Chapter XII: Preface (12)

To some extent the marine creatures which bore in rocks seem to be helped by chemical action, since they show a preference for chalk and limestone, easily dissolved by weak acid secreted by the borer, though, clearly enough, they are not dependent on such chemical aid since we find them also boring in insoluble granite rock and shale and clay. There is one true worm-borer which perforates hard limestone pebbles and chalk rocks, so as to give them the appearance which we call “worm-eaten” when caused by another sort of worm and observed in a very different material, namely, old furniture and woodwork. At Tenby, in South Wales, the limestone pebbles on the beach are quite commonly riddled with these worm-holes, truly “worm-eaten.” When they are not too abundant one can see that the holes are arranged in pairs like a figure 8, about half the size here printed. On splitting the rock or stone one finds a deeply-running U-shaped double tube excavated in the stone. In this the little worm lived. It is easiest to get at the worms in a fresh and living state on a coast where there are chalk-rocks and sea-washed lumps of chalk. The chalk is easy to split and cut at low tide, and then the little key-hole apertures can be broken across and the soft red worm extracted. It is a beautiful red-blooded little worm—little more than half an inch long—with two tactile horns on its head and little bristles and gills on the rings of its annulated body. It is a true “worm,” like the earth-worm, what naturalists call by the not displeasing name an “annelid.” It seems at first sight impossible that this delicate little thing should “worm-eat” the hardest limestone. It has no jaws, but one of the rings or segments of the front part of the body has two of its bristles swollen to relatively gigantic size, hard and black. These are its boring organs, but I have no doubt that it is helped, especially in its young state when commencing to bore, by an acid secretion from the surface of the body.

Curiously enough, in the strict sense of the word “worm,” the boring of chalk and stones by the little marine creature just mentioned (whose name is _Polydora_) is the only instance of a “worm-eaten” condition being produced by a real worm. The worm-eaten condition of wood is produced either by the grub of a minute beetle (which is not in the strict sense a “worm”) or by an ingenious human maker of “antiques” who imitates the little holes on the surface of the woodwork of old furniture, so as to pass off clever reproductions for really ancient cabinet work. The little holes to imitate those of the true insect furniture-borer are sometimes produced by discharging a gun loaded with fine shot at the piece of furniture which is to be passed off as ancient. But knowing purchasers probe the holes so made with a carpet needle, and discover the lead-shot sunk in the wood. Hence there has arisen a profession of specially-skilled “worm-eaters,” who, by careful boring, imitate the holes made by insect grubs.

And now we come at last to the actual, real furniture worm or grub. It is the grub of a small beetle—the _Anobium domesticum_, scarcely one-fifth of an inch long (Fig. 62_c_), greyish-brown in colour, of a cylindrical shape, with the head completely concealed or overhung by the next division of the body, the thorax. The grubs are longer, soft, pale, and fleshy. The sign of the presence of the _Anobium_ in your furniture is the existence of small circular holes here and there on the surface of the wood, with occasionally a little heap of yellow dust on the ground beneath them. This last sign is in fact the only proof you can have that the holes are not ancient and the burrows deserted, and that the enemy is still alive and at work. Rarely, if ever, can you see either the grub or the completed beetle into which it changes after forming a cocoon within the burrows, for they very seldom leave their excavations. But if you break up the wood you will find a surprising number of long, cylindrical passages, running side by side, and for many inches, through the deeper part of the wood, so that it may be quite rotten and ready to crumble, although presenting an uninjured surface save for the little round holes here and there. In these passages you will find both the grubs and the adult beetles.

A closely-allied and somewhat smaller species of _Anobium_ common in houses is of a more voracious character, not confining itself to dry wood, but eating bread, biscuits, rhubarb, ginger, and even cayenne pepper. This second kind, called _Anobium paniceum_, is the real “book-worm”; it gets into old libraries, and the grubs bore their cylindrical tunnels from cover to cover of the undisturbed volumes. In a public library twenty-seven folio volumes standing side by side were perforated in a straight line by one individual _Anobium_ grub or book-worm, and so regular was the tunnel thus eaten out that a string could be passed through the whole length of it, and the entire set of twenty-seven volumes lifted up at once by it.

There are one or two other grubs which less commonly injure books, and pass as “book-worms.” But the most notable of the insect enemies of books and papers is a curious little wingless insect which never passes through a grub stage of existence, but hatches out in the complete form of his parents. He is about a third of an inch long, has the shape of an elongated kite, with a long tail and six legs, and is called by old writers “the silver-fish,” and by entomologists _Lepisma_ (Fig. 63). This little pest does not burrow, but nibbles, and has destroyed many a valuable old document and ancient book. Paste and sugar are a great attraction to him, and he will destroy a boxful of printed labels or a valuable manuscript, leaving only the ink-marked parts untouched, but ready to crumble.

Closely allied to the book-worm beetle, _Anobium_, is a larger beetle, called _Xestobium tessellatum_ (Fig. 62 _a_) which infests old woodwork, its grubs making correspondingly larger tunnels. The entire woodwork of a house has had to be removed and replaced in consequence of this creature’s depredation, and such pieces of furniture as a four-post bedstead have been riddled and made rotten in two or three years by its burrowing. It is still common in England in old wood-panelled rooms and in wooden mantelpieces. The most interesting fact about it is that it is the maker of those nocturnal tappings which are known as the “death-watch.” It is the beetle itself (Fig. 62 _a_), not the grub, which makes these sounds. It makes them by deliberately striking the wood on which it stands, with its head. The taps are usually from five to seven in quick succession, the sound dying away in intensity in the later strokes. A second, and even a third, beetle will then reply with similar taps from the woodwork of some other part of the room. Years ago I used to be gently lulled to sleep by these “raps” in my rooms at Oxford, accompanied by the sound of spasmodic rushes of mice behind the woodwork. At first I thought the tapping was caused by the falling of drops of water through a leaky roof, but soon ascertained the actual cause. One does not notice these tappings until the dead of night when all else is still, and they are so mysterious and persistent that one can understand superstition arising in connection with them, and that the nerves of any one already overwrought, might be so affected by them as to lead to the belief that evil spirits are “rapping,” or that a ghostly coffin is being nailed together for a dying man. The little beetle has often been tracked by a naturalist, and discovered in some concealed position nodding its diminutive but hard head with sharp jerks, and producing an almost incredible volume of sound in proportion to its size. If the beetle, when discovered, is kept in captivity in a wooden box, it is easy to set it “tapping” or “rapping” by tapping oneself with a pencil on the table on which the box is placed, when the faithful little death-watch will unfailingly reply. Possibly some of the “raps” recorded by the pioneers of spirit-rapping, when not produced by the toes of designing mediums like the young ladies of Rochester, N.Y., were actually made by death-watch beetles. It is certain that the somewhat eccentric supposition that disembodied spirits endeavour to make signals to living humanity by “rapping” owes its origin (long before the nineteenth-century craze for “spirit-rapping”) to the measured tap-tap-tapping of the death-watch beetle, and the consequent superstition at a time when the beetle was not known to be the “tapper.”

Whilst the bigger beetle, _Xestobium_, is the common death-watch, it has been proved that the little furniture beetle, _Anobium_, is also a tapper, making regular and persistent strokes like the ticking of a watch. Another insect, called the book-louse (_Atropos divinatoria_), very minute, only one-twentieth of an inch, soft, white, and wingless, not a beetle at all, but also a devourer of literature (Fig. 64), is declared by some good observers to be a “ticker” or “tapper,” but other naturalists deny that it can make such sounds. It seems unlikely on account of the extremely small size and softness of the book-louse, but the matter needs further investigation.

A curious fact is that the grubs of beetles such as _Anobium_ and _Xestobium_ (or other closely allied kinds) are not arrested in their tunnelling by soft metal. They cannot tackle iron plate or brass sheeting, but they will penetrate tinfoil and, what is more astonishing, lead plate and leaden waterpipes. Specimens showing such perforations are in the museums of Oxford and London, and I have received an account of a lead pipe packed in wood in the wall of a house being perforated by these beetle-grubs. Once at work on the wood, “the straightforward intentions” of the grub are not to be diverted by such an obstacle as lead: it goes straight on through the lead as it would through the cover of a book or a knot in the wood.

I have sometimes been asked to give advice as to the best method of destroying the furniture worm or grub. If the piece of furniture (or its pieces) can without injury be “baked” in a hot chamber for twenty-four hours, at a temperature a little above that of boiling water, that is the easiest method of destroying the pest. Or, again, I should suggest placing the piece of furniture in a refrigerating chamber for a week or two. If neither of these methods can be used, the piece of furniture should be placed in a very hot room, and creosote or bisulphide of carbon or solution of cyanide of potassium should be injected with a very fine-nosed syringe into the little circular holes of the burrows on the surface of the wood; then the piece of furniture must be at once exposed to the cold, which will cause the air to be drawn into the burrows and diffuse the volatile poison within. The “worm holes” on the surface should, as soon as the piece of furniture is quite cold, be closed by melted paraffin. If the piece of wood which it is desired to “cure” will stand submersion in water for a few minutes, and is not larger than a cricket bat, it is, of course, easy, by first warming it through and then plunging it into water containing corrosive sublimate or other poison, fairly to impregnate the burrows, and make an end of the beetles and their grubs. Painting is the common and approved means of protecting wood against these attacks, and in some positions metal sheathing is used. The method most largely used for protecting wood in the open air against “worm” and “mould” is that of forcing creosote into its pores—an improvement on the old system of painting with coal tar. A more expensive but beautiful method of protecting wood is to force hard paraffin in a melted condition by pressure into the pores. The wood becomes wonderfully firm and waterproof. Neither damp and mould, nor boring insect, nor shrimp can then penetrate it. This method was introduced some years ago, but I do not know whether it has been largely used.

XXXIX

CHRISTMAS FARE

Most English people who can afford it eat more than is good for them on Christmas Day, and consider it more or less of a religious duty to do so, even though they shrink from the ordeal. It is an interesting tendency, and at the same time one readily explained. Primitive men, and our own remote ancestors, had few, if any, joys greater than those afforded by an abundant meal of roasted meat. When a great beast such as a mammoth was taken in a skilfully-prepared pitfall, and slaughtered, the whole tribe of palaeolithic huntsmen assembled and gorged themselves with its flesh, which, it seems fairly certain, they cooked on open fires. The strongest seized the most and ate the most, and were able to bear up the longest in something like full vigour until such time as another big beast should be killed, and another opportunity for “gorging” should arise, when they would naturally again get the largest share, having eaten most on the previous occasion, and so being least famished. Hence the belief that a great appetite is a fine thing, and that the more you can eat, the stronger and better you are, is one of the deeply-laid traditions of humanity which civilised men have inherited from barbarians, and are only slowly commencing to criticise and to put aside. The negroes who accompany European sportsmen in Central Africa gorge themselves when elephants are killed, and a recent account tells of the serious illness and danger to an expedition caused by the whole countryside flocking to the carcasses of twenty-three elephants killed by an ivory-hunter. The blacks continued to eat the flesh of the elephants for three weeks, when it had become decidedly “high,” and many died, whilst others took weeks to recover, in consequence. The notion of “festivity,” which, especially in England, has been, even in recent times, that of eating and drinking to excess, is prehistoric and barbaric. Serious physiologists and medical men have expressed the opinion that we shall never arrive at a satisfactory mode of nourishing ourselves so as to take neither too much nor what is in itself injurious to health, until the practice of seeking gaiety and celebrating a memory or honouring a friend or friends by means of profuse eating (often followed by wearisome speeches) has given place to a mode of rejoicing which is more likely to produce hilarity and lightness of heart, and less certain to be followed by painful and injurious results. We certainly eat less and drink less of intoxicating liquors than we did, but there is, it seems, still room for improvement.

To connect heavy feeding with Christmas, the third in rank of the great festivals of the Church, is not a universal custom, and is, in fact, a peculiarity of our own country, arising from the rearing and management of cattle in early times, when English pasture land furnished a splendid means of enriching its owners by the production of “hides” and leather. Large numbers of cattle had to be stalled during winter and fed on stored herbage, and a great many were at this season killed and the meat “salted down,” since it would not pay to keep them on stored food. It was not until the introduction of “root-crops” that oxen could be kept in any number through the winter months. Hence there was an excess of fresh meat and fat about Christmas time, and the “roast beef,” plum puddings, and mincemeat of Christmas fare were abundant. The true Christmas pudding and mince-pie had meat as part of their components, and, of course, beef-suet enters largely into their composition at the present day.

The practice of eating sweet fruits and preserves with meat (as in the true mince-pie) still lingers in this country, but has become less general than it is in Germany. We still eat red-currant jelly with roast mutton, and also with hare, and apple sauce is considered appropriate to roast pork and to goose; but pickled plums and cherries and sugared crab-apples, which are usually taken with meat in Germany, are not known to us. I have heard a schoolboy express indignation at being given plums with roast meat. Mincemeat, for mince-pies, was originally (like a “Cornish pasty,” in which raisins are mixed with meat) one of these combinations of sweetness and strength—of sugar and meat—the taste for which has unaccountably disappeared in these days of mechanical uniformity and lack of “homely cheer.”

The introduction of the turkey as a Christmas dish dates from the early time of the importation of that bird into Europe, namely, about 1550. It is already spoken of in connection with Christmas fare in 1570. The “turkey-cock,” as its full name was, is an American bird, and was brought originally from Mexico to Europe, though it is possible that the more northern American species may have been also introduced by the navigator, Jean Cabot. There is a very gorgeous turkey-cock of iridescent bright blue and green, with orange-red warts on his head and neck, found in Honduras. But he has never been acclimatised. He is on view in the Natural History Museum. The turkey belongs to the pheasant family, and is compared by old writers to the peacock, and also to the guinea-fowl (_Numida meleagris_ of ornithologists). Indeed, there was great confusion when the turkey first arrived between it and the guinea-fowl, and it appears to be owing to this mixing up of the two birds that the American bird was called a turkey-cock, since the guinea-fowl is an African bird, and came into the hands of Europeans through Mussulman traders or “Turks.” So far did the confusion go that the great Linnæus applied the Latin name _Meleagris_, which was that of the guinea-fowl, to the “turkey” of America! Some people think that the turkey-cock established his misleading name by his cry, which they say is represented by the words “Turk-turk-turk.” Probably the turkey-cock, though an American bird, was imported by traders who were called “Turkey merchants” because their chief business was with the Levantine and Morocco ports. Another mistake or vagueness as to the native home of the turkey was hit upon by the French, who called it the _Poule d’Inde_, whence their modern name for it, _Dindon_; and the same error is found in an old German name for it, _Kalkuttisch Hün_ (from Calicut, on the Malabar coast of India, where the turkey was introduced from America in the seventeenth century, and has flourished ever since). The Swedish name for the turkey is _Kalcon_, and is only a modification of this old German name. Probably few animals or birds have been so persistently misrepresented by the names given to them as the American bird which we call the turkey.

Our farmyard names for him are far better. In Scotland they call him the “Bubbly-jock,” which vividly suggests his airs and graces, whilst in Suffolk we call him a “Gobble-cock.” I know an old farmhouse near Woodbridge, in Suffolk, which bears the delightful name of “Gobblecock Hall.” “The squire of Gobblecock Hall” would have furnished Randolph Caldecott with inspiration for a Christmas picture story; and so, indeed, would the country round the “Hall,” with its vast sandy tract, ten miles long, known as Hollesley Heath, ending on the seashore near Orford Castle.

The misleading indication as to the native land of an animal—due to the name commonly applied to it—is remarkable in the case of the guinea-pig. Though the guinea-fowl is correctly so called, since it comes from the Guinea Coast of Africa, the guinea-pig has nothing to do with that coast, but comes from South America! It is not a pig, but a rodent, and it does not come from Guinea. It appears that the ships of the “Guinea merchants” of this country established trading relations with South American ports, and hence the little “pig” (Shakespeare calls the hedgehog “hedge-pig”) which they brought home was called a “guinea-pig,” just as the big “cock” imported by Turkey merchants was called a “Turkey-cock.” The guinea-pig suffers other “indignities of appellation.” The Germans call him _Meerschweinchen_, that is, “little sea-pig.” Apparently “sea” pig, because he was brought over the sea. But this leads to unjustifiable suggestions as to the guinea-pig’s character. For the Germans call the porpoise _Meerschwein_, which would seem to mean “pig of the sea”; and those imperfectly acquainted with the German language have been known to take allusions made by German writers to the former animal as intended to apply to the young of the latter. Thus one reads in an English medical book of a number of “young porpoises” being fed upon carrots when it was really “guinea-pigs” which consumed this nutriment. The German physiologists, who often make use of guinea-pigs in their investigations, now call them _Cobayas_, so as to avoid any further misunderstanding. The French word for a porpoise, _marsouin_, is a corruption of the German name _Meerschwein_.

I have pointed out above the origin of heavy feeding at Christmas. Whether it is necessary or not to continue that precise mode of celebration, the sentiments of peace and goodwill which belong to Christmas, the meeting of kinsmen,—and, above all, the dedication of many of its customs to children,—are things to be cherished and treated tenderly. The 25th day of December was fixed by the Church for the celebration of the birth of Christ, but it is fairly certain that the period of the year indicated in the Gospel as that when the shepherds were watching their flocks and saw the star of Bethlehem, was not December, but October. It is also certain that the children owe their share in Christmas to the combination with it of customs proper to the Epiphany, which celebrates the bringing of gifts to the child Christ by the wise men of the East. It appears that the greatest and gayest of the feasts of pagan Rome—the “Saturnalia”—was held at the end of December, and that the early Church in this, as in many other cases, adapted a pagan custom to its own uses, and fixed the feast of the Nativity at this date expressly in order to take over, as it were, the gaiety of the Saturnalia. The brilliant foliage and berries of the holly-tree were used for decorations at the Saturnalia, and thus became a Christmas emblem. The fun and frolic of the Saturnalia were transferred to the name of Christmas, and thus it comes about that the Yule Log and the Lord of Misrule and the Abbot of Unreason, and also snapdragon and clown, harlequin and columbine, are found in full swing at Christmas-tide. Later St. Nicholas, who took the place of Neptune, and was the patron saint of sailors, became associated with Christmas celebrations as Santa Claus or Father Christmas. His regular day was at the beginning of December, and so it was easy to postpone his festivities to three weeks later.

Mistletoe is not a Christmas decoration. It comes to us from the Druids, and belongs to the New Year. It is not allowed to appear in church, and should not be hung up in private houses till Christmas is over and the New Year has come. The hanging up of the mistletoe is in itself a beautiful survival of an ancient worship, and should be associated in our minds with Stonehenge and the prehistoric star temples, whose priests were astronomers. On New Year’s Day they solemnly distributed branches of the mistletoe to the people as a charm ensuring fertility. In December there are many hundredweight of mistletoe cut down and despatched from the ancient Druidical haunts of the Welsh border, and from over-sea Brittany, to all-devouring London, where it is heedlessly nailed up in doorways, and made the excuse for much giggling and embracing. May those who read these lines treat it with due reverence, and when they kiss beneath the beautiful strange branch with its white berries, think of our ancestors—the noble youths and lovely maidens of prehistoric days, who kissed three thousand years ago, and sent this living token of their happy lives down the long ages—to us, distracted hustlers of the motor-car. Prehistoric feeding may not be good for us, but the prehistoric rite of the mistletoe must not be neglected in these days of strange political aspirations on the part of those who have not discovered its sedative virtue.

XL

THE ORIGIN OF OPIUM

That Europe is the original home of the opium-poppy, and not Asia, is even more contradictory of our settled traditions and belief than the fact that Europeans gave tobacco to the East. Yet it is the fact that opium, like tobacco, came to the Far East from Europe. The opium-poppy does not grow wild in Asia; it is a cultivated variety of a Mediterranean poppy, the _Papaver setigerum_, which has a pale purple flower, and was conveyed, long ago, by man from the Levant to Asia. We have true poppies of four species which grow wild in England, all with splendid scarlet or crimson petals, easily distinguished from one another by the shape of the seedboxes, or capsules, which they form. If you scratch the surface of the seed capsule of one of these poppies a milky juice appears. It is this which is collected from the capsules of the much larger opium-poppy in India and China, and when dried forms a hard brown cake, which is called “opium.” It consists of resinous matter, in which is contained a small quantity of the invaluable narcotic called “morphia,” and also small quantities of other powerful poisons.

The pale-purple poppy of the Mediterranean (_Papaver setigerum_) was cultivated hundreds—even thousands—of years ago in the South of Europe and on the Mediterranean shores of Africa—not for opium, but for the oil which can be expressed from the seed, “poppy-seed oil.” The oil is free from narcotic properties. The purple poppy is still cultivated for that oil in France, and poppy-seed oil is an article of commerce used as food, both in the pure state and for adulterating other oils. The earliest cultivation of this poppy is even as remote in Europe as 7000 years, for we find that the Swiss lake-dwellers of the Stone Age cultivated it, and that the variety they obtained was nearer to the wild _Papaver setigerum_ than to its cultivated derivative, the modern opium-poppy, _Papaver somniferum_. How and when it first was recognised that the narcotic substance “opium” could be prepared from the juice exuding from the cut capsule is not exactly known, but it is probable that it was not until the early Middle Ages that the poppy was cultivated for the habitual use of opium as a narcotic indulgence, and that its earlier cultivation was, as to some extent at the present day, for the sake of the oil contained in the seed, its use in medicine requiring but a very small supply. The ancient Greeks were well acquainted with the cultivated poppy. Homer mentions it, and at a much later period Theophrastus and Dioscorides do so. They call it “mekon,” and were aware of the somniferous properties of the sap. Dioscorides, whose wonderful book on plants dates from the first century of our era, speaks of the drug derived from the sap by the name “opos,” and it is from that word that the name “opium” has come. The Romans cultivated the poppy before the republic, and mixed its seeds with their flour in making bread. The story of King Tarquin taking the governor of a rebellious province into a poppy-field, lopping off the heads of the taller poppies with his stick, and then turning to his visitor, without a word, but with a look which said, “That is the way to govern”—is evidence of the very early cultivation of the poppy by the Romans. Hebrew writings do not mention the opium poppy, though it seems to be certain that it has been cultivated in Asia Minor for at least 3000 years. There is no evidence that the plant was cultivated in more ancient times in Egypt, although in Pliny’s time the Egyptians used the juice of the poppy medicinally. In the Middle Ages it was, and in our own day it is, one of the chief objects of cultivation in that country, especially for the manufacture of opium.

The cultivated variety _P. somniferum_ of the present day differs from the wild _P. setigerum_, in having the seed-capsule surmounted by ten or twelve stigmas (the free ends of the leaves which are united to form the capsule), instead of by eight as in the wild form. It seems that the introduction of the poppy from the shores of the Mediterranean into Persia, India, and China is due to Arab traders, and is coincident with the rise of Mohammedanism; and it is probable that it was valued and cultivated from that time onwards, not so much for the sake of its seed and oil, as for the narcotic juice, which was made up by Arabian “confectioners” into a kind of paste, and eaten, as were other vegetable extracts—such as “bang,” from hemp—for the sake of the pleasurable effects produced by its poisonous action on the nervous system. It is certain that the opium poppy does not occur at all in the wild state in the Middle and Far East. In 1516 opium was already an article of trade from India to China. The poppy was cultivated, and the use of opium known and frequent in India for some five centuries before that date. Probably the cultivation of the plant in China was not started until the eighteenth century.

It was the Chinese who hit upon the mode of indulging in opium by smoking it in a pipe. There is no record, written or pictorial, of this practice earlier than 1730, about fifty years before which date (1680) we find the smoking of tobacco represented on Chinese pottery. Very soon the Chinese were not content to import their opium from India, but large areas were put under cultivation with the Indian poppy in China and Manchuria. For a century or more the export of opium from India to China continued and increased as the consumption of the drug increased, the native Chinese production not being sufficient to meet the demand. In 1730 and 1796 the Chinese Government issued edicts forbidding the smoking of opium, and in the last century the efforts of the Chinese authorities to prevent the importation of Indian opium, whether with a view to suppress a dangerous vice or to favour the home-grown article, led to war with England. In some parts of China—for instance, Amoy—three-fourths of the population are, or were until lately, opium-smokers. Now it is believed that the Chinese Government is genuinely determined to put a stop to the dangerous and enervating indulgence in this narcotic, and the opium-growers of India will have to limit their output, and employ their land and labour for other crops.

It is the fact that the eating of opium (for it is not “smoked” there) does very little harm in India, since it is not used by a large proportion of the people nor in excess. Many persons who have studied the subject maintain that the widely-spread injury caused by opium in China is due to the short time during which it has been in use there as compared with India. It is held that a population after a few centuries becomes immune to such poisonous but attractive indulgences by the killing out of those who cannot resist excess—and the suggestion is that the simplest way of dealing with such cravings for poison is to let those who have them and cannot resist their demand, freely indulge and die, and their stock with them. This is, however, a slow and tedious way of eradicating an evil tendency. It may, perhaps, be the only way, and hereafter, when the production by careful and restricted breeding of a sound and healthy population becomes recognised as being part of the duty of the makers and administrators of the law in civilised states, it is not improbable that we shall see something of the kind deliberately put into practice.

The opium-pipe and the mode of smoking at present in use in China are very different from the pipe and smoking of tobacco used there or elsewhere. I investigated the matter myself twenty years ago in an opium-den near the London Docks, under the instruction of a polite Chinaman. The opium-pipe has a very narrow cavity, about one-sixth of an inch wide. The prepared opium, in a condition resembling treacle, is smeared on the walls of the cavity with a pin, and the pipe is held to a lighted lamp. The flame drawn into the pipe causes the opium to frizzle and give off smoke, but it does not “light” and continue to burn. Each whiff which the smoker inhales has to be procured by applying the pipe to the lamp. The smoke is tasteless, and it requires a good deal of patience and several re-smearings of the inside of the pipe before the smoker begins to experience the pleasant effects of the drug. These consist in the production of a sense of perfect contentment and indifference to all trouble and care, whilst the imagination gives a rose-colour, or an even more alluring aspect, to all that one sees or thinks of—until a gentle sleep closes the scene.

The Chinese, having obtained the seeds, cultivated the opium-poppy, and made opium before the prepared article was imported in any great quantity from India. There is, of course, no doubt as to the injury which is done to a population by the habitual use of opium. At the same time, there is no one who knows anything about medicine and the use of drugs who does not speak of opium with reverence and even affection. Forty years ago, at a dinner-party where the leading physicians of London were present, it was suggested that they should each write down in order of merit the ten drugs to which they attached the greatest value. I heard from one who was present that they all put opium in the first place, and that mercury, iodide of potassium, and ipecacuanha followed in that order in the majority of the lists. The value of opium as a medicinal agent is one thing; its deadly effect on those who have become victims to its daily use is another. The origin of the medicinal use of opium can be traced to Egypt in Pliny’s time, but beyond that nothing is known.

As I am writing of botanical matters, I may briefly refer to an ambiguity about the names “banana” and “plantain.” There is no difference (as is sometimes suggested) between the fruits indicated by these two words. Our word “plantain” is merely a corruption of the Spanish word _platano_, which is the name of the plane-tree. It was loosely applied in South America by the Spanish colonists to the banana palm (_Musa sapientum_), just as they called the North American bison a buffalo, and as the Anglo-Americans call a stag an elk, and a red thrush a robin. The banana palm is not an American tree, but was introduced there from the East Indies by the early navigators, and was very soon cultivated by the South American Indians as well as by the colonists. There have been great authorities—for instance, Humboldt—who have believed that there is a native South American banana palm as well as an East Indian one; but the definite conclusion of botanists, after careful inquiry, is that there is only one species, and that it is of South Asian origin. There are an enormous number of cultivated varieties—forty-four are described; they can all be arranged in two groups, the large-fruited bananas (fruit 7 inches to 15 inches long), and the small-fruited bananas, commonly called fig-bananas (fruits 1 inch to 6 inches long). All are equally entitled to the name “plantain” as well as “banana.” The finest flavoured varieties are cultivated in Hindustan, and there only, being often of very great value and rarity. Those which come into the English market are chiefly, if not entirely, of West Indian production. The foliage of the banana palm consists of oblong leaves of magnificent size and unbroken surface; small trees are to be seen in hothouses (they bear fruit at Kew), and are frequently used for decorative purposes.

XLI

THE MOST ANCIENT MEN

In the winter of 1908-09 a very interesting discovery was announced in the daily newspapers—the discovery of a human skull and some bones buried in a cave called the Grotto of the Chapelle-aux-Saints, in the central department of France, known as the Corrèze, not very far from Perigueux, in the Dordogne. An account was given of this discovery by Professor Marcelin Boule, of the Paris Museum, to the Académie des Sciences, and the description of the bones, which had been carefully pieced together, and were exhibited to the meeting of the Academy, was sent by him to me (see Fig. 65). Some exaggerated statements as to the monkey-like character of the race to which these bones belonged (exaggerated, but not altogether devoid of truth) were circulated by imaginative correspondents in the newspapers. It is the fact that these human remains are of enormous antiquity, and belong to a very peculiar and primitive race known as the Neander Men, so called because a skull and some bones of this same race were found fifty years ago in a cave in the Neander valley,[7] near Elberfeld, on the Rhine.

The French archæologists, or “prehistorians,” as we now call them—are the leading discoverers in all that relates to very early man. The caves in Central and Southern France (Dordogne, Pyrenees, and Riviera) and the gravels in the north have furnished the most wonderful and interesting evidences of the existence of human beings at an immensely remote period in this part of Europe. Enthusiastic excavators and collectors of French nationality have discovered, preserved, and described the weapons, carvings, and drawings made by the old cave-dwellers of Southern France, buried by the accumulated deposits of ages deep in the caverns where the human artists who made these things used to live. In England only two such caves containing the implements of prehistoric men have been found—whilst a few are known in Belgium, Moravia, and Switzerland.

Although we know an immense number of the flint instruments, bone harpoons, and carvings and drawings of the ancient cave-dwellers, yet skulls and bones of the men themselves are extremely rare. Bones, skulls, and teeth of the animals they killed and ate are abundant in the caves—such as those of great bulls, deer, and horses. The bones also of animals which lived in these caves and contended with the ancient men for the possession of the shelter afforded by them, are abundant: bones of hyæna, of bear, of lion, and wolf. But human bones are exceedingly rare. This arises partly from the fact that human bones are not so thick and strong as those of large animals, and more easily soften, break up, and are lost. It is also due partly to the fact that the men were not nearly so numerous as the wild animals; but it is chiefly due to the fact that these people usually, but not always, buried their dead in the open; and whilst the bones of animals which had been eaten were left about in heaps on the floor of the caves, and became cemented together by the petrifying deposit caused by water dripping from the walls of these limestone caverns or by streams actually flooding the caverns, the bodies of the men themselves were removed when they died by their friends and families, and buried in the open ground, where they have gradually dissolved and broken up. Only a few here and there of the more ancient races were buried in a cave, and are in consequence preserved until the present day. Obviously, it would only be an exceptional honour or superstition which would cause the giving up of a cave to the interment of a dead body, or only rarely that a corpse could be tolerated in the floor of the cave still inhabited by living men.

It is a mistake to suppose that all the bones of all the men and animals which have lived on the earth’s surface are naturally and as a matter of course permanent enduring things. On the contrary, when they are buried in soil or sand permeated by water, they slowly soften and decay, dissolve and disappear. When washed into streams and rivers or into the sea, they break up and dissolve. No bones were dredged up from the floor of the ocean by the explorers of the Challenger expedition. A bone sunk in the sea gradually dissolves. Only those bones (and the same is true of shells) are permanently preserved which happen to get into certain favourable positions, embedded in clay or hard deposit, which is not disturbed, and becomes slowly raised up and free from soaking water before the bone is dissolved; or, again, those which have been protected in the accumulated deposits of the floor of a cavern covered in by layers of hard calcareous slab or stalagmite, which usually is formed by the water dripping from the limestone roof and walls. The limestone is dissolved like sugar, and is deposited when the water evaporates—“petrifying” the floor of the cave. It is owing to this rarity of the natural preservation of bones that we never find more than a few of those of extinct animals of various degrees of antiquity, and never more than a very few of those of the ancient men who lived in caverns and made “flint implements.”

As a preliminary to dealing below with the story of “the Neander Men”—to which race the newly-found skull and bones from the Corrèze belong—it will help to make the importance of that skeleton obvious if I very briefly and dogmatically state what are the great periods in the prehistoric record of man, and the probable distance in time from us of those periods. It must be remembered that what I have to say applies only to the “prehistoric history” of man in Western Europe and the Mediterranean region, for it is only this part of the world which has been sufficiently carefully examined to yield any definite conclusions. Let us suppose that we can travel back through the ages, and proceed to do so. We find that there are three well-marked successive periods in Europe—which are called the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, and the Stone Age. When we go back to Julius Cæsar conquering Gaul and parts of Germany and Britain, we find that the Romans had steel swords, and freely made use of that metal for a variety of tools and constructive purposes. The Gauls and Belgi and Allemanni and Britons were still in the Bronze Age; they had beautifully made bronze swords and daggers and helmets and shields, which were weaker and softer than those of iron used by the Romans. The use of iron was soon spread by the conquerors, and the rest of Europe entered on the Iron Age. When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in England they had iron weapons. At what date precisely the Romans themselves took to the use of iron is not known, probably they learnt its use from the peoples of Africa; but at no distant date, a few hundred years before Christ, they, too, and the Greeks were in the Bronze Age. In Western Europe we see the Bronze Age, as we travel back in time, disappearing, and we come to the Stone Age, about 2000 B.C. Copper was used at the later stage of the Stone Age, and then the alloy with tin, which is called “bronze.” At the time that the big stones of Stonehenge were set up (the smaller stones of the outer circle are more ancient) the Stone Age was coming to its end, and the Bronze Age coming in.

Everywhere, but not always within the same thousand years or so, we see as we go still farther back, the use of metal giving place to the use of stone. In Europe we see a highly-developed material civilisation from three to seven thousand years ago. The people till the land, sow crops, keep herds, build houses (of wood), make pottery, combs for the hair, necklaces of amber and of shells, and other ornaments, but they have no metal weapons or implements. They sometimes use native gold to make decorative ornaments; but their knives, daggers, swords, saws, and hammers are all of stone, either flint or dense greenstone. We reach this purely Stone Age in Europe at 2000 B.C.; in Egypt we do not get back to it so soon, but, about 5000 B.C., we there come upon a pre-Pharaonic population which made use of beautifully-finished stone knives in place of metal. The first people we come upon in Europe as we pass from the Bronze to the Stone Age had a great deal of skill and an elaborate social organisation. Their stone weapons were beautifully chipped and often highly polished (Figs. 66 and 67). We find the slabs of grit upon which they rubbed the chipped flint adzes in order to make them smooth. But soon we find, as we go back, that polishing is unknown, and that the chipped flint adzes are used in a rough state. On entering the Stone Age we find that we are only on the fringe of an immense period of “stone-weaponed humanity,” extending back for tens of thousands of generations of men, when stone (and in Europe especially, that stone which we call “flint”) was the one great stand-by of the human race—the one hard cutting material which man learnt to shape and apply to his own purposes—so as to make holes with it, saw with it, scrape with it, cut with it, kill with it. On account of its prodigious range in time it is found necessary to divide the Stone Age into two periods—a later, called the “Neolithic” (the new stone period), and an older, stretching back until the traces of it are lost in geologic changes of the earth, which is called the “Palæolithic” (the old stone period).

Thus if we start on a time-journey to explore the earliest traces of man in Europe, we pass along the centuries back, through the Iron and the Bronze Ages of humanity, and arrive at the vast Stone Age, which stretches away into the obscurity of more than a hundred thousand, probably of many hundred thousand, years. The later or newer fringe of the Stone Age is called the “Neolithic,” or newer Stone Age, or Age of Polished Stone, because the men of that period polished their stone implements after chipping them into shape. That which we dimly see beyond is the “Palæolithic,” or older period of “stone-weaponed” humanity, when polishing was unknown.

The Neolithic civilisation comprised the Swiss and Glastonbury lake-dwellers, who built houses on piles in the water: also the makers of the kitchen-middens of Denmark, and the builders of the great stone avenues, circles, and cromlechs, and the elevators of the solitary big stones called “menhirs”—most of them rougher and probably two thousand or three thousand years older than the big stones of Stonehenge. Our journey has now brought us into the full darkness of prehistoric times. We cannot tell how far back this “Neolithic” period reaches, but there are things found which make it certain that it reaches to 7000 B.C., and probably a good deal farther. We are now far in time behind the most ancient Greeks and the more ancient Egyptians. Europe is a rich, moist pasture-land, peat bogs are abundant and luxuriant woodlands; the climate is mild; the wild animals are those which to-day inhabit Central Europe, but more abundant. The domesticated animals kept by the men are those which we have to-day, and many of the crops and cultivated plants are those of our own time, such as wheat, barley, oats, and rye. We know also by their remains that the Neolithic men fed on chestnuts, hazel nuts, walnuts, plums, apples, pears, and strawberries, and cultivated the vine, the pale opium-poppy, and the narrow-leaved flax. Hemp was not known to them.

As we push back still farther into the night of antiquity—we cannot say at how many thousand years from to-day, whether ten, twenty, or fifty thousand—the climate becomes very cold, the glaciers extend far down the valleys, and we note that the level of sea and land has changed. Great Britain and Ireland are part of the Continent of Europe. There are strange animals in the south of what was England, and there, as well as in France, reindeer abound, wild horses, the bison, the Siberian saiga antelope, the great ox, bears, gluttons, and wolves; and there are men living in caves—the natural caverns which form in limestone rock. These men are chipping flints (but do not polish them) and carving bones, but now have no herds, nor cultivated fields, nor pottery (some very rough fragments have been found), nor buildings, nor earthworks. They are like some modern savages, Nature’s gentlemen, “who toil not, neither do they spin,” but they hunt and fish. They live entirely on the produce of the chase and on fish, wild fruits, and roots.

They wear undressed skins and furs, and paint or tattoo their faces. They make twisted ropes (probably of skin) which they fix as a halter round the head and jaw of the wild horse, as shown by their own carvings (Figs. 8 and 9). Probably they ride him. They certainly eat him. At Solutré, near Mâcon, the bones of no less than a hundred thousand horses were found piled up as a sort of kitchen-midden round a camp of Palæolithic men! They have the art of making fire, and have a wonderful artistic skill in carving and drawing on bone and ivory and on stones, and in painting on the walls of their caves, the animals which surround them and are hunted by them (Fig. 71). They make great numbers of carved harpoons or toothed spear-heads (Fig. 68) from bone, and also needles for sewing skins; whilst from flint they chip spear-heads, knives, hand-hatchets, and saws. They decorate their carvings with spirals, lozenges, and circles cut in low relief (Fig. 69). But their truly astonishing skill and mental development is shown in their carvings and engravings of animals and fish (Fig. 70), which are executed either on bones or stones, or on pieces of the ivory of the mammoth. Besides the reindeer, horses, goats, saiga antelope, rhinoceros, mammoth, and seal, their carvings include statuettes and drawings of men and women (Fig. 7).

At the best period some of these carvings show a mastery of the material, a directness and a simplicity and beauty of essential line, together with true observation of characteristic form, which separate these works from those of the ordinary savage of modern times, and have caused living artists of authority to declare that these craftsmen had those definite gifts which entitle them to be recognised as brother artists—an assurance which confirms my own impression based on a long study of large series of the actual specimens. The best works of their later period (for their skill took time to develop, and follows the laws of growth of all art) represent animals, such as deer, in movement and often turning round or foreshortened (Fig. 70); some of their carvings of horses’ heads are worthy of the Parthenon (Fig. 9). On the other hand, as is often observed in primitive art, their representations of the human face and figure are very inferior, and tend to caricature.

We are now in the Palæolithic period, and, what is more, we have quitted what geologists call the recent or modern epoch, and have entered on “geologic” times; this is the Pleistocene or Quaternary epoch. It is a legitimate and useful thing thus to draw a strong line between the Neolithic and the Palæolithic portions of the Stone Age. The Neolithic men belong, so to speak, to our own days. They were, even seven thousand years ago, only a little rougher in their tools than were the peasants of the remoter parts of Central Europe a few hundred years ago. They had not even as much tendency to or gift for artistic work as the ploughmen of our own days, and have left none behind them. Excepting that they used stone axes and knives instead of steel ones, they really led the life of mediæval country-folk. But once you pass them in your journey backwards—once you enter the Pleistocene circle—you find that climate, land surface, animals, plants, mode of life are as utterly changed as were you suddenly transferred from the English countryside to Terra del Fuego or to an Eskimo village. The Palæolithic men and their whole surroundings and arts of life have no touch of familiarity for the modern inhabitants of Europe.