The situation can be appreciated from the fact that wool, imported prior to the passing of the Dingley tariff, is being reshipped to England, where it is bringing better prices than can be obtained here under the ægis of the protective duty of eleven cents a pound. Three and a half million pounds were shipped in the seven months ending January 31st.
We should profit by this experience, try to cultivate friendly relations in parts of the world where advantageous trade connections can be established, instead of following the ignis fatuus of Asiatic expansion.
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE.
By EDMUND NOBLE.
It is an interesting and suggestive fact in Nature study that at the outset man was thrown utterly upon himself for the very vocabulary of the world-puzzle which presented itself to him for solution. He had not only to unriddle his "inscription in an unknown tongue," but to evolve even the possibility of an explanation out of his inner consciousness. His first theories of the universe were based, not on anything which the cosmos was, independently of him, but upon his own nature and activities as a living animal. This resort to himself as his chief means of interpretation resulted from the very nature of the knowing process; for knowledge of things is never in any absolute sense what things are, but is rather what they are like. When we cognize an object we do it by referring that object to the class of objects which in one or more respects it resembles. And as in this process we draw from the objects most familiar to us the principle of explanation which we need for the less familiar things that have not yet become part of our mental possessions, much depends upon priority in the setting up of mental classes, as well as on the strength of the impression which they make upon the mind. The earliest and deepest class impressions are necessarily those which arise out of man's knowledge of himself—of his body and the parts thereof, of his corporeal activities, and of his feelings and thoughts; next, of the bodies of other men and of their movements; finally, in the order of vividness, of the animate and inanimate objects most nearly related to his life. It is these classes which, by virtue of their priority and strength, naturally acquire dominating influence over all later acquirements, and it is to them that the mind refers the impressions gained from the more remote inorganic world.
Among the simpler illustrations of the effort man makes to assimilate the external system to himself are those with which we are more or less familiar in the domain of language. We find them first in the forms for gender by which, in all inflectional tongues, inanimate objects are to this extent likened to living animals. A similar tendency is at work in the widespread lingual habit of naming things after parts of the body, as in the case of "door," called the "eye of the house" by the native of Banks' Island; of "son-tree," the term applied by the Siamese to "fruit"; of the Malay's use of the noun "child" for "lock"; of "house-belly," the African Mandingo's equivalent for "in the house"; and of "hair," often used for "leaf" or "feather" in many Melanesian languages.[29] In more modern forms of speech the process is suggested by such expressions as the head of a bridge, the eye of a needle, the mouth of a river, the neck of an estuary, the trunk and arms of a tree, the lungs of a bellows, the bones of an umbrella, the nose of a promontory, the ears of a book, the fingers of a clock, the legs of a table, the veins of marble, the foot of a mountain. Then there are analogies based on the activities of the human body, for when we describe things as standing, sitting, or lying; as rising, falling, running, or climbing—when we use expressions like "striking clock," "dancing light," "sleeping lake," "yawning precipice," "laughing skies," "babbling brooks," "raging billows," we are applying to the objects named terms originally used to describe our own acts. The sense of hearing, again, is utilized in such expressions as taube Nuss ("with nothing in the shell") and taube Kohlen ("those which have burned out"). So the defect of blindness is objectified in the cæcum vallum of Roman speech, in ciego, said in Spanish of cheese that "has no eyes," and in the blinder Schuss of the Germans, whose more familiar Augenblick everybody recalls. Not less suggestive are the numerous expressions which project conceptions of life and death into the environment, such as the caput mortuum (tête morte) of chemistry, eau vive (Quellwasser), "dead water" (turn of the tide), todte Farbe and lebhafte Farbe, vivus lapis (firestone), "quicksand" and "quicksilver," the "dead of night," "dead weight," a "dead level," and todtes Kapital. Nor must we forget that the reading of vitality into inorganic objects, common enough among savages, has by no means disappeared from civilized races. Dr. Stanley Hall's inquiries have shown that out of forty-eight children just attaining school age, twenty believed the moon and stars to be alive, fifteen thought a doll and sixteen thought flowers would suffer pain if burned. One pupil described the crescent moon as "half stuck" or "half buttoned" into the sky; the spluttering of coals in a fire was called "barking" by a girl four years and a half old. Miss Ingelow says that when over two years old, and for about a year after, she had the habit of attributing intelligence not only to all living creatures, but even to stones and manufactured articles.
This projection of words originally descriptive of the human body or of its activities into the objective world of Nature finds its richest illustrations in poetry,[30] where it may be held to represent less the elaborate artifice of a cultured mind than one of the most primitive tendencies of that mind powerfully swayed by emotion. Yet the process belongs equally to the more prosaic efforts which man puts forth to utilize the objects of his environment in the interests of self-maintenance. One of the earliest of these is seen in the use of words describing parts of the body to facilitate the description of the external world in its numerical aspects. Thus the Chinese use for "two" certain syllables (ny and ceul) which originally mean "ears," the Hottentots employing the word for "hand" in the same sense. In middle high German the word for "sheaf" (Schock) signifies sixty, and is applied in that sense to all kinds of objects. The Letts, owing to their habit of throwing fish three at a time, employ the word mettens, "a throw," in the sense of "three." Among the same people flounders are tied in lots of thirty, whence has arisen the practice of designating thirty by the word kahlis, meaning "cord." The Quichuas attach the significance of ten to the word chuncu, "heap." The Gallas word for "half" has been traced to the verb chaba, "to break," and is the equivalent of our own word "fraction." So in a large number of languages the term for hand signifies "five," "two hands" meaning ten, and "man" ("two hands and two feet") twenty.
A like origin must be claimed for the measures of space and weight needed by man in his industrial and commercial activities. The finger, the thumb, the hand, the palm, the forearm, the foot—the extended arms, as in the ancient orgya, and the extended legs, as in the modern yard—have all played a fundamental part in determining the standard measures of the civilized world. To the same class belong the γυη, the extent of field that could be worked by a laborer in one day; the stade, the distance which a good runner could traverse without stopping to take rest; also measures of time, such as the old division of the day based on the length of a man's shadow.
The human body was thus of primary importance as a means of comprehending and coming into relations with the external world. But men also sought to make the environment intelligible to them by projecting into it the images gained from the more general aspects of their life. Such phrases as "pig of iron," "monkey wrench," "battering ram," "lifting crane," remind us of a period in which objects were actually shaped so as to enable the mind to accommodate itself more completely to the thought of their vitality. The Greek sailing vessel, for example, was so constructed—with the body of a bird, with cheeks, eyes, and projecting ears—as to make it seem to the navigators of the time as almost alive. And the dolphins, eagles, ravens, and dragons which threatened England from the prows of the invading Danish fleet have had their prototypes in almost every nation that has betaken itself to the sea.