Part 16

2. With reference to Lecture Halls, these ought to be nearly as plentiful as churches both in town and country, and can with proper management be made to serve two ends--the carrying forward the work begun at the Free Library, and the rousing from torpidity those whom even that useful institution would fail to reach; for as many would only be led to attend the lecture through the library, so there are many with whom the contrary would hold good, as many a dormant, beer-sodden soul would consent to be carried off for an hour or two to a lecture hall who could never be persuaded to sit down in cold blood to the perusal of a book, although such book might be written in the most fascinating and brilliant style imaginable: the unused eyes would soon begin to ache, the palsied brain soon begin to numb; whereas the speaker, if a good one, and his heart in his subject, would contrive to rivet the man's attention, despite of himself, by the magnetism of enthusiasm, and he would carry away with him some sort of idea--muddled and distorted probably, but still an _idea_--of what it was all about.

Penny Readings interspersed with music have been very much derided by our erudite critics, I think without sufficient cause. These really harmless, if not very high-class gatherings, blending together the ingredients of a certain kind of instruction and of entertainment, were doubtlessly called forth by a genuine desire to familiarize the lower orders of the people with some of the more dramatic passages in our literature, and to render visible to them a higher intellectual standard than the tap-room and the music-hall had made them acquainted with. It was a happy thought to mingle singing and playing with the readings. The introduction of these not only served to take off a possible monotony which might otherwise have been felt, but added attractions really elevating in their influence, the status and general surroundings of the auditory being taken into consideration. There is no need to pry too curiously into the petty vanities which prompted this elocutionist or that vocalist to make an appearance in public, nor to speculate too closely upon the disproportion between the ludicrous extravagance of the efforts often made by incompetent aspirants to obtain fame, and the very modest modicum and evanescent character of that article vouchsafed in return. All this is nothing to the purpose. The simple query is,--Have these things, known as "Penny Readings," in ever so slight a degree, fulfilled the object of their existence as that object is generally understood? If an affirmative answer can be given (as I certainly believe it can) to that question, then are they entitled to honest praise, and not to supercilious contempt.

However, having deposited my little offering at this humble shrine as I passed by, I am free to confess that if we never get any further than this on the road towards the mental improvement of the million, the march of intellect will be a very short march indeed. But it will not--it cannot stop here. The universal law of progress forbids the idea; and in some form or another the irresistible impetus to advance will be felt and obeyed.

Meantime, no better means, so far as I see, appearing for the moment to be available, I fall back upon my pet project of lectures, to be delivered every night (Sundays excepted) from the middle of September to the middle of May in every year, in every one of the multitudinous halls built for the purpose, by men or women well versed in the several subjects upon which they discourse.

Failing the possibility of procuring a sufficient number of lecturers who could spare the time necessary to compose original matter for the purpose, it would be by no means a bad plan, I think, to employ good and experienced hands to condense and compress standard works on different subjects into such a compass as to occupy two or three evenings, and hand these digests over to practised elocutionists to be _read_. Take history, for example. Prescott's "Conquests of Mexico and Peru," Motley's "Rise of the Dutch Republic," Irving's "Conquest of Granada," Carlyle's "French Revolution," or Hepworth Dixon's "Her Majesty's Tower," are peculiarly well adapted to undergo this process. The absorbing interest of the incidents described could not fail to engage the attention of the audience; and I cannot help thinking that the offended _manes_ of such of the above-named great ones as have departed from amongst us would be appeased when it was represented to them that this mutilation of their invaluable legacies to posterity had been conducted with due reverence, and solely for the purpose of introducing them to a far wider (and, perchance, not less appreciative) audience than even their exalted talents could otherwise have commanded. As to the still-living ones, perhaps before taking the liberty suggested with their literary offspring, it might be courteous to ask their permission, and I feel confident they would not be churlish enough to withhold it. I may be reminded that there would still be publishers and owners of copyright to be dealt with; but I leave suggestions as to the best means of negotiating with these awful entities to persons of greater experience than myself.

Obviously this lecture-hall business, like most of my other theories, necessarily involves considerable expenditure; but if anything is to be done, opulence must feel for indigence not only in heart but in pocket.

3. A thorough and unstinted employment of the means above indicated will accomplish much towards the emancipation of our helots from that thraldom of ignorance which gives to the more galling thraldom of caste its sole _raison d'être_. But there is yet one thing needed, the _utilization_ of knowledge acquired, and this can only be attained by dint of laborious and unintermitting class-work. The sacred flame may be kindled in the breast by desultory and omnivorous reading, but the light emitted is as uncertain as that of a wandering marsh-fire--it wants _focussing_ to be of any use to its possessor or his species. And it is in the _class_, under the guidance of a gifted and genial teacher, that this operation can best be performed. It is here that the finishing touch must be applied; here the rounding-off take place; here the heterogeneous be brought into homogeneity, and the discordant be reduced to harmony and system.

If these things are so, the problems which present themselves to be resolved are:--Given certain millions of untrained intellects in crying need of class tuition scattered over certain thousands of square miles in unequal proportions--how to provide sufficient building accommodation to meet the exigencies of the case? and given an uncertain but confessedly immense mass of torpidity and stagnation--how to infuse the necessary leaven into it to quicken it and arouse its latent forces?

I answer as to the first proposition--Require the architects of the multitudinous lecture halls aforesaid to submit plans to you, which shall comprise sections not only of the main building but of three or four adjuncts thereto suitable for class-rooms, after the style of the chapels nestling under the wings of our old cathedrals, or the annexes thrown out at convenient angles from our modern industrial exhibitions for the display of specialities. These would add comparatively little to the original cost of the structure, and save a great deal of time and trouble in hunting up eligible sites, and, when found, negotiating terms of purchase. As to the second proposition, make a _liberal_ distribution of prizes part of your system, so liberal that not only proficiency would be certain of obtaining a reward, but plodding and persevering mediocrity also. Constant attendance, combined with such written answers to questions as evinced that the pupil was making an effort, should, however imperfectly the answers were framed, insure the possession of a prize at the end of every session. With such materials to work upon, a free use of stimulants to exertion must form no inconsiderable part of the programme.

Again, no charge whatever must be made for admission to the classes. Indeed, the entire domain of adult poor education must be as free as United Italy--free from the Alps of the library to the Adriatic of the class-room.

Lastly, no restriction should be made as to the age or sex of the scholar. I am of opinion that no greater incentive to emulation can be offered to either man or woman than the consciousness that they are associated with co-workers or competitors of the opposite sex.

It would be travelling out of the record were I ever so faintly to attempt to enter into details as to the mode in which class-teaching could most advantageously be conducted, or to endeavour to shadow forth what I conceive to be the regulations best adapted for the purpose. No general rules would be found competent to meet ever-varying special conditions. All this must inevitably be left to conform itself to the peculiarities of the respective groups of the taught and the idiosyncrasies of the individual teachers.

Amusements.

On this last, but not least, division of the subject, I need not dilate at very great length. Much has been written with reference to it of late with which I cordially agree.

No one can help being sensible of the melancholy fact that the tendency of many of our so-called entertainments is debasing and degrading in the last degree. It is difficult to imagine anything much more demoralizing in every aspect--anything which appears to be more utterly without redeeming features--than our music-halls. Dances, which are simply unnatural contortions on the part of the male performers, and indelicate exhibitions on the part of the female ones; songs, which are utterly idiotic and meaningless, except when their meaning is indecency, sounding the very lowest depths of imbecility, and having no literary merit save _double entendres_ of the most vulgar description; the whole taking place in an atmosphere redolent with the fumes of beer, gin, and tobacco,--such is the pabulum provided for our delectation through this particular medium. Much the same poisonous mixture is administered at our tea-gardens and other places where we most do congregate. Is it a marvel, then, that our young men waste their strength in drunkenness, and our young women stray from the narrow path? Is it wonderful that when you respectables meet us abroad on Bank Holidays, or Derby or Boat Race days, we comport ourselves in ruffianly fashion, and greet the ears of your dames and damsels with expressions which it is not good for them to hear?

Ultra-exclusives! those of you who are most deeply impressed with the desirability of keeping us in our proper places, and are offended if we pass "between the wind and your nobility," to you most of all do I address myself, and take the liberty of saying that on _you_ rests the onus of providing better and more healthy recreations for us; for needs must that at times the most fastidious of you will find yourselves in the midst of us, and it will interest you even more deeply than others that we should not sink into unmitigated and universal rascaldom, the only natural goal at which the pursuit of such pleasures as those above-named is likely to land us. Give us attractions of a less baneful character, and wean us from these cesspools of infamy. To you it is specially important that this matter should receive attention. Do not, however, seek to do the work half-way; do not attempt to take away the means of recreation we have--evil as they are--until substitutes are furnished; it will not be convenient to you that the people should have too much time to _brood_; it will be safer for you that we should be _mercurial_ rather than that we should be _morose_; in one mood or the other, however you may strive to ignore us, we shall continue to exist in tangible form and be distinctly visible to your perceptions.

I like not threats or innuendoes, however, and say no more concerning this matter.

Time was when holy-days were frequent, when gorgeous pageants feasted the eyes of our forefathers--times of Maypoles and morrice-dancers, of roasted oxen and sheep, of conduits running with wine and milk: I say not I wish these to return. Much I fear that all was not pure, pastoral, Arcadian simplicity amidst these poetic scenes, fascinating as they are to the imagination. I doubt not the taint of vice was there, and the ghastly presence of misery and sorrow, and I do not regret them--let them go.

What, then, do I suggest? Aware of the risk I run in having it imputed to me that my suggestions have already been too numerous, I will, with brevity, venture yet one more.

Repetition is vexatious; notwithstanding which, unification is imperative, and committees must again be called into requisition.

Cricket-clubs, quoit-clubs, bowling-clubs, even skittle-clubs _ad libitum_, in summer; ballad concerts, dramatic performances, &c., in winter, under the same auspices. Membership extended to all comers, fee payable one shilling per annum in monthly instalments; the expulsion or suspension for a longer or shorter term--according to the more or less heinous nature of the offence--of any member for bad language, intoxication, or other misbehaviour; the gradual unbending of the rich and the cultured, and their condescending to grace the sports with their occasional presence, thereby infusing a spirit of refinement into them; the prohibition of betting or _over_-drinking,--these are, shortly and imperfectly stated, the remedies I would suggest.

To conclude the whole matter. We, the industrious poor of this realm--the hard-working classes--are in pressing need of help now, in this present time. This, I believe, is confessed on all hands, diverse and contradictory as the theories how such help could best be given may be. The question at issue is not whether ameliorations are desirable or the contrary, but in what manner to bring them about, and how to be certain that it is bread which is bestowed, and not a stone.

I do not claim to have solved this enigma, or to have invented a millennium. I simply assert my belief that some of my propositions may contain germs capable of being nurtured into hopeful possibilities.

As I have selected four principal points in which improvements are required--health, pocket, mind, and amusements--so have I striven to indicate four principal modes which I think best calculated to attain the desired end, and which for the most part must come from _without_ our borders--namely, sympathy, earnestness, money, and centralized organization--all being essential; the last-named especially being so, for it may be regarded as an irrefragable verity that every movement to be really efficacious must be _national_, and not parochial.

I look for many objections on both sides of the temperate zone, on the waters of which alone I elect to voyage. The frigid will aver that I expect too much, that my notions are Utopian and chimerical to the last degree, and the nostrums prescribed empirical and baneful; that it is not to be supposed sensible people will take all this trouble, and rush into such reckless expenditure in a project so visionary. To such my only answer is,--Where the return is to be great the investment must be great also. The torrid, on the other hand, will say I am not sufficiently thorough; that the only means of elevating the poor is by lugging the wealthy down to their level, abrogating dignities, distributing riches, abolishing ownership in lands and corporeal hereditaments. To these my reply will be,--Evil will the day be which shall dawn on such devil's-sabbath employments as these. Levelling _up_wards is laudable; levelling _down_wards is execrable. I would in nowise interfere with the least of these institutions. The overthrow of dynasties will not advantage us, nor will a general scramble conduce to our lasting welfare. I am a sceptic as to the benefits to be derived from revolution, although professing myself a warm admirer of reformation, as I understand the word--_re_-formation.

Neither do I anticipate that the time will ever come, under the best devised systems, when poverty will altogether cease out of the land. Evil will there be, and good also, while the world stands. This, however, should be no excuse for indifferentism in the work of lessening the sum-total of the evil, and increasing the sum-total of the good.

And so Lazarus unmoors his fragile boat, and launches it, unmanned and untended, on the bosom of the stream,--to meet its fate.

HENRY J. MILLER.

THE FORMS AND COLOURS OF LIVING CREATURES.

In the Essay on Animals and Plants, which appeared in the September Number of this Review, the names were given of the principal groups in which the prodigious multitude of living creatures (existing or known to have existed) have been classified by naturalists. It was therein also indicated that these various groups, and all the subdivisions of such groups, are distinguished one from another by variations in the forms and structures of the creatures which compose them. This fact alone would prove that very many differences in form must exist; but, indeed, a very slight knowledge and a very cursory examination of animals and plants would suffice to show this even to any one who knew nothing of the scope or nature of biological classification. In truth, to the non-scientific observer who feels an interest in living things, the difficulty may seem to be rather how to find general resemblances than how to detect differences between creatures which seem so totally diverse as do humming birds from whales, bees from buffaloes, or the numerous African herds of antelopes from the grasses on which they feed.

Nevertheless it was pointed out in the second Essay of this series[56] that all living creatures do agree to a certain extent in the form and structure of their bodies, inasmuch as their bodies are always bounded by curved lines and surfaces, while, if we divide the body of any animal or plant its structure may always be seen to be heterogeneous--that is to say, composed of different substances, even the simplest showing a variety of minute particles (granules) variously distributed throughout its interior. It has also been pointed out[57] that all living creatures agree in beginning life in the form of a small rounded mass of protoplasm. But all animals and plants further agree in that each kind has its own proper size, shape, structure, and colour, and each (as we shall hereafter see) shows a positive unity in its fundamental constitution, co-existing with the heterogeneity above referred to.

But though each kind has its own proper size, shape, structure, and colour, yet these vary more or less in different individuals, and the degrees of variability are different in different kinds both of animals and plants.

As to size, although most living creatures have certain limits which they rarely exceed or fall below, yet many organisms vary greatly in this respect. Thus, that familiar weed, the common centaury (_Erythræa centaurium_), may vary in height--according to the soil and other external conditions--from half an inch to five feet.

As to figure and structure there is more constancy, and the amount of variation which may in these respects be found between different individuals of the same animal species, is generally but slight. In plants and in plant-like animals much greater differences exist as to external configuration; but even in them the internal structure of each species varies but little.

Colour is a character which some readers may be disposed to regard as extremely inconstant. We are familiar with many differently coloured varieties of our cultivated flowers; and white blackbirds, and black leopards are not very uncommon objects. Nevertheless, colour is really a character of much constancy, and is one not only constantly present in different individuals of one kind of plant or animal, but is one constantly present in particular groups of kinds.

Thus, for example, all the English plants of the dandelion order which have opposite leaves, have yellow flowers, with the single exception of the eupatory (_Eupatorium cannabinum_), and whole groups of butterflies are respectively characterized as being blue, or white, or yellow.

We have seen that the life of every living being is accompanied by, and may be described as, a series of adjustments of action and structure to external conditions which surround it. Accordingly we may expect to find that the sizes, shapes, structures, and colours of living beings bear relations, which are in very many cases obvious, to their external circumstances, as directly favouring their nutrition, reproduction, or preservation from external injury.

Every living creature must be either fixed (like a rooted tree), or capable of spontaneously moving, or of being passively drifted from place to place, and must have a structure and figure suitable to one or other of these conditions.

Again, every living creature, whether free or fixed, is either a terrestrial, an aquatic, or an aërial organism; and it may be fitted to live in any two, or even in all three of these conditions--as, for example, is the swan. If terrestrial, it may inhabit the surface of the earth only, or it may occasionally or habitually dwell beneath it. The structure, forms, and even colours of organisms are in most cases plainly adapted to their modes of life in the above respects.

Thus, any living creature, which is fixed to the surface of the earth, must either adhere to it by having one side or portion of its body spread out and adjusted to irregularities in the supporting surface, or else by sending prolongations of its substance into the substance of the supporting body, as a plant sends its roots into the soil. Such prolongations, moreover, must (in order to hold fast) either sink deeply or else expand, at a slight depth, into a rounded or discoidal mass, or into radiating processes whereby the whole structure may be securely anchored.

This special modification of form, again, may or may not be accompanied by certain further modifications of structure, according as such rooting parts are to serve, as mere holdfasts, simply for attachment, or (as in most plants) for the absorption of food also.

Another modification is also correlated with these conditions. We have seen[58] that an interchange of gases takes place between each organism and its surrounding medium. But such interchange cannot take place in the subterranean part of the body, and a corresponding difference of structure between such subterranean part and other parts must therefore obtain.

Again, as to colour, we find differences which are evidently related to the different degrees in which different parts of a living body are exposed to the influence of light. Such contrasts notoriously exist, not only between the green parts of plants above the soil and the lighter coloured roots, but between the foliage of a plant which is exposed to sun light and another of the same kind kept in a dark cellar. Many animals which live in permanent darkness are colourless, as, _e.g._, the _Proteus_;[59] but yet this is not an invariable rule, some, as the mole, being of a dark colour.

The forms of organisms are evidently often directly related to surrounding influences. A plant or plant-like animal fixed to the soil may be so fixed that light, air, food, friends and enemies can have access equally on all sides or not. Thus, a tree so placed that light and air are excluded on one side, will not grow freely towards that side, but only in directions from whence light and air have access. A coral reef increases much more rapidly towards the open sea (the waves of which bring in food and facilitate gaseous interchange) than towards an adjacent shore.