538 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



method of dealing out punishment, as such, and thus keeping 

 alive the spirit of vengeance ? 



What a ghastly, ludicrous state of affairs it must be, to see 

 the murderer condemned to die, and awaiting in his cell the 

 arrival of the fatal day, assured by his spiritual advisers that he 

 has been pardoned by his Maker, and that the gentle Saviour is 

 "waiting to receive him in eternity, and still not have a ray of 

 hope that the measure of the penalty, judicially pronounced, will 

 be diminished ! It would seem reasonable that a man who has 

 been pardoned by his Creator should be pardoned by his fellows, 

 and he surely should be if punishment was the only design. If, 

 however, competent men have decided that his life is a menace to 

 human society, then the questions of punishment and forgiveness 

 are not to be considered. Even the great physician, Galen, seven- 

 teen hundred years ago wrote, "The evildoer is one whom we 

 must destroy, not punish," repeating very nearly the words of 

 Aristotle that when a criminal is a criminal by nature he ought 

 to be destroyed, not in revenge, but for the same reason that 

 scorpions and vipers are destroyed. Seneca advocated the same 

 axiom. Let us, therefore, eliminate from our laws, which are or 

 ought to be of benefit to humanity, all idea or notion of punish- 

 ment ; for, while our codes continue to present it, the whole aim 

 and object of our common law, as it relates to the criminal, can 

 not but point to the single fact of an effort to inflict pain on a 

 human being. We try a man in order to ascertain if he must be 

 punished, and the other higher, broader, and more noble function 

 of the court, namely, to protect the majority of law-abiding citi- 

 zens, is lost sight of by the larger proportion of the human race. 

 The simple term justice or condemnation will convey the idea 

 that the good of society is the consideration of the court, while 

 the term punishment conveys the idea that the individual alone 

 is the factor, and we can not blame the criminal, as long as it 

 remains on our statute-books, for imagining that the whole force 

 of our courts is to cause him bodily pain. 



While studying the songs of birds, Mr. Charles A. Witchell soon found 

 that young birds acquire first the call cries and alarm notes of their respect- 

 ive species ; that in each species these notes are much less liable to vary 

 than are the sougs; and that in different species iihysically allied they are 

 more alike than are the songs of those species. Another interesting feature 

 was the prominent occuri'ence of a particular cry in the species; its repe- 

 tition in a less marked form in one or two allied birds, in which another 

 cry might be the most pronounced ; and the utterance of this second cry by 

 some other allied birds, which had not the first-mentioned note. These 

 facts are commended by the author to naturalists as bearing on the ques- 

 tion of a common ancestry of species. 



