flows the life-giving river; those mighty lakes, no less a mystery, no less an enigma in their solemn beauty, since human eyes have beheld them, than while their very existence was an unsolved problem. The life of this mystery, the clue to this enigma, is flowing before me: it gleams under my eyes; it washes these shores, these monuments, written over with hieroglyphics, ponderous volumes of a secret lore; it reflects these granite gods with their stony eyes, immovable, and no less mysterious than is the river. This is indeed the country of the Sphinx. The heat was becoming unendurable; the sun rode directly over our heads; the shadows seemed to shrink away from his burning gaze. Only a hint of shade, a slender blueish line remained visible at the foot of the temple of Isis. The sky was vividly, intensely blue-blue as the enamelled statuettes of Osiris ; and there was something appalling in its immovable serenity. Yes, an eternal sameness, even of beauty, would be terrible. The sun was a sun of fire, his heat as of molten lead; all nature seemed to suffer and faint beneath the fierceness of his rays. The birds flew for refuge into the deserted temples; the date-palms drooped their proud heads, their languishing fronds depending as mournfully as the branches of a weeping willow. At this hour the beauty of Philæe is more than solemn, more than austere : it assumes a strangely sad, an indescribably mournful, desolate aspect. Over everything is cast a feverish, unnatural glow, a tawny-yellow tint; there are no shadows, there is no blending of hues; the villages seem uninhabited; and, far away in the distance, the mountains, glorious as | flaming messengers of Horus at sunrise, take on at noon a dead, lifeless, indescribable hue, like the dull, yellowish gleam of an expiring conflagration. One last long look at Philæ, and I turned regretfully away. This was as far south as we were going; the limit of our voyage was reached. We were about five hundred miles from Cairo, and almost under the tropics: for two months almost every day had been increasing the distance between us and France. I felt as sad in leaving Philæ as in parting from a friend. But, at least, a picture of the scene, so tender and graceful in many of its aspects, and so grand and terrible in others, with its sublime monuments and luxuriant verdure set in the very heart of the arid desert—a violent contrast seen everywhere in Egypt (the one unalterable feature of its scenery), and yet which always causes a new surprise-will never fade from my memory. Certain places, like certain people, have the power of winning us at the very first glance. Issuing from the desert, and arriving suddenly at this secluded little corner of the earth, this oasis of nature, this island of the past, the traveller feels a strange sense of repose, a deep inward satisfaction. Something within him seems to say, It is well with you here: stop, and make the most of your happiness. This intangible, dreamy, promised, prophetic bliss fades from you as you depart; it becomes one of the lost possibilities. You sigh, as when thinking of a dead friendship. And then you know there is always something bitter in eternal separations. SCIENCE AND NATURE. Two WO new inventions are recorded for unveiling the secrets of the deep sea. One of these is a product of German ingenuity, and consists of an apparatus by which specimens of water can be obtained from any desired depth of the ocean. A strong, heavy vessel, entirely closed and empty, has a valve through which water may be admitted, but which is only put in motion by means of powerful electro-magnets connected with it. These magnets are also connected with a wire accompanying the rope by means of which the apparatus is lowered from the ship. When the empty vessel, which is in reality a plummet, has reached the required depth, an electric current is sent from the battery on ship-board to the coils below; the magnetism thus generated opens the valves, and the vessel is then filled with water and can be drawn up. The second invention is American, and was adopted in Prof. Agassiz' recent scientific expedition. Its object is to determine how far the abysses of the ocean are permeable by the rays of the sun. A plate prepared for photographic purposes is inclosed in a case so contrived as to be covered by a revolving lid in the space of forty minutes. The apparatus is sunk to the required depth, and at the expiration of the period stated is drawn up and developed in the ordinary way. It is said that evidence has been obtained by means of this instrument of the operation of the chemical rays of the sun at much greater depths than had hitherto been supposed possible. According to the School Board Chronicle, "some curious statistics have been published, establishing a suggestive comparison between the expenses of education and police supervision in the cities of St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna. With regard to education, the expenses of the Russian capital are estimated at one per cent., of the total budget; Vienna stands as high as nine per cent. ; and Berlin reaches thirty-one. Costs of philanthropic institutions are expressed by the proportions of: Berlin, twenty-two; Vienna, fifteen; and St. Petersburg, nine per cent. Of course, the ratio becomes inverted when we turn to the police force. Here we find Prussia down for seventeen, Austria for twenty-one, and Russia for fifty-one (figures of comparison.) Berlin employs one policeman for every four hundred and ninety-five of its population, Vienna one for every four hundred and ten, and St. Petersburg one for every two hundred and ten. The practical teaching of these statistics is that while Berlin pays twice as much for schools as for prisons and police, Vienna pays two and one-third times less, and St. Petersburg fifty times less." The moral is too obvious to need pointing out. In spite of the wonderfully rapid growth and development of the railway system of North America, we have the best of evidence that the system is not yet equal to the wants of so vast a country, in the fact that the farmers in the Western States have taken to using corn as the cheapest fuel they can get. Not only is corn now regularly used in place of wood or coal, but supplies of it are laid up to be employed as fuel during the winter. It is said to make quite as good a fuel as wood, whilst it is much cheaper; and three tons of it are alleged to give the same amount of heat as one ton of coal. Such a state of things is the product of two causes. One of these is that the rate of freight by rail is so heavy that it is better for a farmer to burn his corn than to send it to the eastern markets, in spite of the high prices which food-stuffs fetch in the Eastern States of the Union. The second of these causes is the gradual diminution of timber, owing, in the main, to its reckless destruction, and to the fact that hardly any provision is made to secure a future supply. The burning of grain implies that the forests of the corn-producing districts of the West have been more or less exhausted. It is high time that measures were adopted to secure that the coming generation shall not be compelled to import all their wood from some distant region; for though corn may burn very well, it is hardly the material out of which houses or fences can be constructed. Some curious considerations have been brought forward by Sir Walter Elliot with regard to the "throw-stick" employed as a weapon of chase by the rude races inhabiting the mountain and forest tracts of Central and Western India. The "throw-stick" is a curved and flattened piece of wood, about two feet long and from three to six inches broad, and it is thrown with the concave side foremost. It forms a very efficient and accurate weapon, and animals as large as deer can be killed with it. The iron weapons subsequently used by these same races seem to have been deduced from this primitive weapon, which they in many cases closely resemble. The most curious point, however, about the Indian “throwstick" is its close similarity to the Australian boomerang," which it resembles in all essential points except that it does not return to the hand when thrown. Prof. Huxley, in classifying the varieties of the human race exclusively by their physical characters, founded a great divi-known work is "The Naturalist in British sion--the "Australoids"—for the reception of Columbia," in which an excellent account is the aborigines of New South Wales, the prim- given of the zoology of Vancouver Island and itive races of Central India, and the ancient British Columbia; but he also contributed Egyptians. It is a curious confirmation of this many short papers to various popular scientific classification to find that amongst these three periodicals. far distant peoples the "throw-stick" is the weapon of chase, whilst it does not occur in intermediate countries. We have seen that this is the case with the existing Australians and some of the Indian tribes, and we know that it was also the case with the old Egyptians, for the pictures in the tombs of the kings at Thebes represent hunting-scenes in which the curved sticks, found at this day in India, are largely represented. At the meeting of the National Academy of Science held at Cambridge, Mass., Nov. 22, Prof. Agassiz gave a very interesting account of his researches in the "Hassler Expedition," with more especial reference to his discovery that South America, equally with the Northern continent, has enjoyed a prolonged "glacial period." More interesting, however, to the general public were the remarks made by this eminent naturalist and energetic "anti-evolutionist " upon the Darwinian theory of the origin of species. He defended his rejection of this theory upon the ground that the Darwinians "are presenting views on scientific principles which are not even based on real observation; that they have not shown evolution, or the power of evolution, in the present day, and hence are not entitled to assume it in the past.” | He further characterized the theory as a mire of mere assertion." Similar views have also been expressed by Principal Dawson, of Montreal, who has recently avowed his belief that Darwinism is "the prostitution of science to the service of a shallow philosophy." 66 According to Nature," a most remarkable discovery has just been made in the Arctic regions. Some months ago a small expedition set out from San Francisco to proceed by way of Wrangell Land to the eastern part of Siberia, and thence to penetrate northwards towards the Pole. The expedition was under the command of a rich and adventurous young Frenchman, M. Pavy, and was entirely of an unofficial and private character. The Courier des Etats Unis now publishes an account of discoveries alleged to have been made by M. Pavy; and if this account can be relied upon, these discoveries are most important, involving nothing less than the finding of an Arctic Continent. The account professes to be a summary of dispatches, dated Wrangell Land, lat. 74.38, W. long. 176.18, Aug. 23rd, 1872, committed to the care of the captain of a whaler for the French Geographical Society, which, it is said, will publish the scientific results after having examined them. The following are the chief points of this remarkable and somewhat incredible story :-On July 17th, Pavy and his party reached the mouth of the river Petrolitz. From this point they met with immense fields of ice moving towards the north-east. The observations indicated a deviation of eighteen miles, caused by the movments of the ice, a fact tending to confirm the theory of M. Pavy respecting the concentration and the augmentation in rapidity of the branch of the great Japanese current which passes through Behring's Straits, and flows towards the east away from the coast English science has just sustained a loss by of Siberia. The exploring party reached the the death of Mr. John Keast Lord, the super-mouth of Wrangell Land, at the mouth of a intendent of the great aquarium of Brighton, great river coming from the north-west, which and a charming writer on various branches of is not laid down in any map. This discovery Natural History. He was originally a Captain confirms M. Pavy's theory that there exists a in the Royal Artillery, and in this capacity vast polar continent which stretches far to the served in the Crimean war, and took part in north, the temperature of which is warm enough the battle of Balaclava. At the close of the to melt snow in summer. The current of this Russian campaign, he quitted the army for the unnamed river turns to the east, and follows more congenial field of science. His best the coast with a velocity of six knots an hour. M. Pavy and his companions followed the cur- Prof. Asa Gray, in delivering his valedictory rent of the river towards the north, a distance address as retiring president of the American of two hundred and thirty miles. Its bed is Association of Science, made some interesting uniformly horizontal, and it is bordered by remarks about the "big trees" or sequoias of mountains of great height, with several perpen- California. That their age must be counted by dicular peaks. At eighty miles from the mouth hundreds of years we cannot doubt; but we also of the river the explorers found on the plain cannot doubt that they did not antedate the some vestiges of mastodons, and on clearing glaciers, whose icy expanses have left their inaway the snow from a spot whence emerged dubitable evidences everywhere around. “Have the tusks of one of that extinct race, they they played," he asks, “in former times and on brought to light its enormous body, in a perfect a larger stage, a more imposing part, of which state of preservation. The skin was covered the present is but the epilogue? We cannot with black stiff hair, very long and thick upon gaze high up the huge and venerable trunks, the back. The tusks measured nearly twelve which one crosses the continent to behold, withfeet in length, and were bent back about the out wishing that these patriarchs of the grove level of the eyes. From its stomach were taken were able, like the long-lived antediluvians of pieces of bark and grasses, the nature of which Scripture, to hand down to us, through a few could not be analysed on the spot. Over an generations, the traditions of centuries, and so area of many miles the plain was covered with tell us somewhat of the history of their race. the remains of mastodons; and the whole re- Fifteen hundred layers have been counted, or gion abounded in polar bears, which lived upon satisfactorily made out, upon one or two fallen the bodies of these extinct animals. At one trunks. It is probable that close to the heart hundred and twenty miles from the coast, and of some of the living trees may be found the half a league from the river, rises a vast block circle that records the year of our Saviour's of ice, one thousand feet in height, the base of nativity. A few generations of such trees might which is surrounded by gravel, and polished carry the history a long way back. But the rounded stones deeply sunk in the soil. At the ground they stand upon, and the marks of very date of his despatches, M. Pavy was preparing recent geological change and vicissitude in the to winter in the 75th degree of latitude, in the region around, testify that not very many such valley of the great river of the supposed polar generations can have flourished just there, at continent. He considered himself certain to least in an unbroken series." Upon the whole, arrive in the beginning of next season at a polar Prof. Gray concludes that the "big trees” of sea of moderate temperature at the northern California are the last survivors of a once extremity of the continent. The explorers cal-powerful and widely spread race; and that a culate on afterwards reaching the Atlantic little further drying up of the climate, which is through Melville's Straits. now in progress, will precipitate their doom. CURRENT LITERATURE. The death of Lord Lytton removes from the roll of "Men of the Time" the name of one of the most distinguished writers who has graced, by the versatility of his genius and the industry of his pen, the literature of the present century. Born before the novelists who were contemporary with himDickens, Thackeray, Lever, Ainsworth, and G. P. R. James, he has outlived them. Yet, enjoying a longer lease of life than they, he has given, in the multifarious occupations of his pen, the amplest evidence of his extraordinary industry and intellectual activity. From "Pelham," published in 1828, to the work "Kenelm Chillingly," he had just finished for the press, Lord Lytton has striven as no author ever strove, to achieve high distinction in almost every path of literature. And no writer, attempting so much, can be said to have succeeded as he has done, or to have better merited the honour of a 66 'general proficiency" from contemporary critics or from posterity. Novelist and romancist, poet and dramatist, essayist and translator-in all proficient. Never, perhaps, rising to the heights of genius, yet always manifesting talent, research, and culture. A man of the world, polished and versatile; imitative rather than creative; clever rather than profound. An author, in short, typical of the educated English nobility, with cultivated literary tastes, a talent for story telling, proud of his family honours, and covetous of literary fame. His name will be a foremost one among the "men of letters" of his time; and he has well won the honour of the tomb which is now the resting place of his remains. Since Lord Lytton's death, if current rumour in literary circles be true, we have an i.lustration at once of the writer's marvellously varied talents, as well of his eccentricity in the matter of authorship. It is stated that his lordship is the author of "The Coming Race," a work of considerable ingenuity on an ideal people supposed to inhabit some neighbouring sphere, and who are represented as being endowed with powers far transcendent to man; and also the author of a story now appearing anony. mously in Blackwood's magazine-" The Parisians.' That these works, one of which at least, is in so extraordinary a field of study, should have to be credited to Lord Lytton, only shows how diversified and many phased was the mind that produced them, and the many other subjects that engaged his pen. Moreover, when it is considered that while these anonymous works were in course of appearance, a new and acknowledged story, "Kenelm Chillingly, his Adventures and Opinions,” was about to be issued by the author, we are as much impressed with the industry as with the versatility of the writer whose death is so universally deplored. It will, we dare say, interest our readers to learn that the book which Lord Lytton had just completed before his death, "Kenelm Chillingly,”—a work, we believe, of the type of the "Caxtons" and "My Novel❞—had been arranged by the author to be republished in Canada by Messrs. Hunter, Rose & Co., of Toronto, and it will now be posthumously published by that house. We understand that his lordship was very proud of being approached by a Canadian house with the design of introducing his works to the readers of the Dominion, and we are told that he expressed great gratification at the reprint which had been made in Canada of his long poem of King Arthur." Though of unequal merit, yet this work had, manifestly, been a long and interesting labour to him; and looking upon its production as a chef d'œuvre of his pen, his lordship naturally felt a pleasure at its production in Canada, and in the estimation of the author this circumstance no doubt atoned in some degree for the cold reception the work met with from English critics and readers. But we pass from the gossip of these items in Current Literature to glance at the department we specially design to bring succinctly before our readers-the serial literature of the day, and we find Fraser's Magazine contains a paper by Mr. Cyril Graham on the " Dominion of Canada," tracing the progress and vicissitudes of the country under British rule. From the conquest to confederation the fortunes of the colony are followed with considerable minuteness; and the article, on the whole, may be said to convey to English readers a tolerably accurate idea of the successive events in our political and industrial life. Here and there the paper betrays its having been written abroad, for we find the writer making the mistake of saying in reference to Ontario's single chamber, in contrast to the Two Houses of the other Provinces, that "this anomaly seems to be distasteful, and it is to be desired that it may soon cease." Some allusion is made at the close of the paper to the future, politically, of the Dominion, and the scheme of Imperial Confederation is referred to; but the article throughout is historical and not speculative. Macmillan this month has no very noticeable paper. The story, "A Slip in the Fens," is continued. Mr. D. A. Spalding's article on "Instinct" will repay perusal, as the writer narrates the result of some original experiments with young animals in the domain of instinct. The phenomena of instinct, it is remarkable, seems still to baffle all attempt at a rational theory on the subject. Blackwood has a most lugubrious paper entitled "Our State and Prospects", in which it comments severely upon the malady of the nation as the result of the retention in power of the present liberal government. The machinery of government and the whole constitution of society is dolefully said to be debilita ted, out of joint, and unable to bear the least strain. Strikes, mutinies and outrages in the industrial, and general demoralization, contempt of authority, and universal disrespect in the social world, are advanced as the out-growth of the incapacity of the administration. The foreign policy, indifference to Russian encroachment, and a long catalogue of grievances are brought forward to condemn the ministry, and a host of subjects to be dealt with in the parliament now opened, are hurled at the Government to perplex, and if possible engulf it in disaster and overthrow. |