pounds of butter to take home with me to burn in the fire to cap the
climax and burn out the spell.'
"Then he want through his enchantments over the cow, and took the
money and the butter home with him. One day when he had been drinking
a little I asked him if he really burned all that butter. 'Divil a
grain of it did I burn; I ate it with my pertaties.' It was on that
same trip when Mosey was curin' the cow that a man who lived near by
sent for him. 'I feel mighty quare, Mosey,' says he, 'an' I can't
describe exactly how I do feel!' 'You're bewitched, sir,' says he,
'and badly bewitched!' (he always used those words). 'Faith, an' I'll
try and cure ye! Have ye got any blue yarn about the house?' The man's
wife went to look for some, and she came back with a hank of blue
yarn. Mosey wound off enough of it to make a cord about the size of
his finger; they twisted it together, he pretending to put some
enchantments on it, and then he told the sick man to fasten it round
his waist next to his skin. 'Don't you lose it on peril of your life,'
says he, 'or you're a dead man!' 'Peggy, get a needle and sew it on
me!' he says to his wife, an' she done it. He gradually got well--may
be he'd a got well anyway. I can't vouch for that."
When asked if such things were still happening, the cane-seller
replied:
"Not three weeks ago a woman thought her cow was bewitched because her
butter wouldn't gather, and she het an old horseshoe hot and dropped
it in the churn of milk. When she churned again the butter on that
occasion gathered, and _it was the same milk_ that was in the churn to
burn the witch. You can put that down for June, '93."
The Potts Creek neighborhood is said to be a center for the witch
superstition. It is also a favorite place for "bush meetings," to
which the natives come from a distance in their wagons with picnic
dinners of salt-risen corn pone and sliced bacon, and there they
listen approvingly to fervid exhortations that are based on orthodox
Baptist and Methodist doctrines. The West Virginia mountaineer is
profoundly religious in temperament, and considers that he has
scriptural ground for a belief in witchcraft.
* * * * *
PROF. H. E. ARMSTRONG has described how, by taking incidents from
suitable story books, children aged respectively seven and a
half, ten, and twelve and a half years were set to work to test
the physical facts mentioned, and how, by the systematic use of
the balance, measuring instruments, and simple apparatus, or even
household utensils, a true spirit of scientific research was
engendered. Evidence of the good effect was exhibited in the
notebooks made by the children, which demonstrate clearly how
well the juvenile investigators have mastered the scientific
method of observation.
ORIGIN OF ANCIENT HINDU ASTRONOMY.
BY THE COUNT GOBLET D'ALVIELLA.
It is manifest that India is indebted for some of its astronomy to the
Greeks. Not that it had not astronomy and astronomers from an epoch
anterior to the invasion of Alexander. It had, in fact, been necessary
to make observations of the heavens in order to fix a calendar that
would enable the sacrifices of the Vedic ritual in connection with the
return of the seasons and the revolutions of the stars to be
celebrated at the right dates. Further, the belief in astrology, or
the influence exercised by the movements of the planets on physical
phenomena and all the events of human life, would lead, in India as
elsewhere, to the observation and anticipation of everything relating
to the conjunction and opposition of the heavenly bodies.
The Rig-Veda has allusions to the phases and stations of the moon. The
stations (_nakshatras_) consisted, according to a tradition preserved
by the Brahmans, of twenty-seven constellations (afterward
twenty-eight) which the moon was supposed to traverse successively in
the course of its sidereal revolution. A lunar zodiac and a primary
division of time into months were thus obtained. The moon, moreover,
bears in the Veda the name of month-maker (_mâsakrit_). Each station
was assigned a uniform length of 13° 20' on the ecliptic, and a
denomination, generally derived from mythology. The month, in turn,
took its name from the constellation that had the honor of harboring
the moon. Manon and the Djyotisha (a special treatise included among
the Védângas, or commentaries on the Vedas) tell us that the year was
composed of twelve months, the month of thirty days, the day of thirty
hours, the hour of forty-eight minutes, all strictly sexagesimal
subdivisions, like our own measures of time. The Djyotisha also
teaches the art of constructing a clepsydra, or water-clock.
The adjustment of the solar year to correspond with the lunar year and
of the two with the civil year dates from this period. The month was
still composed of thirty days, but the solar years were grouped into
quinquennial periods, in the middle and at the end of which the lunar
month was doubled. Combining these quinquennial periods with the
revolutions of the planet _Brihaspati_ (Jupiter), which was calculated
as occupying about twelve years, the Indian astronomers computed an
astronomical cycle of sixty solar years. As the same cycle is found
with the Chaldeans, where, according to Berosus, it was called the
_Sossos_, we have to inquire how far Brahmanic astronomy was
influenced by the systems which were originally formed in ancient
Chaldea. The presumption of such an influence furnishes a simpler and
more probable hypothesis than the effort to trace the earliest
astronomical ideas of the Hindus, as M. W. Brennand has recently
suggested, to a period when the ancestors of the Aryans, the Semites,
and the Chinese were wandering together over the plateaus of central
Asia!
We know now, from the cuneiform inscriptions, that the Chaldeans had,
at a period far anterior to the entrance of the Aryans into India,
invented a double calendar, solar and lunar, with intercalary periods;
discovered the proper motion of the planets; calculated the return of
eclipses; and constituted a double metrical system, decimal and
sexagesimal; and, as was done, too, in India, had divided the
circumference into three hundred and sixty degrees of sixty minutes
each. It is impossible to draw the lines exactly between the
astronomical discoveries which the Hindus borrowed from abroad and
those which they drew from their own resources prior to the invasion
of the Greeks, but we need in no case go farther than Mesopotamia for
the source of the borrowed data.
The ancient literature of India contains observations of the positions
or conjunctions of some of the stars that carry us back to positive
dates in the history of the sky. The astronomers Bailly, Colebrooke,
and Bentley, and, more recently, M. Brennand, have found notes
relative to astronomical phenomena that took place in the twelfth,
fourteenth, fifteenth, and even the twenty-first centuries B. C. Max
Müller, however, advises prudence and reserve in accepting these
calculations, some of which may have been afterthoughts, and others
offer only apparent agreements.
In any case, the advent of Buddhism, by depreciating the religious
practices and astrological speculations of the Brahmans, contributed
to bringing on a decline of astronomy at the very time it was taking
its most vigorous stand among the Greeks. We learn from a passage in
Strabo that the Pramnai regarded the Brahmans as boasters and mad
because they were interested in physiology and astronomy. Now, there
really exists an ancient Buddhist treatise in which the predictions by
the Brahmans of eclipses of the sun and of the conjunctions and
oppositions of the planets, and their discussions of the appearance of
comets and meteors, are treated as despicable arts and lies.
It was just at this age that Hellenic culture was developed in
northwest India. It held astronomy, and astrology too, in great
esteem. The Milinda Panda mentions the royal astrologer as one of the
principal functionaries of Menander. No doubt there were, among the
Gavanas (Ionians) of Taxila and Euthydêmia, minds versed in the
knowledge of the principal cosmological systems formulated among the
Greeks from Thales to Aristotle, and also acquainted with all the
progress in the physical and mathematical sciences that had been
achieved by the Alexandrian astronomers in the last centuries before
Christ. To comprehend the extent of the influence of Hellenic science,
we have only to inquire what Hindu astronomy had become again at the
time of the restoration of the Brahmans in the sixth century A. D.
Aryabhatta teaches the rotation of the earth around its axis;
maintains that the moon, naturally dark, owes its light to the rays of
the sun; formulates the true theory of eclipses; assigns an elliptical
form to the planetary epicycles; and demonstrates the displacement of
the equinoctial and solstitial points. Varâha-Mihira devotes himself
especially to astrological labors, but also has the merit of having
condensed into a vast encyclopædia the _Pantcha Siddhântikâ_, the
principal astronomical treatises that were current in India. And
Brahmazoupta is especially famous for his revision of an older
treatise, the _Brahma Siddhânta_.
In the opinion of the most competent critics, these works, which are
chiefly empirical methods of determining the positions of the stars,
are inferior to those which the Alexandrians have left us. Yet, in
matters relating to the measurement of arcs and to spherical
trigonometry, they reveal a more advanced state of the science. It is
impossible to determine at what period this new astronomical science
was constituted in India. Some of its theories squarely betray their
indebtedness to Greek science, as, for instance, that of the
displacement of the equinoctial and solstitial points by a periodical
vibration or tremor. We can also say as much of the solar zodiac, the
names of the constellations of which strikingly resemble the Greek
names in form as well as in significance, and the same of the names of
the chief planets. Other expressions are found, notably in the works
of Varâha-Mihira, which indicate, if not a borrowing, a contact, at
least, with the works of the Greek astronomy, of which Mr. Burgess
gives a fairly complete list in his Notes on Hindu Astronomy and the
History of our Knowledge of it, in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society. Among these terms, some are Greek words which have been
utilized in naming constellations or astronomical measures; others
have retained the special significations which they had in the works
of the Alexandrian astronomers. It would certainly be an exaggeration
to insist that the adoption of a foreign term of necessity implies the
borrowing of the idea which it expresses. It is, nevertheless,
probable that the Sanskrit writers would not have made use of so many
of these exotic denominations if the ideas they represent had already
found their expression in the languages of India.
Further, among the fine Siddântas which Varâha-Mihira collected and
condensed as including all the astronomical science of his time, there
are two, the _Romaka_ and the _Pauliça_, the names of which suggest
directly--the first the scientific culture of the Roman world, and the
other Paulus, a celebrated Alexandrian astronomer of the third century
A. D.[8]
[Footnote 8: The Romaka Siddânta employs, as a measure of time,
the _Guga_ of 2,850 years or 1,040,953 days, giving a tropical
year of 365 days, 5 hours, 55 minutes, and 12 seconds, which is
exactly the figure proposed by Ptolemy and Hipparchus.--_Burgess,
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society._]
We apparently find, likewise, the names of Manetho (fourth century A.
D.) in _Manittha_ or _Manimda_; of Spensippus in _Sporedjivadja_; and
of Ptolemy in _Asoura Maya_, whom the _Sounya Siddhânta_ designates as
the founder of astronomy, and who another treatise says was born at
Romakapouri, "the city of the Romans."
In this order of ideas the natives of India have never tried to deny
their sources. The Gavanas, we read in the _Gargí Samhitâ_, are
barbarians; but this science (astrology) has been constituted by them,
and they must be revered as saints. M. Weber affirms that a treatise
on astrology bearing their name, the _Gavana Çastra_, was reputed to
have been written in the land of the Gavanas by the god Sourya in
person, when, expelled from heaven by the resentment of his divine
rivals, he came down and was born again in the city of the Romans.[9]
[Footnote 9: The term Romakapouri does not necessarily imply the
city of Rome; the name was probably extended to Alexandria and
perhaps also to Byzantium. In other writings we find the name
Gavanapouri, the city of the Greeks (or Ionians), applied to
Alexandria.]
We find, further, that the Greek calendar appears to have survived
Hellenic domination in northern India. General Cunningham, in 1862,
read in the inscriptions of the Indo-Scythians the names of the
Macedonian months Artemisios and Appellaios. Since then the names of
two other months of that calendar--Panemos and Daisios--have been
found in inscriptions in the Kharosthis character.
Another era of Grecian origin, that of the Seleucidæ, seems likewise
to have furnished the Hindus their first historical computation.[10]
It should be observed, in fact, that their most ancient era, that of
the Mauryas, dates from the year 312 B. C., or the beginning of the
era of the Seleucidæ. This had been adopted by the Grecian sovereigns
of India, as is attested by a coin of Plato, struck in the year 166 B.
C.
[Footnote 10: Till then, the Hindus hardly seem to have sought for
a common measure of time except for astronomical or mythological
purposes.]
Beginning with the Indo-Scythians, India generally adopted the era of
the Cakas, which began, not, as had been long supposed, with the
expulsion of the Scythians, but with the coronation of their
principal sovereign, Kanichka.[11] Nevertheless, the inscriptions
offer still other historical computations, as, for instance, that of
the Gouptas era, which began in the year 240 of the Çaka era, and that
of Vikramâditya, which was made to begin retrospectively fifty-six
years B. C. Hence arise complications of a nature to make the task of
paleography and history no lighter.--_Translated for the Popular
Science Monthly from Ciel et Terre (from the author's essays on
Classical Influences on the Scientific and Literary Culture of
India)._
[Footnote 11: M. Sylvain Levi has, however, lately reopened the
question of the initial date of this era.]
SKETCH OF WILLIAM KEITH BROOKS.
The old problem of Nature _versus_ nurture that meets us in studying
the life history of any organism becomes especially interesting in
dealing with the biography of men of eminence. Are their achievements
the inevitable expression of the natural forces innate in them at
birth, or the product of environmental influences, or some resultant
of these two factors? And how much may we in each case assign to one
factor or to the other?
These difficult questions naturally suggest themselves in glancing at
the life of the subject of this sketch. Like so many men who have won
prominence in comparatively new countries, he seemed, in an
environment that had no apparent relation to his future, to grow from
innate tendencies toward something not suggested by the circumstances
about him, even to grow in opposition to the molding influences of
these, and to conquer them. Later, however, we find him surrounded by
influences that made a particular mode of self-expression easy, if
they may not be said to have forced such expression. It was then that
the casual observer might say that the circumstances made the man;
yet, looking backward, we can trace the initiative in the man that led
him into the congenial environment. A selection of proper environment
to express Nature has been rightly claimed as a potent factor in all
organic life; nurture, then, comes as a secondary power to mold, or
rather to translate, the inherent power.
WILLIAM KEITH BROOKS, the second son of Oliver Allen Brooks and
Eleanora Bradbury, daughter of the Rev. Phineas Kingsley, was born in
Cleveland, Ohio, in 1848. In 1877 he married Amelia Katherine,
daughter of Edward T. Schultz and Susan Rebecca, daughter of David L.
Martin. He has two children.
Brooks grew up amid the stimulating influences of a relatively new
country, where freedom of development was not so sharply restricted
but that all paths of life seemed equally open to one who would work.
As a boy he was not one of those precocious naturalists of the common
sort whose collecting instincts find expression in the hoarding of
dead animals or plants rather than the neater postage stamp; names and
authorities, classes and species, neatly arranged mummies, were not
his delight. At first there seemed no sign that zoölogy would claim
him as a most ardent admirer. Yet he was fond of live things and their
ways, and introduced into his home that most delightful microcosm, the
fresh-water aquarium (so much neglected in this country), in which he
could observe at ease the habits and slow changes of living things
when their native haunts were not accessible. Such early interest in
the essential wonders of livingness rather than in man's artificial
classification of phenomena was thus prophetic of much of his later
originality of thought and view.
He has never forgotten how much he owes to the instruction of the
earnest and broad-minded teachers in the public schools of Cleveland.
His college life began at Hobart, where two years left a deep
impression from an acquaintance with Berkeley's thought, gained in
browsing in the library, and long treasured up to produce fruit in
philosophic views of maturer years. Then at Williams College, where
the notable Natural History Society was sending out its expedition
across South America, his love of Nature matured and specialized for
two years longer, until he received the A. B. degree in 1870. It was
Williams also that later, in 1893, bestowed upon him the LL. D.
degree. For him the completion of college life was truly the
"commencement" and not the finish of his intellectual training. His
strong trend toward pure science and abstract mental life forced him
onward into post-graduate work. But this required funds, and America
was not Germany; the struggle for existence was not here so intense
that one might not win bread in many walks of life without special
training, and parents did not need to extend the larval period of
support for offspring beyond the completion of college life to gain
for them a place in any rank, social or intellectual. Now, a rapidly
increasing need for the Ph. D. degree as entrance to professional
life, necessitating several years of post-graduate study, often forces
parents to take up their share in the increased burden. Then, however,
few were agreed as to the advisability of prolonging an unpractical
life devoted to study beyond what seemed the maximum limit of
unproductive preparation for life--the day of graduation at college.
Beyond that the young man must make his own way as best he might. The
subject of this sketch chose to work his way by his own unaided
efforts into the fullest measure of academic training.
That was before the day of competition between universities, and there
was no temptation to go here rather than there in order to live a
semi-parasitic existence as scholar or fellowship holder.
First in his father's counting house, and then at a boy's school near
Niagara, young Brooks bravely gained the means to pursue higher
branches of natural history, and to devote himself to research. In the
former position he realized how futile for him would be a life given
to money-getting, and he palliated the uncongenial nature of that life
by such abstract thought as seemed useful, one immediate result of
which was the invention of a mechanical device for computing interest
and discounts in sterling money, that had considerable circulation.
This, though it scarcely indicated a stronger bias for mathematics
than for Nature study, showed a latent possibility that was not to be
developed. In the latter position, which brought him in close contact
with the wonders of time action, so plainly read in one of Nature's
books for the blind--Niagara Falls--he found food for thought, as well
as a deep interest in the action of young minds. Here was much
material for philosophical study of wood life too, as well as for
growth of conceptions of the way to learn and to teach.
Free, after serving three years, to follow his genius, Agassiz's
romantic venture at Pennikese drew this young naturalist, as it did so
many of that epoch; and henceforth marine life, with its revelation of
fundamental problems, fascinated him. Working on at Agassiz's museum,
learning its collections by heart, absorbing from this center of
American natural history and from its founder both stimulus and
method, influenced deeply also by the unobtrusive teachings of McCrady
and others who helped to make Cambridge the Mecca of naturalists, he
was already an active contributor to the discussion of problems in the
embryology of animals when he won his Ph. D. degree in 1875.
Quiet, diffident, slow to speak, leaving hasty action, too, for those
of other constitution, with thoughtful brow and keen eye to look
outward, as well as to regard inner thought, this young man with
flowing beard was a noticeable person. At this time he was to be seen
always accompanied by his faithful "Tige"; for, wiser than Ulysses, he
shared all the hardships and joys of life with this loved companion.
Now he sought his true environment, and found it in the new university
starting in 1876--the Johns Hopkins University. There he was appointed
Fellow, an honor subsequently won by many who are well known to
biological science, as W. T. Sedgwick, E. B. Wilson, K. Mitsukuri, A.
F. W. Schimper, H. H. Donaldson, H. L. Osborn, J. McKeen Cattell, H.
H. Howell, A. T. Bruce, E. S. Lee, H. E. Nachtrieb, W. Noyes, J.
Jastrow, E. B. Mall, H. V. Wilson, C. E. Hodge, S. Watase, and T. H.
Morgan. Like C. O. Whitman, in 1879, he did not enter upon the
privileges of that position, but as instructor and associate became at
once a guiding element in the new growth. In the freedom from old
traditions, from fixed conventions and routines offered by this new
university, this peculiar original mind found its best environment,
and while the opportunity doubtless did much for the man, the man
certainly reacted most favorably for the welfare of the highest ideals
of his new home.
We find him at once outspoken in emphasis of the philosophical aspect
of animal morphology, contributing thoughts upon "inductive reasoning
in morphological problems," upon "the relation between embryology and
phylogeny," upon "the causes of serial and bilateral symmetry," and
upon the "rhythmic nature" of the cleavage of an egg. Yet this period
was also, and pre-eminently, one of acquisition of hard-earned and
detailed facts. The development of Pulmonates and Lamellibranchs, of
Crustacea and of Medusæ, as well as of the marvels of Salpa's life
history, became absorbing studies.