Our Illustrations.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIV, Issue 25, 22 June 1910, Page 16

Our Illustrations.

MR JOSEPH McCABE. RATIONALIST, PRESS LECTURER, AND AUTHOR, TO TOUR NEW ZEALAND. ARRIVES NEXT SUNDAY. ZT\R- JOSEPH McC’ABE, whose mfl I ■ terest with the Rationalist .jJk/ Press Association is so well / known, and whose works • are very widely read, is to arrive in Auckland next Sunday from Sydney. Mr. McCabe is the missionary of modernism. At one time he was a priest In the Roman Catholic Church, and withdrew from the cloister to take up and promote the cause of scientific religion as opposed to the orthodox. He has been sent to Australia and New Zealand by the Rationalist Press Association to deliver a series of lectures similar to those which have made his name so well known throughout England. The visit amounts to a tacit recognition of the steady intellectual growth of the colonies in the minds of those interested in spreading popular knowledge of scientific subjects. Mr. McCabe’s treatment of Evolution in popular language with' the aid of his specially prepared serpen illustrations has probably drawn larger audiences in the aggregate than any other lectures have on any one subject. Mr. McCabe will deliver lectures in Auckland as follows:—Monday, June 27, Choral Hall, “Evolution of Man”; Tuesday, June 28, St. James’ Hall, “Evolution of Morality and Civilisation”; Wednesday (afternoon), June 29, Albert Hall, “The Present Conflict between Science and Theology.” Amongst other subjects the lecturer will treat of during his tour of the Dominion, are the following:—“A stirring future of the Birth and Death of the World”; “Evolution of the Mind and the Animal World”; “From Primitive Microbe to Civilised Man.” Mr McCabe, we are requested to state, comes purely on a mission to spread the modern development of Thought and Reason. He is doing this without profit to himself. It is intended, after deducting his actual expenses, to devote the surplus from his lectures to the fund of the R.P. Association. It is the first time any of these subjects have been handled by so. popular a lecturer in the Dominion, and his method of treatment places his subjects within the grasp of everybody. Mr McCabe’s recent book on the “Martyrdom of Ferrer” has had an enormous run, and has been translated throughout Europe. His last book, “The Decline of the Roman Catholic Church,” has also excited wide interest and controversy. Francisco Ferrer. The death of Francisco Ferrer, who was shot on October 13 of last year as the result of a court martial convicting him Of complicity in the riots of Barcelona, was the subject of a lecture by Mr Joseph McCabe in Melbourne recently. Mr McCabe, in giving an interesting eketch of Ferrer’s career, said that it was true that as a young man Ferrer was a revolutionary, but in Spain a revolution had been merely the normal and ordinary form of bringing about a change of government during the greater part of the I9th century. It was hard for Australians to realise the present condition of Spain. Out of 16 millions of people, only four millions could read and write. The vast mass of the people

were held in the densest ignorance. Schoolmasters in Spain received £lO a year, while the bullfighter received £lO,OOO. Governments changed office by agreements between the rival parties, the one saying to the other in effect, “You have had the spoils of office long enough.” Of the four hundred members of the Spanish Cortes, not 150 were really elected by the people. Without wishing to wound the feelings of anyone, he would give Australians a word of advice, and ask them to dissociate themselves as rapidly as possible from Roman Catholicism in Spain, as many had in that country itself. There did not and could not exist in Australia the things done in Spain in the name of religion. Survivals of the Brute. If you are a hairy man, the hair on vour upper arm runs down, the hair along vour forearm runs up. It is the same with the ape. That, said Mr Joseph McCabe in a Sydney lecture, is one evidence of evolution. When the ape sits in the rain he clasps his hands over his head, and the hair of his arms acts like a thatch, and the rain runs off. So did our ape-like ancestor, and that is why our hair still rims that way. The Protestant Hall was crowded. The subject of this lecture, the evolution of man, was evidently the most popular of the series. The lecture consisted, for the most part, of a description of those parts and organs of the human body which, while they serve no use now, are evidences of man’s rise from lower forms of life in which they were of use. A statue by the great sculptor, Praxiteles, was shown upon the screen. Scientists, said Mr McCabe, while fully appreciating the beauty of Nature and of man, analysed it, to show how it has evolved. Parts of man’s figure, even at its utmost beauty, as represented in that statue, could hot be understood except as survivals from earlier stages in its ancestry.

"The breasts, for instance. Why should the male have breasts? They were a survival from a time when both sexes suckled the young, and even nowadays this was in some countries not an unknown thing, and Mr. McCabe gave instances from Madras and Ceylon. The external fleshy ear, again, was about as useful 'as a tin ear-trumpet would be if it were crushed flat. It, too, was a shrunken survival from the time when, larger, pointed, and movable, as in the dog or horse, it was really useful to catch the waves of sound. There were seven muscles connected with it, the whole of which no human being could ~ use. These, too, were survivals. In the larger apes the outer ear was almost as small and useless as in man. Over the body, again, were patches of muscle, as that by which a man moved his eyebrows, useless now, but survivals of the coat of muscle which in such animals as cows was used to twitch the skin to drive away the flies. The fleshy pad on the inner corner of the eye was a survival of a third eyelid, which in some birds and in the shark was capable of being drawn sideways across the eye. In the middle of man’s brain was a third eye, the pineal body, now partly atrophied, and without opening through the skull. Some ancestor of ours saw with that, eye and even now there was one fish-like animal that used it, through an opening in the top of the head. The hair on our bodies, useless to us, was a useful covering to the lower animals, and to primitive man. And the vermiform appendix, which often, because of its narrow inlet, beyond which food may gather and decay,

Las to be removed from man, had in the vegetarian animals a far larger inInt, and was used as an extra storage chamber. The human embryo before birth was shown to go through the stages of life at which the lower animals had stopped. It began with gills and a fish’s heart up in the throat; these shrank, and lungs and a human heart formed in their places, until we reached the human form. Even now, many of man's blood vessels were those proper to a quadruped. And there wag a crowning proof. It had been found that the blood of one animal had a poisonous effect on that of another if that other were far removed from it in kind. But the blood of man did not poison that of the higher apes; it was akin. Australia was a museum of survivals, evidences of evolution, because this continent was cut off from the rest of the world before higher types than opossum and kangaroos could evolve. “ And isolation,” said the lecturer, “ means stagnancy or death.” Half a million years ago the large apes retreated into the forests, their skulls closed over their brains in the bony ridge that is there now, and there was no room for progress. That was one reason why the apes could not be developed. Our hairy ancestor did not retreat and isolate himself. He developed, and became man. They receded, and became apes. With us and our ancestors, the dome of the skull had been slowly rising for a million years. It was the change of outlook, brought about by the hairy link’s descent from a tree life, that had given him his first start. But the progress of primitive man had been very slow. He had at first no articulate speech. Living in caves together, instead of as isolated families, had taught him that. And so 50,000 years ago the rudiments of civilisation, with the sowing of corn and the taming of animals, had been born.

In the last 2000 years humanity had travelled faster in progress than in 200,000 years before; and in the last 100 years ten times faster than in any other age. In the 10 million years yet left to us, and before the sun died and the earth grew cold, what might we not become?

THE DECLINE OF HALLEY’S COMET.

(Photographs taken at Meeanee Observatory by the Marist Fathers.) The photographs of Halley's comet, reproduced in this issue, were taken from the Meeanee Observatory, Hawke’s Bay, and have been chosen from their numerous fellows with a view to illustrate how the beautiful comet of a few weeks back is rapidly breaking up as it recedes from the sun. The tail is made up of minute particles of luminous matter, first thrown out from the head, and then forced as if by a violent wind away from the sun to form the tail. As soon, therefore, as the volcanic action ceases in the head, the tail as surely disappears as the river whose source is drained. .The head is active only when near the sun; and as it passes back again into space life slowly becomes extinct, and the tail, the manifestation of that vitality, dies with it. . During the taking of the photographs the comet had to be kept shining on the same place on the photographic plate. The motion of the telescope, then, had the effect of drawing the stars out into lines pointing but the direction and extent of the motion of the comet. The extreme rarity of the comet is shown from the fact that stars show through it even in the head itself. Indeed, in photographs taken through the large telescope'the fainter stars were distinct lines across the plate, when as yet the outline of the head was scarcely noticeable.