Chapter V: Part 5

The natives who live near glaciers know that they advance and retreat, but the fact that the whole glacier is really a slowly flowing viscous mass--a sort of frozen but not immobile river--was only established by scientific observation in the last century. The frozen river is fed by the snow which falls on the higher mountain ridges, and is squeezed into the form of ice instead of snow powder by its own weight as it slips down the inclines, warmed by the unclouded sunshine. The big glaciers move much more rapidly (or perhaps one should say less slowly) in the middle than at the sides. The measurements which have been made differ in different glaciers and in different parts of the same glacier, and show smaller movement in winter than in summer. The advance of the sides is retarded, as in the case of an ordinary river of flowing water, by friction against the rocks, which enclose the glacier as its banks enclose a river. A good average case shows a flow downwards in summer of half a foot a day at the sides and a foot and a half in the middle. The distance below the snow-line to which the flowing glacier descends down a mountain gorge--before it melts away and becomes a river of liquid water--depends, as does the rate at which it moves, in the first place, on the temperature of the region and on the sharpness of the slope. A glacier will flow downwards (as will a lump of pitch) along a scarcely perceptible incline, but more slowly than down a steeper incline, and it will, consequently, get further down into the warm valley without altogether melting away when the slope is steep.

But apart from these considerations, the bigger and thicker (or deeper) the glacier, that is to say, the more snow which each year falls at its starting-place and goes to making it, the further down will it flow before melting away; and it is the heavy snowfall of many years ago or of a series of years long past which has to-day reached in the form of ice the lower end of the glacier. So, though the lower end of the glacier may melt more quickly if the valley has become hotter, yet the heavy snowfalls of fifty years ago may only now have reached the valley, and may quite counterbalance the melting action of the warmer summers. Or reverse conditions, namely, less snow and lower or unchanged temperature in the valley, may prevail.

The Government of India has lately established a definite survey and record of the movement of several Himalayan glaciers and of the variation in the distance to which their “snouts” descend into the valleys. Twelve glaciers were examined last year, and will be properly watched in future. The Yengutsa glacier has gained about two miles in length since Sir Martin Conway visited it in 1892; the great Hispar glacier has slightly retreated. The Hassanabad glacier three years ago increased its length by a rapid progress of the free “snout” of as much as six miles in three months, and is now no longer increasing or advancing! Many years ago it had reached its present position, and then retreated. The rock masses carried on the ice and left in great heaps at the point where the glacier melted away are known as terminal “moraines,” and often serve to show the position to which the snout of a glacier once extended--far below its present limit. A curious fact as to the increase and shrinkage of glaciers is that of two neighbouring glaciers, as in the case of the glacier Blanc and the glacier Noir in Dauphiné (France), one may be advancing whilst the other is in retreat. Further study and knowledge of the causes of these variations will throw important light on questions of general meteorology.

Although there is no evidence to lead us to suppose that existing glaciers are now actually in a condition of general retreat, leading to their ultimate disappearance, yet it is one of the most certain and interesting results of geological study that some hundred and fifty thousand years ago the northern hemisphere was far colder than it is now, owing partly to the same change in the inclination of the earth’s axis to which I alluded on a former page (p. 81) as affecting the orientation of ancient astronomical temples--a change which diminished, when at its extreme, the effective amount of heat received from the sun in these regions of the earth. The peculiar scratching, polishing, and erosion of rocks, the existence of moraines, and other evidence, prove that enormous glaciers covered the north of Europe, that England and Scotland were in large part covered by a great ice-sheet or glacier, and that the great valleys of Switzerland such as the Rhone Valley and the basin of the Lake of Geneva, were filled by enormous glaciers, which helped to mould and deepen the valleys. The present glaciers are truly the remnants or rootlets of those enormous masses of the glacial epoch. On such of the land surface as was not then covered by ice, existed the hairy elephant or Siberian mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, wild cattle, lions, bears, hyenas, and other animals now extinct in this part of the world. Man had made his appearance, hunted these animals, and lived in caves. His weapons and carvings and their bones tell us the story in no uncertain terms.

The biggest Swiss glaciers of to-day, compared to the great glacier of the Rhone Valley, of which they are but the highest tributaries, still surviving unmelted among the mountain-tops, are in size as a mountain freshet is to the great stream of Loch Lomond, or as the Serpentine in Hyde Park to the neighbouring Thames. Vast as was the great glacier of the Rhone Valley, and immense as has been the work done by water and ice in carving the great highway in the mountain-mass of Switzerland, it has all been effected since the date of the formation on the sea-bottom and the subsequent elevation of the strata which we call “the chalk”--a deposit which comes not very far down in the series of strata of the earth’s crust. Only 3,000ft. of deposit exist above it, whilst below it are more than 60,000ft. of water-deposited or “sedimentary” rocks. The huge Alps have risen since the date of the “chalk,” for we find strata containing marine shells of the Tertiary period at a height of 10,000ft. in those mountains. Where those shells now are was the bottom of the sea at a comparatively recent date, probably not more than fifty million years ago! And not only have the Alps been raised since then from the sea level to 15,000ft. (the height of Mont Blanc), but the huge mountain valleys and the great chasm of the Rhone Valley many miles wide, with its floor thousands of feet below the mountain ridges, have been scoured out. Deeper and wider it has gradually become as it has taken shape, whilst the mountain sides have been removed first by water and later by ice--by the great glacier consisting of solid ice, miles wide and a thousand and more feet in thickness. The water no longer fills the valley in solid form, but once again rushes along as an irresistible torrent, tearing and wearing the rock without rest or mercy, carrying it off by thousands of tons day by day, year by year, to the plains of Provence and the deep floor of the Mediterranean Sea.

The blue colour of the glacier ice--like that of pure water--is now known to be due to no impurity or admixture of other substances. It does not, as was supposed by Tyndall, owe its blueness to a dust of finest colourless particles as do blue smoke, the blue sky, and as do the blue eyes which have attracted the observation of naturalists (and others) in Ireland and the North of Europe. Water, whether liquid or solid, is blue, just as “blue copperas” is, or as “Prussian blue” is; but light must pass through some ten or twenty feet thickness of it to make the colour evident to our eyes. The green tint is due to an admixture of yellow, the exact cause of which is not quite easy to discover. Probably it is due to minute quantities of earthy matter mixed with the surface snow.

The pressing of the high-lying snow, so as to form solid ice or “glacier,” is concerned with the same property of snow as that which enables us to make snow “bind” into a snowball. You cannot make snowballs during very hard frost--the snow must be in air of a thawing temperature at the moment it is squeezed by the hand. The hand itself will not be warm enough to produce that temperature when the thermometer is below freezing-point. The snow commences to melt in the hand when one squeezes it, and then when the squeezing is stopped the water formed quickly freezes again and cements the snow particles together to form ice, enclosing innumerable minute bubbles. The heat of the sun and the pressure of the weight of the snow itself take the place in the mountains of the warmth and pressure of the human hand. The minute air bubbles make the newest glacier-ice white and opaque, especially when seen in a great mass; but gradually they get squeezed together, and the glacier ice becomes first “fibrous” in appearance, and then, after long years of pressure by its own weight, fairly clear. Ice in great masses has the properties of a viscous body, like pitch or soft sealing-wax, owing to the fact that wherever the solid mass breaks its particles melt a very little and then freeze again. Under increased pressure ice melts at a lower temperature than when it is not subjected to pressure. When the pressure is removed the water freezes again. Thus crushed ice or snow can be put into a “squeeze-mould” and pressed, so as to form a solid mass of ice of any shape you may choose. Four or five slabs of ice, placed one over the other, very soon become, owing to this property, one continuous solid mass. White glacier ice is so full of air bubbles as to be comparable in structure to sponge, or, more closely, to cork. A cube of such ice exposes, owing to its rough air-hole pitted surface, a much larger surface of contact to the atmosphere than does a cube of perfectly smooth clear ice. Consequently in a warm room or chamber the white ice melts much more quickly than does the clear, and hence you should choose clear ice rather than white ice if you wish for a block which will last.

Before leaving the glaciers, let me briefly relate an incident arising from their slow but regular downward flow to the region where they melt away and deposit, as a terminal moraine, the burden of rocks they have received years before in regions far above. A young man of five-and-twenty, on his honeymoon, visited the Alps, and ventured alone on to a glacier. He fell into a deep “crevasse,” or ice-fissure, and his body was not recovered. The exact spot where he fell into the ice-chasm was recognised, and the mountain-folk, who knew their glacier and its rate of movement well, told the broken-hearted young widow that it would take thirty years before that region of the glacier would have moved so far downwards as to reach the lowest limit, and in due course melt away. She haunted the glacier in which her young husband was entombed year after year, and at last, when she was now grey-headed and withered by time, that special tract of ice had descended so far, and was so near the thawing, thinned-out margin of the glacier that they were able to break into it with axe and pole. Then she, an old woman, had a wonderful experience. They led her to the glacier’s edge. Her young husband, preserved these thirty years in the ice, which had melted around him and re-frozen, lay there unchanged. His features were not marred by the lapse of years, nor was his clothing rent or injured. He seemed as one asleep, resting after a long day’s climb, and she, poor soul, had, during a blissful interval, the conviction that all those weary years of waiting were but a long, bad dream, that she, too, still was young, and was waking, as she had loved to do long years ago, in time to see him lift his lids and smile.

39. _Votes for Women_

Now that so many people placidly accept the notion that women are to have votes in the election of members of Parliament, one is tempted to ask whether science has any facts to put forward which should be considered before so great a change in our national organisation is made. There are various interesting facts as to the relations of males and females in the animal world and as to the relative strength and activity of the sexes--which are sometimes cited as arguments in the matter. Speaking generally, it is clear enough that among animals the female is endowed with qualities which bear exclusively upon her function as the guardian of the eggs or germs of a new generation. She nourishes those germs at the expense of her own substance before birth, feeds them, tends them and protects them--after birth. The male in many cases contributes to the feeding and protection of the young, but is as often as not quite unconcerned with such matters. In the higher animals the male is far more powerful than the female, and fights with other males both for the possession of a mate or a harem, and for the undisturbed occupation of feeding grounds for himself and family.

Among lower animals there are curious cases of the greater strength and size of the female. Thus, among spiders, the female is nearly twice as bulky as the male. She makes, in many cases, a nest ready for her young, and is visited there by the wandering irresponsible male, who, in spite of great danger to himself, is irresistibly attracted to seek a brief caress from the terrible spideress. She is terrible, not only on account of her bulk, but because she makes a rule of killing, and sucking the blood of, her infatuated admirer unless he is sufficiently alert and agile to escape from her side more quickly than he came to it. The courtship of spiders is a very interesting bit of natural history. The males execute a sort of dance, and are strangely excited by the vibrating note of a tuning fork. Two American naturalists, Mr. and Mrs. Peckham, and also Dr. McCook, have studied this subject in great detail.

A strange-looking, dark green worm, as big as a walnut, with a ribbon-like trunk six or eight inches in length attached to its mouth, lives in holes in the rocks in the Mediterranean. A similar worm has been found off the Norwegian coast. Fanciful names are given by zoologists to these two worms--the first is called Bonellia, the second Hamingia. It does no harm to cite their names, and I do so with an apology to those who do not like names. These goodly sized worms are females, only females. For years the corresponding male was unknown. At last a minute creature one-eighth of an inch in length, like a tiny fragment of green thread, was found crawling about on and into these big green Bonellias. Its structure when it was examined with the microscope proved it to be the adult male of the worm on which it was crawling. It was so insignificant and minute as to escape all observation except that of a trained naturalist searching for it with a magnifying glass. Some seven or eight of these diminutive males are found on one female, infesting her as fleas infest a mouse, and of about the same relative size. The microscopic husband of the Norwegian Hamingia it was my good fortune to discover many years ago, when I was dredging marine animals in the deep waters of the Stavanger Fjord.

So there is nothing in the eternal fitness of things proclaiming the male as the necessary superior of the female throughout Nature. The fact is that the question of equality and of general superiority and inferiority has no place in regard to male and female from a naturalist’s point of view. It is true that women are so very much less endowed with muscular strength than men that practically every woman is inferior to every man in this respect. It is also true that woman’s brain is smaller than man’s, and that apart from mere size, the intellectual activity and capacity of women, by whatever test you examine it, is less than that of man. When exceptional cases on both sides are excluded, the definite intellectual inferiority of the average woman, as compared with the average man, is established as a fact. The observations of those concerned in the education of young men and young women side by side confirm this, and it is further demonstrated by a consideration of the intellectual performances of average men and average women. That, at any rate, is my own experience as a University teacher. But women, on the other hand, fill a place in human life as mothers, and administrators of detail, and as companions, in which man, by the nature of things, cannot compete with them at all.

At the house of the late Sir James Knowles, some twenty-five years ago, when discussing the relative value of the physical and intellectual capacities of the men as compared with the women of the English working class, Mr. Gladstone (at that time the head of the Government) said to me, “I am of opinion that the relative value of a man and a woman is in all classes of society about the same as it was in my grandfather’s time in Jamaica when they purchased slaves. They gave £120 for a man and £80 for a woman, and that is a fair measure of their relative value all the world over.” It is necessary to remember that Mr. Gladstone was not estimating the ultimate value of woman in human life when he said this. He would, I think, have considered, as I do, that it is absurd to attempt to estimate that or to raise a discussion as to general superiority and inferiority in reference to the male and the female of the human species. They are creatures as necessary one as the other, differing from one another profoundly and excelling one another in diverse qualities and capacities. Without this complementary division of fitness and quality our life would be a monotone robbed of the infinite variety which characterises humanity. What Mr. Gladstone estimated as being less by one-third in women than in men is power--work-value--whether physical or intellectual. I think Mr. Gladstone’s estimate must be admitted as true.

But I do not for a moment say that when this inferior intellectual and physical capacity of woman is admitted the question is settled as to whether women should vote for the election of representatives to carry on the affairs of the country. The affairs of the country! They are, in the first place, the protection of person and property by the law, which must be upheld by force if necessary; then defence against foreign aggression, also a matter of force; and, further, the education and training not only of children but of the ripe youth of the country--a matter of intellect--which also has a weighty influence in the making of wise laws. Then there is the devising of weapons and means of defence by land and by sea, as well as the discovery and application of knowledge in regard to disease, both of mind and body, for the benefit of the community. And there will soon be a good deal more!

It does not necessarily follow, because women cannot themselves do some of these things at all, and for the others are less able than men, that they should not give a vote in electing the men who are to attend to them. The only question is, Would it make life better for both women and men were they allowed to do so?

The argument that the paying of taxes on men’s property qualifies men to give a vote, and therefore the paying of taxes on women’s property should, _ipso facto_, entitle women to give a vote, is fallacious, because the paying of taxes is not the reason or determining cause of men having a vote, but only a subsidiary test or qualification which might be abolished or modified. The property of minors pays the tax, but it is not proposed on that account that children should vote. The property qualifications in use at present are merely a method for excluding certain men, and we might have an intellectual qualification or a muscular qualification for the same purpose. Indeed, we do at present exclude male imbeciles and those who are immature. The reason for extending the Parliamentary vote to a larger and larger body of the male population has been to secure the assent of the strength and manhood of the country to the laws and public acts of the Government, and to ensure its willing participation in that maintenance of the central Government’s decisions by physical force, which is the ultimate and by no means very remote method by which they are maintained. It does not seem to be likely to be an improvement on our present system that women, who must always be regarded as specially privileged because of their physical weakness, should nevertheless be allowed to influence by the mere number of their votes the decision of questions in which the employment of the physical strength of men acting as defenders of our territory, guardians of the peace, or ministers of the law, is the essential condition of an effective result following on such decision.

To a naturalist human population does not appear as a number of units of which a few more are female than male--but rather as a series of families, consisting of men, women, and children, bound together by a variety of reciprocal services, dependent one on another, ordered and disciplined to a distribution of functions and duties by the tradition and experience of ages. The notion that the paterfamilias is the rightful chief of his wife and children, and that through him they are represented, and should be content to be represented, in the local and greater State Government--is one of long standing in civilised Europe. The powers of the paterfamilias have been gradually limited in the course of the development of social life since the young men and the old bachelors, too, have been given a share of power in the State: but the recent proposal to break the fabric of his household by giving the Parliamentary franchise to women is so sudden and strange a notion that he seems not to have realised what it means.

The apathy which many men exhibit in regard to this proposal is as remarkable as the amiable courtesy with which others assent to it rather than “disoblige a lady.” Looking at the proposal not as a question of justice, which really has nothing to do with it, but in reference to the inquiry as to whether it is likely, if carried, to increase the happiness and prosperity of the community, I must say that, so far as the natural history of man gives indications, it seems to me that if women acquired the Parliamentary franchise and made active use of it, they would be led into a new attitude of independence and separation from the men and from the family group to which they are by birth or alliance attached. I fear that the great business of making the nest beautiful, producing and tending the young, nursing the sick, helping the aged, consoling the afflicted, rewarding the brave, of dancing and singing and creating gaiety within the charmed circle where political contests and affairs of State are of no account, would be neglected and without honour. In the end these amenities of life would probably fall into the hands of commercial companies and be sent out at so much a head--imported from Germany. Woman would not be the gainer, for she can only gain by continuing to astonish man by all she does for his enchantment and delight, to serve him and to crown his life--she will only suffer by becoming “independent.” The movement which is supposed to lead to a higher development of womanhood, and consists in women mobbing people on their doorsteps, waving flags and shouting at other people’s meetings, and struggling in the arms of policemen, seems to be inconsistent with a development in the direction which has hitherto been popular and successful in the progress of man from savagery to decency. It is difficult to suppose that men will really be so blind to the facts of the real importance and true value of women as to allow this movement to succeed whilst they look on with vague incredulity as to its being anything more than a huge joke.

There is, too, finally, one serious warning to be derived from the ascertained facts of human physiology and psychology. The immutable task, the sacred destiny, of women is to become the mothers of new generations. Nothing which is likely to interfere with or lessen the respect and veneration due to women in view of this tremendous natural determination of their instincts and aspirations should be lightly sanctioned by men so long as they have the power of deciding the matter. There is good and sufficient ground for fearing that the new status of women which would be established by their entry on an equal footing with man into the arena of political struggle and public life, would injuriously affect in a majority or large minority of cases that mode of life and economy of strength which is necessary for those who must give so much to the great and exacting demands of maternity. The gratification of the whim of a few earnest but injudicious women would be an altogether insufficient justification for the injury of the “physique” of women in general by the strain of public competition with men, and for the widespread development in women of an increased habit of self-assertion and self-sufficiency--habits which must make them unwilling to accept their natural duties as wives and mothers--and must make men equally unwilling to promote them to these honours and privileges.

40. _Tobacco and the History of Smoking_

A proposal is before Parliament to prevent little boys from “smoking” in public places. Little girls are, as the bill at present stands, not to be interfered with. Perhaps this is because they are not to have votes when they grow up, and so they may do as they like.

Apart from the question as to whether the smoking of tobacco is injurious to the health or not, there are many curious questions which arise from time to time as to the history and use of tobacco. I have no doubt that for children the use of tobacco is injurious, and I am inclined to think that it is only free from objection in the case of strong, healthy men, and that even they should avoid any excess, and should only smoke after meals, and never late at night. The strongest man, who can tolerate a cigar or a pipe after breakfast, lunch, and dinner, may easily get into a condition of “nerves” when even one cigarette acts as a poison and causes a slowing of the heart’s action.

A curious mistake, almost universally made, is that of supposing that the oily juice which forms in a pipe or at the end of a cigar is “nicotine,” the chief nerve-poison of tobacco. As a matter of fact, this juice, though it contains injurious substances, contains little or no “nicotine.” Nicotine is a colourless volatile liquid, which is vapourised and carried along with the smoke; it is not deposited in the pipe or cigar-end except in very small quantity. It is the chief agent by which tobacco acts on the nervous system, and through that on the heart--the agent whose effects are sought and enjoyed by the lover of tobacco. A single drop of pure nicotine will kill a dog. Nicotine has no aroma, and has nothing to do with the flavour of tobacco, which is due to very minute quantities of special volatile bodies similar to those which give a scent to hay.

Most people are acquainted with the three ways of “taking tobacco”--that of taking its smoke into the mouth, and more or less into the lungs, that of chewing the prepared leaf, and that of snuffing up the powdered leaf into the nose, whence it ultimately passes to the stomach. A fourth modification of the snuffing and chewing methods exists in what is called the “snuff stick.” According to the novelist, Mrs. Hodgson Burnett, the country women in Kentucky use a short stick, like a brush, which they dip into a paperfull of snuff; they then rub the powder on to the gums. Snuff-taking has almost disappeared in “polite society” in this country within the past twenty years, but snuffing and chewing are still largely practised by those whose occupation renders it impossible or dangerous for them to carry a lighted pipe or cigar--such as sailors and fishermen and workers in many kinds of factories and engine-rooms.

One of the most curious questions in regard to the history of tobacco is that as to whether its use originated independently in Asia or was introduced there by Europeans. It is largely cultivated and used for smoking throughout the East from Turkey to China--including Persia and India on the way--and special varieties of tobacco, the Turkish, the Persian, and the Manilla are well known, and only produced in the East, whilst special forms of pipe, such as the “hukah” or “hooka,” the “hubble-bubble,” and the small Chinese pipe are distinctively Oriental. Not only that, but the islanders of the Far East are inveterate smokers of tobacco, and some of them have peculiar methods of obtaining the smoke, as, for instance, certain North Australians who employ “a smoke-box” made of a joint of bamboo. Smoke is blown into this receptacle by a faithful spouse, who closes its opening with her hand and presents the boxful of smoke to her husband. He inhales the smoke and hands the bamboo joint back to his wife for refilling. The Asiatic peoples are great lovers of tobacco, and it is certain that in Java they had tobacco as early as 1601, and in India in 1605. The hookah (a pipe, with water-jar attached, through which the smoke is drawn in bubbles) was seen and described by a European traveller in 1614. Should we not, therefore, suppose that in Asia they had tobacco and practised smoking before it was introduced from America into the West of Europe? It seems unlikely that Western nations should have given this luxury to the East when practically everything else of the kind has come from the East to Europe--the grape and wine made from it, the orange, lemon, peach, fig, spices of all kinds, pepper and incense. Yet it is certain that the Orientals got the habit of smoking tobacco from us, and not we from them.

Incredible as it seems, the investigations of the Swiss botanist, De Candolle (see his delightful History of Cultivated Plants--a wonderful volume, published for 5s., in the International Scientific Series) and of Colonel Prain, formerly in India, now Director of Kew, have rendered it quite certain that the Orientals owe tobacco and the habit of smoking entirely to the Europeans, who brought it from America, as early as 1558. In the year 1560 Jean Nicot, the French Ambassador, saw the plant in Portugal, and sent seeds to France to Catherine de’ Medici. It was named Nicotiana in his honour. But the introduction into Europe of the practice of smoking is chiefly due to the English. In 1586 Ralph Lane, the first Governor of Virginia, and Sir Francis Drake brought over the pipes of the North American Indians and the tobacco prepared by them. The English enthusiasm for tobacco smoking, “drinking a pipe of tobacco,” as it was at first called, was extraordinary both for its sudden development, its somewhat excessive character, and the violent antagonism which it aroused, and, as we learn from Mr. Frederic Harrison, still arouses. It was at once called “divine tobacco” by the poet Spenser, and “our holy herb nicotian” by William Lilly, and not long afterwards denounced as a devilish poison by King James. The reason why the English had most to do with the introduction of smoking is that the inhabitants of South America did not smoke pipes, but chewed the tobacco, or took it as snuff, and less frequently smoked it as a cigar. From the Isthmus of Panama as far as Canada and California, on the other hand, the custom of smoking pipes was universal, and wonderful carved pipes of great variety were found in use by the natives of these regions, and also dug up in very ancient burial grounds. Hence the English colonists of Virginia were the first to introduce pipe-smoking to Europe.

The Portuguese had discovered the coasts of Brazil as early as 1500, and it is they who carried tobacco to their possessions and trading ports in the Far East--to India, Java, China, and Japan, so that in less than a hundred years it was well established in those countries. Probably it went about the same time from Spain and England to Turkey, and from there to Persia, and rapidly developed not only special new forms of pipe (the hookah) for its consumption, but also within a few years special varieties of the plant itself. These were raised by cultivation, and have formerly been erroneously regarded as native Asiatic species of tobacco plant.

The definite proof of the fact that tobacco was in this way introduced from Western Europe to the Oriental nations is, first, that Asiatics have no word for it excepting a corruption of the original American name tabaco, tobacco, or tambuco: it is certain that it is not mentioned in Chinese writings nor represented in their pottery before the year 1680. In the next place, it appears that careful examination of old herbariums and of the records of early travellers who knew plants well and recorded all they saw, proves that no species of tobacco is a native of Asia. There are fifty species of tobacco, but all are American excepting the Nicotiana suaveolens, which is a native of the Australian continent, and the Nicotiana fragrans, which is a native of the Isle of Pines, near New Caledonia.

Forty-eight different species of tobacco (that is to say, of the genus Nicotiana) are found in America. Of these Nicotiana tabacum is the only one which has been extensively cultivated. It has been found wild in the State of Ecuador, but was cultivated by the natives both of North and South America before the advent of Europeans. It seems probable that all the tobaccos grown in the Old World for smoking or snuffing are only cultivated varieties--often with very special qualities--of the N. tabacum, with the exception of the Shiraz tobacco plant, which, though called N. persica, is of Brazilian origin, and the N. rustica, of Linnæus, a native of Mexico, which has a yellow flower, and yields a coarse kind of tobacco. This has been cultivated in South America and also in Asia Minor. But tobaccos so different as the Havannah, the Maryland and Virginian, the incomparable Latakia, the Manilla, and the Roumelian or Turkish--all come from culture-varieties of the one great species, Nicotiana tabacum.

The treatment of tobacco-leaf to prepare it for use in smoking, snuffing, and chewing requires great skill and care, and is directed by the tradition and experience of centuries. As is the case with “hay,” the dried tobacco-leaf undergoes a kind of fermentation, and, in fact, more than one such change. The cause of the fermentation is a micro-organism which multiplies in the dead leaf and causes chemical changes, just as the yeast organism grows in “wort” and changes it to “beer.” It is said that the flavour and aroma of special tobaccos is due to special kinds of ferment, and that by introducing the Havannah ferment or micro-organism to tobacco-leaves grown away from Cuba, you can give them much of the character of Havannah tobacco! A very valuable kind of tobacco is the Roumelian, from which the best Turkish cigarettes are made. It has a very delicate flavour, and very small quantities of an aromatic kind prepared from a distinct variety of tobacco plant grown near Ephesus and on the Black Sea (probably a cultivated variety of Nicotiana rustica) are judiciously blended with it. This blending, and the use of the very finest qualities of tobacco-leaf, are essential points in the production of the best Turkish cigarettes. The so-called “Egyptian” cigarettes are made from less valuable Turkish tobacco, with the addition of an excess of the aromatic kind. It is a mistake to suppose that opium or other matters are used to adulterate tobacco. The only proceeding of the kind which occurs is the mixing of inferior, cheap, and coarse-flavoured tobaccos with better kinds. Water and also starch are used fraudulently to increase the weight of leaf-tobacco. But skilful “blending” is a legitimate and most important feature in the manufacture of cigars, cigarettes, and smoking mixtures.

The first “smoking” of tobacco seen by Europeans was that of the Caribs or Indians of San Domingo. They used a very curious sort of tubular pipe, shaped like the letter Y. The diverging arms were placed one up each nostril, and the end of the stem held in the smoke of burning tobacco-leaves, which was thus “sniffed up” into the nose. The North American Indians, on the other hand, had pipes very similar to those still in use. The natives of South America smoked the rolled leaf (cigars), chewed it, and took it as snuff.

It has been suggested that in Asia smoking of some kind of dried herbs may have been a habit before tobacco was introduced--since even Herodotus states that the Scythians were accustomed to inhale the smoke of burning weeds, and showed their enjoyment of it by howling like dogs! But investigation does not support the view that anything corresponding to individual or personal “smoking” existed. “Bang” or “hashish” (the Indian hemp) was not “smoked,” but swallowed as a kind of paste before the introduction of tobacco-smoking in the East--as we may gather from the stories of the “Arabian Nights”--although the practice of smoking hemp (which is the chief constituent of “bang”) and also of smoking the narcotic herb “henbane,” has now been established. Opium was, and is, eaten in India, not “smoked.” The “smoking” of opium is a Chinese invention of the eighteenth century.

The Oriental hookah suggests a history anterior to the use of tobacco, but nothing is known of it. The word signifies a cocoanut-shell, and is applied to the jar (sometimes actually a cocoanut) containing perfumed water, through which smoke from a pipe, fixed so as to dip into the water, is drawn by a long tube with mouthpiece. It seems possible that this apparatus was in use for inhaling perfume by means of bubbles of air drawn through rose-water or such liquids, before tobacco-smoking was introduced, and that the tobacco-pipe and the perfume-jar were then combined. But travellers before the year 1600 do not mention the existence of the hookah in Persia or in India, though as soon as tobacco came into use this apparatus is described by Floris, in 1614, and by Olearius, in 1633, and by all subsequent travellers.

The conclusion to which careful inquiry has led is that though various Asiatic races have appreciated the smoke of various herbs and enjoyed inhaling it from time immemorial, yet there was no definite “smoking” in earlier times. No pipes or rolled-up packets of dried leaves--to be placed in the mouth and sucked whilst slowly burning--were in use before the introduction of tobacco by Europeans, who brought the tobacco-plant from America and the mode of enjoying its smoke, and passed on its seeds to the people of Turkey, Persia, India, China, and Japan.

41. _Cruelty, Pain and Knowledge_

It is difficult to write or to read or even to think about “cruelty” and preserve one’s sober judgment and reason. Most people are upset by emotion when torture and the details of the infliction of pain are discussed. All the more must we remember that emotion is a powerful driving force, but a bad guide. Only true knowledge and sound reasoning can guide us aright.

An awful fact about the emotional state produced by witnessing or hearing about the agonies of human beings or of sentient animals is that to some people (actually very few and diminishing in number among civilised races) it is distinctly a source of pleasure, though to most of us it is intolerably painful. This fact forms one of the most difficult problems of psychology. It seems that just as there are people who enjoy seeing dangerous acrobatic performances or climbing themselves among ice and rocks at the risk of their lives, or reading of hairbreadth escapes, of bloody murders, of ghosts, and other horrors--all of which are repulsive to the majority--so there are some people who experience delicious shudderings--“des frissons exquis”--when they see a man or an animal in torture or read a description of such things. In the eighteenth century it was not unusual for a country cousin on a visit to London to be taken as a treat to see half a dozen men and boys hanged at Newgate, and then to complete the happy day by a visit to Bedlam to see the madmen flogged! Fortunately, public opinion and education seem to have been able actually to alter the operation of the emotions excited by these brutalities--so that to-day practically everyone in the Western States of Europe regards the unnecessary infliction of pain with horror and indignation, and is anxious to avoid witnessing pain, even in cases where it is a necessary evil.

It is a mistake to suppose that there is any tendency on the part of scientific men or medical men to be callous or indifferent to the infliction of pain. The surgeon sometimes has to inflict pain in order to prevent greater future pain or death--but he is not indifferent to the pain he causes. He is not even “cruel only to be kind”--but appears cruel to the unthinking because he has to give pain which he knows will save his patient from far greater pain, and he has to maintain a calm and determined attitude in order to help those around him to exercise self-control. The medical art is, above all things, an art of removing and abolishing pain, and its practitioners are all the more sensitive concerning pain because they know more and see more of it than other people, and make it their chief business to alleviate suffering.

Charles Darwin took a prominent part twenty-five years ago in urging the Government of the day not to make a law which would prevent physiologists and medical men from obtaining knowledge as to animal life and disease by experiment. The great naturalist was a great lover of animals and a most gentle and tender-hearted man. He wrote to me in 1870: “Experiment must, of course, be allowed for the progress of physiology and medicine, but not for damnable and detestable curiosity. I will write no more about it, or I shall not sleep to-night.” Mr. Darwin was alluding to horrible so-called “experiments” which in former days--especially in the latter part of the eighteenth century--were made by utterly irresponsible and ignorant amateurs, witnessed by fashionable ladies, and reported in the newspapers and letters of the day. It is these reckless and useless “experiments” which rightly excited horror and opposition a century ago, and were described by the name “vivisection.” We have to thank these blundering philosophers of the salons of a past age for the mistaken feeling with which some people regard the really valuable and careful investigations which are made by medical men at the present day, with the use of every precaution to prevent pain to the animals used.

The testing of drugs, the inoculation of parasitic disease, and the trial of different modes of removing or controlling the disease so inoculated, carried on by highly trained and learned men, who thoroughly know what they are about, and who communicate with one another from all parts of the world as to the progress they are making in curing or even abolishing diseases, such as diphtheria, cholera, sleeping sickness, and phthisis are very different from the impudent unscientific “experiments” of the days of Horace Walpole. The inquiries carried on in the modern laboratories of our great universities should not for a moment be confused with the horrors performed to glorify and show the superior cold-bloodedness of drawing-room pretenders to science, in those strange times.

I believe that most sensible people feel as Mr. Darwin felt, and I myself would certainly subscribe to what he wrote to me in the letter which I have quoted above. Amongst those who feel thus strongly on the subject there are some who can control their emotion and calmly consider whether the pain inflicted under any given circumstances is justifiable as leading to a great ultimate diminution of pain by the knowledge obtained. There are others who are constitutionally incapable of controlling their emotion in this matter. They hear dreadful stories of cruelty, and are so upset that they are incapable of ascertaining whether the stories are true or not. They are quite unfit to weigh the question as to whether the pain given in the case they hear of may or may not be a necessary step towards avoiding far greater pain in the future for thousands of human beings and sentient animals. Far be it from me to think harshly of these tender-hearted people, though their mistaken outcry may tend to stop the discovery of pain-saving and life-saving knowledge. I feel more sympathy with them than with those (happily rare) individuals who are really indifferent to seeing or giving bodily pain to men or to animals.

There is reason to hope that careful and well-considered statement of the facts will eventually enable many of those who are mentally unhinged by descriptions of pain and bloodshed to recognise that they have been deceived, partly by their own fancies and partly by the false statements of professional agitators. Unfortunately, there are always present in human society individuals who find it to their advantage to excite the minds of their more emotional fellow-citizens by tales of horror. The lust of such power--the power to lead or urge a large body of men driven by emotional excitement into violent action--has led from time to time to exaggeration, misrepresentation, and elaborate plot and perjury directed against a group of innocent or worthy people, whose proceedings were mysterious or misunderstood by the community at large. Thus, from time to time, the crowd has been infuriated and led to the murder of the Jews by agitators, who started the baseless story that the Jews had slain a Christian child, and used its blood at their feast of the Passover. Titus Oates and Lord George Gordon made use of the unreasoning emotion of the crowd in the same way. To a less serious extent the emotional unreasonableness of a number of men and women is being played upon at the present day by quite a large variety of agitators, would-be leaders of crusades and campaigns against the beneficent work of the physiological and medical laboratories of our universities and medical schools.

There are one or two other features about “cruelty” and the mental conditions leading to and arising from it, which, however uncanny and troubling, should be carefully considered when public opinion is roused in regard to its repression. Among these is the fact that the word is freely applied to the mere infliction of pain without consideration of the question as to whether there is a guilty mind determining it. Storms and frosts are called “cruel” by poetic license; but it is probably quite wrong to call a cat or a tiger cruel. These animals take pleasure in playing with their prey, as they would with an inanimate ball or mechanical toy. There is no reason to suppose that they are conscious of the infliction of pain or take pleasure in pain as pain. And so it must happen sometimes with thoughtless human beings who disregard the pain which they cause, when eagerly engaged in “sport” or in the pursuit of some all-absorbing and consuming purpose. The whole subject of cruelty is a distressing one, but should not on that account be misapprehended or dealt with wildly and blindly.

Twenty-five years ago a Royal Commission sat which was appointed to inquire as to what restrictions, if any, it was desirable to place upon the practice of making experiments on animals for physiological and medical purposes. As a result of its labours an Act of Parliament was passed which made definite regulations for the purpose of preventing unqualified persons from indulging in reckless experiments on animals. There were stories circulated by the agitators then--as there are now--to the effect that medical students perform horrible and painful operations (vivisections, as the agitators term them,) on live animals in secret or with the connivance of their teachers. It was proved twenty-five years ago that these stories were false. At the same time an elaborate law was passed to satisfy the emotional persons misled by the agitators, which made it necessary for an experimenter (1) to have a licence (dependent on a certificate as to his competency); (2) that he should use anæsthetics; and (3) that experiments should only be carried out in licensed laboratories.

The agitators of the present day have by heart-rending stories, similar to those told twenty-five years ago, produced a similar excitement and a similar result, namely, a Royal Commission on Vivisection, which has been occupied for a year and a half in listening to the statements and delusions of those who declare that the law made twenty-five years ago is insufficient, and that all sorts of cruelties are committed by the physiologists and doctors. The Commission has also questioned the leading physiologists and medical men in the country, and listened to their voluntary statements. I have seen the very voluminous report of the evidence thus given on both sides. The various accusations made against the medical men in the conduct of their laboratories have been carefully gone into. It is contended, on their side, that these charges are based on misunderstanding--the misunderstanding which one would expect from an ignorant person with a strong feeling or prejudice in the direction of the misunderstanding. For instance, the fact that chloroform is administered and the animal rendered insensible when operated on, has been overlooked in some of the accounts which excited the so-called “antivivisectors”--notably in the misleading account of “the brown dog.” The whole of the evidence should be read by those who are really in doubt on the matter. Probably it will not be long before the Commission reports, and its conclusions will command the very greatest respect, not only because its members include eminent lawyers, medical men and independent representatives who were ready to give an impartial mind to the inquiry, but also because it is obvious that the very greatest care has been taken to obtain the fullest evidence from both sides.