The Galaxy, April, 1877 Part 20

Besides these, nothing else of a political character was settled, and the second was determined only by the stern arbitrament of war. The right of search was, however, similarly adjusted, and the treaty of peace effected at Ghent, on December 24, 1814, contains no allusion to the _casus belli_. There are few, if any, who do not rejoice at the accomplishment of the first. The mode of emanc.i.p.ation was not such as we would have chosen; but as the problem baffled the wisdom of all the statesmen of the past, we may as well be grateful that African slavery no longer exists to perplex and confound patriots and Christians. The opinions of the framers of the Const.i.tution were reversed on these three subjects by the war. All else remains intact, or can be put _in statu quo ante bellum_. The Const.i.tution was not abolished. No vital principle of the Federal system, State interposition excepted, was destroyed. "The invasions of the Const.i.tution have resulted from administrative abuses," says Governor Jenkins, "and not from structural changes in the government. This distinction should be kept constantly in view. In a complex government like our own let it never be conceded that a power once usurped is thenceforth a power transferred, nor that a right once suppressed is for that cause a right extinguished, nor that a Const.i.tution a thousand times violated becomes a Const.i.tution abolished." The war did not decide that the powers of the Federal Government were indefinite and unlimited. That is subsequent usurpation. The war did not decide that State lines were to be obliterated, State flags torn down, State governments reduced to munic.i.p.alities, and the elements of civil authority fused into one conglomerate and centralized ma.s.s. Whatever may be the fate or the construction of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, they cannot mean the concentration of all power at Washington and the complete control of the States by the general Government. Our Const.i.tution-makers could not have contemplated political irresponsibility; that the minority should be at the mercy of the majority; and that the residuary ma.s.s of undelegated powers was to be swallowed up by the delegated.

The fathers felt that no body of men could be safely entrusted with unrestrained authority, and they knew that "all restrictions on authority unsustained by an equal antagonist power must for ever prove wholly inefficient in practice." That a mere party majority can rule as they please, is hateful despotism. A majority, unhindered by any rule but their discretion, is anything but free government; for human nature cannot endure unlimited power, and bodies of men are not more discreet in their tyranny than individual tyrants. The distinction between the granting and the executing, the Const.i.tution-making and the law-making power, is to be reaffirmed. The general Government and the States have separate and distinct objects and peculiar interests--"the States, acting separately, representing and protecting the local and peculiar interests, and acting jointly, through one general government, representing and protecting the interests of the whole; and thus perfecting, by an admirable but simple arrangement, the great principle of representation and responsibility, without which no government can be free or just."--_VI. Calhoun_, 66.

We need civil service reform in the United States, States, and cities, reducing the number, increasing the competency and responsibility of office-holders, and abolishing the pestiferous maxim that to the victors in a party contest belong of right the offices of the country.

We need rigid economy, public and private, civic purity, honest administration. To take a citizen's money, except for the just and economical administration of affairs, is governmental robbery. Economy is not possible in Federal, or State, or munic.i.p.al governments, with high taxes. Men will steal. The Bible says that the love of money is the root of all evil. Handling large sums of the people's money is a temptation before which many have yielded. "Economy and accountability are virtues without which free and popular governments cannot long endure."

Closely allied is the good old homely virtue of honesty. Under the temptation of loss of property, men have sought to acc.u.mulate by any methods and get back to ante-secession pecuniary condition. Public corruption has been contagious. Men contract debts loosely and improvidently, and wipe out easily by bankrupt laws. Tweedism has fastened itself upon elections. False registration, ballot-box stuffing, the machinery and appliances for fraud, are not the exclusive practice of one section or party. "Cheating never thrives." It is as true in politics as in religion that there is no good in sin. It is essentially and always evil. Party is a great tyrant at best, and the caucus system enslaves men, and few have the courage to disobey its edicts and encounter its vengeance; but when party to the terrible enginery of a caucus, controlled by the vulgar and the vicious, adds fraud and bribery, woe be to our republic and to our civilization!

An indispensable factor to the product of the South's upbuilding is the introduction of a more healthful public opinion as a positive element in politics. It ought to be an ever-present and a permanent force in elections and the choice of candidates. Any thing like union of church and State, or the prescribing of a Christian profession as a test for office, is not to be thought of, except to resist the first hint at such a possibility; but such opposition should not prevent moral and Christian men from demanding honesty in officials, fairness and openness in party machinery, and common decency and morality in candidates. In cities, political preferment and success in nominating caucuses are largely the result of party machinery by "pot-house politicians," by grog shops and gambling saloons, and by men not conspicuous for virtue or intelligence. So foul is the atmosphere of party politics, to such dishonoring and degrading practices are applicants for office often reduced, so necessary is it to spend money corruptly and to pension the _claqueurs_ and intriguers and wire-pullers, that the virtuous and patriotic are often disgusted, and many Christians are unwilling to peril spiritual health and life by contact with such impurities. The complications and "tr.i.m.m.i.n.g"

expediences often deter the pure and refined from political a.s.sociations, and those who control American politics are quite content to dispense with the presence, except at the ballot-box, of those who ought to give tone and direction to public opinion. Moral character, sobriety, decency, chast.i.ty, are not the elements of availability in the selection of candidates. Drunkards, profligates, connivers at fraud, plotters, are apparently as acceptable for nomination and election as those whose intelligence and virtues should commend them to public approval. Macaulay has a sentiment which ought to be printed on satin and hung up in every house to be memorized by every voter: "The practice of begging for votes is absurd, pernicious, and altogether at variance with the true principles of representative government. The suffrage of an elector ought not to be asked, or to be given, as a personal favor. It is as much for the interests of const.i.tuents to choose well as it can be for the interest of a candidate to be chosen.... A man who surrenders his vote to caresses and supplications forgets his duty as much as if he sold it for a bank-note. I hope to see the day when an Englishman (an American) will think it as great an affront to be courted and fawned upon in his capacity of elector as in his capacity of juryman."

Not lightly fall Beyond recall The written scrolls a breath can float: The crowning fact, The kingliest act Of freedom is the freeman's vote.

The too common practice in all portions of the Union honors vice and gives scant encouragement to n.o.blest qualities. If a community bestow its rewards and honors on inferior or vicious men, higher qualities will decay and perish or seek other fields. If honors and rewards be allotted to the n.o.ble and the good, the demand will develop intelligence and n.o.bility. In America there is lamentably a plentiful lack of great men. Whatever may be the demand, the supply is inadequate. Woe to the country, said Metternich, whose condition and inst.i.tutions no longer produce great men to manage its affairs. The country needs men of earnest convictions and n.o.ble aims, "to whom power is not a possession to be grasped, but a trust to be fulfilled." A nation can have no purer wealth than the stainless honor of its public men. The philosophic Macintosh enunciated almost a maxim when he said, "There can be no scheme or measure as beneficial to the State as the mere existence of men who would not do a base act for any public advantage." By some, politics seems to be regarded as a game in which the sharpest are to win. Federal, State, or munic.i.p.al government can never be safely committed to any party or men as the result of fraud or connivance at fraud.

Since the Federal Government dispensed with a period of probation as preparatory to suffrage, and refused to leave the whole question of suffrage to the States where it properly belongs, the presence of the negroes becomes to the South fearfully ominous of peril. Giving the right to vote to the ignorant and incapable is only a part of the evils a.s.sociated with the inhabitancy of such a mult.i.tude of citizens of a different and inferior race. Such is the climate of the South, the fertility of soil, the ease of bare subsistence, that little labor and but scant clothing and shelter are needed by the negroes, with their thriftlessness, and without taste or desire for any large measure of artificial comforts, and with few incentives to patient industry. Their presence will prevent any early or large immigration of Europeans. The removal of the negroes is an obvious suggestion, but the policy pursued toward the Indians, undesirable, as coinhabitants, but as capable as negroes of free government, seems impracticable from want of territory for colonization and because of the large number of the negroes. This displacement at present may be impossible, and would certainly be tedious and expensive. Close contact of the two races becomes a necessity of this cooccupancy of territory. The Southern white people should cultivate kindliest feelings and make wise and strenuous efforts for the improvement of their former slaves. Already the whites bear the expense of educating the blacks. In the last six years the expenditure in Virginia for "colored schools" has amounted to near $1,668,000, and it would be safe to say that one and a half millions of this sum were paid by white citizens. So also we take care of their blind, and deaf, and dumb, and idiotic, pay for the trial and safe-keeping of their criminals, and bear the burdens of government. Impartial justice should be administered without reference to race, color, or previous condition; freedom and the right to hold and inherit property should be guaranteed; protection against all violence or wrong should be afforded; but there should be formed no party nor other affiliations which may tend to efface the line of social separation, or ignore the predestined distinction of color. The attempt in Africa to Europeanize the negro and ignore his idiosyncrasies as a race has utterly failed.

The races here should be kept from abnormal admixture. Rigid laws, springing from and enforced by an inflexible public opinion, should prevent intermarriage. Miscegenation will degrade the Caucasian. Red and white deteriorate, _a fortiori_, white and black. The fusion would lower the white race in the scale of civilization, of moral and mental power, and would reproduce the ignorance, superst.i.tion, priestcraft, and chronic revolutions of Mexico with her mongrel population.

A felt want of the South is the restoration of old-fashioned love of country. A sore need is to feel in our souls, as a pa.s.sion, that this is _our_ country; that _we_ have part and lot in it; and to be deeply interested in its welfare and perpetuity. To keep alive animosities is unchristian. Brooke found it impossible to frame an indictment against a whole people. It ought to be equally hard to involve a whole party, or geographical section, in sweeping accusations of injustice, and tyranny, and fraud. Strong as is the provocation at times to bitterness and hatred, the South should not cherish resentment, but rather seek that which makes for peace and reconciliation. It is better, as far as possible, to obliterate unpleasant memories, to practise toleration and forgiveness, to cultivate a genuine patriotism, ardent love for this ancient birth land of the free. It is easy by cheap rhetoric to open wounds afresh and inflame hostility; but every true son and daughter of the South should strive not to transmit a legacy of hate, nor make our land a Poland or an Ireland. The n.o.ble ambition ought rather to be to lift up the South and the United States to the level of its privileges, and in the future to harmonize the ideal and the actual. The South needs the development of her material resources, the diversification of industry, the construction of permanent highways, the power of machinery in its manifold applications, sounder notions of labor, rigid economy and responsibility in all offices. The whole country should encourage universal education in universities, colleges, academies, and public schools; elevate the tone of a free press; preserve an able and independent judiciary; insist upon juster and more enlarged ideas of official duty; maintain the principles of const.i.tutional liberty and absolute freedom of religion, and above all, a spirit of subordination to the divine law, and a reverent acknowledgment of Him in whose hands are the destinies of nations.

J. L. M. CURRY.

DRIFT-WOOD.

TALK ABOUT NOVELS.

IF the St. Louis preacher who lately tilted against novels chose judiciously his points of attack, he presumably won a victory. His own Sunday-school library is very likely filled with wishy-washy fiction for bright young minds that might be harvesting works worth remembering, whether of romance or history. The prudent Quakers of Germantown rejoice in a free library without a novel, and a librarian who never read one. Indiscriminate novel reading is as sorry a tipple as addiction to newspapers, which also, in fact, are largely works of the imagination. Besides, the moral of even a goody-good story may be ingeniously twisted by perverse readers. The other day a lad was indicted in England for breaking into the Rev. Mr. Sherratt's schoolroom, where he stole some books and cake, trudging off with them in a wheelbarrow at midnight. He was an old pupil, the son of respectable parents; in his pocket was a book ent.i.tled "Industry Without Honesty," and his ambition was to become a _Chevalier d'Industrie_ of the sort he had been reading about. It is said that Dumas's story, "Monsieur Fromentin," so spread the rage for lottery gambling that the author in great grief bought up and burned every copy he could lay hands on. For generations English youth have turned footpads or thieves, in emulation of Sir Richard Turpin, Lord John Sheppard, and other knights of the road whose careers are set forth in the shining pages of biographical romance. French youngsters have a like exemplar in Louis Cartouche. Two San Francisco lads are now in jail for trying to rob a stagecoach, in Claude Duval style--luckless little victims, knocked down by the pa.s.sengers in a way not recorded in the novels that had ruined them. Lads are for ever running away to sea in imitation of some Jack Halyard or Ben the Bo's'n; and surely we know that urchins of all ages and sizes are picked up on their way west to "fight Injuns," thanks to their dogs'-eared dime novels narrating the prowess of Buffalo Bills and Texas Jacks. Boyish sympathy goes out toward the Paul Cliffords, the Arams of romance. I remember, as if it were of yesterday, the sad fate of Red Rover, and how the overwrought little reader, when he came to the hero's death, put by the book that he could not finish, and walked about in the twilight of a Sat.u.r.day whose hours had slipped unnoticed away, inconsolable with sympathy and grief.

But the preacher need not rest his case on "Mike Martin," or "Rinaldo Rinaldini," or "The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main," or any of the predatory heroes embalmed in story for the improvement of youth, since he has also the field of poisonous French romance to complain of, with its imitations in our tongue. In short, he can indict in a lump the bad books of fiction, and against the good he may charge that they exhaust our tears and pa.s.sion on imaginary distresses.

Still, nothing would then have been said of novels which could not be said in a degree of the newspapers, the drama, the law, the pulpit itself. We must not judge them by their worst fruits. "Pamela" was praised from the pulpits of its day, although, to be sure, it would hardly now be given to young women. I well remember, when prowling about the homestead bookcase, coming upon Rowland Hill's "Village Dialogues." Their characters were fict.i.tious, the distresses imaginary; still I presume the St. Louis preacher would not object to "Socinianism Unmasked," the "Evils of Seduction," and the "Awful Death of Alderman Greedy." Everybody sees how fiction is a weapon of philanthropy. Christ himself taught by parables. Clergymen resort to romance to achieve what the sermon cannot do, and men of science to achieve what the essay cannot do. Religious newspapers publish serial novels. The anti-slavery, temperance, prison reform, and poor law agitations owe immeasurably to novels. Daniel Webster said of d.i.c.kens that he had done more to ameliorate the condition of the British poor than all the statesmen that ever sat in Parliament. And this present wonderful movement of the Jews to recover Palestine--what does it not owe to a novel?

A n.o.ble influence, too, comes from some novels that do not aim to be _doctrinaire_ or proselyting. A story of Thackeray is a tonic to the scorn of base action; a story of Charles Kingsley is a trumpet call to Christian duty; a story of George Eliot is an inspiration to high thought and honorable living. Some of her sisterhood are probably capable of uneasily disliking George Eliot because she has a depth of intelligence quite beyond their plummet, which the world admires; but I should think that most women would be proud of the strength and vast influence of one who, in succeeding to the royal line of feminine novelists, has carried its triumphs far beyond anything achieved by Miss Burney, Jane Austin, Miss Porter, Miss Martineau, Charlotte Bronte, and Georges Sand.

We lay aside some authors with a sense of fulness that will not let the attention be immediately distracted to other persons and things. The greatest books put the mind at once into a fruitful state, as if it had received seed of instantly bearing power. Less great books may still give us the desire to imitate their heroes or follow their maxims. Only dead books neither beget new thoughts nor incite by examples. As the characters of children are partly moulded from their surroundings, so the imaginary friends of fiction are mental a.s.sociates for good or ill.

We take heart and hope from the novelist's scenes, or are so wrought upon by his personages that these phantoms move us more than most real men and women. If all we know of Adam Bede is what we read of him, pray what more do we know of Czar Peter? Instead of lamenting the fascination of the story-wright, let us rather plead for its n.o.ble use, saying of him, as a great and generous brother writer said of d.i.c.kens: "What a place it is to hold in the affections of men! What an awful responsibility hanging over a writer! What man holding such a place, and knowing that his words go forth to vast congregations of mankind--to grown folks, to their children, and perhaps to their children's children--but must think of his calling with a solemn and humble heart! May love and truth guide such a man always!"

Most of us have known an era in life when we looked down on novels like Miss Muloch's, with their gentle refrain: "He was so handsome, how could she help loving him? She was so beautiful, what could he do but adore her?" Better worth reading were stories of frontier trails, knightly tourneys, chases of smuggler and corvette--those stimulating feasts that we swallowed rather too hastily for health, and which, I grant the St. Louis preacher, formed so rich a mixture that nightmare sometimes followed a _pate_ of adventure and murder on which we had too bountifully supped.

Yet who would willingly forget the terror of that moment when Crusoe discovers the footprints on the lonely sh.o.r.e? I fancy many a lad has borne testimony to the genius of De Foe by popping his curly pate beneath the bed clothes at that awful juncture, in as great fright as if he himself had just seen the track in the sand. Or perhaps, living by the seaside, he has rowed his wherry to some neighboring bunch of rocks, to take possession of it, Crusoe fashion, bribing some less enthusiastic companion to act the role of Friday, until, unworthy of his faithful prototype, the extemporized Friday sulks and throws off his allegiance. I lately heard that Crusoe's isle was now tenanted by industrious German colonists, who had planted and stocked it, not like Robinson, but under all agricultural advantages, and that Juan Fernandez was a regular entrepot for whale ships. Think of it! Yankee tars revictual where the lonely mariner saw cannibals feasting! But it is only Selkirk's domain that is thus invaded; Crusoe's right there is none to dispute; safe in the keeping of genius, his monarchy can no more be annexed by filibuster or colonist than the magic isle of Prospero.

Musing on popular novels, one is struck by the changes of fashion in fiction. Who now reads "Clarissa," which Dr. Johnson p.r.o.nounced the first book of the world for knowledge of the human heart; which D'Alembert styled unapproachably greater than any romance ever written in any language; for which Diderot predicted an immortality as ill.u.s.trious as that of Homer? Who reads "Cecilia," which Burke sat up all night to read? The romances over which our great grandmothers simpered and sighed are to our age intolerable bores. Reade, not Richardson, is the man for our money; Miss Braddon, not Miss Burney, is the rage at the circulating libraries. Whither are gone those stories that a few years ago could not be printed fast enough--"The Lamplighter," "Hot Corn," and the rest of that brood? They are hidden under dust in the alcoves, or have been carted off to the pulp mill.

Could mind of man have fancied, an oblivion so swift for those favorites of the public? Could mortal ken have foretold its present fate for the "Wide, Wide World"?--a story now quite dropped out of sight, but once the town's rage, and whose heroine I remember as a sort of inexhaustible human watering cart with the tear tap always turned on.

What has become, too, of those learned novels, patterned after Bulwer--extracts from Lempriere in dialogue form, sandwiched with layers of low life? "Surely, my dear niece, you remember what Athenaeaus quotes on this subject from the Leontium of Hermesianax of Colophon, the friend of Philetas?" "Perfectly, aunt, and methinks mention is also made of the same elegiac poem in Pausanias, and again in Antoninus Liberalis, the latter saying," etc. Where, I say, are the novels in that vein, with their charming mixture of murder, mythology, and metaphysics? They have their run, strut their brief hour, and give way to some "Madcap Violet" or "Helen's Babies." Never fear a lack of fresh novels. If the lads lose Mayne Reid, they find Jules Verne. The secret is an open one: the novel is the best paid branch of literature--always excepting Mr. Gladstone's pamphlets. Times have changed since "Evelina"

was sold for 20.

Perhaps of all novelists Victor Hugo receives the largest earnings for a single work. One of his clerical enemies, Mgr. de Segur, has bitterly attacked him for his gains--"$100,000 for 'Les Miserables' alone," said the critic in angry extravagance. But Hugo's admirers will not grudge his gains.

The English have put a premium on prolix novels by giving them a regulation length of just three volumes, to be cold for a guinea and a half. This droll uniformity has much less basis of reason than the old custom of writing tragedies and comedies just five acts long; for there is sense in making a play last out an evening. Trouble to writer and weariness to reader must come of spinning a novel against s.p.a.ce, overlaying a plot with trivial incidents, and stuffing a story with padding, merely to reach a standard of length both arbitrary and absurd. Yet prodigious was the patience of our novel-reading ancestry prior to Fielding. The "Grand Cyrus" was issued in ten volumes, "Clarissa Harlowe" in eight, and sometimes an heroic romance reached twelve. Jules Janin puts Richardson on Shakespeare's level, and modern French readers appreciate "Clarissa" more than English--but they get it abridged. Mr. Dallas, following Janin, has abridged the famous novel with care for English readers, too, and a more recent editor likewise aims to evade its monotony by striking out "tediously unnecessary pa.s.sages and unimportant details," though old-fashioned readers may still like to take "Clarissa" in all its prolixity. As to the romances that preceded it, they seem to our age duller than any ever written--"huge folios of inanity," said Sir Walter, "over which our ancestors yawned themselves to sleep." I warrant their descendants never yawned over "Guy Mannering."

Still, modern novels as a cla.s.s are more apt to be voluble than prolix.

Story-writers like Trollope, Mrs. Edwards, and McCarthy amaze us at the ductility which the English tongue a.s.sumes for them. They seem less to compose than to _reel off_ their pages. To Trollope's free-and-easy flow is there any stop? None, surely, through mental exhaustion. His bright loquacity and productiveness remind one of that bewitched salt mill in the story of Nicholas, which ground on for ever, without effort or wearying, until it had salted the whole sea.

PRIMOGENITURE AND PUBLIC BEQUESTS.

SOMETHING was said, in a former "Driftwood" essay, regarding the frequent dedications of private fortunes, in America, to public uses.

We see a philanthropic millionaire stripping himself, even in hale life, of all his wealth save a slender annuity and the portions reserved for his heirs and legatees; or we see the bulk of a great fortune given to charities in a testamentary bequest.

Certainly Americans, though often overreaching in making a fortune, are proverbially lavish in distributing it. New England, the home of 'cuteness in trade, is extraordinary for the number and extent of its charitable bequests. Americans may do things that an Englishman will not in getting the best of a bargain, but quite as quickly as the average Englishman, they give the whole fruits of the sharp trade to some sufferer. Unscrupulous in a contest of wits, they yet have bowels of compa.s.sion beyond many other nations, are perhaps the least cruel of all, and have made American private endowments of educational and charitable inst.i.tutions famous the world over.

But can we put all the credit of these endowments to the score of national character? Is not some part traceable simply to the abolition of the old privileges and customs of primogeniture? I fancy that were it American usage to pa.s.s the bulk of great estates to a succession of eldest sons or to the nearest heir, we should see fewer great bequests to the public. "The heir" would ever be an overshadowing figure in the rich man's plans; whereas now, if kith and kin be well provided for, no one finds it strange that the bulk of an estate like Mr. Peabody's or Mr. Lick's or Mr. Cornell's should go to public education and charity.

Our English-speaking race, as we all know, has ever had a thirst for posthumous power; so bent were our ancestors on tying up their estates in perpetuity that when the law came in to forbid it many were the devices to prolong the grasp. Privileges of primogeniture are still jealously guarded in England, for the sake of acc.u.mulating family honors and wealth. Even in America older brothers sometimes oddly think themselves sole managers of the parental estate--a fancy due, perhaps, to the influence of our English derivation. We see its traces where even an estimable oldest brother, as self-appointed head of the family, deals with the inherited estate as if it were all his own: prescribes the household expenses, "invests" the portions of others as may seem good unto him, loses them in his speculations without qualm of conscience, or doles out from his gains to his younger brothers and sisters with the air of a munificent prince giving bounties.

Paterfamilias was eminently just in taking him into the historic firm on a third share, but it would be preposterous to do the same by brother Tom. Let Tom and Harry, after a few years' longer probation of clerkship than Primus needed, be generously taken in; but let them divide a third of the partnership between them. Primogeniture, I repeat, still leaves its curious traces with us in these unpleasant delusions of the oldest male child; but the abolition of its ancient privileges, and the habit of distributing fortunes and opportunities share and share alike among equal heirs or legatees, have accustomed many rich men besides childless millionaires to sparing a generous portion for charities and colleges. This view is strengthened by observing that the famous dedications of private fortunes to public uses are made by men who have earned their wealth, not inherited it.

Inherited wealth is more likely to be transmitted to its owner's heirs than broken up for public benefactions. And so, in fine, we may trace a part of our national celebrity for public bequests to the lack of primogenital laws and of any social system of retaining the bulk of family wealth in a line of eldest sons.

We are sometimes unjust toward men of prodigious wealth who disappoint public expectation by bequeathing nothing for public purposes. The American who keeps fifty millions intact in his family only does what is customary in other lands, and what may be done without reproach. If he break no law, a man may do what he will with his own--although, to be sure, so may his countrymen talk as they will of what he does; and they will hardly lump in a common eulogy the public benefactors and those who devise none of their prodigious wealth to the public weal.

For these latter the one or two of their fellow men who have become millionaires by their wills may properly raise memorial churches, and stained windows, and chimes of bells; but such wills have earned no paeans of public grat.i.tude.

PHILIP QUILIBET.

SCIENTIFIC MISCELLANY.

PHOTOGRAPHING FROM THE RETINA.

ONE of the first fruits of the daguerreotypic art was the suggestion that unknown murderers could be detected by photographing the last image left on the retina of the murdered person's eye. The idea that this could be done seems to have taken strong hold of many imaginations, and we believe this suggestion is repeated to the police authorities of New York on the occurrence of every noticeable and mysterious murder. That such a detective task will ever be accomplished by photography is extremely doubtful, on account of the length of time that usually pa.s.ses before the discovery of a murder. But science has now advanced so far that the image on the retina _has been fixed and photographed_. This has been done by Prof. Kuhne of Heidelberg, but not with human subjects, as decapitation is one necessary part of the process. Prof. Kuhne placed a rabbit four and a half feet from a closed window, in the shutter of which was an opening twelve inches square.

The animal's head was first covered by a black cloth for five minutes and then exposed for three minutes. The head was then instantly cut off, and one eye taken out in a room illuminated by yellow light. The eyeball was opened and instantly plunged into a five per cent. solution of alum. This occupied two minutes, and the other eye, still remaining in the head, was then exposed at the window just as the first had been.

It was then taken out and placed in the alum solution like its fellow.

The next morning the two retinae were carefully isolated, separated from the optic nerve, and turned. On a beautiful rose red ground a sharp image, somewhat more than one millimetre (one-twenty-fifth inch) square was found. The image on the first retina--that which was exposed during life--was somewhat reddish and not so sharply defined as that on the other.

This fixature of the last impression on the living retina is by no means an accidental discovery, but is the final step in a laborious series of delicate researches. Nor is it the triumph of one man alone, the preliminary work having been performed by two distinguished physiologists. Prof. Boll of Rome discovered that the external layer of the retina in all living animals has a purple color, which is destroyed by light. During life the color is perpetually restored by darkness, but after death, Boll thought, it disappeared entirely. Prof. Kuhne followed up this wonderful discovery and confirmed it in general, while correcting some of Boll's conclusions. He first ascertained that death does not necessarily destroy the color, since a retina that is not exposed to white light, but is kept in a room lighted by a yellow sodium flame, retains this "vision purple" for twenty-four or twenty-eight hours, even though incipient decomposition may have set in. It is destroyed at the temperature of boiling water or by immersion in alcohol, glacial acetic acid, and strong solution of soda, but in strong ammonia, saturated solution of common salt, or glycerine, it remains undiminished for twenty-four hours. On testing the effect of different colored lights upon this "vision purple," he found that the most refrangible rays change it most, while red has hardly more effect than yellow light. The color is not so delicate as Boll supposed. A few moments' exposure to daylight does not bleach the retina. This requires exposure for a considerable time to direct sunlight. The source of the color was found to be the inner surface of the choroid upon which the retina lies. If a portion of the retina is disengaged from the choroid and raised up, it bleaches, though the remainder, still attached portion, retains its color. If the raised flap is carefully replaced upon the choroid, it regains its purple hue. This restoration is believed to be a function of the living choroid, and probably of the retinal epithelium, though it is independent of the black pigment which this epithelium contains. This vision purple is the latest discovery in optical physiology, and it cannot fail to be a most important one. How far it will alter the received views upon the subject of changes in the strength of vision, which are now attributed to alterations in the distance of the crystalline lens, cannot be foretold. But it may be found possible to stimulate by drugs the restorative action of the choroid, and thus by gaining increased "definition," improve weak sight. As to the detection of murderers by photographing the last retinal picture from their victims' eyes, while these discoveries do not leave this an impossibility, they do not much improve the probability of its ever being done. Very often the sight of the a.s.sa.s.sin is not the last which comes within the victim's vision. Too long a time also usually elapses before discovery. These and similar difficulties must prevent the utilization of these discoveries in this direction, even if they should prove to be in themselves all that is hoped. The retinal picture has not yet been photographed, but it seems probable, from the above recounted experiments, that it can be.