The Faber Book of Science (33 page)

Realizing that I had discovered a rich field, I proceeded to take advantage of it, dedicating myself to work, no longer merely with earnestness, but with fury. In proportion as new facts appeared in my preparations, ideas boiled up and jostled each other in my mind. A fever for publication devoured me. In order to make known my thoughts, I made use chiefly of a certain professional medical review, the
Gaceta
Médica
Catalana.
The tide of ideas and impatience for publication rising rapidly, however, this outlet became too narrow for me. I was much annoyed by the slowness of the press and the lateness of the dates of appearance. To extricate myself once and for all from such fetters, I decided to publish upon my own account a new review, the
Revista
trimestral
de
Histología
normal
y
patológica.
The first number saw the light in May, 1888, and the second appeared in the month of August of the same year. Naturally, all the articles, six in number, sprang from my own pen. From my hands emerged also the six lithographic plates which were included. Financial considerations obliged me not to print more than sixty copies altogether at the time and these were distributed almost entirely among foreign scientists.

Needless to say the vortex of publication entirely swallowed up my income, both ordinary and supplementary. Before that desolating cyclone of expenditure, my poor wife, taken up with caring for and watching five little demons (during the first year of my residence in
Barcelona, another son was born to me), determined to get along without a servant. She divined no doubt that there was maturing in my brain something unusual and of decisive importance for the future of the family, and, discreetly and self-sacrificingly, avoided any
suggestion
of rivalry or competition between the children of the flesh and the creatures of the mind.

As a distraction for the reader, who, I suppose, will be surfeited with the foregoing lucubrations, I should like to tell here how I freed myself from a tenacious and inveterate vice, the game of chess, which seriously menaced my evenings.

Knowing my fondness for the noble game of Ruy López y Philidor, various members of the
Casino
Militar
invited me to join it.

I was weak enough to do so; I made my debut with varying success, measuring myself against players of considerable skill; and soon my skill increased and with it the morbid eagerness to overcome my adversaries. In my foolish vanity, I reached the point of playing four games simultaneously, against separate combatants, besides numerous onlookers who discussed at length the consequences of every move. There was one game that lasted two or three days. In my desire to shine at all costs and my confidence in my rather good visual memory, I even played without looking at the board.

Needless to say, I acquired as many books on the aristocratic pastime as I could lay my hands on and I even fell into the folly of sending solutions of problems to foreign illustrated papers. Carried away by the growing passion, I found my sleep broken by dreams and nightmares, in which pawns, knights, queens, and bishops were jumbled together in a frenzied dance. After being defeated the evening before in one or several games, it often happened that I wakened with a sudden start in the early hours of the morning, with my brain burning and in a whirl, breaking out in phrases of irritation and despair and exclaiming: ‘I am a fool! I had a checkmate at the fourth move and did not see it.’ In fact, putting the board on the table, I proved with sorrow the delayed clairvoyance of my
unconscious
mind,
which had been working within me during the few hours of repose.

This could not continue. The almost permanent fatigue and cerebral congestion weakened me. If one does not lose money in playing chess, one loses time and brain energy, which are worth infinitely more, and one’s will is turned aside and runs through the wrong channels. In my opinion, far from exercising the intelligence, as many claim, chess
warps it and wears it out. Conscious of the danger of my position, I trembled before the distressing prospect of becoming converted into one of those amorphous types, sedentary and corpulent, who grow old unproductively and insensibly, seated at a card table or a chess table, without arousing any sincere affection or exciting, when the inevitable apoplexy or the terrible uraemia comes, more than a feeling of cold and formal commiseration. ‘Too bad about Pérez! He was a good player! We shall have to look about for someone to take his place.’ – For the player at a club or casino is no more than a table leg, something like the common picture which occupies a place in the room simply to balance the others.

But how was I to cure myself thoroughly? Feeling myself incapable of an inexorable, ‘I do not play any more,’ the possession of a will of iron; constantly excited by the eagerness for revenge, the evil genius of every player; the only supreme remedy which occurred to me was the
similia
similibus
of the homeopathists: to study the works upon chess thoroughly and reproduce the most celebrated plays; and besides to discipline my rather sensitive nerves, augmenting the imaginative and reflex tension to the utmost. It was indispensable, also, to abandon my usual style of play, with consistently romantic and audacious attacks, and stick to the rules of the most cautious prudence.

In this way, expending my whole inhibitory capacity in the undertaking, I finally attained my desired end. This consisted, as the reader will have guessed, in flattering and lulling to sleep my insatiable self-love by defeating my skilful and cunning competitors for a whole week. Having demonstrated my superiority, eventually or by chance, the devil of pride smiled and was satisfied. Fearful of a relapse, I abandoned my place in the casino and did not move a pawn again for more than twenty-five years. Thanks to my psychological stratagem, I emancipated my modest intellect, which had been sequestrated by such stupid and sterile competitions, and was now able to devote it, fully and without distraction, to the noble worship of science.

If any scientist had a nose for, to use Medawar’s phrase, ‘the solution of the possible’, Rutherford had. His attack was simple and direct, or rather he saw his way, through the hedges of complication, to a method which was the simplest and most direct.

An example is the most dramatic event of his career, the experiments by which he proved the existence of the atomic nucleus. The Curies had shown that radium emits various kinds of ‘radiation’, and one of these was now known to consist of a stream of electrically charged particles. These ‘alpha particles’ were identical to helium atoms with their electrons removed; but they originated not from helium gas but sprang spontaneously from the radium atoms as they disintegrated.

Even though atomic disintegration was still little understood, Rutherford saw these high-speed alpha particles as useful projectiles. He intercepted them with a thin sheet of gold foil, to see what happened as they passed through. If atoms were diffuse spheres of electrical charge, as Thomson had imagined, then most of the alpha particles should have gone straight through; a few should be deflected slightly. But some of the alpha particles bounced straight back again. It was like firing artillery shells at a piece of tissue paper, and getting some of them returning in the direction of the gun.

Rutherford could only explain this by postulating that these alpha particles were hitting small, massive concentrations within the atoms.
He thus concluded that most of an atom’s mass resided in a minute, positively charged nucleus at the centre, while the electrons went around the outside – very much like the planets orbiting the massive sun. Most of the atom was just empty space. If an atom were expanded to the size of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, virtually all its mass would lie within a central nucleus no larger than an orange. The large majority of alpha particles passed the atoms’ emptiness and carried on through the foil; but just occasionally one would hit a nucleus
head-on
, and rebound along the way it had come.

Positive, like all Rutherford’s physics. He said that he knew it was convincing, and maintained that he was completely surprised. One wonders if he hadn’t had a secret inkling. He was superlatively good at making predictions about nature.

In 1919, he started firing alpha particles at nitrogen atoms. Nothing much should have happened. A great deal did.

As in his earlier experiments, the alpha particles came from radium. This time he was directing them down a tube filled with nitrogen gas. At the far end, he found he was detecting not just alpha particles, but also particles with all the properties of hydrogen nuclei. There was, however, no hydrogen in the tube. With his high-speed alpha-particle projectiles, Rutherford had actually broken them off the nuclei of the nitrogen atoms.

The discovery of radioactivity had earlier shown that certain, rare types of atom could spontaneously disintegrate. Now Rutherford had shown that ordinary atoms were not indestructible. By knocking out a hydrogen nucleus (later called a proton) from the nucleus of nitrogen he had converted it into another element, oxygen. Rutherford had, to a limited extent, achieved the dream of the alchemists and changed one element to another.

How I hate the man who talks about the ‘brute creation’, with an ugly emphasis on
brute.
Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological time
via
sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden? …

Palæontology has its comfortable words too. I have revelled in my littleness and irresponsibility. It has relieved me of the harassing desire to live, I feel content to live dangerously, indifferent to my fate; I have discovered I am a fly, that we are all flies, that nothing matters. It’s a great load off my life, for I don’t mind being such a micro-organism – to me the honour is sufficient of belonging to the universe – such a great universe, so grand a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For nothing can alter the fact that I
have
lived;
I
have
been
I
, if for ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter-which
composes my body is indestructible – and eternal, so that come what may to my ‘Soul’, my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its separate part – I shall still have some sort of a finger in the Pie. When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me – but you cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you …

I probably know more about Lice than was ever before stored together within the compass of a single human mind! I know the Greek for Louse, the Latin, the French, the German, the Italian. I can reel off all the best remedies for Pediculosis [infestation with lice]: I am acquainted with the measures adopted for dealing with a nuisance in the field by the German Imperial Board of Health, by the British R.A.M.C., by the armies of the Russians, the French, the Austrians, the Italians. I know its life history and structure, how many eggs it lays and how often, the anatomy of its brain and stomach and the physiology of all its little parts. I have even pursued the Louse into ancient literature and have read old medical treatises about it, as, for example, the
De
Phthiriasi
of Gilbert de Frankenau. Mucius the lawgiver died of this disease, so also did the Dictator Sylla, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Emperor Maximilian, the philosopher Pherecydes, Philip II of Spain, the fugitive Ennius, Callisthenes, Alcman and many other distinguished people including the Emperor Arnauld in 899. In 955, the Bishop of Noyon had to be sewn up in a leather sack before he could be buried. (See
Des
Insectes
reputés
venimeux,
par M. Amoureux Fils, Doctor of Medicine in the University of Montpellier, Paris, 1789.) In Mexico and Peru, a poll-tax of Lice was exacted and bags of these treasures were found in the Palace of Montezuma (see Bingley,
Animal
Biog.,
first edition, iii). In the
United
Service
Magazine
for 1842 (clix, 169) is an account of the wreck of the
Wager,
a vessel found adrift, the crew in dire straits and Captain Cheap lying on the deck – ‘like an ant-hill’.

So that as an ancient writer puts it, ‘you must own that for the quelling of human pride and to pull down the high conceits of mortal man, this most loathesome of all maladies (Pediculosis) has been the inheritance of the rich, the wise, the noble and the mighty – poets, philosophers, prelates, princes, Kings and Emperors’.

In his well-known
Bridgewater
Treatise,
the Rev. Dr Kirby, the Father of English Entomology, asked: ‘Can we believe that man in his pristine state of glory and beauty and dignity could be the receptacle of prey so loathsome as these unclean and disgusting creatures?’ (Vol. I, p. 13). He therefore dated their creation
after
the Fall.

The other day a member of the staff of the Lister Institute called to see me on a lousy matter, and presently drew some live Lice from his waistcoat pocket for me to see. They were contained in pill boxes with little bits of muslin stretched across the open end thro’ which the Lice could thrust their little hypodermic needles when placed near the skin. He feeds them by putting these boxes into a specially constructed belt and at night ties the belt around his waist and all night sleeps in Elysium. He is not married.

In this fashion he has bred hundreds from the egg upwards and even hybridized the two different species!

In the enfranchised mind of the scientific naturalist, the usual feelings of repugnance simply do not exist. Curiosity conquers prejudice …

I am over 6
feet high and as thin as a skeleton; every bone in my body, even the neck vertebrae, creak at odd intervals when I move. So that I am not only a skeleton but a badly articulated one to boot. If to this is coupled the fact of the creeping paralysis, you have the complete horror. Even as I sit and write, millions of bacteria are gnawing away my precious spinal cord, and if you put your ear to my back the sound of the gnawing I dare say could be heard …

As, for all practical purposes, I have done with life, and my own existence is often a burden to me and is like to become a burden also to others, I wish I possessed the wherewithal to end it at my will. With two or three tabloids in my waistcoat pocket, and my secret locked in my heart, how serenely I would move about among my friends and fellows, conscious that at some specially selected moment – at midnight or high noon – just when the spirit moved me, I could quietly slip out to sea on this Great Adventure. It would be well to be
able to control this: the time, the place, and the manner of one’s exit. For what disturbs me in particular is how I shall conduct myself; I am afraid lest I become afraid, it is a fear of fear. By means of my tabloids, I could arrange my death in an artistic setting, say underneath a big tree on a summer’s day, with an open Homer in my hand, or more appropriately, a magnifying glass and Miall and Denny’s
Cockroach.
It would be stage-managing my own demise and surely the last thing in self-conscious elegance! …

We discuss post mortem affairs quite genially and without restraint. It is the contempt bred of familiarity, I suppose, Eleanor [his wife] says widows’ weeds have been so vulgarised by the war widows that she won’t go into deep mourning. ‘But you’ll wear just one weed or two for me?’ I plead, and then we laugh …

I become dreadfully emaciated. This morning, before getting off the bed I lifted my leg and gazed wistfully along all its length. My flabby
gastrocnemius
[calf muscle] swung suspended from the
tibia
like a gondola from a Zeppelin. I touched it gently with the tip of my index finger and it oscillated …

My bedroom is on the ground floor as I cannot mount the stairs. But the other day when they were all out, I determined to clamber upstairs if possible, and search in the bedrooms for a half-bottle of laudanum, which Mrs — told me she found the other day in a box, a relic of the time when — had to take it to relieve pain.

I got off the bed on to the floor and crawled around on hands and knees to the door, where I knelt up straight, reached the handle and turned it. Then I crawled across the hall to the foot of the stairs, where I sat down on the bottom step and rested. It is a short flight of only 12 steps and I soon reached the top by sitting down on each and raising myself up to the next one with my hands.

Arrived at the top, I quickly decided on the most likely room to
reach first, and painfully crawled along the passage and thro’ the bathroom by the easiest route to the small door – there are two. The handles of all the doors in the house are fixed some way up above the middle, so that only by kneeling with a straight back could I reach them from the floor. This door in addition was at the top of a high but narrow step, and I had to climb on to this, balance myself carefully, and then carefully pull myself up towards the handle by means of a towel hung on the handle. After three attempts I reached the handle and found the door locked on the inside.

I collapsed on the floor and could have cried. I lay on the floor of the bathroom resting with head on my arm, then set my teeth and crawled around the passage along two sides of a square, up three more steps to the other door which I opened and then entered. I had only examined two drawers containing only clothes, when a key turned in the front door lock and Eleanor entered with — and gave her usual whistle.

I closed the drawers and crawled out of the room in time to hear Eleanor say in a startled voice to her mother: ‘Who’s that upstairs?’ I whistled, and said that being bored I had come up to see the cot: which passed at that time all right.

Next morning my darling asked me why I went upstairs. I did not answer, and I think she knows.

I am getting ill again, and can scarcely hold the pen. So good-bye Journal – only for a time perhaps.