Part 10

Our closing glance must be directed to the far Orient. Japan, the newest of kingdoms, has a model brace of institutions for superior education in agriculture. When Japan awoke to the new ideas, to which for ages she was oblivious, her keenest statesmen grasped the thought that her agricultural people needed new light and intellectual quickening along the lines which so vitally affected their daily subsistence. She took the United States into her confidence. She imported for a season our Commissioner of Agriculture (General Capron), in 1871-'72, as "Adviser to the Colonial Office at Hokaido," who, after visiting Japan, advised the Government to organize at once an agricultural college at Sapporo, and still another at Tokio. This advice was cordially received and speedily adopted. American scholars of the highest wisdom and experience were imported to inaugurate the work. The college was inaugurated by Colonel W. S. Clark, LL. D., President of Amherst Agricultural College, in August, 1876, with twenty-four students. Its new location was Sapporo, and its new name was the Sapporo Agricultural College. The Government dealt liberally in grants of land, but these ample acres have since been mostly confiscated, leaving only sufficient for educational purposes. Few can estimate the wonderful uplift which has come to Japan through this efficient school. In 1893 it had sent out from its agricultural course 123 graduates; from the engineering, 4; military, 42; and from the practical department, 114.

In 1874 an agricultural department was added to the Imperial University at Tokio, the original location of the Sapporo College. An exhaustive syllabus in the Department of Agriculture provides examination for many profound students of this science, and admits them to the highest university degree. Four courses are open in the university--viz., agriculture, agricultural chemistry, forestry, and veterinary medicine. In 1895 there were 261 students of agriculture in the university.

From this extended though by no means exhaustive review of the status of scientific instruction in agriculture throughout the world, it is evident that all the progressive nations have caught the inspiration which attaches to this branch of education, and are swinging into line in their efforts to adopt it. Old ideals are rapidly giving place to the new. Educators are forced to admit that mental culture is as possible under the study of science as by the protracted study of languages and literature; that such study aids vastly more than the latter in the training which prepares men for the active duties of life; and that if the development of husbandry as a pursuit does not keep pace on an intelligent basis with every other technical pursuit, national greatness and permanence will never be achieved.

EASTERN OYSTER CULTURE IN OREGON.

BY F. L. WASHBURN, A. M.,

STATE BIOLOGIST AND PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OREGON.

During the past two years the United States Fish Commission, with characteristic enterprise, has been carrying on experiments in the propagation of Eastern oysters in the bays of the Oregon coast. Work of a similar nature is now being undertaken in the State of Washington.

As the result of an application through official sources, re-enforced possibly by the results of a biological survey made by this department during the preceding summer, twenty-two barrels of Eastern oysters were, on November 7, 1896, deposited on a portion of Oysterville Flat, so called, in Yaquina Bay, Oregon, seven miles and a half from the ocean. The oystermen of that section have agreed to abstain from tonging for native oysters upon the portion of the flat thus reserved until sufficient time has elapsed to justify an opinion as to the result of the experiment. These introduced oysters were of two varieties--the long, slender East Rivers and the more oval, fan-shaped, and ribbed Princess Bays. Their journey of twelve days across the continent, in sugar barrels, from New York to San Francisco and thence to Oregon without water did not cause the mortality one might expect, for in strewing them over the bed from the scows of the oystermen very few dead individuals were observed--certainly not one half of one per cent.

This alien oyster has much to contend with here. It was realized that the cold and salt water rushing in from the Pacific--colder and salter by far than in their Atlantic home at the same time--if it did not entirely prevent spawning would at least make the survival of the young embryos a matter of doubt; yet it was hoped that perhaps, after a number of years, the oysters might become acclimated, as it were, and their spawn, inheriting their parents' acquired hardiness, we might present to the people of the State a new form of Oregon product in the shape of Eastern oysters hatched and grown in the waters of this bay. Notwithstanding the fecundity of this oyster, a female producing in the vicinity of sixty million eggs at a spawning, it must be remembered that even under the most favorable conditions in its own home, where the water has in summer a fairly constant temperature of over 70° F. and a salinity of 1.012 on an average, but a very small proportion of this multitude survive. How much more unlikely is its survival in the waters of Yaquina Bay, Oregon, where the writer has seen the water change from a temperature of 70° F. and a saltness of 1.012 to a temperature of 55° and a salinity of 1.022 within six hours! It was to save the young embryos from exposure to these and kindred dangers that I, as a volunteer employee of the United States Fish Commission during the summers of 1897 and 1898, among other things resorted to the artificial fertilization of the eggs in a temporary laboratory, carrying the delicate embryos to the swimming stage and dumping them by thousands into the bay. Given some clean crocks, a microscope, dissecting instruments, tumblers, rubber tubing, thermometers, and instruments to test the saltness of the water, and innumerable embryos can be cared for without much trouble. The process, as practiced by Brooks, Ryder, Nelson, and others in America, is too well known to need repeating here. Its efficacy is well established, and, in spite of the incredulity of the oystermen, who wished to see the oysters spawn "spontaneous," as they expressed it, an incredulity amounting almost to opposition, the writer has persevered in this work for two seasons and intends to continue it the coming summer.

The native oyster of this Northwest coast (_Ostrea lurida_), smaller 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.

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.