A Group of Scientific Books

TIME out of mind, men have noticed some sort of correlation between the state of the weather and the “pinting” of the “innard vane;” but Professor Dexter has been first to investigate on a large scale the extent of this relation. Conduct, it turns out, depends to a surprising degree on temperature, humidity, wind velocity, and the like; although the “skyey influence” does little more than tip one way or the other the unstable balance of human motive.

To take an example almost at random, in New York city the number of arrests for assault varies closely with the temperature. The New Yorker, the mildest of men during freezing weather, becomes recalcitrant as the thermometer gets above forty, grows pugnacious above sixty-five, only to become long-suffering again when a really hot day, above eighty-five, has taken the starch out of him. Curiously enough, Shakespeare, whom nothing seems to have escaped, has noted this connection between temper and temperature.

The New York woman, moreover, has in her temper a still more sensitive thermometer than her brother. A very Griselda at low temperatures, give her just the right degree of heat and, reckoned from her average, she is half again more quarrelsome than a man. Temperature and air pressure are, however, at odds in this. The contentious person, “rash and very sudden in choler” as the thermometer goes up, very properly flies his danger signals as the barometer falls. In fact, most things grow worse as a general storm comes on: sickness, insanity, crime suicide, and the natural depravity of schoolchildren; though drunkenness and the clerical errors of bank officers decrease.

Scores of special investigations like this of Professor Dexter’s have gone to the making of Mr. Havelock Ellis’s study of “the two most interesting beings in the world.” The book is, of course, not new; but the demand for a fourth edition has enabled the author to incorporate a considerable body of new evidence, and, in the light of this, to revise certain of his minor conclusions.

The net result of this latest account of “the only two kinds of people there are” is to show that there is hardly an organ of the body or a measurable quality of any sort which is not unlike in the two sexes. “A man is a man even to his thumbs, and a woman is a woman down to her little toes.” Women even button their garments on the other side from men and choose Sunday instead of Monday as their favorite day for making way with themselves.

Whoso thinks that it is any part of the order of nature that one half of mankind should forever rule the other will get small comfort from Mr. Ellis. So far, at least, as laboratory tests go, our sisters “are unquestionably superior in general tactile sensibility and probably superior in the discrimination of tastes,” with no advantage either way in the case of the other senses. They have better memories, read more rapidly, bear pain better, recover better from wounds and serious illnesses, are less changed by old age, and live longer. Unkindest cut of all, they have relatively larger brains, — especially in the frontal region. Even our old gibe at their likeness to children is now taken away from us, since every pertinent fact shows pari passu that men are more like apes. Women, in short, if one must have a formula, are more civilized than men; and civilization itself is but the process of making the world ladylike. In fact, about the only thing left to us men with which to withstand the feminist is our superiority of muscle. This, at least, is still unquestioned. Men are two, three, and four times stronger than women, and the occasional exceptional woman hardly reaches the level of the average man. Curiously, even between the ages of eleven and fifteen, when girls are taller and heavier, boys still retain their single advantage. Men, too, if slower of mind, are quicker of body, have much greater lung capacity and more blood corpuscles, and exhale nearly twice as much carbon dioxide. But we pay for it all by being less able to endure confinement and bad air, so that the very strength that is in us is weakness. Still, it is worth while to have one excellence, though we have to share it with the males of all the higher animals.

A considerable portion of Mr. Ellis’s material appears in other guise in Dr. Hall’s cyclopædic account of adolescence, many recent investigations on schoolchildren serving equally well the purposes of both writers. Child study, of which the President of Clark University is the apostle if not the high priest, looks upon the child as a creature after his own kind, with his own diseases, his own faculties, and his own instincts; a sort of larva, in short, who becomes adult almost as much by the suppression of some parts of his nature as by the expansion of others. So far as its main contention goes, the new science seems to have made out its case. After all, the fact that the child is growing and the man is not is in itself sufficient to make different beings of the two; and if Dr. Hall had done nothing more than bring together between two covers the great body of fact which bears on this single aspect of the question, he would have performed a notable service to the theory of education. Along, however, with this conception of the child as something other than undeveloped man, goes almost inevitably the doctrine that the soul, like the body, passes through “ growth stages” which summarize epochs in the history of savage and pre-human ancestors. That “the soul is as old as the body” and like it has its rudimentary structures and its embryonic organs is the main thesis of the Genetic Psychology. It certainly is an attractive theory that the characteristic traits of boyhood, its vagrancy, its healthy-mindedness, its frank delight in the things of the body, are the inheritance from some large-limbed barbarian; as the inward-facing soles of infancy are a reminiscence of a still older progenitor. The child psychologist, however, is satisfied with no such general interpretation. Infancy, childhood, youth, are to be marked off into separate periods, each the recapitulation of some definite ancestral experience. Dr. Hall will have it that the years of retarded growth between eight and eleven “suggest on the recapitulation theory some long stationary period during which life had been pretty fully unfolded and could be led indefinitely and with stability and security in some not too cold Lemuria, New Atlantis, Eden, or other possible cunabulum gentium. This arrest may even suggest the age of senescence in some post-simian stage of ancestry. This short pause would thus be the present echo of a long phyletic stage when for many generations our pre-human forebears were pigmoid adults, leading short lives and dying at or before the pubic growth increment now occurs.” The theory is not altogether unplausible, even in the absence of any evidence that we ever had a “pigmoid” ancestor.

Much beyond this, however, common sense must refuse to go in applying the evolutionary formula to every childish peculiarity. Some of the most striking physical characters of youth certainly do not repeat any ancestral condition, — the small jaw and large brain for example, which, so far as they look either way, look toward the future rather than the past, and show the direction in which the race is going, more than they reveal the way it has come. After the analogy of bodily organs, then, the child psychologist ought to expect no universal conformity to his adaptation of von Baer’s great theory. Certainly one need not be infidel to the blessed and comfortable doctrine of recapitulation,if,even under Dr. Hall’s tutelage, he fail to discover in the human sold any reminiscence of the paleozoic fish. For what, after all, does the evidence amount to, which, Dr. Hall thinks, deserves the equivalent of four Atlantic pages? Children and adults make motions which remind imaginative persons of the swaying of a fish’s body or the paddling of its fins; we dream of “floating, hovering, gliding, with utter independence of gravity;” women, who are “phyletically older” than men, are more apt to drown themselves; children like to play in the water; certain land animals have become aquatic. What one of these would have been different if our race had begun its career in the Garden of Eden! The boy’s liking for water has as much to do with an ancestral fish as his interest in fire with an ancestral salamander. All this is a part of Dr. Hall’s tendency to push any theory beyond all necessity. For him no merely amphibious or freshwater or littoral forebear will account for the delights of wiggling bare toes in the mud. Our fishy ancestor must be everywhere “pelagic;” although, as in the case of the “pigmoid,” what little evidence there is is rather against the existence of any such creature.

Indeed, the old-fashioned pedagogue, were he disposed to be sarcastic, might well retort on the new in terms of the latter’s own recapitulation theory. Psychology is indeed the child of biology, and it is just now going through the “growth stage” which corresponds to the ancestral period when “reversion ” was the fashion, when every supernumerary digit on a kitten’s paw was thought to revive a finray, and every variant in a human being, which chanced to resemble anything in one of the lower animals, was hailed as the inheritance from some — usually hypothetical — forefather. Poor Doctrine of Evolution! no sooner does one branch of science stop overworking it than another takes it up. But then, these young sciences must sow their speculative wild oats: though there might well be some sort of a statute of limitations to bar the Genetic Philosophers from everything earlier than the lower tertiary.

This, however, is but one aspect, and that not the most important, of a work remarkable no less for its range of ideas than for its learning and its candor. In spite, therefore, of some overstatement, — witness the account of the human gills (sic) in which the unquestioned facts would have been quite sufficient for the argument,—in spite also of much diffuseness and obscurity, — there is a sentence five feet and eight inches from noun to verb, — Adolescence, when all is said, is likely to turn out to be the most significant work in its field since Herbert Spencer’s Education.

Like Mr. Havelock Ellis, and like a good many other students of primitive society nowadays, Dr. Hoivard maintains that the world has been far kinder to women than has been commonly supposed. Savages are like other men, and turn out on more extended acquaintance to be not nearly so black as early travelers painted them; while primitive customs seem less barbarous as they become better understood. Doubtless, on the face of it, the Anglo-Saxon father who sold his daughter into matrimony regarded her like any other piece of property, and presumably cared little for the young woman’s preferences. On the other hand, it is quite possible that the apparent bridesale is a mere legal fiction designed to protect the rights of the wife by the most careful provisions known to early society, the obligation of a contract under the common law. Be this as it may,the habit of mind which interprets the wedding ring, not as a symbolic fetter, but as the rudiment of the “one dollar and other valuable consideration” which sustains a contract, works out under Dr. Howard’s fingers into a delightfully simple interpretation of the history of marriage. For him group - marriage, bride - purchase, wife-capture, and other forms and patterns of the yoke, far from being in any sense inevitable stages in the development of the institution, are only local and temporary aberrations from a universal and primitive monogamy. Monogamy, often permanent, is the most common type of union among the higher animals, and without much doubt was nearly everywhere the rule in our own race before the beginnings of civilization. More than this, “ in every stage of social development, consent and contract in some form have been cardinal elements of marriage.

Dr. Howard naturally, then, makes havoc with all theories of the development of matrimony which involve “ growth stages.” There never was any Patriarchal Family out of which has developed the State. There never was any Matriarchate in which women were the heads of the household and the superiors politically of men. In short, there never have been universal stages of any sort, except so far as man, like the species below him, has tried all possible experiments, and natural history has repeated itself. All variants, however, tend to instability, so that the history of matrimonial institutions is the story of the return of civilized man to the self-betrothal and free marriage of the stone age. The highest type of marriage and the family is, therefore, at the same time the most primitive. Monogamy, tempered by divorce, is at once the starting point and the goal of human evolution.

These four books, each in its own way, suggest the question whether, notwithstanding all that has been justly urged on the other side, women have not upon the whole been happier than men. If men have too often been cruel to their sisters, they have by no means always been kind to one another; and the fact that women have fared ill in the civilizations which we know best should not blind us to other aspects of the case. At any rate, every year three or four times as many men as women find life not worth living; while, like the first, the second birth at adolescence — to use Dr. Hall’s phrase — is often hardest on boys. The greater sensitiveness of women to changes in the weather, which appears almost everywhere in Professor Dexter’s studies, is, as Mr. Ellis shows, but one aspect of their greater general affectibility. But to be affectible is to enjoy fullness of life, to be, in short, human. Besides, as things are now, civilization rests on the ability of each man to do one thing supremely well, though he neglect manifold sources of happiness. If, therefore, the great painters and musicians and prophets have been men, probably the average woman gets more pleasure from color and sound, and more consolation from faith, than the average man.

Lest, however, we should forget how much of human nature still keeps its ancient mystery, comes the Ingersoll Lecturer for 1904 to show us the barriers beyond which Science, remaining Science, may not pass. On the general question of immortality, Dr. Osler can only say once more what has already been said by nearly all who, with equal right to speak in the name of Science, have been equally careful not to exceed their authority:—

“Though his philosophy find nothing to support it, . . . the scientific student should be ready to acknowledge the value of a belief in the hereafter as an asset in human life. In the presence of so many mysteries which have been unveiled, in the presence of so many yet unsolved, he cannot be dogmatic and deny the possibility of a future state, ... he will ask to be left, reserving his judgment, but still inquiring. He will recognize that amid the turbid ebb and flow of human misery, a belief in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come is the rock of safety to which many of the noblest of his fellows have clung; he will gratefully accept the incalculable comfort of such a belief to those sorrowing for precious friends hid in death’s dateless night; he will acknowledge with gratitude and reverence the service to humanity of the great souls who have departed this life in a sure and certain hope, — but this is all. Whether across death’s threshold we step from life to life, or whether we go whence we shall not return, even to the land of darkness, as darkness itself, he cannot tell. Nor is this strange. Science is organized knowledge, and knowledge is of things we see. Now the things that are seen are temporal: of the things that are unseen science knows nothing, and has at present no means of knowing anything.”

Small comfort as this opinion may bring to the troubled soul, it certainly does tend to introduce some sort of clarity into the muddled intellect. E. T. B.