Part 3

The feeling of the spot is one of almost complete isolation from the world below, and a neighbourhood to something startling if not almost terrible. Like Fatima in Bluebeard’s Tower, impelled by an overbearing curiosity, we turn the lock of the centre door, and enter the chamber. A strange sight is presented. The room is large, with the sloping roof-beams above, and a stained and uncovered floor below. The walls all round are crowded with shelves, covered with bottles of various sizes full of the queerest-looking of all queer things. Many are of a bright vermilion colour; others yellow; others brown; others black; whilst others again display the opaque whiteness of bloodless death. Three tables are in the room, but these are as crowded as the walls. Cases of instruments, microscopes, tall jars, cans, a large glass globe full of water-newts, hydras, and mosses; small cases of drawers filled with microscopic objects, and a thousand other odds and ends. Here is a long coil of snake’s eggs, just brought from a country stable-yard; there some ears of diseased wheat, sent by a noble landlord who studies farming; beside them lies part of a leaf of the gigantic water-lily, the Victoria Regia, and near that a portion of a vegetable marrow is macerating in a saucer to separate some peculiar vessels for exhibition under the microscope. There are two windows to the room, besides some ventilators in the roof; and before one of these, where the light is best, are ranged microscopes complete and ready for use, and round about them all sorts of scraps of glass and glaziers’ diamonds, and watch-glasses, and forceps, and scissors, and bottles of marine-glue, and of gold-size,—these being the means and appliances of the microscopic observer. Before the second window is a sink, in which stand jars of frogs and newts, and other small creatures. A lathe, a desk, and writing utensils, the model of a whale cast ashore in the Thames, an old stiff-backed wooden chair, once the seat of the Master of the Worshipful Company of Surgeons, a few cases of stuffed birds and animals, and some tall glass-stoppered bottles that went twice round the world with Captain Cook and Dr. Solander, make up the catalogue of the chief contents of an apartment, which, at first glance, has the look of an auctioneer’s room filled with the sold-off stock of a broken down anatomical teacher. A closer inspection, however, shows that though there is so great a crowd of objects, there is little or no confusion, and the real meaning of the place, its intention, and labours, reveal themselves.

We are in a storeroom of the strange productions of all corners of the earth, from the air above and from the waters below. Every particle in every bottle that looks perhaps to the uninitiated eye only a mass of bad fish preserved in worse pickle, has its value. A thin slice of it taken out and placed under the microscope, illustrates some law of the animal economy, or displays, perhaps, some long undiscovered fact, or shows to the surprise of the gazer, a series of lines beautifully arranged, or perhaps curiously mingled, and rich in their figured combinations as the frozen moisture of a window-frame on a winter’s morning. To this room as to a general centre come contributions from all corners of the earth; the donors being chiefly medical men employed on expeditions, or in the public service, though other medicos, who go to seek fortune in strange lands, often remember their alma mater, and pack up a bottle of curious things “to send to the College.” Doctors on shipboard, doctors with armies, doctors in Arctic ships, or on Niger expeditions; in the far regions of Hindûstan, and in the fogs and storms of Labrador, think now and then of their “dissecting days,” and of the noble collection in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which every true student feels bound to honour, and to help to make complete. Many, when going forth into distant countries, are supplied from this place with bottles specially adapted to receive objects in request, and receive also a volume of instructions, how the specimens may be best preserved. “When a quadruped is too large to be secured whole, cut off the portion of the head containing the teeth,” says one direction. “If no more can be done,” says another, “preserve the heart and great blood-vessels.” “Of a full-grown whale,” says a third of these notes, “send home the eyes with the surrounding skin, their muscles and fat in an entire mass.” “When many specimens of a rare and curious bird are procured, the heads of a few should be taken off and preserved in spirit.” “When alligators and crocodiles are too large to be preserved whole, secure some part. The bones of such things are especially desirable. Secure also the eggs in different stages.” “Snakes may be preserved whole, or in part, especially the heads, for the examination of their teeth and fangs.” “Eyes of fishes are proper objects of preservation.” Such are a few of the hints sent forth to their medical disciples by the College, and the fruits of the system are a bountiful supply. Never a week passes but something rare or curious makes its appearance in Lincoln’s Inn Fields; sometimes from one quarter, sometimes from another, but there is always something coming, either by messenger or parcel-cart. Apart from these foreign sources, there are other contributaries to the general stock. Country doctors and hospital surgeons, from time to time, send in their quota; the Zoological Society likewise contribute all their dead animals. When the elephant died at the Regent’s Park Gardens, a College student and an assistant were busily occupied for days dissecting the huge animal. When the rhinoceros expired at the same place, a portion of its viscera was hailed as a prize; and when the whale was cast, not long ago, upon the shores of the Thames, the watermen who claimed it as their booty, steamed off to the College to find a customer for portions of the unwieldy monster; nor were they disappointed. Beyond all these, there still remains another searcher out of materials for the scalpel and the microscope. He is a character in his way. By trade, half cattle-slaughterer half-oysterman, he is by choice a sort of dilettante anatomist. One day he is killing oxen and sheep in Clare Market, and the next is scouring the same market for morbid specimens “for Mr. Quickett, at the College.” He knows an unhealthy sheep by its looks, and watches its post mortem with the eye of a savant. Many a choice specimen has he caught up in his time from amongst the offal and garbage of that fustiest of markets in the fustiest of neighbourhoods. Indeed, through him, all that is unusual in ox, calf, sheep, fish, or fowl, found within the confines of Clare Market, finds its way to the “work shop” of the College to be investigated by scalpel and microscope. When a butcher is known to have any diseased sheep, our collector hovers about his slaughter-house, and that which is bad food for the public, often affords him and his patron a prize. He is a sort of jackal for the anatomists—a kind of cadger in the service of science—a veritable snatcher-up of ill-conditioned trifles.

Returning to the room in the College roof, where the general cornucopia of strange things is emptied, we find its presiding genius in Mr. Quekett, a quiet enthusiast in his way, who goes on from month to month and year to year, watching, working, and chronicling such facts as can be made out. When a novelty comes in, it is examined, described, investigated by the microscope; and, if worthy, is sketched on stone for printing. It is then catalogued, and placed in spirit for preservation—minute portions, perhaps, being mounted on glass as objects for the microscope. Thus disposed of, it becomes a “store preparation.” From this store the lectures at the College are illustrated by examples; and from it also are the bright bottles in the Hunterian Museum kept complete. From time to time something very rare comes to hand, and then there is quite an excitement in the place. It is turned about, examined, and discussed, with as much zest as a lady would display when first opening a present of jewels, or first criticising a new ball-dress. If the new acquisition be an animal but recently dead, a drop of its blood is sought and placed under the microscope to see the diameter of its globules; if it has a coat of fur, perhaps one of the hairs are next submitted to the same test; and then a fine section of its bone passes a similar ordeal. Its brain is investigated, weighed, and placed in spirit for preservation. Its general characteristics are then gone over, and a description of them written down. If worthy of a place in the Museum, this description goes to make a paragraph in the catalogues of the Collection—fine quarto volumes, of which there are many now complete, containing more exact anatomical and physiological descriptions of objects, than perhaps any other work extant.

The last contribution to the series of Catalogues was made in the room we have been examining. Its production was the constant labour of two years; and the volume contains exact particulars of many facts never before noticed. Amongst other things, for instance, made out with certainty in this place by Mr. Quekett, after months of patient investigation, was the elementary differences in the character of bone. To the common eye and common idea, all bone is simply bone; and for common purposes the word indicates closely enough what the speaker would describe. Not so to the naturalist and the physiologist; and so scalpel and microscope went to work: the sea, the land, and the air, lent each their creatures peculiar to itself, and the labour of the search was at length rewarded by a discovery that each great class of living things has an elementary difference in the bones upon which its structure is built up. Hence, when a particle of bony matter is now placed under the microscope, come whence it may—from a geological strata, or from the depths of the sea, or from within the cere-cloth of a mummy—the observer, guided by Mr. Quekett’s observations, knows whether it belonged in life to bird, beast, or fish.

Glancing round this anatomical workshop, we find, amongst other things, some preparations showing the nature of pearls. Examine them, and we find that there are dark and dingy pearls, just as there are handsome and ugly men; the dark pearl being found on the dark shell of the fish, the white brilliant one upon the smooth inside shell. Going further in the search, we find that the smooth glittering lining upon which the fish moves, is known as the _nacre_, and that it is produced by a portion of the animal called _the mantle_: and for explanation sake we may add, that gourmands practically know the mantle as _the beard_ of the oyster. When living in its glossy house, should any foreign substance find its way through the shell to disturb the smoothness so essential to its ease, the fish coats the offending substance with nacre, and a pearl is thus formed. The pearl is, in fact, a little globe of the smooth glossy substance yielded by the oyster’s beard; yielded ordinarily to smooth the narrow home to which his nature binds him, but yielded in round drops—real pearly tears—if he is hurt. When a beauty glides proudly among a throng of admirers, her hair clustering with pearls, she little thinks that her ornaments are products of pain and diseased action, endured by the most unpoetical of shell-fish.

Leaving the centre-room of the three in the College roof, let us just glance at the other two apartments. Upon entering one we see the walls lined with boxes, something like those in a milliner’s shop, but, instead of holding laces and ribands, we find them labelled “Wolf,” “Racoon,” “Penguin,” “Lion,” “Albatross,” and so on with names of birds, and beasts, and fishes. On lifting a lid, we find the boxes filled with the bones of the different creatures named; not a complete skeleton of any one, perhaps, but portions of half-a-dozen. In this room, the two students attached to the College carry on dissections, under the directions of the superior authorities. What they do is entered in a book kept posted up, and this affords another source for reference as to anatomical facts. When they have laboured here for three years, they have the option of a commission as Assistant Surgeon in the Army, Navy, or East India Company’s service, as a reward for their College work.

If the atmosphere of the two apartments we have investigated was bad, that of the third room was infinitely worse, though windows and ventilators are constantly open. In this place large preparations are kept, and all the specimens are here put into the bottles required for exhibition in the Museum. This third room, like the first, has a curiously characteristic look. It would make a fine original for a picture of an alchemist’s study. On one side is a large structure of brickwork with pipes and taps, conveying the idea of a furnace and still, or of an oven. Alongside it is a bath and a table, and the purpose of the whole is for _injecting_ large animals. This is a very difficult operation, the object being to drive a kind of hot liquid sealing-wax into every artery of the body, even the most minute. All things brought here, and capable of it, are injected somewhat after this fashion before they pass under the scalpel. Besides this oven-looking structure there are pans, and tubs, and casks; one containing a small dromedary, another being “a cask of camel.” A painter’s easel stands there ready for use, and on the floor are some bones of a megatherium; the tables are covered with bottles and jars, and the walls are similarly decorated. Strings of bladders hang about, and under foot we see thin sheets of lead coated with tin-foil; these latter being used for tying down the preparation bottles so that they may for years remain air-tight; a tedious and somewhat difficult operation. In this place every year they use scores, sometimes hundreds of gallons of alcohol; one fact which helps to show that museums on a large scale are expensive establishments.

Here, as elsewhere, however, in our establishments, whatever may be expended on materials, the men who do the work of science are but indifferently paid. But lucre is not their sole reward. No mere money payment could compensate (for instance) a man for spending a lifetime in this College of Surgeons’ roof. Forget the object in view; ignore the charm that science has for its votaries; and this place becomes a literal inferno, filled with pestilential fumes, and surrounded by horrible sights. But they who fix the salaries know how much the pursuit of science is a labour of love; and so they pay the man of science badly, not here alone, but in all the scientific branches of the public service. But the science-worker though he may feel the injustice, yet moves on his way rejoicing, pleased with his unceasing search into the secret workings of nature, and exhilarated from time to time by some discovery, or by the confirmation of some cherished notion. And though the glittering prizes of life be bestowed on strivers in far different walks, the student of nature holds on his cheerful and philosophic way, rewarded by the glimpses he gets of the power that made and sustains all terrestrial things, and rewarded, moreover, by the holy contact with that infinite wisdom seen at work in the construction, the adaptation, and the continuance of the marvellous and illimitably varied works it is the business of his life to investigate.

CHIPS.

NICE WHITE VEAL.

We shudder at the cruelties practised upon Strasbourg geese to produce the celebrated _pâtés de foie ǧras_; but remorse would assuredly afflict the amateurs of veal with indigestion, if they reflected on the tortures to which calves are subjected to cause the very unnatural colour of the meat which they so much prize. The natural and wholesome tint of veal is not white, but pink. An ancient French traveller in England (1690) says that the English veal has not the “beautiful red colour of the French.” Dr. Smollett, in “Peregrine Pickle,” upbraids epicures, on the scores both of cruelty and unwholesomeness, saying that our best veal is like a “fricassee of kid gloves,” and the sauce of “melted butter” is rendered necessary only by the absence of the juices drained out of the unfortunate animal before death.

The process of killing a calf is a refinement of cruelty worthy of a Grand Inquisitor. The beast is, while alive, bled several times; in summer, during several hours of the night, and frequently till it faints; when a plug is put into the orifice till “next time.” But the lengthened punishment of the most unoffending of animals is at the actual “killing.” It is tied together, neck and heels, much as a dead animal when packed in a basket and slung up by a rope, with the head downwards. A vein is then opened, till it lingeringly bleeds to death. Two or three “knocks” are given to it with the pole-axe whilst it hangs loose in the air, and the flesh is beaten with sticks, technically termed “dressing” it, some time before feeling has ceased to exist. All this may be verified by those who insist on seeing the penetralia of the slaughter-houses; or the poor animal may be seen moaning and writhing—by a mere glance—on many days of the week, in Warwick Lane, Newgate Street.

This mode of bleaching veal is not only a crime, but a blunder. The flesh would be more palatable and nutritious killed speedily and mercifully. But were it otherwise, and had it been twenty times more a luxury, who, professing to honour the common Creator, would, for the sensual gratification of the palate, cause the calf to be thus tortured?

“ALL THINGS IN THE WORLD MUST CHANGE.”

Would’st thou have it always Spring, Though she cometh flower-laden? Though sweet-throated birds do sing? Thou would’st weary of it, Maiden. Dost thou never feel desire That thy womanhood were nearer? Doth thy loving heart ne’er tire, Longing yet for something dearer?

Would’st have Summer ever stay— Droughty Summer—bright and burning? Dost thou not, oft in the day, Long for still, cool, night’s returning? Dost thou not grow weary, Youth, Of thy pleasures, vain though pleasant— Thinking Life has more of Truth Than the satiating present?

Would’st have Autumn never go? (Autumn, Winter’s wealthy neighbour), Stacks would rise, and wine-press flow Vainly, did’st thou always labour. When thy child is on thy knee And thy heart with love’s o’erflowing, Dost thou never long to see What is in the future’s showing?

When old Winter, cold and hoar, Cometh, blowing his ten fingers, Hanging ice-drops on the door Whilst he at the threshold lingers, Would’st thou ever vigil keep With a mate so full of sorrow? Better to thy bed and sleep, Nor wake till th’ Eternal morrow!

THE LAST OF A LONG LINE.

IN TWO CHAPTERS.—CHAPTER II.

In Great Stockington there lived a race of paupers. From the year of the 42nd of Elizabeth, or 1601, down to the present generation, this race maintained an uninterrupted descent. They were a steady and unbroken line of paupers, as the parish books testify. From generation to generation their demands on the parish funds stand recorded. There were no _lacunæ_ in their career; there never failed an heir to these families; fed on the bread of idleness and legal provision, these people flourished, increased, and multiplied. Sometimes compelled to work for the weekly dole which they received, they never acquired a taste for labour, or lost the taste for the bread for which they did not labour. These paupers regarded this maintenance by no means as a disgrace. They claimed it as a right,—as their patrimony. They contended that one-third of the property of the Church had been given by benevolent individuals for the support of the poor, and that what the Reformation wrongfully deprived them of, the great enactment of Elizabeth rightfully—and only rightfully—restored.

Those who imagine that all paupers merely claimed parish relief because the law ordained it, commit a great error. There were numbers who were hereditary paupers, and that on a tradition carefully handed down, that they were only manfully claiming their own. They traced their claims from the most ancient feudal times, when the lord was as much bound to maintain his villein in gross, as the villein was to work for the lord. These paupers were, in fact, or claimed to be, the original _adscripti glebæ_, and to have as much a claim to parish support as the landed proprietor had to his land. For this reason, in the old Catholic times, after they had escaped from villenage by running away and remaining absent from their hundred for a year and a day, dwelling for that period in a walled town, these people were amongst the most diligent attendants at the Abbey doors, and when the Abbeys were dissolved, were, no doubt, amongst the most daring of these thieves, vagabonds, and sturdy rogues, who, after the Robin Hood fashion, beset the highways and solitary farms of England, and claimed their black mail in a very unceremonious style. It was out of this class that Henry VIII. hanged his seventy-two thousand during his reign, and, as it is said, without appearing materially to diminish their number.

That they continued to “increase, multiply, and replenish the earth,” overflowing all bounds, overpowering by mere populousness all the severe laws against them of whipping, burning in the hand, in the forehead or the breast, and hanging, and filling the whole country with alarm, is evident by the very act itself of Elizabeth.