head the mollusca, having brains enough for almost anything short of mathematics, doubtless regard their humble cousins the oysters as "dull dogs." Nevertheless, oysters have the valuable quality of knowing when to keep their mouths shut, which is more than can be said of some of the higher vertebrates. In deep water these voiceless orators, knowing their business, remain open-mouthed; but when placed on tidal beaches they straightway apply the closure, and sit with tight lips and unwagged beards for a week at a stretch. Although destitute of heads they adapt themselves to unfamiliar circumstances.

Storms are a danger to sea-birds as well as to the mariner; the lashing waves and sweeping winds preventing them from earning their living in their adopted element. Deep-sea fishes probably pass their lives in ignorance of the fact that there are such things as hurricanes, the waves, which appear to us so magnificent and terrible, never reaching them in their untroubled depths. Fishes which haunt the shallow seas and the coast-line, as well as surface species frequenting the open ocean, have some knowledge of the meaning of a storm; but most of them have only to go below, or into deeper water, to escape its violence. But occasions arise, at long intervals, when agile fishes are entrapped near the rocks, or embayed like some helpless ship, thereby suffering wreck and ruin. In a violent north-west storm on the Cornish coast, not long ago, fresh fish were swept in almost on the writer's doorstep, including gobies, wrasse, pipe-fishes, plaice, and a conger measuring over four feet and weighing nine pounds. Why did these different species-flat, round, thick, and long-sail in before the waves, like sheep drifting before a pitiless wind and rain, instead of heading for the open sea? Migratory species know enough of the cur

rents, the trend of the coast, and the direction where greater warmth or more food is to be obtained, to steer to their coveted havens. The fact that these expeditions are annual is no explanation of the mystery. There must have been a time when they began, and when therefore their prows were turned towards unknown seas. How migratory fishes would have be haved if embayed in a storm it is impossible to say, but it is certain that a sudden and violent gale, flinging gigantic waves on the shore, demoralized such a cunning and active fish as the conger and sent it to its doom.

Creatures with brains of a higher type than those of fishes cannot always adapt themselves to the uncertain actions of wind and wave, and to the dangers of elemental strife. On the same shore which witnessed the exit of the fishes from their ancestral home and their vain attempt to live on dry land, a hundred gannets recklessly threw their lives away. Gannets, as is well known, soar aloft, swing round, and, closing their wings, plunge down on shoals of fishes. This proceeding requires deep water, if the beaks and heads of the birds are not to be shattered. But gannets impelled by hunger, if not by greed, dash down upon fishes without considering what is on the other side, and have been seen to fracture their skulls by transfixing the planks on which herrings were resting. A bird once nearly killed a friend of the writer in its clumsy plunge on a herring by his side. The hundred gannets already mentioned, together with another hundred of their fellows, sighted a shoal of sand-eels on the edge of the shore. A heavy ground sea was breaking on the sand, but this did not deter the hungry birds. They sailed up into the air, and fell like splashing thunderbolts upon the glit tering sand-eels. Then they sailed back, but not-not the two hundred.

To right and left big birds floundered and swam, or tried to swim, their breath almost beaten out of their bodies by the tremendous thud of the waves. One might have expected the keen-witted creatures would have taken warning by the disaster which had befallen their friends. But no; squadron after squadron rushed into the jaws of death, until a hundred snowy figures, and some in speckled, immature plumage, lay stretched upon the shore: for the fishermen, called together by the sight of wholesale suicide, not only gathered the battered corpses, but also, with boathooks and sticks, assisted some of the unsuccessful candidates to effect their exit from life. The circumstances were unfamiliar, and the minds of the birds were not equal to the strain. The craving for food was stronger than the instinct of self-preservation.

It may be doubted whether those of us who are able to obtain sufficient food without difficulty, can appreciate the craving for sustenance experienced by sea-birds and other animals, which have often, by the force of circumstances, to fast for long periods. Gulls will eat until they cannot fly, and when they find pilchards on board a boat will continue their feast until they can only lie down and gasp. A superfluity of food comes at such long intervals that, when it does come, the avian intellect reels at the prospect, and what seems a horn of plenty brings dire disaster. Seeing that gulls and gannets know no better, we are not surprised to hear of a John Dory, stuffed to the very mouth, floating helplessly on the surface of the water, unable to escape from a flock of seabirds, which have deprived it of its eyesight, and will quickly take away its life. A snake which thrusts its head through the paling to seize an unwary frog, and finds itself unable to draw back again with the frog in its

throat, has wit enough to disgorge the amphibian and to deftly draw it through by the leg, so as to swallow it on the safe side of the palings; but probably a snake which happened to be on the wrong side, in company with a frog, would consume it on the premises, and so render itself incapable of wriggling through the bars.

Animals are notoriously afraid of fire, and a ring of camp fires is a common protection used by travellers to ward off the attacks of the larger carnivora. It may be that flames are associated in the minds of the animals with the pealing of thunder and the flash of lightning, or with vast jungle or forest conflagrations, for their knowledge of fires kindled by human beings cannot be extensive. Two recent experiences have suggested to the writer that this dread of flames does not exist where thunderstorms are infrequent and forest fires unknown. A kitten, two months old, which had never seen a fire except from a distance, came into a room in which one had just been lighted. A lump of coal was sending out a bright jet of flame. She looked, then cautiously approached, as if stalking some living thing, and finally put her paw upon it to test its nature. It was an unfamiliar object, and she examined it with the yearning for knowledge and the caution of a philosopher. Apparently one experiment was sufficient. The paw was hastily drawn back and the nose removed to a safer position, and although the kitten often gazed at the fire in after-days, she never approached near enough to singe her Persian fur. Her brain had taught her, not indeed to dread the fire, but to avoid actual contact with it. A story is current of a cat which dashed water upon an incipient outbreak of fire, and thus saved the house in which she lived; but much of the beauty of the story has been ascribed to the imagination of the story

teller. The scepticism is probably uncalled for. At all events, a badger, which had made its home among the granite cliffs near the spot where this is being written, dealt with the devouring element with sagacity and skill. A friend, while painting a sea-piece, discovered a badger's lair, and thought to play the animal a practical joke. Gathering together a bundle of grass and weeds, he placed it inside the mouth of the hole, and, igniting it with a match, waited for the ignominious flight of the astonished householder. But Master Badger was a resourceful animal, and not disposed to be made a butt of practical jokers. He came up from the depths of his hole as soon as the penetrating smoke told him that there was a fire on the premises, and deliberately scratched earth on the burning grass with his strong claws until all danger was past. No human being could have grasped the situation more quickly, or displayed greater skill in dealing with an unfamiliar event.

Birds, with all their acuteness, often fail to move out of their accustomed groove. The chirping sparrows have persisted in building their nests in the roof-gutters of the next house; ignoring the fact that rain is not unknown in this climate, and that a heavy shower will flood their tenements and drown their offspring. Not only so, but next year and the year after they will do the same, failing to learn by experience how to accommodate themselves to British weather. Jackdaws, when untainted by civilization, dwell in holes in the rocks, but quickly adapt themselves to new circumstances. The writer has been almost smothered with smoke caused by a nest which completely blocked his chimney, ten feet from the top. As the chimney has only been built a few months, it is obvious that as a site it must have been unfamiliar to the troublesome birds. Now,

that time is far distant when first chimneys were invented and the first jackdaws descended their blackened depths; yet a long experience, while it has shown the birds the convenience of chimneys for holding their abominable sticks, has not taught them that their premises cannot be insured against fire. Perhaps, after all, the brains of jackdaws are sharper than is supposed. The nests are placed in the chimneys just when fires are being given up for the summer, so that the jackdaws enjoy the use of the chimneys more than the man who pays for their erection.

Belt, in his Naturalist in Nicaragua, draws attention to the methods of attack used by different species of wasps. One, accustomed to animals and not to man, takes care to crawl down the outstanding hairs to the skin before inserting its sting; while others, which live in the midst of human dwellings, fly straight at a man's face. The first species, true to inherited instinct, when it attacks unfamiliar human beings attaches itself to their hair or their beards. But there must have been a time when the second species discovered that the face was the vulnerable part, and the discovery was the outcome of the action of brain. To be slain in the hunting field is often regarded as the natural end of the life of a wild boar, and the boar at bay furnishes a dramatic incident to the painter and the poet. Yet this stand of the hunted beast, conducted on his part with wonderful skill, strength, and courage, in a position chosen with astonishing judgment, is often the first and last in his lifetime. The circumstances are entirely unfamiliar, but the animal does all that a living thing can do; just as if fighting for life against strange and resistless adversaries were an everyday task. On the beach below, countless gray mullets have been drawn ashore year after year. To be

enclosed in a net occurs to them as a rule only once, for individuals which escape a cast of the seine flee from the dangerous spot as if it were tainted by the plague. Yet the keen-witted fishes, when imprisoned within the meshed walls, display as much ingenuity and skill in endeavoring to break out again, as would be astonishing in the case of the highest of the mammalia. A fish's brain, if the mullet be taken as its representative, is acute and profound. Longman's Magazine.

An orator once advised his hearers to tie their brains in a knot if they wished to achieve intellectual success. Nature has already performed this operation upon vertebrate and invertebrate creatures, and on all the higher species in both classes in abundant measure. How matter can be translated into mind, and mind into action, is a mystery. The outcome of that mystery calls for our wonder and admiration.

John Isabell.

"Latin verses, the sweetest things in the world," so said on one occasion Archbishop Benson, and so would have said five-and-twenty years ago half the prelates on the English Bench, and, for the matter of that, half the English Judges, and not a few English statesmen. They had all been brought up on them, in the days of which Matthew Arnold in that most literary of skits, Friendship's Garland, calls "the good old fortifying classical curriculum." But what, said Arminius, did your friend really learn at the Charterhouse from this system? "I have seen some longs and shorts of his on the Calydonian boar which were not bad," replies his interlocutor. But neither the writers nor the critics of those days looked on Latin verses as poetry, even when they were so, but only as a charming and graceful exercise of special value in educating literary taste and skill. We should have to go a good deal further back than a quarter of a century to find the time when in

"Poems, Charades, Inscriptions, of Pope Leo. XIII., Including the Revised Compositions of his Early Life, in Chronological Order." With English Translation and Notes by H. T. Henry,

England Latin was a living vehicle for poetry. A few admirable composers like Sir Richard Jebb, or Professor Robinson Ellis, or Mr. Godley, a poet here and there like Mr. Swinburne, may still write verses in Greek or Latin that are not only verses but poetry; but the days are gone by when an English poet would naturally express his original thoughts in Latin, and Gray, the last English poet, probably, whose Latin verses are at all commonly quoted, thought the practice out of date. In England Latin has become really a dead language. In Italy, and especially in the Roman Church, this is not quite the case. The language, in which the Gospel, after speaking

to the South in Greek About the soft Mediterranean shores-

spoke

then in Latin to the Latin crowdis there still alive. The stream of its life runs thin, but it is yet a living

Overbrook Seminary. New York and Philadel phia: The Dolphin Press ("American Ecclesiasti cal Review"). (6s. 6d. net.)

stream. The Pope still makes his pronouncements urbi et orbi, and issues his letters out of the Northern or the Southern gate, in the Latin tongue. It is to him a natural vehicle of prose. There is no reason why it should not be a natural vehicle of poetry.

The Pope has long been known to be a scholar and a friend of scholars. He has done not a little to make the Vatican Library more accessible to them, and only the other day it was announced that, not content with the Vatican, his Holiness had purchased at the cost of £20,000 the Barberini Library, building and books together, and intended to throw it open to the studious public. But this is not all. Many Popes before Leo XIII., and very many Cardinals, have patronized learning and the love of classic antiquity. In the Renaissance they were tempted, and some yielded to the temptation, to patronize it too much. Good Latinity was almost more important than sound doctrine, and a false quantity worse than a peccadillo. We all remember Browning's Bishop "ordering his tomb in St. Praxed's Church," and how his taste for sensuous paganism mixes with his religion, and his love of elegant Latin with his hatred of his enemies, when he bespeaks for his monument "Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of," as well as "The Saviour at His Sermon on the Mount" and "St. Praxed in a Glory," and for his epitaph

Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word.

No gaudy ware like Gandolf's second line,

Tully, my masters, Ulpian serves his turn.

Pope Leo is not a humanist, but he is a lover of humane letters, and, like Archbishop Temple, recognizes their value for the training of the human intellect, and also their charm. He is a scholar, but he is more than a scholar,

he is a poet. We do not say that he is a great poet, for to be a great poet is hardly possible for any one very great in other ways. A Pope or King can scarcely be a great poet. There have no doubt been exceptions, even if, as the higher criticism seems to postulate, King David never wrote a Psalm, or, at any rate, one which his people cared to preserve. But a Pope or King may show poetic quality; and such is the character of the pieces in this volume. They show it all the more for what may at first seem their defect. They are not to be judged so mainly as efforts of scholarly composition. Many of his lines would not be passed at Eton or Shrewsbury. It is not only that they do not conform to the narrow Ovidian standard. All Latin elegiacs need not do that, any more than all English heroics need conform to the narrow standard of Pope. But they have the freedom of a living language and the license of Italian Latin.

"When in 1897 Andrew Lang, the foremost man of letters in England, cabled to the New York World his exquisite translation of the Epistola ad Fabricium Rufum, the general reading public was made aware of the poetical attainments of Leo XIII." It is thus that the editor of this volume begins his preface. The deft and delightful

writer whose name is thus introduced will be the first to smile at the position here assigned him, and it would be hardly fair to take the enthusiastic language of Mr. Henry quite seriously; though if he means that Mr. Lang is one of the very happiest and most versatile of living English critics and translators, he means no more than is true.

We do not know who Mr. Henry, of Overbrook Seminary, is. He is not very strong as a critic, though the notes he has collected are full of interesting matter, and he is not very careful as an editor. There are too