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Little & Ives Co., New York THE FORUM FOR JULY 1914 SKULLS AND CROSSBONES AND NINE-LEAVED CLOVER JAMES HUNEKER HEN Sir Oliver Lodge, as President of the British W face of Professor Schäfer, his predecessor, because of the latter's "materialism," misinformed persons fancied there would be waged a wordy warfare. As a matter of fact, no war was waged. Professor Schäfer is a busy man and his adversary was sparring with a straw figure, the old stuffed effigy, long known as "the arrogant man of science," that bogie of middle-class orthodoxy which flourished during the mid-Victorian period. The speech of Sir Oliver at Birmingham was an attempted answer to Professor Schäfer's speech the previous year. But that particular speech, like the historic Belfast address of Tyndall's, was neither arrogant nor was it windy prophecy. Tyndall's idea of the potentialities of matter have been verified with the years; elusive and magical as is radium, nevertheless it is matter; its properties are apprehended in terms of the real. Not less miraculous is wireless telegraphy. What "miracle" in the past can match it? For Walt Whitman the "hinges" of his hand were miraculous. and the moral law filled Kant with awe. are living a constant miracle, whether as matter or as spirit; for these categories are outworn verbalisms interchangeable in meaning. Matter in the light of recent experiment is none the less ethereal and spirit none the less material. The curious part of Sir Oliver's attack is that he and his followers are really materialists, for they desire to render visible the invisible, to weigh the spiritual; while the materialists, so-called, I The starry heaven Rightly viewed, we 2085 82 THE FORUM are seeking an opposite path. Occult phenomena are just now suspected and Sir Oliver Lodge's appeal for the "spiritualization" of science but recalls the experiments of Sir William Crookes and the "materialization" of the spritely "Katie King" and the other's dire exposure; also the sad ending of Professor Zoellner, of Leipzig, as a result of his endeavor to discover the Fourth Dimension of Space. The fling at the " relativists" by Lodge now demonstrates the hopelessness of arguing with an absolutist. Yet, nature abhors an absolute. Science is ever humble and only records. To limit investigation because some table-tipper or clairvoyant believes science to be "materialistic" is to open the door to the whole rag-tag and bobtail that hovers about the moving army of civilization, playing upon its credulity, and exacting toll for its fake panaceas. Sir Oliver's utterances were not warmly received by the orthodox, but fortune-tellers, palm-readers, astrologists, horoscope humbugs, anti-vivisectionists, anti-vaccinationists, friends of barnburning and votes for children, and purple motherism; in a word, all enemies of the light, of progress, hail the President of the British Association as a mighty prophet. It was the clear-thinking Huxley who said "our knowledge is restricted to those feelings of which we assume external phenomena to be the cause," which is modest enough; and Sir E. Ray Lankester truthfully adds: "We think it is of the utmost importance to humanity to maintain that separation "—i. e., we have gained this science by making observation and inference-the main purpose of our mental activity, and by keeping them entirely distinct and free from any unverified suppositions, hopes, or fears, as to the ultimate mechanism and its purpose "lest once again human thought be paralyzed by bogies and by those who seek to wield power over their fellows by the false pretence that they not merely guess but know the secret workings." Sir Oliver Lodge was answered at one of the sessions in a paper by Professor B. Moore with the collaboration of Mr. Arthur Webster. The authors demonstrated that sunlight so effected chemical and physical changes in organic matter as to bring about a form of life. However, this is a question for the biologists. After witnessing the results of the experiments of Hugo de Vries at Amsterdam last autumn we balk at nothing. And de Vries is not "arrogant "; nor was Darwin, the astronomer, nor Father Secchi. What has literally been a magnificent bone of contention was the discovery of the Piltdown skull in Sussex, December, 1912, by Mr. Charles Dawson. It is unlike other ancient skulls, but the fact that two such eminent men of science as Professor Arthur Keith of the Royal College of Surgeons and Dr. SmithWoodward of the British Museum should dispute over their respective reconstructions has kept the British Association in a state of suspense. Dr. Smith-Woodward's reconstruction shows us the Piltdown creature as half man half ape, with a brain capacity of 1,070 cubic centimetres; while Professor Keith's reconstruction shows a human brain with the normal capacity of 1,500 cubic centimetres. Professor Elliot Smith partially sides with Keith. It appears that Father Teilhard, a young French palæontologist, who was working with Mr. Dawson, found a tooth in undisturbed gravel not far from the spot where was exhumed the skull of "Eoanthropus Dawsonii." This tooth it was that lends color to Dr. Smith-Woodward's claim. Not so, says Keith, whose argument is: "By some mischance the groove for the median blood channel which runs along the roof of the skull was displaced nearly an inch to one side . . . . . In the original reconstruction the bones of the right and left sides are nearly in contact; in the amended reconstruction-my own-they are widely separated in order that the groove for the venous channel may fall into its natural position, namely, in the middle line of the roof of the skull." This technical fault, urges Professor Keith, has caused the Smith-Woodward reconstruction. But what a disappointment it would be if the skull was once owned by some thick headed Briton. I haven't read that glorious book of fun, The Pickwick Papers, for years, so I can't quote the episode of the finding of "Bill Stumps, his mark" (was it Stubbs or Stumps?). This page might be profitably read by certain scientific men without a sense of humor. Théophile Gautier with due solemnity once urged the French authorities to exhibit at the Jardin d'Acclimation, in a cage, |