396 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



[Nov. 14, 1884. 



this compound nature of man is defended in a scientific 

 treatise, and Knowledge is concerned with its scientific side 

 alone, the question that leaps to the lips is, when did 

 the direct action take place — in the embryo, or at birth, 

 or at the first awakenings of the moral sense? Readers of 

 that eccentric book, " The Unseen Universe," published 

 some eight years ago, may remember that the authors 

 bailt up a spiritual body whose home lay beyond the 

 visible cosmos.* Their argument was to the following 

 effect : — Just as light is held to result from vibrations of 

 the ether set in motion by self-luminous or light^reflecting 

 bodies, so every thought occasions molecular action in 

 the brain, which gives rise to vibrations of the ether. 

 While the efiect of a portion of our mental activity is to 

 leave a permanent record on the matter of the brain, and 

 tiius constitute an organ of memory, the efiect of the 

 remaining portion is to set up thought-waves across the 

 ether, and to construct by these means, in some part of the 

 anseen universe, what may be called our " spiritual body." 

 By this process there is being gradually built up, as the 

 resultant of our present activities, our future selves ; and 

 when we die our consciousness is in some mysterious way 

 transferred to the spiritual body, and thus the continuity 

 «f identity is secured. 



Eternal form shall still divide 

 Th' eternal soul from all beside. 



We may well quote the ancient words : " If they do 

 these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the 

 dry t" The physicists, who thus locate the soul in limits- 

 less space, and call it vibrations ; the mathematician, who 

 said it must be extension ; and the musician, who said, like 

 Aristoxenus, that it was harmony; the Cartesian philosopher 

 who locates it in the pineal gland ; the Costa Rican, who places 

 it in the liver ; the Tongans, who make it co-extensive with 

 ■the body ; and the Swedenborgians, who assume an under- 

 lying, inner self pervading the whole frame — these have 

 met together, the lower and the higher culture have kissed 

 ■each other. 



The tripartite division of man by the Rabbis, the Platon- 

 ists, the Pauiinists, the Chinese, the medifeval theories of 

 vegetal, sensitive, and rational souls — what are these but 

 the " other self " of savage philosophy writ large! Plato's 

 number is found among the Sioux : of their three souls 

 one goes to a cold place, another to a warm place, and 

 <iie third stays to guard the body. Washington Matthews, 

 in his " Ethnology and Philology of the Hidatsa Indians," 

 says : — " It is believed by some of the Hidatsa that every 

 human being has four souls in one. They account for the 

 phenomena of gradual death, when the extremities are 

 apparently dead while consciousness remains, by supposing 

 the four souls to depart, one after another, at difl'erent times. 

 When dissolution is complete, they say that all the souls are 

 gone, and have joined together again outside the body. I 

 have heard a Minsutaree quietly discussing this doctrine 

 with an Assinneboine, who believed in only one soul to 

 each body." 



Let it not be thought that because science explains the 

 earthborn origin of some of man's loftiest hopes, she makes 

 claim to have spoken the last word, and forbids utterance 

 from any other quarter. The theologian is not less free to 

 assume such miraculous intervention in man's development 

 as marks him nearer to the angel than to the ape, only his 

 assumptions lie beyond the scope of scientific inquiry. And 

 it should be noted that whilst science takes away, she gives 



• For criticism of this pseudo-scientific theory, see Professor 

 ■Clifford's brilliant paper in " Lectures and Essays," Vol. I., pp. 228, 

 St. ; and a review of " The Unseen Universe," by the present 

 writer, Fraser's Magazine, January, 1876. 



with no niggard hand, so that the loss is more seeming 

 than real. 



When belief in the earth's central and supreme place in 

 the universe was surrendered at the bidding of astronomy, 

 there was compensation in the revelation of a universe to 

 which thought can fix no limits. And if man is bidden to 

 surrender belief in his difference in kind from other living 

 creatures, he will be given the conception of a collective 

 humanity whose duties and destiny he shares. That con- 

 ception will not be the destruction, but the enlargement, of 

 the field of the emotions, and, in contrasting the evan- 

 escence of the individual with the permanence of the race, 

 he may find a profounder meaning in the familiar words — 



" We are such stnff as dreams are made on. 

 And our little life is rounded with a sleep." 



PLEASANT HOURS WITH THE 

 MICROSCOPE. 



By Henkt J. Slack, F.G.S., F.R.M.S. 



A DADDY-LONGLEGS is not an insect treated by 

 ordinary observers with much respect. Children 

 laugh at it, and wonder at its readiness to leave a few 

 legs in their fingers. Older folks find nothing elegant in 

 its appearance, or graceful in its short snatches of flight 

 across the grass. To the gardener and farmer it is an object 

 of dislike on account of the damage its grub does to 

 lawns and grass-land. Curtis, in " Farm Insects," says 

 of it: "This universally - distributed and mischievous 

 gnat, by dropping its eggs in the field, garden, and 

 pasture - land, annually causes serious losses to the 

 cultivator by the destruction of various crops as well as 

 flowers." "rhe ravages committed by it are sometimes 

 enormous, whole fields of mangel-wurzel falling a prey to 

 it, besides the ruin of potatoes, beets, cabbages, kc. There 

 are upwards of thirty British species of Tipula or Crane- 

 flies, the Daddy-Longlegs being the biggest. Their grubs 

 are tough, hardy things, standing any amount of wet, and 

 called in some country places Leather Jackets. Out of 

 thirty species, Curtis only identified three as positively 

 known to be a serious nuisance. 



The profile of these insects shows how they got their 

 name of Crane-flies, from the projection of the mouth 

 organs, which, however, make a snout rather than a neck. 

 The male of Tipula okra^ea, the Daddy, is easily known 

 from the female by the end of its abdomen being blunt and 

 thick, while that of the female is tapering and pointed. 

 Mr. Curtis says, " The eggs are laid by the females, I appre- 

 hend, as they fly, or when they rest amongst the herbage, 

 and are propelled as from a popgun." This may be so 

 when the nature of the ground suits, but the creature is 

 supplied with an ovipositing apparatus consisting of two 

 parts, one adapted, like certain forceps used by surgeons, to 

 enlarge an orifice, and another to guide the eggs into the 

 hole thus made. Fig. 1 represents these organs separated ; 

 the shorter one, which conducts the eggs, is opened wide to 

 show its hollow jaws. The female often seems stuffed full of 

 eggs, which, according to Curtis, may amount to three hundred 

 or more at one time. The maggots are footless things, with 

 black heads and good jaws. They change to pupse from 

 August to September, and are furnished with spiny rings, 

 which enable them to work their way to the surface of the 

 ground, and, when their emerging time comes, he says, 

 thousands of empty cases may be seen sticking half out of 

 the earth amongst the grass. The wings of the perfect 

 insects, though long and fairly broad, do not make them 



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