Wheatstone, where the music of a piano is transferred from its
sound-board, through a thin wooden rod, across several silent rooms in
succession, and poured out at a distance from the instrument. The
strings of the piano vibrate, not singly, but ten at a time. Every
string subdivides, yielding not one note, but a dozen. All these
vibrations and subvibrations are crowded together into a bit of deal
not more than a quarter of a square inch in section. Yet no note is
lost. Each vibration asserts its individual rights; and all are, at
last, shaken forth into the air by a second sound-board, against which
the distant end of the rod presses. Thought ends in amazement when it
seeks to realise the motions of that rod as the music flows through
it. I turn to my tree and observe its roots, its trunk, its branches,
and its leaves. As the rod conveys the music, and yields it up to the
distant air, so does the trunk convey the matter and the motion--the
shocks and pulses and other vital actions--which eventually emerge in
the umbrageous foliage of the tree. I went some time ago through the
greenhouse of a friend. He had ferns from Ceylon, the branches of
which were in some cases not much thicker than an ordinary pin--hard,
smooth, and cylindrical--often leafless for a foot or more. But at
the end of every one of them the unsightly twig unlocked the exuberant
beauty hidden within it, and broke forth into a mass of fronds, almost
large enough to fill the arms. We stand here upon a higher level of
the wonderful: we are conscious of a music subtler than that of the
piano, passing unheard through these tiny boughs, and issuing in what
Mr. Martineau would opulently call the 'clustered magnificence' of the
leaves. Does it lessen my amazement to know that every cluster, and
every leaf--their form and texture--lie, like the music in the rod, in
the molecular structure of these apparently insignificant stems? Not
so. Mr. Martineau weeps for' the beauty of the flower fading into a
necessity.' I care not whether it comes to me through necessity or
through freedom, my delight in it is all the same. I see what he sees
with a wonder superadded. To me, as to him, not even Solomon in all
his glory was arrayed like one of these.
I have spoken above as if the assumption of a soul would save Mr.
Martineau from the inconsistency of crediting pure matter with the
astonishing building power displayed in crystals and trees. This,
however, would not be the necessary result; for it would remain to be
proved that the soul assumed is not itself matter. When a boy I
learnt from Dr. Watts that the souls of conscious brutes are mere
matter. And the man who would claim for matter the human soul itself,
would find himself in very orthodox company. 'All that is erected,'
says Fauste, a famous French bishop of the fifth century, 'is matter.
The soul occupies a place; it is enclosed in a body; it quits the body
at death, and returns to it at the resurrection, as in the case of
Lazarus; the distinction between Hell and Heaven, between eternal
pleasures and eternal pains, proves that, even after death, souls
occupy a place and are corporeal. God only is incorporeal.'
Tertullian, moreover, was quite a physicist in the definiteness of his
conceptions regarding the soul. 'The materiality of the soul,' he
says, 'is evident from the evangelists. A human soul is there
expressly pictured as suffering in hell; it is placed in the middle of
a flame, its tongue feels a cruel agony, and it implores a drop of
water at the hands of a happier soul. Wanting materiality,' adds
Tertullian, 'all this would be without meaning.' [Footnote: The
foregoing extracts, which M. Alglave recently brought to light for the
benefit of the Bishop of Orleans, are taken from the sixth Lecture of
the 'Cours d'Histoire Moderns' of that most orthodox of statesmen, M.
Guizot. 'I could multiply,' continues M. Guizot, 'these citations to
infinity, and they prove that in the first centuries of our era the
materiality of the soul was an opinion not only permitted, but
dominant.' Dr. Moriarty, and the synod which he recently addressed,
obviously forget their own antecedents. Their boasted succession from
the early Church renders them the direct offspring of a 'materialism'
more 'brutal' than any ever enunciated by me.]
I have glanced at inorganic nature--at the sea, and the sun, and the
vapour, and the snow-flake, and at organic nature as represented by
the fern and the oak. That same sun which warmed the water and
liberated the vapour, exerts a subtler power on the nutriment of the
tree. It takes hold of matter wholly unfit for the purposes of
nutrition, separates its nutritive from its non-nutritive portions,
gives, the former to the vegetable, and carries the others away.
Planted in the earth, bathed by the air, and tended by the sun, the
tree is traversed by its sap, the cells are formed, the woody fibre is
spun, and the whole is woven to a texture wonderful even to the naked
eye, but a million-fold more so to microscopic vision. Does
consciousness mix in any way with these processes? No man can tell.
Our only ground for a negative conclusion is the absence of those
outward manifestations from which feeling is usually inferred. But
even these are not entirely absent. In the greenhouses of Kew we may
see that a leaf can close, in response to a proper stimulus, as
promptly as the human fingers themselves; and while there Dr. Hooker
will tell us of the wondrous fly-catching and fly-devouring power of
the Dionaea. No man can say that the feelings of the animal are not
represented by a drowsier consciousness in the vegetable world. At
all events, no line has ever been drawn between the conscious and the
unconscious; for the vegetable shades into the animal by such fine
gradations, that is impossible to say where the one ends and the other
begins.
In all such enquiries we are necessarily limited by our own powers: we
observe what our senses, armed with the aids furnished by Science,
enable us to observe; nothing more. The evidences as to consciousness
in the vegetable world depend wholly upon our capacity to observe and
weigh them. Alter the capacity, and the evidence would alter too.
Would that which to us is a total absence of any manifestation of
consciousness be the same to a being with our capacities indefinitely
multiplied? To such a being I can imagine not only the vegetable, but
the mineral world, responsive to the proper irritants, the response
differing only in degree from those exaggerated manifestations, which,
in virtue of their magnitude, appeal to our weak powers of
observation.
Our conclusion, however, must be based, not on powers that we imagine,
but upon those that we possess. What do they reveal? As the earth
and atmosphere offer themselves as the nutriment of the vegetable
world, so does the latter, which contains no constituent not found in
inorganic nature, offer itself to the animal world. Mixed with
certain inorganic substances--water, for example--the vegetable
constitutes, in the long run, the sole sustenance of the animal.
Animals may be divided into two classes, the first of which can
utilise the vegetable world immediately, having chemical forces strong
enough to cope with its most refractory parts; the second class use
the vegetable world mediately; that is to say, after its finer
portions have been extracted and stored up by the first. But in
neither class have we an atom newly created. The animal world is, so
to say, a distillation through the vegetable world from inorganic
nature.
From this point of view all three worlds would constitute a unity, in
which I picture life as immanent everywhere. Nor am I anxious to shut
out the idea that the life here spoken of, may be but a subordinate
part and function of a Higher Life, as the living moving blood is
subordinate to the living man. I resist no such idea as long as it is
not dogmatically imposed. Left for the human mind freely to operate
upon, the idea has ethical vitality; but, stiffened into a dogma, the
inner force disappears, and the outward yoke of a usurping hierarchy
takes its place.
The problem before us is, at all events, capable of definite
statement. We have on the one hand strong grounds for concluding that
the earth was once a molten mass. We now find it not only swathed by
an atmosphere, and covered by a sea, but also crowded with living
things. The question is, How were they introduced? Certainty may be
as unattainable here as Bishop Butler held it to be in matters of
religion; but in the contemplation of probabilities the thoughtful
mind is forced to take a side. The conclusion of Science, which
recognises unbroken causal connection between the past and the
present, would undoubtedly be that the molten earth contained within
it elements of life, which grouped themselves into their present forms
as the planet cooled. The difficulty and reluctance encountered by
this conception, arise solely from the fact that the theologic
conception obtained a prior footing in the human mind. Did the latter
depend upon reasoning alone, it could not hold its ground for an hour
against its rival. But it is warmed into life and strength by
associated hopes and fears--and not only by these, which are more or
less mean, but by that loftiness of thought and feeling which lifts
its possessor above the atmosphere of self, and which the theologic
idea, in its nobler forms, has engendered in noble minds.
Were not man's origin implicated, we should accept without a murmur
the derivation of animal and vegetable life from what we call
inorganic nature. The conclusion of pure intellect points this way
and no other. But the purity is troubled by our interests in this
life, and by our hopes and fears regarding the life to come. Reason
is traversed by the emotions, anger rising in the weaker heads to the
height of suggesting that the suppression of the enquirer by the arm
of the law would be an act agreeable to God, and serviceable to man.
But this foolishness is more than neutralised by the sympathy of the
wise; and in England at least, so long as the courtesy which befits an
earnest theme is adhered to, such sympathy is ever ready for an honest
man. None of us here need shrink from saying all that he has a right
to say. We ought, however, to remember that it is not only a band of
Jesuits, weaving their schemes of intellectual slavery, under the
innocent guise 'of education,' that we are opposing. Our foes are to
some extent of our own household, including not only the ignorant and
the passionate, but a minority of minds of high calibre and culture,
lovers of freedom moreover, who, though its objective bull be riddled
by logic, still find the ethic life of their religion unimpaired. But
while such considerations ought to influence the form of our argument,
and prevent it from ever slipping out of the region of courtesy into
that of scorn or abuse, its substance, I think, ought to be maintained
and presented in unmitigated strength.
In the year 1855 the chair of philosophy in the University of Munich
happened to be filled by a Catholic priest of great critical
penetration, great learning, and great courage, who had borne the
brunt of battle long before Doellinger. His Jesuit colleagues, he
knew, inculcated the belief that every human soul is sent into the
world from God by a separate and supernatural act of creation. In a
work entitled the 'Origin of the Human Soul,' Professor Frohschammer,
the philosopher here alluded to, was hardy enough to question this
doctrine, and to affirm that man, body and soul, comes from his
parents, the act of creation being, therefore, mediate and secondary
only. The Jesuits keep a sharp look out on all temerities of this
kind; and their organ, the 'Civilità Cattolica,' immediately pounced
upon Frohschammer. His book was branded as 'pestilent,' placed in the
Index, and stamped with the condemnation of the Church. [Footnote:
King Maximilian II. brought Liebig to Munich, he helped Helmholtz in
his researches, and loved to liberate and foster science. But through
his liberal concession of power to the Jesuits in the schools, he did
far more damage to the intellectual freedom of his country than his
superstitious predecessor Ludwig I. Priding himself on being a German
Prince, Ludwig would not tolerate the interference of the Roman party
with the political affairs of Bavaria.] The Jesuit notion does not
err on the score of indefiniteness. According to it, the Power whom
Goethe does not dare to name, and whom Gassendi and Clerk Maxwell
present to us under the guise of a 'Manufacturer' of atoms, turns out
annually, for England and Wales alone, a quarter of a million of new
souls. Taken in connection with the dictum of Mr. Carlyle, that this
annual increment to our population are 'mostly fools,' but little
profit to the human heart seems derivable from this mode of regarding
the Divine operations.
But if the Jesuit notion be rejected, what are we to accept?
Physiologists say that every human being comes from an egg not more
than the 1/120th of an inch in diameter. Is this egg matter? I hold
it to be so, as much as the seed of a fern or of an oak. Nine months
go to the making of it into a man. Are the additions made during this
period of gestation drawn from matter? I think so undoubtedly. If
there be anything besides matter in the egg, or in the infant
subsequently slumbering in the womb, what is it? The questions
already asked with reference to the stars of snow may be here
repeated. Mr. Martineau will complain that I am disenchanting the
babe of its wonder; but is this the case? I figure it growing in the
womb, woven by a something not itself, without conscious participation
on the part of either father or mother, and appearing in due time a
living miracle, with all its organs and all their implications.
Consider the work accomplished during these nine months in forming the
eye alone--with its lens, and its humours, and its miraculous retina
behind. Consider the ear with its tympanum, cochlea, and Corti's
organ--an instrument of three thousand strings, built adjacent to the
brain, and employed by it to sift, separate, and interpret, antecedent
to all consciousness, the sonorous tremors of the external world. All
this has been accomplished, not only without man's contrivance, but
without his knowledge, the secret of his own organisation having been
withheld from him since his birth in the immeasurable past, until
these latter days. Matter I define as that mysterious thing by which
all this is accomplished. How it came to have this power is a
question on which I never ventured an opinion. If, then, Matter
starts as 'a beggar,' it is, in my view, because the Jacobs of
theology have deprived it of its birthright. Mr. Martineau need fear
no disenchantment. Theories of evolution go but a short way towards
the explanation of this mystery; the Ages, let us hope, will at length
give us a Poet competent to deal with it aright.
There are men, and they include amongst them some of the best of the
race of man, upon whose minds this mystery falls without producing
either warmth or colour. The 'dry light' of the intellect suffices
for them, and they live their noble lives untouched by a desire to
give the mystery shape or expression. There are, on the other hand,
men whose minds are warmed and coloured by its presence, and who,
under its stimulus, attain to moral heights which have never been
overtopped. Different spiritual climates are necessary for the
healthy existence of these two classes of men; and different climates
must be accorded them. The history of humanity, however, proves the
experience of the second class to illustrate the most pervading need.
The world will have religion of some kind, even though it should fly
for it to the intellectual whoredom of 'spiritualism.' What is really
wanted is the lifting power of an ideal element in human life. But
the free play of this power must be preceded by its release from the
practical materialism of the present, as well as from the torn
swaddling bands of the past. It is now in danger of being stupefied by
the one, or strangled by the other. I look, however, forward to a
time when the strength, insight, and elevation which now visit us in
mere hints and glimpses, during moments 'of clearness and vigour,'
shall be the stable and permanent possession of purer and mightier
minds than ours--purer and mightier, partly because of their deeper
knowledge of matter and their more faithful conformity to its laws.
********************
XII. FERMENTATION, & ITS BEARINGS ON SURGERY & MEDICINE.
[Footnote: A Discourse delivered before the Glasgow Science Lectures
Association, October 19, 1876.]
ONE of the most remarkable characteristics of the age in which we
live, is its desire and tendency to connect itself organically with
preceding ages--to ascertain how the state of things that now is came
to be what it is. And the more earnestly and profoundly this problem
is studied, the more clearly comes into view the vast and varied debt
which the world of to-day owes to that fore-world, in which man by
skill, valour, and well-directed strength first replenished and
subdued the earth. Our prehistoric fathers may have been savages, but
they were clever and observant ones. They founded agriculture by the
discovery and development of seeds whose origin is now unknown. They
tamed and harnessed their animal antagonists, and sent them down to us
as ministers, instead of rivals in the fight for life. Later on, when
the claims of luxury added themselves to those of necessity, we find
the same spirit of invention at work. We have no historic account of
the first brewer, but we glean from history that his art was
practised, and its produce relished, more than two thousand years ago.
Theophrastus, who was born nearly four hundred years before Christ,
described beer as the wine of barley. It is extremely difficult to
preserve beer in a hot country, still, Egypt was the land in which it
was first brewed, the desire of man to quench his thirst with this
exhilarating beverage overcoming all the obstacles which a hot climate
threw in the way of its manufacture.
Our remote ancestors had also learned by experience that wine maketh
glad the heart of man. Noah, we are informed, planted a vineyard,
drank of the wine, and experienced the consequences. But, though wine
and beer possess so old a history, a very few years ago no man knew
the secret of their formation. Indeed, it might be said that until
the present year no thorough and scientific account was ever given of
the agencies which come into play in the manufacture of beer, of the
conditions necessary to its health, and of the maladies and
vicissitudes to which it is subject. Hitherto the art and practice of
the brewer have resembled those of the physician, both being founded
on empirical observation. By this is meant the observation of facts,
apart from the principles which explain them, and which give the mind
an intelligent mastery over them. The brewer learnt from long
experience the conditions, not the reasons, of success. But he had to
contend, and has still to contend, against unexplained perplexities.
Over and over again his care has been rendered nugatory; his beer has
fallen into acidity or rottenness, and disastrous losses have been
sustained, of which he has been unable to assign the cause. It is the
hidden enemies against which the physician and the brewer have
hitherto contended, that recent researches are dragging into the light
of day, thus preparing the way for their final extermination.
*****
Let us glance for a moment at the outward and visible signs of
fermentation. A few weeks ago I paid a visit to a private still in a
Swiss chalet; and this is what I saw. In the peasant's bedroom was a
cask with a very large bunghole carefully closed. The cask contained
cherries which had lain in it for fourteen days. It was not entirely
filled with the fruit, an air-space being left above the cherries when
they were put in. I had the bung removed, and a small lamp dipped
into this space. Its flame was instantly extinguished. The oxygen of
the air had entirely disappeared, its place being taken by carbonic
acid gas. [Footnote: The gas which is exhaled from the lungs after the
oxygen of the air has done its duty in purifying the blood, the same
also which effervesces from soda water and champagne.] I tasted the
cherries: they were very sour, though when put into the cask they were
sweet. The cherries and the liquid associated with them were then
placed in a copper boiler, to which a copper head was closely fitted.
From the head proceeded a copper tube which passed straight through a
vessel of cold water, and issued at the other side. Under the open
end of the tube was placed a bottle to receive the spirit distilled.
The flame of small wood-splinters being applied to the boiler, after a
time vapour rose into the head, passed through the tube, was condensed
by the cold of the water, and fell in a liquid fillet into the bottle.
On being tasted, it proved to be that fiery and intoxicating spirit
known in commerce as Kirsch or Kirschwasser.
The cherries, it should be remembered, were left to themselves, no
ferment of any kind being added to them. In this respect what has
been said of the cherry applies also to the grape. At the vintage the
fruit of the vine is placed in proper vessels, and abandoned to its
own action. It ferments, producing carbonic acid; its sweetness
disappears, and at the end of a certain time the unintoxicating
grape-juice is converted into intoxicating wine. Here, as in the case
of the cherries, the fermentation is spontaneous--in what sense
spontaneous will appear more clearly by-and-by.
It is needless for me to tell a Glasgow audience that the beer-brewer
does not set to work in this way. In the first place the brewer deals
not with the juice of fruits, but with the juice of barley. The
barley having been steeped for a sufficient time in water, it is
drained and subjected to a temperature sufficient to cause the moist
grain to germinate; after which, it is completely dried upon a kiln.
It then receives the name of malt. The malt is crisp to the teeth,
and decidedly sweeter to the taste than the original barley. It is
ground, mashed up in warm water, then boiled with hops until all the
soluble portions have been extracted; the infusion thus produced being
called the wort. This is drawn off, and cooled as rapidly as
possible; then, instead of abandoning the infusion, as the wine-maker
does, to its own action, the brewer mixes yeast with his wort, and
places it in vessels each with only one aperture open to the air. Soon
after the addition of the yeast, a brownish froth, which is really new
yeast, issues from the aperture, and falls like a cataract into
troughs prepared to receive it. This frothing and foaming of the wort
is a proof that the fermentation is active.