Various

“ The horse knows and traces, after years of absence, the road he had once been accustomed to travel; and even reptiles and fishes acquire a knowledge of persons, of times, and of things; all this being independent of that range of intelligences which has been given to every creature for the preservation of its own existence, and for ensuring the continuance of its species. The terms Knowledge and Ignorance are used, then, in a comparative sense, being, according to circumstances, convertible one into the other. What, for instance, is knowledge at one time, becomes ignorance at another ”

“ Thus finding himself alone, he naturally turned solo player, and became one of the lions of Dublin, drawing nightly crowds to the taverns he frequented, where he could indulge his love for flights of fancy to his heart’s content. ”

“ KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE.—No. I. BOULDERS.
In using the above terms, let it not be supposed that I mean to imply by the one a perfect knowledge, or a knowledge of everything, and by the other a perfect ignorance, or a total want of any knowledge. Either of such conditions of the mind is incompatible with human organization; the one, a perfect knowledge, belongs alone to an order of intelligence infinitely excelling that of man; and the other, a perfect ignorance, must be sought for in creatures so far below him as to possess no intelligence. ”

“ To take things right, the language of beasts appears so limited to us only with relation to our own; however, it is sufficient to beasts, and more would be of no service to them. Were it not to be wished that ours, at least in some respects, were limited too? If beasts should hear us converse, prate, lie, slander, and rave, would they have cause to envy us the use we make of speech? They have not our privileges, but in recompense they have not our failings. ”

“ It was well for Captain George Mathews, or Mathew, as the name is now generally written, and his garrison too, that he had not the hot-headedness of an Irishman, or he would probably have set this “thundering summons” at defiance, and Cahir Castle would not only have shared the fate of most Irish fortresses at that period, but, what would have been a far greater loss, the Apostle of Temperance, who has done as much to regenerate the people of Ireland as Cromwell did to destroy them, would in all human probability never have existed. ”

“ So many indeed are the practical illustrations of the different manner in which the same object is viewed by knowledge and by ignorance, that it is difficult to make a first choice. All around us there are objects, the nature and qualities of which are known to the few, unknown to the many, and hence either overlooked or misunderstood by the latter, studied and understood by the former. ”

“ Each portion, however minute, of our own body, and of that of every other organic being, has in it wherewithal to exercise the ingenuity and reflection of the wisest; and yet how many thousands live and die without having even desired much less sought after such knowledge! Nor is the inorganic world less fruitful in subjects of inquiry, nor less neglected. ”

“ Thus, when a train is moving rapidly, the moving power had not only to pull the train on, but it had to drag a succession of columns of air, at different velocities, one outside the other, to a considerable extent outside the train; and it did more, for it overcame their friction one upon the other; for as these columns of air were at different velocities, the one would be rubbing against the other; and all this the moving power had to encounter. This would go far to explain the great magnitude of resistance found, and its entire discordance with any thing previously suspected. ”

“ It is easy to perceive that her discourses or songs are varied. She lowers or raises her voice, hastens or protracts the measure, lengthens or shortens her chit-chat; and these evidently are so many different sentences. Now, following the rule I have laid down, that the knowledge, desires, wants, and of course the expressions of beasts, are confined to what is useful or necessary for their preservation, methinks nothing is more easy than at first, and in general, to understand the meaning of these different phrases.”—Dublin University Magazine. ”

“ That pleasant intellectual countenance, bright and playful as his own music even to the last, has disappeared from amongst us; but the memory of such a man should not be allowed to die, and we will therefore, while in the vein, devote a column of our Journal to a sketch of one of the many incidents remembered of his long life, as illustrative in some degree not only of his character, but also of that of society in Dublin during the last century. ”

“ Here, then, the excavation of the valleys of the Alps, and the transport of the boulders, are considered results of one great catastrophe, by which the bottom of the sea became hard dry land, its waters descending into huge abysses which had burst open around the Alps. The phenomenon of Boulders is general in a large portion of the northern hemisphere; the explanation however is local and hence insufficient; whilst the philosopher’s machinery, of huge abysses, like the peasant’s giant, is born of necessity, not deduced from experience. ”

“ For the present we shall pass over these more humble whisperers of things curious and strange, and turn to those massive fragments of rocks which, far removed from their original site, are now scattered either singly or in groups over a large portion of the earth’s surface, resting sometimes on the slopes of hills composed of materials totally different from their own, seen sometimes on the sand and gravel of extensive plains, and distant from the mountains of which they were once a part, sometimes from one to three hundred miles: they are Boulders. ”

“ Saussure, celebrated for his examination of the Alps, imagined a great debacle and retreat of the sea from the strata that had been formed, as he supposed, by chemical precipitations; and to the violent rush of the vast current he ascribed the excavation of the valleys, and the transport of immense masses of stones from the central chain of the Alps, beyond the precincts of those mountains, to the Jura. ”

“ Cahir looks pleasant even on one of our characteristic gloomy days. As it is not, however, our present purpose to enter on any detailed account of the town itself, but to confine our notice to one of its most attractive features—its ancient castle—we shall only state that Cahir is a market and post town, in the barony of Iffa and Offa West, county of Tipperary, and is situated on the river Suir, at the junction of the mail-coach roads leading respectively from Waterford to Limerick, and from Cork by way of Cashel to Dublin. ”

“ The trick consists in placing a snake, previously tamed and accustomed to music, in some remote place, and they manage it so that in appearing accidentally to approach that place, and beginning to play, the snake comes forward at the wonted sounds. When they enter into an agreement with any simpleton who fancies that his house is infested with serpents—a notion which they sometimes contrive to infuse into his brain—they cunningly introduce some tame snakes into some crevice of his house, which come to their master as soon as he sounds his musical call. ”

“ Even the youngest of you, however, must surely remember the little man—little indeed in size, but every inch of him a gentleman, who but a few years since might be occasionally seen taking an airing, when the sun shone on him, in Sackville Street, sometimes leaning on his servant’s arm, and at others driven in his pony-phaeton, which his prudence in youth had enabled him to secure for his days of feebleness and old age. ”

“ The person we allude to was Robert Meekins, or, as he was familiarly called, “Bob,” a violinist of great tavern-playing [Pg 260] notoriety in his day. Like his brother professors, the harpers of the last century, of whom Mr Bunting has given us such characteristic anecdotes, Bob was a thoroughly Irish musician in every sense of the word; and though, as we believe, he had never travelled out of Dublin, his native city, few were found to equal him on his instrument either in tone, execution, or expression of feeling. ”

“ Many travellers who have written on the practice of serpent-charming have declared it as their conviction that the process is based in deception, that is, that the serpents charmed forth from holes are by no means wild creatures, who really and naturally inhabit those recesses, but animals which have been previously tamed, their poisonous fangs extracted, and placed there by the juggler or an accomplice, in order to the performance of his pretended miracle. ”

“ There, now, Dublin readers, some thousands of you at least have the man before you, though many of you are unfortunately too young to have heard his exquisitely delicate and expressive hands on the piano, extemporising with matchless felicity upon Garryowen or some other melody of Old Ireland ”

“ Birds do not sing, but speak. What we take for singing is no more than their natural language. Do the magpie, the jay, the raven, the owl, and the duck, sing? What makes us believe that they sing is their beautiful voice. ”

“ Mounted he may indeed be on a hill so high that he can discern objects in the distance which are hidden from the more humble plodders of the plain below, and yet his own horizon be proportionately limited when compared to that of others who have climbed the still higher mountain above him. ”

“ The chuckling enchanter then instantly whips up the serpent, claps it into his basket, pockets his fee, and, all the while doubtless laughing in his sleeve, goes to some other house, to renew his offers of assistance to similar dupes.”
As to the idea that the snakes are previously deprived of their fangs, and that the jugglers secure themselves against all danger of being injured by the regular dancing snakes that they carry about with them in baskets, a single anecdote related by Forbes, in his Oriental Memoirs, will I think suffice to combat and refute it. ”

“ Others, and even yet they are many, attribute the transport of both gravel and boulders to the Noachian deluge, which is their great geological catastrophe. The application, however, of that great historical event to such physical agencies, is beset with great difficulties. The words of scripture do not support, but rather oppose, the notion of a huge wave rising in the north to a great height, then rushing southwards over the dry land, and rooting up or sweeping before it, by hydrostatic pressure, fragments of the earth’s crust. ”

“ But these weak rebels did not remain long inactive, or exhibit weakness in attack; and the earl’s journey back to Dublin towards the end of July was marked by a series of disasters that sealed his doom; or, as the Four Masters remark, “The Irish afterwards were wont to say that it were better for the Earl of Essex that he had not undertaken this expedition from Dublin to Hy-Conell Gaura, as he had to return back from his enterprise without receiving submission or respect from the Geraldines, and without having achieved any exploit except the taking of Cahir-duna-iasgach.” ”

“ Birds, if you will, sing in the same sense, but they sing not for singing’s sake, as we fancy they do. Their singing is always an intended speech; and it is comical enough that there should be thus in the world so numerous a nation which never speak otherwise but tunably and musically. ”

“ James Galdie had no more in his company than sixty men, and coming to the wall of the bawne of the castle undiscovered, by the help of ladders, and some masons that brake holes in some part of the wall where it was weak, got in and entered the hall before they were perceived. The serjeant, named Thomas Quayle, which had the charge of the castle, made some little resistance, and was wounded. ”

“ I think that even this brief and hurried account must have compelled my readers to cast from their minds all notion of the snakes being laid in the proper places by the jugglers beforehand, as preparatory to a performance, as I have shown in the instances above mentioned that no such thing could have been done. And the idea of the creature’s having been previously rendered harmless, is also overturned by the circumstance of the Cobra de Capella, handled one day with impunity by Forbes, having on the following morning bitten a young woman, who died of the effects of the poison within an hour. ”

“ The country in which these accumulations of erratic boulders had taken place, is an expanse of sand covered with heath, except where broken by cultivated patches around the scattered villages, the surface being undulated by hills composed either of sand or of heaps of boulders. ”

“ To apply this theory in the case of the Jura boulders, Playfair assigned their transport to an epoch anterior to the formation or excavation of the deep valleys and lakes which would now form an insurmountable obstacle to such transport, and thus obtained a greatly inclined plane, extending from the summit of the Alps to the Jura, on which to trundle the fragments gradually downwards, by aid of the numerous streams and torrents descending from the higher to the lower ground. ”

“ He likewise informs us that they are supposed to have the power of charming those dangerous reptiles, and of commanding them to approach and surrender themselves at the sound of music; and he quotes the passages of scripture to which I referred in my preceding article, as confirmatory of the authenticity of the practice; yet he will not admit that even this mass of evidence will convince that the charmer’s art is aught but an imposture. ”

“ Amongst the most prominent of these objectors are to be found the Abbé Dubois and the traveller Denon; and the latter author even goes so far as to affirm that the secret of the Psylli was a piece of nonsense that he might easily have discovered had he been so disposed. A precious traveller truly! to have had it in his power to discover a secret that a hundred naturalists would have given their very eyes to become acquainted with, and yet to neglect taking the necessary trouble. ”