The Galaxy, April, 1877 Part 22

Importation 4,685 Sales of Government old lead 1,050 Missouri 17,165 Galena district 6,425 Utah, Nevada, California 33,630 ------ 62,955

The production of some few selected places was: Palmer mine, 466 tons, Mine LaMotte, 1,657, St. Joseph mines, 1,938, Granby mines, 4,423 tons, these being all Missouri; Omaha smelting works, 11,336 tons, St. Louis and Pennsylvania smelting works, 8,000 tons, New York and Newark works, 7,776 tons, California, Nevada, and Utah works, 6,518. The latter four items amount to 33,630 tons, which is all made from silver-lead ores, mostly by the zinc process of refining.

ARCTIC EXPLORATION.

In fitting out the lately returned Arctic expedition the English government attempted to make it the last one of its kind. That is, it appropriated a million dollars and engaged the cooperation of the best scientific authorities, and sent out its best men, who departed in the full knowledge that their enterprise had aroused a real national enthusiasm, and that the most strenuous effort was expected of them.

The purpose of these acc.u.mulated advantages was to so fortify the voyagers that their success or failure should satisfy the world upon the subject of polar exploration. They went, struggled so bravely that their loss of life was greater than on any expedition since the fatal one under Franklin--and came back without succeeding. Their commander deliberately declared success to be impossible from the nature of the difficulties which always exist near the pole, and that this goal of nine centuries' effort would never be reached.

But, in spite of Captain Nares's positiveness, the Arctic question is now just where he took it up. Seventy miles has been added to the distance covered, but the world is just as unsatisfied as ever, and polar exploration is just as ardently desired as ever. The spirit is unchanged, but the name is altered. Against the uniform report of the explorers who have been so numerous during the last decade that a mere journey to the pole is not likely to yield much addition to man's knowledge, it is hardly possible for even the most enthusiastic navigators to stand up. But when Lieutenant Payer, on returning from the Austrian expedition north of Spitzbergen, declared that there was but one way to make the icy northern regions yield up their scientific secrets, and that was by colonizing parties within the Arctic circle, to stay there long enough to make a continued study of its meteorology and physics, the scientific world gave him its unqualified support.

Several nations have been reported to be on the point of organizing such a colony, but America seems likely to be the first to act energetically on the suggestion. Captain Howgate of the Signal Service Corps has pet.i.tioned Congress for $50,000 with which to send out a company of forty men, provided with supplies for three years. They are to be taken by a government vessel to some point between 81 deg. and 83 deg., the route taken to be by Smith's sound. There they will be left, the vessel returning. An annual visit is to be paid the colony, but otherwise they will be left to themselves. To prevent the scandalous quarrels which ruined the Polaris expedition, the whole party will be enlisted in the United States service, and strict discipline will be maintained. The fact that the suggestion for the expedition comes from a Signal Service officer will give the country confidence in the plan, and also ensure proper attention to that science which may hope to reap the greatest benefit from Arctic observations, the science of meteorology and cosmic physics. The scientific members of the party are to include an astronomer, one or more meteorologists, and two or more naturalists. The project is by no means on a sure footing as yet, but it has got so far as to be favorably reported on by the Naval Committee of the House of Representatives. It certainly embodies the plan which scientific men all over the world unite in endorsing, and which seems to offer the most promising rewards to effort. But disguise the fact as we will, it still remains true that it is in exploration and discovery that such schemes find their surest ground for support. The gains to science have uniformly been greater than the satisfaction to curiosity, and this plan is professedly made with especial care to secure the greatest return to science. But the march to the pole is the thing that is inviting, and it entices now just as strongly, after all the failures, as it ever did. Captain Howgate's plan provides for this.

During their three years' stay his men will be on the watch for opportunities to advance northward, and if they find none, they intend to make such a study of currents, ice, and seasons as will give the cue to others in after years.

The princ.i.p.al difficulties in pushing far northward may be summed up in a few words. The attempt must be made in summer (the Arctic day), when the ice is liable to break up. A boat must therefore be carried, and this makes the sledge train heavy. The ice to be crossed is extremely rough, and explorers have not been able to find smoother spots of any considerable size. By rough we mean that it is covered with deep rifts, blocks and snow drifts from five to twenty feet or more in height, and these impediments cover the surface so closely as to leave no alternative but a slow tugging of the sledges over the most available parts of them. The English expedition found these drifts to lie directly across their course, having been formed by a west wind. The labor of crossing them is performed with the thermometer far below the freezing point. There is no fire, provisions have to be carefully husbanded, sleep is dangerous unless frequently broken, and if one of the party breaks down, the strength of the whole is seriously diminished, while its task is greatly increased. Such has been the history of exploration up to within 400 miles of the pole, and it is at least probable that many of these difficulties will be intensified as that point is reached. The north pole may now be considered to occupy the centre of an area 800 miles in diameter, the condition of things within which it is not possible even to conjecture. We may plausibly suppose (1) that it is not land, for the ice of the Arctic sea is never more than 150 feet thick, and there are no glaciers; (2) that it is a shallow sea; and (3) that the precipitation of moisture in the centre must be considerable, as the ice is moving in all directions from the centre during the summer. The theory of an open sea at the pole is now discarded by most scientific men, and, we believe, by all experienced explorers except Hayes. In the present state of knowledge it rests upon the presumption that the polar sea is very shallow, so that the deep and warm currents which are known to enter the Arctic ocean may be forced to the surface there; and that the ice drift removes the ice as fast as it forms.

EXPLORATION NOTES.

THE Portuguese government has decided to spend $100,000 on a scientific expedition to Central Africa.

EVERY exploring expedition across the continent of Australia has to taste the extreme difficulties of travel in the barren parts of that extraordinary country. Mr. Giles, the last explorer, says: "From the end of the watershed in longitude 120 deg. 20 min., the lat.i.tude being near the 24th parallel, to the Rawlinson range of my last horse expedition, in longitude 127 deg., the country was all open spinifex sandhill desert. At starting into the desert most of the camels were continually poisoned, the plant which poisoned them not being allied in any way to the poison plants of the settled districts of Western Australia. I now know it well, and have brought specimens. The longest stretch without water was a ten days' march. One old cow camel died after reaching the water. We had some rain on May 8 before reaching the Ashburton, and some of it must have extended into the desert. It was the only chance water we obtained."

PROF. NORDENSKIOLD, who sailed from Norway to the mouth of the river Jenesei, in Siberia, is now preparing for a voyage from that river along the sh.o.r.e of the Arctic sea to Behrings straits. It may be that the navigation of the Arctic sea, which is impossible away from land, can be accomplished in its neighborhood. The return journey will be made by way of China, India, and the Suez ca.n.a.l, the whole forming the most remarkable voyage ever undertaken by one ship.

BRADFORD, Pennsylvania, is lighted with gas from a well situated about two miles from town.

IN the United States heavy rains are less frequent between 4:35 P.M.

and 11 P.M than at any other part of the day. The greatest number are between 7:35 A.M. and 4:35 P.M.

IN the Alps the snow line is 8,900 feet high on the northern side and 9,200 feet on the southern. In the Himalayas it is 16,600 feet on the northern side and 16,200 feet on the southern.

THE eminent physicist, Prof. J. C. Poggendorff, for many years professor in the Berlin university, and editor of "Poggendorff's Annalen," has died in Berlin, in his eighty-first year.

THE magnitude of the prizes which may be drawn by exploring antiquarians in Europe is shown by the recent finding near Verona, Italy, of two large amphorae containing 50,000 coins of the Emperor Gallienus and his immediate successors. The majority of them are of bronze, but there are some of silver. Nearly all of them are in the finest state of preservation, and are so fresh from the mint as to make it evident that they were never put into circulation.

PROF. LOOMIS says that in this country great rainfalls do not generally continue over eight hours, and very rarely do they continue for twenty-four hours, either at one place or a number of places considered successively.

ACCORDING to the Washington "Gazette," the paint makers are grinding up Egyptian mummies for the fine brown color which they make when powdered. This color is due to the asphaltum with which the cloths wrapped around the mummies was impregnated.

THE Washington monument is probably doomed. In its present condition it is a grievous eyesore in the Washington landscape, and a board of army engineers now say that its foundations are not strong enough to permit raising the shaft higher, and it is proposed to take it down.

MR. H. BYa.s.sON has produced a kind of petroleum by the mutual action of steam, carbonic acid, and sulphuretted hydrogen in presence of iron at a white heat. All these substances are known to be contained in the rocks of the earth's crust, which also has at various times afforded the necessary heat.

GOLD, though the princ.i.p.al standard of value, is not moved about the world much. The entire import of London, the greatest banking city in the world, was only $116,222,350 in 1876, and the export was $81,097,850. Nearly the whole of the difference went into the vaults of the Bank of England, the stock of which increased $34,992,020.

PROF. HAWES has proved the existence of metallic iron in the basalt d.y.k.es of New Hampshire. It exists as small specks in the centre of grains of magnet.i.te. This contradicts the theory that the metallic iron of the d.y.k.es is the result of carbon acting upon the magnet.i.te in them, and proves that the iron is the primary and the magnet.i.te the secondary product.

THOUGH agricultural professorships are not considered to have produced all the good that was once expected from them, there is one lately established by the French Government which might well be copied in other countries. It is a professorship of comparative agriculture at Vincennes, and its occupant will make a systematic comparison of home and foreign agriculture.

THE character of the Yale lectures to mechanics is seen from the following t.i.tles to some of the lectures: "Forester and Forest Products," Prof. William H. Brewer; "Mosses," Prof. C. D. Eaton; "Our Red Sandstone," G. W. Hawes; "The Usury Laws," Prof. F. A. Walker; and "Sanitary Engineering," Prof. W. P. Trowbridge. The course contains thirteen lectures, and costs $1.

A FRENCH paper says that "an American company proposes to introduce fur seals from Alaska into Lake Superior! The temperature of the lake is considered to be sufficiently cold for the purpose, and the company hopes to obtain from Congress and the Canadian Parliament an act protecting the creatures from slaughter for twenty years, after which time it is supposed that they will be sufficiently acclimatized and numerous to form subjects of sport." As the fur seal is a marine animal and Lake Superior is a body of fresh water, the success of the experiment, and even the authenticity of the story, is at least doubtful!

M. GIFFARD, inventor of the steam injector which bears his name, has entered upon a line of invention of which Americans have been very fond. He is building a small steamer to ply, during the French Exposition, over the three miles of the Seine between Pont Royal and the Exhibition. The steamer will be thirty metres, or one hundred feet long and three and a half metres, or eleven feet eight inches broad, and is to make forty-five miles an hour! The length is to the beam, therefore, as 8-1/2 to 1. It is singular that marine engineering has gained but little from these attempts to attain excessive speeds. The real advances have been obtained by small successive improvements.

CURRENT LITERATURE.

MR. HENRI VAN LAUN is known in the world of letters by his admirable translation of Taine's "History of English Literature," and also by his not yet completed translation of Moliere's works; the latter being not merely a translation, but a very thoroughly worked English edition of the great French dramatist. He now presents us with the first volume of an original critical work of great importance and interest[9]--nothing less than a history of French literature. Mr. Van Laun's work is not a mere critical appreciation of French writers, which of itself would be an undertaking of very considerable moment, and which would fill a place hitherto unoccupied in our critical literature. The present work is in fact a history of French thought, and even more; it is a history of the French people as exhibited in the writings of Frenchmen from the very earliest period. The author accepts the theory which has lately come into vogue among the more elaborate, if not the profounder critics, that the literature of an age is a manifestation of its spirit; that a nation, or rather a people, has a soul like an individual man, and that that soul is manifested and is to be read in the pages of its authors; that as it, the people, is developed, intellectually, morally, socially, and politically, from age to age, the changes through which it pa.s.ses are reflected in its literature, and that there no less, perhaps even more, than in the record of its doings at home, abroad, in the family, in society, in commerce, in manufactures, in art, and on the field of battle, is to be found its true portraiture. Indeed, he begins his book with the a.s.sertion that "the history of a literature is the history of a people; if not this, it is worthless."

[9] "_History of French Literature._" By HENRI VAN LAUN. I. From its Origin to the Renaissance. 8vo, pp. 342. New York: G. P.

Putnam's Sons.

To this theory and its general acceptance we owe chiefly the very wide scope and the philosophical profundity of most modern critical writing of the higher kind. Critics are not content nowadays with taking up a poem, novel, essay, or history, and looking at it by itself as an individual and isolated work of art. They must look into the personal life of the writer; they must discover and estimate all the influences by which he was surrounded; and among these they give a very important place to the condition of the society in which he lived, the political and religious forces which were at work while he was studying, thinking, writing. Briefly, they regard him not as an isolated individual force, but as a manifestation, a result of many forces, as doing his work less by personal volition than as the unconscious agent or representative of the times in which he lived. Consequently a critical edition or appreciation of a great writer has come to be not a purely literary task, but an attempt to unfold the mental and moral condition of a people and a period. Compare, for example, Addison's criticism of the "Paradise Lost," to which in a great measure the general appreciation of that poem is due, with David Ma.s.son's "Life of Milton." The former can all be included in a thin duodecimo volume, and has been so printed; the latter, still unfinished, fills several ponderous octavo volumes. Addison concerns himself with the poem itself; Ma.s.son writes an elaborate history of Puritanism and of the English people during the development and completion of that religious, social, and political revolution which produced the Commonwealth in Old England and the Puritan emigration to America, with the formation of the religious commonwealths of New England. True, Addison did not undertake to do what Ma.s.son undertook, and allowance must be made for the avowed difference between the methods of the two writers. But still that very difference is the significant exponent of the critical spirit of the times in which they lived. The very fact that the Victorian critic has undertaken his tremendous task, which Addison or any man of his time would not have thought of, is significant of the change in critical manner to which we have referred.

That the new theory of the proper scope of criticism is well founded, cannot be entirely denied. Literature to a certain degree is a characteristic product of the age and of the people for which, if not by which, it is produced. And if Mr. Van Laun had confined himself to the affirmative part of his proposition, his position would have been less disputable than it became when he added his negative a.s.sertion. It is not quite true that the history of a literature is the history of a people; still further from the truth is it that literary history which is not the history of a people is worthless. It might be easily shown that some of the very greatest literary productions known to the world have very slight relations, or none at all, to the condition of the society in which they were written. What, for example, is there in Shakespeare's plays, or in Sir Walter Scott's poems and novels, which is a manifestation of the spirit of their time? Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, and Moore were strictly contemporaries. What could be more unlike than their poems in spirit or in substance? What one trait have they in common? The theory in question is an example of the tendency of men to over generalization of particular facts, and of a like tendency to over subtlety in critical philosophy.

The spirit of a people is, however, undeniably manifest in the writings of its best and most favored authors; and to trace the rise of that spirit and the gradual formation of a national or popular character is a legitimate and a very instructive part of the task of a critic who undertakes to present a full appreciation of a national literature.

Mr. Van Laun certainly begins at the beginning. He shows us what the French people are; how the French nation arose and gradually grew into an individual existence; and he thus imitates and emulates the distinguished French critic whose work he has translated. M. Taine is strong on the manifestation of Anglo-Saxonism in English literature, and even finds the results of English beef and beer, and of the very rain and fog of England, in the books of English writers.

Mr. Van Laun's theory of the origin of the French people is not a very clear one; not even in his own mind, it would seem. He starts with the a.s.sertion, in very positive terms, that the Iberians were the vanguard of the invading races who overwhelmed and swept before them the oldest known inhabitants of Western Europe--the Celts; and his language implies that the former were and the latter were not an Indo-European race; that the vanguard of the Indo-European invaders _found_ the Celts in Europe and overcame them. But there is no doubt, we believe, that the Celts themselves were, or are, an Indo-European race, and that they are the oldest representatives of that race in Europe. Their position in the extreme west, even in the Highlands of Scotland and in Ireland, shows this. As to the Iberians, the name itself is rather vague as that of a people or a race; but as far as we know anything of the race which Mr. Van Laun seems to have in view, _they_ were found in the west of Europe by the invading Celts. The Basques are regarded by philologists and ethnologists as the modern representatives of the "Iberians," if that name must be used--at any rate of the prehistoric inhabitants of Western Europe. Of this Mr. Van Laun himself seems to have an inkling, for he says "they were possibly themselves an indigenous European race driven back upon the Celts by the invading tribes which so persistently trod upon their heels." He finds a confirmation of this supposition in a curious etymological coincidence. In the Basque tongue _atzean_ signifies "behind," and _atzea_ "a foreigner." He accounts for this by supposing that the Iberian, pushed hard by the invaders, made common cause with the Celt, and that therefore the ever-encroaching Goth and Frank were "the people behind him." But if his "Iberians" were an indigenous European race, how could they be "driven back" upon the Celts unless the latter had gone through and through them, and so actually got before them, leaving the indigenous people between them--the Celts--and the succeeding Indo-European invaders? The fact is that Mr. Van Laun has begun so very far back that he is in deep water, rather out of his depth--out of any one's depth indeed. For as to the Basques, they are still an ethnological and philological puzzle. The balance of probabilities, however, seems to be in favor of their being the, or an, indigenous European race, not connected with the Aryan or Indo-European races, against whom they, a small remnant, have managed to hold their own, and preserve their individuality in language, law, and customs for more than two thousand years. The first element, the ground, so to speak, of the French nation, is, however, doubtless Celtic; and as to how much of an intermingling there may have been between them and the "Iberians," or the indigenous race represented by the Basques, we do not know. Judging by the very remarkable individuality of that strange people, their boldness, and their disposition to keep themselves to themselves, the probabilities of any very great intermingling between them and their conquerors are very small indeed.