Chapter 7

We need not devote attention to the aims and arrangements of the agricultural colleges proper, but will pass at once to those which deal with the mechanical arts, dealing first of all with those that are assisted by the national land grant. Taking them alphabetically, we have first the State Agricultural College of Colorado, in the mechanical and drawing department of which shops for bench work in wood and iron and for forging have been recently erected, this institution being one of the newest in America. In the Illinois Industrial University the student of mechanical engineering receives practice in five shops devoted to pattern-making, blacksmithing, moulding and founding, benchwork for iron, and machine tool-work for iron. In the first shop the practice consists of planing, chiseling, turning, and the preparation of patterns for casting. The ordinary blacksmithing operations take place in the second shop, and those of casting in the third. In the fourth there is, first of all, a course of freehand benchwork, and afterward the fitting of parts is undertaken. In the fifth shop all the fundamental operations on iron by machinery are practiced, the actual work being carefully outlined beforehand by drawings. This department of the University consists, in point of fact, of three separate schools, destined to qualify the student for every kind of engineering--mining, railway, mechanical, and architectural. In addition to the shops and machine rooms, there are well furnished cabinets of geological and mineralogical specimens, chemical laboratories for assaying and metallurgy, stamp mill, furnaces, etc., and, in fact, every known vehicle for practical instruction. The school of architecture prepares students for the building profession. Among the subjects in this branch are office work and shop practice, constructing joints in carpentry and joinery, cabinet making and turning, together with modeling in clay. The courses in mathematics, mechanics and physics are the same as those in the engineering school; but the technical studies embrace drawing from casts, wood, stone, brick, and iron construction, turners' work, slating, plastering, painting, and plumbing, architectural drawing and designing, the history and aesthetics of architecture, estimates, agreements specification, heating, lighting, draining, and ventilation. The student's work from scale drawing occupies three terms, carpentry and joinery being taught in the first year, turning and cabinet making in the second, metal and stone work in the third. A more condensed course, known as the builder's course, is given to those who can only stop one year. The machine shop has a steam engine of 16 horse power, two engines and three plain lathes, a planer, a large drill press, a pattern shop, a blacksmith's shop, all of the machinery having been built on the spot. The carpenter's shop is likewise supplied with necessary machine tools, such as saws, planers, tenoning machine, whittlers, etc., the power being furnished by the machine shop. At the date of the last University report, there were 41 students in the courses of mechanical engineering, 41 in those of civil engineering, 3 in mining engineering, and 14 in architecture. Tuition is free in all the University classes, though each student has to pay a matriculation fee of $10, and the incidental expenses amount to about $23 annually. He is charged for material used or apparatus broken, but not for the ordinary wear and tear of instruments. It should be mentioned that the endowment of the Illinois Industrial University is from scrip received from the Government for 480,000 acres of land, of which 454,460 have been sold for $319,178. The real estate of the University, partly made up by donations and partly by appropriations made in successive sessions by the State of Illinois, is estimated at $450,000.

The Purdue University in Indiana, named after its founder, who gave $150,000, which was supplemented by another $50,000 from the State and a bond grant of 390,000 acres, also provides a very complete mechanical course, with shop instruction, divided as follows:

Bench working in wood for 12 weeks, or 120 hours. Wood-turning " 4 " " 40 " Pattern-making " 12 " " 120 " Vise-work in iron " 10 " " 100 " Forging in iron and steel " 18 " " 180 " Machine tool-work in iron " 20 " " 200 "

The course in carpentry and joinery embraces: 1. Exercising in sawing and planing to dimensions. 2 Application, or box nailed together. 3 Mortise and tenon joints; a plain mortise and tenon; an open dovetailed mortise and tenon (dovetailed halving); a dovetailed keyed mortise and tenon. 4. Splices. 5. Common dovetailing. 6. Lap dovetailing and rabbeting. 7. Blind or secret dovetail. 8. Miter-box. 9. Carpenter's trestle. 10. Panel door. 11. Roof truss. 12. Section of king-post truss roof. 13. Drawing model.

The course in wood turning includes: 1. Elementary principles: first, straight turning; second, cutting in; third, convex curves with the chisel; fourth, compound curves formed with the gouge. 2. File and chisel handles. 3. Mallets. 4. Picture frames (chuck work). 5. Card receiver (chuck work). 6. Watch safe (chuck work). 7. Ball.

In the pattern-making course the student is supposed to have some skill in bench and lathe work, which will be increased; the direct object being to teach what forms of pattern are in general necessary, and how they must be constructed in order to get a perfect mould from them. The character of the work differs each year. For instance, for the last year, besides simpler patterns easily drawn from the sand, such as glands, ball-cranks, etc., there were a series of flanged pipe-joints for 2½ in. pipes, including the necessary core boxes; also pulley patterns from 6 in. to 10 in. diameter, built in segments for strength, and to prevent warping and shrinkage; and, lastly, a complete set of patterns for a three horse-power horizontal steam engine, all made from drawings of the finished piece. In the vise work in iron, the chief requirements are these: 1, given a block of cast iron 4 in. by 2 in. by 1½ in. in thickness, to reduce the thickness ¼ in. by chipping, and then finishing with the file; 2, to file a round hole square; 3, to file a round hole into elliptical; 4, given a 3 in. cube of wrought iron, to cut a spline 3 in. by 3/8 in. by ¼ in., and second, when the under side is a one half round hollow--these two cuts involve the use of the cope chisel and the round nose chisel, and are examples of very difficult chipping; 5, round tiling or hand-vise work; 6, scraping; 7, special examples of fitting. In the forging classes are elementary processes, driving, bending, and upsetting; courses in welding; miscellaneous forging; steel forging, including hardening and tempering in all its details.

It is worth mentioning that in the industrial art school of the Purdue University there were 13 of the fair sex as students, besides one in the chemical school, and two going through the mechanical courses just detailed, showing that the scope of woman's industry is less limited in America than in England. The Iowa State Agricultural College has also two departments of mechanical and civil engineering, the former including a special course of architecture. The workshop practice, which occupies three forenoons of 2½ hours each per week, is, however, of more general character, and is not pursued with such a regard to any special calling as in the case of the Purdue University.

The Kansas State Agricultural College has a course of carpentry, though designed rather more to meet the everyday necessities of a farmer's life. In fact, all the students are obliged to attend these classes, and take the same first lessons in sawing, planing, lumber dressing, making mortises, tenons, and joints, and in general use of tools--just the kind of instruction that every English lad should have before he is shipped off to the Colonies. This farmer's course in the Kansas College provides for a general training in mechanical handiwork, but facilities are given also to those who wish to follow out the trade, and special instruction is provided in the whole range of work, from framing to stair-building, as also in iron work, such as ordinary forging, filing, tempering, etc. Of the students attending this college, 75 percent, are from farmers' homes, and the majority of the remainder from the families of mechanics and tradesmen.

The State College of Maine provides courses for both civil and mechanical engineers, and has two shops equipped according to the Russian system. Forge and vise work are taught in them, though it is not the object of the college so much to teach the details of any one trade as to qualify students by general knowledge to undertake any of them afterward. A much more complete and thorough technical education is given in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at Boston, where there are distinct classes for civil, mechanical, mining, geological, and architectural engineering. The following are the particulars of the instruction in the architectural branch, which commences in the student's second year, with Greek, Roman, and Mediæval architectural history, the Orders and their applications, drawing, sketching, and tracing, analytic geometry, differential calculus, physics, descriptive geometry, botany, and physical geography. In the third year the course is extended to the theory of decoration, color, form, and proportion; conventionalism, symbolism, the decorative arts, stained glass, fresco painting, tiles, terra-cotta, original designs, specifications, integral calculus, strength of materials, dynamics, bridges and roofs, stereotomy. In the fourth year the student is turned out a finished architect, after a course of the history of ornament, the theory of architecture, stability of structure, flow of gases, shopwork (carpentry), etc.

The number of students in this very comprehensive Institute of Technology was, by the latest report, 390, of whom 138 were undergoing special courses, 39 were in the schools of mechanical art, and 49 in the Lowell School of Practical Design. Tuition is charged at the rate of 200 dols. for the institute proper, and 150 dols. for the mechanical schools, the average expenses per student being about 254 dols. There are 10 free scholarships, of which two are given for mechanical art. The Lowell School has been established by the trustee of the Lowell Institute to afford free technical education, under the auspices of the Institute of Technology, to both sexes--a large number of young women availing themselves of it in connection with their factory work at Lowell. The courses include practical designs for manufactures, and the art of making patterns for prints, delaines, silks, paperhangings, carpets, oilcloth, etc., and the school is amply provided with pattern looms. Indeed, the whole of the appliances for practical teaching at the Institute are on such a complete scale that at the risk of being a little tedious it is as well to enumerate them. They comprise laboratories devoted to chemistry, mineralogy, metallurgy, and industrial chemistry; there are also microscopic, spectroscopic, and organic laboratories. In other branches there are laboratories and museums of steam engineering, mining, and metallurgy, biology and architecture, together with an observatory, much used in connection with geodesy and practical astronomy. The steam engineering laboratory provides practice in testing, adjusting, and managing steam machinery. The appliances in connection with mining and metallurgy include a five-stamp battery, Blake crusher, automatic machine jigs, an engine pulverizer, a Root and a Sturtevant blower, with blast reverberating, wasting, cupellation, and fusion furnaces, and all other means for reducing ores. The architectural museum contains many thousand casts, models, photographs, and drawings. The shops for handwork are large and well arranged, and include a vise-shop, forge shop, machine, tool, and lathe shops, foundry, rooms for pattern making, weaving, and other industrial institutions. The vise-shop contains four heavy benches, with 32 vises attached, giving a capacity for teaching 128 students the course every ten weeks, or 640 in a year of fifty weeks. The forge-shop has eight forges. The foundry has 16 moulding benches, an oven for core baking, and a blast furnace of one-half ton capacity. The pattern-weaving room is provided with five looms, one of them in 20-harness, and 4-shuttle looms, and another an improved Jacquard pattern loom. It may safely be said that there is nor an establishment in the world better equipped for industrial and technical education than this Institute of Massachusetts.--_London Building News_.

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IVORY GETTING SCARCE.--The stock of ivory in London is estimated at about forty tons in dealers' private warehouses, whereas formerly they usually held about one hundred tons. One fourth of all imported into England goes to the Sheffield cutlers. No really satisfactory substitute for ivory has been found, and millions await the discoverer of one. The existing substitutes will not take the needed polish.

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THE ANAESTHETICS OF JUGGLERS.

Fakirs are religious mendicants who, for the purpose of exciting the charity of the public, assume positions in which it would seem impossible that they could remain, submit themselves to fearful tortures, or else, by their mode of living, their abstinence, and their indifference to inclement weather and to external things, try to make believe that, owing to their sanctity, they are of a species superior to that of common mortals.

In the Indies, these fakirs visit all the great markets, all religious fetes, and usually all kinds of assemblages, in order to exhibit, themselves. If one of them exhibits some new peculiarity, some curious deformity, a strange posture, or, finally, any physiological curiosity whatever that surpasses those of his confreres, he becomes the attraction of the fete, and the crowd surrounds him, and small coin and rupees begin to fall into his bowl.

Fakirs, like all persons who voluntarily torture themselves, are curious examples of the modifications that will, patience, and, so to speak, "art" can introduce into human nature, and into the sensitiveness and functions of the organs. If these latter are capable of being improved, of having their functions developed and of acquiring more strength (as, for example, the muscles of boxers, the breast of foot racers, the voice of singers, etc.), these same organs, on the contrary, can be atrophied or modified, and their functions be changed in nature. It is in such degradation and such degeneration of human nature that fakirs excel, and it is from such a point of view that they are worth studying.

We may, so to speak, class these individuals according to the grades of punishments that they inflict upon themselves, or according to the deformities that they have caused themselves to undergo. But, as we have already said, the number of both of these is extremely varied, each fakir striving in this respect to eclipse his fellows. It is only necessary to open a book of Indian travel to find descriptions of fakirs in abundance; and such descriptions might seem exaggerated or unlikely were they not so concordant. The following are a few examples:

_Immovable fakirs_.--The number of these is large. They remain immovable in the spot they have selected, and that too for an exceedingly long period of time. An example of one of these is cited who remained standing for twelve years, his arms crossed upon his breast, without moving and without lying or sitting down. In such cases charitable persons always take it upon themselves to prevent the fakir from dying of starvation. Some remain sitting, immovable, and apparently lifeless, while others, who lie stretched out upon the ground, look like corpses. It may be easily imagined what a state one of these beings is in after a few months or years of immobility. He is extremely lean, his limbs are atrophied, his body is black with filth and dust, his hair is long and dishevelled, his beard is shaggy, his finger and toe nails have become genuine claws, and his aspect is frightful. This, however, is a character common to all fakirs.

We may likewise class among the immovables those fakirs who cause themselves to be interred up to the neck, and who remain thus with their head sticking out of the ground either during the entire time the fair or fete lasts or for months and years.

_Anchylotic Fakirs_.--The number of fakirs who continue to hold one or both arms outstretched is very large in India. The following description of one of them is given by a traveler: "He was a goussain--a religious mendicant--who had dishevelled hair and beard, and horrible tattooings upon his face, and, what was most hideous, was his left arm, which, withered and anchylosed, stuck up perpendicularly from the shoulder. His closed hand, surrounded by straps, had been traversed by the nails, which, continuing to grow, had bent like claws on the other side. Finally, the hollow of this hand, which was filled with earth, served as a pot for a small sacred myrtle."

Other fakirs hold their two arms above their head, the hands crossed, and remain perpetually in such a position. Others again have one or both arms extended. Some hang by their feet from the limb of a tree by means of a cord, and remain head downward for days at a time, with their face uncongested and their voice clear, counting their beads and mumbling prayers.

One of the most remarkable peculiarities of fakirs is the faculty that certain of them possess of remaining entirely buried in vaults and boxes, and inclosed in bags, etc., for weeks and months, and, although there is a certain deceit as regards the length of their absolute abstinence, it nevertheless seems to be a demonstrated fact that, after undergoing a peculiar treatment, they became plunged into a sort of lethargy that allows them to remain for several days or weeks without taking food. Certain fakirs that have been interred under such conditions have, it appears, passed ten months or a year in their grave.

_Tortured Fakirs_.--Fakirs that submit themselves to tortures are very numerous. Some of them perform exercises analogous to those of the Aissaoua. Mr. Rousselet, in his voyage to the Indies, had an opportunity of seeing some of these at Bhopal, and the following is the picturesque description that he gives of them: "I remarked some groups of religious mendicants of a frightfully sinister character. They were Jogins, who, stark naked and with dishevelled hair, were walking about, shouting, and dancing a sort of weird dance. In the midst of their contortions they brandished long, sharp poniards, of a special form, provided with steel chains. From time to time, one of these hallucinated creatures would drive the poniard into his body (principally into the sides of his chest), into his arms, and into his legs, and would only desist when, in order to calm his apparent fury, the idlers who were surrounding him threw a sufficient number of pennies to him."

At the time of the feast of the Juggernaut one sees, or rather one _did_ see before the English somewhat humanized this ceremony, certain fakirs suspended by their flesh from iron hooks placed along the sides of the god's car. Others had their priests insert under their shoulder blades two hooks, that were afterward fixed to a long pole capable of pivoting upon a post. The fakirs were thus raised about thirty feet above ground, and while being made to spin around very rapidly, smilingly threw flowers to the faithful. Others, again, rolled over mattresses garnished with nails, lance-points, poniards, and sabers, and naturally got up bathed in blood. A large number cause 120 gashes (the sacred number) to be made in their back and breast in honor of their god. Some pierce their tongue with a long and narrow poniard, and remain thus exposed to the admiration of the faithful. Finally, many of them are content to pass points of iron or rods made of reed through folds in their skin. It will be seen from this that fakirs are ingenious in their modes of exciting the compassion and charity of the faithful.

Elsewhere, among a large number of savage tribes and half-civilized peoples, we find aspirants to the priesthood of the fetiches undergoing, under the direction of the members of the religious caste that they desired to enter, ordeals that are extremely painful. Now, it has been remarked for a long time that, among the neophytes, although all are prepared by the same hands, some undergo these ordeals without manifesting any suffering, while others cannot stand the pain, and so run away with fright. It has been concluded from this that the object of such ordeals is to permit the caste to make a selection from among their recruits, and that, too, by means of anesthetics administered to the chosen neophytes.

In France, during the last two centuries, when torturing the accused was in vogue, some individuals were found to be insensible to the most fearful tortures, and some even, who were plunged into a species of somnolence or stupefaction, slept in the hands of the executioner.

What are the processes that permit of such results being reached? Evidently, we cannot know them all. A certain number are caste, sect, or family secrets. Many are known, however, at least in a general way. The processes naturally vary, according to the object to be attained. Some seem to consist only in an effort of the will. Thus, those fakirs who remain immovable have no need of any special preparation to reach such a result, and the same is the case with those who are interred up to the neck, the will alone sufficing. Fakirs probably pass through the same phases that invalids do who are forced to keep perfectly quiet through a fracture or dislocation. During the first days the organism revolts against such inaction, the constraint is great, the muscles contract by starts, and then the patient gets used to it; the constraint becomes less and less, the revolt of the muscles becomes less frequent, and the patient becomes reconciled to his immobility. It is probable that after passing several months or years in a state of immobility fakirs no longer experience any desire to change their position, and even did they so desire, it would be impossible owing to the atrophy of their muscles and the anchylosis of their joints.

Those fakirs who remain with one or several limbs immovable and in an abnormal position have to undergo a sort of preparation, a special treatment; they have to enter and remain two or three mouths in a sort of cage or frame of bamboo, the object of which is to keep the limb that is to be immobilized in the position that it is to preserve. This treatment, which is identical with the one employed by surgeons for curing affections of the joints, has the effect of soldering or anchylosing the articulation. When such a result is reached, the fakir remains, in spite of himself and without fatigue, with outstretched arms, and, in order to cause them to drop, he would have to undergo a surgical operation.

As for those voluntary tortures that cause an effusion of blood, the insensibility of those who are the victims of it is explainable when we reflect that _India_ is _the_ country _par excellence_ of anæsthetic plants. It produces, notably, Indian hemp and poppy, the first of which yields hashish and the other opium. Now it is owing to these two narcotics, taken in a proper dose, either alone or combined according to a formula known to Hindoo fakirs and jugglers, but ignored by the lower class, that the former are able to become absolutely insensible themselves or make their adepts so.