Labour and Childhood/The Projection of Nerves

by Margaret McMillan

CHAPTER VIII

THE PROJECTION OF NERVES

HERE we may halt—in a book about children. But a glance forward and beyond them may be allowed. What we may call the projection of nerves has taken place very rapidly—all within the last century and a half.

As always happens, the artisan inventor was ahead of the physiologist and discoverer. (Sometimes, of course, the inventor becomes the discoverer.) In 1774, Le Sage laid insulated metal wires under the Rhine and connected these with pith-ball electroscopes. There were twenty-four wires, one for each letter of the alphabet, and the message was transmitted by frictional electricity. This was sixty years or more before Dubois Raymond begun his studies on nerve fibre—that is, on nervous conductors of the body. But even in the early telegraphs the wire reproduced the fibre more or less in detail, having gaps in the supports, as in the fibre, and reproducing too the outer sheath. And every year saw a host of seekers and experimenters arise, all on the track of a secret, the key to which was within. And at last the modern industrial world began to have a nervous system.

So fast and free the messages began to thrill along those new fibres that the wit of the inventor was taxed to find ways of transmitting messages from wire to wire, of sending more than one message through one wire, of sending many currents indeed along every wire in a second. Speed is not only a test of fitness—it is one of the great tests in so far as the nervous system is concerned,^[1] and it is the great test of telegraph systems. And now, one and another inventor vied with one another, tripped one another up almost, in the perfecting of the apparatus for rapid transmission. One can read the story of how they brought out "combiners," "receivers," and "distributers," and how they learned to utilize all the delivery capacity of their wire, in any popular work on modern telegraphy. It is a dizzy chapter in the story of human history. And it seems, at first, as if nothing in any former chapter prepared us at all to read this one.

The year 1860 was memorable, for it was in this year that M. Rouvier published his scheme of "multiple transmission." In 1860, too, Broca, the pioneer of the physiology of the brain, proved that certain speech defects are associated with disease of a small part of the brain in the third left frontal convolution, and showed how different areas have special functions and receive a particular kind of message. He was, no doubt, very far from dreaming how complicated and diverse as a receiving medium the human brain is, but he was able to localize the function of speech, and thus to lay the foundation of all that made it possible for us to learn something about the hitherto unknown world of the cerebral cortex.

What connexion had this event with the other? That is to say, with the rapid development of a telegraphic system over the world? It appears to have had a certain connexion. For many years Broca worked, and before him men like him, Dubois Raymond, and other physiologists, were studying the nerve fibre, the electric action of nerves and muscle, and the transmission of nerve excitement. They found that there are hundreds of miles of nerve fibre in the human body, and that this fibre in living beings is just as much a roadway for traffic as is any line or cable ever laid. "Suppose," says an admirer of Dubois Raymond, "that the nerves of hearing and of sight of a man were cut, and the outer end of the former was perfectly joined to the central end of the latter, then the sound of an orchestra would awaken in us the sensation of light and colour, and if the fibre serving the centre of vision was affixed to the hearing part of the brain, then a highly coloured picture would give us impressions of sound!" Thus far, in function as well as form, the parallelism between fibre and wire is as close as it well could be.

However, physiologists and artisans worked apart as usual. For years the latter made efforts to lay a cable between America and England. Once and again they set forth to make the attempt. Every one knows how they failed again and again, and how fruitful these failures were; how they indicated to Sir William Thomson a means of helping the baffled workers by improving the receiving centre by his new sensitive galvanometer. They made the fibre—he made the brain cells. And then at last, in 1860, across the wild ocean lifting its steep, blue, moving hills for thousands of leagues the fibre was laid that joined two continents.

Over the leaf is a drawing (from Ernest Kapp's book) of transverse cuttings of cable, and of nerve fibre. On looking at the former alone, one might feel tempted to say "How could they think of it?" But on glancing at the fibre, this wonder gives place to another, and we may say rather, "Nothing do we think. It thinks in us."

Many of the great writers of the nineteenth century hated machinery with a personal hatred. The chief of these was Ruskin, who can hardly mention it without scorn. The idealism of William Morris was expressed largely in crafstmanship as opposed to machine-made things. Carlyle did not extend his lectures on heroes so as to include the artisan. He ended with the hero as poet and as man of letters, thus far and no further! He often makes comparisons between men and machines, and even trees and machines, greatly to the disadvantage of the latter. For example, "O, that we could displace the machine god and put a man god in his place!" and "I find no similitude of life so true as this of a tree! Beautiful! Machine of the universe! Do but think of that in contrast!"

But it was reserved for the workers themselves to hate machinery in earnest—not in word only, but in deed. A machine is never perhaps quite a soulless thing to the person who works it, or who has made it (that is perhaps why the engine-driver alludes to his engine as "her" not "it," and why the sailor speaks of his vessel as if it were a woman). And when in the eighteenth century a half-mad boy smashed a machine because it seemed to rob him or hurt him, the learned felt pity, but the workers felt sympathy. They came to hate machinery with a personal hatred, and to forget the makers of it in their hatred. Through books, out of print now and forgotten, one can get a glimpse of these poor men, confused by the power of this new factor in industry, and maddened by hunger. One reads for example how to an old mill in a lovely Yorkshire valley came a party of workmen one wild night in March—how, armed with crowbars, bludgeons, and hammers, they pushed open the door of the engine-room and gazed in. By fitful moonlight they could see the engine—the foe that had taken the food from their children's lips. It was still now. Its cruel soul slept. They gazed half-stupefied, half-fascinated. Then they fell on the monster and hacked it to pieces. When a force of armed men, representing the owners and masters, came over the hill in the morning they did not even think of showing fight to them, still less of showing fear. They set off for another mill—there to hack and maim another machine.

The impulse was blind of course, but the presentiment of the machine-breakers was only too true. Machinery increased productive power enormously, but its effect on the children of the factory people and working population was not very favourable!^[2]

The explosions of rage and despair with which one new machine after another was succeeded became feebler of course in time. The people resigned themselves, and began to feel, above all, that this progressive movement which did not favour them was in the nature of things and inevitable. Steam-power was like a brute-soul. It devoured the young, dismissed the old, and degraded the adult so that he became the rival, as wage-slave, of his wife and child. Under the black pall of the mill-smoke these gloomy thoughts formed and wandered through the vacant minds of myriads.

But the movement that made modern industrial Britain—the projection of the moving power itself and all its organs—did not hesitate, because of the hardships it brought on innocent lives. It paused no more for these causes than does a blizzard or a north wind. It swept on. It swept past, or rather is sweeping past. And now electricity is beginning to displace steam as a motor power.

And electricity has had a different kind of first greeting. No one is angry with it. Everyone is amazed at it. After every new and startling discovery, such as that of the Becquerel Rays, the Röntgen Rays, etc., the public seems to hold its breath, to listen with mystification, with awe, and to expect it knows not what. More than one scientist has remarked this love of mystery that makes many people welcome the very latest discoveries in physics as the people centuries ago would have hailed "miracles" and "signs." But its effect on the workers was reassuring. "This great power should not pass into the hands of the few," said one of their representatives the other day. "It should become the instrument of the people, and not of a ruling class."

One cannot but dwell with pleasure on the fact that electric cables, and wires, and "installations " of every kind are projections, not of fighting organs, like the common knife or hammer, but of the nervous system. The nervous system which drains feeling, as it were, from every region of the body, collects it in special organs, attracts it, as Luys says, by means of nervous conductors, so that it becomes a mobile force, transmissible to a distance: the nervous system, which makes sympathy and unity possible! It has got itself projected at last! And just as light, though terrible, is reassuring, so those projections that bind continents together, and make the lonely station a part of the busy world, are chasing away the last terrors of the dark ages, wiping out their dark dreams.

Yes! that same energy which makes communication between people thousands of miles apart possible, and destroys distance, is not only present in us, but through it we move, and live, and have our being. Through it we move (because muscles, above all other tissues of the body, except nerves, exercise electric action). Through it we live, for what life is possible without electricity? And as for the human Brain itself, it not only exercises such action, it appears to offer the original of all conductors, coherers, multipliers, condensers, transmitters, and all other electrical apparatus whatsoever, and to make life of a higher kind possible through these. Long years have passed since Dubois Raymond began the serious study of the electric phenomena of nerves, muscles, and glands; long years have passed since he showed by experiment that the magnetic current can be deflected by the Will.^[3] And now, though large areas of the brain hold their secrets fast-locked, yet the middle or motor brain has yielded up its secret. And what is that great secret? Simply that its activity is electric in its nature. So true is this that, if stimulated by a current from the outside, it will, at different points, perform its functions of moving hand, lip, eye, or other member. It is demonstrably an electrical apparatus. It is also well established that the fibres of nerve-cells connect to make thinking possible— that the electric current is turned off and on constantly within us. In short, it is known that fibre and brain are the great originals of the latest order of apparatus for communication. But those whom we may still call the tool-makers of the world do not wait for indications from the brain specialist! They are forging far ahead, making "tools" for which the brain itself is not absolutely known to offer any prototype. They were on the untrodden path already, even in the days of Dubois Raymond. For, in 1838, Steinheil was dreaming of wireless telegraphy. Even then he began to show "how an indication having no connexion with the multiplier generates currents in that multiplier through the excitation of the ground above." Yet ten years ago most people were doubtful about the success of telegraphy without wires. They were doubtful; but very quickly, at last, the success of wireless telegraphy was assured, and already it is a thing grown familiar, almost commonplace. The man in the street has grown used to the idea of ether waves that are received after a journey of thousands of miles, having been guided on their journey.

True, the physiologist is again on the track of the inventor, finding new parallels in the light of the new projection. Luys and others show how the action of nerve cells resembles that of the particles in a coherer and de-coherer of a Marconi instrument, and Mr. Collins confirms this, saying that the human body "has every essential for communication at a distance, without the aid of any mechanical instruments." And this declaration was one which might be expected, if precedent counts for anything. For hitherto at least work, or rather tools, have already held a prophecy. They have always foreshadowed the next great discovery as to the nature and functioning of bodily organs. If there is not every essential in the body for communication at a distance without the aid of any mechanical instruments, then something quite novel has happened. The workers have invented in a new fashion. They have taken flight, as it were, without any impetus from within.

Certainly it is no part of our task in this book to discuss such precedents and possibilities. They lie far beyond the scope of the work—beyond and outside it. Still at the threshold of the whole subject of education as the world of to-morrow will understand it, we have no call to attempt the making plain of higher problems of brain capacity and function. Happy if we can begin to set our house in order, to clear away the mass of corruption and foulness at the threshold, stem back the tide of disease and death, and establish the first principles of the hygiene of instruction—happy if we can now freely attempt this; we need not wish to claim the right to do more.

Only we may insist that education must give free play to the impulse for progressive self-projection—that school-life must not hinder this movement, on pain of hindering all healthy development whatsoever. To-day, when the newest tools do not simply reproduce the human hand, but the hand of genius, when the latest mechanisms show how projection is being carried ever farther into the more hidden and mysterious recesses of the nervous structure, it is surely clear that any education, worthy the name, is a process that helps and assures free projection even in childhood. First it aids in the projection of a rude hand; but later, as the impulse grows and is not checked but guided, the inner life asserts itself. It follows the long track of history, cleaves it like a wing, reveals itself in the older boy's interest in mechanisms, his willingness even to endure drudgery if he may go on to the making of these.

More urgent, too, grows the vision of beautiful things gained through drama, books, drawings, and life. These strive to come forth, as it were. They feed the impulse that will project them. It is clear that this is a natural process. It is also clear that success and progress depends largely from the first on the health and vigour of bodily organs. Now these are weakened by disease. They are weakened, too, by systems of training or teaching that ignore the final aim of self-projection.

"But," it may be argued, "the majority of people must always be hewers of wood and drawers of water. They must be 'hands' always. They must serve machines, not make 'projects.'" This prophecy is really only a tradition. In every department of life science is making possible a new economy—a mode of dealing even with debris and refuse that makes these valuable as raw material.

It is not likely, then, that the greatest wealth of all, human brain power, will be dammed back and cast under for ever. Sooner or later the time must come when such a course must be looked upon as a kind of race mutilation. When the depressing influences of dirt and disease have been swept away, the race, stimulated by the nature of the discoveries with which it is surrounded, must revolt against the artificial barrier that holds back its energies. When that day comes the nature of the school doctor's task will reveal itself, and its real scope and meaning will become clear. He will no longer merely fight the battle with disease. He will safeguard nascent faculty, and declare the sacredness of growing human life, of becoming life, just as of old the religious teachers proclaimed the sacredness of mere human existence.

1. This is so true that intelligence is tested by speed, and doctors speak of backward and defective children often as "children of slow response."
2. And this has become more than ever apparent, thanks to the labours of the school doctor. Take for example this Chart, transcribed by Charles Roberts, F.R.C.S., showing the actual relative heights of boys of the ages of eleven and twelve in the year 1873 as compared with Dr. Arkell's in 1907.

   Height in inches.	Public Schools, Country.	Middle Lower Class.	Factories.	Industrial.
   60
   59
   58	Mean height.
   57
   55	55 inches.
   54		54 inches.
   53
   52			52 inches.
   51
   50				50 inches.
   49
   48

   
   Dr. Arkell's Chart for 1907:—

   Mean Height of boys of eleven at Secondary Schools		55·5 inches.
   	Children of middle and lower middle Class A	53·1 inches.
   	Factory hand Class B.	51·8 inches.
   	Industrial school Class C.	49·7 inches.

   From Dr. Roberts' Table of Weights in 1873 for boys of eleven of Factory hand class 67·7 lb:—

   Mean weight of boys in 1907 at eleven from Dr. Arkell's chart.
   	Secondary School	70 lb.
   	Children of Middle and Lower Middle Class	61·4 lb.
   	Factory Class	59 lb.
   	Industrial School Class	55·5 lb.

   Thus it would appear that the eleven year old child of that very large class of workers who are in regular employment but with small wages has lost in the past thirty years more than 8 lb. in weight, and this serious loss has taken place in spite of the great advance in medical science and the improved sanitation of cities. Thus, the rapid improvement in machinery cannot be said to have brought any very great benefit to them.

3. Rosenthal thus describes the experiment. "The ends of the wire of the multiplier were connected with two vessels filled with liquid, and the index finger of both hands dipped in these vessels. A rod arranged in front of the vessel served to steady the position of the hands. Currents are then present in the muscles of both arms and of the breast, which, since the groups of muscles are symmetrically arranged, cancel each other, acting one on the other. When all is thus arranged, the man strongly contracts the muscle of one arm; the result is an immediate deflection of the multiplier, which indicates the presence of a current ascending in the contracted arm from the hand to the shoulder. We are therefore able, by the mere power of the will, to generate an electric current, and to set the magnetic needle in motion."