Chapter V: Part 5

The germ of tuberculosis is the seed, and the predisposed person the soil, and it requires a combination of both to develop the disease. To illustrate the necessity of suitable conditions for the development of plants--for it is now almost universally admitted that the germ of tuberculosis is a micro-organism which belongs to the vegetable kingdom--I remember some years ago, while in North Europe, seeing in a hothouse a plant which is here commonly known as the "four o'clock." The gardener in charge of the conservatory considered it a remarkable plant, but difficult to propagate, and stated that it was absolutely impossible to raise it out of doors. In this part of the world, however, we know that this plant grows so easily that once established in a garden it is difficult to keep it within limits. In both of the cases we have the same seed, the difference being only in the soil and the conditions favorable for its development. The absence of either the seed or the soil will absolutely prevent tuberculosis, and if the laws of hygiene are properly carried out, both in destroying the seed and in preventing the formation of a suitable soil, favorable effects will soon be shown.

Hygiene in regard to patients demands simply that the infectious character of the expectoration be destroyed. The vessels for this purpose should contain some disinfecting solution, should be cleaned regularly, and handkerchiefs, towels, or other material with which the expectoration has come in contact should be sterilized by being placed for at least half an hour in boiling water. This is necessary not only for those in the same room with the patient, but also for the patient, as it is quite possible that a former expectoration may produce reinfection of the patient himself.

Another method of contracting tuberculosis is by means of animals, such as cows, used for food and milking, which are known to be subject to this disease. It has been shown in some localities that one cow out of every twenty-five was affected with tubercular disease. This suggests the importance of having competent veterinarians to examine not only the meat which is sold, but also the cows used for milking purposes. Where there is the slightest doubt as to the nature of the meat or milk, the former should be thoroughly cooked and the latter sterilized before using.

In this connection it would be well to refer to the subject of spitting in street cars and in public places. While this nuisance is the subject of danger to every one in the street cars, especially in winter, when the windows are closed and a large amount of impurities is inhaled, it is more particularly so to ladies, whose skirts, in spite of every care, are soiled by the filthy expectoration, thus making them subject not only to the inhalation in the car, but also to carrying the infectious material to their homes.

The danger of this condition is not merely speculative. It has been bacteriologically demonstrated that the organisms of various contagious diseases thus find a lodging place in our cars and public places, and experiments on animals, in which the inoculation has developed diseases, have shown that these organisms retain their vitality in these places and may propagate disease under favorable conditions.

A factor in the spread of diseases of the throat and mouth that should not be overlooked is kissing. Unfortunately, this matter has usually been treated with much levity, and where a sanitarian is bold enough to condemn the habit he is frequently made the subject of all forms of ridicule in the public press.

The tender lining of the lips, mouth, and throat, and its large blood supply, make it peculiarly susceptible to contagion, and I have no doubt that the habit of kissing is responsible for many cases of infection. Last year I noticed a lady coming from a house from which a diphtheria flag was flying, who walked to the corner to take the street car, when a nurse with a small child approached. The lady without hesitation stooped down and kissed the little child. As it is well known that a healthy person may transmit a disease without incurring the disease himself, this lady voluntarily risked the danger of inflicting this disease upon the innocent child. It is not an uncommon thing for nurses to kiss the children under their charge, and here in New Orleans even the colored nurses sometimes practice this habit, occasionally with the permission of the parents. In fact, a fashionable lady on one occasion told me, when I remonstrated with her about this, that she feared to hurt the feelings of the old nurse, who had been a valuable servant in the family for many years.

How often this habit is productive of evil results is of course only speculation. I recall, however, an instance in which two small children of one family developed a specific disease which originated in the mouth and affected the whole system. Examination proved this to have been caused by a nurse, a white woman, who had been in the habit of kissing the children. If women will voluntarily incur risks by using kissing as a form of salutation in all stages of acquaintanceship, I would at least request that the innocent children be spared the possible consequences.

The subject of the hygiene of the ear is so intimately connected with conditions influencing the nose and throat, which have already been explained, that but few words are needed to cover this part of my subject. In general, the best care of the ear is to leave it alone. Ear scoops are injurious; the ear should be cleaned simply on the outside, and nothing, as a rule, should be inserted into the external canal. I have seen many cases of abscess and the most severe inflammation due to endeavors to clean the ear with the omnipresent hairpin and other objects used for this purpose. The use of cotton in the ear in general is to be condemned. It produces an artificial condition in the outer canal of the ear which reduces its physical resistance and makes it more liable to injury from exposure. The ear is sometimes injured by the entrance of cold water. This happens occasionally during ordinary bathing, but more frequently in outdoor bathing and in swimming. In surf bathing, where the water is thrown up with considerable force, it is much more liable to enter the external orifice of the ear, and severe inflammation may originate from this cause.

Salt water has been claimed to be more injurious than fresh, but my personal experience leads me to believe that it is more a question of temperature than of the quality of the water. Some years ago a large reservoir was built by an educational institute near this city, the water, which was quite cold even in summer, being supplied by an artesian well. The tank was used for bathing purposes, but earache soon became so frequent among the boys that the use of the reservoir for this purpose had to be entirely abandoned. In ordinary bathing, the entrance of water into the ear can easily be avoided. In swimming or surf bathing it is advisable to use a pledget of lamb's wool to close the opening of the ears. Ordinary cotton soon becomes saturated and is of no use in this connection, but the wool, which is slightly oily, forms an excellent protection in these cases.

The "running ear" is a diseased condition which should not be tampered with by the inexperienced, but which should not be neglected. The old idea that the child will outgrow it, or that it is a secretion of the head which if interfered with would prove dangerous, has been fruitful of many cases of deafness and even more serious complications.

Another condition to which I would call your attention is the incipient development of deafness in children. Where the capacity of hearing is quickly lowered from the normal to fifty per cent, it is so striking that the patient is much distressed and even confused. But when this change takes place insidiously from day to day, it is frequently not observed by either the patient or those around him until it has greatly advanced. Children thus affected hear only with difficulty and by straining certain small muscles of the ear, which soon become fatigued, and the child becomes listless and inattentive. I have seen numerous cases in which children have been severely punished for inattention, when this was due to defective hearing. Watchfulness and early attention in these cases will frequently prevent the more serious forms of deafness.

THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE WEST INDIES.

BY F. L. OSWALD.

I.--THE FAUNA OF THE ANTILLES: MAMMALS.

The study of the geographical distribution of plants and animals has revealed facts almost as enigmatical as the origin of life itself. Water barriers, as broad as that of the Atlantic, have not prevented the spontaneous spread of some species, while others limit their habitat to narrowly circumscribed though not geographically isolated regions.

Tapirs are found both in the Amazon Valley and on the Malay Peninsula; the brook trout of southern New Zealand are identical with those of the Austrian Alps. Oaks and _Ericacea_ (heather plants) cover northern Europe from the mouth of the Seine to the sources of the Ural; then suddenly cease, and are not found anywhere in the vast Siberian territories, with a north-to-south range rivaling that of all British North America.

But still more remarkable is the zoölogical contrast of such close-neighborhood countries as Africa and Madagascar, or Central America and the West Indian archipelago. The Madagascar virgin woods harbor no lions, leopards, hyenas, or baboons, but boast not less than thirty-five species of mammals unknown to the African continent, and twenty-six found nowhere else in the world.

Of a dozen different kinds of deer, abundant in North America as well as in Asia and Europe, not a single species has found its way to the West Indies. The fine mountain meadows of Hayti have originated no antelopes, no wild sheep or wild goats.

In the Cuban sierras, towering to a height of 8,300 feet, there are no hill foxes. There are caverns--subterranean labyrinths with countless ramifications, some of them--but no cave bears or badgers, no marmots or weasels even, nor one of the numerous weasel-like creatures clambering about the rock clefts of Mexico. The magnificent coast forests of the Antilles produce wild-growing nuts enough to freight a thousand schooners every year, but--almost incredible to say--the explorers of sixteen generations have failed to discover a single species of squirrels.

The Old-World tribes of our tree-climbing relatives are so totally different from those of the American tropics that Humboldt's traveling companion, Bonplant, renounced the theory of a unitary center of creation (or evolution), and maintained that South America must have made a separate though unsuccessful attempt to rise from lemurs to manlike apes and men. Of such as they are, Brazil alone has forty-eight species of monkeys, and Venezuela at least thirty. How shall we account for the fact that not one of the large West Indian islands betrays a vestige of an effort in the same direction?

More monkey-inviting forests than those of southern Hayti can not be found in the tropics, but not even a marmoset or squirrel-monkey accepted the invitation. In an infinite series of centuries not one pair of quadrumana availed itself of the chance to cross a sea gap, though at several points the mainland approaches western Cuba within less than two hundred miles--about half the distance that separates southern Asia from Borneo, where fourhanders of all sizes and colors compete for the products of the wilderness, and, according to Sir Philip Maitland, the "native women avoid the coast jungles for fear of meeting Mr. Darwin's grandfather."

The first Spanish explorers of the Antilles were, in fact, so amazed at the apparently complete absence of quadrupeds that their only explanation was a conjecture that the beasts of the forest must have been exterminated by order of some native potentate, perhaps the great Kubla Khan, whose possessions they supposed to extend _eastward_ from Lake Aral to the Atlantic. The chronicle of Diego Columbus says positively that San Domingo and San Juan Bautista (Porto Rico) were void of mammals, but afterward modifies that statement by mentioning a species of rodent, the _hutia_, or bush rat, that annoyed the colonists of Fort Isabel, and caused them to make an appropriation for importing a cargo of cats.

Bush rats and moles were, up to the end of the sixteenth century, the only known indigenous quadrupeds of the entire West Indian archipelago, for the "Carib dogs," which Valverde saw in Jamaica, were believed to have been brought from the mainland by a horde of man-hunting savages.

But natural history has kept step with the advance of other sciences, and the list of undoubtedly aboriginal mammals on the four main islands of the Antilles is now known to comprise more than twenty species. That at least fifteen of them escaped the attention of the Spanish creoles is as strange as the fact that the Castilian cattle barons of Upper California did not suspect the existence of precious metals, though nearly the whole bonanza region of the San Joaquin Valley had been settled before the beginning of the seventeenth century. But the conquerors of the Philippines even overlooked a variety of elephants that roams the coast jungles of Mindanao.

Eight species of those West Indian _incognito_ mammals, it is true, are creatures of a kind which the Spanish zoölogists of Valverde's time would probably have classed with birds--bats, namely, including the curious _Vespertilio molossus_, or mastiff bat, and several varieties of the owl-faced _Chilonycteris_, that takes wing in the gloom preceding a thunderstorm, as well as in the morning and evening twilight, and flits up and down the coast rivers with screams that can be heard as plainly as the screech of a paroquet. The _Vespertilio scandens_ of eastern San Domingo has a peculiar habit of flitting from tree to tree, and clambering about in quest of insects, almost with the agility of a flying squirrel. There are times when the moonlit woods near Cape Rafael seem to be all alive with the restless little creatures; that keep up a clicking chirp, and every now and then gather in swarms to contest a tempting find, or to settle some probate court litigation. San Domingo also harbors one species of those prototypes of the harpies, the fruit-eating bats. It passes the daylight hours in hollow trees, but becomes nervous toward sunset and apt to betray its hiding place by an impatient twitter--probably a collocution of angry comments on the length of time between meals. The moment the twilight deepens into gloom the chatterers flop out to fall on the next mango orchard and eat away like mortgage brokers. They do not get fat--champion gluttons rarely do--but attain a weight of six ounces, and the Haytian darkey would get even with them after a manner of their own if their prerogatives were not protected by the intensity of their musky odor. The above-mentioned _hutia_ rat appears to have immigrated from some part of the world where the shortness of the summer justified the accumulation of large reserve stores of food, and under the influence of a hereditary hoarding instinct it now passes its existence constructing and filling a series of subterranean granaries. Besides, the females build nurseries, and all these burrows are connected by tunnels that enable their constructors to pass the rainy season under shelter. They gather nuts, _belotas_ (a sort of sweet acorns), and all kinds of cereals, and with their _penchant_ for appropriating roundish wooden objects on general principles would probably give a Connecticut nutmeg peddler the benefit of the doubt.

They also pilfer raisins, and a colony of such tithe collectors is a formidable nuisance, for the _hutia_ is a giant of its tribe, and attains a length of sixteen inches, exclusive of the tail. It is found in Cuba, Hayti, Jamaica, Porto Rico, Antigua, Trinidad, the Isle of Pines, Martinique, and two or three of the southern Bahama Islands, and there may have been a time when it had the archipelago all to itself. The Lucayans had a tradition that their ancestors found it on their arrival from the mainland, and in some coast regions of eastern Cuba it may still be seen basking in the sunlight--

"Sole sitting on the shore of old romance,"

and wondering if there are any larger mammals on this planet.

Its next West Indian congener is the Jamaica rice rat, and there are at least ten species of mice, all clearly distinct from any Old-World rodent, though it is barely possible that some of them may have stolen a ride on Spanish trading vessels from Central America.

Water-moles burrow in the banks of several Cuban rivers, and two genera of aquatic mammals have solved the problem of survival: the bayou porpoise and the manatee, both known to the creoles of the early colonial era, and vaguely even to the first discoverers, since Columbus himself alludes to a "sort of mermaids (_sirenas_) that half rose from the water and scanned the boat's crew with curious eyes."

Naturally the manatee is, indeed, by no means a timid creature, but bitter experience has changed its habits since the time when the down-town sportsmen of Santiago used to start in sailboats for the outer estuary and return before night with a week's supply of manatee meat. The best remaining hunting grounds are the reed shallows of Samana Bay (San Domingo) and the deltas of the Hayti swamp rivers. Old specimens are generally as wary as the Prybilof fur seal that dive out of sight at the first glimpse of a sail; still, their slit-eyed youngsters are taken alive often enough, to be kept as public pets in many town ponds, where they learn to come to a whistle and waddle ashore for a handful of cabbage leaves.

Fish otters have been caught in the lagoons of Puerto Principe (central Cuba) and near Cape Tiburon, on the south coast of San Domingo, the traveler Gerstaecker saw a kind of "bushy-tailed dormouse, too small to be called a squirrel."

But the last four hundred years have enlarged the list of indigenous mammals in more than one sense, and the Chevalier de Saint-Méry should not have been criticised for describing the bush dog of Hayti as a "_canis Hispaniolanus_." Imported dogs enacted a declaration of independence several centuries before the revolt of the Haytian slaves, and their descendants have become as thoroughly West Indian as the Franks have become French. A continued process of elimination has made the survivors climate-proof and self-supporting, and above all they have ceased to vary; Nature has accepted their modified type as wholly adapted to the exigencies of their present habitat. And if it is true that all runaway animals revert in some degree to the characteristics of their primeval relatives, the ancestor of the domestic dog would appear to have been a bush-tailed, brindle-skinned, and black-muzzled brute, intermittently gregarious, and combining the burrowing propensity of the fox with the co-operative hunting _penchant_ of the wolf.

Fourteen years of bushwhacker warfare have almost wholly exterminated the half-wild cattle of the Cuban sierras, but the bush dog has come to stay. The yelping of its whelps can be heard in thousands of jungle woods and mountain ravines, both of Cuba and Hayti, and no variety of thoroughbreds will venture to follow these renegades into the penetralia of their strongholds. Sergeant Esterman, who shared the potluck of a Cuban insurgent camp in the capacity of a gunsmith, estimates the wild-dog population of the province of Santiago alone at half a million, and predicts that in years to come their raids will almost preclude the possibility of profitable cattle-breeding in eastern Cuba.

Still, the _perro pelon_, or "tramp dog," as the creoles call the wolfish cur, is perhaps a lesser evil, where its activity has tended to check the over-increase of another assisted immigrant. Three hundred years ago West Indian sportsmen began to import several breeds of Spanish rabbits, and with results not always foreseen by the agricultural neighbors of the experimenters. Rabbit meat, at first a luxury, soon became an incumbrance of the provision markets, and finally unsalable at any price. Every family with a dog or a trap-setting boy could have rabbit stew for dinner six times a week, and load their peddlers with bundles of rabbit skins.

The burrowing coneys threatened to undermine the agricultural basis of support, when it was learned that the planters of the Fort Isabel district (Hayti) had checked the evil by forcing their dogs to live on raw coney meat. The inexpensiveness of the expedient recommended its general adoption, and the rapidly multiplying quadrupeds soon found that "there were others." The Spanish hounds, too, could astonish the census reporter where their progeny was permitted to survive, and truck farmers ceased to complain.

In stress of circumstances the persecuted rodents then took refuge in the highlands, where they can still be seen scampering about the grassy dells in all directions, and the curs of the coast plain turned their attention to _hutia_ venison and the eggs of the chaparral pheasant and other gallinaceous birds. On the seacoast they also have learned to catch turtles and subdivide them, regardless of antivivisection laws. How they can get a business opening through the armor of the larger varieties seems a puzzle, but the _canis rutilus_ of the Sunda Islands overcomes even the dog-resisting ability of the giant tortoise, and in Sumatra the bleaching skeletons of the victims have often been mistaken for the mementos of a savage battle.

Near Bocanso in southeastern Cuba the woods are alive with capuchin monkeys, that seem to have escaped from the wreck of some South American trading vessel and found the climate so congenial that they proceeded to make themselves at home, like the ring-tailed colonists of Fort Sable, in the Florida Everglades. The food supply may not be quite as abundant as in the equatorial birthland of their species, but that disadvantage is probably more than offset by the absence of tree-climbing carnivora.

Millions of runaway hogs roam the coast swamps of all the larger Antilles, and continue to multiply like our American pension claimants. The hunters of those jungle woods, indeed, must often smile to remember the complaint of the early settlers that the pleasure of the chase in the West Indian wilderness was modified by the scarcity of four-footed game, and in the total number (as distinct from the number of species) of wild or half-wild mammals Cuba and Hayti have begun to rival the island of Java.

[_To be continued._]

IRON IN THE LIVING BODY.

BY M. A. DASTRE.

Iron occurs, in small and almost infinitesimal proportions, in numerous organic structures, in which its presence may usually be detected by the high color it imparts; and in the animal tissues is an important ingredient, though far from being a large one. It is essential, however, that the animal tissues, and particularly the liquids that circulate through them, should be of nearly even weight, else the equilibrium of the body would be too easily disturbed, and disaster arising therefrom would be always imminent. Hence the iron is always found combined and associated with a large accompaniment of other lighter elements which, reducing or neutralizing its superior specific gravity, hold it up and keep it afloat. Thus the molecule of the red matter of the blood contains, for each atom of iron, 712 atoms of carbon, 1,130 of hydrogen, 214 of nitrogen, 245 of oxygen, and 2 of sulphur, or 2,303 atoms in all. Existing in compounds of so complex composition, iron can be present only in very small proportions to the whole. Though an essential element, there is comparatively but little of it. The whole body of man does not contain more than one part in twenty thousand of it. The blood contains only five ten-thousandths; and an organ is rich in it if, like the liver, it contains one and a half ten-thousandths. When, then, we seek to represent to ourselves the changes undergone by organic iron, we shall have to modify materially the ideas we have formed respecting the largeness and the littleness of units of measure and as to the meaning of the words abundant and rare. We must get rid of the notion that a thousandth or even a ten-thousandth is a proportion that may be neglected. The humble ten-thousandth, which is usually supposed not to be of much consequence, becomes here a matter of value. Chemists working with iron in its ordinary compounds may consider that they are doing fairly well if they do not lose sight of more than a thousandth of it; but such looseness would be fatal in a biological investigation, where accuracy is necessary down to the infinitesimal fraction. The balances of the biologists must weigh the thousandth of a milligramme, as their microscopes measure the thousandth of a millimetre.

The great part performed by iron in organisms, what we may call its biological function, appertains to the chemical property it possesses of favoring combustion, of being an agent for promoting the oxidation of organic matters.

The chemistry of living bodies differs from that of the laboratory in a feature that is peculiar to it--that instead of performing its reactions directly it uses special agents. It employs intermediaries which, while they are not entirely unknown to mineral chemistry, yet rarely intervene in it. If it is desired, for example, to add a molecule of water to starch to form sugar, the chemist would do it by heating the starch with acidulated water. The organism, which is performing this process all the time, or after every meal, does it in a different way, without special heating and without the acid. A soluble ferment, a diastase or enzyme, serves as the oxidizing agent to produce the same result. Looking at the beginning and the end, the two operations are the same. The special agent gives up none of its substance. It withdraws after having accomplished its work, and not a trace of it is left. Here, in the mechanism of the action of these soluble ferments, resides the mystery, still complete, of vital chemistry. It may be conceived that these agents, which leave none of their substance behind their operations, which suffer no loss, do not have to be represented in considerable quantities, however great the need of them may be. They only require time to do their work. The most remarkable characteristic of the soluble ferments lies, in fact, here, in the magnitude of the action as contrasted with infinitesimal proportion of the agent, and the necessity of having time for the accomplishment of the operation.

Iron behaves in precisely the same way in the combustion of organic substances. These substances are incapable at ordinary temperatures of fixing oxygen directly, and will not burn till they are raised to a high temperature; but in the presence of iron they are capable of burning without extreme heat, and undergo slow combustion. And as iron gives up none of its substance in the operation, and acts, as a simple intermediary, only to draw oxygen from the inexhaustible atmosphere and present it to the organic substance, we see that it need not be abundant to perform its office, provided it have time enough. This action resembles that of the soluble ferments in that there is no mystery about it, and its innermost mechanism is perfectly known.

Iron readily combines with oxygen--too readily, we might say, if we regarded only the uses we make of it. It exists as an oxide in Nature; and the metallurgy of it has no other object than to revivify burned iron, remove the oxygen from it, and extract the metal. Of the two oxides of iron, the ferrous, or lower one, is an energetic base, readily combining with even the weakest acids, and forming with them ferrous or protosalts. Ferric oxide, on the other hand, is a feeble base, which combines only slowly with even strong acids to form ferric salts or persalts, and not at all with weak acids like carbonic acid and those of the tissues of living beings. It is these last, more highly oxidized ferric compounds that provide organic substances with the oxygen that consumes them, when, as a result of the operation, they themselves return to the ferrous state.

Facts of this sort are too nearly universal not to have been observed very long ago, but they were not fully understood till about the middle of this century. The chemists of the time--Liebig, Dumas, and especially Schönbein, Wöhler, Stenhouse, and many others--established the fact that ferric oxide provokes at ordinary temperatures a rapid action of combustion on a large number of substances: grass, sawdust, peat, charcoal, humus, arable land, and animal matter. A very common example is the destruction of linen by rust spots; the substance of the fiber is slowly burned up by the oxygen yielded by the oxide. About the same time, Claude Bernard inquired whether the process took place within the tissues, in contact with living matter in the same way as we have just seen it did with dead matter--the remains of organisms that had long since submitted to the action of physical laws--and received an affirmative answer. Injecting a ferric salt into the jugular vein of an animal, he found it excreted, deprived of a part of its oxygen, as a ferrous salt.

This slow combustion of organic matter, living or dead, accomplished in the cold by iron, represents only one of the aspects of its biological function. A counterpart to it is necessary in order to complete the picture. It is easy to perceive that the phenomenon would have no bearing or consequence if it was limited to this first action. With the small provision of oxygen in the iron salt used up, and, if reduced to the minimum of oxidation, the source of oxygen being exhausted, the combustion of organic matter would stop. The oxidation obtained would be insignificant, while the oxidation should be indefinite and unlimited, and it is really so.

There is a counterpart. The iron salt, which has gone back to the minimum of oxidation and become a ferrous salt, can not remain long in that state in contact with the air and with other sources of the gas to which it is exposed. It has always been known that ferrous compounds absorb oxygen from the air and pass into the ferric state; we might say that we have seen it done, for the transformation is accompanied by a characteristic change of color, by a transition from the pale green tint of ferrous bases to the ochery or red color of ferric compounds.

We can understand now what should happen when the ferruginous compound is placed in contact alternately with organic matter and oxygen. In the former phase the iron will yield oxygen to the organic matter; in the second phase it will take again from the atmosphere the combustible which it has lost, and will be again where it started. The same series of operations may be continued a second time and a third time, and indefinitely, as long as the alternations of contact with organic matter and exposure to atmospheric oxygen are kept up, the iron simply performing the part of a broker. The same result will occur if atmospheric air and organic matter are constantly together; the consumption will continue indefinitely, and the iron will perform the part of an intermediary till one of the elements of the process is exhausted.

This explanation was necessary to make clear the solution of the mystery of slow or cool combustion, the existence of which has been known since Lavoisier, without its mechanism being understood. That illustrious student gave out the theory that animal heat and the energy developed by vital action originated in the chemical reactions of the organism, and that, on the other hand, the reactions that produce heat consisted of simple combustions, slow combustions, that differed only in intensity from that of the burning torch. The development of chemistry has shown that this figure was too much simplified from the reality, and that most of these phenomena, while they are in the end equivalent to a combustion, differ greatly from it in mechanism and mode of execution. By this we do not mean to say that all the combustions are of this character, and that there do not exist in the organism a large number of such as Lavoisier understood, and of such as the combustions effected by the intervention of iron furnish the type of. Lavoisier's successors, Liebig among them, tried to find reactions conformed to this type. Their attempts were unsuccessful, but they had the happy result of revealing, if not the real function of iron in the blood, at least that of the red matter in which it is fixed.

The question of the presence of iron in the coloring matter of the blood gave rise to long discussions. Vauquelin denied it. He made the mistake of looking for iron in the form of a known compound, in direct combination with the blood, while later researches have shown that it is found almost exclusively in the red matter that tinges the globules, in a complicated combination that escapes the ordinary tests; or, according to a usual method of expression, it is dissimulated. Liebig also failed to find this combination, and it was not till 1864 that Hoppe-Seyler succeeded in obtaining it pure and crystallized. But Liebig had already perceived its essential properties, and was able to point out approximately its functions as early as 1845; yet the single fact that there was no assimilation possible between this substance and the salts of iron, cut this question off into a kind of negative suspense. Different from these compounds, it could not behave like them, and accomplish slow combustions of the same type. It is a remarkable fact, and one that illustrates well how iron preserves through all its vicissitudes some trace of its fundamental property of favoring the action of oxygen on substances, that this composition, so special and so different from the salts of iron, behaves nearly as they do. While it is not of itself an energetic combustible, it is, according to Liebig's expression, "a transporter of oxygen"--a luminous view, which the future was destined to confirm. Although the transportation is not produced by the mechanism supposed by Liebig, but by another, the general result is very much the same from the point of view of the physiology of the blood. The coloring matter of the blood conveyed by the globules fixes oxygen in contact with the pulmonary air, and distributes it as it passes through the capillaries upon the tissues. The globule of blood brings nothing else and distributes nothing else, contrary to the opinion that had been held before. The theory of slow combustion effected through iron, while not absolutely contradicted in principle, was not entirely confirmed in detail, so far as concerned iron, or the more prominently ferruginous tissue.

No search was made for other tissues or organs presenting more favorable conditions, for no others were known that had iron in themselves. The liver and the spleen were supposed to receive it from the blood under the complicated form in which it exists there, or under some equivalent form. It was not, therefore, supposed till within a very few years that the two conditions were realized in any organ that were required to secure a slow combustion by iron--that is, combinations resembling ferrous and ferric salts with a weak acid and a source of oxygen. The doubt has been resolved by recent studies. The liver fulfils the requirement. It contains iron existing under forms precisely comparable to the ferrous and ferric compounds, and is washed by the blood which carries oxygen in a state of simple solution in its plasma and of loose combination in its globules. Thus all the conditions necessary for the production of slow combustion are gathered here, and we can not doubt that it takes place. A new function is therefore assigned to the liver, and it becomes one of the great furnaces of the organism.

Compounds of iron are so abundant in the ground and the water that we need not be surprised when we find them in various parts of plants, and particularly in the green parts. Their habitual presence does not, however, authorize the conclusion that this metal is necessary to the support and development of vegetable life. Some substances, evidently indifferent, foreign, and even injurious, if they exist abundantly in a soil, may be drawn into roots through the movement of the sap, and fix themselves in various organs. This occurs with copper in certain exceptional circumstances when the soil is saturated with its compounds, and if such a condition should be found to be repeated over a large extent of country, we might be led, by analysis alone of its vegetable productions, to the false conclusion that copper was an essential or even necessary constituent of them. But the value of the part performed by an element can not be determined by analysis alone. Direct proofs are necessary for that, methodical and comparative experiments in cultivation in mediums artificially deprived or furnished with the element the importance of which we wish to estimate. This has been done for combinations of iron, and the utility of that metal, especially to the higher plants, has been made thereby to appear.

If iron is absent from the nutritive medium the plant will wither. If we sprout seeds in a solution from which this metal has been carefully excluded, the development will follow its regular course as long as the plant is in the condition properly called that of germination, or while it does not have to draw anything from the soil. The stem rises and the first leaves are formed as usual. But all these parts will continue pale, and the green matter, the granulation of chlorophyll, will not appear. Now, if we add a small quantity of salt of iron to the ground in which the roots are planted, or a much-diluted solution is sprinkled on the leaves and the stem, the chlorotic plant will recover its health and take on its normal coloration. Experiments of this sort make well manifest that iron is necessary to green plants, and they show, besides, the bearing of its action, and that what is most special and most characteristic in the phenomena of vegetable life may be traced exactly to the organization of that green matter. It was long thought that if iron was necessary for the formation of chlorophyll, it was because it had a part in its constitution. We know now that this is not so. The metal does nothing but accompany the chlorophyll in the granulation in which it is found.

The influence which iron exerts in the development of the lower plants, like the muscidenes, was illustrated with great precision in a study made about thirty years ago by M. Raulin, who experimented with the common mold (_Aspergillus niger_), to determine the coefficient of importance of all the elements that have a part in its vegetation. When the iron was removed from a medium that had been shown capable of giving a maximum crop of that mold, the plants languished, and the return fell off immediately to one third. Estimating the quantity of metal that produces this effect, it was found that the addition of one part of iron was sufficient to determine the production of a weight of plant nearly nine hundred times as great. The suppression of the iron further caused an irreparable loss, for when it was sought to remedy the wilting of the plants by restoring the iron which had been taken from the medium--an experiment which had been successful with higher plants--the attempt was a failure, and the plants could not be prevented from perishing.

These facts are full of interest in themselves, and they further show well the necessity or utility of iron in plant life, but they teach us no more. They reveal nothing of the mechanism of the action, and if we wish to penetrate further in the matter we always have to turn to animal physiology.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue des Deux Mondes._

THE MALAY LANGUAGE.

BY R. CLYDE FORD,

PROFESSOR OF GERMAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE, ALBION COLLEGE.

A gentleman who had lived for several years among the Indians of the Canadian northwest said that he went among them believing they were an untutored race. But when they told him of a dozen kinds of berries growing in a locality where he knew but two, brought him flowers he could not find after careful search, and around their council fires showed as deep an insight into the mysteries of life as the _savants_ of his university, then he concluded they could no longer be called untutored.

And why should they be? Is there no culture or civilization outside of the enlightenment of Europe or America? And because a civilization does not exactly fit the grooves in which most of the world has moved, may it not be a real civilization for all that? If such is possible, then we vote the Malays a cultured people. Of course, their culture is not like our own; it knows no railroads, no telegraphs, boasts of no intricate political machinery, has no complicated social despotisms. Native princes rule for the most part over peaceful states, and politics means no more than the regulation of quiet village life. But what need of railroads, when the rivers are avenues of trade and communication? Why telegraphs, when the world is bounded by the jungle horizon? Or why, in short, severe civil and social enactments, when the common _Wahlspruch_ of life is, "Fear disgrace rather than death"? Such a civilization, we admit, is a humble one; but it also has the advantage of being a happy one. And where contentment dwells, where honesty prevails, where the home is a stronghold, there are culture and civilization, even though they may not coincide with our own.

The Malays are not barbarians, and their language by its grace and adaptability has shown its right to be. To-day it is the mother tongue of more than forty millions of people, and the _lingua franca_ of Chinamen, Hindus, European, and natives. It is spoken from Madagascar to the distant islands of the Pacific, and from the Philippines to Australia. With it one can barter in Celebes and sell in Java; converse with a sultan in Sumatra or a Spaniard in Manila. Moreover, it is soft and melodious, rich in expression, poetical in idiom, and simple in structure--a language almost without grammar and yet of immense vocabulary, with subtle distinctions and fine gradations of thought and meaning; a language that sounds in one's ears long after _Tanah Malayu_ and the coral islands and the jungle strand have sunk into hazy recollection, just as they once dropped out of sight behind one's departing ship.

Malay is written in the Arabic character, which was adopted with Mohammedanism, probably in the thirteenth century. Anciently, the Malays used a writing of their own, but it is not yet clearly settled what it was. There are now thirty-four characters employed, each varying in form, according as it is isolated, final, medial, or initial. Naturally, the Arabic influence over the language has been a marked one; the priest who dictates in the religion of a people is a molder and shaper of language. We have only to recall the Catholic Church and the influence of the Latin tongue in the mouths of her priests to know that this is so. Many Arabic words and phrases have been adopted, but more in the language of literature than in that of everyday speech. A large number of expressions of court and royalty, and terms of law and religion, are Arabic; also the names of months, days, and many articles of commerce and trade; nevertheless, the language of common speech is still Malay.

Another influence, also, has been felt in the Malay--that of the Sanskrit language. The presence of many Sanskrit words has caused some very ingenious theories to be constructed in proof that the Malays were of Indian origin, and such word fragments the survival of the primitive tongue. Such theories, however, have not stood the test of philology, and the fact still remains that the language is essentially unique, with an origin lost in the darkness of remote antiquity. However, Sanskrit influence has been much greater, and has penetrated much deeper into the elemental structure of the language than the Arabic. In fact, the aboriginal language, before it felt the animating spirit of the Aryan tongue, must have been a barren one, the language of a primitive man, a fisherman, a hunter, a careless tiller of the soil. As Maxwell says in his Manual of the Malay Language, the Sanskrit word _hala_ (plow) marks a revolution in Malayan agriculture and, one may say further, Malayan civilization. What changed the methods of cultivating the soil, changed the people themselves. It is probable that this change came through contact with people to whom Sanskrit was a vernacular tongue, but whether through conquest by the sword or by religion is hard to tell. Perhaps it was by both. At any rate, it was deep and strong, and left a lasting impression on the language. Sanskrit names fastened on trees, plants, grain, fruits, household and agricultural implements, parts of the body, articles of commerce, animals, metals and minerals, time and its division and measurement, family relationships, abstract conceptions, warfare, and fundamental ideas of religion and superstition. Such a conquest must have been an early and tremendous one.

Strangely enough, Malay is almost a grammarless tongue. It has no proper article, and its substantives may serve equally well as verbs, being singular or plural, and entirely genderless. However, adjectives and a process of reduplication often indicate number, and gender words are added to nouns to make sex allusions plain. Whatever there is of declension is prepositional as in English, and possessives are formed by putting the adjectives after the noun as in Italian. Nouns are primitive and derivative, the derivations being formed by suffixes or prefixes, or both, and one's mastery of the language may be gauged by the idiomatic way in which he handles these _Anhängsel_. Adjectives are uninflected.

The use of the pronouns involves an extensive knowledge of Oriental etiquette--some being used by the natives among one another, some between Europeans and natives, some employed when an inferior addresses a superior and _vice versa_, some used only when the native addresses his prince or sovereign; and, last of all, some being distinctly literary, and never employed colloquially. Into this maze one must go undaunted, and trust to time and patience to smooth out difficulties.

Verbs, like nouns, are primitive and derivative, with some few auxiliaries and a good many particles which are suffixed or prefixed to indicate various states and conditions. These things are apt to be confusing, and when the student learns that a verb may be past, present, or future without any change in form, he does not know whether to congratulate himself or not. Prepositions, too, are many and expressive; conjunctions, some colloquial, some pedantic.

We now come to a peculiarity which Malay has in common with other Indo-Chinese languages--the "numeral co-efficients," as Maxwell calls them, which are always employed with a certain class of objects, just as we say "head" of horses, "sail" of ships, etc. They are very many as compared with English, and very idiomatic in their use. For instance, the Malay says, "Europeans, three _persons_," "cats, four _tails_," "ships, five _fruits_," "cocoanuts, three _seeds_," "spears, two _stems_," "planks, five _pieces_," "houses, two _ladders_," and so on to fifteen or twenty different classes of articles or objects. By some this has been regarded as a peculiarity of the languages of southeastern Asia; but the same thing may be noticed in the Indian languages of our own continent.

As a language Malay is easily learned and has much to repay for so doing. It is full of wonders and surprises--among other things is the natural home of euphemism, where a spade is called anything but a spade. For instance, to die is beautifully expressed in Malay as a return to the mercy of Allah. The language is decidedly rich in poetical expression and imagery. A neighbor is one whom you permit to ascend the ladder of your cottage, and your friend is a sharer of your joys and sorrows. Interest is the flower of money, a spring is an eye of water, the sun the eye of day, and a policeman all eyes. A walk is a stroll to eat the wind, a man drunk is one who rides a green horse, and a coward a duck without spurs. A flatterer is one who has sugar cane on his lips, a sharper is a man of brains, a fool a brain-lacker.

In his proverbs also the Malay shows a matchless use of metaphor and imagery, his words having the softness of the jungle breeze, and at the same time the grimness of the jungle shades. Nowhere does the nature of his race or the peculiar genius of his language show out better than in these terse, pithy sayings which the Malay uses to sweeten his speech or lend effectiveness to it. The real Malay is a creature of the forest or the sea, whence he draws his livelihood, and it is but natural that he should envelop his daily and perhaps dangerous life with homely philosophy. He loves the freedom which he enjoys; take him away from it and he eats his heart out in homesickness. "Though you feed a jungle fowl from a golden plate, it will return to the jungle again." In his humble life he has discovered that blood, be it good or bad, counts for something, and he thinks of the forest lairs; "a kitten and small, but a tiger's cub." He is beset with dangers by sea and land; often he is between the devil and the deep. "One may escape the tiger, and fall into the jaws of the crocodile." He recognizes the inevitable, and draws what consolation he can. "When the prow is wrecked the shark gets his fill"--a very stoical recognition of ill winds. "For fear of the ghost he hugs the corpse," is often the solution of his dilemma. Sometimes he indulges in drollery, but is never unphilosophical. "To love one's children, one must weep for them now and then; to love one's wife, one must leave her now and then." The language is full of such expressions; they are the natural products of the speech of a poetical and Nature-loving folk. Without attempting a classification we give a few of the most characteristic proverbs, drawing largely on a collection made in the Malay Peninsula by W. E. Maxwell, at one time British resident there:

Will the crocodile respect the carcass?
Follow your heart, death; follow your feelings, destruction.
You find grasshoppers where you find a field.
Earth does not become grain.
Don't grind pepper for a bird on the wing.
The flower comes, age comes.
When the father is spotted, the son is spotted.
The plant sprouts before it climbs.
When he can't wring the ear, he pulls the horn.
The creel says the basket is poorly made.
Ask from one who has,
Make vows at a shrine,
Sulk with him who loves you.
When the house is done the chisel finds fault.
As the crow goes back to his nest (no richer, no poorer).
Whoever eats chilies burns his mouth.
Because of the mouth the body comes to harm.
If you are at the river's mouth at nightfall, what's the use of
talking of return?
A broken thread may be mended, but charcoal never.
The pea forgets its pod.
As water rolls from a _kladi_ leaf.
A shipwrecked vessel may float again, a heart once broken is broken
forever.
It is a project, and the result with God.
He carries a torch in daylight.
A slave who does well is never praised; if he does badly, never
forgiven.
It rains gold afar, but stone at home.
What if you sit on a cushion of gold with an uneasy mind!
When money leaves, your friend goes.
If you dip your hand into the fish tub, go to the bottom.
Whoever digs a hole falls into it himself.
If your legs are long, have your blanket long.
Like a frog under a cocoanut shell, he thinks he sees the sky.
If you can't get rattan, bind with roots.
The plantain does not bear twice.
He sits like a cat, but leaps like a tiger.
The tortoise lays a thousand eggs and tells no one; the hen lays a
single egg and tells all the world.
Those will die of thirst who empty the jar when it thunders in a dry
time.
Handsome as a princess, poisonous as a snake.
Small as an ant, wise as a mouse-deer.

LIFE ON A SOUTH SEA WHALER.[13]

BY FRANK T. BULLEN.