What Is Man? and Other Essays Read online

  The two most famous volcanoes of Europe are Sodom and Gomorrah.

  The chapter headed "Analysis" shows us that the pupils in our public schools are not merely loaded up with those showy facts about geography, mathematics, and so on, and left in that incomplete state; no, there's machinery for clarifying and expanding their minds. They are required to take poems and analyze them, dig out their common sense, reduce them to statistics, and reproduce them in a luminous prose translation which shall tell you at a glance what the poet was trying to get at. One sample will do. Here is a stanza from "The Lady of the Lake," followed by the pupil's impressive explanation of it:

  Alone, but with unbated zeal,

  The horseman plied with scourge and steel;

  For jaded now and spent with toil,

  Embossed with foam and dark with soil,

  While every gasp with sobs he drew,

  The laboring stag strained full in view.

  The man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an instrument made of steel alone with strong ardor not diminishing, for, being tired from the time passed with hard labor overworked with anger and ignorant with weariness, while every breath for labor he drew with cries full or sorrow, the young deer made imperfect who worked hard filtered in sight.

  I see, now, that I never understood that poem before. I have had glimpses of its meaning, it moments when I was not as ignorant with weariness as usual, but this is the first time the whole spacious idea of it ever filtered in sight. If I were a public-school pupil I would put those other studies aside and stick to analysis; for, after all, it is the thing to spread your mind.

  We come now to historical matters, historical remains, one might say. As one turns the pages he is impressed with the depth to which one date has been driven into the American child's head —1492. The date is there, and it is there to stay. And it is always at hand, always deliverable at a moment's notice. But the Fact that belongs with it? That is quite another matter. Only the date itself is familiar and sure: its vast Fact has failed of lodgment. It would appear that whenever you ask a public- school pupil when a thing—anything, no matter what—happened, and he is in doubt, he always rips out his 1492. He applies it to everything, from the landing of the ark to the introduction of the horse-car. Well, after all, it is our first date, and so it is right enough to honor it, and pay the public schools to teach our children to honor it:

  George Washington was born in 1492.

  Washington wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1492.

  St. Bartholemew was massacred in 1492.

  The Brittains were the Saxons who entered England in 1492 under Julius Caesar.

  The earth is 1492 miles in circumference.

  To proceed with "History"

  Christopher Columbus was called the Father of his Country.

  Queen Isabella of Spain sold her watch and chain and other millinery so that Columbus could discover America.

  The Indian wars were very desecrating to the country.

  The Indians pursued their warfare by hiding in the bushes and then scalping them.

  Captain John Smith has been styled the father of his country. His life was saved by his daughter Pochahantas.

  The Puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds of America.

  The Stamp Act was to make everybody stamp all materials so they should be null and void.

  Washington died in Spain almost broken-hearted. His remains were taken to the cathedral in Havana.

  Gorilla warfare was where men rode on gorillas.

  John Brown was a very good insane man who tried to get fugitives slaves into Virginia. He captured all the inhabitants, but was finally conquered and condemned to his death. The confederasy was formed by the fugitive slaves.

  Alfred the Great reigned 872 years. He was distinguished for letting some buckwheat cakes burn, and the lady scolded him.

  Henry Eight was famous for being a great widower haveing lost several wives.

  Lady Jane Grey studied Greek and Latin and was beheaded after a few days.

  John Bright is noted for an incurable disease.

  Lord James Gordon Bennet instigated the Gordon Riots.

  The Middle Ages come in between antiquity and posterity.

  Luther introduced Christianity into England a good many thousand years ago. His birthday was November 1883. He was once a Pope. He lived at the time of the Rebellion of Worms.

  Julius Caesar is noted for his famous telegram dispatch I came I saw I conquered.

  Julius Caesar was really a very great man. He was a very great soldier and wrote a book for beginners in the Latin.

  Cleopatra was caused by the death of an asp which she dissolved in a wine cup.

  The only form of government in Greece was a limited monkey.

  The Persian war lasted about 500 years.

  Greece had only 7 wise men.

  Socrates . . . destroyed some statues and had to drink Shamrock.

  Here is a fact correctly stated; and yet it is phrased with such ingenious infelicity that it can be depended upon to convey misinformation every time it is uncarefully unread:

  By the Salic law no woman or descendant of a woman could occupy the throne.

  To show how far a child can travel in history with judicious and diligent boosting in the public school, we select the following mosaic:

  Abraham Lincoln was born in Wales in 1599.

  In the chapter headed "Intellectual" I find a great number of most interesting statements. A sample or two may be found not amiss:

  Bracebridge Hall was written by Henry Irving.

  Show Bound was written by Peter Cooper.

  The House of the Seven Gables was written by Lord Bryant.

  Edgar A. Poe was a very curdling writer.

  Cotton Mather was a writer who invented the cotten gin and wrote histories.

  Beowulf wrote the Scriptures.

  Ben Johnson survived Shakspeare in some respects.

  In the Canterbury Tale it gives account of King Alfred on his way to the shrine of Thomas Bucket.

  Chaucer was the father of English pottery.

  Chaucer was a bland verse writer of the third century.

  Chaucer was succeeded by H. Wads. Longfellow an American Writer. His writings were chiefly prose and nearly one hundred years elapsed.

  Shakspere translated the Scriptures and it was called St. James because he did it.

  In the middle of the chapter I find many pages of information concerning Shakespeare's plays, Milton's works, and those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope, Swift, Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge, Hood, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli—a fact which shows that into the restricted stomach of the public-school pupil is shoveled every year the blood, bone, and viscera of a gigantic literature, and the same is there digested and disposed of in a most successful and characteristic and gratifying public-school way. I have space for but a trifling few of the results:

  Lord Byron was the son of an heiress and a drunken man.

  Wm. Wordsworth wrote the Barefoot Boy and Imitations on Immortality.

  Gibbon wrote a history of his travels in Italy. This was original.

  George Eliot left a wife and children who mourned greatly for his genius.

  George Eliot Miss Mary Evans Mrs. Cross Mrs. Lewis was the greatest female poet unless George Sands is made an exception of.

  Bulwell is considered a good writer.

  Sir Walter Scott Charles Bronte Alfred the Great and Johnson were the first great novelists.

  Thomas Babington Makorlay graduated at Harvard and then studied law, he was raised to the peerage as baron in 1557 and died in 1776.

  Here are two or three miscellaneous facts that may be of value, if taken in moderation:

  Homer's writings are Homer's Essays Virgil the Aenid and Paradise lost some people say that these poems were not wr
itten by Homer but by another man of the same name.

  A sort of sadness kind of shone in Bryant's poems.

  Holmes is a very profligate and amusing writer.

  When the public-school pupil wrestles with the political features of the Great Republic, they throw him sometimes:

  A bill becomes a law when the President vetoes it.

  The three departments of the government is the President rules the world, the governor rules the State, the mayor rules the city.

  The first conscientious Congress met in Philadelphia.

  The Constitution of the United States was established to ensure domestic hostility.

  Truth crushed to earth will rise again. As follows:

  The Constitution of the United States is that part of the book at the end which nobody reads.

  And here she rises once more and untimely. There should be a limit to public-school instruction; it cannot be wise or well to let the young find out everything:

  Congress is divided into civilized half civilized and savage.

  Here are some results of study in music and oratory:

  An interval in music is the distance on the keyboard from one piano to the next.

  A rest means you are not to sing it.

  Emphasis is putting more distress on one word than another.

  The chapter on "Physiology" contains much that ought not to be lost to science:

  Physillogigy is to study about your bones stummick and vertebry.

  Occupations which are injurious to health are cabolic acid gas which is impure blood.

  We have an upper and lower skin. The lower skin moves all the time and the upper skin moves when we do.

  The body is mostly composed of water and about one half is avaricious tissue.

  The stomach is a small pear-shaped bone situated in the body.

  The gastric juice keeps the bones from creaking.

  The Chyle flows up the middle of the backbone and reaches the heart where it meets the oxygen and is purified.

  The salivary glands are used to salivate the body.

  In the stomach starch is changed to cane sugar and cane sugar to sugar cane.

  The olfactory nerve enters the cavity of the orbit and is developed into the special sense of hearing.

  The growth of a tooth begins in the back of the mouth and extends to the stomach.

  If we were on a railroad track and a train was coming the train would deafen our ears so that we couldn't see to get off the track.

  If, up to this point, none of my quotations have added flavor to the Johnsonian anecdote at the head of this article, let us make another attempt:

  The theory that intuitive truths are discovered by the light of nature originated from St. John's interpretation of a passage in the Gospel of Plato.

  The weight of the earth is found by comparing a mass of known lead with that of a mass of unknown lead.

  To find the weight of the earth take the length of a degree on a meridian and multiply by 6 1/2 pounds.

  The spheres are to each other as the squares of their homologous sides.

  A body will go just as far in the first second as the body will go plus the force of gravity and that's equal to twice what the body will go.

  Specific gravity is the weight to be compared weight of an equal volume of or that is the weight of a body compared with the weight of an equal volume.

  The law of fluid pressure divide the different forms of organized bodies by the form of attraction and the number increased will be the form.

  Inertia is that property of bodies by virtue of which it cannot change its own condition of rest or motion. In other words it is the negative quality of passiveness either in recoverable latency or insipient latescence.

  If a laugh is fair here, not the struggling child, nor the unintelligent teacher—or rather the unintelligent Boards, Committees, and Trustees—are the proper target for it. All through this little book one detects the signs of a certain probable fact—that a large part of the pupil's "instruction" consists in cramming him with obscure and wordy "rules" which he does not understand and has no time to understand. It would be as useful to cram him with brickbats; they would at least stay. In a town in the interior of New York, a few years ago, a gentleman set forth a mathematical problem and proposed to give a prize to every public-school pupil who should furnish the correct solution of it. Twenty-two of the brightest boys in the public schools entered the contest. The problem was not a very difficult one for pupils of their mathematical rank and standing, yet they all failed—by a hair—through one trifling mistake or another. Some searching questions were asked, when it turned out that these lads were as glib as parrots with the "rules," but could not reason out a single rule or explain the principle underlying it. Their memories had been stocked, but not their understandings. It was a case of brickbat culture, pure and simple.

  There are several curious "compositions" in the little book, and we must make room for one. It is full of naivete, brutal truth, and unembarrassed directness, and is the funniest (genuine) boy's composition I think I have ever seen:

  On Girls

  Girls are very stuck up and dignefied in their maner and be have your. They think more of dress than anything and like to play with dowls and rags. They cry if they see a cow in a far distance and are afraid of guns. They stay at home all the time and go to church on Sunday. They are al-ways sick. They are al- ways funy and making fun of boy's hands and they say how dirty. They cant play marbels. I pity them poor things. They make fun of boys and then turn round and love them. I dont beleave they ever kiled a cat or anything. They look out every nite and say oh ant the moon lovely. Thir is one thing I have not told and that is they al-ways now their lessons bettern boys.

  From Mr. Edward Channing's recent article in SCIENCE:

  The marked difference between the books now being produced by French, English, and American travelers, on the one hand, and German explorers, on the other, is too great to escape attention. That difference is due entirely to the fact that in school and university the German is taught, in the first place to see, and in the second place to understand what he does see.

  A Simplified Alphabet

  This article, written during the autumn of 1899, was about the last writing done by Mark Twain on any impersonal subject.

  I have had a kindly feeling, a friendly feeling, a cousinly feeling toward Simplified Spelling, from the beginning of the movement three years ago, but nothing more inflamed than that. It seemed to me to merely propose to substitute one inadequacy for another; a sort of patching and plugging poor old dental relics with cement and gold and porcelain paste; what was really needed was a new set of teeth. That is to say, a new ALPHABET.

  The heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet. It doesn't know how to spell, and can't be taught. In this it is like all other alphabets except one—the phonographic. This is the only competent alphabet in the world. It can spell and correctly pronounce any word in our language.

  That admirable alphabet, that brilliant alphabet, that inspired alphabet, can be learned in an hour or two. In a week the student can learn to write it with some little facility, and to read it with considerable ease. I know, for I saw it tried in a public school in Nevada forty-five years ago, and was so impressed by the incident that it has remained in my memory ever since.

  I wish we could adopt it in place of our present written (and printed) character. I mean SIMPLY the alphabet; simply the consonants and the vowels—I don't mean any REDUCTIONS or abbreviations of them, such as the shorthand writer uses in order to get compression and speed. No, I would SPELL EVERY WORD OUT.

  I will insert the alphabet here as I find it in Burnz's PHONIC SHORTHAND. [Figure 1] It is arranged on the basis of Isaac Pitman's PHONOGRAPHY. Isaac Pitman was the originator and father of scientific phonography. It is used throughout the globe. It was a memorable invention. He made it public seventy- three years ago. The firm of Isaac Pitman & Sons, New York, still exists, and they continue
the master's work.

  What should we gain?

  First of all, we could spell DEFINITELY—and correctly—any word you please, just by the SOUND of it. We can't do that with our present alphabet. For instance, take a simple, every-day word PHTHISIS. If we tried to spell it by the sound of it, we should make it TYSIS, and be laughed at by every educated person.

  Secondly, we should gain in REDUCTION OF LABOR in writing.

  Simplified Spelling makes valuable reductions in the case of several hundred words, but the new spelling must be LEARNED. You can't spell them by the sound; you must get them out of the book.

  But even if we knew the simplified form for every word in the language, the phonographic alphabet would still beat the Simplified Speller "hands down" in the important matter of economy of labor. I will illustrate:

  PRESENT FORM: through, laugh, highland.

  SIMPLIFIED FORM: thru, laff, hyland.

  PHONOGRAPHIC FORM: [Figure 2]

  To write the word "through," the pen has to make twenty-one strokes.

  To write the word "thru," then pen has to make twelve strokes— a good saving.

  To write that same word with the phonographic alphabet, the pen has to make only THREE strokes.

  To write the word "laugh," the pen has to make FOURTEEN strokes.

  To write "laff," the pen has to make the SAME NUMBER of strokes—no labor is saved to the penman.

  To write the same word with the phonographic alphabet, the pen has to make only THREE strokes.

  To write the word "highland," the pen has to make twenty-two strokes.

  To write "hyland," the pen has to make eighteen strokes.

  To write that word with the phonographic alphabet, the pen has to make only FIVE strokes. [Figure 3]

  To write the words "phonographic alphabet," the pen has to make fifty-three strokes.

  To write "fonografic alfabet," the pen has to make fifty strokes. To the penman, the saving in labor is insignificant.

  To write that word (with vowels) with the phonographic alphabet, the pen has to make only SEVENTEEN strokes.

  Without the vowels, only THIRTEEN strokes. [Figure 4] The vowels are hardly necessary, this time.