The Reminiscences of an Astronomer Part 18

The bones were duly discovered, and it was not many years thereafter before the Wild West Exhibition was seen in the princ.i.p.al Eastern cities. When it visited New Haven, its conductor naturally renewed the acquaintance of his former patron and supporter.

"Do you remember, professor," said he, "our talk as we were going on your expedition to the Rockies,--how you told me about the mountains rising up and being split open and the bones of animals being lost in there, and how you were going to get them?"

"Oh, yes," said the other, "I remember it very well."

"Well, professor, do you know, when you told me all that I r'ally thought you was puttin' up a job on me."

The result was a friendship between the two men, which continued during Marsh's whole life. When the one felt that he ought no longer to spend all the money he earned, he consulted Marsh on the subject of "salting it down," and doubtless got good advice.

As an exposer of humbugs Marsh took a prominent place. One of these related to the so-called "Cardiff Giant." Sometime in 1869 the newspapers announced the discovery in northern New York, near the Canadian border, of an extraordinary fossil man, or colossal statue, people were not sure which, eight or ten feet high. It was found several feet below the ground while digging a well. Men of some scientific repute, including even one so eminent as Professor James Hall, had endorsed the genuineness of the find, and, on the strength of this, it was taken around to show the public. In the course of a journey through New York State, Marsh happened to pa.s.s through the town where the object was on exhibition. His train stopped forty minutes for dinner, which would give him time to drive to the place and back, and leave a margin of about fifteen minutes for an examination of the statue. Hardly more than a glance was necessary to show its fraudulent character. Inside the ears the marks of a chisel were still plainly visible, showing that the statue had been newly cut. One of the most curious features was that the stone had not been large enough to make the complete statue, so that the surface was, in one place, still in the rough. The object had been found in wet ground. Its material was sulphate of lime, the slight solubility of which would have been sufficient to make it dissolve entirely away in the course of centuries. The absence of any degradation showed that the thing was comparatively new. On the strength of this, Marsh promptly denounced the affair as a humbug.

Only a feeble defense was made for it, and, a year or two later, the whole story came out. It had been designed and executed somewhere in the Northwest, transported to the place where discovered, and buried, to be afterward dug up and reported as a prehistoric wonder.

Only a few years ago the writer had an opportunity of seeing with what wonderful ease intelligent men can be imposed upon by these artificial antiquities. The would-be exhibitor of a fossil woman, found I know not where, appeared in Washington. He had not discovered the fossil himself, but had purchased it for some such sum as $100, on the a.s.surance of its genuine character. He seems, however, to have had some misgivings on the subject, and, being an honest fellow, invited some Washington scientific men to examine it in advance of a public exhibition. The first feature to strike the critical observer was that the arms of the fossil were crossed over the breast in the most approved undertaker's fashion, showing that if the woman had ever existed, she had devoted her dying moments to arranging a pose for the approval of posterity. Little more than a glance was necessary to show that the fossil was simply baked clay.

Yet the limbs were hard and stiff. One of the spectators therefore asked permission of the owner to bore with an auger into the leg and see what was inside. A few moments' work showed that the bone of the leg was a bar of iron, around which clay had been moulded and baked.

I must do the crestfallen owner the justice to say that his anxiety to convince the spectators of his own good faith in the matter far exceeded his regret at the pecuniary loss which he had suffered.

Another amusing experience that Marsh had with a would-be fossil arose out of the discovery here and there in Connecticut of the fossil footprints of birds. Shortly after a find of this kind had been announced, a farmer drove his wagon up in front of the Peabody Museum, called on the professor, and told him he had dug up something curious on his farm, and he wished the professor would tell him what it was. He thought it looked like the footprints of a bird in a stone, but he was not quite sure.

Marsh went out and looked at the stone. A single glance was enough.

"Oh, I see what they are. They are the footprints of the domestic turkey. And the oddest part of it is, they are all made with the right foot."

The simple-minded countryman, in making the prints with the turkey's foot, had overlooked the difference between the right and left foot, and the consequent necessity of having the tracks which pertained to the two feet alternate.

Washington is naturally a centre of information on all subjects relating to the aboriginal tribes of America and to life on the plains generally. Besides the Geological Survey, the Bureau of Ethnology has been an active factor in this line. An official report cannot properly ill.u.s.trate life in all its aspects, and therefore should be supplemented by the experiences of leading explorers. This is all the more necessary if, as seems to be the case, the peculiar characteristics of the life in question are being replaced by those more appropriate to civilization. Yet the researches of the bureau in question are not carried on in any narrow spirit, and will supply the future student of humanity with valuable pictures of the most heroic of all races, and yet doomed, apparently, to ultimate extinction.

I do not think I ever saw a more impressive human figure and face than those of Chief Joseph as he stood tall, erect, and impa.s.sive, at a President's reception in the winter of 1903. He was attired in all the brilliancy of his official costume; but not a muscle of his strongly marked face betrayed the sentiments with which he must have gazed on the shining uniforms pa.s.sing before him.

[1] _Men and Measures of Half a Century_, by Hugh McCulloch.

New York: Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1889.

X

SCIENTIFIC ENGLAND

My first trip to Europe, mentioned in the last chapter, was made with my wife, when the oldest transatlantic line was still the fashionable one. The pa.s.senger on a Cunarder felt himself amply compensated for poor attendance, coa.r.s.e food, and bad coffee by learning from the officers on the promenade deck how far the ships of their line were superior to all others in strength of hull, ability of captain, and discipline of crew. Things have changed on both sides since then.

Although the Cunard line has completed its half century without having lost a pa.s.senger, other lines are also carefully navigated, and the Cunard pa.s.senger, so far as I know, fares as well as any other. Captain McMickan was as perfect a type of the old-fashioned captain of the best cla.s.s as I ever saw. His face looked as if the gentlest zephyr that had ever fanned it was an Atlantic hurricane, and yet beamed with Hibernian good humor and friendliness. He read prayers so well on Sunday that a pa.s.senger a.s.sured him he was born to be a bishop. One day a ship of the North German Lloyd line was seen in the offing slowly gaining on us. A pa.s.senger called the captain's attention to the fact that we were being left behind.

"Oh, they're very lightly built, them German ships; built to carry German dolls and such like cargo."

In London one of the first men we met was Thomas Hughes, of Rugby fame, who made us feel how worthy he was of the love and esteem bestowed upon him by Americans. He was able to make our visit pleasant in more ways than one. Among the men I wanted to see was Mr. John Stuart Mill, to whom I was attracted not only by his fame as a philosopher and the interest with which I had read his books, but also because he was the author of an excellent pamphlet on the Union side during our civil war.

On my expressing a desire to make Mr. Mill's acquaintance, Mr. Hughes immediately offered to give me a note of introduction. Mill lived at Blackheath, which, though in an easterly direction down the Thames, is one of the prettiest suburbs of the great metropolis. His dwelling was a very modest one, entered through a pa.s.sage of trellis-work in a little garden. He was by no means the grave and distinguished-looking man I had expected to see. He was small in stature and rather spare, and did not seem to have markedly intellectual features.

The cordiality of his greeting was more than I could have expected; and he was much pleased to know that his work in moulding English sentiment in our favor at the commencement of the civil war was so well remembered and so highly appreciated across the Atlantic.

As a philosopher, it must be conceded that Mr. Mill lived at an unfortunate time. While his vigor and independence of thought led him to break loose from the trammels of the traditional philosophy, modern scientific generalization had not yet reached a stage favorable to his becoming a leader in developing the new philosophy. Still, whatever may be the merits of his philosophic theories, I believe that up to a quite recent time no work on scientific method appeared worthy to displace his "System of Logic."

A feature of London life that must strongly impress the scientific student from our country is the closeness of touch, socially as well as officially, between the literary and scientific cla.s.ses on the one side and the governing cla.s.ses on the other. Mr. Hughes invited us to make an evening call with him at the house of a cabinet minister,--I think it was Mr. Goschen,--where we should find a number of persons worth seeing. Among those gathered in this casual way were Mr. Gladstone, Dean Stanley, and our General Burnside, then grown quite gray. I had never before met General Burnside, but his published portraits were so characteristic that the man could scarcely have been mistaken. The only change was in the color of his beard.

Then and later I found that a pleasant feature of these informal "at homes," so universal in London, is that one meets so many people he wants to see, and so few he does not want to see.

Congress had made a very liberal appropriation for observations of the solar eclipse,--the making of which was one object of my visit,--to be expended under the direction of Professor Peirce, superintendent of the Coast Survey. Peirce went over in person to take charge of the arrangements. He arrived in London with several members of his party a few days before we did, and about the same time came an independent party of my fellow astronomers from the Naval Observatory, consisting of Professors Hall, Harkness, and Eastman. The invasion of their country by such an army of American astronomers quite stirred up our English colleagues, who sorrowfully contrasted the liberality of our government with the parsimony of their own, which had, they said, declined to make any provision for the observations of the eclipse.

Considering that it was visible on their own side of the Atlantic, they thought their government might take a lesson from ours.

Of course we could not help them directly; and yet I suspect that our coming, or at least the coming of Peirce, really did help them a great deal. At any rate, it was a curious coincidence that no sooner did the American invasion occur than it was semi-officially discovered that no application of which her Majesty's government could take cognizance had been made by the scientific authorities for a grant of money with which to make preparations for observing the eclipse.

That the scientific authorities were not long in catching so broad a hint as this goes without saying. A little more of the story came out a few days later in a very unexpected way.

In scientific England, the great social event of the year is the annual banquet of the Royal Society, held on St. Andrew's day, the date of the annual meeting of the society, and of the award of its medals for distinguished work in science. At the banquet the scientific outlook is discussed not only by members of the society, but by men high in political and social life. The medalists are toasted, if they are present; and their praises are sung, if, as is apt to be the case with foreigners, they are absent. First in rank is the Copley medal, founded by Sir G.o.dfrey Copley, a contemporary of Newton. This medal has been awarded annually since 1731, and is now considered the highest honor that scientific England has to bestow.

The recipient is selected with entire impartiality as to country, not for any special work published during the year, but in view of the general merit of all that he has done. Five times in its history the medal has crossed the Atlantic. It was awarded to Franklin in 1753, Aga.s.siz in 1861, Dana in 1877, and J. Willard Gibbs in 1902.

The long time that elapsed between the first and the second of these awards affords an ill.u.s.tration of the backwardness of scientific research in America during the greater part of the first century of our independence. The year of my visit the medal was awarded to Mr. Joule, the English physicist, for his work on the relation of heat and energy.

I was a guest at the banquet, which was the most brilliant function I had witnessed up to that time. The leaders in English science and learning sat around the table. Her Majesty's government was represented by Mr. Gladstone, the Premier, and Mr. Lowe, afterward Viscount Sherbrooke, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Both replied to toasts. Mr. Lowe as a speaker was perhaps a little dull, but not so Mr. Gladstone. There was a charm about the way in which his talk seemed to display the inner man. It could not be said that he had either the dry humor of Mr. Evarts or the wit of Mr. Depew; but these qualities were well replaced by the vivacity of his manner and the intellectuality of his face. He looked as if he had something interesting he wanted to tell you; and he proceeded to tell it in a very felicitous way as regarded both manner and language, but without anything that savored of eloquence. He was like Carl Schurz in talking as if he wanted to inform you, and not because he wanted you to see what a fine speaker he was. With this he impressed one as having a perfect command of his subject in all its bearings.

I did not for a moment suppose that the Premier of England could have taken any personal interest in the matter of the eclipse. Great, therefore, was my surprise when, in speaking of the relations of the government to science, he began to talk about the coming event.

I quote a pa.s.sage from memory, after twenty-seven years: "I had the pleasure of a visit, a few days since, from a very distinguished American professor, Professor Peirce of Harvard. In the course of the interview, the learned gentleman expressed his regret that her Majesty's government had declined to take any measures to promote observations of the coming eclipse of the sun by British astronomers.

I replied that I was not aware that the government had declined to take such measures. Indeed, I went further, and a.s.sured him that any application from our astronomers for aid in making these observations would receive respectful consideration." I felt that there might be room for some suspicion that this visit of Professor Peirce was a not unimportant factor in the changed position of affairs as regarded British observations of the eclipse.

Not only the scene I have described, but subsequent experience, has impressed me with the high appreciation in which the best scientific work is held by the leading countries of Europe, especially England and France, as if the prosecution were something of national importance which men of the highest rank thought it an honor to take part in. The Marquis of Salisbury, in an interval between two terms of service as Premier of England, presided over the British a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science, and delivered an address showing a wide and careful study of the generalizations of modern science.

In France, also, one great glory of the nation is felt to be the works of its scientific and learned men of the past and present.

Membership of one of the five academies of the Inst.i.tute of France is counted among the highest honors to which a Frenchman can aspire.

Most remarkable, too, is the extent to which other considerations than that of merit are set aside in selecting candidates for this honor.

Quite recently a man was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences who was without either university or official position, and earned a modest subsistence as a collaborator of the "Revue des Deux Mondes."

But he had found time to make investigations in mathematical astronomy of such merit that he was considered to have fairly earned this distinction, and the modesty of his social position did not lie in his way.

At the time of this visit Lister was an eminent member of the medical profession, but had not, so far as I am aware, been recognized as one who was to render incalculable service to suffering humanity.

From a professional point of view there are no two walks in life having fewer points of contact than those of the surgeon and the astronomer. It is therefore a remarkable example of the closeness of touch among eminent Englishmen in every walk of life, that, in subsequent visits, I was repeatedly thrown into contact with one who may fairly be recommended as among the greatest benefactors of the human race that the nineteenth century has given us. This was partly, but not wholly, due to his being, for several years, the president of the Royal Society. I would willingly say much more, but I am unable to write authoritatively upon the life and work of such a man, and must leave gossip to the daily press.

For the visiting astronomer at London scarcely a place in London has more attractions than the modest little observatory and dwelling house on Upper Tulse Hill, in which Sir William Huggins has done so much to develop the spectroscopy of the fixed stars. The owner of this charming place was a pioneer in the application of the spectroscope to the a.n.a.lysis of the light of the heavenly bodies, and after nearly forty years of work in this field, is still pursuing his researches.

The charm of sentiment is added to the cold atmosphere of science by the collaboration of Lady Huggins. Almost at the beginning of his work Mr. Huggins, a.n.a.lyzing the light of the great nebula of Orion, showed that it must proceed from a ma.s.s of gas, and not from solid matter, thus making the greatest step possible in our knowledge of these objects. He was also the first to make actual measures of the motions of bright stars to or from our system by observing the wave length of the rays of light which they absorbed. Quite recently an ill.u.s.trated account of his observatory and its work has appeared in a splendid folio volume, in which the rigor of science is tempered with a gentle infusion of art which tempts even the non-scientific reader to linger over its pages.

In England, the career of Professor Cayley affords an example of the spirit that impels a scientific worker of the highest cla.s.s, and of the extent to which an enlightened community may honor him for what he is doing. One of the creators of modern mathematics, he never had any ambition beyond the prosecution of his favorite science.

I first met him at a dinner of the Astronomical Society Club.

As the guests were taking off their wraps and a.s.sembling in the anteroom, I noticed, with some surprise, that one whom I supposed to be an attendant was talking with them on easy terms. A moment later the supposed attendant was introduced as Professor Cayley.

His garb set off the seeming haggardness of his keen features so effectively that I thought him either broken down in health or just recovering from some protracted illness. The unspoken words on my lips were, "Why, Professor Cayley, what has happened to you?"

Being now in the confessional, I must own that I did not, at the moment, recognize the marked intellectuality of a very striking face.

As a representation of a mathematician in the throes of thought, I know nothing to equal his portrait by d.i.c.kenson, which now hangs in the hall of Trinity College, Cambridge, and is reproduced in the sixth volume of Cayley's collected works. His life was that of a man moved to investigation by an uncontrollable impulse; the only sort of man whose work is destined to be imperishable. Until forty years of age he was by profession a conveyancer. His ability was such that he might have gained a fortune by practicing the highest branch of English law, if his energies had not been diverted in another direction. The spirit in which he pursued his work may be judged from an anecdote related by his friend and co-worker, Sylvester, who, in speaking of Cayley's even and placid temper, told me that he had never seen him ruffled but once. Entering his office one morning, intent on some new mathematical thought which he was discussing with Sylvester, he opened the letter-box in his door and found a bundle of papers relating to a law case which he was asked to take up. The interruption was too much. He flung the papers on the table with remarks more forcible than complimentary concerning the person who had distracted his attention at such an inopportune moment. In 1863 he was made a professor at Cambridge, where, no longer troubled with the intricacies of land tenure, he published one investigation after another with ceaseless activity, to the end of his life.

Among my most interesting callers was Professor John C. Adams, of whom I have spoken as sharing with Leverrier the honor of having computed the position of the planet Neptune before its existence was otherwise known. The work of the two men was prosecuted at almost the same time, but adopting the principle that priority of publication should be the sole basis of credit, Arago had declared that no other name than that of Leverrier should even be mentioned in connection with the work. If repute was correct, Leverrier was not distinguished for those amiable qualities that commonly mark the man of science and learning. His att.i.tude toward Adams had always been hostile. Under these conditions chance afforded the latter a splendid opportunity of showing his superiority to all personal feeling. He was president of the Royal Astronomical Society when its annual medal was awarded to his French rival for his work in constructing new tables of the sun and planets. It thus became his duty to deliver the address setting forth the reasons for the award.

He did this with a warmth of praise for Leverrier's works which could not have been exceeded had the two men been bosom friends.

Adams's intellect was one of the keenest I ever knew. The most difficult problems of mathematical astronomy and the most recondite principles that underlie the theory of the celestial motions were to him but child's play. His works place him among the first mathematical astronomers of the age, and yet they do not seem to do his ability entire justice. Indeed, for fifteen years previous to the time of my visit his published writings had been rather meagre.

But I believe he was justly credited with an elaborate witticism to the following effect: "In view of the fact that the only human being ever known to have been killed by a meteorite was a monk, we may concede that after four hundred years the Pope's bull against the comet has been justified by the discovery that comets are made up of meteorites."

Those readers who know on what imperfect data men's impressions are sometimes founded will not be surprised to learn of my impression that an Englishman's politics could be inferred from his mental and social make-up. If all men are born either Aristotelians or Platonists, then it may be supposed that all Englishmen are born Conservatives or Liberals.

The utterances of English journalists of the Conservative party about American affairs during and after our civil war had not impressed me with the idea that one so unfortunate as to be born in that party would either take much interest in meeting an American or be capable of taking an appreciative view of scientific progress.