Aug. 10, 1883.] 



• KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



91 



large pot in the pool, then turned her directly through 

 the neck of it. Thence, after receiving another drenching 

 from its combing waves, she dashed on withoiit further 

 accident to the quiet bosom of the river below Lewiston. 



Thus was accomplished the most remarkable and perilous 

 voyage ever made by men. To look at the boat and the 

 navigation she was to undertake no one would have pre- 

 dicted for it any other than a fatal termination. The boat 

 was seventy-two feet long with seventeen feet breadth of 

 beam and eight feet depth of hold, and carried an engine of 

 an hundred horsepower. In conversation with Robinson 

 after the voyage, he stated that the greater part of it was 

 like what he had always imagined must be the swift 

 sailing of a large bird in a downward liight ; that when 

 the accident occurred the boat seemed to be struck from 

 all directions at once ; that she trembled like a fiddle- 

 string and felt as if she would crumble away and drop into 

 atoms ; that both he and Mclntyre were holding to the 

 wheel with all tlieir strength, but produced no more efl'ect 

 than if they had been two flies ; that he had no fear of 

 striking the rocks, for he knew that the strongest suction 

 must be in the deepest channel, and that the boat must 

 remain in that. Finding that Mclntyre was somewhat 

 bewildered by excitement or by his fall as he rolled up by 

 his side but did not rise, he quietly put his foot on his 

 breast to keep him from rolling round the deck, and thus 

 finished the voyage. 



The effect of this trip upon Robinson was decidedly 

 marked. To it, as he lived but a few years afterward, his 

 death was commonly attributed. But this was incorrect, 

 since the disease which terminated his life was contracted 

 at New Orleans at a later day. " He was," said Mrs. 

 1-lobinson to the writer, " twenty years older when he 

 came home that day than when he went out." He sank 

 into his chair like a person overcome with weariness. He 

 decided to abandon the water, and advised his sons to 

 venture no more about the Rapids. Both his manner and 

 appearance were changed. Calm and deliberate before, 

 he became thoughtful and serious afterward. He had 

 been borne, as it were, in the arms of a power so mighty 

 that its impress was stamped on his features and on his 

 mind. Through a slightly opened door he had seen a vision 

 which awed and sulidued him. He became reverent in a 

 moment. He grew -^-enerable in an hour. 

 ': ^Yet he had a strange, almost irrepressible desire to 

 make this voyage immediately after the steamer was put 

 on below the Falls. This wish was only increased when 

 the first -Vaid of the Mist was superseded by the new 

 and stauncher one. He insisted that it could be made 

 with safety, and that it might be made a good pecuniary 

 speculation. 



Ti[n total number of visitors to the Fisheries Exhibition 

 reached 1,000,000 during the course of Tuesday, the last 

 day of J uly, that is to say, within sixty-eight days of the 

 opening on Whit Monday. This gives an average of about 

 11, 700 visitors per diem. The two largest days were Whit 

 Monday and Tuesday, with 42,941 and 29,146 visitors 

 respectively. 



For cementing rubber or gutta percha to metal Mr. 

 Moritz Grossman, in his " Year Book " for 188.3, gives the 

 following recipe : — Pulverised shellac, dissolved in ten 

 times its weight of pure ammonia. In three .days the 

 mixture will be of the required consistency. The ammonia 

 penetrates the rubber, and enables the shellac to take a 

 ♦inn hold, but as it all evaporates in time, the rubber is 

 ininio\ably fastened to the metal, and neither gas nor 

 water will remove it. 



PRINCIPLES OF DRESS REFORM. 



By E. M. King. 



IT is the theory of Herbert Spencer that imperfection in 

 mankind is due to its being out of harmony with its 

 surroundings. That " all evil results from the non- 

 adaptation of constitution to conditions." That this non- 

 adaptation is caused by having a faculty in excess or a 

 faculty that is deficient. That finally, by the working of 

 an unalterable law, " all excess and all deficiency must 

 disappear, that is, that all unfitness must disappear ; that 

 is, all imperfection must disappear." And, in this way, 

 humanity must become completely adapted to its con- 

 ditions, that is to say perfect.* 



There seems to me to be a flaw in this reasoning. There 

 is a tacit assumption that " conditions " are perfect, and 

 therefore that if character is adapted to conditions it must 

 necessarily become perfect also. But the conditions which 

 surround men may not l:>e perfect, they may tend to 

 diminish a good faculty, and to increase a bad one, and 

 this will not lead to perfection, but the reverse. Writers 

 on social science whose works I have read do not seem to 

 have recognised that mankind has two surroundings or 

 conditions ; his natural surroundings and his social sur- 

 roundings. The former, or laws of nature, are fixed and 

 inexorable; the latter, or social laws, are not as " H. S." 

 aflirmsjt " sure and inflexible," but fluctuating, and con- 

 tinually made and unmade by society. I am not speaking 

 here of mere social etiquette, but of all sociological laws. 



We are conscious, daily and hourly, of the powerful 

 influence of our social surroundings; they even appear to 

 shut us out from, or blind our eyes to, the more sure, but 

 less apparent, laws of nature. Very often the two sets of 

 laws are at variance, and thus it happens that an individual 

 may be perfectly in harmony with his social surroundings 

 or conditions, but out of harmony with his natural sur- 

 roundings or conditions. Our social surroundings, for a 

 time at least, shield us from some of the pains and penal- 

 ties of disobeying — or being out of harmony with — the 

 laws of nature. When this state of contradiction, or 

 antagonism, is arrived at, the punishment appears to be, by 

 slow degrees, distributed from the individual to the class, 

 or race, or nation which disobeys. 



For instance, a man dealing dishonestly where there is a 

 low standard of honesty in trade, suflers little from his 

 social surroundings — he is in harmony with them, and they 

 with him ; but instead of himself and his trade moving on 

 to perfection by this adaptation of constitution to condi- 

 tions, he is moving on to degradation of character and his 

 trade sinking to decay and ruin. Again, a man who lives 

 an impure life, in a society which allows laxity of morals as 

 excusable in men, i.s in harmony with his social surround- 

 ings, although he is at war with the laws of nature. His 

 social surroundings are increasing his bad faculties and 

 diminishing his good ones, and in the end that class, or 

 race, or nation so degrading character to its social con- 

 ditions, meets with its due reward. 



Before humanity reaches perfection it has a two-fold 

 work before it, not only to adapt character, or constitution, 

 to conditions, but so to modify, alter, and improve these 

 latter, that they shall be favourable to the highest develop- 

 ment of his faculties, whether intellectual, moral, or 

 physical. 



Of necessity, then, the first step of every reformer must 

 be to put himself out of harmony with his immediate or 

 social surrounding or conditions. Socrates, Lloyd Garrison, 

 and other such reformers, were all glorious men, who had 



' Social Statics," chap. 



t Ibid., p. 55. 



