IF ALL MEN WERE ANGELS, NO CONSTITUTION WOULD BE NECESSARY

James Madison

JAMES Madison, Washington's floor manager at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia, stated the main necessity for holding the Convention at all arose from selfish and untrustworthy human nature. The assembly probably understood exactly who he had in mind, although that is a little unfair to residents of Virginia. He really meant everybody. In the theology of the time, mankind was stained with original sin. Particularly in France, many 18th century romanticists responded to the Enlightenment by defiantly declaring human nature is born pure in heart. In their view, current evils grow from the pollution of civilization, without which it might be possible to have no government at all. At its root, such romanticism was an outcry against progress and civilization, blaming the world's troubles on the Industrial Revolution, so to speak. From Madison's skeptical viewpoint, the most awkward feature of the Romantic Period was its adoption by his Francophile friend and neighbor, Thomas Jefferson, the current American ambassador to France. Madison recognized that Jefferson and Patrick Henry were prepared to assail any attempt to add the slightest power to a central government, particularly if it weakened the power of Virginia. As indeed they promptly came forward to do and nearly succeeded.

Treaty of Paris

After fighting an eight-year war for freedom, American belief was wide-spread that it was time to draw back from such anarchy. But there was widespread suspicion in every other direction, too. England seemed to concede, not defeat but only current military overstretch, possibly displaying reluctance to see its former colonies with full sovereignty. George III might wait for America to weaken itself and then try to take them back. Britain almost couldn't do anything right; it was also possibly up to no good when the Treaty of Paris astonishingly conceded land to the Mississippi instead of stopping at the Appalachians. Even our ally France nursed regrets for its somewhat older concessions after the French and Indian War. If even the two mightiest nations of Europe could not maintain order in the vast North American wilderness, perhaps they felt the inexperienced colonies would soon collapse from the effort. Further intra-European wars seemed likely, and could soon spread from Europe to the Western hemisphere. The guillotine was bad enough, Bonaparte would be worse. Our governance as a league of states was in fact, only a league of armies. The Articles of Confederation would not quell inter-state rivalries in peacetime, as only four years (1783-87) experience after the Treaty of Paris were clearly foreshadowing. It was time we listened to Benjamin Franklin, who had been arguing since the Albany Conference of 1745 for unification of the colonies, and to Robert Morris who had been arguing for a written constitution since 1776, a bicameral legislature since 1781, government by professional departments instead of congressional committees, and the ability to levy national taxes -- since at least 1778. Professor Witherspoon of Princeton had provided some ideas about how to make these proposals self-enforcing, Washington was firmly behind a Republican system and opposed to a monarchy. On the other hand, everyone knew that under the Articles of Confederation the thirteen States had often refused to pay their share, abused their ability to deal independently with foreigners, dealt unfairly with their neighbors, and capriciously mistreated their own citizens. It was time to act boldly. With a blue-ribbon convention of national heroes behind these simple ideas, surely it would be possible to convince the sovereign state legislatures to dethrone themselves.

John Marshall

Two men quietly applied even deeper thinking than that; Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, and John Marshall of Virginia. Both of them had served in state legislatures, both were dismayed by the experience. Franklin also had a long period of close-up observation of the British Parliament, suffering personal abuse there, and had reason to reflect on the earlier abuses by that Parliament under Cromwell during the English Civil War. Certain bad tendencies seemed universal in legislative bodies. Although John Marshall was not a member of the Virginia Constitutional delegation in 1787, he was active in the politics of the group it represented back home. Both Marshall and Franklin had reason to be uneasy about misbehavior in representative bodies, whether called legislatures, congresses, or parliaments. When people said states misbehaved under the Confederation arrangement, they really meant legislatures misbehaved. Franklin did what he could within the Convention to curb this observed behavior by enumerating limited powers and endorsing power balanced against power. When he had nudged it as far as he could, he wearily agreed to give the product a try. Franklin did not trust Utopias, but he had lived among Quakers for years, observing one Utopian society which seemed to endure without resorting to tyranny.

The Constitutional provisions in Article I, Section X became the heart of what the 1787 Convention wanted to change about the relationship of the national and state governments.

States are forbidden to ...

"emit bills of credit, make anything but gold or silver a legal tender in payment of debts, pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts."

1787 Convention

This brief clause is almost a presentment of what state legislatures were doing, which serious patriots regarded as wholly unacceptable. Failure of states to abide by the terms of international treaties must be included in such a summary, although the new Constitution went beyond the powers of states by locating treaties beyond the power of even Congress to change, once ratified. Some observers in fact feel that within the First Article clause, protecting the sanctity of contracts was really the nut of the matter. In one way or another, most states seemed to resort to paying their debts with inflation, somehow failing to recognize that borrowing never pays debts, it only postpones them. The great bulk of this new nation's business was to be conducted as voluntary agreements between two contracting parties. The State -- and the states -- were to stay out of the private sector, except as referee, to see that both sides kept their agreements. As a footnote, the matter of government intervention in private affairs was to rise again in the behavior of the Executive branch in the 1937 Court Packing uproar, and in the 2009 health insurance legislation. Some critics, therefore, have discomfort that the heaviest Constitutional weight was placed by the Founding Fathers on protecting private property. Are not other issues more important, they ask, like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? The Founders, of course, we're here not ranking benevolences by value; they were stating principal urgencies for convening the meeting. In a strange unintended way, they here stumbled on the right to property as the foundation for all other rights. But John Marshall understood it was true and was to spend thirty years hammering it into place. People broke individual promises by defaulting on debts; they simply did the same as governments, using inflation.

To Germantown: A Short Appreciation

A breezy summary of European geopolitics, including many rough inaccuracies, will probably irritate residents of that region but may help Americans understand the history and composition of the Germantown area of Philadelphia.

The Western World was long defined as a province of Rome, and all roads led there. At the top of the Italian boot can be found the Swiss Alps, forcing Romans to go around through what is now Provence in France. An old jingle defines the river system of Switzerland as " The Rhine, the Rhone, Danube, and Poa rise in the Alps, and away they go!"

So northward-bound Romans, Caesar and all, went West around the Alps up to the Rhone Valley, and eventually came upon the Rhine River flowing north to Rotterdam, just across the English channel from London, or Londinium as they called it. The crossover between the Rhone and the Rhine was at Strassbourg where the European Parliament now meets. For two thousand years, the main highway from Rome to London was the Rhine River.

Essentially, everybody to the West of the Rhine was Roman Catholic, and everybody to the East of the river was Protestant. At least, that was true in the Sixteenth Century. The head of the river in Switzerland was Calvinist Protestant, and the mouth of the river in Holland was Reform Protestant. Along the main part of the river, Alsace, Lorraine, Palatine, Luxembourg, divided East and West but for centuries pieces of land shifted control back and forth. The reformation movement started by Martin Luther ended up as the Thirty Years War, from which the region took another hundred years to recover, and more hundreds of years to forget and forgive. You might call it a religious Mason-Dixon line, remembering of course that the American Civil War was mostly fought on the Potomac, not the Mason Dixon.

Professional soldiers teach Military students that there is no war worse than a religious war. Lots of people, probably thousands, were burned at the stake during the religious wars along the Rhineland. Rape and pillage were common Partee. And so, if you lived in a little farming village in this region, and some Englishman named William Penn came around with an offer to emigrate to his peaceful kingdom in America, it sounded wonderful. Religious toleration was an important part of the attractiveness, and nowhere to be found in Europe.

William Penn's mother was Dutch. It is likely he spoke the local languages. For a number of years he had traveled in the Low Countries and the Rhineland, preaching the ideas of George Fox the Quaker. And then, one day he arrived with a new idea. The King of England had given him a huge stretch of uninhabited land in the New World, no doubt influenced by the idea that Quakers were a nuisance and this was a good way to get rid of them. Whatever. Penn was selling land grants, and he could be trusted. Why not give it a try?

Germantown Before 1730

In 1730, there was a great influx of German peasantry to America, stimulated by the English government giving bounties to ship captains who would help fill the country with settlers. Protestants only, of course, so the ships were forced to land in England on the way, so Catholics on board could be returned to Europe. The majority of these ships landed in Philadelphia, but one group of thirty families did land in New York where they found the Dutch inhabitants had maintained their dislike of those sects from upriver on the Rhine. Both the Calvinists and the Dutch Reformed were interested in religious freedom, but both were uninterested in religious toleration. The thirty German families then went up to the Hudson to Albany, were treated badly there, too, and eventually cut their way through eighty miles of forest to the headwaters of the Susquehanna at Coopertown, New York. From there they floated down that river to the backwoods of Pennsylvania and started a colony in what is now called the Pennsylvania Dutch country.

The flood of German immigrants into Philadelphia after 1730 soon made Germantown German. From 1683 to 1730, however, Germantown had been settled by Dutch Quakers and some Swiss ones. These earlier immigrants were townspeople of the artisan and business class, rapidly establishing Germantown as the intellectual capital of Germans throughout America. This eminence was promoted further by the establishment by the Rittenhouse family (Rittinghuysen, Rittenhausen) of the first paper mill in America. Rittenhousetown is a little collection of houses still readily seen on the north side of the Wissahickon Creek, with Wissahickon Avenue nestled behind it. The road which now runs along the Wissahickon is so narrow and windy, and the traffic goes at such dangerous pace, that many people who travel it daily have never paid adequate attention to the Rittenhousetown museum area. It's well worth a visit, although the entrance is hard to find (try coming down Wissahickon Avenue).

Even today, printing businesses usually locate near their source of paper to reduce transportation costs. North Carolina is the present pulp paper source, before that it was Michigan. In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, a paper came from Germantown, so the printing and publishing industry centered here, too. When Pastorius was describing the new German settlement to prospective immigrants, he said, " Es ist nur Wald" -- it's just a forest. A forest near a source of abundant water. Some of the surly remarks of Benjamin Franklin about German immigrants may have grown out of the competition from Christoper Sower (Saur), the largest printer in America.

Francis Daniel Pastorius was sort of a local European flack for William Penn, assembling in the Rhineland town of Krefeld a group of Dutch Quaker investors called the Frankford Company. When the time came for the group to emigrate, however, Pastorius alone actually crossed the ocean; so he had to return the 16,000 acres of Germantown, Roxborough and Chestnut Hill he had been ceded. Another group, half Dutch and half Swiss, came from Krisheim (Cresheim) to a 6000-acre land grant in the high ground between the Schuylkill and Delaware. The time was 1683. They were soon joined by Mennonites, followers of Menno Simons, a reform group similar to Quakers but a hundred years older. The truly Dutch origins of these original settlers give an additional flavor to the term " Pennsylvania Dutch&#34.

Where the Wissahickon crosses Germantown Avenue, a group of Rosicrucian hermits created a settlement, one of considerable musical and literary attainment. The leader was John Kelpius, and upon his death the group broke up, many of them going further west to the cloister at Ephrata. From 1683 to 1730 Germantown was small wooden houses and muddy roads, but there was nevertheless found the center of Germanic intellectual and religious ferment. Several protestant denominations have their founding mother church on Germantown Avenue, Sower spread bibles and prayer books up and down the Appalachians, and even the hermits put a defining Germantown stamp on the sects which were to arrive after 1730. The hermits apparently invented the hex signs, which was carried westward by the more agrarian later German peasant immigration, passing through on the way to the deep topsoil of Lancaster County.

Germantown After 1730

The early settlers of Germantown were Dutch or German-speaking Quakers; they were also of the craftsman class. Consequently, they were rather poor subsistence farmers. With a whole continent stretching beyond them, professional farmers would not likely choose to settle on a stony hilltop, two hours away from Philadelphia. Their future lay in a religious congregation, in papermaking, textile manufacture, publishing, printing, and newspapers. Plenty of stones were lying around, so stone houses soon replaced the early wooden ones. Since Philadelphia in 1776 had only twenty or so thousand inhabitants, and only thirty wheeled vehicles other than wagons, it was not too difficult for Germantown to imagine it might eventually eclipse the nearby English seaport. Two wars and two epidemics brought those dreams to an end, but in a sense, those calamities were stimulants to the town, as well.

In 1730 the German peasants began to arrive in large numbers from the Palatinate section of the Rhine Valley. While it is true they arrived as survivors of a horrendous ocean sailing experience, packed in such density that it was not unusual to find dead bodies in the hold that had only been supposed to have wandered into a different part of the ship. Quite often, they paid for their passage by selling themselves into what amounted to limited-time slavery, and the usual pattern was for parents to sell an adolescent child into slavery for eight or ten years in order to pay for the voyage of the family. They were uneducated, even ignorant, and often were proponents of small new religious sects. But they were professional farmers, and good at it. They knew, and a quick tour of Lancaster County today confirms their belief, that if you had a reasonable amount of very good land, you could live a life that approached the craftsmen in comfort and usually far exceeded them in personal assets. They have taken a long time to rise from farm to sophistication, but the already sophisticated craftsmen in Germantown wasted no time in abandoning farming. The newcomers arrived in Philadelphia, made their way to the nearby town of Germantown, learned a little about the new country and the refinements of their Protestant culture, and then pressed on to the great fertile valley to the West. Some of them, of course, stayed on permanently in the steadily growing little metropolis on the hill.

During this period, Germantown also invented the Suburb. Benjamin Chew, the Chief Justice, built a magnificent stone mansion on Germantown Avenue. Present-day visitors are still impressed with the immensity and sturdy mass of his home. Grumblethorpe, Stenton and a score of other country homes were placed there. Germantown still wasn't a very big town, but it was plenty comfortable, quiet, safe, intellectual and affluent. The first disruption came from the French and Indian War.

Germantown and the French and Indian War

Present-day interest in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and related issues tend to drown out what was once a lively interest in the French and Indian War (1754-1760) as the pivot of American colonial history. Benjamin Franklin was so important in the French and Indian War that he could have died in 1761 at the age of 48 and still be remembered as one of our most far-sighted and influential statesmen. He was, however, not a plaster saint. Little Germantown was peripheral to events in those days, little interested in what was happening in Quebec or Albany. Like Hamlet's schoolmates Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, however, the Germantowners got drawn into events they did not entirely understand and played an unwilling part in history.

The French and Indian War was mainly about control over the Ohio Valley. Having established a communications system running out of Quebec, and carefully placing forts in the area beyond the Allegheny Mountains from which to trade with and possibly convert the Indians, the French had a rather elegant strategy for controlling the center of the continent. It involved urging their Indian allies to attack and harass the English-speaking settlements along the frontier. It was a nasty business. The survivors of General Braddock's defeated army at what is now Pittsburgh reported hearing screams for several days as the prisoners were burned at the stake. Rape, scalping and kidnapping children were standard practice, intended to intimidate the enemy. The Scotch-Irish settlers beyond the Susquehanna, which was then the frontier, were never terribly congenial with the pacifism of the Eastern Quaker-dominated legislature. The fact is, they liked to fight, and gouging of eyes was almost their ultimate goal in a moral dispute. They had an unattractive habit of inflicting what they called the "fishhook" involving thrusting fingers down an enemy's throat and tearing out his tonsils. As might be imagined, the English Quakers in Philadelphia and the German Quakers in Germantown were instinctively hesitant to take the side of every white man in every dispute with a red one. For their part, the frontiersmen were infuriated at what they believed was an unwillingness of the Quaker-dominated legislature to come to their defense. Meanwhile, the French pushed Eastward across Pennsylvania, almost coming to the edge of Lancaster County before they were pushed back and ultimately defeated by the British.

In December 1763, once the French and Iroquois were safely out of range, a group of settlers from Paxtang Township in Dauphin County attacked the peaceable local Conestoga Indian tribe and totally exterminated them. Fourteen Indian survivors took refuge in the Lancaster jail, but the Paxtang Boys searched them out and killed them, too. Then, they marched to Philadelphia to demand greater protection for the settlers. Benjamin Franklin was one of the leaders who came to meet them and promised that he would persuade the legislature to give frontiersmen greater representation, and would pay a bounty on Indian scalps.

Meanwhile, Franklin was active in raising troops and serving as a soldier. He recognized that thirteen divided colonies could not easily mount a coordinated defense against the well-organized French strategy, and called a meeting in Albany to propose a united confederation. The Albany Convention agreed with Franklin, but not a single colony ratified the plan, and Franklin was disgusted with them. Out of all this, Franklin emerged strongly anti-French, strongly pro-British, and not a little skeptical of colonial self-rule. As a leader of a political party the Pennsylvania Legislature, he was very familiar with the tendency of the German Pennsylvanians to vote in harmony with the Philadelphia Quakers. It must be noticed that Franklin's main competitor in the printing and publishing business was the Sower family in Germantown. Franklin persuaded a number of leading English non-Quakers that the Germans were a coarse and brutish lot, ignorant and illiterate. If they could be sent to English-speaking schools, perhaps they could gradually be won over to a different form of politics.

Since the Germans of Germantown was supremely proud of their intelligence community, they were infuriated. Their response was almost a classic episode of Quaker warfare. They organized, off Market Square, the Union School, which was eventually to become Germantown Academy. Its instruction and curriculum were sufficiently outstanding to justify the claim that it was the finest school in America. Later on, George Washington was to send his adopted son (Parke Custis) to school there. In 1958 the Academy moved to Fort Washington, but needless to say, the idea of forcing the local ignorant Germans to go to a proper English school was rapidly shelved.

The Battle of Germantown: Oct. 3, 1777

After its brief commotion from the unwelcome reverberations of the French and Indian War, Germantown settled down to a period of colonial prosperity and quite vigorous growth. Most of the surviving hundred historical houses of the area date from this period, and it might even be contended that the starting of the Union School had been a beneficial stimulus.

Almost two decades passed. What we now call the American Revolution started rumbling in far-off Lexington and Concord, soon moved to New York and New Jersey. General William Howe, the illegitimate uncle of King George III, then decided to occupy the largest city in the colonies, considered getting his brother's Navy up Delaware but decided against a naval attack on the chain barrier blocking the narrow mudflats of the river at what is now The International Airport. Instead, he sent the navy down to Norfolk and back up te Chesapeake, landing the troops at the head of the Elk River. Washington was soon defeated at the Battle of the Brandywine Creek trying to head him off. So Howe invested Philadelphia, organizing his main defensive position in the center of Germantown against an attack by Washington that was soon to come. His headquarters were in Stenton and Morris House, General James Agnew was at Grumblethorpe The Center of British defense was at set up at Market Square where Germantown Avenue crosses Schoolhouse Lane. With Washington holed up in Valley Forge, that should take care of that. Raggedy rebels were unlikely to attack a prepared hilltop position with a river on either side, defended by a large number of British regulars.

Washington did not look at things that way, at all. He had watched General Braddock conduct an arrogant suicide mission in the woods near Ft. Duquesne, and also knew the British didn't like to get too many yards away from their navy. His plan was to attack frontally down the Skippack Pike with the troops under his direct command, while Armstrong would come down Ridge Avenue and up from the side. General Greene would attack along Limekiln Road, while General Smallwood and Foreman would come down Old York Road. In the foggy morning of October 3, the main body of American troops reached Benjamin Chew's massive stone house, now occupied by determined British troops, and General Knox decided this was too strong a pocket to leave behind in his rear. Precious time was lost with an artillery bombardment, and unfortunately, the flanking troops down the lateral roads were late or did not arrive at all. The forward movement stopped, then the British counter-attacked. Washington was therefore forced to retreat, but he did so in good order. The battle was over, the British had won again.

But maybe not. Washington had not routed the British Army or forced them to leave Philadelphia. They did leave the following year, however, and there was meanwhile no great desertion from the Colonial cause. Washington's troops suffered terrible privation and discouragement at Valley Forge, but the crowned heads of Europe didn't know that. For reasons of their own, the French and German monarchs were pondering whether the American rebellion was worth supporting, or whether it would soon collapse in a round of public hangings. From their perspective, the Americans didn't have to win, in fact, it might be useful if they didn't. But if they were spirited and determined, led by a man who was courageous and resolute, their damage to the British interests might be worth what it would cost to support them. The Battle of Germantown can thus be reasonably argued to have been a victory for Washington, even if he had to retreat in an orderly withdrawal.

In Germantown itself, the process of turning a defeat into a victory soon began, with the alienation of the German inhabitants against the inevitably destructive experiences of British military occupation. Germantown would never again see itself as the capital city of a large German hinterland. It was on its way to becoming part of the city of Philadelphia.

1793: Germantown Nurses the Yellow Fever

The French Revolution continued from 1789 to 1799 and created the opportunity for a second revolution in the colonies which an overstretched mother country would lose. The slaves of Haiti just about exterminated the white settlers, except for some who escaped, taking Yellow Fever and Dengue with them. Both diseases are Mosquito-borne, so they flare up in the summer and die down in the winter, although the Philadelphians who received the exiles didn't know that. Yellow Fever was bad in 1793, came back for three more years, and flared up badly in 1798. It could easily be seen that it was worse in the lowlands, absent in the hills. It reached a peak in October, disappeared after the first frost. In the early fall, people died a horrible death, jaundiced and bilious.

The Yellow Fever epidemic had a profound effect on many things. It was one of the major reasons the nation's capital did not remain in Philadelphia. It made the reputation of Dr. Benjamin Rush who announced the highly unfortunate treatment of bleeding the victims, thus provoking numerous anti-scientific medical doctrines which were essentially based on the comparative value of doing nothing at all. It took a full century for American scientific medicine to recover from this blow to its reputation. One very good thing the epidemic did was put an end to the torch-light parades of window-breaking rioters, agitating with Jefferson's approval for an American version of the guillotine and the terror. Federalists like Adams and Bingham never forgave him for it, and this class warfare movement would likely have got much worse if suddenly everyone had not dropped tools, and headed for the safety of Germantown.

The President of the new republic, George Washington, was in Mt. Vernon in the summer of 1793, wondering what to do about the Yellow Fever epidemic, and particularly uncertain what the Constitution empowered him to do. He finally decided to rent rooms in Germantown and called a cabinet meeting there. His first rooms were rented from Frederick Herman, a pastor of the Reformed Church and teacher at the Union School, although he later moved to 5442 Germantown Ave, the home of Col. Franks. Jefferson chose to room at the King of Prussia Tavern.

During this time, Germantown was the seat of the nation's government. As was fervently hoped for, the cases of yellow fever stopped appearing in late October, and eventually, it seemed safe to convene Congress in Philadelphia as originally scheduled, on December 2.

Although Germantown was badly shaken by the experience, it was a heady experience to be the nation's capital. Meanwhile, a great many rich, powerful and important people had come to see what a nice place it was. Germantown then entered the second period of growth and flourishing. Walking around Germantown today is like wandering through the ruins of the Roman forum, silently tolerant of visitors who would have never dared approach it in its heyday.

Contemporary Germantown

The Strittmatter Award is the most prestigious honor given by the Philadelphia County Medical Society and is named after a famous and revered physician who was President of the society in the 1920s. There is usually a dinner given before the award ceremony, where all of the prior recipients of the award show up to welcome to this year's new honoree.

This is the reason that Henry Bockus and Jonathan Rhoads were sitting at the same table, sometime around 1975. Bockus had written a famous multi-volume textbook of gastroenterology which had an unusually long run because it was published before World War II and had no competition during the War or for several years afterward; to a generation of physicians, his name was almost synonymous with gastroenterology. In addition, he was a gifted speaker, quite capable of keeping an audience on the edge of their chairs, even though after the speech it might be difficult to remember just what he had said. On this particular evening, the silver-haired oracle might have been just a wee bit tipsy.

Jonathan Rhoads had likewise written a textbook, about Surgery, and had similarly been president of dozens of national and international surgical societies. He devised a technique of feeding patients intravenously which has been the standard for many decades, and in his spare time had been a member of the Philadelphia School Board, a dominant trustee of Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, and the provost of the University of Pennsylvania. Not the medical school, the whole university, and is said to have been one of the best provosts of the University of Pennsylvania ever had. When he was President of-of the American Philosophical Society, he engineered its endowment from three million to ten times that amount. For all these accomplishments, he was a man of few words, unusual courtesy -- and a huge appetite in keeping with his rather huge farmboy physical stature. On the evening in question, he was busy shoveling food.

"Hey, Rhoads, wherrseriland?". Jonathan's eyes rose to the questioner, but he kept his head bowed over his plate.

"Rhoads, Westland?" The surgeon put down his fork and asked " What are you talking about?"

" Well," said Bockus, " Every famous surgeon I know, has a house on an island, somewhere. Where's your island?

"Germantown," replied Rhoads, and returned attention to his dinner.

Geckos: Academy of Natural Sciences brings Mini Dinosaurs

Gecko

FRIENDS who spent time in Vietnam have a lasting memory of lizards stuck to the ceiling, catching flies with their tongues. Those animals are named geckos, one of the oldest and probably most varied families of reptiles, but confined to the Southern hemisphere. Fossils have been found containing geckos from fifty million years ago, so they were here before the big dinosaurs were wiped out, when the Yucatan was probably struck by an asteroid.

Anthony Geneva

There was a time when Africa, India, South America and Antarctica were united in one monstrously big continent, and the many varieties of gecko are scattered over the land masses which originally made that up. At least this is the way Anthony Geneva explains it to visitors to the Academy of Natural Sciences at 19th and Ben Franklin Parkway. There are no geckos to be found naturally in Philadelphia. Philadelphians hardly need reminding that the first dinosaur bones, ever, were discovered in Haddonfield NJ, and were soon taken to the Academy for permanent display. Ever since that time, the Academy's collection of dinosaurs has expanded, and are the things with the most impact on school-age visitors. The Academy is getting ready to celebrate its 200th anniversary in a few years, however, and contains much more than dinosaur bones, including extensive research facilities with world-famous scientists at work in them. In any event, the dinosaur image is a clear metaphor for the present display of little reptiles that look like dinosaurs, whatever the DNA trail may be. The main exhibition area is currently filled with dozens of glass display cases containing live geckos, and the little rascals are so good at camouflage that you have to hunt carefully for them before they suddenly seem to emerge from the shadows. There are white ones, black ones, bright green and bright orange ones, speckled in all sorts of weird patterns. They make sounds resembling bird songs, and the term gecko is a native word referring to such sounds. The Academy displays these gecko-noises for visitors who are invited to push twenty or so buttons. Geckos move, but suddenly, and probably for some predatory purpose. If you are really into geckos, you focus on their feet.

Gecko

The variety of toe and foot shape is almost infinite and seems more so if you have a magnifying lens. The foot pads terminate in different kinds of extremely fine hairs, and that's their big secret. Those hairs are so fine the molecules of the foot and the molecules of the wall or ceiling attract each other magnetically. Since no energy is expended in the adherence, the gecko can remain attached to a wall or ceiling indefinitely, even after the gecko dies. But, by raising the angle of contact to thirty degrees, the foot detaches, and the little rascals can scoot along very rapidly, upside down. At present, there is a great deal of commercial and maybe military interest in clarifying the secrets of this adhesion. To be industrially useful, the footpad size would have to scale up to much larger dimensions, but just imagine gluing together the vessel ruptures and aneurysms inside the brain as we now do in a cumbersome manner with chicken-wire stents, just one example that quickly occurs to a visitor. If these little fellows figured out how to make these reversible adhesives fifty million years ago, our scientists ought to be able to imitate them.

Drop around to visit the Academy. It's filled with amazing things like this.

Artificial Intelligence

James Marsh

Earlier this year, the Franklin Inn Club and the Right Angle Club held lectures on the same subject (Artificial Intelligence) on two successive luncheons. The Franklin Inn was addressed by a member, Jim Marsh a former engineer, and the Right Angle by a member who was formerly in charge of investing the retirement portfolio of the Dupont Company. Essentially they said the same thing about two apparently unconnected industries. Artificial Intelligence is rapidly acquiring new abilities, and it's soon going to revolutionize the whole world.

At least, judging by the speed things are changing in the computer world, unreported advances will soon fill in the gaps which will make dramatic change inevitable. That's slightly different, and much of it is beyond American control. The central advance is for computers to utilize massive extensions of their present abilities, enabling them to test huge new conjectures rapidly by writing code for computers without depending on human innovation. Machines have a bigger, more permanent memory, and can test and implement wide varieties of new ideas beyond human abilities to keep up. That is unless human innovation blows us up first.

What is AI?

Apparently, trucks are apparently just on the edge of loading and pulling out of a loading block, and driving across the country--without a driver and without an accident. Human autos will be greatly reduced in number, possibly replaced by driverless taxis. Fewer potholes, fewer street repairs. People out of work, nothing to tax.

The stockbroker probably had a longer view than the engineer. so both of them may be right, at slightly different times. Artificial intelligence will increase supply, and also increase demand, but at different times. That will generate two collisions, one with supply in excess and the other with demand in excess, but at different times. So, in the short run, we have lower prices, and in the long run, we have greater growth. Or even vice versa , a crash followed by a boom, or possibly a boom followed by a crash, and it doesn't much matter whether it is triggered by crude oil prices, or the price of silk stockings.

How soon? Ah, that's the question. Right now people are behaving as though they think it may be two or three years. That may be true, but it seldom is true that people anticipate the future accurately. More often, what everybody knows, isn't worth knowing.

THE ENGLISH SETTLEMENTS 1619-1776 (Vol 189)

At first, the British Empire wasn't even British, it was English. English history, English religion, English unification, even English court intrigue, and gossip. When Sir Francis Drake brought home the Spanish gold, it was welcome enough, but it was just part of the English Revolution, on its way to becoming the British Empire. English settlers were just a curiosity, like the "Indians" they brought home. England was Ben Franklin's idea of home, left behind by his prosperous family because of largely religious quarrels. The silk-dye Franklins, by the way, had to start over at the bottom in Boston because Cotton Mather's crowd wouldn't accept their money, or see their side of a silly English religious quarrel. England was, in fact, everybody's home, intellectually, although that was fast coming to an end. Because of the plague and the fire, lots of things were coming to an end, and lots of other things were just starting. For now, the important thing was they were people of former substance, wide acquaintance, and thoroughly English. Whiggish and out of favor perhaps, but not seriously in rebellion.

When they got to America, the whole Franklin family was rambunctious and supported itself with sister Jane's invention of bar soap, her father's candle-making shop, and brother James' printer shop. They got in trouble somewhat with a straight-laced community, but most of their troubles would be called "scrapes" and "quarrels" of a family trying to re-establish itself in new circumstances. When he got to Philadelphia, Benjamin repeated the performance. Arriving at a strange town as a penniless teenager, he turned a print-shop into a chain of newspapers and was ready to retire to his hobbies and politics at the age of 42. Along the way, he learned to keep his mouth shut.

Franklin was not an aristocrat, but there were scarcely any aristocrats who did not seek him out. In spite of writing one of the most famous autobiographies in America, few people could be certain of his religion, his marital status, his politics. He was definitely not a Quaker, but for a while, he led the Quaker faction. He never went past the second grade, but would have won a Nobel prize if there had been such a thing, and financed his own research. He spent eighteen years living in London, inventing a musical instrument which pleased Mozart, and regularly visiting Parliament. When the King's Saint Paul Cathedral was struck by lightning, the King sought his advice. When King George III rejected this advice, the personal quarrel turned him into a personal enemy of the King. As a consequence, he finally turned rebel, joined the Continental Congress, and eventually helped write the American Constitution. At the Albany Conference of 1754, he had proposed a Union of the Thirteen Colonies and lived to see it a reality in 1789. But in spite of that, it took a personal confrontation with King George III to convince him Independence was a good idea. In spite of his greatly praised autobiography, no one suspected it of him. No one seems to have known.