LETTERS OF J. BEETE JUKES.*
THESE letters are pleasant reading. They are a full and clear expression of the mind of a man who has not long since passedfrom amongst us, and whose name, at least, is familiar to most of our readers. They are interesting also as showing the external and most busy aide in the life of a scientific man known chiefly through his technical works. Mr. Jukes was engaged as far back as 1839 in the geological survey of Newfoundland, was appointed naturalist in a surveying expedition to Torres Straits, was one of the few men who in 1844 were permitted to penetrate the interior of Java, in 1846 he had a place on the Staff of the English Survey, and was actively engaged in studying and delineating the principal geo- logical features of the coal districts in the Midland Counties, and also in surveying-work in Wales. Subsequently he was appointed local director of the Geological Survey in Ireland. To the fidelity Letters of J. B. Jukes, MA., FRS., F.O.S. London : Chapman and Hall. 1871.
with which his work was done some passages in his letters bear very ample indirect testimony, as the following :—
"I had once been working hard for about five weeks, trying to under" stand and delineate on the one-inch map a complicated bit of mountain ground a few miles south of Conway, in North Wales. It was made up of interstratified slates, sandstones, and felstones, with large and irregular masses of intrusive greenstone, the exposed parts of each being frequent, bat not continuous. Many a weary day had I climbed the sides and clambered along the crags of a hill, some five or six miles in length, by two or three in breadth, and the highest peak of which was not more than 1,800 feet above the sea, trying in vain to reduce to order the seemingly endless complexity of its structure, and having at length on the map as curiously complex a patchwork of incongruous colours and unnatural forms as Punch, had he turned geologist, could have devised ; when one evening, as, after a hard day's work, I was descending a steep bit of ground, almost in despair at all my labour seeming to be thrown away, I hit upon the clue to a great fault or dislocation. I had only time then to verify the observation, but it gave me at once the solution of all the puzzle ; and in two or three days I was enabled to map the whole district, with as near an approach to accuracy as the scale of the map admitted of. The country was chopped up by a series of large parallel faults, that were quite easy to be seen when once the clue to one of them and its bearings were obtained, but which there was nothing to render a priori probable, and which could not have been discovered without that thoroughly exhaustive process of examination which I was enabled to apply to the district. I have ever since regretted that, in my haste and joy at acquiring a right notion, I obliterated all my former work from the map which contained it ; for I should have been glad to preserve it now as a curious instance of the contrast between laborious hypothesis and the simplicity of natural truth."
These letters, written over a period of thirty years (from 1838 to 1868), testify curiously to the change in the minds of the un- initiated on the subject of geological science from the moment (so along ago to educated thought) when men received geological facts "as if such knowledge Heaven had ne'er foreseen and not provided for," to the present, when the patient investigators of truth may be said in many ways to be witnessing, if not receiving, the rewards of their labours ; to many of them, to witness is to receive. The substantial pecuniary advantages to be gained both by the us tion and by individuals as the direct result of more accurate geological knowledge, though never admitted by Pro- fessor Jukes as a legitimate end for the student to have in view, were yet made evident in his own case, though never to. his personal gain. His work for long lay among the coal- fields of the Midland Counties, and he proved often, as he naturally would, the waste which arose from the futile experiments of unscientific men. He says he himself "knew in South Staffordshire two instances of ground bailiffs, intelligent men, well versed in coal-getting, continuing to sink in Silurian shale. And with heaps of the fossils of that formation lying on the pit- bank, they were still going down for coal." The money, he adds, wasted in this century for want of the very rudiments of geo- logical knowledge in those who wasted it would have paid for the whole Survey and Museum since its establishment, and given an endowment of 12,000 per annum for ever. And this waste, he observes, has not only been incurred in fruitless trials, but in bad mining where coal actually was, as in the case of "the great Swamp," in South Staffordshire, where he writes (in 1851), there are many thousand acres of thick coal still under water, the result. entirely of bad mining, the whole estimated at a value of 1500,000, and the interest of that sum lost for many years, much of it for ever, taking into consideration, as he does, the enormous sum it would cost to drain. He proceeds to investigate some of the losses incurred through ignorance in the search for mineral veins, and writes :—
" Miners and geologists are equally destitute of that knowledge of the mode of deposition of minerals in veins, which would enable them to avoid so great a loss; but it is obvious that this knowledge can only be ultimately attained by the application of the most accurate scientific investigation into the nature and origin of mineral veins, and that the necessary preliminary to that must be the exact delineation of them and their attendant phenomena on maps of a sufficiently large scale to exhibit. them clearly and without distortion."
Mr. Jukes never for a moment ignores that, to quote his own words, "the necessary preliminary to these utilitarian applications is the discovery and establishment of abstract scientific truth by men who look to that, and that alone, and whose whole faculties and lives are devoted to it." But he knew well (+tough, too, that the men who afterwards make practical application of scientific truth "attain far wider reputation than the real men of science, and become to the popular gaze the representatives of science itself :"—
"The ram that batters down the wall, For the great swing and rudeness of his poise They place before his hand that made the engine, Or those that with the fineness of their souls By reason guide his execution."
We have only space to touch upon these points, on which Mr. Jukes writes most fully, but if any of our readers care to satisfy
their curiosity on this subject, they can easily do so by referring to these letters for themselves. As a theorist Mr. Jukes fell into a very decided controversy with all the men of science he most revered. We are not prepared to enter into the details of that Devonian controversy which cost the somewhat eccentric professor such a world of trouble, but it is no mean element in the lives of the true sons of science, that whatever the strife, they at least do not bring to it the little mind. Jukes could not understand the question of personal feeling entering into any field of inquiry where the one result to be obtained was truth. He writes, characteristically enough, "Surely any one who is above a spoilt child in such a matter would be more glad that the truth should be arrived at, than sorry he himself should be shown to have fallen into involuntary error." More advanced geologists did not endorse his pet theory, but his own internal conviction of its truth was to himself sufficient recompense.
But we must nob lead our readers to suppose these letters possess a geological interest alone. There are many other questions dis- cussed in them, and the earlier ones are often spiced with the raciest humour. Mr. Jakes's earlier life was beset with difficulties, not without their interest to those who may be following in his path, and it is amusing to observe in these early years facts, assumed as such with a quiet mind, which have been exploded, long ago (as the nineteenth century marks time), as, for instance, many of his conclusions on the subject of the formation of coal, very tenaciously grasped at the time, but which of course had to yield to the maturer investigation. There is a curious little letter, written in March, 1839, just after he, and Professor Sedgwick, whose devoted pupil Jukes was, had been to the Royal Society, where, he writes, "I heard a notice from Sir J. Herschel read on the new process of drawing by sunlight, or, as he calls it, photography." He mentions, in con- nection with the subject, that afterwards Professor Wheat- stone showed Sedgwick and himself some specimens, very beautiful specimens apparently, of what had been done by Nieper fourteen years before, and says, "The neglect and apparent contempt with which Nieper was treated at the time are wonderful."
In the following month, April, 1837, Mr. Jukes sailed for New- foundland, and throughout the survey there shared in all the labour and lived on the same fare as the men who accompanied him. He was evidently a man of undaunted courage and an entire absence of self-consciousness, a strong-natured man, mentally and physically. Two sentences in a remarkable letter to Dr. Ingleby strike us as evidence of, at least, the singularly buoyant mental atmosphere with which be surrounded himself. He writes :—" I cannot at all understand why you fail to see proofs of benevolent design in the moral world ; they appear to me quite as abundant and more striking than the purely physical." Again, "There is no wretch so miserable or wicked or depraved, but has more pleasure than pain [the italics are our own], and more of good in him than evil. In all cases pain and wickedness are the small exceptions, or they would cease to be felt and remarked. There is certainly more than enough of both, but pleasure, good- ness, and happiness are infinitely more abundant." Really we recommend men with sensitive nerves, keen sympathies, and a metaphysical turn of mind, specially if they have the misfortune to have an ear quick to catch the "sad perplexed minors" in "Creation's under-song," to try geological surveying for a little while. It may strengthen their physical, if not their spiritual fibre, when half-maddened with the sense of the depth and width of pain they are powerless to cure. At what an admiring distance must most of us contemplate the man who can regard pain as a 4 'small exception" in the world. There are a few truths worth know- ing, however, which he must miss, who reaches rapidly such a giddy height as this. But we have no right to expect the deeper human insight from the subject of this notice. He did his own work in the world lovingly and well, and we should not have made these brief comments at all, but that the editor has inserted his letters to Dr. Ingleby as the best exponents of one side of her brother's mind. And Dr. Ingleby has characterised the letter to which we have referred as "one of the finest specimens of epistolary argument" he ever met with. We, for our own part, turn with more pleasure to those active labours in which his mind seems to have found its true home. We have the results of eight years' sojourn in Ireland in some letters full of the clearest common-sense, on many points, which concerned the well-being, political and social, of the Irish people, whose innermost national life he had unusual opportunities of studying. His account of his visit to Australia and description of the natives, written barely thirty years ago, reads like some ancient record, so completely is it a picture of the past. But few pages in this
autobiography, for such it really is, though unconsciously so on the writer's part—we never read letters more evidently written without a thought of the chance of their ultimate publication— are more interesting than those in which Mr. Jukes describes his visit to Java, then impenetrable (1844). Entirely a locked- up country to strangers, it was by favour of the President at Sourabaya that Mr. Jukes and his party were allowed to penetrate into the interior. We can scarcely give a better idea of the freshness which, apart from the scientific portions of them, characterises these letters, than by inserting one or two extracts from those in which he describes to his sister his visit to this island :—
" The first part of our sojourn in Java was very pleasant. On November 9, Captain B., Evans, and I. with a young man of Sourabaya, set off for the interior of the country. We travelled first for about seventy miles through Passaronan and Probolingo along the coast to the eastward, driving in a carriage with four horses, or ponies rather. From Probe- lingo we struck off to the southward on pony-back, with thirteen coolies carrying our baggage on foot, and about ten attendants under a native chief on horseback. We now got into the most beautiful, rich, picturesque, and magnificent country I ever saw or could have imagined—rich plains covered with all kinds of tropical productions, watered in every direction by clear rocky brooks, surrounded by mountains, either in single cones or serrated ranges, from 4,000 to 11,000 feet in height ; abundance of game whenever we chose to stop and shoot—jungle-fowl, peacocks, deer, wild pigs, tigers ; all the native chiefs apprised of our approach wherever we came ; a house and most luxurious entertainments ready for us as we dismounted ; escorts, coolies, the whole country apparently, at our command ; every trouble taken out of our hands, and nothing for us to do but to ride, shoot, eat, drink, and admire the glorious scenery that everywhere surrounded us. We crossed one great range of mountains by a path that led us through the extinct crater of a volcano, five milea across and 7,000 feet above the sea, and in the centre of which was a small cone and crater still in action, though when we looked down into it, it was only blowing out steam, with a roar as of a thousand blast- furnaces. Take a scene on the slope of these mountains, as they dip into tho plain of Malang. Scene—An open mountain valley, full of coffee plantations, with small scattered villages, into which opens a deep mountain glen crowded with the rankest luxuriance of tropical vegetation, groups of tree-ferns and great broad-leaved plants, so as to arch over and frequently hide altogether the full brook that comes flashing and roaring down over the rocks in a succession of rapids, varied by water- falls; the road, narrow, steep, and slippery, as it winds down the sides of the glen, expands into a broad green lane with an exquisite carpet of turf as it opens on the more level lands That same afternoon we rode into Pakis, on the plain of Malang, with an escort of thirty mountain horsemen and apearmen in three lines, beaded by a widono and two bakkels, whose silver trappings and gold-covered krisses and gay blue-and-red garments quite put to shame our soiled and way worn English shooting-dresses. Here we could not stir without a guard of honour of six spearmen, and every one uncovered and sat down (their position of respect) as we walked along. We all agreed we never were such great men before and never should be again. Here, too, we found some beautiful ruins of ancient Hindoo temples, dating from A.D. 700, or thereabouts, and a most delicious country. Being 1,200 feet above the sea and rain every afternoon, the temperature was delightful ; and, as far as mere climate and situation go, I never saw a country I should more like to live in. No tropical country is so cool and pleasant and healthy as the interior of Java. . . . . . We spent a week at various heights from five to seven thousand feet, and got strawberries, raspberries, and green peas. Then down to the plain of Malang, where, as far as extreme loveliness of country and freshness, pleasantness, and healthiness of air and climate go, I could be perfectly content to pass my life. Fresh green lanes, with short springy turf, brawling brooks, patches of forest, undulating ground, with pretty hills among rice-fields and banana- trees ; and every now and then, in some forest glade, you come upon an old Hindoo temple in ruins, with elegant architecture, elaborately carved tracery and ornaments, and graceful, grotesque, or really beautiful sculpture and statuary. Around these temples piles of brick, buried in the depths of the forest, fragments of walls, or the road running along some ancient brick causeway, all attest the former grandeur of the ancient Hindoo empires and kingdoms, all but the tradition of which has passed away. Some of the most beautiful ruins date from A.D. 700, when Java was far more populous, wealthy, and powerful than England."
Previous page
