The Chautauquan, February 1885

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The Chautauquan.

A MONTHLY MAGAZINE DEVOTED TO THE PROMOTION OF TRUE CULTURE. ORGAN OF THE CHAUTAUQUA LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC CIRCLE.

Vol. V. FEBRUARY, 1885. No. 5.

Officers of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.

President, Lewis Miller, Akron, Ohio. Chancellor, J. H. Vincent, D.D., New Haven, Conn. Counselors, The Rev. Lyman Abbott, D.D.; the Rev. J. M. Gibson, D.D.; Bishop H. W. Warren, D.D.; Prof. W. C. Wilkinson, D.D.; Edward Everett Hale. Office Secretary, Miss Kate F. Kimball, Plainfield, N. J. General Secretary, Albert M. Martin, Pittsburgh, Pa.

Contents

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REQUIRED READING FOR FEBRUARY.

HOW ENGLISH DIFFERS FROM OTHER LANGUAGES.

BY RICHARD GRANT WHITE.

It has occurred to me that some readers of The Chautauquan may have been disappointed in these articles because in their judgment they have been thus far not sufficiently “practical.” Many people, far too many, desire chiefly to find some short, straight road to knowledge. They like to have some man who is called an “authority” upon a certain subject cut his knowledge up into small parcels or “chunks” of convenient size, and arrange them with labels, alphabetically, in an article or a book, so that they maybe referred to at need, and followed like a recipe for making a pudding, and with as little thought. But there are no such recipes for acquiring real knowledge. In this way an acquaintance with facts may be made which, used blindly, may prove of some immediate service, and may not. Nothing, however, learned in this perfunctory way is worthy of the name of knowledge. For it is a barren process; it really teaches nothing; it profits nothing; it does nothing for the education of the person by whom it is adopted. Real knowledge comes only by a thoughtful learning of the relations of facts. True as to all subjects, this is eminently true as to language; because, language is eminently a subject of relations. There is hardly a word that we use which has not relations to other words, and other forms of speech; relations historical, spiritual, almost moral; to set forth which in detail would furnish occasion for a little essay. The mere learning to speak and to write a language is only a matter of memory and practice; nothing more. It is child’s work, and it is continually done, and is best done, by children. A man may speak and write English, French, German or Latin with unexceptionable correctness and fluency, and yet know no more about that language than a well instructed parrot would which had been taught to use all the words which he uses. His study would not be a study of language; and in that which he had painfully learned he might be easily and unconsciously surpassed by a child who had never studied at all. Now what I hope to do here is to help my readers to some knowledge of the English language, in so far as my own imperfect acquaintance with my mother tongue and its literature will enable me to do so.

We have seen what English is, of what stuff it is made, how it came by its present compositeness of substance; how it became strong, and full, and flexible, and fervent; let us now look a little into its structure, i. e., the way in which it is put together, in doing which we shall see by comparison how it differs from other languages. This matter of structure, the formation of the sentence, is the distinctive trait of a language. Mere words are not the essential difference between languages. Many words are common (with slight phonetic variation) to all the languages of the Aryan or Indo-European stock, as we have already seen. Multitudes of words have been adopted into all the modern tongues from other languages ancient and modern, dead and living, as most of the readers of The Chautauquan know. The bulk of English dictionaries like Webster’s and Worcester’s is composed of words which are of Latin, Greek, French or Italian origin, and which indeed are essentially the same words in all these languages; their unlikeness being merely a phonetic variation, mostly caused by difference in pronunciation, or change in termination. For example, flower is in Latin flos (genitive floris), in Italian fiore, in French fleur, in Spanish flor; each language having somewhat changed the sound of the word, according to rules or habits which are loosely called laws; but the word is in all essentially the same. A sentence—many sentences—might be written in English, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish and German, in which all the words of subject-matter (all but verbs like have and be, and prepositions and conjunctions) should be essentially the same, and so like that an intelligent person with some faculty for language, and who understood any one of these languages, could apprehend the meaning of any one of the supposed sentences with little difficulty. And yet the sentences would be respectively English, Latin, French, and so forth. Why and how? It is to the reason of this, that is the why and the how of it, that we shall now give a little time and attention.

The most important and significant distinction between languages is in their grammar; that is, in the structure of the sentence. In the languages mentioned above the greatest unlikeness in this respect is manifested in English, Latin and German, or to name them in their order of grammatical importance, Latin, German and English. The term “grammar” has two senses; one large and vague, and called by some “philosophical” or “scientific” (phrases commonly used with a deplorable union of pretension and looseness), which includes all that relates to the history, the substance and the structure of a language; the other much narrower and simpler; the sense implied when the phrases “good grammar” and “bad grammar” are used. To this sense I shall here confine myself, and shall here repeat a definition of grammar which I have given before.[A]

Grammar concerns the forms of words and their dependent relations in the sentence.

To illustrate this: It is “bad grammar,” ludicrously, monstrously bad grammar, to say in Latin, Nos habeo bonus mater, and yet these Latin words, literally and simply translated in their order, mean, We have a good mother, which in English is perfectly “good grammar.” In the Latin (to call it Latin) every word is wrong; in English every word is right. The reason of this is that in Latin words change their forms according to their relations, not according to their essential meaning. Habeo means have; but it can not be used to express a plural having; that requires for we (nos) the form habemus. Bonus means good; but it can not be used to express the goodness of a feminine object, for which the form bona is required. Yet further: Even bona can not be used to qualify a noun which is the object of a verb, or, as we say, in the objective (or accusative) case, for which the form bonam is required. Mater means mother, but as the object of the verb have, mater must change its form to matrem. By these required changes of form the Latin sentence becomes, Nos habemus bonam matrem, which is “good grammar,” although poor Latin, but which, after all the changes, means simply, We have a good mother; nothing more nor less. Yet further: The sentence, as written above, although grammatical, is poor Latin because it is at variance with the habit, or as it is sometimes called the spirit, or even the genius, of the Latin language. In Latin the word habemus (although like habeo it means simply, have) is so positively and distinctively limited in use to the first person plural that the pronoun nos—we—is quite superfluous, and is never used unless with an emphatic purpose; habemus, without the nos, means, we have. Moreover it was the Latin habit of speech to place the object generally before the verb; and good Latin for, We have a good mother would be, bonam matrem habemus—i. e., A good mother we have, or rather (literally) Good mother we have for the Latin strangely has no articles, or none which correspond to our an (or a) and the, and which may be translated by them.

This illustration, brief and simple although it be, is sufficient, I think, to make the great and essential distinction between English and Latin, and measurably between English and all other modern civilized tongues, clear to the readers of these articles. The essential difference is not one of words but of the construction of the sentence. In Latin and other languages that construction depends not upon the thought and the meaning of the words, but upon the forms of the words—their inflections. Now the distinctive trait of English is that it is a language without inflections—not absolutely so, but so to all intents and purposes; and, being without inflections, it is therefore without grammar, which, as we have seen, concerns the forms of words and their dependent relations in the sentence. Nos habeo bonus mater is bad grammar because the forms of the words are incorrect according to the usage of the Latin language. Bonus means good; but for the expression of the quality good in its barest, simplest idea bonus takes on five forms in Latin; bonus for masculine goodness in the singular, bona for feminine singular, bonum for neuter singular; boni masculine plural; bonæ feminine plural, bona neuter plural. To be brief; for use in various relations, this word bonus takes on no less than thirteen forms, of which more need not here be given. Mater—mother—takes on eight of these forms or inflections, which are called cases. But in English good has but one form. Singular, plural, masculine, feminine, neuter, nominative, possessive, dative, objective, vocative—in whichever of these senses the word which it qualifies is used it has but one form—good. Thus it is with all English adjectives, and with articles (an and the) which are a kind of adjective. In all other languages adjectives and articles have various forms adapted to the various numbers, genders, and cases of nouns. In English nouns have two cases (strictly but one, the nominative not being a true case), the second of which is the possessive: e. g., mother’s; and they have a singular and a plural form, e. g., mother, mothers.

In other languages the verb is inflected into a multitude of forms, expressive of voice (active and passive), person, number and time of action. In English the variations of form in the verb are very few. There is no passive voice. The English has but one passive verb; the obsolete hight, which means, is called. As to time, there are only the forms of present and perfect, e. g., love and loved; as to person and number, inflections only in the present tense, e. g., love, lovest, loves; and of these one, lovest, is obsolete, or very obsolescent. To these inflected forms there is to be added only the present or indefinite participle loving. Beyond this there are in English, by way of inflection, only the cases of the pronouns, e. g., he, his, him, who, whose, whom, etc. And it is here to be remarked that almost all the questions of “good grammar” and “bad grammar” that arise in English relate to the use of pronouns. (For surely we may leave out of consideration here the difficulties of those who say I see or I seen him, for I saw him, or I have went for I have gone, and the like.) Here, therefore, we have set forth, although very succinctly, the distinctive grammatical position of the English language.

That position is briefly this: In English words have (with the few exceptions mentioned above) but one form; and as grammar is concerned only with the formal relations of words in the sentence, English has no grammar. Among languages it is the grammarless tongue.

Let us further illustrate this point by a brief consideration of a subject which is very perplexing to the learners of a foreign language, and which is not less so to the historical students of language in general; a subject which, I believe, has never been explained by the latter with any semblance of satisfaction—gender. All other languages are infested with gender; in English there is no such distinction in words as that of gender. English, it should be needless to say, has words to express difference of sex; that no language can fail to do, for failing in that, it would not communicate the facts and thoughts of every-day life. But grammatical gender has no relation to sex, no relation to the essential characteristics of things. Gender, grammatical gender, is an attribute of words. He creatures are male, she creatures female, and the words which are their names are generally (but not universally) masculine and feminine in all languages. Things neither male nor female are neuter, which means merely, neither. But this is not gender. Gender, as I have said before, is an attribute of words; of words only. For example, the Latin word penna—a pen, or quill, is feminine; in French the word table—table, is also feminine. It is needless to say that there is no question as to the sex of a pen, or of a table; nor is there any quality in either of those objects which has a sexual trait or characteristic. In each case it is the word which is of the feminine gender; and in all, or almost all, languages but English all or almost all words are afflicted with this mysterious pest of gender. How annoying and perplexing it is, and how it complicates the use of language, and makes the acquisition of foreign languages difficult, no student needs be told. For it creates an ever present and far-reaching perplexity. It dominates the construction of the sentence and binds it up in bonds of iron. For every adjective, and in French and other languages having articles, every article which is applied to a noun must be of the gender of that noun. You can not say in Latin bonus penna, a good pen, without “bad grammar,” you must say bona penna. You can not say in French un mauvais table, a bad table, but must say une mauvaise table; nor le table, but la table—although both mean the table, nothing more nor less. The absurdity of this is made very apparent when a feminine word is applied to a male object. Thus majesté—majesty, is feminine; but when a king is called your majesty, the words sa majesté (her majesty) are used because the word majesty is feminine; and instead of saying he (il) did thus or so, we must say she (elle) did it, although the she was a man; the reason being that the word majesté is feminine.[1] All this has been swept clean away in English, in which language there is no distinction of gender but only that of sex: male creatures, or those so personified, are masculine, female, feminine; those which have no sex are neuter; and there an end. English is eminently a language of common sense; and one marked evidence of this trait is its freeing itself entirely from the nuisance of grammatical gender along with other grammatical trammels.[2]

It has freed itself from those trammels; for at one time it was hampered by them sorely. Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, was an inflected speech, and was tied up in the bonds of gender and other grievous grammatical tetherings. This was long ago; but it was after Britain had become England, or Engle-land, the land of the English people and of English speech. When our English forefathers were little better than semi-savages, bloody, barbarous, heathen, worshiping Thor and Woden, and in a state of benighted ignorance of which it would be difficult for those of my readers who have not tried to pierce the darkness of that historical past to form even an approximate notion—at this time, and in this social and intellectual condition of the speakers of the English language, it was copiously provided with grammar. Even Greek had not much the better of it in this respect. It had not only forms for person and number, but gender forms, and cases galore.[3] Take, for example, a word which was English a thousand years ago, just as it is to-day, man. This simple word has undergone no change in all the thousand years, unless by losing a little breadth of sound; it having probably been pronounced mahn, of which sound the rustic mon of provincial England is a relic and representative. But man could not be used pure and simple, under all circumstances and in all cases, in the English of that day any more than, as we have seen, mater and bonus could be so used in Latin. There was the nominative singular—man, simply; the genitive mannes—of a man; the dative men, to or for a man; accusative mannan—a man objectively; nominative plural men; genitive manna—of men, or men’s; and a dative mannum—to or for men.

Of all these various forms or cases of man, the language has freed itself, excepting the genitive singular, mannes, and the nominative plural, men. These have been retained, not by accident, or neglect, but at the dictate of common sense, because convenience and intelligibility required their use. It was found necessary to distinguish the plural from the singular; and the genitive or possessive idea from the simple and absolute; but man as a dative or accusative singular, and men as the same in the plural, were found quite as useful and convenient as the old inflected forms; and therefore (or therefore finally and in a great measure) the latter were discarded. The genitive or possessive has been retained; but it has slightly changed its form; by contraction only, however; mannes has become man’s. The old sign of the possessive was es; and it is this, and not the pronoun his (as once was supposed) that is represented in our possessive case, in which the apostrophe merely marks the elision of the old e. There is really no good reason for the use of the apostrophe, none which would not apply equally to many other cases in which no elision is marked. In the Elizabethan era it was not used, and with no consequent confusion. Mans folly, the boys hat, Johns coat, are as clear in meaning as they would be with the apostrophe; and the possible confusion of the possessive with the plural, as in that fancy of the girls, and that fancy of the girl’s is so remote and so very unlikely as to be worthy of little consideration.

As to English in its earliest form (Anglo-Saxon) suffice it here to say in this regard that it was so largely an inflected language, that is, it varied the forms of its words so numerously to express time of action, mode of action, person, number, case, and gender, that it is in this respect almost as unlike modern English as Greek is, and is little less difficult of acquirement to the English speaking student of to-day than Latin. Its very articles had gender forms as well as case forms; and, moreover, like the Mæso-Gothic and like the Greek it had preserved the old dual number (for the expression of a plural of two) although only in the personal pronoun. A comparative examination of the pronoun of the first person and of the present tense of the verb to have in their ancient and modern forms will show the mode and the reason of the changes by which English has assumed its present character.

OLD ENGLISH PRONOUN OF THE FIRST PERSON.

The dual form has been swept away entirely as needless, and worse, cumbrous and perplexing; but it will be seen that we have retained every one of the other forms. Ic has become I; mine is still the possessive of I; me is still not only the objective form of the first person, but the dative, “make me a hat,” or “buy me a horse,” being merely “make a hat to or for me,” or “buy to or for me a horse.” We and us will be recognized at sight, and ure has only changed its pronunciation from oor to our. These forms have been retained in our modern English partly because a pronoun is the most ancient of indestructible parts of speech,[B] but chiefly because of their usefulness, their convenience. A brief consideration of them by the intelligent reader will make this so plain that more need not be said on the subject.

Now let us see the unlike fate of the verb to have. This will be more readily apparent if we look at it in Latin, in French, and in English (it is actually the same word in all these languages, with slight phonetic variation); and we shall thus also have another demonstration of the manner in which English differs from other languages.

It will be seen at once that the Latin and the French have each a special plural form, and also three forms for the three persons of that number. English has swept away this plural form entirely, and uses for the plural in all its persons the simple have of the first person singular. The form of the second person singular has also virtually disappeared; the simple have appearing in its substitute, you have. Whether the form of the third person singular will ever follow the other is doubtful; but it is certain that our language has lost nothing in clearness, and has gained much in simplicity by the doing away with all the formal superfluity by which the old numbers and persons were distinguished.

This simplification of the forms of words is not absolutely confined to the English language. It appears to be a tendency of language; a modern tendency, using modern in its widest sense. For this movement toward simplification appears in the Latin, in the Romance tongues formed from it, and in the Gothic languages. In none, however, does this simplification, this destruction of superfluous forms, approach, even remotely, that which has taken place in English. So different, indeed, are the results, that the process seems, if not of another kind, at least as having another motive. For example, all the other languages retain the absurdity of gender. In this respect German is no better than French. And let me here remark that the common notion that English and German are most alike of all modern languages, and most nearly akin, is altogether wrong. On the contrary, English and German are very unlike; the most unlike of all the Gothic (or Teutonic) languages. English and French have much greater likeness, both in substance and in structure. There are more words now common to the English language and to the French than to English and German; and the syntax of the French language is very much more like that of the English, than German syntax is. A French sentence literally translated in the French order of the words is, in most cases, so like an English sentence that it requires little change to be correct English, while a similar translation of a German sentence produces an effect both harsh and ludicrous.

The simple form of the English language is the result of two causes. Of these the first in order of time was the conflict and subsequent mingling of the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and the Norman-French. When two languages are thus brought together and are both spoken by two peoples, all that is superfluous in the words of each soon begins to disappear. Each people grasps only the essential in the foreign words which it is obliged to use; each soon adopts the curtailed form of its speech used by the neighbors of another race and speech with whom it is obliged to live in daily communication; and ere long a composite speech of simpler forms takes the place of two tongues—each of which was more complex in structure, but less rich and varied in substance. By this process, out of Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French, came modern English. But not only thus. Other languages have mingled, but never before with such a result. Never was there in any other amalgamation, such an esurience of superfluous form; a devouring which has to all intents and purposes made English a language of one-formed words, and therefore a language practically without formal grammar. In this characteristic is its strength; from this comes its flexibility, its adaptation to all the needs of man, the highest and the lowest. Hence it is eminently the language of common sense as well as of the highest flights of poetry. The English mind saw that it was not necessary to have two words to express possession in the singular and in the plural; that good as clearly expressed the goodness of a woman as of a man, and that of a dozen men as well as that of one; that pens and tables needed no distinction of gender in their names; in fact that nothing was gained, and that much was lost by these grammatical excrescences; and therefore they were done away with very thoroughly, almost entirely. The process was pretty well completed some three hundred years or more ago; since when no noteworthy changes in this respect have taken place. But it is still going on, although so slowly as to be perceptible only on close examination. All the little specks of grammar that English has are mostly to be found in the pronouns, as I have before remarked. In the use of one of these a change is very gradually taking place. Whom has begun to disappear, began, indeed, a long time ago; but of late is fading somewhat more perceptibly. For example: all speakers of good English say, The man whom I saw, not The man who I saw; whom being the objective form of who.

But now-a-days not one person in a hundred of the best bred and best educated speakers of English asks, Whom did you see? but, Who did you see? Indeed, the latter form of the question may be regarded almost as accepted English. Yet in the latter phrase, as in the former, the pronoun is the object of the verb see, and should strictly have the objective form. But, Whom did you see? would now sound very formal and precise, almost priggish, like gotten instead of got. When, however, the pronoun is brought in direct contact with the verb, as in the phrase, The man whom I saw, we shrink from insult to the little semblance of grammar that our language possesses, and give the word its objective form. The time will probably come, although it may be remote, when whom will have altogether disappeared. As to gotten, its use is now so confined to the over-precise in this country as to make it almost an Americanism. Its disappearance from our language in England is also one of the evidences of the process of simplification which is still slowly going on. Another, which has taken place within the memory of the elder living generation, is the disappearance of the subjunctive mood, which is now obsolete, or so very obsolescent as to be met with very rarely. But thirty-five or forty years since correct writers used this mood, and wrote, for example, if he go instead of if he goes. Of the effect of this grammarless condition of the English language we may see something in a subsequent article.

FOOTNOTES

[A] “Every Day English,” chapter xvii.

[B] Certain uneasy manipulators of speech have lately set themselves at making an impersonal English pronoun. Vanity of vanities! Make a pronoun? As well undertake to build a pyramid. Better. There is not a pronoun in use that was not hoary with age before the first stone of Keops was laid.

SUNDAY READINGS.

SELECTED BY CHANCELLOR J. H. VINCENT, D. D.

[February 1.]

I find David making a syllogism, in mood and figure, two propositions he perfected.

(Ps. lxvi) 18. If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.

19. But verily God hath heard me, he hath attended to the voice of my prayer.

Now I expected that David should have concluded thus:

Therefore I regard not wickedness in my heart.

But far otherwise he concludes:

20. Blessed be God, who hath not turned away my prayer, nor his mercy from me.

Thus David hath deceived, but not wronged me. I looked that he should have clapped the crown on his own, and he puts it on God’s head. I will learn this excellent logic, for I like David’s better than Aristotle’s syllogisms, that, whatsoever the premises be, I make God’s glory the conclusion.

Young King Jehoash had only a lease of piety, and not for his own, but his uncle’s life (2 Kings xii:2): He did that which was right in the sight of the Lord all his days, wherein Jehoiada the priest instructed him.

Jehu was good in the midst of his life, and a zealous reformer to the utter abolishing of Baal out of Israel, but in his old age (2 Kings x:31) he returned to the politic sins of Jeroboam, worshiping the calves in Dan and Bethel.

Manasseh was bad in the beginning and middle of his life, filling Jerusalem with idolatry; only toward the end thereof, when carried into a strange land, he came home to himself and destroyed the profane altars he had erected.

These three put together make one perfect servant of God. Take the morning and rise with Jehoash, the noon and shine with Jehu, the night and set with Manasseh. Begin with youth-Jehoash, continue with man-Jehu, conclude with old-man-Manasseh, and all put together will spell one good Christian, yea, one good, perfect performer.

Constantly pray to God, that in his due time he would speak peace to thee.… Prayers negligently performed draw a curse, but not prayers weakly performed. The former is when one can do better, and will not; the latter is when one would do better, but, alas! he can not.…

Be diligent in reading the word of God, wherein all comfort is contained.… Thou hast a great journey to go, a wounded conscience has far to travel to find comfort (and though weary shall be welcome at his journey’s end), and therefore must feed on God’s word, even against his own dull disposition, and shall afterward reap benefit thereby.…

Be industrious in thy calling; I press this the more because some erroneously conceive that a wounded conscience cancels all indentures of service, and gives them (during their affliction) a dispensation to be idle.

Let none in like manner pretend that (during the agony of a wounded conscience) they are to have no other employment than to sit moping, to brood over their melancholy, or else only to attend their devotion; whereas a good way to divert or assuage their pain within is to take pains without in their vocation. I am confident, that happy minute which shall put a period to thy misery shall not find thee idle, but employed, as some ever secret good is accruing to such who are diligent in their calling.—Fuller.[1]

[February 8.]

The Deity is intended to be the everlasting field of the human intellect, as well as the everlasting object of the human heart, the everlasting portion of all holy and happy minds, who are destined to spend a blissful but ever active eternity in the contemplation of his glory.… He will forever remain “the unknown God.” We shall ever be conscious that we know little compared with what remains to be known of him; that our most rapturous and lofty songs fall infinitely short of his excellence. If we stretch our powers to the uttermost, we shall never exhaust his praise, never render him adequate honor, never discharge the full amount of claim which he possesses upon our veneration, obedience, and gratitude. When we have loved him with the greatest favor, our love will still be cold compared with his title to our devoted attachment. This will render him the continual source of fresh delight to all eternity. His perfection will be an abyss never to be fathomed; there will be depths in his excellence which we shall never be able to penetrate. We shall delight in losing ourselves in his infinity. An unbounded prospect will be extended before us; looking forward through the vista of interminable ages we shall find a blissful occupation for our faculties, which can never end; while those faculties will retain their vigor unimpaired, flourish in the bloom of perpetual youth, … and the full consciousness remain that the Being whom we contemplate can never be found out to perfection … that he may always add to the impression of what we know, by throwing a veil of indefinite obscurity over his character. The shades in which he will forever conceal himself will have the same tendency to excite our adoring wonder as the effulgence of his glory; the depths in which he will retire from our view, the recesses of his wisdom and power as the open paths of his manifestation. Were we capable of comprehending the Deity, devotion would not be the sublimest employment to which we can attain. In the contemplation of such a Being we are in no danger of going beyond our subject; we are conversing with an infinite object, … in the depths of whose essence and purposes we are forever lost. This will probably give all the emotions of freshness and astonishment to the raptures of beatific vision, and add a delightful zest to the devotions of eternity. This will enable the Divine Being to pour in continually fresh accessions of light; to unfold new views of his character, disclose new parts of his perfection, open new mansions of himself, in which the mind will have ample room to expatiate. Thus shall we learn, to eternity, that, so far from exhausting his infinite fullness, there still remain infinite recesses in his nature unexplored—scenes in his counsels never brought before the view of his creatures; that we know but “parts of his ways;” and that instead of exhausting our theme, we are not even approaching nearer to the comprehension of the Eternal All. It is the mysteriousness of God, the inscrutability of his essence, the shade in which he is invested, that will excite those peculiar emotions which nothing but transcendent perfection and unspeakable grandeur can inspire.—Robert Hall.[2]

[February 15.]

We need not go far to seek the materials for an acceptable offering; they lie all around us in the work of our callings, in the little calls which divine Providence daily makes to us, in the little crosses which God requires us to take up, nay, in our very recreations. The great point is to have the mind set upon seeing and seeking in all things the service of Christ and the glory of God, and, lo! every trifling incident which that mind touches, every piece of work which it handles, every dispensation to which it submits becomes a sacrifice.

“If in our daily walks our mind

Be set to hallow all we find,

New treasures still of countless price

God will provide for sacrifice.

We need not bid for cloistered cell

Our neighbor and our work farewell,

Nor strive to wind ourselves too high

For sinful man beneath the sky;

The trifling round, the common task

Will furnish all we ought to ask,

Room to deny ourselves—a road

To bring us daily nearer God.”

If we allow the beauties of nature to raise our heart to God, we turn that into a sacrifice. If cross incidents, which could not be avoided or averted, are taken sweetly and lovingly, out of homage to the living will of God, this, too, is a sacrifice. If work be done in the full view of God’s assignment of our several tasks and spheres of labor, and under the consciousness of his presence, however secular in its character, it immediately becomes fit for presentation on the altar. If refreshment and amusement are so moderated as to help the spirit instead of dissipating it, if they are to be seasoned with the wholesome salt of self-denial (for every sacrifice must be seasoned with salt) they, too, become a holy oblation. If we study even perverse characters, with a loving hope and belief that we shall find something of God and Christ in them, which may be made the nucleus of better things, and instead of shutting ourselves up in a narrow sphere of sympathies, seek out and try to develop the good points of a generally uncongenial spirit; if we treat men as Christ treated them, counting that somewhere in every one there is a better mind, and the trace of God’s finger in creation, we may thus possibly sanctify an hour which would else be one of irksome constraint, and after which we might have been oppressed with a heavy feeling that it had been a wasted one. If a small trifle, destined to purchase some personal luxury or comfort, be diverted to a charitable and religious end, this is the regular and standing sacrifice of alms, recognized by the Scripture and the Liturgy. And finally, if we regard our time as, next to Christ, and the Holy Spirit, the most precious gift of God; if we gather up the fragments and interstices of it in a thrifty and religious manner, and employ them in some exercise of devotion or some good and useful work, this, too, becomes a tribute which God will surely accept with complacency, if laid upon his altar and united by faith and a devout intention with the one Sacrifice of our dear Lord.

Yes; if laid upon his altar; let us never forget or drop out of sight that proviso. It is the altar, and the altar alone, which sanctifieth the gift. Apart from Christ and his perfect sacrifice, an acceptable gift is an impossibility for man. For at best our gifts have in them the sinfulness of our nature; they are miserably flawed by defectiveness of motive, duplicity of aim, infirmity of will. “The prayers of all saints,” what force of interpretation must they have with God, if, as we are sure, “the effectual, fervent prayer of a” (single) “righteous man availeth much!” Yet when St. John saw in a vision “the prayers of all saints” offered “upon the golden altar which was before the throne,” it was in union with that which alone can perfume the tainted offsprings of even the regenerate man. “There was given unto him much increase, that he should offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which is before the throne.”

The increase is the intercession of Jesus. Place your offering, be it prayer or alms, deed or work, or submission—in his hands for presentation; pray him, as your only priest, to transact for you with God, and he will do so. And the sense of God’s favor shall shine out upon thy offering; and the dew of his blessing shall descend upon it, and ye shall be gladdened with your Father’s smile.—Goulburn.[3]

[February 22.]

Heaven, as a place of residence and state of enjoyment, should always be viewed in contrast with earth. This is a state of pupilage and probation, that of dignity and promotion. Here is conflict, there victory. This is the race, that the goal. Here we suffer, there we reign. Here we are in exile, there at home. On earth we are strangers and pilgrims, in heaven fellow citizens with the saints; and, released from the strife and turmoil, the bitterness and regrets of earth, are incorporated forever with the household of God.

This is triumph! How striking the contrast! How must earth and its trials be lost sight of in such a vision! How must this contrast strengthen the ties of confidence, and kindle the ardor of devotion!

What did Moses care for the perils of the wilderness, when, from the storm-defying steep of Pisgah, he viewed the land of promise, imaging forth the green fields of heaven’s eternal spring! Look at Elijah, the immortal Tishbite, exchanging the sighs and solitude of his juniper shade, for wheels of fire and steeds of wind that bore him home to God! Look at Paul—poor, periled and weary, amid the journeyings and conflicts of his mission: the hand that once stretched the strong eastern tent, or wore the dungeon’s chain, now sweeps in boldest strain the harps of heaven.… Look at the Christian of apostolic and early times, exchanging the clanking of his chains and the curses of his jailor—the dungeon’s den and martyr’s stake—for the notes of gladness and lofty anthem pealing from lute and harp, bedecked with eternal amaranth! The load of chain with which he went out to meet the descending car of his triumph, with its angel escort, was a richer dowry than the jewels of empire! The taper that flickered in the dungeon of the sainted hero shot a ray more glorious than ever spoke the splendor of the full-orbed moon! What are the crowns or the diadems of all this world’s masters or Cæsars, compared with the prospects of such an expectant!

Christians! what need we care, although on earth we were so poor and low we had nor purse nor pillow; so few and trodden down we had no power; and hamlets, huts and grottoes were the places where we wept and prayed; if these are to be exchanged for a residence amid the jaspers and chrysolites, the emeralds and sapphires of the heavenly Jerusalem!

What though soiled by the dust of toil or damp with the dungeon’s dew—struggling amid tattered want along our lone and periled path—when even here we find ourselves invested with glory in the night of our being, and sustained by hopes guiding and pointing us to the temple hymn and the heavenly harp above! …—Bascom.[4]

HOME STUDIES IN CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS.

BY PROF. J. T. EDWARDS, D.D.

Director of the Chautauqua School of Experimental Science.

CHEMISTRY OF FIRE.—ANCIENT FANCIES.

In all ages, and among all nations, fire has been regarded with peculiar interest. Of the four great elements so essential to life—earth, air, water, fire—the last has often been considered as divine in its origin and influence. To the unscientific observer it seems more than matter, and little less than spirit. Contemplating a flame, he sees that while it has form, it lacks solidity. He may pass a sword through it, but like the ghost of the story, no wound is made in its ethereal substance. Its touch is softer than down, but it penetrates the hardest substances. The diamond carves glass, but flame destroys the diamond.

Men early found that fire was directly connected with their comfort and progress, and even essential to their existence. How they first obtained it is still matter of conjecture; whether it was brought down from the skies, as the ancient Greeks supposed, struck out from the flinty rock, evolved by the friction of dry wood, kindled by the lightning, or obtained from the flaming torch of the volcano, we can not tell.

Certain it is, that having once been obtained, all the early races were very careful to preserve it. Among many it was regarded as sacred, and kept perpetually burning, both in their places of worship and in their homes. The officers appointed for its preservation were of the highest rank and influence. Among the titles assumed by Augustus Cæsar was that of keeper of the public fire. Whenever by accident the fire in the temple of Vesta, at Rome, was extinguished, all public business was at once suspended, because the connection between heaven and earth was believed to be severed, and must be restored before business could properly proceed.

Grecian colonists carried fire to their new homes from the altar of Hestia. The “Prytaneum”[1] of the ancient Greeks and Romans was a place where the national fire was kept always burning; it was here the people gathered, foreign ambassadors received, and hospitalities of the state were offered. Here, too, heads of families obtained coals for lighting their household fires, which in turn became sacred, so that every hearth was an altar, where resided the Lares and Penates, the gods who presided over the welfare of the home.

Fancies akin to these beliefs of olden time may still be found among the nations of the East and in northern Europe.

MODERN FALLACIES.

No correct ideas of combustion were attained until the time of Lavoisier.[2] This great French savant gave precision and accuracy to the investigations of chemical science by the introduction of the balance. He disproved the theory that “water is the ultimate principle of all things,” and prepared the way for a clear apprehension of the truth that matter, though constantly changing its form, is never destroyed. He also announced the correct theory of combustion. Until this time scientists had held what was called the “Phlogiston[3] Theory.” We can but smile at the absurdity of this belief, and yet no hypothesis was ever taught more positively, or maintained more tenaciously. It declared, in brief, that when substances burned, they parted with a certain material called phlogiston. When, at length, its advocates were asked to explain the fact, discovered by Dr. Priestly,[5] that quicksilver, when burned, weighed more than before, they were forced to put forward the ridiculous statement that phlogiston possessed the property of “buoyancy” so that when it was contained in a body its weight was lessened; which was as wise as the brilliant supposition that a person can lift himself over a fence by tugging at his boot straps. After a fierce struggle they were forced to confess that they had placed “the cart before the horse.” The truth was precisely opposite to their statement. Substances when they burn take up something instead of giving it off. That something is oxygen, and a body when burned, if it can be weighed, will be found to weigh as much more as the added weight of the oxygen which has united with it. Example: Iron-rust is iron, plus oxygen.

MAGNESIUM RIBBON BURNING, AND PRODUCING MAGNESIC OXIDE (MgO).[4]

THE TRUE EXPLANATION.

We shall here confine ourselves to the consideration of the heat and light produced by chemical action. It will be remembered that by this term (chemical action) is meant the process of uniting two or more different elements to form a compound different from either. We usually consider air essential to combustion, but this is not necessarily the fact. Gold foil or powdered antimony, dropped into a jar of chlorine, spontaneously ignites. Even in the interior of the earth, heat must be produced by the uniting of any elements that have an affinity for each other.

BORACIC ACID IMPARTS A GREEN COLOR TO THE FLAME OF ALCOHOL.[6]

The most common agent of combustion is oxygen. Of this interesting gas some description has been given in a preceding article. It is the fruitful source of almost all of our artificial heat.

The fallen tree in the forest is slowly consumed by it, not less surely than the flaming wood and coal in our stoves. The human body is a furnace. In the minute corpuscles[7] of the blood, carbon is uniting with oxygen as certainly as are the particles of carbon in the flame of our lamps.

Oxygen is the scavenger that partially cleans our gutters. It is a bird of prey that devours the offal in our fields and woods. It is nothing less than the gnawing tooth of old Father Time himself, which crumbles cities and destroys all things.

Combustion, as we now know it, consists simply in the union of some combustible material with oxygen. The generic term for all this action is “oxidation.” For convenience, special names are given to particular modes. When metallic oxidation occurs we call the product “rusting.” When oxygen unites with vegetable matter we call it decaying or rotting; when with animal substances we term it rotting or putrefaction. When flame is produced, the word combustion or burning is used. The amount of heat generated is, in all cases, proportioned to the amount of chemical action. Great ingenuity and skill have been shown in the discovery and utilization of materials best calculated to combine readily with oxygen. To these, as a class, has been applied the term

HYDRO-CARBONS.

All substances composed essentially of the elements, hydrogen and carbon, would come under this designation. These would include coal, wood, petroleum, the fats, resins, wax and many others, with some of the gases, among which may be named light and heavy carburetted hydrogen, CH₄ and C₂H₄ respectively.

PHOSPHORUS BURNING IN OXYGEN.[8]

In the days of our grandfathers tallow candles were almost universally employed for lighting houses, and wood for warming them. It would not be impossible to find even now, in our own country, homes illuminated (?) by a rag burning in a saucer of fat. Some of us are not too young to remember the bundle of candle-rods—nice, straight sticks used in dipping candles—snugly put away for that purpose, alas! sometimes summoned forth to assist in enforcing family discipline!

GREEN FIRE COLORED BY A SALT OF BARIUM.[9]

Strands of twisted cotton wick were suspended from these sticks, and successively dipped into a kettle of hot tallow, until external additions made them of the requisite size. Tin candle moulds finally superseded these. Then the wick was suspended in the center and the fat poured in. In cooling, the candles contracted, and so slipped easily from the moulds. Wax candles can not be cast in moulds, as they expand in cooling. They are made by pouring successive additions upon them. They are afterward given symmetrical form by rolling and shaping. Along the sea coast I have seen women and children gathering bay berries,[10] a fruit about as large as a grain of black pepper and covered with a grayish-white, fragrant wax. When these seeds are placed in hot water the wax dissolves and serves the same purpose as tallow, making delightfully aromatic candles.

Many of the hydro-carbons possess an agreeable odor. Sometimes the woodmen gather the bark and chips of the hickory to smoke hams and shoulders on account of the peculiarly pleasant flavor they impart. In burning, a candle or lamp becomes a gas factory, manufacturing and consuming its own product. The flame consists of three cones. The first, that next to the wick, is composed solely of gas. It is not hot, as can be shown by thrusting the end of a match into it, the match will not ignite. If the match be placed across the flame at the same point it will burn at the edges, but not in the center. A more striking illustration of the fact that the flame is hot only where it comes in contact with the air, can be shown in the following manner: Place on the bottom of an inverted plate some alcohol, in the center set a tiny saucer containing powder; ignite the alcohol, and the powder will remain undisturbed in the center of the surrounding flame until a draft brings the edge of the flame against the powder, when it will at once explode.

Look steadily at the flame of an ordinary candle and you can readily discern the three cones; the first is gas, the second gas in rapid combination with the oxygen of the air, the third the products of this combination—watery vapor, carbonic anhydride, and, possibly, some unconsumed carbon.

RED FIRE COLORED BY A SALT OF STRONTIUM.[11]

The process that goes on in our stoves is essentially the same. The carbon and hydrogen of the wood or coal unite with the oxygen that passes through the draft. Now note a wonderful provision for our comfort. It has already been remarked that the product of combustion consists of the thing burned, plus oxygen. Suppose, in the case of our fires, this product were a solid, we should then be forced to take out of the stove more material than we put in. The Creator has, however, provided that these resulting materials shall take the form of gas or vapor, so that they can float away. The ashes that remain form but a small part of the whole. The two most common products of combustion are watery vapor and carbonic anhydride.

The illumination of our towns and cities has long been accomplished by the use of gas manufactured from coal. Bituminous coal is used for this purpose, and the process consists in heating it to destructive distillation, and afterward condensing and absorbing such portions of the volatilized materials as might clog the gas pipes or interfere with perfect combustion.

Nature, it is now known, has her own gas works, on an immense scale. Thirty-five years ago the village of Fredonia, N. Y., was partially lighted with gas, and the supply is still unexhausted. Indeed, of late, many private individuals have sunk pipes two or three hundred feet, and thus supplied their homes with gas for illuminating, heating, and cooking purposes. In Butler and McKean counties, Pennsylvania, the production of these gas wells is enormous. Many have been burning day and night for years, while others have been utilized for heating and lighting towns and cities. Gas is now extensively used in rolling mills for smelting iron. Petroleum, or rock oil, which is usually associated with this natural gas, has now become of immense value to this and other lands. It is one of the chief articles of export from this country, ranking perhaps as fourth. Wells have recently been struck in Pennsylvania that flowed 5,000 and 6,000 barrels per day.

SODIUM BURNING ON HOT WATER.[12]

There is reason to believe that this material is the product of distillation of organic matter in the earth. It is found in porous rock, usually coarse sand, at depths varying from three hundred to two thousand feet. When the rock above the sand containing oil is tight, the gas is often retained, which by its expansion presses upon the oil and forces it to the surface through the pipes put down for this purpose. This produces a flowing well. When the gas has escaped a pump is necessary.

The most useful hydro-carbon now employed is coal. Its use was first introduced in the latter part of the twelfth century, and as late as the thirteenth century petitions were made by residents of London demanding its exclusion, on account of its injurious effect on the health. But now, Great Britain mines annually more than one hundred million tons of coal. Its uses are manifold. By it England has multiplied her power a thousand fold. It is almost always employed in generating steam, and the aggregate steam power of England is equal to the productive laboring force of four hundred millions of men, or “twice the power of the adult working population of the globe.” Most countries know its value.

POURING CARBON DI-OXIDE FROM ONE VESSEL INTO ANOTHER TO EXTINGUISH FLAME.[13]

Coal is the key that unlocks for us the treasures of the iron ore. It seizes upon the oxygen in the ore, and liberates the pure metal. By a wonderful provision they often exist in the same mountain, side by side. I have seen in Pennsylvania, running out of the same tunnel in the hills, car loads of coal and iron ore.

Among the many advantages possessed by our own country is our immense store of this precious hydro-carbon. With an area of 300,000,000 miles of territory, we have more than 200,000 square miles of known coal producing area, or one in fifteen.

Great Britain has one-half of the coal fields of all Europe, but even she has but one square mile of coal to twenty square miles of territory. Beside, our coal seams are of great thickness, and lie comparatively near the surface. In the far West, vast fields of lignite[14] have been discovered, so that there seems no prospect of our exhausting our fuel supply for ages to come.

The diamond is crystallized carbon, and can be burned, though one would hardly care to be warmed by so costly a fire.

Cleopatra, in a freak of extravagance, dissolved a wonderful pearl, but who could think of the wise queen of England using in so wasteful a manner her Kohinoor.[15] Six of the great diamonds of the world are called, by way of eminence, “The Paragons,” and a romantic interest has been attached to this form of carbon among all nations. In point of fact, however, the black diamonds of the coal pit are more interesting, and of far greater value to mankind than these glittering gems from Golconda,[16] Brazil and the Dark Continent.[17]

TEMPERANCE TEACHINGS OF SCIENCE;
OR, THE POISON PROBLEM.

BY FELIX L. OSWALD, M.D.

CHAPTER V.—PROHIBITION.

“Rugged or not, there is no other way.”—Luther.

The champions of temperance have to contend with two chief adversaries—ignorance and organized crime. The well-organized liquor league can boast of leaders whose want of principles is not extenuated by want of information, and who deliberately scheme to coin the misery of their fellowmen into dollars and cents. But the machinations of such enemies of mankind would not have availed them against the power of public opinion, if their cunning had not found a potent ally in the ignorance, not of their victims only, but of their passive opponents. We need the moral and intellectual support of a larger class of our fellow-citizens, before we can hope to secure the effectual aid of legal remedies, and in that direction the chief obstacles to the progress of our cause have been the prevailing misconceptions on the following points:

1. Competence of Legislative Power.—There can be no doubt that the legislative authority even of civilized governments has been frequently misapplied. The most competent exponents of political economy agree that the state has no business to meddle in such affairs as the fluctuation of market prices, the rate of interest, the freedom of international traffic. On more than one occasion European governments, having attempted to regulate the price of bread-stuffs, etc., were taught the folly of such interference by commercial dead-locks and the impossibility of procuring the necessaries of life at the prescribed price, and were thus compelled to remedy the mischief by repealing their enactments. Usury laws tend to increase, instead of decreasing, the rate of interest, by obliging the usurer to indemnify himself for the disadvantage of the additional risk. The attempt to increase national revenues by enforcing an artificial balance of trade has ever defeated its own object. It is almost equally certain that compulsory charities do on the whole more harm than good. On the other hand, there are no more undoubtedly legitimate functions of government than the suppression, and the, if possible, prevention, of crime, and the enforcement of health laws; and it can be demonstrated by every rule of logic and equity that the liquor traffic can be held amenable in both respects. The favorite argument of our opponents is the distinction of crime and vice. For the latter, they tell us, society has no remedy, except in as much as the natural consequences (disease, destitution, etc.) are apt to recoil on the person of the perpetrator; the evil of intemperance therefore is beyond the reach of the law. We may fully concede the premises without admitting the cogency of the conclusion. The suspected possession or private use of intoxicating liquors would hardly justify the issue of a search warrant, but the penalties of the law can with full justice be directed against the manufacturer or vender who seeks gain by tempting his fellowmen to indulge in a poison infallibly injurious in any quantity, and infallibly tending to the development of a body and soul corrupting habit; they may with equal justice be directed against the consumer, stupefied or brutalized by the effects of that poison. The rumseller has no right to plead the consent of his victim. The absence of violence or “malice prepense,”[1] is a plea that would legalize some of the worst offenses against society. The peddler of obscene literature poisons the souls of our children without a shadow of ill-will against his individual customer. The gambler, the lottery-shark, use no manner of force in the pursuit of their prey. By what logic can we justify the interdiction of their industry and condemn that of the liquor traffic? By the criterion of comparative harmlessness? Have all the indecencies published since the invention of printing occasioned the thousandth part of the misery caused by the yearly and inevitable consequences of the poison vice? The lottery player may lose or win, but the customer of the liquor vender is doomed to loss as soon as he approaches the dram-shop. The damage sustained by the habitual player may be confined to a loss of money, while the habitual drunkard is sure to suffer in health, character and reputation, as well as in purse. And shall we condone the conduct of the befuddled drunkard on account of a temporary suspense of conscious reason? That very dementation constitutes his offense.

His actions may or may not result in actual mischief, but he has put the decision of that event beyond his control. The man who gallops headlong through crowded streets is punished for his reckless disregard of other men’s safety, though the hoofs of his horse may have failed to inflict any actual injury. A menagerie keeper would be arrested, if not lynched, for turning a city into a pandemonium by letting loose his bears and hyenas, and for the same reason no man should be permitted to turn himself into a wild beast.

“Virtue must come from within,” says Prof. Newman;[2] “to this problem religion and morality must direct themselves. But vice may come from without; to hinder this is the care of the statesman.” And here, as elsewhere, prevention is better than cure. By obviating the temptations of the dram-shop a progressive vice with an incalculable train of mischievous consequences may be nipped in the bud. Penal legislation is a sham if it takes cognizance of moral evils only after they have passed the curable stage. “It is mere mockery,” says Cardinal Manning,[3] “to ask us to put down drunkenness by moral and religious means, when the legislature facilitates the multiplication of the incitements to intemperance on every side. You might as well call upon me as a captain of a ship and say: ‘Why don’t you pump the water out when it is sinking,’ when you are scuttling the ship in every direction. If you will cut off the supply of temptation, I will be bound by the help of God to convert drunkards, but until you have taken off this perpetual supply of intoxicating drink we never can cultivate the fields. Let the legislature do its part and we will answer for the rest.”

All civilized nations have recognized not only the right but the duty of legislative authorities to adopt the most stringent measures for the prevention of contagious disease; yet all epidemics taken together have not caused half as much loss of life and health as the plague of the poison vice.

2. Magnitude of the Evil.—Since health and freedom began to be recognized as the primary conditions of human welfare, the conviction is gaining ground that the principles of our legislative system need a general revision. It was a step in the right direction when the lawgivers of the Middle Ages began to realize the truth that the liberty of individual action should be sacrificed only to urgent consideration of public welfare, but the modified theories on the comparative importance of these considerations have inaugurated a still more important reform. Penal codes gradually ceased to enforce ceremonies and abstruse dogmas and to ignore monstrous municipal and sanitary abuses. The time has passed when legislators raged with extreme penalties against the propagandists of speculative theories and ignored the propagation of slum diseases, yet, after all, there is still a lingering belief in the minds of many contemporaries that intemperance, as a physical evil, a “mere dietetic excess,” does not justify the invasion of personal liberty. They would consent to restrict the freedom of thought and speech rather than the license of the rum-dealer, yet the tendency of a progressive advance in public opinion promises the advent of a time when that license will appear the chief anomaly of the present age. The numberless minute prescriptions and interdicts of our law books and their silence on the crime of the liquor traffic will make it difficult for coming ages to comprehend the intellectual status of a generation that could wage such uncompromising war against microscopic gnats and consent to gratify the greed of a monstrous vampire.

3. Self-correcting Abuses.—Modern physicians admit that various forms of disease which were formerly treated with drastic drugs can be safely trusted to the healing agencies of nature. Many social evils, too, tend to work out their own cure. High markets encourage competition and have led to a reduction of prices. Luxury leads to enforced economy by reducing the resources of the spendthrift. Dishonest tradesmen lose custom, and a German government that used to fine editors for publishing unverified rumors might have left it to the subscribers to withdraw their patronage from a purveyor of unreliable news. But there are certain causes of disease that demand the interference of art. Poisons, especially, require artificial antidotes. If a child has mistaken arsenic for sugar, its life commonly depends on the timely arrival of a physician. The organism may rid itself of a surfeit, but is unable to eliminate the virus of a skin disease. Alcoholism belongs to the same class of disorders. We need not legislate against corsets; the absurdities of fashion change and vanish like fleeting clouds, and their votaries may welcome the change; but drunkards would remain slaves of their vice though the verdict of public opinion should have made dram-drinking extremely unfashionable. The morbid passion transmitted from sire to son, and strengthened by years of indulgence, would defy all moral restraints and yield only to the practical impossibility to obtain the object of its desire.

“A number of years ago,” says Dr. Isaac Jennings, “I was called to the shipyard in Derby, to see John B., a man about thirty years of age, of naturally stout, robust constitution, who had fallen from a scaffold in a fit, head first upon a spike below. In my visit to dress the wounded head, I spoke to him of the folly and danger of continuing to indulge his habit of drinking, and obtained from him a promise that he would abandon it. Not long after I learned that he was drinking again, and reminded him of his promise. His excuse was, that it would not do for him to abandon the practice of drinking suddenly. A few weeks after this he called at my office and requested me to bleed him, or do something to prevent a fit, for he felt much as he did a short time before having the last fit. I said to him, ‘John, sit down here with me and let us consider your case a little.’ I drew two pictures and held before him; one presented a wife and three little children with a circle of friends made happy and himself respectable and useful in society; the other, a wretched family, and himself mouldering in a drunkard’s grave; and appealed to him to decide which should prove to be the true picture. The poor fellow burst into tears and wept like a child. When he had recovered himself from sobbing so that he could speak he said: ‘Doctor, to tell you the truth, it is not that I am afraid of the consequences of stopping suddenly that I do not give up drinking. I can not do it. I have tried and tried again, but it is all in vain. Sometimes I have gone a number of weeks without drinking, and I flattered myself that the temptation was gone, but it returned, and now if there was a spot on earth where men lived and could not get spirits, and I could get there, I would start in a minute.’ I thought I had understood something of the difficulties of hard drinkers before, but this gave me a new impression of the matter, and most solemnly did I charge myself to do what I could to make a spot on earth where men could live and couldn’t get spirits.”

4. Lesser Evils.—Even in a stricter form than any rational friend of temperance would desire its enforcement, prohibition would not involve any consequences that could possibly make the cure a greater evil than the disease. The predicted aching void resulting from the expurgation of beer-tunnels could be filled by healthier means of recreation. The grief of the superseded poison-mongers would not outweigh the mountain-load of misery and woe which the abolishment of their cursed trade would lift from the shoulders of the nation. When the state of Iowa declared for prohibition the opponents of that amendment bemoaned the loss entailed by the departure of “so many industrious and respectable citizens,” i. e., from the exodus of the rumsellers! We might just as well be asked to bewail the doom of the Thugs[4] as the subversion of a prosperous industry. We might as well be requested to sympathize with the respectable bloodhound-trainers and knout-manufacturers whom the abolition of slavery threw out of employment. The liquor dealer has no right to complain about the rigor of a law that permits him to depart with the spoils of such a trade. We are told that the mere rumor of Maine laws has deterred many foreigners from making their homes with us; that the Russian peasants decline to come without their brewers and distillers, and that by general prohibition we would risk to reduce our immigration from every country of northern Europe. We must take that risk, and let Muscovites rot in the bogs of the Volga if they can not accept our hospitality without turning our bread corn into poison. Our utilitarian friends would hardly persuade us to legalize cannibalism in order to encourage a larger immigration of Fiji islanders. The absence of such guests might not prove an unqualified evil. I shall not insult the intelligence of my readers by repeating the drivel of the wretches who would weigh the reduction of revenues against the happiness of a hell-delivered nation, and I will only mention the reply of a British financier who estimates that the increase of national prosperity would offset that reduction in less than five years.

5. Efficacy of Prohibition.—Will prohibition prevent the use of intoxicating liquor? Not wholly, but it will answer its purpose. It will banish distilleries to secret mountain glens and hidden cellars. It will drive the man-traps of the poison-monger from the public streets. It will save our boys from a hundred temptations; it will help thousands of reformed drunkards to keep their pledge; it will restore peace and plenty to many hundred thousand homes. More than a century ago the philosopher Leibnitz[5] maintained that the plenary suppression of the liquor traffic would be the most effectual means for reforming the moral status of civilized nations, and experience has since fully demonstrated the correctness of that opinion. A memorandum endorsed by a large number of statistical vouchers describes the effect of prohibition in Sweden: “The nation rose and fell, grew prosperous and happy, or miserable and degraded, as its rulers and law-makers restrained or permitted the manufacture and sale of that which all along the track of its history has seemed to be the nation’s greatest curse.” … “The vigorously maintained prohibition against spirits in 1753-1756, and again in 1772-1775, proved the enormous benefits effected in moral, economical, and other respects, by abstinence from intoxicating spirits.” … “This it is which has so helped Sweden to emerge from moral and material prostration, and explains the existence of such general indications in that country of comfort and independence among all classes.”

From the Edinburgh Review for January, 1873, we learn that in eighty-nine private estates in England and Scotland, “the drink traffic has been altogether suppressed, with the happiest social results. The late Lord Palmerston[6] suppressed the beer shops in Romsey as the leases fell in. We know an estate which stretches for miles along the romantic shore of Loch Fyne,[7] where no whiskey is allowed to be sold. The peasants and fishermen are flourishing. They have all their money in the bank, and they obtain higher wages than their neighbors when they go to sea”—a proof that a small oasis of temperance can maintain its prosperity in the midst of poison-blighted communities.

Here and there the wiles of the poison-mongers will undoubtedly succeed in evading the law, but their power for mischief will be diminished as that of the gambling-hell was diminished in Homburg and Baden,[8] where temptation was removed out of the track of the uninitiated till the host of victims dwindled away for want of recruits. Not the promptings of an innate passion, but the charm of artificial allurements is the gate by which ninety-nine out of a hundred drunkards have entered the road to ruin. It would be an understatement to say that the temptation of minors will be reduced a hundred fold wherever the total amount of sales has been reduced as much as five fold—a result which has been far exceeded, even under the present imperfect system of legal control. “In the course of my duty as an Internal Revenue officer,” says Superintendent Hamlin of Bangor, “I have become thoroughly acquainted with the state and extent of the liquor traffic in Maine, and I have no hesitation in saying that the beer trade is not more than one per cent. of what I remember it to have been, and the trade in distilled liquors is not more than ten per cent. of what it was formerly.” “I think I am justified in saying,” reports the Attorney-General, “that there is not an open bar for the sale of intoxicating liquor in this county” (Androscoggin, including the manufacturing district of Lewiston—once a very hotbed of the rum traffic). “In the city of Biddeford, a manufacturing place of 11,000 inhabitants, for a month at a time not a single arrest for drunkenness has been made or become necessary.” And from Augusta (the capital of the state): “If we were to say that the quantity of liquor sold here is not one-tenth as large as formerly, we think it would be within the truth; and the favorable effects of the change upon all the interests of the state are plainly seen everywhere.”

“It is perhaps not necessary,” says the Boston Globe, of July 29, 1875, “to dwell on the evils of intemperance, and yet people seldom think how great a proportion of these might be prevented by driving the iniquity into its hiding places, and preventing it from coming forth to lure its victims from among the unwary and comparatively guileless. Few young men who are worth saving, or are likely to be saved to decency and virtue, would seek it out if it were kept from sight. But when it comes forth in gay and alluring colors, it draws a procession of our youth into a path that has an awful termination. Nor does the evil which springs from an open toleration of the way in which this vice carries on its traffic of destruction fall only on men. A sad proportion of its victims is made up from shop girls and abandoned women who are not so infatuated at the start that they would plunge into a life of infamy if its temptations were strictly under the ban, and kept widely separated from the world of decency. But it intruded itself upon them. Its temptations and opportunities are before their eyes, and the way is made easy for their feet to go down to death.”

“To what good is it,” says Lord Brougham,[9] “that the legislature should pass laws to punish crime, or that their lordships should occupy themselves in trying to improve the morals of the people by giving them education? What could be the use of sowing a little seed here and plucking up a weed there, if these beer shops are to be continued to sow the seeds of immorality broadcast over the land, germinating the most frightful produce that ever has been allowed to grow up in a civilized country, and, I am ashamed to add, under the fostering care of Parliament.”

The prohibition of the poison traffic has become the urgent duty of every legislator, the foremost aim of every moral reformer. The verdict of the most eminent statesmen, physicians, clergymen, patriots and philanthropists, is unanimous on that point. We lack energy, not competence, nor the sanction of a higher authority, to gain the votes of the masses.

“We can prove the success of prohibition by the experience of our neighboring state,” writes Dr. Herbert Buchanan, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire; “all the vicious elements of society are arraigned against us, but I have no fear of the event if we do not cease to agitate the subject.”

Agitation, a ceaseless appeal to the common sense and conscience of our fellowmen can, indeed, not fail to be crowned with ultimate success. The struggle with vice, with ignorance and mean selfishness may continue, but it will be our own fault if our adversaries can support their opposition by a single valid argument, and the battle will be more than half won if a majority of our fellow-citizens have to admit that we contend no longer for a favor, but for an evident right.

STUDIES IN KITCHEN SCIENCE AND ART.

V. TEA, COFFEE, AND CHOCOLATE.

BY BYRON D. HALSTED, SC. D.

We have here to consider the sources of the three leading dietetic beverages. They are very unlike in general appearance, but all possess the same vegetable principle, called an alkaloid,[1] though known under different names. Thus modern chemistry has proved the identity of the theine of the tea, the caffeine[2] of the coffee and the theo-bromine[3] of the chocolate. This same vegetable alkaloid, remarkable for its large per cent. of nitrogen, is found in small quantities in a few other plants, most of which have been used to some extent for the making of an exhilarating drink. It answers our purpose best to treat each of our three subjects under its respective head.

Tea (Thea viridis[4]).—The tea of commerce is the prepared leaves of a shrub belonging to the order Camelliaceæ[5] represented in the United States by loblolly bay[6] and Stuartia.[7] Perhaps the most familiar near relative of the tea plant is the camellia of our green houses and window gardens. The wild tea shrub grows from twenty to thirty feet high, and is found native in China and Japan. When under cultivation the shrub is pruned so as to not exceed six feet in height. The flowers are large, white and fragrant; they are produced in clusters in the axils of the simple, oblong, evergreen, serrate leaves. China and Japan are among the leading tea-growing countries, its cultivation being chiefly confined between twenty-five and thirty-five north latitude. Tea was in general use in China in the ninth century, but it was not until the seventeenth century that it was introduced into Europe. About the middle of this century the East India Company imported tea into England, since which time it has become the regular beverage of many millions of people in all parts of the world. The importations of tea into the United States for the year ending June 30th, 1884, were 67,665,910 pounds. It will be seen that this gives somewhere near a pound and a quarter of tea for each man, woman and child in this country. Most of our China tea trade is carried on with Shanghai, Foo Chow and Amoy.

In China the tea shrub is grown chiefly on the southern slopes of hills in poor, well watered soil, to which manure is applied. The seeds are dropped in holes at regular intervals, and during the third year the first crop is obtained. In from seven to ten years the shrubs are cut down and shoots spring up from the stumps, which continue to yield crops of leaves. A single plant produces on an average between three hundred and three hundred and fifty pounds of dried leaves. The leaves are picked three times a year, in April, May, and June or July. The young, tender leaves of the first gathering make the best tea, and this is very largely consumed in its native country. The older leaves of the second and third pickings make a poorer quality of tea which abounds in tannin,[8] and contains but a small per cent. of the best elements of superior tea. It was long supposed that black and green sorts of tea were made from distinct varieties, or even species of plants; in fact, there has been a great deal of mystery surrounding the culture and preparation of tea until within the past score of years. Authorities now state that there is only one species of plant yielding tea leaves, and from this all sorts are made. The differences are natural, being some of them due to climate and conditions of soil, etc., while others are the result of the manipulation of the leaves after they are gathered. Black and green tea may come from the same shrub, or even the same branch of a plant. The leaves forming black tea undergo a fermentation before they are dried, while those designed for green tea are at once submitted to a high heat in iron pans, and not copper pans, as generally supposed. After the leaves for black tea have been gathered they are placed in heaps, when they become flaccid and turn dark from incipient fermentation. The leaves are then rolled between the thumb and fingers or upon bamboo tables until the desired twist is obtained. They next pass to a drying room and are heated in an iron pan; again twisted, and afterward dried over a slow fire. The principal difference between the preparation of black and green tea is that in the latter the freshly gathered leaves go at once into the heated pans. The repeated twisting and heating is nearly the same with both classes. The green teas are sometimes artificially colored by using turmeric[9] with gypsum or Prussian blue. A flavor is frequently given to the tea by adding aromatic flowers, as those of the pekoe and caper.[10] Among the leading varieties of black tea are: Bohea, a small leaf, crisp and strong odor, with brackish taste; two sorts of Congous—the large leaf with fine flavor, and the small leaf with a burnt smell. The Souchong is the much prized “English Breakfast,” made from leaves of three-year-old trees. Only a small part of the so-called Souchong is genuine. Pekoe is made from the tenderest leaves gathered from three-year-old plants while in bloom. Oolongs are common kinds of black teas, much used for mixing with other sorts. Of the green teas the Gunpowder is round, like shot, with green color and fragrant taste. The Imperial is more loosely rolled than the Gunpowder. Young Hyson is in loose rolls, which easily crumble to the touch; it gives a light green infusion. Old Hyson is the older leaves in the picking for Young Hyson. Twankay consists of mixed and broken leaves, and is of inferior quality. Japan teas are both colored and uncolored, and come from Japan; they are very largely consumed in this country.

The chemical composition of a fair sample of tea is; Theine, 1. to 3. per cent.; caseine,[11] 15.; gum, 18.; sugar, .3; tannin, 26.; aromatic oil, .75; fat, 4.; vegetable fiber, 20.; mineral substances, 5.; and water, 5. per cent.

The tannin is an astringent, while the theine acts as a gentle excitant upon the nervous system. This is probably enhanced by the warmth of the infusion. The best authorities agree that tea is a valuable article of diet for healthy, grown people. It however is not suitable for children until growth is completed. Adults with irritable constitutions may be injured by tea-drinking. Tea is the solace of old age. Cibber[12] wrote: “Tea! thou soft, thou sober, sage and venerable liquid … thou female tongue-running, smile-smoothing, heart-opening, wink-tippling cordial, to whose glorious insipidity I owe the happiest moments of my life, let me fall prostrate.” Waller[13] truthfully says:

“Tea doth our fancy aid,

Repress those vapors which the head invade

And keep the palace of the soul.”

Tea is extensively adulterated in many ways. In China exhausted tea leaves and foliage of other trees are employed by millions of pounds each year. Willow leaves are among the principal ones used for mixing with tea. A British consul once related that at Shanghai there were at one time 53,000 pounds of willow leaves in preparation to be sold as tea. Mineral matters are used to color or “face” the tea. “The common test,” states Mr. Felker, in his work “What the Grocers Sell Us,” “is by infusion; this is poured off the leaves and examined for color, taste, and odor, all of which are characteristic.… Impurities like sand, iron filings and dirt may be seen among the leaves or at the bottom of the cups. The leaves, too, betray by their coarseness and botanical character, the nature and quality of the tea, for although the leaves of the genuine tea differ much in form and size, yet their venation and general structure are very distinctive.… ‘Lie tea,’ used to adulterate Gunpowder tea, consists of tea dust mixed with mineral substances, starch and gum, and then formed into little masses resembling tea.” Large tea houses employ professional tea tasters who make steepings and judge upon the flavor, purity, etc.

Coffee.—The coffee of commerce is the seed of a shrub, Coffea Arabica,[14] belonging to the order Rubiaceæ,[15] which is represented in the United States by the charming little “bluets” of our pastures in spring. The cape jessamine and bouvardias[16] of the green house are near relatives of the coffee plant. The name coffee is probably derived from the Arabic word Kahwah, although some authorities contend that it is traced to Caffa, a province of Abyssinia, where the coffee plant flourishes in the wild state. The coffee shrub is an evergreen, growing to the height of twenty feet, with long, smooth, shining leaves. The pure white flowers are produced in clusters in the axils of the leaves and followed by fleshy berries which, when ripe, resemble small, dark red cherries. Each berry usually contains two seeds embedded in the yellowish pulp. These seeds, when separated from the pulp and papery covering, form the raw coffee of the stores. Each seed—improperly called a berry—is somewhat hemispherical, with a groove running through the middle of the flat side. Sometimes one seed is abortive in the berry, and the other becomes round, as in the Wynaad coffee from India, sometimes called “male berry” coffee.

Coffee is cultivated in many countries lying between fifteen north and fifteen south latitude. It may be successfully grown thirty degrees from the equator. Like the tea plant, the coffee shrub favors the well watered mountain slopes. The trees are set in long, straight rows, six feet apart, and six feet from each other in the row. The coffee tree is naturally a plant with long, straggling shoots, but under cultivation it is pruned to make a shrub not exceeding six feet in height, with long, lateral branches. A full crop should be obtained the third year. The berries are gathered when the pulp begins to shrivel, and are at once taken to the store-house, where they are pulped. The berries are passed between large, rough rollers, which remove the pulp, but not the parchment-like covering of the seeds. The berries with the pulp removed are heaped up, covered with old sacking, and allowed to ferment for two days. Water is turned on and all glutinous matter removed. The seeds are spread out to dry, after which they are passed between wooden cylinders that remove the thin, dry covering. The coffee seeds, after being winnowed, are assorted into various sizes and packed ready for shipment. A thrifty shrub yields two pounds of marketable coffee. The raw coffee seed has a horny texture, without the peculiar aroma characteristic of the roasted berry.

The early history of coffee is obscure. It has been in use for over a thousand years. The knowledge of its use was first brought into Arabia from Abyssinia in the fifteenth century. “Its peculiar property of dissipating drowsiness and preventing sleep was taken advantage of in connection with the prolonged religious services of the Mohametans, and its use as a devotional antisoporific stirred up a fierce opposition on the part of the priests. Coffee was by them held to be an intoxicant beverage, and therefore prohibited by the Koran;[17] and the dreadful penalties of an outraged sacred law were laid over the heads of all who became addicted to its use. Notwithstanding the threats of divine retribution, and though all manner of devices were adopted to check its growth, the coffee-drinking habit spread rapidly among the Arabians, Mohametans, and the growth of coffee as well as its use as a national beverage became as inseparably associated with Arabia as tea is with China.” Coffee reached Great Britain in the seventeenth century. Charles II. attempted to suppress coffee houses by proclamation, because they “devised and spread abroad divers false, malicious and scandalous reports to the defamation of his Majesty’s government and to the peace and quiet of the nation.” How different is this view from that held by those interested in good government, peace and prosperity at the present day! We now rejoice in the establishment of coffee houses, hoping that they may supplant the much dreaded rum shops.

It is worthy of note here that the three dietetic beverages treated in this article were all introduced into Europe at nearly the same time. Tea came through the Dutch; cocoa was brought from South America to Spain, and coffee came from Arabia by the way of Constantinople.

Coffee was for some time supplied only by Arabia, but near the beginning of the eighteenth century its culture was introduced into Java and the West India islands. At the present day its culture is general within the tropics, Brazil leading the list in amount annually produced. In the Eastern hemisphere the principal coffee regions are Java and Ceylon, where a superior article is produced. The amount of coffee imported into the United States during the year ending June 30th, 1884, was 534,785,542 pounds, and 18,907,627 pounds in excess of the previous year. It is seen that these figures give nearly ten pounds for each individual in this vast country. This amount per capita is exceeded by only a few countries. Holland leads all European states, with an average of twenty-one pounds per head, followed closely by Belgium, Denmark and Norway.

The dietetic value of coffee depends principally upon the alkaloid caffeine or theine which it contains in common with tea and cocoa or chocolate. Good coffee contains nearly one per cent. of this substance. When obtained in a pure state it crystallizes in slender needles. The peculiar aroma of coffee is due to the presence of caffeone,[18] which develops in the process of roasting. It may be isolated as a brown oil, heavier than water, by distilling roasted coffee with water. The roasting of coffee is an operation requiring much good judgment, for by carrying the process beyond a certain point the aroma is destroyed and a disagreeable flavor is produced.

Roasted coffee when ground quickly deteriorates unless kept in close vessels. Mocha coffee, which is brought from Arabia, is the best, and that from Java ranks next. Much of the so-called Mocha coffee is raised in Brazil, or elsewhere, and shipped to Arabia, after which it finds its way into the markets. The berries of the true Mocha coffee are small, dark and yellow; those of Java are a paler yellow, while the West India and Brazilian coffees have a greenish-gray tint. The last named coffee is usually sold under the name of Rio, an abbreviation of the leading coffee exporting port of Brazil, namely, Rio de Janeiro; Martinique and St. Domingo coffees are two other kinds but little known.

Coffee is principally valuable for its stimulating effects upon the system. It produces a buoyancy of feeling, lightens the sensation of fatigue, and sustains the muscles when under prolonged exertion. A cup of rich, hot coffee seems to infuse new life into an o’er-tired body. Equally with tea it is “the cup that cheers, but not inebriates.”

“Coffee which makes the politician wise

And see through all things with his half-shut eyes.”

Coffee is the subject of many adulterations, usually when sold in the ground state. Several kinds of seeds resembling coffee in size have been employed to adulterate the whole coffee, some of which need to be colored before they will pass for the genuine. Many kinds of roots are sliced, dried and roasted for the adulteration of coffee, among the leading ones of which are chicory, carrot and the beet. Spent tanbark and even dried beef’s liver have been thus employed. Many of these fraudulent additions can be detected with the microscope. Ground coffee floats on water, while most of the adulterations will sink or discolor the water. There is said to be a machine in England for making false berries out of vegetable substance.

Chocolate.—The chocolate of the shops is derived from a small evergreen tree, native of South America, Mexico, and West Indias. This tree, Theobroma cacao, has large, pointed leaves and rose-colored flowers, which are followed by fruit pods six to ten inches long. The first part of the botanical name is from the Greek meaning “food for the gods,” and the second or specific word cacao is the old Mexican name for the tree. The order Sterculiaceæ[19] to which the theobroma or chocolate tree belongs is not represented in our flora. It however is known to many by a species of Mahernia[20] from the cape of Good Hope, cultivated in conservatories. The order contains about 520 species, nearly all of which are tropical. The long pods, while green, resemble cucumbers, and when ripe contain from thirty to an hundred seeds, arranged in rows, and of the size of sweet almonds. During the season of ripening the pods are gathered daily, laid in heaps until they have fermented, when they are opened by hand and the seeds spread in the sun to dry, after which they are ready for market. Before the Spaniards visited Mexico the natives made a beverage from the seeds, which they called chocalat, and from this we derived our word chocolate. The Spaniards have the credit of introducing this beverage into Europe. In the manufacture of chocolate the cocoa (which is a corruption of the original Mexican cacao) beans are roasted similar to the roasting of coffee, and after the husk is removed they are reduced to a paste. This paste is afterward mixed with equal quantities of sugar and heated and turned into cakes of various shapes familiar to all housekeepers. Cacao nibs are the bruised and broken seeds, and cocoa shells are the thin coverings of the seeds or beans which are separated before the seeds are ground to powder. Broma is chocolate prepared for the market in a certain way, and is a trade name.

The importations of chocolate for the year ending June 30th were 12,235,304 pounds, being an increase of nearly thirty-five per cent. over the previous year.

Of the three leading beverages herein briefly described tea is the only one that has been grown as a crop in the United States. In a reply to an inquiry recently addressed to the Commissioner of Agriculture, it was stated that the tea plant is hardy at Washington, D. C., and that the tea plantations near Summerville, South Carolina, are doing well. “There is no trouble about growing the plant, but the question of profitable culture for the manufacture of tea is quite another thing.… The purpose of the Department of Agriculture … is to cheapen the present methods or possibly suggest the placing of the teas on the market in a wholly different shape from what is done at present.” We may be able to supply our own demands for tea, but it is not likely that the same will be true of coffee and chocolate.

HOUSEHOLD BEVERAGES.

At the breakfast table of a friend not long ago I heard the gentleman of the house remark over his fragrant coffee:

“I laughed at my wife when she went into the cooking school last summer, I thought her a model cook before; but for some reason she has improved. I never tasted such coffee as this.”

My hostess answered: “The reason is simple enough. I had always cooked by rule before. I learned in my studies in cookery to reason. It makes a great difference.”

It does make a difference, and never a greater than in preparing tea, coffee and chocolate. There is rarely a cup of any one of these beverages on our tables which is fit to drink; our coffee is bitter and muddy, tea is either insipid or too strong, and chocolate has failed to become the popular drink which it deserves to be, because so rarely well prepared.

Few cooks understand the nature of either the coffee berry or the tea leaf, and consequently do not know how to treat them in order to extract their delicious flavor, aroma, and nerve-bracing qualities.

Few cooks have an idea of the extreme delicacy of these articles, of how scientifically, even artistically, they must be treated. To extract an oil or flavor is one of the nicest experiments of the laboratory, and one for which a chemist selects his materials with the greatest care, attends strictly to the cleanliness of his vessels, watches every change in temperature, and counts even seconds in time. Making these beverages is nothing less than performing a delicate chemical experiment, and yet we are so ignorant or careless about this important work that we attend strictly to neither heat nor time, and often take just what we can most easily get to work with.

If you would have good tea, coffee and chocolate begin your care with your buying. Tea is a most troublesome article to purchase. There are so many varieties on the market, and so much adulteration that the probability is that unless you are taking extreme precautions you are getting an inferior article. Adulteration is astonishingly common, poor teas being manipulated to make them appear like the first-class grades; inferior black teas colored to look like high-priced green teas, “lie tea” sold in vast quantities, and made-over teas[1] made to pass for fresh. How to obtain the genuine article is the housewife’s first problem. Careful examination may be made under the microscope for coloring matter, the tea may be soaked to see if it unrolls into true leaves, or after washing it in a little water the liquid may be tested with chemicals for foreign substances. But all this means trouble that few housewives care to take. Probably the most practical plan is to find by careful experiment a thoroughly reliable[2] tea-house and then confine your patronage to it. A pound of tea bought here and another there, as convenience may dictate or some friend advise, will insure you nothing but adulteration. The only safe plan is to find a house which sells good tea. Your tea bought, it must be prepared. In making a cup of tea the chemical composition and the effect of each step in its preparation must be observed or your draught will be ruined. The constituents in the leaf which you must look after are the theine, the aromatic oil, and the tannin. Your tea must be treated in such a way that the first two, which give to the drink its flavor and aroma, will be extracted, but that the bitter tannin will be left undeveloped. The theine and oil are both volatile substances, so that if your tea is steeped too long, or if it is boiled, they will literally fly away, while the tannin extracted will turn your cup into a bitter, herby drink. A rule is easily formulated from this bit of science:

Into a perfectly clean tea-pot, just scalded with boiling hot water, put a heaping tablespoonful of tea for each person, and upon it pour a cup and a half of boiling water for each spoonful. Cover your pot with a “cosy”[3] if you have one, and let it stand on the back of the range, where it will not boil, for from five to ten minutes. The length of time required to steep each variety of tea must be determined by experiment, some varieties taking longer than others. The exact length each housewife must determine when she tries a new kind; and it may be said of the exact proportion of tea to water that it as well must be determined by experiment. No rule in cooking is inflexible. It must always be modified by the good sense and the scientific care of the cook.

The English custom of making tea on the table is the prettiest and the most satisfactory. They pour upon the tea required a small quantity of boiling water, this is placed upon the table, covered with the “cosy;” a pot of water taken when boiling from the stove is kept hot by a spirit lamp, and when the tea is steeped as much boiling water as the quantity of tea used demands is poured into the tea-pot. It is allowed to stand about three minutes and then poured into the cups and on the cream. Remember, cream should always be poured into the cups first for both tea and coffee, and tea is as much improved by cream as is coffee.

The purchase of coffee is beset with the same trouble as that of tea—adulteration. You may get a manufactured berry, you may get chiccory; to avoid this careful tests must be applied and only reliable firms patronized. Nothing but unbrowned coffee should be bought; the roasting should be done at home. This process requires particular care. The coffee berry is hard and horny, water has no effect upon it even when it has been ground. It must be roasted in order that certain constituents may become soluble. These constituents are a fragrant volatile oil called caffeone, and the caffeine, which is identical with the theine of tea. By roasting the oil is distributed through the berry and so made soluble, while the caffeine is developed so that it may be absorbed by water. Just the right amount of roasting must be done or the essential constituents will be expelled and the bitter qualities will be made to predominate. I have said that the roasting should be done at home. It may be done in the shops, of course, but the operation there is carried on so unscientifically that the aroma is lost on the town instead of being shut up in the berry. Only a few days ago, passing up a business street of a city, I was astonished to find the air heavy with the delicious aroma of coffee. It scented the air for a square, and only when I came to a large grocery store was the mystery explained. The grocer was browning his coffee, and its odor was serving for an advertisement, effective, perhaps, among the ignorant, but which would warn every wise housewife not to purchase roasted coffee. The process is best carried on in one of the very nearly perfect coffee roasters to be found in the shops; if these are not at hand an ordinary dripping pan may be used. It should be covered to prevent loss of aroma, and should be continually shaken to prevent burning. The entire attention of one person should be given the coffee during this operation. When turned to a rich chestnut brown remove, keeping covered until quite cool. If left open the aroma escapes very rapidly from warm coffee, but if kept covered much of that made volatile by the heat is re-absorbed. A tight dish—an air-tight canister is best—must be ready to keep it in.

When using, grind only what you need, and take care that it is not left coarse, when the strength can not be extracted, or that it is not too fine, when the liquor will be muddy in spite of you; in this, as always, experiment until you know the degree of fineness which ground coffee should have. A heaping tablespoonful of ground coffee to a cup and a half of water is the ordinary proportion for making strong coffee—the only kind which should ever be prepared, by the way, the diluting ought always to take place in the cup; to the required amount of coffee add the white and shell of an egg and cold water to thoroughly wet the whole; stir up these ingredients in your coffee pot and pour upon them the required amount of boiling hot water. Let it boil from ten to fifteen minutes, pour in half a cup of cold water and remove to the side of the stove where it can not boil. Do not boil longer than the exact time which you have found necessary for the kind of coffee you are using, if you do you lose your flavor and extract in its place a bitter principle which is ruinous. Remember always what one of our famous cooks says: “There comes a time in baking, frying or broiling when injured nature revolts and burns up, but a thing may boil until not a vestige of its original condition remains, and unless the water evaporates, it may go on boiling for hours without reminding one by smell or smoke that it is spoiled.”

Your coffee will settle in about five minutes. Now if you must use a different coffee urn, gently pour off the liquor so as not to disturb the grounds. The settling of coffee is an essential point. The regulation method of stirring an egg into the freshly ground berry is undoubtedly best, but another and more economical practice may take its place. After your freshly roasted berries are cool enough to be easily handled, add to each pound a fresh egg and stir it in until each kernel is coated smoothly with the mixture. Care must be taken that the coffee be not warm enough to cook the egg. When eggs are expensive an economical method is to wash the shells before they are broken, and use with cold water to settle the coffee.

After all these precautions there are still other points to guard. Not the least is the condition of the inside of the coffee pot; it should never be stained, burnt or coated, but kept perfectly bright by being washed, and, if necessary, scoured after each meal. It would be a gain in aroma if your coffee pot could always be kept perfectly tight so that none could escape, and if it could go to the table in the same dish. The pleasant, suggestive odors which precede a meal are always signs that the most delicious flavors of your coming breakfast, dinner or tea are escaping, that through the unskillfulness of your cook you are losing what should give the greatest charm to your meal.

Café au lait[4] is an excellent drink and easily prepared. Make in the usual way a pint of strong coffee, and into your table urn or a pitcher pour a cup and a half of fresh milk, scalding hot; to this add the coffee and let the whole stand for five minutes in a hot place, or in a kettle of hot water.

Chocolate is a most delicious drink if properly prepared; it is, however, so often raw, muddy and strong that we have not been able to educate ourselves to its peculiar disagreeableness. Make it by the following rule and you will find it both nutritious and pleasant: Select with care the best make of chocolate, and into a little cold water rub smooth five tablespoonfuls of grated chocolate; be sure that it be rubbed in smoothly, a hard particle of chocolate is as unwelcome a visitor in your cup as floating tea leaves or black bobbing bits of coffee berries. So rub it smooth and stir it slowly into five cups of boiling water. Let it boil for about five minutes, and in the meantime heat two cups of milk; this must be stirred into the boiling chocolate and the whole allowed to simmer for a few minutes longer. You may sweeten it on the fire or in the cup.

HUXLEY ON SCIENCE.[C]

All the time that we are awake we are learning by means of our senses something about the world in which we live and of which we form a part; we are constantly aware of feeling, or hearing, or smelling, and, unless we happen to be in the dark, of seeing; at intervals we taste. We call the information thus obtained sensation.

When we have any of these sensations we commonly say that we feel, or hear, or smell, or see, or taste something. A certain scent makes us say we smell onions; a certain flavor, that we taste apples; a certain sound, that we hear a carriage; a certain appearance before our eyes, that we see a tree; and we call that which we thus perceive by the aid of our senses a thing or an object.

Moreover, we say of all these things, or objects, that they are the causes of the sensations in question, and that the sensations are the effects of these causes. For example, if we hear a certain sound, we say it is caused by a carriage going along the road, or that it is the effect, or the consequence, of a carriage passing along. If there is a strong smell of burning, we believe it to be the effect of something on fire, and look about anxiously for the cause of the smell. If we see a tree, we believe that there is a thing, or object, which is the cause of that appearance in our field of view.

In the case of the smell of burning, when we find on looking about, that something actually is on fire, we say indifferently either that we have found out the cause of the smell, or that we know the reason why we perceive that smell; or that we have explained it. So that to know the reason why of anything, or to explain it, is to know the cause of it. But that which is the cause of one thing is the effect of another. Thus, suppose we find some smouldering straw to be the cause of the smell of burning, we immediately ask what set it on fire, or what is the cause of its burning? Perhaps we find that a lighted lucifer match has been thrown into the straw, and then we say that the lighted match was the cause of the fire. But a lucifer match would not be in that place unless some person had put it there. That is to say, the presence of the lucifer match is an effect produced by somebody as cause. So we ask, why did any one put the match there? Was it done carelessly, or did the person who put it there intend to do so? And if so, what was his motive, or the cause which led him to do such a thing? And what was the reason for his having such a motive? It is plain that there is no end to the questions, one arising out of the other, that might be asked in this fashion.

Thus we believe that everything is the effect of something which preceded it as its cause, and that this cause is the effect of something else, and so on, through a chain of causes and effects which goes back as far as we choose to follow it. Anything is said to be explained as soon as we have discovered its cause, or the reason why it exists; the explanation is fuller, if we can find out the cause of that cause; and the further we can trace the chain of causes and effects, the more satisfactory is the explanation. But no explanation of anything can be complete, because human knowledge, at its best, goes but a very little way back toward the beginning of things.

When a thing is found always to cause a particular effect, we call that effect sometimes a property, sometimes a power of the thing. Thus the odor of onions is said to be a property of onions, because onions always cause that particular sensation of smell to arise, when they are brought near the nose; lead is said to have the property of heaviness, because it always causes us to have the feeling of weight when we handle it; a stream is said to have the power to turn a waterwheel, because it causes the waterwheel to turn; and a venomous snake is said to have the power to kill a man, because its bite may cause a man to die. Properties and powers, then, are certain effects caused by the things which are said to possess them.

A great many of the things brought to our knowledge by our senses, such as houses and furniture, carriages and machines, are termed artificial things or objects, because they have been shaped by the art of man; indeed, they are generally said to be made by man. But a far greater number of things owe nothing to the hand of man, and would be just what they are if mankind did not exist—such as the sky and the clouds; the sun, moon and stars; the sea with its rocks and shingly or sandy shores; the hills and dales of the land; and all wild plants and animals. Things of this kind are termed natural objects, and to the whole of them we give the name of Nature.

Although this distinction between nature and art, between natural and artificial things, is very easily made and very convenient, it is needful to remember that, in the long run, we owe everything to nature; that even those artificial objects which we commonly say are made by men, are only natural objects shaped and moved by men; and that, in the sense of creating, that is to say, of causing something to exist which did not exist in some other shape before, man can make nothing whatever. Moreover, we must recollect that what men do in the way of shaping and bringing together or separating natural objects, is done in virtue of the powers which they themselves possess as natural objects.

Artificial things are, in fact, all produced by the action of that part of nature which we call mankind, upon the rest.

We talk of “making” a box, and rightly enough, if we mean only that we have shaped the pieces of wood and nailed them together; but the wood is a natural object and so is the iron of the nails. A watch is “made” of the natural objects gold and other metals, sand, soda, rubies, brought together, and shaped in various ways; a coat is “made” of the natural object, wool; and a frock of the natural objects, cotton or silk. Moreover, the men who make all these things are natural objects.

Carpenters, builders, shoemakers, and all other artisans and artists, are persons who have learned so much of the powers and properties of certain natural objects, and of the chain of causes and effects in nature, as enables them to shape and put together those natural objects, so as to make them useful to man.

A carpenter could not, as we say, “make” a chair unless he knew something of the properties and powers of wood; a blacksmith could not “make” a horseshoe unless he knew that it is a property of iron to become soft and easily hammered into shape when it is made red-hot; a brickmaker must know many of the properties of clay; and a plumber could not do his work unless he knew that lead has the properties of softness and flexibility, and that a moderate heat causes it to melt.

So that the practice of every art implies a certain knowledge of natural causes and effects; and the improvement of the arts depends upon our learning more and more of the properties and powers of natural objects, and discovering how to turn the properties and the powers of things and the connections of cause and effect among them to our own advantage.

Among natural objects, as we have seen, there are some that we can get hold of and turn to account. But all the greatest things in nature and the links of cause and effect which connect them, are utterly beyond our reach. The sun rises and sets; the moon and the stars move through the sky; fine weather and storms, cold and heat, alternate. The sea changes from violent disturbance to glassy calm, as the winds sweep over it with varying strength or die away; innumerable plants and animals come in being and vanish again, without our being able to exert the slightest influence on the majestic procession of the series of great natural events. Hurricanes ravage one spot; earthquakes destroy another; volcanic eruptions lay waste a third. A fine season scatters wealth and abundance here, and a long drought brings pestilence and famine there. In all such cases, the direct influence of man avails him nothing; and, so long as he is ignorant, he is the mere sport of the greater powers of nature.

But the first thing that men learned, as soon as they began to study nature carefully, was that some events take place in regular order and that some causes always give rise to the same effects. The sun always rises on one side and sets on the other side of the sky; the changes of the moon follow one another in the same order and with similar intervals; some stars never sink below the horizon of the place in which we live; the seasons are more or less regular; water always flows down-hill; fire always burns; plants grow up from seed and yield seed, from which like plants grow up again; animals are born, grow, reach maturity, and die, age after age, in the same way. Thus the notion of an order of nature and of a fixity in the relation of cause and effect between things gradually entered the minds of men. So far as such order prevailed it was felt that things were explained; while the things that could not be explained were said to have come about by chance, or to happen by accident.

But the more carefully nature has been studied, the more widely has order been found to prevail, while what seemed disorder has proved to be nothing but complexity; until, at present, no one is so foolish as to believe that anything happens by chance, or that there are any real accidents, in the sense of events which have no cause. And if we say that a thing happens by chance, everybody admits that all we really mean is, that we do not know its cause or the reason why that particular thing happens. Chance and accident are only aliases[1] of ignorance.

At this present moment, as I look out of my window, it is raining and blowing hard, and the branches of the trees are waving wildly to and fro. It may be that a man has taken shelter under one of these trees; perhaps, if a stronger gust than usual comes, a branch will break, fall upon the man, and seriously hurt him. If that happens it will be called an “accident,” and the man will perhaps say that by “chance” he went out, and then “chanced” to take refuge under the tree, and so the “accident” happened. But there is neither chance nor accident in the matter. The storm is the effect of causes operating upon the atmosphere, perhaps hundreds of miles away; every vibration of a leaf is the consequence of the mechanical force of the wind acting on the surface exposed to it; if the bough breaks, it will do so in consequence of the relation between its strength and the force of the wind; if it falls upon the man it will do so in consequence of the action of other definite natural causes; and the position of the man under it is only the last term in a series of causes and effects, which have followed one another in natural order, from that cause, the effect of which was his setting out, to that the effect of which was his stepping under the tree.

But, inasmuch as we are not wise enough to be able to unravel all these long and complicated series of causes and effects which lead to the falling of the branch upon the man, we call such an event an accident.

When we have made out by careful and repeated observation that something is always the cause of a certain effect, or that certain events always take place in the same order, we speak of the truth thus discovered as a law of nature. Thus it is a law of nature that anything heavy falls to the ground if it is unsupported; it is a law of nature that, under ordinary conditions, lead is soft and heavy, while flint is hard and brittle; because experience shows us that heavy things always do fall if they are unsupported, that, under ordinary conditions, lead is always soft, and that flint is always hard.

In fact, everything that we know about the powers and properties of natural objects and about the order of nature may properly be termed a law of nature. But it is desirable to remember that which is very often forgotten, that the laws of nature are not the causes of the order of nature, but only our way of stating as much as we have made out of that order. Stones do not fall to the ground in consequence of the law just stated, as people sometimes carelessly say; but the law is the way of asserting that which invariably happens when heavy bodies at the surface of the earth, stones among the rest, are free to move.

The laws of nature are, in fact, in this respect, similar to the laws which men make for the guidance of their conduct toward one another. There are laws about the payment of taxes, and there are laws against stealing or murder. But the law is not the cause of a man’s paying his taxes, nor is it the cause of his abstaining from theft and murder. The law is simply a statement of what will happen to a man if he does not pay his taxes, and if he commits theft or murder; and the cause of his paying his taxes, or abstaining from crime (in the absence of any better motive) is the fear of consequences which is the effect of his belief in that statement. A law of man tells what we may expect society will do under certain circumstances; and a law of nature tells us what we may expect natural objects will do under certain circumstances. Each contains information addressed to our intelligence, and except so far as it Influences our intelligence, it is merely so much sound or writing.

While there is this much analogy between human and natural laws, however, certain essential differences between the two must not be overlooked. Human law consists of commands addressed to voluntary agents, which they may obey or disobey; and the law is not rendered null and void by being broken. Natural laws, on the other hand, are not commands, but assertions respecting the invariable order of nature; and they remain laws only so long as they can be shown to express that order. To speak of the violation, or the suspension, of a law of nature is an absurdity. All that the phrase can really mean is that, under certain circumstances the assertion contained in the law is not true; and the just conclusion is, not that the order of nature is interrupted, but that we have made a mistake in stating that order. A true natural law is a universal rule, and, as such, admits of no exceptions.

Again, human laws have no meaning apart from the existence of human society. Natural laws express the general course of nature, of which human society forms only an insignificant fraction.

If nothing happens by chance, but everything in nature follows a definite order, and if the laws of nature embody that which we have been able to learn about the order of nature in accurate language, then it becomes very important for us to know as many as we can of these laws of nature, in order that we may guide our conduct by them.

Any man who should attempt to live in a country without reference to the laws of that country would very soon find himself in trouble. And if he were fined, imprisoned, or even hanged, sensible people would probably consider that he had earned his fate by his folly.

In like manner, any one who tries to live upon the face of this earth without attention to the laws of nature will live there for but a very short time, most of which will be passed in exceeding discomfort; a peculiarity of natural laws, as distinguished from those of human enactment, being that they take effect without summons or prosecution. In fact, nobody could live for half a day unless he attended to some of the laws of nature; and thousands of us are dying daily, or living miserably, because men have not yet been sufficiently zealous to learn the code of nature.

It has already been seen that the practice of all our arts and industries depends upon our knowing the properties of natural objects which we can get hold of and put together; and though we may be able to exert no direct control over the greater natural objects and the general succession of causes and effects in nature, yet, if we know the properties and powers of these objects, and the customary order of events, we may elude that which is injurious to us, and profit by that which is favorable.

Thus, though men can nowise alter the reasons or change the process of growth in plants, yet having learned the order of nature in these matters, they make arrangements for sowing and reaping accordingly; they can not make the wind blow, but when it does blow they take advantage of its known powers and probable direction to sail ships and turn wind-mills; they can not arrest the lightning, but they can make it harmless by means of conductors, the construction of which implies a knowledge of some of the laws of that electricity of which lightning is one of the manifestations. Forewarned is forearmed, says the proverb; and knowledge of the laws of nature is forewarning of that which we may expect to happen, when we have to deal with natural objects.

No line can be drawn between common knowledge of things and scientific knowledge; nor between common reasoning and scientific reasoning. In strictness all accurate knowledge is science; and all exact reasoning is scientific reasoning. The method of observation and experiment, by which such great results are obtained in science, is identically the same as that which is employed by every one, every day of his life, but refined and rendered precise. If a child acquires a new toy, he observes its characters and experiments upon its properties; and we are all of us constantly making observations and experiments upon one thing or another.

But those who have never tried to observe accurately will be surprised to find how difficult a business it is. There is not one person in a hundred who can describe the commonest occurrence with even an approach to accuracy. That is to say, either he will omit something which did occur, and which is of importance, or he will imply or suggest the occurrence of something which he did not actually observe, but which he unconsciously infers must have happened. When two truthful witnesses contradict one another in a court of justice, it usually turns out that one or other, or sometimes both, are confounding their inferences from what they saw with that which they actually saw. A swears that B picked his pocket. It turns out that all A really knows is that he felt a hand in his pocket when B was close to him; and that B was not the thief, but C, whom A did not observe. Untrained observers mix up together their inferences from what they see with that which they actually see in the most wonderful way; and even experienced and careful observers are in constant danger of falling into the same error.

Scientific observation is such as is at once full, precise, and free from unconscious inference.

Experiment is the observation of that which happens when we intentionally bring natural objects together, or separate them, or in any way change the conditions under which they are placed. Scientific experiment, therefore, is scientific observation, performed under accurately known artificial conditions.

It is a matter of common observation that water sometimes freezes. The observation becomes scientific when we ascertain under what exact conditions the change of water into ice takes place. The commonest experiments tell us that wood floats in water. Scientific experiment shows that, in floating, it displaces its own weight of the water.

Scientific reasoning differs from ordinary reasoning in just the same way as scientific observation and experiment differ from ordinary observation and experiment—that is to say, it strives to be accurate; and it is just as hard to reason accurately as it is to observe accurately.

In scientific reasoning general rules are collected from the observation of many particular cases; and, when these general rules are established, conclusions are deduced from them, just as in everyday life. If a boy says that “marbles are hard,” he has drawn a conclusion as to marbles in general from the marbles he happens to have seen and felt, and has reasoned in that mode which is technically termed induction. If he declines to try to break a marble with his teeth, it is because he consciously or unconsciously performs the converse operation of deduction from the general rule “marbles are too hard to break with one’s teeth.”

You will learn more about the process of reasoning when you study logic, which treats of that subject in full. At present, it is sufficient to know that the laws of nature are the general rules respecting the behavior of natural objects, which have been collected from innumerable observations and experiments; or, in other words, that they are inductions from those observations and experiments. The practical and theoretical results of science are the products of deductive reasoning from these general rules.

Thus science and common sense are not opposed, as people sometimes fancy them to be, but science is perfected common sense. Scientific reasoning is simply very careful common reasoning, and common knowledge grows into scientific knowledge as it becomes more and more exact and complete.

The way to science then lies through common knowledge; we must extend that knowledge by common observation and experiment, and learn how to state the results of our investigations accurately, in general rules or laws of nature; finally, we must learn how to reason accurately from these rules, and thus arrive at rational explanations of natural phenomena, which may suffice for our guidance in life.

FOOTNOTES

[C] From Science Primers. Introductory. By Prof. T. H. Huxley, F.R.S.

THE CIRCLE OF THE SCIENCES.

Science means classified knowledge. There may be much general knowledge that is not science. It attains to that dignity only when the particular facts known are generalized, and arranged in some order, instead of being jumbled together, and lying about loosely in the memory, to be taken up at random. Especially must the basal facts of the science be verified, not assumed.

Information that is general and assured, though as yet lacking system and a proper ordering of the elementary facts, may, and usually will in time advance to the dignity of science. History warrants this expectation. Only let not the boast be made, or the honor conferred prematurely. Geography, chemistry, and political economy are all now sciences. The first has been recognized among the sciences from an early day, though it has advanced rapidly during the present century. The last two are comparatively new members, having held their place in the “Circle” scarcely a hundred years. True, many of the facts of chemistry, and the principles of political economy had been known for ages, but the knowledge men had of them lacked either system or certainty, or both. So, also, in respect to mineralogy, botany, and zoölogy, a store of known facts had been for ages accumulating, before they could rightly be called sciences. To reach that distinction the quality and orderly arrangement of the things known are as necessary as the quantity.

In the heading of this series of articles, “Circle” does not suggest the rim of a wheel, or a curved line all the points of which are equally distant from the center around which it is drawn, but rather a group of sciences, just as “social circle,” and “circle of friends” indicate the amicable relations of the persons without saying anything of their positions in the place of their meeting. It is a goodly group, this family of the sciences, and the members now so numerous and having such distinctive characteristics will be introduced, not as a body but severally, and in five classes: The Mathematical, Physical, Mental, Moral, and Social Sciences. They hold such intimate relations with each other, mutually giving and receiving aid, that we will not attempt to keep the members of classes from mixing occasionally in our account of them, as they often do in reality.

Mathematics is the science of quantities and numbers. Its principles are of the first importance, and are of service in all the departments of science. In several of its subdivisions, of which brief mention will be made, it uses known quantities for the determination of those unknown, reasoning from certain relations existing between them. The qualities it discusses are represented by diagrams, figures, or symbols, adopted for the purpose. It is customary to speak of pure and mixed, or abstract and applied mathematics; the former treating of laws, principles, and relations in the abstract, or without any special reference to anything as actual or existing. The latter discusses the principles, laws and relations in connection with existing phenomena. The operations with numbers and symbols in pure mathematics, dealing only with abstract quantities, do not necessarily imply the idea of matter. Those of the science as applied have much to do with material phenomena. The elements that enter into the calculations in both cases are axioms or self-evident truths, things that are known intuitively, or grasped by the reason soon as presented, only in applied mathematics, used more or less in all sciences, these same axiomatic, self-evident truths are employed in the discussion of natural objects, the laws, properties, and relations of which are learned mostly by experience and induction.

The sciences classed as pure mathematics are Arithmetic, Geometry, Algebra, Analytical Geometry and Calculus. Arithmetic is eminently the science of numbers, and treats of, or practically illustrates their nature and uses. It employs the nine Arabic digits or figures with the addition of the cipher, giving them various positions to express numerical values, and not the native qualities or functions of the things to which they are applied. The methods are the same, and the results obtained equally true, whatever may be the nature of the quantities about which inquiry is made. The elementary or fundamental idea in arithmetic is unity, expressed by the figure 1, from which, with the help of the other eight digits, and the individually valueless cipher, 0, expressions for all the other values, whole or fractional, are formed.

As arithmetical processes underlie, or enter into, the work of nearly all mathematical calculations, its great importance as a science is evident; though as often taught in our schools and used in business, it is simply a method of reckoning or computation.

Algebra is a kindred science, that, by the use of letters and symbols, enables us to solve more readily all difficult questions relating to numbers. It is, indeed, a kind of universal arithmetic. In the ordinary arithmetic the numbers or figures employed, taken separately, have always the same value, and the result, when, sometimes by a tedious process, obtained, is applicable only to the particular question proposed, but in solving the problem by algebra, since we employ letters to which any values may be attributed at pleasure, the result obtained is largely applicable to all questions of a particular class. Thus, having the sum and difference of two quantities given, we readily obtain an algebraic expression for the quantities themselves. By the new method the goal is reached speedily, and the cabalistic terms, that may, at his first attempts, perplex and discourage the young student, become his delight; and in many difficult processes greatly shorten the work, enabling him with ease to solve problems that to the common arithmetician are tedious, if not impossible.

Geometry, one of the oldest of sciences, measures extension, treats of order and proportion in space. Its working elements are not numbers or symbols, but points, and lines, either straight or curved, and surfaces, with volumes, or solids. The simpler problems, when successfully demonstrated, are used in solving those more complicated, making the progress easy.

Lines are made up of points, and have extension only in one direction. Surfaces have length and breadth, and are distinguished as triangles, quadrilaterals, polygons, etc., according to the number of lines that circumscribe them. Solids have length, breadth, and thickness. From a few elementary facts, much geometrical science has been deduced, by very simple, logical processes. It is intimately related to other sciences, and of much practical importance; but, if there were no other advantage derived, as a discipline of the reasoning faculty there can be nothing better. To pursue the study profitably there is little need of an instructor. Class recitations are helpful, but let any one intent on personal culture, and having only a little time for the work, get a good elementary treatise on plane and solid geometry, and study it. The exercise will become a delight, will give strength and grip to the faculties, and furnish protection against the mental dissipation caused by spending much time in the hasty, careless reading of what is fitly called light literature.

Analytical geometry is that branch which examines, discusses and develops the properties of geometrical magnitudes by the use of algebraic symbols. The questions or problems are solved, not, as in plane geometry, by diagrams or figures drawn to show certain relations of magnitudes, but by making algebraic symbols represent them, and thus solving the problems. Analysis is much used in simple algebraic processes, but more in analytical geometry, and in differential and integral calculus, which has been called the transcendental analysis. It is useful as a higher branch of the science, and without it the best achievements of the greatest mathematicians would scarcely have been possible. These last named branches are generally best pursued in our higher academies and colleges. A college course would be sadly deficient without them, but only for exceptional cases would it be advisable to put them in a course of study to be pursued privately.

If this brief mention of the higher mathematics kindles desire for further knowledge, and you hesitate to grapple with them alone, by all means go to college, and after a proper introduction, wherein the chief embarrassment is felt, even calculus will be found an agreeable acquaintance.

Under the head of “Mixed Mathematics,” applicable to both laws or abstract principles and facts, the discussion of things as actual and possible, we have first, mechanics, the science that treats of the various forces and their different effects. By force is meant any power that tends to prevent, produce, or modify motion. Three are recognized—(1) gravitation, or the attraction of bodies toward each other; (2) the cause, whatever it may be, of light, heat, and electricity; (3) life, an equally mysterious power producing the actions of animals and the growth of plants. These forces, though entirely unseen and their causes unknown, are definite quantities. We readily conceive of one force as equal to, or greater than another, and know that equal forces, applied in opposite directions, balance each other. To everything that moves there is force applied greater than the resistance to be overcome. A number of forces may act on an object at the same time, accelerating, retarding, or changing the direction of the motion given to it. When the forces are so balanced as to hold the body on which they act in a state of equilibrium, their action and consequent phenomena are investigated under the head of Statics, or the science which treats of bodies at rest. When motion is produced, Dynamics considers the laws that govern the moving bodies and the phenomena that result. These branches of mechanical science are of great practical importance, and a knowledge of them would save from many blunders and failures resulting from incompetence. The same laws govern in the movement of all bodies, whether solid or liquid. Hydrostatics, Hydrodynamics, Hydraulics, etc., are branches of the same science, and worthy of separate mention only because they apply the general principles of statics and dynamics to the phenomena of rest or motion in liquids. The foundation for all that is peculiar in these branches with the lengthened names, and that together may be called Hydro-mechanics, lies in the properties that distinguish the liquid from other states of material bodies, whether gaseous or solid, viz.: in the presence of cohesion, but with great mobility of parts and more or less elasticity. Some peculiarities are so noteworthy as to deserve mention even in this limited presentation. Because of the only slight cohesive attraction, and entire freedom of motion among the particles, liquid bodies possess no definite form of their own, but adapt themselves to the form of the excavations or vessels containing them. They, of course, vary much in their fluidity, the mobile liquids, as water and alcohol, flowing more readily than molasses, heavy oils, and tar. Fluids at rest press equally in all directions, upward, downward, and laterally. In this, also, they differ from solids that press only down, or in the direction of the center of gravitation. If not confined they can not be heaped up, but their particles seek a common level. An absolute water level is, of course, possible only when the area covered is so limited that lines joining all the points on the surface with the center of gravity are practically parallel, or their convergence an inappreciable quantity. In large bodies of water, as the ocean, the surface corresponds with the general rotundity of the earth.

The fact of the equal pressure of liquids in all directions, and with the same intensity, is found of great importance in practical mechanics. The strong pressure of a small column of water is finely illustrated by simple experiment with the water bellows, or hydraulic paradox, in which one pound of water in a tube lifts a hundred pounds on the top of the bellows, and the greater the disproportion between the diameter of the tube and that of the top of the bellows, the greater weight it will raise. More than two hundred years ago Pascal showed the enormous pressure exerted by a lofty column of water in a small tube. A strong cask was filled with water, and a small tube forty feet high closely fitted in its head, when a few pints of water poured into it burst the cask, and would have done so if it had been made of the strongest oaken staves and bound with hoops of iron. This is the power used in the hydraulic press, a very simple machine of much value in the industrial arts when there is a demand for great force that can be slowly and steadily applied, as in compressing cloth, oil cake, paper, gunpowder and numerous other things. Its parts are so few that it can be described without a model to represent it. A small, upright cylinder, with a closely fitting piston used as a pump to draw and force the water, and connected at the base by a tube with a much larger cylinder directly under the substance to be pressed, in which there is also a piston to be moved upward, though water tight. The whole is secured in position by powerful frame work. Beneath the piston the water is received. And knowing the principles of hydrostatics we can estimate its power. If the areas of the lower surfaces of the two pistons are to each other as one to four hundred square inches, one pound pressure on the small one will deliver to the lower surface of the large one a pressure equal to four hundred pounds weight. But let the arms of the lever used as the force pump handle be to each other as one to fifty. Then when a force of fifty pounds is applied at the end of the long arm of the lever it will descend with a force of 50×50=2,500, and there will be delivered on the lower surface of the large piston a power to raise it expressed by 50×50×400=1,000,000. Some allowance must be made for friction or other impediments, say one fourth, which is more than enough, and still a man or boy at the end of that pump handle would be able to lift at least three hundred and seventy-five tons.

The sciences we have been considering under the general name of mechanics, which is derived from a Greek word that means to contrive, invent, construct, have much to do with machinery, with the methods of construction, the propelling forces, and the phenomena produced. There were machinists and some simple machines propelled by human or brute force, by weights and springs, by falling or running water, and air in motion before the laws of motion and forces were understood, or the rude mechanic arts began to assume the character of a science. The machines were, of course, imperfect, and lacked efficiency, while many of those now in use seem nearly perfect and adapted to the work expected of them. But notwithstanding the marvelous advance that has been made in the manufacture of machinery, and the intelligent application of mechanical powers, we look for still greater things as possible in the future.

It is well, however, never to forget that whatever the seeming may be, the most perfect machine of human invention does not create force. That is as impossible for man as it is to give life or create matter. All he can do is to collect, concentrate and use, to the best advantage, the forces that exist. He may by skillful appliances gain a great mechanic advantage, and overcome very formidable resistance, but he must be content to do it very slowly; and it has been often said that “what he gains in power he loses in speed.” In many cases this seems a necessity, and he must submit to it. His simplest machine, if the fulcrum is placed very near the weight, gives a man tremendous power gained by his position at the long arm of the machine. But the point at which he applies the force must move much faster and a greater distance than the object against which it is directed. So when a man with a system of pulleys raises to the top of a tower a block of granite that four men might lift from the ground he sacrifices in speed what he gains in the new way of applying the force he has for the purpose.

You visit a large manufacturing establishment or the mechanical department of a great national or international industrial exposition and see a whole acre of machinery of all kinds, shafts, wheels, saws, lathes, and spindles in rapid motion, and, astonished at the complications, inquire for the power that carries the whole. You will possibly find it is in some remote part of the premises, and shut up in the motionless boiler where the steam is said to be generated, which only means that the water heated expands and struggles to escape from its confinement, while man understanding the laws of its action manages to liberate the force under conditions that make it his servant.

The science of numbers and magnitudes, useful in discussing the distances, measurements, and motions of terrestrial bodies, is especially so in its application to astronomy.

Astronomy as a physical science will receive consideration in the next number; here only the mathematical elements are noticed, and they are everywhere manifest. The same general laws control all material bodies, those near to us, and those seen at a distance. So the science of the stars is not now mere theory, but has all the elements of mathematical certainty. When dealing with such vast numbers and magnitudes as engage the astronomer’s attention, with a few known principles or laws, and abundant recorded telescopic observations for the basis of their work, men can calculate even more accurately than they can count or measure. Having once prepared their theorem, aided by the logarithms of Napier[1] that simplify and shorten the more difficult arithmetical calculations, they can readily determine the distance, magnitude and motions of a planet, and know that it is done with sufficient exactness. The distances of the heavenly bodies are generally determined by their parallax, that is the difference between the directions of the bodies as seen from two different points. The inclination of the lines thus drawn is the angle of parallax. By supposing the lines prolonged to the sun, and other lines drawn through the points selected to the center of the earth a quadrangle is formed, all the angles and sides of which are easily found. In measuring very minute parallaxes it may not be possible to determine the exact position of the body as projected on the celestial sphere, but in that case recourse can be had to relative parallax, or the difference between the parallaxes of two bodies lying nearly in the same direction. The best opportunity for this is afforded by the transit of Venus, and on this account great interest is felt in that phenomenon, and extensive preparations are made for taking accurate observations.

The figure, size and density of the celestial bodies have all been calculated with approximate certainty. The orbits, through which they pass in their revolutions, described, and their velocities ascertained.

There is a solar system of which the sun is the center, and in its relation to the planets stationary, though really moving on through infinite space; the orbits through which planets move are not circles, but more or less elliptic, having the sun at one focus of the ellipse.

That planets move in ellipses was announced by Kepler[2] as the first law governing their motions, and a second deduced from this and confirmed by observations, is that they do not move with equal velocity in all parts of their orbits; and that a line drawn from the center of the earth to the center of the sun passes over equal spaces in equal times. He also found as a third law that the squares of the times of the revolutions of the planets are proportional to the cubes of their mean distances from the sun.

Navigation shows how vessels are directed in their course upon the great waters. In proportion as the “paths of the seas” have become open, safe and free for all, they are found paths of knowledge and civilization. The science, small at its beginning, has grown to its present advanced state by slow degrees, helped by contributions from the most opposite sources. Practical but uneducated seamen have doubtless done much, as their ingenuity is often, in emergencies, taxed to supply means of safety and success that are wanting. More has been contributed by scholars, secluded philosophic men whose lives are spent “in communion with the skies,” in observing the motions of the heavenly bodies and studying the laws by which they are regulated. But perhaps the most valuable service has been rendered by another class who combine an experience of the sea with much knowledge of astronomical science, men acquainted with the needs of seamen and qualified to meet them. The introduction of the mariner’s compass early in the fifteenth century was an epoch in the history of navigation, as it made seamen in a measure independent of the sun and stars. This was an incalculable advantage, as soon became apparent to those who adopted the compass as their guide. Of the many improvements and helps in the science of navigation we can only name, as conspicuous, the invention of Mercator’s chart[3] in 1569, Davis’s quadrant[4] about 1600, and Hadley’s quadrant a century later. The character of the instruments and a glance at the Nautical Almanac will show how largely both mathematics and astronomy enter into the science of navigation. Nor is it quite safe to take passage with a shipmaster who has but limited knowledge of either. He should at least thoroughly understand his instruments and be a ready, accurate computer.

Geometry grew out of the practice of surveying, and now embodies many of the laws and principles of the science. There are several distinct systems of surveying, classed according to the purposes contemplated. It is astronomically employed in determining the figure of the earth by the actual measurement of arcs. A fair knowledge of mathematics and trigonometry is required in what are known as coast surveys. Land surveying is of the plainest kind, and employed in finding the contents of areas, or in dividing large tracts into lots of smaller dimensions. The chief difficulty is in getting the exact bearing of the lines and the measure of the angles when the plot is an irregular polygon.

Topographical surveying, beside the measurement of lines and angles, takes note of variations of level, that the draft may properly represent superficial inequalities. Maritime surveying is an important branch, fixing the positions of shoals, rocks and shore-lines. Mine surveying determines the location of works in the mine and decides whether the excavations conform, as required, to lines on the surface. The compass and chain are the surveyor’s most common instruments, but others are used according to the nature of the surveys to be made. Incompetency or carelessness in surveys often occasions serious trouble and loss.

Fortifications for the defense of cities and the protection of soldiers are as ancient as the existence of armies. The former, built in time of peace, of such form and materials as military science and experience suggest, are called “permanent fortifications;” and the temporary works constructed as the exigencies of a campaign require are “field fortifications.” The art and science have been practiced and studied in all ages, and there is now an immense literature on the subject.

As methods of defense must be adjusted to those of attack the earlier permanent fortifications, in the progress of society and after the introduction of artillery, became nearly worthless. High stone walls are a protection while they stand, but, however strong, they can be battered down by heavy siege guns that have less effect when directed against earth works, which seem less formidable. A place thoroughly fortified is seldom taken by a sudden assault. The United States have fortified less than most of the great European nations, but are by no means defenseless. Previous to 1860 there had been expended on our forts more than $30,000,000; and all the exposed positions have been greatly strengthened within the last twenty-five years.

End of Required Reading for February.

THE POET’S VISION.

BY MARY A. LATHBURY.