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MORE SCIENCE FROM AN EASY CHAIR

MORE SCIENCE FROM
AN EASY CHAIR

BY

Sir RAY LANKESTER
K.C.B., F.R.S.

WITH 34 ILLUSTRATIONS

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET, W.C.
LONDON

First Issued in this Cheap Form in 1920

Originally published by Messrs. Adlard & Son in 1913
First published by Methuen & Co. Ltd. 1914
Second Edition 1915
Third Edition 1920

PREFACE

The present volume is a reprint of that issued in 1912 with the title, "Science from an Easy Chair: Second Series." It consists, like its predecessors, of chapters originally published by me in the Daily Telegraph, which I have revised and illustrated by a large number of drawings. In order to render the issue of the present cheap edition possible, it has been found necessary to restrict its size a little by the omission of chapters dealing with Glaciers, Ferns and Fern-seed, and the history of the Sea-squirts or Ascidians, which are contained in the original larger book. My hope is that this collection of papers, "about a number of things," may meet with as kind a reception from my readers as that which they have accorded to its predecessors.

E. RAY LANKESTER
July 1, 1920

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

PLATES

MORE SCIENCE FROM AN EASY CHAIR

CHAPTER I

A DAY IN THE OBERLAND

I am writing in early September from Interlaken, one of the loveliest spots in Europe when blessed with a full blaze of sunlight and only a few high-floating clouds, but absolutely detestable in dull, rainy weather, losing its beauty as the fairy scenes of a theatre do when viewed by dreary daylight. It is the case of the little girl of whom it is recorded that "When she was good she was very good, and when she was not she was horrid." This morning, after four days' misconduct, Interlaken was very good. The tremendous sun-blaze seemed to fill the valleys with a pale blue luminous vapour, cut sharply by the shadows of steep hill-sides. Here and there the smoke of some burning weeds showed up as brightest blue. Far away through the gap formed in the long range of nearer mountains, where the Lütschine Valley opens into the vale of Interlaken, the Jungfrau appeared in full majesty, absolutely brilliant and unearthly. So I walked towards her up the valley. Zweilütschinen is the name given to the spot where the valley divides into two, that to the left leading up to Grindelwald, under the shadow of the Mönch and the Wetterhorn, that to the right bringing one to Lauterbrünnen and the Staubbach waterfall, with the snow-fields of the Tchingel finally closing the way—over which I climbed years ago to Ried in the Loetschen Thal.

The autumn crocus was already up in many of the closely trimmed little meadows, whilst the sweet scent of the late hay-crop spread from the newly cut herbage of others.

At Zweilütschinen, where the white glacier-torrent unites with the black, and the milky stream is nearly as cold as ice, and is boiling along over huge rocks, its banks bordered with pine forest, I came upon a native fishing for trout. He was using a short rod and a weighted line with a small "grub" as bait. He dropped his line into the water close to the steep bank, where some projecting rock or half-sunk boulder staved off the violence of the stream. He had already caught half-a-dozen beautiful, red-spotted fish, which he carried in a wooden tank full of water, with a close-fitting lid to prevent their jumping out. I saw him take a seventh. The largest must have weighed nearly two pounds. It seems almost incredible that fish should inhabit water so cold, so opaque, and so torrential, and should find there any kind of nourishment. They make their way up by keeping close to the bank, and are able, even in that milky current, to perceive and snatch the unfortunate worm or grub which has been washed into the flood and is being hurried along at headlong speed. Only the trout has the courage, strength, and love of nearly freezing water necessary for such a life—no other fish ventures into such conditions. Trout are actually caught in some mountain pools at a height of 8,000 ft., edged by perpetual snow.

You are rarely given trout to eat here in the hotels. A lake fish, called "ferras," a large species of the salmonid genus Coregonus, to which the skelly, powan, and vendayce of British lakes belong, is the commonest fish of the table d'hôte, and not very good. A better one is the perch-pike or zander. It is common in all the larger shallow lakes of Central Europe, and abounds in the "broads" which extend from Potsdam to Hamburg, though it is unknown in the British Isles. It is quite the best of the European fresh-water fish for the table, and there should be no difficulty about introducing it into the Norfolk Broads. It would be worth an effort on the part of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries to do so, as the perch-pike, unlike other fresh-water fishes, would hold its own on the market against haddock, brill, and plaice. Another interesting fresh-water fish which grows to a large size in the Lake of Geneva (where I have seen it netted) is the burbot—called "lote" in French—a true cod of fresh-water habit which, though common throughout Europe and Northern Asia, is, in our country, only taken in a few rivers opening on the east coast. It is a brilliantly coloured fish, orange-brown, mottled with black, and is very good eating.

Passing up the Lauterbrünnen valley, I came upon some wild raspberries and quantities of the fine, large-flowered sage, Salvia glutinosa, with its yellow flowers, in shape like those of the dead-nettle, but much bigger. They were being visited by humble-bees, and I was able to see the effective mechanism at work by which the bee's body is dusted with the pollen of the flower. I have illustrated this in some drawings (Fig. 1) which are accompanied by a detailed explanation. Two long stamens, a1, arch high up over the lip of the flower, li, on which the bee alights, and are protected by a keel or hood of the corolla. Each stamen is provided with a broad process, a2, standing out low down on its arched stalk, and blocking the way to the nectar in the cup of the flower. When the bee pushes his head against these obstacles and forces them backwards, the result is to swing the long arched stalk, with its pollen sacks, in the opposite direction, namely, forwards and downwards on to the bee's back. It was easy to see this movement going on, and the consequent dusting of the bee's back with pollen. In somewhat older flowers, which have been relieved of their pollen, the style, st., or free stalk-like extremity of the egg-holding capsule, already as long as the stamens, grows longer and bends down towards the lip or landing-place of the yellow flower. When a pollen-dusted bee alights on one of these maturer flowers the sticky end of the now depending style is gently rubbed by the bee's back and smeared with a few pollen-grains brought by the bee from a distant flower. These rapidly expand into "pollen tubes," or filaments, and, penetrating the long style, reach the egg-germs below. Thus cross-fertilization is brought about by the bees which come for the nectar of Salvia. The stalks and outer parts of the flower of this plant produce a very sticky secretion which effectually prevents any small insects from crawling up and helping themselves to the nectar exclusively provided for the attraction of the humble-bee, whose services are indispensable.

Fig. 1.—Diagrams of the flower of the yellow sage (Salvia glutinosa) a little larger than life. 1. An entire flower seen from the side. st. The stigma, a2. The pair of modified half-anthers which are pushed back by the bee when inserting its head into the narrow part of the flower. 2. A similar flower at a later stage when the stigma, st., has grown downwards so as to touch the back of a bee alighting on the lip of the flower, and gather pollen from it. 3. Diagram of one of the two stamens. f. The stalk or filament of the stamen. a1. The pollen-producing half-anther, eo. The elongated connective joining it to the sterile half-anther. 4. Section through a flower showing ov. the ovary; nec. the nectary or honey-glands; st. the style; li. the lip of the flower on which the bee alights. 5. Similar section showing the effect of the pushing back of a2 by the bee, and the downward swinging of the polliniferous half-anther so as to dust the bee's back with pollen. The dotted arrow shows the direction of the push given by the bee.

Fig. 2.—The Edelweiss, Gnaphalium leontopodium.

As I walked on, a belated Apollo butterfly, with its two red spots, and a pale Swallow-tail fluttered by me. Then some children emerged from unsuspected lurking-places in the wood and offered bunches of edelweiss (Fig. 2). This curious-looking little plant does not grow (as pretended by reporters of mountaineering disasters) exclusively in places only to be reached by a dangerous climb. I have gathered it in meadows on the hillside above Zermatt, and it is common enough in accessible spots. The flowers are like those of our English groundsel and yellow in colour—little "composite" knobs, each built up of many tubular "florets" packed side by side. Six or seven of these little short-stalked knobs of florets are arranged in a circlet around a somewhat larger knob, and each of them gives off from its stalk one long and two shorter white, hairy, leaf-like growths, flat and blade-like in shape and spreading outwards from the circle, so that the whole series resemble the rays of a star (or more truly of a star-fish!). They look strangely artificial, as though cut out of new white flannel (with a greenish tint), and have been dignified by the comparison of the shape of the white-flannel rays with that of the foot of the lion and the claws of the eagle. They are extraordinary-looking little plants, and are similar in their hairiness and pale tint to some of the seaside plants on our own coast, which, in fact, include species closely allied to them ("cud-weeds" of the genus Gnaphalium).

The huge cliffs of rocks on either side (in some parts over a thousand feet in sheer height from the torrent) come closer to one another in the part where we now are than in most Alpine valleys, so as almost to give it the character of a "gorge." At some points the highest part of the precipice actually overhangs the perpendicular face by many feet. A refreshing cold air comes up from the icy torrent, whilst the heat of the sun diffuses the delicious resinous scent of the pine trees. Above the naked rock we see steep hill-sides covered with forest, and away above these again bare grass-slopes topped by cloud. But as the clouds slowly lift and break we become suddenly aware of something impending far above and beyond all this, something more dazzling in its white brightness than the sun-lit clouds, a form sharply cut in outline and firm, yet rounded by a shadow of an exquisite purple tint which no cloud can assume. The steely blue Alpine sky fits around this marvel of pure whiteness as it towers through the opening cloud, and soars out of earth's range. What is this glory so remote yet impending over us? It is the Jungfrau, the incomparable virgin of the ice-world, who bares her snowy breast. She slowly parts her filmy veil, and, as we gaze, uncovers all her loveliness.

The rock walls of the Lauterbrünnen valley show at one place a thickness of many hundred feet of strongly marked, perfectly horizontal "strata"—the layers deposited immense ages ago at the bottom of a deep sea. Not only have they been raised to this position, and then cut into, so as to make the profound furrow or valley in the sides of which we see them, but they have been bent and contorted in places to an extent which is, at first sight, incredible. Close to one great precipice of orderly horizontal layers you see the whole series suddenly turned up at right angles, and the same strata which were horizontal have become perpendicular. But that is not the limit, for the upturned strata are seen actually to turn right over, and again become horizontal in a reversed order, the strata which were the lowest becoming highest, and the highest lowest. The rock is rolled up just as a flat disc of Genoese pastry—consisting of alternate layers of jam and sponge-cake—is folded on itself to form a double thickness. The forces at work capable of treating the solid rocks, the foundations of the great mountains, in this way are gigantic beyond measurement. This folding of the earth's crust is caused by the fact that the "crust," or skin of the earth, has ceased to cool, being warmed by the sun, and therefore does not shrink, whilst the great white-hot mass within (in comparison with which the twenty-mile-thick crust is a mere film) continually loses heat, and shrinks definitely in volume as its temperature sinks. The crust or jacket of stratified rock deposited by the action of the waters on the surface of the globe has been compelled—at whatever cost, so to speak—to fit itself to the diminishing "core" on which it lies. Slowly, but steadily, this "settlement" has gone on, and is going on. The horizontal rock layers, being now too great in length and breadth, adjust themselves by "buckling"—just as a too large, ill-fitting dress does—and the Alps, the Himalayas, and other great mountain ranges, are regions where this "buckling" process has for countless ages proceeded, slowly but surely. Probably the "buckling" has proceeded to a large extent without sudden movement, but with a lateral pressure of such power as ultimately to throw a crust of thousands of feet thickness into deep folds a mile or so in vertical measurement from crest to hollow, protruding from the general level both upwards and downwards, whilst often the folds are rolled over on to each other.

Fig. 3.—Diagrams to show the "folding" of rock strata. A. Normal horizontal position of the strata, a, b, c, d; xy, horizontal line. B. Folding due to a shortening of the horizontal xy by lateral pressure, acting in the direction of the arrow and due to shrinkage. C. More extreme case of folding, in which a raised ridge is made to fall over so as to bring the lowest layer d above a, b and c.

This crumbling and folding has gone on at great depths—that is to say, some miles below the surface (a mere nothing compared with the 8,000 miles diameter of the globe itself), though we now see the results exposed, like the pastry folded by a cook. Immense time has been taken in the process. A folding movement involving a vertical rise of an inch in ten years would not be noticed by human onlookers, but in 600,000 years this would give you a vertical displacement of more than 5,000 ft. (nearly a mile!). It has been shown that in Switzerland, along a line of country extending from Basle to Milan, strata of 10,000 ft. to 20,000 ft. in thickness, which, if straightened out, would give a flat area of that thickness, and of 200 miles in length, have been buckled and folded so as to occupy only a length of 130 miles! The former tight-fitting skin of horizontal rock layers has "had to" buckle to that extent here (and in the same way in other mountain ranges in other parts of the world), because the whole terrestrial sphere has shrunk, owing to the gradual cooling of the mass, whilst the crust has not shrunk, not having lost heat.

Filled with interest and delight in these things, I reached the railway station at Lauterbrünnen, from whence the little train is driven far up the mountain, even into the very heart of the Jungfrau, by an electric current generated by a turbine, itself driven by the torrent at our feet, the waters of which have descended from the glaciers far above, to which it will carry us. In a few minutes I was gently gliding in the train up the to the "Wengern Alp" and the "Little Scheidegg"—a slope up which I have so often in former years painfully struggled on foot for four hours or more. One could to-day watch the whole scene, in ease and comfort, during the two hours' ascent of the train. And a marvellous scene it is as one rises to the height of 8,000 ft., skirting the glaciers which ooze down the rocky sides of the Jungfrau, and mounting far above some of them. At the Scheidegg I changed into a smaller train, and with some thirty fellow-passengers was carried higher and higher by the faithful, untiring electric current. After a quarter of an hour's progress we paused high above the "snout" of the great Eiger glacier, and descended by a short path on to it, examined the ice, its crevasses and layers, and its "glacier-grains," and watched and heard an avalanche. The last time I was here it took a couple of hours to reach this spot from the Scheidegg, and probably neither I nor any of my fellow-passengers could to-day endure the necessary fatigue of reaching this spot on foot. Then we remounted the train, and on we went into the solid rock of the huge Eiger. The train stops in the rock tunnel and we got out to look, through an opening cut in its side, down the sheer wall of the mountain on to the grassy meadows thousands of feet below.

Then we start again, and on we are driven by the current generated away down there in Lauterbrünnen, through the spiral tunnel, mounting a thousand feet more till we are landed at an opening cut on the further side of the rocky Eiger, which admits us to an actual footing on the great glacier called the Eismeer, or Icelake. We lunch at a restaurant cut out as a cavern in the solid rock, and survey the wondrous scene. We are now at a height of 10,000 feet, and in the real frozen ice-world, hitherto accessible only to the young and vigorous. I have been there in my day with pain, danger, and labour, accompanied by guides and held up by ropes, but never till now with perfect ease and tranquillity and without "turning a hair," or causing either man or beast to labour painfully on my behalf. We had taken two hours only from Lauterbrünnen; in former days we should have started in the small hours of the morning from the Scheidegg, and have climbed through many dangers for some six or seven hours before reaching this spot.

I confess that I am not enchanted with all of the modern appliances for saving time and labour—the telegraph, the telephone, the automobile, and the aeroplane. But these mountain railways fill me with satisfaction and gratitude. When the Jungfrau railway was first projected, some athletic Englishmen with heavy boots and ice-axes, protested against the "desecration" of regions till then accessible only to them and to me, and others of our age and strength. They declared that the scenery would be injured by the railway and its troops of "tourists." As well might they protest against the desecration caused by the crawling of fifty house-flies on the dome of St. Paul's. These mountains and glaciers are so vast, and men with their railroads so small, that the latter are negligible in the presence of the former. No disfiguring effect whatever is produced by these mountain railways; the trains have even ceased to emit smoke since they were worked by electricity. I quite agree with those who object to "funiculars." The carriages on these are hauled up long, straight gashes in the mountain side, which have a hideous and disfiguring appearance. But I look forward with pleasure to the completion of the Jungfrau railway to the summit. I hope that the Swiss engineers will carry it through the mountain, and down along the side of the great Aletsch glacier to the Bel Alp and so to Brieg. That would be a glorious route to the Simplon tunnel and Italy!

I took three hours in the unwearied train descending from the Eismeer to Interlaken, and was back in my hotel in comfortable time for dinner, "mightily content with the day's journey," as Mr. Pepys would have said. I have always been sensitive to the action of diminished pressure, which produces what is called "mountain sickness" in many people. Many years ago I climbed by the glacier-pass known as the Weissthor from Macugnaga to the Riffel Alp, with a stylographic pen in my pocket. The reservoir of the pen contained a little air, which expanded as the atmospheric pressure diminished, and at 10,000 feet I found most of the ink emptied into my pocket. Probably one cause of the discomfort called "mountain sickness" arises from a similar expansion of gas contained in the digestive canal, and in the cavities connected with the ear and nose. The more suddenly the change of pressure is effected, the more noticeable is the discomfort. But I was rather pleased than otherwise to note, as I sat in the comfortable railway carriage, that when we passed 8,000 feet in elevation the old familiar giddiness, and tendency to sigh and gasp, came upon me as of yore, as I gathered was the experience of some of my fellow-passengers: and when we were returning, and had descended half-way to Lauterbrünnen, I enjoyed the sense of restored ease in breathing which I well remember when the whole experience was complicated by the fatigue of a long climb. A white-haired American lady was in the train with me ascending to the Eismeer. "I have longed all my life," she said, "to see a glaysher—to touch it and walk on it—and now I am going to do it at last. I and my daughter here have come right away from America to go on these cars to the glaysher." When we were descending, I asked the old lady if she had been pleased. "I can hardly speak of it rightly," she said. "It seems to me as though I have been standing up there on God's own throne." I do not sympathise with the Alpine monopolist who would grudge that dear old lady, and others like her, the little train and tramway by which alone such people can penetrate to those soul-stirring scenes. They are at least as sensitive to the beauty of the mountains as are the most muscular, most long-winded, and most sun-blistered of our friends—the acrobats of the rope and axe.

Interlaken
September, 1909

CHAPTER II

SWITZERLAND IN EARLY SUMMER

It is the early summer of 1910 and I have but just returned from a visit to Switzerland. The latter part of June and the beginning of July is the best for a stay in that splendid and happy land if one is a naturalist, and cares for the beauty of Alpine meadows, and of the flowers which grow among and upon the rocks near the great glaciers. This year the weather has, no doubt, been exceptionally cold and wet, and at no great height (5,000 feet) we have had snow-storms, even in July. But as compared with that of Paris and London the weather has been delightful. There has been an abundance of magnificent sunshine, and many days of full summer heat and cloudless sky. A fortnight ago (July 16th), and on the day before, it was as hot and brilliant in the valley of Chamonix as it can be. Mont Blanc and the Dome de Goutet stood out clear and immaculate against a purple-blue sky, and, as of old, we watched through the hotel telescope a party struggling, over the snow to the highest peak.

At Chillon the lake of Geneva, day after day, spread out to us its limitless surface of changing colour, now blending in one pearly expanse with the sky—so that the distant felucca boats seemed to float between heaven and earth—now streaked with emerald and amethystine bands. The huge mountain masses rising with a vast sweep from St. Jingo's shore displayed range after range of bloom-like greys and purples, whilst far away and above delicately glittered—like some incredible vision of a heavenly world beyond the sun-lit sky itself—the apparition of the snows and rocks of the great Dents du Midi. All this I have left behind me, and have passed back again to dull grey Paris, to the stormy Channel, and to the winter of London's July.

The incomparable pleasure which the lakes and valleys and mountains of Switzerland are capable of giving is due to the combination of many distinct sources of delight, each in itself of exceptional character. A month ago, in bright sunshine, I went, once again, by the little electric railway (most blessed invention of our day) from the pine-shaded torrent below to the great Eiger rock-mountain, and through its heart to the glacier beyond, more than 10,000 feet above sea-level. On the way back I left the train at the foot of the Eiger glacier, and walked down with my companion amongst the rocks of the moraine and over the sparse turf of these highest regions of life. Everywhere was a profusion of gentians, the larger and darker, as well as the smaller, bluest of all blue flowers. The large, plump, yellow globe-flowers (Trollius), the sulphur-yellow anemone, the glacial white-and-pink buttercup, the Alpine dryad, the Alpine forget-me-nots and pink primroses, the summer crocus, delicate hare-bells, and many other flowers of goodly size were abundant. The grass of Parnassus and the edelweiss were not yet in flower, but lower down the slopes the Alpine rhododendron was showing its crimson bunches of blossom. It is a pity that the Swiss call this plant "Alpenrose," since there is a true and exquisite Alpine rose (which we often found) with deep red flowers, dark-coloured foliage, and a rich, sweet-briar perfume. Lovely as these larger flowers of the higher Alps are, they are excelled in fascination by the delicate blue flowers of the Soldanellas, like little fringed foolscaps, by the brilliant little red and purple Alpine snap-dragon, and by the cushion-forming growths of saxifrages and other minute plants which encrust the rocks and bear, closely set in their compact, green, velvet-like foliage, tiny flowers as brilliant as gems. A ruby-red one amongst these is "the stalkless bladder-wort" (Silene acaulis), having no more resemblance at first sight to the somewhat ramshackle bladder-wort of our fields than a fairy has to a fishwife. There are many others of these cushion-forming, diminutive plants, with white, blue, yellow, and pink florets. Examined with a good pocket lens, they reveal unexpected beauties of detail—so graceful and harmonious that one wonders that no one has made carefully coloured pictures of them of ten times the size of nature, and published them for all the world to enjoy. Busily moving within their charmed circles we see, with our lens, minute insects which, attracted by the honey, are carrying the pollen of one flower to another, and effecting for these little pollen flowers what bees and moths do for the larger species.

Thus we are reminded that all this loveliness, this exquisite beauty, is the work of natural selection—the result of the survival of favourable variations in the struggle for existence. These minute symmetrical forms, this wax-like texture, these marvellous rows of coloured, enamel-like encrustation, have been selected from almost endless and limitless possible variations, and have been accumulated and maintained there as they are in all their beauty, by survival of the fittest—by natural selection. All beauty of living things, it seems, is due to Nature's selection, and not only all beauty of colour and form, but that beauty of behaviour and excellence of inner quality which we call "goodness." The fittest, that which has survived and will survive in the struggle of organic growth, is (we see it in these flowers) in man's estimation the beautiful. Is it possible to doubt that just as we approve and delightedly revel in the beauty created by "natural selection," so we give our admiration and reverence, without question, to "goodness," which also is the creation of Nature's great unfolding? Goodness (shall we say virtue and high quality?) is, like beauty, the inevitable product of the struggle of living things, and is Nature's favourite no less than man's desire. When we know the ways of Nature, we shall discover the source and meaning of beauty, whether of body or of mind.

As these thoughts are drifting through our enchanted dream we suddenly hear a deep and threatening roar from the mountain-side. We look up and see an avalanche falling down the rocks of the Jungfrau. The vast mountain, with its dazzling vestment of eternal snow, and its slowly creeping, green-fissured glaciers, towers above into the cloudless sky. In an instant the mind travels from the microscopic details of organic beauty, which but a moment ago held it entranced, to the contemplation of the gigantic and elemental force whose tremendous work is even now going on close to where we stand. The contrast, the range from the minute to the gigantic, is prodigious yet exhilarating, and strangely grateful. How many millions of years did it take to form those rocks (many of them are stratified, water-laid deposits) in the depths of the ocean? How many more to twist and bend them and raise them to their present height? And what inconceivably long persistence of the wear and tear of frost and snow and torrent has it required to excavate in their hard bosoms these deep, broad valleys thousands of feet below us, and to leave these strangely moulded mountain peaks still high above us? And that beauty of the sun-lit sky and of the billowy ice-field and of the colours of the lake below and of the luminous haze and the deep blue shade in the valley—how is that related to the beauty of the flowers? Truly enough, it is not a beauty called forth by natural selection. It is primordial; it is the beauty of great light itself. The response to its charm is felt by every living thing, even by the smallest green plant and the invisible animalcule, as it is by man himself. As I stand on the mountain-side we are all, from animalcule to man, sympathizing and uniting, as members of one great race, in our adoration of the sun. And in doing this we men are for the moment close to and in happy fellowship with our beautiful, though speechless, relatives who also live. Even the destructive bacteria which are killed by the sun probably enjoy an exquisite shudder in the process which more than compensates them for their extinction.

The pleasures of flower-seeking in Switzerland are by no means confined to the great heights. At moderate heights (4,000 to 5,000 feet) you have the Alpine meadows, and below those the rich-soiled woods which fill in the sides of the torrent-worn valleys. You cannot see an Alpine meadow after July, as it is cut down by then. It is at its best in June. It bears very little grass, and consists almost entirely of flowers. In places the hare-bells and Canterbury bells and the bugloss are so abundant as to make a whole valley-floor blue as in MacWhirter's picture. But more often the blue is intermixed with the balls of, red clover and the spikes of a splendid pale pink polygonum (a sort of buckwheat) and of a very large and handsome plantain. Large yellow gentians, mulleins, the nearly black and the purple orchids, vetches of all colours, the Alpine clover with four or five enormous flowers in a head instead of fifty little ones, the Astrantias (like a circular brooch made up of fifty gems each mounted on a long elastic wire and set vibrating side by side), the sky-blue forget-me-nots, and the golden potentillas, are usually components of the Alpine meadow. At Murren, and no doubt commonly elsewhere, there are a few very beautiful grasses among the flowers, but the most remarkable grass is one (Poa alpina), which has on every spikelet or head a bright green serpent-like streamer. Each of these "streamers" is, in fact, a young grass-plant, budded off "viviparously," as it is called, from the flower-head, or "spikelet," and having nothing to do with the proper fertilized seed or grain. The young plants so budded fall to the ground, and striking root rapidly, grow into separate individuals. It is probably owing to some condition in Alpine meadows adverse to the production of fertilized seed that this viviparous method of reproduction has been favoured, since it occurs also in an Alpine meadow-plant allied to the buckwheat, namely, Polygonum viviparum (not the kind mentioned above), where the lower flowers are converted into little red bulbs, by which the plant propagates. Both the viviparous grass and the polygonum are found in England. In fact, a very large proportion of Alpine plants occur in parts of the British islands (a legacy from the glacial period), though many which are abundant in Switzerland are rare and local here.

At a lower level, in the woods, we come upon other plants, not really "Alpine" at all, but of great and special beauty. We found four kinds of winter-green (Pirola), one with a very large, solitary flower, white and wax-like, and the beautiful white butterfly-orchid with nectaries three quarters of an inch long, and other large-flowered orchids. We were anxious to find the noble Martagon lily, and hunted in many glades and forest borders for it. At last, concealed on a bank in a wood, between Glion and Les Avants, it revealed itself in quantity, many specimens standing over three feet in height. Martagon is an Arabic word, signifying a Turkish cap. A very strange and uncanny-looking lily, which I had never seen before, turned up near Kandersteg at the Blue Lake, beloved of Mr. H. G. Wells. This is "the Herb Paris." It has four narrow outstretched green sepals, and four still narrower green petals, eight large stamens, and a purple seed capsule. Its broad oval leaves are also arranged in whorls of four. Its name has nothing to do with the "ville lumière," nor with the Trojan judge of female beauty, but refers to the symmetry and "parity" of its component parts. I was not surprised to find that "the Herb Paris" is poisonous, and was anciently used in medicine. It looks weird and deadly.

Marmots, glacier fleas (spring-tails, not true fleas), admirable trout, and burbot (the fresh-water cod, called "lote" in French), outrageous wood-gnats, which English people call by a Portuguese name as soon as they are on the Continent, and singing birds (usually one is too late in the season to hear them) were our zoological accompaniment. There were singularly few butterflies or other insects, probably in consequence of the previous wet weather.

July, 1909

CHAPTER III

GLETSCH

Varied and uncertain as the weather was in Switzerland during July of the year 1910, it showed a more decided character when I returned there at the end of August. For three weeks there was no flood of sunshine, no blazing of a cloudless blue sky, which is the one condition necessary to the perfection of the beauty of Swiss mountains, valleys and lakes. The Oberland was grey and shapeless, the Lauterbrünnen valley chilly and threatening; even the divine Jungfrau herself, when not altogether obliterated by the monotonous, impenetrable cloud, loomed in steely coldness—"a sterile promontory." Crossing the mountains from the Lake of Thun, we came to Montreux, only to find the pearl-like surface of the great Lake Leman transformed into lead. Not once in eight days did the celestial fortress called Les Dents du Midi reveal its existence, although we knew it was there, immensely high and remote, far away above the great buttresses of the Rhone valley. So completely was it blotted out by the conversion of that most excellent canopy, the air, into a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours, that it was difficult to imagine that it was still existing, and perhaps even glowing in sunshine above the pall of cloud. Italy, surely, we thought, would be free from this dreadful gloom.

The southern slopes of the Alps are often cloudless when the colder northern valleys are overhung with impenetrable mist. In four hours you can pass now from the Lake of Geneva through the hot Simplon Tunnel to the Lago Maggiore. So, hungering for sunshine, we packed, and ran in the ever-ready train through to Baveno. Thirty years ago we should have had to drive over the Simplon—a beautiful drive, it is true—but we should have taken sixteen hours in actually travelling from Montreux, and have had to pass a night en route at Brieg! A treacherous gleam of sunshine lasting half an hour welcomed us on emerging from the Simplon tunnel, and then for eight days the same leaden aspect of sky, mountain, and lake as that which we had left in Switzerland was maintained. Even this could not spoil altogether the beauty and interest of the fine old garden of the Borromeo family on the Isola Bella. Really big cypress trees, magnificent specimens of the Weymouth pine—the white pine of the United States, Pinus strobus, first brought from the St. Lawrence in 1705, and planted in Wiltshire by Lord Weymouth—a splendid camphor tree, strange varieties of the hydrangea, and many other old-fashioned shrubs adorn the quaint and well-designed terraces of that seat of ancient peace. The granite quarries close behind Baveno, and the cutting and chiselling of the granite by a population of some 2,000 quarrymen and stonemasons, were not deprived of their human interest by rain and skies more grey than the granite itself. But, at last, we gave up Italy in despair, retreated through the tunnel one morning, and an hour after mid-day were careering in a carriage along the Rhone valley—with jingling of bells and much cracking of a harmless whip—upwards on a drive of seven hours to the Rhone glacier, to the hotel called "Gletsch," staking all on the last chance of a change in the weather.

We passed the enclosed meadow near Brieg, whence three days later the splendidly daring South-American aviator started on his flight across the Alps, only to die after victory—a hero, whose courage and fatal triumph were worthy of a better cause. After some hours, passing many a black-timbered mountain village—the houses of which, set on stone piles, are the direct descendants of the pile-supported lake dwellings of the Stone Age on the shores of the Lake of Neuchatel—we came to the upper and narrower part of the valley. The road ascended by zig-zags through pine forests, in which the large blue gentian, with flowers and leaves in double rows on a gracefully bowed stem, were abundant. In open places the barberry, with its dense clusters of crimson fruit, was so abundant as actually to colour the landscape, whilst a huge yellow mullen nearly as big as a hollyhock, and bright Alpine "pinks," were there in profusion. Before the night fell, a long, furry animal, twice the size of a squirrel, and of dark brown colour, crossed the road with a characteristic undulating movement, a few feet in front of our carriage. It was a pine-marten, the largest of the weasel and pole-cat tribe, still to be found in our own north country. It must not be confused with the paler beech-marten of Anne of Brittany, which often takes up its abode in the roofs of Breton houses, according to my own experience in Dinard and the neighbourhood. Night fell, and our horses were still toiling up the mountain road. Impenetrable chasms lay below, and vast precipices above us. We crossed a bridge, and seemed in the darkness to plunge into the sheer rock itself, and, though thrilled with a delightful sense of mystery and awe, were feeling a little anxiety at the prospect of another hour among these gloomy, intangible dangers, when we rounded a projecting rock, and suddenly a brilliant constellation burst into view in the sky. It was the electric outfit of the Belvedere Hotel, 7,500 feet above the sea, and far up more than a thousand feet above us and the glacier's snout. In another minute the great arc lamps of the Gletsch Hotel, close to us, blazed forth, and we were welcomed into its snug hall and warmed by the great log-fire burning on its hospitable hearth.

The next day we were early afoot in the most brilliant sunshine, under a cloudless sky—really perfect Alpine weather. In the shade the persisting night-frost told of the great height of the marvellous amphitheatre which lay before us. The valley by which we had mounted the previous night abruptly abandons its steep gradient and gorge-like character, and widens into a flat, boulder-strewn plain, a little over a mile in diameter, surrounded, except for the narrow gap by which we had entered, by the steep, rocky sides of huge mountains. At the far end of the plain, a mile off, the great Rhone glacier comes toppling over the precipice, a snowy white, frozen cascade of a thousand feet in height. It looks even nearer than it is, and the gigantic teeth of white ice at the top of the fall seem no bigger than sentry-boxes, though we know they are more nearly the size of church steeples. The celebrated Furca road zig-zags up the mountain side for a thousand feet close to the glacier, and when you drive up it and reach the height of the Belvedere, you can step on to the ice close to the road. Then you can mount on to the flat, unbroken surface of the broad glacier stream above the fall, and trace the glacier to the snow-covered mountain-tops in which it originates. There is no such close and intimate view of a glacier to be had elsewhere in Europe by the traveller in diligence or carriage. We walked by the side of the infant Rhone, among the pebbles and boulders, to the overhanging snout of the great glacier from beneath which the river emerges. A very beautiful wine-red species of dwarf willow-herb (Epilobium Fleischeri) was growing abundantly in tufts among the pebbles, and many other Alpine plants greeted our eyes. The heat of the sun was that of midsummer, whilst a delicate air of icy freshness diffused itself from the great frozen mass in front of us.

Some large blocks of the glacier ice had fallen from above, and lay conveniently for examination. Whilst the walls of the ice-caves which have been cut into this and other glaciers present a perfectly smooth, continuous surface of clear ice, these fragments which had fallen from the surface exposed to the heat of the sun, were, as seen in the mass, white and opaque. When a stick was thrust into the mass, it broke into many-sided lumps of the size of a tennis-ball, which separated, and fell apart in a heap, like assorted coals thrown from a scuttle, though white instead of black. These were the curious glacier nodules, "grains du glacier," or "Gletcherkörne," characteristic of glacier ice as contrasted with lake ice. This structure of the glacier ice is peculiar to it, and is only made evident where the sun's rays penetrate it and melt the less pure ice which holds together the crystalline nodules. According to Dr. J. Young Buchanan, these nodules are masses of ice crystals comparatively free from mineral matter, whilst the water around them, which freezes less readily, contains mineral impurities in solution. The presence of saline matter in solution lowers, in proportion to its amount, the freezing-point of the water. Accordingly, although frozen into one solid mass with the nodules, the cementing ice melts under the heat of the penetrating rays of the sun sooner—that is, at a lower temperature—than do the purer crystalline nodules, and allows them to separate. It is owing to this that the exposed surface of glacier ice is white and powdery, disintegrated by the superficial heat, and forming a rough surface, on which one can safely walk. Lake ice does not break up in this manner under the sun's rays, but as it melts retains its smooth, slippery surface. It is formed in water, and not from the cementing and regelation of the powdery crystalline snow, as is glacier ice.

Pictures of the Rhone glacier published in the year 1820 and in the eighteenth century show that in old days the terminal ice-fall did not end abruptly in a narrowed "snout," as it does now, but spread out into a very broad half-dome or fan-shaped, apron-like expanse, some 700 feet high and a quarter of a mile broad at the base. It was considered one of the wonders of Switzerland, and was pictured in an exaggerated way in travellers' books. In 1873, when I first drove down the Furka road and saw the Rhone glacier, this wonderful, apron-like, terminal expansion of the glacier was still in existence. It has now completely disappeared. In those days, and for many years later, there was only a mule-path over the adjacent Grimsel Pass, but now there is a carriage road leading out of the Rhone glacier's basin northwards to Meiringen, whilst the old-established Furka road, at the other side of the amphitheatre, leads eastward to Andermatt, the St. Gothard, and the Lake of Lucerne. Hence three great roads now meet at Gletsch. Before leaving this wondrous spot we inspected some plump marmots, who were leading a happy life of ease and plenty in a large cage erected in front of the hotel; then in absolutely perfect weather we mounted the Grimsel road. We heard the frequent whistling of uncaged marmots as we ascended, and saw many of the little beasts sitting up on the rocks and diving into concealing crevices as we approached, just as do their smaller but closely allied cousins the prairie marmots (so-called "prairie dogs") of North America. The view, as one ascends the Grimsel, of the snow-peaks around Gletsch is a fine one in itself, but is vastly enhanced in beauty by the plunge downwards of the rocky gorge made by the Rhone as it leaves the flat-bottomed amphitheatre of its birth. The top of the Grimsel Pass, which is a little over 7,000 feet above sea-level, is the most desolate and bare of all such mountain passes. The rock is dark grey, almost black, and of unusually hard character. It is unstratified, and so resistant that it is everywhere worn into smooth, rounded surfaces, instead of being splintered and shattered. A small, black-looking lake at the top of the pass contains to this day the bones of 500 Austrians and French who fought here in 1799. It is called the Totensee, or Dead Men's Lake. At this point one stands on a great watershed, dividing the rivers of the north from the rivers of the south. You may put one foot in a rivulet which is carrying water down the Aar Valley, and through the Lakes of Brienz and of Thun to the Rhine and North Sea, whilst you keep the other in another little stream, whose particles will pass by the Rhone gorge and valley through the Lake of Geneva to the great Rhone and the Mediterranean. Three incomparably fine days—September 17th, 18th, and 19th—atoned for three weeks of sunless cloud. One of them we spent in the high valley of Rosenlaui, where are hairy-lipped gentians and the blue-iced glacier, but of these I have not space to tell. Then the clouds and the rain resumed their odious domination, and we left Lucerne and its lakes invisible, overwhelmed in grey fog, and made for Paris.

October, 1910

CHAPTER IV

THE PROBLEM OF THE GALLOPING HORSE

Until instantaneous photography was introduced, a little more than twenty-five years ago (by the discovery of the means of increasing the sensitiveness of a photographic plate), and gradually became familiar to everyone in the exhibitions known as the "biograph" or "cinematograph," the actual position of the legs in a galloping horse at any given fraction of a second was unknown. Anyone who has tried to "see" their position will agree that it cannot be done. Attempts had been made to make out what the movements and positions of the legs "must" be, by studying the hoof-marks in a soft track laid for the purpose. But the result was not satisfactory.

As everyone knows, the so-called "biograph" pictures are produced by an enormous series of consecutive instantaneous photographs taken on a continuous transparent flexible film or ribbon. The camera has a mechanism attached to it by which the sensitive film is jerked along so as to expose a length of two inches (the size of the picture given by the camera) for, say, one-thirtieth of a second without movement. The film is then jerked on and a second bit of two inches is brought into place for a thirtieth of a second and so on until a ribbon of some thousand pictures is obtained. The interval between each picture is usually also about one-thirtieth of a second, so that at least fifteen pictures are taken in every second of time, and according to the requirements of illumination and the rapidity of the movements of the men or animals photographed this number may be greatly increased. The film is developed, printed and fixed on a similar rolling mechanism and the pictures are thrown one by one by a powerful lantern on to a screen, and are jerked along at the same rate as that at which they were taken, and are magnified enormously. Animals and men in rapid movement, railway trains, the waves of the sea are thus photographed, and when the serial pictures are thrown successively on the screen the result is that the eye detects no interval between the successive pictures—the figures appear as continuous moving objects. This is due to the fact that whilst the impression produced on the retina of the eye by each picture lasts for a tenth of a second (less with brighter light), the interval between the successive pictures is only one-thirtieth of a second, and accordingly the retinal impression has not gone or ceased before the next is there; hence there is no break in the series of retinal impressions, but continuity.[1]

Plate I.—Figs. 1 to 11, drawings from Muybridge's photographs of consecutive poses of the galloping horse, each photograph taken by an exposure of one fortieth of a second and separated from the next by an interval of one fortieth of a second. The horse in Fig. 10 has returned to the same pose as that with which the series starts in Fig. 1. Fig. 11 gives a pose one hundredth of a second earlier in the series than that taken in Fig. 2. Fig. 12 shows a combination of the hinder half of Fig. 9 with the front half of Fig. 6, giving thus the maximum extension of both fore and hind legs.

It is this duration of the impression on the retina which prevents us from separating or "seeing distinctly" the successive phases of a horse's legs as he gallops by, and has led to the remarkable result that no artist has ever until twenty-five years ago represented correctly any one phase of the movement of the legs in a galloping horse, and it is doubtful whether that correctness is what the painter of a picture really ought to put on his canvas. If we examine the separate pictures of a galloping horse as taken on a cinematograph film, we have before us the actual record of the positions assumed by the legs at intervals of the thirtieth of a second (or whatever less interval and length of exposure may have been chosen), and it is simply astonishing to find how utterly different they are from what had been supposed. Twenty years ago Mr. Muybridge produced a number of these instantaneous photographs of moving animals—such as the horse in gallop, trot, canter, amble, walk, and jumping and bucking—also the dog running, birds of several kinds flying, camel, elephant, deer, and other animals in rapid movement. The animals were photographed on a track in front of a wall, marked out to show measured yards; the time was accurately recorded to show rate of movement and length of exposure, and of interval between successive pictures. By means of three cameras worked by electric shutter-openers, a side, a back, and a front view of the animal were taken simultaneously. Repeated photographs were obtained at intervals of a fraction of a second, giving a series of fifteen or twenty pictures of the moving animal. The length of exposure for each picture was one-fortieth of a second or less, and the interval between successive pictures was about the same. Muybridge's great difficulty had been to invent a shutter which would act rapidly enough. I have some of these pictures before me now (see Pl. I). They show that what has been drawn by artists and called the "flying gallop," in which the legs are fully extended and all the feet are off the ground, with the hind hoofs turned upwards, never occurs at all in the galloping horse, nor anything in the least like it. There is a fraction of a second when all four legs of the galloping horse are off the ground, but they are not then extended, but, on the contrary, are drawn, the hind ones forward and the front ones backward, under the horses' belly (see Pl. I, figs. 2 and 3). A model showing this actualinstantaneous attitude of the galloping horse has recently been placed in the Natural History Museum. When the hoofs touch the ground again after this instantaneous lifting and bending of the legs under the horse, the first to touch it is that of one of the hind legs (Pl. I, fig. 4), which is pushed very far forward, forming an acute angle with the body. The shock of the horse's impact on the ground is thus received by the hind leg, which reaches obliquely forward beneath the body like an elastic <-spring. Since the instantaneous photographs have become generally known artists have ceased to represent the galloping horse in the curious stretched pose which used to be familiar to everyone in Herring's racing plates (see Pl. II, fig. 1), with both fore and hind legs nearly horizontal, and the flat surface of the hind hoofs actually turned upwards! Indeed, as early as 1886 a French painter, M. Aimé Morot, availed himself of the information afforded by the then quite novel instantaneous photographs of the galloping horse, and exhibited a picture of the cavalry fight at Rezonville between the French and Germans, in which the old flying gallop does not appear, but the attitudes of the horses are those revealed by the new photographs. The picture is an epoch-making one, whether justifiable or not, and is now in the gallery of the Luxembourg. It must be noted that though Meissonier and others had succeeded in representing more truthfully than had been customary, other movements of the horse, such as "pacing," ambling, cantering, and trotting, yet in regard to them, also, more easily observed because less rapid, the instantaneous photograph served to correct erroneous conclusions.

Plate II.—Various representations of the gallop. Fig. 1.—From Géricault's picture, "The Epsom Derby, 1821." Figs. 2 and 3.—From gold-work on the handle of a Mycenæan dagger, 1800 b.c. Fig. 4.—From iron-work found at Koban, east of the Black Sea, dating from 500 b.c. Fig. 5.—From Muybridge's instantaneous photograph of a fox-terrier, showing the probable origin of the pose of the "flying gallop" transferred from the dog to other animals by the Mycenæans. Fig. 6.—The stretched-leg prance from the Bayeux tapestry (eleventh century). Fig. 7.—The stretched-leg prance used to represent the gallop by Carle Vernet in 1760. Fig. 8.—The stretched-leg prance used by early Egyptian artists.

Plate III.—Representations of the gallop. Fig. 1.—A combination of the hinder half of Fig. 10, Pl. I, with the front half of Fig. 4, Pl. I. Fig. 2.—One of the many admirable Chinese representations of the galloping horse. This is very early, namely, 100 a.d. The pose is that of the "flying gallop" as in Figs. 2, 4 and 5 of Pl. II. Fig. 3.—From a Japanese drawing of the seventeenth century; the pose is a modification of the "flying gallop," and agrees closely with that of Fig. 1 in this plate. Fig. 4.—The flex-legged prance from a bas-relief in the frieze of the Parthenon, b.c. 300. Fig. 5.—A modern French drawing giving a pose very similar to that of Figs. 1 and 3. It is the most "effective" pose yet adopted by artists, and is an improvement on the full-stretched flying gallop, though failing to suggest the greatest effort and rapidity. Fig. 6.—Instantaneous photographs of four phases of a horse "jumping."

Two very interesting questions arise in connection with the discovery by instantaneous photography of the actual positions successively taken up by the legs of a galloping horse. The first is one of historical and psychological importance, viz. why and when did artists adopt the false but generally accepted attitude of the "flying gallop"? The second is psychological and also physiological, viz. if we admit that the true instantaneous phases of the horse's gallop (or of any other very rapid movement of anything) cannot be seen separately by the human eye, but can only be separated by instantaneous photography, ought an artist to introduce into a picture, which is not intended to serve merely as a scientific diagram, an appearance which has no actual existence so far as his or other human eyes are concerned, viz. that of the actual pose assumed instantaneously and simultaneously by the four legs of the galloping horse? And further, if he ought not to do this, what ought he to do, on the supposition that his purpose is to convey to others the same impression of rapid movement which exists—not, be it observed, in his eye, or on the retina of that eye—but in his mind, as the result of attention and judgment?

The first of these questions has been answered by the great French authority on archæology and the history of art, M. Salomon Reinach,[2] whose writings are as lucid and terse as they are accurate, and solidly based on research. M. Reinach shows (and produces drawings to support his statement) that in Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, mediæval, and modern art up to the end of the eighteenth century "the flying gallop" does not appear at all! The first example (so far as those schools are concerned) is an engraving by G. T. Stubbs in 1794 of a horse called "Baronet." The essential points about "the flying gallop" are that the fore-limbs are fully stretched forward, the hind limbs fully stretched backward, and that the flat surfaces of the hinder hoofs are facing upwards. After this engraving of 1794 the attitude introduced by Stubbs became generally adopted in English art to represent a galloping horse, and the French painter, Géricault, introduced it into France in 1821 in his celebrated picture, the "Derby d'Epsom," (see Pl. II, fig. 1) which is now in the Louvre.

Previously to this there had been three other conventional poses for the running horse in art, of which only the third (to be mentioned below) has any resemblance to a real pose, and that not one of rapid movement. We find: (1) The elongated or stretched-leg "prance" (French, "cabré allongé"), in which, whilst the front legs are off the ground, and all four legs are stretched nearly as much as in the flying gallop, there is this essential difference, viz. that the hoofs of the hind legs are firmly planted on the ground (see Pl. II, fig. 7). This pose is seen in a picture by the same artist (Stubbs) of two years' earlier date than that in which he introduced "the flying gallop." The "stretched-leg prance" is found in Egyptian works (Pl. II, fig. 8) of 580 b.c., and is a favourite pose to indicate the gallop, in ancient Assyrian as well as mediæval art, for instance, in the Bayeux tapestry (Pl. II, fig. 6). We find, further, (2) that the second pose made use of for this purpose is the "flexed-leg prance," in which all the four legs are flexed, so that the hind legs rest on the ground beneath the horse's body, whilst the forelegs "paw" the air. This is seen both in Egyptian, Greek, and Renaissance art (Leonardo, Raphael, and Velasquez). It is by no means so graceful or true to Nature as the next pose, but gives an impression of greater energy and rapidity. The third pose represents a kind of "prancing," and is seen on the frieze of the Parthenon (Pl. III, fig. 4), and in many subsequent Greek, Roman, and other works copied from or inspired by, this Greek original. One only of the hind legs is on the ground, and the animal's body is thrown up as though its advance were checked by the rein. It is called "the canter" by M. Reinach, but that term can only be applied to it when the axis of the body is horizontal and parallel to the surface of the ground.

The reader will perhaps now suppose that we must attribute the "flying gallop" to the original, if inaccurate genius of an eighteenth century English horse-painter. That, however, is not the case. M. Reinach has shown that it has a much more extraordinary history. It is neither more nor less than the fact that in the pre-Homeric art of Greece—that which is called "Mycenæan" (of which so much was made known by the discoveries of that wonderful man Schliemann when he dug up the citadel of Agamemnon)—the figures of animals, horses, deer, bulls (see the beautiful gold cups of Vaphio), dogs, lions, and griffins, in the exact conventional pose of "the flying gallop," are quite abundant! (See Pl. II, figs. 2, 3 and 4.) There was an absolute break in the tradition of art between the early gold-workers of Mykené (1800 to 1000 b.c.) and the Greeks of Homer's time (800 b.c.). Europe never received it, nor did the Assyrians nor the Egyptians. Thirty centuries and more separate the reappearance in Europe of the flying gallop—through Stubbs—from the only other European examples of it—the Mycenæan. What, then, had become of it, and how did it come to England? M. Reinach shows, by actual specimens of art-work, that the Mycenæan art tradition, and with it the "flying gallop," passed slowly through Asia Minor north eastwards to the Trans-caucasus (Koban, 500 b.c.), to Northern Persia, and thence by Southern Siberia to the Chinese Empire (Pl. III, fig. 2) as early as 150 b.c., and that the "flying gallop," so to speak, "flourished" there for centuries, and was transmitted by the Chinese artists to the Japanese, in whose drawings it is frequent (Pl. III, fig. 3). It was at last finally brought back to Europe, and to the extreme west of it, namely, England, by the importation in the eighteenth century into England of large numbers of Japanese works of art. It was a Japanese drawing (M. Reinach infers) which suggested to Stubbs the upturned hinder hoofs and the detachment from the ground of "the flying gallop" which he gave in his portrait of "Baronet," and so established that pose for a century in modern European art. This is a delightful tracing out of the wanderings of an artistic "convention," and the curious thing is that its chief importance is not that it has to do with the movements of the horse, but that it tends (as do other discoveries) to establish the gradual passage of pre-classical Mycenæan art across Central Asia to China and Japan by trade routes and human migrations which had no touch with later Greece nor with Assyria nor India.

How did the Mycenæans come to invent, or at any rate adopt, the convention of "the flying gallop," seeing that it does not truly represent either the fact or the appearance of a galloping horse? Though 20,000 years ago the earliest of all known artists, the wonderful cave-men of the Reindeer period, drew bison, boars, and deer in rapid running movement with consummate skill, they were (be it said to their credit!) innocent of the conventional pose of the "flying gallop." I base this statement on my own knowledge of their work. M. Reinach thinks that the "flying gallop" was devised as an intentional expression of energy in movement. I venture to hold the opinion that it was observed by the Mycenæans in the dog, in which Muybridge's photographs (now before me) demonstrate that it occurs regularly as an attitude of that animal's quickest pace or gallop (see fig. 5, Pl. II). It is easy to see the "flying gallop" in the case of the dog, since the dog does not travel so fast as the galloping horse, and can be more readily brought under accurate vision on account of its smaller size. The late Professor Marey (a great investigator of animal movement) appears to have denied that the dog exhibits the full stretch of both limbs with the pads of the hind-feet upturned, and all the feet free from the ground. He was mistaken, as Muybridge's photograph giving side and back view of a galloping fox-terrier amply demonstrates. It is quite in accordance with probability that the early Mycenæan artists, having seen how the dog gallops, erroneously proceeded to put the galloping horse, and all other animals which they wished "to make gallop," into the same position.

It appears, then, that the poses used by artists at different times and in different parts of the world to represent the "galloping" of the horse have no correspondence to any of the poses actually assumed by a galloping horse as now demonstrated by instantaneous photography. The "prancing" attitude of the horses of the frieze of the Parthenon was probably not intended to represent rapid movement at all. The "stretched-leg" pose and the "flex-leg" pose are, as a matter of fact, phases of "the jump," and are definitely recorded in Muybridge's instantaneous photographs of the jumping horse, but have no existence in "galloping" nor in any rapid running of the horse. They were probably adopted by the artists of Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and their successors in Europe as an expedient without conviction, to represent rapid movement, the true poses of which defied satisfactory reproduction. And it is also the fact that the "flying gallop," which appeared in Mycenæan art thirty-seven centuries ago, and then travelled by a "Scythian" route through Tartary to China, and came back to Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, is also—so far as it has any real representative in the action of the horse—only approached by a brief phase of the "jump." The poses of the horse in jumping are shown in the small figures taken from instantaneous photographs and reproduced in Fig. 6 of Pl. III. The "flying gallop" ("ventre a terre"), with all four legs stretched, and the under surface of the hind feet upturned, is really seen by us all every day in the dog, and is recorded in instantaneous photographs of that animal going at full speed. In fact, the gallop of the dog (and of some other small animals) is a series of jumps; the animal "bounds along." But this is a totally different thing from the gallop of the horse. It is probable that the dog's gallop was transferred, so to speak, to the horse by artists, and a certain justification for it was found in one of the attitudes of a jumping horse, which, however, never exhibits both the front and the hind legs simultaneously in so completely horizontal a position as they are made to take in the Mycenæan gold-work and the modern "racing plates."

How, then, we may now ask, ought an artist to represent a galloping horse? Some critics say that he ought not to represent anything in such rapid action at all. But, putting that opinion aside, it is an interesting question as to what a painter should depict on his canvas in order to convey to others who look at it the state of mind, of impression, feeling, emotion, judgment, which a live, galloping horse produces in him. The scientific draughtsman would, of course, present to us a series of drawings exactly like the instantaneous photographs, his object being to show what "is," and not what the artist aims at, namely, what "appears," "seems," or (without pondering and analysis) "is thought to be." The painter, in his quality of artist, would be wrong to select any one of the dozen or more poses of the galloping horse published by Muybridge, each limited to the fortieth of a second, since no human eye can fix (as the photographic camera can) separate pictures following one another at the rate of twenty a second, each enduring one fortieth of a second, and each separated by an interval of a fortieth of a second from the next. All the phases which occur in any one-tenth of a second (only two, or possibly three of the Muybridge series shown in Pl. I) are, as it were, fused in our visual impression, because each picture lasts on the retina of the eye for one-tenth of a second, or (to put it more accurately) because the "impression" or condition of the retina produced by each picture persists or endures for the tenth of a second.

It may, perhaps, be suggested (and, indeed, has been), that it is the "blurred" or "fused" picture produced by the successive poses of the galloping horse's legs in one-tenth of a second that the painter ought to imitate on his canvas. In support of this notion we have the fact that the rapidly running wheels of a coach or of a gun-carriage (as in the pictures by Wouwerman) are represented by artists, not with the twelve or fourteen spokes which we know to be there—and would be photographed as separate things in an exposure of the fortieth of a second—but as a blurred haze of some fifty or more indistinct "spokes." In this case it undoubtedly results that the observer of the picture is satisfied and receives the mental impression or illusion of a rapid rotation of the wheel. I have tried the experiment with instantaneous photographs of the galloping horse, and I get three results: first, no combination of successive phases occupying one-tenth of a second gives anything resembling the "flying gallop" of the racing plates (the Mycenæan and Stubbsian pose), or any other conventional pose; second, no combination of successive instantaneous photographs limited to ten second gives any pose which satisfies the judgment and suggests a movement like the gallop; third, the combination which comes nearest to satisfying the judgment as being a natural appearance, but does not quite succeed in doing so, is one formed by the fusion of figs. 2 and 3 of Pl. I. This gives all four legs off the ground, drawn up or flexed beneath the horse's body, as in Morot's picture of the sabre-charge at Resonville.

The fact is that we have to take into consideration two other factors in the process, which we call "seeing," besides the duration of the retinal impression or excitation. These are, first, attention, and second, judgment. We are apt to think that "seeing" is a simple, straightforward sort of thing, whereas it is really a strangely complex and delusive process. "I did not see it, therefore it was not there," or "You must have seen it; it was right in front of you," are common assertions, and the belief that such assertions are justified leads to miscarriage of justice in courts of law. Yet everyone knows that he may stare out of the window of a railway carriage and have a long panorama pass before his eyes, or may walk along a crowded street and look his acquaintances in the face, and in neither case will he have "seen" or recognized anything, or be able to give an account of the scene that was pictured on the back of his eye. Attention, the direction of the mind to the sensation, is necessary; and it appears that it is very difficult (to some more than to others) to hold the attention alert, and to give it to the unexpected. In fact, to a very large extent we can only "see" (using the word to signify the ultimate mental condition) that which we are prepared to see or that which we expect to see. In the absence of such expectation, a very strongly illuminated or well-marked, outstanding object is far more readily "seen" than less marked objects. Accordingly, the outstretched legs of the galloping horse, now in front and now behind, are "seen," whilst the rest of the phases are not observed. Moreover, it is a fact that the swinging pendulum of a clock is "seen" at the extreme position of the swing on each side, and not in the intermediate space. This is because the image is formed very quickly, twice in the space where the bob of the pendulum is coming to the limit of its swing and is again returning on its course. For the same reason, the outstretched legs of the horse going up to their limit and at once returning give in very quick succession, near their extreme limit, an ascending and a descending phase which are not strictly but sensibly alike, and so doubly impress the retina, and obtain for the legs "attention" when in that extreme position. The choice of the attitude depicted by Morot is explained by the fact that, as is shown by its persistence through two successive pictures (figs. 2 and 3 of Pl. I), this pose must produce a more continuous impression on the retina than any other of the attitudes shown, since none of them endure through two successive pictures.

The mental process of attention results in a certain duration or memory of the mental condition which is a distinct thing from the primary retinal impression, and leads to the ignoring or mental obliteration of an instantaneous interval separating two phases of the position of moving legs which have strongly "arrested the attention." Hence, it seems that the most forward pose of the galloping horse's front legs and the most backward pose of its hind legs—though far from simultaneous, even in the slow changing retinal impressions—may be mentally combined by "the arrest of attention," and that the artist really ought to present his picture of the galloping horse with those two poses combined (although as a matter of scientific truth they do not occur simultaneously) in order that he may produce by his painted piece of canvas, as nearly as he can, the mental result which we call "seeing" a horse gallop. This combination of the front half of one figure with the hinder half of another so as to give in each case the extreme phase of extension of the legs I have made in Pl. I, fig. 12.

But there is, further, in all "seeing" before even a mental result of attention to the retinal picture is, as it were, "passed," admitted and registered as "a thing seen," the further operation of rapid criticism or judgment, brief though it be. We are always unconsciously forming lightning-like judgments by the use of our eyes, rejecting the improbable, and (as we consider) preposterous, and accepting and therefore "seeing" what our judgment approves even when it is not there! We accept as "a thing seen" a wheel buzzing round with something like fifty spokes—but we cannot accept a horse with eight or sixteen legs! The four-leggedness of a horse is too dominant a prejudice for us to accept a horse with several indistinct blurred legs as representing what we see when the horse gallops. The mind revolts at such a presentation, though it is true, and the whole scheme and composition of the artist is perverted or fails to gain attention and to exercise its charm—by the unwelcome presence in his picture of the revolting truth. It is the consideration of facts of this kind which enables us to understand the origin and importance of what are called "conventions" in pictorial or glyptic art. The artist is, in fact, operating by means of his painted canvas or moulded clay upon a queer, prejudiced, ill-seeing, dull, living creature—his brother-man. In order to give if possible to that brother, by means of a painted sheet, some or all of the delights, emotions, suggestions, perceptions of beauty, and so on, which he himself has experienced in contemplating a real scene, the artist has to present that scene, not as it really is, nor even as he thinks it really is, but in such a way that his canvas shall appeal to his brother's attention and judgment with the same emotional and intellectual result as the scene itself produced in him. Therefore he must not aim at accuracy of reproduction of natural fact nor even of visual fact, but at the transference to another mind of his own mental condition—his inner judgment as to "things seen"—by means of necessarily imperfect pictorial mimicry. He must therefore avoid startling or abnormal truthfulness of observation of the unessential and even more strictly must he refuse to make his picture a scientific diagram demonstrating what "is" rather than what is "seen" or is "thought to have been seen."

On these grounds I find that the most satisfactory pictures of the galloping horse are those which combine a phase of the movement of the front legs with a phase of the movement of the hind legs, not simultaneous in actual occurrence, but following one another. It is for the artist to select the combination best suited to producing the mental result aimed at. Some of the Chinese and Japanese representations of the galloping horse and some of their European imitations (but not all—certainly not that of Stubbs, of the Epsom Derby of Géricault, and the racing plates) seem to me to be eminently satisfactory and successful in this respect. In the pictures to which I allude (Pl. III, figs. 3 and 5) all the legs are off the ground; the front legs are advanced, but one or both may be more or less flexed, whilst the hind legs, though directed backwards with upturned hoofs, are not nearly horizontal (as they actually are in the galloping dog), but show the moderate extension which really occurs in the horse, and is recorded by instantaneous photography. This pose, favoured by many European and Japanese artists, can be obtained by uniting the outstretched hind legs of fig. 9 of the Muybridge series (Pl. I), with the outstretched forelegs of fig. 6, as shown in Pl. I, fig. 12, or by uniting the hind legs of fig. 10 with the forelegs of fig. 4 as shown in Pl. III, fig. 1.

With regard to the representation of other "gaits" of the horse than that of the rapid gallop—such as canter, trot, amble, rack, and walk—I have no doubt that instantaneous photography can (and in practice does) furnish the painter with perfectly correct and at the same time useful and satisfactory poses of the horse's limbs. These, though of longer duration than the poses of the gallop, can only be correctly estimated by the eye with great difficulty, and only sketched by artists of exceptional skill and patience. The movement of the wings of birds in flight has been very successfully analysed by instantaneous photography. Some of the poses revealed must familiarise the public with what can be, and, in fact, has been, observed in the case of large sea-birds, by the unassisted eye, and has been represented in pictures by the more careful observers of nature among modern painters. A large sea-bird sailing along with apparently motionless wings has been photographed in the act of giving a single stroke so rapid as to escape observation by the eye.

An interesting question in regard to the movements of the horse is that as to how far any known "pace" is natural to that animal, and how far it has been acquired by training and is, in a sense, artificial. We know so little of the wild horse, and of the more abundant wild asses and zebras, that it is difficult to say anything precise on this question. There is only one region in which the true original wild horse of the northern part of Asia and Europe still exists. That is the Gobi Desert, in Central Asia. This horse is known as Prevalsky's wild horse, in honour of the Russian traveller who discovered it. Live specimens are now to be seen in the Zoological Gardens and elsewhere. It closely resembles the drawings of horses made by the palæolithic Cromagnard cave-men. A century ago a wild horse, probably of the same race as this, inhabited the Kirghiz Steppes, and was known as the Tarpan: it is now extinct. The more southern Arabian horse is not known in the wild state, whilst the wild horses of America are descendants of domesticated European horses which have "run wild." I do not know of any studies of the movements of the true wild horse, nor of those of wild asses and zebras, carried out by the aid of instantaneous photography. It would be interesting to know whether untaught wild "equines" would fall naturally into the gaits known as "the amble" and "the rack," or whether the walk, the trot, and the gallop are their only natural gaits.

The amble, in which the fore and hind leg on the same side are advanced simultaneously, is a natural gait of the elephant, the fastest Muybridge could get from that great beast. He made a menagerie elephant amble at the rate of a mile in seven minutes. The only other animal known to habitually exhibit "the amble" is the giraffe. It is often exhibited by the giraffes in the Zoological Gardens in London, but has not, I believe, been recorded by a series of instantaneous photographs. When going at full speed over the grass wilds of Central Africa the giraffe exhibits a gait more like the galloping of deer and antelopes, and carries the long neck horizontally. No complete study of the "gaits" of large animals other than the horse has been made, since menagerie specimens and menagerie conditions are not satisfactory for the purpose, and, unfortunately, it has not been possible as yet to take series of photographs of them in their wild conditions.

The electric spark furnishes a most important means of taking instantaneous photographs, but the operator must perform in the dark. An electric spark can be obtained which lasts only the one two-thousandth of a second, and by its use as the sole illuminating agent we can get a photograph of a phase of movement lasting only that excessively short space of time, or, if we please, a succession of such phases by using a succession of sparks. Thus, a rifle bullet is readily photographed while in flight with scarcely perceptible distortion. A wheel revolving many hundred times a second can thus be photographed, and appears to be stationary. Dr. Schillings has applied this method to the photography of wild animals by night in the forests of tropical Africa, and has published an interesting book giving his photographic results. In order to take these pictures the track followed by certain animals has to be detected, and then a thread is stretched "breast-high" across the track, so that the animal coming along it by night shall pull the thread. Immediately the thread is pulled it sets an electric contact in action. There is a brief flash of one two-thousandth of a second, and a picture is taken by a camera previously fixed, out of harm's way, so as to focus the area where the thread was stretched.

Dr. Schillings obtained some very remarkable photographs of "the night life of the forest" in this way—lions and leopards advancing on their prey were suddenly revealed, and the helpless antelope or other victim was shown crouching in the dark, or making a desperate effort to escape.

The electric-spark method was applied by a friend of mine to demonstrate the movements by which a kitten falling backwards from a table succeeds in turning itself so as to alight on its feet. During a fall of less than 3 feet he obtained five successive spark-pictures of the kitten, which, I beg it may be clearly understood, was a pet kitten, and was neither frightened nor hurt by the proceedings.

Instantaneous photographs, whether obtained by the use of an electric spark as a means of illumination, or by the less rapid method of a spring shutter working in combination with a sensitive film, which is jerked along so as to be exposed when the shutter is open and travel when it is shut, has been applied to the analysis of other movements than those I have mentioned, and has yet to be applied to many more, such as the crawling of insects and millipedes, and the beautiful rippling movement of the legs and body by which many marine worms swim. It has been extensively used in the study of human locomotion, and of the successive poses of the arms and legs in various athletic exercises, and in such games as baseball and golf.

A first-rate fencer of my acquaintance had a five-minutes' film of himself taken when fencing, giving 10,000 consecutive poses. He wished to see exactly what movements he made, and to ascertain by this minute examination any error or want of grace in his action, in order to avoid it. An unexpected picture is obtained when a man or woman is thus "biographed" whilst walking rapidly, and suddenly turns to the right or left. A fraction of a second occurs when the toes of the two feet are directed towards one another (that is to say, are "turned in"), as one of the legs swings round in the break-off to right or left. This instantaneous phase is very awkward and ugly in appearance. It is never pictured by artists, although regularly occurring, and seems to have been as little known before instantaneous photography was introduced as were most of the phases of the horse's gallop. The positions assumed when in the air by a high-jump athlete are almost incredible as revealed by the camera. He appears to be sitting in a most uncomfortable way on the rope over which he is projecting himself.

A very fine attitude is fixed for the artist in one of Muybridge's instantaneous series of the "bowler"—the cricket "bowler." The up-lifted right arm, the curve outwards of the whole figure on the right side, and the free hang of the right leg make a most effective pose for a sculptor to reproduce. Among the most remarkable results obtained in Muybridge's series are the stages of the growth or development of strong "expression" in the face. The anxiety in the face of the baseball batsman as he awaits the ball is painful; as he hits at the ball his expression is one of savage ferocity, and in a fraction of a second this gives place to a dawning smile, which as we pass along two or three later "instantanèes" develops into a broad grin of satisfaction. Another genuine study of expression both of face and gesture and movement is given in the series where a pailful of cold water is unexpectedly poured over the back of a bather seated in a sitz bath—astonishment, dismay, anger, eagerness to escape, and the reaction to shock are all clearly shown. Darwin's studies on "the expression of the emotions" would have been greatly assisted by such analysis, and the subject might even now be developed by the use of serial instantaneous records obtained by photography. It may be useful to those interested in this subject to know that copies of Muybridge's large series of instantaneous photographs[3] of animal and human subjects in movement are preserved both in the library of the Royal Academy of Arts in London and in the Radcliffe Library at Oxford. I may also mention the extremely valuable series of instantaneous photographs of living bacteria, blood-parasites and infusoria produced by MM. Pathé, and the series of fishes and various invertebrates (including the curious caterpillar-like Peripatus) taken by Mr. Martin Duncan.

The representation of the moon in pictures of the ordinary size (some three feet long by two in height) is a case in which the artist habitually—one may almost say invariably—departs greatly from scientific truth, and it is a question as to whether he is justified in what he does. Take first the case of the low-lying moon near the horizon as contrasted with the high moon. Everyone knows that the moon (and the sun[4] also) appears to be much bigger when it is low than when it is high. Everyone who has not looked into the matter closely is prepared to maintain that the luminous disc in the sky—whether of moon or of sun—not merely seems to, but actually does, occupy a bigger space when it is low down near the horizon than when it is high up, more nearly overhead. Of course, no one nowadays imagines that the moon or the sun swells as it sinks or diminishes in volume as it rises. Those who think about it at all, say that the greater length of atmosphere through which one sees the low sun or moon, as compared with the high, magnifies the disc as a lens might do. This, however, is not the case. If we take a photograph of the moon when low and another with the same instrument and the same focus when it is high, we find that the celestial disc produces on the plate (as it does on our eyes) a picture-disc of practically the same size in both positions. In fact, the high moon or sun produces a picture-disc of a little larger size than the low moon or sun. I have here reproduced (Pl. IV) a photograph, published by M. Flammarion, in which the moon has been allowed to print itself on a photographic plate exposed during the time the moon was rising, and it is seen that the track of the moon has not diminished in width as it rose higher and higher. No one will readily believe this, yet it is a demonstrable fact. Astronomers have made accurate measurements which show that there is no diminution of the disc under these circumstances, but a slight increase—since the moon is a very little nearer to us when overhead than when we see it across the horizon.

Plate IV.—The track of the rising moon registered by continuous exposure of a photographic plate. It is given here in order to show that the diameter of the visible disc of the moon does not diminish as it rises. The slight increase in the breadth of the track registered by the moon's disc is probably due to a little distortion caused by the side portion of the lens. After M. Flammarion. The actual width of the moon's disc as printed here is a little over one eighth of an inch, which, if we regard it as "a picture" and not merely as a mechanical record, implies that the observer's eye is only about 14-1/2 inches distant from the picture plane instead of the more usual 18 inches, which corresponds to a diameter of the pictured moon's disc of between 1/6th and 1/7th of an inch (.156 inch).

If we put a piece of glass coated with a thin layer of water-colour paint into a frame, and then make a peep-hole in a board which we fix upright between us and the upright piece of framed glass, we can keep the framed glass steady (let us suppose it to be part of the window of a room), and then we can move the peep-hole board back from it into the room to measured distances. At a distance of one and a half feet from the framed glass, which is that at which an artist usually has his eye from his canvas or paper, we can trace on the smeared or tinted piece of glass the outlines of things seen through it exactly as they fill up the area of the glass—men, houses, trees, the moon. The moon's disc (and the same is true of the sun) is found always to occupy a space on the glass which is 1/115th of the distance of the eye from the framed glass plate. When the eye-to-frame distance is eighteen inches, the diameter of the disc of the moon on the smeared glass will occupy exactly 1/115th of eighteen inches, which is between one-sixth and one-seventh of an inch. Similarly if the peep-hole is at nine and a half feet or 114 inches from the framed glass (which stands for us as the equivalent of an artist's picture) the moon will occupy almost exactly one inch in diameter—the size of a halfpenny. With such a simple apparatus of peep-hole and smeared glass in an upright frame, it is easy to mark off the size covered by the moon (or sun), whether low or high, on the smeared glass, and it is found never to vary whether high or low—so long as the same "eye-to-frame" or "peep-hole" distance is preserved. That seems to be an important fact for painters of sun-sets and moon-rises. But what do they do? They never give the right size (namely one-sixth of an inch) which corresponds to an eye-to-frame distance of eighteen inches. They give to a high moon, if they are very careful, a quarter of an inch for diameter. This means that the observer is about two and a half feet, or thirty inches from the picture—nearly twice what the artist's eye really is as he paints. And then—if painting a moon-rise or sunset—they suddenly pretend to go to a distance of nine and a half feet from the picture and make the moon an inch across because it is low down, or even give the moon two inches in diameter, which would mean that they (and those who look at the picture when hung up for view) are observing at nineteen feet distance from the front plane or frame of the picture. They do not alter the other features in the picture to suit this change of distance of the eye from the frame and there is no warning given. Certainly there is no obvious and necessary reason for treating a picture containing a high moon as though you were three feet from the front plane of the scene presented, and a low moon as though you were twenty feet from that plane! The confusion which may result in the representation of other objects when these changes of eye-to-frame distance are made is shown by the following simple facts. According to the simple laws of perspective, if the eye is at thirty inches from the picture-plane or frame (as declared by a moon drawn of a little more than a quarter of an inch broad), a post or a man six feet high drawn on the canvas as three inches high absolutely and definitely means that that man or post is sixty feet away from the observer inside the picture. The height of the represented object is the same fraction of the real object as the eye-to-frame distance is of the distance of the observer to the real object. If by a two-inch moon the artist has thrown you back from the front plane of the scene to a distance of nineteen feet, then the six-foot post or man drawn as three inches high definitely asserts that it or he is 456 feet distant within the picture. So, too, if the church tower which cuts the moon is really sixty feet high and is drawn of two inches vertical measure in the picture, it is an assertion—when the moon is represented one quarter of an inch broad—that the church tower is 290 yards, or a sixth of a mile distant. If, on the other hand, other things remaining the same, the moon is drawn two inches in diameter, the church tower is now asserted to be eight times as far off, or about a mile and a third. Very generally these facts are not considered by painters. They represent the low moon (or sun) big because the erroneous mental impression is common to all of us that it is big—that is, bigger, much bigger, than the high moon or sun, and they do not follow out the consequences in perspective of the pictorial increase of the moon's apparent diameter.

If we could ascertain why it is that the low moon produces a false impression of being bigger—as a mere disc in the scene—than does the high moon, we might be able to discover how an artist could produce, as Nature does, an impression or belief in its greater size whilst keeping it all the time to its proper size. The explanation of the illusion as to the increased size of the sun's or moon's disc when low, given by M. Flammarion and other astronomers, is that the low sun or moon is unconsciously judged by us as an object at a greater distance than the high moon or sun. This is due to the long vista of arching clouds above and of stretching landscape or sea below when the sun or moon is looked at as it appears on or near the horizon. The illusion is aided by the dulness of the low moon and the brightness (supposed nearness) of the high moon. Being judged of (unconsciously) as further off than the high moon, the low moon is estimated as of larger size although of the same size. This is, I believe, the correct explanation of the illusion. When one gazes upwards to the sky, a small insect slowly flying across the line of sight sometimes is "judged of" as a huge bird—an eagle or a vulture—since we refer it to a distance at which birds fly and not to the shorter distance to which insects approach us. It seems that it would be possible for the painter, by carefully studying actual natural facts and introducing their presentation into his picture, to produce the impression of greater distance, and therefore of size, into a quarter-inch moon placed near the horizon. He is not compelled for want of other means to "cut the difficulty" and paint a falsely inflated moon which shall brutally and by measurement call up the illusion of increased size. I reproduce here (Pl. V) an interesting drawing which shows how such illusions of size can be produced. It is none the worse for my purpose because it is an advertisement by the well-known firm who have kindly lent it to me. The three figures represented in black are all of the same height, yet the furthest one appears to be much taller and bigger altogether than the middle one, and the middle one than the nearest. This result is obtained by suggesting distance as separating the right-hand figure from us, whilst giving it exactly the same height as the others. This seems to me to be a simple case of an illusion of increased size produced by a suggestion of increased distance when all the time there is equality in size—as in the case of the moon on the horizon compared with the moon overhead. It would be interesting to see an attempt on the part of a competent painter to produce in this way (which is, I believe, Nature's way) the illusion of increased size in a low-lying moon without really increasing the visual size of his painted moon as compared with one in another picture (to be painted by him) representing the moon bright, clear and small, overhead.

Plate V.—Drawing of three figures—Lord Lansdowne, Mr. Lloyd George, and Mr. Asquith—showing how an illusion of size may be produced in a picture. The figure of Mr. Asquith is of the same actual vertical measurement as that of Lord Lansdowne, viz. two inches and one eighth. Yet owing to the position in which the three figures are placed and the converging lines—suggesting perspective—the drawing of Mr. Asquith does not merely represent a much taller man than does that of Lord Lansdowne, but actually gives the impression, at first sight, that the little black figure representing Mr. Asquith is longer and bigger altogether than that representing Lord Lansdowne. Yet the figures are of the same dimensions. It is owing to illusion of the same nature that the disc of the low moon appears larger than that of the high moon.

The theatrical scene-painter has another kind of difficulty with the low moon and the setting sun. He can never be right for more than one row of seats—one distance—in the theatre. Here there is no peep-hole, no frame or picture-plane. The observer is in the picture. If the moon is represented by an illuminated disc of one foot in diameter, it will, when looked at at a distance of 115 feet, have the same visual size as the moon itself, but if your seat is nearer the scene it will look too large, if further off it will look too small. There is no getting over this difficulty, as the standard of actual Nature is set up on the stage by the men and women appearing on it at a known distance. It used to be asked in classical times by ingenious puzzle-makers—"What is the size of the moon?" A true answer to that question would be "that of a plate a foot in diameter seen at a distance of a hundred and fifteen feet."

To a large extent the painter, like other artists, has to produce things which do not shock common opinion and experience, and must even consciously concede to that necessity, and make the sacrifice of objective truth, in order to secure attention for his higher appeal to the sense of beauty, to emotion, and sentiment. Approved departures by the artist from scientific truth are those which are deliberately made in order to give emphasis—as, for instance, in the huge, but tender hand of the man in the emotional masterpiece, "Le Baiser," by the great sculptor Rodin. Another departure from objective truth which is justified, is seen in Troyon's picture in the Louvre, where the false drawing and exaggerated size of the leg of a calf advancing towards the observer suggest, and almost give the illusion of, movement.

But it can hardly be maintained that any and all the liberties which a painter or a whole school of painters choose to take with fact in their presentation of Nature—are beyond criticism. It is possible for a landscape painter to improve in his treatment of the moon by better observation and increased knowledge—just as other painters have learnt not to introduce into their pictures the sort of wooden rocking-horse to stand for a beautiful living animal, which satisfied Velasquez, Carl Vernet and the ancient Egyptians.

[1] See note on page 46.

[2] "La Representation du Galop dans l'art ancien et moderne," 'Revue Archeologique,' vol. xxxvi et seq., 1900.

[3] A word is needed in amplification of what was said on p. 26 as to the blending of successive images produced on the retina of the eye by the bioscope or cinematograph or by the old "wheel of life." The point which is of importance is not the length of time during which the stimulation of the retina caused by an image endures—becoming weaker and weaker as fractions of a second pass—but it is this: How long will a stimulus last in undiminished brightness? How soon must it be followed by another stimulus (another image) so that there may be fusion or continuity, the one succeeding the other before the earlier has had time, not to disappear, but to decline. If it has had time to decline in intensity, the appearance of flickering results. That is what the cinematographer has to avoid. It is found that a quicker succession—a shorter interval—is necessary with strong light than with weaker light in order to produce continuity. With a faint light the interval may be as great as one-tenth of a second; with a strong light it must not exceed one-thirtieth (or with still stronger light, one-sixtieth) of a second. With the stronger light there is a more rapid and a greater loss of the initial intensity of the impression or effect of stimulus, and though each successive effect remains as long, or longer, in dwindling intensity, you get want of continuity, or "flicker."

[4] What we may call the "visual size" of the sun happens to be owing to its far greater size and its far greater distance from us—very nearly the same as that of the moon—and is subject to the same numerical law of apparent diameter, viz. a disc of any given measurement in diameter will cover it exactly when held at a distance from the eye which is 115 times that measurement.

CHAPTER V

THE JEWEL IN THE TOAD'S HEAD

To what jewel or precious stone was Shakespeare alluding when he makes the exiled Duke in "As You Like It" (after praising his rough life in the forest of Arden, and declaring that adversity has its compensations), exclaim:

"The toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head"?

No doubt the unprejudiced reader supposes when he reads this passage that there is some stone or stone-like body in the head of the toad which has a special beauty, or else was believed to possess magical or medicinal properties. And it is probable that Shakespeare himself did suppose that such a stone existed. As a matter of fact there is no stone or "jewel" of any kind in the head of the common toad nor of any species of toad—common or rare. This is a simple and certain result of the careful examination of the heads of innumerable toads, and is not merely "common knowledge," but actually the last word of the scientific expert. In these days of "nature study" writers familiar with toads and frogs and kindred beasts have puzzled over Shakespeare's words, and suggested that he was really referring to the beautiful eyes of the toad, which are like gems in colour and brilliance.

This, however, is not the case. Shakespeare himself was simply making use of what was considered to be "common knowledge" in his day when he made the Duke compare adversity to the toad with a magic jewel in its head commonly known as "a toad-stone," although that "common knowledge" was really not knowledge at all, but—like an enormous mass of the accepted current statements in those times, about animals, plants and stones—was an absolutely baseless invention. Such baseless beliefs were due to the perfectly innocent but reckless habit of mankind, throughout long ages, of exaggerating and building up marvellous narrations on the one hand, and on the other hand of believing without any sufficient inquiry, and with delight and enthusiasm, such marvellous narrations set down by others. Each writer or "gossip" concerning the wonders of unexplored nature, consciously or unconsciously, added a little to the story as received by him, and so the authoritative statements as to marvels grew more and more astonishing and interesting.

It was not until the time of Shakespeare himself that another spirit began to assert itself—namely, that of asking whether a prevalent belief or tradition is actually a true statement of fact. Men proceeded to test the belief by an examination of the thing in question, and not by merely adducing the assertions of "the learned so-and-so," or of "the ingenious Mr. Dash." This spirit of inquiry actually existed in a fairly active state among the more cultivated of the ancient Greeks. Aristotle (who flourished about 350 b.c.), though he could not free himself altogether from the primitive tendency to accept the marvellous as true because it is marvellous and without regard to its probability—in fact because of its improbability—yet on the whole showed a determination to investigate, and to see things for himself, and left in his writings an immense series of first-rate original observations. He had far more of the modern scientific spirit than had the innumerable credulous writers of Western Europe who lived fifteen hundred to two thousand years after him. Even that delightful person Herodotus, who preceded Aristotle by a hundred years, occasionally took the trouble to inquire into some of the wonders he heard of on his travels, and is careful to say now and then that he does not believe what he heard. But the mediæval-makers of "bestiaries," herbals, and treatises on stones, which were collections of every possible fancy and "old-wife's tale," about animals, plants, and minerals, mixed up with Greek and Arabic legends and the mystical, medical lore of the "Physiologus"—that Byzantine cyclopædia of "wisdom while you wait"—deliberately discarded all attempt to set down the truth; they simply gave that up as a bad job, and recorded every strange story, property and "application" (as they termed it) of natural objects with solemn assurance, adding a bit of their own invention to the gathered and growing mass of preposterous misunderstanding and superstition.

In the seventeenth century the opposition to this method of omnivorous credulity (which even to-day, in spite of all our "progress," flourishes among both the rich and the poor) crystallised in the purpose of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge—whose motto was, and is "Nullius in verba" (that is, "We swear by no man's words"), and whose original first rule, to be observed at its meetings, was that no one should discourse of his opinions or narrate a marvel, but that any member who wished to address the society should "bring in," that is to say, "exhibit" an experiment or an actual specimen. A new spirit, the "scientific" spirit, gave rise to and was nourished by this and similar societies of learned men. As a consequence the absurdities and the cruel and injurious beliefs in witchcraft, astrology, and baseless legend, melted away like clouds before the rising sun. In the place of the mad nightmare of fantastic ignorance, there grew up the solid body of unassailable knowledge of Nature and of man which we call "science"—a growth which made such prodigious strides in the last century that we now may truly be said to live in the presence of a new heaven and a new earth!

Fig. 4.—Representation of a man extracting the jewel from a toad's head; two "jewels", already extracted are seen dropping to the ground. From the "Hortus Sanitatis," published in 1490.

It was, then, a real "stone," called the toad-stone, to which Shakespeare alluded. It is mentioned in various old treatises concerning the magical and medicinal properties of gems and stones under its Latin name, "Bufonius lapis," and was also called Borax, Nosa, Crapondinus, Crapaudina, Chelonitis, and Batrachites. It was also called Grateriano and Garatronius, after a gentleman named Gratterus, who in 1473 found a very large one, reputed to have marvellous power. In 1657, in the "translation by a person of quality" of the "Thaumatographia" of a Polish physician named Jonstonus, we find written of it: "Toads produce a stone, with their own image sometimes. It hath very great force against malignant tumours that are venomous. They are used to heat it in a bag, and to lay it hot, without anything between, to the naked body, and to rub the affected place with it. They say it prevails against inchantments of witches, especially for women and children bewitched. So soon as you apply it to one bewitched it sweats many drops. In the plague it is laid to the heart to strengthen it." Another physician of the same period (see "Notes and Queries," fourth series, vol. vii, 1871, p. 540) appears to be affected by the new spirit of inquiry, for he relates the old traditions about the stone and how he tested them. He says it was reported that the stone could be cut out of the toad's head. (In the book called "Hortus Sanitatis," dated 1490, there is a picture, here reproduced [Fig. 4], of a gentleman performing this operation successfully on a gigantic toad.) Our sceptical physician, however, goes on to say that it was commonly believed that these stones are thrown out of the mouth by old toads (probably the tongue was mistaken for the stone), and that if toads are placed on a piece of red cloth they will eject their "toad-stones," but rapidly swallow them again before one can seize the precious gem! He says that when he was a boy he procured an aged toad and placed it on a red cloth in order to obtain possession of "the stone." He sat watching the toad all night, but the toad did not eject anything. "Since that time," he says, "I have always regarded as humbug ('badineries') all that they relate of the toad-stone and of its origin." He then describes the actual stone which passes as the toad-stone, or "Bufonius lapis," and says that it is also called batrachite, or brontia, or ombria. His description exactly corresponds with the "toad-stones" which are well known at the present day in collections of old rings.

Fig. 5.—The palate of the fossil fish Lepidotus, showing the stud-like teeth in position. These are often found singly, and stained of a dull brown colour by the rock in which they were embedded. It was the colour of these fossil teeth, like that of a toad's body, which led to the assertion that they were produced in the head of the toad. a. A single detached tooth or "toad-stone" seen from the bright unattached surface. b. The same seen from the attached surface. c. A section of the tooth showing its cup-like shape. (Original drawings.)

I have examined twelve of these rings in the British Museum, through the kindness of Sir Charles Read, P.S.A., the Keeper of Mediæval Antiquities, and four in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. Two of these are of chalcedony, with a figure of a toad roughly carved on the stone, and are of a character and origin different from the others. The others, which are the true and recognised "toad-stones" or "Bufonius lapis," are circular, slightly convex "stones," of a drab colour, with a smooth enamel-like surface. They are plate-like discs, being of thin substance and concave on the lower surface, which has an upstanding rim. I recognised them at once as the palatal teeth of a fossil fish called "Lepidotus," common in our own oolitic and wealden strata, and in rocks of that age all over the world. I give in Fig. 5 a drawing of a complete set of these teeth and of a single one detached. They were white and colourless in life, but are stained of various colours according to the nature of the rock in which they were embedded. A drab colour like that of the skin of the common toad is given to them by the iron salts present in many oolitic rocks; those found in the wealden of the Isle of Wight are black. That the "toad-stones" mounted in ancient rings are really the teeth of a fish has been already recorded by the Rev. R. H. Newell ("The Zoology of the English Poets," 1845), but he seems to be mistaken in identifying them with those of the wolf-fish (Anarrhicas). They undoubtedly are the palatal teeth of the fossil extinct ganoid fish Lepidotus.

Before leaving the queer inventions and assertions of the old writers about these fossil teeth, which they declared to be taken out of the toad's head, let me quote one delightful passage from a contemporary of Shakespeare (Lupton: "A thousand notable things of sundry sortes. Whereof some are wonderful, some strange, some pleasant, divers necessary, a great sort profitable, and many very precious," London, 1595). "You shall know," he says, "whether the Toadstone called 'crapaudina' be the right and perfect stone or not. Hold the stone before a toad, so that he may see it. And if it be a right and true stone, the toad will leap towards it and make as though he would snatch it from you; he envieth so much that a man should have that stone. This was credibly told Mizaldus for truth by one of the French King's physicians, which affirmed that he did see the trial thereof."

We have thus before us the actual things called toad-stones, and believed by Shakespeare and his contemporaries to be found in the head of the toad. How did it come about that these pretty little button-like, drab-coloured fossil teeth were given such an erroneous history? This question was answered by the late Rev. C. W. King, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, in his book on "Antique Gems" (London, 1860). He says, "I am not aware if any substance of a stony nature is ever now discovered within the head or body of the toad. Probably the whole story originated in the name Batrachites (frog-stone or toad-stone), given in Pliny to a gem brought from Coptos, and so called from its resemblance to that animal in colour." We have not, it must be noted, any specimens of the toad-stone at the present day actually known to have been brought from Coptos. It is quite possible that the fossil fish-tooth was substituted ages ago for Pliny's Batrachites, and was never found at Coptos at all! Whether that is so or not, the fact is that Pliny never said it came out of a toad, but merely that it was of the colour of a toad.

The Pliny referred to is Pliny the Elder, the celebrated Roman naturalist who wrote a great treatise on natural history, which we still possess, and died in a.d. 79 whilst visiting the eruption of Vesuvius. He says nothing of the Batrachites being found inside the toad, nor does he mention its medicinal virtues. The name alone—simply the name "Batrachites," the Greek for toad-stone—was sufficient to lead the fertile imagination of the mediæval doctors to invent all the other particulars! It is a case precisely similar to that of the old lady who was credited with having vomited "three black crows." When the report was traced step by step to its source it was found that her nurse had stated that she vomited something as black as a crow!

The belief in the existence of a stone of magical properties in the head of the toad is only one of the many instances of beliefs of a closely similar kind which were accepted by Pliny (although he records no such belief as to the toad-stone), and were passed on from his treatise on natural history in a more or less muddled form to the middle ages, and so to our own time by later writers. Thus Pliny cites, as stones possessing magical properties, the "Bronte" found in the head of the tortoise, the Cinædia in the head of a fish of that name, the Chelonites, a grass-green stone found in a swallow's belly, the Draconites, which must be cut out of the head of a live serpent, the Hyænia from the eye of the Hyæna, and the Saurites from the bowels of a green lizard. All these and the Echites, or viper-stone, were credited with extraordinary magical virtues, and many of the assertions of later writers about the toad-stone are clearly due to their having calmly transferred the marvellous stories about other imaginary stones to the imaginary toad-stone. The only stone in the above list which has a real existence is that in the fish's head. Fish have a pair of beautiful translucent stones in their heads—the ear-stones or otoliths—by the laminated structure of which we can now determine the age of a fish just as a tree's age is told by the annual rings of growth in the wood of its stem. The fresh-water crayfish has a very curious pair of opaque stones (concretions of carbonate and phosphate of lime) formed in its gizzard as a normal and regular thing. They are familiar to every student who dissects a crayfish, and I am told that in Germany to-day, as in old times also, the "krebstein" is regarded by the country-folk as possessed of medicinal and magical properties. I am not able, on the present occasion, to trace out the possible origin of all the stories and beliefs about stones occurring within animals. They are more numerous than those cited by Pliny; they exist in every race and every civilization and refer to a large variety of animals. Probably many of these beliefs date from prehistoric times. In the East the most celebrated of these stones, since the period of Arabic civilisation, is called a bezoar-stone, "Bezoar" is the Persian word for "antidote," and does not apply only to a stone. The true and original "bezoar-stone" of the East is a concretion found in the intestine of the Persian wild goat. Those which I have seen are usually of the size and shape of a pigeon's egg and of a fine mahogany colour, with a smooth, polished surface. The Persian goat's bezoar-stone is found, on chemical analysis, to consist of "ellagic acid," an acid allied to gallic acid, the vegetable astringent product which occurs in oak-galls used until lately in the manufacture of ink. The bezoar-stone is probably a concretion formed in the intestine from some of the undigested portions of the goat's food. Such concretions are not uncommon, and occur even in man. "Bezoar-stones" are obtained in the East from deer, antelopes, and even monkeys, as well as goats, and must have a different chemical nature in each case. Minute scrapings from these stones are used in the East as medicine, and their chemical qualities render their use not altogether absurd, though they probably have not any really valuable action. It is probable that their use had a later origin than that of the "stones" connected with magic and witchcraft. Sixteenth century writers, ever ready to invent a history when their knowledge was defective, declared the bezoar-stone to be formed by the inspissated tears of the deer or of the gazelle—the "gum" which Hamlet remarked in aged examples of the human species.

The substance called "ambergris" (grey amber), valued to-day as a perfume, is a fæcal concretion similar to a bezoar-stone. It is formed in the intestine of the sperm-whale, and contains fragments of the hard parts of cuttle-fishes, which are the food of these whales. "Hair-balls" are formed in the intestines of various large vegetarian animals—and occasionally stony concretions of various chemical composition are formed in the urinary bladder of various animals, as well as of man. The "eagle-stone" is also a concretion to which magical properties were ascribed. I have seen a specimen, but do not know its history and origin. Glass beads found in prehistoric burial-places are called by old writers "adders' eggs," and "adder-stones," and were said (it is improbable that one should say "believed") to hatch out young adders when incubated with sufficiently silly ceremonies and observances. A celebrated "stone" of medicinal reputation in the East is the "goa-stone." This is a purely artificial product—a mass of the size and shape of a large egg, consisting of some very fine and soft powder like fullers'-earth, sweetly scented, and overlaid with gold-leaf. A very little is rubbed off, mixed with water, and swallowed, as a remedy for many diseases. The deep connection of medicine with magic throwing light on the strange application of stones and hairs, bones and skins, by imaginative mankind, in all ages and places, is exhibited in the common practice of writing with ink a sentence of the Koran (or other sacred words) on a tablet, washing off the ink and making the patient swallow the water in which the sacred phrase has been thus dissolved! How convenient it would be were it possible thus to impart knowledge, virtue, and health to suffering humanity!

A good example of one of the ways in which magical properties become attributed to natural objects is the stone known as amethyst. The ancient Indian name of this stone had the sound represented by its present name. In Greek this sound happens to mean "not intoxicated"; hence, without more ado, the ancients declared that the amethyst was a preventive of, and a cure for, drunkenness.

CHAPTER VI

ELEPHANTS

In the novel by that clever but contradictious writer, Sam Butler, entitled "The Way of All Flesh," an amiable and philosophically minded old gentleman, who pervades the story, states that when one feels worried or depressed by the incidents of one's daily life, great comfort may be derived from an hour spent at the Zoological Gardens in company with the larger mammalia. He ascribes to them a remarkable soothing influence, and I am inclined to agree with him. I am not prepared to decide whether the effect is due to the example of patience under adversity offered by these animals, or whether it is perhaps their tranquil indifference to everything but food, coupled with their magnificent success in attaining to such dignity of size, which imposes upon me and fills me for a brief space with resignation and a child-like acquiescence in things as they are. The elephant stands first as a soothing influence, and then the giraffe, the latter having special powers, due to its beautiful eyes and agreeable perfume. Sometimes the hippopotamus may diffuse a charm of his own, an aura of rotund obesity, especially when he is bathing or sleeping; but there are moments when one has to flee from his presence. I never could get on very well with rhinoceroses, but the large deer, bison, and wild cattle have the quality detected by Mr. Butler. So has the gorgeous, well-grown tiger, in full measure, when he purrs in answer to one's voice: but the lion is pompous, irritable, and easily upset. He never purrs. He is unpleasantly and obscurely spotted. He seems to be afraid of losing his dignity, and to be conscious of the fact that his reputation—like that of some English officials—depends on the overpowering wig which he now wears, though his Macedonian forerunner had no such growth to give an illusive appearance of size and capacity to his head. However opinions may differ about these things, we will agree that the elephant (or "Oliphant," as he was called in France 400 years ago) is the most imposing, fascinating, and astonishing of all animals.

Fig. 6.—The Indian elephant (Elephas maximus or indicus). Observe the small size of its ear-flap.

At the present day there are two species only of elephant existing on the earth's surface. These are the Indian (Fig. 6) (called Elephas indicus, but sometimes called Elephas maximus on account of the priority which belongs to that designation, although the Indian elephant is smaller than the other), and the African (Fig. 7) (called Elephas Africanus). In the wild state their area of occupation has become greatly diminished within historic times. The Indian elephant was hunted in Mesopotamia in the twelfth century b.c., and Egyptian drawings of the eighteenth dynasty show elephants of this species brought as tribute by Syrian vassals. To-day the Indian elephant is confined to certain forests of Hindoostan, Ceylon, Burma, and Siam. The African elephant extended 100 years ago all over South Africa, and in the days of the Carthaginians was found near the Mediterranean shore, whilst in prehistoric (late Pleistocene) times it existed in the south of Spain and in Sicily. Now it is confined to the more central and equatorial zone of Africa, and is yearly receding before the incursions and destructive attacks of civilised man.

Fig. 7.—The African elephant (Elephas Africanus) with rider mounted on its back. The drawing is an enlarged representation of an ancient Carthaginian coin.

At no great distance of time before the historic period, earlier, indeed, than the times of the herdsmen who used polished stone implements and raised great stone circles, namely, in the late Pleistocene period, we find that there existed all over Europe and North Asia and the northern part of America another elephant very closely allied to the Indian elephant, but having a bow-like outward curvature of the tusks, their points finally directed towards one another, and a thick growth of coarse hair all over the body. This is "the mammoth," the remains of which are found in every river valley in England, France and Germany, and of which whole carcases are frequently discovered in Northern Siberia, preserved from decay in the frozen river gravels and "silt." The ancient cave-men of France used the fresh tusks of the mammoth killed on the spot for their carvings and engravings, and from their time to this the ivory of the mammoth has been, and remains, in constant use. It is estimated that during the last two centuries at least 100 pairs of mammoths' tusks have been each year exported from the frozen lands of Siberia. In early mediæval times the trade existed, and some ivory carvings and drinking horns of that age appear to be fashioned from this more ancient ivory.

Already, then, within the human period we find elephants closely similar to those of our own time, far more numerous and more widely distributed than in our own day, and happily established all over the temperate regions of the earth—even in our Thames Valley and in the forests where London now spreads its smoky brickwork. When we go further back in time—as the diggings and surveying of modern man enable us to do—we find other elephants of many different species, some differing greatly from the three species I have mentioned, and leading us back by gradual steps to a comparatively small animal, about the size of a donkey, without the wonderful trunk or the immense tusks of the later elephants. By the discovery and study of these earlier forms we have within the last ten years arrived at a knowledge of the steps by which the elephant acquired in the course of long ages (millions of years) his "proboscis" (as the Greeks first called it), and I will later sketch that history.

But now let us first of all note some of the peculiarities of living elephants and the points by which the two kinds differ from one another. The most striking fact about the elephant is its enormous size. It is only exceeded among living animals by whales; it is far larger than the biggest bull, or rhinoceros, or hippopotamus. A fair-sized Indian elephant weighs two to three tons (Jumbo, one of the African species, weighed five), and requires as food 60 lb. of oats, 1-1/2 truss of hay, 1-1/2 truss of corn a day, costing together in this country about 5s.; whereas a large cart-horse weighs 15 cwt., and requires weekly three trusses of hay and 80 lb. of oats, costing together 12s. or about 1s. 8-1/2d. a day. It is this which has proved fatal to the elephant since man took charge of the world. The elephant requires so much food and takes so many years in growing up (twenty or more before he is old enough to be put to work), that it is only in countries where there is a super-abundance of forest in which he can be allowed to grow to maturity at his own "charges" (so to speak) that it is worth while to attempt to domesticate and make use of him. For most purposes three horses are more "handy" than one elephant. The elephant is caught when he is already grown up, and then trained. It is as a matter of economy that he is not bred in confinement, and not because there is any insuperable difficulty in the matter. Occasionally elephants have bred in menageries.

There is no doubt that the African elephant at the present day grows to a larger size than the Indian, though it was the opinion of the Romans of the Empire that the Indian elephant was the more powerful, courageous, and intelligent of the two. It seems next to impossible to acquire at the present day either specimens or trustworthy records of the largest Indian elephants. About 10 ft. 6 ins. at the shoulder seems to be the maximum, though they are dressed up by their native owners with platforms and coverings to make them look bigger. In India the skin of domesticated individuals is polished and carefully stained, like an old boot, by the assiduity of their guardians, so that a museum specimen of exceptional size, fit for exhibition and study, cannot be obtained. On the other hand, the African elephant not unfrequently exceeds a height of 11 ft. at the shoulder. With some trouble I obtained one exceeding this measurement direct from East Africa for the Natural History Museum, where it now stands. It seems highly probable that this species occasionally exceeds 12 ft. in height. On the ground, between the great African elephant's fore and hind legs, in the museum, I placed a stuffed specimen of the smallest terrestrial mammal—the pigmy shrew-mouse. It is worth while thus calling to mind that the little animal has practically every separate bone, muscle, blood-vessel, nerve, and other structure present in the huge monster compared with it—is, in fact, built closely upon the same plan, and yet is so much smaller that it is impossible to measure one by the other. The mouse is only about one fifth the length of the elephant's eye. According to ancient Oriental fable, the mouse and the dragon were the only two animals of which the elephant was afraid.

The African elephant has much larger tusks relatively to his size than the Indian, and both males and females have them, whereas the Indian female has none. A very fine Indian elephant's tusk weighs from 75 lb. to 80 lb. The record for an African elephant's tusk was (according to standard books) 180 lb. But I obtained ten years ago for the museum, where it now may be seen, an African elephant's tusk weighing 228-1/2 lb. Its fellow weighed a couple of pounds less. It measures 10 ft. 2 in. in length along the curvature. This tusk was recognised by Sir Henry Stanley's companion, Mr. Jephson, when he was with me in the museum, as actually one which he had last seen in the centre of Africa. He told me that he had, in fact, weighed and measured this tusk in the treasury of Emin Pasha, in Central Africa, when he went with Stanley to bring Emin down to the coast. As will be remembered, Emin had no wish to go to the coast, but returned to his province. He was subsequently attacked and murdered by an Arab chief, who appropriated his store of ivory, and in the course of time had it conveyed to the ivory market at Zanzibar. The date of the purchase there of the museum specimen corresponds with the history given by Mr. Jephson.

Fig. 8.—The crowns of three "grinders" or molars of elephants compared. a is that of an extinct mastodon with four transverse ridges; b is that of the African elephant with nine ridges in use and ground flat; c is that of the mammoth with sixteen narrow ridges in use—the rest, some eight in number, are at the left hand of the figure and not yet in use.

The African elephant (as could be seen by comparing the small one living in Regent's Park with its neighbours) has a sloping forehead graduating into the trunk or proboscis, instead of the broad, upright brow of the Indian. He also has very much larger ears, which lie against the shoulders (except when he is greatly excited) like a short cape or cloak (see Fig. 7). These great ears differ somewhat in shape in the elephants of different parts of Africa, and local races can be distinguished by the longer or shorter angle into which the flap is drawn out. The grinding teeth of the two elephants differ very markedly, but one must see these in a museum. The grinders are very large and long (from behind forwards), coming into place one after the other. Each grinder occupies, when fully in position, the greater part of one side of the upper or of the lower jaw. They are crossed from right to left by ridges of enamel, like a series of mountains and valleys, which gradually wear down by rubbing against those of the tooth above or below. The biggest grinder of the Indian elephant has twenty-four of these transverse ridges, whilst that of the African has only eleven, which are therefore wider apart (see Fig. 8). An extinct kind of elephant—the mastodon—had only five such ridges on its biggest grinders, and four or only three on the others. Other ancestral elephants had quite ordinary-looking grinders, with only two or three irregular ridges or broad tubercles. Both the Indian and African elephant have hairless, rough, very hard, wrinkled skins. But the new-born young are covered with hair, and some Indian elephants living in cold, mountainous regions appear to retain a certain amount of hair through life. The mammoth (which agreed with the Indian elephant in the number of ridges on its grinders and in other points) lived in quite cold, sub-Arctic conditions, at a time when glaciers completely covered Scandinavia and the north of our islands as well as most of Germany. It retained a complete coat of coarse hair throughout life. The young of our surviving elephants only exhibit transitorily the family tendency.

The last mammoth probably disappeared from the area which is now Great Britain about 150,000 years ago. It might be supposed that no elephant was seen in England again until the creation of "menageries" and "zoological gardens" within the last two or three hundred years. This, however, is by no means the case. The Italians in the middle ages, and through them the French and the rulers of Central Europe, kept menageries and received as presents, or in connection with their trade with the East and their relations with Eastern rulers, frequent specimens of strange beasts from distant lands. Our King Henry I, had a menagerie at Woodstock, where he kept a porcupine, lions, leopards, and a camel! The Emperor Charlemagne received in 803 a.d. from Haroun al Raschid, the Caliph of Bagdad, an elephant named Abulabaz. It was brought to Aix-la-Chapelle by Isaac the Jew, and died suddenly in 810. Some four and a half centuries later (in 1257), Louis IX, of France, returning from the Holy Land, sent as a special and magnificent present to Henry III, King of England (according to the chronicle of Matthew Paris), an elephant which was exhibited at the Tower of London. It was supposed by the chronicler to be the first ever brought to England, and indeed the first to be taken beyond Italy, for he did not know of Charlemagne's specimen. In 1591 King Henry IV of France, wishing to be very polite to Queen Elizabeth of England, and apparently rather troubled by the expense of keeping the beast himself, sent to her, having heard that she would like to have it, an elephant which had been brought from the "Indies" and landed at Dieppe. He declared it to be the first which had ever come into France, but presented it to Her Majesty "as I would most willingly present anything more excellent did I possess it." Thenceforward elephants were from time to time exhibited at the Tower, together with lions and other strange beasts acquired by the Crown.

None of these elephants were, however, "the first who ever burst" into remote Britain after the mammoths had disappeared, and we were separated from Europe by the geological changes which gave us the English Channel—La Manche. Though Julius Cæsar himself does not mention it, it is definitely stated by a writer on strategy named Polyænus, a friend of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, but not, I am sorry to say, an authority to whose statements historians attach any serious value—that Cæsar made use of an elephant armed with iron plates and carrying on its back a tower full of armed men to terrify the ancient Britons when he crossed the Thames—an operation which he carried out, I believe, somewhere between Molesey and Staines.

Elephants are often spoken of as "Ungulates," and classed by naturalists with the hoofed animals (the odd toed tapirs, rhinoceroses, and horses, and the even-toed pigs, camel, cattle, and deer). But there is not much to say in defence of such an association. The elephants have, as a matter of fact, not got hoofs, and they have five toes on each foot. The five toes of the front foot have each a nail, whilst usually only four toes of the hind foot have nails. A speciality of the elephant is the great circular pad of thick skin overlying fat and fibrous tissue, which forms the sole of the foot and bears the animal's enormous weight. This buffer-like development of the foot existed in some great extinct mammals (the Dinoceras family, of North America), but is altogether different from the support given by a horse's hoof or the paired shoe-like hoofs of great cattle or the three rather elegant hoofed toes of the rhinoceros.

The Indian elephant likes good, solid ground to walk on, and when he finds himself in a boggy place will seize any large objects (preferably big branches of trees) and throw them under his feet to prevent himself sinking in. Occasionally he will remove the stranger who is riding on his back and make use of him in this way. The circumference of the African elephant's fore-foot is found by hunters to be half the animal's height at the shoulder, and is regarded as furnishing a trustworthy indication of his stature.

The legs of the elephant differ from those of more familiar large animals in the fact that the ankle and the wrist (the so-called knee of the horse's foreleg) are not far above the sole of the foot (resembling man's joints in this respect), whilst the true knee-joint (called "the stifle" in horses)—instead of being, as in horses, high up, close against the body, strongly flexed even when at rest, and obscured by the skin—is far below the body, free and obvious enough. In fact, the elephant keeps the thigh and the upper arm perpendicular and in line with the lower segment of the limb when he is standing, so that the legs are pillar-like. But he bends the joints amply when in quick movement. The hind legs seen in action resemble, in the proportions of thigh, foreleg, and foot, and the bending at the knee and ankle, very closely those of a man walking on "all fours." The elephant as known in Europe more than 300 years ago was rarely seen in free movement. He was kept chained up in his stall, resting on his straight, pillar-like legs and their pad-like feet. And with that curious avidity for the marvellous which characterized serious writers in those days to the exclusion of any desire or attempt to ascertain the truth, it was coolly asserted, and then commonly believed, that the elephant could not bend his legs. Shakespeare—who, of course, is merely using a common belief of his time as a chance illustration of human character—makes Ulysses say (referring to his own stiffness of carriage) ("Troilus and Cressida," Act II) "The elephant hath joints, but none for courtesy; his legs are legs for necessity, not for flexure." An old writer says: "The elephant hath no joints, and, being unable to lye down, it lieth against a tree, which, the hunters observing, do saw almost asunder; whereon the beast relying—by the fall of the tree falls also down itself, and is able to rise no more." Another old writer (Bartholomew, 1485), says, more correctly: "When the elephant sitteth he bendeth his feet; he bendeth the hinder legs right as a man."

A writer of 120 years later in date (Topsell) says: "In the River Ganges there are blue worms of sixty cubits long having two arms; these when the elephants come to drink in that river take their trunks in their hands and pull them off. At the sight of a beautiful woman elephants leave off all rage and grow meek and gentle. In Africa there are certain springs of water which, if at any time they dry up, they are opened and recovered again by the teeth of elephants." The blue worm of the Ganges referred to is no doubt the crocodile; both in India and Africa animals coming to the rivers to drink are seized by lurking crocodiles, who fix their powerful jaws on to the face (snout or muzzle) of the drinking animal and drag it under the water. Thus the fable has arisen of the origin of the elephant's trunk as recounted by Mr. Rudyard Kipling. A young elephant (before the days of trunks), according to this authority, when drinking at a riverside had his moderate and well-shaped snout seized by a crocodile. The little elephant pulled and the crocodile pulled, and by the help of a friendly python the elephant got the best of it. He extricated himself from the jaws of death. But, oh! what a difference in his appearance! His snout was drawn out so as to form that wonderful elongated thing with two nostrils at the end which we call the elephant's trunk, and was henceforth transmitted (a first-rate example of an "acquired character") to future generations! The real origin of the elephant's trunk is (as I will explain later) a different one from that handed down to us in the delightful jungle-book. I do not believe in the hereditary transmission of acquired modifications!

Topsell may or may not be right as to the result produced on elephants by the sight of a beautiful woman. In Africa the experiment would be a difficult one, and even in India inconclusive. Topsell seems, however, to have come across correct information about the digging for water by an African elephant by the use of his great tusks—those tusks for the gain of which he is now being rapidly exterminated by man. Serious drought is frequent in Africa, and a cause of death to thousands of animals. African elephants, working in company, are known to have excavated holes in dried-up river beds to the depth of 25 feet in a single night in search of water. It is probable that the Indian elephant's tusk would not be of service in such digging, and it is to be noted that he is rather an inhabitant of high ground and table-lands than of tropical plains liable to flood and to drought. The tusk of the Indian elephant has become merely a weapon of attack for the male, and there are even local breeds in which it is absent in the males as well as in the females. The mammoth was a near cousin of the Indian elephant, and inhabited cold uplands and the fringes of sub-Arctic forests, on which he fed. His tusks were very large, and curved first outward and then inward at the tips. They would not have served for heavy digging, and probably were used for forcing a way through the forest and as a protection to the face and trunk.

The trunk of the elephant was called "a hand" by old writers, and it seems to have acted in the development of the elephant's intelligence in the same way as man's hand has in regard to his mental growth, though in a less degree. The Indian elephant has a single tactile and grasping projection (sometimes called "a finger") placed above between the two nostrils at the end of the trunk; the African elephant has one above and one below. I have seen the elephant pick up with this wonderful trunk with equal facility a heavy man and then a threepenny piece.

The intelligence of the elephant is sometimes exaggerated by reports and stories; sometimes it is not sufficiently appreciated. It is not fair to compare the intelligence of the elephant with that of the dog—bred and trained by man for thousands of years. So far as one can judge, there is no wild animal, excepting the higher apes, which exhibits so much and such varied intelligence as the elephant. It appears that from early tertiary times (late Eocene) the ancestors of elephants have had large brains, whilst, when we go back so far as this, the ancestors of nearly all other animals had brains a quarter of the size (and even less in proportion to body-size) which their modern representatives have. Probably the early possession of a large brain at a geological period when brains were as a rule small is what has enabled the elephants not only to survive until to-day, but to spread over the whole world (except Australia), and to develop an immense variety and number of individuals throughout the tertiary series in spite of their ungainly size. It is only the yet bigger brain of man which (would it were not so!) is now at last driving this lovable giant, this vast compound of sagacity and strength, out of existence. The elephant—like man standing on his hind legs—has a wide survey of things around him owing to his height. He can take time to allow of cerebral intervention in his actions since he is so large that he has little cause to be afraid and to hurry. He has a fine and delicate exploring organ in his trunk, with its hand-like termination; with this he can, and does, experiment and builds up his individual knowledge and experience. Elephants act together in the wild state, aiding one another to uproot trees too large for one to deal with alone. They readily understand and accept the guidance of man, and with very small persuasion and teaching execute very dextrous work—such as the piling of timber. If man had selected the more intelligent elephants for breeding over a space of a couple of thousand years a prodigy of animal intelligence would have resulted. But man has never "bred" the elephant at all.

The Greeks and Romans knew ivory first, and then became acquainted with the elephant. The island of Elephantina in the Nile was from the earliest times a seat of trade in the ivory tusks of the African elephant, and so acquired its name. Herodotus is the first to mention the elephant itself; Homer only refers to the ivory by the word "elephas." Aristotle in this, as in other matters, is more correct than later writers. He probably received first-hand information about the elephant from Alexander and some of his men after their Indian expedition. The Romans had an unpleasant first personal experience of elephants when Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, landed a number with his army and put the Roman soldiers to flight. But the Romans then, and continually in after-times, showed their cool heads and sound judgment in a certain contempt for elephants as engines of war. They soon learned to dig pits on the battlefield to entrap the great beasts, and they deliberately made for the elephants' trunks, hewing them through with their swords, so that the agonised and maddened creatures turned round and trampled down the troops of their own side. The Romans only used them subsequently to terrify barbaric people, and as features in military processions. But Eastern nations used them extensively in war. In a.d. 217 Antiochus the Great brought 217 elephants in his army against 73 employed by Ptolemy, at what was called "the Battle of the Elephants." The battle commenced by the charging head to head of the opposing elephants and the discharge of arrows, spears and stones by the men in the towers on their backs.

An interesting question has been raised as to whether the elephants used by the Carthaginians were the African species or the Indian. There is no doubt that the elephants of Pyrrhus and those known to Alexander were the Indian, though they were taken in those days much to the West of India, namely, in Mesopotamia, and it would not have been difficult for the Carthaginians to convey Indian elephants, which had certainly been brought as far as Egypt, along the Mediterranean coast. An unfounded prejudice as to the want of docility of the African elephant has favoured the notion that the Carthaginians used the Indian elephant. As a matter of fact, no one in modern times has tried to train the African elephant, except here and there in a zoological garden. Probably the Indian "mahout," or elephant trainer could, if he were put to it, do as much with an African as he does with an Indian elephant. It would be an interesting experiment. In the next place, there is decisive evidence that it was the African elephant which the Carthaginians used, since we have a Carthaginian coin (Fig. 7) on which is beautifully represented—in unmistakable modelling—the African elephant, with his large triangular cape-like ears and his sloping forehead. In the time of Hannibal there were stables for over 300 of these elephants at Carthage, and he took fifty with him to the South of France with his army for the Italian invasion. He only got thirty-seven safely over the Rhone, and all but a dozen or so died in the terrible passage of the Alps. After the battle of Trebia he had only eight left, and when he had crossed the Apennines there was only one still alive. On this Hannibal himself rode.

Since the period when the white chalk which now forms our cliffs and hills was deposited at the bottom of a vast and deep ocean—the sea bottom has been raised, the chalk has emerged and risen on the top of hills to 800 feet in height in our own islands, and to ten times that height elsewhere, and during that process sands and clays and shelly gravels have been deposited to the thickness of some 2,800 feet by seas and estuaries and lakes, which have come and gone on the face of Europe and of other parts of the world as it has slowly sunk and slowly risen again. The last 200 feet or so of deposits we call the Pleistocene or Quaternary; the rest are known as the Tertiary strata. They are only a small part of the total thickness of aqueous deposit of stratified rock—which amounts to 60,000 feet more before the earliest remains of life in the Cambrian beds are reached, whilst older than, and therefore below this, we have another 50,000 feet of water-made rock which yields no fossils—no remains of living things, though living things were certainly there! Our little layer of Tertiary strata on the top is, however, very important. It took several million years in forming, although it is only one-fortieth of the whole thickness of aqueous deposit on the crust of the earth. We divide it into Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene, and each of these into upper, middle, and lower, the Eocene being the oldest. Our London clay and Woolwich sands are lower Eocene; there is a good deal of Miocene in Switzerland and Germany, whilst the Pliocene is represented by whole provinces of Italy, parts of central France, and by the White and Red "crags" of Suffolk.[5]

Fig. 9.—Skeleton of the Indian elephant. Only four toes are visible, the fifth concealed owing to the view from the side.

It is during this Tertiary period that the mammals—the warm-blooded, hairy quadrupeds, which suckle their young—have developed (they had come into existence a good deal earlier), and we find the remains of ancestral forms of the living kinds of cattle, pigs, horses, rhinoceroses, tapirs, elephants, lions, wolves, bears, etc., embedded in the successive layers of Tertiary deposits. Naturally enough, those most like the present animals are found in late Pliocene, and those which are close to the common ancestors of many of the later kinds are found in the Eocene, whilst we also find, at various levels of the Tertiary deposit, remains of side-branches of the mammalian pedigree, which, though including very powerful and remarkable beasts, have left no line of descent to represent them at the present day. We have been able to trace the great modern one-toed horses, zebras, and asses, with their complicated pattern of grinding-teeth back by quite gradual steps (represented by the bones and teeth of fossil kinds of horses), to smaller three-toed animals with simpler tuberculated teeth, and even, without any marked break in the series, to a small Eocene animal (not bigger than a spaniel) with four equal-sized toes on its front foot, and three on its hind foot. We know, too, a less direct series of intermediate forms leading beyond this to an animal with five toes on each foot and "typical" teeth. In fact, no one doubts that (leaving aside a few difficult and doubtful cases) all such big existing mammals, as I mentioned above, as well as monkeys and man, are derived from small mammals—intermediate in most ways between a hedgehog and a pig—which flourished in very early Eocene times, and had five toes on each foot, and "a typical dentition." Even the elephants came from such a small ancestral form. The common notion that the extinct forerunners of existing animals were much bigger than recent kinds, and even gigantic, is not in accordance with fact. Some extinct animals were of very great size—especially the great reptiles of the period long before the Tertiaries, and before the chalk. But the recent horse, the recent elephant, the giraffe, the lions, bears, and others, are bigger—some much bigger—than the ancestral forms, to which we can trace them by the wonderfully preserved and wonderfully collected and worked-out fossilised bones discovered in the successive layers of the Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene strata, leading us as we descend to more primitive, simplified, and smaller ancestors.

It is easy to understand the initial character of the foot of the early ancestral mammals. It had five toes. By the suppression or atrophy of first the innermost toe, then of the outermost, you find that mammals may first acquire four toes only, and then only three, and by repeating the process the toes may be reduced to two, or right away to one, the original middle toe. There is no special difficulty about tracing back the elephants in so far as this matter is concerned, since they have kept (like man and some other mammals) the full typical complement of five toes on each foot.

But I must explain a little more at length what was the "typical dentition,"—that is to say, the exact number and form of the teeth in each half of the upper and the lower jaw of the early mammalian ancestor of lower Eocene times, or just before. The jaws were drawn out into a snout or muzzle, an elongated, protruding "face," as in a dog or deer or hedgehog, and there were numerous teeth set in a row along the gums of the upper and the lower jaw. The teeth were the same in number, in upper and in lower jaw, and so formed as to work together, those of the lower jaw shutting as a rule just a little in front of the corresponding teeth of the upper jaw. There were above and below, in front, six small chisel-like teeth, which we call "the incisors." At the corner of the mouth above and below on each side flanking these was a corner tooth, or dog-tooth, a little bigger than the incisors, and more pointed and projecting. These we call "the canines," four in all. Then we turn the corner of the mouth-front, as it were, and come to the "grinders," cheek-teeth or molars. These are placed in a row along each half of upper and lower jaw. In our early mammalian ancestor they were seven in number, with broader crowns than the peg-like incisors and canines, the bright polished enamel of the crown being raised up into two, three or four cone-like prominences. The back grinders are broader and bigger than those nearer the dog-tooth. The three hindermost grinders in each half of each jaw are not replaced by "second" teeth, whilst all the other teeth are.

Fig. 10.—The teeth in the upper and lower jaw-bone of the common pig—drawn from photographs. a and b represent the right half of the lower jaw (a) and the right half of the upper jaw (b) seen in horizontal position. Inc. are the incisors or chisel-like front teeth, three in number, in each half of each jaw and marked 1, 2, 3. C marks the canine or dog-tooth, which here grows to be a large tusk. The molars, "grinders," or cheek teeth are marked 1 to 7. Figs. c and d give a side view of the left halves of the upper (c) and of the lower jaw-bone (d), with the teeth in place. The bone has been partly cut away so as to show the fangs or roots of the teeth, which are double in the molars, and even threefold in molar No. 7. The explanation of the lettering is the same as that given for Figs. a and b. The letter p in Fig. b points to a "foramen" or hole in the upper jaw-bone. These drawings are introduced here as showing the complete number of teeth which the ancestor of pigs, goats, elephants, dogs, tigers, men, and even whales possessed. The reduction in number and the alteration in the shape of the primitive full set of teeth is referred to in the present chapter on "Elephants," and in those on "Vegetarians and their Teeth" (p. 102), and on "A Strange Extinct Beast" (p. 92).

Now this typical set of teeth—consisting of twenty-eight grinders, four canines, and twelve incisors—is not found complete in many mammals at the present day, though it is found more frequently as we go back to earlier strata.[6] Though some mammals have kept close to the original number, they have developed peculiar shape and qualities in some of the teeth as well as changes in size. The common pig still keeps the typical number (Fig. 10), but he has developed the corner teeth or canines into enormous tusks both in the upper and lower jaw, and the more anterior grinders have become quite minute. The cats (lions and tigers included) have kept the full number of incisors (see Figs. 21 and 22, pp. [103], [104]); they have developed the four canines into enormous and deadly stabbing "fangs," and they have lost all the grinders but three in each half of the lower jaw and four in each half of the upper jaw (twelve instead of twenty-eight), and these have become sharp-edged so as to be scissor-like in their action, instead of crushing or grinding. Man and the old-world monkeys have lost an incisor in each half of each jaw (see Pls. VI and VII); they retain the canines, but have only five molars in each half of each jaw (twenty in all instead of twenty-eight). Most of the mammals—whatever change of number and shape has befallen their teeth in adaptation to their different requirements as to the kind of food and mode of getting it—have retained a good long pair of jaws and a snout or muzzle consisting of nose, upper jaw, and lower jaw, projecting well in front of the eyes and brain-case. Man is remarkable as an exception. In the higher races of men the jaws are shorter than in the lower races, and project but very little beyond the vertical plane of the eyes, whilst the nose projects beyond the lips. Another exception is the elephant. This is most obvious when the prepared bony skull and lower jaw are examined, but can be sufficiently clearly seen in the living animal. The lower jaw and the part of the upper jaw against which it and its grinders play is extraordinarily short and small. The elephant has, in fact, no projecting bony jaw at all, no bony snout, its chin does not project more than that of an old man, and even the part of the upper jaw into which its great tusks are set does not bend forward far from the perpendicular (Fig. 9).

Fig. 11.—A reconstruction of the extinct American mastodon (Mastodon ohioticus) from a drawing by Prof. Osborne. Other extinct species of mastodon are found in Europe.

Fig. 12.—a. Skull, and b. restored outline of the head of the long-jawed extinct elephant called Tetrabelodon—the name referring to its four large tusks—two above and two below.

The elephant (see Fig. 9) has no sign of the six little front teeth (incisors) above and below which we find in the typical dentition and in many living mammals, nor of the corner teeth (dog-teeth, or canines). In the upper jaw in front there is the one huge tusk on each side, and in the lower jaw no front teeth at all! Then as to the grinders. In the elephant these are enormous, with many transverse ridges on the elongated crown, and so big that there is only room for one at a time in each half of upper and lower jaw. Six of these succeed one another in each half of each jaw, and correspond (though greatly altered) to six of the seven grinders of the typical dentition. Are there amongst older fossil elephants and animals like elephants any which have an intermediate condition of the teeth, connecting the extremely peculiar teeth of the modern elephants with the typical dentition such as is approached by the pig, the dog, the tapir, and the hedgehog? There are such links. We know a great many elephants from Pleistocene and Pliocene strata—some from European localities, more from India, and some from America. A little elephant not more than 3 feet high when adult is found fossil in the island of Malta; other species were a little larger than the living African elephant. Whilst the Indian elephant has as many as twenty-four cross-ridges on its biggest grinding tooth (Fig. 8) there is a fossil kind which has only six such ridges. But besides true elephants we know from the Pliocene, Miocene, and Upper Eocene of the old world, the remains of elephant-like creatures (some as big as true elephants), which are distinguished by the name "Mastodon" (Fig. 11). And, in fact, we are conducted through a series of changes of form by ancient elephant-like creatures which are of older and older date as we pass along the series, and are known as (1) Mastodon, (2) Tetrabelodon, (3) Palæomastodon, (4) Meritherium, until we come to something approaching the general form of skull and skeleton and the typical dentition of the early mammalian ancestor. Mastodons of several species are found in Pliocene strata in Europe and Asia; detached teeth are found in Suffolk. One species actually survived (why, we do not know) in North America into the early human period, and whole skeletons of it are dug out from the morasses such as that of "Big-bone Lick." The Mastodons had a longer jaw and face than the elephants, though closely allied to them. They bring one nearer to ordinary mammals in that fact, and also in having (when young) two front teeth or incisors in the lower jaw. Their grinders had the crowns less elongated than those of the elephants, and there were only five cross-ridges—on the biggest—and these ridges tend to divide into separate cones (Fig. 8). So here, too, we are approaching the ordinary mammals, of which we may keep the pig and the tapir in mind as samples. But the Mastodons still had the great trunk and huge tusks of the elephants.

Next we must look at Tetrabelodon (Fig. 12), and it is this creature which has really revealed the history of the strange metamorphosis by which elephants were produced. The Tetrabelodon is known as "the long-jawed mastodon," because, as was shown in a wonderfully well-preserved skeleton from the lower Pliocene of the centre of France, set up in the Paris Museum, it had a lower jaw of enormous length, ending in two large horizontally directed teeth (Fig. 12). Instead of a lower jaw a foot long, as in an elephant or in the common kind of mastodon—this long-jawed kind had a lower jaw 5 feet or 6 feet long! The tusks of the upper jaw were large, and nearly horizontal in direction, bent downwards a little on each side of the long lower jaw. This lower jaw seemed incomprehensible, almost a monstrosity—until it occurred to me that it exactly corresponds to the elongated upper lip and nose which we call the elephant's trunk—and that the trunk of "Tetrabelodon" must have rested on his long lower jaw. In descending to Tetrabelodon we leave behind us the elephants with hanging unsupported trunk; the lower jaw here is of sufficient length to support the great trunk. When the lower jaw shortened in the later mastodons and elephants the trunk did not shorten too, but remained free and depending, capable of large movement and of grasping with its extremity. Photographs, casts, and actual specimens of the extraordinary skull of the long-jawed mastodon or Tetrabelodon and of the creatures mentioned below may be seen in the Natural History Museum.

Lastly we have the wonderful series of discoveries made about twelve years ago by Dr. Andrews (of the Natural History Museum) of elephant-like creatures in the upper Eocene of the Fayoum Desert of Egypt. Palæomastodon (the name given by Dr. Andrews to one of them) is a "pig-like" mastodon, with an elongated, bony face, the tusks of moderate size, and the lower jaw not projecting more than a few inches beyond them, so that the proboscis is quite short and rests well on it (Fig. 13). This animal had six moderate sized grinders (molars or cheek-teeth) on each side of each jaw in position simultaneously, as may be seen in the complete skull shown in Fig. 14. Of other teeth it had only the two moderate-sized front tusks above and two very big, chisel-like "incisors" in the front of the lower jaw. Exactly how these were used and for what food no one has yet made out.

Fig. 13.—Head of the ancestral elephant—Palæomastodon—as it appeared in life. It shows, as compared with the earlier ancestor, an elongation both of the snout and the lower jaws. The tusk in the upper jaw has increased in size, but is still small as compared with that of later elephants. (After a drawing by Prof. Osborne.)

Fig. 14.—Restored model of the skull and lower jaw of the ancestral elephant Palæomastodon from the upper Eocene strata of the Fayoum Desert, Egypt. It shows the six molar teeth of the upper and lower jaw (left side), the tusk-like upper incisors and the large chisel-like lower incisors in front.

The remains, which finally bring the elephants into line with the ordinary mammals with typical dentition, were discovered also by Dr. Andrews and named "Meritherium" by him, signifying "the beast of the Lake Meris." This creature is not bigger than a tapir, and had the shape of head and face which we see in that and the ordinary hoofed animals (Fig. 15). It had no trunk, and whilst it had six small and simplified mastodon-like grinders in each half of each jaw, it had six incisors in the upper jaw and a canine or corner tooth on each side. In the lower jaw there were only two large incisors besides the cheek-teeth or grinders. Not the least interesting point about Meritherium is that it tells us which of the front upper teeth have become the huge tusks of the later elephants. Counting from the middle line there are in Meritherium three incisors right and three left. The second of these upper teeth on each side is much larger than the others. It is this (seen in Fig. 15) which has grown larger and larger in later descendants of this primitive form and become the elephant's tusk, whilst all the others have disappeared.

Fig. 15.—Head of the early ancestor of elephants—Meritherium—as it appeared in life. Observe the absence of a trunk and the enlarged front tooth in the upper jaw, which is converted in later members of the elephant-stock or line of descent into the great tusk. (After a drawing by Prof. Osborne.)

We now know the complete series of steps connecting elephants with ordinary trunkless, tuskless mammals. The transition from the "beast of Meris" on the one hand to the common typidentate mammalian ancestor, and on the other hand to the elephants, is easy, and requires no effort of the imagination. His short muzzle (upper and lower jaw), first elongated step by step to a considerable length, giving us Palæomastodon (Fig. 13). Then the lower jaw shrunk and became shorter than it was at the start, and the rest of the muzzle (the front part of the upper jaw, carrying with it the nostrils), drooped and became the mobile muscular elephant's trunk!

[5] I am inclined to think that the line between Pliocene and Pleistocene or Quaternary ought, in this country, to be drawn between the White and Red Crag of Suffolk. Glacial conditions set in and were recurrent from the commencement of the Red Crag deposit onwards.

[6] Mammals having the number and form of teeth which I have just described as typical—or such modification of it as can easily be produced by suppression of some teeth and enlargement of others—are called Typidentata. On the other hand, the whales, the sloths, ant-eaters, and armadilloes, as also the Marsupials, are called Variodentata, because we cannot derive their teeth from those of the Typidentate ancestor. They form lines of descent which separated from the other mammals before the Typidentate ancestor of all, except the groups just named, was evolved.

CHAPTER VII

A STRANGE EXTINCT BEAST

The terraces of gravel deposited by existing rivers and the deposits in caverns in the limestone regions of Western Europe—the so-called "Pleistocene" strata—contain, besides the flint weapons of man and rare specimens of his bones, the remains of animals which are either identical with those living at the present day (though many of them are not living now in Europe) or of animals very closely similar to living species. Thus we find the bones of horses like the wild horse of Mongolia, of the great bull (the Urus of Cæsar), of the bison, of deer and goats, of the Siberian big-nosed antelope, of the musk-ox (now living within the Arctic circle), of the wild boar, of the hippopotamus (like that of the Nile), and of lions, hyenas, bears, and wolves. The most noteworthy of the animals like to, but not identical with, any living species are the mammoth, which is very close to the Indian elephant, but has a hairy coat; the hairy rhinoceros, like, but not quite the same as, the African square-mouthed rhinoceros; and the great Irish deer, which is like a giant fallow-deer. These three animals are really extinct kinds or species, but are not very far from living kinds. In fact, the most recent geological deposits do not contain any animals so peculiar, when compared with living animals, as to necessitate a wide separation of the fossil animal from living "congeners" by the naturalist who classifies animals and tries to exhibit their degrees of likeness and relationship to one another by the names he adopts for them. The mammoth is a distinct "species" of elephant. It requires, it is true, a "specific" or "second" name of its own; but it belongs to the genus elephant. Hence we call it Elephas primigenius, whilst the living Indian elephant is Elephas Indicus. The reader is referred to the preceding chapter for further notes about elephants.

The strata next below the Pleistocene gravels and cave deposits are ascribed to the "Pliocene age"—older than these are the "Miocene" and the "Eocene," and then you come to the Chalk, a good white landmark separating newer from older strata.

We know now in great detail the skeletons and jaws of some hundreds of kinds of extinct animals of very different groups found in the Eocene, the Miocene, the Pliocene, and the Pleistocene layers of clays, sands, and gravels of this part of the world. Nothing very strange or unlike what is now living is found in the Pleistocene—the latest deposits—but when we go further back strange creatures are discovered, becoming stranger and less like living things as we pass through Pliocene to Miocene, and on—downwards in layers, backwards in time—to the Eocene.

Though the past history of the Mediterranean sea shows that it was formerly not so extensive as it is now, and that there were junctions between Europe and Africa across its waters, yet the deeper parts of that sea are very ancient, and some of the islands have long been isolated. In Malta the remains of extraordinary species of minute elephants have been found, one no larger than a small donkey, and in the island of Cyprus an English lady, Miss Dorothea Bate, has discovered the bones of a pigmy hippopotamus (like that still living in Liberia) no larger than a sheep. Miss Bate some three years ago heard of the existence of a bone-containing deposit of Pleistocene age in limestone caverns and fissures in the island of Majorca, and with the true enthusiasm of an explorer determined to carry on some "digging" there and see what might turn up. In the following spring she was there, and obtained a number of bones, jaws, and portions of skulls, which appeared at first sight to be those of a small goat. Its size may be gathered from the fact that its skull is six inches long. These and the bones of a few small finches were all that rewarded her pains. The bones of fossil goats (of living species) are found in caves at Gibraltar and in Spain; so at first the result seemed disappointing. But on carefully clearing out the specimens and examining them in London, Miss Bate found that the supposed goat bones obtained by her in Majorca were really those of a new and most extraordinary animal, to which (in a paper published in the "Geological Magazine" in September, 1910) she has given the name "Myotragus balearicus."

Fig. 16.—Side-view of the skull and lower jaw of a goat. inc. i. The three lower incisor teeth of the left side. can. i. The little canine teeth grouped with them. p. The toothless front part of the upper jaw. m. s. Upper molars or "grinders." m. i. Lower molars or grinders. Compare this and the following figures with Fig. 10, showing the more complete "dentition" of the pig.

Fig. 17.—Horizontal view of the teeth in the lower and upper jaw of the goat. In front of the lower jaw the group of three incisors (inc. i.) and one canine is seen, whilst the toothless bony plate (p.) of the upper jaw, against which they work, is seen in the right-hand half of the figure. The molars, "grinders," or cheek-teeth are numbered 1 to 6 in each jaw.

Fig. 18.—Side view of the skull of a typical "rodent" mammal, the Coypu rat (Myocastor coypus) from South America. inc. s. Upper incisor. inc. i. Lower incisor. m. s., m. i. Upper and lower molars, grinders or cheek-teeth.

I must ask the reader now to look at the figures here given (Figs. 16 and 17) of the skull and the lower jaw of a goat. The lower jaw might (except for size) pass for that of a sheep, ox, antelope or deer. They are all alike. There are on each side six grinding cheek-teeth (molars), and then as we pass to the front we find a long toothless gap until we come to the middle line where the two halves of the jaw unite. There we see a little semicircular group of eight chisel-like teeth, which work against the toothless pad of the upper jaw opposed to them, and are the instruments by which these animals, with an upward jerk of the head, "crop" the grass and other herbage on which they feed, to be afterwards triturated by the grinding cheek teeth. A vast series of living and of fossil animals, called the Ruminants—including the giraffes, the antler-bearing forms called deer, the cavicorn or sheath-horned bovines, ovines and caprines, and the large series of antelopes of Africa and India—all have precisely this form of jaw, this number and shape and grouping of the teeth. Now let me call to mind the lower jaw of a hare or rabbit or rat (Figs. 18 and 19). There we find on each side the group of grinding cheek-teeth, with transverse ridges on their crowns, and a long, toothless gap before we arrive at the front teeth. But the front teeth are only two in number, one on each side, close to each other, very large, and each with a tremendously long, deeply set root. They meet a similar pair of teeth in the upper jaw, and give the hare, rabbit, rats, mice, beavers, and porcupines the power of "gnawing" tough substances. These animals are hence called Rodents, or gnawers, and the two great front teeth are called "rodent-teeth." No two arrangements of teeth could be much more unlike than are the group of eight little chisel-like teeth of the lower jaw of the Ruminants and the two enormous gnawing teeth of the Rodents. Apparently the two rodent incisors, or front teeth, of the lower jaw of the rat correspond to the two middle incisors of the Ruminant's lower jaw; the other front teeth of the Ruminant have atrophied, disappeared altogether. The rodent condition has been developed from that of an ancestor which had several front teeth and not two large ones only; but we have not at present found the intermediate steps.

Fig. 19.—View in the horizontal plane of the teeth of the left half of the lower and the left half of the upper jaw of the Coypu rat to show the single great gnawing incisor on each side, the four flat grinding molars and the wide gap between molars and incisors. Compare with Figs. 17 and 22.

The reader should compare the teeth of the goat and the large rat here pictured with the more typical and complete series of the pig, given in Fig. 10, p. 84. The pig's teeth are the same in number as those of the ancestral primitive typidentate mammal, and their form is near to that of the ancestor's teeth.

Now I come to the extraordinary interest of Miss Bate's goat-like or antelope-like animal from Majorca. Although it is shown by its skull (Fig. 20) and other bones to be distinctly one of the sheath-horned Ruminants, very like a small goat or antelope, the lower jaw, of which there are several specimens, does not present in front the little group of eight small chisel-like "cropping" teeth, but, instead, two enormous rodent teeth placed side by side, very deeply fixed in the jaw, and quite like those of some rat-like animals in shape. Hence the name given to this little marvel by Miss Bate—"Myotragus," "the rat-goat." This strange little animal also differs from goats and antelopes in having proportionately much thicker and shorter "feet" (cannon-bones) than they have.

If the remains of this strange little creature had turned up in more ancient strata—in Pliocene or Miocene—it would have not been quite so astonishing. But it would be still very remarkable, since it has all the characters of a goat-like creature in the shape of its skull, its bony horn-cores, its limb-bones, and its cheek-teeth; and yet, as it were monstrously and in a most disconcerting way, protrudes from its lower jaw two great rats' teeth. Nothing like it or approaching it or suggesting it, is known among recent or fossil Ruminants. They all without exception have a lower jaw with the teeth of the exact number and grouping which you may see in a sheep's lower jaw. We know hundreds of them, both living and fossil, many from the Pleistocene, others from Pliocene deposits, and even from the still older Miocene, but all keep to the one pattern of lower jaw and lower jaw teeth. It is only in this little island of Majorca, surrounded by very deep water and not known to have nurtured any other animal so large in size either in recent or geologic times, that we come upon a Ruminant with horns like a goat's, but with great rat-like front teeth in place of the semicircle of eight little cropping toothlets. The wonderful thing is that the bones found by Miss Bate are light and well preserved, evidently not very ancient—probably late Pleistocene in age.

Fig. 20.—Drawing of the skull of the rat-toothed goat, Myotragus—the new extinct beast discovered in limestone fissures in the island of Majorca by Miss Bate. 1. Side view of the skull and lower jaw. 2. Appearance of the two rat-like teeth as seen when the end of the lower jaw is viewed from above.

The questions that arise are: Where did the rat-goat come from? How did this utterly peculiar change in a Ruminant's teeth come about? With regard to the second question, it is a matter of importance that although we have hitherto not discovered any Ruminants with this modification of the teeth, still less any cavicorn or sheath-horned Ruminant so altered, yet it is by no means rare amongst herbivorous mammals to find such rat-like teeth making their appearance, whilst the smaller side-teeth of the incisor group or front teeth disappear. The Australian kangaroos and wombats are a case in point—so is the lemur-like aye-aye of Madagascar (an insect eater). So is the Hyrax or "damian" of the Cape, and also the very ancient Plagiaulax from the præ-chalk Purbeck clay. But perhaps the best case for comparison with the ruminants is that of the rhinoceroses. There are a great many species and even genera of fossil and recent rhinoceroses. An old Miocene kind (called Hyracodon) has eight little teeth in the front of the lower jaw. In a Pliocene kind of rhinoceros (called R. incisivus) these are reduced to two, the middle two, which are of great size and project far forward—like those of the rat-goat of Majorca. Among living rhinoceroses the Indian species have these two front teeth, but smaller, whilst the square-mouthed African rhinoceros has none at all! This helps us, as a parallel, to understand "the strange case" of Myotragus. But, of course, the rhinoceroses are a distinct line of animal descent—remote from Ruminants. They are (like horses and tapirs) odd-toed hoofed beasts—not even-toed ones, as are pigs, camels, and ruminants.

On first considering the question of the origin of the rat-goat of Majorca, some naturalists will, no doubt, be tempted to suggest that it is a case of a sudden "sport," a "mutation" as they now call it, and not a result of gradual slowly developed reduction of the now lost teeth and correspondingly gradual enlargement of the two middle ones, taking many thousand generations to bring about. The fact that the rat-goat is found on an island cut off from competition with other animals will favour this view. On the other hand, there is the important and really remarkable fact that familiar as man has been for ages with Ruminants of many kinds—such as sheep, goats, cattle, deer—there is absolutely no case on record of an "oddity" or "monstrosity" resembling the rat-goat's condition occurring in the teeth of any of the hundreds of thousands of these animals killed and eaten by man, and therefore closely examined. Professor Bateson, who a few years ago ransacked the museums of Europe for instances of "discontinuous variation," or "sports," and wrote a valuable book on the subject, did not discover any example of the kind. Apart from the view, which is very generally held, that such sudden "mutations" as "rat-teeth in a ruminant" are—even should they occur—not perpetuated, we are not really in any way driven to suppose that the rat-goat of Majorca originated in that island. It is true that we know nothing like it in the Pliocene and Miocene of the Mediterranean region which could have been its immediate ancestor. But probably the ancestors of the rat-goat were slowly developed from a Miocene sheath-horned ruminant, a primitive sort of antelope in some part of North-west Africa, or in an extension of it now submerged in the Atlantic, and stragglers of this curious and now lost Ruminant stock were left in Majorca when in Miocene or early Pliocene times that island became detached from its Hispano-African connection.

CHAPTER VIII

VEGETARIANS AND THEIR TEETH

No mistake, said Huxley, is more frequently made by clever people than that of supposing that a cause or an opinion is unsound because the arguments put forward in its favour by its advocates are foolish or erroneous. Some of the arguments put forward in favour of the exclusive use by mankind of a vegetable diet can be shown to be based on misconception and error, and I propose now to mention one or two of these. But I wish to guard against the supposition that I am convinced in consequence that animal substances form the best possible diet for man, or that an exclusively vegetable diet may not, if properly selected, be advantageous for a large majority of mankind. That question, as well as the question of the advantage of a mixed diet of animal and vegetable substances, and the best proportion and quantity of the substances so mixed, must be settled, as also the question as to the harm or good in the habitual use of small quantities of alcohol, by definite careful experiment by competent physiologists, conducted on a scale large enough to give conclusive results. The cogency of the arguments in favour of vegetarianism which I am about to discuss is another matter.

In the first place it is very generally asserted by those who advocate a purely vegetable diet that man's teeth are of the shape and pattern which we find in fruit-eating or in root-eating animals allied to him. This is true. The warm-blooded hairy quadrupeds which suckle their young and are called "mammals" (for which word perhaps "beasts" is the nearest Anglo-Saxon equivalent) show in different groups and orders a great variety in their teeth. The birds of to-day have no teeth, the reptiles, amphibians, and fishes have usually simple conical or peg-like teeth, which are used simply for holding and tearing. In some cases the pointed pin-like teeth are broadened out so as to be button-like, and act as crushing organs for breaking up shell-fish. The mammals alone have a great variety and elaboration of the teeth.

Fig. 21.—Side view of the skull of a clouded tiger (Felis nebulosa) to show the teeth. inc. s. The three incisors. can. s. Upper canine, corner-tooth, or dog-tooth. can. i. Lower canine. m. s. The four upper molars or cheek-teeth (called "grinders" in herbivorous animals). m. i. The three lower molars or cheek-teeth.

Fig. 22.—View in the horizontal plane of the teeth of the lower and upper jaw of the same clouded tiger's skull. inc. i. Lower incisors. inc. s. Upper incisors. can. i. and can. s. Lower and upper canine. m. The cheek-teeth—three only in the lower jaw, a minute fourth molar present in the upper.

In shape and size, as well as in number, the teeth of mammals are very clearly related to the nature of their food in the first place, and secondly to their use as weapons of attack or of defence. When the surface of the cheek-teeth is broad, with low and numerous tubercles, the food of the animal is of a rather soft substance, which yields to a grinding action. Such substances are fruits, nuts, roots, or leaves, which are "triturated" and mixed with the saliva during the process of mastication. Where the vegetable food is coarse grass or tree twigs, requiring long and thorough grinding, transverse ridges of enamel are present on the cheek-teeth, as in elephants, cattle, deer, and rabbits (see Figs. 8, 17, 19). Truly carnivorous animals, which eat the raw carcases of other animals, have a different shape of teeth. Not only do they have large and dagger-like canines or "dog-teeth" as weapons of attack, but the cheek-teeth (very few in number) present a long, sharp-edged ridge running parallel to the length of the jaw, the edges of which in corresponding upper and lower teeth fit and work together like the blades of a pair of scissors. The cats (including the lions, tigers and leopards) have this arrangement in perfection (see Figs. 21 and 22). They cut the bones and muscles of their prey into great lumps with the scissor-like cheek-teeth, and swallow great pieces whole without mastication. Insect-eating mammals have cheek-teeth with three or four sharp-pointed tubercles standing up on the surface. They break the hard-shelled insects and swallow them rapidly. The fish-eating whales have an immense number of peg-like pointed teeth only. These serve as do those of the seals—merely to catch and grip the fish, which are swallowed whole.

It is quite clear that man's cheek-teeth do not enable him to cut lumps of meat and bone from raw carcases and swallow them whole, nor to grip live fish and swallow them straight off (Pl. VI). They are broad, square-surfaced teeth, with four or fewer low rounded tubercles fitted to crush soft food, as are those of monkeys (see Pl. VII and its description). And there can be no doubt that man fed originally, like monkeys, on easily crushed fruits, nuts, and roots. He could not eat like a cat.

A fundamental mistake has arisen amongst some of the advocates of vegetarianism by the use of the words "carnivorous" and "flesh-eating" in an ill-defined way. Man has never eaten lumps of raw meat and bone, and no one proposes that he should do so to-day. Man did not take to meat-eating until he had acquired the use of fire, and had learnt to cook the meat before he ate it. He thus separated the bone and intractable sinew from the flesh, which he rendered friable and divisible by thorough grilling, roasting, or baking. To eat meat thus altered, both chemically and in texture, is a very different thing from eating the raw carcases of large animals. Man's teeth are thoroughly fitted for the trituration of cooked meat, which is, indeed, as well suited to their mechanical action as are fruits, nuts, and roots. Hence we see that the objection to a meat diet based on the structure of man's teeth does not apply to the use of cooked meat as diet. The use by man of uncooked meat is not proposed or defended.

Yet, further, it is well to take notice of the fact that there are many vegetarian wild animals which do not hesitate to eat certain soft animals or animal products when they get the chance. Thus, both monkeys and primitive men will eat grubs and small soft animals, and also the eggs of birds. Whilst the cat tribe, in regard to the chemical action of their digestive juices, are so specialised for eating raw meat that it is practically impossible for them to take vegetable matter as even a small portion of their diet, and whilst, on the other hand, the grass-eating cattle, sheep, goats, antelopes, deer and giraffes are similarly disqualified from any form of meat-diet, most other land-mammals can be induced, without harm to themselves, to take a mixed diet, even in those cases where they do not naturally seek it. Pigs, on the one hand, and bears, on the other, tend naturally to a mixed diet. Many birds, under conditions adverse to the finding of their usual food, will change from vegetable to animal diet, or vice-versâ. Sea-gulls normally are fish-eaters, but some will eat biscuit and grain when fish cannot be had. Pigeons have been fed successfully on a meat diet; so, too, some parrots, and also the familiar barn-door fowl. Many of our smaller birds eat both insects and grain, according to opportunity. Hence it appears impossible to base any argument against the use of cooked meat as part of man's diet upon the structure of his teeth, or upon any far-reaching law of Nature which decrees that every animal is absolutely either fitted (internally and chemically, as well as in the matter of teeth) for a diet consisting exclusively of vegetable substances, or else is immutably assigned to one consisting exclusively of animal substances. There is no à priori assumption possible against the use as food by man of nutritious matter derived from animals' bodies properly prepared.

So far as à priori argument has any value in such a matter, it suggests that the most perfect food for any animal—that which supplies exactly the constituents needed by the animal in exactly right quantity and smallest bulk—is the flesh and blood of another animal of its own species. This is a startling theoretical justification—from the purely dietetic point of view—of cannibalism. It is, however, of no conclusive value; the only method which can give us conclusions of any real value in this and similarly complex matters is prolonged, full, well-devised, well-recorded experiment. At the same time, we may just note that the favourite food of the scorpion is the juice of the body of another scorpion, and that the same preference for cannibalism exists in spiders, many insects, fishes, and even higher animals.

Another line of argument by which some advocates of vegetarianism appeal to the popular judgment is by representing flesh-food derived from animals as something dirty, foul, and revolting, full of microbic germs, whilst vegetable products are extolled as being clean and sweet—free from odour and putrescence and from the scaremonger's microbes. This, I perhaps need hardly say, is a gigantic illusion and misrepresentation. I came across it the other day in a very unreasonable pamphlet on food by the American writer, Mr. Upton Sinclair. Putrefactive microbes attack vegetable foods and produce revolting smells and poisons in them, just as they do in foods of animal origin. It is true that on the whole more varieties of vegetable food can be kept dry and ready for use by softening with hot water than is the case with foods prepared from animals. This is only a question of not keeping food too long or in conditions tending to the access of putrefactive bacteria. It is, on the whole, more usual and necessary, in order to render it palatable, to apply heat to flesh, fish, and fowl than to fruits. And it is by heat—heat of the temperature of boiling water—applied for ten minutes or more, that poison-producing and infective bacteria are killed and rendered harmless. More people have become infected by deadly parasites and have died from cholera and similar diseases, through having taken the germs of those diseases into their stomachs with raw and over-ripe fruit or uncooked vegetables and the manured products of the kitchen garden, than have suffered from the presence of disease-germs or putrefactive bacteria in well-cooked meat. Here, in fact, "cooking" makes all the difference, just as it does in the matter we were discussing above of the fitness of flesh and bone for trituration by man's teeth.

Plate VI.—The series of teeth in the upper (1) and lower jaw (2) of a modern European (natural size). The teeth are placed closely side by side without a gap—an arrangement which does not occur in the apes nor in any other living mammal, although it is found in some extinct herbivores—the Anoplotherium and the Arsinöitherium. The shape of the arch formed by the row of teeth should be compared with that shown by the same arch in the Gibbon (Pl. VII). The crowns of the teeth are very carefully drawn in this figure, which is from a plate published by Professor Selenka.

It must be noted that the number of tubercles on the true molars may be in exceptional cases one more or one less than that given in this drawing which gives the most usual number. The word "molar" is often used to include the five cheek-teeth on each side of each jaw, but more strictly the anterior bicuspid teeth are called "pre-molars," and the three larger teeth behind them, which have no predecessors or representatives in the first or milk dentition, are called true molars or simply "molars"—a rule we have followed here.

In both upper and lower jaw we see the four incisors in the middle (Inc. 1, Inc. 2); on each side of them is the conical crown of a canine—a tooth which is greatly enlarged in the ape (see Pl. VII), but is no larger proportionately than it is here even in the most ancient known human jaw, that from the Pleistocene of Heidelberg (see "Science from an Easy Chair," Methuen, 1910, p. 405). The two small bicuspid "pre-molars" and the three large molars follow these on each side in each jaw. The crown of the most anterior (or "first") molar of the upper jaw has four cusps, tubercles, or cones on it. It is "quadri-tuberculate." The second and third molars of the upper jaw have three such prominent tubercles (excluding a row of small tubercles on the hinder margin of the second); they are, in fact, tri-tuberculate; whilst the two hindermost molars of the lower jaw have four tubercles and are called quadri-tuberculate. The first molar (M1) of the lower jaw has in this specimen five tubercles. In 60 per cent. of European lower jaws this is the case. But in 40 per cent. this tooth is quadri-tuberculate. In Polynesians, Chinese, Melanesians and negroes five tubercles are found on this tooth in 90 per cent. of the jaws examined. The apes are characterised by five tubercles on this tooth, and they are found also on the first lower molars of prehistoric men. Four tubercles only on this tooth is a departure from the ape's condition and is found more frequently in Europeans.

It is obvious that these big molar teeth, as well as the two smaller ones in front of them on each side of each jaw, are adapted for breaking up rather soft, pulpy food, and not for cutting lumps of bone or raw flesh, as are the molars of the clouded tiger (identical with those of all species of the genus Felis), shown in Figs. 21 and 22, pp. 103, 104, nor for rubbing grain, grass or herbage to a paste, as are those of the goat (Fig. 17), those of the Coypu rat (Fig. 19), and those of the elephants and mastodons (Fig. 8).

Plate VII.—Drawings of (1) the upper and (2) the lower series of teeth of the Gibbon (Hylobates concolor), one of the anthropoid or most man-like apes (enlarged by one third). If these drawings are compared with those in Pl. VI, showing man's teeth, the most striking difference seen is that the "arch" or series of teeth is here elongated and squared, not rounded in front, whilst there is plenty of room in both jaws for the last or wisdom tooth, which is not the case in modern races of men, though in the ancient Neander man's jaw and in that from Heidelberg there is ample space for the last molar as in the apes. The next most important difference is that in the gibbon the four canine teeth are very large and tusk-like, and must certainly be of value as weapons of attack—which man's are not. Connected with the large size of the canines is the presence of a gap (or "diastema" as it is called) between the four front teeth or incisors of the upper jaw and the upper canine—which allows the lower canine to fit in front of the upper canine when the jaw is closed. The number of the tubercles or cones on the molars (the two smaller pre-molars and the three hinder large molars) can be compared in detail in these beautiful drawings from Professor Selenka's work, which are the most careful and perfect which have ever been published. The agreement of these teeth in man and the gibbon is very close: but there are differences. The first, or most anterior pre-molar of the lower jaw has one predominant cusp or cone; the second, like both in the upper jaw, is "bicuspid," or bi-tuberculate, as in man. The three big molars of the upper jaw are closely similar to those of man, with some small differences, the second being quadri-tuberculate, whilst in man it is as often tri-tuberculate (as it is in Pl. VI) as it is quadri-tuberculate. But the two anterior big molars of the lower jaw are seen to have each five well-marked cones, cusps or tubercles; they are quinqui-tuberculate, whilst in man the first lower molar is often quadri-tuberculate and the second even more frequently so. The last lower molar (wisdom tooth) of the gibbon is like that of man, quadri-tuberculate.

The details of the tubercles on these molar teeth distinctly justify the conclusion that they are adapted in the two animals compared—namely, man and the gibbon—to food of the same mechanical quality, and this undoubtedly is fruit and nuts. Nevertheless such a form of tooth is equally well adapted to the texture of cooked meat, which has served many races of man for probably hundreds of thousands of years as food.

Once we remember that man is not fitted for the "raw meat" diet of the carnivora, but is fitted for the "cooked meat" diet which he has himself discovered—alone of all animals—we shall get rid of a misleading prejudice in the consideration of the question as to whether civilised men should or should not make cooked meat a portion of their diet, with the purpose of maintaining themselves in as healthy and vigorous a state as possible. Do not let us forget that ancient Palæolithic cave-men certainly made use of fire to cook their meals of animal flesh, and that probably this use of fire dates back to a still earlier period when, in consequence of this application of the red, running tongues of flame, which he had learned to produce, primitive man was able to leave the warmer climates of the earth and their abundant fruits, and to establish himself in temperate and even sub-Arctic regions.

Experiments on a large and decisive scale in regard to the value of the different foods taken by man and the question of the desirability of cooked meat as part of his diet have never been carried out, nor has the use of alcohol been studied by direct experimental method on a large scale. Inasmuch as the feeding of our Army and Navy, of prisoners, lunatics, and paupers, is the business of the State, it is obviously the duty of the Government to investigate this matter and arrive at a decision. It can be done by the Government, and only by the Government. The Army Medical Department is fully capable, and, I am told, desirous, of undertaking this investigation. Five hundred soldiers in barracks would find it no hardship, but an agreeable duty (if rewarded in a suitable way), to submit to various diets, and to comparative tests of the value of such diets. There would be no difficulty in arranging the experimental investigation. Fifty years ago similar work (but not precisely in regard to the questions now raised) was done by the Army Medical Department, under Parkes, with most valuable and widely recognised results.

CHAPTER IX

FOOD AND COOKERY

Animals, taking one kind with another, nourish themselves on an immense variety of food. The flesh and the blood of other animals of all kinds, warm or cold, the leaves, twigs, fruits, juices of plants, putrid carcases, hair, feathers, skin, bran, sawdust, the vegetable mould or "humus" of the earth's surface, the sand of the sea, with its minute particles of organic detritus, all serve as food to different kinds of animals. Some are very little fettered in their tastes, and are called "omnivorous," others are bound in the strictest way to a diet consisting of the leaves of some one species of plant or the juices of one species of animal. Some of the latter class, under stress or privation, can accommodate themselves to a new food very different in character and origin from that which is habitual to them; others have no elasticity in this respect, and must have their exact habitual food-plant or food-animal, unless they are to die of starvation.

Man exhibits his great powers of accommodation to changed circumstances in respect of food as well as in other matters. If we are to suppose, as is probable, that our original ape-like ancestors fed exclusively upon fruits and an occasional egg or juicy grub, how vast are the changes in diet to which man has habituated himself! Man is sometimes said to be omnivorous, but this is not a sufficient description of the state of things which has grown up as he has spread over the earth's surface. Every race—and even many a small group of men—has its accustomed diet, to depart from which is a pain and a difficulty, even though new kinds of food may be gradually accepted and even become popular. Man has in this, as in so many other things, a large range of possible accommodation, but he has at the same time habits the continuance of which are necessary for the healthy working of the nervous system. The psychical element in the matter of food-habit is important in all higher animals, but most of all in man. The digestive organs are controlled by the nervous system, and the brain acts upon the latter in such a way as to favour or to restrain the "appetite" and the secretion of the elaborate digestive juices, so that fear, surprise, disgust, and "nausea" (that strange product of mental and physical reactions) may destroy appetite and inhibit the digestive process. There are vast populations of men who live on rice, or beans, or meal, and never eat animal food, not even milk (after babyhood), nor cheese, and would be, at a first attempt to eat it, "put off" and disgusted by a mutton chop. There are others who subsist almost entirely on fish, others who live on dried beef, others who live on the fat of whales and seals, and would be for a generation or two injured, half starved, and some of them even killed, by a change of diet. Again, there are others who consider that they must have and will be "ill" unless they had the cooked flesh of an ox or sheep as part of their daily food. Let us examine this latter group a little more fully—a group to which the nations of Europe belong, with the exception of the Italians, who are essentially a meal-, fruit-, and cheese-eating people.

Apparently at a very early time, even before the last glacial period, man had learnt the use of fire, and roasted or grilled the carcases of other animals which he killed in the chase, in order to consume them as food. We have no reason to suppose that man ever made use of the raw flesh of higher animals as his habitual diet. His teeth are not, and never were, from his earliest ape-like days, adapted to true carnivorous diet. Cooked meat is not the food of a carnivor, but is an adaptation of the flesh of animals to the requirements of a frugivorous animal. Probably the use of grain and cultivated vegetable food is a later step in human progress than the roasting of meat. The Neandermen, and even the later Reindeer-men (Cromagnards), had no cultivated fields, but lived on roasted meat (of beasts, birds, and fish) and wild fruits. We know how thoroughly the most ancient Greeks enjoyed the long slices of roasted meat cut from the chine, as told in the Homeric poems, and everywhere in Europe after the neolithic or polished-stone period, meat was a main article of diet, in conjunction with the vegetable products of agriculture. In this country, after the Norman conquest, meat-eating was greatly favoured by the important industry which grew up in hides. The land was well suited for the pasturage of cattle, and owing to the smallness of the population and the abundance of cattle slaughtered for their hides, meat was almost to be had for the asking. It was thus that Englishmen became great meat-eaters and that "the roast beef of Old England" was established. Later the same superfluity of meat—in this case, "mutton"—recurred and became general when wool-growing and the manufacture of woollen goods developed into important industries. Relatively to the population there was more "meat" of oxen and sheep in this country than on the continent of Europe, and this disproportion has been maintained.

But the increase of population has led to a considerable change in the diet of a very large proportion—the poorer part—of the community. Whilst the families of the better-paid working class and all the middle and upper class continue to eat meat, the agricultural labourer and the poorer workmen in towns live chiefly on flour, sugar, bacon, and cheese. Probably they have become habituated to this diet, and, provided that the quantity is sufficient, it cannot be maintained that the diet, in which meat is nearly or altogether absent, is unhealthy. Many vigorous and muscularly well-developed populations in other lands thrive on exclusively vegetable food.

A curious and not altogether comforting reflection is that if the inexpensive and simple food of the agricultural labourer is sufficient, the section of the community which spends from five to ten shillings per head a day on a mixed diet of meat, fish, eggs, and vegetables is guilty of waste and excess. Here, however, the remarkable, and, in fact, exceptional domination of "habit" (in the case of man), in regard to both the actual articles of food and the mode of its preparation, has to be recognised. Such and such inexpensive and unskilfully prepared food may contain more than the necessary amount of proteids (that is, matters like flesh, the casein of cheese and of vegetables, and the albumen of eggs), of hydro-carbons (i.e., fats), of carbo-hydrates (i.e., starch and sugar), yet if you were suddenly to compel a man accustomed to well-cooked meat to live on such food he would be unable to assimilate it, his digestive organs would refuse to work, and he would become, if not seriously ill, yet so ill-nourished and sickly that he would be unfit for his work and readily fall a victim to disease. It is, in fact, impossible to lay down any scheme of diet based on the mere provision of the necessary quantities of food materials whilst ignoring the formed habits of the individual and the relation of the psychical conditions which we call "taste," "appetite," "fancy," "disgust," to the actual processes of digestion and the consequent efficiency of the proposed diet.

No doubt gradually, after a few generations, a whole people may become healthily habituated to a diet which would have been positively injurious to their forebears, and no doubt individuals may be led by fortitude or by necessity in time (perhaps weeks, perhaps years) to acquire a tolerance, or even enjoyment, of food at first repulsive, and therefore injurious. The difficulty in the matter is not that of correctly determining what is physiologically sufficient for the human animal, nor even what would be a healthy diet for a community when once, after a transition period of distress and injury, habituated or "attuned" to that diet. The difficulty is to arrive at a conclusion as to what is really the suitable and reasonable diet for an individual—yourself or one like yourself—having regard to the lifelong habits of the individual, and the consequent nervous reactions established in him or her in relation to the taste, quality, and mode of presentation of food. Robust people, so long as they get what suits their own uncultivated taste, are apt to make very light of what they call "fancies" about food, and to overlook their real importance.

Feeding on the part of civilised man is not the simple procedure which it is with animals, although many animals are particular as to their food and what is called "dainty." The necessity for civilised man of cheerful company at his meal, and for the absence of mental anxiety, is universally recognised, as well as the importance of an inviting appeal to the appetite through the sense of smell and of sight, whilst the injurious effect of the reverse conditions, which may lead to nausea, and even vomiting, is admitted. Even the ceremonial features of the dinner table, the change of clothes before sitting down to the repast, the leisurely yet precise succession of approved and expected dishes, accompanied by pleasant talk and light-hearted companionship, are shown by strict scientific examination to be important aids to the healthy digestion of food, which need not be large in quantity, although it should be wisely presented.

These psychical conditions of healthy feeding are not trivial matters, as we are too apt to suppose. They are part, and a very important part, of the physiology of nutrition, and so deserving of scientific inquiry and of practical attention. They have been made the subject of careful experiment by a Russian physiologist, Pavloff. At a recent meeting of the British Association this matter was brought under discussion in the Physiological Section, and it was pointed out by the author of a very interesting communication that the whole question as to what is and what is not a sound and healthy diet is too often dealt with by writers who ignore the psychical (or shall we say the cerebral?) factor. Cases were cited of dangerous arrest of the power of digesting, or even of swallowing, food which were cured by giving the patient some apparently inappropriate and probably harmful article of food for which he or she had a fancy, such as a grilled salmon-steak, the last thing which would be spontaneously recommended by a medical man to a patient who had been suffering for weeks from inability to take food. The willingness is all—the assent, the approval of the cerebral centres, and the consequent unlocking of the whole arrested mechanism of digestive secretions and movements. Such a case is only an extreme instance. But it is undoubtedly the fact that just as the sight of so small a thing as a drop of blood, or even the word "blood," will on occasion cause a strong, healthy man to faint, so quite a small excess or defect in the accustomed quality of food will at times arrest the appetite and digestive processes of a healthy man. To many a healthy individual one among many flavours and savours associated with agreeable food is necessary in order that healthy appetite and proper digestion may be set going, and the absence of the right flavour and the presence of what is, in his experience, a wrong and disgusting smell or taste in the food set before him, will produce nausea and complete arrest of the digestive processes.

It is apparently owing to this cause that "tinned meats" have proved to be of little value as rations for an army in campaign, for exploring expeditions, and for remote mining camps. It is not that such tinned meats do not contain the necessary constituents of food, or that they contain poisonous substances, but that they produce a sense of disgust, and arrest the digestive processes. Soldiers, travellers, and miners have assured me that they prefer a dry biscuit and dried, or salted, or sugared meat, to the supposed more "tasty" tinned meats, and that such is the general experience of their comrades.

Of similar nature is another very serious trouble, in regard to the healthy feeding of the modern Englishman, which has come upon us in consequence of the quite modern system of huge restaurants, whether in London or in the very large hotels, which are now run in Swiss, Italian and English summer resorts. Hundreds of visitors are "catered for" daily. There is no attempt at anything which deserves the name of cookery. Great monopolists control the supplies, and contract to deliver to these hotels, even in out-of-the-way localities, so much ice-stored, "mousey" fish, "mousey" quails, stringy meat, impossible vegetables and fruits, gathered from the cheapest markets of Europe and of a quality just not bad enough to cause a revolt among the hotel visitors. The heating of the food is done by patent machinery in ovens and by the use of boiling fat. No cook is in these circumstances possible, with his artistic feeling for the production of a perfect result of skill and taste. A kind of bottled meat-flavoured sauce, manufactured from spent yeast, is used to make the soups, and is poured, with an equally nauseating result, over the hard veal, the tough chicken, the "mousey" quails, and the tasteless beef and mutton, which are never roasted, but are baked or stewed in boiling fat—though shamelessly described as "rôtis" in the pretentious and mendacious "menu" placed on the dinner-table. The consequence is that the tourist, who has been overfed at home, eats very little, and his health benefits. But in such an hotel the man who lives carefully when at home, and desires a simple but properly cooked meal, is reduced to a state of indigestion, semi-starvation and misery.

The Englishman who is disgusted by the new mechanical methods of cookery in the great hotels of Continental "resorts," returns to London, and finds the same atrocious system at work—not only in the public restaurants, but in his club. Nowhere in London can you rely on being served with really fresh fish, however highly you may pay for it. Rarely it is fresh, usually it is not. The ice storage people take good care that you shall not obtain fresh fish, and so retain your taste for it. Nowhere at club or restaurant, with rare exceptions, can you obtain meat roasted in the old-fashioned way on a roasting-jack, carefully "basted" during the process, and served when exactly cooked to a turn. There were, only a few years ago, one or two such places surviving—both clubs and restaurants—where proper roasting was done, but, like the rest, they have now adopted lazy, economical, money-saving methods. Their managers calculate that what they do will serve. It is good enough for the crowd! So at last you abandon the efforts to obtain decent simple food, in club or hotel, and dine with your friend en famille. The same thing confronts you. The joint has been baked in an oven, of which it smells, and is surrounded by a sickly gravy, produced by pouring hot water over it! In conversation with your hostess, you find that she knows nothing whatever about the simplest elements of the preparation of food. She tells you she avoids roasting because it necessitates a large fire and an extra expenditure of £5 a year on coal, and she also purchases those mouldy, frost-bitten potatoes instead of the best, because they cost half as much as sound ones—and she herself does not care for potatoes. They are fattening!

Sometimes at a restaurant or club, served by a foreign "chef," a Yorkshire pudding, as hard as a stale loaf of bread, is handed round in slabs with the so-called "roast" beef. It is not roasted: it is baked beef, and the pudding is an ill-tasting baked mess, also. Nowhere in London in public or private house do I ever see the properly cooked article. True Yorkshire pudding can only be made by placing it under the roasting joint, which drips digestion-promoting essences into the pudding whilst itself rotating, hissing and spluttering—as did the joints roasted in the caves long ago by the prehistoric Reindeer-men. The scientific importance of good roasting and grilling is that a savour is thereby produced which sets the whole gastric and digestive economy of the man who sniffs it and tastes it, at work. Possibly our successors, a generation or two hence, will have learnt to do without this, and will have acquired as intimate and happy a gastronomic relation to what now are for us the nauseous flavours of superheated fat (rarely renewed), and of the all-pervading gravy fabricated by chemical treatment of yeast, as that which we ourselves have acquired in regard to the old-established and painstaking cookery of the early Victorian and many preceding ages.

Medical men who are occupied as specialists with the study of very young children have clearly demonstrated that the implanting of tastes, tendencies and habits in infants of from two to eight years of age has an immense importance in their subsequent development. Character and capacity are really formed in those early years. Food preferences, no less than mental and moral qualities, are then created. Yet the children of both rich and poor are in these early stages either left to haphazard or entrusted to ignorant nursemaids. For those of us who were not born to the present system the transition to the new methods of wholesale cookery is an abomination, and to escape from them a matter of difficulty. We have to secure an ancient roasting-jack and a large clear fire in our own kitchen, and to instruct our cook—since no woman has taught her what she ought to know—in the art of roasting and grilling, in the preparation of Yorkshire pudding, in the mystery of the marrow-bone and the proper and distinct use of garlic, onions, shalots, chives, chervil, tarragon, marjoram, basil, other herbs, and divers peppers, and finally to train her in the supreme accomplishment of the seasoning of a salad.

Maybe that the present established relations of our appetites to the time-honoured savours, by which the ancient Jews sought to propitiate the Deity, are destined to be superseded. On the other hand it is quite possible that all the juggling of modern "machine" cookery is a false step, and injurious to digestion and health. It is not unlikely that there is no relish which has so sure a hold on the digestion of European man, no appeal to the cerebral mechanism controlling the liberation of his gastric juices, which is so infallible as that emanating from "well and truly" roasted or grilled meat.