The Chautauquan, Vol. 05, October 1884, No. 1Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Science
The Chautauquan, Vol. 05, October 1884, No. 1
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Chautauqua Institution -- Periodicals; Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle -- Periodicals
Mr. Henry Bergh, who has done a good work for horses in New York, and
tried to do a good deal of work not absolutely good for other animals
(cats for instance), has one quality of a successful reformer; he can use
strong language. He denounces M. Pasteur as “A Jenner in France who now
crawls to the earth’s surface and begins the fiend-like and disgusting
work of polluting the bodies and flesh of the lower animals.” Mr. Bergh
does not believe in inoculation for small-pox. It is a pity he does not
confine his benevolence to horses and their sorrows, a subject which he
understands.
* * * * *
Constant gains characterize the uses of electricity. Recently a message
was sent from Australia to England in _twenty-three minutes_, over
13,318 miles of wire. French experiments in the use of electricity as a
motor are making rapid progress. Telephone messages have been sent 1,200
miles, from Cincinnati to Baltimore, and we are not certain that this is
the best record. Bulwer’s “Coming Race” did everything by just touching
buttons and setting automata at work. Perhaps that race is really
“coming” after all.
* * * * *
What is in a name? The cholera is no worse, nor any more curable, by
calling its cause a _microbe_ (literally minute life, meaning microscopic
insect). It does help us, however, to emphasize old truth. The diseased
are usually victims, Dr. Koch says, of the microbes. If the digestive
organs are impaired, the microbe attacks them with more success.
Still, we are thus far not very much wiser for the terms _microbe_ and
_bacillus_. Meanwhile, Dr. Koch’s first practical rule, that “dry heat
is fatal to the microbe,” is contradicted by the well-known fact that
cholera in Asia is very much at home in the dryest heat known on the
globe.
* * * * *
The papers report that a colored man having married a white woman in
Indiana has been tried for the crime and sentenced to five years in the
penitentiary. We can not discover any use in such proceedings. As we
have remarked once before, the mixture of races is not brought about by
legitimate relations of the sexes, but by illegitimate. Indiana punishes
the wrong people. For one mulatto born in marriage there are a thousand
born out of wedlock. Besides, it has not been proved that the moral
quality of a crime attaches to marriage by persons of different races. It
is highly speculative morals, at all events.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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