Just as I was leaving Cambridge in 1869 or ’70 there arrived that great man, Sir Michael Foster, who organised the revolution in which the futilities of the early 19th century were blown to fragments, and in their place a sound system of practical instruction was created. Foster was discovered by Huxley, and it was through him, and thanks to the patriotism of Trinity College in creating for him the post of Praelector, that Foster got this great opportunity. The effect of what he did for English education has been incalculably great. His pupils have gone forth into all lands, and have spread the art of learning and teaching wherever they have come to rest.
In thinking over the reformation wrought by Michael Foster I am somehow—quite inconsistently—reminded of the great scene inGuy Mannering. I see in imagination the cold dark cave at Warroch Head, where Dirk Hatteraick lurks; he plays the part of False Science in the Mystery Play, and the cave is the Cave of Inanity. Then comes the great flare of light, as Meg Merrilees throws the torch on to the heap of flax, and her cry, “The hour is come and the man!” while Harry Bertram with his supporters rush in and bind False Science fast.Harry Bertram is, of course, Michael Foster, and I should say that Dandie Dinmont is Coutts Trotter. Meg Merrilees is naturally Huxley, who was the magician of the affair (she is always said to have looked like a man). Here all analogy breaks down. Meg was killed by False Science, Huxley was not; indeed it was the other way. Harry Bertram lived happily ever afterwards. Michael Foster was not so fortunate, and I am ashamed to think that before he died he was misunderstood and half forgotten in his own University.
I must apologise for this outburst of incoherence; I am afraid it was not this sort of thing that Tyndall had in mind when he pleaded for the scientific imagination—that is something much more serious.
Not only does the student of to-day get good practical teaching, but he has the great advantage of being under professors who are generally engaged in original work. And if a man can afford the time to stay up after his degree, he is encouraged and helped to undertake research. If practical teaching is the foundation, the protoplasm as it were, of scientific education, I am sure that original work is its soul or spirit.
Whether, like my father in South America, we have the genius to solve big problems in geology and “can hardly sleep at night for thinking of them,” or whether, as with us smaller people, the task is some elusive little point which we triumphantly track to its cause, there is an extraordinary delight in such work. Professor Seward arranged an admirable imitation of original research in hisadvanced class on the anatomy of plants at Cambridge. He gave out specimens which the students had never seen; these had to be investigated, and they had to giveviva voceaccounts of their discoveries to the rest of the class. I believe this to be a method worth imitating, and I may say as an encouragement to women teachers that it was a Newnham student who was especially distinguished in this mutual instruction class.
When I left Cambridge and became a medical student in London, I had the luck to work in the laboratory of Dr. Klein, who was then head of the Brown Institute at Nine Elms. He was fresh from Vienna, with all the continental traditions in favour of original research. Even in the ordinary laboratory work I remember how he tried to throw the romance of practicality over my task. He rushed in one day with a large bread-knife stained with blood in the most sinister manner, saying that a murder had occurred in South Lambeth, and it was for me to determine whether or no the red fluid on the blade was blood!
Later on he set me to work investigating inflammation, and I can still remember his praise of the harmless little paper I wrote. To my secret satisfaction he blamed me for the severity of my remarks on a German Professor who had written on the subject. He told me to strike out my criticism, though he allowed it to be just. I sighed as an author, but obeyed as a pupil,—to misquote the words of Gibbon.
Education is often spoken of, and is praised or blamed, as a method of imparting information tothe young. It is obvious that it is far more than this. It includes the stimulation of tastes, tendencies, or instincts which are inherent but dormant in the pupil. In my case the opportunity, so wisely and kindly given by Dr. Klein, of seeing science in the making—of seeing research from the inside—his giving me the delight of knowing that I had added a minute fragment to the great raging flood of publications which marks the progress of knowledge—all this was a potent factor in my education in the wider sense. That is, it did not merely teach me certain facts, but woke in me the desire to work at science for its own sake. My father finally gave me the necessary opportunity by taking me as his assistant.
No one should ever be able to finish the history of his own education, because it is co-extensive with his life. In my father’s autobiography written shortly before his death, he attempts to sum up the effect of this self-education on himself, both as concerns his experimental research and also in regard to the literary part of his work. An instance of his modest estimate of his own mental progress, is so characteristic that I shall venture to quote it. “I think that I have become a little more skilful in guessing right explanations and in devising experimental tests; but this may probably be the result of mere practice, and of a larger store of knowledge. I have as much difficulty as ever in expressing myself clearly and concisely; and this difficulty has caused me a very great loss of time; but it has had the compensating advantage of forcing me to think long and intently about everysentence, and thus I have been led to see errors in reasoning and in my own observations or those of others.” I repeat that self-education is an endless task. To some men this is a comforting, to others a depressing, fact. Samuel Johnson was, I think, saddened by the making of fresh plans of conduct for each new year. A very different man, though also a Samuel,—Butler, the author ofErewhon, was cheered by the thought that it was always possible to improve. When I knew him he was working as a painter in an untidy room in Clifford’s Inn, without much furniture except a piano. He was poor, and therefore, to save models, painted himself over and over again, the result being a cupboard full of grim heads, which he called the chamber of horrors. He always believed he should succeed at last, and the point I am slowly reaching is that he comforted himself with the belief that John Bellini entirely altered his style when he was between 60 and 70 years of age. One of the French aphorism writers, Vauvenargues, has said (as translated by Lord Morley), “To do great things a man must live as though he had never to die.”[94]I too would recommend the wholesome theory that it is never too late to learn; it helps to keep one from falling too soon into incurable fogeydom.
In the lives of big men it is sometimes possible to see how work done for its own sake may turn out to have had its real value as a piece of training for something of far greater worth. Thus my fatherbegan in 1846 working at a curious Cirripede,i.e., a barnacle, which he had found on his voyage; this led him to examine others, and in the end he worked seven or eight years at this group of animals.
To his children the habit of working at barnacles seemed a commonplace human function, like eating or breathing, and it is reported that one of us being taken into the study of a neighbour, and seeing no dissecting table or microscope, asked with justifiable suspicion, “Then where does he do his barnacles?” When I was writing my father’sLife, I asked Mr. Huxley his opinion whether this seven or eight years’ work had been, in his judgment, worth the great labour involved. His answer was that no man is a good judge of the speculative strain which may be put on the raw materials of science, unless he knows at first hand how this raw material is acquired, and this knowledge my father gained by his barnacles. TheOrigin of Speciesis the evidence that he did not miscalculate the strain his facts would bear, for his theory is as strong as ever.
There is one influence, of the greatest importance in regard to education, with which I have not attempted to deal. I mean the personal influence of the teacher. This is a part of the pupil’s environment which not even a millionaire can undertake to supply to his pet University. It is rather a thing to pray for, and to treasure when the gods send it to us.
There is a magic in the personal effect of a great teacher, which makes it comparatively unimportantwhat sort of science he teaches. In him the How entirely dwarfs the What.
To take an instance. My father’s master, Professor Henslow, was of this type. But some of his advice was extremely bad. Thus he told my father to read Lyell’sPrinciples, but on no account to believe the theoretical parts of the book. In spite of the warning, my father was at once converted to the doctrines set forth in thePrinciples, and Lyell was from that time forward the chief influence of his scientific life. But his gratitude to Henslow remained fresh and strong to the day of his death.
The same thing is true of Lyell and his instructors. When he left Oxford and went down to Scotland geologising, he must have been full of Buckland’s teaching, and ought to have believed that the surface of the county of Forfar was just as the Flood left it, some few thousand years ago. But he at once proceeded to discover in Noachian Forfarshire the most striking evidence of geological change actually in progress. So that, under the influence of a great catastrophist, Lyell became the greatest of the uniformitarians, and more than any one man was the destroyer of the older point of view.
The personal effect of teacher on pupil cannot be bought at a price, nor can it be paid for in any coin but gratitude. It is the possibility of earning this payment that makes the best part of a teacher’s life.
An Address to a Society Of Morris Dancers, Oxford, February 12, 1914
In the following pages I have brought together some scattered information on the instruments, especially connected with Folk-Dancing, which give the title to my address. The coming to life of a mass of beautiful tunes and dances, in response to the patient search of Mr. Cecil Sharp and a few others, is one of the most magical occurrences of which I have any memory. In a less degree I have experienced the same sense of the unexpected, in learning that in a Kentish village, so near London as often to be darkened by the skirts of town fogs, the ancient superstition still existed of telling the bees that their master is dead. Such an unsuspected lurking of primitive belief in our midst may well give a shock of surprise. But in the resurrection of the mass of hidden music, and of the dying traditions of dances, a web of extraordinary beauty is suddenly revealed—a matter of real importance.
If tunes have souls they are shut out by death from ever again vibrating in a human tenement. They are like thegabel-rachels, the souls of unbaptised infants whom men in Yorkshire used to hear crying round the church as though beggingto be let in. But the traditional tunes of England are no longer homeless; they have a safe refuge in the printed page. They have become immortal, or as near immortality as modern paper can insure.
Mr. Sharp has done wonderful things; he is like a naturalist who should discover that we are unconsciously surrounded by whole races of beautiful things as unknown to us as elves and fairies. In the Commemoration Service we speak gratefully of all those who “found out musical tunes.” If ever a man deserved remembrance for literally finding out tunes it is Mr. Sharp.
But to return to the musical instruments of the Morris dancers—the Pipe and Tabor. I am told that the little drum on which the piper accompanies his tune should be pronounced ‘tabber.’ I have no doubt this is right. The Oxfordshire name Dub suggests it, and the old French word Tabour is something of an argument in the same direction. In Wright’sDialect Dictionaryit is said that the lesser spotted woodpecker is called the “tabberer” from its habit of drumming on tree trunks. I should like to call my pipe a “tabberer’s” pipe if only out of affection for the little black and white bird and his drum, but the modern pronunciation, with a longa, has a strong hold and can hardly be ousted. We nowadays put the pipe before the tabor, but in Shakespearian days this was not so. InThe TempestAriel plays the tune “Flout ’em and scout ’em” on a tabor and pipe—and the artist was called a taborer[98]not a piper. In the same waythe Provençal performer on the two instruments was (according to Daudet), and I hope still is, known as the tabourinaire.
Morris dancing, for which the tabor and pipe once supplied the music, is now an everyday accomplishment. At Cambridge one may see Fellows of Colleges dancing, waving handkerchiefs and knocking sticks in the old manner, and I hope the same is true of Oxford.
But piping is not so common. Some of us have heard Mr. Sharp at a lecture, or Mr. Haydn Coffin on the stage. But it is not an art likely to spread rapidly, because the old English is pipe rare and hard to come by, and copies are not common either.
I began to learn the taborer’s art on a French or Basque galoubet obtained in Oxford from that kind friend of many musicians, the late Mr. Taphouse. But it was only quite recently, when Mr. Manning lent me an old Oxfordshire instrument and allowed me to have it copied, that I made any kind of progress.
I do not know when playing the “whittle and dub” (as they were called) became extinct as a village art. It certainly existed thirty years ago, and for all I know there are still some living who could hand on the grand manner of taboring. Mr. Taphouse remembered very well the days when the pipe and drum were heard all round Oxford at fairs and village festivals. I remember his showing me a whittle with a crack in it where it had been broken over the head of a reveller by a drunken taborer.
The two instruments have been generally associated with dancing. Tans’ur,[100a]writing in 1772, speaks of this. “The Tabor and Pipe are two musical Instruments that always accompany each other, and are mostly used at Wakes by Country People, and at their Dancings and innocent Diversions, and often with Morris Dancers.” He speaks of the pipe as played with the left hand, “on which Wrist hangs a small drum, braced in Tune to the Pipe, and beat by the Right Hand as a Bass in Time to it: both of which being well managed make pretty Harmony.”
In the Wallace Collection there is a picture by N. Lancret (1690–1743) of a celebrated dancer, Mme. Camargo, who is accompanied by a small orchestra of two recorders, a bassoon and one or more viols; these are partly hidden at the back of the scene, while a boy with pipe and tabor[100b]stands close to the dancer, giving the impression that she depends on him rather than on the more formal musicians in the background. It may remind us of the Duke of Plaza Toro, who sings a song accompanied and supported by his own particular private drum as well as by the orchestra. The same quasi independence of the tabor and pipe is still to be found in the folk music of the Catalans, the inhabitants of the north-east of Spain. The dancewhich Mr. Casals—himself a Catalan—described to me, is a round dance of some complexity. It is held in high esteem as a national affair, and is danced by gentle and simple together. The band consists of a tabor and pipe, four large rustic oboes, some cornets and a double-bass. The interesting point is that the taborer always leads off with a solo, a spirited flourish which Mr. Casals was so good as to play on the piano. It is curious that there is only one such traditional flourish, and this is used whatever the dance-music may be. Mr. Casals described the effect of the whole band as moving and exciting in a high degree.
I have an old newspaper cutting of the Queen Victoria and Prince Albert watching the British sailor dance a hornpipe on the deck of a man-of-war, accompanied by a couple of marines with a drum and fife. Shakespeare evidently considered these two instruments as the military equivalent of the tabor and pipe. He makes Benedick laugh at Claudio, in love, for throwing over the drum and fife for the taborer’s music.
In the middle ages the tabor and pipe were a good deal associated with the performances of strollers and mountebanks. On the other hand, they did not always take this role. There is a beautiful carved figure playing the pipe and tabor in the Angel Choir of Lincoln Cathedral, dating from 1270. In Strutt’sSports and Pastimes(Ed. 2, Plate XXIV), a horse is shown, dancing to a tabor and pipe, from a MS. of about 1300; on Plate XXIII is a drawing of a taboring hare (without a pipe) of about the end of the 13th century. I am notaware that these instruments are known to have existed in England earlier than the 13th century.
Fra Angelico puts these instruments into the hands of an angelic lady. Her tabor is beautifully given, the pipe is but slightly indicated. In Florence, among the singing boys of Luca della Robbia (reproduced in fig. 5), is to be found the best representation of a pipe player that I have seen. There is a comparatively modern picture of Will Kemp,[102a]the Shakespearian actor, performing his dance to Norwich. He started, apparently in 1599, on the “first Monday in cleane Lent,” and succeeded in his object, though not without difficulty. His attendants’ names are pleasant: Taborer, Tom Slye, Servant, Wm. Bee, Overseer, Geo. Sprat.
I am glad to say that a tabor and pipe appear in one very honourable secular affair,[102b]namely, a tournament, more correctly a joust or single combat. One of the combatants is supported by a bagpipe, the other by a tabor and pipe. It must be confessed, however, that the taborer was not well treated in mediaeval times, badly paid, and not received with the honour given to minstrels.
Fig. 5.—Pipe and Tabor
I like the rustic character of the pipe, and its association with cheerful mediaeval vagabonds, and, still more, its memories of centuries of village dances. I wish it had found a place in that “dancing in the chequered shade,” in which Miltonhas immortalised the jocund rebecks. But Milton was a player of the bass viol, and does not show any especial feeling for wind instruments, so at least I gather from Welch’s interesting book.[103a]
The taborer’s pipe is a whistle; it happens to be made of wood, but its musical structure is precisely that of the penny whistle, except in one important particular, that it has but three holes in place of six. The pipe is therefore a poor relation of that beautiful but extinct instrument therecorder[103b]which is only a wooden whistle. The recorder has a low, hollow, but most effective tone, and I shall never forget the ravishing effect of a quartet of recorders as played at a concert given by Mr. Galpin, the well-known authority on old English instruments. The taborer’s pipe has none of the sweetness of the recorder; it is essentially a shrill instrument; indeed, I am told by a philologist that its old German nameSchwegelcontains a root implying shrillness. Another old German name isStamentien Pfeiffe, which my philological friend tells me does not occur in the best German dictionary, and is of unknown origin.
As I have said, the pipe has but three holes (stopped by the index, middle finger and thumb); these give four fundamental tones, which however do not occur in the working scale of the instrument.In the penny whistle, and most wood-wind instruments, the octave or first harmonic gives the means of extending the scale. But in the taborer’s pipe the whole of the workable scale consists of harmonics; what corresponds to the lower octave in the penny whistle—the non-harmonic or fundamental part of the register—can only be faintly sounded. It is the first harmonic or octave of the lowest of these faint notes that forms the bottom note of the scale of the three-holed pipe.[104a]This note is approximately D of the modern flat pitch. By successively raising the middle and index fingers and then the thumb, E, F, and G are sounded. Then all the finger holes are again closed, and by a little extra impulse given to the breath A is sounded, being the harmonic 5th of the lower D. Then follow B and C as harmonic 5ths of E and F, and the final D as the octave of the lowest tone. Above this a variable number of notes—about four—are producible by cross-fingerings. The ordinary work-a-day scale of the taborer’s pipe corresponds to the 12 or 13 uppermost notes of a seven octave P-F., or to the upper notes of a piccolo. The galoubet’s scale begins on a B flat one-third below the taborer’s pipe. There was also a bass galoubet. This instrument is known from the figures in Praetorius[104b](1618), and also from one solitary pipe which hasescaped destruction. Mr. Galpin has a copy of it in his wonderful collection, and has allowed me to play on it.[105a]
Mersenne,[105b]in speaking of the performance of an Englishman, John Price, may give to some unwary reader the impression that the said John could play a continuous scale of three octaves. But it is quite clear that Mersenne included the faint D an octave below the lowest harmonic note, so that Price could produce anintervalof three octaves but a continuousscaleof only two octaves. This is not impossible. I can play two out-of-tune shrieking notes above my high A, or 12th note, so that I can, after a fashion, get within one note of John Price, and I live in hopes of acquiring yet another and tying with him. The uppermost sounds are made by what was technically known aspinching,i.e.crooking the thumb and forcing the nail into the top hole, so that only a minute stream of air escapes. An old pipe of mine shows the mark of the pinching thumb nail. Mr. Forsyth speaks of “an instrument with only a few notes” as being “much restricted in the way of compass”:[105c]this is not quite just to the taborer’s pipe.
In relation to Mr. Forsyth’s discussion on thediauloi, it should be remembered that the double pipe still exists in Russia. It is describedby Mahillon[106]under the name of the Gelaïka. The fundamental tones of the two instruments are the lower F sharp in the treble stave, and the B natural above it. Mahillon adds: “tantot elles se partagent la mélodie, d’autres fois elles font entendre des intonations doubles.”
With regard to the Greek double-pipe, I am sure that Mr. Forsyth is right, and that the bandage (phorbeia), which is commonly said to have served to compress the cheeks, must have had some other use. I have no doubt that he is justified in assuming that the bandage served to support the instrument. In a pipe with three holes on the upper surface a certain amount of grip on the instrument is given by pressure of the little finger above and the thumb below, and with practice it would be quite possible to manage the instrument. Still, the bandage would give freedom to the fingers, and for the four-holed pipe this form of support would be absolutely necessary. My conclusions are based on experiments on the penny whistle temporarily converted into an instrument for one hand.
In speculating on the evolution of the taborer’s pipe, it must be remembered that its harmonics (on which, as I have said, its scale depends) are those of a cylindrical pipe, and a pipe that is long in relation to its bore. I like to think that it had its origin in some of the many natural hollow cylinders found among plants, for instance, the reed grass that grows in fens and dykes, or the elder which supplies a pipe when its pith is bored out, and isperhaps more familiar as the parent of pop-guns than of musical instruments. Then again, there are the hollow stalks of umbelliferous plants, such as angelica and hemlock. The late Mr. Welch, in his interesting book on Recorders, pointed out[107]thatsambucusthe elder,calamusthe reed, andcicutathe hemlock all occur in classic verse in relation to rustic music. Indeed the word calamus still lives, though corrupted to the French chalumeau and still further altered to the German Schalmei and the English shawm.
Welch doubts whether hemlock or similar stems would be strong enough for the suggested purpose. They certainly would not stand rough usage, but it is possible to make a taborer’s pipe out of anAngelicastem, for I have one. It is husky and out of tune, but it shows the thing to be possible.
This connexion between music and the form of plants is not without interest from a wider point of view. We ask ourselves why hollow cylinders occur so commonly in vegetable architecture. That rough teacher, the struggle for life, has taught plants that a tube is, mechanically speaking, the best way of arranging a limited amount of formative or building material. The hemlock or the reed can thus make stalks of ample strength and at comparatively slight cost. There is romance in the fact that plants made tubular stems to their own private profit for unnumbered ages before the coming of man: the hollow reeds waiting all these aeons till Pan should come and make them musical.
The pipe and tabor have probably come down to us less changed than any other wood-wind instrument, with the possible exception of the panpipes; both flutes and flageolets have become covered with keys, while the pipe still has no more than three aboriginal holes, one for the thumb behind and two for the fingers in front. I have wasted some time in trying to make out how the early taborers held their pipes, but musical instruments are generally drawn with hopeless inaccuracy. I have been rewarded by finding that a boy in Luca della Robbia’s bas-relief (Fig. 5) at Florence holds the pipe just as I do,[108a]between the ring and little fingers, which keep the instrument steady even when all three holes are uncovered. There is an interesting point connected with the true or French flageolet. This instrument has six holes arranged in two triads, a thumb and two fingers of the right hand, and the same for the left, so that if all holes are open there would seem to be nothing to steady the pipe. But in Mr. Welch’s book (p. 50) is a figure from Greeting’sPleasant Companion[108b]showing how the flageoletshould be held, and this, curiously enough, is one of the best views of what I hold to be the proper grip for the taborer’s pipe.
The tabor is still much as it was in Fra Angelico’s day (judging from the angel above referred to), and indeed in earlier times, as shown in the piping angel in Lincoln Cathedral. We can see what a drum-maker calls the ropes and braces[109a]for tightening the parchment; the snares are also shown in many early drawings of tabors. These are pieces of gut or of horse-hair, stretched across the drum-head, which add a spirited rattle to its tone. Why the first edition of theDictionary of Musicwent out of its way to say that the tabor had no snares I cannot guess.
In many of the mediaeval drawings the artist is shown beating his drum on the snare side. I had fancied that this was only one more instance of the bad drawing of musical instruments, but when I saw the careful work of Luca della Robbia, in which the tabors are all beaten on the snare side, I could no longer doubt. I was, however, glad to find in a French account[109b]of the Provençal 3-holed pipe or galoubet, that this custom survives. In Luca della Robbia’s work a single snare-cord is shown instead of four to six catgut lines as in modern drums and this is also true of the Provençal instrument. So that both the characteristics that seemed strange to me in Luca’s tabor survive in Provence.
It may not be generally known that the French for the snare of a drum istimbre; this is the original meaning of the word, and its familiar use to mean the characteristic tone of a musical sound is later. According to Darmstetter the word ‘timbre’ is own brother to ‘tambour,’ both being derived from a low Latin form of tympanum.
The tabor-stick has changed since the early centuries. In some of the old drawings the taborer is striking his instrument with a bludgeon, instead of the light and elegant sticks such as are to be seen in Mr. Manning’s collection at Oxford. Such implements were doubtless treasured by the taborer. Valmajour, the tabourinaire in Daudet’sNuma Roumestan, possessed a drum-stick which had been in the family for 200 years.
The way of holding the drum has not always been the same. Nowadays we are told to hang it from the thumb or wrist. But in many early drawings it is apparently firmly strapped or tied to the forearm, or even above the elbow.[110a]The Lincoln Angel and Luca’s boy have tabors supported by a string round the neck, and this I find to be the best method.
I hope that the drum may long survive in Provence with its ancient companion the pipe.[110b]A different instrument, however, supplies an accompaniment to the galoubet in the Basque provinces. It is a rough sort of lyre with six orseven strings tuned alternately to the tonic and dominant, which beaten with a stick make a drone bass to the pipe. It has the attractively savage name oftoon-toona, an imitative word like tom-tom; the galoubet is called thecherula.
From a French cyclopædia I learn that in Provence the taborer’s art was a secret passed on from father to son, a mystery they refused to teach for money. They appeared to hold the patriotic opinion that the art of playing the galoubet, or as they call it, theflûtet, has never spread from Provence because of its extreme difficulty. This has been a comfort to me in my attempts to play the pipe and tabor.
At the risk of being tedious in the way of repetition I have thought it worth while to put together a rough list of the illustrations of pipe and tabor which I have met with.
The earliest representation of a player on the 3-holed pipe, of which I have any knowledge, is the beautiful figure in the Angel Choir at Lincoln. Its date is, I believe, 1270, and it has been injured so that it is not possible to be sure of the manner in which the pipe is held. The tabor is suspended by means of a string round the neck.
The most careful representation of our instrument is that by Luca della Robbia, figured at p. 102, in which what I call the correct grip is given.
In Pierpoint Morgan’sCatalogue of Early Printed Books, Vol II., p. 118, are some illustrations from Gafori, 1492. The pipe is quite incorrectly held, more than two fingers being employed while the thumb is free.
Ibid., Vol III., p. 82. In a figure from Pierre Michaud’sDance des Aveugles, 1485, the pipe has four instead of two holes on the upper surface.
Ibid., Vol III., p. 86. The pipe is incorrect, the holes being too far from the lower end of the instrument; the hand is wrongly given according to our standards, the little finger being flourished in the air. The tabor is suspended from the hand as in the English style, and is struck on the snare side.
In Kemp’sNine Daies Wonder(see above p. 102) the drawing of the pipe is not instructive.
In Strutt’sSports and Pastimesthere are several early drawings of performers on the 3-holed pipe. The grip in the majority is correct,i.e.there are three fingers visible, two covering the holes and the ring finger gripping against the little finger underneath. The illustrations are also correct in the fingers being close to the lower end of the pipe.
In Betley Hall, Staffordshire, is a painted glass window, probably dating from 1535, in which a piper is represented. Mr. Tollet, a former squire of Betley, gave an account of it in Johnson and Steevens’ Shakspeare, which is reprinted in a privately published book by Barthomley. The pipe is a conical tube, on which four fingers arerepresented; it could not, I believe, have been drawn from a model.
In Mahillon’sCataloguei., p. 375, is a figure of a Basque playing a 3-holed pipe, and accompanying himself on the tountouna, a rough stringed instrument. The grip seems to be carefully drawn, but it is hard to see how it could be efficient, only two fingers being seen on the upper surface of the pipe. On the other hand, in a photograph of a Basque playing the same instrument (which I owe to the kindness of a correspondent), the grip is like that figured by Mahillon.
Finally, inPunch, November 13, 1907, a 3-holed pipe is incorrectly drawn. The bore of the instrument is conical, the holes are incorrectly given, and the hand is wrong.
The following diagram gives the fingerings which I have found to be best for a 3-holed pipe, a copy of an old one in the possession of Mr. Manning, of Oxford, to whom I am indebted for much kindly assistance.
Fig. 6. 3-holed pipe fingering
The fingerings are given for the keys D and G. I have not attempted to play in other keys. For each note the upper circle represents the thumbhole; 1 and 2 are for the first and second fingers respectively. The black circles are supposed to be closed, the white are open. Holes that are half open are represented by circles half white, half black. In the case of A2 and B2 the circles are three-quarter black; this means that a very minute crack is left open.
It is important to remember that each pipe has its individuality. For instance, in one of my instruments G must have the thumb hole completely open, and the alternate fingering (with the index hole closed) is quite out of tune. The note E is sometimes sharp; in the pipe, the fingerings of which are given in fig. 6, this fault is corrected by means of a thin metal lining to the lower hole.
In attempting to give a picture of any man’s life and work it is well to follow the rule of theDictionary of National Biography, and begin with the dates of his birth and death. Stephen Hales was born in 1677 and died in 1761, having had experiences of the reigns of seven sovereigns.
The authorities for his life are given in my article on Hales in theDictionary of National Biography. Botanists in general probably take their knowledge of the main facts of his life from Sachs’History of Botany. It is therefore worth while to point out that both the original and the English translation (1890) contain the incorrect statement that Hales was educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and that he held the living of Riddington, whereas he is one of the glories of Corpus, and was perpetual curate of Teddington. These inaccuracies, however, are trifles in relation to the great and striking merits of Sachs’History, a work which, to my thinking, exhibits the strength and brilliance of the author’s mind as clearly as any of his more technical writings. Sachs was noniggling biographer, and his broad vigorous outlines must form the basis of what anyone, who follows him, can write about the botanists of a past day.
To return to Hales’ birth. It is of interest to note how he fits into the changing procession of lives, to see what great men overlap his youth, who were his contemporaries in his maturity, and who were appearing on the scientific stage as he was leaving it.
Sir Isaac Newton was the dominant figure in English science while Hales was developing. He died in 1727, the year in which Hales published hisVegetable Staticks, a book, which like theOrigin of Species, appeared when its author was 50 years of age. Newton was at the zenith of his fame when Hales was a little boy of 10—hisPrincipiahaving been published in 1687, and when Hales went up to Cambridge in 1696 he must have seen the great man coming from his rooms[116a]in the N.E. corner of the Great Court of Trinity—that corner where Newton’s and other more modern ghosts surely walk—Macaulay who used to read, pacing to and fro by the chapel,[116b]and Thackeray who, like his own Esmond, lived “near to the famous Mr. Newton’s lodgings.” In any case there can be no doubt that the genius of Newton cast its light on Hales, as Sachs has clearly pointed out(Hist. Bot., Eng. Tr., p. 477). Another great man influenced Hales, namely Robert Boyle, who was born 1627 and died 1691. John Mayow again, that brilliant son of Oxford, whose premature death at 39 in 1679 was so heavy a blow to science, belongs to the same school as Hales—the school which was within an ace of founding a rational chemistry, but which was separated from the more obvious founders of that science by the phlogiston-theory of Becchers and Stahl. I do not find any evidence that Hales was influenced by the phlogistic writers, and this is comprehensible enough, if, as I think, he belongs to the school of Mayow and Boyle.
The later discoverers in chemistry are of the following dates, Black 1728–1799, Cavendish 1731–1810, Priestley 1733–1804, Scheele 1742–1786, Lavoisier 1743, guillotined 1794. These were all born about the time of Hales’ zenith, nor did he live[117]to see the great results they accomplished. But it should not be forgotten that Hales’ chemical work made more easy the triumphant road they trod.
I have spoken of Hales in relation to chemists and physicists because, though essentially a physiologist, he seems to me to have been a chemist and physicist who turned his knowledge to the study of life, rather than a physiologist who had some chemical knowledge.
Whewell points out in hisHistory of the InductiveSciences[118a]that the physiologist asks questions of Nature in a sense differing from that of the physicist. TheWhy? of the physicist meantThrough what causes? that of the physiologist—to what end? This distinction no longer holds good, and if it is to be applied to Hales it is a test which shows him to be a physicist. For, as Sachs shows, though Hales was necessarily a teleologist in the theological sense, he always asked for purely mechanical explanations. He was the most unvitalistic of physiologists, and I think his explanations suffered from this cause. For instance, he seems to have held that to compare the effect of heat on a growing root to the action of the same cause on a thermometer[118b]was a quite satisfactory proceeding. And there are many other passages inVegetable Statickswhere one feels that his speculations are too heavy for his knowledge.
Something must be said of Hales’ relation to his predecessors and successors in botanical work. The most striking of his immediate predecessors were Malpighi 1628–1694, Grew 1628–1711, Ray 1627–1705, and Mariotte (birth unknown, died 1684); and of these the three first were born one hundred years before the publication ofVegetable Staticks. Malpighi and Grew were essentially plant-anatomists, though both dealt in physiological speculations. Their works were known to Hales, but they do not seem to have influenced him.
We have seen that as a chemist Hales issomewhat of a solitary figure, standing between what may be called the periods of Boyle and of Cavendish. This is even more striking in his botanical position, for here he stands in the solitude of all great original inquirers. We must go back to Van Helmont, 1577–1644, to find anyone comparable to him as an experimentalist. His successors have discovered much that was hidden from him; but consciously or unconsciously they have all learned from him the true method and spirit of physiological work.
It may be urged that in exalting Hales I am unfair to Malpighi. It may be fairer to follow Sachs in linking these great men together, and to insist on the wonderful fact that before Malpighi’s book in 1671, vegetable physiology was still where Aristotle left it, whereas 56 years later, in 1727, we find in Hales’ book an experimental science in the modern sense.
It should not be forgotten that students of animal physiology agree with botanists as to Hales’ greatness. A writer in theEncyclopædia Britannicaspeaks of him as “the true founder of the modern experimental method in physiology.”
According to Sachs, Ray made some interesting observations on the transmission of water, but on the whole what he says on this subject is not important. There is no evidence that Ray influenced Hales.
Mariotte, the physicist, came to one physiological conclusion of great weight;[119]namely, thatthe different qualities of plants,e.g.taste, odour, etc., do not depend on the absorption from the soil of differently scented or flavoured principles, as the Aristotelians imagined, but onspecific differencesin the way in which different plants deal with identical food material—an idea which is at the root of a sane physiological outlook. These views were published in 1679,[120]and may have been known to Hales. He certainly was interested in such ideas, as is indicated by his attempts to give flavour to fruit by supplying them with medicated fluids. He probably did not expect success, for he remarks (p. 360): “The specifick differences of vegetables, which are all sustained and grow from the same nourishment, is [sic] doubtless owing to the very different formation of their minute vessels, whereby an almost infinite variety of combinations of the common principles of vegetables is made.” He continues in the following delightful passage: “And could our eyes attain to a sight of the admirable texture of the parts on which the specific differences in plants depends, [sic] what an amazing and beautiful scene of inimitable embroidery should we behold? what a variety of masterly strokes of machinery? what evident marks of consummate wisdom should we be entertained with?” To conclude what has been said on Hales’ chronological position—Ingenhousz, the chief founder of the modern point of view on plant nutrition, was born 1730 and published his book,On Vegetables, etc., in 1779.So that what was said of Hales’ chemical position is again true of him considered in relation to nutrition; he did not live to see the great discoveries made at the close of the 18th century.
There is in his writing a limpid truthfulness and simplicity, unconsciously decorated with pretty 18th century words and half-rusticities which give it a perennial charm. And inasmuch as I desire to represent Hales, not only as a man to be respected but also to be loved, it will be as well to give what is known of the personal side of his character before going on to a detailed account of his work.
He was, as we have seen, entered at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in June 1696. In February 1702–3 he was admitted a fellow of the College. It was during his life as a fellow that he began to work at chemistry in what he calls “the elaboratory in Trinity College.” The room is now occupied by the Senior Bursar, and forms part of the beautiful range of buildings in the bowling green, which, freed from stucco and other desecration, are made visible in their ancient guise by the piety of a son of Trinity and the wisdom of the College authorities. It was here, according to Dr. Bentley, that “the thieving Bursars of the old set embezzled the College timber,”[121]and it was this room that was fitted up as “an elegant laboratory” in 1706 for John Francis Vigani, an Italian chemist, who had taught unofficially in theUniversity for some years, and became, in 1703, the first Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge.
Judging from his book,Medulla Chymiae, 1682, Vigani was an eminently practical person, who cared greatly about the proper make of a furnace and the form of a retort but was not cumbered with theories.
Hales vacated his fellowship and became minister or perpetual curate of Teddington[122]in 1708–9, and there he lived until his death, fifty-two years afterwards. He was married (? 1719) and his wife died without issue in 1721.
He attracted the attention of Royalty, and received plants from the King’s garden at Hampton Court. Frederick Prince of Wales, the father of George III., is said to have been fond of surprising him in his laboratory at Teddington. This must surely be a unique habit in a prince, but we may remember that, in the words of the Prince’s mock epitaph, “Since it is only Fred there’s no more to be said.” He became Clerk of the Closet to the Dowager Princess, and this “mother of the best of Kings,” as she calls herself, put up his monument in Westminster Abbey. Hales had the honour of receiving the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 1739, and Oxford made him a D.D. in 1733.
Some years ago I made a pilgrimage to Teddington, and found in the parish registers many interesting entries by his hand; the last, in a tremulous writing, is on November 4th, 1760, two months before he died. He was clearly an active parishpriest. He made his female parishioners do public penance when he thought they deserved it. He did much for the fabric of the church. “In 1754[123a]he helped the parish to a decent water supply and characteristically records in the parish register that the outflow was such as to fill a two-quart vessel in ‘three swings of a pendulum beating seconds, which pendulum was 39+2/10 inches long from the suspending nail to the middle of the plumbet or bob.’” Under the tower he helped to build (which now serves as a porch) Stephen Hales is buried, and the stone which covers his body is being worn away by the feet of the faithful. By the piety of a few botanists a mural tablet, on which the epitaph is restored, has been placed near the grave.
Horace Walpole called Hales “a poor, good, primitive creature” and Pope[123b](who was his neighbour) said, “I shall be very glad to see Dr. Hales, and always love to see him, he is so worthy and good a man.” Peter Collinson writes of “his constant serenity and cheerfulness of mind”; it is also recorded that “he could look even upon wicked men, and those who did him unkind offices, without any emotion of particular indignation; not from want of discernment or sensibility, but he used to consider them only like those experiments which, upon trial, he found could never be applied to any useful purpose, and which he therefore calmly and dispassionately laid aside.”
Hales’ work may be divided into three heads:
I
Physiological, animal and vegetable;
II
Chemical;
III
Inventions and miscellaneous essays.
Under No. I I shall deal only with his work on plants. The last heading (No. III) I shall only refer to slightly, but the variety and ingenuity of his miscellaneous publications is perhaps worth mention here as an indication of the quality of his mind. It seems to me to have had something in common with the versatile ingenuity of Erasmus Darwin and of his grandson Francis Galton. The miscellaneous work also exhibits Hales as a philanthropist, who cared passionately for bettering the health and comfort of his fellow creatures by improving their conditions of life.
His chief book from the physiological and chemical point of view is hisVegetable Staticks. It will be convenient to begin with the physiological part of this book, and refer to the chemistry later.Vegetable Staticksis a small 8vo of 376 pages, dated on the title-page 1727. The “ImprimaturIsaac Newton Pr. Reg. Soc.” is dated February 16, 1720, and this date is of some slight interest, for Newton died on March 20, andVegetable Staticksmust have been one of the last books he signed.
The dedication is to George Prince of Wales, afterwards George III. The author cannot quite avoid the style of his day, for instance: “And asSolomonthe greatest and wisest of men, disdeigned[124]not to inquire into the nature of Plants,from theCedar of Lebanon,to the Hyssop that springeth out of the wall: So it will not, I presume, be an unacceptable entertainment to your Royal Highness,” etc.
But the real interest of the dedication is its clear statement of his views on the nutrition of plants. He asserts that plants obtain nourishment, not only from the earth, “but also more sublimed and exalted food from the air, that wonderful fluid, which is of such importance to the life of Vegetables and Animals,” etc. We shall see that his later statement is not so definite, and it is well to rescue this downright assertion from oblivion.
His book begins with the research for which he is best known, namely that on transpiration. He took a sunflower growing in a flowerpot, covering the surface of the earth with a plate of thin milled lead, and cemented it so that no vapour could pass, leaving a corked hole to allow of the plant being watered. He did not take steps to prevent loss through the pot, but at the end of the experiment cut off the plant, cemented the stump, and found that the “unglazed porous pot” perspired 2 ozs. in 12 hours, and for this he made due allowance.
The plant so prepared he proceeded to weigh at stated intervals. He obtained the area of the leaves by dividing them into parcels according to their several sizes, and measuring one leaf[125]of each parcel. The loss of water in 12 hours converted to the metric system is 1.3 c.c. per 100 sq. cm. ofleaf-surface; and this is of the same order of magnitude as Sachs’ result,[126a]namely, 2.2 c.c. per 100 sq. cm.
He goes on to measure the surface of the roots[126b]and to estimate the rate of absorption per area. The calculation is of no value, since he did not know how small a part of the roots is absorbent, nor how enormously the surface of that part is increased by the presence of root-hairs. He goes on to estimate the rate of the flow of water up the stem; this would be 34 cubic inches in 12 hours if the stem (which was one square inch in section) were a hollow tube. He then allowed a sunflower stem to wither and to become completely dry, and found that it had lost ¾ of its weight, and assuming that the ¼ of the “solid parts” left was useless for the transmission of water he increases his 34 by ⅓ and gives 45⅓ cubic inches in 12 hours as the rate. But the solid matter which he neglected contained the vessels, and he would have been nearer to the truth had he corrected his figures on this basis. The simplest plan is to compare his results with those obtained by Sachs[126c]in allowing plants to absorb solutions of lithium-salts. If the flow takes place through conduits equivalent to a quarter of a square inch in area, the fluid will rise in 12 hours to a height of 4+34 or 136 inches, or in one hour to 28.3 cm.[126d]This is a result comparable to, thoughvery much smaller than, Sachs’ result with the sunflower, viz. 63 cm. per hour.
The data are however hardly worth treating in this manner. But it is of historic interest to note that when Sachs was at work on hisPflanzenphysiologie, published in 1865, he was compelled to go back nearly 140 years to find any results with which he could compare his own.
We need not follow Hales into his comparison between the “perspiration” of the sunflower and that of a man, nor into his other transpiration experiments on the cabbage, vine, apple, etc. But one or two points must be noted. He found[127a]the “middle rate of perspiration” of a sunflower in 12 hours of daylight to be 20 ounces, and that of a “dry warm night” about 3 ounces; thus the day transpiration was roughly seven times the nocturnal rate. This difference may be accounted for by the closure of the stomata at night, a phenomenon unknown to Hales.
Hales[127b]notes another point which a knowledge of stomatal behaviour might have explained, viz., that with “scanty watering the perspiration much abated”; he does not attempt an explanation, but merely refers to it as a “healthy latitude of perspiration in this sunflower.”
In the course of his work on sunflowers he notices that the flower follows the sun. He says, however that it is “not by turning round with the sun,”i.e.that it is not a twisting of the stalk, andgoes on to call itnutation, which must be thelocus classicusfor the term used in this sense.
An experiment[128a]that I do not remember to have seen quoted elsewhere is worth describing. It is incidentally of interest as showing the generous scale on which his work was planned. An apple bough five feet long was fixed to a vertical glass tube nine feet long. The tube being above and the branch hanging below, the pressure of the column of water would act in concert with the suck of the transpiring leaves, instead of in opposition to this force. He then cut the bare stem of his branch in two, placing the apical half of the specimen (bearing side branches and leaves) with its cut end in a glass vessel of water; the basal and leafless half of the branch remained attached to the vertical tube of water. In the next 30 hours only 6 ounces dripped through the leafless branch, whereas the leafy branch absorbed 18 ounces. This, as he says, shows the great power of perspiration. And though he does not pursue the experiment, it is worthy of note as an attempt, like those of Janse[128b]and others, to correlate the flow of water under pressure with the flow due to transpiration.
It is interesting to find that Hales used the three methods of estimating transpiration which have been employed in modern times—namely, (i) weighing, (ii) a rough sort of potometer, (iii) enclosing a branch in a glass balloon and collectingthe precipitated moisture, the well-known plan followed by various French observers.
He (Vegetable Staticks, p. 51) concluded his balance of loss and gain in transpiring plants by estimating the amount of available water in the soil to a depth of three feet, and calculating how long his sunflower would exist without watering. He further concludes (p. 57) that an annual rainfall of 22 inches is “sufficient for all the purposes of nature, in such flat countries as this about Teddington.”
He constantly notes small points of interest,e.g.(p. 82) that with cut branches the water absorbed diminishes each day, and that the former vigour of absorption may be partly renewed by cutting a fresh surface.[129a]
He also showed (p. 89) that the transpiration current can flow perfectly well from apex to base when the apical end is immersed in water.
These are familiar facts to us, but we should realise that it is to the industry and ingenuity of Hales that we owe them. In a repetition (p. 90) of the last experiment we have the first mention of a fact fundamentally important. He took two branches (which with a clerical touch he calls M and N), and having removed the bark from a part of the branch, dipped the ends in water, N with the great end downwards but M upside down. In this way he showed that the bark was not necessary for the absorption or transmission of water.[129b]I suspectthat one branch was inverted out of respect for the hypothesis of sap-circulation. He perhaps thought that water could travel apically by the wood, but only by the bark in the opposite direction.
Next in order (p. 95) comes his well-known experiment on the pressure exerted by peas increasing in size as they imbibe water. There are, however, pitfalls in this result of which Hales was unaware, and perhaps the chief interest to us now is that he considered the imbibition of the peas[130a]to be the same order of phenomenon as the absorption of water by a cut branch—notwithstanding the fact that he knew the absorption to depend largely on the leaves.[130b]It may be noticed that Sachs, in his imbibitional view of water-transport, may be counted a follower of Hales.
In order to ascertain “whether there was any lateral communication of the sap and sap vessels, as there is of blood in animals,” Hales (p. 121) made the experiment which has been repeated in modern laboratories,[130c]i.e.cutting a “gap to the pith,” and another opposite to it and a few inches above. This he did on an oak branch six feet long whose basal end was placed in water. The branch continued to “perspire” for two days, but gave off only about half the amount of water transpired by a normal branch.[130d]He does not trouble himself aboutthis difference, being satisfied of “great quantities of liquor having passed laterally by the gap.”
He is interested in the fact of lateral transmission in connexion with the experiment of the suspended tree (Fig. 24, p. 126), which is dependent on the neighbours to which it is grafted for its water supply. This seems to be one of the results that convinced him that there is a distribution of food material which cannot be described as circulation of sap in the sense that was then in vogue.
Hales (p. 143) was one of the first[131a]to make the well-known experiment—the removal of a ring of bark, with the result that the edge of bark nearest the base of the branch swells and thickens in a characteristic manner. He points out that if a number of rings are made one above the other, the swelling is seen at the lower edge of each isolated piece of bark, and therefore (p. 143) the swelling must be attributed “to some other cause than the stoppage of the sap in its return downwards,” because the first gap in the bark should be sufficient to check the whole of the flowing sap.[131b]He must, in fact have seen that there is a redistribution of plastic material in each section of bark.
We now for the moment leave the subject of transpiration and pass on to that of root-pressure on which Hales is equally illuminating.
His first experiment (Vegetable Staticks, p. 100), was with a vine, to which he attached a vertical pipe made of three lengths of glass-tubing jointed together. His method is worth notice. He attached the stump to the manometer with a “stiff cement made of melted Beeswax and Turpentine, and bound it over with several folds of wet bladder and pack-thread.” We cannot wonder that the making of water-tight connexions was a great difficulty, and we can sympathise with his belief that he could have got a column more than 21 feet high but for the leaking of the joints on several occasions. He notes the familiar fact that the vine-stump absorbed water before it began to extrude it.
He afterwards (pp. 106–7) used a mercury gauge, and registered a root-pressure of 32½ inches or 36 feet 5½ inches of water, which he proceeds to compare with his own determination of the blood-pressure of the horse (8 feet) and of other animals. Perhaps the most interesting of his root-pressure experiments was that (p. 110) in which several manometers were attached to the branches of a bleeding vine, and showed a result which convinced him that “the force is not from the root only, but must proceed from some power in the stem and branches,” a conclusion which some modern workers have also arrived at.