As the Bishop sat down, there was a wild burst of applause and much laughter, but amid the din were calls, "Huxley! Huxley!" These shouts increased as it came over the people that while the Bishop had made a great speech, he had gone a trifle too far in ridiculing a member who up to this time had been silent. The good English spirit of fair play was at work. Still Huxley sat silent. Then the enemy, thinking he was completely vanquished, took up the cry with intent to add to his discomfiture: "Huxley! Huxley!"

Slowly Huxley arose. He stood still until the last buzzing whisper had died away. When he spoke it was in so low a tone that people leaned forward to catch his words.

Huxley knew his business: his slowness to speak created an atmosphere. There was no jest in his voice or manner. The air grew tense.

His quiet reserve played itself off against the florid exuberance of the Bishop. The Bishop was not a man given to exact statements: his knowledge of science was general, not specific.

Huxley demolished his card house point by point, correcting the gross misstatements, and ending by saying that since a question of personal preferences had been brought into the discussion of a great scientific theme, he would confess that if the alternatives were a descent on the one hand from a respectable monkey, or on the other from a Bishop of the Church of England who could stoop to misrepresentation and sophistry and who had attempted in that presence to throw discredit upon a man who had given his life to the cause of science, then if forced to decide he would declare in favor of the monkey.

When Huxley took his seat, there was a silence that could be felt. Several ladies fainted. There were fears that the Bishop would reply, and to keep down such a possible unpleasant move the audience now applauded Huxley roundly, and amid the din the chairman declared the meeting adjourned.

From that time forward Huxley was famous throughout England as a man to let alone in public debate.

* * * * *

It is a fine thing to be a great scientist, but it is a yet finer thing to be a great man. The one element in Huxley's life that makes his character stand out clear, sharp and well defined was his steadfast devotion to truth. The only thing he feared was self-deception. When he uttered his classic cry in defense of Darwin, there was no ulterior motive in it; no thought that he was attaching himself to a popular success; no idea that he was linking his name with greatness.

What he felt was true, he uttered; and the strongest desire of his soul was that he might never compromise with the error for the sake of mental ease, or accept a belief simply because it was pleasant.

Huxley once wrote this terse sentence of Gladstone: "It is to me a serious thing that the destinies of this great country should at present be to a great extent in the hands of a man who, whatever he may be in the affairs of which I am no judge, is nothing but a copious shuffler in those that I do understand." Gladstone crossed swords with Huxley, Spencer and Robert Ingersoll, and in each case his blundering intellect looked like a raft of logs compared with a steamboat that responds to the helm. Gladstone was a man of action, and silence to such is most becoming.

He had a belief, that was enough; he should have hugged it close, and never stood up to explain it. Let us vary a simile just used: Lincoln once referred to an opponent as being "like a certain steamboat that ran on the Sangamon. This boat had so big a whistle that when she blew it, there wasn't steam enough to make her run, and when she ran she couldn't whistle."

Huxley, Spencer and Robert Ingersoll, all made Gladstone cut for the woods and cover his retreat in a cloud of words. Ingersoll once said that in replying to Gladstone he felt like a man who had been guilty of cruelty to children.

If one wants to see how pitifully weak Gladstone could be in an argument, let him refer to the "North American Review" for Eighteen Hundred Eighty-two.

Yet Ingersoll was surely lacking in the passion for truth that characterized Huxley. Ingersoll was always a prosecutor or a defender: the lawyer habit was strong upon him. Just a little more bias in his clay and he would have made a model bishop.

His stock of science was almost as meager as was that of Samuel Wilberforce, and he seldom hesitated to turn the laugh on an adversary, even at the expense of truth. When brought to book for his indictment of Moses without giving that great man any credit for the sublime things he did do, or making allowances for the barbaric horde with which he had to deal, Bob evaded the proposition by saying, "I am not the attorney of Moses: he has more than three million men looking after his case."

Again, in that most charming lecture on Shakespeare, Ingersoll proves that Bacon did not write the plays, by picking out various detached passages of Bacon, which no one for a moment ever claimed revealed the genius of the man.

With equal plausibility we could prove that the author of Hamlet was a weakling, by selecting all the obscure and stupid passages, and parading these with the unexplained fact that the play opens with the spirit of a dead man coming back to earth, and a little later in the same play Shakespeare has the man who interviewed the ghost tell of "that bourne from whence no traveler returns." Even Shakespeare was not a genius all the time. And Ingersoll, the searcher for truth, borrowed from his friends, the priests, the cheerful habit of secreting the particular thing that would not help the cause in hand. But one of the best things in Ingersoll's character was that he realized his lapses and in private acknowledged them.

On reading the smooth, florid and plausible sophistry of Wilberforce, Ingersoll once said: "Be easy on Soapy Sam! A few years ago, a little shifting of base on the part of my ancestors, and I would probably have had Soapy Sam's job."

This resemblance of opposites makes a person think of that remark applied to Voltaire. "He was the father of all those who wear shovel-hats."

* * * * *

When Thomas Huxley and his wife arrived in New York in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-six, on a visit to the Centennial Exhibition, this interesting item was flashed over the country, "Huxley and his titled bride have arrived in New York on their wedding-journey."

This item caused Mr. and Mrs. Huxley—both of them royal democrats—more joy than did the most complimentary interview. At home they had left a charming little brood of seven children, three of them nearly grown-ups.

Huxley sent Tyndall, who a few months before had married a daughter of Lord Hamilton, the clipping and this note: "You see how that once I am in a democratic country I am pulling all the honors I can in my own direction." The next letter the Huxleys received from Tyndall was addressed, "Sir Thomas and Lady Huxley." Huxley never stood in much awe of the nobility; he evidently felt that there was another kind of which he himself in degree was heir. Huxley never had a better friend than Sir Joseph Hooker, and we see in his letters such postscripts as this:

"Dear Sir Joseph: Do come and dine with us; it is a month since we have seen your homely old phiz." And Sir Joseph replies that he will be on hand the next Sunday evening and offers this mild suggestion, "Scientific gents as has countenances as curdles milk should not cast aspersions on men made in image of Maker."

* * * * *

The wordy duel between Huxley and Gladstone prompted Toole, the great comedian, to send a box of grease-paints to Huxley with a note saying, "These are for you and Gladstone to use when you make up." It was a joke so subtle and choice that the Huxleys, always dear friends of Toole, laughed for a week.

Poor Gladstone required a diagram when he heard of the procedure; and then, not being trepanned for the pleasantry, remarked that if Toole and Huxley collaborated on the stage, it would be eminently the proper thing, and in his mind there was little choice between them, both being fine actors.

Later, we hear of Huxley saying he thought of sending the box of grease-paints to Gladstone, so the Premier could use them in making up with God; as for himself, he was like Thoreau and had never quarreled with Him.

Huxley had many friendships with people seemingly outside of his own particular line of work. Henry Irving, the Reverend Doctor Parker, John Fiske and Hall Caine once met at one of Huxley's "Tall Teas," and Doctor Parker explained that he personally had no objection to visiting with sinners.

For Parker, Huxley had a great admiration and often attended the Thursday noon meeting at the Temple, "to see and hear the greatest actor in England," a compliment which Parker much appreciated, otherwise he would not have repeated it. "If I ever take to the stage, I will play the part of Jacques or Touchstone," said Huxley.

John Fiske in his delightful essay on Huxley said that in the Huxley home there was more jest, joke and banter than in any other place in London. The air was surcharged with mirth, and puns, often very bad ones, were tossed back and forth with great recklessness.

At one time John Fiske was at the Huxleys and the dual or multiple nature of man came up for discussion. Huxley spoke of how very often men who were gentle and charming in their homes were capable of great crimes, and of how, on the other hand, a man might pass in the world as a philanthropist, and yet in his household be a veritable autocrat and tyrant.

Fiske then incidentally mentioned the case of Doctors Parker and Webster of Harvard—men of intellect and worth. These men brooded over a misunderstanding that grew into a grudge and eventually hatched murder. One worthy professor killed the other, cut up the body, and tried to burn it in a chemist's retort. Only the great difficulty of reducing the human body to ashes caused the murder to out, and brought about the hanging of a scientist of note.

"Yes, I have thought of the difficulty of disposing of a dead body," said Huxley, solemnly; "and often when on the point of committing murder this was the only thing that made me hesitate!"

"Oh, Pater, we are ashamed of you," said his three lovely daughters in concert. Huxley's ability to joke and his appreciation of the ludicrous marked him, in the mind of John Fiske, as the greatest thinker of his time. The humorist knows values, and that is why he laughs. Sensibility is, in fact, the basic element of wit.

* * * * *

Huxley's duties on the "Rattlesnake" were not in the line of science. His rank was assistant surgeon; but as sure-enough surgeons were only sent out on bigger craft, he was this ship's doctor.

With the captain's help the men were kept busy, but not too busy, and the food and regulations were such that about all Huxley had to do was to look upon his work and pronounce it good.

As a physician, Huxley practised throughout his life the science of prevention.

"With a prophetic vision, quite unconscious, my parents named me after that particular apostle I was to admire most," once said Huxley. He was a doubter by instinct, and approached the world of Nature as if nothing were known about it.

His work on the Medusa won him the recognition of the British Society, and this secured him the coveted surgeon's commission. Two tragedies confront man on his journey through life—one when he wants a thing and can not get it; the other when he gets the thing and finds he does not want it.

Having secured his surgeon's commission, Huxley felt a strong repulsion toward devoting his life to the abnormal.

"I am a scientist by nature, and my business is to teach," he wrote to his affianced wife. These were wise words which he had learned from her, but which he repeated, seemingly quite innocent of their source. We take our own wherever we find it.

Miss Heathorn admired a surgeon, but loved a scientist, and Huxley being a man was making a heroic struggle to be what the young woman most wished. Love supplies an ideal—and that is the very best thing love does, with possibly an exception or two. So behold a ship's surgeon in London, full-fledged, refusing offers of position, and even declining to take a choice of ships, for such is the perversity of things animate and inanimate that, when we do not want things, Fate brings them to us on silver platters and begs us to accept. We win by indifference as much as by desire.

"I have declined to ship on board the 'Cormorant' as head surgeon, and have applied to the University of Toronto for a position as Professor of Natural History."

And so America had Huxley flung at her head. Toronto considered, and the Canadians sat on the case, and after considerable correspondence, the vacant chair was given to Professor Baldini of the Whitby Ladies College. It was a close call for Canada! Huxley had imagined that the New World offered special advantages to a rising young person of scientific bent, but now he secured a marriage-license and settled down as lecturer at the School of Mines. A little later he began to teach at the Royal College of Surgeons, with which institution he was to be connected the rest of his life, and fill almost any chair that happened to be vacant.

From the time he was twenty-seven Huxley never had to look for work. He was known as a writer of worth, and as a lecturer his services were in demand.

He became President of the Geological and Ethnological Society; was appointed Royal Commissioner for the Advancement of Science; was a member of the London School Board; Secretary of the Royal Society; Lord Rector of the University of Aberdeen; President of the Royal Society; and refused an offer to become Custodian of the British Museum, a life position, and where he had once applied for a clerkship.

In letters to Darwin he occasionally signed his name with all titles added, thus, "Thomas Henry Huxley, M.B., M.D., Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S. of Her Majesty's Navy."

Huxley was a forceful and epigrammatic writer, and had a command of English second to no scientist that England has ever produced. He was the only one of his group who had a distinct literary style. As a speaker he was quiet, deliberate, decisive, sure; and he carried enough reserve caloric so that he made his presence felt in any assemblage before he said a word. In oratory it is personality that gives ballast.

Of his forty or so published books, "Man's Place in Nature," "Elementary Physiology" and "Classification of Animals" have been translated into many languages, and now serve as textbooks in various schools and colleges.

Huxley is the founder of the so-called Agnostic School, which has the peculiarity of not being a school. The word "agnostic" was given its vogue by Huxley. To superficial people it was quite often used synonymously with "infidel" and "freethinker," both words of reproach. To Huxley it meant simply one who did not know, but wished to learn.

The controlling impulse of Huxley's life was his absolute honesty. To pretend to believe a thing against which one's reason revolts, in order to better one's place in society, was to him the sum of all that was intellectually base.

He regarded man as an undeveloped creature, and for this creature to lay the flattering unction to his soul that he was in special communication with the Infinite, and in possession of the secrets of the Creator, was something that in itself proved that man was as yet in the barbaric stage.

Said Huxley: "As to the final truths of Creation and Destiny, I am an agnostic. I do not know, hence I neither affirm nor deny."

* * * * *

Humor and commonsense usually go together. Huxley had a goodly stock of both. When George Eliot died, there was a very earnest but ill-directed effort made to have her body buried in Westminster Abbey. Huxley, being close to the Dean, serving with him on several municipal boards, was importuned by Spencer to use his influence toward the desired end. Huxley saw the incongruity of the situation, and in a letter that reveals the logical mind and the direct, literary, Huxley quality, he placed his gentle veto on the proposition and thus saved the "enemy" the mortification of having to do so.

Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey, but this was not to be the final resting-place of the dust of Mill, Tyndall, Spencer, George Eliot or Huxley. These had all stood in the fore of the fight against superstition and had both given and received blows.

The Pantheon of such battle-scarred heroes was to be the hearts of those who prize above all that earth can bestow the benison of the God within. "Above all else, let me preserve my integrity of intellect," said Huxley. Here is Huxley's letter to Spencer:

4 Marlborough Place, Dec. 27, 1880

My Dear Spencer: Your telegram which reached me on Friday evening caused me great perplexity, inasmuch as I had just been talking to Morley, and agreeing with him that the proposal for a funeral in Westminster Abbey had a very questionable look to us, who desired nothing so much as that peace and honor should attend George Eliot to her grave.

It can hardly be doubted that the proposal will be bitterly opposed, possibly (as happened in Mill's case with less provocation) with the raking up of past histories, about which the opinion even of those who have least the desire or the right to be pharisaical is strongly divided, and which had better be forgotten.

With respect to putting pressure on the Dean of Westminster, I have to consider that he has some confidence in me, and before asking him to do something for which he is pretty sure to be violently assailed, I have to ask myself whether I really think it a right thing for a man in his position to do.

Now I can not say I do. However much I may lament the circumstance, Westminster Abbey is a Christian Church and not a Pantheon, and the Dean thereof is officially a Christian priest, and we ask him to bestow exceptional Christian honors by this burial in the Abbey. George Eliot is known not only as a great writer, but as a person whose life and opinions were in notorious antagonism to Christian practise in regard to marriage, and Christian theory in regard to dogma. How am I to tell the Dean that I think he ought to read over the body of a person who did not repent of what the Church considers mortal sin, a service not one solitary proposition of which she would have accepted for truth while she was alive? How am I to urge him to do that which, if I were in his place, I should most emphatically refuse to do? You tell me that Mrs. Cross wished for the funeral in the Abbey. While I desire to entertain the greatest respect for her wishes, I am very sorry to hear it. I do not understand the feeling which could create such a desire on any personal grounds, save those of affection, and the natural yearning to be near, even in death, those whom we have loved. And on public grounds the wish is still less intelligible to me. One can not eat one's cake and have it too. Those who elect to be free in thought and deed must not hanker after the rewards, if they are to be so called, which the world offers to those who put up with its fetters.

Thus, however I look at the proposal, it seems to me to be a profound mistake, and I can have nothing to do with it. I shall be deeply grieved if this resolution is ascribed to any other motives than those which I have set forth at greater length than I intended. Ever yours very faithfully, T. H. HUXLEY



JOHN TYNDALL

In my little book on Faraday, published in Eighteen Hundred Sixty-eight, I have stated that he had but to will it to raise his income, in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-two, to five thousand pounds a year. In Eighteen Hundred Thirty-six, the sum might have been doubled. Yet this son of a blacksmith, this journeyman book-binder, with his proud, sensitive soul, rejecting the splendid opportunities open to him—refusing even to think them splendid in presence of higher aims—cheerfully accepted from the Trinity House a pittance of two hundred pounds a year.

—John Tyndall

JOHN TYNDALL

Tyndall was of high descent and lowly birth. His father was a member of the Irish Constabulary, and there were intervals when the boy's mother took in washing. But back of this the constable swore i' faith, when the ale was right, that he was descended from an Irish King, and probably this is true, for most Irishmen are, and acknowledge it themselves.

The father of our Tyndall spelled his name Tyndale, and traced a direct relationship to William Tyndale, who declared he would place a copy of the English Bible in the hands of every plowboy in the British Isles, and pretty nearly made good his vow. William Tyndale paid for his privileges, however. He was arrested, given an opportunity to run away, but wouldn't; then he was exiled. Finally he was incarcerated in a dungeon of the Castle Vilvoorden.

His cell was beneath the level of the ground, so was cold and damp and dark. He petitioned the governor of the prison for a coat to keep him warm and a candle by which he could read. "We'll give you both light and heat, pretty soon," was the reply.

And they did. They led Tyndale out under the blue sky and tied him to a stake set in the ground. Around his feet they piled brush, and also all of his books and papers that they could find.

A chain was put around his neck and hooked tight to the post. Then the fagots were piled high, and the fire was lighted.

"He was not burned to death," argued one of the priests who was present; "he was not burned to death. He just drew up his feet and hanged himself in the chain, and so was choked: he was that stubborn!" The father of John Tyndall was an Orangeman and had in a glass case a bit of the flag carried at the Battle of the Boyne.

It is believed, with reason, that the original flag had in it about ten thousand square yards of material. Tyndale the Orangeman was of so uncompromising a type that he occasionally arrested Catholics on general principles, like the Irishman who beat the Jew under the mistaken idea that he had something to do with crucifying "Our Savior." "But that was two thousand years ago," protested the Jew. "Niver moind; I just heard av it—take that and that!"

Zeal not wisely directed is a true Irish trait. It will not do to say that the Irish have a monopoly on stupidity, yet there have been times when I thought they nearly cornered the market. I once had charge of a gang of green Irishmen at a lumber-camp.

I started a night-school for their benefit, as their schooling had stopped at subtraction. One evening they got it into their heads that I was an atheist. Things began to come my way. I concluded discretion was the better part of valor, and so took to the woods, literally. They followed me for a mile, and then gave up the chase. On the way home they met a man who spoke ill of me, and they fell upon him and nearly pounded his life out.

I never had to lick any of my gang: they looked after this themselves. On pay-nights they all got drunk and fell upon each other—broken noses and black eyes were quite popular. Father Driscoll used to come around nearly every month and have them all sign the pledge.

That story about the Irishman who ate the rind of the watermelon "and threw the inside away," is true. That is just what the Irish do. Very often they are not able to distinguish good from bad, kindness from wrong, love from hate. Ireland has all the freedom she can use or deserves, just as we all have. What would Ireland do with freedom if she had it? Hate for England keeps peace at home. Home rule would mean home rough-house—and a most beautiful argument it would be, enforced with shillalah logic. The spirit of Donnybrook Fair is there today as much as ever, and wherever you see a head, hit it, would be home rule. Donnybrook is a condition of mind.

If England really had a grudge against Ireland and wanted to get even, she could not do better than to set her adrift.

But then the Irish impulsiveness sometimes leads to good, else how could we account for such men as O'Connor, Parnell, John Tyndall, Burke, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Arthur Wellesley and all the other Irish poets, orators and thinkers who have made us vibrate with our kind?

Transplanted weeds produce our finest flowers.

The parents of Tyndall were intent on giving their boy an education. And to them, the act of committing things to memory was education. William Tyndale gave the Bible to the people; John Tyndall would force it upon them. The "Book of Martyrs," the sermons of Jeremy Taylor, and the Bible, little John came to know by heart. And he grew to have a fine distaste for all. Once, when nearly a man grown, he had the temerity to argue with his father that the Bible might be better appreciated, if a penalty were not placed upon disbelief in its divine origin. A cuff on the ear was the answer, and John was given until sundown to apologize. He did not apologize.

And young Tyndale then vowed he would change his name to Tyndall and forever separate himself from a person whose religion was so largely mixed with brutality. But yet John Tyndale was not a bad man. He had intellect far above the average of his neighbors. He had the courage of his convictions. His son had the courage of his lack of convictions.

And the early drilling in the Bible was a good thing for young Tyndall. Bible legend and allusion color the English language, and any man who does not know his Bible well, can never hope to speak or write English with grace and fluency. Tyndall always knew and acknowledged his indebtedness to his parents, and he also knew that his salvation depended upon getting away from and beyond the narrow confines of their beliefs and habits. Because a thing helps you in a certain period of your education is no reason why you should feed upon it forevermore.

This way lies arrested development.

Life, like heat, is a mode of motion, and progress consists in discarding a good thing as soon as you have found a better.

* * * * *

Occasionally Herbert Spencer used to spend a Sunday afternoon with the Carlyles at their modest home in Chelsea. At such times Jeannie Welsh would usually manage to pilot the conversational craft along smooth waters; but if she were not present, hot arguments would follow, and finally a point would be reached where Carlyle and Spencer would simply sit and glare at each other.

"After such scenes I always thought less of two persons, Carlyle and myself," said Spencer; "and so for many years I very cautiously avoided Cheyne Row." Then there was another man Spencer avoided, although for a different reason; this individual was John Tyndall.

On the death of Tyndall, Spencer wrote:

"There has just died the greatest teacher of modern times: a man who stimulated thought in old and young, every one he met, as no one else I ever knew did. Once we went together for a much-needed rest to the Lake District. Gossip, which has its advantages in that it can be carried on with no tax on one's intellectual powers, had no part in our conversation. The discussion of great themes began at once wherever Tyndall was.

"The atmosphere of the man was intensely stimulating: everybody seemed to become great and wise and good in his presence.

"We walked on the shores of Windermere, climbed Rydal Mount, rowed across Lake Grasmere (leaving our names on the visitors' list), and all the time we dwelt upon high Olympus and talked.

"But, alas! Tyndall's vivacity undid me: two days of his company, with two sleepless nights, and I fled him as I would a pestilence."

But Carlyle growled out one thing in Spencer's presence which Spencer often quoted. "If I had my own way," said Carlyle, "I would send the sons of poor men to college, and the sons of rich men I would set to work."

Manual labor in right proportion means mental development. Too much hoe may slant the brow, but hoe in proper proportion develops the cerebellum.

In the past we have had one set of men do all the work, and another set had all the culture: one hoes and another thirsts. There are whole areas of brain-cells which are evolved only through the efforts of hand and eye, for it is the mind at last that directs all our energies. The development of brain and body go together—manual work is brain-work. Too much brain-work is just as bad as too much toil; the misuse of the pen carries just as severe a penalty as the misuse of the hoe. And it is a great satisfaction to realize that the thinking world has reached a point where these propositions do not have to be proven.

There was a time when Spencer regretted that he had not been sent to college, instead of being set to work. But later he came to regard his experience as a practical engineer and surveyor as a very precious and necessary part of his education.

John Tyndall and Alfred Russel Wallace had an experience almost identical. In childhood John attended the village school for six months of the year, and the rest of the time helped his parents, as children of poor people do. When nineteen he went to work carrying a chain in a surveying corps. Steady attention to the business in hand brought its sure reward, and in a few years he had charge of the squad, and was given the duty of making maps and working out complex calculations in engineering.

In mathematics he especially excelled. Five years in the employ of the Irish Ordnance Survey and three years in practical railroad-building, and Tyndall got the Socialistic bee in his bonnet. He resigned a good position to take part in bringing about the millennium.

That he helped the old world along toward the ideal there is no doubt; but Tyndall is dead and Jerusalem is not yet. When the rule of the barons was broken, and the stage of individualism or competition was ushered in, men said, "Lo! The time is at hand and now is." But it was not. Socialism is coming, by slow degrees, imperceptibly almost as the growing of Spring flowers that push their way from the damp, dark earth into the sunlight. And after Socialism, what? Perhaps the millennium will still be a long way off.

In Eighteen Hundred Forty-seven, when Tyndall was twenty-seven years old, Robert Owen, one of the greatest practical men the world has ever seen, cried aloud, "The time is at hand!"

Owen was an enthusiast: all great men are. He had risen from the ranks by the absolute force of his great untiring, restless and loving spirit. From a day laborer in a cotton-mill he had become principal owner of a plant that supported five thousand people.

Owen saw the difference between joyless labor and joyful work. His mills were cleanly, orderly, sanitary, and surrounded with lawns, trees and shrubbery. He was the first man in England to establish kindergartens, and this he did at his own expense for the benefit of his helpers. He established libraries, clubs, swimming-pools, night-schools, lecture-courses. And all this time his business prospered.

To the average man it is a miracle how any one individual could bear the heaviest business burdens and still do what Robert Owen did.

Robert Owen had vitality plus: he was a gourmet for work. William Morris was just such a man, only with a bias for art; but both Owen and Morris had the intensity and impetus which get the thing done while common folks are thinking about it.

Owen was familiar with every detail of his vast business, and he was an expert in finance. Like Napoleon he said: "The finances? I will arrange them."

Robert Owen erected schoolhouses, laid out gardens, built mills, constructed tenements, traveled, lectured, and wrote books. His enthusiasm was contagious. He was never sick—he could not spare the time—and a doctor once said, "If Robert Owen ever dies, it will be through too much Robert Owen."

Owen went over to Dublin on one of his tours, and lectured on the ideal life, which to him was Socialism, "each for all and all for each."

Fourier, the dreamer, supplied a good deal of the argument, but Robert Owen did the thing. Socialism always catches these two classes, doers and dreamers, workers and drones, honest men and rogues, those with a desire to give and those with a lust to get.

Among others who heard Owen speak at Dublin was the young Irish engineer, John Tyndall. Tyndall was the type of man that must be common before we can have Socialism. There was not a lazy hair in his head; aye, nor a selfish one, either. He had a tender heart, a receptive brain and the spirit of obedience, the spirit that gives all without counting the cost, the spirit that harkens to the God within. And need I say that the person who gives all, gets all! The economics of God are very simple: We receive only that which we give. The only love we keep is the love we give away.

These are very old truths—I did not discover nor invent them—they are not covered by copyright: "Cast thy bread upon the waters."

John Tyndall was melted by Owen's passionate appeal of each for all and all for each. To live for humanity seemed the one desirable thing. His loving Irish heart was melted. He sought Owen out at his hotel, and they talked, talked till three o'clock in the morning.

Owen was a judge of men; his success depended upon this one thing, as that of every successful business must. He saw that Tyndall was a rare soul and nearly fulfilled his definition of a gentleman. Tyndall had hope, faith and splendid courage; but best of all, he had that hunger for truth which classes him forever among the sacred few.

During his work out of doors on surveying trips he had studied the strata; gotten on good terms with birds, bugs and bees; he knew the flowers and weeds, and loved all the animate things of Nature, so that he recognized their kinship to himself, and he hesitated to kill or destroy.

Education is a matter of desire, and a man like Tyndall is getting an education wherever he is. All is grist that comes to his mill.

Robert Owen had but recently started "Queenswood College" in Hampshire, and nothing would do but Tyndall should go there as a teacher of science.

"Is he a skilled and educated teacher?" some one asked Owen. "Better than that," replied Owen; "he is a regular firebrand of enthusiasm."

And so Tyndall resigned his position with the railroad and moved over to England, taking up his home at "Harmony Hall."

Harmony Hall was a beautiful brick building with the letters C. M. carved on the cornerstone in recognition of the Commencement of the Millennium. The pupils were mostly workers in the Owen mills who had shown some special aptitude for education. The pupils and teachers all worked at manual labor a certain number of hours daily. There was a delightful feeling of comradeship about the institution. Tyndall was happy in his work.

He gave lectures on everything, and taught the things that no one else could teach, and of course he got more out of the lessons than any of the scholars.

But after a few months' experience with the ideal life, Tyndall had commonsense enough to see that Harmony Hall, instead of being the spontaneous expression of the people who shared its blessings, was really a charity maintained by one Robert Owen. It was a beneficent autocracy, a sample of one-man power, beautifully expressed.

Robert Owen planned it, built it, directed it and made good any financial deficit. Instead of Socialism it was a kindly despotism. A few of the scholars did their level best to help themselves and help the place, but the rest didn't think and didn't care. They were passengers who enjoyed the cushioned seats. A few, while partaking of the privileges of the place, denounced it.

"You can not educate people who do not want to be educated," said Tyndall. The value of an education lies in the struggle to get it. Do too much for people, and they will do nothing for themselves.

Many of the students at Harmony Hall had been sent there by Owen, because he, in the greatness of his heart and the blindness of his zeal, thought they needed education. They may have needed it; but they did not want it: ease was their aim.

The indifference and ingratitude Robert Owen met with did not discourage him: it only gave him an occasional pause. He thought that the bad example of English society was too close to his experiments: it vitiated the atmosphere.

So he came over to America and founded the town of New Harmony, Indiana. The fine solid buildings he erected in Posey County, then a wilderness, are still there.

As for the most romantic and interesting history of New Harmony, Robert Owen and his socialistic experiments, I must refer the gentle reader to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a work I have found very useful in the course of making my original researches.

After a year at Harmony Hall, Tyndall saw that he would have to get out or else become a victim of arrested development, through too much acceptance of a strong man's bounty. "You can not afford to accept anything for nothing," he said. Life at Harmony Hall to him was very much like life in a monastery, to which stricken men flee when the old world seems too much for them. "When all the people live the ideal life, I'll live it; but until then I'm only one of the great many strugglers." Besides, he felt that in missing university training he had dropped something out of his life. Now he would go to Germany and see for himself what he had missed.

While railroading he had saved up nearly four hundred pounds. This money he had offered at one time to invest in shares in the Owen mills. But Robert Owen said, "Wait two years and then see how you feel!"

Robert Owen was not a financial exploiter. Tyndall may have differed with him in a philosophic way; but they never ceased to honor and respect each other.

And so John Tyndall bade the ideal life good-by, and went out into the stress, strife and struggle, resolved to spend his two thousand dollars in bettering his education, and then to start life anew.

* * * * *

Robert Owen had been over to America and had met Emerson, and very naturally caught it. When he returned home he gave young Tyndall a copy of Emerson's first book, the "Essay on Nature," published anonymously.

Tyndall read and re-read the book, and read it aloud to others and spoke of it as a "message from the gods."

He also read every word that Carlyle put in print. It was Carlyle who introduced him to German philosophy and German literature, and fired him with a desire to see for himself what Germany was doing.

Germany had still another mystic tie that drew him thitherward. It was at Marburg, Germany, that his illustrious namesake had published his translation of the Bible.

At Marburg there was a University, small, 't was true, but its simplicity and the cheapness of living there were recommendations. So to Marburg he went. Tyndall found lodgings in a little street called "Heretics' Row." Possibly there be people who think that Tyndall's taking a room in such a street was chance, too. Chance is natural law not understood.

Marburg is a very lovely little town that clings amid a forest of trees to the rocky hillside overlooking the River Lahn. Tyndall was very happy at Marburg, and at times very miserable. The beauty of the place appealed to him. He was a climber by nature, and the hills were a continual temptation.

But the language was new; and before this his work had all been of a practical kind. College seems small and trivial after you have been in the actual world of affairs. But Tyndall did not give up. He rose every morning at six, took his cold bath, dressed and ran up the hill half a mile and back. He breakfasted with the family, that he might talk German. Then he dived into differential calculus and philosophical abstrusities. He was not sent to college: he went. And he made college give up all it had. On the wall of his room, as a sort of ornamental frieze in charcoal, he wrote this from Emerson: "High knowledge and great strength are within the reach of every man who unflinchingly enacts his best."

Down in the town was a bronze bust of a man who wrote for it the following inscription: "This is the face of a man who has struggled energetically."

One might almost imagine that Hawthorne had received from Tyndall the hint which evolved itself into that fine story, "The Great Stone Face."

The bust just mentioned, attracted John Tyndall for another reason: Carlyle had written of the man it symboled: "Reader, to thee, thyself, even now, he has one counsel to give, the secret of his whole poetic alchemy. Think of living! Thy life, wert thou the pitifullest of all the sons of earth, is no idle dream, but a solemn reality. It is thine own; it is all thou hast with which to front eternity. Work, then, even as he has done—like a star, unhasting and unresting."

* * * * *

At Marburg, Tyndall was on good terms with the great Bunsen, and used to act as his assistant in making practical chemical experiments before his classes.

These amazing things done by chemists in public are seldom of much value beyond giving a thrill to visitors who would otherwise drowse; it is like humor in an oration: it opens up the mental pores.

Alexander Humboldt once attended a Bunsen lecture at Marburg and complimented Tyndall by saying, "When I take up sleight-of-hand work, consider yourself engaged as my first helper." Tyndall's way of standing with his back to the audience, shutting off the view of Bunsen's hands while he was getting ready to make an artificial peal of thunder, made Humboldt laugh heartily.

Humboldt thought so well of the young man who spoke German with an Irish accent, that he presented him with an inscribed copy of one of his books. The volume was a most valuable one, for Humboldt published only in deluxe, limited editions, and Tyndall was so overcome that all he could say was, "I'll do as much for you some day." Not long after this, through loaning money to a fellow student, Tyndall found himself sadly in need of funds, and borrowed two pounds on the book from an 'Ebrew Jew.

That night, he dreamed that Humboldt found the volume in a secondhand store. In the morning, Tyndall was waiting for the pawnbroker to open his shop to get the book back ere the offense was discovered.

Heinrich Heine once inscribed a volume of his poems to a friend, and afterward discovered the volume on the counter of a secondhand dealer. He thereupon haggled with the bookman, bought the book and beneath his first inscription wrote, "With the renewed regards of H. Heine." He then sent the volume for the second time to his friend. 'T is possible that Tyndall had heard of this.

In Eighteen Hundred Fifty, when Tyndall was thirty years of age, he visited London, and of course went to the British Institution. There he met Faraday for the first time and was welcomed by him.

The British Institution consists of a laboratory, a museum and a lecture-hall, and its object is scientific research. It began in a very simple way in one room and now occupies several buildings.

It was founded by Benjamin Thompson, an American, and so it was but proper that its sister concern, the Smithsonian Institution, should have been founded by an Englishman.

Sir Humphry Davy on being asked, "What is your greatest discovery?" replied, "Michael Faraday." But this was a mere pleasantry, the truth being that it was Michael Faraday who discovered Sir Humphry Davy. Faraday was a bookbinder's apprentice, a fact that should interest all good Roycrofters.

Evenings, when Sir Humphry Davy lectured at the British Institution, the young bookbinder was there. After the lecture he would go home and write out what he had heard, with a few ideas of his own added. For be it known, taking notes at a lecture is a bad habit—good reporters carry no notebooks.

After a year Faraday sent a bundle of his impressions and criticisms to Sir Humphry Davy anonymously. Great men seldom read manuscript that is sent to them unless it refers to themselves. At the next lecture, Sir Humphry began by reading from Faraday's notes, and begged that if the writer were present, he would make himself known at the close of the address.

From this was to ripen a love like that of father and son. Every man who builds up such a work as did Sir Humphry Davy is appalled, when he finds Time furrowing his face and whitening his hair, to think how few indeed there are who can step in and carry his work on after he is gone.

The love of Davy for the young bookbinder was almost feverish: he clutched at this bright, impressionable and intent young man who entered so into the heart and soul of science; nothing would do but he must become his assistant. "Give up all and follow me!" And Faraday did.

Something of the same feeling must have swept over Faraday after his work of twenty-five years as director of the British Institution, when John Tyndall appeared, tall, thin, bronzed, animated, quoting Bunsen and Humboldt with an Irish accent.

And so in time Tyndall became assistant to Faraday, then lecturer in natural history; and when Faraday died, Tyndall, by popular acclaim, was made Fullerian Lecturer and took Faraday's place. This was to be his life-work, and it so placed him before the world that all he said or did had a wide significance and an extended influence.

* * * * *

Tyndall was always a most intrepid mountain-climber. The Alps lured him like the song of the Lorelei, and the wonder was that his body was not left in some mountain crevasse, "the most beautiful and poetic of all burials," he once said.

But for him this was not to be, for Fate is fond of irony. The only man who ever braved the full dangers of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado was killed by a suburban train in Chicago while on his wedding-tour. Most bad men die in bed, tenderly cared for by trained nurses in white caps and big aprons.

Tyndall climbed to the summit of the Matterhorn, ascended the so-called inaccessible peak of the Weisshorn, scaled Mont Blanc three times, and once was caught in an avalanche, riding toward death at the rate of a mile a minute. Yet he passed away from an overdose, or a wrong dose, of medicine given him through mistake, by the hands of the woman he loved most.

At one time Tyndall attempted to swim a mountain-torrent; the stream, as if angry at his Irish assurance, tossed him against the rocks, brought him back in fierce eddies, and again and again threw him against a solid face of stone. When he was rescued he was a mass of bruises, but fortunately no bones were broken. It was some days before he could get out, and in his sorry plight, bandaged so his face was scarcely visible, Spencer found him. "Herbert, do you believe in the actuality of matter?" was John's first question.

Both Tyndall and Huxley made application to the University of Toronto for positions as teachers of science; but Toronto looked askance, as all pioneer people do, at men whose college careers have been mostly confined to giving college absent treatment.

Herbert Spencer avowed again and again that Tyndall was the greatest teacher he ever knew or heard of, inspiring the pupil to discover for himself, to do, to become, rather than imparting prosy facts of doubtful pith and moment. But Herbert Spencer, not being eligible to join a university club himself, was possibly not competent to judge.

Anyway, England was not so finical as Canada, and so she gained what Canada lost.

* * * * *

Tyndall paid a visit to the United States in the year Eighteen Hundred Seventy-two, and lectured in most of the principal cities, and at all the great colleges. He was a most fascinating speaker, fluent, direct, easy, and his whole discourse was well seasoned with humor.

Whenever he spoke, the auditorium was taxed to its utmost, and his reception was very cordial, even in colleges that were considered exceedingly orthodox.

Possibly, some good people who invited him to speak did not know it was loaded; and so his earnest words in praise of Darwin and the doctrine of evolution, occasionally came like unto a rumble of his own artificial thunder. "I speak what I think is truth; but of course, when I express ungracious facts I try to do so in what will be regarded as not a nasty manner," said Tyndall, thus using that pet English word in a rather pleasing way.

In his statement that the prayer of persistent effort is the only prayer that is ever answered, he met with a direct challenge at Oberlin. This gave rise to what, at the time, created quite a dust in the theological road, and evolved "The Tyndall Prayer Test."

Tyndall proposed that one hundred clergymen be delegated to pray for the patients in any certain ward of Bellevue Hospital. If, after a year's trial, there was a marked decrease in mortality in that ward, as compared with previous records, we might then conclude that prayer was efficacious, otherwise not.

One good clergyman in Pittsburgh offered publicly to debate "Darwinism" with Tyndall, but beyond a little scattered shrapnel of this sort, the lecture-tour was a great success. It netted just thirteen thousand dollars, the whole amount of which Tyndall generously donated as a fund to be used for the advancement of natural science in America.

In Eighteen Hundred Eighty-five, this fund had increased to thirty-two thousand dollars, and was divided into three equal parts and presented to Columbia, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. The fund was still further increased by others who followed Professor Tyndall's example, and Columbia, from her share of the Tyndall fund, I am told now supports two foreign scholarships for the benefit of students who show a special aptitude in scientific research. Professor James of Harvard once said: "The impetus to popular scientific study caused by Professor Tyndall's lectures in the United States was most helpful and fortunate. Speaking but for myself, I know I am a different man and a better man, for having heard and known John Tyndall."

* * * * *

When John Tyndall died, in the year Eighteen Hundred Ninety-three, Spencer wrote:

"It never occurred to Tyndall to ask what it was politic to say, but simply to ask what was true. The like has of late years been shown in his utterances concerning political matters—shown, it may be, with too great frankness. This extreme frankness was displayed also in private, and sometimes, perhaps, too much displayed; but every one must have the defects of his qualities. Where absolute sincerity exists, it is certain now and then to cause an expression of a feeling or opinion not adequately restrained.

"But the contrast in genuineness between him and the average citizen was very conspicuous. In a community of Tyndalls (to make a rather wild supposition), there would be none of that flabbiness characterizing current thought and action—no throwing overboard of principles elaborated by painful experience in the past, and adoption of a hand-to-mouth policy unguided by any principle. He was not the kind of man who would have voted for a bill or a clause which he secretly believed would be injurious, out of what is euphemistically called 'party loyalty,' or would have endeavored to bribe each section of the electorate by 'ad captandum' measures, or would have hesitated to protect life and property for fear of losing votes. What he saw right to do he would have done, regardless of proximate consequences.

"The ordinary tests of generosity are very defective. As rightly measured, generosity is great in proportion to the amount of self-denial entailed; and where ample means are possessed, large gifts often entail no self-denial. Far more self-denial may be involved in the performance, on another's behalf, of some act that requires time and labor. In addition to generosity under its ordinary form, which Professor Tyndall displayed in unusual degree, he displayed it under a less common form.

"He was ready to take much trouble to help friends. I have had personal experience of this. Though he had always in hand some investigation of great interest to him, and though, as I have heard him say, when he bent his mind to the subject he could not with any facility break off and resume it again, yet, when I have sought scientific aid, information or critical opinion, I never found the slightest reluctance to give me his undivided attention. Much more markedly, however, was this kind of generosity shown in another direction. Many men, while they are eager for appreciation, manifest little or no appreciation of others, and still less go out of their way to express it.

"With Tyndall it was not thus; he was eager to recognize achievement. Notably in the case of Michael Faraday, and less notably, though still conspicuously in many cases, he has bestowed much labor and sacrificed many weeks in setting forth the merits of others. It was evidently a pleasure to him to dilate on the claims of fellow workers.

"But there was a derivative form of this generosity calling for still greater eulogy. He was not content with expressing appreciation of those whose merits were recognized, but he used energy unsparingly in drawing the attention of the public to those whose merits were unrecognized; time after time in championing the cause of such, he was regardless of the antagonism he aroused and the evil he brought upon himself. This chivalrous defense of the neglected and ill-used has been, I think by few, if any, so often repeated. I have myself more than once benefited by his determination, quite spontaneously shown, that justice should be done in the apportionment of credit; and I have with admiration watched like actions of his in other cases: cases in which no consideration of nationality or of creed interfered in the least with his insistence on equitable distribution of honors.

"In this undertaking to fight for those who were unfairly dealt with, he displayed in another direction that very conspicuous trait which, as displayed in his Alpine feats, has made him to many persons chiefly known: I mean courage, passing very often into daring. And here let me, in closing this little sketch, indicate certain mischiefs which this trait brought upon him. Courage grows by success. The demonstrated ability to deal with dangers produces readiness to meet more dangers, and is self-justifying where the muscular power and the nerve habitually prove adequate. But the resulting habit of mind is apt to influence conduct in other spheres, where muscular power and nerve are of no avail—is apt to cause the daring of dangers which are not to be met by strength of limb or by skill. Nature as externally presented by precipice ice-slopes and crevasses may be dared by one who is adequately endowed; but Nature, as internally represented in the form of physical constitution, may not be thus dared with impunity. Prompted by high motives, John Tyndall tended too much to disregard the protests of his body.

"Over-application in Germany caused absolute sleeplessness, at one time, I think he told me, for more than a week; and this, with kindred transgressions, brought on that insomnia by which his after-life was troubled, and by which his power for work was diminished; for, as I have heard him say, a sound night's sleep was followed by a marked exaltation of faculty.

"And then, in later life, came the daring which, by its results, brought his active career to a close. He conscientiously desired to fulfil an engagement to lecture at the British Institution, and was not deterred by fear of consequences.

"He gave the lecture, notwithstanding the protest which for days before his system had been making. The result was a serious illness, threatening, as he thought at one time, a fatal result; and notwithstanding a year's furlough for the recovery of health, he was eventually obliged to resign his position. But for this defiance of Nature, there might have been many more years of scientific exploration, pleasurable to himself and beneficial to others; and he might have escaped that invalid life which for a long time he had to bear. In his case, however, the penalties of invalid life had great mitigations—mitigations such as fall to the lot of few.

"It is conceivable that the physical discomforts and mental weariness which ill-health brings may be almost, if not quite, compensated by the pleasurable emotions caused by unflagging attentions and sympathetic companionship. If this ever happens, it happened in his case. All who have known the household during these years of nursing are aware of the unmeasured kindness he has received without ceasing. I happen to have had special evidence of this devotion on the one side and gratitude on the other, which I do not think I am called upon to keep to myself, but rather to do the contrary. In a letter I received from him some half-dozen years ago, referring, among other things, to Mrs. Tyndall's self-sacrificing care of him, occurred this sentence: 'She has raised my ideal of the possibilities of human nature.'"



ALFRED R. WALLACE

"Amok" is an innovation which I do not recommend. It consists in letting go when things get too bad, and doing damage with tongue, hands and feet. It is the tantrum carried to its logical conclusion. I saw one instance where a henpecked husband "ran amok" and killed or wounded seventeen people before he himself was killed. It is the national and therefore the honorable mode of committing suicide among the natives of Celebes, and is the fashionable way of escaping from their difficulties. A man can not pay, he is taken for a slave, or has gambled away his wife or child into slavery, he sees no way of recovering what he has lost, and becomes desperate. He will not put up with such cruel wrongs, but will be revenged on mankind and die like a hero. He grasps his knife, and the next moment draws out the weapon and stabs a man to the heart. He runs on with bloody kris in his hand, stabbing every one he meets. "Amok! Amok!" then resounds through the streets. Spears, krises, knives, guns and clubs are brought out against him. He rushes madly forward, kills all he can—men, women and children—and dies, overwhelmed by numbers, amid all the excitement of a battle.

—Alfred Russel Wallace, in "The Malay Archipelago"

ALFRED R. WALLACE

The question of how this world and all the things in it were made, has, so far as we know, always been asked. And volunteers have at no time been slow about coming forward and answering. For this service the volunteer has usually asked for honors and also exemption from toil more or less unpleasant.

He has also demanded the joy of riding in a coach, being carried in a palanquin, and sitting on a throne clothed in purple vestments, trimmed with gold lace or costly furs. Very often the volunteer has also insisted on living in a house larger than he needed, having more food than his system required, and drinking decoctions that are costly, spicy and peculiar.

All of which luxury has been paid for by the people, who are told that which they wish to hear.

The success of the volunteer lies in keeping one large ear close to the turf.

Religious teachers have ever given to their people a cosmogony that was adapted to their understanding.

Who made it? God made it all. In how long a time? Six days. And then followed explanations of what God did each day.

Over against the volunteers with a taste for power and a fine corkscrew discrimination, there have been at rare intervals men with a desire to know for the sake of knowing. They were not content to accept any man's explanation. The only thing that was satisfying to them was the consciousness that they were inwardly right. Loyalty to the God within was the guiding impulse of their lives.

In the past, such men have been regarded as eccentric, unreliable and dangerous, and the volunteers have ever warned their congregations against them.

Indeed, until a very few years ago they were not allowed to express themselves openly. Laws have been passed to suppress them, and dire penalties have been devised for their benefit. Laws against sacrilege, heresy and blasphemy still ornament our statute-books; but these invented crimes that were once punishable by death are now obsolete, or exist in rudimentary forms only, and manifest themselves in a refusal to invite the guilty party to our Four-o'Clock. This hot intent to support and uphold the volunteers in their explanations of how the world was made, is a universal manifestation of the barbaric state, and is based upon the assumption that God is an infinite George the Fourth.

Six hundred years before Christ, Anaximander, the Greek, taught that animal life was engendered from the earth through the influence of moisture and heat, and that life thus generated gradually evolved into higher and different forms: all animals once lived in the water, but some of them becoming stranded on land put forth organs of locomotion and defense, through their supreme resolve to live. Anaximander also taught that man was only a highly developed animal, and his source of life was the same as that of all other animals; man's present high degree of development having gradually come about through growth from very lowly forms.

Anaxagoras, the schoolmaster of Pericles, also made similar statements, and then we find him boldly putting forth the very startling idea that between the highest type of Greek and the lowest type of savage there was a greater difference than between the savage and the ape. He also taught that the earth was the universal mother of all living things, animal and vegetable, and that the fecundation of the earth took place from minute, unseen germs that floated in the air.

According to modern science, Anaxagoras was very close upon the trail of truth. But there were only a very few who could follow him, and it took the combined eloquence and tact of Pericles to keep his splendid head in the place where Nature put it, and Pericles himself was compromised by his leaning toward "Darwinism."

Every man who speaks, expresses himself for others. We succeed only as our thought is echoed back to us by others who think the same. If you like what I say it is only because it is already yours. Moreover, thought is a collaboration, and is born of parents. If a teacher does not get a sympathetic hearing, one of two things happens: he loses the thread of his thought and grows apathetic, or he arouses an opposition that snuffs out his life.

And the dead they soon grow cold.

The recipe for popularity is to hunt out a weakness of humanity and then bank on it. No one knows this better than your theological volunteer. Aristotle, the father of natural history, who early in life had a Pegasus killed under him, taught that the diversity in animal life was caused by a diversity of conditions and environment, and he declared he could change the nature of animals by changing their surroundings. This being true he argued that all animals were once different from what they are now, and that if we could live long enough, we would see that species are exceedingly variable.

To explain to child-minds that a Supreme Being made things outright just as they are, is easy; but to study and in degree know how things evolved, requires infinite patience and great labor. It also means small sympathy from the indifferent whom the earth has spawned in swarms, and the hatred of the volunteers who ride in coaches, and tell the many what they wish to hear.

The volunteers drove Aristotle into exile, and from his time they had their way for two thousand years, when John Ray, Linnaeus and Buffon appeared.

In Seventeen Hundred Fifty-five, Immanuel Kant, the little man who stayed near home and watched the stars tumble into his net, put forth his theory that every animal organism in the world was developed from a common original germ.

In Seventeen Hundred Ninety-four, Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, inspired by Kant and Goethe, put forth his book, "Zoonomia," wherein he maintained the gradual growth and evolution of all organisms from minute, unseen germs. These views were put forth more as a poetic hypothesis than as a well-grounded scientific fact, so little attention was paid to Erasmus Darwin's books. The fanciful accounts of Creation put forth by Moses three thousand years before were firmly maintained by the entrenched volunteers and their millions of devotees and followers.

But Kant, Goethe, Karl von Baer and August de Sainte-Hilaire were now planting their outposts throughout the civilized world, honeycombing Christendom with doubt.

In the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-two, Herbert Spencer had argued in public and in pamphlets that species have undergone changes and modifications through change of surroundings, and that the account of Noah and his ark, with pairs of everything that flew, crept or ran, was fanciful and absurd, so far as we cared to distinguish fact from fiction.

Early in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-eight, Charles Darwin received from his friend, Alfred Russel Wallace, a paper entitled, "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type." At this time Darwin had in the hands of the secretary of the Linnaeus Society a paper entitled, "On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties, or the Perpetuation of Species and Varieties by Means of Natural Selection."

The similarity in title, as well as the similarity in treatment of the Wallace theme, startled Darwin. He had been working on the idea for twenty years, and had an immense mass of data bearing on the subject, which he some day intended to issue in book form.

His paper for the Linnaeus Society simply summed up his convictions. And now here was a man with whom he had never discussed this particular subject, writing an almost identical paper and sending it to him—of all men!

Well did he pinch his leg, and call in his wife, asking her if he were alive or dead. Straightway he went to see Sir Charles Lyell and Sir Joseph Hooker, both more eminent than he in the scientific world, and laid the matter before them. After a long conference it was decided that both papers should be read the same evening before the Linnaeus Society, and this was done on the evening of July First, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-eight.

Darwin then decided to publish his "Origin of Species," which in his preface he modestly calls an "Abstract." The publication was hastened by the fact that Wallace was compiling a similar work. After giving Wallace full credit in his most interesting "Introduction," and reviewing all that others had said in coming to similar conclusions, Darwin fired his shot heard round the world. And no man was more delighted and pleased with the echoing reverberations than Alfred Russel Wallace, as he read the book in far-off Australia.

The honor of discovering the Law of Evolution, and lifting it out of the hazy realms of hypothesis and poetry into the sunlight of science, will ever be shared between Charles Robert Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who were indeed brothers in spirit and lovers to the end of their days.

* * * * *

In an insignificant village of England, now famous alone because he began from there his explorations of the world, Alfred Russel Wallace was born, in the year Eighteen Hundred Twenty-two. He was one of a large family of the middle class, where work is as natural as life, and the indispensable virtues are followed as a means of self-preservation. It is most unfortunate to attain such a degree of success that you think you can waive the decalogue and give Nemesis the slip.

About the year Eighteen Hundred Forty, the railroad renaissance was on in England, and young Wallace, alive, alert, active, did his turn as apprentice to a surveyor.

Chance is a better schoolmaster than design. All boys have a taste for tent life, and healthy youngsters not quite grown, with ostrich digestions, passing through the nomadic stage, revel in hardships and count it a joy to sleep on the ground where they can look up at the stars, and eat out of a skillet.

A little later we find Alfred working for his elder brother in an architect's office, gazing abstractedly out of the window betimes, and wishing he were a ground-squirrel, fancy free on the heath and amid the heather, digging holes, thus avoiding introspection. "Houses are prisons," he said, and sang softly to himself the song of the open road.

I think I know exactly how Alfred Russel Wallace then felt, from the touchstone of my own experience; and I think I know how he looked, too, all confirmed by an East Aurora incident.

Some years ago, one fine day in May, I was helping excavate for the foundation of a new barn. All at once I felt that some one was standing behind me looking at me. I turned around and there was a tall, lithe, slender youth in a faded college cap, blue flannel shirt, ragged trousers and top-boots. My first impression of him was that he was a fellow who slept in his clothes, a plain "Weary," but when he spoke there was a note of self-reliance in his low, well-modulated voice that told me he was no mendicant. Voice is the true index of character.

"My name is Wallace, and I have a note to you from my father," and he began diving into pockets, and finally produced a ragged letter that was nearly worn out through long contact with a perspiring human form divine—or partially so. I seldom make haste about reading letters of introduction, and so I greeted the young man with a word of welcome, and gave him a chance to say something for himself.

He was English, that was very sure—and Oxford English at that. "You see," he began, "I am working just now over on the Hamburg and Buffalo Electric Line, stringing wires. I get three dollars a day because I'm a fairly good climber. I wanted to learn the business, so I just hired out as a laborer, and they gave me the hardest job, thinking to scare me out, but that was what I wanted," and he smiled modestly and showed a set of incisors as fine and strong as a dog's teeth. "I want to remain with you for a week and pay for my board in work," he cautiously continued.

"But about your father, Mr. Wallace—do I know him?"

"I think so; he has written you several letters—Alfred Russel Wallace!"

You could have knocked me down with a lady's-slipper. I opened the letter and unmistakably it was from the great scientist, "introducing my baby boy."

I never met Alfred Russel Wallace, but I know if I should, I would find him very gentle, kindly and simple in all his ways—as really great men ever are. He would not talk to me in Latin nor throw off technical phrases about great nothings, and I would feel just as much at home with him as I did with Ol' John Burroughs the last time I saw him, leaning up against a country railroad-station in shirt-sleeves, chewing a straw, exchanging salutes with the engineer on a West Shore jerkwater. "S' long, John!" called the going one as he leaned out of the cab-window. "S' long, Bill, and good luck to you," was the cheery answer.

But still, all of us have moments when we think of the world's most famous ones as being surely eight feet tall, and having voices like fog-horns.

"I can do most any kind of hard work, you know"—I was aroused from my little mental excursion, and noticed that my visitor had hair of a light yellow like a Swede from Hennepin County, Minnesota, and that his hair was three shades lighter than his bronzed face. "I can do any kind of work, you know, and if you will just loan me that pick"—and I handed him the pickax.

Young Wallace remained with us for a week, asking for nothing, doing everything, even to helping the girls wash dishes. That he was the son of a great man, no one would have ever learned from his own lips. In fact, I am not sure that he was impressed with his father's excellence, but I saw there was a tender bond between them, for he haunted the post-office, morning, noon and night, looking for a letter from his father. When it came he was as happy as a woodchuck. He showed me the letter: it was nine finely written pages.

But to my disappointment not a word about marsupials, siamangs or Syndactylae: just news about John, William, Mary and Benjamin; with references to chickens and cows, and a new greenhouse, with a little good advice about keeping right hours and not overeating.

The young man had spent three years at Oxford, and was an electrical engineer. He was intent on finding out just as much about the secrets of American railroad construction as he possibly could. As for intellect, I did not discover any vast amount; perhaps, for that matter, he didn't either. But we all greatly enjoyed his visit, and when he went away I presented him with a clean, secondhand flannel shirt and my blessing.

* * * * *

From the appearance of the young man I imagine that Alfred Russel Wallace at twenty-one was very much such a man as his son, who did such good work at the Roycroft with pick and shovel. Alfred was earnest, intent, strong, and had a deal of quiet courage that he was as unconscious of as he was of his digestion.

He taught school, and to interest his scholars he would take them on botanical excursions. Then he himself grew interested, and began to collect plants, bugs, beetles and birds on his own account.

By Eighteen Hundred Forty-eight, the confining walls of the school had become intolerable to Wallace, and he started away on a wild-goose chase to Brazil, with a chum by the name of Henry Walter Bates, an ardent entomologist. Alfred had no money either, but Bates had influence, and he cashed it in by arranging with the Curator of the British Museum, that any natural-history specimens of value which they might gather and send to him would be paid for. And so something like a hundred pounds was collected from several scientific men, and handed over as advance payment for the wonderful things that the young men were to send back.

They embarked on a sailing-vessel that was captained by a kind kinsman of Bates, so the fare was nil, in consideration of services rendered constructively.

Arriving in Brazil the young men began their collecting of specimens. They got together a very creditable collection of birds' eggs and sent them back by the captain of the ship they came out on, this as an earnest of what was to come.

Bates and Wallace were together for a year. Bates insisted on remaining near the white settlements; but Wallace wanted to go where white men had never been. So alone he went into the forests, and for two years lived with the natives and dared the dangers of jungle-fever, snakes, crocodiles and savages. For a space of ten months he did not see a single white person.

He collected nearly ten thousand specimens of birds, which he skinned and carefully prepared so they could be mounted when he returned to England; there was also a nearly complete Brazilian herbarium, and a finer collection of birds' eggs than any museum of England could boast.

This collection represented over three years' continuous toil. All the curious things were packed with great care and placed on board ship.

And so the young naturalist sailed away for England, proud and happy, with his great collection of entomological, botanical and ornithological specimens.

But on the way the ship took fire, and the collection was either burned or ruined by soaking salt water.

That the crew and their sole passenger escaped alive was a wonder. Wallace on reaching England was in a sorry plight, being destitute of clothes and funds.

And there were unkind ones who did not hesitate to hint that he had only been over to Ireland working in a peat-bog, and that his knowledge of Brazil was gotten out of Humboldt's books.

In one way, Wallace surely paralleled Humboldt: both lost a most valuable collection of natural-history specimens by shipwreck.

Several of the good men who had advanced money now asked that it be paid. Wallace set to work writing out his recollections, the only asset that he possessed.

His book, "Travel on the Amazon and Rio Negro," had enough romance in it so that it floated. Royalties paid over in crisp Bank of England notes made things look brighter. Another book was issued, called, "Palm-Trees and Their Uses," and proved that the author was able to view a subject from every side, and say all that was to be said about it. "Wallace on the Palm" is still a textbook.

The debts were paid, and Alfred Russel Wallace at thirty was square with the world, the possessor of much valuable experience. He also had five hundred pounds in cash, with a reputation as a writer and traveler that no longer caused bookworms to sneeze.

Having paid off his obligations, he felt free again to leave England, a thing he had vowed he would not do, so long as his reputation was under a cloud. This time he selected for a natural-history survey a section of the world really less known than South America.

* * * * *

Early in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four, Alfred Russel Wallace reached Asia. He had decided that he would make the first and the best collection of the flora and fauna of the Malay Archipelago that it was possible to make.

White men had skirted the coast of many of the islands, but information as to what there was inland was mostly conjecture and guesswork.

Just how long it would take Wallace to make his Malaysian natural-history survey he did not know, but in a letter to Darwin he stated that he expected to be absent from England at least two years. He was gone eight years, and during this time, walked, paddled or rode horseback fifteen thousand miles, and visited many islands never before trod by the foot of a white man.

The city of Singapore served him as a base or headquarters, because from there he could catch trading-ships that plied among the islands of the Archipelago; and to Singapore he could also ship and there store his specimens. From Singapore he made sixty separate voyages of discovery. In all he sent home over one hundred twenty-five thousand natural-history specimens, including about ten thousand birds, which, later on, were all stuffed and mounted under his skilful direction.

On returning to England, Wallace took six years in preparation of his book, "The Malay Archipelago," a most stupendous literary undertaking, which covers the subjects of botany, geology, ornithology, entomology, zoology and anthropology, in a way that serves as a regular mine of information and suggestion for natural-history workers.

The book in its original form, I believe, sold for ten pounds (fifty dollars), and was issued to subscribers in parts. It was bought, not only by students, but by a great number of general readers, there being enough adventure mixed up in the science to spice what otherwise might be rather dry reading. For instance, there is a chapter about killing orang-utans that must have served my old friend, Paul du Chaillu, as excellent raw stock in compiling his own recollections.

Wallace states that the only foe for which the orang really has a hatred is the crocodile. It seems to share with man a shuddering fear of snakes, although orangs have no part in making Kentucky famous. But the crocodile is his natural and hereditary enemy. And as if to get even with this ancient foe, who occasionally snaps off a young orang in his prime, the orangs will often locate a big crocodile, and jumping on his back beat him with clubs; and when he opens his gigantic mouth, the female orangs will fill the cavity with sticks and stones, and keep up the fight until the crocodile succumbs and quits this vale of crocodile tears.

The orang is distinct and different from the chimpanzee and gorilla, which are found only in Western Africa.

In Borneo, the "man-ape" is quite numerous. This is the animal that has given rise to all those tales about "the wild man of Borneo," which that good man, P. T. Barnum, kept alive by exhibiting a fine specimen. Barnum's original "wild man" lived at Waltham, Massachusetts, and belonged to the Baptist Church. He recently died worth a hundred thousand dollars, which money he left to found a school for young ladies.

The orang, or mias, hides in the swampy jungles, and very rarely comes to the ground. The natives regard them as a sort of sacred object, and have a great horror of killing them. Indeed, a person who kills a man-ape, they regard as a murderer; and so when Wallace announced to his attendants that he wanted to secure several specimens of these "wild men of the woods," they cried, "Alas! he is making a collection: it will be our turn next!" And they fled in terror.

Wallace then hired another set of servants and resolved to make no confidants, but just go ahead and find his game.

He had hunted for weeks through forest and jungle, but never a glimpse or sight of the man-ape! He had almost given up the search, and concluded with several English scientists that this orang-utan was a part of that great fabric of pseudo-science invented by imaginative sailormen, who took most of their inland little journeys around the capstan. And so musing, seated in the doorway of his bamboo house, he looked out upon the forest, and there only a few yards away, swinging from tree to tree, was a man-ape. It seemed to him to be about five times as large as a man.

He seized his gun and approached; the beast stopped, glared, and railed at him in a voice of wrath. It broke off branches and threw sticks at him.

Wallace thought of the offer made him by the South Kensington Museum: "One hundred pounds in gold for an adult male, skin and skeleton to be properly preserved and mounted; seventy-five pounds for a female."

The huge animal showed its teeth, cast one glance of scornful contempt on the puny explorer, and started on, swinging thirty feet at a stretch and catching hold of the limbs with its two pairs of hands.

Wallace grasped his gun and followed, lured by the demoniac shape. A little of the superstition of the natives had gotten into his veins: he dare not kill the thing unless it came toward him, and he had to shoot it in self-defense.

It traveled in the trees about as fast as he could on the ground. Occasionally it would stop and chatter at him, throwing sticks in a most human way, as if to order him back.

Finally, the instincts of the naturalist got the better of the man, and he shot the animal. It came tumbling to the ground with a terrific crash, grasping at the vines and leaves as it fell.

It was quite dead, but Wallace approached it with great caution. It proved to be a female, of moderate size, in height about three and a half feet, six feet across from finger to finger. Needless to say that Wallace had to do the skinning and the mounting of the skeleton alone. His servants had chills of fear if asked to approach it. The skeleton of this particular orang can now be seen in the Derby Museum.

In a few hours after killing his first orang, Wallace heard a peculiar crying in the forest, and on search found a young one, evidently the baby of the one he had killed. The baby did not show any fear at all, evidently thinking it was with one of its kind, for it clung to him piteously, with an almost human tenderness.

Says Wallace:

"When handled or nursed it was very quiet and contented, but when laid down by itself would invariably cry; and for the first few nights was very restless and noisy. I soon found it necessary to wash the little mias as well. After I had done so a few times it came to like the operation, and after rolling in the mud would begin crying, and continue until I took it out and carried it to the spout, when it immediately became quiet, although it would wince a little at the first rush of the cold water, and make ridiculously wry faces while the stream was running over its head. It enjoyed the wiping and rubbing dry amazingly, and when I brushed its hair seemed to be perfectly happy, lying quite still with its arms and legs stretched out. It was a never-failing amusement to observe the curious changes of countenance by which it would express its approval or dislike of what was given to it. The poor little thing would lick its lips, draw in its cheeks, and turn up its eyes with an expression of the most supreme satisfaction, when it had a mouthful particularly to its taste. On the other hand, when its food was not sufficiently sweet or palatable, it would turn the mouthful about with its tongue for a moment, as if trying to extract what flavor there was, and then push it all out between its lips. If the same food was continued, it would proceed to scream and kick about violently, exactly like a baby in a passion.

"When I had had it about a month it began to exhibit some signs of learning to run alone. When laid upon the floor it would push itself along by its legs, or roll itself over, and thus make an unwieldy progression. When lying in the box it would lift itself up to the edge in an almost erect position, and once or twice succeeded in tumbling out. When left dirty or hungry, or otherwise neglected, it would scream violently till attended to, varied by a kind of coughing noise, very similar to that which is made by the adult animal.

"If no one was in the house, or its cries were not attended to, it would be quiet after a little while; but the moment it heard a footstep would begin again, harder than ever. It was very human."

* * * * *

The most lasting result of the wanderings of Alfred Russel Wallace consists in his having established what is known to us as "The Wallace Line." This line is a boundary that divides in a geographical way that portion of Malaysia which belongs to the continent of Asia from that which belongs to the continent of Australia.

The Wallace Line covers a distance of more than four thousand miles, and in this expanse there are three islands in which Great Britain could be set down without anywhere touching the sea.