From an Easy Chair

by Sir E. Ray Lankester

Although there is no evidence to lead us to suppose that existing glaciers are now actually in a condition of general retreat, leading to their ultimate disappearance, yet it is one of the most certain and interesting results of geological study that some hundred and fifty thousand years ago the northern hemisphere was far colder than it is now, owing partly to the same change in the inclination of the earth’s axis to which I alluded on a former page ([p. 81]) as affecting the orientation of ancient astronomical temples—a change which diminished, when at its extreme, the effective amount of heat received from the sun in these regions of the earth. The peculiar scratching, polishing, and erosion of rocks, the existence of moraines, and other evidence, prove that enormous glaciers covered the north of Europe, that England and Scotland were in large part covered by a great ice-sheet or glacier, and that the great valleys of Switzerland such as the Rhone Valley and the basin of the Lake of Geneva, were filled by enormous glaciers, which helped to mould and deepen the valleys. The present glaciers are truly the remnants or rootlets of those enormous masses of the glacial epoch. On such of the land surface as was not then covered by ice, existed the hairy elephant or Siberian mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, wild cattle, lions, bears, hyenas, and other animals now extinct in this part of the world. Man had made his appearance, hunted these animals, and lived in caves. His weapons and carvings and their bones tell us the story in no uncertain terms.

The biggest Swiss glaciers of to-day, compared to the great glacier of the Rhone Valley, of which they are but the highest tributaries, still surviving unmelted among the mountain-tops, are in size as a mountain freshet is to the great stream of Loch Lomond, or as the Serpentine in Hyde Park to the neighbouring Thames. Vast as was the great glacier of the Rhone Valley, and immense as has been the work done by water and ice in carving the great highway in the mountain-mass of Switzerland, it has all been effected since the date of the formation on the sea-bottom and the subsequent elevation of the strata which we call “the chalk”—a deposit which comes not very far down in the series of strata of the earth’s crust. Only 3,000ft. of deposit exist above it, whilst below it are more than 60,000ft. of water-deposited or “sedimentary” rocks. The huge Alps have risen since the date of the “chalk,” for we find strata containing marine shells of the Tertiary period at a height of 10,000ft. in those mountains. Where those shells now are was the bottom of the sea at a comparatively recent date, probably not more than fifty million years ago! And not only have the Alps been raised since then from the sea level to 15,000ft. (the height of Mont Blanc), but the huge mountain valleys and the great chasm of the Rhone Valley many miles wide, with its floor thousands of feet below the mountain ridges, have been scoured out. Deeper and wider it has gradually become as it has taken shape, whilst the mountain sides have been removed first by water and later by ice—by the great glacier consisting of solid ice, miles wide and a thousand and more feet in thickness. The water no longer fills the valley in solid form, but once again rushes along as an irresistible torrent, tearing and wearing the rock without rest or mercy, carrying it off by thousands of tons day by day, year by year, to the plains of Provence and the deep floor of the Mediterranean Sea.

The blue colour of the glacier ice—like that of pure water—is now known to be due to no impurity or admixture of other substances. It does not, as was supposed by Tyndall, owe its blueness to a dust of finest colourless particles as do blue smoke, the blue sky, and as do the blue eyes which have attracted the observation of naturalists (and others) in Ireland and the North of Europe. Water, whether liquid or solid, is blue, just as “blue copperas” is, or as “Prussian blue” is; but light must pass through some ten or twenty feet thickness of it to make the colour evident to our eyes. The green tint is due to an admixture of yellow, the exact cause of which is not quite easy to discover. Probably it is due to minute quantities of earthy matter mixed with the surface snow.

The pressing of the high-lying snow, so as to form solid ice or “glacier,” is concerned with the same property of snow as that which enables us to make snow “bind” into a snowball. You cannot make snowballs during very hard frost—the snow must be in air of a thawing temperature at the moment it is squeezed by the hand. The hand itself will not be warm enough to produce that temperature when the thermometer is below freezing-point. The snow commences to melt in the hand when one squeezes it, and then when the squeezing is stopped the water formed quickly freezes again and cements the snow particles together to form ice, enclosing innumerable minute bubbles. The heat of the sun and the pressure of the weight of the snow itself take the place in the mountains of the warmth and pressure of the human hand. The minute air bubbles make the newest glacier-ice white and opaque, especially when seen in a great mass; but gradually they get squeezed together, and the glacier ice becomes first “fibrous” in appearance, and then, after long years of pressure by its own weight, fairly clear. Ice in great masses has the properties of a viscous body, like pitch or soft sealing-wax, owing to the fact that wherever the solid mass breaks its particles melt a very little and then freeze again. Under increased pressure ice melts at a lower temperature than when it is not subjected to pressure. When the pressure is removed the water freezes again. Thus crushed ice or snow can be put into a “squeeze-mould” and pressed, so as to form a solid mass of ice of any shape you may choose. Four or five slabs of ice, placed one over the other, very soon become, owing to this property, one continuous solid mass. White glacier ice is so full of air bubbles as to be comparable in structure to sponge, or, more closely, to cork. A cube of such ice exposes, owing to its rough air-hole pitted surface, a much larger surface of contact to the atmosphere than does a cube of perfectly smooth clear ice. Consequently in a warm room or chamber the white ice melts much more quickly than does the clear, and hence you should choose clear ice rather than white ice if you wish for a block which will last.

Before leaving the glaciers, let me briefly relate an incident arising from their slow but regular downward flow to the region where they melt away and deposit, as a terminal moraine, the burden of rocks they have received years before in regions far above. A young man of five-and-twenty, on his honeymoon, visited the Alps, and ventured alone on to a glacier. He fell into a deep “crevasse,” or ice-fissure, and his body was not recovered. The exact spot where he fell into the ice-chasm was recognised, and the mountain-folk, who knew their glacier and its rate of movement well, told the broken-hearted young widow that it would take thirty years before that region of the glacier would have moved so far downwards as to reach the lowest limit, and in due course melt away. She haunted the glacier in which her young husband was entombed year after year, and at last, when she was now grey-headed and withered by time, that special tract of ice had descended so far, and was so near the thawing, thinned-out margin of the glacier that they were able to break into it with axe and pole. Then she, an old woman, had a wonderful experience. They led her to the glacier’s edge. Her young husband, preserved these thirty years in the ice, which had melted around him and re-frozen, lay there unchanged. His features were not marred by the lapse of years, nor was his clothing rent or injured. He seemed as one asleep, resting after a long day’s climb, and she, poor soul, had, during a blissful interval, the conviction that all those weary years of waiting were but a long, bad dream, that she, too, still was young, and was waking, as she had loved to do long years ago, in time to see him lift his lids and smile.

39. Votes for Women

Now that so many people placidly accept the notion that women are to have votes in the election of members of Parliament, one is tempted to ask whether science has any facts to put forward which should be considered before so great a change in our national organisation is made. There are various interesting facts as to the relations of males and females in the animal world and as to the relative strength and activity of the sexes—which are sometimes cited as arguments in the matter. Speaking generally, it is clear enough that among animals the female is endowed with qualities which bear exclusively upon her function as the guardian of the eggs or germs of a new generation. She nourishes those germs at the expense of her own substance before birth, feeds them, tends them and protects them—after birth. The male in many cases contributes to the feeding and protection of the young, but is as often as not quite unconcerned with such matters. In the higher animals the male is far more powerful than the female, and fights with other males both for the possession of a mate or a harem, and for the undisturbed occupation of feeding grounds for himself and family.

Among lower animals there are curious cases of the greater strength and size of the female. Thus, among spiders, the female is nearly twice as bulky as the male. She makes, in many cases, a nest ready for her young, and is visited there by the wandering irresponsible male, who, in spite of great danger to himself, is irresistibly attracted to seek a brief caress from the terrible spideress. She is terrible, not only on account of her bulk, but because she makes a rule of killing, and sucking the blood of, her infatuated admirer unless he is sufficiently alert and agile to escape from her side more quickly than he came to it. The courtship of spiders is a very interesting bit of natural history. The males execute a sort of dance, and are strangely excited by the vibrating note of a tuning fork. Two American naturalists, Mr. and Mrs. Peckham, and also Dr. McCook, have studied this subject in great detail.

A strange-looking, dark green worm, as big as a walnut, with a ribbon-like trunk six or eight inches in length attached to its mouth, lives in holes in the rocks in the Mediterranean. A similar worm has been found off the Norwegian coast. Fanciful names are given by zoologists to these two worms—the first is called Bonellia, the second Hamingia. It does no harm to cite their names, and I do so with an apology to those who do not like names. These goodly sized worms are females, only females. For years the corresponding male was unknown. At last a minute creature one-eighth of an inch in length, like a tiny fragment of green thread, was found crawling about on and into these big green Bonellias. Its structure when it was examined with the microscope proved it to be the adult male of the worm on which it was crawling. It was so insignificant and minute as to escape all observation except that of a trained naturalist searching for it with a magnifying glass. Some seven or eight of these diminutive males are found on one female, infesting her as fleas infest a mouse, and of about the same relative size. The microscopic husband of the Norwegian Hamingia it was my good fortune to discover many years ago, when I was dredging marine animals in the deep waters of the Stavanger Fjord.

So there is nothing in the eternal fitness of things proclaiming the male as the necessary superior of the female throughout Nature. The fact is that the question of equality and of general superiority and inferiority has no place in regard to male and female from a naturalist’s point of view. It is true that women are so very much less endowed with muscular strength than men that practically every woman is inferior to every man in this respect. It is also true that woman’s brain is smaller than man’s, and that apart from mere size, the intellectual activity and capacity of women, by whatever test you examine it, is less than that of man. When exceptional cases on both sides are excluded, the definite intellectual inferiority of the average woman, as compared with the average man, is established as a fact. The observations of those concerned in the education of young men and young women side by side confirm this, and it is further demonstrated by a consideration of the intellectual performances of average men and average women. That, at any rate, is my own experience as a University teacher. But women, on the other hand, fill a place in human life as mothers, and administrators of detail, and as companions, in which man, by the nature of things, cannot compete with them at all.