April 14, 1882.] 



• KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



509 



Herbert Spencer puts it — that it can hardly be said to 

 possess any distinct voluntary capacity, or any strongly- 

 marked personality at all. In the case of man and the 

 other higher animals, almost the whole nervous system is 

 bound up with the brain, sending messages up to it, and 

 receiving orders from it in return, so that a single great 

 nervous centre governs all our movements, and ensures that 

 uniformity of action without which the complicated acti- 

 vities of human life would be impossible. The only 

 nerves (worth mentioning) in the human body which are 

 not thus under the control of the brain, are those of the 

 heart and other internal organs ; and over these parts, as 

 everybody knows, we have not any voluntary power. 

 But all our limbs and muscles are moved in accord- 

 ance with impulses sent down from the brain, so that, 

 for example, when 1 have made up my mind to send a 

 telegram to a friend, my legs take me duly to the telegraph 

 oflSce, my hand writes the proper message, and my tongue 

 undertakes the necessary arrangements with the clerk. 

 But in the insect's body there is no such regular subordi- 

 nation of all the parts composing the nervous system to a 

 single central organ or head-office. The largest knot of nerve- 

 matter, it is true, is generally to be found in the neighbour- 

 hood of the sense-organs, and it receives direct nerve-bundles 

 from the eyes, antenna^, mouth, and other chief adjacent 

 parts ; but the w ings and legs are moved by separate knots 

 of nerve-cells, connected by a sort of spinal cord with the 

 head, but capable of acting quite independently on their own 

 account Thus, if we cut off a wasp's head and stick it on 

 a needle in front of some sugar and water, the mouth wnJl 

 greedily begin to eat the sweet syrup, apparently uncon- 

 scious of the fact that it has lost its stomach, and that the 

 food is quietly dropping out of the gullet at the other end 

 as fast as it is swallowed. So, too, if we decapitate that 

 queer Mediterranean insect, the Praying Mantis, the head- 

 less body will still stand catching flies with its outstretched 

 arms, and fumbling about for its mouth when it has caught 

 one, evidently much surprised to find that its head is un- 

 accountably missing. In fact, whatever may be the case 

 with man, the insect, at least, is really a conscious auto- 

 maton. It sees or smells food, and it is at once impelled 

 by its nervous constitution to eat it. It receives a sense- 

 impression from the bright hue of a flower, and it is irre- 

 sistibly attracted towards it, as the moth is to the candle. 

 It has no power of deliberation, no ability even to move its 

 own limbs in unaccustomed manners. Its whole life is 

 governed for it by its fi.xed nervous constitution, and by the 

 stimulations it receives from outside. And so, though the 

 world probably appears much the same to the beetle as to 

 as, the nature of its life is very different. It acts like a 

 piece of clock-work mechanism, wound up to perform a 

 certain number of tixed movements, and incapable of ever 

 going beyond the narrow circle for which it is designed. 



ME. MUYBRIDGE AND ROWING. 



By the Editor. 



THE method which has been applied so successfully to 

 determine all the successive stages of a horse's motion 

 in galloping at the rate of a mile in less than two minutes, 

 can be much more easily applied to determine all the suc- 

 cessive stages of an oarsman or sculler's action — for even 

 the swiftest racing-boat does not travel faster than a mUe 

 in five minutes on still water, and by taking her against 

 stream the problem would be rendered even easier. If 

 rowing men of the Oxford, Cambridge, and the various 

 Thames clubs would invite ]Mr. Muybridge to this con- 

 genial work, the pi-inciples of good rowing style and the 



secret of successful oarsmanship could very readily be deter- 

 mined. Hanlan might, I have no doubt, be persuaded to 

 row past the twelve cameras, and so hand down to posterity 

 the perfection of his marvellous style. Mr. Muybridge 

 would be willing, I know, to do his part — his expenses 

 being guaranteed, of course. I do not know what the 

 expenses would be, but to judge from all that I have 

 learned, they would lie somewhere between two and three 

 hundred poimds, for a week's experiments, with all neces- 

 sary assistance in arranging for the sets of twelve in- 

 stantaneous pictures. He would -nillingly supply con- 

 tributors with copies (free of further expense) for study 

 and comment. The value of such views at the present 

 time, and their interest hereafter, w-hen, perhaps, new 

 methods of rowing may have come into vogue, and when, 

 at any rate, oarsmen will like well to know how their pre- 

 decessors rowed, can hardly be over-estimated. If the 

 presidents of Oxford, Cambridge, London, and other clubs, 

 care to see anything done in this direction, arrangements 

 could be quickly made (at present ^Mr. Muybridge's appa- 

 ratus is at New York, but it could be here in a fortnight), 

 and the expenses readily subscribed. I should be very 

 willing, for my own part, to put my name down for £50, 

 if that sum would bring the amount up to the required 

 total. If, however, there were good prospect of the 

 amount being readily made up otherwise, I would content 

 myself with such a subscription (five or ten guineas) as 

 hundreds of boating men would, I am sure, be glad to 

 offer for so invaluable a contribution to the scientific 

 investigation of oarsmanship. 



American- Agriccltlre r. E.nglish. — Mr. Fowler, M.P., for 

 Cambridge, recently gave to a Chicago Tribuyie reporter his im- 

 pressions of the agricultural resources of the West, where he has 

 spent some time in making observations. " What has interested me 

 most," said he, " is the matter of transportation to Eagland, in con- 

 nection Avith the cost of production there, and the question is wliether 

 we can continue much longer to compete with America in the rais- 

 ing of wheat, or even to raise it at all and make it pay. The natural 

 protection to English production, by reason of the cost of cari'iage, 

 must be — nay, is — rapidly diminishing, and I rather expect, if we 

 were to have a good harvest in Eui'ope and America at the same 

 time, you would have prices such as we have never expected.'* 

 " The American farmer is producing and transporting wheat and 

 com so cheaply, then, that his English brother cannot compete 

 with him ? " " It is a good deal as a gentleman expressed it to me 

 the other day, when he said : ' A man out here in Iowa is competing 

 with the English farmer just as if he lived in Yorkshire.' That 

 may be a strong way of putting it, but you must observe the 

 great advantages which the American farmer has over the farmer 

 on the other side. Iowa land, for instance, costs SIO an acre, 

 while in England it costs £50, £70, or £80 an acre, so that the 

 Englishman is terribh" handicapped at the start, for he has to pay 

 interest on £50 to £70, while the Iowa man pays interest only on 

 £2. Then, in addition to all that, the Iowa man has a better soil 

 and a better climate. In short, with these advantages in favour of 

 the American farmer, with the cost of transportation minimized as 

 it is, so that our natural protection from that cause is rapidly 

 diminishing, I have great doubts whether the cultivation of wheat 

 will pay in England at all. I speak not so much of the present as 

 of the future, for our crop this year has been a good one, while 

 yoiu'3 seems to have been just the other way. Your deficiency this 

 year, as I have seen it stated, is 80,000,000 bushels— nearly aa 

 large as England's entire production in an ordinary season. But 

 here is your vast expanse of territory developing every year. Then, 

 again, you virtually raise wheat in this country by machinery. The 

 extent of your wheat-raising territory is simply astounding, but 

 your population, while large in the aggregate, is spread over these 

 vast expanses, and your real market is elsewhere — across the water, 

 over in England, where we find a contrary state of affairs : a com- 

 paratively small wheat-raising area, with millions of people to be 

 fed. And I don't begrudge yon your good fortune in the least. 

 Your prosperity is ours, for, unless our people be cheaply fed, they 

 cannot afford to work for reasonable wages, and unless we can 

 manufacture at reasonable cost, we can no longer hope to supply 

 the werld with our manufactured products." 



