Part 11 (1/2)
In addition to these representations, Peron was accorded an interview with the Minister of Marine, Decres, when, supported by Fleurieu and other members of the Inst.i.tute, he explained what the expedition had done, and exhibited specimens of his collections and of Lesueur's drawings. Champagny, the Minister of the Interior, was also induced to listen to the eloquent pleading of the naturalist. As a result, the Government resolved to publish; and in 1807 appeared the first volume of the text, together with a thin folio atlas containing a number of beautiful drawings and two charts. The books were issued under the superscription, ”par ordre de S.M. L'Empereur et Roi.” On Sunday, January 12, 1808--”apres la messe”--Peron, who was accompanied by Lesueur, one of the artists, had the honour of being admitted to the presence of the Emperor, and presented him with a copy of the work.* (* Moniteur, January 13, 1808.) The naturalist became somewhat of a favourite with the Empress Josephine, who on several occasions sent a carriage to his lodgings to take him to Malmaison; and she treated him ”as a good mother would have treated a dear son.”* (* Girard, F. Peron page 50.) He gave to her a pair of black swans from Australia, and the Empress generously discharged debts which he had incurred in acquiring part of his collection.
Peron died of a throat disease on December 14, 1810, just seventeen days after the liberated Flinders reached England. He was buried at Cerilly, where a monument, designed by Lesueur, marks his grave. At the time of his death he had not quite finished writing the second volume of the Voyage de Decouvertes. The conclusion of the work was therefore entrusted to Louis de Freycinet, who had already been commissioned to produce the atlas of charts.
Of Peron's personal character, and of the value of his scientific work, nothing but high praise can be written. He was but a young man when he died. Had he lived, we cannot doubt that he would have filled an important place among French men of science, for his diligence was coupled with insight, and his love of research was as deep as his apt.i.tude for it was keen. A pleasant picture of the man was penned by Kerandren, who had been one of the surgeons on the expedition to Australia. ”Peron,” he said* (* Moniteur, January 24, 1811. The Moniteur of June 7, 1812, also contained a eulogy on Peron delivered before the Societe Medicale d'emulation de Paris, by A.J.B. Louis.), ”carried upon his face the expression of kindliness and sensibility. The fervour of his mind, the vivacity of his character, were tempered by the extreme goodness of his heart. He made himself useful to most of those who were the companions of his voyage. There was joined to his confidence in his own ability, a great modesty. He was so natural--I would even say so candid--that it was impossible to resist the charm of his manners and his conversation.”
Apart from his authors.h.i.+p of the first and part of the second volume of the Voyage de Decouvertes, Peron wrote a number of short ”memoires sur divers sujets,” suggested to his mind by observations made during the voyage. One of the most valuable of these, from a scientific point of view, was an essay upon the causes of phosph.o.r.escence in the sea, frequently observed in tropical and subtropical regions, but occasionally in European waters.*
(* Crabbe described it admirably in The Borough (9 103):
”And now your view upon the ocean turn, And there the splendour of the waves discern; Cast but a stone, or strike them with an oar, And you shall flames within the deep explore; Or scoop the stream phosphoric as you stand, And the cold flames shall flash along your hand; When, lost in wonder, you shall walk and gaze On weeds that sparkle and on waves that blaze.)
Although Peron was not the first naturalist to explain that this aspect of floating fire given to the waves was due to the presence of mult.i.tudes of living organisms, he was the first naturalist to describe their structure and functional processes.* (* Phipson on Phosph.o.r.escence (1862) page 113, mentions that as early as 1749 and 1750, Vianetti and Grixellini, two Venetians, discovered in the waters of the Adriatic quant.i.ties of luminous animalculae; and the true cause of the phenomena must have occurred to many of those who witnessed it, though groundless and absurd theories were current. Of the creature discovered and described by Peron, Phipson says that it is ”one of the most curious of animals. It belongs to the tribe of Tunicata. Each individual resembles a minute cylinder of glowing phosphorus. Sometimes they are seen adhering together in such prodigious numbers that the ocean appears as if covered with an enormous ma.s.s of s.h.i.+ning phosphorus or molten lava.” Professor Moseley investigated the Pyrosoma while with the Challenger expedition.
He wrote: ”A giant Pyrosoma was caught by us in the deep-sea trawl. It was like a great sac, with its walls of jelly about an inch in thickness.
It was four feet long and ten inches in diameter. When a Pyrosoma is stimulated by having its surface touched, the phosph.o.r.escent light breaks out just at the spot stimulated, and then spreads over the surface of the colony to the surrounding animals. I wrote my name with my finger on the surface of the giant Pyrosoma as it lay on deck, and my name came out in a few seconds in letters of fire.” The author owes this last reference to an excellent paper on ”Phosph.o.r.escence in Plants and Animals,” by Miss Freda Bage, M.Sc., printed in the Victorian Naturalist, 21 page 100 November 1904.) His treatise on the Pyrosoma atlantic.u.m is an extremely interesting example of his scientific work. The creature is weighed and measured; its appearance is described; then it is carefully taken to pieces and its structure and internal organisation are minutely detailed; next there is an account of its functions, and an explanation of how the phosph.o.r.escent appearance is produced; and finally its mode of life, nutrition, and system of generation are dealt with. Peron collects a number of specimens, places them in a vessel filled with sea-water, and observes how, at rhythmic intervals, the creature alternately contracts and dilates in a fas.h.i.+on a.n.a.logous to the art of breathing among more highly organised animals; and he notices that the phosph.o.r.escence appears and disappears with these movements, being most fully displayed when the creature's body is most contracted, and disappearing during the moments of most complete expansion. Here we have careful examination and observation, study of the organism in its native habitat, anatomical dissection, and experiment--a piece of biological work exceedingly well done. Cuvier would have read the piece with satisfaction in his pupil.
Other Memoires by Peron, on the temperature of the sea on the surface and at measured depths; on the zoology of the Austral regions; on dysentery in hot countries and the medicinal use of the betel-nut; on sea animals, such as seals; and on the art of maintaining live animals in zoological collections, were valuable; and the subjects on which he wrote are mentioned as indicating the range of his scientific interests. One of his pieces of work which, naturally, aroused much interest in Europe, was an extremely curious investigation relative to the physiological peculiarities of females of the Bushman tribes in South Africa, where Peron made an inland journey for the purpose.* (* There is a technical note on this delicate subject in Girard's F. Peron, Naturaliste, Voyageur aux Terres Australes (Paris, 1857); a book which also gives a good summary of Peron's scientific work.)
When he died, Peron had not had time to apply himself adequately to the enormous ma.s.s of material that he had collected. His fertile and curious mind, we cannot doubt, would have enriched the scientific literature of France with many other monographs. The deaths at sea of Bernier and Deleuze also deprived the records of the expedition of contributions which they would have made on their special lines of research.
Collections of specimens and piles of memoranda, uninformed by the intelligence of those to whom their meaning is most apparent, are a barren result.
Peron's biological work was done in accordance with the spirit and principles of Cuvier, who stood at the head of European savants in his own field. ”Trained for four years in Cuvier's school,” wrote the naturalist, ”I had for guide not only his method and his principles, but ma.n.u.script instructions that he had had the goodness to write for me on my departure from Europe.” Cuvier insisted on the importance of structure and function; ”to name well you must know well.” The part played by the creature in its own share of the world, its nervous organisation, its life as involved in its form, were essentials upon which he laid stress in his teaching; and he imparted to those who came under his influence a breadth of view, a feeling for the unity of nature, that is quite modern, and has governed all the greatest of his successors. ”Not only is each being an organism, the whole universe is one, but many million times more complicated; and that which the anatomist does for a single animal--for the microcosm--the naturalist is to do for the macrocosm, for the universal animal, for the play of this immense aggregation of partial organisms.” Detailed research, coupled with an outlook on the whole realm of nature--that was the essential principle of Cuvier's science; and it is because we can recognise in Peron a man who had profitably sat at the feet of the great master, that his death before he had applied his zeal to the material collected with so much labour is the more deeply to be regretted.
The few paragraphs in which Peron expressed his views regarding the modification of species may be quoted. It has to be remembered that they were written in the early years of the nineteenth century, when ideas on this subject were in a state of uncertainty rather than of transition, and more than half a century before Darwin gave an entirely new direction to thought by publis.h.i.+ng his great hypothesis. Cuvier at this time believed in the fixity of species--constancy in the type with modification in the form of individuals; but his opinions underwent some amount of change in the latter part of his career. The point argued with such gravity, and the conclusion which Peron stresses with the impressiveness of italics, are not such as a naturalist nowadays would think it worth while to elaborate, namely, that organisms having a general structural similarity are modified by climate and environment. It would not require a voyage to another hemisphere to convince a schoolboy of that truth nowadays. But the paragraphs have a certain historical value, for they put what was evidently an important idea to an accomplished naturalist a century ago. They present us, in that aspect, with an interesting bit of pre-Darwinian generalisation.
”Before natural history had acquired a strict and appropriate language of its own,” wrote Peron,* (* Voyage de Decouvertes, 1824 edition 3 243.) ”when its methods were defective and incomplete, travellers and naturalists confused under one name, in imitation of each other, so to speak, animals which were essentially different. There is no cla.s.s of the animal kingdom which, in the actual state of things, does not include several orbicular species; that is to say, several species which are in some degree common to all parts of the globe, however they may be modified by geographical and climatic conditions. Other species, although confined to certain lat.i.tudes, are, however, usually regarded as common to all climates, and to all seas comprised within these lat.i.tudes. The existence of these last animals is regarded as being independent of lat.i.tude. To confine ourselves to marine species, one sees it constantly repeated in books of the most estimable character, that the great whale (Balaena mysticetus, Linn.) is found equally amidst the frozen waters of Spitzbergen and in the Antarctic seas; that the sharks and seals of various kinds are found in equally innumerable tribes in seas the farthest apart in the two hemispheres; that the turtle and the tortoise inhabit indifferently the Atlantic, the Indian, and the great equinoctial oceans.
”Were one to consult only reason and a.n.a.logy, such a.s.sertions would appear to be doubtful, as a matter of experience they are found to be absolutely false. Let any one glance at the evidence upon which these pretended ident.i.ties rest; one will then see that they exist only in the names, and that there is not a single WELL-KNOWN animal belonging to the northern hemisphere, which is not specifically different from all other animals EQUALLY WELL KNOWN in the opposite hemisphere. I have taken the trouble to make that difficult comparison in the case of the cetacea, the seals, etc.; I have examined many histories of voyages; I have gathered together all the descriptions of animals; and I have recognised important differences between the most similar of these supposedly identical species.
”n.o.body, I dare say, has collected more animals than I have done in the southern hemisphere. I have observed and described them in their own habitat. I have brought several thousands of kinds to Europe; they are deposited in the Natural History Museum at Paris. Let any one compare these numerous animals with those of our hemisphere, and the problem will soon be resolved, not only in regard to the more perfectly organised species, but even as to those which are simpler in structure, and which, in that regard, it would appear, should show less variety in nature...In all that mult.i.tude of animals from the southern hemisphere, one will observe that there is not one which can be precisely matched in northern seas; and one will be forced to conclude from such a reflective examination--such an elaborate and prolonged comparison--as I have been forced to do myself, THAT THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SPECIES OF WELL-KNOWN ANIMALS WHICH, TRULY COSMOPOLITE, IS INDISTINGUISHABLY COMMON TO ALL PARTS OF THE GLOBE.
”More than that--and it is in this respect above all that the inexhaustible variety of nature s.h.i.+nes forth--however imperfect each of these animals may be, each has received its own distinct features. It is to certain localities that they are fixed; it is there that they are found to be most numerous, largest in size and most beautiful; and to the extent that they are found most distant from the appropriate place, the individuals degenerate and the species becomes gradually extinguished.”
On the geographical side the series of causes described in preceding pages prevented the achievement of that measure of success which the French Government and the Inst.i.tute had a right to expect. While Baudin dallied, Flinders s.n.a.t.c.hed the crown of accomplishment by his own diligent and intelligent application to the work entrusted to him in the proper field of activity. The French filled in the map of eastern Tasmania, and contributed details to the knowledge of the north-west coast of Australia; but what they did const.i.tutes a poor set-off against what they failed to do. The chief feature of interest, in an estimation of the work done, is the publication of the first map of Australia which represented the whole outline of the continent--saving defects--with any approach to completeness. The Carte Generale of 1807 showed the world for the first time what the form of Australia really was, with its south coasts fairly delimited, and the island of Tasmania set in its proper position in relation to them. But the circ.u.mstances in which this result was effected were not such as secured any honour to the expedition, and must, when the facts became known, have been deeply deplored by instructed French people. Flinders was working at his own complete map of Australia in his miserable prison at Mauritius while his splendidly won credit was being filched from him; and it was merely the misfortune that placed him in the power of General Decaen that debarred him from issuing what should have been the first finished outline of the vast island which he had been the earliest to circ.u.mnavigate. Historically the Carte Generale is interesting, but no honour attaches to it.
Yet full praise must be given to Louis de Freycinet for the charts issued by him. He drew them largely from material prepared by others, and much of that material, as we have seen, was rough and poor. As a piece of artistic workmans.h.i.+p, the folio of charts issued by Freycinet in 1812 was a fine performance, and fairly earned for him the command of the expedition entrusted to him by the Government of Louis XVIII. Before the volume was published by the order of Napoleon, it was submitted by the Minister of Marine to Vice-Admiral Rosily, Director-General du Depot de la Marine. That officer's report* (* Printed in the Moniteur, January 15, 1813.) gave an account of the work which Freycinet had done not only in the drawing but in regard to the actual engraving of the charts. ”M.
Freycinet,” said the Vice-Admiral, ”who has done the princ.i.p.al part of this work, was more capable than any one else known to us of accomplis.h.i.+ng such a result. It is to him that we owe the preparation of this fine atlas. He has neglected no means of giving to it the last degree of perfection. He has himself made the drawings of the charts and plans, and then he has reproduced them upon the copper-plates, and has engraved the scales of lat.i.tude and longitude by a new method perfected by himself, and which a.s.sures the exact.i.tude of his work. The beauty of the engravings, and the execution of the work in general, leave nothing to be desired, and testify to the care that he has devoted to make the collection of charts one of the most useful of works in promoting the progress of hydrography.”
The praise thus officially bestowed upon Freycinet's work will be felt to be deserved by any one who studies the atlas of 1812; but admiration of the workmans.h.i.+p will not commit the careful student to an equally cordial opinion concerning the completeness and accuracy of the charts as representations of the coasts traversed by the expedition. The south coast--the most important part, since here the field was entirely fresh--was very faulty in outline, and in other parts where Baudin's vessels had opportunities for doing complete work, important features were missed. And at the back of it all there looms the shadow of Matthew Flinders, the merit of whose own work s.h.i.+nes out all the brighter for the contrast.* (* A remarkable example of the way to avoid difficult questions by ignoring them is afforded by Girard's book on Peron, which, throughout its 278 pages, contains no reference whatever to Flinders. It devotes forty pages to the voyage, but absolutely suppresses all reference to the Encounter Bay incident, the imprisonment of Flinders, and other questions concerning him. Yet Girard's book was ”couronne par la Societe d'emulation de d'Allier.” There should have been some ”rosemary, that's for remembrance,” in the crown.)
CHAPTER 12. CONCLUSIONS AND CONSEQUENCES.
Further consideration of Napoleon's purposes.
What Australia owes to British sea power.
Influence of the Napoleonic wars.
Fresh points relative to Napoleon's designs.
Absence of evidence.
Consequences of suspicions of French intentions.
Promotion of settlement in Tasmania.
Tardy occupation of Port Phillip.
The Swan River Settlement.