Part 11

What happens, then, when there is a cessation of selection? All sorts of birth-variations appear and grow up. The fine adjustment of form--maintained by natural selection carried on unceasingly--no longer obtains. The characteristics of the race become less emphasised. All sorts of birth-variations have an equal chance, and the tendency must be for those characteristics which have most recently been established and maintained by severe selection to dwindle and then to disappear altogether. The majority of birth-variations will--when selection is prevented--always tend to present a lessened, rather than an increased, development of any one characteristic--the excelling minority will no longer be selected, but all will have an equal chance in mating and reproducing. Hence, bit by bit, all salient features, all the characteristics of the race previously maintained by selection, will, as a result of survival of all variations and general crossing and interbreeding--dwindle and disappear. It is to this process that the term “degeneration” has been applied by biologists. How far it may go, and what are its limits and various outcomes, I cannot now discuss. It is sometimes spoken of as “retrogression”--which implies wrongly a return to a previous state. From some points of view it might be called “simplification.”

The point to which I have been making is this--that civilised mankind appears to be very nearly in regard to most points of structure and quality in a condition of “cessation of selection.” It is the better-provided and well-fed, well-clothed, protected classes of the community, in which this cessation of selection is most complete. Racial degeneration is, therefore, to be looked for in those classes quite as much as in the half-starved, ill-clad, struggling poor, if, indeed, it should not be expected to be more strongly marked in them. There are facts which tend to show that such anticipations are well-founded.

This is a matter requiring further discussion. It is probable, I may say in anticipation, that whilst natural selection in the struggle for existence is only obscurely operative (except as to alcoholism and some diseases) in civilised man, yet what Mr. Darwin called sexual selection--the influence of preference in mating--has an important scope, and it may be that hereafter it will be of enormous importance in maintaining the quality of the race.

Meanwhile, it seems that the unregulated increase of the population, the indiscriminate, unquestioning protection of infant life and of adult life also--without selection or limitation--must lead to results which can only be described as general degeneration. How far such a conclusion is justified, and what are possible modifying or counteracting influences at work which may affect the future of mankind, are questions of surpassing interest. In any case, it is interesting to note that the cessation of selection is more complete, and the consequent degeneration of the race would, therefore, seem to be more probable in the higher propertied classes than in the bare-footed toilers, whose ranks are thinned by starvation and early death. One may well ask, “Is this really so?”

38. The Movement, Growth, and Dwindling of Glaciers

Last summer we were watching the gradual change of the brilliant sunlight on the snows of Mont Blanc as the shadows crept up the pine-covered sides of the valley of Chamonix. We noted how the highest peak--the true summit of Mont Blanc--remained almost white and brilliant when the somewhat lower and nearer Dome de Gouter (so often, when clouds are about, mistaken for the true summit by tourists) had assumed a marvellous shade of saffron-rose colour. The crevasses of the glaciers were marked by an unearthly pale-green tint and delicate purple hues of weird beauty were spreading over the evanescent forms of the great snow-field, when one of the hotel guests--a citizen of Geneva--said, “Ah, yes! Look at them whilst you may, and wonder at them, those glaciers of the Alps. They are but the remnants, the roots, as it were, of the vast glacier which once filled the whole of this vale of Chamonix and spread down into the valley of the Rhone, and ploughed out with the slow movement of its huge mass the deep rock basin of the Lake Leman. Every year they dwindle, as they have dwindled for ages past, and soon--perhaps not more than another 100 years hence--they will have disappeared utterly from human sight and knowledge.” I continued to gaze at the scene, and as the night fell and the distant details were lost to view I felt as though a venerable, but decrepit, friend had passed from my sight, never to return. I was rejoiced to see the glaciers still there when the morning sun showed forth their strange opaque white and faintly green masses on the mountain sides--stupendous outpourings, as it were, of whipped cream tinted with pistachio-nut.

But was it true, that lament of the Genevese savant? Undoubtedly the glaciers in many parts of the Alps have been shrinking for the last thirty years. It is longer than that since I first saw the glaciers of the Chamonix valley, and there is no doubt that they have shrunk up since then, leaving acres of boulders and bare polished rock where was the ice I formerly climbed. The glacier of Argentière, near the upper end of the valley, is a mile or more shorter than it was; the ice caves which we used to visit at the foot of the Mer de Glace have melted away, and the end of the glacier is now high up above a precipitous surface of polished rock far from the site of the little pavilion, with its gay flag and amiable guardian, who used to exhibit the marvellous ice cavern.

I find on looking into the matter that it is true that there has, during the latter half of the past century, been a great dwindling of the lower end or “snout,” a drawing back, as it were, not only of Swiss glaciers, but of glaciers in other parts of the world--as, for instance, in Alaska and in the Himalayas. But I cannot avoid a feeling of satisfaction in recording the opinion of geological authorities that, contrary to the assertion of the Swiss pessimist, there is not any ground for believing that the present noticeable shrinking is due to a continuous process by which the enormous glaciers of remote ages have been incessantly reduced until now they are but rootlets or stumps of the former masses, destined to evaporate completely under the continued remorseless operation of increasing temperature. On the contrary, it appears that, though there are not accurate records and measurements as to past centuries as there will be as to present and future years, yet there is abundant evidence that Alpine glaciers have grown longer in some centuries and retreated in others. The period of alternate extension and retraction has not been ascertained with accuracy, but by some geologists it is supposed to be about fifty years. The retraction or shrinking is not due to a continuous increase of the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere--or of this hemisphere--but to contending causes which operate alternately towards increase and towards decrease when one or two hundred years are considered. Such are the greater or less rainfall and snowfall over a very large area, and the formation and persistence of clouds, concerned with which are probably those varying quantities--the spots on the sun.

The simple proof that glaciers have extended and again retreated within historic times is furnished by the fact that in some parts of the Alpine range the retreat of a glacier has uncovered ancient miners’ excavations, which must have been worked when the glacier did not reach the spot excavated. Subsequently the glacier advanced, and now after some hundreds of years it has again retreated and exposed the ice-covered borings and workings. The tradition of a glacier-enclosed village in the Zermatt mountains, shut off from the world by the advance of glaciers, lost and mysterious, is evidence that such advance has been observed by the native population.

The natives who live near glaciers know that they advance and retreat, but the fact that the whole glacier is really a slowly flowing viscous mass--a sort of frozen but not immobile river--was only established by scientific observation in the last century. The frozen river is fed by the snow which falls on the higher mountain ridges, and is squeezed into the form of ice instead of snow powder by its own weight as it slips down the inclines, warmed by the unclouded sunshine. The big glaciers move much more rapidly (or perhaps one should say less slowly) in the middle than at the sides. The measurements which have been made differ in different glaciers and in different parts of the same glacier, and show smaller movement in winter than in summer. The advance of the sides is retarded, as in the case of an ordinary river of flowing water, by friction against the rocks, which enclose the glacier as its banks enclose a river. A good average case shows a flow downwards in summer of half a foot a day at the sides and a foot and a half in the middle. The distance below the snow-line to which the flowing glacier descends down a mountain gorge--before it melts away and becomes a river of liquid water--depends, as does the rate at which it moves, in the first place, on the temperature of the region and on the sharpness of the slope. A glacier will flow downwards (as will a lump of pitch) along a scarcely perceptible incline, but more slowly than down a steeper incline, and it will, consequently, get further down into the warm valley without altogether melting away when the slope is steep.

But apart from these considerations, the bigger and thicker (or deeper) the glacier, that is to say, the more snow which each year falls at its starting-place and goes to making it, the further down will it flow before melting away; and it is the heavy snowfall of many years ago or of a series of years long past which has to-day reached in the form of ice the lower end of the glacier. So, though the lower end of the glacier may melt more quickly if the valley has become hotter, yet the heavy snowfalls of fifty years ago may only now have reached the valley, and may quite counterbalance the melting action of the warmer summers. Or reverse conditions, namely, less snow and lower or unchanged temperature in the valley, may prevail.

The Government of India has lately established a definite survey and record of the movement of several Himalayan glaciers and of the variation in the distance to which their “snouts” descend into the valleys. Twelve glaciers were examined last year, and will be properly watched in future. The Yengutsa glacier has gained about two miles in length since Sir Martin Conway visited it in 1892; the great Hispar glacier has slightly retreated. The Hassanabad glacier three years ago increased its length by a rapid progress of the free “snout” of as much as six miles in three months, and is now no longer increasing or advancing! Many years ago it had reached its present position, and then retreated. The rock masses carried on the ice and left in great heaps at the point where the glacier melted away are known as terminal “moraines,” and often serve to show the position to which the snout of a glacier once extended--far below its present limit. A curious fact as to the increase and shrinkage of glaciers is that of two neighbouring glaciers, as in the case of the glacier Blanc and the glacier Noir in Dauphiné (France), one may be advancing whilst the other is in retreat. Further study and knowledge of the causes of these variations will throw important light on questions of general meteorology.

Although there is no evidence to lead us to suppose that existing glaciers are now actually in a condition of general retreat, leading to their ultimate disappearance, yet it is one of the most certain and interesting results of geological study that some hundred and fifty thousand years ago the northern hemisphere was far colder than it is now, owing partly to the same change in the inclination of the earth’s axis to which I alluded on a former page (p. 81) as affecting the orientation of ancient astronomical temples--a change which diminished, when at its extreme, the effective amount of heat received from the sun in these regions of the earth. The peculiar scratching, polishing, and erosion of rocks, the existence of moraines, and other evidence, prove that enormous glaciers covered the north of Europe, that England and Scotland were in large part covered by a great ice-sheet or glacier, and that the great valleys of Switzerland such as the Rhone Valley and the basin of the Lake of Geneva, were filled by enormous glaciers, which helped to mould and deepen the valleys. The present glaciers are truly the remnants or rootlets of those enormous masses of the glacial epoch. On such of the land surface as was not then covered by ice, existed the hairy elephant or Siberian mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, wild cattle, lions, bears, hyenas, and other animals now extinct in this part of the world. Man had made his appearance, hunted these animals, and lived in caves. His weapons and carvings and their bones tell us the story in no uncertain terms.

The biggest Swiss glaciers of to-day, compared to the great glacier of the Rhone Valley, of which they are but the highest tributaries, still surviving unmelted among the mountain-tops, are in size as a mountain freshet is to the great stream of Loch Lomond, or as the Serpentine in Hyde Park to the neighbouring Thames. Vast as was the great glacier of the Rhone Valley, and immense as has been the work done by water and ice in carving the great highway in the mountain-mass of Switzerland, it has all been effected since the date of the formation on the sea-bottom and the subsequent elevation of the strata which we call “the chalk”--a deposit which comes not very far down in the series of strata of the earth’s crust. Only 3,000ft. of deposit exist above it, whilst below it are more than 60,000ft. of water-deposited or “sedimentary” rocks. The huge Alps have risen since the date of the “chalk,” for we find strata containing marine shells of the Tertiary period at a height of 10,000ft. in those mountains. Where those shells now are was the bottom of the sea at a comparatively recent date, probably not more than fifty million years ago! And not only have the Alps been raised since then from the sea level to 15,000ft. (the height of Mont Blanc), but the huge mountain valleys and the great chasm of the Rhone Valley many miles wide, with its floor thousands of feet below the mountain ridges, have been scoured out. Deeper and wider it has gradually become as it has taken shape, whilst the mountain sides have been removed first by water and later by ice--by the great glacier consisting of solid ice, miles wide and a thousand and more feet in thickness. The water no longer fills the valley in solid form, but once again rushes along as an irresistible torrent, tearing and wearing the rock without rest or mercy, carrying it off by thousands of tons day by day, year by year, to the plains of Provence and the deep floor of the Mediterranean Sea.

The blue colour of the glacier ice--like that of pure water--is now known to be due to no impurity or admixture of other substances. It does not, as was supposed by Tyndall, owe its blueness to a dust of finest colourless particles as do blue smoke, the blue sky, and as do the blue eyes which have attracted the observation of naturalists (and others) in Ireland and the North of Europe. Water, whether liquid or solid, is blue, just as “blue copperas” is, or as “Prussian blue” is; but light must pass through some ten or twenty feet thickness of it to make the colour evident to our eyes. The green tint is due to an admixture of yellow, the exact cause of which is not quite easy to discover. Probably it is due to minute quantities of earthy matter mixed with the surface snow.

The pressing of the high-lying snow, so as to form solid ice or “glacier,” is concerned with the same property of snow as that which enables us to make snow “bind” into a snowball. You cannot make snowballs during very hard frost--the snow must be in air of a thawing temperature at the moment it is squeezed by the hand. The hand itself will not be warm enough to produce that temperature when the thermometer is below freezing-point. The snow commences to melt in the hand when one squeezes it, and then when the squeezing is stopped the water formed quickly freezes again and cements the snow particles together to form ice, enclosing innumerable minute bubbles. The heat of the sun and the pressure of the weight of the snow itself take the place in the mountains of the warmth and pressure of the human hand. The minute air bubbles make the newest glacier-ice white and opaque, especially when seen in a great mass; but gradually they get squeezed together, and the glacier ice becomes first “fibrous” in appearance, and then, after long years of pressure by its own weight, fairly clear. Ice in great masses has the properties of a viscous body, like pitch or soft sealing-wax, owing to the fact that wherever the solid mass breaks its particles melt a very little and then freeze again. Under increased pressure ice melts at a lower temperature than when it is not subjected to pressure. When the pressure is removed the water freezes again. Thus crushed ice or snow can be put into a “squeeze-mould” and pressed, so as to form a solid mass of ice of any shape you may choose. Four or five slabs of ice, placed one over the other, very soon become, owing to this property, one continuous solid mass. White glacier ice is so full of air bubbles as to be comparable in structure to sponge, or, more closely, to cork. A cube of such ice exposes, owing to its rough air-hole pitted surface, a much larger surface of contact to the atmosphere than does a cube of perfectly smooth clear ice. Consequently in a warm room or chamber the white ice melts much more quickly than does the clear, and hence you should choose clear ice rather than white ice if you wish for a block which will last.

Before leaving the glaciers, let me briefly relate an incident arising from their slow but regular downward flow to the region where they melt away and deposit, as a terminal moraine, the burden of rocks they have received years before in regions far above. A young man of five-and-twenty, on his honeymoon, visited the Alps, and ventured alone on to a glacier. He fell into a deep “crevasse,” or ice-fissure, and his body was not recovered. The exact spot where he fell into the ice-chasm was recognised, and the mountain-folk, who knew their glacier and its rate of movement well, told the broken-hearted young widow that it would take thirty years before that region of the glacier would have moved so far downwards as to reach the lowest limit, and in due course melt away. She haunted the glacier in which her young husband was entombed year after year, and at last, when she was now grey-headed and withered by time, that special tract of ice had descended so far, and was so near the thawing, thinned-out margin of the glacier that they were able to break into it with axe and pole. Then she, an old woman, had a wonderful experience. They led her to the glacier’s edge. Her young husband, preserved these thirty years in the ice, which had melted around him and re-frozen, lay there unchanged. His features were not marred by the lapse of years, nor was his clothing rent or injured. He seemed as one asleep, resting after a long day’s climb, and she, poor soul, had, during a blissful interval, the conviction that all those weary years of waiting were but a long, bad dream, that she, too, still was young, and was waking, as she had loved to do long years ago, in time to see him lift his lids and smile.

39. Votes for Women

Now that so many people placidly accept the notion that women are to have votes in the election of members of Parliament, one is tempted to ask whether science has any facts to put forward which should be considered before so great a change in our national organisation is made. There are various interesting facts as to the relations of males and females in the animal world and as to the relative strength and activity of the sexes--which are sometimes cited as arguments in the matter. Speaking generally, it is clear enough that among animals the female is endowed with qualities which bear exclusively upon her function as the guardian of the eggs or germs of a new generation. She nourishes those germs at the expense of her own substance before birth, feeds them, tends them and protects them--after birth. The male in many cases contributes to the feeding and protection of the young, but is as often as not quite unconcerned with such matters. In the higher animals the male is far more powerful than the female, and fights with other males both for the possession of a mate or a harem, and for the undisturbed occupation of feeding grounds for himself and family.

Among lower animals there are curious cases of the greater strength and size of the female. Thus, among spiders, the female is nearly twice as bulky as the male. She makes, in many cases, a nest ready for her young, and is visited there by the wandering irresponsible male, who, in spite of great danger to himself, is irresistibly attracted to seek a brief caress from the terrible spideress. She is terrible, not only on account of her bulk, but because she makes a rule of killing, and sucking the blood of, her infatuated admirer unless he is sufficiently alert and agile to escape from her side more quickly than he came to it. The courtship of spiders is a very interesting bit of natural history. The males execute a sort of dance, and are strangely excited by the vibrating note of a tuning fork. Two American naturalists, Mr. and Mrs. Peckham, and also Dr. McCook, have studied this subject in great detail.

A strange-looking, dark green worm, as big as a walnut, with a ribbon-like trunk six or eight inches in length attached to its mouth, lives in holes in the rocks in the Mediterranean. A similar worm has been found off the Norwegian coast. Fanciful names are given by zoologists to these two worms--the first is called Bonellia, the second Hamingia. It does no harm to cite their names, and I do so with an apology to those who do not like names. These goodly sized worms are females, only females. For years the corresponding male was unknown. At last a minute creature one-eighth of an inch in length, like a tiny fragment of green thread, was found crawling about on and into these big green Bonellias. Its structure when it was examined with the microscope proved it to be the adult male of the worm on which it was crawling. It was so insignificant and minute as to escape all observation except that of a trained naturalist searching for it with a magnifying glass. Some seven or eight of these diminutive males are found on one female, infesting her as fleas infest a mouse, and of about the same relative size. The microscopic husband of the Norwegian Hamingia it was my good fortune to discover many years ago, when I was dredging marine animals in the deep waters of the Stavanger Fjord.

So there is nothing in the eternal fitness of things proclaiming the male as the necessary superior of the female throughout Nature. The fact is that the question of equality and of general superiority and inferiority has no place in regard to male and female from a naturalist’s point of view. It is true that women are so very much less endowed with muscular strength than men that practically every woman is inferior to every man in this respect. It is also true that woman’s brain is smaller than man’s, and that apart from mere size, the intellectual activity and capacity of women, by whatever test you examine it, is less than that of man. When exceptional cases on both sides are excluded, the definite intellectual inferiority of the average woman, as compared with the average man, is established as a fact. The observations of those concerned in the education of young men and young women side by side confirm this, and it is further demonstrated by a consideration of the intellectual performances of average men and average women. That, at any rate, is my own experience as a University teacher. But women, on the other hand, fill a place in human life as mothers, and administrators of detail, and as companions, in which man, by the nature of things, cannot compete with them at all.

At the house of the late Sir James Knowles, some twenty-five years ago, when discussing the relative value of the physical and intellectual capacities of the men as compared with the women of the English working class, Mr. Gladstone (at that time the head of the Government) said to me, “I am of opinion that the relative value of a man and a woman is in all classes of society about the same as it was in my grandfather’s time in Jamaica when they purchased slaves. They gave £120 for a man and £80 for a woman, and that is a fair measure of their relative value all the world over.” It is necessary to remember that Mr. Gladstone was not estimating the ultimate value of woman in human life when he said this. He would, I think, have considered, as I do, that it is absurd to attempt to estimate that or to raise a discussion as to general superiority and inferiority in reference to the male and the female of the human species. They are creatures as necessary one as the other, differing from one another profoundly and excelling one another in diverse qualities and capacities. Without this complementary division of fitness and quality our life would be a monotone robbed of the infinite variety which characterises humanity. What Mr. Gladstone estimated as being less by one-third in women than in men is power--work-value--whether physical or intellectual. I think Mr. Gladstone’s estimate must be admitted as true.

But I do not for a moment say that when this inferior intellectual and physical capacity of woman is admitted the question is settled as to whether women should vote for the election of representatives to carry on the affairs of the country. The affairs of the country! They are, in the first place, the protection of person and property by the law, which must be upheld by force if necessary; then defence against foreign aggression, also a matter of force; and, further, the education and training not only of children but of the ripe youth of the country--a matter of intellect--which also has a weighty influence in the making of wise laws. Then there is the devising of weapons and means of defence by land and by sea, as well as the discovery and application of knowledge in regard to disease, both of mind and body, for the benefit of the community. And there will soon be a good deal more!

It does not necessarily follow, because women cannot themselves do some of these things at all, and for the others are less able than men, that they should not give a vote in electing the men who are to attend to them. The only question is, Would it make life better for both women and men were they allowed to do so?

The argument that the paying of taxes on men’s property qualifies men to give a vote, and therefore the paying of taxes on women’s property should, ipso facto, entitle women to give a vote, is fallacious, because the paying of taxes is not the reason or determining cause of men having a vote, but only a subsidiary test or qualification which might be abolished or modified. The property of minors pays the tax, but it is not proposed on that account that children should vote. The property qualifications in use at present are merely a method for excluding certain men, and we might have an intellectual qualification or a muscular qualification for the same purpose. Indeed, we do at present exclude male imbeciles and those who are immature. The reason for extending the Parliamentary vote to a larger and larger body of the male population has been to secure the assent of the strength and manhood of the country to the laws and public acts of the Government, and to ensure its willing participation in that maintenance of the central Government’s decisions by physical force, which is the ultimate and by no means very remote method by which they are maintained. It does not seem to be likely to be an improvement on our present system that women, who must always be regarded as specially privileged because of their physical weakness, should nevertheless be allowed to influence by the mere number of their votes the decision of questions in which the employment of the physical strength of men acting as defenders of our territory, guardians of the peace, or ministers of the law, is the essential condition of an effective result following on such decision.

To a naturalist human population does not appear as a number of units of which a few more are female than male--but rather as a series of families, consisting of men, women, and children, bound together by a variety of reciprocal services, dependent one on another, ordered and disciplined to a distribution of functions and duties by the tradition and experience of ages. The notion that the paterfamilias is the rightful chief of his wife and children, and that through him they are represented, and should be content to be represented, in the local and greater State Government--is one of long standing in civilised Europe. The powers of the paterfamilias have been gradually limited in the course of the development of social life since the young men and the old bachelors, too, have been given a share of power in the State: but the recent proposal to break the fabric of his household by giving the Parliamentary franchise to women is so sudden and strange a notion that he seems not to have realised what it means.

The apathy which many men exhibit in regard to this proposal is as remarkable as the amiable courtesy with which others assent to it rather than “disoblige a lady.” Looking at the proposal not as a question of justice, which really has nothing to do with it, but in reference to the inquiry as to whether it is likely, if carried, to increase the happiness and prosperity of the community, I must say that, so far as the natural history of man gives indications, it seems to me that if women acquired the Parliamentary franchise and made active use of it, they would be led into a new attitude of independence and separation from the men and from the family group to which they are by birth or alliance attached. I fear that the great business of making the nest beautiful, producing and tending the young, nursing the sick, helping the aged, consoling the afflicted, rewarding the brave, of dancing and singing and creating gaiety within the charmed circle where political contests and affairs of State are of no account, would be neglected and without honour. In the end these amenities of life would probably fall into the hands of commercial companies and be sent out at so much a head--imported from Germany. Woman would not be the gainer, for she can only gain by continuing to astonish man by all she does for his enchantment and delight, to serve him and to crown his life--she will only suffer by becoming “independent.” The movement which is supposed to lead to a higher development of womanhood, and consists in women mobbing people on their doorsteps, waving flags and shouting at other people’s meetings, and struggling in the arms of policemen, seems to be inconsistent with a development in the direction which has hitherto been popular and successful in the progress of man from savagery to decency. It is difficult to suppose that men will really be so blind to the facts of the real importance and true value of women as to allow this movement to succeed whilst they look on with vague incredulity as to its being anything more than a huge joke.