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 70 present organisation? And the Arunta belief may a least count for something as evidence of progress. What that evidence amounts to, having pointed it out, I am content for others to value. We shall be on surer ground if we turn to the organisation and institutions of the tribes.

Most of the Australian communities whose organisation is known have been found divided into two exogamous groups. Men, that is, are not allowed to take their wives from the group into which they themselves were born, but from the complementary group. Mr. Howitt, than whom there is no more competent living authority, considers that these two groups were originally totem-clans, or, as he would say, totem-hordes. The right of marriage is still further restricted by an ingenious system of classification, which has the effect, where it is most fully developed, of completely preventing the intermarriage of near kin. I will not try now to explain this system (known as the class-system), but I may say that it offers the most complicated puzzle that savage institutions have ever offered to civilised inquirers; and that is saying a great deal. In what appears to be the oldest form of the organisation, it is accompanied by the reckoning of kinship and descent through the mother only—what we call Mother-right. Moreover, there is reason to believe that individual marriage was formerly unknown: groups of men and women possessed and exercised conjugal rights in common. Unmistakable relics of this condition still exist; but gradually a double transformation has taken place in many of the tribes. Group-marriage has been giving way to individual marriage; and Mother-right has yielded to Father-right, or Agnation, the tracing of descent through the father only. What may be the object of the change from mother-right to father-right, and whether that object was one consciously pursued, are questions I cannot now discuss. One effect, however, of the change is to localise the group or clan which adopts father-right, for it


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 Rh binds together in a common tie the fighting and hunting force of any community in a manner and to an extent generally unknown where mother-right prevails. A man as a rule takes his wife with him; he does not go to live with her. In mother-right this tends to scatter the kin; in father-right it tends to consolidate the kin with the local group. This tendency, it will be easily understood, contributes in no small measure to strengthen the organisation of the local group in its struggle for life. Consequently, it is not surprising to find that most aggressive and progressive communities have, at one stage in their career, been organised on the basis of agnation.

A few years ago Mr. Howitt mapped out these changes among the Australian tribes according to geographical areas as far as he was then able to trace them; and his investigations led to significant results. He found that: "The most backward-standing types of social organisation, having descent through the mother and an archaic communal marriage, exist in the dry and desert country; the more developed Kamilaroi type, having descent through the mother, but a general absence of the Pirauru marriage practice [a relic of communal or group-marriage] is found in the better watered tracts which are the sources of all the great rivers of East Australia; while the most developed types, having individual marriage, and in which in almost all cases descent is counted through the father, are found along the coasts where there is the most plentiful supply of water and most food. In fact, it is thus suggested that the social advance of the Australian aborigines has been connected with, if not mainly due to a more plentiful supply of food in better watered districts."

To the list of tribes given by Mr. Howitt must now be added the Arunta. The districts inhabited by the Arunta and their allied tribes, though dry, are rather to be

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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 72 described as steppe-country than desert. We should, therefore, be prepared to find, if Mr. Howitt's conclusions be correct, that their social arrangements would not belong to quite the most archaic type. As we shall see in a moment, they turn out to be even more advanced than we might expect. But Mr. Howitt goes on to observe: "Also it must be borne in mind that the origin of individual marriage, the change of the line of descent, and the final decay of the old class organisation, are all parts of the same process of social development, and that not one cause only has been at work but a number of causes which have worked together towards that ultimate result which can be seen in the most advanced communities."

In what particulars then has the Arunta organisation advanced? First of all, it has advanced to individual marriage; and that it has advanced to individual marriage from group-marriage the tables of kinship and certain of the tribal ceremonies contain abundant evidence, with which I need not trouble you. Secondly, descent is traced in the male line. This is a startling feature of the organisation of a people which has no proper knowledge of paternity. It should be explained, however, that it only means that a child belongs to the same exogamous moiety of his tribe as the husband of his mother. Assuming the account we have of the beliefs of the Arunta to be correct as far as it goes, the tracing of descent in the male line for the purpose of determining the exogamous group to which a child shall belong involves, and can involve, no real recognition of blood. Yet the tables of kinship show that some relation is held to subsist between father and child. Exactly what that relation is conceived to be we are not in a position


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 Rh at the present moment to say. It is noteworthy that an Arunta man in speaking of his child employs a different term from that employed by a woman in speaking of her child. This is by no means an isolated phenomenon in communities in a similar stage of organisation, and points to an earlier condition of mother-right. A careful philological and sociological comparison of the terms of relationship throughout the Australian continent is one of our most urgent needs.

In a community so small as an Australian tribe usually is, severe limitations are obviously imposed on the choice of a bride by the division into two exogamous groups and the further division into mutual connubial classes. But I am sure I shall not call in vain upon you to pity the sorrows of the Australian youth, when I remind you that his choice was usually more limited still. For to each of the two exogamous groups was assigned a number of totems, and it by no means followed that marriage was permitted into any of the totem-clans composing the opposite exogamous group. On the contrary, it was often limited to one or two. The consequence would be that an eligible bride was uncommonly scarce, even when the aspirant had a sister or a cousin or an aunt ready to be bartered in exchange. To a disconsolate bachelor the relaxation or the abolition of the limitation imposed by the totem might be a measure of relief, none the less welcome though it enfranchised a troop of competitors also.

If the evidences of progress I have enumerated—the legends of the Alcheringa, and the traces of group-marriage and mother-right—be of any value, they enable us to see that the present disregard of the totem in marriage may be a stage in the sloughing of totemism altogether. The only object now fulfilled by the totem-organisation among the Arunta is the performance at intervals of the Intichiuma and Engwura ceremonies. The former are of a magical character, and certainly wear an archaic appearance. Thus much may safely be said, without pronouncing an opinion


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HEY sat about their camp-fire, that little party of Americans retreating southward from Hudson Bay before the on-coming menace of the great cold. Sat there, stolid under the awe of the North, under the uneasiness that the day's trek had laid upon their souls. The three men smoked. The two women huddled close to each other. Fireglow picked their faces from the gloom of night among the dwarf firs. A splashing murmur told of the Albany River's haste to escape from the wilderness, and reach the Bay.

"I don't see what there was in a mere circular print on a rock-ledge to make our guides desert," said Professor Thorburn. His voice was as dry as his whole personality. "Most extraordinary."

"They knew what it was, all right," answered Jandron, geologist of the party. "So do I." He rubbed his cropped mustache. His eyes glinted grayly. I've seen prints like that before. That was on the Labrador. And I've seen things happen, where they were."

"Something surely happened to our guides, before they'd got a mile into the bush," put in the Professor's wife; while Vivian, her sister, gazed into the fire that revealed her as a beauty, not to be spoiled even by a tam and a rough-knit sweater. "Men don't shoot wildly, and scream like that, unless—"

"They're all three dead now, anyhow," put in Jandron. "So they're out of harm's way. While we—well, we're two hundred and fifty wicked miles from the C. P. R. rails."

"Forget it, Jandy!" said Marr, the journalist. "We're just suffering from an attack of nerves, that's all. Give me a fill of 'baccy. Thanks. We'll all be better in the morning. Ho-hum! Now, speaking of spooks and such—"

He launched into an account of how he had once exposed a fraudulent spiritualist, thus proving—to his own satisfaction—that nothing existed beyond the scope of mankind's everyday life. But nobody gave him much heed. And silence 67


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74 on Dr. Frazer's contention that we have in these ceremonies a clue to the original purpose of totemism, namely, to secure for the community, by means of magic, a plentiful supply of necessaries and immunity from the perils to which man is exposed in his struggle with nature. At all events, they are periodical ceremonies having for their object the increase of the totem-animal or plant. "Every local totemic group has its own Intichiuma ceremony," when, save by special invitation, no one else is allowed to be present. Nor in any case can the invitation be extended beyond the tribal totem-group or beyond that moiety of the tribe to which the great majority of the members of the local group belong. Not less important are the Engwura ceremonies. They are part of the rites of initiation into manhood. But here an interesting difference reveals itself. The Engwura are not owned by the local totemic group. "Each totem," we are told, "has its own ceremonies, and each of the 'ceremonies' may be regarded as the property of some special individual who has received it by right of inheritance from its previous owner, such as a father or an elder brother," or who in some cases may have received it direct from the Iruntarinia, or spirits. So among the Kwakiutl the claim to initiation, the dances, the songs, the clan- and family-traditions, and other privileges, are ordinarily obtained through inheritance. Tartarin and his friends were not so jealous of their own songs as a Kwakiutl of these properties. The jealousy of the Arunta is hardly less obvious; for the right of anyone outside the totem to be present at an Engwura ceremony is dependent on the will of the owner, though the invitations are more freely given than to the Intichiuma.


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Rh It will be seen that these two groups of ceremonies, the Intichiuma and the Engwura are of great importance in the life of the tribe. Upon the former depends the supply of food and other necessaries. The latter are the final rites in the admission of youths to manhood. Thus, on the one hand, their continuance is safeguarded; on the other hand, they have a conservative influence: totemism cannot die out while they continue to be performed. On the side of organisation, however, as distinguished from the ceremonial side, the totem-clan is in decay. Nay, it has already ceased to be a clan. The tie of blood is no longer recognised; and where the tie of blood is destroyed, there is no clan in the proper sense of the word. Mr. Howitt's inquiries tend to show that the change in the line of descent, from reckoning exclusively through the mother to reckoning exclusively through the father (which is exactly what has happened among the Arunta) is accompanied by "a profound alteration in the social arrangements," and that the decay and even the disappearance (as among the Chlpara of southern Queensland) of the totemclans are part and parcel of the changes that take place. The course of development in other tribes thus leads us to anticipate what is taking place among the Arunta. But at present the organisation survives as a totem-group, having as its sole bond of union the performance of the ceremonies. On the whole, though the conjecture may be a bold one, it would not surprise me if it should turn out that the organisation is undergoing a slow transformation into something more like the so-called secret societies of the British Columbian tribes.

If this view be correct, then vanishes the difficulty that here is a totemistic people to whom the rule of exogamy does not apply; for it is only a difficulty if we insist on


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Wishart, James


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Wishart, John


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Wishart, Robert


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 76 regarding the Arunta as a people wholly "primitive." The rule remains true that where totemism is in full force, "persons of the same totem may not marry or have sexual intercourse with one another." The disregard of the rule would be an inevitable stage in the decline of the institution.

It may, however, be objected that there is no trace of totemic exogamy among the Arunta; whatever traces there may be of any totemic regulation of marriage point in an opposite direction. These traces consist of little more than frequent references in the legends to men and women of the same totem living in local groups together, whence it is inferred to have been quite normal for a man to have a wife of the same totem as himself. I am not sure that a complete and satisfactory answer can be given to the objection. But the character of the legends must be taken into consideration. I have already referred to them, not as narratives of actual events, but as possible witnesses to the bare fact of progress. They seem in almost all cases expressly framed to account for the present condition of something which to the native mind requires explanation. In other words, they are mainly ætiological. Now, a restriction or taboo of any kind is always a subject requiring explanation. Consequently, the present marriage-restrictions would be felt to require a legend to account for them, and they are accounted for by a legend. The absence of restrictions, on the other hand, requires no explanation. Restrictions, again, which have been abolished or have passed silently away no longer need to be accounted for. Accordingly they are forgotten, and any explanation of them once extant is forgotten also. Hence we are not likely to find references to prohibitions of marriage within the totem-group, or to practices indicating the existence of such prohibitions. If, then, we are asked why the converse


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Wissing, Willem


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Rh case of conjugal relations within the group continues to be prominent in the legends, the answer must be that it is not a veritable memory of what actually took place, but a reflection of the condition of things to which there is a general tendency in the present day, namely, the tendency for the totem-group to coincide with the local group. In the legends this tendency would be emphasised. Where it exists, that is, where the local group consists largely or chiefly of the members of one totem-group, and there is no prohibition against conjugal relations within the totem-group, there conjugal relations within the totem-group will become frequent in proportion to the comparative local strength of the totem-group, unless they be checked by any other restriction. They are now held in check to some extent by the class-regulations. But in the times of which the legends speak there were no class-regulations, for the institution of of these regulations is among the subjects to be explained by the legends themselves.

I am afraid I have committed the unpardonable sin of dulness. It is an easily-besetting sin to one who pries into savage thought. Yet savage thought is the seed-plot of civilised literature and of much of civilised philosophy and civilised religion. To the ordinary man or woman of our time and country, its details are often strange and repulsive; more usually they are, from their remoteness, utterly devoid of interest. Such a person feels like one I knew who was taken to hear a lecture on spiders. "What are spiders to me?" he asked; "I am willing to let them alone, if they will only let me alone." Totemism has not been allowed to let us alone. Until lately it has occupied a large place in the speculations of anthropologists. Now, at a time when it has been a little discredited, I have thought it might be useful to pause and ask whether all the recent discoveries have left it in evil case, whether some of the interpretations placed on facts are quite justified, whether, in fine, the fabric is really as


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Witchell, Edwin


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Withals, John


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Witham, George


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Witham, Robert


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Wither, George


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Withering, William


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Witherington, William Frederick


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 78 much battered as we have been led to fear. If to some of you much of what I have said be trite as well as dull, I would plead that it is labour not always lost to restate the obvious; for the obvious is in danger of being overlooked, because it is obvious. The points I have chosen to touch were not chosen because they were the easiest to deal with, but because they were vital to the definition of the totem as we have understood it. I have not tried to discuss the question whether totemism is as large a factor in social and religious evolution as many have been inclined to think. All I have tried to show is that we need not at present revise our conception of it in the two material points of exogamy and the relation of the totem to the clan, in consequence of anything lately published concerning the tribes of which I have been speaking. But of course we must never forget that no theory of totemism is other than provisional. Totemism itself is but a name for a working hypothesis which may at any time have to be revised or abandoned.

When I began I pointed out that in the natural growth of science it was inevitable that we should shift our base of operations from European tradition to savage tradition. Let me urge further that among savage peoples the Australian aborigines and the Indian tribes of the North-West Coast of America are entitled on national grounds to more than superficial attention. They dwell, the latter chiefly, the former wholly, within the limits of .aur own Empire. They are our own fellow subjects. We are deeply interested in their moral and material condition; we are largely responsible for their welfare. To understand their arts and institutions, their traditions and ideas, is the first requisite for their proper government. Over


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Witherow, Thomas


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Withers, Thomas


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Witherspoon, John


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Withman


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Wivell, Abraham


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Wix, Samuel


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Wodehouse, Robert de


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Wodelarke, Robert


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Wodenote, Theophilus


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Wodhull, Michael


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68 fell upon the little night-encampment in the wilds; a silence that was ominous.

Pale, cold stars watched down from spaces infinitely far beyond man's trivial world.

Next day, stopping for chow on a ledge miles upstream, Jandron discovered another of the prints. He cautiously summoned the other two men. They examined the print, while the women-folk were busy by the fire. A harmless thing the marking seemed; only a ring about four inches in diameter, a kind of cup-shaped depression with a raised center. A sort of glaze coated it, as if the granite had been fused by heat.

Jandron knelt, a well-knit figure in bright mackinaw and canvas leggings, and with a shaking finger explored the smooth curve of the print in the rock. His brows contracted as he studied it.

"We'd better get along out of this as quick as we can," said he in an unnatural voice. "You've got your wife to protect, Thorburn, and I,—well, I've got Vivian. And—"

"You have?" nipped Marr. The light of an evil jealously gleamed in his heavy-lidded look. "What you need is an alienist."

"Really, Jandron," the Professor admonished, "you mustn't let your imagination run away with you."

"I suppose it's imagination that keeps this print cold!" the geologist retorted. His breath made faint, swirling coils of vapor above it.

"Nothing but a pot-hole," judged Thorburn, bending his spare, angular body to examine the print. The Professor's vitality all seemed centered in his big-bulged skull that sheltered a marvellous thinking machine. Now he put his lean hand to the base of his brain, rubbing the back of his head as if it ached. Then, under what seemed some powerful compulsion, he ran his bony finger around the print in the rock.

"By Jove, but it is cold!" he admitted. "And looks as if it had been stamped right out of the stone. Extraordinary!"

"Dissolved out, you mean," corrected the geologist. "By cold."

The journalist laughed mockingly.

"Wait till I write this up!" he sneered. "'Noted Geologist Declares Frigid Ghost Dissolves Granite!'"

Jandron ignored him. He fetched a little water from the river and poured it into the print.

"Ice!" ejaculated the Professor. "Solid ice!"

"Frozen in a second," added Jandron, while Marr frankly stared. "And it'll never melt, either. I tell you, I've seen some of these rings before; and every time, horrible things have happened. Incredible things! Something burned this ring out of the stone—burned it out with the cold interstellar space. Something that can import cold as a permanent quality of matter. Something that can kill matter, and totally remove it."

"Of course that's all sheer poppycock," the journalist tried to laugh, but his brain felt numb.

"This something, this Thing," continued Jandron, "is a Thing that can't be killed by bullets. It's what caught our guides on the barrens, as they ran away—poor fools!"

A shadow fell across the print in the rock. Mrs. Thorburn had come up, was standing there. She had overheard a little of what Jandron had been saying.

"Nonsense!" she tried to exclaim, but she was shivering so she could hardly speak.

That night, after a long afternoon of paddling and portaging—laboring against inhibitions like those in a nightmare—they camped on shelving rocks that slanted to the river.

"After all," said the Professor, when supper was done, "we mustn't get into a panic. I know extraordinary things are reported from the wilderness, and more than one man has come out, raving. But we, by Jove! with our superior brains—we aren't going to let Nature play us any tricks!"

"And of course," added his wife, her arm about Vivian, "everything in the universe is a natural force. There's really no super-natural, at all."

"Admitted," Jandron replied. "But how about things outside the universe?"

"And they call you a scientist?" gibed Marr; but the Professor leaned forward, his brows knit.

"Hm!" he grunted. A little silence fell.

"You don't mean, really," asked Vivian, "that you think there's life and intelligence—Outside?"

Jandron looked at the girl. Her beauty, haloed with ruddy gold from the firelight, was a pain to him as he answered:

"Yes, I do. And dangerous life, too. I know what I've seen, in the North Country. I know what I've seen!"

Silence again, save for the crepitation of the flames, the fall of an ember, the murmur of the current. Darkness narrowed the wilderness to just that circle of flickering light ringed by the forest and the river, brooded over by the pale stars.

"Of course you can't expect a scientific man to take you seriously," commented the Professor. "I know what I've seen! I tell you there's Something entirely outside man's knowledge."

"Poor fellow!" scoffed the journalist; but even as he spoke his hand pressed his forehead.

"There are Things at work," Jandron affirmed, with dogged persistence. He lighted his pipe with a blazing twig. Its flame revealed his face drawn, lined. "Things. Things that reckon with us no more than we do with ants. Less, perhaps."

The flame of the twig died. Night stood closer, watching.

"Suppose there are?" the girl asked. "What's that got to do with these prints in the rock?"

"They," answered Jandran, "are marks left by one of those Things. Footprints, maybe. That Thing is near us, here and now!"

Marr's laugh broke a long stillness.

"And you," he exclaimed, "with an A. M. and a B. S. to write after your name,"

"If you knew more," retorted Jandron, "you'd know a devilish sight less. It's only ignorance that's cock-sure."

"But," dogmatized the Professor, "no scientist of any standing has ever admitted any outside interference with this planet."

"No, and for thousands of years nobody ever admitted that the world was round, either. What I've seen, I know."

"Well, what have you seen?" asked Mrs. Thorburn, shivering.

"You'll excuse me, please, for not going into that just now."


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Wodrow, Robert


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Woffington, Margaret


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 80 unknown; for the practice often continues when the cause has ceased; and concerning superstitious ceremonies it is vain to conjecture; for what reason did not dictate, reason cannot explain." These words were written a hundred and forty years ago. No writer of repute—nay, not the most infallible of journalists—would venture to write them to-day, when science is constantly revealing the source of ancient customs, and when by reason we are slowly, and it may be not without vain conjectures by the way, yet surely, being led to the true significance of many a superstitious ceremony, wild song and uncouth tale. Painfully, indeed, and step by step we are exploring the caverns whence, in the myths of that strange people in the west, mankind emerged through much tribulation into this loftier, happier, and more spacious world; and we are bringing back to light the lowly and long-forgotten beginnings of the race. The coming century has doubtless many surprises in store for us and our children. It will be no surprise for students of anthropology if the progress of discovery enable us by-and-bye to reconstitute the history of humanity to an extent of which Dr. Johnson and all the generations of learned men in the past never so much as dreamed.


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title: Author:Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes


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40 to one end of manifold forces. Proportioned to the importance of the organ to be formed, is the extreme care with which its tuition is provided,—a care pretermitted in no single case. What tedious training, day after day, year after year, never ending, to form the common sense; what continual reproduction of annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of little men; what disputing of prices, what reckonings of interest,—and all to form the Hand of the mind ;—to instruct us that "good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed!"

The same good office is performed by Property and its filial systems of debt and credit. Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate;—debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be foregone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most. Moreover, property, which has been well compared to snow,—"if it fall level to-day, it will be blown into drifts to-morrow,"—is the surface action of internal machinery, like the index on the face of a clock. Whilst now it is the gymnastics of the understanding, it is hiving in the foresight of the spirit, experience in profounder laws.

The whole character and fortune of the


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Rh are affected by the least inequalities in the culture of the understanding; for example, in the perception of differences. Therefore is Space, and therefore Time, that man may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and individual. A bell and a plough have each their use, and neither can do the office of the other. Water is good to drink, coal to burn, wool to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun, nor coal eaten. The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man. What is not good they call the worst, and what is not hateful they call the best.

In like manner, what good heed, nature forms in us! She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoology, (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature's dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure and useful results. How calmly and genially the mind apprehends one after another the laws of physics! What noble emotions dilate the mortal as he enters into the counsels of the creation, and feels by knowledge the privilege to ! His insight refines him. The beauty of nature shines in his


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42 own breast. Man is greater than he can see this, and the universe less, because Time and Space relations vanish as laws are known.

Here again we are impressed and even daunted by the immense Universe to be explored. "What we know, is a point to what we do not know." Open any recent journal of science, and weigh the problems suggested concerning Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge whether the interest of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted.

Passing by many particulars of the discipline of nature, we must not omit to specify two. The exercise of the Will or the lesson of power is taught in every event. From the child's successive possession of his several senses up to the hour when he saith, "Thy will be done!" he is learning the secret, that he can reduce under his will, not only particular events, but great classes, nay the whole series of events, and so conform all facts to his character. Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful. Man is never weary of working it up. He forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and melodious words, and gives them wing as angels of persuasion and command. One after another, his victorious


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Rh thought comes up with and reduces all things, until the world becomes, at last, only a realized will,—the double of the man.

2. Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason and reflect the conscience. All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments. Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. Prophet and priest, David, Isaiah, Jesus, have drawn deeply from this source. This ethical character so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, as to seem the end for which it was made. Whatever private purpose is answered by any member or part, this is its public and universal function, and is never omitted. Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use. When a thing has served an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior service. In God, every end is converted into a new means. Thus the use of commodity,


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44 regarded by itself, is mean and squalid. But it is to the mind an education in the doctrine of Use, namely, that a thing is good only so far as it serves ; that a conspiring of parts and efforts to the production of an end, is essential to any being. The first and gross manifestation of this truth, is our inevitable and hated training in values and wants, in corn and meat.

It has already been illustrated, that every natural process is a version of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every process. All things with which we deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,—it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields. But the sailor, the shepherd, the miner, the merchant, in their several resorts, have each an experience precisely parallel, and leading to the same conclusion: because all organizations are radically alike. Nor can it be doubted that this moral sentiment which thus scents the air, grows in the grain, and impregnates the waters of the world, is caught by man and sinks into his soul. The moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him. Who can


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Rh "You mean," the Professor demanded, dryly, "if the—hm!—this suppositious Thing wants to—?"

"It'll do any infernal thing it takes a fancy to, yes! If it happens to want us—"

"But what could Things like that want of us? Why should They come here, at all?"

"Oh, for various reasons. For inanimate objects, at times, and then again for living beings. They've come here lots of times, I tell you," Jandron asserted with strange irritation, "and got what They wanted, and then gone away to—Somewhere. If one of Them happens to want us, for any reason, It will take us, that's all. If It doesn't want us, It will ignore us, as we'd ignore gorillas in Africa if we were looking for gold. But if it was gorilla-fur we wanted, that would be different for the gorillas, wouldn't it?"

"What in the world," asked Vivian, "could a—well, a Thing from Outside want of us?"

"What do men want, say, of guinea-pigs? Men experiment with 'em, of course. Superior beings use inferior, for their own ends. To assume that man lais [sic] the supreme product of evolution is gross self-conceit. Might not some superior Thing want to experiment with human beings?

"But how?" demanded Marr,

"The human brain is the most highly-organized form of matter known to this planet. Suppose, now—"

"Nonsense!" interrupted the Professor. "All hands to the sleeping-bags, and no more of this. I've got a wretched headache. Let's anchor in Blanket Bay!"

He, and both the women, turned in. Jandron and Marr sat a while longer by the fire. They kept plenty of wood piled on it, too, for an unnatural chill transfixed the night-air. The fire burned strangely blue, with greenish flicks of flame.

At length, after vast acerbities of disagreement, the geologist and the newspaperman sought their sleeping-bags. The fire was a comfort. Not that a fire could avail a pin's weight against a Thing from interstellar spacsspace [sic], but subjectively it was a comfort. The instincts of a million years, centering around protection by fire, cannot be obliterated.

After a time—worn out by a day of nerve-strain and of battling with swift currents, of flight from Something invisible, intangible—they all slept.

The depths of space, star-sprinkled, hung above them with vastness immeasurable, cold beyond all understanding of the human mind.

Jandron woke first, in a red dawn.

He blinked at the fire, as he crawled from his sleeping-bag. The fire was dead; and yet it had not burned out. Much wood remained unconsumed, charred over, as if some gigantic extinguisher had in the night been lowered over it.

"Hmmm!" growled Jandron. He glanced about him, on the ledge. "Prints, too. I might have known!"

He aroused Marr. Despite all the jourelist'sjournalist's [sic] mocking hostility, Jandron felt more in common with this man of his own age than with the Professor, who was close on sixty.

"Look here, now!" said he. "It has been all around here. See? It put out our fire—maybe the fire annoyed It, some way—and It walked round us, everywhere." His gray eyes smouldered. "I guess, by gad, you've got to admit facts, now!"

The journalist could only shiver and stare.

"Lord, what a head I've got on me, this morning!" he chattered. He rubbed his forehead with a shaking hand, and started for the river. Most of his assurance had vanished. He looked badly done up.

"Well, what say?" demanded Jandron. "See these fresh prints?"

"Damn the prints!" retorted Marr, and fell to grumbling some unintelligible thing. He washed unsteadily, and remained crouching at the river's lip, inert, numbed.

Jandron, despite a gnawing at the base of his, brain, carefully examined the ledge. He found prints scattered everywhere, and some even on the river-bottom near the shore. Wherever water had collected in the prints on the rock, it had frozen hard. Each print in the river-bed, too, was white with ice. Ice that the rushing current could not melt.

"Well, by gad!" he exclaimed. He lighted his pipe and tried to think. Horribly afraid—yes, he felt horribly afraid, but determined. Presently, as a little power of concentration came back, he noticed that all the prints were in straight lines, each mark about two feet from the next.

"It was observing us while we slept," said Jandron.

"What nonsense are you talking, eh?" demanded Marr. His dark, heavy face sagged. "Fire, now, and grub!"

He got up and shuffled unsteadily away from the river. Then he stopped with a jerk, staring.

"Look! Look a' that axe!" he gulped, pointing.

Jandron picked up the axe, by the handle, taking good care not to touch the steel. The blade was white-furred with frost. And deep into it, punching out part of the edge, one of the prints was stamped.

"This metal," said he, "is clean gone. It's been absorbed. The Thing doesn't recognize any difference in materials. Water and steel and rock are all the same to It.

"You're crazy!" snarled the journalist. "How could a Thing travel on one leg, hopping along, making marks like that?"

"It could roll, if it was disk-shaped. And—"

A cry from the Professor turned them. Thorburn was stumbling toward them, hands out and tremulous.

"My wife—!" he choked.

Vivian was kneeling beside her sister, frightened, dazed.

"Something's happened!" stammered the Professor. "Here—come here—!"

Mrs. Thorburn was beyond any power of theirs, to help. She was still breathing; but her respirations were stertorous, and a complete paralyslaparalysis [sic] had stricken her. Her eyes, half-open and expressionless, showed pupils startlingly dilated. No resources of the party's drug-kit produced the slightest effect on the woman.

The next half-hour was a confused panic, breaking camp, getting Mrs. Thorburn into a canoe, and leaving that accursed place, with a furious energy of terror that could no longer reason. Up-stream, ever up against the swirl of the current the party fought, driven by horror. With no thought of food or drink, paying no heed to landmarks, lashed forward only by the mad desire to be gone, the three


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Rh this? Who can guess how much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman? how much tranquillity has been reflected to man from the azure sky, over whose unspotted deeps the winds forevermore drive flocks of stormy clouds, and leave no wrinkle or stain? how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes? What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of Health!

Herein is especially apprehended the unity of Nature,—the unity in variety,—which meets us everywhere. All the endless variety of things make an identical impression. Xenophanes complained in his old age, that, look where he would, all things hastened back to Unity. He was weary of seeing the same entity in the tedious variety of forms. The fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.

Not only resemblances exist in things whose analogy is obvious, as when we detect the type of the human hand in; the flipper of the fossil saurus, but also in objects wherein there is great superficial unlikeness. Thus architecture is called "frozen music," by De Stael and Goethe. Vitruvius thought an architect should be a


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User talk:124.122.84.181

Welcome

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HUS is the unspeakable but intelligible and practicable meaning of the world conveyed to man, the immortal pupil, in every object of sense. To this one end of Discipline, all parts of nature conspire.

A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, whether this end be not the Final Cause of the Universe; and whether nature outwardly exists. It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World, that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul? The relations of parts and the end of the whole remaining the same, what is the difference, whether land and sea interact, and worlds revolve and intermingle 4


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Rh which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul. Therefore the soul holds itself off from a too trivial and microscopic study of the universal tablet. It respects the end too much, to immerse itself in the means. It sees something more important in Christianity, than the scandals of ecclesiastical history, or the niceties of criticism; and, very incurious concerning persons or miracles, and not at all disturbed by chasms of historical evidence, it accepts from God the phenomenon, as it finds it, as the pure and awful form of religion in the world. It is not hot and passionate at the appearance of what it calls its own good or bad fortune, at the union or opposition of other persons. No man is its enemy. It accepts whatsoever befalls, as part of its lesson. It is a watcher more than a doer, and it is a doer, only that it may the better watch.


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66 God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him? Yet this may show us what discord is between man and nature, for you cannot freely admire a noble landscape, if laborers are digging in the field hard by. The poet finds something ridiculous in his delight, until he is out of the sight of men.


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N inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things, the highest reason is always the truest. That which seems faintly possible—it is so refined, is often faint and dim because it is deepest seated in the mind among the eternal verities. Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole. The savant becomes unpoetic. But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments. 67


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68 For, the problems to be solved are precisely those which the physiologist and the naturalist omit to state. It is not so pertinent to man to know all the individuals of the animal kingdom, as it is to know whence and whereto is this tyrannizing unity in his constitution, which evermore separates and classifies things, endeavoring to reduce the most diverse to one form. When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity. I cannot greatly honor minuteness in details, so long as there is no hint to explain the relation between things and thoughts; no ray upon the metaphysics of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show the relation of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, architecture, to the mind, and build science upon ideas. In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldly and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect. The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype. Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks that wonderful congruity


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Rh which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something, of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open. A perception of this mystery inspires the muse of George Herbert, the beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century. The following lines are part of his little poem on Man.

"Man is all symmetry,

Full of proportions, one limb to another,

And to all the world besides.

Each part may call the farthest, brother;

For head with foot hath private amity,

And both with moons and tides;

"Nothing hath got so far

But man hath caught and kept it as his prey;

His eyes dismount the highest star;

He is in little all the sphere.

Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they

Find their acquaintance there.

"For us, the winds do blow,

The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow;

Nothing we see, but means our good,

As our delight, or as our treasure;

The whole is either our cupboard of food,

Or cabinet of pleasure.


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70

"The stars have us to bed:

Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws.

Music and light attend our head.

All things unto our flesh are kind,

In their descent and being; to our mind,

In their ascent and cause.

"More servants wait on man

Than he'll take notice of. In every path,

He treads down that which doth befriend him

When sickness makes him pale and wan.

Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath

Another to attend him."

The perception of this class of truths makes the attraction which draws men to science, but the end is lost sight of in attention to the means. In view of this half-sight of science, we accept the sentence of Plato, that, "poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history." Every surmise and vaticination of the mind is entitled to a certain respect, and we learn to prefer imperfect theories, and sentences, which contain glimpses of truth, to digested systems which have no one valuable suggestion. A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit.

I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of man and nature, which a certain poet sang to me; and which, as they have always been in the world, and perhaps