Page images
PDF
EPUB

beings with sentience can exist under conditions other than his own, and habitually assumes-as, for instance, is assumed in this very review-that a world without air is a dead world, or at all events an empty world; yet there is no proof that the ether, which we know to be everywhere, cannot support life, or that circumstances of which we know nothing may not modify either its intolerable cold or the effect of that cold. In Mars itself there is some potency at work which, to the despair for the moment of terrestrial science, produces warmth where cold ought to reign permanently supreme. It is as certain as any deduction from analogy can be that air in Mars, though it exists, is as rarefied as it would be at the top of a mountain twice as high as Mount Everest, and that consequently the normal and permanent degree of cold ought to be terrible. "The thermal income of Mars is less than half that of the earth, and its theoretical mean temperature is consequently-taking into account its low "albedo," or reflective power per unit of area-thirty degrees Centigrade below freezing." Yet the actual climate of Mars is mild, snow certainly melts rapidly-that is patent to the telescope-vapor certainly rises -that is clear from the spectrumanalysis-water flows, and there are indications, if not proofs, that a sudden vegetation follows the sudden thawing of the snow. What warms the air is unknown, but it is warmed past all question or doubt, and all arguments, therefore, as to the inevitableness of cold in other worlds must be pronounced imperfect, as also are those which show the impossibility of sustaining corporeal life. All we can say with certainty is that if sentient beings with corporeal frames exist in Mars, the relation of the lungs to the body cannot be identical with their relation in man, which, as we are aware of fishes, is not an impossible exercise of the imagination. If conditions fatal to human life on this little globe are compatible in any one other world with corporeal life, no condi

tions can be finally declared to be hopelessly inconsistent with it, the only certainty in the event of such a discovery being that our "necessary" or "inevitable" conditions are not universally either inevitable or necessary. in fact, whatever the direction taken after such a discovery by human thought, it must necessarily be widened—not widened as it might be by a new revelation, but widened-and to attain that end a generation of millionaires or a mountain of gold might worthily and rightfully be expended. What are they worth compared with a great expansion of the human intellect?

It remains to state, though it is hardly needful, that as yet inquiry is in its embryonic stage, and may of course encounter natural barriers which will forever prove impassable. All that we actually know hitherto may be summed up in a very few lines. One planet, Mars, is habitable by corporeal beings but slightly differing from ourselves. There is warmth, there is water, there are seasons in a sequence like those of earth, there is a strong probability, though not yet a certainty, of recurrent vegetation-indicated to the observer by otherwise inexplicable changes of color-and there is some reason to believe in the existence of great public works intended to store and distribute the otherwise insufficient supply of water. The proof of this latter hypothesis, though it convinced Professor Schiaparelli, is as yet wholly insufficient, resting as it does on the assumption that nature never makes perfectly straight lines; but it is sufficient to justify years of patient observation, and the expenditure if needful of millions, in the effort to increase our telescopic powers. The reviewer says: "A new epoch in the investigation of Mars was opened by Signor Schiaparelli's discovery of the 'canals' of Mars during the memorable opposition of 1877. He may be called a miraculous observer. Everything, so far, seen by him with conviction has had only to wait for full ratification. The

views of Mars afforded him by an eight and three-quarters inch, later by an eighteen inch refractor were of unprecedented perfection. They had the exquisite clearness of a line-engraving, and left no room for illusion; the features they included were unmistakably there. His canals have thus gradually triumphed over the incredulity, as to their objective presence, of those whose eyes or whose instruments were incapable of showing them, and have taken rank among the least questionable, although perhaps the very strangest of planetary phenomena." We entirely acknowledge that the artificiality of these lines is at best a grand guess, and that the dreamy stuff written two years ago about the possibility of interstellar communication is most of it pure nonsense; but our contention remains. solid, that observation of Mars, if carried on for years and with improved instruments, may produce results so enlightening that the chance of attaining them is well worth the devotion of millions of treasure and the lives of many thoughtful men.

From The Speaker.

ON THE VOLGA.

The Englishman of to-day can only feebly imagine what a country owes to its rivers. We love our Thames and Mersey, have even a sneaking affection for the smells of the Clyde and the muddy expanses of the Humber; but England can be pictured without any great river system. No one could picture Russia without the Volga. The Volga made Russia, and is even yet the great artery of national life. The physical conditions to which it owed its importance as one of the great routes of primitive trade, and then as the line of conquest of the Slavic princes, still give it the importance of a real seaboard. Even in this day of rapid railway extension it remains the grand road through vast tracts of unbroken country, the road

by which the fertile South sends her corn in exchange for the no less necessary timber of the North. This predominance cannot last. In the economy of the modern state the watercourse, unless it tap a country rich in minerals, is quickly supplanted by the iron road. The empire of the czars only seems to be, but is not, an exception to the history of Western social evolution. At last she is awaking, rapidly and unmistakably, from her long Middle Age. A new South is rising over the coal and iron basins of Donetz and Ekaterinburg; a new North living in cities, laboring in factories, impelled by steam and electricity, fills the old-time Muscovite with foreboding of some terrific and incalculable change. Even the Volga has its crop of factories, and its steamers of the American type; its historic citiesTver, Yaroslav, Kostroma, Nijni Novgorod, Kazan-which rose from the wreckage of the Tartar invasion as it became again the line of national expansion and colonization, find themselves threatened to-day by a foe more insidious, a domination more overwhelming. For the most part, however, the drama of industrial revolution will be worked out on another stage; and for long enough the great river will remain to the student of the old Russia, the Russia of the mujik, an unequalled line of observation.

Stand on the bluffs which slope up from the broad, sandy foreshore to any of the large towns from Rybinsk to Nijni Novgorod. What a sense of space one gets in a typical Russian landscape! The heavens seem to dilate under the bright sunshine; breezes, fresh with the breath of Northern ice, carry a flotilla of bellying clouds along an immense horizon. The stillness and silence, a silence too serene to be oppressive, brooding over the whole prospect, enhance this illusion of vastness. Outside the town, save for an occasional flight of wild-fowl, there is no sign of life. Harvest is over; and in many of the villages old men, women, and children are left alone for the long winter days, while the grown

to the keen wind, or with no better protection than a red cotton shirt, run up and down the gangway bearing huge bales and packages with indescribable verve and earnestness. Νο resting, no shirking in this brute toil. Ah! country of the seared face and virgin heart; what centuries of penury and slave-service have taught this utter devotion to the meanest task! What tragedies, harder than Job's, pass daily within these millions of wooden cabins or under this coldly smiling sky! What unutterable pathos sobs itself out in the low chant of the Volga gangsmen. It is the vesper hymn of the temple of eternal labor, and not less acceptable, one would think, to the good God who knows best, because it goes up to heaven without the mediation of gilded saints and priests to whom gold and saintliness are almost equally foreign. We English know it more familiarly in the pages of Tolstoi, the marvellous artist

men get work in the nearest factory town. Another note of social change! Below, the broad stream takes its way, smooth and strong, dotted here and there with strings of wooden bargesreal floating villages some of themrafts of uncut logs, and now and then a village ferry boat. For miles on one bank extend dark forests of fir, pine, and birch. On the other, the ridge is capped by a succession of hamlets, a dozen wooden huts to each, with a windmill or a church set on every higher point. Behind us lies the town, wooden from end to end with the poor exception of the tower of the firewatchmen-a sort of stone sermon on the plague which they call here the red rooster. The colorist will remark how wonderfully the white walls, green or blue roofs, and blue or gilded cupolas of the churches befit this pure and tranquil scene. A score of little droshkies lie in wait for the invisible wayfarer, the big bundle of dry goods which answers to the cry of "istvos--this gospel of salvation by handchik" slumbering serenely at the tail of his gallant little pony-pride of pov erty-stricken Slavia. An unkempt mujik in inverted sheepskin crosses the dusty cobbled expanse which is the town's main street; and a group of what may or may not be women, on some pilgrimage of labor or perhaps of piety, passes down to the steamboat pier. Down there the human ant-colony is busy loading and unloading for the new factory hard by. A score of laborers, meagre, ragged, bare-chested

work. But Tolstoi had it from a village mason, who again had it with his blood straight from the heart of the Russian earth and Russian history. For this is the great unknown quantity men call Russia-an immeasurable patience, an immeasurable industry, an immeasurable devotion. Some day a prophet will come along and touch it into intelligent self-consciousness; what will happen then who can tell? But it will be good to live in that day of resurrection.

Extraction of gold by the Cyanide Process. According to a report of the South Australian School of Mines, that ready solubility of gold in a weak solution of cyanide of potassium upon which depends the extraction of so much of the metal from poor quartz rocks, is very adversely affected by the presence of traces of sulphides. Fifty cubic centimetres of a 0.2 per cent. solution of cyanide of potassium mixed with a cubic centime tre of an aqueous solution of sulphuretted hydrogen, failed to dissolve a gold leaf which would have been dissolved by the cyanide alone in about three minutes.

Agitation with a small quantity of mercuric oxide removed the sulphur and reThe stored the cyanide to activity. publication of this report will probably go far to prevent some unaccountable failures in working the cyanide process. In the same report it is stated that if iron is in contact with the zinc used to precipitate the gold from the cyanide solution, a local action sets in, and the potassium cyanide (which ordinarily is used over again) is wasted by the formation of a deposit of zinc cyanide; the precipitation of the gold being also incomplete.

DECEMBER 12, 1896.

READINGS FROM AMERICAN MAGAZINES.

From Harper's Magazine. "THE CELLAR AND THE WELL."

I had three memorable meetings with Dr. Holmes not very long before he died: one a year before, and the other two within a few months of the end. The first of these was at luncheon in the summer-house of a friend whose hospitality made it summer the year round, and we all went out to meet him, when he drove up in his open carriage, with the little sunshade in his hand, which he took with him for protection against the heat, and also, a little, I think, for the whim of it. He sat a moment after he arrived, as if to orient himself in respect to each of us. Beside the gifted hostess, there was the most charming of all the American essayists, and the Autocrat seemed at once to find himself

singularly at home with the people who

to the closing couplet. But I will give them in full, because in going to look them up I have found them so lovely, and because I can hear his voice again in every fondly accented syllable:

Who sees unmoved, a ruin at his feet,
The lowliest home where human hearts
have beat?

The hearth-stone, shaded with the bistre
stain,
A century's showery torrents wash in
Its starving orchard where the thistle
vain;

blows,

And mossy trunks still mark the broken

rows;

Its chimney-loving poplar, oftenest seen
Next an old roof, or where a roof has been;
Its knot-grass, plantain,-all the social
weeds,

Man's mute companions following where

he leads;

Its dwarfed pale flowers, that show their straggling heads,

greeted him. There was no interval needed for fanning away the ashes; he tinkled up before he entered the house, and at the table he was as vivid and scintillant as I ever saw him, if indeed Its woodbine creeping where it used to

Sown by the wind from grass-choked garden beds;

climb;

Its roses breathing of the olden time;
All the poor shows the curious idler sees,
As life's thin shadows waste by slow de-

grees,

tell,

well!

I ever saw him as much so. The talk began at once, and we left it mostly to him, after we had made him believe inat there was nothing egotistic in his taking the word, or turning it in illus-Till naught remains, the saddening tale to tration from himself upon universal matters. I spoke among other things of Save last life's wrecks-the cellar and the some humble ruins on the road to Gloucester, which gave the way-side a very aged look; the tumbled foundationstones of poor bits of houses, and "Ah," he said, "the cellar and the well?" He added, to the company generally, "Do you know what I think are the two lines of mine that go as deep as any others, in a certain direction?" and he began to repeat stragglingly certain verses from one of his earlier poems, until he came

[blocks in formation]

The poet's chaunting voice rose with a triumphant swell in the climax, and "There," he said, "isn't it so? The cellar and the well-they can't be thrown down or burnt up; they are the human monuments that last longest, and defy decay." He rejoiced openly in the sympathy that recognized with him the divination of a most pathetic, most signal fact, and

he repeated the last couplet again at our entreaty, glad to be entreated for it. I do not know whether all will agree with him concerning the relative importance of the lines, but I think all must feel the exquisite beauty of the picture to which they give the final touch.

written so intimately with so much dignity, and perhaps none has so endeared himself by saying just the thing for his reader that his reader could not say for himself. He sought the universal through himself in others, and he found to his delight and theirs He said a thousand witty and brilliant that the most universal thing was often, things that day, but his pleasure in this if not always, the most personal thing. gave me the most pleasure, and I recall In my later meetings with him I was the passage distinctly out of the dim- struck more and more by his gentleness. ness that covers the rest. He chose to I believe that men are apt to grow genfigure us younger men, in touching upon tler as they grow older, unless they are the literary circumstance of the past of the curmudgeon type, which rusts and present, as representative of and crusts with age, but with Dr. modern feeling and thinking, and him- Holmes the gentleness was peculiarly self as no longer contemporary. We marked. He seemed to shrink from all knew he did this to be contradicted, and things that could provoke controversy, we protested, affectionately, fervently, or even difference; he waived what with all our hearts and minds; and in- might be a matter of dispute, and rather deed there were none of his generation sought the things that he could agree who had lived more widely into ours. with you upon. In the last talk I had he was not a prophet like Emerson, nor with him he appeared to have no grudge ever a voice crying in the wilderness left, except for the puritanic orthodoxy like Whittier or Lowell. His note was in which he had been bred as a child. heard rather amid the sweet security of This he was not able to forgive, though streets, but it was always for a finer its tradition was interwoven with what and gentler civility. He imagined no was tenderest and dearest in his recolnew rule of life, and no philosophy or lections of childhood. We spoke of theory of life will be known by his puritanism, and I said I sometimes name. He was not constructive; he wondered what could be the mind of a was essentially observant, and in this he man toward life who had not been showed the scientific nature. He made reared in its awful shadow, say an Enhis reader known to himself, first in the glish Churchman, or a Continental little, and then in the larger things. Catholic; and he said he could not From first to last he was a censor, but a imagine, and that he did not believe most winning and delightful censor, such a man could at all enter into our who could make us feel that our faults feelings; puritanism, he seemed to were other people's and who was not think, made an essential and ineradicawont ble difference. I do not believe he had any of that false sentiment which attributes virtue of character to severity of creed, while it owns the creed to be wrong.

To bait his homilies with his brother

worms.

At one period he sat in the seat of the scorner, as far as Reform was concerned, or perhaps reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous; but he seemed to get a new heart with the new mind which came to him when he began to write the Autocrat papers, and the light mocker of former days became the serious and compassionate thinker, to whom most truly nothing that was human was alien. His readers trusted and loved him; few men have even

[blocks in formation]
« PreviousContinue »