Part 12

When, in 1884, Pasteur discovered the true nature and cure of hydrophobia, he dispelled the accumulated superstition of centuries regarding this mysterious and dreaded disease. But in some countries where hydrophobia exists his cure is not yet known, and the old superstitions remain. While collecting mammals near San José del Cabo, in the cape region of Lower California, two summers ago, I found the country people very fearful of wild animals, especially of skunks and coyotes. My Mexican boy, whom I had sent on an errand, remained perched half the afternoon in a thorny mesquite tree because he had seen a coyote and was afraid it was _rabioso_. But they fear the skunks most of all because of their habit of approaching men in the night while they sleep, and biting them on the toe or ear, or any exposed part. In defense, unusual precautions are taken to exclude them. The windows of the houses are barred with iron, and the doors are made in halves, horizontally, so that the lower part may be closed to keep out animals and snakes without interfering with free ventilation. The common people, who live in brush houses, blockade their doorways at night, and rely on their cur dogs to attack any animal which may come near.

Notwithstanding all this evidence, and innumerable ghastly stories, I remained a month in the country, at the rancho of Francis Pazik, a very intelligent and well-educated Bohemian, without seeing any rabid animals. Then, one evening just at sundown, a crowd of men came up the path, leading one of Pazik's mules and dragging the carcass of a skunk. They said that it had come out into the open field where the mule was picketed and bitten it on the hind foot. All of them insisted that it was rabid, and cited its extreme emaciation as a proof. The young man who dragged it showed me his great toe, half burned off with blue vitriol, and told me that a skunk had bitten him there two months before, and the doctors had burned it. These native "doctors" are uneducated men who live on the superstition of the people. In the case of hydrophobia their methods are characteristic. There are in the cane fields little insect-eating animals called shrews which, in that country, give off a scent so like that of a skunk that Pazik has hunted them out with his dogs in the night by mistake. The "doctors" pay as much as two dollars apiece for shrews on urgent occasions, and, mixing their bodies with herbs and roots, form a concoction which they claim will ward off hydrophobia. Besides this, they also bleed the patient and cauterize the wound.

According to the Mexicans, there are two kinds of rabies: that affecting the head and that affecting the stomach. When animals have _rabia_ in the head they become stupid and move about slowly, biting at everything they see or touch. They are not violent, and become very thin. But when they have rabies in the stomach it gives them great pain, and they bark and howl and race about frantically, chasing other animals and tearing them. Mr. Cipriano Fisher, of Santa Catarina, told me of his experience with a coyote which had rabies in the stomach. He was hunting deer at Cape San Lucas, and had killed two. Carrying the smaller one and his gun to camp, he returned unarmed, except for the knife which every one wears in that region, to bring in the other. As he went down a deep cañon he heard a coyote ahead, howling in the peculiar way which he knew to be characteristic of the _rabioso_. All the hunters claim they can recognize the howling of a rabid coyote, and they say that no other animal will answer it or go near it. The howling approached rapidly. Knowing that he could not escape by running back uphill, nor kill it with his knife without being bitten, he stepped quickly into the brush and cut a long green club. As he turned back into the open place he saw the coyote down the cañon, leaping up and snapping at the air. When the coyote saw him it broke into a furious run up the trail, and when, as he says, about thirty feet away, made a flying leap at his face. He jumped to one side, struck the rabid animal in the back of the head as it passed, and killed it with the one blow.

Skunks are particularly dangerous to persons who sleep out at night. J. Ellis McLellan, a field collector of the United States Department of Agriculture, whom I met at San José del Cabo, told me of an unpleasant experience he had with a skunk while coming down from La Paz. On account of the heat he had ridden in the night as far as Agua Caliente, where he stopped near a ranch house to sleep till morning. Although the night was warm, he covered his head with a _serape_ for protection from insects and wandering animals. Early in the morning he was awakened by a twitching at his blanket and, raising the _serape_, saw a skunk biting and jerking at it. Realizing the gravity of the situation, he reached for his heavy knife, and then, suddenly throwing aside the _serape_, he leaned forward and put his whole force into one blow. As he ducked under the blanket again, for protection, the dogs from the house rushed out in a body and pounced upon the dying skunk, which they worried on top of McLellan until the ranch people beat them off. When skunks bite at men's toes and ears, or at blankets in this way, it is taken as an indication that they are rabid.

Shortly after this I saw a young man at Miraflores who had just been seized with hydrophobia. Two months before he had been bitten on the great toe by a skunk as he lay asleep in his house at Agua Caliente, but had shown no symptoms of the disease until that day, when he suddenly began to bite at the door jamb in the store at Miraflores. They put him into the brick jail, where he soon became very violent. When I went down to the jail the next morning I found a group of Mexicans about the huge wooden door, which was chained fast and tied with _riatas_ in addition. From the inside there came a succession of thumps and blood-curdling groans and strangles. I peered in through the barred window, and saw the unfortunate man lying on his back in a corner, spasmodically kicking out his legs from his chest and rolling his dilated eyes. Suddenly he leaped to his feet and, grasping the iron bars, shook the great door violently, chained and tied as it was. Then he seemed to leap against the walls, and at last fell down, groaning. He soon became rational again, and began to talk through a crack in the door to an old man whom I took to be his father. He asked for water, but they would not give him any, and while he was pleading for a knife or pistol another spasm seized him.

Presently the judge came over with two policemen. They said they were going to take the _rabioso_ out and tie him to a tree, because he was getting the jail too dirty, and might not die for a week. As soon as the spasm passed, and the man lay weak and moaning, the burly policemen loosed the _riatas_, and, stepping in quickly, seized him from behind. He protested pathetically against going into the hot sunshine, but they pushed him out and started toward the corral to tie him up. But when the fierce sun struck him he was racked by horrible convulsions. He kicked and struggled, bit at his shoulders, and blew spittle into the air when he threw his head back. The policemen breathed hard, and the old man, his father, hugged himself in agony as he walked behind. There was a desperate struggle, then, with a final paroxysm, the _rabioso_ suddenly collapsed and hung limp in their arms. At first they thought that he was dead, but when he showed signs of life they carried him to the corral and tied him to a tree before he became conscious. Two days later he died.

Pasteur himself does not undertake to cure patients who have been seized with spasms; but the judge told me that, fifteen years before, an Italian doctor had come through their country making marvelous cures. When he arrived at Miraflores there was a _rabioso_ in the jail who was so badly afflicted and so long-lived that the judge had ordered him to be shot. When the Italian doctor heard this, however, he asked permission to try an experiment on the man. This being granted, he had the patient lassoed, dragged to the river, and held under water until he was apparently drowned. After the _rabioso_ was full of water, the doctor rolled him on a barrel and resuscitated him; then he gave him some medicine which cured him. Cipriano Fisher told me that he had cured a valuable bulldog of rabies by this same method, using the bitter juice of the _pitahaya_, a species of cactus, for medicine. This crude means of alleged cure is unique, and seems based on the theory that the antipathy of rabid animals to water, implied in the name hydrophobia, is the cause of their death, and partial drowning, therefore, a cure.

Rabies is extremely prevalent at times in certain districts of the Cape region. McLellan says it does not occur north of the tropic of Cancer--that is, of La Paz and Todos Santos--and it is hardly known in the thickly populated district about San José del Cabo, but at Cape San Lucas, and especially also along the base of the mountains near Miraflores and Agua Caliente, where it is very hot and dry, rabid animals are greatly to be feared. While collecting in these mountains I passed several good ranches which had been deserted because, as my guide said, stock could not be raised there successfully on account of the _rabia_.

This man had worked as a _ranchero_ or stock herder for two years on one of these ranches, and had been obliged at one time to kill eleven cattle and seven sheep and goats in two weeks on account of their having rabies. It was part of his duty to follow up rabid coyotes, foxes, skunks, and wild cats when he saw them or heard their peculiar cry, and shoot them before they bit the stock. But he assured me very gravely that he preferred to work in the valley for less wages rather than have charge of Chollalito rancho; and when we camped there for a night he slept on top of the pack boxes, with his bare feet wrapped in blankets and a _serape_ over his head, and reverently pulled out the blessed rag he wore around his neck, in order to more surely protect himself against the rabid skunks and coyotes. There is, however, very little danger in traveling through this interesting country. Cases of hydrophobia are comparatively rare, and some scientists who have collected in Baja California have even denied its existence there. But with the traveler, as with the native, there remains the vague, constant, but unrealized expectation of seeing some raging coyote come tearing through the cactus, or of having his toe bitten in the middle of the night as he sprawls in the heat and darkness.

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PROFESSOR WELLDON, in the British Association, expressed his sense of the intellectual insolence of those who presume to say, notwithstanding our ignorance of animal characters, that because a characteristic seems to us minute and without importance, it is therefore without importance to the animal. Until we know the function of the animal throughout, and can picture its physiological processes thoroughly, we have no right to say, _a priori_, that this or that feature is of no use.

THE SENSE OF COLOR.

BY M. ANDRÉ BRACCHI.

When the different rays of the solar spectrum strike the eye separately they each produce a particular characteristic and subjective impression, which is called color. Ingenious theories have been set forth by physiologists, like Young, Helmholtz, Hering, and others, to explain the perception of colors by our eye, but the problem still awaits solution, and is not likely to be explained from that side, because it is rather psychical. The laws regulating the perception of colors are not physiological; we perceive only relations. We know that the sense of color may be modified independently of that of light and of space. Two phases may be distinguished in its evolution. Every light, whether chromatic or not, produces a simple luminous impression on the retina--a simple excitation of the optic nerve, without being analyzed by it. In the second phase the brain, the psychic center of color, intervenes. There may obviously be considerable differences between persons in the interpretation of what we call colors, and we may judge that there is an education of this psychical center, and that it is an important matter.

Different as the ways of interpreting a sensation of color may be, there are still some fundamental ideas in the matter which painters, for example, do not all observe. Some, like the impressionists, exaggerate them, and others neglect them. Which of these are wrong? and which right? are questions we are not concerned with, our purpose being to show that many of the phenomena of color, shade, sources of light, etc., escape a large proportion of persons unless they are attentive observers. If we visit the exhibitions of the impressionists we shall be entertained at the criticisms we hear over the canvases of such painters as Renoir and Monet; youths who have just come out of the drawing school declaring that their master never taught them to put blue on a face, and that in Nature all shadows are gray or black, and none red or violet; and we should astonish a great many people if we should say that a white robe should never be painted in a portrait picture with white lead alone. "All skies are blue, all trees are green, all pantaloons are red," said a celebrated painter who was trying to show how the habit of seeing a colored object in a certain way prevented one from perceiving the different colors that might be applied to it. We recollect the trouble of a brave youth who, having sat for his portrait to a celebrated painter, was distracted at perceiving green in the reflections of the hair of his likeness. Yet there are in Nature shadows that are blue and reflections that are green, and if we do not see them habitually it is because we do not give sufficient attention to them.

A common division of the spectrum is into warm and cold colors. The warm colors are red, yellow, orange, and yellow-green; the cold colors are violet, blue, green, and blue-green. This is not an arbitrary division, but answers to a fact of experience which passes from our physical to our moral impressions, and may cause in us feelings of comfort or uneasiness, joy, sadness, or moral depression. Some persons are influenced by the gray-colored sky, others are gay when the day is bright. It is a current expression that the color of the southern landscape is warm. Goethe said that blue caused him to feel cold.

The terms warm and cold are technical expressions in the arts. A color tone is cooled by putting blue in it, and warmed by adding red or yellow. "This practice is not arbitrary," says M. F. Bracquemond in his book on Design and Color; "it copies the colored aspects which natural light imposes on all imitation that seeks to realize the colored and factitious light of painting. To reach this, art observes the order according to which the natural lights distribute their various colored elements, and classes luminous aspects--a process which it has always observed--into the two categories of warm and cold. Hence, so far as examples come to us, this contrast is easy to verify; at the Louvre, for example, in works from Pompeii, and in those of all the masters." Preyer relies upon this division of colors into warm and cold for a comparison of chromatic sensations with thermic, and for supposing that the color sense is developed from the sense of temperature. Chromatic sensitiveness to this author is only a special case of thermic sensitiveness limited to the retina. Darwin's ideas were evidently the same; the whole human body was a sort of retina capable of improvement; we may, it is true, suppose with Lord Kelvin that "there is absolute continuity between the perception of heat by the retina of the eye and its perception by means of the tissues and nerves."

A very elementary experiment will easily enable us to recognize these different qualities of colors. Set a lighted candle on a table near a window; there are then two sources of light--the daylight, blue and cold, and the light of the candle, orange-red and warm. Cast a shadow on the white paper by holding a pencil straight up. The shadows cast by the candle will be blue to a degree that no one can mistake it, a greenish blue. Placing the pencil between the window and the candle and looking at the shadows, we have, first, the blue shadow of the candle, and then the shadow projected by the cold daylight. The color of the last, though perhaps less evident than the other, is an orange-yellow, of rich, warm tone.

From this little experiment we may conclude that a warm light provokes a cold shadow, a cold light a warm shadow, and that the color of the shadow is complementary to that of the light. In the experiment, daylight was the source of the cold light. Let us now take a third source of light, warmer than that of the candle, the flame produced by burning alcohol and salt--a very warm, deep orange light, which makes the light of the candle seem cold and its blue shadows appear yellow, while its own shadows are blue.

We recently observed a very striking example of these warm and cold appearances of light; it was at the theater: a beam of red light shone brightly upon an actor, whose shadow was absolutely green. Some of the people around us were astonished at the phenomenon, which they could perceive very plainly. Phenomena of this kind are produced every instant in a nature illuminated by the sun; nearly all the shadows are colored in hues which we can distinguish with a little attention where the unpracticed eye sees nothing but gray. Thus in a mountainous country, exposed to the warm light of the sun, the mountains in the horizon appear blue through the haze; then, as evening draws on, the sun appears a deeper orange, more reddish, while the sky seems green by contrast, and the red rays of the sun falling on the mountains turn them violet, in those beautiful tints which give so much glory to those countries of large shadows and bright lights.

However intense the light of day may be, it is therefore always colored, and gives those colored shadows which painters do not always observe. The painter, in fact, should make an analysis of the complex light around him, and should repeat the result in synthesis on his canvas. Upon hardly any other condition can he represent the transparency of the atmosphere, or the luminosity of a subject or a landscape. These colored shadows are not, therefore, false colors, as often seems to be believed, or optical illusions; they are really existent, but our eyes are hardly ever practiced enough to discern them; we are deficient in education of the color sense. This education is not hard to attain. There are persons who have special aptitudes and are consequently remarkable colorists, just as some persons have an admirably organized ear for music; but, besides these, it is possible for all persons endowed with the faculty of observing and capable of attention to acquire with considerable rapidity the faculty of discerning colors, where they at present hardly see anything but confused gray masses. (The epithet gray, we may observe, is used as applied to many things the color of which is not susceptible of exact determination.) Such attentive observation of colors is, however, attended with some danger to painters. Every person prefers some one color, is influenced by a particular shade. When we examine the works of the painters we see that there are many differences in the way of seeing. Some see blue, red, green; others see clear, others obscure. In the analysis of a complex color it happens that there is sometimes an auto-suggestion. Where there is a hardly defined violet, the painter will exaggerate it on his canvas, and will be obliged, in order to keep up the right tone, to increase the intensity of the colors next to it. Hence arises a common error with painters, who start with a true principle, but are not able to apply it properly, and give their picture a tonic violet, green, or yellow, beyond all reason.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique._

SKETCH OF THOMAS EGLESTON.

BY PROF. DANIEL S. MARTIN.

As a general rule, the work of the scientist is not of a kind to attract conspicuous notice from the public, especially in great cities, filled and thrilled with commercial and political activity; and so it comes to pass that men of rare attainments and untiring energy, in the highest walks of life and thought, may spend their whole life-time in such an environment, and be scarcely known outside of a limited circle of kindred minds. They may confer lasting benefits on the community, render important services to the whole country, and be widely known and honored in other lands, and yet receive but little general recognition in the place of their abode.

Such a man, in such a community, is Prof. THOMAS EGLESTON, of the city of New York. He has been too busy and too modest to seek prominence in the public eye, and his scientific work has been of a kind that does not lend itself readily to popular lectures or startling announcements; but as a mineralogist, a metallurgist, and a mining engineer, and as the planner and founder of the great School of Mines of Columbia University, he has made a deep and permanent impress on the history of science in the United States.

Professor Egleston is of New England stock, his ancestors having been among the first settlers of Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1635. Thence they came by a toilsome and perilous journey to Connecticut, and founded Windsor, which was thenceforward their home, and whence his father came to New York. The removal to Connecticut arose from a desire for greater freedom of life and worship than they found in Massachusetts; and Professor Egleston has been deeply interested in studying the little-known records of this movement, and the influence which it exerted, as an almost unwritten chapter in American history. He proposes to publish these researches, together with much other material relating to our colonial history, in which he is an enthusiastic student.