Eliza Ann Youmans

“ The mildews, rusts, and smuts of grain—those scourges of the farmer—are all fungi. Their minute mycelium penetrates and destroys the tissues of plants, and, bursting through the cuticle, covers them with myriads of their orange, brown, and black spore. All those black, pustular growths seen on dead wood, bark, twigs, and leaves, and the whole tribe of moulds that cover every substance exposed to dampness, are fungi. Not only do these fungi ravage the living and the dead, but they fill the air with the countless myriads of their spores. ”

“ But the mind of Caroline Herschel was of another mould. She learned various things, from a desire to please her friends and to earn her living; but there is no evidence that she ever studied anything from a love of knowledge. Her whole life was inspired by purely personal feelings. In a former article we saw how submissively she delved for the family throughout her youth, and left them full of concern about their daily comforts. It was an all-absorbing love for her brother which led her to study astronomy, and at his death her devotion to science ended. ”

“ My mother was not so severe as she had threatened to be, for she gave me a dinner that I could eat; but she never failed to have the porridge served in the morning. In all this she was actuated by a sense of duty alone, for she was ever aiming at our welfare. Ignorance was the rock on which her kindest endeavors were wrecked, and she was not to be blamed for not knowing what nobody else in her rank, or, so far as I have yet discovered, in any other rank of life, then knew. ”

“ TO think of lace merely as a symbol of vanity is quite to miss its deeper significance. If the feeling that prompts to personal decoration be a proper one—and it is certainly a natural and universal sentiment—then lace has its defense, and we may agree with old Fuller of the seventeenth century, when he says: "Let it not be condemned for superfluous wearing, because it doth neither hide nor heat, seeing that it doth adorn." ”

“ But, when George Combe afterward wrote a full account of the first sixteen years of his own life, the suppressed portion of his brother's biography was embodied in it, and this is the autobiography with which we are now concerned. It was natural, perhaps, that relatives should object to its publication; but certainly in no other part of the work before us are Combe's tenderness, sense of justice, and ability, better shown than here; for, while he tells everything frankly, he all the while impresses the reader with the upright, affectionate, and intelligent character of his parents. ”

“ Combe thought his helplessness was due to the fact that at school he was taught nothing; but children nowadays are rendered equally helpless by over-teaching. They get abundant instruction and but little education. Our youths leave school as incapable of independent thinking as was Combe himself. With all our boasted progress empty-headed teachers still abound, and the failure of children in repulsive tasks is still punished, less grossly than but often quite as cruelly as ever. ”

“ WHATEVER may be thought of the intellectual differences between men and women, the broad mental contrast between Caroline Herschel and her brother Sir William Herschel is undeniable. Intellectual activity and a love of knowledge for its own sake influenced his boyhood, characterized his manhood, and dominated his whole life. ”

“ These subtile particles, "invisible to the naked eye, and light almost as vapor, are continually floating in the air we breathe, or swimming in the water we drink, or lying amid the impalpable dust and sand of the soil, waiting the presence of warmth and moisture to burst into independent life. ”

“ MOST people in this country have heard of Miss Caroline Herschel the astronomer. Without knowing much about her, she has been vaguely regarded by the public as a profound scientific genius, the strong-minded peer and coadjutor of her brother, the illustrious Sir William Herschel. It is supposed that she rose above the narrow sphere of woman's usual domestic life, and spent her time in studying the universe and making astronomical discoveries. ”

“ But the most important step ever taken in the making of lace was the invention of the bobbin-net machine. Until this invention machine-lace was, for the most part, only a kind of knitting that had to be gummed and stiffened to give it the solidity of net. The great problem of the time was how to imitate pillow-made net by machinery. Numerous attempts to do this were made by smiths, weavers, and lace-makers. Much inventive talent was vainly spent, and many men of genius fell into poverty through their prolonged and unrequited efforts to construct the required machine. ”

“ Lady Herschel and the housekeeper were with him, administering everything which could be thought of for supporting him. I found him much irritated at not being able to grant Mr. Bulman's request for some token of remembrance for his father. As soon as he saw me, I was sent to the library to fetch one of his last papers, and a plate of the forty-foot telescope. But, for the universe, I could not have looked twice at what I had snatched from the shelf, and when he faintly asked if the
breaking up of the milky-way was in it, I said 'Yes,' and he looked content. ”

“ But most of the species included in it are either quite invisible, or else the parts which characterize them as fungi are so small as to be indistinguishable. The feature by which a fungus may always be known is the mycelium. Every plant of which this structure forms a part, spreading its web through-out the substance on, or in, which it grows, belongs among fungi. They differ among themselves in such comparatively unimportant respects as the mode of growth of the hymenium, or the degree of complexity of the reproductive system, but mycelia and spore production are their essential characters. ”

“ Many years later the study of physiology revealed to me my sin, and carried instruction with it. The organism of the animal was injured and rendered miserable by the dirt, and nervous irritability, akin to insanity, was the result. This example I subsequently applied to the case of the human poor, and saw in the deleterious physical condition in which many of them habitually live the cause of some of their sufferings and crimes. ”

“ This movement, which in the case of climbing plants was believed to be due to increased growth of the side that for the time became convex, has more recently been proved to result from the circumstance that every part of a plant while it is growing, and in some cases after growth has ceased, has its cells rendered more turgescent and its cell-walls more extensile first on one side and then on another. Why this should be the case is not known, but Darwin suggests that the changes in the cells may require periods of rest, which accords with our knowledge of the rhythmical nature of motion. ”

“ Professor Rains saw that all this was unsatisfactory; and that, to make his knowledge good for anything, the pupil must experiment, must test the properties of substances, and himself find out how they behave and react toward each other. In short, if he has any honest, intelligent, educational purpose in view, he can only gain it by practice and direct experience with chemical agents and materials.
But there is a difficulty at the outset met everywhere, and which is generally fatal to all thorough chemical study in ordinary schools. Practical chemistry is dirty work. ”

“ I always had an active life and pursuits out of school, when any leisure was left me. We had ample play-ground near my father's brewery. My brother Abram was only a few years older than I. He was very clever at all boyish games, tricks, and small mischiefs; full of fun; a builder of rabbit-houses, and keeper of rabbits; passionately addicted to brass cannons and pistols, and the use of gunpowder in all its forms; and I followed him, a willing pupil. There were a number of boys, sons of workingmen, living in the neighborhood, who formed our companions in play ”

“ Savages are incapable of wonder; they do not know enough to wonder. Said Professor Grove, in his address before the British Association at Nottingham, "If the primitive inhabitants of Britain could emerge and behold the wonderful triumphs of art and science in our civilization, it is doubtful if they would know enough to be astonished." ”

“ The instruction I drew from these occurrences was that, without knowledge of the structure and functions of a living organism, and its relations to the natural objects to which it is adapted and which influence its conditions, the best intentions may inflict only suffering when pleasure is meant to be given; and that this holds as true in the case of human beings as in that of rabbits. ”

“ Only minds highly cultivated and widely informed are capable of appreciating the tremendous idea of evolution so as to be deeply impressed by it. We are not to suppose, because the young readily acquire terms and phrases, and seem in a way to understand them, that they are therefore in possession of their real and full meanings. There are stages in the process of assimilating ideas which the pupil reaches one after another in the slow course of mental unfolding. ”

“ Though good for nothing but decoration, the most earnest elements of humanity have been enlisted in connection with it. Lace-making, a product of the first rude beginnings of art, though complex, and involving immense labor, was yet early perfected. ”

“ The delicate threads of the mycelium are formed of rows of cells placed end to end, and microscopic inspection of thin slices from the stem and cap show, that they also are composed of cells alone.
The rank of this plant in the vegetal kingdom is settled by the direction of growth of its vegetative system and by the nature of its tissues. All flowering plants, as well as the ferns and mosses, have their vegetative part made up of root, stem, and leaves. The root grows downward and the stem upward. But the growth of the mycelium, the vegetative system of the mushroom, is horizontal ”

“ At night the sun sinks out of sight, and still it is light for some time after, for the sunlight is reflected from the sunset-clouds and the sky. Sometimes, upon a summer's day, when broken clouds partly hide the sun, you will see long bars of dusky light streaming from openings in the clouds. ”

“ It will be observed that, in telling us about his education, Combe all the while distinguishes sharply between his real education and his nominal education. His knowledge of mental science, such as it was, helped him to interpret his own experiences. The things he remembers are to him indexes to his natural gifts, as the strongest impressions would be made on his predominant faculties. By this means he discovers the emotional bias that shaped his life, in the incidents of a summer spent on his uncle's farm when he was three or four years old. ”

“ Those who have what is locally termed the haleine grasse (greasy breath) are obliged to confine themselves to black." To preserve purity of color it is made in the open air in summer, and in winter in the lofts over cow-houses, as the warmth of the animals enables the workers to dispense with fire, which makes more or less smoke. The most beautiful blondes were once made at Caen, but competition with the machine-made blondes of Calais and Nottingham has caused the manufacture of white blonde to be abandoned at this place, and its lace-makers now confine themselves to making black lace. ”

“ If physiology and the laws of mental action had been known in those days, everything might have been different. The silence, pleasing excitement, and general good behavior which reigned when we had an intelligible object presented to us, clearly indicated what was wanted to render us all happy; but the hint was not taken. In point of fact, there was no other rational knowledge adapted to the young mind in our teacher's brain: ex nihilo nihil fit [2] was exemplified in his whole teaching ”

“ When we observe the growing stem of the hop, after the first two or three joints are formed, we see it bend to one side and travel slowly round toward all points of the compass, and continue these revolutions day and night. This spontaneous gyrating motion of stems and tendrils was first remarked by Palm and Mohl, and Professor Sachs gave it the name of revolving nutation.
Mr. Darwin has found that this kind of motion is ever present in the growing parts of plants, so that it must be regarded as a universal property of growing vegetation, and he suggests for it the better term circumnutation. ”

“ The earliest observation perceives the extraordinary influence of the surrounding medium upon the destinies of the living organism. It is not difficult to surround these destinies with such a halo of imagination as shall impress on the mind a sense of the mystery, sanctity—I may acid, the necessary calamities of life—before it has become absorbed in the consideration of living personalities. ”

“ Changes of abode, not always for the better; anxieties, on account of Alexander's prospects, and Jacob's vagaries; disappointment at seeing his daughter grow up without the education he had hoped to give her—were the circumstances under which the worn-out sufferer struggled through the last three years of his life, copying music at every spare moment, assisting at a concert only a few weeks before his death, and giving lessons until he was obliged to keep wholly to his bed. ”

“ Nothing serious could be attempted, for want of time, till the beginning of June, when some of my brother's scholars were leaving Bath; and' then, to my sorrow, I saw almost every room turned into a workshop. A cabinet-maker making a tube and stands of all descriptions in a handsomely-furnished drawing-room; Alexander putting up a huge turning-machine (which he had brought in the autumn from Bristol, where he used to spend the summer) in a bedroom, for turning patterns, grinding glasses, and turning eye-pieces, etc. ”

“ He was known among his music-pupils as an astronomer, and some of them had lessons from him in this science as well as in music. He early applied his inventive talents to the improvement of telescopes. He began by getting from one of the shops a two-and-a-half-foot Gregorian telescope which served for viewing the heavens and for studying the construction of the instrument. Then he began to make instruments himself, which he went on improving and enlarging till at last the mirror for his great forty-foot telescope resulted. ”

“ The bobbin-net machines and warp frames are extensively used in France, and twenty years ago there were 50 bobbin-net machines in Belgium, making very fine extra twist-net on which cushion sprigs are applied.
The invention of machinery for lace-making, however, has not diminished the consumption of costly hand-made laces. The rich seem more eager than ever to obtain the finer products of the needle and pillow, insisting that the touch, finish, and beauty, of such laces can never be attained by the products of the lace-frame. ”