death-bed. As he neared the quarter of the city in which she dwelt, his heart throbbed with emotion at the possibility of being too late to see her alive. When the chairs stopped at the gate of the family mansion he felt reassured, as he did not see the usual announcement of a death in the house, by a tablet suspended at the door-post inscribed with the name, age, and honours of the departed.

The mandarin embraced his beloved daughter as he led her towards the inner chambers, which she had left when quite a child with her mother, who had died at Peking not long after their arrival there. "Welcome, my child!" he said, "to the home of your ancestors; and although our faith is changed from theirs, yet it is incumbent on us not to disturb the family harmony by disputing with our kindred on the occasion of our visit."

"Dearest father," she replied, "I will obey you in everything."

At the threshold of the inner apartments they were most cordially received by the families of Meng-kee's two brothers, who inhabited the family mansion, of which his mother, on her sick-bed, was still the acknowledged superior. This is one of the apparently anomalous customs in China, where females generally hold a degraded position, but it is based upon the ancient patriarchal communities, where the eldest bears rule.

Father and daughter were ushered into the sickchamber, where the octogenarian lady lay propped up in a stately bedstead; her withered features and glassy eyes scarcely giving indications of life, certainly not of recognition, as they knelt before her and spoke some affectionate words. She herself had been speechless for some weeks, and it was evident that the vital lamp would be soon extinguished.

THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD: AMERICAN ILLUSTRATIONS OF EUROPEAN ANTIQUITIES. BY PRINCIPAL DAWSON, LL.D., MONTREAL.

IT

IX.

T is a remarkable fact that all our researches on the site of Hochelaga have disclosed so few relics of the trade and intercourse which existed between the nations of distant parts of America, and of which we shall see we have evidence in the narrative of Cartier, as well as in the objects found elsewhere. In the burial mounds of the Hurons, for example, Wilson and Taché found specimens of the Pyrula of the coast of Central America, brought all that distance as objects of superstitious veneration or of national pride. In an Indian grave at Brockville, west of Montreal, I have already mentioned the existence of a necklace made of pierced shells of Purpura lapillus from the New England coast, and of ring-shaped beads of native copper from Lake Superior. Thus the East and the West had been made tributary to the grandeur of some chief or Indian lady. Schoolcraft mentions that the Dentalium of the Pacific coast has been found as far east as Lake Superior. Pearls from the coast of California occur as far east as the Ohio, and copper and silver from Lake Superior were carried to Mexico and the Gulf States. The Manatee or Dugong of tropical America figures as an ornament on the pipes of the Ohio, and the Mica of the Apalachian mountains was distributed

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throughout the Mississippi valley. Of all this Hochelaga shows little except a few copper beads, and, besides the two small pieces of metal already referred to, nothing of the numerous tools and trinkets left by Cartier himself. Yet one of these fragments-the little piece of brass mentioned in a previous paper— may have been a part of one of Cartier's crosses which it is not unlikely were cut up into small pieces and distributed to different persons, or disposed of in trade with less fortunate tribes. This absence of evidence of commercial intercourse may be accounted for in one of two ways. At the time of Cartier's visit the people of Hochelaga, owing to the hostility of the Hurons on the west, and of the Iroquois on the south, were very much isolated, and may for a long time have lost the intercourse with foreign nations which they had once enjoyed. Changes of this kind tending to isolate tribes, often reduce them to great scarcity or absolute want of foreign commodities, and may account for such remarkable differences as have been observed in this respect between the people of the older and more recent Palæolithic ages in Europe by Dupont and others, the oldest European race being evidently better supplied with foreign objects than that which succeeded it. Again, at the destruction of Hochelaga, its treasures may have been thoroughly plundered by the conquerors, a fate which has no doubt befallen many of the old haunts of primitive men in the Old World.

I fear such considerations are too often overlooked by observers who study such remains, and who may reach the most opposite results from the investigation of different localities occupied contemporaneously by tribes in precisely the same stage of civilisation. Thus of three or four sites occupied by different sections of a tribe simultaneously or at times not very remote from each other, one may have been destroyed and plundered by an enemy; another may have witnessed the hurried manufacture of a quantity of rough weapons for an emergency; another may have been only abandoned from slow decay. Each of these would be so dissimilar from the others that it might be regarded as having belonged to times remotely distant.

But a careless or too enthusiastic antiquary might commit still graver errors of this kind. A village like Stadacona or Hochelaga had its outlying stations. Its pottery would be made at some claybed, probably distant from the town. It must have had its mines or quarries of flint and other useful stones perhaps far away within the confines of friendly tribes on the Ottawa. Its hunting and fishing parties had their places of resort, where in spring, autumn, or winter, they may have spent weeks together in the pursuit of particular animals requiring special kinds of tackle or weapons. Many tribes on the sea-coasts had their summer stations near to oyster-beds, on the produce of which, along with sea-birds and fish, they subsisted during a part of the year, though we know that in winter the same tribes dwelt inland, and hunted deer and other large animals. After the extinction of the tribe these different stations would present the most diverse appearances. One would yield a great collection of mis-shapen and half-made implements, difficult to understand, and rude and primitive in aspect. Another would apparently be the shelter or station of a tribe provided only with implements for hunting, and leaving behind it abundance of the bones of deer and other large game. Another would show a

people living solely on fish, and with implements of entirely different form, and mostly of bone. Another would present gouges for tapping maple-trees, and kettles of pottery broken in the boiling of sugar. Another on the coast might show little beyond heaps of oyster-shells, and a few of the stones used in opening them for use. The main town would have the aspect, in its kitchen-middens and stores of pottery, of the settlement of a far more advanced people. I do not say that all of our modern archæologists have failed to appreciate the meaning of these differences, but it is impossible to overlook the fact that many of their researches have been vitiated to some extent by neglect of considerations so simple, that the most ordinary observers of the prehistoric monuments of America scarcely think them deserving of mention. It must, however, be confessed that American writers also, taken by the infection wafted from the Eastern Continent, have sometimes allowed their fancy in such matters to get the better of their judgment.

Even among hunting tribes, culture and the arts are not wholly dormant. In the ancient Acadia the immense abundance of deer, water-fowl, and fish, enabled the Micmac to live in plenty on the produce of fishery and the chase, each season having its appropriate animal, while the rocky character of many parts of the country was not favourable to agriculture. Hence the Micmac was almost wholly a hunter, and the arts of life had reference mainly to the implements for the chase, and for fishing, or for the preparation of meat and skins; and as he must necessarily move from place to place according to the seasons for different kinds of fish and game, he dwelt in tents, or wigwams (his oil or wick), made of birch bark, and could easily pack his family and property in his bark canoe, or transport his whole house and furniture on the backs of his party, or on a tobogan drawn over the snow. Mamberton, a celebrated Micmac Sachem, and one of the first converts of the French missionaries, when taught the petition, "give us this day our daily bread," which, by the way, was practically a mistranslation on the part of the missionaries, objected, "Why is no mention made of our fish and venison?" and very properly, since these two in his former creed were gifts of the Great Spirit, and were to him much more than bread. Yet the Micmacs were not only adepts in the more delicate and difficult parts of the art of chipping flints, but, as we shall see, were geographers and travellers of no mean intelligence, and made their name and power known and felt widely over the American coast, both to the north and to the south, and this, perhaps, just for the reason that they were hunters rather than farmers.

Another illustration may be taken from the now

end as the Red Indians. I may add, that in the Hudson's Bay districts, immense numbers of cariboo are killed in the spring when crossing certain rivers, where they are waylaid by the natives. Such facts serve to explain some of the deposits of bones of the reindeer found in France. When, by such means as those above mentioned, a tribe had succeeded in killing several hundreds or thousands of deer, there would not only be a great feast and much cracking of marrowbones, but a long time would be occupied in drying and preparing the flesh and skins, and working the antlers up into implements. In these processes multitudes of flint knives and scrapers would be used, and when the tribe left the place, a deposit of remains of the reindeer period would be left. This might recur year after year at the same place, till the tribe might be driven from the country by some enemy, or till the deer became exterminated, or were obliged to migrate in some other direction. At other seasons of the year the reindeer hunters might be living as fishermen, on the coasts, or even as farmers, in particular valleys. Even if the people in question were merely rude hunters, they could not have lived on reindeer all the year, and must have left elsewhere deposits indicating their mode of life at the seasons when deer could not be had.

I may connect these illustrations of perished arts with a reference to a now obsolete implement-the grooved hammer, noticed in a previous article of this series. Such hammers were the common tools of the ancient copper miners of Lake Superior. Evans informs us that they are found in ancient copper mines in Wales, also in Staffordshire and in the north of Ireland, and in Scandinavia, as well as in ancient mines in Spain and in Saxony. They also occur in the old Egyptian turquoise mines of Wady Meghara, in Arabia. In North America they are not limited to the mining district. I figure a specimen with its handle of tough wood and raw hide (Fig. 30), as now, or lately, used by the Avickarees, a people of the western prairies. Morgan, from whom the illustration is taken, states that it is used to drive stakes, and for cracking buffalo bones to extract the marrow. I have seen similar hammers

USED BY AVICKAREE INDIANS FOR BREAKING MARROW-BONES OF BUFFALO. From a paper by Morgan, in the Report of the Regents of University of New York.

brought by Mr. Bell, of the Canadian Survey, from the country of the Dakotas or Sioux and other western tribes, who constantly use them for breaking marrowbones of the buffalo. Thus, the grooved hammer may be equally a relic of the civilised Egyptian or Alleghan miner, or of the rude hunter of the plains. But, even in the case of the latter, it may not be a

token of absolute barbarism. The American hunter does not merely use it to break bones, that he may at once devour their marrow. On the con

trary, he often breaks up the marrow-bones of his game, that he may refine and preserve the precious oil for future use, or may employ it as an ingredient of his carefully prepared pemmican, which is his dependence in his long journeys, and one of his most valuable sources of income. As he says, the agricultural white man may have plenty of bread, but he is "hungry for buffalo meat," while the Indian, with plenty of pemmican, may be "hungry for bread," or may be desirous of the goods of the European trader. What if some of the old cave men of Europe were not merely savage gorgers on flesh and marrow, but industrious preparers of pemmican, for future use or trade, and if the caves were their temporary workshops at the season of preparing this valuable product, and the implements therein their knives for cutting up the flesh, their hammers for breaking the bones, and their bodkins and needles for sewing up the skin bags in which it was finally put up for the markets of the Stone age. If we take this view, so accordant with American analogies, it will explain why the greater part of the chipped bones in many cave deposits bear no traces of cooking; and will relieve the cave men from the suspicion which has been cast upon their memory, that they habitually ate raw venison.

In a previous article I referred to the old quarries of flint in the Flint Ridge on the Ohio, and to the mines of the ancient Alleghans in the copper districts of Lake Superior. These mining arts, like the agriculture of many of the more settled tribes, have become lost to the modern Indian, and in the case of his flint mines, even to the white men who have succeeded him, and who, while they have at a comparatively recent time reopened his copper mines, have found that in all the more important of these they had been anticipated by the Indians. In like manner there are obsolete mines of the flint age in Europe. Evans describes those of "Grimes Graves" at Brandon, where 250 flint mines have been found. They are shafts sunk through chalk, in some cases to the depth of thirty-nine feet, to reach a layer of specially good flint. Galleries had been run out from them horizontally in this layer. The miners had worked with picks and chisels of deer's antlers and of basalt; and the traces of their sagacious industry are now only traditional "graves" to the agricultural peasants who have succeeded them. Still more extensive ancient mines of the flint period exist in Belgium. That the men who made these excavations were industrious and ingenious we cannot doubt, yet their flint knives and arrows are to us the indices of a still ruder stage of humanity than that to which we would refer their antler-pointed picks and basalt chisels. It should perhaps somewhat moderate our pride of higher civilisation when we find that, with the exception of a few "flint jacks," we have not only lost the art of fabricating the beautiful chipped implements of the flint age, but that throughout the east, and even among the peasantry of western Europe, they are, when found, regarded as the work of supernatural beings; and as "elfin bolts," and "elfin bolts," and under other names, have strange talismanic virtues ascribed to them, at which their ancient makers would have smiled. Still, these fancies have a venerable origin. Among the flint folk themselves a flint-headed arrow was a type of efficiency, as compared with one tipped with bone, horn, or

hardened wood. Hence, in the traditions of the Micmacs, as collected by Mr. Rand, and in old Norse Sagas referred to by Nilsson, it is always a flint arrow that is used in slaying the giants and other monsters of their tales. Such stories would readily, after flint weapons fell into disuse, lead to the belief in their magic powers; nor is a great lapse of time necessary to effect such results. Already, in some districts of America, the Indian has so lost the tradition of the arts of his ancestors, that when questioned as to their implements he says the Great Spirit alone knows by whom and for what they were made.

Thus, even if we confine our attention to the one subject of lost arts, it can be shown that changes, many of them tending rather to degradation than to elevation, have taken place in America since its discovery, which are comparable in amount with those extending in Europe from the Palæolithic age to the present day. That they occurred as rapidly in Europe I do not affirm, yet there is no good reason to doubt that many of those diversities to which vast periods have been assigned, were either not successive, or required for their production times not much greater than that which has elapsed since the voyages of Columbus. It may be asked, If this is so, what reliance can be placed on archæological investigations? I answer, Much, if observers will carefully study facts, and compare them with their modern analogues, and will avoid hasty generalisations, and the common error of making the facts conform to preconceived hypotheses. Geologists require also to learn that the methods which apply to the succession of formations, in which we have to do only with physical causes, and with the structures and instincts of irrational animals, will not suffice when we have to deal with the results of the many-sided intellirudest states, gives him a god-like supremacy over gence of man, which, even in his most primitive and succumb, and vastly complicates all his relations to many external conditions to which mere animals nature.

LIVINGSTONE.

ELF-EXILED from the cherished voice and smile Of friends, long solitary years he spent, To draw the curtain from a continent, And wrest its utmost secret from old Nile. Death only did his steadfast feet beguile

From Afric's shore, and to the wanderer lent A friend-girt resting-place and monument, In the great Abbey's glory-echoing aisle. This Christian temple, and that Christless coast, So distant and so diverse though they be, Are sweetly one, O Livingstone, to thee: For He, whose Cross thy banner was and boast, There cheered thy lonely footsteps mile by mile,— Here guards thy dust, and soothes thy soul the while!

RICHARD WILTON, M.A.

JOHN HOWARD'S MOTTO.

M

ID giant forms of wrong,

The dungeon's ghastly brood,
Rank growths of ages past,
Dauntless our hero stood,
While 'neath his steadfast gaze,
As through excess of light,
Quailed every guilty form,
Foul creatures of the night:
For on his manly breast
Shone forth his warrior crest-
Christ is my hope.

Nor sword nor spear had he,
Nor shield nor coat of mail-
Not e'en the shepherd's sling,
Our foemen to assail.
No spot nor stain of blood
His pure white garments bore;
For not on battle-fields,
Sodden with human gore,
Shone forth his warrior crest-
· Christ is my hope.

No shade of selfish thought
Darkened the path he trod-
Stern duty's narrow way,
The rough steep road to God.
Strong in that hope he wrought,
Firm in that path he strove,
Till every conflict o'er,
In the bright realms above,
Forth from his manly breast
Burst free and unreprest―
Christ was my hope.

or four years in the Arctic seas, and was received by Queen Victoria herself on its arrival in England. Mr. Grinnell absolutely refused to accept his lawful share of the salvage. Another of Mr. Grinnell's memorable shipping adventures was that of the Euphrates. The Euphrates was built before the war of 1812, and was run up the river to New Bedford for the purpose of being scuttled, an English vessel being in pursuit. The Euphrates, however, lived to be burnt by the Shenandoah in the great war of the rebellion. Again, in 1844, Mr. Grinnell built the Henry Clay, which was named after his great friend and leader. The Henry Clay was burnt at her dock in New York a few years later. Mr. Grinnell took Henry Clay down to view the charred timbers, the figure-head, strange to say, being the only part of the vessel which the fire had not touched. "That is the best likeness of an ugly man I ever saw," was the only comment of the great Whig statesman. Mr. Grinnell was not only an intimate friend of Henry Clay, but also of Daniel Webster. These two great personal friends accompanied him once on a visit to Hell Gate, when in 1846 he was, at his own expense, blasting the famous Pot Rock. He reduced the surface of the rock to 10 feet below low-water mark, spending a small fortune in the operation. Clay and Webster were both loud in their approbation, and told Mr. Grinnell that he was manufacturing the future water-ways of New York city. Mr. Grinnell was for thirty years a member of the great whale-ship firm now known as Grinnell, Minturn,

and Co.

LONDON MISSIONARY SOCIETY.-Among the pleasant aspects of this country, and the bits of sunshine lighting up its varied landscape, must be reckoned the work of such a body as the London Missionary Society. It is scarcely possible to think for a moment of the immense extent and wealth and power of this Empire without asking oneself how it employs an influence which must be for some purpose or other. What are we doing that we may hope may stay the execution of the sentence on the power that is found wanting? The London Missionary Society contributes what it can to the discharge of an obligation which is an essential part of Christianity. It takes the Bible and those doctrines which are confessedly on the face of it, and are the common faith of hundreds of millions, disagree as they may on other questions. It comprises within its supporters, and consequently its managers, many sects and denominations; it is bound to no Liturgy, no Hierarchy, no Orders, no Acts of Parliament, no Courts of Law, the matter of its teaching is of universal acceptance; its organisation is that which is always and everywhere applicable. It commenced its operations just after the French Revolutionists had challenged every creed, every principle, and every institution, beginning with the destruction of their own Church and Monarchy. After seventynine years it has an income of about £116,000; it has 155 English missionaries, who are, in fact, heads of churches, in which are many qualified native agents, acting as pastors and teachers, and continually expanding the sphere of the Society's operations. These extend over China, India, Madagascar, South Africa, the West Indies, Polynesia, and New Guinea. The Society is hopeful, for it has done a good deal, and now is the time to do more. Excepting the miserable war in Spain, all the world is at peace. The most impenetrable regions have been opened by travellers; the most jealous empires have thrown down the walls of exclusion; the most tremendous moral difficulties have given way; and there is not a race, or an empire, or a colour, or a caste that does not actually invite peaceful teaching and persuasion. No one can carry his thoughts back to the state of the world half a century ago without counting the mountains that have been cast into the sea, the impossibilities which have disappeared, and the miracles that have been effected.-The Times.

THE SCALIGERS.-In the paper about Verona ("Leisure Hour," p. 344) the name of Scaliger is mentioned. The word recalls to me, and probably to most readers, the two most eminent literary characters, father and son; J. C. Scaliger, known as the elder, and J. J. Scaliger, called the younger, and by far the greater prodigy of learning. They lived from 1484 to 1609, and were but of humble origin. Instead of applying the same Latin name to the princely family, would it not be better to adopt the Italian name Della Scala? They were feudal lords of Verona, and some of them figure in Dante's "Paradiso," canto xvii. They were nick-named "dogs of war," just as our own monarch's ancestors were "the wolves" [Guelph]; and one of them was called Can grande, i.e., "the great dog," whose name figures in a striking anecdote of Dante when, in exile, he resided as guest at the court of Count Francesco. It appears that the poet's manners were

abstracted, perhaps morose; and during such a fit of the "browns, some courtiers heaped refuse bones near him as he sat at table. Those were days of what we now call coarse manners; the meal being placed on a board supported on trestles, and what a guest could not eat was literally thrown to the dogs, who watched below. On this occasion, if such ever occurred, what the dogs rejected was piled up at the poet's feet, and when the tables were removed, there was presumptive evidence of gross gluttony against the poet, who, no doubt, lived on air, and thus furnished a standing reproach against more convivial courtiers. A general titter went round, and, amid the general chaff, the irritated poet turned off the laugh by exclaiming, "Take them to the great dog there," pointing to the Can grande, i.e., Count Francesco Della Scala.— A. HALL.

PARENTHESIS.—An article in the "Literary Churchman," on "Reading the Lessons in Church," on the whole sensibly written, gives the following hints on the treatment of parenthesis.' Here what you want is to indicate that you have left the main line of the original sentence, and that you mean to come back to it. This you do by deserting the pitch of your ordinary reading voice. You go on your usual way right up to the parenthesis. You pause just enough to excite attention (not a bit more), you drop a little (very little), you keep as near to a monotone as the case will admit of, and then at the end of your parenthesis you go up again to the level your voice was at when the sentence was interrupted, and proceed as if nothing had happened. Some people have a very happy knack of doing this. They manage to pronounce the last vocable before the parenthesis so as to mark the note on which they leave off strongly on the listener's ear. It stays upon your ear's memory all through the parenthesis. And it is with a feeling of positive pleasure that you hear the reader resume the note (or pitch) which has still been vibrating upon your organs-as soon as he gets back again into the main line of his sentence. Similar considerations rule the mode of reading the dependent clauses which come into a long sentence, like small sentences worked into the main sentence.

EUCALYPTUS GLOBULUS.-The "Italie," a paper published in French at Rome, gives some particulars respecting the Australian tree, the Eucalyptus globulus, of which so much has been said lately. Upwards of 3,000 young trees have been planted by the municipality of Rome at San Sisto Vecchia. But, unfortunately, this tree is extremely tender when young, and cannot resist a temperature lower than 27 degrees Fahr.; so, notwithstanding the great care that has been taken in sheltering the young plants from wind and cold, the results have been hitherto unsatisfactory. As a proof that the Eucalyptus requires a climate where the temperature is never lower than freezing point, it may be mentioned that of all the trees planted by the Roman Railway Company along the line from Rome to Naples, only those plants in the neighbourhood of Naples have survived through the winter.

TORONTO.-This Toronto, with its 60,000 to 70,000 inhabitants, astonishes me more than any place which recognises the authority of Queen Victoria. While I read of sharp conflicts in the British Parliament on the miserable question of an extra half-hour for getting drunk after midnight, I found here, on Saturday evening last, every drink shop closed after seven o'clock, not to be reopened until six on Monday morning, and at the very hour when the dram shops were shut the savings-bank opened, and the people were crowding in to pay their deposits. All through the province of Ontario, not a drink shop, not a cigar shop-not even an ice-cream shop-is opened on Sunday. The public thoroughfares are not half as beclouded with smoke or infested with little smoking puppies as are the public walks of the "mother country." Without a State Church, places of worship abound here in every street, and they are all thronged with worshippers. There is scarcely a church or chapel in which the singing from a neighbouring house of prayer may not be heard. At 11 A.M. and 7 P.M. the place seemed to be redolent with hymns of praise, and better order in the streets I never witnessed. No wonder that in such a place great numbers of working men own their habitations.-Mr. Cook, the

Excursionist.

has arisen the superabundant supply of genteel clerks and the deficient supply of good mechanics. It is much to be regretted that the former practice of apprenticeship has fallen so much out of use. Better mechanics were thus formed. There is one mechanical trade with which I am especially connected, viz., that of bookbinding. I regret to say that an extreme difficulty exists to obtain intelligent and willing men to do the work which is ready to be given out. More hands "with heads" are wanted in the bookbinding trade. This is a cry of distress from a bookseller whose business is injured owing to the delays and the inefficiency of the existing binders and their workmen.-4 Correspondent of Mr. Ruskin in "Fors Clavigera."

BOTTLED MILK.-An enterprising milkman in America furnishes his customers with "milk in glass." In his waggon are arranged inside racks containing quart and pint bottles filled with pure fresh milk, full measure. These bottles are delivered as required, the customer returning the bottle left the day before; and no pitcher, pails, bowls, or dishes are necessary. Another advantage of this system, especially in warm weather, is that each bottle is tightly corked, and can be laid in a pail or pan of cold water, keeping it sweet and fresh, or put away in a cooler, taking up but little room.-The Sanitary Record.

POPISH MIRACLES OF RECENT DATE.-It is now thirty years since the famous apparition of the Virgin to a peasant boy and girl at a place called Sous les Baissis, in the mountains adjoining the village of La Salette. A lit de justice was convened on the spot to examine the evidence in favour of the miraculous appearance, and it was satisfactorily proved that the part of the Virgin was enacted by a crazy young woman called Lamerlière. A Roman Catholic father asserted before the assembled clergy of Grenoble, in the neighbourhood of La Sallette, that Lamerlière had confessed to him her own identity with the supposititious Virgin. Notwithstanding this testimony, forty thousand pilgrims, rivalling the Orientals, whom they call "benighted," flocked for many years annually to the scene of the miracle, and the sale of water from a fountain said to have miraculously burst forth on the spot long averaged £12,000 a year.

REPORTING FORTY YEARS AGO.-Referring to the banquet at Edinburgh to Earl Grey in 1834, Henry Cockburn, in his "Personal Recollections," says :-"The Times' London newspaper sent down reporters of their own. They left the room at twelve o'clock at night on Monday, the 15th, and at one o'clock in the afternoon of Friday, the 19th, that newspaper reached Edinburgh by the mail with a full account of the proceedings. Post horses, Macadam roads, shorthand, and steam printing never did more. They posted up in thirty hours, so that they were in London on Wednesday morning at six o'clock. The paper was thrown off that forenoon, and left London for Edinburgh by the mail that evening." They thought this very wonderful in 1834, and so it was, but the Edinburgh people would complain if they had to wait so long for an account in the "Times" now of such a meeting.

GHOSTS BY CHEMISTRY.-A curious spiritualistic revelation is given by a Transatlantic scientific contemporary :-"The spirit photographs which pass current among credulous spiritualists for genuine ghosts of the departed are produced in various ways. The latest and most scientific method is as follows:-The plain background screen, before which the sitter is placed in order to have his portrait taken, is to be painted beforehand with the form of the desired 'spirit,' the paint being composed of some solution of sulphate of quinine. When this painting dries on the screen it is invisible to the eye, but it sends out rays that have power to impress the photo. plate, and thus the image of the person, together with the quinine ghost, are simultaneously developed upon the negative.'

at table after dinner than they do now; and on one occasion, at SITTING AFTER DINNER.-At that time the men sat longer a dinner party at Sir James Mackintosh's house, when Lady Mackintosh and the ladies returned to the drawing-room, society, would not deign to enter into conversation with Madame de Staël, who was exceedingly impatient of women's ringing the bell, she said, "Ceci est insupportable!" and any of the ladies, but walked about the room; then suddenly when the servant appeared, she said, "Tell your master to come upstairs directly; they have sat long enough at their wine." Except in the families where I was intimate, the conversation of the ladies in the drawing-room, when we came up from dinner, often bored me. I disliked routs exceedingly, and should often have sent an excuse if I had known what to say. After my marriage I did not dance, for in Scotland it was thought highly indecorous for a married woman to dance.— Autobiography of Mary Somerville.