Part 10

I went out in the dull autumnal day, Around me fell the rain, The bare trees shivered ’gainst the ashen sky, My heart was full of pain.

High in a maple tree, upon a branch, The tree-trunk close beside, A little empty bird’s nest, snug and neat, My tearful eyes espied.

And straightway, for the time, from grief and care My sad heart was beguiled, And on this remnant of the summer gone Through rain and tears I smiled.

Not oft has life so dull and drear a day, But something bright appears To speak of sunshine and the spring time flown, And bring a smile through tears.

THE LIFE OF A PLANET.

By RICHARD PROCTOR.

The material life of a planet is beginning to be recognized as being no less real than the life of a plant or of an animal. It is a different kind of life; there is neither consciousness such as we see in one of those forms of life, nor such systematic progress as we recognize in plant-life. But it is life, all the same. It has had a beginning, like all things which exist; and like them all, it must have an end.

The lifetime of a world like our earth may be truly said to be a lifetime of cooling. Beginning in the glowing vaporous condition which we see in the sun and stars, an orb in space passes gradually to the condition of a cool, non-luminous mass, and thence, with progress depending chiefly on its size (slower for the large masses and quicker for the small ones), it passes steadily onward toward inertness and death. Regarding the state in which we find the earth to be as the stage of a planet’s mid-life—viz., that in which the conditions are such that multitudinous forms of life can exist upon its surface, we may call that stage death in which these conditions have entirely disappeared.

Now, among the conditions necessary for the support of life in general are some which are unfavorable to individual life. Among these may be specially noted the action of those subterranean forces by which the earth’s surface is continually modeled and remodeled. It has been remarked with great justice, by Sir John Herschel, that since the continents of the earth were formed, forces have been at work which would long since have sufficed to have destroyed every trace of land, and to have left the surface of our globe one vast limitless ocean. But against these forces counteracting forces have been at work, constantly disturbing the earth’s crust, and, by keeping it irregular, leaving room for ocean in the depressions, and leaving the higher parts as continents and islands above the ocean’s surface. If these disturbing forces ceased to work, the work of disintegrating, wearing away, and washing off the land would go on unresisted. In periods of time such as to us seem long, no very great effect would be produced; but such periods as belong to the past of our earth, even to that comparatively short part of the past during which she has been the abode of life, would suffice to produce effects utterly inconsistent with the existence of life on land. Only by the action of her vulcanian energies can the earth maintain her position as an abode of life. She is, then, manifesting her fitness to support life in those very throes by which, too often, many lives are lost. The upheavals and downsinkings, the rushing of ocean in great waves over islands and seaports, by which tens of thousands of human beings, and still greater numbers of animals, lose their lives, are part of the evidence which the earth gives that within her frame there still remains enough of vitality for the support of life during hundreds of thousands of years to come.

This vitality is not due, as seems commonly imagined, to the earth’s internal heat. Rather the earth’s internal heat is due to the vitality with which her frame is instinct. The earth’s vitality is in reality due to the power of attraction which resides in every particle of her mass—that wonderful force of gravitation, omnipresent, infinite in extent, the property whose range throughout all space should have taught long since what science is teaching now (and has been foolishly blamed for teaching), the equally infinite range of God’s laws in time also. By virtue of the force of gravity pervading her whole frame, the crust of the earth is continually undergoing changes, as the loss of heat and consequent contraction, or chemical changes beneath the surface, leave room for the movement inward of the rock-substances of the crust, with crushing, grinding action, and the generation of intense heat. If the earth’s energy of gravity were lost, the internal fires would die out—not, indeed, quickly, but in a period of time very short compared with that during which, maintained as they constantly are by the effects of internal movements, they will doubtless continue. They are, in a sense, the cause of earthquakes, volcanoes, and so forth, because they prepare the earth’s interior for the action of her energies of attraction. But it is to these energies and the material which as yet they have on which to work, that the earth’s vitality is due. She will not, indeed, retain her vitality as long as she retains her gravitating power. That power must have something to work on. When the whole frame of the earth has been compressed to a condition of the greatest density which her attractive energies can produce, then terrestrial gravity will have nothing left to work on within the earth, and the earth’s globe will be to all intents and purposes dead. She will continue to exercise her attractive force on bodies outside of her. She will rotate on her axis, revolve around the sun, and reflect his rays of light and heat. But she will have no more life of her own than has the moon, which still discharges all those planetary functions.

But such disturbances as the recent earthquakes, while disastrous in their effects to those living near the shaken regions, assure us that as yet the earth is not near death. She is still full of vitality. Thousands—nay, tens, hundreds of thousands of years will still pass before even the beginning of the end is seen, in the steady disintegration and removal of the land without renovation or renewal by the action of subterranean forces.—_The Contemporary Review._

DISRAELI’S LONDON.

One of Disraeli’s favorite ideas was that London ought to be made the most magnificent city in the world—a real _Kaiserstadt_, or imperial town, a model to all other cities in the character of its public buildings, the sanitary perfection and outer picturesqueness of its private houses, the width of its streets, etc. When Napoleon III. commenced the re-edification of Paris he used to say: “Is it not pitiful that the emperor should be doing by force what we could do so much better of our own free will, if we had a proper pride, to say nothing of good sense in the matter?” Once when he was staying at Knole, he launched out into a parody of Macaulay’s idea of the New Zealander meditating over the ruins of London Bridge. He imagined this personage reconstructing in fancy a row of villas at Brixton: “What picture he would make of it! he would naturally suppose that knowing how to build, and having just awoken to a knowledge of sanitation, we had built according to the best ideas in our heads.” Then he took his New Zealander among the ruins of the stately commercial palaces crowded in narrow lanes all round the Bank, and the Exchange: “He would conclude that there must after all have been some tyrannical laws which prevented our merchants from combining their resources to make their streets spacious and effective, for it would seem absurd to him that intelligent men should, at a great cost, have built palaces for themselves in holes and corners where nobody could admire them properly, when by acting in concert, they might at much less expense have set much finer palaces in noble avenues, courts and squares.” Then Disraeli broke out into an animated description of his regenerate London with Wren’s four grand approaches to St. Paul’s, boulevards transecting the metropolis in all directions; and the palace of Whitehall rebuilt after Inigo Jones’s designs to make new government offices. He would have covered the embankment pedestals with statues of admirals set in colossal groups recalling great naval achievements, and he thought Stepney ought to have its cathedral of St. Peter, and containing memorials to all the humble heroes, sailors or fishermen who lost their lives performing acts of courage on the water. When he had finished speaking somebody observed that his plan would cost £200,000,000, and convert every ratepayer into a porcupine. “We may have to pay £500,000,000 in the end for doing things in the present way,” he answered; “and as to the porcupine, he is manageable enough if you handle him in the right way.”—_Temple Bar._

TEMPERATURE.

By J. MORTIMER-GRANVILLE.

Such expressions as a “cool head,” “hot-headed,” and the like, commonly relate to temperament rather than temperature; but it is essential to a full comprehension of the subject before us that the _rationale_ of animal heat should be stated, and the laws that govern the phenomenon of temperature actual and subjective, at least cursorily, explained.

Heat and the sensation of heat are two widely different states. When, on a chilly day or after washing in cold water, a man rubs his hands until a glow of heat seems to suffuse them, there is a very slight rise of actual temperature caused by the friction; the feeling is principally due to nerve-excitement, produced mechanically by the rubbing. The blood flows more freely into, and through, the parts excited immediately afterward, as shown by the redness, but the first impression of heat is mainly one of sensation. The feeling and the fact are not even constantly related. A person may feel hot when not only the surrounding temperature but that of his body is low; or, he may feel cold when really overheated. These perverted sensations are occasionally morbid—that is to say, form part of a state of disease—or they may arise from individual peculiarities which, perhaps, render perceptions of a particular class especially acute. On the other hand, there are conditions of the body, and special sensibilities, in which the sense of heat is dulled, and even considerable elevations of temperature are not perceived. It is easy to see how impossible it must be to form a correct judgment of the actual state of heat either around or within us by simple sensation.

Throughout the world, whether man be placed in tropical heat or arctic cold, the temperature of his body must, to maintain health, be preserved at the same point—about 98.4 to .6 degrees of Fahrenheit. A very small departure from this universal mean standard constitutes or indicates disease. The external heat is comparatively unimportant, or only of secondary moment, in the economy of nature; we can not rely upon it for the compensation of differences in the heat generated within the body by the organism. Except for the production of a temporary effect, such as to give time for the reëstablishment of the normal temperature in a body chilled, as by submersion, external heat is useless for vital purposes. The only way in which it can act is by preventing the loss of more heat, and giving a slight aid to recovery by warming the surface of the body.

If when a person is cold he goes into a heated apartment, or sits before a large fire, he receives with advantage just as much heat as will bring the skin of his body up to the normal standard; as soon as that point is reached, the organism will begin to labor to get rid of the superfluous caloric, and by sweating the heat must be kept from rising above the standard. All the heat thrust upon the body above 98.6 degrees is waste and mischievous except in so far as it may promote perspiration, which probably helps to work off some of the useless and burdensome, possibly morbid and poisonous, materials that oppress the system. This is how Turkish baths, and “sweatings” generally, do good, by exciting increased activity of the skin, and, as it were, opening up new ways of egress for matters which, if retained, might offend.

So far as the heat of the body is concerned, whether in health or disease, every degree of external heat which is above the complement to form 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit with the heat of the body itself at the time, is useless and may do harm. It follows that in fever the surrounding atmosphere should be kept cool; in depressing disease, when the heat-producing powers of the organism are small, the air around should be warm. These are precisely the conclusions to which experience and observations conduct us; and the facts now briefly stated explain the reason why.

There is no warmth in clothes; the heat comes from the body itself, generated within, or the surrounding atmosphere, or from substances with which the body may be in contact. Of course clothes, like any other materials, can be charged with heat, and will take up as much thermic or heating property as their specific capacity allows. It is this capability of receiving heat which constitutes the first condition of warmth in the comparative value of different materials of dress. The second condition consists in the physical power of any fabric to hold the heat with which the article has been charged. For example, some materials will become warmer in a given time and retain their heat longer than others under the same conditions of exposure, first to heating and then to cooling influences. The principle of clothing should be to protect the body from external conditions which tend to abstract heat, when the surrounding temperature is lower than that of the body; and to strike heat into the organism, when the temperature of the outside air and of the substances with which the skin may be brought into contact is higher than that of the animal body itself.

Local temperature, that is, the heat in the several regions of the body is determined by conditions which control the circulation of the blood, and the function of nutrition or food appropriation. If the circulation is free in a part, its temperature is maintained; if, from any cause, the flow of blood is retarded, the local heat will be reduced. Any one may put this to the test by encasing the hands in somewhat tight gloves when the weather is cold. The pressure prevents the free passage of the blood through the vessels, and the temperature falls. There is no warmth of any kind in the gloves; they act simply as non-conductors of heat, and prevent the heat generated within the body from passing off. For example—if a piece of lint or rag be dipped in cold water and laid on the skin, and a sheet of impervious or non-conducting material, such as india-rubber or thick flannel, is wrapped closely round, the heat of the body will raise the cold water to a temperature at which it will be given off as steam the moment the covering is removed. When the extremities are enclosed in thick or dense coverings, their temperature will depend on the amount of heat generated within them, and if the flow of blood through the vessels is arrested or retarded, nothing is gained, but everything lost, by the measures taken to protect them from the external cold.

This is a matter of the highest practical moment, and needs to be thoroughly understood. The feet can not be kept warm unless the blood circulates freely in the extremities, and that will not be the case if the boot, shoes, or stockings are tight. These last-named articles of clothing are practically the worst offenders. A stocking encircling the foot and leg closely and enveloping every part, with special pressure at the instep, around the ankle, and above or below the knees, must inevitably tend to oppose the circulation and so reduce the natural heat. The arteries which bring the blood to the extremity are set deeper than the veins that carry it back, and, as the latter are provided with valves which open toward the heart, it is too commonly supposed that the “support” afforded by the stocking will favor the return of blood more than it can impede the deeper supply-currents, and so help the circulation; but practically we know this is not the fact, for a tight stocking ensures a cold foot, and the chilliness of which many persons complain is mainly caused by the practice of gartering, and wearing stockings which constrict somewhere or everywhere.

There is a popular notion that if the feet are cold the head must be hot, and by keeping the extremities warm with wraps the “blood is drawn from the head,” and its temperature reduced. Those who have on the one hand studied the phenomenon of fever, and on the other noted the physical condition of races and individuals who habitually leave the extremities unclothed, will know that this theory of the distribution of heat is only partially true. Heat depends on the due supply of nutrient elements to the tissues. It is the expression or result of the process of local feeding. If a part is active it will be heated. When the feet are left bare the complex muscular apparatus of the extremity, which in a stiff shoe scarcely works, is called into vigorous action, the arch of the foot plays with every step, and each toe performs its share in the act of progression. This promotes growth and calls for nutrition, whereby the heat is maintained; whereas if it be simply packed away as a useless piece of organism, no amount of external heat will warm it. Work is the cause and counterpart of heat throughout the body.

The same principle applies to the head. No amount of external cooling will reduce the temperature, no drawing away of the blood by artificial expedients will permanently relieve the sense or obviate the fact of heat if the organ within the cranium is excessively or morbidly active. The brain is a peculiarly delicate and complicated organ, requiring more prompt and constant nutrition than any other part of the body, because the constituent elements of its tissue change more rapidly than those of any other in proportion to the amount of exercise. Moreover, the brain is always acting during consciousness, and even in sleep it is seldom wholly at rest, as we know from the occurrence of dreams. The faculty of nutrition is highly developed in the organ or it could not so continuously, and on the whole healthily, discharge its functions, even when other parts of the body, or the system as a whole, are suffering from disease. When the head is heated there is nearly always a local cause for it, and the remedy must be addressed to the seat of the malady. The temporary expedient of “drawing away the blood” by applying heat to the extremities is useful as far as it goes, and may suffice to enable the organ to rid itself by the contraction of its blood-vessels from a surplus charge of this fluid, but in the absence of special causes the _reason_ of the “heat of head” is undue exercise or disturbance of nutrition in the brain itself. Perhaps the seat of the over-work and consequent heating may have been limited to a particular part of the head; for example, the apparatus of sight, or hearing, as when the head becomes heated by reading too long or in a strong light. The point to understand is that when the head is physically hot it is the seat of too much or disorderly nutrition, and either the amount of brain or sense-power exercised must be reduced or the mode of action changed, and the particular part of the apparatus of perception or thought which has been too severely taxed relieved.

The true condition of health is that in which the temperature of the body as a whole and of its several parts is not disturbed by surroundings either of heat or cold. The preservation of a natural and healthy temperature is mainly to be secured by the maintenance of a regular and well distributed circulation of blood charged with the materials of nutrition.

The first condition of a free and continuous flow of blood is a healthy heart, not hampered by irritants, mental or physical. Sudden grief or fright produces cold by arresting the circulation, and the flow may be permanently retarded by anxiety. The mind has a wondrously direct influence on the heart and blood-vessels—on the latter through the nerves, which increase or reduce the calibre of the minute arteries, as in blushing or blanching at a thought. Instead of loading the body with clothes, the “chilly” should search out the physical cause of their coldness. The blood must not only circulate freely; it must be rich in nourishing materials, and not charged with poison. An excess of any one element may destroy the value of the whole. It is too much the habit of valetudinarians and unhealthy people of all kinds, to charge the blood with substances supposed to be “heating” or “cooling” as they think the system requires them. This is a mistake. The body does not need to be pampered with cordials, or refrigerated with cunningly devised potions. If it be well nourished it will be healthy.

* * * * *

There is something fearful in seeing a man of high character being under an obligation to a fool.—_Goethe._

SKATING AND SKATERS.

By ROBERT MACGREGOR.

Though it appears to be impossible to fix on the time when skating first took root in this country, there can be no doubt that it was introduced to us from more northern climates, where it originated more from the necessities of the inhabitants than as a pastime. When snow covered their land, and ice bound up their rivers, imperious necessity would soon suggest to the Scands or the Germans some ready means of winter locomotion. This first took the form of snow-shoes, with two long runners of wood, like those still used by the inhabitants of the northerly parts of Norway and Sweden in their journeys over the immense snowfields.

When used on ice, one runner would soon have been found more convenient than the widely-separated two, and harder materials used than wood; first bone was substituted; then it, in turn, gave place to iron; and thus the present form of skate was developed in the North at a period set down by Scandinavian archæologists as about A. D. 200.

Frequent allusions occur in the old Northern poetry which prove that proficiency in skating was one of the most highly esteemed accomplishments of the Northern heroes. One of them, named Kolson, boasts that he is master of nine accomplishments, skating being one; while the hero Harold bitterly complains that though he could fight, ride, swim, glide along the ice on skates, dart the lance, and row, “yet a Russian maid disdains me.”

Eight arts are mine: to wield the steel, To curb the warlike horse, To swim the lake, or skate on heel To urge my rapid course. To hurl, well aimed, the martial spear, To brush with oar the main— All these are mine, though doomed to bear A Russian maid’s disdain.

Specimens of old bone skates are occasionally dug up in fenny parts of the country. There are some in the British Museum, in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries, and probably in other collections. There seems to be good evidence that even in London the primitive bone skate was not entirely superseded by implements of steel until the latter part of last century.

Mr. Roach Smith, F.S.A., describing one found about 1839, says that “it is formed of the bone of some animal, made smooth on one side, with a hole at one extremity for a cord to fasten it to the shoe. At the other end a hole is also drilled horizontally to the depth of three inches, which might have received a plug, with another cord to secure it more effectually.”