Part 4 — THE GIRL’S OWN QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS.

The Examiners Report on the Third and Last Twenty-four Questions.

Our useful and interesting competition is now at an end, and we give here the answers to the third and last instalment of questions. In this final march few competitors have fallen out of the ranks, and it is gratifying to have to record that the quality of the papers has steadily improved in almost every case, as, indeed, was to be expected from the painstaking and enthusiasm displayed at the start. It only remains now to say a few words about the competition as a whole, and to intimate who are the prize-winners and certificate-holders, and for that our diligent girls will not have long to wait.

49. What epidemic in Italy in the sixteenth century was cured by means of music?

To illustrate the proverb that a bad beginning makes a good ending, many failed to answer. But it was by no means out-of-the-way information that this epidemic was what is known as tarantism, which prevailed in South Italy to an extraordinary extent during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, being at its height during the sixteenth century. It was a sort of hysteria, and the different forms taken by the disease were cured by means of different airs, to which the patients were forced to dance till they often dropped down with exhaustion. Bands of players used to go through the country to provide the medicinal music, the melodies they played being spoken of as tarantellas.

50. What is the mother-tongue of Queen Victoria?

It depends, says a competitor, on what you mean by mother-tongue. If you mean mother’s tongue, it is German; but if you mean the language of her native land, it is English. This is a sensible reply. The Queen was born at Kensington Palace on May 24th, 1819, her father being the Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III. Her mother was the daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg. When she came to England shortly before the birth of her child, the Duchess could speak hardly any English, and German was thus a language with which our Queen was familiar in her earliest years. One girl suggests that we should settle this “puzzling question by saying that ‘her Majesty has two mother-tongues.’”

51. What is the best time at which to water indoor and outdoor plants?

The best answers to this question pointed out that it depends on the season of the year. In spring and autumn plants should be watered in the morning, whilst in summer the proper time is the evening; and in winter what little water is needed should be given in the middle of the day. Mrs. Loudon’s Plain Instructions in Gardening were quoted by three or four to the effect that, though some people object to watering plants when the sun is upon them, this is not at all injurious so long as the water is not too cold, and is only given to the roots. To give water over the leaves when the sun is on them makes the leaves blister and become covered with pale brown spots.

52. Is abundant hair an indication of bodily and mental strength?

Here many girls showed their good sense by giving their own personal observations, and in this way some odd facts were brought forward. The general drift of the answers is pretty well summed up in the following quotation—

“Abundant hair is neither an indication of bodily nor of mental strength, whatever it may be supposed to be. The story of Samson has given rise to the notion that hairy people are strong physically; but the fact is that the Chinese, who are the most enduring of all races, are nearly bald. And as to the supposition that long and thick hair is a sign or token of intellectuality, all antiquity, all madhouses, and all common observation are against it. The easily-wheedled Esau was hairy; the mighty Cæsar was bald.”

One girl, in a spirit of fun, says, “If the brain is over-worked, the hair comes out,” and draws very neatly two pictures of herself, one with a fine head of hair as she was “before answering these questions” and the other with the scantiest of scanty locks showing how she looked “after they had been all replied to.”

53. How many ways can be named of profitably using broken bread?

“Some notable housewives,” says Miss Florence Stackpoole, “make the ignominious confession that, in the manner of using up broken bread, they are, in schoolboy slang, fairly ‘stumped.’ How to get rid of it they do not know.” They may now be recommended to consult our numerous band of competitors, who in their replies to this question showed much practical housekeeping sense. “About forty-five ways,” says one girl, and we are inclined to think that we could nearly make up that number by taking all the different ways suggested, beginning with the various uses to which broken bread can be put in cookery and ending with its employment in cleaning pictures, wall-papers, and felt hats; feeding the birds, “who are very glad of it, especially in cold weather”; trapping birds, “for which, no doubt, they are not so thankful”; furnishing bait for fishing, and feeding pigs, chickens and cats.

54. Was public money ever raised in England by encouraging the spirit of gambling?

The right answer to this question is that public money was at one time raised in this country by means of lotteries. The first public lottery in England, so far as can be ascertained, was drawn in 1569, and had for its object the repair of harbours and other useful public works. “From that date in the reign of Queen Elizabeth,” says Dr. Robert Chambers, “down to 1826 (except for a short time following upon an Act of Queen Anne), lotteries continued to be adopted by the English Government as a source of revenue. It seems strange that so glaringly immoral a project should have been kept up with such a sanction so long.” A good many girls did not answer this question at all, and several, without referring to lotteries, ran off into particulars regarding the famous South Sea Bubble.

55. Who was the religious poet so beloved by the parish of which he was rector, that many of his parishioners would stop their ploughs when his bell rang for prayer, that they might offer their devotions to God with him?

This beautiful example of the influence that may be exerted by a godly pastor appeared to be well known. The poet was the saintly George Herbert, rector of Bemerton, in Wiltshire, who was born in 1593 and died in 1632. And when he died, says Izaak Walton, who wrote his Life, “he died like a saint, unspotted of the world, full of humility, and all the examples of a virtuous life.”

56. How did the leek come to be the emblem of Wales?

As was to be expected, for the answer is not to be looked for in well-authenticated history, a good many different explanations were given. According to some this national device of Wales, commonly worn by Welshmen on St. David’s Day, March 1st, was selected for its high position because it possesses the old Cymric colours, green and white. Others had it that it was in memory of a great victory over the Saxons, when the Welshmen, obeying the command of St. David, put leeks into their hats, to distinguish between themselves and their foes. A good many said that it was dated from the battle of Crecy, and backed up their opinion by quoting Shakespeare. One girl we noticed said it was because the Welsh think the leek a lucky plant, and grow it on their cottage roofs to bring good fortune. And a few unromantic competitors said it was all on account of the prominent place occupied by the leek in Welsh cookery.

57. What famous outlaw has a conspicuous place in ballad literature?

Many outlaws have a place in ballad literature, but one stands head and shoulders above all the rest, and that is Robin Hood. The numerous and spirited ballads of which he and his companions, such as Maid Marian, Friar Tuck and Little John, are the leading characters, are favourite reading with all who love adventure and romance. Towards the close of the Middle Ages, says a competitor, quoting a well-known authority, Robin Hood was the people’s ideal as Arthur was that of the upper classes. He was the ideal yeoman as Arthur was the ideal knight.

58. Where can a married couple, after a twelvemonth of matrimony, lay claim to a flitch of bacon after proving that, during the whole time, they have never had a quarrel and never regretted the marriage?

This whimsical custom, about which nearly everybody seemed to know, is connected with the priory of Dunmow in Essex, and dates as far back as the reign of King John. The earliest instances of the awarding of the flitch have not been recorded: the first we have particulars of is dated 1445. After 1763, the custom fell into the background, but a revival of it was effected in 1855, by Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, the novelist, and since then several have applied for and gained this strange matrimonial prize.

59. Has anyone ever tried to count the stars?

“Look now towards Heaven,” we read in the Scriptures, “and tell the stars if thou be able to number them.” Many observers, however, including the two Herschels, have made the attempt. The stars visible to the naked eye are only a fraction of the whole, but according to the estimate of the distinguished German astronomer, Argeland, the number seen by the unaided vision in the latitude of Berlin is 3,256, and for the whole heavens may be put at about 5,000. Another German astronomer makes out the naked-eye stars in the whole heavens to be about 6,800. When the telescope is introduced the number is enormously increased. The larger the telescope the more stars we see. The number has been run up by authorities worthy of respect to as high as twenty million stars, and more, within the grasp of an 18-inch reflector! Some girls, in answering this question, mentioned that there was an International Photographic Survey of the Heavens now going on which is sure to throw light on this interesting problem.

60. What English Earl once got a box on the ear from a great Queen?

All competitors were right who said that the receiver of this royal box was the Earl of Essex, and the giver Queen Elizabeth. It was on an occasion when the two had begun to dispute on the subject of an assistant in the affairs of Ireland, to which the earl was going as Lord Deputy. The dispute ended in the earl’s receiving from her majesty a box on the ear, with, we are told, the encouraging addition of “Go and be hanged!” The fall of Essex is generally dated from this circumstance, and it is thought that he never forgave it.

61. Is what is known as the poisonous upas tree of Java a fact or a hoax?

It was right to say that it is partly the one and partly the other; about an ounce of fact, however, to a pound of hoax. The name upas—a Javanese word meaning poison—is given by the Malays and people of Western Java to the poison obtained from the gum of a tree that used to be employed in Celebes to envenom the bamboo shafts of the natives.

The famous description of the upas tree, with its effluvia killing all things near it, is a pure fiction, the invention of George Stevens, the Shakespearean commentator, who seems to have had a special turn for mystifying and befooling the public. According to him the tree destroyed all animal life within a radius of fifteen miles or more, and when the poison was wanted it was fetched by condemned criminals, of whom scarcely two out of twenty ever returned.

Several girls mentioned that the upas tree is to be met with in botanic gardens in this country and, says one, “not doing a halfpennyworth of harm to anybody.”

62. What is the best way of treating a fainting fit?

Almost all seemed to have an intelligent idea of what to do. They had grasped the fact that the direct cause of fainting is diminished circulation of blood through the brain, and that, therefore, in trying to restore a person who has fainted, the first thing to be done is to alter that condition. The patient, they said, should be laid down quite flat, “so that the feebly-acting heart may not have to propel the blood upward, but horizontally”; tight clothing should then be loosened, cool fresh air admitted, cold water sprinkled down the face, volatile salts, or other stimulant vapours, held at intervals to the nostrils; and a little cold water, either by itself or having in it a teaspoonful or two of sal volatile, or the same quantity of spirits, being given as soon as the patient is able to swallow.

63. What public punishment was once in use in England for scolding women?

Women who made free use of their tongues were punished in an original way in old England. They were submitted to the correction of the ducking stool, a chair at the end of a plank which moved up and down over a river or pond—it was a sort of see-saw arrangement. The scold was fastened in the chair, the other end of the plank was lifted up, and down she went into the water, the number of immersions being in proportion to the vigour of her fiery tongue. It was an old institution: we find it mentioned in the Doomsday Survey. In the seventeenth century, the ducking stool was superseded, to a certain extent, by what was known as the branks. This was a scold’s bridle, the chief part of which entered the mouth and pressed upon the tongue, thus forming an effectual gag. “Ducking stools and branks, however,” one writer sadly remarks, “with all their terrors, seem to have been insufficient to frighten the shrews of former days out of their bad propensities.”

64. What was the origin of the phrase, “The wise fools of Gotham?”

A good number of competitors had been unable to discover how these Nottinghamshire worthies obtained their unenviable notoriety. According to tradition, King John once intended to pass through Gotham on his way to Nottingham, but the inhabitants prevented him, for some reason or other best known to themselves. The king, in a rage, sent some of his servants to inquire why they had been so uncivil, and the Gothamites, hearing of their approach, thought of an expedient to turn away the monarch’s displeasure—they pretended more stupidity than really belonged to them. When the messengers arrived they found some of the inhabitants endeavouring to drown an eel in a pool of water; some were employed in dragging carts into a large barn to shade the wood from the sun, and lifting horses into lofts to eat hay; and others were engaged in building a hedge round a cuckoo which had perched in a bush. In short they were all employed in some ridiculous task or other, which convinced the king’s servants that Gotham was a village of fools—a reputation it has ever since maintained. Such is the story, but its truth is another matter. In one paper we find a good word for Gotham quoted from Fuller, to the effect that “Gotham doth breed as wise people as any which causelessly laugh at their simplicity.”

65. Is length of life greater now than it used to be?

The best answer to this question will be to quote some interesting statistics given by Mr. Holt Schooling, who takes for the basis of his statements the three official English life-tables (for 1838-1854, 1871-1880, and 1881-1890). These tables show an increase in the second period over the first of 1.44 years expectation of life at birth to every male, and 2.77 to every female; and in the third period over the first of 3.75 to every male, and 5.33 to every female. In other words, 3¾ years of life have been added on the average to every male child, and 5¹⁄₃ years to every female child. Thus the children born in any one year in England and Wales will in the mass live more than four million years longer than at the beginning of the period dealt with in these tables.

Girls who puzzled over such old examples as the Countess of Desmond, who is said to have died at 145, Thomas Parr, credited with 152, and Henry Jenkins, who is reported to have died at 169, should take note that the ages of these persons are generally allowed to have been much exaggerated, and that, even if the figures were authentic, it does not do, from a few isolated instances, to infer a general conclusion.

66. Of what literary work has it been said that it is “perhaps the only book about which the educated minority has come over to the opinion of the common people?”

The book was the Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan, and he who said it was Lord Macaulay. The general rule, Lord Macaulay points out, is that when the educated minority and the common people differ about the merit of a book, the opinion of the educated minority finally prevails. The Pilgrim’s Progress, of which the numerous early editions were evidently intended for the cottage and the servants’ hall, the paper, the printing, and the plates being all of the meanest description, furnishes a notable exception. A wonderful book! “One of the few books,” says Coleridge, “which may be read repeatedly at different times, and each time with a new and a different pleasure.”

67. Who was the young Fellow of Oxford who, during the latter half of last century, eloped with a banker’s daughter, and came in the end to be Lord Chancellor of England?

“When on a visit to Newcastle,” writes a competitor, “I was taken to see the window through which Bessy Surtees came when on the 18th of November, 1772, she eloped with Jack Scott, who afterwards became Lord Eldon. He was the Lord Chancellor referred to in the question.” Yes, that is so. By the aid of a ladder and an old friend, “this adventurous young man,” as one girl calls him, carried off the lady from her father’s house, and away they went across the Border to Blackshiels in Scotland, where they were married. It proved a happy and fortunate union, but the example, we need hardly say, is not recommended for general imitation.

68. What plant was introduced early in the seventeenth century into this country as an ornamental plant, but is now a favourite vegetable?

We had in view the scarlet-runner bean, which is a native of South America, and was introduced into England in 1633, when “it was at first only cultivated in the flower-garden as an ornamental plant, and it is treated as such by all the early writers on flowers.” Several other plants were named by competitors, and in some cases with a considerable show of reason, but the one we have named is perhaps the most striking example.

69. Who was the father of English cathedral music?

Amongst the musicians named by girls as bearing this honourable title were St. Ambrose, Palestrina, Orlando Gibbons, Henry Purcell, Handel, Haydn and Bach. These were given in error. He who is justly called “the father of English cathedral music” is Thomas Tallis, or Tallys, as he himself spelt his name, who was born about 1515 and died about 1585. “His genius,” says Mr. W. S. Rockstro, “has left an indelible impression upon the English school, which owes more to him than to any other composer of the sixteenth century, and in the history of which his name plays a very important part indeed.”

70. What may justly claim to be the greatest work of imagination in the world?

This was a question giving an opportunity for considerable difference of opinion. It drew forth many intelligent answers, and gave a good deal of insight into individual taste. We give here the seven principal works named by way of answer, placing them in the order of frequency:—The Arabian Night’s Entertainments, Don Quixote by Cervantes, Gulliver’s Travels by Dean Swift, the Divine Comedy of Dante, Spencer’s Faerie Queen, The Pilgrim’s Progress of John Bunyan, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.

71. What Scottish sovereign, looking out of the window of the prison in which he was once confined, caught sight, for the first time, of the lady whom he afterwards married?

The captive monarch was James I. of Scotland. He had fallen into the hands of the English when, a youth fourteen years old, he was on his way by sea to France, and remained a prisoner for about eighteen years. One day he happened to be looking out of his window in the great tower of Windsor Castle, when Lady Jane Beaufort, the daughter of the Earl of Somerset, was walking in the garden below. The charms of her person, and the gentleness of her character won his heart, and they were married with great splendour shortly before James set out for the north to take up his crown. Lady Jane happened to be a cousin-german to Henry IV. of England, “and thus,” remarks John Hill Burton, the historian of Scotland, “romance found the very match which policy would have dictated.”

72. How many different kinds of clouds may be seen floating in the sky?

Few failed in this question, the answers going as a rule to show that an observer of cloudland, about a hundred years ago, classified the clouds, and proposed a series of names for them, since very generally accepted. He divided them into seven kinds; three being simple, and four intermediate or compound. The three simple forms are the Cirrus, the Cumulus, and the Stratus. The intermediate or compound forms derived from these three are the Cirro-cumulus, the Cirro-stratus, the Cumulo-stratus, and the Cumulo-cirro-stratus, the last named most often being called the Nimbus.