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 Until dawn the two matchless teams held on together, the Scotchman setting the pace.

At dawn they stopped at Dead Man's Hill for a bite to eat and to throw the dogs each his portion. But neither man stopped to sleep. The part of the race was still ahead and every minute counted.

All that day they raced over the frozen trail, the whining of the runners and the tinkle of the bells and the panting of the straining dogs making arduous music in their ears. By twilight they reached Forest. Sixty-four miles from Nome, the goal of the race. Sixty-four long, weary miles, miles that strained men's hearts almost to the breaking point. The last sixty-four miles where nerve and will and superhuman endurance all counted. Only men with souls like gods could stay in at the finish in this race, and only dogs with the brains of dogs and the endurance of wolves could win.

Here the dogs were again fed and the men took a hasty supper and a short rest,

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 and they were off. But now there were only four men in the race, the half-breed, Joe, Hans Johnson, the Scotchman and Henderson. But Hans and the Indian were plainly outclassed, being an hour behind.

If Dick himself was excited Silversheene was equally so. He had drawn a sled to Nome many a time in the past and knew instinctively that the city was their destination. That was where men always went. And for some reason his master wanted to beat the team that they had trailed for the past three days and nights. Silversheene loved his master more than he did his life, and he would haul him into the city ahead of the Scotchman or die in his traces.

He would pull, pull, pull. He would run, run, run. He would make his team mates run. They must not lag. They must fly. The team ahead was flying, and they must fly.

So if the team started to lag Silversheene would lash them into a better pace by his

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

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 eager barking. The dogs all knew he was their leader. They loved him in their brute way because he was faster and stronger than any of them. They would follow his lead or all die in the traces. So it was a perfectly working machine with no friction or discord and that is what counts.

On the teams sped, through the long, dark night and the whining runners, the tinkling bells, and panting dogs made mad music to the ears of the two fighting, straining men. There was a small fortune at the end of the race for the winner. The Scotchman had already won seventy thousand dollars in these races, and Dick vowed in his soul, and swore by old Oregon and the state he loved that the ten thousand should be his this year. So on through the inky night they raced.

Finally the great gun at Fort Davidson boomed out its warning that the racers were coming. All the spectators who wished to see the finish must be in line. But Henderson's Huskies and Scotty Ellis's Baldies

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 were not racing now. They were trotting heavily along. The strained dogs' tongues were out. Their tails drooped, while the men ran as though they could hardly move one leg after the other. But there was one thing which gave Richard hope. He had run ten miles more on the home stretch than had the Scotchman. Truly his youth was telling.

At the sound of the cannon the Scotchman flung his whip into his straining team, and with voice and whip lifted them a hundred feet ahead of Henderson's Huskies. The spectators cheered themselves hoarse as they saw him take the lead, and several teams dashed back to the city to tell the waiting crowd that the Scotchman was going to win. He was running away from the "chechahco" and his Huskies, but they had counted their chickens too soon. For, while the Henderson team was being driven by a greenhorn, yet he was a wonderful "chechahco." But, best of all, he had the greatest lead dog in Alaska urging on his

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 mates. Seeing the gap that the Scotchman had put between them, Dick called to Silversheene.

"Mush, Silversheene! mush!" and the splendid dog put his last ounce of strength into closing up the gap. He strained at his traces and barked at his team mates, and in another mile had closed up the gap and was running side by side with the Scotchman's team. This so infuriated the Baldies that they swerved against the Huskies to engage them in a running fight. But Dick called to Silversheene, and Scotty Ellis to Baldy, and they swung back into their respective places and the miles rushed by.

Finally they reached the last mile and Dick jumped off the sled to rest his team for the final spurt. Here his Marathon training would stand him in good stead. The lighter sled enabled his team again to take the lead which Scotty vainly tried to overcome. He called to his straining dogs and flung the whip into them, but it was useless.

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 Dick and Silversheene had the advantage and they meant to keep it.

Half a mile from the coveted goal Richard again flung himself on the sled. He could scarcely breathe and his eyesight was dim. He had just sense enough left to guide his team.

"Mush! Silversheene! Mush!" he gasped in a wheezy voice and Silversheene cried to his team mates and they opened up another burst of speed.

Gradually they drew away from the Baldies while the waiting crowd cheered itself hoarse.

"The Huskies," they cried, "Henderson's Huskies. They are going to win. The Scotchman is beaten. The Huskies have won."

For with a rush of eager feet and a tinkle of bells old Silversheene had carried his team by the winning flag two hundred feet ahead of the seven-times winner and won the sweepstake for his dear master.

Men shouted and laughed and threw their

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 caps in the air. Women and children laughed and cried while the bands played and the flags and handkerchiefs were waved to the victors.

Finally as Scotty Ellis's Baldies neared the flag a great cheer also went up for them. Scotty was still the king of the Alaskan trail, and the fact remained that he had already won the race seven times.

As his team came to a halt he got stiffly to his feet and limped towards Richard.

"Put it there, you chechahco. You have beaten me and you did it fair. You are a good sport, and a mighty good driver, but it was not you that beat me. It was that lead dog of yours. He is the greatest sled dog in Alaska. I will give you ten thousand dollars for him, just as he stands."

"Thank you, Scotty. "You are the best loser I ever saw. But there isn't gold enough in Alaska to buy Silversheene. He is my brother and we don't sell our brothers. Shake again, Scotty."

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N October following the great race, Richard Henderson, the latest champion dog musher, and Silversheene, the King of all Alaskan sled dogs, took a steamer at St. Michael, bound for the United States. It is safe to say that when they went aboard they were the happiest dog and man in all Alaska. They had spent the summer rather leisurely travelling about and enjoying themselves. Richard had disposed of the other dogs in the famous team at fancy prices, and this money, together with the ten thousand which he had won in the sweepstake, made him feel quite like a capitalist.

But, as his father had prophesied, he had had his fill of Alaska. This land of brutal ity and force where only the heavy fist

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 counted. This country that stripped men's souls of all the finer qualities and left them nothing but blood and iron as a requisite for success.

Yet he and Silversheene had gloried in the life. The battle with the elements and the hard conditions had suited them both. But they were dominant spirits. A good fight was to their liking.

They had matched their strength and courage against the best that Alaska had to offer and had won, so they were well content. It was enough now to take life easy and think with a glow of pleasure of the great race and all the other hard conditions.

When Richard had come north the year before it had been springtime and the air was balmy, but now it was keen and almost cutting.

The gulls, the auks, the white geese and all the other northern birds were winging their way southward, and their numbers were amazing.

The autumn migration of the seals was

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 also taking place, and they were travelling southward, not only in thousands, but in tens and even hundreds of thousands.

They saw seals everywhere in Behring Sea. They were upon the rocks, along shore, swimming in the open sea, disporting themselves upon the very crest of the waves. A mighty countless host of strange migrants. They swam without chart or compass. Many of them going more than ten thousand miles from their home in the St. Paul Islands, but when spring came again they would turn their noses unerringly northward and find the island more easily than the mariner could have done with his chart and compass.

Yes, it was a great country, this northern wilderness, with its wonderful rivers and mountains and forests, but Richard thought that old Oregon would look better to him than ever before, once he saw his native state again.

They had arrived home in time to eat Thanksgiving dinner with the rest of the

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 family, and it was a thanksgiving day all remembered for the rest of their lives. They received Silversheene as one returned from the dead, and petted and praised him until his tail was fairly lame wagging appreciation. Mrs. Henderson told Eleanor that she would break the dog's neck if she hugged him so much, but both dog and girl seemed to think it was all right.

There was but one cloud on the horizon to mar the homecoming of Dick and Silversheene, and this was because of their old enemmy Pedro Garcia. He had become very insolent and untrustworthy of late, and Mr. Henderson had been compelled to discharge him. After he had left town, ten thousand dollars was found missing from the safe. While that very morning Mr. Henderson had received a letter from the greaser in which he threatened to return some night and shoot up the house.

Dick laughed when he read it.

"Let him come," he said. "I have had considerable practice with a .44 since I left

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 Oregon. I would like nothing better than to take a crack at the dirty greaser's head. I guess Silversheene would like to get his teeth into his legs also. Between us we ought to hold the ranch. Don't you folks worry. We will look out for things. He probably thought he could bully you when I was away, but we are ready for him now, so let him come."

When Richard held the letter out for Silversheene to smell it, to the surprise of all but Dick the dog's hackles went up and his eyes became like living coals, while he uttered a low menacing growl. "What did I tell you?" cried Dick excitedly. "Silversheene hasn't forgotten the man who sold him into slavery. We will settle that account with him yet." So Richard scoured the room over the stable for Pedro's old clothes. He finally secured some shoes and pants which still held the man's body scent. These he displayed to Silversheene and told him to eat him up. Even Dick was amazed at the towering rage into which the old

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 fighter flew when he realized that he was to trail his old enemy.

"I guess we have made it plain to him, Father," said Dick. "He knows as well as I do that Pedro is the quarry and we are all out to get him. You need not worry about his stealing a march on this place. That dog won't close an eye at night until he gets him, and when he does come upon him, if there isn't a tree nearby there will be a dead greaser."

"Aren't you afraid Pedro will kill him before you can come to his aid?" inquired Eleanor fearfully.

"No, I guess not," said Dick. "Why, I shot at him myself for nearly a week and did him no harm. He knows guns and revolvers and will look out for himself."

As Richard had prophesied, Silversheene took his responsibility in regard to Pedro Garcia very seriously. He slept by day and at night was on guard. Even his old friend Jerry, the cocker spaniel, could not get him to play much during these days of

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 watching. He had seen too much serious work during his two years in Alaska to play now.

So each night he might be seen walking sedately about the place inspecting all the outbuildings. Or perhaps he would lie in some conspicuous place where he could watch all the approaches to the ranch.

Each night at eleven, when Eleanor went to bed, he would come under her window and sit upon his haunches watching until she came to the window and said good-night to him. Then he would go back to his silent vigil. His family, those he loved, were in danger and he was standing guard like a faithful sentinel.

The dastardly attempt of Pedro to harm those who had been his benefactors came much sooner than Dick had anticipated. In fact, he thought the threatening letter bluff, and hardly expected the greaser to return at all. That was why he had not worried about the Mexican's shooting Silversheene.

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 So he was much astonished one night about a week after his return by a terrific din in the backyard.

First there was an angry snarl from Silversheene, and then two shots fired in quick succession. At the sound of the revolver Dick's heart went sick. He had been too sure that Silversheene could take care of himself. Perhaps the greaser had gotten him at close range. But the shots were immediately followed by a series of blood-curdling yells in a high-keyed, frenzied voice that sounded very much like Pedro's. As these yells continued and they were intermingled with more furious snarls from Silversheene, Dick concluded he was giving a good account of himself. So without waiting to dress he ran downstairs, two steps at a time, and hurried into the yard. This was what had happened in the meantime in the backyard.

Silversheene had been lying on the top of a low brick wall which enclosed the garden at the back of the house. He felt quite

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 sure danger would come from this unprotected quarter. He was lying perfectly motionless, seemingly asleep. But he was very much awake, although his head was between his paws. His eyes were wide open and gazing intently about while his keen nostrils, which were as sharp as the scent of a wolf, were continually testing the air, and his pointed ears were cocked. Presently he lifted his head cautiously, his nostrils extended several times rapidly, and his ears became a little more erect. After perhaps a minute his vigilance was rewarded for he saw a figure, which he thought he recognized, open the gate at the back of the garden and approach the house. A dog with less wisdom and with less hunting instinct might have sprung down from his perch at once and made for the intruder, and thus given him a chance to escape, but not so Silversheene. He had watched and waited too many times by squirrel holes and by beaver dams not to know that it was useless to strike until the quarry was within

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 reach, so he lay still upon the wall and watched. The only change in him was that his eyes turned to two living coals and his whole body went rigid.

When he did spring it would be with the propulsion of steel springs.

The cunning dog waited until Pedro had passed the middle of the garden and was between him and the house, then he sprang from his hiding place like a white flash, and, with a blood-curdling snarl, came in a series of great bounds over rosebushes and across flower beds, straight towards the terrified greaser.

At the first sound Pedro had whirled and faced his adversary and then uttered a yell edged with superstitious terror and this was the frantic thought which raced through his fevered brain:

It was Silversheene—no, it could not be! He had sold him for the Alaskan dog trade two and a half years before. No southland dog who went to Alaska ever came back. They all died in the traces. No, this

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 could not be Silversheene, for he was dead. Then, horror of horrors! This mad creature bounding towards him like a frenzied thing was an apparition. Silversheene was dead, and this was his spirit.

A dog without flesh or bone who was coming to avenge him.

Pedro did not know whether it would do any good to shoot at him or not, but that seemed the only thing to do, besides it was instinctive, so he had raised his revolver hurriedly and fired twice. But the apparition did not even feel his shots. It was the spirit dog of vengeance.

So when Silversheene was almost upon him the greaser had dropped his revolver and gone up the nearest tree like a monkey.

It might be useless to climb a tree to avoid a spirit dog but that also was instinctive.

Yet when he felt Silversheene's teeth in his leg and heard his pants ripped clean from his body he changed his mind about it being a spirit dog of vengeance. It was

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 a sure-enough flesh and blood dog. He had barely missed pulling him out of the tree. So Pedro scrambled up higher and drew his knife, while Silversheene started to climb the tree, unmindful of the gleaming knife and the man's kicks and curses.

This was the fiend who had sold him into captivity, the devil who was going to hurt his dear friends. Well, he had treed him, and he would drag him down and throttle him just as he and his pack of gray wolves had killed a half-breed one dark night on the Alaskan trail.

It was at this point, when Pedro had climbed to fifteen feet and Silversheene was close upon him, and the greaser was slashing at him with his cruel knife, that Dick appeared under the tree with his .44. Mr. Henderson also was soon on the scene, while Eleanor who had nearly fainted at sound of the shots was watching from her window.

Silversheene was so furious that he paid no attention to Dick's calls to come down,

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 but steadily climbed towards his victim.

Dick was finally obliged to climb up and draw him down by main force, while Mr. Henderson covered the greaser with his revolver.

At last the noble dog was safe on the ground, although every hair on his back stood erect and his eyes flashed so that Dick himself was almost afraid of him.

Finally Mr. Henderson went into the house and telephoned for the sheriff while Dick and the dog stood guard.

It was with great satisfaction that they at last saw Pedro handcuffed and taken away to the county jail to await his trial. Silversheene was, of course, the hero of the capture.

The following morning, the Henderson family, including Silversheene, went to the courthouse to the trial of Pedro Garcia.

Richard and Mr. Henderson each took the stand and told at length the greaser's treachery. They told of his selling Silversheene for the Alaskan dog trade, of his

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 theft of the money and the threatening letter, and of his final dramatic capture by the dog. There was a great crowd in the courthouse.

Many of the spectators were as anxious to see the winner of the Alaskan sweepstake as they were to see justice done.

When Pedro finally took the stand in his own defense, which he did with much swagger, Silversheene was so furious that it was all Dick could do to quiet him.

The judge, who was a great lover of dogs and knew a gentleman when he saw one, was much impressed by Silversheene's rage. He finally invited Silversheene to sit with him upon the bench and they sat side by side, judge and dog, and tried the man. But in this case the man was more of a brute than was the dog.

The Mexican was finally bound over to the grand jury, and the Hendersons later had the satisfaction of seeing Pedro given a ten-year job with the Oregon chain gang.

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 So his evil-doings, due to the cleverness of Silversheene, were at an end.

When Silversheene and Dick had first returned to Oregon and the bosom of their family, the dog had been occasionally haunted by the hardships and the horrors of the old days. Sometimes, even while lying under a giant shade tree, with the scent of roses heavy upon the balmy air, he would dream of the Alaskan trail, of the scourge of a long black lash and the killing pace.

Often, while the fragrant breezes fanned the tree tops and the song birds sang of love and beauty, Silversheene would lie on the velvet lawn dreaming of the Alaskan blizzard and his pound of frozen dry fish, or of a cold bed in the frosty snowbank.

Or, perhaps he would be lying by a cheerful open fire with the family all about him when the specters of the old days and ways would steal upon him. Instead of the frescoed room, the walls would fade away to

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 the open fields under the starry sky and his friends would change to cave men and women, with long arms and short legs, with bodies partly covered with hair, and they would all be crouching about the feeble campfire looking fearfully into the darkness at the gray wolf sitting upon his haunches watching them.

Then the man would pick up a firebrand and throw it at the gray prowler and he would slink away into the darkness. Or Silversheene would dream that he again heard his wild brother, the wolf, calling to him in that thin, weird, high-keyed, wolf howl, the call of the wolf to the dog.

At such times he would stir uneasily in his sleep and his legs would twitch, and if they did not awaken him he would at last spring up with an angry bark or a pitiful whimper and look fearfully about him for the gray shape, the shade of the wolf that he had been.

Then he would see all his beloved family and the cheerful room and the bright fire

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 light and look very foolish. At such times he usually went to Dick to be comforted, for he had also seen these things in the stern old days in Alaska, and understood.

But by degrees these bad dreams of the past, and the intuitions of his heritage of wolf ancestry, faded away, until they were almost forgotten.

Thus it was that Silversheene grew old, with the hard, relentless things in his life growing dim and distant and the bright and beautiful things each year becoming brighter and more real. He grew old with his beloved family about him. By the open fire or out on the ranch he was always one of them. There was no chair too good for him, and no seat too comfortable. They all loved him as dog was never loved before and he repayed them in kind. They were his royalty, his Kings and Queens for whom he would gladly have laid down his life. All but Richard, and Dick was his god.

Often he would steal away from the rest of the family to be alone with Dick. They

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 had struggled and suffered together and there was a love between them and an understanding that did not quite attain with the others. As Richard had told Scotty Ellis when he clasped the grizzled musher's hard hand at the end of the great race, they were brothers.

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text: Silversheene

title: Silversheene


text: Silversheene/Introduction

title: Silversheene/Introduction


text: Silversheene/Chapter 1

title: Silversheene/Chapter 1


text: Silversheene/Chapter 2

title: Silversheene/Chapter 2


text: Silversheene/Chapter 3

title: Silversheene/Chapter 3


text: Silversheene/Chapter 4

title: Silversheene/Chapter 4


text: Silversheene/Chapter 5

title: Silversheene/Chapter 5


text: Silversheene/Chapter 6

title: Silversheene/Chapter 6


text: Silversheene/Chapter 7

title: Silversheene/Chapter 7


text: Silversheene/Chapter 8

title: Silversheene/Chapter 8


text: Silversheene/Chapter 9

title: Silversheene/Chapter 9


text: Silversheene/Chapter 10

title: Silversheene/Chapter 10


text: Silversheene/Chapter 11

title: Silversheene/Chapter 11


text: Silversheene/Chapter 12

title: Silversheene/Chapter 12


text: Silversheene/Chapter 13

title: Silversheene/Chapter 13


text: The Battle of the Boyne (chapbook)

title: The Battle of the Boyne (chapbook)


text: The Battle of the Boyne (chapbook)/The Battle of the Boyne


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text: The Battle of the Boyne (chapbook)/Get Up and Bar the Door


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text: The Battle of the Boyne (chapbook)/Carle and the King Come


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Calceolaria.]

Herbs or small shrubs. Leaves opposite or whorled, rarely alternate. Flowers in axillary or terminal few- or many-flowered cymes or panicles, rarely solitary. Calyx inferior or slightly adherent to the base of the ovary, 4-partite; segments valvate. Corolla-tube very short or almost wanting; limb 2-lipped; lips nearly equal and both inflated in the New Zealand species, but in the majority of the American ones the upper lip is small, rounded, and entire, and the lower large, much inflated, and slipper-shaped. Stamens 2, lateral, afiixed near the base of the corolla; anthers 2-celled. Ovary 2-celled; ovules numerous in each cell; style simple; stigma minute. Capsule ovoid-conic, septicidally 2-valved; valves 2-fid. Seeds numerous, striate.

1. C. Sinclairii, ''Hook. Ic. Plant.'' t. 561.—More or less glandular-pubescent in all its parts. Stems slender, erect, laxly branched, 6–18 in. high. Leaves opposite, on slender petioles 1–3 in. long; blade 1–3 in., ovate or elliptic-ovate, obtuse or subacute, obliquely rounded or almost cordate at the base, coarsely crenate-toothed or -lobed, the lobes again toothed, membranous, pubescent on both surfaces, paler below. Panicles terminal, branched, few- or many-flowered; pedicels slender. Flowers small, ¼–⅓ in. diam., white or yellow spotted with purple. Calyx-lobes small, deltoid, acute. Corolla pubescent, divided about ⅓-way down into 2 nearly equal concave lips, the upper lip but slightly smaller. Stamens on very


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Page:Aratus The Phenomena and Diosemeia.pdf/31

Rh 15. . Seven small stars. These seven stars are now in the constellation of the Bull; but on the sphere of Eudoxus they formed a small constellation of themselves, near the left knee: according to Hipparchus, near the left foot of Perseus.

16., or. . This constellation contains the splendid star.

17. A bird with expanded wings, and outstretched neck.

18. . or

19., or. . In this constellation is the bright star Altair [sic].

20. This constellation was called by the ancients the musical sign. The reason given for this title was, that it contained nine stars, the number of the Muses. The cause of the name may be the Dolphin's supposed fondness of music. (Pl. Nat. Hist. 8.)

1. A constellation containing no bright stars. His head is reversed, looking back to the east.

2. The forepart of a Bull, facing to the east. In the left eye is the bright star.


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   and the only admission of error arises from the fact that one member of that Puritan family took a particularly Puritan view of strong drink. That is, he regarded it generally as a poison and sometimes as a medicine, if only a mental medicine. But a poison and a medicine are very closely akin, as the nearest chemist knows; and they are chiefly akin in this; that no one will drink either of them for fun. Moreover, medicine and a poison are also alike in this; that no one will by preference drink either of them in public. And this medical or poisonous view of alcohol is not confined to the one Puritan to whose failure I have referred, it is spread all over the whole of our dying Puritan civilisation. For instance, social reformers have fired a hundred shots against the public-house; but never one against its really shameful feature. The sign of decay is not in the public-house, but in the private bar; or rather the row of five or six private bars, into each of which a respectable dipsomaniac can go in solitude, and by indulging his own half-witted sin violate his own half-witted morality. Nearly all these places are equipped with an atrocious apparatus of ground-glass windows which can be so closed that they practically conceal the face of the


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   buyer from the seller. Words cannot express the abysses of human infamy and hateful shame expressed by that elaborate piece of furniture. Whenever I go into a public-house, which happens fairly often, I always carefully open all these apertures and then leave the place, in every way refreshed.

In other ways also it is necessary to insist not only on the fact of an extreme Protestantism, but on that of the Protestantism of a garrison; a world where that religious force both grew and festered all the more for being at once isolated and protected. All the influences surrounding Bernard Shaw in boyhood were not only Puritan, but such that no non-Puritan force could possibly pierce or counteract. He belonged to that Irish group which, according to Catholicism, has hardened its heart, which, according to Protestantism has hardened its head, but which, as I fancy, has chiefly hardened its hide, lost its sensibility to the contact of the things around it. In reading about his youth, one forgets that it was passed in the island which is still one flame before the altar of St. Peter and St. Patrick. The whole thing might be happening in Wimbledon. He went to the Wesleyan Connexional School. He went to hear Moody


text: Author:Arthur Henry Messiter

title: Author:Arthur Henry Messiter


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484 short filaments; anthers orbicular. Capsule ⅙ in. long.—Raoul, Choix, 43; ''Hook. f. Fl. Nov. Zel. i. 187; Handb. N.Z. Fl. 201; Bot. Mag.'' t. 6597. C. albula and C. Sturmii, Col. in Trans. N.Z. Inst. xxvii. (1895) 391, 392.

2. C. repens, Hook. f. Fl. Nov. Zel. i. 187.—A slender much-branched creeping and rooting pubescent herb, stems 4–12 in. long; branches very slender, prostrate or ascendmg, sparingly leafy. Leaves opposite, on long slender petioles; blade ½–1½ in. long, broadly oblong or ovate to orbicular, coarsely and irregularly doubly toothed or crenate, very thin and membranous, sparingly pubescent on both surfaces. Panicles terminal, small, 1–5-flowered; pedicels almost filiform. Flowers about ¼ in. diam., white spotted with purple. Calyx adherent to the ovary at the base; lobes ovate, acute. Corolla divided about half-way down into two nearly equal concave entire lips, upper lip slightly smaller. Capsule ovoid-conic, membranous.—''Handb. N.Z. Fl.'' 202.

Erect or prostrate herbs. Leaves opposite, entire or toothed. Flowers solitary and axillary, or the upper ones sometimes forming a terminal raceme. Calyx tubular or campanulate, 5-angled, 5-toothed. Corolla tubular at the base, 2-lipped above; upper lip erect or spreading, 2-lobed; lower spreading, 3-lobed; throat usually with two protuberances. Stamens 4, didynamous; anthers all perfect, 2-celled; cells divergent, often confluent at the top. Style slender; stigma of 2 flat laminæ. Capsule loculicidally dehiscent, valves usually splitting away from a central column which bears the placentas. Seeds small, numerous.

M. repens, R. Br. Prodr. 439.—Perfectly glabrous. Stems stout, succulent, creeping and rooting at the joints; branches prostrate or ascending or erect, 1–5 in. long. Leaves opposite, sessile, often stem-clasping, ⅙–¼ in. long, broadly ovate to oblong, obtuse, quite entire, thick and succulent, pitted when dry. Flowers few,


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   and Sankey. "I was," he writes, "wholly unmoved by their eloquence; and felt bound to inform the public that I was, on the whole, an atheist. My letter was solemnly printed in Public Opinion, to the extreme horror of my numerous aunts and uncles." That is the philosophical atmosphere; those are the religious postulates. It could never cross the mind of a man of the Garrison that before becoming an atheist he might stroll into one of the churches of his own country, and learn something of the philosophy that had satisfied Dante and Bossuet, Pascal and Descartes.

In the same way I have to appeal to my theoretic preface at this third point of the drama of Shaw's career. On leaving school he stepped into a secure business position which he held steadily for four years and which he flung away almost in one day. He rushed even recklessly to London; where he was quite unsuccessful and practically starved for six years. If I had mentioned this act on the first page of this book it would have seemed to have either the simplicity of a mere fanatic or else to cover some ugly escapade of youth or some quite criminal looseness of temperament. But Bernard Shaw did not act thus because he was careless, but because he was ferociously


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   careful, careful especially of the one thing needful. What was he thinking about when he threw away his last halfpence and went to a strange place; what was he thinking about when he endured hunger and small-pox in London almost without hope? He was thinking of what he has ever since thought of, the slow but sure surge of the social revolution; you must read into all those bald sentences and empty years what I shall attempt to sketch in the third section. You must read the revolutionary movement of the later nineteenth century, darkened indeed by materialism and made mutable by fear and free thought, but full of awful vistas of an escape from the curse of Adam.

Bernard Shaw happened to be born in an epoch, or rather at the end of an epoch, which was in its way unique in the ages of history. The nineteenth century was not unique in the success or rapidity of its reforms or in their ultimate cessation; but it was unique in the peculiar character of the failure which followed the success. The French Revolution was an enormous act of human realisation; it has altered the terms of every law and the shape of every town in Europe; but it was by no means the only example of a strong and swift


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Mimulus.] axillary and solitary; peduncles stout, usually shorter than the leaves. Calyx broadly funnel-shaped or almost obconic, truncate at the mouth, minutely toothed. Corolla variable in size, ¼–½ in. diam., white with a yellow throat; tube dilated upwards, much longer than the calyx; lobes broad, rounded. Capsule broadly oblong, obtuse, enclosed in the calyx, about ¼ in. long.—''Hook. f. Fl. Nov. Zel. i. 188; Handb. N.Z. Fl. 202; Bot. Mag. t. 5423; Benth. Fl. Austral.'' iv. 482. M. Colensoi, Kirk in Trans. N.Z. Inst. iii. (1871) 179.

Small herbs, often prostrate and creeping. Lower leaves opposite or rosulate, upper ones when present often alternate. Flowers in terminal subsecuud racemes or solitary. Calyx campanulate, 5-partite, not angled. Corolla-tube short; upper lip erect, 2-fid; lower larger, spreading, 3-fid; throat with 2 protuberances. Stamens 4, didynamous; anther-cells divergent, often confluent at the tip. Style slender; stigma 2-lamellate. Capsule loculicidally dehiscent, valves entire. Seeds numerous, very minute, ovoid.

1. M. pumilio, R. Br. Prodr. 439.—A small perennial herb with a creeping underground stem, putting up short leafy branches. Leaves close together, forming an erect tuft, variable in size, ¾–3 in. long including the petiole, obovate-spathulate, obtuse, gradually narrowed into the petiole, membranous, entire or irregularly sinuate-toothed, glabrous or sparingly pilose. Peduncles slender, usually exceeding the leaves, 1–6-flowered; pedicels long, each with a linear-setaceous bract. Calyx narrow-campanulate; lobes narrow, acute. Corolla ¼–½ in. long, white or blueish-white with a yellow centre; tube exceeding the calyx; lobes broad, rounded. Capsule included in the persistent calyx.—''Hook. Ic. Plant. t. 567; Hook. f. Fl. Nov. Zel. i. 189; Handb. N.Z. Fl. 202; Benth. Fl. Austral.'' iv. 484.


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486

2. M. radicans, Cheesem.—Stems creeping and rooting at the joints, often subterranean, putting up short erect leafy branches 1–3 in. high. Leaves close together, spreading, petiolate, ¾–2 in. long including the petiole, obovate or linear-obovate, obtuse, gradually narrowed into the petiole, entire or very obscurely sinuate, pilose or almost glabrous. Peduncle terminal, 1–3-flowered, usually longer than the leaves; pedicels with 1 or 2 linear-subulate bracts. Flowers large, ½–¾ in. long, white with a yellow centre. Calyx campanulate, 5-cleft, not angled, pilose with jointed hairs. Corolla-tube much exceeding the calyx; upper lip erect; lower lip much larger, spreading. Capsule ⅓ in. long, ovoid, enclosed in the persistent calyx.—Mimulus radicans, ''Hook. f. Fl. Nov. Zel. i. 188; Handb. N.Z. Fl.'' 202.

Herbs, glabrous or glandular-pubescent. Leaves opposite, entire or toothed. Flowers axillary and solitary, 2-bracteolate. Calyx deeply 5-partite; segments nearly equal. Corolla-tube cylindric; lips spreading, upper entire or 2-fid, lower 3-fid. Perfect stamens 2, included; anther-cells distinct, parallel; staminodia or barren stamens 2, filiform, sometimes wanting. Style filiform; stigma dilated and deflexed, entire or 2-lamellate. Capsule ovoid, loculicidally or septicidally dehiscent, 4-valved, valves separating from a columnar placentiferous axis. Seeds numerous, small, reticulate.

1. G. peruviana, ''Linn. Sp. Plant.'' 17.—Stems stout, glabrous or slightly viscid-pubescent, laxly branched, ascending or suberect from a decumbent or almost prostrate base, 3–12 in. high. Leaves opposite, sessile, ¼–¾ in. long, ovate or ovate-lanceolate or oblong, dis-


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IOSCORIDES prescribes loadstone to be given with sweetened water, three scruples' weight, to expel gross humours. Galen writes that a like quantity of bloodstone avails. Others relate that loadstone perturbs the mind and makes folk melancholick, and mostly kills. Gartias ab Horto thinks it not deleterious or injurious to health. The natives of East India tell us, he says, that loadstone taken in small doses preserves youth. On which account the aged king, Zeilam, is said to have ordered the pans in which his victuals were cooked to be made of loadstone. The person (says he) to whom this order was given told me so himself. There are many varieties of loadstone produced by differences in the mingling of earths, metals, and juices; hence they are altogether unlike in their virtues and effects, due to propinquities of places and of agnate bodies, and arising from the pits themselves as it were from the matrices being soul. One loadstone is therefore able to purge the stomach, and another to check purging, to cause by its fumes a serious shock to the mind, to produce a gnawing at the vitals, or to bring on a grave relapse; in case of which ills they exhibit gold and emerald, using an abominable imposture for lucre. Pure loadstone may, indeed, be not only harmless, but even able to correct an over-fluid and putrescent state of the bowels and bring them back to a better temperament; of this sort usually are the oriental magnets from China, and the denser ones from Bengal, which are neither misliking nor unpleasant to the actual senses. Plutarch and Claudius Ptolemy, and all the copyists since their time, think that a loadstone smeared with garlick does not allure iron. Hence some suspect that garlick is of avail against any deleterious power of the magnet: thus in philosophy many false and idle conjectures arise from fables and falsehoods. Some physicians have that a loadstone has power to extract the iron of an arrow from the human body. But it is when whole that the loadstone draws, not when pulverized and formless, buried in plasters; for it does not attract by reason of its material, but is rather adapted for the healing of open wounds, by reason of exsiccation, closing up and drying the sore, an effect by which the arrow-heads would rather be retained in the wounds. Thus vainly and preposterously do the sciolists


text: Author:William Hutchins Callcott

title: Author:William Hutchins Callcott


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 look for remedies while ignorant of the true causes of things. The application of a loadstone for all sorts of headaches no more cures them (as some make out) than would an iron helmet or a steel cap. To give it in a draught to dropsical persons is an error of the ancients, or an impudent tale of the copyists, though one kind of ore may be found which, like many more minerals, purges the stomach; but this is due to some defect of that ore and not to any magnetick property. Nicolaus puts a large quantity of loadstone into his divine plaster, just as the Augsburgers do into a black plaster for fresh wounds and stabs; the virtue of which dries them up without smart, so that it proves an efficacious medicament. In like manner also Paracelsus to the same end mingles it in his plaster for stab wounds.

OT foreign to our present purpose will it be to treat briefly also of the medicinal virtue of iron: for it is a prime remedial for some diseases of the human body, and by its virtues, both those that are natural and those acquired by suitable preparation, it works marvellous changes in the human body, so that we may the more surely recognize its nature through its medicinal virtue and through certain manifest experiments. So that even those tyros in medicine who abuse this most famous medicament may learn to prescribe it with better judgment for the healing of the sick, and not, as too often they use it, to their harm. The best iron, Stomoma, or Chalybs, Acies, or Aciarium, is reduced to a fine powder by a file; the powder is steeped in the sharpest vinegar, and dried in the sun, and again soused in vinegar, and dried; afterwards it is washed in spring water or other suitable water, and dried; then for the second time it is pulverized and reduced on porphyry, passed through a very fine sieve, and put back for use. It is given chiefly in cases of laxity and over-humidity of the liver, in enlargement of the spleen, after due evacuations; for which reason it restores young girls when pallid, sickly, and lacking colour, to health and beauty; since it is very siccative, and is astringent without harm. But some who in every internal malady always talk of obstruction


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 of the liver and spleen, think it beneficial in those cases because it removes obstructions, mainly trusting to the opinions of certain Arabians: wherefore they administer it to the dropsical and to those suffering from tumour of the liver or from chronic jaundice, and to persons troubled with hypochondrical melancholia or any stomachic disorder, or add it to electuaries, without doubt to the grievous injury of many of their patients. Fallopius commends it prepared in his own way for tumours of the spleen, but is much mistaken; for loadstone is pre-eminently good for spleens relaxed with humour, and swollen; but it is so far from curing spleens thickened into a tumour that it mightily confirms the malady. For those drugs which are strong siccatives and absorb humour force the viscera when hardened into a tumour more completely into a quasi-stony body. There are some who roast iron in a closed oven with fierce firing, and burn it strongly, until it turns red, and they call this Saffron of Mars; which is a powerful siccative, and more quickly penetrates the intestines. Moreover they order violent exercise, that the drug may enter the viscera while heated and so reach the place affected; wherefore also it is reduced to a very fine flour; otherwise it only sticks in the stomach and in the chyle and does not penetrate to the intestines. As a dry and earthy medicament, then, it is shown by the most certain experiments to be, after proper evacuations, a remedy for diseases arising from humour (when the viscera are charged and overflowing with watery rheum). Prepared steel is a medicament proper for enlarged spleen. Iron waters too are effectual in reducing the spleen, although as a rule iron is of a frigid and astringent efficiency, not a laxative; but it effects this neither by heat nor by cold, but from its own dryness when mixed with a penetrative fluid: it thus disperses the humour, thickens the villi, hardens the tissues, and contracts them when lax; while the inherent heat in the member thus strengthened, being increased in power, dissipates what is left. Whereas if the liver be hardened and weakened by old age or a chronic obstruction, or the spleen be shrivelled and contracted to a schirrus, by which troubles the fleshy parts of the limbs grow flaccid, and water under the skin invades the body, in the case of these conditions the introduction of iron accelerates the fatal end, and considerably increases the malady. Amongst recent writers there are some who in cases of drought of the liver prescribe, as a much lauded and famous remedy, the electuary of iron slag, described by Rhazes in his ninth book ad Almansorem, Chap. 63, or prepared filings of steel; an evil and deadly advice: which if they do not some time understand from our philosophy, at least everyday experience, and the decline and death of their patients, will convince them, even the sluggish and lazy. Whether iron be warm or cold is variously contended by


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 many. By Manardus, Curtius, Fallopius and others, many reasons are adduced on both sides; each settles it according to his own sentiment. Some make it to be cold, saying that iron has the property of refrigerating, because Aristotle in his Meteorologica would put iron in the class of things which grow concreted in cold by emission of the whole of their Heat: Galen, too, says that iron has its consistency from cold; also that it is an earthy and dense body. Further that iron is astringent, also that Chalybeate water quenches thirst: and they adduce the cooling effect of thermal iron waters. Others, however, maintain that it is Warm, because of Hippocrates making out that waters are warm which burst forth from places where iron exists. Galen says that in all metals there is considerable substance, or essence, of fire. Paolo affirms that iron waters are warm. Rhazes will have it that iron is warm and dry in the third degree. The Arabians think that it opens the spleen and liver; wherefore also that iron is warm. Montagnana recommends it in cold affections of the uterus and stomach. Thus do the smatterers cross swords together, and puzzle inquiring minds by their vague conjectures, and wrangle for trifles as for goats' wool, when they philosophize, wrongly allowing and accepting properties: but these matters will appear more plainly by and by when we begin to discuss the causes of things; the clouds being dispersed that have so darkened all Philosophy. Filings, scales, and slag of iron are, as Avicenna makes out, not wanting in deleterious power (haply when they are not well prepared or are taken in larger quantity than is fit), hence they cause violent pain in the bowels, roughness of the mouth and tongue, marasmus, and shrivelling of the limbs. But Avicenna wrongly and old-womanishly makes out that the proper antidote to this iron poison is loadstone to the weight of a drachm taken as a draught in the juice of mercurialis or of Beet; for loadstone is of a twofold nature, usually malefiant and pernicious, nor does it resist iron, since it attracts it; nor when drunk in a draught in the form of powder does it avail to attract or repel, but rather inflicts the same evils.


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Gratiola.] tantly and sometimes obscurely serrate, usually 3-nerved. Flowers in the axils of the leaves; peduncles very short, sometimes almost wanting. Calyx-segments lanceolate, acuminate. Corolla ⅓–½ in. long, white or yellowish-white with a yellow throat, the lips broad, much shorter than the tube. Anthers connivent; cells transverse, parallel. Staminodia filiform, elongated. Capsule ovoid-globose, ⅕ in. long, membranous.—''Benth. Fl. Austral.'' iv. 493. G. sexdentata, ''A. Cunn. Precur. n. 383; Raoul, Choix, 43; Hook. f. Fl. Nov. Zel. i. 189; Handb. N.Z. Fl.'' 203. G. latifolia, ''R. Br. Prodr. 435; Kirk in Trans. N.Z. Inst. iii. (1871) 165. G. glandulifera, Col. in Trans. N.Z. Inst.'' xvii. (1885) 245.

2. G. nana, Benth. in D.C. Prodr. x. 404.—Stems procumbent or creeping, much branched, often matted, 2–8 in. long, usually more or less clothed with jointed glandular hairs, but sometimes almost glabrous; branches ascending at the tips. Leaves sessile or very shortly petiolate, ⅙–¼ in. long, broad or narrow-oblong or obovate, obtuse or subacute, narrowed at the base, obtusely toothed, glabrous or glandular-pilose. Flowers few, on short peduncles. Calyx glandular-pilose; segments often toothed. Corolla ¼–⅓ in. long, white or white with pinkish veins, throat yellow; lobes short, rounded. Anthers connivent; cells transverse, parallel. Staminodia filiform, elongated. Capsule broadly ovoid.—''Handb. N.Z. Fl. 203; Benth. Fl. Austral.'' iv. 493. G. pubescens, ''Hook. f. Fl. Nov. Zel. i. 189 (not of R. Br.)''. G. concinna, Col. in Trans. N.Z. Inst. xix. (1887) 264.

Very small perfectly glabrous creeping and rooting herbs. Leaves opposite or fascicled at the nodes, quite entire. Flowers minute, axillary, solitary, ebracteolate. Calyx campanulate, shortly and obtusely 3–4-lobed. Corolla-tube short; lobes 5, nearly equal. Stamens 2 or 4, affixed to the corolla-tube; filaments filiform; anther-cells diverging at the base, confluent at the top. Ovary perfectly or imperfectly 2-celled; style short, dilated upwards into


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vii|Section.|Across Thibet.

PAGE

Talking Over the First Thibetans 9

Tent at Burben-cho 16

Thibetans at Burben-cho 17

Thibetan Homsbmen 21

A Petty Chief 25

The Namtso 29

Pack-Horses 33

Religious Insignia 34

The Petty Amban 41

Tent op the Envoys from Lhassa 48

Thibetans Loading a Yak 56

The Caravan in Motion 65

The Cooking Tent 70

Chief of the Djashas 71

Thibetan Savages round a Fire 76

The Ta-Lama, the Ta-Amban, and other Chiefs from Lhassa 81

A Thibetan Saluting 85

The Lama Guide 88

An Attendant of the Amban 89

Thibetan Horsemen 91

Monument near the Lama-house of So 92

Thibetan of the Redskin Type 97

Yak Driver with Prayer-mill 100

A Loaded Yak 104

The Lama-house at So 109

A House at So 113

Women at Bata-Soumdo 119

Woman and Child of Sérésumdo 120

House at Sérésumdo 121

Types of Natives at Sérésumdo 125

Mendicant Lamas 129

Scene near Sérésumdo I37

The "Obo" at Tchounoo 145

Prayers Carved on a Stone 151

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Rh pathologist as he was, foresaw, or at any rate had some ideas about, what the histology of the future was to tell? The book itself had its leaves uncut; but could such a mind as that altogether still the passion of the seer? He saw and taught that the knowledge of the skeletal tissues must come first; that this would open up some of the more pronounced changes of morbid anatomy, and their association with certain signs and symptoms of disease. Next, as opportunity developed, would come an inquiry into the minute structure of the normal tissues, and not till then would it be possible to interpret those finer alterations present in disease or gain any appreciable knowledge of the subtleties of function. Such is, indeed, a sequence of events that has actually come about, and with which we are all familiar.

Within the short span of our own lives this is true for our own time, so let me dwell to-day on our earlier pathology, trace it as now, and prospect its future.

And no more pertinent introduction could I take than the history of the growth of our knowledge of malignant tumours.

Years ago, when the scientific world was pulsating under the influence of the master mind of Virchow and of his Cellular Pathology, many of you, my learned colleagues, kindly here to-day, were hard at work studying and describing the features of morbid growths, and trying to obtain an insight from the histological appearances of how, and perhaps why, they came.

And let me here recall en parenthèse what entrancing days those were. I have often heard a doubt expressed about the value of histological

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 shrill quota to the tirade. I remarked here, as elsewhere, how far more copious is the female mind in the material of insult. The audience laughed in high good humour over the man's declamations; but they bridled and cried aloud under the woman's pungent sallies. She picked out the sore points. She had the honour of the village at her mercy. Voices answered her angrily out of the crowd, and received a smarting retort for their trouble. A couple of old ladies beside me, who had duly paid for their seats, waxed very red and indignant, and discoursed to each other audibly about the impudence of these mountebanks; but as soon as the show-woman caught a whisper of this, she was down upon them with a swoop: if mesdames could persuade their neighbours to act with common honesty, the mountebanks, she assured them, would be polite enough: mesdames had probably had their bowl of soup, and perhaps a


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 glass of wine that evening; the mountebanks also had a taste for soup, and did not choose to have their little earnings stolen from them before their eyes. Once, things came as far as a brief personal encounter between the showman and some lads, in which the former went down as readily as one of his own marionettes to a peal of jeering laughter.

I was a good deal astonished at this scene, because I am pretty well acquainted with the ways of French strollers, more or less artistic; and have always found them singularly pleasing. Any stroller must be dear to the right-thinking heart; if it were only as a living protest against offices and the mercantile spirit, and as something to remind us, that life is not by necessity the kind of thing we generally make it. Even a German band, if you see it leaving town in the early morning for a campaign in country places, among trees and meadows, has a romantic


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 flavour for the imagination. There is nobody, under thirty, so dead but his heart will stir a little at sight of a gypsies' camp. "We are not cotton-spinners all;" or, at least, not all through. There is some life in humanity yet and youth will now and again find a brave word to say in dispraise of riches, and throw up a situation to go strolling with a knapsack.

An Englishman has always special facilities for intercourse with French gymnasts; for England is the natural home of gymnasts. This or that fellow, in his tights and spangles, is sure to know a word or two of English, to have drunk English aff-'n-aff, and perhaps performed in an English music-hall. He is a countryman of mine by profession. He leaps, like the Belgian boating men, to the notion that I must be an athlete myself.

But the gymnast is not my favourite; he has little or no tincture of the artist in his compo-


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8 inquiries, in comparison with other forms of investigation, but I venture to affirm that there is no more informing study than minute research into the structure of our organs, and the diseases from which they suffer: it knits together the whole order of creation; it teems with ideas and suggestions about the life-history of cells—the very living bricks, remember, of which we are built up—that to the responsive mind of one struggling with disease is for ever opening up new thoughts, new channels, of inquiry, resource, grip, and hope, that one could hardly have suspected.

What did morbid anatomy and histology—the Cellular Pathology of that day—tell to the Mid-Victorian pathologist?

Well, it was known in those now seemingly far off days that the autogenous propagation of tumours was not uncommon—one could see it almost any day in the post-mortem room, in the peritoneum for example, where a tumour originating in one part of that membrane was transplanted to another part, and was well rooted there. It was well known as the result of experiment that exogenous plantings in similar regard were seldom attended with success. Yet one noted that when sewing—skin-seed, shall I call it?—upon large sores some stimulus was forthcoming, something happened, that clearly set epithelium growing, and it often grew with considerable energy. This would apply to autogenous as well as exogenous grafts, within the common species. I have always doubted if the import of that suggestion of skin-grafting has received quite its just meed of recognition, in its physiological aspect. The observation is full of instruction when we try

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 sition; his soul is small and pedestrian, for the most part, since his profession makes no call upon it, and does not accustom him to high ideas. But if a man is only so much of an actor that he can stumble through a farce, he made free of a new order of thoughts. He has something else to think about beside the money-box. He has a pride of his own, and, what is of far more importance, he has an aim before him that he can never quite attain. He has gone upon a pilgrimage that will last him his life-long, because there is no end to it short of perfection. He will better upon himself a little day by day; or even if he has given up the attempt, he will always remember that once upon a time he had conceived this high ideal, that once upon a time he had fallen in love with a star. Tis better to have loved and lost." Although the moon should have nothing to say to Endymion, although he should settle down with Audrey


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16 chemist in concentrating his attention on gases is apparently overlapping pure physics, which seems to have established that many media supposed to be gaseous are really clouds of solid particles of inconceivable minuteness, borne along by a velocity of which no words can convey any adequate conception. It seems, therefore, not altogether within the realm of fancy to suggest that we may all be working now in some intermediate zone, on the confines between the three kingdoms of living energy—for the colloidal states of inorganic life, the crystalloids of biology, may perhaps allow of this expression of the facts—whose language at present we do not understand, and whose purposes or meanings we are therefore unable to interpret. I wonder.

Animate or inanimate, we are never outside life. Montaigne puts it very quaintly when he says even as nature makes us to see that many dead things have yet certain secret relations to life. How like is Radium in all but death to what I would call the aureole of life. Here seems to be one substance that is always spending yet is never spent; that has power within it to re-gather of its loss, and by its action on the cell may even be said to originate the function of vitality. But does the spirit of life die? It may correlate with other forces of nature; it may, perhaps, transfer itself to other forms of being; may it be that we begin to see that it might transcend the firmament of space.

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 and feed pigs, do you not think he would move with a better grace, and cherish higher thoughts to the end? The louts he meets at church never had a fancy above Audrey's snood; but there is a reminiscence in Endymion's heart that, like a spice, keeps it fresh and haughty.

To be even one of the outskirters of art, leaves a fine stamp on a man's countenance. I remember once dining with a party in the inn at Chateau Landon. Most of them were unmistakable bagmen; others well-to-do peasantry; but there was one young fellow in a blouse, whose face stood out from among the rest surprisingly. It looked more finished; more of the spirit looked out through it; it had a living, expressive air, and you could see that his eyes took things in. My companion and I wondered greatly who and what he could be. It was fair time in Chateau Landon, and when we went along to the booths, we had our question answered; for there


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Rh The physician thinks not of death, but of the tenacity of life, and of how long, save by catastrophe, it takes to bring the machine to a standstill.

Even in the presence of the pathologist death may be disputed. Many years ago there was what may be called a pathological axiom, that the pus cell was a dead cell. Yet it was at the same time evident that, unemployable or even obnoxious as regards its influence in the home, it had colonizing proclivities that were charged with great possibilities in some new world. Dead indeed it might be from one point of view, yet from another one might say of it, as Lord Curzon said once of the British Empire: “It is not a moribund organism, it is yet in its youth, and has in it the vitality of an unexhausted purpose.” Where, indeed, is the demarcation in a degenerate cell—we call it so from a narrow self-centred aspect-between life and death? We know of none, for even desiccated it does but pass into some more minute state of atomic subdivision, that is almost certainly capable of renewed energy, although it may not as yet be within our ken to give an answer to the question With what body does it come?”

All living things are rhythmic. Is it altogether otherwise with matter devoid of life? Within the cadences of that rhythm are the moan of disease, and the pause and silence of death, but the resurgam of life is ever the dominant of the song. And this is well illustrated by our growing appreciation of the activity of the pus cell. Laudable pus, as it used to be called by a seeming contradiction in terms, I suppose on the altruistic plea that some-

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 was our friend busily fiddling for the peasants to caper to. He was a wandering violinist.

A troop of strollers once came to the inn where I was staying, in the department of Seine et Marne. There was a father and mother; two daughters, brazen, blowsy huzzies, who sang and acted, without an idea of how to set about either; and a dark young man, like a tutor, a recalcitrant house-painter, who sang and acted not amiss. The mother was the genius of the party, so far as genius can be spoken of with regard to such a pack of incompetent humbugs; and her husband could not find words to express his admiration for her comic countryman. "You should see my old woman," said he, and nodded his beery countenance. One night, they performed in the stable-yard, with flaring lamps: a wretched exhibition, coldly looked upon by a village audience. Next night, as soon as the lamps were lighted, there came a plump of rain,


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18 where deep down in the worst of criminals there lies a warrant of nobility.

I know not whether now it has still further lost or regained a character, when, reappearing as the leucocyte of to-day, as hungry chickens rush for food, it revels in cannibalistic orgies, or else, as some may prefer, it fulfils the more useful, if more subservient, function of scavenger or destructor to the community. Then as my dreams suggest, reinforced by such omnivorous gatherings, by ionization, shall I say? amalgam, symbiotic fusion, or combine, these lusty atoms disintegrating and ambushing into still more minute particles, rearrange themselves within the confines of the body politic, in which they find themselves, and thus perhaps reincarnate some of the bacilli, cocci, and such other early and unstable existences as nature seems to have in store for us for good and ill, within the cycle of living things. It seems, indeed, quite within the possibilities of the revelations of the future that germ and sperm of a sort are here at work, and that a primer lesson is thus conveyed not alone on the origin of communities but on the very beginnings of existence.

Now all these changes and shiftings of ground suggest to me the existence of a struggle on the part of the pathologist to find out some morbid change for every disease, and it is indeed admitted that we have been ever more and more reducing function to terms of structural change. But now the time has come when it seems worth while to

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Rh insist that all this work upon the foundations, whether it be anatomical, histological, chemical, physical, has, unconsciously perhaps, but none the less inevitably, been ushering in another point of view than that from which we started, and the latest phase of pathology is this more intricate one that concerns itself with the investigation of function. It is now no longer so much the morbid change as the prejudicial function that is to be our quarry, or rather the passage of the one into the other. It is to this point that the researches on cancer have come. As pathologists we are now trying to identify as it comes and passes that coign of clinical medicine—

where a detrimental method of function commences devolution, and sets towards decay.

And what numberless instances are there where, with no accessible morbid changes, this is the problem. Perhaps it may even be said that there is no disease, however much we think we know about it, in which this is not the problem still. Take this latter case first as exemplified by arterial tension (de motu sanguinis). It came first into more precise recognition in clinical medicine as a symptom of what we have known as a form of Bright’s disease—a disease that is of structural change. But before very long it was noticed that it might be present under conditions when the examination after death showed no alterations in the kidney of any moment. So Bright’s disease has been rechristened, and now we hardly hear of it. That postal address is now “not known,” and you must inquire for

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Rh Diabetes shall be my between-maid—in part functional, in part perhaps otherwise. What morbid anatomy have we not sought in this disease, and have not found it? Long indeed have many of us hovered over the alterations we had hoped to find, and have not found them. Changes in the nervous system; in the pancreas; in the liver; in the blood, and so on.

To my mind there is no more splendid and yet pathetic figure in the whole range of medical history than that of Pavy. In early life he set himself to unravel the pathology of diabetes, and in so doing he planted himself with correctly fore-casting eye at the spot that made victory certain—and to my mind he won it by taking the first parallel; but it may be doubted if he himself quite realized that he had done so, and there are those to-day who certainly think that he was defeated. I am not of that opinion. It has always seemed obvious, when one considers how greatly the output of sugar varies even under the most rigid system of dieting, that the excreted sugar could not be a mere output of what has been taken in—that the human kiln has, in fact, the power of in some way coining sugar out of its own constituent elements; and I believe that Pavy’s ultimate credit for a real step onward in this still most intricate disease will rest upon his observation that the proteid molecule is in some way split up, and that a carbohydrate molecule emerges therefrom. Still other parallels need assault. The question has now to be answered, What causes this seemingly inveterate sugar craze

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32 count it indeed happy and appropriate that on such a day, by the filial and devoted generosity of its President, Sir Thomas Barlow, the College should receive its latest and priceless benefaction of eleven recently discovered autograph letters, the very ipsissima scripta of William Harvey.

Alive as these are, with human interest, how the shade of Harvey seems to become re-embodied, and the passage of time to have been, for the moment, stayed!

The Past!

I sometimes think, Sir, that the mundane casket of our Harveian Librarian must be as full of ghosts as a queen bee is of embryonic honey. These walls are alive with memories of benefactors of the College. The dead herein still speak to us, and here is harboured the tomb of many a brilliant but buried thought, awaiting its emancipation that still tarries. And with Pavy, Hughlings Jackson, Wilks, Allchin, and others dear to us, all gathered to the Fathers of Medicine almost since St. Luke’s Day last, what an addition to the supporters of the Arms of this our ancient College, even within the bygone year! And of the less recent Past, who is there entering this Library, and making his obeisance, Sir, to your Presidential Chair, that does not experience the charm of a great contentment, when he remembers that the afterglow of Harvey and his followers still guides him on, to that yet more perfect day of ever-increasing knowledge and less disputable truth?

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Rh of the wind ; the spirit of a voice; the magnetism of a presence or a touch; or that ineffable something in face or form that the painter tries to catch, is there nothing travelling that other way?

To inquire into final causes, it has been said, inasmuch as they are beyond the grasp of the human intellect, is not the pursuit of a scientific mind. Such an opinion, since it would seem to ignore the stimulus, the insight, the instigations of the imagination, must be belated if ever it could have been true. Still, reverencing as I do that attitude of mind, thus expressed not long ago by Mr. Arthur Balfour, that to make the best of the future one must never ignore the past, you may perhaps think that could Harvey have returned to us for this afternoon he might have looked askance at the future to which I have committed the influence of his immortality, and the trend of the set purpose of his life. But methinks he would have absolved me; for where is that knowledgeful man—let him step forward that we may look at him—who has deliberately forsworn that pleasure, I will venture even to say profit, of a mind set free to roam awhile, who does not dream even while he works, whose mood is not rather:

It is thus that past, present, and future hold in one, why the Harveian Orator at this annual festival is bidden by our Master’s expressed will to commemorate the Past. And the Fellows will

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52 old system still occupied the strongholds of the administration, and motives were not wanting to dispose them to an obstinate defence. The habits of a long life were now for the first time broken in upon. They felt as if the world were given to understand that they had spent their strength for nought, and that their learning was altogether vanity. The axe seemed to them to be laid at the root of their reputations. This was more than human nature could bear. Men who had been remarkable for self-restraint completely lost their temper, and those who had been accustomed to give free expression to their feelings showed unusual warmth on this occasion. It was a striking exhibition of character. It is true that the well-earned honours of mature life had rendered several of these distinguished persons independent


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Rh of their early reputation for eastern learning. But this availed nothing. The blow had gone straight to the sources of their habitual feelings, and the effect which followed was highly remarkable.

The motive which led the oriental literary societies to take up the cause of that section of the committee which supported the interests of oriental literature is still more obvious. The object of the Asiatic societies is to investigate the history and antiquities of the East; to lay open to the European world whatever the records of Asia contain to illustrate and aid the progress of mind, of morals, and of natural history. The object of the education committee is to instruct the people of India in sound knowledge and true morality. The Asiatic societies are organs for making known the arts and sciences of Asia to Europe. The education committee is an organ for making known the arts and sciences of Europe to Asia. Yet different, and, to a great extent, incompatible, as these objects are, the education committee had acted, in the main, as if it had been only a subordinate branch of the Bengal Asiatic Society. The same gentleman was long secretary to both. Ancient learning of a kind which every body must admit


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54 to be more fit for an antiquarian society than for a seminary of popular education was profusely patronised. Extensive plans for the publication of Arabic and Sanskrit works, which exceeded the means of any literary association, were executed out of the fund which the British parliament had assigned for enlightening the people of India. The full extent of this union became apparent after it had been dissolved. A limb had been torn from the parent trunk, and the struggle with which the disruption was resisted showed how intimate the connection had been. By vehemently complaining of the suspension of the plans for the encouragement of ancient oriental literature, the literary societies virtually acknowledged the identity of their own operations and of the past operations of the education committee.

Those societies are entitled to the highest respect, and nobody can blame them for endeavouring to obtain support in the prosecution of the laudable objects for which they are associated. The responsible parties were the education committee and the Bengal government. It was for them to consider whether the mode which had been adopted of disbursing the education fund was the one best suited to the accomplishment of


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Rh the object for which that fund had been instituted. If it was, they had properly acquitted themselves of the trust reposed in them, whether their plans happened to coincide with those of the Asiatic Society or not; if it was not, some change was obviously required.

This deeply important subject was long and carefully examined, both by the committee and the government. The decision which was come to has been already related, and it is needless to recount all the arguments which were used on the occasion. The whole question turns upon two points: the first of which is, whether English or Sanskrit and Arabic literature is best calculated for the enlightenment of the people of India; the other, whether, supposing English literature to be best adapted for that purpose, the natives are ready to avail themselves of the advantages which it holds out. When these points are determined the question is settled, and it is capable of being settled in no other way.

The comparative state of science in European and Asiatic countries might be supposed to be too well known to admit of any dispute on the first point; but as our opponents sometimes argue as if it were still a doubtful question whether English or oriental literature is most calculated to advance


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56 the cause of human improvement, I shall appeal to several authorities which will, I think, be listened to with deference on this question.

The pains which the late Bishop took to obtain correct information on every subject which had even a remote bearing on the improvement of India are so well known, that nobody will be surprised at his having left his opinion on this vital point fully on record. The following is extracted from his letter to Sir, dated March 1824, published in the appendix to his journal.

“Government has, however, been very liberal in its grants, both to a society for national education, and in the institution and support of two colleges of Hindu students of riper age, the one at Benares, the other at Calcutta. But I do not think any of these institutions, in the way after which they are at present conducted, likely to do much good. In the elementary schools supported by the former, through a very causeless and ridiculous fear of giving offence to the natives, they have forbidden the use of the Scriptures or any extracts from them, though the moral lessons of the Gospel are read by all Hindus who can get hold of them, without scruple, and with much attention, and though their exclusion is tantamount to excluding all moral instruction from


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I Am a Cat/Chapter 3
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22 on the part of the proteids? This curious reversion, may we call it, to a plant-like metabolism in thus compounding with carbon to the rejection of its natural affinities. Is it nervous inco-ordination, or toxic disorganization, or what? Again we seem to be driven back, cancer-like, upon a loquacity of function, upon some misapplied vital energy behind the scenes with which as yet we cannot grapple.

Who till within quite recent times would have thought that a proteid molecule could give birth to sugar? I trust there is no chemist here to-day. To one of decadent age it seems quite a surprising outcome, yet I understand that biochemistry is already quite familiar with it, and regards it as an everyday occurrence, whether in the physiology of plants or animals. And how this must enlarge one’s horizon of the subtlety of energy that lies within the human kiln! The mills of God, the engines of life, are indeed wonderful examples of an indomitably complete performance. They seem able to enforce within the organic confines of the body that extreme atomic disintegration we are now learning to recognize in the inorganic world, and which seems to suggest that even the stability of the primary elements, as they were wont to be called, is not immutable; that our gold, for instance, at some future geological day may lose its caste, and rank as some inferior substance.

Brought under such conditions of continuous performance, no wonder that our reactions are thus delicate and complete: not that we manufacture something out of nothing, as might seem to be the

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Rh their schools, the Hindu sacred writings having nothing of the kind, and, if they had, being shut up from the majority of the people by the double fence of a dead language, and an actual prohibition to read them, as too holy for common eyes or ears. The defects of the latter will appear when I have told you that the actual state of Hindu and Mussulman literature, mutatis mutandis, very nearly resembles what the literature of Europe was before the time of Galileo, Copernicus, and Bacon. The Mussulmans take their logic from Aristotle, filtered through many successive translations and commentaries, and their metaphysical system is professedly derived from Plato, (‘Filatoun’). The Hindus have systems not very dissimilar from these, though, I am told, of greater length and more intricacy; but the studies in which they spend most of their time are the acquisition of the Sanskrit, and the endless refinements of its grammar, prosody, and poetry. Both have the same natural philosophy, which is also that of Aristotle in zoology and botany, and Ptolemy in astronomy, for which the Hindus have forsaken their more ancient notions of the seven seas, the six earths, and the flat base of Padalon, supported on the back of a tortoise. By the science which they now possess they are some of


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 mocked, others threatned; and some cried after him to return: Now among those that did so, there were two that were resolved to fetch him back by force: The name of the one was Obstinate, and the name of the other Pliable. Now by this time the Man was got a good distance from them; But however they were resolved to pursue him; which they did and in little time they over-took him Then said the Man, Neighbours, Wherefore are you come? They said, To perswade you to go back with us; but he said, That can by no means be: You dwell, said he, in the City of Destruction (the place also where I was born,) I see it to be so; and dying there, sooner or later, you will sink lower then the Grave, into a place that burns with Fire and Brimstone; Be content good Neighbours, and go along with me.

What! said Obstinate, and leave our Friends, and our comforts behind us!

Yes, said Christian, (for that was his name) because that all is not worthy to be compared with a little of that that I am seeking to enjoy,


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Rh outcome of my argument, but that by such means a much greater and a more absolute resolution of ourselves is possible, and our primary elements, being unfettered, renew their potential energy to synthesize again by some of Nature’s seductively elastic methods as now still unknown or but guessed at. There is nothing strange in this. Our environment in diverse ways, known and unknown, is essential to the working of the machine, of course, but I am contending for the possibility of still more direct methods of combination that have become conceivable in these days of progressive physical knowledge. And from this point of view it becomes legitimate perhaps to try and catch a glimpse, behind the veil of present attainment, of the working of the obviously potent influence of climate upon temperament, constitution, and disease. For it is at any rate conceivable that light or electricity split up, energy in one garb or another liberated in this way or that, might make to waver between negative and positive some weak-kneed member of our society of constituents, might loosen the force of attraction that had hitherto kept its atoms bound, might thus katabolize our tissues, and involve new varieties of function, in some hitherto unsuspected way. How, for instance, should plant-life have photo-synthetic metabolism all to itself?

It is to points like these, unsubstantial, even visionary, though they seem, that pathology is now compelled to turn its attention. And in so doing, although there is still much to be done in the post

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Rh But in Oxford we have never been guilty (since a better system was known in the world at large) of teaching the physics of, however we may have paid an excessive attention to his metaphysics and dialectics.

“In Benares, however, I found in the institution supported by Government a professor lecturing on astronomy after the system of and, while one of the most forward boys was at the pains of casting my horoscope; and the majority of the school were toiling at Sanskrit grammar. And yet the day before, in the same holy city, I had visited another college, founded lately by a wealthy Hindu banker, and entrusted by him to the management of the Church Missionary Society, in which, besides a grammatical knowledge of the Hindusthanee language, as well as Persian and Arabic, the senior boys could pass a good examination in English grammar, in,  Scientific Dialogues, the use of the globes, and the principal facts and moral precepts of the Gospel, most of them writing beautifully in the Persian and very tolerably in the English character, and excelling most boys I have met with in the accuracy and readiness of their arithmetic. * * *, a learned native,


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24 mortem room, it is leaving its terra firma, of morbid anatomy (I say it with lingering regret) mapped out so well by the great masters of the past, by Baillie, Bright, Addison, Peacock, Bristowe, Jenner, Wilks, Payne, and many another still happily with us, and to be betaking itself to aviation, a deadly dangerous, albeit, as it must be, an earnest pursuit. Let us remember lest we forget.

And of the many pathological phenomena that I think emphasize this still more, and which I would fain call unequivocally functional, in their origin at any rate, I must yet mention one or two. It used to be said that acute disease is mostly an outburst from a chronic one. This is but very imperfectly true. It is true that many an acute attack of disease is supposed to be de novo, when, as a fact, further investigation proves that it has followed upon pre-existing changes. But then these, in their turn, have come about in so insidious a manner that they have never been capable of recognition as disease at all; and I am here to-day to contend that the future of pathology will be a physiological one, the study of erratic function that has confirmed itself into an habitually baneful one. And I see no reason for limiting the pathology thus engendered to function only. It is surely permissible to hold that morbid function may bring about structural change. There is not an organ of the body of which this is not true, but how largely and obviously so when applied to the brain. A large part of the structural disease of the brain is led up to by slow and insidious misapplications of thought and action that ultimately declare themselves as pronounced disease,

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60 who has sometimes been called, though I fear without reason, a Christian, remonstrated against this system last year in a paper which he sent me to be put into Lord hands, and which, for its good English, good sense, and forcible arguments, is a real curiosity, as coming from an Asiatic. I have not since been in Calcutta, and know not whether any improvement has occurred in consequence; but from the unbounded attachment to Sanskrit literature displayed by some of those who chiefly manage those affairs, I have no great expectation of the kind. Of the value of the acquirements which so much is sacrificed to retain I can only judge from translations, and they certainly do not seem to me worth picking out of the rubbish under which they were sinking. Some of the poetry of the I am told is good, and I think a good deal of the  pretty. But no work has yet been produced which even pretends to be authentic history. No useful discoveries in science are, I believe, so much as expected; and I have no great sympathy with those students who value a worthless tract merely because it calls itself old, or a language which teaches nothing, for the sake of its copiousness and intricacy. If I were to run wild after oriental learning I should certainly follow that of


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Rh the Mussulmans, whose histories seem really very much like those of Europe, and whose poetry, so far as I am yet able to judge, has hardly had justice done to it in the ultra flowery translations which have appeared in the West.”

Bishop Heber’s account of his visit to the Sanskrit college at Benares is strikingly characteristic of the system of public instruction described in the above extract. It presents a picture which would be highly amusing, if the mental and moral darkness which must be the result of such a system were not calculated to excite feelings of the deepest melancholy.

“Suttees are less numerous in Benares than many parts of India, but self-immolation by drowning is very common. Many scores, every year, of pilgrims from all parts of India come hither expressly to end their days and secure their salvation. They purchase two large Kedgeree pots, between which they tie themselves, and when empty these support their weight in the water. Thus equipped, they paddle into the stream, then fill the pots with the water which surrounds them, and thus sink into eternity. Government have sometimes attempted to prevent this practice, but with no other effect than driving the voluntary victims a little further down the river; nor indeed, when a man has come several hundred miles


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62 to die, is it likely that a police officer can prevent him. Instruction seems the only way in which these poor people can be improved, and that, I trust, they will by degrees obtain from us.

“The Vidalaya is a large building divided into two courts, galleried above and below, and full of teachers and scholars, divided into a number of classes, who learn reading, writing, arithmetic, (in the Hindoo manner,) Persian, Hindoo law, and sacred literature, Sanskrit, astronomy according to the Ptolemaic system, and astrology! There are 200 scholars, some of whom of all sorts came to say their lessons to me, though, unhappily, I was myself able to profit by none, except the astronomy, and a little of the Persian. The astronomical lecturer produced a terrestrial globe, divided according to their system, and elevated to the meridian of Benares. Mount Meru he identified with the north pole, and under the southern pole he supposed the tortoise “chukwa” to stand, on which the earth rests. The southern hemisphere he apprehended to be uninhabitable, but on its concave surface, in the interior of the globe, he placed Padalon. He then showed me how the sun went round the earth once in every day, and how, by a different but equally continuous motion, he also visited the signs of the zodiac. The whole system is precisely that of Ptolemy, and


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Rh insanity thus becoming a cancer-like mood of the cells of thought, as well as a mood of growth.

Admittedly there is plenty of gross disease in the brain, but it is as nothing compared with the many forms of misdirected energy that we call insanity. I would venture to call as witness the late Dr. Hughlings Jackson on this point, for, starting out on his work with inferences concerning function based upon definite lesions, he passed onwards to the wider sphere to which I say pathology is turning, where disease is the outcome of misdirected function. There is much of what we call insanity that is of this character: a man of impulse or emotion indulges his weakness—or his strength, is it?—and increases it. Little by little he loses his control, and the balance sinks to mania. A lethargic mind refuses first one fence and then another and another, until all really effortful response fails, and a mere sensori-motor existence is the result. Take also the class of functional paralyses where movement and sensation suddenly disappear : surely thus to close up the book of one’s existence over so large an area must profoundly interfere with the trophic changes in the tissues, and, if protracted enough, lead to stasis, condensation, atrophy, all of them active instigators of structural change. There is much hope in this way of looking at things. How largely the world of the insane exists because it has harboured the fateful presentiment that thus it must be! It were better to spend one’s time in perfecting some mechanism of the will that should damp down such mendacious forecasts.

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Rh the contrast was very striking between the rubbish which these young men were learning in a government establishment and the rudiments of real knowledge which those whom I had visited the day before had acquired, in the very same city, and under circumstances far less favourable. I was informed that it had been frequently proposed to introduce an English and mathematical class, and to teach the Newtonian and Copernican system of astronomy; but that the late superintendent of the establishment was strongly opposed to any innovation, partly on the plea that it would draw the boys off from their Sanskrit studies, and partly lest it should interfere with the religious prejudices of the professors. The first of these arguments is pretty much like what was urged at Oxford (substituting Greek for Sanskrit) against the new examinations, by which, however, Greek has lost nothing. The second is plainly absurd, since the Ptolemaic system, which is now taught, is itself an innovation, and an improvement on the old faith of eight worlds and seven oceans, arranged like a nest of foxesboxes [sic].”

My readers may be surprised to hear that this college had been “completely re-organized ” four


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26 Another instance may well be fatigue, for it nowadays is a disease. What more common than to meet woman or man who is “so tired, always tired.”

We all know the machine that will not spark aright—every movement an effort, even rest a pain. You know too well that there is nothing to be called structural change, and that even rest furnishes you with no remedy. It is clear that what is required is a fresh stock of some form of energy for charging up the machine that we are as yet not able to supply. So far away, and yet perhaps so nigh. These are they who are born out of due time; the day of their like has yet to come. And with fatigue might well be coupled pain, for there are those who almost seem to be born in pain, and of a sort that no remedy seems able to assuage. Says the poet:

but that is extra medicinam. Even more than death pain is our hereditary foe—no quarter given. In olden days hysteria stalked abroad, but to-day a broader view of physiology would teach that pain is no certain indication of any existing morbid anatomy; that its intensity is always subjective, individual, aloof from standardization; and it is evident that in such chronic pain one needs to recreate the nervous elements, or to instil them with some electroid that shall reset the spring of the machinery in motion, and guide it smoothly on its livelong bent. Nor, though it has been the quest of æons, does this seem to be inexorably beyond the knowledge of the future.

Of other groups of disease that might be men-

title: Page:The Harveian oration 1912.djvu/30