is the Free Library of Philadelphia. In 1889 his uncle, George S.
Pepper, bequeathed the sum of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars
"to the trustees of such Free Library which may be established in the
city of Philadelphia." From the beginning Dr. Pepper took a warm
interest in the Free Library movement. It was under his leadership
that the library was organized, and he was made the first president of
its board of trustees. Speaking of his activity in this direction, the
librarian, Mr. John Thomson, said: "No detail was too small for his
personal attention. No plan for its future growth was too large for
his ambitious hope of both public and private support. The remarkable
and rapid increase in the circulation of the Free Library, the
multiplication of its branches, the organization of all its
departments on a broad and generous plan, his success in enlisting a
large number of able fellow-workers, his clear, plain statements to
Councils and the city authorities, his activity in securing needed
legislation at Harrisburg, were some of the results of that
intelligent energy which enabled him to do so much and to do it so
well." The bequest of the Pepper family has been supplemented by ample
appropriations by the City Councils, and the Free Library is now one
of the most important institutions in Philadelphia. The library at
present has twelve flourishing branches, while the combined
circulation of the system for the year 1898 was 1,738,950 volumes.
Dr. Pepper was also connected with many scientific bodies. He was
Vice-President of the American Philosophical Society, and President of
the first Pan-American Medical Congress in 1893. He was a Fellow of
the College of Physicians; President of the Philadelphia Pathological
Society from 1873 to 1876; Director of the Biological Section, Academy
of Natural Sciences; President, in 1886, of the American
Climatological Association; President of the Foulke and Long Institute
for Orphan Girls; President of the First Sanitary Convention of
Pennsylvania; and in 1882 he was a member of the Assay Commission of
the United States Mint. He received the degree of LL. D. from
Lafayette College in 1881, and from the University of Pennsylvania in
1893.
In 1873 Dr. Pepper married Miss Frances Sargeant Perry, a lineal
descendant of Benjamin Franklin, and a granddaughter of Commodore
Oliver Hazard Perry. Four sons were born, of whom three survive--Dr.
William Pepper, Jr., Benjamin Franklin Pepper, and Oliver Hazard Perry
Pepper. Failing in health, Dr. Pepper went to California early in the
summer of 1898, where he died of heart disease on July 28th of that
year. His body reached Philadelphia on August 6th. Funeral services
were held in St. James's Protestant Episcopal Church, after which the
body was cremated, and the ashes interred in Laurel Hill Cemetery. The
American Anthropometric Society received, by the conditions of his
will, Dr. Pepper's brain. Among the members of this society were Dr.
Joseph Leidy, Phillips Brooks, and Prof. E. D. Cope. The articles of
membership of the Anthropometric Society require that each member
contribute his brain in the interests of science.
Dr. Pepper's death was followed by many expressions of sorrow from
learned societies in various parts of the world. One of the most
beautiful tributes was the memorial meeting held in the city of Mexico
on September 12th. The leading medical and scientific societies of
Mexico assembled in the hall of Congress to do honor to the work and
character of Dr. Pepper. President Diaz occupied the chair, and about
him were gathered the leading citizens, officials, and scientists of
Mexico. Representatives of the National Medical School and the Board
of Health eulogized Dr. Pepper, while Hon. Matias Romero spoke of him
not as a physician, but as an "altruist who had consecrated himself to
doing good for his fellow-men."
In Philadelphia, steps have been taken to erect a substantial memorial
to Dr. Pepper. At a memorial meeting, held on March 6th last, a
proposition was made to place a statue of the deceased scientist on
the City Hall plaza, after the style of the Girard Monument. A
committee was appointed with power to raise funds for the proposed
statue, the cost not to exceed ten thousand dollars.
* * * * *
One of the letters of William Pengelly, geologist, of Torquay,
England, printed in the memoir published by his daughter, gives
this sketch of Babbage, the mathematician and inventor of the
calculating machine: "I then called on Babbage, and could not get
away until after one. He is a splendid talker. He seemed much
pleased to see me, and complimented me very much on my lecture
(at the Royal Institution), in which he was evidently much
interested. He is the most marvelous worker I ever met with. I
never saw anything like the evidence of multifarious and vast
labor which his 'workshop' presents; he sticks at nothing. One
drawer full of riddles, another of epigrams, one of squared
words, etc.... It is appalling! And then the downright fun of the
fellow; it is almost intoxicating to be with him!"
Correspondence.
"DO ANIMALS REASON?"
DR. EDWARD THORNDIKE'S interesting account, in our August number, of
his investigations touching the reasoning power of animals has brought
us a large number of letters questioning some of the main conclusions
set forth in the article, and criticising the method of the inquiry.
Not having room for all these communications, we print one of them,
and add extracts from two others. These represent the principal
objections urged by the various writers against the conclusions drawn
by the author of the article from his experiments.
_Editor Popular Science Monthly:_
SIR: The first reading of Dr. Thorndike's article Do Animals Reason?
in the August Popular Science Monthly, gave the impression, which has
been deepened by subsequent perusal, that his experiments were not
only inadequate to solve the question, but unfairly chosen.
A dog or a cat, utterly hungry, is placed in a box, from which it can
escape "by performing some simple (?) action, such as pulling a wire
loop, stepping on a platform or lever, clawing down a string, or
turning a wooden button."
In the first place, what tends to destroy the reasoning power more
than utter hunger? This intense physical craving begets frenzy rather
than reason. The more intense this primeval desire, the greater the
demand upon primitive instinct for its satisfaction. In the open the
cat will jump at a bird, the dog at a bone. If the bird be up a tree,
the cat will climb; if the bone be buried, the dog will burrow.
Climbing and burrowing are deep-rooted developments of the feline and
the canine nature.
Put a dog or a cat, utterly hungry, in a box and hang a piece of meat
outside. Instinct prompts a jump through the bars of the box at the
meat, and the greater the number of unsuccessful attempts the less the
likelihood of the animal with a gnawing stomach sitting down to
scrutinize the mechanical construction of the box to the point of
perceiving that by stepping on a lever it will open a door. How many
millions of years did it take two-legged man to arrive at the
perception of the use of the lever? Did the shaggy biped arrive at
that perception by sitting down when utterly hungry and looking at a
lever; or did he, through countless generations, by some such chance
as lifting a stone with a stick, come to the knowledge of weight and
fulcrum?
Put an anthropoid ape, some several degrees nearer man in intelligence
than a cat, in a modern office elevator that moves by the push of an
electric button, suspend the elevator between two stories, and what do
you suppose that anthropoid ape will do?
Put a schoolgirl fresh from belles-lettres and matinées in the cab of
a locomotive and tell her to run it to the next station. She can not
but know that steam will make the wheels go round, but what will she
do in the maze of throttles, handles, disks, and rods that confronts
her? What will she do if utterly hungry?
Take a laborer from his pick and shovel on the railway embankment and
put him at the desk of the general manager. He can read and write. Let
the messenger boys and clerks shower him with the letters and
telegrams that bombard that desk every day, and let him try to settle
the questions to which they give rise.
Now, why can not the schoolgirl run the locomotive, the laborer the
railroad? Because the relations of things necessary to the tasks have
never been imprinted upon their registering cells; because, in the
latter case at least, of the lack of power of co-ordination--that is,
the lack of the power of abstract reasoning that the task involves.
Why can not anybody do anything as well as anybody else? Because
certain relations have been more deeply impressed upon certain brains
than upon others; because of the greater power of certain brains to
co-ordinate certain relations, their greater ability to give concrete
manifestation of the result of such co-ordination through the efferent
nerves. Otherwise any one of us could design a bridge, compose a
symphony, or organize a trust.
The oftener relations are impressed upon the registering cells, the
more readily are those relations co-ordinated, provided the brain
structure be of the requisite caliber. Reiterated impression through
the ages of the relations between their needs and surrounding things,
together with the development of structural capacity, has led the
beaver to build his dam, the bee the honeycomb, the ant its village,
the bird its nest. In each case the registered impressions have led to
action made possible by long-continued contact between structure and
environment; the actions are the result of development that has
proceeded mite by mite through unknown time. The brain of neither bird
nor beast nor man will immediately co-ordinate radically new
impressions received in a radically new environment into coherent
action that leads to definite result.
Here is an example within the writer's immediate knowledge: At the age
of seventeen a boy entered the service of one of the large railway
systems as a clerk in the passenger department. Through eleven years
of enthusiastic and concentrated endeavor to master the details of the
service he rose to the head of the clerical force--that is, the
reiterated impression upon his brain cells of the functions of the
passenger service led to that co-ordination which resulted in
efficient action. Then he became employed in the office of a large
coal-mining company. For several days it was with the utmost
difficulty that he could bring his attention to bear upon the new
tasks. While seated at the desk in the coal office the old railway
problems would chase through his mind; when he began to write the
initials of the Pittsburg Consolidated Coal Company, he would find
that he had written the initials of the Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Chicago
and St. Louis Railway Company; instead of the initials of the
Pittsburg, Fairport and Northwestern Dock Company, the initials of the
Pittsburg, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railway Company. The latter initials
in each case would appear upon the paper before he knew it, actually
without his knowing that he had written them. The entirely unfamiliar
routine entailed by the custody of bank accounts, coal leases, deeds
and contracts, reports of coal shipments, and the handling of
vouchers, became adjusted in his brain bit by bit through many weeks,
and it was months before he could co-ordinate the new impressions into
broad and well-defined reasoning. If he had been utterly hungry
through all the period of the new service, it might have taken years.
Now, what can be expected of a dog or a cat, whose mental processes
have been adjusted by inheritance and experience to life in the fields
and jungles, when placed in a box, utterly hungry, to study mechanical
contrivances? It is manifest that if the brain of a dog or a cat would
become adjusted to the radically unfamiliar steps necessary to release
it from such a radically unfamiliar environment, that adjustment could
only come by extremely slow degrees. Voluntary perception is almost
beyond the limits of expectation, and the leading of the animal
through the necessary steps would have to be repeated time after time
before the impressions upon its brain would reach any degree of
permanence, especially as its brain would be lacking in attention, and
the repeated handling be an annoyance to it. But that by such tutelage
the animals, or a proportion of them, arrived at a knowledge of the
means necessary to escape from the box is shown by Dr. Thorndike
himself. "If one repeats the process, keeps putting the cat back into
the box after each success, the amount of useless action gradually
decreases, the right movement is made sooner and sooner, until finally
it is done as soon as the cat is put in." But he says: "This sort of a
history is not the history of a reasoning animal. It is the history of
an animal who meets a certain situation with a lot of instinctive
acts.... Little by little the one act becomes more and more likely to
be done in that situation, while the others slowly vanish. This
history represents the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the
decisions of a rational consciousness."
Wherein, however, does this differ from the manner in which hundreds
of clerks in offices finally learn routine work and mechanically go
through the motions necessary to its performance? Do not the actions
of thousands of laborers in field and factory seem to proceed from a
wearing smooth of a path in the brain, rather than from rational
consciousness? Yet they can not be said to be devoid of reason. Is not
a great proportion of the daily actions of any one of us gone through
from force of habit, almost by instinct?
The word reason does not apply alone to the mental processes of a
Helmholtz, but to the co-ordination, however slight, of relations that
result in definite action even of a humble organism. Herbert Spencer
has clearly shown that instinct and reason differ in degree and not in
kind.
Dr. Thorndike lays stress upon the fact that a "cat which, when first
put in, took sixty seconds to get out, in the second trial eighty, in
the third fifty, in the fourth sixty, in the fifth fifty, in the
sixth forty," etc., and remarks: "Suppose the cat had, after the third
accidental success, been able to reason? She would then have, the next
time and all succeeding times, performed the act as soon as put in."
Not long ago the writer and a man whose high intelligence can not be
questioned, in moments of relaxation were trying to do one of the
familiar ring puzzles--endeavoring to separate a ring from two others
of peculiar shape and then to join the three. After repeated trials,
one would loosen it, but could not replace it; the other finally
succeeded in replacing it, but could not loosen it. Then the one could
replace it, but not loosen it; the other loosen, but not replace it,
and each was closely watching the other all the time. It was half an
hour or more before either could both loosen and replace the ring,
occasional successful attempts not being repeated until after several
succeeding failures. Contrast the relation of the brain of the dazed
and indifferent and peculiarly bedeviled cat to the puzzle presented
to it by the inside of the box with the earnest effort of the two men
to solve the ring puzzle. Who has not found a task more difficult the
fifth or sixth time than the second or third, and has only performed
it with ease after repeated attempts of varying degrees of success and
failure?
In conclusion, the writer begs leave to relate an incident, which has
not before appeared in print, that profoundly impressed him with the
belief that at least in one instance one particular animal displayed
reason. One Sunday morning, a dozen years or more ago, he was standing
on the bank of the Ohio River at the Sewickley Ferry. A family group,
accompanied by a large Newfoundland dog, hailed the ferryman and got
in his boat, leaving the dog, which persuasively barked and wagged his
tail, on the bank. As the boat pulled out into the stream the dog
whined, and then made ready to leap in after it. Then he stopped at
the water's edge, and, with head down, gazed intently at the river for
several seconds--it seemed a minute or more. Then he ran up the bank
more than a hundred feet, stopped, looked at the receding boat,
plunged into the stream, and swam vigorously. The current, bearing him
down, made his course diagonal to the bank. A boy standing by my side
said: "Isn't that a smart dog? If he'd been a crazy dog he'd have
jumped in where he was, but he ran up the bank so the current wouldn't
wash him down away from the boat."
But the dog, swimming with all his vigor, was borne past the boat when
within twenty feet or so of it; he endeavored to straighten his course
without success, and then, in a long semicircle, swam around to the
near bank, landing two or three hundred feet below the place whence
the ferryboat had started.
What this dog would have done if placed, utterly hungry, in a box from
which he could only liberate himself by stepping on a platform or
turning a wooden button, I do not know.
LOGAN G. MCPHERSON.
PITTSBURGH, _August 3, 1899._
MR. FREDERIC D. BOND, of 413 South Forty-fourth Street, Philadelphia,
writes: Of the accuracy of Dr. Thorndike's experiments I have no
doubt, but certain facts connected with them seem to deprive the
observations of much of their relevance.
Dr. Thorndike states that he arranged his experiments to give
reasoning every chance to display itself, if it existed, and to
observe those in which the acts required and the thinking involved
were not far removed from the acts and feelings of ordinary animal
life. Of these experiments one of the chief was to determine whether
and in what way a cat would escape from a box opening by turning a
button. Now, I submit that in this and the succeeding experiments the
conditions Dr. Thorndike fancied to exist by no means did so. Simple
as the release of a door by a button seems to us, the apparent
simplicity arises merely from our empirical knowledge of what does
happen in such a situation. Actually to think out the rationale of the
matter, as an animal having no experience either personally or from
heredity would have to do, involves very complex mental processes. The
environment of a human being is vastly different from an animal's,
though of this fact we constantly lose sight in reasoning; of
mechanical appliances and principles, for example, an animal knows
nothing, and yet we are too apt to suppose it regarding the world with
a store of ancestral and individual experiences utterly foreign to it;
and then, on its failing to do what, in the light of such experience,
seems to us easy, we proceed to call into question its possession of
reason....
That the cats did finally learn to escape shows, according to Dr.
Thorndike, "the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the
decisions of a rational consciousness." May I ask Dr. Thorndike what
possible reason could a cat have to suppose that what happened once
must needs happen again? Does Dr. Thorndike fancy his own knowledge of
a million like matters was acquired by reason, and not empirically
elaborated by processes of exactly the same sort as the cats went
through? Let this experiment be tried on a healthy infant of two
years, and I am of the opinion that the results would be the same as
with the cat; yet the infant undoubtedly carries on "thinking
processes similar, at least in kind, to our own," which Dr. Thorndike
implicitly denies to his cats.
The chief cause of the inability of students to reach concordant
results in this matter of animal intelligence appears to lie in a
certain uncritical assumption often made. That all consciousnesses
have a certain field of presentations, that to this field they attain,
that because of it they feel and will, are fundamental facts; but the
belief that attention or feeling or will differs per se in different
consciousnesses, other than as the field to which they are at the
moment related, differs--this is an utterly unwarranted assumption.
According to the action of its environment, each conscious being must
know the world just so far as is needed to conform its existence
thereto, or else it must perish; but whether such knowledge, which is
acquired by experience only, be quite small, as with animals, or
somewhat larger, as with man, there is no reason to suppose that the
attention, feeling, or will of the animal differs in itself from the
same psychological state in man.
MR. ANDREW VAN BIBBER, of Cincinnati, Ohio, says: Animals, and
especially wild ones, have no bank account or reserve, and have to
face new conditions daily, and yet they make a living where man would
starve.
When I was out in Colorado and Utah, years ago, I used to know of
animals removing the bait nicely from dangerous traps without
springing the trap. I knew of a dog who went over a mile to call his
owner to the aid of a boy who had broken his leg, and who would not be
refused till understood. This is brutish "instinct," is it?--something
that Dr. Thorndike can't define. Will "instinct" teach a tired,
half-starved horse to eat oats if you set them before him? Dr.
Thorndike would say "Yes," but Dr. Thorndike would be wrong unless
that horse knew from personal past experience what oats were. What
animals learn (like the human animal) they learn chiefly by
experience. They accumulate facts in their minds and use them.
I served in the cavalry of the Armies of the Tennessee and the
Cumberland, and I know that instinct will not cause a hungry horse to
touch oats unless he knows from his own experience what oats are. We
used to capture horses in Mississippi which had never seen oats. It is
all corn down there. We would bring them into camp tired out and
hungry, and would pour out our oats for them. Not one of them would
touch the oats. You could leave the hungry horses hitched for
twenty-four hours before oats, and not one grain would they touch.
They would stand there and starve. We had to throw up their heads and
fill their mouths full of oats. If we stopped there, they would spit
them out. We had to grab their jaws and work them sideways until they
had a good taste. Then they understood, and ate oats right along.
Plenty of such horses in Mississippi to-day....
If Dr. Thorndike tried his intelligent "Experiment No. 11" with a
two-year-old cat, why didn't he try it with a two-year-old human? I
guess he would have found an equal amount of ignorance of the
mechanism of door fastenings, which comes only with teaching, and
would have produced only struggles and screaming.
THE TREND OF POPULATION IN MAINE.
_Editor Popular Science Monthly:_
SIR: In the article contributed to your magazine for the month of
August on Recent Legislation against the Drink Evil, I notice what
appears to me to be a misstatement of fact. The writer speaks of the
results of prohibition in the State of Maine, and says, "In
sixty-three years Maine has seen her commerce disappear and her
population dwindle."
I have not investigated the matter of Maine's commerce, but I find
that her population has not dwindled in any possible sense of the term
during the period indicated above.
It is, perhaps, a common impression that Maine has had such an exodus
of her people to other States of the Union that she has suffered a
loss in population. What are the real facts of the case? The census
taken by the Government in 1840 gave the State 501,000 people, and
that taken in 1890, 661,000, which shows, during the interval between
1840 and 1890, an increase of 160,000. The increase in population
even during the decade 1880-'90 was 13,000. Whether there has been a
decrease since 1890 nobody at present knows, and will not know until
the decennial census is taken next year.
In view of these facts, I feel justified in challenging the
correctness of the gentleman's statement, quoted above.
There can be no room for doubt that Maine has sustained considerable
losses in population from farm desertion, but no statistics can be
presented to show that the State has, during the time stated above,
been dwindling in the number of people living within her borders.
J. EARLE BROWN.
WOONSOCKET, R. I., _August 17, 1899._
Editor's Table.
_EDUCATION AND CHARACTER-BUILDING._