Read Ebook: Professor Royce's Libel A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University by Abbot Francis Ellingwood

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The next day, June 25, I wrote to Mr. Warner: "I ought distinctly to deny that my rejected article is 'a libellous paper.' Its statements are true; its motive is not malice, but a self-evident purpose to defend myself against Dr. Royce's libel; and, even if it should be concluded to come under any legal definition of 'libel,' I maintain that it is self-evidently a 'justifiable libel.' If I pay any heed to your notice, it is merely because your notice strengthens my case.--You do not mention when Dr. Royce will return from Denver; but, because my purpose in enclosing to you that Card is in good faith a pacific one, I will wait a reasonable time for his return beyond the date I mentioned. You will not judge the character of that Card accurately, and you cannot give sound or salutary advice to your client, if you ignore the libellous character of his original article. I do not see how 'a self-respecting man' could ever have written such a paper; but, if he did it inadvertently and not maliciously, he would certainly do one of two things: either submit courageously, unflinchingly, and without legal protest, to the reply it challenged and evoked, or manfully retract charges demonstrated, as these have been, to be false. Have you really a different idea of 'self-respect'? Certainly not, for you are an honorable gentleman. Be this as it may, I warn you not to persist in considering that Card as other than a pacific step on my part, if you desire to counsel your client to his own good, or to prove yourself a real friend to Harvard College. I say this in good faith."

To this, on July 2, Mr. Warner replied: "Dr. Royce has returned, and I have submitted to him the Card which you have prepared. As I anticipated, Dr. Royce says that he cannot sign it, nor can I advise him to do so. It goes far beyond any disavowal of malice or personal hostility, and it amounts to a retraction of the opinions which he actually holds about your philosophical system, and that retraction you surely cannot expect him to make. Dr. Royce has again expressed to me his regret that the form of his article should have wounded you, and he is entirely ready to disavow any intention of wounding you."

In reply to Mr. Warner, August 4, I wrote as follows: "Permit me further to say, with regard to Dr. Royce's letter, that I can only interpret it as a distinct refusal to retract his accusation that I have made 'extravagant pretensions as to the originality and profundity of my still unpublished system of philosophy'--a distinct refusal to retract his accusation that I have 'borrowed my theory of universals from Hegel'--a distinct refusal to retract his 'professional warning' based upon these accusations. These were the chief points of my Card, and I note the refusal implied by Dr. Royce's evasive letter. But I decline to accept his plea of 'conscientiousness' in maintaining the accusation as to Hegel. I might as well plead 'conscientiousness' in maintaining an accusation that Dr. Royce assassinated Abraham Lincoln, in face of the evidence that John Wilkes Booth was the assassin."

Here the correspondence closed. My apology for inflicting it upon you, gentlemen, must be the necessity of showing to you that, as I was plainly bound to do, I first exhausted every means of private redress before laying the matter before you publicly. Not till I had failed to obtain a fair hearing in the same periodical which published Dr. Royce's libel, and not till I had failed to obtain from Dr. Royce himself a retraction of this libel, did I find myself reduced to the alternatives of either acquiescing in your own unwarrantably insinuated condemnation, or else of clearing my assailed reputation through direct and open appeal to you. I am no lover of strife, and least of all do I now seek revenge. I seek only such a vindication of my good name from unmerited calumny as you, in your own good judgment and in your own chosen way, are now, I most respectfully submit, bound in justice to give.

To you, therefore, gentlemen of the Corporation and Board of Overseers of Harvard University, I make with all due deference this public appeal for redress of a wrong done to me by one of your appointees--a wrong done, not in his private capacity as an individual , but publicly and explicitly and emphatically in the name of his "profession," that is, of his position as a professor in Harvard College. This position is an official one, due to your appointment; and his scandalous abuse of it renders him amenable to discipline by you to whom he owes it. Therefore, I now formally appeal to you for redress of these specific wrongs, committed by Assistant Professor Josiah Royce in flagrant violation of my rights as a citizen and as a man:--

I submit that these acts of wrong constitute conduct unbecoming a gentleman, a man of honor, or a professor in Harvard University, and justly entitle me to redress at your hands. This appeal has not been made hastily or without a patient and long-protracted effort to secure justice in other ways. Dr. Royce has succeeded hitherto, during many months, in defeating that effort; but now the appeal lies to those whom he cannot control, and now he must abide your judgment. Asking neither less nor more than justice, and believing that you will recognize justice as Harvard's highest law,

I have the honor to remain, gentlemen, in devoted loyalty to our Alma Mater,

Your obedient servant,

FRANCIS E. ABBOT.

CAMBRIDGE, Oct. 1, 1891.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

On page 5, in the word Boeotia, the oe ligature has been expanded to the two characters, oe. The sentence begins: Only a native of Boeotia could be imposed upon by them, when the actual character....

Most of them live in deep water. There are free-moving varieties as well as those that are fixed to the bottom with stems like plants. Until recent years few were recovered in good condition because of the tendency of one of these plant-animals to break itself to pieces when agitated. When brought up from the bottom to the deck of a ship the crinoid would proceed to break off the featherlike arms which make up the blossoms. This was its natural defense reaction in the depths. Its way of escape when one of its arms was seized by a fish was to break it off. Then it could grow another quite easily. As a matter of fact, this is the way the crinoid grows--one of the most wasteful processes of growth in nature. It breaks off one arm and grows two instead; but it cannot increase the number of its arms without discarding an old one.

Another difficulty is that the gorgeous colors of the meat-eating flowers are fast only in salt water. They fade rapidly in air, fresh water or alcohol so that there can be only a fleeting impression of the true coloration.

These crinoids live, for the most part, on diatoms, small crustaceans, and other tiny sea creatures which they first paralyze with poison from the tentacles which line the grooves of the arms through which food is carried to the mouth.

True creature of night is the guacharo, or "oil bird", of northern South America. It is reddish-brown, about the size of a barnyard hen. Excessive layers of fat built up about its abdomen formerly were valued highly by natives for eating purposes, resulting in the slaughter of countless thousands every year. The guacharo spends its days a half mile or more deep in the interior of mountain caves. Here it roosts and builds its nests in crevices high in the rock walls. It leaves in groups of twenty to thirty shortly after dusk and apparently spends the whole night foraging for food, sometimes covering as much as 200 miles.

Like the cave bat, it seems to have no difficulty finding its way in absolute darkness. An explanation of this ability, acoustic orientation, has been reported by Dr. Donald R. Griffin of Cornell University. The birds apparently are guided by echos of specific sharp "clicking" sounds which they make.

"The individual click," Dr. Griffin explains, "consists of a very few sound waves having a frequency of about 7,000 cycles per second. The duration of each click is about a millisecond . The clicks were loud enough to be audible easily about 200 yards inside the cave. Except for their lower frequency, these sounds are very similar to those used by insectivorous bats for their acoustic orientation.

"The external ear canals of three captive birds were plugged with cotton. They then became disoriented when flying in the dark. They collided with every object they encountered. Before and immediately after this treatment they flew about in a small dark room avoiding all collisions with the walls."

Their best known habitat is the guacharo cave in Venezuela's Humboldt National Park, where they are rigidly protected. Most of them nest in a vast subterranean hall more than a half mile long and a hundred feet high. Here more than a thousand of the birds greet the intruder instantly with a wave of awesome and deafening shrieks.

"With the advent of dusk," reports Dr. Eugenio de Bellard Pietri--Venezuelan cave explorer, "the birds come out in compact groups but before the exodus a preliminary flight is held by a few as if to make sure that night is falling. Soon they return to the depths of their somber mansion, evidently to give the flock the all clear signal. Late in the evening there is not a single adult specimen left in the cave. The flight of these birds is silent and cannot easily be detected."

The lowly snail reaches an apotheosis--rivalling flowers and butterflies as an expression of nature's artistry--in Cuban forests. Delicate sunrise tints of pink, blue, violet, green and yellow make the shells of two or three genera of tree-dwelling mollusks like rare jewels. Most conspicuous are snails of the genus Polymita, confined to the Oriente province. Here they cover some trees so completely that the effect is like that of a tree of flowers. Only upon close observation can one detect that the blossoms are shells.

The animals live for the most part on a fungus that grows on the bark. The colors of the shells are affected by various chemical constituents of the bark, notably tannic acid, and serve as warning to other creatures. In taste the snails are very bitter and no bird will intentionally attack them. The color serves notice that only a disgusting mouthful is to be had.

Two of the most beautiful of these shell forms were recently discovered by Dr. Paul Bartsch, former Smithsonian curator of mollusks. Fragile, translucent, colored as delicately as the loveliest of orchids, these particular snails are the fairies of the mollusk world in the unconscious artistry with which they have constructed their moving palaces. One, a hitherto unknown species, has a remarkable combination of pale orange, orange buff, deeper orange and flame color--all shading delicately into each other. The color effect is such as one might find rarely in rose petals. Another has a blending of ivory, olive green, lemon yellow and orange.

On Barro Colorado island in the Panama Canal Zone the Smithsonian Institution maintains an "experimental cemetery." It consists of rows of upright posts which look like gravestones, half buried in the soil. The purpose is to test the propensities of the island's 42 species of termites--just about man's most persistent and expensive enemy in the tropics--to eat different kinds of wood impregnated with different kinds of repellants and poisons. To date approximately 35,000 tests have been made. The longer the work is continued the more Dr. James Zetek, former director of the station, is impressed with the contrariness and ingenuity of the blind, ant-like insects which achieve sub-human acmes of engineering ability, and whose appetites are marvelous.

Among Barro Colorado's termites are some extraordinary bugs indeed. One, for example, eats lead. It gnaws its way through the lead sheathings on cables. This is not because it likes a lead diet. Lead, in fact, is indigestible and the insects starve to death. But their appetites are so insatiable that the little creatures just keep on gnawing, in the hope that there will be wood on the other side.

This particular insect is known by the scientific name of coptotermes niger. It has been known to eat through a concrete floor nearly five inches thick--again not because of any particular liking for concrete but because of the expectation of coming eventually to digestible wood. The feat was made possible because the sand used in making the concrete contained many fragments of sea shells which were dissolved by a powerful chemical excreted by the insects.

It is very difficult to dispose of termites by poison--that is, permanently. Races have risen here, for example, which seem to thrive on arsenic. The insect lives on the cellulose in wood. This must be digested by certain intestinal bacteria in the digestive tract. If these micro?rganisms can be poisoned the termite starves. At first at least 99 percent of the bacteria succumb to heavy doses of arsenic. This means that 99 percent of the termites are killed. But always there are a few exceptionally tough bacteria with a high resistance to the poison. Their descendants in a few generations apparently become almost entirely resistant. With their help a new race of termites comes into existence.

Ordinarily termites attack only dead or dying wood. Some of them, however, carry fungi around with them to kill their own wood. The Canal Zone insects can dispose of living trees. Dr. Zetek tells of one attempt to establish an avocado plantation. He warned against it. When the trees had reached the fruit-bearing stage and seemed healthy he was ridiculed for his warnings. Branches were heavy with avocados and there was promise of a record crop. He shook his head when shown the flourishing orchard. "The poor trees," he remarked. "They know they are going to die. They are just making one last mighty effort to preserve their species by producing plenty of fruit and seeds." He secured the orchard owner's permission to chop down one tree. The whole inside, he found, was riddled with termite galleries. This tree and all the others in the orchard were dead within a year.

There are life-and-death battles in the microscopic world between tiny shelled animals and flesh-devouring fungi. The phenomenon can be compared to that of a tree catching and eating big turtles.

When a culture of diseased plant roots is made, there soon appear great numbers of microscopic plants and animals--bacteria, fungi, amoebae, nematodes and other life forms. Immediately the struggle for survival starts. The animals try to eat the plants and the plants attempt to devour the animals.

Among the animal forms which appear are vast numbers of creatures known as rhizopods. Practically unknown except to specialists, these microscopic creatures play an important part in the economy of life. They are probably the best-equipped of all the new arrivals to survive, since their soft bodies are covered with relatively heavy shells.

Some years ago Dr. Charles Dreschler of the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported the existence of predaceous meat-eating fungi--parasitic forms of plant life--which literally lassoed such unprotected animals as amoebae and thread-like nematodes and proceeded to devour them at leisure by the process of infiltrating their bodies. It would appear that the armored rhizopods are completely protected from these ferocious plants.

But the animal has one weak spot in its defense. It must get its mouth outside its shell in order to eat. Apparently the most inviting forage at hand is the innocent-appearing fungus. The rhizopod proceeds to suck at it with movements which Dr. Dreschler describes as similar to "sucking an egg."

The rhizopod mouth is small. Once it has sucked in any of the fungus its fate is sealed, for, explains Dr. Dreschler, "to such undiscriminating voracity the fungus responds by rapidly proliferating from the partly ingested portion a bulbous outgrowth slightly larger than the mouth, so that the rhizopod is held securely."

The unfortunate shelled animal is like a fish caught on a hook. It struggles vainly to get away. It rushes, but the fungus simply lets out the line until the rhizopod is brought to an abrupt stop and can be hauled in. The line is a filament connecting the body of the fungus with the bulb in the animal's mouth.

Once its prey is secure, the fungus proceeds to send out growths from the bulb through the creature's flesh, literally eating it alive. Very rarely, like a hooked fish, a rhizopod is able to break away.

In the course of its life, a single one of these thread-like fungi will capture many of the shelled animals, lining them up securely mouth-to-mouth on both sides of itself. It absorbs their substance at its leisure. Other predaceous fungi have definite external organs for capturing their prey. This particular species, however, has no external appendages and appears completely inert and innocent until it is stimulated to action by the sucking of the rhizopod.

A densely woven carpet of life covers the floor of the world of light under the sea--just below the level reached by the most penetrating rays of the sun. It is a carpet of many colors and of flashing lights, the strands of its texture rapidly moving, predaceous, warring organisms. They probably are a mixture of lantern-carrying fish, ten-tentacled squid with malevolent red eyes, and small, luminous, shrimp-like creatures known as euphasids. Their nature can only be deduced by the echoes of sound from their bodies.

This carpet, about 300 feet thick, is the sea's "false bottom." It was discovered by Navy ships making depth soundings during the war. Such soundings depend on the time taken for echoes to be reflected to the surface from the ocean floor. Recorded on a ship's instruments, they represent an extremely precise procedure perfected to the point where a continuous record of depth can be obtained with an accuracy of a few inches.

But, using certain wavelengths of sound, echoes were received from depths between 1,000 and 1,500 feet, whereas the sea itself was known to be two or three miles deep at these places. The only plausible explanation was that there were vast multitudes of floating or swimming objects of some sort, constituting almost a solid surface, at the depths from which the echoes came. The mystery was increased by the fact that the false bottom existed only during daylight. The carpet was laid shortly after sunrise and rolled up at twilight. The indication was that the echo-producing objects rose to the surface at the beginning of darkness--a clue which has given rise to much speculation and argument.

The carpet is under all the oceans, even the nethermost Antarctic. In some areas it seems practically continuous over thousands of square miles. In others it is broken up into smaller areas, like scatter rugs on a floor.

The false bottom is almost as much a mystery today as when it first puzzled the Navy's navigators. All are agreed that it must be composed of vast hordes of animals. They are not directly observable by any known technique. Some indication of their size and abundance, however, can be deduced from the wave lengths of sound which they echo. There must be, it has been calculated, from ten to twenty of these organisms in each cubic meter of water. They echo only long sound waves. High frequency sound passes through them like light through glass and is bounced back from the true sea bottom. They have been a mild nuisance, but never a peril, to modern navigators.

Whatever the organisms may be, they evidently cannot endure any light. At dawn they sink immediately from within about 100 feet of the surface through the zone of moonlight-pale, green illumination which represents sunshine's deepest penetration of sea water.

Chief proponents of the theory that a preponderance of them are squid are oceanographers of the Navy's Hydrographic Office. It is well established that the deep sea abounds in these fantastic mollusks. They rarely are seen at the surface. They move through the water very rapidly by a kind of jet propulsion, gulping water in the mouth and shooting it out explosively from the rear. They are little affected by changes in hydrostatic pressure, as are fish with air bladders. When the false bottom rises at sunset it comes to the surface at a rate of forty to fifty feet a minute. No swimming fish, it is maintained, could rise so rapidly through the decreasing pressure. It would get the "bends", like a human diver brought to the surface in too great a hurry.

These squid range in length from three or four inches to more than a foot. They are of about the right size to return some of the echoes which have been observed. The faintly luminous euphasid shrimps also are known to be very abundant in the depths. Presumably they provide most of the squids' food.

The principal investigations have been carried out by the Navy's Electronics Laboratory and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography of San Diego. An outstanding difficulty hitherto has been that the echoes have been known only from the false bottom as a whole. They have covered a wide spectrum of sound wavelengths. A recently developed technique is to lower a hydrophone connected with a sound-producing mechanism into the depths in order to record echoes from individual objects at distances of a few feet. Indications to date are that some of them are from a foot to eighteen inches long--too large to be squid and far too large to be shrimp. They can only, it is deduced, be deep water fish. If a great number of fairly large fish are indicated, this false bottom might turn out to be the richest pasture in the ocean for the production of food for man.

Navy divers have swum through the false bottom at night when it was within less than 200 feet of the surface. They have observed enormous numbers of euphasids and other small organisms--but very few fish. This, however, is only suggestive. There is no good reason to believe the carpet has the same texture at night as by day. It is quite likely that the organisms disperse widely over the surface waters.

There are snakes that look like snarls of six-inch-long pieces of wrapping twine. These worm snakes are the world's closest imitators of worms. Among the most secretive of living things, they rarely come in contact with man. When they are seen they usually are mistaken for worms. Only zoologists can put them in their true families. These living strings live exclusively under the earth, sometimes in tangled snarls of scores of individuals.

They are the smallest of snakes. Their closest relatives, however, are the gigantic boas and pythons. Judging from their wide distribution--on such isolated spots, for example, as Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean--they are quite ancient reptiles whose wanderings started about fifty million years ago.

They are found most often in termite nests, where they eat the eggs and possibly the larvae. Small earthworms and other soil creatures add to their diet. The worm snakes are almost toothless. Eyes are buried under skin, are only faint spots, and probably only can discriminate light from darkness. The tail looks somewhat like the head--a likeness presumably developed as a camouflage. They retain a snake's scales, but these are highly polished so they can be of no help in crawling.

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