something like that in vogue a generation ago in this country,
using leaves, etc., as forms. The rocks at Wolgan Gap are a
coarse sandstone stained almost black by an iron oxide derived
from included bands of ironstone. These black surfaces were
selected by the artists. Nearby in the rock is a band of shale
which had disintegrated at its exposed edge to a white powder.
The native artist put some of this white powder in his mouth,
placed his hand or foot upon the rock, and blew the moistened
powder upon and around his outstretched fingers or toes. When
he removed them they were outlined on the rock. Since the
sandstone is coarse and deeply pitted, the moist powder was
blown into minute cavities where it has remained despite the
erosive activities of some generations. The presence of the
powder is shown on the photographs as a sort of halo around the
object. The hands are either right or left, and, in some cases,
both hands seem to have been stencilled at once. Sometimes the
whole arm and hand are stencilled together, and in one of the
photographs a boomerang is shown. The age of these stencils is
not known. They were first discovered at Wolgan Gap about sixty
years ago, but others have been known for a longer time, for
instance, those at Greenwich, Parametta River, near Sydney.
The significance of these stencillings has been the subject of
some controversy. The natives may have been induced to make
them as boys carve their names on benches or even rocks. The
materials for making the stencillings were present and, the
example once having been set, others would emulate it. It is
interesting that similar stencillings of the hands were made by
cave men on the walls of some of the European caves, as, for
instance, those of Aurignac in southern France. Evidently
spatter work is no modern pastime.
THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE
SUBSTITUTES FOR WAR
THIS war, beyond measure disastrous to civilization, is a trial
also of our democracy. We may hope that it is an old-world war
and an old-men's war, repugnant to the genius of our newer
life. The statements of some of our public men and the contents
of some of our newspapers can not be read without
discouragement. But it is also true that there has perhaps not
appeared a cartoon in any American newspaper tending to glorify
war, and no legislation has so far been enacted in preparation
for war. There is good reason to believe that the people have
not been infected by the contagion of blood.
As Professor Patrick argued in a recent issue of the Monthly,
man is by genetic inheritance a fighting and a playing animal,
not an animal delighting in steady work. The ape and the tiger
will be exterminated elsewhere in nature before they will be
suppressed in man. It is a slow process, but surely proceeding.
The writer of this note has determined the proportion of each
century in which the leading nations have been engaged in war.
The curve thus found has no great reliability; for it does not
take into account the percentages of the peoples concerned, but
its course clearly indicates that even under circumstances as
they have been, wars will come to an end. And there is good
reason to believe that the newer condition--universal education
and universal suffrage, democratic control, improved economic
conditions of living for the people, the scientific
attitude--will tend to bend the curve more rapidly toward the
base line of permanent "peace on earth and good will to men."
While man has inherited instincts which exhibit themselves in
playing and fighting, the same instincts may by social control
be diverted to playing the games of art or science, to fighting
disease and vice. It is rarely wise or feasible to attempt to
suppress instincts; they should be directed so as to provide
desirable conduct. Loyalty to family, to group, to neighborhood
and to nation can not be lightly cast away for an abstract
cosmopolitanism. But it can be expressed otherwise than by
seizing everything in sight by cunning or by violence.
William James, the great psychologist, in one of his brilliant
essays published in The Popular Science Monthly for October,
1910, tells us that history is a bath of blood; we inherit the
war-like type; our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone
and marrow; showing the irrationality and horror of war does
not prevent it; but a moral equivalent can be found by
enlisting an army to toil and suffer pain in doing the hard and
routine work of the world. It is doubtful, however, if the
"gilded youths" to whom James refers would accept
"dish-washing, clothes-washing and window-washing,
road-building and tunnel-making, foundries and stoke-holes," as
a substitute for war, and for the great mass of the people
there is more than enough of these things. It is to escape from
them that we seek excitement and adventure, intoxication by
drugs and war.
Professor Cannon, of Harvard University, proposes international
football and other athletic contests as substitutes for war.
The adrenal glands, whose secretions excite the combative and
martial emotions, must function, and their activity, he argues,
can be directed in this way. Mr. Bryan has just now made the
proposal that we build six great national roads by which armies
might be collected for defence; the secretary of the navy has
founded a Naval Inventions Board; the postmaster general has
suggested that aeroplanes be used to deliver mail in order that
we may have an aerial corps ready for service. There may be an
element of the absurd in some of these proposals, as there
would be in using submarines to catch cod fish, so that there
might be practise in building and managing such crafts for
peaceful pursuits. There is, however, psychological
justification for aiming to direct the emotions so that their
discharge is not destructive, but of benefit to the nation and
to the world. Such would be the development of our national
resources, the construction of railways, roads, waterworks and
the like; social and political reforms; progress in the care of
public health, in education and in scientific research. It is
proposed that the next congress should spend half a billion
dollars on the army and navy. It is possible that on a
plebiscite vote, exactly under existing conditions, a majority
would vote to make the department of war a department of public
works, military defence being only one of its functions, and to
spend the sum proposed on public works useful in case of war,
but not an incitement to war.
NATIONAL WEALTH AND PUBLIC INDEBTEDNESS
WHILE the lives and the wealth of the European nations are
being sacrificed on a scale hitherto unparalleled, it is well
in the interests of those nations, as well as of our own, that
we conserve the lives and wealth of our own people. The
greatest wealth of a nation is its children, its productive
workers, its scientific men and other leaders, its accumulated
knowledge and social traditions. These are immeasurable, but
the Bureau of the Census has recently prepared a report on the
material wealth and indebtedness, according to which it is
estimated that the total value of all classes of property in
the United States, exclusive of Alaska and the insular
possessions, in 1912, was $187,739,000,000, or $1,965 per
capita. This estimate is presented merely as the best
approximation which can be made from the data available and as
being fairly comparable with that published eight years ago.
The increase between 1904 and 1912 was 75 per cent., for the
total amount and 49 per cent. for the per capita. Real estate
and improvements, including public property, alone constituted
$110,677,000,000, or 59 per cent. of the total, in 1912. The
next greatest item, $16,149,000,000, was contributed by the
railroads; and the third, $14,694,000,000, represented the
value of manufactured products, other than clothing and
personal adornments, furniture, vehicles and kindred property.
The net public-indebtedness in 1913 amounted to $4,850,461,000.
This amount was made up as follows: National debt,
$1,028,564,000, or $10.59 per capita; state debt, $345,942,000,
or $3.57 per capita; county debt, $371,528,000, or $4.33 per
capita; and municipal debt, $2,884,883,000, or $54.27 per
capita. Thus the average urban citizen's share of the net
federal, state, county and municipal debt combined was $72.76;
and the average rural citizen's share of the net federal, state
and county debt combined was $18.49.
The total federal debt in 1910 was $2,916,205,000, of which
amount $967,366,000 was represented by bonds, $375,682,000 by
non-interest-bearing debt (principally United States notes or
"greenbacks"), and $1,573,157,000 by certificates and notes
issued on deposits of coin and bullion. Against this
indebtedness there was in the treasury $1,887,641,000 in cash
available for payment of debt, leaving the net national
indebtedness at $1,028,564,000, or $10.59 per capita. The
increase in the net indebtedness between 1902 and 1913 amounted
to 6 per cent., but for the per capita figure there was a
decrease of 13 per cent. The burden due to the national debt is
thus very light in comparison with that imposed by the
indebtedness of other great nations.
The state debt, however, rests still more easily on the
shoulders of the average citizen, being only one third as great
as that of the nation. The total state indebtedness in 1913 was
$422,797,000, and the net debt--that is, the total debt less
sinking-fund assets--was $345,942,000, or $3.57 per capita. The
net debt increased by 44.5 per cent. between 1902 and 1913, and
the per capita net debt by 18 per cent.
The total county debt in 1913 amounted to $393,207,000, of
which amount $371,528,000, or $4.33 per capita, was net debt.
The net indebtedness increased by 89 per cent. between 1902 and
1913, and the per capita net indebtedness by 55 per cent. By
far the greatest item of indebtedness in this country is that
of municipalities. This amounted in 1913 to an aggregate of
$3,460,000,000, of which $2,884,883,000, or $54.27 per capita,
represented net indebtedness. The rate of increase in net
indebtedness between 1902 and 1913 was 114 per cent.
While the nations of Europe are involving themselves in the
toils of debts, we should use our vast surplus wealth to pay
the national, state and municipal debts, even those contracted
for public improvements. We save every year about $100 for each
adult and child of the country and waste about an equal sum. It
would be well if this wealth could be invested for the benefit
of each, and education and scientific research are the most
productive of all investments.
SCIENTIFIC ITEMS
WE record with regret the death of Karl Eugen Guthe, professor
of physics in the University of Michigan and dean of the
Graduate School, in Hanover, Germany; of John Howard Van
Amringe, long dean of Columbia College and professor of
mathematics; of Carlos J. Finlay, known for his advocacy of the
theory that yellow fever is transmitted by mosquitoes; of A. J.
Herbertson, of Wadham College, Oxford, professor of geography
in the university; of Julius von Payer, the distinguished polar
explorer and artist, of Vienna, and of Guido Goldsehmiedt,
professor of chemistry in the University of Vienna.
DR. JACQUES LORE, of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical
Research, has been elected a foreign fellow of the Linnean
Society, London.--Dr. David Bancroft Johnson, president of
Winthrop Normal and Industrial College, of Rockhill, S. C., has
been elected president of the National Education Association,
in succession to Dr. David Starr Jordan, chancellor of Stanford
University.
A MEMORIAL to Johann C. Reil, the anatomist, has been erected
in Halle. It stands in front of the university clinic, the seat
of his labors until called to Berlin in 1810. He died in 1813,
aged fifty-five years.--A bronze bas-relief--the work of Mr. S.
N. Babb--is about to be erected in St. Paul's Cathedral in
memory of Captain Scott and his companions who perished in the
Antarctic. At the request of the committee responsible for the
memorial an inscription has been written by Lord Curzon, which
reads as follows: "In memory of Captain Robert Falcon Scott,
C.V.O., R.N., Dr. Edward Adrian Wilson, Captain Lawrence E. G.
Oates, Lieut. Henry R. Bowers and Petty Officer Edgar Evans,
who died on their return journey from the South Pole in
February and March, 1912. Inflexible of purpose, steadfast in
courage, resolute in endurance in the face of unparalleled
misfortune. Their bodies are lost in the Antarctic ice. But the
memory of their deeds is an everlasting monument."
THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY
NOVEMBER, 1915
PAPUA, WHERE THE STONE-AGE LINGERS
BY DR. ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYER
WITH their undaunted spirit for braving the wilds, the English
entered New Guinea in 1885. For centuries the great island had
remained a mere outline upon the map the fever-haunted glades
of its vast swamps and the broken precipices of its mountain
ranges having defied exploration, more than the morose and
savage character of its inhabitants. Even in the summer of
1913, Massy Baker the explorer, discovered a lake probably 100
miles or more in shore-line, which had remained hidden in the
midst of the dark forests of the Fly and Strickland River
regions, and here savages still in the stone age, who had never
seen a white man, measured the potency of their weapons against
the modern rifle.
To-day there are vast areas upon which the foot of the white
man has not yet trodden, and of all the regions in the tropical
world New Guinea beckons with most alluring fascination to him
to whom adventure is dearer than life.
Far back in the dawn of European exploration, the Portuguese
voyager Antonio de Abreu, may have seen the low shores of
western New Guinea, but it is quite certain that sixteen years
later, in 1527, Don Jorge de Meneses cruised along the coast
and observed the wooly-headed natives whom he called "Papuas."
The name "New Guinea" was bestowed upon the island by the
Spanish captain, Ynigo Ortz de Retes, in 1515, when he saw the
negroid natives of its northern shores.
Then there came and passed some of the world's greatest
navigators. Torres wandering from far Peru, to unknowingly
discover the strait which bears his name; Dampier, the
buccancer-adventurer, and, in 1768, the cultured, esthetic
Bougainville, who was enraptured by the beauty of the deep
forest-fringed fjords of the northeastern coast. Cook, greatest
of all geographers, mapped the principal islands and shoals of
the intricate Torres Strait in 1770; and a few years later came
Captain Bligh, the resourceful leader of his faithful few,
crouching in their frail sail boat that had survived many a
tempest; since the mutineers of the Bounty had cast them adrift
in the mid-Pacific. In the early years of the nineteenth
century the scientifically directed Astrolabe arrived, under
the command of Dumont D'Urville, and, later, Captain Owen
Stanley in the Rattlesnake, with Huxley as his zoologist, Then,
in 1858, came Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of
Darwinism, who, by the way, is said to have been the first
Englishman who ever actually resided in New Guinea.
The daring explorers and painstaking surveyors came and went,
but the great island remained a land of dread and mystery,
guarded by the jagged reefs of its eastern shores, and the
shallow mud flats, stretching far to sea-ward beyond the mouths
of the great rivers of its southern coast. So inaccessible was
Papua that even the excellent harbor of Port Moresby, the site:
of the present capital, was not discovered until 1873. One has
but to stifle for a while in the heavy air that flows lifeless
and fetid over the lowlands as if from a steaming furnace, or
to scent the rank odors of the dark swamps, where for centuries
malaria must linger, to appreciate the reason for the
long-delayed European settlement of the country. But those who
blaze the path of colonial progress are not to be deterred by
temperatures or smells; let us remember that Batavia, "the
white man's graveyard," is now one of the world's great
commercial centers; and Jamaica, the old fever camp of the
British army, is now a health resort for tourists.
Papua, the land of the tired eyes and the earnest face, of the
willing spirit and the weary body, waning as strength fails
year by year in malaria and heat, the land wherein the heart
aches for the severed ties of wife and home; its history has
hardly yet begun, but the reward of generations of heroism will
be the conquest of another empire where England's high
standards of freedom are to he raised anew. A victory of peace
it is to be, as noble as any yet achieved in war; and great
through its death roll, and forgotten though the workers be,
the fruits of their labors will bless that better world Great
Britain is preparing for those of ages yet to come.
There are great resources in Papua with its area of 90,500
square miles. Untrodden forests where the dark soil moulders
beneath the everlasting shade; swamps bearing a harvest of
thousands of sago and nipa palms, and mountains in a riot of
contorted peaks rising to a height of 13,200 feet in the Owen
Stanley range.
It is still a country of surprises, as when petroleum fields,
probably 1,000 square miles in area, were discovered only about
four years ago along the Vailala River, the natives having
concealed their knowledge of the bubbling gas springs through
fear of offending the evil spirits of the place. It is evident
that although the country has been merely glanced over, there
are both agricultural and mineral resources of a promising
nature in Papua. It remains but for modern medicine to
over-come the infections of the tropics for the region to rise
into prominence as one of the self-supporting colonies of the
British empire.
The early history of British occupation centers around the
striking personality of James Chalmers, the great-hearted,
broad-minded, missionary, one of the most courageous who ever
devoted his life to extending the brotherhood of the white
man's ideals. Chafing, as a young man, under the petty
limitations of his mission in the Cook Islands, he sought New
Guinea, as being the wildest and most dangerous field in the
tropical Pacific. Here, for twenty-five years, he devoted his
mighty soul to the work of introducing the rudiments of
civilization and Christianity to the most sullen and dangerous
savages upon earth. Scores of times his life hung in the
balance of native caprice; wives and friends died by his side,
victims to the malignant climate and to native spears, while he
seemed to possess a charmed life; until, true to his
prediction, he was murdered by the cannibals of Dopina at the
mouth of the Fly River in 1901.
Hundreds of scattered tribes had learned to revere their great
leader "Tamate," as they called him, who brought peace and
prosperity to his followers. Yet a danger to Papua that he
himself foresaw and did all in his power to avert came as a
result of the introduction of the very civilization of which he
was the champion, for with peace came new wants that the most
unscrupulous of traders at once sought to supply at prices
ruinous to the social and moral welfare of the natives.
Also, the proximity of Queensland threatened to become a
menace; for Chalmers himself was well aware of the dark history
of the "blackbird trade" wherein practical slavery was forced
upon the indentured laborers, lured from their island homes to
toil as hopeless debtors upon the Australian plantations. A
government of the natives for the native interests he desired;
not one administered from the Australian mainland in the
interest of alien whites. The hopes of Chalmers were only
partially realized, for Papua is still only a territory of
Australia.
In most respects this condition appears to be unfortunate. The
crying needs of a new country are usually peculiarly local and
not likely to be appreciated by a distant ruling power.
Moreover, Australia is itself an undeveloped land and requires
too large a proportion of its own capital for expansion at home
to be a competent protector of a colony across the sea. One
feels that Papuan development might have proceeded with greater
smoothness had the colony been more directly under the British
empire, rather shall an Australian dependency.
The strategic necessity that Australia should command both the
northern and the southern shores of Torres Straits might still
have been secured without the sacrifice of any important
initiative in matters of government upon the part of Papua.
The cardinal evil that Chalmers feared has, however, been
averted. The natives still own 97 1/2 per cent. of the entire
land area, and wise laws guard them in this precious
possession, and aim to protect them from all manner of unjust
exploitation. It is much to the credit of the government that
the cleanest native villages and the most healthy, ambitious
and industrious tribes, are those nearest the white
settlements. Contact between the races has resulted in the
betterment, not in the degradation, of the Papuan natives.
The touch of a master hand is apparent in a multitude of
details in managing the natives of Papua; and it is of interest
to see that in broad essentials the plan of government is
adapted from that which the English have put to the test of
practice in Fiji; the modifications being of a character
designed to meet the conditions peculiar to Melanesia, wherein
the chiefs are relatively unimportant in comparison with their
role in the social systems of the Polynesians and Fijians.
Foremost in the shaping of the destiny of Papua stands the
commanding figure of Sir William Macgregor, administrator and
lieutenant governor from 1888 to 1898. As a young man Macgregor
was government physician in Fiji, where he became prominent not
only as a competent guardian of the health of the natives, but
as a leader in the suppression of the last stronghold of
cannibalism along the Singatoka River. In Papua his tireless
spirit found a wide field for high endeavor, and upon every
department of the government one finds to-day the stamp of his
powerful personality. Nor did he remain closeted in Port
Moresby, a stranger to the races of his vast domains, for over
the highest mountains and through the densest swamps his
expeditions forced their way; the Great Governor always in the
van. It was thus that he conquered the fierce Tugeri of the
Dutch border, who for generations had been the terror of the
coasts; and wherever his expeditions passed, peace followed,
and the law of the British magistrate supplanted the caprice of
the sorcerer.
But his hardest fight was not with the mountain wilds or the
malarious morasses. It was to secure from the powerful ones of
his own race the privileges of freemen for the natives of
Papua.
In his youth he had seen the blessings that came with the
advent of British rule in Fiji; and here, in broad New Guinea,
upon a vaster scale, he strove to make fair play the dominant
note in the white man's treatment of a savage race.
Arrayed against Chalmers and Macgregor were conservatism and
suspicion founded in ancient precedent, and a commercial
avarice that saw in native exploitation the readiest means to
convert New Guinea into a "white man's country." Aversion there
was also in high places to embarking upon a possibly fruitless
experiment, involving generations of labor and expense for a
remote and uncertain harvest. Chalmers and Macgregor, however,
through the force of their high convictions and the wisdom of
their wide experience, won the great fight for fairness; for
civilization's cardinal victories are those, not of the
soldier, but of the civil servant who dares risk his reputation
and his all for those things he deems just and generous; and
when Papua comes to erect statues to her great leaders, those
of these two patriots must surely occupy the highest places, as
champions of the liberties of the weak. The noble policy of
Macgregor is still, and let us hope it long may be, the keynote
of the administration in Papua, which to-day is being ably
carried forward under the great governor's disciple, the
Honorable John H. P. Murray.
The proclamation given by Captain Erskine in 1884 declared that
a British Protectorate had become essential for the
safeguarding of the lives and property of the natives of New
Guinea and for the purpose of preventing the occupation of the
country by persons whose proceedings might lead to injustice,
strife and bloodshed, or whose illegitimate trade might
endanger the liberties and alienate the lands of the natives.
It is, however, one thing for a government to declare its
altruistic intentions, but often quite another to carry them
into effect.