141 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



Creation 

 riticism 



096. CREDULITY ACCEPTING 

 WORTHLESS REMEDIES- The Silkworm 

 Plague. Pamphlets about the plague [dis- 

 ease of silkworms] had been showered upon 

 the public, the monotony of waste paper be- 

 ing broken, at rare intervals, by a more or 

 less useful publication. " The pharmaco- 

 poeia of the silkworm," wrote M. Cornalia in 

 1860, " is now as complicated as that of 

 man. Gases, liquids, and solids have been 

 laid under contribution. From chlorin to 

 sulfurous acid, from nitric acid to rum, from 

 sugar to sulfate of quinin all has been 

 invoked in behalf of this unhappy insect." 

 The helpless cultivators, moreover, welcomed 

 with ready trustfulness every new remedy, 

 if only pressed upon them with sufficient 

 hardihood. It seemed impossible to dimin- 

 ish their blind confidence in their blind 

 guides. In 1863 the French Minister of Ag- 

 riculture signed an agreement to pay 500,- 

 000 francs for the use of a remedy which 

 its promoter declared to be infallible. It 

 was tried in twelve different departments of 

 France, and found perfectly useless. In no 

 single instance was it successful. TYNDALL 

 Floating Matter of the Air, essay 1, p. 10. 

 ('A., 1895.) 



697. CRIME NOT EXCUSED BY IN- 

 TOXICATION The time may perhaps come 

 when the man who voluntarily resigns that 

 self-directing power which is the noblest gift 

 of his Creator, and gives himself over to the 

 domination of rage, lust, jealousy, or any 

 other bad passion which may be excited by 

 the action of alcohol on his brain, may be 

 regarded as not less criminal than an en- 

 gine-driver who should raise the fire of his 

 locomotive to an extra heat, and bring up 

 its steam to its highest pressure, and then 

 abandon it, after starting it on a career of 

 destruction. CARPENTER Mental Physiology, 

 bk. ii, ch. 17, p. 651. (A., 1900.) 



698. CRIMINALS OFTEN MORAL IM- 

 BECILES Physical, Mental, and Moral De- 

 generates Juvenile Offenders. Now, if 

 there be a class of persons who are without 

 the moral sense, who are true moral imbec- 

 iles, it is the class of habitual criminals. 

 All observers who have made them their 

 study agree that they constitute a morbid 

 or degenerate variety of mankind, marked 

 by peculiar low physical and mental charac- 

 teristics. They are scrofulous, often de- 

 formed, with badly formed, angular heads, 

 are stupid, sluggish, deficient in vital en- 

 ergy, and sometimes afflicted with epilepsy. 

 They are of weak and defective intellect, tho 

 excessively cunning ; and now a few of them 

 are weak-minded and imbecile. The women 

 are ugly in features, and without grace of 

 expression or movement. The children who 

 become juvenile criminals do not evince the 

 educational aptitude of the higher industrial 

 classes; they are deficient in the power of 

 attention and application, have bad memo- 

 ries, and make slow progress in learning; 

 many of them are weak in mind and body, 



and some of them actually imbecile. At the 

 end of the best part of a life spent among 

 prisoners, a prison surgeon declares himself 

 to be mainly impressed with their extreme 

 deficiency or perversion of moral feeling, the 

 strength of the evil propensities of their na- 

 ture, and their utter impracticability; 

 neither kindness nor severity availing to 

 prevent them from devising and doing wrong 

 day by day, altho their conduct brought on 

 them further privations. MAUDSLEY Body 

 and Mind, lect. 4, p. 110. (A., 1898.) 



699. CRIMSON OF SUNSET AND 



SUNRISE Mountain-tops Shine Like Rubies 

 Glory Due to Dust. The action of the 

 particles [of matter suspended in the air] 

 upon the solar light increases with the at- 

 mospheric distances traversed by the sun's 

 rays. The lower the sun, therefore, the 

 greater the action. The shorter waves of 

 the spectrum being more and more with- 

 drawn, the tendency is to give the longer 

 waves an enhanced predominance in the 

 transmitted light. The tendency, in other 

 words, of this light, as the rays traverse 

 ever-increasing distances, is more and more 

 towards red. This, I say, might be stated 

 as an inference, but it is borne out in the 

 most impressive manner by facts. When 

 the Alpine sun is setting, or, better still, 

 some time after he has set, leaving the limbs 

 and shoulders of the mountains in shadow, 

 while their snowy crests are bathed by the 

 retreating light, the snow glows with a 

 beauty and solemnity hardly equaled by 

 any other natural phenomenon. So, also, 

 when first illumined by the rays of the un- 

 risen sun, the mountain-heads, under favor- 

 able atmospheric conditions, shine like ru- 

 bies. And all this splendor is evoked by the 

 simple mechanism of minute particles, them- 

 selves without color, suspended in the air. 

 TYNDALL Fragments of Science, vol. i, ch. 5, 

 p. 141. (A., 1897.) 



TOO. CRITICISM OF THE HUMAN 

 EYE Practical Perfection through Theoretical 

 Defects. The perfection of this adaptation 

 [of the human eye], however, has been par- 

 tially denied by several modern writers, 

 who have based their denial on a statement 

 contained in a most interesting and instruct- 

 ive lecture on " The Eye and Vision," given 

 some years ago by my very distinguished 

 friend, Professor Helmholtz. The first part 

 of this lecture is devoted to an exposition of 

 the structure and actions of the eye, con- 

 sidered merely as an optical instrument, and 

 of those more recent researches which have 

 shown that, in addition to retinal defects 

 previously known, the eye is not perfectly 

 corrected for either spherical or chromatic 

 aberration, that the crystalline lens has by 

 no means the perfect clearness it has been 

 supposed to possess, and that its fibrous 

 structure produces an irregular radiation in 

 the image of any single bright point. " Now, 

 it is not too much to say," continues the lec- 

 turer, " that if an optician wanted to sell 



