Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, March 1899

In the fifth place, let me plead for the virtue of patience. In a scientific career we encounter two dangers, for the avoidance of which patience is our best support and guide. When life is young and enthusiasm is boundless; when from the details which we may have laboriously gathered together we seem to catch sight of some new fact or principle, some addition of more or less importance to the sum of human knowledge, there may come upon us the eager desire to make our discovery known. We may long to be allowed to add our own little stone to the growing temple of science. We may think of the pride with which we should see our names enrolled among those of the illustrious builders by whom this temple has been slowly reared since the infancy of mankind. So we commit our observations to writing, and send them for publication. Eventually we obtain the deep gratification of appearing in print among well-known authors in science. Far be it from me to condemn this natural desire for publicity. But, as your experience grows, you will probably come to agree with me that if the desire were more frequently and energetically curbed, scientific literature would gain much thereby. There is among us far too much hurry in publication. We are so afraid lest our observations or deductions should be forestalled – so anxious not to lose our claim to priority, that we rush before the world, often with a half-finished performance, which must be corrected, supplemented, or canceled by some later communication. It is this feverish haste which is largely answerable for the mass of jejune, ill-digested, and erroneous matter that cumbers the pages of modern scientific journals. Here it is that you specially need patience. Before you venture to publish anything, take the utmost pains to satisfy yourselves that it is true, that it is new, and that it is worth putting into print. And be assured that this reticence, while it is a kindness to the literature of science, will most certainly bring with it its own reward to yourselves. It will increase your confidence, and make your ultimate contributions more exact in their facts as well as more accurate and convincing in their argument.

The other danger to which I referred as demanding patience is of an opposite kind. As we advance in our career, and the facts of our investigations accumulate around us, there will come times of depression when we seem lost in a labyrinth of detail out of which no path appears to be discoverable. We have, perhaps, groped our way through this maze, following now one clew, now another, that seemed to promise some outlet to the light. But the darkness has only closed around us the deeper, and we feel inclined to abandon the research as one in which success is, for us at least, unattainable. When this blankness of despair shall come upon you, take courage under it, by remembering that a patient study of any department of Nature is never labor thrown away. Every accurate observation you have made, every new fact you have established, is a gain to science. You may not for a time see the meaning of these observations, nor the connection of these facts. But their meaning and connection are sure in the end to be made out. You have gone through the labor necessary for the ascertainment of truth, and if you patiently and watchfully bide your time, the discovery of the truth itself may reward your endurance and your toil.

It is by failures as well as by successes that the true ideal of the man of science is reached. The task allotted to him in life is one of the noblest that can be undertaken. It is his to penetrate into the secrets of Nature, to push back the circumference of darkness that surrounds us, to disclose ever more and more of the limitless beauty, harmonious order, and imperious law that extend throughout the universe. And while he thus enlarges our knowledge, he shows us also how Nature may be made to minister in an ever-augmenting multiplicity of ways to the service of humanity. It is to him and his conquests that the material progress of our race is mainly due. If he were content merely to look back over the realms which he has subdued, he might well indulge in jubilant feelings, for his peaceful victories have done more for the enlightenment and progress of mankind than were ever achieved by the triumphs of war. But his eye is turned rather to the future than to the past. In front of him rises the wall of darkness that shrouds from him the still unknown. What he has painfully accomplished seems to him but little in comparison with the infinite possibilities that lie beyond. And so he presses onward, not self-satisfied and exultant, but rather humbled and reverential, yet full of hope and courage for the work of further conquest that lies before him. —Nature.

SHALL WE TEACH OUR DAUGHTERS THE VALUE OF MONEY?

By ALEXANDRA L. B. IDE

I am induced to write a few lines on this subject by a remark recently made to me by a widow of large property. In speaking about the management of her money she said: "As to myself, I leave everything to my business man or agent. I would not know if my tax bills were correct. He gives me plenty of money to spend on my charities; why should I trouble myself about the details?" Evidently it had never occurred to her that she might be spending her principal; that some day she might wake up to the fact that her fortune had been dissipated. Another rich woman, to whom I made the remark that certain bonds were bought at par, inquired, "Is that the same thing as buying them on a margin?" Now here were representative women of New York society, both belonging to excellent families, and to all appearances well educated. It is amazing that such profound ignorance on ordinary business matters exists. In conversation with many other wealthy women I discovered that it was very much the exception to find a woman who possessed the slightest knowledge of money matters.

Now, why should these things be? The time has passed for a young girl to be brought up a "perfect fool." Let her not waste the beautiful morning of her life in profitless and frivolous occupations. The reason often given as excuse for the ignorance of many women is, so few comparatively have any money to keep, therefore it is useless to teach them.

True, it is unusual to find a young girl with an independent fortune; but she may marry rich, and what a help she would be to a sensible man if she were capable of aiding him in his business affairs! Again, she might be left a widow, and have the entire direction of her husband's property. No knowledge is ever lost. The more one knows, the more one realizes how little one does know. I maintain that a woman's intellect is perfectly capable of coping with and understanding business affairs. In some matters she is far shrewder than the average man, and in many cases her quick insight sees at a glance that which man requires time to penetrate. Only give her half a chance. I do not wish for a moment to be understood as advocating women becoming stockbrokers or lawyers; nothing could be more unnatural or unsuitable. It seems to me only in accordance with the wishes of a reasonable woman to participate with her brothers in such rudimentary knowledge as will enable her to oversee or take the entire charge of her own property. Take, for example, a well-to-do New York business man. He has acquired through his own industry and shrewdness a large fortune. He maps out the education for his children. His sons are sent to the best schools, and afterward to college. He determines that no expense shall be spared to fit them for their future career.

For his daughters expensive foreign governesses are engaged, who teach them the languages, music, and other accomplishments. Or the daughters are sent to some high-priced fashionable school, where they are put through a course of training to enable them to "shine in society." Having reached the age of eighteen, the daughter returns to the parental roof.

What does she know in exchange for the large sum of money her education has cost? Usually her penmanship is bad and illegible. Her knowledge of arithmetic very slight. These two essentials of education are not her forte.

But she is a good dancer, and perhaps at the assembly or some such function the father's heart has swelled with pride as he noticed how eagerly she was sought as a partner. She can sing French songs, probably those which are rather risqué. She can converse, perhaps, in two or three different modern languages. As a general rule her French can scarcely be understood by the foreign attachés at Newport. The girl is absolutely unequipped for real life, and the man of sense, who has passed the boyish age and is looking for a partner for life, knows this. Possibly this is one cause why there are comparatively few marriages in our best society. What man is less likely to seek as wife a woman who knows something about the care and value of money? It is strange that a father should be so blinded to the best interests of his daughter. Is it because he considers her intellect so far below that of his son that he makes no effort to instruct her in regard to the care of money? The only thing she knows about money is how to spend it – generally on herself, for clothes and jewels. Perhaps on the first of the month, when the bills for his daughter's extravagance pour in on him, he is vexed; but if his fortune is large, and it is no inconvenience for him to pay them, he generally does so without a murmur. "Let her have a good time while she is young," he soliloquizes.

But stop a moment and consider. What you sow you reap is as true in this material concern as in the world of agriculture. The fond parent by his indulgence and neglect is sowing the seeds of extravagance, perhaps those of want. Years hence she may reap the fruit of his ill-judged kindness in fostering habits of reckless expenditure.

In a few years the father dies; his property is divided; the daughter receives her share. If she is married to a good business man who has time to take charge of her fortune, possibly, during her husband's lifetime, the difficulty is bridged over. But the chances are she may not be married, or again the man she has selected as husband may be worthless as a business man. It is not to be expected that a brother (even if she is fortunate enough to possess one), however kind, will overburden himself with the manifold details of looking after the property of a sister. He has his own interests, which demand his attention. He thinks his duty accomplished when he has chosen a man to look after his sister's affairs whom he believes to be reliable. The person whom he has appointed as guardian over his sister's interests may have an honest and high character, but that is no guarantee that in a moment of weakness he may not yield to the temptation of abusing the trust. He knows the woman is absolutely ignorant of how her affairs are being conducted, and in all probability would not be the wiser if he appropriated some of her fortune to his own uses. Her very ignorance is his security. Who can not recall several such cases? If each day for half an hour the father had instructed his child in the essentials of business – how to calculate interest quickly, the manner of filling out a lease in renting property, explaining about mortgages, and giving her a lesson as to what were the best investments – she would know enough to steer clear of the many sharks and vultures which usually find her a ready prey. The woman who does not know the difference between a registered and coupon bond should be ashamed to acknowledge such ignorance. A parent's neglect in teaching his child about monetary affairs is culpable, almost amounting to a crime. There is nothing so costly as ignorance. This very fortune which you have taken infinite pains to accumulate will be perhaps dissipated, owing to your want of forethought in imparting the requisite knowledge to your child. This information she will in after years buy for herself at a heavy premium. If knowledge is power in other matters, it is more than ever true in monetary affairs. Power to keep your fortune is a power worth having, and more difficult to acquire than to make a fortune. Let a girl but try to earn five dollars, and she will see the task is not an easy one. Then, unless she be a fool, she will realize that what is so difficult to obtain should not be wasted.

I recall the case of a fashionable woman in New York society which came under my own observation. Her husband told me he had deposited in a bank a large sum of money for his wife to draw on, given her a bank and check book, explained and showed her how to draw checks. He very sensibly thought that it would be a far better plan for her to pay her bills herself, instead of coming to him every time she needed money. His relief from being her almoner was of short duration, for in less than a month she came to him, and, throwing the check and bank books on his library table, told him it was too much trouble – she could not make head or tail of it; she wished to return to the old system! He could pay her bills in future. This woman had been married twenty years. Too much trouble, is it? Yes, I believe this is the keynote why women are so ignorant. They are lazy, pure and simple. The details of business are too dry and uninteresting. It is so much easier to have some one else do the work for you. So much less exertion to read a novel, or ride the wheel with some attractive man. "How prosaic," you say, "to add up account books, balance check books, and calculate whether your tax bill is correct when your property is assessed at the rate of 2.01!"

I believe, if the truth were told, half the divorces in which the reason given is incompatibility of temper arise from the fact that women know nothing of the value of money. I am not speaking entirely of women who have their own property, but also of those who are dependent on a husband's income. The wife has a vague idea that there is an inexhaustible supply of cash somewhere! What man can not tell you how worried and harassed he felt when his wife came to him for money to spend on nonessentials, and which he could ill afford? If he attempted to remonstrate with her he probably received a rude or angry reply! The wife, perhaps, had been used to an indulgent father, who gratified her every whim. She overlooks the fact that a father and husband are two vastly different beings, and require different treatment. To some women a husband's value decreases when he can no longer supply them with finery. Their alleged love soon wanes, and a divorce is sought on any pretext.

It is easy to see that by a knowledge of business affairs a woman can dispense with the services of an agent or trust company, whose salary thus being saved is added to her income. In case a woman is fitted by a proper education for so doing, who could attend to her own interests better than herself, as she is the party interested? The phrase, "If you wish anything well done, do it yourself," is never better exemplified than in this case. Lastly, but not least, in saving our money it need not be from a miserly spirit; but the more we have, the more we can profitably give away. What pleasure equals that of relieving real distress, and of helping others? Did not our Saviour himself set the example of saving when, after performing the miracle where he fed the multitude with the loaves and fishes, he said: "Gather up the fragments that remain. Let nothing be lost."

SKETCH OF CLÉMENCE ROYER

By M. JACQUES BOYER

Madame Clémence Augustine Royer was born at Nantes, France, April 21, 1830, of an old Catholic family. When she reached a suitable age she was sent to school at the Sacré Cœur, where she received the most of her education. Very shortly after coming out of the convent she abandoned the religious doctrines they had tried to inculcate in her there, and, like so many young persons, was attracted to poetry. But her literary efforts as a whole received very little attention, and she would never have been successful if she had only teased the Muse. Happily, she applied herself, about 1850, to more serious studies, and went to England, where she spent several years and acquired a thorough knowledge of the language of Shakespeare. She removed thence to Switzerland, and there found her definite vocation. The natural sciences, philosophy, and political economy from that time engaged her attention.

The opening of Madame Royer's course of lectures to women on logic at Lausanne in the winter of 1859 and 1860 attracted much notice. The first lecture was published under the title of an Introduction to Philosophy, and brought most flattering praise to the author from contemporary students. In an animated style the disciple of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the apostle of bold and ingenious ideas, was already beginning to declare herself. In the meantime she collaborated on the journal The New Economist, which the historian and sociologist Pascal Duprat had just founded.41

At the close of 1860, the Canton of Vaud having opened a competition on the Principles of Taxation, "the little lady with a straw hat," as her neighbors familiarly called her, handled the subject so thoroughly that her memoir, entitled Théorie de l'Impôt et Dime sociale (Theory of the Impost and Social Tithe, 1862), won her the honor of dividing the prize with Proudhon. While not all the ideas set forth in this work were new, she took care at least to co-ordinate the systems of her predecessors, to select from the one and the other of them what was good in them, and to condense into a homogeneous whole works which were scattered hither and thither. But we will pass over these books of her youth to dwell more at large on that part of her work which will assure Madame Royer an honorable place among the most zealous promoters and ablest defenders of the Darwinian theories.

Her first effort in this line was to translate into French, in 1862, the Origin of Species of the great English naturalist, preceding the work with a preface which in itself alone constituted an excellent summary of the doctrine of evolution. She pointed out the results which logically follow from the transformist theory. She did not conceal from herself that in doing thus she would be the object of attacks from the immobilist and ecclesiastical parties still so numerous thirty years ago in all civilized countries; but she flattered herself, too, and with just reason, that she would furnish the liberals and progressives of France with a powerful weapon. In this introductory chapter she characterized the original and strong personality of Darwin in appropriate terms, saying: "While he has not the brilliant qualities of a Cuvier as a writer or a professor, he is at least a worthy heir of the profoundly philosophical science of the two Geoffroys Saint-Hilaire … one of those workmen who cut their stone with an indefatigable courage. But there are also thicker and heavier stones, without beauty or apparent grace, which are designed to be hidden at the base of an immense edifice, like the massive columns with which the architects of the middle ages decorated the crypts of their Gothic cathedrals. It is truth in the rough. He does not impose his condition, but communicates it and proves it. If it is certain, he affirms it; when he supposes, he says so; when he doubts, he acknowledges it." She then passes to the exposition of Darwinism as responding to one of the noblest aspirations of the mind, the preliminary step to the accounting for the world of organized beings, as astronomy, physics, and geology have explained the origin of inanimate substances. In effect, the illustrious Englishman, connecting the domain of botany and zoölogy with the action of second causes, sought first to comprehend the genesis, and then the evolution, in the same way that astronomers and geologists teach us concerning the origin of our globe and the successive phases through which its surface has passed.

Not only did Madame Clémence Royer initiate us into transformism. In her masterly introduction she went still further. Carrying the exposition to its final consequences, she provoked a useful revolution in the ideas then current. She dared to say what many men of science would only have left to be inferred. Her translation, revealing the name of Darwin to the French public, who hardly knew of it at that period, gave the occasion for a very active conflict between the partisans of "creationism" and the Nantese philosophy. The success of this work was so great as to induce her to complete her preface by publishing a few years afterward a work wholly her own, Origine de l'Homme et des Sociétés (Origin of Man and Societies, 1870), which, being her best production, deserves a special analysis. With the assistance of documents collected by the most famous anthropologists, Madame Royer reconstitutes the history of the primitive ages of mankind, and after studying its origins and development she seeks for the bonds that connect the great human family with the rest of living Nature; and finally forecasts its future from its past.

In the first part she takes up the question of the origin of life and of its transformations upon the earth. The living species are grouped around man, who is the topmost shoot of the gigantic "tree of life." Two laws regulate the transmission of life – the law of heredity and the law of variability. The former assures the continuation of the type, and the latter variety in its modifications. The organic kingdom as a whole oscillates between these two contrary rules which fix limits each upon the other and which suffice to explain the successive appearance through the ages of different forms of life. The organic individual is thus the solution of a problem in algebra set to Nature. Atavism is the constant quantity, and the force of variation is the perpetually changing unknown factor. The problem is therefore complex, but the principles to which the variable is subject resolve themselves into a series of partial laws which are deduced from an aggregate of observations, and which, according to our author, one may summarize as he goes.

Most of the variations reveal themselves in the embryo during the fætal period. But after its birth the young product is affected not only by the ambient medium, but also by the consequences of the reproductive act. The latter, in fact, having impressed the initial movement upon its organism, reacts incessantly against the modifying influences of the ambient, and atavism prevails as always the resultant unless important accidents come in to change the course.

It is only necessary to add a few experimental considerations to complete a rapid sketch of the laws of variability. First, correlation of growth: Homologous organs tend to vary in the same direction, and together. Are the fingers joined or divided? The hand follows similar variations. Then there is a compensation of growth which prevents the excess of the preceding rule; when one organ is developed, another is atrophied. Also vital competition. Every organized being must be in harmony with the conditions of its existence or it will not subsist; the monster may appear, but will not live. Lastly, by virtue of natural selection, the individual must likewise possess the means of perpetuating its species. Otherwise, a series of transformations will come to pass in the course of successive generations, improving the organism and adapting it more and more to the exigencies of its habitat. The least prolific species of to-day fulfill these conditions so well that they of themselves alone would cover the surface of the earth if their multiplication was not checked by that of other species. But as only a limited quantity of life is possible on our planet, the less well-adapted organisms perish. The struggle therefore produces a selection. It is hence presumed that in the same species only varieties manifesting tendencies in most complete harmony with the method of their existence will be preserved, all the intermediate varieties being destroyed. Consequently, if we push the doctrine of Darwin to its extreme limits, we arrive at the idea, now rejected, that in the beginning only a single germ arose at one point on the globe. All the analogies, on the other hand, lead us to suppose that the earth was fruitful over its entire surface.

This leads us to inquire how life appeared on the earth. The debate between the heterogenists and the panspermists has been long vain, because the question has been laid before them in insoluble terms. In order to resolve it, therefore, we must take ourselves back in thought thousands of thousands of centuries in the past. A thin crust of red-hot lava, hardly solidified, extended over the incandescent nucleus of our globe. An eternity then passed before the fiery sphere was forever confined within its coffin of granite. The metalloids dominant in this chaos of affinities and repulsions were then floating in an irrespirable atmosphere along with a mass of aqueous vapors. At the end of many millions of years, the waters definitely took their place around the globe. But who can ever tell what useless abortions, to be destroyed as soon as they were created, arose in these oceans saturated with anomalous substances? The first germs of life doubtless arose from the thick proliferous stratum which was developed under the pressure of a dense atmosphere in contact with liquids still warm, incessantly traversed by electric currents of unimaginable intensity. It was a sprout that arose everywhere at once. But in those innumerable spontaneous efforts, continued during the enormous length of time required to purify the atmosphere from its acrid vapors and the seas from their foreign matters, only a small number of these germs achieved a beginning of vegetation. This, according to Madame Royer's theory, was the way life began on the globe.