I always look upon the Christmas Cattle Show of the Smithfield Club as a scientific delight. Breeding is a most serious branch of scientific knowledge, held by many people (of whom I am one) to be of more importance to statesmen, politicians, and philanthropists than any other kind of knowledge, and yet almost absolutely neglected and completely ignored except by our farmers and horticulturists. When examining in turn the splendid animals at Islington I have felt indignant that it should be not improbable that, owing to ignorance and neglect in official quarters, the long matured traditions and built-up skill of our cattle-breeders will be destroyed, crushed out of existence by huge, devastating capitalist “combines.” Soon we shall not get the beef we wish for, but we shall have to take whatever inferior stuff the giant monopolist chooses to force on us—or go without! Our wonderful stock, so patiently and happily bred, the envy of the world, will disappear, and our breeders forget their art. We shall none of us in Britain know more about prime beef, roasts, grills, and marrow-bones than do the people of Europe or the eaters of terrapin and soft-shelled crabs.
It is wonderful that man, by deliberate choice in selecting the sires and dams, has been able to produce such widely-different races as the short-horn, the Highland and the Sussex breed, and not only to produce them, but to keep them there generation after generation. In Nature, no such deviations are allowed—her motto is “One species, one shape,” which is only relaxed so as to allow a few geographical varieties. It is man who makes all these strange breeds, just as he has made such a queer, irregular, varied lot of creatures from the human stock. Withdraw once and for all man’s guiding “intelligence,” or perversity, if you choose so to call it, and all these cattle would in a few hundred years revert to one form, nearly (but not quite) the same as that they came from. So, too, the Sheep; so, too, the Pigs. And man himself, if one could poison him universally with a mind-destroying microbe, would become a beautiful, healthy, silly creature, dying at first by millions annually, and at last represented by a hundred thousand unvarying specimens, inhabiting the warm but healthy corners of the earth, aimlessly happy, free from disease, neither increasing nor decreasing in number. It is legitimate, and is a means of examining the whole problem of man’s history, to inquire whether we have reason or not to suppose that, were intelligent man thus removed arbitrarily and completely from the scene, a new “lord of the world” would arise, by normal evolutionary process. A bird, an elephant, a rat, might give rise to the new line of progressive development, and, unchecked by man, once jealous and repressive, but now down-fallen, this new stock might acquire such brains and wits as we men now boast of, and people the earth. You never can tell! But it is not the business of science to expatiate on such possibilities.
The domesticated cattle of Europe are of very ancient prehistoric origin. They are for convenience called “Bos taurus,” and seem to be derived from the huge Bos primigenius or Aurochs, the Urus of Cæsar, which was wild in Central Europe in his time, and from the Indian Bos indicus—which is represented by the Indian and African native breeds of “humped” cattle. It is, however, very difficult to trace most of man’s domesticated animals or his cultivated plants to their original wild forms and original habitation. At the Cattle Show we only see British and Irish breeds, and only those cattle bred as meat-makers—the Highland, the Welsh, the Shorthorns, the polled Angus, the South Devons, the Hereford, the Sussex, the Galloway, the Dexter. But there are other British breeds famous for their milk-producing quality, such as the Guernseys and Jerseys, whilst in Hungary, Italy, and Spain they have magnificent breeds of great size, and often with truly splendid spirally-turned horns (e.g. the Spanish), which are used for ploughing and carting, and are fattened, killed, and eaten after doing ten years’ good work. These fine creatures are not seen in England. They come nearest to the extinct Aurochs, which was, however, bigger than any of them. It, too, existed in prehistoric times in England, and we find its bones in the gravel of the Thames Valley. The last aurochs, or wild bull of Europe, was killed in Poland near the end of the seventeenth century. The wild Chillingham cattle are Roman cattle run wild. Many of these breeds and the bones of the aurochs to compare as to size may be seen in the north hall of the Natural History Museum, where I commenced a collection of domesticated breeds of cattle, sheep, horses, dogs, &c., eight years ago. Chillingham cattle are to be seen in the Zoological Gardens.
An interesting fact in this connection is that the splendid bull which is kept in half-wild herds in Spain for the purpose of “bull-fights,” is of a totally different race from that of the big, long-horned agricultural cattle. It may be seen at Cromwell-road, a specimen killed in the ring having been procured at my request and presented to the museum through the kindness of the British Consul at Seville. The Spanish fighting bull is, curiously enough, more like our Channel Island milk-producing cattle than any other. It probably came to Spain from North Africa—but there seems to be no record or history concerning it—and if there were it would probably be a fantastic invention. It seems that only the bulls of this special breed can be played with and dazzled by the matador’s red cloak. A Scotch bull was once brought by sea to Seville and introduced to the arena. He paid no attention to cloaks, red or otherwise, but always went straight for his man. It is stated that he was soon left quite alone in the ring! The native African cattle (of Indian origin) at Ujiji and in Damaraland have the biggest horns of any true Bos—as much as 13 1/2 ft. along the curve from point to point. We have to distinguish from our own cattle, for which there is no name except “Bos taurus,” for neither ox, bull, cow, heifer, nor steer will do—the other bovines—the buffaloes, the yak, and the bison—besides those great beasts the gayal and the gaur of India and the banting of Malay. All these may be seen and studied either in the Museum or the Zoological Gardens.
25. The Experimental Method
The observations lately made by a Chancellor of the Exchequer about an attempt to put salt on a bird’s tail remind me of my first attempt to deal experimentally with a popular superstition. I was a very trustful little boy, and I had been assured by various grown-up friends that if you place salt on a bird’s tail the bird becomes as it were transfixed and dazed, and that you can then pick it up and carry it off. On several occasions I carried a packet of salt into the London park where my sister and I were daily taken by our nurse. In vain I threw the salt at the sparrows. They always flew away, and I came to the conclusion that I had not succeeded in getting any salt or, at any rate, not enough on to the tail of any one of them.
Then I devised a great experiment. There was a sort of creek eight feet long and three feet broad at the west end of the ornamental water in St. James’s Park. My sister attracted several ducks with offerings of bread into this creek, and I, standing near its entrance, with a huge paper bag of salt, trembled with excitement at the approaching success of my scheme. I poured quantities—whole ounces of salt—on to the tails of the doomed birds as they passed me on their way back from the creek to the open water. Their tails were covered with salt. But, to my surprise and horror, they did not stop! They gaily swam forward, shaking their feathers and uttering derisive “quacks.” I was profoundly troubled and distressed. I had clearly proved one thing, namely, that my nursemaid, uncle, and several other trusted friends—but not, I am still glad to remember, my father—were either deliberate deceivers or themselves the victims of illusion. I was confirmed in my youthful wish to try whether things are as people say they are or not. Somewhat early perhaps, I adopted the motto of the Royal Society, “Nullius in verba.” And a very good motto it is, too, in spite of the worthy Todhunter and other toiling pedagogues, who have declared that it is outrageous to encourage a youth to seek demonstration rather than accept the statement of his teacher, especially if the latter be a clergyman. My experiment was on closely similar lines to that made by the Royal Society on July 24, 1660—in regard to the alleged property of powdered rhinoceros horn—which was reputed to paralyse poisonous creatures such as snakes, scorpions, and spiders. We read in the journal-book, still preserved by the society, under this date: “A circle was made with powder of unicorne’s horn, and a spider set in the middle of it, but it immediately ran out several times repeated. The spider once made some stay upon the powder.”
26. Hypnotism and an Experiment on the Influence of the Magnet
A more interesting result followed from an experiment made in the same spirit twenty-five years later. I was in Paris, and went with a medical friend to visit the celebrated physician Charcot, to whom at that time I was a stranger, at the Salpêtrière Hospital. He and his assistants were making very interesting experiments on hypnotism. Charcot allowed great latitude to the young doctors who worked with him. They initiated and carried through very wild “exploratory” experiments on this difficult subject. Charcot did not discourage them, but did not accept their results unless established by unassailable evidence, although his views were absurdly misrepresented by the newspapers and wondermongers of the day.
At this time there had been a revival of the ancient and fanciful doctrine of “metallic sympathies,” which flourished a hundred years ago, and was even then but a revival of the strange fancies as to “sympathetic powders,” which were brought before the Royal Society by Sir Kenelm Digby at one of its first meetings, in 1660. In the journal-book of the Royal Society of June 5 of that year, we read, “Magnetical cures were then discoursed of. Sir Gilbert Talbot promised to bring in what he knew of sympatheticall cures. Those that had any powder of sympathy were desired to bring some of it at the next meeting. Sir Kenelm Digby related that the calcined powder of toades reverberated, applyed in bagges upon the stomach of a pestiferate body, cures it by several applications.” The belief in sympathetic powders and metals was a last survival of the mediæval doctrine of “signatures,” itself a form of the fetish still practised by African witch-doctors, and directly connected with the universal system of magic and witchcraft of European as well as of more remote populations. To this day, such beliefs lie close beneath the thin crust of modern knowledge and civilisation, even in England, treasured in obscure tradition and ready to burst forth in grotesque revivals in all classes of society. The Royal Society put many of these reputed mechanisms of witchcraft and magic to the test, and by showing their failure to produce the effects attributed to them, helped greatly to cause witches, wizards, and their followers to draw in their horns and disappear. The germ, however, remained, and reappears in various forms to-day.