THE NEW CREDULITY.
WE have been a little struck with the reception which a wild story from Brisbane about a new method of suspending animation for indefinite periods has received from a portion of the Press. The story appears in the Brisbane Courier of January 11th, and professes to be the account by an eye- witness, who, however, gives no name, of some experiments made in New South Wales by Signor Rotura, an unknown man of science, in suspending animation in sheep and dogs. A marvellous drug, discovered "in South America," which is a big, vague sort of place, is injected into the animals, and so completely suspends life that in a warm climate decomposition might be dreaded. The bodies are there- fore frozen, frozen as hard as stones, till a danger arises, if they are not handled tenderly, of breakage,—a curiously ghastly, yet realistic touch of the narrator. They are, however, alive, and may be kept for any time packed on shelves, and then, after being steeped for a few minutes in warm water, and enduring the injection of another South-American drug into the neck, the animals, even if kept frozen for weeks and months, go frisking and gambolling about as if nothing had occurred. In fact, nothing has occurred, except a suspension of the processes of life so perfect that the time of suspended animation does not, as Signor Rotura believes, count in the normal term of animal existence, but is an addition to it. The process, which has been already successfully tried, of course would enable Australian flockmasters to forward their flocks alive, but unfed, to Europe, and thus to realise astounding fortunes. It is, moreover, applicable to man, and the discoverer has applied to Sir H. Parkes to let him have the next life-con- vict to experiment on, feeling confident that the man may be safely retained in frozen trance for a long period, and be then revived,—to become, let us hope, a more valuable member of society.
The story is, of course, a b# of deliberate nonsense, intended to attract attention to the Brisbane Courier, and chiefly in- teresting, because it shows that there exists in Brisbane a storyteller with some at least of Edgar Poe's capacity for
weird suggestion. His idea is a very clever one, for he has appealed at one and the same time to the inherent love of the marvellous and to the passion, for money-making, under its specially local development ; while he has adroitly availed himself of two medical theories, known probably to most of his readers, that the drug woorali will sus- pend motion—though not the consciousness of pain—and that cold will prevent the decomposition of animal tissues. Some of the details, too, are adroitly invented, particularly the refusal of one experimenter to go on experimenting with a favourite dog, lest it should be hurt, though he had no scruple about freezing other animals ; and also the admission that the experiment sometimes fails. The reporter is probably not a man of any scientific knowledge, for he has allowed the printers to mis- print the name of his imaginary drug, and to give 32° Fahr. as blood-heat, and he is perhaps not aware either that the freezing of an entire body and life are incompatible, or that as the blood must, on his theory, remain in the body and unchanged, it would when frozen occupy one-sixth more than its usual room,—that is, would fracture its containing vessels, as water does our pipes. One of the realistic little details—the share taken in the experiments by Mr. Newton is already denied, rather unnecessarily, by the gentleman whose name has been used, and there is no ground for supposing any basis of fact in the way of a new process of refrigeration to be at the bottom of the story. It is clearly a literary hoax, not at all badly done, by some one who has a clear perception of men's appetite for wonder, and a humorous idea of the kind of " result " which would induce a money-loving public to read anything.
The story, having appeared in the Times without comment, has, of course, been republished everywhere, and it is amusing to see that in many instances those who republish it think it necessary to be cautious, and repudiate total disbelief. So many wonderful things, they say, and in especial one London journal says, have turned out true, that it would be rash to declare this one certainly invented. There is a disposition perceptible to think there may be something in it, though not all that is alleged, and that as Mr. Edison has bottled sound, so Signor Rotura—an Italian name was probably chosen because an Italian has made the most recent and successful experiments in embalming—may have bottled life; that as sound may be re- echoed weeks after it was first heard, so a lamb may skip about after it has been some weeks frozen. As there is an electric telegraph, why should not Death be baffled P That is a very curious instance of a new form of credulity which is growing up amongst us, a credulity which is not faith, but rather disbelief, so far-reaching that it causes a certain powerlessness of mind, an inability to reject at once and decidedly anything that even puts on the appearance of "science." The incapacity to weigh evidence—to see, for example, that for this story there is absolutely as yet no evidence at all, any more than there is evidence for the authenticity of Bulwer Lytton's " Strange Story," that there is no witness produced, or promised, or named, nothing but an unauthenticated narrative—is a phenomenon we are all ac- quainted with ; but this sort of credulity differs in kind from that. It would almost seem as if the advance of science had in some minds decreased the capacity for using the scientific method, as if their confidence in the usual data for reasoning had been gradually BO upset that they did not trust them any longer, and did not see why, a far-off locality being granted, parallel lines should not meet, or the whole be smaller than the part. That would not, they think, be much more surprising than the phonograph. We observed only a little while ago a statement going the round of the newspapers that a certain Texan had eaten his own weight in meat at one sitting, no one apparently perceiving that if that were true, then a pint bottle could hold a quart, and reasoning of any kind, even the reasoning necessaryfor arithmetic or mensuration, was entirely useless and unmeaning. The great truth that if two plus two can be five, counting is nonsense, and that the terms of any conceivable sum in arithmetic would all shift, seems to have lost some of its hold, to the indefinite injury, if the want of grip became general, of human reasoning power. That is at all events a strange result of the progress of scientific discovery, and it is all the stranger, because the new credulity is almost confined to the action of " science " itself. People are not
generally more credulous. They do not believe in each other more than they did, or in unusual events more than they did ;
and they believe in the supernatural a great deal less than they did. If the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Lord Houghton, and Professor Tyndall all declared that they saw and spoke with a sentient being possessing a body clearly not human, all journalists would at once accuse them either of falsehood, or hoaxing, or a very suspicious condition of brain and eyesight ; but if they all declared they had seen a man swallow a drug which turned him all over both yellow and blue at the same time, the statement would be printed everywhere as the last "medical marvel." Yet the former assertion, though requir- ing, of course, unusually complete evidence, would involve no greater impossibility than the existence of any supernatural being does—which existence half the incredulous accept—while the latter is a contradiction in terms, and no more capable of proof than the assertion that on one occasion, and in the usual conditions of the world, water, being still water, did outweigh mercury, which was, nevertheless, still mercury. There is the greatest reluctance even to consider any statement involving an acceptance of the supernatural, combined with the most childlike readiness to swallow anything which can be de- scribed as a mechanical, medical, or mental marvel. The modern mind considers that the old woman who said" she would believe that Jonah swallowed the whale, if that were in the Bible," was a fool ; but if the old lady had seen in one of Mr. Huxley's lec- tures a statement that a flying-fish had swallowed an albatross, and had believed it, she would not have been accounted credulous. A "ghost" is impossible, but the generation of force without the consumption of anything,—that can be credited at once. If Mr. Edison were to say that he had seen a table rise in the air, he would bele-wiled at ; but if he were to say publicly that he had discovered a method of lighting New York for a penny a week by self- existent electricity, the price of gas shares would fall. The notion of a "conversion," a rare mental operation, which, never- theless, does occasionally occur outside, as well as inside, the circle of religious emotion, is contemptuously ridiculed, but the notion of a new motor " produced " from a small wine-glassful of water is received with most respectful attention. The preacher who describes a possible time in which all men shall be Christian and laws scarcely needed, is condemned as a foolish dreamer; but when Sir William Thomson looks forward to the day when North America shall be lighted by the electric force generated by utilising Niagara, he is only going a little too far ahead of his generation. We are really not going one inch beyond the truth when we say there are men who would reject the central fact of Christianity,—the Resurrection of Christ, not for defect of evidence, but because it is, in se, impossible, yet would believe that certain combinations of electricity and heat could generate life ; and thousands who `would reject the story of Paul's vision as ridiculous, while receiving as true an account-of a new instrument which would enable a Londoner lo see New York.
The usual explanation of this tendency to a new credulity in the midst of a new scepticism is that men are willing to believe in the one case and utwilling in the other, and no doubt some such feeling is occasionally an explanation. Hatred of Christianity, or of Russians, or of English Liberals, made thousands of men believe in the Rhodope outrages, in the teeth of evidence which would have satisfied the English Bench. But we do not believe that this explanation covers the Whole case. We have found the same credulity as to scientific assertions in persons who would much rather have believed the super- natural, and indeed, in persons who have that dislike of the conquests of science which is often to be seen in men who dread a final victory for Materialism. There are Catholics and Calvinists to whom the phonograph is an offence, an indi- cation that this is the last age of the world, and that Satan is prevailing, who 'would, nevertheless, accept an assurance that a phonograph had been discovered which could translate a song sung before it into another language with unhesitating cred- ence. It seems to us much more natural to believe that men are very much what they were, that the appetite for the mar- vellous exists as of old, but that the agency from which the marvellous is expected is unconsciously being changed. The process of god-making, so often repeated by humanity, is going on again, and Nature is being endowed with attri- butes which imply an absence of conditions, and enveloped in the very atmosphere of awe which once surrounded the super- natural. Why should not anything be discovered, when the
lightning has been made to carry messages ? It is the object of superstition, not the superstitious mind, which has been changed, and the man who rejects the miracle of Cana thinks Cagliostro " may " have possessed the secret of the philoso- pher's stone. The world is supposed to advance very fast, and we suppose does do so in the direction of comfort, but we half wish some "Eno" or "Old Parr" would sell the Elixir of Life at fifty guineas the bottle. If he would only advertise ably, and get the Brisbane Courier to write his advertisements, the result would, we strongly suspect, surprise the Probate Office, and be regarded as an unexpected mercy by a Chancellor of the Exchequer.
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