![country people to sacrifice some animal, usually a black cat, a black cock, or a black dog, by
burying it alive, in order to check the spread of cholera. In the village of Kamenka, a
peasant, whose son had died of this disease, interred with the body eight live tomcats. The
immolation of dumb animals, however, is deemed less efficacious than that of human
beings. On one occasion, when the cholera was raging severely, a deputation of peasants
waited upon their parson, stating that they had determined to bury him alive in order to
appease the demon of the plague. He escaped this horrible death only by apparently
acceding to their wishes and craving a few days' respite in order to prepare for such a
solemn ceremony; meanwhile he took the measures necessary to secure his safety and
thwarted the purpose of his loving parishioners. In Okopovitchi, a village of the same
province, the peasants succeeded in enticing an aged woman, Lucia Manjkov, into the
cemetery, where they thrust her alive into the grave containing the bodies of those who had
died of the epidemic, and quickly covered her up. When brought to trial they proved that
they had acted on the advice of a military surgeon, Kosakovitch, who was therefore
regarded as the chief culprit, and sentenced to be knouted by the hangman, and then to
undergo twelve years' penal servitude in Siberia. We are indebted for these instances of
barbarous superstition to the researches of Augustus Löwenstimm, associate jurisconsult in
the department of justice at St. Petersburg, who has derived them from thoroughly
authentic and mostly official sources. He reports several occurrences of a similar kind during
the epidemics of cholera in 1831, 1855, and 1872. Indeed, it is very difficult to abolish such
pagan practices so long as the clergy foster the notion that animal sacrifices are expiatory
and propitiatory in their effects. In some parts of the province of Vologda it is still
customary on the day dedicated to the prophet Elias (July 20th in the Greek calendar) to
offer up bullocks, he-goats, or other quadrupeds within the precincts of the church. The
animal is driven into the courtyard surrounding the sacred edifice and there slaughtered;
the flesh is boiled in a large kettle, one half of it being kept by the peasants who provide
the sacrifice, while the other half is distributed among the priests and sacristans.[26]
The belief that the walls of dams, bridges, aqueducts, and buildings are rendered
preternaturally strong by immuring a living human being within them still prevails in many
countries of Christendom, and there is hardly an old castle in Europe that has not a legend
of this sort connected with it. Usually a child is supposed to be selected for this purpose,
and the roving bands of gypsies are popularly accused of furnishing the infant victims. The
custom of depositing gold coins or other precious objects in the foundation stones of
important public edifices is doubtless a survival of the ancient superstition.[27]
Löwenstimm mentions a curious superstition of pagan origin still practiced in portions of
Russia, and known as "korovya smertj" (cow-death) and "opachivaniye" (plowing
roundabout). If pestilence or murrain prevails in a village, an old woman of repute as a
seeress or fortune-teller enters the confines of the village at midnight and beats a pan.
Thereupon all the women of the place assemble in haste, armed with divers domestic
utensils—frying-pans, pokers, tongs, shovels, scythes, and cudgels. After shutting the cattle
in their stalls, and warning the men not to leave their houses, a procession is formed. The
seeress takes off her dress and pronounces a curse upon Death. She is then hitched to a
plow, together with a bevy of virgins and a misshapen woman, if such a one can be found,
and a continuous and closed furrow is drawn round the village three times. When the
procession starts, the image of some saint suitable to the occasion, that of St. Blasius, for
example, in the case of murrain, is borne in front of it; this is followed by the seeress, clad](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5740-250308135339-44ad3b31/85/Strategic-Management-Communication-for-Leaders-3rd-Edition-Walker-Solutions-Manual-34-320.jpg)
![only in a shift, with disheveled hair and riding on a broomstick; after her come women and
maidens drawing the plow, and behind them the rest of the crowd, shrieking and making a
fearful din. They kill every animal they meet, and if a man is so unfortunate as to fall in with
them he is mercilessly beaten, and usually put to death. In the eyes of these raging women
he is not a human being, but Death himself in the form of a were-wolf, who seeks to cross
their path and thus break the charm and destroy the healing virtue of the furrow. The
ceremony varies in different places, and generally ends by burying alive a cat, cock, or dog.
In some districts the whole population of the village, both men and women, take part in the
procession, and are often attended by the clergy with sacred images and consecrated
banners. During the prevalence of the pest in the province of Podolia, in 1738, the
inhabitants of the village of Gummenez, while marching in procession through the fields,
met Michael Matkovskij, a nobleman of a neighboring village, who was looking for his stray
horses. The strange man, wandering about with an eager look and a bridle in his hand, was
regarded as the incarnate pestilence, and was therefore seized and most brutally beaten
and left lying half naked and half dead on the ground. At length he recovered his senses
and succeeded with great difficulty in reaching his home. No sooner was it known that he
was still alive than the peasants rushed into his house, dragged him to their village,
subjected him to terrible tortures, and finally burned him. A curious feature of these
remedial rites is the mixture of paganism and Christianity which characterizes them; and it
is an unquestionable though almost incredible fact that their atoning efficacy is often quite
as firmly believed in by the village priests of the Russian Church as by the most ignorant
members of their flock. In the autumn of 1894 some Russian peasants in the district of
Kazan slew one of their own number as a sacrifice to the gods of the Votiaks, a Finnish race
dwelling on the Volga, Viatka, and Kama Rivers. Even orthodox Christians of the Greek
Church, although regarding these gods as devils, fear and seek to propitiate them,
especially in times of public distress.
Still more widely diffused is the practice of infanticide as the sequence of superstition. The
belief that dwarfs or gnomes, dwelling in the inner parts of the earth, carry off beautiful
newborn babes and leave their own deformed offspring in their stead is not confined to any
one people, but is current alike in Germanic, Celtic, Romanic, and Slavic countries, and
causes a misshapen child to be looked upon with suspicion and subjected to cruel tortures
and even killed. The supposed changeling is often severely beaten with juniper rods and the
scourging attended with incantations, so as to compel the wicked fairies to reclaim their
deformed bantling and restore the stolen child. If the castigation proves ineffective, more
summary measures are frequently taken, and the supposititious suckling is thrown out of
the window on a dunghill or immersed in boiling water. In 1877, in the city of New York, an
Irish immigrant and his wife burned their child to death under the delusion that they were
ridding themselves of a changeling. Cases of this kind are quite common in Ireland, where
the victims are sometimes adults.[28] Not long since Magoney, an Irish peasant, had a sickly
child, which the most careful nurture failed to restore to health and strength. The parents,
therefore, became convinced that a changeling had been imposed upon them, and when
the boy was four years old they resolved to have recourse to boiling water, in which he was
kept, notwithstanding his shrieks and protestations that he was not an elf, but their own
Johnny Magoney, until death released him from his torments.
Wilhelm Mannhardt, the celebrated writer on folklore, states that when, in 1850, he was in
Löblau, a village of West Prussia, he saw a man brutally maltreating a boy on the street. On](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5740-250308135339-44ad3b31/85/Strategic-Management-Communication-for-Leaders-3rd-Edition-Walker-Solutions-Manual-35-320.jpg)
![and an ashen stake driven through his back, while in Poland and East Prussia the corpse is
wrapped up in a fish net and covered with poppies, owing, doubtless, to the soporific
qualities of this plant. Preventive measures of this kind are often taken with the consent
and co-operation of the clergy and local authorities. Thus, in 1849, at Mariensee, near
Dantzig, in West Prussia, a peasant's wife came to the Catholic priest of the parish and
complained that an old woman named Welm, recently deceased, appeared in her house and
beat and otherwise tormented her child. The priest seems to have accepted the truth of her
statement, since he ordered the corpse to be disinterred, decapitated, reburied at a cross-
road, and covered with poppies. In 1851, during the prevalence of cholera in Ukraine, in the
governmental province of Kiev, the peasants of Possady attributed the epidemic to a
deceased sacristan and his wife, who were supposed to roam about at night as vampires
and kill people by sucking their blood. In order to stay the ravages of the scourge the
corpses of this couple were exhumed, their heads cut off and burned, and ashen stakes
driven through their backs into the ground. In 1892 a peasant woman in the Russian
province of Kovno hanged herself in a wood near the village of Somenishki. The priest
refused her Christian burial because she had committed suicide, and was therefore given
over to the devil. In order that she might rest quietly in her grave and not be changed into
a vampire, her sons severed her head from her body and laid it at her feet. In thus refusing
to perform religious funeral rites the priest obeyed the canons of the church and also the
laws of the Russian Empire. Until quite recently a corner of unconsecrated ground next to
the wall of the Russian cemetery was reserved as a sort of carrion pit for the corpses of
self-murderers, and it is expressly prescribed in the Svod Sakonov[29] that they "shall be
dragged to such place of infamy by the knacker, and there covered with earth." This
treatment of a felo-de-se by the ecclesiastical and civil authorities directly fosters popular
superstition by tending to confirm the notion that there is something uncanny, eldritch,
demoniacal, and preternaturally malignant inherent in his mortal remains, a notion still
further strengthened by a most unjust paragraph (1472) in the Russian code, which
declares the last will and testament of a suicide to have no legal validity. Drought, too, as
well as pestilence, is ascribed to the evil agency of vampires, which "milk the clouds," and
hinder the falling of the dew. In 1887 the South Russian province of Cherson began to
suffer from drought soon after a peasant had hanged himself in the village of Ivanovka, the
inhabitants of which, assuming a causative connection between the aridity and the self-
homicide, poured water on the grave while uttering the following words: "I sprinkle, I pour;
may God send a shower, bring on a little rainfall, and relieve us from misery!" As this
invocation failed to produce the desired effect, the body was taken up and inhumed again in
a gorge outside of the village. In some districts the corpse is disinterred, beaten on the
head, and drenched with water poured through a sieve; in others it is burned.
The records of the criminal courts in West Prussia during the last half century contain
numerous instances of the violation of graves from superstitious motives. Thus in March,
1896, a peasant died in the village of Penkuhl; soon afterward his son was taken ill of a
lingering disease, which the remedies prescribed by the country doctor failed to relieve. It
did not take long for the "wise women" of the village to convince him that his father was a
"nine-killer," and would soon draw after him into the grave nine of his next of kin. The sole
means of depriving him of this fatal power would be to disinter him and sever his head from
his body. In accordance with this advice the young man dug up the corpse by night and
decapitated it with a spade. In this case the accused, if tried in court, might honestly
declare that he acted in self-defense; indeed, he might plead in justification of his conduct](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5740-250308135339-44ad3b31/85/Strategic-Management-Communication-for-Leaders-3rd-Edition-Walker-Solutions-Manual-38-320.jpg)
![to find such stuff constituting the theme of popular song within the confines of
Christian civilization at the present day, a grewsome stuff more suitable as the staple of
Othello's tales
"—of the cannibals that each other eat,
The anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders."
In the burglary just mentioned the murder and mutilation of the maid were incidental
to the robbery, and probably an afterthought, but there are on record numerous
instances of persons being waylaid and killed for the sole purpose of making candles
out of their adipose tissue. No longer ago than November 15, 1896, two peasants were
convicted of this crime in Korotoyak, a city on the Don in South Russia. Their victim
was a boy twelve years of age, whom they strangled and eviscerated in order to make
candles from the fat of the caul and entrails. It would be superfluous and tedious to
cite additional examples of this outrageous offense against humanity and common
sense, for, like the devils that entered into the Gadarene swine, their name is Legion.
A still more disgusting and dangerous superstition is the notion that supernatural
powers are acquired by eating the heart of an unborn babe of the male sex, just as a
savage imagines that by eating the heart of a brave foe he can become indued with his
valor. The modern European cannibal believes that by eating nine hearts, or parts of
them, he can make himself invisible and even fly through the air. He can thus commit
crime without detection, and defy all efforts to arrest or imprison him, releasing himself
with ease from fetters, and passing through stone walls. This horrible practice has been
known for ages, and is still by no means uncommon. In the first half of the fifteenth
century the notorious marshal of France, Gilles de Laval, Baron of Rayz, is said to have
murdered in his castle near Nantes one hundred and fifty women in order to get
possession of unborn babes. He was then supposed to have committed these atrocities
from lewd motives, and was also accused of worshiping Satan. A mixed commission of
civilians and ecclesiastics, appointed to examine into the matter, found him guilty and
condemned him to be strangled and burned on October 25, 1440. In 1429, when he
was thirty-three years of age, he had fought the English at Orleans by the side of Joan
of Arc, and it was probably the desire to acquire supernatural powers in emulation of
the maid that led him to perpetrate a succession of inhuman butcheries extending over
a period of fourteen years, the real object of which seems to have been imperfectly
understood by the tribunal which sentenced him to death.[30] Löwenstimm cites several
instances of this crime. Thus, in 1577 a man was put to the rack in Bamberg, North
Bavaria, for murdering and disemboweling three pregnant women. In the seventeenth
century a band of robbers, whose chief was known as "King Daniel," created intense
consternation among the inhabitants of Ermeland in East Prussia. For a long time these
freebooters roved and spoiled with impunity, but were finally arrested and executed.
They confessed that they had killed fourteen women, but, as the unborn infants proved
to be female, their hearts were devoid of talismanic virtue. Indeed, they attributed their
capture to this unfortunate and unforseeable circumstance, and posed as persons
worthy of commiseration on account of their ill luck. One of the strangest features of](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5740-250308135339-44ad3b31/85/Strategic-Management-Communication-for-Leaders-3rd-Edition-Walker-Solutions-Manual-42-320.jpg)
![A GEOLOGICAL ROMANCE.
By J. A. UDDEN.
A western naturalist once said that the geology of Kansas was monotonous. In one
sense this remark is certainly justifiable, and the same may be said about the geology
of some of the other States on the Western plains. The American continent is built on a
comprehensive plan, and many of its formations can be followed for hundreds of miles
without presenting much variation in general appearance. Occasionally, however, some
feature of special interest crops out from the serene uniformity, and the very nature of
its surroundings then makes it appear all the more striking. Minor accidents in the
development of our extensive terranes sometimes stand out in bold relief, as it were,
from the monotonous background. In their isolation from other details such features
occasionally display past events with unusual clearness.
Such is the case with a deposit of volcanic ash which has been discovered in the
superficial strata on the plains.[31] It lies scattered in great quantities in a number of
localities in Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, and Colorado, having been found in no
less than twenty counties in the first-mentioned State. It measures from two to
fourteen feet in thickness in different localities, and is mostly found imbedded in yellow
marl and clay, and has a somewhat striking appearance in the field, due to its snowy
whiteness and to the sharpness of the plane which separates it from the underlying
darker materials. Many years before its real nature was known it had been noticed and
described by Western geologists. Prof. O. T. St. John saw it many years ago in Kansas,
where it appeared as "an exceedingly fine, pure white siliceous material," forming a
separate layer of several feet, and set off by a sharp line from the buff clay-marl below.
His words describe its usual appearance in other places (see Fig. 1).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5740-250308135339-44ad3b31/85/Strategic-Management-Communication-for-Leaders-3rd-Edition-Walker-Solutions-Manual-46-320.jpg)
Strategic Management Communication for Leaders 3rd Edition Walker Solutions Manual
- 1. Visit https://testbankbell.com to download the full version and explore more testbank or solutions manual Strategic Management Communication for Leaders 3rd Edition Walker Solutions Manual _____ Click the link below to download _____ http://testbankbell.com/product/strategic-management- communication-for-leaders-3rd-edition-walker-solutions- manual/ Explore and download more testbank or solutions manual at testbankbell.com
- 2. Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be interested in. You can click the link to download. Test Bank for Business Communication: Developing Leaders for a Networked World, 3rd Edition, Peter Cardon http://testbankbell.com/product/test-bank-for-business-communication- developing-leaders-for-a-networked-world-3rd-edition-peter-cardon/ Solution Manual for Strategic Management 3rd Edition http://testbankbell.com/product/solution-manual-for-strategic- management-3rd-edition/ Strategic Management 2nd Edition Rothaermel Solutions Manual http://testbankbell.com/product/strategic-management-2nd-edition- rothaermel-solutions-manual/ Solution manual for Fundamentals of Machine Component Design Juvinall Marshek 5th edition http://testbankbell.com/product/solution-manual-for-fundamentals-of- machine-component-design-juvinall-marshek-5th-edition/
- 3. Medical-Surgical Nursing Patient-Centered Collaborative Care Ignatavicius 6th Edition Test Bank http://testbankbell.com/product/medical-surgical-nursing-patient- centered-collaborative-care-ignatavicius-6th-edition-test-bank/ Test Bank for You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking like a Sociologist, 6th Edition, Dalton Conley, ISBN-10: 0393674185, ISBN: 9780393674187 http://testbankbell.com/product/test-bank-for-you-may-ask-yourself-an- introduction-to-thinking-like-a-sociologist-6th-edition-dalton-conley- isbn-10-0393674185-isbn-9780393674187/ Solution Manual for Methods in Behavioral Research, 14th Edition, Paul Cozby, Scott Bates http://testbankbell.com/product/solution-manual-for-methods-in- behavioral-research-14th-edition-paul-cozby-scott-bates-2/ Test Bank for Group Dynamics for Teams 4th Edition Daniel J Levi Download http://testbankbell.com/product/test-bank-for-group-dynamics-for- teams-4th-edition-daniel-j-levi-download/ Test Bank for Community Public Health Nursing 7th Edition by Nies http://testbankbell.com/product/test-bank-for-community-public-health- nursing-7th-edition-by-nies/
- 4. Test Bank for Gift of Fire, A: Social, Legal, and Ethical Issues for Computing Technology, 4/E 4th Edition : 0132492679 http://testbankbell.com/product/test-bank-for-gift-of-fire-a-social- legal-and-ethical-issues-for-computing-technology-4-e-4th- edition-0132492679/
- 5. Strategic Management Communication for Leaders 3rd Edition Walker Solutions Manual Full download chapter at: https://testbankbell.com/product/strategic-management- communication-for-leaders-3rd-edition-walker-solutions-manual/ Chapter 2: Foundations of Communication? Lecture Notes and Teaching Suggestions CHAPTER SYNOPSIS To be a strategic communicator requires a number of skills and abilities as well as certain knowledge; some might say it requires a certain mindset. These skills and abilities include understanding principles and concepts considered to be the foundation of effective communication, especially a high level of self-awareness, an ability to understand other people (who often have differing experiences, values, and interests from our own, including cultural differences), a basic knowledge of the complexity of the communication process itself, and the ability to think critically—to analyze and evaluate situations, and use that information to formulate effective communication strategies. How can you develop your analytical and critical thinking abilities so that you are better able to heighten your skills as a strategic communicator? LEARNING OBJECTIVES I. Approach communication from a more complex perspective that embraces a strategic and ethical focus. II. Understand the process of perception and the way it affects the way information is interpreted. III. Understand the importance of self-awareness as a foundational element of effective communication and the understanding of others. IV. Identify obstacles to strategic and ethical communication. LECTURE OUTLINE I. Requirements for Strategic Communication PowerPoint slide 2 Content: A. Personal literacy: understanding of self-awareness and self-esteem.
- 6. B. Social literacy: ability to understand other people (diverse) to be able to engage and challenge them. C. Business literacy: understanding of the organization’s business environment, culture, and processes. D. Cultural literacy: valuing and leveraging cultural differences. 7 © 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
- 7. Notes: Role Play Exercise: Divide the class into four groups. Assign each of the four requirements for strategic communication to each group. Each group would be charged with the task of searching the Internet to provide examples that would best describe the requirement for strategic communication assigned. Watch a YouTube video related to Strategic Communication: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWvi-jI6DMc Hold a discussion about the main points discussed in the video. II. Models of Communication (p. 17) PowerPoint slide 3 Content: a. Information Transfer: Assumes communication is transmitted without distortion from sender to receiver b. Transactional: Assumes sender and receiver are focused on achieving shared meaning, without interest in own perspective c. Strategic Control: Assumes sender is entirely focused on own interest, possibly to the detriment of honest ethical communication d. Dialogic: Assumes communication is a process of joint creation of reality, focused on audience and context, allows different points of view Notes: A. Communication as information transfer. • Assumes that communication can be achieved without distortion. • Flaws: interpretation and distortion are unavoidable. Nonverbal communication is ignored. B. Communication as transactional process. • Acknowledges that both senders and receivers are active and simultaneous interpreters of messages. • Flaws: emphasis on shared meaning. It does not emphasize the political nature of many organizations. • Communication as strategic control. • Assumes that communication is a tool that individuals use to control their environment. • Flaws: it recognizes that people should not be expected to communicate in any objectively rational way, thus ignoring the goals of clarity and honesty.
- 8. • Communication as dialogic process. • Mitigates against many of the problems associated with the other three models discussed earlier. • Focuses on the contribution of the “receiver’s” perspective to an interpretation and course of action that are jointly formulated. • Audience analysis should drive strategy and message formulation. • Does not assume that meaning is shared, but instead recognizes the interplay between difference and similarity of those involved in the communication process. • Does not assume that we are isolated individuals, but instead that we live in groups and communities and that our actions affect others. • Requires an understanding of the socially constructed nature of reality— individuals create meaning through communication—and the possibility for a strategic approach to communication to go awry in an ethical sense. • Perceives others as interdependent partners capable and deserving of their own voice to influence the organizational dialog. • Is considered an index of the ethical level of communication to the degree that participants in communication display the preceding attributes. • Supports systems theory, plurality, and intercultural communication. PowerPoint slide 4 Content: Monologue v. Dialogue A. Monologue • Talking to oneself • Deception • Superiority • Exploitation • Pretense • Coercion B. Dialogue • Joint creation of reality • Trust
- 9. • Sincerity • Lack of pretense • Humility • Directness • Open-minded • Honest Notes: Exercise: Visit http://www.scribd.com/doc/17878315/Models-of-Communication and play the PowerPoint presentation. Then, divide the class into groups of five students. Each group will be responsible for explaining each of the models presented in the PowerPoint file. Exercise: Show the video found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpkm7D4Bn6I and ask students to present five things that stood out the most to them. Follow it by holding a meaningful discussion. III. Perception (p. 22) PowerPoint slide 5 Content: 1. Stereotypes cause us to focus on certain cues 2. We make attributions about who or what is responsible for what we sense 3. All the factors we sense are compiled into a coherent whole to form an impression Notes: A. Because everything is interpreted through our own experiences, beliefs, and values, it is difficult to understand what is really “out there.” B. Because we all have different life experiences, value systems, worldviews, and beliefs, we thus may perceive reality differently. C. These differences can be enormous obstacles to effective communication, particularly if we are unaware of them. Today’s diverse workplace adds a more complex dimension to this problem. D. Perceptual differences may lead to additional problems: • Stereotyping • Attribution • Impression formation • Culture Exercise: Ask students to view the stereotyping video found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXzKLtgKJj0 and hold a meaningful discussion. IV. Self-awareness and Communication (p. 24) PowerPoint slide 6
- 10. Content: A. What is my “EQ”? a. Self i. Am I aware of my feelings: ii. Can I manage my emotions and impulses? iii. Do I persist in the face of setbacks and failures? b. Others i. Can I sense how others are feeling? ii. Do I have the ability to handle others emotions? Notes: A. To become effective communicators, we must know ourselves, including our strengths and weaknesses, which affect the way we interact with others. B. Self-concept refers to how we think about ourselves and how we describe ourselves to others. – How we view ourselves – How we view the other person – How we believe the other person views us – How the other person views himself/herself/themselves – How the other person views us – How the other person believes we view him/her/them C. Self-awareness and communication concepts. – Self-fulfilling prophecy – Self-awareness – Intrapersonal communication – Intrapersonal intelligence – Reflexivity – Interpersonal intelligence – Self-esteem – Emotional intelligence
- 11. Exercise: Show the video found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfp_ti1NQZ8 and hold a meaningful discussion. V. Obstacles to Strategic Communication (p. 28) PowerPoint slide 7 Content: Obstacles to Strategic and Ethical Communication 1. Perceptual mindset 2. Inferential Errors 3. Thinking Style Notes: A. Perceptual mindsets. – Confirmation bias – False dichotomies – Inferential errors PowerPoint slide 8 Content: Ways to combat confirmation bias • Confirmation bias: A tendency to distort information that contradicts the beliefs or attitudes we currently hold. 1. Actively seek out disconfirming information 2. Vigorously present and argue disconfirming evidence to others 3. Play devil’s advocate 4. Gather allies to challenge confirmation bias PowerPoint slide 9 Content: Ways to combat false dichotomies A. False dichotomy: A dichotomy that is not jointly exhaustive or that is not mutually exclusive. Be suspicious of absolutes. Look for alternatives to the one or two suggestions recommended Employ the language of qualifications. Speak in terms of degrees -Sometimes -Rarely -Mostly -Occasionally Exercise: Show the false dichotomies video found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4x4nmeNlxw and hold a meaningful discussion.
- 12. PowerPoint slide 10 Content: What causes inferential errors? ▪ Vividness: “I heard about a terrible tragedy that happened to someone who did that…” ▪ Unrepresentativeness: “That restaurant is no good, I went there one time and I didn’t like it…” ▪ Correlation: “Every time I’ve gotten sick, I was wearing these shoes…” PowerPoint slide 11 Content: Other perceptual errors • Oversimplifying: Tendency to prefer simplicity over complexity because it is less effort • Imposing consistency: Tendency to impose patterns where they don’t exist • Focusing on the negative: Tendency to perceive negative characteristics as more important than positive • Making a fundamental attribution error: Tendency to assume that others’ failures are their own fault, but that success is due to situational factors • Exhibiting a self-serving bias: Tendency to assume that our own failures are due to situational factors, but our success is due to our personal qualities Thinking styles – ▪ Sponge: Indiscriminant absorption of information ▪ ▪ Passive No method for deciding usefulness – ▪ Filter: Critical absorption of relevant information ▪ Active processing ▪ Ask questions of material to determine usefulness ANSWERS TO CHAPTER DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 1. Explain each of the four models of communication and what distinguishes them, including their strengths and weaknesses. Why might the dialogic model better meet the needs of today’s workplace? A. Communication as information transfer.
- 13. • Assumes that communication can be achieved without distortion. • Flaws: interpretation and distortion are unavoidable. Nonverbal communication is ignored. B. Communication as transactional process. • Acknowledges that both senders and receivers are active and simultaneous interpreters of messages. • Flaws: emphasis on shared meaning. It does not emphasize the political nature of many organizations. C. Communication as strategic control. • Assumes that communication is a tool that individuals use to control their environment. • Flaws: it recognizes that people should not be expected to communicate in any objectively rational way, thus ignoring the goals of clarity and honesty. D. Communication as dialogic process. • Mitigates against many of the problems associated with the other three models discussed earlier. • Focuses on the contribution of the “receiver’s” perspective to an interpretation and course of action that are jointly formulated. • Audience analysis should drive strategy and message formulation. • Does not assume that meaning is shared, but instead recognizes the interplay between difference and similarity of those involved in the communication process. • Does not assume that we are isolated individuals, but instead that we live in groups and communities and that our actions affect others. • Requires an understanding of the socially constructed nature of reality— individuals create meaning through communication—and the possibility for a strategic approach to communication to go awry in an ethical sense. • Perceives others as interdependent partners capable and deserving of their own voice to influence the organizational dialog. • Is considered an index of the ethical level of communication to the degree that participants in communication display the preceding attributes. • Supports systems theory, plurality, and intercultural communication.
- 14. The dialogic model better meets the needs of today’s workplace because of its numerous advantages discussed above. In short, it mitigates against many of the problems associated with the other three models. Tags: BUSPROG: Communication | Diversity DISC: Stakeholders | Conclusion LO: 2-1 | 2-4 Bloom’s: Evaluation Difficulty: Difficult Topic: A-Head: Models of Communication 2. Identify examples of the use of moral exclusion and describe the intent and effect of their use. Based on this analysis, discuss whether such practices are ethical. Support your response with evidence. Moral exclusion occurs when the application of moral values, rules, and fairness is not considered necessary for particular individuals or groups. The practice of moral exclusion results in individuals being perceived as nonentities, expendable, or undeserving. The result is that harming such individuals becomes acceptable, appropriate, or just. Persons who are morally excluded are thus denied their rights, dignity, and autonomy. Examples include showing the superiority of oneself or one’s group by making unflattering comparisons to other individuals or groups; characterizing people as lower life forms or as inferior beings; placing the blame for any harm on the victim; justifying harmful acts by claiming that the morally condemnable acts committed by “the enemy” are worse; misrepresenting harmful behaviors by masking or conferring respectability on them through the use of neutral, positive, technical, or euphemistic terms to describe them; and justifying harmful behavior by claiming that everyone is doing it or that is an isolated case. Tags: BUSPROG: Ethics DISC: Conclusion LO: 2-4 Bloom’s: Analysis Difficulty: Moderate Topic: A-Head: Models of Communication 3. How have differing perceptions affected your communication with others? What steps might you take to avoid misunderstandings created by perceptual differences? A. Because everything is interpreted through our own experiences, beliefs, and values, it is difficult to understand what is really “out there.”
- 15. B. Because we all have different life experiences, value systems, worldviews, and beliefs, we thus may perceive reality differently. C. These differences can be enormous obstacles to effective communication, particularly if we are unaware of them. Today’s diverse workplace adds a more complex dimension to this problem. D. Perceptual differences may lead to additional problems: • Stereotyping: can be a label for making sense out of what we perceive by categorizing or generalizing about it or it can be an oversimplified way of labeling people with the intention of denigrating them in some way. • Attribution: the assignment of meaning to other people’s behavior. • Impression formation: process of integrating a variety of observations about a person into a coherent impression of that person. • Culture: the totality of what is learned by individuals as members of a society and shared by others of that society. It is a way of life, a mode of acting, feeling, and thinking. To avoid misunderstandings, we must recognize the contested perceptual nature of reality and our interpretation of it. It thus requires openness to others’ views and opinions, if we are to communicate effectively to reach anything approaching shared meaning. Tags: BUSPROG: Analytic DISC: Conclusion | Consequences LO: 2-2 Bloom’s: Application Difficulty: Moderate Topic: A-Head: Perception 4. What are three different errors that may occur due to our perceptual mindsets? How might these be avoided? Perceptual mindsets lead to the following errors: – Confirmation bias – False dichotomies – Inferential errors • Vividness • Unrepresentativeness • Correlation
- 16. – Other perceptual errors • Oversimplifying • Imposing consistency • Focusing on the negative • Making a fundamental attribution error • Exhibiting a self-serving bias To avoid these errors, we must become critical thinkers. Critical thinking is discussed below. Critical Thinking: In the past, the focus on feelings went too far. The result is the neglect of thinking. We must answer that neglect. Students must be taught how to sort out their feelings, decide to what extent their feelings have been shaped by external influences, and evaluate them carefully when those feelings conflict among themselves or with the feelings of others. In short, students must be taught to think critically. Feeling and thought are complementary. Feeling is an excellent beginning to the development of a conclusion. Thought provides a way to identify the best and most appropriate feeling. Students must acquire the intellectual skills necessary to solve the challenging problems of today and tomorrow. The critical thinking strategy may be summarized as follows: 1. Knows oneself and remains mindful of the ways in which own habits of mind undermine own treatment of issues. 2. Is observant and reflects on what is seen and heard. 3. When an issue is identified, clarification is sought by listing its subheadings and raising probing questions about each. 4. Conducts a thorough inquiry, obtaining all relevant facts and informed opinions. 5. Evaluates own findings, and then forms and expresses own judgment. Generic guide for facilitating critical thinking: A. What do I think about this matter? B. What line of reasoning led me to that conclusion? C. What evidence supports my position? D. Can I give an example? E. How typical is that example? F. In what way does my experience support or challenge my idea? G. What additional information can help me reach a conclusion? Where can I find that information? H. What objections could be raised to my idea? I. Are any of these objections wholly or partially valid? Explain. J. What other views of this issue are possible? Which of those is most reasonable?
- 17. Ruggiero, V. (1998). Beyond feelings. A guide to critical thinking. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company. Tags: BUSPROG: Analytic DISC: Conclusion LO: 2-4 Bloom’s: Application Difficulty: Moderate Topic: A-Head: Obstacles to Strategic and Ethical Communication 5. What are some examples of black-and-white, or dichotomous, thinking from recent news reports or opinion columns you have seen or read? What other possibilities may exist to broaden the views or options presented in these reports? Student responses should discuss how dichotomous thinking is basically the tendency to see the world in terms of “either-or.” Such thinking is typically false because there are almost always more than two possibilities in our complex world. This tendency creates a false dichotomy, which blinds people to other possibilities. To avoid the pitfalls of false dichotomies, individuals should: A. Be suspicious of absolutes. Look for alternatives to the one or two suggestions recommended. B. Employ the language of qualifications. Speak in terms of degrees by using such terms as sometimes, rarely, occasionally, mostly, usually, and moderately. Tags: BUSPROG: Analytic DISC: Conclusion LO: 2-4 Bloom’s: Application Difficulty: Moderate Topic: A-Head: Obstacles to Strategic and Ethical Communication 6. What are the benefits of thinking critically? Critical thinking is an important skill with many benefits. Critical thinkers communicate ethically to the extent that their acknowledgement of multiple possible hypotheses or sources of information allows them to communicate a position honestly and clearly. In addition, being a critical thinker allows individuals to learn to deal with ambiguity and appreciate the complexity of our world. Finally, thinking critically can help an individual gather better information, and ultimately make better decisions. This skill results in increased credibility for the critical thinker.
- 18. Tags: BUSPROG: Analytic DISC: Conclusion | Consequences LO: 2-4 Bloom’s: Comprehension Difficulty: Moderate Topic: A-Head: Obstacles to Strategic and Ethical Communication APPLICATIONS 1. Use a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis to determine your career goals. This is an exercise in analysis, evaluation, and ultimately, strategic thinking. First, identify the opportunities available to you and the possible risks; second, identify your strengths and weaknesses; third, identify the resources available to you to attain these opportunities; and fourth, match the opportunities available to you with those that are attainable. From this analysis should emerge an attainable career goal. It should also help you identify personal characteristics that you may leverage in a career search as well as those liabilities that you may set goals to eliminate or reduce. Student responses should include a thorough SWOT analysis to identify the opportunities ßavailable to them and the possible risks; identify their strengths and weaknesses; identify the resources available to them to attain these opportunities; and match the opportunities available to them with those that are attainable. The end result should be the establishment of an attainable career goal and a better understanding of themselves. Tags: BUSPROG: Analytic DISC: Conclusion LO: 2-3 Bloom’s: Analysis Difficulty: Moderate Topic: A-Head: Self-Awareness and Communication 2. Using the Internet, search for free online self-assessments of emotional intelligence, locus of control, leadership traits, and self-monitoring. One place to start is at www.queendom.com. After completing the assessments and reading the results, summarize them and then write three goals for self-improvement for each personality measure, including your plan for achieving each of them. Student responses should include a summary of the results of completing the assessments and a statement related to three goals for self-improvement, including their plan for achieving such goals. Tags:
- 19. BUSPROG: Analytic DISC: Conclusion LO: 2-3 Bloom’s: Analysis Difficulty: Moderate Topic: A-Head: Self-Awareness and Communication 3. Using YouTube, identify examples of persons who you think exemplify a leader. Make a list of your observations: What does the person do that exemplifies leadership? You may look at the way he or she speaks, looks, or behaves. From this list, what traits of a leader did you infer from your observations? What did you notice about the way this person communicated? Set some personal goals for yourself to help you to begin to incorporate the traits you identified in your own communication practices. Student responses should discuss how an effective leader is an effective strategic communicator. This leader requires a number of skills and abilities as well as certain knowledge; some might say it requires a certain mindset. These skills and abilities include understanding principles and concepts considered to be the foundation of effective communication, especially a high level of self-awareness, an ability to understand other people (who often have differing experiences, values, and interests from our own, including cultural differences), a basic knowledge of the complexity of the communication process itself, and the ability to think critically—to analyze and evaluate situations, and use that information to formulate effective communication strategies. Tags: BUSPROG: Analytic DISC: Conclusion | Consequences | Patterns LO: 2-1 Bloom’s: Analysis Difficulty: Moderate Topic: A-Head: Self-Awareness and Communication 4. Choose a culture that differs from your own and then describe your benefits and attitudes about and perceptions of this culture. Now conduct research to find out as much about the culture and its values, beliefs, and practices as you can. You may also wish to interview someone from this culture, if this opportunity is available. After learning more about the culture, what perceptions did you hold about it? Has your research changed your attitudes and beliefs about the culture? Student responses should include that, most likely, after conducting research about the chosen culture, their perceptions changed about that culture. In other words, ethnocentric behavior is our natural tendency. Upon gaining of a better understanding of a given culture, we begin to move from ethnocentrism to cultural relativism. Cultural relativism refers to seeing a particular culture through the eyes of that culture, as opposed to the eyes of our own culture.
- 20. Tags: BUSPROG: Analytic | Diversity DISC: Conclusion LO: 2-2 Bloom’s: Analysis Difficulty: Moderate Topic: A-Head: Perception CASE ANALYSIS A. Kaplan University: The Business of Education Answers to Discussion Questions 1. Moving forward, how should the Washington Post Company communicate: • To the public? • To investors? • To students? Student responses will vary but might mention that their communication with ALL groups involved should be open and honest and should encourage dialogue. Specifically: • To the public: Acknowledging and listening to concerns without getting defensive. • To investors: Honestly disclosing the difficult situation and clearly explaining how they are approaching the issues that could impact investors • To students: Recognizing the unique difficulties Kaplan students are facing on an individual level and communicating their commitment to helping these students deal with their issues and prevent similar issues going forward. 2. Does the perception of conflict of interest damage the Washington Post's credibility? Student responses will vary. Many will argue that it does damage the Post’s credibility though some will suggest that it doesn’t. People may argue that if the Post communicated strategically, it would not damage credibility as much. Students that make this argument should elaborate on what a strategic communication-based response to this situation would look like. 3. Should Kaplan University change its business model? Student responses will vary. There’s no absolute right answer to this. There’s a compelling argument for changing the business model, especially given the ethical and legal missteps that the company took under their existing model. But
- 21. students may argue that Kaplan should keep its current business model and change their practices. Students should support either argument with evidence. 4. What can Kaplan University do to build more credibility for its academic programs? Student responses will vary. One key (communication-related) action that would be an important step toward building more credibility for its academic programs would be to engage in a rich dialogue with its most important audience—past, current, and potential students—and then develop plans for change based on this feedback. Demonstrating that the company is truly listening and responding to its most important audience would begin to develop some of the credibility the company has lost. 5. What should be done by the Washington Post Company or Kaplan, Inc. in response to the online petition to close Kaplan University? Student responses will vary but good responses will note that the one thing Washington Post Company and Kaplan, Inc. should not do is ignore the online petition to close Kaplan University. Ignoring the petition could make it look like Kaplan either finds the issue to be insignificant (which could be a big mistake given the growth in attention to the issue) or doesn’t know how to manage/deal with the petition (which could make the company look incompetent). 6. What steps can the Washington Post Company and Kaplan University take to prepare for future communication challenges? Student responses will vary, but they should include some of the steps that Washington Post Company and Kaplan University might take in developing the infrastructure that would simplify future communication challenges. These might include establishing regular dialogue with key stakeholder groups or improving communication metrics and integrating these metrics into regular organizational planning. 7. Who are the key stakeholders? Student responses will vary but might include: • Students (past, current, potential future) • The public • Investors in the Washington Post Company • Policy makers (and perhaps policy influencers like Change.org) • Possibly other for-profit universities • The media
- 22. Another Random Scribd Document with Unrelated Content
- 23. work such disturbance to the composition of the air as to endanger the well-being of the animal inhabitants of the earth. The activity of a square metre of leaf surface results in the formation of one and a half to two grammes of solid substance per hour in sunlight. A vigorous sunflower with one hundred and forty-five leaves constructed thirty-six grammes of solid matter in a day, and a squash with one hundred and sixteen leaves one hundred and sixteen grammes in the same length of time. The amounts formed by such trees as the beech, maple, oak, poplar, elm, and horse-chestnut, with leaf surfaces aggregating three hundred to one thousand square metres, must be correspondingly large. A comparison of plants grown in strong sunlight, diffuse light, and darkness will reveal many differences in stature and internal structure. These differences are for the most part due to the formative and tonic effect of light. Otherwise expressed, the influence of variations of light upon plants causes adaptive reactions, and disturbances of the nutritive processes and growth. In consequence of these facts the reaction of any given organ to changes in the intensity of the illumination will depend upon its specific functions and relation to the remainder of the organism. The stems formed by seedlings and awakening underground organs are usually surrounded by plants or other objects which cut off more or less sunlight. The developing shoot can not spread its leaves to the light advantageously until it has outstripped or grown beyond the objects intervening between it and the light. This necessity is one of the most important conditions in the struggle for existence. To meet it, a very great majority of seed-forming plants have acquired the power of accelerated elongation of the stems when deprived of their normal amount of light. Very striking examples of this reaction are offered by the awakening corms of the Jack-in- the-pulpit (Arisæma triphyllum). The corms usually lie at a distance of five or six centimetres below the surface of the soil, and when the growth of the large bud begins in the spring the heavy sheathing scales elongate and pierce the soil, opening when the surface is reached at the distance of a few centimetres. If the corm should have been buried deeper in the substratum by floods or drifts of leaves, the growth of the bud scales will continue until the light is reached, though it may be a distance of twenty centimetres. Such growth may be seen if the corms are grown in a deep layer of sphagnum moss, or in a dark room. After the stems emerge from the "drawn" buds they show a similar attenuation, attaining a length of twice the normal. The excessive elongation of stems is accompanied by variations in the structure and contents of the tissues. The cells are generally longer, while the walls are thinner. In consequence, organs grown in darkness are very weak and easily bent or broken. Growth in darkness is attended by the non-formation of chlorophyll. This is replaced by etiolin, giving the plant a pale, waxy, yellow appearance. The adaptive elongation is not shown by all species, however. It has been found that stems of beet, hop, dioscorea, and a few others show no adaptations to diminished light. The adaptive modification of stems elongating in darkness is developed from the retarding influence exercised by light upon growth. Thus it is a well-known fact that the action of
- 24. certain portions of the sun's rays actually impedes or checks the increase in volume known as growth, though it does not influence actual division of the cells to any great extent. When this retarding action is eliminated excessive elongation ensues. The behavior of leaves in illuminations below the normal depends upon the relation of these organs to the storage structures of the plant as well as upon other factors, and many types are dependent upon their own activity for plastic material necessary for growth. It is to be said in general that leaves of dicotyledonous plants are incapable of full development in darkness, though to this rule there are many exceptions. Thus the leaves of the beet develop normally, or nearly so, in darkness. On the other hand, leaves of monocotyledonous plants attain normal size in darkness, especially those with straight or curved parallel venation. Some, as the iris, swamp marigold, and onion, attain a greater length in darkness than in light. Here, as in stems, cell division is not modified, but the growth of the individual cell is increased. The growth of leaves in darkness may be easily observed if the underground perennial stems of common mandrake are placed in a dark chamber before the growth of the leaf buds has begun. The leaves are peltate, and in the bud are folded about the end of the petiole after the manner of an umbrella. Usually this umbrella expands as soon as it has pushed upward and become free from the soil, attaining a diameter of twenty-five to forty centimetres when outspread. In darkness, however, it refuses to unfold, the laminæ are pale yellow and retain the crumpled form of the bud, and as the petiole shows an exaggerated elongation the organ takes on the appearance of a very small parasol on a very long handle. The imperfect development of leaves and the rapid decay of aërial organs deprived of sunlight leads to the conclusion that the action of light is necessary to the health and normal activity of these organs, and the light therefore exercises a tonic influence upon vegetation. Many species of plants are so plastic and capable of such ready response to variations in external conditions that they undergo distinct morphological changes in response to variations in the intensity of the light. The common potato is an example of this fact. The edible tubers are simply thickened stems, and the plant has the habit of storing starch in any stems not acted upon by the light. The branches arising from the base of the main stem are generally underneath the surface of the soil, and afford the proper conditions for tuber formation. Sugar is constructed in the leaves, carried down the length of the stem, and deposited in the underground branches as starch. Space is made for the accumulating store by the multiplication of the thin-walled cells of the pith. If any of the upper branches should become shaded, they become at once the focus of converging streams of sugar, and similar enlargement ensues, resulting in the formation of tubers. Such structures are occasionally observed in plants grown thickly together. Vöchting, by a number of most ingenious experiments, has succeeded in producing tubers on any branch of a potato plant by simply inclosing the branch in a small dark chamber. As the result of one experiment the entire main stem springing from a sprouting tuber was converted into a new tuber nearly as large as the first. The entire plant at the close of the experiment had the form of a dumb-bell, with the old tuber as one ball and the new tuber as the other.
- 25. The same writer has described important results obtained from a study of the action of light upon the stems of cactus, consisting of a number of flattened internodes. When the growing tips of such plants were allowed to develop in a dark chamber the new internodes grown were cylindrical in form. Such behavior suggests that these plants were originally furnished with cylindrical stems and foliar leaves. The leaves at some time in the history of the plant were found unsuitable, and gradually atrophied, while the stems were flattened and extended to take up their functions. Some very striking adaptations of form of organs to the intensity of the light have been analyzed by Goebel. The common harebell (Campanula rotundifolia) has an upright stem twenty to sixty centimetres in height. The upper part of the stem bears sessile lanceolate leaves, decreasing in size from the base to the summit. The first leaves formed by the stem on its emergence from the soil are entirely different in construction, showing a heart-shaped lamina with a distinct petiole. These leaves are formed at the actual surface of the soil, are generally more or less shaded or covered by fallen leaves, and in fact are not known or seen by many collectors or observers of the plant. Goebel found that similar leaves might be formed on any part of the plant if it were shaded from the full glare of the sun's rays. The cordate leaves at the base of the stem were always produced, however, no matter to what intensity of illumination that part of the plant was subjected. It is therefore safe to conclude that the cordate leaves are inherited forms, and that the lanceolate organs are adaptations to light which may be shown by any individual of the species. In general it is to be said that the leaves of sun-loving species have a thick epidermis, entirely free from chlorophyll, with stomata on the lower side only, a firm consistence due to the formation of woody tissues, and are often provided with a coating of hairs. The leaves of shade-loving plants, on the other hand, have a thin-walled epidermis often containing chlorophyll, stomata on both sides, and are not so plentifully provided with hairs as those in exposed situations. The variations in external form described above are due to the intensity of the illumination. At the same time the structure and arrangement of the cells depend on the direction from which the light rays come. Thus, an organ receiving light from one side only will exhibit a structure different from an organ of the same kind receiving direct rays from two or more sides. Light, then, is a cause of dorsiventrality—that is, of the fact that the upper and lower sides of organs are not alike in structure. The leaf affords a splendid example of dorsiventrality as a result of the exposure of one side only to direct light. The upper side of a horizontal leaf, such as the oak, beech, or maple, contains one or two layers of cylindrical cells with their long axes perpendicular to the surface. In vertical leaves, such as the iris, these palisade cells, as they are termed, are not so well defined, and in all leaves grown in darkness this tissue is very much reduced. If a young leaf not yet unfolded from the bud is fastened in such a position that the under side is uppermost, palisade cells will be formed on the side exposed to the direct rays of the sun. The influence of light upon the sporophylls, or reproductive organs of the seed-forming plants, is quite as well defined as upon the vegetative organs. In general it is to be said that stamens and pistils may reach functional maturity in darkness or diffuse light, and if pollination is provided for, seed and fruit formation may ensue.
- 26. The diminution of light has the effect of transforming inflorescences into leafy shoots in some instances, however. The more common reaction consists of alterations in the size, form, and color of the perianth, and greater changes are induced in the petals than in the sepals. The corolla shows greater decrease in size in Melandryum and Silene, in diffuse light, though the relative form is maintained. The writer has obtained most striking results from growing flowers of Salvia (sage) in a dark chamber, inclosing the inflorescence only. In the normal flower the irregular scarlet corolla attains three times the length of the calyx, and two stamens extrude from under the upper lip. When grown in darkness, the corolla with the adherent stamens measure about three millimetres in length, or one twelfth the normal, and are scarcely more than half the size of the calyx, which is but two thirds the size of similar organs grown in the light. The color is entirely lacking from the corolla, and is found only along the veins of the calyx. In other instances in which the corolla is composed of separate members, an unequal reaction is exhibited. The corolla of nasturtium (Tropæolum majus) consists of five approximately equal petals. Flowers of this species grown in darkness show one of nearly normal stature, two of reduced size, while the remaining two take the form of club-shaped bracts. The diminished size of the perianth of cleistogamous flowers of such types as the violet is due directly to the action of diminished light upon the hidden or inclosed flower. The influence of light upon the structure, reproductive processes, and distribution of the lower forms brings about the most widely divergent reactions, which can not be described here. The distribution and color of marine algæ depend upon the depth of the water and the consequent intensity of the light. This gives rise to distinct zones of aquatic vegetation. Thus in one series of surveys the littoral zone, the beach area covered at high water and exposed at low water, was found to furnish proper conditions for green, brown, and red algæ. The sublittoral zone, extending to a depth of forty metres, is furnished with red algæ, increasing in number with the depth, and the brown algæ disappear; while the elittoral zone, from forty to one hundred and ten metres, is inhabited by red algæ alone. The number of species of vegetal organisms below this depth is extremely small. An alga (Halosphæria viridis) has been brought up from depths of one thousand to two thousand metres. A very great number of bacteria are unfavorably affected by light, and find proper conditions at some depth in the soil or water. It is on account of this fact that the water of frozen streams becomes more thickly inhabited by certain organisms than in the summer time, and exposure to sunlight is adopted as a hygienic measure in freeing clothing and household effects from infection. Bacteria occur abundantly in sea water at depths of two hundred to four hundred metres, and quite a number of species are to be found at eight hundred to eleven hundred metres. The distribution of fungi follows the general habit of bacteria in that they thrive best in darkness. It is to be noticed in this connection that light is also a determining factor in the distribution of the higher land plants. Thus the amount of light received in polar latitudes is quite
- 27. insufficient for the needs of many species, entirely irrespective of temperature. The retarding influence of light upon growth is even more marked in the lower forms than in the higher. Such action is the result of the disintegrating effect of the blue-violet rays upon ferments and nitrogenous plastic substances. The greater massiveness of the bodies of the higher plants enables them to carry on the chemical activities in which these substances are concerned in the interior, where the intense rays may not penetrate. The attenuated and undifferentiated fungi must seek the shade, to escape the dangers of strong light, against which they have no shield. The reproductive processes are particularly sensitive to illumination. The formation of zoöspores by green felt (Vaucheria) may occur only in darkness, at night, or in diffuse light, and these examples might be multiplied indefinitely. Many features of the germination of spores and the growth of protonemæ or prothallia among the mosses, liverworts, and ferns are determined by light. Perhaps the most striking reactions of plants to light are to be seen in locomotor and orientation movements. Locomotor movements are chiefly confined to lower forms, and are most noticeable in the "swarm spores," or zoöspores of the algæ, though exhibited by spermatozoöids as well. Zoöspores may be seen collected against the side of the vessel receiving direct sunlight, while the opposite side of the vessel will be free from them. The chlorophyll bodies of green cells arrange themselves similarly. The latter bodies may move away from the exposed side of the cell if the light exceeds a certain intensity. The typical plant may not move its body toward or away from the source of light, but it may secure the same end by dispositions of its surfaces to vary the angle at which the rays are received. This form of irritability is one of the most highly developed properties of the plant. Wiesner has found that a seedling of the vetch is sensitive to an amount of light represented by one ten-millionth of a unit represented by a Roscoe-Bunsen flame. The "sensitiveness" to light may take one of three forms: The organ may place its axis parallel and pointing toward the source of the rays, as in stems, when it is said to be proheliotropic; the axis of the organ may assume a position perpendicular to the rays, which is designated as diaheliotropism; or it may place its axis parallel to the rays and pointing away from the light, when it is said to be apheliotropic. Upright stems are proheliotropic, horizontal leaves and creeping stems are diaheliotropic, and roots and such stems as those of ivy are apheliotropic. Sunlight varies from zero to the full blaze of the noonday sun, and assumes its greatest intensity in the equatorial regions. The intensity in latitudes 40° to 45° north would be represented by 1.5 units, and at the equator by 1.6 units. Near the equator the intensity is so great that an ordinary leaf may not receive the full force of the noonday sun without damage. The injury would not result from the luminous rays, but from the temperatures, 40° to 50° C., arising from the conversion of light into heat. As an adaptation to this condition nearly all leaves have either a pendent or a vertical position, or the power of assuming this position by motor or impassive wilting movements.
- 28. Among the plants of the temperate zone the so-called compass plants are examples of similar adaptations. The compass plants include, among others, the wild lettuce (Lactuca scariola) and rosin weed (Silphium laciniatum). These plants place the leaves in a vertical position with the tips pointing north and south in such manner that the direct rays of the morning and evening sun only may strike the surfaces at right angles, while the edges are presented to the fierce rays at noonday. That this arrangement is an adaptation against the intense light is evident when it is seen that specimens growing in shaded locations or in diffuse light place the leaves in the typical horizontal position. To meet the functional conditions, both sides of the compass leaves are almost equally provided with palisade cells for food formation and stomata for transpiration. The estimation of the light striking a compass leaf shows that it receives approximately the same amount of light as a horizontal leaf during the course of a day, but the two maxima of intensity, morning and evening, are much below that of the noon of horizontal leaves. The influence of light upon plants may be briefly summed as follows: Light is necessary for the formation of food substances by green plants, and it is an important factor in distribution in land and marine forms. Growth and reproduction are generally retarded by the action of the blue-violet rays. Light is fatal to certain bacteria and other low forms of vegetable life. Many plants have the power of accelerated growth of stems in diminished light as an adaptation for lifting the leaves above "shading" objects. The growth of many leaves and of the perianth of flowers is hindered in diminished light. The outward form of many organs, particularly leaves, is dependent upon the intensity of the light received. The internal structure of bilateral or dorsiventral organs is largely determined by the direction of the rays. Plants have the power of movement to adjust their surfaces to a proper angle with impinging light rays, as a protective adaptation. Matches which do not contain any phosphorus and which take fire by friction on any surface—a match that has been long sought—have been prepared by Mr. S. A. Rosenthal and Dr. S. J. von Kornocki. It is represented that they can be manufactured as cheaply as ordinary matches.
- 29. THE STONE AGE IN EGYPT. By J. DE MORGAN. The investigation of the origin of man in Egypt is a very complex problem, belonging as much to geology as to archæology. The earliest evidences we have of human industry, in fact, go back to so remote a period that they should be regarded rather as fossils than as archæological documents. They are very coarsely worked flints, which are found near the surface of the ground among the pebbles of the Quaternary or Pleistocene epoch, and similar to those which occur abundantly in Europe, America, and Asia; but the study and collection of them have been pursued with less method than in those countries. The more recent monuments, so much more conspicuous and more easily accessible, have attracted most attention, while these have been left in the background. No region in the world presents a clearer and more distinct individual character than Egypt. Each village is a special world, each valley a universe that has developed its own life; and man has felt the special local impressions; and even in modern times, while all the Egyptian villages present a similar aspect, and although the fellah appears to be the same sort of a man everywhere, each locality has its special individual characteristics. One who knows how to observe men and things critically will find considerable differences. These dissimilarities are as old as Egypt itself. They have always existed, and are as much more intense as the communications between district and district were formerly more difficult. They are due to physical conditions special to each village, to the prevailing winds, the form and character of the mountains, the extent of cultivable lands, and the supply of water. A study of the detail of the country is a very important preliminary to the examination of Egyptian history. Every village and every nome had formerly its special divinity and its particular usages. Are we sure that the gods and customs were not imposed by local conditions? At Ombos two hostile gods were adored in the same temple. May we not see in this fact a recollection of the hostility which has always prevailed between the inhabitants of the two banks of the river, and still continues? Previous, however, to investigating these details which have been so influential on Egyptian civilization, we ought to dispel the darkness which hides from us the earliest traces of man in the valley of the Nile, and examine how man lived in his beginning, to study the geology of the country and its condition when it issued from the seas. As one of the results of this study we find that palæolithic man, known to us only through the rough-cut flints we find in the alluvions, made his first appearance. After this period of excavation came that of filling up with silt, which still continues. New evidences of man appear in his burial places and the ruins of his villages, the kitchen middens which he has left in his habitations of unburned brick and in his camps. This time he is more civilized; he chips his flints with a skill that is not surpassed in European neolithic implements; he makes vessels of stone and clay, covers them with rude paintings, sculptures animal forms of schist, and wears necklaces of the shells and the stones of the country. Then comes a foreign people to take possession of Egypt, bringing knowledge of metals, writing, hieroglyphics, painting, sculpture, new industries and arts that have nothing in common with the arts of the people it has
- 30. overcome. The ancient Pharaonic empire begins, or perhaps the reign of the divine dynasties. The men with stone implements are the aborigines; the others are the conquering civilized Egyptians. Nothing can be more interesting than a comparison of the arts of the aborigines and those of the Egyptians of the earlier dynasties. Nearly all their characteristics are different, and it is impossible to regard them as of common origin. Yet some of the native forms persisted till the last days of the empire of the Pharaohs. These aborigines belonged to a race that is now extinct, they having been absorbed into the mass of the Egyptians and Nubians among whom they lived, and from this mixture the fellah of ancient times is derived. The origin of the conquering race—of the Egyptians as we know them—has not been precisely determined. The weight of evidence, so far as it has been obtained, and the balance of opinion, are in favor of an Asiatic origin and of primary relationship with the Shemites of Chaldea. In Egypt more than in any other country it is necessary to proceed with the most scrupulous circumspection in the examination of remote antiquities. The relics of thousands of years of human life have been piled one upon another and often intermixed. The questions they raise can not be answered in the cabinet or by the study of texts; but the inquiry must be prosecuted on the ground, by comparison of the deposits where they are found and in the deposits from which they are recovered. From my first arrival in Egypt, in 1892, my attention has been greatly occupied with the question of the origin of the relics of the stone age that have been found from time to time in that country. I have gathered up the scattered documents, explored a large number of sites, and have bought such flint implements as I have found on sale. I have gradually been led to believe that while some of these cut stones may possibly belong to the historical epoch, we shall have to attribute a much more remote antiquity to the most of them, and that evidences of a neolithic age in the valley of the Nile are more abundant than has generally been supposed. In many minds the historical antiquity of Egypt, the almost fabulous ages to which its civilization ascends, seem to challenge the history of other countries, and the land of the Pharaohs, rejecting all chronological comparison, to have appeared in the midst of the world as a single example of a land which savage life had never trodden. Yet what are the centuries since Menes ruled over the reclaimed valleys, the few thousand years of which we can calculate the duration, by the side of the incalculable lapse of time since man, struggling with the glaciers and the prehistoric beasts, began his conquest of the earth? The antiquity of Egypt, the eight thousand years (if it be as many) since the first Pharaoh, are only as an atom in the presence of these ages. We can assert some vague knowledge of these pre-Pharaonic inhabitants, for two hatchets of the Chellean pattern were found some time ago in the desert, one at Esnet, the other near the pyramids of Gizeh; and we can now affirm in the most positive manner that Quaternary man lived in the country which is now Egypt, and was then only preparing to be. Four palæolithic stations have been more recently discovered—at Thebes, Tukh, Abydos, and Daschur. Join these sites to the other two where isolated pieces were found, and we have the geography of what we know at present of Chellean man in the valley of the Nile. Doubtless continuous researches would result in similar discoveries at other points, for I have met these relics wherever I have been able to make a short sojourn. The Chellean implements are found in the gravels of the diluvium on the pebbly surface. They have been disturbed and probably scattered, but
- 31. some places yield them more numerously than others—points possibly corresponding to the ancient workshops. I have found a considerable number of specimens at Deir-el-Medinet; M. Daressy, of the Bureau of Antiquities, found a perfectly characteristic Chellean hammer stone in the Yalley of the Queens at Gurneh, as perfectly worked as the best specimens found at Chelles, St. Acheul, and Moulin-Quignon. The finds are not very numerous at Tukh, but one may in a few hours make a collection there of hatchets (or hammer stones), scrapers, points, simple blades, and a large number of stones bearing indisputable marks of having been worked, but not presenting precise forms. The deposit at Abydos is in the bottom of a circle behind the ruins surrounding the Pharaonic necropolis. The specimens seem sufficient to prove the existence of Quaternary man in Egypt, while the search for them has hardly yet begun. In view of them it is extremely improbable that man did not also exist there during the long period that intervened between this primitive age and that of the earliest Egyptians who had metals. He did exist there then, and the evidences of it are found in neolithic remains between Cairo and Thebes, a distance of about eight hundred kilometres along the valley of the Nile, in the Fayum, and in Upper Egypt. Among these are the remarkable tombs at Abydos which have been explored by M. E. Amélineau, and of which he has published descriptions. They belong to a category which I have characterized as tombs of transition and as signalizing the passage from the use of polished stone to that of metals. Their archaic character can not be disputed, and their royal origin is probably certain. They may belong to aboriginal kings or to the earliest dynasties. They reveal a knowledge of brass and of the use of gold for ornament. At the necropolis of El-'Amrah, a few miles south of Abydos, are some archaic tombs, all of the same model, composed of an oval trench from five to six and a half feet deep. The body is laid on the left side, and the legs are doubled up till the knees are even with the sternum; the forearms are drawn out in front and the hands placed one upon the other before the face, while the head is slightly bent forward. Around the skeleton are vases, and large, rudely made urns, often filled with ashes or the bones of animals, and nearer to them are painted or red vessels with black or brown edges, vessels roughly shaped out of stone, and figurines in schist representing fishes or quadrupeds, cut flints, alabaster clubs, and necklaces and bracelets of shells. Bronze is rare, and found always in shape of small implements. Both purely neolithic tombs and burials of the transition period to metals occur at El-'Amrah. The most remarkable feature of the burials is the position of the corpse, totally unlike anything that is found of the Pharaonic ages. The Egyptian finds of stone implements present the peculiarity as compared with those of Europe, that types are found associated together belonging to what would be regarded in other countries as very different epochs. The time may come when subdivisions can be made of the Egyptian stone age, but the study has not yet been pursued far enough to make this practicable at present. Among these articles are hatchets showing the transitions, examples of which are wanting in Europe, from the rudest stone hammer to the polished neolithic implement; knives of various shape and some of handsome workmanship; scrapers, lance heads, arrowheads, saws, pins, bodkins, maces, beads, bracelets, and combs. The large number of instruments with toothed blades found at some of the stations may be regarded as pointing to a very extensive cultivation of cereals at the time they were in use. The deposits of Tukh, Zarraïdah, Khattarah, Abydos, etc., situated in regions suitable for growing grain, yield thousands of them, while they are very rare at the fishing station of Dimeh. That the use of sickles tipped with flint very probably lasted long after the
- 32. introduction of metals seems to be proved by the hieroglyphics; but very few evidences of the existence of such tools are found after the middle empire. No traces of articles related to the religion of the Pharaohs are found in the burial places of the aborigines. In place of the statuettes and funerary divinities of later times are found rude figurines of animals cut in green schists. They represent fishes, tortoises with eyes adorned with hard stone or nacre, and numerous signs the origin of which is unknown, and were apparently regarded as fetiches or divinities. Articles of pottery are very numerous, very crude, and of a great variety of forms. It is not necessary to suppose that the people who have left these relics were savages or barbarians. History and even the present age afford instances of many peoples who have obtained considerable degrees of civilization while backward in some of the arts. It is hardly possible to achieve delicacy of design and finish without the use of metals. I believe I have shown that an age of stone once existed in Egypt, and that it furthermore played an important part, even in Pharaonic civilization.— Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Author's Recherches sur les Origines de l'Egypte.
- 33. SUPERSTITION AND CRIME. By Prof. E. P. EVANS. In January, 1898, an elderly woman came in great anxiety to a priest of the Church of St. Ursula, in Munich, Bavaria, and complained that the devil haunted her house at night and frightened her by making a great noise. In explanation of this unseasonable and undesirable visit from the lower world she stated that a joint-stock company had been formed in Berlin, with a branch in Munich, for the purpose of discovering hidden treasures, and that in order to attain this object a human sacrifice must be made to the devil, and that she had been selected as the victim. A woman, whose husband was a stockholder in the aforesaid company, had kindly communicated to her this information, so that she might be prepared and have time to set her house in order. Satan, however, grew impatient of the promised sacrifice, and began to look after her. The priest sent one of his younger assistants at the altar to read appropriate prayers in the haunted house, and thus exorcise the evil spirit. We can hardly suppose that his reverence believed in the reality of the reported apparition, and yet he could not assert its impossibility by calling in question the existence of the devil or the actuality of diabolical agencies in human affairs without undermining the foundations of the ecclesiastical system, of which he was an acknowledged supporter. Such a declaration would "take away our hope," as the Scotchman said of the denial of a literal hell-fire and the doctrine of eternal punishment. It was for the same reason that the great body of the Catholic clergy, from Pope Leo XIII and the highest dignitaries of the church down to the humblest country vicar, so easily fell into the snares laid by Leo Taxil and accepted the signature of the devil Bitru as genuine, and his revelations concerning the pact of the freemasons with Satan as authentic. It is certainly somewhat startling to meet with such a case of gross superstition as the above-mentioned in one of the seats of modern science and centers of European civilization. In rural districts, remote from the influences of intellectual culture, however, instances of this kind are of quite frequent occurrence, and often result in the commission of crime. Human sacrifices to Satan are still by no means uncommon in many parts of Russia, and are supposed to be effective in warding off famine and in staying the ravages of pestilence. Even in Germany and other countries of western Europe the belief in their prophylactic virtue is remarkably prevalent, and would be often put into practice were it not for the stricter administration of justice and the greater terror of the law. In October, 1889, the criminal court in the governmental province of Archangelsk, in northern Russia, sentenced a Samoyede, Jefrern Pyrerka, to fifteen years' imprisonment with hard labor for the murder of a maiden named Ssavaney. His sole defense was that an unusually severe winter with a heavy fall of snow had produced a famine followed by scurvy, of which all his children had died. He therefore made an image of the devil out of wood, smeared its lips with fat, and set it up on a hillock. He then attempted to lasso one of his companions, Andrey Tabarey, and had already thrown the noose round his neck, when the energetic wife of the intended victim intervened and rescued her husband. Shortly afterward he succeeded in strangling the girl and offering her as a sacrifice to his idol. In the province of Novgorod, known as "the darkest Russia," it is a general custom among the
- 34. country people to sacrifice some animal, usually a black cat, a black cock, or a black dog, by burying it alive, in order to check the spread of cholera. In the village of Kamenka, a peasant, whose son had died of this disease, interred with the body eight live tomcats. The immolation of dumb animals, however, is deemed less efficacious than that of human beings. On one occasion, when the cholera was raging severely, a deputation of peasants waited upon their parson, stating that they had determined to bury him alive in order to appease the demon of the plague. He escaped this horrible death only by apparently acceding to their wishes and craving a few days' respite in order to prepare for such a solemn ceremony; meanwhile he took the measures necessary to secure his safety and thwarted the purpose of his loving parishioners. In Okopovitchi, a village of the same province, the peasants succeeded in enticing an aged woman, Lucia Manjkov, into the cemetery, where they thrust her alive into the grave containing the bodies of those who had died of the epidemic, and quickly covered her up. When brought to trial they proved that they had acted on the advice of a military surgeon, Kosakovitch, who was therefore regarded as the chief culprit, and sentenced to be knouted by the hangman, and then to undergo twelve years' penal servitude in Siberia. We are indebted for these instances of barbarous superstition to the researches of Augustus Löwenstimm, associate jurisconsult in the department of justice at St. Petersburg, who has derived them from thoroughly authentic and mostly official sources. He reports several occurrences of a similar kind during the epidemics of cholera in 1831, 1855, and 1872. Indeed, it is very difficult to abolish such pagan practices so long as the clergy foster the notion that animal sacrifices are expiatory and propitiatory in their effects. In some parts of the province of Vologda it is still customary on the day dedicated to the prophet Elias (July 20th in the Greek calendar) to offer up bullocks, he-goats, or other quadrupeds within the precincts of the church. The animal is driven into the courtyard surrounding the sacred edifice and there slaughtered; the flesh is boiled in a large kettle, one half of it being kept by the peasants who provide the sacrifice, while the other half is distributed among the priests and sacristans.[26] The belief that the walls of dams, bridges, aqueducts, and buildings are rendered preternaturally strong by immuring a living human being within them still prevails in many countries of Christendom, and there is hardly an old castle in Europe that has not a legend of this sort connected with it. Usually a child is supposed to be selected for this purpose, and the roving bands of gypsies are popularly accused of furnishing the infant victims. The custom of depositing gold coins or other precious objects in the foundation stones of important public edifices is doubtless a survival of the ancient superstition.[27] Löwenstimm mentions a curious superstition of pagan origin still practiced in portions of Russia, and known as "korovya smertj" (cow-death) and "opachivaniye" (plowing roundabout). If pestilence or murrain prevails in a village, an old woman of repute as a seeress or fortune-teller enters the confines of the village at midnight and beats a pan. Thereupon all the women of the place assemble in haste, armed with divers domestic utensils—frying-pans, pokers, tongs, shovels, scythes, and cudgels. After shutting the cattle in their stalls, and warning the men not to leave their houses, a procession is formed. The seeress takes off her dress and pronounces a curse upon Death. She is then hitched to a plow, together with a bevy of virgins and a misshapen woman, if such a one can be found, and a continuous and closed furrow is drawn round the village three times. When the procession starts, the image of some saint suitable to the occasion, that of St. Blasius, for example, in the case of murrain, is borne in front of it; this is followed by the seeress, clad
- 35. only in a shift, with disheveled hair and riding on a broomstick; after her come women and maidens drawing the plow, and behind them the rest of the crowd, shrieking and making a fearful din. They kill every animal they meet, and if a man is so unfortunate as to fall in with them he is mercilessly beaten, and usually put to death. In the eyes of these raging women he is not a human being, but Death himself in the form of a were-wolf, who seeks to cross their path and thus break the charm and destroy the healing virtue of the furrow. The ceremony varies in different places, and generally ends by burying alive a cat, cock, or dog. In some districts the whole population of the village, both men and women, take part in the procession, and are often attended by the clergy with sacred images and consecrated banners. During the prevalence of the pest in the province of Podolia, in 1738, the inhabitants of the village of Gummenez, while marching in procession through the fields, met Michael Matkovskij, a nobleman of a neighboring village, who was looking for his stray horses. The strange man, wandering about with an eager look and a bridle in his hand, was regarded as the incarnate pestilence, and was therefore seized and most brutally beaten and left lying half naked and half dead on the ground. At length he recovered his senses and succeeded with great difficulty in reaching his home. No sooner was it known that he was still alive than the peasants rushed into his house, dragged him to their village, subjected him to terrible tortures, and finally burned him. A curious feature of these remedial rites is the mixture of paganism and Christianity which characterizes them; and it is an unquestionable though almost incredible fact that their atoning efficacy is often quite as firmly believed in by the village priests of the Russian Church as by the most ignorant members of their flock. In the autumn of 1894 some Russian peasants in the district of Kazan slew one of their own number as a sacrifice to the gods of the Votiaks, a Finnish race dwelling on the Volga, Viatka, and Kama Rivers. Even orthodox Christians of the Greek Church, although regarding these gods as devils, fear and seek to propitiate them, especially in times of public distress. Still more widely diffused is the practice of infanticide as the sequence of superstition. The belief that dwarfs or gnomes, dwelling in the inner parts of the earth, carry off beautiful newborn babes and leave their own deformed offspring in their stead is not confined to any one people, but is current alike in Germanic, Celtic, Romanic, and Slavic countries, and causes a misshapen child to be looked upon with suspicion and subjected to cruel tortures and even killed. The supposed changeling is often severely beaten with juniper rods and the scourging attended with incantations, so as to compel the wicked fairies to reclaim their deformed bantling and restore the stolen child. If the castigation proves ineffective, more summary measures are frequently taken, and the supposititious suckling is thrown out of the window on a dunghill or immersed in boiling water. In 1877, in the city of New York, an Irish immigrant and his wife burned their child to death under the delusion that they were ridding themselves of a changeling. Cases of this kind are quite common in Ireland, where the victims are sometimes adults.[28] Not long since Magoney, an Irish peasant, had a sickly child, which the most careful nurture failed to restore to health and strength. The parents, therefore, became convinced that a changeling had been imposed upon them, and when the boy was four years old they resolved to have recourse to boiling water, in which he was kept, notwithstanding his shrieks and protestations that he was not an elf, but their own Johnny Magoney, until death released him from his torments. Wilhelm Mannhardt, the celebrated writer on folklore, states that when, in 1850, he was in Löblau, a village of West Prussia, he saw a man brutally maltreating a boy on the street. On
- 36. inquiry he found that the lad had done nothing worthy of blame, but that his only fault was an exceptionally large head. This cranial peculiarity, offensively conspicuous in what seems to have been a narrow-headed family, was reason enough for the parents to disown their offspring, and to treat him as the counterfeit of a child foisted in by the fairies. At Hadersleben, a considerable market town of North Silesia, the wife of a farmer, in 1883, gave birth to a puny infant, which the parents at once assumed to be a changeling. In order to defeat the evil designs of the elves and to compel the restoration of their own child, they held the newborn over a bed of live coals on the hearth until it was covered with blisters and died in intense agony. In East Prussia, the Mazurs, a Polish race, whose only notable contribution to modern civilization and the gayety of nations is the mazurka, take precautionary measures by placing a book (usually the Bible, although any book will do) under the head of the newborn babe, so as to prevent the devil from spiriting it away and substituting for it one of his own hellish brood, thus unwittingly furnishing a marvelous illustration of the beneficent influence of the printing press and the magic power of literature. The Estonian inhabitants of the island of Oesel in Livonia refrain from kindling a fire in the house while the rite of baptism is being celebrated, lest the light of the flames should render it easier for Satan surreptitiously to exchange an imp for the infant. After the sacred ceremony has been performed there is supposed to be no danger of such a substitution. One of the most incredible instances of this extremely silly and surprisingly persistent superstition occurred in 1871 at Biskunizy, a village of Prussian Posen, where a laborer, named Bekker, had by industry and frugality gradually acquired a competence and been able to buy a house of his own, in which he led a happy domestic life with his wife and five children, of whom he was very fond. After fourteen years of unbroken felicity the wife's elder sister, Marianne Chernyāk, came from Poland to pay them a visit. This woman was a crackbrained devotee, who spent half her time in going to mass and the other half in backbiting her neighbors. She also claimed that she could detect at once whether a person is in league with Satan, and could cast out devils. The villagers came to look upon her as a witch, and avoided all association with her, especially as her aberrations manifested themselves in exceedingly malevolent and mischievous forms. Unfortunately, she acquired complete ascendency over her younger sister, who accepted her absurd pretensions as real. On November 19, 1871, Marianne, after returning from confession, went to bed, but at midnight Mrs. Bekker, who slept with her youngest child, a boy about a year old, was awakened by a fearful shriek and lit the lamp. Thereupon the sister rushed into the room, crying: "The demons have stolen your child and put a changeling in your bed: beat him, beat him, if you wish to have your child again!" Under the influence of this suggestion, which seemed to be almost hypnotic in its character, the bewildered mother began to beat the boy. The aunt now seized him and swung him to and fro, as if she would fling him out of the window, at the same time calling out to Satan: "There! you have him; take your brat!" She then gave him back to his mother with the words: "Throw him to the ground, drub him, beat him to death; otherwise you will never recover your child." This advice was followed, and the boy severely strapped with a heavy girdle as he lay on the floor. Meanwhile Bekker, hearing the noise, got up and at first tried to intervene for the protection of his son, but was easily convinced by his wife that she was doing the right thing, and persuaded to aid her in discomfiting the devil by beating the boy with a juniper stick. The process of exorcism, thus renewed with increased vigor, soon proved fatal. At this juncture, as the son of the aunt, a lad of five years, threw himself down with loud lamentations
- 37. beside the dead body of his little cousin, his mother cried out: "Beat him; he is not my child! Why should we spare him? We shall get other children!" Thereupon he, too, was maltreated in the same manner until he expired. The aunt then declared that the devil had crept into the stovepipe, and went to work to demolish the stove, but, when she was prevented from doing so, fled into the garden, where she was found the next morning by the school-teacher. By this time Bekker and his wife seem to have come to their senses, and were sitting by the corpses of the murdered children, weeping and praying, as the neighbors entered the house. The trial, which took place at Ostrov in January, 1872, led to the introduction of conflicting expert testimony concerning the mental soundness of the accused, and the matter was finally referred to a commission of psychiaters in Berlin, who decided that Bekker and his wife were not suffering from mental disease, and therefore not irresponsible, but that the aunt was subject to periodical insanity to such a degree as not to be accountable for her actions. Curiously enough, the jurors remained uninfluenced by this testimony, and pronounced her guilty of the crime laid to her charge, and in accordance with this verdict the court sentenced her to three years' imprisonment with hard labor. The jurors even went so far as to declare that she herself did not believe in the existence of elf children or satanic changelings, but made use of this popular superstition for her own selfish purposes, and that she guilefully denounced her own boy as an imp in order to get rid of him. In this verdict, or rather in the considerations urged in support of it, it is easy to perceive the effects of strong local prejudice against the accused, who had the reputation of being a lazy, malicious, and crafty person, and was therefore denied the extenuation of honest self-deception. Indeed, in such cases it is always more or less difficult to determine where sincere delusion ceases and conscious swindling begins. Just at this point the annals of superstition present many puzzling problems, the solution of which is of special interest as well as of great practical importance not only to the psychologist and psychiater, but also to the legislator and jurisprudent, who have to do with the enactment and administration of criminal laws. In the penal codes of the most civilized nations the agency of superstition as a factor in the promotion of crime is almost wholly ignored, and, as this was not the case in former times, the omission would seem to assume that the general diffusion of knowledge in our enlightened age had rendered all such specifications obsolete and superfluous. Only in the Russian penal code, especially in the sections Ulosheniye and Ustav on felonies and frauds, as cited by Löwenstimm, do we find a distinct recognition and designation of various forms of superstition as incentives to crime. Thus, in paragraph 1469 of the first of these sections, the murder of "monstrous births or misshapen sucklings" as changelings is expressly mentioned, and the penalty prescribed; and in other clauses of the code punishments are imposed for the desecration of graves and mutilation of corpses, in order to procure talismans or to prevent the dead from revisiting the earth as vampires, and for various offenses emanating from the belief in sorcery and diabolical possession. The practice of opening graves and mutilating dead bodies is quite common, and arises in general from the notion that persons who die impenitent and without extreme unction, including suicides and victims to delirium tremens, apoplexy, and other forms of sudden death, as well as schismatics, sorcerers, and witches, come forth from their graves and wander about as vampires, sucking the blood of individuals during sleep and inflicting misery upon entire communities by producing drought, famine, and pestilence. The means employed to prevent this dangerous metamorphosis, or at least to compel the vampire to remain in the grave, differ in different countries. In Russia the deceased is buried with his face downward,
- 38. and an ashen stake driven through his back, while in Poland and East Prussia the corpse is wrapped up in a fish net and covered with poppies, owing, doubtless, to the soporific qualities of this plant. Preventive measures of this kind are often taken with the consent and co-operation of the clergy and local authorities. Thus, in 1849, at Mariensee, near Dantzig, in West Prussia, a peasant's wife came to the Catholic priest of the parish and complained that an old woman named Welm, recently deceased, appeared in her house and beat and otherwise tormented her child. The priest seems to have accepted the truth of her statement, since he ordered the corpse to be disinterred, decapitated, reburied at a cross- road, and covered with poppies. In 1851, during the prevalence of cholera in Ukraine, in the governmental province of Kiev, the peasants of Possady attributed the epidemic to a deceased sacristan and his wife, who were supposed to roam about at night as vampires and kill people by sucking their blood. In order to stay the ravages of the scourge the corpses of this couple were exhumed, their heads cut off and burned, and ashen stakes driven through their backs into the ground. In 1892 a peasant woman in the Russian province of Kovno hanged herself in a wood near the village of Somenishki. The priest refused her Christian burial because she had committed suicide, and was therefore given over to the devil. In order that she might rest quietly in her grave and not be changed into a vampire, her sons severed her head from her body and laid it at her feet. In thus refusing to perform religious funeral rites the priest obeyed the canons of the church and also the laws of the Russian Empire. Until quite recently a corner of unconsecrated ground next to the wall of the Russian cemetery was reserved as a sort of carrion pit for the corpses of self-murderers, and it is expressly prescribed in the Svod Sakonov[29] that they "shall be dragged to such place of infamy by the knacker, and there covered with earth." This treatment of a felo-de-se by the ecclesiastical and civil authorities directly fosters popular superstition by tending to confirm the notion that there is something uncanny, eldritch, demoniacal, and preternaturally malignant inherent in his mortal remains, a notion still further strengthened by a most unjust paragraph (1472) in the Russian code, which declares the last will and testament of a suicide to have no legal validity. Drought, too, as well as pestilence, is ascribed to the evil agency of vampires, which "milk the clouds," and hinder the falling of the dew. In 1887 the South Russian province of Cherson began to suffer from drought soon after a peasant had hanged himself in the village of Ivanovka, the inhabitants of which, assuming a causative connection between the aridity and the self- homicide, poured water on the grave while uttering the following words: "I sprinkle, I pour; may God send a shower, bring on a little rainfall, and relieve us from misery!" As this invocation failed to produce the desired effect, the body was taken up and inhumed again in a gorge outside of the village. In some districts the corpse is disinterred, beaten on the head, and drenched with water poured through a sieve; in others it is burned. The records of the criminal courts in West Prussia during the last half century contain numerous instances of the violation of graves from superstitious motives. Thus in March, 1896, a peasant died in the village of Penkuhl; soon afterward his son was taken ill of a lingering disease, which the remedies prescribed by the country doctor failed to relieve. It did not take long for the "wise women" of the village to convince him that his father was a "nine-killer," and would soon draw after him into the grave nine of his next of kin. The sole means of depriving him of this fatal power would be to disinter him and sever his head from his body. In accordance with this advice the young man dug up the corpse by night and decapitated it with a spade. In this case the accused, if tried in court, might honestly declare that he acted in self-defense; indeed, he might plead in justification of his conduct
- 39. that he thereby preserved not only his own life, but also the lives of eight of his nearest and dearest relations, and that he should be commended rather than condemned for what he had done. It is the possibility and sincerity of this plea that render it so difficult to deal with such offenses judicially and justly. Here is needed what Tennyson calls
- 40. "The intuitive decision of a bright And thorough-edged intellect, to part Error from crime." Quite different, however, from a moral point of view, is the opening of graves in quest of medicaments, and especially of talismans, which are supposed to bring good luck to the possessor or to enable him to practice sorcery and to commit crime with impunity. In ancient times, and even in the middle ages, physicians sometimes prescribed parts of the human body as medicine, and in Franconia, North Bavaria, a peasant now occasionally enters an apothecary's shop and asks for "Armensünderfett," poor sinner's fat, obtained from the bodies of executed malefactors and prized as a powerful specific. The culprit was tried first for murder and then for lard, and thus made doubly conducive to the safety and sanitation of the community. Formerly many persons went diligently to public executions for the purpose of procuring a piece of the criminal as a healing salve, but since the hangman or headsman has generally ceased to perform his fearful functions in the presence of a promiscuous crowd, such loathsome remedies for disease are sought in churchyards. In May, 1865, a Polish peasant in Wyssokopiz, near Warsaw, discovered that the grave of his recently deceased wife had been opened and the corpse mutilated. Information was given to the police, and a shepherd's pipe, found in the churchyard, led to the detection of the culprit in the person of the communal shepherd, a man twenty-six years old, who on examination confessed that he, with the aid of two accomplices, had committed the disgustful deed. His object, he said, was to procure a tooth and the liver of a dead person. He intended to pulverize the tooth and after mixing it with snuff to give it to his brother-in-law in order to poison him. On perceiving, however, that the body was that of a woman, he did not take the tooth, because it would have no power to kill a man; but he cut out the liver for the purpose of burying it in a field where the sheep were pastured, and thus causing the death of the entire flock in case he should be superseded by another shepherd, which he feared might happen. All three were condemned to hard labor in Siberia. It is a quite prevalent notion that if any part of a corpse is concealed in a house, the inmates will have the corresponding bodily organs affected by disease and gradually paralyzed. A drastic example of this superstition occurred in May, 1875, at Schwetz, a provincial town of West Prussia, where a woman named Albertine Mayevski became the mother of a male child, which died soon after its birth. The father, to whom she was betrothed, refused to marry her, and to punish him for this breach of promise she disinterred the body of her babe, cut off its right hand at the wrist and the genitals, and hid them in the chimney of the house of her faithless lover, hoping thereby to cause the hand, with which he had pledged his vow, to wither away, and to render him impotent. All this she freely confessed when brought to trial, and was sentenced to two months' imprisonment. But such relics of the tomb are used, on the principle of similia similibus, not only for inflicting injury, but also for bringing luck. Thus members of the "light-fingered craft" carry with them the finger of a corpse in order to enhance their
- 41. skill, success, and safety in thievery; if the finger belonged to an adroit thief or a condemned criminal its talismanic virtue is all the greater. It is also believed that a purse in which a finger joint is kept will contain an inexhaustible supply of money. The finger of a murdered man is greatly prized by burglars because it is supposed to possess a magic power in opening locks. The records of criminal courts prove that these absurd notions are generally entertained by common malefactors in East Prussia, Thuringia, Silesia, Bohemia, and Poland. A candle made of fat obtained from the human body is very frequently used by thieves on account of its supposed soporific power, since with such a taper, known in Germany as Diebslicht or Schlummerlicht (sloom-light in provincial English), they are confident of being able to throw all the inmates of the house into a deep sleep, and thus rummage the rooms at will and with perfect impunity. The danger of detection is also forestalled by laying a dead man's hand on a window sill; and in order to make assurance doubly sure, both preservatives are usually employed. Hence the proverbial saying, "He sleeps as though a dead hand had been carried round him." The desire to procure material for such candles often leads to the commission of crime. An Austrian jurist, Dr. Gross, in his manual for inquisitorial judges (Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter), and the folklorists Mannhardt and Jakushkin, give numerous instances of this kind, and there is no doubt that the many mysterious murders and ghastly mutilations, especially of women and children, so horrifying to the public and puzzling to the police, are due to the same cause. In most cases the prosecuting attorneys and judges are unable to discover the real motives of such bloody and brutal deeds because they are ignorant of the popular superstitions in which they have their origin, and, for lack of any better explanation, attribute them to mere brutishness, wantonness, homicidal mania, and other vague and unintelligible impulses, whereas in reality they spring from a supremely selfish but exceedingly definite purpose, are perpetrated deliberately, and with the normal exercise of the mental faculties, and can not be mitigated even by the extenuating plea of sudden passion. Crimes of this sort are of common occurrence not only in the semi- barbarous provinces of Russia, but also in Austria and Germany, justly reckoned among the most civilized countries of Christendom. On January 1, 1865, the house of a man named Peck, near Elbing in West Prussia, was entered during the absence of the family by a burglar, Gottfried Dallian, who killed the maid-servant, Catharina Zernickel, and ransacked the premises in search of money and other objects of value. Before carrying off his spoils he cut a large piece of flesh out of the body of the murdered girl in order to make candles for his protection on future occasions of this sort. The talismanic light, which he kept in a tin tube, did not prevent him from being caught in the act of committing another burglary about six weeks later. During the trial, which resulted in his condemnation to death, he confessed that he had eaten some of the maid-servant's flesh in order to appease his conscience. This disgusting method of alleviating the "compunctious visitings of Nature" would seem to confirm the suggestion of a writer in the Russkiya Wjedomosti (Russian News, 1888, No. 359) that the thieves' candle is a survival of primitive cannibalism, distinct traces of which he also discovers in a Russian folk song which runs as follows: "I bake a cake out of the hands and feet, out of the silly head I form a goblet, out of the eyes I cast drinking glasses, out of the blood I brew an intoxicating beer, and out of the fat I mold a candle." It is certainly very queer
- 42. to find such stuff constituting the theme of popular song within the confines of Christian civilization at the present day, a grewsome stuff more suitable as the staple of Othello's tales "—of the cannibals that each other eat, The anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders." In the burglary just mentioned the murder and mutilation of the maid were incidental to the robbery, and probably an afterthought, but there are on record numerous instances of persons being waylaid and killed for the sole purpose of making candles out of their adipose tissue. No longer ago than November 15, 1896, two peasants were convicted of this crime in Korotoyak, a city on the Don in South Russia. Their victim was a boy twelve years of age, whom they strangled and eviscerated in order to make candles from the fat of the caul and entrails. It would be superfluous and tedious to cite additional examples of this outrageous offense against humanity and common sense, for, like the devils that entered into the Gadarene swine, their name is Legion. A still more disgusting and dangerous superstition is the notion that supernatural powers are acquired by eating the heart of an unborn babe of the male sex, just as a savage imagines that by eating the heart of a brave foe he can become indued with his valor. The modern European cannibal believes that by eating nine hearts, or parts of them, he can make himself invisible and even fly through the air. He can thus commit crime without detection, and defy all efforts to arrest or imprison him, releasing himself with ease from fetters, and passing through stone walls. This horrible practice has been known for ages, and is still by no means uncommon. In the first half of the fifteenth century the notorious marshal of France, Gilles de Laval, Baron of Rayz, is said to have murdered in his castle near Nantes one hundred and fifty women in order to get possession of unborn babes. He was then supposed to have committed these atrocities from lewd motives, and was also accused of worshiping Satan. A mixed commission of civilians and ecclesiastics, appointed to examine into the matter, found him guilty and condemned him to be strangled and burned on October 25, 1440. In 1429, when he was thirty-three years of age, he had fought the English at Orleans by the side of Joan of Arc, and it was probably the desire to acquire supernatural powers in emulation of the maid that led him to perpetrate a succession of inhuman butcheries extending over a period of fourteen years, the real object of which seems to have been imperfectly understood by the tribunal which sentenced him to death.[30] Löwenstimm cites several instances of this crime. Thus, in 1577 a man was put to the rack in Bamberg, North Bavaria, for murdering and disemboweling three pregnant women. In the seventeenth century a band of robbers, whose chief was known as "King Daniel," created intense consternation among the inhabitants of Ermeland in East Prussia. For a long time these freebooters roved and spoiled with impunity, but were finally arrested and executed. They confessed that they had killed fourteen women, but, as the unborn infants proved to be female, their hearts were devoid of talismanic virtue. Indeed, they attributed their capture to this unfortunate and unforseeable circumstance, and posed as persons worthy of commiseration on account of their ill luck. One of the strangest features of
- 43. this cruel and incredible superstition is its persistency in an age of superior enlightenment. Dr. Gross records two cases of comparatively recent occurrence in the very centers of modern civilization: one in 1879, near Hamburg, where a woman, great with child, was killed and cut open by a Swede named Andersen, and another of like character ten years later in Simmering, near Vienna. An ordeal very commonly practiced in the middle ages to determine the guilt or innocence of any one accused of theft was to give him a piece of consecrated cheese, which, if he were guilty, it would be impossible for him to swallow. Hence arose the popular phrase, "It sticks in his throat." Thus Macbeth says, after he had "done the deed": "But wherefore could not I pronounce amen? I had most need of blessing, and amen Stuck in my throat." Wuttke states that this custom still prevails in the Prussian province of Brandenburg, where a person suspected of larceny is made to swallow a piece of Dutch cheese on which certain magical letters and signs are scratched. His failure to do so is regarded as conclusive evidence of his guilt. Various other means of making inquest for the detection of crime are in vogue, some of them merely silly, and others mercilessly savage. Thus a mirror is laid for three successive nights in the grave of a dead man. It is placed there in the name of God, and taken out in the name of Satan. It is believed that by looking into such a mirror the person of the thief can be clearly seen. A bull belonging to a peasant not far from Perm, on the Kama, died suddenly. The owner declared that the death of the animal was due to witchcraft, and demanded that all the women of the village should be made to creep through a horse collar in order to discover the hag who had wrought the mischief. This plan was approved by his neighbors, and, although their wives protested against being subjected to the degrading and for corpulent women extremely difficult and even dangerous test, they finally submitted to it rather than remain under the suspicion of practicing the black art. This performance, which is unquestionably a relic of Uralian-Finnish paganism, took place on March 16, 1896. The following instance may serve as an example of the ruthless barbarity to which such delusions often lead: In December, 1874, a South Russian peasant in the vicinity of Cherson missed one hundred rubles and went to a weird woman in order to learn what had become of them. She consulted her cards and declared that the money had been stolen by a certain Marfa Artynov. The man was greatly astonished at this response, because the accused was a highly respected teacher of young children, and had the reputation of being thoroughly honest. Nevertheless, his credulity got the better of his common sense, and with the aid of his neighbors he seized Marfa and carried her to the churchyard, where he bound her to a cross and began to torture her, beating her with a knout, suspending her by her hands, and twisting and tearing her neck and tongue with a pincers. To her cries and entreaties her tormentors coolly replied, "If you are really innocent, what we are doing can cause you no pain!" Many of the persons who offer their services as clairvoyants and seers to a credulous and confiding public, and whose utterances are accepted as
- 44. oracles, are professional swindlers. Thus a young lady moving in the higher circles of society in Vienna had a valuable set of diamonds stolen. By the advice of a trusted lackey she consulted a woman, who was reputed to have the power of divination, and who informed her, contrary to the strong suspicions of the police, that the theft had been committed, not by any member of the household, but by a stranger. The young lady was so firmly persuaded of the truth of this statement that, although urged by the court to prosecute the lackey, she refused to do so. The evidence against him, however, was so strong that he was finally tried and condemned. The pythoness, who had endeavored to exculpate him, proved to be his aunt and accomplice. A queer phase of superstition, which in many parts of Europe seriously interferes with the administration of justice, manifests itself in the various means of avoiding the evil consequences of perjury, at least so far as to soothe the pangs of conscience and to avert the divine anger. This immunity is secured in some provinces of Austria by carrying on one's person a bit of consecrated wafer, a piece of bone from the skeleton of a child, or the eyes of a hoopoe, holding a ducat or seven small pebbles in the mouth, pressing the left hand firmly against the side, crooking the second finger, or pulling off a button from the trousers while in the act of swearing, or spitting immediately after taking an oath. The Russian province of Viatka is settled by a people of Finnish origin, the majority of whom have been baptized and call themselves orthodox Christians, while the remainder are still nominally as well as really heathen. When they take an oath it is administered by a pope or priest, and a Russian jurist, J. W. Mjeshtshaninov, describes the method employed by them to forswear themselves with safety. When called upon to take an oath, the witness raises the right hand with the index finger extended; he then lays the left hand in the palm of the right hand with the index finger pointing downward, and by a crisscross combination of the other fingers, which probably works as a charm, the whole body is converted into a conductor, so that the oath entering through the index finger of the right hand passes through the index finger of the left hand into the earth like an electric current. The witness thus feels himself discharged of the binding influence of the oath, and may give false testimony without laying perjury upon his soul. The superstitions which encourage ignorant people to commit crime are handed down from generation to generation, and have in most cases a purely local character. In other words, the charms and sorceries and other magical arts employed to produce the same results differ in different places, and unless the judges are familiar with these various forms of superstition they will be unable to understand the exact nature of the offenses with which they have to deal, and their efforts to detect and punish violations of the law will be greatly hampered and sometimes completely thwarted. The subject here discussed has not only a speculative interest for ethnographers and students of folklore, but also, as already indicated, a practical importance for criminal lawyers and courts of justice in the Old World and even in the United States. The tide of immigration that has recently set in from the east and south of Europe has brought to our shores an immense number of persons strongly infected with the delusions which we have attempted to describe. Acts which would seem at first sight to have
- 45. their origin in impulses of cruelty and brutality are found on closer investigation to be due to crass ignorance and credulity, and, although the ultimate motives are usually utterly selfish, there are rare instances in which the perpetrators of such deeds are thoroughly disinterested and altruistic, and do the most revolting things, not from greed of gain, but solely for the public good. In cases of this kind the most effective preventive of wrongdoing is not judicial punishment but intellectual enlightenment.
- 46. A GEOLOGICAL ROMANCE. By J. A. UDDEN. A western naturalist once said that the geology of Kansas was monotonous. In one sense this remark is certainly justifiable, and the same may be said about the geology of some of the other States on the Western plains. The American continent is built on a comprehensive plan, and many of its formations can be followed for hundreds of miles without presenting much variation in general appearance. Occasionally, however, some feature of special interest crops out from the serene uniformity, and the very nature of its surroundings then makes it appear all the more striking. Minor accidents in the development of our extensive terranes sometimes stand out in bold relief, as it were, from the monotonous background. In their isolation from other details such features occasionally display past events with unusual clearness. Such is the case with a deposit of volcanic ash which has been discovered in the superficial strata on the plains.[31] It lies scattered in great quantities in a number of localities in Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, and Colorado, having been found in no less than twenty counties in the first-mentioned State. It measures from two to fourteen feet in thickness in different localities, and is mostly found imbedded in yellow marl and clay, and has a somewhat striking appearance in the field, due to its snowy whiteness and to the sharpness of the plane which separates it from the underlying darker materials. Many years before its real nature was known it had been noticed and described by Western geologists. Prof. O. T. St. John saw it many years ago in Kansas, where it appeared as "an exceedingly fine, pure white siliceous material," forming a separate layer of several feet, and set off by a sharp line from the buff clay-marl below. His words describe its usual appearance in other places (see Fig. 1).
- 47. Fig. 2.—Flakes of Volcanic Ash. Magnified about 100 diameters. A, flake with a branching rib; B, fragment of a broken hollow sphere of glass; C, fragment with drawn-out tubular vesicles; D and E, plain fragments of broken pumice bubbles. (From American Geologist, April, 1893.) Fig. 1.—Stratified Volcanic Ash near Meade, Kansas. (From the University Geological Survey of Kansas, vol. ii.) This ash occurs in several outcrops in McPherson County in the central part of Kansas, where the writer had an opportunity to study it somewhat in detail a few years ago. Some of the features of the dust at this place reveal the conditions under which it was formed with considerable distinctness, and the volcanic episode which produced it appears strikingly different from the dull monotony of the ordinary geological work recorded in the terranes of the plains. It may be said to consist of angular flakes of pumice, averaging one sixteenth of a millimetre in diameter, and having a thickness of about one three-hundredth of a millimetre. The most common shape of the flakes is that of a triangle, or rather of a spherical triangle, since the flakes are apt to be concave on one side and convex on the other. In the microscope they sometimes appear like splinters of tiny bubbles of glass, and this is really what they are (Fig. 2). The explosive eruptions which give rise to showers of this kind of ash, or dust, are due to fusion and superheating of subterranean masses of rocks charged with more or less moisture. A part of this moisture escapes in the form of steam at the time of an eruption. But the viscidity of the ejected material prevents much of the steam from passing off, and such of the lava as cools most rapidly retains a certain quantity in solution, as it were. Obsidian is a rock which has been made in this way. It often contains much of the original water, which will cause it to swell up into a stony froth when fused. This volcanic dust has the same property. If one small particle of it be heated on a piece of platinum foil it is seen to swell up into a compound bubble of glass (Fig. 3). It is evident that this is due to the expansive force of the heated included moisture, to which the viscid half-molten glass readily yields. At the time of the eruption which produced this dust, subterranean heat was applied to the moisture-bearing rock until this was superheated to such an extent that the weight of the overlying material was insufficient to hold the water from expanding into steam. Then there was a tremendous explosion, and the molten magma was thrown up with such a force that it was shattered into minute droplets, in the same way as water does when it is thrown forcibly into the air. Being thus released from pressure, the steam inside of each little particle of the heated glass caused it to swell out into a tiny bubble. As this kept on expanding it was cooled, the thin glass wall of the bubble congealed, and finally burst from the pressure of the steam within. This is the reason why the little
- 48. Fig. 3.—A Particle of Volcanic Ash swelled up by Fusion. Magnified 100 diameters. dust particles are thin, mostly triangular, and often slightly concave flakes with sharp angles. Sometimes the angles appear rounded, as if the fragments had been viscid enough to creep a little after the bubble burst. The study of one single little grain of dust, barely visible to the naked eye, thus makes clear the nature of a catastrophe which must have shaken a whole mountain, and which left its traces over a quarter of a continent. That the dust was produced in this way is quite evident from other circumstances. If a handful from the dust of this place be thrown into water and gently stirred, it nearly all will settle after a while. But some rather large particles remain floating on the surface. If these are removed and examined under the microscope, they are seen to be hollow spheres (Fig. 2, b). These are some of the original bubbles that never burst, either because they contained too little steam or else because the steam was cooled before it had time to break the walls open. It is evident that not every droplet of the molten magma would form a single sphere, but that many also would swell up into a compound frothlike mass of pumice. A few such pieces may sometimes be observed in the deposit at this place, and that many more were made and broken is evident from the great number of glass fragments which have riblike edges on their flat sides (Fig. 3, a). The nature of the force which caused the eruption may thus be understood from the study of one little grain of the dust, but much more extended observations are needed in order to make out the place where the great convulsion took place. It will, perhaps, never be known what particular volcanic vent was the source of this ash. Different deposits may have come from different places. But it seems possible that it all came from the same eruption. There can be no doubt that the volcanic disturbances occurred to the west of the Great Plains. No recent extinct volcanoes are found in any other direction. This conclusion is corroborated by the fact that the dust is finer in eastern localities and coarser nearer the Rocky Mountains. In a bed near Golden, in Colorado, seventy-three per cent, by weight, of the dust consists of particles measuring from one fourth to one thirty-second of a millimetre, while some from Orleans, in Nebraska, contains seventy-four per cent of particles measuring from one sixteenth to one sixty- fourth of a millimetre in diameter. Still finer material comes from the bluffs of the Missouri River near Omaha. Evidently the coarser particles would settle first, and if the dust is finer toward the east, it must be because the wind which brought it blew from the west. Most likely the eruption occurred somewhere in Colorado or in New Mexico. It may be asked how it can be known that the dust was carried this long distance by the wind. May it not as well have been transported by water? The answer must be, in the first place, that showers of the same kind of material have been observed in connection with volcanic outbursts in other parts of the world. One such shower is known to have strewn the same kind of dust on the snow in Norway after a volcanic
- 49. Fig. 4.— Tracks in the Volcanic Dust, probably made by a Crawfish. eruption in Iceland, and after the great explosion on Krakatoa, in 1883, such dust was carried by the wind several hundred miles, and scattered over the ocean. If this ash had been transported by water, it would not be found in such a pure state, but it would be mixed with other sediments. There would, no doubt, also be found coarser fragments of the volcanic products. On the contrary, it appears uniformly fine. No particles have been found which measure more than one millimetre in diameter, and less than one per cent of its weight consists of particles exceeding one eighth of a millimetre in diameter. In seven samples taken from different places the proportions of the different sizes of the grains were about as follows: Diameter of grains in millimetres 1 ⁄2-1 ⁄4 1 ⁄4-1 ⁄8 1 ⁄8-1 ⁄16 1 ⁄16-1 ⁄32 1 ⁄32-1 ⁄64 1 ⁄64-1 ⁄128 1 ⁄128-1 ⁄256 Percentage of weight of each size 0.1 0.1 19 37 32 9 1 Flaky particles of this size are easily carried along by a moderate wind. In some places it appears as if the dust were resting on an old land surface where no water could have been standing when it fell. There is really no room for doubt that it was carried several hundred miles by the wind. It must have darkened the sky at the time, and it must have settled slowly and quietly over the wide plains, covering extensive tracts with a white, snowlike mantle several feet in thickness. What a desolate landscape after such a shower! What a calamity for the brute inhabitants of the land! Right here in McPherson County there was either a river or a lake at the time of the catastrophe. This is plainly indicated in several ways. In one place the dust rests on sand and clay, with imbedded shells of fresh-water clams. It is assorted in coarse and fine layers like a water sediment. Lowermost is a seam of very coarse grains. These must have settled promptly through the water, while the finer material was delayed. In another place it lies on higher ground, and here marks of sedges and other vegetation are seen extending up about a foot into the base of the deposit, from an underlying mucky clay. Bog manganese impregnates a thin layer just above the clay, indicating a marshy condition. Here also the material is somewhat sorted, but in a different way. It is ripple-bedded. The water was evidently shallow, if there was any water at all. A burrow like that of a crawfish extended down into the old clay bottom. On a slab of the volcanic ash itself some tracks appeared (Fig. 4). These were probably made by an individual of the same race in an effort to escape from the awful fate of being buried alive like the inhabitants of Herculaneum and Pompeii. The shower must have lasted for a time of two or three days. I infer this from the nature of the wind changes, which are indicated by the ripples in the dust. These still lie in perfect preservation (Fig. 5), and may be studied by removing, inch by inch, the successive layers from above downward, for it is evident that as the direction of the wind
- 50. Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to specialized publications, self-development books, and children's literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system, we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading. Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and personal growth! testbankbell.com