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{July 26, 188- 



facilities for spreading by " indirect infection." To get 

 rid of these conditions should be our special aim at such 

 a moment. 



We have already pointed out how the poisonous dis- 

 charges infect all receptacles into which they may be 

 received and which tend to retain them, such as cesspools, 

 sewers, and drains ; how, when these receptacles are 

 leaky, the soil around them becomes infected, leading to 

 the pollution of air and of the water-bearing strata ; and 

 to a less extent it must be remembered that clothing and 

 linen which have become soiled by these discharges are 

 in a similar way liable to retain the infection. But of all 

 these sources of infection none are so dangerous as those 

 which are liable to infect our public water-services ; 

 indeed single attacks of cholera in its slightest form may, 

 if the discharges can by means of streams or otherwise 

 reach our water-sources or reservoirs, "exert a terribly 

 infective power on considerable masses of population." 

 Measures of cleanliness, taken beforehand are, according 

 to the Memorandum, of far more importance for the pro- 

 tection of a district against cholera than removal or disin- 

 fection of filth after the disease has actually made its 

 appearance, and even if cholera fails to spread to this 

 country all action taken in this direction will, by prevent- 

 ing disease and ill-health from other causes, in the long 

 run turn out to be remunerative. 



Immediate investigation as to the wholesomeness of 

 water-sei rices shouli be made. The sources and the 

 reservoirs should be examined by the authorities; inter- 

 mittent services should, as far as possible, give way to 

 constant supplies ; cisterns should be kept scrupulously 

 clean, and above all the waste-pipes leading from them 

 should be so contrived as to flow in the open air. All 

 accumulations of filth and house refuse should be re- 

 moved regularly and at frequent intervals from the 

 proximity of dwellings ; house-drains and waste-pipes 

 should be well ventilated, and so disconnected from the 

 main sewers as to prevent the possibility of air from the 

 public culverts from making its way into them. Action 

 in these directions will do more to save households from 

 infection than all the quarantine measures ever devised, 

 and it is the absence of such action that has enabled 

 cholera to spread itself broadcast throughout Egypt, not- 

 withstanding the rigid measures of quarantine that have 

 been adopted in that country. 



THE LIFE OF EDWARD HENRY PALMER 



The Life and Achievements of Edward Henry Palmer. 

 By Walter Besant, M.A. (London : Murray, 1883.) 



THE tragedy of Palmer's death gives his biographer the 

 right to look to a wider circle of readers than would 

 in ordinary cases feel interest in the life of an Oriental 

 scholar and explorer. Mr. Besant has used his opportunity 

 with the skill of an accomplished story-teller. Those who 

 hive dipped into the author's imaginative works will 

 quickly recognise the familiar methods of art by which 

 the reader's interest is sustained and carried on, the 

 whole narrative disposed so as to lead up to the final 

 cUa strophe, and the figure of the hero invested even from 

 childhood with something of an unearthly glamour. This 

 method of treatment is a little disappointing to those who 



do not need to have their interest in Palmer stimulated, 

 but only wish to learn as much about him and his work 

 as possible ; but it is fair to remember on the one hand 

 that Mr. Besant is no Orientalist, and so naturally looks 

 at Palmer's linguistic achievements through a mysterious 

 haze, the effect of which is very artistically imparted to 

 the reader's mind, and on the other hand that the excep- 

 tional nature of Palmer's powers, and the exceptional 

 course of education in which these powers found their 

 fitting development, are really calculated to stir the senti- 

 ment of wonder which the biographer has chosen to make 

 the keynote of his book. 



Palmer's linguistic talent was not analytical but mimetic ; 

 it was associated in his youth with histrionic tastes ; and 

 the love of mimicry, as Prof. Nicholl has well observed in 

 his appendix on " Palmer's Work as an Oriental Scholar," 

 had a large part in his literary compositions in Oriental 

 tongues. It was through the mimetic faculty — not ot 

 course by mere vulgar superficial mimicry, but by a child- 

 like gift of sympathy and imitation — that Palmer learned 

 iges. His teac'.ers were men, not books ; and when 

 he learned Arabic, for example, he did not merely learn 

 tar and vocables, but acquired the power of thinking 

 and expressing himself like an Arab. When he spoke or 

 wrote an Eastern tongue he seemed to be for the time a 

 real Oriental ; to hear him recite Arabic was to feel 

 one's self carried back to a camp in the desert. The talent, 

 or rather the type of mind, which all this implies is very 

 rare in the West ; in the East it is more common, though 

 hardly in the perfection in which Palmer possessed it ; 

 and this perhaps is the reason why C riental languages 

 ultimately became the study of his choice. His gifts put 

 him in thorough sympathy with the tastes and aims of 

 modern Oriental scholarship ; it was the later models of 

 Eastern literature, themselves imitative and full of dex- 

 terous variations of fixed themes rather than of original 

 ideas, that fascinated him and called forth his powers in 

 not unsuccessful rivalry with the best native writers of 

 the day. The precise character of Palmer's scholarship 

 cannot be expressed by a single Western term. He was 

 more than a linguist and yet less than, or other than, a 

 scholar of the Western type ; for he was singularly desti- 

 tute of the critical faculty which we esteem inseparable 

 from scholarship. He was in a word an Oriental Adib, 

 a man who loved language for the feats that could be 

 done with it, and not for the ulterior scientific purposes 

 which are the chief concern of most Western Orientalists. 



Mr. Besant does not seem to have clearly grasped the 

 peculiar type of Palmer's learning. He sees that he 

 differed from most Orientalists ; but he has the curious 

 notion that the difference lay in a sort of grammatical 

 pedantry which Palmer lacked, and to which other men 

 give undue importance. That of course is purely ima- 

 ginary. Palmer more nearly perhaps than any other 

 Occidental who ever lived realised the Eastern ideal of 

 literary culture. But the best Western Orientalists have 

 been great just because they had a different and, it must 

 be added, a more fruitful conception of the aims and uses 

 of linguistic knowledge than the East has attained to. 

 In criticism, in comparative philology, in the use of 

 language to throw light on the past history of our race, 

 Western scholars have solved problems which the most 

 accomplished Oriental never even contemplates, and in 



