Engis or Cro-Magnon), so remarkable for its fine proportion, is also
remarkable for its capacity. According to M. Broca, who could only
work under precautions calculated to diminish the amount, it is equal
to at least 1,590 cubic centimetres (96.99 cubic inches). I have
already remarked that this number is far higher than the mean taken
from modern Parisians; it is equally so in comparison with other
European nations."
These facts all conspire to prove that the cultivation of thousands
of years has not increased the size of human skulls. In 1886, we
measured many of the skulls unearthed at Pompeii, the remains of
Romans who lived nearly two thousand years ago, and we found them on
the average larger in every way, but especially in the forehead, than
the skulls of Romans of this century.
In the museums of Switzerland we measured in 1887 several skulls of
the ancient lake dwellers of that country, and found them larger
in all respects, but particularly in the forehead, than those of
the Swiss people of the last fifty years. The average circumference
of the skulls we measured in the catacombs of Paris was twenty-one
inches and a half, which is about an inch more than that of Parisians
who have died within the past fifty years.
"The average internal capacity of the Peruvian skull is only
seventy-three cubic inches; that of Toltec skulls, seventy-seven
inches, and that of barbarous tribes, eighty-two inches; so that the
extraordinary anomaly is presented of a larger brain being possessed
by the barbarous tribes than by the nations who achieved no mean
degree of civilization in Central America and Peru. The average
European skull is ninety-three inches in bulk."[56] The author was
informed by Mr. Lucien Carr, of the Ethnological Museum of Harvard
University, that the capacity of the Peruvian skulls was about one
hundred centimetres smaller than that of the skulls of any other
people living in America at the same time. Yet that small-headed
people was the most highly civilized of all.
FOOTNOTES:
[32] Medical Times and Gazette, London, England, November 17, 1883.
[33] Whewell also had "the scalp and skull thick." Brain weighed 49
ounces. The Lancet, London, England, March 17, 1866, p. 280.
[34] Medical Times and Gazette, London, England, May 12, 1883, p. 525.
[35] London Medical Gazette, London, England, September 13, 1828, p.
478.
[36] Brain Weight of Man. By Dr. Bischoff. Bonn, Germany, 1880, p.
137.
[37] Authority for this weight is the Medical Army Museum,
Washington, D. C.
[38] This brain is kept in and its weight is recorded on the glass
jar in the Pathological Museum at Munich, Germany.
[39] Idiocy and Imbecility. By Dr. Ireland. London, 1877, p. 75.
[40] The Human Species. By A. De Quatrefages. D. Appleton and
Company, New York, 1884, p. 380.
[41] Dr. Gall's works, Boston, Massachusetts, vol. i, p. 36.
[42] Life of George Combe, London, 1878, vol. ii, p. 381.
[43] Medical News and Gazette, London, June 16, 1888, p. 521.
[44] Morning Herald, Sydney, Australia, February 23, 1884.
[45] Eleven Chinamen, found by Dr. C. Clapham to afford an average of
50.4 ounces, had been killed in a typhoon, and were therefore in no
wise wasted by disease. (Journal of the Anthropological Institute,
London, England, vol. vii, p. 90.)
[46] The Nervous System, London, 1834, p. 447.
[47] Anatomie comparative du système nerveux, tome i, 1839, p. 506.
[48] Ueber die typischen Verschiedenheiten der Windungen der
Hemisphären und über die Lehre vom Hirngewicht, Göttingen, 1860. Also
see Pathology and Therapeutics of Mental Diseases, London, 1870, p.
23.
[49] History of Philosophy, London, 1867, vol. ii, p. 433.
[50] The Brain as an Organ of Mind, London, 1880, pp. 276, 277.
[51] Nachrichten, Göttingen, February 29, 1860, p. 75.
[52] Carpenter's Principles of Human Physiology, London, 1881, p. 659.
[53] Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, 1853, vol. lxxix, p. 360.
[54] Idiocy and Imbecility, London, 1877, pp. 216-219.
[55] See The Brain as an Organ of Mind, London, 1880, p. 465; also,
The Human Brain, London, 1847, pp. 288, 289.
[56] Eclectic Magazine, December 14, 1863, p. 428.
SPELEOLOGY, OR CAVE EXPLORATION.[57]
BY M. E. A. MARTEL.
The not very graceful word _speleology_ was composed a few years ago
by M. Émile Rivière out of Greek elements, as a translation of the
German _Höhlenkunde_, to signify the study of caves. The study claims
a place among the sciences, and is, I believe, able to justify its
claim. Caves have been subjects of interest and curiosity in all
times and countries. In the primitive ages, when palæolithic man was
obliged to defend himself against the large Quaternary wild beasts,
and did not yet know how to construct cabins, he lived in the most
inaccessible caves, or those easiest to close, which he could find.
Afterward, when man had advanced in civilization to the neolithic
stage, and had somewhat improved tools and arms, having learned to
build huts and villages, caves became simply burial places. In the
historical periods of antiquity they were transformed into pagan
sanctuaries or temporary hiding places in times of revolt, civil
war, or invasion. Down to the middle ages and the renascence, they
shared this function with abandoned quarries. Through these changes
they gradually became objects of popular fear and absurd legend. I
have nearly everywhere in France found legendary and profound belief
in some monstrous basilisk or dragon in the depths of dark caverns,
guarding immense treasures; and woe to the rash adventurer who tried
to steal these riches!
In short, caves have suffered their vicissitudes; their use as
habitations seems to be inversely proportioned to the degree of
civilization. The miserable aborigines of Australia have not yet
quite abandoned them; and in France the present occupation of the
grottoes of Ezy, in the Eure, by some outcast families, who lead a
sordid existence in them, indifferent to all social conventions,
has recently been cited as an extremely curious anthropological
phenomenon.
Science, too, has laid its hold on caves only within a little more
than a century; for it was not till 1774 that Esper recognized that
the large bones taken from the caverns near Baireuth, in Bavaria,
were not those of human giants, but of extinct animals, and he
called them, they being petrified by limestone, _zoöliths_, or
animal-stones; and it was his remarks upon them that drew Cuvier's
attention to paleontology.
Three sciences have of late years been advanced by the explorations
of caves: paleontology; prehistory, or research among the remains
of primitive men and their industries; and zoölogy, or the study
of living beings. The animals of caverns--crustaceans, insects,
batrachians, and fishes--constitute a special fauna, which has been
for fifty years a subject of study to naturalists of various nations,
and to the anatomy of which M. Armand Viré, of the Natural History
Museum of Paris, has been giving special attention for five years
past.
There are other sciences the study of which in connection with
caves, while capable of yielding valuable fruits, has been too long
neglected: geology, for their origin and formation; mineralogy, for
their relations to metallic veins; meteorology, for thermometrical
and barometrical variations and the formation of carbonic acid;
terrestrial physics, for the experiments on gravity that might be
carried on in deep vertical pits, supplementing the observations
of Foucault in the Pantheon at Paris, and Airy in the English
mines; hydrology, which has hardly yet perceived that caves are
predominantly great laboratories of springs; agriculture, which might
transform them into reservoirs for times of drought or storage basins
in case of flood; and public hygiene, which is just beginning to
discover that they may harbor in their fissures hitherto unsuspected
causes of contamination of the water of the springs that issue from
them. The number and importance of these new problems that have
arisen from the recent extension of underground investigations seem
fully to justify the specialization of the science of caves--another
creation of the Speleological Society, now four years old. This
special interest in the science of caves began about fifteen years
ago, when, in 1883, three members of the Austro-German Alpine
Club--Herren Harske, Marinitsch, and Müller--resumed in the limestone
plateaus of Istria and Carniola called the Karst, explorations which
had been actively and profitably carried on in the middle of the
century, from 1850 to 1857, by Dr. Adolf Schmidt, whose discoveries
in the caves of Adelsberg, Planina, and St. Canzion won him a
membership in the Vienna Academy of Sciences. Their efforts and those
of Herr F. Kraus, who died last year, had the result of interesting
the Austrian Government in the subject; and since 1886 various
engineers have been commissioned by the Minister of Agriculture to
make official explorations and construct economical works in the
caves and underground rivers of Istria, Carniola, and Herzegovina.
Credits are granted every year for enterprises which prove to be more
useful than would at first be thought.
It was at the same time, between 1883 and 1885, that I made my first
investigation in the Causses of Lozère, Aveyron, and the adjoining
departments of France, the results of which were to reveal for the
first time to the public, and even to geographers, the picturesque
beauties, then unknown, and now becoming the fashion, of the gorges
of the Tarn, Jenta, and Dourbie, the rocks of Montpelier le Vieux,
etc. In my excursions over the plateaus of the Causses I frequently
met, at the level of the surface, open, dark holes, and mouths of
vertical wells--_avens_--the depths of which no one had ever looked
into, unsoundable, they said, which the peasants naturally took to be
real mouths of hell. Recollecting what I had admired at Adelsberg and
in various caves of the Pyrenees, I guessed these avens might also
be doorways to subterranean splendors and scientific treasures. So I
began in 1888 the methodical exploration of the unexamined natural
cavities of my own land first, and then of other countries of Europe;
and since then I have devoted several weeks every year to this work.
These pits are simply horizontal holes opening upon the surface of
the ground, of very different forms and dimensions. Herdsmen are very
careful not to let their cattle go too near them, for they sometimes
fall in.
The diameter of these pits varies from a few inches to several
hundred yards, and they are sometimes more than six hundred feet
deep. It is not easy to go down into them, especially when they are
on high levels away from habitations and roads. In such cases a
considerable apparatus of ropes, rope ladders, telephone, portable
boat, tent, etc., has to be taken along. The first measurement with
the sounding line gives the depth only of the first pit--and there
are often several succeeding one another. A rope ladder long enough
to reach the bottom is then let down, and the man who descends has
a rope tied about him for additional security, which is held by the
people above. A great many pits are narrower at the top than lower
down, forming something like a reversed speaking trumpet, so that
the explorer finds it very difficult to make himself heard at the
top; hence I have adopted the practice of taking a telephone along.
The interior shapes of the pits are very diverse. The narrower ones
are easiest to go down, because they permit one partly to support
himself against their walls. The wider ones leave him hanging loose,
in a position which he feels to be very precarious. When there is a
second or third pit, and we have not ladders enough, we have to trust
ourselves to a simple rope with a board fastened at the end of it
for a seat. The _gouffre_ of Vigne Close, in Ardèche, which is about
six hundred feet deep, has five successive pits, and its complete
exploration required three days. The bottom of the pit may be a
simple cleft in the rock, or an immense cathedral-like chamber; as at
Rabanel, near Ganges, and Hérault, the deepest abyss in France, the
vault of which expands into a gigantic nave, five hundred feet high,
which is lighted by the beam of light that falls through the opening,
presenting a grand and indescribable spectacle. Some pits of less
depth, as the Tin doul de la Vayssière, in Aveyron, and the Padirac
well, in Lot, both leading to underground rivers, enjoy a still more
complete illumination. Considerable talus banks close the ends of
these broad pits, and are generally produced by the caving in of the
roofs of caves.
Lively controversies and gross errors have prevailed concerning the
geological formation of abysses. The abyss of Jean Nouveau, Vaucluse,
among others, furnishes evidence against the false hypothesis that
such pits are as a rule the results of cave-ins, whereas pits of that
origin are rare and exceptional. These pits are for the most part
fissures, the principal feature of which is their narrowness. At Jean
Nouveau the greatest breadth is not more than about sixteen feet. It
is the deepest vertical pit of a single shaft without intermediate
terraces that we know of, and is about five hundred and thirty feet
from the surface of the ground to its floor. The mass of stone
rubbish at the bottom prevented our descending into a second pit.
Pits composed, like Vigne Close, of several successive wells, destroy
another hypothesis--that of the formation of _gouffres_ by the
emissions from thermal springs.
The greatest danger in descending these pits arises from the showers
of stones that sometimes come down upon the head of the explorer.
These are often started by his friends the hunters, or by their dogs
gamboling around at will.
While some of the caverns I have explored were stopped up by
obstacles of one kind or another that prevented further progress, in
others we found considerable rivers running a nearly free course. We
rarely found pits formed by the collapse of the roofs of the cave in
cases where the distance from the subterranean river which by its
work of erosion provoked the catastrophe to the surface was more
than one hundred metres. The pit of the Mas Raynal, Aveyron, is one
hundred and six metres deep, and abuts upon a large subterranean
river, which supplies the Sorgues of Saint-Affrique, one of the
finest springs of France. When we explored it, in 1889, we could not
pass the low chambers which occur in it because the water was too
high, and we have not visited it since. Its exploration in a dry
season might reveal many very interesting chambers.
In the cave of Rabanel, the first well, which ends in a talus of
fallen stones, furnishes an instance of a vertical fissure grafted,
if we may use the word, upon an interior grotto that already existed.
A stream runs through this grotto which falls into a second well
twenty-six metres, and is then lost in smaller passages so nearly
stopped up with earth that we were not able to follow it through its
course of about a mile till it comes out at the Brissac spring.
The cave of Trebiciano, in Istria, near Trieste, the deepest known,
has a total depth of more than a thousand feet. It is not, however,
entirely natural, but is composed of numerous vertical fissures which
lead, at about eight hundred and fifty feet below the surface, to a
large cavern, at the bottom of which flows the subterranean river
Recca. The fissures do not naturally communicate directly with one
another, but the engineer Lindner was commissioned in 1840-'41 by the
city of Trieste to construct for the municipality a supply of potable
water from the underground streams, and after eleven months of labor
made artificial connections between the different parts of the chasm.
These vertical pits are formed by the wearing down, from the top,
by the waters which become ingulfed in them. This mode of their
formation was demonstrated to me in 1895, when I was in Great Britain
under a commission from the French Minister of Instruction. I then
explored several caves in which the rivers were still running, and
satisfied myself that the pits were simply absorbing wells. Such
wells are not effective now in southern France and Austria, but
in northern Europe, where rain is more abundant, they are still
operative. I found the plainest evidence of this fact in Yorkshire,
at the Gaping Ghyll, Ingleborough, where a river precipitates itself
at one leap one hundred metres under the earth. English investigators
and travelers had tried without success to descend into it in
1845, 1870, and 1894, having conquered only about one hundred and
ninety-five feet of its total depth of two hundred and twenty-nine
feet. It took me twenty-five minutes to go down upon a rope ladder
which was suspended in the midst of the cascade. Fortunately, the
pit had the daylight to the very bottom--a wonderful spectacle,
compensating me for all my trouble and the long douche bath which
greeted me at the end of the descent, where stretched an immense
Roman nave nearly five hundred feet long, eighty feet wide, and
ninety feet high, without any sustaining pillar. From the middle of
the roof of this colossal cavern fell the cascade in a great nimbus
of vapor and light--a wonderful fantastic scene, such as Gustave
Doré or Jules Verne could never have imagined. The most pleasant
feature of the whole of it, however, to me was the thought that I had
succeeded where the English had failed, and on their own ground. The
people were nevertheless very pleasant to me, and at my instance have
continued the exploration and made some new discoveries.--_Translated
for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique._
FOOTNOTE:
[57] From an address before the Société des Amis des Sciences.
SKETCH OF CHARLES HENRY HITCHCOCK.
The name of Prof. Charles H. Hitchcock is closely associated with the
progress of New England geology, especially with the discovery of the
great terminal glacial moraine, and, in connection with the name of
his father, Dr. Edward Hitchcock, with the study of the fossil bird
tracks of the Connecticut River Valley.
CHARLES HENRY HITCHCOCK was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, August
23, 1836, the son of Prof. Edward Hitchcock, the eminent geologist,
who was afterward president of Amherst College. The family is of
English origin, and was planted in America by two brothers who came
over at nearly the same time and made homes for themselves in New
Haven, removing later to towns near by. Luke Hitchcock, the ancestor
of the subject of this sketch, came in 1695, and finally settled at
Wethersfield, Connecticut. His descendants in the direct line lived
at Springfield, Granville, Deerfield, and Amherst, Massachusetts.
Professor Hitchcock is in the seventh generation from Luke, and is
equally removed from Elder John White, his maternal ancestor, who
came to Canton, Massachusetts, toward the end of the seventeenth
century, and removed thence to the Connecticut Valley. Both lines of
ancestry were purely English, and all the progenitors were men of
integrity, regarded in their times as worthy to fill offices of trust
in church and town. Two of them served in the Revolutionary army.
The father of Professor Hitchcock was one of the most distinguished
geologists and educators of his time, and his services, especially
as State Geologist of Massachusetts, have already been described
in the Popular Science Monthly.[58] His mother was the daughter
of Jacob White, a well-to-do farmer of Amherst, who, believing in
the education of women, had given her the best opportunities for
study available at the time. She could read the Greek Testament and
calculate eclipses, and was a gifted artist with pencil and brush.
She prepared with her own hands many of the numerous illustrations in
her husband's reports, and also diagrams for the lecture room. She
took indefatigable pains with the education of her children, placing
their moral and religious welfare first. Of the eight children of
the family, six of whom reached maturity, the surviving brother
is professor of physical culture, and, for the time being, acting
president at Amherst College, and one of the two surviving sisters,
the widow of the Rev. C. M. Terry, has been for several years matron
of the Hubbard Cottage, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.
Beginning with 1835, the year before Professor Hitchcock was born,
his father, Professor Edward Hitchcock, was largely occupied with
the study of the "fossil bird tracks" in the New Red Sandstone
of the Connecticut Valley, and with the discussions to which the
investigation gave rise, the story of which has been told by Prof.
C. H. Hitchcock himself in the Popular Science Monthly (vol.
iii, August, 1873). Besides the search for the fossils and their
collection and comparison, and the examination of the literature
that might throw light on the subject, there were studies into the
proper interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis, the debate
with Prof. Moses Stewart, of Andover, and the gradual approach of the
American clergy to general acquiescence in the belief that geology is
not at variance with Scripture. Professor Hitchcock's childhood was
largely spent under the influence of these studies and discussions.
The boy seemed to be full of promise, and because of his observing
ways and proneness to speculation was called "the young philosopher."
He used to bring his mother the very small flowers of _Spergula
rubra_, which are so obscure that older eyes often fail to notice
them. He seemed to be fonder of his father than the other children,
and was never so happy as with him. Through this constant intercourse
Charles became absorbed in his father's pursuits, and grew up into
a knowledge of geology from Nature and from verbal explanations--a
more satisfactory method than that of learning from books; and he
was associated with his father in all his geological work from the
time when he was first old enough to be of service. Thus, before
1856 he was acquainted, from inspection, with the terraces and
reputed beaches and drift phenomena of all western Massachusetts; he
had handled every specimen of a foot mark in the Appleton Cabinet,
and by 1861 was the principal assistant on the Vermont Survey,
having prepared for the press the greater part of the matter of the
report. He had enjoyed the best educational advantages of his day,
having completed the classical and preparatory courses of Williston
Seminary, and been graduated thence in 1852, then graduated from
Amherst College in 1856, a short time before his twentieth birthday.
Among his early classmates and college friends were Dr. Cyrus
Northrup, president of Minnesota University; Dr. Richard Mather,
professor of Greek at Amherst College; the Rev. Dr. Goodwin, of
Chicago; and Dr. William Hayes Ward, editor of The Independent. After
graduation he spent a year in special study of Hebrew and chemistry
at Yale College, two years at Andover Theological Seminary, and one
year in Europe, studying in the Royal School of Mines under Professor
Huxley, and in the British Museum investigating the crustacea and
trilobites. Here he enjoyed the friendship of Professor Richard Owen,
and had the guidance of Dr. H. Woodward.
In 1857 Mr. Hitchcock was appointed assistant geologist to the
Geological Survey of Vermont. He served the full term of the survey,
and had charge of the preparation of the report relating to the
stratigraphical geology, the measurement and delineation of the
sections, and the compilation of the geological map.
In 1861 he received the appointment of State Geologist of Maine,
in which service he spent two summers in field work, preparing two
reports of progress, which were published in connection with the
report of the secretary of the Board of Agriculture. Besides the
general reconnoissance, he discovered the existence of large areas of
Upper Silurian and Devonian terranes. He has embodied his views of
the distribution of the formations in his general map of the United
States.