud theory or to the slag theory
of sun-spots. The first was championed by Galileo, the second by Simon Marius, "astronomer
and physician" to the brother Margraves of Brandenburg. The latter opinion received a further
notable development from the fact that in 1618, a year remarkable for the appearance of three
bright comets, the sun was almost free from spots; whence it was inferred that the cindery refuse
from the great solar conflagration, which usually appeared as dark blotches on its surface, was
occasionally thrown off in the form of comets, leaving the sun, like a snuffed taper, to blaze with
renewed brilliancy.[132]
[Pg 53]
In the following century, Derham gathered from observations carried on during the years 1703-
11, "That the spots on the sun are caused by the eruption of some new volcano therein, which at
first pouring out a prodigious quantity of smoke and other opacous matter, causeth the spots; and
as that fuliginous matter decayeth and spendeth itself, and the volcano at last becomes more
torrid and flaming, so the spots decay, and grow to umbræ, and at last to faculæ."[133]
The view, confidently upheld by Lalande,[134] that spots were rocky elevations uncovered by the
casual ebbing of a luminous ocean, the surrounding penumbræ representing shoals or sandbanks,
had even less to recommend it than Derham's volcanic theory. Both were, however, significant
of a growing tendency to bring solar phenomena within the compass of terrestrial analogies.
For 164 years, then, after Galileo first levelled his telescope at the setting sun, next to nothing
was learned as to its nature; and the facts immediately ascertained, of its rotation on an axis
nearly erect to the plane of the ecliptic, in a period of between twenty-five and twenty-six days,
and of the virtual limitation of the spots to a so-called "royal" zone extending some thirty
degrees north and south of the solar equator, gained little either in precision or development
from five generations of astronomers.
But in November, 1769, a spot of extraordinary size engaged the attention of Alexander Wilson,
professor of astronomy in the University of Glasgow. He watched it day by day, and to good
purpose. As the great globe slowly revolved, carrying the spot towards its western edge, he was
struck with the gradual contraction and final disappearance of the penumbra on the side next the
centre of the disc; and when on the 6th of December the same spot re-emerged on the eastern
limb, he perceived, as he had anticipated, that the shady zone was now deficient on the opposite
side, and resumed its original completeness as it returned to a central position. In other spots
subsequently examined by him, similar perspective effects were visible, and he proved in
1774,[135] by strict geometrical reasoning, that they could only arise in vast photospheric
excavations. It was not,[Pg 54] indeed, the first time that such a view had been suggested. Father
Scheiner's later observations plainly foreshadowed it;[136] a conjecture to the same effect was
emitted by Leonard Rost of Nuremburg early in the eighteenth century;[137] both by Lahire in
1703 and by J. Cassini in 1719 spots had been seen as notches on the solar limb; while in 1770
Pastor Schülen of Essingen, from the careful study of phenomena similar to those noted by
Wilson, concluded their depressed nature.[138] Modern observations, nevertheless, prove those
phenomena to be by no means universally present.
Wilson's general theory of the sun was avowedly tentative. It took the modest form of an
interrogatory. "Is it not reasonable to think," he asks, "that the great and stupendous body of the
sun is made up of two kinds of matter, very different in their qualities; that by far the greater part
is solid and dark, and that this immense and dark globe is encompassed with a thin covering of
that resplendent substance from which the sun would seem to derive the whole of his vivifying
heat and energy?"[139] He further suggests that the excavations or spots may be occasioned "by
the working of some sort of elastic vapour which is generated within the dark globe," and that
the luminous matter, being in some degree fluid, and being acted upon by gravity, tends to flow
down and cover the nucleus. From these hints, supplemented by his own diligent observations
and sagacious reasonings, Herschel elaborated a scheme of solar constitution which held its
ground until the physics of the sun were revolutionised by the spectroscope.
A cool, dark, solid globe, its surface diversified with mountains and valleys, clothed in luxuriant
vegetation, and "richly stored with inhabitants," protected by a heavy cloud-canopy from the
intolerable glare of the upper luminous region, where the dazzling coruscations of a solar aurora
some thousands of miles in depth evolved the stores of light and heat which vivify our world—
such was the central luminary which Herschel constructed with his wonted ingenuity, and
described with his wonted eloquence.
"This way of considering the sun and its atmosphere," he says,[140] "removes the great
dissimilarity we have hitherto been used to find between its condition and that of the rest of the
great bodies of the solar system. The sun, viewed in this light, appears to be nothing else than a
very eminent, large, and lucid planet, evidently the first, or, in strictness of speaking, the only
primary one of our system; all others being truly secondary to it. Its similarity to the other globes
of the solar system with regard to its solidity, its[Pg 55] atmosphere, and its diversified surface,
the rotation upon its axis, and the fall of heavy bodies, leads us on to suppose that it is most
probably also inhabited, like the rest of the planets, by beings whose organs are adapted to the
peculiar circumstances of that vast globe."
We smile at conclusions which our present knowledge condemns as extravagant and impossible,
but such incidental flights of fancy in no way derogate from the high value of Herschel's
contributions to solar science. The cloud-like character which he attributed to the radiant shell of
the sun (first named by Schröter the "photosphere") is borne out by all recent investigations; he
observed its mottled or corrugated aspect, resembling, as he described it, the roughness on the
rind of an orange; showed that "faculæ" are elevations or heaped-up ridges of the disturbed
photospheric matter; and threw out the idea that spots may ensue from an excess of the ordinary
luminous emissions. A certain "empyreal" gas was, he supposed (very much as Wilson had
done), generated in the body of the sun, and rising everywhere by reason of its lightness, made
fo
r itself, when in moderate quantities, small openings or "pores,"[141] abundantly visible as dark
points on the solar disc. But should an uncommon quantity be formed, "it will," he maintained,
"burst through the planetary[142] regions of clouds, and thus will produce great openings; then,
spreading itself above them, it will occasion large shallows (penumbræ), and mixing afterwards
gradually with other superior gases, it will promote the increase, and assist in the maintenance,
of the general luminous phenomena."[143]
This partial anticipation of the modern view that the solar radiations are maintained by some
process of circulation within the solar mass, was reached by Herschel through prolonged study
of the phenomena in question. The novel and important idea contained in it, however, it was at
that time premature to attempt to develop. But though many of the subtler suggestions of
Herschel's genius passed unnoticed by his contemporaries, the main result of his solar researches
was an unmistakable one. It was nothing less than the definitive introduction into astronomy of
the paradoxical conception of the central fire and hearth of our system as a cold, dark, terrestrial
mass, wrapt in a mantle of innocuous radiance—an earth, so to speak, within—a sun without.
Let us pause for a moment to consider the value of this remarkable innovation. It certainly was
not a step in the direction of[Pg 56] truth. On the contrary, the crude notions of Anaxagoras and
Xeno approached more nearly to what we now know of the sun, than the complicated structure
devised for the happiness of a nobler race of beings than our own by the benevolence of
eighteenth-century astronomers. And yet it undoubtedly constituted a very important advance in
science. It was the first earnest attempt to bring solar phenomena within the compass of a
rational system; to put together into a consistent whole the facts ascertained; to fabricate, in
short, a solar machine that would in some fashion work. It is true that the materials were
inadequate and the design faulty. The resulting construction has not proved strong enough to
stand the wear and tear of time and discovery, but has had to be taken to pieces and remodelled
on a totally different plan. But the work was not therefore done in vain. None of Bacon's
ap
horisms show a clearer insight into the relations between the human mind and the external
world than that which declares "Truth to emerge sooner from error than from confusion."[144] A
definite theory (even if a false one) gives holding-ground to thought. Facts acquire a meaning
with reference to it. It affords a motive for accumulating them and a means of co-ordinating
them; it provides a framework for their arrangement, and a receptacle for their preservation, until
they become too strong and numerous to be any longer included within arbitrary limits, and
shatter the vessel originally framed to contain them.
Such was the purpose subserved by Herschel's theory of the sun. It helped to clarify ideas on the
subject. The turbid sense of groping and viewless ignorance gave place to the lucidity of a
possible scheme. The persuasion of knowledge is a keen incentive to its increase. Few men care
to investigate what they are obliged to admit themselves entirely ignorant of; but once started on
the road of knowledge, real or supposed, they are eager to pursue it. By the promulgation of a
confident and consistent view regarding the nature of the sun, accordingly, research was
encouraged, because it was rendered hopeful, and inquirers were shown a path leading
indefinitely onwards where an impassable thicket had before seemed to bar the way.
We have called the "terrestrial" theory of the sun's nature an innovation, and so, as far as its
general acceptance is concerned, it may justly be termed; but, like all successful innovations, it
was a long time brewing. It is extremely curious to find that Herschel had a predecessor in its
advocacy who never looked through a telescope (nor, indeed, imagined the possibility of such an
instrument), who knew nothing of sun-spots, was still (mistaken assertions[Pg 57] to the contrary
notwithstanding) in the bondage of the geocentric system, and regarded nature from the lofty
standpoint of an idealist philosophy. This was the learned and enlightened Cardinal Cusa, a
fisherman's son from the banks of the Moselle, whose distinguished career in the Church and in
literature extended over a considerable part of the fifteenth century (1401-64). In his singular
treatise De Doctâ Ignorantiâ, one of the most notable literary monuments of the early
Renaissance, the following passage occurs:—"To a spectator on the surface of the sun, the
splendour which appears to us would be invisible, since it contains, as it were, an earth for its
central mass, with a circumferential envelope of light and heat, and between the two an
atmosphere of water and clouds and translucent air." The luminary of Herschel's fancy could
scarcely be more clearly portrayed; some added words, however, betray the origin of the
Cardinal's idea. "The earth also," he says, "would appear as a shining star to any one outside the
fiery element." It was, in fact, an extension to the sun of the ancient elemental doctrine; but an
extension remarkable at that period, as premonitory of the tendency, so powerfully developed by
subsequent discoveries, to assimilate the orbs of heaven to the model of our insignificant planet,
and to extend the brotherhood of our system and our species to the farthest limit of the visible or
imaginable universe.
In later times we find Flamsteed communicating to Newton, March 7, 1681, his opinion "that the
substance of the sun is terrestrial matter, his light but the liquid menstruum encompassing
him."[145] Bode in 1776 arrived independently at the conclusion that "the sun is neither burning
nor glowing, but in its essence a dark planetary body, composed like our earth of land and water,
varied by mountains and valleys, and enveloped in a vaporous atmosphere";[146] and the learned
in general applauded and acquiesced. The view, however, was in 1787 still so far from popular,
that the holding of it was alleged as a proof of insanity in Dr. Elliot when accused of a
murderous assault on Miss Boydell. His friend Dr. Simmons stated on his behalf that he had
received from him in the preceding January a letter giving evidence of a deranged mind, wherein
he asserted "that the sun is not a body of fire, as hath been hitherto supposed, but that its light
proceeds from a dense and universal aurora, which may afford ample light to the inhabitants of
the surface beneath, and yet be at such a distance aloft as not to annoy them. No objection, he
saith, ariseth to that great luminary's being inhabited; vegetation may obtain there as well as with
us. There may be water and dry land, hills and dales, rain and fair weather; and as[Pg 58] the
light, so the season must be eternal, consequently it may easily be conceived to be by far the
most blissful habitation of the whole system!" The Recorder, nevertheless, objected that if an
extravagant hypothesis were to be adduced as proof of insanity, the same might hold good with
regard to some other speculators, and desired Dr. Simmons to tell the court what he thought of
the theories of Burnet and Buffon.[147]
Eight years later, this same "extravagant hypothesis," backed by the powerful recommendation
of Sir William Herschel, obtained admittance to the venerable halls of science, there to abide
undisturbed for nearly seven decades. Individual objectors, it is true, made themselves heard, but
their arguments had little effect on the general body of opinion. Ruder blows were required to
shatter an hypothesis flattering to human pride of invention in its completeness, in the plausible
detail of observations by which it seemed to be supported, and in its condescension to the natural
pleasure in discovering resemblance under all but total dissimilarity.
Sir John Herschel included among the results of his multifarious labours at the Cape of Good
Hope a careful study of the sun-spots conspicuously visible towards the end of the year 1836 and
in the early part of 1837. They were remarkable, he tells us, for their forms and arrangement, as
well as for their number and size; one group, measured on the 29th of March in the latter year,
covering (apart from what may be called its outlying dependencies) the vast area of five square
minutes or 3,780 million square miles.[148] We have at present to consider, however, not so much
these observations in themselves, as the chain of theoretical suggestions by which they were
connected. The distribution of spots, it was pointed out, on two zones parallel to the equator,
showed plainly their intimate connection with the solar rotation, and indicated as their cause
fluid circulations analogous to those producing the terrestrial trade and anti-trade winds.
"The spots, in this view of the subject," he went on to say,[149] "would come to be assimilated to
those regions on the earth's surface where, for the moment, hurricanes and tornadoes prevail; the
upper stratum being temporarily carried downwards, displacing by its impetus the two strata of
luminous matter beneath, the upper of course to a greater extent than the lower, and thus wholly
or partially denuding the opaque surface of the sun below. Such processes cannot be
unaccompanied by vorticose motions, which, left to themselves, die away by degrees and
dissipate, with the peculiarity that their lower portions come to rest more speedily than their
upper,[Pg 59] by reason of the greater resistance below, as well as the remoteness from the point
of action, which lies in a higher region, so that their centres (as seen in our waterspouts, which
are nothing but small tornadoes) appear to retreat upwards. Now this agrees perfectly with what
is observed during the obliteration of the solar spots, which appear as if filled in by the collapse
of their sides, the penumbra closing in upon the spot and disappearing after it."
But when it comes to be asked whether a cause can be found by which a diversity of solar
temperature might be produced corresponding with that which sets the currents of the terrestrial
atmosphere in motion, we are forced to reply that we know of no such cause. For Sir John
Herschel's hypothesis of an increased retention of heat at the sun's equator, due to the slightly
spheroidal or bulging form of its outer atmospheric envelope, assuredly gives no sufficient
account of such circulatory movements as he supposed to exist. Nevertheless, the view that the
sun's rotation is intimately connected with the formation of spots is so obviously correct, that we
can only wonder it was not thought of sooner, while we are even now unable to explain with any
certainty how it is so connected.
Mere scrutiny of the solar surface, however, is not the only means of solar observation. We have
a satellite, and that satellite from time to time acts most opportunely as a screen, cutting off a
part or the whole of those dazzling rays in which the master-orb of our system veils himself from
over-curious regards. The importance of eclipses to the study of the solar surroundings is of
comparatively recent recognition; nevertheless, much of what we know concerning them has
been snatched, as it were, by surprise under favour of the moon. In former times, the sole
astronomical use of such incidents was the correction of the received theories of the solar and
lunar movements; the precise time of their occurrence was the main fact to be noted, and
subsidiary phenomena received but casual attention. Now, their significance as a geometrical test
of tabular accuracy is altogether overshadowed by the interest attaching to the physical
observations for which they afford propitious occasions. This change may be said to date, in its
pronounced form, from the great eclipse of 1842. Although a necessary consequence of the
general direction taken by scientific progress, it remains associated in a special manner with the
name of Francis Baily.
The "philosopher of Newbury" was by profession a London stockbroker, and a highly successful
one. Nevertheless, his services to science were numerous and invaluable, though not of the
brilliant kind which attract popular notice. Born at Newbury in Berkshire, April 28, 1774, and
placed in the City at the age of fourteen, he derived from the acquaintance of Dr. Priestley a love
of science[Pg 60] which never afterwards left him. It was, however, no passion such as flames up
in the brain of the destined discoverer, but a regulated inclination, kept well within the bounds of
an actively pursued commercial career. After travelling for a year or two in what were then the
wilds of North America, he went on the Stock Exchange in 1799, and earned during twenty-four
years of assiduous application to affairs a high reputation for integrity and ability, to which
corresponded an ample fortune. In the meantime the Astronomical Society (largely through his
co-operation) had been founded; he had for three years acted as its secretary, and he now felt
entitled to devote himself exclusively to a subject which had long occupied his leisure hours. He
accordingly in 1825 retired from business, purchased a house in Tavistock Place, and fitted up
there a small observatory. He was, however, by preference a computator rather than an observer.
What Sir John Herschel calls the "archæology of practical astronomy" found in him an
especially zealous student. He re-edited the star-catalogues of Ptolemy, Ulugh Beigh, Tycho
Brahe, Hevelius, Halley, Flamsteed, Lacaille, and Mayer; calculated the eclipse of Thales and
the eclipse of Agathocles, and vindicated the memory of the first Astronomer Royal. But he was
no less active in meeting present needs than in revising past performances. The subject of the
reduction of observations, then, as we have already explained,[150] in a state of deplorable
confusion, attracted his most earnest attention, and he was close on the track of Bessel when
made acquainted with the method of simplification devised at Königsberg. Anticipated as an
inventor, he could still be of eminent use as a promoter of these valuable improvements; and,
carrying them out on a large scale in the star-catalogue of the Astronomical Society (published in
1827), "he put" (in the words of Herschel) "the astronomical world in possession of a power
which may be said, without exaggeration, to have changed the face of sidereal astronomy."[151]
His reputation was still further enhanced by his renewal, with vastly improved apparatus, of the
method, first used by Henry Cavendish in 1797-98, for determining the density of the earth.
From a series of no less than 2,153 delicate and difficult experiments, conducted at Tavistock
Place during the years 1838-42, he concluded our planet to weigh 5·66 as much as a globe of
water of the same bulk; and this result slightly corrected is still accepted as a very close
ap
proximation of the truth.
What we have thus glanced at is but a fragment of the truly surprising mass of work
accomplished by Baily in the course of a[Pg 61] variously occupied life. A rare combination of
qualities fitted him for his task. Unvarying health, undisturbed equanimity, methodical habits,
the power of directed and sustained thought, combined to form in him an intellectual toiler of the
surest, though not perhaps of the highest quality. He was in harness almost to the end. He was
destined scarcely to know the miseries of enforced idleness or of consciously failing powers. In
1842 he completed the laborious reduction of Lalande's great catalogue, undertaken at the
request of the British Association, and was still engaged in seeing it through the press when he
was attacked with what proved his last, as it was probably his first serious illness. He, however,
recovered sufficiently to attend the Oxford Commemoration of July 2, 1844, where an honorary
degree of D.C.L. was conferred upon him in company with Airy and Struve; but sank rapidly
after the effort, and died on the 30th of August following, at the age of seventy, lamented and
esteemed by all who knew him.
It is now time to consider his share in the promotion of solar research. Eclipses of the sun, both
ancient and modern, were a speciality with him, and he was fortunate in those which came under
his observation. Such phenomena are of three kinds—partial, annular, and total. In a partial
eclipse, the moon, instead of passing directly between us and the sun, slips by, as it were, a little
on one side, thus cutting off from our sight only a portion of his surface. An annular eclipse, on
the other hand, takes place when the moon is indeed centrally interposed, but falls short of the
ap
parent size required for the entire concealment of the solar disc, which consequently remains
visible as a bright ring or annulus, even when the obscuration is at its height. In a total eclipse,
on the contrary, the sun completely disappears behind the dark body of the moon. The difference
of the two latter varieties is due to the fact that the apparent diameter of the sun and moon are so
nearly equal as to gain alternate preponderance one over the other through the slight periodical
changes in their respective distances from the earth.
Now, on the 15th of May, 1836, an annular eclipse was visible in the northern parts of Great
Britain, and was observed by Baily at Inch Bonney, near Jedburgh. It was here that he saw the
phenomenon which obtained the name of "Baily's Beads," from the notoriety conferred upon it
by his vivid description.
"When the cusps of the sun," he writes, "were about 40° asunder, a row of lucid points, like a
string of bright beads, irregular in size and distance from each other, suddenly formed round that
part of the circumference of the moon that was about to enter on the sun's disc. Its formation,
indeed, was so rapid that it presented the appearance of having been caused by the ignition of a
fine train of gunpowder.[Pg 62] Finally, as the moon pursued her course, the dark intervening
spaces (which, at their origin, had the appearance of lunar mountains in high relief, and which
still continued attached to the sun's border) were stretched out into long, black, thick, parallel
lines, joining the limbs of the sun and moon; when all at once they suddenly gave way, and left
the circumference of the sun and moon in those points, as in the rest, comparatively smooth and
circular, and the moon perceptibly advanced on the face of the sun."[152]
These curious appearances were not an absolute novelty. Weber in 1791, and Von Zach in 1820,
had seen the "beads"; Van Swinden had described the "belts" or "threads."[153] These last were,
moreover (as Baily clearly perceived), completely analogous to the "black ligament" which
fo
rm
ed so troublesome a feature in the transits of Venus in 1764 and 1769, and which, to the
regret and confusion, though no longer to the surprise of observers, was renewed in that of 1874.
The phenomenon is largely an effect of what is called irradiation, by which a bright object
seems to encroach upon a dark one; but under good atmospheric and instrumental conditions it
becomes inconspicuous. The "Beads" must always appear when the projected lunar edge is
serrated with mountains. In Baily's observation, they were exaggerated and distorted by an
irradiative clinging together of the limbs of sun and moon.
The immediate result, however, was powerfully to stimulate attention to solar eclipses in their
physical aspect. Never before had an occurrence of the kind been expected so eagerly or
prepared for so actively as that which was total over Central and Southern Europe on the 8th of
July, 1842. Astronomers hastened from all quarters to the favoured region. The Astronomer
Royal (Airy) repaired to Turin; Baily to Pavia; Otto Struve threw aside his work amidst the stars
at Pulkowa, and went south as far as Lipeszk; Schumacher travelled from Altona to Vienna;
Arago from Paris to Perpignan. Nor did their trouble go unrewarded. The expectations of the
most sanguine were outdone by the wonders disclosed.
Baily (to whose narrative we again have recourse) had set up his Dollond's achromatic in an
upper room of the University of Pavia, and was eagerly engaged in noting a partial repetition of
the singular appearances seen by him in 1836, when he was "astounded by a tremendous burst of
ap
plause from the streets below, and at the same moment was electrified at the sight of one of
the most brilliant and splendid phenomena that can well be imagined. For at that instant the dark
body of the moon was suddenly surrounded with a corona, or kind of bright glory similar in
shape and relative magnitude to that which painters draw round the heads of saints,[Pg 63] and
which by the French is designated an auréole. Pavia contains many thousand inhabitants, the
major part of whom were, at this early hour, walking about the streets and squares or looking out
of windows, in order to witness this long-talked-of phenomenon; and when the total obscuration
took place, which was instantaneous, there was a universal shout from every observer, which
'made the welkin ring,' and, for the moment, withdrew my attention from the object with which I
was immediately occupied. I had indeed anticipated the appearance of a luminous circle round
the moon during the time of total obscurity; but I did not expect, from any of the accounts of
preceding eclipses that I had read, to witness so magnificent an exhibition as that which took
place.... The breadth of the corona, measured from the circumference of the moon, appeared to
me to be nearly equal to half the moon's diameter. It had the appearance of brilliant rays. The
light was most dense close to the border of the moon, and became gradually and uniformly more
attenuate as its distance therefrom increased, assuming the form of diverging rays in a rectilinear
line, which at the extremity were more divided, and of an unequal length; so that in no part of the
corona could I discover the regular and well-defined shape of a ring at its outer margin. It
ap
peared to me to have the sun for its centre, but I had no means of taking any accurate measures
fo
r determining this point. Its colour was quite white, not pearl-colour, nor yellow, nor red, and
the rays had a vivid and flickering appearance, somewhat like that which a gaslight illumination
might be supposed to assume if formed into a similar shape.... Splendid and astonishing,
however, as this remarkable phenomenon really was, and although it could not fail to call forth
the admiration and applause of every beholder, yet I must confess that there was at the same time
something in its singular and wonderful appearance that was appalling; and I can readily imagine
that uncivilised nations may occasionally have become alarmed and terrified at such an object,
more especially at times when the true cause of the occurrence may have been but faintly
understood, and the phenomenon itself wholly unexpected.
"But the most remarkable circumstance attending the phenomenon was the appearance of three
large protuberances apparently emanating from the circumference of the moon, but evidently
fo
rm
ing a portion of the corona. They had the appearance of mountains of a prodigious
elevation; their colour was red, tinged with lilac or purple; perhaps the colour of the peachblossom would more nearly represent it. They somewhat resembled the snowy tops of the Alpine
mountains when coloured by the rising or setting sun. They resembled the Alpine mountains also
in another respect, inasmuch as their[Pg 64] light was perfectly steady, and had none of that
flickering or sparkling motion so visible in other parts of the corona. All the three projections
were of the same roseate cast of colour, and very different from the brilliant vivid white light
that formed the corona; but they differed from each other in magnitude.... The whole of these
three protuberances were visible even to the last moment of total obscuration; at least, I never
lost sight of them when looking in that direction; and when the first ray of light was admitted
from the sun, they vanished, with the corona, altogether, and daylight was instantaneously
restored."[154]
Notwithstanding unfavourable weather, the "red flames" were perceived with little less clearness
and no less amazement from the Superga than at Pavia, and were even discerned by Mr. Airy
with the naked eye. "Their form" (the Astronomer Royal wrote) "was nearly that of saw-teeth in
the position proper for a circular saw turned round in the same direction in which the hands of a
watch turn.... Their colour was a full lake-red, and their brilliancy greater than that of any other
part of the ring."[155]
The height of these extraordinary objects was estimated by Arago at two minutes of arc,
representing, at the sun's distance, an actual elevation of 54,000 miles. When carefully watched,
the rose-flush of their illumination was perceived to fade through violet to white as the light
returned, the same changes in a reversed order having accompanied their first appearance. Their
fo
rm
s, however, during about three minutes of visibility, showed no change, although of so
ap
parently unstable a character as to suggest to Arago "mountains on the point of crumbling into
ru
ins" through topheaviness.[156]
The corona, both as to figure and extent, presented very different appearances at different
stations. This was no doubt due to varieties in atmospheric conditions. At the Superga, for
instance, all details of structure seem to have been effaced by the murky air, only a
comparatively feeble ring of light being seen to encircle the moon. Elsewhere, a brilliant radiated
fo
rm
ation was conspicuous, spreading at four opposite points into four vast luminous
expansions, compared to feather-plumes or aigrettes.[157] Arago at Perpignan noticed
considerable irregularities in the divergent rays. Some appeared curved and twisted, a few lay
across the others, in a direction almost tangential to the moon's limb, the general effect being
described as that of a "hank of thread in disorder."[158] At Lipeszk, where the sun stood much
higher above the horizon than in Italy or France, the corona showed with surprising splendour.
Its apparent extent was judged by Struve to be no less than twenty-five minutes (more than[Pg 65]
six times Airy's estimate), while the great plumes spread their radiance to three or four degrees
from the dark lunar edge. So dazzling was the light that many well-instructed persons denied the
totality of the eclipse. Nor was the error without precedent, although the appearances attending
respectively a total and an annular eclipse are in reality wholly dissimilar. In the latter case, the
surviving ring of sunlight becomes so much enlarged by irradiation, that the interposed dark
lunar body is reduced to comparative insignificance, or even invisibility. Maclaurin tells us[159]
that during an eclipse of this character which he observed at Edinburgh in 1737, "gentlemen by
no means shortsighted declared themselves unable to discern the moon upon the sun without the
aid of a smoked glass;" and Baily (who, however, was shortsighted) could distinguish, in 1836,
with the naked eye, no trace of "the globe of purple velvet" which the telescope revealed as
projected upon the face of the sun.[160] Moreover, the diminution of light is described by him as
"little more than might be caused by a temporary cloud passing over the sun"; the birds
continued in full song, and "one cock in particular was crowing with all his might while the
annulus was forming."
Very different were the effects of the eclipse of 1842, as to which some interesting particulars
were collected by Arago.[161] Beasts of burthen, he tells us, paused in their labour, and could by
no amount of punishment be induced to move until the sun reappeared. Birds and beasts
ab
andoned their food; linnets were found dead in their cages; even ants suspended their toil.
Diligence-horses, on the other hand, seemed as insensible to the phenomenon as locomotives.
The convolvulus and some other plants closed their leaves, but those of the mimosa remained
open. The little light that remained was of a livid hue. One observer described the general
coloration as resembling the lees of wine, but human faces showed pale olive or greenish. We
may, then, rest assured that none of the remarkable obscurations recorded in history were due to
eclipses of the annular kind.
The existence of the corona is no modern discovery. Indeed, it is too conspicuous an apparition
to escape notice from the least attentive or least practised observer of a total eclipse.
Nevertheless, explicit references to it are rare in early times. Plutarch, however, speaks of a
"certain splendour" compassing round the hidden edge of the sun, as a regular feature of total
eclipses;[162] and the corona is[Pg 66] expressly mentioned in a description of an eclipse visible at
Corfu in 968 A.D.[163] The first to take the phenomenon into scientific consideration was Kepler.
He showed, from the orbital positions at the time of the sun and moon, that an eclipse observed
by Clavius at Rome in 1567 could not have been annular,[164] as the dazzling coronal radiance
visible during the obscuration had caused it to be believed. Although he himself never witnessed
a total eclipse of the sun, he carefully collected and compared the remarks of those more
fo
rt
unate, and concluded that the ring of "flame-like splendour" seen on such occasions was
caused by the reflection of the solar rays from matter condensed in the neighbourhood either of
the sun or moon.[165] To the solar explanation he gave his own decided preference; but, with one
of those curious flashes of half-prophetic insight characteristic of his genius, declared that "it
should be laid by ready for use, not brought into immediate requisition."[166] So literally was his
advice acted upon, that the theory, which we now know to be (broadly speaking) the correct one,
only emerged from the repository of anticipated truths after 236 years of almost complete
retirement, and even then timorously and with hesitation.
The first eclipse of which the attendant phenomena were observed with tolerable exactness was
that which was central in the South of France, May 12, 1706. Cassini then put forward the view
that the "crown of pale light" seen round the lunar disc was caused by the illumination of the
zodiacal light;[167] but it failed to receive the attention which, as a step in the right direction, it
undoubtedly merited. Nine years later we meet with Halley's comments on a similar event, the
first which had occurred in London since March 20, 1140. By nine in the morning of May 3,
1715, the obscuration, he tells us, "was about ten digits,[168] when the face and colour of the sky
began to change from perfect serene azure blue to a more dusky livid colour, having an eye of
purple intermixt.... A few seconds before the sun was all hid, there discovered itself round the
moon a luminous ring, about a digit or perhaps a tenth part of the moon's diameter in breadth. It
was of a pale whiteness, or rather pearl colour, seeming to be a little tinged with the colours of
the iris, and to be concentric with the moon, whence I concluded it the moon's atmosphere. But
the great height thereof, far exceeding our earth's atmosphere, and the observation of some, who
fo
und the breadth of the ring to increase on the west side of the moon as emersion[Pg 67]
ap
proached, together with the contrary sentiments of those whose judgment I shall always
revere" (Newton is most probably referred to), "makes me less confident, especially in a matter
whereto I confess I gave not all the attention requisite." He concludes by declining to decide
whether the "enlightened atmosphere," which the appearance "in all respects resembled,"
"belonged to sun or moon."[169]
A French Academician, who happened to be in London at the time, was less guarded in
expressing an opinion. The Chevalier de Louville declared emphatically for the lunar
atmospheric theory of the corona,[170] and his authority carried great weight. It was, however,
much discredited by an observation made by Maraldi in 1724, to the effect that the luminous
ring, instead of travelling with the moon, was traversed by it.[171] This was in reality decisive,
though, as usual, belief lagged far behind demonstration. In 1715 a novel explanation had been
offered by Delisle and Lahire,[172] supported by experiments regarded at the time as perfectly
satisfactory. The aureola round the eclipsed sun, they argued, is simply a result of the diffraction,
or apparent bending of the sunbeams that graze the surface of the lunar globe—an effect of the
same kind as the coloured fringes of shadows. And this view prevailed amongst men of science
until (and even after) Brewster showed, with clear and simple decisiveness, that such an effect
could by no possibility be appreciable at our distance from the moon.[173] Don José Joaquim de
Ferrer, however, who observed a total eclipse of the sun at Kinderhook, in the State of New
York, on June 16, 1806, ignoring this refined optical rationale, considered two alternative
explanations of the phenomenon as alone possible. The bright ring round the moon must be due
to the illumination either of a lunar or of a solar atmosphere. If the former, he calculated that it
should have a height fifty times that of the earth's gaseous envelope. "Such an atmosphere," he
rightly concluded, "cannot belong to the moon, but must without any doubt belong to the
sun."[174] But he stood alone in this unhesitating assertion.
The importance of the problem was first brought fully home to astronomers by the eclipse of
1842. The brilliant and complex appearance which on that occasion challenged the attention of
so many observers, demanded and received, no longer the casual attention hitherto bestowed
upon it, but the most earnest study of those[Pg 68] interested in the progress of science.
Nevertheless, it was only by degrees, and through a process of "exclusions" (to use a Baconian
phrase) that the corona was put in its right place as a solar appendage. As every other available
explanation proved inadmissible and dropped out of sight, the broad presentation of fact
remained, which, though of sufficiently obvious interpretation, was long and persistently
misconstrued. Nor was it until 1869 that absolutely decisive evidence on the subject was
fo
rt
hcoming, as we shall see further on.
Sir John Herschel, writing to his venerable aunt, relates that when the brilliant red flames burst
into view behind the dark moon on the morning of the 8th of July, 1842, the populace of Milan,
with the usual inconsequence of a crowd, raised the shout, "Es leben die Astronomen!"[175] In
reality, none were less prepared for their apparition than the class to whom the applause due to
the magnificent spectacle was thus adjudged. And in some measure through their own fault, for
many partial hints and some distinct statements from earlier observers had given unheeded
notice that some such phenomenon might be expected to attend a solar eclipse.
What we now call the "chromosphere" is an envelope of glowing gases, by which the sun is
completely covered, and from which the "prominences" are emanations, eruptive or flame-like.
Now, continual indications of the presence of this fire-ocean had been detected during eclipses in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Captain Stannyan, describing in a letter to Flamsteed an
occurrence of the kind witnessed by him at Berne on May 1 (o.s.), 1706, says that the sun's
"getting out of the eclipse was preceded by a blood-red streak of light from its left limb."[176] A
precisely similar appearance was noted by both Halley and De Louville in 1715; during annular
eclipses by Lord Aberdour in 1737,[177] and by Short in 1748,[178] the tint of the ruby border
being, however, subdued to "brown" or "dusky red" by the surviving sunlight; while
observations identical in character were made at Amsterdam in 1820,[179] at Edinburgh by
Henderson in 1836, and at New York in 1838.[180]
"Flames" or "prominences," if more conspicuous, are less constant in their presence than the
glowing stratum from which they spring. The first to describe them was a Swedish professor
named Vassenius, who observed a total eclipse at Gothenburg, May 2 (o.s.), 1733.[181][Pg 69] His
astonishment equalled his admiration when he perceived, just outside the edge of the lunar disc,
and suspended, as it seemed, in the coronal atmosphere, three or four reddish spots or clouds,
one of which was so large as to be detected with the naked eye. As to their nature, he did not
even offer a speculation, further than by tacitly referring them to the moon. The observation was
repeated in 1778 by a Spanish Admiral, but with no better success in directing efficacious
attention to the phenomenon. Don Antonio Ulloa was on board his ship the Espagne in passage
from the Azores to Cape St. Vincent on the 24th of June in that year, when a total eclipse of the
sun occurred, of which he has left a valuable description. His notices of the corona are full of
interest; but what just now concerns us is the appearance of "a red luminous point" "near the
edge of the moon," which gradually increased in size as the moon moved away from it, and was
visible during about a minute and a quarter.[182] He was satisfied that it belonged to the sun
because of its fiery colour and growth in magnitude, and supposed that it was occasioned by
some crevice or inequality in the moon's limb, through which the solar light penetrated.
Allusions less precise, both prior and subsequent, which it is now easy to refer to similar objects
(such as the "slender columns of smoke" seen by Ferrer)[183] might be detailed; but the evidence
already adduced suffices to show that the prominences viewed with such amazement in 1842
were no unprecedented or even unusual phenomenon.
It was more important, however, to decide what was their nature than whether their appearance
might have been anticipated. They were generally, and not very incorrectly, set down as solar
clouds. Arago believed them to shine by reflected light,[184] but the Abbé Peytal rightly
considered them to be self-luminous. Writing in a Montpellier paper of July 16, 1842, he
declared that we had now become assured of the existence of a third or outer solar envelope,
composed of a glowing substance of a bright rose tint, forming mountains of prodigious
elevation, analogous in character to the clouds piled above our horizons.[185] This first distinct
recognition of a very important feature of our great luminary was probably founded on an
observation made by Bérard at Toulon during the then recent eclipse, "of a very fine red band,
irregularly dentelated, or, as it were, crevassed here and there,"[186] encircling a large arc of the
moon's circumference. It can hardly, however, be said to have attracted general notice until July
28, 1851. On that day a total eclipse[Pg 70] took place, which was observed with considerable
success in various parts of Sweden and Norway by a number of English astronomers. Mr. Hind
saw, on the south limb of the moon, "a long range of rose-coloured flames,"[187] described by
Dawes as "a low ridge of red prominences, resembling in outline the tops of a very irregular
range of hills."[188] Airy termed the portion of this "rugged lines of projections" visible to him
the sierra, and was struck with its brilliant light and "nearly scarlet" colour.[189] Its true character
of a continuous solar envelope was inferred from these data by Grant, Swan, and Littrow, and
was by Father Secchi, after the great eclipse of 1860,[190] formally accepted as established.
Several prominences of remarkable forms, especially one variously compared to a Turkish
scimitar, a sickle, and a boomerang, were seen in 1851. In connection with them two highly
significant circumstances were pointed out. First, that of the approximate coincidence between
their positions and those of sun-spots previously observed.[191] Next, that "the moon passed over
them, leaving them behind, and revealing successive portions as she advanced."[192] This latter
perfectly well-attested fact was justly considered by the Astronomer Royal and others as
affording absolute certainty of the solar dependence of these singular objects. Nevertheless
sceptics were still found. M. Faye, of the French Academy, inclined to a lunar origin for
them;[193] Feilitsch of Greifswald published in 1852 a treatise for the express purpose of proving
all the luminous phenomena attendant on solar eclipses—corona, prominences and "sierra"—to
be purely optical appearances.[194] Happily, however, the unanswerable arguments of the
photographic camera were soon to be made available against such hardy incredulity.
Thus, the virtual discovery of the solar appendages, both coronal and chromospheric, may be
said to have been begun in 1842, and completed in 1851. The current Herschelian theory of the
solar constitution remained, however, for the time, intact. Difficulties, indeed, were thickening
around it; but their discussion was perhaps felt to be premature, and they were permitted to
accumulate without debate, until fortified by fresh testimony into unexpected and overwhelming
preponderance.CHAPTER IV
PL
ANETARY DISCOVERIES
In the course of his early gropings towards a law of the planetary distances, Kepler tried the
experiment of setting a planet, invisible by reason of its smallness, to revolve in the vast region
of seemingly desert space separating Mars from Jupiter.[195] The disproportionate magnitude of
the same interval was explained by Kant as due to the overweening size of Jupiter. The zone in
which each planet moved was, according to the philosopher of Königsberg, to be regarded as the
empty storehouse from which its materials had been derived. A definite relation should thus exist
between the planetary masses and the planetary intervals.[196] Lambert, on the other hand,
sportively suggested that the body or bodies (for it is noticeable that he speaks of them in the
plural) which once bridged this portentous gap in the solar system, might, in some remote age,
have been swept away by a great comet, and forced to attend its wanderings through space.[197]
These speculations were destined before long to assume a more definite form. Johann Daniel
Titius, a professor at Wittenberg (where he died in 1796), pointed out in 1772, in a note to a
translation of Bonnet's Contemplation de la Nature,[198] the existence of a remarkable symmetry
in the disposition of the bodies constituting the solar system. By a certain series of numbers,
increasing in regular progression,[199] he showed that the distances of the six known planets from
the sun might be represented with a close approach to accuracy. But with one striking
interruption. The term of the[Pg 72] series succeeding that which corresponded to the orbit of
Mars was without a celestial representative. The orderly flow of the sequence was thus
singularly broken. The space where a planet should—in fulfilment of the "Law"—have revolved,
was, it appeared, untenanted. Johann Elert Bode, then just about to begin his long career as
leader of astronomical thought and work at Berlin, marked at once the anomaly, and filled the
vacant interval with a hypothetical planet. The discovery of Uranus, at a distance falling but
slightly short of perfect conformity with the law of Titius, lent weight to a seemingly hazardous
prediction, and Von Zach was actually at the pains, in 1785, to calculate what he termed
"analogical" elements[200] for this unseen and (by any effect or influence) unfelt body. The
search for it, through confessedly scarcely less chimerical than that of alchemists for the
philosopher's stone, he kept steadily in view for fifteen years, and at length (September 21, 1800)
succeeded in organising, in combination with five other German astronomers assembled at
Lilienthal, a force of what he jocularly termed celestial police, for the express purpose of
tracking and intercepting the fugitive subject of the sun. The zodiac was accordingly divided for
purposes of scrutiny into twenty-four zones; their apportionment to separate observers was in
part effected, and the association was rapidly getting into working order, when news arrived that
the missing planet had been found, through no systematic plan of search, but by the diligent,
though otherwise directed labours of a distant watcher of the skies.
Giuseppe Piazzi was born at Ponte in the Valtelline, July 16, 1746. He studied at various places
and times under Tiraboschi, Beccaria, Jacquier, and Le Sueur; and having entered the Theatine
order of monks at the age of eighteen, he taught philosophy, science, and theology in several of
the Italian cities, as well as in Malta, until 1780, when the chair of mathematics in the University
of Palermo was offered to and accepted by him. Prince Caramanico, then viceroy of Sicily, had
scientific leanings, and was easily won over to the project of building an observatory, a
commodious foundation for which was afforded by one of the towers of the viceregal palace.
This architecturally incongruous addition to an ancient Saracenic edifice—once the abode of
Kelbite and Zirite Emirs—was completed in February, 1791. Piazzi, meanwhile, had devoted
nearly three years to the assiduous study of his new profession, acquiring a practical knowledge
of Lalande's methods at the École Militaire, and of Maskelyne's at the Royal Observatory; and
returned to Palermo in 1789, bringing with him, in the great five-foot circle which he had
prevailed upon Ramsden to construct,[Pg 73] the most perfect measuring instrument hitherto
employed by an astronomer.
He had been above nine years at work on his star-catalogue, and was still profoundly
unconscious that a place amongst the Lilienthal band[201] of astronomical detectives was being
held in reserve for him, when, on the first evening of the nineteenth century, January 1, 1801, he
noticed the position of an eighth-magnitude star in a part of the constellation Taurus to which an
error of Wollaston's had directed his special attention. Reobserving, according to his custom, the
same set of fifty stars on four consecutive nights, it seemed to him, on the 2nd, that the one in
question had slightly shifted its position to the west; on the 3rd he assured himself of the fact,
and believed that he had chanced upon a new kind of comet without tail or coma. The wandering
body, whatever its nature, exchanged retrograde for direct motion on January 14,[202] and was
carefully watched by Piazzi until February 11, when a dangerous illness interrupted his
observations. He had, however, not omitted to give notice of his discovery; but so precarious
were communications in those unpeaceful times, that his letter to Oriani of January 23 did not
reach Milan until April 5, while a missive of one day later addressed to Bode came to hand at
Berlin, March 20. The delay just afforded time for the publication, by a young philosopher of
Jena named Hegel, of a "Dissertation" showing, by the clearest light of reason, that the number
of the planets could not exceed seven, and exposing the folly of certain devotees of induction
who sought a new celestial body merely to fill a gap in a numerical series.[203]
Unabashed by speculative scorn, Bode had scarcely read Piazzi's letter when he concluded that it
referred to the precise body in question. The news spread rapidly, and created a profound
sensation, not unmixed with alarm lest this latest addition to the solar family should have been
fo
und only to be again lost. For by that time Piazzi's moving star was too near the sun to be any
longer visible, and in order to rediscover it after conjunction a tolerably accurate knowledge of
its path was indispensable. But a planetary orbit had never before been calculated from such
scanty data as Piazzi's observation afforded;[204] and the attempts made by nearly every
astronomer of note in Germany to compass the problem were manifestly inadequate, failing even
to account for the positions in which the body had been actually seen, and à fortiori serving only
to[Pg 74] mislead as to the places where, from September, 1801, it ought once more to have
become discernible. It was in this extremity that the celebrated mathematician Gauss came to the
rescue. He was then in his twenty-fifth year, and was earning his bread by tuition at Brunswick,
with many possibilities, but no settled career before him. The news from Palermo may be said to
have converted him from an arithmetician into an astronomer. He was already in possession of a
new and more general method of computing elliptical orbits; and the system of "least squares,"
which he had devised though not published, enabled him to extract the most probable result from
a given set of observations. Armed with these novel powers, he set to work; and the
communication in November of his elements and ephemeris for the lost object revived the
drooping hopes of the little band of eager searchers. Their patience, however, was to be still
fu
rt
her tried. Clouds, mist, and sleet seemed to have conspired to cover the retreat of the fugitive;
but on the last night of the year the sky cleared unexpectedly with the setting in of a hard frost,
and there, in the north-western part of Virgo, nearly in the position assigned by Gauss to the
ru
naway planet, a strange star was discerned by Von Zach[205] at Gotha, and on a subsequent
evening—the anniversary of the original discovery—by Olbers at Bremen. The name of Ceres
(as the tutelary goddess of Sicily) was, by Piazzi's request, bestowed upon this first known of the
numerous, and probably all but innumerable family of the minor planets.
The recognition of the second followed as the immediate consequence of the detection of the
first. Olbers had made himself so familiar with the positions of the small stars along the track of
the long-missing body, that he was at once struck (March 28, 1802) with the presence of an
intruder near the spot where he had recently identified Ceres. He at first believed the new-comer
to be a variable star usually inconspicuous, but just then at its maximum of brightness; but
within two hours he had convinced himself that it was no fixed star, but a rapidly moving object.
The aid of Gauss was again invoked, and his prompt calculations showed that this fresh celestial
acquaintance (named "Pallas" by Olbers), revolved round the sun at nearly the same mean
distance as Ceres, and was beyond question of a strictly analogous character.
This result was perplexing in the extreme. The symmetry and simplicity of the planetary scheme
ap
peared fatally compromised by the admission of many, where room could, according to oldfa
shioned rules, only be found for one. A daring hypothesis of[Pg 75] Olbers's invention provided
an exit from the difficulty. He supposed that both Ceres and Pallas were fragments of a primitive
trans-Martian planet, blown to pieces in the remote past, either by the action of internal forces or
by the impact of a comet; and predicted that many more such fragments would be found to
circulate in the same region. He, moreover, pointed out that these numerous orbits, however
much they might differ in other respects, must all have a common line of intersection,[206] and
that the bodies moving in them must consequently pass, at each revolution, through two opposite
points of the heavens, one situated in the Whale, the other in the constellation of the Virgin,
where already Pallas had been found and Ceres recaptured. The intimation that fresh discoveries
might be expected in those particular regions was singularly justified by the detection of two
bodies now known respectively as Juno and Vesta. The first was found near the predicted spot in
Cetus by Harding, Schröter's assistant at Lilienthal, September 2, 1804; the second by Olbers
himself in Virgo, after three years of persistent scrutiny, March 29, 1807.
The theory of an exploded planet now seemed to have everything in its favour. It required that
the mean or average distances of the newly-discovered bodies should be nearly the same, but
admitted a wide range of variety in the shapes and positions of their orbits, provided always that
they preserved common points of intersection. These conditions were fulfilled with a striking
ap
proach to exactness. Three of the four "asteroids" (a designation introduced by Sir. W.
Herschel[207]) conformed with very approximate precision to "Bode's law" of distances; they all
traversed, in their circuits round the sun, nearly the same parts of Cetus and Virgo; while the
eccentricities and inclinations of their paths departed widely from the planetary type—that of
Pallas, to take an extreme instance, making with the ecliptic an angle of nearly 35°. The
minuteness of these bodies appeared further to strengthen the imputation of a fragmentary
character. Herschel estimated the diameter of Ceres at 162, that of Pallas at 147 miles.[208] But
these values are now known to be considerably too small. A suspected variability of brightness
in some of the asteroids, somewhat hazardously explained as due to the irregularities of figure to
be expected in cosmical potsherds (so to[Pg 76] speak), was added to the confirmatory
evidence.[209] The strong point of the theory, however, lay not in what it explained, but in what it
had predicted. It had been twice confirmed by actual exploration of the skies, and had produced,
in the recognition of Vesta, the first recorded instance of the premeditated discovery of a
heavenly body.
The view not only commended itself to the facile imagination of the unlearned, but received the
sanction of the highest scientific authority. The great Lagrange bestowed upon it his analytical
imprimatur, showing that the explosive forces required to produce the supposed catastrophe
came well within the bounds of possibility; since a velocity of less than twenty times that of a
cannon-ball leaving the gun's mouth would have sufficed, according to his calculation, to launch
the asteroidal fragments on their respective paths. Indeed, he was disposed to regard the
hypothesis of disruption as more generally available than its author had designed it to be, and
proposed to supplement with it, as explanatory of the eccentric orbits of comets, the nebular
theory of Laplace, thereby obtaining, as he said, "a complete view of the origin of the planetary
system more conformable to Nature and mechanical laws than any yet proposed."[210]
Nevertheless the hypothesis of Olbers has not held its ground. It seemed as if all the evidence
available for its support had been produced at once and spontaneously, while the unfavourable
items were elicited slowly, and, as it were, by cross-examination. A more extended acquaintance
with the group of bodies whose peculiarities it was framed to explain has shown them, after all,
as recalcitrant to any such explanation. Coincidences at the first view significant and striking
have been swamped by contrary examples; and a hasty general conclusion has, by a not
uncommon destiny, at last perished under the accumulation of particulars. Moreover, as has been
remarked by Professor Newcomb,[211] mutual perturbations would rapidly efface all traces of a
common disruptive origin, and the catastrophe, to be perceptible in its effects, should have been
comparatively recent.
A new generation of astronomers had arisen before any additions were made to the little family
of the minor planets. Piazzi died in 1826, Harding in 1834, Olbers in 1840; all those who had
prepared or participated in the first discoveries passed away without witnessing their resumption.
In 1830, however, a certain Hencke, ex-postmaster in the Prussian town of Driessen, set himself
to watch for new planets, and after fifteen long years his patience was rewarded. The asteroid[Pg
77] found by him, December 8, 1845, received the name of Astræa, and his further prosecution of
the search resulted, July 1, 1847, in the discovery of Hebe. A few weeks later (August 13), John
Ru
ssell Hind (1823-1893), after many months' exploration from Mr. Bishop's observatory in the
Regent's Park, picked up Iris, and October 18, Flora.[212] The next on the list was Metis, found
by Mr. Graham, April 25, 1848, at Markree, in Ireland.[213] At the close of the period to which
our attention is at present limited, the number of these small bodies known to astronomy was
thirteen; and the course of discovery has since proceeded far more rapidly and with less
interruption.
Both in itself and in its consequences the recognition of the minor planets was of the highest
importance to science. The traditional ideas regarding the constitution of the solar system were
enlarged by the admission of a new class of bodies, strongly contrasted, yet strictly co-ordinate
with the old-established planetary order; the profusion of resource, so conspicuous in the living
kingdoms of Nature, was seen to prevail no less in the celestial spaces; and some faint
preliminary notion was afforded of the indefinite complexity of relations underlying the apparent
simplicity of the majestic scheme to which our world belongs. Both theoretical and practical
astronomy derived profit from the admission of these apparently insignificant strangers to the
rights of citizenship of the solar system. The disturbance of their motions by their giant
neighbours afforded a more accurate knowledge of the Jovian mass, which Laplace had taken
ab
out 1/50 too small; the anomalous character of their orbits presented geometers with highly
stimulating problems in the theory of perturbation; while the exigencies of the first discovery
had produced the Theoria Motus, and won Gauss over to the ranks of calculating astronomy.
Moreover, the sure prospect of further detections powerfully incited to the exploration of the
skies; observers became more numerous and more zealous in view of the prizes held out to them;
star-maps were diligently constructed, and the sidereal multitude strewn along the great zodiacal
belt acquired a fresh interest when it was perceived that its least conspicuous member might be a
planetary shred or projectile in the dignified disguise of a distant sun. Harding's "Celestial
Atlas," designed for the special purpose of facilitating asteroidal research, was the first
systematic attempt to represent to the eye the telescopic aspect of the heavens. It was while
engaged on its construction that the Lilienthal observer successfully intercepted Juno on her
passage through the Whale in 1804; whereupon promoted to Göttingen, he there completed, in
1822, the arduous task so opportunely entered[Pg 78] upon a score of years previously. Still more
important were the great star-maps of the Berlin Academy, undertaken at Bessel's suggestion,
with the same object of distinguishing errant from fixed stars, and executed, under Encke's
supervision, during the years 1830-59. They have played a noteworthy part in the history of
planetary discovery, nor of the minor kind alone.
We have now to recount an event unique in scientific history. The discovery of Neptune has
been characterised as the result of a "movement of the age,"[214] and with some justice. It had
become necessary to the integrity of planetary theory. Until it was accomplished, the phantom of
an unexplained anomaly in the orderly movements of the solar system must have continued to
haunt astronomical consciousness. Moreover, it was prepared by many, suggested as possible by
not a few, and actually achieved, simultaneously, independently, and completely, by two
investigators.
The position of the planet Uranus was recorded as that of a fixed star no less than twenty times
between 1690 and the epoch of its final detection by Herschel. But these early observations, far
from affording the expected facilities for the calculation of its orbit, proved a source of grievous
perplexity. The utmost ingenuity of geometers failed to combine them satisfactorily with the
later Uranian places, and it became evident, either that they were widely erroneous, or that the
revolving body was wandering from its ancient track. The simplest course was to reject them
altogether, and this was done in the new Tables published in 1821 by Alexis Bouvard, the
indefatigable computating partner of Laplace. But the trouble was not thus to be got rid of. After
a few years fresh irregularities began to appear, and continued to increase until absolutely
"intolerable." It may be stated as illustrative of the perfection to which astronomy had been
brought, that divergencies regarded as menacing the very foundation of its theories never entered
the range of unaided vision. In other words, if the theoretical and the real Uranus had been
placed side by side in the sky, they would have seemed, to the sharpest eye, to form a single
body.[215]
The idea that these enigmatical disturbances were due to the attraction of an unknown exterior
body was a tolerably obvious one; and we accordingly find it suggested in many different
quarters. Bouvard himself was perhaps the first to conceive it. He kept the[Pg 79] possibility
continually in view, and bequeathed to his nephew's diligence the inquiry into its reality when he
fe
lt that his own span was drawing to a close; but before any progress had been made with it, he
had already (June 7, 1843) "ceased to breathe and to calculate." The Rev. T. J. Hussey actually
entertained in 1834 the notion, but found his powers inadequate to the task, of assigning an
ap
proximate place to the disturbing body; and Bessel, in 1840, laid his plans for an assault in
fo
rm
up
on the Uranian difficulty, the triumphant exit from which fatal illness frustrated his
hopes of effecting or even witnessing.
The problem was practically untouched when, in 1841, an undergraduate of St. John's College,
Cambridge, formed the resolution of grappling with it. The projected task was an arduous one.
There were no guiding precedents for its conduct. Analytical obstacles had to be encountered so
fo
rm
idable as to appear invincible even to such a mathematician as Airy. John Couch Adams,
however, had no sooner taken his degree, which he did as senior wrangler in January, 1843, than
he set resolutely to work, and on October 21, 1845, was able to communicate to the Astronomer
Royal numerical estimates of the elements and mass of the unknown planet, together with an
indication of its actual place in the heavens. These results, it has been well said,[216] gave "the
final and inexorable proof" of the validity of Newton's Law. The date October 21, 1845, "may
therefore be regarded as marking a distinct epoch in the history of gravitational astronomy."
Sir George Biddell Airy had begun in 1835 his long and energetic administration of the Royal
Observatory, and was already in possession of data vitally important to the momentous inquiry
then on foot. At his suggestion, and under his superintendence, the reduction of all the planetary
observations made at Greenwich from 1750 onwards had been undertaken in 1833. The results,
published in 1846, constituted a permanent and universal stock of materials for the correction of
planetary theory. But in the meantime, investigators, both native and foreign, were freely
supplied with the "places and errors," which, clearly exhibiting the discrepancies between
observation and calculation—between what was and what was expected—formed the very
groundwork of future improvements.
Mr. Adams had no reason to complain of official discourtesy. His labours received due and
indispensable aid; but their purpose was regarded as chimerical. "I have always," Sir George
Airy wrote,[217] "considered the correctness of a distant mathematical result to be a subject rather
of moral than of mathematical evidence." And that[Pg 80] actually before him seemed, from its
very novelty, to incur a suspicion of unlikelihood. No problem in planetary disturbance had
heretofore been attacked, so to speak, from the rear. The inverse method was untried, and might
well be deemed impracticable. For the difficulty of determining the perturbations produced by a
given planet is small compared with the difficulty of finding a planet by its resulting
perturbations. Laplace might have quailed before it; yet it was now grappled with as a first essay
in celestial dynamics. Moreover, Adams unaccountably neglected to answer until too late a
question regarded by Airy in the light of an experimentum crucis as to the soundness of the new
theory. Nor did he himself take any steps to obtain a publicity which he was more anxious to
merit than to secure. The investigation consequently remained buried in obscurity. It is now
kn
own that had a search been instituted in the autumn of 1845 for the remote body whose
existence had been so marvellously foretold, it would have been found within three and a half
lunar diameters (1° 49′) of the spot assigned to it by Adams.
A competitor, however, equally daring and more fortunate—audax fortunâ adjutus, as Gauss
said of him—was even then entering the field. Urbain Jean Joseph Leverrier, the son of a small
Government employé in Normandy, was born at Saint-Lô, March 11, 1811. He studied with
brilliant success at the École Polytechnique, accepted the post of astronomical teacher there in
1837, and, "docile to circumstance," immediately concentrated the whole of his vast, though as
yet undeveloped powers upon the formidable problems, of celestial mechanics. He lost no time
in proving to the mathematical world that the race of giants was not extinct. Two papers on the
stability of the solar system, presented to the Academy of Sciences, September 16 and October
14, 1839, showed him to be the worthy successor of Lagrange and Laplace, and encouraged
hopes destined to be abundantly realised. His attention was directed by Arago to the Uranian
difficulty in 1845, when he cheerfully put aside certain intricate cometary researches upon which
he happened to be engaged, in order to obey with dutiful promptitude the summons of the
astronomical chief of France. In his first memoir on the subject (communicated to the Academy,
November 10, 1845), he proved the inadequacy of all known causes of disturbance to account
fo
r the vagaries of Uranus; in a second (June 1, 1848), he demonstrated that only an exterior
body, occupying at a certain date a determinate position in the zodiac, could produce the
observed effects; in a third (August 31, 1846), he assigned the orbit of the disturbing body, and
announced its visibility as an object with a sensible disc about as bright as a star of the eighth
magnitude.
The question was now visibly approaching an issue. On September[Pg 81] 10, Sir John Herschel
declared to the British Association respecting the hypothetical new planet: "We see it as
Columbus saw America from the coast of Spain. Its movements have been felt, trembling along
the far-reaching line of our analysis with a certainty hardly inferior to that of ocular
demonstration." Less than a fortnight later, September 23, Professor Galle, of the Berlin
Observatory, received a letter from Leverrier requesting his aid in the telescopic part of the
inquiry already analytically completed. He directed his refractor to the heavens that same night,
and perceived, within less than a degree of the spot indicated, an object with a measurable disc
nearly three seconds in diameter. Its absence from Bremiker's recently-completed map of that
region of the sky showed it to be no star, and its movement in the predicted direction confirmed
without delay the strong persuasion of its planetary nature.[218]
In this remarkable manner the existence of the remote member of our system known as
"Neptune" was ascertained. But the discovery, which faithfully reflected the duplicate character
of the investigation which led to it, had been already secured at Cambridge before it was
announced from Berlin. Sir George Airy's incredulity vanished in the face of the striking
coincidence between the position assigned by Leverrier to the unknown planet in June, and that
laid down by Adams in the previous October; and on the 9th of July he wrote to Professor
Challis, director of the Cambridge Observatory, recommending a search with the great
Northumberland equatoreal. Had a good star-map been at hand, the process would have been a
simple one; but of Bremiker's "Hora XXI." no news had yet reached England, and there was no
other sufficiently comprehensive to be available for an inquiry which, in the absence of such aid,
promised to be both long and laborious. As the event proved, it might have been neither. "After
fo
ur days of observing," Challis wrote, October 12, 1846, to Airy, "the planet was in my grasp if
only I had examined or mapped the observations."[219] Had he done so, the first honours in the
discovery, both theoretical and optical, would have fallen to the University of Cambridge. But
Professor Challis had other astronomical avocations to attend to, and, moreover, his faith in the
precision of the indications furnished to him was, by his own confession, a very feeble one. For
both reasons he postponed to a later stage of the proceedings the discussion and comparison of
the data nightly furnished to him by his telescope, and thus allowed to lie, as it were, latent in his
observations the [Pg 82] momentous result which his diligence had insured, but which his delay
suffered to be anticipated.[220]
Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that the Berlin astronomer had two circumstances in his
fa
vour apart from which his swift success could hardly have been achieved. The first was the
possession of a good star-map; the second was the clear and confident nature of Leverrier's
instructions. "Look where I tell you," he seemed authoritatively to say, "and you will see an
object such as I describe."[221] And in fact, not only Galle on the 23rd of September, but also
Challis on the 29th, immediately after reading the French geometer's lucid and impressive
treatise, picked out from among the stellar points strewing the zodiac, a small planetary disc,
which eventually proved to be that of the precise body he had been in search of during two
months.
The controversy that ensued had its ignominious side; but it was entered into by neither of the
parties principally concerned. Adams bore the disappointment, which the dilatory proceedings at
Greenwich and Cambridge had inflicted upon him, with quiet heroism. His silence on the subject
of what another man would have called his wrongs remained unbroken to the end of his life;[222]
and he took every opportunity of testifying his admiration for the genius of Leverrier.
Personal questions, however, vanish in the magnitude of the event they relate to. By it the last
lingering doubts as to the absolute exactness of the Newtonian Law were dissipated. Recondite
analytical methods received a confirmation brilliant and intelligible even to the minds of the
vulgar, and emerged from the patient solitude of the study to enjoy an hour of clamorous
triumph. For ever invisible to the unaided eye of man, a sister-globe to our earth was shown to
circulate, in perpetual frozen exile, at thirty times its distance from the sun. Nay, the possibility
was made apparent that the limits of our system were not even thus reached, but that yet
profounder abysses of space might shelter obedient, though little favoured, members of the solar
fa
mily, by future astronomers to be recognised through the sympathetic thrillings of Neptune,
even as Neptune himself was recognised through the tell-tale deviations of Uranus.
It is curious to find that the fruit of Adams's and Leverrier's[Pg 83] laborious investigations had
been accidentally all but snatched half a century before it was ripe to be gathered. On the 8th,
and again on the 10th of May, 1795, Lalande noted the position of Neptune as that of a fixed
star, but perceiving that the two observations did not agree, he suppressed the first as erroneous,
and pursued the inquiry no further. An immortality which he would have been the last to despise
hung in the balance; the feather-weight of his carelessness, however, kicked the beam, and the
discovery was reserved to be more hardly won by later comers.
Bode's Law did good service in the quest for a trans-Uranian planet by affording ground for a
probable assumption as to its distance. A starting-point for approximation was provided by it;
but it was soon found to be considerably at fault. Even Uranus is about 36 millions of miles
nearer to the sun than the order of progression requires; and Neptune's vast distance of 2,800
million should be increased by no less than 800 million miles, and its period of 165 lengthened
out to 225 years,[223] in order to bring it into conformity with the curious and unexplained rule
which planetary discoveries have alternately tended to confirm and to invalidate.
Within seventeen days of its identification with the Berlin achromatic, Neptune was found to be
attended by a satellite. This discovery was the first notable performance of the celebrated twofo
ot reflector[224] erected by Mr. Lassell at his suggestively named residence of Starfield, near
Liverpool. William Lassell was a brewer by profession, but by inclination an astronomer. Born
at Bolton in Lancashire, June 18, 1799, he closed a life of eminent usefulness to science, October
5, 1818, thus spanning with his well-spent years four-fifths of the momentous period which we
have undertaken to traverse. At the age of twenty-one, being without the means to purchase, he
undertook to construct telescopes, and naturally turned his attention to the reflecting sort, as
fa
vouring amateur efforts by the comparative simplicity of its structure. His native ingenuity was
remarkable, and was developed by the hourly exigencies of his successive enterprises. Their
uniform success encouraged him to enlarge his aims, and in 1844 he visited Birr Castle for the
purpose of inspecting the machine used in polishing the giant speculum of Parsonstown. In the
construction of his new instrument, however, he eventually discarded the model there obtained,
and worked on a method of his own, assisted by the supreme mechanical skill of James
Nasmyth. The result was a Newtonian of exquisite definition, with an aperture of two, and a
fo
cal length of twenty feet,[Pg 84] provided by a novel artifice with the equatoreal mounting,
previously regarded as available only for refractors.
This beautiful instrument afforded to its maker, October 10, 1846, a cursory view of a Neptunian
attendant. But the planet was then approaching the sun, and it was not until the following July
that the observation could be verified, which it was completely, first by Lassell himself, and
somewhat later by Otto Stuve and Bond of Cambridge (U.S.). When it is considered that this
remote object shines by reflecting sunlight reduced by distance to 1/900th of the intensity with
which it illuminates our moon, the fact of its visibility, even in the most perfect telescopes, is a
somewhat surprising one. It can only, indeed, be accounted for by attributing to it dimensions
very considerable for a body of the secondary order. It shares with the moons of Uranus the
peculiarity of retrograde motion; that is to say, its revolutions, running counter to the grand
current of movement in the solar system, are performed from east to west, in a plane inclined at
an angle of 35° to that of the ecliptic. Their swiftness serves to measure the mass of the globe
round which they are performed. For while our moon takes twenty-seven days and nearly eight
hours to complete its circuit of the earth, the satellite of Neptune, at a distance not greatly
inferior, sweeps round its primary in five days and twenty-one hours, showing (according to a
very simple principle of computation) that it is urged by a force seventeen times greater than the
terrestrial pull upon the lunar orb. Combining this result with those of Professor Barnard's[225]
and Dr. See's[226] recent measurements of the small telescopic disc of this farthest known planet,
it is found that while in mass Neptune equals seventeen, in bulk it is equivalent to forty-nine
earths. This is as much as to say that it is composed of relatively very light materials, or more
probably of materials distended by internal heat, as yet unwasted by radiation into space, to
ab
out five times the volume they would occupy in the interior of our globe. The fact, at any rate,
is fairly well ascertained, that the average density of Neptune is about twice that of water.
We must now turn from this late-recognised member of our system to bestow some brief
attention upon the still fruitful field of discovery offered by one of the immemorial five. The
fa
mily of Saturn, unlike that of its brilliant neighbour, has been gradually introduced to the
notice of astronomers. Titan, the sixth Saturnian moon in order of distance, led the way, being
detected by Huygens, March 25, 1655; Cassini made the acquaintance of four more between
1671 and 1684; while Mimas and Enceladus, the two innermost, were caught by Herschel in
1789, as they threaded their lucid[Pg 85] way along the edge of the almost vanished ring. In the
distances of these seven revolving bodies from their primary, an order of progression analogous
to that pointed out by Titius in the planetary intervals was found to prevail; but with one
conspicuous interruption, similar to that which had first suggested the search for new members
of the solar system. Between Titan and Japetus—the sixth and seventh reckoning outwards—
there was obviously room for another satellite. It was discovered on both sides of the Atlantic
simultaneously, on the 19th of September, 1848. Mr. W. C. Bond, employing the splendid 15-
inch refractor of the Harvard Observatory, noticed, September 16, a minute star situated in the
plane of Saturn's rings. The same object was discerned by Mr. Lassell on the 18th. On the
fo
llowing evening, both observers perceived that the problematical speck of light kept up with,
instead of being left behind by the planet as it moved, and hence inferred its true character.[227]
Hyperion, the seventh by distance and eighth by recognition of Saturn's attendant train, is of so
insignificant a size when compared with some of its fellow-moons (Titan is but little inferior to
the planet Mars), as to have suggested to Sir John Herschel[228] the idea that it might be only one
of several bodies revolving very close together—in fact, an asteroidal satellite; but the
conjecture has, so far, not been verified.
The coincidence of its duplicate discovery was singularly paralleled two years later. Galileo's
amazement when his "optic glass" revealed to him the "triple" form of Saturn—planeta
tergeminus—has proved to be, like the laughter of the gods, "inextinguishable." It must revive in
every one who contemplates anew the unique arrangements of that world apart known to us as
the Saturnian system. The resolution of the so-called ansæ, or "handles," into one encircling ring
by Huygens in 1655, the discovery by Cassini in 1675 of the division of that ring into two
concentric ones, together with Laplace's investigation of the conditions of stability of such a
fo
rm
ation, constituted, with some minor observations, the sum of the knowledge obtained, up to
the middle of the last century, on the subject of this remarkable formation. The first place in the
discovery now about to be related belongs to an American astronomer.
William Cranch Bond, born in 1789 at Portland, in the State of Maine, was a watchmaker, whom
the solar eclipse of 1806 attracted to study the wonders of the heavens. When, in 1815, the
erection of an observatory in connection with Harvard College, Cambridge, was first
contemplated, he undertook a mission to England for the purpose of studying the working of
similar institutions there, and on[Pg 86] his return erected a private observatory at Dorchester,
where he worked diligently for many years. Then at last, in 1843, the long-postponed design of
the Harvard authorities was resumed, and on the completion of the new establishment, Bond,
who had been from 1838 officially connected with the College and had carried on his scientific
labours within its precincts, was offered and accepted the post of its director. Placed in 1847 in
possession of one of the finest instruments in the world—a masterpiece of Merz and Mahler—he
headed the now long list of distinguished Transatlantic observers. Like the elder Struve, he left
an heir to his office and to his eminence, but George Bond unfortunately died in 1865, at the
early age of thirty-nine, having survived his father but six years.
On the night of November 15, 1850—the air, remarkably enough, being so hazy that only the
brightest stars could be perceived with the naked eye—William Bond discerned a dusky ring,
extending about halfway between the inner brighter one and the globe of Saturn. A fortnight
later, but before the observation had been announced in England, the same appearance was seen
by the Rev. W. R. Dawes with the comparatively small refractor of his observatory at
Wateringbury, and on December 3 was described by Mr. Lassell (then on a visit to him) as
"something like a crape veil covering a part of the sky within the inner ring."[229] Next morning
the Times containing the report of Bond's discovery reached Wateringbury. The most surprising
circumstance in the matter was that the novel appendage had remained so long unrecognised. As
the rings opened out to their full extent, it became obvious with very moderate optical assistance;
yet some of the most acute observers who have ever lived, using instruments of vast power, had
heretofore failed to detect its presence. It soon appeared, however, that Galle of Berlin[230] had
noticed, June 10, 1838, a veil-like extension of the lucid ring across half the dark space
separating it from the planet; but the observation, although communicated at the time to the
Berlin Academy of Sciences, had remained barren. Traces of the dark ring, moreover, were
fo
und in drawings executed by Campani in 1664[231] and by Hooke in 1666;[232] while Picard
(June 15, 1673),[233] Hadley (spring of 1720),[234] and Herschel,[235] had all undoubtedly seen it
under the aspect of a dark bar or belt crossing the Saturnian globe. It was, then, of no recent
origin; but there seemed reason to think that it had lately gained considerably in brightness. The
fu
ll[Pg 87] meaning of this suspected change it was reserved for later investigations to develop.
What we may, in a certain sense, call the closing result of the race for discovery, in which
several observers seemed at that time to be engaged, was the establishment, on a satisfactory
fo
oting, of our acquaintance with the dependent system of Uranus. Sir William Herschel, whose
researches formed, in so many distinct lines of astronomical inquiry, the starting-points of future
kn
owledge, detected, January 11, 1787,[236] two Uranian moons, since called Oberon and
Titania, and ascertained the curious circumstance of their motion in a plane almost at right
angles to the ecliptic, in a direction contrary to that of all previously known denizens (other than
cometary) of the solar kingdom. He believed that he caught occasional glimpses of four more,
but never succeeded in assuring himself of their substantial existence. Even the two first
remained unseen save by himself until 1828, when his son re-observed them with a 20-foot
reflector, similar to that with which they had been originally discovered. Thenceforward they
were kept fairly within view, but their four questionable companions, in spite of some false
alarms of detection, remained in the dubious condition in which Herschel had left them. At last,
on October 24, 1851,[237] after some years of fruitless watching, Lassell espied "Ariel" and
"Umbriel," two Uranian attendants, interior to Oberon and Titania, and of about half their
brightness; so that their disclosure is still reckoned amongst the very highest proofs of
instrumental power and perfection. In all probability they were then for the first time seen; for
although Professor Holden[238] made out a plausible case in favour of the fitful visibility to
Herschel of each of them in turn, Lassell's argument[239] that the glare of the planet in Herschel's
great specula must have rendered almost impossible the perception of objects so minute and so
close to its disc, appears tolerably decisive to the contrary. Uranus is thus attended by four
moons, and, so far as present knowledge extends, by no more. Among the most important of the
"negative results"[240] secured by Lassell's observations at Malta during the years 1852-53 and
1861-65, were the convincing evidence afforded by them that, without great increase of optical
power, no further Neptunian or Uranian satellites can be perceived, and the consequent
relegation of Herschel's baffling quartette, notwithstanding the unquestioned place long assigned
to them in astronomical text-books, to the Nirvana of non-existence.CHAPTER V
COMETS
Newton showed that the bodies known as "comets," or hirsute stars, obey the law of gravitation;
but it was by no means certain that the individual of the species observed by him in 1680 formed
a permanent member of the solar system. The velocity, in fact, of its rush round the sun was
quite possibly sufficient to carry it off for ever into the depths of space, there to wander, a
celestial casual, from star to star. With another comet, however, which appeared two years later,
the case was different. Edmund Halley, who afterwards succeeded Flamsteed as Astronomer
Royal, calculated the elements of its orbit on Newton's principles, and found them to resemble so
closely those similarly arrived at for comets observed by Peter Apian in 1531, and by Kepler in
1607, as almost to compel the inference that all three were apparitions of a single body. This
implied its revolution in a period of about seventy-six years, and Halley accordingly fixed its
return for 1758-9. So fully alive was he to the importance of the announcement that he appealed
to a "candid posterity," in the event of its verification, to acknowledge that the discovery was
du
e to an Englishman. The prediction was one of the test-questions put by Science to Nature, on
the replies to which largely depend both the development of knowledge and the conviction of its
reality. In the present instance, the answer afforded may be said to have laid the foundation of
this branch of astronomy. Halley's comet punctually reappeared on Christmas Day, 1758, and
effected its perihelion passage on the 12th of March following, thus proving beyond dispute that
some at least of these erratic bodies are domesticated within our system, and strictly conform, if
not to its unwritten customs (so to speak), at any rate to its fundamental laws. Their movements,
in short, were demonstrated by the most unanswerable of all arguments—that of verified
calculation—to be calculable, and their investigation was erected into a legitimate department of
astronomical science.[Pg 89]
This notable advance was the chief result obtained in the field of inquiry just now under
consideration during the eighteenth century. But before it closed, its cultivation had received a
powerful stimulus through the invention of an improved method. The name of Olbers has already
been brought prominently before our readers in connection with asteroidal discoveries; these,
however, were but chance excursions from the path of cometary research which he steadily
pursued through life. An early predilection for the heavens was fixed in this particular direction
by one of the happy inspirations of genius. As he was watching, one night in the year 1779, by
the sick-bed of a fellow-student in medicine at Göttingen, an important simplification in the
mode of computing the paths of comets occurred to him. Although not made public until 1797,
"Olbers's method" was then universally adopted, and is still regarded as the most expeditious and
convenient in cases where absolute rigour is not required. By its introduction, not only many a
toilsome and thankless hour was spared, but workers were multiplied, and encouraged in the
prosecution of labours more useful than attractive.
The career of Heinrich Olbers is a brilliant example of what may be done by an amateur in
astronomy. He at no time did regular work in an observatory; he was never the possessor of a
transit or any other fixed instrument; moreover, all the best years of his life were absorbed in the
assiduous exercise of a toilsome profession. Born in 1758 at the village of Arbergen, where his
fa
ther was pastor, he settled in 1781 as a physician in the neighbouring town of Bremen, and
continued in active practice there for over forty years. It was thus only the hours which his
robust constitution enabled him to spare from sleep that were available for his intellectual
pleasures. Yet his recreation was, as Von Zach remarked,[241] no less prolific of useful results
than the severest work of other men. The upper part of his house in the Sandgasse was fitted up
with such instruments and appliances as restrictions of space permitted, and there, night after
night during half a century and upwards, he discovered, calculated, or observed the cometary
visitants of northern skies. Almost as effective in promoting the interests of science as the
valuable work actually done by him, was the influence of his genial personality. He engaged
confidence by his ready and discerning sympathy; he inspired affection by his benevolent
disinterestedness; he quickened thought and awakened zeal by the suggestions of a lively and
inventive spirit, animated with the warmest enthusiasm for the advancement of knowledge.
Nearly every astronomer in Germany enjoyed the benefits of a frequently active correspondence
with him, and his communications to the scientific periodicals of the[Pg 90] time were numerous
and striking. The motive power of his mind was thus widely felt and continually in action. Nor
did it wholly cease to be exerted even when the advance of age and the progress of infirmity
rendered him incapable of active occupation. He was, in fact, alive even to the last day of his
long life of eighty-one years; and his death, which occurred March 2, 1840, left vacant a position
which a rare combination of moral and intellectual qualities had conspired to render unique.
Amongst the many younger men who were attracted and stimulated by intercourse with him was
Johann Franz Encke. But while Olbers became a mathematician because he was an astronomer,
Encke became an astronomer because he was a mathematician. A born geometer, he was
naturally sent to Göttingen and placed under the tuition of Gauss. But geometers are men; and
the contagion of patriotic fervour which swept over Germany after the battle of Leipsic did not
spare Gauss's promising pupil. He took up arms in the Hanseatic Legion, and marched and
fo
ught until the oppressor of his country was safely ensconced behind the ocean-walls of St.
Helena. In the course of his campaigning he met Lindenau, the militant director of the Seeberg
Observatory, and by his influence was appointed his assistant, and eventually, in 1822, became
his successor. Thence he was promoted in 1825 to Berlin, where he superintended the building
of the new observatory, so actively promoted by Humboldt, and remained at its head until within
some eighteen months of his death in August, 1865.
On the 26th of November, 1818, Pons of Marseilles discovered a comet, whose inconspicuous
ap
pearance gave little promise of its becoming one of the most interesting objects in our system.
Encke at once took the calculation of its elements in hand, and brought out the unexpected result
that it revolved round the sun in a period of about 3-1/3 years.[242] He, moreover, detected its
identity with comets seen by Méchain in 1786, by Caroline Herschel in 1795, by Pons, Huth, and
Bouvard in 1805, and after six laborious weeks of research into the disturbances experienced by
it from the planets during the entire interval since its first ascertained appearance, he fixed May
24, 1822, as the date of its next return to perihelion. Although on that occasion, owing to the
position of the earth, invisible in the northern hemisphere, Sir Thomas Brisbane's observatory at
Paramatta was fortunately ready equipped for its recapture, which Rümker effected quite close to
the spot indicated by Encke's ephemeris.
The importance of this event can be better understood when it is[Pg 91] remembered that it was
only the second instance of the recognised return of a comet (that of Halley's, sixty-three years
previously, having, as already stated, been the first); and that it, moreover, established the
existence of a new class of celestial objects, somewhat loosely distinguished as "comets of short
period." These bodies (of which about thirty have been found to circulate within the orbit of
Saturn) are remarkable as showing certain planetary affinities in the manners of their motions
not at all perceptible in the wider travelling members of their order. They revolve, without
exception, in the same direction as the planets—from west to east; they exhibit a marked
tendency to conform to the zodiacal track which limits planetary excursions north and south; and
their paths round the sun, although much more eccentric than the approximately circular
planetary orbits, are far less so than the extravagantly long ellipses in which comets
comparatively untrained (as it were) in the habits of the solar system ordinarily perform their
revolutions.
No great comet is of the "planetary" kind. These are, indeed, only by exception visible to the
naked eye; they possess extremely feeble tail-producing powers, and give small signs of central
condensation. Thin wisps of cosmical cloud, they flit across the telescopic field of view without
sensibly obscuring the smallest star. Their appearance, in short, suggests—what some notable
fa
cts in their history will presently be shown to confirm—that they are bodies already effete, and
verging towards dissolution. If it be asked what possible connection can be shown to exist
between the shortness of period by which they are essentially characterised, and what we may
call their superannuated condition, we are not altogether at a loss for an answer. Kepler's
remark,[243] that comets are consumed by their own emissions, has undoubtedly a measure of
truth in it. The substance ejected into the tail must, in overwhelmingly large proportion, be for
ever lost to the central mass from which it issues. True, it is of a nature inconceivably tenuous;
but unrepaired waste, however small in amount, cannot be persisted in with impunity. The
incitement to such self-spoliation proceeds from the sun; it accordingly progresses more rapidly
the more numerous are the returns to the solar vicinity. Comets of short period may thus
reasonably be expected to wear out quickly.
They are, moreover, subject to many adventures and vicissitudes. Their aphelia—or the farthest
points of their orbits from the sun—are usually, if not invariably, situated so near to the path
either of Jupiter or of Saturn, as to permit these giant planets to act as secondary rulers of their
destinies. By their influence they were, in[Pg 92] all likelihood, originally fixed in their present
tracks; and by their influence, exerted in an opposite sense, they may, in some cases, be
eventually ejected from them. Careers so varied, as can easily be imagined, are apt to prove
instructive, and astronomers have not been backward in extracting from them the lessons they
are fitted to convey. Encke's comet, above all, has served as an index to much curious
information, and it may be hoped that its function in that respect is by no means at an end. The
great extent of the solar system traversed by its eccentric path makes it peculiarly useful for the
determination of the planetary masses. At perihelion it penetrates within the orbit of Mercury; it
considerably transcends at aphelion the farthest excursion of Pallas. Its vicinity to the former
planet in August, 1835, offered the first convenient opportunity of placing that body in the
astronomical balance. Its weight or mass had previously been assumed, not ascertained; and the
comparatively slight deviation from its regular course impressed upon the comet by its attractive
power showed that it had been assumed nearly twice too great.[244] That fundamental datum of
planetary astronomy—the mass of Jupiter—was corrected by similar means; and it was
reassuring to find the correction in satisfactory accord with that already introduced from
observations of the asteroidal movements.
The fact that comets contract in approaching the sun had been noticed by Hevelius; Pingré
admitted it with hesitating perplexity;[245] the example of Encke's comet rendered it conspicuous
and undeniable. On the 28th of October, 1828, the diameter of the nebulous matter composing
this body was estimated at 312,000 miles. It was then about one and a half times further from the
sun than the earth is at the time of the equinox. On the 24th of December following, its distance
being reduced by nearly two-thirds, it was found to be only 14,000 miles across.[246] That is to
say, it had shrunk during those two months of approach to 1/11000th part of its original volume!
Yet it had still seventeen days' journey to make before reaching perihelion. The same curious
circumstance was even more markedly apparent at its return in 1838. Its bulk, or the actual space
occupied by it, appeared to be reduced, as it drew near the hearth of our system, in the enormous
proportion of 800,000[Pg 93] to 1. A corresponding expansion accompanied on each occasion its
retirement from the sphere of observation. Similar changes of volume, though rarely to the same
astounding extent, have been perceived in other comets. They still remain unexplained; but it can
scarcely be doubted that they are due to the action of the same energetic internal forces which
reveal themselves in so many splendid and surprising cometary phenomena.
Another question of singular interest was raised by Encke's acute inquiries into the movements
and disturbances of the first known "comet of short period." He found from the first that its
revolutions were subject to some influence besides that of gravity. After every possible
allowance had been made for the pulls, now backward, now forward, exerted upon it by the
several planets, there was still a surplus of acceleration left unaccounted for. Each return to
perihelion took place about two and a half hours sooner than received theories warranted. Here,
then, was a "residual phenomenon" of the utmost promise for the disclosure of novel truths.
Encke (in accordance with the opinion of Olbers) explained it as due to the presence in space of
some such "subtle matter" as was long ago invoked by Euler[247] to be the agent of eventual
destruction for the fair scheme of planetary creation. The apparent anomaly of accounting for an
accelerative effect by a retarding cause disappears when it is considered that any check to the
motion of bodies revolving round a centre of attraction causes them to draw closer to it, thus
shortening their periods and quickening their circulation. If space were filled with a resisting
medium capable of impeding, even in the most infinitesimal degree, the swift course of the
planets, their orbits should necessarily be, not ellipses, but very close elliptical spirals along
which they would slowly, but inevitably, descend into the burning lap of the sun. The
circumstance that no such tendency can be traced in their revolutions by no means sets the
question at rest. For it might well be that an effect totally imperceptible until after the lapse of
countless ages, as regards the solid orbs of our system, might be obvious in the movements of
bodies like comets of small mass and great bulk; just as a feather or a gauze veil at once yields
its motion to the resistance of the air, while a cannon-ball cuts its way through with
comparatively slight loss of velocity.
It will thus be seen that issues of the most momentous character hang on the time-keeping of
comets; for plainly all must in some degree suffer the same kind of hindrance as Encke's, if the
cause of that hindrance be the one suggested. None of its congeners, however, show any trace of
similar symptoms. True,[Pg 94] the late Professor Oppolzer announced,[248] in 1880, that a comet,
first seen by Pons in 1819, and rediscovered by Winnecke in 1858, having a period of 2,052 days
(5·6 years), was accelerated at each revolution precisely in the manner required by Encke's
theory. But M. von Haerdtl's subsequent investigation, the materials for which included
numerous observations of the body in question at its return to the sun in 1886, decisively
negatived the presence of any such effect.[249] Moreover, the researches of Von Asten and
Backlund[250] into the movements of Encke's comet revealed a perplexing circumstance. They
confirmed Encke's results for the period covered by them, but exhibited the acceleration as
having suddenly diminished by nearly one-half in 1868. The reality and permanence of this
change were fully established by observations of the ensuing return in March, 1885. Some
physical alteration of the retarded body seems indicated; but visual evidence countenances no
such assumption. In aspect the comet is no less thin and diffuse than in 1795 or in 1848.
The character of the supposed resistance in inter-planetary space has, it may be remarked, been
often misapprehended. What Encke stipulated for was not a medium equally diffused throughout
the visible universe, such as the ethereal vehicle of the vibrations of light, but a rare fluid,
rapidly increasing in density towards the sun.[251] This cannot be a solar atmosphere, since it is
mathematically certain, as Laplace has shown,[252] that no envelope partaking of the sun's axial
rotation can extend farther from his surface than nine-tenths of the mean distance of Mercury;
while physical evidence assures us that the actual depth of the solar atmosphere bears a very
minute proportion to the possible depth theoretically assigned to it. That matter, however, not
atmospheric in its nature—that is, neither forming one body with the sun nor altogether
aëriform—exists in its neighbourhood, can admit of no reasonable doubt. The great lens-shaped
mass of the zodiacal light, stretching out at times far beyond the earth's orbit, may indeed be
regarded as an extension of the corona, the streamers of which themselves mark the wide
diffusion, all round the solar globe, of granular or gaseous materials. Yet comets have been
kn
own to penetrate the sphere occupied by them without perceptible loss of velocity. The
hypothesis, then, of a resisting medium receives at present no countenance from the movements
of comets, whether of short or of long periods.
Although Encke's comet has made thirty-five complete rounds of its orbit since its first detection
in 1786, it shows no certain signs[Pg 95] of decay. Variations in its brightness are, it is true,
conspicuous, but they do not proceed continuously.[253]
The history of the next known planet-like comet has proved of even more curious interest than
that of the first. It was discovered by an Austrian officer named Wilhelm von Biela at
Josephstadt in Bohemia, February 27, 1826, and ten days later by the French astronomer
Gambart at Marseilles. Both observers computed its orbit, showed its remarkable similarity to
that traversed by comets visible in 1772 and 1805, and connected them together as previous
ap
pearances of the body just detected by assigning to its revolutions a period of between six and
seven years. The two brief letters conveying these strikingly similar inferences were printed side
by side in the same number of the Astronomische Nachrichten (No. 94); but Biela's priority in
the discovery of the comet was justly recognised by the bestowal upon it of his name.
The object in question was at no time, subsequently to 1805, visible to the naked eye. Its aspect
in Sir John Herschel's great reflector on the 23rd of September, 1832, was described by him as
that of a "conspicuous nebula," nearly 3 minutes in diameter. No trace of a tail was discernible.
While he was engaged in watching it, a small knot of minute stars was directly traversed by it,
"and when on the cluster," he tells us,[254] it "presented the appearance of a nebula resolvable and
partly resolved into stars, the stars of the cluster being visible through the comet." Yet the depth
of cometary matter through which such faint stellar rays penetrated undimmed, was, near the
central parts of the globe, not less than 50,000 miles.
It is curious to find that this seemingly harmless, and we may perhaps add effete body, gave
occasion to the first (and not the last) cometary "scare" of an enlightened century. Its orbit, at the
descending node, may be said to have intersected that of the earth; since, according as it bulged
in or out under the disturbing influence of the planets, the passage of the comet was affected
inside or outside the terrestrial track. Now, certain calculations published by Olbers in 1828[255]
showed that, on October 29, 1832, a considerable portion of its nebulous surroundings would
actually sweep over the spot which, a month later, would be occupied by our planet. It needed no
more to set the popular imagination in a ferment. Astronomers, after all, could not, by an
alarmed public, be held to be infallible. Their computations, it was averred, which a trifling
oversight would suffice to vitiate, exhibited clearly enough the danger, but afforded no guarantee
of safety from a collision, with all the terrific consequences[Pg 96] frigidly enumerated by
Laplace. Nor did the panic subside until Arago formally demonstrated that the earth and the
comet could by no possibility approach within less than fifty millions of miles.[256]
The return of the same body in 1845-46 was marked by an extraordinary circumstance. When
first seen, November 28, it wore its usual aspect of a faint round patch of cosmical fog; but on
December 19, Mr. Hind noticed that it had become distorted somewhat into the form of a pear;
and ten days later, it had divided into two separate objects. This singular duplication was first
perceived at New Haven in America, December 29,[257] by Messrs. Herrick and Bradley, and by
Lieutenant Maury at Washington, January 13, 1846. The earliest British observer of the
phenomenon (noticed by Wichmann the same evening at Königsberg) was Professor Challis. "I
see two comets!" he exclaimed, putting his eye to the great equatoreal of the Cambridge
Observatory on the night of January 15; then, distrustful of what his senses had told him, he
called in his judgment to correct their improbable report by resolving one of the dubious objects
into a hazy star.[258] On the 23rd, however, both were again seen by him in unmistakable
cometary shape, and until far on in March (Otto Struve caught a final glimpse of the pair on the
16th of April),[259] continued to be watched with equal curiosity and amazement by astronomers
in every part of the northern hemisphere. What Seneca reproved Ephorus for supposing to have
taken place in 373 B.C.—what Pingré blamed Kepler for conjecturing in 1618—had then actually
occurred under the attentive eyes of science in the middle of the nineteenth century!
At a distance from each other of about two-thirds the distance of the moon from the earth, the
twin comets meantime moved on tranquilly, so far, at least, as their course through the heaven
was concerned. Their extreme lightness, or the small amount of matter contained in each, could
not have received a more signal illustration than by the fact that their revolutions round the sun
were performed independently; that is to say, they travelled side by side without experiencing
any appreciable mutual disturbance, thus plainly showing[Pg 97] that at an interval of only
157,250 miles their attractive power was virtually inoperative. Signs of internal agitation,
however, were not wanting. Each fragment threw out a short tail in a direction perpendicular to
the line joining their centres, and each developed a bright nucleus, although the original comet
had exhibited neither of these signs of cometary vitality. A singular interchange of brilliancy
was, besides, observed to take place between the coupled objects, each of which alternately
outshone and was outshone by the other, while an arc of light, apparently proceeding from the
more lustrous, at times bridged the intervening space. Obviously, the gravitational tie, rendered
powerless by exiguity of matter, was here replaced by some other form of mutual action, the
nature of which can as yet be dealt with only by conjecture.
Once more, in August, 1852, the double comet returned to the neighbourhood of the sun, but
under circumstances not the most advantageous for observation. Indeed, the companion was not
detected until September 16, when Father Secchi at Rome perceived it to have increased its
distance from the originating body to a million and a quarter of miles, or about eight times the
average interval at the former appearance. Both vanished shortly afterwards, and have never
since been seen, notwithstanding the eager watch kept for objects of such singular interest, and
the accurate knowledge of their track supplied by Santini's investigations. A dangerously near
ap
proach to Jupiter in 1841 is believed to have occasioned their disruption, and the
disaggregating process thus started was likely to continue. We can scarcely doubt that the fate
has overtaken them which Newton assigned as the end of all cometary existence. Diffundi
tandem et spargi per cœlos universos.[260]
Biela's is not the only vanished comet. Brorsen's, discovered at Kiel in 1846, and observed at
fo
ur subsequent returns, failed unaccountably to become visible in 1890.[261] Yet numerous
sentinels were on the alert to surprise its approach along a well-ascertained track, traversed in
five and a half years. The object presented from the first a somewhat time-worn aspect. It was
devoid of tail, or any other kind of appendage; and the rapid loss of the light acquired during
perihelion passage was accompanied by inordinate expansion of an already tenuous globular
mass. Another lost or mislaid comet is one found by De Vico at Rome, August 22, 1844. It was
expected to return early in 1850, but did not, and has never[Pg 98] since been seen; unless its reap
pearance as E. Swift's comet of 1894 should be ratified by closer inquiry.[262]
A telescopic comet with a period of 7-1/2 years, discovered November 22, 1843, by M. Faye of
the Paris Observatory, formed the subject of a characteristically patient and profound inquiry on
the part of Leverrier, designed to test its suggested identity with Lexell's comet of 1770. The
result was decisive against the hypothesis of Valz, the divergences between the orbits of the two
bodies being found to increase instead of to diminish, as the history of the new-comer was traced
backward into the previous century.[263] Faye's comet pursues the most nearly circular path of
any similar known object; even at its nearest approach to the sun it remains farther off than Mars
when he is most distant from it; and it was proved by the admirable researches of Professor Axel
Möller,[264] director of the Swedish observatory of Lund, to exhibit no trace of the action of a
resisting medium.
Periodical comets are evidently bodies which have each lived through a chapter of accidents, and
a significant hint as to the nature of their adventures can be gathered from the fact that their
ap
helia are pretty closely grouped about the tracks of the major planets. Halley's, and five other
comets are thus related to Neptune; three connect themselves with Uranus, two with Saturn,
ab
ove a score with Jupiter. Some form of dependence is plainly indicated, and the researches of
Tisserand,[265] Callandreau,[266] and Newton[267] of Yale College, leave scarcely a doubt that the
"capture-theory" represents the essential truth in the matter. The original parabolic paths of these
comets were then changed into ellipses by the backward pull of a planet, whose sphere of
attraction they chanced to enter when approaching the sun from outer space. Moreover, since a
body thus affected should necessarily return at each revolution to the scene of encounter, the
same process of retardation may, in some cases, have been repeated many times, until the more
restricted cometary orbits were reduced to their present dimensions. The prevalence, too, among
periodical comets, of direct motion, is shown to be inevitable by M. Callandreau's demonstration
that those travelling in a retrograde direction would, by planetary action, be thrown outside the
probable range of terrestrial observation. The scarcity of hyperbolic comets can be[Pg 99]
similarly explained. They would be created whenever the attractive influence of the disturbing
planet was exerted in a forward or accelerative sense, but could come only by a rare exception to
our notice. The inner planets, including the earth, have also unquestionably played their parts in
modifying cometary orbits; and Mr. Plummer suggests, with some show of reason, that the
capture of Encke's comet may be a feat due to Mercury.[268]
No great comet appeared between the "star" which presided at the birth of Napoleon and the
"vintage" comet of 1811. The latter was first described by Flaugergues at Viviers, March 26,
1811; Wisniewski, at Neu-Tscherkask in Southern Russia, caught a final glimpse of it, August
17, 1812. Two disappearances in the solar rays as the earth moved round in its orbit, and two
reappearances after conjunction, were included in this unprecedentedly long period of visibility
of 510 days. This relative permanence (so far as the inhabitants of Europe were concerned) was
du
e to the high northern latitude attained near perihelion, combined with a certain leisureliness
of movement along a path everywhere external to that of the earth. The magnificent luminous
train of this body, on October 15, the day of its nearest terrestrial approach, covered an arc of the
heavens 23-1/2 degrees in length, corresponding to a real extension of one hundred millions of
miles. Its form was described by Sir William Herschel as that of "an inverted hollow cone," and
its colour as yellowish, strongly contrasted with the bluish-green tint of the "head," round which
it was flung like a transparent veil. The planetary disc of the head, 127,000 miles across,
ap
peared to be composed of strongly-condensed nebulous matter; but somewhat eccentrically
situated within it was a star-like nucleus of a reddish tinge, which Herschel presumed to be solid,
and ascertained, with his usual care, to have a diameter of 428 miles. From the total absence of
phases, as well as from the vivacity of its radiance, he confidently inferred that its light was not
borrowed, but inherent.[269]
This remarkable apparition formed the subject of a memoir by Olbers,[270] the striking yet
steadily reasoned out suggestions contained in which there was at that time no means of
fo
llowing up with profit. Only of late has the "electrical theory," of which Zöllner[271] regarded
Olbers as the founder, assumed a definite and measurable form, capable of being tested by the
touchstone of fact, as knowledge makes its slow inroads on the fundamental mystery of the
physical universe.
[Pg 100]
The paraboloidal shape of the bright envelope separated by a dark interval from the head of the
great comet of 1811, and constituting, as it were, the root of its tail, seemed to the astronomer of
Bremen to reveal the presence of a double repulsion; the expelled vapours accumulating where
the two forces, solar and cometary, balanced each other, and being then swept backwards in a
huge train. He accordingly distinguished three classes of these bodies:—First, comets which
develop no matter subject to solar repulsion. These have no tails, and are probably mere
nebulosities, without solid nuclei. Secondly, comets which are acted upon by solar repulsion
only, and consequently throw out no emanations towards the sun. Of this kind was a bright
comet visible in 1807.[272] Thirdly, comets like that of 1811, giving evidence of action of both
kinds. These are distinguished by a dark hoop encompassing the head and dividing it from the
luminous envelope, as well as by an obscure caudal axis, resulting from the hollow, cone-like
structure of the tail.
Again, the ingenious view subsequently propounded by M. Brédikhine as to the connection
between the form of these appendages and the kind of matter composing them, was very clearly
anticipated by Olbers. The amount of tail-curvature, he pointed out, depends in each case upon
the proportion borne by the velocity of the ascending particles to that of the comet in its orbit;
the swifter the outrush, the straighter the resulting tail. But the velocity of the ascending particles
varies with the energy of their repulsion by the sun, and this again, it may be presumed, with
their quality. Thus multiple tails are developed when the same comet throws off, as it approaches
perihelion, specifically distinct substances. The long, straight ray which proceeded from the
comet of 1807, for example, was doubtless made up of particles subject to a much more vigorous
solar repulsion than those formed into the shorter curved emanation issuing from it nearly in the
same direction. In the comet of 1811 he calculated that the particles expelled from the head
travelled to the remote extremity of the tail in eleven minutes, indicating by this enormous
rapidity of movement (comparable to that of the transmission of light) the action of a force much
more powerful than the opposing one of gravity. The not uncommon phenomena of multiple
envelopes, on the other hand, he explained as due to the varying amounts of repulsion exercised
by the nucleus itself on the different kinds of matter developed from it.
The movements and perturbations of the comet of 1811 were no less profoundly studied by
Argelander than its physical constitution by Olbers. The orbit which he assigned to it is of such
vast dimensions as to require no less that 3,065 years for[Pg 101] the completion of its circuit; and
to carry the body describing it at each revolution to fourteen times the distance from the sun of
the frigid Neptune. Thus, when it last visited our neighbourhood, Achilles may have gazed on its
imposing train as he lay on the sands all night bewailing the loss of Patroclus; and when it
returns, it will perhaps be to shine upon the ruins of empires and civilizations still deep buried
among the secrets of the coming time.[273]
On the 26th of June, 1819, while the head of a comet passed across the face of the sun, the earth
was in all probability involved in its tail. But of this remarkable double event nothing was
kn
own until more than a month later, when the fact of its past occurrence emerged from the
calculations of Olbers.[274] Nor had the comet itself been generally visible previous to the first
days of July. Several observers, however, on the publication of these results, brought forward
accounts of singular spots perceived by them upon the sun at the time of the transit, and an
original drawing of one of them, by Pastorff of Buchholtz, has been preserved. This undoubtedly
au
thentic delineation[275] represents a round nebulous object with a bright spot in the centre, of
decidedly cometary aspect, and not in the least like an ordinary solar "macula." Mr. Hind,[276]
nevertheless, showed its position on the sun to be irreconcilable with that which the comet must
have occupied; and Mr. Ranyard's discovery of a similar smaller drawing by the same author,
dated May 26, 1828,[277] reduces to evanescence the probability of its connection with that body.
Indeed, recent experience renders very doubtful the possibility of such an observation.
The return of Halley's comet in 1835 was looked forward to as an opportunity for testing the
truth of floating cometary theories, and did not altogether disappoint expectation. As early as
1817, its movements and disturbances since 1759 were proposed by the Turin Academy of
Sciences as the subject of a prize ultimately awarded to Baron Damoiseau. Pontécoulant was
adjudged a similar distinction by the Paris Academy in 1829; while Rosenberger's calculations
were rewarded with the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.[278]
They were verified by the detection at Rome, August 6, 1835, of[Pg 102] a nearly circular misty
object not far from the predicted place of the comet. It was not, however, until the middle of
September that it began to throw out a tail, which by the 15th of October had attained a length of
ab
out 24 degrees (on the 19th, at Madras, it extended to fully 30),[279] the head showing to the
naked eye as a reddish star rather brighter than Aldebaran or Antares.[280] Some curious
phenomena accompanied the process of tail-formation. An outrush of luminous matter,
resembling in shape a partially opened fan, issued from the nucleus towards the sun, and at a
certain point, like smoke driven before a high wind, was vehemently swept backwards in a
prolonged train. The appearance of the comet at this time was compared by Bessel,[281] who
watched it with minute attention, to that of a blazing rocket. He made the singular observation
that this fan of light, which seemed the source of supply for the tail, oscillated like a pendulum to
and fro across a line joining the sun and nucleus, in a period of 4-3/5 days; and he was unable to
escape from the conclusion[282] that a repulsive force, about twice as powerful as the attractive
fo
rce of gravity, was concerned in the production of these remarkable effects. Nor did he hesitate
to recur to the analogy of magnetic polarity, or to declare, still more emphatically than Olbers,
"the emission of the tail to be a purely electrical phenomenon."[283]
The transformations undergone by this body were almost as strange and complete as those which
affected the brigands in Dante's Inferno. When first seen, it wore the aspect of a nebula; later it
put on the distinctive garb of a comet; it next appeared as a star; finally, it dilated, first in a
spherical, then in a paraboloidal form, until May 5, 1836, when it vanished from Herschel's
observation at Feldhausen as if by melting into adjacent space from the excessive diffusion of its
light. A very uncommon circumstance in its development was that it lost all trace of tail previous
to its arrival at perihelion on the 16th of November. Nor did it begin to recover its elongated
shape for more than two months afterwards. On the 23rd of January, Boguslawski perceived it as
a star of the sixth magnitude, without measurable disc.[284] Only two nights later, Maclear,
director of the Cape Observatory, found the head to be 131 seconds across.[285] And so rapidly
did the augmentation of size progress, that Sir John Herschel estimated the actual bulk of this[Pg
103] singular object to have increased forty-fold in the ensuing week. "I can hardly doubt," he
remarks, "that the comet was fairly evaporated in perihelio by the heat, and resolved into
transparent vapour, and is now in process of rapid condensation and re-precipitation on the
nucleus."[286] A plausible, but no longer admissible, interpretation of this still unexplained
phenomenon. The next return of this body, which will be considerably accelerated by Jupiter's
influence, is expected to take place in 1910.[287]
By means of an instrument devised to test the quality of light, Arago obtained decisive evidence
that some at least of the radiance proceeding from Halley's comet was derived by reflection from
the sun.[288] Indications of the same kind had been afforded[289] by the comet which suddenly
ap
peared above the north-western horizon of Paris, July 3, 1819, after having enveloped (as
already stated) our terrestrial abode in its filmy appendages; but the "polariscope" had not then
reached the perfection subsequently given to it, and its testimony was accordingly far less
reliable than in 1835. Such experiments, however, are in reality more beautiful and ingenious
than instructive, since ignited as well as obscure bodies possess the power of throwing back light
incident upon them, and will consequently transmit to us from the neighbourhood of the sun rays
partly direct, partly reflected, of which a certain proportion will exhibit the peculiarity known as
polarisation.
The most brilliant comets of the century were suddenly rivalled if not surpassed by the
extraordinary object which blazed out beside the sun, February 28, 1843. It was simultaneously
perceived in Mexico and the United States, in Southern Europe, and at sea off the Cape of Good
Hope, where the passengers on board the Owen Glendower were amazed by the sight of a "short,
dagger-like object," closely following the sun towards the western horizon.[290] At Florence,
Amici found its distance from the sun's centre at noon to be only 1° 23′; and spectators at Parma
were able, when sheltered from the direct glare of mid-day, to trace the tail to a length of four or
five degrees. The full dimensions of this astonishing appurtenance began to be disclosed a few
days later. On the 3rd of March it measured 25°, and on the 11th, at Calcutta, Mr. Clerihew
observed a second streamer, nearly twice as long as the first, and making an angle with it of 18°,
to have been emitted in a single day. This rapidity of projection, Sir John Herschel remarked,
"conveys an astounding impression of the intensity of the forces at work." "It [Pg 104]is clear," he
continued, "that if we have to deal here with matter, such as we conceive it—viz., possessing
inertia—at all, it must be under the dominion of forces incomparably more energetic than
gravitation, and quite of a different nature."[291]
On the 17th of March a silvery ray, some 40° long and slightly curved at its extremity, shone out
ab
ove the sunset clouds in this country. No previous intimation had been received of the
possibility of such an apparition, and even astronomers—no lightning messages across the seas
being as yet possible—were perplexed. The nature of the phenomenon, indeed, soon became
evident, but the wonder of it did not diminish with the study of its attendant circumstances.
Never before, within astronomical memory, had our system been traversed by a body pursuing
such an adventurous career. The closest analogy was offered by the great comet of 1680
(Newton's), which rushed past the sun at a distance of only 144,000 miles; but even this—on the
cosmical scale—scarcely perceptible interval was reduced nearly one-half in the case we are
now concerned with. The centre of the comet of 1843 approached the formidable luminary
within 78,000 miles, leaving, it is estimated, a clear space of not more than 32,000 between the
surfaces of the bodies brought into such perilous proximity. The escape of the wanderer was,
however, secured by the extraordinary rapidity of its flight. It swept past perihelion at a rate—
366 miles a second—which, if continued, would have carried it right round the sun in two hours;
and in only eleven minutes more than that short period it actually described half the curvature of
its orbit—an arc of 180°—although in travelling over the remaining half many hundreds of
sluggish years will doubtless be consumed.
The behaviour of this comet may be regarded as an experimentum crucis as to the nature of tails.
For clearly no fixed appendage many millions of miles in length could be whirled like a
brandished sabre from one side of the sun to the other in 131 minutes. Cometary trains are then,
as Olbers rightly conceived them to be, emanations, not appendages—inconceivably rapid
outflows of highly rarefied matter, the greater part, if not all, of which becomes permanently
detached from the nucleus.
That of the comet of 1843 reached, about the time that it became visible in this country, the
extravagant length of 200 millions of miles.[292] It was narrow, and bounded by nearly parallel
and nearly rectilinear lines, resembling—to borrow a comparison of Aristotle's—a "road"
through the constellations; and after the 3rd of March showed no trace of hollowness, the axis
being, in fact, rather brighter[Pg 105] than the edges. Distinctly perceptible in it were those
singular aurora-like coruscations which gave to the "tresses" of Charles V.'s comet the
ap
pearance—as Cardan described it—of "a torch agitated by the wind," and have not
unfrequently been observed to characterise other similar objects. A consideration first adverted
to by Olbers proves these to originate in our own atmosphere. For owing to the great difference
in the distances from the earth of the origin and extremity of such vast effluxes, the light
proceeding from their various parts is transmitted to our eyes in notably different intervals of
time. Consequently a luminous undulation, even though propagated instantaneously from end to
end of a comet's tail, would appear to us to occupy many minutes in its progress. But the
coruscations in question pass as swiftly as a falling star. They are, then, of terrestrial production.
Periods of the utmost variety were by different computators assigned to the body, which arrived
at perihelion, February 27, 1843, at 9.47 P.M. Professor Hubbard of Washington found that it
required 533 years to complete a revolution; MM. Laugier and Mauvais of Paris considered the
true term to be 35;[293] Clausen looked for its return at the end of between six and seven. A
recent discussion[294] by Professor Kreutz of all the available data gives a probable period of 512
years for this body, and precludes its hypothetical identity with the comet of 1668, known as the
"Spina" of Cassini.
It may now be asked, what were the conclusions regarding the nature of comets drawn by
astronomers from the considerable amount of novel experience accumulated during the first half
of this century? The first and best assured was that the matter composing them is in a state of
extreme tenuity. Numerous and trustworthy observations showed that the feeblest rays of light
might traverse some hundreds of thousands of miles of their substance, even where it was
ap
parently most condensed, without being perceptibly weakened. Nay, instances were recorded
in which stars were said to have gained in brightness from the process![295] On the 24th of June,
1825, Olbers[296] saw the comet then visible all but obliterated by the central passage of a star
too small to be distinguished with the naked eye, its own light remaining wholly unchanged. A
similar effect was noted December 1, 1811, when the great comet of that year approached so
close to Altair, the lucida of the Eagle, that the star seemed to be transformed into the nucleus of
the comet.[297] Even the[Pg 106] central blaze of Halley's comet in 1835 was powerless to impede
the passage of stellar rays. Struve[298] observed at Dorpat, on September 17, an all but central
occultation; Glaisher[299] one (so far as he could ascertain) absolutely so eight days later at
Cambridge. In neither case was there any appreciable diminution of the star's light. Again, on the
11th of October, 1847, Mr. Dawes,[300] an exceptionally keen observer, distinctly saw a star of
the tenth magnitude through the exact centre of a comet discovered on the first of that month by
Maria Mitchell of Nantucket.
Examples, on the other hand, are not wanting of the diminution of stellar light under similar
circumstances;[301] and we meet two alleged instances of the vanishing of a star behind a comet.
Wartmann of Geneva observed the first, November 28, 1828;[302] but his instrument was
defective, and the eclipsing body, Encke's comet, has shown itself otherwise perfectly
translucent. The second case of occultation occurred September 13, 1890, when an eleventh
magnitude star was stated to have completely disappeared during the transit over it of Denning's
comet.[303]
From the failure to detect any effects of refraction in the light of stars occulted by comets, it was
inferred (though, as we know now, erroneously) that their composition is rather that of dust than
that of vapour; that they consist not of any continuous substance, but of discrete solid particles,
very finely divided and widely scattered. In conformity with this view was the known smallness
of their masses. Laplace had shown that if the amount of matter forming Lexell's comet had been
as much as 1/5000 of that contained in our globe, the effect of its attraction, on the occasion of
its approach within 1,438,000 miles of the earth, July 1, 1770, must have been apparent in the
lengthening of the year. And that some comets, at any rate, possess masses immeasurably below
this maximum value was clearly proved by the undisturbed parallel march of the two fragments
of Biela's in 1846.
But the discovery in this branch most distinctive of the period under review is that of "short
period" comets, of which four[304] were known in 1850. These, by the character of their
movements, serve as a link between the planetary and cometary worlds, and by the[Pg 107] nature
of their construction, seem to mark a stage in cometary decay. For that comets are rather
transitory agglomerations, than permanent products of cosmical manufacture, appeared to be
demonstrated by the division and disappearance of one amongst their number, as well as by the
singular and rapid changes in appearance undergone by many, and the seemingly irrevocable
diffusion of their substance visible in nearly all. They might then be defined, according to the
ideas respecting them prevalent fifty years ago, as bodies unconnected by origin with the solar
system, but encountered, and to some extent appropriated, by it in its progress through space,
owing their visibility in great part, if not altogether, to light reflected from the sun, and their
singular and striking forms to the action of repulsive forces emanating from him, the penalty of
their evanescent splendour being paid in gradual waste and final dissipation and extinction CHAPTER VI
INS
TR
UMENTA
L ADVANCES
It is impossible to follow with intelligent interest the course of astronomical discovery without
fe
eling some curiosity as to the means by which such surpassing results have been secured.
Indeed, the bare acquaintance with what has been achieved, without any corresponding
kn
owledge of how it has been achieved, supplies food for barren wonder rather than for fruitful
and profitable thought. Ideas advance most readily along the solid ground of practical reality,
and often find true sublimity while laying aside empty marvels. Progress is the result, not so
much of sudden flights of genius, as of sustained, patient, often commonplace endeavour; and
the true lesson of scientific history lies in the close connection which it discloses between the
most brilliant developments of knowledge and the faithful accomplishment of his daily task by
each individual thinker and worker.
It would be easy to fill a volume with the detailed account of the long succession of optical and
mechanical improvements by means of which the observation of the heavens has been brought to
its present degree of perfection; but we must here content ourselves with a summary sketch of
the chief amongst them. The first place in our consideration is naturally claimed by the
telescope.
This marvellous instrument, we need hardly remind our readers, is of two distinct kinds—that in
which light is gathered together into a focus by refraction, and that in which the same end is
attained by reflection. The image formed is in each case viewed through a magnifying lens, or
combination of lenses, called the eye-piece. Not for above a century after the "optic glasses"
invented or stumbled upon by the spectacle-maker of Middelburg (1608) had become diffused
over Europe, did the reflecting telescope come, even in England, the place of its birth, into
general use. Its principle (a sufficiently obvious one) had indeed been suggested by Mersenne
as[Pg 109] early as 1639;[305] James Gregory in 1663[306] described in detail a mode of embodying
that principle in a practical shape; and Newton, adopting an original system of construction,
actually produced in 1668 a tiny speculum, one inch across, by means of which the apparent
distance of objects was reduced thirty-nine times. Nevertheless, the exorbitantly long tubeless
refractors, introduced by Huygens, maintained their reputation until Hadley exhibited to the
Royal Society, January 12, 1721,[307] a reflector of six inches aperture, and sixty-two in focal
length, which rivalled in performance, and of course indefinitely surpassed in manageability, one
of the "aerial" kind of 123 feet.
The concave-mirror system now gained a decided ascendant, and was brought to unexampled
perfection by James Short of Edinburgh during the years 1732-68. Its resources were, however,
first fully developed by William Herschel. The energy and inventiveness of this extraordinary
man marked an epoch wherever they were applied. His ardent desire to measure and gauge the
stupendous array of worlds which his specula revealed to him, made him continually intent upon
adding to their "space-penetrating power" by increasing their light-gathering surface. These, as
he was the first to explain,[308] are in a constant proportion one to the other. For a telescope with
twice the linear aperture of another will collect four times as much light, and will consequently
disclose an object four times as faint as could be seen with the first, or, what comes to the same,
an object equally bright at twice the distance. In other words, it will possess double the spacepenetrating power of the smaller instrument. Herschel's great mirrors—the first examples of the
giant telescopes of modern times—were then primarily engines for extending the bounds of the
visible universe; and from the sublimity of this "final cause" was derived the vivid enthusiasm
which animated his efforts to success.
It seems probable that the seven-foot telescope constructed by him in 1775—that is within little
more than a year after his experiments in shaping and polishing metal had begun—already
exceeded in effective power any work by an earlier optician; and both his skill and his ambition
rapidly developed. His efforts culminated, after mirrors of ten, twenty, and thirty feet focal
length had successively left his hands, in the gigantic forty-foot, completed August 28, 1789. It
was the first reflector in which only a single mirror was employed. In the "Gregorian" form, the
fo
cussed rays are, by a second reflection[Pg 110] from a small concave[309] mirror, thrown
straight back through a central aperture in the larger one, behind which the eye-piece is fixed.
The object under examination is thus seen in the natural direction. The "Newtonian," on the
other hand, shows the object in a line of sight at right angles to the true one, the light collected
by the speculum being diverted to one side of the tube by the interposition of a small plane
mirror, situated at an angle of 45° to the axis of the instrument. Upon these two systems
Herschel worked until 1787, when, becoming convinced of the supreme importance of
economising light (necessarily wasted by the second reflection), he laid aside the small mirror of
his forty-foot then in course of construction, and turned it into a "front-view" reflector. This was
done—according to the plan proposed by Lemaire in 1732—by slightly inclining the speculum
so as to enable the image formed by it to be viewed with an eye-glass fixed at the upper margin
of the tube. The observer thus stood with his back turned to the object he was engaged in
scrutinising.
The advantages of the increased brilliancy afforded by this modification were strikingly
illustrated by the discovery, August 28 and September 17, 1789, of the two Saturnian satellites
nearest the ring. Nevertheless, the monster telescope of Slough cannot be said to have realised
the sanguine expectations of its constructor. The occasions on which it could be usefully
employed were found to be extremely rare. It was injuriously affected by every change of
temperature. The great weight (25 cwt.) of a speculum four feet in diameter rendered it
peculiarly liable to distortion. With all imaginable care, the delicate lustre of its surface could not
be preserved longer than two years,[310] when the difficult process of repolishing had to be
undertaken. It was accordingly never used after 1811, when, having gone blind from damp, it
lapsed by degrees into the condition of a museum inmate.
The exceedingly high magnifying powers employed by Herschel constituted a novelty in optical
astronomy, to which he attached great importance. The work of ordinary observation would,
however, be hindered rather than helped by them. The attempt to increase in this manner the
efficacy of the telescope is speedily checked by atmospheric, to say nothing of other difficulties.
Precisely in the same proportion as an object is magnified, the disturbances of the medium
through which it is seen are magnified[Pg 111] also. Even on the clearest and most tranquil nights,
the air is never for a moment really still. The rays of light traversing it are continually broken by
minute fluctuations of refractive power caused by changes of temperature and pressure, and the
currents which these engender. With such luminous quiverings and waverings the astronomer
has always more or less to reckon; their absence is simply a question of degree; if sufficiently
magnified, they are at all times capable of rendering observation impossible.
Thus, such powers as 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, even 6,652,[311] which Herschel now and again
ap
plied to his great telescopes, must, save on the rarest occasions, prove an impediment rather
than an aid to vision. They were, however, used by him only for special purposes,
experimentally, not systematically, and with the clearest discrimination of their advantages and
drawbacks. It is obvious that perfectly different ends are subserved by increasing the aperture
and by increasing the power of a telescope. In the one case, a larger quantity of light is captured
and concentrated; in the other, the same amount is distributed over a wider area. A diminution of
brilliancy in the image accordingly attends, cœteris paribus, upon each augmentation of its
ap
parent size. For this reason, such faint objects as nebulæ are most successfully observed with
moderate powers applied to instruments of a great capacity for light, the details of their structure
actually disappearing when highly magnified. With stellar groups the reverse is the case. Stars
cannot be magnified, simply because they are too remote to have any sensible dimensions; but
the space between them can. It was thus for the purpose of dividing very close double stars that
Herschel increased to such an unprecedented extent the magnifying capabilities of his
instruments; and to this improvement incidentally the discovery of Uranus, March 13, 1781,[312]
was due. For by the examination with strong lenses of an object which, even with a power of
227, presented a suspicious appearance, he was able at once to pronounce its disc to be real, not
merely "spurious," and so to distinguish it unerringly from the crowd of stars amidst which it
was moving.
While the reflecting telescope was astonishing the world by its rapid development in the hands
of Herschel, its unpretending rival was slowly making its way towards the position which the
fu
ture had in store for it. The great obstacle which long stood in the way of the improvement of
refractors was the defect known as "chromatic aberration." This is due to no other cause than that
which produces[Pg 112] the rainbow and the spectrum—the separation, or "dispersion" in their
passage through a refracting medium, of the variously coloured rays composing a beam of white
light. In an ordinary lens there is no common point of concentration; each colour has its own
separate focus; and the resulting image, formed by the superposition of as many images as there
are hues in the spectrum, is indefinitely terminated with a tinted border, eminently baffling to
exactness of observation.
The extravagantly long telescopes of the seventeenth century were designed to avoid this evil (as
well as another source of indistinct vision in the spherical shape of lenses); but no attempt to
remedy it was made until an Essex gentleman succeeded, in 1733, in so combining lenses of flint
and crown glass as to produce refraction without colour.[313] Mr. Chester More Hall was,
however, equally indifferent to fame and profit, and took no pains to make his invention public.
The effective discovery of the achromatic telescope was, accordingly, reserved for John Dollond,
whose method of correcting at the same time chromatic and spherical aberration was laid before
the Royal Society in 1758. Modern astronomy may be said to have been thereby rendered
possible. Refractors have always been found better suited than reflectors to the ordinary work of
observatories. They are, so to speak, of a more robust, as well as of a more plastic nature. They
suffer less from vicissitudes of temperature and climate. They retain their efficiency with fewer
precautions and under more trying circumstances. Above all, they co-operate more readily with
mechanical appliances, and lend themselves with far greater facility to purposes of exact
measurement.
A practical difficulty, however, impeded the realisation of the brilliant prospects held out by
Dollond's invention. It was found impossible to procure flint-glass, such as was needed for
optical use—that is, of perfectly homogeneous quality—except in fragments of insignificant
size. Discs of more than two or three inches in diameter were of extreme rarity; and the crushing
excise duty imposed upon the article by the financial unwisdom of the Government, both limited
its production, and, by rendering experiments too costly for repetition, barred its improvement.
Up to this time, Great Britain had left foreign competitors far behind in the instrumental
department of astronomy. The quadrants and circles of Bird, Cary and Ramsden were
unapproached abroad. The reflecting telescope came into existence and reached maturity on
British soil. The refracting telescope was cured of its inherent[Pg 113] vices by British ingenuity.
But with the opening of the nineteenth century, the almost unbroken monopoly of skill and
contrivance which our countrymen had succeeded in establishing was invaded, and British
workmen had to be content to exchange a position of supremacy for one of at least partial
temporary inferiority.
Somewhat about the time that Herschel set about polishing his first speculum, Pierre Louis
Guinand, a Swiss artisan, living near Chaux-de-Fonds, in the canton of Neuchâtel, began to
grind spectacles for his own use, and was thence led on to the rude construction of telescopes by
fixing lenses in pasteboard tubes. The sight of an England achromatic stirred a higher ambition,
and he took the first opportunity of procuring some flint glass from England (then the only
source of supply), with the design of imitating an instrument the full capabilities of which he was
destined to be the humble means of developing. The English glass proving of inferior quality, he
conceived the possibility, unaided and ignorant of the art as he was, of himself making better,
and spent seven years (1784-90) in fruitless experiments directed to that end. Failure only
stimulated him to enlarge their scale. He bought some land near Les Brenets, constructed upon it
a furnace capable of melting two quintals of glass, and reducing himself and his family to the
barest necessaries of life, he poured his earnings (he at this time made bells for repeaters)
unstintingly into his crucibles.[314] His undaunted resolution triumphed. In 1799 he carried to
Paris and there showed to Lalande several discs of flawless crystal four to six inches in diameter.
Lalande advised him to keep his secret, but in 1805 he was induced to remove to Munich, where
he became the instructor of the immortal Fraunhofer. His return to Les Brenets in 1814 was
signalised by the discovery of an ingenious mode of removing striated portions of glass by
breaking and re-soldering the product of each melting, and he eventually attained to the
manufacture of perfect discs up to 18 inches in diameter. An object-glass for which he had
fu
rn
ished the material to Cauchoix, procured him, in 1823, a royal invitation to settle in Paris;
but he was no longer equal to the change, and died at the scene of his labours, February 13
fo
llowing.
This same lens (12 inches across) was afterwards purchased by Sir James South, and the first
observation made with it, February 13, 1830, disclosed to Sir John Herschel the sixth minute star
in the central group of the Orion nebula, known as the "trapezium."[315] Bequeathed by South to
Trinity College, Dublin, it was employed at the Dunsink Observatory by Brünnow and Ball in
their investigations of stellar parallax. A still larger objective (of nearly 14 inches) made of
Guinand's glass was secured in Paris, about the same[Pg 114] time, by Mr. Edward Cooper of
Markree Castle, Ireland. The peculiarity of the method discovered at Les Brenets resided in the
manipulation, not in the quality of the ingredients; the secret, that is to say, was not chemical, but
mechanical.[316] It was communicated by Henry Guinand (a son of the inventor) to Bontemps,
one of the directors of the glassworks at Choisy-le-Roi, and by him transmitted to Messrs.
Chance of Birmingham, with whom he entered into partnership when the revolutionary troubles
of 1848 obliged him to quit his native country. The celebrated American opticians, Alvan Clark
& Sons, derived from the Birmingham firm the materials for some of their early telescopes,
notably the 19-inch Chicago and 26-inch Washington equatoreals; but the discs for the great
Lick refractor, and others shaped by them in recent years, have been supplied by Feil of Paris.
Two distinguished amateurs, meanwhile, were preparing to reassert on behalf of reflecting
instruments their claim to the place of honour in the van of astronomical discovery. Of Mr.
Lassell's specula something has already been said.[317] They were composed of an alloy of
copper and tin, with a minute proportion of arsenic (after the example of Newton[318]), and were
remarkable for perfection of figure and brilliancy of surface.
The capabilities of the Newtonian plan were developed still more fully—it might almost be said
to the uttermost—by the enterprise of an Irish nobleman. William Parsons, known as Lord
Oxmantown until 1841, when, on his father's death, he succeeded to the title of Earl of Rosse,
was born at York, June 17, 1800. His public duties began before his education was completed.
He was returned to Parliament as member for King's County while still an undergraduate at
Oxford, and continued to represent the same constituency for thirteen years (1821-34). From
1845 until his death, which took place, October 31, 1867, he sat, silent but assiduous, in the
House of Lords as an Irish representative peer; he held the not unlaborious post of President of
the Royal Society from 1849 to 1854; presided over the meeting of the British Association at
Cork in 1843, and was elected Vice-Chancellor of Dublin University in 1862. In addition to
these extensive demands upon his time and thoughts, were those derived from his position as
practically the feudal chief of a large body of tenantry in times of great and anxious
responsibility, to say nothing of the more genial claims of an unstinted hospitality. Yet, while
neglecting no public or private duty, this model nobleman found leisure to render to science
services so conspicuous as to entitle his name to a lasting place in its annals.[Pg 115] He early
fo
rm
ed the design of reaching the limits of the attainable in enlarging the powers of the
telescope, and the qualities of his mind conspired with the circumstances of his fortune to render
the design a feasible one. From refractors it was obvious that no such vast and rapid advance
could be expected. English glass-manufacture was still in a backward state. So late as 1839,
Simms (successor to the distinguished instrumentalist Edward Troughton) reported a specimen
of crystal scarcely 7-1/2 inches in diameter, and perfect only over six, to be unique in the history
of English glass-making.[319] Yet at that time the fifteen-inch achromatic of Pulkowa had already
left the workshop of Fraunhofer's successors at Munich. It was not indeed until 1845, when the
impost which had so long hampered their efforts was removed, that the optical artists of these
islands were able to compete on equal terms with their rivals on the Continent. In the case of
reflectors, however, there seemed no insurmountable obstacle to an almost unlimited increase of
light-gathering capacity; and it was here, after some unproductive experiments with fluid lenses,
that Lord Oxmantown concentrated his energies.
He had to rely entirely on his own invention, and to earn his own experience. James Short had
solved the problem of giving to metallic surfaces a perfect parabolic figure (the only one by
which parallel incident rays can be brought to an exact focus); but so jealous was he of his
secret, that he caused all his tools to be burnt before his death;[320] nor was anything known of
the processes by which Herschel had achieved his astonishing results. Moreover, Lord
Oxmantown had no skilled workmen to assist him. His implements, both animate and inanimate,
had to be formed by himself. Peasants taken from the plough were educated by him into efficient
mechanics and engineers. The delicate and complex machinery needed in operations of such
hairbreadth nicety as his enterprise involved, the steam-engine which was to set it in motion, at
times the very crucibles in which his specula were cast, issued from his own workshops.
In 1827 experiments on the composition of speculum-metal were set on foot, and the first
polishing-machine ever driven by steam-power was contrived in 1828. But twelve arduous years
of struggle with recurring difficulties passed before success began to dawn. A material less
tractable than the alloy selected, of four chemical equivalents of copper to one of tin,[321] can
scarcely be conceived. It is harder than steel, yet brittle as glass, crumbling[Pg 116] into
fragments with the slightest inadvertence of handling or treatment;[322] and the precision of
figure requisite to secure good definition is almost beyond the power of language to convey. The
quantities involved are so small as not alone to elude sight, but to confound imagination. Sir
John Herschel tells us that "the total thickness to be abraded from the edge of a spherical
speculum 48 inches in diameter and 40 feet focus, to convert it into a paraboloid, is only 1/21333
of an inch;"[323] yet upon this minute difference of form depends the clearness of the image, and,
as a consequence, the entire efficiency of the instrument. "Almost infinite," indeed (in the phrase
of the late Dr. Robinson), must be the exactitude of the operation adapted to bring about so
delicate a result.
At length, in 1839, two specula, each three feet in diameter, were turned out in such perfection as
to prompt a still bolder experiment. The various processes needed to insure success were now
ascertained and under control; all that was necessary was to repeat them on a larger scale. A
gigantic mirror, six feet across and fifty-four in focal length, was accordingly cast on the 13th of
April, 1842; in two months it was ground down to figure by abrasion with emery and water, and
daintily polished with rouge; and by the month of February, 1845, the "leviathan of
Parsonstown" was available for the examination of the heavens.
The suitable mounting of this vast machine was a problem scarcely less difficult than its
construction. The shape of a speculum needs to be maintained with an elaborate care equal to
that used in imparting it. In fact, one of the most formidable obstacles to increasing the size of
such reflecting surfaces consists in their liability to bend under their own weight. That of the
great Rosse speculum was no less than four tons. Yet, although six inches in thickness, and
composed of a material only a degree inferior in rigidity to wrought iron, the strong pressure of a
man's hand at its back produced sufficient flexure to distort perceptibly the image of a star
reflected in it.[324] Thus the delicacy of its form was perishable equally by the stress of its own
gravity, and by the slightest irregularity in the means taken to counteract that stress. The problem
of affording a perfectly equable support in all possible positions was solved by resting the
speculum upon twenty-seven platforms of cast iron, felt-covered, and carefully fitted to the
shape of the areas they were to carry, which platforms were themselves[Pg 117] borne by a
complex system of triangles and levers, ingeniously adapted to distribute the weight with
complete uniformity.[325]
A tube which resembled, when erect, one of the ancient round towers of Ireland,[326] served as
the habitation of the great mirror. It was constructed of deal staves bound together with iron
hoops, was fifty-eight feet long (including the speculum-box), and seven in diameter. A
reasonably tall man may walk through it (as Dean Peacock once did) with umbrella uplifted.
Two piers of solid masonry, about fifty feet high, seventy long, and twenty-three apart, flanked
the huge engine on either side. Its lower extremity rested on a universal joint of cast iron; above,
it was slung in chains, and even in a gale of wind remained perfectly steady. The weight of the
entire, although amounting to fifteen tons, was so skilfully counterpoised, that the tube could
with ease be raised or depressed by two men working a windlass. Its horizontal range was
limited by the lofty walls erected for its support to about ten degrees on each side of the
meridian; but it moved vertically from near the horizon through the zenith as far as the pole. Its
construction was of the Newtonian kind, the observer looking into the side of the tube near its
upper end, which a series of galleries and sliding stages enabled him to reach in any position. It
has also, though rarely, been used without a second mirror, as a "Herschelian" reflector.
The splendour of the celestial objects as viewed with this vast "light-grasper" surpassed all
expectation. "Never in my life," exclaimed Sir James South, "did I see such glorious sidereal
pictures."[327] The orb of Jupiter produced an effect compared to that of the introduction of a
coach-lamp into the telescope;[328] and certain star-clusters exhibited an appearance (we again
quote Sir James South) "such as man before had never seen, and which for its magnificence
baffles all description." But it was in the examination of the nebulæ that the superiority of the
new instrument was most strikingly displayed. A large number of these misty objects, which the
utmost powers of Herschel's specula had failed to resolve into stars, yielded at once to the
Parsonstown reflector; while many others showed under entirely changed forms through the
disclosure of previously unseen details of structure.
One extremely curious result of the increase of light was the abolition of any sharp distinction
between the two classes of "annular" and "planetary" nebulæ. Up to that time, only four ringshaped systems—two in the northern and two in the southern[Pg 118] hemisphere—were known
to astronomers; they were now reinforced by five of the planetary kind, the discs of which were
observed to be centrally perforated; while the definite margins visible in weaker instruments
were replaced by ragged edges or filamentous fringes.
Still more striking was the discovery of an entirely new and most remarkable species of nebulæ.
These were termed "spiral," from the more or less regular convolutions, resembling the whorls
of a shell, in which the matter composing them appeared to be distributed. The first and most
conspicuous specimen of this class was met with in April, 1845; it is situated in Canes Venatici,
close to the tail of the Great Bear, and wore, in Sir J. Herschel's instruments, the aspect of a split
ring encompassing a bright nucleus, thus presenting, as he supposed, a complete analogue to the
system of the Milky Way. In the Rosse mirror it shone out as a vast whirlpool of light—a
stupendous witness to the presence of cosmical activities on the grandest scale, yet regulated by
laws as to the nature of which we are profoundly ignorant. Professor Stephen Alexander of New
Jersey, however, concluded, from an investigation (necessarily founded on highly precarious
data) of the mechanical condition of these extraordinary agglomerations, that we see in them
"the partially scattered fragments of enormous masses once rotating in a state of dynamical
equilibrium." He further suggested "that the separation of these fragments may still be in
progress,"[329] and traced back their origin to the disruption, through its own continually
accelerated rotation, of a "primitive spheroid" of inconceivably vast dimensions. Such also, it
was added (the curvilinear form of certain outliers of the Milky Way giving evidence of a spiral
structure), is probably the history of our own cluster; the stars composing which, no longer held
together in a delicately adjusted system like that of the sun and planets, are advancing through a
period of seeming confusion towards an appointed goal of higher order and more perfect and
harmonious adaptation.[330]
The class of spiral nebulæ included, in 1850, fourteen members, besides several in which the
characteristic arrangement seemed partial or dubious.[331] A tendency in the exterior stars of
other clusters to gather into curved branches (as in our Galaxy) was likewise noted; and the
existence of unsuspected analogies was proclaimed by the significant combination in the "Owl"
nebula (a large planetary in Ursa Major)[332] of the twisted forms of a spiral with the perforated
effect distinctive of an annular nebula.[Pg 119] Once more, by the achievements of the
Parsonstown reflector, the supposition of a "shining fluid" filling vast regions of space was
brought into (as it has since proved) undeserved discredit. Although Lord Rosse himself rejected
the inference, that because many nebulæ had been resolved, all were resolvable, very few
imitated his truly scientific caution; and the results of Bond's investigations[333] with the Harvard
College refractor quickened and strengthened the current of prevalent opinion. It is now certain
that the evidence furnished on both sides of the Atlantic as to the stellar composition of some
conspicuous objects of this class (notably the Orion and "Dumb-bell" nebulæ) was delusive; but
the spectroscope alone was capable of meeting it with a categorical denial. Meanwhile there
seemed good ground for the persuasion, which now, for the last time, gained the upper hand, that
nebulæ are, without exception, true "island-universes," or assemblages of distant suns.
Lord Rosse's telescope possesses a nominal power of 6,000—that is, it shows the moon as if
viewed with the naked eye at a distance of forty miles. But this seeming advantage is neutralised
by the weakening of the available light through excessive diffusion, as well as by the troubles of
the surging sea of air through which the observation must necessarily be made. Professor
Newcomb, in fact, doubts whether with any telescope our satellite has ever been seen to such
advantage as it would be if brought within 500 miles of the unarmed eye.[334]
The French opticians' rule of doubling the number of millimetres contained in the aperture of an
instrument to find the highest magnifying power usually applicable to it, would give 3,600 as the
maximum for the leviathan of Birr Castle; but in a climate like that of Ireland the occasions must
be rare when even that limit can be reached. Indeed, the experience acquired by its use plainly
shows that atmospheric rather than mechanical difficulties impede a still further increase of
telescopic power. Its construction may accordingly be said to mark the ne plus ultra of effort in
one direction, and the beginning of its conversion towards another. It became thenceforward
more and more obvious that the conditions of observation must be ameliorated before any added
efficacy could be given to it. The full effect of an uncertain climate in nullifying optical
improvements was recognised, and the attention of astronomers began to be turned towards the
advantages offered by more tranquil and more translucent skies.
Scarcely less important for the practical uses of astronomy than the optical qualities of the
telescope is the manner of its mounting.[Pg 120] The most admirable performance of the optician
can render but unsatisfactory service if its mechanical accessories are ill-arranged or
inconvenient. Thus the astronomer is ultimately dependent upon the mechanician; and so
excellently have his needs been served, that the history of the ingenious contrivances by which
discoveries have been prepared would supply a subject (here barely glanced at) not far inferior in
extent and instruction to the history of those discoveries themselves.
There are two chief modes of using the telescope, to which all others may be considered
subordinate.[335] Either it may be invariably directed towards the south, with no motion save in
the plane of the meridian, so as to intercept the heavenly bodies at the moment of transit across
that plain; or it may be arranged so as to follow the daily revolution of the sky, thus keeping the
object viewed permanently in sight instead of simply noting the instant of its flitting across the
telescopic field. The first plan is that of the "transit instrument," the second that of the
"equatoreal." Both were, by a remarkable coincidence, introduced about 1690[336] by Olaus
Römer, the brilliant Danish astronomer who first measured the velocity of light.
The uses of each are entirely different. With the transit, the really fundamental task of
astronomy—the determination of the movements of the heavenly bodies—is mainly
accomplished; while the investigation of their nature and peculiarities is best conducted with the
equatoreal. One is the instrument of mathematical, the other of descriptive astronomy. One
fu
rn
ishes the materials with which theories are constructed and the tests by which they are
corrected; the other registers new facts, takes note of new appearances, sounds the depths and
peers into every nook of the heavens.
The great improvement of giving to a telescope equatoreally mounted an automatic movement
by connecting it with clockwork, was proposed in 1674 by Robert Hooke. Bradley in 1721
actually observed Mars with a telescope "moved by a machine that made it keep pace with the
stars;"[337] and Von Zach relates[338] that he had once[Pg 121] followed Sirius for twelve hours
with a "heliostat" of Ramsden's construction. But these eighteenth-century attempts were of no
practical effect. Movement by clockwork was virtually a complete novelty when it was adopted
by Fraunhofer in 1824 to the Dorpat refractor. By simply giving to an axis unvaryingly directed
towards the celestial pole an equable rotation with a period of twenty-four hours, a telescope
attached to it, and pointed in any direction, will trace out on the sky a parallel of declination, thus
necessarily accompanying the movement of any star upon which it may be fixed. It accordingly
fo
rm
s part of the large sum of Fraunhofer's merits to have secured this inestimable advantage to
observers.
Sir John Herschel considered that Lassell's application of equatoreal mounting to a nine-inch
Newtonian in 1840 made an epoch in the history of "that eminently British instrument, the
reflecting telescope."[339] Nearly a century earlier,[340] it is true, Short had fitted one of his
Gregorians to a complicated system of circles in such a manner that, by moving a handle, it
could be made to follow the revolution of the sky; but the arrangement did not obtain, nor did it
deserve, general adoption. Lassell's plan was a totally different one; he employed the crossed
axes of the true equatoreal, and his success removed, to a great extent, the fatal objection of
inconvenience in use, until then unanswerably urged against reflectors. The very largest of these
can now be mounted equatoreally; even the Rosse, within its limited range, has been for some
years provided with a movement by clockwork along declination-parallels.
The art of accurately dividing circular arcs into the minute equal parts which serve as the units of
astronomical measurement, remained, during the whole of the eighteenth century, almost
exclusively in English hands. It was brought to a high degree of perfection by Graham, Bird and
Ramsden, all of whom, however, gave the preference to the old-fashioned mural quadrant and
zenith-sector over the entire circle, which Römer had already found the advantage of employing.
The five-foot vertical circle, which Piazzi with some difficulty induced Ramsden to complete for
him in 1789, was the first divided instrument constructed in what may be called the modern
style. It was provided with magnifiers for reading off the divisions (one of the neglected
improvements of Römer), and was set up above a smaller horizontal circle, forming an "altitude
and azimuth" combination (again Römer's invention), by which both the elevation of a celestial
object above the horizon and its position as referred to the horizon could be measured. In the
same year, Borda invented the "repeating circle" (the principle of which had[Pg 122] been
suggested by Tobias Mayer in 1756[341]), a device for exterminating, so far as possible, errors of
graduation by repeating an observation with different parts of the limb. This was perhaps the
earliest systematic effort to correct the imperfections of instruments by the manner of their use.
The manufacture of astronomical circles was brought to a very refined state of excellence early
in the nineteenth century by Reichenbach at Munich, and after 1818 by Repsold at Hamburg.
Bessel states[342] that the "reading-off" on an instrument of the kind by the latter artist was
accurate to about 1/80th of a human hair. Meanwhile the traditional reputation of the English
school was fully sustained; and Sir George Airy did not hesitate to express his opinion that the
new method of graduating circles, published by Troughton in 1809,[343] was the "greatest
improvement ever made in the art of instrument-making."[344] But a more secure road to
improvement than that of mere mechanical exactness was pointed out by Bessel. His
introduction of a regular theory of instrumental errors might almost be said to have created a
new art of observation. Every instrument, he declared in memorable words,[345] must be twice
made—once by the artist, and again by the observer. Knowledge is power. Defects that are
ascertained and can be allowed for are as good as non-existent. Thus the truism that the best
instrument is worthless in the hands of a careless or clumsy observer, became supplemented by
the converse maxim, that defective appliances may, through skilful use, be made to yield
valuable results. The Königsberg observations—of which the first instalment was published in
1815—set the example of regular "reduction" for instrumental errors. Since then, it has become
an elementary part of an astronomer's duty to study the idiosyncrasy of each one of the
mechanical contrivances at his disposal, in order that its inevitable, but now certified deviations
from ideal accuracy may be included amongst the numerous corrections by which the pure
essence of even approximate truth is distilled from the rude impressions of sense.
Nor is this enough; for the casual circumstances attending each observation have to be taken into
account with no less care than the inherent or constitutional peculiarities of the instrument with
which it is made. There is no "once for all" in astronomy. Vigilance can never sleep; patience
can never tire. Variable as well as constant sources of error must be anxiously heeded; one
infinitesimal inaccuracy must be weighed against another; all the forces and vicissitudes of
nature—frosts, dews, winds, the interchanges of heat,[Pg 123] the disturbing effects of gravity,
the shiverings of the air, the tremors of the earth, the weight and vital warmth of the observer's
own body, nay, the rate at which his brain receives and transmits its impressions, must all enter
into his calculations, and be sifted out from his results.
It was in 1823 that Bessel drew attention to discrepancies in the times of transits given by
different astronomers.[346] The quantities involved were far from insignificant. He was himself
nearly a second in advance of all his contemporaries, Argelander lagging behind him as much as
a second and a quarter. Each individual, in fact, was found to have a certain definite rate of
perception, which, under the name of "personal equation," now forms so important an element in
the correction of observations that a special instrument for accurately determining its amount in
each case is in actual use at Greenwich.
Such are the refinements upon which modern astronomy depends for its progress. It is a science
of hairbreadths and fractions of a second. It exists only by the rigid enforcement of arduous
accuracy and unwearying diligence. Whatever secrets the universe still has in store for man will
only be communicated on these terms. They are, it must be acknowledged, difficult to comply
with. They involve an unceasing struggle against the infirmities of his nature and the instabilities
of his position. But the end is not unworthy the sacrifices demanded. One additional ray of light
thrown on the marvels of creation—a single, minutest encroachment upon the strongholds of
ignorance—is recompense enough for a lifetime of toil. Or rather, the toil is its own reward, if
pursued in the lofty spirit which alone becomes it. For it leads through the abysses of space and
the unending vistas of time to the very threshold of that infinity and eternity of which the
disclosure is reserved for a life to come.
👁 :
ACT I
SCENE I. Elsinore. A platform before the Castle.
Enter FRANCISCO and BARNARDO, two sentinels.
BARNARDO.
Who’s there?
FRANCISCO.
Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.
BARNARDO.
Long live the King!
FRANCISCO.
Barnardo?
BARNARDO.
He.
FRANCISCO.
You come most carefully upon your hour.
BARNARDO.
’Tis now struck twelve. Get thee to bed, Francisco.
FRANCISCO.
For this relief much thanks. ’Tis bitter cold,
And I am sick at heart.
BARNARDO.
Have you had quiet guard?
FRANCISCO.
Not a mouse stirring.
BARNARDO.
Well, good night.
If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus,
The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste.
Enter HORATIO and MARCELLUS.
FRANCISCO.
I think I hear them. Stand, ho! Who is there?
HORATIO.
Friends to this ground.
MARCELLUS.
And liegemen to the Dane.
FRANCISCO.
Give you good night.
MARCELLUS.
O, farewell, honest soldier, who hath reliev’d you?
FRANCISCO.
Barnardo has my place. Give you good-night.
[Exit.]
MARCELLUS.
Holla, Barnardo!
BARNARDO.
Say, what, is Horatio there?
HORATIO.
A piece of him.
BARNARDO.
Welcome, Horatio. Welcome, good Marcellus.
MARCELLUS.
What, has this thing appear’d again tonight?
BARNARDO.
I have seen nothing.
MARCELLUS.
Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy,
And will not let belief take hold of him
Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us.
Therefore I have entreated him along
With us to watch the minutes of this night,
That if again this apparition come
He may approve our eyes and speak to it.
HORATIO.
Tush, tush, ’twill not appear.
BARNARDO.
Sit down awhile,
And let us once again assail your ears,
That are so fortified against our story,
What we two nights have seen.
HORATIO.
Well, sit we down,
And let us hear Barnardo speak of this.
BARNARDO.
Last night of all,
When yond same star that’s westward from the pole,
Had made his course t’illume that part of heaven
Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself,
The bell then beating one—
MARCELLUS.
Peace, break thee off. Look where it comes again.
Enter GHOST.
BARNARDO.
In the same figure, like the King that’s dead.
MARCELLUS.
Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.
BARNARDO.
Looks it not like the King? Mark it, Horatio.
HORATIO.
Most like. It harrows me with fear and wonder.
BARNARDO
It would be spoke to.
MARCELLUS.
Question it, Horatio.
HORATIO.
What art thou that usurp’st this time of night,
Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march? By heaven I charge thee speak.
MARCELLUS.
It is offended.
BARNARDO.
See, it stalks away.
HORATIO.
Stay! speak, speak! I charge thee speak!
[Exit GHOST.]
MARCELLUS.
’Tis gone, and will not answer.
BARNARDO.
How now, Horatio! You tremble and look pale.
Is not this something more than fantasy?
What think you on’t?
HORATIO.
Before my God, I might not this believe
Without the sensible and true avouch
Of mine own eyes.
MARCELLUS.
Is it not like the King?
HORATIO.
As thou art to thyself:
Such was the very armour he had on
When he th’ambitious Norway combated;
So frown’d he once, when in an angry parle
He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.
’Tis strange.
MARCELLUS.
Thus twice before, and jump at this dead hour,
With martial stalk hath he gone by our watch.
HORATIO.
In what particular thought to work I know not;
But in the gross and scope of my opinion,
This bodes some strange eruption to our state.
MARCELLUS.
Good now, sit down, and tell me, he that knows,
Why this same strict and most observant watch
So nightly toils the subject of the land,
And why such daily cast of brazen cannon
And foreign mart for implements of war;
Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task
Does not divide the Sunday from the week.
What might be toward, that this sweaty haste
Doth make the night joint-labourer with the day:
Who is’t that can inform me?
HORATIO.
That can I;
At least, the whisper goes so. Our last King,
Whose image even but now appear’d to us,
Was, as you know, by Fortinbras of Norway,
Thereto prick’d on by a most emulate pride,
Dar’d to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet,
For so this side of our known world esteem’d him,
Did slay this Fortinbras; who by a seal’d compact,
Well ratified by law and heraldry,
Did forfeit, with his life, all those his lands
Which he stood seiz’d of, to the conqueror;
Against the which, a moiety competent
Was gaged by our King; which had return’d
To the inheritance of Fortinbras,
Had he been vanquisher; as by the same cov’nant
And carriage of the article design’d,
His fell to Hamlet. Now, sir, young Fortinbras,
Of unimproved mettle, hot and full,
Hath in the skirts of Norway, here and there,
Shark’d up a list of lawless resolutes,
For food and diet, to some enterprise
That hath a stomach in’t; which is no other,
As it doth well appear unto our state,
But to recover of us by strong hand
And terms compulsatory, those foresaid lands
So by his father lost. And this, I take it,
Is the main motive of our preparations,
The source of this our watch, and the chief head
Of this post-haste and rummage in the land.
BARNARDO.
I think it be no other but e’en so:
Well may it sort that this portentous figure
Comes armed through our watch so like the King
That was and is the question of these wars.
HORATIO.
A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye.
In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets;
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star,
Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands,
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.
And even the like precurse of fierce events,
As harbingers preceding still the fates
And prologue to the omen coming on,
Have heaven and earth together demonstrated
Unto our climatures and countrymen.
Re-enter GHOST.
But, soft, behold! Lo, where it comes again!
I’ll cross it, though it blast me. Stay, illusion!
If thou hast any sound, or use of voice,
Speak to me.
If there be any good thing to be done,
That may to thee do ease, and grace to me,
Speak to me.
If thou art privy to thy country’s fate,
Which, happily, foreknowing may avoid,
O speak!
Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life
Extorted treasure in the womb of earth,
For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death,
Speak of it. Stay, and speak!
Stop it, Marcellus!
MARCELLUS.
Shall I strike at it with my partisan?
HORATIO.
Do, if it will not stand.
BARNARDO.
’Tis here!
HORATIO.
’Tis here!
[Exit GHOST.]
MARCELLUS.
’Tis gone!
We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence,
For it is as the air, invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery.
BARNARDO.
It was about to speak, when the cock crew.
HORATIO.
And then it started, like a guilty thing
Upon a fearful summons. I have heard
The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,
Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat
Awake the god of day; and at his warning,
Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,
Th’extravagant and erring spirit hies
To his confine. And of the truth herein
This present object made probation.
MARCELLUS.
It faded on the crowing of the cock.
Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm;
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.
HORATIO.
So have I heard, and do in part believe it.
But look, the morn in russet mantle clad,
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.
Break we our watch up, and by my advice,
Let us impart what we have seen tonight
Unto young Hamlet; for upon my life,
This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him.
Do you consent we shall acquaint him with it,
As needful in our loves, fitting our duty?
MARCELLUS.
Let’s do’t, I pray, and I this morning know
Where we shall find him most conveniently.
