·Shackleton s ship the Endurance Imprisoned in the ice of the Antarctic in 1915

·QUEST AND CONQUEST
By
MALCOLM BURR
DSc (Oron)
60
NDIAN BRANCH
GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE
OXFORD UNIVERSITI PRESS

·OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
AMEN HOUSE LONDON ECS
Edinburgh Glasgow Bombay
Calcutta Medras Melbourne
New York Toronto Cape Town
GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE
PUBLISHER TO THE
UNIVERSITY
First published August 1933
Fourth impression 1939
First printed in India 1945
Fourth Indian finpression 194.
Printed in Brush India at the Jam e Jamihed Printin Press, fou
Pornbay by JJ Khambatta and Publlaned by Grotius Cumbetler
Oxford University Press Fort Bombay

·Contents Introduction VII QUEST PACT 3 12 18 31 42 48 52 The Lure of the Unynown The Arctic The Antarctic Africa Asia Arabia Australia Heights and Depths CONQUEST The Dunce who Taught Men to Think Family Science The Man Who Conquered Smallpox Ferments and Germs A Simple Frenchman A Blacksmith's Boy How the Sugar Crop was Saved Wireless The Romance of Rubber The Glory of Egypt The Dawn of Civilization Most Ancient India Pehin Man 59 71 77 84 91 95 100 108 119 127 135 142 145 ·The Illustrations Acknowledgment and thanks are due to the following for permission to reproduce copyright photographs Universal Films for Eskimos in Kayaks the Executors of the late Lady Shackleton for the Endurance, The Iir perial War Museum for the portrait of Colonel Lawrence Dr Howard Carter for the two scenes in the tomb at Luxor, the Malayan Information Agency for the rubber estate, the Director the Science Museum for the exhibit of Fara day's magnet and the print of Hancock's omnibus Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Co for Marconi in 1901, The Tines for a Street at Ur, and the RAF for the Crown Copyright photograph of the ruins at Ur, the Exclusive News Agency for the sugar cane field the Ruwenzori Range and Mongol' Cowboy , Verlag Ullstein, Berlin, for the aerial view of Tierra del Fuego from Silberkondor uber Feuerland' by Gunther Pluschow, Paul Popper for the Victoria Falls and two photographs by the late Herbert G Ponting of the Antarctic glacier and Captain Scott Wide World Photograpns for H G Watkins and the American Stratosphere Balloon Fox Photos for chimpanzees Photopress for the Discovery's wireless-cabin the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association for the sugar cane beetle The Royal College of Physicians for the portrait of Edward Jenner, Mondiale Ltd for the kanga roos and the Roof of the World Mr C P Skrine and Messrs Allen & Unwin for Kashgar from Moved On Mr Arthur Probsthain for Mohenjo Daro Messrs Kegan Paul for a plate from Children of the Yellow Earth M. Girail don for the photograph of the portrait of Pasteur and Mr Spencer Arnold for his assistance in collecting the photographs Vi .

·Introduction A CENTURY and a half ago the men who had made the French Revolution thought that they had invented liberty and that a new era had dawned for mankind They claimed to have brought in the age of Reason, which they celebrated by dancing in their grand old cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris They were right, though they did not understand how or why A new era had in fact dawned, the turing-point in the history of humanity in all the practical things of everyday life they still belonged to the past for no progress was yet to be seen But the gulf that divides us to-day from those Frenchmcn of a hundred and fifty years ago is greater than the gulf which separated them from the artists of Tutankhamen in Ancient Egypt and the sanitary engineers who built Mohenjo Daro in Sind perhaps five thousand ycars ago Half a million years ago, perhaps, primitive man hal learnt the mastery of fire, which, with articulate speech, first marked him from the brutes Fur, far later perhaps about ten thousand years ago, he made the greatest inventions that have affected human destiny, the art of growing the fruits of the carth, of going upon the face of the waters in boats and the use of the wheel He had, too, tamed wild animals, to make use of them for his own purpose the jungle foul, the sheep, goat, bull camel and others, and his noblest conquests of all the dog and the horse 111 ·VILI Introduction During the many thousand years that have elapsed since, only three inventions of prime importance have been made which have had deep influence upon the ideas of mankind, for it must be realized that ideas are more powerful than deeds First, the art of writing, that is, of inscribing thoughts so that they can be handed on through space and time Secondly, the invention by the Chinese, nearly two thousand years ago, of paper the best medium to make the passage of those thoughts still freer Thirdly, the art of printing, believed also to have been used by the Chinese in ancient days, but made real and useful by Gutenberg, a German, less than six hundred years ago By this art the exchange of thought has been made freer still, and so general education has been rendered possible And in all this long time there has been only one really great discovery, that of the New World When, in 1812, Napoleon raced from Moscow to Paris to save his throne, he had no means of travel more speedy than had Alexander the Great in the fourth century before Christ or than Julius Cacsar three hundred years later, for transport was still dependent upon the horse Nor could he send even most urgent despatches more swiftly than Genghiz Khan in AD 1220, or Akbar in 1600, for signalling was still dependent upon flag or fire Much less than a hundred years ago, when men and women wished to travel from England to India, they were still dependent upon sails and the wind, and their route lay round the Cape of Good Hope There had been no speeding up of navigation since Hanno of Carthage had sailed round the west coast of Africa five centuries before Christ ·Introduction 1X Medicine was still mostly a matter of herbs and simples, when the wise women of the countryside made better cures than many a doctor To enter a hospital was a terrible risk, and to face an operation meant certain agony and almost certain death Mosquitoes still spread unsuspected the ravages of malaria, and in crowded cities, camps and prisons the death-rate was appalling, for typhus, typhoid, cholera, small-pox and bubonic plague still raged about the world unchecked Half the world did not know the other half, in spite of the dauntless work upon the seas of early British, Dutch and Portuguese navigators Discovery had been made by water, and, though the coasts of the world were fairly well-known, the interiors of the continents were still marked white upon the map In the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria the Royal Geographical Sociсty of London knew no more about the sources of the Nile than did Ptolemy in the year AD 150, and they still refused to believe the true things that Hero. dotus, the Greek historian, wrote in the fifth century before Christ In the eyes of Europe and Asia Africa was still the Dark Continent with but a few settlements dotted round the coast, like buttons on an overcoat Australia was still loss known, and apart from a handful of Europeans on a few favourcd parts of the coast, was inhabited only by somc wandering tribes of natives suill in the culture of the Stone Age In the New World, the northern wastes of Canada were still unexplored, the United States had not vet sprawled across to the Pacific and the Mississippi si as still uncharted In South Americi vast archs were still inhabited onlt bi > una notte ·x Introduction naked savages with poisoned arrows Asia, the ancient home of civilization, was slumbering 3r Railways had scarcely grown out of the narrow tracks laid for the haulage of tubs in English mincs, and the possibilities of steam were realized only by a handful of far-seeing men Electricity was still the plaything of experimenting philosophers, and its offspring was not yet conceived, namely the telegraph, the telephone, electric lighting, heating and traction, the harnessing of the waterfalls of the earth to send their tremendous power over vast distances, and all the countless uses of the electric current in the factory and the home There was yet to pass a whole century before the mysterious current should surpass its own marvels by giving us telegraphy without wires, which was to lead to broadcasting There was to be another half century still before men would dream that it could be possible to talk over the air, to send pictures even, without the help of wires, much less to cast the image of moving things upon a distant screen From 1800 three generations of men passed before chemists stumbled upon the miracle of radium, which was to turn the ideas of earlier philosophers inside out The use of mineral oil for burning was hnown to but a few, and so the invention of the engine which is driven by the explosion of oil gas inside a cylinder had not yet given men the motor-car or made possible the conquest of the air Then twenty miles an hour was thought a breakneck speed To-day men have moved at three hundred

·The face of a glacier in the Antarctic
1
QUEST
The Lure of the Unknown
VARIED are the motives that lead the bolder spirits
of mankind to explore the carth Some venture
for gain and cheerfully face hardship and danger in
order to find wealth, fresh ficlds for their activity,
nes territories for their countrymen, new routes
for their trade, neu markets for their goods The
marınc authorities and all who have to do with
słups nood knowledge of the seas and the coasts, and
the sailors of the world are not content so long as
onc mile of coast remains uncharted

·2 The Lure of the Unknown Etikelen Rivalry spurs men on to great deeds, the keen zdesire to outdo others, to be the first to make new discoveries or to reach new goals. Greater still is the scientific curiosity, the intense desire to know, which has urged men even farther Why else did August Piccard venture ten miles up into the air? There is, too the lure of the Unknown, that mysterious appeal that for some men gives Waterless deserts a charm endless.ice and.snow a fascination. Neither reeking forest, nor fear of deadly reptues and insects, of savage beasts and still more savage men, of mortal disease, of death from hunger or from thirst has ever daunted the finer sort of men, cuen af there be no material reward to win But noblest of all is that urge which sees in the virgin peak of Everest a challenge and an inspiration Why else should men strain and struggle to reach it? It is not for gain, nor wholly for glory Mount Everest to-day is far more than the highest mountain in the world It is the symbol of the loſtiest heights of man's imagination. The motive that drote young merf to risk everything upon those forbidding pinnacles was not physical, but spiritual so that the humblest invalid, losing hope in an unequal struggle might take heart from their example, when they read of that supreme test of human endurance the deceast, ។

·Eskimos in their kayaha
The Arctic
To the sca-faring peoples of the north the Arctic
has ever acted as a lure It was natural, therefore,
that when the Napolconic wars come to an end,
cxperienced British sailors should turn their energics
from fighting men to fighting ice and snow, and find
scope for their ambitions in the Arctic cold and
gloom The Admiralty was anxious to hnow if
there was a way for slups to China and the East
Indies by the north-kfest, and there was an outburst
of active exploration in the north of Canada Thus
175 the old hunt for the North-West Passage once
more renewed
Ty o centuries previously bold English sulors
find shown the war Martin Frobishier in 1576
John Drvis in 1585 Henr Hudson in 1601-10 and

·The Arctic William Baffin in 1615, all of whom have left their names upon the map of the north The first of the new adventurers was Captain Scoresby, who found the icy seas more open than he expected This was in 1817 Two ships followed a couple of years later under the command of Licutenant Franklin, but returned without great result Another under Captain John Ross and Lieutenant Edward Parry sailed in 1818, and opened new fishing grounds in Baffin Bay In the next year Party made a second journey, in which he sailed round from Greenland to the Behring Strait, and so proved that the North-West Passage does exist The results of these journeys were so important that in 1821 he undertook a third, always breaking new ground In the meantime his friend Franklin had been exploring the Coppermine river, but had been driven back by the two great enemies of polar exploration, cold and starvation In 1824 Parry left again, and in 1825 and 1826 Franklin led his second expedition They found much that was new, mapped new coasts and returned to England in 1826 Three years later John Ross started on his second journey this time taking his nephew James, who was to corn undying fu a" in Antarctic exploration They spent lour years surveying in the north, and hoisted the British f1 at the magnetic pole In the absence of news, thoi was much anxiety about their fate, and a rel. cxpedition was sent out under Sir George Back » had been as a boy sya ranklin The R however, *had been by a whaler brought home Baci h his ship in m** Sinking condition 5 E + ·The Arctic 5 The Erebus and Terror fighting through an ice pack in a gale Meanwhile, good surveying work had been done in the north by men employed in the fur trade by the Hudson Bay Company The growing knowledge encouraged Franklin to start upon a great expedition in 1845, which had a tragic end Sır John wis no longer a young man when hc sailed with the two ships Erebus and Terror, in which Sir James Ross had been doing grand work in the Antarctic Franklin and his party disappeared into thc frozen wastes In 1848 a relief expedition was sent to look for them under Sir James Ross They found nothing, and their return without news shoched England Many relief expeditions were organized The first man to bring back any information was Sır Erasmus Ommaney, who found some of their relics at their old winter quarters on Becchey Island M'Cluc actually traversed the North-West Passage, for which he, received not ·6 The Arctic only the honour of knighthood like Party, Franklin, the Rosses and other great Arctic explorers down to our own day, but a share of a grant of £10,000 voted by the Houses of Parliament to him, his officers and crety It was not until 1858 that any news was brought of the Frankun expedition, when Dr Rae picked up tidings of their fate from the Eskimos and so earned the reward of £10,000 offered by the Admiralty for definite information After the failure of the official rclicí expeditions the British public was so deeply moved that funds were raised by subscription to enable Lady Franklin, who devoted all her own resources to the task, to send yet another Lieutenant, afterwards Sir Leopold McClintock, a specialist in sledge work, sailed in the yacht Fox In 1860 he brought back 7 the first tangible relics a skull, a piece of taltered serge, and an oak strip from a sledge, found at Thunder Cove, Adelaide Peninsula ten miles from King William Land, where the Erebus and Terror had been abandoned in April 1848 The party had been sighted by a whaler near Lancaster Sound on July 26th, 1845, and an old Eskimo woman afterwards told hou 'the Englishmen fell and died as they walked' Thus perished Sir John Franklin and the whole party of a hundred and twenty-nine officers and men But they had not died in vain for the search for their remains, which in twelve years had occupied no fewer than thirty-nine erpeditions, led to the survey of some seven thousand miles of coastline and the exploration of a vast extent of unknown country The epic of polar ex. ploration is indeed a wonderful story of humín courage and endurance, inspiring to read ·The 'Arctic 7 Recently there has come a romantic reminder of the heroic past It had been suggested that the failure of the Franklin expedition had been due, at least in part, to badly preserved food Eighty-one years afterwards, one of their caches was discovered and a tin of beef, sealed on Beechey Island in 1850, was opened in a Liverpool laboratory in 1926 It was found to be still in good eatable condition Much had Englislımen struggled and suffered to make that North-West Passage, yet it was reserved for a Norwegian to be the first to sail right through in one ship His name, which was to become famous for other exploits too, was Ronald Amundsen Meanwhile Russian cyplorers had been doing good worh on the north coast of Siberia and in 1875 Nordenskjold a Swede sho had leunt exploration in Greenland made a voyage to Zemlya In 1876 he was the first to reach the mouth of the Yenisci In 1878 he made another journey, in command of the Vega and the Lena He did much valuable scientific work, surveying the coast, taking soundings of the scas, making records of the weather, observing marine currents and animal life On August 19th, 1878 he fired a salute off Cape Chely uskın, the mostly northerly cype of the Old World In that month the Lena sailed up the rner after which it was named as far as Yahutsh and the Vega continued sur eving the Siberian coast mahing many discoveries On July 18th 1879, Nordenshjold clcared the most castern promontory of Asia, which he named Cape Deshev, after the gallant Cossack officer who had been the first to sail round it to hundred and thirts scars previously Nordenskjold ·8 The Arctic ranks among the great scientific explorers of the world Other Norsemen, too, did fine work in the Arctic One of the most famous was Fritjof Nansen, who won his spurs by crossing Greenland from west to east in 1882, which Nordenskjold had tried in vain to do In 1893 be formed the bold project of allowing his ship to be frozen into the ice, as he was convinced that she would then drift right across the North Pole, which had by now become the aim of all polar exploration He had a ship specially designed to resist the great pressure of the ice, the Fram She actually was frozen in for three years, and, although Ninsen did not reach the Pole, he showed that he was right in maintaining that the North Pole is a decp sea covered with ice Nansen, with one companion, spent an entire winter in a hut in the Arctic, Living upon walrus ment and blood mixed with flour They forgot what it feels like to wash, and Nansen said that the first thing he noticed when he met the English traveller Jackson on Franz Josef Land was that he smelt of expensive English soap A Swede named Salmon Andree started upon an attempt to reach the North Pole which was as original, if not as foolhardy, as it was brave He went in a balloon, from Spitzbergen, on July 11th 1897 and vanished On August 8th 1930, a, party of explorers found an old camp on Whale Island or Giles Land, with human remains, among then the body, well presened, of Andree He and his companions had clearly succumbed to hunger and cold Thus after thirty-three years did the ice delver up its dead, and Andree's body was

·The Arctic
I G Watkins explorer in his hauck
brought to Stockholm for public funcral
In the New World the good work was carried
on by Stefansson who showed that the Arctic is not
wholly desolate that there is meat there for those
xho Anot how to get it He lised among the
Eskimo for four ycars with hardly any baggage

·10 The Arctic bi orta except his rifle and ammunition to shoot game for food He is one of the very few Europeans who have learnt the language of the Eshimo properly, and he has shown that they have developed a way of living exactly suited to the climate If they are persuaded to live in wooden houses and behave like Europeans, they become ill and fade away It is a remarkable fact that their implements, from needles, awls and fish-hooks to spear and harpoon points in bone and ivory, are very similar to those of the men of the last phase of the Old Stone Age in Western Europe, who lived under similar condim tions amid ice and snow Still more remarkable is the fact that they are also almost identical in physical structure, and it has been suggested that the Eskimo of the north of Canada to-day are the direct descendants of the men who hunted reindeer in Europe at the close of the Great Ice Age The conquest of the air opened a new cra in polar exploration In 1924, Binney, leading an Oxford University Expedition, uscd a seiplane for surveying and photography in the Arctic, in North- East Land In 1925 Ainundsen tried to fly to the North Pole but the first man to reach it by air was Commander Byrd of the United States Navy, who left Spitzbergen on May 9th, 1926, flew over the Pole and returned This was done in fifteen hours ! What a new epoch in polar exploration! Two days later Amundsen, with Ellsworth and an Italian named Nobile, reached the Pole in a semi-ngid airship in sixteen hours In 1928 Wilkins flew in twenty hours from Alasha to Spitzbergen, a distance of 1,200 miles in that year Nobilc ficw an Italian airship to the Pole, but he was wrecked on ·The Arctic 11 the return journey, and Amundsen lost his life in trying to rescue him In 1930 a young Cambridge undergraduate, H G Watkins, formed the idea that there might be a short air route between London and Canada bv way of Iceland and Greenland This attracted attention afresh to that great ice-covered land, which had in the past been a schooling ground for many famous explorers Watkins did such splendid work that he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society of London He returned to Greenland to continue, but while hunting for food in his hayak, or Eskimo canoe, he lost his lifc It was a tragedy for Arctic exploration that a career so brilliantly opened should be cut off on the threshold olmanhood Other men carried on the work The British Arctic Air Route Expedition lasted from July 6th, 1930 until October 1st, 1931 In order to carry out observations on the weather through that long and cruel winter, Courtauld allowed himself to be frozen in, confined to his snow-buried hut on an ice-cap from December 6th 1930 till May 1st, 1931 Older inen were not to be outdonc and the veteran French polar investigator, Jean Baptiste Etienne Charcot, set off in his yacht, the famous Pourquoi pas? This fine old savant, who had already attained high rank in the literature of polar exploration, was wreched by a hurricane on hus way home from Rejhjavik to Copenhagen on September 17th, 1936, and perished in his sixtv ninth year, with all his cren but one The Russians to-day are making great cxer- ·10 The Arctic except his rifle and ammunition to shoot game for food He is one of the very few Europeans who have learnt the language of the Eskimo properly, and he has shown that they have developed a way of living exactly suited to the climate If they are persuaded to live in wooden houses and behave like Europeans, they become ill and fade away It is a remarkable fact that their implements, from needles, awls and fish-hooks to spear and harpoon points in bone and ivory, are very similar to those of the men of the last phase of the Old Stone Age in Western Europe, who lived under similar conditions amid ice and snow Still more remarhable is the fact that they are also almost identical in physical structure, and it has been suggested that the Eshimo of the north of Canada to day are the direct descendants of the men who hunted reindeer in Europe at the close of the Great Ice Age The conquest of the air opened a new era in polar exploration In 1924, Binney, leading an Oxford University Expedition, used a scaplane for surveying and photography in the Arctic, in North- East Land In 1925 Amundsen tried to fly to the North Pole, but the first man to reach it by air kas Commander Byrd of the United States Navy, who left Spitzbergen on May 9th, 1926, flew over the Pole and returned This was done in fifteen hours! What a new epoch in polar exploration' Two days Inter Amundsen, with Ellsworth and an Italian named Nobile, reached the Pole in a semi-rigid air. ship in sixteen hours In 1928 Wilkins ficw in tuonty hours from Alaska to Spitzbergen, a distance of 1.200 miles In that year Nobile flew an Italian airship to the Pole, but he was wrecked on ·He re- The Arctic 11 the return journey, and Amundsen lost his life in trying to rescue him In 1930 a young Cambridge undergraduate, HG Watkins formed the idea that there might be a short air route between London and Canada by way of Iceland and Greenland This attracted attention afresh to that great ice-covered land, which had in the past been a schooling ground for many famous explorers Watkins did such splendid work that he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society of London turned to Greenland to continue, but while hunting for food in his hayah, or Eskimo canoe, he lost his life It was a tragedy for Arctic exploration that a career so brilliantly opened should be cut off on the threshold of manhood' Other men carried on thc work The British Arctic Air Route Expedition lasted from July 6th, 1930 until October 1st, 1931 In order to carry out observations on the weather through that long and cruel winter, Courtauld allowed himself to be frozen in confined to his snow-buried hut on an ice-cap from December 6th, 1930, till May 1st, 1931 Older men were not to be outdone, and the vctcrin French polar investigator, Jean Baptiste Eticnnc Charcot, set off in hıs yacht, the famous Pourquoi Pas? This finc old savant, who had alrendy attained high rank in the literature of polar cyploration, was wreched by a hurricanc on his way home from Rejhjavih to Copenhagen on September 17th, 1936, and perished in his sixty ninth y car, with all his crew but onc The Russians to-day are making great excrema f ·12 The Antarctic tions in the north and with a scverely practical object They are straining every nerve to establish industries and towns in the extreme north of Siberia, on the shores of the Frozen Ocean, as they call the Arctic Sea, and have put up an extensive series of meteorological stations, which report on the conditions of the atmosphere, pressure and currents, to enable the central stations to make useful forecasts of the weather Prince Rudoll Island, near Novaya Zemlya, boasts of being the northernmost radio station in the world Hou remote this spot is can be realized when we lcun that the journey from Archangel the most nor therly town in Russia, is about 2,500 miles The Antarctic The story of the South Pole is as romantic and full of tales of courage and hardihood as that of the North Captain Cool was the first to pay a visit to the Antarctic continent, but he did not land In 1819-20 a Russian, Admiral Bellingshausen, spent two years surveying there, and his efforts were rewarded, for he was the first to discover land within the Antarctic Circle He called at Peter I Land On this great survey he sailed completely round the Pole. One of the earliest pioneers was a sailor named Weddell, who was scal-hunting In 1819 he found the sea that nowy bears his name Next year an Englishman named Edward Bransfield found a capo which he called Trinity Land, which was discover- ·The Antarctic 13 d independently a year later by Captain N B Palmer, an American sealer, after whom it was ong known as Palmer Land A recent survey has hown that Trinity Land is a part of the Antarctic Continent, so the honour of being the actual discoverer of the great white continent belongs to Cdward Bransfield In 1831 another Englishman Captain Biscoe, called a new cape that he had ound Enderby Land after his employers, and a ittle more than a century later, Sır Douglas Mawson showed that this too, was part of the mainand Great interest was roused in Europe by these discoveries of a new part of the world, and in 1938 a French cxpcdition left under Captain JSC Dumount d'Urbeville to whom was long given the honour of being the first actually to sight the continent itself, on January 20th, 1840 Two years later an American, Lieutenant Wilkes, was in the same waters and although he sighted the French ships, through some misunderstanding the two crpeditions did not meet In 1839 an important expedition left England under the command of Captain James Ross already known for his work in the Arctic with tho ships destined to become famous, the Erebus and the Tortor The mun object of his voyage was to study the magnetic conditions a subject upon which he was an authority He found lofty mountain ranges and peaks running up to 10,000 fcct He hoisted the Union Jack but apart from his crew, the only witnesses of the ceremony were the uncountable penguins which gazed on without cmotion Ross next discovered, to his surprise, ·7 14 The Antarctic two volcanoes, which he named after his vessels Mt Erebus and Mt Terror In 1842 he under took a second voyage, but this time he was unlucky and only his splendid seamanship averted a disaster He made very important scientific obscrvation and still more important discoveries Then there was a pause in Antarctic explora tion In 1895 Larsen landed, the first man to set foot on the mainland itself, and in 1898 a Belgian expedition carried on much detailed scientific in vestigation In the same year Borchgrevink, one of Larsen s men, penctrated farther south than anyone yet The turn of the century sax still more exped: tions Commander Scott led one in a speciall built boat, the Duscozery, in August 1901, with a young officer, by name Ernest Shackleton, on his staff The expedition was not sensational, but produced valuable scientific results Sledgc-jour ncys into the interior shoued the existence there of a great plateau nearly 10,000 feet above the sea In the same year a German expedition was led by Professor Drygalski, which discovered Kaiser Wilhelm Land, Nordenskjold came down from the north to explore Graham 'Land and Bruce in the Scotia surveyed the Weddell Sea and found Coats Land That keen French explorer, Charcot, in the Pourquoi Pas?, made important discoveries on two crpedı tions in 1903 and 1908, and found morc land, which he named after his own father and presidents of the French Republic In 1907 Ernest Shackleton, profiting by the experience he had gained with Scott, sailed in the Nimrod with a scientific staff He completed a

·The Antarctic
15
Scott at home in the Antarctic writing his diary
remarkable land joui ney, passing the 'Farthest
South'sct reached by man on November 26th On
January 9th, 1909, his party marched to 88 23 S,
where they hoisted the Union Jach and left a
brass cylinder containing records for some future
explorer to find If only their supplies had held
out they could have reached the Pole itself
Although he had not succeeded Scott deter.
mined that it should be an Englishman who would
first reach the South Pole, and in 1910 he led his
second expedition with this express object On
January 9th, 1912 Scott with his handful of
resolute men, doggedly tramping through the
blizzards over those cight hundred miles of icc,'
passed Shackleton's 'Farthest South' point, and on
the 16th they reached the Pole itself for which
they had strisen so hard and suffered so much

·16 The Antarctic The grisly spectre of death had been dogging their footsteps but it was the Pole itself that gart them the first blow, for there they found a sleigh runner with a piece of black Nag attached Amundsen, the Norwegian, had been there before them H had in fact, reached the South Pole on Decembe 14th, 1911, only four weeks earlier ! The disappointment was heart-breaking Thc turned to struggle back 'My God! This is a awful place I wrote Scott in his diary Yet thes dauntless men made their notes and collecter fossils of priceless scientific value as they fough their way back through the blizzards Those fossil tell us that there is coal in the Antarctic, and tho once upon a time those hurricane-swept, frozer lands enjoyed a mellow climate The tragedy that was brooding over them ther. struck On February 16th Seaman Evans, who had been selected for the expedition on account of his great strength collapsed The stran and disappointment drove him out of his mind, and he died Then one of the officers, Oates saw that there were not enough supplies for all, but that it one fell out, there was hope for the others So he said to his friends, 'I am just going outside, and may be some time' He then walked out of the tent into the blizzard, and that some time' was eternity The three left fought on They managed to drag themselves to a depot where they had left food and there they, too, dicd A relief expedition afterwards found their remains, with notebooks and the specimens which throxa a flood of light upon the continent In one of the books were Scott's farewell vords "These ·The Antarctic 17 rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale More scientific expeditions followed Sir Douglas Mawson, who had been with Shackleton in 1901, did valuable work on his expedition to Victoria Land One of his companions fell into a crevasse and was killed, and another died in Mawson's arms In 1913 Sır Ernest Shackleton once more led an expedition, on the Endurance After unbelievable suffering, the party reached South Georgia, and all but three were saved from a fate like Scott's When the Great War was over Shachleton returned to his old love and sailed on the Quest to carry out research among the islands Once again the South claimed its victim, for he died in South Georgia at 3-30 am on January 5th, 1922, of an attack of angina pectors His name takes its place with those of the greatest explorers of the world The now cra led to the use of aeroplanes herc, too Sır Hubert Wilkins made valuable surveys, as did the American Admiral Byrd Rising above the 10,000 fect range, he flew over the Polc a distance of 800 miles and back in nineteen hours That enabled him to realize what a tremendous fight with hunger and death had been those toiling journeys of Scott and Shackleton, crawling along down therс on the land And so the work goes on There are still sonicthing like two thousand miles of coast to bc charted, and men for the work are always forthcoming ·1 Africa' T THERE is an old saying that out of Africa there ever comes something new, and, during the past hundred and fifty years, brave men have forced their way into her heart and brought back a remarhablo series of discoveries It IS within the memory of men still living that the middle of Africa was left white upon the maps. quite unknoun, and before that the mapmahers put wild pictures of lions and elephants there As the poet Swift remarked Geographers in Afric maps Alake tarase pletumes fin their opt and oar inhabitablo down Pisce elephants in place of Rount Only the coast was known Europeans had towns at Loanda, at Cape Town and elsew here, but never went far inland They know something about the mouths of the great niers, but did not know where their waters came from A great puzzle ways the Niger In 1788 an Association was formed in London to explore it Neither its direction nor its source was known, and then not even its mouth The Association sent out Mungo Park ·Africa 19 four expeditions, but the country was so unhealthy and the natives so fierce that all the explorers died to or were murdered Then a Scottish doctor, Mungo Park, who had travelled in Sumatra, volunteered He went first to the Gambia to study the Mandingo language and it for you customs and then started up-country The King of Wooll received him well, but told him that farther up, where no white man had yet been seen, they would be sure to kill him Not afraid, he went up into the country of the Moslem Fulahs, where he created quite a stir amongthe kings wives, who tcased him about his white shin and prominent nose Escaping with difficulty, after being robbed several times and imprisoned once, this dogged man carried on his journey, even without his interpreter and servant On July 20th, 1796, he reached his goal and wrote that he had found 'the majestic Niger flowing slowly to the castward' Weak from fever, in rags and poverty, he tried to return to the Gambia choosing a different route On the way bandits took the last few possessions he had, and when he reached the friendly Mandingo country again he had nothing at all left the local governor recovered his horse and clothes for him, and a slavc-dealer tooh pity on him, giving him a home for several months while he lay desperately ill from fever Mungo Park was moved by the sufferings of the slaics, for the Black Continent from end to cnd was the sery home of slavery He i rote that three-quarters of the people were slaves, living in misery, with no hope being flogged killed or abandoned to wild beasts for the slightest uhim set bi these poor doun trodden creatures showed him great 51 of 1 ·700 20 Africa kindness His description of their misery helped to move Bishop_Wilberforce to his great campaig: against the slave trade, which eventually led to the abolition of that curse When Parh reached Gambia he was so much altered in appearance that his friends thought he was a ghost He had not been able to follow thn whole course of the river, and thought that the lower part of it became the Congo for further more He returned to England to equip and rest, and in 1805 set forth once more upon his quest Br the time he reached the Niger most of his party went sick or dead, but still he carried on He started down the river, to follows it to its mouth but in the Bussa rapids he lost his life. Thus died a very gallant and determined cyplorer The problem of the mouth of the Niger was not solved till twentyfive years later, by two brothers John and Richard Lander chan detecty The men who thus first blazed the trail into the heart of Africa were herocs indeed “ Only the most dauntless courage, only the most iron strength could hope to survive the dangers and liardships Most of them died of fever, or were murdered by natives, but others were always ready to carry on the work (Africa is an exacting mistress She breaks, tortures and hells the many who love lier, but they love her still, and those who escape her deadly embrace the first time cannot resist her call, and go bark. Greatest of all explorers s as David Livingstone like Part, a Scot, and also trained as a doctor It was in 1841 that he landed at Algon Bay For the next thirty years he devoted himself to the cont ·Africa 21 nent, neglecting his home, his friends, even his family, all in the cause he had so much at heart, the exploration of Africa and the welfare of the natives He had the rare gift of friendship with them That gave him success and in return he, more than any. etter man, contrimad to their release from the two curses of Africa, slavery and cannibalism 1 He began by cutting himself off from Europeans, to learn the language and customs of the tribes with whom he was going to work as a missionary In 1849 he started into the interior and had the gratıfication of being the first European to see Lake Ngami Two years later he went on another two hundred miles, and made friends with Sebituanc, the victorious king of the Malololo Thanks to the king's support, Livingstone was able to discover the Zambezi Then, as the Boers were determined to keep the country closed, he was determined to open it up so he made it his life's work He went down to Cape Town, sent his wife and family bach to England, and returned to the north When he reached the country of the Makololo again, his friend the king was dead, but his son and successor, Sekeletu, received him well, and gave him a party of men to escort and help him With them, he made his way rīght across towards the north-1 est and came out on the Atlantic coast at Loanda, the pleasant capital of Portuguese Angola, and one of the oldest European towns in tropical Africa Most of the way he had ridden upon an ox, the famous Sindbad The explorer had no love for him, for the brute was both uncomfortable and stubborn Riding Sindbad he wrote, was little better than walk- ·22 Africa ing, the dullest of all methods of travel This journey to the sea and back to Sekeletu, took bir two years Then he started on a journey to the cast, as the wanted to find the way to the Indian Occer Sekeletu gave him a supply of elephant tūsks which he could sell for funds for his work On this journey he heard the Makololo talk about The Smit that Thunders", and he found it Hc came to spot where the great river Zambezı, nearly a mile across, suddenly leaps clear a sheer 400 feet into crack in the earth only 20 yards vido From the crash of the waters the spray is ilung up to such height that it can be seen full seven miles away where, top, the thunder can be heard Dcepts impressed by this tremendous sight, Livingston wrote 'It had never been seen before by Europeor eyes, but scenes so lovely must have been gaze upon by angls in their flight' He called those wondrous falls after his great Queen Victoria, bu after him other Englishmen came and built a tour there, which they called in his honour, Livingstone The Victoria Falls arc in truth orte of the greatesi margeld marvels of crcation They cannot be shown in one picture alone, nor can all their wonder be seen in a single day In April 1868 Livingstone set forth once more into the wilderness, and in August discorcred Lahe Nyasa All around he sow grisly traces of the Arah Starëtrade, and his terrificd porters begin to desert His party was much riduced and the Arabs wem hostile, knowing that he was the enemy of that dread Iur commerce Livingstone kas no longer young and vigorous For a quarter of a century he hnd beon 1

·The Victoria ratis Erora the ur
The cantlles et bridge carrint a railway and motor road and links
South Africa with Rhodesia

·Auen hurt 24 Africa living in the wilds 'exposure and hardshup were beginning to tell upon lum fever and dysenter were sapping even his iron constitution In Januar 1867 one of his porters deserted with his medicirx chest. The loss was desperate He wrote that ki felt as though he had received sentence of death But even that would not deter him He knew thi risks he was facing, but a man who fears risks ca! never be an expprer fement When, rached by rheumatic fever, he met som Arab traders, he travelled with them, finding Lake Mweru and then Lake Bangweulo, where only fou borsemained faithful to him Then pncupon! attacked him He met with kindness and hopitality at the hands of the greatest of the slave traders Mohammed Bogharıb Within four months he wa on the road again This time he set out to solve the problem of the river Lualaba, which ran northwards from Lake Bangweulo Could it be the origin of the Nilc HARI His feet developed, ſestering ulcers and he could is hardly cran), 50 he joined the caravan of anothci kind-hearted slave-dealer, Duguinbe for he was unable to travel alone Unfortunately, this man's followers quarrelied with the natites and a massacre followed The outrage was so revolting that Livingstone would not stay He called to Util. where, his hicalth shattered, he could do nothing but sit and with Stores sent up from Zanzibar never reached him The position seemed hopelcss Suddenly one morning his sersant Susi came dashung in Austing * An Englishman is coming!' It was Slanicy, sent by an American newspaper ·464 ܨܐ Africa 25 - that the El proprietor to look for the great traveller, who was believed to be lost Stanley's story of the meeting is famous He felt uncomfortable, not knowing e how the great man would receive him 'I walked up to him, took off my hat and said, “Dr Livingestone, I presume?" ' sufrenc Yes," said he with a kind smile, lifting his i cap slightly I replace my hat on my head, and he puts on his cap, and we both grasp hands, and then I say aloud ""I thank God, Doctor, I have been permittecd to see you He answered, “I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you The two explored Lake Tanganyika together, and found that it could not be the source of the Nile Then Stanley left him, for Livingstone, who would not look upon himself as lost, refused to return to England while his work was incomplete, But now he was a broken man, exhausted by dysentery and internatticeding He reached the village of a chiet named Chitamba in Ilala, near Bangweulo, where on April 29th, 1873, he collapsed i's The next morning his devoted servants, Susi and * Chumah, came into his tent and found him knceling by his bedside, dead Thus passed, as he himself would have wished, the greatest of all African explorers perhaps the # greatest explorer of all time of him Stanler wrote that he stood prc.emincnt above all, and Sir Percy Sykes, himself a Yamous Traveller, describes him as a model to explorers and an inspiration to mankind. So great was the reverence inspired by the Great Miaster as his men called him, that Susi and 8 e ·26 Africa Chumah then did a very wonderful thing These two simple Africans felt that he should be buried among his own people, so they took out his heart, buried it on the spot where he died, made a list of all the things he left, embalmed the body, and sci out for Zanzibar, a journey of some fifteen hundred miles through warring tribes They refused to deliver their precious burden to a British officer leading an expedition come too late to rescue him, and carried him to the coast Thus did these untutored men achieve the great duty they took upon themselves, for now their Great Master rests, thanks to their devotion, among England s other herocs in Westminster Abbey in London The next great name in the annals of African travel is that of Richard Burton That remarkable Englishman began his career in India, where he learnt many languages, including Persian and Arabic Brave as a lion, if not rechless, he had in 1954 performed the hay or pilgrimage to Mecca disguised as a Mohammedan A year later he faced another wild adventure The Emir of Harar chief of the warlıhe Moslem Gallas, had forbidden Christians to enter hus city under pain of death, because it had been prophesied that ike first to do so kould be the lated instrument of the downfall of the city Severni Christians had thus been done to death The Fmir too, had quarrellcd with the ruler of Zeila, on the Somalı coast who was friendly to Burton To mako things worse, small-por was riging in Harar, and the Gallas would let no one either in or out Difliculties stimulated Burton to action Hc decided to go in, and went. It vas a paltry prize, he wrote after uds, a dull grey pule of stones, 4 ·Africa 27 hardly worth the rish of the lives of himself and his two servants They advanced to the gate, sent salaams to the Emir, and prayed for an audience Until that moment every Christian who had tried to enter Harar had at once been murdered But Burton was admitted I walked into a vast hall,' he wrote, 'between two long rows of Galla spearmen They were large, half naked savages, each man holding a huge spear I purposely sauntered down them coolly with a swagger, with myTeyes fixed upon their dangerous-looking faces I had a six-shooter concealed in my waist-belt and determined, at the first show of excitement, to run up to the Emir and put it to his head It was a desperately critical moment, and the lives of the little party hung upon the caprice of this uzvuard and ignorant fantes tan anhem : 2. He graciously held out a skinny hand Burton's life was saved because the Emir carnestly wanted a European doctor And so it was that within a few years there were European consuls in the forbidden city, which to-day is part of the Empire of Italy So Burton returned alive Two years later, accompanied by Captain Spehe he began to expore East Africa, to seck the source of the Nile Alicr surmointing countless dangers from bandits from warring tribes, and from much sickness, on February 13th, 1858, Burton and Speke together gazed upon the waters of Lake Tanganyik? Burton was now too ill to go on, so Speke continued alonc, and on August 3rd found the second largest inland sea in the world, which he named Lakevictoria Spekc hurned bych to London and returned to ·2 28 Africa oleval line East Africa in October 1860, determined to discove the source of the Nile, u hich still bailed geographers, On this journey he was the first European to enter Uganda, where he was well received by the king Mutesa, whose mother was struck by Spehc's magn! ficent beard and his skill at shooting rhinoceros and flying birds He marched on northwards, and on July 28th, 1862, came upon a gorge, where a rive tumbled and crashed among the rocks Here he stood and watched thousands of fish leaping at the Hy, falls with all their might, hippopotami and crom *** codiles lying sleepily in the water of the Take above. He named the cascade Ripon Falls after the then President of the Royal Geographical Society of London, who had supported his cxpedition Thus the Nile flows from Lake Victoria The last of the romantic explorers of Africa was H M. Stanley After leaving Livingstone he survey ed the region of the newly, discovered lakes, to which he added yet another, Lake Edward Then he made his way down the Conga, arriving safely at Boma in August 1873 One more great journey he made, from the Atlantic side, fighting his way up the Congo through warlıke tribes and cannibals, to relieve & Gcrman official in the Egyptian service, Emin Pasha, who had been cut off from Egypt when the Dervishes took Khartoum It was on his lost journey that Stanley made perlaps his greatest discovery One morning one of his servants called him to look at a big mountain near them, all covered with salt He looked, and saw a cloud of silver, and is lie gazed he realized that it was not salt but snow, on the Equator It was the most mysterious mountain

·Africa
29
The Nuwenzori Rango
Note the flc of bearers belonging to an expedition
l in the world, no less than the Mountain of the Moon,
of which Ptolemy wrote in the year A.D 150, saying
that from it rose the Nile Spche had heard the
Arabs talk of it and the natives kneut it, calling it
( Ruwenzori
It is usually clad in fog and cloud, so
that Sır Samuel Biker who had travelled and shot
near it, passed by without seeing it, and Emin had
not hnown it was there Stanley found that the
snous of Runenzori help to supply the waters of
Lales Edward and Albert, which is one of the two
sources of the White Nile, the other being Victoria
Ny inza Ptolemy was right
Since Stanler's day Africa has been divided

·30 Africa among the European powers and frontiers have marked out Railways have been built from end to end, and motor lorries have replaced the heads of porters, while mails are carried bv aeroplane This is the result of fifty years' work by skilful and devoted men Within that period one name stands out that will be remembered for ever when men talk of Africa. Cecil Rhodes, a young undergraduate who went out to Africa for his health, grew into a far-seeing statesman, whose labours added two great territories to the British Empire, which have been named after him, Southern and Northern Rhodesia. There, where within the memory of living man was only the warfare of Lobengula, king of the Matabele, savagery and barbarism, there is to-day law, order and civili zation It Europe has wronged Africa in the past, her missionaries, headed by Livingstone, and the best type of British officer, have abolished slavery and cannibalism, and introduced education and justice, while the African hnows a security he had never dreamt of In the words of Sir Percy Sykes, We have sinned but repented, and, thanks to our great explorers and administrators, we have atoncd for our sins 4 ·Asia WHILE the heart of Africa was being explored by British travellers and the frozen wastes of the far / north and south were being mapped by the sailors of many nations, there was one vast region which had been civilized for centuries while Europe herself was still barbarousThat was Asia But while the coasts had been in touch with Europe since the Middle Ages the immense interior had been shut off slumbering as it were, suspicious of strangers Only, vague and fearful tales sometimes trickled through to the outside world verifer Russia was the first western country to hnoch upon the door, and both her scientific men and her soldiers insisted on seeing and studying the country In 1857 one of the first of the Russians, PP Semenov explored the range of the Tian Shan, which shuts off the old Chinese Empire from the plains of the north He was a man of science, who did not thirst for conquest, but for knowledge On thс other side in the south and west, it was the military authorities who took action Russia was then ambitious to expand castwards and absorb the independent principalities of Central Asia which under their oirn Khans and Emirs were protected by the vast waterless deserts, which act as a buffer between cast and west In 1842 a British mission from India, consisting of Colonel Stoddard and Captain Conolly arried at Bukhart to open diplomauc relations but the Emir Nasrullah fiung their both into a pit where they were tortured for scicral 31 1 ·99 Asia AGU months by huge bugs kept for the purpose, and ther pulled them out and cut off their heads in the market place In 1862 a famous orientalist, Armini Vambery, penetrated into this hot bed disguised a agervish, and left a description of that monster a cruelty the Emır, who was said by his own people have been suckled by a tiger A clever Russian soldier, General Chernaleff, found that the Tartars and Turcoman horsemen, who live on the edge of the desert and constantly cross,' it," defeat thirst by carrying curdled_milk in théirittīrsuks, or leather bottles, to which they add water when they find it The acıd of the sour milk is very refreshing and quenches the thirst far better than water alone General Chernaieff felt that the natíve princes had been protected by thôir dëserts for so long that they would have forgotten how to fight, however brave their soldiers might be, and that his men would have better rfles and guns So he decided not to take a big army, which would be difficult to provide with water, but a small, very efficient force of only fifteen hundred men He arranged to provide these with the sour milk, made a dash across the desert in 1864 and conquered the rich provinces of Kokand (Ferghana) with Tashkend For adding so rich a province to his master's empire, General Chernaieff expected a great reward, but when he returned to Russia he svas charged with a heavy debt for the costs of the campaign He was a poor man with but little property, but a bill of sale was taken out even upon that. Fortunately, the papers came before the Tsar, Alexander II He was very angry and wrote the word 'Shameful' across them, and forbade it ·Asiá 33 Climbing over the Rool of the World-harskoram mote the lak, used for carryiag goods etc In 1867 another Russian commander, General Kaufmann conquered the rich emirate of Bukhara, with the ancient city of Samarcand, once the capital of the great conqueror Tamerlane, zs Timur Leng Lame Timur is generally called in English Не son great fame for this and the scientific Russian traveller Fedtchenko who crossed the Alai range in | 1871 named its highest peak in his honour In 1873 General Kaufmann also conquered the cmirate of Khiva Russia did not annex these states but allowed the Emirs and Khans to manage their own affairs as vassal princes under the Tsar Thc ancient town of Kliojand had been won by European troops once before more than two thousand years ago when Alexander the Grent scized it ·34 Asia He called it Eskhate, which in Greek mean Farthest There was yet a people which kept its liberty ir the plains the Turcomans, who inspired dread be their raids upon the towns within their reach They are splendid horsemen but wild, and in those days were great robbers In 1881 General Skobeleil broke their power at Geoh Tepe, on the east side o the Caspian, and a little later another group of Tur comans surrendered at Mery In ways like that, all Central Asia, west of China, became Russian This progress of the Russian Bear in Asia made the British Lion uneasy There still remained vast country that was interesting to both English and Russian, hidden and mysterious behind the rampart of the enormous mountain ranges which encircle Chinese Turkestan No European had stood upon that frontier on the heights of the Pamirs for nearly seven hundred years Since the great Venetian traveller, Marco Polo, had been there in 1272 In 1838 an English officer in the Indian navy, Lieutenant Wood, reached the spot and looked down upon the mighty Amu Daria trick. ling out of a frozen lahe, the Sir-l-Kul That great river is famous in classical literature as the Oxus All that great unknown world was very tempting to men of science as well as soldiers In 1857 two Germans in the service of the Indian Government, Hermann and Robert, Schlagintweit, succeeded in Crossing the Karakoram, which means the Black Gravel, a great plateau 18 000 feet above the sea, Yvhuch really does seem to be the Roof of the World Up there in that thin air and fearful cold, both men and beasts suffer terribly from mountain sickness.

·Asia 35 The head aches, the lips swell and burst, the mouth tastes of corruption, the heart thumps, the lungs gasp Of the beasts of burden, many die in suffering and the road is marked by the sheletons of horses The two Germans returned, but a third brother, Adolf crossed and succeeded in reaching the city of Kashgar Now Kashgar belonged to China but at that time an Usbeg by name Yakub Bek had made himself prince Yahub was a remarkable character He had begun life as a dancing boy in a tea-house in Tashhand become a prominent soldier, and by craft and treachery made himself master of Kashgar and of the greater part of Chinese Turkestan He assumed the title of Emir Muhammad Yakub Khan, Emir-ul-Musulman, Chief of the True Believers and Atalyk, that is Defender of the Faith The appearance of a and pou erful Mohammedan chieftain in Central Asia cxcited attention at once in Saint Petersburg, London and Calcutta Perhaps he might be a useful friend, or perhaps a dangerous enemy But Yakub was ruthless and cruel He ſcared strangers, and Adolf was at once murdered in 1868 an English officer named Hays and also crossed the Karakoram and reached Kashgar He was lucky, for he came out alive, but he was shortly afterwards murdered on the Karahorim His murderer_jas unknown and the place. remote, but an Indian detective took up the täil-and, der many years' patient hunt, ran his man down He found him in a bazaar in Taslihand in ussian territory At the demand of the British Government the Russian authoritics handed the murderer over, and he was punished new

·36
Asia
2
The Approach to Kruhger
for his crime
About that time there was living in Leh,
Western Tibet, an Englishman named Robi
Shaw Traders used to come into Leh from ma
directions, and among them Shaw mct an agent
Yakub Khan, who invited him to visit his mast
in Kashgar Shau accepted. He was well recei
ed by the Khan, who såid he would be glad
receive an official mission from the British Yaki

·Asia 37 vas crafty, for he saw that such a mission would Idd to his dignity and prestige So in 1870 the Indian Government sent F D Porsyth to see Yakub, and three years later Forsyth vent again, this time taking a well organized expelition The object was to make a trade agreement with Yakub, but the needs of science were not orgotten Three scientific men went with Forsyth, out the geologist, Dr Stolicska, could not stand the strain of that awful journcy across the Karakoram and died of mountain sickness on his way back to India The work of the Mission, both difficult and dangerous, was greatly helped by some Indian Pandits, who had been doing important surveying work in Tibet It is amusing to read that Yakub had issucd a very original law, that every visitor to his country who came without a wife was allowed three days in which to find one or leave the country As the members of the Forsyth Mission ranked as diplomats, they were probably escused from this. obligations 1 coul, red A man who revealed two of the secrets of the hcart of Asia was another Russian, NM. Praesulski, who spent the greater part of his life exploring the depth of inner China the cruel Gobi desert, the swamps of Tsaidam, the shifting waters of the late Lob Nor, the Golden Mountains, Altyn Dagh, the Mountains of Heaven, Nan Shan and Tian Shan, and Tibet Unui his travels it was belieucd that no such animals existed as wild horses and wild camels, for they were known only as the servants of min But Prjou alskı found reil wild horses in Mongolia and real wild camels too In 1888 this great traveller dicd of typhoid on the shores of Lahe Issyh Kul ·$8 Asia The great names mentioned are of men who ex plored the present There went up also from India a man who explored the past The work done by Sir Aurel Stein was extraordinary He revealed a world forgotten, yet preserved in small and often trivial detail by the hot, dry sand of the Takla Makan, where he unearthed city after city He found even sheaves of com with mummified mice and even the traps that had been set to catch them, he found rubbish heaps as fresh as though recent, dating back well over a thousand years, yet in some cases keeping even the smell This was worst, he wrote in a pile of nine feet of rubbish in an old Tibetan fort of the eighth century Inside the fort, he writes the smell was horrid so for relief he went outside at intervals But outside the blizzard was so piercing that for shelter he went back to his ancient smell He found masses of old documents title-decds, records police orders, passports and accounts all written, not on paper, but on wood He discovered new languages and re-discovered old ones He found remains of ancient art, many beautiful things Least expected was the strong influence of the Grech classics upon ancient Chinese art, greater than both the Iranian and Indian art through which it acted cherubim, with wide open eyes, with nothing of the slant of castern Asia, shadiag, otherwise not known in Asiatic art, no thc frank enjoyment of the good things of life decanters, goblets, guitars with boys and girls th faces like the Greeks and head-dresses from Iran, Most extraordinary of all, in the oasis 61 T Huang he found a cave that had been sealed in the beginning of the cleventh century, at the time ol ·Asia 39 the invasions of the Tanguts, to preserve the treasures of the old Chinese temples This room he called the Hall of the Thousand Buddhas, and it is difficult to imagine his sensation when the secret was revealed to his eyes He found over six thousand documents in nume rous languages, pictures from the best period of Chinese art, and a piece of the oldest known Chinese textile From the heart of 1 Central Asia he brought back documents in the Kharoshthi language for older than any preserved in India, which show that in thesecond century of our cra Indian influence extended to the very borders of China proper He found old Brahini A Mlongo! cowboy of the Gobi script containing three languages, one being the oldest known manuscript in Sanskrt. He found too the oldest known Tibetan manuscript dealing with worldly affairs He found the best relics yet known of the ancient, halfforgotten Turhs literature He found and surveyed i for two hundred miles the ancient fronter all of China, built to keep out the hordes of barboriins more than a thousand scars ago, yet in that extraordinary climato keeping astonishing detnils desert. lle uy the Lasso. polo In his hand far catch Ins ild horten.

·40 Asia preserved, even movementorders of troopsand monet spilt twelve centuries ago out of a hole in a sach carr; ing the pay for the soldiers Stein deserves to ran! with the really great explorers Most of has wors was done in blizzards with forty degrees of frost T him a broken leg was only a provoking delay in hu work of survey at 24,000 feet above the sea Among the explorers of Central Asia much of the credit must go to Indian Pandits, who did specialis fine work in Tibet One of the greatest of these was Nain Singh, the Pandit of Kumaon, who found the gold mines of the Tibetans at an altitude o over 16,000 feet These mines were very jealosul guarded by the Tibetans, who frightened the natives away by telling them that the gold was pro tected by evil spirits But he found that the bes protection was the difficulty of the journey and the fearful climate at that great height Another great Indian was Kishen Singh, who made his way into the then forbidden City of Lhasa and back Su Percy Sykes, in his History of Exploration, tells the story of a Chinesc lima who was trained and sent to Lhasa, to find out whether the great river Brahma putra was the same as that river which in Tibet is called the Tsang-po He had orders to 'follow it as far as possible, and then throw into it a number of logs in which certain signs had been cut The idea was that these logs would eventually drift dorn and be picked up a thousand miles or more farther down If one log were found, it would prove that the Tsang-po of Tibet is the upper portion of the Brahmaputra Watch was kept on the lower river for two years and then given up Four years later the Indian Kinthu, who had HA ·Asia 41 been in the service of the lama, arrived back in India He told a wild and romantic story, how the Chinaman had failed in his trust, how he himself nad been sold into slavery, how he had worked for 215 freedom, and then made his way down the Isang-po to carry out the work which had been entrusted to his false master He described in detail all the places which he had passed down that great river, right down to a point within sixty miles of the plains of India Then, he said, as he could not go any farther, he had thrown the logs into the water He was not believed at first, but thirty years later his story was proved to be true, and at long last he received the reward which he had so well deserved Sır Percy Sykes, himself a great traveller, pays a ho generous tribute to the courage, capacitv and enthusiasm of the Indian surveyors, with whom he worheď for many years One more great Indian adventure must be mentioncd, a recent one On the frontiers of India and Tibet 'stands the loftiest mountain in the world.fr Mt Everest, rearing its head to 29 002 fcet, has lured the boldest spirits to dare its dangers Time and time again have men tried In 1924 two Englishmen, Mallom- und Irvince and many gallant native porters, give their lives in the attempt to reach the summit In 1933 a very determined but unsuccessful cffort was made under Hugh Ruttledge. Mountain technique is not afraid of it. To reach 28,000 feet is almost easy Ruttledge maintains that, if only the weather be favourable, the con. quest is certain But if the grcat mountain has not been scaled it has sielded to the acroplane On April 3rd 1933, ·42 Arabia Lord Clydesdale, Colonel Blacker and Flight Lieutenant M'Intyre flew across the top The eye of man had not before looked upon the mountain's southern face, and the photographs taken on, the wonderful flight show where In and Mallory now rest, the grandest tombstone mae ever had Arabia 1 . FEW, parts of the world have remained so unchang ed and mysterious as Arabia Few lands have lured the adventurous so enticingly The hai), the great pilgrimage of the Moham mëdāns to Mecca, for centuries excited the curiosity of Europeans, but for an unbelieving Christian to venture his head there meant certain death. In 1812 a Swiss dared it, J L Burchhardt For two years he had lived among Arabs in Syria and studied the language and the Koran to such good effect that he could pass for an Arab doctor So calling himself the Sheikh Ibrahim ibn Abdullni, and disguised as a pulgrim, he went What is more, he was successful, for he came out alive and wrote in English the first description of the ceremonies and of the Ka'ba, that mysterious black stone which, lihe other meteorites, fell from the heavens In 1854 an Englishman undertook the great adventure, that dare devil Richard Burton, to whom no land was closed "Hc, too, penetrated disguised' as a doctor learned in the lay, and so became the Haji Abdullah He performed all that the ritual demuds, and when it was finished, he withdrew to ·Arabia 43 Jeddah to take ship home The nerve strain must have been very great, for the slightest slip on his part would have meant instant death There must have been some fifty or sixty thousand pilgrims from all parts of Africa and the cast, without any notion of hygiene Especially in that great heat, with so miscrable a water-supply, at must have been a fearful centre of infection There was no provision for proper cleanliness, the air must have reched with the putrefying offal and flesh drying in the sun, and sanitation did not exist Burton confessed that, when he had entered once more upon the open road and drank in the pure air of the desert which he had learnt to love, the newly-made Haji Abdullah felt 'such joy as only the captive delivered from his dungeon can cxpericncc' His rclief was justified for it had been 7 narrow escape His servant Mahommed, a native of Mecca bchavcd vcry strangely, and tricd to extort moncy from him Something Burton had done or said had roused the boy's suspicions, and to a fcllars scrant he had said that he was surc his mister was a sahib from India, and added he wa Richard Burton 1821-1890 ·44 Arabia hath laughed at our beards' The boy ha? judged truly, for it was as a British officer in India that Burton had first learnt his Arabic, and studie! the Koran and the philosophy of the East Many great travellers have penetrated into the depths of Arabia since the days of Burton, every one has met with great adventure, and everyo has been able to do so only because he could speab the language Even women dared it, though: some ways travel is easier for 7 woman than a mar In 1913, Gertrude Bell, on the journey from Danias cus to Hail, was shabbily treated by a sheikh a' Najud, who took her revolver and field glasses, anthen she was held prisoner by the Shammar tribe in a place which, she wrote 'smelt of blood' But the greatest adventure of all that ever befel a European in Arabia was that of an eccentri young English archaeologist and scholar, T E Lawrence During the Great War 1914-18, some British officers went to the Hedjaz to persuade thc Arabs to rise and throw off their masters the Turks Among them was this youth, who know the Arabs well and could speak their tongue, which he had lcarnt when worhing as an archaeologist in Syrii, studying the ancient castles of the Crusaders Lawrence landed at Jeddah on October 16th 1916, and for the next two years lived as an Arab and fought as a soldier The Arabs learnt to like him, then to respect him, and then to love him The young Englishman could ride a camel as well as any Arab could endure the heat and thirst in the desert as rall and as long as any Arab Whatever they could do, that he could do as well, and sometimes ·Arabia 45 better He was no longer surveying ancient castles, but raiding Turkish outposts, blowing up Turkish military trains, and fighting Turkish armies The student and the book-lover had read much of ancient wars, and he saw what are the eternal rules of warfare He made use of that reading and, with his splendid brain, applied it to the tash he now had in hand, and in the end victory was his Two years after his landing at Jeddah, almost to a day, with This Arab officers and friends, he entered the "ancient city of Damascus, now once again an Arab town i Once, when exploring enemy land, he was tahen prisoner by the Turks The ordeal through which he was put was unspeakable, and he was flogged into sensclessness Yet, bleeding and lacerated, he crawled out of the hospital where they had flung him, and crept away A wandering tribesman took pity on him, mounted him on his own camel and restored him to his friends At the very end he was made prisoner by lus own people, a patrol of the Bengal Lancers They would not believe that he was English, and prodded him with a lance He was not released until they met an officer Through those two years in the desert Lawrence had dressed like an Arab, but had shaved regularly : His beardless face, generally fair but nou burnt red by the sun, and his bright blue cies must have been in startling contrast with his white robes and head. dress There was no one else like him in all Arabia, and once seen, he was instantly l'nown Among his own Aribs, that was his greatest protection.. The Great War thres open much of hidden Arabia to the foreign cse, and to-day the Infidel folyte . น ·Arabia may visit even the Holy City of Mecca upon plat ment of a fee Yet the final mysteries of the lat have only recently been revealed The last cork of this stubborn land to yield to the intruder ha been the Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter, the lifeless, desert of sand, where over vast distances neither man nor beast nor plant can live This huge area is protected by its waterlessness, but even more by watathe fanatical hostihty of the few wandering tribesmen. These violently resent the Lfting of the last curtain, and are prepared at all costs to defend the few brackish waterholes and scantv Lawrence grazing ground that do exist here and there in that area of some 300 000 Two Englishmen conquered it at last; Philby and Bertram Thomas Philby had entered the scrvice Of King Ton Saud, and Thomas had acted as Vizier to the Sultan of Muskat' Both were masters of the dialects and customs of the people Philby had accepted Islam, but Thomas was a Christian 4. It wns in 1928 that Thomas undertook his first journey, secretis This was a reconnaisance, on square miles ·Arabia 47 which he was helped by the Kathir tribe, who escorted him to a range of watered hills, the Qara, the region from which came the sweet-smelling frankincense the same as that burned by the Hebrews in the tabernacle in the days of Moses and mentioned in the Song of Solomon in the Bible It was on December 1st, 1930, that Thomas started a second time, having bought, the support of a local sheikh by promise of a nie reward Carefully avoiding the tribesmen, who would be sure to murder the rash Kafir or Unbeliever who ventured into their domain, Thomas reached the Persian Gulf on February 5th, 1931 Thus he had crossed it from south to north Philby was an experienced Arabian traveller On a journcy to see the Ruler of Jauf some years previously, through unsettled country, he had reached Jauf and made friends with the slave governor Philby described his friend as one of the most attractive personalities he had ever met in Arab lands He refused a cash present, but was anxious to be provided with a good poison // 10. Well qualificd by local knowledge, backed by the power of King Ibn Saud himself Philby crossed the Empty Corner from east to west in 1936 Even then he was cxposed to desperate hardship On one vast waterless cxpanse the cimels brohe down For six days they had marched in long stages Nerer hnd I seen Arabs dmc camels as they drove that day, from two in the morning till nine at night Never have I seen camels on the borderland of star ation march as those camels marched They came through in ninety days the Rub' al' Khali had been crossed for the first time from cast to

·48
Australia
west This was described by Sir Percy Sykes az
magnificent achievement
By those two journeys, wrote Sir Percy, the
that hid the Rub' al Khali has been rent, and the
word 'End' has been written on land exploratic
in the old sense of the word, for the last of the
great unknown areas of the inhabited globe ht
now been conquered And we may all, surely, k
glad to think that this great effort was made it
with modern inventions, not with motors or aero
planes, but with the age-old method, on the legs e
camels and alone
Australia
urte
AUSTRALIA is a world by itself, a fragment of ai
ancient past First discovered by a Hollander
William Janszoon, in 1606, was long known as
New Holland, but it was many years before any
serious attempt was made to examine it, althoug/
another Hollander, Abel Tasman, a great navigator
had discovered the adjoining island called after him.
Tastnania.
But in 1770 there landed on the south-cast coast
a Yorkshireman who was perhaps the greatest novi
gator of all time, Captain James Cook, accompanied

·* Australia by a learned man of science, Sir Joseph Banks They were so struck by the wealth of flowers in that secluded spot, that they named it Botany Bay It was here that they noticed an extraordinary animal, 'as big as a greyhound, of a mouse colour, and very swift', which went upon only two legs, imahing vast bounds' That was the first time a Europcan set eyes upon a kangaroo As was the case in Africa a few settlements grew con favoured spots around the coast, especially in the south-east corner, but the interior long remained a blank Australia never enjoyed the fame and romance of Africa, but produced her share of heroic explorers, who ventured into the unknown interior True, the natives were primitive rather than savage, not yet emcreged from the culture of the Stone Age, offering danger rather of occasional murder than of organized warfare, nor were there ficrcc bcasts to fear The greatest foe was thirst, which claimed its toll of the bold travellers who ventured into the stony heart of Australia The first great name was that of E Stuart, who in 1828-30 explored the rivers called by him Darling, the noble Murray, and the Murrumbudgée which joins it Fourteen years later, as a veteran, he returned to complete the survey of the Darling In 1844 Dr Leichhardt loft Moreton Buy on the cast coast and vanished into the unknown Fifteen months later, almost naked half dead from hunger this intrepid man staggered on to the north coast of the continent in the Gulf of Carpentana, which no white man had seen since Janszoon's visit, nearly two and a half centuries beforc In 1848 be braved the unknown again, and was never heard of since ·50 Australia 1 In 1860 the colonists of Victoria, in the resolved to send an expedition to cross the whol continent from south to north The Parliamper made a grant, and the colonists subscribed a specia fund among themselves, so that the expedita should be really properly equipped They ese imported camels specially from India, to help ther cross the central desert The two chief members of the party were Robei O'Hara Burke, an officer of police and Williar John Wils, from the Melbourne Observatory The began by establishing a base depot at a place calle Menindee on the river Darling, intending to ad vance northwards from there Burke left a ma named Wright in charge and himself pushed on tahing seven men, five horses, and sixteen camels, ti find a suitable place for a still more advanced duin farther north, where Wright was to follow by easy stages Burhe found good water supply and graz ing land at a place called Cooper's Creeh, so orderer Wright to move the depot there For some reason Wright did not obey orders ac curately but frittered away his time in local investi gation, so Burke decided not to wait any longer foi him at Cooper's Creek, but pushed on still farther taking Wills and two other men, Gray and King with a horse and half a dozen cames for supplies With considerable difficulty, they got past the McKinlay mountains, and reached Flinders River, which flows into the Gulf of Carpentaria, on the north coast of Australi? Thus they accomplished their task They did not wait there long but started back upon the return journey on February 23rd, 1861 ·Australia 51 Not long after this Gray fell ill, and on April 16th he died Five days after burying their comrade, Burke, Wills and King crossed the desert again and reached Cooper's Creeh, where they looked for rest and fresh supplies But they were cruelly undeceived The man they had left in charge thought they would never return He had abandoned hope, and his post too, on that very day Wright had not even sent out a search party Their position was desperate Worn by their long treh to the north and bach, they were hardly fit to trudge their way to Menindee They wandered about the district for some time in search of food, or else tried to make the road to Adelaide but they were too far gone Some wandering natives helped them, but before very long both Burke and Wills died of starvation King alonc survived, As time went by und no news of the expedition was forthcoming the promoters sont out relief parties to find and help them Two of these reached the north coast, while a third explored the middle of the continent The fouth, lcd by M A W Wowitt, found King still alive, and brought him back to safety He told them where his comrades lay, so the bodies of Burke and Wills were brought back in sad procession to Melbourne, and given a solemn public funcral and a monument was erected that their names might be held in honoured memory ·Heights EXPLORERS have faced terrors innumerable, deat! and suffering, in order to examine the face of the earth There are also the heights of the air and the depths of the sea, and of the earth Balloonists and men flying in aeroplanes hac learnt a great deal about the atmosphere, up quite big heights An Italian in May 1937 reached 2 height of 51,361 feet in an aeroplane The al which envelops our earth has not a sharply-definec surface like the sea, but gradually becomes thinnei and thinner, as everyone knows who has climbed? mountain The first few thousand feet are subject to clouds, run, mist, fog, and storms But thes do not extend beyond six miles up from the carth That part is called the troposphere Beyond that is region of perpetual cam, of unbroken sunshine ani unvarying fine weather without wind or moisture That is called the stratosphere The air up ther! is, so thin thatā human cannot breathe in it, and cold Uke a Siberian winter It is cold in spite o the sunshine, because there is nothing for the sur to warm A Swiss professor in Brussels, August Piccard determined to expore this stratosphere. HC wanted to find out all sorts of scientific details about the temperature and density of the air, and above all, certain mysterious rays that seem to come to us from outer space and are very little understood to which have been given the name of cosmic rays - ✓ 1 ·Heights and Depths 53 It was a very bkave thing to do, for nothing like at had ever been attempted before A long time was spent making the preparations and working out all the calculations upon which they were based It is almost impossible for men to breathe near the top of Mt Everest, and out of the question at twice that height Professor Piccard therefore was obliged to tahe his air with him what he did was to make a strong ball-shaped chamber of aluminium, the lightest metal, and an enormous balloon filled with hydrogen, the lightest gas, to lift The ball was to be air-tight and oxygen for breathing supplied inside from cylinders The ball had windows and holes through which to thrust the ends of his instruments, all carefully designed so as to be air-tight He could not afford to lose any of his precious oxygen At last everything was ready On May 27th 1931, on a perfect morning, his balloon went up from the flying ground at Augsburg, a spot chosen far from the sea to avoid the danger of coming down into the water The two brave men, Pro fessor Piccard and his assistant M Paul Kıpfer, allowed themselves to be screwed in, and they were high in the air before they hnew they were off, so smooth was the motion Disaster threatened them almost at oncc When the Professor tried to push an observation instrument through the valve in the floor, he found that the metal had warped slightly, so the instrument did not fit the holc An ominous hissing showed that their precious air was escaping Desperately they struggled The sun beat down on the situation was terribli threatening the The ·1 + 54 Heights and Depths inside- rose to 1049 , F; and th: twormen en nearly stified They were-already 20 000 feet up and stillising, Piccard then decided to leto some hydrogen, to prevent their rising higher bi the valve jammedz. They were rising rapidly, w no means of stopping, and the air was whistlio out- through the whole in the floor They secme doomed Then at last, by a desperate effort, the Professor forced the instrument out, the hole was pluggen and they were saved Then another danger threatened them Thé hed of the sun made the rubber seats of the manhole covers 'shtivel and wrinkle Once more the art began to, escape: gone Thus they drifted slowly, about ten miles above the carth They looked out through the windows. The sky was beautiful of a bluish purple not quite dach enough to see the stars The Alps below: them looked like a clief map From that height if there had been ano mist over the carth they could have looked upon a circle seventeen hundred, miles in arcumference. Then at last, as the sun went down the gas in the balloon began to contract, and they slouis sank. , At nine at night when a mere two and a hall miles up, they opened the sundou, and how glad those ipo brave men must have been to drink in the fresh air opce spore > The balloon subsided gently on to a glacier near Innsbruck in Austria, - about a hundred miles from their starting place Worn out and hungry, the too slept till morning, and then walked down to the nearest village, Ober-Gurgl, where their ·The American stratophets balloon before its record scent of e tert Stove Data ·56 Heights and Depths arrival caused an immense sensation Devoted : they were to their scientific work, we can have litt! doubt that the thing that interested them mosta that hour was a good solid breakfast, after twenty four hours' starvation They had been up! 53,152 feet, just over ten miles The example set by Piccard stimulated others into this new field On January 31st 1934, a part of Russiins, after two years upon their prepara tions, went up in a balloon called the Oscavialır They reached a greater height than Piccard, 72,17 feet, almost thirteen mules, but as thcy came dom a hurricane wrenched the gondola from the balloo and it crashed All the scientific instruments 110 smashed to pieces, and the bodies, still in gondola, were mutilated beyond all description Undaunted by this tragedy, two Americans we up in Dakota on November 12th, 1935 The landed safely not far away They said that y there the sky was like a jet black awning, and t) cosmic rays one hundred and fiftv times as intent: as upon the earth And they had beaten t record They had been up to 74,000 feet, that almost fourtecn miles up into and above the air Depths The dangers and mysteries of the ser huv inspired men of all kinds, but Icw have been invite by the depths The greatest to which a driver cat go is some 300 feet below the surface Few mei can stand the immense pressure of the water at tha depth, even in their special sults of mour, ant there is little they can do when they get there 1 ·Heights and Depths 57 was gold that tempted men to break that record, and in 1929 and 1930 some brave Italians were enticed down by the lure of £1,000,000, buried in the ship Egypt which had sunk off Ushant in 1922 She lay some 400 feet below the surface, but those Italians reached her The divers were enclosed in a kind of steel bottle, to stand the terrific pressure and in it they could scarcely crawl All they could do was to signal and telephone to the men on dech, to guide them with their grab Their pluck and persistence had their reward, as always and the bullion was recovered Those Italians however, were not men of science An American zoologist, Dr William Becbe, especially interested in fishes, resolved to see what life in the sea was like at far greater depths It was known that down there no light penetrates froni the sunshinc above, that the pressure is terrific, and no ordinary creatures could survive there an instant Yet it was known that there are fishes down there, weird and strange monsters, that live by devouring one another, and provide their own lights, for they are luminous Sometimes these fishes are brought to the surface by deep trawls but directly they cntcr into the low ci pressure they burst Beebe employed the same method as Piccard He had a ball of steel made 4 ft 9 in in diameter, strong cnough to stand the tremendous pressure Nox the pressure of the atmosphere on the surface at sca leich is fifteen pounds to the square inch But Bccbe was going down, not to the 300 ft of divers but to ten times that depth to 3,000 ft more than half a mile, and down there the pressure is a half 1 ton to the squarc inch ·58 Heights and Depths The rish, he knew, was very great, so as experiment he sent the thing down empty, to 1 the sealing of the windows, for obviously it wo have been useless to go down unless he could li out He knew that if the shell had given way, window burst in, the men inside would have be not drowned, but crushed to pulp instantly S was with breathless interest that they haulcd shell up after its trial dive Directly they opel the door on the deck of their vessel, 'without slightest warning the bolt was snatched from th hands and shot across the deck like a shiell fron gun It was followed by a solid cylinder of wat and air mixed with the water, to look like ste Beebe wrote, "If I had been standing in the way should have been decapitated' These plucky men sealed themselves in, a went down, down, to see with their own cyes manner of life exists in the grip of such t. forces It was all new and strange, for what little informa tion we had was but the uncertain markings on the threshold of a new world' When down inky blackness, Beebe switched on the scarchlight It cut an almost material swath across the field of vision, and for the first time in the history of scientific inquiry, the life of those depths une revealed to human cycs, as he gazed upon tl patterns of fish of unknown type that quam acro the narrow field of vision Between 1930 and 19: he made no fewer than thirty such dies in t1 clear waters off Bermuda 6 $ ·II CONQUEST "he Dunce who Taught Men to Think N the early years of the nineteenth century there ved in the finc old town of Shrewsbury in England prosperous country doctor named Robert Waring Darwin He was a sound, practical min, successful in his profession, but, although son of a well-known naturalist, Erasmus Darwin, Dr Darwin had no marked taste for science Mrs Darwin the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, whose name is famous the pottery world ! To this eminently practical couplc there, was born on February 12th, 1809 a second son whom they christened Charles The boy showed no great promise as a child but a marked tastc for flowers birds and stoncs He must in fact have been a Irouble and disappointment to his parents, for at Was Charles Darwin 1203 .. in 59 ·& 6D The Dunce who Taught Shrewsbury Grammar School he was a failure narrow, old-fashioned curriculum of the Greek Latin classics was to him meaningless and dea dull, and the seven years at school were mast But his spare time was spent in eager interest queer sidelines of knowledge He tried to pick some chemistry, a subject not taught in Eng schools in those days, and was punished by master for wasting his time in such a useless * He was fond of poetry, but above all, he liked things, animals, plants, and also rocks The 51 of the naturalist was in him. He was also keen on outdoor sports, on horses, dogs, riding, above all, shooting His father then sent him to Edinburgh to I medicine, so that he would carry on the fan tradition and be a doctor But he found lectures very dull, subjects that should have ! interesting were put to him in a boring wav, the horrors of the surgical operating theatre bel the days of chloroform shook him so badly that gave up the notion of being a doctor The c good he obtained in Edinburgh was the friends... of some naturalists and practice in skinning an stuffing birds, wluch was taught him by a negru Edinburgh did him no more good than Shrewsbur- He picked up a good deal of knowledge but only the way, and of the stated subjects he learnt ne to nothing His father, in despair, came to the conclusic that the onlt place for him was in the Church Charles agreed, and went to Cambridge Universite to qualify Here the old story was repeated IF became friendly - with Professor Hension W ·Men to Think 61 ectured on botany, and took him out for walks in he countryside, and also with the famous proessor of geology, Sedgwich, who brought him back o a subject from which the dullness of the teachog in Edinburgh had frightened him He became ceply interested now, read a great deal about many hranches of natural history, and devoured good Pravel books He neglected his stated work, as isual, but managed to take his B.A in 1831 That was to be the critical year of his life His riend Professor Henslow happened to hear that he Admiralty was sending a ship to survey the oasts of South America, and that the commanding Sfficer, Captain Fitzroy, was looking for a young aaturalist who would care to go with him The Professor recommended his young friend as a keen man with the makings of a good all-round naturalist To his father's practical mind it was a hare-brained scheme for his son to go gadding about the world instead of staying at home like a respectable person and continuing to read for the Church He was, in fact, seriously shocked at the idea Luckily, when his uncle, the second Josiah Wedgwood, plended his cause, his father rather grudgingly replented, and Charles was permitted to sign on as i naturalist to HMS Beagle | She was not a modern, comfortable craft, but only a 235 ton brig, with no luxuries and hardly any conveniences Not only was there no laboratory or workroom for him, but not even a cabin to himself But Captain Fitzroy took a liking to the kcen young naturalist, and gave him the use of hall his own cabin The Beagle sailed from Devonport on December > ·- 62 The Dunce who Taught 27th, 1831, and the young naturalist must ha suffered much from the cold and from sea-sickne during the first ten days at sea, fighting the galos the Bay of Biscay, before they made Tenenler January 6th Now for the first time Charles Darwin was real in his element Now he was to feel that wonderi thrill of setting foot on the very shores of which! had dreamt For at Cambridge his mind had bex fired by the work of that greatest of travellers, *** Humboldt and above all, by his description i Tenerife But fate was agunst him at the start for ti port authorities at Santa Cruz vcrc afraid of choles and refused to allow anyone from the ship to lan What a cruel disappointment that must have bet for young Darsvin as he stood on deck and watche the lofty peak of Teyde, over 12,000 fect above th sea, fade gradually away into the clouds A day or two later he received his consolatio: They reached the Cape Verde Islands and Darul went ashore on the island of Sao Thiago or S Jago, and for the first time found himself standin on burnt-up broun volcanic soll almost baru ( vegetation, utterly foreign from anything he ha seen before From that day forward, lıfe must have been on long drcam of delight, as the naturalist explored th wonders of the coasts of South Americ? He sal the stately cxuberance of the tropical forest a Bahia and vas allowed no less than three month. at Rio de Janeiro then a miserable fever-striche city in the midst of surroundings of incomparable beautv He say the pampas of the Argentine, u It?

·Men to Think 63 Ictheir queer bırds, and mammals He saw the gauchos catch the rhea, the South American ostrich, with de the bolas, their special weapon He saw them strip Tecnaked and nde their naked horses into the river He was astonished, he wrote, when he saw how „splendidly the two animals, man and horse are ruly suited to each other He went down to Patagonia, then an almost unknown land, where he found huge bones of a gigantic ground sloth, but PE recently extinct. This started him thinking on the TIETO relation between the extinct and the living, and then between kind and hind, species and species He visited the Falkland Isles where there zre no trees at all and hardly any bushes He saw the storm rached fjords of Tierra del Fuego the Land of Fire, with glaciers running down into the sea, and naked savages at the bottom of the human, scale He travelled over the peaks of the Andes up the coast of Chile, and at Valdivia saw the horrors of an earthquake He landed on the Galapagos Islands, out in the Pacific, where he was Dr astonished to find the queerest of crcaturcs , lizards that ate seaweed, birds not frightened of men and monstrous ungunly tortoises Then their vessel crossed the Pacific, and they landed at some of the beautiful islands of Oceania, wand at Sydney and Darwin saw New Zealand He landed on coral Islands, crossed to Mauritius Founded the Cape of Good Hope, and so returned home landing in England in October 1836 It was a very different Charles Dars in that, then settled at Cambridge The idea of the Church had long since been forgotten Under the stimulus. of that sonderful adı cnture he had ripened He had bores olan . 20! ! 30m dh 1 ·64 The Dunce who Taught seen, observed and, above all, he had learot think independently, to observe accurately, reason logically, and to write clearly, as one biegu pher has well put it And that clear thinking of young man who had been a dunce at school destined to revolutionize the thoughts of man. When he had landed at the Galapagos Islands, out in the Pacific Ocean, he had found that e separate island had its own kind of bird, and, it was even stranger, its own kind of tortoise Ho did they get there? Why were there so man kinds? Why did each island have its own peculi set of creatures? All were clearly of the same gen ral type that lives upon the mainland Those burd must have come originally somehow from the mau land, and then, living an 'isolated life, develops into different forms The only thing that coul explain the problem was Descent with Modificatio His ideas grew slowly He cvolved his philosoph gradually, 'but gave his whole life to it 'It was 1837 that he opened his first notebook to collex facts for the theory that was taking shape in n brain but it was nineteen years before he wrot it out. A great change came over him soon after this A a young man he had been strong and vigorous, a untiring horsēman, a fine shot and an athlete When he was about thirty a mysterious slincs attacked him that clouded the rest of his llic He became subject to fits of lethargy, he sensity fatigued, and towards the close of the day would bx spiritless' and exhausted, his head sham and h! hands trembled gastric trouble ruined his sleep It night His old love of poetry and music turned 13 ·To wild masniscence of Trem del puero #hero glaciers run down to the 162 ·66 The Dunce who Taught dıslıht His capacity for work was hicaully redo ed Yet he turned out a prodigious amount work, and lived a full life until he was sevent four thanks to the constant care of his wife, Em Wedgwood, his cousin, whom he had married in 16 It was in 1856 that he started writing out ! theory In 1858 he received a bolt from the blu A field naturalist with whom he had been in cori spondence, by name Alfred Russel Wallace, nout worh far away in the Moluccas, sent him the man script of a paper he had written as a result of wb he had seen and thought about in the orien! forests The paper had the rather ponderous tit! Issay on the Tendency of Varieties to depart and finitely from the Original Type' Wallacc ashe Darwin's opinion on the essay, and requested hi: to hand it on lo Lyell, the gcologist When Darwin rond the paper through his hea must have sunk like a stone His friend had ant cipated him The fruit of nineteen cars patie! plodding was kasted He sent the essay on that same day to Lvelluk had already advised him not to postpone too lon the publication of his own work He wrote You words have come true with a sengeance that should be forestalled' Darsn was human, and it is easy to understan how, in the first bitter moment of chagrin, he fel inclined to throu up lus work and leave the field 1 Wallace But Lyell, and his friend looker, th botanist, urged him not to and it was on the advice that a combined paper by Wallnce and Dar 1 In has read before the Linnean Socicts in Londos on July 1st, 1858 ·Men to Think 67 Not Man ancestors but relatives This momentous paper fell flat, jprobably because only thrcement understood what it meant Lyoll Hooker and Huxley But it marhed an cpoch an Darwin now set to work in carnest, and in 1859 published what he called an abstract' of his meditations and experiments of twenty ycars Its shortened title was The Origin of Specics By 1876 sixteen thousand copies had been sold in England and it had been translated into almost ever cnilized linguage It ac rise to tremendous excitement in Eng·wiwing 68 The Dunce who Taught land, because it was looked upon as an attack up Christian belief The Bible taught that God crestě Man on the sixth day If Darwin taught that M.: was not created on the sixth day, in faci created at all but descended from monkeys, must be the enemy of the Church As a matter i fact, Darwin did not think that Man is descerdfrom monkeys What he taught is that Mane monkeys are both descended Irom one hindi ancestor. But the men of the Church did mu understand that In fact, very few people unde stood Dartvın at first The Church vas up in arms In 1860 there was meeting of the-Brush Association for the Advancd ment of Science at Oxford, where the chief men o both sides met in debate Bishop Wilberford spoke for the Church, "He was an exccllent cccles astic, but of Science his ignorance was completi He had read a little for the occasion, and be supplied with a few points by Professor Owen, wb did not like Darwin, but he had learnt 7 lesso without digesting it, and he wound up his series < blunders with surprising want of taste, in a ponda ous attempt to be funny 'I should like to ask Professor Huxley,' h demanded of Darwin's great chumpion is it o his grandfather's or on his grandmother's side thn the ape ancestry comes in?) Huxley rubbed his hand in glee, and turned an whispered to his neighbour to that gentlemon astonishment "The Lord hath dclicred him inki my hand,' and then arising, calm and dignified told the Bishop that he like them all, had grom out of a speck of protoplasm no bigger than the li ·Men to Think 69 of his pencil, and continued 'I should feel no shame to have risen from such an origin , but I should feel it a shame to have sprung from one who prostituted the gifts of culture and eloquence to the service of prejudice and false- Fhood' From that date the battle raged fiercely Most of those who attacked the new ideas quite failed to Sunderstand them In the long run the effect of Darwin's work was to make men thinh as naturalists, to seek the causes of things in nature, not in mystery Men turned to at with relief, to escape from the unbending demands of the intolerant churches, and to devote their efforts to improving the condition of mankind e upon this earth It broadened the views of the churchmen themselves and of all philosophers To day the clash of controversy is almost still Darwin's character was simple and noble The storm of abuse based on ignorance left him un- Calm and dignified as a rock, he did not stoop to answer Serene as a statue in a storm, he knew that Truth must prevail He had three stout champions, Lvell the geologist Hooker, the botanist and Huxley, the biologist He felt sie in their He retired to a secluded home at Down, in Kent shere with the simplest of tools, he improvised apparatus for his experiments out of old biscuit tins bils of string, and a hammer and a few nails To distinguish the contents of his various bottles and flasks he would tie pieces of coloured wool round them He was a cheerful companion, with a genertous, hcartı laugh and he liked a bit of fun lic >moved Chands ·1 70 The Dunce who Taught would work during the morning, but his doctors would not let him continue after lunch He to!! walk round his garden, read a novel, and allow evening to end without his game of back gammon. He knew the value of his own work of the book that shook the world, he himself wrote, look on it as absolutely certain that very much The Origin will be proved rubbish, but I cxpect ratione hope that the framework will stand' He was right Much has gone, much that had himself would have shed in the light of later knoz ledge, but the main frameu orh stands unshaken ] is, as one of his biographers has put it, like i mighty trce in winter from which the foliage has hey fallen but you can the better see the massive trunk and the branches forking in all directions Blog may be rejected even yet But one outstandin! fact remains unshaken, that Charles Darwin rolu tionized the method of modern thought. Ha influence has permcated the whole activity modern philosophy From Medicinc to Engineer ing, in Chemistr and in Astronoms, men think to day in terms of Evolution So it was that the bo who was a dunce at school in cd to Telolutionize th method of men's thoughts and be buried 11 Westminster Abbey 1 1 1 1 ·ܢܝܙ Family Science TASTE for scientific enquiry does not often run in milies, but there are some brilliant exceptions ather curiously, two striking cases are linked ogether There is the well-known scientific family Becuerel, of Paris The first Antoine Cesar, was orn at Chatillan in 1788 He became an engineer fficer in Napoleon's armies, and took part in plenty I fighting in Spain and France After the fall of Tapoleon in 1815, he retired from the army and evoted himself to science He was especially iterested in electricity, and for his researches in his subject he received in 1837 a great distinction, he Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London le worked on the growth of plants, and magnetism, nd the study of the weather, and published a great cal He became Professor of Physics at the Jatural History Museum in Paris in 1837, and held he post till he died in 1878 at the age of ninety His son Alexander Edmond, born in 1820, succeded him as professor at the museum He devotd himself to the study of light When he died in 1891, he was followed in turn s his son, Antoine Henri, who was born in 1852 Intoine was a civil cngineer by profession, but on is father's death succeeded to the Chair of Physics it the Natural History Museum in Paris thus making what must be a record It uns this grandson who became the most famous He was making 7 series of experiments of the three ·1 72 Family Science on the nature of fluorescence, that is, the propert some things have of glowing with different colour In making one of these experiments he was using piece of ore containing the metal uranium, th heaviest of the chemical elements then knots which has this peculiar property of fluorescence ? wrapped a piece of the ore in black paper so as? shut out light, and left it for some time under photographic plate When he opened the pack e he found a feeble but quite distinct photograr printed on the paper This was a very simple experiment, but th result was extraordinary As light was shut ou the photograph must have been made by some oth kind of ray For the same reason it had nothing do with fluorescence It must be due to somethin mysterious conling out of the uranium orc itselt He next put the piece of uranium ore near simple apparatus called an clectroscopc This is a extremely delicate appliance for detecting ver faint currents of electricity It showed that som thing like electric waves were coming out of th uranium Becquerel III had discovered a new kind o matter, matter that gives out rays, mdiant matte in fact His discovery led to a complete revolution in Physics For his grcat service to natura science Becquerel received the grant of hail the Nobel Prize for Physics, the other halt being grante to a certain lads He died in 1908 His discovery was so extraordinary that it sag met rather sceptically by some scientific men Bui another Frenchman, Pierre Curie, Professor of Physics at the Sorbonne in Paris, took up the studs 3

·Family Science
73
Madame Curie
He was helped in his work by a Polish lady, Marie
Sklodowska, daughter of a professor who had come
to Paris to study Physics Curie married her, and
the two set to work to examine this remarkable
They worked systematically through the chemical
new thing

·74 Family Science elements to see if any others besides uraruum ke haved in this strange manner, and found the same property in thorium But the minerals containing thorium and uranium are not common, and it not easy to get the material to work with Tys chief source of uranium ore was at Joachustal, 1 Bohemia, then part of Austria, where a minera! callcd pitchblende was worked by the Austrian government for the sake of the uranium in ih Text Austrian government generously placed a ton a their residues at the disposal of the Curles Their work, patient and laborious, was wel rewarded, for they found in the pitchblendero fewer than thrce quite new kinds of clements, to which they gave the name radium, because it radiates, polonium, in honour of Mme Curie's native land, and actinlum But the quantities of these elements are so excessively small that they nre sery precious, and very diMcult to handle Out of a whole ton of pitchblende, about half consists ol urunium Out of this the Curies were able to extract only thrcc grains of radium or the other two, the quantities are so small that they can only Just be detected It takes so much work and time to get so tiny a quantity of radium out of so big n mass of ore that the price is about fifty thousand times that of gold The scicntfic World at last realized that a tremendous discovery had been made In 1903, the Royal Society awarded tho Curice husband and wife together, the Davy MIcdal, and in the sinic y car the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Mimc Curic and Professor Becquerel jointly In 1905, Professor Curic, was clected to the French ·Family Science 75 Academy of Science The two sciences of Chemistry and Physics were revolutionized by these new discoveries, which, Jhowever, could not be digested at once Hardly more than thirty years ago, an eminent professor of Chemistry in London, when asked by his pupils to tell them something about the wonderful new element of which they were reading in the newspapers, Tooked quizzically at them, hesitated a moment, and then said 'Gentlemen for information about radium I refer you to The Daily Mail' To him, at the end of his career, the claims for this new discovery were incredible and incomprehensible He could not believe in radiant matter much less in the truth of that dream of the alchemists of old, that one element can be changed into another Yet it was not long before Professors Soddy and Rutherford showed that radium is always breaking up, or rather breakıng down, and the results are other stuff, quite well-known including the gas called helium and lead! When they were so well launched upon the new science tragedy stalked the devoted couple On April 19th, 1906, the scientific world was shocked to hcar that Professor Curie, while walking in the strect, no doubt absorbed in thought, had been struck by 1 cart and killed instantly He was only forty-seven years of age His widois carried on the work, to which she devoted the remaining tucnty-eight ycars, of her life Shc established ihe new science upon a firm basis, and when in January 1943 she dicd at the age of sixty-seven, she was described by Professor 1 1

·76
Family Science
Soddy as 'the most famous soman of all time'
Everything to do with the radiant matter s
extraordinary Not the least remarkable is it
independence Man can effect no more control olu
its behaviour than he can over the movements
the stars The radium goes on radiating and breat
ing down, and man can neither hasten its work mm
delay it, much less stop it It is quite aloof fru
human control
Then came Mme Curie's daughter, brought ux
naturally, as keen a chemist and physicist, as him
mother She, too, married a physicist, M. Jolid!
but rightly retained her own famous name as well
.
Thus Mme Joliot-Curie and her husband continued
the work They carried it a step further, Mme
Curie's daughter was the first human being to pro
duce radio-activity artificially She has recentir
produced a new element if we can call it clement
which she has herself made she calls it radium
sodium It bchaves in the same way as radium
and the other radiint clements, and as it can be
used like radium for healing, its discover how
brought down the fantastic price of radium
Mme Joliot-Curie is a young woman What con
tributions to Science may slie not make jul?

·el I 1 The Man who Conquered Smallpox It In the middle of the eighteenth century there lived at the little country town of Berkeley in Gloucestershure in the West of England, a country | parson named Rev Stephen Jenner He was vicarof Berkeley, belonged to an old county family, and owned much property in the district When he died, in 1754, his son Stephen took his place, and acted as father to his little )Edward brother Edward, then aged only six While quite a boy, Edward showed been interest in natural history, and decided to become a doctor He began his studies under a surgcon named Lud- - low, who was in practice not far from Gloucester, Where he saw a great deal of the country folk One day, about 1768, he heard a dairymud who had come into the surgery about some ailment, say that there was smallpox about, but she was not afraid as cowpox already Now smallpox is a Jenner From the portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence reproduced by the kind Demolasion of The Royal College of Physicians London 3 she had had ·78 The Man who Conquered Smallpox terrible disease, but cowpox, though rather lihe ut Is not nearly so serious Jenner was interested, and began making enquiries among the countrs people, and found that the belief was general thal cowpox acts as a protection against small pox Cowpox as the name suggests, is a disease of cattle and diarymads are liable to catch it When he was twenty-one Jenner went to London to study under John Hunter, a famous teacher of Medicine, with whom he lived for two years Herr he met many interesting, men, including Sir Joseph Banks, the botanist, who had recently returned from his famous voyage to Australia with Captain Cook Banks asked young Jenner to arrange and prepare all the specimens of natural history which he had broughtback Jenner did the work so well that he was invited to join the second expedition It must have been a tempting offer to a keen young naturalist, but Jenner was too intent upon his profession, and too devoted to his elder brother and home to accept it He returned shortly afterwards to his native place, where he took an active part in founding a local medical society He kept up correspondence with Hunter, under whose advice he continued his observations on various branches of natural history, and in 1792 he took the degree of Doctor of Medicine of St Andrews University in Scotland Jenner took an active interest in the life and affairs of his native district He made the first balloon ever seen there He was a cultivated man and socially a great favourite He could sing well, was a poet in a small way, and a good performer ·are often The Man who Conquered Smallpox 79 While living in London he had told Hunter about the country belief in the protection against smallpox given by cowpox, but the great man paid little attention to it Back in the country, Jenner began to collect evidence He ashed his colleagues who all said that they had heard of the belief from the country folk, but looked upon it as mere superstition Jenner, however, continued to think that there might be something in it The ideas of country folk, if not founded on learning, are based on long observation It was about 1775 that he was able to start making regular notes He quichly confirmed his impression that all the country people were firmly settled in their belief But when he investigated carefully all the cases he could hear of he found that there were many persons who had had both diseases This was discouraging, but he persevered with his inquiries Cowpox was not very common, and it was five years before he discos ered that there were two distinct complaints confused under the Only the real cowpox gave protection the other that was mistaken for it not being of any help That accounted for the cases recorded in which cowpox had not prevented an attack of smallpox The onls way in which the country belief could be tested was to give some healthy person cowpo und sce whether it did indeed protect that person from the more serious discuse On May 14th 1796, Jenner inoculated a boy of cight nimed James Phipps with matter taken from the cowpou blisters on the hands of 7 dairy maid Sarah Nelmes, and a fortnight later he carefully inoculated him with real smallpox It was a bold thing to do, and Jenner name ·80 The Man who Conquered Smallpox confident though he was, must hăve had an anxious time waiting to see what would happen He fore. told that the boy would not suffer from smallpos, He Has right Cowpox was so scarce in the daines that Jenner had difficulty in finding more material, and it was two years before he was able to repeat his experiment This confirmed his ašsurance, so he wrote a treatise on the subject, under the title Inquiry into the Cause and Effects of variolae Vaccinae, but before actually publishing he decided to go to London to consult doctors there and, if possible make some more experiments He spent three months looking for someone who would consent to be inoculated with the fell disease which is hardly surprising, and returned home without further result But the surgeon of St Thomas's Hospital, Henry Cline, to whom he had given some of his vaccine of cowpox, gave it to a child suffering from disease of the hip joint, as he thought the counter-irritation' might do good The result was that the child was found to be protected against smallpox Cline at once becanie a supporter of Jenner, but while most doctors preferred to wait for more evidence, many took a strong stand against inocul? tion, calling it a rash and dangerous practice But the dread of smallpor was so widespread that the public were decply interested, and most were ready to run any risk for the sake of protection against so fearful a scourge. Some harm was done by some of the injections supplied by Jenner, but this he found, was due to some infection in the vaccine.

·The Man who Conquered Smallpox 81
Jenner vaccinating his son
w
لم
set up
Obviously, it was of prime importance to have the
vaccine quite pure and not contaminated
By 1799 the practice of vaccination had spread
orer England
Ignorant quachs, cien
business as vaccinators One charlatan named
Pearson had the impudence to start a vaccination
clinic in London to supply vaccine to all who might
Want it for a good price, of course and went so far
as to offer Jenner the post of honorar physician
The risk of misuse was so obvious that Jenner came
hurring to London at once, and he succeeded in
Artting the project stopped
He had non achieved fime and the gratitude of
6

·82 The Man who Conquered Smallpox thousands He was presented to the King and Queen and to the Prince of Wales, and the royal famıly helped to spread the good news that smallpor was at last conquered It few all over the world Jenner was hailed as a great benefactor of mankind, as indeed he was In Holland and Switzerland clergymen recommended vaccination from the pulpit, and in Roman Catholic countries religious processions were formed to receive the vaccine In Germany, Jenner's birthday or the anniversary of his inoculation of the boy Phipps was celebrated as, a public holiday The Empress of Russia decreed that the first child vaccinated in her country should be named Vaccinoy and be educated at the expense of the State In 1807 vaccination was made compulsory in Bavaria, in Denmark in 1810, in Sweden in 1814, and most other countries in the world followed Only in the land of his burth was Jenner treated as anything but a saviour True, on a petition of his friends, a grant of £10,000 was made to him but it was not paid for two years, and after, £1,000 had been deducted for expenses, he had left over hardly more than enough to cover the cost of his work He vaccinated hundreds of poor people every week, free of charge While foreign honours and decorations were showered upon him, Oxford University, declined to grant him the degree of M.D unless he passed an examination in the Classics! That, he sud, he would not do for a diadem So great was the gratitude of mankind, that when, on the outbreak of war with France, many 7 Taulu ·The Man Who Conquered Smallpox 83 urtested and Jenner signed a petition for their 'elease, Napoleon exclaimed We can refuse lothing to that man!! Englishmen detained in \ustria and Mexico were released at Jenners equest, and many actually used as passport letters igned by him His signature was honoured everywhere But in his own country no attention was vaid to his petition in favour of French prisoners nd he was not even able to find employment for ils son George Still, his many friends worked hard on his behalf, nd as a result of their agitation the Government oted him in 1806 a grant of £20,000 without leduction A public subscription raised for him grateful people in India brought him £7,383 In 1810 his eldest son died, and the blow affected us health, overstrained by his untiring work to ave others He paid his last visit to London in 814, when he was presented to the Allied Sovereigns the next year his wife died, and from that day he ever again left his native town of Berkeley In he beginning of 1823 he presented to the Royal society a paper on the migration of birds On January 25th of that year he had an apoplectic fit n his library, and the next morning he passed It is characteristic of the extrnordinars attitude of his countrymen that it was not until 1858 that a itatue was put up to his honour in London by public subscription, and his process of vaccination compulsory in most countries of the world for nearly lalf a century, was not made so in England unul 1853 Excn now the anti-vaccinntoks are so strong that they have persuaded Parlament to give way ·84 Ferments and Germs exemption to those who swear before a magistrala that they, 'conscientiously believe that it i dangerous to the health of their child Since the boy Phipps was vaccinated in 170 how many millions in all parts of the world han had cause to bless that English country, doctor!" Ferments and Germs It is a curious thing that the greatest advance in time step in the history of Medicine was made by a ma who was not a doctor On December 27th, 1822 in the little country town of Dole, in: Franche Comte in central France, the wife of a tanner namned Pasteur bore a son to whom was given the narze Louis That child was destined to be one of the greatest benefactors'of the human race When he was sixteen, he was sent to Paris with a friend to study in the Latin Quarter But Louis who was a nervous boy, did not like the bustle of Paris, and longed for the quiet life of the countin ! Ifconly Il could get a whiff of the smell of the tannery once more, I should be all right again,' he said to his companion He went home, but his ambition for education took him to the towns again, and he went to the Royal College of Bcsancon, where in 1840 he took the degree of Bachelor of Letters Two years later he took the same degree inyscience It is rather curious that as a lad he does not seem to have shown any signs of brilliance, and even in the subject in which he was to sin undying fame chemistry, his work was described mediocre' The key to his success wis not brilliance, but sheer hard work and persistence as

·Ferments and Germs
85
Tastcur in his laboratory
From the painting by A. Edellet
He was gifted with the infinite capacity of taking
pains The weapon he wielded was exactitude
As quite a young man he made a discovery that
ull then had baffled all The great Swedish chemist,
Berzelius, had hnown that the substance called
tartaric acid, made from lees of wine, sometimes
behaves in one way, sometimes in another there

·86 Ferments and Germs seemed to be an active form and an inactive forma yet the substance was the same The great French man Biot had also known the fact, but neither could understand it Pasteur showed that really there are two distinc kinds of acid in the one substance If a ray a polarized light be thrown through a solution, ore acid throws it to the right the other, a new kind to the left When he told Biot about this, the old gentleman was incredulous, and made his young friend repeat the experiment in his presence Pasteur was successful, and Biot deli led Fron that moment the old man treated him as a son This discovery made Pasteur's reputation as & serious chemist, and the result was the offer of the post of Professor of Chemistry at Strasbourg Thu: launched upon life, he married a lady namer Laurent, who was to make him happy for many years He next tried to make the inactive form of the acid He found that when it was placed with's mould, the right-handed acid was destroyed, bul not the left-handed Inquiry into this led him to far greater discoveries By 1854 he had established such a position that he was appointed Professor of Chemistry and Dean of the Faculty of Science at Lille In his opening address he made a remark which should be taken to hcart by all workers, although it was intended only for men engaged in scientific research He said Chance favours only those who are prepared' When his chance came, he was prepared 'He was one day consulted by a brewer, who ·Ferments and Germs 87 - asked him to try to find a cure for some defect -- in his beer, which was then causing heavy losses in the industry Pasteur set to work to examine the yeast under the microscope, and found two hands, -one round, the other long The round yeast came from the good beer, the long yeast from the bad beer He followed up this clue diligently and the result revolutionized the science of biology He showed, to the confusion of the old philosophers that there is no such thing as Spontaneous Generation' That means that Life cannot arise by itself, that every living thing has parents, even the most minute creature that cannot be seen without the microscope Now every body knows that when beer and wine are made, alcohol results, that when vinegar is made, acetic acid is produced, and when milh turns sour the result is lactic acid Pasteur showed that the process by which all this happens, fermentation, is brought about by the action of minute creatures called bacteria, or ferments Different kinds of ferment produce different kinds of fermentation Pasteur showed that putrefaction is a hind of ferment and many diseases are caused by just such tiny organisms He showed, too, that if you shut these ferments out, no change takes place If you kill the ferments you stop the change He saw that the same ideas could be applied to many discasest The results of these discoveries were the most far-reaching of the century They replaced brilliant guesswork by cxact scientific method, experiment, observation and record Pasteur profoundly modi. fied the st hole basis of medicine surgery, physiology, ·88 Ferments and Germs biology, and all the arts and industries which are based upon some form of fermentation He placer bacteriology upon a scientific basis He applied the same method to the industry wine-making, which is so important in France It was at that time suffering severe loss owing to a kind of wine-sickness Quickly he traced the cause, found the cure, and restored prosperity to the wine growers Then he did the same thing for the sulk industry, by curing the epidemic which was killing off the silh worms - He next turned his attention to the possibility of finding protection against diseases, and immunita from them He did the same thing that a gardener does when he removes all weeds from a bed, so as to have only one kind of plant in it Pasteur found that he could make such a special bed of cach kind of ferment, only he did not call it a bed but a culture He next found that by continung to produce such cultures under certain conditions the poison made by those ferments which cause discase became feebler Then came the crowning discovery. that when this enfeebled poison is given to an animal, that animal is protected against the disease. The poison is called a tovin and the antidote an antitoxin The preparation made from the animal is usually called the serum, as it is made from the serum, or thin fluid part of the blood Now in the blood there are a number of pale little things called white corpuscles They are the policemen of the blood When germs enter the blood, these corpuscles come flying to the rescue crowd round the enemy, and devour him If the sufferer is strong enough and has enough of these ·va While corpuscler in the blood traisting an invasion of typhoid from The lorence like corpuscler are the mou corpurely that contain oxycon ·90 Ferments and Germs policemen in his blood, they will win and he will get well But if the germs are stronger, they wil become so numerous and make so much poison inside him, that he will be in danger of death. Then, if the proper culture be injected into him, it acts as an ally, summoning the antitoxins to the fray It stimulates the patient to build up the antitoxins of his own powers In fact, the cullure mobilizes the natural forces of the sufferer, just als a country mobiuzes its forces to repel an invader Acting on these lines, Pasteur found cures for two diseases which were causing a loss of about 10 per cent of the food supply of France chicken cholera, and anthrax in cattle and sheep In both he reduced the death-rate to about 1 per cent. He did not sell these discoveries, but made them a free gift to the world Such services cannot be measured in money, but it was the opinion of one of the greatest men of science of the period, T H Huxley, that the money saved by those discoveries was enough to pay for the war indemnity extorted from Pasteur's country by Germany in 1871 That is to say, more than £300,000,000 in gold The next discovery by this remarkable man was so startling that for a time the world could hardly believe it It was a cure for that most mysterious and horrible of all diseases, hydrophobia made experiments on dogs, as they are the chief carriers of the disease, and by injecting one with the weakened venom, found ihat he had made it immune against infection, that is he had given it protection He worked long and hard, until at last, in 1885, he dared take the responsibility of trying his serum upon a human being It is not hard to He ·معده A Simple Frenchman 91 imagine the nervous strain upon both, the experimenter and his patient, as he made this tremendous experiment, or the hopes and fears that filled his heart Was he going to remove from the world that awful malady, which had till then defied all treatment-a malady so terrible in its symptoms, so terrifying in its effects, so cruel in the torturing death which it had till then never failed to inflict? He was successful On November 14th, 1888, there was opened in Parıs the Pasteur Institute to which sufferers flocked in thousands It was not many years before the death-rate from the foul scourge was brought = down from 100 to 1 per cent Unspoilt by the honours showered upon him simple-minded and unaffected, this truly great worker and benefactor of mankind, the results of whose worh have saved more human lives probably, than those of any other individual, passed peacefully to rest at the age of seventy-three on September 28th, 1895 1 A Simple Frenchman IN the ycar 1775 there was born in a village near Lyons, in France, a mathematical prodigy HC was working out sums in arithmetic before he could read and write, using pebbles His name was Andre Maric Ampere His father, a respected magistrate in Lyons began to teach the boy Latin but soon found out what a talent the boy had for mathematics, so the Latin was illoned to drop Andre found, however, ·lessons again 92 A Simple - Frenchman that he wanted to read the worhs published b. mathematicians in Latin, so he asked for the By the time he was eighteen, as ha wrote afterwards, he knew as much of mathematic as he ever knew But he was no narrow pedant. His active brain took an interest in many subjects He was a great reader, eagerly devouring all the serious books he could find on history, travel, poetn, philosophy and, above all the natural sciences In 1793 the soldiers of the French Revolution took Lyons Ampere, the father, had courageousls protested against the horrors they had committed and so they showed him little mercy He was flung into prison'and not long afterwards, like most moderate men, her had his head cut off upon the guillotinc Andre who was of a' sensitive and affectionate nature was so horrified by the shock of his fathers murder that he abandoned work and seemed sunt in a kind of dazed stupor for nearly a year One day some letters on botany chanced to come into his hands, and as he glanced through them the keenness of his intellect was at once aroused There can be little doubt that those letters saved his fcason He worhed hard at botany for a while, and then turned to the classic pocts Perhaps it was because of a lady that he took to writing serse himself The lady's name was Julie Carron, whom he met in 1796 Ampere fell in love with her, and three years later they were married Times were difficult, but Ampere earned his living by giving lessons in mathematics chemistry and languages in his native city In 1801 he moved to Bourg to take a post as professor of physics and ·A Simple Frenchman 93 Andre Marie Ampere chemistry, an opening which he could not afford to miss Unfortunately, he was for some reason obliged to leave his young wife, who was ill, with her baby boy In 1802 he published a small treatise on, the mathematical chances of gambling, in which he showed that the odds arc hezuly against the player This attracted the attention of an influential mon in Lyons, who secured for him the chair of mathematics in the college of his natuc town in 1804 ·94 A Simple Frenchman By the irony of fate, this move, which should har brought him so much happiness, came too late fc in that same year his beloved wife, who had beer ailing for several years, passed away, and Amper was heart-broken He never really recovered from this second bereavement To distract his mind from the familiar surround ings, his friend then obtained for him a small post i Paris, in the Polytechnic School, where he soo after was elected professor He found time, in spit of his teaching duties, to carry on his scientifi experiments In 1814 he was elected a member o the famous Institute of France His reputation ? expanding, and eventually developed into a fam based firmly on his success in showing the clos connexion between electricity and magnetism, who he called the science of electrodynamics September 11th, 1820, he heard of an observatior : made by a Dane named IOersted, that a currea. from an appliance called a voltaic pile acts upon a magnetic needle, Stimulated by this, only a week later he presented the Academy with the most complete account of such phenomena that yet existed That, and the later researches based upon it, were the chief work of his life, and in recognition of its value his name has been given to one of the chief units of clectricity, the unit of current, the ampere Ampcre died at Marseilles on Junc 10th, 1836, leaving a name firmly engraved upon the annals of science and, for the gentle, almost childlike simplicity of his character upon the hearts of lis friends 01 1 ·A Blacksmith's Boy IN a little village in the north of England a century and a half ago there was living a family of hardworking country people, poor, and highly religious, members of the strict Christian sect known as the Sandemanites One of these, by name James Faraday, was somewhat more ambitious, or perhaps enterprising, than his nine brothers and sisters, for he married a farmer's daughter and migrated to London, where he set up a blacksmith's forge on the south side of the Thames, where two main roads met Here, he thought, there should be plenty of business for a good blacksmith, as there was heavy horse traffic upon the roads It was, of course, long before the days of Railways For some reason, perhaps because of poor health, James Faraday did not make a success of his business, and the family lived in the cheapest of lodgings, in some meus at the back of fashionable houses His third son, named Michael, born on September 22nd, 1791, was destined to be one of the greatest men of science to whom Britain has given birth Michael grew up in 7 very poor home, in an au of piety, honesty, and hard work, virtues that marhed him throughout his life Directly he las old enough to be able to do so at the age of thirteen, Michael who had learnt to read and write at n day school found a job as cround boy in ? booksellers shop He was so alert and hard. working that his master accepted lum 25 in 95 ·96 A Blacksmith's Boy apprentice to the trade of book-binding without charging the usual fee The boy was delighted as it gave him the opportunity of reading the bood he was handling, and we are hardly surprised to know that serious articles in the Encyclopaedu Britannica were his favourites, and a book thai to-day would seem very naive and quaint, Concer sations on Chemistry, by Mrs Marcet. Through this reading he became strongly attract ed by chemistry and electricity both of which sciences, of course, were in those days in thei childhood When he was nineteen a customer o his employer, a Mr Dance, was so attracted by the youth's keen interest that he took him to hear fou lectures by Sir Humphry Dayy, the Professor o Chemistry at the Royal Institution Michici, delight, took copious notes, and wrote them out hr full afterwards He had for a long time carefully cultivated the taking of notes and had been earnestly studying English, -especially the art of expressing himsel clearly and accurately, both in writing and spca ing We may be sure, therefore, that hus noles were excellent, and when he bound them beautifully himself, and sent them round to Sir Humphry, that distinguished gentleman was naturally much impressed Accompanying the volume was a letter in which young Faraday asked for employment in the laboratory of the Royal Institution The repis was prompt and encouraging On March 18th, 1813 Michael Faraday was appointed laboratory assistant at the Royal Institution at a salary of tu enty-five shillings a recb, and with the use of a couple of rooms at the top of the building 1

·A Blacksmith's Boy
97
-
5
#
S1
Faradays mspnet and copper disc
Further good fortune awaited him Davy was a
remarkable man, the most distinguished English
chemist at the time a gifted man of the world as
well, and he was so impressed by young Faraday
that he took him as secretary and assistant upon a
tour through France Italy and Switzerland which
lasted from October 1813 to April 1815 Davy gare
lectures, for which Faraday prepared the apparatus.

·98 A Blacksmith's Boy This gave him the chance of meeting the gres scientific Europeans of the day Richly must hl receptive mind have been stored with memonė and impressions when he returned to London, ta months before the battle of Waterloo On resuming his duties at the Royal Institution hıs salary was raised to thirty shullings By 181! he was not only busy with his duties, but foun time to add to his modest income by taking pupil He acted as assistant to Brande, who succeeded Davy at the Institution, and, while constantly im proving his own education, was making experiments himself In 1820 he read his first paper before the Royal Society It was now that his genius at making experiments found its real scope In 1821 he was promoted Superintendent of the house and laboratory This enabled him to marry, and he brought his bride, Sarah Barnard, daughter of a Sandemanite elder, to as rooms in the Institution He was thirty years of age, and now he entered upon the important period of his life For forty-six years the couple lived in those modest quarters in the austere happiness which their sect ordain In 1825 he was appointed Director of the Laboratory, and his salary raised to £100 a year In the same year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society In 1835 he was appointed Professor This was for him a magnificent thing, as he was not obliged to give lectures, and could devote his whole timerto research Hišroutput of work was immense Famous were the series of lectures which he gave on Friday evenings, and Faraday on the Chemistry of a Candle has become a classic He conducted ·A Blacksmith's Boy 99 Eresearch into an astonishing vanety of subjects, into numerous problems of chemistry and physics Though his contributions to chemistry were very important, it is his work on magnetism and electricity that is far the greater The crowning discovery of all was the result of ten days hard work experimenting in 1831 He spun a coper disc between the tivo poles of a horseshoe magnet The reffect of this was to induce, that is to bring on, a current in the disc This starting of a current in a conductor of electricty is called induction and the effect is to turn the mechanical energy of the spinning wheel into the clectrical energy of the flowing current The simple experiment led eventually to the invention of the dynamo and clcctric motor Those days may, perhaps, be regarded as the most important ten days in the history of electrical science, for upon them is based the whole of modern electrical enginecring Although he never sought honours, they were show cred upon him by monarch, governments and universities He declined the Presidential Chair of the Royal Society and also the professorship at London University He was constantly consulted by zuthorities, and in his later life was making an incomc of over £1,000 a year, which to his unassuming mind meant wealth indeed Riches were his for the ashing but he considered only his korh HC gave up most of his fces and died, as he had lived a poor man He was intensely religious On one occasion only did he fail to be present at the all-day Sunday service of his seci, and that is when he was commanded to lunch with Qucen Victoria For that offcnce he was excommunicated, but in views

·100 How the Sugar Crop was Saved
of his fame, he was afterwards readmitted to the
fold
Curiously, like Darwin, he was no mathematica
It was as an experimenter that he stood unrivalle
and Michael Faraday ranks without dispute among
the greatest investigators of Science that the worla
has seen, with Archimedes, Galileo and Newton'
Among the sugar canes of Hawall
How the Sugar Crop
was Saved
IN those isles of perpetual summer called Hawaii
,
or the Sandwich Islands the chief source of
wealth is sugar Tens of thousands of acres are
under the sugar cane, and most of the inhabitants
depend, in one way or another, upon the crop

·How the Sugar Crop was Saved 101 : The planters, however, do not have it all their Slyn way, for they have a tiny but serious enemy That is a little whitish maggot with a dark brown read, which turns into a dull little brown weevil, a beetle with a snout, about an inch long It bores Einto the canes for home and food, and, of course, when a cane is infested it grows weak or dies This miserable little maggot was for a long time costing the planters something like a million dollars a year So the Association of Sugar Planters declared war upon the weevil They mobilized the women and children and sent them into the hot, steamy plantauons to pick and collect the beetles and grubs, and bring them in to be burnt The quantities they collected were huge In one year they brought in 2,641,725 ounces of the beetles and grubs, for which they were paid 25 cents per ounce As there are about three hundred beetles to the ounce, nearly eight million of the insects were caught and destroyed in that scason It they had been left in the canes to do their evil work what tremendous damage they would have done! Thes would have made an enormous hole in the harvest But even this did not seem to heep the bcetles down really cffectively In most countries there are animals that feed on crcatures like that and keep the numbers down but in Hawan which is far away in the mid ocean, away from any munland, there are not vers many animals birds or useful insects to help the planters There are some unts which destroy the maggots, a few mongooses some tords and two or three kinds of birds in particular the mina, all of which are useful to the planters, but there are not cnough of them to be ·Homofil 102 How the Sugar Crop was Saved really helpful "It is curious that heré rats se regarded as friends of man, instead of a hated pest, The rats rather like the taste of the maggots, and gnaw their way into the canes, which are already bored by them, to devour the grubs Finding that they could not cope with the pesty, the planters decided to employ a specialist, an entomologist named Mur, who had done some very good work in finding means of getting rid of another insect pest Muir decided to act on the principle of 'Set a thief to catch a thief' He felt sure that somewhere in the tropical orient there must be some kinds of insect that feed on the weevil If he could find them, breed them, and let them loose in Hawajı he might conquer the pest But the thing waswhere could he find that ally? The first step was to find the original home o the beetle, for it was not really a native of Hawaii- And as sugar-cane is grown all over the east, he had to guess where its home might be looking for a needle in a haystack. In July 1906 Muir sailed from Hawaii on his quest. He intended to comb out the chief sugar-cant countries systematically from west to east The first place he saw was south China There he spent six months in the steamy plantations, hunting every day for the boring grub, but he did not find it Then he went to the Malay States and worked there for several months, again without result. Next he went to Java No better luck there either By that time he had been an ay a year, hard at work in a bad climate But he was not disappointed He knew what a long and difficult job he had, and It was like

·1
1
The sugar-fane Drectie at work and the dy hich geta frto the
marcat nt the beetle and by teding on It kuih i
1

·With 104 How the Sugar Crop was Saved was sure that if he persisted he would win in the long run But it cost money Would the planter ? go on Hè reported to his Association that he had so fa drawn blank, but had a clue The Association gate him more funds, and told him to go on with the search He went first to Borneo, landing at Pontianak o July 24th, 1907 Pontianak, which had been a Chinese settlement long before the Dutch took it, on a marshy, malarious site He had to steam for nine hours up a winding stream lined with palms and mangroves, reeking in the moist, tropical heat, till he came out into lowland forest scenery, the tops of rattans waving gracefully above the trees The houses are built on piles, with a couple of feet of water beneath them at high tide The soil is soft peat, and the drinking water the colour of strong tea--not very appetising but not un wholesome to drink In this strange spot he worked hard for some time, but still without result There he accepted an invitation to visit a planter at a place called Teloc Ayer, an all night journey by There, too, he failed to make any discovery Then he went farther up still, three days by canoe and two on foot, to a place called Moewong The place was so interesting, he wrote afterwards, that he could have spent a lifetime there that the famous Dyaks who live there are no longer the savage head-hunters they used to be The only heads they hunt to day are the heads of the Dutch queen upon her silver coins His visit to Borneo was interesting, but he had not found his weevil So he returned to Java, and river He found ·How the Sugar Crop was Saved 105 ailed thence for the Moluccas He next tried Imboina, a hilly island clad in dense forest where le arrived on October 10th, 1907 He liked the Imboinese, whom he found pleasure-loving folk, ond of singing and dancing The rhythmic music of their tomtoms as they rowed used to lull him to leep in his canoe In this pleasant land he hunted ils grub for several weeks, but in vain Next he tried Larat, a big island in the group alled Tenimber Here he found hospitality in the house of the Dutch administrator, and he set to vorh in real earnest, for he had information that his veetle was there for the first ten days he explord the island to find the sugar-cane The canes were too young, but he found plenty of the weevil n sago and betel palms Here, he thought, was a ikely spot in which to find the ally for which le was hunting It was exhausting work Often ie spent hours on end standing in ten inches of vater The brittle leaves of the sago palms broho off in his flesh Mosquitoes drove him mad, even when he covered his head with net But still he persisted For five weeks he worhed He opened housands of cocoons of the maggot, but not once lid he find a sign of its enemy for which he was looking So he said good-bye to his hind friends ind returned to Amboina In Larat he had learnt a good deal more about the habits of the weevil, although there it was living in palms, and not in sugar-canes At Amboina also he found it in the paims Here at last he found a clue He had suspected that there Vas a kind of fly which preyed upon the weevil and he was right There is a family of flies called the ·106 How the Sugar Crop was Saved Tachinidae which look very much like the common septic house fly, but have very different habris They lay their eggs in the grubs of other insects, so when their young hatch out they have plenty to eat right under their noses Mur had long fels sure that he would one day find the right kind of Tachinid But to be a useful ally, the fly must be very numerous, be able to breed in cages, and its life history must be studied carefully, so that he could organize the transport of a stock of them back to Hawau alive He found that in places where the palm grow like the cane in Hawaii, the fly kept the beetles down Here he decided was his ally He hai done the first great step in his task Next cami the job of collecting quantities of the fly, breeding in numbers, and taking a stock back alıve te Hawaii That was a difficult job, as the fly's life 1 short and there was no direct line of steamers S he sent a colleague to Hong Konb, to start a breed ing station there as a half-way house, and sent : consignment from Amboina But the flies died or the way, and the result was a failure So Muir decided to take a consignment himself By dint of much care and trouble he managed to heep his flies right up to the very last day, but then, for some unknown reason, they all died the day before he reached Honk Kong ! The job of transporting quantities of the precious fly seemed a harder task than finding it. He heard that the weevil was known at a place called Fakfah in British New Guinea That was nearer to Hawan, and he felt it very probable that the fiy would be there too, so he packed off to Port ·Surp How the Sugar Crop was Saved 107 thew Moresby, and went to stay with a planter, Mr Brent Rattle, on the Laloki river, some fifteen miles from the coast Within an hour of arrival, he had found reriboth weevil and fly d' He settled down there in earnest to breed a big Eht Estock of the fly It was now April 1909, and his y reports encouraged the Association They told him they would go on finding the money, so that he 5Ecould complete his work He managed to accumudolate a large stock of the fly in his breeding-cages, and started off to Australia in triumph on his way Eng to Hawaii 2 bx But before he went on board he collapsed with El typhoid When he reached Brisbane he was put sto straight into hospital His precious flies were sent ed forward, but without his skilled attention they were in all dead upon arrival at Honolulu, those fies on s which had been spent so much money and toil He recovered, and as soon as he was strong In enough, began again He established a breedingstation in Queensland, and landed back in Neur Guinea on February 7th, 1910 Here he found a gold rush Port Moresby was crammed with adventurers Labour was as rare as bedrooms But by February 11th he had found a kind of conveyance called å buckboard on which to drive out to Mr Rattles The road, he said was pretty good for New Guinea, but very bad for It took him five hours to travel twelve miles, down to the river, where he shouted till Mr Rattie's boys came down stream to pick Mr Rattle was away, but had left the beys for him to make himself at home He set to C buckboards him up worh at once ·- 108 Wireless By April 21st he had a stock of the flies, so he took them down to the port to ship for Queensland but the boat was late, and then he was seized tita fever He was eventually carried on board, and when he reached the breeding station in Australia, he was nearly dead The presence of his colleague there saved the situation When he recovered, he took a stock of the flies to Fiji, to make another breeding-station there, No sooner had he landed than once more he went intd hospital with malaria. He recovered, and on August 16th, 1910, he landed at Honolulu, with i good stock of his precious flies alive Thus hi achieved his task Four years had been spent on the hunt, gallantis spent by Mur, gallantly supported by the planters The fly was bred in numbers, and released among the canes Our strange little ally did its work Muir had justified himself He had spent four years in tropical jungles, exposed to every kind of infection, undaunted by difficulties and repeated disappointments But he had saved many millions of dollars and delivered Hawau from its most destructive pest, and by his perseverance and resource had set an example to all mankind Wireless WIRELESS telegraphy is generally considered a quité modern invention, but it took a hundred years to grow As long ago as 1838, K. A. Steinheil found that a return current could come back through the earth, and all through the nineteenth century men were trying to work out a system of ·Wireless 109 telegraphing through space without the use of wire Morse, at Washington, inventor of the famous code, made a step forward in 1842, and was followed by several experiments The first man actually to send a signal through space without wires was a Scot, James Bowman Lindsay, of Dundee, who succeeded in sending experimental messages cross the river Tay between 1845 and 1854 In 1864 that mathematical genius, Clerk Maxwell, foretold on theoretical grounds that, just as there are waves of light, so there are waves of electricity in the seventies an American, Elhu Thompson, was making experiments in what seemed to most people a fancıful idea, that is, of sending electrical waves through a brick wall without the use of wires But he was far too busy on other things to follow the matter up, and he built up the huge electrical business of Thompson-Houston instead Had he persisted, we might now have been talking about thompsonigrams Between 1880 and 1890 H R Hertz had proved the existence of the electric waves foretold by Clerk Maxwell He found that they are invisible, but can be reflected like light waves, and travel at In 1882 Branly, of Paris, found that when metals are powdered, as iron filings for instance, their power of conducting electric current is affected by these mysterious waves of Hertz Other physicists, such as Sir Oliver Lodge, had been at work on the same subject for some time, and had carried out very interesting and encouraging experiments The first man to make any practical use of them Kas a young Italian engineer, whose name was the same speed ·> 1 110 Wireless destined to become famous Guglielmo Marconi was born at Pontecchio, near Bologna, in Italy, or April 25th, 1874 His father was an Italian country gentleman, but his mother was an Irish lady, a Misi Jameson, from County Wexford Guglielmo-15AS educated privately in Iatly, and from his earliest years was intensely interested in physics and elec tricity He followed the work that was being done by experimenters, and by 1895 had become firmly convinced that it was possible to invent a means of telegraphing by waves instead of wires When he was twenty-one he set to work in earnest making experiments at his home In spite of his home-made and crude apparatus, before the end of the year, he succeeded in sending signals over a mile The next year he came to England and took out a patent, the first ever granted for wireless telegrapby by means of electric waves and before the end of the year, showed his apparatus to the officials of the British Post Office on top of the roof of the GPO in London The Post Office officials were extremely interest ed, and gave the young Italian every encourage ment They helped him to carry out more experi ments in the south-west of England, and before long he was sending signals over two, then four, and then nine miles Foreign governments were interested too, the first among them, very naturally, being the Italian So in June 1897 young Marconi was invited to go Spezzia where he put up a station and succeeded in sending messages to Italian warships twche miles out at sea After this he was invited to give a to ·Wireless 111 who Alarcont in 1901 with his receiving and transmitting apparatus demonstration before King Humbert and Queen Margherita His progress had been so rapid that by 1897 a company was formed in London to further the young inventor's work By 1898 a permanent station was put up at Alum Bay in the Isle of Wight, which was able to send signals to Bournemouth, twelve miles away The first commercial use of Marconi's invention was in 1898, when the Kingstown regatta races ·112 Wireless were reported for The Dublin Express by him with an apparatus on a tug, which followed the yachts w the Irish Sea, and in the same year, during Coway Week, he put up wireless apparatus at Osborn House in the Isle of Wight, so that Queen Victor who was living there then, could send messages the Prince of Wales, afterwards King Edward VI on the royal yacht Osborne It was a year of records for before it was over wireless was used for the firs time to enable lightships to keep in touch with the shore, which was done successfully between th East Goodwin lightship and the South Forelaw lighthouse, in a part of the Straits of Dover that i dangerous for shipping The value of this wa brought home when a steamer collided with th lightship in March the next year The accident wa at once reported by wireless to the South Foreland and lifeboats put out in time to prevent any loss o life At Easter 1899 Marconi sent a message cross the English Channel, and showed that communications could be kept up from the shore with ships at sea. The British Admiralty was alive to the value of this, and in July and August of that year the new system was given a trial during naval manœuvres Two cruisers, the Juno and the Europa, were fitted with apparatus, and the result was so satisfactory that the officials of the British Admiralty took the matter up very seriously, especially the late Admiral Sir Henry Jack, who himself invented many im provements The navies of the world quickly followed the example The first time that wireless was used by the military authorities was in the South African War ·--- L Wireless 113 By January 1901 Marconi had succeeded in elegraphing by wireless without difficulty from the Isle of Wight to The Lizard in Cornwall, a distance If about a couple of hundred miles Two public Companies were formed at that time, Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company and the Marconi International Marine Communication Company Stations were put up at suitable points, on many coasts and many ships equipped with the apparatus By the end of 1901 this radio-telegraphy was esta- :blished on a secure industrial basis Now he felt justified in attempting the ambition of his life, to send wireless messages across the JAtlantic A powerful station was built at Poldhu in south Cornwall It was a great undertaking, as special electrical appliances were required, for which there was no precedent to serve as guide The apparatus was made by J A Fleming, who invented the first wireless valve The station was complete by the end of the year, and Marconi crossed the Atlantic to Newfoundland There, at St John's, he sent up a wire on a box kite and sat down to wait to see if he could pick up the signal with a sensitive appliance called a coherer and a telephone It had previously been arranged that the men in Cornwall would send out the letter S in the Morse Code, that is three dots, at fixed hours The inventor waited with calm confidence to see if his apparatus would pick up that signal, and I it did, to see if those three dots were repeated at the In this way he would be sure that it really was the signal, and was not due to some atmospheric disturbance Many people had been sceptical The thing was intervals agreed ·214 Wireless fantastic Not only was the distante far too sican ] over two thousand miles, but there came in tween Poldhu and St John's the bulge of the curta ture of the earth How tense for that young maš must have been those hours of waiting W. that signal come? And would it be repeated? It came. From that day there was no going bach. It February 1902. Marconi repeated the experiment this time at sea on board ss Philadelphia Ali distance of 1,557 miles from Poldhu he receive telegrams-printed on the ordinary Morse tape, sep by wireless By 1904 press messages were bein sent cross the Atlantic, and news beint tram mitted to ships 'at sea, which were thus able 1 print their own_daily newspapers wireless in the Russian Japanese war showed th world that a new factor had come into both mit tary and naval operations In 1906 an international conference was held i Berlin to regulate the new system, and its decisior were accepted by the chief powers of the world Exactly a century ago, in 1845, an escaping mur derer was caught in London owing to an urgent message sent by the electric telegraph with wires which was then a brand-new. invention sensational incident made the public realize that the electric telegraph would have very great practical utility So it was with wireless In 1910 the police wanted to arrest a man named Dr Crippen who was suspected of having murdered his wife It was found that Crippen had escaped from the country and sailed on a steamer called the Montrose for Canada The police authorities sent a The use This

·Wireless
115
Nowadays ahlps and aeroplanes can keep in constant
comunication with land Above is the wireless operator
at hts post on board the famous exploring vessel the
Discovery
Wireless telegram across the Atlantic, asking the
captain of the Montrose whether on board his ship
there was a man of Crippen's description When

·116 Wireless the reply came back that there was just that sort of man, the English police sent a wireless message asking the Canadian police to arrest him directiv the ship came into port Crippen was brought back to England and hanged for his crime Once again it was the romantic capture of an escaping murderer that made the public realize that another great step forward had been made in civilization In 1905 the young inventor gave a lecture before the Royal Institution in London, in which he pointed out that most probably wireless messages round the world to places on the other side might be done more easily and with less expenditure of electrical energy than would be required for much shorter distances People were incredulous, as they generally were when Marconi made prophecics but as usual he was proved to be right In 1910 he received signals and messages at Buenos Aires which had been sent from Clifden in Ireland, a distance of about six thousand miles Another step forward was made on September 22nd, 1918, when Marconi startled the world by sending the first wireless messages from England to Australia These wireless waves bearing the messages were sent out at random in all directions at once was very useful, especially at sea, for sending messages of distress and calling for help The fearful disaster of the great vessel Titanic in 1912 was to a real extent softened by this means, and many hundreds of lives were saved by vessels that came speeding to the rescue After that classic catastrophe, ali Bmtish ships above a certain tonnage This ·Wireless 117 The sending of waves out in every direction has rendered possible modern broadcasting, with all the possibilities of radio The first broadcast was started in 1917, by Captain Donisthorpe, with the help of his wife when training troops at Worcester for the use of wireless in the Great War Every Tuesday night a regular programme of gramophone records was sent out, to relieve the monotony of the men who were listening the whole time for Morse signals Marconi was very anxious to find some method of sending the waves in whatever direction he wished, instead of the random method This was the disadvantage of long waves, which also have another disadvantage, that they do not travel so well by day as by night In his first experiments on the Atlantic in 1902, he had found that while he could receive signals over a distance of 2,000 miles by night, the same effort would send them only 700 miles by day So he set to work to invent a method of sending direct messages, what he called a beam system This was 1916, during the war, when such a discovery would have been of immense value to the allies He had begun work on short waves in his carly years, but given them up for longer waves with greater power Now he reverted to experiments with short waves In 1924 he discovered that short waves, of about 30 metres in length, could be sent and received over thc greatest distances during daylight Shortwaves have proved themselves capable of being sent by night, even with very little power, over any distince Marconi showed that they are much more obedient than long waves and, ·118 Wireless above all, that they can be directed, and sent in a beam, like the beam of light from a searchlight He has stated publicly that this possibility of focussing and directing electric waves of short length, just like beams of light, will become universal, In 1930, from his yacht Elektra in the Gulf of Genoa, he switched on the illumination of the Electrical Exhibition at Sydney, New South Wales To-day he is working on very short waves, of only half a metre When these are successful, he says, we can scrap our existing telephones And so Guglielmo Marconi ranks among the greatest inventors the world has seen His name had passed into every language before he was thirty, and monarchs, governments and scientific organizations the whole world over have rivalled one another to do him honour It is difficult to estimate the importance to mankind of the work of Marconi He has robbesha the sea of much of its terror He has contributed more than any other man to make the peoples of the world understand that they are all members of one family And now we are seeing the first offspring of his invention, broadcasting, with all its immense power that it places in the hands of governments, both for good and evil for education and amusement. The next is television. Who can say what the effect of that will be upon our civilization, and how much farther yet we may be taken?

·The Romance of Rubber ABOUT thirty years or more ago there was a familiar anecdote in London about a man who took a cab and paid the driver sixpence too little The old cabbies of London were famous for their vigorous language, and this one resented the mistake, or what he thought was an attempt to swindle him, so he left fly a torrent of oaths The gentleman drew himself up and protested against such terrible language, ending up with a statement of his name in order to impress the cabby with a sense of his dignity Do you know who I am 'No, and I don't care, so that's that'' 'I am The M'Intosh 'I don't care if you're the blooming umbrella, but I'm jolly well going to have my sixpence It was a natural mistake, for not many Londoners know that it is an ancient Scottish custom for the head of a clan to be referred to in that manner The gentleman was the head of the clan of Intosh, of which the members are known as M'Intosh, or, as it is usually spelt nowadays, Macintosh It was a member of the clan, Charles Macintosh, who first manufactured waterproof garments in England That was fifty years after the introduction into England of a queer støff called indiarubber When Christopher Columbus landed at Hati on his second voyage between 1493 and 1496 he noticed that the natives were playing with balls which they made from the gum of a tree That is 119 ·120 The Romance of Rubber the first known mention of rubber balls, for there cannot be much doubt that that 'gum' referred to was the white juice called latex, which oozes out from some trees when cut The natives of South America, we are told, used the same stuff to keep the rain off, and in 1615 Spanish troops in Mexico wore macintoshes 1 It is a remarkable thing that it was left to South American semi-savages to show us what a uscful thing is rubber, for there are many kands of trees that give us as good latex in tropical Africa and parts of Asia But the fact remains that until its use was learnt in the New World, the Old World lived without a substance which we now use every day It is remarkable, too, that the Spaniards did not seem to realize how useful rubber could be for they made no attempt to bring it to Europe Its introduction to the Old World we owe to the French In 1736 the Academy of Sciences of Paris sent a scientific expedition to Peru When it had completed its work one of the party, Charles de la Condamine, set off alone on a remarkable expedi tion He crossed from Quito to Peru During that journey, in those days very bold and adven turous this courageous and enterprising man obsered the use the natives made of the juice of a parti cular tree, he saw that they protected themselves with it against rain and made bottles and waterproof shoes by smearing a coat of the juice over the matemal and drying it over a smoky fire Condamine saw how useful this strange juice could be, so he brought samples home, with a full description of the tree What delayed the growth of its use is the fact

·The Romance of Rubber
121
Here we see the method of tapping rubber trees for their later
in Malaya
that the juice thickens of its own accord, and so
could not be imported without spoiling Nor could
they find any flud that would dissolve the tough,
resilient stuff into which the latex turned
Chemistry was in those days in its infancy, and
relatively few substances were known Still,
several fluids were found, chiefly by French
chemists that would dissolve the latex such as
turpentine ether, and, best of all, petroleum A
great discovery was made in 1790 by Fourcroy, that
the thickening, or coagulation as it is called could
be prevented by the addition of an alhalı, such as
soda or potash, and he suggested that the latex

·122 The Romance of Rubber should be imported into France and a new industry set up Perhaps owing to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars that followed, these researches were forgotten, and another forty years went by before any progress was made with this useful substance, though its properties were by then known to chemists, and a latex very like the American kind had been discovered in Sumatra and Penang in a plant called Ficus elastica By the close of the eighteenth century the only practical use the French had found for it was to rub out pencil marks, and it was first used for this in England in 1770, where it was popularized by Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen Of course, because it was for_this_purpose it was called rubber, and because men remembered that we owe it to the miscalled 'Indians' of South America it became known as indiarubber French boys had learnt to play games with rubber-cored balls, which bounced nicely, and rubber catheters had been taken into use in surgery It was an outside circumstance that led to the birth of the modern rubber industry In 1802 coal gas was used in England for the first time for ighting a house This was so successful and such an improvement on the old, dear and smoky lamps and candles, that gas companies started all over England and Scotland, the result of which was that enormous quantities of coal tar and naphtha were left over, waste products as they were called in those days, before any use could be found for then In 1819 a coachbuilder named Thomas Hancock ·The Romance of Rubber 123 started experiments with rubber to make water proof capes for the stage coaches, which were the chief means of transport in England in those days He quickly found a use for its elastic properties and took out a patent for making gloves, braces garters, shoe soles and sides of elastic, which was so great a success that he found difficulty in getting enough rubber He triea then to make use of the cuttings that were left over, and found the best thing to do was to tear the scrap to pieces and press it into a mould, when it became welded into a tough, solid mass, which was not nearly so difficult to cut This was called masticating it Thus he learnt to make use of what had been wasted, and started new methods of manufacture, and of mixing other substances with it About this time the Scottish chemist, Charles Macintosh, referred to at the beginning of this chapter, was successfully inventing new processes, especially in making dyes for textiles He found by experiment that naphtha is a good solvent of rubber He took out a patent at once, and started making waterproof coats, which to day bear his name in many languages Hancock heard of this, and took a licence from Macintosh for the use of naphtha as a solvent He quickly found that by his mastication process he could use solutions twice as strong This gave him such an advantage that Macintosh invited him to join his firm, and become chairman Their business was a great success, and the goods they produced rapidly grew in popularity In 1824, Sir John Franklin used waterproof covers for his boats on his famous Arctic expedition and also for air ·+ 124 The Romance of Rubber mattresses, air pillows and life-belts Other indus tries awoke to its existence, and a whole range of new uses were found for rubber In 1826 the insurance companies started using rubber instead of leather for the hoses of their fire-engines, and brewers adopted it The French, who had been such early pioneers. learnt the new processes from the English, ind Hancock started a factory in France in 1828, and the first one in the United States was begun four years later But the story of rubber is not one of unbroken success, because the public soon found out that rübber becomes hard and staff in the cold, and soft and sticky when hot This was a nuisance with macintoshes, especially in America, where_the extremes of climate are more severe than in Eng land The result was that the pioneers in the United States lost their money In 1843 Hancock after many experiments, dipped thin strips of rubber in molten sulphur, which, to his delight he found completely changed its character He found, too, that if left long enough in the sulphur, the rubber became hard black and horny In fact, it was what we nou call ebonite or vulcanite, and the name given to the process was vulcanization The baby industry had in 1830 imported only 23 tons of raw rubber In twenty years the amount had risen to 381 tons, and by 1870 it had grown to 7 606 tons Thus, slowly, did the new industry grow up The next big step was the use of rubber to make tyres A hundred years ago the roads of England were very rough and bad, a fact which hindered the ·The Romance of Rubber 125 A contemporary print of Hancocks steam omnibus development of steam cars' But in spite of this, Thomas Hancock's brother Walter ran a regular steam 'bus service in London between Paddington and the City, and another was run between Gloucester and Cheltenham Hancoch's machine ran at twenty miles an hour on the flat and made journeys as far afield as Birmingham and Marlborough But the heavy tolls on the roads (mostly privately owned), their rough condition and popular preiudice were against it, and the use of steam cars on the roads died away But it gave rise to the idea that such elastic material as rubber would be useful to put on the wheels to reduce the jolting, and as early as 1845 RW Thompson invented the first pneumatic tyre ·126 The Romance of Rubber He took out a patent, and his tyre was tested in Hyde Park, but people were not interested, and the pneumatic tyre went to sleep for half a century Solid rubber tyres, however, came into general use for vehicles Bicycles and tricycles were coming into favour about that period, and rubber tyres were used for them, but it was not until 1888 that a Belfast veterinary surgeon named JB Dunlop invented the rubber tyre filled with compressed air It was a success, and at once taken up by racing cyclists There were many difficulties at first, but they were overcome, and in 1895 a motor car fitted with pneumatic tvres was driven in the Bordeaux-Paris trials To-day three-quarters of the world's supply of rubber is used for tyres The greatly increased demand for rubber raised the question of supply The latex was then tapped by natives from trees growing in the remotest parts, in unhealthy climates, where white men could scarcely Uvc Somcone thought of growing the tree in plantations The discovery of a so called vine rubber in Penang as far bach as 1798 showed that it need not be confined to tropical America, and the trec might be cultivated in India or the East Indies Still the need for rubber was not great cnough for muny years to make the question acute, but in 1855 Hancock consulted the famous botanist Sir J W Hooker, about the possibility of developing supplies in other countrics Now, by 1859, Sir Clement Marhham had successfully introduced the cinchona tree from Peru into India so that the Old World was independent of the wilds of South America for its quinine This ·The Glory of Egypt 127 put into his head the idea of doing the same with rubber The tree selected as the best for the purpose is the now famous Hevea braziliensis In 1873, 2,000 seeds were sent to be tested by Sir Joseph Hooker at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, but only about a dozen germinated On September 22nd six of these young plants were sent to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Calcutta, and that is the date of the birth of the rubber planting industry in the East Other plants were tried, such as the native Indian Ficus elastica, and trees called Ceara and Castilloa, all of which gives a latex that makes rubber In 1876, W H Wickham chartered a steamer to bring a big supply of Hevea, which he contracted to deliver for the price of £10 per thousand seeds On June 14th, at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, he delivered a consignment of 70,000 seeds From them has arisen the greater rubber industry which has brought so much prosperity to the Orient, and enabled the motor industry to proceed full speed ahead The Glory of Egypt In the year 1922 three men and a woman stood and gazed upon a small flight of steps which Egyptian workmen had exposed They were Lord Carnarvon, Į Lady Evelyn Herbert, Mr Howard Carter and Mr Callender They were seeking what had never yet been found in Egypt, an untouched tomb in the Valley of Kings, where, many centuries previously, the men of ancient Egypt had buried their sovereigns The royal tombs, rich in gold and precious things, had ·128 The Glory of Egypt tempted robbers of all ages, and all the tombs bad been rified of their contents But the explorers felt that surely there must be one left that the defilers had not found, that would be intact, and just as it was left by those ancient officials some tiventy or thirty centuries ago, when they sealed it and the royal mourners left their dead Pharaoh to his eternal sleep Those officials knew the danger to their royal dead, so they cunningly concealed the tombs from impious hands But when Lord Carnarvon and his party had toiled at great expense for five years, shifting the sand and exposing fresh rocky faces without result, they began to feel that their quest was vain They almost gave up hope Sull, they decided that they ! would continue for one more season, and if they found no encouragement then, to abandon the search Within five days of the opening of the new season they struck the entrance to an unknown tomb Feverishly they worked, and by November 3rd had discovered a flight of sixteen steps Down these, untrodden by man since they were first cut, with bated breath-they went *It was one of the most exciting moments of my life,' wrote Mr Carter afterwards At the bottom they found a sealed doorway With trembling hands Carter cut a small hole through the door, thrust through it an electric torch, and peeped It was an amazing sight that met his eye He saw a small chamber heaped with elaborate, gorgeous gulded and inlaid objects, as that beam lit up strange shapes of animals and statues in every corner

·Mr stoward Carter opening the door of the inner shrise to find
the sarcophagus of Tutankhamen
9

·130 The Glory of Egypt The party gazed through in turn, and for the first time modern eyes rested upon the only royal tomb in Egypt left intact They saw revelation after revelation But it took much labour still and several years' work to reveal, prescrve, pack and examine that extraordinary collection of grave furniture, brilliant and glittering, protected in that dark, dry sealed chamber for three thousand years, all retaining its freshness and beauty Within the sepulchral chamber itself they found a shrine, and within that an inner shrine And then the sarcophagus within that, three coffins, one within the other, the last of gold, and that contained the royal mummy itself, the very head limbs and bones of long-departed majesty With all respect, these inodern men had bridged thirty centuries, and made contact with an ancient romance of a young hing and his consort and their brief happiness There was a beautiful chest of alabaster, standing three feet high, completely overlad with gold, over it a cornice of sacred cobras Surrounding these were four beautiful statues of the guardian god. desses of the dead, gracious figures, with outstretched protecting arms, so natural and so lifelike in their pose, so pitiful and so compassionate in their faces, that the Englshmen felt it was almost a sacrilege to look upon them The chest was decorated with bas-reliefs of the king with inscriptions in blach of passages from the Book of the Dead Under the lid were four compartments Four beautifully modelled heads of the young hing formed the lids to the ſour compartments, each with a miniature gold collin shaped like a human figure ·twin The Glory of Egypt 131 lelicately inlaid with lapis lazuli These contained he king's internal organs wrapped respectfully in inen As a religious rite, a liquid resembling a und of pitch had been poured over these four niniature coffins and had become so solid in the ourse of those centuries that it required long and kilful work to extricate the coffins from it There were even two tiny coffins of two still-born hildren It was like intruding upon the privacy of grief The figure of the king was pre-eminent in delicacy It was, in fact, a portrait, which showed a pleasant attle face, not that of a powerful statesman, but with all the signs of inherited nobility, well-set eyes, clear-cut nose, and definite mouth The catalogue alone of all the beautiful objects interred with them would fill a chapter, a worthy setting for all that is left of Tutankhamen, the young King, with his little Queen, his furniture, all of an astonishing brilliance, witnesses to a world of refinement and beauty unsurpassed in any age It was an amazing discovery, repaying a thousand times the toil and expenditure lavished upon it By the irony of fate, in the very hour of this triumph of archaelogs, the leader of the party, Lord Carnarvon, died Mr Carter carried on the work, which threw a flood of light upon life in ancient Egypt at a critical time in her history For the young king had lived in exciting times For centuries the Pharaohs, priesthood, and people had been worshipping in their ancient manner, When there came to the throne Amenhotep IV, who had previously been, it seems, High Priest to ·132 The Glory of Egypt Ammon, the Sun-God at Heliopolis He had been so absorbed with the thought of the power of the sun, which he could see with his own eyes was the giver of life and prosperity to the people of Egypt, that when he himself became Pharoah, he aban. doned the old religion and forbade the old gods He cut out the name of Re and of Ammon from the inscriptions, even when forming part of the name of his own father, Amenhotep III His new God was Aton, the Sun's' Disc Hc dropped the 'Amen' from his own name, and changed it to Alhenaton, the Brilliancy of Aton He abandoned the old capital Thebes, and built himself a new one which he called Klutaton, the Horizon of Aton He found means to do this by seizing the revenues of Ammon, the wealthiest and most powerful of the priestly orders, and he took for the same purpose the tributes from Cush and from distant Syria His new religion was expressed in his poems, which breathed the spirit of the purest monotheism, the worship of only one God But like many other men moved by the highest and purest motives, Akhenaton was not practical in mundane affairs He squandered thc wealth of his country upon us now religion He neglected the defences and military organizations of his empire He roused the hatred of the pon erful and wealthy class of the priests of the old gods, and he never reached the hearts of his people The frescoes of his palace show originality in art In place of the conventional figures customary before his day we see lively pictures of natural life We see Waterfowl rising from the reeds, and animals galloping among the papyrus It is like the free

·The Glory of Egypt
133
70
A corner of the tomb with one of the statues of the king
and easy, often amateurish, natural art of ancient
Crete, which makes the layman wonder whether
Akhenaton's mother were a Cretan parte
In the year 1350 BC, the seventeenth of his region,
Akhenation died He had no sons but left a family
of daughters One son-in-law succeeded him, but
only for a very short reign and then came a second,
a young noble named Tutanhhaton Not a fanatic
like his father-in-law, he restored the old gods and
changed his own name, striking out the allusion to

·134 The Glory of Egypt Aton, and called himself Tutankhamen It was his tomb that had thus been opened His young and sensitive face was not that of the re forming fanatic He was young when he died, and the eighteenth dynasty came to an end Sixty yeurs after the death of Akhenaton, his religion had been blotted out from the face of the country, his inscrip tions defaced, his new capital reduced to ruins The reformer had been too original, and the people reverted to its conservatism This discovery added greatly to our knowledge of the art of this strangely gifted Egyptian people It was an art which had been diverted to eminently practical purposes It was all subordinated to the demands of Church and State, which were identified Everything was made as tremendous as possible the better to impress upon the common people the might and majesty of Pharaon They were a strongly conservative people, and for century after century there was little change to be scen in their culture So practical and mundane were they that professional undertakings held tombs prepared and painted, ready to sell to rich clents The entire people was obsessed with the idea of continuity of life after death, and for that reason made their funeral ritual and their tombs as claborate as they could afford The beauts and the wealth were debased to purcly material considerations As one authority upon ancient Egyptian art writes, the vast mass of Egyptian objects of art has the stamp of commercial production The Pharaoh invented mass production and publicity That brilliant collection of gorgeous objccts, pied so carelessly together, is hit off contemptuously by

·The Dawn of Civilization 135
one authority, as the most expensive rubbish that
money could buy from the most fashionable
furnishers'
1
A street of private houses excavated at Ur
The Dawn of Civilization
A RATHER short, thich-set, keen-nosed, clean-shaven
man wearing a turban comes to pay a call upon
the father of Abraham, the Father of the Hebrews
Across the shaded court he saw with satisfaction
through the kitchen door the cauldron steaming on>
the range, and, shufiling out of his red leather
slippers, he entered the guest chamber, to take up a
modest seat at the far end, and to be moved up,
protesting, to the place where higher-piled cushions
bespoke a place of honour Pulling down the

·136 The Dawn of Civilization fringed mantles over the skirts of their undergar ments, they would sit cross-legged, while a houseslave in short white tunic would bring in plates and cups and set them on a stool at the side of each' This was in Ur, the town where Abraham spent his youth before he withdrew to the freer, more peaceful life of the nomad with his herds, to found the Jewish people The house, of the well to-do middle-class kind, was comfortable, solidly built of brick, with an open courtyard, as in Spain, and a balcony, supported on brick or wooden pillars, and "rooms opening out of it It was rather big, two to three storeys high, with ten or even twenty rooms for households were numerous in the days when men had many wives and slaves There was probably no great luxury but ample comfort, with simplc but adequate drainage The houses were clean and whitewashed In that hot climate there was no need for fireplaces so heating when required | was provided from a charcoal brazier, as is so com mon in the East to-day Lighting was primitive, for they had only a wich floating in a clay saucer of oil Big wooden store chests stood in the store rooms, and for the night there were low woodcn bed-steads with handsome ornamented headboards For meals, they had cross-legged tables and couches with straw mats rugs and cushions While the poorer classes had earthenware vessels for their food, the richer families used copper and silver, with gold plates, and rich mosaic of lapis lazuli, the Persian laward Outside the town was closely pached with natow winding lancs probably hot and dusty, like many oriental towns to this day, not carefully ·The Dawn of Civilization 137 planned and laid out like the great city of Nebuchadnezzar nearly a thousand years later The most conspicuous building in the place was a mas-ts sive hump-shaped structure, 150 feet by 200 feet at the base and 75 feet high, the ziggur at, the Tower of Babel It was not the original one built soon after the great Flood nearly two thousand years earlier, but the second one, built by King Ur-Engur about the year 2300 BC, and the base is still standing Ur was a great city of the kingdom of Larsa, the land of the Sumerians, of flat and reedy plains by the mouth of the great rivers It was already an ancient kingdom in Abraham's days, for a great military cemetery with the bodies of soldiers armed with battle-axes is dated about 3000 BC It was rich, too, for in a mausoleum about the year 2800 BC, in the reign of Bur-Sın, were buried three men, two children and thirteen women, all richly adorned with ornaments of gold In a soldier's grave dating about 3250 BC, touching an axe near the head of a dead soldier, was found a little stone statuette, a female figure about ten inches high, in white alabaster, with eyes of shell and lapis lazuli Was it that of the goddess whom he worshipped? Or could it have been of the woman he loved? In the reign of Rim Sın, who flourished about 1920 BC, there lived in Ur a produce merchant by name Es-nasir He was an enterprising man, for he had agents and correspondents in many countries abroad, and carried big stocks of sesame and other grain He also dealt considerably in real property, for in his house have been found many documents dealing with these transactions He was not, however, always lucky, for it seems that he had trouble ·138 The Dawn of Civilization with his creditors, and that his mortgagees fore. closed upon him He certainly reduced his style of living Near by there lived a priest, who was also a teacher, for among the very numerous documents found in his house there were no fewer than 150 school books These are very useful too, for they tell much about life in Ur in those days, but most useful of all is a grammar of the Sumerian languige for the use of the Semites who lived there, so now scholars can follow out in detail all the twists and turns of the complex Sumerian verb Like all the empires of the world in turn, the kingdom of Larsa declined and fell The martial Elamites swooped down upon its wealth from the hills of Iran, sacked the town and looted the rich royal palaces The Sumerians were great organizers, commercial, practical people, yet very different in character from the more sensual, thoughtful Semites They liked pomp and display, and, though they produced good artists and excellent craftsmen, they were not so much interested in art for its own sake as for its practical value, to impress upon the simple people the poner and majesty of the kings When the Semites obtained the power during the second millennium they adopted Sumerian culturc and art, but used it entirely for propaganda and publicity They contributed nothing to what they had taken from the Sumerians They mercis used it When a king died it was necessary to provide for his comfort and safety in the next world, so an armed bodyguard svas sent with him, with seri ants, horses women and slaves all butchered and buned ·The Dawn of Civilization 139 The ruins of Ur with the rigourat looming in the background with him in the royal mausoleum A savage custom in our eyes but it persisted in Central Asia, and in Europe survived in Scandinavia down to the minth century A.D Thanks to the work done by British and American archælogists in the lower valley of the Euphrates and Tigris, the history of this country and its civilization can now be followed back four thousand years before Christ Sir Leonard Woolley, who has led so much of the work at Ur, thinks it is older than the civilization of Egypt The art of writing can be traced here, from the highly developed wedge-writing, or cuneiform, of Assyria and Babylon, back to the very beginnings of picture-writing at Erech It can be traced nght back to the first sign of human life in the Euphrates valley, nearly seven thousand years ago ·140 The Dawn of Civilization The work of archæological research is immensely difficult To reach the lowest levels at Jemdet Nasr, dated back about 4000 BC, where the most ancient objects are found no les than 5,000 tons of accumulated rubbish had to be removed This tahes us back to before the great Flood of which we read in the Book of Genesis in the Bible, which drowned out great areas of the country, left eleven feet of silt over Ur, and overwhelmed the lowlands It was after the Flood that the kings built the first ziggurat at Ur, probably to provide a refuge from the waters if there came a sccond flood as great At that distant time they had already, learnt how to make pottery, painted with designs in black and buff They had an elaborate art, with seals, beads stone vascs, lions and bulls in relief This last design was persistent all through their history down to much later centuries Farther north than Ur was Eshnunna to-day called Tel Asmar, fifty miles from Baghdad Herc an American party from Chicago dug up an old house dating from about 2500 BC The houses were well built, bordering on a public squarc Thc people who lived in them had every comfort, with their pots and pans and handmills, and other houschold utensils The mistress of the house used rouge, which she hept in musscl shells, and also kohl to blacken her eyebrows, as do women in Central Asla to-day She had combs of ivory, rich bead work, and elegant embroidery and among her things were found lumps of bitumen These were used for making ornaments and utensils inlaid with mother-of-pearl and lapis lazuli They had filigree work, and many precious stones with beads of ·The Dawn of Civilization 141 carnelion, lapis lazuli and onyx In another place was found a complete service for the great banquets in the temple, with bowls of copper, flasks, lamps, strainers, and silver-hulted daggers, and a perforated drinking-tube But the most surprising find they made at Eshnunna was the modern drainage system, made watertight with bitumen There were comfortable bathrooms, draining into large vaulted sewers under the streets, and lavatories of the European type, with raised seat, not the low oriental type in the lavatory stood a large water vessel, with small dipping-pots All this elaborate civilization, with the art of dress, of working jewellery and precious metals and stones, of making pottery, of achitecture and sanitary engineering, of carving and writing, arose in the country, and grew out of humble beginnings The oldest remains were found by Dr Mallowan at Tel Arpachiyah The place consisted of humble mud dwellings with small rooms round a central court, of the same character that may be seen in the East to-day Here they already had pottery, based on the design of baskets This pottery takes us back well into the fifth millennium, a good seven Some is as thin as an egg shell, hand-made and exquisitely finished Here was found a store of wheat, the oldest in the world Queerest of all were little statuettes of human figures in terra cotta, the women dressed in black and white, with crossed braces behind and in front They wore beads and many stones, with amulets and pendants but the odd thing is that the heads are not shaped, they are merely pegs, as though those early artists shrunk from depicting the human head thousand years ·142 Most Ancient India Here surely we have the first beginnings of our History Most Ancient India IT is a curious thing that, although the histor of India is so old, although her literature goes so far back, the oldest buildings known, until quite recent ly, did not date more than a trifle of some two thousand years ago, to about 300 BC Then suddenly the spade of the archeologist revealed a far more ancient past buried under the soil in Sind and the Punjab, which at one stroke took back her history ten times as far Two such places are known to-day, Harappa, in the Montgomery District of the Punjab ind Mohenjo Daro in the Larkhana District of Sind In the latter place 240 acres are covered by the ancient remains, and of these thirteen have been opened up and examined in detail If an Indian of to day were magically transported back five thousand years to that ancient town of Mohenjo Daro, laid open by Sir John Marshall, and described in his great work he would see a splendid city, but yet it would not strike him as so vert strange He would sec men of various races, some swarthy of skin, others fair, some of the Chinese type, busy on their daily work He would see wheeled carts with supplies of wheat and barles hauled by buffalocs or oren on broad, straight thoroughfares laid out for a lively traffic, leading into the town from north and south and east and west He would notice dogs basking in the streets as to-das He would meet men coming down the ·Most Ancient India 143 } مه 712 1 At Mohenjo Daro one of the broad strects (Copyright Government of India by permlaston of Bfr Arthur Probathain) Great North Road leading strings of camels from the desert lands, or others up the Great South Road with elephants bringing produce from the hot amoist districts Outside in the country hc would see shepherds tending their flocks of sheep, and swine routing for dainties He would see that the folk were dressed in the same white cotton, much as in India to-day, the women wearing beautiful neck- ·144 Most Ancient India laces, with armlets, fillets, girdles, car-rings and anklets of silver, of gold, of porcelain, of ivory Soldiers would march past him carrying axes or their shoulders with maces and spears and dagger thrust through their girdles, and some with box? and arrows too But he would be surprised that they had no armour, nor did they carry swords Nor had they yet discovered the use of iron They were still in the Age of Bronze Then perhaps he would be invited inside a house, and at once notice how solidly built it was, with well-made doors and windows, the floors well paved and with good bathrooms, and an excellent drain. age system made watertight with bitumen A good dinner would be seried to him in good crockery, and he would see at a glance that their pottery was first class, not rough hand-fashioned stuff, but properly made, upon a potter's wheel The men and women of Sind knew how to live in comfort five thousand years ago His host might ask him to take a letter, for they had the art of writing alrcady, which he would sign with a seal Their seals were beautifully engraved but we have not yet hit upon the secret of reading their script Professor Langden thought that it was the ancestor of the early Brahmi writing of the third century before Christ Those men of ancient days travelled far, for their scals have been found at Kish, in Mesopotamia, in deposits that were there before the days of Sargon. His date is known about 2650 BC., so there was commerce between northern India and Mesopotamia even in those far off days This ancient civilization, already so highly ·1 Pekin Man 145 developed fifteen hundred generations ago, is believed to have been built up by the Dravidian peoples, but there were-men-from Mesopotamiamand Armenia, who brought knowledge_of_the good things of life from the West..where civilization had been developing already for a millennium and a half before-the- City of Mohenjo Daro reached its prime Among the human remains found there were those of the Mongolian type, and of the round-headed Alpine type, which to day spreads across Central Asia and Europe, and of the Mediterranean type, which has given to mankind almost all the essential arts But there was one vast difference between the India of those days and the India of to-day The Aryans had not yet come down from the north, and the languages of the great Sanskritic family had not yet been heard in Hindustan Pekin Man at DURING the years just after the Great War, a Swedish geologist, Dr Andersson, was working on the fossils of Northern China In 1921 he was busy 4 hunting for old bones with Dr Granger, from the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a Dr Zdansky, when a Chinese came and told them that he knew of a fine place for dragons you bones The Chinese know the bones of extinct animals and call them all dragons' bones They think they are good for medicine So the men of science went to the place it is called Chou K'ou Tien, about 35 miles from Pekin They found a shallow crack in a limestone cliff, filled up with debris from the rock, and fossil bones ·146 Pekin Man Before they had been at work long, they realized that they had found a site of first-rate importance that must be worked systematically While they were busy, a violent rainstorm came on, and the three learned men found then selves cut off in their cave A brook that had trickled belok the mouth of the cave was swollen into a raging torrent and washed away the bridge Those men of science were obliged to wait till the fourth das before they could reach their home, and to do that they had to strip almost naked and wade through the rushing river tranoll kutusten Dr Zdansky stayed there several wees, examin ing the cave in detail In one place there was light sandy clay with pieces of sharp quartz in it The. idea entered Dr Andersson's head that these pieces of quartz were just the sort of stones that primitive man would pick up and use to cut up his food He felt sure they would find remains of early man very early indecd Turning to Dr Zdansky, the Swede tapped on the wall of the cave and said, 'I have a feeling that there lie here the remains of one of our ancestors, and it is only a question of finding him Take vour time and stick to it till the cave is emptied, if need be So Zdansky continued all that summer, and in 1923 came back to it He found lorge quantities of bones of carnivora, that is beasts of pret of dogs, two kinds of bear, a hyæna, a sabre-toothed tiger, a huge cat as big as a lion, together with rhinoceros horse, pig, deer, buffalo and an ape From a study of the bones and the ground, the geologist formed the opinion that the deposit must date from the very beginning of the last period of geological time,

·Pekin Man
147
for
all
stuh
The cave at Chou h ou Tien kith the geologists and thelr assistants
et Wort

·148 Pekin Man what is called the Pleistocene One may say about 500,000 years ago That was just the beginning of the time when central Europe was fecling the advancing chill of the first of the four Ice Ages, and Northern China was passing through a drs period Zdansky took his material to the muscun. at Upsala in Sweden to clean and study it In 1926 Dr Andersson in Pekin received a letter from him saying that he had found among it a tooth that looked very human So Dr Andersson was ht' But not everybody was convinced that it was a real human tooth Some suggested that it might be a worn tooth of some flesh eating animal, some big cat, for instance, or other carnivore, as their teeth somewhat resemble human ones when old One evening, when some scientific men werc holding a meeting in a Chinese restaurant in Pekin Professor Grabau chaffed the Suede Well, Dr Andersson' he said, 'how are things now with your Pehin man! it a man or a carnivore?! 'I felt the ground was roching beneath my feet wrote Dr Andersson afterwards when an idca struck him His reply was neat and witty My dear Dr Grabau,' he answered smartly 'the latest news from Chou K'ou Tien is that our old friend is neither a man nor a carnivore, but something half-way between the two It is a lady And for some time after that it was tercrred to as the Pekin Lader ? The discovery 175 so important that a young Swedish scientist by name Dr Bohlin went out to ·Pekin Man 149 China on purpose to study it carefully and, if possible, find some more material He began on April 16th, 1927 There was a local war in full swing at the time, and troops came marching past the cave, and the thunder of guns could be heard The place swarmed with soldiers and the air was full of stories of the atrocities committed by bandits TERTAKES But the young Swede paid no attention to all that He went on working steadily at his bones in his cave, all through the summer, patiently and doggedly, but without result At last the autumnal weather made further work impossible, so, on October 17th, he had to pack up and go home But he hated leaving without finding another trace of the Pekin Man, so he stayed just one more day He got his reward He found another tooth He set off at once for Pekin in a rickshaw, but on his way tumbled right into the local war! An army was besieging Pekin, and the soldiers stopped, stripped and searched him They took almost everything he had, but not the only thing he had to show for his seven months' hard work, the precious tooth' He managed to make his way into the city and dashed off at once to show the tooth to the Professor of Anatomy, Dr Black It was pronounce ed a human tooth, and to it was given the name Chinese Man, Sinanthropus The whole scientific world was excited by this time The Rockefeller Foundation provided funds for further work, and in 1928 the search was undertaken by the Geological Survey of China The enterprise was rewarded Late in, November, Dr Pei had dug deep down, over 70 feet from the floor and found two open holes Into one he ·150 Pekin Man let himself down with a rope, but found nothing of great importance + Into the other he was able to crawl, and on December 1st he began to dig out the sediment The next afternoon at four o'cloch he found an almost complete skull;/ Since then the work has continued During nine years' operations in that cave, at least 10,000 cubic yards of earth have been removed and examined in detail The result has been to provide science with remains of no fewer than twenty-four individuals of Pehin Man The importance of this is tremendous Our knowledge of the Erect Monkey-Man of Java, Pithecanthropus is based on a single fragment of a skull Even of Neanderthal Man, of the middle of the Old Stone Age, we have only two incomplete skulls, though there are plenty of other bones and of his tools Very important are the teeth, but the study of the skull tells us much about the owner's brain But of Pekin Man there is enough material to let us judge the difference due to sex and age It is the most complete collection of fossil man yet known Pekin Man was of a very primitive type His brain case is far smaller than that of modern man, or even of Neanderthal Man, who lived much later in the middle of the Old Stone Age But the jaws and teeth are more like those of an ape He was like a great ape with a big brain, but jet he was a man He knes the use of fire, of tools rude and rough, but real implements We cannot choose our ances tors, and Professor Weidenreich maintain firmly that Pehin Man is in our direct line of ancestry. We may not be proud of this coarse and sugged

·1511
Pekin Man
type, for the bones are in such a state that it can be
seen that they are not the bones of the early men
who dined in their cave-home, but of the men upon
whon others dined They are the remains not of
the diners, but of the dinners Pehin Man was a
Cannibal merliw

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