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♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



[Sept. 7, 1883. 



AMERICAN MANNERS IN TRAVELLING. 



By RicHAHD A. Proctor. 



MR. PHIL ROBINSON'S diatribes, recently very 

 widely circulated in English country newspapers, 

 illustrate well the bias of patriotism. Consider the pleas- 

 ing efleots produced by this " highest of civic virtues " as 

 thus manifested. (Some will say I am not writing about 

 science ; but in these days sociology has already begun to 

 be a science, and it deserves to be regarded, and soon will 

 be regarded, as among the most important of the sciences.) 

 I do not know how long Mr. Robinson has been in 

 America or how much he has travelled there ; but even 

 if he has been no longer there than the twenty months 

 which, in all, I have passed in America, I should say it 

 was very unlikely that he had travelled more than I in 

 that country, seeing that during nearly all those twenty 

 months I have been busily travelling from place to 

 place, and sometimes for weeks in succession have 

 averaged ten or twelve hours' travel per day. Let me 

 in passing also note that so much hard travelling does 

 not tend to encourage fair judgment of manners, 

 <fec , but rather to cause the traveller to look with 

 jaundiced eyes on all or nearly all he sees. I may 

 further add that to my own experience of American 

 travelling ways, I can add those of members of my own 

 family who have passed nearly their whole lives in that 

 country. I find, however, that whereas l\Ir. Phil Robinson 

 describes certain bad habits as characterising the travelling 

 Americans generally, leading to the idea that at least nine 

 out of ten Americans when travelling grab their food, and 

 gorge and snort in ways too hideously unpleasant for repe- 

 tition, I have never among all my fellow-travellers in 

 America seen one single person afflicted with such evil 

 habits (all at one time) ; and though I can cite one or two 

 cases in which I have seen one particular bad habit of 

 those mentioned by Mr. Robinson, two or three cases in 

 which I have seen another, there are one or two of the evil 

 habits which he attributes to Americans generally which I 

 have never seen at all. Yet I am an observant traveller, 

 very sensitive to sights and sounds and smells not altogether 

 agreeable, and certainly ready enough to mention what I 

 have noticed. 



Supposing for a moment, though I think it utterly un- 

 likely, that Mr. Robinson had in one single instance seen 

 all the gross faults of manners which he attributes to all 

 Americans when travelling — supposing (which I flatly 

 deny, however) that some one of these faults could be seen 

 in half, or a third, or a fourth, or even a tenth or twentieth 

 of American travellers, still would it not have occurred 

 to Mr. Phil Robinson, but for the bias of that "first 

 of civic virtues," that if in England all classes had, as 

 in America, to seek the same refreshment rooms and to 

 sit at the same sets of tables, the observed instances of bad 

 manners would be at least as numerous as I have imagined 

 they might be (but deny that they are) in America 1 Of 

 course, many will say that so far as comfort in travelling is 

 concerned it matters nothing whether bad habits present 

 themselves through a wrong system causing cultured and 

 uncultured to be brought together, or through the preva- 

 lence of such habits. This would be a digression from the 

 argument ; but I believe the truth to be that the American 

 system leads to a diminution of otherwise prevalent bad 

 habits — for ninety-nine hundredths of the so-called lower 

 class in America will not sutf'er any inferiority to be shown 

 in their habits in the presence of those whom they regard 

 as no otherwise better than in having more money to spend. 

 But be this as it may, a fair, unbiassed comparison of the 



manners of the travelling community, class for class, or 

 comparing the whole number of travellers, would show that 

 — in some way or another — a marvellous superiority has 

 arisen on the other side of the Atlantic. Such otl'ences as 

 the stolid, stupid, staring so common here even among 

 well-to-do people, rudeness to women or children, careless- 

 ne.ss as to the comfort of the old and weak, and so forth, 

 are scarcely ever seen on the other side of the Atlantic. 

 If I were an American, with what " pride in my port, 

 defiance in my eye " should I be tempted to boast that a 

 young, inexperienced, and pretty girl, poor or rich, in her 

 teens, can travel across the length and breadth of the 

 United States alone and unprotected, not only in perfect 

 safety and comfort, but with the certainty that nine-tenths 

 of the men — of all classes — with whom her journey brings 

 her into contact, esteem it equally a duty and pleasure to 

 assist her in every possible way. How contemptuously I 

 might be tempted to remind the Briton that — for reasons 

 too well known — the most courteous and well-meant profler 

 of assistance to such a traveller in this country is apt to be 

 looked on with suspicion. On the Continent, and especially 

 in France, it is even worse. — Keivcastle Weekly Chronicle. 



Insulating Wires. — A composition for insulating wires 

 has been recently patented, which is made up as follows : — 

 By mixing ozokerit with blacklead, carefully dried, and 

 guttapercha in the proportions of about 3 of ozokerit to 

 10 parts black lead and 1.5 guttapercha. The properties 

 of the constituents do not by any means augur success. 



New Sodrce of Caoutchouc. — The attention of the 

 Indian Government has been drawn to a new plant, which 

 is common in southern India, and yields abundant supplies 

 of pure caoutchouc. It is an apocynaceous plant called 

 Prameria (/landidifera, the native habitat of which appears 

 to be in the forests of Cochin China, where the liquid juice 

 is often employed in medicine by the Annamites and 

 Cambodians. When broken, the twigs are seen to con- 

 tain an abundance of caoutchouc, which can be drawn out 

 into threads, as in the East African Landolphias. — Elec- 

 trician. 



The Human Footprints in Nevada. — The scientific 

 world was much excited during the summer of 1881 by 

 news of the discovery of human footprints near Carson, 

 Nevada. The tracks were uncovered in quarrying stone 

 for building. Some of the tracks were made by an animal 

 allied to the elephant ; some resembled the footprints of 

 the horse and the deer ; others were made by a wolf ; and 

 some were bird tracks. The supposed human footprints 

 were in six series, each with alternate right and left tracks. 

 The stride was about that of a man of medium height, 

 being from 2 J to 3 feet in length. The footprints are from 

 18 to 20 inches long, and about 8 inches wide, and the line 

 of the right tracks is separated from the line of the left 

 tracks from 18 to 19 inches. This width of straddle was 

 naturally regarded as aflbrding strong reason for rejecting 

 the belief that the footprints were those of men. Pro- 

 fessor O. C. Marsh has put forward the much more pro- 

 bable theory that they are the tracks of a large sloth, 

 remains of which have been found at the same level as 

 the tracks. "The footprints," he says, "are almost exactly 

 what these animals would make if the hind feet covered 

 the impressions of the fore feet," In size, in stride, and in 

 width of straddle the footprints agi-ee closely with what 

 would probably be made by the Mylodon or by the 

 Morotherium, the two kinds of sloth whose remains have 

 been discovered in the same geological strata. — Nevxastle 

 Weekly Chronicle. 



