and by many preferred to its Eastern congener, while it is far less
fruitful in its spawning than the latter, retains its young within the
parent shell until long after they have passed the tender stages, when
they leave the mantle cavity of the parent to swim for themselves.
This oyster could rightly be called viviparous, while the Eastern
oyster is oviparous. On account of its nurse-acting proclivities this
West-coast oyster has an immense advantage here over the introduced
species. The latter's eggs have to run the following gantlet: (1) Not
meeting with a fertilizing cell and perishing in consequence; (2)
sinking, before or after fertilization, in the fatal mud; (3) being
eaten by small fish and other minute animals; (4) being killed by
sudden changes in the temperature and density of the water. Artificial
fertilization and the rearing of the embryos in the laboratory largely
eliminate these dangers. We have adopted other methods to insure
success. A few of the oysters were removed from the Government plant
and deposited two miles farther up the bay, nine miles and a half from
the ocean, where it was thought the water was warmer, less salt, and
less variable than on Oysterville Flat. Some, during the breeding
season, were placed on spawning floats and anchored near the shore,
where the shallow water is thoroughly warmed by the sun. It was in one
of these floats that the oystermen had an opportunity to see the
oysters spawn "spontaneous," for the water therein, reaching 70° F.,
became milk-white with spawn or milt within an hour after the oysters
had been taken from the plant. This was really our first proof that
the introduced oyster would spawn here. Some were placed in sloughs
adjoining the bay, with the hope that favorable conditions would be
met with there. Others were placed in artificially constructed salt
ponds somewhat after the style used by the French.
[Illustration: EASTERN OYSTERS IN OREGON. The lower row shows size
when planted in 1896; the upper row represents their appearance in
1898.]
What has been the outcome? The oysters, particularly the Princess Bay
variety, have grown enormously and are in excellent condition. Until
this spring no Eastern spat or young Eastern oysters had been
discovered; this, of course, is the crucial point in the experiment;
we know they will spawn, but will the spawn develop? Recently, much to
our encouragement, a few young oysters, apparently of last summer's
spawning, have been found and forwarded to Washington, proof positive
that the oyster will propagate here, but not certain evidence of the
practical outcome of the experiment. It is too early to predict
results as yet; two years more are really required to tell the story.
For thirty years Eastern oysters have been shipped to San Francisco by
enterprising firms of that city, planted there in the bay until a
large size is attained, and then sold at an immense profit. These
firms have always claimed that the Eastern oyster did not reproduce
there. As far as can be ascertained from a reliable source, the
shipments in recent years have rather increased than diminished, this
fact being used as an argument to support the above statement. It is
nevertheless a known fact that much Eastern spat and many adult
oysters undoubtedly hatched there have been found by members of the
United States Fish Commission and others. Moreover, with increasing
trade one would naturally expect more shipments, even though the
introduced oyster did propagate to some extent.
_Ostrea lurida_, the toothsome little native oyster which years ago
was so abundant at Yaquina Bay, affording support to many families,
has decreased in numbers to such an alarming extent that unless some
radical measures are soon taken to prevent, the native oyster industry
of this locality will be a thing of the past. This decrease in the
size and numbers appears to be due to several causes. In the first
place, there has been a very persistent tonging on a somewhat limited
area. This might have been counterbalanced by proper precautions to
insure a future supply, but, with characteristic lack of foresight,
such precautions have been neglected, and the beds have been culled
year after year, until the comparatively few oysters now marketed from
Yaquina Bay are of very questionable size. Each oysterman has two
acres of flats for private use. Three natural beds in the bay afford
sources of supply for these private beds. The larger oysters tonged on
the natural beds are marketed, and the smaller specimens spread on
the private ground referred to. Beyond strewing clean shells on these
private beds, no provision is made to collect the swimming embryos
during the spawning season, and multitudes must be carried away and
lost. The writer has urged upon the oystermen the need of collectors
of brush or tile, by the use of which the oysters which they have
acquired may be largely increased in numbers, and will endeavor to
demonstrate, by the use of tile collectors, that hundreds of young
spat may be saved and raised to marketable age. Our native oyster
structurally and physiologically resembles the European oyster
(_Ostrea edulis_), and, like it, could be propagated in artificial
oyster ponds. The practicability of such work on the West American
coast depends, of course, on the market price of the resulting product
as compared with the outlay required for labor.
MALAY FOLKLORE.
BY R. CLYDE FORD.
The Malay is an Oriental, and, of course, possesses a goodly number of
superstitions and old wives' fables, but he does not hug them to his
soul like some of the other peoples of the East--the Chinaman, for
instance, who lives only by favor of gods, ghosts, goblins, and
devils. The Malay lives in spite of spirits, good or bad, and tries to
be a model Mohammedan at the same time. With bold assurance and
positiveness, he puts his trust in Allah; but, after all, this does
not keep him from cherishing, on the sly, a knowledge of a few
uncanny, hair-raising beliefs any more than to be a devout churchman
with us removes one from the occult influences of stolen dishcloths,
overturned saltcellars, and the phases of the moon.
The Malay man's _aberglaube_--his superstition--is undoubtedly of
ancient origin. For five hundred years or more he has said his prayers
five times a day in response to the muezzin's cry of _Allah ho akbar_,
and his religion has penetrated the very life of his race and spread
to the most distant confines of the archipelago, but it has never been
able to remove entirely the heritage of that past when he was governed
by Sanskrit gods or by deities of his own. Whatever he may have
believed then and since changed, these fragments and relics of
goblindom and superstition go back to that time, and so link on to all
the weird love that prevailed in the ancient world. Another evidence
of the primitiveness of Malay folklore may be seen in the fact that
the inhabitants of the jungles and _padangs_ and the aboriginal
dwellers of mountains and dense forests cherish much more heathen
notions and greater elaborations of everyday superstitions than the
more enlightened and modernized Malays of towns and _campongs_. In the
East, as in the West, the man who lives close to Nature "holds
communion with her visible forms," and likewise finds out, or thinks
he does, a good deal about her invisible shapes.
The Malay has on his list of uncanny things the names of several
spirits. Disease is everywhere a great dread of men, and often looked
upon as an infliction of the supernatural powers. There are several
spirits of sickness recognized among the Malays, but they reserve
their greatest horror for the influences of the _Hantu Katumbohan_, or
spirit of smallpox. But other spirits abound; there are some that
inhabit the sources of streams, and many that dwell in forests. Mines,
too, have their patron goblins, which are propitiated by the miners.
The sea-going Malay, also, whose vision has been clarified by bitter
salt spray, knows and frequently sees the spirits that inhabit certain
parts of the ocean.
The _Hantu Pemburo_, or phantom hunter, is a spirit the Malays take
special account of; in general, he seems to resemble the _wilde Jäger_
of German folklore. Long ago, so the story has it, there lived a
certain man and his wife in Katapang, in Sumatra. One day the wife
fell sick, and, thinking the flesh of a mouse-deer might strengthen
her, she asked her husband to kill one for her. He went forth on the
hunt, but was unsuccessful and soon returned. His wife now became very
angry, and told him to try again--in fact, not to return till he could
come home with the coveted game. The man swore a mighty oath, called
his dogs, took his weapons, and set out into the forest. He wandered
and wandered, and always in vain. The days ran into months, the months
became years, and still no mouse-deer. At last, despairing of finding
the animal on earth, he ordered his dogs to bay the stars, and they
sprang away through the sky, and he followed. As he walked with
upturned gaze, a leaf fell into his mouth and took root there.
At home things were not going well. His son, born after his departure,
when he became a lad, was often taunted by the other children of the
_campong_, and twitted of the fact that his father was a wandering
ghost. After hearing the truth from his mother, the boy went out into
the forest to meet the huntsman. Far from the haunts of men, in the
depths of the forest, they met and conversed. The boy told of his
wrongs, and the father vowed to avenge them, and ever since that time,
say the Malays, he has afflicted mankind. At night he courses through
the wood and sky with a noisy, yelping pack, and woe to the man who
sees him! On the peninsula the people mutter this charm to ward off
his evil influence:
"I know thy history,
O man of Katapang!
Therefore return thou
To thy jungle of Mohang,
And do not bring sickness upon me."
The Malay is a firm believer in the efficacy of charms. He wears
amulets, places written words of magic in houses, and sports a tiger's
claw as a preventive of disease. If he is specially primitive and
backwoodsy, when he enters a forest he says: "Go to the right, all my
enemies and assailants! May you not look upon me; let me walk alone!"
To allay a storm he says: "The elephants collect, they wallow across
the sea; go to the right, go to the left, I break the tempest." When
about to begin an elephant hunt, according to Thompson, he uses this
charm: "The elephant trumpets, he wallows across the lake. The pot
boils, the pan boils across the point. Go to the left, go to the
right, spirit of grandfather (the elephant); I loose the fingers upon
the bowstring."
The Malay believes in witches and witchcraft. There is the bottle imp,
the _Polong_, which feeds on its owner's blood till the time comes for
it to take possession of an enemy. Then there is a horrid thing, the
_Penangalan_, which possesses women. Frequently it leaves its rightful
abode to fly away at night to feed on blood, taking the form of the
head and intestines of the person it inhabited, in which shape it
wanders around.
Such beliefs may perhaps have their origin in metempsychosis, which in
other ways has some foothold among the common people. For instance,
elephants and tigers are believed sometimes to be human souls in
disguise, and so the Malay addresses them as "grandfather" to allay
their wrath and avoid direct reference to them. Crocodiles also are
often regarded as sacred, and special charms are used in fishing for
them. One such, given by Maxwell, is as follows: "O Dangsari, lotus
flower, receive what I send thee. If thou receivest it not, may thy
eyes be torn out!"
The domestic animals also figure in Malay folklore. Dogs are unlucky
and regarded with suspicion, for they would like to lick their
master's bones. Cats, on the other hand, are lucky, and show a
fondness for their owners.
Owls are regarded as birds of ill omen, and their hooting forebodes
death.
Days are lucky and unlucky. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are
fortunate birthdays, and a dream on a Thursday night will come true.
To dream of a dog or a flood is unlucky. To stumble when starting on a
journey is a bad sign, and before setting out on a pilgrimage to Mecca
certain formulas are muttered and signs followed.
The Malay hates to tear down a house, and so the old one is left
standing when a new one is built. The ladder of a house must be built
just so, or disaster comes to the owner or builder; and to knock one's
head on the lintel is regarded as unfavorable. One rises quickly from
a meal; otherwise, if he is single, he may be regarded with disfavor
by his prospective father-in-law.
As one travels over the archipelago he finds that superstitions vary,
and what may be regarded by the Malays of the peninsula as
particularly ominous may have no meaning at all with the Malays of the
south or east. The Dyaks of Borneo are probably the most uncivilized
of all the Malay tribes, for Mohammedanism has taken but little hold
upon them, and their natural paganism remains as yet unshaken. Of
their folklore we know but little. It awaits the conquest of the West,
like the island itself.
ELECTRICITY FROM THALES TO FARADAY.
BY ERNEST A. LESUEUR.
It is so common a notion nowadays that electricity had its birth and
rise in the nineteenth century that it gives one a strange mental
sensation to contemplate the fact that all the myriads of commercial
applications that have of late years been developed in this field
might have been made by the Chinese or the ancient Egyptians, so far
as the potentiality of Nature for developing electrical phenomena is
concerned. The writer used to know a delightful old gentleman in
Vermont who once referred, as to a well-known fact, to Edison's having
invented electricity. It is astonishing how closely his state of mind
typifies that of a great many people.
In the form of the lightning, the aurora, and the shock of the
electric eel or torpedo, electrical manifestations have been known
ever since man commenced to observe those phenomena, but the fossil
resin amber was the substance which eventually gave its name to the
now tremendous agency. This material was observed, many centuries
before our era, to possess the property of attracting light bodies to
itself when rubbed with wool, and, being called [Greek: êlektron]
(electron) by the Greeks, transmitted its name to the property or
force which it thus brought into evidence. The fact is mentioned as
early as 600 B. C., by Thales of Miletus, although he does not
transmit to us the name of the original observer of the phenomenon.
Homely as was the experiment, it marked a beginning in electrical
research.
Not that scientific investigations in that or any line were pushed
very assiduously in those days, for there is a great gap between the
discovery of the property above alluded to and the acquisition of any
more solid knowledge pertaining to electricity. The phenomenon was at
that time set down in the list of natural facts, and no attempt
appears to have been made to connect it with others. The inquiring
spirit of the present age can hardly be brought into more striking
relief than by a comparison of the, at present, almost daily advances
in scientific knowledge with the fact that twenty-two hundred years
elapsed between the discovery of the above-mentioned power of amber by
the ancients and the later one that a very large number of other
substances, such as diamonds, vitrefactions of all kinds, sulphur,
common resin, etc., possess the same property. A few other scattered
facts were, however, also noted by the ancients: fire is said to have
streamed from the head of Servius Tullius at the age of seven, and
Virgil asserts that flame was emitted by the hair of Ascanius.
In examining, now, the history of the rise of electrical science we
find, as just mentioned, the vast gap of over two millenniums between
the discovery of the attracting power of rubbed amber and the mere
extension of man's knowledge so as to include other substances. The
philosophers Boyle and Otto von Guericke, who were active during the
latter half of the seventeenth century, added a mass of new data in
this line. Boyle, moreover, discovered the equivalence of action and
reaction between the attracting and the attracted body, and that the
rubbed amber or other "electric" retained its attractive powers for a
certain period after excitation had ceased.
Otto von Guericke made a vast step forward by constructing the first
electrical machine, in a crude form, truly, but which proved of the
utmost service in adding to our knowledge of the properties of
electricity. His machine was constructed very simply of a globe of
sulphur mounted on a spindle, which could be rotated by means of a
crank; the operator applied friction with the hand, his body receiving
a positive charge, while the surface of the sulphur acquired a
negative. The fact of the two electrifications being separated at the
surface of the sulphur was not, however, known at the time; the only
charge that Guericke observed being that appearing on the sulphur. The
reason for this was that the latter, being a nonconductor, any
electricity generated upon it was compelled to stay there, for a
certain time at least, and consequently accumulated so as to be
observable; whereas the opposite electrification flowing into the
operator's hand continuously escaped to earth without giving any sign
of its presence. Had the operator stood upon an insulating support,
the electrification would have accumulated on his body as well as upon
the sulphur. Guericke made the discovery that a light body, having
been once attracted to an electrified surface, was almost immediately
repelled from it, and could not be again attracted without having its
imparted electrification removed by contact with an uncharged surface.
Sir Isaac Newton, about 1675, made an interesting application of a
principle allied to this. He used a hollow, drum-shaped contrivance
with glass ends and a very short axis, into which he put a number of
fragments of paper. On briskly rubbing the outside of the glass with a
piece of silk the paper was caused to "leap from one part of the glass
to another and twirl about in the air." This was repeated in 1676
before the Royal Society, to the great edification of that learned
body.
Newton made a considerable improvement in the electrical machine of
Guericke by the substitution of a hollow globe of glass for Guericke's
sulphur one. What is chiefly interesting about the improvement is the
fact that Guericke's sulphur globe, of comparative weight and
cumbrousness, was made by casting melted sulphur into a glass globe
and then breaking off the glass. Guericke observed in the dark a
peculiar luminosity of conducting surfaces when well charged by means
of his machine; he compared it to the phosphorescent light observed
when lump sugar is broken in the dark. It was what is now known as the
brush-discharge effect.
In 1705 Francis Hawksbee discovered the peculiar phenomenon which he
termed the mercurial phosphorus. It was produced by causing a stream
of well-dried mercury to fall through an exhausted glass receiver. The
friction of the particles of mercury against the jet piece and the
glass caused an electrification which evinced itself in a
phosphorescent glow. The receiver, indeed, had not to be by any means
thoroughly exhausted, the phenomenon occurring at an air pressure up
to about fourteen inches of the barometer.
The crackling noise and the spark accompanying electrical discharge
suggested about this time the analogy of those miniature disturbances
to thunder and lightning, but the identity of the two was not fully
established until later.
Up to this time the fact that certain substances were capable of
conducting electricity was not known, but in 1729 Stephen Gray, F. R.
S., an enthusiastic investigator, made the discovery, and at the same
time the cognate one that a large class of materials are
nonconductors. The only source of electricity which was at the
disposal of experimenters up to this time was the electrical machine,
improved, as described, by Newton, which furnished intermittent
currents (discharges) of infinitesimal quantity, as we should say now,
but of extremely high pressure. This fact of the enormous pressure
resulted in the electricity's forcing its way through very imperfect
conductors, so as to cause our investigators to rank many of these
latter with the metals. Thus Gray concluded that pack thread was a
good conductor because it did not oppose sufficient resistance to
prevent the flow of his high pressure (or, as we should now say, high
voltage or tension) electricity. He tried wire as well, but did not
realize it was a better conductor than the thread, although its
conductivity was actually in the millions of times as great. In
collaboration with his friend Wheeler he conveyed electrical
discharges a distance of eight hundred and eighty-six feet, through
presumably air-dry pack thread--an achievement which would almost be
notable at the present time. He insulated the line by hanging it from
loops of silk thread.
Gray hoped "that there may be found out a way to collect a greater
quantity of electric fire, and consequently to increase the force of
that power, which, _si licet magnis componere parva_, seems to be of
the same nature with thunder and lightning."
About this time Desaguliers discovered that those materials which,
upon being rubbed, develop electrical charges, are all nonconductors,
and that, conversely, nonelectrics are conductors. The terms electrics
and nonelectrics were applied to bodies respectively capable and
incapable of excitation; the words idioelectrics and anelectrics were
also used in respectively equivalent senses.
In France, Dufay discovered that the conductivity of pack thread was
greatly improved by the presence of moisture, and he succeeded in
conveying a discharge a distance of almost thirteen hundred feet. He
suspended himself by silken cords and had himself electrified, and
then observed that he could give a shock accompanied by a spark to any
person standing on the ground.
He also established the fact of the two opposite kinds of
electrification, and gave them the names of vitreous and resinous,
from the fact that the former was developed by the excitation of glass
and vitreous substances generally, and the latter from that of amber
and resins. He observed that the distinguishing characteristic of the
two was the fact that opposite charges attracted each other, while
similar ones exerted mutual repulsion. Dufay and Gray died within
three years of each other, both at the age of forty, Gray having added
to the results already mentioned the discovery of the conducting
powers of certain liquids and of the human body.
Experimental research now began to spread into Germany and the
Netherlands. The electrical machine was greatly improved by Professor
Boze, of Wittenberg, and Professor Winkler, of Leipsic, who
respectively added the prime conductor and the silk rubber to that
important piece of apparatus. A Scotch Benedictine monk of
Erfurt--Professor Gordon--substituted a glass cylinder for the sphere,
and thereby brought the instrument in its essentials practically to
the form in which it exists to-day. The improvement enabled the
production of very large sparks, which were caused to produce the
inflammation of various combustibles. Gordon went so far as to ignite
alcohol by means of a jet of electrified water.
We now come to an epoch-making discovery--that of the condenser, or,
in its conventional laboratory form, the Leyden jar. Professor
Muschenbroeck, of the University of Leyden, was struck with the idea
that it would be a good plan to try to prevent the dissipation of the
electric charge by inclosing the conductor containing it in an
insulating envelope. He therefore took a glass jar, partly filled it
with water, and electrified the latter. His assistant, who was holding
the bottle, accidentally touched the wire which made connection with
the water, and received on the instant a shock much more violent than
any that the electrical machine was capable of giving. This led to the
discovery that as the charge of vitreous electricity had accumulated
in the water, a corresponding charge of the opposite kind had gathered
upon the outside of the glass and been "bound" there, as it is called,
by the attraction exercised upon it by the charge on the inside. It
had been enabled to get upon the glass by the fact of the assistant's
hand having covered part of the surface of the latter, and, since he
stood upon the ground, the electricity had quietly flowed from the
latter up through his body to the outside surface of the glass.