Leif Ericson, the long-forgotten Scandinavian discoverer of North
America, nearly five hundred years before Columbus, has at last
received American justice, and a statue in his honor has been erected,
which was unveiled in Boston, on Commonwealth Avenue, before a
distinguished assemblage, on the 29th of October.
The history of the Scandinavian discovery and settlement was related
on this occasion by Prof. E. Horsford, from whose address the
following passages are extracted:
"What is the great fact that is sustained by such an array of
authority? It is this: that somewhere to the southwest of
Greenland, at least a fortnight's sail, there were, for 300
years after the beginning of the 11th century, Norse colonies on
the coast of America, with which colonies the home country
maintained commercial intercourse. The country to which the
merchant vessels sailed was Vinland.
"The fact next in importance that this history establishes is,
that the first of the Northmen to set foot on the shores of
Vinland was Leif Ericson. The story is a simple one, and most
happily told by Prof. Mitchell, who for forty years was
connected with the coast survey of the United States in the
latitudes which include the region between Hatteras and Cape
Ann. Leif, says Prof. Mitchell, never passed to the south of the
peninsula of Cape Cod. He was succeeded by Thorwald, Leif's
brother. He came in Leif's ship in 1002 to Leif's headquarters
in Massachusetts Bay and passed the winter. In the spring, he
manned his ship and sailed eastward from Leif's house, and,
unluckily running against a neck of land, broke the stem of the
ship. He grounded the ship in high water at a place where the
tide receded with the ebb to a great distance, and permitted the
men to careen her in the intervals of the tide, to repair her.
When she was ready to sail again, the old stem or nose of the
ship was set up in the sand. Thorwald remained a couple of years
in the neighboring bay, examining sandy shores and islands, but
not going around the point on or near which he had set up his
ship's nose. In a battle with the Indians he was wounded and
died, and was buried in Vinland, and his crew returned to
Greenland. A few years later, Thorfinn and his wife, Gudrid, set
out with a fleet of three ships and 160 persons, of whom seven
were women, to go to Vinland, and in two days' sail beyond
Markland they came to the ship's nose set upon the shore, and,
keeping that upon the starboard, they sailed along a sandy
shore, which they called Wunderstrandir, and also
Furderstrandir. One of the captains, evidently satisfied that
they were not in the region visited by Leif and Thorwald, turned
his vessel to the north to find Vinland. Thorfinn and Gudrid
went further south and trafficked, and gathered great wealth of
furs and woods, and then returned to Greenland and Norway."
Prof. Horsford refers next to various geographic names on the New
England coast which are of Scandinavian origin.
"What do all these names mean? They are certainly not Algonquin
or Iroquois names. They are not names bestowed by the Plymouth
or Massachusetts Bay colonies. Of most of them is there any
conceivable source other than the memories lingering among a
people whose ancestors were familiar with them? Are they, for
the most part, relics of names imposed by Northmen once residing
here?
"I have told you something of the evidence that Leif Ericson was
the first European to tread the great land southwest of
Greenland. His ancestry was of the early Pilgrims, or Puritans,
who, to escape oppression, emigrated, 50,000 of them in sixty
years, from Norway to Iceland, as the early Pilgrims came to
Plymouth. They established and maintained a republican form of
government, which exists to this day, with nominal sovereignty
in the King of Denmark, and the flag, like our own, bears an
eagle in its fold. Toward the close of the 10th century a
colony, of whom Leif's father and family were members, went out
from Iceland to Greenland. In about 999, Leif, a lad at the time
of his father's immigration, went to Norway, and King Olaf,
impressed with his grand elements of character, gave him a
commission to carry the Christianity to which, he had become a
convert to Greenland. He set out at once, and, with his soul on
fire with the grandeur of his message, within a year
accomplished the conversion and baptism of the whole colony,
including his father.
"To Leif a monument has been erected. In thus fulfilling the
duty we owe to the first European navigator who trod our shores,
we do no injustice to the mighty achievement of the Genoese
discoverer under the flags of Ferdinand and Isabella, who,
inspired by the idea of the rotundity of the earth, and with the
certainty of reaching Asia by sailing westward sufficiently
long, set out on a new and entirely distinct enterprise, having
a daring and a conception and an intellectual train of research
and deduction as its foundation quite his own. How welcome to
Boston will be the proposition to set up in 1892, a fit statue
to Columbus.
"We unveil to-day the statue in which Anne Whitney has expressed
so vividly her conception of this leader, who, almost nine
centuries ago, first trod our shores."
The statue, however, is purely fanciful, and gives no idea either of
the personal appearance or costume of the great sailor, who has waited
for this justice to his memory much longer than Bruno and many other
heroes of human progress.
Columbus may have been original in his ideas, but it was the Northmen
who led in exploration. It was they who changed the old flat-bottomed
ships of the Roman Empire to the deep keels which made the exploration
of the Atlantic ocean possible.
This act of justice has been prompted by the appreciative sentiments
of the late Ole Bull, and the efforts of Miss Marie Brown, who has
lectured on the subject. Miss Brown says that Columbus learned of the
discovery of America at Rome, and also at Iceland, which he visited in
1477. Indeed, Columbus was not seeking the America of the Norsemen,
but was sailing to find the Indies.
But now that historic justice is done, we realize that as Bryant
expressed it of Truth, "the eternal years of God are hers," and she
needs a good many centuries to recover her stolen sceptre. The triumph
of truth follows battles in which there are many defeats that seem
almost fatal. What is the loss of five centuries in geographic truth
to the loss of a thousand years in astronomic science? It was for more
than a thousand years that the heliocentric theory of the universe,
developed by the genius of PYTHAGORAS, was ignored, denied, and
forgotten, until the honest scholar, COPERNICUS, revived it by a
mathematical demonstration, which he did not live long enough to see
trampled on; for the great astronomer that next appeared, Tycho Brahe,
denied it, and the Catholic Church attempted to suppress it in the
person of Galileo, who is said to have been forced by imprisonment and
torture to succumb to authority (the torture may not be positively
known, but is believed with good reason). Even Luther joined in the
theological warfare against science, saying, "I am now advised that a
new astrologer is risen, who presumeth to prove that the earth moveth
and goeth about, not the firmament, the sun and moon--not the
stars--like as when one sitteth on a coach, or in a ship that is
moved, thinketh he sitteth still and resteth, but the earth and trees
do move and run themselves. Thus it goeth; we give ourselves up to our
own foolish fancies and conceits. This fool (Copernicus) will turn the
whole art of astronomy upside down; but the Scripture showeth and
teacheth another lesson, when Joshua commandeth the sun to stand
still, and not the earth."
The attitude of Luther in this matter was the attitude of the Church
generally, in opposition to science, for it assumed its position in an
age of dense ignorance, and claimed too much infallibility to admit of
enlightenment. Nevertheless, the Church feels the spirit of the age
and slowly moves. At the present time it is being _slowly_ permeated
by the modern spirit of agnostic scepticism, which is another form of
ignorance.
Mankind generally occupy the intrenched camp of ignorance within which
they know all its walls embrace; outside of which they look upon all
that exists with feelings of suspicion and hostility, and alas, this
is as true of the educated as of the uneducated classes. It was the
French Academy that laughed at Harvey's discovery and at Fulton's plan
of propelling steamboats, and even at Arago's suggestion of the
electric telegraph, as the Royal Society laughed at Franklin's
proposed lightning rods. It was Bonaparte who treated both Fulton and
Dr. Gall with contempt. It was the medical Faculty that arrayed itself
against the introduction of Peruvian bark, which they have since made
their hobby; and it was the same Edinburgh Review which poured its
ridicule upon Gall, that advised the public to put Thomas Gray in a
straight-jacket for advocating the introduction of railroads. Equally
great was the stupidity of the French. The first railroad was
constructed in France fifty years ago. Emil Periere had to make the
line at his own expense, and it took three years to obtain the consent
of the authorities. Their leading statesman, Thiers, contended that
railroads could be nothing more than toys. We remember that a
committee of the New York Legislature was equally stupid, and
endeavored to prove in their report that railways were entirely
impracticable. English opposition was still more stupidly absurd. Both
Lords and Commons in Parliament were entirely opposed. "The engineers
and surveyors as they went about their work were molested by mobs.
George Stephenson was ridiculed and denounced as a maniac, and all
those who supported him as lunatics and fools." "George Stephenson
although bantered and wearied on all sides stood steadfastly by his
project, in spite of the declarations that the smoke from the engine
would kill the birds and destroy the cattle along the route, that the
fields would be ruined, and people be driven mad by noise and
excitement."
Nothing is better established in history than the hostility of
colleges and the professional classes to all great innovations. "Truly
(says Dr. Stille in his Materia Medica) nearly every medicine has
become a popular remedy before being adopted or even tried by
physicians," and the famous author Dr. Pereira declares that "nux
vomica is one of the few remedies the discovery of which is not the
effect of mere chance."
The spirit of bigotry, in former times, jealously watched every
innovation. Telescopes and microscopes were denounced as atheistic,
winnowing machines were denounced in Scotland as impious, and even
forks when first introduced were denounced by preachers as "an insult
on Providence not to eat our meat with our fingers."
It is not strange that the last fifty years have sufficed to cover
with a cloud of collegiate ignorance and bigotry the discoveries of
the illustrious Gall, for whom I am doing a similar service, to that
of Copernicus for Pythagoras.
This is nothing unusual in the progress of Science. There was no
brighter genius in physical science at the beginning of this century
than Dr. Thomas Young, who died in 1829, whose discoveries fell into
obscurity until they were revived by more recent investigation. He had
that intuitive genius which is most rare among scientists.
He was a great thinker and discoverer, who knew how to utilize in
philosophy discovered facts, and was not busy like many modern
scientists in the monotonous repetition of experiments which had
already been performed.
"At no period of his life was he fond of repeating experiments
or even of originating new ones. He considered that however
necessary to the advancement of science, they demanded a great
sacrifice of time, and that when a fact was once established,
time was better employed in considering the purposes to which it
might be applied, or the principles which it might tend to
elucidate."
He says, in his Bakerian lecture, "Nor is it absolutely necessary in
this instance to produce a single new experiment; for of experiments
there is already an ample store."
In a letter to his sister-in-law, Mrs. Earle, he says, "Acute
suggestion was then, and indeed always, more in the line of my
ambition than experimental illustration," and on another occasion,
referring to the Wollaston fund for experimental inquiries, he said,
"For my part, it is my pride and pleasure, as far as I am able, to
supersede the necessity of experiments, and more especially of
expensive ones." The famous Prof. Helmholtz said of Young:
"The theory of colors with all their marvellous and complicated
relations, was a riddle which Goethe in vain attempted to solve,
nor were we physicists and physiologists more successful. I
include myself in the number, for I long toiled at the task
without getting any nearer my object, until I at last discovered
that a wonderfully simple solution had been discovered at the
beginning of this century, and had been in print ever since for
any one to read who chose. This solution was found and published
by the same Thomas Young, who first showed the right method of
arriving at the interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphics."
"He was one of the most acute men who ever lived, but had the
misfortune to be _too far in advance of his contemporaries_.
They looked on him with astonishment, but could not follow his
bold speculations, and thus a mass of his most important
thoughts remained buried and forgotten in the 'Transactions of
the Royal Society,' until a later generation by slow degrees
arrived at the re-discovery of his discoveries, and came to
appreciate the force of his argument and the accuracy of his
conclusions."
This half century of passive resistance to science, in the case of Dr.
Young and Dr. Gall, is nothing unusual. It was 286 years from the day
when Bruno, the eloquent philosopher, was burned at the stake by the
Catholic Church, before a statue was prepared to honor his memory in
Italy.
What was the reception of the illustrious surgeon, physiologist, and
physician, John Hunter? While he lived, "most of his contemporaries
looked upon him as little better than an enthusiast and an innovator,"
according to his biographer; and when, in 1859, it was decided to
inter his remains in Westminster Abbey, it was hard to find his body,
which was at last discovered in a vault along with 2000 others piled
upon it.
Harvey's discoveries were generally ignored during his life, and
Meibomius of Lubeck rejected his discovery in a book published after
Harvey's death.
When Newton's investigations of light and colors were first published,
"A host of enemies appeared (says Playfair), each eager to obtain the
unfortunate pre-eminence of being the first to attack conclusions
which the unanimous voice of posterity was to confirm." Some, like
Mariotte, professed to repeat his experiments, and succeeded in making
a failure, which was published; like certain professors who at
different times have undertaken to make unsuccessful experiments in
mesmerism and spiritualism, and have always succeeded in making the
failure they desired.
Voltaire remarks, and Playfair confirms it as a fact, "that though the
author of the _Principia_ survived the publication of that great work
nearly forty years, he had not at the time of his death, twenty
followers out of England."
If educated bigotry could thus resist the mathematical demonstrations
of Newton, and the physical demonstrations of Harvey, has human nature
sufficiently advanced to induce us to expect much better results from
the colleges of to-day--from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest?
If such a change has occurred, I have not discovered it.
Neglect and opposition has ever been the lot of the original explorer
of nature. Kepler, the greatest astronomical genius of his time,
continually struggled with poverty, and earned a scanty subsistence by
casting astrological nativities.
Eustachius, who in the 16th century discovered the Eustachian tube and
the valves of the heart, was about 200 years in advance of his time,
but was unable, from poverty, to publish his anatomical tables, which
were published by Lancisi 140 years later, in 1714.
Not only in science do we find this stolid indifference or active
hostility to new ideas, but in matters of the simplest character and
most obvious utility. For example, this country is now enjoying the
benefits of fish culture, but why did we not enjoy it a hundred years
ago? The process was discovered by the Count De Goldstein in the last
century, and was published by the Academy of Sciences, and also fully
illustrated by a German named Jacobi, who applied it to breeding trout
and salmon. This seems to have been forgotten until in 1842 two
obscure and illiterate fishermen rediscovered and practised this
process. The French government was attracted by the success of these
fisherman, Gehin and Remy, and thus the lost art was revived.
Even so simple an invention as the percussion cap, invented in 1807,
was not introduced in the British army until after the lapse of thirty
years.
The founder of the kindergarten system, Friedrich FROEBEL, is one of
the benefactors of humanity. How narrowly did he escape from total
failure and oblivion.
The "Reminiscences of Frederich Froebel," translated from the German
of the late Mrs. Mary Mann, gives an interesting account of his life
and labors, upon which the following notice is based:
"Froebel died in 1852, and it is possible that his system of
education would have died with him--to be resurrected and
reapplied by somebody else centuries later--only for a friend
and interpreter who remained to give his teachings to the world.
This friend, disciple, and interpreter was Madame Von Marenholz.
His system of education had this peculiarity which made it
different from any other plan of teaching ever given to the
world--it was first grasped in its full significance by women.
They, sooner than men, saw its truth to nature, and its grand,
far-reaching meaning, and became at once its enthusiastic
disciples. But the German women are in a bondage almost unknown
to their sisters of the other civilized races, therefore
Froebel's reform progressed only slowly. Had his principles been
given to the world in the midst of American or English women,
they would most likely have been popularly known and adopted
long ago.
"Froebel did not see any very magnificent practical results flow
from the "new education" in his time. While he lived the
ungrateful tribe of humanity abused, misrepresented, and laughed
him to scorn, as it has done everybody who ever conferred any
great and lasting benefit on it. A touching illustration of this
is given in the anecdote narrating Frau Von Marenholz's first
meeting with the founder of kindergartens. The anecdote begins
the book, and it is the key-note of the sorrowful undertone
throughout.
"In 1849 Frau Von Marenholz went to the baths of Liebenstein.
She happened to ask her landlady what was going on in the place,
and in answer the landlady said that a few weeks before a man
had settled down near the springs who danced and played with the
village children, and was called by people "the old fool." A few
days afterwards Madame Von M. was walking out, and met "the old
fool." He was an old man, with long gray hair, who was marching
a troop of village children two and two up a hill. He was
teaching them a play, and was singing with them a song belonging
to it. There was something about the gray-haired old man, as he
played with the children, which brought tears into the eyes of
both Madame Von M. and her companion. She watched him awhile,
and said to her companion:
"'This man is called 'old fool' by these people. Perhaps he is
one of those men who are ridiculed or stoned by contemporaries,
and to whom future generations build monuments.'"
"I knew," says Madame Von M., "that I had to do with a true
man--with an original and unfalsified nature. When one of his
pupils called him Mr. Froebel, I remembered having once heard of
a man of that name who wished to educate children by play, and
that it had seemed to me a very perverted view, for I had only
thought of empty play, without any serious purpose."
"Froebel met with violent opposition and ridicule all his life,
and just when at last he thought he had successfully planted his
ideas, there came a sudden death-blow to his hopes, which was
also a death-blow to the good and great man. The Prussian
Government was and is as tyrannical as William the Conqueror,
who made the English people put their lights out at dark, and
suddenly, in August, 1851, the Prussian Government immortalized
itself by passing a decree forbidding the establishment of any
kindergartens within the Prussian dominions. In unguarded
moments, Froebel had used the expression "education for
freedom," in referring to his beloved plans, and that was enough
for Prussia, in the ferment of fear in which she has been ever
since 1848. Kindergartens in Germany have not yet recovered from
this blow, and Froebel himself sunk under it and died. But a
little time before he died, he said: "If 300 years after my
death, my method of education shall be completely established
according to its idea, I shall rejoice in heaven."
"Froebel's life was full of strange vicissitudes and
disappointments. The few friends who understood him, and the
children whom he taught, and who, perhaps, understood him better
than anybody else, reverenced him, and loved him as father,
prophet, and teacher.
"On his seventieth birthday, two months before his death, his
beloved pupils gave him a festival, which is beautiful to read
about. It must have gladdened the pure-hearted old man
immeasurably. Froebel was wakened at sun-rise by the festal song
of the children, and as he stepped out of his chamber to the
lecture-room, he saw that it had been splendidly adorned with
flowers, festoons, and wreaths of all kinds. The day was
celebrated with songs and rejoicing, and gifts were received
from pupils and friends in various parts of the world, and in
the evening, after a song, a pupil placed a green wreath upon
the master's head.
"Two months after this he died peacefully. One of his strongest
peculiarities was his passionate love for flowers, and during
his illness he repeatedly commended the care of his flowers to
his friends. He had the window opened frequently, so he could
gaze once more on the out-door scenes he loved so well. Almost
his last words were: 'Nature, pure, vigorous Nature!'"
JOHN FITCH, the inventor of steamboats, was even less fortunate than
Froebel. No patron took him by the hand, and although his invention
was successfully demonstrated at Philadelphia in 1787, by a small
steamboat, the trial being witnessed by the members of the convention
that formed the Federal constitution, he could not obtain sufficient
co-operation to introduce the invention, and finally left his boat to
rot on the shores of the Hudson and returned to his home at Bardstown,
Ky., where he died in 1798. The unsuccessful struggles of Fitch make a
melancholy history. In his last appeal he used this language: "But why
those earnest solicitations to disturb my nightly repose, and fill me
with the most excruciating anxieties; and why not act the part for
myself, and retire under the shady elms on the fair banks of the Ohio,
and eat my coarse but sweet bread of industry and content, and when I
have done, to have my body laid in the soft, warm, and loamy soil of
the banks, with my name inscribed on a neighboring poplar, that future
generations when traversing the mighty waters of the West, _in the
manner that I have pointed out_, may find my grassy turf."
IN the lives of Pythagoras, Copernicus, Galileo, Ericson, Bruno,
Harvey, Kepler, Newton, Hunter, Gall, Young, Froebel, Gray, Fitch,
Stephenson, and _many_ others, we learn that he who assails the
Gibraltar of conservative and authoritative ignorance must expect to
conduct a very long siege, to maintain a resolute battle, and perhaps
to die in his camp, leaving to his posterity to receive the
predestined surrender of the citadels of Falsehood and Darkness, for
the eternal law of the universe declares that all darkness shall
disappear, and Light and Peace shall cover the earth, as they already
fill the souls of the lovers of wisdom.