BUCHANAN'S. JOURNAL OF MAN
Many Authors




BUCHANAN'S
                           JOURNAL OF MAN.

            VOL. I.        DECEMBER, 1887.        NO. 11.




CONTENTS OF JOURNAL OF MAN.


  The World's Neglected or Forgotten Leaders and Pioneers
  Social Conditions--Expenses at Harvard; European Wages; India as a
    Wheat Producer; Increase of Insanity; Temperance; Flamboyant
    Animalism
  Transcendental Hash
  Just Criticism
  Progress of discovery and Improvement--Autotelegraphy; Edison's
    Phonograph; Type-setting Eclipsed; Printing in Colors; Steam
    Wagon; Fruit Preserving; Napoleon's Manuscript; Peace; Capital
    Punishment; Antarctic Explorations; The Desert shall Blossom as
    the Rose
  Life and Death--Marvellous Examples
  Outlines of Anthropology (continued) Chapter X.--The Law of
    Location in Organology




THE WORLD'S NEGLECTED OR FORGOTTEN LEADERS AND PIONEERS.


Leif Ericson, the long-forgotten Scandinavian discoverer of North
America, nearly five hundred years before Columbus, has at last
received American justice, and a statue in his honor has been erected,
which was unveiled in Boston, on Commonwealth Avenue, before a
distinguished assemblage, on the 29th of October.

The history of the Scandinavian discovery and settlement was related
on this occasion by Prof. E. Horsford, from whose address the
following passages are extracted:

    "What is the great fact that is sustained by such an array of
    authority? It is this: that somewhere to the southwest of
    Greenland, at least a fortnight's sail, there were, for 300
    years after the beginning of the 11th century, Norse colonies on
    the coast of America, with which colonies the home country
    maintained commercial intercourse. The country to which the
    merchant vessels sailed was Vinland.

    "The fact next in importance that this history establishes is,
    that the first of the Northmen to set foot on the shores of
    Vinland was Leif Ericson. The story is a simple one, and most
    happily told by Prof. Mitchell, who for forty years was
    connected with the coast survey of the United States in the
    latitudes which include the region between Hatteras and Cape
    Ann. Leif, says Prof. Mitchell, never passed to the south of the
    peninsula of Cape Cod. He was succeeded by Thorwald, Leif's
    brother. He came in Leif's ship in 1002 to Leif's headquarters
    in Massachusetts Bay and passed the winter. In the spring, he
    manned his ship and sailed eastward from Leif's house, and,
    unluckily running against a neck of land, broke the stem of the
    ship. He grounded the ship in high water at a place where the
    tide receded with the ebb to a great distance, and permitted the
    men to careen her in the intervals of the tide, to repair her.
    When she was ready to sail again, the old stem or nose of the
    ship was set up in the sand. Thorwald remained a couple of years
    in the neighboring bay, examining sandy shores and islands, but
    not going around the point on or near which he had set up his
    ship's nose. In a battle with the Indians he was wounded and
    died, and was buried in Vinland, and his crew returned to
    Greenland. A few years later, Thorfinn and his wife, Gudrid, set
    out with a fleet of three ships and 160 persons, of whom seven
    were women, to go to Vinland, and in two days' sail beyond
    Markland they came to the ship's nose set upon the shore, and,
    keeping that upon the starboard, they sailed along a sandy
    shore, which they called Wunderstrandir, and also
    Furderstrandir. One of the captains, evidently satisfied that
    they were not in the region visited by Leif and Thorwald, turned
    his vessel to the north to find Vinland. Thorfinn and Gudrid
    went further south and trafficked, and gathered great wealth of
    furs and woods, and then returned to Greenland and Norway."

Prof. Horsford refers next to various geographic names on the New
England coast which are of Scandinavian origin.

    "What do all these names mean? They are certainly not Algonquin
    or Iroquois names. They are not names bestowed by the Plymouth
    or Massachusetts Bay colonies. Of most of them is there any
    conceivable source other than the memories lingering among a
    people whose ancestors were familiar with them? Are they, for
    the most part, relics of names imposed by Northmen once residing
    here?

    "I have told you something of the evidence that Leif Ericson was
    the first European to tread the great land southwest of
    Greenland. His ancestry was of the early Pilgrims, or Puritans,
    who, to escape oppression, emigrated, 50,000 of them in sixty
    years, from Norway to Iceland, as the early Pilgrims came to
    Plymouth. They established and maintained a republican form of
    government, which exists to this day, with nominal sovereignty
    in the King of Denmark, and the flag, like our own, bears an
    eagle in its fold. Toward the close of the 10th century a
    colony, of whom Leif's father and family were members, went out
    from Iceland to Greenland. In about 999, Leif, a lad at the time
    of his father's immigration, went to Norway, and King Olaf,
    impressed with his grand elements of character, gave him a
    commission to carry the Christianity to which, he had become a
    convert to Greenland. He set out at once, and, with his soul on
    fire with the grandeur of his message, within a year
    accomplished the conversion and baptism of the whole colony,
    including his father.

    "To Leif a monument has been erected. In thus fulfilling the
    duty we owe to the first European navigator who trod our shores,
    we do no injustice to the mighty achievement of the Genoese
    discoverer under the flags of Ferdinand and Isabella, who,
    inspired by the idea of the rotundity of the earth, and with the
    certainty of reaching Asia by sailing westward sufficiently
    long, set out on a new and entirely distinct enterprise, having
    a daring and a conception and an intellectual train of research
    and deduction as its foundation quite his own. How welcome to
    Boston will be the proposition to set up in 1892, a fit statue
    to Columbus.

    "We unveil to-day the statue in which Anne Whitney has expressed
    so vividly her conception of this leader, who, almost nine
    centuries ago, first trod our shores."

The statue, however, is purely fanciful, and gives no idea either of
the personal appearance or costume of the great sailor, who has waited
for this justice to his memory much longer than Bruno and many other
heroes of human progress.

Columbus may have been original in his ideas, but it was the Northmen
who led in exploration. It was they who changed the old flat-bottomed
ships of the Roman Empire to the deep keels which made the exploration
of the Atlantic ocean possible.

This act of justice has been prompted by the appreciative sentiments
of the late Ole Bull, and the efforts of Miss Marie Brown, who has
lectured on the subject. Miss Brown says that Columbus learned of the
discovery of America at Rome, and also at Iceland, which he visited in
1477. Indeed, Columbus was not seeking the America of the Norsemen,
but was sailing to find the Indies.

But now that historic justice is done, we realize that as Bryant
expressed it of Truth, "the eternal years of God are hers," and she
needs a good many centuries to recover her stolen sceptre. The triumph
of truth follows battles in which there are many defeats that seem
almost fatal. What is the loss of five centuries in geographic truth
to the loss of a thousand years in astronomic science? It was for more
than a thousand years that the heliocentric theory of the universe,
developed by the genius of PYTHAGORAS, was ignored, denied, and
forgotten, until the honest scholar, COPERNICUS, revived it by a
mathematical demonstration, which he did not live long enough to see
trampled on; for the great astronomer that next appeared, Tycho Brahe,
denied it, and the Catholic Church attempted to suppress it in the
person of Galileo, who is said to have been forced by imprisonment and
torture to succumb to authority (the torture may not be positively
known, but is believed with good reason). Even Luther joined in the
theological warfare against science, saying, "I am now advised that a
new astrologer is risen, who presumeth to prove that the earth moveth
and goeth about, not the firmament, the sun and moon--not the
stars--like as when one sitteth on a coach, or in a ship that is
moved, thinketh he sitteth still and resteth, but the earth and trees
do move and run themselves. Thus it goeth; we give ourselves up to our
own foolish fancies and conceits. This fool (Copernicus) will turn the
whole art of astronomy upside down; but the Scripture showeth and
teacheth another lesson, when Joshua commandeth the sun to stand
still, and not the earth."

The attitude of Luther in this matter was the attitude of the Church
generally, in opposition to science, for it assumed its position in an
age of dense ignorance, and claimed too much infallibility to admit of
enlightenment. Nevertheless, the Church feels the spirit of the age
and slowly moves. At the present time it is being _slowly_ permeated
by the modern spirit of agnostic scepticism, which is another form of
ignorance.

Mankind generally occupy the intrenched camp of ignorance within which
they know all its walls embrace; outside of which they look upon all
that exists with feelings of suspicion and hostility, and alas, this
is as true of the educated as of the uneducated classes. It was the
French Academy that laughed at Harvey's discovery and at Fulton's plan
of propelling steamboats, and even at Arago's suggestion of the
electric telegraph, as the Royal Society laughed at Franklin's
proposed lightning rods. It was Bonaparte who treated both Fulton and
Dr. Gall with contempt. It was the medical Faculty that arrayed itself
against the introduction of Peruvian bark, which they have since made
their hobby; and it was the same Edinburgh Review which poured its
ridicule upon Gall, that advised the public to put Thomas Gray in a
straight-jacket for advocating the introduction of railroads. Equally
great was the stupidity of the French. The first railroad was
constructed in France fifty years ago. Emil Periere had to make the
line at his own expense, and it took three years to obtain the consent
of the authorities. Their leading statesman, Thiers, contended that
railroads could be nothing more than toys. We remember that a
committee of the New York Legislature was equally stupid, and
endeavored to prove in their report that railways were entirely
impracticable. English opposition was still more stupidly absurd. Both
Lords and Commons in Parliament were entirely opposed. "The engineers
and surveyors as they went about their work were molested by mobs.
George Stephenson was ridiculed and denounced as a maniac, and all
those who supported him as lunatics and fools." "George Stephenson
although bantered and wearied on all sides stood steadfastly by his
project, in spite of the declarations that the smoke from the engine
would kill the birds and destroy the cattle along the route, that the
fields would be ruined, and people be driven mad by noise and
excitement."

Nothing is better established in history than the hostility of
colleges and the professional classes to all great innovations. "Truly
(says Dr. Stille in his Materia Medica) nearly every medicine has
become a popular remedy before being adopted or even tried by
physicians," and the famous author Dr. Pereira declares that "nux
vomica is one of the few remedies the discovery of which is not the
effect of mere chance."

The spirit of bigotry, in former times, jealously watched every
innovation. Telescopes and microscopes were denounced as atheistic,
winnowing machines were denounced in Scotland as impious, and even
forks when first introduced were denounced by preachers as "an insult
on Providence not to eat our meat with our fingers."

It is not strange that the last fifty years have sufficed to cover
with a cloud of collegiate ignorance and bigotry the discoveries of
the illustrious Gall, for whom I am doing a similar service, to that
of Copernicus for Pythagoras.

This is nothing unusual in the progress of Science. There was no
brighter genius in physical science at the beginning of this century
than Dr. Thomas Young, who died in 1829, whose discoveries fell into
obscurity until they were revived by more recent investigation. He had
that intuitive genius which is most rare among scientists.

He was a great thinker and discoverer, who knew how to utilize in
philosophy discovered facts, and was not busy like many modern
scientists in the monotonous repetition of experiments which had
already been performed.

    "At no period of his life was he fond of repeating experiments
    or even of originating new ones. He considered