Stromness

“ The locking of the armies in the trenches, the sinking of the Lusitania, the murder of Nurse Cavell, the use of poison-gas and liquid fire, the submarine warfare, the Gallipoli campaign, the hundred other incidents of the war, almost stunned us at first, and then our minds began to compass the train of events and develop a perspective. I suppose our experience was unique. No other civilized men could have been as blankly ignorant of world-shaking happenings as we were when we reached Stromness Whaling Station. ”

“ June 3.—The wind continuing favourable after leaving Yarmouth, about nine this morning we passed the rugged and bold projecting rock, termed Johnny Groat's house, and soon afterwards Duncansby Head, and then entered the Pentland Firth. A pilot came from the main shore of Scotland, and steered the ship in safety between the different islands, to the outer anchorage at Stromness, though the atmosphere was too dense for distinguishing any of the objects on the land. ”

“ We were still 150 miles away from Stromness whaling-station by sea. The alternative was to attempt the crossing of the island. If we could not get over, then we must try to secure enough food and fuel to keep us alive through the winter, but this possibility was scarcely thinkable. Over on Elephant Island twenty-two men were waiting for the relief that we alone could secure for them. Their plight was worse than ours. We must push on somehow. Several days must elapse before our strength would be sufficiently recovered to allow us to row or sail the last nine miles up to the head of the bay. ”

“ On the western side a long line of precipitous cliffs, rising a thousand feet above the sea, opposes an unbroken front to the full force of the Atlantic. At the western end as we saw it from above Stromness, the rocks form the profile of a man's face, not so stern as that in the Franconia Notch of the White Mountains, but having rather a more genial look. It is said to resemble Sir Walter Scott, a likeness which, I confess, I could see only when I shut my eyes and thought of Chantrey's bust. ”

“ If any sailor could keep his boat above water in them, she knew Geordie could; and if not—she durst follow that thought no further, but, putting her hands before her face, stood praying, while the two men pulled silently away in the little skiff that had brought them up the outlet connecting the lake of Stennis with the sea. Margaret would have turned away from Ronald's open grave less heart-broken.
It was midnight now, but her real terror absorbed all imaginary ones; she did not even call a pony, but with swift, even steps walked back to Stromness. ”

“ Fishing and fowling, as well as antiquarian puzzles, have long been attractions to these rocks and waters, that begin to be more visited for their own sake, now that our generation develops a taste in out-of-the-way aspects of nature. It was a lucky hit for the archipelago when in 1814 Walter Scott accompanied the Northern Lights Commissioners on their jovial tour of office, at Stromness picking up from a toothless Norna that story of the pirate Gow which he so well dressed up in the contents of his note-book. ”

“ But he kept such thoughts to himself, and when he went back to Glasgow took with him solid proof of his sister's devotion.
It was necessary, now, for Margaret to make a great change in her life. She determined to remove to Stromness and occupy the little four-roomed cottage that had been her mother's. It stood close to that of Geordie Twatt, and she felt that in any emergency she was thus sure of one faithful friend. "A lone woman" in Margaret's position has in these days numberless objects of interest of which Margaret never dreamed. ”

“ My understanding of the doctrine is, that there are five chief powers or forces in Nature: one mechanical, or molar, the momentum of moving matter; the others molecular, or embodied in the molecules, also supposed in motion—these are, heat, light, chemical force, electricity. To these powers, which are unquestionable and distinct, it is usual to add vital force, of which, however, it is difficult to speak as a whole; but one member of our vital energies, the nerve-force, allied to electricity, fully deserves to rank in the correlation. ”

“ Impeded and condemned, I beat against the towering rock for ages; atom by atom I wear away its strength, and the day comes when my waves are rolling above it, and their white crests are whispering softly as they rise and fall over the spot where once it stood and defied my strength." "Be true, be true," they say to all, "Love not a falsehood for its sweetness. My waves are salt and rough, but they bear not deceit within their depths, and they roll unchanged for ever and ever."
Such is the voices of the deep—such are the lessons they teach. ”

“ Electricity had no soul, light and heat had no soul. Was she herself an impersonal force, or conjunction of forces, like one of these? She looked still at the unicellular shadow that lay within the field of light, under her microscope. It was alive. She saw it move—she saw the bright mist of its ciliary activity, she saw the gleam of its nucleus, as it slid across the plane of light. ”

“ Here we have, in the transformation of the vibrations of sound to another form of energy, a continual degradation of energy; but we may have by the same means an exaltation of spiritual potential energy which is unexplained by our doctrine of the conservation of force, and seems to require the incoming of another element in our calculations. Where does appear the force of mind, the high courage, which can enable a feeble body to maintain a high potential energy out of the same physical materials which contribute to the formation of the sluggishness of others? ”

“ Of all the forms of nature's immeasurable, all-pervading energy, which ever and ever changing and moving, like a soul animates the inert universe, electricity and magnetism are perhaps the most fascinating. ”

“ Shadow upon the one side, bright light upon the other, azure above and swallows. Ever rolling the human stream flows, mostly on the south side yonder, near enough to be audible, but toned to bearableness. A stream of human hearts, every atom a living mind filled with what thoughts?—a stream that ran through Rome once, but has altered its course and wears away the banks here now and triturates its own atoms, the hearts, to dust in the process. ”

“ Let us suppose, that all bodies which gravitate towards each other are found to be embosomed in a subtile, ambient fluid, which connects them, as it were, into one system; that the positive and negative states of electricity are resolvable into the presence of two fluids standing in certain relations to each other; and that substances show chemical affinity for each other only when they are in opposite electrical conditions. ”

“ But in the present state of science, the magnetic, electric, and chemical powers are the last and highest of inorganic nature. These, therefore, we assume as presenting themselves again to us, in their next metamorphosis, as reproduction (i.e. growth and identity of the whole, amid the change or flux of all the parts) , irritability and sensibility; reproduction corresponding to magnetism, irritability to electricity, and sensibility to constructive chemical affinity. ”

“ Of course, this intensification of force, in proportion to the condensation, concretion, and differentiation of the forms produced by it, is not a thickening of a substantive entity, but is simply an increasing complication in the relations in the establishment of which all realization consists. The energy which forms and maintains the higher and more definite forms of material existence has to overcome and to hold its own against not only the inherent energy of the primary physical form, but against the specialized energy of the intermediate forms as well. ”

“ We therefore find our physical investigations lead us to three great final inquiries, when we ask—What is the nature of electricity, æther, and energy? Already, it seems possible, we may obtain some clue to an answer to the first question, and find it in a study of the electrons, or tiny corpuscles which build up atoms. Concerning the structure of æther, physical investigation, which has revealed its existence, may be able to analyze a little more deeply its operations. But the question, What is Energy? ”

“ Radiating in every direction, from millions of centric points, run shivers of undulation manifested in endless metamorphosis as heat, or light, or actinism, as magnetism or electricity. Crossing one another in every imaginable way, as if all space were crowded with a mesh-work of nerve-threads, these motions go on forever in a harmony that nothing disturbs. ”

“ The blood is the life of man, its element or stimulæ of life is electricity, let this but escape from the blood, and with it the soul or spirit has fled, and the body is left to moulder back to dust. We find electricity to be [229] a principle of immateriality; an element of fire, which pervades all things, in a greater or less degree, not only solids and fluids, but also atmosphere or air. ”

“ What a chasm divides the electric pastime of these savages from the discovery of a metallic conductor discharging its electric shocks, or a pile composed of many chemically-decomposing substances, or a light-engendering magnetic apparatus! In such a chasm lie buried thousands of years that compost the history of the intellectual development of mankind! ”

“ Electricity, magnetism, the hypothetical ether, the inscrutable forces manifested everywhere in the biological field—all these are, as regard their ultimate nature, altogether mysterious.
In a word, the student of nature is dealing everywhere with the wonderful, the incomprehensible. Yet all the manifestations that he observes are found to repeat themselves in certain unvarying sequences. Certain applications of energy will produce certain movements of matter. ”

“ Every phase, every phenomenon, is a manifestation of matter. Thunderstorm, lightning, electricity, or thought—whatsoever it may be, call it by any other name, designate it or describe it how you will, we cannot separate any object from this terrestrial globe of matter. The elements composing this world gave birth to life, life manifests its energies in many forms, then returns again to the great ocean of elements whence it came. ”

“ Even on the material plane we see how the vibrations of light and heat penetrate those of visible and tangible substance, and how, in your more recent discoveries, light rays penetrate solid metals formerly called opaque. When I say that these vibrations are interpenetrable and non-obstructive, the statement must be taken as approximating the truth, and not as a finality, independent of all conditions; for by the power of the will, or as a result of mental habit, a man may either exclude or admit to his consciousness the thought vibrations of others. ”

“ Night and darkness ruled, but chaos had no part, and never ruled in all the cycles of creative power. The direct currents of electric force and the circular currents of magnetic power swept through and through earth's molecular structure, ranging the atoms in all the lines of crystal perfection and spherical form, and laying the rock-ribbed foundations in geological stratas in the heart and center of a growing world. ”

“ When a stone is thrown into the air, and falls to earth according to definite laws, or when in a solution of salt a crystal is formed, the phenomenon is neither more nor less a mechanical manifestation of life than the growth and flowering of plants, than the propagation of animals or the activity of their senses, than the perception or the formation of thought in man." Here crystallization, organic life, sensation, and formation of thought, are expressly put in one line of mechanism with the falling of a stone. ”

“ Here materialism calls to its aid the discovery of the correlation and equivalence of forces, one of the most stupendous achievements of our century. We now know that heat and light [Pg 68] and electricity and actinism are not forces generically distinct and isolated each from the others. All are specific modes of molecular motion, transformable one into another at any moment as naturally as a cloud condenses into raindrops. ”

“ Let us not suppose for a moment that these conclusions indicate in the remotest degree that electricity is life,—that vital power is due to electricity.
During life, with every motion, and, indeed, with every emotion, whether we move a muscle or exert the mind, there is a change of state. The result of this is chemical phenomena,—heat and electricity; but these are not life. We excite them equally by giving motion to a dead mass. ”

“ These then are the two methods by which the energy of the system will manifest itself in work. The one, which is much the more important for our purposes, leads always to a diminution of surface, to the so-called “principle of minimal areas”; the other, which leads to the lowering (under certain circumstances) of surface tension, is the basis of the theory of Adsorption, to which we shall have some occasion to refer as the modus operandi in the development of a cell-wall, and in a variety of other histological phenomena. ”

“ If we now follow the same Thought by examining the Inorganic, we make the extraordinary discovery that this power to influence, based on sympathetic action, is the very mainspring by which physical work can be sustained, and upon it depends entirely the very action of our physical senses. Our senses are based upon the appreciation of Vibration, in the Air and Ether, of greater or less rapidity, according to the presence in our organs of processes capable of acting in sympathy with those frequencies. ”