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SCIENTIFIC PAPERS
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GEORGE ROLLESTON, M.D., F.R.S.
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ZO OL O GY.
K. k 2
XXVIII.
ON THE DOMESTIC CATS, FELIS DOMESTICUS
AND MUSTELA FOINA, OF ANCIENT AND
MODERN TIMES.
HAVING recently had occasion to study the habits and anatomy of
the English Marten Cats, Mustela martes and Mustela foina, and
having looked into the history of these animals and of certain other
carnivora which have borne the same name as they in ancient and
modern times, I have come to think that the latter of the two
creatures specified, namely, the white-breasted marten, Mustela
foina, was the animal which the ancient Greeks and Romans em-
ployed for the same domestic purposes for which we employ the
Felis domesticus ; whilst this latter animal has been employed as
at present in Western Europe for probably a considerably longer
period than the last thousand years. Other writers to whom I
have referred, and amongst them notably Dureau de la Malle, have
adopted the former of these conclusions; but upon premises more
or less inadequate or incorrect, or both. I am well assured that
this question has for the philosophic naturalist much more than a
merely archaeological interest, for in the resolving of it we may
have light cast upon the working of the principle which Mr. Dar-
win has shown to be more potent than any other in regulating the
distribution of species, and which Van Beneden, with the well-known
physiological” aphorisms of Wolff and Treviranus before his eyes,
has formulated in the words”, “les étres qui composent une Faune
sont solidaires entre eux comme les organes d'un étre vivant.” It
is true that no such close interdependence as exists between man
* Paget's ‘Surgical Pathology, p. 17, ed. Prof. Turner, 1863; Lewes, “Physiology
of Common Life, i. p. 286; Wolff's ‘Theoria Generationis, p. 108, § 236.
* “Recherches sur la Faune Littorale de Belgique—Cétaces,’ p. 4.
502 DOMESTIC CATS.
and certain others of the domesticated animals, even to the extent
of the interchange of disease and death by the intermediation of
cysticerci and echinococci, has been shown to obtain between him
and any of the animals of which I shall here have to write; but
readers of the “Origin of Species’ will recollect that more intricate,
if less mournful net-works, may bind up the presence in a par-
ticular country of a domestic animal with something so apparently
distant from the sphere of operation as the general colouration of
the landscape. Col. Newman" showed how the number of humble-
bees in a district depended on the presence of man, whose domestic
cats kept down the numbers of the honey-loving and devouring
field-mice; and Mr. Darwin demonstrated in the way of experiment,
that the presence of the humble-bee was a pre-requisite for the
fertilisation of the heart’s-ease and red clover. The dependence of
animal life upon the presence of particular forms of vegetable life is
familiar enough to us; our own comfort depends too directly in
these over-peopled days and countries upon the adequate abun-
dance of our flocks and herds, and that adequate abundance again
depends too directly upon that of the turnip crops, unknown
to our forefathers, to suffer us to forget it; but it is none the less
true that the peculiar character of the vegetation, and consequently
of the landscape of a country, depends very frequently upon the
peculiar characters of its animal inhabitants. The antelopes”, by
carrying and dispersing the seeds of grapes, change the characters
of the African desert; and the red glow of the clover field which
gratifies the eyes of the artisan depends ultimately on pollen-carry-
ing insects, and at second-hand from them upon the cats which
spend their daylight hours in the same murky atmosphere that he
does. It is possible that some such secret bond may exist between
the widely spread family of the Mustelidae”, and that of the
Abietineae, the geographical range of which so nearly coincides with
theirs. In this country the geographical distribution of the fir is
now all but exclusively dependent upon man's artificial aid; where
it does take place independently of him, it takes place in great
measure by the aid of the squirrel which carries off the cones or
seeds, and, having buried them, forgets, or is unable to dig them
* ‘Origin of Species, p. 84, 4th edit.
* Livingstone’s ‘Travels and Researches in South Africa,’ 1857, p. 99.
* Wagner, ‘Abhand, Akad, Wiss. München, Bd. iv. pp. 26 and Ioſ, 1846.
DOMESTIC CATS. 503
up again. It is not likely that any direct alliance subsists between
any musteline and any rodent, but the more arboreal and egg-
loving mustelines, such as the martens, may by robbing the nests
of the rapacious birds, such as the carrion crows, the great enemies
of the squirrels, indirectly but most efficiently favour the spread of
these latter creatures. But the subject of the interdependence of
the two kingdoms of animal and vegetable life is a much larger one
than the one I propose to deal with here; and I have but intro-
duced the mention of it to show what broad and distant views may
be gained by attentive gazing through what may seem to be but
narrow casements. I shall arrange what I have to say under two
heads, I shall first attempt to prove that, though the ancient
Greeks and Romans had not domesticated the cat, Felis domesticus,
in classical times, this animal was nevertheless domesticated in
Western Europe at an earlier period than is commonly assigned".
And secondly, I shall address myself to showing that the white-
breasted marten, Mustela foina, which is known also as the ‘Beech
Marten” or ‘Stone Marten, was functionally the ‘Cat” of the
ancients. A list of the different works and memoirs which I have
consulted or read upon the topics I have written upon will be found
appended to this article. Either my conclusions or my premises, or
both, will be found by any one who will verify the references I
have given to differ more or less from those of most or all the
writers I have quoted, in all or most of the points which we treat
of in common; but I have abstained from the invidious task of
specifying in detail the various errors, small and great, into which,
I think, my predecessors, great and small, have, Sir G. C. Lewis not
excepted, fallen.
A few words may be employed at the outset in elucidating one
of the few universally conceded points in this history, and showing
that the classical writers knew nothing of any domesticated Felis in
their own countries, and that Mr. George Scharf” has consequently
fallen into an anachronism in introducing a figure of our cat into
his vignette in illustration of the telling of Lord Macaulay's tale of
the Battle of the Lake Regillus. In Egypt the cat was domesticated
* Link, “Die Urwelt und das Alterthum, pp. 199–201, Berlin, 1821 ; Klemm,
• Culturgeschichte,’ i. 1, quoting Link; Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire, ‘Hist. Nat. Gen.’
tom. iii. 96.
* “Lays of Ancient Rome, p. 78, 1860.
504 - T)OMESTIC CATS.
from an early period, as we know from Herodotus and also from
the Book of Baruch "; and Cuvier” could not discover any specific
difference between the mummied remains of the domesticated Felis
of those days and the similar structures in our own pet cats. Varro
(fl. B. c. 28) and Columella (fl. A.D. 20) both speak of the Felis as
Appian (fl. A.D. 190) does of the aixovpot kakoepyot as animals to be
kept out of poultry-pens, but none of these writers speak of the
animal as being domesticated ; and Cicero when he speaks, or hints,
more suo, that he would speak but for a reluctance to be tedious, de
Jelium utilitate, speaks in the same connexion of the ichneumon and
the crocodile, and shows us thereby that he had Egypt and not
Italy in his eye. The two lines in the Batrachomyomachia, 51–52,
- tr}\eſorov. 3) Yaxémy treptóetöta ärts àptorm,
# kai rpanyà oðiſovra kara Tpéryxmv čpeetvet,
do not seem to compel us to translate yaxémy by felem, as kará
TpéyAmu may very well mean ‘along and throughout my hole,’ and
indeed the line
éx9tarn Yaxém Tpéryxms croogev čAoûora
may seem to show that the catching outside was a rare occurrence,
and the inside or musteline method the commoner *.
Neither do I think that certain others of my predecessors have
been more correct in translating the words in the fifteenth Idyll of
Theocritus, the Adoniazusae, line 28,
ai Yaxéal pſakaicós Xpſia Sovri ka9eißev,
as though the domestic cat was alluded to by Praxinoe. For though
our proverb speaks of the catching of a weasel asleep as a matter of
some difficulty, anybody who has watched the way in which one of
* * Epistle of Jeremy, Book of Baruch' (Apocrypha), chap. vi. verse 22.
* “Annales du Muséum,” An. xi. (18oz.), p. 234; ‘Ossemens Fossiles, Discours Pré-
liminaire, p. lxii, ed. I82I.
* It must be recollected, however, that though a carnivore's body will always pass
tolerably easily through a foramen which will allow of the passage of its head, the pudes
of the Batrachomyomachia were not rats, Parliamentary institutions not having been
introduced into the kingdom of Artemisia, where it is supposed to have been com-
posed; and that as the thirty-first of Babrius' Fables, or indeed measurement with
a pair of compasses of even our smallest weasel's interzygomatic diameter, will show,
many a mouse-hole will admit a mouse which will not let his enemy in after him. But
the Yaxfi was essentially troglodytic, though some holes were too small for it, else my
argument would fall to the ground, and Sannyrion would not have written—
tí div Yevópevos eis &mºv čváčoopal ;
ſpép' ei Yevotpamv Yax7;
DOMESTIC CATS. 505
the larger mustelines when tame or at least in captivity composes
itself to sleep, and the very evident reluctance with which it unrolls
itself, when awaked, out of the dog-like convolution into which it
has curled itself up, will feel the force of the more correct render-
ing. Some of the Alexandrians, again, who were contemporary
with Theocritus, used the same word for the tame cats (with which
they were more familiar than he, a mere occasional visitor in Egypt,
could have been) that Herodotus uses. Callimachus, in his ‘Hymn
to Ceres, has, line III,
kai rāv afºoupov táv ćrpepe 9mpia pukká,
where the Scholiast in loco gives kártos as the synonym.
On the other hand, the compiler of the collection of foolish stories
(which is ascribed falsely to Aristotle, and called the ‘De Mira-
bilibus Auscultationibus'), who is supposed to have lived about the
same time as Callimachus and Theocritus, speaks, as does AElian
after him, N. A. 15. 26, section 28, of a kind of Cyrenian mouse as
being TAaTvTpóorotos éotep ai ya)\al ; and it is difficult to think
that ya)\aſ is not intended to stand in this passage for Feles.
Section 28 however may have been introduced into this treatise in
later times, or possibly the words Čotep ai yaxaſ may by themselves
have found their way there as a gloss from the pen of some wise
Byzantine to whom in a later age, when the yaxiſ of the classic
times had resigned both office and name to the aſſovpos from Egypt,
curae ſuit ejusmodi quisquilias conscribere. The Batrachomyomachia,
it should be observed, is quite free from any taint of Alexandrian
or Byzantine impurity, and the use of the word yawſ by writers
from these localities does not bear therefore upon its employment in
the verses above quoted from it. But though there is no reason
for supposing that the Felis domesticus was domesticated in any
other country than Egypt before the Christian era, there are many
reasons for demurring to the statement ordinarily" made to the
effect that this animal was first spread throughout Europe at the
end of the period of the Crusades. On looking into Ducange's
Glossarium, under the words ‘Catta’ and ‘Cattinae Pelles, I find
that Caesarius, who was the physician-brother of Gregory, the
theologian of Nazianzus, and who died A.D. 369, having been the
friend of the second Constantine and Constantius, speaks of évôpvpot
* For example, ‘Conversations-Lexicon,’ Bd. viii. p. 735; Bahr, Hdt. ii. 66.
506 DOMESTIC CATS.
Kárrat; and I presume that the use of this expression shows with
Some degree of probability that tame cats were in use by this time
in Constantinople. The date of Palladius is somewhat uncertain,
though supposed with a good deal of probability to have been about
the same as that of Caesarius, but as his local habitation appears to
have been Italy, his words, iv. 9.4, ‘Contra talpas prodest catos
frequenter habere in mediis conductis, mustelas habent plerique man-
suetas,” are of importance. They show that the two kinds of cat
were both in use as domesticated animals side by side and at the
same time, in Italy, nine hundred years before the first of the
Crusaders reached Constantinople, and in the days of Gratian and
Theodosius, not in those of Godfrey and Tancred.
From the same authority, Ducange, I find that Evagrius (fl. 536)
many years later, indeed almost a couple of centuries after the date
ordinarily assigned to Palladius, still recognises atNovpos as the
more correct denomination for the Felis domesticus, saying, as
though the word kārta were a somewhat trivial and over-familiar
designation, atNovpov #v Káttav ii ovv6eſa Aéyet, lib. vi. 24. The word
‘bird’ stood once, I believe, in much the same relation to the word
“fowl:” and the householders of this country show often a greater
precision and correctness, more prisca fides in short in this matter
of the use of these two words, than the upper Ten Thousand do.
I have had a reference given me to a work of the period of
Eustathius, i.e. about I IOO A.D., viz. the Taxeoplvopaxia of Theo-
dorus Prodromus, in which the word ya)\fi may be found" and
proved to be used for the cat as we understand the word. I have
not however been able to discover or borrow any reference to the
employment of the word yaxi, in the sense of Felis or in any other
* The following are a few lines from this work, taken from an edition printed at
Basle, 1518, by Frobenius, without numbering to the lines. They are, I think,
conclusive:—
rts to riv airm ; piº) p3ovāorms toū Aéºyeuv.
B. iv YaNému &vápagev div6pátrav yévos,
airm Yap alet xmpaptov Tepiſºčitel,
kai piùs épévvá . . .
juās 8vXveſ Avykuköv 8Aétrovgå tu, *
troAA#v karayvot's róv táAat treqvicórav
Tºv do 6&velav kai kaictormv ŠovXetav
2_A^3 ° sº * f
div6' àvarep ciga, poxedºv pluxattárov
pévovtes oik droxpov eixov kapātav.
A *A an • 3/ 3. f
kai 37 kareixe roſs Övvčuv d'Yptas,
kai ouv ráxel 8é8poke rôv weavíav.
DOMESTIC CATS. 507
in the writings of any author who flourished, if authors did flourish,
in the years which rolled so drearily away between the days of
Evagrius and those of the author of this tragi-comedy. The word
'mustela seems, I may say, in leaving this part of my subject, nearly
always, if not quite, to stand for a weasel of one kind or another;
though Phaedrus does once, namely iv. I. 9, use the word in a
passage homologous with one of those in which we find aixovpos
used in the fables ascribed to AEsop. This latter word, on the other
hand, seems always to stand for a Felis domesticus or catus ; whilst
Felis in the Latin writers does seem, according to Facciolati, to be
used indifferently, or nearly so, for either Feline or Musteline. The
argument to show that our white-breasted Marten, Mustela foina,
was used for the same domestic purposes by the ancients as the
Felis domesticus is by ourselves, may be briefly stated thus. An
animal called ya)\ff by Aristotle (“Hist. Anim.’ ii. 3. 5, vi. 3o. 2,
viii. 27. 2, ix. 2. 9, ib. 7. 4), and repeatedly referred to by Aristo-
phanes' and other Greek writers of the best ages, as well as by the
Scholiasts”, under this title and in more or less completely pro-
verbial expressions, is spoken of as destroying mice, snakes, lizards,
birds and birds' eggs, as being the reverse of odoriferous, as
* Aristophanes, “Acharn.” 255 :—
käktrotfigerat Yaxás
orot, pumbèv firrov 86eiv.
‘Plutus' 693 :—
itrö rod 8&ovs 86éovoa pipitſtepov yaxis.
‘Vesp. 363, 4:—
&otrep pie Yaxºv ºpéa kxépadav
Tmpoñouv čxovt’ 38extakovs.
Ibid. I 182 :—
oùra tror' fiv piùs kai yaxi.
Ibid. II86:—
pits ka? YaNäs HéAAets Aéºyeuv čv čvapágiv;
‘Thesmoph.” 558:—
às r" at to kpé’ & ‘Attarovptov raſs pagtporoſs Stö00aai,
ëmetta rāv Ya?\ſiv pápaev.
‘Eccles.” 792 :—
# 5uiéetev Yaxfi.
* Simonides of Amorgos, fl. B.C. 660; Stobaeus, ‘Florilegia,’ vol. iii. ed. Gaisford, p. 63,
T. 73. 61 :—
texérrovoa 5’ pået troAAd yetrovas kaká,
dóvra 5’ tepa moxNákus careo6tet.
Cf. also Yaxfi xitáviov, Yaxfi ºpokorév ; Babrius 27, Yaxi, 9mpôo a piùs 're kai gaúpas.
Mr. Max Müller tells me that in the “Hitopadesa” an animal, called Nakula, kills
the serpent under the same provocation and with the same reward as the hound kills
the wolf in our story of Llewellyn. It very probably may have been a marten.
508 IDOMESTIC CATS,
being addicted to stealing, and also being so common an animal
as to be, like our cat, a convenient scapegoat for the blame
due to the thefts of other and not quadrupedal animals, and
finally, as being like in its colour and its pelage (except that
this latter is a little less thick) and its general appearance and
its moral characteristics to the animal called in antithesis to it
ya)\fi äypta, but ordinarily irtus, which is a little larger, which
loves honey, which kills birds, and is very susceptible of being
tamed. It is impossible to think that any great mistake can attach
to the interpretation of statements so consentient, so numerous, and
relating so eminently to matters of every-day life and constantly
observable occurrence. We have two sets of resemblances and
differences detailed to us as existing between two animals, the yaxfi
and the yaxfi äypta or iktts; these two sets of resemblances and
differences are just those which exist between our white-breasted
marten and our yellow-breasted marten, and as I believe it is im-
possible to find a second pair of animals to which this comparison
will apply, I apprehend that the point is proved. Both the
British martens are, as I know from my own observations, and
information gathered from persons in the habit of hunting them,
great destroyers of mice, birds, and snakes; they are both stated in
the ordinary works of natural history to be fond of honey, which
the ferret 1 and the weasel will not touch ; the fur of both is
valuable, but that of the larger species is the more valuable.
The colouration of the polecat, Mustela putorius, puts it out of the
field into which it has so often been wrongfully introduced, as does
also the not altogether” unimportant fact that it is not certain that
it is found in the extreme south of Europe. If any one who has
not had, or perhaps does not care to have, proof that the common
north-country name for the marten, viz. ‘Sweet Mart’ as opposed to
‘Foumart’ or ‘Foul Mart,’ an alias which the polecat has earned,
may not after all be so distinctive as to make us think that we
cannot have in the white-breasted marten the same creature as that
alluded to in the first two passages I have quoted from Aristo-
phanes, wishes to have this scruple removed at easy cost, he may
consult Gesner (“Hist. Anim.’ p. 866), who quotes something, in
loco, to the purpose from Alexander Aphrodisiensis. The stoat,
* Buffon, vii. 213; Wagner, ‘Sãugethiere," i. 5oo.
* Blasius, ‘Sãugethiere Deutschlands,’ p. 224.
DOMESTIC CATS. 509
Mustela herminea, could not have failed to have had the well-
marked club-shaped black tip of its much larger tail mentioned in
contradistinction to that of the common weasel, Mustela vulgaris,
if these two animals had been the pair contrasted as ya)\fi and ikris;
and it may further be remarked that the comparatively small bulk
of these animals, as also of the Sardinian weasel, Mustela boccamela,
which has likewise had its claims advocated for the title of yakſ,
would have very sufficiently prevented them from being the ‘fine
thieves’ which we know from Simonides, Aristophanes and Ba-
brius, the yaxaſ were. In looking over my notes of the anatomy of
the last marten, a male which came into my hands, I find that
there was upon its linea alba a space of two inches in length almost
bare of hair to direct attention to the fact mentioned by Aristotle,
‘Hist. Anim. ii. 3. 5, kal yèp # ya)\fi da toûv éxel Tô alôoſov, and to
explain how he came to class this comparatively small animal as
regards this carnivorous peculiarity with animals so much larger as
the fox and the wolf.
I will conclude the question of the marten cat with the lines
from Nicander, the contemporary of Theocritus, which Schneider
gives, l.c., iv. p. 49, and I will add to them, what Schneider does
not in eatenso, viz. the commentary of the Scholiast as given in the
Editio Princeps of Aldus Manutius, printed 1499, before the art of
printing was sixty years old. I give the lines and the scholium, as
both are much to the points just discussed and dismissed, and
neither are hackneyed in the literature of the subject. Nicander,
* Theriaca,’ l. 196:—
Moppi) 5’ ixvečrao kivajrérov otov ćplvöpſis.
irrièos # r" Špwton karouktóimov čAeópov
plateral, éé únvolo cabaptráčaga treretºpov.
To these lines are laterally apposed in the cramped contractions of
the edition specified, the following words of the Scholiast": āpavāpīs
* I hope I shall not be considered presumptuous for saying that having seen the Pine
Marten or Yellow-breasted Marten escape ‘like a shadow,’ as Longfellow describes the
hare as doing, from the midst of an assemblage of men and dogs of all dimensions when
smoked out from under some rocks, I believe I have a better idea of what Nicander,
who may have been similarly privileged, meant by áplvöpfis than the Scholiast had.
Great as was the creature's need, its agility was more than commensurate with it; and
whilst the words abiit, eaccessit, evasit, and alas, for the interests of anatomical investi-
gation, effugit also, are but weak symbols to express its speed, it takes a whole
hexameter-ful of imagery to give the picturesque effect which its lithe abstraction of
itself from jaws and paws produced upon me. It fled
‘Par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno.’
510 DOMESTIC CATS.
bè #rot purpas à Tâs belvås kai épy(Nov. tºtts & # Aeyouéum &ypta ya)\ff.
kal "Opimpos kpati 8' étruktvöémv Čs ātrö täs irriè0s toū (&ov.
Thirdly: Strabo's words, iii. 386, quoted by Schneider, l.c., iii.
p. 524, and relating to the taking of rabbits, kal 67 kai yaMäs àypias
às i Aubiſm tpéqet pépovolv čTurmöés, as puégavres trapſaariv eis rās
dTás. ai Ö' égéAkovouv čo Toſs Švváiv, prove, I suppose, beyond a
question, that ya)\fi stood for ferret, Mustela furo, as well as for
the martens, as early as the Christian era.
Fourthly: as one kind of yaxfi was known as the Taptmoro (a ya)\fi,
and as the Scholiasts tell us." Taprugatav was used äurt toº peyāAmv,
and as Herodotus informs us, iv. 192, that ya)\aſ very like these
Tartessian (or larger) yaxaſ were to be seen in Libya, where we know
any animal like and larger than a marten would be a viverra, I think
we may with some little probability suppose that the Tapriyorgia
ya)\fi was nothing less or else than the Viverra genetta, which is
found all over Africa and also in the South of Spain and France,
where it is domesticated even now, here and there, and acts as a
tolerable cat. I have not been able to find that this animal is
known in Greece, it is not included by Blasius in his ‘Sãugethiere
Mitteleuropas;’ whence we can the better understand why it was
called Taptmoro (a ya)\ff; though it is found in Asia Minor, whither
it may have found” its way from Egypt. If the Herpestes wid-
ringtoni, recently found * in the Sierra Morena, had been as well
known in the region of Tartessus as the Viverra genetta, its claims
to be considered as the Taptmooria ya)\m would perhaps have been
as much greater as its size is. But the Pharaoh's Rat, which
would then have been the yaxfi of Herodotus as being the repre-
sentative of the Spanish Herpestes, would have been contrasted
with it in the point of being considerably smaller, which however
is not the case. I append measurements of these and of certain
other of the animals of which I have spoken in this paper, the
point of size being the point in which the Tartessian or Spanish
Marten is contrasted with the commoner one by the Scholiast, and
being, as it seems to me, sufficiently great to mask the difference
which the lateral and the caudal striping of the Genet also consti-
tutes between it and the yaxaſ of Greece.
1 See Aristoph. ‘Ranae, ed. Bothe, adnot. ad l. 440, sub vocc. Taproota Hiſpatva,
ibique citata. -
* Ainsworth, cit. A. Wagner, ‘Abhand. Akad. Wiss. München,’ iv. Ioy,
* Gray, ‘Ann. and Mag. Nat. Hist.’ 1842, ix. 50.
DOMESTIC CATS. 511
Length of Body. Length of Tail.
Common Genet, Viverra genetta..................... 2O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I6”
Pharaoh's Rat, Herpestes ichneumon............... 18" ............... I8”
Spanish Ichneumon, Herpestes widdringtoni...... 22" ............... 20"
White-breasted Marten, Mustela foima............ 16" ............... 8”
Yellow-breasted Marten, Mustela martes......... 18" -............... I2”
Polecat and Ferret, Mustelae putorius et furo...... 18" ............... 6”
Sardinian Weasel, Mustela boccamela............... 8%" ............... 4”
Stoat, Mustela erminea........................... ..... ro" ............... 4”
Common Weasel, Mustela vulgaris.................. 7%" ............... 2”
The upshot of this paper then is to show that in classical times
the word yakſ, was used by the Greeks to denote the musteline
marten and ferret, but not the polecat probably, though probably
the genet, and that in later times, but not till later times, it was
used also for the Felis domesticus. The word mustela does not seem
to have been transferred together with the office when the latter
was handed over from the marten to the felis, in Italy. In the
East the felis took both the name and the work of the rival it
supplanted. It did succeed in supplanting the marten as the
domestic mouse-killer, probably partly by virtue of its greater
attachment to man and to place, partly by virtue of its less pro-
nounced tendency to burglary and petty larceny, partly by virtue
of its more even temper, and partly by its greater cleanliness and
less offensiveness. The very points also in which as a wild animal
it is inferior make it superior as a domestic one to a musteline.
Its constitution being less plastic it cannot fit itself as easily as
the latter to varying climates, in many of which, as Reugger has
shown of Paraguay, it cannot run wild. Its range of foods is more
limited, and its faculty for, and its courage in adopting new methods
of purveying for itself, less conspicuous than theirs. Hence ‘the
poor cat of the adage? being more dependent on man, has been
obliged to render itself more useful to him than the marten, and it
has very successfully turned its inferiority to ‘commodity.’
The question as to how, in the trivial language of two different
nations, English and Greek, in modern as in ancient times, Viver-
rines", Mustelines, and Felines have each had a representative
called by the same name as a couple of animals, one in each of the
two other families, is a little harder to understand for the ana-
tomist, or for the anatomical artist, than it is for anybody who,
being devoid of either of these accomplishments, will stand inside
* We speak of a civet cat as well as of a marten cat and common cat.
512 DOMESTIC CATS.
the half-shed half-house for the ‘Small Carnivora’ at the Zoological
Gardens, and listen there to the remarks of people who overlook
the little differences upon which scientific zoology is founded.
“They are all cats,” I heard one of these authorities' say there one
day, albeit there were then plenty of the eminently annuloid
viverrines as well as a very typical felis, the Felis chaus, to be
compared and contrasted at a single glance and within a few feet
of each other. It is not hard to see how the mustelines and viver-
rines come to be classed together, seeing that so many members of
both families are so markedly elongate, vermiform, tapering and
low on their limbs. But the relative proportions in the sides, in
the trapezium which four lines, corresponding one to the fore-legs,
one to the hind, one to the line of the back, and the fourth to the
ground on which the creature stands, make up respectively in a
feline and in a viverrine or musteline viewed from the side, are so
very different, to say nothing of the all but equally striking differ-
ences in the proportions of the skull and jaw diameters, longitu-
dinal and transverse, inter se, firstly, and in relation to the cervical
region, secondly, that we must look to points of habit rather than
of structural arrangement to account for the imposition of this
common name upon creatures to our eyes so different. And I
suppose the springy yet silent lightness of their step when placid,
and the lightning-like pounce of their attacking step, correlated as
they are with a more or less similar armature in tooth and claw,
are the points which ‘imaginationem ferientia aut intellectum vul-
garium notionum nodis astringentia' have caused the imposition of
the common name these animals have had given them. The ar-
boreal and nocturnal habits again, correlated with certain modi-
fications in the organs of special sense, are common points to the
feles and the mustelae, and especially though not exclusively to
the martens. Both alike take to trees when pressed by hounds,
but since the invention of fire-arms this single device of the ‘cats’
is no longer worth as in the old fable more than all the tricks of
the fox. The phrase ‘up a tree’ was not, perhaps could not have been,
anterior to that of “as sure as a gun.” The pine marten indeed
will, Blasius informs us, sit still on the same place on a bough
* Strabo, however, uses much the same language in speaking of what must. I think,
in all probability have been the common genet, Viverra genetta. Writing of Mauri-
tania he says, xvii. c. 3, p. 827 A, Casaubon —pépet be kai Yaxás aixotſpots to as cat
Öpotas, traßv Šti tā āūyxm mporém Twice plâAAov.
DOMESTIC CATS. 513
after having been shot at once and missed. The cat has, Reugger
informs us (“Sãugethiere Paraguay, p. 214), learnt to kill the rattle-
snake in Paraguay, and I have read that the felis acquired this
self-same snake-killing dexterity in the island of Naxos, but I
have not the reference at hand at this moment. Herein it has by
practice under the stimulus of constant provocation come to re-
semble the mustelines in what is instinctive to them; but though it
will steal cream, as Falstaff told us, it will never, like the martens,
steal eggs nor honey nor take to burrows in the way of refuge.
I am aware that there are both scholars and men of science to
whom disquisitions such as these will seem but the strenua inertia
hominis male feriati. Critics such as Pope, and, I regret to have to
add, such as Hallam (see ‘Literature of Modern Europe, i. 277), speak
of such attempts to preserve the unities of time and place in Faunae
as in dramas, the one with the cynical sneering giggle, the other
with the elevated and refrigerating yet half-compassionate contempt
congenial to their respective schools of literature and of politics.
But to the scholar I would say that, though in these matters as in
many others by increasing knowledge we increase also sorrow, or
at least our susceptibility for annoyance, it is rare indeed to find
a writer of the classical periods making blunders in the way of
putting animals into places which they never were found in, except
in connexion with the circus of olden or the menagerie of modern
times, which are so rife in all but our very best modern writers.
Modern catalogues of African mammals show that Virgil did not
deserve the criticism as to the presence of the stag there which
Pope in the ‘Martinus Scriblerus’ puts into the mouth of Bentley as
unworthy of any one else; and that Lipsius need not have ex-
plained away, as he does (‘Elect." ii. 4), the phrase Libystidos ursae.
The placing of the lion by Theocritus, i. 72, Tſivoy X6 'k opvpoſo
Aedºv čvékAava e 6avóvra, is in fact the only anachronism or ana-
topism of the kind which my memory furnishes me with from the
writers of the best periods of Greek and Roman literature.
To the man of science I may say in the words of Goethe 3–
“Müsset im Naturbebrachten
lmmer eins wie alles achten
Nichts ist drinnen, nichts ist draussen :
Denn was innen, das ist aussen
So ergreifet ohne Säumniss
Heilig óffentlich Geheimniss.”
Ll
514 DOMESTIC CATS,
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Aristotle, “Die Thierarten,’ von C. J. Sundevall. Stockholm, 1863. ‘De Ani-
malibus Historiae,” Schneider, Lipsiae, r81 I.
Sir George Cornewall Lewis, ‘Notes and Queries,’ 2nd Series, viii. Oct. 1, 1859.
Ducange, ‘Glossarium.”
Link, “Die Urwelt und das Alterthum.” Berlin, 1821.
J. Geoffroy St. Hilaire, ‘Hist. Nat. Gen.” Paris, 1862.
De Blainville, ‘Ostéographie Felis,” p. 68.
Dureau de la Malle, “Ann. Sci. Nat.' tom. xvii. 1829.
Bazin, ‘Actes Soc. Linn.’ Bordeaux, 1843.
Lenz, ‘Zoologie der alten Griechen und Römer.” Gotha, 1856.
XXIX.
ON THE CAT OF THE ANCIENT GREEKS.
IN a book, with the existence of which I became acquainted a
few days ago, by a reference in Aubert and Wimmer's new edition
of Aristotle’s ‘Historia Animalium,’ and which, through the kindness
of Mr. Sclater, I have had put into my hands this day, I have come
upon certain statements which confirm not only certain of the
conclusions, but certain also of the conjectures put forward by me
in the ‘Journ. of Anat. and Phys., Nov. 1867 (Article XXVIII).
This book is Dr. Erhard’s ‘Fauna der Cycladen,’ Leipzig, 1858.
From it I learn that the Mustela foina, the white-breasted marten,
the animal which in my paper I strove to show was the domestic
mouse-killer of the ancient Greeks, is common now in all the
Cyclades, and in some of them actually has the old Greek name
tkrus at the present day. The polecat, Mustela putorius, and the
ferret are not members of this fauna; neither could Dr. Erhard
find the genet there. I need not point out the bearing of
these statements upon those advanced by me in that article. But
I will take this opportunity of saying that Dr. Erhard's little
volume deserves to be better known than it is at present in England.
Besides giving us an excellent example and a ‘simple case 'for the
study of the rationale of the Distribution of Species, it teaches us the
very important, and not a little needed lesson of caution, in receiving
catalogues of indigenous animals of any area, however small and
accessible, as being necessarily exhaustive. Though the vegetation
of the Cyclades is (p. 7) of such a character that a hare can hardly
hide itself from the eye of the eagle, and though at first Dr.
Erhard was (p. 8) inclined to think their mammalian fauna was
as exclusively Adullamite as that of a coral island, he has, after an
Ll 2
516 ON THE CAT OF THE ANCIENT GREEKS.
investigation of several years, given us a list of no less than sixteen
land mammals, amongst which there is one new and previously
undescribed species, the Ægoceros pictus, the Ibex of the Cyclades.
The very general distribution of the rabbit, which in its wild state
here is as large as the hare or larger, goes some way towards show-
ing that it was indigenous in the area of the Cyclades, as it is sup-
posed to have been in the Balearic Islands before they were broken
up into an archipelago. But at the same time it is the harder to
understand how Aristotle and how the Greek gourmets who ºvres
év tág, Aayºots must have known how different a rabbit's flesh was
from a hare's, if they had ever eaten it, could have failed to dis-
tinguish the one animal from the other, the rabbit being now most
abundant there, and having made the Myconos, so often mentioned
by these ancients, into a honeycomb with their burrows. But in
their days these islands were richer in population, an occasional
massacre of Melians having been as nothing to the constant ope-
ration of Turkish barbarism ; and if, as I have striven to show, this
larger population had in domestication, house by house, such an
enemy of the rabbit as the marten is, we have some sort of an ex-
planation of the absence of the mention by them of an animal as
existing in the Cyclades in classic, which must all but certainly
have existed there in geological, as it does also in our own times.
The islands, I may add, were probably or certainly better wooded
than now; and trees favour the multiplication of the rabbit less
than they do that of its many and various enemies.
2. In my previous paper I said, Article XXVIII. p. 51 1, ‘In the
East the felis took both the name and the work of the rival it
supplanted.’ It is possible that I should have been right in making
this statement more extensive, and in saying that the cat of the
Egyptians took not only the name yaxfi, but also the name irtus of
its predecessor in the Greek house. For I find from a passage
of Tzetzes, ‘Chil. v. 8, quoted by Bochart, ‘Hierozoicon, i. 986, 57,
that this authority, if so we may call him, called the aixovpos by
the name of iktus. The passage from Bochart runs thus: “In
Hesychio voce Krušéa, ktís Éott (§ov Špowev ya)\fi, viverra est animal
feli simile. Proinde putawit Tzetzes esse felis speciem, quod his
verbis diserte asserit Chiliadis quinti capite octavo,
tieris Bē $ov kai airò texeſ (l. TréNet) putòopáyov
Xepoafov kai terpátrovv pºv, 6 aikovpov kaAoûgev.’
ON THE CAT OF THE ANCIENT GREEKS. 517
But I am inclined, as I think Bochart was also, to consider
these lines to be so worthy of their author as to be unworthy of
any attention from us. And it is interesting to note that, in a
Basle edition, of the year 1546, of Tzetzes' works, the first, and to
the credit of human nature it should be added, also, up to 1826,
the last independent edition of this portion of his works, some
of which happily still remain unprinted, there stands opposite
these lines the following Latin note: ‘Ali; mustelam rusticam seu
viverram.’ *
3. If I understated my case in this instance, I overstated it in
another, when I said (p. 513) that the cat will never take to burrows
in the way of refuge. I have already said, in this paper, that in
drawing up catalogues and making faunae, it is wise and well to
avoid universal negatives. It would have been well if I had had this
precept before my eyes in a more generalised form when I wrote
my last paper; for I have since been informed by two good ob-
servers that they have each of them known a cat take to trog-
lodytism. In neither of these cases, however, did the animal profit
much by doing what it could not have been expected to do.
XXX.
ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF PREHISTORIC
TIMES IN BRITAIN,
AND ON THE MUTUAL RELATIONS OF THIS WARIETY OF PIG AND ‘SUS
SCROFA FERUs,' ‘SUS CRISTATUS,' ‘SUS ANDAMANENSIS, AND
‘SUS BARBATUS.’
PoRTIONs of two skeletons of domestic pigs having been put
into my hands by the Rev. William Greenwell, F.S.A., from an
interment of the so-called late Celtic period, i.e. of the ultimate or
penultimate century before the Roman conquest of this country,
I determined to compare them with such other specimens of Suidae.
as might by any possibility be genetically connected with them.
Among these other specimens I may mention, first, several speci-
mens of the wild boar, Sus scrofa, var. ferus, from the alluvial
deposits of this neighbourhood, and now in the Geological Series
of the Oxford Museum, under the charge of Professor Prestwich,
F.R.S.; secondly, five specimens of the Indian wild hog, Sus
cristatus, kindly lent me by Sir Walter Elliot, K.C.S.I., F.L.S.;
thirdly, two skulls of Sus andamanensis, presented to the Oxford
University Museum by my friend Prof. J. Wood-Mason, of the
Indian Museum, Calcutta; and fourthly, four skulls of Sus barbatus
from Borneo. The extensive series of skulls of Suidae contained
in the British Museum, those in the Royal College of Surgeons of
London, and the specimens of wild- and domestic-swine skulls con-
tained in our own collection were also used for this comparison.
It may be well at the outset to specify the several points of wide
and general interest upon which such an enquiry as the ensuing
may be brought to bear. First among these I would mention its
bearings upon the now so commonly discussed questions relating to
the early migrations of our own species. The pig was one of the
ON THE DOMESTIC PIG of PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 519
earliest, possibly the very earliest, of animals which man domes-
ticated ; and the question of the source or sources whence it was
derived has consequently an “ethnographisch-archäologische Bedeu-
tung’ (to use the words of Fischer", in his analogous investigation
as to the sources whence the jade and nephrite of early European
times were procured) of the first importance. Gibbon * has re-
marked that ‘man is the only animal which can live and multiply
in every country from the equator to the poles;’ and he has pro-
ceeded to aver that ‘the hog seems to approach nearest to our
species in that privilege.” As a matter of fact, Gibbon here, as so
often elsewhere, was very nearly though not quite exact : the
northward limit of the range of the wild boar may perhaps be
taken as somewhere between 55° and 6o° N., and that of the tame
pig as 64° N., whilst that of the common fowl 4 extends probably
a little, and that of the dog certainly much, further northward.
The mention of the Australian dingo suggests another amendment
of the somewhat cynical remark of our great historian.
Secondly, a very useful light is thrown, or may be thrown, upon
the question of the extent to which the influences of civilisation
act upon our own species, by the analogous enquiry into the effects
which domestication has been able to produce upon an animal
linked so closely with ourselves in a many-sided commensalism.
The least pleasant aspect of that commensalism, that, namely, which
is presented to us by the facts of our solidarity with swine in
the maintenance of the alternation of the forms of life of Taenia.
and Trichina, must, it may be remarked, upon any view of the
origination of the four species concerned, force upon our attention
* H. Fischer, “Nephrit und Jadeit nach ihren mineralogischen Eigenschaften.”
Stuttgart, 1875. For similar investigations as to the sources of the cultivated plants
and the weeds of prehistoric times, see Keller's ‘Lake-Dwellings,’ translated by Lee,
pp. 303 and 343. -
* ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ chap. ix. note 9. p. 352. Smith's
edition.
* For the northward range of the wild boar and the tame pig, see Brandt and
Ratzeburg, ‘Med. Zool.’ p. 89; Fitzinger, ‘Sitzungsberichte d. Akad. d. Wiss. Wien,’
1864, p. 387; Radde, “Reise im Süden von Ostsibirien,’ i. 236; Zimmermann, “Geo-
graphische Geschichte,’ i. 189, 1778. Middendorf, in his ‘Sibirische Reise,’ p. Io92,
1867, gives 56° N. lat. as the extreme actual northward limit of the wild boar.
(Since I wrote as above, Mr. H. N. Moseley has procured for me a skull of a tame pig
from Stene i Bö, Lofoten Islands, 2° above the arctic circle.)
* For the northward range of the domestic fowl, Gallus domesticw8, see Brandt and
Ratzeburg, l.c. p. I5o.
520 ON THE DOMIESTIC PIG OF
considerations of the very greatest gravity. To take somewhat
lower ground, from such a study as that of the variations of the pig
under domestication, we may obtain safe criteria for estimating the
relative effects of food, whether scanty or abundant, of early or late
exercise of the sexual functions, and of intercrossing, upon the
formation of facial characteristics. The importance of not over-
looking the influences of sex and of age is nowhere more forcibly
pressed upon our attention than in an examination of a series of
skulls of Suidae. It has often been overlooked in disquisitions on
the skulls of Hominidae.
Thirdly, whether the question at issue as regards man between
the Polygenists and the Monogenists will, as has been predicted
(Darwin, ‘Descent of Man,” ed. 2nd, p. 180, 1874), “die a silent
and unobserved death' or not, there can be no doubt that illustra-
tions of the argumentations whereby that question has been, or
ought to have been, dealt with, can be furnished nowhere more
fitly and fully than in an enquiry into the distinctness or non-
distinctness of the various races of swine.
Three distinct views have been advocated as to the relationship
of the domestic to the wild swine, Sus scrofa, var. ferus. We may
take as the first of these that advocated by Professor Steenstrup",
and stated by him in the following plain words:—
"Il n'y a pas de transition a observer entre les sangliers et les plus anciens
cochons domestiques.’
In this view Professor Steenstrup will find Mr. Samuel Sidney
coincide in the opening sentences of his work “On the Pig ;’ and a
view very closely similar to it was put tentatively forward in the
year 1821 by a savant who combined the functions of a Professor
of Materia Medica with those of Director of the Botanical Garden
at Berlin, Professor Link, in the following words, to be found in
his work “Die Urwelt und das Alterthum, i. p. 192:—
‘Das zahme Schwein stammt nach allen Naturforschern von den wilden Schweinen
ab, und auch die Alten waren schon dieser Meinung”; doch scheint mir die Säche
keinesweges entschieden. Die Stärke, Grösse und Farbe des wilden Schweines wiirden
keinen Unterschied machen, da die wilden Thiere stārker, grösser, und diinkler
gefärbt sind, als die zahmen, aber die grossen Hauer des wilden Ebers scheinen doch
nicht bloss Vergrósserung zu sein. Die Feltdecke des zahmen Schweines findet sie
* “Bulletin du Congrès International d’Archéologie préhistorique a Copenhague en
1869, p. 163.
* Varro, “De Re Rustica,’ l. ii. c. 1.
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 521
niemals auch bei dem fettesten wilden Schweine, die gestreifte Farbe des Frischlings
ist sogar merkwürdig, die Stirn der wilden Schweine ist mehr gewölbt, die Ohren
sind kūrzer, mehr Zugerundet, der Rüssel länger, andere Verhältnisse an den innern
Theilen zu geschweigen. Es fehlt ganz an Beispielen, dass die Zähmung solehe
Veränderungen hervorgebracht. Wielleicht stammt das zahme Schwein von einer
orientalischen Art ab, welche gross aber unschädlich sein soll, und him und wieder in
einigen Reisebeschreibungen erwähnt wird". Doch erfordert die Sache noch eine
genauere Untersuchung. Das siamische Schwein aus dem östlichen Asien abstam-
mend, ist ohne Zweifel eine besondere Art.”
Frecisely the opposite view was held by Mr. Youatt, who at
p. 35 of his work on ‘The Pig, London, 1847, says, when speaking
of the wild boar,
“No one can for a moment doubt that it is the parent stock from which the
domesticated breeds of swine originally sprang.’
Blasius (“Sãugethiere,’ 1857, p. 509), Fr. Cuvier (‘Hist, des
Mamm.,’ 1824), and Giebel (‘Sãugethiere, p. 225, 1859), would, I
apprehend, agree with the extreme view enunciated by Mr. Youatt.
An intermediate view is put forward by Rütimeyer in his inestim-
able work, “Die Fauna der Pfahlbauten,’ pp. 186–190: according
to him, what, owing to the slow spread in Germany of improved
breeds, may still be called das gemeine Hausschwein has originated
from Sus scrofa, var. ferus ; whilst the Berkshire breeds, he thinks,
may owe their origin to Sus celebensis ; and his Sus scrofa, var.
palustris, ‘das Torfschwein,” a domestic pig known as ‘das Bündt-
ner Schwein, and Sus indicus may represent a distinct stock, if not
species. Nathusius, in his ‘Schweineschädel, p. 175, agrees with
Rütimeyer as to the origin of the large-eared race common in
Central Europe, but suggests Sus vittatus, of the islands of Java,
Borneo, Amboyna, and Batchian, as the parent stock of the widely-
spread domestic breed known as Sus indicus. In this latter point
he agrees with S. Müller. Fitzinger (l.c.) differs from Nathusius
in supposing, without perhaps adequate reasons, Sus leucomystaa to
be the parent stock of the Chinese, Cape, Portuguese, and Cleve-
land breeds, whilst Sus cristatus, the wild pig of Hindostan, he
suggests as the parent stock of the Siamese and Sardinian races.
Temminck (“Fauna Japonica, p. 57, pl. xx, cit. Nathusius, l.c.
p. 167) suggests that Sus leucomystaw may be the parent of the
domestic Sus indicus; and though Nathusius, p. 167, demurs to
* Otter, ‘Voyage en Persie, t. i. p. 207; D. Maillet, “Description de l'Egypte,’
t. ii. p. 176. -
522 , ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF
the enunciation of this statement as being definitely proved, his
objection amounts to little more than saying that Sus leucomysław
is probably not specifically distinct from Sus vittatus, which Nathu-
sius himself holds to be the parent stock of Sus indicus.
My own views, as based upon the data available to me, are to the
following effect:—The prehistoric domestic swine which have come
into my hands appear to me to be more nearly affined to Sus scrofa
than to any of the Asiatic wild swine with which I am acquainted ;
secondly, without wishing to affirm absolutely that too much
weight has been laid by Nathusius upon the shortness of the lacry-
mal for differentiating Sus indicus, as we now see it, from Sus scrofa
and its progeny, I am inclined to think that sub-equality, if not
actual equality, between the malar and the orbital borders of the
lacrymal bone may be found in prehistoric skulls of the Sus scrofa,
var. ferus, and especially in the female skulls of that variety of Sus
which, in other points, such as the slenderness of the snout, differ
from the ‘Torfschwein,” the representative in those times of Sus
findicus, according to Rütimeyer; and, thirdly, I think it is possi-
ble to show that, whilst Sus cristatus, Sus leucomystaa, Sus vittatus,
and Sus timorensis form a closely connected group of Suidae non
verrucosi, with which, again, Susandamanensis and Sus papuensis are
to be allied, all these sub-species differ in points of considerable if
not of specific value from Sus verrucosus of Java, from Sus celebensis,
and, finally, from Sus scrofa of the Palaearctic region as well as
from the non-verrucose Sus barbatus of Borneo.
It may be well to begin with this latter point first, and to show
that the group of Eastern pigs, of which the wild pig of India,
the Malay peninsula, and the Lancay Islands, Sus cristatus, may be
taken as a type, is always distinguishable from Sus scrofa, var. ferus,
of Europe, and Asia north of the Himalayas. This view is not
equivalent to one which should lay it down as certain that they
are specifically distinct, a question which it is not proposed to raise
here. I should agree, however, with Mr. Jerdon, whose book on
the Mammals of India, 1874, came into my hands subsequently to
the formation of my opinion, in holding that the Indian wild hog
was ‘as worthy of specific distinction as many other recognised
species’ (l.c. p. 241), though this is not to say much. I should
not, however, entirely accept his statement to the effect that the
head of the Indian wild hog was longer and more pointed than
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 523
that of the European wild boar, though this has been laid down
by Colonel Sykes (“Proc. Zool. Soc. 1831, p. 30) as being the
state of the case; for in measuring the relative lengths of the nasal
and fronto-parietal regions of the Indian wild hog, I have come
to think that precisely the reverse of this statement is usually,
though not invariably, the case, the Indian hog having the nasal
bones shorter relatively to the rest of the roof-bones of the skull
than Sus scrofa, var. ferus. Neither do I agree with Colonel
Sykes in holding that the straightness of the plane of the forehead
will differentiate the Indian at least from modern European wild
boars: some concavity is produced in the mesial contour-line of
large prehistoric wild boars, not by any angulation at the junc-
tion of the facial with the cranial bones, as in modern tame swine
of highly cultivated breeds, but by the upgrowth of the back por-
tion of the skull roof-bones and the occipital transverse crest ;
modern European wild boars, however, which are much inferior
in size to their prehistoric and, indeed, to their mediaeval pre-
decessors, have the fronto-parietal and nasal lines forming one
unbroken straight line.
Colonel Sykes's words, “Tail never curled or spirally twisted,’
appear to me (l.c. p. 11) to be said of the tame variety of the
Indian hog; but though Fitzinger (‘Sitzungsberichte Akad. Wiss.
Wien,’ 1864) specifies the form in which the caudal vertebrae are
carried as one of the specific marks in each of his descriptions of
the Suidae, and though Linnaeus uses the words (Ed. xiii. ‘Syst.
Nat.’ p. 65) ‘Cauda sinistrorsum recurvata” for differentiating Canis
Jamiliaris from Canis lupus, s. Canis cauda incurvata, I am inclined
to think too much weight may be laid upon this point. -
Thoroughly trustworthy figures of the European wild boar,
such as that given by Schreber (‘Sãugethiere, taf. cccxx), or that
in Buffon's ‘Hist. Nat.’ v. pl. xiv, and Fréd. Cuvier, ‘Hist. Mamm.,’
represent it as having the root and tip of its tail lying evenly be-
tween two points; though the Vienna zoologist just referred to says
of this appendage in this animal,
‘Schwanz geringelt, kurz, nicht ganz bis zum Fersengelenke reichend.”
And as an indication of the trifling value of such a point as this,
it may be remarked that of two female specimens of the very well-
marked species, Sus barbatus, one young, the other old, figured by
524 ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF
S. Müller, ‘Verhand.’ i. taf. 30, one has the tail curled, and the
other, the elder one, has it straight.
Mr. Blyth (cit. Jerdon, l.c.) holds S. cristatus to be only a variety
of the wild boar of Europe, but still to be a well-marked race. De
Blainville (‘Ostéog. Sus, p. 129) sees no differences of morphological
importance between any of the Asiatic swine and the European
wild boar, and says:—
‘La première espèce que le squelette nous permet de distinguer par des caractères
susceptibles d’étre lus et exposés est celle qui se trouve dans toute l'Afrique au dela
de l'Atlas et jusqu'à son extrémité la plus méridionale et même au dela dans la
grande Île de Madagascar, et qui est connue sous le nom de Sus larvatus (Potamo-
choerus africanus, Porcus madagascariensis, nobis').
Giebel follows De Blainville in this. Dr. Gray, in ‘Proc. Zool.
Soc.’ 1852, p. 130, said that, after examining ten skulls of the
European wild boar and its offspring from this country, from the
Gambia, and from the Cape, as also twelve skulls of the wild hog
from Continental India, he could not discover any constant easily-
described character by which the European and the Indian kinds
could be distinguished. And, he adds, “this is the case in the
many other genera allied to the pigs. It is true, no doubt, that
many animals, such as—
‘the lion and the tiger, the fox and the jackal, the ass and the zebra, are far more
strikingly differentiated by their pelage than by their skulls,”
as Professor Huxley (‘Prehistoric Remains of Caithness,’ p. 132)
has taught us; still it yet remains to be proved that differences
which, though only skin-deep, are constant and permanent, will not
ultimately be found to be correlated with more or fewer differences
of the deeper-lying parts, either of a purely qualitative or of a
quantitative kind.
In a disquisition the ultimate object of which is the attainment
of clearer views as to the origin of our tame pigs, the question
meets us at the outset whether there exists any marked difference
between the wild stocks under comparison as regards their suscep-
tibility of domestication. Upon this point I have to say that I
find, in opposition to what Mr. Samuel Sidney has laid down in the
first chapter of his work on the pig, that Sus scrofa, var. ferus, is
credited by most trustworthy authors with as great a capacity for
domestication as any wild animal, including its wild Asiatic
congeners, upon which observations are recorded as to this particular
PREHISTORIC, TIMES IN BRITAIN. 525,
susceptibility. Pallas's words in his ‘Zoographia, i. p. 269, as to
the wild boar of the Palaearctic region, called by him, not incon-
veniently, Sus europaeus, in contradistinction to the China or Siam
pig, called by him Sus indicus, says plainly and emphatically ‘por-
celli cicurari assuescunt facile et cum domesticis generant.” Radde's
utterances (“Reisen im Süden von Ost-Sibirien, Bd. i. p. 236) are
even more to the point, as they affirm the like of wild swine of
greater age. They run thus:—
“So muss ich gestehen dass sie sehr friedlicher Natur sind, und es mir mehrmals
passirte mittelalte Wildeschweine sich mir bis auf vier Faden Weite nahen zu
sehen.’
The Asiatic pigs, secondly, of the group represented by Sus cris-
tatus, though not, within my knowledge, those known as Sus verru-
cosus, nor those known as Sus barbatus, have very similar and very
numerous testimonies borne to their educability and capacity for
attachment to man. Fitzinger, indeed, says of the domesticated
Chinese pig, his ‘Sus leucomystaa, sinensis,” that it resembles the
domesticated European pig generally in its habits and character,
but that it shows much more attachment than the European farm-
pig to the persons who take care of it, and will even follow them
about, although it is otherwise troublesome and obstinate. (: Sit-
zungsberichte d. Akad. Wiss. Wien,’ 1858, Bd. xxx. p. 235.) In
Formosa, when the Dutch first became acquainted with it, in the
beginning of the seventeenth century, every native woman, we are
informed, on the authority of Ogilby (‘Atlas Chinensis, ii. p. 8, eit. by
Swinhoe, ‘Proc. Zool.’ 1870, p. 643), had ‘a great pig running after
her, as we use to have a dog.' A closer intimacy than this has been
observed to exist between Homo sapiens asiaticus, Linn., and Sus
sinensis, Linn., by Professor Huxley (cit. Galton, ‘Trans. Ethnol.
Soc.’ vol. iii. 1865, p. 127), who has seen sucking-pigs nursed at
the breasts of women, apparently as pets, in islands of the New-
Guinea group. As regards the wild races, Sir Walter Elliot tells
me, in a letter of date May 15, 1876:—
‘I have seen the young of Sws cristatus, which had been captured by some of the
Indian nomad communities, and reared by them, running about among the domestic
stock; so that it would be hard to say where the line should be drawn".’
* It would appear that this difficulty has been felt by others to be a very real one.
Colonel Walter Campbell tells us, at p. 325 of his ‘Indian Journal,’ 1864, that he
fears ‘the young gentlemen of the present day have taken to spearing village pigs
instead of wild boars,’ and that he has “seen the thing done before now.’
526 - ON THE DOMIESTIC PIG OF
The wild Sus papuensis has been found by Europeans, as we are
informed by M. R. P. Lesson (‘Voyage de la Coquille,’ 1826, vol. i.
p. 176), to be more thoroughly domesticable than the half-wild
state in which some of the natives are content to leave it would
have led us to expect, and to set up relations of mutual amity, not
only with the human, but also with canine companions.
As regards the Aethiopian region, the wild hog is reported to us
by Dr. Barth" as consorting on terms of perfect amity, and, indeed,
intimacy, with other domesticated animals than the dog, and also
with the natives. These are his words relating to a district in
Central Africa:-
“Naked young lads were splashing and playing about in the water together with
wild hogs in the greatest harmony; never in any part of Negroland have I seen this
animal in such numbers as here about the Shárſ. Calves and goats were pasturing in
the fields with wild hogs in the midst of them.’
It is impossible to be perfectly certain what wild hog this may
have been ; still it can scarcely have been any other than Sus sen-
naariensis, which has been supposed (see Darwin, “Domestication,”
i. p. 71, 2nd ed.) by J. W. Schütz to have been the parent stock of
Sus scrofa, var. palustris, of Rütimeyer, but underneath the entry of
which, in the British Museum Catalogue of 1869, p. 338, I find
the following note:— &
“Dr. Murie says he has often seen and eaten the true wild boar of the genus Sus
in Africa, as well as the Potamochoerus, on the west coast. I have never seen any,
or the skull of one.’ -
Like Dr. Gray, I have had no quite satisfactory opportunities for
forming an opinion, such as inspection of authentic skulls gives, as
to the relations of Sus sennaariensis to Sus scrofa ; but whilst going
over the series of skulls of Suidae in the British Museum, I came
upon one which, though entered under the head of Potamochoerus
africanus, ought, I make no doubt, to be entered under the head of
Sus sennaariensis, or, as I should prefer to call it, Sus scrofa, var.
africanus. This skull is numbered 715 a ; and of it we have the
following history from Dr. Gray (; Proc. Zool. Soc.’ 1868, p. 35;
IBrit. Mus. Catalogue, 1869, p. 342):—
• A skull without its lower jaw (715 a) was brought home by Captain Alexander
from his expedition to Damara, and presented to the British Museum. It is recorded
in Mr. Gerrard’s “Catalogue of the Bones in the British Museum” as Sus capensis
1 Referred to by Nathusius, p. 147, l.c.; or see his ‘Travels in Central Africa,'
vol. iii. p. 311, 1857.
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 527
(p. 277). It is the skull of an adult animal, with the crown of the grinders much
worn. It is probably the skull of a female, as it agrees with all the characters of
Potamochoerus ; but it has only a well-marked ridge across the upper part of the
base of the sheath of the upper canine, and the upper margin of the nose is not
dilated nor swollen.’
When I took this skull into my hands I was uncharitable enough
to suggest to Mr. Gerrard that it was a skull of Sus cristatus
wrongfully assigned to Damara as its habitat. Leaving this low
ground, I came to think that it might have come from some
descendant of pigs of the Sus indicus breed which had run wild at
the Cape and reverted to the Sus cristatus form. But I have now
no doubt that this is a skull of such a wild boar as those of which
Dr. Murie speaks; and if this be so, the Sus of Africa is not readily
to be distinguished from Sus cristatus, at least by cranial characters.
Dr. Gray, under the heading Sus sennaariensis (“Proc. Zool. Soc. l.c.
p. 32, and British Mus. “Catalogue,’ 1869, p. 338), suggests that
the skull figured by De Blainville (‘Ostéographie, tab. v) may have
belonged to a Sus sennaariensis. It is described as ‘Sus scrofa
aegypt; ' by De Blainville ; but, as far as I can judge from the
drawing, it has all the characters, to be hereinafter detailed, which
distinguish Sus scrofa, var. ferus, from Sus cristatus, and conse-
quently from such a skull as that labelled 715 a, and brought home
by Captain Alexander. Of course there is no & priori difficulty in
the way of our supposing that the wild boar either of Palestine or
of Algiers, both well-known animals, may have extended into
Egypt, a country which has so much both of the Palaearctic and
of the Aethiopian fauna in occupation of its territory. Anyhow
Dr. Murie and Dr. Barth are sufficient witnesses to the fact that a
true Sus is found in Africa south of the Atlas and Sahara. I cannot,
therefore, accept Mr. Wallace's statement (‘Geograph. Distrib. of
Animals, vol. i. pp. 253, 286–322) to the effect that a true Sus is
not to be found in the Aethiopian region. The mistake made, and
handsomely acknowledged, by Fitzinger (‘Sitz. Acad. Wiss. Wien,’
1864, Bd. 49, i. p. 389), in naming certain young specimens of Sus
sennaariensis by the name which Fr. Cuvier had given to the masked
boar, supposing them to be the young of that species, would not
have occurred with adult specimens. What Fr. Cuvier called Sus
larvatus, we know as Potamochoerus africanus ; to save further con-
fusion of names and errors of fact, it would be well to drop the
name Sus larvatus altogether. Potamochoerus, which I observed to
528 ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF
resemble Sus cristatus in having a large lacrymo-frontal ridge, is,
of course, specifically distinct from it. Sus sennaariensis, if, as I
think is most likely, closely allied to Sus cristatus, is another in-
stance of the wide distribution of ‘Pachyderms,’ a point on which
Rütimeyer insists, in a different tone (“Herkunft unserer Thierwelt,’
p. 34) from that adopted by Gibbon, but not less categorically, nor,
indeed, less strikingly, remarking, as he does, that at the present
day the Hyraw and the Hippopotamus are the only genera of ‘Pachy-
derms’ confined to one quarter of the globe.
The Aethiopian region therefore must be held to possess a true
Sus ; and as to domesticability, the Palaearctic, the Oriental, and
the Aethiopian Suidae have possibly equal claims".
* Pigs fulfil excellently well the six conditions enumerated by Mr. Francis Galton,
l, c., as necessary for domestication : viz. I. That the animal should be hardy;
2. That it should have an inborn liking for man; 3. That it should be comfort-
loving; 4. That it should be found useful; 5. That it should breed freely; 6. That
it should be gregarious. Aesop, Aelian, and Lactantius (cit. by Bochart, ‘Hiero-
zoicon," ii. 698) have, in various ways, remarked on the peculiarity of the pig as
contrasted with other domestic animals, in that it is useful only when dead, giving
neither milk, as does the cow, nor wool as does the sheep. With this peculiarity is
connected the fact, useful for the often difficult task of deciding whether a particular
skull came from a wild or a domestic breed, that domestic pigs are usually made
useful while young. Rütimeyer, indeed (l.c. p. 52), gives it as one of his reasons
for supposing Sus scrofa, var. palustris, to be represented by a wild as well as by a
tame stock, that its remains are usually those either of very old or quite young indi-
viduals. A pig will father while quite young; and whilst gaining nothing in its
capacity of manufacturer of food in its own body, it loses in its capacity of a breeding
animal with increase of age. This is not the case with the cow ; and the discovery,
therefore, of remains of very old individuals of this species only justifies us in inferring
that the cow was a scarce and valuable animal in the period and place to which it
belonged. See Rütimeyer, ‘Fauna der Pfahlbauten, p. Io.
The special value of the pig as a domesticated animal is commonly expressed in an
estimate that ‘ twice the weight of food may be obtained from hogs than can be
obtained from the same cost of food by means of any other animals’ (Richardson,
l. c. p. 42). In a little more detail, it is to be remarked that the pig, as a meat
producer, stands at an advantage (to the consumer), first, in the smaller relative
weight of its ‘offal” as compared with the entire weight of its body, but secondly, and
chiefly, in the large proportion of fat, the kind of food which is eminently the hardest
for a savage or for the poor to procure, which it will store up upon almost any dietary.
For this, see Lawes and Gilbert's invaluable Paper in the Royal Society's Transactions
for 1859, ‘On the Composition of some of the Animals fed and slaughtered as Human
Eood, page 565 for relative proportion of offal, pages 513 and 543 for storing up of
fat. It may be here remarked that De Blainville (‘Ostéographie, G. Sus,” Intro-
duction, p. IoT) may very likely be right in suggesting that the pig may have
furnished animal food to the earliest races of man before either cow or sheep, but that
he could not have had our knowledge of the very various kinds of animals which,
even in these days, furnish lower races of men with animal food, when he supposes
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 529
There would be little weight to be laid upon mere differences in
size, even if much greater differences did exist between Sus scrofa,
var. ferus, and Sus cristatus than a comparison of the measurements
given in the British Museum ‘Catalogue of Carnivorous Pachyder-
matous and Edentate Mammalia,’ 1869, pp. 334, 337, 338, or a
comparison of the skulls themselves shows to be the case; for
Pallas's' words and Nathusius's" are both clear to the effect that
differences of as much as 50 per cent. do exist between individuals
of the Sus scrofa, var. ſerus ; and a comparison of what I believe to
be the skull of an old wild sow, from the alluvium of the Thames,
near Oxford, with that of a modern wild boar, will put the matter
beyond all question.
According to Nathusius”, the differences in size between the
largest and the smallest wild swine are so considerable as to have
caused them to be distinguished by such names as ‘Hauptschweine’
and ‘Kümmerer’ respectively; the latter of which terms has an
equivalent in the word ‘Wreckling,’ applied in some parts of Eng-
land to the supernumerary pig in a litter, i.e. to the one which
makes the litter exceed the number of available teats, and fares
accordingly. Two or three of the commonly reported facts” as to
the pairing and period of reproduction of the wild swine account
very sufficiently for these great differences in their size. Though
the males are monogamous, severe battles nevertheless take place
between them for the possession, it is said, of the largest females;
the smallest females consequently are left for the vanquished, which
will usually be the smallest males. Hence a great difference in the
two sets of offspring would be reasonably expected. But, further,
it is known that the wild, like the tame * swine, will breed long
that animal food must have been supplied by one or other of the three animals
named. And his reason for such truth as his conclusions contain is, it is to be feared,
but a poor one ; it runs thus, ‘le Cochon étant l’animal qui sympathise le moins par
ses qualités affectives avec l'espèce humaine a dā étre celui qu’elle aura le moins
répugné a tuer de sangfroid pour s'en nourrir ; ce qui aura eu lieu plus tard et avec
bien plus de répugnance pour le Mouton et pour le Boeuf.”
* ‘Zoographia,’ 1831, p. 267.
* “Schweineschädel,’ 1864, p. 65.
* See Richardson, “Domestic Pigs,’ pp. 18, 19 (Warne, London); Samuel Sidney,
“The Pig, p. 4 (Routledge, London); Blasius, ‘Sãugethiere,' p. 509, 1857; Wagner,
‘Sãugethiere," p. 426, 1835; Brandt and Ratzeburg, ‘Medizinische Zoologie," p. 88,
820.
I : º: the period at which tame sows will breed, see Sidney, l.c. p. 61 : Low, “On
the Domesticated Animals of the British Islands,’ p. 415.
M DOl
530 ON THE DOMIESTIC PIG OF
before the period of maturity; and that the offspring of such
unions, whether both of the parents or only one be immature, are
likely to be smaller in size as well as fewer in number, needs no
argument.
Whilst no & priori probability can be gathered from any greater
domesticability in favour of the claims of either European, Asiatic,
or African Sus to be the exclusive source of our domestic pigs, and
whilst mere size equally fails to differentiate these races, the point
of the relation between the length and the height respectively of
the lacrymal bone on which Nathusius has laid such weight
(“Schweineschädel, passim et pp. 9, Io, 83, 91, 92, 175), and to
which Mr. Darwin has assigned so much importance (‘Animals and
Plants under Domestication, vol. i. p. 70, ed. 1875), though in the
immense majority of cases enabling us at once to differentiate the
skulls of Sus cristatus, as indeed of the other Asiatic pigs without
facial warts, from those of Sus scrofa, var. ferus, also sometimes
fails us. Having measured a very considerable number of skulls of
Sus cristatus from very various parts of India, and having invari-
ably found them to have the orbital border of the lacrymal shorter
than, or at most only just equal in length to the malar, and bear- tº
ing in mind the constant reference made by Nathusius to the mor-
phological and classificatory value of this proportional difference in
the tame variety, the so-called Sus indicus, I was entirely unable to
understand how that author could say (l.c. p. 185) that two skulls
of Sus cristatus furnished to him by Mr. E. Gerrard differed from
skulls of Sus scrofa, var. ferus, only in being smaller altogether.
But after measuring the skulls from Sir Walter Elliot's collection
and those in the British Museum, with the result of feeling certain
that, from the contour, proportions, and, in adult males, the texture
and sculpturing, together with the lacrymal of Sus cristatus, it was
always possible to distinguish such skulls from those of our wild
boar, I came, in the Royal College of Surgeons, upon a skull
which, whilst possessing certain other peculiarities (to be hereafter
detailed) as distinctive, more or less, of Sus cristatus, did combine
with them the long lacrymal of Sus scrofa, var. ferus. This skull
is numbered 3251 a, and was pointed out to me by Professor
Flower, with his often experienced kindness, as being a skull of
Sus cristatus, which, together with two others, with the same
appearance as to textural condition, had been brought out of the
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 531
stores of the Museum into its series. Both these other skulls pos-
sessed the short lacrymal so characteristic, as the subjoined tables
of measurements will show, of Sus cristatus and its allies, together
with the other points usually observed in that animal’s skull. The
principal points, besides those of general facies and proportions,
which appeared to me to justify this assignment of skull 3251 a
(Royal College of Surgeons) were, in the absence of the shortness
of the lacrymal,—first, the great prominence of what may be called
the lacrymo-frontal ridge, that part of the frontal bone, to wit,
which lies between the channel for the supraorbital nerve mesially
and the upper border of the lacrymal bone outwardly; secondly,
the great relative development of the part of the third molar which
is posterior to the two anterior bicuspidate lobes of that tooth;
thirdly, the absence of convexity backwards in the naso-frontal
suture. These three points are usually present in Sus cristatus,
and they are usually found to be accompanied by the fourth pecu-
liarity of a short lacrymal. One or other of these characters may
be absent ; but in an undoubted specimen of an adult male Sus
cristatus I have never seen more than one of these missing ; whilst
it is rare for the second, and very rare for either the first or the
third, to be found in undoubted specimens of the Palaearctic wild
boar. In a skull figured by Mr. Richardson (l.c. p. 50), from
“an excavation in an island on Loch Gur, a lake in the neighbourhood of Limerick,”
and
“found in company with skulls of oxen, goats, sheep, red deer, reindeer, and our
extinct gigantic deer, sometimes erroneously styled the Irish elk,’
but considered by Nathusius (p. 150) to have belonged to a
domestic animal, it is true that the lacrymo-frontal ridge is repre-
sented as of great size; but we must set against the assigning of
much importance to this fact the considerations that the drawing
is taken from a reconstructed skull, that it is obviously inaccurate
in some points, as, for example, like a drawing in S. Müller's
‘Verhandl. (Taf. 28 bis, fig. 3), in having an extra tooth poste-
riorly to its canines, and that it may consequently be supposed to
be likely to be inaccurate in other particulars also. The fronto-
lacrymal ridge is, of course, in the adult underlain by a prolonga-
tion of the frontal sinuses; it is, however, visible enough in very
young specimens of domestic pigs, which show other points of
M Oſl 2,
532 ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF
affinity to the Sus indicus long before the frontal sinuses are
fully developed; and I am inclined to think it may sometimes,
though certainly not always, be detected in very young specimens
of Sus seroſa, var. ſerus, such as the one figured by Nathusius, l.c.
(Taf, i. fig. I, Taf, iii. fig. 13). Though the fulness of this region
is due in the adult partly to its being underlain by frontal sinuses,
which are relatively small in the early stages of the animal’s life,
there is still some justification for regarding this structure as an
instance of the retention by the adult of an early structural ar-
rangement; for it is easy to understand that the contour described
by the external tables in early youth may be carried out conform-
ably by the blood-vessels of the scalp as the animal grows older.
A parallel to such a process is furnished to ‘us very frequently,
though by no means so nearly universally, by the retention in the
adult Sus cristatus of that fulness and convexity of the vertical
aspect of the fronto-parietal region which is characteristic of Sus
scrofa both wild and domestic, as well as of Sus cristatus and Sus
indicus, at birth 1. Lieutenants W. E. Baker and H. W. Durand,
in their paper on ‘Subhimalayan Fossil Remains of the Dádupúr
Collection,’ in the ‘Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. v.
1836, p. 664, observe of the two fossil skulls which they describe,
that in both
‘there is in the frontal plane a total absence of convexity. As this plane ascends
there is a tendency to concavity, in consequence of the parietal crests being more
strongly marked than in the existing species, and thus producing the appearance of
- a gentle hollow where, in the common wild hog, there would be a gentle swell.’
Further on, in the same paper, the authors remark:—
“From the form of the cranium, the shape of the canines and incisors, and the other
points in which the fossil differs from the existing species of the country, a specific
difference may be inferred; for the dissimilarity, although less than that which occurs
between the Babyrussa, the S. larvatus, and the Sus scrofa, or common hog, is too
remarkable, particularly in the shape of the canines of the lower jaw, to admit of the
fossil being considered as a mere variety of the Sus scrofa.”
Sir Walter Elliot, however, to whom I owe this reference as
well as other things, writes me to the effect that the skulls sent by
him to me
‘do not seem to differ much from the Subhimalayan fossil specimens figured and
described,’
as above specified. And it is worthy of being put upon record that
* See Nathusius, pl. i. figs I and 3, pl. iii. fig. 13, and pp. 3 and 13. Compare the
mesial fulness in the frontals of S. papuensis.
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 533
of five skulls of modern wild Indian hogs thus sent by Sir Walter
Elliot, three show the upgrowth of parietal crests, which Lieu-
tenants Baker and Durand had supposed to be characteristic of the
fossil animal, and to contribute towards justifying its claim to be
considered specifically distinct. These three skulls have the follow-
ing labels and histories appended to them by Sir Walter Elliot,
which, when coupled with the localities assigned below to the
British Museum specimens (specimens not, so far as I can see,
different in any essential point from Sir W. Elliot's), bear im-
portantly on the question of the unity of Sus cristatus:—
No. 71. Large boar, killed near Rajkote, in Kattywar, June 4, 1832. He was
with a large sounder, and ripped two horses severely. Rajkote is in the ex-
tensive open plains of the Kattywar peninsula.
No. 330. Nilgherry Hills, 1840.
No. 428. Jaggiapettah, 1851. On the east side of the Madras Presidency, in the
Masulipatam district, on the high road from Masulipatam to Hyderabad.'
These three skulls agree in having their third molars considerably
worn and their canines large, their muscular insertion-surfaces
marked with polygonal reticulations" in some places, and with
arborescent markings in others, and, thirdly, in the spar-like hard-
ness and density of the bones generally; and they must be sup-
posed consequently to have belonged to old and powerful male
animals. In all of these points they differ more or less from the
other two skulls, also of male but of younger and less powerful
animals. But such differences as these are far from being of
specific value, either in comparison of modern races with fossil ones,
or in comparison of modern races inter se. All the five skulls,
however, lent to me by Sir Walter Elliot possess the lacrymo-
frontal ridge developed into a very considerable prominence; and
though every now and then I have had occasion, in going over the
extensive series of skulls of Indian wild hogs which have been
available to me, to note an almost, I have never noted an entirely
complete disappearance of it. The fronto-lacrymal ridge is not,
even in the aged hog, a mere expansion or dilatation of the frontal
bone : it is underlain, it is true, by an arm of the frontal sinuses;
but it has thick and independent walls of its own. Though not
quite exactly homologous with the supraciliary ridges of human
anatomy, it is nevertheless very closely comparable with them. In
* For similar reticulation in Bos primigenius, see Rütimeyer, ‘Fauna der Pfahl-
bauten,' taf. iii. fig. 3.
534 ON THE DOMIESTIC PIG OF
some varieties of the human species the supraciliary ridges, whether
underlain by sinuses or not, are very constantly developed into
great prominences. In a classification, indeed, of human crania
proposed by Dr. Williamson", “skulls with the supraciliary ridge
so prominent as to overshadow the face” formed one out of four
classes into which all crania were divided. It is not necessary to
go so far as this for acknowledging that this character may be-
come, in the Suidae at least, a race character”.
The second in order of the three points which, taken together,
as they usually exist together, with the fourth, that relating to the
lacrymal, help us to identify Sus cristatus, is complexity of its
third molar, at least in male specimens, and specially the com-
plexity of that part of the tooth which lies posteriorly to the two
primary bicuspidate lobes.
The division of the third molar which lies posteriorly to the two
anterior lobes is, in the male Sus cristatus, equal sometimes in size
to and sometimes even greater than both those other lobes taken
together. This is not often, though it is occasionally, the case in
Sus scrofa, var. ferus, of modern times. Nor is it the case in the
females of Sus crisłażus ; so that the greater development observed
in the males may perhaps be due to the working of the law of
sexual battle. The large size of the canines postulates a large
determination of blood to the jaw; and the large size of the third
molar, a tooth evolved at the period of sexual maturity, when the
animal ‘ venerem et praelia tentat, may be, to use a word sug-
gested long ago by myself”, “tautogeneous” with it. Still the
fact that the third molars are small both in Sus barbatus and Sus
barbirussa shows that this smallness cannot always be explained on
physiological grounds.
The third point, that of the straightness of the naso-frontal
suture, appears to have some classificatory value, whether we look
at it with the light furnished by its importance and validity in the
" * Observations on Human Crania in Museum, Fort Pitt, Chatham,’ 1857.
* It is observable in the pigmy Nepal pig, Porcula salviania, as also in the African
Potamochoerus. It does not appear to me that male Suidae possess it more markedly
than females; and herein it differs from the supraciliary-ridge development as seen in
our own species, as also from the race-mark to be next mentioned. An analogous
eminence, rudimentary in S. papuensis, occupies the middle frontal line over an area
homologous with the human glabella in each of four pigs' skulls brought from the
Admiralty Islands by H.M.S. Challenger.
* “Nat. Hist. Rev.’ Oct. 1861, p. 486, Article IV, p. 57.
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 535
classification or identification of other animals, or in that furnished
by the facts of its own developmental history.
The nasal and the frontal bones together form a roof over the
ethmoid and the turbinal bones; and as there is no apparent phy-
siological reason why they should contribute in different propor-
tions towards the securing of this end, the fact that they do so is
of so much the greater morphological value. In Sus cristatus the
naso-frontal suture very ordinarily runs (also in Sus andamanensis)
straight across the roof of the ethmoid, at right angles to the long
axis of the skull; or the frontals may intrude themselves mesially
between the nasals, making thus the contour of the suture to be
convex forwards. Precisely the reverse is the case in the adult
European wild boar. Some weight has been laid" upon a similar
conformation in the skull of the tiger, as being of service in differ-
entiating it from the skull of the lion; and though it is not
pretended that an equally great distinctness can be supposed to
exist between the two animals now under comparison, still the
structural differences in the two sets of cases are analogous.
But when we come to look at the skulls of developing pigs, we
see that real value attaches, from this point of view also, to the
relatively greater or less extension backwards of the nasal bones,
and the contour described consequently by the naso-frontal suture.
A tape crossed at right angles to the long axis of the skull from
one infra-orbital foramen to the other, passes very closely in front
of, and often parallel with the naso-frontal suture in the very
young pig ; the suture gets removed further and further away
from it as the pig increases in age. Nathusius (Taf, iii. figs. II
and 13) has figured the skulls of a young wild boar and of an adult
wild boar upon the same plate ; and the straight line of the suture
of the former contrasts most instructively with the backwardly
arching contour of the latter. The straightness, therefore, of the
naso-frontal suture may be supposed to illustrate the principle
that climatic or other conditions may cause structural arrange-
ments to be permanently retained in certain races whilst they are
obliterated in others. The retention of the prolongation of the
sagittal suture over the frontal region is believed, with much
reason, to be hereditarily transmitted in our own species; and I
incline to think that the persistence of the frontal tubera with
* ‘Ost. Catalog. Royal College of Surgeons of England,’ 4506, p. 706.
g. Ivoy
536 ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF
very much of their infantile eminence, which we see not rarely in
adult men, may be taken as furnishing another parallel to the
retention in some degree, by the adult Sus cristatus, of the cha-
racters of the young animal’s naso-frontal relations.
In the fourth place, as regards the value of the relative shortness
of the lacrymal bone as a means for differentiating the skulls of
Sus cristatus and its allies from those of Sus scrofa, var. ferus, I was
for a long time of opinion that the same might be said of this all
but invariably observed peculiarity of Sus cristatus, which I have
already said, however shortly, of the straightness of its naso-
frontal suture; and that all this may, mutatis mutandis, be repeated
as to the lacrymal's peculiarities in the two sub-species there can
be no doubt. Anybody who will examine the figures given in
Spix's ‘Cephalogenesis,” or the reproduction of them in Erdl’s
‘Tafeln der vergleichenden Anatomie des Schädels,’ 1841, can
convince himself of the fact that the malar border of the lacrymal
is very short as compared with its orbital border in the young
pig"; and if he extend his observation to the various adult Suidae,
he will find that this side of the bone goes on growing from a
condition of permanent inferiority in Susandamanensis till it reaches
subequality or entire equality with the orbital length in some
Suidae—such as Sus cristatus, Sus vittatus, Sus leucomysław, Sus
taivanus, Sus timoriensis, Sus papuensis, and Sus barbatus, all Suidae
without facial warts—and finally exceeds the orbital border in
length considerably in Sus scrofa, var. ferus, and ordinarily in Sus
verrucosus (and Sus celebensis 2), and disproportionately, it may be
added, in the African wart-hog (Phacochoerus).
* Though I do not suppose that it would be possible to say in 1876 what Dr.
Gray said (“Proc. Zool. Soc.” I868, p. 19) in 1868, to the effect that Nathusius's works
were not to be had either in the library of the British Museum or in the library of
either the Zoological, Royal, or Linnean Society, it may nevertheless be convenient
to give here the results of his measurements of the borders of the lacrymal bones at
different periods of the life of Sus scrofa. They stand thus at p. 10 of his work
of 1864:—
Newly born. 2 months old. 6 months old. Adult.
Lacrymal bone. millim. millim. millim. millim.
Height .................. 7 I3 I8 2 I
Frontal border ......... II 20 42 6o
Malar border............ 3 6 25 35
Ratio of height......... I J 9 2-6 3
Ratio of frontal border I I-8 3-8 5' 5
Ratio of malar border I 2 8:3 II'6
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 537
There is no doubt that the younger the pig the greater is the
distance separating its lacrymal's length from equality with or
superiority to its lacrymal’s height ; but the subjoined tables
show that there is no constant relation to be observed between
the growth of the entire facial skeleton out of the short propor-
tion of early days into the elongated muzzle of the adult, and
the longitudinal evolution of the lacrymal factor of that snout.
The longest snout, such as that of the adult Sus barbatus, may,
as Nathusius has remarked with surprise (p. 167), show a
lacrymal with the proportions of the domestic Sus indicus, or the
immature Sus scrofa, var. ferus ; and I venture to suggest that
the elongation of the lacrymal, which Professor Owen taught
us to call a ‘mucodermal bone,’ may be correlated with the evo-
lution of the facial warts which are found in all the Suidae with
such lacrymals. If these two structures are thus correlated, we
come to be able to explain how it is that the length of the
lacrymals is, though not very variable, still as variable as we have
found it to be ; for the facial warts themselves are a variable
structure, as we should from several analogies expect them to be.
If they were not so, it would be difficult to explain how it is that
in many zoological descriptions" of our European wild boar, no
mention is made of the presence of warts (small ones, it is true)
immediately below the eyes; and inasmuch as they are so variable,
and probably more liable” to disappear in the female sex, we can,
on the hypothesis of the evolution of the lacrymal in length being
correlated with their presence, understand how the lacrymal is
sometimes found to be shorter than we should have expected it to
be in skulls such as those of the wild sows from prehistoric deposits
in this country, measurements of which are given p. 546.
* De Fatio, in his “Faune des Vertébrés de la Suisse,’ 1869, p. 354, goes, if I
understand him rightly, further than this, by using the words ‘Pas de saillies
sur la face en dessous des yeux,’ in his definition of “Le Sanglier ordinaire, das wilde
Schwein.”
* Dr. Gray, in his description of Potamochoerus africanus (“P. Z. S. 1868, p. 34),
says of the male animal's face, that it ‘is swollen and often warty on the sides in front,’
and of the females, that ‘the side of the nose is simple.’ Fitzinger, however, whose
descriptions of the external characters appear to be carefully done, does not say that
any such sexual difference exists in this species or in any other of the Suidae with
warts. There are other reasons, however, for the suggestions in the text, of which
the sexual limitations of the facial callosities in the orangs may be taken as an
example.
538 ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF
As the interpretation I suggest of the proportions observed to
exist between the length and height of the lacrymal bone depends
upon the method of gradations, as applied not only to several
varieties, but indeed to several species of Suidae, as well as upon a
history of the development of the bone, it will be well now to give
a short list of those species—pointing out the particulars which
justify their claim to that rank, and contrasting them with the
aggregate of characters which do enable us, as a matter of fact,
to differentiate such forms as Sus cristatus from Sus scrofa, possibly
without justifying us in considering them distinct species.
And first of Sus barbatus. I am in no way inclined to give too
much weight to differences in colouring or in character of hair or
bristles; still a glance at the drawing of this animal in S. Müller's
‘Verhandl.’ taf. 30, showing its half-black, half-tawny, wavily, not
crisply, curling beard, its ochraceous dorsal stripe, and its tail
ending in a considerable brush, impresses one with the idea that it
is impossible that the bony substructures should not make some
approach at least to a similar diversity from other forms of Suidae.
This anticipation was fully borne out by an examination of four
skulls, two of which are in the British, and one in the Oxford
Museum—and of Schlegel’s figure of the skull described by him,
and S. Müller, ‘Verhandl. pp. 173, 179–181, and taf. 31. figs.
4 and 5.
The skull of Sus barbatus is absolutely longer than the skulls
either of Sus scrofa, var. ſerus, or Sus cristatus ; and relatively to
the body its length is considerably greater, being, as given by
Fitzinger, no less than ; of the length of the trunk. The contour
described by its sagittal suture is strikingly different from that
described by the corresponding suture in most other Suidae ; its
highest point is some way in front of the plane of the occipital
squama, and occupies a level far above the plane occupied by the
anterior half of the frontal or by the nasal bones; and these latter
bones make up more than one half of the entire length of the
skull, resembling herein the typical Sus scrofa, whilst the naso-
frontal suture resembles that of Sus cristatus. Its maximum inter-
zygomatic width is in the middle of that arch, not at its posterior
border as in most other Suidae.
In addition to these larger points, the following may be men-
tioned as having a great morphological importance, though relating
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 539
to smaller structural peculiarities. The third molar consists of
three lobes; but, large as is the jaw and the canine armature of
this Sus, the most posteriorly placed of the three lobes is more
simple than even the very simple posterior lobe of the pigmy Sus
andamanensis, having only one cusp prominently marked in the
upper, and four in the lower jaw, whilst the entire posterior lobe
is little, if at all, greater in antero-posterior extent, and much
smaller in transverse, than either of the anterior, differing thus
altogether from Sus cristatus.
A second point, relating to a small structure as measured by the
callipers, which is a very large one, however, to the morphologist,
is the permanent retention by Sus barbatus of the mesopterygoid of
Parker (‘Phil. Trans.’ 1874, p. 324, pl.xxxvi, fig. 4. ms.py) as a
distinct bone. This peculiarity was observed in all the four skulls
of Sus barbatus examined by me; and its obvious general signifi-
cance is increased by the fact that it is in the area of the meso-
pterygoid that the great basicranial cavities are excavated in the
Babirussa and Phacochoerus, and are represented rudimentarily in
Sus vittatus.
Knowing what we do 1 of the affinity of the fauna of the sub-
region of Ceylon and South India to that of Malaya, there is no
a priori improbability in a view which should accept the Sus ceylon-
ensis of Blyth? (“Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal,’ xx. p.
173) as identical with the Sus barbatus of Borneo. Mr. Blyth's
words, l, c., are as follows:—
“Sus zeylanensis. Skull longer than that of the Indian boar, nearly straight in
profile, very much contracted at the vertex. Palate contracting posteriorly to less
than 1" from the magnitude of the last molar, which is considerably larger in both
jaws than in the wild boar of India, the upper measuring I?” long by #" broad
anteriorly. Vertex narrowing to 1" only in breadth. Total length of skull from
vertex to tips of nasals 16}". Altogether the skull approximates closely in contour
to the figures of the skulls of Sus barbatus by Dr. S. Müller and M. Temminck.’
Dr. Gray appears to have had access, which I have not had, to a
photograph of this Sus zeylanensis, and says that, judging from it,
“The skull is much shorter and thicker than the skull of S. barbatus. The photo-
graph is much more like that of Sus verrucosus.’
For my own part, I cannot think Mr. Blyth would ever have
* Tennant, ‘Nat. Hist. of Ceylon,’ pp. 61–68, 186; Wallace, ‘Geographical Distri-
bution,’ i. p. 328.
* See Gray, ‘ Proc. Zool. Soc.’ 1868, p. 24; “Brit. Mus. Cat.’ 1869, p. 331.
540 ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF
spoken of a real male Sus barbatus as having a skull with a straight
profile; Müller and Schlegel figured a female skull, whereas Mr.
Blyth's, I am sure, was a male's. As regards the contraction of
the vertex, which shows Mr. Blyth's skull to have been a male's,
this is sometimes exceeded by the old and strongly muscular Indian
wild hog, such as Sir Walter Elliot's No. 71 (for history of which
see p. 533), where it is only 8", whilst in the skull No. 72 it is
1.8", showing an oscillation, owing to the varying action of the
temporal muscles, which entirely deprives it of any morphological
value; and the measurements of the molars, finally, assure me that
there is no need to add the words ‘und wahrscheinlich auch Ceylon’
to the word ‘Borneo’ as the ‘Waterland’ of Sus barbatus, as Fitzinger
has done, Z. e. p. 393. Müller and Schlegel, p. 179, give Borneo,
if I rightly read their words, as the ‘habitat” of this well-marked
species.
Secondly, of Sus verrucosus. The soft and perishable parts of
Sus verrucosus are even more interesting and of greater importance
than the bones; for they show us that wild pigs do have appendages
—warts, to wit, covered with long bristles, and attached to the
corners of the lower jaw, like those of the Irish greyhound pig,
once so plentiful in Galway; and they thus do away with one of
the objections to Mr. Darwin's views, stated fairly (by himself) in
the work on ‘Animals and Plants under Domestication,’ i. p. 79, ed.
1875. If it is a profitable thing to lay Müller and Schlegel's figure
of Sus verrucosus (tab. 28. l. c.) alongside of Richardson's figure of
the ‘old Irish greyhound pig' (l.c. p. 49 ; Darwin, l.c. p. 79),
it is profitable also to read the Dutch letterpress" of the two former
authors, from which we learn, when helped by the translation given
by Fitzinger, that the young of Sus verrucosus are never striped, and
hereby have it suggested to us how it may be that so many of our
domestic breeds never have their young striped—none, in fact, ex-
cept the Westphalian and the Turkish. Rútimeyer (l.c. p. 187)
has suggested that the so-called ‘Berkshire breed’ of domestic pigs
may have its parent stock in Sus celebensis, as figured by Schlegel
* The words of the two Dutch naturalists are, ‘Verhandl.’ p. 177: “De deer
jonge voorwerpendezer sort zijn niet gestreept, en onderschieden zich daardoor van
de jongen van Sus vittatus en van de meeste, ja, misschien van alle overige soorten.”
It is much to be regretted that Dr. Gray did not enter a note of this most im-
portant fact in his papers above referred to, in which the ‘Verhandlungen’ are
often cited.
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 541
and S. Müller, which resembles it in the great transverse develop-
ment of its skull, the verticality of its forehead, of its occiput, and
its temporal fossae, in the height of its zygomatic arch, and
specially in the remarkable height and massiveness of its lower
jaw. There is no doubt that Sus celebensis is very closely allied to
Sus verrucosus, having not only the same general facies but the same
peculiarities, though on a smaller scale, as those whence the Java
pig has taken its name. The chief point of difference which
Rütimeyer points out between the figured Sus celebensis and the
Berkshire breed depends upon the artist, I apprehend—being, as it
is, a greater length of the molar series, which, however, consists of
eight teeth in the figure of Sus celebensis (Verhandlungen, pl. 28
bis, fig. 3); and it is possible enough that the young of Sus celebensis
(the contrary not having been definitely recorded) may be like the
young of Sus verrucosus in not being striped, and that they may
thus have resembled the young of the Irish greyhound pig, as when
old they actually do resemble it in the development of the man-
dibular warts.
As regards the skulls of Sus verrucosus, figured tab. 32 by Müller
and Schlegel, the lacrymal in fig. 4 appears to have the favourable
relation of length to height which is characteristic usually of the
other Suidae with facial warts; whilst in fig. I, which was taken
from a very old individual, the height and length would appear to
be subequal, as in the skull (fig. 6) of Sus vittatus, on the same
plate. I should have set less store by this variation in the two
drawings than I do, if Nathusius had not distinctly recorded
(p. 179, l.c.) that this latter is the relation in the Sus verrucosus
skull in his possession. On the other hand, all the undoubted Sus
verrucosus skulls which I have been able to measure have presented
the elongated form of this bone; and the closely allied species Sus
celebensis, as figured in Müller and Schlegel’s fig. 3, tab. 28 bis,
may or may not have the long lacrymal usual in that pig. But,
on the whole, I should certainly accept the position that the elonga-
tion of the lacrymal was not constant in Sus verrucosus, though it
has been so in the skulls I have seen; and with this position I
should hesitate to assign to this peculiarity all the value which
Nathusius's insistence might lead one to assign to it.
Taking, in the second place, this variability in the proportions of
the lacrymal bone, and coupling with it, first, the absence of striping
542 ON THE DOMIESTIC PIG OF
in the young, and secondly the presence of mandibular warts, such
as one of our domestic breeds, viz. the Galway greyhound pig, still
retains, or did till quite lately retain, we may be tempted to think
that some form allied to Sus verrucosus or Sus celebensis may have
been the single parent stock of all our domestic breeds, except, of
course, such as the Westphalian and Turkish, which are striped in
their youth, and would be referred to the indigenous Sus scrofa, var.
ferus, as their parent stock. In favour of such a view, we have, of
course, the general principle ‘Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter
necessitatem.’
But the wide range” of Sus vittatus, over Java side by side with
Sus verrucosus, over Borneo with Sus barbatus, and, as stated, also
over Amboyna, Macassar, Banka, and Sumatra, gives it special
claims to attention. This pig appears to me to be very closely
allied indeed to Sus cristatus, and to be similarly and readily dis-
tinguishable from our European wild boar. In this latter point I
differ from Rütimeyer (J. c. p. 187), whilst I should agree with him
in considering it all but identical with Sus leucomystaa. The claims
of Sus vittatus and Sus leucomysław, and Sus taivanus of Formosa
(occurring, as they do, in an area comprising Japan as well as Java),
to have given origin to Sus indicus, the domestic Chinese pig, in
days sufficiently far off to have allowed the tendency to striping of
the young to become eliminated, are very strong, and can scarcely
be considered antagonistic.
Closely allied as Sus cristatus is to these races, its severe struggle
for existence entailed by its habitat on a continental area tenanted
* It is interesting to compare with these statements, as to the geographical distri-
bution of the Asiatic Suidae, the following words from M. Gabriel de Mortillet's
memoir in the “Revue d’Anthropologie,” iv. 4. 1875, p. 653, as to the origin of
bronze: ‘Reste le groupe de l’extrême Orient Asiatique. C'est là évidemment
où il faut chercher l'origine du bronze. Les principaux gisements sont dans la pres-
qu'ile de Malacca et surtout dans l'île de Banca, mais ils s'étendent dans d'autres iles
de la Sonde et remontent jusque dans l'empire Birman ou l'étain est encore exploité
actuellement dans le district de Merguy. Ce minéral, dans tous ces gisements, se
recueille de la manière la plus simple et la plus facile dans les alluvions. Ce sont
bien certainement les alluvions les plus riches du monde en étain et celles qui oc-
cupent la plus grande étendue. Il est done tout naturel que ce soit celles qui les
premières aient attiré l'attention de l’homme. Le cuivre serencontre dans les mémes
régions. Tout le monde connait les gisements de cuivre des iles de la Sonde, Timor,
Macassar, Borneo. La Birmanie anglaise présente des mines de cuivre a côté de ses
exploitations d'étain. Le pays se trouve donc dans les meilleures conditions pour
avoir vu naitre l'industrie du bronze.” Gallus bankiva, the parent stock of our
common fowl, is found over the same area.
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 543
by the tiger (Felis tigris), as well as other Carnivora unfriendly to
Suidae, appears to me to have specialised it, especially as regards
its dental armature and the bones which carry it, into divergence
from the probable line of parentage of the inconveniently so-called
Sus indicus. Sus andamanensis, on the other hand, and, I am
inclined to think, one or two other of the Asiatic Suidae, show,
from a precisely opposite cause, that of restriction to a very con-
fined area, the same divergence from what I have imagined the
present stock of the Chinese breed may have been. But against
any such speculations about what we do not see in the darkness of
past ages we have to set what we can see by travel in the broad
daylight of the present, viz. that almost all Suidae are readily
domesticable by savages in almost every quarter of the globe; and
what savages do now they may very well have done formerly.
I have not been able to institute any satisfactory examination
into the relations of the Aethiopic to the Asiatic Suidae; and I
should welcome an opportunity of examining skulls and skins of
the true Sus seen by Dr. Murie and Dr. Barth in Central Africa.
It would be additionally satisfactory if investigations could be set
on foot as to the existence or non-existence in this Sus of the Cystic
form of Taenia solium, which certainly exists in Sus cristatus.
Dr. Cobbold informs me that Taenia mediocannellata is the common
tapeworm of Indian as of other patients; but I apprehend that, as
it has been so very definitely laid down by others' that the pig is
at least one source whence inhabitants and sojourners in India
become infested with tapeworm, it would be premature to conclude
the reverse even from his authoritative statements. It must be
very difficult to prove a negative here.
The facts of most direct importance, however, in investigations
as to the relationships of prehistoric to modern races are those of
the great variations observed—first, in the entire size of the indi-
vidual animals, and, secondly, in the proportions of particular bones,
and notably of the lacrymal bones, in specimens from the same
species or sub-species of Suidae. In view on the one side of this
twofold variability which is explicable upon acknowledged physio-
logical principles, and affects the wild races both of Europe and
* Notably by Dr. Charles A. Gordon, ‘Medical Times and Gazette,” May 2, 1857,
p. 429; and by Dr. T. R. Lewis, Appendix B. to ‘Eighth Annual Report of the
Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India,’ 1871.
544 ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF
Asia, and, on the other, of the aptness for domestication possessed
by Sus scrofa, var. ferus, it appears to me to be unsafe to postulate
for prehistoric British swine any other parent stock than the one
just named. On the other hand, such is the diffusibility and
transportability of Sus that it is not impossible, nor inconceivable,
that the domestic European pig, even of the Stone Age, may have
had an Asiatic or African origin. As regards the Bronze Age,
indeed, if its tin and copper did really come from the East, such a
view cannot be said to be even improbable. But the acceptance of
it does not seem to me to be necessitated by the facts.
MEASUREMENTS OF THE ORBITAL AND MALAR BORDERS OF THE
LACRYMAL BONE”.
I. Sus cristatus and its allies.
Skull of Indian wild boar, Sus cristatus, No. 72 in Sir Walter Elliot's collection.
Rilled about 1830, at Haugul, S.W. corner of Dharwar province, in South Mahratta
country.
Height of lacrymal I in. ; malar border I in.
Skull of Indian wild boar, Sus cristatus, No. 46, Sir Walter Elliot's collection.
* To this paper I append a number of measurements, taken from various Suidae, of
the length and height of the lacrymal bone, this point having had great weight laid
upon it by Nathusius, and holding good within very considerable limits. I have not
given any measurements relating to the widening of the palate (a second point insisted
upon by Nathusius), because, as regards the wild races, I have found that this widening
of the interpremolar, as opposed to the intermolar transverse diameter of the palate, is
sometimes found in specimens which undoubtedly belong to wild European boars,
whilst, on the other hand, the two measurements are usually subequal in the other
wild races, such as Sus cristatus, which I have measured. In taking the length of
the lacrymal along its malar border, some little ambiguity is caused by the fact that
in many specimens the lip of the orbit is a little everted, so as to resemble to some
extent the spout of a mortar rather than the rim of a cup at the line of junction of the
malar with the orbital border of the lacrymal. Where the differences between the
heights and lengths are measured by tenths or twentieths of an inch or by milli-
metres, this structural arrangement may make the measurements vary importantly.
There is, however, always a line separating the part of the lacrymal which is to be
considered as belonging to the inner aspect of the orbit from that which is strictly
facial; and from this line the measurements have been taken. The frontal border of
the lacrymal, again, often bends downwards just before reaching its orbital edge, just
posteriorly to the plane of the lacrymal canals, thereby curtailing the height of the
bone for the distance corresponding with this deflection. My measurements have
been taken in the plane occupied by the lacrymal canals, so as to avoid this source of
fallacy.
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 545
Shot at Dendelly April 12, 1831, in the great forest tract between Dharwar and Goa.
Height of lacrymal I in. ; malar border I in.
Skull of large Indian boar, Sus cristatus, No. 71, Sir Walter Elliot's collection.
Killed near Rajkote, in Kattywar, June 4, 1832.
Height of lacrymal I.o in. ; malar border o.8 in.
Skull of Indian wild boar, Sus cristatus, No. 428, Sir Walter Elliot's collection.
From Jaggiapettah, on the east side of the Madras Presidency, on the high road from
Masulipatam to Hyderabad. An old male with some obliteration of sutures.
Height of lacrymal o-95 in. ; malar border o-95 in.
Skull of young female, Sus cristatus. British Museum, 716 m. ‘Terai Nepal;
Dr. Oldham.”
Height of lacrymal 1-1 in.; malar border o-75 in.
Skull of adult female, Sus cristatus. British Museum, 716 n. “India; Professor
Oldham.”
Height of lacrymal o. 1 in. ; malar border o. 7 in.
Skull of young female, Sus cristatus, about nine months old. British Museum,
71.6 g. “Nepal; B. H. Hodgson.”
Height of lacrymal o-9 in. ; malar border o.75 in.
Indian pig, Sus cristatus. British Museum, 716 g. Under five months of age, very
convex frontals, slightly tumid lacrymo-frontal ridges. -
Height of lacrymals o.5 in. ; malar border of 25 in. -
Indian pig, Sus cristatus. British Museum, 716 v. ‘Nearly adult female, Nilgherris.’
Height of lacrymal o-95 in. ; malar border o.6 in.
Young male of Sus indicus; in collection of British Museum, not catalogued; with
third molar just coming into use—that is to say, about eighteen months old.
Height of lacrymal o-9 in. ; malar border o.9 in.
Skull of Indian wild hog, Sus cristatus, No. 3251 a, Royal College of Surgeons of Eng-
land. This is the skull of an adult male probably, the complexity of the posterior lobe of
the third molars being very great. The naso-frontal suture resembles that of Sus scrofa
rather than that of Sus cristatus. The lacrymo-frontal ridge is very largely developed.
Height of lacrymal o. I in. ; malar border I.25 in. *
Skull of Indian wild hog, Sus cristatus, No. 3251 b, R. C. S. England.
Skull of Indian wild hog, Sus cristatus, No. 3251 c, R. C. S. England.
Height of lacrymal o-I in. ; malar border o.95 in., in both.
These two skulls were probably from the same district as No. 3251 a ; but they
differ from it, and agree with all the other specimens of Sus cristatus in having the
height and the malar length of the lacrymal subequal.
Skull of wild sow from Andaman Islands, Sus andamanensis, No. 1514 b, Oxford
TJniversity Museum.
Height of lacrymal 17 mm.; malar border 8 mm. : adult.
Skull of Sus vittatus from Amboyna. Alfred Russel Wallace, Esq. British
Museum, 1362 c. An adult male with a nearly straight naso-frontal suture, and
a convex fronto-parietal region.
Height of lacrymal o-55 in. ; malar border o.8 in.
Sus vittatus. British Museum, 1362 f. “Skull of animal developing the hinder
molar.” The lacrymo-frontal ridges are convex, the frontal region is flat, the naso-
frontal suture, however, is straight, as in S. cristatus.
Height of lacrymal I.OS in. ; malar border o'6 in.
IN Il
546 ON THE DOMIESTIC PIG OF
II. Sus scrofa, var. ferus, and its allies.
‘Sus libycus.' British Museum, 713 a. “Hab. Asia Minor, Xanthus (Sir Charles
Fellowes). The skull is very distinct from all the skulls of the wild boars from Ger-
many in the British Museum.” The animal was just about eighteen months old : its
interectorbital region is still convex; but it has no very marked lacrymo-frontal ridge;
its naso-frontal suture is convex backwards, as in Sus scrofa, var. ferus; its nasals are
8 in. long, as against 14% of total skull length; and the height of the lacrymal is less
than its inferior length. Here it resembles Sus scrofa rather than Sus cristatus.
Height of lacrymal 1 in. ; malar border o. I 5 in.
Wild boar from Germany, Sus scrofa, var. ferus, 3253 a, R. C. S. England. Adult.
Height of lacrymal o-9 in. ; malar border I-5 in.
Wild boar from Germany, Sus scrofa, var. ferus. O. U. Museum, 1513 a. All
teeth in place.
Height of lacrymal I in. ; malar border I-5 in.
Wild boar from Germany, Sus scrofa, var. ferus. O. U. Museum, 1513. Presented
by Professor Max Müller. With all the teeth, except third molar, in use; sixteen
months old.
Height of lacrymal o-75 in. ; malar border I.o5 in.
Young wild boar, Sus scrofa, var. ferus. R. C. S. England. With first molar only
through, therefore between five and six months old, with frontals still very convex in
vertical aspect, but with flat lacrymo-frontal ridge.
Height of lacrymal o-7 in. ; malar border o.7 in. ; frontal border I-5 in.
Skull of old wild sow, Sus scrofa, var. ferus, from alluvium near Oxford. Figured
plate xli. fig. 2, from the Geological Collection, O. U. Museum.
Height of lacrymal 17 millims. ; malar border 18 millims.
Skull, from peat, of wild sow, Sws scrofa, var. ferus. British Museum. With third
molar through.
Height of lacrymal o-8 in. ; malar border 1.05 in.
Skull from silt of old bed of Lea river, shown to me in British Museum Geological
Collection by Mr. Davis. Under eighteen months.
Height of lacrymal o-6 in. ; malar border o.5 in.
Second skull from same locality, and in British Museum, with all the teeth in place,
and the third molar with considerable complexity in its posterior lobe.
Height of lacrymal o-6 in. ; malar border o.8 in.
Skull of Sus scrofa, var. ferus : British Museum, 713 i. The animal was about
sixteen months old, all the teeth being in place except the third molars above and
below. There is still some convexity across the frontals, though flattening is begin-
ning on either side towards the ectorbital processes. The lacrymo-frontal ridge is not
markedly convex; the nasals are convex backwards in the middle line.
Height of lacrymal o-9 in. ; malar border o.75 in.
Skull of Sus scrofa, var. ferus : British Museum, 713 k. The frontals are convex
from the level of the supraorbital foramina backwards; the fronto-nasal suture is
straight, nearly as it is represented in the young German wild boar (Nathusius, i. e.
Taf, iii. 12). Lacrymo-frontal ridge is slightly convex.
Height of lacrymal o-75 in. ; malar border o.5 in.
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 54.7
III. Sus verrucosus, var. ceramica.
Brit. Mus. 712 d. ‘Skull, adult. A wild boar from Ceram. Collected by Mr.
Wallace.” Of this skull I have noted that its third molar is comparatively simple,
whereas the other specimens of Sus verrucosus in the British Museum have it complex.
All the other specimens of Sus verrucosus catalogued p. 330, Catalogue 1869, as Sus
verrucosus, with the exception of No. 1362 d, which was received from Mr. Wallace as
Sus vittatus, have been noted by me as having the lacrymal long in relation to its height,
and as having complex molars. As, however, Nathusius, l.c. p. 179, has noted the
lacrymal to be short in a specimen obtained by him from Java, and as, of two skulls
figured by Solomon Müller (“Verhandl.’ tab. 32. figs. 2 and 4), one has the lacrymal
short and the other long, it is clear that this species varies in this matter. The
closely allied species Sus celebensis cannot be said quite certainly, from Müller's pl.
28 bis, fig. 3, to have, or not to have, the long lacrymal usually found in the pigs with
facial warts.
Height of lacrymal I.O in. ; malar border o.75 in.
IV. Sus barbatus, Born EO.
Skull of Sus barbatus. I519 d, O. U. Museum. Figured plate V. fig. 7.
Height of lacrymal 1.2 in. ; malar border 1.2 in.
Skull of Sus barbatus. Procured in Borneo by the Rev. C. Spencer Bubb.
Height of lacrymal 1.2 in. ; malar border 1.2 in.
Skull of Sus barbatus. British Museum, 712 a ; called Euhys barbatus, Hand-list,
p. 58, 1873.
Height of lacrymal I-15 in. ; malar border I in.
In Sus barbatus the lacrymo-frontal ridge is not very prominent, though recog-
nisable: in the shortness of the lacrymal, which is a constant character in this
species, so far as recorded in S. Müller's figures and elsewhere, and in the characters
of the naso-frontal suture, it resembles Sus cristatus and its allies rather than Sus
scrofa.
EIBLIOGRAPHY,
Baker and Durand, “Subhimalayan Fossil Remains,’ Journal As. Soc. Bengal, vol. v.
1836, p. 664.
Bartlett, “Proc. Zool. Soc.’ 1861, p. 264.
Blainville, ‘Ostéographie,” Sus.
Blasius, “Naturgeschichte der Säugethiere Deutschlands,’ 1857.
Bochart, ‘Hierozoicon,’ 1663, i. pp. 696, 978.
Brandt und Ratzeburg, ‘Medizin. Zoologie,’ 1829, pp. 80–150.
Buffon, ‘Hist. Nat.' tom. v. pp. 131–137, pl. xxiv. fig. 2, pl. xv.
Campbell, Colonel Walter, “My Indian Journal,’ 1864, p. 325.
Crawford, J., “Trans. Ethn. Soc., ii. p. 439, 1863.
Cuvier, F. et Geoffroy, ‘Hist. des Mammiferes.’
Cuvier, G., ‘Oss. Foss.’ ii. p. 119.
Daubenton, Buffon, l.c. p. 189.
Erdl, ‘Tafeln der vergleich. Anatomie des Schädels,’ 1841.
Eyton, ‘Proc. Zool. Soc. 1837.
N In 2
548 ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF
Fitzinger, ‘Sitzungsberichte d. Akad. Wiss. Wien, Bd. 29, 1858, p. 361; 50, 1864,
p. 383.
Forrest, ‘Voyage to New Guinea, 2nd ed. 1780, p. 97.
Galton, Francis, “Ethnological Society's Trans.’ iii. p. 127, 1865.
Giebel, C. G., “Säugethiere, p. 225, 1859.
Gordon, C. A., Esq., M.D., “Medical Times and Gazette,” May 2, 1857, p. 429.
Gray, ‘ Proc. Zool. Soc.’ 1852, p. 130, 1868, Jan. 9; Brit. Mus. Cat. ‘Mammals,’ 1869,
p. 325; ‘Hand-list,’ 1873, p. 57.
Hodgson, B., “Journal Asiatic Society Bengal,’ x. p. 911.
Jerdon, ‘Mammals of India,’ 1874, p. 241.
Link, ‘Urwelt," i. p. 192, 1821.
Linnaeus, ‘Systema Naturae, ed. 13, p. 217.
Low, “Domesticated Animals of the British Islands.”
Müller, Solomon, ‘Verhandlungen,” taf. 28–32.
Nathusius, ‘Die Racen des Schweines,’ 1860; “Die Schweineschädel,’ 1864.
Pallas, ‘Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica, p. 267, 1831.
Parker, W. K., “Phil. Trans.” 1874, p. 324.
Pictet, “Origines Indo-Européennes,’ 1859, p. 369.
Radde, “Reisen im Süden von Ost-Sibirien,’ i. p. 236.
Richardson, “Domestic Pigs,’ London, Warne.
Rütimeyer, ‘Fauna der Pfahlbauten,’ 1861.
Schreber, J. C. D. von, “Die Säugethiere,’ 1835, taf. 320, &c.
Sclater, “Proc. Zool. Soc.” I861, p. 63; 1863, p. 122.
Sidney, S., “The Pig,’ London, Routledge.
Spix, ‘Cephalogenesis.”
Swinhoe, “Proc. Zool. Soc.” I862, p. 361; 1864, p. 382 ; 1870, p. 369.
Sykes, ‘ Proc. Zool. Soc.’ 1831, p. Ioa.
Temminck, “Fauna Japonica, taf. 20.
Wagner, A., “Götting. Gel. Anzeigen,” lx. p. 535, 1839.
Youatt, ‘The Pig,” 1847.
Zimmermann, “Geogr. Geschichte," i. p. 189, 1778.
PostsCRIPT, March 22, 1877.
SINCE the publication of an abstract of the foregoing paper in
“Nature’ for July 20, 1876, I have been enabled to compare the
undermentioned skulls and figures of Suidae, and to consult the
undermentioned volumes and memoirs which had not previously
been accessible to me. I have also been favoured with valuable
information by the letters of a number of scientific correspondents
named below. The information thus gained, in addition to that
upon which my paper was based, has been in the main confirma-
tory of the views I had come to independently of it; the very im-
portant fact, however, that the young of Sus celebensis are striped,
as communicated to me by Dr. A. B. Meyer, of the Royal Zoologi-
cal Museum at Dresden, is directly contradictory of the suggestion
which I threw out at p. 541, as is also the fact published by him
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 549
as to the striping of the young of the nearly allied S. verrucosus
directly contradictory of the statement of Müller and Schlegel
given above, p. 540.
LIST OF Sources oF INFORMATION ON ‘SUIDAE MADE AVAILABLE
To ME SINCE JULY, 1876.
I. A skull of S. celebensis 2, kindly lent me by Dr. A. B. Meyer, Director of the
Royal Zoological Museum at Dresden.
II. A skull of a Sus, sp.?, ?, from Ternate; also lent me by Dr. A. B. Meyer.
III. Two skulls of the domestic pig of Bengal (S. cristatus, var. domesticus), pre-
sented to the Oxford University Museum by E. Lockwood, Esq., Monghyr,
Bengal.
IV. Two skulls of S. scrofa, var. ferus, presented by Dr. Fiedler, of Dresden.
V. A skull of S. scrofa, var. ferus, presented by M. le Marquis de l’Aigle,
Château de Compiègne, Pise, France.
VI. A skull of S. scrofa, var. domesticus, from Stene i Bö, Lofoten Islands, 2°
above Arctic Circle; presented by H. N. Moseley, Esq., Fellow of Exeter
College, Oxford.
VII. Two bronze statuettes of S. scrofa, var. ferus, from the Gallo-Roman period in
France; presented by John Evans, Esq., F.R.S.
VIII. A Memoir by Professor L. Rütimeyer, “Neue Beiträge zur Kenntniss des
Torfschweins,’ in the ‘Verhandlungen der naturforschenden Gesellschaft
in Basel,’ iv. 1, 1864, pp. 132–186.
IX. The Inaugural Dissertation “Zur Kenntniss des Torfschweins,’ by Johann
Wilhelm Schutz, Berlin, May 4, 1868, referred to by Mr. Darwin in
‘Animals and Plants under Domestication,’ vol. i. p. 71, 2nd ed., 1875.
Y. A Memoir by Professor R. Hartmann, “Verbreitung der in nordöstlichen
Afrika wild lebenden Säugethiere,' in the Berlin ‘Zeitschrift für Erd-
kunde,” Bd. iii. 1868, in which (at pp. 349—352) there is an account of
S. Sennaariensis, which the Professor and Dr. Schutz consider to be the
parent stock of S. scrofa, var. palustris.
XI. Letter from Dr. A. B. Meyer, of the Royal Zoological Museum, Dresden.
XII. Letter from Professor R. Hartmann, of Berlin.
XIII. Letter from Professor Fitzinger, of Vienna.
XIV. Letter and drawing from Professor Busk, of London.
XV. Letter from the Rev. C. Spencer Bubb, late Missionary in Borneo.
XVI. Letter from G. Dobson, Esq., B.A., M.B., F.L.S.
A comparison of the skull of the old male of S. celebensis lent me
by Dr. A. B. Meyer, and the measurements of it given below, with
the skulls of S. andamanensis and with the descriptions of the skull
of S. verrucosus given by Nathusius, Rütimeyer, and Müller and
Schlegel, will show that while agreeing with these skulls in general
contour and proportions it is intermediate between them in actual
size. The highest point in the sagittal contour is, as in the
Suidae above named, a little way anterior to the upper edge of
550 ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF
the occipital squama; the transverse arc from one orbital process
of the frontal to the other is even more convex than in any other
Asiatic pig; the zygomatic arch is short, deep, and roughly sculp-
tured; the lower canine's alveolus reaches back to a prominent
external protuberance in the plane of the anterior lobe of the third
molar, a point further backwards than it usually attains to. The
posterior lobes of the third molars, though consisting of 4–5 cusps,
have not the great antero-posterior length relatively to the rest
of the tooth which we find in specimens of the same sex of S.
cristatus.
As in S. verrucosus, the bony palate is nearer to the basicranial
bones than in most other Suidae.
Its measurements (being those adopted by Professor Rütimeyer,
‘Verhandlungen Gesellschaft Basel,’ 1864, p. 163, from Nathusius,
‘Abbildungen von Schweineschädeln,’ 1864, p. 6) are as follows:—
MEASUREMENT OF SKULL OF ‘SUS CELEBENSIS."
millim. inches.
Length from foramen magnum to tip of intermaxillaries ... 281
= IO-3
Length of occipital crest to tip of intermaxillaries ... ... 325 = I2.8
Length from occipital crest to tip of nasals ... ... ... ... 320 = I2-55
Length of nasals ... ... ... ... ... ... . I54 = 6. I
Anterior part of frontal and Sagittal sutures ... ... ... 56 = 2.2
Posterior part of frontal and sagittal suture ... ... ... 97 = 3.8
From occipital foramen to vomer ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 = I-7
From occipital foramen to palate ... ... ... ... ... ... 72 = 2.85
Dentigerous part of maxilla ... ... ... ... ... ... ... I2O = 4.7
Incisive part of palate ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 61 = 2.4
Greatest interzygomatic width ... ... ... ... ... ... 14o = 5-5
Greatest frontal width ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 88 = 3.5
Smallest facial width ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 31 = 1.2
Intermaxillary width ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 37 = 1.45
Least nasal width ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 24 = I-95
Intermolar width ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 43 = 1.7
Interpremolar width ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 4I = I-6
Occipital height ... ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I 12 = 4-7
millim. , f/ -
Lacrymal orbital border ... 22 = 9 compare I in Sws verrucosus, Rütim.
Lacrymal malar border ... 17 = 7 92 I. I.3
Lacrymal upper border ... 3I = I-4 32 I-84
millim. w/
Length of S. celebensis, sec. Dr. A. B. Meyer ... 116o = 45-67
9 y 39 Müller and Schlegel 950 = 37-40
Length of tail of S. celebensis, sec. Dr. A. B. Meyer 25o = 9.84
3 y 39 Müll. and Schleg. 150 = 59
Height of S. celebensis, sec. Dr. A. B. Meyer 550–570 = 21-22
99 , Müller and Schlegel 560 = 2.2
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 551
Dr. A. B. Meyer's specimen was more brown than Müller's and
Schlegel's figure, pl. 28 bis ; the tuft at the angle of the mouth red-
brown, and the hair on the nape longer. As to his measurements
of S. celebensis, Dr. A. B. Meyer observes that they are taken from
a full-grown animal, and, being larger than those of Müller and
Schlegel, bring S. celebensis more nearly on to a level with S. verru-
cosus. Its smaller size suggests the dwarfing action of a confined
insular habitat undergone in some of the upheavals or subsidences
of Celebes.
Dr. A. B. Meyer informs me that the young of S. celebensis
are striped, in contradiction to the suggestion which I (see p. 541,
supra), being impressed with the closeness of the affinity between
this Sus and S. verrucosus (which Müller and Schlegel had declared
not to be striped when young), had thrown out. He informs me
also that he has the authority of General von Schierbrant, who has
lived thirty years in Java and is a first-rate sportsman, for saying
that Müller and Schlegel (l.c. p. 177) are not correct in what they
say is the case with S. verrucosus. If this be so, the claim which
S. verrucosus would have had to be considered the parent stock of
our improved breed of pigs falls to the ground. On the other
hand, I cannot, knowing the great modificatory power which
domesticating influences of one kind or other have been proved
to possess over the highly plastic porcine organism, and bearing
in mind the similarity between the Irish greyhound pig and
S. verrucosus, agree with Professor Rütimeyer (p. 184, l.c., 1864) in
excluding this Sus from consideration when we are speculating as
to the parentage of our domestic pigs. *
The skull of the Sus from Ternate lent me by Dr. A. B. Meyer
belonged to a young male, the third molars of which were just
coming into place, and which may be supposed therefore, according
to the analogy of S. scrofa, var. domesticus, if that may be taken as
any guide, to have been about eighteen months old (see Nathusius,
l. c. p. 21). It differs from skulls of S. cristatus in the flatness of
its lacrymo-frontal ridge, in the convexity backwards of its naso-
frontal suture, and in being somewhat smaller than male skulls of
that variety of Sus usually are. The posterior lobes of its third
molars are not quite so large as they usually are in S. cristatus;
but to this point I am not inclined to assign as much importance
as some other writers do (see Rütimeyer, ‘Fauna der Pfahlbauten,'
552 ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF
pp. 33 and 188, and, per contra, Nathusius, Z. e. pp. 49 and 103). In
the straightness of its vertical contour it contrasts with S. celebensis;
S. andamanensis, S. vittatus, as figured by Müller and Schlegel, l.c.
plate 32. fig. 6, and with S. barbatus ; and resembles S. cristatus, as
it does also in its general facies. Dr. A. B. Meyer thinks that this
Sus may possibly deserve to be considered a new species, S. terma-
tensis ; but having had abundant experience of the facility with
which the wild pigs of that region cross considerable arms of the
sea, he would, I gather, express himself with much caution as to its
relations to S. papuensis and the Suidae of the neighbouring islands,
volcanic and other, tenanted by swine. The colouring, however, of
the head of this Sus differs from that of any other Sus seen by
Dr. A. B. Meyer, or figured by Schlegel—the head being covered
all over with long black hair, except in the region occupied by
a broad yellowish brown streak beginning between the eyes and
descending to the snout, where it broadens.
MEASUREMENTS OF SKULL OF ‘SUs TERNATENSIs.’
millims. inches,
Length from foramen magnum to tip of intermaxillaries ... 290 = 11.4
,, occipital squama y 3 95 ... ... 355 = I4. I
33 3 * to tip of nasals ... ... ... 345 = 13.5
Length of nasals • * * s e º 'º e º 'º e º e º e s e e º e e 17 = 16.7
Anterior part of line of frontal and sagittal sutures ... ... 86 = 3.2
Posterior part of same line ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 = 37
Molar length ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... I43 = 5.65
Incisive bone length ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 = 2.2
Greatest interzygomatic width ... ... ... ... ... ... I 37 = 5.65
Greatest facial width ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 95 = 3-8
Least facial width ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 36 = I-45
Intermaxillary width ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 40 = 1.6
Least nasal width ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 28 = 1. I
Intermolar width ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 49 = 1.9
Interpremolar width ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 44 = I-75
Occipital height . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 = 4.4
Lacrymal orbital border ... ... . . ... ... ... ... ... 25 = I
, malar border ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 20 = -8
93 upper border ... ... ... ... 34 = I-3
A comparison of the two skulls of the domestic pig of Monghyr,
Bengal"—which animals, as Mr. Lockwood informs me, are kept in
large numbers by the pariah castes of his district, feed on human
ordure, and are sold out of the district to the Chinamen at
* For which I am indebted to the kindness of E. Lockwood, Esq.
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 553
Calcutta—with the skulls of the wild pig of Hindostan (S. cristatus)
shows that they differ from them in little else than their smaller
size. They may be spoken of, therefore, as S. cristatus, var.
domesticus; and they are as distinguishable from any variety of
S. scrofa, var. domesticus, or indeed of S. indicus, as is the wild
S. eristatus from other wild Suidae.
It is noteworthy that one of the skulls belonged to a very old
sow. In these, as in the days when Juvenal spoke (Sat. vi. I60)
of another Eastern country as a place where
‘Vetus indulget senibus clementia porcis,' -
it is a rare thing for a domestic pig to be allowed among Western
nations to live long enough to wear down its third molars. Mr.
H. N. Moseley, however, informs me that domestie pigs are kept
in the Chinese Buddhist monasteries till they die of old age and
infirmities; and of India, Meiners, in his “Allgemeine kritische
Geschichte der Religionem,’ 1806, Bd. i. p. 193, says, “In Asien
war von jeher Hindostan, wie in Afrika, Egypten, der Thron des
Thierdienstes.’
It is noteworthy, secondly, that with the worn-down molars of
this aged domesticated pig were correlated abscesses on both sides
of the lower jaw, much as might have been the case (see J. R.
Mummery, Esq., “Trans. Odont. Soc. ii. 2, 1869, p. 72) in ill-fed
human beings with similarly worn-down teeth.
Mr. Lockwood informs me that the young of the domestic pigs
of his district are striped like the young of wild pigs.
The skull of a wild boar, from France, presented by the Marquis
de l’Aigle, shows that the posterior lobe of the third molar in the
lower jaw may attain the same proportions in S. scrofa, var. ferus,
that it does in S. cristatus. .
The skull of S. seroſa, var. domesticus, procured for me by H. N.
Moseley, Esq., from the Lofoten Islands, two degrees within the
Arctic Circle, has the long, low, lacrymal characteristic of S. scrofa,
war. ferus, a fact of particular interest when coupled with the
information, also procured for me by him, to the effect that the
young domestic pigs of that region are occasionally born with
stripes, and with his observation that the old pigs have a very
wild-boar-like appearance. These facts should be borne in mind as
telling against the views propounded by M. André Sanson, in his
memoir ‘Sur la prétendue transformation du Sanglier en Cochon
554 ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF
domestique,” in the ‘Journal de l’Anatomie et de la Physologie,”
tom. iv. 1867, p. 38.
In Professor Hartmann’s memoir above referred to, it is stated
(p. 350) that certain Negro tribes, who disobey Mahommedan pre-
cepts by eating as well as domesticating S. Sennaariensis, excuse
themselves by saying it was formerly the custom to do so, a fact
which goes some little way to disprove the view that this true Sus
can be merely a feral variety of S. scrofa, imported by Europeans.
Professor Hartmann, in a letter of date Sept. 28, 1876, says,
* Sus sennaariensis ist ein kleines dem europäischen Torfschwein (der Pfahlbauten)
âhnliches Schwein, echtes Sus, welches wild durch einen grossen Theil von Mittel-
Afrika vorzukommen scheint . . . Sus scrofa ferus in der Sahara und in Aegypten
nicht selten, findet sich angeblich ebenfalls in Sennaar, indess weiss ich hierüber nichts
völlig Sicheres.’
Professor Busk, in a letter to me of Dec. 17, 1876, informs me
that in the Etruscan Museum at Florence, amongst numerous little
bronze articles extracted from the ancient Etruscan tombs, there
were many figures of animals, one in particular being a very well
made statuette of a pig, which to his eye very closely resembles
the Berkshire breed, the only point in which it differed being the
comparatively large eye, whilst the rest of the contour was quite
what we might expect to see at an ordinary cattle-show. The
animal was represented apparently as having a close curled tail.
With it were a good many statuettes of stags, the horns of which
were of the type of the pliocene Cervus ctenoceros. In the very per-
fectly restored Etruscan tomb erected in the Museum, with all its
original contents and frescoes, Professor Busk noticed, amongst
other figures of animals, one very well drawn of a monkey climbing
up a tree or pole.
I should suggest that the monkey and the pig, both alike, are
representations of animals from the same quarter of the globe as
that whence the kinsmen of the Etruscans in the time of Solomon
brought, every three years, into Mediterranean regions, the ivory,
apes, and peacocks, the Sanskrit names of which still remain to
speak to their habitat. See Max Müller, ‘Lectures on the Science
of Language,’ 1861, ser, i. p. 190, and ser. ii. p. 234, for the source
whence these animals and copper came to Europe.
Professor Busk sent me by the same post odontograms of the
teeth of S. cristatus, S. scrofa, var. ferus, and S. Scrºfa, var. domes-
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 555
ticus, which show that in S. cristatus the antero-posterior length of
the third molars is much greater in relation to that of the rest of
the molar series than it is in either of the other Suidae named. I
have above, p. 534, noted that the sexual differences in this matter
are very considerable in S. cristatus ; and those produced by domes-
tication are also not insignificant—points which somewhat impair
the value of these statements of relative proportions, though no
less an authority than Rütimeyer avers, ‘Fauna der Pfahlbauten,”
p. 188, that
‘mit viel grösserer Zähigkeit das Gebiss den Species-Typus āusseren Einflussen ge-
geniber aufrecht halt als die Schädelbildung.’
(Cf. however Nathusius, l.c. pp. 49, Iog, and Studer, “Mittheil.
Ant. Gesell. Zürich,’ xix. 3, 1876, p. 67.) Professor Busk also
observes that in S. cristatus nearly all the teeth, except molar 3,
are wider in both jaws in proportion to their length than they are
in the other two, and that from this we may suppose that the
Indian pig is more exclusively herbivorous than the tame or wild
animals with which he has compared it. Jerdon speaks of S. cris-
tatus, Z. e. p. 243, as being in general almost entirely ‘ vegetable
feeders.” Captain Baldwin’s views (‘The Game of India, pp. 154–5,
I876) are to the same effect.
Professor Busk’s drawing and description of this Etruscan pig,
coupled with a similar figure of a pig found in the ruins of Hercu-
laneum (see Nathusius, l.c. p. 142, fig. 33, and Darwin, l.c. p. 71),
furnishes a good illustration of Rütimeyer's saying (“Fauna der
Pfahlbauten,’ p. 190), that though the modern breed of domestic
pigs is recent enough to have been introduced by steamboats, it
nevertheless had been represented continuously from former ages by
the Bündtner-Schwein in the valleys of the Grisons. A figure of
a sow suckling three young ones may be seen on an Umbrian medal
of probably the third century B.C. at latest, figured by M. Sambon,
in his ‘Monnaies Antiques de l’Italie,’ 1870, pl. v. 5, with the
short snout bent on the chanfrin, the pendent ears, and the mane
limited to the nuchal region, which justify us in considering it to
have been intended to represent a tame variety. A pig, figured
Žbidem, pl. iv. 4, from Etruria has a snout of such slenderness as to
correspond very closely with the description given of S. &crofa, var.
palustris, whilst it contrasts in other points very strikingly with the
wild boars represented from Apulia and Lucania, on the other side
556 ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF
of Italy (ibidem, plates xiv. I, xv. 17 and 37, xix. 4), which have as
close a zoological as legendary connexion with the wild boar of
Calydon, on the other side of the Adriatic (see ‘Thesaurus,” Bran-
denburg, i. pp. 318 and 464, 1696, and ‘Thesaurus Numismaticus,’
i. p. 4oo, and tab. xl).
Of the two bronze statuettes given me by Mr. John Evans, one
has the long slender snout, and the mane reaching the whole
length of the convex back, from the prominent ears to the curled
tail, which may justify us in considering it as intended for a wild
boar; the other combines the sturdy straddle, and the long and
large erect mane, beginning on the forehead and in front of the
erect ears, characteristic of a wild boar, with a snout as dispropor-
tionately short, and tusks as reduced as we ever see them in the
highest-bred modern Chinese pig. The characters of the wild and
tame varieties, however, being thus inaccurately and inartistically
combined in these statuettes, cause them to contrast disadvan-
tageously with the Italian works of art just mentioned; but they
furnish us with a conclusive answer to the weak reasoning of De
Blainville (‘Ostéographie, Sus, p. 170), expressed in the following
words:—
“Du temps de César, il parait cependant qu’elle (la culture du cochon) n'était pas
encore parvenue dans les Gaules, car il n'est nullement question de cet animal dans
ses Commentaires; elle s'y est done propagée depuis la conquête, d'où elle a passé en
Angleterre, qui ne possédait pas même de sanglier dans ses forêts l' -
If further answer were required to this astounding statement, a
reference to Mr. Evans's work on British Coinage would furnish
it—figures of the boar, some of which are exceedingly characteristic,
being given there on ple. vi., viii, xi, xii, and xiii, from those
ancient coins. But all well-informed antiquaries are aware that
the wild boar is one of the earliest animals figured in Celtic works
of art (see ‘Horae Ferales, p. 185, pl. xiv.; Montellier, “Mémoires
sur les Bronzes Antiques,’ Paris, 1865; and Stephens, ‘Literature
of Kymry, p. 230).
Professor Rütimeyer's paper in the ‘Verhandlungen der natur-
forschenden Gesellschaft in Basel, iv. 1, 1864, is, I apprehend, re-
ferred to by Mr. Darwin when he says (‘Animals and Plants under
Domestication, i. p. 71, 2nd ed. 1875) that “Rütimeyer himself
seems now to feel some doubt” as to whether the ‘Torfschwein' ex-
isted as a wild animal during the first part of the stone period. No
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 557
reference is given l.c. to any memoir of Professor Rütimeyer's; and
I became, after writing the foregoing paper, acquainted with the one
in question from a mention of it made by Herr Edmund Naumann in
‘Archiv für Anthropologie,” Bd. viii. 1, 1875, p. 19, in a discussion
on “Die Fauna der Pfahlbauten im Starnberger See.’ From a perusal
of this paper of Professor Rütimeyer, I am inclined to think that he
would regard the skull (fig. 2) from the alluvium of the Thames valley
in the Oxford Univ. Museum as a skull of S. scrofa, var. palustris.
I have spoken of it as the skull of a wild sow, considering, as said
above, p. 530, that early breeding may, in a species admitting of
such a wide range of structural oscillation, and notably in the matter
of mere size, account for a very great distance between its male and
female representatives (see for a similar view as regards our own
species ‘Journal of Anthropological Institute,’ vol. ii. 1875, p. 122).
I am not inclined to withdraw from this view even after reading
Prof. Rütimeyer's and Herr J. W. Schutz's memoirs. For in the
former of these I find (p. 151) that the five skulls used for descrip-
tion are acknowledged to be skulls of sows, and four of them to
have been skulls of old sows, and the measurements given at p. 163
have been taken exclusively from skulls confessedly female (see
p. 161). And I learn from Herr Schutz's essay (p. 44) that Steen-
strup (cit. Wiegmann’s ‘Archiv,’ xxvii. n. 112) had distinctly stated
that the ‘Torfschwein’ was (as I had hinted without any know-
ledge of his views, see p. 254, supra) simply the female representa-
tive of S. scrofa, var. ferus. Professor Rütimeyer had not at the
time of writing his “Fauna der Pfahlbauten,’ 1861 (see p. 33), a
single perfect skull of the ‘Torfschwein’ available to his com-
parison ; the almost perfect skulls treated of in his memoir of
1864 (see p. 150) have caused him to modify the view put forward
at p. 190 of the earlier work, and in the later one he allows (pp. 158–
16o) that, both in the matter of the length of the lacrymal and in
the absence of widening of the palate anteriorly, the S. scrofa, var.
palustris, was more nearly affined to S. scrofa, var. ferus, than to S.
ândicus. To show this was the reason for giving a great number
of my measurements, supra, pp. 544–547. I take this opportunity
of saying that the very small breed of the Scottish highlands and
islands, with suberect ears, usually of a dusky brown colour, with
an arched back and coarse bristles along the neck and spine, spoken
of by Professor Low in his “Domesticated Animals of the British
558 ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF
Islands,’ p. 429, may perhaps be such a breed as Professor Rüti-
meyer suggests, in his later paper (p. 168, see also p. 148), should
be looked for in Eastern Europe or Western Asia or in fossil
forms 1. - - -
Mr. G. Dobson, F.L.S., in a letter to me of date Jan. 15, 1877,
writes that the young of the pig of the Andaman and of the
Nicobar Islands are striped.
Tho Rev. C. Spencer Bubb informs me that the young Borneo
domestic pig is sometimes striped and sometimes not, whilst the
young Chinese pig is never striped; and he adds that there are
certainly two domestic breeds in Borneo.
DESCRIPTION OF PLATES IV AND V.
Fig. I. Orbito-lacrymal region of partially reconstructed skull of Sus scrofa, var.
domesticus, wanting nasals and intermaxillaries, from late Celtic interment at Arras,
East Riding of Yorkshire. Oxford Museum.
It is, as Nathusius has well pointed out, l.c. p. 147, by no means always easy to
be absolutely certain as to the question whether a particular pig's skull belonged to a
wild or to a domesticated individual. The difficulty is increased when the animal is
young, as in this case, the last molar having only just come into use, and the animal
consequently being only about 18 months old, and when as the small size generally,
and especially the small size of the third molar and the canine, may be taken, I
believe, to indicate that it is of the female sex. It is true that the paucity of cusps
in the molars has been taken as indicating the wild state ; a comparison, however, of
the male and female molar series in Sus cristatus has suggested to me that the greater
size of the molars really depends upon a greater supply of blood, such as the male
molars would get, by virtue of sharing the greater supply lavished on the canines, and
such as a well-fed domesticated animal's molars would get in common with all its
other structures and organs. The comparatively vertical occipital squama is one main
anatomical point in favour of this skull having belonged to a domesticated specimen;
the pterygoid, on the other hand, has much of the obliquity characteristic of the wild
Sus scrofa, var. ferus. When we consider, however, that this skull was found in an
interment containing a human body, together with portions of another skull of a pig
of the same age, the probability that it belonged to a tame individual appears to be
very great. The subjoined measurements show that the lacrymal bone, though not
* I suspect that latitude has more to do with the production of such varieties than
longitude, and still operating causes more than geological. One of these causes is
suggested by the words of Varro, ii. 4. 13, cited by Dureau de la Malle, “Economie
politique des Romains,’ ii. p. 149: ‘Porcique nati hieme, fiunt exiles propter
frigora.”
-
Paſe/V page 358
Aº. 2.
F. Huth, Lººtin:



-
-
º
or -
\º
F. Huth, Luthºrºinº
D C M E S T I C P I G. S

PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 559
so long relatively to its height as is often the case in the non-domesticated Sus scrofa,
is yet longer than it is in Sus indicus, or in any of the Eastern pigs from which Sus
indicus can with any probability be supposed to have descended.
inches. inches.
Length from anterior external Length from anterior border of
angle (apex) of frontal to orbit to posterior . © • I-4
middle of occipital ridge . 5.9 || Greatest width of occiput . • 2-4
Length from apex of frontal to Length of molar series . • 2-3
apex of maxilla . e . 4. I | Height of occiput . e . 3.8
Length from anterior border of Height of lacrymal . º . O-7
orbit to temporal ridge . . 3.8 | Length of lacrymo-malar suture . o.8
The difference here noted between the height of the lacrymal and the length of
its lower border amounts but to a tenth of an inch ; but in the female of Sus indicus,
with the same stage of dentition, fig. 4, the height of the lacrymal, instead of being
one tenth of an inch less, is o.35 inch greater in length than its lacrymomalar
border.
Fig. 2. Orbito-lacrymal region of Sus scrofa, var. ferus, old Q, from alluvium of
Thames valley, obtained for the Oxford University Museum from the cutting for the
drainage works near Iffley, 1876, by Professor Prestwich, F.R.S.
This skull combines the general contour and the slender snout of Sus scrofa, var.
ferus, with a lacrymal bone differing little in its proportions from the lacrymals so
characteristic of the Asiatic pigs, less Sus verrucosus (and celebensis). The fronto-
parietal region does not form one continuous slope in the same plane as is the case in
the Wild Boar of Germany (Pl. IV. fig. 5); but this difference may be observed in
skulls certainly of Wild Boars from the Thames-valley deposits; whilst the great wear
of the teeth and the slenderness and length of the naso-facial region are much in
favour of considering this specimen to have belonged to the wild race. I have placed
side by side with the measurements of this skull the measurements given by
Rütimeyer, l. c. pp. 45 and 183, of his ‘Torfschwein,’ Sus scrofa, var. palustris.
Unhappily, Rütimeyer has never been able to procure (see pp. 43 and 45, note I)
a skull of this variety of Sus with the facial bones in connexion with the brain-case,
nor has Nathusius (see p. 149, l.c.) ever been able to see an uninjured lacrymal bone
from the same animal. These facts, whilst making the value of this skull (the oppor-
tunity of figuring which I owe to the kindness of Professor Prestwich) greater, make
the value of the comparison of its measurements less.
The instructive observations of Nathusius (l.c. pp. 99–IoI), to the effect that
ill-nourished pigs have the entire length of their skulls greater as measured from the
occipital crest to the apex of the snout, whilst the portion of that length made up by
the frontal and parietal is somewhat shorter, and the nasal portion proportionally
longer, when coupled with the fact of the great wear of the teeth in this specimen,
enable us to explain the one great point of inferiority, that of the length of the fronto-
parietal region, which this skull's measurements show us, compared with those of the
“Torfschwein.” It may be added, that the true explanation of Dr. Gray's statement
‘Brit. Mus. Catal.’ 1869, p. 329), that the nasal bones of the skull elongate as Suidae
increase in age, ‘and especially as they reach adult and old age,’ is probably that he
had in his mind's eye skulls of old and ill-fed wild pigs, such as this specimen. On the
other hand, when we are comparing such skulls as this with the “Torfschwein' of
Rütimeyer, we must recollect that he represents this latter variety of pig, and what he
560 ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF
supposes to be its still surviving representative, the ‘Bündtner-Schwein,’ as having a
short snout (see pp. 42, 45, 181–185). The classificatory value, however, of such a
peculiarity is much reduced by the results of such experiments as those of Nathusius
just referred to.
MEASUREMENTs of IFFLEY SKULL AND of RüTIMEYER's ‘ToRFSCHWEIN,"
pp. 45, 183, l.c.
Iffley Skull. Torfschwein.
inches. inches.
Greatest frontal width between ectorbital processes . 3-2 3-7
Least width on vertex . g º º º © o.8 O.9
Greatest interzygomatic width g e e º 4-6 4.7-4.9
Height of occipital from inferior border of foramen
magnum . e' e e º e & º 3.5 3.8–4.5
Length of vertex from level of supraorbital foramen
to ridge of occiput . e º e e e 3.8 4'4
Horizontal distance from anterior border of orbit to
posterior of temporal fossa e º tº º 3-o 3. I
Length of intermaxillary along alveolar border «» 2 * I I-9–2-4
Maximum length of skull from apex of inter-
maxillaries . º º & e e . IO-9 -
Length of nasal bones (approximately) . e e 5'5 -
Length from apex of intermaxillaries to inferior
border of foramen magnum . º º . IO-3 -
Length from anterior external angle (apex) of frontal
to middle of occipital ridge . e e e 5-9 -
Length from middle of fronto-nasal suture to middle
of occipital ridge . e e 4.8
Length from anterior border of orbit to posterior . I-4 -
Greatest width of occiput e º e e & 2-4 -
Breadth of nasal at commencement of naso-fronta
suture, which is the point of maximum width of
nasals . e º © º & º & I • I -
Maximum width of intermaxillaries e e º I-3 t-
Height of lacrymal along rim of orbit . te e 17 millims.
Length of lacrymal along malar suture . g © 18 millims.
Fig. 3. Orbito-lacrymal region of Sus andamanensis. I514 b, Oxford University
Museum, adult 2. -
The skull from which this drawing was taken was that of a wild sow from the
Andaman Islands, procured for me by my friend J. Wood-Mason, F.G.S., of the
Calcutta Museum. It is about the same size as the two prehistoric British skulls,
Plate IV. Figs. I and 2, and as the ‘Torfschwein’ of Rütimeyer—resembling this latter
in the one important particular, that of its long fronto-parietal region, in which it
differs from the British skull (Fig. 2). It differs from all the pigs' skulls here figured
in the exaggeratedly disproportionate shortness of the malar border of its lacrymal
bone, which is, as in the newly-born European pig, little more than half the length of
the orbital border. In its convex frontal region we have, again, a character retained
in the adult Asiatic which is transitorily represented in the European pig. This
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 561
convexity of the fronto-lacrymal ridge is well marked, and, like the straight naso-
frontal suture and the two other peculiarities specified, serves to differentiate Sus
andamanensis from specimens of similar size from the Palaearctic region, and to show
that it is a member of the group represented by Sus cristatus. Again, this skull
resembles Sus cristatus and differs from Sus 8crofa in being somewhat shorter, and
having the paroccipitals, temporal bullae, and pterygoid processes more crowded
together. The length of the nasals is a little less than that of the fronto-parietal
region in the vertical aspect, as is often, though not always, the case in Sus cristatus,
though very rarely, if ever, in Sus scrofa.
MEASUREMENTS OF SKULL OF ‘SUS ANDAMANENSIS, FEMALE.
- inches. inches.
Greatest frontal width between Length from apex of frontal to
ectorbital processes º ... 3-3 middle of occipital ridge . • 5'95
Least width on vertex º . o.8 Length from middle of fronto-
Greatest interzygomatic width . 4.65 nasal suture to middle of occi-
Height of occiput from inferior pital ridge o e • 5'5
border of foramen magnum .. 3-7 Length from anterior border of
Length of vertex from level of orbit to posterior . º . I •5
supraorbital foramina to middle Greatest width of occiput . . 2-5
of occipital ridge . o • 4-5 Breadth of nasals at commence-
Horizontal distance from anterior ment of naso-frontal suture,
border of orbit to temporal which is the broadest part of
ridge e o © o ... 3-O5 nasals . e º e . I •O
Length of intermaxillary along Maximum width of intermaxillary
alveolar border © o • 2-O region & o e . I •2
Maximum length of skull from Height of lachrymal along rim of
apex of intermaxillaries . . Io.8 orbit e © e e . I 7 mm.
Length of nasals. º e • 5 Length of lachrymal along malar
Length from apex of intermax- suture . e te e . 8 mm.
illaries to anterior edge of fora- Length of molar series e a 2-O
men magnum . º © . 9. I Length of premolar series . • I-3
Fig. 4. Orbito-lachrymal region of skull of wild Indian sow, Sus cristatus, British
Museum. See ‘Catalogue of Carnivorous, Pachydermatous, and Edentate Mammalia,”
1869, p. 334 (where this skull is catalogued as ‘716 m. Skull of young female.
Length Ioł, height 7% inches. Terai, Nepal; Dr. Oldham'), or Hand-List, published
1873, p. 64. - *
This skull has been figured to show the points in which it contrasts with the
British pig's skull (Fig. I) on the one hand, as to racial characters, and with the
Indian boar's skull (Fig. 6) as to sexual characters, agreeing as it does with the one
as to sex, and with the other as to age.
It is, as may be seen by constructing two triangles with the three first measure-
ments given of it and of that of Sus cristatus (Fig. 6) respectively, a very much
Smaller skull than that ; the principal points, however, enumerated in the description
of that skull, as differentiating it from Sus scrofa, can be recognised in its smaller
contours. The third molar in the upper jaw has the part posterior to its second
principal lobe much smaller relatively and absolutely than is the case in boars of Sus
cristatus ; this posterior factor, however, effloresces into as many as seven cusps in the
upper and five in the lower jaw of this specimen.
O O
562 ON THE DOMESTIC PIG OF
MEASUREMENTs of SKULL, No. 716 m, BRITISH MUSEUM COLLECTION.
‘SUS CRISTATUS, FROM TERAI, NEPAL.
inches. inches.
Extreme length . & . I 1.2 Length of lachrymalalong malar
Extreme height . * e 4°3 suture . º & O.75
Base-line & g tº , IO Interpremolar transverse dia-
Height of lachrymal along rim meter of palate . . . I-6
of orbit . . © g g I • I Intermolar e te © I-75
Fig. 5. Orbito-lachrymal region of skull of wild boar, Sus scrofa, var. ferus, from
Germany. No. 1513a, Oxford University Museum.
The entire dentition was in place; the portion of the third molar which is
posterior to the four primary cones is very small as compared either with the rest of
the tooth or with its homologue in the Indian wild boar (fig. 6). It is, however,
considerably in front at a line drawn as a perpendicular to the plane of the cutting-
edges of the molars from the lachrymal canal. This skull differs markedly from the
skull just named in the greater length, relatively to the height, of its lachrymal bone,
in the greater length of its nasals relatively to the length of the fronto-parietal region,
in the absence of any great convexity in the part of the frontal abutting upon the
lachrymal, and in the convexity backwards of its fronto-nasal suture.
MEASUREMENTS OF SEULL of GERMAN WILD BOAR, No 1513 a, OXFORD
TJNIVERSITY MUSEUM.
inches. inches.
Extreme length 16.5 | Width of nasals © wº ſº I-3
Extreme height 5.1 | Maximum interzygomatic width 5.9
Base-line from anterior margin Maximum frontal (interector-
of foramen magnum to apex bital) width . . . e gº 4-2
of intermaxillaries I4-o Height of lachrymal along rim
Length of nasals, approximatively 8.o of orbit e tº g e I •O
Eronto-parietal length in ver- Length of lachrymal along malar
tical aspect e g 6.8 suture . I • 2
Fig. 6. Orbito-lachrymal region of skull of Indian wild boar, Sws cristatus, killed at
Haugul, Dharwar province; from the collection of Sir Walter Elliot, K.C.S.I.
No. 72.
In this animal the third molar is only just coming into place, and its very large
multicuspidate posterior lobe is not so far forward relatively as in the European wild
boar (fig. 5) nor in other Indian hogs of greater age. It shows however very plainly
the points, several if not always all of which have, by their presence in every speci-
men of Sus cristatus which I have examined, enabled me to distinguish it from Sus
scrofa, var. ferus. It has the relatively short lachrymal—a tape, stretched as an arc
across the long axis of the skull, from the anterior inferior angle of the bone on one
side to the homologous point on the other, passing over the frontals, and not over any
part of the nasals; the naso-frontal suture, which lies entirely in front of such an arc,
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN BRITAIN. 563
is straight, and not convex backwards; the portion of the frontal which is bounded in-
ternally by the supraorbital channel, and externally by the lachrymal bone, is markedly
convex. The nasals are broader, as is nearly always the case, and shorter also, which
is not by any means always the case, relatively to the fronto-parietal region of the
vertex, than in Sus scrofa, var. ferus.
MEASUREMENTS OF INDIAN WILD BOAR, No. 72, SIR WALTER ELLIOT’s
COLLECTION.
inches. inches.
Extreme length . º . 16.9 || Minimum vertical width e I.8
Extreme height . º tº 5.I | Height of lachrymal along rim
Base-line from anterior margin of orbit tº & gº e I
of foramen magnum to apex Length of lachrymal along
of intermaxillaries . . 13 malar suture ſe e O-9
Length of nasals . * & 7-3 || Interpremolar transverse dia-
Length of fronto-nasal suture meter of palate . dº tº 1.6
to middle of occipital ridge . 8 Intermolar . e ſº * O-25
Width of nasals at apex of Length of posterior upper
frontals ſº © g ſº 2 molar . e te * I-35
Maximum interzygomatic width 6 Breadth . © g (e. {º O-9
Maximum frontal (interector- Length of third lower molar . I.6
bital) width ſº tº . 4.4 || Breadth . . . gº º tº o.8
Fig. 7. Orbitolachrymal region of skull of Sus barbatus, Borneo. I519 d, Oxford
University Museum.
This skull, like the other three skulls of the same species examined by me (of
which two are in the British Museum), differs from those already described in large
points as well as in small ones; and there can be little reason for hesitating to
accept it as specifically distinct from them, and indeed from all other Suidae.
The contour described by the middle line of its nasal and fronto-parietal regions
superiorly, the relations of the greatest width and greatest lengths both of the entire
skull and of the nasal bones, the position of the plane of its greatest interzygomatic
width, not posteriorly, but in the middle of the zygomatic arch, are points of large
difference. The exceeding simplicity of its third molars and the persistence of the
mesopterygoid as a distinct bone, are points of small difference, but yet of great mor-
phological importance. In the shortness of its lachrymal bone it resembles the other
Swidae without facial warts.
Its naso-frontal suture and lachrymo-frontal ridge are more like those of these
pigs than those of Sw8 Scrofa.
MEASUREMENTs of SKULL OF ‘SUs BARBATUs,' No. 1519 d, OXFORD UNIVERSITY
MUSEUM.
inches. inches.
Extreme length . tº • I9-7 Fronto-parietal region in verti-
Height . © g sº g 6.7 cal aspect from same point
Base-line o g . . 16.7 as preceding measurement
Length of nasals from plane of to occipital ridge in straight
postero-lateral tips . . IO-5 line . tº * & © 9-o
O O 2.
564 ON THE PREHISTORIC PIG IN BRITAIN.
inches. inches.
Width of nasals . e tº I-5 Length of posterior upper molar I-4
Maximum (interzygomatic) Breadth of anterior, which is
width e © e G 6.8 much the widest lobe . & O-9
Maximum frontal (interector- Length of posterior lower molar I-5
bital) width . g gº 4-5 Breadth of anterior lobe . e o.8
Minimum vertical. {º te I-4 Intermolar space at narrowest
Lachrymo-malar line . { } I • 2 point . e ſº ſº g I • I
Height of lachrymal . e I • 2
Fig. 8. Left lower third molar of Sus andamanensis, female, 13 times the natural
size. -
This tooth shows the three divisions of the third molar of the true Suidae in
great simplicity. There are two bicuspidate lobes corresponding to the two principal
lobes of molar I and molar 2, and, like them, enclosing a single azygos lobe in the middle
line between them. This azygos lobe is developed from the second bicuspidate lobe.
There is no ridge developed in Sus andamanensis on the anterior part of the tooth,
i.e. on the face in contact with molar 2. Posteriorly to two bicuspidate lobes, which
already show signs of wear, are seen five smaller cusps, occupying in all a much
smaller space than the rest of the tooth. In the males of Sus cristatus these five
smaller cusps would, as in well-fed domestic pigs, occupy a very much larger space
relatively and absolutely than they do here, or even in Sus scrofa, var. ferus. In Sus
barbatus the third lower molars are as simple as they are in Sus andamanensis, and,
like this Sus, have the third molars of the upper jaw simpler still than the lower.
The five posterior cusps consist of one placed mesially in the interspace between the
primary cusps of the second pair, of three placed like the dots in the sign "... ', and of
a fifth, not constant, accessory cusp placed on the inner side. The four latter are
represented in the upper jaw of this pig by two, and in Sus barbatus by one
main cusp.
XXXI.
NEW POINTS IN THE ZOOLOGY OF
NEW GUINEA.
THE author commenced by saying that the zoology of New
Guinea has had a great deal of research bestowed upon it, and will
yet have a great deal more, as a consequence of the profit which
has already resulted. A point which recent zoological discoveries
in New Guinea throw light upon is that there was a dry land
passage at one time between Australia and New Guinea, recent
discoveries in the latter country having revealed the presence there
of animals similar to, or identical with, some found in Australia.
This is held as proof that where Torres Strait now is there was
once dry land. But against this hypothesis is urged the difference
between the vegetation of the two islands. This, however, is
accounted for by what Herbert Spencer calls the circumambient
medium. Though people are inclined to think vegetables consider-
ably less sensitive than animals, sometimes they are more sensitive
to heat and dryness; and the author believes that it is the greater
tenderness of the vegetation in those countries which accounts for
the disparity observable between the vegetable growths of New
Guinea and those of Australia. In the centre of New Guinea there
is a high range of mountains, which attract and impart moisture to
the surrounding country; while the interior of Australia consists
of great barren plains, which harbour no moisture. The plants, as
they have not had the means to protect themselves available to
animals, have gradually altered their form to accommodate them-
selves to circumstances. A curious creature, covered with prickles,
living on ants and other insects, and unprovided with means of
militant operations, is found on both sides of the Straits. Two
kinds of Echidna have also been discovered in New Guinea, and
566 NEW POINTS IN THE ZOOLOGY OF NEW GUINEA.
corresponding with them is one in Tasmania and another in
Australia. These creatures could not travel over water, and so
there must have been land communication at the period of their
original distribution. Quite lately an Echidna has been found in
the south-west corner of New Guinea, and sent to Professor
Rolleston by the Rev. Mr. Lawes, the discoverer, accompanied by
a letter, in which the statement is made that this is the first ever
found. For this species the name Echidna lawesii is proposed. The
Cassowary has also been found on both sides of Torres Straits.
Proof of the existence of the Tree-Kangaroo, both in Australia and
New Guinea, Professor Rolleston also considered reliable. At its
conclusion the paper treated of the Admiralty-Island pig, in the
first part of which Professor Rolleston pointed out the peculiarity
of a glabella.
[As no description is given in this abstract of the characters which distinguish this
new species of Echidna from other species of the same genus, I wrote to C. Robertson,
Esq., Demonstrator of Anatomy, University of Oxford, to ask if any description of the
species had been recorded in the Catalogue of the Museum or elsewhere. He answered
that he was not aware of any description drawn up by Dr. Rolleston, but referred me
to the ‘ Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales,’ in which I find that
Mr. E. P. Ramsay, Curator of the Australian Museum, Sydney, contributed March 26,
1877 (‘ Proc. Linnean Society N. S. W.,’ vol. ii. p. 31), a note of a species of Echidna
(Tachyglossus) from Port Moresby, New Guinea. Mr. Ramsay distinguishes it from
the Tachyglossus bruijnii from the northern parts of that island. He describes its ex-
ternal characters on p. 32, and states in a footnote that he has ‘not yet learned the
name which has been given to this new species, but daily expects to hear of it from my
friends in England. Should it however be still unnamed, I propose for it the name of
T. lawesii, in honour of its discoverer.” In vol. iii. p. 244, September 30, 1878, he
states that Mr. Goldie has obtained three other specimens, and he gives the measure-
ments of each.-EDITOR.]
XXXII.
ON THE ROT IN SHEEP.
THE English Lake District presents us with as simple a case for
the investigation of the cause of rot in sheep as any other portion
of the wide area over which that disease has spread, with, perhaps,
the exception of such isolated localities as the Faroe Islands: for
sheep abound upon its thousand hills, while the species of snails
and slugs are but few, and the conditions of its geological form-
ation, of its fauna and of its flora differ as widely from those of
many other regions within our four seas similarly affected as it is,
all things considered, possible for them to differ. Having occasion
to visit the district in question last week, I used the opportunity
for making a few enquiries of the farmers and shepherds there as to
the natural history of this plague. These enquiries were of the
simplest kind, anybody can repeat thm, and I cannot but think
that the answers he will receive will incline such an enquirer to
think that a strong a priori case is made out in favour of the view
put forward in ‘The Times' of April 7, to the effect of identifying
the black slug (Arion ater) or the gray slug (Limaa agrestis) as one
necessary link in the chain of causes concerned. I found the
natives as intelligent and observant as I have found them to be
any time during the last thirty-four years upon natural history
questions; and I very rapidly got the following facts deposed to by
them without any prompting on my part :—
1. The fluke disease is a disease of low grounds, and notably of
pastures liable to be flooded.
2. But not exclusively of pastures liable to be flooded; for, what
is of special consequence as going some way towards eliminating
the pond snails (Limnaeus pereger) and others from the charge of
sharing in the causation of fluke disease, the pasturing of sheep in
a stubble rich in the ‘melancholic poisonous green,” which a wet
568 - ON THE ROT IN SHEEP.
autumn often produces, is a very sure way for producing the
disease.
3. The words just given in inverted commas are not the exact
words employed by my informants; those which follow are, or
pretty nearly so—‘a single bellyful will give the disease.’
4. ‘A pasture will give the disease at the back-end of the year
which won’t give it after Candlemas.” This means that the winter
cold and rains destroy or wash away the larval or other forms of
flukes which the slugs brought with them in the autumn.
The first of these observations is, like all other observations and
all experiments concerning the matter with which I am acquainted,
utterly destructive of Dr. Harley's suggestion as to the self-
infection of sheep from their own droppings or those of their
fellow sheep. If this were possible why should it not take place
on the uplands or ‘commons’—as the Lake shepherds call the
unenclosed mountains—where the sheep, for the sake of food on
those often limited grazing spaces or ‘alps, or for the sake of
shelter, often huddle together as closely as they do or can do any-
where else? It is destructive also of the often-uttered ascription
of rot to damp and moisture, the mountain ridges of Westmoreland
being ‘many-fountained to a degree never dreamed of by Theo-
critus in Mediterranean districts, or realised by our own Laureate
out of these ‘rainy isles.’ It is, on the other hand, confirmatory, as
are all accurate observations on the subject, of the view which
asserts that the presence of snail or slug is a necessary factor in
the causation of rot. Snails and slugs are but scantily represented,
if present at all, on mountain tops; there are no slugs in Forbes'
and Tschudi’s lists of high Alpine ranges; and these districts, like
salt marshes, owe their character for considered soundness,’ as the
phrase is, as regards the most destructive of sheep diseases, to this
absence or paucity of, at least, certain mollusca.
I was first put in this pursuit upon the slimy trail of the slugs
and snails specified by various well-known facts which it is here
unnecessary to specify. The number of the mollusca which it is
necessary to trouble about appears to me to be very distinctly and
very conveniently limited by the fact pointed out by the late
Willemoes-Suhm, one of the ‘good company of famous knights’
upon H. M. Challenger, as to the Faroe Islands. The Faroe
Islands are afflicted by the rot, but they have only eight snails and
ON THE ROT IN SHEEP. 569
slugs, all told, out of which to choose the guilty party or parties.
These are, as enumerated in Siebold and Kölliker’s ‘Zeitschrift”
for 1873 (vol. xxiii. p. 339), Limaa agrestis, Limaa marginatus,
Witrina pellucida, Hyalina alliaria, Limnaeus pereger, Limnaeus
truncatulus, Arion ater, Arion cinctus. That the fluke of the Faroe
Islands sheep spends a considerable part of its life as a parasite in
one or more of these mollusca admits of about as much doubt as
the statement that the ‘giddy' disease—the ‘sturdy,’ as the Lake
T)istrict shepherds pronounce the French word &tourdi—of the
sheep is similarly dependent upon a to-and-fro shuttlecock alterna-
tion of one animal between two others. I do not say that it is
necessarily in one, and one only, of the specified eight mollusca.
Undoubtedly the fluke, like other parasites, may, in its sporting
tour, infest many hosts. As a matter of fact, this particular fluke
(Fasciola hepatica) in its adult stage infests some dozen mammals
beside the sheep and ourselves. But, as a matter of speculation, I
incline to think that the fluke in its younger days is, like some
other animals, a little, or indeed a good deal, more particular as to
where it lodges than it is in later life. As a matter of practice at
any rate there is no need to tell farmers to be on their guard
against snails which do not infest their pastures, and of the eight
just specified they need usually in England only look to the
black slug and the gray slug. Willemoes-Suhm suspected the
gray slug, I suspect the black slug; partly on account of its very
wide distribution in space (it having been found as a ‘spectre noir'
in Prince Jerome Bonaparte's voyage to Jan Mayen's island),
partly from the facts furnished to me by Mr. D. Gresswell,
M.R.C.V.S., of Louth, to the effect that sheep which have been
feeding on turnips harbouring ‘black jacks’ will die of rot even
when shifted on to salt marshes. Any inhabitant of the Shetland
Islands who will inform us that sheep-rot does infest his country,
or any inhabitant of Siberia who will inform us that it does not
infest his, will settle the question, in a preliminary way at least, in
favour of the black slug. For ‘this very common, beautiful, and
exceedingly variable slug,' as Forbes calls it, is not found in
Siberia, and the Limaa agrestis is ; while in the Shetlands the case
of distribution is precisely reversed. Whoever will furnish us with
the information required will be indeed a ‘true farmers' friend.”
Anyhow, the line of prevention indicated in my previous letter of
570 ON THE ROT IN SHEEP.
April 7th' is the same whichever animal is the one to be blamed,
or if both are. And in confirmation of what I there recommend
let me say that rot is comparatively rare in the Lake district,
while the pasturage of ducks and geese on marshy ground is a
branch of agricultural industry greatly developed. It was with
much pleasure that I saw two large flocks—one of ducks, the other
of geese—6chelonned some hundred yards or less apart on such
ground there. They will keep down both black and gray slugs as
fast as they appear, without, so far as is known, incurring any
danger from this fluke.
* [In this letter he recommended the employment of birds, especially ducks, for the
destruction of the snails. As sheep lick up snails for the sake of the relish which
their salt taste imparts, he recommended that blocks of rock salt should be placed
convenient for the sheep to get at.—EDITOR.]
[The publication of the above as a letter in the ‘Times’ of April 14, 1880, induced
the Royal Agricultural Society of England to offer a grant to Dr. Rolleston for an
investigation into the life-history of the liver-fluke. Dr. Rolleston was unable to
undertake the research, but recommended to that Society one of his pupils and
demonstrators, Mr. A. P. Thomas of Balliol College, who commenced the investiga-
tion on June 7, 1880. The results of his enquiry have been incorporated in pre-
liminary reports to the Royal Agricultural Society (“Journal, vol. xvii. 1881, p. 1; vol.
xviii. 1882, p. 439), and in “Nature,” vol. xxvi. p. 606. Mr. Thomas communicated
more elaborate memoirs to the Royal Agricultural Society of England, October,
1882, printed in their ‘Journal, vol. xix. S. S. part 1, under the title ‘The
Natural History of the Liver-fluke and the prevention of Rot;’ and to the
‘Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science,’ January, 1883, under the title ‘The life-
history of the Liver-fluke (Fasciola hepatica).” The conclusion at which he has
arrived is that the Lymnaeus truncatulus is the only English mollusc which can serve
as intermediate host to the liver-fluke, though it is possible that in other countries
some other mollusc may be the intermediary. It was at one time thought that,
although Fasciola hepatica occurred in Australia, the genus Lymnaeus did not exist
there. Mr. W. Hatchett Jackson has directed my attention to a paper by Mr. E. A.
Smith, ‘On the Fresh-water Shells of Australia, in the ‘ Proc. Linnaean Society
(Zoology), vol. I6, p. 255, in which he enumerates eleven species of Iymnaeus, one
of which, L. victoriae, is almost identical with L. truncatulus.-EDITOR.]
XXXIII.
NOTE ON THE GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION
OF LIMAX AGRESTIS, ARION HORTENSIS,
AND FASCIOLA HEPATICA.
THAT some not inconsiderable confusion exists as to the question
of the existence of Arion ater and Limaa agrestis in Greenland, will
be seen from the following quotation, to be found as hereinafter
specified (“A Manual of the Natural History, Geology, and Physics
of Greenland, together with Instructions for the use of the Arctic
Expedition.’ 1875. London):—
(P. I24.) ‘Mollusca Groenlandica :
Classis i. ANDROGYNA, Mörch.
Ordo i. GEOPHILA, Fér.
* I. Arion fuscus, Müll. Probably introduced. L. agrestis,
L., according to Wormskiold.
The species marked with an * are doubtful inhabitants of Greenland.”
Prefixed to the list whence the above passage is taken is a note
to the effect that the list is the ‘ Prodromus Faunae Molluscorum
Groenlandiae (in Rink's ‘ Grönland,’ &c., 1857, pp. 75–100). By
Dr. O.A. L. Mörch. Revised and augmented by Dr. O. A. L. Mörch,
University Museum, Copenhagen. April, 1875.”
On referring, however, to the Prodromus itself, as published in
Danish in 1857, I find the entry which concerns us stands simply
thus:—
* Mollusca Grönlandica:
Order i. GEOPHILA.
Gen. i. Limaa, L.
* I. L. agrestis, L. (ifolge Wormskjold).
* Betigner at Artens Forekomst paa Grönland ikke er sikker.’
That is to say, that the line in the entry given in the Manual of
1875—‘*Arion fuscus, Müll. Probably introduced -is altogether
something fresh and new ; whilst the asterisk, denoting that the
572 ON THE GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION
animal so marked is possibly not indigenous, was removed from the
Limax agrestis, and prefixed to the curious name ‘Arion fuscus,
IMüll.”
It is difficult to understand how the late Dr. O. A. L. Mörch can
have come, in 1875, to alter his previous entry in this manner.
For the name ‘Arion’ was unknown to Müller, the author of the
‘Historia Vermium, having been introduced into malacology by
Férussac, as he himself tells us"; and as regards the animal itself,
on the supposition that Dr. Mörch, by his entry “Arion fuseus,
Müll.,’ intended to have written ‘ Limaa, fuseus, Müll. ;’ and
knowing that this Limax, so called by Müller, was really an Arion
(hortensis), and not a slug with a posteriorly placed respiratory inlet
and a continuous shell, it is still more difficult to see how he could
have added the word I. agrestis, L., apparently as a synonym.
For in the thirteenth edition of the ‘Systema Naturae,’ tom. i.
pars vi. pp. 31 or—31 O2, the (true) “Limax agrestis' is distinguished
from the ‘Limaa fuseus’ (= Arion hortensis hodie) of ‘Müller, Hist.
Verm. ii. p. ii. n. 209.’ -
On referring to Dr. O. A. L. Mörch’s ‘Faunula Molluscorum
Islandiae, communicated on the 13th April 1866, and published
in 1868, in Danish, in the “Widensk. Medd. fra den naturhist.
Forening i. Kbwn, pp. 185–227, I find at p. 196, 3, that ‘Limaa,
agrestis, L.’ stands with a ? after its name, even though there can
be no doubt from references to Olafsen, several of which are, in
fact, given by Mörch, that a gray slug, as well as the black slug,
Arion ater, exists in Iceland. And a suggestion at the end of the
entry, to the effect that the specimens may possibly belong to the
species Limaa tenellus, appears to explain the presence at the
beginning of it of a 2 after the words Limaa, agrestis.
Perhaps, therefore, the true explanation of the entry in the
Manual of 1875 is as follows. In the interval between 1857 and
1875 a black slug may have been proved to Dr. Mörch’s satisfaction
to have been found in Greenland, and he may have identified it as
the Arion fuseus of Moquin-Tandon, which is the same as the Arion
hortensis of Férussac, and as the Limaa fuscus of Müller and
Linnaeus; and he may, by a very slight slip, have entered it as
‘Arion fuseus, Müll., instead of ‘Arion fuscus, Moquin-Tandon,’ or
* Limaa, fuscus, Müll.’ To his addition ‘Probably introduced,’
* “Hist. Nat. des Mollusques," ii. 1820–1851, pp. 23 and 54.
OF LIMAX AGRESTIS, ETC. 573
some objection might be taken on the ground that there is no very
strong a priori reason why an Arion should not exist in Greenland,
considering that it exists in Iceland, the land shells of which
Mörch himself" allows are nearly allied to those of Greenland, and
is not only an acknowledged member of the circumpolar fauna”,
but the most abundant of all slugs in Finmark and Lapland. It is
curious—and not only curious, but in view of the question of the
distribution of Fasciola hepatica also important—to note what
follows. In 1875 Dr. Mörch appears, after thus adding Arion
hortensis to his former list of Greenland mollusca, to have been
content to leave the entry of “Limaa agrestis, L., according to
Wormskiold,” untouched, though in smaller type, feeling probably
that as the entry of the animal was overtly made only on the
authority of Wormskiold, he was in no way pledged either to
holding that it was Limaa, agrestis, and not Limaa tenellus, which
existed in Greenland, or indeed to holding that any Limax what-
ever existed there. What completes my case is the fact that in
1877, when preparing a list of the Greenland mollusca for the
English translation of Dr. Rink’s ‘Grönland, of 1857, Dr. Mörch
omits all mention of Limaa agrestis altogether, and his entry runs
as follows (p. 436):—
* Class i. ANDROGYNA.
Order i. GEOPHILA, Fér.
I. Arion fuscus. Probably introduced.”
If we follow Dr. Mörch, therefore, we shall strike Limaa agrestis
out of the list of Greenland mollusca, and hold that Arion hortensis,
which exceeds it in number in other circumpolar regions, has in
Greenland displaced, or at any rate replaced, it altogether.
If, however, Limaa agrestis, notwithstanding the advantage which
* See Manual, p. 135. -
* Middendorff, indeed, in his ‘Sibirische Reise," ii. 1851, p. 419, omits the name
of this small slug from his list of Circumpolar Freshwater and Land Molluscs, but five
pages farther on, l.c., says in a note, ‘Wielleicht ist Limaa (Arion) sub-fuscus, Drap.
(Drap. “Moll.” p. 125, pl. ix. 8; Limaa fasciatus, Nillsen, “Hist. Moll. Suec.” 1822,
p. 3) eine circumpolare Art dieses Geschlechtes;’ and he proceeds to note its
discovery by himself within the polar circle in Finland, feeding on sphagnum, as also
in Lapland, feeding on fungi, up to 69° N. Lat. Schrenk (“Reise in Amurlande,’
1859–1867, ii. p. 692), whilst identifying the Limaſe sub-fuscus of Draparnaud with
the Arion hortensis of Férussac, and so with the Limaa fuscus of Müller and Linnaeus,
confirms the view as to its circumpolar character, and uses it as an argument for its
being indigenous in America.
574 ON THE GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION
its coloration might be supposed to have been likely to give it, is
beaten in the struggle for existence in circumpolar districts by
Arion hortensis, of about the same size, but of such different colour
in other districts, if not in the North", as not only to have been
called fuscus and sub-fuscus, but even to have been confounded with
the true Arion ater (from which, indeed, it is mainly distinguished
by its more mesially placed respiratory orifice and its small size),
it surpasses Arion hortensis” in more southern latitudes.
Middendorff indeed expressly says, l.c. : ‘In Siberien traf ich
diesen Limaa (Arion hortensis) nicht, sondern nur einen einzigen
kleinen Limaa in Starowof Gebirge, welcher dem Limaa agrestis, L.
recht àhnlich sehe.” But this absence from Siberia, to which F.
Schmidt’s silence as to its presence bears some testimony, may be
paralleled by the similar absence of Paludina vivipara (Middendorff,
l.c., p. 426) and of crayfishes from the Siberian river basins”, and,
as in those two cases, when compared with the facts of a distribution
elsewhere does not disprove a circumpolar character.
Gerstfeldt, “Mém. Sav. Etrang. St. Pétersbourg,’ 1859, 515 (11),
refers to some few, small, ill-preserved specimens, ‘einige wenige
kleine und schlecht erhaltene Exemplare' of slugs from Irkutsk
and Wilni and from the Amur, and speaks of them under the name
Arion ater. Their small size may justify us in supposing them to
have been Arion hortensis ; and the bad state of preservation in
which they were, and which makes Gerstfeldt himself speak doubt-
fully of his identification, p. 535 (31), makes this note of their
presence less authoritative than it otherwise would have been, and
has caused Schrenk to suggest that they were in reality specimens
of Limaa agrestis. gº
An illustration of the paucity and rarity of Limaa agrestis in
circumpolar regions is furnished by the entry made by Friedrich
Schmidt in his list of Animals from the Region of the Lower
* Even in England, where the Arion hortensis is often of a “deep blue-black,' and
is, I suspect, the ‘Black Jack’ of agriculturists, it is not rarely “yellowish, sometimes
“gray or greenish-gray’ (Lovell Reeve's ‘British Land and Freshwater Molluscs, p. 11).
In Amoorland it is ‘graugelblich,’ with three stripes, one dorsal and two lateral
narrower ones; whilst its rival the Limac agrestis is described as “hell-bräunlich-
oder blåulich-grau.’ See Schrenk, l.c.
* See Schrenk, ‘Amurlande, ii. 690-693, 1869; Middendorff, ‘Sibirische Reise,’
ii. p. 424, 1851. -
* See Huxley, “On Crayfishes, p. 305.
OF LIMAX AGRESTIS, ETC. 575
Yenisei, “Mém. Acad. St. Pétersbourg,’ 1872, p. 48, as to this
eminently social mollusc : “In einem faulen Treibholzstamm auf
den grossen Briochow Insel (70° N. Br.) in einem Evemplar gefun-
den.' But, per contra, in Amoorland, Schrenk tells us, l.c., that
Limaa, agrestis outnumbers Arion hortensis, just as Arion hortensis
outnumbers Limaa agrestis in Sweden, Finland, and Lapland, and
that while Limaa agrestis spreads into Spain, Portugal, Italy,
Algeria, and the southern slopes of the Caucasus, Arion hortensis
reaches no farther south than the southern slopes of the Pyrenees
and Alps. .
In a letter published in the ‘Times, April 14, 1880, and repub-
lished with certain omissions in the ‘Zoologische Anzeiger, May 24,
p. 258–26o (Article XXXII), I suggested that Arion ater may be the
* Zwischenwirth,’ or one ‘Zwischenwirth,’ to Fascioſa hepatica. For,
calling the small black slug upon the distribution of which I have,
following Schrenk and Middendorff, just been writing, ‘Arion ater,’
I have the example and authority of Forbes and Hanley, and I
think that of Gerstfeldt. But now, following Schrenk more
closely, I should call it Arion hortensis, and should wish to be
understood to be of opinion that it will—as I hope, by means of
experiments now being carried on in my laboratory by Mr. A. P.
Thomas—be ultimately shown that the smaller of our two British
Arions really is one at least of the hosts infested by the sheep-
fluke, Fasciola hepatica ".
As regards the distribution of the Fasciola hepatica in northern
regions we have the authority of Leuckart, “Die Menschlichen
Parasiten, i. p. 531, 1863, for saying that it is found in Greenland
and North America; and the same excellent authority quotes (l.c.,
ii. p. 870, 1876) Krabbe to the effect that it is not found in Iceland.
The last statement is confirmed by Jonsson in ‘Deutsche Zeitschrift
für Thiermedicin und vergleichende Pathologie,” Bd. v. Heft vi.
1879, p. 413, in the words ‘Leberegeln kommen in Island nicht
vor.’ I wish to add that there is no mention of the disease which
Fasciola hepatica causes in Olafsen's and Povelsen's two volumes of
‘Travels in Iceland,’ though the diseases of sheep are repeatedly
treated of by those authors”. And a similar remark may be made
* [From the editorial note appended to the immediately preceding Article, it will
be seen that Mr. Thomas's experiments resulted in the conclusion that Limnaeus
truncatulus is the intermediate host.—EDITOR.]
* See German translation published in 1794, i. pp. 112–280; ii. pp. 46, I98, Igg.
576 ON THE GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION
as to Siberia; neither Middendorff, nor Radde, nor the great Pallas,
treating as they do so exhaustively of the natural history of that
region, ever within my knowledge make any allusion to the exist-
ence there of Fascioſa hepatica as a cause of sheep disease. As
regards, however, the existence of this animal and of the sheep-rot
in Greenland, as testified by Leuckart, I wish to lay alongside of it
the following statement from the English translation of Rink's
‘ Greenland’ already referred to, and edited by Dr. Robert Brown
in 1877. There, p. 97, it is stated that about the year 1855 there
were in the whole of Greenland only from thirty to forty cows, a
hundred goats, and twenty sheep, and that this handful of cattle
were located at Julianshaab, on the west coast. A statement to
the same effect is given by Dr. Brown himself in the ‘Manual of
Arctic Instruction,’ 1875, p. 27. Surely if the rot still exists in
Greenland, and has not shared the fate of so many other forms of
life which have finally left its inhospitable shores, we have in
Julianshaab a simple case and a circumscribed area wherein to
prosecute research.
If the presence of Fasciola hepatica in an isolated locality—that of
Julianshaab, on the west coast of Greenland—is likely to prove
instructive, its absence from Iceland may also throw some light
upon the subject. Most or all of the mollusca which have been or
can be supposed to act and suffer as Zwischenwörth for the Fasciola
are to be found in Iceland, viz. Arion ater, Arion hortensis, Limnaea
truncatula and Limnaea peregra ', as well as Planorbis rotundatus, if
not Planorbis marginatus. And that abundant opportunities for the
introduction of Fasciola hepatica into Iceland have been given by
the importation of sheep from abroad is learnt from what Olafsen,
l. c., ii. pp. 198–199, tells us as to the ascription of another sort of
sheep disease to such importation.
I incline to ascribe this immunity from rot which the sheep
enjoy in Iceland to the habit which they in common with the
Shetland and Orkney sheep have of feeding between high- and
low-water marks upon the sea-weeds specified by Olafsen in various
passages, q.v., l.c., i. 233, 279, ii. 198, and Low, “Domestic Animals
of Great Britain,’ p. 59. The Fasciola hepatica is a freshwater
animal, and would not of course be picked up in such a locality as
the interval between ‘Ebbe and Fluth,’ to which the sheep resort
* See Mörch, “Faunula Molluscorum Islandiae,’ 1868, pp. I2 and 16.
OF LIMAX AGRESTIS, ETC. 577
even on the dark nights of winter. It is possible to speculate as to
the virtues of salt as an anthelminthic, and to suggest that it may
act either by enabling a better gastric juice to be secreted, and so
giving the sheep a better chance of digesting the larval fasciolae
when swallowed, or by provoking a more copious flow of bile, and
so washing the young fluke out of the gall-ducts. This, perhaps,
is not the place for such enquiries. But it is a pure natural
history fact that localities rich in deposits of salt are favourable to
the growth and health of sheep". Pallas, in the wonderful eleventh
Fasciculus of his ‘Spicilegia Zoologica,’ dwells on this in reference
to the Steatopygous variety of the domestic sheep at pp. 65-67;
and with reference to the Argali, the Ovis fera Siberica, supposed to
be the parent stock of Ovis aries, var. domestica, he writes thus at
p. 12: ‘Omni vero tempore ubi possunt loca salsagine rorida quibus
universa Siberia abundat crebro frequentant, terramgue sale foetam
cavant quod cervino quoque generi solemne est.’
* [The importance of the recommendation of salt as an anthelminthic has now been
practically tested. Mr. A. P. Thomas has proved that common salt in very small
proportions is fatal to the redia and sporo-cyst of Fasciola, as also to Limnaeus trun-
catwiws, which serves as host to the intermediate forms of the liver-fluke. Mr. T. P.
Heath has published an experiment in the ‘Western Morning News,’ Oct. I4, 1882
(cited in Mr. Thomas's paper in ‘Journ. Royal Agric. Soc. of England,’ vol. xix. S.S.
part 1), in which sheep fed on permanent pastures with salt mixed with oats were
quite sound, whilst others to which salt was not administered were affected with liver-
flukes.—EDITOR.]
P p
AIR CHAE OLOGY.
P p 2
XXXIV.
RESEARCHES AND EXCAVATIONS CARRIED ON
IN AN ANCIENT CEMETERY AT FRILFORD.
THE paper which I have the honour of laying before the Society
of Antiquaries was drawn up by me at the suggestion of J. Y.
Akerman, Esq., F.S.A., and in the hope that it might serve as a
continuation of his “Report of Excavations in an ancient Cemetery
at Frilford, near Abingdon, Berks,’ which may be found in the
Society’s Proceedings for May 25, 1865.
During the years 1867 and 1868, I have from time to time, by
the kindness of William Aldworth, Esq., the owner of the soil, been
allowed not only to watch such quarrying operations as have been
carried on upon the site of this cemetery, but also to conduct some
excavations there independently of that work. The results of my
observations I have arranged under two heads. First, I have given
an account of the objects and discoveries of a purely archaeological
character; and, secondly, I have specified the various conclusions
to which my examinations of the very extensive series of human
remains have seemed to me to point more or less doubtfully. Ap-
pended to this paper will be found, first, a detailed catalogue of all
the very numerous objects, both of archaeological and of anatomical
interest, which the liberality of Mr. Aldworth has transferred to
the University Museum ; secondly, a tabular catalogue, giving in
one view the number, the age, the stature, and the nationalities
of the human remains; and thirdly, a catalogue raisonné which
presents a similar coup d'ail of the different objects of cardinal
importance, which have served as fixed points for my various
identifications.
Mr. Akerman’s investigations had, as may be seen by referring
to his paper already cited, led him to the conclusion that Roman or
582 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon interments were both alike to be
found in the Frilford Cemetery, but that the majority of them
belonged to the latter of the two nationalities. I have, however,
by the discovery of Anglo-Saxon cinerary urns placed superficially
to the relicless graves of which Mr. Akerman speaks, been com-
pelled to refer these inhumations to a period anterior to that of
Pagan Saxondom, and to differ herein from the instructor from
whom I have learned and to whom I owe so much. It is upon
this discovery of Anglo-Saxon cremation urns, containing half-
calcined human bones, and holding when discovered, relatively to
relicless or all but relicless skeletons found in the ground below
them, a position from 15 to 18 inches nearer the surface, that I rest
almost the only conclusion to which I have ventured to come in
opposition to Mr. Akerman's views. But it is hoped that a record
of the somewhat extensive series of observations made in this
cemetery during the last two years may serve to cast some light
upon certain moot points upon which Mr. Akerman's investigations
did not give him an opportunity of remarking.
The cemetery is situated in the angle intercepted between the
left bank of the river Ock and the road leading from Frilford to
Wantage. Frilford “Field’ is now brought under cultivation, but
the tradition that this portion of it is haunted still survives in the
recollections of the rustics, one of whom informed me that, though
he had never seen them there himself, ghosts were supposed to be
particularly likely to be seen at a single thorn-bush" which stood,
some time back, close to the site of these graves. Great numbers
of Roman coins have been and still are found by labourers engaged
in ordinary agricultural work all round this spot; and fragments
of very many varieties of Roman pottery are equally accessible,
though, of course, much more abundant, on and in the superficial
* The growth of this thorn-bush may have been accidental here, but we know that
thorns were purposely planted on tumuli. (See Jacob Grimm, “Verbrennen der
Leichen, Berlin Abhandl. 1849, pp. 203, 209, 242, 244; Nillson, cit. in loc.; Max
Müller, ‘Zeitschrift Deutsch. Morgenländ. Gesellsch.’ ix. 11; Theocritus, Idyll xxiv.
87, where Wüstemann remarks in his commentary, “Omnibus spinarum generibus
vim noxarum depellendarum inesse existimabant veteres.’ See also ‘Horae Ferales,”
p. 69.) The neighbouring tumulus known as Barrow Hill is beset with thorn-
bushes at the present day; and the British barrow of Dinnington, in South Yorkshire
(p. 159), on the estate of J. C. Athorpe, Esq., was similarly clothed. The thorn may
have belonged to the “certis lignis’ used, according to Tacitus, ‘Germania,’ xxvii,
in the cremation of chiefs.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 583
layers of the now cultivated fields. There is much more evidence
to show that Roman civilisation had taken firm root in this locality,
and some of this evidence will appear in the course of my account
of the excavations of the cemetery. But two excavations which we
made in two spots, about a couple of hundred yards distant from
the cemetery, gave us a more vivid idea of the wealth and civilisa-
tion of the Roman or Romano-British inhabitants of the place,
which their Saxon conquerors named Frilford, than anything which
we found in the burial ground, which both races successively occu-
pied. Mr. Aldworth had observed the greater greenness and
strength of the crops upon these two patches of ground; and by
his suggestion I dug into them with the result of finding', for a
depth of ten feet or more, an aggregation of fragments of pottery
of the most varied patterns and degrees of fineness mixed up with
similarly fragmentary bones of the ox, sheep, pig, and dog, and
with other articles, such as knives and coins, which, like the bones
and shards specified, would be expected in the rubbish-heap of a
great house. The site of this great house I have not found; but I
strongly suspect that the quarry, whence the stones for its con-
struction were taken, was employed for, and is now represented by,
one or other, or both, of those pits of rubbish. This short history
illustrates the truth of a remark recently made by the Hon. W. O.
Stanley” as to the imperfection of ‘the investigation of sites and of
dwellings in the early times; ” but time and opportunity may
enable me to supply this deficiency. In the meantime, the dis-
covery in the cemetery of four interments in leaden coffins, and
after the Roman fashion, so fully described by the Abbé Cochet *,
furnishes additional evidence as to the character of the civilisation
existing here in the times of the Later Empire, which the excava-
tion of hypocausts and tessellated pavements might confirm, but
cannot be thought necessary to complete.
Four other kinds of interment, one Romano-British and three
Anglo-Saxon, have been observed and described in the following
account of the excavations at Frilford. The Romano-British
interments differ from those just mentioned merely in being of
less expensive character; they constitute the greater part of all
* See Catalogue, infra, Sept. 24, 1868.
* “Ancient Interments and Sepulchral Urns in Anglesea, p. 19.
* “Normandie Souterraine,' pp. 29, 30.
584 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
the interments I have examined at Frilford, and that they are
Romano-British is, to omit for the present other evidence, proved
by the fact that superficially to them in the soil I have found
Anglo-Saxon urns containing burnt human bones, and belonging,
therefore, to the first periods of Anglo-Saxondom in England.
About half of the Anglo-Saxon interments discovered here were
interments in the way of cremation. The other half are cases
of inhumation with the well-known Anglo-Saxon relics, and, in
adopting inhumation, the Anglo-Saxons either dug shallow graves
without regard to the points of the compass, independently of,
though often superficially to, those of their conquered prede-
cessors; or, secondly, they dug deeper graves pointing to or
towards the East, following thus Christian precedent both as to
depth and as to direction, but diverging from the practice of the
Romano-Britons in setting stones round the graves instead of pro-
tecting the body in a wooden or other coffin; and whilst doing
this, they sometimes—all supposed scruples as to secondary inter-
ments' notwithstanding—displaced one body, probably that of one
of their predecessors, to make room for the corpse they were in-
terring with the same orientation. I say it is probable that where
an Anglo-Saxon skeleton is found to have displaced another set of
remains, the primary interment was a Romano-British one, because
I think it improbable that the half-heathen custom of interring
with insignia should have been combined for a sufficiently long
time with the Christian method of deep and oriented interment to
allow of one body thus interred being sufficiently forgotten to be
safely displaced. Burial with insignia was early discontinued by
Christianised populations, except in the cases of distinguished per-
sonages ecclesiastical and temporal”, and the Anglo-Saxons I have
exhumed do not appear by their insignia to have belonged to either
of these classes.
* The Abbé Cochet, in the first edition of his ‘Normandie Souterraine, p. 185, had
stated that ‘l'usage d’enterrer plusieurs fois au mème endroit est éminemment mo-
derne ;' but in the second edition of that work, pp. 209, 432, 436, and also in the
“Tombeau de Childeric,” p. 55, he has receded from this untenable position. Grimm,
towards the conclusion of his paper, “Ueber das Verbrennen der Leichen, ubi supra,
p. 269, quotes the words of Sidonius Apollinaris, ‘Jam niger caespes ex viridi, jam
supra antiquum sepulchrum glebae recentes,’ to show’that the practice was only too well
known to the Christians of the later Roman Empire. See also Friedr. Simony, ‘Die
Alterthümer Halstatter Salzberg, Wien, 1851.
* See “Capitularia Regum Francorum," ii. 852,
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 585
In all the inhumations which I have examined at Frilford, the
bodies had been extended at full length, and in the cases of
Romano-British burials more or less oriented. The fact that the
deviation from orientation is usually towards the south may seem
to indicate that the majority of deaths took place then, as now, in
the winter-quarters of the year, when the point in the horizon at
which the sun would rise would be south of east ".
I. Qf the Roman Interments in Leaden Coffins discovered
at Frifford.
By a reference to Mr. Akerman’s paper already quoted, it may
be seen that two leaden coffins, each of which contained a skeleton,
and one of which contained a coin of Constantine the Great also,
were found in the Frilford cemetery in the autumn of 1864. The
commencement of my researches in this cemetery dates from the
discovery in it of a third and fourth coffin of similar character and
contents to these, in the month of January, 1867. These inter-
ments were near to each other, ten feet only intervening between
the foot of the one and the head of the other grave. The direction
of the graves was 45° south of east, which, when corrected for the
magnetic variation, would give E.S.E. as the true bearing. The
coffins were at a depth of about five feet below the present surface
of the soil, and this greater depth, as well as their greater intrinsic
costliness, would seem to show that their tenants had been persons
of greater wealth and consideration than the occupants of the
similarly oriented graves of which we shall have to speak next.
The length of the coffins is 6 feet 4 inches, and their breadth I foot
6 inches. Both of the coffins have undergone much mechanical
change in the way of contortion and crushing, and they contrast
herein to disadvantage with certain coffins of the same period in
the British Museum, and in the Museum of Antiquities at York,
which still retain the form which was conferred upon them at their
manufacture”. The Frilford coffins have also undergone much
* Cf. Abbé Cochet, ‘Normandie Souterraine, ed. i. pp. 192, 193, 255, 265.
* The leaden coffins to be seen in the British Museum were dug up in Camden
Gardens, Bethnal Green, in the excavations for the New Docks at Shadwell, and in
Whitechapel. For the coffins in the York Museum, see Professor Phillips's ‘York-
shire,’ p. 247, and ‘Descriptive Catalogue of Antiquities in York Museum,' by the
* Rev. C. Wellbeloved, p. 77, and his ‘Eburacum,’ p. 112.
586 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
chemical change, the metallic lead having been changed both on
their exterior and throughout their substance into the red oxide
and carbonate, whereby they have suffered great loss of plasticity
and flexibility. Each of them possessed a lid, which appears to
have been simply laid upon the top of the rectangular coffin proper
without any soldering. Large nails with square heads were found
in relation with the coffin, and as woody fibre, shown by micro-
scopic examination to be probably oaken, is still plainly enough to
be detected upon the urn, even with the naked eye, it would seem
that the leaden coffin had been surrounded by a wooden one'. An
analysis of the substance of these coffins, which I owe to the kind-
ness of Heathcote Wyndham, Esq., M.A., Fellow of Merton Col-
lege, shows that it contains 3.28 per cent. of tin, and that the
coffins resemble in this, as in other particulars, those described by
the Abbé Cochet in his ‘Normandie Souterraine, pp. 28–31, as
characteristic of the Gallo-Roman period in France. In each of
these coffins was found the skeleton of a strong man, who was at
the time of his death considerably past the middle period of life.
Of the anatomical characters of these skeletons I shall have to
speak in detail later; it is sufficient to say here that they show
that the individuals to whom these bones belonged were strong men,
in the possession of the means for culture and comfort which those
days could afford, but who had also suffered much from the physical
and other inclemencies which we know to be the natural incidents
of the life of the soldier. In one of these coffins five coins were
found, of which one was a coin of Constantine the Younger,
another of Valens, and a third, which, like the first, was a third-
brass specimen, was a coin of Gratian. By means of this last coin
we are enabled to say that this interment took place, in all proba-
bility, within the short but eventful period which elapsed between
the accession of Gratian and the evacuation of Britain by the
* This conclusion almost rises to certainty when we read the account given by Ralph
Thoresby, “Phil. Trans.’ 1705, No. 296, p. 1864, of the excavation of a coffin, “pro-
bably interred 1500 years ago,” which was seven feet long, and was “inclosed in a
prodigious strong one made of oak planks, about two inches and a half thick, which,
beside the riveting, were tacked together with brags and great iron nails . . . they are
four inches long, the head not diewise, as the large nails now are, but perfectly flat
and an inch broad.” The length of the Frilford nails is four and a half inches, and
the breadth of their heads one inch and a quarter. See also L’Abbé Cochet, ‘Nor-
mandie Souterraine, ed. i. p. 33; ‘Archaeologia, vii. 376, 381 ; Bloxham’s ‘Frag-
menta Sepulchralia," p. 39.
CEMETERY AT FRIDFORD. 587
Legions, inasmuch as the departure of the Romans may be reason-
ably supposed to have entailed the collapse of the civilisation and
customs which they had introduced and supported".
II. Of the Roman or Romano-British Inferments without leaden, but
£n most cases, probably, with wooden coffins, and in semi-oriented
graves.
The second and most numerous class of interments that we meet
with in this cemetery are found occupying parallel, or nearly
parallel, rows of trenches, running, to speak generally, from a point
more or less north of west to one more or less south of east, and
containing, very commonly, besides the skeletons, bones and teeth
of domestic animals (though not in the great abundance noted in
other Romano-British cemeteries), fragments of charcoal, oyster-
shells, shards, flints, and nails, with woody fibre adhering to them. In
some of these graves coins were discovered, in addition to the other
objects just specified. Now, we are not justified by the presence of
any, nor, indeed, by the presence of all, of these peculiarities, in
concluding that any interment is Roman or Romano-British, the
imitative tendencies” of the Teutonic races having led them some-
what slavishly into copying the customs of the world they sub-
dued, even in points relating to such matters as the burial of the
dead. Each and all of the objects have been found all but in-
* For a note of a discovery of leaden coffins in the neighbourhood of other
Roman remains, see Schaaffhausen, “Die Germanische Grabstätten am Rhein,’ 1868,
p. I 3I.
* For the imitative tendencies of the Teutonic races generally, see Coote's “Neglected
Fact in English History, p. 44; Worsaae's “Primeval Antiquities of Denmark,’
Eng. Trans. 1849, p. 14o ; Engelhardt, “Denmark in the Iron Age, Preface, p. viii;
Von Sacken, ‘Leitfaden zur Kunde des Heidnischen Alterthums, p. 158; Wylie's
‘Fairford Graves, p. 30 ; Merivale’s ‘Conversion of the Northern Nations,’ p. 92;
Roach Smith, ‘British Assoc. Report for 1855, p. 145. For the presence of bones of
animals and their teeth in Anglo-Saxon graves, see Wylie, l.c., p. 24; Akerman,
“Pagan Saxondom,” Introd. p. xvii. For that of charcoal, Wylie, l.c., 29; Akerman,
“Further Researches at Long Wittenham, Archaeologia, vol. xxxix. For that of shards
and flints, Douglas’ ‘Nenia Britannica,’ pp. Io and 34; Wylie and Akermann, ll. cc.
For that of the Portorium, Lindenschmit, “Archiv für Anthrop. ii. 3, 1868, in review
of Wanner's work, and in his own work, “Die Germanische Todtenlager bein Selzen,”
p. 51 ; Von Sacken, l.c., p. 154; Akerman, ‘ Proc. Soc. Antiq.’ 2 S. iii. 165. See
also Abbé Cochet, ‘Tombeau de Childeric, passim, and ‘Normandie Souterraine,’
p. 31.
588 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
differently in both Anglo-Saxon and Romano-British, in Frankish,
and in Gallo-Roman graves. I was first convinced that these
interments, more than fifty of which have been under examination
at Frilford since I first became acquainted with the cemetery, con-
tained the remains of Romano-Britons, and not of Anglo-Saxons,
by the discovery of an unmistakeable Anglo-Saxon urn, about
fifteen inches above a skeleton occupying one of these graves
(No. vi. Sept. 1867). Two other skeletons, one of an old woman
interred with three coins (No. iv. Jan. 9, 1868), and one of an old
man (No. iii. April 1, 1868), were found subsequently occupying
the same position relatively to similar Anglo-Saxon urns containing
similarly burnt human bones. It is possible, however, to object to
this apparently satisfactory argument; first, that the deeper-lying
body may have belonged to a Christianised, and the cremation urn
to an apostate, Anglo-Saxon’s burial ; or, secondly, that the crema-
tion urn belonged to an Anglo-Saxon funeral which took place in
the heathen pre-Augustinian period, but that it was carefully
replaced, after having been disturbed, to make room for one of the
same race who had died after the evangelization of Berkshire by
Birinus. Both these objections—the former suggested to me by
Mr. Akerman, and the latter by the reading of Mr. Roach Smith's
letter in the ‘British Association's Report for 1855, p. 1451—are,
however, fully met by the discovery, on four different occasions, of
Anglo-Saxon skeletons, verifiable as such by their insignia, and
with no constant relation to the points of the compass, in the same
relative position to these interments as that already described as
being held by the cremation urns. (See infra, Catalogue, No. xviii.
Feb. 8, 1868; No ix. Sept. 25, 1868, infra.) It is possible,
though not probable, that an urn, even of much fragility and
elegance, may have been replaced in its entirety, heavily laden
though it was with its contents ; but it is impossible to conceive
that a similar pious painstaking can have laid out a disturbed
skeleton a second time in the full and due proportions of the un-
articulated bones possessed by the skeletons found lying super-
ficially to the ‘grave-row’ interments of which I am speaking as
Roman or Romano-British. The variation in the direction of the
two bodies lying one above the other, the deeper being always the
oriented one, excludes, of course, the possibility of their having
* See also ‘Inventorium Sepulchrale,’ Introd. p. xvi. and p. 8.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 589
been interred at the same time, as after a battle bodies are buried
one above another in trenches. The funeral feast, and the visit to
the burial-place of a beloved relative, will account sufficiently for
the presence of the teeth and bones of the domestic ruminants, and
the pig, in these graves. In the Romano-British cemetery at
Helmingham in Suffolk, which I had an opportunity of examining
through the kindness of the Rev. George Cardew, relics of this
kind were more abundant than I have found them to be in the
Frilford cemetery. Oyster-shells were found in considerable abund-
ance in both these cemeteries, as the other indications of Roman
occupation would have led us, a priori, to expect. I may perhaps
here say, that it does not seem clear to me that any great proba-
bility attaches to an argument for the heathen character of an
interment from the discovery there of such evidences of a funeral
feast as the bones of domestic animals. The instinct so beautifully
alluded to by Wordsworth, in his well-known poem “We are Seven,”
has in itself nothing repugnant to the spirit of Christianity, though
the actual practice at the grave-side may and often did degenerate
from that of the ‘little Cottage Girl'
‘Who took her little porringer
And ate her supper there.”
Scandal arose out of the abuse of the funeral feast; but, inas-
much as the Church in all ages has acquiesced in the retention by
newly-made converts of customs which, though heathen in origin,
may not have been intrinsically immoral, it is easy to understand
how a custom intrinsically laudable may have been tolerated when
kept within due limits. As to the actual practice being rife
amongst Christians” the numerous denunciations and inhibitions
issued relating to it afford very abundant evidence.
* The following passages may be cited in addition to those so often referred to from
the “Capitularies’ of Charlemagne. In the collection of the Canons of the Greek
Synods, by Martin, Bishop of Braga in Portugal, who died in 586, we find the follow-
ing words, “Non oportet, non liceat Christianis prandia ad defunctorum sepulchra
deferre et sacrificari mortuis.’ See the ‘Corpus Juris Canonici,” where the passage is
adopted as the text of Decretum Gratiani, De Consecr. dist. i. cap. 29, § 2, under the
title ‘Ex Concilio Martini Papae.’ Hardouin, ‘Acta Conciliorum,’ &c. 1611, iii. 390,
has printed Martin of Braga's Collection, and, according to the margin of his edition,
this particular canon comes from the third Council of Arles, and not from a Greek
source. See also Gretzer, ‘De Funere Christiano,” to which work I owe the foregoing
quotation, lib. iii. pp. 159, 164, 166, ed. 1611, where Ambrose, Augustine, Cyprian,
Gaudentius, and Faustus the Manichee, may all be found deposing to the fact of the
590 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
A few bones of the dog and some teeth of the horse were found
in some of the interments, but not in such numbers or positions as
to make it at all probable that the former were the relics of a
favourite animal interred with its master, or that the latter were
remains which, in like manner, had been buried from similar, or
from superstitious notions, or which had been the leavings of the
practice of eating horseflesh which we know existed in those days
in spite of the efforts of the Christian priests".
Fragments of carbonaceous matter are to be found in Romano-
British as also in Anglo-Saxon and undoubtedly Pagan interments.
It is a little hazardous to pronounce quite positively as to a piece of
black woody tissue that it was put into the grave as charcoal; and
that its blackness is not due to the ‘eremacausis,' which it has
been exposed to for so many hundreds of years. If, however, such
matter be in masses of considerable size, which possess on fracture
the peculiar lustre of charcoal, and if it have not been impregnated
funeral feast being abused by the Christians into an occasion of great licence. I do
not happen to have met with any evidence to show that food or drink was put into
the graves of the early Christians from any influence which any pre-Christian belief
may have had upon them as to its possibly being of some use to the departed in the
new world. This superstition was of course operative in the case of heathens, and
amongst certain of the Scandinavian races (see Lubbock's “Prehistoric Times,’ p. 89)
it has lasted even down to our own times. Weinhold tells us (“Altnordisches Leben,”
p. 493) that the tobacco-pipe, pocket-knife, and filled brandy flask were placed
in Swedish graves (it is to be supposed only in remote districts), if not up to the
present time, at all events up to the beginning of the present generation. Heathen
customs, however, and customs as markedly heathen as cremation, retained their
vitality to a very late period in the Baltic regions. (See for this Grimm, loc. cit.;
Wylie, ‘Archaeologia,” xxxvii. 467; and Lindenschmit, “Alterth. heidnisch. Vorzeit,”
Heft ii. Bd. ii. ad Taf. vi., for long persistence of heathen customs amongst the Ale-
manni. See also Wylie, ‘Graves of Alemanni.')
* For the interment of favourite animals with their masters, see Von Sacken,
“Heidnisches Alterthum,’ 1865, p. 155; Weinhold, “Sitzungsberichte Phil. Hist.
Flass. Akad. Wien, Bd. 29, p. 203, 1859. The bones of a large dog were found at
Long Wittenham in a Romano-British interment so near to certain human remains
as to make it seem possible that the animal had been purposely so placed. For the
burial of the horse (Das Trauer-Pferd) in Teutonic graves, and those of other races,
see Keysler, ‘Antiq. Select.’ I?20, p. 168; Wylie, ‘Graves of the Alemanni, Archaeo-
logia, vol. xxxvi, ibique citata; Cochet, ‘Normandie Souterraine,’ p. 298. For the
suspension of the skull of the horse over graves, see “Pagan Saxondom,’ p. 23. For
the practice of eating horse-flesh, see ‘Confessional of Archbishop Ecgbert,’ c. 38;
the Decrees of Council held A.D. 785, under the presidency of Gregory, Bishop of
Ostia; and ‘Penitential of Theodore, c. xxx. s. 17. See also Lubbock, “Prehistoric
Times,’ p. 115; Keysler, l, c., pp. 322, 340; and Pearson, ‘History of England,”
i. IB8.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 591
with any salt of iron or other mineral so as to have been preserved
by such impregnation from the decay which would otherwise have
befallen it, we are justified in considering it exceedingly prob-
able that it was put into the grave in the condition either of yet
burning embers, or of charcoal. The test mentioned by the Abbé
Cochet, ‘Normandie Souterraine, p. 198 ed. i. (p. 229 ed. ii.), for
differentiating charcoal from decayed wood, viz. that the latter
gives a sherry colour on boiling with potash, is a little unsatis-
factory, inasmuch as the purest charcoal would give a similar
reaction after being surcharged and sopped through and through
for ages with water, more or less laden, ea hypothesi, with im-
purities. Without losing sight of the possibility that blackened
woody matter may be the remnants of a coffin, it is well to con-
sider the different explanations which may be given of the presence
of true charcoal in an interment. Four such have been given, two
of which refer the practice to the operation of Christian beliefs;
the third refers it to the working of feelings which are neither
distinctly Christian nor yet distinctly heathen ; whilst the fourth
explanation is applicable to heathen interments only. The two first
explanations may be expressed in two separate utterances of Du-
randus, the first being the often quoted one, vii. c. 35, as to the
placing of embers and incense, prunae cum thure, in the grave; and
the second, a few lines further on, speaking of a Christian practice
of placing charcoal in the grave to serve there as an imperishable
protest against using the soil of the grave thereafter for secular
purposes, ‘in testimonium quod terra illa in communes usus amplius
redigi non potest; plus enim durat carbo sub terra quam aliud.’
The third of the four explanations refers the presence of charcoal in
the graves to the holding of feasts by their side in replacement of
the pagan sacrifices of former times. The fourth explanation refers
us to the overt and recognised performance, or to the stealthy con-
tinuance of the eminently heathen practice of burning the body or
of lighting a fire in the grave to prepare it for the reception of the
corpse. Any one or all of the three first explanations are admissible
in the case of the Romano-Britons; the fourth may very probably
apply to the interments of the half-converted or apostatising Anglo-
Saxons, to whose history we shall return".
* For the discovery of carbonaceous matter in graves, see Cochet, ‘Normandie
Souterraine,' ed. i. pp. 198, 255, 256, 3o4; Kemble, “Horae Ferales, pp. 98, Io4;
592 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
We are, from our recollections of the classical allusions to the
naulus or portorium, strongly tempted to think that the placing of
coins upon the corpse must have been a distinctively heathen prac-
tice. A curious passage which I came upon in Martene's great work
(‘De Antiquis Ecclesiae Ritibus, ii. 374) has caused me to attach
importance to the fact that, in two of the interments I have ex-
amined here, the number of the coins interred was five. One of
these interments was the first of the two in leaden coffins described
already, and the other was an interment of the class of which I am
now writing, and will be found in the appended catalogue under
the number xxiv. of Feb. 21, 1868. Martene’s words are, ‘Addit
anonymus Turonensis: — Quidam sortilegi contra fidem agentes
ponunt quinque solidos super pectus mortui, et in hoc imitantur
morem gentilium qui in ore mortui ponebant denarium “ut habeat
quem porrigat ore trientem.” I am not aware of any explanation
having been offered for the selection of five as the number of the
coins which the gentiles, or those who imitated them, placed in the
grave. But such a passage as the one just quoted does not, even
when taken by itself, justify us in considering an interment with
coins to have been always an interment without the rites of the
Christian Church. Many persons act contra fidem and imitanțur
norem gentilium, whom, for historical purposes at least, we must
consider to be Christians. As probably in the case of placing of
charcoal in the grave, so, certainly, in that of the placing of coins
there, the Church exercised a wise toleration, protesting, it may be,
more or less directly, by the introduction of such sentences as those
which our Burial Service contains, against the thought that we can
take anything with us out of the world, but acquiescing in the
actual repetition and continuance of the custom. Just as the
custom of placing earthen vessels in tombs has survived down
almost to our own time in remote districts such as La Bresse and
Morvan in France (see Cochet, ‘Archéologie Céramique, p. 1, 1860),
so that of placing coins on the mouth and chest of the corpse is
persisted in even to the present day in parts of the country similarly
Wylie, ‘Fairford Graves, p. 29; ‘Graves of Alemanni, p. 13; Schaaffhausen, “Ger-
manische Grabstätten am Rhein,’ 1868, p. 104; Walder, “Anzeiger für Schweiz.
Alterthum,’ March 1869, p. 32. For the discovery of fragments of charcoal scattered
throughout the entire mass of heathen tumuli, see Keller, “Mittheilungen der Anti-
quarischen Gesellschaft in Zürich,” Bd. iii. p. 66. For the use of charcoal as being
imperishable, see Augustine, ‘De Civ. Dei,' xxi. 4.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 593
remote from the great centres of life. The fact, however, that
money to the amount of no less than three hundred pieces of Roman
coinage was placed in the tomb of Childeric is more conclusive
than any mere speculation from the analogies furnished by ancient
or modern times. A kindly instinct induced persons, who probably
enough had never heard of Charon, to bury with their deceased
friend or relative that which they knew him or her to have valued
most, and the presence of coin in a grave may convey thus to us a
satire upon the departed, which it was never intended to hint at.
The Abbé Cochet seems to me' to lay too much stress upon ‘la
coſtume Chrétienne de rendre à la terre les hommes nus comme ils
y sont entrés.” For this principle would have prevented the burial
with ornaments”, of which, however, we are told in the “Capi-
tularia Regum Francorum, ii. 852 (cf. also p. 701), ‘Mos ille in
vulgo obsoletus in funeribus episcoporum et presbyterorum re-
tinetur.’ s
In many of these semi-oriented graves nails with woody fibre
still adhering to them were found, and from their presence, as also
from that of a piece of coffin-hooping (see also Dr. Thurnam,
‘Catalogue, Osteological Series, Royal College of Surgeons,’ ii. 881,
5712) in one of these graves, we may argue with considerable prob-
ability for the employment of coffins in some, at least, of these
interments. The custom of throwing shards, and flints, and pebbles
into the grave is common both to Romano-British and to Anglo-
Saxon interments in England. That it was pagan and even of
very early origin seems probable, and that it persisted into Christian
periods is pretty certain. Shakespeare's well-known lines” (Hamlet,
v. 1) show, however, that its pagan origin had somehow or other
so strongly impressed itself upon the public mind that it was no
* ‘Normandie Souterraine,” p. 194. See also Keysler, ‘Antiq. Select.’ p. I74.
* See also the account of the plundering of the gorgeously-arrayed corpse of Pope
Adrian I. in Mabillon, “ Museum Italicum,’ i. 41 ; Gretzet, ‘De Funere Christiano,’
i. 28; Chrysostom, Hom. 84; Guichard, ‘Funérailles,’ 1581, p. 581, where the Council
of Auxerre is said to have condemned ‘toutes ces bobances.’
* Douglas, in his ‘Nenia,' appears to be the first person who drew attention to the
lines of Shakespeare, referred to, see p. Io, and also p. 34. For other references to
the custom, see Keller, l.c. p. 65; Wylie, ‘Fairford Graves,’ p. 25 ; Akerman, “Pagan
Saxondom,’ Introd. p. xvii.; Weinhold, “Sitzungsberichte Kais. Akad. Wiss. Wien.
Hist. Phil. Klasse,’ 1858, bd. 29, hft. i. p. 166; Fried. Simony, ‘Die Alterthümer vom
Halstatter Salzberg, Sitzungsberichte Kais. Akad. Wiss. Wien. Phil. Hist. Klasse,'
1851, p. 7; Keysler, l.c. p. 106; Rev. G. R. Hall, ‘Nat. Hist. Trans. Northumber-
land and Durham,’ i. 2, 1866, p. 167.
Q Q1
594 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
longer practised in Christian burials. They show also that the pre-
sence of these shards cannot be explained as being due to accident.
Indeed, upon several occasions, I have found fragments of pottery
in such relations to the bones of skeletons, in company with which
nails were found, as to make it seem highly probable that the shard,
when thrown in, must have clanked upon the boards of the coffin,
which the nails show us was present there. The thought that our
own custom of throwing earth into the grave during the burial
service may be connected with this custom, and again, that both
may be connected with the classical custom referred to in Horace's
line, ‘Injecto ter pulvere curras, and also Virgil, ‘AEneid," vi. 365,
and in Sophocles, ‘Antigone, 256, Aetiti) ā’āyos petſyovros Ós étriv
kóvus, will at once suggest itself; but only to be dismissed on
mature consideration; for to the modern antiquary it is no paradox
to say that the custom of throwing in shards was probably much
older than that of scattering earth over the corpse; and I would
suggest, as it is very likely others may have done before me, that
the throwing in of the broken pottery may be the perfunctory re-
presentation of the deposition in the grave of the entire vase, and
that the throwing of earth, for which Archytas and Palinurus
begged, may in like manner represent the toilsome but unattempted
process of inhumation '. Massillon, long before prehistoric archae-
ology had been thought of, argued for the conclusion that a belief
in a future state is a naturally implanted conviction from the fact
that “nulle part vous n'en rencontrez des peuples sans sépultures
et sans vases, and the Abbé Cochet, in his ‘Archéologie Céramique,’
p. 1, says that the custom of placing earthen vessels in tombs is
one of the most ancient of all customs, and, as just noticed, that it
still exists in secluded and remote parts of France, as in Morvan
and La Bresse. This coexistence with the custom of our modern
burials seems to disprove any interdependence of the two practices.
Again, the fact that fragments of pottery were used in interments
by cremation, as well as in interments by inhumation, seems to
show that the shard and the handful of earth were not set in
motion by the same impulses. In very early times earthen vessels
were of great value, and it was in those days a proof of at least
* For the tendency of customs involving expense to assume cheaper forms, see Sir
John Lubbock, ‘Nat. Hist. Rev.’ Oct. 1861, p. 801; “Prehistoric Times, p. 98 ed. i,
p. I42 ed. ii.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 595
as great affection to bury or throw on to the funeral pile an earthen
vessel as it was in after ages to burn his gorgeous insignia with
Pompey'. I take this opportunity of quoting a passage from a
curious work, the only one” of very many old books which I have
looked through in the Bodleian and elsewhere for some passage
parallel to the one quoted so often from ‘Hamlet' in which I have
found one. This book is entitled ‘Funus Parasiticum, sive L.
Biberii Curculionis Parasiti Mortualium, Ad ritum prisei Funeris,
Auctore Nicolao Regultio, Lubeccae, MDCXXXVII. In describing the
imaginary funeral of the parasite whom he is satirising, the author
uses the following words: “Cum quisque certatim in rogum dona
cumulat, et partim trullas, cantharos, lances, alii struices patinarias,
cyathos, ciboria coquinaria, omnia flammae committunt.’ It is
obvious, of course, that the author may be representing the throw-
ing in of these articles as being the most natural thing to do at
the funeral of a glutton, as they had been his instrumenta artis ; and
Peniculus, it may be recollected, in the ‘Menaechmi’ of Plautus,
i. l. 25, speaks in terms of unctuous affection of his hosts’ struices
patinarias—the very words employed by Regultius. Still, I am
inclined to think that Regultius may have had some recollection,
or at least some tradition, of the custom considered as so dis-
tinctively heathen by the priest in ‘Hamlet” when he introduced
this particular feature with so much iteration into his burlesque
ad ritum prisei funeris. Writing at Lübeck, he may well have been
familiar with the Baltic provinces further eastward, which the
Teutonic knights had so much difficulty in civilising and Chris-
tianising.
Roots of plants had twined themselves about and around the
bones contained in these graves, and the minute mollusc * Achatina
acicula was found inside the skulls in such abundance as to make it
* See Lucan, ix. 175. -
* Since writing as above I have met with the following passage in Keysler's ‘Anti-
quitates Selectae,’ p. 173: ‘Inde Nimischae, in pago uno miliari a Gubena distante
universus adparatus culinarius erutus, cacabi, ollae, catini, phialae, patinae, urceoli,
lagenulae, testante D. Christiani Stieffii Epistola.’ This Epistola was published
in 4to, in 1704, and treats of “Lignicenses atque Pilgramsdorficenses urnas.’ See
Keysler, loc. cit. p. 113. - -
* See Wylie, ‘Archaeologia,” xxxvii. 467.
* See Schaaffhausen, “Die Germanische Grabstätten am Rhein,’ p. 125; and “Col-
lectanea Antiqua (vi. 201), a work with which I was not acquainted when I wrote, as
above, for an account of a cemetery at Kempston.
Q q 2
596 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
very evident that air and moisture had very free access even to the
bottom of these graves, and consequently we should not be justified
in arguing from the want now in many of these graves of any traces
of such perishable materials as the wood and metal-work of a coffin,
to the conclusion that no coffin had been put into them 1400 years
ago. The wonder, indeed, is not so much that such substances
should in some instances and in such circumstances have vanished,
as that they should in any have persisted to the present day. Still
I am inclined to think that evidence is not wanting to show that
in some cases the Romano-Britons, like other races in ancient,
mediaeval, and modern times, interred their dead sometimes with,
sometimes without, coffins. This evidence lies mainly in the fact
that in some cases a large stone has been found so near the head as
to render it difficult to think any coffin, however thin its walls, can
have been interposed between the stone and the body. (See Cata-
logue, xv *, Sept. 26, 1868; xvii", Sept. 26, 1868.) But even in
these interments, where coffins may not have been employed, and
which consequently so far resemble the Anglo-Saxon burials by
inhumation shortly to be described, three important and easily
recognisable differentiating peculiarities are present. First, stones
do not appear to have been placed by the Romano-Britons under
the head of the corpse, as they were placed in Anglo-Saxon inter-
ments, and consequently we do not find in the former, as we do in
the latter so very commonly, the cervical vertebrae impacted along
the base of the skull from the occipital foramen up to the symphysis
of the jaw. Neither do the Romano-Britons, at least at Frilford,
appear to have set stones along the sides of their graves, as the
Anglo-Saxons did. Thirdly, the Romano-British graves, when
recognised as such, in contradistinction to the Anglo-Saxon inter-
ments, by the help of these external peculiarities, are found to con-
trast with them in a point of even greater, as it is of more intrinsic,
interest, viz., in the very large proportion of aged skeletons which
they contain. The male Anglo-Saxon skeletons are invariably, or
all but invariably, the skeletons of young men: quite the reverse
is the case with the Romano-British. To this point, as resting
upon anatomical evidence, I shall have to revert in the second part
of my paper; it is sufficient here to say that the difference is just
what would be observed now between the cemetery of a settled
civilized Christian village and that of an outlying station on the
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 597
border-land between some gradually advancing empire, and the
territories of some gradually receding but intermittently aggressive
aborigines.
III. Of the Anglo-Saa.on Interments in the way of Cremation.
Ten urns containing burnt bones have come into my hands
during the excavations carried on at Frilford. Of these two were
patterned urns, and the rest plain. A fairly perfect patterned
vessel from this cemetery is to be seen in the British Museum, and
two patterned fragments have been recovered by me. These three
latter vessels, I incline to think, on account of their size, may have
been holy-water vessels rather than cremation urns. The pattern
upon them, as well as that upon the patterned urns which were
found with burnt bones inside them, is the pattern now so familiar
to us as the Anglo-Saxon pattern, from the memoirs of Kemble,
Akerman, the Honourable R. C. Neville, and others; and the general
style and conformation of all the urns, patterned and plain alike, is
not much less plainly referable to the same type. Neither class of
urns has been lathe-turned; in none of them is the bottom per-
fectly flat; they are all of a darkish colour, and, though this colour
may occasionally have a tawny streaking intermingled with it, it
has usually been protected from reddening by the intermixture of
vegetable matter with the paste. The figured urns possess the
vandykes, the punched stellate or multiradiate stamps, the circular
thumb-made depressions, the encircling zones scored with a pointed
stick, and the ‘characteristic bumps, so fully and accurately
described by Mr. Kemble in the ‘Horae Ferales, pp. 87 and 222,
as distinguishing Anglo-Saxon urns found in England as well as
urns found in the North-German fatherland".
The Frilford urns are, with the exception of those found at Long
Wittenham, the first urns of Anglo-Saxon manufacture which I
have seen recorded as found in Berkshire. Mr. Wylie” has put on
* See also for figures of urns resembling those found at Frilford; Engelhardt,
‘Denmark in the Iron Age,’ English translation, 1866, p. 9; urn from Smedeby,
Slesvig ; Akerman, “Pagan Saxondom,’ Introd. p. xxviii, and pl. iv.; “Archaeologia,”
vol.xxxviii. pl. 20, fig. I ; Hon. R. C. Neville, ‘Saxon Obsequies,” pls. 24–33; Bloxam's
“Fragmenta Sepulchralia, p. 59; Roach Smith, ‘Inventorium Sepulchrale,' Introd.
p. xv. For the discovery of a bone-punch for stamping ornaments, see Schaaffhausen,
‘Die Germanische Grabstätten am Rhein,’ p. 139, 1868.
* ‘Archaeologia, xxxvii. 473.
598 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
record similar ‘finds’ from some thirteen English counties, to wit,
Warwickshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Northamptonshire,
Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Norfolk, Suf-
folk, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and the Isle of Wight. The
* Horae Ferales, p. 229, enable us to add a fourteenth county,
Sussex, to this list. An urn in the possession of the authorities
of Queen's College, Oxford, and which a short note in the
catalogue existing in their magnificent library may be taken
as localising with some probability to Faversham, in Kent,
gives us this county —in which cremation, like the paganism
with which it was correlated, was earlier superseded than else-
where by Christianity—as a fifteenth in which Anglo-Saxons
established themselves whilst still heathens. Berkshire makes the
tale up to sixteen. When we consider how distinctively Christi-
anity opposed” itself to the practice of cremation, every fresh dis-
covery of these distinctively Anglo-Saxon urns shows us how
thoroughly overrun our England was by the ‘heathen of the
Northern sea” in the period which elapsed between the landings
* For the rarity of the discovery of cremation urns, at least in an unbroken, un-
disturbed condition, in Kent, see ‘Inventorium Sepulchrale,” xv, xlvi. 184, 186; “British
Assoc. Report,’ 1855, p. 146; and Mr. Wylie, loc. cit. The Queen's College urn is
indubitably of Anglo-Saxon origin. The evidence for its coming from Kent amounts
only to probability, and stands thus: in Queen's College Library there is a ‘List of
the Collection of Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, British, and other antiquities,
formed by the late Rev. Robert Mason, D.D., from the collections of Messrs. Belzoni
Salt, Burton, Millingen, and others, 1822 to 1839. In this Catalogue there is the
following entry: ‘Sepulchral urns, a large and small, 2.” On the smaller of these
two urns, which, however, is of Roman manufacture, there is a ticket, ‘Found at
Faversham, Kent.’ The exteriors of the two urns have much the same colouration or
discolouration, which makes it seem likely that they came from the same excavation,
and they were, consequently, as we now find them, catalogued and placed together.
* For the opposition of the Christians to the practice of cremation, see Neander's
‘Life of Julian, English translation, p. Io9 ; Ibid. “Minucius Felix,” cit. p. 45; ‘Acta
Martyrum,” Baron, ii. p. 290 ; Martyrdom of S. Tharacus; Tertullian, cit. Grimm,
Berlin Abhand. 1849, p. 207; ‘Ep. Ecc. Vienn. et Lugundi, fin. Euseb. H. E. v. 1,
cit. Pusey, “Minor Prophets,' Amos vi. Io; Charlemagne, “Capit, ad. Saxon.” 789 A.D.,
cit. Fleury, ‘Ecc. Hist.’ i. 44, 45; Gruber, “Origines Livoniae, cit. Wylie, ‘Archaeo-
logia,” xxxvii. 467; Kemble, ‘Horae Ferales, p. 95; Schaaffhausen, “Germanische
Grabstätten am Rheine,’ p. 9o; ‘Jahrbuch des Vereines von Alterthums-freunden im
Rheinlande,' Bonn, 1868.
* Literary evidence for the numbers of the Saxons is furnished by such expressions
as those which Claudian puts into the mouth of a personified Britannia,
* Ne litore toto
Prospicerem dubiis venientem Saxona ventis.”—Laus Stilichonis, xxii. 254.
Evidence for the sudden and continual vexations to which Britain and other regions
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD, 599
in it of Hengist and that of Augustine. The legend which makes
Hengist land in Thanet and be buried at Conisborough, in South
Yorkshire, tells obviously in the same direction, but it is always
well to strengthen a conclusion based on the interpretation of such
a history as this by evidence drawn from actual, tangible, and
verifiable facts. And it is worth while, consequently, to put on
record here certain ‘finds’ of Anglo-Saxon urns which have been
made subsequently to, or, for other reasons, have not been enumer-
ated among those already referred to. In the year 1859 five urns
of the Anglo-Saxon type, which are now to be seen in the museum
of the Philosophical Society in York, were found by F. W. Calvert,
Esq., in his garden, which is about half-a-mile outside of Mickle-
gate Bar on the right side of the road from York to Tadcaster.
Several Roman urns and sarcophagi were found at the same time and
place, the Anglo-Saxons having in this, as in so many other
Roman stations, used the cemeteries of their predecessors. An urn
with an inscription, which I have not seen, was found at the same
time. Five other undoubtedly Anglo-Saxon urns are mentioned in
‘The Descriptive Account of the Antiquities’ of this Museum (p. 95,
n. 34), as being found in tumuli on the Wolds. An urn' as in-
dubitably Anglo-Saxon has been discovered at Kempston, in Bed-
fordshire, for a sight of which I am indebted to the kindness of
Canon Greenwell of Durham. Lastly, in the ‘Illustrated London
News’ of Jan. 25, 1868, Supplement, p. 93, some excellent figures
of several urns found by Dr. Massey of Melbourne, at King's New-
ton in Derbyshire, may be seen; and though I have not as yet
had an opportunity of personally examining these specimens, I ap-
prehend they will be recognised as belonging to the same class as
the North German urns of the “Horae Ferales; the South Jutland
or Slesvig urns figured by Engelhardt, loc. cit. and plates 14 and
17; and those from the sixteen English counties above enumerated.
If, as Mr. Kemble has said, ‘wherever Christianity set foot crema-
tion was to cease”, we may be doubly sure that wheresoever
cremation was practised in a country which had been previously
Christian, Christianity had for the time become extinct. Of the
were subjected by the Saxons may be found in ‘Ammianus Marcellinus,” xxvi. 4,
xxviii. 2.
* See ‘Collectanea Antiqua, iv. 161, vi. 166, 201 seqq.
* “Horae Ferales," p. 95.
600 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
co-existence in place of cremation-urns and of skeletons inhumed
entire there is no doubt; and, as many authorities seem convinced
that the two practices co-existed also in time”, I should be slow to
set against their opinion the fact of the strong feeling which the
Christians entertained as to the impiety of cremation. For I read
in the passages just referred to, and can believe, that a practice was
not always nor immediately discontinued because it was denounced.
Still, at Frilford, though in three cases urns were found above
Romano-British inhumations, in no case had I any reason to think
that one part of the population on this area was practising the one,
at the same time that another was practising the other, of these
two modes of sepulture. If it should be allowed—in dangerous
opposition, it is true, to Mr. Kemble’s dictum, that no pagan Saxon
was buried except when burnt”, that the Anglo-Saxon inhuma-
tions, shortly to be described as without orientation and with relics,
may have been the burials of pagans, I should be more inclined to
think that the two rites may have been practised contempo-
raneously, as we know them to have been by several heathen
nations. To the heathen the two modes of sepulture were com-
paratively indifferent, and very slight reasons may have determined
his choice of the one or the other. With the Christian it was
different, and abstinence from cremation was made to seem a corol-
lary of some of the most sacred and cherished articles of his faith.
Hence I am not disposed to think that the conquered Romano-
Britons would continue to use the cemetery of their forefathers
when it was constantly being, as they would think, desecrated by
the deposition in it of the urns of the unbelievers. The Saxons,
on the other hand, as already remarked, had no reluctance against
burying in the ground which held the bones of the former lords of
the soil, and as the positions of several of the urns show—
‘Little they recked of those strong limbs
Which mouldered there below.’
* For the co-existence of cremation with inhumation, see Kemble ‘Horae Ferales,'
p. 918; Neville's ‘Saxon Obsequies,” p. 11; Wylie, ‘Archaeologia,” xxxvii. p. 456;
Akerman, “Further Researches at Brighthampton, Archaeologia,’ xxxviii; ‘Invento-
rium Sepulchrale, pp. 165, 195; Weinhold, ‘Sitzungsberichte Kais. Akad. Hist.
Phil. Klasse,' bd. 29, p. 138, bd. 30, p. 176; Lindenschmit, “Archiv Anth." iii.
II.4.
* “Horae Ferales," p. 98; and, per contra, the Rev. S. Finch, ‘Coll. Antiq.” vi. 220,
and Thrupp, ‘Anglo-Saxon Home,” p. 399.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD, 601
I should add that it is possible that half-converted Saxons may
have relapsed into cremation in the absence of the missionary, and
under the temptation which the licence of the ‘lyke-wake’ created.
IBut the practice of such a transitional period, if it ever existed,
would not affect the historical argument for the overrunning of this
country by heathens, which the discovery of these urns in so many
parts of it furnishes.
A piece of Samian ware was found in the Roman rubbish-pit
already mentioned as having been discovered within about 200
yards of the cemetery. The resemblance of its pattern to that on
the Anglo-Saxon urns is very striking, though the execution and
finish are as different as is the material. A pattern of vandykes,
scored zones, and stellate impressions, is one which, by its sim-
plicity, would suggest itself to the rudest nations, and I do not, of
course, mean to hint that the urns found here by me were figured
after the pattern of Roman ware found here by the Anglo-Saxons.
Still the similarity of the two patterns is very striking, and when
we consider that urns with Latin inscriptions and of Roman manu-
facture have been found with Anglo-Saxon patterns upon them *, it
is less difficult to imagine that the Teutonic races, years before the
period we are dealing with, and while yet in their North German
native country, imitated with a stick on coarse hand-fashioned
clay-paste the very simple but still beautiful pattern which the
Gallo-Romans imprinted on finer and lathe-turned materials.
Another illustration would thus be furnished of the extreme readi-
ness already alluded to with which the Germanic natives imitated
the arts and refinements of the Romans.
Burnt human bones have been here and there met with without
any urn in relation with them, but within my experience at Fril-
ford they have been merely scattered or even single bones, the
presence of which may be explained by the disinterment of an urn,
and the subsequent replacing of its fragments and its contents with
less care than was sometimes bestowed upon this task”.
In none of the urns were any other contents than human bones
mingled with earth and stones discovered, except in the case of the
* See Roach Smith, ‘British Association Reports for 1855, p. 145, and the same
writer's ‘Collectanea Antiqua,’v. 115, pl.x. where such an urn, bearing the inscription
D.M. LAELIAE RUFINAE WIXIT. A.III. M.III.D.VII. is figured.
* See ‘Inventorium Sepulchrale,’ Introd. p. xvi, pp. 8, 9, 12, 17, 18, 19, 40, 156,
I59, IZ5.
602 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
urn found Sept. 1867, in which a few pieces of glass were found
together with the bones, and in that of the small unpatterned urn
found Jan. 1867, in which the incisor of a hare or rabbit was
also found in company with the human remains, and like them had
been subjected to the fire.
The urns were in most instances at but a very short distance
from the surface of the ground, and, shallow as the furrows are
(some five inches or so) which it is usual to make in this soil, the
upper rims of the urns have in several instances received injury
from the plough-share. This superficial position of cremation urns
enables us to understand how the many superstitions" as to their
pullulation in the spring, &c. arose, and it is paralleled, we may re-
mark, by the shallowness of the inhumations of the same race, to
the consideration of which I now proceed.
IV. Q/ Anglo-Saaon Interments in the way of inhumation without
orientation, but with insignia and in shallow graves.
The Anglo-Saxons appear to have discontinued cremation, prob-
ably at the urgent request of the Christian missionaries, without at
the same time adopting the direction of the grave which the usage
of their teachers, as well as of their predecessors, would have led
them to adopt. The shallowness” of many graves containing
skeletons extended at full length and adorned with Anglo-Saxon
insignia may again be referred to the retention by half-converted
proselytes of some of that carelessness as to the disposal of the
corpse which marked many heathen races then, as, indeed, it does
now. The now well-known insignia of the male and female Anglo-
Saxon respectively—to wit, the umbo, the spear, the buckle, and
the knife; the fibulae, the perforated beads, the similarly per-
forated glass ornaments; the ear and tooth picks, the scoops, the
* For the belief as to urns being ‘natural productions pullulating from the earth
like bulbous roots,’ see “Horae Ferales, p. 86, For other superstitions relating
to them, see Cochet, ‘Normandie Souterraine,’ p. 124; Wylie, ‘Archaeologia,”
xxxvii. 46.
* For the shallowness of Anglo-Saxon and other Teutonic interments, see Cochet,
“Tombeau de Childeric," p. 41 ; Bloxam, “Fragmenta Sepulchralia, p. 47; Engelhardt,
‘Denmark in the Early Iron Age,’ p. 9; Akerman, ‘Archaeologia,’ vol. xxxviii,
Long Wittenham; Kemble, Ibid. vol.xxxvii. 1856; Wanner, ‘Alemannische Todten-
feld bei Schleitheim, pp. Io, 20.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 603
shroud-pin, the perforated coins, and the knife, found both with
women's and men’s skeletons—have been found with several skele-
tons at Frilford, which were interred in graves varying in depth
from eighteen up to twenty-seven and thirty inches, and varying
still more in their compass bearings. In four of these cases,
skeletons, which must be supposed to have been Romano-British,
have been found to underlie these Anglo-Saxon remains, just as
similarly inhumed skeletons have been already spoken of as under-
lying cremation urns. In one case a large fragment of a large
unpatterned urn, which resembles in style the urn found at Long
Wittenham, containing human bones (figured by Mr. Akerman,
‘Archaeologia,’ xxxviii. 352, pl. xx. fig. 4), was discovered lying
over the pelvis of an Anglo-Saxon woman, buried with disc-shaped
fibulae, beads, and shards. The fragment was itself in seven pieces
when discovered; but, as they have admitted of readjustment, the
fragment must have been put into the grave in the condition
which it is in as now restored, in accordance with the custom of
carefully replacing the fragments of a disturbed funeral urn, which
has been several times noted in other Saxon burials". In another
of these interments some Roman tiling was found set along the
side of the grave, a practice which other Teutonic tribes, in their
imitation of the Roman civilisation, adopted, as has been observed
by Wanner”. In another, a spear-head with the raised ridge,
which Mr. Akerman (“Pagan Saxondom, p. x.) has observed is to
be seen on the assagaye of the modern Hottentot, was found ac-
companying a skeleton, the sex and nationality of which were
spoken to by the presence of an umbo and a buckle”, as well as by
its osteological characters. Fibulae were not found with the male
skeletons; with the female skeletons the common disc-shaped
fibulae were the most usual. In one case, however, the cruciform
variety, such as Mr. Akerman has figured (“Archaeologia, xxxix.
pl. xi. figs. 8, 9) from Long Wittenham, or (“Pagan Saxondom,”
pl. xviii. fig. 1) from the neighbourhood of Rugby, was exemplified
in two fibulae found with a female skeleton, which was accom-
* See ‘Inventorium Sepulchrale,' Introd. p. xvi, &c.
* “I)as Alemannische Todtenfeld bei Schleitheim, p. 13. See also Lindenschmit,
‘Archiv für Anthropologie," ii. 3, p. 356. -
* For the indications which the presence of a buckle furnishes as to nationality,
see Akerman, “Pagan. Saxondom,’ p. 58; Cochet, ‘Tombeau de Childeric, pp. 228,
234.
604 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
panied also by the earpick and toothpick and scoop so frequently
found in Anglo-Saxon interments". No sword has as yet been
found in the cemetery at Frilford, and the general character of the
Anglo-Saxon relics which have been discovered is in keeping with
the absence of this mark of condition and authority, if such it
may be considered to be. In one case a male skeleton was re-
ported to me to have been found lying in one of these shallow
graves with its face downwards. Unfortunately I was not upon
the spot when this skeleton was removed; but, though Schaaff-
hausen & has pointed out that unskilled observers may be deceived
as to the position of the face in a grave, I am nevertheless of
opinion that the workman who had assisted in the removal of a
very large number of skeletons from their graves was right in the
report he made to me. Because, in the first place, I have myself
seen an instance of such a mode of interment in a Romano-British
barrow ; and, secondly, it is not difficult to understand how such a
misplacement could occur with an uncoffined body borne to a grave,
the shallowness of which bore, and bears, evidence to a carelessness
which the ‘lyke-wake’ would be only too likely to intensify. It
has often been observed 4 that the Anglo-Saxons by no means in-
variably employed coffins in their interments. When the head is
found to have been supported upon stones placed underneath it, it
is plain that the interment must have been coffinless. But I do
not find in my notes of the class of shallow, non-oriented, Anglo-
Saxon interments that the head had been so supported; and, inas-
much as the results of its having been so raised are ordinarily very
evident, the cervical vertebrae being impacted between the rami of
- the lower jaw, and this bone being, not rarely, separated widely
from the upper jaw, owing to the changes of position which the
perishing of the soft parts has entailed,—it is difficult to think
that this peculiar arrangement would have been left unnoticed if it
had existed. A nail has occasionally been found in a grave con-
* See “Pagan Saxondom,’ p. 70, and pl.xxxv. fig. 4; “Archaeologia, vol. xxxvii,
Brighthampton, No. 1 ; vol. xxxviii, Brighthampton, No. 16, preserved in Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford; ‘Fairford Graves, pl. ix. fig. Io, object similarly preserved.
* See Akerman, ‘Archaeologia, vol. xxxix, Further Researches at Long Wittenham.
* “Die Germanische Grabstätten am Rhein, p. 119.
* Wylie, ‘Graves of Alemanni, p. 13; Bloxam, “Fragmenta Sepulchralia, pp. 67,
72; Akerman, “Pagan Saxondom, Introd. p. xvi. Compare plate xiv. with plates
xxxix, lvii, lxii, and lxvi, of Strutt's ‘Horda Angel-cynnan.'
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 605
taining an Anglo-Saxon skeleton, but I have never come upon
nails in such numbers as to make me think it probable that they
had come there otherwise than accidentally, nor have I ever found
in such interments that all but infallible sign of a coffin having
been employed, namely, coffin-hooping. The shallow Anglo-Saxon
graves do not appear to have had stones set round their edges; and
the absence of such stones is another, and complementary, illustra-
tion of the carelessness which appears to have characterised the
performance of these burials. Wherever stones have been found
set round a grave, the grave has had the semi-oriented bearings of
the Romano-British interments, and has all but universally the
same depth as these graves, and may hence be considered to belong
to a distinct era of inhumation.
V. Of Anglo-Saaon Interments in the way of inhumation in graves of
the same compass-bearings, and usually of the same depth, as the
Romano-British graves, but differing from them in having stones
set along the edges of the grave, and in containing insignia to-
gether with the skeletons.
* I have not at Frilford come upon a grave with stones set round
its edges which had not the Romano-British direction towards
E.S.E., and which did not contain a skeleton with the insignia of
the Anglo-Saxon race. Following the Romano-British direction,
these interments have followed the same precedent ordinarily as to
depth also, and the like, it may be noted, has been observed by
Wanner of the Alemannian interments at Schleitheim *. The
closeness of the stones to the sides, head, and feet of the skeleton
seems to preclude the notion of coffins having been employed in
these interments, and the fact that the sides of these stones, which
looked towards the skeleton, were in some cases reddened in a way
in which actual experiment shows that similar stones of the neigh-
bourhood do redden under the action of fire, makes it appear all
but certain that the charcoal found in these graves around and
even under the skeleton must have been produced by a fire lighted
in the grave before, or indeed after, the corpse was put into it”.
* “I)as Alamannische Todtenfeld bei Schleitheim, pp. 11, 18.
* In a note from Professor Pearson to me, in which he gives much valuable infor-
mation upon other points relating to the history of this country in the times with
606 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
Mr. Kemble, in the passages already referred to , supposes that in
the transition state from heathenism to Christianity, such practices
as this may have been stealthily indulged in by the newly-made
and only half-converted proselytes, and these interments lend a
considerable confirmation to this view. The Abbé Cochet" and
Professor Schaaffhausen” seem to incline towards supposing that
the similar appearances which they have noticed are to be ascribed
to the remnants of a coffin; but I am inclined to think that the
absence of nails, the raised position of the head observed in some
of these burials, the large size of, and the retention of a certain
brilliancy by, the fragments of carbonaceous matter found in these
graves, and underneath as well as around the skeletons, as well as
the conditions of reddening and of position which the stones
present, are points militating very strongly against the hypothesis
of a coffin having been present, and in favour of a wood fire having
been lighted in the grave either in preparation for, or for the
partial combustion of, the dead body. No coins were found in such
relations with the head or chest of any of these skeletons as to
make it seem likely that they had been put in as ‘portoria;' in
one case, however, a coin was found perforated, for suspension,
doubtless as an ornament, about the region of what had been the
chest or waist of a very much water-worn skeleton. Shards and
flints, and a few bones and teeth of domestic animals, were found
in these as in other kinds of inhumation observed in this cemetery.
In one of these interments a pair of odd fibulae, one being of the
cruciform, the other of the saucer or disc pattern, was found, one
upon one shoulder and the other upon the other of a female skeleton.
Similarly, or somewhat similarly, “two large cruciform and two
circular fibulae of bronze,” now preserved in the York Museum,
were found with a skeleton in the Danes Dale Tumulus *. These
discoveries may seem of trifling moment, but they do go to show,
which I am concerned, he says, “The “Anglo-Saxon Laws,” vol. ii. contain several
lists of superstitious practices which the Church condemns, such as burning corn upon
graves. It is true that the compilations in which these ordinances occur are in one
sense not authentic, that is, have been ascribed to wrong authors; but they probably
represent the customary laws of the Church here and on the continent with tolerable
fidelity.”
* “Horae Ferales, pp. 98–Io4.
* Opere cit., pp. I98, 255, 256, 3o4.
* Opere cit., p, Ioq.
* See Catalogue, p. 93, and “Coll. Antiq.' vi. pl. 28.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 607
first, that no pattern of fibulae should be considered as peculiar to
any one district, except provisionally; secondly, that a very con-
siderable uniformity may have existed in the manners and customs
of the Anglo-Saxons throughout the entire length of England;
and, thirdly, that, inasmuch as intercommunication between places
as far apart as Frilford and Driffield must have been difficult in
those days, the numbers of the invaders of these similar fashions
and habits must have been considerable.
The stones were set round in the grave in but a single row from
within outwards, and in height they do not seem to have extended
from the bottom of the grave further upwards than a stone coffin
(of which they may be supposed to have been a cheap imitation)
would have done. The graves here, as at Selzen, are narrowed
towards their lower ends". In such interments as these the skull
may or may not be found to rest upon a stone which had been put
under it in the way of support, and which has caused the lower jaw
to settle down upon the cervical vertebrae, and to hold them im-
pacted between its rami. The Anglo-Saxon habit of thus placing
stones beneath the head of the corpse may or may not be adum-
brated by the mediaeval stone-pillow in monuments as suggested
by the Abbé Cochet “; but, at all events, it goes some way towards
proving that coffins were not employed in the interments in which
it is noticeable.
In one of these graves a mass of what has been called a ‘scori-
form ' lava, though it is different enough from the true scoriae or slag
similarly found in Anglo-Saxon graves at Fairford by Mr. Wylie",
was found at the foot of a female skeleton. The bulk it made up
was about that of an orange, and, as it has separated into two
co-adaptable halves, each of which resists very violent hammering,
we must suppose that since it was put into the grave it must have
been subjected to some disrupting agency which acted upon it with
great force, and yet left it, when broken asunder, in situ. It is
possible that the piece of lava in question may have been broken
into two pieces by the action of a fire lighted in the grave, as, it
* See Lindenschmit, “Archiv für Anthropologie," ii. 3. 356, in review of Wanner's
Memoir, “Das Alamannische Todtenfeld bei Schleitheim ;' Schaaffhausen, op. cit.
pp. 131, 154. -
* ‘Normandie Souterraine, ed. i. p. 192.
* “Fairford Graves, p. 24.
608 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT .
has been suggested, was the case with a millstone found split to
pieces in a Saxon grave discovered" at Winster in Derbyshire, and
showing, which this grave did not, signs of a fire having been
lighted in it. But one of the many valuable hints which I owe to
Professor Phillips has made me think that it may be to frost
rather than to fire that we ought to look to account for the fractures
of volcanic products such as these. A porous soil would allow the
cavities of such a piece of lava to become filled with water, and a
shallow grave in a severe winter might furnish the other requisite
conditions. Some mortar-like matter was adherent to the exterior
of the piece of lava besides and distinct from the calcareous in-
crustation which the water of the soil had deposited upon it. The
lava itself, as containing hauyne, we may be justified in regarding
as having, in all probability, come from Niedermennig, which is a
place whence, in the time of Augustus”, the Romans took building
materials for the bridge at Trèves, and whence, as a matter of fact,
millstones are now largely exported, and whence, consequently, we
may think it not wholly unlikely * they were exported in former
and Anglo-Saxon times. It is difficult, of course, to be quite sure
that a sub-globular mass such as the piece of lava I found at the
feet of this Anglo-Saxon female had been a piece of a quern; but
fragments, of identical and closely identical mineralogical characters,
found near a barrow in Norfolk,” and ‘in a British barrow at
Thetford,” respectively, have been considered as pieces of a mill-
stone by the well-known antiquary J. Wickham Flower, Esq., to
whose kindness I owe the opportunity of comparing these several
sets of volcanic fragments together.
Schaaffhausen + has put on record several instances of Germanic
interments either in coffins made out of tufa, or in graves with
fragments of such volcanic matter set round their copes, together
with other stones, and it is just possible that the Niedermennig
lava may have been put, as it was in this grave, at the foot of the
grave, whilst other stones were set round the sides, as a kind of
reminiscence of what the ‘setting' of the interment might have
* Extract from the ‘Times, Thursday, Oct. 23, 1856, given in “Horae Ferales,'
p. IO4.
* Daubeny, on ‘Volcanoes, pp. 49, 64.
* See Bruce, “Roman Wall, ed. iii. 1867, p. 438, seen by me subsequently to
writing as above.
* “Op. cit.” pp. 122, 127; Wren, “Parentalia," p. 27.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 609
been elsewhere. But I am not aware that we have any reason for
thinking that the Anglo-Saxons, who, rather more than a century'
after the first invasion, drove the ‘Southern Belgae or Firbolgi’ out
of Berkshire into Wales and Damnonia, received any accessions to
their numbers from regions so far south as Andernach and Cob-
lentz”, where such interments could be easily, and were frequently
made ; and it is more probable that a fragment of lava may have
been put into a grave in its aspect of a fragment of a millstone, an
implement of daily life, than in its aspect of a fragment of the
Same material as that out of which entire coffins or the entire
‘setting' of a grave had been made elsewhere.
On the whole, I am inclined to regard these interments as be-
longing to a period of transition from the comparative if not total
heathenism of shallower interments without orientation, and with-
out the decent regard for the dead which the setting of stones
round the graves indicates, to the more distinctively Christian
mode of burial without insignia and in coffins. The greater depth
and the direction of the graves I should regard as due to the teach-
ing of the Christian missionaries; the adoption of the very graves
used by the Romano-Britons may have been due merely to the
imitative tendencies of the conquering races, or it may be ascribed
to the influence of some remnants of the conquered Christians, who
may have maintained their religion on sufferance, and their tradi-
tions as to the tombs of their fathers during the dark period which
intervened between the invasion of Cerdic and the preaching of
Birinus. The tricking out of a corpse with insignia of sex, or rank,
or employment, seems half heathen to us who have the great truth
that we can take nothing out of the world with us impressed upon
us at times when we are most open to impressions; still it is just
such a custom as a missionary with the proper amount of the
wisdom of the serpent would acquiesce in. Time, such a teacher
would know, was on his side, and he would feel that he could afford
to wait.
It is possible that the differences between these two kinds of
Anglo-Saxon inhumation may have been due to some social dif-
ferences between the persons severally practising them, and that
* See Beale Poste, “Celtic Inscriptions,’ 1861, p. 71.
* Leo, however, in his ‘Ortsnamen, pp. Ioo-Ioq, has tried to show that most of
the local names near Heidelberg correspond to local names in Kent.
R. I’
610 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
the deeper graves may have been dug for richer, and the shallower
for poorer, persons. But the insignia in both alike are very closely
similar, and I incline, therefore, to ascribe the greater care bestowed
upon the latter class of interment not to any sense of the favours
which a richer person had conferred in times past, but to the
greater care which Christianity would teach ought to be bestowed
upon the burial of the body.
The resemblance of the Anglo-Saxon manners and customs to
those of the kindred but hostile race of the Franks is very familiar
to the English explorer of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, if he be ac-
quainted either with Lindenschmit’s work, ‘Das Germanische Tod-
tenlager bein Selzen,” or with the works of the Abbé Cochet so
often referred to in this paper. The Merovingian * and the Anglo-
Saxon resembled each other in their abhorrence of city life; and
also in the melancholy point of their short-livedness which has
already been alluded to, and which appears to be explicable by the
fact that in the times we have been dealing with these races pre-
ferred a country life, it is true, to a town life, but a country life in
a camp, not a country life in a village. As Temple (cit. Rapin, p. 161)
and Leibnitz long ago remarked, there are other points which serve
to show the community of origin of the Frank and the Saxon, such
are their reckoning time by the nights, as the ‘fortnight,’ to say
nothing of their closely allied languages. A minor point of com-
munity is furnished by their common employment of the Roman
tiling to set round their graves. On the other hand, the Saxons
retained the custom of cremation a century and a half longer than
the Merovingians, and their urns were not lathe-turned, whilst
those of the Selzen Teutons were. (See Lindenschmit, l.c., p. 15.)
Holy-water vessels have not been so constantly found at Frilford
as they appear to have been at Selzen, from the beautiful figures
given in the monograph referred to, or as they are expressly stated
to have been by the Abbé Cochet in the Merovingian interments”.
* Gibbon, vi. 336, chap. xxxviii. for Merovingians; Tacitus, ‘Germania, chap. 16,
for Germans generally; Coote's “Neglected Fact in English History,’ p. 123; Ammi-
anus Marcellinus, xvi. 2-12; Pearson, op. cit. i. 264. Augustine brought Frank
interpreters with him into Kent, Bede, ‘H. E.’ i. 25, and the Welsh poems sometimes
speak of the Saxon enemy as a “Frank; ' see Skene, ‘Four Ancient Books,’ i. 460.
* See ‘Archéologie Céramique,' pp. II, 13.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 611
VI. Conclusions suggested by an Ealamination of the Human Remains
found at Frilford.
The cranial and other osteological peculiarities of the human
remains which I have examined from the Frilford cemetery seem
to me to throw sometimes a very unambiguous, and sometimes, it
must be confessed, a more or less questionable light upon certain
of the moot points in the political and natural history of the period
in which their owners lived. Among those points may be specially
mentioned the often-raised and very variously answered questions,
as to the extent to which the Anglo-Saxon Conquest was
equivalent to an extirpation of the population previously in oc-
cupation of this country”, and as to the physical and more par-
ticularly the cranial characters of the Romans and Romanized
Britons. But it is worthy of note that very indubitable evidence,
at least as to some of the social and moral peculiarities”, of the
conquered and the conquering races respectively, may be gathered
from a careful examination of their bony remains 4.
I have subjoined in a tabular form the results of my examination
of the sometimes fairly complete, sometimes exceedingly incomplete,
remains of 123 burnt or buried bodies which have come into my
* For the question of the extent to which the Celtic population were destroyed by
the Saxon Invasions, see Pearson's ‘History of England during the Early and Middle
Ages,’ i. 99–103, 1867; Freeman's ‘Norman Conquest,’ i. 18, 20; Akerman, ‘Archae-
ologia, p. 38, Second Report, Brighthampton; Turner's ‘Anglo-Saxon History, i. 311;
Wylie, ‘Fairford Graves.’ p. 8; Kemble's ‘Saxons in England, i. 21 ; D. Wilson,
“Anthropological Review, iii. 81.
* For the various views which have been held as to the Roman cranium, see
Ecker, ‘Crania Germaniae,’ p. 86, 1865; Ecker, ‘Archiv für Anthropologie,” i. 2,
p. 279, 1866; ii. 1, p. IIo, 1867; Hölder, Ibid. ii. 1, p. 58; His, ‘Crania Helvetica,’
pp. 39, 4o ; His, “Archiv für Anthropologie,” i. 1, p. 73, 1866; His and Vogt, Mor-
tillet's ‘Matériaux pour l’Histoire de l'Homme,” August 1866, pp. 522, 523; “Crania
Britannica, p. 23, chap. ii. and pl. 49 ; Davies and Thurnam, cit. ‘Indigenous Races,’
p. 312 ; Maggiorani, cited by Ecker, “Cran. Germ.’ p. 88, and ‘Arch. für Anth.”
l. c.; cited by v. Baer, “Bull, Acad. Imp. Sci.” St. Petersburg, 1860, p. 58, fig. g;
Edwards, “Des Caractères Physiologiques des Races Humaines, p. 50 ; Nott and
Gliddon, ‘Indigenous Races,’ p. 31 I, and Cardinal Wiseman, cit. in loco.
* As to the supposed degeneracy of the Britons, see Kemble, ‘Saxons in England,”
ii. 294, i. 6; “Encyclopaedia Metropol. xi. 378; Zosimus, cit. ‘Mon. Hist. Brit.”
lxxviii. vi. 6.
* As the German periodical, the ‘Archiv für Anthropologie,” is conducted under the
joint editorship of Ecker and Lindenschmit, and as the latter, I apprehend, is as well
known among archaeologists as the former is among biologists, no apology will be needed
for the constant reference which I shall have to make to its pages. It may be well to
R. Iſ 2.
612 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
hands from the excavations and quarrying carried on at Frilford at
various times during the years 1864–68 inclusive. In spite of the
ravages of fire in the cases of cremation, and the all but equally de-
structive working of the water containing carbonic and other acids
upon inhumation in ground with the rock (coralline oolite) at an
average distance of about a yard from the surface, it has been possible
to identify the sex and age in all but about a sixth of the skeletons,
or parts of skeletons, examined. Many skeletons, however, and
many urns had been lost to science, as may be gathered from Mr.
Akerman's report", during the various quarrying operations carried
on at various times previously to his investigations, and the arith-
metical results of my researches are much less valuable consequently
than they otherwise might have been. But I incline to think that
the tolerably exhaustive and complete collection which the great
kindness of the authorities at Frilford has enabled me to make of
the fruits of the excavations carried on during the last two years,
may be taken as a fair sample of what the entire series was.
One of the most striking peculiarities of the series of 123
skeletons, as represented more or less fragmentarily in the Univer-
sity Museum at Oxford, is the very large number of old persons’
remains which it presents to our view. The most superficial ob-
server cannot fail to be impressed by this fact. A little more accu-
rate inspection shows that the proportion of aged persons varied
most surprisingly in accordance with the nationality, and that of
the persons of either sex who were interred with Anglo-Saxon
insignia only two could have been considered old. We are, un-
happily, even now too familiar with the history of invading armies
to feel it necessary to spend much time in excogitating an ex-
planation of this fact : it is worthy, however, of mention, that a
similar fact has been noted by the Abbé Cochet 4 in the burial-
grounds of the kinsfolk of the Anglo-Saxons, the Merovingian
Franks. The preponderance of longevity being seen to attach to
the Romano-British population, the presence with these aged
add here that the English reader can find a very clear account of the classification of
crania adopted by His and Rütimeyer, and alluded to very frequently by myself, as
also by various writers in the periodical just mentioned, in the ‘ Prehistoric Remains
of Caithness, pp. IO4, IoS, a work written by S. Laing, Esq. M.P. and Professor
Huxley, conjointly.
* “Proc. Soc. Antiq.” ubi supra.
* ‘Normandie Souterraine, p. 183.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 613
‘frames’ of coins bearing such names as those of Gratian tempts us
to explain the phenomenon by the hypothesis of the young men
having been taken away to fight and die in distant countries under
such commanders as Magnus Maximus. Persons who some years
ago had the opportunity of seeing village after village on the
continent of Europe inhabited by forms like that of Tithonus, will
be ready to accept this explanation as sufficient to account for the
fact. Till I came to add up the various individual identifications
of the two sexes which I had made from time to time, and without
any reference to any historical relations which the skeletons or
their owners might have possessed during life, I held this hypothesis
myself. But on adding up the numbers of males and females
severally, I find that I have assigned no less than 48 of the 123
bodies to the male sex, and only 34 to the female. Even if we add
to the female series the II individuals as to whose sex I have felt
myself unable to pronounce, the force of this arithmetic is but little
impaired, or, indeed, not at all". The fact of the great pre-
ponderance in number of aged remains may be explained by a
reference to the present condition of the population on the spot.
Frilford is renowned for its salubrity and the longevity of its
inhabitants at the present day. The fact of the great preponderance
of male skeletons is not so easy of explanation, and it is especially
difficult of solution when we note that more than half of these male
skeletons are aged ones. Barracks and prisons furnish an excess of
male skeletons in their burial-grounds, I apprehend, but not an
excess of aged male skeletons. I am not aware that the monks of
the west had established themselves among the Atrebates before
the time of Cerdic *. And the only hypothesis which has suggested
* It has been suggested to me that the soldiers, who, on the hypothesis before
us, are supposed to have left their bones in foreign lands, may have taken wives
with them. But it could not have been often in days of such difficulty in travelling
that Lycoris
‘Perque nives alium perque horrida castra secuta est."
The soldiers of Gustavus Adolphus were, very many of them, married men, but I do
not know that their wives accompanied them to his famous battle-fields. The men,
too, who fought and won at Lützen had very different motives and incentives from
those of the recruits who followed the standards of the various ‘tyrants’ and pre-
tenders of the later Roman Empire, and it is only by means of such motives and
incentives that men can be got in any large numbers to break away from family ties
and join distant military expeditions.
* See, however, ‘Hist. Mon. de Abingdon,’ i. pp. 2, 3.
614 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
itself to me is that the part of the burial-ground which has
fallen under my inspection may have been used by preference,
though by no means exclusively, for male interments. The hypo-
thesis of a battle is excluded by several considerations, and notably
by that of the age of the skeletons.
Of the thirty-five skeletons assigned by me to the female sex,
thirteen were of aged, and no less than nineteen of young, women.
The great dangers of child-birth may be supposed to be indicated
by these figures, and the osteophytic intracranial growths' so often
observed in the puerperal state, and noted here in four cases, may
point in the same direction. Under the head of children I have
reckoned all persons below the age of thirteen or fourteen. The
numbers of this class, viz. twenty-eight, which I have identified,
holds a much smaller proportion to the whole number, I23, than
we should expect from modern statistics. But the greater perish-
ability of children’s bones, and the lesser depths of their graves,
which, if not more chemically, is yet mechanically more dangerous
to their preservation, must be borne in mind in considering these
figures, and should prevent us from basing any argument upon
them over-hastily. Still, we may perhaps be justified in thinking
that there could not have been at Frilford, even in days when
glazed windows and coal were as little used as China-ware and
* China drink,’ that great infantile mortality which, by weeding
out all the weakly in early life, produces a population of adults
with a great proportion of aged individuals.
The Anglo-Saxon remains which I have procured from Frilford
have suffered much from the mechanical and chemical agencies to
which the shallowness of their graves, and, secondly, the shallow-
ness of the soil, exposed them ; and the youth of their owners has
still further rendered them amenable to these destructive and
distorting forces. But, thanks to the reconstructive ability of Mr.
Charles Robertson, I have been enabled to see that the two types
of crania which have been shown by Dr. Barnard Davis to have
been found with Anglo-Saxon insignia, both at Long Wittenham *,
and at Linton, in Cambridgeshire *, co-existed side by side in the
* Rokitansky, ‘Path. Anat., Sydenham Soc. Trans. iii. 208; Bock, ‘Pathologie,”
p. 209.
* See ‘Archaeologia,” xxxviii. No. 107, 770 k. Oxford Univ. Museum.
* See ‘Crania Britannica,’ Dec. 4, pl.xlvi. Two other crania of this ‘platycephalic'
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 615
Anglo-Saxon contingent which possessed itself of Frilford. I may
remark that the two types are recognisable in specimens of both
sexes, and a very fairly perfect female cranium from a grave in which
a pair of fibulae and a number of beads were found, as it shows at
once, and distinguishably, the tribal and the sexual characters,
which have very often been confounded, and as from the surround-
ings with which it was found there is no doubt as to its value as a
standard of reference. This skull appears to have belonged to the
shorter and broader type of Anglo-Saxon crania, which was, I am
inclined to think, the less cultivated of the two types. A second
Anglo-Saxon female cranium found here belongs to the same type.
A single female and a single male cranium of a more elongated
form were also found with Anglo-Saxon insignia. The female
skeleton, it may be remarked, belonged to an old person, and in
this point, as also in the possession of cruciform fibulae, instead of
circular ones, this skeleton differed from the two others with which
we have compared it. It was chiefly from a comparison of the
female Anglo-Saxon skull, with the first cranium described by me
as ‘cranium (male) marked A' for Mr. Akerman in his ‘Report of
the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries,” May 25, 1865,
that I came to see that my assignment of this latter to the male
sex had been in all probability erroneous. This cranium was re-
ported as having been found with a fibula two feet above it, and
though this by no means proves it to be an Anglo-Saxon skull
from the archaeological point of view, the very close anatomical
approximation of this skull to the indubitably Anglo-Saxon skull
does, when coupled with this fact, lend some considerable probability
to such a conclusion. In justice to myself, I may be permitted to
say that the cranium and lower jaw were the only bony relics upon
which I had to form my judgment as to sex, and that in my report
I did draw attention to the small development of size and strength
which they seemed to show that their owner must have possessed.
And the authority of anatomists of no less repute than His and
type have been found in the Frilford cemetery subsequently to the writing of this
paper, viz. March 22, 1869 (Nos. iv and v). Both had belonged to young men. In
both the body had been buried with the head raised; and in one the grave, though
semioriented, was only 18 inches deep, and the arm lay across the body, and not by
the side, as in the burials of Latinised populations (see Cochet, ‘Normand. Souterr.’
p. 193). There were no relics, and we have not therefore more than probable
evidence for their nationality.
616 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
Rütimeyerl, Welcker”, and Ecker 8, may be adduced to show that
it is by no means always possible to decide the question of the sex
of a cranium in the absence of the pelvis and other bones. It is
interesting to remark that a very similar female cranium was found
by the Rev. George Cardew in a Romano-British cemetery at
Helmingham under circumstances such as that of having the head
raised, which makes it probable that the skull may have differed as
much ethnologically as it does anatomically from the skulls of the
Romanized Celts, amongst whom it, as also another cranium sup-
posed not to have been Celtic, was found. This cranium has been
presented to the University Museum by the Rev. G. Cardew, and
has been carefully measured and compared with other skulls Sup-
posed or known to have belonged to Anglo-Saxons. Two smallish
brachycephalic or sub-brachycephalic and prognathic crania, one of
which belonged to an old (No. xiv. Jan. 15, 1868) and the other to
a young woman (No. x. March 17, 1868), and neither of which
has any other than osteological evidence attached to it for the
decision, I am inclined upon this evidence to think may have been
Anglo-Saxons of the type of the two female crania just spoken of.
The younger of these two women's skulls was found with the
cervical vertebrae impacted between the rami of its lower jaw, and
in this, as in many other particulars, resembles the female Anglo-
Saxon skull from Brighthampton, to be seen catalogued as No.
5,712 D, in the College of Surgeons.
Among the entire series, besides some fourteen crania, or parts
more or less fragmentary of crania, and other bones, which speak
to the existence of a distinet interment without making it possible
to refer the remains certainly to a distinct type, there are some
four or five crania which bear a considerable resemblance to crania
of what is perhaps the most common modern English type. The
frontal region, without attaining any very extraordinary develop-
ment, or exceeding either in vertical or transverse diameter the
frontal regions of the larger specimens of brachycephalie British
skulls, is, nevertheless, possessed of more equable proportions
relatively to the other regions of the cranium than the great
majority of ancient crania *. And in consequence, to some extent,
* “Crania Helvetica, pp. 8, 9.
* ‘Archiv für Anthropologie,” i. 1, p. 127. * Ibid. ii. 1, p. 1 Io.
* See Broca, ‘Sur la Capacité des Crânes Parisiens,' Bull. Soc. Anth. de Paris,
tom. iii. I 13, 1862.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 617
of this, the entire calvaria shows a more evenly ovoidal contour
than the skulls composing the rest of this series. These crania
were found in graves in which no relics, except in one instance a
nail, were found, and which ran in the ordinary semi-oriented
Romano-British direction. And, so far as the brain case is con-
cerned, these crania might be looked upon as embodying the result
of intermarriages of the broader “Sion' type with the narrow
‘Hohberg’ type, and corresponding with the ‘Misch-Form 'spoken
of by His at p. 49 of the ‘Crania Helvetica.’ And they might
perhaps be considered as representing the inevitable result of the
settlement of a large Roman immigration in the midst of a dolicho-
cephalic Celtic people. But, inasmuch as these crania show a not
inconsiderable tendency to prognathism, and resemble herein the
Anglo-Saxon, and differ from the Romano-British series, I incline
to think they may have belonged to Christianised Anglo-Saxons
who died before the churchyard had superseded the cemetery, but
after the custom of burial with insignia had given way to the
urgency with which its anti-Christian character may have been
represented to the convert. The hypothesis of poverty will account
for the absence of relics, but I do not incline to accept it here,
partly on account of the presence of a nail, which may seem to
imply the employment of a coffin in one of the interments, and
partly on account of the resemblance which these skulls show to
the male Anglo-Saxon cranium (No. 36, Researches at Long Wit-
tenham, ‘Archaeologia, vol. xxxviii.) and to a female Anglo-Saxon
cranium obtained for me by the kindness of the Rev. R. Taylor,
from the Kemble Cemetery, described by Mr. Akerman in the
‘Archaeologia,” 1856, vol. xxxvii, in neither of which cases have we
reason to suspect the existence of straitened means.
The name of Magnus Maximus, the Maxen-lwedig of the
Mabinogion, forbids us to think that in the days of Gratian there
could have been, either in modes of life or in modes of burial,
much difference between a Roman and a Romano-Briton. Tenants
of leaden coffins must, from the expensive character of their inter-
ment, have been persons of distinction, such as were the ‘Equites”
under the Roman empire; but Roman citizenship no more implied
Roman blood in the days of Ambrose than it did in those of
* See Kemble's ‘Saxons in England," ii. 272 ; Pearson's ‘History of England, i.45;
Coote's “Neglected Fact in English History, pp. 40, 45.
618 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
St. Paul. The Notitia", indeed, informs us that races such as the
Tungrians, Dacians, Moors, Cilicians, and Dalmatians, as well as
Spaniards, Gauls and Germans, were employed by the imperial
policy to hold Britain at the foot of Rome.
But if it is at all possible to separate and distinguish, when one
is treating of the times of Maximus, between a Romano-British
and a Roman interment, it may be possible to do so in such cases as
those of the two interments in leaden coffins already described. The
tenants of these coffins must at least have been persons of wealth,
and in the enjoyment during their lifetime of all the distinctive
characteristics which still remained attached to the title ‘Civis
Romanus.’ It is true that coins were found with the one and not
with the other of these two skeletons, but in all other particulars
attending their sepulture they seem to have very closely resembled
each other. But when we come to compare their crania we find
that while that of the skeleton found with coins is of an elegantly
vaulted and lofty form, that of the other is low, broad, and globose.
Professor His would speak of the one as belonging to his ‘Hoh-
berg,’ and of the other as belonging to his ‘Sion' typus. The skull
of the former differs but little, and that chiefly in the way of refine-
ment, from the elongated and vaulted crania procured from British
barrows of a pre-Roman period, such as the long barrow at Nether
Swell, near Stow-on-the-Wold (Article xviii), calvariae from which I
have side by side with that of this Roman from the leaden coffin as I
write; the skull of the latter is as broad and low as another equally
authentic ‘ Roman’ cranium of about the same period, figured by
Professor Ecker at pl.xx. of his ‘Crania Germaniae.’ So far, then,
as these crania bear upon the argumentation as to whether the
Roman skull was an elongated and vaulted, or an elongated and
broad and flat skull, we may at first sight be tempted to rest in the
conclusion that both types were equally and alike found in the
imperial race. I believe, however, that it is possible to show that
we should be wrong in considering with Professor His 4 that the
* See ‘Roman City of Uriconium,' by J. Corbet Anderson, Esq., p. 129; and
Hölder, ‘Archiv für Anthropologie," ii. 1, 88; Taylor, “Words and Places,’ p. 284,
ibique citata.
* ‘Arch. für Anthrop.’ i. 1, p. 70; “Crania Helvetica,’ p. 38. One of the Hohberg
type skulls is supposed by the authors to have come from a cemetery the graves in
which were oriented, and contained swords and spear-heads as well as coins. This
however does not prove that they belonged to Roman soldiers, but rather the contrary.
See ‘Cran. Helv.’ p. 21, note,
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 619
former of these types, which he has also spoken of as the aristocratic
type of head, is really the Roman skull par eacellence. First, as it
seems to me, the Romans themselves considered theirs to be a
broad rather than a lofty-headed race. In looking at Roman
monuments as reproduced for us in such works as Lindenschmit’s
“Alterthümer unserer heidnischen Worzeit,’ we cannot fail to be
struck by the great angle at which the ears stand out from the
head; and this feature, a very striking and obvious one, is, as
observation on living “eurycephalic persons will show, correlated
with a globose and bossy rather than with a vertically-walled and
narrow temporo-parietal region. The engraving of the beautiful
monument to Manlius Coelius, an officer in the army of Varus,
given at Heft vi. Taf, v. of Lindenschmit's work, just referred to,
shows this peculiarity in the attachment of the external concha of
the ear in each of three heads it represents; and much the same may
be said of the figures given Heft iv. Taf. vi., Heft ix. Taf. iv., and
especially of the uppermost of the two figures in Heft viii. Taf. vi.
Busts also of the Roman emperors and of other Romans which are
‘recognised as more or less authentic speak to the same effect.
Secondly, we do find the broad and flat form of the cranium very
commonly in cemeteries of undoubted Roman character in England,
and the arched and centrally-ridged and narrow cranium we do find
in as undoubtedly British barrows. A skull, most singularly re-
sembling one of my globose platycephalic crania from Frilford, was
recently shown me by Canon Greenwell from a cemetery at Mar-
gate, where it had been found with Roman pottery, whilst the
‘Hohberg’ type of skull is the very form which Retzius describes
as the less common Celtic form, and calls, for the sake of dis-
tinguishing it, by the name ‘Belgic".’ Thirdly, through the
kindness of Thomas Combe, Esq., M.A., of Oxford, I have had put
into my hands, and into the Oxford Museum, a skull, ‘found in
excavating a house of the time of the Roman Republic, discovered
below a vineyard, near the baths of Caracalla, on the Via Appia,"
and this skull, though it belonged to a person of not more than
between twelve and fourteen years of age, enables me to understand
how the modern Italian anthropologist Maggiorani speaks of the
ancient Roman skull as a long but broad skull, oblong and four-
cornered, with broad interparietal and broad frontal regions. But
* “Ethnologische Schriften,’ p. Io9.
620 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
I must say that the skull from the leaden coffins, of which I am
speaking, as also a more or less authentic bust of Julius Caesar, and
such works of art as the Roman figured in Lindenschmit’s ‘Alter-
thūmer, Heft vii. Taf v. have convinced me that too much weight
may be laid upon breadth of forehead. In these heads the broad
character which they present does not depend upon the frontal but
upon the parietal region, and the vertical view of the cranium pre-
sents very much such an outline from back to front as the broad
side of the flint axes or celts, so familiar to antiquaries, presents
from front to back. The head of the first Napoleon must have
presented such a contour when viewed from above; and I believe,
in spite of our tendency to connect a narrow forehead with foolish-
ness, that a truer analysis would connect it in many cases merely
with premature closure of the frontal suture, which seems hereditary
in some families. This premature closing is consistent with the
possession of a large cerebrum, and of great mental powers, and we
cannot arrogate for it any ethnological significance, at all events in
cultured races.
His and Rütimeyer (“Crania Helvetica, p. 34) hold that their
‘Sion' type of cranium, which seems to me to be represented by
the broad, flattish, globosely contoured skulls, of which I have just
been speaking, was the type of skull possessed by the Helvetii,
their ‘Celtic forefathers, and by the inhabitants of their Pfahl-
bauten. And, as there is evidence to show that this same form of
skull existed in pre-Roman times even in these islands, we must
not suppose that the flatter and more globose skulls which we find
at Frilford belonged exclusively to Roman immigrants, or to im-
migrants from Southern Europe, who may have been commanding
as officers, or settled as upper-class decuriones or equites in the
neighbourhood of this cemetery. The loftier and narrower crania,
however, may with less hesitation be supposed to have belonged to
men of similar station, but of British birth and blood, who had
acquiesced in Roman rule, and identified themselves with Roman
institutions.
Differing in the particulars specified, the osteological remains of
the two occupiers of leaden coffins do nevertheless present certain
important points of resemblance. Both belonged to men who were
beyond the middle period of life, who were possessed of great
muscular strength, but whose skulls, teeth, and jaws seem to show
CEMETERY AT FRIII'ORD. 621
that they had the command of the comforts of civilisation. Whilst
the skulls in both cases present the appearances of refinement, the
other bones of the skeleton are much roughened by the develop-
ment upon them on the one hand of ridges for the insertion and
origin of muscles, and on the other of rheumatic (?) exostoses. And
these same bones show, in the one case, with considerable proba-
bility, and in the other with absolute certainty, that their owner had
been exposed, or exposed himself, to personal injury and violence,
and had, probably, been a soldier of much service in the stormy
times to which, in one case, the antiquarian relics enable us to
assign his remains with perfect certainty. The left collar-bone
belonging to the skull of the more globose and flatter outlines had
undergone and repaired a comminuted fracture during life, and the
left metatarsal of the second toe of the foot of the same side, a bone
but rarely broken, had been broken, though less severely, than the
collar-bone, and had, like it, been repaired during life. A fall
from a horse may break a collar-bone, but injuries such as war
entails are suggested to us by a history like this. The other skull,
which was found with five coins, and which I have said may
probably be looked upon as having been produced by the action of
Roman influences upon the more roughly-hewn dolichocephalic
Britons, was found in company with a left first rib, which had
anchylosed with its ossified costal cartilage, which again, like the
clavicle just above it, had its sternal articular end greatly enlarged.
It is possible that these peculiarities may have been the result of
exostotic disease, of which the other bones bear evidence, though
less marked evidence than the bones of the other skeleton with
which we are comparing them ; but for the reason conveyed in
these last words, as also because the abnormal appearances are not
repeated on the opposite side, I incline to ascribe them to the
working of some mechanical injury inflicted, possibly, in war, and
certainly many years before death. The owner of this skull had
lost, and was at the time of his death losing, teeth by caries", and
was suffering and had suffered from exostosis in sympathy with it ;
the owner of the other had lost two of the molars of the right side
of the lower jaw early in life, and the molars of the corresponding
side in the upper jaw are little worn and suggestive of youth till we
.* For an interesting history of dental caries, as observed in the ancient inhabitants
of Britain, see a paper by J. R. Mummery, Esq. ‘Trans. Odont. Society,’ 1869.
622 IXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
look at the other side. The lower jaw in the former of the two
skulls is very well formed; in the latter it is comparatively feeble,
especially in the region of the chin; the teeth in both are less worn
than the age testified to by the rest of their skeletons would have
led us to expect. The occupiers of these coffins were both tall
men ; the stature of the man found with the coins must have been
nearly five feet eleven inches, that of the other nearly six feet. A
skeleton of an old man, the skull of which closely resembles that of
the former of these (see ‘Catalogue,’ infra, No. xiv. May 1867),
and which bears less ambiguous marks of its owner having been a
warrior in the gaping, though healed, wound on its left side, be-
longed, as its femur of 19.5 inches length shows, to a man of fully
six feet in height. The stature of each of these three warriors was
much above that of the average Roman of ancient days, who spoke
of the Germanic and Celtic races as possessing immania ac procera
corpora, as it is also above that of his modern Italian representative",
and above that of the Long-barrow British skeletons”. The better
food of civilization may have increased the stature of the former of
the two occupiers of the leaden coffins, and of the owner of the
beautifully elegant and vaulted cranium (No. xiv. May 1867);
whilst intercrossing would account for the increase in height in the
skeleton to which the flatter skull belonged, if, with Edwards,
Cardinal Wiseman *, Sandifort, and Ecker, we should consider it to
be probably Roman.
The craniography of the occupiers of the graves which I have
spoken of as Romano-British or British, and which the archaeo-
logical evidence above adduced shows to have belonged to the
times of the later Roman empire, is a subject of considerably greater
difficulty than that of the Anglo-Saxon and of the leaden coffin
interments. An examination of fifty-three of these interments, and
a comparison, carried on at great cost of time, of their contents .
with those of several other cemeteries, has conducted me to the
following conclusions as to the tribal characters of the pre-Saxon
inhabitants of this district with whom I have had to deal. In the
* See Edwards, ‘Des Caractères Physiologiques des Races Humaines,’ p. 53. See
Reysler, l.c. p. 220, for the stature of the ancient races under comparison, ibique
citata.
* See Thurnam, op. cit. pp. 40–41.
3 ‘Lectures on the Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion,’ p. 152, cit.
Nott and Gliddon, ‘Indigenous Races, pp. 311, 312.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 623
first place, I have not in my excavations at Frilford met with any
representatives of the brachycephalic type of ancient Britons so
well described by Dr. Thurnam", and called ‘Belgic” by Professor
Huxley. This is especially noteworthy, as typical examples of this
form of cranium have been, through the kindness of the Duke of
Marlborough, procured by me for the University Museum from the
long barrow at Crawley, described by Mr. Akerman, in the
• Archaeologia, xxxvii. 432, and supposed by him to belong to the
same period in time, as it does to much the same district in space,
as the Frilford cemetery. Secondly, the longer, narrower, and
more vaulted skulls, supposed to have distinguished a race which
in England at least took the priority in point of time of the brachy-
cephalic and taller race just mentioned, are, in what I should con-
sider their most typical form, all but equally absent here. That
most typical form I should consider as identical with the form
regarded as ‘Belgic' by Retzius *, and spoken of by him as ‘a
Celtic but not the common Celtic form; ' and the form called
“Cumbecephalic’ by Professor Daniel Wilson * I should regard as
being but a slight modification of it. And the three skulls which
I have classed in my Tabular view of results of Osteological In-
vestigations (infra) as belonging to the ‘Hohberg’ typus of His
and Rütimeyer, may be looked upon as embodying the results of
the working upon that form of the Roman civilisation with which
their owners were in contact. Those results are expressed by a
decrease in the angularity of the external outlines, and an increase
in the cubic capacity indicated in a few cases very strikingly by an
open frontal suture; see p. 619, supra. Thirdly, a very large
majority, viz. thirty-two out of the fifty-three, adult Romano-
British interments investigated by me belong to a type which has
frequently been confounded, since the time of Retzius’ writings,
with the dolichocephalic types just spoken of, but which that ex-
cellent ethnographer distinguished from it as ‘Cimbric, a variety
of ‘the common Celtic' type. Comparing this form of cranium,
which I may add is by no means extinct amongst ourselves at the
' ‘On Two principal Forms of Ancient British and Gaulish Skulls, pp. 31, IoI.
Skulls of this form are considered by Sir Thomas Wilde to have belonged in Ireland
to fair-headed, light-coloured, blue, or grey-eyed Celtae, or Tuatha De Danaan. See
“Beauties of the Boyne, 2nd ed. I850, pp. 221, 237, 239, and the figure at p. 232.
* See ‘Ethnologische Schriften, pp. Ioſ, Io8.
* “Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, chap. ix. 1851.
624 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
present day, with the elongated but narrow form which he sup-
poses to have belonged to the ‘Belgae, Retzius speaks first of ‘the
common Celtic form, and says it differs from the Belgic,’ in being
less narrow and compressed. The Cimbric variety, he adds, which
is found in South Sweden and Denmark, is even somewhat broader
still; is very like the Scandinavian Gothic form, and is of an elon-
gated oval shape, with a greatly developed occipital region. And
Retzius has, by the gift of a ‘plaster cast of the cranium of an
ancient aboriginal of Scandinavia regarded as the Celt’ to the
easily accessible and invaluable ethnological series in the London
College of Surgeons", enabled us to understand most unambiguously
what"was the type of skull to which he alluded. To this type, most
assuredly, the large majority of the adult Romano-British crania
found in this cemetery are referable. And I may here say that a
skull obtained by me, with many others, from a barrow at Dinning-
ton, near Rotherham, in South Yorkshire (Article xiii), of which casts
have been made and presented to various museums in this and
other countries by Dr. Thurnam, corresponds very closely with this
cast presented to the College of Surgeons by Professor Retzius, and
more closely still with some of the very fine skulls obtained by me
from Frilford. Professor Ecker, in writing of this cast”, observes,
apparently without having Retzius’ comparison above quoted of
such skulls to the Scandinavian Gothic type before his mind, that
it resembles the skulls he has described as ‘Grave Row,” “Reihen-
Gräber’ skulls, and assigned to the ancient Germanic and modern
Swedish peoples. Very similar skulls, again, I have obtained from
Romano-British cemeteries of the later times of the Empire, as
testified to by archaeological evidence, at Long Wittenham, in
Berkshire, through the kindness of the Rev. J. C. Clutterbuck;
from Helmingham, in Suffolk, through the agency of the Rev. G.
Cardew, and from Towyn-y-Capel, Holyhead, by that of the Hon.
W. O. Stanley. The ancient British skull from a cist at Winter-
borne Monkton, North Wilts, figured by Dr. Thurnam, “Crania
Britannica,’ Plate 58, is closely similar in contour and proportions,
as taken by measurement, to the variety of which I am here treating.
* See ‘Catalogue,” Osteological Series, ii. 880, Prep. 5709.
* “Archiv für Anthropologie," i. 2, p. 283. As Professor Ecker considers his
* Reihengråberform' to correspond with the ‘Hohberg’ type of His and Rütimeyer, it
would appear that he would consider this cast as belonging to that class, from which,
however, its cubic capacity differentiates it.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD, 625
The osteological peculiarities of this “elongated oval Romano-
British type, as seen at Frilford, show us that we have to deal,
there at least, with times of civilisation. For civilisation differs
from heathendom in nothing more markedly to the eye of the
craniologist than in the age to which persons who have lived under
its influences attain; and the long skulls of which I am now
speaking differ very strikingly from the long and narrow skulls
described by Dr. Thurnam in this very particular, that in very
many cases they belonged to very aged individuals". The greater
average stature of this variety of Celt (5 feet 8 inches as against
5 feet 6 inches of the older form) may perhaps be in like manner
ascribed to the greater civilisation and command of the means of
sustenance which we know them to have possessed. I have referred
eleven female skulls to this type as against twenty-one male; the
female skulls in many cases approaching very closely to the pro-
portions of the medium-sized skulls”. A much greater difference,
on the other hand—viz., as much as 8.5 inches, judging from the
average approximatively obtained from the measurement of the
long bones of ten women referred to this type—appears to have
existed between the statures of either sex in this type than exists
between the statures of modern & English men and women. It may
be said that the estimation of the stature by the various methods
which take one or more of the long bones as their standard, is
amenable always to several sources of fallacy, and more especially in
the case of female skeletons; but in savage races * at the present
* See Dr. Thurnam, op. cit. p. 6o. -
* Huschke, ‘Schädel, Hirn, und Seele," p. 48; Hölder, ‘Arch. für Anthropologie,”
ii. I, p. 55. -
* The average height of 295 adult male patients examined in the Somerset County
Lumatic Asylum by Dr. Boyd, and recorded by him in the “Philosophical Transactions’
for 1861, p. 261, varied from 67.8 to 65 inches; that of 233 females from 63-2 to 61.6
inches. The average height of the modern German male is given by Vierordt in his
“Grundriss der Physiologie, 2nd ed. p. 460, as 172 centimetres (5 feet 3% inches);
that of the German female as 164 (5 feet 2} inches). In the long barrow explored by
Dr. Thurnam (l.c. p. 27) at Tilshead, three male skeletons varied in length from
5 feet 5 inches to 5 feet 8 inches, and three female skeletons from 4 feet 9 inches to
5 feet 3 inches. The average height of the dolichocephalic men from megalithic and
other long barrows is given by the same author (l.c. pp. 40, 41) as 5 feet 5 inches as
against 5 feet 9 inches for the brachycephalic men from circular barrows.
* Sir Andrew Smith, K.C.B., has kindly informed me that he can safely state from
extensive observation made during seventeen years' residence in South Africa, that
the Amakosa Kaffirs to the eastward of the Colony, average, men 5 feet 8% inches,
women 5 feet I: inch.
S S
626 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
day an average difference nearly equal to that just given, as de-
duced from my measurements, has been observed to exist between
the statures of the two sexes. And though the Romano-Britons
must be considered to have been a civilised population, it must be
borne in mind that the physical comfort, upon which such matters
as stature depend, of their times was something very different from
that of ours, when coal and glass" are more or less within the reach
of the poorest settled inhabitants of our country. The greater
relative stature of the males of this variety of the Romanised Celt
may perhaps be accounted for by their having been more exposed
to and invigorated by the influenées of an out-of-door life; whilst
the stature of the females, which is so disproportionately smaller as
compared with modern ratios, may have been due to their spending
their lives inside houses which, if light must have been cold, if
warm must have been dark—which had no chimneys, and only in
the case of the rich, hypocausts, and even in their case probably no
glass.
Fourthly, a second form of cranium differing from the one just
described is found with similar archaeological surroundings. It
resembles this form in its noble proportions and indications of
culture; it equals or exceeds it in length, and is distinguished
from it by its greater breadth, and, whilst considering it to cor-
respond to the “Sion Typus’ of His and Rütimeyer, I have spoken
of it in my catalogue and tables as the ‘globose Romano-British ’
type. A very large proportion, six out of the eleven female crania,
and seven out of the ten male crania, referred by me to this type,
belonged to persons of considerable age. The men attained an
average stature of 5 ft. 8-5 in. The crania and the other bones of
this variety of men enjoying Romano-civilisation have resisted the
ravages of time better than those of the other form. There is no
reason, however, for supposing that this valuable peculiarity is
referable to any conditions not intrinsic to the bones themselves.
The mode of their sepulture is identical with that of the other form,
and one of the best-marked specimens of the type in question was
taken from a grave over which an Anglo-Saxon urn containing the
burnt bones of an adult was found. The larger skulls in this series
* For introduction of panes of glass, or at least of the manufacturers of them, into
England in 680 A.D., see Wylie, ‘ Fairford Graves,’ p. 17, and per contra Corbet
Anderson, “Uriconium,’ 1867, p. 69, ibique citata.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 627
belonged in all but one instance to men of a stature little, or not at
all, short of six feet, and this large stature must not be forgotten
when we admire the large size of their brain-case. Only one female
skull which at all approximates in size to these larger crania has
come into my hands at Frilford; and this skull belonged to a
woman of little, if at all, more than 5 ft. 1 in. in height. But
I incline to think that the female crania, seven in number, which
I have spoken of as ‘the River-bed type modified by increase of
size, and which constitute in the tabular view to which I allude
a third variety of the Romano-British series, with an average
stature of four feet nine inches and a-half, are to be considered as
the female representatives of the ‘globose Romano-British type.”
For, strikingly similar as the contour of these skulls is to that
assigned by Professor Huxley" to his ‘River-bed skulls, their
capacity exceeds that of those crania, and their measurements come
to correspond very closely with those of the smaller male skulls
belonging to individuals of smaller stature of the globose Romano-
British type, whilst in their solid texture they resemble the larger
skulls of that division.
Facsimiles of these female crania have been procured from many
excavations in this country. I have found them in the ‘Long
Barrow’ at Crawley, which has been already spoken of as contain-
ing skeletons with crania of the brachycephalic British type, and
which, it should be added, has furnished us with evidence as to
female skulls corresponding to the large brachycephalic male skulls,
and differing, therefore, considerably from every variety of the
River-bed type. A skull very closely similar to this Frilford
variety of pre-Saxon times may be seen in the museum of the
London College of Surgeons, under the number ‘5712 R’ in the
Catalogue, and with the title ‘ Peat skull.’ And, lastly, a modern
female skull obtained for me by Dyce Duckworth, Esq., M.D., from
the Hinter-Rhein-Thal, near the Splügen Pass, the country of the
“Disentis’ type of the Swiss anatomists, would have shown me, had
other evidence been wanting, that this form of, cranium has per-
sisted into, and is abundant in, our own day. .
A modification of the River-bed type is presented to us in
certain small crania to which I have applied the term ‘cylindro-
cephalic.” In this form represented by two female and undoubtedly
* See ‘Prehistoric Remains of Caithness, p. 120. -
S S 2.
628 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
pre-Saxon crania (No. ii. Sept. 1867, and No. iv. Jan. 1868), the
frontal and parietal tuberosities are nearly or quite obsolete, and
the calvaria, elongating as if in compensation, becomes somewhat
cylindroidal in its antero-posterior outline.
Only one male cranium has been found by me at Frilford, which
I should class with the River-bed male skull from Muskham, and
the Towyn-y-Capel skulls so intelligibly described by Professor
Huxley in the ‘Prehistoric Remains of Caithness,’ p. 120, and fre-
quently examined by myself in the museum of the College of
Surgeons. This cranium belonged to a strong man of six feet,
beyond the middle period of life, who seems, from the direction of
his grave, and the copper staining upon his somewhat prognathic
jaws and collar-bone, to have been acknowledged as a Romano-
Briton, and to have been buried just as individuals whose osteo-
logical remains speak with some authority to their greater culture.
By the possession of a slightly greater breadth, and consequently
a much higher cephalic index, 78 as against 76 of the typical male
River-bed skull just specified, this skull shows a tendency towards
assuming the outlines of the smaller representatives of the globose
Romano-British type. The fact that but one male against nine
female skulls of the River-bed type has been found at Frilford
amidst so many other types of head and so many marks of civilisa-
tion, is suggestive of the explanation which their having belonged to
a slave population would more or less satisfactorily give. The River-
bed skulls from the barrow at Crawley which have come into my
hands are also all female, as I think, but this barrow has by no
means been exhaustively explored. And I incline, though doubt-
fully, not having had the pelvis nor the long bones to aid me in
forming my judgment, to refer the Towyn-y-Capel skulls in the
College of Surgeons to the same sex as all the similarly-constructed
crania, except the one just mentioned, found at Frilford. In the
large male skulls, of which I have spoken, Professors Rütimeyer
and His would, I think, recognise their ‘Sion typus;’ and assuredly
they merit the titles Kräftigkeit and Würde, which Rütimeyerl be-
stows upon them. It may be right to hold that these crania belonged
to men British in blood, though here at least Roman by citizenship;
but, if we assign them to the Roman immigrants, we shall have an
explanation of the enlargement of the River-bed type of skull sug-
* ‘Jahrbuch der Schweizer Alpen' for 1864, p. 398.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 629
gested to us at once in the very probable hypothesis of intermarriages
taking place between foreigners and the, possibly aboriginal, in-
habitants of the country, who may have been actually slaves, but
must certainly have been in a lower state of civilisation. And in
this hypothesis the paucity of male River-bed skulls would also find
an explanation. -
The Roman immigrants had all but certainly a preponderating
proportion of males amongst them, and it would be natural to
suppose that the same disproportion prevailed similarly among the
swarms of the less settled, less civilised, Saxons. But I am bound
to say that the craniological evidence before me leads me to think
that the reverse of this very reasonable anticipation was what
actually took place, at all events here; for the crania found buried
with the Anglo-Saxon insignia of the female sex are most distinctly
different, both as to signs of culture, and as to type and contour,
from the crania which belonged to the Romano-British women
exhumed here. I do not think these Rowenas with somewhat
prognathic jaws, and small unhandsomely contoured calvariae, could
have been ‘exceedingly fair and goodly to look upon ;’ and I am
certain that Martial, though he may not have been a physiognomist,
would never have said of these Saxon females what he said of the
British lady, Claudia Rufina", that she might have been taken
by a Roman matron for one of her own country-women.
M. Serres, on the other hand, appears” to have convinced him-
self that in the Merovingian cemetery of Londinières the males
belonged to the Scandinavian and the females to the Celtic race.
And, upon the general considerations which have been very clearly
and convincingly put forward by Professor Pearson * and by Mr. L.
O. Pike *, I should be inclined to think that wholesale massacres of
the conquered Romano-Britons were rare, and that wholesale im-
portations of Anglo-Saxon women were not much more frequent.
Still Anderida was levelled with the ground, and its women and
children, as well as its male inhabitants, were put to the sword.
* Claudia caeruleis quum sit Rufina Britannis
Edita, quam Latiae pectora plebis habet !
Quale decus formael Romanam credere matres
Italides possunt.—xi. 53.
* Cochet, ‘Normandie Souterraine, p. 188, ed. i ; ‘Comptes Rendus, xxxvii. p. 518;
“L’Athenaeum Français,’ Oct. 22, 1853, p. IoI3.
* Op. cit. p. Ioo. -
* “The English and their Origin, pp. 59, et seqq. .
630 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
And where the obstinate resistance of the inhabitants may not have
provoked the invaders into cruelty, which would have been un-
natural, even in the notoriously cruel Saxon (see Salvian, cit.
Kingsley, “Roman and Teuton,’ p. 46), the civilisation of the
former may very well have attained to such a level as to make them
think a retreat into Damnonia preferable to remaining on the same
spot with a race so destitute, as the Saxons were, both of the
means and appliances of the arts and manufactures which make
this life enjoyable, and of the beliefs which make the prospect of
another comforting. At Frilford the relics of Roman manufacture,
as well as other remains, show, as I have said, that a population
must have existed there previously to the Saxon invasion, which
was in the possession of a very considerable share of the material
and other elements of the civilisation of that period. The very
name of this Romanised settlement has been lost, and the Saxon
name Frilford, like that of Garford, a village a few hundred yards
distant, may possibly speak, as the Rev. Isaac Taylor, in his ‘Names
and Places,’ has suggested with reference to Gateshead", to the
destruction of a bridge by the worshippers of Frea. The name,
indeed, seems to point to the same explanation as the great number
of urns; and to suggest that the very real heathenism of the
soldiers of Cerdic may have driven away a population who might
have acquiesced in submission to such professed Christians as the
soldiers of Clovis exhumed at Londinières. Such a story as that
which Bede tells us” of the refusal of the British priests to eat in
company with the Saxons, even in his time, enables us to under-
stand in what abhorrence the Christians must have held them in
the days of cremation”. Some Lloegrians, as the Triads tell us 4,
‘became as Saxons;' but many of the Celtic tribes, as their poems
show us, preferred emigration to submission and coalescence. The
large Romanised towns, no doubt, made terms with the Saxons,
who abhorred city life ", and who would probably be content to
leave the unwarlike burghers in a condition of heavily-taxed
submissiveness. The villages would be more exposed to the violence
* See pp. 266, 267. Gateshead, however, may mean Caprae Caput. See Bede,
* H. E.”
* H. E." ii. 4, 20.
* See also ‘Crania Britannica, p. 184, vol. i., and pl.xx. p. 3.
* Pike, op. cit. p. 46.
* See Pearson, op. cit. p. 264.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 631
and lawlessness of hordes made insolent by conquest than the large
towns; and I am inclined to think that where we find Roman
remains succeeded by relics of the Anglo-Saxon cremation
period, on a locality which now bears an Anglo-Saxon name,
emigration or extirpation of a Christian population may have very
often entered into the now irrecoverable history of the locality.
I further suspect that the heathenism of the Anglo-Saxon domi-
nation during the hundred and fifty years' which elapsed between
the time of Hengist and that of Augustine is one and not an un-
important factor in the complex aggregation of conditions which
has given us the Germanic language which we speak. Whilst
and where heathenism reigned supreme, the performance of the
Church services would doubtless cease; and in an age of few books,
and those in manuscript, and in a country which, with whatever
centres of civilisation and population, was, after all, but thinly
peopled, it is easy to understand how the language of the van-
quished succumbed in three or four generations to that of the
victors, whose relics speak to their great numbers being so ubi-
quitously scattered over England. Even in France, where the
Merovingians allowed every citizen to declare what law, Frank
or Roman, he would live under, and where the priests used the
Theodosian code, and so put the Germanic idiom at a disadvantage,
it was still employed by the kings and nobles even in the Car-
lovingian period *. On the other hand, during my somewhat
considerable practice in the way of exhuming Saxons, and my
gradual familiarisation with the two facts of their great aptness at
destroying and of their great slowness in elaborating material
civilisation, a doubt has little by little grown up in my mind as to
the extent of the debt which we are so commonly supposed to owe
* Professor Pearson, ‘History of England, i. IoI, suggests that the long duration
of the struggle may have caused the victory of the Saxon language, by allowing of
the perpetual fresh arrivals of German-speaking invaders.
* See Gibbon, ‘Decline and Fall," ed. 1838, vi. I 18, 351, 376, chap. 38, viii. I56.
For an instance of the power obtained and exercised by the Christian ministers, see
Fleury, ‘Eccl. Hist.’ viii. 34, 5o, of the Council of Macon. Fleury in his small work,
‘Essays on Ecclesiastical History,’ tells us, p. 203, English Transl. I 721, that the
Goths, Franks, and other German people dispersed into several parts of the Roman
provinces, were so few in comparison with the ancient inhabitants that it was not
thought necessary to change the language of the Church on their account. On the
other hand, Bede tells us, that in his time God was served in five several languages
in Britain, namely, Anglorum, Britonum, Scotorum, Pictorum, et Latinorum. See
also Taylor, “Words and Places,’ 1864, p. 151; Lingard, ‘Hist. A.S. Church,’ i. 307.
632 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
to our Anglo-Saxon conquerors. That they conquered a much
divided and not very numerous Romanised population of Christians,
and overran the greater part, if not the whole, of England proper
whilst yet heathens, and within the comparatively short space of
time during which they remained such, proves, of course, that the
Saxons were superior to the Britons in the arts of war as it was
then understood and carried on. But though war in our days is
very intimately dependent upon the arts of peace, proficiency in the
one set of accomplishments was by no means so correlated with
proficiency in the other fourteen hundred years ago. And though
my investigations have made me a very firm believer in the reality
of the Saxon ‘man and steel, the soldier and his sword,” they have
not revealed to me any convincing evidence of the importation into
this country by these invaders of any such distinctive civilisation
as the language often held as to our ‘old Teutonic constitution,’ or
‘the landing of Hengist in Thanet having been the birthday of
English liberty,’ would seem to pre-suppose. Civilisation and
culture are not wholly dependent upon material conditions, but
I apprehend they cannot exist without giving us some material
and tangible evidence of their existence, at all events secundum
statum praesentem, of a very different kind from what we find in
pre-Augustinian Anglo-Saxon interments in England. Mr. Meri-
vale's dictum " to the effect that ‘it may appear that moral culture
is almost altogether independent of material progress,’ is too much
out of keeping with the ordinarily-accepted views of the way in
which the external world works upon human nature, ouris acuens
mortalia corda, to need discussion at length; and when Professor
Pearson” says “it would be unjust to judge the Teutonic tribes of
the fifth century by the low development of the mechanical arts
among them,' we expect to have evidence of some other arts and
pursuits having somehow or other attained to a compensatory high
development amongst these races at that time. Guizot *, it is well
known, has compared the social and political condition of the
Germanic races at this period of their history to that of the Red
* “Conversion of the Northern Nations,’ p. 186.
* See, however, his ‘History of England,’ pp. 44, 51, Ios, 112, 130, 264. The high
development of the pictorial art to which Professor Westwood's magnificent work,
recently (1868) published, speaks, belongs to Christianised, and therefore as little to
“unalloyed Saxondom' as do Caedmon, Bede, or Alcuin.
* ‘Hist, Civ. Franc.’ lect, vii, tom. i ; cit. Merivale, ubi supra, note G, p. 185.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 633
Indians; and when we find Sharon Turner, the historian of the
Anglo-Saxons, telling us" that Ethelbert, after his conversion by
Augustine, ‘became distinguished as the author of the first written
Saxon laws which have descended to us, or which are known to
have been established, an important national benefit for which he
may have been indebted to his Christian teachers, as there is no
evidence that the Saxons wrote any compositions before, we may
be inclined to think that the views of Guizot are nearer to the
truth than those of Ozanam”, Greenwood, and Rogge.
We have historical, literary, archaeological, and anatomical
evidence for saying that two or more distinct varieties of men
existed both in England and France, both previously to and during
the periods of the Roman and of the Teutonic invasions and
dominations °. The earliest Welsh traditions, Professor Pearson
informs me, speak of the social races inhabiting Britain, the
Kymry, the Lloegrwys, and the Brythons,’ all descended from the
Kymry. The word ‘Kymry’ itself, however, has been supposed,
* “History of the Anglo-Saxons,’ i. 332. See also Taylor, ‘Words and Places,’
p. 339, and per contra, Kemble, on Runes, ‘Archaeologia,” xxviii.
* Ozanam, however, cit. ‘Merivale, l.c. 187, says, “Les lois de l’ancienne Germanie
me nous sont connues que par les témoignages incomplets des anciens, par la réduction
tardive des codes barbares, par les coſtumes du moyen àge. Il y reste done beaucoup
de contradictions, d'incertitudes, et de lacunes.” Gibbon may be shown to be simi-
larly self-contradictory by a comparison inter se of the following passages; vol. i.
chap. ix. p. 362, ed. Milman, 1838; vol. vi. chap. xxxviii. p. 325; vol. v. chap. xxxi.
p. 317. The stories told of the two Gothic Princes in the two latter passages are
quite inconsistent with the statement contained in the first of the three, to the effect
that ‘in the rude institutions of the barbarians of the woods of Germany we may
still distinguish the original principles of our present law and manners.’ See Finla-
son's Introduction to Reeves’ ‘History of the English Law,’ 1869, p. xl; and Professor
Pearson's ‘Historical Maps,’ 1869, where at p. vii. the Professor speaks of the Saxon
invaders as consisting of “a few boat-loads of barbarians.’ I agree as to the barbarism,
but differ as to the numbers of the Anglo-Saxons. Both these valuable works came
into my hands after the coming of these sheets from the printers. See per contra,
B. Thorpe, “Ancient Laws and Institutes of England,’ preface, p. xxii.
* Gibbon, v. 351, ed. 1838, says, “If the princes of Britain relapsed into barbarism
whilst the cities studiously preserved the laws and manners of Rome, the whole island
must have been gradually divided by the distinction of two national parties.’ See also
Pearson, l.c. pp. 99, Ioo; Coote's “Neglected Fact in English History,’ pp. 144, 149,
169 ; Skene’s ‘Four Ancient Books of Wales; Gododin, ‘Poems, pp. 382, 394, 412 ;
Broca, ‘Recherches sur l'Ethnologie de la France, Mém. Soc. Anthrop. de Paris,
tom. i. 1860 ; Sir William R. Wilde, “Beauties of the Boyne, pp. 229, 232; Dr.
Thurnam, “On the two principal forms of Ancient British and Gaulish Skulls,”
Memoirs of the Anthropological Society of London, vol. i. ibique citata; Huxley,
‘Prehistoric Remains of Caithness, pp. I 14, seqq.
634 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
like the words “Frank’ and ‘Aleman,’ to denote social or con-
federative, rather than genealogical, community; and, though we
are warned thus in limine against any premature attempt to har-
monise the results of philological with those of craniographical
enquiry, it may not be entirely hopeless to attempt to harmonise
the traditions which tell us that the Romanised town populations,
the “Lloegrians,’ took the side of the Saxons against their own
Countrymen, with the facts of our ‘finds’ in cemeteries. Now,
these facts, as they have presented themselves to me, I have, with
the help of light borrowed from many other investigators, read
thus. Two varieties of capacious crania, one dolichocephalic and
the other brachycephalic, have been found by me in cemeteries
referable by their archaeological characters to the periods cor-
responding with, and immediately subsequent to the close of the
Roman domination in England. These two varieties of skulls are
not ordinarily found occupying one and the same tumulus, at least
with the relative positions which the remains of two races in-
habiting the same district peacefully usually hold to each other,
and I incline, though but doubtſully, to anticipate that evidence
will be ultimately produced to identify the dolichocephali in ques-
tion with the Lloegrian traitors, and the brachycephali with that
portion of the Kymry which preferred exile to the Saxon yoke.
The fact of the dolichocephali having been found abundantly (see
p. 624, supra) in the Suffolk region of the Littus Saxonicum, where
the Celt and Saxon are not known to have met as enemies when
East Anglia became a kingdom, is not without its significance.
Their geographical distribution may indicate a greater political
pliability just as their greater variety of cranial conformation in-
dicates a greater anatomical plasticity. In the same cemeteries
with both of these varieties of skulls I have found skulls which are
very closely similar to Professor Huxley’s ‘River-bed' type of
skull, and which I should be inclined to think may have belonged
to a serf, or at all events to a poor, population, whose necessities
may have made them as indifferent as any similar population is
now to the political leanings of their masters. I should agree with
Professor Huxley in considering this a very ancient form of cranium;
but, though I should allow, with a knowledge of the great aptitude
for modification possessed by the human cranium, that it may be
connected by transitional forms with the dolichocephalic Celtic
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 635
varieties', I am convinced that it is even more closely allied with
that brachycephalic form which has been called ‘Ligurian’ by
Professor Nicolucci, which is identified with the ‘Disentis’ type of
Professors His and Rütimeyer, by Dr. Hölder in his excellent paper
on the ethnography of Würtemberg’, though the Swiss Professors
themselves would demur to this unification *; and which, finally, is,
I apprehend, the form considered till recently 4 by nearly all con-
tinental anthropologists as the oldest of European types. I am
inclined to hold that the rough-hewn brachycephalous Briton, of
whom Dr. Thurnam has written in his paper on ‘the two principal
forms of ancient British and Gaulish skulls*,’ was distinct from
the brachycephalous ‘Ligurian, though very possibly descended
from one common stock; just as I should think it very probable
that the cultured brachycephalous skulls of which I have spoken
were produced simply by the operation of civilising influences upon
the rougher crania of similar type, but of earlier times; and as I
should suppose that Roman civilisation and Roman inter-crossing
elaborated the larger out of the smaller and earlier dolichocephalie
skulls of this country. The five varieties which I believe may be
thus distinguishable—viz., the two brachycephalous, and the two
dolichocephalous, cultured and uncultured respectively, and the
‘Ligurian’—will be found to be connected with each other by
inosculant forms. Even under conditions of the most primitive *
simplicity and peacefulness, the human cranium shows a great
tendency to variation; and in England we must recollect that this
essential liability to variation was much intensified in early times
by the migrations and immigrations of the Belgae from the con-
tinent; by those of the pastoral inhabitants of the then thinly
peopled, forest-covered country; and in later times by those of the
Romans and Saxons. Most or all invasions entail more or less of
* As taught by Professor Huxley, l.c. p. 120 ; and ‘Proc. Soc. Antiq.' April 19,
1866. -
* ‘Arch. für Anthrop.’ bd. ii. htt. i. 55–57.
* See ‘Crania Helvetica,’ p. 41 ; ‘Arch. für Anthropologie,” i. 70, 1866; Ecker,
“Cran. Germ. pp. 76–86; Huxley, l.c. pp. 117–1 18.
* For a discussion as to the priority in point of time of the brachycephalous or the
dolichocephalous form of skull, see Mortillet, ‘Matériaux pour l’Histoire positive et
Philosophique de l'Homme,’ 1867, pp. 383–385; Ecker, “Crania German.’ p. 93.
* “On two Forms, l.c. pp. 31–44.
* See Bates, ‘Naturalist on the Amazons," ii. p. 129, and per contra, Ecker, ‘Crania
Germaniae Meridionalis,” p. 2; Gratiolet, ‘Système Nerveux,’ ii. p. 286.
636 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
intermarriage between the invaders and the invaded; and the
craniographer who considers what very motley hordes passed into
England under the names ‘Roman’ and ‘Saxon’ respectively, and
for what long periods these immigrations continued to be made,
will be cautious as to his inferences. Other disturbing conditions
were introduced by the invasions specified: among them I need
only mention the establishment of an antithesis between town and
country life, which, in a country intersected by woods and ill-
provided with roads, is equivalent to the establishment of an
antithesis between civilisation and savagery. Isolation, howsoever
produced, whether by social, by political, or by physical barriers,
tends to exaggerate the ethnical or tribal characteristics which
intercrossing tends to obliterate. But a subjective cause of much
fallacy lies in the curiously corresponding psychological fact that
one class of mind is as prone to overrate distinctions as another is
to underrate differences.
In conclusion, I must be allowed to express my sense of the
obligations I have incurred to Professor Phillips, whose advice and
opinion I have very constantly sought; to Professor Pearson, whom
I have consulted well nigh as frequently; to Heathcote Wynd-
ham, Esq., M.A., Fellow of Merton College, who has given me
assistance upon several chemical and mineralogical points which
arose in the course of my investigations; to James Parker, Esq.,
for suggestions as to several archaeological matters; and to Charles
Robertson, Esq., for superintending these disinterments upon several
occasions when I was unable to be present.
CATALOGUE OF FRILFORD EXCAVATIONS.
October and November, 1864.
I. SET. Cranium A. Found with a fibula 2 ft. above it, wrongly described by me as
a male skull in ‘Proc. Soc. Antiq.’ 2 ser. iii. 139. Probably an Anglo-Saxon
woman. Middle-aged.
Cranium B. Found with a small Roman coin. Probably, from this and from ana-
tomical characters, a Romano-British woman. Middle-aged. Elongated oval
type.
Lower jaw from leaden coffin No. i. Roman man. C. Middle-aged. In this leaden
coffin a coin of Constantine the Great was found.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 637
Calvaria E. Asymmetrical and with a partly open frontal suture. It is possible,
though this calvaria came into my hands a month later than the lower jaw C,
that it belonged to it. Mr. Akerman says (p. 3, ‘ Proc. Soc. Ant.’ l.c.) that the
remains from the two coffins were handed over to me for examination.
Calvaria D. Incomplete. From a second leaden coffin. Middle-aged man.
Capacious.
Fragments of 8econd lower jaw, possibly belonging to calvaria D.
º January 25, 1867.
II SET. i. Skull of ‘Hohberg’ type of His and Rūtimeyer, with long and other bones,
from a leaden coffin, in which were found five coins, one of which was of Con-
stantine the younger, a second of Valens, and a third of Gratian, obiit A.D. 383.
Femur 193, humerus 13-9. Old man.
ii. Skull of “Sion' type of His and Rütimeyer, with long and other bones, from a
leaden coffin, in which no coins were found. Clavicle and second left metatarsal
broken and repaired during life.
iii. Coins (some of which were lost in sending by post), and leaden coffins.
iv. Plain urn, which contained the bones of a child probably two to three years
old.
2 old men, 2 middle-aged men, 2 middle-aged women, I child, = 7 bodies.
April 16, May 9, 16, 1867.
III SET. i. Skull of old man, of ‘Sion’ or globose Romano-British type. Skull circum-
ference, 22# in. Femur, 20% in. Tibia, 15% in. Height, 6 ft. I in.
ii. Skull of young woman, of “enlarged River-bed type,’ see p. 625, supra, with some
Osteophytic deposit internally, aet. 20 to 25. Humerus, Io.3 in. Tibia, 11.7 in.
Stature, circa 4 ft. 6 in.
iii. Lower jaw, and frontal bone, platycephalic, said to have been found with umbo
No. v. Old man.
iii. Second lower jaw, also said to have been found with umbo. Very old man.
iv.
v. Umbo, reported to have been found with jaws iii and iii!, but in the grave in which
the umbo was reported to have been found a secondary interment was supposed
to have taken place, a tibia and femur having been observed in it lying with their
relative positions reversed.
vi. Calvaria of young woman, of “enlarged River-bed type,’ with cephalic index 77,
and some leaning towards the smaller type on the one side, as well as to the
globose Romano-British male skull vi of September, 1867, on the other. It
resembles skulls vi of April 1, 1868, and xi of same date, and very possibly
may be the female form of the Romano-British globose type. It is mainly in
length that these female skulls are inferior to the smaller male skulls of the
‘Sion' type. N.B.-8 millimetres is the average excess of male length. Femur,
13 in. Humerus, Io in. Mean stature from these two bones, 4 ft. 2.5 in. A
phalanx of an ox and a piece of pottery were sent with this skull. This skull was
found very near an infant's.
vi. Child about time of birth.
vii. Skull of very old man, of Romano-British elongated type. Humerus, 13.2 in.
Radius, 9.2 in. Exostotic growths on humerus. Stature, 5 ft. Io in.
638 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
viii. Skull of strong young man, of Romano-British elongated type. No long bones.
viii. Skull of child, first dentition, middle period of.
ix. Bones of child, first dentition, early period of.
ix. Bones of child, first dentition, early period of
x. Skeleton of young man, of globose Romano-British type, very similar to skull ix of
March 17, 1868. Found with fragments of Roman pottery. Femur, 17 in.
Humerus, 22-5 in. Radius, 9.2 in. Ulna, Io. I in. Stature, 5 ft. 4 in. Some
carious teeth. -
xi. Skull of young woman, of Romano-British elongated type. g-
xi. Skull of young woman, (?) of Romano-British globose type.
xi. Skull of young man (?). Type (?).
xii. Calvaria of young woman, of Romano-British elongated type, with osteophyte
internally. Much water-worn, teeth all good but one, which is carious.
xiii. Skull and long bones of young Anglo-Saxon woman, from a shallow 18-in. grave
running from west by south to east by north, the deviation from orientation being
18° north. Two fibulae, four or five beads, and fragment of an urn. Femur,
17 in. Tibia, 14 in. Stature, 5 ft. 4 in. A piece of Anglo-Saxon and another
of Roman pottery found in this grave, of small size.
4 old men, 6 young women, I infant, 3 children, 2 young men, I doubtful, - I 7 bodies.
xiv. Skull of old man, of ‘Hohberg’ type, with the long bones. A large wound
through skull, healed during life. Grave 3 ft. 6 in. deep, without relics, running
in a direction from N.W. to S.E. Femur 20 in. long. Stature 6 ft. All the
molars of upper jaw are lost. In the lower jaw the two anterior molars are left.
Some teeth are carious; they are small in size. The grave was immediately on
the right of that of the Anglo-Saxon woman xiii.
xv. Skull of Romano-British woman, with long bones, from a grave of same direction
but not quite the same depth as the preceding—2 ft. 9 in. Femur, 16 in.
Humerus, I1; in. Stature, 5 ft. A good instance, as is also xiii of Sept. 26, 1868,
xxiv. of Feb. 21, 1868, and cranium A of Oct. 1864, of the close adherence to type
which female skulls, especially of the elongated Romano-British type, show.
xvi. Skull of very old man, #, inch thick, of elongated British type, with Sagittal
furrow posteriorly. No relics.
xvii. Patterned cremation wrn, containing bones of child before period of second den-
tition.
xviii. Plain wrn, containing the bones of a person about the period of puberty.
xix. Skull of woman, middle-aged, of elongated Romano-British type. Charred matter
and pottery, and carious teeth from the grave. Femur, 16 in. Stature, 5 ft.
xx. Bones of child under 6 years.
xxi. Skull of young person with abnormal succession of teeth. Spongy growths in
orbits, and hypertrophic calvaria. Reported to have been found with two pieces
of blackish pottery and a nail.
xxii. Skull of young man, of ‘Hohberg’ type, wanting jaws. Femur, 18.3 in. Stature,
5 ft. II in. Sent with pieces of pseudo-Samian ware.
xxiii. Skull of male, of “Sion’ type. Massive, weighty. Belonged to a man past
middle period of life. Many teeth lost, both before and after death.
xxiv. Skull of young person, probably woman. Fragmentary, without history.
xxv. Skull of young person, probably woman. Teeth carious.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 639
xxvi. Lower jaw of old person, with six teeth.
xxvii. Bones of old woman, Dec. 31, 1867. Elongated British type. Femur, I s in.
Stature, 4 ft. 8 in. Coffin hooping and nails found in grave.
xxvii'. Fragments of an urn of Anglo-Saxon ware, said to have been found with a
burnt bone, Dec. 31, 1867.
I old woman, 3 old men, I old person (sex'), 3 young women, 2 young persons (sex'),
I young man, 2 children, I middle-aged woman, - 14 bodies.
September 16, 17, 18, 1867.
IV SET. i. Calvaria and bones of old woman from a grave running from N.N.W. by
N.W. to S.S.E. by S.E. 3 ft. 2 in. deep down to the coralline oolite. A burnt
flint, some pseudo-Samian ware, and some gray lathe-turned pottery, were found
in the grave with her. Femur, 16; in. Radius, 8% in. Stature, 5 ft. 14 in. Of
enlarged ‘River-bed” type. Lower jaw nearly destroyed by water-wear.
ii. Similar calvaria from continuation of same trench. “Cylindrocephalic’ female
skull. Stature, 5 ft. 4 in. Femur, I 7 in.
iii. Skull and long bones of young man of elongated British type, from continuation of
same trench. A sheep's tooth close by his jaws, and two flints. Stature, 5 ft.
Io in. Right fibula a good deal curved, epiphyses not fused.
iv. Skull of young Anglo-Saacon, found with spear and umbo. The spear at right
side of head with point upwards. This had been a secondary interment, the
upper jaw of a very old man (iv) having been found close to this skull, as
also a manubrium sterni with articular facet for first left rib much enlarged,
which could not have belonged to this skeleton. The grave was broader than
the others, and had large stones set along its sides. Its direction was W. N.W.
to E.S.E.
iv. Upper jaw of old person, probably male. Sternum and large head of humerus and
os calcis with it. -
v. Skull of very old man, with skeleton, from continuation of trench whence the
Anglo-Saxon No. iv came. The direction of the grave the same, but no relics
nor any stones set around it. Skull like iv and xi of March 17, and i of March
23, 1868. A mixed form combining the Hohberg with the Sion type. Can these
skulls have belonged to Christian Anglo-Saxons? See p. 616, supra. Femur,
18 in. Stature, 5 ft. 8 in.
vi. Skull of old man of “Sion' type, found with skeleton at a depth of 15 inches
below the patterned urn ix, the urn occupying a space corresponding with the
top of the sacrum of the skeleton below. Skull bones a little roughened by
water-wear, but also strongly made, and indicating, as do the other bones also,
both age and great strength by their various outstanding processes. Ceph.
index, 78. Stature, 5 ft. 8 in. Found with several pieces of flint and with
pieces of pottery.
vii. Skeleton of very old man, of elongated Romano-British type. A typical skull
such as No. 5709 in Royal College of Surgeons, which belonged to an ‘ancient
aboriginal inhabitant of Scandinavia regarded as the Celt;’ and called ‘dolicho-
cephalic by the donor, Professor Retzius.’ Found in a trench between the trench
with skeleton No. vi in it to the south, and the one with the Anglo-Saxon No. iv
in it to the north. Femur, 194 in. Stature, 5 ft. II in. Osseous upgrowth of
acetabulum, and hypertrophy of head of femur to correspond. Cephalic index, 72.
640 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
viii. Young woman, act. 17 to 19, from trench in same direction, but to south of others,
dug September, 1867, and to north of trench containing Romano-British woman,
xv of May, 1867. Found with flints and shards.
ix. Urn found above skeleton vi, containing bones of child under 8.
x. Fragment of probably a holy-water vessel.
About 4 ft. of ground had fallen in to the right of the pit, looking towards the River
Ock.
2 old women, I young woman, 4 old men, 2 young men, I child, = Io bodies.
January 9, 1868.
i. Child's bones, between 9 and Io aet. Many fragments of scoriform lava, probably
Niedermennig (Daubeny, ‘Volcanos, p. 50); no other relics brought with it;
compare Wylie, ‘Fairford Graves,” p. 24, and account of Anglo-Saxon woman,
xxii, Jan. 6, 1869. (Cf. Schaaffhausen, ‘Die Germanische Grabstätten am Rhein,’
1868, p. 122, and p. 608, supra.)
ii. and iii. Young women (20, 23), placed close, side by side, in the same trench ; ii a
little shallower than iii, and a little further forward, and with the left humerus
across the cervical region of iii. Roman pottery and nails. The legs of the two
skeletons were wide apart. The iron relics (nails) were found on the pelvis. No
nails near the feet. Probably buried at same time ; coffins in same trench.
iiia. Delicate unpatterned urn with child's bones, about 6 in. below the surface, and
18 in. above skull No. iv.; the place about a yard to the right of the place where
the pattermed urn of September 17, 1867, was found. Child's age towards the
end of 5–6th year.
iv. Old woman's skull, much senile atrophy, found 18 in. below urn iii" with face
upwards. No soil had fallen into the skull; one coin, the largest, was found on
lower jaw; two smaller ones on atlas and axis, which are stained in consequence.
Coins not identified. One nail was found on the right side of the head, but none
on the left, nor at the feet. All the bones are very light. Humerus, Io. 7 Io in.
Femur, 14-5 in., gives stature 4 ft. 6 in. ; humerus (say II in.) gives stature
4 ft. Io.6 in. ; mean 4 ft. 8.3 in., Small skull, cylindrocephalic.
v. Skull of a child, removed by the men. Close by was found a piece of lead, pos-
sibly from a leaden coffin, and with the bones an ulna, which had belonged to a
very powerful man, which had been part of a fractured segment repaired during
life. Compare account given p. 62o, supra, of skeletons from leaden coffins. First
dentition complete; second not begun.
3 children, 3 women, I old, 2 young, -6 bodies.
January 15, 1868.
vi. Strong wrn, not patterned, containing child's bones. Removed by men from earth
a little to right of No. i of Jan. 9. Aged probably about 9–10. Premolars not
displaced ; milk molars.
vii. Child's bones, a little to right of urn vi. Early period of first dentition.
viii. Child's bones under 6, at extreme left of “fall,’ i.e. of mass of earth thrown down
in quarrying operations. Removed by men.
ix. Young man, with nails and Roman pottery, nails at head and feet. Elongated
British type.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 641
x. Child, much decayed. Early period of first dentition.
xi. Calvaria, man, middle age, with pot and flint. Long bones much water-worn.
Elongated British type. No lower nor upper jaw.
xii. Old man. Face upwards, and left arm across body. About middle of “fall' and
to right of viii and xi. Elongated British type, but vertically carinate like the
preceding specimen. The crossing of the arms may point to his being an Anglo-
Saxon. See xxii, Jan. 6, 1869.
xiii. Old woman. Calvaria and femora, 16.7 in. Osteophytes and pacchionian pits.
Water-worn. “Sion’ type. Compare vi of April 1, 1868; xi of April 1, 1868;
vi of May, 1867.
xiv. Old woman. Skeleton sent by carrier. Right humerus, I 1.7 ; left, 11.2. Femur,
I3-4. Anglo-Saxon woman.
4 children, I young man, I middle-aged man, I old man, 2 old women, =9 bodies.
January 20, 1868.
xv. Knife, with much rust and (?) woody fibre adhering to it. Found close to xii in
the loose earth which had fallen to the bottom of the pit. Could this knife have
belonged to the little old woman, xiv (?); see skull, which is much more like that
of the Anglo-Saxon woman xiii of May, 1867 ?
xvi. Urn, a little to the left of the knee of xiii of January 15. The urn unopened.
xvii. Skeleton of woman (young). Her tibia was I ft. beneath the humerus of an
Anglo-Saxon, xviii, who was lying in a direction from S. S.S.W. to N. N.N.W.
and at right angles to her grave, which was in the ordinary Romano-British
direction from W.N.W. to E.S.E. In the intersection of the graves a beautiful
coin of Constans was found. Left radius injured during life and repaired. Both
humeri malformed. With this came part of upper jaw of old person, with three
teeth from canines inclusive backwards, of elongated Romano-British type.
Stature, 4 ft. II in.
I young woman, I age and sex uncertain, = 2 bodies.
February 8, 1868.
xviii. Anglo-Saxon young man, with umbo, spear, knife (no buckle), Roman tiles,
stones round grave; coin of Constans in intersection of his grave with that of xvii;
some animal’s (sheep 7) bones in grave (see Akerman, “Pagan Saxondom,’ Introd.
p. xvii); grave from head S.S.S.W. to N. N.N.E.; foot at right angles to grave
xvii 2 ft. deep ; xvii 3 ft. A tooth of ox between head of Anglo-Saxon and feet
of Romano-British woman. Femora only partially recovered, a large stone over
their lower ends having crushed them very much. Fragments of great size.
Clavicles long and curved. Humerus, I 3-1; radius, 9-3. For Roman tilings,
see” Archiv für Anthropologie,” i. 3, 356; (see xxii of Jan. 6, 1869).
xix. Man, strong, beyond middle life, probably. Head of River-bed type, parietal
protuberance. Ribs broken and repaired in life; abscess at root of one molar. A
good deal of exostosis on left humerus. Copper staining on jaw, and clavicle. No
nails found with body. Romano-British direction of grave. See p. 628, supra.
xx. Skull of middle-aged man, with Roman tile. Very elongated, with long bones.
Bones loose. Skull peculiarly elongated.
xxi. Skull of young man, found with vertebra of ruminant in grave, and a fragment
T t
642 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
of pottery. Diseased hip. This cranium has some approximation to the modern
form of English crania, and resembles herein cranium No. v of Sept. 1867, crania
xi and iv. of March 17, and cranium No. i of March 23, 1868.
2 young men, I aged, I middle-aged, = 4 bodies.
February 21, 1868.
xxii. Old Romano-British man, large skull with rong bones. Copper stain on left
ulna, immediately to N.E. of grave xviii, so that the Roman tiles found in taking
out the skeleton were supposed to belong to this skeleton. A good deal of
charcoal and decayed wood was found near the head, but not near the legs nor
pelvis. Of elongated type. Femur, 18.4; ulna, Io-3. The man, however, who
took out the tiles supposed them to belong to Anglo-Saxon No. xviii. In the
cases described by Wanner (‘Das Alemannische Todtenfeld bei Schleitheim,’ 1867,
pp. 13, 16; “Archiv für Anthrop." ii. 3, p. 356), Roman tiling was similarly
employed. In some cases the graves were, as here, so close as to have only a
single tile as a wall between them. See xxii of Jan. 6, 1869.
xxiii. Old woman (? old man). . Skull and long bones. Femur, 17 ; humerus, I 2.2 ;
radius, 8.9; ulna, 9.5 ; stature, 5.4. This is a very old skeleton, and I think the
sex may be doubtful, but it is probably, from lower jaw's muscular markings,
a male. The forehead is vertical, but perhaps abnormally; the vertex is cari-
nate. Globose type.
xxiv. Skull of old woman, with five coins; one of Valens, and one of Constans I.
Flint, ball-shaped, chipped. Flat flint and Roman pottery. Femur, I 5.6;
tibia, 12.4 ; radius, 8.4. Lower jaw nearly destroyed by water-wear. Elongated
type. -
xxv. Man, prime of life. Frontal suture patent.
xxvi. Fragmentary cranium of old person ; bones of young person of eighteen to
twenty wrongly assigned to it. …”
xxvii. Long calvaria, man prime of life. Lower jaw a good deal water-worn, and
the long bones lost, perhaps destroyed by decay.
xxviii. Infant.
xxix. Child, first dentition complete.
I child, first dentition complete, I infant, 2 men, prime of life, 2 old men, 1 old
woman, I old, doubtful of which sex, prob. male, I young person, 18–20, -9
bodies, counting xxvi as two.
March 4, 1868.
i. Skeleton of Romano-British woman, adult, of globose type, like No. xi of April 1,
1868. Skull larger and more strongly made than most female skulls, and a nearer
approximation to male skulls of same type. Teeth considerably worn ; no wisdom
teeth developed. Orthognathous, with posterior sagittal furrow. Femur, 16.2 ;
tibia, 13-4; humerus, II-2; stature, 5 ft. 8. Io in. %
I adult woman.
March 17, 1868.
i. Skull, with long bones and patellae, of a very strong young man, buried with frag-
ments of Roman pottery, black and red, and nail, with wood adhering to it, from
coffin. Femur, 18.5; humerus, 13.3. Skull, flat and broad, to be reconstructed.
Hyoid fully ossified. Elongated type.
ii. Skull of old man, with femur, and tibiae, and nails near head. Of elongated, flat
type. Large. Very large bones. Femur, 189.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. - 643.
iii. Skull of young woman, with long leg-bones and patellae; short stature; teeth
carious ; and abscess in alveolar processes. Elongated type. Lower jaw all but
destroyed by water-wear.
iv. Skull of adult man. No femora; no lower jaw; carious teeth. Skull high and
long, but not delicate, though possessing transverse post-coronal depression.
(Compare skull v of Sept. 1867, and skull i of March 23, 1868.) No femora were
found with it; the skeleton having been thrown down in a ‘fall' during the
quarrying operations. -
v. Skull of young Anglo-Saacon woman, very much contorted and distorted by post-
mortem pressure, found in a grave 2 ft. 4 in. deep, with six beads, some near head,
some over chest, perforated, of various sizes, of blue spongy glass, striated con-
centrically; fibula on either shoulder of flat shape, circumference gimped, and
immediately within a circle of stamped round depressions, diameter, 1.3, of much
the same pattern, but not identical, nor of quite same weight as another fibula of
uncertain date and place from this cemetery; of quite different pattern from
the two other sorts of fibulae found here, though of same general shape, flat, as
fibulae of xiii, May, 1867. A skewer-shaped bronze pin, 4 in. on the left breast;
a knife, 3 in, long, near the waist. For pin fastening shroud, see “Pagan Saxon-
dom,’ p. 71, pl. XXXV. fig. 5; “Archaeologia,’ xxxv. 477. The direction of the
grave was not quite that of the Romano-British, viz. W.N.W. to E.S.E., but was
very nearly this, running, as it did, from a little to the north of W. N.W. to a
little to the south of E.S.E. There was some Roman pottery in the grave,
animals' bones, an ox tooth, an oyster-shell, and a flint. The skull and the other
bones are much water-worn. But we can see that the skull is small and short,
that the nasals rose from a level with the glabella, which was little prominent,
though underlaid, as also the similarly low superciliary ridges, by sinuses. The
parietal tubera are fairly marked, the minimum frontal diameter apparently very
small, 3.7 in., though it may have been diminished by compression, the same
minimum frontal being 3-9 in. in each of the two other Anglo-Saxon women from
Frilford. The interior of the skull has the smooth polished appearance character-
istic of youth. The wisdom-tooth in the right half of the lower jaw is very small,
and not at all worn. The premolars are also little used in comparison with the
two true molars, though more than the third molar. The chin seems to have
been emarginated unusually below, but to have been fairly pronounced. The upper
jaw, judging from a small portion of the right side, must have been slightly
prognathous. None of the teeth are carious. There is copper staining on some
of the ribs, the clavicle of the left, and the humerus of the right side.
vi. Patterned urn. Probably a holy-water vessel, with characteristic bosses. Found
a little to the south of the grave of Anglo-Saxon woman No. v. It was about
4 in. from the surface of the ground with its top edge, which had escaped the
plough ; its bottom was about 6% in. Close to this urn or holy-water vessel was
a mass of infant skull bones, the child having been about (before or after) the
time of matural birth. It is possible that the diggers of the Anglo-Saxon woman’s
grave may have disturbed this urn in the process, and having broken the urn
may have reinterred it in fragments, and its contents apart from the fragments.
A plain fragment, which does not appear to have belonged to the patterned
fragment, was also found at some little distance from the patterned urn and the
baby bones. And it is again possible that the child may have been deposited in
the urn of which this latter fragment was a part. But I incline to think this
was not the case, as the child's bones do not bear marks of fire; and though the
Roman rule expressed in the words “minor igne rogi' (Juv. xv. 14o ; Plin.
T t 2
644 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
vii. 16) may not apply to an Anglo-Saxon interment, these bones may have belonged
to a still-born child, for which no urn would probably have been used.
vii. Skull and some long bones, imperfect, of young woman, wisdom teeth not through.
A piece of grey spongy pottery; no other relics. Romano-British direction,
W.N.W. to E.S.E. -
viii. Skull and long bones of child of 8 years, with two pieces of Roman pottery.
viii. Skull and some long bones of old man. Skull both globose and elongated.
Humerus roughened at point of origin and insertion of muscles.
ix. Skull and long bones of old woman (? very old man), with Roman pottery. Skull
of type of x, May, 1867. Femur, 16.3 ; tibia, I 3-2 ; humerus, II-4; stature,
5 ft. I in. It is doubtful, I think, whether this skull may not be a very old man's.
The lower jaw shows great marks of old age. The straight clavicles point the
other way. Of “Sion' type.
x. Skull with long bones, of young woman, possibly Christian Anglo-Saxon. This skull
was sent by the men, but without relics. The type seems to be that of
Anglo-Saxon woman xiii, May, 1867, and of woman, 771 m, Oxford University
Museum (see p. 616, supra), from Helmingham. The wisdom teeth are, though
little worn, very small in upper jaw. The jaw prognathic. Some little doubt as
to sex from slope of forehead and parietes and large mastoids, but, nearly cer-
tainly, female. Femur, 15 in. ; stature, 4 ft. 8 in. (I–51) by 4 = 56; tibia, II.5 ;
fibula, II.2 ; ulna, 8-3 ; radius, 7.5; humerus, Io.4. The cervical vertebrae,
from 7th onwards, having been impacted into the interior periphery of the lower
jaw, it is probable the head was raised when the body was buried, and hence that
this may have been an Anglo-Saxon interment. With this skull compare skull
5712 D, Royal College of Surgeons, which belonged to an Anglo-Saxon woman
from Brighthampton, and No. xiii, of Sept. 26, 1868, infra.
xi. Strong young man, with long bones. Protuberance on right parietal. Buried
with nail. Wisdom teeth either not coming or retarded. Second molars little
worn. Compare skull ix, supra, and vii, Sept. 1867. Taken out of grave by
the workmen, as also No. x.
I infant, I child of eight, 4 young women, 3 old men, I adult man, 2 young men, -
12 skulls.
March 23, 1868.
i. Young woman, aet. 17–18, no relics. Buried in grave running W.N.W. to E.S.E.
Good skull of modern well-developed European type. Ceph. index, 78. Height,
5 ft. 4 in. ; humerus, I I-9 in. ; femur, I 7 in. ; skull, 7 in. long, 5-4 in. broad, cir-
cumference 19.6 in. Compare skulls vii of Sept. 1867, and xi and iv. of March 17,
1868, for somewhat similar conformation. Can these skulls have belonged to
Christian Anglo-Saxons ? See p. 616, supra,
ii. Old woman, skull and long bones. Romano-British direction. No relics. Sutures
much obliterated. Exostoses in antrum maxillare. Extreme length of skull, 7 in.
The roots had reached into its interior. Vertical forehead. Elongated type.
Femur, 15.5 in.
iii. Child, with first permanent molar not through, at a short distance from ii; a
fragment of pottery, Romano-British, with it.
iii. Skull of strong adult man, with no long bones. Of broad platycephalic type.
Teeth small, considerably worn, one carious. A nail found with bones. The
skull was full of the small mollusc Achatina acicula.
iv. Skull with long bones, very perfect, of very strong adult man, found with Roman
tile and Romano-British pottery. Femur, 18.8 in. ; humerus, 13.8 in. ; radius,
9.9 in. ; ulna, II in. ; stature, 5 ft. II in. Of globose type.
I young woman, I old woman, I child, 2 adult men, - 5 skulls.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 645
- * - April 1, 1868.
i. Young Anglo-Saxon man, lying with head at N.N.E. and foot at S.S.W., the very
reverse of the compass-points held by the head and foot respectively of Anglo-
Saxon xviii of Feb. 8, 1868, and of Anglo-Saxon women of May, 1867. The body
was thrown down in the ‘fall’ of the quarry, and was described as ‘not being in
a grave, but lying above and at right angles to the other graves.” There was
a buckle I; in. long on the pelvis (cf. “Pagan Saxondom,’ p. 58; ‘Tombeau de
Childeric,” p. 234), and adhering to it some coarse flax fabric, as proved by the
microscope. This skeleton has the left radius and ulna bronze-stained, and in the
neighbourhood into which the bones were thrown a spear-head with a central
raised ridge (like the assagaye of the Hottentots, “Pagan Saxondom,’ p. 10), an
umbo, and a knife were found. These latter the workmen thought belonged to a
child, iè, which occupied a grave in the ordinary Romano-British bearing; but it is
much more probable that they belonged to this skeleton, which had an Anglo-
Saxon buckle upon its pelvis, and from which, in the wrench and jerk of the fall,
the umbo and knife may very readily have been dislocated. The diameter of the
umbo was 6.2 in. ; height, 2.8 in. ; lesser circumference, 14.4 in. There were four
broad-headed rivets on the broad periphery, with three eyelet-holes between each
pair. Its type was therefore the ordinary one found here. This umbo was
exchanged for one in the possession of the Aldworth family. The skull appears
after reconstruction to have been of the platycephalic ovoidal Anglo-Saxon type.
Cf. “Crania Britannica,’ Plate XLVI, and plate added in description of Plate IX.
i". Child, probably boy of about 12.
ii. Skull of old woman, with Anglo-Saxon ornaments, such as are described p. 70 of
“Pagan Saxondom,’ and figured Plate XXXV. fig. 4; and ‘Fairford Graves,”
Plate IX. fig. Io; “Cran. Brit.” Plate XX. p. 5; and Brighthampton, ‘Archae-
olog.’ xxxvii. No. i. 38; No. xvi. in Ashmolean Museum ; and with fibulae such
as are figured at fig. i. in Plate XVIII. “Pagan Saxondom,’ as found near Rugby.
The body lay in a grave running from W.S.W. to E.N.E., not an unusual bearing
for an Anglo-Saxon here. The grave was 27 in. deep. Stains of green on left
clavicle and right rib i., the pins on the ring having been on the left shoulder,
and the fibulae one on each shoulder. The fibulae are similar, also, to the two
figured by Mr. Akerman in the ‘Archaeologia, vol. xxxix. Plate XI. figs. 8 and
9, as found at Long Wittenham.
iii. Skull and femur and patella of old man, dug out of a grave with Romano-British
bearings, and from under an urn, iii”, containing burnt bones of an adult. A
mail was found in the grave with this old man. Skull eminently globose. Femur,
18.8 in. ; stature, 5 ft. II in. Lower jaw nearly destroyed by water-wear.
iii". Urm not reconstructed, plain, containing adult bones. It had a flat stone on the
top of it.
iii". Plain urn, with two bosses each on opposite sides, not pushed out from the
inside, but stuck on to the outside, containing burnt bones of an adult.
iv. Man past middle-life. Skull of globose type, with some of long bones. In a very
much deeper grave than usual, 40 in. deep, in usual Romano-British direction,
from W. N.W. to E.S.E. Many nails in grave with the bones, with wood,
probably oak, adherent. A fragment of old Roman pottery, the bottom of an
urn, in grave. Femur, 18.18; tibia, 14-8; stature, 5-II.
v. Skull of child, 64 years old, with two amber beads. Came from last grave but one
on right side, as did also the skeleton No. ix, which had a coin with it, and also
osteophytes internally in skull.
646 ExCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
tº
vi. Skull with a few broken long bones of old woman, very like a modern Swiss skull,
768 B, in Oxford Museum, with a cephalic index of 82. The oblique dip away
of the posterior half of the parietal makes its distinctive character from the
Anglo-Saxon xiii of May, 1867, and the skull xiv. of Jan. 16, 1868. It is shorter
and broader than the River-bed type, but its longitudinal are has the same
contour. Again, No. vi of 1867, with cephalic index 79, resembles it very much,
and by vi of May, 1867, we pass to vi of Sept. 17, 1867, with cephalic index 78,
and to the female skull or calvaria xi of April 1, 1868, xiii of Jan. 15, 1868.
vii. A child's skull, removed by the men. First dentition only.
viii. Young woman 25 to 3o, skull and long bones, found near child with two amber
beads. Skull of Romano-British, elongated, coronally-constricted type. See
• Crania Britannica,’ Plate LVIII. Wisdom-teeth not through the gum, though
the crista is anchylosed to the ilium.
ix. Skull of woman 25 to 30, found with a coin which is lost, and in last grave but
one on right side, whence came the child with the two amber beads. Osteophytes
on inner surface of skull. Femur, 16.5 in...; tibia, I 3-6 in. ; stature, 5 ft. 2 in.
x. Fragments of skull of old person, probably female. No history; found in ‘fall” with
fragments of Roman pottery; skull of platycephalic type with the posterior
sagittal ‘ rainure, supposed to characterize Celts and Scandinavians. See ‘Bull.
Soc. Anthrop. de Paris,’ 1863, p. 319; 1864, p. 283. Internally, in correspond.
ence with this, is a very deep furrow for the longitudinal sinus; showing of
course that the bottom of the two furrows outside and inside the skull corresponds
to a line of arrested growth, and that the skull has grown out on either side in
lines of the parietal tubera, to fit itself to the growing brain. In other skulls, as
for example skull No. ii of March 23, 1868, this parietal vallecula on the
exterior corresponds with raised ridge along the line of the longitudinal sinus.
See “Jour. of Anatomy and Phys. iii. 253, 1868, also Article xiii, p. I59.
xi. Skull and long bones of old woman # from extreme right of quarry; of globose
Romano-British type, resembling skull No. vi of Sept. 1867, and vi of April I,
1868, and vi of April, 1867. Femur, 14.5 in. ; stature, 4 ft. 6 in.
xii. Child with first set of teeth—removed by me. Romano-British direction of grave.
2 old men, 2 adults Q 8, 1 young man, I boy I 2, 3 children, 4 old women, 2 young
women, = 15 bodies. -
September 24, 1868.
- The excavations on this day were carried on
upon two patches of ground which Mr. Ald-
worth had observed to have stronger and
greener corn growing upon them than was to
be seen elsewhere. Great quantities of the
bones of the domestic animals, exclusive of the
i. Key of Roman type .
i
i. Stag's-horn hair pin .
iii. Bronze ring . . . . . . . horse but including the dog, were found, to-
iv. Two knives . . . . . . . . gether with the articles specified and numbered.
v. Spoon . . . . . . . . . No human remains were observed however.
These spots appear to have been the rubbish-
pits of some house of a person of considerable
wealth, an ‘eques.’ See Pearson, ‘History of
England, i. 45; and Coote, “Neglected Fact in
L English History, pp. 40–45, cit. in loco.
vii. Coin. One of the many coins imitated from Roman originals in 5th and 6th
centuries. Very common in England.
vi. Coin-shaped Kimmeridge shale
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 647
viii. Pottery of very many patterns and degrees of fineness, from very fair and fine
Samian down to very coarse ware. Some of both bestudded interiorly with
particles of silex ; some with pattern very like that of the Anglo-Saxon urn.
See Bruce, “Roman Wall, p. 438; A. Corbet’s “Uriconium, p. 63.
September 25, 1868.
ix'. Anglo-Saxon girl, with two plain bronze fibulae, in a grave from 18 in. to 24 in.
deep, lying over Romano-British woman (xvii” of Sept. 26, infra p. 648). The
skeleton's upper half ran from W.N.W. to E.S.E.; but the lower half of the body
was twisted at an obtuse angle to the upper half, and lay from N.N.E. to S.S.E.
This distortion probably accounts for the displacement of one of the fibulae from
the right shoulders on to the manubrium sterni. Towards the lower end of this
grave a beautiful coin was found, Byzantine, 4th century. Decentius. Many
bones brought of a child of 9 aet. For the view that men had only one fibula
and women two, see L’Abbé Cochet, ‘Tombeau de Childeric,’ 6d. 2de. 18 59,
p. 228. Can this distorted position correspond to the ‘contraction from the hips'
described by Canon Greenwell, at Kirby-under-Dale, Times, 1841 ?
x”. Skeleton of a child, I2 to 14 months, from a grave running from W. N.W. head to
E.S.E. foot. The depth of skeleton was 23 in.
xi". Skeleton of child, 6 to 7, found lying immediately above xii" in a grave with
bearings W. for head, E. for feet. There was a large stone at its head, and in
the grave were three pieces of Roman pottery, one beautifully patterned, and a
horse's tooth. First true molar just coming into place. Could this child have
been a Christian Anglo-Saxon 2 -
xii". Skeleton of adult male, probably 25 to 3o aet, lying underneath preceding
skeleton, head at W. N.W., feet at E.S.E. Femur, 19.2 in. ; humerus, 13.7 in.
Globose Romano-British type. Stature, 5 ft. loin.
September 26, 1868.
xiii. Skeleton of adult woman. Femur, I6 in. ; stature, 5 ft. In a grave running
from W.N.W. by N.W. to E.S.E. by S.E., its depth being 35 in. to stone which
was under the back of her head. The vertex of the head was horizontal, the
frontal norma looking E.S.E. and the vertebrae of the neck being underneath the
base of the skull. The head of the humerus was 2 in. from the skull. No relics
nor traces of nails in this grave. Possibly a coffinless one. Elongated type. A
number of shards were with this skeleton, but I think it may have been an
Anglo-Saxon woman, such as No x of March 17, 1868. -
xiv°. Skeleton of young man. Femur, 17.6 in.; stature, 5 ft. 4-4 in. The skull lay on
its right side, in a grave running from W.N.W. to E.S.E. of 36 in. deep, without
pottery or nails. Elongated British type.
xv8. Skeleton of old man. Femur, I'7.19 in. ; stature, 5 ft. 7.6 in. From a grave
running from W.N.W. to E.S.E. 32 in. to top of skull, which was lying on its
right side, not raised. The lower jaw a little on one side, not, however, so much
as the head. A stone 9 in. long, 5 in. across, and 3% thick, was so close to the
forehead as to render it difficult to think a coffin could have been present.
Elongated British type. Very fine skull, nearly of same size as the largest skull
of the Dinnington series. See “Journal of Anatomy and Physiology,’ vol. iii.
p. 253, 1868, also Article xiii, p. 160.
xvi. Skeleton of old man. Femur, 16.3 in. ; stature, 5 ft. Iº in. From grave of
same direction and depth as others; no nails, but some fragments of pottery and
‘marks of burnings.” Elongated British type.
648
EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
xvii". Skeleton of young woman, enlarged River-bed type. Femur, 162 in. ; stature,
xviii
xix.
XX,
xxi.
I
5 ft. # in. From a grave running N.N.W. by N.W. at 36 in. deep, one foot
deeper than the Anglo-Saxon girl's grave No. ix' of Sept. 25, under which it ran.
There was a large stone close to the forehead. The head was on its left side,
looking slightly upwards. A large fragment of the rim of an urn was found
between the left os innominatum and Sacrum of this skeleton. A small nail was
also found in this grave.
September 28, 1868.
. Skeleton, reported by men by whom it was taken out as having been discovered
in levelling the ground and smoothing the inequalities caused by the excavations
of Friday and Saturday, Sept. 25 and 26, and as having been in a grave of same
direction as, but of much less depth (viz. only 18-19 in.) than, the other graves.
It was ‘lying with its face downwards, as also its leg bones; and was found
with two pieces of iron, and also a knife. One of the pieces of iron reached from
its right elbow to its shoulder; the other was between the hip bone and the
bottom of the grave. The knife was underneath the frame, about the middle of
the body. The piece by the arm was a long piece all joined in one.” Probably
buried when bearers drunk. A coin was sent with this skeleton. Not verified.
(? Postumus) Young (? middle aged) Anglo-Saxon man of broader head type,
many carious teeth, bones much water-worn. Femur, 17.8 in. ; stature, 5 ft. 7.2 in.
Had received and repaired during life a severe injury on left frontal and both
parietals.
Skull with one long bone, the humerus considerably worn, the rest decayed or
water-worn, as also the lower jaw. No relics nor iron. In a grave of same
direction as preceding, and as the Romano-British grave, but deeper. Of
elongated Romano-British type. Old man.
Child. The long bones not brought, having been beneath the growing crop of
turnips. First dentition in place.
Bones of infant about time of birth, taken out of a grave about 18 in. deep, and
of ordinary direction, W N.W. to E.S.E.
TABULAR VIEW OF RESULTS OF OSTEOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS.
I. Table of Skulls and Skeletons illustrating the several Types and Nationalities.
The Celtic or vii. May, 1867.
Romano-Brit- XVI. A. ss 95
ish cranium of iii. Sept. 1867.
the ‘Cimbric * Vll. s, , , r Cranium B. Oct. 1864.
typeof Retzius ix. Jan. 15, 1868. xi. May, 1867.
is illustrated X}• 3, 2, xii. , ,
by— Xll. 2, 99 XV. 2, 33
XX. Jan. 20, 1868. xix. , ,
Male crania, xxi. Feb. 8, 1868. Female crania, xxvii. Dec. 31, 1867.
with average sta- : XXII. , 35 with average sta- * xvii. Jan. 20, 1868.
ture of 12 skele- xxy, Feb. 21, 1868. ture of 9 skele- xxiv. Feb. 21, 1868.
tons, 5 ft. 8-3 in. XXVii. ..., 33 tons, 4 ft. II-5 in. iii. Mar. 17, 1868.
i. March 17, 1868, i. Mar. 23, 1868,
..ll. 2, 2, ? A.S. P.A. Š.
iv. , ,, P.A. S. ii. . . »
..y. Sept. 1867 ? A: S. f viii. Apr. 1, 1868.
iii. March 23, 1868. \, xiii. Sept. 26, 1868.
xx. Sept. 26, 1868.
xi. Mar. 17, 1868? A.S.
xix. Sept. 28, 1868.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD.
649
The globose
Romano-Brit-
ish type, the
‘Sion typus” of
His and Rūti-
meyer, is illus-
trated by—
Of skulls, which, though not
found with, are,
causes, Conjectured to have be-
longed to, Anglo-Saxons . º
. Of Roman, or Romano-Brit-
ish, skulls of the ‘Hohberg’
type and stature 5 ft. Io.5 in. .
Anglo Saxons with relics
ii.
xxiii.
xxiii.
iv.
xii.
viii.
ix. March 14, 1868.
. Sept. 1867.
Ill.
xix.
i
º
ºl.
7.
Leaden coffin, 1867.
May, 1867.
Feb. 21, 1868.
March 23, 1868.
Sept. 25, 1868.
March 17, 1868.
April 1, 1868.
Feb. 8, 1868,
|
3 Female crania . º º e
II. Numerical Table.
Men from Leaden coffins, in 1864 and 1867 . © -
Men of the Hohberg type, besides one from leaden coffin, i, 1867 { Sººnk .
Anglo-Saxons with
or in urns . º
Young or middle-aged men with relics
3.11 º º º
Čhildren . . . . . . . . . .
Adults in urns (one about puberty) . ©
vi.
ii.
xi.
vi.
i
March 4, 1868.
April, 1867.
April 1, 1868.
e Sept. 1887.
Male crania,
with average sta-
ture of 11 skele-
tons, 5ft. 8.5 in.
One male cra-
nium which be-
longed to a man
of 6 feet may be
looked upon as
furnishingaform
transitional from
an enlargedriver.
bed type to the
globose Romano-
British form.
m other
. H
}*
}
there are
there are 3 Male crania .
Female crania
Male crania o
Males—Bones imperfect
Child . . . ©
3 Male crania
1. Female cra- |
mium, of size cor-
responding to H
male variety of
globose type.
8. Female cra-
nia, of smaller
size, and of a
type which may
be called the en-
larged river-bed H
type, with 7 ske-
letons averaging
4 feet 9-5 inches,
are represented
by— 2
2. Female cra-
nia, of a small size
and a type which
may be spoken of
as the cylindro-
cephalic river-bed
type, with a mean
stature of 5 ft., are
represented by—
{
• & tº e
relics
Old men .
Middle aged
{
Young women .
Middle-aged
Old 88
Urn unopened .
Children in urns .
xvii.
X111.
Xl.
Sept. 1868.
Jan. I5 1868.
May, 1867.
i. Sept. 1867.
iv. Jan. 1868.
. Sept. 1867.
I. March 17, 1868.
XI.
33 32
X. March 17, 1868.
XIV.
i. March 23, 1868.
xviii.
v.
IV.
Jan. 15, 1868.
. Leaden coffin, 1867.
. May, 1867.
33 33
Nov. 1864.
. May, 1867.
March 17, 1867.
. April 1, 1867.
Sept. 25, 1868.
Feb. 8, 1868.
April 1, 1868.
Sept. 28, 1868.
May, 1867.
Sept. 1867.
v. April 1, 1868.
• 2
: ; } . 4
I
: } . 2
• 4 )
• I
• 2
• I
... I • 2 I
• 2
• 3
• I
5
650 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT
- Old . . I
Skeletons supposed to have ( Men . . & - te Middle-aged I } 3
belonged to Anglo-Saxons, Young . I 6
fºugh found without re- Old t
1CS e º e e ld . I
Women { Young 2 } 3
Old . © II
Romano-Britons of elon- Men . { Middle-aged 3 } 21 Y
gated oval capacious type, Young 7
called “Cimbric’ by Retz- 32
ius, “Ethnologische Schrif- Qld ... . 4
ten,” p. 108 . . . . U Women { Mºased § II
Oung
Romano-Britons of globose Old . & 7
or “Sion type, the male | Men . . { Middle-aged 2 × Io )
crania of great size occa- Young I |
sionally, and , the female • 2 I
in only one instance ap- | Qld. ... . 6 |
proaching the larger male Women { Middle-aged 1 II
Crania in dimensions . . U Young 4
Male skeleton of enlarged River-bed type (Old) . . º e © e e & © . . I
Old . -> I
Men . . º - - 2
Skeletons the type of which { %ing . .
has not been determined, the Old
bones having been too much Women . e e e { e &
|
|
:
6
§. by water-wear or Young
Other WIS6 ©
e - Old . e 2
U Sex undetermined . . { Young . 4. 6
Infants . e • * e e - e • - 4
Children found without J Within period of first dentition . . . . . . . . . 14 2
relics and in graves . . From period of commencement of second dentition to • 23
that of puberty º º º • * - 5
Total • . I23
ſ 3o children. º e - e sº . Y
25 old men . º *
I3 old women
I9 young Women - • e &
- I5 young men . . . . e o Of which 123–
Of which 123 there are + 8 middle-aged men . • * • ?" 48 are men.
3 middle-aged women . º e 35 are WOmen.
2 old persons of undetermined sex -
4 young persons of undetermined sex .
3 adults from urns . e - e º
I urn unopened g - e e tº 2
FIXED POINTS FOR ARGUING AS TO DATE AND NATIONALITY
OF THE SKELETONS FOUND AT FRILFORD.
I. Coins.
In leaden coffin No. i, Jan. 1867, five coins, of which one was a coin of Constantine
the younger, one a coin of Valens, one a coin of Gratian.
In the leaden coffin opened by J. Y. Akerman, Esq. F.S.A., Oct. 1864, and also in one
of the graves opened by him at the same time, a coin of Constantine I. was
found. -
In the point where graves xvii and xviii of Jan. 20 and Feb. 8, 1868, intersected, a
coin of Constans was found. Possibly accidentally fallen in.
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 651
With skeleton xxiv. of Feb. 21, 1868, an old woman, of the elongated oval Romano-
British or Celtic type, five coins were found, of which one belonged to Valens,
and another to Constans I.
With skull ix of April 1, 1868, a coin was found, which is lost.
With skeleton iv Jan. 9, 1868, of a very old woman, of small cylindrocephalic type,
three coins were found, which could not be identified.
In the grave (but towards the lower end of it, whither it may have found its way
accidentally) of the Anglo-Saxon girl No. ix of Sept. 25, 1868, a Byzantine
fourth-century Decentius,
In the Roman rubbish-heap, examined Sept. 24, 1868, a coin was found, one of the
many imitated from Roman originals in fifth and sixth centuries. Very common
in England.
With the skeleton No. xviii of Sept. 28, 1868, a coin was sent, Postumus (?).
II. Relics.
Arms and ornaments. Lower jaws iv. of April and May, 1867. Reported to have
been found with an umbo No. v.
Skeleton No. xii of May, 67. Anglo-Saxon woman. Was found with fibulae and
beads.
Skeleton No. v of March 17, 1868. Anglo-Saxon woman. Was found with fibulae,
beads, and pin.
Skeleton No. ii of April 1, 1868. Anglo-Saxon woman. Was found with fibulae of
Midland counties type, with scoops and pickers on ring, and with a knife. But
see “Further Researches, Long Wittenham,’ ‘Archaeologia,” xxxix. Pl. XI.
p. I42.
Skeleton No. iv. of Sept. 1867. Anglo-Saxon man. Was found with an umbo and a
spear-head.
Skeleton No. xviii of Feb. 8, 1868. Anglo-Saxon man. Was found with an umbo, a
spear-head, a knife, and some Roman tiles set round his grave.
Skeleton No. i of April 1, 1868. Was found with an umbo, a spear-head with a
central raised ridge, a buckle, and a knife.
Skeleton No. v. of a child, April 1, 1868. Was found with two beads, not spherical,
and therefore probably Anglo-Saxon.
Skeleton No. ix of Sept. 25, 1868. Anglo-Saxon girl. Was found with two fibulae.
A coin was also found towards the lower end of her grave, but may have fallen
or worked its way into the grave without any intention on the part of the burying
persons. The coin was a fourth-century Byzantine coin of Decentius.
Skeleton No. xviii of Sept. 28, 1868. Anglo-Saxon man. Was found with the face
downwards, and with two pieces of iron, probably remnants of a crushed umbo, a
knife, and a coin, which was considered as probably of Postumus.
III. Urms.
Plain urn, iv. of Jan. 25, 1867, containing bones
of a child, 2 to 3 years old.
Patterned wrm, xvii of May, 1867, containing bones
of child before second set of teeth.
i. Anglo-Saxon.
652 EXCAVATIONS AT FRILFORD.
r Plain urn, xviii of May, 1867, containing bones
of person before age of puberty.
Patterned urn, ix of Sept. 1867, containing bones
of child under 8 years of age.
Plain wºn, iii” of Jan. 9, 1868, containing bones
of child from 5 to 6 years of age.
Plain urn, vi of Jan. 15, 1868, containing bones
I. Cremation . . . . . . of child from 9 to Io years of age.
- Plain urn, xvi of Jan. 20, 1868, unopened.
Plain urn, iii” of April 1, 1868, containing bones
of adult.
Plain urn, with two bosses, iii” of April 1, 1868,
containing bones of adult. -
Fragments, with bones, were found Sept. 1867,
\- and Dec. 31, 1867.
Patterned vessel in British Museum, of date 1864.
Patterned fragment, figured Plate i, found Sept.
1867. º
2. Holy Water Vessels (?)
Patterned fragment, figured Plate ii, found March
17, 1868, No. vi.
tº º A Roman vessel was found perfect at bottom of
ii. Roman . . . . . . .
one of the walls.
iv of Jan. 9, 1868, under urn No. iii” of Jan. 8,
I868.
iii of April 1, 1868, under urn No. iii” of April 1,
1868, not reconstructed.
iv. Skeletons found under urns
xvii of Jan. 20, 1868, was under Anglo-Saxon man,
xviii of Feb. 8.
xvii of Sept. 26, 1868, was under Anglo-Saxon girl,
ix of Sept. 25, 1868.
See also No. 3 (xxxvii), of Jan. 20, 1869, found under Anglo-Saxon woman, xxxviii
with fibulae, No. 2 (xxiii) of Jan. 6, 1869, found under Anglo-Saxon woman,
xxii with fibulae, both of which are in the Oxford University Museum, as also
No. xii" 4 of September 25, 1868, p. 647, supra.
vi of Sept. 1867, under urn No. ix.
v. Skeletons found under other
skeletons, which are identi-
fiable by their relics . . l
XXXV.
FURTHER RESEARCHES IN AN ANGLO-SAXON
CEMETERY AT FRILFORD, WITH REMARKS
ON THE NORTHERN LIMIT OF ANGLO-
SAXON CREMATION IN ENGLAND.
THE first discovery in the cemetery at Frilford, subsequent to
those already recorded in the ‘Archaeologia,’ xlii. pp. 417–485
(Article xxxiv), was made on March 22, 1869, when a leaden coffin
was found, containing the bones of a young woman, with a toilet
comb' at the right of the back of her head. This brings the
number of leaden coffins found at Frilford up to five; one of them
has already been figured in ‘Archaeologia,’ xlii. pl. XXIV. figures
7 and 8.
The second was the discovery of some fragments, which, when
fitted to the three fragments found in September, 1867, one of
which is figured in the ‘Archaeologia,” xlii. pl. XXIII. fig. 2, p. 423,
make up the larger portion of what is often called a ‘holy-water
vessel.” The fragments of September, 1867, were to my eyes so
distinctly Saxon that I had one of them figured, and the unexpected
discovery of the remaining fragments enabled us to build up the
urn shown in the annexed woodcut. I imagine that a plough's
coulter had knocked out the first discovered fragments. No burnt
bones were found quite close to the urn, but one fragment was
found a little way off?. -
This reconstructed vessel may be compared with vessels of some-
what similar shape, and possibly similar purpose, found in Roman
* For difference between toilet and other combs, see Anderson, ‘Proc. Soc. Ant.
Scot.’ June Io, 1872, p. 551, and woodcut in loco.
* The fragment, which with a triangular apex pointing upwards, occupies about
the middle point in the front upper border of the urn figured above, is the same
fragment which is figured with its apex pointing downwards, pl. XXIII. fig. 2,
‘Archaeologia,’ xlii.
654 FURTHER RESEARCHES IN AN
cemeteries, for instance, at Hardham, Sussex, as figured by Pro-
fessor W. Boyd Dawkins'. But urns more similar still have been
found in many Teutonic cemeteries in England, as well as in France
and Germany.
May 3, 1870–An old Anglo-Saxon woman, with tweezers”,
knife, metallic button, and small metallic ornament at head of
humerus; large stones set by the sides of the graves, as described
in ‘Archaeologia, l.c. p. 438; but no nails. Depth of grave 2 feet
6 in., direction north-west to south-east. Abundance of charcoal in
the grave; arms extended, patellae in situ, Tibiae platycnemic.
Anglo-Saxon urn, Frilford. Scale # linear.
May 3, 1870–Fragment giving about three-sevenths of the
circumference of an Anglo-Saxon holy-water vessel,” or, perhaps,
rather of a rudimentary representation of cremation urn ; found
near the bones of a young person. This vessel has the characteristic
German angular projection round its body, the vandyking and the
stamped pattern, &c., which we are familiar with in urns of larger
size intended for the reception of burnt bones. Its small size,
as well as the fact that many such vessels have been found with
buried bodies and without any bony contents, shows that this
* * Sussex Archaeological Collections,’ vol. xvi. p. 58.
* For figures of similar tweezers, see Lindenschmit, “Alterthümer,' Bd. ii. Hft. v.
Taf, vi, where they are said to be found usually in men's graves, but sometimes in
women's. Neville, ‘Saxon Obsequies, pl. II; Cochet, ‘Normandie Souterraine, p. 219,
pl. VII. fig. 35.

ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 655
vessel cannot be considered as a cinerary vessel". Cochet, in his
‘Arch. Céramique, p. 13, explains what he calls the mystery of the
custom by the often-quoted passage as to holy water from ‘Duran-
dus, vii. 35, 37. I think this passage of little weight”, considering
that Durandus lived in the thirteenth century. I incline to con-
sider these vases, another example of which, from Haslingfield, is
herewith figured, and which sometimes have been, as at Selzen,
found to contain combs, shears, beads, fibulae, flint and steel, and
bronze rings, in fact everything that an ordinary cremation urn
does contain except the bones, to be rudimentary representations
of such cremation urns. Solemn occasions are tenacious of their
symbols, and will hold to them or keep hold of them in miniature
when they can no longer maintain them in full proportions. The
Fragment of Saxon urn, Frilford. Saxon urn, Haslingfield.
Scale linear. Scale linear.
wide range over which this diminutive representation of the larger
Germanic urn has been found is another argument in favour of my
* For the greater fineness of workmanship in these smaller vessels, see Kemble,
“Horae Ferales, p. 225; Roach Smith, ‘Collect. Antiq." iv. 161-196.
* It was thus as given by Cochet l.c. : ‘Corpus ponitur in speluncă in quâ . . .
ponitur aqua benedicta . . . Aqua benedicta ne daemones qui multum eam timent ad
corpus accedant: solent namdue desaevire in corpora mortuorum, ut quod nequiverunt
in vita saltem post mortem agant.” Cochet's own words are: ‘Tous les cimetières
Mérovingiens et même Carlovingiens que nous retrouvons . . . montrent toujours aux
pieds du mort un vase vide dont les hommes d’aujourd’huinous demandent le sens et
le mystère. Nous croyons l’avoir trouvé dans la piété naive et grossière, peut-être
même matérielle et superstitieuse, de nos pères. Nous supposons done, non sans
fondement, qu'ils auront mis dans ce vase une eau sacrée préservatrice des obsessions
et des possessions démoniaques sifréquentes chez lesvivants et dont les morts ne leur
paraissaient ni exempts ni affranchis.'

656 FURTHER RESEARCHES IN AN
view, which is based upon the recognition of an acknowledged
tendency of the human mind as opposed to a view which can only
appeal to a superstition of probably much more limited geographical
range'. A somewhat similar vessel, both as to size and contour,
from the Oberpfalz of Bavaria, may be found figured in “Die Samm-
lungen des Germanischen Museums, Nürnberg, 1868, p. 67.
May 23, 1870, iii; May 23, 1870, vii.-Skeleton of old Romano-
Briton lying in a grave such as described in ‘Archaeologia,” xlii.
p. 422, undisturbed 18 inches below skeleton of a young Anglo-
Saxon, aet. about 17, with umbo, spear, and knife.
May 23, 1870, iv b ; May 23, 1870, iv. a. — Skeleton of old
Romano-Briton, buried with coffin, lying from 4 ft. 7 in. below
skeleton of old Anglo-Saxon woman, lying in the contracted
position without any relics, and, indeed, with disproof of any
coffin, with two cruciform fibulae, a shroud-pin, an iron ring, and
a knife”.
In both cases the long axis of the upper grave formed more
or less of a right angle with the long axis of the semi-oriented
lower one. This shows that the burials could scarcely have been
simultaneous: for the other conclusions which can be based upon
the finding of two skeletons, verifiable as Saxon and Romano-
British respectively in the relation specified, see my previous
* For the general literature, see Cochet, “Arch. Cér.’ p. 14, ibique citata; ‘Nor-
mandie Souterraine, pp. 199, 267 ; ‘La Seine Inférieure,” p. 530; “Tombeau de
Childeric,” p. 391, ibique citata; Akerman, ‘Researches at Long Wittenham,' Archae-
ologia, xxxviii. pp. 342, 346, 352 (note), 330, 333, 342, 352 ; pl. XX. fig. 2; “Pagan
Saxondom,’ pl. XXII, where an urn 8 in. high is described as containing tweezers,
shears, comb, and knife, though it is not stated whether any bones were found in it or
not. See also ‘Inventorium Sepulchrale,’ 1856, Introd. p. xxvi, and Neville's ‘Saxon
Obsequies,” p. 9, where vessels like these are said to have been very frequently, as
regards the entire number (viz. three or four times out of twelve), found with infant
skeletons, and to have been found either at head or foot, “though in the grave of an
adult two small vases were found, one on each side of the former.” This difference
in placing seems to me to favour my view as above stated. The Selzen vases were, it
is true, or nearly always, at the feet, and those found in the French interments of the
same period, always, according to Cochet, l.c. But at Hallstatt (see V. Sacken, “Das
Grabfeld von Hallstatt,’ 1868, p. Io'7) the position of these vases was most variable :
“bald standen sie zur rechten, bald zur linken Seite des Skelettes, neben dem Kopfe,
bei dem Hüften oder zu den Füssen, bei Verbrennungen in der Regel neben den
Brandresten, selten auf denselben.’
* These four skeletons, with the relics accompanying them, were presented to the
Cornell University, Ithaca, United States. A more detailed account of these objects
than that given above may be found in the ‘Register’ of that University for 1870–
I87I, pp. 50–54.
ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY AT FRIIFORD. 657
Memoir on Frilford, Article XXXIV. It is worth while noticing
that this Anglo-Saxon woman was 5 ft. 5 in. in height, an instance
of what is said to be usual, but what I have found to be by no
means invariable, viz., an equality, or an approach to equality, in
the stature of the German women and men"; next, that her skull
was found five inches above her sternum, three stones having been
placed underneath it; and, lastly, that the knees were at a higher
level by several inches than either the ankles or the hips, besides
being, as the statement of the body having been in the contracted
position implies, out of the line of the long axis of the skeleton.
These points are not ordinarily found in Christian burials. The
arms were, however, crossed, and the hands folded inwards, as was
often done in such interments; with which, again, on the other
hand, this Anglo-Saxon burial appears to have contrasted in the
body's being turned somewhat on to the left side, a point which,
from the crushed condition of the skeleton, lying only about 2 feet
from the surface of the ground, it was difficult to make out.
The question now arises, Were such non-oriented, contracted,
shallowly interred, but relic-provided, bodies, the bodies of heathen
or of Christianised Saxons’ Mr. Kemble's dictum, “Horae Ferales,”
p. 98, to the effect, that, “if there is any equivocation in the matter,
it lies the other way; a few half-converted Christians may for
a while have clung to the rite of burning, but no Pagan Saxon was
buried without it,' is well known; but I am of opinion that this is
one of the few mistakes which Mr. Kemble made. This one mis-
take of Mr. Kemble led him logically to a conclusion to be found
at p. 230 of the same valuable work, the ‘Horae Ferales,’ in a
remark printed from the MSS. left behind him. Speaking of the
rarity of Saxon urns in Scottish Museums, one from Buchan, to be
seen in the Museum of the Antiquarian Society, being specified as
the only one he knew of, Mr. Kemble remarks, “If they (Anglo-
Saxon urns) should turn out to be very rare there (in Scotland not
merely in Scottish museums), it would be evidence that no very
important settlement was made there by the Saxons before their
conversion to Christianity; a result which history seems to bear
out. It was, in fact, Christianity which united the Saxons suf-
ficiently to make them capable of acting en masse against their
* For figure of a skeleton with skull similarly raised, see ‘Grabfeld von Hallstatt,’
tab. iii. fig. 4.
IJ Ul
658 FURTHER RESEARCHES IN AN
neighbours.” Without raising any objection to the view which
would assign the tendency to attack one's neighbours en masse to
the religion which is ordinarily said, and by members of the Society
of Friends believed, to teach lessons of peace, I would remark, that
history does not seem to me to bear out Mr. Kemble’s view, and
that the finds in many unmistakeably Teutonic burials by inter-
ment seem to me to suggest the idea of heathendom by their
shallowness, their want of orientation, their possession of secular
relics, and by the frequency, especially in the north, with which
the skeleton is discovered to be in the contracted position. In the
case of Kent, the great salient facts recorded by the historians as
to the conversion of Æthelberht are almost or even quite as in-
disputable as the facts of the ‘Inventorium Sepulchrale’ with
regard to the comparative rarity of cremation urns in that earliest
to be founded of Saxon kingdoms. It is true, as Mr. Kemble him-
self has shown (“Horae Ferales,’ p. 91), that cremation urns are
not entirely unknown in Teutonic cemeteries in Kent; but no
one can doubt that this comparative rarity in that locality, when
coupled with the facts that Kent was sufficiently powerful and
thickly peopled for the Frankish King Charibert to give his
daughter to the King of Kent, and that this King Æthelberht,
and, by consequence, most of his Court, were nevertheless heathen,
shows that a Saxon population, at all events when firmly estab-
lished in a country, could give up cremation before taking up
with the teaching of the missionaries.
The drawings which I lay before the Societyl represent a num-
ber of urns from a Saxon cemetery at Sancton, co. York, a village
a little south of Market Weighton, and the once better known
Goodmanham. These urns, the acquisition of which I owe to the
kindness of Charles Langdale, Esq., of Houghton Hall, mark, as
I believe, and as far as is known, the northern limit of cremation
as practised to any considerable extent by Teutons in the north of
England. But, little” as we do know of the history of the Con-
quest of Northumbria, we have some reason for believing that
AEthilfrith was an unbeliever, and that by his great victory at
Daegsastan in 603 a Pagan Saxondom was established under his
* These drawings were reproduced in the ‘Archaeologia,” plate xxxiii, 1879, vol. xlv.
* For statements as to this littleness, see Stubbs, ‘Constitutional History,’ p. 61;
Freeman, ‘Norman Conquest,’ i. 25, 26.
ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 659
rule from the Humber to the Forth. If Æthilfrith was a heathen,
such no doubt were his followers; and, if the whole of Northumbria
was heathen in 603, its two component sub-kingdoms of Bernicia
and Deira were, it cannot be doubted, at least as pagan for the period
little short of a couple of generations which intervened between the
date of the battle of Daegsastan and that of the landing, before A.D.
547, of Ida the Flame-bearer at Flamborough Head. The bones,
however, of the unsung heroes of these wars have not previously
been found in cremation urns, at least in any abundance, though
contracted Teutonic burials are common enough between the two
latitudes mentioned.
U u 2
XXXVI.
ON THE THREE PERIODS KNOWN AS THE IRON,
THE BRONZE, AND THE STONE AGES.
I HOPE that in the observations I am about to submit I shall
make plain the differences which have enabled antiquaries to divide
pre-historic times into two principal divisions, namely, the Stone
and the Bronze ages—and to draw a tolerably sharp line of
demarcation between these periods—and the Iron age, in which
we are now living, and to which the interment examined this day
in Oakley Park belonged.
It has been said very truly that “Les divisions des étres, des
objets, des sciences sont la source la plus commune des erreurs de
l'esprit humain ;’ and naturalists regard the aphorism ‘Nature is
not so strict a classifier as man’ as being one of their common-
places. And I do not say that no one of the three ages has been
overlapped at either end by another, nor can I accept all the
minute subdivisions of these periods which some specialists have
urged upon us. But gradations at both ends of any series should
not prevent us from seeing, acknowledging, and holding, that it
may be distinct enough in its middle; and if old forms of imple-
ments and weapons are enabled by isolation as regards locality to
live into contemporaneity with newer ones, that is only what
happens with older forms of animal and vegetable life which
isolation of the same kind often preserve as living fossils, but
without for a moment making us doubt the propriety of referring
them to an age distinct from ours.
Let us begin with the Iron Age, with the age of which we
know most, and so work our way gradually upwards and backwards
through the Bronze into the Stone periods. The drawings I ex-
hibit represent the implements and weapons used by the Romans
THE IRON, THE BRONZE, AND THE STONE AGES. 661
and by the Anglo-Saxons, which were of iron. The Roman weapons
are, some of them, such as we see them to be on monuments and
some other works of art; but in some instances they were drawings
of the actual weapons themselves as found on battle-fields and
elsewhere. The hastae and pila of the Saxon and Frank, for such
were in reality their spear and the angon, were, on the other hand,
found where I have never found the Roman weapons, viz., in the
graves of those warriors. This difference, as to the fitting out of
their deceased, depended, I would suggest, upon a difference of
views as to the future state of the dead; and this difference did not
consist, I apprehend, in that the one race held that the future state
would be such a peaceful one that weapons of war would be super-
fluous in it, whilst the other believed that it would be more or less
a continuation of the life of assault and battery they had so richly
enjoyed here; but in a very different opposition of beliefs. The
‘sunt aliquid Manes’ of Propertius was as beautiful a piece of
poetry to the Roman as any other of the beautiful poetry of that
sweet poet, but it was nothing more. The Teuton, on the other
hand, held firmly on to the belief in another world; and this belief
accounts for the deposition of weapons in the graves of their dead.
I am inclined to think that the Iron Age would be better spoken
of as the ‘Steel Age.” For there is no reason why we should not
suppose that iron, as distinct from steel, may have been in the
hands of many tribes before they came into the possession of
Bronze; and if the iron was soft iron merely, bronze would be
much more useful and trustworthy for the purposes of war and the
chase, for which so many ancient and modern races have mainly
lived. A very striking instance from Roman history of the com-
parative uselessness of untempered iron tools for such purposes is
given us by Polybius, Hist. ii. c. 33. There we read, in a probably
somewhat unjustly unfavourable account of that somewhat rare
animal, a liberal military commander, that his colonels saved him,
as colonels have in later times saved other generals, from disasters,
by the following tactics. The Gauls came to the fight armed with
long pointless soft iron broadswords. These, the Roman tribunes
had observed, bent after each blow delivered on to a sufficiently
resistent body. Such a body they sought and found in the pilum
—that best of pikes or bayonets, with which a man could parry or
thrust, but with which he could not strike or slash. The brave
662 ON THE THREE PERIODS KNOWN AS
barbarian came up ferow viriºus, brandishing his broadsword, its
downward strokes were parried, and the malleable iron, glancing
downwards, bent as malleable iron will do, and left its gigantic
owner at the mercy of an Italian, some five feet six inches in
stature, who then brought into this sword-play a weapon which he
had been taught to use punctim, non caesim. The same tactics
succeeded at Culloden, as the tactic of thrusting and giving point
always will succeed when masses of men in rows, not isolated
individuals merely, are pitted against each other on the thrusting
versus the slashing plan, though the slashing sword at Culloden
was of good steel enough. The point for our present purpose in
this story of the victory of Flaminius over the Insubrian Gauls
lies in the proof it gives us of the existence, so lately in the world's
history as B.C. 224, of a warrior-race fighting with soft iron instead
of steel swords.
The red kidney iron ore, which we know so well from the fact of
such large fortunes having been made out of it in the country
lying north of Ulverston, and that other hematite known as
‘hematite brun,’ ‘Brauneisenerz, ‘Sumpferz, and the specular
iron ore of Elba and Norway, are widely ‘distributed,’ very rich
in their percentage of iron, and allow of its being easily (even if
wastefully, as we should consider it) extracted. In the metallic
state, iron is seldom met with naturally; as the ‘Dictionary of
Chemistry,’ sub voc., p. 335, tells us, telluric iron is very rare ; and
meteoric iron, the other variety of native metallic iron, now that
the common Greek name for iron is known not to have any relation
to any sidereal origin, but to express simply the dew-like out-
sweating of the metal as reduced in the primitive ‘bloomeries’ of
those early Dactyli, Elfins, and Dwarfs, whom we know as ‘Tubal
Cains,’ ‘Vulcans,’ ‘Sindris,’ and ‘Wayland Smiths,’ has lost any
claim which it may have been supposed to have had to being
considered the primitive source of iron weapons. Hence it is of the
utmost consequence to keep in mind the fact that certain widely
diffused ores of iron are very easy of reduction, as the examples
furnished by the metallurgy of certain African negroes, and of wild
tribes in India and in Borneo, abundantly prove. And it is possible
enough that in pre-historic times one of the more easily reduced
ores of iron may have been reduced, and even found to be malleable,
before not only bronze but even the mode of reducing a copper ore
THE IRON, THE BRONZE, AND THE STONE AGES. 663
was discovered. Still, this would not prove that bronze must, as
has been maintained, have, as being a more complex invention,
been a later discovery than that particular modification of iron
known as steel. The rigid resistent bronze would make a better
weapon, especially for that most efficient process of sword-play,
‘giving point,’ the thrusting punctim, as opposed to mere slashing
caesim, of the Roman military writers, than would such soft iron as
in the absence of the knowledge of converting iron into steel could
only have been available to the savages who reduced it. A pike
may ‘bend bravely, even when made of good steel, and a fortiori,
as the quotation from Polybius shows, when made only of un-
tempered iron. When, however, once the art of making steel out
of iron was discovered, and soft iron took on ‘the ice-brook’s
temper, the wider diffusion of the material, and the greater
facilities of this process of manufacturing an equally useful article
out of it, caused the displacement of bronze just as many a similar
discovery has caused the displacement of many another product of
toilsome elaboration by the introduction of another and simpler
one. It should not, however, be forgotten that “cementation' is a
preliminary process to that of hardening and tempering in the
manufacture of steel, that it is a process requiring several days as
well as the combination of several other conditions if it is to be
successful, and that the improbability of pre-historic men stumbling
early and easily into the knowledge of a process consisting of a
considerable number of heterogeneous operations is, in spite of the
now apparent simplicity of those operations, as great, perhaps, as
the improbability of their similarly stumbling into the discovery of
bronze.
Coming in the second place to the Bronze Age, and facing the
discussions hereinafter to be bibliographised, I have to say that, as
against all quotations from old and modern authors, and as against
all records, by whomsoever recorded, of the discovery of iron weapons
in Bronze Age Tumuli, I am as confident as I can be of anything
in Anthropology that no iron will be, though bronze not rarely is,
found in Tumuli of the Bronze Period and Round Shape in this
country at least. I have been present and assisted in more ways
than one at the examination of many ‘Round,’ ‘Bell,’ ‘Bowl,’ ‘Cone’
shaped Barrows, and in the primary interment in such Barrows I
have never seen any other metal than bronze. It is common
664 ON THE THREE PERIODS KNOWN AS
enough to find a Saxon burial with iron and bronze both in the
superficial layers of such barrows, but the superficial position of
such burials shows their posteriority in point of date. The central
interment at the bottom of the barrow on or sunk into the natural
soil, may or may not contain a bronze dagger, may or may not
contain weapons of flint, survivals from, and religious or ceremonial
reminiscences of, the Stone Age, may or may not contain vessels of
pottery, may contain a skeleton in the contracted position, or burnt
bones either in an urn, or in a case of bark, or simply naked in the
earth (I have seen all these cases); but it has never contained any
shred of iron within my experience, nor, as I believe, within that of
any person who can be trusted to distinguish between a primary
and a secondary interment.
It will be said by some in answer to this that iron is oxidizable
and perishable in an eminent degree, and that it would disappear
whilst the bronze would remain. This suggestion I will not
characterize as one of the study as opposed to one of the barrow,
but as one of the laboratory, and the laboratory with its strong
reagents supports it in a way that the slow and weak or wholly
inert chemistry of the deep sand, or rubble, or gravel-filled grave
does not. Of course, if you conceive a stream of water, acidulated
even slightly with nitric acid, to pass constantly over an iron
spear-head, there is no difficulty in estimating the time which will
be necessary for the entire disappearance of an implement so tested.
But no such agent is available in many, I might say most, Bronze
Period graves. In some such graves you may find the objects they
contain encrusted with a deposit of carbonate of lime, which would
have protected an iron weapon of the Bronze Period if there had
been any to protect ; or you may find, as I am happy often to have
seen, the bones in a capital state of preservation, and contrasting to
great advantage with the corroded and ‘perished 'bones of Saxons
whose iron weapons were, nevertheless, very present with them ; or the
grave itself may contain a considerable quantity of free carbonic
acid, as other sunk wells do, and yet may be so dry from conditions
of superjacent and subjacent rubble and soil as to have afforded no
means for the removal of any results of any slight erosion which its
contents might have suffered. The phenomena disclosed by the
spade must be compared with those disclosed by the test tube;
there is here a makro- as well as a mikro-chemistry.
THE IRON, THE BRONZE, AND THE STONE AGES. 665
One of many other convincing arguments for the conclusion that
iron came into general use later than bronze, is, to my mind, the
fact that in Switzerland you find, as in the museum at Berne,
bronze bracelets ornamented with beads of iron, and, as in a knife
from Mörigen, the blade of a cutting instrument made mainly of
bronze but similarly inlaid with strips of steel. On this, Désor
and Favre (‘Le bel Age du Bronze Lacustre,’ 1874, p. 16) remark,
“Or pour qu'on ait employé le fer en guise d’ornement il fallait bien
qu'on le tint en grande estime et qui il me fiſt pas très commun.” The
larger use of iron when a thin blade of it was carried on a handle
of bronze, the retention by such iron blades of the leaf-shape of the
bronze blades which they displaced from their bronze pommels, and
finally the exceedingly rich ornamentation of the pommels of the
iron swords found at that most instructive discovery at Hallstatt,
are all similarly indications that iron was of later introduction than
bronze; that at first it was the scarcer of the two materials. If,
afterwards, iron was made a servant of all work, and bronze was
retained simply for the manufacture of ornaments, as by our Anglo-
Saxon forefathers, this is but a history which can be paralleled by
that of many other household goods !
Copper, as distinguished from bronze, is, on a priori grounds,
likely to have been discovered and used long before metallic iron.
For it is much more abundant in the metallic state in nature, as
for example in Siberia, in the Faroe Islands, in many Cornish and
in some Welsh mines, in Brazil, Chili, and Peru, and, above all, in
large masses near Lake Superior, in North America. And, in
addition to being there available and obvious as a red metal—or,
indeed, the red metal—copper is malleable and ductile immediately
after fusion, and acquires considerable hardness when mired with
other metals. These last five words from the ‘Dictionary of
Chemistry,” sub voe. “Copper,’ bring us face to face with the
question: Where was made the discovery of the advantages to be
gained from alloying copper with tin, and so obtaining bronze 2
It was of course likely to be made in some district in which the
ores of these two metals were to be found in proximity. There are
three such areas. Firstly, Cornwall: but as against the claims of
our westernmost county are to be set, not only the ratiocinatively
weighty words of Caesar as to pigs or ingots of bronze, Aere utunfur
importato, but many materially ponderable arguments in the shape
666 ON THE THREE PERIODS KNOWN AS
of bronze celts themselves demonstrably also imported as manu-
factured. Secondly, Khorasan : as to the existence of tin in which
district we have hints from Strabo and from Burnes, but have
lately had full and authentic information furnished to us in a paper
written by the late illustrious Von Baer but twelve days before his
death on November 28th, 1876, and published in the “ Archiv für
Anthropologie, ix. 4, p. 262. It appears that the Vice-President
of the Imperial Geographical Society of St. Petersburg, Herr
Semenow, at the instance of Von Baer, procured the following
report as to the existence of tin and copper and other minerals in
the neighbourhood of the places tolerably familiar to us, as Herat,
Merv, and the Bamyan Pass. Here is the Report:–
“ Ein Bewohner der Stadt Meschhed, Aga Mamed Kasym Ragim, Arrendator
eines der vielen Kupferbergwerke in Chorassan, theilte mir mit, das 2o Farsangen
(I Farsange = annähernd 7 Werst) von der Stadt Utschan Miot Abot sich die reich-
sten Lager von Zinn, Eisen, Kupfer, Schwefel und Blei befinden und 2)6 Farsanger
von Meschhed ein Zinnbergwerk das sogenannte Rabotge Alokaband ist. Die Ge-
nauigkeit dieser Angaben ist bekräftigt durch den Vorsteher der russischen Kauf-
mannschaft im Chorassan, den Bucharen Hadschi Ibrahim der wohl bekannt ist mit
der hiesigen Gegend und mit vielen Personen die sich mit Bergwerksarbeiten be-
schäftigen: ausserdem habe ich mich factisch von dem Vorkommen des Zinns hier
überzeugt durch Ueberfluss von zinnernen Waschkrügen und grossen Schüsseln alter
einheimischer Arbeit, welche aus dem Zinn des Ortes gefertigt sind wie mir die
Besitzer sagten.
“ Nach den Aussagen der Kaufleute, die durch Handelsinteressen mit Merw in
Verbindung stehen, sind die bergigen Theile Turkmeniens das von Stamme Teke ein-
genommen wird, überhaupt reich an verschiedenen Erzen unter welchen sich auch
Zinn vorfindet. Genauere Nachrichten jedoch über diesen Gegenstand werde ich geben
in der Ausarbeitung der Tagebücher meiner Reisen im nordöstlichen Persien.
“ Hierzu schreibt der Geheimrath Semenow: “ Diese Nachrichten sind nach meiner
Bestellung gesammelt und mitgetheilt von einem Reisenden, der im Auftrage der
Geographischen Gesellschaft und des Herrn Gluchowskoi eine Reise nach Ost-Persien
(Meschhildo) zu Stande gebracht hat. Er heisst Ogorodnikow.”–P. SEMENOW.
“Diese Nachrichten machen es höchst wahrscheinlich, dass zu der vielen Bronze, die
man in den Ruinen von Assyrien und Babylonien gefunden hat, das Zinn aus der
Gegend von Chorassan kam, wo man die Drangianer zu suchen haben wird. Wie
weit hin das Vorkommen des Zinns sich erstreckt, ob bis zum Bamyan Passe der das
natürliche Thor im Hindukusch aus Afghanistan und Indien in das Flachland des
Orus bildet, bleibt noch künftigen Untersuchungen vorbehalten. Dass aber bis zur
Entdeckung der Zinngruben in Cornwallis alles Zinn zu den vielen Bronzen, die in
allen Ländern des Mittelländischen Meeres und in Skandinavien gefunden sind nur
aus dieser Gegend kam, möchte ich doch bezweifeln."
There is yet a third locality in which copper and tin are found
in a condition of proximity, which may well have led to the com-
bination of them into bronze. This locality is no less extensive,
and no less ancient a seat of human history, than the region lying
THE IRON, THE BRONZE, AND THE STONE AGES. 667
between Birmah and Banca, inclusively. This is what Mortillet
writes, ‘Revue d’Anthrop.’ i. v. 1875, p. 653:—
‘Reste le groupe de l'extrême Orient Asiatique. C'est là évidemment oil il faut
chercher l'origine du bronze. Les principaux gisements sont dans la presqu'île de
Malacca et surtout dans l'île de Banca, mais ils s'étendent dans d'autres iles de la
Sonde et remontent jusque dans l'empire Birman oil l'étain est encore exploité ac-
tuellement dans le district de Merguy. Ce minéral dans tous ces gisements se recueille
de la manière la plus simple et plus facile dans les alluvions. Ce sont bien certaine-
ment les alluvions les plus riches du monde en étain et celles qui occupent la plus
grande étendue. Il est done tout naturel que ce soit celles qui les premières aient
attiré l'attention de l’homme. La cuivre serencontre dans les mémes régions. Tout
le monde connait les gisements de cuivre des iles de la Sonde, Timor, Macassar,
Borneo. La Birmanie anglaise présente des mines de cuivre à côté des ses exploita-
tions d'étain. Le pays se trouve donc dans les meilleures conditions pour avoir vu
naitre l’industrie du bronze.”
Von Baer himself, l.c., thinks that Ceylon may very probably
have been one source whence tin was procured by the Phoenicians
trading for it with the Malays, as they traded doubtless with them,
at second, if not at first hand, for the cinnamon which still retains
its Malay name, little altered though it has passed through the
mouths of so many Western races. I a little doubt the correctness
of the introduction of the Malays into the picture ; for if the
Malays brought bronze, or even only the ores of either or both of
the metals forming it, to meet the Phoenicians at Ophir, it is
difficult to understand how they should have failed to carry the
knowledge they could not thus have failed to gain, with them on
their colonising expeditions over Polynesia. Yet Polynesia was
in the Stone Age till quite recently, though the common fowl and
the pig had been carried to some of the most remote of its islands,
and the dog even to New Zealand, in times beyond the memory,
if not beyond the traditions of the natives, and long before they
came into rapport with Europeans; and we learn from Mr. J. Craw-
furd, ‘Trans. Ethn. Soc., iii. 1865, p. 353, that it was the Gentoo
traders of the Coromandel coast who brought tin from Malaysia to
India, when the Europeans first came into relation with Malaysia
in the early years of the sixteenth century.
There can be no doubt that many of the bronze weapons now
found in this country were imported as made up ; if my memory
does not deceive me, hollow bronze weapons have been found upon
our south coasts, containing still the cores on which they had been
moulded for the use of our natives, who were balked of them by
668 ON THE THREE PERIODS RNOWN AS
the shipwreck of the vessel laden for them. On the other hand,
masses of bronze in the rough, pigs, that is, or even ingots, have
also been found in this country, together with smelting apparatus
and moulds; so that bronze must also have been worked up here,
as there is abundant evidence (see Klemm, ‘German. Alterthums-
kunde,’ 1836, p. 151) to show it was also in Germany. Every
nation, the most refined, perhaps, not more than the most bar-
barous, has its own fancies as to the patterns of its own weapons,
as much as its own clothes, its own architecture, and its own
ceremonials; and this feeling of independence would shortly evoke
a demand for the raw material and a production of moulding
apparatus. A very instructive story, bearing upon the possible
working of this desire for variation, is told by Major-General Lane
Fox, F.R.S., in a paper on ‘Primitive Warfare,' read by him June
5, 1868, at the Royal United Service Institution. As the paper
in question was printed only and not published, it may be allowable
here to reproduce it. It runs thus:—
“The next principle which we shall have to consider is that of variation. Amongst
all the products of the most primitive races of man, we find endless variations in the
forms of their implements, all of the most trivial characters. A Sheffield manufacturer
informed me that he had lately received a wooden model of a dagger-blade from
Mogadore, made by an Arab who desired to have one of steel made exactly like it;
accordingly my informant, thinking he had found a convenient market for the sale of
such weapons, constructed some hundreds of blades of exactly the same pattern ; on
arriving at their destination, however, they were found to be unsaleable. Although
precisely of the same type as those in general use about Mogadore, all of which to the
European eye would be considered alike, their uniformity rendered them unsuited to
the requirements of the inhabitants, each of whom prided himself upon possessing his
own particular pattern, the peculiarity of which consisted in having some almost im-
perceptible difference in the curve or breadth of the blade.”
Persons who, like myself, incline to the belief that the regions
round the Bay of Bengal were probably the seat, not only of the
discovery of the stream-works oxide of tin, but also of that of its
alloy with copper, will be tempted to assign more weight than is due
to the fact, or supposed fact, of the bronze-swords having such small
handles, as it may be thought Hindoos or people like them would
have. I am not quite clear that this bronze sword, leaf-shaped or
other, has always a very small hilt; certainly in some cases, if we
imagine the hilt to be wrapped round with leather or other material
suitable for the purpose, it will not turn out to be at all too small for
the grip of an ordinary English hand of the present day. At any
THE IRON, THE BRONZE, AND THE STONE AGES. 669
rate there can be no doubt that in this country the skeletons of the
Bronze. Period belonged to much larger, and stronger, and taller
men than did the skeletons of the Long Barrow stone-using folk
who procured them. In some parts of England the contrast in
this matter of size between the men of the Bronze and those of
the Stone Age is as great as that now existing between the Maori
and the gentle Hindoo; and in some, though not in all, parts, the
Bronze-users appear to have as entirely extirpated the Stone-users,
as the Maoris, in their cannibal days, would have extirpated any
similarly weaker race. The facts as seen by me, when in company
with Canon Greenwell, and upon other occasions, appear to me to
justify some such statement as this, as to the introduction of bronze
into this country. The stone-using inhabitants of Great Britain,
if not also of Ireland, may have had their first introduction to a
knowledge of bronze in the way of peaceful barter and commerce.
Some probability is given to such a view as this by the fact that
some of the earliest bronze axes are evidently moulded upon the pat-
tern furnished by stone weapons, just as in North America, where
there was a Copper Age, the copper arrow-heads are modelled
(see Lubbock, “Pre-historic Times,’ sec. ed., 1869, p. 245) on the
type of their stone ones. But with improved and advanced Bronze
weapons in this country, we find, invariably within my experience,
an improved and advanced race of men, so far as powerful limbs,
tallness of stature, and capacious crania, do make one race of men
superior to another. This race of men, besides their physical, pre-
sent us with many ceremonial and other differences; their burial
mounds are round; their pottery is of another kind, or kinds rather,
as they have funeral as well as other wares, the former of which the
stone men had not ; the ornaments they buried with their dead are
of a different kind, type, and material ; finally, the numbers of
dead interred in round barrows, and the numbers of round barrows
themselves, are very much greater than those of the dead interred
in long barrows, and than those of the round barrows themselves.
All this seems to me to point to a conquest of this country having
been effected by Bronze-using invaders, who came in great numbers,
probably as has been elsewhere suggested, from the Cimbric penin-
sula, which was once again in the Iron Age, viz. in the Iron Age
of Swegen and Cnut, an officina gentium victricum. If the Danes
in a recent war had been as much in advance of their enemies in
670 ON THE THREE PERIODS KNOWN AS
the adoption of improved weapons of war, as ea hypothesi they were
in the Bronze Age, and de facto in the Iron Age, of the inhabitants
of these islands, Schleswig-Holstein might still have been an
appanage of Denmark.
I take this opportunity of remarking that anybody who will
take the trouble of reading the few lines which come in Hesiod's
‘Works and Days,’ 144–148, just before the often-quoted line as to
the sequence of the Bronze and Iron Ages, will find that he had
somehow become as much impressed with the vast size and brute
strength of the bronze-using people as I, in spite of the currently
accepted statements as to the small hands of the men of that era,
have become from actual handling of the bones. Bronze Age
tumuli, however, may have been excavated, indeed, as the history of
the examination of the Tomb of Theseus, at Scyros, shows, they
actually were excavated in the days of the very early bards, such
as the one just referred to.
Virgil’s line
‘ Grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulcris'
expresses the tendency to magnify the size of such brouvailles; still
there was solid fact for what Hesiod wrote, l.c., and Ovid might
have given more space to insisting upon this very distinctive cha-
racteristic of the Bronze Age, than he has in his reproduction of
Hesiod, Metamorph. i. I25–127:—
‘Tertia post illam successit ahenea proles,
Saevior ingeniis, et ad horrida promptior arma ;
Non scelerata tamen: de duro est ultima ferro.”
In modern Europe we have but some half-dozen millions of men
under arms at the present moment, and we have lost by war in the
last twenty-five years something under a couple of millions only, by
the accidents inseparable from modern fighting ; and it is difficult
for us, consequently, to realise, even approximatively, the terrible
conditions prevalent in the ‘bella, horrida bella’ of the Bronze
Age. Hesiod appears to have been much impressed by what tra-
dition told him of it; he does not, however, appear to have thought
his own time so very much better, as we have such good reason for
thinking ours is.
I have sometimes thought that the comparison (for which see
Max Müller, Lectures, ii. p. 256, 8th edition, 1875) by the Sanskrit
THE IRON, THE BRONZE, AND THE STONE AGES. 671
writers of copper to the muscles or flesh of an animal, may really
have been a comparison of greenish bronze to muscles taking on a
greenish hue from decomposition, and that we should thus save
ourselves from supposing that copper, which, as a metal, is eminently
‘red, should have been contrasted by our forefathers with some-
thing, iron, to wit, which they compared to blood. At any rate,
leaving both mythology and pathology, I may say that Sir John
Lubbock has given us excellent reasons for doubting whether
Europe, or at least the western part of it, ever went through a pure
copper stage, as America, so rich in native copper, did. And as
regards metallic tin being used for weapons at least, I have come
upon only a single statement which could bear such a meaning ;
this statement is given by Klemm, ‘Germanische Alterthumskunde,”
p. 19, in the following words: ‘Ein Stück aus reinem Zinn fand
Kortum in der Ruhenthal Grabstatte,’s. 8. Io 5. It is plain, how-
ever, that this may have been a ‘find of an ornament as dis-
tinguished from an implement made of unalloyed metallic tin.
There are two Greek words standing at the end of line 612 of
the ‘Agamemnon’ of Aeschylus, which mean “baths for copper,’ but
which are usually translated dyeing of copper’ and are supposed to
be a proverbial mode of indicating an impossibility, or, as the Ger-
mans put it, an “Unding.” I strongly suspect that these words
have attained this secondary signification, not from any reference to
colouring, but simply to “tempering,’ and that the mode of temper-
ing bronze having been a secret, it has to be considered something
supra- and ultimately contra-natural. If this suggestion is true, we
have in it a fresh argument for the view which teaches that the
discovery of alloying copper with tin was extra-European in origin.
There is another new argument for the same conclusion, and for the
corollary to it, that bronze, like the Jade, Jadeit, and Nephrit of
the preceding or Stone Period, and like all imported articles in such
times, must have been scarce and highly valued; and this argument
lies in the fact that the use of stone weapons survived so long after
the introduction of this alloy. This was forced upon me in the ex-
amination this year of certain barrows in Somersetshire, proved to
be of the Bronze Period by the discovery in them of bronze weapons,
with burnt human bones, in which worked flints were in such
abundance, that had it not been for the discovery of the bronze
implements, we might almost have supposed that we were dealing
672 ON THE THREE PERIODS KNOWN AS
with interments of the Stone Age. These barrows were in a
district (that of Castle-Cary) the surface strata of which are low
down in the lower secondary formations, yet the worked flints, and
they not only ‘strike-a-lights’ or ‘thumb-flints,’ but scrapers, were
as abundant as they might have been in a tumulus upon a chalk
down. Their varied quality and great quantity render it impos-
sible to think that they are in such a district merely thrown in
ceremonially, and are evidence to the effect that, though tin and
copper were available enough, and side by side, at no greater distance
than Cornwall, those particular deposits had not then been utilised
for the manufacture in question.
Let us now pass to the Stone Age. I have not the knowledge
requisite for subdividing the Bronze Age into distinct periods; and
looking at the question in the light which played over the Somer-
setshire hills, when I was employed, as just now stated, upon them,
I doubt whether any subdivision of it, as it was in England, can
be justified. A Copper Age, no doubt, must have existed, and did
exist, in America, antecedently to the Age of copper alloyed with
tin ; but there is no evidence that it ever existed in England, at
least. More may be said, on the authority of Polybius and on other
evidence, for the subdivision of the Iron Age into two periods, one
of which, the earlier of course, had not learnt the art of tempering
iron, whilst to it a second, ‘the age of steel, succeeded then.” But
as regards the Stone Age we have no need to have recourse to mere
probable arguments and a priori evidence. There is no doubt what-
ever that the Stone Age is divisible into two great periods upon
several principles, which, however, make their several sections in
the same plane. We can look at a stone weapon and ask ourselves
one or other of these three questions; firstly, was it intended to be
used in the hand, or used as hafted ? Secondly, has it been polished
and ground up, or has it been left simply chipped over with con-
choidal fractures? Thirdly, was it found in company with pottery,
however rude, or was it found in some river gravel-bed, in company
with no other evidence of human handiwork, but with the bones
of mammoth and rhinoceros? If a stone weapon is so fashioned
that we can see that it was intended to be stuck into a handle or
haft, and if it is polished, we may be sure that it belonged to a
later than the mammoth period in this country, and that it may
be spoken of as Neolithic in contradistinction to the Palaeolithic
THE IRON, THE BRONZE, AND THE STONE AGES. 673
weapons. It is true that in the great factory for flint weapons,
which has been described by Major-General Lane Fox (“Journal
Anth. Inst., v. 3, 1876), at Cissbury, an implement, or implements,
which could only be used as held in the naked hand, came out
during the period of the excavations carried on there, and amongst
multitudes of ‘celts,” which were as obviously intended to be used in
handles. But survivals were not unknown in the great Stone Age
any more than in our great Steel Age; and for the very various
manipulative processes connected with the working of a Flint-mine,
with its tortuous galleries, necessitating an amount of ‘body-
bending toil” no way inferior to that necessitated by the galleries
of the modern coal-pit, a pointed stone weapon which had a blunt
end fitted for a hand grasp would not rarely have its advantage.
The fact that at Cissbury, as also at Grimes Graves, in Norfolk
(for which see “Journal Ethn. Soc., N.S., ii. p. 214), and at Spienne,
in Belgium (for which see ‘Mém. Soc. Sci. et Arts du Hainaut,”
1866–7, p. 355), it was found worth while to undertake and
execute such extensive works as are those flint-mines, enables us
to realise the meaning of the words ‘Stone Age' very vividly.
The demand for these weapons was so great that it was found
profitable to go through all this toil to supply it ; the margin of
advantage which made it profitable, lying in the mineralogical
fact that a flint taken freshly out of its chalky matrix, and retain-
ing its normal hygrometric properties, is more workable and
plastic than a flint which has been rolled about the world in
floods per mare per terram. A modern workman will break flints
fresh from the chalk for a shilling, whilst for an equal amount of
results for gravel pebbles he will charge you eighteen-pence. It
may seem something of a contradiction to the principles of the
identity of the period of handled, with that of polished, as opposed
to chipped flints, to say that the flints manufactured at Cissbury
were, with the few exceptions alluded to, all intended to be fitted
with handles, and yet that they were all left unpolished; but the
process of polishing a flint, when finely chipped, as these are, is a
very easy one, involving only the use of a little sand and water
to rub the broad chipped cutting edge into smoothness, on a stone
such as modern savages use for the purpose; and the modern
manufactory of metal weapons shows us that weapons and imple-
ments of all kinds are, from certain considerations of expediency,
X X
674 ON THE THREE PERIODS KNOWN AS
stored and stacked in an unfinished state, before being sent out on,
or for, sale. -
One point I should wish here to put upon record, relatively to
the excavations at Cissbury. In my paper on ‘The Animal Re-
mains found at Cissbury,’ published in the Journal of the Anthrop.
Inst. for July, 1876, vi. p. 22, as also in ‘British Barrows, p. 742
(this volume, Articles XVII, XIX), I expressed myself as having
been much impressed by what I had seen to the effect that the
pitfall, especially as eked out with certain accessories, had counted
for a great deal in the economy (if this be not to profane the
word) of the Stone Age. In the earlier of the two places referred
to, I say: “Hurdles of gorse probably were arranged on the prin-
ciple of the wicker hoops in a decoy, and it is easy to see how,
by such a plan, eked out, perhaps, by the firing of heaps of the
same useful material, a wild bull, or a herd, might be driven over
a pitfall.’ In the latter, I say: “It requires a greater effort of
imagination on our part to imagine a pack of wild dogs co-operating
with priscan men in driving a herd of wild cattle or wild pigs (both
of which were represented in the Cissbury Pits) along a track in
which a pitfall had been dug and covered over. Still what we
know justifies us,’ &c. When I wrote these words, I was very
distinctly of opinion that the suggestion they contain was, how-
ever obvious, yet entirely an original and novel one ; I was rudely,
yet not unpleasantly, undeceived a few days ago, when verifying,
as it is always well to do by often-quoted lines, the lines of
Lucretius, v. 1285. I tried back,' as I have heard it expressed
elsewhere, to the preceding context, which greatly fascinated me,
not only by its grand roll and flow, but also by the singularly clear
insight which it gave me into the way in which its author had
faced the great problem of “ Kulturgeschichte.” In that context I
came, to my great surprise, upon two lines, 1249–1250, which con-
tain a suggestion at once half-coinciding with, and half-contradicting
my own as just quoted. Lucretius, undoubtedly, can claim priority
as to the part of his hypothesis in which he and I agree; and per-
haps I had better not claim originality as to either part of mine;
but this question is of little consequence. Here are the lines of
Lucretius, v. 1249–125o:-
‘Nam fovea atque igni prius est venarier ortum
Quam sepire plagis Saltum canibusque ciere.'
THE IRON, THE BRONZE, AND THE STONE AGES. 675
To this disquisition on the several Ages of Iron, Bronze, and
Stone, I will here append an account of the disinterment of a
skeleton of the Iron (Roman) Period, which took place by the
permission of the Earl Bathurst, on August 27, in Oakley Park,
during heavy rain, in the presence of the Hon. Mrs. Lennox, the
Hon. Miss M. Ponsonby, Professor A. H. Church, Christopher
Bowley, Esq., R. A. Anderson, Esq., E. C. Sewell, Esq., and myself.
The skeleton was contained in a stone coffin, covered by a flat stone
slab, much of the same character as the undoubted Roman coffins
found at York and elsewhere in England, though, unlike many of
them, it contained no relic besides the skeleton itself, and a Roman
nail, of a type known at Cirencester. The dimensions of the coffin
Were :-
Length e o e g 7' 2"
External | Width at N.E. end . & 2' 8"5
| Width at S.W. end . & 2' 4"
Length ſº e e tº 5' 8"
Internal | Width at N.E. end . e I' 5"5
Width at S.W. end I' 5".
Its bearings were from N.E. by E. to S.W. by W., a rather
unusual orientation, it being more common to find the feet at a
point a little south, than at a point a little north, of the rising
sun, deaths being more numerous in the winter than in the sum-
mer quarters of the year. The head, however, was at the north-
eastward end, and this appears to make it probable that this coffin
dates as far back as the time when the Romans had relinquished
the practice of cremation, without accepting the religion, or, at
least, the religious practices of Christianity; to a time, that is,
between the death of Severus, in the first decade of the third, and
the accession of Constantine, in the first decade of the fourth
century, A.D. The skeleton was in good preservation; the only
disturbance to which it had been subjected, of a violent kind,
previous to our exploration, having been quite recently inflicted
by some gay young anthropologists from the day school, who, in
defiance of the school-board’s inspector, had, in their zeal for
science, been poking sticks through a chink at the north-east end
of the coffin, and had slightly displaced the skull inwards, besides
damaging its outer table and exposing the diploe. The lower jaw,
however, had not been displaced. On the back of the skull, and
also around the first cervical vertebra, there is a considerable
X X 2.
676 ON THE THREE PERIODS KNOWN AS
deposit of lime, probably the remains of quicklime which the
Romans often put into their coffins, as may be seen to great advan-
tage in the museum at York. I did not observe this till the bones
were cleaned in the museum here; and I did not note whether
there was any hole in the bottom of the coffin, whereby an exit
would be possible for this lime as dissolved by carbonated water
passing down into the coffin. Some of the other bones were
blackened in places by carbonaceous deposit from the leaves and
other vegetable matters, such as, if my memory serves me, beech-
nuts, which had found their way into the coffin and decayed there,
and also from the decay of the soft parts of the body and the wrap-
lings of it. The nail found in the coffin may, indeed, appear to
indicate that some sort of coffin of wood was used, as well as the
coffin of stone; there would have been plenty of room for one, as
the length of the Roman body was but five feet one inch, whilst
the internal length of the stone coffin was 5' 8"; but I think this
nail may have worked its way in from without, through the same
chinks which gave inlet to the other foreign bodies already men-
tioned. *
The left arm lay alongside the body, and the left hand rested
on the pelvis; the right arm was stretched upwards with the hand
at the face; the left leg was drawn up to the centre of the body, or
thereabouts. The distance from the end of the coffin to the pelvis
was 2' 11", leaving a space of about 4” between the sole of the
foot and the end of the coffin.
My thanks are eminently due to Professor A. H. Church and
to E. C. Sewell, Esq., for their help before, after, and during this
disinterment. For the measurements and descriptions following,
I am more entirely responsible than for what has preceded.
MEASUREMENTS AND DESCRIPTION OF SKELETON,
FROM STONE COFFIN IN OAKLEY PARK,
On the Estate of the EARL BATHURST, August 27, 1877.
Measurements of Skull.
External length . º º 7.3" | Frontal arc . º & o 5.2"
Fronto-inial length f/ Parietal arc . . . . 4.5"
Extreme breadth . o o 5.8" Occipital arc . e º o 4.5"
Upright height . © wº 5.5" | Greatest frontal width . º 4:9"
Absolute height . e e 5.2" | Greatest occipital width . º 4.8%
Circumference e o . 21.3" Basicranial axis o t . 3.75"
THE IRON, THE BRONZE, AND THE STONE AGES. 677
Measurements of Face.
Length of face © º . 2.25" | Width of lower jaws, ramus . I-3'
Breadth of face Interangular diameter . . 3-6"
Basio-submasal line o , 34" Cephalic index. © e o 79"
Basio-alveolar line . e . 3.5" Antero-posterior index . º 55"
Height of orbit . o . I.5" Femur . º e e . 17”
Width of orbit s º . I.6” Tibia. º º º g . I 2.2"
Length of nose . o . 2.0" Humerus. o º º . II.5"
Width of nose c e . I.o" Stature . º e s . 5'1"
Depth of lower jaw, at sym-
physis . © tº . I.I."
Age, about 30.
A well-filled-out skull, on the whole, though the parietal
tubera are still distinguishable, as is often the case in female skulls;
the forehead is vertical, but the parietal region slopes with consider-
able obliquity in its posterior two-fifths; the plane of the superior
occipital squama lies distinctly behind that of the posterior part
of the parietals, so that a very marked undulation is formed at the
line of meeting of the two bones. The relation of inferiority held
by the height to the breadth of the skull is probably merely a
sexual character; the vertical contour being eminently that of the
dolichocephalic type of skulls, whilst the smallness of the mastoid,
the slightness of the supra-orbital ridges, and the feebleness of the
lower jaw, show, what the characters of the limb and trunk bones
also show, viz., that the owner of this skeleton was a woman.
This woman had lost the second molar of the left half of
her upper jaw some time before the evolution of the wisdom
teeth of the lower jaw of the same side, and probably not very
long after the evolution of the second molar of the same side of the
lower jaw. The first molar of the right half of the upper jaw had
been similarly lost early in life; the second molar next to it was
largely excavated, and the wisdom tooth, on to which that carious
cavity opened, had an abscess at its fangs. The lower jaw teeth,
though all sound except the left second premolar, are much
crowded together. It is not clear that the wisdom tooth of the
left upper jaw was ever developed. Six abnormalities is a large
proportion in the dental series of a woman who was not much
beyond thirty years of age.
The slightness and straightness of the collar bones, the hori-
zontal direction of the neck of the femur, the characters of the
os innominatum and other bones, show the skeleton to have
678 THE IRON, THE BRONZE, AND THE STONE AGES.
belonged to a woman of about thirty years of age, or a little over.
The suture between the first and second vertebrae of the sacrum
is widely, but not symmetrically open, and its patency with a
greater width on the left than on the right side must be con-
sidered as due to some morbid process. All the sutures and epi-
physes of the limbs are closed and anchylosed; so also are, to a
great extent, the sagittal and lambdoid sutures in the skull. The
characters of the facial bones, such as those of the elevation of the
nasal bones, and the proportions indicated by the measurements,
show that this Romano-British lady may have deserved the praise
of Martial as expressed in the following lines:—
‘Claudia caeruleis quam sit Rufina Britannis
Edita, quam Latiae pectora plebis habet !
Quale decus formae Romanam credere matres
Italides possunt.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE BRONZE CONTROVERSY.
Crawfurd, John, ‘Supposed Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages,' Trans. Ethn. Soc., N.S.,
iv. I—I 3. 1866.
Wright, Thomas, ‘On the true assignation of the Bronze weapons,’ ibid., 176-196.
Lubbock, Sir John and Frederick, ‘On the true assignation of the Bronze weapons,”
ibid., v. IoS-II5. I 867.
Lindenschmit, “Zur Beurtheilung der alten Bronzefunde diesseits der Alpen, und der
Annahme einer nordischen Bronze-cultur,’ ‘Archiv für Anthropologie,” viii. 3,
161, 177. 1876.
Hostmann, Review of Hans Hildebrand’s ‘Das Heidnische Zeitalter in Schweden,’
translated by Mestorf, 1873, 8vo., A. A. viii. 278–314. 1876.
Mestorff reviews Engelhardt in the following pages, 315–320, of the same Journal.
Sophus Müller, “Dr. Hostmann und das nordische Bronzealter,’ ibid., ix. 2 and 3,
I27–14 I.
Hostmann, “Zur Kritik der Kulturperioden,” A. A., ibid, 185, 219. 1876.
C. E. V. Baer, ‘Das Zinn von wo?’ A. A., ix. 4, 187, 7, pp. 263-269.
Sophus Müller, “Zur Bronzealters Frage,” 27, 41.
Hostmann, “Zur Technik der Bronze,” 41–63. ! A. A., x. 2. I877.
Lindenschmit, “Zu den Vorstehenden, 63–73.
Hostmann, “Hoher Alter des Eisen-verarbeiten,” A. A., x. 4, 418.
See also for an excellent, though not distinctly controversial, account of the Bronze
Age in North Europe, a memoir, in an octavo of less than 140 pages, by Sophus
Müller. “Die nordische Bronzezeit und deren Periodentheilung’ von Sophus Muller,
aus dem Dänischen von J. Mestorff, Jena, 1878.
The beautifully illustrated work, ‘Le bel Age du Bronze Lacustre,’ by E. Desor
and L. Favre, 1874, has been referred to above.
The first volume of the Newcastle Archaeologia, 1822, contains a valuable article by
the Secretary, the Rev. John Hodgson, under the title, “An Enquiry into the Era
when Brass was used in purposes to which Iron is now applied.”—pp. 17–99.
XXXVII.
ON THE STRUCTURE OF ROUND AND
LONG BARROWS.
PROFESSOR RolliSTON read papers to the British Association,
September, 188o, On the Structure of Round and Long Barrows, his
remarks being illustrated by a number of diagrams. Premising
that one of his objects was to preserve barrows from being spoilt,
and thus to prevent the destruction of certain links in the history
of our species, he described the construction of barrows which he
had explored, and urged the absolute necessity of very great care
being exercised in such exploration. Speaking of urn burials in
round barrows, he briefly referred to the question of the cremation
of bodies, and the idea of it. Why did the people burn their dead?
He believed the idea was this—that all savage races, when they
had to deal with an enemy, were exceedingly prone to wreak
certain ignominies on dead bodies. Burning the bodies put it
right out of the power of the enemy to do this, and the urn
enabled people to carry away their friends who were so burnt.
In time of pestilence it became actually necessary for sanitary
considerations to burn the dead, and it was only in time of plague
or war that we found that cremation or burning became the order
of the day, and that was readily explicable by the fact that men
always did what they could on the principle of least action, because
burning was a troublesome process. Any universality of burning
was explained by the fact that ancient history was simply one great
catalogue of plague, and pestilence, and war, and the like. Of
course he was an enemy to cremation, because it did a great deal
of harm, preventing us from knowing what sort of people our pre-
decessors were. Professor Rolleston chronicled the finding in a
680 ON THE STRUCTURE OF ROUND AND LONG BARROWS.
barrow of the Bronze period of a man laid out at full length, the
general rule being that of burial in a contracted position. As
regarded the date to be assigned to these things, he might give it
as his opinion that no Roman ever used a bronze sword, nor crossed
swords with an enemy using a sword of that material. As regarded
the long barrows, that mode of burial stretched all the way from
Wales to the Orkneys, and in them was found not a scrap of metal.
His opinion was that the idea of the construction of these barrows
was taken from limestone mountain headlands projecting into the
sea, such as might be seen by a little trip in their immediate
locality". The men lived in caves, and the idea for the place of
burial was taken from the place of living, it being often found that
a man made the house in which he lived his burial-place.
* [The Meeting of the British Association at which this paper was read, was held
at Swansea.—EDITOR.]
XXXVIII.
ON THE CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF THE
ANGLO-SAXON CONQUEST OF ENGLAND,
AS IILUSTRATED BY ARCHAEOLOGICAL
RESEARCH.
THERE are numerous points of general and living interest
relating to the Anglo-Saxon conquest of this country which are
very largely dependent upon archaeological research for their elucida-
tion. Amongst these may be mentioned the question of the extent
to which the Romano-British population previously in occupation
was extirpated; the question of the relative position, in the scale
of civilisation, held by victors and vanquished; and the question of
the extent of our indebtedness as to language and laws to one or
other of the two nationalities. Light is thrown, even upon points
apparently of the most purely archaeological character, from such
literary sources as histories of the nomenclature of localities, as the
records of monasteries, as illustrations in manuscripts, and as
laws. But the graves of the Anglo-Saxons and their contents have
been for the present investigator the primary, and such literary
works as those alluded to, and such as many of those published
under the direction of the Master of the Rolls and by the Early
English Text Society, have been only a secondary source of in-
formation. They have, however, been by no means neglected
by him.
It may be well to begin by stating how an Anglo-Saxon is to be
distinguished from a Romano-British interment. Anglo-Saxons,
during the period of their heathendom, which may be spoken of
roughly as corresponding in England to a period of some 200 or
300 years onwards from their first invasion of the country in force,
were interred in the way of cremation, and in urns of the pattern
682 ON THE CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE
so common in the parts of North Germany and of Denmark whence
they are supposed on all hands to have come. A reference to any
manual of archaeology, or an inspection of any such series as that
figured by Mr. Kemble in the Horae Ferales from the museum in
Hanover, will show the unmistakable identity of the pattern, fashion,
and moulding of such urns as these, and those which I have had
figured after digging them up in Berkshire. The Romans and
Romano-Britons had given up the practice of burning the dead long
before the time of Hengist and Horsa. When they practised it in
England, their urns were of a very different kind, being well burnt
and lathe-turned. All the Romano-Britons I have exhumed in the
cemetery at Frilford, which has furnished me with the tolerably
wide basis of something approaching to 200 interments of all kinds,
were interred much as we inter our dead now. They were oriented,
though by the aid of the sun and not by that of a compass; and,
dying in greater numbers in the winter quarters of the year, had
the bearings of their graves, as has been observed by the Abbé
Cochet, pointing a little south of east. Now a Romano-British
interment in this way of burial has to be distinguished from an
Anglo-Saxon one in the same way of non-cremation, and this may
be done thus:—the Romano-Britons never buried arms nor any
other implements which could be of use in this, and might be sup-
posed to be of similar use in the next world, together with a corpse.
Funeral ware, such as lachrymatories, I have not found in company
with coins of the Christian Emperors; but such articles stand in
relation to quite a different idea from that which caused the Teuton
to inter the dead with spear, shield, and knife; to say nothing of
the common situla and sword. The Anglo-Saxons are supposed by
Kemble to have relinquished cremation only when they assumed
Christianity. It is a little difficult to be quite sure of this: at any
rate, when we find, as we often do, an Anglo-Saxon in a very
shallow grave, which may point to any one point of the compass, and
in the arms and other insignia which it contains, such clear proof
that its tenant thought that whatever he may not have brought
with him into the world, at all events he could carry something out,
we are tempted to differ even from such authority as Mr. Kemble’s.
|But I am inclined to think that in some cases it is possible to
identify the tenant of a properly oriented grave as having been
an Anglo-Saxon. In many such graves Anglo-Saxons are to be
OF THE ANGLO-SAXON CONQUEST OF ENGLAND. 683
recognised by virtue of their insignia; and mixed up with their
bones may be found the bones of the Romano-Briton who occupied
the grave before them. But further, in some such cases it is pos-
sible to be nearly sure that we have to deal with an Anglo-Saxon,
even though there be no arms or insignia in the grave. These
cases are those in which we have evidence from the presence of
stones under the skull that no coffin was employed in the burial,
and in which stones are set alongside of the grave as if vicariously.
In many such cases the craniological character of the occupant of
such a grave lends some colour to this supposition. But upon such
identifications as had been come to in the absence of arms and
insignia I have based no statistics. The results of the statistics of
the cemetery which I have explored, as stated above, when brought
to bear upon the large questions alluded to at the beginning of the
paper, would lead us to think that the Anglo-Saxons conquered,
firstly and most forcibly on account of the shorter lives they led.
An old Anglo-Saxon male skeleton was a rarity, an old Romano-
British one a very common ‘find ’ in my excavations. Nothing
however in this life is, from the natural history point of view, more
characteristic of real civilisation or real savagery than this point
of the duration of life. The Merovingian Franks had, like the
followers of Cerdic, been observed to have led short lives, merry—as
the Capitularies of Charlemagne teach us of their kinsmen—with
those kinds of mirth the end of which is heaviness. The next
question which suggests itself upon the mastery of these facts and
figures is, Were not these men merely soldiers encamped ? are not
these statistics just such as a cemetery similarly explored now-a-days,
say at Peshawur or Samarcand, would yield 2 Not altogether such;
for, however improbable it may seem, it is nevertheless true that
the Anglo-Saxons, at all events in Berkshire, appear to have brought
their own wives with them, and not to have provided themselves
with wives from the families of the conquered previous inhabitants.
The figures of the crania of females interred with Anglo-Saxon
insignia, when compared with figures of the crania of Romano-
British women, show a very great difference, to the disadvantage of
the former of the two sets of females. The soldiers of Cerdic, who
conquered this part of Berkshire about half a century or so after
the time of the first invasion, resembled the soldiers of Gustavus
Adolphus in very little else, but they appear to have resembled
684 ON THE CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE
them in being accompanied by their wives. Whether this was the
case elsewhere in England, I do not know. I am inclined to think
that savagery was no great recommendation, nor heathendom
either, to a Christianised female population in those days; and that
the reluctance which would on these grounds interpose itself to
prevent intermarriage between Romano-Britons and Saxons, sets
up as great an a priori improbability against the theory which
assumes that such intermarriages did take place, as the difficulty
of bringing wives over in the ships of those days sets up in its
favour.
Indeed, on the hypothesis of much intermarriage, the actuality
of our Anglo-Saxon language is a very great difficulty. We do
speak a language which, though containing much Celtic and a good
deal of Norman-French, is nevertheless ‘English.” Now we know,
from finding cremation urns of the Anglo-Saxon type all over
England nearly, that the whole of the country was overrun by a
heathen population ; to thus overrun it, this population must have
been (relatively at least) numerous: add to the two conditions of
heathendom and multitude, which may be considered as proved, the
third condition of isolation, which may be considered as matter
for dispute, and then the fourth, of this heathendom and isolation
lasting from the time of Hengist to that of Augustine,—and the
present fact of our language being what it is is explained.
For proving anything as to the period of which I have been
speaking, a period which is rendered prehistoric not so much by
conditions of time as by conditions of space—the absence of contem-
porary historians having been entailed by geographical and political
isolation—arguments of two kinds, literary arguments and natural
history arguments, must be employed. Neither the one kind nor
the other is sufficient by itself. The empires of the natural sciences
and of literature touch at many isolated points, and here and there
they lie alongside of each other along lengthy boundary lines. But
empires need not be hostile though they be conterminous; and
that the empires of which we have just spoken may be united
happily and in a most efficient alliance from wants in common, may
be seen from the title-page of that most excellent German periodical,
the ‘Archiv für Anthropologie,” where we have the name of the
physiologist Ecker coupled in editorship with that of the antiqua-
rian Lindenschmit. The necessity for a combination of the two
OF THE ANGLO-SAXON CONQUEST OF ENGLAND. 685
lines of evidence and argument is as obvious when we have to con-
trovert, as when we have to establish a conclusion. If you have to
attack or resist a force comprising both cavalry and infantry, you
must have both cavalry and infantry of your own; otherwise some
day or other, either in a country intersected by woods, or in some
open plain furrowed into deep undulations, one of the two arms in
which you are deficient will take you in one or both flanks, and
you will be surprised, broken, and routed.
XXXIX.
JADE TOOLS IN SWITZEERLAND.
[The Geneva Correspondent of the ‘Times’ newspaper, Dec. 17, 1879, having re-
ferred to the ‘find’ of a jade instrument in the bed of the Rhone in the course of
excavations then being conducted, and having raised the question of the region from
which the mineral Jade had been derived, a correspondence extending over some weeks
took place, in which Professor Max Müller, Mr. Hodder M. Westropp, Dr. Rolleston,
Professor Story-Maskelyne, Major Raverty, and A. B. M. took part. Dr. Rolleston's
letters were principally directed to show that the source of jade is Oriental, and in this
he was supported by Professor Story-Maskelyne.—EDITOR ]
LETTER. I.
Dec. 25, 1879.
Your correspondent Mr. H. M. Westropp calls the supposition
that the jade tools found in the Swiss lake-dwellings came from
the East ‘a wild hypothesis.' Now, we must judge of the diffi-
culties of the past by what we can see of the possibilities of the
present, and I make bold to say that some thousands of men who
read those words this morning must have had in their pockets
implements which had travelled with the single individuals carry-
ing them, in their single lifetimes, over much greater distances
than this ‘wild hypothesis’ supposes the westward migrating
Stone-Age men to have traversed in many generations. Hence
I submit there is no a prior; improbability attaching to the view
in question.
This view is, indeed, one of the best-established facts which
recent prehistoric research has brought to light.
So long ago as 1865, M. Fellenberg, père, analysed four imple-
ments of nephrite from Meilen and Concise, and one of jadeite from
Mooseedorff. This nephrite was found to have precisely the same
chemical composition as the well-known New Zealand nephrite,
analysed by Scherer; and the jadeite to be similarly identical with
the mineral known under that name from China, and analysed by
JADE TOOLS IN SWITZERLAND, 687
Damours. Now, of nephrite and jadeite, it is known that, with
the single exception constituted by the discovery of an unworked
fragment at Schwemmsal in Saxony, no unworked specimen of
either has been found nearer to Switzerland than, for nephrite,
Turkestan and the environs of Lake Baikal; and, for jadeite,
China.
Mr. Max Müller says it was a harder business for the west-
ward emigrants of the Stone Age to carry the ponderous tools,
which their Aryan language represents, than the lighter ones which
the Messrs. Fellenberg, père et fils, have taught us so much about.
It is not for me to defend the Professor; but, once more to illustrate
the past from the present, I may say that many parents, if there
are any who feel sceptical as to this ponderation, can have the
opportunity of convincing themselves of its correctness by taking
stock of the amount of Greek and Latin their sons have been suc-
cessful in transporting home with them through the perils and
trials of a railway journey this Christmas.
But there are some things harder to transport with you than
pocket-knives, whether of jadeite or nephrite, and harder to carry
with you even than Aryan or any other languages. These are
domestic animals. The sheep and the goat are both found in the
Stone-Age pile-dwellings along with these weapons. Does Mr.
H. M. Westropp think a goat would be easier of transport than a
celt (of jade)? Let him try. Yet it would be ‘a wild hypothesis’
indeed which should aver that these animals came otherwise into
the Switzerland pile-dwellings than by slow transportation from
the East.
I am anxious to hear how your correspondent will meet this
difficulty. But before I write again I should be glad to be assured
that any antagonist who may reply to my suggestions had con-
sulted the following references:—
Keller—‘Lake Dwellings; ” English translation by J. E. Lee,
F.G.S.; I. p. 195, 2nd ed. 1878; and Fischer and Fellenberg, eitt.
ân loc. Edmund von Fellenberg—‘Bericht an die tit. Direction
der Entsumpfungen über die Ausbeutung der Pfahlbauten, Bern,
1875. L. R. von Fellenberg—“Neues Jahrbuch für Mineralogie,”
p. 619, 1866.
688 JADE TOOLS IN SWITZERLAND.
LETTER. 2.
Jan. 2, 1880.
YoUR correspondent Mr. H. M. Westropp is slow to take a well-
meant hint such as the one with which I ended my letter published
by you on December 25.
I. The views which he ascribes to M. Desor, it is true M. Desor
did once hold, but he repudiated them at the International Con-
gress of Anthropologists and Archaeologists which met at Brussels
in 1872. Here are his old and his new views, as given in the
* Comptes Rendus’ of that Congress, published in 1873. Speaking
of ‘the wild hypothesis’ of the importation of jade into Switzer-
land, M. Desor, p. 352, says:—“Pour ma part, je n'ai pu admettre
une hypothèse aussi peu vraisemblable, et pendant longtemps j'ai
pensé avec M. de Mortillet que ces roches devaient se trouver dans
les Alpes mémes. Mais voici tantôt wingt ans que nous cherchons
sans rien découvrir.’ A page and a little more follows; and on
p. 353, M. Desor sums up his altered view thus:— Ma conclu-
sion que j’émets a défaut d'autres, est done celle-ci; ces roches, vu
leur petit nombre, vu leur admirable état de conservation, sont
des reliques des temps les plus anciens; elles ont été apportées
d'Orient par les premiers colons qui ont succédé aux peuplades
de la pierre taillée.”
2. Mr. Westropp asks me to account for the presence of jade axes
in Ireland; but I do not know that any have ever been found there,
though there is no reason why they should not, except the reason
which explains their absence from Denmark and Sweden and which
I leave your readers to divine. I say I do not know of any jade
hatchets having been found in Ireland; neither did Sir Thomas
Wilde, if we may judge from his ‘Catalogue of the Antiquities of
the Royal Irish Academy, p. 39, 1857.
3. Sir John Lubbock's words in ‘Prehistoric Times,’ 4th ed.
p. 82, are:—‘Though, perhaps, it would not yet be safe to conclude
that these jade axes were introduced from the East, no European
locality for jade or jadeite has yet been discovered; and it is per-
fectly possible they may have passed from hand to hand and from
tribe to tribe by a sort of barter.’
4. I cannot verify the second reference made to Sir John
JADE TOOLS IN SWITZERLAND. 689
Lubbock, writing, as I am, in haste for an afternoon post. But if
the sheep and goat were known at all in the Stone Age—and every
collection of Swiss-lake antiquities shows they were—my argument
stands.
Let me say in conclusion that archaeologists in England will be
glad to have a notification of the various kinds of animals which
were found in such abundance in the Bienne Lake pile-dwelling at
Schaffis. In that station—one of the oldest in the Stone Age—
both jadeite and nephrite implements were found; but whether
sheep and goat bones were found in company with them I cannot
quite positively say. Of course, it has been put on record that the
two sets of objects were so found in the Stone-Age pile-dwellings
of Mooseedorff, Locras, and Wanwyl.
y y
ADDR, ESSES
AND
MISCELLANEOUs PAPERs
Y y 2
XL.
ADDRESS ON PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO
MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES,
DELIVERED BEFORE THE BRITISH MEDICAL ASSOCIATION,
AT OXFORD.
THE fact that my connection with the University of Oxford has
put me into the honourable office of giving this address will, I hope,
justify in your eyes my adoption for it of an arrangement, and my
choice for it of a set of topics, which that local position has suggested
to me. If I were to say that I had chosen for the subject of this
address the bearings of the studies which it is the business of my life
to teach here, upon the interests of the medical profession, I should
be giving it too ambitious a title; it is but with some and with few
of these bearings that I propose or feel myself competent to deal.
I shall limit myself, firstly, by selecting only such topics as, having
been pressed forcibly upon my own attention in my own peculiar
course of labour, have come to assume, in my own eyes at least, a
considerable importance, and have seemed, in consequence, not
unlikely to prove possessed of interest for others also ; and I shall
limit myself, secondly, by abstaining from going over ground
which has, within my own knowledge, been occupied by persons
who have on previous occasions stood in the position which I now
occupy before you.
Let me throw the heads of my address into a few short phrases,
and say that I propose, with your permission, to speak firstly of the
bearing of certain portions of the very extensive range of subjects,
comprised under the titles Anatomy and Physiology, upon certain
points and problems which come before the attention of the medical
practitioner in the course of his actual duties; and secondly, of the
illustration which some of the conclusions recently come to in
Biological Science cast upon the validity of certain principles which
are ordinarily looked upon as authoritative canons for the regulation
694 PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO
of the reason in medical, and, indeed, in other investigations.
Under the term Biological Science are included, besides pure
Physiology, Human and Microscopic Anatomy, Comparative Ana-
tomy also ; and in this place, as your visit to the Museum will
have convinced you, we give considerable, but as we hope, not
undue prominence to this latter branch of study. I propose to
speak of the bearings of Biology on Medicine in each, but, owing
to our local speciality just alluded to, specially in the last men-
tioned of these four departments. And I must ask you to bear in
mind that the very constant reference which I shall make, if not
in my address, at all events in my notes, to the works and writings
of others, is in like manner to be explained by my wish to have a
distinctive colouring given to this address by the local peculiarities
of the great educational centre in which we are assembled. For
one of the most distinctive peculiarities of this ancient University
is the formation within its precincts of such a library of modern
science as will shortly have no superior, and but few rivals, in the
world. This we owe to the well-advised administration of the
funds of that famous physician, Dr. Radcliffe; and it is from a
wish to make a sort of acknowledgment of the obligation which
medical and other sciences owe to him and his trustees, that I shall
so constantly, at least in print, refer to the chapters and pages of
the innumerable books which their enlightened munificence has put
here at the disposal of the student. It is not, I can assure myself,
from any irritable anxiety to impugn or depreciate the work of
others, that I have so constantly consulted and specified their
pages; nor, I trust, have I allowed myself to be tempted into the
unpardonable fault of using, or rather abusing, a great opportunity
by making upon it a petty personal display. Rather have I felt it
to be my duty to occupy this hour as you occupy your lives, in
doing what it may be possible to do for the good of humanity.
Your presence and your example make me feel that any other
course would be but impertinence; and I have therefore kept con-
stantly before my eyes Bacon's sentence in condemnation of all
empty parade of useless erudition—Wana est omnis eruditionis osten-
tatio nisi utilem operam secum ducat.
The title of Niemeyer's work on medicine, the seventh edition of
which has recently appeared and come into my hands, will furnish
me with an excellent text for my first head—The Connection and
MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES. 695
Interdependence of Medicine and Physiology. That title runs
thus:—“Lehrbuch der speciellen Pathologie und Therapie, mit
besonderer Rücksicht auf Physiologie und pathologische Ana-
tomie, von Dr. Felix von Niemeyer. Siebente vielfach vermehrte
und verbesserte Auflage,’ Berlin, 1868. From this work I will
take my first illustration of the nexus and connection of which I
have to speak; and I believe that, though I am obliged to dissent
from the explanation therein given of the facts I shall refer to from
its pages, the explanation which they seem to me to bear, or rather
demand, shows even more clearly than the one there given the
intimacy of the alliance which is now becoming so close between
the experimentalist and the practitioner. In writing (vol. ii. p. 334)
of a form of neuralgia, the pain of which those who have suffered
from it themselves, or, indeed, have seen others suffering from it,
will allow is not exaggerated by the application to it of the words
“fast unerträgliche,” Niemeyer remarks' that the physiologists
Dubois-Reymond and Dr. Möllendorff refer its origin to the ex-
istence of a dilated state of the arteria carotis cerebralis. This state
of dilatation these authorities explain by a reference to certain facts
in the physiology of the cervical sympathetic as discovered now
some seventeen years ago by Bernard, and elucidated still further
by Waller, Budge, and Brown-Séquard. And in like spirit, or at
least by a reference to certain anatomical facts in the arrangement
of blood-vessels, which he supposes to become dilated and distended,
the great Göttingen anatomist, Henle (cited by Niemeyer, vol. ii.
pp. 319–339), explains the causation of certain neuralgiae. The
neuralgia which is apt to haunt the sixth, seventh, and eighth
intercostal spaces of the left side, he has suggested may be ex-
plained by the peculiar arrangement of the left or smaller azygos
vein in that region; and the greater relative frequency of neuralgia
of the first than of the second and third divisions of the fifth
cerebral nerve, he refers to the greater quantity of dilatable veins
with which it is beset in passing from the inner to the outer
surface of the sphenoid. Now I venture, though with some diffi-
dence, as I find myself in opposition to such names and authorities,
to dissent from the explanations thus given of these facts, which I
* Incorrectly however; Dubois-Reymond himself explaining hemicrania as due to
a tetanus of the muscular coat of the arteries. See Reichert u. Dubois-Reymond's
Archiv, 1860; Brown-Séquard, “Journal de la Physiologie, iv. I 3, 1861.
696 PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO
suppose must be acknowledged, with perhaps an exception as to
the relative statistical frequency of neuralgia of the first division of
the fifth, to be only too real facts. By laying the physiology of
the cervical sympathetic alongside of the natural history of an
attack of neuralgia, we shall be enabled, I believe, to see that there
are stages in each corresponding with stages in the other, but that
it is a stage of spasm in the one, and not a stage of relaxation and
congestion, which corresponds with the stage of pain in the other.
Stimulation of the upper cervical sympathetic produces, more or
less immediately, contraction of the blood-vessels of the head and
dilatation of the pupil, and diminution of the temperature. This
is the first line of operation, resulting in what Brown-Séquard
(‘Lectures on the Physiology and Pathology of the Nervous Sys-
tem,’ 1860, p. 142) calls ‘Decrease of Vital Properties.” But after
a while the reverse of all this takes place, and the vessels dilate.
Now whether this be so in consequence of exhaustion, as is ordi-
narily said (e.g. Funke, “Physiologie,” vol. ii. p. 772), or not, as
Dr. Lovén (who says in Ludwig's ‘Arbeiten Phys. Anst., Leipzig,
1866, p. 11, that the sympathetic is not so easily tired) thinks, is
of no consequence, or of little consequence, as the fact of the
sequence of events is accepted as I have stated it on all hands.
Indeed, similar alternations of alteration in the calibre of vessels
take place, as is well known, spontaneously, as the phrase goes—
whether rhythmically or not, still chronometrically in relation to
the needs of the animal and its tissues; in the arteries of the
rabbit's ear (Funke, loc. cit. ii. p. 771, citing Schiff and Callenfels),
in the veins of the bat's wing (Wharton Jones, ‘Phil. Trans.’ 1852),
in the arteries of the frog's web (Lister, “Phil. Trans.’ 1858,
p. 653); and the oecurrence of these latter alternations makes the
occurrence of the former more intelligible. Now, a similar alterna-
tion from a stage of contraction of blood-vessels, of coldness of
skin, of shivering, of total absence of heat, redness, swelling, or
tenderness, to one of increased circulation, swelling, heat, and
tenderness, constitutes two stages in an attack of neuralgia, homo-
logous with the two described as occurring in irritation of the
sympathetic. It is rare, I believe and Dr. Anstie teaches (‘Stimu-
lants and Narcotics,’ 1864), for pain, as opposed to tenderness, to
persist after congestion; and pain in tissues differs as much from
tenderness as remorse in a conscience differs from tenderness in
MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES. 697
that organisation; and the two things are well-nigh equally ex-
clusive the one of the other in both cases. Perhaps the mere
apposition of the two sets of occurrences side by side is sufficient to
justify my conclusion that the congestive stage of the physiological
experiment is not the homologue of the painful one of the morbid
history, mere apposition being sometimes sufficient to decide us on
more difficult homologies, at least in the negative. But I may
add, that the argument from the juvantia ac laedentia, as the older
physicians and physiologists phrased it, gives some confirmation to
the view which teaches that spasm and starvation go in company
with pain ; relaxation and congestion only with tenderness. I will
put the facts before you as premises; you will piece them together
into an argument for yourselves. Chloroform * is the greatest of
juvantia in neuralgia; chloroform, indeed, and ether, in equal parts,
as recommended” by Mr. R. Ellis, may be safely entrusted to a safe
person for self-administration; and, if taken persistently as well
as prudently, may keep the attack in suspense until the enemy,
from weariness or chronometric obligations, retreats or withdraws”.
But this great reducer of neuralgia, this great and blessed producer
of ‘indolence,’ as Locke called it, is also the great reducer of
muscular spasm, as we know from its action and our employment
of it in cases of hernia, and, indeed, of tetanus. Now, if it relaxes
muscles which we can see in the limbs and trunk without the aid
of a microscope, we may think it not improbable that it will do the
like by muscles which we cannot see without the aid of that instru-
ment, in the arterioles. Chloroform, secondly, has the reverse
action to that of the sympathetic, in dilating the blood-vessels of
the head”; as, indeed, also has alcohol, itself too a producer, though
* For action of chloroform, see further, ‘Chloroform, its Action and Administration,'
by A. E. Sansom, M.B., 1865; “Asthma,’ by Hyde Salter, M.D., 1868, p. 216.
* See ‘Lancet, February, May, June, 1866, and pamphlets published by Hardwicke
and Brettell.
* The anaesthetic effect of bisulphide of carbon in various kinds of headache, as
pointed out by the late Dr. Kennion (“Medical Times and Gazette,’ July 18, 1868,
p. 77), may, perhaps, be similarly explained.
* I find that both Mr. Durham (‘Guy's Hospital Reports, iii. vi. 1860, p. 153) and
Hammond (“On Wakefulness,’ p. 25) are agreed that, in animals under chloroform,
the veins of the brain become distended. I do not, however, lay any great stress upon
this fact; firstly, because the veins may become distended under the influence, not so
much of the chloroform, as of the more or less partial hindrance to respiration which
its inhalation implies; and, secondly, because we have, as yet (Funke, vol. ii. pp.
769–773), no very distinct evidence for the production of effects on the veins by the
698 PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO
less directly, of the ‘indolence' we desire, as well as of much that
we deprecate. And chloroform, thirdly, antagonises the sympathetic
in its very obvious action on the pupil.
It may be bold in me to venture further in this direction; yet,
as a member of the British Medical Association, and as a reader of
our admirable Journal, I may perhaps be allowed to say, before I re-
turn to my own more immediate subjects, that the account given
by Dr. George Johnson in that periodical for March 21st, 1868',
seems to me to indicate that epilepsy itself is but a frightful
caricature of neuralgia, and of the results of vaso-motor irritation
and contraction. The presence of dilatation of the pupil in all
those sets of cases may be thought perhaps but a slight indication
in the direction of identity of cause. High spirits and great
vivacity are not rarely, in both diseases alike, precursors of an
attack; while counter-irritation, which both Schiff and Setsche-
now * are agreed in considering a strong and universal reflex de-
pressant, is not rarely, in both diseases alike, both, ea hypothesi,
dependent on reflex vascular constriction, a preventive *.
sympathetic. But, taking the facts as given, we must allow that venous fulness,
though inferior doubtless to arterial replenishment, is still, as the growing prostate
of the aged, the rank hairs shooting up round old ulcers, and the cock's spur trans-
planted to the cock's comb, show, a more or less favourable condition for growth and
nutrition; whereas pain is correlated always with malnutrition and ordinarily with
atrophy, and is now always spoken of as a “depression’ rather than as ‘an exaltation
of function.”
* See Brown-Séquard, ‘Lectures, l.c. p. 179, ibique citata.
* Setschenow's words are these (“Neue Versuche," p. 23, 1864): “Es giebt endlich
bei meinen Gegnern einen Versuch, an dessen Richtigheit ich keinen Grund zu zweifeln
habe, am welchem die einseitige Trigeminus-Reizung eine starke allgemeine Reflex-
Depression hervorrief.” These words seem to furnish something like a rationale of
the picking of the nose in helminthiasis, as also of much of that counter-irritation of
the fifth nerve at its periphery which so-called “nervous irritable” persons practise on
themselves in the way of ‘tricks.” Malgaigne practised similarly on his patients, as
certain savage races do upon themselves with their labrets, ear- and nose-rings.
* These views I came to entertain without any knowledge—or perhaps I should
rather say without any conscious recollection—of those which Dr. Radcliffe had put
before the world in his lectures delivered at the College of Physicians, and published
in 1864 in his work on Epilepsy, Pain, and Paralysis. I have not altered what I had
written in consequence of my consultation of this most valuable work, to which I re-
sorted after seeing a reference to it in Dr. Anstie's book. This latter work I have
already quoted in the text, and I found it most useful and suggestive to me. I
believe, indeed I hope, that what I have written is more or less in accordance with
Dr. Radcliffe's views. But it is as much inferior for purposes of consultation, and in-
deed from other points of view also, to what Dr. Radcliffe has written, and I have read
of his, on the same subject, as a skull when just removed, and that in a somewhat
MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMEs. 699
physiological experiment worked out for us, from time to time, in
the laboratory of Nature, which throws not a little light on a
question which, I learn from Dr. Wilson Fox's work on ‘Dyspepsia”
(p. 141), is still a matter of debate among pathologists—the ques-
tion, to wit, ‘of the influence of perverted innervation in causing
inflammatory, or sometimes even still severer morbid changes 1.’ It
is well known that stags, after injury to the testes, have correspond-
ing changes wrought out in the corresponding horns. Such a
specimen I can show you from the Christ Church Museum, founded
by TJr. Matthew Lee. In a curious old work dedicated to him,
in company with two others of the King's Physicians, by Dr.
Richard Russell”, and styled ‘The Economy of Nature in Acute
I will now proceed to give, in the second place, an account of a
fragmentary condition, from a barrow, is to the same skull when pieced together and
reconstructed, as you may see many such skulls in the Museum, by Mr. Robertson.
* The following references to authorities on this vexed question I herewith ap-
pend:—
Lister, “Philosophical Transactions,’ 1858, p. 627.
Beale, “Philosophical Transactions,’ 1865, part i. p. 447.
Virchow, ‘Archiv, vol. xvi. 1859, p. 428; ‘Cellular Pathology,’ Chance's transla-
tion, pp. 3II, 312.
Paget’s ‘Surgical Pathology,’ Turner's edition, p. 237, 1863.
‘British Medical Journal,’ 1866, p. 402.
Anstie, ‘Lancet,’ 1866, vol. ii. p. 548.
Simon, “Holmes's System of Surgery,’ vol. i. p. 62.
Bernard, ‘Leçons Physiol. Pathol. Syst. Nerv.,’ vol. ii. p. 518.
Brown-Séquard, ‘Lectures on the Physiology and Pathology of the Nervous
System," p. 143. & r
Budge, ‘Handbuch der Physiologie,” p. 794.
Funke, ‘Handbuch der Physiologie, vol. ii. p. 776.
Donders, “Spec. Physiologie," p. 140.
Billroth, “Die Allgemeine Chirurgische Pathologie und Therapie,’ 1868, p. 72.
Niemeyer, “Lehrbuch der Pathologie und Therapie,’ 1868, ii. pp. 320, 340, 428.
Handfield Jones, ‘Functional Nervous Disorders,’ p. II ; Lectures in ‘Medical
Times and Gazette,’ 1865.
Samuel, “Moleschott's Untersuchungen,” Band ix. p. 18.
* It may be interesting to record here, in passing, that Dr. Richard Russell lived at
Reading, that he was a friend of Dr. Chapman and of Dr. Frewen of this very place,
and that the copy of his work to which I have referred, and which exists in the Christ
Church Scientific Library attached to the Christ Church Museum, and deposited with
it in the University Museum Buildings, did in 1760, eleven years before Dr. Russell's
death, belong to Dr. Chapman. Now these facts and dates render it not improbable.
that this very specimen may have been given by Dr. Russell to Dr. Chapman, possibly
together with this copy of his book. It is unfortunate that so much should be left to
speculation; but this digression may be justified by the moral which it conveys, to the
effect that we are bound, when receiving a specimen into a museum, to put on record
forthwith, for the benefit of our successors, a note of its history and donor. Dr. Russell
700 PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO
and Chronical Diseases of the Glands’ (pp. 21–24), five cases of
injury to the testicular gland in stags are recorded. In such cases
as these after the injury to the testis, the horn may or may not be
shed annually, and it may never thenceforward lose its ‘ velvet; ’
but it never becomes the dry lowly vascular weapon of offence
which, in a fortnight or three weeks from the present time, we
shall see the bucks polishing their hard leather-coated horns into
against shrubs and trees. It remains vascular and spongy within,
and coated outside with a hairy skin, which may be prolonged into
pendulous outgrowths. Being sensitive and fragile, and bleeding
easily, it acts as a second sexual disqualification; and, as I am
speaking of this correlation of growth, I may be allowed to add,
that its reality is further testified to by its absence after similar
lesions in reindeer, where both bucks and does are alike horned.
Now, I submit that the unilateral correspondence of malnutrition,
such as we have here, is as good an instance and exemplification of
Pflüger's first law of reflex action, the law of unilateral (gleichseitig)
transmission of stimulus, as any unilateral or homolateral twitching
of any muscle can be in response to any one-sided stimulus. Only
the reflex action shows itself in the way of nutrition—a sort of
reversed hemiplegic nutrition, it is true—and not in that of move-
ment nor in that of secretion *.
Let me, as in the former case, lay alongside of the physiological
experiment a parallel to it from pathology. This I will do by the
help of Budge, who, at pages 794–795 of his ‘Handbook of Phy-
siology, gives us the two following short histories, which have
was the author of several other works besides the one I have quoted. Their existence
has escaped the notice of Dr. Munk, in his interesting volumes, ‘The Roll of the
Royal College of Physicians,’ vol. ii. p. 132. Their titles are: 1. ‘De Tabe Glandulari
sive de usu Aquae Marinae in Morbis Glandularum Dissertatio;’ in I vol. 8vo.; pret.
58. 2. ‘A Dissertation concerning the Use of Sea-water in Diseases of the Glands;" to
which is added an Epistolary Dissertation to R. Frewen, M.D.; in one volume, 8vo. ;
price 58.
* See Otto, “Neue seltene Beobachtungen Samml.,’ vol. ii. p. Io; Elsaesser, “Diff.
Sex. Mamm. praeter partes sexuales,” p. 36. Since writing the above, I have seen a
note to p. 22 of Mr. Paget's ‘Surgical Pathology,' edited by Professor Turner, in
which the fact that no disturbance of nutrition is effected by mere transplantation of
the testis in cocks, is brought forward to show that no mere nervous disturbance can
account for these alterations of nutrition. I do not think that these negative results,
obtained from experiments on half a dozen birds, can outweigh the positive facts of
unilateral correspondence in malnutrition which have been so frequently observed in
mammals. (See Hunterian Catalogue, Osteological Series, vol. ii. p. 591.)
MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES. 701
come under his own observation. His words run thus in trans-
lation: ‘After a long-continuing stagnation of blood at the end of
the small intestine and the beginning of the large, in consequence
of which exudations and adhesions of the peritoneum ensued, the
entire right half of the body became weaker than the left, was
tired sooner by exertion; the right foot became cold sooner, under
the same circumstances, than the left; the right ear became much
more rapidly the seat of vascular dilatation than the left; and
other similar phaenomena developed themselves. After a great
abscess under the right gluteus maximus, and an immense loss of
pus, the right hand and the entire right arm became not only
evidently thinner to the eye than the left, but also actually
smaller.” These cases are decisive as to the interference of the
nervous system in the process of nutrition; and, though organs
and structures, such as the epithelial and the cartilaginous, both
physiological and, I suppose, morbid, may and do exist and grow
in animal bodies being as devoid of blood-vessels and nerves as
though they were found in vegetables, still any arguments based
upon these undoubted facts can be met at once, if so we care to
meet them, with the more or less accepted physiological axioms,
‘The interdependence of parts augments with their development;
the solidarity of organs increases and is more intimate with each
superaddition of a fresh factor to the entire economy.” But these
cases do not, of course, touch the question of the way in which this
nervous influence comes to act on the tissues, whether mediately
through the blood-vessels, or immediately on the tissues with which
they are supposed, in the case of the salivary glands by Pflüger,
though not, as I apprehend, by Dr. Beale (“Phil. Trans.’ 1865,
p. 447), to become continuous. Nor does such an experiment as
that of Bidder, in which a salivary gland, under nerve-stimulation,
picked out two-thirds of the entire quantity of iodide of potassium
in the circulation, to one-third picked out by the substance of its
fellow, not so stimulated. For a more innervated gland is also a
more vascular gland; and of the two antecedents, greater nerve-
current and greater blood-current, we have no right from this
experiment to say that the one rather than the other is the cause
of this particular consequent. And much probability will come to
attach itself to Virchow's views, according to which innervation is
not proven to increase nutrition directly, but works only mediately
702 PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO
by its influence on the blood-vessels, in the minds of persons who
may be averse to multiplying laws by cases such as these. We
go to a case, as I suppose most of us may, like myself, have gone,
and we frequently find one side of the body hot, and the other
cold. This latter, the friends will tell us, is the paralysed part ;
we find that it is not; and Bernard's experiments, and Brown-
Séquard's (l.c. p. 146), enable us to understand why this is so.
An excellent case to the same effect, showing how increase of vital
properties may take place in the entire absence of any connection
with the upper part of the cord or brain, may be given from a
paper of the late Sir B. C. Brodie's, in the twentieth volume (1837) of
the ‘Medico-Chirurgical Transactions.’ ‘A man was admitted into
St. George's Hospital, in whom there was a forcible separation of
the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae, attended with an effusion of
blood within the theca vertebralis, and laceration of the lower part
of the cervical portion of the spinal cord. Respiration was per-
formed by the diaphragm only—of course, in a very imperfect
manner. The patient died at the end of twenty-two hours; and,
for some time previously to his death, he breathed at long in-
tervals; the pulse being weak, and the countenance livid. At
length, there were not more than five or six respirations in a
minute. Nevertheless, when the ball of a thermometer was placed
between the scrotum and the thigh, the quicksilver rose to III?
of Fahrenheit's scale. Immediately after death, the temperature
was examined in the same manner, and found to be still the
same.’
The larger size of a horse's hoof, the nerves of which had been
divided, should probably be similarly explained by the greater afflux
of blood which would set in thither temporarily until the continuity
of the nerve was re-established. (Ogle, ‘Med. Times and Gazette,’
Nov. 3, 1866.) And, finally, such an occurrence as the inflamma-
tion of skin, cartilage, or cornea, after its own sweet will, and not
in the line of an irritated nerve passing through it or near it
(Virchow's ‘Cell. Path., Chance's translation, p. 299), seems to
speak plainly enough to the self-sufficiency of animal cells to
respond to what Niemeyer calls “Insulte, without appealing to any
higher powers for assistance; just, in fact, as though they were as
little animal, as truly vegetable, and as independent of any cranio-
spinal centre as the gall-producing oak or willow.
MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES. 703
But, in spite of all this, I am inclined to think that the direct action
of nerves on cells is a vera causa; and, even if our highest micro-
scopic powers do succeed in proving that nerve-tissues are never
continuous with any other tissues in any part of their distribution,
it must still be recollected that such intervals as may be demon-
strated will be, if not insensible, at all events infinitesimal; and
nerve-force may well be sufficient to act across such gaps as these.
(See Dr. Radcliffe’s ‘Lectures on Epilepsy,’ 1864, pp. 13 and 330.)
I can appeal for my justification to Professor Lister's experiment,
recorded in his paper on the Cutaneous Pigmentary System in the
Frog ( Phil. Trans.” 1858, pp. 636–639), in which certainly the
nerve-system is shown to have some control over the molecular
movements of concentration and diffusion quite independently of
the blood-vascular system. The cessation of the circulation in a
frog's web entails the concentration of the pigment; therefore
Professor Lister took a pale frog—i.e. one in which the pigment
was already concentrated; and, tying a ligature above the ankle,
so as to eliminate the condition of cessation of the blood's circu-
lation, he then eliminated the condition of nerve-influence from the
cranio-spinal axis by amputation above the ligature. Cessante causa,
cessaţ et effectus ; the nerve-force is removed; and the pigmentary
diffusion which it had held in check is set up and continues, until
superseded by the post mortem concentration which ordinarily takes
place, and produces that lightening of the dark hue usually seen in
the frog after death. This experiment, which I have not given in
full, nor in Professor Lister's own words, is a very striking one;
and I hope I may remark, without offence to any representatives of
the German Fatherland, to which physiology owes so much, that
much that has been recently written and worked at there might
have been spared, had Mr. Lister's papers been as well known to
them as they will be to their successors. They seem to me to mark
an era in the literature and in our knowledge of the essence of
inflammation.
Here, if I may be allowed to digress somewhat, I would remark
that Professor Lister's suggestion made in 1858 (loc. cit. pp. 619
and 640) as to the probability of the existence in the limbs of a
ganglionic apparatus co-ordinating molecular and other movements
at the periphery, sometimes independently, sometimes subordinately
to the cranio-spinally placed nerve-centres, may seem to have found
704 PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO
a justification in Professor Beale's demonstration in 1865 of the
ending of the muscular nerves in nucleate reticular plexuses.
Assuredly, the discovery of these net-works bearing nuclei does
away with the necessity for any further carrying on of the appa-
rently interminable discussions as to the existence of an ‘idio-
muscular” as opposed to a “neuro-muscular” contractility. But I
will take this opportunity of saying, that there are not wanting
purely physiological considerations, which, though not by any
means amounting to demonstration, do nevertheless lend some
little probability to the ‘neuro-muscular” explanation of those
movements which take place in muscles separated from all con-
nection with central nerve-organs. Firstly, these movements are,
within my experience, more marked and frequent in the muscular
tissues of young animals; and the history of the development of
nerves would lead us to expect to find a greater degree of inde-
pendence in the peripheral nerve-system, than we should look for
in the adult organism; for nerves do not grow from cells in the
direction of what we know in the adult state and under low powers
of the microscope as their branches; but, as Von Hensen has shown
(Quain’s ‘Elements of Anatomy, 7th edit. p. clziv), two nerve-cells
are connected by a fibre, and it is by the withdrawal of the one cell
from the other, and the elongation, so to say, of the interconnecting
fibre, that the peripheral and central ganglionic systems respectively
assume their adult relations. And just so, I may add, in certain
annelids and lamellibranchiata, we have, as we not rarely do have
in the lower animals, a stereotyped though but partial adumbration
of what is but a single scene in the moving diorama of the develop-
ment of the higher; and we find the peripheral nerve-system
studded with eyes or other sensory organs, and possessed of a
prominence and importance relatively to the central nerve-ganglia
which is only temporarily seen in the development of more perfect
creatures. $
Secondly, many of the cases of death in adults, in which this
irritability is found to exist most commonly and markedly, are
cases in which, from very various reasons, the functions of the
intracranial nerve-centres are put into abeyance at a very early
stage in the process deathward. Such are (see Nysten, cited by
Brown-Séquard, ‘Proceedings of Royal Society,’ 1862, p. 211)
cases of decapitation, of asphyxia, and of sudden haemorrhage from
MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES. 705
a large artery. Now we know that movements do continue in a
portion of intestine which has been deprived of its mesentery, and
we ascribe the production of these movements to the presence in
the walls of the intestine of the plexuses demonstrated to us by
Meissner and Auerbach; and, if we may ascribe like effects to like
causes, we may ascribe the post mortem twitchings of muscles to
Professor Beale's neuro-muscular apparatus. In like manner we
should expect from similar reasons, and we do find, as a matter of
fact, this same neuro-muscular irritability greatly prominent in the
small-brained cold-blooded vertebrata, and in hibernating mammals.
In all of these animals alike, the central nerve-system is small
relatively to the entire mass of their bodies; whilst in birds, or at
least in the more highly organised of the class—for birds, like
other bipeds, differ as to the mass and use of the brain (see Parker,
“Zool. Soc. Trans.’ v. 1862, p. 207)—the brain may hold a more
favourable relation to the entire mass of their bodies than in any
other class of animals; and in birds, as is well known, with some
few reptile-like exceptions, such as the peewit, muscular irritability
ceases almost with their last act of expiration.
Whilst speaking of this condition occasionally found in the
muscles after death, I am tempted to say a few words of the empty
condition of the arteries which is almost constantly found after
death. I observe that Von Bezold has explained this well-known
phaenomenon as being due to a last nervous impulse communicated
to the small peripheral vessels from the brain. His words are
(‘Untersuchungen aus dem Physiologischen Laboratorium in Würz-
burg, Heft ii. pp. 358, 359, 1867): ‘Sicher ist aber ein ungemein
wichtiges Moment hierbei die Innervation der Muskeln in den
kleinen Gefässen des Körpers. Man stelle sich vor, dass in der
Agonie, in Todes-Kämpfe, das vasomotorische central Organ im
Gehirn noch in Krampf-zustande versetzt wird, welche mit Pausen
der Erschöpfung abwechseln . . . Ausserdem ist gezeigt worden,
dass jenes letzte Ueberpumpen des Blutes aus den Arterien in die
Venen, bei den Säugethieren wenigstens, unter dem Einfluss einer
letzter Thätigkeit des Gehirns geschieht.' Surely all these ‘Wor-
stellungen’ would have been spared, if Professor Von Bezold had
been acquainted with Mr. Lister's papers, or even with those points
in them to which I have referred. Indeed, that his view is un-
tenable, is clear from a consideration of the fact that the circulation
Z Z.
706 PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO
can be kept up, and will, like the muscular irritability, persist in a
decapitated animal for a long while after death, if artificial respira-
tion be put in play. The empty state of the arteries post mortem is
most probably to be explained by the action of the peripheral
nerve-system on the arterioles; though Dr. Alison would have
explained it by the attraction a fronte force of the tissues around
the capillaries; but Von Bezold's view of the source of the nervo-
muscular action of the peripheral vessels is, I apprehend, more
untenable and less plausible than most theories which have ‘had
their day and ceased to be.”
The following short history seems to me to be a good instance of
the action, or rather of the want of action, of the peripheral nerve-
system upon the arterioles. A man, who came some years ago
under my own care, had had a bullet pass through his arm just
above the elbow, so as to sever the musculo-spiral nerve. The
scars of exit and entrance were in the lower third of the arm.
Under ordinary circumstances, the soft parts of the lower arm
maintained their normal consistence; but their power of resisting
changes of temperature was greatly impaired, as well of course as
the sensibility of the parts supplied by the injured nerve. I recol-
lect seeing the swollen state of the inner side of the hand one cold
raw morning when the man was on sentry duty, and had his hand
chilled down by the musket he had to carry. Now, I apprehend
that this turgescence is to be explained by saying, that the local or
peripheral nerve-system of the affected parts was competent under
ordinary circumstances to regulate the calibre of the arteries; but
that its activity was liable to be depressed, as under the circum-
stances related, into actual abeyance, in the absence of any possi-
bility of any assistance being supplied to it from the cranio-spinal
nerve-axis. Thus, under the depressing effect of cold, which seems
to work here much as it does in checking the regeneration of
artificially amputated parts in snails and in salamanders (“Müller's
Physiology,’ by Baly, 2nd edit., i. p. 444; Bonnet, ‘CEuvres,’ tom.
v. i. pp. 328, 329), the peripherally placed ganglionic system was
put into abeyance; and turgescence of the vessels it ordinarily
supplied with ‘tone’ ensued. Just similarly in mammals the skin
of which has been covered with an impermeable varnish, and
in which death is as much due to the chilling down which the
destruction of the non-conducting power of their hairy integument
MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES. 707
entails as to the penning-in of its various acrid and volatile and .
other secretions, oedema and vascular congestion are to be observed
in the skin, as well as in other organs (Ranke, ‘Physiologie,”
p. 456). The flame of mammalian life, like the flame of inorganic
combustion of carburetted hydrogen, can only be sustained at
a high temperature; a certain reduction is as fatal to the one as it
is to the other in the Davy lamp, and the vitality of the more
exposed peripheral is more easily depressed than that of the more
protected central nerve-system.
I should be paying but a poor compliment to the judgment
which has provided a microscopic exhibition for the instruction and
entertainment of this evening, if I were to dwell at any length
upon the relations borne by Histology to Medicine and Surgery.
And, secondly, if I were to dwell in the least adequately upon the
importance of a knowledge of Microscopic Zoology to the diagnosis,
and what is better than the diagnosis, and even than the thera-
peutics, the prophylaxis of diseases of all kinds, from those which
are considered trifling or contemptible by most men, except those
who suffer from them, up to those which excite world-wide anxieties,
such as trichiniasis or cholera, I should have to extend my address
to a length you would shudder to think of. Upon one single
point I will make a few remarks; and the purport of these will be
to show how the manipulation of such an instrument as a catheter
may find, if we are to do justice to our patients, its regulative
condition in the manipulation and revelations of the microscope.
I had myself recently come to suspect that the determining con-
dition of the triple phosphatic alkalescence of the urine was to be
looked for and found in the presence of some of those organisms
which Pasteur has proved and hygienists have believed to be the
real causative agents of fermentations and putrefactions. One
accepted view of the causation of this most mischievous metamor-
phosis is, that the coats of the bladder, in consequence of altered
innervation, as after spinal injuries, act upon the urine as so much
dead matter acts on blood in causing its coagulation, or as the
tissues round about the capillaries act when they are in an abnormal
condition upon the rows of blood-corpuscles within those canals; and
by this ‘catalytic' agency break up the urea and throw down the
ammoniaco-magnesian phosphates. Another view ascribes the like.
effect to the ‘fermentative’ working of the abundant, catarrhal,
Z Z 2.
708 PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO
mucus, which is in some cases flaked off from the inner walls of the
bladder. Now, neither of these views suggests a vera causa for the
effect for which they profess to account. Blood coagulates when in
contact with non-vitalised matter, and blood-corpuscles arrange
themselves in rouleaua, under similar circumstances. But Mr.
Lister, who has shown us so much which bears on this matter, has
shown us also, and that in the last number but two (July 18, 1868)
of our Journal, that urine will remain for an indefinite period
undecomposed in a properly constructed, which happens to mean
a properly contorted, receptacle, even though that receptacle be as
little vitalised as glass. And Niemeyer has shown, what I dare
say many who are now honouring me with their presence have
observed, but, I think, not recorded, that urine often retains its
acidity through protracted cases of vesical catarrh, and in spite of
cumuli of clouds of ‘fermentative mucus; which are, therefore, as
little of verae causae as is ‘catalysis’ itself. But the presence of
vibrios in the urine, and that before it leaves the bladder, is a vera
causa, i.e. a present condition, and therefore possibly a cause, or
connected with the cause, of the phaenomena to be investigated
(see Beale, ‘On the Urine, p. 196); and the idea that the alka-
lescence in question depended upon them, an idea which I had not
the time to find an opportunity of verifying for myself, I find has
been verified for the benefit of others by Niemeyer, with the assist-
ance of Traube and Teuffel. “In the course of last year,’ says,
Niemeyer (l.c. ii. 66, 1868), ‘I arrived, partly by means of an
observation of Traube's, partly by means of experiments and obser-
vations of my own, which have been published by Teuffel in the
“Berlin Klinische Wochenschrift,” at the conviction that it was not
the vesical mucus, but lower organisms, which probably get into
the bladder by means of the introduction of badly cleaned catheters,
and excite there the alkaline fermentation of the urine.' Now,
whether the vibrios find their way into the bladder exclusively on
dirty catheters or not, I apprehend that the addition of some
carbolic acid to the oil used for lubricating these instruments,
whether they be guilty or not of what is here laid to their charge,
will be a piece of practice calculated to prevent the alkalescence
which the vibrios cause by preventing these vibrios themselves
from entering on their evil activity. Mr. Lister's paper, just
alluded to, will show that this is an experiment which may very
MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES. 709
safely be tried; if carbolic acid can be safely introduced into a
wounded pleural cavity, assuredly we need not hesitate about the
passing of it into a bladder. Thus many scientific researches,
undertaken in the first instance for the elucidation of speculative
truth, and for the rectificatiou not of unsound organs and func-
tions but of unsound theories and explanations, and prosecuted
throughout by the aid of the most refined methods and instru-
ments, come ultimately to bear upon such matters as catheterisa-
tion and alkalescent urine. I would not, however, be thought
to undervalue the worth of researches carried on at whatever cost
with the sole object of procuring correct notions as to the way
in which processes, even wholly beyond our power of modification,
have been and are being carried on. It is a great and positive
gain when we get rid of one false hypothesis, one single false
formula which by frequent repetition has attained to the dignity
of a philosophic axiom, and acquired a sort of prescriptive right to
“warp us from the living truth.” The Chemists, as I am informed,
are conspiring to effect what the old Greeks would have called
a ‘Catalysis’ of the kingdom of ‘Catalysis’ itself, and its banish-
ment to the Limbo of Vanity, there to herd with Phlogiston and
many other and younger as well as older unsubstantial Idola
Theatri; and though these alterations of theory may not as yet
have affected the oxygen we breathe, nor even have enabled 'us as
yet to regulate with any greater precision the processes of fermenta-
tion with which we have for so many ages had an empirical
familiarity, they have given us at least a warning as to maintaining
always that proper diffidence as to the all-sufficient validity of
our theories, by whomsoever promulgated or endorsed, which is so
constantly of avail in actual practical work. The phaenomena, let
me add, to account for which the hypothesis of Pangenesis has
been recently (Darwin, ‘Animals and Plants under Domestication,”
1868, ii. p. 403) put forward provisionally, are, and will, we may
believe, always remain, beyond our control; but there will be no
one, I suppose, who will not feel an interest in observing how the
revelations in the all but infinite divisibility of “germinal matter,’
which we owe to Professor Beale, may come to bear upon the
explanation of the marvellous phaenomena of reproduction and
hereditary transmission. Nor can I leave this subject without re-
marking that it is in great probability upon the self-multiplication of
710 PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO
such infinitesimal particles as this hypothesis of Pangenesis postu-
lates that processes, to the naked eye the very reverse of Genesis,
have been found to depend; and the Blue Book on the Cattle-
Plague (‘Third Report of the Commissioners,’ &c., p. 151) will show
you that here, too, we are dependent on the employment of the
very highest powers of the microscope; and it is scarcely necessary
to add that its employer was in this ease Professor Beale.
If I have been short in speaking of the advantages which the
histology of modern days has conferred upon its therapeutics,
I might be shorter still in dealing with my third head—the
dependence, namely, of the healing art upon the facts of Anthro-
potomy—that is to say, upon the naked-eye knowledge of the
structure with which it has to concern itself. Some little, how-
ever, I must say with your permission. Some persons are inclined
to think that there is some sort of antagonism between the interests
of microscopic and those of naked-eye anatomy; and hints more or
less obscurely expressed may be found to this effect here and there
in writings even of the present day. It is in much the same spirit
that persons are found to say that the sending of missionaries to
the heathen abroad entails so much curtailment of similar work
at home, and others will say that the starting of any fresh
charitable institution necessitates the subduction of so much from
the funds available for those already on foot; and that others
again will say that the encouragement of natural science is
‘inimical’ to the progress and cultivation of literary and classical
studies. Now, all these views depend upon the radically false
assumption that intellectual and moral activities are limitable and
measurable by certain quantitative conditions, just as a man’s
expenditure is or ought to be limited and measurable by his balance
in the bank. This analogy is a wholly fallacious one, but it has
nipped many an excellent project in the bud. A truer analogy is
furnished us by the history of those infinitesimal scraps of germinal
matter of which I was just now speaking, which are hard to
destroy even with floods of carbolic acid and copperas, and which
possess a faculty of self-multiplication wholly unparalleled within
my experience in the history of the metallic objects of which we
were just now speaking. Activity and earnestness, in fact, which
are some of the best things, resemble some of the worst in being
eminently contagious. The example of a strenuous labourer in
MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES, 711.
one field, spreads into the weedy acres of his slothful brethren on
the right and left; and the improvement of the microscope has
but been accompanied by a more thorough and accurate working
out of human dissection. Let us leave metaphor and general state-
ments, and come to facts. I have in my possession a work written
for the use of anatomical students in the University of Edinburgh
—a place then, as now, at least on a level with the most advanced
centres of such education elsewhere in Great Britain. Its title is,
‘The Anatomy of the Human Bones and Nerves, with a Description
of the Human Lacteal Sac and Duct, by Alexander Monro, M.D.,
late Professor of Anatomy in the University of Edinburgh. A new
edition, carefully revised, with aditional Notes and Illustrations, by
Jeremiah Kirby, M.D., author of “Tables of the Materia Medica.”
1810. The date of its appearance takes precedence, therefore, by a
dozen years at least, of the first appearance of an achromatic com-
bination; and if the development of microscopic zeal had really
been injurious to the diffusion of thorough anthropotomical know-
ledge, we should find here in perfection that precision and fulness
which ea hypothesi are the exclusive fruits of individual attention
and undistracted concentration. Now, a few weeks ago, I was
pursuing some anatomical researches into the homologies of the
shoulder-joint muscles, and by the suggestion of one or two of my
friends, amongst whom I may mention Dr. Boycott, I took up the
line of argument for homological identity which innervation
furnishes. Being deep in the country, I was reduced to consult, in
the absence for the moment of other books, the work I have just
mentioned, for a small matter in the composition and decomposi-
tion of the brachial plexus. This is what I found to satisfy my
enquiry in a book expressly treating, you will please to recollect,
of the nerves, and written by one of those ‘famous old anthro-
potomists’ who were not distracted by “microscopische Spielereien.’
‘The fourth cervical nerve, after sending off that branch which
joins with the third to form the phrenic, and bestowing twigs on
the muscles and glands of the neck, runs to the armpit, where
it meets with the fifth, sixth, and seventh cervicals, and first dorsal,
that escape in the interstices of the musculi scaleni, to come at the
armpit, where they join, separate, and rejoin in a way scarcely to be
rightly expressed in words; and, after giving several considerable
nerves to the muscles and teguments which cover the thoraa, they
712 PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO
divide into several branches, to be distributed to all parts of the
superior extremity. Seven of these branches I shall describe under
particular names’ (p. 291). These seven branches have the parti-
cular names of Scapularis, Articularis, Cutaneus, Musculo-Cutaneus,
Muscularis, Ulnaris, and Radialis. Of such little trifles as the
connection of the second and third cervical sympathetic ganglia
which gives off heart-nerves with the arm-nerves, upon which
connection the pain down the inside of the arm in heart-disease
Niemeyer (ii. 338) supposes may, and the older anatomists would
have said must depend; as the subclavius nerve and its connection
with the phrenic, and so with the shoulder-tip pain in liver-disease,
we have just as little mention made as we have of the nerves
supplying those small muscles, the pectorales. Surely knowledge
is not like a volcanic archipelago, where the upheaval of one mass
of solid ground entails the submergence of another; rather it
resembles some vast table-land which is rising, and now and then
at accelerated rates of progress, out of the waters, and has, in these
days of the subdivision of property and of labour, its broad and
continuous surface seized upon, partitioned out by enclosures, and
put under cultivation by various occupants so soon as ever its out-
lines are recognisable. -
My last topic in this division of my address is the connection
which Comparative Anatomy has with Medicine and Surgery, and
the bearing which a cultivation of this department of Biology has,
or is likely to have, upon the interests of the profession. Of the
benefits which Comparative Anatomy receives at the hands of
medical practitioners there is little occasion to speak; or rather
Mr. Parker's volume on ‘The Shoulder Girdle,' just published by
the Ray Society, may speak for me; it is only less vast than
valuable, and will constitute the commencement of a new epoch in
the science. But what I have to speak to is, not the benefits
which Comparative Anatomy receives, but those which it can
confer. And I believe that the educational working of this study
is perhaps the particular line along which the best fruits for the
profession, and for the public, may reasonably be looked for. Any
study which forces its students into that most valuable knowledge
—the knowledge of when a thing is proved, and when it is not—
is ipso facto an ally of real medicine, and a deadly enemy of
quackery. A person who has in any way become acquainted with
MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES. 713
what reasoning and reasons are in one subject, will be apt to look
for similar reasons and similar reasoning when he has to deal with
another, and especially and rightly if that other be a closely allied
subject. And when natural knowledge shall have become more
widely and generally diffused, an end which we may hope to help
towards accomplishing by means of our School of Physical Science,
quackery, with its painful spectacles of reputation and confidence
unfairly withheld and more unfairly bestowed, will cease to flourish
in its present rank exuberance. A worker in Biology gains repu-
tation accordingly as he is acute enough to observe and generalise
for himself, and accordingly as he is conscientious enough to make
himself master of and duly acknowledge the labours of others. It
cannot be said that learning, talent, and labour are equally certain
to secure prominence either for a medical doctrine or a medical
practitioner. The medical doctrine obtains currency, acceptance,
and popularity, and the confidence of an ill-educated public, by
virtue ordinarily either of the effect on the imagination which its
paradoxical character secures for it, or of the effect on the
ear of the alliterative ring of the phraseology in which it is em-
bodied. The success of persons, again, in the medical profession,
and in some other walks of life too, may depend on personal quali-
ties quite other than any connected with diligence, attainment, or
ability—upon, say, certain peculiarities of manner, either in the
way of polish or in that of roughness. The greatness of the stake,
his own health, for which a man is playing when he adopts a par-
ticular doctrine or doctor of medicine, no doubt disturbs the balance
of such powers of judgment as he may have, much as in Gessler's
hopes the placing of an apple on the head of Tell’s son disturbed
the steadiness of the father's hand and eye. But habits of thought,
as of other things, may be acquired by a proper course of educa-
tion, and habits, like drill, steady a man under emergencies; and a
scientific training enables a man to set about forming a right
judgment in a right way and upon proper and legitimate grounds,
even when nothing less than life itself is at stake. If a know-
ledge of such a subject as Comparative Anatomy, and of its external
aspect, scientific Zoology, is a knowledge which will give the lay-
man more power of forming right decisions, it is perhaps needless
to labour long at showing that this self-same knowledge may be of
the like service to the professional man. A sort of practical proof
714. PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO
of its value is furnished us by the fact, that in Edinburgh as in
Germany a dissertation on some subject of Comparative Anatomy
is often accepted as a thesis for the degree of Doctor in Medicine.
By such a regulation we have the obvious fact recognised, that the
same sort of skill in the employment of methods, the same fami-
liarity with organs, tissues, and functions, the same reasoning
powers, are employed in investigating the problems of life where-
soever existing. The second aphorism of the ‘Novum Organon’
applies to the one as to the other line of investigation, that of
Human, and that of Brute Biology:-Instrumentis et aua'iliis res
perficitur ; and alike in both, nec manus nuda nec intellectus siói per-
missus multum valet. Comparative Anatomy, finally, besides thus
benefiting the public firstly, and the profession secondly, is of use
to Human Biology and Medicine, as such, inasmuch as it casts so
much light upon the problems which the more highly evolved
organs, functions, and other relations of our own species render in
a much higher, and, indeed, sometimes in the highest degree,
difficult or impossible to investigate. Answers to what are riddles
in Human Anatomy and Physiology are often to be found given in
very simple language in the structures and functions of the lower
and lowest animals. Of such hints furnished by the brute creation
towards the proper solution of certain problems which concern each
and all of us in dealing with our own species, I will herewith, by
your permission, give a few. Of the use of rest towards the repair
of injuries I presume there is little doubt, but the best established
teaching is all the better for the support of a few concrete ex-
amples. Now, in what animals do we find the greatest capacity
for repair of injuries, and for the reproduction of lost parts and
limbs? Precisely in those in which the whole of life is carried on
at the lowest rate, and in the nearest approximation to rest which
is compatible with animality,+in those animals, to wit, which
breathe water, and have but its scanty percentage of dissolved
oxygen to sustain their animal functions. The metamorphoses
which an animal may have undergone, or may have to undergo,
have very little directly to do with its power of recovery from injury,
or of regenerating a lost limb. No animals go through more com-
plex metamorphoses than do many of the Crustacea, and nearly all
the Echinodermata; yet assuredly no other class has a larger
capacity for the reproduction of lost fragments of their bodies.
MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES. 715
Now the latter of these classes is exclusively, and the former all
but exclusively, aquatic. The more perfect, again, an insect's
metamorphosis, i.e. its power of building up tissues and organs,
the more perfect ordinarily, or rather the more profound, has been
its quiescence as a pupa. Indeed, the very exception here proves
the rule, and proves it to be a good one; for such hemimetabolous
insects as, like May- and dragon-flies, come, in their imago state, to
differ almost as much from their larval forms as the imagos of
many holometabolous insects do from their larvae, are during those
preparatory stages as completely aquatic as any crustacean (West-
wood, ‘Introduction to Entomology,’ vol. ii. pp. 29, 38; Carus and
Gerstaecker, ‘Handbuch der Zoologie,” p. 29). I am aware that
there is such authority as Mr. Paget's (“Surgical Pathology, ed.
Turner, p. 123) and Mr. Darwin's (‘Animals and Plants under
Domestication,’ vol. ii. p. 15) in favour of regarding the power of
repairing injuries as standing in an inverse ratio to the amount of
metamorphotic change through which an animal has gone; and I
must therefore take the more pains to show that my explanation, to
the effect that this happy power depends mainly upon the peace-
fulness and quiet with which the various processes of life are carried
on ordinarily, and after the mutilation, is the truer one. My
opponents’ case would rest on such facts as these which follow. I
will give them first, and then show how they really support my
views. The larvae or tadpoles of the tailless Batrachia, but not
the adults, says Dr. Günther (Darwin, loc. cit., and Owen, ‘Com-
parative Anatomy of the Vertebrate Animals,’ vol. i. p. 567), are
capable of reproducing lost limbs. So with insects, says Mr. Dar-
win, l.c., ‘the larvae reproduce lost limbs, but, except in one order'
(the Orthoptera, and amongst them the Phasmidae'), ‘the mature
insect has no such power.” There is, however, one common property
which lies at the bottom of the power of repair both in the larval
forms and in the perfect adult animal, both in the invertebrata and
in the vertebrata specified. This common property is the compara-
tive insignificance of the apparatus for ačrial respiration : in all alike
—in the larva of the anurous amphibia, in the larva of the butterfly,
* There seems to be some little doubt whether even a Phasma can regenerate lost
parts after its last moult, and some authorities would not consider it adult till after
such ecdysis. The crustacea, however, moult many times after attaining the adult
state, i.e. a state in which they can reproduce the species. --
716 PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION To
and in the orthopterous insect—the lungs or the tracheae, as the
case may be, contrast to disadvantage with those of their con-
geners, or adult representatives, which have come to differ from
them in having lost the power of reproducing lost parts. But
active respiration is a prerequisite for activity of function and
rapidity of rate of vital processes: and the absence of this is,
according to my argument, the cause of the presence of the re-
parative power. The lungs are of course all but wholly in abey-
ance in the tadpole, and the tracheae have no vesicular dilatations
developed upon them in the caterpillar forms of any insect, nor in
the adults of the non-volant Orthoptera. In the Phasmidae, the
curious ‘walking-stick’ insects, we observe just the same slug-
gishness, combined with great tenacity of life, which we observe
among mammals in the Bruta. Let me add some more facts in
further illustration of my position. The Myriapoda, which Mr.
Newport has shown to possess this power of repair up to the time
of their final moult, are so little like the more typical insects, as to
have been classed with the Crustacea, by no less an authority than
Von Siebold. Any one, again, who will compare the simple non-
cellular lung of the adult Batrachian newt Salamandra aquatica,
which possesses an unlimited power of repair as an adult, but not in
its young stages (Bonnet, ‘CEuvres Hist. Nat.’ v. Pt. i. p. 294), with
the lung of the adult frog, will have little difficulty in under-
standing how their power of repair differs out of all proportion
more than the amount of the metamorphotic changes they severally
go through. The land Salamander, Salamandra terrestris, has, so
far as I know, escaped the hands of Spallanzani and Bonnet; its
adult lung being little inferior in extent and development of spongy
matter to that of the adult anura, I should expect the power of
regeneration to be reduced to zero as in them. If the teaching of
Comparative Anatomy has forced me to differ from the teaching of
Mr. Paget, there are other facts in the same region of research
which, as it seems to me, put one of his other many valuable doc-
trines in a clearer light than even his own clear enunciation of it.
‘Each man’s capacity,’ says Mr. Paget (‘Lancet,” Aug. 24th, 1867),
“for bearing a surgical operation may best be measured by the
power of his excretory organs in the circumstances in which the
operation will place him.” Now, I am inclined to ascribe the very
considerable, and indeed, on my views, somewhat exceptional
MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES. 717
powers of reproduction which two sets of air-breathing terrestrial
animals, the pulmonate snails and the earth-worms, possess, to the
great development of their excretory apparatus. Living, as they
do very ordinarily, in atmospheres laden with carbonic acid from
decaying vegetable matters, they must get rid of the products of
their waste and wear in the shape of fluid solutions; and the alka-
line secretion with which the bodies of both are so abundantly
slimy, furnishes just the required medium. When injured or
mutilated, these animals can withdraw themselves pretty com-
pletely from the atmospheric oxygen by shedding out this secre-
tion, and it at the same time disembarrasses their system from any
excess of carbonic acid which may be generated within it. Thus
they can attain the most perfect possible condition for repair and
regeneration, the minimum of activity of all save the excretory
organs; and I submit that it is possible that these two conditions
may be connected as cause and effect, just as in the reverse direction
a defeat of surgical skill may be connected with the presence of a
fatty kidney or liver, or the excitability of a nervous system. It
is going perhaps too far to attempt to explain the much greater
power of repair which Amphibia possess as compared with either
Pisces below or Reptilia above them to the larger size, and conse-
quent smaller aggregate surface and less perfect ačrating power of
their blood-cells, and to the transpirability of their naked skins,
which execute such important depuratory work for them, and are so
closely connected and correlated with their lungs, livers, and
kidneys. It is curious, however, and interesting to remark that
the older anatomists, in commenting on the very obvious solidarity
of these latter organs, went on, in their ignorance, I imagine, to a
great extent of the nature of amyloid and other degenerative
changes in such cases, to observe that it was illustrated by the
‘fact' that, as the lungs grew smaller, so the kidneys grew larger
in phthisis". (See Funk, ‘De Salamandrae Terrestris Vitā, 1827,
and Meckel, ‘Pathol. Anat.’ vol. i. 613, 646.)
Verloren, as quoted by Donders (‘On the Constituents of Food,”
* For accounts of experiments as to regeneration of lost or destroyed parts, see
Darwin, ‘Animals and Plants under Domestication,’ vol. ii. p. 15, ibique citata; Owen,
* Comp. Anat. of the Vertebrata,’ vol. i. p. 567; Newport, “Phil. Trans.’ vol. cxxxiv.
1844, ibique citata; Paget, ‘Surg. Path., ed. Turner, p. 123; Spence Bate, “Ann.
and Mag. Nat. Hist,” August, 1868, citing Mr. Lloyd of Hamburg, p. 118; McIntosh,
‘Experiments on Carcinus Moenas,” p. 28.
718 PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO
translated by W. Daniel Moore, M.D., p. 24), has shown how the
history of insects bears on the question which we are about to
have expounded to us of the “Relation of Food to Force;’ and
the very title of Bischoff's and Voit's work, ‘The Laws of the
Nutrition of the Carnivora,' shows how this subject, to which I shall
no further allude, but leave it to the able handling to which it has
been entrusted, is dependent on the life, and the modes of life, of
the lower creation. But I would say that it was from a study of
the structures of the class of animals last mentioned—viz. the
Carnivora—that I first came myself to be convinced that the
uterine mucous membrane would, if properly looked for, be found
in all animals alike to stretch after delivery over the area previously
occupied by the placenta; and assuredly there is no one of the
many complex and hard to be investigated problems of human
physiology to which we are more bound to be thankful for light
whencesoever obtained; and this, though the light come, as, in
justice to Dr. Matthews Duncan and Dr. Priestley, I must say it did,
in the way of illustration and confirmation rather than in that of
discovery. (See ‘Zoological Society's Transactions, V. 1863, p. 289,
Article X; Dr. Duncan's ‘Researches in Obstetrics, p. 206.)
These facts of the structural and functional arrangements of the
lower animals have been used recently to illustrate some other
points of uterine pathology and therapeutics in our own species.
In a work by Dr. F. A. Kehrer, of Giessen, in two parts, the
former of which was published in 1864, and treats of “Die Zusam-
menziehungen des weiblichen Genital-canals,’ and the second of
which was published in the year 1868, and treats of “Die Ver-
gleichende Physiologie der Geburt des Menschen und der Säuge-
thiere, I find no little light thrown upon the question of relative
position, whether as cause or effect, in which early and late abortions
respectively stand to imperfect involution of the uterus. And I
find also in loco a very distinct admonition as to the inexpediency
of allowing fear of decomposition to terrify us into what is called
‘meddlesome midwifery.’ These extracts I think you may be in-
terested to hear; I will simply quote them, and leave you, who are
so well able to do it, to make the application of them for yourselves.
‘Finally, let it be remarked that in rabbits in the earlier stages of
gestation I saw the foetus with its foetal envelopes protrude entirely
out of the os uteri, whilst the placenta still remained firmly attached
MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES. 719
in the uterus; a phenomenon which indicates either that in the
earlier stages of pregnancy the placenta materna is less lacerable,
or that the motor power of the uterus is a relatively smaller one,
and one which finds its analogy in the occurrences which take
place in abortions and premature deliveries in the human subject.’
Heft i. p. 52. In his second Heft, p. 166, Dr. Kehrer, in speaking
of the retention of the placenta being sometimes followed by
symptoms like septic poisoning and sometimes not, has wise words
to the following effect:-‘What chemical changes may be set
up in the retained placenta is clearly dependent hereon, whether
the after-birth is shut off from contact with the air by the genitalia
or not; for, if air find access to it, the membranes of the ovum
putrefy; if the air be excluded, a process of decomposition, prob-
ably identical with one of maceration of the foetus, but wanting
further chemical investigation, is set up. The occurrence of the
one or the other eventually is so far of importance, as thereupon
hangs the after-effect of a retention of the placenta upon the
general health. In fact, we observe in women, just as in the
animals mentioned, sometimes only insignificant symptoms, some-
times emaciation and sickness; sometimes, as after the absorption
of putrilage from the decomposing membranes, a violent, even a
fatal pyaemic fever. In the face of these facts, it seems to me to be
rational in ruminants, in which the cotyledon can only be detached
from the uterus by considerable violence, and scarcely even then,
completely to avoid all introduction of the hand into the cavity of the
włerus after delivery, just with the object of keeping it free from the
ingress of air, and to leave the separation of the placenta rather to
the natural forces. We shall thus best avoid putrefaction being
set up in the cavity of the uterus, and so expose the animal the less
to the risk of pyaemia.’ I have not quoted from the recently pub-
lished works of Dr. Matthews Duncan and of Dr. Graily Hewitt,
though I have specified in my notes the pages of those works
which bear upon what I have just quoted from a foreign source.
I have forborne to do this, not because I think those works less
valuable, but because I think them more so, and I presume they
will be in your hands as they have passed through mine".
* Dr. Graily Hewitt, ‘The Diagnosis, Pathology, and Treatment of Diseases of
Women,’ second edition, 1868, pp. 32, 342, 393; Dr. Matthews Duncan, ‘Researches
in Obstetrics,' pp. 276, 284, 285; Cazeaux, “Traité des Accouchemens, pp. 334, 349.
720 PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO
The human anatomist who has once seen in the lower animals the
structures which represent, as it were, in exaggeration or caricature,
the human costocoracoid membrane; the tuberculum pubis, with
the homologue of the clavicle which is attached to it as Poupart's
ligament; or the supracondyloid process of the humerus—is not
likely to forget their existence when, with either scalpel or bistoury
in hand, either for the ligature of an artery or the setting free of a
hernia, he has to deal with their representatives in the human
frame. But, if I am right in thinking that the ciliary muscle in
the eye would not have secured for itself the notice which it has
done of late years, had it not been for the much more obvious
manifestation of a similar, if not homologous, muscular apparatus
in the eye of a bird, I apprehend that I am justified in saying that
every surgeon who performs Mr. Hancock's operation of cylicotomy
for glaucoma is under obligations, whilst so doing, to Comparative
Anatomy and Sir Philip Crampton. I need not speak of the
bearing of the discovery of this muscle in the human eye by Mr.
Bowman upon the physiology of its adjustment to clear vision at
varying distances. Pure Physiology, again, unassisted by Com-
parative Anatomy, has made out much of pure function; but, much
as has been attempted in the way of experiment with infusions of
pancreatic substance, and with the introduction of cannulae into the
duct of the gland, I am inclined to think that a comparison of the
relative size of the gland in the carnivora and the herbivora re-
spectively, in a dog, say, and in a rabbit, points as unmistakably as
any of the lines of experiment just referred to—which, by the very
nature of the case, are greatly beset with several sources of fallacy
—to the fact that this salivary gland is concerned as much with
the digestion of albumen and fat, as with that of starchy substances.
With the remark that Hyrtl’s discovery (‘Wien. Zool.-Bot. Ges,’
1861, cit. Henle, ‘Handb. der Anat. ii. 310) of the diverticular
character of the glomeruli in the kidney of the selachians and
amphibia bears not a little upon the existence of a similar arrange-
ment between the vasa recta and the renal arterioles in the human
kidney, whereby, as by the direct communication shown by Schroeder
van der Kolk to exist between the arteries and veins of the pia
mater, the capillary circulation may be skipped, and the tissues
in relation with it left at rest, I leave this part of my subject, and
begin the concluding portion of my address.
MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES.. 721
In this part of my address I propose to consider, mainly by the
light of recently attained biological results, the value of two great
rules for the conduct of the understanding, each of which has a
legitimate sphere of application, but the former of which enjoys,
it seems to me, more and the latter less than its deserved promi-
nence. The first of these two regulative principles has received
the endorsement of Newton, and it stands as his first ‘Regula
Philosophandi, at the commencement of the Third Book of the
Principia. It was known in the days of the schoolmen as the
‘Razor of Occam,’ and in later days it has been styled the ‘Law of
Parsimony’ or “Economy.” Newton enunciates it as follows:—
‘Causas rerum naturalium non plures admitti debere, quam quae
et verae sint et earum phaenomenis explicandis sufficiant. Dicunt
utique philosophi: “Natura nihil agit frustra; ” et “Frustra fit
per plura quod fieri potest per pauciora.” Natura enim simplex est
et rerum causis superfluis non luxuriat.” I know that this Regula
has great influence on the minds of many biologists, and I believe
that this its influence is by no means always for good. This is not
a subject in which authorities ought to count for much ; but I may
say that, while the names of Aristotle, Malebranche, Maupertuis,
St. Hilaire, Goethe, Bichat, and Dugald Stewart may be quoted in
approval of this rule, the names of Bacon, Mill, and De Candolle
may be brought forward by those who repudiate it or curtail its
application. Our motto, however, is, ‘Nullius addictus jurare in
verba magistri; and our business is to ask, not what men have laid
down, but how Nature operates. Can a phaenomenon have more
than one cause, or can it not ? Is it possible, for example, and to
put the question in a concrete and most practically interesting
point of view at once, that a fever which we know can spread by
infection or contagion, can also originate spontaneously? I rather
incline, though but doubtfully, and after an imperfect examination
of imperfect data, to anticipate that a negative answer to this latter
question will turn out some day to be the true one ; but I do not
know that there is anything in the analogy of Nature to compel us
to incline towards this negative conclusion a priori. Such a phae-
nomenon, at all events, as a living animal, is often enough produced
by two or more distinct processes, within the limits of the same
species: as, for example, from ova of different character, summer
ova or winter ova, impregnated or unimpregnated ova; by fission
3 A
722 PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO
or gemmation; through two different series of metamorphotic
changes. And such a phaenomenon as the production of a par-
ticular tissue may depend—in the case of adipose tissue, for
example—upon the employment in Nature's laboratory of one or
the other of two different chemical compounds. Pain may be, as
Dr. Handfield Jones has shown paralysis is, produced in one case
by the impact of shock upon nerve-centres, in another by the cur-
tailment of their supply of blood. In each and all of these cases,
the maxim which has many a time been sonorously enunciated in
these Schools, ‘Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,'
would, if listened to, have closed our ears and eyes to at least one-
half of the truth. That Bacon would have classed this maxim
with his ‘Idola Theatri,’ I think I am justified in saying, for that
in the very next section (Section xlv) of the ‘Novum Organon’ to
that in which he treats of these delusive notions, I find these
words:– Intellectus humanus ex proprietate suá facile suppomit
majorem ordinem et aequalitatem in rebus quam invenit;’ and if
I am told, as by Mr. Mill (“Logic,’ vol. ii. p. 379, ed. 1846), that
Bacon, in the actual practice of investigation, acted as though
there were no such thing as Plurality of Causes, I need only
answer that herein his practice did not differ from his precepts at
all more widely than does the practice of many other writers, of
many practising, of many teaching doctors, differ from theirs. I
have a satisfaction in quoting the living De Candolle, who enjoys
one of the first and best deserved scientific reputations of the day,
in repudiation of Maupertuis’ famous principle of ‘least action.’
De Candolle writes thus in his ‘Géographie Botanique,” vol. ii. p.
II 5: ‘Nous aimons à croire aux moyens simples, peut-être unique-
ment à cause du peu de portée de notre esprit.”
What, then, is the legitimate application ? where does Nature
really bind herself to the observance of a ‘Law of Parsimony’?
In, as I think, three distinct lines of her operations.
Where an organ can be diverted from one and set to discharge
another function, there Nature will spare herself the expense of
forming a new organ, and will adapt the old one to a new use.
She is prodigal in the variety of her adaptations, she is niggard in
the invention of new structures (Milne-Edwards, cit. in Darwin's
‘Origin of Species, p. 232). The complicated arrangement of co-
operating muscles whereby the bird’s third eyelid is drawn across
MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMEs. 723
to moisten and wipe its eyeball without undue pressure on the
optic nerve, is manufactured, if so we may express ourselves, out
of the suspensorius muscle, which in other animals has but the
simple function of slinging up the eye. The scarcely less complex
and beautiful arrangement of the bird’s levator humeri is the result
of a modification of a subclavius muscle. (See ‘Trans. Linn. Soc.”
vol. xxvi. 1868, Article XI)
Secondly, where, by availing herself of the inorganic forces
always at work and available in the circumambient medium, what-
ever that medium may be, or where, by the employment, as in what
is called ‘Histological Substitution,’ of a lowly organised or vitalised
tissue, such as elastic tissue, she can spare herself the manufacture
of such expensive structures as muscle, there Nature adopts a line
of practice which we call a Law of Parsimony. Where a suspen-
sory muscle for the eye can be dispensed with altogether, as where
there is a more or less closed bony orbit, as in ourselves, and an
air-tight cavity formed by it together with the soft tissues lining
it, there atmospheric pressure is trusted to steady the eye in the
socket, as it refixes the tooth loosened by inflammation, and holds
the head of the femur in the acetabulum. The eye of the burrowing
mole, on the other hand, loses its recti and obliqui before it verges
itself into total extinction; but this very suspensorius it retains
after the wreck of its other property, as its guardian in the un-
divided undifferentiated temporo-orbital fossa.
Thirdly, where matter that would otherwise be wholly refuse,
and to be rejected, can be utilised, there Nature exemplifies this
law by her ‘utilisation of waste substances.’ The transverse colon,
with its various contents, aids and ekes out the elastic recoil of the
lungs in expiration ; and by its near approximation to the stomach
has, as Duverney long ago pointed out, the shock of the ingestion
of fresh food propagated directly to it as a warning against slug-
gishness in the discharge of its own function. The air we use in
speech, as Mr. Paget has pointed out, we could not use for
breathing.
Many other instances of the ‘Law of Parsimony” might be
given; but I know not of any which cannot be reduced under one
or other of these three heads; I know of none, that is, which can
be in any way held to negative the tenability of a law of ‘Plurality
of Causes.’
3 A 2.
724 PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO
The second great principle for the regulation of the understanding
of which I wish to speak, is one which, I believe, possesses less
currency and notoriety, and is less observed than it deserves.
This canon bids us, in considering a complex phaenomenon, to be
most careful that we omit none of the circumstances which can by
any possibility be of the essence of the case. And as the possi-
bilities of Nature are all but infinite—as, for example, the investi-
gator of problems of Geographical Distribution knows well that a
‘secret bond' may bind up together, and that inextricably, the
interests of organisms removed as far as possible to all appearance
from each other in the scale of life; as a fly or a plant may, by its
increasing and multiplying, make half a continent uninhabitable or
inhabitable by the highest mammals; I apprehend that in bio-
logical and medical problems, by the phrase ‘all the circumstances
which can by any possibility be of the essence of the case, we mean
practically, “all the circumstances of the case, without any quali-
fying limitation. But we will let Descartes, to whom the enuncia-
tion of this rule is usually and, so far as I know, rightly assigned,
enunciate it for us in his own words. These run thus (CEuvres,
tom. xi. 1826, ed. W. Cousin, p. 23): “Régle Septième pour la
Direction de l’Esprit. Pour compléter la science, il faut que la
pensée parcoure d'un mouvement non interrompu et suivi tous les
objets qui appartiennent au but qu’elle veut atteindre et qu’ensuite
elle les résume dans une énumération méthodique et suffisante.’
Some of the very greatest advances which have been made of late
in practical diagnosis have been made in the spirit of this recom-
mendation. The application of a chemical test to the urine for
information as to the expediency of giving or withholding wine in
the case of a sinking life, would have seemed to Swift, could he
have had any idea either of such a procedure or of the employment
of a sphygmograph for the same object, more absurd than any
of the follies he ascribed to the philosophers of Laputa. But as
Archbishop Whately—a name to be greatly honoured here, and,
indeed, wherever else liberality, and fearlessness, and ability are
held in respect—has well pointed out, the absurdities of Laputan
aspirations are less wonderful than the actual attainments of
modern science. And to these results science has attained, because
her votaries have known that what may seem to Swift, and such as
Swift, to be but curious and dilettante, otiose, or even disgusting,
MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES. 725
may turn out ultimately to be essential elements in problems, the
solution of which promotes directly and greatly the interests of
man, and the glory of Him to whom nothing is common or un-
clean. Could anything have seemed at first sight to be more
impertinent, more otiosely curious and trifling, than to enquire
during an epidemic of cholera what was the nature of the subsoil
in the area it was ravaging, to what depth it was porous, and at
what level the water was, and had been previously, standing in it 2
Yet, as I think, Von Pettenkofer has at last fought out and won
his battle on these points (see ‘Zeitschrift für Biologie,” Bd. I,
Heft ifi. und iv. 1865; Bd. II. Heft i. 1866; Supplemental Heft,
1867, p. 54; Bd. IV. Heft iv. p. 400); and the distinguished
President of our “Public Medicine’ section, Mr. Simon, who is as
little prone as most men of science to take up over-readily with
any new wind of doctrine, has told us (“Report of the Privy
Council for 1866, pp. 366 and 457) that certain of his carefully
observed cases of the distribution of this disease seem to illustrate
and find their explanation in Von Pettenkofer's theory. I have
pleasure in adding that I see, by papers published by the illustrious
Professor of Munich in the “Allgemeine Zeitung” for June last,
that he has been able to show that, amongst all the other circum-
stances of the case at Gibraltar and at Malta, there were still to be
found, all guessing and objections notwithstanding, the porous
subsoil and the retreating ground-water, as factors in the complex
constituting an area or arena for cholera. Let us attend to and
note always all the circumstances in every complex phaenomenon
which we have to investigate, but let us not betake ourselves over-
hastily to the process of eliminating antecedents, until we are quite
sure that they do not enter as factors into its causation.
I may say, in conclusion, that attention to this seventh rule of
Descartes might have saved such students of Natural Science as
have fallen into materialism from falling into it. The Physiologist,
as such, has nothing to do with the data of Psychology which do
not admit of being weighed or measured, nor of having their force
expressed in inches or ounces. This language, which I long ago
employed myself (‘Nat. Hist. Rev., April 1861; ‘Med. T. and Gaz.’
* See also “Allgemeine Zeitung, December 8, 1868, No. 343. Ueber das Ver-
hältniss der “amtlichen Choleraberichte” zum Boden und Grundwasser." Von Dr.
Max von Pettenkofer.
726 PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO
March 15, 1862, Articles I, II), coincides with an utterance which
I am glad to see in Mr. Herbert Spencer's recently issued first
number of his new edition of ‘Principles of Psychology.’ There
(part i. chap. i. p. 48) Mr. Spencer says, “It may safely be affirmed
that Physiology, which is an interpretation of the physical processes
which go on in organisms in terms known to natural science, ceases
to be Physiology when it imports into its interpretations any
psychical factor, a factor which no physical research whatever can
disclose or identify, or get the remotest glimpse of.” But, I appre-
hend', if the Physiologist wishes to become an Anthropologist, he
must qualify himself to judge of both sets of factors. There is
other science besides Physical Science, there are other data besides
quantifiable data. Schleiden, a naturalist well known by name to
all of us, compares the Physical Philosopher (‘Materialismus der
neueren deutschen Naturwissenschaft, p. 48), who is not content
with ignoring, without also denying the existence of a science
based on the consciousness, to a man who, on looking into his purse
and finding no gold there, should not be content with saying,
‘I find no gold here, but should go further and say, ‘there is no
such thing as gold either here or anywhere else.” It is interesting
to note that here in Oxford, till within a few years of the present
time, we narrowed the application of the word “Science’ in what
seems now to be a curiously perverted fashion. For, ignoring all
the physical world as entirely as though we had been already dis-
embodied, we used the word to denote and connote only Logic,
Metaphysics, and Ethics. By a ‘student of science in my under-
graduate days was meant a student of the works of Aristotle, Kant,
and Sir William Hamilton. The wheel has since made somewhat
of a circle; our nomenclature, like much else belonging to us, is
altering itself into a closer correspondence with the usages and needs
of the larger world outside; the so-called ‘student of science’ of
the year 1850 is now said to go into the ‘School of Philosophy;”
and ‘the student of science,’ as our terminology runs in the year
1868, will be found at the Museum studying the works of Helm-
holtz, Miller, and Huxley. I do not say this by way of triumph,
but rather in that of regret, little disposed or used though I am,
* In the ‘Anatomical Memoirs of John Goodsir, edited by his successor, Professor
Turner, and published subsequently to the delivery of this Address, some remarks to
the same effect as these may be found; vol. i. pp. 268 and 292.
MEDICINE 1N MODERN TIMES. 727
and hope always to remain, to regret or deprecate change as such.
For there is a philosophy of both subjects, and a science also in
both ; and I would hope that both the one and the other might
still retain a lien on the two words and the two things, nor suffer
its rival to establish a claim for sole possession by its own default
in exercising a right of usage.
Advocates of the dignity of man are wont to regard, or to profess
to regard, with something like horror, doctrines which would hint
that either his bodily structures or his mental faculties, his “more
pure and nobler part, may have attained their perfection in the
way of gradational evolution. But it is not clear to me that the
horror expressed for these conclusions is much more legitimate
than the arguments with which they have been assailed by Prime
Ministers and others, in the Sheldonian Theatre close by, and else-
where within our precincts. For dignity rests upon responsibility
—a man is worthy or unworthy, accordingly as he can or cannot
make a good answer when called upon by a voice, either from
within or without, to account for his conduct or for his character.
And just as a man is responsible for the employment of the wealth
he possesses to the Government under which he is suffered to enjoy
that wealth, no matter in what way he may have become possessed
of it, whether by the hereditary transmission of a family estate, or
in any other of several feasible and conceivable ways, so is a man
responsible for the employment of his corporeal and mental facul-
ties, howsoever he may have been allowed to become seized of them,
to that larger and largest Government under which he has his
being. I believe, however, that, if men would take as much and
the same care in these psychological questions as the physiologist
does in his experiments and observations, to overlook none of the
conditions and circumstances of the entire complex of phaenomena
upon which they undertake to decide, they would come to see that
above, and often behind, but always beside and beyond the whirl
of his emotions and the smoothly fitting and rapidly playing
machinery of his ratiocinative and other mental faculties, there
stands for each man a single undecomposable something—to wit,
himself. This something lives in his consciousness, moves in his
will, and knows that for the employment and working of the entire
apparatus of feelings and reasoning it is individually and indivisibly
responsible. Its utterances have but a still small voice, and the
728 PHYSIOLOGY, IN RELATION TO MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES.
turmoil and noise of its own machinery may, even while working
healthily, entirely mask and overwhelm them. But if we with-
draw ourselves from time to time out of the smoke and tarnish of
the furnace, we can hear plainly enough that, howsoever the engine
may have come together, and into its present being, the engineer,
at all events, is no result of any processes of accretion and agglo-
meration. Science, business, and pleasure are but correlatives of
the machinery in its different applieations and activities; we are
something besides all this, manifesting ourselves to others in the
decisions of our will, and manifesting ourselves to ourselves in our
aspirations and consciousness of responsibility.
‘And e'en as these are well and firmly fixed,
In dignity of being we ascend.”
I have heard this line of argumentation likened to an attempt to
defend Sebastopol by balloons. “Whilst you are in the clouds,
your city will be taken beneath your feet. But a position, though
airy, may yet be impregnable. There are those present who will
recollect how the highest placed forts of that town were never
taken, but continued to the last to answer shot for shot, and shell
for shell, to the Allies. The attacking forces knew not the strength
of those north forts till they entered them, but when they entered
them, they entered them as friends.
XLI.
THE HARVEIAN ORATION, 1873.
TÉ Töö' àxvvpal,
q66vov ćpielböpuevov tá kaka čpya;
q'avti ye plâv oira, kev čvöpt trapplovíplay
6áAAoto av eiðaipoviav
rà ital rô pépé06al.
PINDAR, Pyth. vii. 18 sqq.
TO
GEORGE BURROWS, M.D., F.R.S., D.C.L.,
PRESIDENT OF THE
ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS OF ENGLAND,
WHOSE OWN ATTAINMENTS,
WHOSE SYMPATHY WITH THE INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY
AND PROGRESS OF OTHERS,
WHOSE UNSWERVING DISCHARGE OF GREAT, AND WHOSE
CONSCIENTIOUS FULFILMENT OF DETAIL DUTIES,
FURNISHED FOR MANY YEARS A VALUABLE EXAMPLE
TO THE
STUDENTS OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW's HOSPITAL,
THIS EIA RIVE IAN OR ATION
IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED
BY ONE OF HIS FORMER PUPILS.
OxPORD, 1873.
MR. PRESIDENT AND FELLOWs of THE CollBGE OF PHYSICIANS:—
A man whose lot it is to live away from London may well feel
some diffidence in accepting an invitation to lecture before a
metropolitan audience; and, Sir, when you honoured me by re-
questing me to deliver this year's Harveian Oration, I felt and
730 THE HARVEIAN ORATION,
expressed this natural hesitation. I wish to record that you pointed
out to me that my function in Oxford was to pursue and lecture
publicly upon the very subjects with which Harvey occupied him-
self; and I suggested to myself that what could with any propriety
form the substance of a course of lectures in the one place, could,
mutatis mutandis, furnish materials for an address in the other.
I felt besides, that, as the President of the College of Physicians is
by virtue of his office one of the five electors to the Linacre Pro-
fessorship, the Linacre Professor might seem scarcely justified in
declining an invitation to appear before the learned body to which
in part he owed his position ; and, though I mention it last, I felt
first of all that a wish expressed to me, not so much by the official
whom I am now addressing, as by the individual who now more
than twenty years ago introduced me to Harvey’s hospital, and has
persistently befriended me ever since, was a wish which I ought not
lightly to disregard. If now, Sir, I follow an example which you
have often set me, and, without needless preface or further personal
allusions, address myself at once to the business before me, I shall
thereby pay you the best of all compliments, by showing you that
your teaching has not been wholly thrown away upon your former
pupil.
The time allotted to me I propose to occupy, firstly, in expound-
ing with all possible brevity certain advances recently made in our
knowledge of the amatomy and physiology of the circulatory organs;
and, secondly, in giving the as yet unrecorded history of one of the
many attempts to rob Harvey of his rightful rank in the noble
army of discoverers, which were made in the latter half of the
seventeenth century.
Some of the last, if not the very last, of the many fruitful ex-
periments which Harvey performed in the way of interrogating
Nature as to the circulation, were experiments in the way of
injection. If the writer of a work which appeared but some forty-
three years ago, ‘On the Diseases and Injuries of Arteries”,” had
taken the pains to repeat those experiments which Harvey per-
formed more than two hundred and twenty years ago, and when in
* “On the Diseases and Injuries of Arteries, with the Operations required for their
Cure; being the substance of the Lectures delivered in the Theatre of the Royal
College of Surgeons in the spring of MDCCCXXIX.’ By G. J. Guthrie, F.R.S. London,
1830.
THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 731
his seventy-fourth year, we should not have had the following
statement at page 9 of his book: “I have conceived that the arteries
contained air in an uncombined state, which may assist in keeping
them distended, and in facilitating the circulation; but I have not
been able to prove it.’ The fact that Harvey performed experi-
ments in the way of injection may be unknown to many persons
who are too well informed to conceive that the arteries may or
can, compatibly with the carrying on of any circulation, contain
air in an uncombined state; for these experiments are not to be
found recorded either in the treatise ‘De Motu Cordis’ or in
either of the two letters to Riolanus; which two compositions were,
in the older editions of Harvey's works, printed as three parts of
a single treatise, under the names of ‘Exercitatio Anatomica i. De
Motu Cordis,” etc., ‘Exercitatio Anatomica ii. De Circulatione
Sanguinis,' and ‘Exercitatio Anatomica iii. De Circulatione San-
guinis;’ and were, till the appearance of the College of Physicians'
edition in 1766, the only published", as they are still the best
* The statement made (by Dr. Akenside; see Pettigrew, ‘Medical Portrait Gallery,’
Preface, p. 7, citing Dr. F. Hawkins) in the Praefatio to the College of Physicians’
edition of Harvey's works, to the effect that only two of Harvey's Letters had been
published prior to the year 1766, is not correct. Horstius, as Harvey's words in the
‘Epistola Sexta,’ p. 631 (“Harveii Opera, ed. 1766), show, when read in connexion
with the Epistola immediately preceding it, received three letters from Harvey. By
consulting Horstius' work referred to by Dr. Akenside, l.c., I found at pp. 61–65 the
letter, which appears in our edition as ‘Epistola Tertia responsoria Morisono,’ pub-
lished by Horstius in 1656 with the omission of the first six and a half, and also of the
last three and a half lines. These lines Harvey had doubtless ordered his amanuensis
—a functionary of great importance to one who wrote so bad a hand (see p. 165, ed.
1766, or Harvey's own autograph MS., No. 486, Sloane Coll., British Museum)—to
omit when he bade him copy and send to Horstius, ‘eadem quae antea medico cuidam
Parisiensi (se. Morisono) responderat.” Horstius does not publish Harvey's letter
(the ‘Epistola Quinta’ of our edition) of date Feb. I, 1654–5, but appends the last
letter of the three (the ‘Epistola Sexta’ of our edition) to his own answer to Harvey's
earlier communication. I shall henceforward refer to the College of Physicians’
edition of Harvey's works as ‘ed. 1766, and to Dr. Willis' most valuable translation
of them, published by the Sydenham Society in 1847, as ‘ed. Willis.’ I throw out as
a topic for future discussion the question whether Dr. Willis is right in following the
editions of Harvey's writings of an earlier date than 1766, in retaining the negative
in the sentence (at p. 131 in both his edition and in that of 1766) in the second
epistle to Riolanus which refers to the Critias of Plato. I think Dr. Willis is right,
and that Dr. Lawrence was wrong; but to do this it is necessary to sacrifice Harvey's
credit for knowledge of Plato whilst vindicating the consecutiveness of his reasoning.
Harvey himself would probably have accepted this alternative. It is right to add,
however, that so far as my reading of the edition of 1766 has carried me, I have come
upon no other case where I have been forced to think that Dr. Lawrence may have
blundered.
732 THE - HARVEIAN - ORATION.
known, records of Harvey's work and labour upon the circulation of
the blood. The experiments to which I refer are put upon record in
a letter of Harvey’s to P. M. Slegel, of date 1651 (see ‘Harveii
Opera, ed. 1766, p. 613; ed. Willis, p. 597). They were under-
taken with the object of giving a final and happy despatch to all
the quibbling objections of Riolanus, “omnes Riolani circa hanc
rem altercationes jugulare;’ and they consisted, firstly, in forcing
water from the cava into the right ventricle whilst the pulmonary
artery, the ‘vena arteriosa' of those days, was ligatured—whereby
Riolanus' suggestion as to the permeability or porosity of the
interventricular septum was shown to be untenable; and, secondly,
in forcing water from the pulmonary artery round into the opened
left ventricle, whereby the lesser circulation was demonstrated, to
use Harvey's own favourite word, airobia; or, to use the very
words employed by him upon this very occasion, by an ‘experi-
mentum & bukrov a me' (in his seventy-fourth year) “nuper et
collegis aliquot praesentibus exploratum.” Simple as this experi-
ment may seem to us now, I do not think that any apology is
required for the drawing of attention to it; for it is only twenty-
eight years ago (see ‘Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal,’
vol. lxiii. p. 20) that Dr. Sharpey, to whom our Baly Medal has
been so recently and so fitly assigned, had to perform the very
closely similar experiment of injecting defibrinated blood into the
thoracic aorta, with the very closely similar object of showing that
the force of the heart was sufficient to account for the passage of
blood through the intestinal and hepatic vascular systems—nay,
to perform an all but identical experiment, adding on to it but the
means for estimating and reproducing the force put out by the
ventricle concerned. If such experiments as these were necessary
in 1845, how much more necessary must have been the still
simpler experiments of Harvey in 1651 ! At that time, the prestige
of Riolanus the younger ‘pressed heavily upon mankind.’ Harvey
himself had called that individual ‘anatomicorum coryphaeum ”
in 1649 : and, in the very year and letter we are dealing with, he
calls him “celebrem anatomicum.’ And Pecquet, the discoverer of
the thoracic duct, in his work, also of this selfsame year 1651,
the ‘Experimenta Nova Anatomica,’ a work spoken of by Haller
(‘Bibliotheca Anatomica,’ i. p. 443) as ‘nobile opus et inter prae-
cipua saeculi decora,' has the following remarkable passage: ‘Ita
THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 733
sentiunt non vulgaris peritiae medici Harveius, Veslingius, Con-
ringius, Bartholinus, aliique complures; nee melior ipse Joannes
Riolanus (quod mirari subit pro eximiä viri, quá in rebus anatomicis
caeteros anteivit, sagacitate). Audi hanc in rem illius sententiam.’
p. 4, l.c. : This, I think, I will spare you; but I will remark that,
after this singular—or perhaps, alas ! not singular—instance of the
blundering judgments which contemporary writers may pass upon
each other, no young man, nor indeed any old one—for Harvey
was in his seventy-fifth year when he first read Pecquet's work (see
‘Ep. Tert.’ p. 620, ed. 1766; p. 604, ed. Willis)—should overmuch
fret if his own age, in his own estimation, do him scanty justice.
Posterity ordinarily—I do not say always—rectifies these false
judgments; it has done so, at all events, in the cases of the men so
grotesquely grouped together by Pecquet". Haller, for example,
writing in 1774 (‘Bibliotheca Anatomica,’ i. p. 301), speaks of
Riolanus as ‘vir asper et in nuperos suosque coaevos immitis ac
nemini parcens, nimis avidus Suarum laudum praeco, et se ipso
fatente anatomicorum princeps.” The duty of attacking and abolish-
ing such a man may, or indeed must, have been a disagreeable one
to his contemporaries. They appear to have shirked it : it was
their duty to have faced it, notwithstanding it might have been
disagreeable. -
Harvey used for these experiments a somewhat rough injecting
apparatus, ‘quemadmodum in clysteribus injiciendis fieri solet”
(p. 614, ed. 1766; p. 597, ed. Willis). The modern experiment
which I wish first to introduce to your attention rests for its
accomplishment upon the employment of the delicate injection-
syringe (for Einstichung) of Ludwig, and of the fine soluble Berlin
blue for the substance to be injected. Here, as in many other
instances, our superiority to our forefathers rests mainly or wholly
upon our possession of more delicate, or upon our command of more
powerful agents; and the delicate syringe and the penetrating
soluble injection-mass help us to discoveries and demonstrations
impossible in default of such means; just as the superior lenses of
Malpighi and Leeuwenhoeck helped them to the discovery and
* See also, I would add, Gregorius Horst, the father of Harvey's correspondent of
the same name, in his “Opera Medica, i. p. 83 (1661), where Riolanus is spoken of as
“anatomicorum hujus saeculi fere primum;’ and consult Bartholinus himself, who, in
his work “De Lacteis Dubia' (1654), refers to “multis Riolani observationibus quibus
rem anatomicam immortali nominis celebritate auxit.' - -
734 THE HARVEIAN ORATION.
demonstration of the capillary circulation, unknown to the discoverer
of the makroscopic circulation. The experiment to which I refer
has its results fairly represented in the accompanying drawing
(Fig. 1) of a specimen prepared by myself at a class-demonstration.
FIG. I.-Vermiform Appendix, Caecum, and parts of Small Intestine and
Colon of Rabbit (Lepus cuniculus), with the Peyerian and also some of the
mesenteric glands in connexion with them injected. The ileum and colon
lie side by side, the former describing a siphon-shaped curve before ending
in a dilatation, known as the “sacculus rotundus’ and homologous with the
aggregation of Peyerian follicles situated in man just anteriorly to the ileo-
caecal valve. The sacculus rotundus occupies the centre of the figure; above
and a little to the left of it another somewhat similar aggregation of Peyerian
follicles is seen just beyond the ileocolic valve. The colon curves backwards
externally to and concentrically with the ileum. The caecum consists of two
portions: one larger in calibre, thinner in walls, and sacculated spirally; the
other, the homologue of the human ‘appendix vermiformis,' smaller in
calibre, but with much thicker walls. It has been injected as described in
the text, and the injection is seen to have passed into some mesenteric glands
situated close to the junction of the two segments of the caecum, and between
it and the colon.

THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 735
It gives a figure of the lacteals injected, by the means just specified,
as they exist upon the terminal segment, here widely globular, of
the ileum, upon a single disciform patch upon the commencing
colon, and, finally and chiefly, upon and all around the walls of the
colossal vermiform appendix of the rabbit. In this latter place it is
but what the Germans call, and have called (Frey, ‘Das Mikroskop
und die mikroskopische Technik,’ 4th ed. 1871, p. 255), a Kinder-
spiel, to insert the point of the fine Einstiehung syringe charged
with the soluble blue injection just beneath the peritonal coat at
the caecal end or elsewhere, when, upon pressing the piston,
a reticulation of blue will spread itself over the surface of the tube,
enclosing as islands the solid substance of the Peyerian follieles.
It needs but a little perseverance in the way of gentle pressure to
cause superficial tubular lymphatics to arise into view, and to
declare their true character by their contrast with and distinctness
from the blood-vessels, as well as by their moniliform character
speaking of their richness in internally placed valves. Passing
over the convex walls of the appendix, they join larger trunks
which run along its mesenteric border; these larger trunks in
their turn enter the mesenteric glands, and form in their substance
reticulations strikingly like those formed previously in the walls of
the intestine around the solid substance of the Peyerian follicle—
suggesting thus to the naked eye the similarity, and by consequence
the homology, which a microscopic examination enables us to prove
to exist between the lymph-sinuses and the solid masses they
surround in the Peyerian follicles and in the mesenteric glands
respectively".
It is the demonstration of the relation of the lymphatic or lac-
teal vessels, or sinuses, as the case may be, in different animals, to
the solid ampulla-like mass in the Peyerian follicles which the
modern method of puncture can claim as being eminently its own
* I take this opportunity of expressing my surprise that Henle has not seen his
way towards accepting this view of the real nature or Bedeutung of the Peyerian
follicles. In his ‘Gefässlehre’ of 1868 (p. 404) he refers us back to his “Eingeweide-
lehre," p. 57, of 1862, where, as also in the second edition, 1873, p. 62, the absorbent
character of these structures is denied, just as it was by Hyrtl in his Handbuch der
Topographischen Anatomie,’ 1860, p. 646, and by Teichmann, “Das Saugadersystem,”
1861, pp. 86–91. The view which I have adopted was accepted by a distinguished
Fellow of this College, Dr. Burdon-Sanderson, in the Eleventh Report of the Medical
Officer of the Privy Council for 1868, p. 96.
736 THE HARVEIAN ORATION.
attainment; for many years ago—in 1784, in fact—and three years
before the appearance of Mascagni's splendid work, with similar
figures and histories of similar experiments (‘Vasorum Lymphati-
corum Historia et Iconographia,’ 1787), the continuity of the
lacteal radicles upon the walls of the intestine with the “lymph-
paths’—to borrow a word of later coinage—in the mesenteric
glands, and finally, after passing through successive lines of these
apparently solid structures, with the thoracic duct itself, had been
demonstrated by Sheldon, then Professor of Anatomy in our Royal
Academy of Arts. These are his words (from p. 49 of his work,
‘Of the absorbent System,’ 1784), describing his plate No. 5: “In
the fifth plate of this work, upon a portion of human jejunum from
an adult female subject, seventeen lacteal vessels are injected with
quicksilver, by inserting pipes into them upon the intestine. They
were remarkably large and varicose in this subject, and as the quick-
silver was poured into the lymphatic injecting-tube to fill these
vessels, it frequently ran out in a full stream by the jugular vein,
which was opened. This circumstance rendered it evident that the
mercury had passed through the whole course of the lacteals and
thoracic duct, and had penetrated even into the venous system. It
is, I believe, the only instance in which the thoracic duct has been
injected from the lacteals on the intestines'.”
Sheldon's first plate, I may add, when compared with his letter-
press on p. 37, appears to show that what he calls ‘ampullulae' were
really Peyerian glands, and that he had repeatedly seen these glands
* I have some pleasure in pointing out that by making a reference to the plates of
the venerable Professor Arnold, fasc. i. tab. i. fig. 2, 1838, it may be seen that the
quicksilver injection could sometimes give as correct results as the ‘silver method' of
modern microscopy for the detection of lymphatics by their epithelium. The figure I
refer to shows the fourth ventricle plexus without, the velum interpositum on the
contrary with, lymphatics injected with quicksilver. The use of the silver method has
enabled me to prove that this representation is correct: abundance of choroidal villi
can be procured—and very beautiful objects they are when treated with O.25 per cent.
solution of nitrate of silver—from the plexus in the fourth ventricle, but no lymphatic
vessels. These can be shown from the velum interpositum by the use of the same
reagent. The use of quicksilver as an injection-substance has not always led to as
happy results as in the instance just given. Not to specify other cases, it is curious
to note that the penetration of this material into the parieto-splanchnic ganglion of
the Lamellibranchiata when thus employed by the skilful Italian anatomist, Poli,
and its distributing itself thence into the nerves given off from it by displacement of
their granular neurine, seduced him into supposing these structures to constitute a
lymphatic system, “cisternam lacteam et vasorum lactiferorum surculos.’ See ‘Tes-
tacea Utriusque Siciliae,’ tom. i. p. 39, 1791. - -
THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 737
distended in the way of natural injection with chyle, as it is easy
enough to see them distended in an animal, such as a rat, which
can be got to feed on fatty food, and can be killed at a proper
interval of time afterwards. He appears to have had very serious
as well as reasonable doubts as to the existence of any foramen in
the apices of these ‘ampullulae'; but the authority of Lieberkühn,
whose ‘Dissertatio Anatomica’ (p. 18) he had himself edited, ap-
pears to have weighed with him more than his airobia. Near,
therefore, as Sheldon came to seeing the whole truth, he just failed
of doing so entirely and completely; and the views which Lieber-
kühn had put forward (p. 10, loc. cit.) as to the great number
of the Peyerian glands in the lower segment of the small intestines,
being a proof that they held relation to secretion or excretion
rather than to absorption, prevailed and have prevailed, even into
our own day. These are Lieberkühn's words: ‘Quâre ad finem ilei
plures quam in integro intestino positi erunt? Nonne propter
faeces jamjudum exsuccas et indurescentes ut lubricatae valvulam
facile transeant nec laedant’’ In Henle’s ordinarily and marvel-
lously excellent treatise on Anatomy, of date 1841, I find (p. 895)
the excretory character of the Peyerian follicles taken as something
certain; the only thing left uncertain being the question as to
whether their contents found their way into the cavity of the in-
testine by a constantly patent, however small, duct, or by dehiscence,
as ova from an ovary. In 1850 the real meaning, the true physio-
logical import, of these glands was proved by Brücke. The method
of injection, of which I have spoken, enables us to demonstrate or
exhibit what was then proved, and that with the greatest ease. It
is difficult to understand how any one can now doubt that the
Peyerian glands are really but the pileorrhizae of the roots, the
glands the tubera, and the thoracic duct the trunk or stem of the
absorbent tree.
If any apology be needed for my dwelling so long upon a point
of anatomy which has not merely much historical, but also much
practical, interest—the Peyerian glands being the part of the
organism especially affected by the poison of typhoid fever, which
I see has, amongst other aliases, that of ‘Peyerian fever’ (Walshe,
‘On Diseases of the Heart, 3rd ed. p. 208)—I would add that I
was till recently under the impression that the actual demonstration,
the doing, of that which my Figure I, p. 734, represents as done,
3 B
738 THE HARVEIAN ORATION."
might have been a fitting exhibition for me to go through upon
the present occasion, following herein the example of Harvey,
‘viliora animalia in scenam adducentis.’ I have, however, learned
that this very demonstration on the appendix vermiformis of the
rabbit has been often performed in Germany, and, indeed, also in
England; and I judged, consequently, that it might be superfluous,
as it would not be novel, to exhibit it here and now. -
Having been thus disappointed in my intention of demonstrating
something new in this direction, I cast about in another for some-
thing of the same character. And in the heart of a bird, the
Australian Cassowary (Casuarius australis), killed at Rockingham
Bay, lat. 18 deg., on the east coast of that continent, and sent me
by my former pupil, J. E. Davidson, Esq., I came upon a structure
which I am well assured has never been either described or figured
before. It possesses upon this ground some claim upon our atten-
tion; but it possesses stronger claims than any which mere rarity
could give it, being a structure which, though it has never been seen
in any other member of the class Aves, is largely developed, and,
indeed, exactly reproduced in the hearts of certain mammals, and
does not fail to be represented, at least rudimentarily, in our own.
The structure in question is a ‘moderator’ band, holding precisely
the same relations to the other parts of the right ventricle in this
bird which the band so named by Mr. T. W. King in the ‘Guy’s
Hospital Reports,’ vol. ii. p. 122, 1837, holds in many, if not in all,
Ungulate mammals. This, I presume, is made plain by a com-
parison of the two diagrams (Figures 2 and 3), showing, one of them
the heart of this bird, the other the heart of a sheep, with the right
ventricle similarly laid open in each case. The advantage, which in
the struggle for existence, and specially in that very common
phase of it which takes the form of a race for food or from an
eater, which an animal with such a muscular band passing directly
across the cavity of its right ventricle from its fixed to its movable
wall must possess, is not a difficult thing for any man to under-
stand who has ever either watched in another or experienced in
himself the distress caused by the over-distension of any muscular
sae". A band of similar function—I do not say definitely of
* Since writing as above I have been reminded of what I ought not to have for-
gotten, viz. that my friend Dr. Milner Fothergill has discussed this very subject in
his work, ‘The Heart and its Diseases, with their Treatment,’ London, 1872, p. 6.
THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 739
precisely the same morphological importance—has often been figured
as existing in the hearts of most or all Reptilia below Crocodilina;
and it serves in them to close up and expel the blood from the
pulmonary compartment of their imperfectly divided ventricle.
------
nº \
º -
º º
\
- ,
Fig. 2.-Heart of Sheep. The right ventricle is laid open. The letter M.
indicates the moderator band. A probe has been passed between the chordae
tendineae, passing from a musculus papillaris arising from the movable wall
of the ventricle to the two main segments of the tricuspid valves and the
outer wall of the ventricle.
Such being the function of this moderator band, what is its mor-
phological bearing, and what traces can we find of it in ourselves,
tempting us to speculate as to the nature of the secret bond which
brings usinto relations of affinity not only with the mammalian class,
3 B 2.

740 THE HARVEIAN ORATION.
but with an older stock, the many-sided potentialities of which
embraced not only mammals, but all warm-blooded animals, and
not only all warm-blooded creatures, but warm-blooded animals and
Fig. 3.-Heart of Australian Cassowary (Casuarius australis), prepared
similarly to the heart of sheep, figured in Figure 2, and showing at M the
moderator band. A line of papillary upgrowths is indicated at the upper
end of the upper segment of the muscular auriculo-ventricular valve, passing
downwards towards the point of origin of the moderator band from the
septum. They extend in the specimen over a space of about three-eighths
of an inch, and are indicated in the woodcut by dark transverse lines.
reptiles also? The valves of the heart in the higher vertebrata,
when regarded from this point of view of development—the safest

THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 74.1
if not the sole criterion of homology—may be spoken of as being
but trabeculae flaked off from the inner surface of the wall of a
muscular sac, and subsequently made more or less membranous in
the way of specialisation and its correlative economy. Thus, as Ge-
genbaur (Vergleichende Anatomie, 2nd edition, p.836) has remarked,
the intervalvular space in these animals corresponds to the entire
cavity of the spongy-walled heart of fishes and amphibia; and the
sinuous intertrabecular cavities in the spongy walls of these latter
animals correspond with the chief part—viz. the extravalvular part of
the ventricular space—in mammals, birds, and Crocodilina. Now, the
musculi papillares represent the disposal or destination of the inner-
most layer of the right ventricle, according to Dr. Pettigrew (see
his paper, Phil. Trans. 1864, p. 479); and I would submit that the
moderator band is but a specialisation of the next layer in order
from within outwards—to wit, Dr. Pettigrew's sixth layer, which
he has figured (Plate XIV. fig. 33) as proceeding in a spiral direc-
tion from right to left, much as the fibres of the moderator bands I
have figured do. A study of the heart of the rabbit will put this
matter in a very clear light, and further open our eyes to see and
recognise the rudimentary representation of this moderator band in
our own hearts. If we look at the outer aspect of that very con-
stant musculus papillaris, which passes in man from the outer and
movable wall of the right ventricle to distribute its chordae ten-
dineae to the two more anteriorly placed of the three segments of .
its auricular valve, we shall frequently see that its longitudinal
fibres are crossed nearly or quite at right angles by a slender fibrous
band, so that we have before us an appearance not wholly nor
essentially unlike that presented by the striae longitudinales of
Lancisi and the fibres of the corpus callosum when viewed in their
mutual connection. This band of fibres can sometimes be traced up
towards the conus arteriosus, and be seen not to die away until
close upon the point of origin of the most anteriorly or upwardly
placed of the chordae tendineae which arise from the septum to pass.
to the hindermost of the three segments of the tricuspid. The
points between which this line of fibres lies may be observed to be
the very same as those between which the moderator bands in the
cassowary and the sheep stretch as free columns in the diagrams
before you. It is not altogether rare to see this band raise itself
from the position of fusion, like the ventricular wall, and assume
742 THE HARVELAN ORATION.
the character of a cylindrical band for a lesser distance, but with no
less distinctness as a column, than in the Ungulata. Such a case I
had actually before me whilst writing this, and you have it now
figured before you (Fig. 4)".
Fig. 4.—Human Heart. The right ventricle has its cavity exposed. The
moderator band M is seen to pass up from the base of a musculus papillaris
arising from the outer or movable wall of the ventricle into the neighbour-
hood of the conus arteriosus. Close to this, its upper end, a chorda tendinea
arises by two roots, and passes up to the most posteriorly placed of the three
cusps of the tricuspid valve.
* Since this oration was delivered I have received two communications relating
to the presence of a moderator band in the human heart. One of these, from my
former pupil, J. C. Galton, Esq., F.L.S., was accompanied by a sketch in which a
moderator band was drawn as passing in a human heart from the insertion into the
movable wall of the ventricle and the very constant musculus papillaris supplying

.THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 743
Every gradation, in fact, exists between the entire obsolescence
of the moderator band, which we sometimes see in the human
heart, through the typical, and I should anticipate, constant, but
not functionally important, representation of it in the rabbit, up to
the important and structurally prominent development attained to by
it in the ungulate mammal, and this solitary instance for the class of
birds, and the sub-class, with such generalised affinities, of struthiones.
And, speaking of the method of gradations, I take this opportu-
nity of saying that its application in the case of the muscular right
auriculo-ventricular valve of birds will, in my judgment, put an
end to the disputes which have taken place as to its homology with
one or other of the two valves in the crocodiles. The two portions
of the valve in the Casuarius australis are so nearly equal—the
larger being I-7 inch, as against I-4 of the smaller—as to do away
with the difficulty which might be felt in holding that both croco-
dilian valves are represented here. There are other reasons for this
view, which I reserve for another occasion. But whilst speaking of
the heart of the bird, I cannot forbear pointing out how the struc-
- tural arrangements of its auricle, differing as they do strikingly
from those of the same compartment in the mammalian heart, help
us by that contrast to get a true idea of the working of this latter.
Firstly, the walls of the bird's right auricle are relatively thicker,
not only as compared with the walls of its own ventricle, but also
as compared with the walls of the corresponding auricle in the
mammal, the musculi pectinati standing out in as sharp relief as
the similarly working muscular ridges in a hypertrophied bladder,
and inclosing anſractuosities and recesses almost as deep. But,
secondly, and what is of more importance, the bird's auricle is
furnished with a large and functionally active valve, protecting the
entrance of the great veins, and preventing regurgitation into
those vessels just as the auriculo-ventricular valves prevent regur-
gitation from the ventricles. It is fair to argue a priori that if the
what I would call the ‘comad’ and ‘deactrad’ cusps of the tricuspid, to an origin on
the interventricular septum, sending a root up to the point of origin of one of the
chordae tendineae of the third cusp, called ‘septal’ by Mr. Galton. See also Mr.
Galton's Letter to ‘British Medical Journal,” July 26, 1873, p. 83. I have to thank
Dr. Headlam Greenhow for a reference to another notice of the presence of a
moderator band in a human heart. It will be found in an interesting paper of his in
the ‘Transactions of the Pathological Society,’ vol. xxi. 1870, p. 88.
[It should be stated that Mr. T. W. King had figured and described a moderator
band in the human heart and in several mammals other than the Ungulates.—EDITOR.]
744 THE HARVELAN ORATION.
mammalian auricle had counted for as much in the action of the
heart as the bird's, its force would have been economised by the
placing of a large and functionally useful valve in the site of the
rudimentary Eustachian—a structure altogether absent in many
mammals, and variable, as rudimentary structures very often are, in
ourselves. The a priori argument of Comparative Anatomy is
abundantly borne out by the appeal to experiment. Marey, in his
‘Physiologie Médicale de la Circulation du Sang,’ 1863, whilst
referring (p. 36) to other evidence from Comparative Anatomy than
that which I have adduced, cites, in support of the view that the
auricle has but an accessory and subordinate rôle in the functions
of the heaſt, an experiment of Chauveau's, in which the auricle of a
horse, being exposed and irritated, lost its contractile power for a
time, during which, nevertheless, the ventricles continued to con-
tract and the circulation to be maintained. Colin, again (“Traité de
la Physiologie Comparée, vol. ii. p. 257, 1856), found that the left
ventricle continued to be filled with blood even when the cor-
responding auricle was prevented from contracting by the insertion
into it of a finger. And further, Magendie had long ago noted, in
experimentation, what many here present may have noted in patho-
logical or clinical observation—viz. that the auricles may remain
extremely distended for hours, and, like other muscular sacs
similarly conditioned, unable to contract and empty themselves,
without the circulation for all that being brought to a standstill.
It was Dr. Pavy's paper, treating (in the ‘Medical Times and
Gazette' of November 21, 1857) of the case of a man (E. Groux)
with a congenital fissure of the sternum, which first drew my atten-
tion to these points; and his summary of what takes place in the
dog is so clear that I herewith reproduce it:—
“In the dog, the contraction of the ventricles is sharp and rapid,
instead of prolonged, as in the reptile, and does not appear to occupy
nearly so much time as half the period of the heart’s action. The
ventricular contraction communicates a sudden impulse to the
auricles, occasioning in them a distinct pulsation, which is instantly
followed by a peculiar thrill, wave, or vermicular movement, running
through the auricular parietes down towards the wentricle. This
thrill or wave is coincident with the passage of the blood from the
auricle into the ventricle, and takes place so instantaneously after the
ventricular contraction, that the one movement appears to run on,
THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 745
to continue itself into the other. There is then a pause, which
seems comparatively of considerable duration, and which is suc-
ceeded by a recommencement of the heart's action, beginning with
the ventricular contraction.’
Dr. Pavy has very kindly gone to the trouble of repeating the
experiment upon which these statements are based; and from a
letter with which he has favoured me, I gather that the auricular
contraction detectable by the cardiographic tracing, as immediately
preceding the ventricular contraction, is also detectable, of course
during the pause just mentioned, by the eye, unassisted by the
cardiograph, and turned simply upon the exposed heart, in which
the auricular appendix is seen to become redder or more flesh-
coloured at the moment in question. And he further remarks that
this auricular contraction, difficult" though it be to be observed
under physiological conditions, may be exaggerated into consider-
able prominence in disease entailing contraction of the auriculo-
ventricular orifices, and may then make itself known by a pre-
systolic murmur.
I should now be glad to draw attention shortly to a few memoirs
which have appeared comparatively recently, and which treat of
matters of considerable interest, not merely as scientific problems,
but also as practical questions. First among these I would name
the paper which appears in the third volume of Professor Ludwig’s
‘Arbeiten,’ 1868 (having previously appeared in vol. xx. of “Bericht
Math.-Phys.-Klass. K. S. Gesellsch. Wissensch., Leipzig), by Pro-
fessor Ludwig himself and Dr. Dogiel. In this paper we have a
number of experiments recorded as performed with the hearts of
dogs removed from the body, and as nearly as possible emptied of
blood; and the conclusion which the authors come to is that the
heart of the dog, when removed from the body and emptied of
blood, still produces a sound during the systole of the ventricles
which is not essentially different from that which is recognised as
the normal first sound of the heart. The authors add, however
(p. 85), that they do not think these experiments entirely exclude
the possibility of the tension of the auriculo-ventricular valves
* I apprehend that Dr. Walshe's account of the auscultatory phenomena as occur-
ring under normal conditions will be accepted as correct. It runs thus (“Diseases of
the Heart and Great Vessels,’ 3rd ed. 1862, p. 65): “In the normal state the blood
enters the ventricles from the auricles with a current so calm as to prevent audible
sound from being thereby produced in the former cavities.’
746 THE HARVEIAN ORATION.
entering as a factor into the production of the first sound; and
hereby they would be guarded from coming into contradiction with
most English authorities—as for example, Dr. Walshe (‘Diseases of
the Heart,’ 3rd ed. 1862, p. 62). Dr. Guttmann, however, in a
paper of no great length, but of considerable merit, published sub-
sequently to the one just mentioned, and in Virchow's Archiv for
1869, points out with much acuteness what, when once pointed out,
is ever thereafter obvious—viz. that it is, in the nature of things,
impossible, with all possible precautions in the way of emptying
the heart of blood, to empty the complex phenomenon made up by
a systole of the heart of the condition of tension of the auriculo-
ventricular valves. Surely the musculi papillares will contract
with the rest of the ventricular walls, and, contracting, will they
not stretch the chordae tendineae and the valves? For myself, I
would say that we are more likely to overrate the share taken by
the valves than to underrate that taken by the muscular walls. I
need not say to this audience that the fact with which we are all
familiar, of the alteration in the first sound produced by disease of
the auriculo-ventricular valves, does not absolutely prove that they
produce any part of it during health ; and, finally, to my own ear
at least, a modification of Wollaston's experiments, which anybody
can try for himself by making his temporal and masseter muscles
contract at any time of perfect stillness, appears to produce a sound
which is scarcely, if at all, different in quality from the first sound
of the heart. A judgment, however, upon the nature of a sound,
or, indeed, an aggregation of sounds, as in music, is one upon
which two observers may very well differ, as neither of them can
lay his proof of supposed identity or difference alongside of that
which the other may possess, or may suppose he does.
It is with much pleasure that I refer to Dr. Rutherford's paper
on the Influence of the Vagus on the Vascular System, which
appears in the Edinburgh Royal Society Transactions for 1870,
vol. xxvi. In that year, having to deliver an address to the
Biological Section of the British Association at Liverpool, I
made bold to say that the results to which Dr. Rutherford had
come, and which were then only known to me in an abstract
in the ‘Journal of Anatomy and Physiology’ (May 1869, p. 402),
would prove to be of the highest value and importance. His
memoir now published in eatenso, and extending over forty-two
THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 747
pages, as fully justifies my prediction as it will fully repay any one
who will take the pleasant trouble of reading it. The most im-
portant result in a practical point of view is the demonstration
which Dr. Rutherford has given of the nerve-circle, whereby, in the
way of reflex action, the all-important secretion of gastric juice is
called forth. The sensory impulse caused by the ingestion of food
into the stomach is propagated upwards by the vagi to the medulla
oblongata, where it throws into abeyance the vaso-motor nerve-
cells, which, whilst the stomach is empty, keep the blood-vessels of
the gastric mucous membrane constricted, but which, when their
activity is inhibited, allow the zonular fibre-cells of these blood-
vessels to dilate, and allow the increased afflux of blood thus called
for. That relief will result to some of the countless martyrs to
dyspepsia out of the demonstration of this physiological relation of
vagus, sympathetic, and peptic glands, I do not doubt. Possibly,
I would add, Owsjannikow’s observations as to the working of
hydrate of chloral as a depressor of arterial tension (Ludwig's
‘Arbeiten,’ 1872, p. 32) may prove valuable to persons engaged in
practice, by pointing out, in however shadowy a fashion, the road
to a more rational and systematised, even if less general use of this
drug than that which I am told is now made of it. It may seem a
paradox, but it is none the less true for all that, to say that, for the
activity of many organs, a paralysing and inactivity of certain
nerve-centres in connexion with them is a prerequisite. The ac-
tivity of such, indeed of most, organs is but intermittent and
occasional, being but intermittently and occasionally called for,
whilst the constringing activity of the sympathetic has to be
constantly at work to prevent waste of force'.
Owsjannikow’s paper (also to be found in Ludwig's ‘Arbeiten, 6th
year, 1871, and in the “Bericht Math.-Phys.-Klass. K. S. Gesellsch.
Wissensch., Leipzig) just referred to, and published two years sub-
sequently to Dr. Rutherford's, gives, as the result of a number of
experiments performed in Professor Ludwig's laboratory at Leipzig
on rabbits, and independently at St. Petersburg on cats, the con-
* The phenomenon of the distension of the corpora cavernosa, a phenomenon used
by Harvey himself in the way of illustration (p. 129 of the ‘Epistola Secunda ad
Riolanum '), I may adduce in the way of illustration also, being, as it is, dependent
upon a similar nervous mechanism; and being shown so unmistakeably, in cases
where it follows lesions in the nuchal region, to result from paralysis of nerve-centres
situated there or thereabouts. * -
748 THE HARVEIAN ORATION,
clusion that the ganglionic centres of innervation for the entire
sympathetic system occupy but a small space at the base of the
brain, two strips to wit, one on each side of the median fissure in
the floor of the fourth ventricle; of, in the rabbit, a length of about
four millimeters, beginning about four or five millimeters anteriorly
to the calamus scriptorius, and ending about one or two millimeters
behind the level of the corpora quadrigemina. The title of such a
book as Eulenburg and Guttmann’s “Die Pathologie des Sympa-
thicus auf Physiologische Grundlage’ (Berlin, 1873) is an en-
couragement to those who hope to see fruit arise from such
researches as these in the way of additions to our means for meeting,
or at least understanding, human disease and suffering.
It has long been known (Budge, 1855) that the sympathetic
nerves which supply the vessels of the head and iris do not pass
directly or by the shortest possible route to this their distribution,
but pass down the spinal chord for a greater or lesser distance, and
then turn outwards, and pass from the anterior nerve-branches to
bend upwards, much as the recurrent laryngeal nerve does. That
other vascular regions receive their vaso-motor supply by this
apparently circuitous and, till the history of development is taken
into consideration, paradoxical route, is from time to time being
demonstrated. Dr. Pavy, to whom I have already referred, many
years ago identified and mapped out one segment of the road along
which nerve-force passes to the liver and prevents or allows the
occurrence of diabetes. Further exploration of this route we owe
to Cyon and Aladoff (‘Bulletin de l’Académie Impériale des
Sciences de St. Pétersbourg, tom. xvi. p. 307; ‘British Medical
Journal,’ December 23, 1871); and this same investigator, working
still in the same line of investigation, as it is in these days usually
necessary for an investigator to work if he will make himself a
name as a discoverer, has also shown us (Ludwig's ‘Arbeiten,’ 3rd
year, 1868) the track along which the vaso-motor nerves of the
anterior limbs pass, proving that these nerves pass down in the
spinal chord as low as the mid-dorsal region before leaving it to
turn upwards in the sympathetic chain to join the brachial plexus.
Of all the results, however, which have been attained to in the
line of experimentation now under consideration, those come to by
Brown-Séquard and demonstrated by him at the meeting of the
British Association held at Liverpool in 1870, and subsequently
THE HARVEIAN ORATION." 749
published in the ‘Lancet' of January 7, 1871, seem to me to be
certainly the most striking and possibly the most important.
Could anything have been more surprising to him whose memory
we here this day commemorate, than to have been told that an
injury to a particular part of the brain, the pons, called after the
excellent anatomist whose life ended in the very year in which his
had begun, would produce haemorrhage in certain parts of the
lungs, and anaemia, oedema, and emphysema in others? This is
an easy experiment to repeat ; it is one which might have been
done in the days of Harvey as easily as in those of Bernard, of
Budge, of Ludwig, and of Brown-Séquard. But easy though it
would have been to perform, I am bold to say it was well for
Harvey that he never happened to perform it. For considering
that, like Haller, he knew nothing of the contractility of arteries;
considering that Hunter had not performed his now well-known
experiments with the umbilical arteries; considering, Sir, that in
that excellent work on Physiology by Johannes Müller, the trans-
lation of which in 1838, by our late and never sufficiently to be
lamented friend Dr. Baly, we owe to your suggestion, I find several
pages (vol. i. pp. 202-206, 214–219, ed. I 840) devoted to disprov-
ing the muscular contractility of arteries; considering, that it was
not till three years later, in 1841, that Henle’s work, already re-
ferred to, appeared with its still unsuperseded figures, Plate III,
figures 8, 9, and Io of the arteries with their circular muscular coat,
and with its excellent summary in letterpress of the whole subject,
pp. 518–526, and especially pp. 524, 525; when I consider that
nothing of all this had been done, to leave unmentioned other
advances connected with names of men yet living to speak for
themselves and for us—I say it may have been well that Harvey
never came upon the facts relating to the alterations of lung-
substance being entailed by destruction of brain-substance, not
difficult to be observed and reproduced, which we owe to Brown-
Séquard. For if he had come upon them, how could he have
explained them in the absence of the entire chain of connecting
facts, in the forging of which chain so many successive workers—
Purkinje, Valentin, Weber, Burdach, Stilling, and others—have all
contributed links? Might not even Harvey, often as he withstood
such temptations, have, nevertheless, in default of power to assign
the real causes of such a phenomenon, been driven back upon some
750 THE HARVEIAN ORATION.
of those explanations which he himself so forcibly denounces in the
words (‘Epistola Secunda ad Riolanum, p. 116), ‘Vulgo scioli cum
causas assignare haud norunt dicunt statim a spiritibus hoc fieri et
omnium opifices spiritus introducunt, et ut mali poetae ad fabulae
explicationem et catastrophen 9eov &To unxaufis advocant in scenam.”
It is a hard thing for any man to abstain from speculating as to
the cause of any well-established phenomenon, especially if it be of
striking interest and importance; it is a hard thing for any man
to do more than keep pace with his own generation; and those
who have spent any time in reading the works of Harvey's con-
temporaries, will best appreciate the difficulty he must have had in
setting himself free from the influence of the idola theatri referred to.
I pass from this reflection to an exposition of the claims which
have been put forward on behalf of Walter Warner, the editor in
1631 of ‘Harriott's Algebra, to the discovery of the circulation of
the blood; and I do this by a natural transition, Walter Warner
having been a man in whose mind, all his mathematics notwith-
standing, the idola in question greatly abounded. Warner's claims
are alluded to by Dr. Willis in a note to his excellent ‘Life of
Harvey’ (see p. lxiv). They are put forward by Anthony Wood,
upon the authority of Dr. Pell, a man distinguished as one of
Oliver Cromwell's diplomatists, and afterwards as an assiduous
supporter of the then young Royal Society; and upon that of Dr.
Morley, some time Dean of Christ Church, and afterwards Bishop
of Winchester (see Wood, ‘Athenae Oxonienses, vol. i. p. 461, 2nd
ed. 1721; vol. ii. p. 302, ed. Bliss). Aubrey, a contemporary of
Wood's, appears, from a note at p. 417 of the second volume of his
‘Lives of Eminent Persons,’ to have had the same story from Izaak
Walton, who gave Dr. Morley again as his authority; and Aubrey
repeats the tale with certain additions, and notably with that of
Dr. Pell's authority, at p. 577 of the same volume. The same story
was pointed out to me by, one of the officials in the Bodleian
Library as being given in an anonymous biographical Miscellany
to be found in the ‘Rawlinsonian Collection,’ B 158, pp. 152–153.
This MS. appears to be of the latter half of the seventeenth century,
and its legend runs to the following effect. A certain Henry, Earl
of Northumberland, being imprisoned in the Tower, did, for the
better passing of his time, get several learned persons to live and
eonverse with him; one of these men (whom, Aubrey tells us,
THE HARVEIAN ORATION, 751.
l: e. p. 368, the world called the Earl of Northumberland's magi)
was ‘Mr. Warrener.” And the MS. proceeds, “He was the in-
ventor, probably, of the circulation of the blood, of which subject
he made a treatise, consisting of two books, which he sent to Dr.
Harvey, who epitomised and printed them in his own name; he
usually said that Dr. Harvey did not understand the motion of the
heart, which was a perfect hydraulik. . . . . . Dr. Pain, that very
ingenious and learned canon of Christ Church, told me that he had
seen and perused this book of Warrener’s.’ Finally, the excellent
‘Biographia Britannica' has embalmed Wood's and Aubrey's story,
in the articles ‘Harriott’ and ‘Harvey, pp. 2542 and 2550, ed.
1757. Many a priori improbabilities will at once be seen to attach
to this story, and it is easy enough to discredit more than one of
the witnesses. But I have better than indirect evidence to bring
forward, and I will have the agreeable mental exercise of ex-
cogitating it to the ingenuity of my hearers, which ingenuity will
be sharpened, no doubt, by their regard for their own Harvey, and
strengthened by the belief that
- ‘Whatever records spring to light,
He never shall be shamed.’ •
I may be asked, after this quotation, why I should have thought
it worth while to investigate Walter-Warner's claims at all. I will
shelter myself, in the first instance, behind the example of Sir
George Ent, who, feeling and acting by Harvey as Launcelot in his
better days felt and acted by Arthur, took similar pains to set aside
the similar fable as to Harvey's indebtedness to Father Sarpi.
And, in the second place, I will remind my hearers that it was but
as recently as 1838 that an article appeared in the ‘London and
Westminster Review,’ in which the claims of the Italian monk just
mentioned were once again brought forward with surprising con-
fidence, plausibility, and ignorance. ... " -
It was possible, I thought, that the same paltry but evil spirit
which animated Dutens in writing his ‘Inquiry into the Origin of
the Discoveries attributed to the Moderns’ (1767'), and in coming
* Dutens was as well acquainted with the excellent work of William Wotton,
“Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning,’ published in 1694, on the other
side of the question, as a little bitter mind can ever be with a work or the working
of a noble and generous one. His repeated references to it show this, as also the
unimprovable character of his shallow poverty-stricken spirit. - * *
752 THE HARVEIAN ORATION.
to the conclusion that every great man in modern times had been
anticipated by somebody or other in ancient ones, might still be
going about in dry places, and might wholly enter into and en-
tirely fill up the soul of some small antiquary, who, coming under
such inspiration and guidance upon the passages which I have col-
lected, might proceed to instruct the literary public as to Warner's
claims. -
Whilst considering what indirect evidence might be brought
together to rebut this possible attempt at detraction, I came
upon what led me to the discovery of the direct evidence I have
promised to lay before you, in the shape of a clue which brought
me, after a somewhat tortuous course, upon Walter Warner's
actual autograph MS. I found, whilst following up Dr. Pell’s
history, scattered through Dr. Birch's unindexed ‘History of the
Royal Society,' that Dr. Birch had procured a number of MSS. of
Mr. Walter Warner's for that Society mixed up with Dr. Pell’s
(see vol. ii. p. 342; vol. iv. p. 447). Coupling this statement with
the voucher for Warner's claims, ascribed by Wood and Aubrey to
Dr. Pell (who, however, is never reported in Dr. Birch's History,
so far as I found, to have given currency to this statement), I
thought that by these MSS. I should be able to test the truth of
these statements. But the librarian of the Royal Society knew
nothing of any MSS., either of Pell's or of Warner's; and, as the
result will show, it would have been odd if he had—at least, in his
official capacity. I then made inquiry of the Duke of North-
umberland, in whose library the MS. of Warner, once a pensioner
of his house, might possibly be preserved ; but Mr. J. E. Martin
informed me that this hope was a vain one. I found that Sion
College had once possessed one MS. of Warner's ; but I learnt from
the Rev. W. W. Milman that they had lost it, and much besides,
in the great fire of London in 1666. Finally, when taking the
register of Merton College up to the British Museum for the pur-
pose of comparing the entries made in that volume during Harvey’s
wardenship with his one authentic autograph MS. now in the
national collection, I bethought me of making, at the same time,
some inquiries as to Warner and Pell; and at last, when I least
expected it, and had nearly ceased to hope for it, I came upon
Walter Warner's MS., contained in Dr. Birch's collection (which,
according to him, had been made over to the Royal Society), under
THE HARVEIAN ORATION, 753
the title, ‘4394, Birch Collection,” numbered on in continuation of
the Sloane Collection.
Mr. E. Maunde Thompson, by the employment of various scientific
methods, the observation of which went some way to compensate
me for the tedious labour entailed upon me by the result to which
they brought him, identified the MS. as being really Warner's,
and brought its slete down to a year close upon 1610, half-a-
dozen years or so, therefore, before Harvey first lectured at the
College of Physicians. The MS. being thus identified I set myself
down to look through its 416 folio pages, the average number of
lines in a page being thirty-three or thirty-four; the average of
Words, many of them idle ones, being eight or nine in a line. I do
not think it is very likely that I have missed any clearer exposition
of Warner's views than the one which I am about to read from
page 138; nor do I think that, by choosing it, I can in any way
misrepresent them, for they are stated elsewhere in the treatise in
very much the same words, e.g. page I37. These, then, were his
views:– By this spontaneall pulsatory motion the bloud is con-
tinually extracted from the vaines (propter fugam vacui) as well
originally exsuctory as secondarily circulatory and propelled into
the arteries (propter fugam penetrationis), but with some diversity
in the distribution, some part thereof being propelled up into the
head by the internal jugular arteries, ad plexum choroideum for
spirito-faction, the rest into all the rest of the arteries in universum
corpus for organo-faction. Out of that part of the blood that is
propelled by the jugular arteries up to the head, the spiritus con-
fusus or immersus thereof being expressed and segregated in plexu
choroidi, either by excussion or exhalation, and animal spirits,
thereof made by the self-operation of the prae-existent in somno, it
is again distributed as before, one portion thereof being still de-
rived and transmitted to the heart, ad motum spontaneum pulsa-
tionis ciendum, and so about again, perpetua circulatione durante
fabrică corporea, and all violent destructions or impediments ab-
stracted.”
~It is, perhaps, needless to dwell further upon Warner's claims—
certainly I do not propose to trouble you with reading to you any
more of his speculations and conclusions. I have, however, had a
copy made of pages 140, 141, 142, 194, and 195, and, though
the gift may not seem a very valuable one, it will enable any fellow
3 C
754 THE HARVEIAN ORATION.
of Harvey’s College to satisfy himself abundantly, and within our
own walls, as to the real merits of the claimant before us, if the
College will allow it to find a place in their library. In the words
of Harvey’s favourite poet,
“His saltem accumulem donis et fungar inani
Munere.”
In all seriousness it is something to know what a contemporary
of Harvey, and he a mathematician of some eminence, could write
less than ten years before the actual demonstration of the circula-
tion of the blood was given to the world.
Let me say, however, that I do not think it by any means im-
possible that Harvey may have read this treatise of Warner's, hard
though the labour of gathering hints, or rather warnings, from its
many guesses must have been to him. For in many parts of
Harvey's treatise, ‘De Motu Cordis, we meet with phrases which
seem as if they had been used with a special reference to Warner's
views; and his dissertation has at least this claim upon my grati-
tude, that it has made me think that I understand Harvey’s mean-
ing the better for having read it. I fancy, in fact, that I recognise
such phrases in Harvey’s words (‘De Motu, pp. 58, 61, ed. 1766;
p. 56, ed. Willis), “Absºlue dolore vel calore vel fugā vacui,’ and in
such words as ‘longè plus est quam partium nutritioni congruens
est, p. 64; “airoyia, non mentis agitatio, p. 133. He might have
been alluding to almost any page of Warner’s MS. in his repudia-
tion (p. 116, see ‘Epistola Secunda ad Riolanum”) of the hypothesis
of various sorts of spirits. But there is one of Harvey's many
noble and candid, whilst measured and well-balanced utterances,
which seems to me to be admirably suited to serve as a text for an
exposition which perhaps some future Harveian orator may under-
take, of the exact relation which his discoveries held to the know-
ledge and the ignorance, not only of Walter Warner, but of all
others of his contemporaries or predecessors. These words run thus
(‘De Motu, p. 34, ed. 1766; p. 33, ed. Willis):- Sed et hoe” (viz.
the transmission of the blood by the action of the heart, from the
veins into the arteries, through the ventricles of the heart into the
whole body), “omnes aliquo modo concedunt et ex cordis fabrică et
valvularum artificio positione et usu colligunt. Verum tanquam
in loco obscuro titubantes caecutire videntur et varia subcontraria
et non cohaerentia componunt et ex conjectură plurima pronunciant
THE HARWEIAN ORATION. 755
ut ante demonstratum est.’ This may be translated thus:— But
it may be said, that all competent persons accept these views in a
more or less modified form, and have been convinced of the truth
of them from the structure of the heart, and the contrivance, posi-
tion, and use of the valves. But they seem to me to make as little
use of their eyes as men do who are stumbling about in a dark
place, and their account of the matter is made up of heterogeneous,
contradictory, and incompatible statements, and very much of it is
pure guesswork, as I have already shown.” These words, the Latin
ones, not my translation of them, were published, if not written,
nine years (see p. 5, ‘Harveii Opera, ed. 1766, Dedicatio) and more
after Harvey had first proved the facts of the circulation, and from
them we gather that his discovery had, even so early as that date,
got out of the stage in which a discovery is considered to be
untrue, and got into that in which it is said that everybody knew
it before. In no subject could it have been easier to make out a
plausible case than in this of the circulation of the blood. Piccol-
homini (an acquaintance with whom I owe to Mr. Walter Warner,
see his treatise, pp. 194, 200, 20I) had given a diagram, it is there
before you", copied from the copy of his work in our library, of the
junction of the portal and hepatic twigs, incorrect enough, no doubt,
and obtained by a false method (see Harvey, ‘Epistola Prima ad
Riolanum, p. 105, ed. 1766), but still something in the way of a
working hypothesis (see Piccolhomini, ‘Anat. Praelect., Romae,
1586, p. 117, and Warner, MS. p. 194). Servetus had speculated,
but rightly, as to the lesser circulation ; so had Caesalpinus; and
on Harvey’s own showing (p. 15, and ed. Willis, ed. 1766), Realdus
Columbus; and Walter Warner, p. 132 (4394 Birch Coll. MS.)
had spoken of the heart, in 1610, as being ‘a mere muscle, very
strongly and artificially woven, and contrived with omnimodal
nervedus fibres, direct, transverse, and oblike, as it were of purpose,
for dilatation and contraction, according to the fashion of other
muscles.’ And of the action of the auriculo-ventricular and arterial
valves, Harvey himself, nived animá, with untarnished sincerity,
repeatedly (see ‘De Motu, pp. 14, 51, 53, 67, 81) speaks as of
something known to all men, ‘id omnes norunt’ (p. 44). What
then, it might have been triumphantly asked, was there left for
Harvey to discover, when the action of the valves of the heart, its
* I have not thought it necessary to reproduce it in a woodcut.
3 C 2.
756 THE HARWEIAN ORATION.
muscular character, and so much else, was already to be found in
the writings or teachings of his predecessors? To all this we can
answer, as indeed, it seems probable, was practically answered even
within Harvey's lifetime, what was left for Harvey to discover was
nothing less than the circulation itself. His predecessors had but
impinged, and that by guesswork, upon different segments of the
circle, and then gone off at a tangent into outer darkness, whilst he
worked and proved and demonstrated round its entire periphery.
His demonstrations and direct proofs were all new, and his indirect
arguments nearly all new. Whenever he made use of anything
already known, he most punctually acknowledged it. Of his de-
monstration in the way of injection I have already spoken ; of his
demonstration of the use of the valves in the veins, and his proof
that they are similar in function to the arterial, a fact previously
unsuspected (see p. 65, 1 c.), the thirteenth chapter of the treatise
‘De Motu speaks with figures; of his indirect, but irrefragable
argument, in the eighth chapter, from the quantity of blood thrown
out by the heart at each pulsation, an argument which a mathe-
matician such as Harriott, or Warner, might have hit upon, but, so
far as I have found, did not, he speaks himself as being ‘adeo
novum et inauditum utverear ne habeam inimicos omnes homines;’
and finally, the argument, which though it be indirect, every
morphologist will allow to be not only most exquisite, but also most
convincing, for the circulation in the adult warm-blooded animal,
drawn from the relations held by the venae cavae to the efferent
arteries in the embryo, and in all animals with but a single or an
imperfectly divided ventricle, ‘unus duntaxat ventriculus vel quasi
unus, and of which I would recommend every one who is not
already acquainted with it, to gain a knowledge from the seventh
chapter of the same book, was his, and his alone. With regard to
all these points, with regard, that is, to the circulation as a whole;
with regard to the actual demonstration and exhibition of it as
opposed to mere guessing about it ; with regard to all, or nearly
all, sound reasoning as to any large portion of it, Harvey might
have said with Lucretius,
‘Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
Trita solo ';
or in the words of a poet of another country, and a later age,
‘We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.’
THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 757
I do not wish to assert that Harvey was wholly independent of
the works of his predecessors; he himself would, as his repeated
references to them show, have been the very last man to make any
such claim for himself; nor would I say that he owed nothing to
the times—
‘The spacious times of great Elizabeth’—
in which he lived. It is true, I think, in science, as it is also true
in morals and politics, that the times make great men as much as
great men make the times. Many metaphors have been used to
express this latter half-truth. Such is the metaphor, an acquaint-
ance with which I owe to Mr. Picton's new and striking work,
‘The Mystery of Matter,’ p. 265, used by St. Augustine, in which
great men are compared to great mountains, dwelling apart in
loneliness, and sending floods of blessings down upon the little
hills and plains at their feet. Such, again, is the metaphor used
by Wordsworth in apostrophising Milton :
“Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart.’
Such is the metaphor used by Sir Coutts Lindsay, in his poem on
the Black Prince, where a hero
‘Stands like a beacon, throwing light far out
Over the rippling tides of centuries.’
Now all these metaphors strive, and profess, to express but half a
truth, and they are imperfect even for this imperfect purpose, as
they are borrowed from inorganic nature and the arts, and are
unfit to be used as illustrations of the complexities of life and
thought. I would venture to suggest a metaphor which has
struck me, during this investigation, as being more appropriate
and close-fitting, even if less beautiful, than those which I have
quoted. A group of horsemen are attempting to cross an arm of
the sea, up which the tide has been running, and obscuring the
ridge, or spit of sand, by which it is fordable. They form them-
selves into a line, and advance slowly: rider after rider flounders off
into deep water, and, if wise, retires towards the rear of the caval-
cade of his companions, who still feel and advance upon the
bottom beneath them. The line by degrees narrows into a column,
and the column, after a longer interval, narrows into a single file.
To the foremost horseman courage is necessary, as imagination is
to the discoverer, and, impelled by this feeling, he may put a wide
758 THE HARVEIAN ORATION.
interval between himself and his companions, and reaching the
opposite bank long before them, may have leisure to look down
upon them, may be looked up to by them and by the rest of the
world, whilst for some time in solitary occupation of that vantage-
ground. Such I conceive to be a fair representation, in the way of
metaphor, the best and shortest way, perhaps, of representing such
complex relations, of the relations held by Harvey, and indeed by
most or all discoverers, to their contemporaries, to their compeers,
and to the conditions whereby they are surrounded.
It may be expected, perhaps, that, coming from Oxford, and
having been recently elected a Fellow of the College the Warden-
ship of which Harvey held for something more than a year (April
1645 to Midsummer 1646), I should have made search for what-
ever records there may be left of him unpublished in Oxford,
and especially in Merton College. After diligent search, I have
to report that there is but little to be learned of Harvey's history
from any unpublished document which I have been able to find in
Oxford. The Merton College Register gives the following account
of his election to the Wardenship. In 1645 King Charles I,
after the execution of Archbishop Laud, took upon himself the
functions of Visitor, and, having removed Sir Nathaniel Brent
from the office of Warden, for having joined ‘the Rebells now in
armes against 'him, he directed the Fellows to take the customary
steps for the election of a successor. This course consisted in
giving in, after due inquiry, three names to the Visitor, in order
that one of the three, the one we may suppose it would be under-
stood who was named first, should be appointed by the Visitor.
Harvey was so named by five out of the seven Fellows voting;
and, after a dispute of which it is unnecessary to give an account,
he was duly elected on receipt of a second letter from the King.
A couple of days after his admission to the office, on April 11,
1645, Harvey summoned the Fellows into the hall and made a
speech to them, to the effect that it was likely enough that some
of his predecessors had sought the office of Warden to enrich
themselves therefrom, but that his intentions were quite of another
kind, wishing as he did to increase the wealth and prosperity of
the College". He finished his address to the assembled Fellows
* I would here remark that it was well perhaps for the College of Physicians that
Harvey was, by the success of the Parliament, forced to vacate the office of Warden,
THE HARVEIAN ORATION, 759
with an earnest appeal to them to cherish that mutual concord and
amity amongst themselves, which recent occurrences, we may sup-
pose, had tended to weaken. In the other pages of the Register for
the period between April 1645 and the Midsummer of 1646, I find
the name of Charles Scarborough, the protégé of Harvey, and
afterwards frequently an office-bearer in this College; but there is
little or nothing of special interest to us in the rest of the record,
beyond the fact that Harvey appears to have attended the College
meetings and so to have discharged his duties, amongst which the
providing for the contingency of a siege and famine was one. Mr.
Pettigrew (‘Medical Portrait Gallery,’ 1840) has put on record the
fact that Harvey's signature is to be found in the Liber Com-
putorum of Merton. The College Register, however, is not so
enriched, as I can state upon the authority of Mr. E. Maunde
Thompson, who compared the pages relating to Harvey’s warden-
ship with the autograph MS. in the British Museum, when I took
the Register up to London for that purpose".
otherwise he would, no doubt, have kept his word, and Merton College would have
gained what the College of Physicians, or some others of his legatees, would have
lost.
* Mr. E. M. Thompson has made another search for Harvey's missing MS. ‘De
Anatomiá Universá, which Dr. Lawrence mentions at p. xxxi of his ‘Harveii Vita.”
(ed. 1766), and which Dr. Willis tells us at p. vii of his Preface (ed. Willis) had then
(1847) been twice looked for in vain. Mr. Thompson's search has also been equally
fruitless; he writes to me thus, under date June 3, 1873 — Harvey’s “Anatomy.”
was once upon a time in the British Museum. In the first volume of the old MS.
Catalogue of the Sloane MSS. (now marked Sloane MS. 3972 A), there is this entry
on p. 57 :-
“C. ###.—Praelectiones anatomicae universales per me, Gulielmum Harveum me-
dicum Londinensem Anatom. et Chirurg. Professor. Anno Dom. I616, aetatis 37,
praelect. April 1, 1617.”
To which is added, “This is the author's foundation and first Lecture of the circula-
tion in his own handwriting,” and opposite to it is this note by Sir F. Madden, “In
the place of 230 (which seems missing) Ayscough substituted the bracketed no. (6).”
So you will see from this that the MS. was missing in Ayscough's time. I have ran-
sacked our MSS. without finding any clue; so I think you may make up your mind
that it was borrowed, and has gone the way of borrowed books in general.-E. Maunde
Thompson.’ Wood says (‘Fasti Oxonienses, ii. 6) of Harvey, “But more in MSS.
hath he left behind him, the titles of which you may see in the Epist. Dedicat. before
a Historical Account of the Colleges Proceedings against Empyricks’ (1684, London,
Ch. Goodall). Moved by this authority, though Goodall only says that Harvey
designed these treatises, I looked over a large number of medical MSS., assisted
herein by Mr. Walter de Gray Birch, in the Sloane Collection of the British Museum,
without the desired result. Subsequently I found that Harvey himself in 1650 (p.
760 THE HARVEIAN ORATION.
Of Harvey's, as of Berkeley’s sojourn in Oxford, we know little;
little, indeed, has been recorded, with the exception of the some-
what uncertain gossip of the gossiping Aubrey. But what we do
know of the place during those years which elapsed between the
battle of Edgehill and 1646, makes us certain that scientific, and
indeed any other work, must have been carried on in it under
great disadvantages. We read of the plague, and of the “morbus
campestris,” described by a former Harveian orator and Linacre
lecturer as desolating the town and driving people out of resi-
dence. It was, besides, a centre for military operations; and
military life has been shown, by the experience of all ages (though
this experience appears to have been lost upon the heedlessness and
ignorance of this), to be out of harmony with the habits of men,
old as was Harvey then (aet. 64–68), young as our undergraduates
are now, who are, or who ought to be devoted to study. What-
ever else of Aubrey's tales of Harvey I may disbelieve, I can
believe that the words addressed to Charles Scarborough, ‘Prithee
leave off thy gunning and stay here,’ are his.
If, however, we wish to have a real and truthful picture and
image of Harvey before us, we must do by him as we have to do
by Shakespeare, by Aristotle, by Butler, and several other great
writers: we must lay our minds alongside of his, as it is revealed
to us in his works. It is only the writings of great men which
will bear or repay such treatment : no commentary nor any bio-
graphy can give us the real and vivid sensation of having the men
before us which we get from a perusal and reperusal of their books.
Having used for this purpose what Mr. Tom Taylor has recently
spoken of as ‘the invaluable three hours before breakfast,' I have
come to persuade myself that I have obtained something like a
trustworthy idea of what Harvey really was. Previously, how-
ever, to doing this, I gave Christian burial to much of what
I63 and p. 502, ed. I 766; p. 148 and pp. 481, 482, ed. Willis) had recorded the loss
of his ‘adversaria multorum annorum laboribus parta,’ and especially of his work
‘De Generatione Insectorum,’ when his house was plundered in the Civil War. Later
again. I came upon the following passage in Lower's work, ‘Tractatus de Corde, ed.
I669: ‘Quid quod et Harveius si per aetatem et otium licuisset plura polliceri vide-
tur ipse, Lib. de Circulat. Sanguinis, cap. 9. . . . . . Sed quod mazime dolendum est et
ille voto suo et nos spe nostra excidimus.’ Hence I fear there is now little hope either
of recovering or of discovering the lost MS.
* See speech at Eighty-fourth Anniversary Dinner of the Royal Literary Fund,
‘Times, Thursday, May 29, p. 12.
THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 761
Aubrey has left on record about him, feeling more and more
strongly as I grew better aquainted with Harvey that—
‘These were slanders: never yet
Was noble man but made ignoble talk.”
I will speak first of his scientific character, though it may seem
strange to speak of scientific character, as character implies, perhaps,
a moral element; and science, so far as it is really science, and
based exclusively upon sound reasoning, has no moral element in it;
reasoning, so long as it is sound, being of one kind always, and
devoid therefore of all distinctive or personal factors. It is neces-
sary for me to say that I do not forget that Harvey was but
eighteen years junior to Bacon,
‘Whom a wise king and Nature chose
Lord Chancellor of both their laws.’
But neither do I forget that the Novum Organon was published in
1620, subsequently to the discovery and actual demonstration of
the circulation (see Dedicatio to the treatise ‘De Motu Cordis’), if
not to the publication of the treatise on the ‘Motion of the Heart;’
and that the Royal Society, with its motto, ‘Nullius addictus jurare
in verba magistri,’ was a foundation of a much later date. And
consequently, I think, we may feel justified in saying that, so far
as the purely scientific factor of a man’s nature can be said to have
any distinctive or personal character at all, independence, or robust-
ness, or manliness, whichever word we may like to choose, as shown
in superiority to mere authority and the weight of great names,
was a distinctive character of Harvey as a man of science. With
Riolanus in full vigour, and Van der Linden growing towards
maturity, as champions of antiquity, it required not a little manli-
ness to assert, ‘contra receptas vias per tot saecula annorum ab
innumeris iisque clarissimis doctissimisque viris’ (Riolanus was
often thus spoken of), ‘tritam atque illustratam’ (‘Dedicatio, p. 5),
the claims of simple Nature quâ, nihil antiquius majorisve auctori-
tatis’ (‘Epistola Secunda ad Riolanum, p. 123). This element of
real manliness shows itself again, I think, in Harvey’s power of
abstaining from suggesting a rationale of what he felt he did not
understand; as, for example, in what is known (out of England, at
least) as the ‘ Problem of Harvey’ (see ‘De Partu, pp. 132, 549, ed.
1766; p. 530, ed. Willis)—a problem which, I think, could not
762 THE HARVEIAN ORATION,
have been answered till the ‘works and days’ of Bernard'; and in
the cases of several other problems instanced by himself (p. 132,
‘Epistola Secunda ad Riolanum'), and hidden then, to use his own
metaphor (p. 630, ed. 1766; p. 613, ed. Willis, ‘Epistola Prima ad
Horstium'), in the well of Democritus.
For the culture which Harvey had bestowed upon his literary
faculties we have better evidence than Aubrey's, better even than
that of two more trustworthy witnesses than Aubrey—Bishop
Pearson, to wit, and Sir William Temple: we have the evidence of
his own writings as to his familiarity with one of the greatest
writers of antiquity. Bishop Pearson, as Dr. George Paget has
reminded us (see p. 15 of his ‘Notice of an Unpublished Manuscript
of Harvey,’ 1850), writing in 1664, but seven years after Harvey's
death, and Aubrey (see p. lxxxii of ‘Life,' by Dr. Willis, prefixed to
the Sydenham Society’s edition of his works, 1847), have told us
of Harvey’s high appreciation of Aristotle's writings; but in his
own writings he refers to the Stagirite more frequently, I think,
than to any other individual. And, as regards Vergil (the Latin
author whom probably, if but one Latin classical writer could be
saved from destruction, most men would choose to be that one, as
Aristotle probably would be the similarly to be chosen Greek), Sir
William Temple (‘Miscellanies,’ Part ii, On Poetry, p. 314) has told
us that ‘the famous Dr. Harvey, when he was reading Virgil,
would sometimes throw him down upon the table and say he had a
* I refer to Claude Bernard's experiments on the influence of vitiated air (“Des
Effets des Substances Toxigues et médicamenteuses,’ 1857, p. 125), which show so
plainly that organisms can attain a power of tolerance as against morbific agencies if
time is allowed them to become gradually adjusted to such environment. The prin-
ciple demonstrated in these experiments has been brought into greater prominence by
Sir James Paget in his striking account (‘Lancet,” June 3, 1871, p. 734), so inter-
esting to all of us for other than purely scientific reasons, of his serious illness in 1871.
As regards the ‘ Problem of Harvey,’ the foetus in utero has been habituated to lowly
arterialised blood; the blood of the umbilical vein is not scarlet in colour, and hence,
I submit, may be explained the tolerance by a child which has come into the world
but has not yet breathed in it, of conditions which entail death by suffocation in a
child which, having breathed air, is exposed to them. This physiological principle
has, among many other practical bearings, the practical value of furnishing an answer
to the Philistine argument so often brought forward by Antisanitarians in favour of
the retention of abuses, in the words ‘See to what a good old age people live in the
middle of it all !” The answer is, “They have become habituated, and are living in
spite of, not because of these surroundings: immigrants die in the process of acclima-
tisation.” Such persons, and indeed all persons, may read with profit Mr. G. H.
Lewes’ “Physiology of Common Life,’ vol. i. pp. 372-377, upon this subject.
THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 763
devil.” It was a similar spirit which dwelt in Sir Philip Sidney,
who never heard the famous ballad of ‘Percy and Douglas’ without
feeling his ‘heart moved more than with a trumpet.”
It may seem to some but a small matter to vindicate for our
great discoverer claims to a familiarity with Greek; still, any one
who will look at such passages as the one in the ‘Exercitatio de
Partu, p. 553, where he speaks of the mischief done by meddlesome
midwives, or other passages (pp. 116, 129, and 133, ‘Epistola
Secunda ad Riolanum;’ p. 613, ‘Ep. ad Slegelium”), will see, I think,
that he had Greek in abundance at his command, and used it just
when it helped him to express his thoughts more clearly and con-
cisely than any other words at hand at the moment. He used it,
in fact, like a man of sense and real learning, when the use of it
would save him time or trouble—two things, of one of which he
had all too little, whilst of the other he had all too much for his and
our good. Let me add that, in the one authentic MS. which we
now possess of Harvey's (No. 486, Sloane Coll., British Museum),
a MS. never intended for publication, and consisting but of rough
notes for lectures to be delivered, I find that he employs Greek
words in several places (e.g. pp. 65, 66 and 87)".
His style has been spoken of as being more or less inelegant and
unadorned; and the Latin tongue which he used lends itself but
grudgingly and awkwardly to the purposes of science, being strictly
a political language, habituated and framed to describe the march of
the legions, the disputes of the forum, or the denunciations of the
moralist. Still, Harvey's style has always an impressiveness and
Solidity of its own; and sometimes, as for example in the glorious
eighth chapter, ‘De Motu Cordis,’ it rises into real eloquence where
a great occasion justifies the use of repetitions, of antitheses, and
abundance of metaphors. But, though the use of stilted phraseology
was common enough among Harvey’s contemporaries, and though
* I have no sympathy with the eagerness which scientific men sometimes (see Fritz
Müller, ‘Für Darwin,’ p. 28; Dallas' Engl. Trans. p. 42) show in repudiating a know-
ledge of Greek, but on the other hand I should be sorry to be thought to overrate its
value. I am so far from doing this that I incline to thinking that, when through
want of leisure or of means, or through some other deficiency, a young man cannot
add on more than a second foreign language to his acquirement of Latin (which I
presuppose), that second foreign language should, in the case of Englishmen, be, for
linguistic and educational, as well as for more lowly practical reasons, not Greek but
German.
764 THE HARVEIAN ORATION.
his imagination was vivid and active enough, his study (for to this
perhaps we may ascribe it) of the excellent models mentioned saved
him, as such a study can save a man, from falling into the use of
false or extravagant imagery.
Harvey, besides the advantages accruing from acquaintance with
the great minds of the past, enjoyed also those which may be gotten
from familiar intercourse with great contemporary minds. These
advantages constitute in themselves a second education; and they
were at Harvey’s command for the period of more than forty years
during which he was prominently before the public. It is recorded
as one of the many distinctions of John Greaves (see ‘Life,' by
T. Smith, 1699, p. 44), the once celebrated astronomer and anti-
quary, and a man whom we can well believe to have done more, as
a Fellow of Merton, than give a silent vote for Harvey when he
was chosen Warden, that he was one of the friends of Harvey as
well as of Archbishops Laud and Usher. It is indeed in a letter to
this latter dignitary, and in answer, we may suppose, to an appeal
from him on behalf of Harvey, that we find John Greaves pledging
himself in a postscript, under date Sept. 19, 1644, the year before
Harvey’s election as Warden of Merton, to the following effect:
‘If I may serve Dr. Harvy (sic) I shall be most ready either
here or at Leyden to do it.” (See ‘Life of James Usher,’ by
Richard Parr, D.D., 1686, p. 510)". His well-known connection
* I owe this last reference to the ‘Biographia Britannica,’ sub voc. Greaves. For
a further account see Wood’s ‘Athenae Oxonienses,’ vol. iii. ed. Bliss, 1817. To the
former of these sources I owe a second and more interesting reference, viz. to Birch's
edition, 1737, of the ‘Miscellaneous Works of John Greaves,” where, at the end of
Greaves’ ‘Treatise on the Pyramids” (pp. 136, 137), we have given us an account of a
conversation between him and Harvey. It runs thus: ‘That I and my company
should have continued so many hours in the Pyramid and live (whereas we found no
inconvenience) was much wondered at by Dr. Harvey, his majesty's learned physician.
For, said he, seeing we never breathe the same air twice, but still new air is required
to a new respiration (the succus olibilis of it being spent in every expiration), it
could not be but by long breathing we should have spent the aliment of that small
stock of air within, and have been stifled ; unless there were some secret tunnels con-
veying it to the top of the Pyramid whereby it might pass out and make way for fresh
air to come in at the entrance below.” The Fellow of Merton was not wanting in an
answer to the future Warden, assuring him, amongst much else not wholly correct,
that ‘as for any tubuli to let out the fuliginous air at the top of the Pyramid none
could be discovered within or without.’ Harvey replied, “they might be so small as
that they could not easily be discerned, and yet might be sufficient to make way for
the air, being a thin and subtil body.” It has, indeed, been left to our own times and
to v. Pettenkofer to demonstrate and exhibit the action of the capillary pores in the
THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 765
with the court must have constantly brought him into relation
with the statesmen of those stormy times. His legacy to his
‘good friend Mr. Thomas Hobbs, to buy something to keepe in
remembrance’ of him, is touching, even if trifling, evidence in the
same direction. .
Travel, which even in our day confers a kind of culture peculiar
to itself, must have been doubly necessary in days when, in the
absence of the steamship and the railway, an insular position must
have kept its inhabitants very nearly as inaccessible to ‘the thoughts
that move mankind,' as it had happily kept them to the Armada.
Sir George Ent’s interesting and entirely trustworthy account of
the interview with Harvey which resulted in the publication of the
treatise ‘De Generatione,’ will show any one who will consult it that
Harvey had drawn from his opportunities an insight into what
might be expected, and what since his time to some extent has been
realised, from enlarged opportunities of observing not only ‘men,
manners, cities, climates, governments, but also the wonderful facts
of the unequal allotment, in the various parts of the earth, of useful
inorganic products, and of that mystery of mysteries, the distribution
of organic life. (See ‘Works, ed. 1766, p. 162; ed. Dr. Willis,
p. 146.) -
Having been thus fortunate in securing for himself all the
advantages which the various educational agencies of his age would
furnish, he added on to all that they had effected, or could effect,
the yet more elevating and glorious discipline of long sustained and
finally successful labour. He attained a position of mental dignity
in which he could feel neither unduly anxious for the applause of
his compeers, nor unduly moved by the reproaches and misrepre-
sentations of his enemies (see ‘Dedicatio,” p. 164; ‘Epistola Secunda
constituents of a mass of ‘solid’ masonry (see his ‘Beziehungen der Luft zu Klei-
dung, Wohnung und Boden,’ 1872, pp. 41–45, and especially the figures p. 42). What
Leeuwenhoek and Malpighi did for the capillaries of the animal body in supplementa-
tion of Harvey's work, and in correction of one of his few errors, that v. Pettenkofer
has done in supplementation of Harvey's suggestion as to ‘tubuli so small as that they
could not easily be discerned ’ in structures like the Pyramids. It is, perhaps, not
more than curious to note that Harvey was equally right in suggesting the existence
of larger ‘secret tunnels': an account of the discovery and opening of them may be
found in Colonel Howard Vyse's “Operations carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh,’
1837, i. pp. 3, 263, 285–288; ii. pp. 16o, I61; and an amusing history of the incon-
veniences endured in the interior of the Pyramids previously to the discovery of these
“air-channels’ is given by Colonel Coutelle in ‘Description de l'Egypte, Antiquités,
Mémoires,’ ii. p. 46, 1809.
766 THE HARVEIAN ORATION.
ad Riolanum, p. Io9); the impact of these opposite forces resulting,
however, in much benefit for mankind, as without them Harvey
might, it is likely enough, have delayed the publication of his
works indefinitely. Being self-contained without being self-
conscious, he was yet, like all men of real genius, large-hearted
and sympathetic. Whilst he could, in a spirit of perhaps a little
overstrained charity, make excuses (see p. 614, ‘Epistola ad Slege-
lium’) for the pestilent and irrepressible Riolanus, he would, we
may be also sure, have felt an emotion of gratitude upon each of
the many instances in which his own true-hearted adherents, Sir
George Ent and other Fellows of this College, fought his battles
for him, and vindicated for him successfully and during his own
lifetime his own irrefragable claims. And I can believe that,
answering to the character of the dignified, stately, and high-
minded man so well drawn by the author whom he often quotes
(Aristotle, ‘Eth. Nic." iv. 3 (7)), and considering himself worthy
of great respect, being worthy of it, he would not have looked
disapprovingly upon our attempt to show him respect by the
Tercentenary Memorial to which you, Sir, have lent the sanction
of your name. I can further conceive of Harvey as entirely sym-
pathising with the men who have now in their hands the torch of
knowledge which once passed through his, of applauding without
any shadow of jealousy the work of the many workers who in these
days are going over the ground trodden by him under far less
favourable circumstances and with far less assistance from ancillary 1
sciences and their various and still novel instruments and methods.
The same spirit which caused him repeatedly to say (as, for example,
to Sir George Ent, p. 163; to Horstius, p. 630), ‘ haec cum mirã,
ut solet, promptitudine effundens,’ that he doubted not that much
now hidden in darkness would be brought to light by the inde-
fatigable industry of the coming age; the same spirit which dictated
the provision in his will bidding ‘ his lo. friend Mr. Doctor Ent’
sell certain of his ‘books, papers, or rare collections,’ and, “with the
money buy better,’ would have caused him, could he have been
* Such an experiment, for example, as that put on record by Professor Haughton
(‘Principles of Animal Mechanics,’ 1873, p. 151), as performed by Professor Mac.
namara with his assistance, and as showing that the time occupied by absorption,
circulation, and secretion occupies less than four minutes, requires the employment of
iodine; and iodine has been discovered and isolated but some sixty-two years.
THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 767
amongst us, to point out, as a matter for congratulation, in how
many directions his discoveries have been extended and added to,
and how well replaced had been the many works the loss of which
had been so ‘crucifying’ to him.
There was not in Harvey’s mind that defect in the way of a
deficiency of interest in theological questions which constitutes
in the minds of some eminent scientific, and some eminent literary,
men such a lamentable void. He has, on the contrary, in
several places taken pains to state his views upon this highest
of subjects. To one of these passages (from the work ‘De Genera-
tione,’ Exercit. Quinquagesima, p. 385, ed. 1766; p. 370, ed. Dr.
Willis), as Mr. E. B. Tylor has pointed out to me, Professor His
of Leipzig, a worker whom Harvey would have hailed as a colleague,
has referred in one of his always excellent papers, published in the
‘Archiv für Anthropologie,” Bd. iv. 1870, p. 220, on “Die Theorien
der geschlechtlichen Zeugung.’ It is just in the investigation of
the problems indicated in these last words that, as has often been
remarked, the question of the existence of other than purely
material forces presses itself most closely upon the mind; and
hence, perhaps, the repetition by Harvey of his views regarding it,
more than once or even twice, in his treatise just referred to
(see Exercit. 49, p. 730; Ex. 50, p. 385; Ex. 54, pp. 419, 420).
These statements are all to the same purpose. I have chosen one
of them—the last one of the three just cited (not the one quoted by
Professor His)—to repeat here, because, besides its philosophical
and other interest, it has some literary claims upon our attention,
it being not quite impossible, considering its line of thought and
arrangement of words, that Pope, who borrowed on all sides, and
made acknowledgments on none, may have had it before him when
he composed his Universal Prayer. It runs thus:–
‘Nempe agnoscimus Deum, Creatorem summum atque omni-
potentem, in cunctorum animalium fabrică ubique praesentem esse,
et in operibus suis quasi digito monstrari; Cujus in procreatione
pulli instrumenta sint gallus et gallina. Constat quippe in genera-
tione pulli ex ovo omnia singulari providentiã, sapientiã diviná,
artificioque admirabili et incomprehensibili exstructa ac efformata
esse. Nec cuiquam sane haec attributa conveniunt, nisi omni-
potenti rerum principio; quocunque demum nomine id ipsum
appellare libuerit: sive mentem divinam cum Aristotele; sive cum
768 THE HARVEIAN ORATION.
Platone Animam mundi; aut cum aliis Naturam naturantem; vel
cum Ethnicis Saturnum aut Jovem; vel potius, ut nos decet,
Creatorem ac patrem omnium quae in coelis et terris; a quo
animalia eorumque origines dependent, cujusque nutu sive effato
fiunt et generantur omnia.’ (‘De Generatione Animalium, Ex. 54,
pp. 419, 420, ed. I766; p. 402, ed. Willis)
I have detained you far too long ; but, feeling that my praise of
Harvey has been all too feeble, I am anxious, in ending, to employ
in honour of Harvey certain lines of singular beauty and force
which, though composed in commemoration not of him, but of
another famous Englishman, may nevertheless be applied to him
with a singular appropriateness:—
* Remember all
He spoke among you, and the man who spoke ;
Who never sold the truth to serve the hour,
Nor paltered with Eternal God for power;
Who let the turbid streams of rumour flow
Thro' either babbling world of high and low;
Whose life was work, whose language rife
With rugged maxims hewn from life;
Who never spoke against a foe.
Whatever record leap to light,
He never shall be shamed.”
XLII.
THE MODIFICATIONS OF THE EXTERNAL
ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE PRODUCED
BY MAN'S INTERFERENCE,
A LECTURE DELIVERED BEFORE THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL
SOCIETY, MAY 12, 1879.
THE modifications of the external aspects of organic nature pro-
duced by man's interference form so large a part of the results
of all human activities whatever, that the very first thing to be
said in a single evening's lecture on the subject should consist
in a specification of the particular spots in that vast area which
the speaker proposes to touch upon. I propose, then, with your
permission, firstly, to glance at certain of the alterations, positive
and negative, in the landscape of our own country, which we
ourselves and our fathers before us have intentionally or un-
intentionally produced ; secondly, to notice a few of the many
alterations produced by disforesting in our own and other coun-
tries; and thirdly, to show what our knowledge as to the localities
to which the parent stocks of the majority of our domestic animals
and of our cultivated plants may be assigned, implies, as to the
modifications of other regions of the world’s surface which man has
produced by his processes of importation and acclimatisation. Room
may perhaps be found for a few speculations as to the future after
these details as to the past and present.
I do not propose to enter into the large question of the extent
to which man may, with any propriety, be spoken of, as he has
been, as a ‘geological agency,” a “telluric' or a ‘cosmic' agent;
and I will at this very outset of my lecture profess that I think
man's power of modifying the climate of the earth upon which he
lives must be considered”, when all the facts of the case are taken
* Upon this large question, one only of many large questions which the various
details of this subject suggest, and by which, even when most in the concrete, they
3 D
770 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
into account, to be confined within much narrower bounds than
some writers are willing to admit. It is possible to overstate the
extent to which man can go in the direction of exhausting the
soil by wasteful or neglectful agriculture, and to fall over-easily,
not to say over-willingly, into despair as to the restoration to
fertility and political consideration of countries so mismanaged.
And if it is possible to overstate man's influence upon the dry
land and its inhabitants, it is necessary to be very cautious as to
asserting for him any power of altering, except infinitesimally,
the vast area of marine life. Now, as the surface of the sea
is to that of the land as four to one, and as I feel somewhat
desirous of showing that the extent of the subject I have
chosen is not quite so disproportionately large in relation to
your time and my abilities as the mere words in which it is
announced might seem to indicate, I should like to dwell a little
upon this delimitation of it before entering upon the subject
itself.
For one of those striking suggestions qui font penser si elles
excite general interest, it is well to hear Mr. Robert Rawlinson as he spoke in a
lecture on Meteorology, delivered November, 1868, before the Royal Engineers at
Chatham (p. 7):—
‘It is certainly true that man modifies climate over tracts that have been cultivated;
but it is asserted, further, that in various parts of the world, through cutting down
forests, and in consequence of other operations, the works of man, climate has been so
far modified as to have had its character absolutely changed. “The Thames is not
now frozen over as in times past,” one place has more rain than formerly, another place
less, and so on. If by assertions such as these it is intended to be implied that any
works of human hands have actually altered the current course of nature, I must meet
such allegation with a positive denial. The most stupendous of human works can
affect only the comparatively small and narrow space of the earth's surface upon
which they may have been executed. Evaporation has only an indirect and inci-
dental reference to the land—its real dependence being on the great ocean and the
greater sun. And so, while man may exert an influence upon climate over the little
area of his operations, his works can avail nothing to affect the grand features of
nature even over that small area, or to disturb the majestic scale on which she
accomplishes her purposes. Cosmical lmeteorology is unaffected, and must continue to
be unaffected by human agency. The powers of man can never seriously modify the
heat of the sun, cloud, rain, or climate, as these have reference to the world at large;
all statements, therefore, which would assign cosmical atmospheric effect to the cutting
down of forests, to land drainage, land cultivation and such-like agencies, must be
treated with practical disregard.’
For other discussions on the same subject, see Reclus, ‘The Ocean,’ sect. ii. pp.
93–95, ibique citata : Unger, as regards Egypt, ‘Sitzungsberichte Akad. Wiss. Wien,”
xxxviii. pp. 89–93, 1859; De Candolle, ‘Hist, des Sciences,’ 1873, p. 412; Link,
‘Urwelt und Alterthum,’ ii. pp. 128–160, 1822.
PRODUCED BY MAN. 771
ne font pas croire, has been made to the effect that man’s inter-
ference has been potent, even over the sea, to an extent which
men of science have not usually claimed, and poets have denied
to be possible. Mr. G. P. Marsh, the author of a well-known work
on ‘The Origin and History of the English Language,’ 1862, as
well as of the highly interesting work on physical geography
which appeared in 1864, under the title of ‘Man and Nature, or
Physical Geography as modified by Human Action, and as a
second edition, ten years later, under the title of ‘The Earth as
modified by Human Action: a new edition of Man and Nature,’
suggests in this latter work that the phosphorescence of the
Mediterranean, unknown to, or at any rate scarcely noticed by
the ancient writers, may have been greatly increased since their
days through human action in the way of extirpating the whale.
“Is it not possible,” writes Mr. Marsh', ‘ that in modern times the
animalcula which produce it (the phosphorescence of the Medi-
terranean, the most beautiful and striking of maritime wonders)
may have immensely multiplied, from the destruction of their
natural enemies by man, and hence that the gleam shot forth by
their decomposition or by their living processes, is both more
frequent and more brilliant than in the days of classical antiquity?’
In a more utilitarian spirit Middendorff, in his ‘Sibirische Reise”,”
points out that a continuance of the wasteful destruction of the
whalebone whale in the northern seas will render it impossible to
utilise for man's profit the innumerable small crustacea and mollusca
of the Polar seas which that whale converts into train oil | The
profligate inconsiderate slaughter again by the Kolushes of the
sea-cow, Rytina Stelleri, a sirenian ‘whale’ of the region of Behring's
Straits, which lived upon sea-weed, has reduced these savages to
the necessity of using this self-same sea-weed for manuring their
potatoes, which useful vegetable, however, gives them a much
less savoury and sustaining food than was manufactured, so to say,
for their forefathers in the organism of the sea-cow they extirpated.
It is perhaps a little ungracious to point out that the most elegant
of these three correlations and interdependencies is not so definitely
demonstrable as the other two. In the first place, it may be
objected as regards Mr. Marsh's suggestion, that the Mediter-
* Loc. cit., Ist ed. p. II4; 2nd ed. p. Ioa.
Band iv. t. 2. p. 848, 1867.
3 D 2
772 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
ranean whales", not comprehending in their number the right
whale, Balaena mysticetus, are not whales which would either them-
selves prey so largely or exclusively upon the small invertebrata
alluded to by Middendorff–to say nothing of those very much
smaller, upon which the phenomenon of phosphorescence so much
more largely depends,-or be themselves so unrelentingly pursued
by man for the sake of their oil. And secondly, without dwelling
upon any such quantitative relations as the size of the microscopic
‘animalcula’ just alluded to may suggest, it is clear that the square
area of the Mediterranean makes up a space for the extirpation
from which even of so large an animal as a ‘whale' a very con-
siderable fleet would have been required. We know the numbers
and the tonnage of the ships which, till the discovery of petro-
leum ” in large and available quantities, formed the whaling fleets
of quite recent times, 1849–1850, the American whalers in the
Sea of Okhotsk alone numbering 250 ° three-masted vessels, with
a minimum tonnage of 500 tons; but of any such whale-slaying
machine having ever existed in the Mediterranean we have, within
my knowledge, no record whatever. Now the capacity of the
ancient writers for ‘not marking withal’ matters of interest to the
modern naturalist, can scarcely be overrated; but it did not affect
matters relating to war and the chase so much as such trifles as
Stonehenge and the peaceful though colossal aqueduct near Nimes *.
And as a matter of fact, we find in those writers abundance of
references made to the means employed for the capture of the
tunny, a form of the chase which is in no way more exciting, more
useful for illustration and metaphor, nor even more lucrative, than
would that of the whale have been if it had been carried on to any
appreciable extent in the large sea on the shores of which so much
of the history of the world has been written and acted. The Greek
word knreſa means a fishery, not of Cetacea, but of tunnies.
* The principal larger cetacea of the Mediterranean are piscivorous dolphins, such
as Delphinus tursio, Delphinus globiceps, Delphinus orca; it is at least open to doubt
whether such whales as the Balaenopterae and the sperm whale can be considered as
anything more than occasional visitants of Mediterranean waters. See Wagner, ‘Die
Geographische Verbreitung der Säugethiere,” “Abhandl. d. 2 Classe d. Ak. d. Wiss.
München,’ iv. Bd., Abth. i.; and Sundevall, “Die Thierarten des Aristoteles,’ 1863,
p. 88; “Aristoteles’ Thierkunde, Aubert und Wimmer, Bd. i. pp. 73–74, 1868.
* See Marsh, “The Earth as modified by Man's Action,’-1874, p. Io9.
* See Middendorff, l.c., p. 849.
* Marsh, l.c., pp. 426-427.
PRODUCED BY MAN. 773
A story relating to the natural history of these true fishes’
will show, in the way of a parallelism, the facility with which mis-
taken views may obtain currency, “si modo imaginationem feriant
aut intellectum vulgarium notionum nodis astringant,' quantitative
measurements, statistics, relative proportions of masses to other
things, and even literature itself, notwithstanding. In the Oxford
University Museum we have a large skeleton of a tunny (Scomber
thynnus), brought from Madeira, before my time, by my friend
Dr. Acland. A foreign naturalist, whose name, under the cir-
cumstances, I think well to withhold, but whose reputation is
commensurate with his very extensive performance, going over the
Museum with me one day, remarked, after paying a not undeserved
compliment to the skeleton, ‘That fish never came from the
Mediterranean.” I answered that, as a matter of fact, it had
belonged to an ocean-going individual; but I also asked how it
was possible to differentiate a Madeiran from a Mediterranean
specimen. My friend answered, “The Mediterranean is too closely
fished by man to allow of any tunny attaining such dimensions.”
I was silent, though very vivid recollections of long, however
pleasant, days of coasting on those shores, without meeting any
considerable number of vessels, or passing, as on the south coast of
Asia Minor, any considerable towns except in ruins, might have
conspired with my recollections of St. Paul being driven up and
down for fourteen nights in Adria, to make me question this ex-
planation. Some time after, I found that Cetti records tunnies
of no less than from Iooo to 1800 lbs. as being caught now-a-days
in the Sardinian fisheries 4 |
The results of investigation into the extent to which man's
interference may have told injuriously upon the propagation of fish
smaller in size, if not smaller in importance, such as the herring,
may possibly show us that here too we have exaggerated our own
powers for mischief. Not only is the sea a large field, but cyclical
oscillations in the “Frequenz’ of its inhabitants are at least as
possible, irrespectively of our interference, as are the similar varia-
tions observable in air-breathing animals; and many an animal,
as for example the horse in South America, has become extinct
even in recent, not to speak of earlier geological times, owing
to quite other than human agencies. Man has no monopoly of
* See Lenz, ‘Zoologie der alten Griechen und Römer,’ 1856, p. 485.
774 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
destructive agencies, neither, if he had, would that, as it seems
to me, prove that, ‘though' living in physical nature he is not of
her, that he is of more exalted parentage, and belongs to a higher
order of existences.’ He is not, in strictness of language, a ‘cosmic,’
a “telluric,” a “geological,’ nor a ‘supernatural agency.’ He may
ultimately obtain, as prophesied by Mr. Wallace”, such a mastery
of the dry land as to supersede on that portion of the world's
surface the agency of natural selection; but he cannot even there
effect cosmical changes in the climate, and as regards the sea, it is
possible enough, as Mr. Moseley has suggested on the two con-
cluding pages of his “ Notes by a Naturalist on the Cºal/enger,'
that when the present races of animals, plants, and men shall
have perished, the deep-sea animals, at least, if not those of
higher levels, “will very possibly remain unchanged from their
present condition *.’
* Marsh, l.c., p. 34. * “Natural Selection,’ p. 326.
* Having been compelled to express dissent from Mr. Marsh's suggestion as to the
phosphorescence of the Mediterranean having been a less striking phenomenon in
ancient than it is in modern times, I cannot forbear to pay my poor meed of thanks to
this writer for the pleasure and instruction which his works have afforded me. The
‘Kulturpflanzen und Hausthiere' of Herr Victor Hehn resembles Mr. Marsh's work
in dealing with the subject of man's action on organic nature in a way which attracts
the attention and stimulates the thought at once of the politician, of the literary man,
and of the man of science. I expressed my opinion upon the merits of the first edition
of this work in the “Academy” of August 15, 1872. A third edition of it appeared in
1877, considerably enlarged and improved. And it may be observed that, for dealing
at all adequately with this subject, and indeed for avoiding very gross blundering in
so dealing with it, a man must have some knowledge not only of purely scientific
subjects, of the facts of history on the large scale, and of the results at least of
philological inquiry, but also of the power which commercial legislation and com-
mercial enterprise have for altering the distribution of the various vegetable and
animal articles of trade; otherwise he may fall, as some have fallen, into the error of
supposing commercial results to have been produced by changes in the laws, not of
man, but of climate. I make this remark for, among other purposes, that of intro-
ducing another remark to the effect that it is much to be regretted a fresh edition of
Dureau de la Malle's ‘Economie Politique des Romains’ should not be brought out
in these days: it is a work of permanent value, though it bears the date of 1840. As
works of a more exclusively scientific character, but still easily intelligible to persons
possessed of a mastery of the rudiments of botany and zoology, and of cardinal import-
ance in researches such as these, I will specify:— -
De Candolle, ‘Géographie Botanique raisonnée,’ 1855.
Unger's ‘Botanische Streifzüge, in the “Sitzungsberichte' of the Vienna Academy
from 1857 to 1859 inclusively.
Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire, ‘Histoire Naturelle Générale des Règnes Organiques,”
tom. iii., 1862.
K. E. von Baer, “Reden und Studien aus dem Gebiete der Naturwissenschaften,’ four
PRODUCED BY MAN. 775
Beginning at home, let us consider first of all what are the
most prominent changes which man has effected in the landscape,
octavo volumes which appeared in the years 1864, 1873, and 1876, and contain much
of geographical as well as of other interest. This illustrious scientist was for some
years from 1839 onwards concerned, together with v. Helmersen, in bringing out, at
the cost of the St. Petersburg Academy, a periodical, ‘Beiträge zur Kenntniss des
Russischen Reiches.’ In one of the volumes (xviii. 1856, pp. 111–115) of this
periodical, a short paper by v. Baer appears, the purport of which is shown by its
title, “Die Uralte Waldlosigkeit der Süd-russischen Steppe,’ ‘The Aboriginal want of
Wood on the South Russian Steppe.” This paper was written in supplementation of a
paper which had appeared in the fourth volume of the same periodical, 1841, pp.
163-198, with the same object of deprecating a useless and essentially nugatory
attempt to make these steppes timber-bearing. From it I will give an extract, partly
because it is so characteristic of the manner of the great biologist, and partly or
mainly because it shows how pure natural history can be brought to bear upon
political questions and may save a Government from engaging at great expense in
chimerical undertakings. V. Baer says, l.c. :- At that time (1841) I had forborne
to bring up a piece of evidence (in favour of the South Steppe never having been
wooded) which is much older than Herodotus; and the present communication has
only just the purpose of putting out this evidence, for doing which I have had no
earlier opportunity. This piece of evidence is furnished by the squirrels. They are
found throughout the Russian empire, so far as trees are found to grow, even in the
Caucasus, but with the exception of the Crimea and Kamtchatka, although both these
peninsulas have the food which the squirrel wants, and the south coast of the Crimea.
has it in great abundance. Now from these facts the following conclusion can clearly
be drawn, namely, that when these animals reached the southern borders of the
forests in South Russia, and the eastern borders of the forests in Siberia, the wide
expanse of the open South Russian steppes and also the bare levels northward in
Ramtchatka were already in existence. When was it, it may be asked, that the
squirrels came to these borders of the forests I don't know, but that they did come
to them before any historical period nobody will be inclined seriously to dispute.”
Oscar Peschel, in his “Neue Probleme der vergleichenden Erdkunde,’ 1876, p. 1881,
adds in explanation of this curious and convincing argument, “A climbing animal
dependent for food upon seeds of the trees could not of course travel across the sunny
plains of grass; and consequently the South Russian districts in question must have
been treeless ever since there were squirrels on the south boundary of the Russian
forests; and there can scarcely be any doubt that they were there thousands of years
before the time of Herodotus.” Oscar Peschel gives no specific reference to v. Baer's
works: and v. Baer himself, or his printer, curiously, a wrong one in his ‘Auto-
biography,’ p. 644. Nor have I found any reference to it in Professor Stieda’s ‘Karl
Ernst von Baer, eine biographische Skizze,’ 1878. I have therefore another justifica-
tion for the giving of these details, and am glad if I have thus saved others trouble
which I had to take for myself, not unhelped, however, herein, by the staff of the
Bodleian Library.
If Oscar Peschel has made one trifling omission, he has per contra made some of the
most important additions to geographical and anthropological knowledge, separately
and combined, which have been made since the time of Ritter. I need scarcely
specify his
“Völkerkunde,’ 1874.
“Abhandlungen zur Erd- und Völkerkunde,’ 2 vols., 1877–1878.
776 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
so far as the landscape is made up of organic elements, of our own
country. I have not undertaken, and shall not attempt to speak
‘Physische Erdkunde,’ of which three fascicles have appeared in the present year.
The general principles to be found expounded in the works above specified have
found a practical application in the particular question, Are the countries along the
shores, and especially the eastern shores, of the Mediterranean to be looked upon as
having been exhausted by man's interference with them in the way of agriculture,
and so robbed of any chance of political rejuvenescence? And with this question is
connected that which asks whether any perceptible change of climate has been
effected in the same regions by the same agency. The literature of this controversy,
which has been carried on obviously enough by partisans filled at least on one side
with political bias, is, if we give only the most important memoirs, not very extensive,
and may perhaps usefully find a place here.
C. Fraas, in his ‘Klima und Pflanzenwelt,’ 1847, takes the pessimistic view,
which
J. P. Fallmerayer, in a review published in the same year apparently, and re-
published in his ‘ Gesammelte Werke,’ 1861, ii. 462, endorses with a bitter readiness.
C. Fraas, in the ‘Geschichte der Landbau und Forstwissenschaft, München, 1865,
had the opportunity of again expounding his opinions, p. 35o et passim, in his account
of Liebig’s views. Those views are to be found in
Liebig, “Natural Laws of Husbandry, Eng. Trans., 1863, and in his “Chemische
Briefe,” the ninth edition of which bears date 1878.
Oscar Fraas, possibly or presumably a relative of C. Fraas, from certain passages in
his ‘Aus dem Orient,’ 1867–1868, would appear to hold similar views to those of his
namesake; he speaks (vol. i. p. 213) in defiance of Arago's views, as expounded in
‘CEuvres,’ vol. viii., ‘Notices Scientifiques, vol. v. ed. 1859, p. 222, of a ‘veråndertes
Clima der Nilländer,’ and says (p. 215), what will be read with some surprise by
Indian officials, “Heutzutage erlahmt die Energie selbst eines kräftigen Europäer's
unter der Sonne von Egypten . . . man erschlafft, wird träge und faul, man fångt an
zu bummeln l’ An excellent answer to all this is given by
Theobald Fischer, “Beiträge zur Physischen Geographie des Mittelmeerländer,
besonders Siciliens,’ 1877, p. 154, w8que ad finem libri, p. 167.
Fr. Unger, in his ‘Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse einer Reise in Griechenland,’ 1862,
has dealt similarly with this question at the conclusion of his small but excellent
memoir, pp. 187-2II.
The views of Victor Hehn, and those of the recently deceased botanist and author
of an authoritative work, “Die Vegetation auf die Erde,’ 1872 (translated into French
in 1877 by Tchihatcheff), viz. Grisebach, may be given in the words of the latter,
when reviewing the former in the ‘Göttinger gelehrte Anzeigen,’ 1872, xlv. p. 1767.
With these views we agree. They run thus:– Mit Recht verwirft er die Meinung
dass die klassischen Länder erschöpft seien und einer Erneuerung ihrer ehemaligen
Blüthe keine natürliche Grundlagen mehr bâten. Er trifft das Wesen der Sache,
indem er sagt, dass ihr Klima, im Grossen aufgefasst, nicht vom Boden und seiner
Vegetation, sondern von “weitgreifenden, meteorologischen Vorgângen” abhänge, die
durch ihre geographische Lage bestimmt, “von Afrika und dem atlantischen Meere
bis zum Aralen und Siberien reichen.” Ebenso muss man sein eingehendes Verständ-
miss dieser Frage anerkennen, wenn er im Bereich der Agrikultur-Chemie sich gegen
die Ansicht ausspricht, dass der Boden Südeuropas durch seine alte Kultur an
mineralischen Nahrungsstoffen erschöpft sei. Wie die lombardische Ebene durch die
Alpenflüsse mit frischen Silicaten und Kalksalzen gespeist wird, so liefern die so
PRODUCED BY MAN. 777
of such changes as those which the embankment of our rivers has
effected, referring those of my hearers who may feel an interest
in this particular change to Sir Christopher Wren's disquisition
upon the subject, which may be found with very much else very
well worth reading in the ‘Parentalia, p. 285. But I have to say
that changes of proportionately equal magnitude have been effected
in our landscape by the interposition of man in the way of intro-
ducing into it trees which, though now naturalised, are demonstrably
not indigenous to our soil. The most striking of these changes
are those which have been effected by the introduction of the
common elm, Ulmus campestris; next, if indeed not equal in magni-
tude, those effected by the introduction of certain coniferae ; and
then, at a long distance behind as regards numerical importance,
those effected by the introduction of the horse-chestnut and the
sycamore. I do not of course forget that such trees as the walnut,
and a host of other trees which are now entering into the picturesque,
if not into the economical aspect of Great Britain, are as foreign to
our soil as their names remind us they are ; but I am not delivering
a treatise upon our forest trees, and I shall confine myself within
the limits which the three or four trees or orders of trees specified
in the preceding sentence mark out for me. Let me begin with
the simpler cases, those of the horse-chestnut and the sycamore first.
I should indeed be ungrateful, living as I do within such easy
sight of the beautiful, if not unrivalled, horse-chestnuts of New
College Gardens, if I did not express my sense of gratitude to the
men who introduced that tree into England. There is, of course,
as little question as to its non-indigenousness as there can be as
to its beauty. Botanists, however, differ as widely as possible as to
what its native land may have been. I have not been able to
satisfy myself that Hehn, l.c., pp. 348 and 457, is right in saying
that we owe the introduction of this tree into Europe to the Turks.
All but certainly this was not the case if D. Hawkins, as cited by
Fiedler in “Reise durch alle Theile des Königreiches Griechenlands,’
1840, vol. i. p. 649, is right in saying that this tree grows wild
on Pindus and Pelion. There are not wanting species on either
manigfaltig gegliederten Gebirgeketten, welche die Länder am Mittelmeere erfüllen,
aus dem Innern ihrer Felsmassen unerschöpfliche und durch das fliessende Wasser
stetig ausgebreitete Worräthe, um die Erdkrumen der Thälen und Tiefebenen immer
wieder auf Neue zu befruchten.”
778 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
side of the Greek Archipelago which no naturalist would divide or
bifurcate, nor, I imagine, has the Greek Archipelago existed in
its disconnecting discontinuity as long as the species Æsculus
hippocastanum.
The sycamore is another undoubtedly non-indigenous tree, but
it is thoroughly naturalised and abundant in certain parts of
England; and notably in the Lake District it forms a very
characteristic feature of the landscape, when it is massed round the
equally distinctive old farm-houses. In the Lake District its
leaves have assumed a somewhat darker colour than they ordinarily
bear in the southern and midland counties; and its bark often
exhibits what some naturalists would call a mimetic analogy to
that of its fellow-countryman the Oriental plane. The sycamore
has yet other claims upon our attention, as the readiness with
which its seeds take root might have long ago destroyed, even to
the eyes of the least observant, that ‘idolon theatri molestissimum
et ineptissimum’ which taught that if a plant could be proved to
be non-indigenous in a country it was useless to expect it to
flourish there 1.
I will now turn to the Coniferae. In another place ", I drew
attention to the well-known and universally accepted fact, that till
comparatively recent times the Scotch fir (Pinus Sylvestris), the
yew (Tawus baccata) and the juniper (Juniperus communis), had been
the only representatives in these islands of the natural order
Coniferae. I did not dwell then, and I will not dwell now, upon
the greatness of the difference which has, in the last three hundred
years, been effected in the general aspect of our country by our
successive importations of the spruce, the larch, and the silver fir
from other European countries, and the multitudinous trees be-
longing to the same order from North America, from North India,
from California and Mexico, from Japan, from China, and from
Chili, the names of which ‘plants of the fir tribe suitable for the
* For an example of the operation of this notion, so opposed to the most obvious
facts, see “Viti (Fiji), by Berthold Seemann,’ p. 426, where, apropos of the statement
‘the cotton plant is not indigenous in Fiji,’ we have the following note:–
“Most of the newspapers took this fact to be a serious drawback to the successful
cultivation of cotton, quite forgetting that cotton is not indigenous to the United
States and many other countries in which it flourishes. I made exactly the same
statement (cotton is not indigenous in Fiji), but added that, notwithstanding, it had
become almost wild in some parts, so well is the country adapted for its growth,'—B.S.
* “British Barrows,’ p. 724. Article XVII, pp. 326.
PRODUCED BY MAN. 779
climate of the United Kingdom, cultivated by . . . . nurserymen
and seed merchants, fill up some sixty-six pages in a sale catalogue
now before me. Any traveller, by rail or otherwise, can appre-
ciate the greatness of the alteration which has been effected by
man on nature, if he will but bear in mind the three trees just
specified, and recollect as he sees the silver fir spreading out with its
airy interspaces in the sky-line, and the larches and spruces clothing
the hill-side in acres upon acres, that these trees were as little
known to the untravelled Englishman of the times of the Tudors
as were the ‘Weymouth pine, the Deodara, the Wellingtonia, or
the Araucariae. The statesman, indeed, can read something of the
political and commercial history of this kingdom in the trees which
speak of the various countries, farther distant apart from each
other than are ‘China and Peru, with which England has succes-
sively come into rapport; and the changes which he has suggested
to him are scarcely, if at all, less complicated than those which the
naturalist can show to have been similarly set up in the world of
lower life represented by birds and insects. Since I wrote as
above (l.c.) I became acquainted with an article on “Coniferous
Trees’ in the October number of the “Edinburgh Review for
1864, to which I would beg to refer my hearers for a detailed
and very interesting account of the successive successful acclimati-
sations of members of this natural order; and upon the ground
thus sufficiently occupied I will not encroach. It is not un-
interesting, and not entirely irrelevant either, to observe that Great
Britain and Ireland were both richer in Coniferae in recent geolo-
gical periods than they have been since those times down to those
of the Stuarts. In the sunken forest at Cromer, in Norfolk, in a
deposit" of a period immediately preceding the glacial, we find
the spruce fir represented, together with nearly all the rest of the
scanty list of really indigenous post-glacial English trees. In the
Cromer forest we find the spruce represented, together with the
Scotch fir, the yew, the oak, the elder, the birch, and the black-
thorn. The ash has somehow failed to join itself on to this com-
pany; but we see it forming one of it, though the spruce in its
turn is absent as well as all other trees, in many small copses or
thickets in out-of-the-way parts of this country. Such, for example,
are many mountain-lime-stone headlands in parts of the Principality,
* See ‘Rudiments of Geology, by Samuel Sharp, F.S.A., F.G.S. 2nd ed. I876, p. 169.
780 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
where the Welshman—in spite of the traditional hatred for trees
which his race, like some other ancient races, as, for example, the
Spanish, is said to entertain—has allowed the ancient flora to
remain, and left it unmixed with foreign importations. The inter-
vention of the glacial period will easily account for the wiping out
of the spruce from the list of post-glacially indigenous British
trees; but it is not so easy to explain how it has been that the
silver fir (Abies peetinata), which is found in the Scottish peat, was
absent from at least historic Britain till the year 1603; and that
the Pinus mughus, the Taeda of the Romans, should be found in the
peat-bogs of Ireland, and should subsequently have become as
thoroughly extinct there as the Irish elk, Cervus megaceros. On
the other hand, it is not difficult to understand how it has been
that the Scotch fir, with characteristic pertinacity and hardiness,
followed up the retreating glacial forces more closely than even the
‘Norway’ spruce; for at this day it propagates itself, either by
self-sown or by squirrel-sown seeds, much more surely and widely
than does this equally or more than equally hardy tree.
I must not leave the subject of the Scotch fir without rectifying
an error relating to it which various writers', from the time of
Caesar's Greek translator down to those of Evelyn and of myself
inclusively, have fallen into when writing about it. Julius Caesar,
in an often-quoted and as often mistranslated passage”, says of
Britain, ‘Materia cujusque generis, ut in Gallia, est praeter fagum
atgue abietem ;' and these words are ordinarily taken to mean,
* There is wood of all kinds to be found in Britain, as in Gaul,
eacept the beech and the fir.’ Poor old Planudes of course blundered,
* Planudes fl. 1327 A.D. See p. 46 of Appendix to Cambridge edition of Caesar's
Works, 1706.
Evelyn, ‘Silva, a Discourse of Forest Trees delivered in the Royal Society, Oct. 19,
1662. Ed. Hunter, 1776, p. 139.
Hasted, “Phil. Trans.,’ vol. lxi., for year 1771, pt. 2, 1772, p. 166.
De Candolle, ‘Géogr. Botanique, pp. 154,689. I855.
Johns, ‘Forest Trees of Great Britain,’ p. 42.
Rolleston in ‘British Barrows, pp. 722-724. To do myself justice, I did not err
so widely as my companions in this matter. I was as ignorant of Latin as they ; but
I accused Julius of only one blunder, while they accused him of two. If I had
really believed that “Caesar doth not wrong but with good cause' it would have been
better for me. As it was I made a poorish ‘ explanation’ for Julius as regarded the
abies, but confessed that I felt some doubt as to the accuracy of his statement as to
the beech. See Article XVII, pp. 325–6.
* De Bello Gallico, v. 12. -
PRODUCED BY MAN. 781
as a Constantinople monk of the fourteenth century was sure to
blunder, “reaping,’ as Mr. Philip Smith has remarked apropos of
his edition of the Anthology, ‘the reward which often crowns the
labours of bad editors who undertake great works;’ and the words
of Julius appear, l.c., in the following Greek dress: Tāv etőos 6&
ôévôpov trap' airo's, Ös év tá Taxatiq, TAïv qmyoſ Te Kai Trećkms,
qºſetal. Evelyn, speaking of the fir (p. 139, l.c.), uses the follow-
ing words: “which with this so common tree (the beech) the
great Caesar denies to be found in Britain; . . . . but certainly
from a grand mistake, or rather, for that he had not travelled much
up into the country.’ Hasted (l.c.), in 1771, translates the words
thus: ‘This island has every kind of tree the same as Gaul eacept
the fir and the beech.” Some scholars hold still that this is the
right way of translating the words. But my friend Mr. J. P.
Muirhead, the author of the Life of James Watt, pointed out to
me that praeter, in the language of Julius, does by no means always
mean eacept, but means sometimes simply besides. For example,
when | Ariovistus stipulates that Caesar and he should meet and
confer on horseback, each bringing ten assessors with him, Caesar's
words run thus: ‘Ariovistus, ut ex equis colloquerentur, et praeter
se, denos ut ad colloquium adducerent, postulavit.’ And we may
learn from this single passage that it is as well to be quite sure of
an author's meaning before we impute ‘a grand mistake to him,
especially if he happen to be really a grand man. I may add that
Cicero, in a single passage in the same connection as one which I
shall have to refer to shortly for another purpose *, uses the word
praeter in both the senses, eacept and besides. His words, telling us
how Verres bestowed himself, somni, vini, stupri, plenus, run thus:
‘Vir accumberet nemo praeter (except) ipsum et praetextatum
filium ; tametsi recte dixerim sine earceptione virum quum isti essent
neminem fuisse . . . . Mulieres autem nuptae nobiles praeter (be-
sides) unam minorem Isidori filiam, &c., &c. Erat Pippa quaedam
uxor . . . . Erat et Nice foemina.’ My own natural history studies
had familiarised me with the line of Plautus, Stich. iii. 460 —
“Mustela murem ut abstulit praeter pedes'—
and should have shown me that the local meaning of praeter is
also its general meaning, and that it retains the idea of ‘by the
* De Bello Gallico, i. 43.
* In Verrem, Act. ii. lib. v. 31.
782 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC INATURE
side of, even when by the aid of a negative, expressed or im-
plied, it comes to be more conveniently translated by the word
‘ except.’
It would be perhaps showing as much over-anxiety to vindicate
Caesar's accuracy, as has been shown of over-readiness to impute
inaccuracy to him, if I were to point out, after Parlatore", that
Caesar might have been familiar with the Scotch fir itself, Pinus
Sylvestris, even in Italy, to say nothing of the other European
countries traversed by his victorious eagles. An historian who
was or was not a professed botanist, might without any sensible
man blaming him, speak now-a-days of all the common pines,
‘Scotch,” “umbrella,” “cluster,’ &c., as ‘ pines’; my present belief is
that Julius would similarly have spoken of them all as abietes, and
would probably have included the ‘firs’ proper under the same
name as these ‘pines.' But I wish hereby to retract the suggestion
l. c. as to his having meant the silver fir, Abies pectinata, by the
word abies, in the much vexed passage in question; though that
suggestion was made in the best possible spirit, and is scientifically
unanswerable as against those unhappy persons who feel male-
volently towards Caesar, which I never did, and are at the same
time, as I was when I made that suggestion, unable to translate
him correctly?. -
I have yet a couple of points to mention regarding the use which
man has made of the Coniferae, and the alteration which he has
in comparatively recent times effected, firstly by, and secondly
upon, the distribution of this order of trees.
The same number and the same article on Coniferous Trees in
the “Edinburgh Review,’ October, 1864, gives the interesting his-
tory of the recovery by Brémontier and his followers, from the
condition of blown sand, of the vast area (Ioo,000 acres) in the
Landes of Gascony, which should in justice to him bear his name.
* “Etudes sur la Géographie Botanique de l'Italie,” p. 37, 1878.
* Mr. J. A. Froude cannot be accused of any want of loyalty to the subject of his
“Biography’; still we may say to him
Nec te tua plurima, Pentheu,
Labentem pietas, nec Apollinis infula texit—
for in that work, “Caesar, a Sketch,' 1879, I read, at p. 271, of Britain when invaded
B.C. 54, that “the vegetation resembled that of France, save that he saw no beech and
no spruce pine.” Caesar must have seen the beech, but not even Caesar could have
looked either far enough forwards or far enough backwards to have seen the spruce fir
growing in Britain.
PRODUCED BY MAN. 783
His agency was the “cluster’ pine, elsewhere called the ‘pouch”
pine, the Pinus pinaster of the botanists”. The resinous and other
* The pine employed by Brémontier is the Pinus maritima of botanists; it is,
however, as nearly allied to the Pinus halepensis as the two cedars Deodara and
atlantica are to each other. And I used a picture enlarged from a drawing of
Unger's (“Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse,’ p. 88) of a ‘Pinus halepensis,” growing in
Euboea, to show the general habit of the tree which had proved so useful in the
French Landes. It may be well, for my own credit at least, that I here explain that
I had with me, and suspended in the lecture-room, a number of pictures in illustration
of my subject. These I will herewith enumerate, stating the points they were intended
to make intelligible to the eyes, thereby sparing the ears, of those who honoured me
by coming to my lecture. I had with me—
Firstly, the picture just referred to, which was intended primarily to illustrate, as
were some of the other pictures, the mischievous action of the goat, underwood being
almost entirely absent; two goats being drawn browsing upon such shrubs as were
left, and keeping them down to a line corresponding with what Ruskin calls in this
country, where the old legal rule, bidentibus eacceptis, still happily holds good in
practical pasturage, the ‘cattle line.’ The great mass of the picture was occupied by
the tall pines in question, and the bare, barren, and sunburnt native rocks, which
irrigation and the prohibition of goats might cover with figs and olives.
Secondly, two pictures from Lepsius's Egyptian “Denkmäler, Abtheil. iii. 46, iv. 3,
and iv. I26, represented goats and men allied in the unholy task of destroying the
palm-trees of an enemy's country. In one of these pictures the goats had assumed
the same arboreal habits which they are drawn as exhibiting in Hooker and Ball's
‘Marocco, p. 97, in the argan tree. This picture was also shown enlarged by
permission of Sir Joseph Hooker. One of the pictures from the Egyptian monuments
was of the time of the 12th dynasty, and therefore, Professor Rawlinson informs me,
as early, according to Wilkinson, as from B.C. 2020 to B.C. 1860, or even, according to
Brugsch, as from B.C. 2378 to B.G. 2200. It is of course important to know that the
palm was so early as this a familiar object to Egyptian eyes, when, as I further learn
from Professor Rawlinson, “the earliest date-palms represented on Assyrian monu-
ments belong’ to no earlier a date than B.C. 833 to B.C. 858; and that even in
Babylonia, where they now flourish far more than in the region corresponding to
Assyria proper, the palm-trees have not monumental evidence for an earlier date than
B.C. 15oo. A cylinder from Babylonia, of uncertain but not earlier date than this, is
figured in Professor Rawlinson’s “Ancient Monarchies,’ vol. iii. p. 23, 2nd edition.
These dates furnish something of an argument in favour of Unger's suggestion that
the palm may have had its original home in Upper Egypt; and may make it seem
more probable that the Assyrians learnt from the Egyptians, than the Egyptians from
them, the art of cultivating this tree. Kämpfer (“Amoenitates Exoticae,’ p. 714)
declares himself to be, as indeed the inhabitants of Egypt themselves were, of opinion
that Arabia was the native home of the palm, and he dismisses the claims of a more
westerly origin in the four plain words, nam Africam non moramur. We shall,
however, go hereafter in detail into the claims of the ‘Dark Continent.”
Thirdly, a picture of the gathering in of the date harvest in Persia, taken from
Rämpfer's book just referred to, which was used to illustrate in connection with
certain reports of the formation in Algeria of date plantations in regions previously
barren (see Reclus, ‘Earth,’ i. p. 98, Eng. trans., 1871 ; Laurent, “Mémoires sur le
Sahara, p. 85, 1859, cit. Marsh, l.c. p. 482) the power of man for producing happiness
and enjoyment in localities previously but sandy, thirsty deserts.
Fourthly, a picture enlarged from one given in Martius’ ‘Historia Naturalis
784, MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
products of this plantation form now an important article of
commerce; their sale and the planting of more of the previously
barren, shifting, sandy waste, received a great impulse, as did many
alien interests, by the interruption to American imports caused by
their great Civil War', and they occupy a large space in some of
our various public exhibitions of economic products. Some little
uncertainty appears to hang about the question as to the person
to whom the chief credit of this work, which has been compared,
and not unjustly, with that of the recovery of Holland from the
empire of the sea, is really due. The “Edinburgh’ reviewer assigns
it, apparently with good grounds for so doing, to M. Brémontier,
and to a period beginning with the year 1789. Professor Koch 4,
Palmarum," iii. 1823–1850; vol. iii. pl. 120, of the ruins of the ancient Agrigentum,
with their modern surroundings. It is thus described by Martius himself, p. 249,
note:—‘Chamaerops humilis, alia depressa, alia elata octodecimpedalis, in agro Agri-
gentino, antiquissimis ruinis celebri, depicta a Cl. Frid. Gaertner, architecta. Muros
conspicis magnifici templi quod Jovi Olympio olim consecratum, nunc inopis palmae,
opuntiae et agaves domicilium factum est. Junonis Lucinae, Concordiae et Herculis
templa diruta remotiores tenent colles.’ It would be difficult, except possibly by the
introduction of the orange and olive into the picture, to give a more instructive view
of a Mediterranean landscape as altered by man's interference. The ruins of what
Pindar called the fairest city raised by earthly men, of what Virgil called “maxima
longé moenia,' speak to man's power for destruction; the agave and the prickly pear
tell of his discovery and utilisation of America; the fan-palm with its spreading, far-
reaching roots and suckers stands as it did in the far-off times when the priscan
inhabitants of Sicania fed upon its roots, as Cicero (In Verrem, Act. ii. lib. v. 38,
39) suggested they did before Ceres gave them in that very island the gift of Cerealia,
and as it did in the much later days when Verres, by malversation and maladministra-
tion, reduced Roman sailors on the shores of what was called the granary of Rome,
and was but a few days' sail from Rome, once again to pacify hunger by feeding on
that characteristic Mediterranean plant. The importance which plants imported from
the New World have assumed in the Old, forms a subject by itself; of the two just
specified, besides their other applications, we learn from Admiral Smyth's still
unsuperseded “Memoirs of Sicily and its Islands,’ 1834, p. 17, that they ‘form
impenetrable palisades for fortifications, and in the plains they present very serious
obstructions to the operations of cavalry.”
* Lavergne's ‘Economie Rurale de la France, ed. iv. p. 296.
* Professor Koch, of Berlin, who seems to consider the planting of the vine to be
the climax of attainment in the way of utilising a previously desolate region, writes
thus of it, after visiting the spot: ‘Weniger mâchte es bekannt sein, dass unsere
beliebten rothen Bordeaux-Weine ebenfalls in diesem Departement der Haiden
wachsen, und dass der Boden vor nicht sehr langer Zeit hier erst für die Weinfelder
urbar gemacht wurde. Die guten Weine wurden früher auf dem gegentiberliegenden
Ufer der Gironde gewonnen.’ p. 294.
See also Clavé, ‘Etudes sur l'Économie Forestière,’ 1862; cited by Marsh, l.c., pp.
595–606; Reclus, ‘Earth,’ Eng. trans., i. 82; Edmond About, “Le Progrès,’ chap.
vii; Lavergne, “Economie Rurale de la France,’ 1877, p. 297 seqq.
PRODUCED BY MAN. 785
whilst mentioning (l.c. p. 293) Brémontier, couples with his name
that of M. Desbiry, but adds that the greatest credit of all is due
to M. Ivry, of Bordeaux, whom he visited himself in 1864, on his
own plantations at Pian, and found to be still a vigorous man
though eighty-six years of age. Professor Koch pays a meed of
praise to the late Emperor Louis Napoleon for his exertions in the
same direction and locality; and it is, I think, to another name
connected with the Second Empire that the credit is, rightly or
wrongly", assigned, of having enabled the wastes of Gascony to
produce and to boast of the heterogeneous multitude of useful pro-
ducts displayed in our industrial exhibitions as being now manu-
factured out of the pine imported thither from Corsica.
It is in this same many-sided connection interesting to note,
if we in these recent centuries have re-introduced several conifers
which were indigenous, like the spruce, in the immediately pre-
glacial, or like the silver fir, in the still later period of the deposi-
tion of the peat, but perished either before or during the pre-historic
human period”, and if we are still actively employed in adding to
the number of species of this natural order in our landscape by
importation from every quarter of the globe, from China to Chili,
in proportions represented by a descriptive catalogue of more than
4oo ‘plants of the fir tribe suitable for the climate of the United
Kingdom,’ we have, I think it may be shown, also considerably
diminished the numbers of one of the few of our native repre-
sentatives of this order. This is the yew (Taarus baccata). It is
a tree which, though valuable to the turner, nevertheless grows too
slowly to pay well in these days when the spirit which makes
haste to be rich makes a ‘vegetable manufactory’ of the hill-sides
of our Lake District (to use Wordsworth's prose), by covering
them with the rapidly growing larch—to say nothing of the
severe competition, even as a wood for the turner, to which the
beautiful woods of New Zealand and other southern colonies now
subject it. Formerly matters stood somewhat differently, when it
could be said:—
‘England were but a fling
But for the eugh and the gray goose wing.’
* Wrongly very likely—in England we are content to ascribe the invention of the
safety lamp to George Stephenson.
* See De Candolle, ‘Géogr. Botan.” 807.
3 E
786 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
But when the invention of gunpowder and the application of
it to the science and art of projectiles ‘put me a caliver into
Wart's hands, the principal raison d'étre of the yew-tree was
destroyed. A man who drew a good bow, even if he drew it at
a venture, had needs have ‘the limbs, the thews, the stature, bulk,
and big assemblage’ of the men who won the battles of Agincourt,
of ‘Cressy red and fell Poitiers;’ and if he were to put his arrows
into the clout, he had needs have a steady and well co-ordinated eye,
in addition to well co-ordinated and strong arms, to be effective.
Such men were sent on many a campaign from England; and for
the commencement of such campaigns, before the hardships of war
had impaired the soldier's condition, no more efficient man-slaying
machines could, when fair stock was taken of the relative deadli-
ness of the available weapons, have been conceived of, till the rifled
musket was discovered. But even English archers were liable to
the influence of short rations, hard work, and weather; and as
campaigns were not always settled in a few weeks, the firelock—
a weapon which Feeble and Wart, even if they were not their
‘craft's masters,’ could, under the supervision of that admirably
qualified musketry instructor ‘Master Corporate' Bardolph, learn
in a few weeks to use with as much effect as the most stalwart
of tournament champions—displaced the bow and arrow, though
not entirely till after the wars of the Roses. This displacement
seems to have entailed the disappearance from many and many
a locality of lines and avenues of yew-trees, of which here and there
we still have a few representatives left us, and which, in such places
as the combes in chalk districts, form in the way of contrast, and
indeed also intrinsically, such a pleasant and interesting feature of
the landscape".
Of the vastness of the change which the introduction of the
common elm (Ulmus campestris) into Britain has produced in the
landscape, any one who will count and compute the numbers of
the trees visible in any one of our midland counties at one view
* Having above quoted Mr. Hasted to his disadvantage, I wish to make some
compensation to his memory by here quoting a sentence of his with which I entirely
agree, but which I had not read when I wrote as I have done in the text, relatively
to the yew. It is the concluding sentence of the already quoted paper in the “Philo-
sophical Transactions’ of 1771, and runs thus: “Whoever has been much acquainted
with the woods and tracts of ground lying on our chalky hills will surely never
contend that the yew is not the indigenous growth of this country.”
PRODUCED BY MAN. 787
will readily convince himself. It has, I think, been said already
by some one, and may now be said again, that previously to the
development of our railroad system all the experiences and sensations
of the great majority of our rural fellow-countrymen were gained
within an area limited by a horizon bounded by an uninteresting
row of these hedgerow trees. Of the evidence for the belief that
this tree was really imported by the Romans, and not known here
previously by the Britons, however familiar it be to us Saxons,
I have spoken elsewhere 1. To the grounds for that belief, there
stated, let me here add the authority, firstly, of the Cromer forest,
in which no elm (not even the wych elm, of which I do not here
speak) was found; and secondly, of Mr. Bentham”, who says of it:
“In Britain it is the most frequent elm in central, southern, and
eastern England, but in the north and the west only where planted.
It is, indeed, doubtful, whether it be really indigenous anywhere in
Britain.”
Man's increasing command over the inorganic world has, in yet
another way and in another time, and that our own, very power-
fully modified the botanical world around him; and as this parti-
cular instance of the efficiency for good and evil is a matter of some
practical consequence, and one which is still a subject of discussion
and comes into the sphere of legislative interference, I will mention
some of the facts concerning it. I refer to the effects which the
by-products of certain manufactories exercise upon the vegetation
of the districts in which they are situated. One of the most
interesting papers I have ever had the good fortune to listen to
was one read by my friend Mr. Robert Garner, F.L.S., at the
British Association Meeting held at Newcastle in the year 1863,
and printed in the Report for that year at p. 114, as also in his
“North Staffordshire Tracts, p. Io, reprinted from the ‘Stafford-
shire Advertiser’ of 1871. His words run thus *:—
“With respect to chemical impurities of the air, different plants have different
susceptibilities for such influence, and the greater or less impurity of the atmosphere'
may indeed be shown from the effects on plants. Thus the rhododendron will flourish
in an air fatal to the common laurel ; wheat will luxuriate where a holly or oak will
die. Some plants which appear naturally to luxuriate in the coal strata—as the oak,
holly, or some ferns—die when the mines begin to be worked. Fortunately, annuals
* “British Barrows, pp. 721–722. Article XVII, p. 324.
* ‘Handbook of the British Flora,' p. 746.
* British Association Report, l.c.
3 E 2
788 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
suffer least; for instance, corn and wheat do well where nothing else can, and perhaps
the exhalations in question may even tend to ripen them. An increasing deterioration
of the atmosphere in towns and mining districts may be estimated by means of plants
as follows:–1. In the smallest degree of impurity, trees are destitute of the leafy
lichens, and Ericae, the Scotch fir, and the larch die. 2. Next, the common laurel,
the Deodara cedar, the Irish arbutus, the laurustinus, and the yew die. 3. The
araucaria, the thuia, the common cedar, the mezereon, and the Portugal laurel die.
4. The common holly, the rhododendron, the oak, and the elm die. 5. Annuals still
live, and the almond, poplars, and many roses thrive, fruit-trees are barren, peas
unproductive. 6. Hieracia, Reseda lutea, the elder, some saxifrages and sedums, with
many syngenesious and cruciferous weeds, still luxuriate.’
The mountain and moorland plants are most, just as the nettle,
the elder, the shepherd’s purse, the sow-thistle are least susceptible
of antihygienic influences; the former as well as the latter set of
organisms showing the influence of habituation, both alike being
unable to “leave their place of birth ; they cannot live in other
earth, or rather air. The presence of the former would be an
infallible sign on the hygienometer; the presence of the latter
encourages us not to despair".
* That man has sometimes the power of undoing the mischief he has done, even by
the somewhat perilous, and often mischievous, action of legislation, a précis of the
evidence taken and given before Royal Commissions on noxious vapours, and em-
bodied in a Blue Book of last year's (1878) date, will abundantly show. This précis
I take from a letter signed “Edward Sullivan,’ in the ‘Times,’ December 2, 1878.
In this letter Mr. Sullivan says, in summing up for the defence of the alkali
manufacturers :—
‘As regards the injury done to the picturesque value of land by alkali manu-
facturers, I am afraid there is no doubt they must plead guilty. In some cases,
especially in that of Sir Richard Brooke, the damage is most distressing; but there is
a concurrence of evidence from Widnes, Weston, Runcorn, St. Helen's, Flint, and
Hebburn, that during the last four years, since the passing of the Alkali Act of 1874,
the damage has very much diminished, and that in districts where the number of
works has not increased the present damage is inappreciable.
“At page Io of the Report, Major Cross states he lives a mile and a half from the
centre of Widnes. Since the passing of the Act of 1874, he had a fair crop of fruit,
and roses and flowers grew luxuriantly.
* Page II (Runcorn). Mr. Wigg stated he had planted 18oo trees round his house,
about a mile and a half from the nearest works, “which were all growing very well
indeed.”
‘Page II (St. Helen's). Mr. Gamble produced two photographs of a plantation
Iooo yards from the works, one taken in 1862 for the use of the Lords' Committee;
the other, taken in 1876 at the same spot, showing a manifest improvement in growth
and condition of trees.
‘Page II (Flint). Mr. Muspratt stated that subsequently to the Act of 1874
vegetation was not affected at a greater distance than 200 yards. He instanced
gardens containing elms and other trees flourishing within 500 yards, and old oaks
growing luxuriantly within a mile of his works.
PRODUCED BY MAN. 789
M. de Lavergne, in his work on the ‘Economie rurale de la
France depuis 1789, does not mention the name of any individual
‘As regards the depreciation in agricultural value caused by alkali works, a great
deal is to be said.
‘Pages 8 and 9 of the Report. Major Cross, “for seven years a member of the
Widnes Local Board, and five years its chairman,” states the average selling value of
land in and about the present site of Widnes in 1854 not to have exceeded 50l. per
acre. The greater part of the site of the town and works of Widnes was bought in
I86o at from 30l. to 4ol. per acre. Since that time favourable sites within half a mile
of Widnes have been sold at the rate of 16ool., 2400l., and 48ool. per acre.
“Land at Ditton, a mile and a half from Widnes, which in 1858 was not worth 6ol.
per acre, was sold for 3ool., and of late particular lots in Ditton and Cronton, the one
being two miles and a half, the other three and a half, from Widnes, were sold at
6ool. per acre. These purchases were made for building cottages, villas, &c. As
regards letting land for agricultural purposes, Major Cross adduced several extracts
from the poor-rate books, showing that the estimated rental of land situated near the
works had steadily and often largely increased. For instance, at Cuerdley, on which
the principal Widnes works are built, and which contains I573 acres, mainly the
property of Sir Richard Brooke, the estimated value of agricultural land per acre was,
in 1861, Il. 12s. 7d. ; 1871, Il. 16s. 3d.; 1875, 21. 38. At Ditton the value of land
for agricultural purposes had risen during the same period from Il. I 38, per acre to
3!. 58. 7d. (page 9).
‘Major Cross meets the allegation of the deteriorated value of farm produce, by
stating that in the near neighbourhood of Widnes milk sells at from 36. to 4d. a
quart; hay at from 6l. to 8l. per ton. He states he has known hay and straw grown
within a mile of Widnes fetch the highest price in the Liverpool market, and that in
1875 the Manchester and Liverpool Agricultural Society gave to the tenants of a farm
of 80 acres within two miles of Widnes the prize for the best cultivated land.
*Page Io. “Mr. Wigg, while admitting the damage done in past times to Sir R.
Brooke's estate, asserted that the value of his property, through the proximity of the
alkali works, had enormously increased.” That estate consists of 1200 acres on the
Lancashire side and 5600 on the Cheshire side; and Mr. Wigg stated his reason for
believing that the selling value of the Lancashire estate was at this moment greater
than that of the two estates together in 1860.
‘Mr. H. Beswick and Mr. H. Linaker, both agents to important estates near the
works at Runcorn, Weston, and Widnes, and long and intimately connected with the
district, bore witness to the same effect as Major Cross. Both, while admitting
occasional visitations from gas, and consequent injury, declare that they have never
had any difficulty in finding suitable tenants at invariably increased rates. “I can
more readily,” says Mr. Beswick, “let land at better rents within 5 or 6 miles of
Runcorn than I can on other portions of Lord Cholmondeley's estates 20 miles away.
... Within the last few years I have refused 41. a statute acre for land for agricultural
purposes close to Widnes works. The rentals on the property in the neighbourhood
of the works under my care have gradually increased during my time, but they have
increased more rapidly during the last few years. The rental of two farms at Rock
Savage, near to the Weston works, has increased from IoI31. in 1863 to 1503!, in
1876 and 1877. I regret that I cannot say the same for estates under my care at the
distance of 20 miles.” (Page II.)
“I think, therefore, I may fairly assert that when the Report on Noxious Vapours,
1878, comes to be fairly examined and discussed, as most certainly it will be where
so extensive an industry is at stake, it will prove that, great as may be the nuisance
790 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
as having been specially concerned in the great and successful
undertaking of redeeming the Bordeaux Landes. But his remarks
upon it have so much of value in them, and touch upon so many
of the multitudinous sides—historical, political, and economical—
which this enterprise, and other State-supported enterprises, present
to us when we study them in their entirety, that I think I may be
allowed to quote them as they stand. After touching on the
dangers which pines more than other woods are exposed to from
the sparks which the railway train so readily and so fatally scatters
in such dry and parched districts; but omitting the not inconsider-
complained of by the landowners of Lancashire, they have in the great majority of
cases received a very substantial set-off in the increasing value of their land, both for
rental and for sale. -
“The alkali industry is a necessity in a manufacturing country. If it is an evil, it
is a necessary one. Sulphuric acid, the base of all alkali products, may be called the
heart of all manufacturing industries. The consumption of it is the surest gauge of
their condition. There is scarcely a manufactured article in daily use that is not
more or less dependent on it. To enhance the cost of its production by hasty or
ill-judged legislation, would enhance the cost of half the industrial products of the
country. It is not the greed, of manufacturers that has increased the number of
alkali works, but it is the increased trade of the country that has demanded an
increased supply of an indispensable element of production.
“If new works had not sprung up at Widnes or St. Helen's, they would certainly
have sprung up elsewhere. It is to be regretted that so many works have congregated
at Widnes and St. Helen's. The consumption of coal alone, a million tons at the
former and a million and a half at the latter annually, would of itself cause great
nuisance to the neighbouring districts; but who, pray, is to blame for this evil Not,
certainly, the manufacturers who bought and leased the land offered them by the
landowners, but the landowners who offered it.
‘Complaints of injury done to trees, to the picturesque value of ornamental
property, do not come with very good grace from the very proprietors who have sold
and leased contiguous land at very high prices, for the expressed and avowed object of
erecting and extending the works they now wish to destroy.
‘Sir Richard Brooke, whose name most frequently occurs in the report, and who is
undoubtedly the greatest sufferer in the picturesque value of his estate, has within
the last few years leased land immediately opposite his house, at a very high rental,
for the erection of alkali works and the deposit of alkali waste; and, I understand,
has hundreds of acres more to be let for the same purpose: nor is he by any means
the only landowner who has let and sold land expressly for the erection of alkali
works.
“There is a general desire among alkali manufacturers to minimise the nuisance
and injury caused by these works. Recent legislation has undeniably tended to that
result, and any further legislation in the same direction that is reasonable and
practicable will, I know, receive their hearty support; but it will be a fatal mistake
if a somewhat onesided statement of local grievances should cause any hasty legislation
that would destroy an industry that is absolutely indispensable to the manufacturing
prosperity of the country.”
* Pages 297-3oo.
PRODUCED BY MAN. 791
able, even if not complete, safeguard which the planting of lines of
the Robinia pseudacacia on either side of the railroad would furnish ;
which he might very well have added, as this tree does such
good service in this way in other parts of France : he dwells on the
cost and the necessity of wells, and the State help in the way of
subventions for this purpose ; he alludes with some not unjustifiable
bitterness, detectable again at pp. 453-46 I, to the * lost opportuni-
ties'for good in the way of developing the resources of the Landes
which the warlike folly of expenditure in Algeria has entailed ; and
finally, his allusions to the unhappy relations into which the Moors
were successively brought with the Spaniards, with the French,
and lastly with the Turks, are not without a singular interest and
instructivêness. But M. Lavergne shall speak for himself and in
his own language :-
* Un peu avant la révolution de I 789, au moment où tout s'éveillait à la fois, de
grandes compagnies de défrichement se fondèrent, mais sans succès, pour avoir voulu
aller trop vite ; d'autres essais du même genre ont échoué plus récemment par la même
cause. Il n'en a pas été de même des tentatives partielles faites en pleine connais-
sance de cause par les propriétaires du pays : plus d'une spéculation profitable s'est
réalisée sans bruit sur des points isolés.
* Le chemin de fer de Bordeaux à Bayonne traverse maintenant les Landes dans
toute leur longueur, et y apporte la puissance de l'industrie moderne. La valeur des
terres a immédiatement doublé, triplé même, le long de la ligne, et tout le monde
comprend que la solution du problème n'est plus qu'une question de temps. Rien
n'était possible dans un pays sans chemins et sans eau : la compagnie du chemin de
fer s'est engagée à ouvrir sur plusieurs points des routes munies de rails en bois, et si
en même temps on parvient à créer de l'eau salubre, soit au moyen de puits ou de
citernes*, soit au moyen de canaux dérivés des étangs, le plus difficile sera fait ; le
reste viendra de soi. La plus grande partie des terres incultes sera sans doute semée
en pins, chênes et chênes-liéges, et pour accélérer cette transformation, une loi récem-
ment rendue permet à l'État de boiser les terrains communaux jusqu'à concurrence de
six millions de francs. Les autres branches de la culture ne doivent cependant pas
être négligées, et il faut leur faire aussi leur part, car le danger des incendies, si grand
pour des bois résineux sous un soleil ardent, ne permet pas de couvrir le sol d'une
forêt immense et continue : une simple étincelle du chemin de fer suffirait pour
mettre le feu de Bordeaux à Bayonne.
* Les Landes peuvent être aussi productives que quelque contrée que ce soit, mais
elles conserveront toujours un caractère spécial. La singularité de cette nature sera
un de ses charmes. Les régions inhabitées ne se prêtent que lentement à l'habitation
de l'homme, et le régime pastoral, qui multiplie les animaux, et par eux les engrais, y
* * Il suffit, pour avoir de l'eau potable, de creuser des puits de cinq à six mètres de
profondeur, avec des parois imperméables, et d'y introduire une couche de gravier.
Chacun de ces puits coûte 6oo francs. Les Landes en possèdent déjà une cinquantaine,
et on calcule qu'il suffirait de 1oo,ooo francs pour en doter toutes les communes qui
en manquent.'
792 ' MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
sera longtemps, avec le régime forestier, le principal instrument du progrès. Quand
on mesure par la pensée cette vaste solitude, qui s'étend jusqu'aux portes d'une de
nos plus grandes villes, on s'étonne que la France ait pu songer à coloniser des pays
lointains, au lieu de porter ses efforts sur elle-même. Si le dixième de ce qu'a coùté
l'Algérie avait été dépensé dans les Landes, on aurait obtenu de meilleurs résultats, et
1'on aurait épargné biem des flots d'un sang généreux ; mais les stériles conquétes de
la guerre nous ont toujours beaucoup plus séduits que les créations fécondes de la
paix. L'arrondissement de Mont de Marsam, bien qu'il renferme le chef-lieu du
département, ne contient pas plus de Ioo,ooo habitants sur 5oo,ooo hectares, comme
le Tel africain, et il s'y trouve plusieurs parties déjà très-peuplées et très-cultivées;
dans la Lande proprement dite, il n'y a pas plus de Io habitants par Ioo hectares, et
quels habitants ! Cette terre, qui sera um jour populeuse et florissante, n'offre à l'œil
qu'un spectacle de désolation: c'est le désert tel qu'on va le chercher au delà des
mers, avec son triste silence, sa végétation chétive et ses horizons infinis.
* La tradition raconte que, quand les Mores furent chassés d'Espagne, à la fin du
seizième siècle, ils demandèrent, à s'établir dans les Landes, avec l'espérance de les
fertiliser. Les préjugés politiques et religieux ne le permirent pas. Non moins
civilisés à cette époque que beaucoup de peuples chrétiens, les Mores comnaissaient
d'excellents procédés de culture qui marquent encore leur passage dans les plus riches
provinces de la Péninsule. ILes Landes seraient, probablement devenues productives
entre leurs mains, et ce qui leur restait de la barbarie musulmane aurait reculé
devant les idées modernes de tolérance et d'égalité. S'ils ont, tant dégénéré en
Afrique où ils se sont réfugiés, c'est qu'ils y ont trouvé les Turcs, le plus destructeur
de tous les peuples ; cette civilisation a péri tout entière faute d'un asile où elle pût
se développer. Mais le royaume qui devait bientót, révoquer l'édit, de Nantes et
expulser de son sein des Chrétiens et des Frangais, me pouvait s'ouvrir à des enfants
de l'Islam étrangers et persécutés, et ce qui a puissamment contribué à ruiner
l'Espagne me pouvait, contribuer à enrichir la Framce.'
Leaving now the subject of the introduction of foreign trees,
and that of the unintentional destruction of our own, and taking up
the subject of disforesting generally, I have to say that the literature
of it has in these latter days become all but colossal; and that the
moral of it all is just the reverse of that of the capitulary of Charle-
magne', where it is ordained that wheresoever any good men and
true are found to be available they may have forest land given them
for clearing : * ubicunque invenient utiles ullos homines iis detur
silva ad extirpandum.' Two hundred and fifty pages of the second
edition of Mr. Marsh's excellent work, *The Earth as modified by
Man's Action,' are devoted to this subject alone ; the bibliography
extending over mine pages, prefixed to his work, is very largely
made up of the titles of works bearing upon it; and Ihold in my
hand a small, but closely printed, German octavo, which has some
28o pages devoted to the purpose of specifying the names and
* Cap. secund. Anni 813, sive Capitul. xxi. ed. Stephan. Baluzius, 1677, tom. i.
p. 5Io, De Villicis regiis quod facere debent.
PRODUCED BY MAN. 793
giving a few lines as to the scope of such works. Its own title is
“ Die Bedeutung und Wichtigkeit des Waldes, Ursachen und Folgen
der Entwaldung, die Wiederbewaldung, mit Rücksicht auf Pflan-
zenphysiologie, Klimatologie, Meteorologie, Forststatistik, Forst-
geographie und die Förstlichen Verhältnisse aller Länder, für
Forst- und Landwirthe, National-Oekonomen und alle Freunde des
Waldes, aus der einschlagenden Literatur systematisch und kritisch
nachgewiesen und bearbeitet von Freidrich Freiherrn v. Loffelholz-
Colberg, königl. bayer. Oberförster. Leipzig, 1872.
But in Herr v. Loffelholz-Colberg’s list“ aller-Länder, there is
no mention of India nor of its forest or other departments, nor of
their annual reports, nor of the names of (I) Balfour of Birdwood,
(2) of Cleghorn, (3) of Dalzell, (4) of Danvers, (5) of Brandis, of
J. L. Stewart, (6) of Colonel G. F. Pearson, or of Beddome, to each
of whom, though unknown to me personally, I feel myself per-
sonally imdebted. And extensive as is his bibliography, it admits
of being supplemented by the specification not only of works which
have appeared later, and in India, but of some of considerable
importance which appeared earlier, and some of them in Europe of
earlier date".
* For the Memoirs of the Indian authorities named above see:–(I) Revenue
Department, No. 981, 1848; (2) Catalogue Bombay Products, 1862, and Journal,
Society of Arts, Feb. 7, 1879; (3) Sind Forest Reports, 1858–186o; (4) Journal,
Society of Arts, May 24, 1878; (5) Ocean Highways, Oct. 1872, and Systematic
Works, p. 2o4; (6) Report on Forest Departments of India, 1872.
As regards other memoirs I find no mention of v. Baer's papers upon this very
same question of the relation of woods to rainfall already referred to supra, in the
“Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Russischen Reiches, iv. 184I, p. 190, xviii. p. I II, 1856.
From the former of these two papers the following sentences may with some advantage
be quoted, pp. 190–19I:–“ Noch viel weniger darf man glauben, dass nach dem
Verhältnisse der Waldabnahme eines Landes auch die Wassermengen in seinen
Flüssen abnehmen müsse. Es ist nicht unser Absicht den Einfluss ganz läugnen zu
wollen; allein wir wollen nachdrücklich darauf aufmerksam machen, dass die Nieder-
schläge aus der Luft nicht von den kleinern unter ihnen liegenden Localitäten ab-
hangen, sondern von grossen ausgedehnten Verhältnissen, von vorherrschenden Luft-
zügen, von der Quantität Feuchtigkeit welche diese Luftzüge mitbringen, von der
Differenz zweier einander berührender Luftmassen, dass diese Niederschläge es sind,
die unsern Flüssen Nahrung geben, dass in unsern Breiten sie in Form des Schnees
mehrere Monate hindurch aufgespeichert werden und endlich, dass in einem so flachen
Lande wie Russland die Feuchtigkeit welche in Form von Regen und Schnee nieder-
fällt, aus sehr weiter Ferne kommen kann. Dass unsere Flüsse und besonders das
Gebiet der obern Wolga in trockenen Sommern wenig Wasser haben, hat seinen
Grund vorzüglich darin, dass hier kein Gebirge ist, an welchem Niederschläge das
ganze Jahr hindurch nothwendig erfolgen und eben deshalb hat es ohne Zweifel von
794 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
I show you yet another work, an English Parliamentary Report,
of date 1875, Feb. 1, respecting the Production and Consumption
jeher einzelne Sommer gegeben, in denen das Wasser ungewöhnlich niedrig stand.
Wir kennen Zeugnisse hierüber aus der Zeit Peters des Grossen, und ohne Zweifel
wird man sie aus noch früherer Zeit finden wenn man darnach sucht.”
And to supplement a second time the bibliography of Herr Loffelholz-Colberg, I
will say that the following quotation from the well-known and accomplished writer of
the sixteenth century, Bernard Palissy, may fairly take its place with the foregoing
more strictly scientific opinion of von Baer. Mr. Marsh shall introduce it for us
(l.c., p. 303):-"In an imaginary dialogue in the “Recepte Véritable,” the author,
Palissy, having expressed his indignation at the folly of men in destroying the woods,
his interlocutor defends the policy of felling them by citing the example of divers
bishops, cardinals, priors, abbots, monkeries and chapters, who by cutting their woods
have made three profits, the sale of the timber, the rent of the ground, and the “good
portion” they received of the grain grown by the peasants upon it. To this argument
Palissy replies: “I cannot enough detest this thing, and I call it not an error, but a
curse and a calamity to all France; for when forests shall be cut, all arts shall cease,
and they who practise them shall be driven out to eat grass with Nebuchadnezzar
and the beasts of the field. I have divers times thought to set down in writing the
arts which shall perish when there shall be no more wood; but when I had written
down a great number, I did perceive that there could be no end of my writing, and
having diligently considered, I found there was not any which could be followed
without wood . . . . And truly I could well allege to thee a thousand reasons, but it
is so cheap a philosophy, that the very chamber-wenches, if they do but think, may
see that without wood it is not possible to exercise any manner of human art or
cunning.”.”— CEuvres de Bernard Palissy, Paris, 1844, p. 82, first published in
I563.
I may do well to neglect chronological order and mention the work by Dr. J. C.
Brown, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, which appeared in 1876 under
the title, ‘Reboisement in France; or Records of the Replanting of the Alps, the
Cevennes, and the Pyrenees with Trees, Herbage, and Bush, with a view to arresting
and preventing the destructive consequences and effects of Torrents.” Dr. Brown has
besides this and other works on kindred or on the same subjects, given us a work on
“The Hydrology of South Africa, or Details of the former Hydrographic Condition of
the Cape of Good Hope, and of Causes of its present Aridity.’
Professor Ernst Ebermayer's work, “Die Physikalischen Einwirkungen des Waldes,'
being the “Resultate der Förstlichen Versuchs-Stationen im Königreich Bayern,'
Aschaffenburg, is of later date (1873) than the bibliographical précis of Loffelholz-
Colberg, and would not therefore have been referred to by that writer as it ought to
be by all subsequent writers on the same subject. - -
Professor Karl Koch’s ‘Vorlesungen über Dendrologie, one third part of which is
devoted to the subject of the “Influence of Woods on the Health of Men, and on
Climate,” is similarly of later date (1875) than the last edition of Mr. Marsh’s ‘The
Earth as modified by Man's Action.”
Latest in order of time, but by no means last in order of merit, I must place
Professor Wellington Gray's ‘Notes on Tree-Planting and the Water Supply of the
Deccan,” Aug. 1877, contained in the excellent 13th Annual Report of the Sanitary
Commissioner for Bombay, Dr. T. G. Hewlett. The influence on climate of cosmical
as compared with local agencies; of mountain and monsoon, that is, as compared with
man's plantations; and on the other, the influence of the brute population of India,
PRODUCED BY MAN. 795
of Timber in Foreign Countries, from which a very large amount of
most useful information can be procured for the very moderate
charge of elevenpence, one penny less than a shilling—a fact which
would have rejoiced the heart of the late Mr. Joseph Hume. If in
addition to this work we had rendered available to us the usufruct
of the vast experience recorded in the Blue Books of the Indian
Forestry and Sanitary Departments, in a volume of anything like
the same size, I do not say of anything like the same price, the
India Office would add considerably to the very large claims it has
established upon the gratitude and acknowledgments both of men
of science and men of action by the publication of those invaluable
volumes.
I do not propose, indeed I do not dare, to attempt to give a
summary of the results of very many volumes here alluded to,
pleasant and even absorbing reading though many of them have
proved themselves to be. I will not discuss the curious belief still
prevalent in Spain, to the effect that trees breed birds, though
somewhat similar articles of faith are not without adherents nearer
home, merely observing, so that I may affront no one, that it would
be truer to say that the destruction of trees leads to the banishment
of birds, and thereby to the sexual, and in that case spontaneous,
generation of insects. Nor will I speculate as to whether the hatred
of a tree, of which you will be told in travelling in countries and
districts at home and abroad (even in Sicily, see Fischer, l.c. p.
I35), where the Celtic or other pristine ethnological element is still
strong in the natives, is due to a hereditarily transmitted recollec-
tion of the days when, as the capitulary just quoted shows, man had
to wage war against the forests, or a similarly transmitted recollec-
tion of the much more recent forest-laws and the feudal state of
things contemporaneous with them. Neither, on the other hand,
the goats and the camels, as compared with the agency of the human inhabitants,
who besides employing the two organic means for destruction just now mentioned,
also “hack, cut, and burn,” will be found instructively, though briefly, discussed in
this essay. I take this opportunity of adding to this bibliography the names of three
books with the contents of which I was not acquainted when I wrote as above.
They are—
“Wald, Klima, und Wasser, von Dr. von Liburnau,’ 1878. This little octavo is
one of the Munich series of Science Primers, being Bd. xxix. of “Die Naturkräfte,
eine Naturwissenschaftliche Volksbibliothek.’
“Die fürstlichen Verhältnisse Frankreichs, von Dr. A. v. Seckendorff,’ 1879.
‘Der Wald im Nationalen Wirthschaftsleben, von Ph. Geyer,’ 1879.
796 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
will I content myself with simply repeating Mr. Marsh's summing
up of the matter in the short way in which long words so often
(literary critics notwithstanding) enable us to sum up the results of
a long investigation, and saying with him that (p. 300 l.c.) the
forest’s ‘general effect is to equilibrate caloric influences and
moderate extremes of temperature.' But I will firstly, upon
this occasion, repeat what I have often heard my late and much-
lamented friend, Mr. Wm. Menzies, the author of the splendidly-
illustrated book, ‘Forest Trees and Woodland Scenery as described
in Ancient and Modern Poets,’ say, to the effect that England is
after all as well-wooded a country as probably any other civilised
one in the world, adding that Sir John Lubbock has, as I think,
either in some volume which he has contributed to science, or in
some return which he has extracted from Parliament, established
the same fact. And, remarking that if we couple with this fact the
consideration that this favourable numerical representation of trees
is not due to the existence of large forests, we find therein an illus-
tration of the working of certain peculiarities of our social and
political condition as compared with those of other countries, which
I leave to your consideration ; I pass on, secondly, to say a few
words as to the influence which trees exercise in the way of modify-
ing climate locally by means of their leaves. Clearly this comes
fairly under the title of my lecture. Man can cut down ‘the goodly
fir-trees’ and other trees too, ‘Laubholzer” as well as ‘Nadelholzer,'
of an entire country; he can burn them, and by his domesticated
goats and cows and camels he can prevent their suckers and their
seeds from replacing them by fresh plants. What consequences
follow when the square area which a tree in full leaf represents is
abolished 2 Firstly, whatever else may be disputed, there can be
no doubt the loss of this square area means the loss of a very con-
siderable area upon which dust and particulate matter can be caught
and filtered out of the atmosphere. The more sticky the leaves, of
course the more perfect the interception. And as modern investi-
gations, such as those which Mr. John Simon, C.B., used to have
carried on whilst in the Medical Department of the Privy Council
Office, have taught all those who have ears to hear, even if not also
eyes to see, that the germs of many or most infectious diseases are
particulate", we can understand how it is that from so many
* We have such accounts from Ravenna and Beyrout; from the East and the
PHODUCED BY MAN. 797
quarters of the world we have more or less well-established histories
of belts or curtains of trees protecting towns from malarious and
anti-sanitary influences.
Secondly, though doubt may be raised (e.g. by M. J. Bellucci, cit.
“Athenaeum, March 14, 1874, p. 360) as to the giving off by trees
of ozone into the air, there can be no doubt as to another mechanical
effect besides the one already dwelt upon in the way of breaking
the force and the fall of raindrops, and thereby preventing, pro tanto,
the over-rapid flowing away of such rain and the over-violent wash-
ing away of the soil. Simple as this action is, it is, when coupled
with the action of the roots and their spongioles, to which it gives
a fairer chance of coming into play, one of the most important
which a tree in leaf exercises. Finely divided rain sinks into the
West Indies, and from Guiana. Lord Mark Kerr (see ‘Report on Measures adopted
for Sanitary Improvements in India for June 1871 to June 1872, p. 14) did much
planting in Delhi in 1864, and, on coming eight years later to take stock of the
effects of his hygienic work, was able to persuade himself that the almost entire dis-
appearance of the Delhi boil was due to this particular cause. But the Indian
Government had to report in the succeeding year's volume of the same series, p. 17,
that they had not received from the authorities they had consulted ‘reliable data to
warrant any general conclusions being drawn as to the effect of trees and vegetation
on these sores.’ Still they proposed ‘to institute a more particular inquiry into the
matter, and to submit a Report on the investigations in due course.” Upon this
subject something may be found in Mr. Menzies’ ‘Forest Trees and Woodland
Scenery,’ 1875, p. IoI, q.v. ibique ab ipso auctore necnon a me citata. Since the
appearance of Mr. Menzies' work the literature relating to the Eucalyptius globulus as
an agency for ‘purging the unwholesome air' has attained a great development.
Especially to be recommended is a paper, “The Eucalyptus near Rome,” by Dr. R.
Angus Smith, F.R.S., published in the ‘Proceedings’ of the Literary and Philosophical
Society of Manchester, vol. xv., No. 9, pp. 150–164, 1876, as also some papers in the
‘Edinburgh Medical Journal, February 1878, and May 1879, pp. 1052–IoS3, by Dr.
Bell. And what is better even than good memoirs, good progress has been made in
the way of actually planting this tree by no less conspicuous warriors than Garibaldi
in the Roman marshes, and by Sir Garnet Wolseley in Cyprus. I have not, however,
heard of any further development of the use of the Helianthus annuus as an anti-
malarious agent, nor of the adoption of Mr. Menzies' recommendations of the employ-
ment of the horse-chestnut, the sycamore, or the balsam poplar and white poplar for
the same purpose. To the references given l.c. may be added, as speaking in the
same sense, Becquerel, “Mém. Institut,’ xxxv., 1866, p. 444, and Boudin, ‘Géographie
et Statistique Médicales,’ vol. i. p. 229. Much has been written by the two last-
named writers on the electrical action of trees; I will quote the following sentences
from the latter of the two, l.c. : * Enfin le déboisement doit étre considéré comme
équivalent à la destruction d'un nombre de paratonnerres égal au nombre d'arbres
qu'on abat; c'est la modification de l'état électrique de tout un pays; c'est l'accumu-
lation d'un des éléments indispensables à la formation de la grèle dans une localité oil
d'abord cet élément se dissipait inévitablement par l'action silencieuse et incessante
des arbres. Les observations viennent à l'appui de ces déductions théoriques.’
798 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
soil, whilst rain which falls in larger masses runs off and forms
torrents. The roots making up an interlacing fibrillar mass by
their multitudinous divisions, entangle and detain the moisture
which comes to them in capillary columns; and from the loaded
sponge which they thus come to represent, they dole or issue out in
rations the supplies necessary for keeping springs and streams in
constant and perennial volume *. *
It is, I must say, a considerable marvel, that upon a third func-
tion of that part of a tree which man can affect, either by his own
hands or through the intermediation of his domestic animals, with
the greatest results in the way of mischief at the least cost of
labour to himself, so much room for dispute and doubt should still
be left open by the botanists. Upon this third function of the
leaves, their power as evaporators, the most important perhaps of
all their functions, both as regards the tree's own economy and as
regards ours, it is little less than marvellous that a Professor of
Botany should have to write thus in 1875. Professor Koch, how-
ever (“Vorlesungen über die Dendrologie,’ 1875, p. 284), following
Ebermayer, l.c., p. 183, says:–
“The question of the evaporation of water through the tissues of a plant is very
like the question in medicine of the treatment of diseases. The more there is
written about a disease, and the more we have so-called infallible remedies recom-
mended for it one after the other, the less do we get of any real knowledge of it.
There is scarcely a single point in the life of a plant on which so much, and indeed
often so much that is intrinsically self-contradictory, can be specified as having been
written, as this point of evaporation. Whilst Unger, and indeed certainly with right
on his side, owns that a surface of (so much 7) water gives off by evaporation three
times as much as (an equal surface of') a tree, Schleiden says that on the contrary
the tree gives off three times as much as the open surface of water”.'
It is true that Professor Koch goes on to say that nevertheless, as
* It is of course possible to exaggerate the preventive power of arboriculture, as of
other beneficial agencies. If a mountain is sufficiently high, and can be blown upon
by sea breezes as yet undeprived of the full proportion of moisture which a warm
latitude can give them, you will have from time to time destructive torrents rushing
down their sides, however well wooded they may be. But what is an occasional
occurrence only in a well-wooded mountainous country, is a very common one in a
district where the charcoal-burner, the wood-merchant, and the goat have been
allowed to have their wasteful will unchecked. Homer's lines, Il. xi. 492-495, show
that however striking the phenomenon he describes, it was nevertheless not so very
common as the complaints with which so many of the Reports I have referred to
prove it to be now in so many countries in Europe and elsewhere.
* The German words, which I have not attempted to translate quite literally, are
as follows:—
‘Mit der Verdunstung des Wassers durch die Pflanze geht es, wie in der Medizin
PRODUCED BY MAN. 799
Sachs also has said, such observations and the results deduced from
them have a scientific value. As it seems to me, they have not
only a scientific value, as all observations which are reducible to
weights and measures have, but that they have also a very distinctly
appreciable practical value and applicability.
Anybody who will read the account given by my friend the Rev.
Richard Abbay in “Nature,” May 18, 1876, of the formation of a
lake in a district in Australia, 150 miles from Sydney, and 2000'
above the level of the sea, subsequently to the destruction of the
woodlands round about a particular area of depression, will be con-
vinced that this occupation by water of what had been habitable
land was not only posterior to, but caused by, the disforesting
operations of the various agents specified, namely, squatters, grubs,
cattle, sheep, and opossums, not unaided by disease of the trees
themselves. The surplus of the water forming the lake corresponds
to the enormous quantitative disproportion between the evaporating
surface which it exposes when thus collected, and that which it
would have exposed when dispersed through all the myriads of
leaves which man and his allies had destroyed". It is not, however,
necessary to take such a long voyage as that to Sydney to get an
unmistakeable illustration of the evaporating power of leaves. This
power can be illustrated e contrario by observing the construction
on the treeless Yorkshire or other English wolds of the perennial
so-called ‘ dewponds.’ It is not even necessary to travel as far as
the nearest down or wold to make this observation, and fill in the
necessary details as to extent of feeding ground to catch, and
puddled ground to catch, the rainfall. A very simple experiment
with plants no farther to fetch than cabbages, will show, as Pro-
fessor Wellington Gray tells us (l.c. supra, p. 10), that 3000
square inches of their succulent leaves will give off as much as a
pint of water per diem.
It may, however, be fairly objected that the rate of evaporation
mit den Krankheiten. Je mehr tiber eine Krankheit geschrieben ist und je mehr
mach und mach sogenannte untrigliche Mittel empfohlen wurden, um so weniger ist
sie erkannt. Kaum méchte über einen Gegenstand im lebenden Pflanze so viel, und
zwar oft einander widersprechendes, geschrieben worden sein, als tiber die Verdun-
stung. Während Unger, und zwar wohl mit Recht, behauptet, dass eine Wasserfläche
drei Mal so viel verdunstet, als der Baum, sagt Schleiden, dass umgekehrt dieser drei
Mal so viel verdunsteals die offene Wasserfläche.”
* See also Ebermayer, l.c. pp. 184, 185.
800 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTs of ORGANIC NATURE
observable in an isolated mass of leaves, or in a single isolated tree,
does not give us a measure of the rate at which the same process
will go on in a wood when the exposed and evaporating surface is
relatively so much smaller. And this difficulty, which lies in the
geometrical nature of the case, may account for the great dis-
crepancies in the estimates which various writers have given of the
amount of watery vapour given off by masses of wood".
It must, however, be allowed that the cases in which the cutting
down of trees, and the consequent putting into abeyance of the
functions of their leaves, have been followed by the drying up of
springs, are much more numerous, even if they are not better
established, than those in which the reverse effect has been recorded,
as by Mr. Abbay. The explanation of this apparently self-anta-
gonising or capricious operation of the same primary cause is not
far to seek. When a tree is cut down, the area once protected by
its leaves is exposed to the uncounteracted action of the summer
sun, and rainfall may run off it when thus hardened, just as it runs
off an imperfectly thawed surface in the spring, or may sink away
into chinks and fissures which that exposure may, and very often
does, produce, and in either case such rainfall is lost to the summer-
* Professor Pfaff, for example (cit. Ebermayer, l.c. p. 186), gives us 120 kilo-
grammes as the entire amount evaporated by an oak with 700,000 leaves, each of a
square surface of 2325 mill. during the period from May 18 to October 24.
Vaillant (cit. ibid.) gives the amount of watery vapour given off by an oak of 21
metres height and 2.63 metres girth at a height of I metre above the ground, as 2000
kilogrammes on a fine day.
Hartig (cit. ibid.), the author of a “Lehrbuch für Förster,’ Stuttgart, 1861, calculates
that a German morgen (= 2.3895 acres), carrying a thousand trees of nine different
kinds of conifers and broad-leaved trees of twenty years' planting, exhales daily
during the period of vegetation 3ooo pounds weight of water.
Professor Prestwich, in his “Water-bearing Strata,’ 1851, p. 118, gives us as an
estimate for the amount of watery vapour given off by the leaves of “a tree of
average size two and a half gallons per diem.
Mr. Lawes (cit. in loc.), from ‘Journal of Horticultural Society, vol. v. pt. i., 1850,
gives us as a foundation for an estimate of the relations between the amount of water
taken in by vegetable organisms, with the matters it held in solution, and the solid
residue thence extracted and retained by the plants for its uses or for ours, a state-
ment to the effect that three plants of wheat or barley gave off 13 gallon, 250 grains
of water for every grain of solid residue in the adult plant.
Hellriegel, on the other hand (cit. Ebermayer, l.c. p. 187), gives us as his estimate
that for the production of 1 lb. of dry barleycorns, 700 lbs. of water, inclusive of the
water evaporated from the soil, are all that is necessary, and that other cerealia have
their demands limited within somewhat similar proportions. Intervalla vides humane
commoda.
PRODUCED BY MAN. 801
dried fountain. If the water thus thrown upon the surface, thus
modified, finds its way into a basin properly proportioned as to
cubical, as to square area, and as to water-holding power, we may
have a lake formed, as in the case related above by Mr. Abbay. It
is, of course, more usual to find one or other, or two, or all, of these
favourable conditions wanting, and in the more numerous class of
cases we find that the diminution of wood and the diminution of
water go hand in hand. I would go further than this, and aver
that the diminution of wood and the diminution of water in the
shape of ice may not only also go hand in hand, but may also be
connected as cause and effect. M. Viollet-le-Duc, in his delightful
work on ‘Mont Blanc,’ 1877 (translated by B. Bucknall, pp. 341
353), tells us that—
‘Although the glaciers have been tending to diminish for the last forty years in
a somewhat rapid ratio, which would seem to indicate an elevation of the mean
temperature, the forests are quitting the heights where they still lingered, to take a
lower position. Is there any connexion between these two results? We shall not
endeavour to solve the problem.”
It is a little presumptuous to address one’s-self to it after this deter-
rent warning. Still M. Viollet-le-Duc has (l.c. pp. 339, 377) shown
us that the destruction of the forests is abundantly explained irre-
spectively of any inorganic agency by the mischievous action of
man working as a goatherd and a woodcutter. His descriptions of
these operations are couched in language of real pathos and eloquence,
but scientifically it shows us that we need not look for any other.
cause for the disappearance or shrinking of the limits of the forests.
The spruces and the larches, for such are the trees, being thus
destroyed by the ‘essentially destructive power’ of man, how can
their destruction be shown to entail the diminution of the glacier?
I think the loss of these trees as evaporating agencies may be taken
as a vera ac sufficiens causa for the diminution. A great deal of
much interest has been written upon the difference in the amount
of watery vapour given off by various trees and by the cerealia,
which last, and amongst which last, as might be expected from
their deep roots and the amount of their Stoffwechsel, wheat-plants
stand quantitatively pre-eminent. But for our present purpose it
is sufficient to point out that the rays which strike on the mass of
a glacier are, to say nothing of the other conditions of disadvantage
which such a mass opposes to them, enormously outnumbered by the
* See Vogel, Pfaff, and Hartig, cit. Ebermayer, l.c., p. 185.
3 F
802 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
rays which strike on the needle-shaped leaves of an adjacent wood
of ordinary acreage, made up of such trees as the spruce or the
larch ; and the vapour which is thus set free into the entire cir-
cumambient atmosphere alike of glacier and of wood, acts most
potently in several ways in the direction of saving the glacier from
wasting.
On the other hand, great as the influence of the evaporating
power of trees and forests may be shown to be in some directions,
it is possible enough to overrate it as regards such more than
localised matters as the increase of the rainfall.
‘It is,’ says Dr. Brandis (“Ocean Highways,’ Oct. 1872, p. 204), ‘a widely spread
notion, entertained by many writers who are competent to judge, that forests increase
the rainfall, and that the denudation of a country in a warm climate diminishes its
moisture. Much of what is known regarding the history and the present state of the
countries round the Mediterranean seems to support this theory, but it has not yet
been established by conclusive evidence.”
The important point seems to be that in mountains this influence
may count for something considerable, whilst in the plains, how-
soever well wooded, trees can act only as do other good radiators in
the way of precipitating, not wind-borne moving vapour, but simply
dew.
Mr. N. A. Dalzell, in the Report on the Sind Forest for 1859–
1860, observes (par. 31):-
‘Although it would be too hardy an assertion to say that the existence of forests in
Sind causes any increase in the fall of rain, they certainly do so on the summits and
tops of mountains;’ and par. 35 : “In enumerating the benefits derived from forests,
I make here no use of the fact that forests attract rain-clouds, because I do not think
it applicable to plains, and because it is not yet clear that causes are not mistaken for
effects, that is, whether it is the rain produces forests, or forests which produce rain ;
and certainly no inhabitant of Sind would consider it legitimate to decide that because
a country is covered with wood, therefore it is wet.’
It is satisfactory to be able to add that the result of Professor
Ebermayer's prolonged observations in Bavaria has brought him
to the same conclusions as those of Dr. Dalzell, carried on in the
very alien surroundings of Sind. Dr. Ebermayer's words on this
subject, used in summing up the results of his researches, are
(l.c., p. 202):—
‘Auf Grund unserer Untersuchungen, glauben wir daher besuchtigt zu sein an-
nehmen zu dirfen, dass in Ebenen von gleichern allgemeinen Charakter der Einfluss
des Waldes auf die Regenmenge jedenfalls sehr gering ist, und dass er auch auf die
procentische Regenvertheilung keine Einwirkung hat. Mit der Erhebung über die
Meeresoberfläche nimmt die Bedeutung des Waldes bezüglich seines Einflusses auf
PRODUCED BY MAN. 803
die Regenmenge zu, er hat desshalb im Gebirge einen grösseren Werth als im Ebenen.
Im Sommerhalbjahrist die Einwirkung des Waldes auf die Regenmenge viel grösser
als im Winterhalbjahr.’
Whatever the physical principles involved are, anybody may find
beautiful illustrations of them, who will observe in a mountainous
district how—
“The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen,
Puts forth an arm and creeps from pine to pine,
And loiters slowly drawn",
or how
“The light cloud smoulders on the summer crag”,”
recollecting that the phrase ‘Rauchen der Wälder’ is used for the
similar phenomenon when produced by trees, or who will finally in
a lowland or other country stand and study the frost as it hangs
itself on to such a tree as the birch often long before it has begun
to whiten the ground around it.
[Since writing as above, the ‘Observations Météorologiques faites
de 1877–1878, by M. Fautrat, published by the French ‘Ministère
de l’Agriculture et du Commerce : Administration des Forêts,’ 1878,
have come into my hands. This author, with the results of M. Ma-
thieu's eleven years’ observations at Nancy (for which see his ‘Mé-
téorologie Comparée Agricole et Forestière,’ published under the same
auspices, February 1878) before him, as also the results of four years'
observations in the Forest of Halatte, and of three years in the pine-
woods of Ermenonville, has come to the following conclusions.
i. That when it rains more rain falls over a wooded than over a
non-wooded area, and that whilst trees of all kinds possess the
power of condensing vapour, broad-leaved trees produce less effect
than is produced by the narrow-leaved Coniferae (pp. 14 and 16).
ii. That as regards the hydrometric condition of the air, the air
over a wooded area contains more watery vapour (p. 18) than that
over an unwooded area, but that the coniferae have more watery
vapour in their circumambient atmosphere than the broad-leaved
trees. M. Fautrat expresses, or rather expands, this fact in the
following words:—
“If the vapour dissolved in the air was visible as are mists, we should see the
forests surrounded with a vast screen of moisture, and around the Coniferae this
envelope would be more marked than over the broad-leaved trees. What is the
source of this vapour ! Does it come from the soil; is it the result of evaporation
* Tennyson, ‘CEnone.’ * Tennyson, “Edwin Morris.’
3 F 2.
804 MODIFICATIONS OF AspecTs of organic NATURE
from the leaves; or is it due in the Coniferae to the action of the thousands of points
which the whorls of their leaves develop every year? This is a complex question
which the present data of physical science do not enable us to answer. One thing one
can say, and that is that the transpiration of the leaves cannot by itself produce this
phenomenon. For, as a matter of fact, the transpiration in Coniferae is less active
than it is in broad-leaved trees. This fact has been made clear by M. Grandeau in
his “Essais historiques et critiques sur la Théorie de la Nutrition.” (M. Fautrat
might have added, “as also by Hales, cit. Boussingault, “Ann. Chim. et Phys.” sér. v.
tom. xiii. 1878, p. 314, and Sachs, “Handbuch der Exp. Physiologie der Pflanzen,”
1865, p. 225.’) It then follows that if the vapour of water dissolved in such great
abundance in the atmosphere enveloping the pines was the result of the evaporation
from the trees, this phenomenon ought to be much more striking over the mass made up
by the broad-leaved trees than in that made up by the Coniferae, whilst observation
shows that exactly the contrary is the actual fact. We must therefore ascribe to the
soil and to other unknown causes this remarkable property which pines have of
attracting watery vapour.”
If it had appeared from M. Fautrat's tables that this excess of
watery vapour was more marked in rainy than in dry times, it
would have been easy to explain the fact by figuring to ourselves
the all but infinite area which the fine films of water clothing every
needle-shaped leaf of a coniferous tree would make up and offer for
evaporation. For the leaves of our common Coniferae wet readily;
and it is owing to this property I apprehend that they intercept as
much as one-half the rain which falls upon them before it reaches
the ground, whilst broad-leaved trees intercept but one-third. But,
as it appears, the Coniferae possess the hygrometric advantage inde-
pendently of the rainfall. And I have to say that the phenomenon in
question, needing, as it thus confessedly does, some additional explana-
tion besides and beyond that which our usually accepted views furnish,
appears to me to become more intelligible by reference to the theory
as to ‘The Cause of Rain and its Allied Phenomena” which was put
before the world in 1839, and subsequently published in a separate
volume twenty years later, by Mr. G. A. Rowell. This theory may
I think be stated as follows, the author of it having slightly modi-
fied it in 1872, and restated it in a ‘Brief Essay on Meteorological
Phenomena,’ published in 1875. He supposes that the molecules
of watery vapour are completely enveloped in a coating of electricity,
to which they owe their buoyancy. This coating and this buoyancy
he supposes to increase and decrease in ratio with the temperature
of these molecules. Efficient conduction therefore of electricity will
suffice on this theory to precipitate watery vapour either as rain, or
as dew, or as mist. And I apprehend that Mr. Rowell would, in
--- PRODUCED BY MAN. - 805
accordance with his own theory, look upon a fir-tree when shrouded,
as M. Fautrat has described it, with a differentially thick envelope
of vapour, as having thus clothed itself by virtue of the attractive
effect of its myriad points. For electricity tending constantly to
an equal distribution, so fast as the surcharge of electricity on the
particles of vapour nearest the trees was carried away, so fast would
the balance be redressed by supply from the particles more distantly
placed. And thus in accordance with this theory, particles of
watery vapour would be constantly setting in the direction of the
conducting and attracting leaves and twigs. Becquerel's view,
already quoted, according to which the plague of hail which has so
often been observed to follow upon the destruction of the woods
of a country, is to be ascribed to the loss of the lightning-conductors
which the cut-down trees represented while standing, and to the
absence consequently of the incessant though insensible dissipating
agency of the trees, appears to me to show that he would doubtless
have allowed that Mr. Rowell's theory contains some, at least, of
the elements of the true and complete theory of rain. It is not for
me to meddle with memoirs in which neither living animal nor
living vegetable organisms are concerned, otherwise I might have
referred to Lord Rayleigh's paper in ‘The Proceedings of the Royal
Society, March 13th, 1879, pp. 406, 409. But as regards the views
they brought forward, and to a considerable extent as regards the
whole question, I scarcely feel myself to be in a position to give any
decided opinion.
That trees, like other beneficent agencies, do not fail to benefit
themselves whilst thus benefiting the world at large, may be well
gathered from the following passage from Professor Grandeau's
work now in course of publication, ‘Chimie et Physiologie ap-
pliquées à l’Agriculture et à la Sylviculture, 1879, Pt. I, la nutrition
* See a really pathetic account of this given as having been produced during his
seven years' absence from Thüringen by Fischer at p. 164 of his charming “Beiträge
zur physischen Geographie der Mittelmeerländer,’ 1877. Rain and hail-storms had
become frequent, and the fishing brook had disappeared together with the wood of his
boyhood. He adds:—
“Ich will gewiss damit nicht sagen, dass in jenen Gegend jetzt auch nur ein
Tröffchen Regen weniger falle als früher, obwol auch das Örtlich móglich, ja wahr-
scheinlich ist, aber der Wertheiler und Bewahrer der Feuchtigkeit fehlt und so können
locale Ursachen zeitweilig Wirkung haben, die in Süd-Europa allgemeinen kosmischen,
aber durch 6rtliche verstärkten zu zuschreiben est. Ich wurde recht lebhaft an
Sicilien erinnert, aus dem ich eben heimkehrte.”
806 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
de la plante.' In summing up at p. 34o the results of his experi-
ments, and after saying that the simplest and at the same time
the best way of isolating a plant for purposes of experiment from
the action of electricity, is to place it either under a metallic cage
with large meshes, or in the perimeter of a tree, M. Grandeau
proceeds as follows :-
* 2° Les végétaux et en particulier les arbres, soutirent à leur profit l'électricité
atmosphérique et isolent aussi complètement qu'une cage métallique la plante qu'ils
dominent.
* 3° L'isolation produite par un arbre élevé peut s'étendre notablement au delà du
périmètre foliacé de l'arbre.
* 4° Une plante soustraite à l'influence de l'électricité atmosphérique subit, dans
son évolution et dans son développement, un retard et une diminution très-notables.
Dans mes expériences, les quantités de substance vivante produites par les végétaux
isolés ont été inférieures de 3o à 5o p. Ioo à la production à l'air libre. La trans-
formation du protoplasme chlorophyllien en glucose, en amidon, etc., paraît être tout
particulièrement influencée par l'électricité atmosphérique.
* 5° La floraison et la fructification subissent des modifications non moins grandes ;
sous cage isolante et sous les arbres, le nombre des fleurs, des fruits et le poids des
graines ont été inférieurs de 4o à 5o p. Ioo. L'arrêt dans l'assimilation semble
porter tout d'abord sur l'élaboration des principes hydrocarbonés.
* 6o Le taux centésimal de substance sèche et le taux des cendres sont plus élevés en
l'absence de l'électricité, les végétaux qui croissent hors cage s'étant constamment
montrés plus riches en eau et plus pauvres en matières minérales que la plante de
même espèce sous cage isolante.'
M. Celi's adaptation of one of Sir W. Thomson's apparatuses as
an * appareil pour expérimenter l'action de l'électricité sur les
plantes vivantes,' cit. and figured by M. Grandeau in loco from
* Annales de Chimie et de Physique,' sér. v. tom. xv, October 1878,
is well worthy of inspection in this connexion.]
The next part of my Lecture will be devoted to showing by the
aid of three maps and one statistical table, how greatly man has
modified the external aspect of the world he lives in by the intro-
duction into the several parts of it of cultivated plants and domestie
animals, previously, of course, unknown even in the wild state to
such areas of its surface. The maps by their colours show the areas
on which the parent stocks of the most valuable and now most
widely spread of these acquisitions have, with more or less of
approach to demonstration, been shown to be indigenous. The
short table of statistics tells you in its second line that half of
them came from one single * quarter* of the globe, or in the
language of modern zoogeographers from one single zoological
* region.' The table and the maps taken together show us how
pTODUCED BY MAN. 807
largely some quarters of the globe have been benefited by borrow-
ing from others, or in the language of my subject, how largely they
have been modified by man's interference.
The first of these maps is very closely similar to the one which
shows on Mercator’s projection the now more or less generally ac-
cepted zoogeographical regions of the earth's surface, the Palaearctic,
to wit, the Ethiopian, the Oriental, the Australian, and the two
regions of the New World, the Nearctic and the Neotropical; as
given by Dr. Sclater, and in Wallace's great work on Geographical
Distribution.
The second of these maps is an enlargement of that given by
Professor Huxley in the ‘Journal of the Ethnological Society of
London,’ June 7th, 1870, to illustrate and embody his views on
the distribution of the principal modifications of mankind. This
map serves, besides other useful purposes, that of limiting off, by
a distinct colouration, a particular portion of the vast Palaearctic
region which is specially important to the subject in hand, as
it was either actually upon it, or upon regions closely adjacent
to it within that region, that the parent stocks of the moiety
of our cultivated plants and domesticated animals may either be
found still living or may reasonably be supposed to have existed
formerly. The particular subdivision of the Palaearctie Region
has been coloured in a particular way by Professor Huxley, so as
to indicate that upon it his ‘Melanochroic' or dark-white variety
of our species was living not in perfect purity of stock, but more
or less peacefully intermingled with the Mongoloid and with his
‘ Xanthochroic' or fair-white varieties. The area thus peopled
occupies itself on the map a district something of the shape of a
tuning-fork, the two arms of which would form the northern and
southern boundaries of the Mediterranean eastward from the longi-
tudes of Albania and Tripoli; and would be carried by a broad base
extending from the Caucasus over Syria and a part of north-west
Arabia to the Red Sea, whilst its stem would cover Kurdistan,
Khorassan, and North Persia, and end by bifurcating at a spot near
Peshawur. The importance of this area is illustrated by the fact that
a region very closely corresponding, if not quite coincident with it,
is marked out upon quite different principles in the next map. A
coincidence of much less intricacy, and therefore of much less
cogency, though still not without a certain curious significance, is
808 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
furnished to us by the fact that a certain island of blue colour, placed
by Professor Huxley in the ‘Dark Continent’ of Africa to indicate
the presence in Upper Egypt, Nubia, and Abyssinia of some traces
of the Australioid type, corresponds with the area in that continent
whence most or all of her few gifts of valuable cultivated plants and
valuable domesticated animals have come to us, viz., the cotton
plant, and, very probably, the date-palm ; the ass, from the native
stock Asinus taeniopus ; and the cat, from the native stock Felis
maniculata.
Of the two arms into which the eastward end of this area bifur-
cates, the upper or northward one would correspond with the
Kuenlun range, and the southward with the Himalayas ; Ladak,
and part of the table-land of Thibet, lying between them. It is in
the Kuenlun range that Jade mines are found.
The third map, being one of Johnston's Charts of the World on
blank Mercator's Projection, has been coloured so as to illustrate
the following facts in the distribution of certain plants and certain
minerals connected with the ancient development and subsequent
progress of human civilisation. One region is coloured as it is
in the ‘Planteogeographisk Atlas,’ tav. ii, of Professor Schouw,
Copenhagen, 1824, so as to show the distribution of the Vitis
vitifera over the countries forming the northern and southern
shores of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, over Asia Minor,
Palestine, and Mesopotamia, over the lowlands both of Astrakhan
and Turan, and along the southern slopes of the Himalayas, so as
to end at the eastern extremity of that chain. In nearly the same
latitude as that eastern extremity, and about in the same longitu-
dinal line as the long axis of the Peninsula of Malacca, a spot of
another colour marks the situation of the amber mines of Burmah",
while four spots of yet a third colour in British Burmah,
Banca”, Celebes, and Khorassan *, respectively indicate localities in
* For the Amber mines of Burmah see Balfour's ‘Indian Cyclopaedia, s. v., 1871;
and Keith Johnston’s ‘Royal Atlas,” map. 28, in loco lat. 26°20'.
* For the existence of tin together with copper in Burmah see Mortillet, ‘Revue
d'Anthropologie," i. 1875, p. 653.
* For the similar collocation of the two metals which when combined make bronze
in Khorassan and elsewhere in Central Asia south of the Caspian, see v. Baer, ‘Archiv
für Anthropologie, ix.4, p. 262, 1877. We know from the same irrefragable authority,
Bulletin Acad. Sci. St. Pétersbourg. tom. xvii. p. 417–431, 1859, and tom. i., 1860,
pp. 35–37, that the date-palm is still represented a little to the north of these deposits
of tin and copper, at Sari, in the as yet Persian province of Mazanderan on the south
PRODUCED BY MAN. - 809
which copper and tin are still found in such proximity to each
other and in such accessible abundance as to suggest that it is not
improbable that in some one of those districts prehistoric man may
have come upon the invention of bronze. A fourth colour marks
the position of the Kuenlun Jade mines", whence, in still earlier
than bronze times, stone weapons may with great probability be
supposed to have been procured by man before he migrated into the
jadeless regions westward. (See Article XXXIX, p. 686.)
The New World was coloured as it is in Schouw's tav. viii, l.c.,
to show the area of distribution of the Cactaceae, a region com-
prehending South America north of the Tropic of Capricorn, the
Isthmus of Panama, the Peninsula of California up to 30° N. lat.,
the West Indian Archipelago, the northern shores of the Gulf of
Mexico, and the strip of Gulfstream-washed North American coast
between the Alleghanies and the Atlantic up to about 40° N. lat.
From this area more than 25 per cent. of all our cultivated plants
have been procured, as the annexed table shows; and, of course,
since the time of Columbus.
This table (based, so far as it deals with the vegetable kingdom,
mainly upon De Candolle’s ‘Géographie Botanique, pp. 986–987)
gives approximatively the proportions in which the several ‘regions’
of the globe established by that phytogeographer and by several
zoogeographers have contributed to make up the lists of such culti-
vated plants and domesticated animals respectively as are of con-
siderable, even if not always of cosmopolitan, importance.
Of (approacimatively) 16o Cultivated Of (approacimatively) 21 Domestic
Plants. Mammals.
Per cent, Per cent.
The Palaearctic species are .. 50 50 are Palaearctic.
, Oriental 95 25 I4 , Oriental.
, African 5 y 25 I4 , African.
,, Nearctic 9 3 2-5 o ,, Nearctic.
,, Neotropical , 25 I4 ,, Neotropical.
,, Australian 53 O o , Australian.
Of some of the great faets which these maps and this table put
shore of the Caspian. This tree is supposed to have been carried thither, as to so
many other places, by the Arabs during their career of conquest, which contrasts to
such advantage and in so many ways with that of other Mussulman conquerors.
* For an account of the Jade mines in the Kuenlun Range see Cayley, ‘Macmillan's
Magazine,’ October, 1871; and for Jade generally, Rudler “Popular Science Review,’
October, 1879.
810 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
before you, half diagrammatically, the anthropologists, zoologists,
and geographers of the last quarter of the last century and the
first third of this had possessed themselves; and following, at
Pallas, Betrachtungen über die Beschaffenheit der Gebirge: an Address de-
livered Jan. 23, 1777. Zimmermann, “ Geographische Geschichte, Bd. i. P. 4,
1778; Bd. iii. p. 250, 1783. Link, Die Urwelt und das Alterthum, i. P. 243 seqq.
I82 I.
There is perhaps no need for me to apologise for quoting the exact words of
Pallas's Discourse, the less so as, though it appeared in two forms, one German,
the other French, within a year of its being delivered, it is not, I think, a
very common book. The issue which I quote from is that of I 778, the year
in which his Novae Species Glirium appeared, six years later than the year in
which the second volume of his Spicilegia with its wonderful Fasciculus XI. Was
published.
The difficulty in reading Pallas is to understand how his writings can bear the date
they do. But he shall speak for himself:– In den mittägigen Thälern dieses alten
Landes muss man das erste Vaterland des menschlichen Geschlechts und des weissen
Menschen suchen, die von dort in ganzen Nationen die glücklichen Gegenden von
China, Persien und besonders Indien bevölkert haben, dessen Einwohner nach dem
allgemeinen Geständniss unter allen Nationen die ersten gesitteten waren, und wo
man vielleicht die Stammwurzeln der ersten Sprachen in Asia und Europa suchen
muss. Selbst Tybet, eine der höchsten Gegenden Asiens dessen Einwohner, ihrem
Vorgeben nach, von einer Ort Affen welche dieses Land zuerst bewohnten, abstammen
(mit welche sie auch ohnedem einige Aehnlichkeit haben) Tybet hat die Verfeinerung
seiner Sitten jenem Lehrern zu danken, die aus Indien dahin kamen. Pallas adds as
a note to this passage, “ Ich kann nicht umhin, hier zu bemerken, dass alle, sowohl in
den nordischen, als in den mittägigen Ländern von dem Menschen zu Hausthieren
gezämte Gattungen, in den gemassigten Erdstrichen des mittlern Asiens ursprünglich
wild gefunden waren, das einige Kameel ausgenommen dessen beyden Abartungen
nur in Africa gut fortkommen.' Pallas then proceeds to instance the wild ox, the
buffalo, the wild sheep, the Bezoar goat and the Ibex, from a crossing of which he
supposes our common domestic goat to have arisen; the wild boar and, as I believe,
incorrectly, the wild cat (Felis catus), as being the parent stocks of their domesticated
namesakes, and having their original homes in the mountains which occupy Central
Asia and a part of Europe. He adds, “ Das zweybuckelige Kameel ist in den grossen
Wüsten zwischen Tybet und China noch wild vorhanden.' Prejevalsky's “ From
Kulja. across the Tian-Shan to Lobnor” will be familiar in its English translation to
most of us; his account of the wild camel is not more interesting as compared with
this remark of Pallas' than is his account, p. 38, of the devouring of apples and
apricots on the northern slopes of the Tian-Shan by wild boars, goats and deer, when
compared with Tourneforts words (“Voyage du Levant, Amsterdam, 1718, 4, t. 2,
p. I 29, cited by the Botanist Link, 1. c., p. 234) describing a country which he visited
and found to be “ Ein Land erfüllt mit natürlichen Weinbergen und Obstgärten wo
Nussbäume, Aprikosenbäume, Pfirsichbäume, Birnbäume und Apfelbäume von selbst
wachsen. Er setzt hinzu, man kann nicht zweifeln, dass hier einer von den Theilen
Georgiens ist, wo, nach Strabo, alle Arten von Fruchten in Ueberfluss sind, welche
die Erde ohne Cultur hervorbringt.' Georgia lies some distance away from Lobnor,
but both alike lie well within the great mountain system with its outliers which is
called “ Asiens Buckel' by the other writers, as also I apprehend within the modern
“Steppengebiet ’ of Grisebach.
PRODUCED BY MAN. - 811
whatever distance, the great Pallas, they insist upon the strength
of the claims of that portion of Central Asia whence issue the great
rivers Ganges and Indus, Tigris and Euphrates, and which they
speak of as ‘den grossen Buckel Asiens,’ to be considered as the
primitive home of man, mainly as it was, according to them, the
original home of all our domestic animals and so many of our
cultivated food-plants.
These writers and discoverers slightly overstated their case when
they said that all our domestic animals could be referred to parent
stocks indigenous to that region, though, as will be shortly shown
hereafter, it would have been little beyond the truth if, instead of
saying all the domestic animals absolutely, they had said all the
domestic animals which are absolutely indispensable to modern man’s
comfort and progress. But their case for their particular thesis
would have been greatly strengthened if they had known that jade
in the form of stone implements had accompanied man together
with the goat into Western Europe, and was found no nearer to
the Swiss Lake Dwellings than are the Kuenlun mines pointed
out on my map ; if they had known that copper and tin could have
been smelted together into bronze so readily either in Khorassan or
in Burmah; if, to put however injudiciously my weakest point last,
they had also known that amber—such a frequent accompaniment
of prehistoric man—also lay within easy reach of his curious hands
in this latter country. But prehistoric archaeology has till lately
made but little advance since the time of Lucretius. De Candolle
(‘Hist, des Sciences et des Savants,’ p. 263, 1873), indeed, classes it
as a discovery as new and as great as five others of the twenty or
thirty years previous to 1873, viz., spectrum analysis, convertibility
of force, the greater extent of glaciers in geological times, natural
selection, and the alternation of (animal) generations; and the
writers referred to knew not, and could not have known, the whole
strength of their position. As regards my present purpose it is,
in these but little later days, superfluous to point out how the
discovery of mines whence prehistoric man must, or at least might,
have furnished himself with his weapons, implements, and orna-
ments, actually upon or along the same mountain ranges, spurs,
and valleys, in which he must, or at least might, have found in a
wild state the animals which he has now around him as necessary
and universal elements in his own social life, bears upon the
812 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
extent, as measured by latitude and longitude as well as by other
gauges, to which the world has been modified by his migrations
and importations. º -
Let us now enumerate the twenty domesticated mammals which
We possess, and which for practical purposes may be taken as
making up a tale of about twenty or twenty-one; let me specify
which amongst them belong, as regards their origin, to the Palae-
arctic region, and to the restricted portion of it already dwelt upon
and defined, as the maps show you; and thirdly, leaving consider-
ations of locality and of number, let me contrast the value of nine,
ten, or eleven mammals which man domesticated in that district
with that of the others acquired from * or contributed by all the
other regions of the globe taken together.
Our twenty-one chief domesticated mammals may be enumerated
in something like order of merit and necessity to us as follows: the
dog, the cow, the sheep, the pig, the horse, the cat, the goat, the ass,
the camel, the dromedary, the buffalo, the alpaca, the vicugna, the
reindeer, the zebu, the banteng, the yak, the ferret, the rabbit, the
mongoose, and the guinea-pig, omitting some few species the im-
portance of which as being locally limited to very small areas, and
as consisting of individuals numerically few, is too small to make
it necessary to notice them. Representatives of more than one-
half of this list can be fairly claimed by the Palaearctic centre of
creation as owing their parentage to stocks native to its soil; this
half consisting of the dog, the cow, the sheep, the pig, the horse,
the goat, the camel, the dromedary, the reindeer, the ferret, and the
rabbit. I have said ‘representatives’ of one-half of this list because
it is more than probable that some of our breeds of domestic dogs
and of pigs may have been reclaimed from wild parent-stocks in
other regions of the world. There can, however, be no reasonable
doubt that the great majority of the domestic breeds known till
comparatively recent times in Europe, of each of these two animals,
the dog and the pig, were drawn from parent-stocks living in
* It is a curious point in mythology that, so far as my memory serves me, no god
nor demigod should have the credit assigned him of having domesticated any animal
except the horse. Of course this fact, if fact it be, shows two things with more or
less probability; firstly, namely, that these acquisitions were made in very far-off
times, not merely in ‘the ages before morality, but in those much earlier ones, ‘the
ages before history;’ and secondly, that the acquisition of the horse was made in later
days than the domestication of the other animals in question.
PRODUCED BY MAN. 813
the Palaeartic Region, and this is all that is necessary for my
present argument.
As regards the ox, the sheep, the horse, and the goat, I cannot
think that with our present knowledge of zoogeography there can be
any question that their parent-stocks were Palaearctic animals; and
I am further prepared to express my belief that further investiga-
tion will render it highly probable that it was in that particular
though very extensive part of the Palaearctic Region spoken of
vaguely as ‘Asiens Buckel,” or ‘Hochasien, and comprehending
portions of all the great mountain ranges from the Caucasus proper
to the northern side of the Hindoo Koosh, and from the Taurus to
the Altai mountains, that these several parent-stocks were brought
under the influence of domestication. Wild animals are still to be
found in some one or other or in several spots within that area
from which we have no & priori reason for doubting that man
might in the course of ages have educed the three last-named of
the four domestic animals, the ox, the sheep, the horse, and the
goat; and that a wild ox existed in the regions in which the Old
Testament writers lived, not only their writings, but the Assyrian
sculptures, and not only the Assyrian sculptures, but geological
remains testify. The case, however, for the ox having been first
domesticated in Central Asia, is the weakest of the four, and it may
be well to take it first. The Rev. William Houghton has in his
memoir on the domestic mammalia of the Assyrian sculptures
(‘Trans. Soc. Bibl. Archaeology,’ v. i. st. i. p. 2, 1876, and ibid.
1877, p. 54) given us a very spirited drawing from one of the
Assyrian sculptures representing the hunting and the killing of
the wild ox. What is of special value in this sculpture is for our
purpose the presence between the shoulder-blades of a hump, which
is present in so many other of the larger Ruminantia, but which,
as Mr. Houghton remarks, reminds us of the Indian zebu, and
of the fact that there are no specific differences between these two
oxen underlying their soft parts. There can be no doubt that the
figure is intended to represent a wild animal. The Accadians,
who were in the habit of giving names to animals which referred
to the countries whence they obtained them, gave names to the ox,
which Professor Sayce thinks must refer to the country between the
Euphrates and Syria and to Phoenicia. The bulls of Bashan, and
possibly of the Taurus range, may be rightly recalled to our
814 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
memories by these names. The European names for the ox, on the
other hand, are said by M. Joly (cit. Isidore St. Hilaire, ‘Hist. Nat.
Gén. iii. p. 89) to have an Asiatic origin, and M. A. Pictet (“Des
Origines Indo-Européennes, pp. 330–343) has declared his views
to the same effect. This, however, is only what would have been
expected in the European languages of the Aryan division. What
is of importance as regards the domestication of the ox is to note
that, though such languages as the Finnic may use loan words
taken from Aryan tongues to express the general idea of Ox
(= Bovine animal), they frequently have true Turanian vocables
to denote such particularities as we have in view when we speak of
heifers, calves, cows, bulls, and the ‘ox,’ sensu strictori, confirming
in the last matter the statement of Strabo (vii. 4, 8) that castration
was learnt from the eastern Europeans and Sarmatians. There is
in fact a good deal of evidence for a view which should hold either
that the Turanian races domesticated the wild ox, or rather the
wild calf, independently; or that the human species did this great
work before the differentiation into Aryan-speaking and Turanian-
speaking men was carried out. That the Scythian breed of cattle
should have been hornless in the time of Herodotus (iv. 29) appears
to me to be explicable, not on the hypothesis taken up by later
observers that it is an effect of cold, but as being a result of
long-sustained domestication; and if what Hehn, p. 413, l. c.,
suggests as to the South Russian breed of small red steppe cattle
being descendants of those Scythian oxen is true, we should have a
further confirmation of this view furnished in their persistency.
There is, at any rate, another breed of cattle in the South Russian
steppes, which goes by the name of the ‘Kalmuc’ cow, and is sup-
posed to have accompanied the Mongolian or Tartar hordes in their
invasion of Europe. fº
Some writers, in defiance of the arguments that have just been
glanced at, and of many others, have advocated the claims of Africa
to be considered the parent country of the domestic ox. The main
fact, as it seems to me, which has induced or seduced them rather
into this conclusion, is the great extent to which boviculture has
developed itself through the length and breadth of the ‘Dark
Continent.' But without wasting words in pointing out the
curious conclusions to which this reasoning would lead us in other
cases, I would refer such persons to Middendorff's account of the
1°FODUCED BY MAN. 815
development which this same boviculture has attained in Siberia,
and to his statement that not only have the nomads of the southern
steppes, the Buráts, the Mongols, and the Kirghiz, herds number-
ing thousands and tens of thousands wintering out in the open, but
that even the Jakuts (by, it is true, taking more care of their cattle)
have, from being simply nomads, become a pastoral people of dis-
tinction, and even ‘improved cattle-breeders I’ (‘Sibirische Reise,’
iv. 2, 2, p. 1323.)
Coming, in the second place, to the consideration of the sheep,
I must allow that considerable hesitation has been expressed by
many writers as to the question of its parent-stock; and that
doubt may be not altogether unreasonably felt as to whether that
stock may not have become extinct, as the parent-stock of the cow
has all but entirely done. But what I know of the deerlike agility
and watchfulness of some of our European mountain breeds of
sheep, and in the second place what I see of the smaller size of the
animal as giving it a less severe battle to fight for its survival,
makes me slow to think that their parent-stock need be thought
likely to have perished as has that of the larger ruminant. And
setting this view aside, we may say that either the Mouflon (Ovis
musimon and cyprius), with a range from Majorca to Cyprus, and
not without footings, occupied by such varieties as Ovis orientalis
and Ovis vignei, on the mainland on various points of the mountain-
ranges of the Taurus and of Armenia to those of Tibet; or the
Argali, Ovis fera Sibirica s. Ovis argali, with an all but equally
extensive range from the Pamir plateau above Samarcand and Bok-
hara to the Sea of Okhotsk as Ovis nivicola, or Ovis polii, must be
credited with having given to the world this inestimable gift. If it
shall really turn out to be correct that a true Argali, that is to say
a variety of wild sheep, in which both sexes carry horns, had been
found in the Taurus, as Ainsworth (cit. A. Wagner, “Die Geo-
graphische Verbreitung der Säugethiere,' Abhandl. d. ii. kl. d. Ak.
d. Wiss. München, Bd. iv. Abth. i. p. 139) and Ritter (‘Erd-
kunde,’ xi. 506), have averred is the case, the claims of the Argali
would to some persons, I apprehend, appear to be stronger than
they might if its range should, as I incline to think it will, be
shown to be confined to the more easterly limits just given.
But under any and all circumstances, the fact that the female
Mouflons have no horns, whilst the female Argalis have them, though
816 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
smaller in size no doubt than those of the male, when coupled with
the fact that in the older breeds of domestic sheep both sexes carry
horns, appears to me to be conclusive in favour of the Central
Asiatic Wild Sheep. As regards the Natural History arguments
I shall content myself, and I daresay others also, by referring * to
the already quoted eleventh fascicle of Pallas's ‘Spicilegia,” and to
Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire's ‘Histoire Naturelle, iii. pp. 86–87,
ibique citata, but I would add a couple of facts from the linguistic
side of the mass of arguments available for deciding the question.
The first of these is as follows: —The early Accadian inhabitants of
the plains of Babylonia, when they gave an epithet to an animal,
very frequently chose it from the locality whence they supposed the
animal to have been derived. And the epithet which they be-
stowed upon the sheep was “num,” or “numma”,” which means ‘the
highlands,’ and which, as applied by people living in those wide
plains, and as being applied by them to the wolf also, has a
very obvious significance. It is true, as anybody may convince
himself by consulting Bochart's ‘Hierozoicon,’ ii. 2, p. 516, that
poets and other writers, Aryans and Semites, Greeks, Romans,
and Arabians indifferently, have connected the sheep, as they saw
its habits, with mountainous scenery and surroundings; what is of
special importance in the epithet as used in the Accadian column of
the bilingual Assyrian inscriptions is, that it was used in such a
country and in such early, not to say such unpoetical, times.
My second linguistic fact tells, as it seems to me, strongly in
favour of not merely the Asiatic but of the Mongolian origin of
the domestic sheep; it appears, I mean, to point to a more or less
limited area in the wide field of Asia as having been the particular
spot, or at any rate one of the particular spots, where a wild sheep
* I may add a few words from the already quoted memoir by Andreas Wagner,
l. c., p. 137: ‘Hochasien ist recht eigentlich das Vaterland der Wildschafe und
Wildziege, die hier in zahlreicher Menge und in sehr verschiedenen Formen vor-
handen sind. Ob diese alle gesonderte Arten oder nicht vielmehr viele von ihnen
nur Rassen von Hauptarten ausmachen, ist eine Frage die noch lange nicht beant-
wortet est. Mr. Wallace's suggestion (‘Geographical Distribution,’ vol. i. p. 232)
that the vast plateau of Central Asia may, in comparatively recent geological times,
have been much less elevated, and may then have been much more fertile than it is
now, deserves more than this simple mention.
* For these facts see the Rev. W. Houghton “On the Mammalia of the Assyrian
Sculptures,” Trans. Soc. Biblical Archaeology, v. 1, 1876, pp. 3–7, ibid. 2, 1877, p. 42.
‘Gleanings from the Natural History of the Ancients,’ 1879, pp. 12–89.
PRODUCED BY MAN. 817
was brought under domestication. This fact as given by Ahlquist
in his interesting work, ‘Die Kulturwörter der Westfinnischen
Sprachen,’ 1875, p. 14, is to the effect that the Tatars, by which
word he means presumably Turkic and Tungusic tribes in the
neighbourhood of the Lake Baikal, have words of their own for
ram and ewe, táká, to wit, and Sarik, which the Tscheremissians,
who live now as far away from that lake as is the river Volga, use
as loan words. It is, I submit, not easy to imagine that a word
would have maintained its life thus intact and vigorous if the thing
which it represents had not been part of the national life of
the tribe using and retaining it. And this suggestion gains in
force when we learn from the same authority, l.c., that the Hungarian
language has adopted Slavonic words for the ewe, the ram, and the
lamb, and find him deducing from this the conclusion that the
Hungarians, albeit a steppe tribe, had not been shepherds before
they came into relation with the Slavs. It may have been due to
this, but it may also have been owing to a prepotency either in the
Aryan language or in the pastoral craft of the Slav race. For
except upon one or other of these latter hypotheses, it is difficult to
see why the Tscheremissians on the Volga should have retained
their Mongolian names for the ewe and ram, whilst not only the
Hungarians but the Ostjaks, the Vogals, the Mordvins, the Syrians,
and the Wotjaks, from the Volga to the Irtisch, should be using more
or less modified Slavonian words for the same things. Anyhow, that
a lowly, organised language, such as the Tataric, should have words
of its own for the domestic ewe and ram, is a point of great signi-
ficance, especially when we consider that these Tatars lived around
the spurs of the Altai range on the lower and middle zones of
which the Argali was then, as now, available for the purposes of
domestication.
Thirdly, of the horse. The fossil or semi-fossil bones of the horse,
Equus caballus, are found in the lower Thames valley gravels under
our feet, and from this area of the world’s surface all the way to the
regions round the Lake Baikal; and in this latter district the
horse is found, as I think may be safely said, in a wild state at
the present day. It is true that a very large number of naturalists
of the first rank, such as Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace, have
acquiesced in the view which teaches that the so-called ‘Tarpan'
is but a ‘feral’ animal, the offspring of runaway stallions and mares
3 G
818 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC INATURE
from the steppe droves. But it is also true that the small number
of naturalists of the first rank who have travelled over the Russian
steppes, viz. the younger Gmelin, Pallas, and Middendorff, are of
the contrary opinion; and that whilst acknowledging that the
steppe horse, like, perhaps, all other domestic animals except the
sheep, may lapse into feral habits, they hold to the view that the
true ‘Tarpan’ is a descendant of the pristine wild stock, whilst the
“Musin' is but a steppe horse run wild".
The main argument for the descent of the wild horses of the
steppes from the domestic or semi-domesticated stocks of the
Turanian nomads, rests on the fact that a great variety of colour
is observed to exist in the free droves. This, however, appears to
me to prove nothing more than that the tame and wild varieties
breed freely together”. I myself, long ago, succeeded in obtaining
numbers of feral rabbits, parti-coloured with white, on an area
already occupied by the ordinary English wild rabbit. The feral
rabbits never attained an equality in numbers with the gray stock,
but being spared in shooting, whilst the wild stock was not, they
maintained themselves for a considerable number of years in what
was for themselves as against predatory attacks of various kinds an
only too conspicuous prominence. But nobody would have argued
* See Middendorff, ‘Sibirische Reise, iv. 2, 2, pp. 1308–1321 ; Gmelin, “Reise
durch Russland,’ i. 45, 1770, and for drawing Tab. ix.
It may be well, for several reasons, to give the exact facts as to the opinions which
Pallas held at various times respecting the feral or the truly and aboriginally wild
character of the so-called wild horse of the Steppes. In 1769 (see ‘Voyages de
Pallas,’ French translation, 1788, vol. i. p. 324) Pallas inclined to the view of the
Tarpan being simply a feral race; and he repeated this opinion in 1773 (see I. c.,
vol. v. p. 90). But in 1776, in the eleventh fascicle of his ‘Spicilegia Zoologica, p. 5,
he expresses himself to the following effect: ‘Equiferi in campis Bessarabicis circaque
Tanain et per omnem Tatariam magnam in desertis vagantur gregatim, magnam
guidem partem fugitivis Nomadum equis permixti atque multiplicati; ideoque versi-
colores; aliqui tamen habitu toto a cicuratis adeo discrepantes ut primitiva de Stirpe
jeros esse dubitari via: posset. Conf. de iis qui ad Tanain atolue in eremo inter Volgam
et Jaikum habentur S. G. Gmelin [the younger Gmelin], Reisen durch Russland,
vol i. p. 44 seq., et Itinerarii nostri, vol. i. p. 2 II ; et vol. iii. part ii. p. 513.’ See
also the posthumously (1831) published ‘Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica,’ vol. i. p. 260.
To these references I would add the ‘Geographische Geschichte, i. p. 181, 1778,
of the zoologist Zimmermann. Writing only two years after the appearance of
Pallas's Memoir just cited, Zimmermann not only entirely accepted the view given
above in italics, but l. c., p. 204, speaks in not exaggerated terms of Pallas as ‘der
erste aller von mir gekannten Reisenden.”
* The Mongols and Kalmucks, from superstitious motives, take great pains to secure
various colours for their domestic horses, sheep, and goats. Hence some of the variety
in the feral horses. See Pallas, ‘Mongol. Volk,” i. pp. 117, 178, 179.
PRODUCED BY MAN. 819
from this that no wild stock could be held to exist on that area.
Still though we may follow the highly trustworthy naturalists -
and travellers just mentioned as to the persistence of the aboriginal
horse in a wild state on the Turanian steppes, we have yet to
show that it is probable that it was on those steppes rather than
in any other part of the wide area over which the true wild horse
once ranged that it became reduced to domestication. And here
again the Accadian inscriptions come to our assistance; the horse
being called there (see the Rev. William Houghton, l.c., 1876,
p. 3) ‘imiru Kur-ra,’ ‘the animal from the East.” We see from
this that these ancient Turanians claimed, and had their claim
acknowledged, that the taming of the horse was an achievement
wrought out in the cradle of their race. I have sometimes
thought that the ascription by the Greeks of this feat to Poseidon
may be similarly taken to indicate that they had some sort of dim
conviction that the horse had come to them from the countries
beyond the Egean. This, however, may be an overstraining of the
value of such hints. But the history of the horse, whether dug out
of Pile-dwellings and Neolithic interments, or out of records such as
those in Genesis and Exodus, show that it came comparatively late
into use, as a domestic animal at least, in the regions to the west of
the Central Asiatic plains".
The fourth of the domesticated animals, which I have spoken
of as having in great probability had a Central Asiatic origin, the
goat, namely, has its claims, supported by the vast majority of
naturalists without any hesitation. The wild Capra aegagrus of
the Taurus, of the Caucasus, of the Persian mountains, and of
Kirghiz and Tatar districts, “possibly mingled,’ says Mr. Darwin,
“Domesticated Animals and Cultivated Plants,’ i. p. 105, ‘with
the allied Indian species, Capra Falconeri,’ may be safely taken as
the parent-stock of this animal. The Tibetan and Angoran varieties
of the goat, by their well-deserved reputation, may seem, even in
these days and under the light thrown on the subject by the book
just quoted, to lend some support to Col. Hamilton Smith's prin-
ciple”, that where the largest and most energetic breeds of a race
exist, there we may look for their original habitation.
* See further, Lenormant, ‘Premières Civilisations,’ tom. i. p. 322; Ahlquist, ‘Die
Kulturwörter der Westfinnischen Sprachen,’ 1878, p. 9; ‘Spectator,’ April 27, 1878,
ibique a me citata.
* These are Col. Hamilton Smith's views (Nat. Library, “Dogs,’ vol. ii. p. 163, cit.
3 G 2
820 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
It is thus seen that four out of the twenty-one domesticated
Mammalia may, with very considerable probability, be supposed
to have been first domesticated in Central Asia, and though the
non-cosmopolitanism of the two camels, Camelus bactrianus and
Camelus dromedarius, renders them less available for my present
purpose, that, viz., of pointing out the great changes which man
has effected in transporting into all parts of the world what
he found only in some more or less circumscribed portions of it,
the facts of the Central Asiatic origin of the two-humped variety
or species, and of the South-western Asiatic, or at least Arabic,
origin of the one-humped dromedary, bear not a little on the
whole question.
I do not omit the dog and the pig from the list of the animals
Rev. Wm. Houghton, l.c.). Speaking of the possible derivation of the greyhound from
an Asiatic home “somewhere to the westward of the great Asiatic mountain chains
where the easternmost Bactrian and Persian plains commence, and where the steppes
of the Scythic nations spread towards the north,’ Col. Hamilton Smith says, “when
we look to the present proofs of this conclusion and assume that where the largest
and most energetic breeds of the race exist, there may we look for their original
habitations, we then find, to the east of the Indus, the very large greyhounds of the
Deccan, to the west of it the powerful Persian breed, and to the north of the Caspian
the great rough greyhound of Tartary and Russia, and thence we may infer that they
were carried by the migrating colonies westward across the Hellespont, and by earlier
Celtic and later Teutonic tribes along the levels of Northern Germany as far as Britain.”
It is curious that Colonel H. Smith should not in this connexion have mentioned the
Thibetan dog, figured by himself, l. c., with the tan-coloured supra-orbital stripe,
common so significatively to this variety and to the Mexican Alco. For the Thibetan
mastiff has long been known to be one of the largest varieties of the species, and quite
recently (see ‘Times,’ Dec. 26, 1879) Mr. Baber, the consular resident at Szechuen,
is reported as writing of them as the largest dogs he had ever seen.
* That the Central Asiatic wild boar lends itself readily to domestication is thus
expressed by Pallas, ‘Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica, p. 269: ‘Porcelli cicurari as-
suescunt facile et cum domesticis generant.” And Radde's words (“Reisen im Süden von
Ost-Sibirien,’ 1862, i. 236) are as much or more to the point, as they apply to adult
animals: ‘So muss ich gestehen, dass sie sehr friedlicher Natur sind und es mir
mehrmals passirte mittelalte Wildschweine sich mir bis auf vier Faden weite nahen
zu sehen.” If the so-called ‘wild' boar is so tame as to allow this so many centuries
after the invention of gunpowder, it is easy to understand that it may have been much
more amenable to man's influence thousands of years before that discovery. As regards
the dog, it seems probable that even within the limits of the Central Asiatic region
we are dealing with, two very distinct wild stocks may have furnished corresponding
tame ones. The large Indian dog, or Hyrcanian dog of the ancients, may very reason-
ably be supposed (as suggested by Fitzinger) to have been the parent-stock of the
modern Thibetan mastiff, whilst Pallas says that the Kalmuck domestic dog is so like
the jackal of the same region that it is impossible not to consider them identical. See
‘Spicilegia Zoologica,” Fasc. xi.
PRODUCED BY MAN. 821
which there is good reason, to my judgment, for thinking were
domesticated in Central Asia, because I do not think they were
domesticated within that area, but because, I cannot deny, that
it is probable they were also domesticated elsewhere. But it may
fairly be suggested that the art, skill, and craft of domesticating
these and the other six animals having been first learnt in Central
Asia, spread thence; and that thus all or nearly all the acqui-
sitions which man has made in the way of domestication, may thus
owe their origin—if not in the way of actual blood-lineage, yet in
that of being the fruits of man’s experience acquired there—to the
district in question.
I pass by a natural transition to point out very shortly, not the
cardinal necessity of the possession of the sheep, goat, ox, horse,
camel, pig, and dog, for food and clothing, for locomotion, and for
carrying on the processes of the hunting, of the pastoral and of the
agricultural life, but how that necessity has been unconsciously
recognised by man in certain of his earliest institutions.
Of these seven mammals, six are now distributed over the face
of the whole habitable world; but long before this had become the
case with any one of them, except possibly the dog, man had expressed
unconsciously, if not quite inarticulately, his recognition of their
value by using them in one way or another for one or another of
his most sacred rights and ceremonies. The single Latin word
‘Suovetaurilia, denoting a particular kind of sacrifice of the
swine, the sheep, and the ox, which is figured on many a tablet
found in this as in other countries, and was performed at great
crises of Rome's fate, may suffice as regards the three animals
which speak so plainly to our eyes in those sculptures. To Eastern
and to Western people it was indifferent (see Exod. xii. 5, Ps. l. 9,
and classical writers passim) whether sheep or goats were taken out
of the fold for this purpose. As regards the dog, Livy (xl. 6) tells
us that in the Purification of a Macedonian army the two halves
of a dog's body were placed, one on one side, one on the other, of
the road along which the soldiers were passed. Similarly, we are
told by the Arab Ahmed Ibn-Fozlan, who must have witnessed
the proceeding with a good deal of repulsion, that a dog was cut in
half and put into the ship in which a Norse chief was burnt in the
tenth century on the banks of the Volga (see Anderson, ‘Proc.
Scot. Soc. Antiq., May 13, 1872, p. 522); and I have myself
822 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
taken up, not without some effort in overcoming a certain re-
luctance, the bones of a dog who was keeping his mistress faithful
company in a grave undoubtedly of the earliest Neolithic period
in England".
As regards the horse, Achilles, fresh from his conversation with
Xanthus and Balius, tells the Trojans (Il. xxi. 132) that even their
wonted sacrifices of horses will not profit them; the Mongols (see
Howorth’s ‘History of the Mongols, i. 262, 289; and Yule's
‘Marco Polo, i. 265, cit. in loco), the Lusitanians (Livy, Epit. 49),
and the Norsemen (see Ibn Fozlan, l.c.), all alike sacrificed horses
on great occasions. *
I have not found, nor did I expect to find, any account of the
sacrificing of the camel, either in Semitic or classical literature ;
if, however, it be a sound principle that races as yet uncivilised
would be likely to sacrifice or otherwise deprive themselves upon
great occasions of the services of their oldest and most valued
domesticated animals”, we ought to be able to show that the
Central Asiatic nomads did so by the ‘ships of their deserts.' And
I find in Mr. Howorth’s valuable ‘History of the Mongols,’ i. p. 426,
the following passage :—
* See ‘British Barrows," p. 518, 1877; ‘Journal Anthropological Institute,’ October,
1875, p. 157; Article XVIII, p. 394.
* As I am speaking of animals domesticated in Central Asia, I have not mentioned
the ass which, as Dr. Sclater has shown (* Proc. Zool. Soc.’ 1862, p. 164), owns as its
parent-stock the Asinus taeniopus of Abyssinia. Its history gives, however, an illus-
tration of the principles enunciated above at least as striking as those of any of the
eight Asiatic mammals just specified. From the references made to this animal in
the Pentateuch, it would appear to have been domesticated in the region there treated
of before either horse or camel, though subsequently to the ox. Pindar's reference to
it as used for sacrifice by the Hyperboreans (Od. Pyth. x. 1.52) will be to persons who
will bear in mind its African origin almost as convincing evidence of the great anti-
quity of the date of its domestication as its appearance on the oldest Egyptian monu-
ments of the Fourth Dynasty. Hecatombs, such as Pindar speaks of, are, numerically,
figured on one tomb, reproduced for us by Lepsius. That the ass should so early have
been introduced into Hyperborean regions even by a poet is a little surprising, con-
sidering that the horse, which is so much better suited for such climates, was already
available there; but besides being surprising it is also significant. For the sacrificial
and ceremonial use of this animal, see Orelli's ‘Excursus ad Tacit. Hist.’ v. 3, vol. ii,
1848, of his edition of the great historian, ibique citata; Dean Stanley's ‘Jewish
Church, i. 96, ibique citata; ‘Pindar, ed. Dissen and Schneidewin,’ sect. ii. 1847,
p. 353, ibique citata. For the linguistic Palaeontology of the name, see Lenormant,
‘ Origines de Civilisation,’ i. 319. For the use of the animal by the modern Hyper-
boreans see Middendorff, ‘Sibirische Reise,’ iv. 2, 2, p. 1322, where, however, that
naturalist, albeit reckoning ‘Pferdekenntniss und Pferdezucht als seiner Specialität,’
or one of them, leaves the difficulty above hinted at unexplained.
PRODUCED BY MAN. 823
‘Ssanang Setzen now goes on to tell a story which crystallises for us a very curious
phase of old Mongol manners. Altan Khakan had a son called Pubet Paidshi. The
young man died, and his mother determined to kill Ioo boys and Ioo foals of camels,
which were to be buried with him, and to accompany him as an escort to the other
World. She had killed over forty boys when a tumult arose among the people.’
Here I think I may leave this part of my subject, the signi-
ficance of this series of facts being sufficiently self-evident. For
as against these seven domesticated mammals which Central Asia
may with so much probability claim as being her gifts to mankind,
inasmuch as she either herself furnished their parent-stocks, or at
any rate furnished the necessary opportunities for gaining the
knowledge subsequently used in domesticating similar stocks else-
where, what can all the rest of the habitable globe set either as
regards cosmopolitanism or as regards importance P As regards
importance the other thirteen are all but insignificant; as regards
cosmopolitanism, universal importation, that is, either for purposes
of practical utility or ‘animi voluptatisque caussa,’ as Caesar put
it, we can mention but the African cat and the African ass.
I come now to the consideration of the facts and views with
which botanists have supplied us as to the original homes of our
cultivated plants. Our own inspection and recollection of the
landscapes of the various countries in which we have travelled will
enable us to estimate the greatness of the change, which man's
migrations and transportations have effected in the sphere of all
his labour under the sun. And I will begin what I have to
say under this head by the apparent paradox that the argument
which our cultivated plants furnish us with for determining the
locality whence man issued to occupy the world and subdue it, and
alter its external appearance, would, like some other arguments,
have appealed with greater force to one of the civilised races of
antiquity than it does at first sight to us. It is, herein also like
some other arguments, cogent for all that. Let us state it. Fifty
per cent. of our cultivated plants have been shown by De Candolle,
‘Géographie Botanique, pp. 986, 987, and by Élisée Reclus, ‘The
Ocean' (English Trans. ii. chap. 27, 292), following him, to belong
to ‘Europe’ and ‘Asie septentrionale et occidentale, that is to say,
to the Palaeartic Region of Zoogeography. So far the figures are
equal for cultivated plants and for domestic animals, and I do not
feel it necessary to dwell upon the differences which the other
proportional numbers show as regards Africa proper and South
824 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
America. What is of importance, however, to point out, is that to
anybody living, not merely before the time of Columbus—whose
discovery has been said to have acted upon the Old World much
as the approximation of a new heavenly body, planet, or other,
might act upon the whole earth—but before the time, say, of
Tacitus and Agricola, what Africa and India had given him in the
way of cultivated plants, would have seemed just as insignificant
as what, putting the ass and the gallinacean birds out of sight,
they had given him in the way of domestic animals. He might,
if living in Italy, have said, as did Columella (iii. 9. 5, cit. Hehn,
p. 423, l.c.), “Curae mortalium obsequentissima est Italia, quae
paene totius orbis fruges adhibito studio colonorum ferre didicit,’
and pointed out beforehand the airy inaccuracy of Goldsmith's
apostrophe to that country in his “Traveller.” He might, I am
inclined to think, with the evidence available to him, have pointed
out, and correctly, that the middle zone of deciduous trees which
girdled then, as now, so many of the Italian hills with a belt of
chestnuts, and much, therefore, of its distinctive character, was due
to the intercourse of Rome with Pontus and Galatia in pre-Christian
times. And he might have drawn thence the same conclusions
which we may, I think, also draw as to the area on the world's
surface whence man set forth westward on his career of occupation,
having, as he had, available for his wants, vegetables, plants, and
trees of no less value, and of no less prominence in the landscape,
than are these of Palaeartic, though not of Italian, origin, viz.
wheat, barley, rye, oats, spelt, buckwheat, millet (Panicum), peas,
beans, hemp, flax, cabbage, turnip, plum, walnut, vine, cherry,
olive. Of tea, coffee, sugar, even of rice, of oranges, and of several
other of the gifts of the Indian region; or of coffee, or any one of
the three, or four if we include Musa ensete, now flourishingly
growing in Sicily, gifts of Africa proper, a man living at that
time had as little knowledge as he could have had of the gifts
to come from the still undiscovered New World, of the potato,
of maize, of the pineapple, to which his all alien stone pine was to
lend its name, of the equally incorrectly named artichoke, of the
tomato, now somewhat variously obtrusive or intrusive in Mediter-
ranean regions, or of tobacco, or of the prickly pear, or of the
agave, though of the two latter in reference to what was then, and
is still, such a large part of human activities, it can be said, as by
PRODUCED BY MAN. 825
Admiral Smyth (p. 17 of his “Memoir of Sicily and its Islands,’ 1824),
that they ‘form impenetrable palisades for fortifications, and in the
plains present very serious obstructions to the operations of cavalry.”
My third map, with the distribution of the vine after Schouw,
should be compared with my picture from Kaempfer's ‘Amoenitates
Exoticae, Fasc. iv. p. 711, 1712, of what he calls, p. 714, the
Messis dactylifera, the date-harvest of Persia, and speaks of as being
‘lusus magis quam labores.’ The distributional limits of the
“fruitful’ vine and the ‘fruiting’ date-palm now, as of yore, overlap
each other, as was pointed out by Arago in his ‘Mémoire sur
l'État. Thermométrique du Globe terrestre’ (‘CEuvres,’ v. 216, ed.
1858) in Palestine, when from this fact he, with much ingenuity,
argued that 3300 years have not appreciably altered the climate of
Palestine. For
“la limite thermométrique en moins de la datte diffère très peu de la limite ther-
mométrique en plus de la vigne;’
and, what makes the argument, especially to those who have
Kaempfer's picture of the luxuriant date-harvest before their eyes,
entirely and beautifully perfect, he further (p. 217, l.c.) tells us,
“a Abusheer (Bushire) en Perse, dont la température moyenne ne surpasse certaine.
ment pas 23°, on ne peut, suivant Niebuhr, cultiver la vigne que dans les fossés ou
à l'abri de l'action directe des rayons du soleil.’
A more simple, but also a more conclusive proof that the Syrian
climate has not materially changed within the historic period
cannot be imagined".
I began this Lecture with details as to the distribution of pines
* It is strange to find that Arago could, when dealing with France, have swerved so
far from the line of evidence he employed as to Palestine, as to have told the Chamber
of Deputies (February 27, 1836), “Vous serez peut-être étonnés d'entendre que dans
les environs de Paris, ily a quelques siècles, il faisait beaucoup plus chaud qu'aujourd’hui.’
vol. xii. ‘CEuvres, Mélanges, p. 434. But for the context one might have been
tempted to take the last of the words just quoted as applying to the month of Feb-
ruary only ; and in all gravity the title of chapitre xix. in the memoir already quoted,
vol. viii. “CEuvres,’ vol. v. “Nat. Scient.’ p. 239, ‘Observations prouvant que l’ancien
climat se maintient dans une partie des Gaules,’ might seem to justify such an inter-
pretation of words spoken under some provocation in debate. And the more so as a
few pages previously (p. 214) we find Arago recognising the essential deceptiveness
which must attach to ‘une foule de documents historiques’ in the following words:
‘On remarquera que je devrai résoudre le problème que je me suis posé Sans avoir
recours a des chiffres certains, a des observations numériques. L'invention des ther-
mometres ne remonte guère qu’à l'année 1590; on doit même ajouter qu'avant I70o
ces instruments n'étaient ni exactes ni comparables.’
826 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
and firs by, man's agency; I may fitly close those details by
attempting something as regards that ºf one of the palm tribe.
For, though Leopold von Buch was wrong in holding that the two
natural orders were altogether mutually exclusive as regards natural
geographical distribution, as a voyage in the Mediterranean, or the
sight of Martius' picture of Brahea dulcis (vol. iii, taf. 162) side by
side with a true pine in Mexico, teaches us, there can be no doubt
that Caesar and his countrymen were, speaking generally, right in
holding the fir and the beech to be as characteristic of Gaul and
Britain as their repeated allusions and their coins show them to
have thought the palm was of Palestine and the adjacent countries,
at least eastward and southward.
What then do we know, firstly, as to the original home or
botanical region to which the date-palm, Phoenia, dactylifera, belongs?
and secondly, what can we surmise as to the particular spot in that
area in which that tree was first made available as a cultivated
plant, and subjected to those human influences which three of my
pictures are intended to illustrate 2 -
As to the first of these questions there is no doubt, and no
occasion for any very lengthy answer. The region which Grisebach
names, after its principal constituent element, simply ‘Sahara,'
and which stretches over more than ninety degrees of longitude
from Macaronesia to Multania, from the Canaries, that is, to the
Great Desert of Rajputana, and which comprehends not only the
Sahara strictly so-called, but cis-Saharan Africa also, from the
longitude (E. Io") of Tunis eastward, and not only Old Egypt
and Arabia, but young ‘Egypt,” or Sinde also, is the botanical
region of the date-palm. Sir Joseph Hooker (“Morocco and the
Great Alas,’ 1879, p. 409) has pointed out that there are many
Canarian plants which form an exceedingly interesting group, the
members of which, though chiefly Egypto-Arabian, are found to
extend in some instances even into Western India, and he suggests
that ‘it is not unreasonable to suppose that such have covered
Africa in a sub-tropical latitude, and thus reached the Canaries
under conditions now operating.” Other plants, therefore, if not
other trees, may have spread over the same area, whether by man's
aid or without it, and may be taken as equally characteristic of it,
even though they may not need so much ‘water to their feet and
fire to their heads.’ It is, per contra, I may remark, by a sur-
PRODUCED BY MAN. 827
plusage of water to the head and a noxious quantity of heat to the
feet that the latitudinal limits, south and north parallels, of the
date-palm are given. If, as Dr. Daubeny suggested (“Lectures on
Climate,’ 1863, p. 86), we have, as in certain truly tropical (and
continental) countries, heavy falls of rain during that particular
time of the year when the pollen should be carried to the pistilli-
ferous flower, this latter will not be fertilised (unless by man's
interference), the dioecious character of its flowers putting it thus,
as it does also Borassus ſlabel/i, at a serious disadvantage as com-
pared with the cocoanut-palm", Cocos nucifera, whose company they,
in consequence perhaps of a sense of their inferiority, appear to
avoid.
On the other hand, the requirement of a mean temperature of
from 70° to 81'5° F. excludes the date-palm from bearing dates,
except under specially favourable, and therefore only locally pre-
valent conditions, eked out by human protection, on the north
shores of the Mediterranean *; all the way from Alexandretta,
* It is not only the “tempest's wrath,” but also the ‘battle's rage,’ which the
dioecious character of the date-palm helps in the work of destruction. The pictures
from Lepsius's Egyptian Denkmäler which I have copied for this Lecture show that
this was known in the time of those ‘great old houses and fights fought long ago.”
History tells us that Norman and Saracen (see Admiral Smyth's ‘Sicily, p. 19,
Martius, iii. p. 262), Anjou and Arabian generals have, each alike, in defiance
either of the letter or of the spirit of their professed religion, or of both, cut down the
male palms, and so prevented pro tanto the reproduction of the tree with 360 uses to
mankind. The modern Arabs, according to Rohlfs, “Afrikanische Reisen,” Aufl. 2,
1869, p. 7o, cit. Hehn, l.c. p. 513, appear sometimes even in very severe military
operations or devastations to spare the palm even when cutting down other fruit trees.
But Abd-el-Kader appears to have had some transgressions even as to palm-trees on
his conscience to repent of. The solitary palm, the existence of which von Baer
reports to us on a certain peninsula on the south shore of the Caspian, called in our
maps the Peninsula of Mejankal, but in his apparently, and curiously, the Peninsula.
of Potemkin, is, I should think, a solitary survivor of some such proceedings as those
figured in my Egyptian pictures. Von Baer himself looks upon it as a survivor of
companions not destroyed by the art and malice of man, but by local refrigeration, due
to the extinction of certain volcanoes which were active even in comparatively recent
times. Verecunde dissentio.
* Martius writes on this subject, l.c. iii. p. 263, as follows: ‘Haec igitur habuimus
quae de incremento, quod arbor illa capit in imperio florae per Europam meridio-
malem patenti, diceremus. Ex quibus intelligi potest omnino ut nascatur arte effici,
cogitandumque nobis esse eam plures culturae gradus intra fines quos occupaverit
percurrere. Quae si ad summum ascenderit flores emittit, fructusque dulcis et boni
saporis edit, et si manu et arte accedente fecundetur, etiam semina ad propagandum
idonea gignit; quod fit in Hispaniae parte ad meridiem versus remotissima, in Sicilia,
in Graeciae promontoriis maxime ad meridiem vergentibus, et in insula Cypro (nimirum
sub lat, bor. 35° et medio calore annuo 18°C. ad 20°C.). In altera zona flores quidem
828 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
where it still grows, to Gibraltar. The solitary, and for this as
for other reasons unfertile, palms which we still see here and there
in the Aegean and along the region of the west and north shores
of Asia Minor, short of the Black Sea eastward, and which still
strike us as being something as alien to that landscape as was the
seedling-palm at Apollo's Delian temple to the eyes of the much-
travelled Ulysses (Odyss. vi. 162), have been planted there not as
‘food-plants, but ‘animi voluptatisque caussa.’
As regards the particular and single spot in the vast botanical
region, if particular and single spot there really was, upon the
longitudinally vast area of which the date-palm was brought under
that human influence which has since caused it to effloresce into
so many varieties, very various opinions have been advanced, and I
propose to add a fresh one to their number. It may appear at first
sight that such a discussion and such an attempt have in them-
selves an intrinsic futility. We do not need to refer to King
Juba's report of his exploratory voyage to the Canaries to learn
that the date-palm will bear dates even in an oceanic and un-
inhabited island, and some persons may think that we need only,
like the wits of Charles's time, to study ourselves and our sen-
sations to see how the forefathers of the Guanches, when they in
some post-Juban or post-Augustan period occupied the island,
would, under the stimulus of hunger alone, come to learn the art of
date-culture, even if they had not brought the knowledge of it with
them. Still, I think, on the doctrine of chances, or, what comes to
the same thing, the principle “Frustra fit per plura quod fieri
potest per pauciora,’ as well as upon certain concrete arguments
furnished by the Egyptian monuments on the one hand, and by
certain curious but still life-like and truth-like stories on the other,
*
et fructus fert, sed fructuum caro non plane excolitur, quum acerbi sit Saporis, fructifi-
catio nulla, semina cassa : huc pertinet tractus littorum maris Mediterranei in Gallia
meridionali, in Italia, in Sardinia, item regionis Dalmatiae, Insulae Ionicae, Graeciae-
que septentrionalis. Cujus zonae terminum'septentrionalem posueris fortasse 41° 20'-
45° lat. bor. In tertia linea palam durat quidem sub divo, sed flores aut raros aut
nullos emittit : immo fromdescit tantum ; cujus zonae terminus septentrionalistendit
ut commemoravi, per insula's lacus Verbeni sub lat. bor. 46° media anni temperie a
12° usque ad 13°C. Arbor hic provivere potest, etiam si hiemis temperies inter-
dum sub frigoris gradum deprimatur dummodo me nimis (forsan ad—3° vel 4° C.)
accedat, quo frigoris etiam mali medicae, citri, aurantii, et myrti extingui atque
opprimi solent. Superior altitudinis terminus in monte Aetnae usque ad pedum
14oo vel 1680, teste viro cl. Philippio, adscendit.’
PRODUCED BY MAN. 829
which I find in Herodotus, though other writers have not quoted
him ad hoc, that it is not unreasonable to suggest yet another site
for the one where man first intermeddled with the self-preservation
and the species-preservation of the date-palm".
Kaempfer, from whose opinion I dissent with the greatest
reluctance when I consider the thoroughness with which that
model traveller availed himself of his opportunities, and the abund-
ance of those opportunities themselves, gives us his views as to the
place in which the palm in question was first cultivated by man, in
the following words (p. 714) of his ‘Amoenitates Exoticae, Fascic.
iv. 3, published in 1714: ‘Ejus patria in Asia quidem, nam Africam
non moramur.’ -
Ritter (‘Erdkunde, Theil xiii. p. 771 seqq.) considerably narrows
this area by selecting the Babylonian Nabataeans in the valley of
the Tigris and Euphrates as having been the people who dis-
covered and first practised the art of improving the date-palm.
But Professor Rawlinson, in a letter to me, gives ‘B. c. 15oo, or
even earlier’ as the possible date of a probably early Babylonian
cylinder figured with palms in his ‘Ancient Monarchies, iii. p. 23,
2nd ed., and ‘B. c. 883’ as the earliest date for Assyrian figures
representing palms; whilst the Egyptian Twelfth Dynasty, which
possessed the tree, carries us back to from 1860 B.C. to 2200 B.C.,
according to Wilkinson and Brugsch respectively.
* It is a little amusing to find twenty-two pages, 289–311, of Seemann’s ‘Popular
History of Palms’ devoted to discussing the questions whether the date-palm was an
‘endemic (genuine) member of the Canarian Flora,’ and “whether it was indigenous
to the Canary Islands.’ This book was, however, published in 1856, and though
something, and perhaps too much, was even then ascribed to ‘occasional causes’ in
the explaining of anomalies in geographical distribution, a good deal has been learnt
since that time which would have rendered that dozen of pages impossible. It is re-
markable that the author did not use the arguments supplied him by Dr. Carl Bolle in
support of the Atlantic hypothesis, which since those days has been buried as deeply
as the Atlantic itself was supposed to have been. Of course another question, not
raised indeed by Dr. Seemann, as to whether the art of artificially cultivating the date
could have originated in what we now know to be oceanic islands and spread thence
eastward is, by the knowledge we have since 1859 gained as to ‘Man and Nature' in
their independent as well as in their mutually interacting operations, rendered all
but an impertinence. We (see Darwin, ‘Animals and Plants under Domestication,”
i. p. 328, 2nd ed.) “do not believe that any edible or valuable plant except the
Canary grass has been derived from an oceanic or uninhabited island.’ It is only just
not an impossibility that the date-palm should have been so derived; if it had
been, this would indeed have been something more surprising than all the usefulness
of the tree, than all its beauty, and even than all the blunders which have been made
about it.
830 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
Unger, ‘Sitzungsberichte k. Akad. Wiss. Wien, Bd. xxiii. Hft. i.
p. 204, 1857, suggested the countries on the eastern side of the
Persian Gulf as the centre whence in the very earliest times
of commerce and international intercourse this plant was carried
over Arabia, Persia, Hindustan, and North Africa. But he, in a
later Memoir, published after travel in Egypt, ib. xxxviii. pp. 75,
104–106, 1859, quotes Delile as averring that, valeat quantum
valeat, the Egyptians themselves considered that Arabia Felix was
the original country of the date-palm ; and by twice (ll.cc.) men-
tioning the fact that Egypt itself is called not only the land of the
sycamore, but also the land of the palm-tree, he would appear to
assign the same weight to that tradition which I have felt justified
in assigning to those embodied in the Accadian Inscriptions.
Unger himself suggests, though very guardedly, that the date may
have been imported into Lower from Upper Egypt. He is, as such
a botanist would be sure to be, careful to disclaim any acceptance
of the cogency which others have assigned to an argument based on
the luxuriance of growth which the tree does attain in the locality
in question. ‘There is nothing in all this, however, to hinder us
from supposing that the palm does so flourish there, because in its
migration from the north southwards it came in the latter place for
the first time upon the soil best suited to it.’
Martius, on the other hand (1 c. iii. 263), uses this very argument
for assigning the original site of the date-palm to the southern part
of Tunis, ‘Blad el-Dscherid, as he writes the name of the locality,
h. e. arida terra, “falso nuncupata Biledulgerid, as he adds, ‘Beled
el-Jerid,” I may add as named in Johnston's Royal Atlas in lat.
N. 34°, long. S. Io’. ‘Quo loco,” says Martius’, ‘solidae conspici-
* In the same African connection in Martius's grand book I find the two following
passages, which are in themselves a lecture on the extent to which man has modified
the landscape of Southern and Northern Africa, both by acclimatising there plants,
some useful merely, some beautiful, some both, from ‘regions Caesar never knew,”
China, namely, and America. The maize might have been added to the importations
specified in those quotations. Speaking of the date-palm Martius says (p. 264):
“In Promontorium Bonae Spei introducta, nunc per calidiorum regionum hortos sparsa
et una cum Solano tuberoso, Tritico rep. colitur.” Speaking of the North Coast and
the planities Tadschurae, he writes: “Palma illic est splendidissimum decus sylvarum
Citri aurantiorum quae Opuntiis cinguntur.” The potato, the orange, and the hedges
of opuntias set round them were as little known to ‘all the world’ of the Mediter-
ranean as the gas, the coal, the glaze of our pottery, and the tea, coffee, and tobacco,
which, though sold by the épicier in every English hamlet, and making up, as some
persons will say, but a Philistine tale, are yet become absolute necessaries of life even
PRODUCED BY MAN. 831
entur palmarum sylvae tanquam in prima patria gnatae. Earum
fructus sunt frequentissimi et sapidissimi.’
Professor Robert Hartmann ('Die Nigritier, pp. 116, 117, 1876)
gives the most recent account with which I am acquainted of the
date-palm as cultivated in Africa. His remarks as to the existence
in Africa of really wild forms of Phoenia, e.g. Phoenia spinosa s.
humilis, the ‘Kjom-kom’ of Senegal, with small well-flavoured
fruits, and the Phoenia, reclinata, a very variable form, to set off
against the Phoenia sylvestris indica which has so often, though not
correctly, been said to be botanically indistinguishable from the
cultivated Phoenia dactylifera, are specially valuable. He insists,
as I had also done previously to becoming acquainted with his
views, upon the priority of date, which the Egyptian monuments,
with date-palms figured upon them, can show us compared with
the Assyrian or Babylonian similarly adorned. The only argument
which I can imagine—I have not seen or read of its being suggested
by any one else—to be likely to be set against this one based upon
the monuments, is one, partly indeed based upon ancient Egyptian
records, but partly also upon stories recorded for us, with every
indication of their being true, by Herodotus. It might run thus.
Brugsch (cit. Unger, l. c. 1839, p. 106; ‘Geographie der alter
Aegypten,’ p. 74) tells us that palm-wine is enumerated in the
Egyptian Tribute-lists as having been one of the articles received
from Babylonia. Herodotus, i. 193, informs us that wine was made
from dates in Babylonia; and in a couple of passages, iii. 20, 22,
he relates what has become, since his time, the very commonplace
to the most cultured of mankind. [Since writing as above I have met with an
address delivered September 24, 1879, by the traveller Nachtigal before the German
Association for the Advancement of Science at Baden-Baden. In this Address, de-
livered in deprecation of certain schemes for the utilisation of certain parts of the
Sahara, Herr Nachtigal insists that whatever other results might accrue from the
letting in of the waters of the Mediterranean upon the salt marshes of the district
referred to by Martius, as cited in the text above, the ruin of the date-culture, the
most valuable treasure of that region, would probably be one also. For ‘the date-
palm,” says Herr Nachtigal, ‘wants fresh water for its roots, solar rays for its
crown, and fears rain and atmospheric moisture. It is well known that date-
plantations in the neighbourhood of the sea produce only second-rate fruit; and
there is some ground for doubting whether the regions exposed to the doubtful
benefits of the Mediterranean are really the regions which produce the best dates
in the world and thereby have earned the name Beled el-Dscherid, that is, literally,
the Land of the Date-palm. Would it not be rash to endanger a cultivation, the pro-
duce of which is cºunted by millions of money, for very uncertain results?’]
832 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
occurrence of a superiorly civilised assailing an inferiorly civilised
race by means of strong drink. He tells us how Cambyses sent a
cask of palm-wine, presumably brought with him from his own
country, as a present to the Aethiopians, previously called ‘blameless’
by Homer. The Egyptians, also, according to Herodotus, ii. 86,
employed palm-wine (probably, when we compare this passage with
the others already cited, from Babylonia) in the process of embalm-
ing. I have set up this argument, but I think I may knock it
down, and thereby save some of my friends some trouble, by
observing that in England we ought not to think that because a
country shows pre-eminent skill in manufacturing raw material,
that therefore that raw material must even have been grown, not
to say, originally found growing wild, in that country. Fusel oil,
for example, a product analogous in its operation to palm-wine, is
manufactured in this land out of potatoes; but potatoes are not
thereby shown to have been first cultivated either in Great Britain
or Ireland.
I gather from Martius that ‘Celsius in Hierobotanico operam
dat ut Palaestinam tanquam veram hujus arboris patriam esse
ostendat.”
I, in my turn, venture to advocate the claims of the Nasamones
who dwelt around the south-eastern extremity of the Syrtis major,
now known as the Gulf of Sidra (long. E. 20°), to be considered as
the race which first cultivated the palm ; and with them I should
couple those of the Garamantes of Fezzan. What I have to say
about them is based mainly upon the apparently truthful and
certainly life-like account which Herodotus gives of them in three or
four passages, i. 32 and iv. 172, 182, 183, none of which Martius
refers to in his enumeration of profane writers in contradistinction
to the sacred writers who mention date-palms referred to by Celsius;
but partly also upon a single passage of Diodorus Siculus, iii. 4.
We find thus that the Nasamones were a numerous and powerful,
but certainly a very far from civilised people. They combined poly-
gamy with polyandry, much as the Massagetae did at the same
time. Some of their other practices combine several of the notes
of a priscan people, such as the veneration of ancestors, and the
regard for justice which has made the words Trollorum fides
proverbial; and finally those social feelings which are indicated by
the words, i. 32, &vöpóv čvvaoréov Taíðas iſºptotás, and which
PRODUCED BY MAN. 833
Nillson 1 has averred to be eminently characteristic of Savages.
I subjoin the entire passage, iv. 172*, for several reasons, in the
original Greek; and I submit that a people who embodied so much
of wild life in their social condition, could have learnt little from
any of the nations to the east of them, whether Egyptian, Arabian,
Assyrian, or Persian. But as regards their dealing with the date-
palms, we have this remarkable statement made by Herodotus, iv.
172 and 186: “In the summer they leave their flocks by the sea-
side, and go up to the district Augila, to get in the harvest of the
date-palms which grow there in great abundance, and are of great
size, all being fruit-bearing.” Now Herodotus, and, as he tells us,
i. 193, the Greeks of his time generally, were acquainted with the
bisexual dioecious character of the palm and the fig ; that the Baby-
lonians used artificial means for securing the impregnation of
the pistilliferous trees he tells us in loco ; and we know that those
latter were, as they are (see Kaempfer, l.c. p. 672) still, to be
found in Persia as they are (see Martius, l.c. p. 264) still in Egypt.
Some considerable weight, therefore, may fairly be assigned to his
statement, iv. 172, to the effect that at Augila (as also probably,
see iv. 183, in the country of the Garamantes) there were none but
* “Early Inhabitants of Scandinavia, Eng. Trans. ed. Lubbock, p. 167: “Aristocracy
is strongly developed amongst all savage nations.”
* As regards the size of the Fezzan dates, the dates of the Garamantes referred to
by Herodotus, iv. 183, as living ten days’ journey from Augila westwards, and as
having potvºrces capiropópot troAAoi karátrep kai év tofort érépouot, we have the following
information from Dr. Ed. Vogel, cit. Seemann, l.c. pp. 285, 286 : “The largest date of
Fezzan (which is also the best) is 21; Parisian lines and Io in diameter, the smallest
7% by 5.” Lyon, in his ‘Narrative of Travels in North Africa,’ 1821, p. 72, tells us,
‘the dates of Sockan in Fezzan are of a quality far superior to any produced in the
north of Africa.’ Herodotus, iv. I72 : Aioxtoréav Bě roſtov rô mpôs éotrépms àxovrat
Nagapóves, 36Vos éðv troAAóv. of to 64pos karaxeſ movres émi tº 6a)\éoon rô mpó8ara,
āvaſaivovat is Aiyuka x&pov, Ötrapueovres roës poivukas' oi 5è troAAoi Ital épiquxaq,ées
treqūkaol, trávres éðvres kapropópot' roës 8° àrre&é8ous treav 6mpeiiooat, aiºvavrés mp3s
röv #Atov karaXéovoi, kai énetta èrt yaxa truträggovres trivovot. Yvvaſkas 68 vopuiçovres
troAAás Xew écaoros étricouvov airéav trouetivral tºw pištvº Tpótrºp trapatamaſq, tº ka?
Maogaºyétat, tiredv okitova mpoatãowvtal pito yovrat. Trpárov 87 yapéovros Naorapºvos
divöpós vôpos éorè rºw vipºp.my vukri ră mpárrp 5ud trävrov ŠteffeX6eſv ráðv Šavrvpióvov
pua yopévnv' rôv 6' dis #icaotós oi pux0ſ, Stöof Sãºpov ré àv čxt, pepóplevos é oikov.
‘Opiciouot be kai uavruki, Xpéantal rouſſée. 'Ouviſova, uév roës trapa org tow divöpas 8t-
ratorárovs kal dptorovs Aeyop,évous yewégéal, rotºrovs, rôv rápigov dimtépévot. Mav-
rečovrat 8& #tri rāv mpoyávay pouréovres rà a huara, ka? bearevčápºevol étruſcarakoupiéovtat:
rô 5’ &v föm év rà èpel evimviov, rotºrq, xpārat. IIto riot 38 roupotöe xpéavrai tº tºs
Xelpös Stöof meſv, kal airós it rās rot répov trivet fiv 52 pº #xool inpöv pmöèv, oi 5*
rfis xapºd.6ev atroëof Aabóvres Aetxovat.
3 H
834 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
these latter pistilliferous trees. Of course this statement would
need supplementation by one which he may very well have supposed
his readers would take for granted, to the effect that the Nasamones
(and probably the Garamantes) brought the male flowers from a
distance, carefully selecting those liberaliori quodam vigore ac pleniori
habitu, just as Kaempfer, p. 672, tells us the Persian date-farmers
did; this being, in fact, pretty nearly the whole of what is required
in the way of cultivating the date-palm. The palms resorted to,
at least by the Nasamones, were large; they could not, therefore,
have been wild date-palms; and being thus proved to be more or
less under the care of man, they are, secondly, proved to have been
even more under that care and more dependent upon it than culti-
wated palms elsewhere, inasmuch as the pollen necessary for ferti-
lising their flowers had to be brought to them from a distance, the
bridging over of which could only be effected by man’s intervention
at fixed intervals. My argument, in other words, lies in the fact
that a tribe, which, being of very priscan habits and customs,
cannot be supposed to have borrowed much from its more civilised
neighbours, was, nevertheless, credited in the time of Herodotus
with possessing groves of cultivated and exclusively female date-
palms, which bore large and, we may perhaps infer, excellent dates,
as they still continue to do.
We have furnished to us in modern times a verifiable history
very closely parallel with that which I here suggest ; the Elaeis
guineensis is undoubtedly, as a cultivated plant, an acquisition of
negro minds; and as Hartmann says, l.c. p. I 18, this acquisition
has been made for us by a race which still carries on the practice of
human sacrifices; and that in sight of European factories and
European steamboats, much as the Nasamones, whom I suppose to
have discovered the cultivation of another palm, carried on their
polyandry almost within sight of the Egyptian pyramids. ‘The
thing that hath been is the thing that shall be.’
The picture before you from Kaempfer's ‘Amoenitates Exoticae,’
p. 711, Tab. iii. Fasc. iv. 1711, coupled with his comment" upon
the scene of enjoyment which it represents, and in which the palm-
* * Hi sunt palmicolarum in messe, ut sic loquar, dactylifera lusus magis quam labores,
neutiquam cum nostratium agricolarum infinitis occupationibus comparandi. Heu
ilias hic laborum ! dum agros effringimus, subaramus et resulcamus ; dum occamus et
liramus, runcamus et refarrimus. . . Secus sentias de ambrosiis dapibus Persarum et
Arabum; hae gratis omnino et solo almae naturae munere conferuntur.’
PRODUCED BY MAN. 835
trees play so essential a part, may remind us of Linnaeus's often-
quoted saying, ‘Man dwells naturally within the tropics, and lives
on the fruit of the palm-tree; he easists in other parts of the world,
and makes shift to feed on corn and flesh.” But it may suggest a
little more than this. It may cause us to think seriously on the
question what will be, not the effect on external nature which man’s
action will produce, but what will be the effect which external
nature will produce upon man, if by some recrudescence of a glacial
period, either in a geological sense, or in the economic sense, which
an exhaustion of our supply of Nearctic as well as Palaearctic coal
would, in the absence of any substitute, bring about, we should be
driven southwards, and become tropico- instead of cosmopolitan.
What will be the effect of the easy terms upon which life can be
maintained in the tropics upon the species which has hitherto
never developed a lasting civilisation except under the stimulation
‘curis acuens mortalia corda’ of northern latitudes or mountain
elevation + 2 How will it fare with intellectual culture when and
where, not to speak any further of our date-palm, the cocoanut-palm,
the banana, the breadfruit, will make exertion so all but superfluous
for the dura a stirpe genera who now govern the world? If we are
to guide ourselves as we peer into the twilight of the future by
what we can see going on in the broad Mediterranean noonday of the
present, the example of the idle Corsican is not altogether en-
couraging. A Corsican family, we are told by their French fellow-
citizens”, with a couple of dozen of chestnut-trees, and with a herd
of goats which ‘find themselves,’ to the great disgust of all
botanists, have no aspirations left to satisfy beyond that of being
able to buy a gun, to the great disgust of all sportsmen. In
a matter of prophesying, Sir, the argument from authority and
authorities has its legitimate place, and upon the present occasion
it happens to have a very legitimate time *. I have in a work on
‘Hereditary Genius,’ published in the year 1869, found it stated
that “No Englishman of the nineteenth century is purely nomadic:’
and that even the most so among them have also inherited many
civilised cravings which are necessarily starved, and thus entail
* Wallace, “Natural Selection, p. 318; and Bonstetten, “L’homme du Midi et
1'homme du Nord,' 1826, passim.
* Hehn, l.c. p. 346.
* [On the evening when this lecture was delivered the chair was occupied by
Francis Galton, Esq., F.R.S., author of a work on Hereditary Genius.-EDITOR.]
3 H 2.
836 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
personal discomfort and create the required stimulus for their
gratification, when they are tempted to let themselves lapse into
savage Corsican sloth. In the thousands of years which may yet
intervene between us and the necessity for a southward exodus,
these cravings and uneasinesses will have become more inseparably
a part of our nature than even the most optimistically-minded
member of the London School Board can as yet assert they have
become. I have not far to look for another authority who will
assure us that the desire and appetite for intellectual enjoyment
may become as really a ‘constitutional demand’ as those lower
stimuli which in ‘old, unhappy, far-off times’ enabled man to
subdue other gregarious animals to his own uses, and, so aided, to
overrun victoriously the whole globe. Your secretary, Mr. Bates,
after eleven years of absence from England, to which the world
owes his charming work the “Naturalist on the River Amazon,’
and after seeing many tribes living in the happy position in which
a moderate amount of light work will produce for the simple,
peaceful, and friendly people all the necessaries of their simple life
(l.c. vol. ii. p. 137 of the ‘Mundurucus’), found yet (p. 416)—
“after three years of renewed experience of England, how incomparably superior is
civilised life, where feelings, tastes, and intellect find abundant nourishment, to the
spiritual sterility of half-savage existence, even if it were passed in the garden of
Eden. What has struck me,’ says Mr. Bates, ‘powerfully is the immeasurably greater
diversity and interest of human character and social conditions in a single civilised
nation, than in equatorial South America, where three distinct races of man live toge-
ther. The superiority of the bleak north to tropical regions, however, is only in their
social aspect, for I hold to the opinion that although humanity can reach an advanced
state of culture only by battling with the inclemencies of nature in high latitudes, it
is under the equator alone that the perfect race of the future will attain to complete
fruition of man's beautiful heritage, the earth'.”
* V. Baer, who after making himself in his earliest years a prince among biologists,
became in his later years a not inconsiderable geographer, expressed himself in Russian
so long ago as 1848 in one of the geographical manuals of the Geographical Society of
Russia to much the same effect as the two writers above quoted. His words were
translated into German no earlier than 1873, and stand as follows in his ‘Studien aus
dem Gebiete der Naturwissenschaft, Theil ii. Hålfte i. pp. 45–46:—
* Mit recht propheziet daher aus dieser Productions-Kraft der Tropenwelt ein
geistreicher Botaniker, Herr Meier in Königsberg, dass der Mensch, in der civilisirten
Welt rasch sich mehrend, in die heisse Zone zurückwandern werde. Jamaica allein, so
gross ungefähr als das Königreich Sachsen, werde vielleicht 25, ganz gewiss aber 12%
Mal so viel Menschen ernähren können als Sachsen. Und wie viele, setzen wir
hinzu, die Waldfläche Brasiliens! Verkehrt genug mennt man diesen Boden einen
jungfraulichen. Er trug nur für den Menschen bisher wenig Frucht. Dagegen hat
der Haushalt der Natur Jahrtausende hindurch in ihm organischen Stoff aufge-
PRODUCED BY MAN. 837
It is something like an anti-climax to suggest that even when
man is in the tropics and is surrounded there with all the luscious
temptations which the cultivation of those latitudes will give him
on such easy terms, he will still be beset with certain urgent needs
in the way of supplying his bodily wants as well as his cravings
for intellectual excitement and employments. For it is a mistake
to think that the craving for flesh and even for fatty foods becomes
at all obsolete in tropical countries, or that man is at all less of a
flesh-feeder in the regions which are now at least the selected
localities of the most typical flesh-feeders, from Carnivora in his own
class–through the vertebrate snakes down to Arachnida in the
Invertebrata–than he is in the picturesque wilds where the flesh-
speichert für die Menschen, die noch kommen sollen, sowie in andern Gegenden früher,
als die Erdrinde sich bildete, in ihr Steinkohlen vergraben wurden als ungeheure
Magazine von Brennstoff für eine Zeit, in welcher das vermehrte Menschengeschlecht
den Waldwuchs sehr beschränkt haben wird. Aber der Mensch, der aus Europa
zurückwandert in die Heimath, aus der er ursprünglich ausgewandert ist, bringt einen
Gewinn mit, den er unter den Tropen nirgends erlangt hat, die Liebe zur Arbeit, die
Schätze der Wissenschaft, die Künste der Industrie und die Einsicht in die Bedürfnisse
eines geordneten Staatslebens. Damit könnte er freilich die arbeitscheuen Natur-
zustände der früher dort ansässigen Völker erdrücken. Aber man darf hoffen, dass
unter dessen auch die humane Gesinnung immer mehr sich fest gesetzt haben wird,
dass der weiter vorgeschrittene Mensch erkennt, dass er kein Recht hat, den unent-
wickelten jüngern Bruder zu unterdrücken, sondern die Verpflichtung, ihn schonend
weiter zu bilden; dass die Erde ein grosses Waisenhaus ist in welchem die soge-
nannten Wilden die zahlreichen Waisen sind. Man darf erwarten, dass unter den
Tropen, wo weniger Zeit für die Production der Nahrungsmittel erfordert wird, wo
die Natur sie an Bäumen reifen lässt, die geistige Bildung viel allgemeinen werden
muss als im Norden. In der That hat doch in Mittel-Europa, ich spreche nicht
einmal von unserem Norden, nur der kleinste Theil der Bewohner Musse genug, um
die geistigen Anlagen, die in ihm schlummern, auszubilden, während die bei weitem
grössere Anzahl das ganze Jahr hindurch beschäftigt ist, den Nahrungsstoff zu be-
reiten. Wie viel mehr Musse hat schon die arbeitende Klasse in Italien! Auch hat
sie nicht aufgehört, an Kunst und Wissenschaft sich zu ergötzen, und wird dafür von
uns Nordländern mit Unrecht, wie ich glaube, träge genannt. Europa scheint mir
also für die Geschichte der Menschheit, wenn wir sie in grossen Umrissen überblicken, die
hohe Schule, wo sie zur Arbeit gezwungen wurde und geistige Beschäftigung lieben lernte.
Möchten unsre Nachkommen der 3osten und 3oosten Generation, wenn sie im üppigen
Ceylon oder in der ewig gleichmässigen Temperatur der Südsee-Inseln im Schatten der
Palmen über die Schicksale der Menschheit nachdenken, anerkennen, dass wir die
Schulzeit im Norden nicht schlecht verwendeten, sondern geistige Gaben auf sie vererbt
haben, die unter den Tropen nicht gedeihen konnten, denn noch jezt lebt der Naturmensch
dort in sorgenloser Kindheit. Möchten sie, wenn sie wissenschaftliche Reisen in den
Norden unternehmen um den Schnee mit eigenen Augen zu erblicken, mit dankbarer
Achtung auf die Ruinen unserer Schul- und Arbeitshäusen sehen."
Mr. Herbert Spencer speaks to the same effect in his“ Principles of Biology, vol. ii.
PP. 5O2-Z.
838 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
furnishing Cheviot sheep are so abundantly forthcoming as to enter
even into the landscape. It were a still greater and more serious
mistake if any one were to compare, for succulence or sapidity, the
flesh-food as yet procurable in the tropics with that which we have
furnished us in every well-ordered house, and even hostel, in the
United Kingdom of the chilly and rainy isles.
The subject is not altogether romantic, as I have already
acknowledged; there is the more reason therefore for putting its
practical side prominently forward, and thereby, as we may hope,
doing something, however humble, for the bettering of man's
estate. That it is not altogether visionary to hope for some im-
provement in this direction, or to strive to make acquisitions in the
way of domestication under a tropical of the same kind as those
which our forefathers made under a Central Asiatic sun, the follow-
ing utterance of the late Dr. J. E. Gray, of the British Museum,
an authority untainted with enthusiasm, may be taken as showing.
Speaking at the 1864 (Bath) Meeting of the British Association
(see Report of Address, p. 83, in Transactions of Sections) of our
at present available domestic animals, Dr. Gray said:—
‘An attentive study of the list, and of the peculiarities of the animals composing it,
induces me to believe that, in attempting to introduce new domestic animals, into
some of our colonies, it would be desirable not to confine ourselves to the European
breeds, but to ascertain whether some of the domestic races of Asia or Africa might
not be better adapted to the climate and other conditions of the colony, although for
reasons, to which I have before adverted, it would neither be worth the trouble, nor
consistent with good policy, to attempt their introduction here.
“There is evidently ample room for such experiments, which might be advantageously
made, for instance, in the colonies of the coast of Africa, where our horse, ass, oxen,
sheep, and goats, and even dogs, have greatly degenerated, where the horse and the
ass live only for a brief period, where the flesh of the ox and sheep is described as bad
and rare, and the flesh of the goat, which is more common, is said to be tasteless and
stringy. The pig alone, of all our domestic animals, seems to bear the change with
equanimity: and the produce of the ‘milch pig’ is often sold to passengers of the
mail packets, and the ships on the stations, as the milk of the cow, or even the goat,
is rarely to be obtained. Unfortunately both the white and the black inhabitants are
merely sojourners in the land, and do not seem to possess sufficient energy or in-
clination to make the experiment themselves.”
There is a more serious aspect or rather prospect of our future
relation to the animal world. In this realm of activity, as in some
others, we have of late been very rapidly extending our responsi-
bilities. A man needs not to have spent years in the Malay
Archipelago as Mr. Wallace has done, nor in the very different
FRODUCED BY MAN. 839
surroundings of Siberia as Middendorff has done, nor, Sir, in those
of South Africa, to be convinced that the numbers of domesticated
animals, I do not say of species of domesticated animals, will
assuredly, and at no such very distant period, gain a relative mag-
nitude of which our forefathers, who so patiently won them for us
from savagery, could have had no conception. And that earlier
than the attainment of this relative preponderance, the domestic
animals on this world's surface will be nearly the only large land
animals left upon it, and that the wild ones will be but pigmy
vermin, ‘winzige Ungeziefer’ in Middendorff’s words, or, at least,
less noble animals, is equally evident. For example, we can see as
regards the lion, the king of beasts, that the breach-loading rifle is
now rapidly completing what the smooth-bore, with flint and steel,
began; for whereas he loses his life by his boldness in coming out
into the open, we have in one part of the Old World the tiger, and
in another the hyaena, substituted for him, a change in neither case
much or at all for the better.
I have no reason for doubting that in these days we all consciously
strive to act up to what has been spoken of, though not wholly cor-
rectly, as ‘the new commandment of the nineteenth century,’
‘Thou shalt not be cruel;’ and I sincerely trust, that as regards all
animals, domestic and wild, whether in the fields or in the streets
and shambles, whether in the woods or within walls, this command-
ment may, like some others, attain greater extension in practice,
as its many-sided applicability becomes more and more manifest.
But I think that, even without our intending it, the extension of
domestication has increased the sum total of lower animal happiness.
A South African traveller, Sir, whose authority you will not repu-
diate, and we shall not even question, has told us (Galton,
“Domestication of Animals,’ Trans. Ethnog. Soc. iii. N. S. 1865, p.
122), from his own observation of the still very really wild life of
those regions, that it is not after all such unmixed happiness as
persons might think, who have never crouched by night by the
side of pools in that thirsty land, and watched how nightly drink-
ing, even of water, may lead to much misery. “The life of all
beasts,’ says that writer, ‘in their wild state, is an exceedingly
anxious one. From my own recollection, I believe that every
antelope in South Africa has to run for its life every one or two
days upon an average, and that he starts or gallops under the
840 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
influence of a false alarm many times in the day.” Surely whatever
the biped, who can foresee and ponderate, may think of the lot and
the future of the domestic Ruminants, their lot, to themselves, as
they are not troubled with anticipations, totals up an aggregate of
comfort and even of enjoyment far exceeding that which the majority
of wild graminivorous creatures of similar bulk ever obtain. A
flock of well-fed Cheviots, on a snowy moor, in all their hornless-
ness and helplessness as against violence, shows the traveller that
he is in a country whence wolves have entirely disappeared ; would
their lot be happier if they were exposed not merely to the winds
and sleets of Northumbria, but also to the attacks of wolves to
which even in France and Germany they would be liable?
We need not, however, travel in South Africa, as you have
done, to prove the point that dog-fights and bull-fights, cockpits
and shambles notwithstanding, domestication has, on the whole,
increased the sum of the happiness of the lower animals. Let us
by an easy effort of imagination figure to ourselves what would
become of the flocks and herds of sheep and oxen, “even very much
cattle,” which are now living with as large a share of enjoyments
as, and a very much larger share of leisure at least than many of
their masters, if those masters were one and all to be swept away
by some epidemic. Suppose, as Dr. Roberts in his memoir on
‘Spontaneous Generation’ (p. 39) has suggested, that the ferment
which produces some one or other of our worse forms of infectious
disease should ‘sport, as it is playfully styled, or vary, as a peach
may sport or vary into a nectarine; and then suppose that the in-
creased malignity and infectiousness with which it might thus
become endowed, should as entirely destroy our own species within
these Islands, as of late years disease has been known to entirely
depopulate certain Polynesian islets, or as some analogously-de-
veloped disease may be supposed to have exterminated the horse in
South America within recent geological periods. There can be
very little doubt in the mind of anybody who has much experience
of the power of combination for mischief which dogs can, indepen-
dently of men, develope, even in a civilised and thickly populated
country, that in a few days after our disappearance they would be
masters of the country. The mere desire for blood which is so
eminently characteristic of the musteline carnivores would very
shortly and certainly show itself again in our old servants in their
PRODUCED BY MAN. 841
Saturnalia; and in a very short time the entire race of sheep, ex-
cept in a few mountain districts, would have been as wastefully
slaughtered for their blood and fat as flocks and herds have been
and still are slaughtered by us in Australia or South America. Oxen
would hold out a little longer than sheep, and pigs, I incline to
think, longer than either. But that a great diminution of the sum
total of brute enjoyment, and, if such a thing there be, of brute
happiness also, would take place after we had disappeared, I think
needs no demonstration, especially to anybody who, without any
experience of any canine mutiny, has ever studied the phenomena
of a dog-show or listened at night to the opera which its denizens
perform. The various races which, without exactly being do-
mesticated, stand yet on the borderland separating wild from
domesticated life, would also very shortly and very sharply have
brought home to them the fact of their being more dependent on
man than perhaps either they or we have entirely recognised.
Rabbits and hares, pheasants and partridges, if they had reason,
would reasonably regret the times when they viewed, with some-
thing perhaps of disgust, the slouching form of the gamekeeper
with his double-barrelled shot-gun perambulating the ridings in the
woods and skirting their sunny boundaries. Cats and weasels
would with little less delay than the dogs make the life of quad-
rupeds just specified as miserable as that of the sheep and ox had
already been made ; and would, after the lapse of a year or two,
with the aid of hawks and corvidae of several kinds, greatly thin
their numbers. The river embankments on the lower Thames,
lastly, which excited the admiration of Sir Christopher Wren, and
were referred by him to the time of the Romans, and also those
on many other rivers, having no one to repair any of the breaches
which floods would make in them, would before very long allow a
very large acreage of land to become swamp, marsh, and lagune ;
not only thus, on the one hand, depriving many species of animals
of their means of subsistence, but also on the other introducing pre-
datory birds, such as gulls, and accelerating the disappearance of
many others which really hold their own in such neighbourhoods
even now only by man's protection and thanks to his presence.
The purview of this prophecy extends no further than the pre-
cincts of the British Islands; in continental countries organic
nature would more completely resort to the condition it was in
842 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
before it began to be modified by man's interference; the Regnum
Hominis would not be succeeded by the Regnum Canum familiarium,
but by that of Canum luporum; and generally the larger ferae naturae,
both those which eat others and those which are eaten by others,
would resume an importance even in the landscape which their
extirpation within our four seas has rendered an impossibility for
all future time short of the time when the Channel will once again
become dry land.
In concluding a Lecture the title of which might serve for the
often-to-be-repeated title of many successive and closely printed
volumes, let me take as a text the following words from Victor
Hehn's book (‘Kulturpflanzen und Hausthiere,’ 3rd edition, 1877;
Berlin; p. 435), to which I owe more even than I have expressed:
“Was die moderne Welt von der alten unterscheidet ist Natur-
wissenschaft, Technik und Naturalókonomie ’—what makes the
modern world to differ from the old is natural science, command of
apparatus, and political economy. As regards this last differential
peculiarity, I have to remark that Herr Victor Hehn's last edition
bears the date of 1877, and that, consequently, he cannot have had
colonial tariffs either of Melbourne or of Canada before his eyes;
nor, though living in Berlin, could he have heard the words uttered
there only ten days ago, though they were in an authoritative voice
(see ‘Times, May 2nd); nor, finally, could he have been present
at a meeting attended in Paris by the representatives of no less
than fifty-eight Chambers of Commerce on the very day before,
the first, that is, not of April, but of May in this very year of
grace 1879. Otherwise I cannot but think that Herr Hehn would
not have said the political economy of the present, either as put out
in words, or as carried out in practice, was so very different from
that of ancient times. To any one at all thick of sight or hard of
hearing the proportions of any such difference are wholly inappre-
ciable. I turned to what was one of the favourite studies of my
youth, my Aristophanes, and I find Dicaeopolis", to adapting whose
* Acharn. 33–36:—
röv 6' plov 67pov troëóv,
ës oščetrántor eirev, div6pacas trptoo,
dAA’ airós éqepe trávra xd, uptov dirfiv.
Cato and Varro appear, according to the passage given in Hehn, p. 425, to have been
similarly in the dark, the first of these averring, 2.5, in words very nearly reproducing
that of Dicaeopolis, ‘Patrem familias vendacem non emacem esse oportet,” whilst the
PRODUCED BY MAN. 843
name Prince Bismarck would, I apprehend, as little object as it
would seem he does to adopting his principles, sighing for the
time when he would get back to his farm, the articles consumed
in which at least were “reserved for native industry.’ The amount
of difference between these views and those of the statesman just
mentioned, or those of M. Pouyer-Quertier, or of another country-
man of MM. Quesnay, Turgot, and Chevalier who is reported in
the same ‘Times’ of Friday, May 2nd, no time having been lost
in giving these valuable views to the world, to have averred
that an increase in the imports denoted the impoverishment of a
country, I must, as did Captain Lemuel Gulliver under some-
what similar circumstances in Laputa, profess myself to be ‘not
skilful enough to comprehend.” What is shown seems to me
to be that in modern not less than in ancient times men will
run their heads against the multiplication table, and that for the
passing moment, at least, it is not always the heads which come
off second best in the encounter.
Of the second difference between the old world and the new
which our command of methods and means, our recognition of the
futility of attempting enterprises with a manus nuda and an intel-
lectus sibi permissus, has created, the gas, glass, and coal around us
in this room speak, and I need not.
As regards the third great point of contrast upon which Herr
Hehn insists, that of natural science, we are all probably at one
with him. Our agreement may be illustrated by contrasting the
different factors which two poets, each an artist capable of taking a
wide view with due perspective and proportion of the sum of man's
activities, have in ancient and modern times respectively enu-
merated as making up that sum. When Juvenal specifies what he
means by ‘Quidguid agunt homines,’ the comprehensive title of
his satires, he enumerates nothing—because, I suppose, he considered
all else beneath the dignity of a poet—but
‘Votum, timor, ira, voluptas,
Gaudia, discursus"—
large enough matters, but imponderables all of them. Contrast
these items, I purposely speak in Philistine phraseology—with
latter enjoined, 1. 22. 1, in words which the Chambers of Commerce aforesaid re-echoed
in their modified Roman tongue, “Quae nasci in fundo ac fieri a domesticis poterunt,
eorum ne quid ematur.”
844 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE
those which our present Poet-Laureate enumerates in epexegesis of
the “march of mind;’ there we have the line,
“In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind,”
— ponderables and imponderables severally holding their due
mutual proportion. And from this line I can pass in this place by
a natural and locally suggested transition to what I believe to be
as large a difference between the ancient and modern world as
either of the two last touched upon. The whole of the old world,
of the orbis veteribus notus, of Tāora ji oikovpuéum, was but a small
fragment as measured by the geographer when compared with the
world dealt with by our emigration agents and Custom-house officers.
The discovery of America has been said to have exercised much the
sort of influence upon the old world, socially and politically, that
the approximation to our globe of some new planet would exercise
astronomically; and since those “spacious times of great Elizabeth’
China, Japan, Australia, and Polynesia have each entered into the
circle of influences acting upon and acted on by the world as
known to the classical writers. In speaking of any district beyond
those in relation with the valleys of the Euphrates, the Danube,
the Rhine, the Rhone, and the shores of the Mediterranean
and Black Sea, the ancients would but say in really pathetic
antithesis: y
‘Longa procul longis via dividit invia terris.’
The Brindisi mail brings every manager of a museum, as well as
every secretary for the colonies, into weekly relation with ‘regions
Caesar never knew,” by agencies of which he never dreamt and of
which in our own times the greatest perhaps of his successors,
fortunately for us, as he is reported to have remarked in Plymouth
Sound, never learnt to avail himself. And it is in reference to the
all-pervading intercommunication which the application of steam
to navigation has rendered possible that I wish to utter two con-
cluding sentences, not respecting the vast contrast which it has set
up between the present and all preceding centuries, but respecting
the contrast which it will shortly have created between the present
and all future times. Before this application had established high-
ways on the ocean and invented machinery which,
‘Spurning sails and scorning oars,
Keeps faith with time on distant shores,
PRODUCED BY MAN. 845
it was possible on many an oceanic island to recover links which
had fallen out of the chain of evidence as to the origin of species
which the older and larger continents of dry land had furnished; it
was possible also to elucidate the origin, humble and lowly enough,
of our own civilisation by what we could see, and not less by what
we might fail to discover, in the inchoate civilisations, in similar
localities, of semi-savage men. The lines of intercommunication
between the most distant parts of our globe, which the navigator
with, in his own language, ‘a steam-engine under his foot,' is daily
weaving into a more and more nearly all-encompassing web, will
very shortly have introduced so much of the most recent results of
our modern civilisation into what were but lately the most secluded
of localities as to rob them of that value and interest for the pur-
suers of the knowledge specified, which they up to a few years ago
so eminently possessed.
These few years—for they will be but few—to come, have a great
responsibility put upon them in the way of preserving those perish-
able and destructible links in the history of the past, which may be
made incandescent and luminous for the advancement of knowledge,
and to some not inconsiderable extent for the benefiting of man's
estate.
In this work the Society, which has honoured me by inviting me
to address them this evening, has borne a distinguished part in the
past, and I cannot doubt, but, on the contrary, have many reasons
for believing, that it will bear an increasingly important one in the
future.
XLIII.
BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES,
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE BIOLOGICAL SECTION OF THE
BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE.
AMONGST the duties of a President of a Section the delivery of
an Address has in these latter days somehow come to be reckoned ;
and that I may interpose myself for but as short a time as possible
between your attention and the papers announced to you for read-
ing upon your list, I will begin what I have to say without any
further preface.
I wish first to make a few observations as to the kind of prepara-
tion which is indispensable, as it seems to me, as a preliminary to
an adequate and intelligent comprehension of the problems of
biology; or, in other words, to an adequate and intelligent com-
prehension of the discussions which will take place in this room
and in the two other rooms which will be assigned to, and occupied
by, the department of Ethnology and Anthropology, and that of
Physiology pure and proper, with Anatomy.
Having made these observations, I propose, in the second place,
to enumerate the subjects which appear likely to occupy prominent
places in our forthcoming discussions; and thirdly, I will, if your
patience allows me, conclude with some remarks as to certain of
the benefits which may be expected, as having been constantly
observed to flow from a due and full devotion to biological study.
In the first place, then, I wish to say that though the problems
of biology have much of what is called general interest (that is to
say, of interest for all persons) attaching to them,-as, indeed, how
could they fail to have, including as they do the natural history of
our own and of all other species of living organisms, whether
animal or vegetable?—some special preparation must be gone
through if that general interest is to be thoroughly and intelli-
gently gratified. I would compare the realm of biology to a vast
landscape in a cultivated country of which extensive views may be
BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 847
obtained from an eminence, but for the full and thorough appre-
ciation of which it is necessary that the gazer should himself have
cultivated some portion, however small, of the expanse at his feet.
It is, of course, a matter of regret to think that persons can be
found who look upon an actual landscape without any thought or
knowledge as to how the various factors which make up its com-
plex beauty have come to co-operate, how the hand of man is recog-
nisable here, how the dip of the strata is visible there, and how
their alternation is detectable in another place as the potent agency
in giving its distinctive features; but I take it that real and per-
manent, however imperfect, pleasure may be drawn from the con-
templation of scenery by persons who are ignorant of all these
things. I do not think this is the case when we here deal with
coup d'oeil views of biology. The amount of the special knowledge,
the extent of the special training need not necessarily be great;
but some such special knowledge and training there must be if the
problems and argumentations familiar to the professed biologist are
to be understood and grasped by persons whose whole lives are not
devoted to the subject, so as to form for them acquisitions of real
and vital knowledge.
The microscope has done very much (indeed I may say it has
done almost all that is necessary) for enabling all persons to obtain
the necessary minimum of practical and personal acquaintance with
the arrangements of the natural world of which I am speaking.
The glass trough used in Edinburgh, the invention of John Good-
sir, whose genius showed itself, as genius often does show itself, in
simple inventions, can be made into a miniature aquarium (I pur-
posely use a word which calls up the idea of an indoors apparatus,
wishing thereby to show how the means I recommend are within
the reach of all persons); and in it, lying as it does horizontally
and underlain as it is by a condenser, animal and vegetable or-
ganisms can be observed at any and at all hours, and continuously,
and with tolerably high magnifying-powers even whilst undisturbed.
Thus is gained an admirable field for the self-discipline in question.
The microscope which should be used by preference for exploring
and watching such an aquarium should be such a one as is figured
in Quekett's work on the Microscope (p. 58, fig. 36), as consisting
of a stem with a stout steadying base, and of a horizontal arm
some 9 inches long, which can carry indifferently simple lenses or a
848 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES.
compound body. I think of the two it is better that the aquarium
should be horizontal rather than the microscope; and those who
think with me in this matter can nevertheless combine for them-
selves the advantages of the horizontal position of the instrument
with those of the horizontal position of the objects observed by
modifying the eyepiece in the way figured by Quekett (p. 381,
fig. 266). It would be a long task to enumerate fully all the
scientific lessons which may be gathered, first, and all the educa-
tional agencies, secondly, which may be set and kept in move—
ment by a person who possesses himself of this simple apparatus.
The mutual interdependence of the animal and vegetable kingdoms,
their solidarité as the French have called it, and as the Germans
have called it too, copying herein the French, is one of the first
lessons the observer has forced upon him ; the influence of
physical and chemical agencies upon the growth and development
of living beings he soon finds strikingly illustrated; the mysterious
process of development itself is readily observable in the eggs of
the common water-snails and in those of freshwater fish, so that
the way in which the various organs and systems of organs are
chiselled out, built up, and finally packed together and stratified
can be taken note of in these yet transparent representatives of
these great sub-kingdoms which all the while are undisturbed and
at peace: and all these points of large interest are but a few of
many which these small means will enable any one to master for
himself in the concrete actuality, and thoroughly. The necessity
for carefulness and truthfulness in recording what is seen, the
necessity for keeping in such records what one observes quite dis-
tinct from what one infers, the necessity for patience and punctu-
ality, are lessons which, from having a moral factor as well as a
scientific one in their composition, I may specify as belonging
to the educational lessons which may be gathered from such a
course of study. -
I have been speaking of the microscope as an instrument of
education, and I wish before leaving the subject to utter one caution
as to its use when this particular object of education is in view.
If a subject is to act educationally, it must be understood
thoroughly; and if a subject is to be understood thoroughly, it
must form one segment or stretch in a continuous chain of known
facts. ’Apktéov čtrö Tóv yuapſuov, said one of the greatest of
BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 849
educators; you must start from some previously existing basis of
knowledge, and keep your communications with it uninterrupted if
your knowledge is not to be unreal. And my concrete application
of these generalities is contained in the advice that no sudden jump
be made from observations carried on with the naked eye to ob-
servations carried on with the highest powers of the microscope.
I am speaking of the course to be pursued by beginners, and
beginners we all were once; and if our places are to be filled (and
filled they will be) by better men, as we hope, than ourselves, they
will have to be filled, we also hope, by men who have yet to become
beginners. It is in their interest I have been speaking; and I say
that a beginner does not ordinarily get an intelligent conception of
the revelations of the microscope except in Bacon’s words, Ascen-
dendo continenter et gradatim, by progressing gradually from ob-
servations with the naked eye through observations dependent upon
dissecting-lenses, doublets by preference, and the lower powers of
the compound microscope, up to observations to be made with the
higher and highest magnifying-powers. Unless he ascends by
gradations from organs and systems to structures and tissues and
cells, his wonder and admiration at the results of the ultimate
microscope analysis, of what he had but a moment before knowledge
of only in the concrete and by the naked eye, is likely to be but
unintelligent.
There are three other agencies which can be set into activity
with nearly as little trouble and difficulty as the simple apparatus
of which I have just been speaking, and which will, like it, secure
for us the necessary preliminary discipline or ‘ Propädeutik” for the
rational comprehension of Biology. These are Local Museums,
Local Field Clubs, and Local Natural Histories. Local authorities,
persons of local influence, should engage and interest themselves in
the starting into life of the two former of these agencies; and if
some such person as Gilbert White could be found in each county
to write the Natural History of its Selborne, I know not at what
cost it would not be well to retain his services. As the world is
governed, upon each particular area of its surface there is to be
found a certain percentage of the population occupying it who have
special calls for particular lines of study. It is the interest of each
country to have such means and such institutions in being as will
render it possible to detect the existence of persons gifted with such
3 I
850 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES.
special vocations, to give the talent thus entrusted to them fair
scope for development, and to render smaller the risk of their dying
mute and inglorious. A young man who is possessed of a talent
for Natural Science and Physical Inquiry generally, may have the
knowledge of this predisposition made known to himself and to
others, for the first time, by his introduction to a well-arranged
Local Museum. In such an institution, either all at once, or
gradually, the conviction may spring up within him that the in-
vestigation of physical problems is the line of investigation to
which he should be content to devote himself, relinquishing the
pursuit of other things; and then, if the museum in question is
really a well-arranged one, a recruit may be thereby won for the
growing army of physical investigators, and one more man saved
from the misery of finding, when he has been taken into some other
career, that he has, somehow or other, mistaken his profession, and
made of his career one life-long mistake.
Here comes the question, What is a well-arranged museum ?
The answer is, a well-arranged museum, for the particular purpose
of which we are speaking, is one in which the natural objects which
belong to the locality, and which have already struck upon the eye
of such a person as the one contemplated, are clearly explained in a
well-arranged catalogue. The curiosity which is the mother of
science is not awakened for the first time in the museum, but out
of doors, in the wood, by the side of the brook, on the hillside, by
scarped cliff and quarried stone; it is the function of the museum,
by rendering possible the intellectual pleasure, which grows out of
the surprise with which a novice first notes the working of his
faculty of inspiration, to prevent this curiosity from degenerating
into the mere woodman's craft of the gamekeeper, or the rough
empiricism of the farmer. The first step to be taken in a course of
natural instruction is the providing of means whereby the faculties
of observation and of verification may be called into activity; and
the first exercise the student should be set down to is that of recog-
nising, in the actual thing itself, the various properties and pecu-
liarities which some good book or some good catalogue tells him
are observable in it. This is the first step, and, as in some other
matters, ce n'est que le premier pas qui coiſte. And it need not cost
much. There is a name familiar to Section D, and, indeed, not
likely for a long while to be forgotten by members of the British
TBIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 851
Association generally, extrinsic means as well as the intrinsic merits
of the well-loved man conspiring to keep his memory fresh among
us, and the bearer of that name, Edward Forbes, has left it as his
opinion that “It is to the development of the provincial museums
that, I believe, we must in future look for the extension of intel-
lectual pursuits throughout the land.’ (Lecture ‘On the Educa-
tional Uses of Museums, delivered at the Museum of Practical
Geology and published in 1863. Cited by Toynbee, ‘Hints on the
Formation of Local Museums,’ 1863, p. 46.) With the words of
Edward Forbes I might do well to end what I have to say, but
I should like to say a word as to the policy of confining the contents
of a local museum to the natural-history specimens of the particular
locality. No doubt the first thing to be done is the collection of
the local specimens, and this alike in the interest of the potential
Cuviers and Hugh Millers who may be born in the district, and in
the interest of the man of science who may visit the place when on
his travels. But so long as a specimen from the antipodes or from
whatever corner of our world be really valuable, and be duly cata-
logued before it is admitted into the museum, so that the lesson it
has to teach may be learnable, I do not see my way towards
advising that foreign specimens be excluded. It is to my mind
more important that all specimens should be catalogued as soon
as received, than that any should be rejected when offered.
I must not occupy your time further with this portion of my
address. Let me first say that a person who wishes to know what
a Field Club can do for its members, and not for them only, but
for the world at large, will do well to purchase one, or any number
more than one, of the ‘Transactions of the Tyneside Naturalist's
Field Club; and that if there be any person who thinks that White's
‘Selborne’ relates to a time and place so far off that there can be
no truth in the book, and who yet would like to try upon himself
the working of the fourth of the disciplinary agencies of which I have
spoken, that, namely, of reading some local Natural History on the
spot of which it treats, and comparing it with the things them-
selves in situ, let him repair to Weymouth, and work and walk up
and down its cliffs and valleys with Mr. Damon's book in his
hands.
I shall not be suspected in this place and upon this occasion, nor,
as I hope, upon any other, of a wish to depreciate the value of
3 I 2
852 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES.
scientific instruction as an engine for training the mind; but
neither, on the other hand, should I wish to depreciate the value of
literary culture, my view of the relations of these two gymnastics
of the mind being the very simple, obvious, and natural one that
they should be harmoniously combined—
Alterius sic
Altera poscit opem res, et conjurat amice.
I know it may be said that there are difficulties in the way,
and especially practical difficulties; but I have always observed
that people who are good at finding out difficulties, and especially
practical difficulties, are like people who are good at finding out
excuses, good at finding out very little else. The various ways of
getting over these difficulties are obvious enough, and have been
hinted at or fully expressed by several writers of greater or less
authority on many occasions. It is, however, of some consequence
that I should here say what I believe has not been said before,
namely, that a purely and exclusively literary education, imperfect
and one-sided as it is, is still a better thing than a system of
scientific instruction (to abuse the use of the word for a moment) in
which there should be no courses of practical familiarising with
natural objects, verification, and experimentation. A purely literary
training, say, in dialectics, or what we are pleased to call logic,
to take a flagrant and glaring instance first, does confer certain
lower advantages upon the person who goes through it without any
discipline in the practical investigation of actual problems. By
going through such a training attentively, a man with a good
memory and a little freedom from over-scrupulousness, can convert
his mind into an arsenal of quips, quirks, retorts, and epigrams, out
of which he can, at his own pleasure, discharge a mitraille of
chopped straw and chaff-like arguments, against which no man of
ordinary fairness of mind can, for the moment, make head. It is
true that such sophists gain this dexterity at the cost of losing, in
every case, the power of fairly and fully appreciating or investi-
gating truth, of losing in many cases the faculty of sustaining and
maintaining serious attention to any subject, and of losing in some
cases even the power of writing. A well-known character in an
age happily, though only recently, gone by, who may be taken as
a Caesar worthy of such Antonies, used to speak of a pen as his
torpedo. Still they have their reward, they succeed now and then
BIOILOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 853
in convincing juries, and they are formidable at dinner-tables. It
would not be fair, however, not to say that a purély literary train-
ing can do much better things than this. By a purely classical
education a man, from being forced into seeing and feeling that
other men could look upon the world, moral, social, and physical,
with other (even if not with larger) eyes than ours, attains a cer-
tain flexibility of mind which enables him to enter into the
thoughts of other and living men; and this is a very desirable
attainment. And, finally, though I should be sorry to hold with a
French writer that the style makes the man, the benefit of being
early familiarised with writings which the peculiar social condition
of the classical times, so well pointed out by De Tocqueville (‘De
la Démocratie en Amérique,” i. 15), conspired and contributed not
a little to make models of style, is not to be despised. Such a
familiarity may not confer the power of imitating or rivalling such
compositions, but it may confer the power of appreciating their
excellences, the one power appearing to us to be analogous to the
power of the experimenter, and the other to that of the pure ob-
server in Natural Science; and we should undervalue neither.
Masters of Science, it must be confessed, are not always masters
of style; let not the single instance of last night tempt you to
generalise, it is but a single instance, the writings of the man
whom we in this section are most of us likely to look upon as our
master in Science have been spoken of by our President in his
recently published volume as ‘intellectual pemmican *;’ and if
scientific reading and teaching is to be divorced from scientific ob-
servation of natural objects and processes, it is better that a man,
young or old, should have in his memory something which is per-
fect of its kind, entire and unmutilated, such as the opening
sentences of the “Brutus’ of Cicero, which Tacitus, I think, must
have had in his memory when he wrote his obituary of Agricola, or
as the opening sentences of the ‘Republic of Plato, or the conclu-
sion of the ‘Ajax' of Sophocles, than that he should have his
memory laden with a consignment of scientific phrases which, ea.
hypothesi, have for him no vital reality. I have already said that I
am strongly of opinion that literary should always be combined
with scientific instruction in a perfect educational course; these
1 [Professor Huxley was President of the British Association at the meeting at
which this Address was delivered.—EDITOR.]
854 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES.
somewhat lengthy remarks refer therefore only to systems in which
it is proposed that we should have not only a bifurcation but a
radical separation of studies and students; and the moral of this
may be summed up by saying that a purely scientific education
must be a thoroughly practical one, familiarising the student
with actual things as wéll as with words and symbols. It was
upon the solid ground that Antaeus learnt the art of wrestling ;
it was only when he allowed himself to be lifted from it that he
was strangled by Hercules.
Coming now to the second part of my address, I beg to say that
the word Biology is at present used in two senses, one wider,
the other more restricted. In this latter sense the word becomes
equivalent to the older, and till recently more currently used word
‘Physiology. It is in the wider sense that the word is used when
we speak of this as being the Section of Biology: and this wider
sense is a very wide one, for it comprehends, first, Animal and
Vegetable Physiology and Anatomy; secondly, Ethnology and
Anthropology; and thirdly, Scientific Zoology and Classificatory
Botany, inclusively of the Distribution of Species. It may have
been possible in former times for a single individual of great powers
of assimilation to keep himself abreast of, and on a level with, the
advance of knowledge along all these various lines of investigation;
but in those times knowledge was not, and could not, owing to
difficulties of intercommunication, the dearness of books, the costli-
ness or non-existence of instruments, have been increased at the
rate at which it is now being, year by year, increased ; and the
entire mass of actually existing and acquired knowledge was of
course much smaller, though man's power of mastering it was no
smaller than at present. It would now be an indication of very
great ignorance if anybody should pretend that his own stock of
information could furnish him with something in each one of the
several departments of knowledge I have just mentioned, which
should be worthy of being laid before such an assembly as this.
As will have been expected, I shall not presume to do more than
glance at the vegetable kingdom, large as is the space in the
landscape of life which it makes. What I propose to do is merely
to draw your attention to a very few of the topics of leading interest,
which are at the present moment being, or rather will shortly begin
to be, discussed by experts in the Department of Physiology and
FIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 855
Anatomy, in the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology, and,
thirdly, in the Department of Scientific Zoology.
Under the head and in the Department of Physiology proper
and Anatomy, our list of papers and, I am happy to add, the circle
of faces around us suggest to us the following subjects as being
the topics of main interest for the present year:—the questions of
Spontaneous Generation; that of the influence of organised parti-
cles in the production of disease; that of the influence of particular
nervous and chemical agencies upon functions; that of the localisa-
tion of cerebral functions; that of the production and, indeed, of
the entire rôle in the economy of creation of such substances as fat
and albumen; and, finally, that of the cost at which the work of
the animal machine is carried on.
The question of Spontaneous Generation touches upon certain
susceptibilities which lie outside the realm of science. In this
place, however, we have to do only with scientific arguments, and
I trust that the Section will support the Committee in their wish
to exclude from our discussions all extraneous considerations.
Truth is one ; all roads which really lead to it will assuredly con-
verge Sooner or later : our business is to see that the one we are
ourselves concerned with is properly laid out and metalled.
Upon this matter I am glad to be able to fortify myself
hºr Exxºn anthari +; as - an A first of those I will place 2.Il utter-
w.y U W W U Lü li Ü ii U i i u i Usº 5 Łº L. W.M. J.I. Jºi. Nº ** **, *-* * *
ance of Arenbishop Whately, which may be found in the second
volume of his Life, pp. 56–68, and appears to have been uttered by
him, aet. 57, an. 1844: “A person possessing real faith will be
fully convinced that whatever suppressed physical fact appears to
militate against his religion will be proved by physical investiga-
tion either to be unreal or else reconcilable with his religion.
If I were to found a church, one of my articles would be that
it is not allowable to bring forward Scripture or any religious
considerations at all to prove or disprove any physical theory or
any but religious and moral considerations.’ My second quotation
shall be taken from the great work of one of the first, as I appre-
hend, of living theologians, John Macleod Campbell, “The Nature
of the Atonement, pp. xxxii, xxxiii, Introd., and it runs thus:
There are ‘other minds whose habits of pure scientific investigation
are to them a temptation to approach the claim of the kingdom of
God on our faith by a wrong path, causing them to ask for a kind
856 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES.
of evidence not proper to the subject, and so hindering their weigh-
ing fairly what belongs to it. No scientific study of the pheno-
mena which imply a reign of law could ever have issued in the
discovery of the kingdom of God. But neither can it issue in any
discovery which contradicts the existence of that kingdom; nor
can any mind in the light of the kingdom of God hesitate to con-
clude that if such seeming contradictions arise there is implied the
presence of error either as to facts or as to conclusions from the
facts. These are valuable words and weighty testimonies. But
in a matter of this importance one must not forbear to point out
what may seem to be wanting even in the dicta of such men as the
two I have quoted. Neither of them has allowed the possibility
of error attaching itself to the utterances of more than one of the
two parties in such issues as those contemplated. Neither appears
to have thought of the cases in which religious men, if not theo-
logians, have brought woe on the world because of the offences
they have with ill-considered enunciations created. And whilst fully
sympathising with all that the Archbishop and Mr. Campbell
have said, I must say that they appear to me to have left some-
thing unsaid ; and this something may be wrapped up in the
caution that there may be faults on both sides. But at any rate
this Section cannot be considered a fit place for the correction of
errors save of the physical kind; and all other considerations are
for this week and in this place extraneous. In some other week
or in some other place it will be, if it has not already been, our
duty to give them our best attention.
To come now to the kind of considerations which are the proper
business of Section D : let me say that for the discussion of Spon-
taneous Generation very refined means of observation, and, besides
these, very refined means of experimentation are necessary. And
I shall act in the spirit of the advice I have already alluded to as
given to the world by one of her greatest teachers, if I put before
you a simple but a yet undecided question for the solution of which
analogous means of a far less delicate character would appear to be,
but as yet have not proved themselves to be, sufficient. Thus shall
we come to see very plainly some of the bearings, and a few of the
difficulties, of the more difficult of the two questions. What an
uneducated person might acquiesce in hearing spoken of as spon-
taneous generation, takes place very constantly under our very eyes,
BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 857
when a plot of ground which has for many years, or even genera-
tions, been devoted to carrying some particular vegetable growth,
whether grass or trees, has that particular growth removed from it.
When such a clearing is effected, we often see a rich or even a rank
vegetation of a kind previously not growing on the spot spring up
upon it. The like phenomenon is often to be noted on other sur-
faces newly exposed, as in railway-cuttings and other escarpments,
and along the beds of canals or streams, which are laid bare by the
turning of the water out of its channel. Fumitory, rocket, knot-
grass or cowgrass (Polygonum aviculare), and other such weeds, must
often have been noted by every one of us here in England as coming
into and occupying such recently disturbed territories in force;
whilst in America the destruction of a forest of one kind of wood,
such as the oak or the chestnut, has often been observed to be
followed by an upgrowth of young forest trees of quite another
kind, such as the white pine—albeit no such tree had been seen for
generations growing near enough to the spot to make the transport
of its seeds to the spot seem a likely thing. In one case referred to
by Mr. Marsh, “Man and Nature,” p. 289, the hickory, Carya
porcina, a kind of walnut, was remarked as succeeding a displaced
and destroyed plantation of the white pine. Now the advocates
of spontaneous generation must not suspect me of hinting that
+k, aro ; c. gº Yº Yºr r − ocł- or ov-onvº- ** +k, a voir, als Aſ +k, a ravacclvr 3 row, ovo n+
U.J. L.V. i \ly HS win.) Muus viv 113 va-vºhº u J.J.L.A. U 1 1 \ly lili i Ill W.M. Q \J 1. Jil WJ 5 i vºs.y *51 avi win v3
of the operation of any such agency as spontaneous generation here;
no one would suggest that the seeds of the Polygonum aviculare, to
say nothing of those of the hickory, were produced spontaneously;
but what I do say is, that the question of how these seeds came
there is just the very analogue of the one which they and their
opponents have to deal with. And it is not definitely settled at
this very moment. Let us glance at the instructive historical
parallel it offers. For the very gross and palpable facts of which
I have just spoken there are two explanations offered in works of
considerable authority. The one which has perhaps the greatest
currency and commands the largest amount of acceptance is that
which, in the words of De Candolle, regards la couche de terre
végétale d'un pays comme un magasin de graines, and supposes that in
hot summers and autumns, such as the present, the fissures in the
ground, which have proved so fatal this year to the young par-
tridges, swallow up a multitude of seeds, which are restored again
858 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES.
to life when the deep strata into which they are thus introduced,
and in which they are sealed up as the chasms close up, come in
any way to be laid open to the unimpeded action of the sun and
moisture. Squirrels, again, and some birds resembling herein the
rodent mammalia, bury seeds and forget to dig them up again;
and it is supposed that they may bury them so deep as to be pro-
tected from the two physical agencies just mentioned. Now ger-
mination cannot take place in the absence of oxygen; and I would
add that well-sinkers know to their cost how often the superficial
strata of the earth are surcharged with carbonic acid. The rival
explanation and the less popular (I do not say the less scientific)
looks to the agency of transportation as occurring constantly, and
sufficing to explain the facts. By accepting this explanation, we
save ourselves from running counter to certain experiments, some
of which were carried out, if I mistake not, under the auspices of
this Section (see ‘Brit. Assoc. Reports'), and which appear to
curtail considerably the time during which seeds retain their
vitality, and to multiply considerably the number of conditions
which must be in force to allow of such retention for periods far
shorter than those which have to be accounted for. A better
instance of the expediency of checking the interpretations based
merely upon observations, however accurately made, by putting
into action experiments, cannot be furnished than by recording
the fact put on record by Mr. Bentham, when discussing this
question in his last year’s Address to the Linnean Society:—
‘Hitherto direct observation has, as far as I am aware, only
produced negative results, of which a strong instance has been
communicated to me by Dr. Hooker. In deepening the lake in
Kew Gardens they uncovered the bed of an old piece of water,
upon which there came up a plentiful crop of Typha, a plant
not observed in the immediate vicinity; and it was therefore con-
cluded that the seed must have been in the soil. To try the
question, Dr. Hooker had six Ward's cases filled with some of the
soil remaining uncovered close to that which had produced the
Typha, and carefully watched; but not a single Typha came up in
any one of them.” (Note in President's Address, May 24, 1869,
p. lxxii of ‘Linnean Society’s Proceedings.')
To this I would add that experiments with a positive result, and
that positive result in favour of the second hypothesis, if hypothesis
BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 859
it can be called, are being constantly tried in our colonies for us,
and on a large scale. I had taken and written here of the Poly-
gonum aviculare, the ‘knot' or ‘cowgrass'—having learnt, on the
authority of Dr. Hooker and Mr. Travers (see ‘Natural History
Review,’ January, 1864, p. 124, Oct. 1864, p. 619), that it abounds
in New Zealand, along the roadside, just as it does in England—as
a glaring instance, and one which would illustrate the real value
of the second explanation even to an unscientific man and to an
unassisted eye. But on Saturday last I received by post one of
those evidences which make an Englishman proud in thinking that
whithersoever ships can float thither shall the English language,
English manners, and English science be carried, in the shape of
the second volume of the ‘Transactions’ of the New Zealand
Institute, full, like the first, from the beginning to its last page
of thoroughly good matter. In that volume, having looked at
the table of its contents, I turned to a paper by Mr. T. Kirk on
the “Naturalised Plants of New Zealand, and in this, at p. 142, I find
that Mr. T. Kirk prefers to regard the Polygonum aviculare of New
Zealand as indigenous in New Zealand. Hence that illustration
which would have been a good one falls from my hands. And
I must in fairness add, that because one agency is proved to be a
vera causa, it is not thereby proved that no other can by any
possibility be competent simultaneously to produce the same effect,
whatever the Schoolmen with the law of Parsimony ringing in their
ears may have said to the contrary. I have dwelt upon this sub-
ject at this length with the purpose of showing how much difficulty
may beset the settlement of even a comparatively simple question
which involves only the use of the unassisted eye, or at most of
a simple lens. The a fortiori argument I leave you to draw for
yourselves, with the simple remark that the question of spontaneous
generation is now at least one to be decided by the microscope, and
by the employment of its highest powers in alliance with other ap-
paratus of all but equal complexity.
We come, in the second place, to say a word as to the extent
of the influence which organic and living particles, of microscopic
minuteness but solid for all that, have been supposed, and in some
instances at least have been proved, to exercise upon the genesis
and genesiology of disease, and so upon the fortunes of our race,
and our means for bettering our condition, and that of our fellows.
860 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES.
I need not refer to Dr. Sanderson’s valuable Report (just published
in the Privy Council's Medical Officer's ‘Blue Book, Twelfth Re-
port, 1870, p. 229) upon those contagion particles which he pro-
poses to call by the convenient name, slightly modified from one
invented by Professor Béchamp, of ‘Microzymes’; for Dr. Sander-
son is here to refer to the matter for himself and for us; and when
this meeting is over we shall all do well to lay to heart what he
may tell us here and now, and, besides this, to study his already
printed views upon the matter. It may be perhaps my business to
remind you that these views, so far as they are identical with Pro-
fessor Hallier's as to the importance of those most minute of living
organisms, the micrococcus of his nomenclature, the microzymes of
Mr. Simon’s ‘Blue Book,’ were passed in review as to their
botanical correctness by a predecessor of mine in this honourable
office—namely, by the Rev. J. M. Berkeley, at the Meeting held
two years ago at Norwich ; and that some of the bearings of the
theory and of the facts, howsoever interpreted, upon the Theory of
Evolution, were touched upon by Dr. Child in his interesting
volume of “Physiological Essays, p. 148, published last year. It
would not perhaps be exactly my business to express my dissent
from any of these results or views put forward by any of these
investigators I have mentioned; but I wish to point out to the
general public that none of these inquirers would affirm that the
agencies shown by them to be potent in the causation of certain
diseases were types and models of the agencies which are, did we
but know it, could we but detect them, potent in the causation of
all diseases. Many diseases, though, possibly enough, not the
majority of the strictly infectious diseases, are due to material
agents quite distinct in nature from any self-multiplying bodies,
cytoid or colloid. To say nothing of the effects of certain elements
(and elements, it will be recollected, in their singleness and simple
atomicity, have, as the world happens to be constituted and governed,
never been honoured with the office of harbouring life) which when
volatized, as mercury, arsenic, and phosphorus may be, or indeed
which, when simply, dissolved, may be most ruinous to life, there
are, I make no doubt, animal poisons produced in and by animals,
and acting upon animal bodies, which are neither organised nor
living, neither cytoid nor colloid. Dr. Charlton Bastian is not
likely to underrate the importance of such agents, howsoever pro-
BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 861
duced, in the economy, or rather in the waste, of Nature; yet from
his very careful record of his own very elosely observed and per-
sonal experience we can gather that he would not demur to con-
ceding that non-vitalised, however much animalised, exhalations
may be only too powerful in producing attacks, and those sudden
and violent and fever-like attacks, of disease. Dr. Bastian tells us
(‘Phil. Trans.’ for 1866, vol. 196, pt. ii. pp. 583, 584) that when-
soever he employed himself in the dissection of a particular nematoid
worm, the Ascaris megalocephala, he found occasion to observe, and
that in himself, and very closely, the genesiology of a spasmodic and
catarrhal affection, not unlike hay-fever as it seems to me, but under
circumstances which appear to preclude the possibility of any living
organisms being the cause—as they have been supposed, and by
no less an authority than Helmholtz, to be—of the malady just
mentioned. For in Dr. Bastian's case this affection was produced,
not only when the Ascaris megalocephala was dissected when fresh,
but “after it had been preserved in methylated spirit for two years,
and even then macerated in a solution of chloride of lime for several
hours before it was submitted to ea'amination.” Could any microzyme
or megalozyme have survived such an amount of antizymotic treat-
ment—such a pickling as this 2 This is not exactly a medical
association, and I have entered upon this discussion not altogether
without a wish to show how subjects of apparently the most purely
scientific and special interest, as Mycology and Helminthology (the
natural history, that is to say, and the morphology of the lowest
plants and of the lowest Vermes), may, when we least expect it,
come or be brought to bear upon matters of the most immediate
and pressing practical importance. And in this spirit I must say
a word upon the way in which the pathology of snake-bites bears
upon the matters I have been speaking of, and the extent of the
debt which practical men owe to such societies as our Ray Society,
and to such publications as their colossal volume on the snakes of
India, in which Dr. Günther's views as to the real history of the
striking and terrible yet instructive phenomena alluded to are com-
bined (“Reptiles of British India,” Ray Society, 1864, p. 167).
That the snake-poison is an animal poison is plain enough ; that it
is fatal to men and animals everybody knows; but I rather think
that these two facts relative to it are not equally notorious, rich in
light though they be, viz. that the potency of this particular animal
862 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES.
poison varies in direct ratio to the quantity imbibed or infused, just
as though it were so much alcohol, or so much alcoholic tincture of
musk or cantharides; or secondly, that its potency varies in direct
ratio to another varying standard, viz. the size of the animal pro-
ducing it. Now the vaccine matter from the arm of a child is as
potent as the vaccine matter from the arm of any giant would be ;
and whether a grain or a gramme of it be used will make no differ-
ence, so long as it be used rightly. There is a contrast, indeed,
between the modus operandi of these two animal poisons. I would
add that in the “Edinburgh Monthly Medical Journal’ for the
present month there is a very valuable paper, one of a series of
papers, indeed, of the like character, by Dr. Fayrer, where at
page 247, among much of anatomical and other interest, I find the
following important statement: “This poison may be diluted with
water, or even ammonia or alcohol, without destroying its deadly
properties. It may be kept for months or years, dried between
slips of glass, and still retain its virulence. It is capable of ab-
sorption through delicate membranes, and therefore it cannot be
applied to any mucous surfaces, though no doubt its virulence is
much diminished by endosmosis". It appears to act by a catalytic
form ; that is, it kills by some occult influence on the nerve
centres.’ There is such a thing as an ignorance which is wiser
than knowledge, for the time, of course, only ; such an ignorance is
wisely confessed to in these words of Dr. Fayrer's. An explanation
may be true for some, yet not thereby necessarily for all, the facts
within even a single sphere of study; even a true explanation may
have but a very limited application, as a tangent cannot touch
a circle at more than a single point. The memoirs published in
our own reports by Dr. B. W. Richardson, on the action of the
nitrites, and those published by Dr. A. Crum Brown and Dr. T. R.
Fraser, there and elsewhere, on the connexion between chemical con-
stitution and physiological action, deserve especial study as bearing
on the other side of this discussion; whilst Professor Lister's papers
show how the reference of certain diseases to vitalistic agencies
may become of most vital importance in practice. There exists, as
is well known, a tendency to resolve all physiological into physico-
chemical phenomena: undoubtedly many have been, and some more
* Diapedesis may account for what virulence remains, and the poison may therefore
possibly be a cytoid.
BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 863
may still remain to be, so resolved ; but the public may rest
assured that in the kingdom of Biology no desire for a rectification
of frontiers will ever be called out by any such attempts at, or
successes in the way of, encroachment; and that where physics
and chemistry can show that physico-chemical agencies are sufficient
to account for the phenomena, there their claim upon the territory
will be acceded to, as in the cases we have been glancing at ;
and where such claims cannot be established and fail to come
up to the quantitative requirements of strict science, as in the
cases of continuous and of discontinuous development or self-
multiplication of a contagious germ, and in some others, they will
be disallowed.
Pathology has of late made a return to Physiology for much
service she has received, and this in the following directions.
Dr. W. Ogle has thrown much light on the physiology of the
cervical sympathetic nervous system by his record of a patho-
logical history to be found in the recently issued volume (vol. lii.)
of the ‘Medico-Chirurgical Transactions.” The rough and cruel
experimentation of war has had its vivisections utilised for the
elucidation of the physiology of nerves, and especially of their
trophic function, in the valuable volume issued by the American
Sanitary Commission, under the editorship of Dr. Austin Flint.
Dr. Broadbent has done something towards elucidating the question
of the localisation of functions in particular parts of the cerebral
convolutions, which was so extensively and so very exhaustively
discussed at Norwich, by his paper in our most useful and com-
prehensive Journal of Anatomy and Physiology, May 1870, ‘On
the Cerebral Convolutions of a Deaf and Dumb Woman.’
I take this opportunity of mentioning two valuable papers on the
very practical question of the influence of the vagus upon the
heart's action. One of these is a German paper by a gentleman
who is a zoologist and comparative anatomist as well as a physio-
logist, Dr. A. B. Meyer; ‘Das Hemmungsnerven-System des Her-
zens’ is the title of his memoir, a separate publication as I think: the
other is an abstract of a paper [I have not seen the paper published
in eatenso as yet] by Dr. Rutherford, “On the Influence of the
Vagus upon the Vascular System,’ published in the journal just
referred to. Especially do I think Dr. Rutherford's view as to the
vagus acting centrifugally as regards the stomach, and carrying
864. BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES.
stimulus, not thither but thence, to the medulla oblongata, which
stimulus is then radiated downwards by a route formed distally by the
splanchnic nerve, so as to produce inhibitory vascular dilatation in
the neighbourhood of the peptic cells, as worthy of attention".
A considerable number of the papers which will be read before
this Section, indeed a considerable part of the Section itself, will be
devoted to the Natural History of man. Nothing, I apprehend, is more
distinctive of the present phase of that “proper study of mankind’
than the now accomplished formation of a close alliance between the
students of archaeology strict and proper and the biologist with the
express purpose of jointly occupying and cultivating that vast terri-
tory. Literature and art and the products of the arts furnish each their
data to the ethnologist and anthropologist in addition to those which
it is the business of the anatomist, the physiologist, the palaeontolo-
gist, and the physical geographer to be acquainted with ; nor can any
conclusion attained to by following up any single one of those lines of
investigation be considered as definitely absolved from the condition
of the provisional until it has been shown that it can never be put
into opposition with any conclusion legitimately arrived at along
any other of the routes specified. In political alliances the short-
comings of one party necessarily hamper and check the advance
of the other; a failure in the means or in the perseverance of
one party may bring the joint enterprise to a premature close;
mutual forbearance, not to dwell longer upon extreme cases, may
finally be as effectual in slackening progress as even mutual
jealousies. No such disadvantages attach themselves to the alliance
of literature with science, as the German ‘Archiv für Anthro-
pologie,” issued to the world under the joint management of Ecker
the biologist and Lindenschmit the antiquary, will show any one
who consults its pages, replete with many-sided but not superficial,
multifarious but never inaccurate, information.
The antiquary is a little prone, if he will allow me to say so,
when left alone, to make himself but a connoisseur; the historian,
whilst striving to avoid the Scylla of judicial dulness, slides into
the Charybdis of political partisanship; and the biologist not rarely
* Since writing as above I have seen, but have not read, a paper by Dr. Coats in
Ludwig's ‘Arbeiten aus der physiologischen Anstalt zu Leipzig’ for 1870 which would
seem to treat of this subject. The Würzburg Physiological Laboratory Reports for
1867–68 contain, as is well known, a series of papers upon it.
BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 865
shows himself a little cold to matters of moral and social interest
whilst absorbed in the enthusiasm of speciality. The combination
of minds varying in bent is found efficacious in correcting these
aberrations; and by this combination we obtain that white and
dry light which is so comforting to the eye of the truth-loving
student, to say nothing as to its being so much stronger than
the coloured rays which the work of one isolated student may
sometimes have cast upon it from the work of another. It would
be invidious to speculate, and I have forborne from suggesting,
whether the literary contingent in the conquering though composite
army has learnt more from observation of the methods and evolu-
tions of the scientific contingent, or the scientific more from the
observation of the literary; it is, however, neither invidious nor
superfluous to congratulate the general public upon the necessity
which these, like other allies, have been reduced to, of adopting one
common code of signals, and discarding the exclusive use of their
several and distinctive technicalities. Subjects of a universal
interest have thus come to be treated, and that by persons now
amongst us, in a language universally ‘understanded of the people.’
I have been careful to include the palaeontologist amongst the
scientific specialists whose peculiar researches have cast a helpful
and indeed an indispensable light upon the history of the fates and
fortunes of our species. But it is not organic science only which
anthropology impresses into its service; and it would be the
sheerest ingratitude to forget the help which the mineralogist
gives us in assigning the source whence the jade celt has come or
could come, or to omit an acknowledgment of the toil of the
analytical chemist, who has given the percentage of the tin in the
bronze celt, or in the so-called “leaden' and therefore Roman
coffin.
I am very well aware that many persons who have honoured me
by listening to the last few sentences have been thinking that it
is at least premature to attempt to harmonise the two classes of
evidence in question; and that the best advice that can be given
to the two sets of workers severally is, that they should work
independently of each other. Craniography is said, and by irre-
fragable authority, to be a most deceptive guide; works and articles
on ethnology tell us stories of skulls being labelled, even in
museums of the first order of merit, with such Janus-like tickets as
3 K
866 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES.
‘Etruscan Tyrol or Inca Peruvian;' and one of the most celebrated
anthropotomists of the day has been so impressed with the fact that
Peruvian as well as Javanese and Ethiopian skulls may be found on
living shoulders within the precincts of a single German university
town, that he has busied himself with forming a pseudo-typical
ethnological series from the source and area just indicated. Great
has been the scandal thence accruing to craniography, and the col-
lector of skulls has thence come to be looked upon as a dilettante
with singular ghoul-like propensities, which are pardonable only
because they relate to savage races of modern days, or to cemeteries
several hundred years old, but which are not to be regarded as
being seriously scientific. Now to me the existence of such a way
of estimating such a work appears to argue a sad amount of ignor-
ance of the laws of the logic of practical life, or, indeed, of the
chapters on ‘approximate generalisations,’ which any man, however
unpractical, can read in a treatise on logic. A man's features and
physiognomy are instinctively and intuitively, or, if you prefer so
to put it, as a result of the accumulated social experiences of
generations of men, taken as a more or less valuable and trust-
worthy indication of his character; were this not so, photographers
would not, as I apprehend, and hope they do, make fortunes; yet
the face is at least as often fallacious as an index of the mind as the
skull is fallacious as an index of race. The story of the misconception
by a physiognomist of the character of Socrates is familiar to us,
as I think, from Lemprière’s Dictionary; and it may serve to
parallel the story which Blumenbach and Tilesius tell us of the
exact correspondence of the proportions of a skull from Nukahiva
with those of the Apollo Belvidere. The living faces in a gaol,
again, to put the same argument upon other grounds, are as
dangerous to judge from as are the skulls in a museum; yet every
detective is something like a professor of physiognomy, and most of
them could write a good commentary on Lavater. The true state
of the case may, perhaps, be represented thus:—A person who has
had a large series of crania through his hands, of the authenticity of
which, as to place and data, he has himself had evidence, might express
himself, perhaps, somewhat to the following effect if he were asked
whether he had gathered from his examination of such a series any
confidence as to his power of referring to, or excluding from, any
such series any skull which he had not seen before. He might say,
BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 867
‘The human, like other highly organised types of life, admits of
great variety; aberrant forms arise, even in our own species,
under conditions of the greatest uniformity possible to humanity:
amongst savages great variety exists (see Bates, “Naturalist on the
Amazons,” ii. p. 129), even though they all of them may live the
same “dull grey life” and die the same “apathetic end;” and conse-
Quently it may never, except in the case of Australian or Esquimaux,
and perhaps a few other crania, be quite safe to pledge one’s-self as
to the nationality of a single skull. Still there is such a thing as
craniographical type; and if half a dozen sets, consisting of ten
crania apiece, each assortment having been taken from the cemeteries
of some well-marked nationality, were set before me, I would venture
to say, after consultation and comparison, that it might be possible
to show that unassisted cranioscopy, if not invariably right, even
under such favourable circumstances, was nevertheless not wrong
in a very large number of cases.” If it is true on the one hand that
in generalibus latet error, it is true on the other that security is given
us by the examination of large numbers for the accuracy and
reliability of our averages, a principle which Gratiolet informs us
is thoroughly recognised in Chinese metaphysics, and which he has
formulated in the following words:—‘L'invariabilité dans le milieu
s'applique à tout. La vérité n'est point dans un seul fait mais dans
+,-,--- lar, ſo 4-c. . all a neº- A l 2 . . º. ºf e
tous les faits; elle est dans les meyennes, c'est-à-dire dans une.
suite d'abstractions formulées après le plus grand nombre d'observa-
tions possibles.’ (‘Mémoire sur les Plis cérébraux,’ p. 93.) The
natural history sciences do not usually admit of the strictness which
says that an exception, so far from proving a rule, proves it to be a
bad one ; rather are we wise in saying that in them at least the
universality of assertion is in an inverse ratio to that of knowledge,
and that the sweeping statements dear, as Aristotle long ago
remarked (“Rhetoric,’ ii. 21. 9 and Io; ii. 22. I), to a class which
he contrasts with the educated, are abhorrent to the mind of
organic nature. It is true enough, as is sometimes said, that when
opinions and assertions are always hedged in by qualifications, the
style becomes embarrassed, and the meaning occasionally hard to be
understood; but this difficulty is one which lies in the very nature
of the case, and the real excellence of style does not consist in
its lulling the attention and relieving the memory by throwing
an alliterative ring on the ear, but in the furnishing a closely
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868 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES.
fitting dress to thought, and an accurate representation of actual
fact. *
If we are told that the attempt to harmonise the results, not merely
of cranioscopy, but of any and all natural science investigation, with
the results of literary and linguistic research, is needless and even
futile, this is simply equivalent to saying that one or other of these
methods is worthless. For as Truth is one, if two routes purporting
both alike to lead to it do not sooner or later converge and harmonise,
this can only be because one or other of them fails to impinge upon
the goal. It is true that by certain lines of investigation light is
thrown upon a problem only at a single point, and that all further
prosecution of investigation along that line will but lead us off at
a tangent. Still the throwing of even a single ray upon a dark
surface is an achievement with a value of its own ; and it is a
cardinal rule in our sciences never to ignore the existence of
seemingly contradictory data, in whatsoever quarter they may show
themselves. For what would be said of an investigator of a subject
such as physical geography, who should declare that he would pay
no attention except to a single set of data, when he was discussing
whether a particular archipelago had been formed by upheaval, or
should be held to be the fragments and remnants of a disrupted
continent; and that if geological evidence was in crying discord
with his interpretation of the facts of the distribution of species,
it was not his business to reconcile them 2 He would be held to
have neglected his business, as you may see by a reference to
Mr. Bentham’s “Address to the Linnean Society, May 24, 1869
(‘Linn. Soc. Proc. for 1869, p. xcii").
The argument from identity of customs and practices to identity
of race is liable to much the same objections, and to much the same
fallacies, as is the argument from identity of cranial conformation.
The case may be found admirably stated in Mr. Tylor's work on the
‘Early History of Mankind,” p. 276, ed. 2; and I may say that the
means of bringing the problem home to one’s-self may be found by
* The following references to passages of the kind referred to above as to the un-
trustworthiness of craniographical evidence may be useful:—Geographisches Jahrbuch,
1866, p. 481. Hyrtl, “Topograph. Anatomie,’ i. p. 13. Henle, ‘System. Anat.’ i. 198.
FCrause, i. 2, p. 251. “Archiv für Anthropologie,” Hölder, ibid. ii. I, p.60. See also
His and Riitimeyer, and Ecker in their systematic works severally, the ‘Crania Hel-
vetica” and the ‘Crania Germaniae meridionalis.'
BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 869
a visit to any collection of flint implements. In such a collection,
as Mr. Tylor has pointed out, p. 205, we are very soon impressed
with the marked uniformity which characterises these implements,
whether modern or thousands of years old, whether found on this
side of the world or the other. For example, a flint arrow-head
which came into my hands a short time back, through the kindness
of Lord Antrim, after having done duty in these iron times as
a charm at the bottom of a water-tub for cattle in Ireland, was
pointed out or at to me by a very distinguished Canadian naturalist,
who was visiting Oxford the other day, as being closely similar to
the weapons manufactured by the Canadian Indians. . Now after
such an experience one may do well to ask in Mr. Tylor's words
(‘Early History,’ p. 206),
‘How, then, is this remarkable uniformity to be explained? The
principle that man does the same thing under the same circum-
stances will account for much, but it is very doubtful whether it
can be stretched far enough to account for even the greater propor-
tion of the facts in question. The other side of the argument is, of
course, that resemblance is due to connexion, and the truth is
made up of the two, though in what proportions we do not know.
It may be that, though the problem is too obscure to be worked
out alone, the uniformity of development in different regions of the
Stone age may some day be successfully brought in with other
lines of argument, based on deep-lying agreements in culture which
tend to centralise the early history of races of very unlike appear-
ances, and living in widely distant ages and countries.’
If the psychological identity of our species may explain the
identity of certain customs, its physiological identity may explain
certain others. Some of this latter class are of a curious kind, and
relate not to matters of social or family, but to matters of purely
personal and individual interest, concerning as they do the sensi-
bility, and with it all the other functions of the living body. Such
customs are the wearing of labrets or lip-rings, nose-rings, and, if
I may add it without offence, of certain other rings inserted in the
wide region supplied by the fifth or trifacial nerve". A physio-
logical explanation may lie at the base of these practices, which
appear to put at the disposal of the persons who adopt them a
perennial means for setting up an irritation, whence reflex con-
* See ‘Medicine in Modern Times,’ p. 57, Article XL, p. 698.
870 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES.
sequences in the course of reflex nutrition and reflex secretion, as of
gastric juice, may flow. A curious book was written, or at least
published, on the subject of these practices, and others akin to
them, in 1653, by Dr. John Bulwer, a benevolent doctor, who paid
attention to the care of the deaf and dumb previously, I think it is
stated, to Dr. Wallis, and who consequently, with proper pride,
if this precedence really belongs to him, signs himself ‘J. B. cogno-
mento Chirosophus.’ The title of the book is “Anthropometamor-
phosis; Man Transformed, or the Artificial Changeling.' I was
made acquainted with its existence by my friend Mr. Tomlinson,
of Worcester College, from the library of which society I procured
a copy for consultation: the book is not rare I think, but I believe
it is little known; it contains much that is curious, and it is, in-
asmuch as it was written more than 200 years ago, öt’ &Kilpatos fiv
&rt Neudºv, from some, though not from all points of view, the more
valuable. It is, I apprehend, to some of these customs, as well as
to others, that Zimmermann (not the author of the work on Solitude,
but Zimmermann the zoologist) alludes in a rather amusing passage,
which may be found in the third volume of his larger work on the
‘Distribution of Species and on Zoology” (see p. 257). I speak of
the passage as amusing ; it is more than that, or I would not quote
it; indeed you will not see that it is particularly amusing unless I
tell you that volumes ii and iii are of date 1783, and are dedicated to
his own father, whilst volume i, of date 1778, is dedicated to ‘His
Most Serene Highness and Lord, Ferdinand Duke of Brunswick,
my Most Gracious Lord.’ Its quality of amusingness depends upon
these dates, and the speculations they set us to make as to how the
Serene Duke, his ‘Most Gracious Lord,” had offended the man of
science in the interval between 1778 and 1783. It runs thus:—
“If you argue from similarity of customs and ceremonies to identity
of origin of two tribes under comparison, you must first show that
these customs are not such as would naturally tend to the ameliora-
tion of the conditions of the inhabitants in the two countries under
consideration, and would probably therefore, or can naturally, sug-
gest themselves to each of the races in question. Or there may be
customs founded on innate folly and stupidity, and thus, for your
argument to be valid, you must show that, of two peoples widely
separated, each cannot by any chance come into its own country to
adopt the like foolish and stupid customs. For whilst two wise
DIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 871
heads are to make out, each independently of the other and con-
temporaneously, a wise discovery or invention, it is much more
likely, on the calculation of chances, and considering the much
greater number of fools and blockheads (“Thoren und Dummköpfen”),
that in two countries widely apart closely similar follies should be
simultaneously invented. And then, if the inventing fool happens
to be a man of influence and consideration, which is, by the way, an
eaceedingly frequent coincidence, both the nations are likely to
adopt the same foolish practice, and the historian and antiquary,
after the lapse of some centuries, is likely to draw from this
coincidence the conclusion that the two nations both sprang from
the same stock.' Judge and speculate for yourselves how the spirit
which breathes in this passage was excited, but note its scientific
value too. We must not forget that it is possible, in thought at
least, to dissociate the psychological unity of man from his specific
identity even; and that, as regards identity of race, it is only
reasonable to expect that when similar needs are pressing, similar
means for meeting them are not unlikely to be devised inde-
pendently by members of two tribes who have for ages been
separated from their original stocks. The question to be asked is,
does the contrivance about which we are speculating combine, or
does it not combine in itself so large a number of converging
adaptations as to render it upon the calculation of chances unlikely
that it should have been independently invented 2 Yet this very
obvious principle has been neglected, or Lindenschmit would not
have found it necessary to say that, by laying too much stress upon
certain points of national identity in the stones used for the
formation of cromlechs or dolmens, the Hünenvolk might be made
out to have chosen to settle only in those parts of Germany where
erratic blocks of granite or other such large stones could be found !
(‘Archiv für Anthropologie,” iii. p. 115, 1868.)
Sir John Lubbock's recently published work on ‘The Origin of
Civilisation’ may, I anticipate, cause the history and genealogy of
manners and customs to enter largely into the composition of our
lists of papers. There is no need for me, as the author of the
book is here himself, to occupy your time in recommending his
work; but I may be allowed to say that the utility of such
pursuits as those which Sir John Lubbock's book treats of
receives some little illustration from the fact that, as we learn
872 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES.
from him and from Mr. Tylor, the human mind blunders and errs and
deceives itself in these subjects in just the same way as it does in
the kindred, though more immediately arising, pressing, and im-
portant matters of social and political life. In these latter spheres
of observation we are apt occasionally to mistake one of those
intermittent reactions of opinion, produced as eddies are produced
in a river by the deposit of sand and mud at angles in its onward
course, for a deliberate giving up of the principles upon which all
previous progress has been dependent. The straws which float
upon the surface of a backwater may be taken as proofs that the
river is about to flow upwards, and a feeble oarsman in a light boat
may be deceived for some moments by the backward drifting of his
small craft. Now an analogous blunder is often made in matters
of purely historical interest; and we may do well to learn from the
experience thus cheaply earned. ‘The history of the human race
has,’ says Sir John Lubbock, p. 32.2, l.c., “I feel satisfied, on the
whole been one of progress: I do not of course mean to say that
every race is necessarily advancing ; on the contrary, most of the
lower are almost stationary: but Sir John regards these as ex-
ceptional instances, and points out that if the past history of man
had been one of deterioration, we have but a groundless expectation
of future improvement; whilst on the other, if the past has been
one of progress, we may fairly hope that the future will be so
also.
Mr. Tylor's words are equally to the purpose, though, as forming
the end of a chapter merely and not the end of a book, they are less
enthusiastic in tone (p. 193, Tylor, ‘Early History of Mankind').
They run thus:–
“To judge from experience, it would seem that the world, when
it has once got a firmer grasp of new knowledge or a new art, is
very loath to lose it altogether, especially when it relates to matters
important to man in general, for the conduct of his daily life, and
the satisfaction of his daily wants, things that come home to men's
“business and bosoms.” An inspection of the geographical distri-
bution of art and knowledge among mankind seems to give some
grounds for the belief that the history of the lower races, as of the
higher, is not the history of a course of degeneration or even of
equal oscillations to and fro, but of a movement which, in spite of
frequent stops and relapses, has on the whole been forward; that
BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 873
there has been from age to age a growth in man’s power over
nature, which no degrading influences have been able permanently
to check.’
I must not trespass into the province of the botanist, but I should
be glad to say that no easier method of learning how the natural
history sciences can be made to bear upon the history of man, as a
whole, can be devised than that furnished by the perusal of such
memoirs as those of Unger's upon the plants used for food by man.
The very heading and title of the paper I am specially referring to
appears to me to have an ambiguity about it which, in itself, is not
a little instructive. In that title, “Botanische Streifzüge auf dem
Gebiete der Cultur-Geschichte,’ the latter word may be taken, I
imagine, etymologically at least, to refer either to culture proper, or
to floriculture, or to agriculture. At any rate, the paper itself may
be read in the Sitzungsberichte of the Vienna Academy for 1859;
it has, I suppose, superseded the interesting chapters in Link's
‘Urwelt und Alterthum,’ of date 1821; and it is not unlikely, I
apprehend, to be itself, in its turn, superseded also.
Coming, in the third place, to Zoology, I suppose I shall be
justified in saying that the largest issue which has been raised in
the current year, an issue for the examination of the data for
deciding which the two months of July and August which are just
past may have furnished persons now present with opportunities, is
the question of the kinship of the Ascidians to the Vertebrata.
There is or was nothing better established till the appearance of
Kowalewsky’s paper, now about four years ago, than the existence
of a wide gulf between the two great divisions of the animal
kingdom, the Vertebrata and the Invertebrata: nothing could
be more revolutionary than the views which would obviously rise
out of his facts; and within the present year these facts have been
abundantly confirmed by Prof. Kupfer, whose very clearly written
and beautifully illustrated paper has just appeared in the current
number of Schultze’s ‘Archiv für microscopische Anatomie.” Kupfer's
researches have been carried on upon Ascidia canina ; but they more
than confirm the accuracy of what Kowalewsky had stated to take
place in Ascidia mammillata, and which may be summed up briefly
thus:—In the larval Ascidian we have in its caudal appendages an
axis skeleton clearly analogous, if not essentially homologous, to the
chorda dorsalis of the vertebrate embryo, as consisting, like it, of
874 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES.
rows of internally placed cells, and giving insertion by its sheath
to muscles. We have further the nervous system and the digestive
taking up in such embryos much the same positions relatively to
each other, and to this molluscan chorda dorsalis, that are taken up
by the confessedly homologous system in the Vertebrata; we have
the nervous system originating in the same fashion, and closing up
like the vertebrate myelencephalon out of the early form of a
lamellar furrow into that of a closed tube ; we have, finally, the
respiratory and digestive inlets holding the vertebrate relationship
of continuity with, instead of the invertebrate of dislocation and
separation from, each other. Such are the facts; but I am not
convinced that they will bear the interpretation that has been put
upon them; though I must say the possession of this chorda dor-
salis by the active locomotor larva of the Ascidian which one day
settles down into such immobility lends not a little probability to
Mr. Herbert Spencer's view of the genesis of the segmented
vertebral column in animals undoubtedly vertebrate. But on this
view I should not be inconsistent with myself, inasmuch as, to waive
other considerations, the chorda dorsalis in each case would be con-
sidered as an adaptive or teleological modification, not a sign of
morphological kinship". Much perplexity may or must arise here ;
and whilst entertaining these views, I felt myself bound to examine
myself strictly to find whether in not taking them up, I might not
be giving way to that reactionary reluctance to accept new ideas
which advancing years so frequently bring with them ; but a recent
paper, by Lacaze-Duthiers, published in the ‘Comptes Rendus’ for
May 30, 1870, and translated in the ‘Annals and Magazine of
Natural History’ for July 1870, would justify me, I think, in
calling that reluctance by another name. For in that paper the
renowned malacologist just mentioned has brought to light the fact
that there is another sessile and solitary Ascidian, the Molgula
tubulosa, which goes through no such tadpole-like stage as had been
supposed to be gone through by all Ascidians except the Salpae,
which is never active and never puts out the activity which is so
remarkable in the other Ascidians, but settles down and remains
sedentary immediately after it is set free from the egg-capsule,
* See, however, Mr. Herbert Spencer's Appendix D to his principles of Biology, pt.
iv. chap. xvi. This appendix was printed in 1865, but not published till December
I869. I had not seen it when I wrote as above.
BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 875
neither enjoying a Wanderjahr nor possessing a chorda dorsalis. We
are not surprised after this that M. Lacaze-Duthiers observes that
“although embryology may and must furnish valuable information
by itself, it may also, in some cases, lead us into the gravest errors.”
Mr. Hancock, of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, has sent us a paper upon
this subject, which will be read duly and duly noted by us.
Leaving Malacology, which has not in the United Kingdom
obtained the same hold as yet upon the public mind that it has on
the Continent, where, like Entomology, there and here, it has a
periodical or two devoted to the recording of the discoveries of its
votaries, I have much pleasure in directing attention to two short
papers by Siebold in the ‘Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Zoologie’
(xx. 2, 1870), on parthenogenesis in Polistes gallica v. diadema, and
on paedogenesis in the Strepsiptera. In each of these short papers
Siebold informs us that adequate room and time could not be given
them in the Innsbruck meeting held just a year ago, or in the
report of the meeting. It is to me a matter of difficulty to think
what there could have been of greater value than those papers in
a section of Wissenschaftliche Zoologie; it will be to all present a
matter of congratulation to learn, from the venerable professor's
papers, that he will shortly favour us with a new work on the
subject of parthenogenesis. A fresh instance of parthenogenesis in
the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy’s Memoirs (xv. 8, January
I3, 1870).
The subject of the geographical distribution of the various forms
of vegetable and animal life over the surface of the globe, and in
the various media, air, earth, water—fresh and salt, whether deep or
shallow—has always been, and will always remain, one of the most
interesting subsections of biology. It was the contemplation of a
simple case of geographical distribution in the Galapagos archi-
pelago which brought the author of the ‘Origin of Species’ face to
face with the problem which the title of his work embodies; and it
is impossible that sets of analogous and of more complicated facts
(many of which, be it recollected, such as the combination now
being effected between our own fauna and flora and those of
Australia and New Zealand, are patent to the observations of the
least observing) should not, since the appearance of that book,
force the serious consideration of the explanation it offers upon the
876 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES.
thoughts of all who think at all. The wonders of the deep-sea
fauna will, I apprehend, form one, the commensalism of Professor
Van Beneden another, subject of discussion, and furnish an oppor-
tunity for receiving instruction to all of us. The one set of obser-
vations is a striking exemplification of the way in which organisms
have become suited to inorganic environments; the other is an all
but equally striking exemplification of the way in which organisms
can fit and adapt themselves to each other. The current journals
have", as was their duty, made us acquainted with what has been
done in both of these directions; and I am happy to say that in the
case of the deep-sea explorations, as in that of parthenogenesis and
spontaneous generation, a new work, giving a connected and
general view of the entire subject, is announced for publication.
One instance of the large proportions of the questions which the
facts of geographical distribution bear upon, is furnished to us in
the address recently delivered before the Geological Society by its
president, who is also our president, and who may have forgotten to
refer to his own work (see ‘Nature, No. 24, 1870). Another may
be found in the demonstration which Dr. Günther, contrary to our
ordinarily taught doctrines, has given us (‘Zool. Soc. Trans.’ vol. vi.
pt. 7, 1868, p. 307) of the partial identity of the fish-faunas of the
Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Central America; many, thirdly, are
furnished to us by Mr. Wallace’s works passim.
It would be superfluous, after introducing even thus hurriedly to
your notice so large a series of interesting and important subjects
as being subjects with which we shall forthwith begin to deal in
this Section, to say anything at length as to the advantages which
may reasonably be expected to accrue from the study of Biology.
I may put its claims before you in a rough way by saying that I
should be rejoiced indeed if, when money comes to be granted by
the Association for the following up the various lines of biological
research upon which certain of its members are engaged, we could
hope to obtain a hundredth, or I might say a thousandth part
of the amount of money which has in the past year been lost to the
State and to individuals through ignorance or disregard of bio-
logical laws now well established. I need say nothing of the
* See “Nature, No. 39, July 28, 1870, and ‘Royal Society's Proceedings, August
1870, for deep-sea explorations, and ‘Academy,” September Io, 1870, for commen-
Salism.
BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 877
suffering or death which anti-sanitary conditions entail, as surely
as, though less palpably and rapidly than, a fire or a battle ; and I
might, if there were time for it, take my stand simply upon what is
measurable by money. This I will not do, as it is less pleasant to
speak of what has been lost than of that which has been or may be
gained. And of this latter let me speak in a few words, and under
two heads—the intellectual and the moral gains accruing from a
study of the Natural History Sciences. As to the intellectual gains,
the real psychologist and the true logician know very well that the
discourse on method which comes from a man who is an actual
investigator is worth, even though it be but short and packed
away in an Introduction or an Appendix, or though it cover but a
couple of pages in the middle of a book, like the ‘Regulae Philoso-
phandi’ of Newton, more than whole columns of the ‘Sophistical
Tialectic” of the ancient Schoolman and his modern followers. ‘If
you wish your son to become a logician,’ said Johnson, “let him
study Chillingworth’—meaning thereby that real vital knowledge
of the art and science can arise only out of the practice of reasoning;
and as to the value of actual experimentation as a qualification for
writing about method, Claude Bernard and Berthelot are, and I
trust will long remain, living examples of what Descartes and
Pascal, their fellow-countrymen, are illustrious departed examples.
(See Janet, ‘Revue des Deux-Mondes,’ tome lxii. p. 910, 1866.)
I pass on now to say a word on the working of natural science
studies upon the faculty of attention, the faculty which has very
often and very truly been spoken of as forming the connecting-link
between the intellectual and the moral elements of our immaterial
nature. I am able to illustrate their benefieial working in pro-
ducing carefulness and in enforcing perseverance, by a story turning
upon the use of, or rather upon the need for, a word. Von Baer,
now the Nestor of biologists, after a long argumentation (‘Mém.
Acad. Imp. Sci. St. Pétersbourg,’ 1859, p. 340), of the value which
characterises his argumentations generally, as to the affinities of
certain oceanic races, proceeds to consider how it is that certain of
his predecessors in that sphere, or, rather, in that hemisphere, as
Mr. Wallace has taught us Oceania is very nearly, had so lament-
ably failed in attaining or coming anywhere near to the truth.
This failure is ascribed to something which he calls Ungenirtheit,”
a word which you will not find in a German dictionary, the thing
878 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES.
itself not being, Von Baer says, German either. I am happy not
to be able to find an exact equivalent for this word in any single
English vocable; the opposite quality shows itself in facing
conscientiously ‘the drudgery of details, without which drudgery,’
Dr. Temple tells us (‘Nine Schools Commission Report, vol. ii.
p. 31 1), “nothing worth doing was ever yet done.’ Mr. Mill, I
would add, speaks to the same effect, and even more appositely, as
far as our purpose and our vocations are concerned, in his wise
‘Inaugural Address at St. Andrews, p. 50. For the utter incom-
patibility of an āta\aſtropos Órmats (these two words give a Thucy-
didean rendering of ‘Ungenirtheiß’) with the successful investigation
of natural problems, I would refer any man of thought, even though
he be not a biologist, to a consideration of the way in which
problems as simple at first sight as the question of the feeding or
non-feeding of the salmon in fresh water (see Dr. McIntosh, “Linn.
Soc. Proc. vii. p. 148), or that of the agencies whereby certain
molluscs and annelids bore their way into wood, clay, or rocks,
must be investigated. It is easy to gather from such a considera-
tion how severe are the requirements made by natural science
investigations upon the liveliness and continuousness with which
we must keep our faculty of attention at work.
I shall speak of but one of the many purely moral benefits which
may be reasonably regarded either as the fruit of a devotion to or
as a preliminary to success in natural science. Of this I will speak
in the words of Helmholtz, taking those words from a report of
them as spoken at the meeting of the German Association for the
Advancement of Science, which was held last year at Innsbruck.
There Professor Helmholtz, in speaking of the distinctive charac-
teristics of German scientific men, and of their truthfulness in
particular, is reported to have used the following words:–
“Es hat diesen Worzug auch wesentlich zu verdanken der Sittenstrenge und der
wneigennutzige Begeisterung welche die Männer der Wissenschaft beherrscht und
beseelt hat, und welche sie nicht gekehrt hat an āussere Vortheile und gesellschaft-
liche Meinungen.’
These words are, I think, to the effect that the characteristics in
question are in reality to be ascribed to the severe simplicity of
manners and to the absence of a spirit of self-seeking which form the
guiding and inspiring principles of their men of science, and
prevent them from giving themselves up to the pursuit of mere
PIOI, OGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 879
worldly advantages, and from paying undue homage to the
prejudices of society. I think Sittenstrenge may be considered
as more or less adequately rendered by the words severe simplicity of
'manners ; at any rate, as things are known by their opposites, let
me say that it is the exact contradictory of that “profound idleness
and luauriousness’ which, we are told by an excellent authority
(the Rev. Mark Pattison, “Suggestions on Academic Organization,”
p. 241), -for whose accuracy I would vouch in this matter were
there any need so to do, ‘have corrupted the nature’ of a large
class of young men amongst ourselves; whilst the absence of a
spirit of self-seeking is, in its turn, the contradictory of a certain
character which Mr. Mill (l.c. p. 90) has said to be one of the
commonest amongst us adults, and to which Mr. Matthew Arnold
has assigned the very convenient epithet of ‘Philistine.’ Investiga-
tion as to whether these undesirable tendencies are really becoming
more rife amongst us, might be carried on with advantage in a
place such as this", in the way of inquiries addressed to colonists
returning home after a successful sojourn abroad. Such persons are
able to note differences without prejudice, and, ea, hypothesi, with
unjaundiced eyes, which we are apt to overlook, as they may have
grown up gradually and slowly. But, perhaps, researches of this
kind are not quite precisely the particular kind of investigation
with which we should busy ourselves; neither would the leaders of
fashion, the persons with whom all the responsibility for this
illimitable mischief rests, be very likely to listen to any statistics
of ours, their ears being filled with very different sounds from any
that, as I hope, will ever come from Section D. Whether men of
science in England are more or less amenable to blame in this
matter than the rest of their countrymen, it does not become us to
say; but it does become and concern us to recollect that we have
particular and special reasons, and those not far to seek, nor
dependent on authority alone, for believing and acting upon the
belief that real success in our course of life is incompatible with
a spirit of self-seeking and with habits of even refined self-
indulgence.
* [Liverpool, where this Address was delivered.—EDITOR.]
XLIV.
ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY,
DELIVERED TO THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL DEPARTMENT OF THE
BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE.
SOME few weeks ago Mr. James Parker, of Oxford, invited me to
visit your Somersetshire caves, in the company of the Warwickshire
Naturalists’ and Archaeologists' Field Club. It struck me that I
should do well, as I was to preside over the Anthropological
Department at this British Association Meeting, if I tried to learn
as much as I could of the relics and of the surroundings of the
Prehistoric inhabitants of your neighbourhood ; and for this, as
well as for other reasons, I gladly accepted the invitation. During
that pleasant midsummer excursion, I was more than once im-
pressed with the similarity which its incidents bore to those of the
undertaking in which we are now engaged, and, indeed, to those
of the study of Anthropology generally. First, the organisation
of the expedition had entailed some considerable amount of labour
upon those who had charged themselves with that duty; and,
secondly, a thorough exploration of the recesses and sinuosities of
the several caves which we explored devolved upon us not only a
good deal of exertion, but even some slight amount of risk; for
the passages and galleries along which we worked our way were
sometimes low and narrow, often steep, and nearly always slippery.
Thirdly, the outline of the regions explored bore quite different
aspects accordingly as we lighted them up or had them lit up for
us in one or in another of several different ways.
If in any segment of these caves the outside daylight could any-
how find a zigzag way down some shaft into the interior, that
segment wore a general aspect more comfortable to the eye, and so
to the mind, than others not so illuminated. These latter regions,
again, varied greatly inter se, according to the various artificial means
employed for lighting them up. The means ordinarily used for
ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 881
this end made their outlines look a little colder and harder than
the reality itself, cold and hard though this was ; whilst under
certain other modes of illumination employed (it is true, only
occasionally, and for purposes of effect, not ea necessitate) the self-
same outlines looked somewhat lurid. But, howsoever produced
and howsoever affecting us, the light was light nevertheless, and,
on the whole, we preferred it a good deal to the darkness. It is
never well to press a metaphor too far nor too closely; so I will
now lay aside my parable, though it admits of some further ex-
tension, and take up the actual business of the Department.
It may be well to lay before the Department, first of all, the
titles of a few of the principal subjects upon which we have papers
prepared for us; and after, or indeed during the enumeration of
these specimens of what will prove, I can assure you, a very
valuable series of memoirs, we can proceed, as will be naturally
suggested, to those general considerations with which it is cus-
tomary to open the transactions of such assemblages as ours.
First among our contributors I must mention the President-of
the London Anthropological Institute, in which Institute the Eth-
nological Society of 1844 and the Anthropological Society of 1863
are united. Colonel Lane Fox has told us (“Archaeologia,” xlii.
p. 45, 1869) that it was whilst serving on the Sub-committee of
Small Arms in 1851 that he had his attention drawn to the prin-
ciple of continuity by observing the very slow gradations of pro-
gress that were taking place at that time in the military weapons
of our own country. Out of those labours of his on that Sub-com-
mittee other benefits have arisen to the country at large, of which
it is not my province to speak. What I have to speak of is his
suggestion, put out with greater definiteness in his invaluable
Lecture on Primitive Warfare, delivered before the United Service
Institution, June 5, 1868 (p. 15), to the effect that his find at
Cissbury furnishes the links which were wanting to connect the
Palaeolithic with the Neolithic Celt types. Sir John Lubbock 1
and Mr. Evans” have told us that they do not see their way
to accepting this view; and Mr. James Geikie, who holds that
the palaeolithic deposits are of pre-glacial and inter-glacial age,
is almost necessitated, ear hypothesi, to repudiate any such transition.
* Nilsson’s ‘Primitive Scandinavia,’ Editor's Introd. p. 24.
* “Flint Implements, p. 72.
3 L
882 ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY.
He does so (pp. 436–438 of his work on the Great Ice Age) in
language which shows us that Colonel Lane Fox's lecture just re-
ferred to, with its diagram No. 1 (printed, it is true, for private
circulation), could not have met his eye. Colonel Lane Fox's
paper will relate to further explorations carried on at Cissbury
during the present year by a Committee of the Anthropological
Institute with the kind permission of Major Wisden, the owner of
the soil. It will raise more than one large question for us to
address ourselves to. I shall, when Colonel Lane Fox's paper
comes before the Department, contribute towards its discussion by
showing a number of flints from Cissbury, given me by my friend
Mr. Ballard, of Broadwater.
Mr. Pengelly will, on Monday, give us an account of the ‘An-
thropological Discoveries in Kent's Cavern.” A more interesting
subject will not often have been treated in a more interesting
Iſla, IllſléI’.
Polynesia and Australasia generally have always been an in-
teresting field for the anthropologist. Our recent acquisition of
Fiji makes it doubly interesting to us just now; and a flood of
literature has burst forth upon us to meet that interest.
Brofessor Dr. Carl E. Meinicke is to be heartily congratulated
on having, in the present year, brought out a work on the islands
of the Pacific (“Die Inseln der Stillen Oceans, eine geographische
Monographie, Erster Theil, Melanesien und Neuseeland, Leipzig,
1875), in which he can, with not unbecoming pride, say that he is
still working upon the same principles which guided him nearly fifty
years ago in the composition of his works on the continent of
Australia and the South-Sea races. Though I possess Professor
Meinicke's works, I am not as yet entirely in possession of all his
views; but so far as I can see, they are well worthy of attention.
I do not hesitate, however, at all in saying that the most important
contribution to the ethnology of Polynesia which has been made
recently is the article on that subject in the “Contemporary
Review' for February 1873, by the Rev. S. Whitmee, of Samoa.
And I may say that I am not without hopes that we shall be
favoured with some papers upon the ethnology, anthropology, and
future prospects of the Polynesian race by other persons eminently
qualified to speak upon the subject, as having spent many years
usefully among them, and on the spot. I observe that writers who
ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 883
have little respect for most things else, and by no means too much
for themselves, speak still with something like appreciation of the
work done in those regions by the London Missionary Society;
and we here shall value highly any papers which we may be
favoured with from men who have had such long and such favour-
able opportunities for forming opinions on matters which touch
at once our national and our scientific responsibilities.
What question can be of closer concernment than that of the
possibility of rescuing the inhabitants of Polynesia from that
gradual sliding into extinction which some writers appear to ac-
quiesce in as the natural fate of such races? As a text for our
discussions upon this subject, I will here quote to the Department
a passage from the continuation of Waitz's ‘Anthropologie” by
Dr. Gerland—the author, be it remembered, of a special Mono-
graph upon the Causes of the Decrease and Dying-out of Native
Races, which appeared in 1868 (“Ueber das Aussterben der Natur-
völker, Leipzig), and has been often referred to by writers on an-
thropology since that year, and is referred to by himself in the
passage I now lay before you. It runs thus ( Anthropologie der
Naturvâlker,’ von Dr. Theodor Waitz, fortgesetzt von Dr. Georg
Gerland, 1872, vol. ii. pp. 512, 513):—
‘The decrease of the Polynesian populations is not now going on
as fast as it was in the first half of the century; it has in some
localities entirely ceased, whilst in others the indigeneous popula-
tion is actually on the increase 1. From this it is clear that the
causes for that disappearance of the native races which we discussed
at length in the little book above referred to, are now less or no
longer operative. For, on the one hand, the natives have adapted
themselves more to the influences of civilisation; they are not so
amenable as they were at first to the action of diseases, although
we still from time to time have instances to the contrary at the
* See ‘Times' of Saturday, August 21, 1875, p. 6, where the Natal correspondent,
writing of the Caffres, tells us, ‘we shall have to begin civilising the natives some day.
We had better have begun with them ten years ago at 200,ooo strong, than now at
350,000 ; but we had better begin with them now at 350,000 than ten years hence
when they may number half-a-million.” Since writing as above I have received
through my friend the Rev. W. Wyatt Gill a long extract from a paper written in
1861, by the Rev. A. W. Murray. This paper fully confirms Gerland's more recent
views as to the prospects of the native races. Mr. Murray, having spent forty years
in Polynesia, has the best possible right to be heard upon it.
3 L 2.
884. ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY.
present moment (see, for example, “Ev. Miss. Mag.” 1867, p. 300,
Cheever, 295) [or, I may add, our own recent information as to the
destructive outbreak of measles in Fiji); they have become more
able to respond to the efforts to raise their mental and moral status
than they were ; and, with the advance of civilisation, they have
begun to avail themselves more of the remedial agencies which it
brings with it. On the other hand, we cannot ignore the fact
that the Europeans themselves, in spite of many important ex-
ceptions, have nevertheless done a very great deal for the natives,
and are always doing more and more for them. Whilst in this
matter the English Government deserves great praise, and whilst
Sir George Grey has done more for the Polynesians than almost
any other man, the missionaries nevertheless stand in the very first
rank amongst the benefactors of these races, with their unwearied
self-sacrificing activity; and Russel (“Polynesia,” Edinb., 1840) is
entirely right in saying that all the progress which the Polynesians
have made was really set on foot by the missionaries. They have
had the greatest influence upon the civilisation of the natives;
they have taken their part and protected them when they could ;
they have further given them the fast foothold, the new fresh
object, motive, and meaning for their whole existence, of which
they stood so much in need. The Polynesians have often declared
to the missionaries, “If you had not come, we should have perished;”
and they would have perished if their country had not been so dis-
covered. The resources of their physical life were exhausted; and
they had none of the moral nor ideal support for the needs of their
spiritual nature which they stood so urgently in need of, as they
had already attained a grade of culture too high to allow of their
living without some support of that kind. It is true that ex-
traneous circumstances have often, especially in the outset, brought
about their conversion—as, for example, the authority of their
chiefs, the force of example, as also, on the other hand, the occur-
rence of misfortune, great mortality, the loss of a battle, after
which they wished to make the experiment of worshipping a new god
(Russel, pp. 886, 390). And it is also true that the missionaries
have introduced them to an exceedingly bigoted and often little-
elevated form of Christianity; but even this has been a fortunate
circumstance; for just the comprehensibility, the plain appeal to
the senses, of this new religion took hold of the imagination of
ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 885
these races, and they could take hold of it with their understand-
ing ; and, howsoever it may have been put before them, it was
immeasurably above the level of heathenism, and considerably
above that of Mahommedanism. Whatever the dogmas taught
were, the ethics of Christianity were taught with them ; and in
most cases the missionaries gave, at the same time, in their lives
striking, examples of the value of those ethics; and the fact of
their maintenance and exemplification was the main thing.’
Mr. Bagehot has been quoted by Mr. Darwin, in his ‘Descent of
Man, ed. I, vol. i. p. 239, ed. 2, p. 182, as saying that ‘it is
a curious fact that savages did not formerly waste away before the
classical nations, as they do now before the modern civilised na-
tions; had they done so the old moralists would have mused over
the event; but there is no lament in any writer of that period over
the perishing barbarians.’ On reading this for the first, and indeed
for a second time, I was much impressed with its beauty and
originality; but beauty and originality do not impress men per-
manently unless they be coupled with certain other qualities. And
I wish to remark upon this statement, first, that it is exceedingly
unsafe to argue from the silence of any writer, ancient or modern,
to the non-existence of the non-mentioned thing. I do not
recollect any mention in the ancient writers of Stonehenge, nor can
I call to mind at this moment any catalogue of the vocabularies of
the Cimbri and Teutones, of the Ligures and Iberians, with whom
the ancients were brought into prolonged contact. These little
omissions are much to be regretted, as, if they had been filled up,
a great many very interesting problems would thus have been
settled for us which we have not as yet settled for ourselves. But
these omissions do not justify us in thinking that Stonehenge is an
erection of post-Roman times, nor in holding that any of the
strange races mentioned were devoid of a language. And, secondly,
what we know of the classical nations dates from a time when the
‘merciless bronze” had begun to give way to the “dark gleaming'
steel. But long before the displacement of bronze weapons by iron
ones, the bronze had had abundant time to displace both stone
weapons and the people who used them. And it is plain enough to
suggest that one reason why the Óld moralists did not muse over
the disappearance of the aboriginal races lies in the fact that these
races had neither a contemporary Homer to sing their history, nor
886 ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY.
an Evans to interpret their weapons after their extinction. The
actual Homeric poems deal with a region thickly peopled and long
subdued by a Greek-speaking metal-using race. Rhodes and Crete
were as different then from what Fiji and New Guinea are now, as
Merion and Idomeneus are from Thakombau and Rauparahu. But,
thirdly, let us ask, as the philosophers did with regard to the fish
and its weight in and out of the bucket of water, Are the facts
about which we are to inquire really facts? Now I am not going
to plunge into the excursuses appended to editions of Herodotus,
nor to discuss the history of the Minyae, or of any other race of
which we know as little. But I will just quote a few verses from a
beautiful passage in Job which appear to me to give as exact
a description of a barbarous race perishing and outcast, as could be
given now by a poetical observer in Australia or California.
Speaking of such a race the poet says:—
‘For want and famine they were solitary, fleeing into the wilder-
ness in former time desolate and waste. Who cut up mallows by
the bushes, and juniper roots for their meat. They were driven
forth from among men, (they cried after them as after a thief;) to
dwell in the cliffs of the valleys, in caves of the earth, and in
the rocks. Among the bushes they brayed; under the nettles they
were gathered together. They were children of fools, yea, children
of base men : they were viler than the earth’ (Job, chap. xxx.
ver. 3–8).
I opine that these unhappy savages must have “wasted away’
under these conditions, and that there is no need, with such actual
verae causae at hand, to postulate the working of any ‘mysterious’
agency, any inscrutable poisonous action of the breath of civilisa-
tion. What is mysterious to me is not civilisation, but the fact
that people who are in relation with it do not act up to its behests.
And what is the mystery to me is not how an epidemic can,
when introduced amongst helpless Polynesians, work havoc, but
how it is that epidemics should be allowed to do so here in England
from time to time. We are but some four years away from the
last small-pox epidemic, of the management, or rather mismanage-
ment, of which I had myself some little opportunity of taking
stock; and what we saw then in England renders it a little super-
fluous to search for recondite causes to account for depopulation in
countries without Local Boards. You owe much in Bristol to
ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 887
your able, energetic, and eminently successful officer of health,
Dr. David Davies. I hope he may favour us with his views upon
this very interesting subject, and may, knowing, as he well does,
how much energy and knowledge is required for the reduction of
a rate of mortality, tell us how much wickedness, perversity, and
ignorance is necessary for increasing such a rate, whether in
Great or in Greater Britain. I think that he will tell us that what
is mysterious is not the power of the principles of action I have
just mentioned, but the toleration of them. Such, at least, are my
views 1.
We have several philological papers promised us. Amongst them
will be one by the Rev. John Earle, who is known to you in this
neighbourhood as living near Bath, and who is known to people
not so pleasantly situated on the earth’s surface as you are, as the
author of a Handbook of the English tongue. I shall, as he will
be present hereafter to speak on philology, spare myself and you
the trouble of any remarks on that truly natural science, observing
merely that Dr. Farrar * and Professor Häckel 8 are both agreed
upon one point, namely that the adoption of natural-history
methods by the students of languages has opened up for them
a fresh career of importance and interest and usefulness.
Somersetshire is not without its historian ; and the possibility of
his coming renders it unadvisable for me to say anything now as to
*** *** *** w ~ ** rve -- * *E* sº-º. * ----
the relation of history to our subject upon the present occasion.
* Since I wrote as above, we have received the news of the murder of Commodore
Goodenough at Santa Cruz. Commodore Goodenough was one of those persons to
have met whom makes a man feel himself distinctly the better for his interviews and
intercourse. He was not only a typical representative of what is called ‘Armed
Science,’ he not only possessed the eye to watch and the arm to strike, happily so
common in our two services, but he added to all this a cultivation and refinement
duly set forth and typified by manners which were
‘not idle but the fruit
Of loyal nature and of noble mind.”
It is indeed a ‘puzzling world,' as it has been forcibly phrased, in which such a man
loses his life, and we lose his power for good, through the act of what Wordsworth
calls
“A Savage, loathsome, vengeful, and impure.”
Still Corfe Castle is near enough to Bristol to prevent us from forgetting that we our-
selves were once as treacherous and murderous as the modern Papuans, and that less
than 90o years ago. If we have improved, there is hope for them.
* Farrar on the ‘Growth of Language,’ pp. 17, 18, ‘Journal of Philology,’ 1868.
* Häckel, “Anthropogenie,’ 1874, p. 361.
888 ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY.
If, however, the Department can find time to listen to me a second
time, I shall be glad to read a short paper myself upon this very
subject, mainly in the hope of getting Mr. Freeman to speak upon
it also.
I come now (perhaps I should have come before) to the consider-
ation of the subject of craniology and craniography. Of the value
of the entirety of the physical history of a race there is no ques-
tion; but two very widely opposed views exist as to the value
of skull-measuring to the ethnographer. According to the views of
one school, craniography and ethnography are all but convertible
terms; another set of teachers insist upon the great width of the
limits within which normal human crania from one and the same
race may oscillate, and upon the small value which, under such
circumstances, we can attach to differences expressed in tenths
of inches or even of centimetres. As usual, the truth will not be
found to lie in either extreme view. For the proper performance
of a craniographic estimation, two very different processes are neces-
sary : one is the carrying out and recording a number of measure-
ments; the other is the artistic appreciation of the general
impressions as to contour and type which the survey of a series
of skulls produces upon one. I have often thought that the work of
conducting an examination for a scholarship or fellowship is very
similarly dependent, when it is properly carried out, upon the
employment of two methods—one being the system of marking,
the other that of getting a general impression as to the power
of the several candidates; and I would wish to be understood to
mean by this illustration not only that the two lines of inquiry are
both dependent upon the combination and counterchecking of two
different methods, but also that their results, like the results of some
other human investigations, must not be always, even though they
may be sometimes, considered to be free from all and any need for
qualification. Persons like M. Broca and Professor Aeby, who
have carried out the most extensive series of measurements, are
not the persons who express themselves in the strongest language
as to craniography being the universal solvent in ethnography or
anthropology. Aeby, for example, in his ‘Schädelformen der
Menschen und der Affen,’ 1867, p. 61, says:– Aus dem gesagten
geht hervor, dass die Stellung der Anthropologie gegentiber den
Schädelformen eine ausserordentlich schwierige ist;’ and the per-
ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. . 889
petual contradiction of the results of the skull-measurements carried
out by others, which his paper (published in last year’s ‘Archiv
für Anthropologie, pp. 12, 14, 20) abounds in, furnishes a practical
commentary upon the just quoted words. And Broca's words are
especially worth quoting, from the ‘Bulletin de la Société d’An-
thropologie de Paris, Nov. 6, 1873, p. 824:—“Dans l'état actuel
de nos connaissances la craniologie ne peut avoir la prétention de
voler de ses propres ailes, et de substituer ses diagnostics aux
motions fournies par l'ethnologie et par l'archéologie.’
I would venture to say that the way in which a person with the
command of a considerable number of skulls procured from some
one district in modern times, or from some one kind of tumulus or
sepulchre in prehistoric times, would naturally address himself to the
work of arranging them in a museum, furnishes us with a concrete
illustration of the true limits of craniography. I say ‘a person
with the command of a considerable number of skulls;’ for, valuable
as a single skull may be, and often is, as furnishing the missing
link in a gradational series, one or two skulls by themselves do not
justify us (except in rare instances, which I will hereinafter specify)
in predicating anything as to their nationality. Greater rashness
has never been shown, even in a realm of science in which rashness
has only recently been proceeded against under an Alien Act, than in
& g tº tº & ge º
4- 4-1. *Y* * 4- Aſ' *** Aº Aº º ºwn 4-A. wr y gº ºn Ark ºn 4-4
certain spee ulations âS to jºiè immigra Üiółi Oi TàCēS if it;C, Väi'i(5 tiš
corners of the world, based upon the casual discovery in such places
of single skulls, which skulls were identified, on the ground of their
individual characters, as having belonged to races shown on no
other evidence to have ever set foot there.
It is, of course, possible enough for a skilled craniographer to be
right in referring even a single skull to some particular nationality;
an Australian or an Eskimo, or an Andamanese might be so referred
with some confidence; but all such successes should be recorded
with the reservation suggested by the words, ubi earum qui peri-
erunt 8 and by the English line, ‘the many fail, the one succeeds.”
They are the shots which have hit, and have been recorded. But
if it is unsafe to base any ethnographic conclusions upon the ex-
amination of one or two skulls, it is not so when we can examine
about ten times as many—ten, that is to say, or twenty, the
locality and the dates of which are known as certain quantities. A
craniographer thus fortunate casts his eye over the entire series,
890 ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY.
and selects from it one or more which correspond to one of the
great types based by Retzius not merely upon consideration of pro-
portionate lengths and breadths, but also upon the artistic con-
siderations of type, curve, and contour. He measures the skulls
thus selected, and so furnishes himself with a check which even
the most practised eye cannot safely dispense with. He then pro-
ceeds to satisfy himself as to whether the entire series is referable
to one alone of the two great typical forms of Brachycephaly or
Dolichocephaly, or whether both types are represented in it, and if
so, in what proportions and with what admixture of intermediate
forms. With a number of Peruvian, or, indeed, of Western
American skulls generally, of Australian, of Tasmanian, of Eskimo,
of Veddah, of Andamanese crania before him, the craniographer
would nearly always, setting aside a few abnormally aberrant
(which are frequently morbid) specimens, refer them all to one
single type *.
Matters would be very different when the craniographer came to
deal with a mixed race like our own, or like the population of
Switzerland, the investigation into the craniology of which has
resulted in the production of the invaluable ‘Crania Helvetica’ of
His and Rütimeyer. At once, upon the first inspection of a series of
crania, or, indeed, of heads, from such a race, it is evident that some
are referable to one, some to another, of one, two, or three typical
forms, and that a residue remains whose existence and character
is perhaps explained and expressed by calling them ‘Mischformen.”
Then arises a most interesting question—Has the result of inter-
crossing been such as to give a preponderance to these ‘Misch-
formen P’ or has it not rather been such as in the ultimate resort,
whilst still testified to by the presence of intermediating and inter-
connecting links, to have left the originally distinct forms still in
* It is not by any means entirely correct to say that there is no variety observable
among races living in isolated savage purity. The good people of Baden who, when
they first saw them, said all the Bashkirs in a regiment brought up to the Rhine in
1813 by the Russians were as like to each other as twins, found, in the course of a
few weeks, that they could distinguish them readily and sharply enough (see Ecker,
“Crania Germaniae Occid.’ p. 2; “Archiv für Anthrop. v. p. 485, 1872). And real
naturalists, such as Mr. Bates, practised in the discrimination of zoological differences,
express themselves as struck rather with the amount of unlikeness than with that of
likeness which prevails amongst savage tribes of the greatest simplicity of life and the
most entire freedom from crossing with other races. But these observations relate to
the living heads, not to the skulls.
ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 891
something like their original independence, and in the possession of
an unoverwhelmed numerical representation ? The latter of these two
alternative possibilities is certainly often to be seen realised within
the limits of a modern so-called “English’ or so-called ‘British’ family;
and His has laid this down as being the result of the investigations
above mentioned into the Ethnology of Switzerland. At the same time
it is of cardinal importance to note that His has recorded, though only
in a footnote, that the skulls which combine the characters of his
two best-defined types, the “Sion-Typus’ to wit, and the ‘Disentis-
Typus,” in the ‘Mischform,” which he calls “Sion-Disentis Misch-
linge,’ are the most capacious of the entire series of the ‘Crania
Helvetica,’ exceeding, not by their maximum only, but by their
average capacity also, the corresponding capacities of every one of
the pure Swiss types". Intercrossing, therefore, is an agency which
in one set of cases may operate in the way of enhancing individual
evolution, whilst in another it so divides its influence as to allow of
the maintenance of two types in their distinctness. Both these
results are of equal biological, the latter is of pre-eminent archaeo-
logical interest. Retzius” was of opinion, and, with a few qualifi-
cations, I think, more recent Swedish Ethnologists would agree,
that the modern dolichocephalic Swedish cranium was very closely
affined to, if not an exact reproduction of the Swedish cranium of
the Stone Period; and Virchow * holds that the modern brachy-
cephalic Danish skull is similarly related to the Danish skull of the
same period. There can be no doubt that the Swedish cranium is
very closely similar indeed to the Anglo-Saxon; and the skulls
which still conform to that type amongst us will be by most men
supposed to be the legitimate representatives of the followers of
Hengest and Horsa, just as the modern Swedes, whose country has
been less subjected to disturbing agencies, must be held to be the
lineal descendants of the original occupiers of their soil. I am in-
clined to think that the permanence of the brachycephalic stock and
type in Denmark has also its bearing upon the Ethnography of this
country. In the Round-Barrow or Bronze Period in this country,
sub-spheroidal crania (that is to say, crania of a totally different
* See Dr. Beddoe, ‘Mem. Soc. Anth. Lond." iii. p. 552; Huth, p. 308, 1875; D.
Wilson, cit. Brace, ‘Races of the Old World, p. 38o; and His, ‘Crania Helvetica.’
* “Ethnologische Schriften,’ p. 7.
* ‘Alchiv für Anthropologie,” iv. pp. 7 I and 8o.
892 ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY.
shape and type from those which are found in exclusive posses-
sion of the older and longer barrows) are found in great abund-
ance, sometimes, as in the South, in exclusive possession of the
sepulchre, sometimes in company, as in the North, with skulls of
the older type. The skulls are often strikingly like those of the
same type from the Danish tumuli. On this coincidence I should
not stake much, were it not confirmed by other indications. And
foremost amongst these indications I should place the fact of the
‘Tree-interments, as they have been called (interments, that is,
in coffins made out of the trunk of a tree), of this country, and of
Denmark, being so closely alike. The well-known monoxylic coffin
from Gristhorpe contained, together with other relics closely similar
to the relics found at Treenhoi, in South Jutland, in a similar
coffin, a skull which, as I can testify from a cast given me by my
friend Mr. H. S. Harland, might very well pass for that of a
brachycephalic Dane of the Neolithic period. Canon Greenwell
discovered a similar monoxylic coffin at Skipton, in Yorkshire; and
two others have been recorded from the same county—one from the
neighbourhood of Driffield, the other from that of Thornborough.
Evidence, again, is drawn from Col. Lane Fox's opinion that the
earthworks which form such striking objects for inquiry here and
there on the East-Riding Wolds must, considering that the art of
war has been the same in its broad features in all ages, have been
thrown up by an invading force advancing from the east coast. Now
we do know that England was not only made England by immi-
gration from that corner or angle where the Cimbric Peninsula
joins the mainland, but that long after that change of her name
this country was successfully invaded from that Peninsula itself.
And what Swegen and Cnut did some four hundred and fifty years
after the time of Hengist and Horsa, it is not unreasonable to
suppose other warriors and other tribes from the same locality may
have done perhaps twice or thrice as many centuries further back in
time than the Saxon Conquest. The huge proportions of the
Cimbri, Teutones, and Ambrones are just what the skeletons of the
British Round-Barrow folk enable us now to reproduce for our-
selves. It is much to be regretted that from the vast slaughters of
Aquae Sextiae and Vercellae, no relics have been preserved which
might have enabled us to say whether Boiorix and his companions
had the cephalic proportions of Neolithic Danes, or those very
ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 893
different contours which we are familiar with from Saxon graves
throughout England, and from the so-called ‘Danes' graves’ of
Yorkshire. Whatever might be the result of such a discovery and
such a comparison, I think it would in neither event justify the
application of the term ‘Kymric’ to the particular form of skull to
which Retzius and Broca have assigned it.
Some years ago I noticed the absence of the brachycephalic
British type of skull from an extensive series of Romano-British
skulls which had come into my hands; and subsequently to my
doing this, Canon Greenwell pointed out to me that such skulls
as we had from late Keltic cemeteries, belonging to the com-
paratively short period which elapsed between the end of the
Bronze Period and the establishment of Roman rule in Great
Britain, seemed to have reverted mostly to the prae-Bronze dolicho-
cephalic type. This latter type, the ‘kumbecephalic type of
Professor Daniel Wilson, manifests a singular vitality, as the late
and much lamented Professor Phillips pointed out long ago at a
Meeting of this Association held at Swansea—the dark-haired
variety, which is very ordinarily the longer-headed and the shorter-
statured variety of our countrymen, being represented in very great
abundance in those regions of England which can be shown, by
irrefragable and multifold evidence, to have been most thoroughly
permeated, imbibed, and metamorphosed by the infusion of Saxons
and Danes, in the districts, to wit, of Derby, Leicester, Stamford,
and Loughborough. How, and in what way, this type of man—
one to which some of the most valuable men now bearing the name
of Englishmen, which they once abhorred, belong—has contrived to
reassert itself, we may, if I am rightly informed, hear some dis-
cussion in this department. Before leaving this part of my subject
I would say that the Danish type of head still survives amongst
us; but it is to my thinking not by any means so common, at
least in the Midland counties, as the dark-haired type of which we
have just been speaking. And I would add that I hope I may
find that the views which I have here hinted at will be found to
be in accord with the extensive researches of Dr. Beddoe, a get tie-
man who worthily represents and upholds the interests of Anthro-
pology in this city, the city of Prichard, and who is considered to be
more or less disqualified for occupying the post which I now hold,
mainly from the fact that he has occupied it before, and that the
894, AIDDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY.
rules of the British Association, like the laws of England, have
more or less of an abhorrence of perpetuities.
The largest result which craniometry and cubage of skulls have
attained is, to my thinking, the demonstration of the following
facts, viz., first, that the cubical contents of many skulls from the
earliest sepultures from which we have any skulls at all, are larger
considerably than the average cubical contents of modern European
skulls; and secondly, that the female skulls of those times did not
contrast to that disadvantage with the skulls of their male con-
temporaries which the average female skulls of modern days do,
when subjected to a similar comparison". Dr. Thurnam de-
monstrated the former of these facts, as regards the skulls from the
Long and the Round Barrows of Wiltshire, in the Memoirs of the
London Anthropological Society for 1865; and the names of Lez
Eyzies and Cro-Magnon, and of the Caverne de l’Homme Mort,
to which we may add that of Solutré, remind us that the first of
these facts has been confirmed, and the second both indicated and
abundantly commented upon by M. Broca.
The impression which these facts make upon one, when one
first comes to realise them, is closely similar to that which is made
by the first realisation to the mind of the existence of a subtropical
Flora in Greenland in Miocene times. All our anticipations are
precisely reversed, and in each case by a weight of demonstration
equivalent to such a work; there is no possibility in either case
of any mistake; and we acknowledge that all that we had ex-
pected is absent, and that where we had looked for poverty and
pinching there we come upon luxuriant and exuberant growth.
The comparisons we draw in either case between the past and the
present are not wholly to the advantage of the latter : still such
are the facts. Philologists will thank me for reminding them of
Mr. Chauncy Wright's brilliant suggestions that the large relative
size of brain to body which distinguishes, and always, so far as we
know, has distinguished the human species as compared with the
species most nearly related to it, may be explained by the psycho-
logical tenet that the smallest proficiency in the faculty of language
* The subequality of the male and female skulls in the less civilised of modern
races was pointed out as long ago as 1845, by Retzius in Müller's ‘Archiv, p. 89, and
was commented upon by Huschke, of Jena, in his ‘Schädel, Hirn und Seele, pp.
48–51, in 1854.
ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 895
may ‘require more brain power than the greatest in any other
direction, and that “we do not know and have no means of know-
ing what is the quantity of intellectual power as measured by brains
which even the simplest use of language requires'.”
And for the explanation of the pre-eminently large size of the
brains of these particular representatives of our species, the tenants
of prehistoric sepulchres, we have to bear in mind, first, that they
were, as the smallness of their numbers and the largeness of the
tumuli lodging them may be taken to prove, the chiefs of their
tribes; and, secondly, that modern savages have been known, and
prehistoric savages may therefore be supposed, to have occasionally
elected their chiefs to their chieftainships upon grounds furnished
by their superior fitness for such posts—that is to say, for their
superior energy and ability. Some persons may find it difficult to
believe this, though such facts are deposed to by most thoroughly
trustworthy travellers, such as Baron Osten Sacken (referred to by
Von Baer, in the “Report’ of the famous Anthropological Congress
at Göttingen in 1861, p. 22). And they may object to accepting
it, for, among other reasons, this reason—to wit, that Mr. Galton
had shown us in his ‘Men of Science, their Nature and Nurture,’
p. 98, that men of great energy and activity (that is to say, just
the very men fitted to act as leaders of and to commend them-
selves to savages”) have ordinarily smaller-sized heads than men
possessed of intellectual power dissociated from those qualities.
The objection I specify, as well as those which I allude to, may
have too much weight assigned to them ; but we can waive this
discussion and put our feet on firm ground when we say that in all
savage communities the chiefs have a larger share of food and
other comforts, such as there are in savage life, and have conse-
quently better and larger frames—or, as the Rev. S. Whitmee puts
it (ſ.c.), when observing on the fact as noticed by him in Polynesia,
a more ‘portly bearing.” This (which, as the size of the brain
increases within certain proportions with the increase of the size of
* The bibliographer will thank me also for pointing out to him that the important
paper in the “North-American Review,’ for October, 1870, p. 295, from which I
have just quoted, has actually escaped the wonderfully exhaustive research of Dr.
Seidlitz (see his ‘Darwin'sche Theorie,’ 1875).
* An interesting and instructive story in illustration of the kind of qualities which
do recommend a man to savages, is told us by Sir Bartle Frere in his pamphlet,
‘Christianity suited to all forms of Civilization,’ pp. 12–14.
896 ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY.
the body, is a material fact in every sense) has been testified to by
a multitude of other observers, and is, to my mind, one of the
most distinctive marks of savagery as opposed to civilisation. It
is only in times of civilisation that men of the puny stature of
Tydeus or Agesilaus are allowed their proper place in the manage-
ment of affairs. And men of such physical size, coupled with such
mental calibre, may take comfort, if they need it, from the purely
quantitative consideration, that large as are the individual skulls
from prehistoric graves, and high, too, as is the average obtained
from a number of them, it has nevertheless not been shown that
the largest individual skulls of those days were larger than, or,
indeed, as large as the best skulls of our own days; whilst the
high average capacity which the former series shows is readily
explicable by the very obvious consideration that the poorer speci-
mens of humanity, if allowed to live at all in those days, were,
at any rate, when dead not allowed sepulture in the ‘tombs of the
kings,’ from which nearly exclusively we obtain our prehistoric
crania. M. Broca' has given us yet further ground for retaining
our self-complacency by showing, from his extensive series of
measurements of the crania from successive epochs in Parisian
burial-places, that the average capacity has gone on steadily
increasing.
It may be suggested that a large brain, as calculated by the
cubage of the skull, may nevertheless have been a comparatively
lowly organised one, from having its molecular constitution quali-
tatively inferior from the neuroglia being developed to the dis-
advantage of the neurine, or from having its convolutions few and
simple, and being thus poorer in the aggregate mass of its grey
vesicular matter. It is, perhaps, impossible to dispose absolutely
of either of these suggestions. But, as regards the first, it seems
to me to be exceedingly improbable that such could have been the
case. For in cases where an overgrowth of neuroglia has given
the brain increase of bulk without giving it increase of its true
mervous elements, the Scotch proverb, “Muckle brain, little wit,”
applies; and the relatively inferior intelligence of the owners of
such brains as seen nowadays may, on the principle of continuity,
be supposed to have attached to the owners of such brains in
* See his paper, “Bull. Soc. Anthrop. de Paris,’ t. iii. ser. i. 1862, p, Io2; or his
collected ‘Mémoires,’ vol. i. p. 348, 1871.
ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 897
former times. But those times were times of a severer struggle
for existence than even the present ; and inferior intelligences, and
specially the inferior quickness and readiness observable in such
cases, it may well be supposed, would have fared worse then than
now. There is, however, no need for this supposition ; for, as
a matter of fact, the brain-case of brains so hypertrophied" has a
very readily recognisable shape of its own, and this shape is
not the shape of the Cro-Magnon skull, nor indeed of any of the
prehistoric skulls with which I am acquainted.
As regards the second suggestion, to the effect that a large
brain-case may have contained a brain the convolutions of which
were simple, broad, and coarse, and which made up by consequence
a sheet of grey matter of less square area than that made up in a
brain of similar size but of more complex and slenderer convolu-
tions, I have to say that it is possible this may have been the case,
but that it seems to me by no means likely. Very large skulls
are sometimes found amongst collections purporting to have come
from very savage or degraded races; such a skull may be seen in
the London College of Surgeons with a label, ‘5357 D. Bushman,
G. Williams. Presented by Sir John Lubbock”;’ and, from what
Professor Marshall and Gratiolet have taught us as to other Bush-
man brains, smaller, it is true, in size, we may be inclined to think
that the brain which this large skull once contained may never-
theless have been much simpler in its convolutions than a European
brain of similar size would be. This skull, however, is an isolated
instance of such proportions amongst Bushman skulls, so far, at
least, as I have been able to discover ; whilst the skulls of pre-
historic times, though not invariably, are yet most ordinarily large
skulls. A large brain with coarse convolutions puts its possessor
at a disadvantage in the struggle for existence, as its greater size
is not compensated by greater dynamical activity; and hence
I should be slow to explain the large size of ancient skulls by
suggesting that they contained brains of this negative character.
* I may, perhaps, be allowed to express here my surprise at the statement made by
Messrs. Wilks and Moxon, in their very valuable ‘ Pathological Anatomy, pp. 217,
218, to the effect that they have not met with such cases of Cerebral Hypertrophy.
They were common enough at the Children's Hospital in Great Ormond Street when
I was attached to it.
* [This skull is evidently 1299 of the new Catalogue of Crania prepared by
Professor Flower, where it is named ‘The Cranium of a Koranna.’—EDITOR.]
3 M
898 ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY.
And I am glad to see that M. Broca is emphatically of this opinion,
and that, after a judicious statement of the whole case, he ex-
presses himself thus (“Revue d'Anthropologie,” ii. 1, 38): “Rien ne
permet done de supposer que les rapports de la masse encéphalique
avec l’intelligence fussent autres chez eux que chez nous.”
It is by a reference to the greater severity of the struggle for
existence, and to the lesser degree to which the principle of division
of labour was carried out in olden days, that M. Broca, in his paper
on the Caverne de l’Homme Mort just quoted from, explains the
fact of the subequality of the skulls in the two sexes. This is an
adequate explanation of the facts; but to the facts as already stated,
I can add from my own experience the fact that though the
female skulls of prehistoric times are often, they are not always
equal, or nearly, to those of the male sex of those times; and,
secondly, that whatever the relative size of the head, the limbs and
trunk of the female portion of those tribes were, as is still the case
with modern savages, very usually disproportionately smaller than
those of the male. This is readily enough explicable by a reference
to the operations of causes exemplifications of the working of which
are unhappily not far to seek now, and may be found in any detail
you please in those anthropologically interesting (however other-
wise unpleasant) documents, the Police Reports.
Having before my mind the liability we are all under fallaciously
to content ourselves with recording the shots which hit, I must
not omit to say that one at least of the more recently propounded
doctrines in Craniology does not seem to me to be firmly established.
This is the doctrine of ‘occipital dolichocephaly’ being a character-
istic of the lower races of modern days and of prehistoric races as
compared with modern civilised races. I have not been able to
convince myself by my own measurements of the tenability of this
position; and I observe that Ihering has expressed himself to the
same effect, appending his measurements in proof of his statements
in his paper, “Zur Reform der Craniometrie,’ published in the
‘Zeitschrift für Ethnologie’ for 1873. The careful and extensive
measurements of Aeby * and Weisbach” have shown that the occi-
pital region enjoys wider limits of oscillation than either of the
other divisions of the cranial vault. I have some regret in saying
* Aeby, “Schädelform des Menschen und der Affen, pp. 11, 12, and 128.
* Weisbach, “Die Schädelform der Roumanen, p. 32, 1869.
ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 899
this, partly because writers on such subjects as ‘Literature and
Dogma’ have already made use of the phrase ‘occipitally dolicho-
cephalic,’ as if it represented one of the permanent acquisitions of
science; and I say it with even more regret, as it concerns the
deservedly honoured names of Gratiolet and of Broca, to whom
Anthropology owes so much. What is true in the doctrine relates,
among other things, to what is matter of common observation as to
the fore part of the head rather than to anything which is really
constant in the back part of the skull. This matter of common
observation is to the effect that when the ear is ‘well forward” in
the head, we do ill to augur well of the intelligence of its owner.
Now the fore part of the brain is irrigated by the carotid arteries,
which, though smaller in calibre during the first years of life,
during which the brain so nearly attains its full size, than they are
in the adult, are nevertheless relatively large even in those early
days, and are both absolutely and relatively to the brain which
they have to nourish, much larger than the vertebral arteries, which
feed its posterior lobes. It is easy therefore to see that a brain in
which the fore part supplied by the carotids has been stinted of due
supplies of food, or however stunted in growth, is a brain the entire
length and breadth of which is likely to be ill-nourished. As I
have never seen reason to believe in any cerebral localisation which
was not explicable by a reference to vascular irrigation, it was with
much pleasure that I read the remarks of Messrs. Wilks and Moxon
in their recently published ‘Pathological Anatomy, pp. 207, 208,
as to the indications furnished by the distribution of the Pacchio-
nian bodies as to differences existing in the blood-currents on the
back and those on the fore part of the brain. These remarks are
the more valuable, as mere hydraulics, Professor Clifton assures me,
would not have so clearly pointed out what the physiological up-
growths seem to indicate. Any increase, again, in the length of
the posterior cerebral arteries is pro tanto a disadvantage to the
parts they feed. If the blood-current, as these facts seem to show,
is slower in the posterior lobes of the brain, it is, upon purely
physical principles of endosmosis and exosmosis, plain that these
segments of the brain are less efficient organs for the mind to
work with ; and here again ‘occipital dolichocephaly’ would have
a justification, though one founded on the facts of the nutrition of
the brain-cells, not on the proportions of the brain-case. In many
3 M 2.
900 ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY.
(but not in all) parts of Continental Europe, again, the epithet
‘ long-headed’ would not have the laudatory connotation which,
thanks to our Saxon blood, and in spite of the existence amongst
us of other varieties of dolichocephaly, it still retains here. And
the brachycephalic head which, abroad" at least, is ordinarily a
more capacious one, and carried on more vigorous shoulders and
by more vigorous owners altogether than the dolichocephalie,
strikes a man who has been used to live amongst dolichocephali
by nothing more forcibly, when he first comes to take notice of it,
than by the nearness of the external ear to the back of the head;
and this may be said to constitute an artistic occipital brachy-
cephalism. But this does not imply that the converse condition
is to be found conversely correlated, nor does it justify the use of
the phrase ‘occipital dolichocephaly’ in any etymological, nor even
in any ethnographical sense.
I shall now content myself, as far as craniology is concerned, by
an enumeration of some at least of the various recent memoirs upon
the subject which appear to me to be of pre-eminent value. And
foremost amongst these I will mention Professor Cleland's long and
elaborate scientific and artistic paper on the Variations of the
Human Skull, which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions
for 1869. Next I will name Ecker's admirable, though shorter,
memoir on Cranial Curvature, which appeared in the ‘Archiv für
Anthropologie, a journal already owing much to his labours, in
the year 1871. Aeby's writings I have already referred to, and
Ihering's, to be found in recent numbers of the ‘Archiv für An-
thropologie' and the ‘Zeitschrift für Ethnologie,” deserve your
notice. Professor Bischoff's paper on the Mutual Relations of the
horizontal circumference of the Skull and of its contents to
each other and to the weight of the Brain, has not, as I think,
obtained the notice which it deserves. It is to be found in the
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Munich for 1864, the same
year which witnessed the publication of the now constantly quoted
‘Crania Helvetica’ of Professors His and Rütimeyer. Some of
the most important results contained in this work, and much im-
portant matter besides, were made available to the exclusively
* See upon this point :—Broca, “Bull. Soc. Anth.” Paris, ii. p. 648, 1861; ibid.
Dec. 5, 1872; Virchow, “Archiv für Anth.’ v. p. 535; ‘Zeitschrift für Ethnol." iv. 2,
p. 36; “Sammlungen,’ix. 193, p. 45, 1874; Beddoe, “Mem. Anth. Soc. Lond." ii. p. 35o.
ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 901
English reader by Professor Huxley, two years later, in the ‘Pre-
historic Remains of Caithness.’ I have made a list, perhaps not
an exhaustive one, but containing some dozen memoirs by Dr.
Beddoe, and having read them or nearly all of them, I can with a
very safe conscience recommend you all to do the like. I can say
nearly the same as regards Broca and Virchow, adding that the
former of these two savants has set the other two with whom I
have coupled him an excellent example, by collecting and publish-
ing his papers in consecutive volumes.
But I should forget not only what is due to the place in which
I am speaking, but what is due to the subject I am here concerned
with, if in speaking of its literature, I omitted the name of your
own townsman, Prichard. He has been called, and, I think,
justly, the ‘father of modern Anthropology.” I am but putting
the same thing in other words, and adding something more specific
to it, when I compare his works to those of Gibbon and Thirlwall,
and say that they have attained, and seem likely to maintain per-
manently, a position and importance commensurate with that of
the ‘stately and undecaying ” productions of those great English
historians. Subsequently to the first appearance of those histories
other works have appeared by other authors, who have dealt in
them with the same periods of time. I have no wish to depreciate
those works; their authors have not rarely rectified a slip and cor-
rected an error into which their great predecessors had fallen.
Nay, more, the later comers have by no means neglected to avail
themselves of the advantages which the increase of knowledge
and the vast political experience of the last thirty years have put
at their disposal, and they have thus occasionally had opportunities
of showing more of the true proportions and relations of even
great events and catastrophes; still the older works retain a
lasting value, and will remain as solid testimonies to English in-
tellect and English capacity for large undertakings as long as our
now rapidly extending language and literature live. The same
may be most truthfully said of Prichard’s ‘Researches into the
Physical History of Mankind.’ An increase of knowledge may
supply us with fresh and with stronger arguments than he could
command for some of the great conclusions for which he con-
tended; such, notably, has been the case in the question (though
‘ question’ it can no longer be called) of the Unity of the human
902 ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY.
species; and by the employment of the philosophy of continuity
and the doctrine of evolution, with which the world was not made
acquainted till more than ten years after Prichard's death, many a
weaker man than he has been enabled to bind into more readily
manageable burdens the vast collections of facts with which he had
to deal. Still his works remain, massive, impressive, enduring—
much as the headlands along our southern coast stand out in the
distance in their own grand outlines, whilst a close and minute
inspection is necessary for the discernment of the forts and fosses
added to them, indeed dug out of their substance, in recent times.
If we consider what the condition of the subject was when
Prichard addressed himself to it, we shall be the better qualified to
take and make an estimate of his merits. This Prichard has himself
described to us, in a passage to be found in the preface to the
third volume of the third edition of the “Physical History, pub-
lished in the year 1841, and reminding one forcibly of a similar
utterance of Aristotle's, at the end of one of his logical treatises
(“Soph. Elench. cap. xxxiv. 6). These are his words:—
“No other writer has surveyed the same field, or any great part
of it, from a similar point of view. . . . The lucubrations of
Herder and other diffuse writers of the same description, while
some of them possess a merit of their own, are not concerned in the
same design, or directed towards the same scope. Their object is
to portray national character as resulting from combined influences
—physical, moral, and political. They abound in generalisations,
often in the speculative flights of a discursive fancy, and afford
little or no aid for the close induction from facts which is the aim
of the present work. Nor have these inquiries often come within
the view of writers on Geography, though the history of the
globe is very incomplete without that of its human inhabitants.’
A generation has scarcely passed away since these words were
published in 1841; we are living in 1875; yet what a change has
been effected in the condition of Anthropological literature . The
existence of such a dignified quarterly as the ‘Archiv für Anthro-
pologie,' bearing on its titlepage in alphabetical order the honoured
names of W. Baer, of Desor, of Ecker, of Hellwald, of His, of Lin-
denschmit, of Lucae, of Rütimeyer, of Schaaffhausen, of Semper,
of Virchow, of Vogt, and of Welcker, is in itself perhaps the most
striking evidence of the advance made in this time, as being the
ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 903
most distinctly ponderable, and in every sense the largest, Anthro-
pological publication of the day.
Archaeology, which but a short time back was studied in a
way which admirably qualified its devotees for being called ‘con-
noisseurs,’ but which scarcely qualified them for being called men
of Science, has by its alliance with Natural History and its adop-
tion of Natural History methods, and its availing itself of the
light afforded by the great Natural History principles just alluded
to, entered on a new career. There is, as regards Natural History,
Anatomy, and Pathology, nothing left to be desired for the con-
joint scheme represented by the periodical just mentioned, where
we have W. Baer for the first and Virchow for the last, and the
other names specified for the rest of these subjects; whilst Ar-
chaeology, the other party in the alliance, is very adequately re-
presented by Lindenschmit alone. But when I recollect that
Prichard published a work “On the Eastern Origin of the Celtic
Nations' ten years before the volume of ‘ Researches,’ from which
I have just quoted, and that this work has been spoken of as the
work ‘which has made the greatest advance in Comparative
Philology during the present century,” I cannot but feel that the
‘Redaction’ of the ‘Archiv für Anthropologie ’ have not as yet
learnt all that may be learnt from the Bristol Ethnologist; and
they would do well to add to the very strong staff represented on
their titlepage the name of some one, or the names of more than
one, comparative philologist. This the Berlin ‘Zeitschrift für
Ethnologie ’ has done.
Of the possible curative application of some of the leading prin-
ciples of modern Anthropology to some of the prevalent errors of
the day, I should be glad to be allowed to say a few words. The
most important lesson as regards the future (I do not say the im-
mediate future) which the modern study of Human Progress (for
such all men who think, except the Duke of Argyll, are now agreed
is the study of Anthropology) teaches is the folly and impossibility
of attempting to break abruptly with the past. This principle is
now enforced with persistent iteration from many Anthropological
platforms; and I cannot but think it might advantageously be
substituted in certain portfolios for the older maxim, ‘Whatever is
certainly new is certainly false,’ a maxim which seems at first
sight somewhat like it, but which, as being based on pure ignorance
904 ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY.
of the past and teaching only distrust of the future, is really
quite different from it. I am not sure that Prichard ever put
forward the former of these two doctrines, though it is just the
doctrine which would have commended itself to his large, philo-
sophical, many-sided, well-balanced judgment. He died in 1848–
the very year which perhaps, of all save one in history, and that
one the year 1793 (a year in which he was yet a child), showed in
the most palpable way the absurdity of attempting to make civil-
isation by pattern, and of hoping to produce a wholesome future in
any other way than that of evolution from the past.
What have been called the senile, what could equally well have
been called the cynical, Ethics of Pessimism, had not in Prichard's
time found any advocates in this country; indeed, so far as I have ob-
served, they are of a more recent importation than most other modern
heresies. I do not deny that at times it is possible to give way to
certain pressing temptations to think that we are living in a cer-
tainly deteriorated and a surely deteriorating age, and that it is
hopeless and useless to set up, or look up to, aspirations or ideals.
When, for example, we take stock of the avidity with which we
have, all of us, within the last twelve months read the memoirs of
a man whom one of his reviewers has called a ‘high-toned aristo-
crat, but whom I should call by quite another set of epithets, we
may think that we are not, after all, so much the better for the
3ooo years which separate us from the time when it was considered
foul play for a man to enact the part of a familiar friend, to eat of
another man's bread, and then to lay great wait for him. Or can we,
in these days, bear the contrast to this miserable spectacle of mean
treachery and paltry disloyalty, which is forced upon us in the
same history by the conduct of the chivalrous son of Zeruiah, who,
when he had fought against Rabbah and taken the city of waters,
sent for his king who had tarried in Jerusalem, lest that city
should thenceforward bear the name, not of David, but of Joab 2
Or again, as I have been asked, have we got very far above the level
of sentiment and sympathy which Helen, an unimpeachable witness,
tells us the Trojan Hector had attained to and manifested in his
treatment of her, -
“With tender feeling and with gentle words’
Would the utterances of any modern epic poet have so surely
brought tears into the eyes of the noble-hearted boy depicted by
ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 905
Mr. Hughes, as the passage of Homer just alluded to, and cha-
racterised by him “as the most touching thing in Homer, perhaps
in all profane poetry put together’? What answer can be made
to all this by those who maintain that the old times were not
better than these, who maintain the doctrine of Progress, and hold
that man has been gradually improving from the earliest times, and
may be expected to go on thus advancing in the future ? An
answer based upon the employment of simple scientific method,
and upon the observance of a very simple scientific rule—upon, to
wit, the simple method of taking averages, and the simple rule of
enumerating all the circumstances of the case. Noble actions, when
we come to count them up, were not, after all, so very common in
the olden times; and side by side with them there existed, and
indeed flourished, intertwined with them, practices which the
moral sense of all civilised nations has now definitely repudiated.
It is a disagreeable task, that of learning the whole truth; but it
is unfair to draw dark conclusions as to the future, based on
evidence drawn from an exclusive contemplation of the bright side
of the past. A French work, published only last year, was recom-
mended to me recently by an eminent scholar as containing a good
account of the intellectual and moral condition of the Romans
under the Empire. I have the book, but have not been able to
find in it any mention of the gladiatorial shows, though one
might have thought the words Panem et Circenses might have
suggested that those exhibitions entered as factors of some import-
ance into the formation of the Roman character. It is impossible
to go beyond that in the way of looking only at the bright side of
things. Still we ourselves have less difficulty in recollecting that
there were 3oo Spartans sacrificed to the law-abiding instincts of
their race at Thermopylae, than in producing, when asked for
them, the numbers of Helots whom Spartan policy massacred in
cold blood not so many years after, or those of the Melians and
Mitylenaeans whom the polished and cultivated Athenians butchered
in the same way, and about the same time, with as little or far less
justification for doing so. Homer, whom I have quoted above,
lived, it is true, some centuries earlier, but living even then he
might have spared more than the five words contained in a single
line (176 of Iliad xxiii.) to express reprobation for the slaughter of
the twelve Trojan youths at the pyre of Patroclus. The Romans
906 ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY.
could applaud Terence's line, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me
alienum puto ;' but it did not strike them till the time of Seneca
that these noble words were incompatible with the existence of
gladiatorial shows, nor till the time of Honorius did they legally
abolish those abominations. Mutinies and rebellions are not alto-
gether free from unpleasant incidents even in our days; but the
execution of 6ooo captives from a Servile War, in the way that
Crassus executed his prisoners after the final defeat of Spartacus,
viz. by the slow torture of crucifixion, is, owing to the advance of
civilisation, no longer a possibility. If the road from Capua to
Rome witnessed this colossal atrocity, there are still preserved for
us in its near neighbourhood the remains of Herculaneum and
Pompeii to show us what foul broad-daylight exuberance could be
allowed by the public conscience of the time of Titus and Agricola
to that other form which sits ‘hard by hate.” The man who in
those days contributed his factor to the formation of a better
public opinion, did so at much greater risk than any of us can
incur now by the like line of action. Much of what was most
cruel, much of what was most foul in the daily life of the time,
had, M. Gaston Boissier notwithstanding, the sanction of their
state religion and the indorsement of their statesmen and em-
perors to support it. There was no public press in other lands to
appeal to from the falsified verdicts of a sophisticated or a terror-
ised community. Though then as now,
‘Mankind were one in spirit,”
freedom of intercommunication was non-existent; no one could
have added to the words just quoted from Lowell their com-
plemental words,
‘And an instinct bears along,
Round the earth's electric circle the swift flash of right or wrong.’
The solidarity of nations had not, perhaps could not have been
dreamt of-the physical pre-requisites for that, as for many another
non-physical good, being wanting.
Under all these disadvantages men were still found who were
capable of aspiration, of hope for, and of love of better things; and
by constant striving after their own ideal, they helped in securing
for us the very really improved material, mental, and moral posi-
tions which we enjoy. What they did before, we have to do for
those who will come after us.
YLV.
THE EXAMINATION SYSTEM AND THE
PRE-REQUISITES OF CANDIDATES:
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE ST. MARY's HOSPITAL
MEDICAL SCHOOL.
I WAS some time back honoured with an invitation similar in
character to that of which I am now availing myself, and which, I
take it, I owe to the suggestion of my much valued friend and
former pupil, your Dean, Dr. Shepherd. What I had to do then
was a good deal easier of performance that what I have to do
now. Then, as now, I was told that something in the shape, and
if possible, of the nature of an address would be expected from me;
but upon that occasion the address was to come first, and the dis-
tribution of prizes second in order, and I felt that there was little
need to be over-anxious as to the former of my duties, as the minds
of all present—of candidates successful and unsuccessful, of their
admirers and sympathising friends—would be intent upon coming
with all speed to the second part of the business. And whilst I
was glad, on the one hand, to be free from any very heavy sense of
responsibility, I should have been sorry, on the other, to have inter-
posed myself, or my remarks, at any length between any of my
audience and the very pure and yet, I apprehend, very intense
enjoyment which witnessing a public recognition of merit in a
young friend or relative confers. I have comforted myself, however,
whilst considering what I have to do this day, by thinking that it
was quite within my competence to secure for myself the merit of
being brief, and that if I were to write down what I wished to say,
and to confine myself strictly to my manuscript, I could count upon
giving satisfaction in that way at least.
I take it that a person who is put into the honourable position
which I this day hold, has generally something which he is
908 THE EXAMINATION SYSTEM AND THE
glad to have the opportunity of saying from so good a standing-
point or vantage-ground. Accordingly, I wish to say a few words
upon one subject, amongst others, to which I have of late devoted
a very considerable amount of my very fully occupied time—to
wit, the Examination System and the pre-requisites of candi-
dature. The system of requiring certificates of attendance at
lectures and upon other courses of instruction, and the examination
system, are two very distinct means intended to co-operate towards
one end—that, namely, of securing to the public that its future
physicians and surgeons shall, firstly, have had certain opportuni-
ties, and, secondly, have made certain use of them. I must not fail
to add, what will disabuse any, either old or young, of the idea that
I have anything very revolutionary to propose—namely, that these
two systems are necessary as much in the interests of the future
doctor as in those of his future patients, and that without some
such apparatus and machinery as that which they represent,
many a man would lose chances of forming in himself habits of
attention, indispensable for any success, or indeed any virtue, which
chances may never recur. Indeed, it is a matter of common obser-
vation, at least of possible common observation, and I would it were
matter of more common remark, that it is necessary not only for
the acquirement of habits which belong only in part to our intel-
lectual nature, but even for the acquirement of purely intellectual
accomplishments, that certain kinds of work should be done at
certain times and fixed periods in a boy's, in a young, or in an older
man’s life. Languages can be gained with greater facility before
the age of twenty-five than they can ever afterwards; and the same
may, I am inclined to believe, be said of the power of recognising
and recollecting specific differences in zoology and botany. It is
well that the same natural restriction does not invariably exist as
to the power of mastering that of which, however, it is of more
importance that early mastery should be gained than of almost
any other subject—to wit, mathematics. These are the words of a
man whose experience and success as an educator has been great,
not intended, it is true, for the particular case we deal with, and
applying only in the way of analogy, but forcible in that way and
appropriate :-
‘There is but a certain time allotted for each thing to be done
that we have to do, whether it belongs to this world or the other,
PRE-REQUISITES OF CANDIDATES. 909
and if we pass the allotted time it is too late for that work to be
done. If you are idle here at school, it may for a short time make
little difference, perhaps no perceptible difference at all. But you
know perfectly well that that is not so always. After a time it
becomes too late to recover what you have not chosen to take when
it was within your reach. There are things which can be learnt
when you are not twelve which can never be learnt so well after-
wards; there are still more which must be learnt before you are
seventeen or eighteen, or you can never really learn them at all.
You may afterwards wish very much that you had not missed the
chance; but your wishes will not give you back the power that is
gone; you are too late. And the same holds good long after. Each
time of life, as it comes, marks off the foundations of certain studies
as done with ; if you have not laid them by that time you never
can. And precisely the same thing is true of other things besides
studies 1.”
So much for the good to be expected and attained by the observ-
ance of a regular curriculum. It admits of no question. What does,
I think, admit of question, and what is, I think, capable of improve-
ment, is the method for securing such observance. The method at
present in vogue for this end is known as the ‘signing up’ of cer-
tificates of attendance at lectures. Now such a certificate can only
roallwr alonaco 4-A +!, a £o a 4-km of n c.4-i-Alan 4- Tº arº gº + +1, a 21 Al---~~~~
really depose to the fact that a student was present at the delivery
of particular sets of discourses or demonstrations; it cannot depose
to his having profited by them. What the public wish to be
assured of is the latter matter, and its results in the shape of the
possession by him of a certain amount of attainments and dexterity.
But this can only be done by an examination held by one set of
authorities or another; and the very first and the very last principle
of any and every examination which deserves the name is the prin-
ciple of English law—De non eaſistentibus et de non apparentibus
eadem est ratio. Nothing, in the words of the examination statutes
of my own University, should influence the result of the examina-
tion except what forms part of or directly results from the ex-
amination itself. I do not question the good to be had from
attending lectures; I am well assured that good lectures, not over
numerous, bless both him who gives and him who takes. The giver
is benefited by having to put his knowledge into a compact form,
* Temple, ‘Sermons,’ Ser. II., Serm. xl. p. 308. I87I.
910 THE EXAMINATION SYSTEM AND THE
so as to be readily transmissible and communicable in public; the
hearer is benefited by obtaining orally, or rather auditorally, what it
would have cost him more time to obtain, if indeed he could have
obtained it at all, by reading or otherwise. Besides, hearing is what
is known as a ‘natural process,’ and no improvement in the way of
printing can ever entirely supersede it, or make it what it is some-
times said to be—namely, ‘a barbarous anachronism.’ I say nothing
of the advantage to be drawn from contact with a living personal
source of knowledge, though it is clear enough that a few striking
expressions delivered by an earnest man viva voce may awaken more
thought and create more lively interest than a whole volume of
print, however well illustrated. For as iron sharpeneth iron, so
man the face of his friend. I see, know, and gratefully recollect the
benefits of lectures; but the more excellent an institution is the
more is it likely to be injured by compulsory enactments intended
to govern or protect it. Attendance at morning or evening chapel,
or both, is an excellent practice; but the making it compulsory
has a very sure, I do not say an invariable, tendency to rob it of its
beneficial effect. It is a more edifying sight to see a single indi-
vidual going to such a service spontaneously,–as I am told a very
distinguished statesman, the junior member for a constituency not
a hundred miles hence, may be seen doing in all weathers, than to
see a whole college of young men hurrying to Divine service to have
their attendance upon it entered as upon a roll-call. I am glad to
think that the answering a roll-call pure and simple is allowed in
some of our colleges to stand as an alternative for attendance in
chapel. Now compulsory attendance at lectures, like compulsory
attendance at chapels, aims at attaining something which I believe
to be distinctly good, but which I also know to be as distinctly not
securable by it. I cannot see the wisdom of aiming at the un-
attainable, and as testimony to bodily attendance is the only result
really attained by the process of ‘signing up,' I should distinctly
limit the bearing of the documents I refer to to the scope really
attainable—to wit, the scope of a roll-call. I am informed that in
one of the largest of continental countries, the system of signing
for students is entirely given up, it having been so much abused,
and that if a student only passes his examinations well he need not
have attended a single lecture. Hereby, however, I submit that
the public are robbed of some of the security which they have a
PRE-REQUISITES OF CANDIDATES. 911
right to demand. No examination, however large a factor of it the
practical part may be, can give entirely satisfactory proof that a
man knows his subject thoroughly and practically: the elasticity of
words, the power of verbal memory, the possibility of ‘preparing
and ‘grafting’ a candidate for examination, as, in America and
elsewhere, a mine is ‘prepared and ‘grafted” for unwary speculators,
are not all the heads under which sources of fallacy in examina-
tions might be enumerated. Hence I should wish to secure for the
public what a system of roll-calls can secure—namely, the attend-
ance of a student in a particular spot where particular opportunities
for learning particular things should be available for him in a par-
ticular order and succession. This system of requirements should
be made to tally with the system of examinations, and thereby
teachers and pupils, examiners and candidates, would all alike be
relieved from much that is onerous, unreal, and a snare. The
examination system would dignify the system of the roll-call,
which, indeed, as aiming at something definitely attainable and
attaining it, even if nothing more, would at any rate possess the
dignity which truth possesses, that of ‘incorrupta fides nudaque
veritas.” Common sense would consider the advantage, sense of
duty would enforce the necessity, of using opportunities whilst
they were available, and the two systems, that of examinations and
that of the pre-requisites for them, would be brought into a more
harmonious and less burdensome solidarity than they at present
enjoy.
I have been speaking of the duties of young men and of learners,
but do not suppose that I think that older men and teachers, like
myself, have not their duties too. I know that I have mine, and
that I often perform them very much otherwise than I should and
wish to do. One hears talk sometimes which makes one think that
the talker supposes that morality belongs to one sphere and science
to another, and that the two may impinge upon or collide with one
another, but cannot otherwise influence each other. This is an
entire mistake. ‘Faith and ‘duty' are words which may, when
we see them on the outside of a tract, prepare us for finding ethical
and other disquisitions in pari materie within its covers; but faith
and duty, faithfulness and thoroughness, are also things which can
no more be left out of the world of scientific work than they can or
ought to be left out of ‘that other world’ to which I have just
912 THE EXAMINATION SYSTEM AND THE
alluded. Examining is scientific work; indeed, in these days, it is
a work which occupies a very large portion of the time of many a
scientific man, whether to his benefit or that of science I do not
stop to discuss. But I submit, and without any fear of contradic-
tion, that there is no work which calls for more exercise of conscience;
no work—not even that of the judge on the bench—which, when well
done, illustrates more completely the truth of the old doctrine, “In
justice, all moral virtue lies involved.” An examiner has many
temptations to strive against : the temptation to idleness; to give
way to weariness; to meet the sameness of his subject-matter with
perfunctoriness in dealing with it; to give way to feelings of pique
when he finds that his own pet views or papers are entirely un-
known to the examinee. Of course a strong and upright man
resists all these temptations; but strength and uprightness are
largely or entirely moral qualities. I need not labour, however, at
what is self-evident. Let me say a few words about the way in
which a man’s moral nature is, or ought to be, called into activity,
not now when he is engaged in testing, but when he is engaged in
communicating or acquiring, knowledge. As regards the duties of
a teacher when teaching, he is bound to beware of leaving any one
side of a question, any one set of facts, in neglect and inadequately
expounded. Imperfection of exposition in a teacher, not only pro-
duces, in the second generation, so to say, imperfection of investi-
gation in the hearer, but—as words terribly shoot back, like the
Tartar's bow, mightily entangling and perverting the judgment—
such imperfection and want of fulness in the communication reacts
by producing imperfection and want of fulness in investigation in
the teacher himself. It is (trite remark) difficult to estimate the
consequences of any one action; but it is easy to see that an ex-
ample set by a person, himself set in authority, of slovenliness and
inadequacy in his methods of work may hurt the consciences of his
younger brethren, and have widely and lengthily ramifying conse-
Quences in neutralising chances for neutralising evil and suffering.
I have said thus much about the responsibilities of students and
teachers in praesenti. I will, with your permission, say a little
more upon the responsibilities which will gather round the former
in futuro.
Of the students of any hospital at any one time we may safely
say that, making a small deduction for accidental relinquishments
PRE-REQUISITES OF CANDIDATES. 913
of the career and for other disturbing causes, we may look upon all
as likely, in a few months, to come into positions in which the lives
of fellow-creatures of their own species will be largely dependent
upon their decisions—i.e., upon the knowledge they have stored up,
the power of applying it which they have gained, and the resolu-
tion they may have for duly using both. Some of those now
present may be fortunate enough to come into their responsibilities
in or upon areas not destitute of professional colleagues, of whose
counsel and advice they may be glad to avail themselves. Some,
however, may have to be the sole and unsupported representatives
of medical and surgical science in some isolated country locality.
These are large powers and large responsibilities: it is but com-
monplace to say that a consideration of their magnitude, as it looms
out in the future, should make the opportunities and the ea hypothesi
irreplaceable advantages of the present seem doubly valuable. This
is, I say, a commonplace remark; but it is as well to repeat it, for
all that. It is not difficult to imagine, indeed it is easy to bring
proof, that the deepest regret, and, more, the most lasting remorse,
may be produced by the thought that a little more attention to
some particular line of practice, to some particular set of cases, to
some new or some old modes of a curative kind, might have enabled
a man to save a life which has slipped away for the want and in the
absence of the knowledge and the power which might have been
obtained thus, but has not been. Such considerations will readily
suggest themselves to every private conscience in greater detail
than it is well for me to attempt. Public opinion, in English-
speaking countries at least, on both sides of the Atlantic and in
that newer Southern world, attaches what certain eminent though
anonymous publicists are wont to write of as an exaggerated, but
what I should speak of as a due and proper, value to human life and
human suffering. And upon private conscience more or less en-
lightened, and public opinion when properly awakened, morality
and its sanctions rest securely. I say, ‘public opinion when
properly awakened ;' for though systematic writers, in these latter
days, lay abundant weight upon the indispensability of the exist-
ence of activity in public opinion to the sustentation of morality, I
am not clear that the teaching of philosophers has as yet begun to
exercise all the influence in this direction which there is no doubt,
and which it is much to be desired, it will do shortly. I have often
3 N
914 THE EXAMINATION SYSTEM AND THE
occasion to note that men who are individually “upright’ are yet
sluggish and negligent, and even cowardly in the work of con-
tributing their factor to the formation of a healthy atmosphere or
medium of public opinion. Yet, if it was true in former times that
contemptu famae, contemnuntur virtutes, it is undoubtedly the fact
that the progress of thought in more modern times has made the
moral to be drawn from those words of more pressing urgency than
many persons as yet feel it to be. A man, for example, is guilty of
some dereliction of duty; he sells himself, let us suppose, or what-
ever rights of property he may still retain in the commodity he
calls himself, for the vote or votes of one or more beer-sellers, and
for the seat on one or other side of one or other House of Parliament
which that vote or votes may directly or indirectly gain or keep for
him. A man’s own conscience is supposed to punish him enough
for an action or actions such as this, but it is most wrongly sup-
posed so to do. It is the duty, and a duty too often pretermitted,
of everybody who recognises a bad action as being a bad action,
to speak of it as being such, and as meriting general reprobation.
Without such speaking out, morality grows faint, and may be
asphyxiated for want of what is the ‘vital air’—to use the language
of the older physiological chemists—of the atmosphere in which
it lives. Those who, like medical men, see and know much of the
natural history and habits of their fellows have many opportunities
of helping towards creating a healthy tone of social feeling; and
it is possible enough to do one's duty in this way without entering
upon a course of extravagant aggression or crusading.
A few words to point out what I have come to think should be
the main guiding principles necessary for him who would secure
real success in the practice of a really noble profession. I say real
success; and I will say that what the world calls success is, perhaps,
not so often dissociated from this real success as a few glaring
instances might make one think previous to counting them up.
And I believe that the rule, “Put yourself in his place,’ based
on what modern philosophers call the principle of “altruism,” but
what is found expressed plainly enough in much older language
than theirs, is the rule which, if I were confined to the choice of
one single guiding maxim to be given to a young doctor just enter-
ing upon the responsibilities of practice, I should choose for that
maxim. Sympathy is truly called a divine gift, and it does assuredly
PRE-REQUISITES OF CANDIDATES. 915
give a superhuman power. I pre-suppose, of course, patience in
investigation and carefulness in ratiocination; but such is often the
obscurity, intricacy, and complexity of a medical problem, that in
the ultimate resort, it is upon intuition rather than upon syllogism
that its true solution depends. It is to the man who has the touch
of genius, that strength of imagination, which enables him to put
himself in his patient’s place, and thus do full justice to him, that
there “ariseth up light in the darkness.’ It is for the want of all
this that “great men are not always wise.” There is an example
suited to all men, suited eminently to medical men, as it is contained
in the history of One who, though now known to us by other names,
was known to our Saxon forefathers as the “Healer.” He spent a
life to the neglect of Himself in combating the wickedness and in
alleviating the misery of others. As regards these two lines of
labour, it is, I think, possible to maintain that men's instincts or
inclinations have led them, in looking at the history of this life, to
give too little prominence to the severity of the outspoken un-
sparing denunciations of an evil generation which it records. It is
not possible to maintain that men have gone astray in the import-
ance they have assigned to the manifestations they have recognised
in it of vast pity and boundless sympathy.
3 N 2.
XLVI.
THE RELATIVE VALUE OF CLASSICAL AND
SCIENTIFIC TRAINING:
BEING A REVIEW OF DR. MAX V. PETTENKOFER’s WORK ‘won URCH
DIE HUMANISTISCHEN GYMNASIEN FüR DIE UNIVERSITAT VER-
BEREITEN.”
THE German-reading public can possess itself at a very trifling
cost of a very weighty opinion as to the relative value of classical
and of scientific training, by the purchase of an address delivered
last December, in Munich, by Professor Max von Pettenkofer, in his
capacity of Rector or Chancellor of the University for the time
being. There is in existence an English document (we fear we
cannot speak of it as a publication) in the shape of a report, laid
before the authorities of the Owens College, Manchester, which has
appended to it a name nearly, or quite, as familiar to the student
and readers of “Nature' as Pettenkofer's—viz. that of Professor
Roscoe, and in which the same process of ‘ponderation’ is applied
to the classical “Gymnasia” and the modern ‘Real-Gymnasien '
severally. Von Pettenkofer, who is not referred to in that report,
shall here speak for himself, and we may say at once, that after
stating more or less fully the objections which are ordinarily urged
against the classical system, he declares himself an adherent of the
party which stands super antiquas vias. The two delegates of the
Owens College appear to incline in the same direction somewhat,
but are more eclectic and more careful in balancing their utterances
as to the possibility of combining the two systems than either
Von Pettenkofer, whom we shall forthwith cite on the one, or than
Helmholtz, whom they cite on the other side.
RELATIVE VALUE OF CIASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC TRAINING. 917
The argument from authority has a legitimate place in questions
concerning such matters as the genesis of culture and as the
existence of capacity and capabilities; for in such questions neither
the facts themselves nor the mode of their origination can be
always looked upon as beyond the region of probability. But as
we are writing in a scientific periodical, we will begin at least with
something which admits of being quantitatively estimated; and we
will do this by giving the time-tables of the classical (Humanis-
tischen) and of the modern (Real-Gymnasien) schools in Bavaria, as
we find them in Von Pettenkofer's address (pp. 5 and 18).
In classical schools, out of 99 hours per week :—
8 hours per week are given to German.
26 25 29 Latin.
22 95 95 Greek.
8 39 92 Prench.
(I.e. 64 hours, or 65 per cent., are given to languages, three-fourths
being Latin and Greek, and one-fourth German and French.)
17 hours per week are given to Mathematics.
IO 29 39 History.
8 93 5 s Religious Instruction.
In ‘Real-Gymnasien,’ out of II 2 hours per week:-
y p
9 hours per week are given to German.
I 4. 55 53 Latin. -
13 3 * $$. Trench.
4 $ 2 59 English.
(I.e. 40 hours, or 33 per cent, are given to languages, of which
time only one-third is given to one ancient language, one-third to
French, the other two-thirds to German.)
27 hours per week are given to Mathematics.
(I.e. algebra, elementary geometry, trigonometry, descriptive and
analytical geometry and higher analysis, taking 22 per cent. of the
whole number.)
4 hours per week are given to History.
I9 33 33 Natural Science and Geography.
24 39 3 * Drawing and Modelling.
8 33 33 Religious Instruction.
The ‘Real-Gymnasien’ are thus seen to exact 25 per cent, more
hours than the classical schools; and it is by this increase on the
one hand, coupled with a curtailment of the quota assigned to
languages on the other, that time is found for mathematics and for
918 RELATIVE VALUE OF CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC TRAINING.
natural science, with the drawing and modelling so indispensable to
it. Von Pettenkofer deprecates the making of any material increase
in the number of hours to be spent in the Gymnasien, on the un-
deniable ground that the day is no longer and man no stronger
now than were the days and the men of 2000 years ago; and the
space for such additamenta as must be made to the curriculum must
be found by bettering the methods and means for communicating
instruction, and effecting thus an economy of time. The Bavarian
chemist and hygienist does not himself suggest any ways and
means whereby this economy may be effected, and presumptuous
though it be, we will attempt to supplement this deficiency by
saying that such an economy might be effected in England and
English schools by applying one or other, or all three, of the
following lines of treatment to the classical curriculum, even with-
out cutting its Greek adrift. Latin and Greek, to put the boldest
suggestion first, might be studied in certain, and those not a few,
cases, as literatures and not as philologies; or, as a second alterna-
tive, when some training in philology is to be retained at whatever
cost, such training might be made more intelligible, and so less dis-
tasteful and wasteful of time, by making the study of it comparative,
as recommended by Professor Max Müller in his evidence before the
Commission just referred to ; or thirdly, synthetical scholarship, in
the way of verse-making, should be considered as a luxury and
refinement to be reserved for the delectation and cultivation of
those few who, in any age, show any aptitude for it, and synthetical
scholarship in the way even of writing Latin prose might, due
precautions having been taken, be dispensed with in the cases of
youths who, whilst wholly incapable in that, had shown some
capacity in some other line. Our ‘due precautions’ should consist
in the multiplying the practice of synthetical scholarship in the
way of translation from Latin into English. We know the horror
which these suggestions will excite in the breasts of schoolmasters
of the type represented by the gentleman who told the Com-
missioners already referred to, that if he were set to teach history
in set lessons, he ‘should not know how to do it.’ But we believe
that by the adoption of any one of the three lines of action just
glanced at, space and time might be found for the introduction of
the natural sciences into the curriculum of any public school, and
that at once without injury to the dignity of either the one or the
RELATIVE WALUE OF CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC TRAINING. 9]9
other of the two sets of studies, and without injury to the physical
or mental health of the learners.
But it is time, perhaps, that we should let Von Pettenkofer speak
for himself; and this he does (at p. 12, l.c.) to the following
effect:—‘ I am convinced that philology and mathematics furnish
precisely the material for teaching and intellectual discipline which
is essential for our Gymnasia, and I look upon the material furnished
by other sciences as mere accessories. I know that in putting
forward this view, which I do not do now for the first time, I put
myself into opposition with the tide of opinion which is prevalent
just at present, and which anticipates great advantages from the
introduction of additional subjects of instruction, and especially
from the introduction of instruction in natural science into “Latin
schools (Lateinschulen) and Gymnasia.” Further on (p. 16) he
proceeds as follows:—‘The results of actual experience appear to
me to favour my views. In other parts of Germany experiments
have now, for a long while, been made with Gymnasia and similar
institutions, in which much natural science is taught. But I
cannot as yet discover that any remarkable number of persons who
have subsequently distinguished themselves in natural science have
come from these schools. In this matter reliable statistics of the
pupils leaving (der Abiturienten) a Berlin Gymnasium, the so-
called “Old Cologne Gymnasium,” in which natural science has
for a long while formed part of the curriculum, would be very
instructive. Distinguished men come, from time to time, from this
Gymnasium, but certainly not in greater numbers than from any
other classical (Humanistischen) Gymnasium where no natural
science at all is taught. It would long ago have been a notorious
fact if a disproportionate number of the younger professors of
natural science in the Prussian Universities could have been shown
to have been formerly students in the Cologne Gymnasium.’ We
imagine that this ‘Old Cologne Gymnasium' thus referred to by
Von Pettenkofer is none other than the ‘mixed' (simultan) school
described by Mr. Matthew Arnold under the name of the Friedrich
Wilhelm’s Gymnasium at Cologne, in his ‘Schools and Universities
of the Continent, pp. 2 18–221; and but that more antagonism and
less familiarity subsisted between North and South Germany six
months ago than, we are happy to think, subsists now, we appre-
hend that more would have been made of the history of this
920 RELATIVE VALUE OF CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC TRAINING.
institution by the Munich Professor. For Dr. Jaeger, the director
of this mixed school, who, as he had been refused a nomination
to another school, the Bielefeld Gymnasium, by the Education
Minister, on account of his politics, cannot be suspected of re-
actionary leanings, spoke to Mr. Arnold in the following sense
(see p. 221, l.c.):—‘It was the universal conviction with those
competent to form an opinion, that the Realschulen were not at
present successful institutions. He declared that the boys in the
corresponding forms of the classical school beat the Realschule boys
in matters which both do alike, such as history, geography, the
mother tongue, and even French, though to French the Realschule
boys devote far more time than their comrades of the classical
school. The reason for this, Dr. Jaeger affirms, is that the classical
training strengthens a boy's mind so much more. This is what, as
I have already said, the chief school authorities everywhere in
France and Germany testify. In Switzerland you do not hear the
same story.’
With regard to Switzerland, we learn from the Owens College
Report, above mentioned, that Professor Zellner, of the Polytechnic
School at Zurich, holds that the establishment of ‘Real Gymnasia,”
or High Schools of Science, to take equal rank with the old
classical Gymnasia, and to put pure and applied science on the
same footing for educational purposes as that which the classics
enjoy in these schools, is a desirable thing, but that he allows that
by the introduction of a “bifurcation’ system into the older schools,
they might be made equal to meeting all modern requirements.
Helmholtz, on the other hand, may in the same report be found
pleading strongly for ‘the foundation on equal terms of complete
academic institutions for science’ as a ‘counteraction of the tendency
of classical men to lean on authority alone.’
‘Philological culture,’ says the eminent physiologist of Heidel-
berg, “ has an ill effect on those who are to devote themselves to
science; the philologist is too much dependent on authority and
books, he cannot observe for himself, or rely upon his own con-
clusions, and having only been accustomed to consider the laws of
grammar, all of which have their exceptions, he cannot understand
the invariable character of physical laws.’ Granting with all respect
the premises laid down by Professor Helmholtz, we should demur
to the conclusion which he would base upon them, and profess our-
RELATIVE VALUE OF CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC TRAINING. 921
selves unable to see that, because particular institutions have a
tendency to dwarf and stunt particular faculties, they should
therefore be left undisturbed to do this evil work uncounteracted.
And still leaving the premises unimpugned, we should set up a
cross-indictment to the effect that if classical studies left the
student of them unacquainted with the invariability of natural
laws, physical studies leave the student unacquainted with the
variability of men's minds. But, so far as the business of life
consists in having to do business and hold intercourse with our
fellow-men, this acquaintance with the variability of men's minds
is simply the particular kind of knowledge which is not only the
most practically useful and marketable of all kinds of knowledge,
but is precisely the kind which, by common consent, is allowed to
characterise if not to institute “culture.”
Lord Lyttelton, however, and the Endowed Schools Com-
missioners would appear to be in favour of the establishment of
locally distinct schools for the two sets of studies and of students,
and herein to be at one with Helmholtz. The Owens College
Delegates, on the other hand, are, like ourselves, in favour of a
system of bifurcation, which would not necessarily keep apart
persons of different mental conformation who might be much
benefited by mutual contact. They have come to this conclusion
mainly for reasons based on observations and testimony given in
Germany. Our peculiar social organisation makes the question
more complex for us; but we, too, have our experience as well as
the Germans; and time has shown that an Englishman, whose
reputation as an educationalist is equal to that of Helmholtz as a
physicist, may, in this very matter, be as far wrong as we believe
that great physicist to be. In 1864 Dr. Temple told the Public
Commissioners (see Report, vol. ii. p. 312) that he should ‘not
consider it wise to follow the Cheltenham and Marlborough examples
by attäching to the public schools modern departments. The classical
work would lose, the other work would not gain!’ In 1867 we
find a distinguished Rugby master, the Rev. J. M. Wilson, speaking
to the following effect of the results produced by the changes set on
foot in accordance with the proposals of the Public Schools Com-
missioners, and earnestly and honestly carried out. “Lastly, what
are the general results of the introduction of scientific teaching in
the opinion of the body of the masters? In brief it is this: that
922 RELATIVE VALUE OF CLASSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC TRAINING.'
the School as a whole is better for it, and that the scholarship is not
WOTSé. . . . . This is the testimony of classical masters, by no means
specially favourable to science, who are in a position which enables
them to judge. . . . . It is believed that no master in Rugby
School would wish to give up natural science and recur to the old
curriculum.’
XLVII.
THE EARTH-CLOSET SYSTEM.
I VENTURE to think that Von Pettenkofer's opinion of the earth-
closet system may be worthy the attention of the readers of
“The Lancet’ at the present moment. It may be found to the
following effect in the ‘Zeitschrift für Biologie,’ 1867, bd. iii. htt.
ii. and iii. p. 298 :—
“As to salubrity, I not only do not look forward to any gain as being likely to arise
from disinfection with earth and peat, but, on the other hand, I fear the greatest
danger from it, especially as regards cholera. If it is, as it is now pretty generally
believed to be, actually the fact that the porosity of the soil and its impregnation
with excreta do, at all events at particular seasons, bring about a local disposition for
cholera, and that the immunity from cholera which a rocky soil enjoys depends upon
the circumstance that such soils cannot be so impregnated, I cannot see my way
towards recommending the disinfection of privies with earth and peat.”
Now, I apprehend that it will be allowed that the same line of
reasoning will apply to the localisation and diffusion of typhoid
fever. And I would add that certain observations which I made
recently in a fever-stricken village, with the aid of the light which
Dr. Budd’s and Dr. T. K. Chambers's writings had given me, have
induced me to think that of the two recognised foci for infection—
the bespattered privy and the contaminated well—the former may
be the one which is more commonly at work. For though it is said
that the larger proportion of women- and children-sufferers points
to the water, of which they are said to drink more, being the
cause at work, the facts are, not that the women and children
drink more water in tea, &c. than the men, but that they get less
beer; whilst many of the men in our semi-savage villages never use
a privy at all, or at least not habitually. This last is the true
differentiating condition. What applies, however, to the wood-
work and contents of a privy applies to the like elements in the
924, THE EARTH-CLOSET SYSTEM.
constitution of the earth-closet, so far as disinfection or the want of
disinfection is concerned. And if I am told that the earth-closet is
inoffensive, and that the privy is fetid, I answer that a rattlesnake
is none the less dangerous because its rattle is removed; and that,
for anything shown or known to the contrary, odour is to infection,
deodorisation to disinfection, what the noise of the serpent is to its
bite.
I believe now, as I said some years ago in an article in the
‘Quarterly Journal of Science’ for April, 1866, page 189, that
some modification of the latrine system, securing all the advantages
and avoiding all the dangers of the water-closet system proper,
may be contrived for, and safely entrusted to, even the poorest and
most careless of our populations. Upon this point Liebig’s opinion
will be of interest, and the more so, perhaps, inasmuch as, with a
curious neglect of accuracy, the illustrious chemist is often alleged
to be an opponent of systems for the removal of sewage by the
cheapest mode of carriage—namely, that by suspension in water.
His real opinion may be found in a letter addressed to Dr. Varren-
trap, May 1, 1866, and published by that writer in his very
valuable work, “Ueber Werth oder Unwerth der Wasserclosette,’
p. 178, Berlin, 1868. Baron Liebig, after stating that he agrees
with Mr. Lindley's plans for the drainage of Frankfort in all essen-
tial points, says:—
‘I am of opinion that of the present means for the removal of sewage, the one
which is based upon a water-supply, distributed at the rate of six cubic feet (about
thirty-six gallons) per head, is the safest d cheapest method for the removal of all
impurity both of house and of street water . . . For the purposes of agriculture it is
of particular importance that the contents of the sewers should not be conducted into
the sewers, but should be used for manuring.’
Since writing the above, I have performed each of the following
five experiments several times:—
I. Having added to five drops of liquor ammoniae (London
Pharm.) Ioo cubic centimetres of distilled water, I connected the
glass jar containing this solution with an aspirator, between which
and the jar some of Nessler's reagent for the detection of ammonia
was placed in a tube with several bulbs. A Woulff's bottle, con-
taining sulphuric acid, was adapted to the distal side of the jar, so
as to secure the passing of the aspirated air through the acid.
Very shortly after the commencement of aspiration the test fluid
THE EARTH-CLOSET SYSTEM. 925
became yellow and turbid, and finally threw down a very abundant
red precipitate.
2. The same quantity of solution of ammonia having been
poured into a jar of the same size as the one employed in experi-
ment No. 1, dried earth was poured into the jar up to about the
level which the Ioo cubic centimetres of water occupied in the
other jar. The jar having been similarly connected on either
side, and aspirated, Nessler’s reagent became turbid and yellowish,
but gave no very distinct precipitate, and none at all of a red
colour.
3. Ashes from a coal fire having been substituted for the dried
earth of experiment No. 2, this experiment was again tried, with
the result of the formation of scarcely any precipitate in the bulbs
containing Nessler's reagent.
4 and 5. These experiments consisted in repeating experiments
Nos. 2 and 3 severally, with the addition to the earth and ashes
respectively of as much water as the jars would receive into the
space already partially filled with the solid substances specified. In
each case a large quantity of yellowish-red precipitate was formed
in the test fluid upon aspiration. The precipitate was much less
dense and abundant than that produced in experiment No. 1, and
took a much longer aspiration before it was formed. It was
ſº I 1. : All e & -
formed much more rapidly by the air aspirated from the w
earth than by that from the wetted ashes.
It will be asked, Do not these experiments show that ashes and
earth are, each of them in their respective order, superior to water
for use in closets? I think not ; for, firstly, it is not certain that
ammonia is the cause, or a necessary co-efficient of the cause, of
miasma, any more than it was proved formerly by Daniell that
hydro-sulphuric acid was the cause of malaria. Secondly, there is
much reason to believe that it is precisely when the earth receives
choleraic and typhoid evacuations, and should, er hypothesi, disinfect
them, that they become most deadly. (See Pettenkofer, ‘Zeitschrift
für Biologie,’ 1865, p. 357, et passim ; Liebermeister, ‘Deutsche
Klinik, Feb. 17, 1866; Varrentrap, loc. cit., p. 101 ; Parkes's
* Hygiene, pp. 254, 593, ed. i.) The healthiness of Alexander's
armies has been ascribed to his practice of frequently changing his
camping-ground, and army surgeons nowadays recommend the like
practice, or disinfect the ground itself, as the French did in the
926 THE EARTH-CLOSET SYSTEMI.
Crimea. Thirdly, these experiments show very plainly how
seriously wetting impairs the power which earth and ashes have
of retaining gases in their pores; and this, which the rationale
of their operation, as ordinarily taught, would have led us to
anticipate, has been practically confirmed by Dr. Mouat’s actual
experience of the working of earth-closets in India. (See Report
on Gaols of Lower Provinces,’ p. 144, 1868.) Now “slops, or
fluid refuse of all kinds, must be got rid of somehow and some
way; and either they are thrown upon the earth or ash ‘con-
servancy,’ where it exists, and, producing the physico-chemical
solecism to which I have alluded, they reproduce the horrid Man-
chester ‘middens’ (q.v., or, by preference, Mr. George Greaves's
account of them in the ‘Quarterly Journal of Science”), or they
have a system of sewers to receive them, along which the solid
matters, little if indeed at all less noxious than they, might just as
well pass too. Fourthly, the double journey, in and out of town,
which earth must go through, is a great drawback upon the merits
which it may possess; whilst the fact that coals do come into our
towns as it is may tempt us to advocate the employment of the
ashes they are converted into for the purposes in question. In the
house of the rich man, where the bodies producing refuse are not
very greatly out of proportion, or, possibly enough, only equal in
number to the fires producing ashes, and where a separate system
for liquid refuse is but a trifling item in the expense of house-
building, an ash ‘conservancy’ is a possibility. But the quantita-
tive considerations, to which I have just alluded, show a priori that
it is as inapplicable in theory to the needs of a poor population as,
I believe, actual trial of it on the large scale has shown, and always
will show, it to be in fact.
XLVIII.
ON TYPHOID OR, ENTERIC FEVER IN INDIAN
GAOLS, AND ON THE RELATIONS OF THAT
DISEASE AND OF CHOLERA TO THE DRY-
EARTH SYSTEM OF CONSERVANCY.
DR. BUCHANAN, in the Appendix (No. 4, pp. 96, 97, 106) to the
Twelfth Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council (for
1869, published in 1870), has thrown doubt upon the validity of
certain reasonings of mine (in ‘The Lancet, March 20th, 1869,
pp. 4II, 412) as to the possibility of a dry-earth system of con-
servancy favouring the spread of typhoid (or enteric or pythogenic)
fever. One of my arguments having been based upon the fact that
fever spread in the gaols of India in spite of the introduction into
them of that system for dealing with excreta, Dr. Buchanan
§ e g
T 4- l- 1. 4-l. ~4-
objects that this argument is of no cogency unless it be shown that
the Indian fever in question is enteric and not typhus fever.
When I wrote I was of opinion that this Indian gaol fever was
enteric and not typhus, and further investigation has confirmed me
in this belief. -
In 1869 I did not think it necessary to lay any emphasis upon
this point, for I thought it was a settled, received, and established
belief. Dr. Murchison, in his chapter on the ‘Geographical Dis-
tribution of Typhus Fever’ (p. 58 of ‘A Treatise on the Continued
Fevers of Great Britain,’ 1862), had said that there were ‘no
authentic records of typhus, such as we see it in this country,
having been met with in Asia, Africa, or the tropical parts of
America.’ If, in the same connexion, Dr. Murchison allows that
the “Pali disease ’ and the true bubonic plague may be analogous
to, if not identical with, typhus, I have to say that between typhus
as thus locally represented and the gaol fevers as described in the
Indian gaols there is scarcely a single point in common; and if
928 TYPHOID OR ENTERIC FEVER
Dr. Morehead's suggestion, which Dr. Murchison thinks “not
unreasonable,” as to the superaddition of an infectious to a malarious
factor in the formation in such cases as those of the Agra gaol, be.
accepted, I have to say, in the second place, that it makes my
case stronger instead of weaker. For what we know of such com-
binations of an ‘earth-born or ‘earth-sown —to use Dr. Bryden's
expressive synonym for malarious poison—with a personally in-
fectious element is based upon experience of two diseases only—
typhoid, to wit, and cholera,—and of these two diseases precisely it
is known that they spread “by the operation of decomposing
excreta.” We suppose the same to be the case with dysentery. But
I must say that the supposition of remittent fever becoming in-
fectious appears to me to be purely hypothetical, and, as yet at
least, far too unsubstantial to carry even the weight of an objection
without tottering.
Boudin, Guyon, and La Roche are quoted by Keith Johnston,
in the second edition of the “Physical Atlas of Natural Pheno-
mena,” 1856, pl. 35, p. 121, to the effect that “typhus’ was limited
to the northern temperate zone. The date of this work reminds
me that in those days it was thought necessary (as by myself in a
Report on Smyrna, p. 59) to insist on the reality of the distinction,
then a comparatively novel one, between typhus and typhoid
fevers; and I have referred to Keith Johnston's article, not so
much for his own or his authorities’ opinions as to what they called
typhus, as for the sake of quoting his valuable and suggestive,
even though not wholly accurate, remark—‘The geographical and
climatal limits of typhus in Europe and America will be found to
correspond nearly with those of the glutinous Cerealia and potato.”
The organic world, whether pathological or physiological, whether
animal or vegetable, must be looked at as a whole. Facility in
colligating facts can always be obtained; the power of detecting
their rationale can sometimes be obtained by the employment of
this method. I should not, however, accept Keith Johnston's
suggestion of this particular geographical phytographical corre-
spondence ; a nearer, though still only partially correct, boundary
would be obtained by taking the northern limit of the Palmaceae
as the southern limit of true typhus; a botanist who would supply
us with a botanical expression for the words “annual isotherm of
68° Fahr.’ would very nearly meet the case.
IN INDIAN GAOLS. 929
Leaving now the subject of typhus and its existence or non-
existence in India, and coming to the question of typhoid fever,
I must express my surprise at Dr. Buchanan's having said (p. Io9)
that “nothing about enteric fever can be brought into evidence
from India’; for Dr. Murchison quotes a cloud of authorities
(p. 407 op. cit.) in support of his statement that ‘in India it is
now known to be far from uncommon '; and I suppose that a
disease not uncommon outside may be taken as likely to be not
uncommon inside the walls of gaols. I will quote one authority
whom Dr. Murchison has not quoted—namely, Dr. James An-
nesley, the author of a work on the ‘Causes, Nature, and Treat-
ment of the more prevalent Diseases of India and of Warm
Climates generally,” a first edition of which appeared with plates,
in quarto, in 1828, and a second without plates, in octavo, in
1841. At page 457 of the first edition, and page 547 of the second,
under the head ‘ On Organic Changes in Fevers,” I find the follow-
ing words, for the latter part of which plate xxii. of the first
edition furnishes a good illustration :-
* Marks of disease of the large and small intestines are generally confined to their
internal tunics. The duodenum, jejunum, and ileum, especially the duodenum and
termination of the ileum, very frequently are diseased in their mucous surface, which
is inflamed in patches, sometimes covered with a muco-purulent secretion and studded
with small ulcerations, particularly the termination of the ileum. Occasionally the
mucous surface is of a brick-red or purplish shade of colour, apparently ecchymosed,
and covered with a bloody sanies, and readily detached from the subjacent texture.
In several cases the ulcerations—which sometimes are large and far apart, at other
times small and agglomerated, especially the former—have nearly penetrated the
tunics of the intestines, and, in a very few cases, I have observed this occurrence
actually to have supervened, the contents of the bowels being partly effused into the
peritoneal cavity, and having produced peritonitis.’
I come now to evidence which, as being of more recent publica-
tion than my communications in ‘The Lancet’ of March, 1869,
was not available when I wrote, but which shows beyond all doubt
that enteric or typhoid fever is one at least of the gaol-fevers of
India. In Dr. De Renzy’s last Report on the Sanitary Admini-
stration of the Punjab” (for a recently received copy of which I am
indebted, as I imagine, to his kindness), I find, at page 127, the
following statement relative to one of the gaols brought forward in
evidence by me, in ‘The Lancet,” in March, 1869 —
* For 1869. Published at the Lawrence Press, Lahore, 1870.
3 O
930 TYPHOID OR ENTERIC FEVER
“In an extract from Dr. Fairweather's valuable report on the fevers which prevailed
in the spring of the year in the Rawulpindi gaol, which is printed, will be found con-
clusive proof that typhus fever must henceforth be regarded as one of the endemic
diseases of that district.”
On the next page we find that Dr. De Renzy uses the most modern
nomenclature, and contrasts typhus with typhoid and relapsing
fevers. Upon reading this, I determined to come forward, though
a most “unwilling witness", yet without delay—as, from not
having seen any notice of this Report, I believed, and believe, I
must have been one of the first persons in England to receive a
copy of it, and state that I had received information which led
me to believe, in accordance with Dr. Buchanan's suggestion, that
typhus—a disease as little, though also as much, affected in its con-
tagiousness and spread by the use of earth-closets as small-pox—
did really exist, though alongside of typhoid, in one of the Indian
gaols of which I had written. But on turning to Dr. Fair-
weather's Report, at page 8o (Appendix) of Dr. De Renzy’s volume,
I could not thereby convince myself that it did furnish conclusive
proof of the existence of typhus in that gaol. In Dr. Fair-
weather's Report notes are given of eight cases, of which five only
ended fatally, and with a post-mortem examination. Of these five
fatally ending cases, we find it recorded of one (Case 6) that ‘ his
symptoms were more those of enteric than of typhus fever'; and as
the intestines, in the account of the post-mortem examination, are
described as ‘having the lower part of the ileum one mass of ulce-
ration, enlargement and thickening of Peyer's patches, we need
only remark that the diagnosis formed during life was very
abundantly confirmed by the autopsy, but that neither seems to
* I see from one of Dr. Buchanan's notes, p. 96, that some objection can be raised
to my employment of the words “an unwilling witness’ when speaking of a person
who, like Dr. Mouat, comes forward and publishes, with the truthfulness which we
expect and find in such officials, facts which are, or seem to be, scarcely reconcilable
with theories he has advocated. I am not aware that ordinary usage attaches any
offensive insinuation to the words alluded to and employed above. Still I may express
regret for having employed a phrase which could be misinterpreted. After a ‘very
critièal reading,” however, of my letter in ‘The Lancet' of March 20th, 1869, I think
that another of my expressions used there does require amendment. Though John
Hunter said that nothing was so difficult as to know when a fact was a fact, I still
am sorry that I said that Dr. Mouat's facts had been called in question, as that
expression does, I must acknowledge, admit of a harsh interpretation. I do not
suppose Dr. Mouat puts this upon it; I should regret it if any future commentator
should do so.
IN INDIAN GAOLS. 931
prove that the case was anything but what it was supposed to be—
namely, enteric fever. A second of the five died with general
peritonitis, consequent upon perforation of the intestine of one of
‘three small corroding ulcers in ileum, one on ileo-colic valve, one
a few inches further back, and a third about a foot from ileo-colic
valve.’ The mesenteric glands are stated to have shown no signs
of disease; but the man had been ill six weeks; and this fact,
which explains the former one so far as it needs explaining, is at
the same time incompatible with the hypothesis of typhus, and ex-
plicable upon that of typhoid. Of the third of the five cases
(Case 7) it is recorded that he was admitted into the hospital on
April 7th ‘with continued fever, and all that can be recollected
concerning him is that he was much troubled with cough and with
pain in the right side.’ The man died on June 5th, and the
autopsy revealed tubercles crowding the left lung, vomicae in the
right, and ulcers with elevated hardened edges in the ileum. This
appears to have been a case of tuberculosis. Two of the five fatal
cases (Cases 3 and 4) remain to be dealt with. In neither of them
was there any intestinal or mesenteric mischief; and neither of
them, therefore, could have been “enteric' fever. The persistence
of typhus spots is about the only post-mortem appearance patho-
gnomonic of typhus; and this is said to have been absent in one of
the two cases (Case 3), whilst of the other case (Case 4)
*** ***** *—i. A... b3 ºf *-*. ii. V. V. U. M.V., J. W.J LºVD \vase 4) Wé àiſe
told it began as ‘intermittent fever.” With regard to the three
remaining cases of the eight in which there was a favourable ter-
mination, it is more difficult to speak positively either way as to
typhus or typhoid. But with reference to the value of the rash as
a diagnostic mark, in two of these three cases, I must say, con-
sidering what we know of the protean variations which typhoid
fever may, even in our chilly climate, put on as to the character of
the cutaneous eruption accompanying it'—variations consisting in
the development of a ‘scarlet rash,’ of ‘petechiae,’ of ‘vibices,’ of
‘sudamina,’ in addition to the typical lenticularly raised rose-spots—
that it is open to me or to any one else to demur to any one of
these cases being positively set down as certainly not enteric.
With reference, lastly, to the third of the three cases which sur-
vived (Case 8), it is well to mark that the case lasted more than an
* See Murchison, ‘Treatise on Continued Fevers,’ pp. 474, 519; and in ‘The
Lancet,’ Dec. Io, 1870.
3 O 2
932 TYPHOID OR ENTERIC FEVER
entire month ; and that Dr. Fairweather says of it that it looked
‘like a complication of a dysentery, typhus, and typhoid. Of the
eight cases, therefore, which were taken as proving conclusively
the presence of typhus in India, two appear to have been certainly
typhoid, the post-mortem examination proving the disease to have
been this; a third is the case last mentioned; a fourth appears to
have been a case of tuberculosis; a fifth, though covered with
eruption like that of typhus during life, did not retain it after; a
sixth began as a case of intermittent fever; and the two others
who survived may possibly have been cases of typhoid or of
remittent. -
It would appear from the “Report on Measures adopted for
Sanitary Improvements in India from June, 1869, to June, 1870,
recently published, p. 85, that there are two reports extant upon the
fever in the Rawulpindee Gaol, by Dr. Lyons, the medical officer in
charge. It would be interesting to see these.
Dr. Fairweather has prefixed to his detailed accounts of the eight
cases, previously referred to, a short account of the general
characteristics of the disease. Amongst these is noted the absence
of yellowness of the conjunctivae, which may show that the disease
known in Great Britain as ‘relapsing fever’ was not a factor in the
epidemic. Dr. Murchison says of the disorder, indeed (op. cit.,
p. 301), that it is unknown in India, and, indeed, in all tropical
countries.
Certain remarks as to the general characters of the epidemic
which Dr. De Renzy makes in various parts of his report appear
to me to be more easily reconcilable with the hypothesis of its .
having been typhoid than with one which should suppose it to
have been either relapsing or typhus fever. These remarks are as
follows:—
I. It prevailed in the latter half of the year. See Dr. De Renzy,
!oe. cit., p. 121. See also “Report on Sanitary Improvements in
India, 1870, p. 30 ; and Dr. Bryden’s ‘Report on Cholera Epi-
demic, pp. 20, 74.
2. It appeared first in villages (see Dr. De Renzy, p. 121, and
note to p. 87 A of the Appendix, and “Report of Sanitary Improve-
ments, p. 45), and Dr. Anstie tells us (‘Notes on Epidemics, p. 70)
that typhoid is ‘the special epidemic of the slumbrous conservative
rural districts.”
IN INDIAN GAOLS. 933
3. Its severity did not vary concomitantly with that of the
famine. (Dr. De Renzy, loc, cit., p. 132.)
4. It affected more women than men (Dr. De Renzy, loc. cit.,
p. 151; ‘Report on Sanitary Improvements, loc. cit., p. 83), as I
should expect typhoid would usually in India, and have noted it to
do in England, explaining it in both cases by the greater time
spent by the women at home, and the larger dose of poison which
they thus have the certainty of imbibing if the air or the water
or both were soiled in the immediate neighbourhood of their
dwelling.
As Dr. Buchanan says (p. Ioff), ‘It has already been shown that
nothing about enteric fever can be brought into evidence from .
India’; alongside of this sentence (which without some qualifica-
tion limiting its scope was never justified, and should now be
simply retracted) ought to be set a few equally short as well as a
few longer sentences from the latest and most authoritative publi-
cation on the diseases of India and their sanitation—I mean the
* Report on Measures adopted for Sanitary Improvements in India
from June, 1869, to June, 1870. At p. 30 I read: ‘The disease
[typhoid] is manifestly, Dr. Ranking thinks, on the increase in
India, and is daily acquiring greater importance.”
At p. 61 I find notices of it amongst our soldiers at Muttra, at
Mean Meer, at Jullundur, and at Kurrachee; and I suppose that, if
it is found in barracks in so many places, there is some little prob-
ability of its finding its way into gaols.
At p. 6o:—
“During 1868 the number of cases of typhoid was considerable. Out of the total of
91 deaths from fever, 35, more than one-third, are ascribed to the enteric or typhoid
form of disease. But exactitude in the statistics of fever is difficult from similarity of
different types. The liability of the British soldier in India to typhoid fever has not
hitherto attracted the attention it deserves.”
On the same page a death from typhoid fever is recorded as
occurring at Rawulpindee in the 1–6th Regiment. This is to be
noted, firstly, as Rawulpindee is the place in the gaol of which
there were eighty-eight fever deaths in 1868; and, secondly, as in
this Report the contagious fever inside the gaols is not distinctly
spoken of as typhoid, but only the fever affecting the soldiers (see
pp. 19, 78, 82). Against this abstinence from giving the fever
a name must be set the disclosures of Dr. Fairweather's post-
934 TYPHOID OR ENTERIC FEVER
mortems. Much the same applies to the utterances of this Report
(p. 15) as to Peshawur, another of the places the gaols of which
were referred to by me and Dr. Buchanan after Dr. De Renzy (see
Dr. Buchanan’s ‘Report, p. 96, note), thirty-nine cases of death
among the soldiers being ascribed to a ‘continued fever, which
bears the strongest resemblance to, if it be not identical with, the
enteric fever of Europe.” Though the Report never names the gaol
fever, it would appear that it was regarded as identical with that
raging outside, for we have great stress laid on the befoulment of
the water-supply of the whole population; and at p. 281 we are told,
‘all classes appear to suffer from this bad water. Prisoners in gaol
have nothing else to drink.”
The gaol fever of the third gaol, that of Umballah, in which
a fever was found to spread in spite of an earth conservancy,
Dr.De Renzy appears to hold (p. 128), upon the Report of Dr. Bateson,
to have been relapsing fever. But the precautions he lays stress
upon in the case of the town of Ambalah (Umballah), pp. 133–135,
are such as would be efficient against enteric rather than against
typhus or its congener, relapsing fever. Two cases of typhoid, one
verified by a post-mortem, are reported by Dr. De Renzy (p. 125)
from Simla.
I will now proceed to comment upon another statement of
Dr. Buchanan's. At p. 91 of his Report, after quoting the opinions
of seven gentlemen—the Rev. Henry Moule, Mr. Oswald Foster,
Mr. Garnett of Lancaster, the Governor of Dorchester Gaol, the
late Dr. Meyer of Broadmoor, Surgeon-Major Wyatt, and Captain
Mervin Drake, he says: “From this favourable expression of
opinion there are some very few dissentients;’ and he proceeds to
enumerate three—namely, Dr. Geo. Johnson, Prof. Pettenkofer, and
myself. I have to say that to our three names Dr. Buchanan
should have added: Firstly, eight names of the Army Sanitary
Commissioners—namely, those of General J. H. Grant, Captain
Douglas Galton, Dr. John Sutherland, H. H. Massy, Esq.,
T. A. L. Murray, Esq., W. E. Baker, Esq., Sir J. R. Martin,
and Robert Rawlinson, Esq. For the Commission composed of
these eight gentlemen issued, on March 8, 1869, a memorandum
on a “Report and Order of the Madras Government upon the Dry-
Earth System of Sewage in the Madras Presidency,’ which was
circulated more or less freely in England, which was republished in
IN INDIAN GAOLS. 935
Madras in June 1869, and which, as the “Report of Sanitary
Improvements in India' (so often quoted) very mildly puts it
(p. 132), ‘threw the weight of their experience into the scale of
sewerage by water-carriage.’ This memorandum should, I think,
be made more accessible in England than it is at present. We
have as much need of its plainly given common-sense instructions
as the people in Madras; and we have, I apprehend, in our capaci-
ties of ratepayers and taxpayers, an equal claim to have them made
available for the use of Local Boards and other Sewer authorities.
The Army Sanitary Commissioners, I am glad to observe, have
nothing to retract of their opinions as to the dry-earth system ; and
in their answers to Dr. Cunningham's request for instructions in
his capacity of Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of
India, given in the Report just quoted, at p. 206, and of date
July 8, 1870, they refer the Commissioner to the memorandum of
March 8, 1869, and add to it the following words:–
‘It follows that to trust to dry-earth conservancy for improving the health of towns,
while ordinary station or town drainage is permitted to soak away in cesspits or on
the surface, is simply to poison the subsoil with sewer water, which, if collected and
conveyed in drain-pipes, would become a valuable manure. The question may now be
considered as settled by scientific investigation, that the sewage of inhabited buildings
should be treated as a single element, whether as regards health or agriculture; and
also that to divide this sewage into two parts, and to remove the parts separately, is,
as we have stated elsewhere, to pay double where one payment would answer every
purpose.”
The same Sanitary Commission is reported, in the same volume
(p. 38), as having decided that the dry-earth system could not
be generally introduced into a large city like Bombay; and (at
p. 13) as declaring it unnecessary to discuss a certain scheme for
the removal of the sewage of Calcutta, which the Justices of the
Peace for that city—with whose names and numbers I am un-
acquainted—had previously rejected, for this reason amongst others,
namely, that it was ‘simply a system of dry-earth conservancy.’
Secondly : The Rivers Pollution Commissioners, appointed in
1868—namely, Sir William Denison, Dr. Frankland, and John
Chalmers Morton, ought to have their opinion at least referred to.
In their report, published this year, they say (p. 50): “We can
have no hesitation in pronouncing the dry-earth system, however
suitable for institutions, villages, and camps, where personal or
official regulations can be enforced, entirely unfitted to the cir-
cumstances of large towns.”
936 TYPHOID OR ENTERIC FEVER IN INDIAN GAOLS.
Thirdly: I think Dr. Parkes's name must be added to those of
the ‘very few dissentients, who will thus, without counting the
Calcutta magistracy, come to number seventeen, as against the
seven gentlemen named by Dr. Buchanan. For in the third edition
of Dr. Parkes's “Practical Hygiene,” which bears date April, 1869,
I find the following words, which do not appear in the edition of
1864:—
“There is one evident objection to all these dry plans—namely, that the excreta are
retained about our houses for some time. No doubt when mixed with earth they are
inodorous, and it is presumed harmless, but of this no evidence has been given. What
would be the result of cholera or typhoid discharges received in earth and allowed to
remain in the house?'
I have upon other occasions pointed out times and places in
which a dry-earth system of conservancy may have claims upon our
favourable consideration: those times, I have always held, are not
times of epidemics; those places do not lie within the emceinte
of large towns. In several of the Reports which I have consulted
I have found more or less favourable mention made of the system;
these passages I have not thought it my business to quote, for
reasons which may be readily imagined. I propose at a future
opportunity to offer a further communication on this subject, in
which, I trust, the readers of ‘The Lancet' will find something of
greater interest than they can, I fear, have found in this inter-
minable array of authorities. The immoderate length to which my
paper has reached may be justified, I hope, upon the principle that
a man who goes a little out of his own proper line, as I suppose
I do by meddling with hygiene, ought to be doubly sure of his
ground. I trust I have shown that I have not been wanting in
this abundans cautela.
APPENDIX,
NOTES ON THE SITE OF ROMAN POTTERY WORKS
AT THE MYNCHERY UPON THE SEWAGE FARM,
NEAR, OXFORD.
IN the year 1879, in the course of trenching and levelling operations
at the Mynchery or site of the nunnery near Littlemore, Oxford, under-
taken by the Local Board in connection with the formation of a
Sewage Farm, the engineers employed by the Local Board exposed in
the farm-yard a number of human skeletons with some mediaeval stone
coffins. The bodies found undisturbed were all lying with the head to
the west and the feet to the east, and in the graves numerous pavement
tiles were found similar to those of Plantagenet times exposed in making
excavations in All Souls Chapel. The skeletons were of both sexes and
of different ages, and may have been the bodies of persons who had died
in a poor-house attached to the priory of the Benedictine nuns, dissolved
by Henry the Eighth, which formerly stood on this spot.
As in many of the fields a considerable quantity of broken Roman
pottery was also found, both on the surface and buried to the depth of
one and two feet, it was considered desirable that the ground should be
carefully examined in order to see if evidence could be obtained that the
pottery had been manufactured in the locality. Permission having been
given to Dr. Rolleston by the Local Board to continue the excavations,
Mr. Edgar S. Cobbold, who took great interest in the discovery, gave very
material assistance, and in the course of time four kilns (one a double one in
a good state of preservation) in which the pottery had been made, together
with a well and pieces of the burnt clay on which the pots were placed
for the process of baking, were exposed. In the rubbish heaps adjoining
the kilns some moulds were found, and burnt clay retaining the marks
of the workmen's fingers. As a rule the pottery was much broken, but
a few perfect pieces and others almost perfect were found, and of these
some were contained in the well. The pots or shards consisted of jars,
938 APPENDIX.
bottles, vases, flat round dishes or mortaria, and a saucer or small cup.
Two uninjured jars were procured 2.4” high and 8" in maximum width,
and a furrow ran round each jar at the plane of maximum width. The
pottery has been preserved in the University Museum, Oxford. The
mortaria were frosted internally with fine quartz-sand. Coarse flattish
pieces of burnt clay marked as if with impressions of straw, like a cream-
cheese, were found in considerable abundance; they were believed to be
the wrappers used in covering the pots over during the baking. A few
fine shards with an encrusting filagree pattern were also obtained. In
colour the pots and shards were either red, grey, or black and yellowish,
usually unglazed. Some pieces had a hard bright glaze not unlike
Etruscan, but there was no attempt at the red figures one sees on real
Etruscan ware. As a rule they were like the Roman pottery made at
Castor and Upchurch. Pieces of Samian-like ware were also obtained
ornamented with figures of wild animals, which were interesting as
showing a not very successful attempt at copying the continental Samian.
The shards were found not only in immediate proximity to the kilns,
but scattered over various parts of the farm. Along with them were
a good many masses of half-burnt or less than half-burnt clay. A sort
of mask representing a semi-comic face was found with some of the
shards, and along with it some teeth of bos and cervus. Potters' marks,
not names, but consisting of circles, crosses, horizontal and vertical lines,
were seen on some of the shards.
The well was situated to the north of No. 1 kiln. Nos. I and 2 kilns
were to the north of a quarry made in the year 1878, and traces of two
other kilns were to its south. Two of the kilns, one of which was double,
were made of rough stones set in clay, and a third was made of clay
burnt in situ. On a plan of the kilns constructed by Mr. Cobbold it is
stated that the double kiln had a floor of burnt clay with holes in it, and
contained coarser rubbish than the outside, also two whole pots and
many large pieces with a layer of white ash at the bottom. The two
divisions of this kiln were separated by a partition of rough stones, and
they both opened into a common passage. This kiln including its passage
was about 8 feet long, and the two divisions, including the intermediate
partition wall, were about 7 feet wide. The kilns had apparently been
dug out of the natural sand, and were covered over with black earth
containing shards and rubbish; and in the earth adjoining the double
kiln two human skeletons and a few ox-bones were found. The human
bodies had apparently been flung into a rubbish-pit close to the double
kiln, a potter's field wherein strangers or slaves were buried.
APPENDIX. 939
NOTES ON ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES
MADE AT WYTHAM, BERKSHIRE.
IN the year 1869, in the course of digging gravel on Lord Abingdon's
property a little to the north of the village of Wytham, graves containing
human remains were found, and between that date and March 1878
‘many others were exposed. The graves were in the gravel, 5 feet or
even I I feet deep, and in some instances so far down as even to reach
the subjacent clay. One grave is noted as about 3 feet long; another
7 feet 7 inches long and 4 feet Io inches in greatest width ; a third
Io feet long and 5 feet 6inches wide. Some of the graves were filled in
with humus, others with gravel; probably the gravel dug out in making
the grave had been thrown in again.
In some instances it is noted that the ‘head was lying at the east
rather than towards the east;" in one the head was at the south with
the jaw pointing east; in one the head was at the south-west, the feet at
the north-east; in another the skeleton was lying W.N.W. by E.S.E.
The bodies were in the contracted or semi-contracted position, with the
knees approximated to the face; and it is noted that the skeleton or head
was lying sometimes on its right side, sometimes on its left, and with the
hands sometimes up to the face. The skeletons were of both sexes and
of different ages, from old age to childhood. One grave on the south
side of the gravel-pit, exhumed in January 1870, contained the skeleton
of a child about six years of age. As many as three skeletons were in
one instance exposed in a single grave, but usually only a single body was
in each grave. The skulls are described as ‘large, very like my globose
Romano-British type, and like the Sion type of His and Rütimeyer.’
The following objects are noted as having been found in graves along
with the bodies:—the bones of a pig, the split tusk of a boar, another
split tusk (I. I. 19.70) with a hole worked through it in company with
a worked flint, the horn of a red-deer, pottery both coarse and fine in
texture, amber-beads which had probably formed a necklace, and charcoal
about the head.
Additional details are given in the following extracts from Dr. Rolleston's
notes:—
‘January 28, 1870. Found a large stone like a segment of a mill-stone, with many
traces of burning, above the gravel, with another smaller stone 4' 2" below the surface
in mould. Also many animal bones, some burnt through and through. A large
940 APPENDIX.
quantity of bones of cow, also sheep's bones and horn cores, also pigs' and stags' bones;
also a bone double-pointed needle. Subjacent to the earth containing these objects
was a grave 8' deep, the width across level of head 56”; the length of the grave was
7' 7". The length of skeleton from astragalus to top of head 33". Head at S.W.,
feet at N.E. ; black carbonaceous matter a little above vertex. Left hand close to face,
proximal end of metacarpals in relation with teeth, but digits pointing downwards.
Right ulna in line and under leg bones, extended and in articulation with humerus.
Head of right humerus lying on right upper maxilla. Skull and whole body on left
side, the right scapula lying close to coracoid of left scapula, which coracoid was
looking upwards. Body curled round. Patella present, knees 8" from upper jaw.
Distal end of left radius 1" from upper jaw. Right fibula projected beyond distal
end of right femur proximally to head, outer trochanter in relation to os calcis.
Two highest cervical vertebrae between condyles of lower jaw. Spines of dorsal
vertebrae pointing upwards close to left coracoid. Centres of lumbar vertebrae much
eaten away. Ribs pressed away from head. Sacral spines looking upwards. The
left tibia the most superficial of the long bones.
‘June 6, 1870. Went over to Wytham with result of bringing back one human
skull with long bones from a grave 8 feet deep, Io feet long, 5 ft. 6 in. broad, in the
gravel: with lower end of worked celt, and two more or less doubtful worked flints,
and pig's jaw; also a great number of various styles of pottery, (1) Saxon with thumb
marks, (2) very coarse British, (3) much Roman, (4) some angular pottery with
vandyck figuring, very like Saxon, but said not to be Saxon by Prof. Phillips. Also
bones of cow, sheep, deer, horse, pig; also bones of hippopotamus from the gravel.
The skeleton was that of an adult man, head of humerus detached, teeth much worn,
exostosis on right upper jaw and on right mandible, and tartar on teeth. Both patellae
in situ. Lying W. N.W. by E.S.E., doubled up, from head to knee 21 inches. Both
arms with elbow flexed, humerus parallel with upper vertebrae, lumbar vertebrae with
spines looking upwards. Between chin and knee, flint, pig's jaw. The left os inno-
minatum is much blackened internally, also the head of the corresponding femur; to
a less extent also the right innominate bone and femur. Probably a fire was lighted
in the grave superficial to the body and the fine ashes subsequently worked their way
into the bones more or less cracked by the heat. Femur 18.2” inches long; tibia
14 inches. Stature calculated by length of femur 5’ 6”, by length of femur and tibia
together 5. 5.4". The stature is lower than is usual in the brachycephalic Britons.
Extreme length of skull 7.1; extreme breadth 5.8; cephalic index 82. The concep-
tacula cerebelli touch the same surface with the teeth. Teeth all present, but much
worn. Lower jaw very powerful. Sutures extensively obliterated externally. Frontal
sinuses and supraciliary ridges largely developed. In contour the skull is typically
brachycephalic; the posterior half of the parietals dip precipitately, and though the
upper occipital squama does lie in a plane a little posterior to that of the posterior
half of the parietals, it nevertheless does not project behind the inion, which forms a
coarse transverse ridge without any differentiation of the lineae suprema.”
In March 1871, R. Johnson and W. B. Clarke, Esqrs. found the skele-
tons of three dogs in a hole, about 4 feet below the surface of the ground
and about 2 feet in the gravel. At the bottom of the hole the earth was
black and mixed with charcoal, and several stones were found which
showed traces of fire: the dogs' skeletons were immediately on the top of
this blackened earth. The skeletons were close together as if they had
been thrown into the hole in a heap.
APPENDIX. 941
Messrs. Johnson and Clarke say that close to the dogs in the same
hole were—
“remains of ox, pig, roe-deer, pike and some other sort of fish, teal, crane, wild swan,
and horse, and various sorts of pottery. One mass apparently consisted of woody
fibres and oxidized iron. We also found half a spindle-whorl, and Johnson picked up
a bone needle on a rubbish-heap close by, which may have come from the alluvium or
gravel. The long bones of the ox were split and broken, as if for the purpose of
getting the marrow out. Some few pieces of bone show signs of having passed through
the fire.”
The following note on a skeleton exposed in a grave opened in 1875
was made by W. Hatchett Jackson, Esq. :--
‘Wytham, Sept. 17, 1875. The body lay with the head pointing S. E. by S. It
was stretched at full length, perfectly straight. The head was about 1 ft. 6in. below
the surface, and lay with the upper part of the body in mould, while the legs and feet
lay in the gravel. The feet were about 2 ft. 3 in. below the surface, as nearly as could
be judged.
‘The head was fallen forwards on the breast. The thyroid cartilage was slightly
ossified, but tumbled to pieces in the carriage, the bony matter being barely of paper
thickness. The left arm lay along the side of the body, palm uppermost. The right
arm had been folded across the body, and its fingers lay partly in, partly across the
pelvic cavity. When I saw the body, the workmen had broken one leg, and the feet
were gone from both legs. The position of the bones however showed that the left
leg had lain across the right, in the position of the recumbent figures commonly called
Knight Crusaders. The workmen had saved some of the bones of the feet. The
skull and pelvis had been cracked.
“No pottery or any other remains lay upon the body, or very near it. A small piece
of broken pottery lay in the gravel.” -
The skeleton in relation to which the amber-beads were found was
exposed on March 18, 1878, in a grave about one foot in depth, the
superficial gravel being slightly excavated. The head was at the south,
the jaw pointing east; body on right side, hips and knees bent. On this
find Dr. Rolleston has noted:— -
‘This is a semi-contracted position such as is usually supposed to characterise the
British skeleton. But some Saxon bodies, or Teutonic at least, are found in the East
Riding thus contracted, and there can be no doubt that the amber-beads with worked
flattened approximal surfaces are Saxon.”
In addition to the graves two larger openings were found in the gravel.
In a plan of the Wytham gravel-pits, prepared in January 1870 by Sir
Henry Dryden, the one of these pits which is said not to be excavated is
marked on the east side of the pit; another and larger pit was on the
south side. On it Sir H. Dryden has made the following note:–
‘Opening excavated Jan. 26, and appeared to be the remainder of a circular pit, pro-
bably covered in and used as a habitation. The floor was hardened gravel, partly a
naturally hard bed in the gravel, partly hardened artificially and by exposure. In
942 APPENDIX.
digging out the humus, which had collected in it, teeth of ox and deer and a good
deal of pottery were found, but throughout the field the humus is charged with similar
pottery. On the floor a portion of a bivalve shell was found.’
Most of the skeletons and other objects collected at Wytham are pre-
served in the Oxford University Museum.
NOTES ON ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES AT
YARNTON, OXFORDSHIRE.
DURING the years 1875 to 1877, both inclusive, several human skeletons
were exposed in an ancient burial-place to the south-west of the church
of Yarnton, Oxfordshire, on the north side of the railway station. The
excavations leading to the discovery of the skeletons were made for the
purpose of getting gravel as ballast in connection with railway works
then going on in that district.
Whilst removing the soil two ditches of a semicircular form were opened
into. These ditches were situated in close proximity to each other, and,
as appears from a plan constructed by Sir H. Dryden, had the con-
cavity of the semi-lune turned in opposite directions. The ditches were
filled with black earth, and in and near them the graves containing the
skeletons were found. One ditch is noted (May 13–15, 1876) as ‘about
7' 10" wide, and about I’ 6” below the surface, with sloping sides, and
may consequently have been a little less wide when first dug out. Its
depth is from 5 to 5’ Io". This ditch was exposed for a space of
about 60', running nearly north and south, but trending a little east-
wards. On May 13, 1876, Dr. Rolleston noted :-
“We found a skeleton in a grave sunk through the side of the above ditch in such a
way as to show that the ditch had been filled up, and the grave sunk into partly the
filling-up of the ditch and partly into the side or escarpment of it. The skeleton was
lying so near the slope of the ditch that it would have been broken into pieces in the
digging out of the ditch. There can be no reasonable doubt that the ditch was the
earlier of the two. This is confirmed by the fact that in another of these ditches two
bodies were found, one on the top of the other, in 1875. The buriers struck upon a
ditch as a place to dig a grave in, and sank this grave as it happened within the limits
of the ditch on either side. I think the ditches may have been simply places for
living in. As a general rule we have found very little in them, and that very little,
animal bones—ox, dog, goat.”
APPENDIX. - 943
The graves were between two and three feet from the surface of the
ground. They measured from two to three feet in length and were about
two feet in breadth. The direction of the grave varied in different
instances, and the bodies had been laid in them with the head in varying
positions. Thus it is noted in one that the head was at the east; in
another that it was at the north-east ; in a third that the grave was
north-by-south, and the face was at the south; in a fourth that the grave
was east and west, with the face to the north; in a fifth the feet were
north-east-by-north, the head at the opposite end. In those graves where
the skeleton had not been disturbed by the workmen, it was seen that
the body had been buried in the contracted position, the knees being
approximated to the face. -
The skeletons were of both sexes and at various periods of life, some
being children. One child's skeleton is noted as lying with the head at
the south by south-west, the feet were north by north-east, the face was
looking southwards. The body was lying on the right side, the right
knee was more bent up than the left, one hand was up at the face.
Various articles were found in the graves along with the skeletons.
In one a broken urn was close to the skull; in another pieces of pottery
and cows' bones; in a third a bone-pin, 8 inches long, between the arms;
in a fourth a drinking-cup or food-vessel and a flint were in front of the
face; in a fifth an iron spear (I. 29. Io. 76) was immediately in front of
the face, and it projected about ten inches beyond the skull; and in the
same grave an iron knife or dagger (r. 29. Io. 76) nearly a foot long and
an inch and a half wide extended from the elbow by the side of the body
downwards to the side of the left os innominatum : its handle end was
towards the feet, its point towards the head. It is also stated that a
bronze torque or collar was found by the workmen with one of the
skeletons. This collar was acquired by John Evans, Esq., F.R.S.
Details of some of the graves are given in the following extracts from
Dr. Rolleston's notes:—
‘March 23, 1876. The grave was about 3 feet deep and 3 feet long by 2 ft. 3 in.
broad, the long axis lying north by south. The body lay doubled up on its right
side, the face being at the south end of the grave and looking north. From the heels
to the head was 2 ft. 4 in. The spines of the vertebrae pointed north-west. The
cervical vertebrae and a piece of the scapula lay between the rami of the lower jaw.
The right hand was by the pelvis, the left hand up at the face, the right arm being
bent across over the body. A considerable quantity of charred wood-fibre lay above
the bones of the body and about the skull. Near the left hand were found a flint
chipped flake and a bronze needle. -
* Feb. 23, 1876. I drove over with the Rev.W. C. Lukis, F.S.A., and G. L. Rolleston.
We found that a human skeleton had been partially disturbed, but was in great part
944 APPENDIX,
still in situ on the top of the gravel. The skeleton was lying on its left side looking
north, the hands were to the face, the knees to the chest. The grave was about
2 feet in length, and there was no implement, and only one bit of well-burnt dark
pottery in it. At a distance of 5 feet from the foot of the grave was the centre of a
hole 5 feet in diameter, 4 feet deep, in which some animal bones had been found.
The head of the skeleton was 250 S.S.E. from the spot where the ballast escarpment
in Sir H. Dryden's plan cut the semicircular ditch at its outer edge. This has been
added to Sir H. Dryden's plan by Mr. Lukis (N in the plan). The direction of the
body was W.N.W. by E.S.E.”
In a subsequent note Dr. Rolleston says —
“These excavations in the elongated form of ditches must be considered in connection
with shorter forms of holes, such as the one I had dug out on Monday, May 15, with
the result of finding nothing in it except the blackish mould which differentiates
them and the ditches from the gravel in which they are sunk. This hole was 7' 6''
long by 5’ in width, and its depth was 5'3". Its walls were perfectly definable by
the natural gravel, and its long axis was proximately east and west. Could it have
been just a sunk dwelling The men say they sometimes find these holes as much as
8' to Io' deep, and they are obliged to note them because the black mould they contain
does not do for ballast.
“Nov. 23, 1876. A Saxon interment, with head at west and feet at east, with spear
reputed to have been alongside of right humerus. The right hand lay under an umbo
and over the symphysis pubis, the elbow being bent. The left arm appears to have
been straight. A knife of iron lay at a tangent to the anterior rim of the umbo, its
handle end the narrower towards the left side, the blade end towards the right. On
the left side of the pelvis and a couple of inches or so from it were some strips of
bronze, perhaps an ornament of the left wrist-band. I found none on the right. The
grave was I' 6" deep. The entire length occupied was about 5' 4" long.’
Most of the human and other remains are preserved in the Museum
of the University of Oxford.
I N D E X.
Abnormal ossifications, 296.
Amber, 81 I.
Anglo-Saxon conquest, 681.
Aºsason interments, 597, 602, 605,
I.
Animal poisons, 861.
Annelides, blood-corpuscles of, 48o.
Antero-posterior index, 167, 277.
Anthropological literature, 902.
Anthropology, address on, 88o.
Antiquarian research, 864, 905.
Arion ater, 567; hortensis, 571.
Ascidians, kinship to vertebrates, 873.
Barrow, Rockley, 453.
Barrows, British, skulls from, 163; urns
in, 29I ; Nether Swell, 2 tº
Rirkby Stephen, 367. 353, 373;
Barrows, long, 252,679; people of, 353;
round, 227, 440, 679, 891.
Beech, 324.
BCCS, 327.
Biological training and studies, 846.
Biology, meaning of term, 854.
Birch, 326.
Birds, shoulder muscles in, 118, 137.
Blood corpuscles, 68; of annelides, 480.
Bojanus, organ of, 71.
Bos longifrons, 345; 412, 414, 432.
Bos primigenius, 344, 410,417.
Bostaurus, tooth of, 65; prehistoric, 343.
Brachycephaly, 165, 173, 223, 227, 234,
279, 890.
Brain, of orangutang, 2, 30, 44; of man,
24, 4o, 266; of dog, 24, 38; of chim-
panzee, 33, 46, 52 ; of vervet monkey,
38, 42 ; of marmoset, 4o; of mandrill,
46; of ateles, 46.
Brain, weight of, II, 49, 147, 895; preser-
vation of, 53; relation to skull, 265;
blood supply of 269, 899; structure of,
272.
Branchiobdella, 481.
Bridging convolutions, 15, 52.
IBrigantian type of skull, 226.
Britain, domestic pig of 518.
Bronze, 81 I.
Bronze age, 660, 663.
Bushmen, crania of, 462 ; ethnology of,
474.
Cactaceae, distribution of 809.
Camel, 822.
Candidates, pre-requisites of 907.
Castle Carrock, skull, 198.
Cats, domestic, 501; of the ancient Greeks,
5I5.
Caverne de l'Homme Mort, 312, 898.
Cavia aperea, 7I, II5.
Celtic cranium, I55, 244, 254, 313.
Centenarian, post-mortem examination of,
14I, I45, I52- . .
Cephalic index, 167.
£erebellum, 6, 32.
Cervus elaphus, 413, 458; capreolus, 413.
Chastleton, bones from, 460.
Chesnuts, 835.
Cholopus didactylus, blood-corpuscles of,
OC),
Cimbri, Celtic origin of, 228; type of
skull, 277.
Cinclus aquaticus, 63.
Cissbury, animal remains from, 409; ske-
leton from, 428.
Classical training, 916.
Coelogenys, 71.
Coffin, bark, 443.
Colymbinae, 63.
Comparison of human and ape's brain, 31.
Complemental nutrition, 59.
Coniferae, 325, 778.
Convolutions of brain, I5, 36, 47.
Correlations of growth, 56.
Cowlam, skull, 186.
Crane, 334.
Craniography, 866, 888.
Craniometry, 164.
Cranium, Celtic, 155; Weddo, 161. See
also Skulls.
Crannog, fauna of 456.
Crawley, tumulus, 255, 3I4.
Cremation, 293, 367, 445, 597.
Cubage of skulls, 894.
Cymbocephalic, 224, 249, 401, 893.
3 P
946
INDEX.
Dagger, bronze, 444.
Development, theory of, 51.
Diastase, 498.
Dinnington, skull, 155; tumulus, 159.
Diving animals, 62.
Dog, 337, 820.
Dolichocephaly, 165, 223, 231, 233, 249,
387, 890.
Earth-closet system, 923–927.
Ebberston, skull, 22I.
Echidna lawesii, 566.
Elephas indicus, tooth of 65; blood-cor-
puscles of, 68.
Elm, 777, 786.
Enamel, development of, 65.
Enteric fever, 927.
Epicoraco-humeral muscle, 123.
Examination system, 907.
Faithfulness, 911.
Fasciola hepatica, 571.
Fauna, prehistoric, 327; of a crannog,
456.
Felis domesticus, 501.
Fever, typhoid and enteric, 927.
Field Clubs, value of 851.
Fir, 325, 778.
Fissures of brain, 14.
Flint implements, 869.
Flints, 446.
Flixton Wold, skull, 178.
Flora, prehistoric, 322.
Forests, influence of 792.
Fowl, common, 332.
Fox, 338, 379.
Frilford, cemetery at, 581 ; catalogue of
excavations, 636.
— Further Researches at, 653.
Geographical distribution, 875.
Germanic type, 244, 278.
Glands, hybernating, 6o ; thymus, 59, 63.
Globose type of skull, 626, 637.
Gnathic index, 168.
Goat, 819.
Greeks, cats of the ancient, 515.
Growth, correlations of, 56.
Gymnasia, 916.
Hare, skull of 71.
Harveian oration, 729.
Harvey, as Warden of Merton College,
758; his character, 761 ; his culture,
762.
Heart, of bird, 738; of sheep, 739; hu-
man, 742.
Helperthorpe, skull, 215.
Heslerton Wold, skull, 181.
Hippocampus, 19, 28.
Hippomanes, IoS.
Hohberg type of skull, 401, 637.
Horse, 817, 822.
Hybernating glands, 6o.
Hypsistenocephali, 283.
Iberian type of skull, 226.
Ilderton, skull, 183.
Ill-filled skulls, 225, 245, 26.1, 357.
Injuries, repair of 715.
Interments, Roman, 585, 682; Romano-
.*. 587; Anglo-Saxon, 597, 602,
O5.
Inuline, 498.
Iron age, 660.
Jadeit, 347, 686, 81 I.
Jaw, lower, 317; in Bush race, 463.
Khoi-Khoin races, 475.
Rirkby Stephen, barrow near, 367.
Lachrymal bone, 536, 544.
Lake dwellings, 346.
Langton Wold, skull, 202.
Levator humeri, II2, I 13, 120.
Limax agrestis, 567, 571.
Lime-tree, 326.
Limnaeus truncatulus, 569, 570; pereger,
Liver, lobes of, 72.
Liver fluke, 567, 570.
Lobes of liver, 72.
Lochlee, crannog at, 456.
Man, natural history of 864.
Man's influence on organic nature, 769.
Marten cats, 503.
Measurements of crania, 164.
Microzymes, 860.
Mischformen, 225, 281, 890.
Missionaries, work of 883.
Moderator band, 739.
Mollusca in Cissbury pit, 419.
Muscles of shoulder-joint, I 12.
Muscular homologies, tabular view of,
I33.
Museums, value of, 849.
Mustela foina, 501.
Mynchery, 937.
Nephrite, 347, 686.
Nerve supply, relation to homology of
muscles, I2 I.
Nerves, distribution to muscles, 711.
New Guinea, zoology of 565.
Nutrition, complemental, 59.
Oakley Park, interment, 675.
Occipital dolichocephaly, 165, 898.
Orang utang, brain of, 2.
Organic nature as modified by man, 769.
INDEX.
947
Ossifications, abnormal, 296.
Osteological investigations at Frilford,
648
4ö.
Ox, 343, 813.
Paedogenesis, 875.
Falms, 826.
Parsimony, law of 721, 723, 859.
Parthenogenesis, 875.
Pectoralis secundus, II2, II 3, 12o.
Pessimism, ethics of 904.
Peyerian patches, 734.
Physiology in relation to Medicine, 693.
Pigs, 34o, 379, 418, 457; prehistoric, 518.
Pitfalls, 344, 412, 674.
Placenta, in tenrec, 74; hedgehog, 8o;
shrew, 81 ; vampire, 82; dog, 82; rat,
86; rabbit, III ; guinea-pig, 91, IIo;
monkey, 92; man, 95; in classification,
99; in cetacea, Ioa.
Platycnemy, 320, 384, 397, 435.
Polynesia, ethnology of 882.
Porpoise, anatomy of 58, 62.
Pottery, Roman, 937.
Prichard, father of modern Anthropology,
90I.
Rabbit, 335; skull of 71.
Reptiles, shoulder-muscles in, I23, 137.
Rickets, 301.
River-bed type of skull, 627, 637.
Rockley, barrow at, 453.
Roman interments at Frilford, 585, 587.
Roman pottery on sewage farm, 937.
Rot in sheep, 567.
Rudstone, skull, 190, 2II.
Salivary diastase, 498.
Savage races, disappearance of, 885.
Scientific training, 916.
Seals, 62.
Sewage farm, excavations, 937.
Sex, estimation of, I69, 247, 258, 320.
Sheep, 341, 379, 457, 815; rot in, 567.
Sherburn Wold, skull, 208.
Shoulder-joint, muscles of, II2.
Sigwell, barrows at, 440; topography of,
448.
Silurian type of skull, 226, 275, 277.
Sion type of skull, 359, 399, 620, 891.
Skulls, from Dinnington, 155; from Cey-
lon, 161 ; from British barrows, 163;
Weaverthorpe, 174, 217; Flixton Wold,
178; Heslerton Wold, 181; Ilderton,
183; Cowlam, 186; Rudstone, 190,
2II ; Castle Carrock, 198; Langton
Wold, 202; Sherburn Wold, 208; Hel-
perthorpe, 215; Ebberston, 221; Nether
Swell, 384 e. S.; Cissbury, 424, 436;
Rockley, 453; of Bushmen, 462 ; Oak-
ley Park, 676.
Skulls, types of, 226; fractures of, 284.
Spontaneous generation, 855.
Starch, 498.
Stature, estimation of 168, 261, 383.
Stone age, 660, 672.
Subclavius, II.4, II 7.
Sus, species of 518, 538, 540, 542, 546.
Suture, frontal, 294.
Swell, Nether, 353, 369,373.
Swiss lake dwellings, 346, 689.
Sycamore, 778.
Sympathetic nervous system, 863.
Tapeinocephaly, 311, 467.
Teeth, development of enamel in, 65.
Teeth, diseases of, 302; irregularities of,
306.
Teutonic type, 244, 278.
Thoroughness, 91 1.
Thymus gland, 59, 63.
Training, classical and scientific, 916.
Tree-interments, 892.
Trees, functions of 795.
Tumuli, Dinnington, 165; Crawley, 255,
3I4.
Turdus iliacus, 63.
Types, doctrine of, 51, 61.
Typhoid fever, 927.
Ungenirtheit, 877.
Urns in barrows, 291.
Vagus, influence on action of heart, 746,
863.
Ventricles of brain, 27, 30.
Vitis vitifera, distribution of, 808, 825.
Warner, Walter, his claim to the discovery
of the circulation disproved, 750.
Water rats, 336.
Weaverthorpe, skull, 174, 217.
Weddo skulls, 161.
Wild boar, 338, 411.
Wytham, graves at, 939.
Yarnton, graves at, 943.
Yew, 326, 785.
Zinc chloride for preserving brains, 53.
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