EVIL, VIRULENCY OF
In the history of the great calamity of Asiatic cholera in this country in 1832, mention is made of the emigrant steamer that brought the disease to these shores. The steamer touched at Quebec and at Montreal, and landed passengers infected with the disease at both points. Over this intervening distance of two hundred miles, the disease traveled in thirty hours. Pursuing the succeeding events of this history, the writer says:
Over this long distance, thickly inhabited on both shores of the St. Lawrence, cholera made a single leap, without infecting a single village or a single house between the two cities, with the following exceptions. A man picked up a mattress thrown from the Voyageur, and he and his wife died of cholera; another man, fishing on the St. Lawrence, was requested to bury a body from the Voyageur, and he and his wife and nephew died. But more than 4,000 persons died of cholera in Montreal, and more than an equal number in Quebec. An emigrant ship conveying the disease had meanwhile touched at New York, and the mortality soon reached 3,500. These figures will at least indicate the virulence of the disease, when once originated, and the rapidity with which it spreads.
In this account we see that every place touched by the plague-ship or any object from it became a new center from which the disease spread. So moral evil contaminates. Its virulency spans the centuries and affects every son of man. (Text.)
(969)
EVOLUTION
Is the chimpanzee the coming man? The thought of Superintendent Conklin, of the Central Park Museum at New York, had a cast of that hue. He was deeply interested in the possibilities of the development of intelligence and culture in the chimpanzee race, and doubtless his dreams went far beyond the daring of his spoken hope. “Mr. Crowley,” a somewhat noted and remarkably intelligent specimen of this exalted race of monkeys, long adorned the museum, and at the time a helpmeet for him was imported. Dr. Conklin believed that their offspring would inherit their sagacity, and with two or three generations of careful training the least he expected was “a chimpanzee accustomed to wearing clothes, able to stand erect, capable of being taught the meaning of simple commands, and docile enough to obey them.” In the fifth or sixth generation, the doctor thought he should have chimpanzees able to perform to a limited extent the duties of servants. Following out the idea, the doctor predicted a gradual improvement in their features and eventually a possibility that they might grasp the meaning of words and phrases. This is surely a very practical experiment in Darwinian evolution, and tho it may seem funny, it is by no means ridiculous. If horses and dogs may be trained and taught, why not monkeys? And how much more useful would an intelligent trained monkey be by reason of his capacity to grasp and handle things? The story came a few years ago from South America that chimpanzees are already employed there in picking cotton in place of the emancipated slaves.—Springfield Union.
(970)
Evolution, Objection to—See [Brain in Man].
Exaction—See [Ideal, The].