Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 July 1885 — The Real Primitive Man. [ARTICLE]

The Real Primitive Man.

MoMus Nino, a hotel porter at Watch Hill, Connecticut, stopped a runaway team nine years ago at imminent peril to himself, and refused the reward offered by the father of the 6-year-old boy who had been left in the vehicle. Last week he received a legacy of SI,OOO under the father’s wilL Minister to Brazil Thomas J. Jarvis drove a market cart in Norfolk, Virginia, forty years ago. At the close of the war, penniless and unknown, he was practically a wanderer in its streets, when a German clothier pressed a suit of clothes on him. “You are one of the fellows that went to the wars.” said the tradesman; “come and get a suit, and pay me when you get the money.” “And,” says the Governor, “I don’t think he ever regretted letting me have that suit.”

Luxurious New Yorkers pay the following prices for table delicacies: Frozen wild turkeys, 25 cents a pound; fresh Long Island green peas, 40 cents a peck; Delaware cherries, 30 cents a pound; fat capons, 40 cents a pound; bluefish, large and plump; 15 cents a pound; spring lamb, 25 cents a pound; early Georgia peaches, eight forsl; cucumbers, a cent apiece; frogs legs, 40 cents a pound; plover sl-50, and snipe $2.50 a dozen, and, finally, suckling pigs for $3 apiece.

The new Connecticut law against “flash” literature, which has just gone into effect, imposes a fine of SSO or less and imprisonment for three months or less, or both, at the discretion of the court, upon every person who shall sell, lend, give or offer, or have in his possession with intent to sell, lend, give, or offer, any book, magazine, pamphlet, or paper devoted wholly of principally to the publication of criminal news, or pictures and stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust, or crime.

A good story is told of a New York millionaire, who, having had a new house built, negotiated with an artist for some pictures for his dining-room. After some weeks the artist, not having received any call for the pictures, or, what was of more consequence to him, any check for them, called on his patron to push the business to a conclusion. “Well, you see, my dear fellow,” said Croesus, “I’m afraid we can’t take them, after all. The paper in that room is so handsome that it would be a pity to cover it.”

Thebe -was a tall desk in Victor Hugo’s bed-room. It was the one he most used. He arose every morning at 6, washed in cold water, and then took a cup of black coffee and raw egg. This refection kept up strength and did not draw blood from the brain. If ideas did not come rapidly, be went to the window, which was all day open, winter and summer, sought inspiration by gazing thence, returned to the desk, sketched, and then wrote. If his “go” slacked, he walked about again, looked out, and drew. At 11 he breakfasted. His Pegasus was the knifeboard of an omnibus. He mounted it early in the afternoon, and did not return until late. •

“Senator Edmund’s new house on Massachusetts avenue is to be a mansion after my own heart,” writes Subrosa” in the Washington Capital, “It is a house wholly above ground. The first story contains little except the stairway, hall, kitchen, and household offices. The entrance from the street is through a low, round central arch, and all the living rooms are above. There is a magnificent double baywindow, like a pavilion, in the southwest corner, running up through two stories. It will be a charming residence. The Senator paid $2 a foot for the land, which he bought from Mr. Frelinghuysen, who paid only $1.50 for it a few weeks before.”

The Boston Saturday Evening Gazette tells this story of the late Rev. Dr. Thomas Whittemore. One Sunday Messrs. Buggies and Lucas, his sons-in-law, attended his church. Dr. Whittemore never used notes, and on this occesion was very diffuse. When the sermon was about half through, Buggies pulled onft his watch. Whittemore saw him and at once stopped. Looking over the pulpit he said: “Young man, you can put that watch back', for you cannot by looking at it shorten iny sermon one minute.” One can imagine the sensation in the audience and the feeling of Buggies and Lucas. Suffice i\ to say that they never afterward attended church when they knew their reverend father-in-law was to hold forth.

The periodical discovery that Milton plagiarized his “Paradise Lost” and his “Samson Agonistes" from an almost unknown Dutchman named Yan den Yondel, turns up this year with the locusts. It is probably about seventeen yeara since the last fool of literary grubbers turned it ufp. One needs only to read the “Lycidas,” or “Comus,” or i"Penseroso”4§ see that the others had all the material and skill of formation they needed in the same brain. But the world will ue»ver be convulsive little ambitions *thht work for • - , , •< <tr notoriety by startling absurdities, like \>, ‘ • -V; r '■•-’ •

Delia Bacodlb ascription of Shakespeare’s plays 1 to Lord Bacon, which Mr. “Atlantis” t)onnelly has backed by his “cipher” fuddle; and so we shall go on to the last, teazed, if we have not sense enough to laugh, at the constant developments of honors paid to great names with no desert

»ew York journalism is a mystery that probably will nevqr be completely solved. The salaries paid seem to vary all the way from say $1,000,000 down, and generally down, if we may believe latest reports. John Szlupas has sued Michael Twarowski to recover $143.50, claiming it a balance due for services as editor pnd compositor. The evidence adduced shows that he was allowed $4.50 a week as compositor, and $2.50 a week as .editor, and it was further shown that he edited two papers for that amount, one in Polish and one in the Lithuanian language.

The scientific photographers have accomplished a wonderful thing. They have succeeded in producing an actual portrait of the man who exists and whom no man ever saw. The assertion is not as fanciful as it seems. In the last issue of Science appear four por® traits illustrating what has been accomplished. The method of composit photography, devised originally by Francis Gaeton, is simply this: Given a number of men or women, shadowy photographs of each are taken, and, from all these shadows blended is produced a face. It is a face of no one of those who sat, but it is the face of a human being whose countenance exdresses all their traits. This is the theory of the photographer. The face produced bears out the idea. It is a clearly-defined countenance with an expression of its own. It is something striking and fascinating. In one of the photographs printed twelve mathematicians have their faces blended in a new countenance. It is the typical mathematician. Sixteen naturalists’ faces form one, those -of thirty-one painters another. Thera is a, wonderful resemblance between the two faces thus produced. Naturalists and painters alike aae students of form, and color and outline. It is a new face produced by this queer process. No one of the original faces i 3 reproduced. One remarkable device eliminates that source —so far as it appears in the face —of so much of our happiness and unhappiness, “the personal equation.” Like the body after death, it disappears, but still exists, though, unlike the body after death, it is not dissipated through all nature but is condensed into one entity, a visible thing. The striking thing about these composit faces is that the blending seems to bring out in bold relief of expression the dominant trait of the class. The one prevailing idea of the group shows in the combined face strongly. It suggests vast possibilities from this discovery of the photographers. The face shows the nature of a class, its strength and weakness, its degree of kindliness and dignity, its faults and follies. It is the reflection Of the soul of the group. What studies might be made on this idea, what social and political reforms suggested by its pursuit, and how curious and interesting would be the result of some combinations!

“No, if we want to get at the genuine, unadulterated primitive man, we must go much further back in time than the mere trifle of 250,000 years, with which Dr. Croll and the cosmic astronomers so generously provide us, for pre-glacial humanity. We must turn away to the immeasurable earlier firesplit flints which the Abbe Bourgeois —undaunted mortal!—ventured to discover among the Miocene strata of the calcaire de Beauce. These flints, if of human origin at all, were fashioned by some naked and still more hairy creature, who might fairly claim to be considered as genuinely primitive. So rude are they that, though evidently artificial, one distinguished archaeologist will not admit that they can be in any way human; he will have it'that they were’really the handiwork of the great European anthropoid ape of that early period. This, however, is nothing more that very delicate hair-split-ting ; for what does it matter whether you call the animal that fashioned those exceedingly rough and fire-marked implements a man-like ape or an ape-like human being? The fact remains quite unaltered, whichever name you choose to give to it. When you have got to a monkey who can light a fire and proceed to manufacture himself a convenient implement, you maybe sure that man, noble man, with all his glorious and admirable faculties—cannibal or otherwise—is lurking somewhere very close, just round the corner. The more we examino the work of our old master, in fact, the more does the conviction force itself upon us, that he was very far indeed from being primitive—that we must push back the early history of pur race not for 250,000 winters alone, but perhaps for two or three million years, into the dim past of Tertiary ages —Popular Science Monthly.