Grade/
Unit
8.1
Text Title
Author/Source
Notes
The Call of the Wild
Jack London
8.1
The Heart of the Ancient Wood
Charles G. D. Roberts
8.1
“To Build a Fire”
Jack London
8.1
Brian’s winter
Gary Paulsen
Not Included
No Link
Not Included
Not Included
No Link
Not Included
8.1
“The Other Animals
Jack London
8.1
8.1
8.1
Travels with Charley
John Steinback
“Do Animals Think and Reflect,” from The Ways of
Nature
“Minds of Their Own: Animals are Smarter Than You
Think”
8.1
How Smart Are Animals?
PBS
8.2
Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice,
Slavery, Freedom, and Science
8.2
State of Sugar
8.2
“200 Years of Progress in the Louisiana Sugar Industry:
A Brief History”
I is a Long-Memoried Woman
8.2
Philippine Folk Tales (Tinguian)
8.2
8.2
8.2
“How Sugar Changed the World”
“Sugar Cane”
“Sugar”
Marc Aronson and marina
Budhos
This Week in Louisiana
Agriculture
Dr. Charley Richard of the
American Sugar Cane League
Grace Nichols
Compiled and annotated by
Mabel Cook Cole
Heather Whipps
Alfred Corn
Anup Shah
8.2
“Louisiana Sugarcane Farmer”
America’s Heartland
8.2
8.2
Cane Cutting Scene
8.3
8.3
“Flowers for Algernon”
Old Greek Stories: The Story of Prometheus
Louisiana State Museum and
KnowLA, Louisiana
Endowment for the
Humanitites
Daniel Keyes
James Baldwin
8.3
“Neuroethics”
Neuroscience for Kids
8.3
8.3
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus
“Demeter’s Prayer to Hades”
8.3
“What’s in an Inkblot? Some Say, Not Much”
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly
Rita Dove
Erica Goode
8.3
“Does IQ Test Really Measure Intelligence?
---3 – 11
No Link
Not Included
John Burroughs
Virginia Morell
Page
Numbers
--
-12 – 18
Not Included
Non-Print
Not Included
No Link
Not Included
Non-Print
Not Included
----19 – 20
Not Included
--
Not Included
-21 – 22
23 – 24
25 - 30
Non-Print
Not Included
--
Non-Print
Not Included
--
Not Included
No Link
Not Included
Not Included
Not Included
-31 - 35
---36 – 40
Denise Mann
41 - 42
No Link
Not Included
8.3
“The Scarlet Ibis
James Hurst
8.3
“IQ Tests are ‘meaningless and Too Simplistic’ Claim
Researchers”
Nicholas McDermott
8.3
Charly
Ralph Nelson
Non-Print
Not Included
--
8.4
8.4
8.4
“The Tell-Tale Heart
“The Ransom of Red Chief”
The Republic
Edgar Allen Poe
O. Henry
Plato
Not Included
46 - 48
-49 - 50
8.4
Nothing But the Truth
Avi
8.4
Monster
Walter Dean Myers
1
-43 – 45
No Link
Not Included
No Link
Not Included
---
Grade/
Unit
8.4
8.4
8.4
Text Title
Author/Source
“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
The Book Thief (excerpt)
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
James Thurber
Markus Zusak
Ernest Gaines
8.4
Anne Frank: A Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank
8.4
8.4
Stephen Vincent Benet
Tim O’Brien
56
57
Daniel Honan
58
8.4
8.4
“By the Waters of Babylon”
The Things They Carried
“A Million Little Pieces Revisited: Can the Truth Ever
Set James Frey Free”
“Zoo”
“The Blind Men and the Elephant”
Edward Hoch
John Godfrey Saxe
59 – 60
61 – 64
8.4
Narrative Voice and Point of View
8.4
8.4
8.4
8.4
“Narrative Point of View: Some Considerations”
“Best-Selling Memoir Draws Scrutiny”
The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe)
Ceci n’est pas une pomme
8.5
“Conservation as a National Duty”
8.5
8.5
8.5
8.5
8.5
“Autumntime”
“Requiem for a Nest”
“Birdfoot’s Grampa”
“American Flamingo”
“Audubon: A Vision,”
The Mountain Trail and its Message
“A Parable of Sauntering”
8.4
8.5
John Lye
Edward Wyatt
Rene Magritte
Rene Magritte
William Zinsser (The
American Scholar)
A. Lentini
Wanda Coleman
Joseph Bruchac
Greg Pape
Robert Penn Warren
8.5
“Bookstand: Audubon’s Birds and Words”
8.5
8.5
“John James Audubon and the Natural World”
8.5
Roosevelt, Friend of the Birds
8.5
“American Flamingo”
Not Included
Not Included
Park Net, National Park
Service
Thomas Uskali (Louisiana
Cultural Vistas)
Edited by Lucy Blackwell
Audubon
John Muir
Louisiana Cultural Vistas,
Louisiana Endowment for
the Humanities
Roosevelt Memorial
Association Library
John James Audubon
2
Page
Numbers
51 – 53
54 – 55
---
-65 – 66
67 – 68
--69 – 76
77 – 78
79
79
80 – 81
82 – 83
Albert W. Palmer
“Theodore Roosevelt and the National Park System”
The Life of James Audubon: The Naturalist
pp. 439 – 441
“The Calypso Borealis”
Not Included
No Link
Not Included
PDF Not
Included
8.5
8.5
Notes
84
85
PDF
Not Included
PDF
Not Included
--86 - 87
PDF
Not Included
Non-Print
Not Included
Non-Print
Not Included
----
“The Other Animals”
by Jack London
American journalism has its moments of fantastic hysteria, and when it is on the rampage the only thing
for a rational man to do is to climb a tree and let the cataclysm go by. And so, some time ago, when the
word nature-faker was coined, I, for one, climbed into my tree and stayed there. I happened to be in
Hawaii at the time, and a Honolulu reporter elicited the sentiment from me that I thanked God I was not
an authority on anything. This sentiment was promptly cabled to America in an Associated Press
despatch, whereupon the American press (possibly annoyed because I had not climbed down out of my
tree) charged me with paying for advertising by cable at a dollar per word — the very human way of the
American press, which, when a man refuses to come down and be licked, makes faces at him.
But now that the storm is over, let us come and reason together. I have been guilty of writing two
animal — two books about dogs. The writing of these two stories, on my part, was in truth a protest
against the "humanizing" of animals, of which it seemed to me several "animal writers" had been
profoundly guilty. Time and again, and many times, in my narratives, I wrote, speaking of my dogheroes: "He did not think these things; he merely did them," etc. And I did this repeatedly, to the
clogging of my narrative and in violation of my artistic canons; and I did it in order to hammer into the
average human understanding that these dog-heroes of mine were not directed by abstract reasoning,
but by instinct, sensation, and emotion, and by simple reasoning. Also, I endeavored to make my stories
in line with the facts of evolution; I hewed them to the mark set by scientific research, and awoke, one
day, to find myself bundled neck and crop into the camp of the nature-fakers.
President Roosevelt was responsible for this, and he tried and condemned me on two counts. (1) I was
guilty of having a big, fighting bull-dog whip a wolf-dog. (2) I was guilty of allowing a lynx to kill a wolfdog in a pitched battle. Regarding the second count, President Roosevelt was wrong in his field
observations taken while reading my book. He must have read it hastily, for in my story I had the wolfdog kill the lynx. Not only did I have my wolf-dog kill the lynx, but I made him eat the body of the lynx as
well. Remains only the first count on which to convict me of nature-faking, and the first count does not
charge me with diverging from ascertained facts. It is merely a statement of a difference of opinion.
President Roosevelt does not think a bulldog can lick a-wolf-dog. I think a bull-dog can lick a wolf-dog.
And there we are. Difference of opinion may make, and does make, horse-racing. I can understand that
difference of opinion can make dog-fighting. But what gets me is how difference of opinion regarding
the relative fighting merits of a bull-dog and a wolf-dog makes me a nature-faker and President
Roosevelt a vindicated and triumphant scientist.
Then entered John Burroughs to clinch President Roosevelt's judgments. In this alliance there is no
difference of opinion. That Roosevelt can do no wrong is Burroughs's opinion; and that Burroughs is
always right is Roosevelt's opinion. Both are agreed that animals do not reason. They assert that all
animals below man are automatons and perform actions only of two sorts — mechanical and reflex —
and that in such actions no reasoning enters at all. They believe that man is the only animal capable of
reasoning and that ever does reason. This is a view that makes the twentieth-century scientist smile. It is
not modern at all. It is distinctly mediaeval. President Roosevelt and John Burroughs, in advancing such a
view, are homocentric in the same fashion that the scholastics of earlier and darker centuries were
homocentric. Had the world not been discovered to be round until after the births of President
Roosevelt and John Burroughs, they would have been geocentric as well in their theories of the Cosmos.
They could not have believed otherwise. The stuff of their minds is so conditioned. They talk the argot of
3
evolution, while they no more understand the essence and the import of evolution than does a South
Sea Islander or Sir Oliver Lodge understand the noumena of radioactivity.
Now, President Roosevelt is an amateur. He may know something of statecraft and of big-game
shooting; he may be able to kill a deer when he sees it and to measure it and weigh it after he has shot
it; he may be able to observe carefully and accurately the actions and antics of tom-tits and snipe, and,
after he has observed it, definitely and coherently to convey the information of when the first
chipmunk, in a certain year and a certain latitude and longitude, came out in the spring and chattered
and gambolled — but that he should be able, as an individual observer, to analyze all animal life and to
synthetize and develop all that is known of the method and significance of evolution, would require a
vaster credulity for you or me to believe than is required for us to believe the biggest whopper ever told
by an unmitigated nature-faker. No, President Roosevelt does not understand evolution, and he does
not seem to have made much of an attempt to understand evolution.
Remains John Burroughs, who claims to be a thoroughgoing evolutionist. Now, it is rather hard for a
young man to tackle an old man. It is the nature of young men to be more controlled in such matters,
and it is the nature of old men, presuming upon the wisdom that is very often erroneously associated
with age, to do the tackling. In this present question of nature-faking, the old men did the tackling, while
I, as one young man, kept quiet a long time. But here goes at last. And first of all let Mr. Burroughs's
position be stated, and stated in his words.
"Why impute reason to an animal if its behavior can be explained on the theory of instinct?" Remember
these words, for they will be referred to later. "A goodly number of persons seem to have persuaded
themselves that animals do reason." "But instinct suffices for the animals . . . they get along very well
without reason." "Darwin tried hard to convince himself that animals do at times reason in a
rudimentary way; but Darwin was also a much greater naturalist than psychologist." The preceding
quotation is tantamount, on Mr. Burroughs's part, to a flat denial that animals reason even in a
rudimentary way. And when Mr. Burroughs denies that animals reason even in a rudimentary way, it is
equivalent to affirming, in accord with the first quotation in this paragraph, that instinct will explain
every animal act that might be confounded with reason by the unskilled or careless observer.
Having bitten off this large mouthful, Mr. Burroughs proceeds with serene and beautiful satisfaction to
masticate it in the following fashion. He cites a large number of instances of purely instinctive actions on
the parts of animals, and triumphantly demands if they are acts of reason. He tells of the robin that
fought day after day its reflected image in a window- pane; of the birds in South America that were
guilty of drilling clear through a mud wall, which they mistook for a solid clay bank; of the beaver that
cut down a tree four times because it was held at the top by the branches of other trees; of the cow that
licked the skin of her stuffed calf so affectionately that it came apart, whereupon she proceeded to eat
the hay with which it was stuffed. He tells of the phoebe-bird that betrays her nest on the porch by
trying to hide it with moss in similar fashion to the way all phoebe-birds hide their nests when they are
built among rocks. He tells of the high-hole that repeatedly drills through the clapboards of an empty
house in a vain attempt to find a thickness of wood deep enough in which to build its nest. He tells of
the migrating lemmings of Norway that plunge into the sea and drown in vast numbers because of their
instinct to swim lakes and rivers in the course of their migrations. And, having told a few more instances
of like kidney, he triumphantly demands: Where now is your much-vaunted reasoning of the lower
animals ?
4
No schoolboy in a class debate could be guilty of unfairer argument. It is equivalent to replying to the
assertion that 2 + 2 = 4, by saying: "No; because 12 / 3 = 3; I have demonstrated my honorable
opponent's error." When a man attacks your ability as a foot-racer, promptly prove to him that he was
drunk the week before last, and the average man in the crowd of gaping listeners will believe that you
have convincingly refuted the slander on your fleetness of foot. On my honor, it will work. Try it
sometime. It is done every day. Mr. Burroughs has done it himself, and, I doubt not, pulled the
sophistical wool over a great many pairs of eyes. No, no, Mr. Burroughs; you can't disprove that animals
reason by proving that they possess instincts. But the worst of it is that you have at the same time
pulled the wool over your own eyes. You have set up a straw man and knocked the stuffing out of him in
the complacent belief that it was the reasoning of lower animals you were knocking out of the minds of
those who disagreed with you. When the highhole perforated the ice-house and let out the sawdust,
you called him a lunatic . . . .
But let us be charitable — and serious. What Mr. Burroughs instances as acts of instinct certainly are
acts of instinct. By the same method of logic one could easily adduce a multitude of instinctive acts on
the part of man and thereby prove that man is an unreasoning animal. But man performs actions of
both sorts. Between man and the lower animals Mr. Burroughs finds a vast gulf. This gulf divides man
from the rest of his kin by virtue of the power of reason that he alone possesses. Man is a voluntary
agent. Animals are automatons. The robin fights its reflection in the window-pane because it is his
instinct to fight and because he cannot reason out the physical laws that make this reflection appear
real. An animal is a mechanism that operates according to foreordained rules. Wrapped up in its
heredity, and determined long before it was born, is a certain limited capacity of ganglionic response to
eternal stimuli. These responses have been fixed in the species through adaptation to environment.
Natural selection has compelled the animal automatically to respond in a fixed manner and a certain
way to all the usual external stimuli it encounters in the course of a usual life. Thus, under usual
circumstances, it does the usual thing. Under unusual circumstances it still does the usual thing,
wherefore the highhole perforating the ice-house is guilty of lunacy — of unreason, in short. To do the
unusual thing under unusual circumstances, successfully to adjust to a strange environment for which
his heredity has not automatically fitted an adjustment, Mr. Burroughs says is impossible. He says it is
impossible because it would be a non-instinctive act, and, as is well known, animals act only through
instinct. And right here we catch a glimpse of Mr. Burroughs's cart standing before his horse. He has a
thesis, and though the heavens fall he will fit the facts to the thesis. Agassiz, in his opposition to
evolution, had a similar thesis, though neither did he fit the facts to it nor did the heavens fall. Facts are
very disagreeable at times.
But let us see. Let us test Mr. Burroughs's test of reason and instinct. When I was a small boy I had a dog
named Rollo. According to Mr. Burroughs, Rollo was an automaton, responding to external stimuli
mechanically as directed by his instincts. Now, as is well known, the development of instinct in animals
is a dreadfully slow process. There is no known case of the development of a single instinct in domestic
animals in all the history of their domestication. Whatever instincts they possess they brought with
them from the wild thousands of years ago. Therefore, all Rollo's actions were ganglionic discharges
;mechanically determined by the instincts that had been developed and fixed in the species thousands
of years ago. Very well. It is clear, therefore, that in all his play with me he would act in old-fashioned
ways, adjusting himself to the physical and psychical factors in his environment according to the rules of
adjustment which had obtained in the wild and which had become part of his heredity.
Rollo and I did a great deal of rough romping. He chased me and I chased him. He nipped my legs, arms,
and hands, often so hard that I yelled, while I rolled him and tumbled him and dragged him about, often
5
so strenuously as to make him yelp. In the course of the play many variations arose. I would make
believe to sit down and cry. All repentance and anxiety, he would wag his tail and lick my face,
whereupon I would give him the laugh. He hated to be laughed at, and promptly he would spring for me
with good-natured, menacing jaws, and the wild romp would go on. I had scored a point. Then he hit
upon a trick. Pursuing him into the woodshed, I would find him in a far corner, pretending to sulk. Now,
he dearly loved the play, and never got enough of it. But at first he fooled me. I thought I had somehow
hurt his feelings and I came and knelt before him, petting him and speaking lovingly. Promptly, in a wild
outburst, he was up and away, tumbling me over on the floor as he dashed out in a mad skurry around
the yard. He had scored a point.
After a time, it became largely a game of wits. I reasoned my acts, of course, while his were instinctive.
One day, as he pretended to sulk in the corner, I glanced out of the woodshed doorway, simulated
pleasure in face, voice, and language, and greeted one of my schoolboy friends. Immediately Rollo
forgot to sulk, rushed out to see the newcomer, and saw empty space. The laugh was on him, and he
knew it, and I gave it to him, too. I fooled him in this way two or three times; then he became wise. One
day I worked a variation. Suddenly looking out the door, making believe that my eyes had been
attracted by a moving form, I said coldly, as a child educated in turning away bill-collectors would say:
"No, my father is not at home." Like a shot, Rollo was out the door. He even ran down the alley to the
front of the house in a vain attempt to find the man I had addressed. He came back sheepishly to endure
the laugh and resume the game.
And now we come to the test. I fooled Rollo, but how was the fooling made possible? What precisely
went on in that brain of his? According to Mr. Burroughs, who denies even rudimentary reasoning to the
lower animals, Rollo acted instinctively, mechanically responding to the external stimulus, furnished by
me, which led him to believe that a man was outside the door. Since Rollo acted instinctively, and since
all instincts are very ancient, tracing back to the predomestication period, we can conclude only that
Rollo's wild ancestors, at the time this particular instinct was fixed into the heredity of the species, must
have been in close, long- continued, and vital contact with man, the voice of man, and the expressions
on the face of man. But since the instinct must have been developed during the predomestication
period, how under the sun could his wild, undomesticated ancestors have experienced the close, longcontinued, and vital contact with man ?
Mr. Burroughs says that "instinct suffices for the animals," that "they get along very well without
reason." But I say, what all the poor nature- fakers will say, that Rollo reasoned. He was born into the
world a bundle of instincts and a pinch of brain-stuff, all wrapped around in a framework of bone, meat,
and hide. As he adjusted to his environment he gained experiences. He remembered these experiences.
He learned that he mustn't chase the cat, kill chickens, nor bite little girls' dresses. He learned that little
boys had little boy playmates. He learned that men came into back yards. He learned that the animal
man, on meeting with his own kind, was given to verbal and facial greeting. He learned that when a boy
greeted a playmate he did it differently from the way he greeted a man. All these he learned and
remembered. They were so many observations — so many propositions, if you please. Now what went
on behind those brown eyes of his, inside that pinch of brain-stuff, when I turned suddenly to the door
and greeted an imaginary person outside ? Instantly, out of the thousands of observations stored in his
brain, came to the front of his consciousness the particular observations connected with this particular
situation. Next, he established a relation between these observations. This relation was his conclusion,
achieved, as every psychologist will agree, by a definite cell-action of his gray matter. From the fact that
his master turned suddenly toward the door, and from the fact that his master's voice, facial expression,
and whole demeanor expressed surprise and delight, he concluded that a friend was outside. He
6
established a relation between various things, and the act of establishing relations between things is an
act of reason — of rudimentary reason, granted, but none the less of reason.
Of course Rollo was fooled. But that is no call for us to throw chests about it. How often has every last
one of us been fooled in precisely similar fashion by another who turned and suddenly addressed an
imaginary intruder? Here is a case in point that occurred in the West. A robber had held up a railroad
train. He stood in the aisle between the seats, his revolver presented at the head of the conductor, who
stood facing him. The conductor was at his mercy. But the conductor suddenly looked over the robber's
shoulder, at the same time saying aloud to an imaginary person standing at the robber's back: "Don't
shoot him." Like a flash the robber whirled about to confront this new danger, and like a flash the
conductor shot him down. Show me, Mr. Burroughs, where the mental process in the robber's brain was
a shade different from the mental process in Rollo's brain, and I'll quit nature-faking and join the
Trappists. Surely, when a man's mental process and a dog's mental process are precisely similar, the
much-vaunted gulf of Mr. Burroughs's fancy has been bridged.
I had a dog in Oakland. His name was Glen. His father was Brown, a wolf-dog that had been brought
down from Alaska, and his mother was a half-wild mountain shepherd dog. Neither father nor mother
had had any experience with automobiles. Glen came from the country, a half-grown puppy, to live in
Oakland. Immediately he became infatuated with an automobile. He reached the culmination of
happiness when he was permitted to sit up in the front seat alongside the chauffeur. He would spend a
whole day at a time on an automobile debauch, even going without food. Often the machine started
directly from inside the barn, dashed out the driveway without stopping, and was gone. Glen got left
behind several times. The custom was established that whoever was taking the machine out should toot
the horn before starting. Glen learned the signal. No matter where he was nor what he was doing, when
that horn tooted he was off for the barn and up into the front seat.
One morning, while Glen was on the back porch eating his breakfast of mush and milk, the chauffeur
tooted. Glen rushed down the steps, into the barn, and took his front seat, the mush and milk dripping
down his excited and happy chops. In passing, I may point out that in thus forsaking his breakfast for the
automobile he was displaying what is called the power of choice — a peculiarly lordly attribute that,
according to Mr. Burroughs, belongs to man alone. Yet Glen made his choice between food and fun.
It was not that Glen wanted his breakfast less, but that he wanted his ride more. The toot was only a
joke. The automobile did not start. Glen waited and watched. Evidently he saw no signs of an immediate
start, for finally he jumped out of the seat and went back to his breakfast. He ate with indecent haste,
like a man anxious to catch a train. Again the horn tooted, again he deserted his breakfast, and again he
sat in the seat and waited vainly for the machine to go. They came close to spoiling Glen's breakfast for
him, for he was kept on the jump between porch and barn. Then he grew wise. They tooted the horn
loudly and insistently, but he stayed by his breakfast and finished it. Thus once more did he display
power of choice, incidentally of control, for when that horn tooted it was all he could do to refrain from
running for the barn.
The nature-faker would analyze what went on in Glen's brain somewhat in the following fashion. He had
had, in his short life, experiences that not one of all his ancestors had ever had. He had learned that
automobiles went fast, that once in motion it was impossible for him to get on board, that the toot of
the horn was a noise that was peculiar to automobiles. These were so many propositions. Now
reasoning can be defined as the act or process of the brain by which, from propositions known or
assumed, new propositions are reached. Out of the propositions which I have shown were Glen's, and
7
which had become his through the medium of his own observation of the phenomena of life, he made
the new proposition that when the horn tooted it was time for him to get on board.
But on the morning I have described, the chauffeur fooled Glen. Somehow, and much to his own disgust,
his reasoning was erroneous. The machine did not start after all. But to reason incorrectly is very
human. The great trouble in all acts of reasoning is to include all the propositions in the problem. Glen
had included every proposition but one, namely, the human proposition, the joke in the brain of the
chauffeur. For a number of times Glen was fooled. Then he performed another mental act. In his
problem he included the human proposition (the joke in the brain of the chauffeur), and he reached the
new conclusion that when the horn tooted the automobile was not going to start. Basing his action on
this conclusion, he remained on the porch and finished his breakfast. You and I, and even Mr. Burroughs,
perform acts of reasoning precisely similar to this every day in our lives. How Mr. Burroughs will explain
Glen's action by the instinctive theory is beyond me. In wildest fantasy, even, my brain refuses to follow
Mr. Burroughs into the primeval forest, where Glen's dim ancestors, to the tooting of automobile horns,
were fixing into the heredity of the breed the particular instinct that would enable Glen, a few thousand
years later, capably to cope with automobiles.
Dr. C. J. Romanes tells of a female chimpanzee who was taught to count straws up to five. She held the
straws in her hand, exposing the ends to the number requested. If she were asked for three, she held up
three. If she were asked for four, she held up four. All this is a mere matter of training. But consider
now, Mr. Burroughs, what follows. When she was asked for five straws and she had only four, she
doubled one straw, exposing both its ends and thus making up the required number. She did not do this
only once, and by accident. She did it whenever more straws were asked for than she possessed. Did she
perform a distinctly reasoning act? or was her action the result of blind, mechanical instinct? If Mr.
Burroughs cannot answer to his own satisfaction, he may call Dr. Romanes a nature-faker and dismiss
the incident from his mind.
The foregoing is a trick of erroneous human reasoning that works very successfully in the United States
these days. It is certainly a trick of Mr. Burroughs, of which he is guilty with distressing frequency. When
a poor devil of a writer records what he has seen, and when what he has seen does not jibe with Mr.
Burroughs's mediaeval theory, he calls said writer a nature-faker. When a man like Mr. Hornaday comes
along, Mr. Burroughs works a variation of the trick on him. Mr. Hornaday has made a close study of the
orang in captivity and of the orang in its native state. Also, he has studied closely many other of the
higher animal types. Also, in the tropics, he has studied the lower types of man. Mr. Hornaday is a man
of experience and reputation. When he was asked if animals reasoned, out of all his knowledge on the
subject he replied that to ask him such a question was equivalent to asking him if fishes swim. Now Mr.
Burroughs has not had much experience in studying the lower human types and the higher animal types.
Living in a rural district in the state of New York, and studying principally birds in that limited habitat, he
has been in contact neither with the higher animal types nor the lower human types. But Mr.
Hornaday's reply is such a facer to him and his homocentric theory that he has to do something. And he
does it. He retorts: "I suspect that Mr. Hornaday is a better naturalist than he is a comparative
psychologist." Exit Mr. Hornaday. Who the devil is Mr. Hornaday, anyway? The sage of Slabsides has
spoken. When Darwin concluded that animals were capable of reasoning in a rudimentary way, Mr.
Burroughs laid him out in the same fashion by saying: "But Darwin was also a much greater naturalist
than psychologist" — and this despite Darwin's long life of laborious research that was not wholly
confined to a rural district such as Mr. Burroughs inhabits in New York. Mr. Burroughs's method of
argument is beautiful. It reminds one of the man whose pronunciation was vile, but who said: "Damn
the dictionary; ain't I here?"
8
And now we come to the mental processes of Mr. Burroughs — to the psychology .of the ego, if you
please. Mr. Burroughs has troubles of his own with the dictionary. He violates language from the stand
point both of logic and science. Language is a tool, and definitions embodied in language should agree
with the facts and history of life. But Mr. Burroughs's definitions do not so agree. This, in turn, is not the
fault of his education, but of his ego. To him, despite his well-exploited and patronizing devotion to
them, the lower animals are disgustingly low. To him, affinity and kinship with the other animals is a
repugnant thing. He will have none of it. He is too glorious a personality not to have between him and
the other animals a vast and impassable gulf. The cause of Mr. Burroughs's mediaeval view of the other
animals is to be found, not in his knowledge of those other animals, but in the suggestion of his selfexalted ego. In short, Mr. Burroughs's homocentric theory has been developed out of his homocentric
ego, and by the misuse of language he strives to make the facts of life jibe with his theory.
After the instances I have cited of actions of animals which are impossible of explanation as due to
instinct, Mr. Burroughs may reply: "Your instances are easily explained by the simple law of association."
To this I reply, first, then why did you deny rudimentary reason to animals? and why did you state flatly
that "instinct suffices for the animals"? And, second, with great reluctance and with overwhelming
humility, because of my youth, I suggest that you do not know exactly what you do mean by that phrase
"the simple law of association." Your trouble, I repeat, is with definitions. You have grasped that man
performs what is called abstract reasoning, you have made a definition of abstract reason, and,
betrayed by that great maker of theories, the ego, you have come to think that all reasoning is abstract
and that what is not abstract reason is not reason at all. This is your attitude toward rudimentary
reason. Such a process, in one of the other animals, must be either abstract or it is not a reasoning
process. Your intelligence tells you that such a process is not abstract reasoning, and your homocentric
thesis compels you to conclude that it can be only a mechanical, instinctive process.
Definitions must agree, not with egos, but with life. Mr. Burroughs goes on the basis that a definition is
something hard and fast, absolute and eternal. He forgets that all the universe is in flux; that definitions
are arbitrary and ephemeral; that they fix, for a fleeting instant of time, things that in the past were not,
that in the future will be not, that out of the past become, and that out of the present pass on to the
future and become other things. Definitions cannot rule life. Definitions cannot be made to rule life. Life
must rule definitions or else the definitions perish.
Mr. Burroughs forgets the evolution of reason. He makes a definition of reason without regard to its
history, and that definition is of reason purely abstract. Human reason, as we know it to-day, is not a
creation, but a growth. Its history goes back to the primordial slime that was quick with muddy life; its
history goes back to the first vitalized inorganic. And here are the steps of its ascent from the mud to
man: simple reflex action, compound reflex action, memory, habit, rudimentary reason, and abstract
reason. In the course of the climb, thanks to natural selection, instinct was evolved. Habit is a
development in the individual. Instinct is a race-habit. Instinct is blind, unreasoning, mechanical. This
was the dividing of the ways in the climb of aspiring life. The perfect culmination of instinct we find in
the ant-heap and the beehive. Instinct proved a blind alley. But the other path, that of reason, led on
and on even to Mr. Burroughs and you and me.
There are no impassable gulfs, unless one chooses, as Mr. Burroughs does, to ignore the lower human
types and the higher animal types, and to compare human mind with bird mind. It was impossible for
life to reason abstractly until speech was developed. Equipped with swords, with tools of thought, in
short, the slow development of the power to reason in the abstract went on. The lowest human types
do little or no reasoning in the abstract. With every word, with every increase in the complexity of
9
thought, with every ascertained fact so gained, went on action and reaction in the gray matter of the
speech discoverer, and slowly, step by step, through hundreds of thousands of years, developed the
power of reason.
Place a honey-bee in a glass bottle. Turn the bottom of the bottle toward a lighted lamp so that the
open mouth is away from the lamp. Vainly, ceaselessly, a thousand times, undeterred by the bafflement
and the pain, the bee will hurl himself against the bottom of the bottle as he strives to win to the light.
That is instinct. Place your dog in a back yard and go away. He is your dog. He loves you. He yearns
toward you as the bee yearns toward the light. He listens to your departing footsteps. But the fence is
too high. Then he turns his back upon the direction in which you are departing, and runs around the
yard. He is frantic with affection and desire. But he is not blind. He is observant. He is looking for a hole
under the fence, or through the fence, or for a place where the fence is not so high. He sees a dry-goods
box standing against the fence. Presto! He leaps upon it, goes over the barrier, and tears down the
street to overtake you. Is that instinct?
Here, in the household where I am writing this, is a little Tahitian "feeding-child." He believes firmly that
a tiny dwarf resides in the box of my talking-machine and that it is the tiny dwarf who does the singing
and the talking. Not even Mr. Burroughs will affirm that the child has reached this conclusion by an
instinctive process. Of course the child reasons the existence of the dwarf in the box. How else could the
box talk and sing ? In that child's limited experience it has never encountered a single instance where
speech and song were produced otherwise than by direct human agency. I doubt not that the dog is
considerably surprised when he hears his master's voice coming out of a box.
The adult savage, on his first introduction to a telephone, rushes around to the adjoining room to find
the man who is talking through the partition. Is this act instinctive? No. Out of his limited experience,
out of his limited knowledge of physics, he reasons that the only explanation possible is that a man is in
the other room talking through the partition.
But that savage cannot be fooled by a handmirror. We must go lower down in the animal scale, to the
monkey. The monkey swiftly learns that the monkey it sees is not in the glass, wherefore it reaches
craftily behind the glass. Is this instinct? No. It is rudimentary reasoning. Lower than the monkey in the
scale of brain is the robin, and the robin fights its reflection in the window-pane. Now climb with me for
a space. From the robin to the monkey, where is the impassable gulf? and where is the impassable gulf
between the monkey and the feeding-child? between the feeding-child and the savage who seeks the
man behind the partition? aye, and between the savage and the astute financiers Mrs. Chadwick fooled
and the thousands who were fooled by the Keeley Motor swindle?
Let us be very humble. We who are so very human are very animal. Kinship with the other animals is no
more repugnant to Mr. Burroughs than was the heliocentric theory to the priests who compelled Galileo
to recant. Not correct human reason, not the evidence of the ascertained fact, but pride of ego, was
responsible for the repugnance.
In his stiff-necked pride, Mr. Burroughs runs a hazard more humiliating to that pride than any amount of
kinship with the other animals. When a dog exhibits choice, direction, control, and reason; when it is
shown that certain mental processes in that dog's brain are precisely duplicated in the brain of man; and
when Mr. Burroughs convincingly proves that every action of the dog is mechanical and automatic —
then, by precisely the same arguments, can it be proved that the similar actions of man are mechanical
and automatic. No, Mr. Burroughs, though you stand on the top of the ladder of life, you must not kick
10
out that ladder from under your feet. You must not deny your relatives, the other animals. Their history
is your history, and if you kick them to the bottom of the abyss, to the bottom of the abyss you go
yourself. By them you stand or fall. What you repudiate in them you repudiate in yourself — a pretty
spectacle, truly, of an exalted animal striving to disown the stuff of life out of which it is made, striving
by use of the very reason that was developed by evolution to deny the processes of evolution that
developed it. This may be good egotism, but it is not good science.
PAPEETE, TAHITI,
March, 1908
11
The Ways of Nature
by John Burroughs
Chapter 9: Do Animals Think and Reflect?
When we see the animals going about, living their lives in many ways as we live ours, seeking their food,
avoiding their enemies, building their nests, digging their holes, laying up stores, migrating, courting,
playing, fighting, showing cunning, courage, fear, joy, anger, rivalry, grief, profiting by experience,
following their leaders,—when we see all this, I say, what more natural than that we should ascribe to
them powers akin to our own, and look upon them as thinking, reasoning, and reflecting. A hasty survey
of animal life is sure to lead to this conclusion. An animal is not a clod, nor a block, nor a machine. It is
alive and self-directing, it has some sort of psychic life, yet the more I study the subject, the more I am
persuaded that with the probable exception of the dog on occasions, and of the apes, animals do not
think or reflect in any proper sense of those words. As I have before said, animal life shows in an active
and free state that kind of intelligence that pervades and governs the whole organic world,—intelligence
that takes no thought of itself. Here, in front of my window, is a black [Pg 152] raspberry bush. A few
weeks ago its branches curved upward, with their ends swinging fully two feet above the ground; now
those ends are thrust down through the weeds and are fast rooted to the soil. Did the raspberry bush
think, or choose what it should do? Did it reflect and say, Now is the time for me to bend down and
thrust my tip into the ground? To all intents and purposes yes, yet there was no voluntary mental
process, as in similar acts of our own. We say its nature prompts it to act thus and thus, and that is all
the explanation we can give. Or take the case of the pine or the spruce tree that loses its central and
leading shoot. When this happens, does the tree start a new bud and then develop a new shoot to take
the place of the lost leader? No, a branch from the first ring of branches below, probably the most
vigorous of the whorl, is promoted to the leadership. Slowly it rises up, and in two or three years it
reaches the upright position and is leading the tree upward. This, I suspect, is just as much an act of
conscious intelligence and of reason as is much to which we are so inclined to apply those words in
animal life. I suppose it is all foreordained in the economy of the tree, if we could penetrate that
economy. It is in this sense that Nature thinks in the animal, and the vegetable, and the mineral worlds.
Her thinking is more flexible and adaptive in the vegetable than in the mineral, and more so in the
animal [Pg 153] than in the vegetable, and the most so of all in the mind of man.
The way the wild apple trees and the red thorn trees in the pasture, as described by Thoreau, triumph
over the cattle that year after year browse them down, suggests something almost like human tactics.
The cropped and bruised tree, not being allowed to shoot upward, spreads more and more laterally,
thus pushing its enemies farther and farther away, till, after many years, a shoot starts up from the top
of the thorny, knotted cone, and in one season, protected by this cheval-de-frise, attains a height
beyond the reach of the cattle, and the victory is won. Now the whole push of the large root system
goes into the central shoot and the tree is rapidly developed.
This almost looks like a well-laid scheme on the part of the tree to defeat its enemies. But see how
inevitable the whole process is. Check the direct flow of a current and it will flow out at the sides; check
the side issues and they will push out on their sides, and so on. So it is with the tree or seedling. The
more it is cropped, the more it branches and rebranches, pushing out laterally as its vertical growth is
checked, till it has surrounded the central stalk on all sides with a dense, thorny hedge. Then as this stalk
is no longer cropped, it leads the tree upward. The lateral branches are starved, and in a few years the
tree stands with little or no evidence [Pg 154] of the ordeal it has passed through. In like manner the
12
nature of the animals prompts them to the deeds they do, and we think of them as the result of a
mental process, because similar acts in ourselves are the result of such a process.
See how the mice begin to press into our buildings as the fall comes on. Do they know winter is coming?
In the same way the vegetable world knows it is coming when it prepares for winter, or the insect world
when it makes ready, but not as you and I know it. The woodchuck "holes up" in late September; the
crows flock and select their rookery about the same time, and the small wood newts or salamanders
soon begin to migrate to the marshes. They all know winter is coming, just as much as the tree knows,
when in August it forms its new buds for the next year, or as the flower knows that its color and
perfume will attract the insects, and no more. The general intelligence of nature settles all these and
similar things.
When a bird selects a site for its nest, it seems, on first view, as if it must actually think, reflect,
compare, as you and I do when we decide where to place our house. I saw a little chipping sparrow
trying to decide between two raspberry bushes. She kept going from one to the other, peering,
inspecting, and apparently weighing the advantages of each. I saw a robin in the woodbine on the side
of the house trying to decide which particular place was the best site [Pg 155] for her nest. She hopped
to this tangle of shoots and sat down, then to that, she turned around, she readjusted herself, she
looked about, she worked her feet beneath her, she was slow in making up her mind. Did she make up
her mind? Did she think, compare, weigh? I do not believe it. When she found the right conditions, she
no doubt felt pleasure and satisfaction, and that settled the question. An inward, instinctive want was
met and satisfied by an outward material condition. In the same way the hermit crab goes from shell to
shell upon the beach, seeking one to its liking. Sometimes two crabs fall to fighting over a shell that each
wants. Can we believe that the hermit crab thinks and reasons? It selects the suitable shell instinctively,
and not by an individual act of judgment. Instinct is not always inerrant, though it makes fewer mistakes
than reason does. The red squirrel usually knows how to come at the meat in the butternut with the
least gnawing, but now and then he makes a mistake and strikes the edge of the kernel, instead of the
flat side. The cliff swallow will stick her mud nest under the eaves of a barn where the boards are planed
so smooth that the nest sooner or later is bound to fall. She seems to have no judgment in the matter.
Her ancestors built upon the face of high cliffs, where the mud adhered more firmly.
A wood thrush began a nest in one of my maples, as usual making the foundation of dry leaves, bits [Pg
156] of paper, and dry grass. After the third day the site on the branch was bare, the wind having swept
away every vestige of the nest. As I passed beneath the tree I saw the thrush standing where the nest
had been, apparently in deep thought. A few days afterward I looked again, and the nest was
completed. The bird had got ahead of the wind at last. The nesting-instinct had triumphed over the
weather.
Take the case of the little yellow warbler when the cowbird drops her egg into its nest—does anything
like a process of thought or reflection pass in the bird's mind then? The warbler is much disturbed when
she discovers the strange egg, and her mate appears to share her agitation. Then after a time, and after
the two have apparently considered the matter together, the mother bird proceeds to bury the egg by
building another nest on top of the old one. If another cowbird's egg is dropped in this one, she will
proceed to get rid of this in the same way. This all looks very like reflection. But let us consider the
matter a moment. This thing between the cowbird and the warbler has been going on for innumerable
generations. The yellow warbler seems to be the favorite host of this parasite, and something like a
special instinct may have grown up in the warbler with reference to this strange egg. The bird reacts, as
the psychologists say, at sight of it, then she proceeds to dispose of it in the way [Pg 157] above
13
described. All yellow warblers act in the same manner, which is the way of instinct. Now if this
procedure was the result of an individual thought or calculation on the part of the birds, they would not
all do the same thing; different lines of conduct would be hit upon. How much simpler and easier it
would be to throw the egg out—how much more like an act of rational intelligence. So far as I know, no
bird does eject this parasitical egg, and no other bird besides the yellow warbler gets rid of it in the way I
have described. I have found a deserted phœbe's nest with one egg of the phœbe and one of the
cowbird in it.
Some of our wild birds have changed their habits of nesting, coming from the woods and the rocks to
the protection of our buildings. The phœbe-bird and the cliff swallow are marked examples. We ascribe
the change to the birds' intelligence, but to my mind it shows only their natural adaptiveness. Take the
cliff swallow, for instance; it has largely left the cliffs for the eaves of our buildings. How naturally and
instinctively this change has come about! In an open farming country insect life is much more varied and
abundant than in a wild, unsettled country. This greater food supply naturally attracts the swallows.
Then the protecting eaves of the buildings would stimulate their nesting-instincts. The abundance of
mud along the highways and about the farm would also no doubt have its effect, and the [Pg 158] birds
would adopt the new sites as a matter of course. Or take the phœbe, which originally built its nest under
ledges, and does so still to some extent. It, too, would find a more abundant food supply in the vicinity
of farm-buildings and bridges. The protected nesting-sites afforded by sheds and porches would likewise
stimulate its nesting-instincts, and attract the bird as we see it attracted each spring.
Nearly everything an animal does is the result of an inborn instinct acted upon by an outward stimulus.
The margin wherein intelligent choice plays a part is very small. But it does at times play a part—
perceptive intelligence, but not rational intelligence. The insects do many things that look like
intelligence, yet how these things differ from human intelligence may be seen in the case of one of our
solitary wasps,—the mud-dauber,—which sometimes builds its cell with great labor, then seals it up
without laying its egg and storing it with the accustomed spiders. Intelligence never makes that kind of a
mistake, but instinct does. Instinct acts more in the invariable way of a machine. Certain of the solitary
wasps bring their game—spider, or bug, or grasshopper—and place it just at the entrance of their hole,
and then go into their den apparently to see that all is right before they carry it in.
Fabre, the French naturalist, experimented with one of these wasps, as follows: While the wasp was in
its den he moved its grasshopper a few inches [Pg 159] away. The wasp came out, brought it to the
opening as before, and went within a second time; again the game was removed, again the wasp came
out and brought it back and entered her nest as before. This little comedy was repeated over and over;
each time the wasp felt compelled to enter her hole before dragging in the grasshopper. She was like a
machine that would work that way and no other. Step must follow step in just such order. Any
interruption of the regular method and she must begin over again. This is instinct, and the incident
shows how widely it differs from conscious intelligence.
If you have a tame chipmunk, turn him loose in an empty room and give him some nuts. Finding no
place to hide them, he will doubtless carry them into a corner and pretend to cover them up. You will
see his paws move quickly about them for an instant as if in the act of pulling leaves or mould over
them. His machine, too, must work in that way. After the nuts have been laid down, the next thing in
order is to cover them, and he makes the motions all in due form. Intelligence would have omitted this
useless act.
14
A canary-bird in its cage will go through all the motions of taking a bath in front of the cup that holds its
drinking-water when it can only dip its bill into the liquid. The sight or touch of the water excites it and
sets it going, and with now and then a drop thrown from its beak it will keep up the flirting [Pg 160] and
fluttering motion of its tail and wings precisely as if taking a real instead of an imaginary bath.
Attempt to thwart the nesting-instinct in a bird and see how persistent it is, and how blind! One spring a
pair of English sparrows tried to build a nest on the plate that upholds the roof of my porch. They were
apparently attracted by an opening about an inch wide in the top of the plate, that ran the whole length
of it. The pair were busy nearly the whole month of April in carrying nesting-material to various points
on that plate. That big crack or opening which was not large enough to admit their bodies seemed to
have a powerful fascination for them. They carried straws and weed stalks and filled up one portion of
it, and then another and another, till the crack was packed with rubbish from one end of the porch to
the other, and the indignant broom of the housekeeper grew tired of sweeping up the litter. The birds
could not effect an entrance into the interior of the plate, but they could thrust in their nesting-material,
and so they persisted week after week, stimulated by the presence of a cavity beyond their reach. The
case is a good illustration of the blind working of instinct.
Animals have keen perceptions,—keener in many respects than our own,—but they form no
conceptions, have no powers of comparing one thing with another. They live entirely in and through
their senses.
[Pg 161] It is as if the psychic world were divided into two planes, one above the other,—the plane of
sense and the plane of spirit. In the plane of sense live the lower animals, only now and then just
breaking for a moment into the higher plane. In the world of sense man is immersed also—this is his
start and foundation; but he rises into the plane of spirit, and here lives his proper life. He is
emancipated from sense in a way that beasts are not.
Thus, I think, the line between animal and human psychology may be pretty clearly drawn. It is not a
dead-level line. Instinct is undoubtedly often modified by intelligence, and intelligence is as often guided
or prompted by instinct, but one need not hesitate long as to which side of the line any given act of man
or beast belongs. When the fox resorts to various tricks to outwit and delay the hound (if he ever
consciously does so), he exercises a kind of intelligence,—the lower form which we call cunning,—and
he is prompted to this by an instinct of self-preservation. When the birds set up a hue and cry about a
hawk or an owl, or boldly attack him, they show intelligence in its simpler form, the intelligence that
recognizes its enemies, prompted again by the instinct of self-preservation. When a hawk does not
know a man on horseback from a horse, it shows a want of intelligence. When a crow is kept away from
a corn-field by a string stretched around it, the fact shows how masterful is its fear and how [Pg 162]
shallow its wit. When a cat or a dog, or a horse or a cow, learns to open a gate or a door, it shows a
degree of intelligence—power to imitate, to profit by experience. A machine could not learn to do this. If
the animal were to close the door or gate behind it, that would be another step in intelligence. But its
direct wants have no relation to the closing of the door, only to the opening of it. To close the door
involves an after-thought that an animal is not capable of. A horse will hesitate to go upon thin ice or
upon a frail bridge, even though it has never had any experience with thin ice or frail bridges. This, no
doubt, is an inherited instinct, which has arisen in its ancestors from their fund of general experience
with the world. How much with them has depended upon a secure footing! A pair of house wrens had a
nest in my well-curb; when the young were partly grown and heard any one come to the curb, they
would set up a clamorous calling for food. When I scratched against the sides of the curb beneath them
like some animal trying to climb up, their voices instantly hushed; the instinct of fear promptly overcame
15
the instinct of hunger. Instinct is intelligent, but it is not the same as acquired individual intelligence; it is
untaught.
When the nuthatch carries a fragment of a hickory-nut to a tree and wedges it into a crevice in the bark,
the bird is not showing an individual act of intelligence: all nuthatches do this; it is a race [Pg 163]
instinct. The act shows intelligence,—that is, it adapts means to an end,—but it is not like human or
individual intelligence, which adapts new means to old ends, or old means to new ends, and which
springs up on the occasion. Jays and chickadees hold the nut or seed they would peck under the foot,
but the nuthatch makes a vise to hold it of the bark of the tree, and one act is just as intelligent as the
other; both are the promptings of instinct. But when man makes a vise, or a wedge, or a bootjack, he
uses his individual intelligence. When the jay carries away the corn you put out in winter and hides it in
old worms' nests and knot-holes and crevices in trees, he is obeying the instinct of all his tribe to pilfer
and hide things,—an instinct that plays its part in the economy of nature, as by its means many acorns
and chestnuts get planted and large seeds widely disseminated. By this greed of the jay the wingless
nuts take flight, oaks are planted amid the pines, and chestnuts amid the hemlocks.
Speaking of nuts reminds me of an incident I read of the deer or white-footed mouse—an incident that
throws light on the limitation of animal intelligence. The writer gave the mouse hickory-nuts, which it
attempted to carry through a crack between the laths in the kitchen wall. The nuts were too large to go
through the crack. The mouse would try to push them through; failing in that, he [Pg 164] would go
through and then try to pull them after him. All night he or his companion seems to have kept up this
futile attempt, fumbling and dropping the nut every few minutes. It never occurred to the mouse to
gnaw the hole larger, as it would instantly have done had the hole been too small to admit its own body.
It could not project its mind thus far; it could not get out of itself sufficiently to regard the nut in its
relation to the hole, and it is doubtful if any four-footed animal is capable of that degree of reflection
and comparison. Nothing in its own life or in the life of its ancestors had prepared it to meet that kind of
a difficulty with nuts. And yet the writer who made the above observation says that when confined in a
box, the sides of which are of unequal thickness, the deer mouse, on attempting to gnaw out, almost
invariably attacks the thinnest side. How does he know which is the thinnest side? Probably by a delicate
and trained sense of feeling or hearing. In gnawing through obstructions from within, or from without,
he and his kind have had ample experience.
Now when we come to insects, we find that the above inferences do not hold. It has been observed that
when a solitary wasp finds its hole in the ground too small to admit the spider or other insect which it
has brought, it falls to and enlarges it. In this and in other respects certain insects seem to take the step
of reason that quadrupeds are incapable of.
[Pg 165] Lloyd Morgan relates at some length the experiments he tried with his fox terrier, Tony, seeking
to teach him how to bring a stick through a fence with vertical palings. The spaces would allow the dog
to pass through, but the palings caught the ends of the stick which the dog carried in his mouth. When
his master encouraged him, he pushed and struggled vigorously. Not succeeding, he went back, lay
down, and began gnawing the stick. Then he tried again, and stuck as before, but by a chance
movement of his head to one side finally got the stick through. His master patted him approvingly and
sent him for the stick again. Again he seized it by the middle, and of course brought up against the
palings. After some struggles he dropped it and came through without it. Then, encouraged by his
master, he put his head through, seized the stick, and tried to pull it through, dancing up and down in
his endeavors. Time after time and day after day the experiment was repeated with practically the same
results. The dog never mastered the problem. He could not see the relation of that stick to the opening
16
in the fence. At one time he worked and tugged three minutes trying to pull the stick through. Of
course, if he had had any mental conception of the problem or had thought about it at all, a single trial
would have convinced him as well as would a dozen trials. Mr. Morgan tried the experiment with other
dogs with like result. When [Pg 166] they did get the stick through, it was always by chance.
It has never been necessary that the dog or his ancestors should know how to fetch long sticks through a
narrow opening in a fence. Hence he does not know the trick of it. But we have a little bird that knows
the trick. The house wren will carry a twig three inches long through a hole of half that diameter. She
knows how to manage it because the wren tribe have handled twigs so long in building their nests that
this knowledge has become a family instinct.
What we call the intelligence of animals is limited for the most part to sense perception and sense
memory. We teach them certain things, train them to do tricks quite beyond the range of their natural
intelligence, not because we enlighten their minds or develop their reason, but mainly by the force of
habit. Through repetition the act becomes automatic. Who ever saw a trained animal, unless it be the
elephant, do anything that betrayed the least spark of conscious intelligence? The trained pig, or the
trained dog, or the trained lion does its "stunt" precisely as a machine would do it—without any more
appreciation of what it is doing. The trainer and public performer find that things must always be done
in the same fixed order; any change, anything unusual, any strange sound, light, color, or movement,
and trouble at once ensues.
[Pg 167] I read of a beaver that cut down a tree which was held in such a way that it did not fall, but
simply dropped down the height of the stump. The beaver cut it off again; again it dropped and refused
to fall; he cut it off a third and a fourth time: still the tree stood. Then he gave it up. Now, so far as I can
see, the only independent intelligence the animal showed was when it ceased to cut off the tree. Had it
been a complete automaton, it would have gone on cutting—would it not?—till it made stove-wood of
the whole tree. It was confronted by a new problem, and after a while it took the hint. Of course it did
not understand what was the matter, as you and I would have, but it evidently concluded that
something was wrong. Was this of itself an act of intelligence? Though it may be that its ceasing to cut
off the tree was simply the result of discouragement, and involved no mental conclusion at all. It is a
new problem, a new condition, that tests an animal's intelligence. How long it takes a caged bird or
beast to learn that it cannot escape! What a man would see at a glance it takes weeks or months to
pound into the captive bird, or squirrel, or coon. When the prisoner ceases to struggle, it is probably not
because it has at last come to understand the situation, but because it is discouraged. It is checked, but
not enlightened.
Even so careful an observer as Gilbert White credits the swallow with an act of judgment to [Pg 168]
which it is not entitled. He says that in order that the mud nest may not advance too rapidly and so fall
of its own weight, the bird works at it only in the morning, and plays and feeds the rest of the day, thus
giving the mud a chance to harden. Had not the genial parson observed that this is the practice of all
birds during nest-building—that they work in the early morning hours and feed and amuse themselves
the rest of the day? In the case of the mud-builders, this interim of course gives the mud a chance to
harden, but are we justified in crediting them with this forethought?
Such skill and intelligence as a bird seems to display in the building of its nest, and yet at times such
stupidity! I have known a phœbe-bird to start four nests at once, and work more or less upon all of
them. She had deserted the ancestral sites under the shelving rocks and come to a new porch, upon the
plate of which she started her four nests. She blundered because her race had had little or no
17
experience with porches. There were four or more places upon the plate just alike, and whichever one
of these she chanced to strike with her loaded beak she regarded as the right one. Her instinct served
her up to a certain point, but it did not enable her to discriminate between those rafters. Where a little
original intelligence should have come into play she was deficient. Her progenitors Had built under rocks
where there was little chance [Pg 169] for mistakes of this sort, and they had learned through ages of
experience to blend the nest with its surroundings, by the use of moss, the better to conceal it. My
phœbe brought her moss to the new timbers of the porch, where it had precisely the opposite effect to
what it had under the gray mossy rocks.
I was amused at the case of a robin that recently came to my knowledge. The bird built its nest in the
south end of a rude shed that covered a table at a railroad terminus upon which a locomotive was
frequently turned. When her end of the shed was turned to the north she built another nest in the
temporary south end, and as the reversal of the shed ends continued from day to day, she soon had two
nests with two sets of eggs. When I last heard from her, she was consistently sitting on that particular
nest which happened to be for the time being in the end of the shed facing toward the south. The
bewildered bird evidently had had no experience with the tricks of turn-tables!
An intelligent man once told me that crabs could reason, and this was his proof: In hunting for crabs in
shallow water, he found one that had just cast its shell, but the crab put up just as brave a fight as ever,
though of course it was powerless to inflict any pain; as soon as the creature found that its bluff game
did not work, it offered no further resistance. Now I should as soon say a wasp reasoned [Pg 170]
because a stingless drone, or male, when you capture him, will make all the motions with its body,
curving and thrusting, that its sting-equipped fellows do. This action is from an inherited instinct, and is
purely automatic. The wasp is not putting up a bluff game; it is really trying to sting you, but has not the
weapon. The shell-less crab quickly reacts at your approach, as is its nature to do, and then quickly
ceases its defense because in its enfeebled condition the impulse of defense is feeble also. Its surrender
was on physiological, not upon rational grounds.
Thus do we without thinking impute the higher faculties to even the lowest forms of animal life. Much in
our own lives is purely automatic—the quick reaction to appropriate stimuli, as when we ward off a
blow, or dodge a missile, or make ourselves agreeable to the opposite sex; and much also is inherited or
unconsciously imitative.
Because man, then, is half animal, shall we say that the animal is half man? This seems to be the logic of
some people. The animal man, while retaining much of his animality, has evolved from it higher faculties
and attributes, while our four-footed kindred have not thus progressed.
Man is undoubtedly of animal origin, but his rise occurred when the principle of variation was much
more active, when the forms and forces of nature were much more youthful and plastic, when [Pg 171]
the seething and fermenting of the vital fluids were at a high pitch in the far past, and it was high tide
with the creative impulse. The world is aging, and, no doubt, the power of initiative in Nature is
becoming less and less. I think it safe to say that the worm no longer aspires to be man.
18
“200 Years of Progress in the Louisiana Sugar Industry: A Brief History”
by Dr. Charley Richard
The Louisiana territory, named for Louis the XIV, king of France, was claimed by de La Salle in
1682. Although sugarcane originated in New Guinea, Louisiana has long been known for its
importance in the world’s sugar industry. Columbus, in his second voyage to the New World in 1493
carried sugarcane from the Canary Islands to Santo Domingo.
Sugarcane may have been first planted in Louisiana during the late 1600s by Iberville, the “Founder
of Louisiana.” However, there are no records of successful cane production until 1751 when Jesuit
missionaries carried sugarcane plants, with help from experienced field workers, to what is now
downtown New Orleans where the Jesuit Church stands on Baronne Street. The cane, “Creole,” was
sweet and excellent for chewing. However, it was very susceptible to the frosts that occurred in the
less than tropical area of New Orleans. The plantings survived and by the late 1750s one sugar mill
had already been built by Claude-Joseph Dubreuil de Villars of Esplanade Street.
Other planters followed his example and the industry attempted to expand. However, the
manufacture of sugar, which had moved from Europe and spread throughout the Americas, was
difficult because of the short growing season, early winter frosts and immature cane in Louisiana.
“Tafia,” a rum-like drink, was produced from cane juice and consumed in great quantity. Enough
sugar was produced to satisfy the modest New Orleans market in some years.
The sugar was of extremely poor quality and could not be shipped back to France. This caused the
developing industry to falter and it was not until the end of the 18th century when several factors
enabled the industry to blossom. Of particular importance was the indigo crop, which had been a
major economic factor to the area but was lost due to wet weather and insects. A new cane variety,
“Otaheite” (Tahiti or Bourbon cane), was imported from Santo Domingo around 1797, and Etienne
de Bore provided the manpower and expertise for sugar manufacture. De Bore married the daughter
of the former treasurer of Louisiana, Jean-Baptiste Destrehan, and they risked their fortune in the
manufacture of sugar. With the expert help of a sugar maker, Antoine Morin from Santo Domingo,
de Bore succeeded in making sugar granulate at his wife’s family property (now Audubon Park in
New Orleans). De Bore was not the first to have accomplished the feat, but he was the first to do
it in a manner judged to be economically successful. His first crop consisted of some 100 hogsheads
(100,000 lbs.) of sugar which were sold for 12.5 cents per lb., along with 50 cents per gallon for
molasses, which netted him a profit of $12,000. Because of this success, the commencement of the
U.S. sugar industry is cited as 1795.
In 1803, the U.S. purchased the territory of Louisiana from the French. Anglo Americans poured into
Louisiana and joined others in developing the sugar industry. The War of 1812 temporarily slowed
the development of the industry.
Several factors were instrumental in renewing the industry’s growth. The use of steam power in
milling cane, proposed earlier, was finally adopted in the early 1800s in the Louisiana sugar industry.
This allowed the use of more efficient horizontal mills which were larger than those used with animal
power. In 1825 two new varieties, which became known as Louisiana Purple and Louisiana Striped,
were shipped to Louisiana. Both canes were more frost resistant than Creole or Otaheite which
allowed the industry to quickly expand outside of the New Orleans area. Norbert Rillieux, a free man
of color born in New Orleans and educated in Paris, installed his invention, the first triple-effect
evaporator, in 1834. However, it was not until 1843-1844 that his multiple-effect evaporation
process was proven successful. This invention, still used today, has proven to be one of the greatest
19
contributions to the world’s sugar industry. Other inventions which proved successful at about the
same time were the centrifuge, condenser and polariscope.
The planters and processors of that time were faced with the constant risk of frost, floods, cane pests,
animal and insect pests, sickness among slaves, animal diseases and falling market prices. One of the
largest problems was the need for labor. Slavery proved to be the answer and the industry grew to
300,000 slaves prior to 1860. The catastrophic effects of the Civil War on the sugar industry can be
easily seen by comparing the 264,000 short tons of sugar produced in 1861 with the 5,971 short tons
produced in 1864. Sugar producing plantations decreased from 1,200 in 24 parishes in 1861 to 175
plantations in 16 parishes in 1864.
Following the Civil War, the industry slowly began to reorganize, although labor was still the major
problem. The industry was forced to accept change in order to survive. Mechanization, first animal,
then steam, electricity and gasoline, quickly spread throughout the industry. Chemical fertilizers
replaced manures. The Louisiana State University Experiment Station conducted research in a
number of areas. New varieties were imported from foreign lands. Consolidation continued with a
further reduction in the number of factories --- each growing in power, efficiency and size.
World War I raised sugar prices briefly, but they fell quickly after the war was over. New diseases
entered the cane belt, and along with poor weather, caused the near destruction of the cane industry.
Sugar production dropped to the lowest levels (47,000 tons) since the Civil War. Mosaic resistant
POJ varieties from Java were imported. These canes were spread across the industry which quickly
recovered from the onset of new diseases. It was at this time that the American Sugar Cane League,
Louisiana State University, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture joined forces to develop varieties
for the Louisiana sugar industry.
The Great Depression brought drastic changes in the value of the industry and ownership of farms
and factories. World War II brought sugar rations to the U.S., but more importantly, an extreme
shortage of labor. Mechanical harvesters cut the entire Louisiana crop by the late 1940s while
mechanical planters were soon developed. Research programs were instituted in all areas of
production by the various agencies involved in Louisiana. These programs must continue in an effort
to further increase production efficiency and to overcome the numerous issues facing the industry
including environmental regulations.
During the 1990s, the industry’s acreage has reached an all time high. Perils faced by early growers
and processors are still affecting the industry. However, in the 200th year of production (1994) the
industry has set a new record for Louisiana sugar production, having recovered over 1.04 million tons
of sugar. This is a remarkable feat for an industry that has a very short growing season, frosts and
freezes too early in the harvest season, and an industry that many say shouldn’t even be producing
sugarcane. This tremendous accomplishment and the 200 years of production occurred because of
the diligence of the many members of the Louisiana sugar industry — from Iberville, to de Bore to
Rillieux, to the modern-day scientists, growers, processors and other individuals. The year 1995 is
not only a time to commemorate 200 years of production, but also a time to work toward higher
goals, including increased efficiency in the global community in which Louisiana now operates.
20
“How Sugar Changed the World”
by Heather Whipps
What's not to like about candy, ice cream and all those other sweet treats made with everybody's
favorite indulgence, sugar?
Plenty, as it turns out, beyond the way it expands waistlines and causes cavities. It's unlikely that many
candy-lovers in the United States think about history while quaffing an estimated 100 pounds of sugar
per year, but sweet stuff once played a major role in one of the sourest eras in modern times.
White Gold, as British colonists called it, was the engine of the slave trade that brought millions of
Africans to the Americas beginning in the early 16th-century. The history of every nation in the
Caribbean, much of South America and parts of the Southern United States was forever shaped by sugar
cane plantations started as cash crops by European superpowers.
Profit from the sugar trade was so significant that it may have even helped America achieve
independence from Great Britain.
The Trade Triangle
Today more sugar is produced in Brazil than anywhere else in the world even though, ironically, the crop
never grew wild in the Americas. Sugar cane — native to Southeast Asia — first made its way to the New
World with Christopher Columbus during his 1492 voyage to the Dominican Republic, where it grew well
in the tropical environment.
Noting sugar cane's potential as income for the new settlements in the Americas — Europeans were
already hooked on sugar coming from the Eastern colonies — Spanish colonizers snipped seeds from
Columbus' fields in the Dominican Republic and planted them throughout their burgeoning Caribbean
colonies. By the mid 16th-century the Portuguese had brought some to Brazil and, soon after, the sweet
cane made its way to British, Dutch and French colonies such as Barbados and Haiti.
It wasn't long, however, before the early settlers realized they were lacking sufficient manpower to
plant, harvest and process the backbreaking crop.
The first slave ships arrived in 1505 and continued unabated for more than 300 years. Most came from
western Africa, where Portuguese colonies had already established trading outposts for ivory, pepper
and other goods. To most of the European merchants, the people they put on cargo ships across the
Atlantic — a horrendous voyage known as the Middle Passage — were merely an extension of the
trading system already in place.
Sugar slavery was the key component in what historians call The Trade Triangle, a network whereby
slaves were sent to work on New World plantations, the product of their labor was sent to a European
capital to be sold and other goods were brought to Africa to purchase more slaves.
By the middle of the 19th century, more than 10 million Africans had been forcibly removed to the New
World and distributed among the sugar plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean.
21
Sugar boosts independence
During those three centuries, sugar was by far the most important of the overseas commodities that
accounted for a third of Europe's entire economy. As technologies got more efficient and diversified,
adding molasses and rum to the plantation byproducts, sugar barons from St. Kitts to Jamaica became
enormously wealthy.
The importance of those sugar-rich colonies, especially those belonging to Britain and France, had
enormous consequences for the map of the Americas during the 1700s.
Britain lost its 13 American colonies to independence in part because its military was busy protecting its
sugar islands, many historians have argued.
As opposed to the slaves working plantations in the U.S. South, Africans on Caribbean sugar plantations
(and the islands themselves) outnumbered their European owners by a wide margin. The British planters
lived in constant fear of revolt and demanded soldiers for protection. Several decisive battles of the
Revolutionary War would have turned out differently had Britain thrown its full might behind the war,
experts believe.
Sizable garrisons were also stationed in the West Indies to guard the few sugar holdings Britain had left
at the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763. In carving up the Americas after the fighting stopped, King
George III had decided to cede a few of his Caribbean sugar islands to France in order to secure a sizable
chunk of North America.
How important was sugar cane in that time?
In swapping sweet and profitable Guadeloupe for the barren, sugar-free wasteland of Canada, plus most
of the land east of the Mississippi River, many Englishmen thought the King got a raw deal.
22
“Sugar Cane”
by Alfred Corn
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their color is a diabolic dye.”
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refined, and join the angelic train.
Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”
The mother bending over a baby named Shug
chuckles, “Gimme some sugar,” just to preface
a flurry of kisses sweet as sugar cane.
Later, when she stirs a spoonful of Domino
into her coffee, who’s to tell the story
how a ten-foot-tall reed from the Old World,
on being brought to the New, was raised and cropped
so cooks could sweeten whatever tasted bitter?
Or how grade-A granulated began as a thick
black syrup boiled for hours in an iron vat
until it was refined to pure, white crystal.
When I was a child whose payoff for obeying
orders was red-and-white-striped candy canes,
I knew that sugar was love.
The first time someone called me “sweetheart,”
I knew sugar was love.
And when I tasted my slice of the wedding cake,
iced white and washed down with sweet champagne,
don’t you know sugar was love.
One day Evelina who worked for us
showed up with her son Bubba and laughed,
“Now y’all can play together.” He had a sweet
nature, but even so we raised a little Cain,
and Daddy told her not to bring him back.
He thought I’d begun to sound like colored people.
She smiled, dropped her eyes, kept working.
And kept putting on weight. She later died of stroke.
Daddy developed diabetes by age fifty-five,
insulin burned what his blood couldn’t handle.
Chronic depressions I have, a nutritionist
gently termed “the sugar blues,” but damned
if any lyrics come out of them, baby.
Black-and-white negatives from a picture
history of the sugar trade develop
in my dreams, a dozen able-bodied slaves
23
hacking forward through a field of cane.
Sweat trickles down from forehead into eye
as they sheave up stalks and cart them to the mill
where grinding iron rollers will express a thin
sucrose solution that, when not refined,
goes from blackstrap molasses on into rum,
a demon conveniently negotiable for slaves.
The master under the impression he owned
these useful properties naturally never thought
of offering them a piece of the wedding cake,
the big white house that bubbling brown sugar built
and paid for, unnaturally processed by Domino.
Phillis Wheatley said the sweet Christ was brought
here from Asia Minor to redeem an African child
and maybe her master’s soul as well. She wrote
as she lived, a model of refinement, yes,
but black as Abel racing through the canebrake,
demon bloodhounds baying in pursuit,
until at last his brother caught him,
expressed his rage, and rode back home to dinner.
Tell it to Fats Domino, to those who live
on Sugar Hill, tell it to unsuspecting Shug
as soon as she is old enough to hear it.
One day Evelina’s son waved goodbye
and climbed on board a northbound train,
black angels guiding him invisibly.
In class he quoted a sentence from Jean Toomer:
“Time and space have no meaning in a canefield.”
My father died last fall at eighty-one.
Love’s bitter, child, as often as it’s sweet.
Mm-mm, I sure do have the blues today:
Baby, will you give me some sugar?
24
“Sugar”
by Anup Shah
“The first sweetened cup of hot tea to be drunk by an English worker was a significant historical event,
because it prefigured the transformation of an entire society, a total remaking of its economic and social
basis. We must struggle to understand fully the consequences of that and kindred events for upon them
was erected an entirely different conception of the relationship between producers and consumers, of
the meaning of work, of the definition of self, of the nature of things.”
— Sydney Mintz, Sweetness and Power, quoted by Richard H. Robbins, in Global Problems and
the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), p.208.
The consumption of sugar and its history gives a great insight into various inter-related issues, such as
economics, human rights, slavery, environmental issues, health, consumerism issues and so on. We also
see a hint at the “hidden costs” and impacts to society.
Initially sugar was a luxury item
Historically, around 1000 years ago, sugar was used in a variety of ways, such as:
For medicinal purposes (because it can be beneficial in limited quantities)
As a preservative
As a spice
As a sweetener, of course.
Yet up to the seventeenth century, it was an expensive luxury item. To be consumed by the masses, this
luxury had to be turned into a necessity and be available in abundance to drive prices down.
Colonialism, slavery and sugar plantations
Sugar was a lucrative trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The growing of Spain and Portugal’s
sugarcane was expanded into the Caribbean and parts of South America. From there, it would be
shipped to places like Lisbon for refining.
While this led to an industry growing from this, it also came with some costs. One such cost was slavery.
“Modern economists like to talk about the spin-off effects of certain commodities, that is the extent to
which their production results in the development of subsidiary industries. … Sugar production also
produced subsidiary economic activities; these included slavery, the provisioning of the sugar producers,
shipping, refining, storage, and wholesale and retail trade.
… The slave trade was a major factor in the expansion of the sugar industries. … The growing demand for
and production of sugar created the plantation economy in the New World and was largely responsible
for the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
From 1701 to 1810 almost one million slaves were brought to Barbados and Jamaica to work the sugar
plantations.
25
… [S]ugar became the focus of an industry, a sugar complex that combined the sugar plantations, the
slave trade, long-distance shipping, wholesale and retail trade, and investment finance.”
— Richard Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), pp.
215-216
Slave children were also used on sugar plantations.
Sugar then was turned into a necessity
As Robbins continues to point out, sugar consumption increased in the late seventeenth century in
Europe. In England and Wales, from 1663 to 1775 “consumption increased twentyfold” and “rose more
rapidly than bread, meat, and dairy products in the eighteenth century.” (p.216).
Why did this happen?
Summarizing from Robbins (pp. 216—217), there were numerous reasons, including:
An increased production of sugar led to a decrease in price. Hence, what was once confined to
the upper classes was more widely affordable to the middle classes as well. (For a while, prices
were still high due to tariffs and political influence of the powerful plantation owners etc.)
Benefits of sugar were widely touted by various authorities and heavily promoted in many
aspects of people’s lives.
It was used as a sweetener in other substances such as tea, coffee and cocoa.
Sugar’s reputation as a luxury good inspired the middle class to use it to emulate the wealthy.
Sugar was a sign of status! As the price of sugar declined further, even the poorer classes were
able to consume for this and the other reasons.
Government increases in purchase of sugar and sugar products led to further use as well. The
capture of Jamaica from the French led to more sugar plantations being captured and creating
rum rations for the British Navy.
Thus, “sugar production and consumption increased, as did the amount of land devoted to its
production, and the number of sugar mills and refineries, distilleries producing rum, and slaves
employed in the whole process. Most important, the profits generated by the sugar trade increased
dramatically.” (p.217)
As historians McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb also pointed out, as consumerism was rising in general,
innovative selling and cross-selling ideas were being used. This included selling sugar for a loss to help
sell other products in the shops:
“Even the humble eighteenth-century shopkeeper can be shown to have been the master of methods of
boosting sales which are, all too often, confidently attributed to the ingenuity of twentieth-century
commerce. The concept of the loss leader, for example, was well established amongst eighteenthcentury shopkeepers. As Campbell wrote in 1747 [citing The London Tradesman, 1747, pp. 188-9] “A
custom has prevailed amongst Grocers to sell Sugars for the Prime Cost, and [they] are out of Pocket by
the Sale”. The losses were not inconsiderable [but the] intention (as it still is today) was to attract
customers with this loss leader and then induce them to buy “other Commodities” (thereby boosting the
26
shop keeper’s turnover) on which they would have to “pay extravagant Prices” (thereby boosting the
shop keeper’s turnover).”
— Neil McKendrik, John Brewer, J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, (Hutchinson, 1983),
pp. 93-94
As Robbins also continues (p.218) further changes by the British government enabled more mass
consumption of sugar:
Removing tariffs on imports allowed of foreign sugar allowed more competition and a lowering
of prices so that nearly all levels of British society could afford sugar.
Abolishment of slavery in the early 1830s after abolishing the trade itself in 1807, led to the
need for technological improvements that further lowered the price.
An enormous employer of labor, capital and resources. But is it productive?
Sugar production and consumption increased. For example, it was used in greater quantities in tea and
preserves and chocolate increased in popularity. Given the rise in consumption of other sweet foods,
such as jams, sugar in bread, and later, in soda drinks and other confectioneries, candies, sweets and
fast foods etc, the amount of land to produce sugar, refine it, and support the industry has also
increased. That is, even more resources have been expended.
Sugar affects the environment in numerous ways:
Forests must be cleared to plant sugar
Wood or fossil fuel is needed in processing steps
Waste products from processing affect the environment
Parallel consumption of other items related to sugar, including coffee, tea, chocolate, etc all
collectively put additional resource requirements on the environment
Numerous “hidden” or “external” costs include (and this is a very limited set of examples):
o To create, maintain and support the office buildings where people work in these
industries
o To support the marketing
o To support efforts in creating demands as well as meeting real and resulting demands
o To distribute and sell
o To create new ideas and products
o To create, maintain and support factories to make the actual products
o To create the materials for packaging
o To deal with the waste/disposal of these packages
o To deal with resulting health problems and the resources used to deal with them
o To pay and support lobbyists to help governments and regulation agencies see their
perspectives
o and so on.
Furthermore, some of the industries involved in sugar (or sugar related products) have caused some
problems that other segments of society have to deal with. As an example, consider the following, about
Coca Cola:
27
“If the cultural, health and economic problems with Coke’s colonization of Latin America weren’t bad
enough, it also has a labor record that puts even most other multinational companies to shame. In
Guatemala and Colombia, there is strong evidence that the Coca-Cola company actively supported the
murders of union activists by paramilitary members at bottling plants run by its subsidiaries and
contractors over the years. In Mexico, El Salvador and other countries there have also been ample
allegations of the company using paramilitary strength to prevent unionizing and keep employees in
line.
In 2001, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the United Auto Workers (UAW) filed a lawsuit against Coke
for the murder of union activist Isidro Gil Segundo and an ongoing campaign of intimidation, terror,
murder and paramilitary activity against union members and leaders. Across the board, Coke and its
Latin American bottling partners, including Panamco and Bebidas y Alimentos, have waged vicious antiunion campaigns and been accused of rampant illegal labor practices, intimidation techniques, unfair
firings and physical attacks.
… Today, Coca-Cola plainly stands as an unvarnished symbol of neoliberalism and modern corporate
mercantilism. It is, plainly said, a multinational corporation exploiting cheap labor and “emerging
markets,” that employs an array of illegal and criminal business “strategies,” and utilizes powerful public
relations, marketing and lobbying powers to avoid accountability and fatten the company’s profits just
as its product fattens its consumers.”
— Kari Lydersen, Sugar and Blood: Coke in Latin America, Lip Magazine, 28 May 2002
Note here how a luxury-turned-necessity product consumed en masse has produced so many negative
side effects. Yet it is claimed as productive or desired because many jobs are said to be supported and
therefore it has created wealth for those in this industry (though from the above, we also see that not
all who work in this industry have necessarily benefitted).
It is, as a result, of some political sensitivity to even suggest that something like almost the entire sugar
industry (and all the things dependent on it, such as soda drinks and confectioneries, candies, etc)
wastes many resources and that the true costs (economic, political, social, health, environmental etc)
are not accounted for by the industry. After all, the way economic progress is measured today, through
things like growth rates, GDP, GNP etc, all these industries contribute to those measures. On paper
therefore, it looks like the economy is doing well!
Side Note»
Such a suggestion in the mainstream that this in fact is an enormous waste would lead to much
opposition. Hence, this is an example of how wasted capital leads to wasted labor and wasted
resources.
That it is not even discussed in the mainstream of economics, media, politics, etc, is of no surprise, as
much of today’s numerous industries are built off such “externalized” costs and effects. To criticize the
core would be to shake one of the foundations of prosperity in many wealthy nations of today.
If many such industries were to shed waste in this way there would be a lot of unemployement! Yet, as
J.W. Smith suggests in his book, World’s Wasted Wealth, the way to deal with this is to share the
28
remaining productive jobs (through a reduction in the work week). This is quite desirable not from a
lets-all-be-lazy perspective, but because as many health professionals have long said, many people in
developing and developed nations alike all work excessively unhealthy hours. These saved hours would
allow parents more time with their children and families, as well. Of course, this is a complex issue and
not as simple as that. More on this larger and deeper notion of waste and wealth is discussed a bit later
on in the waste page.
Children — that ultimate “market”
The increasing consumption of sugar and related products has of course also been directed towards
children and Eric Schlosser, author of New York Times bestseller, Fast Food Nation, is worth quoting:
“’Liquid Candy,’ a 1999 study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, describes who is not
benefiting from the beverage industry’s latest marketing efforts: the [United States’s] children.
In 1978, the typical teenage boy in the United States drank about seven ounces of soda
every day; today he drinks nearly three times that amount, deriving 9 percent of his
daily caloric intake from soft drinks.
Soda consumption among teenage girls has doubled within the same period, reaching
an average of twelve ounces a day.
A significant number of teenage boys are now drinking five or more cans of soda every
day.
Each can contains the equivalent of about ten teaspoons of sugar. Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Dr
Pepper also contain caffeine. These sodas provide empty calories and have replaced far more nutritious
beverages in the American diet.
Excessive soda consumption in childhood can lead to calcium deficiencies and a greater
likelihood of bone fractures.
About twenty years ago, teenage boys in the United States drank twice as much milk as
soda; now they drink twice as much soda as milk.
Soft-drink consumption has also become commonplace among American toddlers.
About one-fifth of the nation’s one—and two-year olds now drink soda.
“In one of the most despicable marketing gambits,” Michael Jacobson, the author of
“Liquid Candy” reports, “Pepsi, Dr Pepper and Seven-Up encourage feeding soft drinks
to babies by licensing their logos to a major maker of baby bottles, Munchkin Bottling,
Inc.”
A 1997 study published in the Journal of Dentistry for Children found that many infants
were indeed being fed soda in those bottles.”
— Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation; The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, (Houghton Mifflin
Company, 2001), p.54 (Bullet formatting added for clarity, but text remains unchanged)
So, we have seen that
29
With the rise in consumerism, there has been a rise in sugar use.
With the increasing work demands, partly a result of rising consumerism, there has been a rise
in convenience and fast foods
This implies more sugar!
Exploitation has continued. From slavery, it has moved to consumers and children (albeit in
another form), while the environment continues to suffer.
An entire fast food industry has arisen due to consumerism.
Another central pillar of the fast food industry has been the rise of beef consumption, another luxury
turned “necessity.” We turn to the issue of beef consumption in the next page.
30
Old Greek Stories: The Story of Prometheus
by James Baldwin
I. How Fire Was Given to Men
In those old, old times, there lived two brothers who were not like other men, nor yet like those Mighty
Ones who lived upon the mountain top. They were the sons of one of those Titans who had fought
against Jupiter and been sent in chains to the strong prison-house of the Lower World.
The name of the elder of these brothers was Prometheus, or Forethought; for he was always thinking of
the future and making things ready for what might happen to-morrow, or next week, or next year, or it
may be in a hundred years to come. The younger was called Epimetheus, or Afterthought; for he was
always so busy thinking of yesterday, or last year, or a hundred years ago, that he had no care at all for
what might come to pass after a while.
For some cause Jupiter had not sent these brothers to prison with the rest of the Titans.
Prometheus did not care to live amid the clouds on the mountain top. He was too busy for that. While
the Mighty Folk were spending their time in idleness, drinking nectar and eating ambrosia, he was intent
upon plans for making the world wiser and better than it had ever been before.
He went out amongst men to live with them and help them; for his heart was filled with sadness when
he found that they were no longer happy as they had been during the golden days when Saturn was
king. Ah, how very poor and wretched they were! He found them living in caves and in holes of the
earth, shivering with the cold because there was no fire, dying of starvation, hunted by wild beasts and
by one another–the most miserable of all living creatures.
“If they only had fire,” said Prometheus to himself, “they could at least warm themselves and cook their
food; and after a while they could learn to make tools and build themselves houses. Without fire, they
are worse off than the beasts.”
Then he went boldly to Jupiter and begged him to give fire to men, that so they might have a little
comfort through the long, dreary months of winter.
“Not a spark will I give,” said Jupiter. “No, indeed! Why, if men had fire they might become strong and
wise like ourselves, and after a while they would drive us out of our kingdom. Let them shiver with cold,
and let them live like the beasts. It is best for them to be poor and ignorant, that so we Mighty Ones
may thrive and be happy.”
Prometheus made no answer; but he had set his heart on helping mankind, and he did not give up. He
turned away, and left Jupiter and his mighty company forever.
As he was walking by the shore of the sea he found a reed, or, as some say, a tall stalk of fennel,
growing; and when he had broken it off he saw that its hollow center was filled with a dry, soft pith
which would burn slowly and keep on fire a long time. He took the long stalk in his hands, and started
with it towards the dwelling of the sun in the far east.
31
“Mankind shall have fire in spite of the tyrant who sits on the mountain top,” he said.
He reached the place of the sun in the early morning just as the glowing, golden orb was rising from the
earth and beginning his daily journey through the sky. He touched the end of the long reed to the
flames, and the dry pith caught on fire and burned slowly. Then he turned and hastened back to his own
land, carrying with him the precious spark hidden in the hollow center of the plant.
He called some of the shivering men from their caves and built a fire for them, and showed them how to
warm themselves by it and how to build other fires from the coals. Soon there was a cheerful blaze in
every rude home in the land, and men and women gathered round it and were warm and happy, and
thankful to Prometheus for the wonderful gift which he had brought to them from the sun.
It was not long until they learned to cook their food and so to eat like men instead of like beasts. They
began at once to leave off their wild and savage habits; and instead of lurking in the dark places of the
world, they came out into the open air and the bright sunlight, and were glad because life had been
given to them.
After that, Prometheus taught them, little by little, a thousand things. He showed them how to build
houses of wood and stone, and how to tame sheep and cattle and make them useful, and how to plow
and sow and reap, and how to protect themselves from the storms of winter and the beasts of the
woods. Then he showed them how to dig in the earth for copper and iron, and how to melt the ore, and
how to hammer it into shape and fashion from it the tools and weapons which they needed in peace
and war; and when he saw how happy the world was becoming he cried out:
“A new Golden Age shall come, brighter and better by far than the old!”
II. How Diseases and Cares Came Among Men
Things might have gone on very happily indeed, and the Golden Age might really have come again, had
it not been for Jupiter. But one day, when he chanced to look down upon the earth, he saw the fires
burning, and the people living in houses, and the flocks feeding on the hills, and the grain ripening in the
fields, and this made him very angry.
“Who has done all this?” he asked.
And some one answered, “Prometheus!”
“What! that young Titan!” he cried. “Well, I will punish him in a way that will make him wish I had shut
him up in the prison-house with his kinsfolk. But as for those puny men, let them keep their fire. I will
make them ten times more miserable than they were before they had it.”
Of course it would be easy enough to deal with Prometheus at any time, and so Jupiter was in no great
haste about it. He made up his mind to distress mankind first; and he thought of a plan for doing it in a
very strange, roundabout way.
In the first place, he ordered his blacksmith Vulcan, whose forge was in the crater of a burning
mountain, to take a lump of clay which he gave him, and mold it into the form of a woman. Vulcan did
32
as he was bidden; and when he had finished the image, he carried it up to Jupiter, who was sitting
among the clouds with all the Mighty Folk around him. It was nothing but a mere lifeless body, but the
great blacksmith had given it a form more perfect than that of any statue that has ever been made.
“Come now!” said Jupiter, “let us all give some goodly gift to this woman;” and he began by giving her
life.
Then the others came in their turn, each with a gift for the marvelous creature. One gave her beauty;
and another a pleasant voice; and another good manners; and another a kind heart; and another skill in
many arts; and, lastly, some one gave her curiosity. Then they called her Pandora, which means the allgifted, because she had received gifts from them all.
Pandora was so beautiful and so wondrously gifted that no one could help loving her. When the Mighty
Folk had admired her for a time, they gave her to Mercury, the light-footed; and he led her down the
mountain side to the place where Prometheus and his brother were living and toiling for the good of
mankind. He met Epimetheus first, and said to him:
“Epimetheus, here is a beautiful woman, whom Jupiter has sent to you to be your wife.”
Prometheus had often warned his brother to beware of any gift that Jupiter might send, for he knew
that the mighty tyrant could not be trusted; but when Epimetheus saw Pandora, how lovely and wise
she was, he forgot all warnings, and took her home to live with him and be his wife.
Pandora was very happy in her new home; and even Prometheus, when he saw her, was pleased with
her loveliness. She had brought with her a golden casket, which Jupiter had given her at parting, and
which he had told her held many precious things; but wise Athena, the queen of the air, had warned her
never, never to open it, nor look at the things inside.
“They must be jewels,” she said to herself; and then she thought of how they would add to her beauty if
only she could wear them. “Why did Jupiter give them to me if I should never use them, nor so much as
look at them?” she asked.
The more she thought about the golden casket, the more curious she was to see what was in it; and
every day she took it down from its shelf and felt of the lid, and tried to peer inside of it without opening
it.
“Why should I care for what Athena told me?” she said at last. “She is not beautiful, and jewels would be
of no use to her. I think that I will look at them, at any rate. Athena will never know. Nobody else will
ever know.”
She opened the lid a very little, just to peep inside. All at once there was a whirring, rustling sound, and
before she could shut it down again, out flew ten thousand strange creatures with death-like faces and
gaunt and dreadful forms, such as nobody in all the world had ever seen. They fluttered for a little while
about the room, and then flew away to find dwelling-places wherever there were homes of men. They
were diseases and cares; for up to that time mankind had not had any kind of sickness, nor felt any
troubles of mind, nor worried about what the morrow might bring forth.
33
These creatures flew into every house, and, without any one seeing them, nestled down in the bosoms
of men and women and children, and put an end to all their joy; and ever since that day they have been
flitting and creeping, unseen and unheard, over all the land, bringing pain and sorrow and death into
every household.
If Pandora had not shut down the lid so quickly, things would have gone much worse. But she closed it
just in time to keep the last of the evil creatures from getting out. The name of this creature was
Foreboding, and although he was almost half out of the casket, Pandora pushed him back and shut the
lid so tight that he could never escape. If he had gone out into the world, men would have known from
childhood just what troubles were going to come to them every day of their lives, and they would never
have had any joy or hope so long as they lived.
And this was the way in which Jupiter sought to make mankind more miserable than they had been
before Prometheus had befriended them.
III. How the Friend of Men Was Punished
The next thing that Jupiter did was to punish Prometheus for stealing fire from the sun. He bade two of
his servants, whose names were Strength and Force, to seize the bold Titan and carry him to the
topmost peak of the Caucasus Mountains. Then he sent the blacksmith Vulcan to bind him with iron
chains and fetter him to the rocks so that he could not move hand or foot.
Vulcan did not like to do this, for he was a friend of Prometheus, and yet he did not dare to disobey. And
so the great friend of men, who had given them fire and lifted them out of their wretchedness and
shown them how to live, was chained to the mountain peak; and there he hung, with the storm-winds
whistling always around him, and the pitiless hail beating in his face, and fierce eagles shrieking in his
ears and tearing his body with their cruel claws. Yet he bore all his sufferings without a groan, and never
would he beg for mercy or say that he was sorry for what he had done.
Year after year, and age after age, Prometheus hung there. Now and then old Helios, the driver of the
sun car, would look down upon him and smile; now and then flocks of birds would bring him messages
from far-off lands; once the ocean nymphs came and sang wonderful songs in his hearing; and
oftentimes men looked up to him with pitying eyes, and cried out against the tyrant who had placed him
there.
Then, once upon a time, a white cow passed that way,–a strangely beautiful cow, with large sad eyes
and a face that seemed almost human. She stopped and looked up at the cold gray peak and the giant
body which was chained there. Prometheus saw her and spoke to her kindly:
“I know who you are,” he said. “You are Io who was once a fair and happy maiden in distant Argos; and
now, because of the tyrant Jupiter and his jealous queen, you are doomed to wander from land to land
in that unhuman form. But do not lose hope. Go on to the southward and then to the west; and after
many days you shall come to the great river Nile. There you shall again become a maiden, but fairer and
more beautiful than before; and you shall become the wife of the king of that land, and shall give birth
to a son, from whom shall spring the hero who will break my chains and set me free. As for me, I bide in
patience the day which not even Jupiter can hasten or delay. Farewell!”
34
Poor Io would have spoken, but she could not. Her sorrowful eyes looked once more at the suffering
hero on the peak, and then she turned and began her long and tiresome journey to the land of the Nile.
Ages passed, and at last a great hero whose name was Hercules came to the land of the Caucasus. In
spite of Jupiter’s dread thunderbolts and fearful storms of snow and sleet, he climbed the rugged
mountain peak; he slew the fierce eagles that had so long tormented the helpless prisoner on those
craggy heights; and with a mighty blow, he broke the fetters of Prometheus and set the grand old hero
free.
“I knew that you would come,” said Prometheus. “Ten generations ago I spoke of you to Io, who was
afterwards the queen of the land of the Nile.”
“And Io,” said Hercules, “was the mother of the race from which I am sprung.”
35
“What’s in an Inkblot? Some Say, Not Much”
by Erica Goode
Psychology has produced few more popular icons than the Rorschach inkblot test.
Devised 80 years ago by a young Swiss psychiatrist, the Rorschach has entered the language as a
synonym for anything ambiguous enough to invite multiple interpretations. And beyond its pop culture
status, it has retained a central role in personality assessment, administered several hundred thousand
times a year, by conservative estimates, to both children and adults.
In custody disputes, for example, the test is used to help determine the emotional fitness of warring
parents. Judges and parole boards rely on it for insight into a prisoner's criminal tendencies or potential
for violence. Clinicians use it in investigating accusations of sexual abuse, and psychotherapists, as a
guide in diagnosing and treating patients.
Yet almost since its creation, the inkblot test has also been controversial, with early critics calling it
"cultish" and later ones deeming it "scientifically useless."
And in recent years, academic psychology departments have been divided over the merits of the test,
and some have stopped teaching it.
The debate is likely to become even more heated with the publication of an article provoking discussion
and anger among clinicians who routinely use the Rorschach. In the article, three psychologists conclude
that the inkblot test and two others commonly used — the Thematic Apperception Test or T.A.T. and
the Draw-a-Person test — are seriously flawed and should not be used in court or the consulting room.
"There has been a substantial gap between the clinical use of these tests and what the research suggests
about their validity," said Dr. Scott O. Lilienfeld, an associate professor of psychology at Emory
University and the lead author of the article. "The research continues to suggest that they are not as
useful for most purposes as many clinicians believe."
The review, by Dr. Lilienfeld and two colleagues, Dr. James M. Wood of the University of Texas at El Paso
and Dr. Howard Garb of the University of Pittsburgh, appears in the current issue of the journal
Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a publication of the American Psychological Society.
The three tests are known as "projective" because they present people with an ambiguous image or
situation and ask them to interpret or make sense of it. The test taker's responses are assumed to reflect
underlying personality traits and unconscious conflicts, motives and fantasies.
In the T.A.T., test takers are shown a series of evocative pictures depicting domestic scenes and are
asked to tell a story about each one. The figure-drawing test requires drawing a person on a blank sheet
of paper and then drawing a second person of the opposite sex.
While the Rorschach and the other projective techniques may be valuable in certain specific situations,
the reviewers argue, the tests' ability to diagnose mental illnesses, assess personality characteristics,
predict behavior or uncover sexual abuse or other trauma is very limited.
36
The tests, which often take hours to score and interpret, add little information beyond what can be
gleaned from far less time-consuming assessments, the psychologists say. They recommend that
practitioners refrain from administering the tests for purposes other than research "or at least limit their
interpretations to the very small number of indexes derived from these techniques that are empirically
supported."
Dr. Lilienfeld said that the review was written to raise awareness of the problems with the tests in the
legal field and with "the hope that maybe we can reach a small number of open-minded people, and in
particular students, who have yet to make up their minds on this issue."
But he added, "I'm confident that many will take issue with our conclusions."
One of those is Dr. Irving B. Weiner, a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at the
University of South Florida and the president of the International Rorschach Society, who said the
authors of the journal report took research findings out of context to bolster their case.
Dr. Lilienfeld and his colleagues do not really understand how clinicians use the tests, Dr. Weiner said.
They "have been used for a long time very effectively, with very good results and a great deal of
scientific support," he said.
Dr. Gregory J. Meyer, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alaska at Anchorage, who
has studied the Rorschach, said admonishing psychologists against using the tests was "not in the spirit
of advancing our science."
He said the journal's decision to run the psychologists' article was like asking "someone who believes in
creationism to review evolutionary theory and make recommendations about it."
A History of Controversy
Projective tests are no strangers to controversy. The Rorschach, in particular, has inspired intense
passion in defenders and critics over the decades, leading two scientists to observe in a 1999 paper that
the test had "the dubious distinction of being, simultaneously, the most cherished and the most reviled
of psychological assessment instruments."
Dr. Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist who worked with schizophrenic patients, is believed to
have gotten the idea for the test from a popular European parlor game called Klexographie, which
involves making inkblots and telling stories about them. As a child, Dr. Rorschach was so good at the
game that he earned the nickname Klecks, or Blot. He died of peritonitis a year after the test's
publication in 1921. He was 37.
The Rorschach's champions have often been almost worshipful in their belief in its ability to pare back
the layers of the psyche, and the test is generally regarded as offering a richness of information about a
person's psychological world that cannot be gained from interviews or from "self-report" tests like the
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory or M.M.P.I.
37
The test has used the same 10 images since it was developed. Responses to the inkblots can be scored
using more than 100 criteria, including how common or unusual the responses are, what areas of the
blots are focused on, whether movement is seen in the images, and so on.
In an earlier era, clinicians who demonstrated special skill in interpreting the test were dubbed
Rorschach "wizards," and the technique sometimes was referred to as "an X- ray of the mind."
Over the years, the test's detractors have also been zealous, making at times brutal attacks on its
scientific validity, especially in the 1950's and 1960's, when practitioners varied greatly in the ways they
administered and scored the tests.
Some of the criticism abated in the mid-1970's, when Dr. John E. Exner, then a professor of psychology
at Long Island University, developed systematic rules for giving and scoring the Rorschach and
established norms against which the responses of test takers could be compared.
Dr. Exner's "comprehensive system" is used by a majority of psychologists who administer the
Rorschach. Dr. Exner says that Rorschach Workshops, a North Carolina research foundation which he
directs, trains an average of 300 clinicians a year in the method in the United States and several hundred
more in Europe and Japan. The foundation charges $650 for five days of intense training in the
technique.
With the comprehensive system, the test can yield a complex picture of people's psychological strengths
and weaknesses, the Rorschach's proponents say, including their intelligence and overall mental
functioning, their ability to relate appropriately to other people, their sexuality, and their fantasies, fears
and preoccupations.
Below the Surface
The test is considered particularly powerful in situations in which people may not be expected to
volunteer negative information about themselves.
For example, Dr. Carl F. Hoppe, a clinical psychologist who does psychological evaluations for the Los
Angeles Superior Court's family law division, said he administered the Rorschach about 130 times a year
in "high-conflict" custody disputes.
In a custody evaluation, Dr. Hoppe said, parents are often motivated to present themselves positively
and to deny any sort of difficulties, and the Rorschach is a way to look beyond the way people present
themselves.
"We take some of the familiar away," he said, "and look at patterns of perceptions in a highly statistical
manner."
But even with Dr. Exner's scoring system, the embrace of the Rorschach, and other projective tests, has
been far from universal.
38
"There is widespread criticism, there's no doubt about it," said Dr. Wayne H. Holtzman, Hogg professor
of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, who in 1956 developed his own inkblot test to correct
deficiencies he saw in the Rorschach.
Dr. Lilienfeld and his colleagues argue, for example, that there is "virtually no evidence" that the
Rorschach can accurately diagnose depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder or some other
emotional problems, calling into question the test's usefulness in custody hearings or as a diagnostic
tool in psychotherapy.
(The Rorschach is such a common feature of custody disputes that Fathers' Right to Custody, a nonprofit
organization, includes advice on its Web site on the best ways to respond to the inkblots. Describing one
Rorschach card, for example, the site counsels, "This blot is supposed to reveal how you really feel about
your mother." In another case it advises, "Schizophrenics sometimes see moving people in this blot.")
Equally scant, Dr. Lilienfeld and his colleagues conclude, are the data supporting the test's use in parole
and sentencing hearings to evaluate whether prisoners are prone to violence or likely to commit future
crimes. Research suggesting a relationship between certain Rorschach indicators and psychopathic
tendencies and violent behavior has been contradicted by later studies, the authors say.
"It just doesn't work for most things that it's supposed to," Dr. Wood said.
And the psychologists argue that even when the Rorschach appears to have greater validity — for
example, in assessing intelligence, diagnosing schizophrenia and predicting a patient's success in
psychotherapy — it is not clear how much additional knowledge is gained from the test.
In some studies, they point out, the ability of clinicians to predict behavior or diagnose mental disorders
actually went down when data from the Rorschach were added to information derived from other tests.
"The critical question is what, if anything, does this measure buy you above information that could be
more easily collected," Dr. Lilienfeld said.
Detecting Abnormality
Another problem with the Rorschach, the psychologists say in their review, is that the test tends to
"overpathologize," making even normal people look maladjusted.
In a study, which they reviewed, of 123 subjects with no psychiatric history who were given the test,
most at a California blood bank, 16 percent scored in the abnormal range on the test's schizophrenia
index — far higher than the 1 percent incidence of the illness in the general population indicated in
other surveys. Eighteen percent showed signs of clinical depression on the test, and 29 percent had
indicators of extreme narcissism.
Empirical backing for the validity of the other two projective measures, the T.A.T. and the human figure
drawing test, was sketchy at best, the review's authors found, with the drawing test "the weakest" of
the three tests.
39
Psychologists like Dr. Weiner, the author of "Principles of Rorschach Interpretation" and another book
on the test, strongly disputed the conclusions drawn in the review.
They said a diagnosis was never made on the basis of the test alone.
"There are plenty of studies that show the Rorschach can help you identify people who have
schizophrenia or whether people are depressed," Dr. Weiner said, "but the test doesn't make the
diagnosis. No single test that a clinician uses makes the diagnosis. If you're going to use this instrument
effectively, you're going to take a lot of things into consideration."
He added: "Tests don't `overpathologize.' That's done by the person who interprets them."
Dr. Meyer, of the University of Alaska, said that while more research needed to be done on some of the
issues raised by Dr. Lilienfeld and his colleagues, their views did not fairly reflect what is known about
the validity of the Rorschach and other tests.
In an article to be published in the journal American Psychologist, Dr. Meyer and other researchers
conclude that the validity of psychological tests, including the Rorschach and the T.A.T., is comparable to
that of medical tests, like ultrasounds and M.R.I.'s. The article is based on a review of 125 meta-analyses
of the validity of psychological and medical tests.
But even Dr. Exner, the developer of the comprehensive system, agreed that the test "can be abused
unwittingly by the ill-trained person," and he said he was uncomfortable with the use of the test in
"adversarial" settings, like custody disputes, unless the psychologist was working for the court, rather
than for one parent or the other.
"It takes a long time to learn the Rorschach and you've got to work at it, it's not simple," said Dr. Exner,
who is also the curator of the Rorschach archives.
The real question for clinicians in using the test, he said, is, "What do you want to know about the
individual?"
"If you're interested only in some diagnostic labeling," Dr. Exner said, "I don't know that the Rorschach is
worth doing, not simply because of time but because you're flooded with information that you're not
going to use. On the other hand, if you're going to treat someone, I think the Rorschach is a pretty
sturdy instrument.
"The strength of the test," he continued, "is that it helps the really capable interpreter to develop a
picture of an individual."
40
“Does IQ Test Really measure Intelligence?”
by Denise Mann
Dec. 20, 2012 -- Single tests that measure intelligence quotient, or IQ, may become a thing of the past.
A new study of more than 100,000 participants suggests that there may be at least three distinct
components of intelligence. So you could not give a single, unified score for all of them.
Researchers' understanding of the complexities of the human brain has evolved, and so too has the
notion of IQ, what it really means, and how it is most accurately captured.
“There are multiple types of intelligence,” says researcher Adam Hampshire, PhD. He is a psychologist at
the Brain and Mind Institute Natural Sciences Centre in London, Ontario, Canada. “It is time to move on
to using a more comprehensive set of tests that can measure separate scores for each type of
intelligence.”
Using Many IQ Tests
In the study, all participants were invited to take a series of 12 online tests that measure memory,
reasoning, attention, and planning as well as information on the test takers' background and lifestyle.
The entire test takes about 30 minutes to complete.
According to the findings, there are at least three components that affect overall performance on tests.
These include short-term memory, reasoning, and verbal recall.
Lifestyle factors count, too. For example, gamers -- or people who play a lot of computer games -- score
higher on tests of reasoning and short-term memory. Smokers do poorly on tests assessing short-term
memory and vocabulary, while test takers who have anxiety don't do as well on short-term memory
tests, the study shows.
What’s more, the study suggests that each type of intelligence may have its basis in a different set of
brain areas. Researchers used sophisticated brain scans called functional MRIs to map out these areas.
“Potentially, we can measure a more comprehensive set of intelligences," each of which reflects the
capacity of a different part of the brain, Hampshire says.
RIP IQ Test?
So should the IQ test that has provided bragging rights for so many be discontinued or discredited?
Not so fast, he says. “Some very valuable research has been carried out using classical IQ testing.
However, IQ is a massive oversimplification of the spectrum of human cognitive ability.”
IQ scores may also be somewhat misleading, Hampshire says. “Based on the results of our study, it
seems likely that IQ differences will vary in scale or even direction depending on the exact type of
intelligence that the test or set of tests rely most heavily upon. I would suggest that it is both more
accurate and informative to measure multiple types of intelligence.”
41
He plans to see if there are other types of intelligence that were not captured in this study.
Hampshire said the findings themselves weren’t all that surprising, but the number of people who took
part in the study exceeded expectations. “I had thought a couple of thousand people might log in and
participate in the study over the course of six months. Instead, tens of thousands logged in within the
space of a few weeks,” he says. It was a remarkably strong response from members of the general
public, who gave half an hour or more of their time to support this research.”
John Gabrieli, PhD, professor of brain and cognitive science at MIT in Boston, reviewed the study for
WebMD. “This is a really compelling study of an extraordinarily large number of people taking tests with
a careful data analysis. It makes the case against the idea that IQ is localized in one part of the brain. We
imagine that there is THE test of intelligence, but you can measure it in many ways. One measure may
make a person seem super-intelligent, but if they picked another, they may seem average. There are
multiple kinds of intelligence that can link to various tasks and different parts of the brain.”
Gayatri Devi, MD, agrees with the new study findings. She is an attending neurologist at Lenox Hill
Hospital in New York City. “To come up with one unifying score and use that to determine a person’s
overall ability is fraught with problems,” she says. “We need to get away from that.”
The study appears in the journal Neuron.
42
“IQ Tests are ‘Meaningless and Too Simplistic’ Claim Researchers”
by Nicholas McDermott
Researchers say findings are a 'wake up call' for anyone using current tests
Comes after biggest ever study of intelligence
It will come as a relief to those who failed to shine when taking an IQ test.
After conducting the largest ever study of intelligence, researchers have found that far from indicating
how clever you are, IQ testing is actually rather ‘meaningless’.
In a bid to investigate the value of IQ, scientists asked more than 100,000 participants to complete 12
tests that required planning, reasoning, memory and attention.
Researchers say that traditional IQ tests simply do not work as they cannot measure every aspect of
intelligence - and said their findings are a 'wake up call' for schools, universities and others that use the
tests
They also filled in a survey on their background.
They discovered that far from being down to one single factor, what is commonly regarded as
intelligence is influenced by three different elements - short-term memory, reasoning, and verbal ability.
But being good at one of these factors does not mean you are going to be equally gifted at the other
two.
Scientists from Canada’s Western University in Ontario, also scanned some of the participants’ brains
while they undertook the tests.
They found that different parts of the brain were activated when they were tested on each of the three
factors.
Traditional IQ tests are ‘too simplistic’, according to the research, which found that what makes
someone intelligent is too complex to boil down to a single exam.
IQ, which stands for Intelligence Quotient, is an attempt to measure how smart an individual is.
The average IQ is 100. Mensa, the high IQ society, only accepts individuals who score more than 148,
putting them in the top two per cent of the population.
CAN YOU PASS AN IQ TEST?
The following questions are taken from Mensa's online 'brain workout' and are similar to those in many
IQ tests:
Which same three-letter word can be placed in front of the following words to make a new word?
43
SIGN, DONE, DUCT, FOUND, FIRM, TRACT, DENSE
If you count from 1 to 100, how many 7's will you pass on the way?
10, 11, 19, 20, 21
There are 1200 elephants in a herd. Some have pink and green stripes, some are all pink and some are
all blue. One third are pure pink. Is it true that 400 elephants are definitely blue?
Yes or No
2 3 5 7 11 13 ?
14,15, 16, 17, 18
If a circle is one, how many is an octagon?
2, 4, 6, 8, 12
They use the Cattell III B test, which consists of six batches of multiple choice questions aimed at testing
mental agility, with each section lasting between eight and 18 minutes.
The new study, published in the journal Neuron, suggests that intelligence is too complex to be
represented by a single number.
Study leader Dr Adrian Owen, a British neuroscientists based at Western University in Canada, said an
‘astonishing’ number of people had contributed to the research.
Researchers say organisations like Mensa need to rethink their membership - they currently require an
IQ higher than 148 to join
‘We expected a few hundred responses, but thousands and thousands of people took part, including
people of all ages, cultures and creeds and from every corner of the world,’ he said.
‘When you take 100,000 people and tested their brain function, we couldn’t find any evidence for a
single uniform concept of intelligence.
‘The best we could manage is get it down to three elements that contribute to intelligence. But they are
completely different factors, unrelated to one another, and you could be brilliant at one and awful at
another.
For example, the absent-minded professor.
‘IQ tests are pretty meaningless - if you are not good at them, all it proves is that you are not good at IQ
tests.
'It does not say anything about your general intelligence.’ The majority of IQ tests were developed in the
50s and 60s when the way we thought and interacted with the world was different, said Dr Owen.
44
'Study co-author Roger Highfield, from the Science Museum, said: ‘The most surprising thing is that we
still haven’t got over the hang up about IQ tests.
'This really is a wake-up call. We have now shown that on the evidence, these tests are meaningless.
'We need to stop trying to simplify the brain, which is very complicated organ, down to a number.
‘We need to think of intelligence like the Olympics. Is the gold medal winner in the marathon fitter than
the gold medallist in the 100m sprint?’
The researchers are set to continue the groundbreaking study, with the team launching a new version of
the tests online, which you can see at the link below.
45
“The Tell-Tale Heart”
by Edgar Allen Poe
True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?
The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of
hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then,
am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and
night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me.
He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had
the eye of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold;
and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid
myself of the eye forever.
Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You
should have seen how wisely I proceeded—with what caution—with what foresight—with what
dissimulation I went to work! I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I
killed him. And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it—oh so gently!
And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed,
that no light shone out, and then I thrust in my head. Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly
I thrust it in! I moved it slowly—very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man's sleep. It took
me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his
bed. Ha! would a madman have been so wise as this, And then, when my head was well in the room, I
undid the lantern cautiously-oh, so cautiously—cautiously (for the hinges creaked)—I undid it just so
much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye. And this I did for seven long nights—every night
just at midnight—but I found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was
not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye. And every morning, when the day broke, I went boldly
into the chamber, and spoke courageously to him, calling him by name in a hearty tone, and inquiring
how he has passed the night. So you see he would have been a very profound old man, indeed, to
suspect that every night, just at twelve, I looked in upon him while he slept.
Upon the eighth night I was more than usually cautious in opening the door. A watch's minute hand
moves more quickly than did mine. Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers—of
my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph. To think that there I was, opening the door,
little by little, and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts. I fairly chuckled at the idea; and
perhaps he heard me; for he moved on the bed suddenly, as if startled. Now you may think that I drew
back—but no. His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness, (for the shutters were close
fastened, through fear of robbers,) and so I knew that he could not see the opening of the door, and I
kept pushing it on steadily, steadily.
I had my head in, and was about to open the lantern, when my thumb slipped upon the tin fastening,
and the old man sprang up in bed, crying out—"Who's there?"
I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime I did
not hear him lie down. He was still sitting up in the bed listening;—just as I have done, night after night,
hearkening to the death watches in the wall.
46
Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain
or of grief—oh, no!—it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when
overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it
has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I
say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart. I knew that
he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he had turned in the bed. His fears had
been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. He had
been saying to himself—"It is nothing but the wind in the chimney—it is only a mouse crossing the
floor," or "It is merely a cricket which has made a single chirp." Yes, he had been trying to comfort
himself with these suppositions: but he had found all in vain. All in vain; because Death, in approaching
him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful
influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel—although he neither saw nor heard—to
feel the presence of my head within the room.
When I had waited a long time, very patiently, without hearing him lie down, I resolved to open a little—
a very, very little crevice in the lantern. So I opened it—you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily—
until, at length a simple dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and fell full upon
the vulture eye.
It was open—wide, wide open—and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctness—
all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones; but I could see
nothing else of the old man's face or person: for I had directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon
the damned spot.
And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense?—now, I
say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I
knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating
of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.
But even yet I refrained and kept still. I scarcely breathed. I held the lantern motionless. I tried how
steadily I could maintain the ray upon the eve. Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It
grew quicker and quicker, and louder and louder every instant. The old man's terror must have been
extreme! It grew louder, I say, louder every moment!—do you mark me well I have told you that I am
nervous: so I am. And now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so
strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror. Yet, for some minutes longer I refrained and
stood still. But the beating grew louder, louder! I thought the heart must burst. And now a new anxiety
seized me—the sound would be heard by a neighbour! The old man's hour had come! With a loud yell, I
threw open the lantern and leaped into the room. He shrieked once—once only. In an instant I dragged
him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done.
But, for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound. This, however, did not vex me; it would
not be heard through the wall. At length it ceased. The old man was dead. I removed the bed and
examined the corpse. Yes, he was stone, stone dead. I placed my hand upon the heart and held it there
many minutes. There was no pulsation. He was stone dead. His eye would trouble me no more.
If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the
concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I
dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.
47
I then took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and deposited all between the scantlings. I
then replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye—not even his—could have
detected any thing wrong. There was nothing to wash out—no stain of any kind—no blood-spot
whatever. I had been too wary for that. A tub had caught all—ha! ha!
When I had made an end of these labors, it was four o'clock—still dark as midnight. As the bell sounded
the hour, there came a knocking at the street door. I went down to open it with a light heart,—for what
had I now to fear? There entered three men, who introduced themselves, with perfect suavity, as
officers of the police. A shriek had been heard by a neighbour during the night; suspicion of foul play
had been aroused; information had been lodged at the police office, and they (the officers) had been
deputed to search the premises.
I smiled,—for what had I to fear? I bade the gentlemen welcome. The shriek, I said, was my own in a
dream. The old man, I mentioned, was absent in the country. I took my visitors all over the house. I bade
them search—search well. I led them, at length, to his chamber. I showed them his treasures, secure,
undisturbed. In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought chairs into the room, and desired them here
to rest from their fatigues, while I myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed my own
seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim.
The officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them. I was singularly at ease. They sat, and while
I answered cheerily, they chatted of familiar things. But, ere long, I felt myself getting pale and wished
them gone. My head ached, and I fancied a ringing in my ears: but still they sat and still chatted. The
ringing became more distinct:—It continued and became more distinct: I talked more freely to get rid of
the feeling: but it continued and gained definiteness—until, at length, I found that the noise was not
within my ears.
No doubt I now grew very pale;—but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound
increased—and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound—much such a sound as a watch makes
when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath—and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly—
more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and
with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why would they not be gone? I paced the
floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men—but the noise
steadily increased. Oh God! what could I do? I foamed—I raved—I swore! I swung the chair upon which I
had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It
grew louder—louder—louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they
heard not? Almighty God!—no, no! They heard!—they suspected!—they knew!—they were making a
mockery of my horror!—this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony!
Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt
that I must scream or die! and now—again!—hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!
"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks! here, here!—It is the
beating of his hideous heart!"
48
The Republic
by Plato
Plato's Allegory of the Cave
Let me show in a parable to what extent our nature is enlightened or unenlightened.
Envision human figures living in an underground cave, with a long entrance across the whole width of
the cave. Here they've been from their childhood and have their legs and necks chained so that they
cannot move and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning their heads
around.
Above and behind them a fire is blazing in the distance. They see only their own shadows which the fire
throws on the opposite wall of the cave. For how could they see anything but the shadows if they were
never allowed to move their heads?
Between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way and a low wall built along the way like the
screen which puppet players have in front of them over which they show the puppets. Do you see men
passing along the wall, carrying all sorts of articles which they hold projected above the wall? Statues of
men and animals made of wood and stone and various materials?
Of the objects which are being carried in like manner, they would only see the shadows, and if they were
able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually
before them?
And suppose further that there was an echo which came from the wall. Would they not be sure to think
when one of the passers by spoke that the voice came from the passing shadows? To them, the truth
would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.
And now look again and see what will naturally follow if one of the prisoners is released. At first, when
he is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his head round and look towards the light,
all this would hurt him and he would be much too dazzled to see distinctly those things whose shadows
he had seen before.
And then conceive someone saying to him that what he saw before was an illusion. But that now when
he's approaching nearer to reality and his eyes turn toward more real existence, he has a clearer vision.
What will be his reply?
And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him
to name them, will he not be perplexed? Would he not think that the shadows, which he formerly saw,
are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?
And suppose once more that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent and held fast until
he is forced into the presence of the sun itself. When he approaches the light, his eyes will be dazzled.
He will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities. He will require to grow
accustomed to the sight of the upper world.
But first he would see the shadows best, next the reflections of objects in the water, and then the
objects themselves.
49
Then he will gaze upon the stars and the spangled heavens and the light of the moon. He will see the sky
and the stars by night. Last of all, he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of it in the
water but he will see the sun in its own proper place and not in another.
And he will contemplate the sun, as it is. Would he not proceed to argue that it is the sun who gives the
seasons and the years and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the
cause of all things which his fellows have been accustomed to behold? Truly he would first see the sun,
then reason about it. And when he remembered his old habitation and what was the wisdom of the
cave his fellow prisoners, do you not suppose that he would bless himself for the change? Pity them?
And if they were in the habit of conferring honors among themselves on those who were the quickest to
observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before and which followed after and
which were together and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you
think that he would care for such honors and glories? Or envy the possessors of them? Would he not
say, with Homer, "better to be the poor servant of a poor master and to endure anything rather than
think as they do and live after their manner."
Imagine, once more, such a one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation.
Would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness? And if there were a contest of measuring the
shadows and he had to compete with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight
was still weak and before his eyes have become steady, wouldn't they all laugh at him and say he had
spoiled his eyesight by going up there? That is was better not to even think of ascending?
And if anyone tried to release another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender,
and they would put him to death.
It is the task of the enlightened not only to ascend to learning and to see the good but to be willing to
descend again to those prisoners and to share their troubles and their honors, whether they are worth
having or not. And this they must do, even with the prospect of death.
They shall give of their help to one another wherever each class is able to help the community.
50
“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”
by James Thurber
“We’re going through!” The Commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress
uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. “We can’t
make it, sir. It’s spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.” “I’m not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,” said the
Commander. “Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We’re going through!” The pounding of
the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. The Commander stared at the ice
forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. “Switch on No. 8
auxiliary!” he shouted. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” repeated Lieutenant Berg. “Full strength in No. 3
turret!” shouted the Commander. “Full strength in No. 3 turret!” The crew, bending to their various
tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. “The Old
Man’ll get us through,” they said to one another. “The Old Man ain’t afraid of Hell!” . . .
“Not so fast! You’re driving too fast!” said Mrs. Mitty. “What are you driving so fast for?”
“Hmm?” said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment.
She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. “You were up to
fifty-five,” she said. “You know I don’t like to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five.” Walter Mitty
drove on toward Waterbury in silence, the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty
years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind. “You’re tensed up again,” said
Mrs. Mitty. “It’s one of your days. I wish you’d let Dr. Renshaw look you over.”
Walter Mitty stopped the car in front of the building where his wife went to have her hair done.
“Remember to get those overshoes while I’m having my hair done,” she said. “I don’t need overshoes,”
said Mitty. She put her mirror back into her bag. “We’ve been all through that,” she said, getting out of
the car. “You’re not a young man any longer.” He raced the engine a little. “Why don’t you wear your
gloves? Have you lost your gloves?” Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and brought out the gloves. He
put them on, but after she had turned and gone into the building and he had driven on to a red light, he
took them off again. “Pick it up, brother!” snapped a cop as the light changed, and Mitty hastily pulled
on his gloves and lurched ahead. He drove around the streets aimlessly for a time, and then he drove
past the hospital on his way to the parking lot.
. . . “It’s the millionaire banker, Wellington McMillan,” said the pretty nurse. “Yes?” said Walter Mitty,
removing his gloves slowly. “Who has the case?” “Dr. Renshaw and Dr. Benbow, but there are two
specialists here, Dr. Remington from New York and Dr. Pritchard-Mitford from London. He flew over.” A
door opened down a long, cool corridor and Dr. Renshaw came out. He looked distraught and haggard.
“Hello, Mitty,” he said. “We’re having the devil’s own time with McMillan, the millionaire banker and
close personal friend of Roosevelt. Obstreosis of the ductal tract. Tertiary. Wish you’d take a look at
him.” “Glad to,” said Mitty.
In the operating room there were whispered introductions: “Dr. Remington, Dr. Mitty. Dr. PritchardMitford, Dr. Mitty.” “I’ve read your book on streptothricosis,” said Pritchard-Mitford, shaking hands. “A
brilliant performance, sir.” “Thank you,” said Walter Mitty. “Didn’t know you were in the States, Mitty,”
grumbled Remington. “Coals to Newcastle, bringing Mitford and me up here for a tertiary.” “You are
very kind,” said Mitty. A huge, complicated machine, connected to the operating table, with many tubes
and wires, began at this moment to go pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. “The new anaesthetizer is giving way!”
51
shouted an interne. “There is no one in the East who knows how to fix it!” “Quiet, man!” said Mitty, in a
low, cool voice. He sprang to the machine, which was now going pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketaqueep. He began fingering delicately a row of glistening dials. “Give me a fountain pen!” he snapped.
Someone handed him a fountain pen. He pulled a faulty piston out of the machine and inserted the pen
in its place. “That will hold for ten minutes,” he said. “Get on with the operation.” A nurse hurried over
and whispered to Renshaw, and Mitty saw the man turn pale. “Coreopsis has set in,” said Renshaw
nervously. “If you would take over, Mitty?” Mitty looked at him and at the craven figure of Benbow, who
drank, and at the grave, uncertain faces of the two great specialists. “If you wish,” he said. They slipped
a white gown on him; he adjusted a mask and drew on thin gloves; nurses handed him shining . . .
“Back it up, Mac! Look out for that Buick!” Walter Mitty jammed on the brakes. “Wrong lane, Mac,” said
the parking-lot attendant, looking at Mitty closely. “Gee. Yeh,” muttered Mitty. He began cautiously to
back out of the lane marked “Exit Only.” “Leave her sit there,” said the attendant. “I’ll put her away.”
Mitty got out of the car. “Hey, better leave the key.” “Oh,” said Mitty, handing the man the ignition key.
The attendant vaulted into the car, backed it up with insolent skill, and put it where it belonged.
They’re so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty, walking along Main Street; they think they know
everything. Once he had tried to take his chains off, outside New Milford, and he had got them wound
around the axles. A man had had to come out in a wrecking car and unwind them, a young, grinning
garageman. Since then Mrs. Mitty always made him drive to a garage to have the chains taken off. The
next time, he thought, I’ll wear my right arm in a sling; they won’t grin at me then. I’ll have my right arm
in a sling and they’ll see I couldn’t possibly take the chains off myself. He kicked at the slush on the
sidewalk. “Overshoes,” he said to himself, and he began looking for a shoe store.
When he came out into the street again, with the overshoes in a box under his arm, Walter Mitty began
to wonder what the other thing was his wife had told him to get. She had told him, twice, before they
set out from their house for Waterbury. In a way he hated these weekly trips to town-he was always
getting something wrong. Kleenex, he thought, Squibb’s, razor blades? No. Toothpaste, toothbrush,
bicarbonate, carborundum, initiative and referendum? He gave it up. But she would remember it.
“Where’s the what’s-its-name?” she would ask. “Don’t tell me you forgot the what’s-its-name.” A
newsboy went by shouting something about the Waterbury trial.
. . . “Perhaps this will refresh your memory.” The District Attorney suddenly thrust a heavy automatic at
the quiet figure on the witness stand. “Have you ever seen this before?” Walter Mitty took the gun and
examined it expertly. “This is my Webley-Vickers 50.80,” he said calmly. An excited buzz ran around the
courtroom. The Judge rapped for order. “You are a crack shot with any sort of firearms, I believe?” said
the District Attorney, insinuatingly. “Objection!” shouted Mitty’s attorney. “We have shown that the
defendant could not have fired the shot. We have shown that he wore his right arm in a sling on the
night of the fourteenth of July.” Walter Mitty raised his hand briefly and the bickering attorneys were
stilled. “With any known make of gun,” he said evenly, “I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three
hundred feet with my left hand.” Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. A woman’s scream rose
above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty’s arms. The District
Attorney struck at her savagely. Without rising from his chair, Mitty let the man have it on the point of
the chin. “You miserable cur!” . . .
“Puppy biscuit,” said Walter Mitty. He stopped walking and the buildings of Waterbury rose up out of
the misty courtroom and surrounded him again. A woman who was passing laughed. “He said ‘Puppy
biscuit,’ ” she said to her companion. “That man said ‘Puppy biscuit’ to himself.” Walter Mitty hurried
52
on. He went into an A. & P., not the first one he came to but a smaller one farther up the street. “I want
some biscuit for small, young dogs,” he said to the clerk. “Any special brand, sir?” The greatest pistol
shot in the world thought a moment. “It says ‘Puppies Bark for It’ on the box,” said Walter Mitty.
His wife would be through at the hairdresser’s in fifteen minutes, Mitty saw in looking at his watch,
unless they had trouble drying it; sometimes they had trouble drying it. She didn’t like to get to the hotel
first; she would want him to be there waiting for her as usual. He found a big leather chair in the lobby,
facing a window, and he put the overshoes and the puppy biscuit on the floor beside it. He picked up an
old copy of Liberty and sank down into the chair. “Can Germany Conquer the World Through the Air?”
Walter Mitty looked at the pictures of bombing planes and of ruined streets.
. . . “The cannonading has got the wind up in young Raleigh, sir,” said the sergeant. Captain Mitty looked
up at him through touselled hair. “Get him to bed,” he said wearily. “With the others. I’ll fly alone.” “But
you can’t, sir,” said the sergeant anxiously. “It takes two men to handle that bomber and the Archies are
pounding hell out of the air. Von Richtman’s circus is between here and Saulier.” “Somebody’s got to get
that ammunition dump,” said Mitty. “I’m going over. Spot of brandy?” He poured a drink for the
sergeant and one for himself. War thundered and whined around the dugout and battered at the door.
There was a rending of wood and splinters flew through the room. “A bit of a near thing,” said Captain
Mitty carelessly. “The box barrage is closing in,” said the sergeant. “We only live once, Sergeant,” said
Mitty, with his faint, fleeting smile. “Or do we?” He poured another brandy and tossed it off. “I never
see a man could hold his brandy like you, sir,” said the sergeant. “Begging your pardon, sir.” Captain
Mitty stood up and strapped on his huge Webley-Vickers automatic. “It’s forty kilometres through hell,
sir,” said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy. “After all,” he said softly, “what isn’t?” The
pounding of the cannon increased; there was the rat-tat-tatting of machine guns, and from somewhere
came the menacing pocketa-pocketa-pocketa of the new flame-throwers. Walter Mitty walked to the
door of the dugout humming “Auprès de Ma Blonde.” He turned and waved to the sergeant. “Cheerio!”
he said. . . .
Something struck his shoulder. “I’ve been looking all over this hotel for you,” said Mrs. Mitty. “Why do
you have to hide in this old chair? How did you expect me to find you?” “Things close in,” said Walter
Mitty vaguely. “What?” Mrs. Mitty said. “Did you get the what’s-its-name? The puppy biscuit? What’s in
that box?” “Overshoes,” said Mitty. “Couldn’t you have put them on in the store?” “I was thinking,” said
Walter Mitty. “Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?” She looked at him. “I’m going to
take your temperature when I get you home,” she said.’
They went out through the revolving doors that made a faintly derisive whistling sound when you
pushed them. It was two blocks to the parking lot. At the drugstore on the corner she said, “Wait here
for me. I forgot something. I won’t be a minute.” She was more than a minute. Walter Mitty lighted a
cigarette. It began to rain, rain with sleet in it. He stood up against the wall of the drugstore,
smoking. . . . He put his shoulders back and his heels together. “To hell with the handkerchief,” said
Walter Mitty scornfully. He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away. Then, with that
faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and
disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last. ♦
53
“The Book Thief”
by Markus Zusak
DEATH AND CHOCOLATE
First the colors.
Then the humans.
That's usually how I see things.
Or at least, how I try.
***HERE IS A SMALL FACT***
You are going to die.
I am in all truthfulness attempting to be cheerful about this whole topic, though most people find
themselves hindered in believing me, no matter my protestations. Please, trust me. I most definitely can
be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that's only the A's. Just don't ask me to be nice.
Nice has nothing to do with me.
***Reaction to the AFOREMENTIONED fact***
Does this worry you?
I urge you -- don't be afraid.
I'm nothing if not fair.
-- Of course, an introduction.
A beginning.
Where are my manners?
I could introduce myself properly, but it's not really necessary. You will know me well enough and soon
enough, depending on a diverse range of variables. It suffices to say that at some point in time, I will be
standing over you, as genially as possible. Your soul will be in my arms. A color will be perched on my
shoulder. I will carry you gently away.
At that moment, you will be lying there (I rarely find people standing up). You will be caked in your own
body. There might be a discovery; a scream will dribble down the air. The only sound I'll hear after that
will be my own breathing, and the sound of the smell, of my footsteps.
The question is, what color will everything be at that moment when I come for you? What will the sky be
saying?
54
Personally, I like a chocolate-colored sky. Dark, dark chocolate. People say it suits me. I do, however, try
to enjoy every color I see--the whole spectrum. A billion or so flavors, none of them quite the same, and
a sky to slowly suck on. It takes the edge off the stress. It helps me relax.
***A SMALL THEORY***
People observe the colors of a day only at its beginnings and ends, but to me it's quite clear that a day
merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment.
A single hour can consist of thousands of different colors.
Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darknesses.
In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them.
As I've been alluding to, my one saving grace is distraction. It keeps me sane. It helps me cope,
considering the length of time I've been performing this job. The trouble is, who could ever replace me?
Who could step in while I take a break in your stock-standard resort-style vacation destination, whether
it be tropical or of the ski trip variety? The answer, of course, is nobody, which has prompted me to
make a conscious, deliberate decision--to make distraction my vacation. Needless to say, I vacation in
increments. In colors.
Still, it's possible that you might be asking, why does he even need a vacation? What does he need
distraction from?
Which brings me to my next point.
It's the leftover humans.
The survivors.
55
“By the Waters of Babylon”—Last 4 Paragraphs
by Stephen Vincent Benet
That is all of my story, for then I knew he was a man—I knew then that they had been men, neither gods
nor demons. It is a great knowledge, hard to tell and believe. They were men—they went a dark road,
but they were men. I had no fear after that—I had no fear going home, though twice I fought off the
dogs and once I was hunted for two days by the Forest People. When I saw my father again, I prayed and
was purified. He touched my lips and my breast, he said, "You went away a boy. You come back a man
and a priest." I said, "Father, they were men! I have been in the Place of the Gods and seen it! Now slay
me, if it is the law—but still I know they were men."
He looked at me out of both eyes. He said, "The law is not always the same shape—you have done what
you have done. I could not have done it my time, but you come after me. Tell!"
I told and he listened. After that, I wished to tell all the people but he showed me otherwise. He said,
"Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you may die of the truth. It was not idly
that our fathers forbade the Dead Places." He was right—it is better the truth should come little by little.
I have learned that, being a priest. Perhaps, in the old days, they ate knowledge too fast.
Nevertheless, we make a beginning. it is not for the metal alone we go to the Dead Places now—there
are the books and the writings. They are hard to learn. And the magic tools are broken—but we can look
at them and wonder. At least, we make a beginning. And, when I am chief priest we shall go beyond the
great river. We shall go to the Place of the Gods—the place newyork—not one man but a company. We
shall look for the images of the gods and find the god ASHING and the others—the gods Lincoln and
Biltmore and Moses. But they were men who built the city, not gods or demons. They were men. I
remember the dead man's face. They were men who were here before us. We must build again.
56
“The Things They Carried”
by Tim O’Brien
Good Form
It's time to BE BLUNT.
I'm forty-three years old, true, and I'm a writer now, and a long lime ago I walked through Qnang Ngai
Province as a foot soldier.
Almost everything else in this book is invented.
It's not a game. It's a form. Right here, now, as I invent myself, I'm thinking of all I want to tell you
about why this book is written as it is. For instance, I want to tell you this: twenty years ago I watched a
man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my
presence was guilt enough. I remember his face, which was not a pretty lace, because his jaw was in his
throat, and I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief. I blamed myself. And rightly so,
because I was present.
Bur listen. Even that story is made up.
I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why a story-truth is truer sometimes than happeningtruth.
Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces,
but I was young then and I was afraid lo look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless
responsibility and faceless grief.
Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the
centre of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the
other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.
What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.
I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can he
brave. I can make myself feel again.
'Daddy, tell the truth,' Kathleen can say, 'did you ever kill anybody?' and I can say, honestly, 'Of course
not.'
Or I can say, honestly, 'Yes.'
57
“A Million Little Pieces Revisited: Can the Truth Ever Set James Frey Free?”
by Daniel Honan
James Frey tells Big Think that "The Million Little Pieces" controversy with Oprah "really freed me to be
as radical as I want, to break every rule I want, and to not have to care what other people thought."
James Frey: The truth will set me free. . . . I don't care much about truth, or I don't care about the
definition of truth that most people live by. I don't think truth and fact are the same thing. I think truth is
an incredibly subjective individual thing.
The first time I started writing A Million Little Pieces I'd been searching for a voice for years and years
and years, and one day I sat down and I started writing that book, and I wrote the first sentence. And it
felt right. It felt more right than anything I had ever written. And so I kept going, and over the course of
a couple days I wrote probably the first fifteen or twenty pages of it. And I had never worked that fast
before. I was kind of stunned by it. At the end of it I looked at those pages and I was, like, I did it. This is
what I've always, this is how I've always been trying to write. This is the voice I've always been trying to
find.
That book coming out and the controversies related to it were obviously a big moment for me probably
not in the ways people might think. You know, I didn't write that book as a memoir. I've never thought
of it as a memoir. We didn't submit it to publishers as memoirs, even though it was published as one.
When the controversy blew up and I was sort of written off by the publishing business and by the
literary community, instead of being upset about it I was kind of excited. I was, like, I had to work within
your system. I wrote a book that wasn't what it was published as. I always knew I wasn't born to work in
that system, and I won't ever do it again. You know, from that point forward I was free. I got kicked out
of a club I didn't want to be a part of, and it was awesome.
Since then, I've literally done what I want. I call it what I want. I don't say I write fact or fiction. I don't
write novels or memoirs or, you know, narrative non-fiction. I just write books. I tell stories. The
expectations and rules and conventions of the literary community or the publishing community or
society in general mean absolutely nothing to me. What means something to me is telling a story in the
way I think is the right way to do it, and if I need to use factual elements or fictional elements or things
that live in the gray area between, if I have to use grammar of my own invention, if I have to lay the
pages out. Even at this point in my career I publish my books how I want, you know, I don't publish
through conventional publishers anymore. I publish through an art gallery. I publish my books online,
myself.
The Million Little Pieces controversy really freed me to be as radical as I want, to break every rule I want,
and to not have to care what other people thought. It was great.
58
“Zoo”
by Edward Hoch
The children were always good during the month of August, especially when it began to get near the
twenty-third. It was on this day that the great silver spaceship carrying Professor Hugo's Interplanetary
Zoo settled down for its annual six-hour visit to the Chicago area.
Before daybreak the crowds would form, long lines of children and adults both, each one clutching his or
her dollar, and waiting with wonderment to see what race of strange creatures the Professor had
brought this year.
In the past they had sometimes been treated to three-legged creatures from Venus, or tall, thin men
from Mars, or even snake-like horrors from somewhere more distant. This year, as the great round ship
settled slowly to earth in the huge tri-city parking area just outside of Chicago, they watched with awe
as the sides slowly slid up to reveal the familiar barred cages. In them were some wild breed of
nightmare--small, horse-like animals that moved with quick, jerking motions and constantly chattered in
a high-pitched tongue. The citizens of Earth clustered around as Professor Hugo's crew quickly collected
the waiting dollars, and soon the good Professor himself made an appearance, wearing his manycolored rainbow cape and top hat. ``Peoples of Earth,'' he called into his microphone.
The crowd's noise died down and he continued. ``Peoples of Earth, this year you see a real treat for your
single dollar--the little-known horse-spider people of Kaan--brought to you across a million miles of
space at great expense. Gather around, see them, study them, listen to them, tell your friends about
them. But hurry! My ship can remain here only six hours!
And the crowds slowly filed by, at once horrified and fascinated by these strange creatures that looked
like horses but ran up the walls of their cages like spiders. ``This is certainly worth a dollar,'' one man
remarked, hurrying away. ``I'm going home to get the wife.''
All day long it went like that, until ten thousand people had filed by the barred cages set into the side of
the spaceship. Then, as the six-hour limit ran out, Professor Hugo once more took microphone in hand.
``We must go now, but we will return next year on this date. And if you enjoyed our zoo this year, phone
your friends in other cities about it. We will land in New York tomorrow, and next week on to London,
Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Then on to other worlds!
He waved farewell to them, and as the ship rose from the ground the Earth peoples agreed that this had
been the very best Zoo yet. . . .
Some two months and three planets later, the silver ship of Professor Hugo settled at last onto the
familiar jagged rocks of Kaan, and the queer horse-spider creatures filed quickly out of their cages.
Professor Hugo was there to say a few parting words, and then they scurried away in a hundred
different directions, seeking their homes among the rocks.
In one, the she-creature was happy to see the return of her mate and offspring. She babbled a greeting
in the strange tongue and hurried to embrace them. ``It was a long time you were gone. Was it good?''
59
And the he-creature nodded. ``The little one enjoyed it especially. We visited eight worlds and saw many
things.''
The little one ran up the wall of the cave. ``On the place called Earth it was the best. The creatures there
wear garments over skins, and they walk on two legs.''
``But isn't it dangerous?'' asked the she-creature.
``No,'' her mate answered. ``There are bars to protect us from them. We remain right in the ship. Next
time you must come with us. It is well worth the nineteen commocs it costs.''
And the little one nodded. ``It was the very best Zoo ever. . . .''
60
“The Blind Men and the Elephant”
by John Godfrey Saxe
It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind
The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
“God bless me! but the ElephantIs very like a wall!”
The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, “Ho! what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me ’tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!”
61
The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant
Is very like a snake!
The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee.
“What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain,” quoth he;
” ‘Tis clear enough the Elephant Is very like a tree!”
The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: “E’en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!”
62
The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant
Is very like a rope!”
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!
Moral
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
63
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
64
“Narrative Point of View: Some considerations”—Paragraphs 1-3, Sections III, IV, V
by John Lye
The 'meaning' of a story is determined by a number of factors. One of the main factors is the matter of
who is telling the story, and how. There are many 'positions' or 'perspectives' or 'points of view' from
which a story can be told. By 'point of view' we generally mean two somewhat different things: 1) the
relation of the narrator to the action of the story — whether the narrator is, for instance, a character in
the story, or a voice outside of the story; 2) the relation of the narrator to the issues and the characters
that the story involves — whether the narrator is sympathetic, whether she agrees supports of opposes
a particular cultural practice or doctrine, that sort of question.
The first of these meanings of point of view is more technical: the story must get told, there are various
ways to tell it, each way of telling may bring a different emphasis, different knowledge, different ways in
which readers process the story. As a more technical concern, and one which deeply affects how the
story conveys its meanings, this is the meaning of 'point of view' most often dealt with in discussion of
narrative point of view, and it is addressed by the first four of the following five main topics. The second
of these meanings of point of view is more thematic and ideological: how the narrator 'sees' various
issues with which fiction may deal, the various questions, conflicts and anxieties in the culture that are
raised by the narrative. Considerations regarding this sense of the narrator's 'point of view' or
'perspective' or 'position' are addressed in the fifth main topic, "What is the narrator’s orientation?"
There is a caveat (that is, a warning) I will introduce at the beginning: often readers assume that the
narrator represents, or speaks for, the author, or that in fact the narrator is the author. This is an area in
which one must proceed with care: it often is hard to say that the narrator does not speak for the
author, but the narrator is not the author, the narrator is a device of the fiction. Don't make the
assumption that the narrator speaks for the author; make the case for it, if you have grounds to believe
it to be true, otherwise refer to "the narrator," not to "the author."
III. HOW MUCH DOES THE NARRATOR KNOW?
1. An important element in the telling of the story is how much the narrator knows.
a. If we are assured that the narrator 'knows everything,' then we read the story with
trust: what is presented to us is 'what is.'
b. If we are not so assured, we read the story with suspicion, noting the things that the
narrator does not know, or does not understand, and struggling to make sense of the
'data' of the story ourselves and to decipher the narrator as well as the story.
2. This question may arise both with external and internal narrators. We see limited knowledge in
internal narrators as normal, expected. But it is also possible for an 'author' to write a story in
which it becomes clear that the external narrator does not understand the implications of what
she is narrating, is misrepresenting what is happening, and so forth: it becomes clear that the
'author' and the narrator are not 'the same.'
3. This question of what the narrator knows is a separate matter from what the narrator chooses
to tell us.
65
IV. HOW RELIABLE IS THE NARRATOR?
1. Any narrator can be more or less reliable. This is a matter of what they know, but also of what
their intentions in telling are, of what their biases are, of what their own particular blindnesses
are.
V. WHAT IS THE NARRATOR ' S ORIENTATION?
This category covers a number of ways in which the narrator may relate to the story and to the listener.
Here are some categories:
1. Distance: the narrator can be emotionally or in other ways distant from the story she is
narrating, or very close, very involved. This can take a number of forms, including, for instance,
the coincidence or non-coincidence of dialect, vocabulary or style (as transitions from the 'voice'
of the narrator of Pride and Prejudice to that of Elizabeth Bennet, i.e. from the narrator's
reporting of what is in Elizabeth's head to her representation of Elizabeth's precise thoughts, are
difficult to discern), distance in time, distance in culture.
2. Interest: the narrator may share the 'stakes' of the story with the characters or may not; may
show a great interest in the outcome of the story and the choices the characters make or may
be clinical, reserved, apparently uninterested, or disinterested (that word means 'impartial', not
'uninterested').
3. Sympathy: not dissimilar from distance as emotional distance, this refers to how much the
narrator empathizes with the characters, or judges them, or approaches them as a clinical
observer. It differs from emotional distance in that the narrator may be emotionally close, but
judgmental or antipathetic.
4. Voice: this refers to what the narrator is like, as it is conveyed by the language of the narration,
the tone, the choice of comments and descriptions, and so forth: These may indicate
a. what her personality is
b. what her attitude is to the characters, to the subject of the story, to the readers
c. what her ideological position, faith commitment, intellectual and emotional positions
are
5. Orientation: this is a category which is useful, but may repeat aspects of the categories above: is
the narrator approaching the story from a certain position of commitment and concern, for
instance of ideological or sexual or theological or social or political commitment or concern. The
term "orientation" can at times be replaced by the term "standpoint." "Standpoint" is associated
with Standpoint Theory; you may read about that on my page on some feminist theories.
6. Sense of Audience: narrators may differ in their sense of who they are narrating to, and why. In
this case the narrator of an embedded narrative (an account, a diary, a letter, etc) will likely
have a very different audience than the primary internal narrator.
66
“Best-Selling Memoir Draws Scrutiny”
by Edward Wyatt
Police reports and other public records published online on Sunday have raised substantial questions
about the truth of numerous incidents depicted in James Frey's best-selling memoir, "A Million Little
Pieces."
James Frey's "Million Little Pieces," an Oprah Book Club selection, has come under scrutiny.
The book, originally published in 2003 by the Nan A. Talese imprint of Doubleday, soared to the top of
the best-seller lists in the fall after it was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her television book club. Ms.
Winfrey's enthusiastic endorsement helped the book to sell more than two million copies last year,
making it the second-highest-selling book of 2005, behind only "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince."
"A Million Little Pieces" currently tops the New York Times paperback best-seller list; Mr. Frey's second
book, "My Friend Leonard," is on the paper's hardcover best-seller list.
Mr. Frey has repeatedly stated that his book is true. But a lengthy article posted Sunday by The Smoking
Gun Web site (www.thesmokinggun.com) quotes Mr. Frey as saying that events "were embellished in
the book for obvious dramatic reasons." In particular, it quotes him as saying he did not spend nearly
three months in jail after leaving an alcohol and drug rehabilitation center in the mid-1990's, as he
contends in his book, but rather only a few days, at most. In "My Friend Leonard," Mr. Frey writes that
his girlfriend, Lilly, whom he'd met in rehab, called him distraught just before the end of his sentence.
Upon his release he races to her side, only to discover that she has committed suicide.
In "A Million Little Pieces" Mr. Frey says that the three-month sentence stemmed from a 1992 arrest on
felony charges, including fighting with police officers and hitting an officer with his car, that could have
landed him in jail for up to eight years. But the Smoking Gun article and supporting documents state
that Mr. Frey was held for a few hours after an arrest on a drunken-driving charge and that he
eventually paid a small fine, but otherwise spent no significant amount of time in jail.
The Smoking Gun article, which did not carry a byline, stated of Mr. Frey: "The 36-year-old author, these
documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported
criminal career, jail terms and status as an outlaw 'wanted in three states.' "
Yesterday, Mr. Frey did not respond to a telephone message left at his home in Manhattan. Officials at
Random House, Doubleday's parent, would not comment on the Smoking Gun article but issued a
statement saying, "We stand in support of our author, James Frey, and his book which has touched the
lives of millions of readers."
Ms. Winfrey and her representatives at Harpo Productions also did not return calls yesterday. Ms.
Winfrey's promotion of Mr. Frey's book was among the most enthusiastic she has ever given to an
author. When Ms. Winfrey announced her choice - the first work of nonfiction she had selected - she
called the book "a gut-wrenching memoir that is raw and it's so real."
Ms. Winfrey is scheduled to announce her next pick for her book club on Monday.
67
But given the response from viewers yesterday on Internet message boards devoted to Mr. Frey's book,
Ms. Winfrey might find herself having to address questions about its truth. On Ms. Winfrey's site, some
readers expressed dismay that they had been lied to. But on Mr. Frey's own site, bigjimindustries.com,
one fan who identified herself as Julie wrote: "Even if his story is fake, he opened up the eyes of so many
people. How about if we all focus on that instead of accusing him of being a liar?"
Mr. Frey's agent, Kassie Evashevski of Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, did not respond to requests for
comment. A lawyer representing Mr. Frey, who wrote a letter to The Smoking Gun threatening legal
action if it published a defamatory story about the author, did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Also declining to respond to telephone messages were Sean McDonald, Mr. Frey's editor, who now
works for Penguin's Riverhead imprint, and a spokesman for Penguin, which announced last week it had
signed a contract to publish two additional books by Mr. Frey, including a novel.
The discrepancies and Mr. Frey's reported admissions of falsifying details of his life raise questions about
the publishing industry's increasing reliance on nonfiction memoirs as a fast track to the best-seller list.
It is not at all uncommon to see new books marketed as nonfiction containing notes to readers saying
the author has altered the time sequence of events, created composite characters, changed names or
otherwise made up details of a memoir. "A Million Little Pieces," however, contains no such disclaimer.
And the questions about Mr. Frey came at almost the same time as new revelations about the identity
of JT Leroy, a writer whose supposedly autobiographical novels draw on a lifetime of prostitution and
homelessness.
Since its publication in April 2003, "A Million Little Pieces" has attracted attention for its graphic
descriptions of Mr. Frey's harrowing withdrawal from substance abuse and for its remarkable story of
his redemption and sobriety. But aspects of the story, including the author's claim that he underwent
root canal surgery without anesthesia, have drawn repeated questions at book readings, from fans of
Ms. Winfrey's book club and from journalists.
In an interview with The New York Times last month, Mr. Frey said that he had provided extensive
documentation of his account of events in "A Million Little Pieces" to lawyers at Random House Inc., the
parent of Doubleday and Anchor Books, which published the paperback edition, and to lawyers at
Harpo, the production company owned by Ms. Winfrey. But he declined to allow a reporter at The Times
to view those materials or to ask his publisher or Ms. Winfrey to share them. Random House also
refused to allow a reporter to review the materials or to discuss them.
In an interview with The Times last month, Mr. Frey said that he originally envisioned "A Million Little
Pieces" not as a memoir but as a novel. "We were in discussions after we sold it as to whether to publish
it as fiction or as nonfiction," he said. "And a lot of those issues had to do with following in a legacy of
American writers." Mr. Frey noted that writers like Hemingway, Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac had
written very autobiographical books that were published as fiction.
But when Doubleday decided to publish the book as nonfiction, Mr. Frey said, he did not have to change
anything. "It was written exactly as it was published," he said.
68
“Conservation as a National Duty”
by Theodore Roosevelt
THEODORE ROOSEVELT: “CONSERVATION AS A NATIONAL DUTY” (13 MAY 1908)
[1] Governors of the several States; and Gentlemen:
[2] I welcome you to this Conference at the White House. You have come hither at my request, so that
we may join together to consider the question of the conservation and use of the great fundamental
sources of wealth of this Nation.
[3] So vital is this question, that for the first time in our history the chief executive officers of the States
separately, and of the States together forming the Nation, have met to consider it. It is the chief material
question that confronts us, second only–and second always–to the great fundamental questions of
morality. [Applause]
[4] With the governors come men from each State chosen for their special acquaintance with the terms
of the problem that is before us. Among them are experts in natural resources and representatives of
national organizations concerned in the development and use of these resources; the Senators and
Representatives in Congress; the Supreme Court, the Cabinet, and the Inland Waterways Commission
have likewise been invited to the Conference, which is therefore national in a peculiar sense.
[5] This Conference on the conservation of natural resources is in effect a meeting of the representatives
of all the people of the United States called to consider the weightiest problem now before the Nation;
and the occasion for the meeting lies in the fact that the natural resources of our country are in danger
of exhaustion if we permit the old wasteful methods of exploiting them longer to continue.
[6] With the rise of peoples from savagery to civilization, and with the consequent growth in the extent
and variety of the needs of the average man, there comes a steadily increasing growth of the amount
demanded by this average man from the actual resources of the country. And yet, rather curiously, at
the same time that there comes that increase in what the average man demands from the resources, he
is apt to grow to lose the sense of his dependence upon nature. He lives in big cities. He deals in
industries that do not bring him in close touch with nature. He does not realize the demands he is
making upon nature. For instance, he finds, as he has found before in many parts of this country, that it
is cheaper to build his house of concrete than of wood, learning in this way only that he has allowed the
woods to become exhausted. That is happening, as you know, in parts of this country at this very time.
[7] Savages, and very primitive peoples generally, concern themselves only with superficial natural
resources; with those which they obtain from the actual surface of the ground. As peoples become a
little less primitive, their industries, although in a rude manner, are extended to resources below the
surface; then, with what we call civilization and the extension of knowledge, more resources come into
use, industries are multiplied, and foresight begins to become a necessary and prominent factor in life.
Crops are cultivated; animals are domesticated; and metals are mastered.
[8] We can not do any of these things without foresight, and we can not, when the nation becomes fully
civilized and very rich, continue to be civilized and rich unless the nation shows more foresight than we
are showing at this moment as a nation. [Applause]
69
[9] Every step of the progress of mankind is marked by the discovery and use of natural resources
previously unused. Without such progressive knowledge and utilization of natural resources population
could not grow, nor industries multiply, nor the hidden wealth of the earth be developed for the benefit
of mankind.
[10] From the first beginnings of civilization, on the banks of the Nile and the Euphrates, the industrial
progress of the world has gone on slowly, with occasional set-backs, but on the whole steadily, through
tens of centuries to the present day.
[11] It never does advance by jumps, gentlemen. It always goes slowly. There are occasional set-backs,
but on the whole it goes steadily.
[12] But of late the rapidity of the process has increased at such a rate that more space has been
actually covered during the century and a quarter occupied by our national life than during the
preceding six thousand years that take us back to the earliest monuments of Egypt, to the earliest cities
of the Babylonian plain.
[13] Now, I ask you to think what that means; and I am speaking with historic literalness. In the
development, the use, and therefore the exhaustion of certain of the natural resources, the progress
has been more rapid in the past century and a quarter than during all preceding time of which we have
record.
[14] When the founders of this nation met at Independence Hall in Philadelphia the conditions of
commerce had not fundamentally changed from what they were when the Phoenician keels first
furrowed the lonely waters of the Mediterranean.
[15] You turn to Homer–some of you did in your school days, even if you do not now [laughter]–and you
will see that he spoke, not of the Mediterranean but of one corner of the Egean only, as a limitless
waste of water which no one had traversed. There is now no nook of the earth that we are not
searching.
[16] When our forefathers met in Independence Hall, the differences were those of degrees, not of kind,
and they were not in all cases even those of degree. Mining was carried on fundamentally as it had been
carried on by the Pharaohs in the countries adjacent to the Red Sea. Explorers now-a-days by the shores
of the Red Sea strike countries that they call new, but they find in them mines, with sculptures of the
Pharaohs, showing that those mines were worked out and exhausted thousands of years before the
Christian era.
[17] In 1776 the wares of the merchants of Boston, of Charleston, like the wares of the merchants of
Nineveh and Sidon, if they went by water, were carried by boats propelled by sails or oars; if they went
by land were carried in wagons drawn by beasts of draft or in packs on the backs of beasts of burden.
The ships that crossed the high seas were better than the ships that three thousand years before
crossed the Egean, but they were of the same type, after all–they were wooden ships propelled by sails.
There the difference was one of degree in our favor. On shore the difference was one of degree against
us, for on land the roads, at the end of the eighteenth century, when this country became a nation,
were not as good as the roads of the Roman Empire, while the service of the posts, at any rate prior to
70
the days of Benjamin Franklin, was probably inferior. In the previous eighteen hundred years there had
been a retrogression in roads and in postal service.
[18] In Washington’s time anthracite coal was known only as a useless black stone; and the great fields
of bituminous coal were undiscovered. As steam was unknown, the use of coal for power production
was undreamed of. Water was practically the only source of power, saved the labor of men and animals;
and this power was used only in the most primitive fashion. But a few small iron deposits had been
found in this country, and the use of iron by our countrymen was very small. Wood was practically the
only fuel, and what lumber was sawed was consumed locally, while the forests were regarded chiefly as
obstructions to settlement and cultivation. The man who cut down a tree was held to have conferred a
service upon his fellows.
[19] Such was the degree of progress to which civilized mankind had attained when this nation began its
career. It is almost impossible for us in this day to realize how little our Revolutionary ancestors knew of
the great store of natural resources whose discovery and use have been such vital factors in the growth
and greatness of this Nation, and how little they required to take from this store in order to satisfy their
needs.
[20] Since then our knowledge and use of the resources of the present territory of the United States
have increased a hundred-fold. Indeed, the growth of this Nation by leaps and bounds makes one of the
most striking and important chapters in the history of the world. Its growth has been due to the rapid
development, and alas that it should be said! to the rapid destruction, of our natural resources. Nature
has supplied to us in the United States, and still supplies to us, more kinds of resources in a more lavish
degree than has ever been the case at any other time or with any other people. Our position in the
world has been attained by the extent and thoroughness of the control we have achieved over nature;
but we are more, and not less, dependent upon what she furnishes than at any previous time of history
since the days of primitive man.
[21] Yet our fathers, though they knew so little of the resources of the country, exercised a wise
forethought in reference thereto. Washington clearly saw that the perpetuity of the States could only be
secured by union, and that the only feasible basis of union was an economic one; in other words, that it
must be based on the development and use of their natural resources. Accordingly, he helped to outline
a scheme of commercial development, and by his influence an interstate waterways commission was
appointed by Virginia and Maryland.
[22] It met near where we are now meeting, in Alexandria, adjourned to Mount Vernon, and took up the
consideration of interstate commerce by the only means then available, that of water; and the trouble
we have since had with the railways has been mainly due to the fact that naturally our forefathers could
not divine that the iron road would become the interstate and international highway, instead of the old
route by water. Further conferences were arranged, first at Annapolis, and then at Philadelphia. It was in
Philadelphia that the representatives of all the States met for what was in its original conception merely
a waterways conference; but when they had closed their deliberations the outcome was the
Constitution which made the States into a nation. [Applause]
[23] The Constitution of the United States thus grew in large part out of the necessity for united action
in the wise of one of our natural resources. The wise use of all of our natural resources, which are our
national resources as well, is the great material question of today. I have asked you to come together
71
now because the enormous consumption of these resources, and the threat of imminent exhaustion of
some of them, due to reckless and wasteful use, once more calls for common effort, common action.
[24] We want to take action that will prevent the advent of a woodless age, and defer as long as possible
the advent of an ironless age. [Applause]
[25] Since the days when the Constitution was adopted, steam and electricity have revolutionized the
industrial world. Nowhere has the revolution been so great as in our own country. The discovery and
utilization of mineral fuels and alloys have given us the lead over all other nations in the production of
steel. The discovery and utilization of coal and iron have given us our railways, and have led to such
industrial development as has never before been seen. The vast wealth of lumber in our forests, the
riches of our soils and mines, the discovery of gold and mineral oils, combined with the efficiency of our
transportation, have made the conditions of our life unparalleled in comfort and convenience.
[26] A great many of these things are truisms. Much of what I say is so familiar to us that it seems
commonplace to repeat it; but familiar though it is, I do not think as a nation we understand what its
real bearing is. It is so familiar that we disregard it. [Applause]
[27] The steadily increasing drain on these natural resources has promoted to an extraordinary degree
the complexity of our industrial and social life. Moreover, this unexampled development has had a
determining effect upon the character and opinions of our people. The demand for efficiency in the
great task has given us vigor, effectiveness, decision, and power, and a capacity for achievement which
in its own lines has never yet been matched. [Applause] So great and so rapid has been our material
growth that there has been a tendency to lag behind in spiritual and moral growth [laughter and
applause]; but that is not the subject upon which I speak to you today.
[28] Disregarding for the moment the question of moral purpose, it is safe to say that the prosperity of
our people depends directly on the energy and intelligence with which our natural resources are used. It
is equally clear that these resources are the final basis of national power and perpetuity. Finally, it is
ominously evident that these resources are in the course of rapid exhaustion.
[29] This Nation began with the belief that its landed possessions were illimitable and capable of
supporting all the people who might care to make our country their home; but already the limit of
unsettled land is in sight, and indeed but little land fitted for agriculture now remains unoccupied save
what can be reclaimed by irrigation and drainage–a subject with which this Conference is partly to deal.
We began with an unapproached heritage of forests; more than half of the timber is gone. We began
with coal fields more extensive than those of any other nation and with iron ores regarded as
inexhaustible, and many experts now declare that the end of both iron and coal is in sight.
[30] The mere increase in our consumption of coal during 1907 over 1906 exceeded the total
consumption in 1876, the Centennial year. This is a striking fact: Thirty years went by, and the mere
surplus of use of one year over the preceding year exceeded all that was used in 1876–and we thought
we were pretty busy people even then. The enormous stores of mineral oil and gas are largely gone; and
those Governors who have in their States cities built up by natural gas, where the natural gas has since
been exhausted, can tell us something of what that means. Our natural waterways are not gone, but
they have been so injured by neglect, and by the division of responsibility and utter lack of system in
dealing with them, that there is less navigation on them now than there was fifty years ago. Finally, we
72
began with soils of unexampled fertility, and we have so impoverished them by injudicious use and by
failing to check erosion that their crop-producing power is diminishing instead of increasing. In a word,
we have thoughtlessly, and to a large degree unnecessarily, diminished the resources upon which not
only our prosperity but the prosperity of our children and our children’s children must always depend.
[31] We have become great in a material sense because of the lavish use of our resources, and we have
just reason to be proud of our growth. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen
when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils
shall have been still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding
the fields, and obstructing navigation. These questions do not relate only to the next century or to the
next generation. One distinguishing characteristic of really civilized men is foresight; we have to, as a
nation, exercise foresight for this nation in the future; and if we do not exercise that foresight, dark will
be the future! [Applause] We should exercise foresight now, as the ordinarily prudent man exercises
foresight in conserving and wisely using the property which contains the assurance of well-being for
himself and his children. We want to see a man own his farm rather than rent it, because we want to
see it an object to him to transfer it in better order to his children. We want to see him exercise
forethought for the next generation. We need to exercise it in some fashion ourselves as a nation for the
next generation.
[32] The natural resources I have enumerated can be divided into two sharply distinguished classes
accordingly as they are or are not capable of renewal. Mines if used must necessarily be exhausted. The
minerals do not and can not renew themselves. Therefore in dealing with the coal, the oil, the gas, the
iron, the metals generally, all that we can do is to try to see that they are wisely used. The exhaustion is
certain to come in time. We can trust that it will be deferred long enough to enable the extraordinarily
inventive genius of our people to devise means and methods for more or less adequately replacing what
is lost; but the exhaustion is sure to come.
[33] The second class of resources consists of those which can not only be used in such manner as to
leave them undiminished for our children, but can actually be improved by wise use. The soil, the
forests, the waterways come in this category. Every one knows that a really good farmer leaves his farm
more valuable at the end of his life than it was when he first took hold of it. So with the waterways. So
with the forests. In dealing with mineral resources, man is able to improve on nature only by putting the
resources to a beneficial use which in the end exhausts them; but in dealing with the soil and its
products man can improve on nature by compelling the resources to renew and even reconstruct
themselves in such manner as to serve increasingly beneficial uses–while the living waters can be so
controlled as to multiply their benefits.
[34] Neither the primitive man nor the pioneer was aware of any duty to posterity in dealing with the
renewable resources. When the American settler felled the forests, he felt that there was plenty of
forest left for the sons who came after him. When he exhausted the soil of his farm, he felt that his son
could go West and take up another. The Kentuckian or the Ohioan felled the forest and expected his son
to move west and fell other forests on the banks of the Mississippi; the Georgian exhausted his farm and
moved into Alabama or to the mouth of the Yazoo to take another. So it was with his immediate
successors. When the soil-wash from the farmer’s field choked the neighboring river, the only thought
was to use the railway rather than the boats to move produce and supplies. That was so up to the
generation that preceded ours.
73
[35] Now all this is changed. On the average the son of the farmer of today must make his living on his
father’s farm. There is no difficulty in doing this if the father will exercise wisdom. No wise use of a farm
exhausts its fertility. So with the forests. We are over the verge of a timber famine in this country, and it
is unpardonable for the Nation or the States to permit any further cutting of our timber save in
accordance with a system which will provide that the next generation shall see the timber increased
instead of diminished. [Applause]
[36] Just let me interject one word as to a particular type of folly of which it ought not to be necessary to
speak. We stop wasteful cutting of timber; that of course makes a slight shortage at the moment. To
avoid that slight shortage at the moment, there are certain people so foolish that they will incur
absolute shortage in the future, and they are willing to stop all attempts to conserve the forests,
because of course by wastefully using them at the moment we can for a year or two provide against any
lack of wood. That is like providing for the farmer’s family to live sumptuously on the flesh of the milch
cow. [Laughter.] Any farmer can live pretty well for a year if he is content not to live at all the year after.
[Laughter and applause]
[37] We can, moreover, add enormous tracts of the most valuable possible agricultural land to the
national domain by irrigation in the arid and semi-arid regions, and by drainage of great tracts of swamp
land in the humid regions. We can enormously increase our transportation facilities by the canalization
of our rivers so as to complete a great system of waterways on the Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf coasts and
in the Mississippi Valley, from the Great Plains to the Alleghenies, and from the northern lakes to the
mouth of the mighty Father of Waters. But all these various uses of our natural resources are so closely
connected that they should be coordinated, and should be treated as part of one coherent plan and not
in haphazard and piecemeal fashion.
[38] It is largely because of this that I appointed the Waterways Commission last year, and that I sought
to perpetuate its work. There are members of the coordinate branch present. The reason this meeting
takes place is because we had that waterways commission last year. I had to prosecute the work by
myself. I have asked Congress to pass a bill giving some small sum of money for the perpetuation of that
Commission. If Congress does not act, I will perpetuate the Commission anyway, [Great applause] but of
course it is a great deal better that Congress should act; [Applause] it enables the work to be more
effectively done. I hope there will be action. But the Commission will go ahead.
[39] I wish to take this opportunity to express in heartiest fashion my acknowledgment to all the
members of the Commission. At great personal sacrifice of time and effort they have rendered a service
to the public for which we can not be too grateful. Especial credit is due to the initiative, the energy, the
devotion to duty, and the farsightedness of Gifford Pinchot, [Great applause] to whom we owe so much
of the progress we have already made in handling this matter of the coordination and conservation of
natural resources. If it had not been for him this convention neither would nor could have been called.
[40] We are coming to recognize as never before the right of the Nation to guard its own future in the
essential matter of natural resources. In the past we have admitted the right of the individual to injure
the future of the Republic for his own present profit. In fact there has been a good deal of a demand for
unrestricted individualism, for the right of the individual to injure the future of all of us for his own
temporary and immediate profit. The time has come for a change. As a people we have the right and the
duty, second to none other but the right and duty of obeying the moral law, of requiring and doing
justice, to protect ourselves and our children against the wasteful development of our natural resources,
74
whether that waste is caused by the actual destruction of such resources or by making them impossible
of development hereafter.
[41] Any right thinking father earnestly desires and strives to leave his son both an untarnished name
and a reasonable equipment for the struggle of life. So this Nation as a whole should earnestly desire
and strive to leave to the next generation the national honor unstained and the national resources
unexhausted. There are signs that both the Nation and the States are waking to a realization of this
great truth–On March 10, 1908, the Supreme Court of Maine rendered an exceedingly important judicial
decision. This opinion was rendered in response to questions as to the right of the Legislature to restrict
the cutting of trees on private land for the prevention of droughts and floods, the preservation of the
natural water supply, and the prevention of the erosion of such lands, and the consequent filling up of
rivers, ponds, and lakes. The forests and water power of Maine constitute the larger part of her wealth
and form the basis of her industrial life, and the question submitted by the Maine Senate to the
Supreme Court and the answer of the Supreme Court alike bear testimony to the wisdom of the people
of Maine, and clearly define a policy of conservation of natural resources, the adoption of which is of
vital importance not merely to Maine but to the whole country. [Applause]
[42] Such a policy will preserve soil, forests, water power as a heritage for the children and the children’s
children of the men and women of this generation; for any enactment that provides for the wise
utilization of the forests, whether in public or private ownership, and for the conservation of the water
resources of the country, must necessarily be legislation that will promote both private and public
welfare; for flood prevention, water-power development, preservation of the soil, and improvement of
navigable rivers are all promoted by such a policy of forest conservation.
[43] The opinion of the Maine Supreme Bench sets forth unequivocally the principle that the property
rights of the individual are subordinate to the rights of the community, and especially that the waste of
wild timber land derived originally from the State, involving as it would the impoverishment of the State
and its People and thereby defeating a great purpose of government, may properly be prevented by
State restrictions.
[44] The Court says that there are two reasons why the right of the public to control and limit the use of
private property is peculiarly applicable to property in land:
[45] First, such property is not the result of productive labor, but is derived solely from the State itself,
the original owner; second, the amount of land being incapable of increase, if the owners of large tracts
can waste them at will without State restriction, the State and its people may be helplessly
impoverished and one great purpose of government defeated. . . . We do not think the proposed
legislation would operate to “take” private property within the inhibition of the Constitution. While it
might restrict the owner of wild and uncultivated lands in his use of them, might delay his taking some
of the product, might delay his anticipated profits and even thereby might cause him some loss of profit,
it would nevertheless leave him his lands, their product and increase, untouched, and without
diminution of title, estate, or quantity. He would still have large measure of control and large
opportunity to realize values. He might suffer delay but not deprivation. . . . The proposed legislation . . .
would be within the legislative power and would not operate as a taking of private property for which
compensation must be made.
75
[46] The Court of Errors and Appeals of New Jersey has adopted a similar view, which has recently been
sustained by the Supreme Court of the United States. In delivering the opinion of the Court on April 6,
1908, Mr. Justice Holmes said:
[47] The State as quasi sovereign and representative of the interests of the public has a standing in court
to protect the atmosphere, the water, and the forests within its territory, irrespective of the assent or
dissent of the private owners of the land most immediately concerned. . . . It appears to us that few
public interests are more obvious, indisputable and independent of particular theory than the interest of
the public of a State to maintain the rivers that are wholly within it substantially undiminished, except
by such drafts upon them as the guardian of the public welfare may permit for the purpose of turning
them to a more perfect use.
[Applause]
[48] This public interest is omnipresent wherever there is a State, and grows more pressing as
population grows.
[49] Not as a dictum of law, which I cannot make, but as a dictum of moral, I wish to say that this applies
to more than the forests and streams. [Laughter and applause] The learned Justice proceeds:
[50] We are of opinion, further, that the constitutional power of the State to insist that its natural
advantages shall remain unimpaired by its citizens is not dependent upon any nice estimate of the
extent of present use or speculation as to future needs. The legal conception of the necessary is apt to
be confined to somewhat rudimentary wants, and there are benefits from a great river that might
escape a lawyer’s view.
[51] [Laughter] I have simply quoted. [Laughter]
[52] But the State is not required to submit even to an esthetic analysis. Any analysis may be
inadequate. It finds itself in possession of what all admit to be a great public good, and want it has it
may keep and give no one a reason for its will.
[53] These decisions reach the root of the idea of conservation of our resources in the interests of our
people.
[54] Finally, let us remember that the conservation of our natural resources, though the gravest problem
of today, is yet but part of another and greater problem to which this Nation is not yet awake, but to
which it will awake in time, and with which it must hereafter grapple if it is to live–the problem of
national efficiency, the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the Nation. [Applause.]
When the People of the United States consciously undertake to raise themselves as citizens, and the
Nation and the States in their several spheres, to the highest pitch of excellence in private, State, and
national life, and to do this because it is the first of all the duties of true patriotism, then and not till
then the future of this Nation, in quality and in time, will be assured. [Great applause]
76
“Autumntime”
by A. Lentini
I saw my first tree today. Dad finally broke down and took us to East Boston Urban Center 3 after Mom had
been harping on it for the past two weeks. I think he was glad we went after all, because he was smiling quietly all
during the trip back.
Dad used to tell me stories about the trees that still existed when he was a boy. There weren't very many even
then, with the urbanization program in full swing, but most people had seen at least one tree by the time they
started school. It wasn't like nowadays, at any rate. Oh, I've seen the plastic trees; practically every street has a few
of them. But you can tell the plastic ones are artificial just from looking at pictures in the microdot library. And
now, after seeing a real tree, I can say for sure that the artificial ones aren't the same at all.
This morning when we got up, the house was all excited. Mom dialed a light breakfast of toast and synthetic
milk so that we wouldn't waste time eating. And when we finished, the three of us took an elevator-bus up to the
fourth level, where we caught the air track to Brooklyn. From there we took another elevator-bus down to main
level, rode the monorail to Intercity Subway Station 27, and caught the second sublevel AA train to Boston. Our
expectations were so high that Dad and I didn't mind it when Mom told us again how the tree was discovered.
The O'Brien home was one of the few examples of old-style wooden structures that hadn't been demolished in
Boston's urban-renewal campaign at the turn of the century. The family had been able to avoid this because of its
wealth and political influence and the house was passed on through several generations to the present. Old man
O'Brien had no heirs, so when he died the family home went up for auction, and the Urban Center bought it. When
local officials arrived for an appraisal, they discovered that the house had a backyard, which is forbidden by zoning
restrictions.
In the yard was a live tree—an oke was what Mom called it. When the news of the tree's discovery leaked out,
quite a few sightseers stopped by to have a look at it, and the local government, realizing the money-making
potential, began charging admission and advertising the place. By now it had become a favorite spot for school
field trips and family excursions such as ours. When we arrived in main Boston we rode the elevator-bus up to
ground level and caught a monorail out to East Boston Urban Center 3. An air- cush taxi took us the rest of the way
to the residence.
The home itself was unimpressive. It had none of the marble gloss or steely sheen of modern buildings, but was
rather a dull white color, with the paint peeling in places. Dad paid the admission fee, and we spent the next
fifteen minutes on a dull guided tour of the house. The rooms were roped off to keep people from touching
anything, but there were no windows facing the illegal backyard anyway, so it really didn't matter that I couldn't
enter the rooms on that side.
My mind was on the tree, and I thought the inside tour would never end, but soon we were walking through a
doorway hidden in one of the bookshelves and into the backyard. The yard was big—at least ten by twenty feet—
and I was surprised to find real grass growing on the sides of the concrete walkway built for tourists. The grass
didn't distract me for long, however, because I just couldn't help noticing the tree!
It was located at one end of the yard, and there was a mesh fence around it for protection. It was similar in form
to the plastic trees I'd seen, but there was much more to it than that. You could see details more intricate than in
any manmade plant. And it was alive. Long ago someone had carved their initials in the bark, and you could see
where the wound had healed. But best of all was the smell. It was a fresh, living odor, alien to the antiseptic world
outside with all its metal, plastic, and glass. I wanted to touch the bark, but the fence prevented me from doing so.
Mom and Dad just breathed deeply and stared up with smiles on their faces. The three of us stood there for a
moment, and then the tour guide told us to make room for the next group. I didn't want to go—in fact, I almost felt
like crying.
On the way back, Mom and Dad were silent, and I read through one of the brochures the guide had passed out.
77
When I came to the part that said the O'Brien home would be open only for the rest of this year, I was sad. They
intend to tear down the place to make room for some kind of insurance building, and the tree will have to go, too.
For the rest of the trip I just sat still, fingering the object in my pocket which I had picked off the grass in the
O'Briens' backyard. I think it's called an acorn.
78
“Requiem for a Nest”
by Wanda Coleman
he winged thang built her dream palace
amid the fine green eyes of a sheltering bough
she did not know it was urban turf
disguised as serenely delusionally rural
nor did she know the neighborhood was rife
with slant-mawed felines and those long-taloned
swoopers of prey. she was ignorant of the acidity & oil
that slowly polluted the earth, and was never
to detect the serpent coiled one strong limb below
following her nature she flitted and dove
for whatever blades twigs and mud
could be found under the humming blue
and created a hatchery for her spawn
not knowing all were doomed
“Birdfoot’s Grampa”
by Joseph Bruchac
The old man
must have stopped our car
two dozen times to climb out
and gather into his hands
5 the small toads blinded
by our lights and leaping,
live drops of rain.
The rain was falling,
a mist about his white hair
10 and I kept saying
you can’t save them all
accept it, get back in
we’ve got places to go.
But, leathery hands full
of wet brown life,
knee deep in the summer
roadside grass,
he just smiled and said
they have places to go to
20 too.
15
79
“American Flamingo”
by Greg Pape
I know he shot them to know them.
I did not know the eyes of the flamingo
are blue, a deep live blue.
And the tongue is lined with many small
tongues, thirteen, in the sketch
by Audubon, to function as a sieve.
I knew the long rose-pink neck,
the heavy tricolored down-sweeping bill,
the black primaries.
But I did not know the blue eye
drawn so passionately by Audubon
it seems to look out, wary, intense,
from the paper it is printed on.
-- what
Is man but his passion?
asked Robert Penn Warren. In the background
of this sketch, tenderly subtitled Old Male,
beneath the over-draping feathered
monument of the body, between the long
flexible neck and the long bony legs
covered with pink plates of flesh,
Audubon has given us eight postures,
eight stunning movements in the ongoing
dance of the flamingos.
Once at Hialeah in late afternoon
I watched the satin figures of the jockeys
perched like bright beetles on the backs
of horses pounding down the home
stretch, a few crops whipping
the lathering flanks, the loud flat
metallic voice of the announcer fading
as the flamingos, grazing the pond water
at the far end of the infield, rose
80
in a feathery blush, only a few feet
off the ground, and flew one long
clipped-winged ritual lap
in the heavy Miami light, a great
slow swirl of grace from the old world
that made tickets fall from hands,
stilled horses, and drew toasts from the stands
as they settled down again
like a rose-colored fog on the pond.
81
“Audubon: A Vision”
by Robert Penn Warren
I
Was Not the Lost Dauphin
[A]
Was not the last dauphin, though handsome was only
Base-born and not even able
To make a decent living, was only
Himself, Jean Jacques, and his passion--what
Is man but his passion?
Saw,
Eastward and over the cypress swamp, the dawn,
Redder than meat, break;
And the large bird,
Long neck outthrust, wings crooked to scull air, moved
In a slow calligraphy, crank, flat and black against
The color of God’s blood spilt, as though
Pulled by a string.
Saw
It proceed across the inflamed distance.
Moccasins set in hoar frost, eyes fixed on the bird,
Thought: “On that sky it is black.”
Thought: “In my mind it is white.”
Thinking: “Ardea occidentalis, heron, the great one.”
Dawn: his heart shook in the tension of the world.
Dawn: and what is your passion?
[B]
October: and the bear,
Daft in the honey-light, yawns.
The bear’s tongue, pink as a baby’s, out-crisps to the curled tip,
It bleeds the black blood of blueberry.
The teeth are more importantly white
Than has ever been imagined.
The bear feels his own fat
Sweeten, like a drowse, deep to the bone.
Bemused, above the fume of ruined blueberries,
The last bee hums.
The wings, like mica, glint
82
In the sunlight.
He leans on his gun. Thinks
How thin is the membrane between himself and the world.
83
The Mountain Trail and Its Message
by Albert W. Palmer
“ A Parable of Sauntering”
There is a fourth lesson of the trail. It is one which John Muir taught me [during an early Sierra Club
outing].
There are always some people in the mountains who are known as "hikers." They rush over the trail at
high speed and take great delight in being the first to reach camp and in covering the greatest number
of miles in the least possible time. they measure the trail in terms of speed and distance.
One day as I was resting in the shade Mr. Muir overtook me on the trail and began to chat in that
friendly way in which he delights to talk with everyone he meets. I said to him: "Mr. Muir, someone told
me you did not approve of the word 'hike.' Is that so?" His blue eyes flashed, and with his Scotch accent
he replied: "I don't like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not
hike!
"Do you know the origin of that word 'saunter?' It's a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages
people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they
passed asked where they were going, they would reply, "A la sainte terre,' 'To the Holy Land.' And so
they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we
ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them."
John Muir lived up to his doctrine. He was usually the last man to reach camp. He never hurried. He
stopped to get acquainted with individual trees along the way. He would hail people passing by and
make them get down on hands and knees if necessary to see the beauty of some little bed of almost
microscopic flowers. Usually he appeared at camp with some new flowers in his hat and a little piece of
fir bough in his buttonhole.
Now, whether the derivation of saunter Muir gave me is scientific or fanciful, is there not in it another
parable? There are people who "hike" through life. They measure life in terms of money and
amusement; they rush along the trail of life feverishly seeking to make a dollar or gratify an appetite.
How much better to "saunter" along this trail of life, to measure it in terms of beauty and love and
friendship! How much finer to take time to know and understand the men and women along the way, to
stop a while and let the beauty of the sunset possess the soul, to listen to what the trees are saying and
the songs of the birds, and to gather the fragrant little flowers that bloom all along the trail of life for
those who have eyes to see!
You can't do these things if you rush through life in a big red automobile at high speed; you can't know
these things if you "hike" along the trail in a speed competition. These are the peculiar rewards of the
man who has learned the secret of the saunterer!
84
“Theodore Roosevelt and the National Park System”
-Park Net, National Park Service
Theodore Roosevelt, the noted conservation president, had an impact on the national park system
extending well beyond his term in office. As chief executive from 1901 to 1909, he signed legislation
establishing five national parks: Crater Lake, Oregon; Wind Cave, South Dakota; Sullys Hill, North Dakota
(later redesignated a game preserve); Mesa Verde, Colorado; and Platt, Oklahoma (now part of
Chickasaw National Recreation Area). Another Roosevelt enactment had a broader effect, however: the
Antiquities Act of June 8, 1906. While not creating a single park itself, the Antiquities Act enabled
Roosevelt and his successors to proclaim ãhistoric landmarks, historic or prehistoric structures, and
other objects of historic or scientific interestä in federal ownership as national monuments.
Roosevelt did not hesitate to take advantage of this new executive authority. By the end of 1906 he had
proclaimed four national monuments: Devils Tower, Wyoming, on September 24 and El Morro, New
Mexico, Montezuma Castle, Arizona, and Petrified Forest, Arizona, together on December 8. He was also
prepared to interpret the authority expansively, protecting a large portion of the Grand Canyon as a
national monument in 1908. By the end of his term he had reserved six predominantly cultural areas
and twelve predominantly natural areas in this manner. Half the total were initially administered by the
Agriculture Department and were later transferred to Interior Department jurisdiction.
Later presidents also used the Antiquities Act to proclaim national monuments÷105 in all. Forty-nine of
them retain this designation today; others have been retitled national parks or otherwise reclassified by
Congress. The Antiquities Act is the original authority for about a quarter of the 378 areas composing
the national park system in 1999.
Recalling this legacy of Theodore Roosevelt, it seems appropriate that he is now commemorated by five
park system areas÷as many as honor Abraham Lincoln and more than for any other president. Theodore
Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site in New York City, Sagamore Hill National Historic Site in
Oyster Bay, New York, Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site in Buffalo, Theodore
Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, and Theodore Roosevelt Island in Washington, DC, trace his
career and memorialize his contributions to America. The National Park Service, administrator of these
parklands and the many others Roosevelt made possible, has particular cause to honor his memory.
85
“The Calypso Borealis”
John Muir
After earning a few dollars working on my brother-in law's farm near Portage [Wisconsin], I set off on
the first of my long lonely excursions, botanising in glorious freedom around the Great Lakes and
wandering through innumerable tamarac and arbor-vitae swamps, and forests of maple, basswood, ash,
elm, balsam, fir, pine, spruce, hemlock, rejoicing in their bound wealth and strength and beauty,
climbing the trees, revelling in their flowers and fruit like bees in beds of goldenrods, glorying in the
fresh cool beauty and charm of the bog and meadow heathworts, grasses, carices, ferns, mosses,
liverworts displayed in boundless profusion.
The rarest and most beautiful of the flowering plants I discovered on this first grand excursion was
Calypso borealis (the HIder of the North). I had been fording streams more and more difficult to cross
and wading bogs and swamps that seemed more and more extensive and more difficult to force one's
way through. Entering one of these great tamarac and arbor-vitae swamps one morning,holding a
general though very crooked course by compass, struggling through tangled drooping branches and over
and under broad heaps of fallen trees, I began to fear that I would not be able to reach dry ground
before dark, and therefore would have to pass the night in the swamp and began, faint and hungry, to
plan a nest of branches on one of the largest trees or windfalls like a monkey's nest, or eagle's, or
Indian's in the flooded forests of the Orinoco described by Humboldt.
But when the sun was getting low and everything seemed most bewildering and discouraging, I found
beautiful Calypso on the mossy bank of a stream, growing not in the ground but on a bed of yellow
mosses in which its small white bulb had found a soft nest and from which its one leaf and one flower
sprung. The flower was white and made the impression of the utmost simple purity like a snowflower.
No other bloom was near it, for the bog a short distance below the surface was still frozen, and the
water was ice cold. It seemed the most spiritual of all the flower people I had ever met. I sat down
beside it and fairly cried for joy.
It seems wonderful that so frail and lovely a plant has such power over human hearts. This Calypso
meeting happened some forty-five years ago, and it was more memorable and impressive than any of
my meetings with human beings excepting, perhaps, Emerson and one or two others. When I was
leaving the University, Professor J.D. Butler said, "John, I would like to know what becomes o you, and I
wish you would write me, say once a year, so I may keep you in sight. " I wrote to the Professor, telling
him about this meeting with Calypso, and he sent the letter to an Eastern newspaper [The Boston
Recorder] with some comments of his own. These, as far as I know, were the first of my words that
appeared in print.
How long I sat beside Calypso I don't know. Hunger and weariness vanished, and only after the sun was
low in the west I plashed on through the swamp, strong and exhilarated as if never more to feel any
mortal care. At length I saw maple woods on a hill and found a log house. I was gladly received. "Where
ha ye come fra? The swamp, that awfu' swamp. What were ye doin' there?" etc. "Mony a puir body has
been lost in that muckle, cauld, dreary bog and never been found." When I told her I had entered it in
search of plants and had been in it all day, she wondered how plants could draw me to these awful
places, and said, "It's god's mercy ye ever got out."
Oftentimes I had to sleep without blankets, and sometimes without supper, but usually I had no great
difficulty in finding a loaf of bread here and there at the houses of the farmer settlers in the widely
86
scattered clearings. With one of these large backwoods loaves I was able to wander many a long wild
fertile mile in the forests and bogs, free as the winds, gathering plants, and glorying in God's abounding
inexhaustible spiritual beauty bread. Storms, thunderclouds, winds in the woods - were welcomed as
friends.
87