"But," said I, "did you say _four_ children?"

"_Mais oui!_ I have four.

"Why, it seems but yesterday that----"

"_Comptez donc!_ Six years and six months."

His picture of future felicity was very bright. I thought in my heart

that such plans of retirement were--but I suppressed my sermon and

congratulated him upon his prospects. Why should I disturb his happiness

even though it might be a dream? What but a dream would have been even

the realization of all his hopes?

We parted after embracing like old friends. I had more respect for those

two than I had for a great many whose sonorous titles did not cover

qualities half so estimable, manners half so agreeable, characters half

so pure, or a sense of religion half so true and deep.

The French theatre declined after the departure of Monsieur and Madame

Delille. I had entirely ceased attending or taking any interest in it.

Two years passed, when one day, in a lonely part of the Thiergarten, I

met--whom do you think? M. Delille; but pale, sad, solitary, subdued.

"Well, here I am again," said he. "All my fine dreams have disappeared.

I won't bore you with the story. The fact is--that is to say--one can

never count upon one's plans in this world. I have lost my fortune, and

accepted an invitation to become director of the Berlin French theatre.

I am to form a new company. There is a great opposition to this, and the

matter has raised up against me furious enemies. They accuse me of

everything base. You know me. You know I would not be guilty of anything

dishonorable."

I looked into his sad, ingenuous face, and replied:

"I am sure you would not."

"Oh, I thank you. But the worst remains to be told. My wife--my poor,

dear wife--who had been my consolation in all this trouble! _Pauvre

Marie!_ she is very ill, and I was obliged to leave her in Paris, or to

lose all our prospects. She would have it so. This annoys me. This makes

me unhappy. With her I am proof against all troubles. Ah, monsieur, you

do not know my Marie. The most faithful, the most gentle, the purest,

the----"

"But is she so dangerously ill?"

"I hope not. I think not. She will be here in a few weeks. The doctor

has given me his _word of honor_."

A couple of months more. A series of articles, in the mean time,

appeared in the newspapers against M. Delille and the new French theatre

government. The venomous shafts were launched by an able hand. Gall is

sweet compared with them. An actor is the most sensitive of human

beings. His reputation is his all. The personal malice and interest of

the writer were obvious, but the public were too busy to examine. The

crowd enjoy a battle, without caring much about the right.

I met M. Delille a few days after the appearance of the fifth of these

articles, and expressed my indignation. His manner of viewing the

subject was really noble and more instructive to me than many a sermon.

He spoke temperately of the _désagrément_ of his position and the wisdom

of keeping on his way calmly. "An actor," he said, "is a public target.

Every one has the right to shoot at him. I cannot always forget, but I

try to forgive."

"And your wife?"

His face darkened.

"Oh, I am weary. She does not get well. She lingers on. She is not

strong enough to come to me. I cannot go to her. She will not consent.

They would declare I had run away. Her short letters are full of

encouragement and consolation. Ah, if these men knew--but we must be

patient. The doctor positively assures me she is doing very well."

Three weeks later I was again taking a walk through the Thiergarten,

wrapped in my cloak, for it was winter, when I perceived M. Delille

sitting on a quite wet bench. His face was very pale. I never saw a

sadder expression. Hoping to rally him, I said:

"What a melancholy countenance! What a brown study! Come, I have arrived

in time to laugh to you and of it!"

His face did not reply to my gayety. He asked after my health.

"But you are sitting on a wet, snowy bench. You will take cold."

"No, I shall not take cold."

"And how," said I, "is your----"

I paused, for I now for the first time remarked a black crape on his

hat.

He perceived my embarrassment and relieved me.

"My children?"

I was silent.

"They are very well, I thank you--they are very well."

"Come," added he, with an effort, after covering his eyes a moment with

his hand, "what have we now? Is there _really_ to be a war?"

THEODORE S. FAY.

INFLUENCES.

The southern bird, which, swift in airy speed,

Toward ruder regions wings its careless way,

Wafts from its plumage oft a floating seed,

Unheeded relic of some tropic day.

And lo! a wonder! on the spot beneath

The tiny germ asserts its mystic power;

With sudden bloom illumes the rugged heath,

And bursts at once to fragrance, light, and flower.

All the sad woodland flushes at the sight:

The brook, which murmured, sparkles now, and sings:

The cowslips watch, with yearning, strange delight,

The bird which shed such glories from its wings,

Watching it hover onward free and far;

Breathing farewell with restless doubt and pain.

What were a heaven with but one only star?

Must this be all? Will it not come again?

While the new lily, lonely in her pride,

Sighing through silver bells, repeats the strain,

Longing for sister blossoms at her side,

And whispering soft, Will it not come again?

CHARLES CARROLL.

DRIFT-WOOD.

THE TWELVE-MONTH SERMON.

The year's end is traditionally the season for moralizing and

retrospect. _Eheu! fugaces anni_ is a sigh that even the Latin primer

teaches us; and though in schoolbook days calling the years fugacious

seems absurd, we catch the meaning as they glide away. To schoolboys the

man of fifty is immoderately old: thirty marks a milestone on the

downhill of life. People whom we looked upon as of great antiquity, in

childhood, turn out to have been mere striplings. I saw "old Kent"

yesterday after the lapse of thirty years, and protest he was younger

than when he rapped sepulchral silence from his resounding desk. "How

are you, Quilibet First?" he said, quite in the ancient way; he seemed

once more to brandish the ferrule on his awful throne.

Boys always call schoolmasters and sextons "old," irrespective of their

years. Clerks in the shop style their employer "the old gentleman"

without meaning to impute antiquity. Gray-haired diggers and pounders

speak of their overseer as "the old man," even though he be a

rosy-cheeked youth of two-and-twenty. Lexicographers should look to

this. "Old" evidently means sometimes "having independent authority,"

and does not necessarily signify either lack of freshness or being

stricken in years. Thus Philip Festus Bailey's dictum, that "we live in

deeds, not years," is borne out by common parlance, and future

Worcesters and Websters must make a note of it.

Whoever, also, reaches a fixed position of authority, seems (rightly

enough, as the world goes) to have achieved success in life. This

measurement of success by the kind of occupation one follows begins with

us in short clothes. Mary's ambition is to be "either a milliner, a

queen, or a cook;" the ideal of Augustus is a woodchopper, killing bears

when they attack him at his work, and living in a hut. The sons of

confectioners must be marvels if they grow up alike unspoiled in morals

by the universal envy of comrades, and unspoiled in teeth by the

parental sugar-plums. People of older growth attach childish importance

to the trade one plies. Nobs and nabobs (at least on the stage)

disinherit daughters offhand for marrying grocers, and groan over sons

who take to high art. The smug and prudent citizen shudders at the

career of the filibuster, while the adventurer would commit suicide

rather than achieve a modest livelihood in tape and needles. The mother

of Sainte Beuve was sorely distressed at his pursuit of literature, a

career that she reckoned mere vagabondage, despite his brilliant feats

in it, until the day he was elected to the French Academy, and thereby

became entitled to $300 a year. "Then my mother was a little reassured;

thenceforth, _j'avais une place_."

When the close of the year sets us to reckoning up how much we have made

of life, pray what is that "success" of which we all talk so glibly? It

is plainly a standard varying according to each man's taste and

temperament, his humility or vanity, and shifting as his life advances.

What to the Bohemian is success to the Philistine is stark failure. The

anchoret looks on this sublunary sphere as one of sighing, the attorney

as one of suing--there being all that difference betwixt law and gospel.

Sixty years cannot see life through the eyes of sixteen. When men,

fearing to measure themselves, seek the judgment of their fellows,

adulation or affection may lead astray. In the year's retrospect of

science, touching the solar eclipse it is said: "Cape Flattery is our

northwestern cape, and there occurred the largest obscuration of the sun

in the United States." "Cape Flattery," I fear, is the locus of largest

obscuration for the United States every year, and was particularly so in

the past twelvemonth of jubilee and gratulation; and what the mantle of

flattery is for the sunlight of truth in the nation it is in the

individual. In politics, at any rate, the centennial year is closing

with some reproof of our all-summer conceit. Our frame of government is

not so flawless as we fancied; the pharisaic contrast we drew between

our politics and those of other nations is no longer so effective.

And with men as with nations, a ray of clear light reveals the shams and

shortcomings of what is hastily styled success. The pushing, elbowing

fellow gets ahead in the struggle of life, but his success is a

questionable one. The bargaining man, who, partly by instinct and partly

by practice, judges everything from the point of view, "How is that

going to affect me?" will no doubt make money. Even his most

disinterested advice pivots on the thought, "What will pay me best?" as

the magnet surely wheels to the pole. But when all is done, to have

achieved this artistic perfection of self-seeking is a sorry account to

give of life.

Thus, the very successes on which we plume ourselves are sometimes

badges of disaster, as we ourselves may secretly know if others do not.

"When one composes long speeches," says Jarno, "with a view to shame his

neighbors, he should speak them to a looking-glass." If not a hypocrite

or a vain man, he may find himself blushing at the thought _de me fabula

narratur_. The only alteration that our satire on others may require is

to change the name of the folly or fault we lash, and then the stripes

will be merited by ourselves. The other day Temple and I listened to a

discourse of the Rev. Dr. Waddell of St Magdalen's on the perils of

novel-reading. I think the worthy doctor really refrains from that sin;

he is certainly severe on those who are given to it. "That fat man,"

said Temple, as we strolled away from St. Magdalen's sanctuary, "is too

greedy, too gluttonous to listen to any cry but that of his own stomach.

His god is his belly. His indifference to the sufferings of others

amounts to a disease."

"What disease do you call it?" I asked.

"Fatty degeneration of the heart," replied Temple, with a laugh. On the

other hand, quite shocked at people who "make pigs" of themselves, is

Mrs. Pavanne, who starves her stomach to beautify her back, and who, I

assure you, would prefer after three days' fasting a new boiled silk and

trimmings to any similarly treated leg of mutton and capers.

Grundy is a model of social demeanor and domesticity, but occasionally

cheats in a bargain wherever it is safe; Gregory, honest as the day,

gets tipsy. Let Gregory remember his own weakness before scorning

Grundy, and let Grundy respect the good in Gregory before holding him up

to disgrace. The question is often not whether X is a saint and Y a

Satan, but rather what road a man's indulgence takes. Is it body or

spirit that rules him--his fear, lust, vanity, gluttony, surliness, or

sloth? his humility, generosity, piety, sense of justice, sense of duty?

Is his cardinal weakness a vice or only a foible--a crime that degrades

or only a pettiness that narrows him?

If we hold with Scripture that he who ruleth his spirit is greater than

he that taketh a city, we must not give all the laurels of success to

the mighty, wealthy, witty, and renowned. Poor John Jones, the clerk

yonder at a thousand a year, if we reckon at anything gentleness,

courage, simplicity, devotion to mother, wife, and babes, has made as

great a success of life as old Rollin Ritchie, the head of the house.

You would imagine a first use of wealth to be the liberty to pick at

will one's employees and allies, one's friends and agents, to repel the

dishonest and rebuke the impudent, dealing with those whom one chooses

to deal with, where personal choice can fairly be exercised; but such a

privilege is Utopian in business, even among men of fortune, and envied

Ritchie has little more freedom than humble Jones. Besides, the pursuit

of startling success, though it often ruins possibilities of

contentment, rarely creates them. Frédéric Soulié, having had the

misfortune to gain $16,000 in one year by his pen, refused a government

place at $3,000, with leisure to write an occasional play or a novel; he

was eager to produce half a dozen plays and novels in a twelvemonth,

says a biographer, and to repeat his $16,000; and he died of work and

watching in two years more.

We are not, in these kindly Christmas days, to cynically deny to

unpromising careers all power of recovery. Temple was telling me the

other day of this instance known to him: Honorius had an exceedingly

dissolute son, who pursued his vicious courses almost unchecked by

parental rein, until he seemed to think his iniquities the rather

fostered than forbidden. But one day a friend of both questioned the

father why he allowed his son such abused license? "Sir," replied he,

"if my son chooses to go to the devil, as he is now fast going, he alone

must take the consequences." The conversation being reported to our

young rake, he was so affected by the view of his responsibility, which

he now appreciated for the first time, as to turn back toward the way of

virtue. And as before he had conceived his father in some sort liable

for those scandalous excesses, so now, being driven from that strange

error, he chooses for himself the path of honor and usefulness.

In judging unsuccessful lives, too, we need to make large allowance for

the unknown elements of fortune. "It is fate," says the Greek adage,

"that bringeth good and bad to men; nor can the gifts of the immortals

be refused." But we can find justification for charitable judgments

without resorting to this general theory. We discover one youth, who

promised well, ruined by a bad choice of profession, while a second, who

selected well, finds the immediate problem in life to be not personal

eminence, but providing for a wife and half a dozen children: and if he

does fitly provide for them, pray, why set down his life, however pruned

of its first ambitious pinions, as a failure?

So, finally, our unaspiring old-year homily simply chimes in with the

traditional spirit of Christmastide--season of hopeful words and wishes,

of kindness for the struggling, of encouragement for the discouraged, of

charity for the so-called failures.

RIBBONS AND CORONETS AT MARKET RATES.

It is said that a Yankee has arranged to furnish foreign titles

(warranted genuine) of "earl or count for $10,000; European orders, from

$250 to $10,000; membership in foreign scientific and literary

societies, $250 and upward." The story is plausible. Impecunious princes

and potentates have been known to replenish their purses in this way,

though hitherto usually by private sale rather than market quotations.

It is not probable that our ingenious countryman has the Order of the

Seraphim or of the Annonciade at disposal, or that he can supply the

Golden Fleece to whoever will "gif a good prishe," or even that he

would pretend to furnish the Black Eagle of Prussia in quantities to

suit purchasers. He can hardly be the medium of creating many Knights of

the Garter, nor can the Bath or the St. Michael and St. George very well

be in his list of decorations "to order." But we know from the Paris and

Vienna fairs that a Cross of the Legion is obtainable by Americans of

the mercantile class; and as for the Lion and the Sun, it was an order

created by some bygone shah for the express purpose of rewarding

strangers who had rendered service to Persia; and what service more

substantial, pray, than helping to fill the Persian purse? When you come

to central and southern Europe, titles are going a-begging, and hard-up

princelets will presumably be eager to raise the wind with them.

And there will be buyers as well as sellers. To the democratic mind a

royal star or ribbon is an object of befitting reverence. None of our

countrymen would, indeed, on purchasing a title, really ask to be

addressed as "Your lordship," or even to be familiarly called Grand

Forester or Sublime Bootjack to His Serene Highness--unless in private,

by some very much indulged servitor or judicious retainer. But though

the badge of nobility may not be worn in the streets by the happy

purchaser, for fear of attracting a rabble of the curious, he can fondly

gaze upon it in the privacy of home, or try it on for the admiration of

the domestic circle, or haply submit it to the inspection of discreet

friends.

The case is different with the "bogus diploma" trade. Business and not

vanity is doubtless the ruling motive with the foreigners who strut in

plumage bought of the Philadelphia "university." The diploma of M. D. is

worth its price for display before the eyes of the patients waiting in

the "doctor's" office, while to Squeers of Dotheboys Hall the degree of

A. M. is good for at least three new pupils, and Ph. D. for a dozen. I

presume that in some of the foreign magazines and weekly newspapers of a

certain class, D. D. or L.L. D. has a real cash value of at least five

per cent. more in pay, or perhaps it may turn the scale in favor of an

article which, without that honorary signature, might be put in the

waste-paper basket. So long as such practical results can be had the

diploma trade is likely to flourish, with full variety offered to

buyers.

Now, it is not impossible to turn to trade account an Order of the

Elephant, of the Iron Crown, of the Legion of Honor, or of the

Medjidieh, as probably shrewd mechanics,contractors, and tradesmen in

America and England can attest. But while this is an additional

inducement to buyers, I am sure the new industry appeals to a loftier

emotion than that of mere money-making. America, in fact, is ripe for

this improvement. The modern phrase of ambition here in America is

"social status;" and dealers in heraldry are doing a business so

thriving in coats of arms for seal rings and scented note-paper, that I

fancy it is this that has suggested the trade in noble titles. The

village of Podunk looks down on the neighboring town of Hardscrabble.

"Hardscrabble," say the scornful Podunkers, "plumes itself on its

wealth, but Podunk prides herself on her birth--on her extremely old

families!" In fact you find all over the republic people talking of

their aristocratic families, and their "refined neighborhood," and

"refined birth"--even where, after all, it may be only a case of refined

petroleum.

Here, then, is the sphere and the opportunity for the enterprising

middleman. He appeals to a tuft-hunting instinct so deep in human nature

that the mere surface difference of republic or monarchy hardly touches

it. In a London church you will see a pew full of ladies' maids, and

presently there is a great crowding and squeezing, and a low whisper of

"make room for Lady Philippa." It is only another lady's maid joining

her friends; but they all get titles by reflection. Turn from this scene

to the New York area steps, and the artful little rascal who is peddling

strawberries, says to Bridget, who answers the bell, "Have some berries,

_lady_?" knowing that this will make a market, if anything can. The fact

is, we all like to be "Colonel" and "Deacon" and "Doctor," instead of

simple Jones, Brown, and Robinson; calling us "the judge" or "alderman"

is a perpetual titillation of a pleasant feeling. "Good morning, Mr.

Secretary," or, "I hope you are very well, State Senator," is a greeting

that carries a kind of homage with it; and from that you go upward in

titular recognition of official eminence until you come to "His Great

Glorious and most Excellent Majesty, who reigns over the Kingdoms of

Thunaparanta and Tampadipa and all the Umbrella-Bearing Chiefs of the

Eastern Country, the King of the Rising Sun, Lord of the Celestial

Elephants, Master of Many White Elephants, the Great Chief of

Righteousness, King of Burmah."

_Macte virtute_ I would say, then, to the peddlers of stars, crosses,

garters, and A. S. S.'s. There are poverty-stricken principalities and

hard-up beys and khedives enough to find ribbons for a thousand American

buttonholes, and to turn ten thousand of our exemplary fellow citizens

to chevaliers. An envious public sentiment might prevent the wearing of

all the ribbons and crosses that a liberal man of means could buy; but

decorations, like doorplates, are "so handy to have in the house." The

centennial year, by bringing to our shores a shoal of titled personages,

has presumably whetted the appetite of our people for heraldic

distinctions. But for years before we had even the village tailor

appearing occasionally in the local newspaper as Sir Knight Shears, and

the apothecary as Most Worthy Grand Commander and Puissant Potentate

Senna. If it is pleasant for Bobby Shears and Sammy Senna to be knighted

by their cronies and customers, how much more agreeable to the American

mind a decoration and investiture from a real prince!

The possibilities, to be sure, are limited. Aristocratic exclusiveness

confines the Garter to twenty-five persons, the Order of the Thistle is

only for Scotch nobles, and the Iron Cross of Savoy is purely Italian;

military or naval services are required for the St. George of Russia and

the Victoria Cross; and it is to be feared that some sort of illustrious

services would be needed even for the Leopold of Belgium, the Iron Cross

of Prussia, the St. James of Spain, or the Tower and Sword of Portugal.

But in the little principalities of Germany, where the people are

ravenous for titular distinctions, there is a large supply; and as, in

fine, there are said to be sixscore orders of chivalry scattered over

both Christian and Mussulman lands, a wealthy aspirant may not despair

of reaching one or two of them without the pangs of knight errantry.

PHILIP QUILIBET.

SCIENTIFIC MISCELLANY.

COMPLICATIONS OF THE CHANNEL TUNNEL.

Baron von Weber, a distinguished English engineer, predicts that the

Channel tunnel between England and France, if constructed, will be the

cause of great annoyance to English railway managers, and bring forward

some very acute observations in support of this opinion.

_The English railway system was a world of its own_; it was an insular

world which could hardly have been more peculiar if it had belonged to

another quarter of the globe altogether. All this, however, will change

as soon as the tunnel is pierced between England and the Continent.

_England will then no longer be an island, but a peninsula_, and

although the isthmus which connects it with the Continent will be

submarine, its effect on the railway system will be exactly the same as

if it were a natural one.

If the importance of the object to be attained by the Channel tunnel is

to bear any rational proportion at all to the means required, the tunnel

will be constructed only if a very considerable goods traffic between

the two shores is expected, besides the large passenger traffic. Such a

traffic, which would have to compete with sea carriage, is only possible

for goods if shifting the loads is completely avoided, and the wagons

and trucks can run from England far into the Continent and _vice versa_.

Now the English exports to the Continent far exceed the imports from it.

The English trucks, therefore, loaded with rails, machines, coals,

cotton goods, etc., will, after passing the tunnel, be scattered far and

wide on the continental railways (whose length exceeds threefold that of

the whole British system), and will have to run distances five times as

great as from London to the Highlands.

The English railway companies, who are now able to follow their rolling

stock almost with the naked eye, who know exactly how long each truck

will take to run the short distances in their island, who can,

therefore, provide proper loads both for the up and down journeys,

hence making the best use of their stock, and who are always aware in

whose hands their trucks are, will suddenly see a great number of them

disappear out of their sight and beyond their control on long journeys

and unknown routes. They will no longer be able to calculate, even

approximately, when the stock will return. England will therefore lose

an important percentage of its rolling stock, which will be but

incompletely replaced by the foreign wagons, which will remain in

England a much shorter time on account of the shorter distances. The

deficiency will have to be made up at considerable expense. The stock

will travel as far as the shores of the Black and Egean seas, to the

east coast of the Baltic, to the southernmost point of Italy, and to the

Pyrenees; it will pass over the lines of a dozen or more foreign

companies, be brought under the influence of three or four different

legislatures, police regulations, by-laws, Government inspections, etc.,

and where three or four different languages are officially in use.

Quite new legal obligations and intricacies will appear if the companies

having to forward goods direct into foreign countries send their wagons

into the territories of different jurisdictions. It will not be of much

use if the English companies attempt formally to confine their

transactions to the French railway which joins theirs. Claims from

Turkish, Russian, Austrian, Italian, German, Belgian, and French

railways will still be brought against them, in some cases requiring

direct and immediate communication.

A TOWN OF DWARFS.

A writer in the London "Times" describes the effect of excessive

intermarriage on the inhabitants of Protés, a little town in the

province of Santander, Spain. Until eighteen or nineteen years ago, the

village was quite shut off from the rest of the world. Its inhabitants,

from their ever-recurring intermarriages, had become quite a race of

dwarfs. On market days the priests might be seen, with long black coats

and high black hats, riding in to purchase the simple provision for the

week's consumption--men of little intelligence and no learning, sprung

from the lowest ranks. About eighteen years ago the Galician laborers,

or Gallegos, from the mines of Galicia, swarmed into the town for

lodgings, etc., and since their colonization the population has

increased in strength, stature, education, intellect, and morality.

Their intellects, also, have improved--intellects which had been

stunted, dwarfed, and ruined by their frequent intermarriages.

WHOOPING COUGH.

According to Dr. Sturges, an English physician, whooping cough is not

always to be escaped by preventing contagion, for at a certain age the

disposition toward this disease is so great that the child will

originate it. He says: "Whooping cough is a nervous disease of immature

life, due immediately, like nervous asthma, to a morbid exaltation of

sensibility of the bronchial mucous membrane. Although possible in a

modified form at all ages, it has its period of special liability and

full development simultaneously with that time of life when the nervous

system is irritable and the mechanism of respiration diaphragmatic. A

child of the proper age with catarrh and cough is thus on the very brink

of whooping cough. A large proportion of such children will develop the

disease for themselves upon casual provocation, all contagion and all

epidemic influence apart." Therefore he does not think contagion plays

the important part generally supposed, and the assumption of a specific

morbid poison is in his opinion entirely gratuitous. As to treatment he

says:

"The specific remedies for whooping cough (which have their season and

may be said now to include all drugs whatever of any potency) have all

of them a certain testimony in their favor. They agree in a single

point: whether by their nauseousness, the grievous method of their

application, or the disturbance they bring to the child's habits and

surroundings, the best vaunted remedies--emetics, sponging of the

larynx, ill-flavored inhalation, change of scene, beating with the

rod--all are calculated to _impress_ the patient, and find their use

accordingly.

BRITISH ASSOCIATION NOTES.

The committee appointed to test experimentally Ohm's law, that with any

conductor the electromotive force is proportioned to the current

produced, reports that this law is absolutely correct. If a conductor of

iron, platinum, or German silver of one square centimetre in section has

a resistance of one ohm for infinitely small currents, its resistance

when acted on by an electromotive force of one volt (provided its

temperature is kept the same) is not altered by so much as the millionth

of a millionth part. This fine result is the more gratifying since Ohm's

law is entirely empirical and does not rest at all upon logical

deduction.

The vast amount of water circulating through the solid earth is shown by

the calculations of the committee on the underground waters of the

Permian and New Red sandstones.

Taking an average rainfall of 30 inches per annum, and granting that

only 10 inches percolate into the rock, the supply of water stored up by

the Permian and New Red formations was estimated by the committee to

amount to 140,800,000 gallons per square mile per year. This rate would

give, for the 10,000 square miles covered by the formations, in Great

Britain, 1,408,000,000,000 gallons. Only a very small proportion of this

amount is made available for the supply of cities and towns.

The subject of the chemical constitution of matter was taken up by Mr.

Johnstone Stoney, F. R. S., who amused and interested the chemical

section by a number of drawings of tetrahedra, octahedra, etc., on to

which he dexterously stuck representations of oxygen atoms, chlorine

atoms, and so on. His general endeavor seemed to be to convince his

auditors that in most basic salts oxygen is divalent, being in direct

combination with the acidifying constituent of the molecule, but that

when oxygen is not so directly related to this constituent in basic

salts it is tetravalent.

In the geological section, Dr. Bryce observed that there are two lines

along which earthquakes are commonly observed in Scotland, the one

running from Inverness, through the north of Ireland, to Galway bay, and

the other passing east and west through Comrie. The phenomena of

earthquakes in the latter district are now being systematically

observed and recorded, under the direction of a committee appointed by

the British Association, seismometers being employed on the two

principles of vertical pendulum and delicately poised cylinders.

Arrangements have been made to ascertain whether shocks in this region

can be traced to any common central point, there being reason to believe

them to be connected with a mass of granite in Glen Lednoch, whose

position was indicated on a map exhibited by the author. He thought the

Comrie earthquakes may be explained on Mr. Mallet's theory of a shock

produced by the fall of huge masses of rock from the roof of huger

caverns in the earth's crust.

In a paper on the plants of the coal measures, Prof. W. C. Williamson

expressed his strong conviction that the flora of the coal measures

would ultimately become the battlefield on which the question of

evolution with reference to the origin of species would be fought out.

There would probably never be found another unbroken period of a

duration equal to that of the coal measures. Further, the roots, seeds,

and the whole reproductive structure of the coal-measure plants are all

present in an unequalled state of preservation. With reference to

calamites, Prof. Williamson said that what had formerly been regarded as

such had turned out to be only casts in sand and mud of the pith of the

true plant. He had lately obtained a specimen of calamite with the bark

on which showed a nucleal cellular pith, surrounded by canals running

lengthwise down the stem; outside of these canals wedges of true

vascular structure; and lastly, a cellular bark.

In the department of anthropology, Dr. Phené read a paper "On Recent

Remains of Totemism in Scotland." He defined Totemism as a form of

idolatry; a totem was either a living creature or a representation of

one, mostly an animal, very seldom a man. It was considered, from

reference to Pictish and other devices, that a dragon was a favorite

representative among such people of Britain as had not been brought

under Roman sway.

Mr. W. J. Knowles read a paper "On the Classification of Arrowheads,"

recommending the use of the following terms: stemmed, indented,

triangular, leaf-shaped, kite-shaped, and lozenge-shaped. Commander

Cameron, the African explorer, mentioned that arrow-heads of the same

shape as many exhibited by Mr. Knowles were in use in various African

tribes. One shape was formed so as to cause the arrow to rotate, and was

principally used for shooting game at long distances. The shape of the

arrows varied according to the taste of the makers; in one district

there were forty or fifty different shapes.

Commander Cameron gave drawings of the men with horns, a tribe of which

has been found by Captain J. S. Hay. According to the reproductions of

these drawings by the illustrated papers, these horns are very

prominent, and project forward from the cheekbone.

Mr. Gwin-Jeffreys, whose experience in deep-sea dredging makes his

opinion valuable, said that telegraph engineers did not sufficiently

take account of the sharp stones on the sea bottom, but assumed too

readily that they had to deal with a soft bottom only.

Mr. John Murray of the Challenger expedition announced that meteoric

dust is found in the sea ooze, a result that follows as a matter of

course from the discovery that this cosmic dust is falling all over the

earth.

AN ENGLISH CROP.

The yearly trial of harvesting machines was made this year at

Leamington, and the rye grass field, where the reapers and mowers were

worked, has its history given in the "Engineer," London. "It will be

interesting if we first describe this rye grass crop and the preceding

crop. A crop of wheat was grown in this field of seven acres last year,

and by the end of September it was well cultivated and sown with rye

grass seed. Three crops before this have been cut this year, the weight

of which was about eight tons to the acre for each crop, and as the

selling price was 1s. 6d. (36 cents) per cwt., this was at the rate of

£12 ($60) per acre per crop, or £36 per acre for the three crops. Had

not the last crop been set apart for the reaper and mower trials, it

would have been cut three weeks ago, when there were again about eight

tons to the acre. As it was, however, last week the crop had gone too

much to seed, and was too much laid for being of prime quality; the

result of which is, Mr. Tough, the owner, reckons the plants are too

much spent to stand well through a second year, and he therefore

contemplates turning it over in the spring for mangolds. Mr. Tough

calculated, however, that there were ten tons to the acre this cut, and

lots of carts and vans came to take the best of it; that is, the parts

which were not laid and yellow at the bottom, at the same price, 1s. 6d.

per cwt. The carts are weighed in over a weigh-bridge, and weighed out

again after the buyers have loaded up as much as they choose or require.

We may add this is better than selling by square measure. As to the next

growth, Mr. Tough says he shall get two more fair cuts this autumn if

the weather be warm, and he expects the two together will weigh eight

tons per acre more. As there will be a certain sale for this at 1s. 6d.

per cwt., this year's yield will realize the great return of £60 ($300)

per acre.

INFLUENCE OF WHITE COLORS.

Prof. Wallace gave at Glasgow some curious speculations based upon the

peculiarities observable in white animals. He had been discussing at

great length and with rare knowledge the distribution of butterflies,

remarking that some of the island groups were noticeably light-colored,

and endeavored to connect their color with their environment as follows:

Some very curious physiological facts, bearing upon the presence or

absence of white colors in the higher animals, have lately been adduced

by Dr. Ogle. It has been found that a colored or dark pigment in the

olfactory region of the nostrils is essential to perfect smell, and this

pigment is rarely deficient except when the whole animal is pure white.

In these cases the creature is almost without smell or taste. This, Dr.

Ogle believes, explains the curious case of the pigs in Virginia adduced

by Mr. Darwin, white pigs being poisoned by a poisonous root, which does

not affect black pigs. Mr. Darwin imputed this to a constitutional

difference accompanying the dark color, which rendered what was

poisonous to the white-colored animals quite innocuous to the black. Dr.

Ogle, however, observes, that there is no proof that the black pigs eat

the root, and he believes the more probable explanation to be that it

is distasteful to them, while the white pigs, being deficient in smell

and taste, eat it, and are killed. Analogous facts occur in several

distinct families. White sheep are killed in the Tarentino by eating

Hypericum Criscum, while black sheep escape: white rhinoceroses are said

to perish from eating Euphorbia Candelabrum; and white horses are said

to suffer from poisonous food, where colored ones escape. Now it is very

improbable that a constitutional immunity from poisoning by so many

distinct plants should in the case of such widely different animals be

always correlated with the same difference of color; but the facts are

readily understood if the senses of smell and taste are dependent on the

presence of a pigment which is deficient in wholly white animals. The

explanation has, however, been carried a step further, by experiments

showing that the absorption of odors by dead matter, such as clothing,

is greatly affected by color, black being the most powerful absorbent,

then blue, red, yellow, and lastly white. We have here a physical cause

for the sense inferiority of totally white animals which may account for

their rarity in nature. For few, if any, wild animals are wholly white.

The head, the face, or at least the muzzle or the nose, are generally

black. The ears and eyes are also often black; and there is reason to

believe that dark pigment is essential to good hearing, as it certainly

is to perfect vision. We can therefore understand why white cats with

blue eyes are so often deaf; a peculiarity we notice more readily than

their deficiency of smell or taste.

If then the prevalence of white-coloration is generally accompanied with

some deficiency in the acuteness of the most important senses, this

color becomes doubly dangerous, for it not only renders its possessor

more conspicuous to its enemies, but at the same time makes it less

ready in detecting the presence of danger. Hence, perhaps, the reason

why white appears more frequently in islands where competition is less

severe and enemies less numerous and varied. Hence, also, a reason why

albinoism, although freely occurring in captivity, never maintains

itself in a wild state, while melanism does. The peculiarity of some

islands in having all their inhabitants of dusky colors--as the

Galapagos--may also perhaps be explained on the same principles; for

poisonous fruits or seeds may there abound, which weed out all white or

light-colored varieties, owing to their deficiency of smell and taste.

We can hardly believe, however, that this would apply to white-colored

butterflies, and this may be a reason why the effect of an insular

habitat is more marked in these insects than in birds or mammals. But

though inapplicable to the lower animals, this curious relation of sense

acuteness with colors may have had some influence on the development of

the higher human races. If light tints of the skin were generally

accompanied by some deficiency in the senses of smell, hearing, and

vision, the white could never compete with the darker races, so long as

man was in a very low and savage condition, and wholly dependent for

existence on the acuteness of his senses. But as the mental faculties

become more fully developed and more important to his welfare than mere

sense acuteness, the lighter tints of skin, and hair, and eyes, would

cease to be disadvantageous whenever they were accompanied by superior

brain power. Such variations would then be preserved; and thus may have

arisen the Xanthochroic race of mankind, in which we find a high

development of intellect accompanied by a slight deficiency in the

acuteness of the senses as compared with the darker forms.

AN INVOLVED ACCIDENT.

Though American recklessness of life is proverbial among foreigners, we

may be thankful that India-rubber bags of explosive gases are not

carried by ignorant boys through our streets, as in Newcastle, England.

The practice resulted by a singular chain of mishaps in a violent

explosion. The first error was in using a bag for conveying an explosive

gas; the second in using a _leaky_ bag; the third in the experimenter,

who put coal gas into a bag containing oxygen; the fourth in sending a

boy to deliver it. Then comes a chapter of results. The boy became tired

and stopped to rest, dropping the bag on the pavement. Just as he did so

a passer-by lit his pipe and threw the burning match down. By chance it

fell upon the innocent looking bag, and probably just at the spot where

it leaked. After the consequent explosion only two pieces of the bag

could be found, one of which was thrown through the top windows of the

bank. Even the sound wave, or wave of concussion, had a mind to

distinguish itself. It entirely missed the first floor windows of the

bank, and left them uninjured, though the windows in both the ground

floor and the second floor were broken. The wave seems to have crossed

the street, smashing the ground windows there, and then been deflected

back across the street and upward to the top story of the bank.

AN OLD AQUEDUCT SYSTEM.

Ancient life is not usually considered to have been very cleanly, but it

is to the credit of the Romans that as much as 2,200 years ago they made

up their minds to reject the water of the Tiber as unfit to drink. They

hunted for springs in the mountains, and in the course of a few

centuries so many aqueducts were built that Rome had theoretically a

better supply of water than any modern city enjoys. Practically,

however, the Romans suffered from a peculiar kind of water pilfering.

Instead of 400,000,000 gallons daily which the springs furnished, the

city received only 208,000,000 gallons. This immense loss, says a

careful paper by the Austrian engineer, E. H. d'Avidor, arose partly

through neglect of the necessary repairs in the aqueducts, but still

more through the water being positively _stolen_. For one of the

principal favors by which the State and the emperors were in the habit

of rewarding minor services was by granting concessions for the _lost_

water; that is, for the water which escaped through the overflow of the

reservoirs, cisterns, and public fountains, or through the defects in

the aqueducts and mains. The consequence, of course, was that every

landed proprietor who had obtained a concession for the waste water

escaping from an aqueduct passing through his grounds was anxious to

increase this waste as much as possible--and from this wish to

intentional injury was but a step. The overseers and slaves in charge

were constantly bribed to abstain from repairing damages which had

arisen, or to cause new ones to arise, and these abuses reached such a

pitch that one aqueduct (Tepula) brought _no_ water whatever to Rome

during several years, the whole having been wasted, or rather abstracted

on its way. The irregularities of the water supply were still further

increased by the nature of the mains and distributing pipes, which, as I

have mentioned, were mere lead plates soldered into a pear-shaped

section, incapable of resisting even the most moderate pressure and

liable to injury by a common knife, so that any evil-disposed person

could tap the main almost wherever he pleased. At a later period,

indeed, the Romans appear to have used short clay pipes; lengths of such

mains have been discovered, consisting of two-feet spigot and socket

pipes carefully laid in and covered with a bed of concrete. These have

outlasted all the lead pipes, and are still frequently found in good

condition.

In the reign of Augustus, when Rome had about 350,000 inhabitants within

its walls, there was a supply of something like 680 gallons per head;

that is, about forty times as much as the valuation for Vienna. But

there were in ancient Rome no less than 1,352 public fountains, 591 jet

fountains, 19 large fortified camps or barracks, 95 thermæ or immense

public baths, and 39 arenas or theatres, all of which were supplied with

a superfluity of constantly flowing water. The reservoirs contained only

about 6,000,000 gallons, and the distribution must have been very

irregular, and it has been calculated that some houses received ten

times as much water as others. Just as the Western miner reckons the

quantity of water by the _inch_, the Roman estimated it by the

_quinarius_, or amount that could flow through a pipe of one and a

quarter _finger_ diameter, under a head of twelve inches. This would

yield about ninety-two gallons in twelve hours, and the price was so low

that the householder paid only about half a cent _per year_ for each

gallon supplied daily. Ninety-two gallons a day would therefore cost

less than half a dollar a year. (In New York it would cost nearly $18.)

But though cheap, the water was not a vested right of all citizens. The

poor had it for nothing in the ample baths, wash houses, and fountains,

but householders could only obtain the right of water supply by a

petition to the consul, and in later times to the emperor himself; even

then, however, with difficulty. It was a matter of favor and a reward

of merit, that applied only to the person to whom it was granted, not

transferable by gift or sale, and which lapsed with the death of the

owner or the sale of the house for which it had been granted.

GALVANISM CANNOT RESTORE EXHAUSTED VITALITY.

Dr. B. W. Richardson says that artificial respiration is a much more

effective means of restoring the drowned or asphyxiated than galvanism.

By the use of an intermittent current of galvanism it is possible to

make the respiratory muscles of an animal recently dead act in precise

imitation of life, and the heart can be excited into brisk contraction

by the same means. But the result was that "the muscles excited by the

current dropped quickly into irrevocable death through becoming

exhausted under the stimulus, and that in fact the galvanic battery,

according to our present knowledge of its use in these cases, is an all

but certain instrument of death. By subjecting animals to death from the

vapor of chloroform in the same atmosphere, and treating one set by

artificial respiration with the double-acting pump, and the other set by

artificial respiration excited by galvanism, I found that the first

would recover in the proportion of five out of six, the second in

proportion of one out of six. Further, I found that if during the

performance of mechanical artificial respiration the heart were excited

by galvanism, death is all but invariable." This results from the fact

that "the passage of a galvanic current through the muscles of a body

recently dead confers on those muscles no new energy; that the current

in its passage only excites temporary contraction; that the force of

contraction resident in the muscles themselves is but educed by the

excitation, and to strike the life out of the muscles by the galvanic

shock without feeding the force, expended by contraction, from the

centre of the body, is a fatal principle of practice."

CURIOUS OPTICAL EXPERIMENTS.

Prof. Nipher of the Washington university at St. Louis describes some

optical illusions, easily tried and apparently very singular, as

follows: 1. Fold a sheet of writing paper into a tube whose diameter

is about three cm. Keeping both eyes open, look through the tube with

one eye, and look at the hand with the other, the hand being placed

close by the tube. An extraordinary phenomenon will be observed. A hole

the size of the tube will appear cut through the hand, through which

objects are distinctly visible. That part of the tube between the eye

and the hand will appear transparent, as though the hand was seen

through it. This experiment is not new, but I have never seen it

described. The explanation of it is quite evident.

2. Drop a blot of ink upon the palm of the hand, at the point where the

hole appears to be, and again observe as before. Unless the attention be

strongly concentrated upon objects seen through the tubes the ink-spot

will be visible within the tube (apparently), but that part of the hand

upon which it rests will be invisible, unless special attention be

directed to the hand. Ordinarily the spot will appear opaque. By

directing the tube upon brilliantly illuminated objects, it will,

however, appear transparent, and may be made to disappear by proper

effort. By concentrating the attention upon the hand, it may also be

seen within the tube (especially if strongly illuminated), that part

immediately surrounding the ink spot appearing first.

3. Substitute for the hand a sheet of unruled paper, and for the ink

spot a small hole cut through the paper. The small hole will appear

within the tube, distinguishing itself by its higher illumination, the

paper immediately surrounding it being invisible. Many other curious

experiments will suggest themselves. For example: if an ink spot

somewhat larger than the tube be observed, the lower end of the tube

will appear to be blackened on the inside.

ICE MACHINES.

Ice machines are constructions designed to employ the heat generated

from coal in extracting the heat stored up in water at the ordinary

temperature. One ton of coal will make 15 tons of ice, and yet only

about 1 per cent. of the power used is utilized, these machines being

especially wasteful of heat. The work is done through the medium of some

volatile fluid, like ether or ammonia, or by the use of previously

cooled air. Raoul Pictet, who advocates the employment of another

fluid--sulphurous acid solution--says that every machine must comply

with five conditions: 1. Too great pressure must not occur in any part

of the apparatus. 2. The volatile liquid employed ought to be so

volatile that there will be no danger of air entering. 3. It is

necessary to have a system of compression which does not require the

constant introduction of grease or of foreign materials into the

machine. 4. The liquid must be stable, it must not decompose by the

frequent changes of condition, and it must not exert chemical action on

the metals of which the apparatus is constructed. 5. Lastly, it is

necessary, as far as possible, to remove all danger of explosion and of

fire, and for this reason the liquid must not be combustible. The only

substance, in his opinion, that answers these requirements is sulphurous

acid. This subject is a very important one. If the utilization of heat

could be carried to 3 per cent., as in most machines, it might be

possible to make ice cheaper in New York than to gather, store, and

transport it.

AMERICAN ANTIQUITIES.

Some months ago the telegraph announced that a Congress of Americanistes

had met in Nancy in France, and few people in this country could imagine

who the congressmen were or whether they were of this country. It was,

in fact, the meeting of a society, composed chiefly of Europeans, which

means to prosecute studies in the history, language, and character of

American aborigines. This is a laudable work. America probably offers

the most important field for ethnological study in the world. The great

extent of her two continents gave the freest scope for the complete

development of whatever capacity for civilization her people had; and

yet savagism continued here for many centuries after it had ceased in

Europe. Thus the student in going back three hundred years can penetrate

the past as far in this country as he can reach in Europe by pursuing

his inquiries back for two to three thousand years. Under ordinary

circumstances this fact would make American history much easier to study

than those of Europe where the remnants left by the savage tribes are

dimmed by an extraordinary progress or covered by the débris of

centuries of movement. But the truth is it is about as easy to learn the

habits of the ancient Britons as those of the American tribes, even the

most civilized, five centuries ago. This is partly due to the wanton

destruction of valuable records by the early conquerors and partly to

the prepossession that most men, even able ones, seem to be shackled

with; namely, that the origin of America's former inhabitants is to be

sought in some people of Asia. If they would leave that question for the

twentieth century to decide, and begin a painstaking inquiry into what

was going on in this country before its discovery, ask not _who_, but

what sort of men inhabited it, their habits and their relations, the

gentlemen who compose this society of Americanistes would probably reach

valuable results. There is plenty to occupy them. If they do not want to

grapple at once such a knotty subject as the relation of the Mound

Builders to the existing tribes, let them explore Spain for relics of

the Aztecs. It is highly probable that records of the most precious

character are still to be found there in public archives and in private

hands, the descendants perhaps of common soldiers of Cortes's army, who

were quite likely to send home during and after the Conquest things that

were odd and quaint to them and which would be invaluable to us now. As

it is, the time of the Nancy Congress of Americanistes has been too much

occupied with efforts to make the ancient inhabitants of this country a

tag to one of the numerous Asian migrations. All such attempts have been

failures, for the simple reason that we do not have facts enough to

prove _any_ theory. Still they have done some good work, and though the

subject is not of the most importance, we can but think that M.

Comettant's paper on "Music in America" before its discovery by Columbus

must have been as correct in purpose as it appears daring in subject.

* * * * *

Some seeds will germinate when placed between pieces of ice and kept at

a freezing temperature; and it is thought that, this method will afford

an easy means of selecting varieties of seed which will bear a cold

climate.

* * * * *

The explosion in the coal mines at Jabin, Belgium, last February, was

due to the ignition of fine coal powder suspended in the air.

* * * * *

A Vienna lady, who had been maid of honor to the Empress Maria Theresa,

lately died in that city at the age of one hundred and nineteen years.

That is certainly a well established case of longevity extending beyond

a century.

* * * * *

The rare metal vanadium is worth 13,000 francs ($2,600) per pound; about

eight times as much as gold. And yet vanadium is, as Dr. Hayes has

shown, a very widely diffused metal. It forms, however, only a mere

trace in most rocks.

* * * * *

W. Siemens has lately determined velocity of propagation of electricity

in suspended iron telegraph wires, and finds it to be between 30,000 and

35,000 miles per second. Kirchhoff had determined it at 21,000 miles and

Wheatstone at 61,900 miles.

* * * * *

Prof. Forel of Switzerland has proved that the water of lakes oscillates

almost constantly from one bank to another, and this not only from end

to end, but also from side to side. Thus the Swiss lakes have two

_Seiches_, as they are called, in opposite directions.

* * * * *

The sewage schemes have had a good many indignant critics and fervent

defenders. Of the former is Mr. Louis Thompson, who says that the sewage

discharged into seacoast harbors floats on the surface, being lighter

than salt water. Its solid portions are cast up on the shore and in

shoal places, there to become the food of animals, among which are shell

fish, that serve for man's food.

* * * * *

Boys' kites can be kept from plunging by making both the wood cross

pieces in the form of a bow, instead of flat. The string is placed a

little above the centre of the upright bow, and a very light tail

attached. These kites are very steady, and if a string attached to one

side of the centre is pulled after the kite has risen, it can be made to

fly as much as thirty degrees from the wind. For this reason it is

proposed to use kites for bringing a vessel to windward.

CURRENT LITERATURE.

Mrs. Annie Edwards's last book[K] does not open well in point of style.

The first paragraph of the first chapter is: "She was a woman of nearly

thirty when I first saw her; a woman spiritless and worn beyond her

years," etc. This beginning not only a chapter but a book with a pronoun

implying an antecedent is very bad, in the low and vulgar way of

badness. It brings to mind the superhuman daily efforts of the "American

humorist" of journalism to be funny; and it should be left to him and to

his kind. And in the next paragraph Mrs. Edwards describes her heroine

as "walking wearily along the weary street of Chesterford St. Mary." Bad

style again, and this time in the way of affectation. A man's way may be

weary if he is tired or weak; but not even then should it be so called,

when he has just been spoken of as weary himself, or as walking wearily;

and weary as applied descriptively to a village street is almost

nonsense. These defects are not important, but they arrest attention as

being at the very opening of the story. And it must be confessed that

for a chapter or two "A Point of Honor" is rather slight in texture and

commonplace. It is, however, interesting enough to lead us on, and the

reader who holds his way into the third or fourth chapter is repaid. The

authoress then warms up to her work, and begins to show her quality,

which is that of a true literary artist. We do not say a great artist,

be it observed, but a true artist. She paints only _genre_ pictures; but

unlike most works of that class (on canvas at least), they are not mere

representations of pretty faces and pretty clothes. She works with a

real knowledge of the human heart, and her work is full of feeling. She

does nothing in the grand style; even her most loving women do not have

grand passions; but all her work is truthful and warm with real life,

and her earnest people are really in earnest. The story of "A Point of

Honor" is interesting, although its incidents are not all out of the

common way. Gifford Mohun, the handsome young heir of Yatton, an estate

in Devonshire, loves, when he is only twenty, one Jane Grand, a

beautiful and sweet-natured girl who is only a year younger than

himself. Nothing is known of her history. She herself does not know her

own parentage. All this has been concealed from her at her father's

request, and with some reason; for it comes out that she is the daughter

of a felon, who died in the hulks, by a minor French actress, a

modification of whose name, Grandet, she bears. When she knows this, she

refuses to taint Mohun's name and life with such dishonor, and he

accepts her decision; doing so with two implications on the part of the

authoress: first, that he was selfish in doing so at all; next, that

doing it he did it coldly and with a false affectation of feeling. He

leaves Yatton and its neighborhood, and plunges into dissipation. Jane

remains at Chesterford, leading her solitary life and loving him.

Meantime the vicar, Mr. Follett, a man of strong nature, much

tenderness, and great tact, whose character is admirably drawn, loves

Jane, and quietly bides his time. After ten years, however, Mohun

returns, walks into Jane's parlor, and asks her to be friends with him.

She, loving him no less than ever, assents gladly, and thereafter he is

almost domesticated in her cottage. He has become somewhat gross in

manner and in speech, as well as in person; but Jane loves him, and

watches for his coming, day by day, as when she was a girl. This goes on

for some months, with a slight admixture of the curate, when all at once

a new personage appears upon the scene. Mohun receives a letter, which

he shows to Jane, and asks her advice about. It is from a Matty

Fergusson, whom he remembers as the untidy little daughter of some

disreputable people he knew something of at a German watering place. She

tells a sad tale of destitution, and asks him to recommend her to some

of his friends as a governess or companion. He is disgusted and

angered at the intrusion, and proposes to send her a five-pound note, or

perhaps ten pounds, and so end the matter. But Jane, whom he asks to

write the letter for him, is touched with pity for the poor girl's

forlornness and suffering, and writes an invitation to her to come to

Chesterford and visit her for a week. She brings a Greek horse within

the walls of her little Troy. She and Gifford expect to see a poor,

meek, limp, shabbily dressed slip of a girl; but Miss Matty Fergusson

enters the cottage a tall and magnificently beautiful young woman; her

grandeur both of toilet and person quite dwarfing the poor little

cottage and its poor little mistress. The end is now visible. Matty

Fergusson is the adventuress daughter of an adventuress mother. Nothing

was true in her letter except the story of her poverty; and she has

played this game with the direct purpose of catching the master of

Yatton. She succeeds; and when Jane speaks to him about its being time

for his overwhelming young friend to depart, he becomes rude and makes a

brutal speech, which undeceives Jane, and kills her love for him. Mohun,

however, does not give himself up to the Fergusson without an attempt at

freedom, and an endeavor to resume his relations with Jane, whom he now

appreciates at her full worth. He confesses and deplores his fault and

begs forgiveness, and offers to break with Miss Fergusson at any cost,

if Jane will give him back her love. But she, although she forgives,

will not receive him again on the old footing, and he drives off with

his handsome adventuress wife, and Jane loves and is married to Mr.

Follett. The story is told with great and yet with very simple skill,

and the characters of the few personages are revealed rather than

portrayed. And by the way, we remark upon Mrs. Edwards's ability to

interest her readers and work out a story with few materials. She rarely

depends for her effects upon more than four or five personages. She is

equally reserved in her manner. She does not paint black and white, but

with human tints only in light and shadow. In this book Mohun's

selfishness is shown with a very delicate hand, and although we are left

in no doubt as to his real character, he is dealt with in such an

impartial and artistic spirit, that some similarly selfish men will

apologize for him and some others will, it may be hoped, read

themselves in him and struggle against the worse part of their natures.

Jane is, perhaps, more angel than woman, but then a good woman who loves

is so often truly angelic with an admixture of human passion that makes

her more loveable as well as more loving than any angel ever was, that

we cannot find fault with poor Jane's perfection. In reading this book

we cannot but remark the common nature of its subject in women's novels

nowadays. The themes on which they write endless variations are the

selfishness of men, and the unselfishness of women in love. Of the men

in the women-written novels of the day, so many are plausible,

agreeable, clever, accomplished, heartless creatures; only a few escape

the general condemnation, and they are those queer creatures "women's

men"--impossible, and bores, like Daniel Deronda. The heroines, major

and minor, love devotedly. But George Eliot does not fall into the

latter blunder. For some reason she is able to see the feminine as well

as the masculine side of social and sexual selfishness. This treatment

of men on the part of the sex is remarkable, for women themselves will

admit and do admit, in unguarded moments, that there is somewhat less of

disinterestedness in this matter on woman's side than on man's. But the

point, we suppose, is this, that woman, when she does love with all her

heart, loves with a blind devotion, an exclusiveness of admiration and

of passion, and a persistency, which she demands from man, which, not

having, she doubts whether she is loved at all, and which, it must be

confessed, rare in woman, is much more rare in man, with whom indeed it

is exceptional. The truth is that man's love is as different from

woman's as his body is; but it is, therefore, none the less worth having

if she would only think so. Man is made to have less exclusiveness of

feeling in this respect than woman has. He would not be man else, nor

she woman if she were otherwise. The mistake is in her expectation of

receiving exactly the same as she gives. She has found out that she does

not get it, or does so very rarely, and the men in women's novels of the

Gifford Mohun type are one of the ways in which she proclaims and

avenges her wrongs.

--"The Barton Experiment," by "the author of 'Helen's Babies,'"[L]

cannot be called a novel--hardly a tale--and yet it is a story--the

story of a great "temperance movement" at Barton, which is supposed to

be a village somewhere at the west--in Kentucky, we should say, from

certain local references. We do not know who the author of Helen's

Babies is--he, and Helen, and her babies being alike strangers to us;

but he is a clever writer, and a humorist, with no little dramatic

power. His personages are studies from nature, and have individuality

and life; albeit they reveal a somewhat narrow horizon of observation.

He uses largely, but always humorously, the western style of

exaggeration; as, for example, when he makes one of his reformers tell a

steamboat captain that if he will stop drinking whiskey, he will make a

reputation, and "be as famous as the Red River raft or the Mammoth

Cave--_the only thing of the sort west of the Alleghanies_." He

describes his people in a way that shows that he has them in the eye of

his imagination; as in this portrait of a Mrs. Tappelmine: "With face,

hair, eyes, and garments of the same color, the color itself being

neutral; small, thin, faded, inconspicuous, poorly clad, bent with

labors which had yielded no return, as dead to the world as saints

strive to be, _yet remaining in the world for the sake of those whom she

had often wished out of it_," etc. The book is in every way clever, and

its purpose is admirable--the lesson which it is written to teach being

that personal effort and personal sacrifice on the part of reformers is

necessary to reclaim hard drinkers. But the radical fault of all such

moral story writing is that the writer makes his puppets do as he likes.

The drinking steamboat captain yields to the persuasions of his friend,

and even submits to necessary personal restraint. But how if he had not

yielded? Old Tappelmine gives up his whiskey for the sake of money and

employment, which inducements are strongly backed by his neutral-colored

wife; but how if he had been brutally selfish and immovable? In both

these cases, and in all the others, failure was at least quite as likely

as success. People in real life cannot be managed as they can upon

paper. Still the book contains a truth, and is likely to do good.

--The same publishers have also brought out an illustrated book by

Bayard Taylor,[M] which is suitable to the coming holiday season. It is

a collection of short tales of adventure in different parts of the

world, in which boys take a prominent part. It is one of the fruits of

the author's extended travels, and is manly, simple, and healthy--a very

good sort of book for those for whom it is intended, which, in these

days of mawkish or feverish "juvenile" literature, is saying much for

it.

--Why Miss Thacher should call a little book, which contains a little

collection of little sketches, "Seashore and Prairie," we do not see. It

is rather a big and an affected name for such a slight thing. But it is

bright and pleasant, and well suited to the needs of those who cannot

fix their attention long upon any subject. We regret to see in it marks

of that extravagance and affectation in the use of language which are

such common blemishes of style in our ephemeral literature. For example:

a very sensible and much needed plea for the preservation of birds, is

called "The Massacre of the Innocents;" and we are told that "a St.

Bartholomew of birds has been _inaugurated_." Miss Thacher should leave

this style of writing to the newspaper reporters.

--The large circle of readers who are interested in Palestine, and the

lands and waters round about it, will find Mr. Warner's last book of

travel[N] very pleasant reading--full of information and suggestion. He

observes closely, describes nature with a true feeling for her beauties,

and men with spirit and a fine apprehension of their peculiarities. He

is not very reverent, and breaks some idols which have been worshipped.

He is not an admirer of the Hebrews, or of anything that is theirs,

except their literature. His style is lively and agreeable, but we

cannot call it either elegant or correct. He tells some "traveller's

stories;" for instance, one about catching an eagle's feather on

horseback (pp. 103, 104). True he "has the feather to show;" but on the

whole he makes not too many overdrafts upon the credulity of his

readers, and does not color much too highly.

--In his latest tale[O] Mr. Yates introduces American characters,

following what seems to be the prevailing fashion among English authors,

especially those who are not of the first rank. Mr. Yates manages his

foreign scenes and characters with good judgment, but his Americans we

should not recognize as such without his introduction. The scene of the

story is in England. Sir Frederick Randall, a dissolute young nobleman,

is condemned to imprisonment, under an assumed name, for forgery. Making

his escape, he woos a beautiful and innocent American girl, the daughter

of a petroleum millionaire from Oil City. As he is already married, it

is necessary to dispose of one wife before he takes another. This he

does by throwing madam over a cliff by the seashore. Caught by

projecting bushes, she is, without his knowledge, rescued alive by some

Americans, who are yachting off the coast. One of these Americans has

long loved Minnie Adams, the pretty American girl, but she and her

parents are fascinated by Sir Frederick's title and the expected

introduction to high-class English society. Minnie marries the would-be

murderer, and after a year of trouble and brutal treatment, severe

sickness ensues, during which she is nursed by her husband's first and

only legal wife. Finally Sir Frederick is murdered by an old comrade of

his debaucheries, and the two wives are equitably distributed between

the two American gentlemen.

--Messrs. Hurd & Houghton are doing good service in reissuing the

Riverside edition of the Waverley Novels.[P] The well-chosen proportion

of page and type and the excellent work of the Riverside press have

combined to make these volumes, what American books are too apt not to

be--a thing of permanent beauty. The publishers intend to bring out the

edition quite rapidly. Five volumes are ready, and the others will

follow at the rate of one each month. The present is the great era of

mediocre men. A horde of novel writers gain their living successfully

enough, and we take them up and talk about what they are doing, and how

their works compare with each other, as if their doings had real

importance. But what are they to the enduring genius of Abbotsford? He

has not only proved an inexhaustible source of delight to two

generations of readers, but has founded an industry--the publication of

his works--which is likely to be for scores of years to come a permanent

source of livelihood to hundreds.

* * * * *

It is evident that we have not a new light of poetry in Mr. Voldo.[Q] He

tells us that this is a first attempt, and it may well be the last, for

he seems to have been led--and misled--into the practice of poetic

expression by a certain gift, in his case fatal, of rhythm. The flow of

his lines is far superior to the meaning or the expression. In fact the

latter is so involved and farfetched, that the former is often entirely

obscured. To find out what it is he tries to tell us would really be a

painful process, and the few attempts we have made were too immediately

fatiguing to produce any results. Two of his poems are worth reading,

one because its versification is well managed, and the other because its

story is simple and naturally told. It is a relief after so many pages

of overstraining at words, and it shows that Mr. Voldo can be really

pleasant, if he will only be simple. Well, two out of fifty is above the

average!

* * * * *

It is only two years since a prominent American geologist wrote to a

foreign scientific paper that he had been on the point of sending to

Germany for two or three men to assist him in an important State

survey.[R] His reason for this determination was that our country did

not possess men competent to find and follow up intelligently the

different strata; except those who were already engaged on other

surveys. Luckily this discreditable act was prevented by the sudden

abandonment of one of these other surveys, which released assistants

enough to satisfy this extremely difficult gentleman. The truth is that,

by some means, geological science has been pushed in this country with

great vigor and with grand results. Within the last ten years there has

been a revival of energy in that particular science which recalls the

golden days of Hugh Miller, Murchison, Agassiz, and Lyell. The time when

the very exacting gentleman, above alluded to, could not find helpers on

this side of the Atlantic, was the middle point around which were

grouped the surveys of Newberry and Andrews in Ohio, Clarence King in

Nevada, Whitney in California, Wheeler and Powell south of the Pacific

Railroad, and Hayden north of that line. Michigan was just finishing a

partial, but extremely productive, survey of her mineral regions.

Missouri had plunged hopefully into another. Pennsylvania was planning

the comprehensive work in which Leslie and his aids are now engaged.

Indiana, New Jersey, and other States had taken the great steps so much

desired by the initiated all over the world, and had made the geologist

a standing member of their government. All this had been done without

the _necessary_ importation of a foreigner. One or two foreigners had

obtained employment on these surveys, but only because they came here

and sought the work. Nearly every one of the young men who performed the

work of assistants was an American. It is safe to say that in this

revival of geological work from twenty to fifty young Americans have

learned to be scientific men. As to the results of their activity, it is

sufficient to read a report like that of Mr. Powell, to find how rapidly

they are adding to our knowledge of the earth's history, and even

altering the canons of scientific belief. Mr. Powell tells us that in

his first expedition, eight years ago, and for three years after that,

he tried hard to find in the west the equivalents of the State epochs

and periods so well known as the basis of geological nomenclature, and

nearly all taken from the exposures in New York and other Eastern and

Southeastern States. It was not until this attempt was abandoned that he

began to make progress. He had to study the western regions by

themselves, and leave correspondences to the future. That was the

experience of all the workers in the west, and it brings plainly to view

the great fact, of which not all, even of our best known geologists, are

yet fully persuaded, that the geological record, though doubtless a

unit, is not uniform over the whole country. These shackles thrown off,

the geology of the west leaped up with a vigor which is astonishing. It

seemed to be pretty evident, from Prof. Huxley's lectures here, that he

had not before imagined what results had been obtained in America. This

is not surprising. Few foreigners are able to keep along with the work

performed in this country, where there is such a direful supposed lack

of workers! It is a fact that at present there is no part of the world

where the discoveries made in this science are of so general importance

as here. The Rocky mountains owe their name "to great and widely spread

aridity," the mountains being "scantily clothed with vegetation and the

indurated lithologic formations rarely masked with soils." But there are

many systems of uplifts in this region, and Mr. Powell distinguishes

three in the field covered by his report. They are the Park mountains

("the lofty mountains that stand as walls about the great parks of

Southern Wyoming, Colorado, and Northern New Mexico"); the Basin Range

system (named by Gilbert from the fact that many of them surround basins

that have no drainage to the sea); and the Plateau Province. It is worth

remarking that in the west the geologist precedes or accompanies the

topographer, and accordingly has an opportunity to name the regions

according to real peculiarities rather than chance suggestions. The

future map will be significant of the past history as well as of the

ocular features of the landscape. Mr. Powell gives careful sections of

the strata in the Plateau Province, where they are about 46,000 feet

thick. Few persons imagine the vast amount of work, exploration, and

comparison which such drawings embody. The beds form a series of groups

unlike those of the New York geologists, but the great geologic ages are

as well defined as elsewhere. The synchronism remains to be fully

established by palæontological proofs. He thinks he has been able to fix

upon the true point of division between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic ages,

and to prove that coal was deposited through about 7,000 feet of

Cretaceous and about 4,500 feet of Cenozoic beds. Mr. Powell's literary

style is excellent--not involved, but clear and energetic. He was wise

to abandon the idea of publishing an itinerary, which would, as he says,

"encumber geological literature with a mass of undigested facts of

little value." Geology has enough of such meaningless reports. As it is,

we follow him with confidence, and he gives us a story that is plain and

comprehensible.

* * * * *

The publications of the Massachusetts Board of Health[S] have been of a

superior character, and have given that organization decided prominence

among similar American boards. The question of how to prevent river

pollution in their State they think can best be solved by placing

advisory power in the hands of some Government officer, upon whose

conclusions legislative action for each case should be based. This

officer would be paid by the parties in interest. Good results are to be

obtained only by comparing and altering when necessary what is done. In

this country too little is known about this subject, and the appointment

of an official "with power" is the first step toward knowledge. The

suggestions made as to the way to deal with sewage are also mostly good,

but it is doubtful whether general purification can wisely be enforced

in the present state of sanitary science. If there are any very bad

cases of pollution, they may properly be provided for in the way

suggested, and experience gained from them. The lack of experience here

is partially corrected by studying the work accomplished abroad; but a

rapid review of such work can never replace the slower results of

individual experience. The report of Mr. Kirkwood, the engineer, adds to

the abundant testimony we already have of the efficacy and power of

Nature's quietest work. Analyses show that the water of Charles river

above the Newton lower falls is, when filtered, fit, though barely fit,

to drink, and yet it has received the refuse of forty-two mills and

factories, with a population of 14,000 persons known to be sewering

into the river, and a population in the basin of three times that

number. The river has a dry-weather flow of only twenty million gallons

in twenty-four hours. On the general subject of sewage utilization the

secretary concludes that in this country the sewage has no value, but

can in some places, at least, be utilized without loss. In the death

rate of Massachusetts towns the village of Canton (4,192 population)

carries the palm, with only 11.9 deaths per thousand. Holyoke, 56.5 per

thousand, has the highest.

--The report that a city is to be built in England on strict sanitary

principles, in which man may, if he will, live to a hundred and fifty

years of age, will give additional interest to this address[T] in which

Dr. Richardson develops the project. The address was delivered a year

ago, when the Doctor was president of the Health Department of the

Social Science Association. It deserves attention because it indicates,

pretty nearly, the goal toward which all the conscious and unconscious

improvement in our living for centuries has tended. Whether man can

obtain such control over the duration of his life depends very largely

upon whether he finds himself able to submit to the discipline and

self-abnegation without which the mechanical improvements made will have

only partial success. Perfect living is not merely a thing of

appliances. These are necessary, but the subjection of the will to the

requirements of orderly conduct is equally necessary. However, Dr.

Richardson says that "Utopia is but another word for time," and it is

certain that his ideal of public and private life will be at least

approached by the slow progress of small improvements. Some people have

objected that they don't want to live a century and a half, and that a

city where men two hundred years of age might occasionally be seen

walking about is just the place they would most carefully avoid. But we

can none of us escape our fate. If society is progressing toward that

end, let us accept it, and even allow the men of science to hurry up

matters a century or two. It is, perhaps, significant that this change

in man's estate comes just at the time when a reduction in the rate of

interest is taking place, and it seems likely that a man will have to

live to a hundred years in order to accumulate enough to buy him a

house. When he has it, he will need another half century to enjoy it. At

all events read this ideal, extraordinary, and learned exposition of the

health of the future.

--The idea of collecting in one volume a concise statement of modern

theories of the mode in which we receive impressions is excellent, and

it has been well carried out by Prof. Bernstein.[U] Touch, sight,

hearing, smell, and taste are treated from an anatomical and

experimental point of view, and the researches of Helmholtz, Weber, and

the numerous band of investigators who have in late years devised so

many ingenious modes of testing the operation of these senses are well

represented. The book contains probably as much exact and accurate

information, and as thorough a treatment of the subject, as can be

contained in a volume of this size. It is an advanced treatise that

places the reader in possession of the latest theories on these occult

subjects. Of necessity it is not new; but this treatment and the facts

here given will be found novel by most readers.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote K: "_A Point of Honor._" By MRS. ANNIE EDWARDS. 16mo, pp. 325.

New York: Sheldon & Co.]

[Footnote L: "_The Barton Experiment._" By the author of "Helen's

Babies." New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.]

[Footnote M: "_Boys of Other Countries._ Stories for American Boys." By

BAYARD TAYLOR. 12mo, pp. 164. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.]

[Footnote N: "_In the Levant._" By C. D. WARNER. 12mo, pp. 374. Boston:

J. R. Osgood & Co.]

[Footnote O: "_Going to the Bad._ A Novel." By EDMUND YATES. Boston:

William F. Gill & Co. 75 cts.]

[Footnote P: "_Waverley Novels._" Riverside Edition. "Waverley," "Guy

Mannering," "Rob Roy," "The Antiquary." New York: Hurd & Houghton. $3.50

per volume.]

[Footnote Q: "_A Song of America, and Minor Lyrics._" By V. VOLDO. New

York: Hanscom & Co.]

[Footnote R: "_Report on the Geology of the Eastern Portion of the Unita

Mountains and Adjacent Country._" With Atlas. By J. W. POWELL.

Washington: Department of the Interior.]

[Footnote S: "_Seventh Annual Report of the State Board of Health of

Massachusetts._" Boston: Wright & Potter.]

[Footnote T: "_Hygeia_: A City of Health." By BENJAMIN WARD RICHARDSON.

MacMillan & Co.]

[Footnote U: "_The Five Senses of Man._" By JULIUS BERNSTEIN.

Illustrated. New York: D. Appleton & Co. (International Scientific

Series.)]

BOOKS RECEIVED.

"_Outlines of Lectures on the History of Philosophy._" By J. J.

ELMENDORF, L.L. D. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York.

"_Modern Materialism; its Attitude Toward Theology._" By J. MARTINEAU,

L.L. D. The same.

"_A Child's Book of Religion._" By O. B. FROTHINGHAM. The same.

"_An Alphabet in Finance._" By G. MCADAM. The same.

"_Roddy's Ideal._" By HELEN K. JOHNSON. The same.

"_History of French Literature._" By HENRI VAN LAREN. The same.

"_Lectures on the History of Preaching._" By J. A. BROADUS, D. D., LL.

D. Sheldon & Co., New York.

"_Why Four Gospels?_" By Rev. D. D. GREGORY. The same.

"_Rules for Conducting Business in Deliberative Assemblies._" By P. H.

MELL, D.D., LL.D. The same.

"_A Young Man's Difficulties with His Bible._" By D. W. FAUNCE, D.D. The

same.

"_A Vocabulary of English Rhymes._" By Rev. S. W. BARNUM. D. Appleton &

Co., New York.

"_The Carlyle Anthology._" By E. BARRETT. H. Holt & Co., New York.

"_Our Mutual Friend._" By CHARLES DICKENS. Condensed by R. Johnson. The

same.

"_Life and Times of William Samuel Johnston, LL.D._" By E. E. BEARDSLEY,

D.D., LL.D. Hurd & Houghton, New York.

"_Washington._ A Drama in Five Acts." By MARTIN F. TUPPER. J. Miller,

New York.

"_Castle Windows._" By L. C. STRONG. H. B. Nims & Co., Troy, N. Y.

"_That New World_, and Other Poems." By Mrs. S. M. B. PIATT. J. R.

Osgood & Co., Boston.

"_Light on the Clouds_; or, Hints of Comfort for Hours of Sorrow." By M.

J. SAVAGE. Lockwood, Brooks & Co., Boston.

"_In the Sky Garden._" By L. W. CHAMPNEY. The same.

"_The Religion of Evolution._" By M. J. SAVAGE. The same.

"_Student Life at Harvard._" The same.

"_Long Ago._ (A year of Child life)." By ELLIS GRAY. The same.

"_The Young Trail Hunters_; or, The Wild Riders of the Plains." By S. W.

COZZENS. Lee & Sheppard, Boston.

"_Vine and Olive_; or, Young America in Spain and Portugal." By W. T.

ADAMS (Oliver Optic). The same.

"_The National Ode._" By BAYARD TAYLOR. W. F. Gill & Co., Boston.

"_Hold the Fort._" By P. P. BLISS. The same.

"_The Poetical and Prose Writings of Charles Sprague._" A. Williams &

Co., Boston.

"_Corinne_; or, Italy. A Love Story." By MME. DE STAEL. T. B. Peterson &

Bro., Philadelphia.

"_Frank Nelson in the Forecastle_; or, The Sportsman's Club among the

Whalers." By HARRY CASTLEMON. The same.

"_Fridthjof's Saga._ A Norse Romance." By E. FEGNER, Bishop of Mexico.

S. C. Griggs & Co., Chicago.

"_Viking Tales of the North._" By ANDERSON. The same.

"_Michigan Board of Agriculture._ 1875." Lansing, Mich.

NEBULÆ.

--During the progress of the canvass for the Presidential election--in

our September number--we made a promise which seemed about the safest

that could be made, but which proved to be a rash one--so rash that at

this moment we are entirely unable to redeem it--as unable as if we had

undertaken to say which exhibitor at the Philadelphia Exhibition would

not get a medal. We said that we would give our readers accurate

information, in our December number, as to which party was likely to

carry the day. What may happen before these words are printed and laid

before our readers we cannot tell; and the experience of the past few

weeks has taught us caution as to prediction and promise, even upon

apparent certainty; but although the election is more than a month past,

_we_ do not know who is to be President, and no one is wiser on this

subject than we are. The matter is not one to be treated lightly. It is

of the gravest possible importance. No consequence of our civil war is

more serious or more deplorable than that condition of the former slave

States, which has caused this prolonged uncertainty with regard to the

result of the election, and that political state of the whole country

which has made this uncertainty the occasion of such intense and

embittered feeling, and such desperate measures by the managers of both

the great political parties. In fact, the war of secession is not at an

end. Twelve years have passed since the military forces of the seceders

surrendered to those of the Government, but the contest, or one arising

from it, prolongs itself into the present, when those are men who, when

the war broke out, were too young to understand its causes. And at the

same time we are suffering, in our prostrate trade and almost

extinguished commerce, another grievous consequence of the same dire

internecine struggle. Truly ourselves and our institutions are sorely

tried. A like combination of disastrous circumstances would bring about

a revolution in any other country. If we go through this trial safely,

we may not only feel thankful, but take some reasonable pride in the

national character and in the political institutions that will bear such

a long and severe strain without breaking. And yet we all have faith

that we shall endure it and come out in the end more stable and more

prosperous than ever.

--The cause of this trouble is a change in the political substance and

the political habits of the country, of which the average citizen seems

to have little knowledge and of which he takes less thought. We do not

refer to the change of the functions of the Electoral College from those

of a real electing body to those of a mere recorder of the votes of the

people of the several States, which has been much remarked upon of late

years. That change took place very early; and thus far it has been

productive of no trouble or even of inconvenience. If that were all,

there would be little need of any modification of our system of electing

the President. But there has been of later years--say within the last

half century--a change from the political condition of the country to

which the Electoral College was adapted. We are in the habit, in

patriotic moments, of lauding the wisdom and the foresight of the

fathers of the republic. And they were wise, and good, and patriotic

men; but as to their foresight, it would seem that we are to-day a

living witness that they were quite incapable of seeing into the

political future. We are now demanding that the Electoral College shall

be abolished, and the President be elected by a direct popular vote; and

yet nothing is surer than that the distinct purpose of the founders of

our Federal Union was to prevent such an election. Their design was to

establish, not a democratic government, working more or less by

mass-meeting--a direct vote of the mass of the citizens--but a

representative republican government, in which the people should commit

their affairs to their representatives, who should have full power to

manage them according to their discretion, entirely irrespective of the

dictation of their constituents, although not without respect for their

opinions and wishes. The doctrine of instruction, by which the

representative is turned into a mere delegate--a sort of political

attorney--is new and is entirely at variance with the design of the

founders of the republic, to which, of course, the Constitution was

adapted. It was supposed, assumed as a matter of course, by them that

there would always be a body of men of high character and intelligence,

who would have sufficient leisure to perform the functions of

legislators, governors, and other officers, for a small compensation,

and that the people at large would freely commit their affairs to these

gentlemen, choosing, of course, those whose general political views were

most in accordance with their own. So it was at the time of the war of

Independence, and at that of the formation of the Constitution. Of such

a political conception the Electoral College was a legitimate product.

The "Fathers" didn't _mean_ that the people should decide between the

merits of the candidates for the Presidency. They thought--and shall we

therefore decry their wisdom?--that a small body of intelligent and well

educated men, men of character and social position, accustomed to the

study of public affairs, was better fitted to choose such an officer as

the President of the United States than the whole mass of the people.

Moreover, the people themselves have changed, and have become in

substance and in condition something that the "Fathers" did not dream

of. States in which the vote of the mass of the citizens should be in

the hands of negroes or of emigrants from the peasant class of Europe

were not among the political conditions for which their foresight

provided.

--The great controlling fact in our politics is this one, so little

regarded not only by the general public, but by men in active political

life--the thorough change which has taken place in our society and in

the attitude of the people toward the Government. As a consequence of

this change, political power has passed almost entirely out of the hands

of the class of men to whom the framers of our Constitution intended to

commit the administration of the Government which they called into

being. It has fallen into those of men generally much inferior in

cultivation and in position. And as we have already said, the very

substance of the political constituency has changed. A suffrage

practically universal and a controlling vote in one part of the country

of emancipated negro slaves and in the other of uneducated foreign

emigrants was not the political power to which Franklin, and Jefferson,

and Hamilton and Adams, and their co-workers, supposed they were

required to adapt their frame of government. And now no small part of

our difficulty arises from the failure of a very large portion of our

people, North as well as South, to perceive or at least fully to

appreciate this change and its inevitable consequences. It is agreed by

all students of political history, that the weakness of a written

constitution lies in its inflexibility; and the error of many of our

political managers lies in their failure to appreciate this truth and

their assumption that the country is to be governed now just as it was

in the days of Washington. But the fact is that such a condition of

political affairs as now exists in South Carolina and in Louisiana would

have been not only morally but physically impossible in the earlier

years of the republic. "The people" in those States, and to a certain

extent in all the States, but chiefly at the South, has not the same

meaning that it had three-quarters of a century ago. Over the whole

country the conditions of our political problem have changed; but most

of all there; and the result is a strain upon our political

institutions, and even upon our social institutions, which taxes their

stability to the utmost. The present crisis is only inferior in its

gravity to that which preceded the attempted secession; and now as then

South Carolina takes the lead. But serious as the peril is, we shall

pass through it safely. We did not emerge safely from the greater

danger, to be overwhelmed by the less. Wisdom and firmness in the

highest degree are demanded by the emergency; but wisdom and firmness

will control it, and whatever measures may become necessary we may be

sure that they will be fraught with no peril to our liberties, or to

the stability of our Government. The nervous apprehension exhibited by

some people that any grave political disturbance and consequent

manifestation of power on the part of the central Government is likely

to end in a usurpation, and an enslavement of the American people, may

be surely characterized, if not as weak, at least as unwarranted. Think

of it coolly for a moment, and see how absurd it is. Any man born and

bred in the United States ought to be ashamed to entertain such a notion

for a moment. If we look back through the long and weary years of our

civil war, we shall find that mistakes were made on the side of the

arbitrary exercise of power, from which a few individuals suffered; but

indefensible as some of these were, according to the strict letter of

the law, we can now see their real harmlessness to the public as clearly

as we see the error of those who committed them. At no time have our

liberties been in less peril than when the President of the United

States had under his absolute command an army larger than that ever

actually controlled by any monarch (fables and exaggerations allowed

for), and when the warrant of the Secretary of War would have lodged any

man in a Federal fortress. We see now the folly of the vaticinations

against the endurance of our liberty which were uttered by many foreign

wiseacres and some weak-kneed natives. Whatever may come of our present

trouble, let us not forget the lessons of our recent experience. In

spite of any bugaboo we shall remain a Federal republic and a free

people.

--One accompaniment of the singular result of the election has been

sufficiently ridiculous--the daily reports of "the situation" as they

appeared in the columns and at the doors of the Republican and

Democratic newspapers. The phrase "to lie like a bulletin" has been

justified to the fullest extent. On which side lay the deviation from

truth it was impossible to say; but if one respectable journal's

assertions were true, the others surely were false. It was strange and

laughable to read on one bulletin board, "Republican Victory! Election

of Hayes! South Carolina and Florida ours by large majorities!" and then

to find only a few yards off a no less flaming announcement of

"Democratic Triumph! Tilden elected! South Carolina and Florida give

decided Democratic majorities!" And this was not only ridiculous, but

somewhat incomprehensible. For the newspapers which made these flatly

contradictory announcements at the same time and within short distances,

all equally prided themselves on their reputation as purveyors of

news--news that could be relied upon. Moreover, their means of obtaining

news are pretty well known to the public and quite well to each other.

True the "reliable gentleman," and the "distinguished member of

Congress," figured somewhat largely as the sources of those very

discrepant statements; and those persons are notoriously untrustworthy;

even more so than the "intelligent contraband" of the war times. But

after all it was a puzzle--unless, indeed, upon the assumption that

these newspapers published each of them, not what they knew to be the

fact, but what they thought their readers would like to be told; a

theory not to be entertained for a moment. Nevertheless the facts as

they presented themselves did seem to be worthy of some candid

consideration by the journalistic mind; for to mere outsiders they

seemed to point to the prudence and safety, to say the least, of more

caution and reserve of assertion, with the certainty that the

introduction of these new elements into the news department of

journalism would tend to the elevation of the profession, and would

beget a confidence in that department of our leading journals which it

may perhaps be safely said does not exist in a very high degree at

present. Possibly, however, the question may have presented itself in

this form to the journalistic mind: "If we continue to announce victory

for our own party, and it so turns out in the end, we are all right, and

we shall have pleased our readers." If the contrary, we shall merely

have to denounce the frauds of our opponents which have falsified the

truth that we told, and we shall have pleased our readers all the same."

Ingenious gentlemen.

--Among the humors of the election is one so significant that it should

not be allowed to pass by unrecorded. One Irish "American" was

describing to another the glories of a procession which had made night

hideous to those not particularly interested in it; and he closed the

glowing account by saying, "Oh, it wuz an illigent purrceshin intoirely!

Div'l a naygur or a Yankee int' ut!" Doubtless this gentleman would

think an election equally illigant in which neither a naygur nor a

Yankee presumed to vote.

--The period of the election excitement was marked also by the close of

the great Centennial Exhibition, which must be regarded as a very great

success, and which, we are pleased to record, proved far more successful

pecuniarily than we anticipated that it would. Among the grand

expositions of the world's industry this one stands alone, we believe,

in its possession of a surplus over and above its enormous expenses.

This, however, is but one witness to the admirable manner in which it

was managed. But even if it had failed in this respect, as at first it

seemed probable that it would, the money lost would have been well spent

in producing the impression which it left upon all, or nearly all, of

the intelligent foreigners whom it drew to Philadelphia. We happen to

have heard some of these, who had not only been present at other

exhibitions of the same kind in Europe, but had held the position of

judges there, say that the Philadelphia exhibition was superior to all

the others, not, it is true, in the beauty and value of the foreign

articles exhibited, but in the native productions and in the

arrangement, the system and discipline of the whole affair. The American

machinery and tools elicited the highest admiration from qualified

European judges. They found in them the results of a union of the

highest scientific acquirement with a corresponding excellence of

material and exactness in manufacture. All the tools used in the higher

departments of mechanics elicited this expression of admiration, and

with regard to those exhibited by two or three manufacturers the

approbation was without qualification and in the highest terms. This

result will be largely beneficial to our national reputation; for it was

just in these respects, science, thoroughness, and exactness, that our

foreign critics were prepared to find us wanting.

--The richness and variety of American slang is remarked upon by almost

all English travellers, who, however, might find at home, in the

language of high-born people, departures from purity quite as frequent

and as great as those prevalent with us, although perhaps not so gross;

for it must be confessed that most of our slang is coarse and offensive,

at least in form. But the most remarkable American peculiarity in regard

to slang, or indeed in regard to any new fangle in language, is the

quickness with which it is adopted, and comes, if not into general use,

into general knowledge. This readiness of adaptability to slang may,

however, be attributed almost entirely to the reporters and

correspondents, and "makers-up" of our newspapers, who catch eagerly at

anything new in phraseology as well as in fact, to give a temporary

interest to their ephemeral writing. Here, for example, is the word

"bulldose," the occasion of our remarks. A man who went on a journey to

South America or to Europe four months ago would have departed in the

depths of deplorable ignorance as to the very existence of this lovely

word; returning now, he would find it in full possession of the

newspapers--appearing in correspondence, in reports, in sensation

headlines, and even in leading articles. Although to the manner born, he

would be puzzled at the phraseology of the very newspaper which mingled

itself with his earliest recollections and with his breakfast; for there

he would find the new word in all possible forms and under all possible

modifications: _bulldose_, the noun, _to bulldose_, the verb,

_bulldosing_, the present participle, _bulldosed_, the past participle,

and even, to the horror of the author of "Words and their Uses," and in

spite of him, _being bulldosed_, "the continuing participle of the

passive voice." Such a phenomenon in language is peculiar to this

country. But notwithstanding the fears of the purists and the

philologers, it does not threaten the existence of the English language

here, nor is it at all likely to affect it permanently even by the

addition of one phrase or word. For our use of slang of this kind is the

most fleeting of temporary fashions. Such slang passes rapidly into use

and into general recognition, and passes as quickly out again.

Bartlett's "Dictionary of Americanisms" is full of words of this

kind--_locofoco_, for example--which lived their short lives, and then

passed not only out of use, but out of memory. While they are in vogue,

however, they deform our speech, and they tend to increase our habits of

looseness in language; and they bring reproach upon us such as that with

an allusion to which we began this item. For our reputation's sake we

should stop this; it subjects us with some reason to ridicule. But we

shall not stop, because the men who could stop it--the editors--will not

do so. Very few newspapers in the country--only two or three--are really

edited as to the language used in them; and as to slang of this sort, it

is regarded as something pleasant to the ears of the average reader, who

is supposed to think it funny. This is enough. If the readers want it,

the editors will furnish it; and so we may expect to be "bulldosed," or

otherwise dosed with some like nauseous mess of language, until

journalism has some other purpose than to pander to the lower cravings

of the moment.

--It is said that in the schools for girls it is now becoming the

fashion to teach the large angular handwriting which is commonly used by

Englishwomen. The announcement is welcome and surprising in one respect;

for it implies that writing is taught in schools, as to which an

acquaintance with the chirography of the rising generation justly

awakens some doubts. But as to the beneficial result of the adoption of

the style in question, that is a matter of some uncertainty. This

angular English hand is very elegant and lovely to look upon in a little

note, particularly if it assures you of the fair writer's high regard,

or asks you to dinner. But in fact it is so uncertain in its forms that

sometimes it is quite difficult to tell which is meant, the high regard

or the dinner. We have heard of one case of deplorable uncertainty. A

lady going out of town hastily on a short visit left a key upon her

husband's table with a slip of paper on which was written in the new

style a few words which after much toil and with the hint from the key,

he deciphered and read as "Key of wine closet. Please put on gin-sling."

He was amazed; for whatever his fondness might have been for gin-sling,

it was not his habit to put it on the table. Wherefore he inferred that

instead of "gin-sling" he should read "green seal," but there was none

of that brand of champagne in the wine closet. Further investigation led

him to adopt the reading, "please put on full swing." This, however, he

abandoned as not exactly a feminine exhortation in that particular

matter. Then for "gin-sling" he read "gunning," and "gun sing," and

"grinning," all of course to be abandoned in their turn. Submitted to an

expert, the elegant lines were pronounced to be unmistakably, "Key of

wine closet. Recase pat on gnu eing," not a highly intelligible letter

of instruction. Finally, in his perplexity, he remembered something that

the lady had once said upon the subject of the danger of leaving the

particular key in question lying about loose or even in an accessible

drawer, and then it flashed upon him that the writing was, or was meant

to be, "Key of wine closet. Please put on your ring." Hence it appears

that the elegant English hand is very easily read when you know what the

fair writer means to say. Observe, too, that the perplexity would have

been obviated by the introduction of a much needed pronoun--_it_. If the

lady had written, "Put it," etc., there would have been a guide out of

the labyrinth. No small part of the obscurity found in writing arises

from compression. It is better to take the trouble to write two words,

and thereby be understood, than to write one, in angular Anglican

elegance, and leave your reader in darkness.