change public opinion in our favor; and, indeed, we must always seek to lead it, and not be guided by it. For pure science is the pioneer who must not hover about cities and civilized countries, but must strike into unknown forests, and climb the hitherto inaccessible mountains which lead to and command a view of the promised land— the land which science promises us in the future; which shall not only flow with milk and honey, but shall give us a better and more glorious idea of this wonderful universe. We must create a public opinion in our favor, but it need not at first be the general public. We must be contented to stand aside, and see the honors of the world for a time given to our inferiors; and must be better contented with the approval of our own consciences, and of the very few who are capable of judging our work, than of the whole world besides. Let us look to the other physicists, not in our own town, not in our own country, but in the whole world, for the words of praise which are to encourage us, or the words of blame which are to stimulate us to renewed effort. For what to us is the praise of the ignorant? Let us join together in the bonds of our scientific societies, and encourage each other, as we are now doing, in the pursuit of our favorite study; knowing that the world will some time recognize our services, and knowing, also, that we constitute the most important element in human progress.

But danger is also near, even in our societies. When the average tone of the society is low, when the highest honors are given to the mediocre, when third-class men are held up as examples, and when trifling inventions are magnified into scientific discoveries, then the influence of such societies is prejudicial. A young scientist attending the meetings of such a society soon gets perverted ideas. To his mind, a mole-hill is a mountain, and the mountain a mole-hill. The small inventor or the local celebrity rises to a greater height, in his mind, than the great leader of science in some foreign land. He gauges himself by the mole-hill, and is satisfied with his stature ; not knowing that he is but an atom in comparison with the mountain, until, perhaps, in old age, when it is too late. But, if the size of the mountain had been seen at first, the young scientist would at least have been stimulated in his endeavor to grow.

We can not all be men of genius; but we can, at least, point them out to those around us. We may not be able to benefit science much ourselves; but we can have high ideals on the subject, and instill them into those with whom we come in contact. For the good of ourselves, for the good of our country, for the good to the world, it is incumbent on us to form a true estimate of the worth and standing of persons and things, and to set before our own minds all that is great and good and noble, all that is most important for scientific advance, above the mean and low and unimportant.

It is very often said that a man has a right to his opinion. This

might be true for a man on a desert island, whose error would influence only himself. But when he opens his lips to instruct others, or even when he signifies his opinions by his daily life, then he is directly responsible for all his errors of judgment or fact. He has no right to think a mole-hill as big as a mountain, nor to teach it, any more than he has to think the world flat, and teach that it is so. The facts and laws of our science have not equal importance, neither have the men who cultivate the science achieved equal results. One thing is greater than another, and we have no right to neglect the order. Thus shall our minds be guided aright, and our efforts be toward that which is the highest.

Then shall we see that no physicist of the first class has ever existed in this country, that we must look to other countries for our leaders in that subject, and that the few excellent workers in our country must receive many accessions from without before they can constitute an American science, or do their share in the world's work. . . .

We call this a free country, and yet it is the only one where there is a direct tax upon the pursuit of science. The low state of pure science in our country may possibly be attributed to the youth of the country; but a direct tax, to prevent the growth of our country in that subject, can not be looked upon as other than a deep disgrace. I refer to the duty upon foreign books and periodicals. In our science, no books above elementary ones have ever been published, or are likely to be published, in this country; aud yet every teacher in physics must have them, not only in the college-library, but on his own shelves, and must pay the Government of this country to allow him to use a portion of his small salary to buy that which is to do good to the whole country. All freedom of intercourse which is necessary to foster our growing science is thus broken off; and that which might, in time, relieve our country of its mediocrity is nipped in the bud by our Government, which is most liberal when appealed to directly on scientific subjects. One would think that books in foreign languages might be admitted free; but, to please the half-dozen or so workmen who reprint German books, not scientific, our free intercourse with that country is cut off. Our scientific associations and societies must make themselves heard in this matter, and show those in authority how the matter stands.

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE.

BY FELIX L. OSWALD, M. D.

THE ALCOHOL-HABIT (concluded).

II.

UT, in tracing the causes which led to the present development of the poison-vice, we should not overlook the working of another principle which I must call a reaction against the effect of a wrong remedy. We can not serve our cause by ignoring its weak points, for, if we persist in closing our eyes to the significance of our mistakes, our enemies will not fail to profit by our blindness. We can not work in the dark. In order to reach our goal, we must see our way clear; and I trust that no earnest fellow-laborer will misconstrue my motive if I dare to say the whole truth.

The matter is this: At a time when the civilization of antiquity had become extremely corrupt, a society of ethical reformers tried to find the panacea for vice, as we now seek the remedy for intemperance. But, instead of recognizing the local causes of the evil, they ascribed it to the general perversity of the human heart. They, too, failed to distinguish between natural appetites and morbid appetencies, and, misled by the glaring consequences of perverted passions, they conceived the unhappy idea that man's natural instincts are his natural enemies. In order to crush a few baneful nightshades and poppyblossoms, they began a war of extermination against the flowers of this earth. But that attempt led to an unexpected result: the soil of the trampled fields engendered weeds that were far harder to destroy than the noxious herbs of the old flower-garden. The would-be reformers had overlooked the fact that it is easier to pervert than to suppress a natural instinct; but the history of the last twelve hundred years has illustrated that truth by many dreadful examples. The suppression of rational freedom led to anarchy. Celibacy became the mother of the ugliest vices. The attempt to suppress the pursuit of natural science led to the pursuit of pseudo-science-astrology, necromancy, and all sorts of dire chimeras. The suppression of harmless pleasures has always fostered the penchant for vicious pleasures. The austerity of the Stoics helped to propagate the doctrines of Epicurus; in Islam the era of the Hanbalite ascetics was followed by the riots of the Bagdad caliphate; and the open licentiousness of the English antiPuritans, as well as the secret excesses of their northern neighbors, can be distinctly traced to the mistaken zeal of the party which had waged a long and unrelenting war against every form of physical pleasure, and hoped to find salvation in the suppression of all natural desires. That doctrine has never become the permanent faith of any Aryan nation, though now and then it has reached a local ascendency which

made it a grievous addition to the evils it proposed to cure. More than fifteen hundred years ago the Emperor Julian, and even St. Clemens Alexandrinus, denounced the absurdities of the Marcionite Gnostics, who "abstained from marriage, the pursuit of worldly advantages, and all temporal pleasures." The original rigor of those dogmas could not maintain itself against the healthier instincts of mankind; but what they lost in consistency they made up in aggressiveness: an influential sect of the last century attempted to enforce upon others what the Marcionites practiced in private, and, while the Syrian ascetics preferred the desert to the world, the Scotch ascetics tried to turn the world into a desert.

"According to that code," says the author of the "History of Civilization," "all the natural affections, all social pleasures, all amusements, and all the joyous instincts of the human heart, were sinful. They looked on all comforts as wicked in themselves, merely because they were comforts. The great object in life was to be in a state of constant affliction ; whatever pleased the senses was to be suspected. It mattered not what a man liked; the mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever was natural was wrong. It was wrong to take pleasure in beautiful scenery, for a pious man had no concern with such matters. On Sunday it was sinful to walk in the fields, or in the meadows, or enjoy fair weather by sitting at the door of your own house."

"Whatever was natural was wrong"-though even the extremists of that school might have shrunk from the consistency of their Syrian exemplar, who forbade his anchorites to sleep twice under the same tree, lest their spiritual interests should be imperiled by an undue affection for any earthly object!

If it were possible that such dogmas could ever again overpower the common sense of mankind, we should welcome the poison-mania as the lesser evil, for it is better to seek happiness by a wrong road than to abandon the search altogether. It is better to taste a forbidden fruit than to destroy all pleasant trees. But it is impossible that such chimeras should have survived their native night. After the terrible experience of the middle ages, it is impossible that any sane person should fail to recognize the significance of the mistake, and we can not hope to maintain the field against the opponents of temperance till we have deprived them of their most effective weapon: we must furnish practical proofs that they, not we, are the enemies of human happiness; that we make war upon vice, and not upon harmless pleasures.

It is a significant fact that in every civilized country of this earth drunkenness is rarest among the classes who have other and better convivial resources. In the United States, where the "almighty dollar" confers unlimited privileges, the well-to-do people are the most temperate in the world, the poor the most intemperate. In Turkey, where the lower classes are indulged in many pastimes which are considered

below the dignity of an effendi, the poison-vice is actually confined to the upper-ten: temperance reigns in the cottage, while opiumsmoking and secret dram-drinking prevail in the palace. In Scotland, where all classes have to conform to the moral by-laws which discountenance holiday recreations, total abstinence is extremely rare. For"Nature will have her revenge, and, when the most ordinary and harmless recreations are forbidden as sinful, is apt to seek compensation in indulgences which no moralist would be willing to condone. The charge brought against the Novatians in the early ages of the Church can, with equal plausibility, be brought against the Puritans in our own day. One vice, at all events, which Christians of every school, as well as non-Christian moralists, are agreed in condemning, is reputed to be a special opprobrium of Scotland; and the strictest observance of all those minute and oppressive Sabbatarian regulations to which we referred just now has been found compatible with consecrating the day of rest to a quiet but unlimited assimilation of the liquid which inebriates but does not cheer. And under the old régime to be drunk in private, though of course not sanctioned as allowable, would have been accounted a far less heinous outrage on the dignity of the Sabbath than to whistle in the public street."-(The "Saturday Review," July 19, 1879, p. 75.)

There is, indeed, no doubt that the "snuffling, whining saints, who groaned in spirit at the sight of Jack in the Green,"* have driven as many pleasure-seekers from the play-ground to the pot-house as despotism has turned freemen into outlaws and robbers. For the practical alternative is not between conventicles and rum-riots, but between healthful and baneful pastimes. Before we can begin to eradicate the poison-habit we must make reform more attractive than vice; and, as long as the champions of temperance shut their eyes to the significance of that truth, their legislative enactments will always remain dead-letter laws. Our worst defects we owe, in fact, less to the shrewdness of our beer-brewing opponents than to the blindness of our Sabbatarian allies. A free Sunday-garden, with zoological curiosities, foot-races, and good music, would do more to promote the cause of temperance than a whole army of Hudibras revivalists.†

* Macaulay's "History," vol. i, p. 371.

"Every one who considers the world as it really exists, and not as it appears in the writings of ascetics and sentimentalists, must have convinced himself that, in great towns, where multitudes of men of all classes and all characters are massed together, and where there are innumerable strangers, separated from all domestic ties and occupations, public amusements of an exciting order are absolutely necessary, and that, while they are often the vehicle and the occasion of evil, to suppress them, as was done by the Puritans of the Commonwealth, is simply to plunge an immense portion of the population into the lowest depths of vice."—(Lecky, “History of Rationalism,” vol. ii, p. 286 (cf. ibid., vol. ii, p. 350.) "Sir," said Johnson, "I am a great friend to public amusements, for they keep people from vice." ("Boswell," p. 171.)

"Insani fugiunt mundum, immundumque sequuntur."-Giordano Bruno (Moriz Carrière, "Weltanschauung," p. 396).