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 REBECCA WEAVER˜HIGHTOWER

Frontier
Fictions
SETTLER SAGAS AND POSTCOLONIAL GUILT
Frontier Fictions
 Rebecca Weaver-Hightower

Frontier Fictions
Settler Sagas and Postcolonial Guilt
Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
North Dakota State University
Fargo, ND, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-00421-7 ISBN 978-3-030-00422-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00422-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958728

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
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For Marcus
 Acknowledgements

They say it takes a village to raise a child; it has taken more than a village
to write this book. To all of you who have helped my research and writ-
ing or provided inspiration and influence, please know that I am grateful.
You are too many to thank in this space. But I would like to call out the
following for special thanks:

• My spouse, Marcus Weaver-Hightower, and children Harrison and

Evelyn, who I dragged to libraries in South Africa, Australia, and
Canada but also forced to visit every settler tourist site I could find.
Marcus deserves my eternal appreciation for his unflagging support
of my research through all of its phases, his writing and research
advice, and his encouragement. If I were honest, everything I write
should have his name as the second author.
• Members of my various writing groups over the last decade, who
have read many drafts of this manuscript as it evolved and given
excellent expert advice on the argument and writing, especially
Elizabeth Scharf, John Behling, Cynthia Prescott, Thyra Knapp,
Melissa Gjellstad, Chris Basgier, Sheila Liming, Dave Haeselin,
Cari Campbell, Kathleen Vacek, and Patrick Henry. My former stu-
dents Jody Jenson and Michele Willman also greatly assisted with
this research. I am also grateful to Nicholas Birns, Malvern Van Wyk
Smith, and Richard Slotkin for reading an early version of this man-
uscript and to Lorenzo Veracini for reading a later version.

vii
viii    Acknowledgements

• The English department at the University of North Dakota, (espe-

cially Kristin Ellwanger. Cheryl Misialek and Connie Marshall), the
College of Arts and Sciences, and the University of North Dakota
(my academic home while writing this book), for a decade of fund-
ing for research travel, release time for writing, and logistical sup-
port of all kinds. I am also grateful to colleagues in the English
department at Rhodes University (especially Dirk Klopper), who
allowed me to be a visiting researcher during a crucial point in my
research and gave me friendship and much needed guidance.
• The kind librarians worldwide who took the time to track down
materials or help me work in collections, especially staffs at the
National English Literature Museum in Grahamstown, South
Africa; the National Library in Canberra, Australia; and the Library
and Archives Canada in Ottawa. I would also like to especially thank
the staff of the University of North Dakota’s Chester Fritz Library
(especially Will Martin, Zeineb Yousif, and Stephanie Walker) for
their assistance finding obscure references and building the com-
panion website to accompany this book (which can be found at
https://commons.und.edu/settler-literature, in the UND schol-
arly commons). This book could not have been written without the
work of many hardworking librarians and volunteers worldwide dig-
itizing manuscripts and making them available for free through the
internet. Please keep up the good work!
• My patient publishers at Palgrave, who have been excellent to work
with and their anonymous readers, whose influence in shaping this
book I hope to repay some day.
• I would like to thank the publishers of journals and presses who
have allowed me to try out ideas from this book in different
forms, including Western American Literature, Wiley-Blackwell
Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, and English in Africa. Parts of
two chapters were published as essays in Settler Colonial Studies and
Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and
Cultural Studies (Ed. Robert Tally. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
 Contents

1 The Settler Saga 1

2 Guilt and the Settler–Indigene Relationship 41

3 Guiltscapes of the Homestead, Village, and Fort 81

4 Settler Guilt and Animal Allegories 117

5 The Lost Settler Child 157

Conclusion: Settler Holidays and Guilty Reenactments 199

Afterword: Settlers, Guilt, Denial, and Me 225

Index 235

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 The walls surrounding the historic Lower Fort Garry site
in Manitoba (Picture by the author) 3
Fig. 1.2 The empty tepee visitors pass to visit the Lower Fort Garry
site in Manitoba (Picture by the author) 4
Fig. 1.3 The frontispiece to Conquering the Wilderness… by Colonel
Frank Triplett presents its own settler fantasy 6
Fig. 2.1 Settler and Aboriginal Family Round a Fire, South Australia by
Edward Russell (Reproduced courtesy of the National Library
of Australia, collection number an5880827) 57
Fig. 2.2 A Native Family of New South Wales Sitting Down on an
English Settlers Farm, by Augustus Earle (Reproduced
courtesy of the National Library of Australia, collection
number an2818442-v) 58
Fig. 3.1 Still from the American “Crying Indian” Keep American
Beautiful public service announcement of 1971 82
Fig. 4.1 Peaceable Kingdom (1834), the version housed in the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (US) and a detail from the
background of the same painting, showing the painting’s
animal analogy 123
Fig. 4.2 Peaceable Kingdom (1834), the version housed in the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (US) and a detail from
the background of the same painting, showing the painting’s
human analogy 124
Fig. 5.1 An 1871 illustrated edition from Kingsley’s The Lost Child 173

xi
xii    List of Figures

Fig. 5.2 The Little Wanderers, William Strutt’s painting of the living
Duff children resembling a postmortem drawing
(Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia,
collection number 3240607) 174
Fig. 5.3 A photograph by Jose Maria Mora of an unknown deceased
girl, posed as if asleep out in nature 175
Fig. A.1 Still from the YouTube video “Inside Voortrekker
Monument, Day of the Vow” that shows the cenotaph, the
shaft of sunlight, and the crowd of onlookers 200
 Introduction: “Sorry Books”
and the Guilt That Never Goes Away

When British colonist Thomas Need immigrated to Canada in 1832,

he traveled by train, canal boat, and horse-drawn wagon to the plot of
land he had purchased, land that had been taken from the indigenous
Canadians—at least in title, since the people were, in fact, still there. Like
most settler accounts, much of Need’s Six Years in the Bush or Extracts
from the Journal of a Settler in Upper Canada, 1832–1838 focuses on the
work of carving a home out of the wilderness: clearing land for house
and farm, planting crops, and hunting/domesticating or eradicating
hungry animals. What it lacks is discussion of the emotions Need must
have felt—the desperation to succeed, the hope of a better life for him
and his children, the terror of failure or death, and the despair of having
left behind everything familiar. To this list of unacknowledged emotions,
I add the inevitable guilt of taking over land that clearly is, as I will show,
inhabited by another.
Unlike most settler accounts, Need’s diary is unusual in that it reflects
on his legitimacy as a colonizer.1 After reaching his new landholding,
Need begins a survey, remarking, I “wandered on, forming plans for
the future, and peopling the solitudes around me in my mind’s eye,
until the lengthening shades of evening warned me to rejoin my com-
panions” (54). Here Need first imagines the land as empty (“the soli-
tudes around me”) and yet also “peopled” by future settlement, both of
which work to justify colonization, with the future settlement justifying

xiii
xiv    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

the first settlers’ hardship. Yet Need’s very next sentence complicates this
justification by acknowledging the prior existence of indigenous peo-
ple. The rest of his surveying party, he explains, was roasting “a haunch
of venison, bought of an Indian, as usual” (54). These “Indians” from
whom his men “as usual” buy meat were already present on the land
Need claims for his own.2 This prior existence, even if Need does not
acknowledge it, would have meant inhabitance, if not ownership.3 These
two juxtaposed sentences—one justifying Need’s ownership and the next
undermining it—show the competing demands settlers like Need had
to manage: while writing their own ownership into existence, they had
to account for the prior presence of indigenous people on the land they
want to claim, but in such a way that their settler ownership would not
be endangered.
Need presents an even clearer example of this cognitive dissonance a
year later:

On returning home, I found a party of Indians encamped on my prop-

erty near the lake. At first I felt very much disposed to assert my manorial
rights and dislodge them; but on cooler reflection, it struck me that, in
their eyes, I might seem the intruder, and that on the whole it would be
politic as well as charitable to leave them in peace, and live on kindly terms
with them during their sojourn. (98, emphasis original)

Here Need labels the Indian settlement an “encampment” and dis-

cusses their presence as a “sojourn,” both words suggesting temporary
inhabitance. Yet, at the same time he wonders—just for a minute—if
he might be the “intruder” instead, revealing his own buried doubts
about his ownership and leading him to alter his behavior, from dis-
placing to living alongside them. Here Need recognizes the true moral
and legal messiness of his situation, which the rest of his narrative
works hard to erase. Yet “voicing” these self-doubts in his narrative
does not dissuade him from his larger settlement project but apparently
expiates them.
In its simultaneous revelation of guilty feelings and work to repress
them, Need’s account is emblematic of the artifacts Frontier Fictions:
Settler Sagas and Postcolonial Guilt examines. This book analyzes such
moments of ambivalence across nineteenth-century Anglophone settler
literatures of the United States, Australia, South Africa, and Canada in
order to dispute the notion that nineteenth-century colonists did not
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xv

experience guilt. Instead Frontier Fictions argues that texts like Need’s
would not have worked so hard to depict the heroic settler as undis-
puted landowner if doubt were not already circulating. Examining guilt
requires some nuance, though. Unlike Need’s account, protagonists of
most settler texts do not ponder being intruders. Instead, as this book
will illustrate, most reveal guilty thoughts and feelings through echoes,
efforts to bury or disguise them, and translucent fantasies that only par-
tially cloak the ghostly contours underneath.
As I have shared bits of this research in the decade it took to write
this book, I often encountered two responses. Some listeners patiently
explained that of course settlers felt guilt and wrote about it (as if this book
and its examination were unnecessary). These scholars reminded that guilt
over colonization and settlement is clearly visible in the work of writers
like Thomas Pringle, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others, as well as in the
work of benevolence and missionary societies. These texts not only indi-
cate an awareness that wrongs have been committed against indigenous
peoples, but also often express some level of culpability for those wrongs.
On the other hand, other listeners patiently explained that of course set-
tlers did not feel guilty (as if this book and its examination were anachro-
nistic). Guilt and feelings of responsibility for the treatment of indigenous
peoples, they said, are twentieth/twenty-first-century responses that I am
imposing on nineteenth-century people, who did not see indigenous peo-
ple as human or understand colonization as a form of invasion.
Frontier Fictions walks a line in the middle of these two reactions. It
recognizes authors on both poles, those who much discussed guilt and
those who completely ignored it, paying the greatest attention, as I will
explain, to texts that fall in between. Frontier Fictions examines how
ordinary settlers, perhaps not fully conscious of guilty feelings, expressed
ambivalence in subtle, indirect ways—misgivings flashing onto the pages
of otherwise typical settlement narratives. Thus this book conceptual-
izes guilt not just as the reaction of a few progressives with greater than
average sensitivity and insight, but as an understandable—even predict-
able—reaction to an emotionally difficult circumstance. Historians like
Henry Reynolds have likewise archived examples of ordinary people
expressing reservations about the morality of settlement, such as when
a Port Philip settler wrote in the 1840s “this right to Australia is a sore
subject with many of the British settlers… and they strive to satisfy their
consciences in various ways” (Frontier: Reports from the Edge of White
Settlement 162). Such direct discussions of guilty consciences are few and
xvi    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

far between. But one can only speculate how many more people expe-
rienced pangs of conscience than those with the literacy skills and time
to record them. Writing is all the evidence contemporary scholars have
to uncover complicated historical responses to colonization, so we must
unearth underlying guilt by analyzing stories that recur in text after text
about settlers and settlement, stories that betray all the hallmarks of what
psychologists and psychoanalysts call “defense mechanisms.”
Frontier Fictions, in focusing on narrative defense mechanisms, is a
book about psychological guilt and all the ways literature can provide
means to defend against that guilt. As I have indicated above, nine-
teenth-century European settlers and their descendants were and are
wrestling with complicated and often un(der)expressed guilt inherent in
the colonizing process, which throughout this book I refer to as “set-
tler guilt,” a state of mind that can be historically situated but that is
ongoing. The fields of settler colonial studies and postcolonial studies
would benefit from paying greater attention to settler guilt, especially to
how literature expresses and interacts with it.4 A greater understanding
of settler guilt will result in a more nuanced awareness of settlement as a
transnational, historic and contemporary phenomenon and appreciation
of literature as part of that culture. By reading texts like Catherine Parr
Traill’s Backwoods of Canada or Marcus Clarke’s For the Terms of His
Natural Life in terms of their expressions of or denials of psychological
guilt, we gain insight into the historic and contemporary transnational
situation that we call “settlement.”
Frontier Fictions investigates how the narrative tropes this book exam-
ines—the heroic settler, the “doomed” native, the coveted landscape, the
allegorical animal, and the lost child—together function to justify settle-
ment and so appear in texts across settler cultures. By exploring com-
monalities among settler cultures, this book recognizes that the settler
experience includes wrestling with guilt, even if denying it. These com-
monalities lead to studying settlement and its fantasy of legitimacy hori-
zontally across time and space instead of vertically as a phase in a nation’s
development, or as Patrick Wolfe recommends in “Settler Colonialism
and the Elimination of the Native,” as a structure, not an event—a
phrase that has become a touchstone of settler colonial studies and one
that grounds this study. And as a structure and not an accomplished
event, settlement as it continues must be reasserted, defended, and legit-
imized, even hundreds of years after its initial acts, since those of us liv-
ing in the nations that evolved from settler colonies are still existing in
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xvii

this structure and are thus still settlers. Recognizing that settlement must
still be asserted, however, positions it as a structure that can be inter-
rupted or dismantled in the service of indigenous survivance, not as an
inevitability.5

The Twentieth Sorry Century

This book juxtaposes contemporary settlement literature with nineteenth-
century settler stories, like Thomas Need’s, in order to examine how
nineteenth-century tropes must still be circulated as settlement continues
and needs to be defended. I began this book wondering if the awareness
of guilt I saw in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was evident in
the nineteenth; I end it with awareness that the situations I observed in
the nineteenth-century endure in the twentieth and twenty-first. As the
decisions, resulting protests, public response, and then governmental
actions around the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2017 make clear, citizens
of the nations that arose from settler colonies are still settlers playing the
same dramas with much of the same rhetoric.
This book began with rumination on a contemporary settlement
event, Australia’s “Sorry Movement”: the public demonstration of apol-
ogy in the late 1990s, spurred by the release of two shocking govern-
ment reports and the occurrence of two landmark court cases, both
exacerbated by the government’s refusal to release an official apology to
the indigenous people it had historically harmed. Much has been written
about these events by Australian scholars, but for those unfamiliar, the
first report, 1991’s Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, investigated reasons
for the disproportionate number of Indigenous Australians dying while
incarcerated. The second report, 1997’s Bringing Them Home, studied
the “stolen generation” of more than 100,000 indigenous children taken
from their families by a century-long policy of assimilating indigenous
children into “white” culture, a situation largely forgotten or repressed
until the report brought this trauma back into public conscious-
ness. Also in the 1990s, the Australian High Court decided two land-
mark cases: Mabo v. Queensland (1992) and Wik Peoples v. Queensland
(1996), together overturning the concept of terra nullius, which held
that Australia was legally available for British colonization and that
Indigenous Australians had and have no rights to it. Responding to the
two reports and court decisions and culminating decades of activism,
Australians for Native Title called for the government of the 1990s under
xviii    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

PM John Howard to issue a formal apology to Indigenous Australians, a

request refused for many years. An official apology was finally issued in
2005 under Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.
Prime Minister Howard’s refusal spurred many members of the
Australian public to demonstrate remorse on their own. Across the
country, people organized marches and other symbolic acts of repara-
tion, including on 28 May 2000, 250,000 Australians marching across
the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Two years earlier Australians for Native title
organized the first Sorry Day and campaign of “Sorry Books” placed in
civic spaces throughout the country, containing a one-page official apol-
ogy and blank pages for signatures and comments.
The books’ apologies read:

By signing our name to this book we are recording our regret for the
injustice suffered by Indigenous Australians as a result of European settle-
ment; In particular the effect of government policy on the human dignity
and spirit of Indigenous Australians. We are recording our desire for rec-
onciliation and for a better future for all our peoples. By signing this book
we are demonstrating a commitment to a united Australia, which values
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage, and provides justice and
equity for all.

Over one year, half a million Australians signed the over five hundred
Sorry Books and wrote further statements.6
Most of the statements added to the Sorry Books express regret and
communal guilt, like:

To be Australian is not to deny our history, which has shaped our Nation.
To be Australian is to accept what has happened in the past and to learn
from past events, in an effort to grow and develop our nation. I am
extremely ashamed and sorry for the mistreatment of Aboriginal people
and I would not only like to express my shame but also my hope that such
events will never again occur.

Statements like this provide a rich illustration of what I call “persistent

collective guilt,” meaning the continued experience of guilt for the more
overt violence of ancestors, compounded by one’s participation (even if
unwitting and unwilling) in continued acts of settlement.
As well, the Sorry Books provide a useful example of how denial
can serve as an expression of guilt and how settlement, as an enduring
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xix

project, continues to be defended. Some responses undermined the

apology with defensive sentiments, like “I shouldn’t have to say sorry.
I am not personally responsible for these tragedies. It was many years
ago. Let’s just get on with our lives and live peacefully together—all
as Australians.” Others displaced responsibility, as in “I am sorry even
though I myself haven’t done anything wrong. I hope in the future
white people will respect you, and treat you as equals, like I always
have.” A few expressed hostility: “Nonsense. We would need to apolo-
gize for every war/theft/cruelty throughout history. I’m sure we all
have ancestors who were hard done by. Our modern capitalist system is
not entirely fair! Not everyone follows the rules anyway. What were the
rules back in the eighteenth century and nineteenth century? Were they
fair? Was it that the squatters broke the law?” These Sorry Books con-
tain a treasure trove of complicated reactions to apology, responsibility,
and reconciliation. And as the title of this introduction indicates, these
Sorry Books parallel the discussion of Frontier Fictions: Settler Stories
and Postcolonial Guilt in that they record ambivalence and denial of guilt
that might otherwise remain internal. The Sorry Books also show that
awareness or experience of guilt does not always result in change. For
instance, Sorry Day was renamed in 2005 “National Day of Healing for
All Australians,” a significant shift from apology to equal victimhood and
healing. Meanwhile, Indigenous Australians remain a persistent under-
class (as do most of the indigenous groups this book discusses) in regard
to health, economic, and social problems. Though the apology was
important, being apologized to didn’t end oppression.7
Yet, despite its failure to completely uproot the Australian class hier-
archy, the Sorry Movement, like other reconciliation movements world-
wide, highlighted that the nation’s unresolved colonial past continues
to impede progress. Of course, desires for reconciliation and atonement
are not isolated to Australia. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation
Commission—like other twentieth-century truth commissions—was
also created in belief that the nation could not progress until it dealt
with the harm created by apartheid. Canada has also attempted to work
through the psychological and legal morass of colonial crimes by rene-
gotiating treaties with its indigenous population and through its own
truth commission, which concluded in December 2015.8 My own coun-
try, the United States, continues to struggle with need to atone to both
the historical victims of slavery and the indigenous victims of settlement
with official apologies presented in 2009, including injunctions against
xx    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

seeking monetary reparations. Nevertheless, if not providing repara-

tions, symbolic apologies do mark the government’s response to calls for
healing.
Frontier Fictions grows out of transnational cultural movements of
the late twentieth century, like those noted above; but it primarily looks
backward to argue that awareness of the harms of settlement is not new.
Thus each chapter brackets its discussion of nineteenth-century texts
with similar tropes still at work: to emphasize that settlement continues
to need to be asserted and that contemporary situations of inequality and
oppression lead writers and readers to rely upon the same colonial tropes.

The Secret River and Other Sorry Novels

To further explore this connection between expressions of settlement
guilt and literature, I will briefly analyze an important historical novel
about settlement, Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005). Grenville’s
companion text, Searching for the Secret River, tells about the novel’s
writing and how she was inspired to research and novelize the life of a
convict ancestor after an indigenous friend helped her see that her ances-
tor’s “taking up land on the Hawkesbury River,” as her family mythos
held, was really “taking land.” The novel thus demonstrates a culture
continuing to wrestle—through literature—with the legacies of settle-
ment, including guilt, and apology.
A second reason for my interest in this novel concerns its explicit
work to recover unexpressed nineteenth-century settler guilt. Grenville’s
carefully researched account of her ancestor Solomon Wiseman (whom
she renames “William Thornhill”) begins with his impoverished life in
England before his transportation to Australia for stealing. The novel’s
focus, however, is on his life in Australia as a convict and then a free
farmer, where he and his wife produce five children and eventually claim
a prosperous riverbank farm near present-day Sydney. Yet the novel is no
typical nostalgic tale of settlement success (à la Colleen McCullough’s
1977 The Thornbirds), for Grenville unearths Thornhill’s emotions—the
motivations, anxieties, and regrets she imagines her ancestor must have
had—not typically explored in novels about settlement. In particular,
Grenville investigates Thornhill’s struggles to rationalize the legitimacy
of his colonization and deny indigenous presence on the land he covets,
that is his sense of settler guilt.
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xxi

Indeed, much of the novel involves Thornhill dealing with the psy-
chological conundrum and the resulting guilt from settling already
inhabited land. When Thornhill sees evidence of indigenous crops, for
instance, he convinces himself that the plants grow wild. Then, when he
sees that “some other man had set foot here, worked it with his pick,” he
denies that fact, telling his son that animals had dug the dirt (140). But
indigenous ownership of the land Thornhill covets keeps being asserted.
He discovers rock paintings of a fish and his boat, evidence of contin-
ued indigenous habitation, since the paintings portray his own recent
arrival. Thornhill has an epiphany: “It came to him that this might look
an empty place, but … this place was no more empty than a parlour in
London, from which the master of the house had just stepped into the
bedroom. He might not be seen, but he was there” (206). Yet Thornhill
continues to pretend to himself and others that the indigenous claim
does not exist. And, when he cannot deny it any longer, he participates
in a communal massacre of the indigenous people, in an attempt to erase
them from “his” site—and psyche. The book’s ending shows, however,
that Thornhill’s guilt over these actions haunts him the rest of his life.
By imagining the thoughts of settlers, Grenville resurrects a nineteenth-
century settler guilt that has remained largely unrecorded. Similar efforts
have been made in the work of historians like Henry Reynolds, who have
labored to include the erased and denied violence of colonization in
Australia’s historic record.9 Grenville’s work to understand how “taking
land” became recast as “taking up land” parallels the work of this “sorry
book,” the one you are now reading; for Frontier Fictions takes as its aim
the recovery of the (often) unexpressed settler guilt of settlers and the
unpacking of the stories they and their descendants tell to sanitize colonial
violence. My argument is that we need not rely on contemporary novelists
like Grenville to imagine nineteenth-century settler guilt; instead we can
read the nineteenth-century literature itself for evidence, through the nar-
ratives that emerge as tropes across the settler corpus.
My third reason for interest in The Secret River concerns how it func-
tioned within early twenty-first century Australia’s wrestling with its own
continued settlement. The Secret River sparked the public’s imagination,
becoming a critically acclaimed best seller, adapted into a successful play
and film. The novel provided a cultural touchstone for a nation that
needed to have a conversation post-Mabo and work through its settler
guilt. Marguerite Nolan and Robert Clarke, in fact, show in “Reading
The Secret River” how it encouraged public debate about postcolonial
xxii    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

reconciliation. The Secret River is not alone in this work. The American
Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Canadian Thomas
King’s Green Grass, Running Water, and South African JM Coetzee’s
Disgrace all examine contemporary culpability and reoccurring narratives
of legitimacy.10 In some cases, as with the DVD of the Australian film
Rabbit Proof Fence (from Doris Pilkington’s book), which includes mate-
rials for discussion groups, the spurring of public debate about reconcil-
iation seems deliberate. Frontier Fictions argues that these texts, through
these conversations, aided the management of settler guilt not only of
writers but also of readers, who—through the novels—confronted,
explored, and sometimes denied their own settler guilt.
These recent texts present an apt analogy for the work of settler stories
in the nineteenth century, which also aided the confrontation, explora-
tion, and denial of guilt. However, evidence of the cultural and psycho-
logical work being performed by the nineteenth-century novels is not
always as clear with contemporary texts like The Secret River. Some texts
this book examines, like Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, were widely
read in their own time, but many were not. So the evidence is subtle and
elusive, as I attempt to recover reader responses without book reviews
of the day, historical studies of readership, or evidence that settlers were
reading each other’s work.11 Thus my focus on nineteenth-century texts
is often on what these stories of settler contact tell us about authors
struggling with feelings about settlement instead of on readers who I
can only suppose existed. My exploration, then, relies, as I will explain,
on the texts themselves and the repeated tropes they contain—stories
of heroic settlers, “doomed” natives, coveted land, allegorical animals,
and lost children—which repeat across four settler cultures, over two
centuries and beyond, because of the emotional release they provided and
continue to provide.

Spaces of Settlement
My explication of common tropes in nineteenth and twentieth/
twenty-first-century settler tales in order to better understand the
Anglophone settler experience demands that I cut a broad swath in
my analysis. Like James Belich in Replenishing the Earth: The Settler
Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783–1939, I am fasci-
nated by the explosion of Anglo-settler colonies across the globe. And
like other texts of settler colonial studies, this project is comparative.12
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xxiii

Frontier Fictions analyzes Australia, South Africa, Canada, and the

United States because of their similarities and differences in coloniza-
tion and reconciliation, and because of how these experiences affect
their literatures. I chose these four former settler colonies because
each experienced twentieth-century cultural movements to make colo-
nial reparations, which, while making space for apology and reconcili-
ation, also revealed societal rifts, indicating an ambivalence important
for postcolonial studies to analyze. By including the United States of
America, Frontier Fictions, as does Walter Hixson’s American Settler
Colonialism: A History, counters “American exceptionalism.” Despite
calls for the United States to be included in postcolonial discussions,
critics still often leave American literature out of postcolonial debates.13
Frontier Fictions, though, examines the United States as another settler
colony, though one that transitioned from being an occupation colony
to settler colony to colonizer of other spaces (like Puerto Rico and the
Philippines).
I chose these exemplar settler states also because they evince a com-
plicated mix of competing ethnicities. As well as the simplistic white/
black binary of settler and indigene, the countries all contain competing
groups of “whites,” which is important for understanding how literature
constructs “good” and “bad” settlers in its efforts to deflect or project
guilt, explored in Chapter 1. The English and Dutch in South Africa; the
English and French in Canada; the convict and free settler (and English
and Irish) in Australia; and the English, French, and Spanish in the
United States all historically competed for resources and colonial dom-
inance, and in many cases, this tension led to violence over resources.
The Afrikaner descendants of the Dutch warred with the English; the
Quebecois descendants of the French also battled the English; the British
fought wars with the Spanish and French over colonial possessions
in the United States, in addition to what the United States calls “the
Revolutionary War”; and in Australia, lore holds that friction between
convicts and settlers (or “squatters”) stemmed from conflicts in the old
world, since many Australian convicts were Irish or political prisoners,
while soldiers and settlers came from the colonial masters.14
Other similarities among Canada, Australia, the United States, and
South Africa that encourage comparison (further be explored in Chapter 1)
come from the use of claims of indigeneity by settler descendants to estab-
lish land rights. For instance, two mixed race non-aboriginal groups in
both Canada (the Metis) and South Africa (the “Coloureds”) claim to
xxiv    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

be indigenous to their continent, putting them in conflict First Nations

Canadians and black South Africans over priority and land rights.15 Even
more complicated is that Afrikaners understand themselves as distinct from
their Dutch ancestors and thus born of Africa, with the rights indigeneity
brings. French Canadian Quebecois exhibit similar claims to indigeneity, as
a badge of victimhood and basis for rights. So, too, as Pal Ahluwalia has
noted, in Australia, white colonists who were born in Australia called them-
selves “natives” to distinguish themselves from more recent immigrants
and encourage assumed indigeneity, while indigenous peoples were labe-
led “aboriginal natives” to deny citizenship. As Ahluwalia explains, “The
myth of terra nullius was dependent upon the nonrecognition of the local
population and the ‘indigenisation’ of their white conquerors” (“When
Does a Settler Become a Native?” 65). Such claims, stemming from historic
debates, complicate contemporary work to assign land rights and collective
guilt, and again highlight important complexities of the post-colonial set-
tler experience.
Of course, despite similarities among Canada, South Africa, the United
States, and Australia, the nations are significantly different in how, when,
and by whom they were colonized; what techniques were used; and when,
how, and to what extent they experienced decolonization. They most
obviously differ in their current enjoyment of financial prosperity, health,
and global power. Despite its gains since 1994, South Africa, as the most
recently decolonized country, still remains economically, militarily, and
politically less advantaged than the other three; and the “white” pop-
ulation of South Africa, unlike the other three countries, is a numerical
minority (though an economically and politically empowered one). One
might argue that South Africa differs from the other three nations in that
its settlers (the Afrikaners and English) are no longer in national political
power, though their economic and cultural power remains significant. This
book aims to hold in tension discussion of these important historical and
cultural differences while analyzing the settler narratives, because when
held side by side, despite differences, the literatures of these nations illumi-
nate important shared facets of the settler condition in the contact zone.16

The Nineteenth-Century “Guilted” Age

Though set in four very different settings, all of the texts Frontier
Fictions examines were written by first generation settlers. That is, the
texts that proved most useful for my investigation were stories of colonial
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xxv

contact, of early white settlers who struggled to make a home in their

new country while facing—in a literal way—the people already living
there. Indigenous peoples had not been already pushed off to the side so
that their presence could be ignored. Borrowing from what Mary Louise
Pratt in Imperial Eyes calls “the contact zone,” meaning “social spaces
where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other,” (6) I call these
settlers “contact settlers” (and their descendants in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries “continued settlers”). These contact settlers broke
ground in a space where encounter and conflict with indigenous peo-
ples were inevitable. As Mahmood Mamdani explains in “When Does
a Settler Become a Native?”, “Settlers are made by conquest, not just
by immigration,” meaning that violence of some sort—cultural, eco-
nomic, ideological, and physical—was intrinsic to settlement, no matter
the good intentions of the settlers themselves (222).17 Frontier Fictions
focuses on the psychological violence necessary to justify colonizing the
land of indigenous owners who were very much still present.
For these contact settlers, resistance from indigenous peoples was an
ever-present threat because, though the land had been officially claimed,
the on-the-ground work to wrest ownership from the indigene had yet
to be done. These first settlers cut down forests to create farms, pulled
up stumps to plant crops, built cabins from those trees, and established
relationships with other regional settlers and indigenous neighbors. Later
settlers, which one could call “communal settlers,” would come to a set-
tlement already established, where towns were already named and con-
structed, needing people to run stores, newspapers, and schools, where
indigenous people had already largely been displaced and physically and
psychologically contained. While these simple categories in practice had
many overlaps, my interest is in studying and understanding contact but
not communal settlers, because with contact settlers comes more direct
encounter with the indigene that is useful for my understanding of how
that encounter was psychologically and literarily processed.
I limited the authors this study reads to those I could classify as having
inhabited the settler perspective (with more being explored on this book’s
companion website, to be found at https://commons.und.edu/settler-
literature).18 So, for instance, though Henry Kingsley did not remain
in Australia (he immigrated to Australia in 1853, returning to England
in 1857 after failing on the goldfields), I include him because at one
time, he fully intended to remain in Australia and experienced the psy-
chological state his book describes. He was not an armchair settler, like
xxvi    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

R. M. Ballantyne and G. A. Henty, who both wrote sensational and quite

popular novels about settlement from the comfort of Britain. (The complete
list of settler texts I used and considered can also be found at this book’s
companion website, in the University of North Dakota’s digital commons.)
I chose the nineteenth century for my focus because of the importance
of the historical novel and memoir in that century to the national con-
sciousness of the four settler colonies I analyze. In the nineteenth century,
eyewitness settler accounts began to be turned into fiction, readily pro-
duced and consumed by settlers and potential settlers. This focus on the
nineteenth century, however, meant juxtaposing literatures of colonies in
different stages of colonization: the North American and Canadian colo-
nies were well established on the East coast by the nineteenth century but
were expanding to the West coast, while Australia and South Africa were
in the thick of early British colonization. However, despite residing in dif-
ferent stages of settlement, the narratives of contact settlers, when juxta-
posed, provide telling correspondences regarding life in the contact zone.
This book’s title “frontier fictions” emphasizes that all of these texts,
whether claiming to be fictional or not, present fictions of the frontier,
the always expanding edge of settlement which is still being asserted
in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, despite Frederick Jackson
Turner’s famous edict that the frontier closed in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Regarding my use of the word “fictions” in my title: throughout
this book, I do examine contact settler narratives written as nonfic-
tional, either collections of letters, like Catherine Parr Traill’s Backwoods
of Canada; or diaries or memoirs, like Louisa Ann Meredith’s Notes and
Sketches of New South Wales. I also explore settlement novels, like James
Fenimore Cooper’s American frontier story, Last of the Mohicans; John
Robinson’s South African settler saga, George Linton: Or the First Years of
an English Colony; John Richardson’s Canadian military tale, Wacousta:
Or, The Prophecy, a Tale of the Canadas; and Marcus Clarke’s Australian
convict narrative, For the Term of His Natural Life. I apply the same ana-
lytical strategies all texts, since fiction and nonfiction present one person’s
version of settlement, giving insight into the individual consciousness and
self-presentation as well as the nineteenth-century zeitgeist.
In addition to crossing literary genres, this study also reads texts from
a range of media, which argue that the settler fantasy that permeated the
nineteenth century is still very much in existence. The five key tropes
I examine (the heroic settler, the “doomed” native, the coveted land-
scape, the allegorical animal, and the lost child) pop up not only across
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xxvii

cultures and chronologies but also across various forms of media, includ-
ing print media but also paintings, book illustrations, television shows,
films, advertisements, monuments, museum exhibits, and tourist sites.
Such crossover is warranted, for, as Tanya Dalziell aptly explains in Settler
Romances and the Australian Girl, “the role popular texts played in the
production of settlers’ consent to colonial projects cannot be underesti-
mated” (6).
Frontier Fictions furthers the discussion of the settler experience by
looking at similarities in expression across time and space in order to
better understand the ambivalences of the settler psyche horizontally
as a continued experience of colonization, not vertically as a teleologi-
cal completed phase in a nation’s development. As such, the line of this
book’s argument tends to be more triangular than linear, as I compare
what a particular literary text says, what its author wrote and said else-
where, and the historical and cultural context in which the text was pro-
duced. Only by looking at a text as part of an interconnected triangle can
one see what it leaves out, alludes to, represses, denies, or deflects.

Context, Theory, and Methodology

This book’s investigation of contact settlers is built on a solid foundation
of prior scholarship to which it contributes, one being postcolonial stud-
ies.19 The larger field of postcolonial studies has long tended to polarize
texts into those of colonized or colonizer, mostly ignoring the intersti-
tial settler, who can tell us much about how ambivalence and colonial
guilt interconnect. But in recent decades, critics have begun theorizing
the settler experience, to great effect, thus creating an exciting new body
of scholarship to which this book contributes by providing literary exam-
ples of some of the more complicated dynamics discussed in history and
culture.20 Again returning to Patrick Wolfe’s argument that settlement
is a structure, my aim is to better explicate that mode of thinking and
the psychological impulses behind settlers telling their own stories. Other
critics of settler studies, like Mark Rifkin, have recognized and identified
important transnational patterns in settler literature and how they per-
meated thinking. This book aims to further explore the psychological
impulses behind such patterns to explain why they exist, why they cross
cultures and genres, and why they endure.
Explanation of methodology (why I chose to use a psychoanalytic the-
oretical lens and to read the texts that and as I did) is crucial because
xxviii    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

I am piecing together a story of an elusive psychological state that is

often only suggested. If the guilt were more apparent and the literature
more clearly defending against it, then, of course, this book would not
be necessary.
Guilt is a powerful word, provoking resistance from those who feel
targeted by it. So I should explain how I am using that term. First, this
book distinguishes between guilt and shame: guilt describes feelings
formed in reaction to a specific behavior, while shame describes the feel-
ings about oneself resulting from those feelings. That is, guilt is “I did
something bad,” while shame is “I am bad because of the thing I did.”
Though guilt might inspire shame, this project focuses on the emotions
resulting from the behavior instead of the state of being.
Additionally, this book differentiates between ontological guilt (the
state of being morally or legally guilty for a behavior) and emotional
guilt (the feelings experienced in response to the behavior). I stipulate
from the outset that settlers were ontologically guilty. I am influenced by
Albert Memmi in The Colonizer and the Colonized, particularly his dis-
tinction between “colonizers who accept” and “colonizers who refuse.”
Memmi argues, and I agree, that whatever feelings colonizers experi-
enced about their participation in empire, as beneficiaries, they are colo-
nizers—even if they protest, feel guilt, or deny allegiance to the mother
country. No matter their individual intentions in the name of nation or
God, settlers displaced the indigenous people already living on the land
they claimed.21 In stipulating their ontological guilt, though, I am nei-
ther vilifying settlers nor defending them. Settlers were players in a large
and complicated political, economic, and social process (including both
culture and religion), and my interest is in what they thought and felt
while participating in this process, not in castigating or excusing them.
The literature that contact settlers produced indicates that their feelings
were varied and complex, but that not all experienced emotional guilt. It is
a commonplace that even people who perhaps should feel guilty for violent
and transgressive behaviors often do not, while others feel excessive guilt,
even for behaviors for which they bear little responsibility. The literature this
book analyzes shows settlers displaying guilty feelings for their own oppres-
sive actions, but it also shows just as many expressing guilt even though
not directly involved in oppressing indigenous peoples, simply because they
belonged to the group doing the harm or because they benefitted from it.
Such contradictory responses can best be understood using the psycholog-
ical concept of collective guilt. Psychologists Wohl, Branscombe, and Klar
explain individual guilt as “an unpleasant feeling that accompanies the belief
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xxix

that the harmful act one committed was not justified” (“Collective Guilt”
2–3); but, in contrast, collective guilt, Branscombe and Doosje explain in a
related publication, “stems from the distress that group members experience
when they accept that their ingroup is responsible for immoral actions that
harmed another group” (Collective Guilt: International Perspectives 3). That
is, collective guilt need not involve participation in harm-doing; one only
needs to feel allegiance to or membership in the group responsible for the
harm-doing. As already introduced, Frontier Fictions further expands the
idea of collective guilt to “persistent collective guilt,” as a state of ontologi-
cal and moral guilt for an ancestor’s actions.
To better discuss this range of individual emotional responses to collec-
tive guilt, I propose a typology of four categories: Sensitivity, Ambivalence,
Disavowal, and Blindness, which can be seen in the expressions in the
Sorry Books already referenced as well as in the texts Frontier Fictions
will analyze. The first category, Sensitivity, is evident in articulation of
emotional guilt (and shame about oneself and culture in response to that
guilt). History is full of examples of Sensitivity and of texts written with
political aims or as part of benevolence movements, by intellectuals, activ-
ists, and abolitionists of slavery and colonization, including well-stud-
ied writers like Thomas Pringle and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The second
category, Ambivalence, can be characterized as the experience of emo-
tional guilt without full awareness and articulation of it. Guilt emerges
in Ambivalent writing as authors struggle with feelings they cannot quite
understand or admit, some denying these feelings, and others expressing
them in indirect ways. Many ordinary settlers, like Thomas Need, with
whom I began this introduction, display Ambivalence. My third category,
Disavowal, comes from the recognition that guilt exists with others but
the denial of it in oneself. Narratives of Disavowal are often bombastically
nationalistic, evoking indigenous people who are either absent or simplis-
tically evil. And the fourth category, Blindness, comes from the absence of
awareness of guilt in oneself or others and thus a lack of contemplation or
writing about it (though I might argue that we find hints of guilt in the
conspicuous absence of some topics). Distinction between being Blind or
Disavowing in relationship to guilt comes through a person’s response to
the issue of guilt. The Blind person would be confused (Why would they
feel guilty?) while a Disavowing person would be overly assertive of a lack
of guilt, indicating strong defensive feelings behind the denial.
These categories are not necessarily discrete or fixed. People can shift
relationship to guilt within their lifetime and even within the same nar-
rative. Though all are important, this book focuses on Ambivalence and
xxx    INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY

Disavowal, where the writing provides the most insight into the com-
plicated settler position. Frontier Fictions does not focus on Sensitive
texts that obviously express guilt and have been the focus of much liter-
ary criticism already or Blind texts that omit discussion or even recogni-
tion of guilt. Ambivalent and Disavowing texts are both more revealing
and representative of the larger society as it debates and weighs its
conscience.
Unpacking expressions of guilt in settlement narratives and under-
standing how they function for individuals and the larger culture requires
the psychoanalytic concepts of defense mechanisms. Psychologists and
psychoanalysts explain that people respond to feelings of guilt by tell-
ing themselves stories that defend against or release psychological and
emotional discomfort. The repeated, cross-cultural narratives threaded
throughout settler literatures function as defense mechanisms, allow-
ing an individual and a culture to recast the violence of settlement into
something else.
As one might expect, this book draws upon the work of Sigmund
Freud and other psychoanalyts, but my use here, is, as Anne McClintock
explains in Imperial Leather, a “situated psychoanalysis.” That is, Freud
was able, better than anyone, to recognize and theorize the complexities
of the modern condition because he was both an analyst and product
of his time (nineteenth-century colonial-era Europe). I, like other critics,
find his work useful for describing the tangled thoughts and emotions
that grow out of the complicated self/other dynamic that was exacer-
bated by the empire.22 Certainly, as this book argues, inherent in impe-
rial expansion is underlying ontological and emotional guilt; and Freud’s
theories of responses to guilt, though he doesn’t make this connection
himself, make sense as a product of deeply ambivalent colonialism as well
as descriptor of it.
It was Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud, however, who fully
theorized defense mechanisms in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense
(but again not connecting the behavior she witnessed to the impe-
rial world in which they lived), arguing that defense mechanisms must
operate on the subconscious level to be effective in reducing anxiety.
Psychologists since then have identified scores of defense mechanisms;
but the mechanisms that most show up in the literature Frontier Fictions
examines nevermind repression (trying to keep an unpleasant occurrence
from conscious thought), denial (manipulating perceptions to exclude
something unpleasant), identification (attributing to oneself the desired
 INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY     xxxi

characteristics of another), projection (attributing one’s own uncomfort-

able feelings and thoughts onto another), displacement or transference
(placing feelings about one subject or object onto another, safer situa-
tion), and rationalization or intellectualization (explaining away feel-
ings or situations through plausible explanations). These mechanisms,
all of which occur and function below the level of conscious thought,
can work in tandem in the same narrative. Primary defense mechanisms
(repression and denial) serve to prevent unacceptable ideas or impulses
from entering the conscience, while secondary defense mechanisms
(identification, projection, displacement, rationalization, and intellectu-
alization) grow out of these primary defense mechanisms and work to
alter reality, thereby keeping the individual from feeling anxiety or, in
the case of this study, guilt. I draw upon theories of defense mechanisms
throughout this book to show how narratives not only reveal underlying
guilt but also, through the act of being written and read, expiate it.
By investigating settler psychology, however, this book is not meant
to indicate mental illness in settlers. As Phebe Cramer remarks in The
Development of Defense Mechanisms: Theory, Research and Assessment,
psychoanalysts and psychologists have debated whether or not defense
mechanisms are pathological. Cramer, however, argues that they are not,
that adult defense mechanisms originate in the “normal” behaviors of
infants. This book likewise analyzes defense mechanisms as reactions of
otherwise sane, functioning people when put in the complicated environ-
ment of settlement. Contact settlers left their homes because their situ-
ation in Britain was in some way untenable, perhaps because of poverty,
a criminal offense, political or religious pressures, or lack of sufficient
opportunities. But the stresses of settlement—leaving behind everything
familiar to take a gamble on a better life in an unknown land, where
one’s survival depended on hard work, favorable weather, and good
luck and where the promise of prosperity meant beating out, killing off,
or pushing out indigenous competition—would require a high level of
coping.
To understand how defense mechanisms can work to deal with guilt, I
have found Sigmund Freud’s celebrated patient “the Rat Man,” written
about in “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis” (1909) useful.
Though the Rat Man was likely mentally ill whereas I see most settlers as
not, this case works well to show on the individual level the kind of story
creation as defense mechanism that Frontier Fictions traces. The patient,
a former male soldier, sought Freud’s help for his obsessive-compulsive
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
are very valuable for some kinds of medical work. The application of
these currents is quite painless, and but for the strange-looking
apparatus the patient probably would not know that anything unusual
was taking place. To some extent the effect maybe said to be not
unlike that of a powerful tonic. Insomnia and other troubles due to
disordered nerves are quickly relieved, and even such obstinate
complaints as neuritis and crippling rheumatism have been cured.
The treatment is also of great value in certain forms of heart trouble.
By increasing the strength of the high frequency currents the tissues
actually may be destroyed, and this power is utilized for
exterminating malignant growths, such as lupus or cancer.
The heat produced by a current of electricity is made use of in
cauterizing. The burner is a loop of platinum wire, shaped according
to the purpose for which it is intended, and it is used at a dull red
heat. Very tiny electric incandescent lamps, fitted in long holders of
special shape, are largely used for examining the throat and the
various cavities of the body.
In the Finsen light treatment electric light is used for a very
different purpose. The spectrum of white light consists of the colours
red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Just beyond the
violet end of the spectrum are the ultra-violet rays. Ultra-violet light
consists of waves of light which are so short as to be quite invisible
to the eye, and Dr. N. R. Finsen, a Danish physician, made the
discovery that this light is capable of destroying bacterial germs. In
the application of ultra-violet rays to medical work, artificial light is
used in preference to sunlight; for though the latter contains ultra-
violet light, a great deal of it is absorbed in passing through the
atmosphere. Besides this, the sun sends out an immense amount of
radiant heat, and this has to be filtered out before the light can be
used. The usual source of light is the electric arc, and the arc is
much richer in ultra-violet rays if it is formed between electrodes of
iron, instead of the usual carbon rods. The light, which, in addition to
the ultra-violet rays, includes the blue, indigo, and violet parts of the
spectrum, is passed along a tube something like that of a telescope,
and is focused by means of a double lens, consisting of two separate
plates of quartz. Glass cannot be used for the lens, because it is
opaque to the extreme ultra-violet rays. A constant stream of water is
passed between the two plates forming the lens, and this filters out
the heat rays, which are not wanted. In some forms of Finsen lamp
an electric spark is used as the source of light, in place of the arc.
The most important application of the Finsen light is in the cure
of the terribly disfiguring disease called lupus. This is a form of
tuberculosis of the skin, and it is produced by the same deadly
microbe which, when it attacks the lungs, causes consumption. In all
but extreme cases the Finsen light effects a remarkable cure. A
number of applications are necessary, each of half an hour or more;
and after a time the disease begins to disappear, leaving soft, normal
skin. The exact action of the light rays is a disputed point. Finsen
himself believed that the ultra-violet rays attacked and exterminated
the microbe, but a later theory is that the rays stimulate the tissues to
such an extent that they are enabled to cure themselves. As early as
the year 1899 Finsen had employed his light treatment in 350 cases
of lupus, and out of this number only five cases were unsuccessful.
The ultra-violet rays are said to have a very beneficial effect
upon the teeth. Experiments carried out in Paris, using a mercury
vapour lamp as the source of light, show that discoloured teeth are
whitened and given a pearly lustre by these rays, at the same time
being sterilized so that they do not easily decay. The Röntgen rays
are used for the treatment of lupus, and more particularly for deeper
growths, such as tumours and cancers, for which the Finsen rays are
useless, owing to their lack of penetrating power. The action of these
two kinds of rays appears to be similar, but the X-rays are much the
more active of the two.
Electricity is often applied to the body through water, in the form
of the hydro-electric bath, and such baths are used in the treatment
of different kinds of paralysis. Electric currents are used too for
conveying drugs into the tissues of the body. This is done when it is
desired to concentrate the drug at some particular point, and it has
been found that chemicals can be forced into the tissues for a
considerable distance.
 Dr. Nagelschmidt, a great authority on medical electricity, has
suggested the use of electricity for weight reducing. In the ordinary
way superfluous flesh is got rid of by a starvation diet coupled with
exercise, but in many cases excessively stout people are troubled
with heart disorders and asthma, so that it is almost impossible for
them to undergo the necessary muscular exertion. By the application
of electric currents, however, the beneficial effects of the gentle
exercise may be produced without any exertion on the part of the
patient, and an hour’s treatment is said to result in a decrease in
weight of from 200 to 800 grammes, or roughly 7 to 27 ounces.
 CHAPTER XXVI
OZONE

The great difference between the atmospheric conditions before and

after a thunderstorm must have been noticed by everybody. Before
the storm the air feels lifeless. It does not satisfy us as we draw it
into our lungs, and however deeply we breathe, we feel that
something is lacking. After the storm the air is delightful to inhale,
and it refreshes us with every breath. This remarkable transformation
is brought about to a very large extent by ozone produced by the
lightning discharges.
As far back as 1785 it was noticed that oxygen became changed
in some way when an electric spark was passed through it, and that
it acquired a peculiar odour. No particular attention was paid to the
matter however until about 1840, when Schönbein, a famous
German chemist, and the discoverer of gun-cotton and collodion,
became interested in it. He gave this strange smelling substance the
name of “ozone,” and he published the results of his experiments
with it in a treatise entitled, “On the Generation of Ozone.”
Schönbein showed that ozone could be produced by various
methods, chemical as well as electrical. For instance, if a piece of
phosphorus is suspended in a jar of air containing also a little water,
in such a manner that it is partly in the water and partly out of it, the
air acquires the characteristic smell of ozone, and it is found to have
gained increased chemical energy, so that it is a more powerful
oxidizing agent. For a long time the exact chemical nature of ozone
could not be determined, mainly because it was impossible to obtain
the substance in quantities sufficiently large for extensive
experimental research, but also on account of its extremely energetic
properties, which made it very troublesome to examine. These
difficulties were so great that investigators were in doubt as to
whether ozone was an element or a compound of two or more
elements; but finally it was proved that it was simply oxygen in a
condensed or concentrated state.
Apparently ozone is formed by the contraction of oxygen, so that
from three volumes of oxygen two volumes of ozone are produced.
In other words, ozone has one and a half times the density of
oxygen. Ozone has far greater oxidizing power than oxygen itself; in
fact it is probably the most powerful of all oxidizing agents, and
herein lies its great value. It acts as nature’s disinfectant or sterilizer,
and plays a very important part in keeping the air pure, by destroying
injurious organic matter. Bacteria apparently have a most decided
objection to dying; at any rate they take an extraordinary amount of
killing. Ozone is more than a match for them however, and under its
influence they have a short life and probably not a merry one.
Ozone exists naturally in the atmosphere in the open country,
and more especially at the seaside. It is produced by lightning
discharges, by silent electrical discharges in the atmosphere, by the
evaporation of water, particularly salt water, by the action of sunlight,
and also by the action of certain vegetable products upon the air.
The quantity of ozone in the air is always small, and even pure
country or sea air contains only one volume of ozone in about
700,000 volumes of air. No ozone can be detected in the air of large
towns, or over unhealthy swamps or marshes. The exhilarating
effects of country and sea air, and the depressing effects of town air,
are due to a very large extent to the presence or absence of ozone.
A great proportion of our common ailments are caused directly
or indirectly by a sort of slow poisoning, produced by the impure air
in which we live and work. It is popularly supposed that the tainting
of the air of rooms in which large numbers of people are crowded
together is due to an excessive amount of carbonic acid gas. This is
a mistake, for besides being tasteless and odourless, carbonic acid
gas is practically harmless, except in quantities far greater than ever
exist even in the worst ventilated rooms. The real source of the
tainted air is the great amount of animal matter thrown off as waste
products from the skin and lungs, and this tainting is further
intensified by the absence of motion in the air. Even in an over-
crowded room the conditions are made much more bearable if the
air is kept in motion, and in a close room ladies obtain relief by the
use of their fans. What we require, therefore, in order to maintain an
agreeable atmosphere under all conditions, is some means of
keeping the air in gentle motion, and at the same time destroying as
much as possible of the animal matter contained in it. Perhaps the
most interesting and at the same time the most scientific method of
doing this is by ozone ventilation.
In the well-known “Ozonair” system of ventilation, ozone is
generated by high-tension current. Low-tension current is taken from
the public mains or from accumulators, and raised to a very high
voltage by passing it through a step-up transformer. The secondary
terminals of the transformer are connected to a special form of
condenser, consisting of layers of fine metal gauze separated by an
insulating substance called “micanite.” The high tension between the
gauze layers produces a silent electrical discharge or glow. A small
fan worked by an electric motor draws the air over the condenser
plates, and so a certain proportion of the oxygen is ozonized, and is
driven out of the other side of the apparatus into the room. The
amount of ozone generated and the amount of air drawn over the
condenser are regulated carefully, so that the ozonized air contains
rather less than one volume of ozone in one million volumes of air,
experiment having shown that this is the most suitable strength for
breathing. Ozone diluted to this degree has a slight odour which is
very refreshing, and besides diminishing the number of organic
germs in the air, it neutralizes unpleasant smells, such as arise from
cooking or stale tobacco smoke. Ozone ventilation is now employed
successfully in many hotels, steamships, theatres and other places
of entertainment, municipal and public buildings, and factories.
By permission of] [Ozonair, Ltd.

Fig. 42.—Diagram of Ozonizing Plant, Central London Tube Electric Railway.

One of the most interesting examples of ozone ventilation is that

of the Central London tube electric railway. The installation consists
of a separate ozonizing plant at every station, except Shepherd’s
Bush, which is close to the open end of the tunnel. Fig. 42 is a
diagram of the general arrangement of one of these plants, and it
shows how the air is purified, ozonized, and sent into the tunnel. The
generating plant is seen at the top left-hand corner of the figure. Air
is drawn in as shown by the arrows, and by passing through the filter
screen F it is freed from dirt and smuts, and from most of the
injurious gases which always are present in town air. The filter
screen is kept moist by a continual flow of water from jets above it,
the waste water falling into the trough W. The ozone generator is
shown at O. Continuous current at about 500 volts, from the power
station, is passed through a rotary converter, which turns it into
alternating current at 380 volts. This current goes to the transformer
T, from which it emerges at a pressure of 5000 volts, and is supplied
to the ozone generator. From the generator the strongly ozonized air
is taken by way of the ozone pipe P, to the mixing chamber of the
large ventilating fan M, where it is mixed with the main air current
and then blown down the main air trunk. From this trunk it is
distributed to various conduits, and delivered at the air outlets
marked A. Altogether the various plants pump more than eighty
million cubic feet of ozonized air into the tunnels every working day.
In many industries pure air is very essential, especially during
certain processes. This is the case in brewing, in cold storage, and in
the manufacture and canning of food products; and in these
industries ozone is employed as an air purifier, with excellent results.
Other industries cannot be carried on without the production of very
unpleasant fumes and smells, which are a nuisance to the workers
and often also to the people living round about; and here again
ozone is used to destroy and remove the offending odours. It is
employed also in the purification of sewage and polluted water; in
bleaching delicate fabrics; in drying and seasoning timber; in
maturing tobacco, wines and spirits, and in many other processes
too numerous to mention.
 CHAPTER XXVII
ELECTRIC IGNITION

The petrol motor, which to-day is busily engaged all over the world in
driving thousands upon thousands of self-propelled vehicles or
automobiles, belongs to the important class of internal-combustion
engines. Combustion means the operation of burning, and an
internal-combustion engine is one in which the motive power is
produced by the combustion of a highly explosive mixture of gases.
In the ordinary petrol motor this mixture consists of petrol and air,
and it is made by means of a device called a “carburetter.” By
suction, a quantity of petrol is forced through a jet with a very fine
nozzle, so that it is reduced to an extremely fine spray. A certain
proportion of air is allowed to enter, and the mixture passes into the
cylinder. Here it is compressed by the rising piston so that it
becomes more and more heated, and at the right point it is ignited.
Combustion takes place with such rapidity that it takes the form of an
explosion, and the energy produced in this way drives forward the
piston, which turns the crank-shaft and so communicates motion to
the driving-wheels.
The part played by electricity in this process is confined to the
ignition of the compressed charge of petrol and air. This may be
done in two ways; by means of an accumulator and a small induction
coil, or by means of a dynamo driven by the engine. At one time the
first method was employed exclusively, but to-day it is used as a rule
only for starting the car engine, the second or magneto method
being used when the engine has started up.
In accumulator ignition the low-tension current from the
accumulator passes through an induction coil, and is thus
transformed to high-tension current. This current goes through a
sparking plug, which is fixed in the head of the cylinder. The sparking
plug contains two metal points separated by a tiny air gap of from
about 1/30 to 1/50 inch. This gap provides the only possible path for
the high-tension current, so that the latter leaps across it in the form
of a spark. The spark is arranged to take place when the piston is at
the top of its stroke, that is, when the explosive mixture is at its
maximum compression, and the heat of the spark ignites the
mixture, the resulting explosion forcing down the piston with great
power. In practice it is found better as a rule to cause the spark to
pass very slightly before the piston reaches the extreme limit of its
stroke. The reason of this is that the process of igniting and
exploding the charge occupies an appreciable, though of course
exceedingly small amount of time. Immediately on reaching the top
of its stroke the piston begins to descend again, and if the spark and
the top of the stroke coincide in time the explosion does not take
place until the piston has moved some little distance down the
cylinder, and so a certain amount of power is lost. By having the
spark a little in advance of the piston, the explosion occurs at the
instant when the piston begins to return, and so the full force of the
explosion is utilized.
In magneto ignition the current is supplied by a small dynamo.
This generates alternating current, and it is driven by the car engine.
The current is at first at low pressure, and it has to be transformed to
high-tension current in order to produce the spark. There are two
methods of effecting this transformation. One is by turning the
armature of the dynamo into a sort of induction coil, by giving it two
separate windings, primary and secondary; so that the dynamo
delivers high-tension current directly. The other method is to send
the low-tension current through one or more transformer coils, just
as in accumulator ignition. Accumulators can give current only for a
certain limited period, and they are liable consequently to run down
at inconvenient times and places. They also have the defect of
undergoing a slight leakage of current even when they are not in
use. Magneto ignition has neither of these drawbacks, and on
account of its superior reliability it has come into universal use.
 In the working of quarries and mines of various kinds, and also in
large engineering undertakings, blasting plays a prominent part.
Under all conditions blasting is a more or less dangerous business,
and it has been the cause of very many serious accidents to the men
engaged in carrying it out. Many of these accidents are due to the
carelessness resulting from long familiarity with the work, but apart
from this the danger lies principally in uncertainty in exploding the
charge. Sometimes the explosion occurs sooner than expected, so
that the men have not time to get away to a safe distance. Still more
deadly is the delayed explosion. After making the necessary
arrangements the men retire out of danger, and await the explosion.
This does not take place at the expected time, and after waiting a
little longer the men conclude that the ignition has failed, and return
to put matters right. Then the explosion takes place, and the men are
killed instantly or at least seriously injured. Although it is impossible
to avoid altogether dangers of this nature, the risk can be reduced to
the minimum by igniting the explosives by electricity.
Electrical shot firing may be carried out in different ways,
according to circumstances. The current is supplied either by a
dynamo or by a battery, and the firing is controlled from a
switchboard placed at a safe distance from the point at which the
charge is to be exploded, the connexions being made by long
insulated wires. The actual ignition is effected by a hot spark, as in
automobile ignition, or by an electric detonator or fuse. Explosives
such as dynamite cannot be fired by simple ignition, but require to be
detonated. This is effected by a detonator consisting of a small cup-
shaped tube, made of ebonite or other similar material. The wires
conveying the current project into this tube, and are connected by a
short piece of very fine wire having a high resistance. Round this
wire is packed a small quantity of gun-cotton, and beyond, in a sort
of continuation of the tube, is placed an extremely explosive
substance called “fulminate of mercury,” the whole arrangement
being surrounded by the dynamite to be fired. When all is ready the
man at the switchboard manipulates a switch, and the current
passes to the detonator and forces its way through the resistance of
the thin connecting wire. This wire becomes sufficiently hot to ignite
the gun-cotton, and so explode the fulminate of mercury. The
explosion is so violent that the dynamite charge is detonated, and
the required blasting carried out. Gunpowder and similar explosives
do not need to be detonated, and so a simple fuse is used. Electric
fuses are much the same as detonators, except that the tube
contains gunpowder instead of fulminate of mercury, this powder
being ignited through an electrically heated wire in the same way.
These electrical methods do away with the uncertainty of the slow-
burning fuses formerly employed, which never could be relied upon
with confidence.
Enormous quantities of explosives are now used in blasting on a
large scale, where many tons of hard rock have to be removed. One
of the most striking blasting feats was the blowing up of Flood Island,
better known as Hell Gate. This was a rocky islet, about 9 acres in
extent, situated in the East River, New York. It was a continual
menace to shipping, and after many fine vessels had been wrecked
upon it the authorities decided that it should be removed. The rock
was bored and drilled in all directions, the work taking more than a
year to complete; and over 126 tons of explosives were filled into the
borings. The exploding was carried out by electricity, and the mighty
force generated shattered nearly 300,000 cubic yards of solid rock.
 CHAPTER XXVIII
ELECTRO-CULTURE

About thirty years ago a Swedish scientist, Professor Lemström,

travelled extensively in the Polar regions, and he was greatly struck
by the development of the Polar vegetation. In spite of the lack of
good soil, heat, and light, he observed that this vegetation came to
maturity quicker than that of regions having much more favourable
climates, and that the colours of the flowers were remarkably fresh
and clear, and their perfumes exceptionally strong. This was a
surprising state of things, and Lemström naturally sought a clue to
the mystery. He knew that peculiar electrical conditions prevailed in
these high latitudes, as was shown by the wonderful displays of the
Aurora Borealis, and he came to the conclusion that the
development of the vegetation was due to small currents of
electricity continually passing backwards and forwards between the
atmosphere and the Earth. On his return to civilization Lemström at
once began a series of experiments to determine the effect of
electricity upon the growth of plants, and he succeeded in proving
beyond all doubt that plants grown under electrical influence
flourished more abundantly than those grown in the ordinary way.
Lemström’s experiments have been continued by other investigators,
and striking and conclusive results have been obtained.
The air surrounding the Earth is always charged to some extent
with electricity, which in fine weather is usually positive, but changes
to negative on the approach of wet weather. This electricity is always
leaking away to the earth more or less rapidly, and on its way it
passes through the tissues of the vegetation. An exceedingly slow
but constant discharge therefore is probably taking place in the
tissues of all plants. Experiments appear to indicate that the upper
part of a growing plant is negative, and the lower part positive, and at
any rate it is certain that the leaves of a plant give off negative
electricity. In dull weather this discharge is at its minimum, but under
the influence of bright sunshine it goes on with full vigour. It is not
known exactly how this discharge affects the plant, but apparently it
assists its development in some way, and there is no doubt that
when the discharge is at its maximum the flow of sap is most
vigorous. Possibly the electricity helps the plant to assimilate its
food, by making this more readily soluble.
This being so, a plant requires a regular daily supply of
uninterrupted sunshine in order to arrive at its highest possible state
of maturity. In our notoriously variable climate there are many days
with only short intermittent periods of bright sunshine, and many
other days without any sunshine at all. Now if, on these dull days, we
can perform at least a part of the work of the sunshine, and
strengthen to some extent the minute currents passing through the
tissues of a plant, the development of this plant should be
accelerated, and this is found to be the case. Under electrical
influence plants not only arrive at maturity quicker, but also in most
cases their yield is larger and of finer quality.
Lemström used a large influence machine as the source of
electricity in his experiments in electro-culture. Such machines are
very suitable for experimental work on a small scale, and much
valuable work has been done with them by Professor Priestly and
others; but they have the great drawback of being uncertain in
working. They are quite satisfactory so long as the atmosphere
remains dry, but in damp weather they are often very erratic, and
may require hours of patient labour to coax them to start. For this
reason an induction coil is more suitable for continuous work on an
extensive scale.
The most satisfactory apparatus for electro-culture is that used in
the Lodge-Newman method, designed by Sir Oliver Lodge and his
son, working in conjunction with Mr. Newman. This consists of a
large induction coil supplied with current from a dynamo driven by a
small engine, or from the public mains if available. This coil is fitted
with a spark gap, and the high-tension current goes through four or
five vacuum valve globes, the invention of Sir Oliver Lodge, which
permit the current to pass through them in one direction only. This is
necessary because, as we saw in Chapter VIII., two opposite
currents are induced in the secondary winding of the coil, one at the
make and the other at the break of the primary circuit. Although the
condenser fitted in the base of the coil suppresses to a great extent
the current induced on making the circuit, still the current from the
coil is not quite uni-directional, but it is made so by the vacuum
rectifying valves. These are arranged to pass only the positive
current, and this current is led to overhead wires out in the field to be
electrified. Lemström used wires at a height of 18 inches from the
ground, but these were very much in the way, and in the Lodge-
Newman system the main wires are carried on large porcelain
insulators fixed at the top of poles at a height of about 15 feet. This
arrangement allows carting and all other agricultural operations to be
carried on as usual. The poles are set round the field, about one to
the acre, and from these main wires finer ones are carried across the
field. These wires are placed about 30 feet apart, so that the whole
field is covered by a network of wires. The electricity supplied to the
wires is at a pressure of about 100,000 volts, and this is constantly
being discharged into the air above the plants. It then passes
through the plants, and so reaches the earth. This system may be
applied also to plants growing in greenhouses, but owing to the
confined space, and to the amount of metal about, in the shape of
hot-water pipes and wires for supporting plants such as vines and
cucumbers, it is difficult to make satisfactory arrangements to
produce the discharge.
The results obtained with this apparatus at Evesham, in
Gloucestershire, by Mr. Newman, have been most striking. With
wheat, increases of from 20 per cent. to nearly 40 per cent. have
been obtained, and the electrified wheat is of better quality than
unelectrified wheat grown at the same place, and, apart from
electrification, under exactly the same conditions. In some instances
the electrified wheat was as much as 8 inches higher than the
unelectrified wheat. Mr. Newman believes that by electrification land
yielding normally from 30 to 40 bushels of wheat per acre can be
made to yield 50 or even 60 bushels per acre. With cucumbers
under glass increases of 17 per cent. have been obtained, and in the
case of strawberries, increases of 36 per cent. with old plants, and
80 per cent. with one-year-old plants. In almost every case
electrification has produced a marked increase in the crop, and in
the few cases where there has been a decrease the crops were
ready earlier than the normal. For instance, in one experiment with
broad beans a decrease of 15 per cent. resulted, but the beans were
ready for picking five days earlier. In another case a decrease of 11½
per cent. occurred with strawberries, but the fruit was ready for
picking some days before the unelectrified fruit, and also was much
sweeter. In some of the experiments resulting in a decrease in the
yield it is probable that the electrification was overdone, so that the
plants were over-stimulated. It seems likely that the best results will
be obtained only by adjusting the intensity and the duration of the
electrification in accordance with the atmospheric conditions, and
also with the nature of the crop, for there is no doubt that plants vary
considerably in their electrical requirements. A great deal more
experiment is required however to enable this to be done with
anything like certainty.
Unlike the farmer, the market gardener has to produce one crop
after another throughout the year. To make up for the absence of
sufficient sunshine he has to resort to “forcing” in many cases, but
unfortunately this process, besides being costly, generally results in
the production of a crop of inferior quality. Evidently the work of the
market gardener would be greatly facilitated by some artificial
substitute for sunshine, to keep his plants growing properly in dull
weather. In 1880, Sir William Siemens, knowing that the composition
of the light of the electric arc was closely similar to that of sunlight,
commenced experiments with an arc lamp in a large greenhouse.
His idea was to add to the effects of the solar light by using the arc
lamp throughout the night. His first efforts were unsuccessful, and he
discovered that this was due to the use of the naked light, which
apparently contained rays too powerful for the plants. He then
passed the light through glass, which filtered out the more powerful
rays, and this arrangement was most successful, the plants
responding readily to the artificial light. More scientifically planned
experiments were carried out at the London Royal Botanic Gardens
in 1907, by Mr. B. H. Thwaite, and these showed that by using the
arc lamp for about five hours every night, a great difference between
the treated plants and other similar plants grown normally could be
produced in less than a month. Other experiments made in the
United States with the arc lamp, and also with ordinary electric
incandescent lamps, gave similar results, and it was noticed that the
improvement was specially marked with cress, lettuce, spinach, and
other plants of this nature.
In 1910, Miss E. C. Dudgeon, of Dumfries, commenced a series
of experiments with the Cooper-Hewitt mercury vapour lamp. Two
greenhouses were employed, one of which was fitted with this lamp.
Seeds of various plants were sown in small pots, one pot of each
kind being placed in each house. The temperature and other
conditions were kept as nearly alike as possible in both houses, and
in the experimental house the lamp was kept going for about five
hours every night. In every case the seeds in the experimental house
germinated several days before those in the other house, and the
resulting plants were healthy and robust. Later experiments carried
out by Miss Dudgeon with plants were equally successful.
From these experiments it appears that the electric arc, and still
more the mercury vapour lamp, are likely to prove of great value to
the market gardener. As compared with the arc lamp, the mercury
vapour lamp has the great advantage of requiring scarcely any
attention, and also it uses less current. Unlike the products of
ordinary forcing by heat, the plants grown under the influence of the
mercury vapour light are quite sturdy, so that they can be planted out
with scarcely any “hardening off.” The crop yields too are larger, and
of better quality. The wonderful effects produced by the Cooper-
Hewitt lamp are certainly not due to heat, for this lamp emits few
heat rays. The results may be due partly to longer hours worked by
the plants, but this does not explain the greater accumulation of
chlorophyll and stronger development of fibre.
Most of us are familiar with the yarn about the poultry keeper
who fitted all his nests with trap-doors, so that when a hen laid an
egg, the trap-door opened under the weight and allowed the egg to
fall through into a box lined with hay. The hen then looked round,
and finding no egg, at once set to work to lay another. This in turn
dropped, another egg was laid, and so on. It is slightly doubtful
whether the modern hen could be swindled in this bare-faced
manner, but it is certain that she can be deluded into working
overtime. The scheme is absurdly simple. Electric lamps are fitted in
the fowl-house, and at sunset the light is switched on. The
unsuspecting hens, who are just thinking about retiring for the night,
come to the conclusion that the day is not yet over, and so they
continue to lay. This is not a yarn, but solid fact, and the increase in
the egg yield obtained in this way by different poultry keepers ranges
from 10 per cent. upwards. Indeed, one poultry expert claims to have
obtained an increase of about 40 per cent.
The ease with which a uniform temperature can be maintained
by electric heating has been utilized in incubator hatching of
chickens. By means of a specially designed electric radiator the
incubator is kept at the right temperature throughout the hatching
period. When the chickens emerge from the eggs they are
transferred to another contrivance called a “brooder,” which also is
electrically heated, the heat being decreased gradually day by day
until the chicks are sturdy enough to do without it. Even at this stage
however the chickens do not always escape from the clutches of
electricity. Some rearers have adopted the electric light swindle for
the youngsters, switching on the light after the chickens have had a
fair amount of slumber, so that they start feeding again. In this way
the chickens are persuaded to consume more food in the twenty-four
hours, and the resulting gain in weight is said to be considerable.
More interesting than this scheme is the method of rearing chickens
under the influence of an electric discharge from wires supplied with
high-tension current. Comparative tests show that electrified
chickens have a smaller mortality and a much greater rate of growth
than chickens brought up in the ordinary way. It even is said that the
electrified chickens have more kindly dispositions than their
unelectrified relatives!
Possibly the high-tension discharge may turn out to be as
beneficial to animals as it has been proved to be for plants, but so far
there is little reliable evidence on this point, owing to lack of
experimenters. A test carried out in the United States with a flock of
sheep is worth mention. The flock was divided into two parts, one-
half being placed in a field under ordinary conditions, and the other
in a field having a system of overhead discharge wires, similar to
those used in the Lodge-Newman system. The final result was that
the electrified sheep produced more than twice as many lambs as
the unelectrified sheep, and also a much greater weight of wool. If
further experiments confirm this result, the British farmer will do well
to consider the advisability of electrifying his live-stock.
 CHAPTER XXIX
SOME RECENT APPLICATIONS OF
ELECTRICITY—AN ELECTRIC PIPE LOCATOR

One of the great advantages of living in a town is the abundant

supply of gas and water. These necessary substances are conveyed
to us along underground pipes, and a large town has miles upon
miles of such pipes, extending in all directions and forming a most
complex network. Gas and water companies keep a record of these
pipes, with the object of finding any pipe quickly when the necessity
arises; but in spite of such records pipes are often lost, especially
where the whole face of the neighbourhood has changed since the
pipes were laid. The finding of a lost pipe by digging is a very
troublesome process, and even when the pipe is known to be close
at hand, it is quite surprising how many attempts are frequently
necessary before it can be located, and its course traced. As may be
imagined, this is an expensive business, and often it has been found
cheaper to lay a new length of pipe than to find the old one. There is
now an electrical method by which pipe locating is made
comparatively simple, and unless it is very exceptionally deep down,
a pipe never need be abandoned on account of difficulty in tracing it.
The mechanism of an electric pipe locator is not at all
complicated, consisting only of an induction coil with battery, and a
telephone receiver connected to a coil of a large number of turns of
thin copper wire. If a certain section of a pipe is lost, and has to be
located, operations are commenced from some fitting known to be
connected with it, and from some other fitting which may or may not
be connected with the pipe, but which is believed to be so
connected. The induction coil is set working, and its secondary
terminals are connected one to each of these fittings. If the second