4C6 



♦ KNOWLEDGE * 



[Mat 29, 1885. 



the duty. The natives say that termites habitnalh- eat earth ; the 

 isolated females may do so while awaiting development of their 

 progeny. 



In the case of termites on the wing, it is not the fittest but the 

 luckiest who survives. The first perfect insect which emerges may 

 at once be sprung upon by a sparrow, lizard, or fowl ; if it succeeds 

 in soaring, it has to run the gauntlet of the whole feathered race 

 on the wing : and again whe:: it alights, foes of all kinds are to 

 be encountered. It is curious to watch the vagaries of an amorous 

 male termite when his lady-love has been snapped up off the 

 ground. He hunts hither and thither, as if by scent, until bumping 

 up against another pursued female, he joins pursuit as second 

 admirer, perhajjs to find himself, in the end, in the maw of the 

 same sparrow or fowl which devoured his first-born. 



R. F. HricHixsox, M.D. 



Please add an additional correction to my paper on p. 143, line 

 13 from top, for "anxious" read "amorous." 



[Will Dr. Hutchinson kindly refer to column one of p. 39 of the 

 current volume of Knowledge ? — Ed.] 



DUALITY UF BKAIX. 



[1727] — Kindly allow me to describe my own experience. I am 

 a telegraphist, employed by a railway company, my duty being to 

 signal (telegraph) trains passing the station, and to receive trains 

 from other stations. There are seven instruments, and a fair 

 amount of work. Now, I can hear the train reporter call out to 

 me a train whilst booking another and be taking from another 

 station a train, all three things being done at the same time. Again, 

 I can call two separate stations with distinct calls, one left and one 

 right hand, notice what is being said on other circuits, and make 

 remarks to those with me on what is being said (though the latter 

 is rather irksome). 



Often have I caught myself in a partly imconscious state to sur- 

 rotmdings. When I have a train to send, have called station and 

 sent it, booked it, and have not been aware of it. Sometimes I have 

 taken several trains, booked them, and a moment or so after have 

 been surprised to find them received, and by no means can I recollect 

 having taken them. (At these times I have been thinking on sub- 

 jects removed from " railway work.") It has taken some little prac- 

 tice to enable me to call two stations at the same time as reading 

 other stations working. 



I shall be glad if anyone can say if practising doing several 

 things at one and the same time in injtu-ious or beneficial to the 

 brain, seeing that you can only recollect one of the things in some 

 cases, and in others neither, yet be aware you were doing some- 

 thing, yet, the spell having broken, cannot recollect. 



OXWAED. 



[In observing the transit of a star over the wires of a transit 

 instrument the observer has to cotmt the ticks of the clock, esti- 

 mate the second and tenth of a second at which the star is actually 

 bisected by each of the five or seven wires in the eye-pieces, and to 

 write down his results — all simultaneously. This is done daily at 

 every observatoi-y in the world. — Ed.] 



DEVELOPilEST. 



Mr. John Morley's work on Diderot. That distinguished French- 

 man appears to have been in the habit of trying a curious ex- 

 periment at the theatre. He tised to go to tlie highest part of 

 the house, "thrust his fingers in his ears, and then, to the 

 astonishment of his neighbours, watch the performance with the 

 sharpest interest." He knew the words of most of the favourite 

 plays by heart, and his object was to " isolate the gesture of the 

 performers, and to enjoy and criticise that by itself. He kept 

 his ears tiglitly stopped so long as the action and play went 

 well with the words as he remembered them, and he only 

 listened when some discord in gesture made him suppose 

 that he had lost his place." Sometimes he would be asked 

 for an explanation of his conduct, and he would tell his 

 neighbours that he understood better when he stopped hia 

 em-i:. "I laughed within myself," says Diderot, "at the talk 

 to which my oddity gave rise, and still more so at the sym- 

 plicity of some young people, who also put their fingers into their 

 ears to hear after my fashion, and were quite astonished that the 

 plan did not succeed." In this, as Mr. llorley points out, Diderot 

 was merely seeking a whimsical way of acting on his deep con\-ic- 

 tion that " language is a very poor, misleading, and utterly inade- 

 quate instrument for representing what it professes, and what we 

 stupidly suppose it to represent. Koussean had expressed the same 

 kind of feeling when he said that definitions might be good things 

 if onlj- we did not employ words in making them." 



ISEAEL AbR.\IIAMS. 



[1728] — "J. H." has hit the nail on the head, which I, too, for 

 one, am always, in my own mind, hammering at. It is just the weak 

 point, or link, or basis of Darwinism. The question, Shakespeare of 

 science though he was, especially in temperament, so infinitely 

 unconceited, not like Babbage and Wagner — he avoided, viz. : the 

 cause of variation — even though we should grant his theory of 

 development, from or after that. 3Iiss Ballin, Miss Naden, and 

 others assume development, " now in one way, now in another." 

 But that is just begging the question. In a chest ouside my door 

 there is a cat suckling her kittens, and a pigeon close to her 

 pumping maize into her young. Xow, I cannot say how monstrous 

 it seems to suppose that cat descended from pigeon — or, if you 

 must, from their common progenitor (he really is too convenient) . 

 (Jrganic nature is due to the same cause as inorganic ; predestined 

 development of infinite reason, not the result of selected haphazard 

 variation. CoiniEXiAioB. 



GESTURE-LANGUAGE. 



[1729] — I have been much interested in Miss Ballin's series of 

 articles on " Thought and Language," and I think that if the 

 following fact, bearing on one branch of the subject, has not been 

 quoted in your columns it deserves a comer, if one can be found 

 for it. I came across it lately, while reading the first volume of 



BEAST LANGUAGE. 



[1730] — Among all the speculations on this subject, I have never 

 seen it suggested that possibly speech was attributed to animals 

 bv ancient savage tribes, for the simple reason that they have it. 

 There is probably no animal that does not utter sometimes some 

 sound identical with, or at least resembling, some word or 

 words of a given dialect. The mere-pork was so named because 

 he says those two words. The Katy-did is another example from 

 the insect world. The cuckoo, again, says his two syllables as dis- 

 tinctly as any human being. (He is ever subject to alteration of 

 voice like us — for I have heard one persist in enouncing " keowkoo " 

 — as if suffering from cold.) The chough, again, says distinctlj' 

 " chough," and nothing else (pronounced in throat and nose). The 

 French, however, call it chouette. En passant, -what absurd lines 

 are — 



"The chough and crow to roost are gone. 

 The owl sits on the tree." 

 At evening the crow certainly roosts, but the chough and owl fly 

 and cry. 



The common cock seems to say something, but imperfectly. He 

 does not, to my ear, ever say " Cock-a-doodle-doo," but he 

 generally (not always) crows in five syllables. I have been listen- 

 in" care'ftilly to a long conversation kept up by three in my neigh- 

 bourhood — treble, tenor, and bass, I may say. The big bass fellow 

 savs, " Cock-a-haw-a-haw-w-w-w I " as if he were very tired of life 

 indeed. The tenor sings, " Cack-a-ha-a-ha ! " which is his opinion 

 on things in general. And a little chap (no doubt a bantam) insists 

 it is " Kick-a-her-a-her-e-e ! " But of doodle-doo I hear nothing. 

 They have probably shelved that cjuestion.* 



Once I was alone, and in a brown study. Suddenlj- it seemed to 

 me that I had heard (not at that moment, but shortly before) a 

 voice that said, " Quiero andar al correo." ("I want to go to the 

 post," in Spanish.) I got quite uneasy; feared hallucination. I 

 never had heard any one use that phrase, though, of course, I 

 knew each word. In a mintite or two, a cock crew hard by. There 

 was the mystery ! His observation was so bke the above words 

 that no parrot could have said them better — or, at least, so it seemed 

 to me. 



And it is probable that in early times fancy, through want of 

 letters, was much more open to impressions of the kind. Let it, 

 then, be supposed that the savage heard a beast or bird utter some 

 word or phrase coinciding with his own speech, and it is by no 

 means far-fetched to imagine, besides, that he would think many 

 more might be added, if the aniinal chose. 



Possibly, too, there were primitive dialects far more simple than 

 any we know now. Stirely the first, called harharoij must have 

 used with great frequency and iteration the syllables, bar-bar-i-e. 

 Tbeii' language abounded in labials and liquids. In Deut. ii. 20, 

 we come on aborigines (extinct even when the history was written), 

 called Zam-untmim.'f Evidently the Hebrews^ heard nothing in 

 their dialect but zum-znm-znm. It abounded in sibilants and liquids. 



* I have just heard a thrush (to which I was not listening) con- 

 clude a phrase with apijifjiiiKd quite plainly. What legends 

 might not be based on this ! 



+ Zomzommim. J Or Ammonites. 



