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Free Air/Chapter 4

A ROOM WITHOUT

OPHER PRAIRIE has all of five thousand people. Its commercial club asserts that it has at least a thousand more population and an infinitely better band than the ridiculously envious neighboring town of Joralemon. But there were few signs that a suite had been engaged for the Boltwoods, or that Prince Collars and Cuffs had on his royal tour of America spent much time in Gopher Prairie. Claire reached it somewhat before seven. She gaped at it in a hazy way. Though this was her first prairie town for a considerable stay, she could not pump up interest.

The state of mind of the touring motorist entering a strange place at night is as peculiar and definite as that of a prospector. It is compounded of gratitude at having hot safely in; of perception of a new town, yet with all eagerness about new things dulled by weariness; of hope that there is going to be a good hotel, but small expectation - and absolutely no probability - that there really will be one.

Claire had only a blotched impression of peaked wooden buildings and squatty brick stores with faded awnings; of a red grain elevator and a crouching station and a lumberyard; then of the hopelessly muddy road leading on again into the country. She felt that if she didn't stop at once, she would miss the town entirely. The driving-instinct sustained her, made her take corners sharply, spot a garage, send the Gomez whirling in on the cement floor.

The garage attendant looked at her and yawned.

"Where do you want the car?" Claire asked sharply.

"Oh, stick it in that stall," grunted the man, and turned his back.

Claire glowered at him. She thought of a good line about rudeness. But - oh, she was too tired to fuss. She tried to run the car into the empty stall, which was not a stall, but a space, like a missing tooth, between two cars, and so narrow that she was afraid of crumpling the lordly fenders of the Gomez. She ran down the floor, returned with a flourish, thought she was going to back straight into the stall - and found she wasn't. While her nerves shrieked, and it did not seem possible that she could change gears, she managed to get the Gomez behind a truck and side-on to the stall.

"Go forward again, and cramp your wheel-sharp!" ordered the garage man.

Claire wanted to outline what she thought of him, but she merely demanded, "Will you kindly drive it in?"

"Why, sure. You bet," said the man casually. His readiness ruined her inspired fury, She was somewhat disappointed.

As she climbed out of the car and put a hand on the smart bags strapped on a running-board, the accumulated weariness struck her in a shock. She could have driven on for hours, but the instant the car was safe for the night, she went to pieces. Her ears rang, her eyes were soaked in fire, her mouth was dry, the back of her neck pinched. It was her father who took the lead as they rambled to the one tolerable hotel in the town.

In the hotel Claire was conscious of the ugliness of the poison-green walls and brass cuspidors and insurance calendars and bare floor of the office; conscious of the interesting scientific fact that all air had been replaced by the essence of cigar smoke and cooking cabbage; of the stares of the traveling men lounging in bored lines; and of the lack of welcome on the part of the night clerk, an oldish, bleached man with whiskers instead of a collar.

She tried to be important: "Two rooms with bath, please."

The bleached man stared at her, and shoved forward the register and a pen clotted with ink. She signed. He took the bags, led the way to the stairs. Anxiously she asked, "Both rooms are with bath?"

From the second step the night clerk looked down at her as though she were a specimen that ought to be pinned on the corks at once, and he said loudly, "No, ma'am. Neither of 'em.  Got no rooms vacant with bawth, or bath either!  Not but what we got 'em in the house.  This is an up-to-date place.  But one of 'm's took, and the other has kind of been out of order the last three-four months."

From the audience of drummers below, a delicate giggle.

Claire was too angry to answer. And too tired. When, after miles of stairs, leagues of stuffy hall, she reached her coop, with its iron bed so loose-jointed that it rattled to a breath, its bureau with a list to port, and its anemic rocking-chair, she dropped on the bed, panting, her eyes closed but still brimming with fire. It did not seem that she could ever move again. She felt chloroformed. She couldn't even coax herself off the bed, to see if her father was any better off in the next room.

She was certain that she was not going to drive to Seattle. She wasn't going to drive anywhere! She was going to freight the car back to Minneapolis, and herself go back by train - Pullman! - drawing room!

But for the thought of her father she would have fallen asleep, in her drenched tweeds. When she did force the energy to rise, she had to support herself by the bureau, by the foot of the bed, as she moved about the room, hanging up the wet suit, rubbing herself with a slipper towel, putting on a dark silk frock and pumps. She found her father sitting motionless in his room, staring at the wall. She made herself laugh at him for his gloomy emptiness. She paraded down the hall with him.

As they reached the foot of the stairs, the old, the night clerk leaned across the desk, and in a voice that took the whole office into the conversation, quizzed, "Come from New York, eh? Well you're quite a ways from home."

Claire nodded. She felt shyer before these solemnly staring traveling men than she ever had in a box at the opera. At the double door of the dining-room, from which the cabbage smell steamed with a lustiness undiminished by the sad passing of its youth, a man, one of the average-sized, average-mustached, average business-suited, average-brown-haired men who can never be remembered, stopped the Boltwoods and hawed, "Saw you coming into town. You've got a New York license?"

She couldn't deny it.

"Quite a ways from home, aren't you?"

She had to admit it.

She was escorted by a bouncing, black-eyed waitress to a table for four. The next table was a long one, at which seven traveling men, or local business men whose wives were at the lake for the summer, ceased trying to get nourishment out of the food, and gawped at her. Before the Boltwoods were seated, the waitress dabbed at non-existent spots on their napkins, ignored a genuine crumb on the cloth in front of Claire's plate, made motions at a cup and a formerly plated fork, and bubbled, "Autoing through?"

Claire fumbled for her chair, oozed into it, and breathed, "Yes."

"Going far?"

"Yes."

"Where do you live?"

"New York."

"My! You're quite a ways from home, aren't you?"

"Apparently."

"Hamnegs roasbeef roaspork thapplesauce frypickerel springlamintsauce."

"I - I beg your pardon."

The waitress repeated.

I - oh - oh, bring us ham and eggs. Is that all right, father?"

"Oh - no - well - "

"You wanted same?" the waitress inquired of Mr. Boltwood.

He was intimidated. He said, "If you please," and feebly pawed at a fork.

The waitress was instantly back with soup, and a collection of china gathered by a man of much travel, catholic interests, and no taste. One of the plates alleged itself to belong to a hotel in Omaha. She pushed a pitcher of condensed milk to the exact spot where it would catch Mr. Boltwood's sleeve, brushed the crumb from in front of Claire to a shelter beneath the pink and warty sugar bowl, recovered a toothpick which had been concealed behind her glowing lips, picking for a while, gave it up, put her hands on her hips, and addressed Claire:

"How far are you going?"

"To Seattle."

"Got any folks there?"

"Any - Oh, yes, I suppose so."

"Going to stay there long?"

"Really - We haven't decided."

"Come from New York, eh? Quite a ways from home, all right.  Father in business there?"

"Yes."

"What's his line?"

"I beg pardon?"

"What's his line? Ouch!  Jiminy, these shoes pinch my feet.  I used to could dance all night, but I'm getting fat, I guess, ha! ha!  Put on seven pounds last month.  Ouch!  Gee, they certainly do pinch my toes.  What business you say your father's in?"

"I didn't say, but - Oh, railroad."

"G.N. or N.P."

"I don't think I quite understand-"

Mr. Boltwood interposed, "Are the ham and eggs ready?"

"I'll beat it out and see." When she brought them, she put a spoon in Claire's saucer of peas, and demanded, "Say, you don't wear that silk dress in the auto, do you?"

"No."

"I should think you'd put a pink sash on it. Seems like it's kind of plain - it's a real pretty piece of goods though.  A pink sash would be real pretty.  You dark-complected ladies always look better for a touch of color."

Then was Claire certain that the waitress was baiting her, for the amusement of the men at the long table. She exploded. Probably the waitress did not know there had been an explosion when Claire looked coldly up, raised her brows, looked down, and poked the cold and salty slab of ham, for she was continuing:

"A light-complected lady like me don't need so much color, you notice my hair is black, but I'm light, really Pete Liverquist says I'm a blonde brunette, gee, he certainly is killing that fellow, oh, he's a case, he sure does like to hear himself talk, my! there's Old Man Walters, he runs the telephone exchange here, I heard he went down to St. Cloud on Number 2, but I guess he couldn't of, he'll be yodeling for friend soup and a couple slabs of moo, I better beat it, I'll say so, so long."

Claire's comment was as acid as the pale beets before her, as bitter as the peas, as hard as the lumps in the watery mashed potatoes:

"I don't know whether the woman is insane or ignorant. I wish I could tell whether she was trying to make me angry for the benefit of those horrid unshaven men, or merely for her private edification."

"By me, dolly. So is this pie.  Let's get some medium to levitate us up to bed.  Uh-uh- I think perhaps we'd better not try to drive clear to Seattle.  If we just went through to Montana? -or even just to Bismarck?"

"Drive through with the hotels like this? My dear man, if we have one more such day, we stop right there.  I hope we get by the man at the desk.  I have a feeling he's lurking there, trying to think up something insulting to say to us.  Oh, my dear, I hope you aren't as beastly tired as I am.  My bones are hot pokers."

The man at the desk got in only one cynical question, "Driving far?" before Claire seized her father's arm and started him upstairs.

For the first time since she had been ten - and in a state of naughtiness immediately following a pronounced state of grace induced by the pulpit oratory of the new rector of St. Chrysostom's - she permitted herself the luxury of not stopping to brush her teeth before she went to bed. her sleep was drugged - it was not sleep, but an aching exhaustion of the body which did not prevent her mind from revisualizing the road, going stupidly over the muddy stretches and sharp corners, then becoming conscious of that bed, the lump under her should blades, the slope to westward, and the creak that rose every time she tossed. For at least fifteen minutes she lay awake for hours.

Thus Claire Boltwood's first voyage into democracy.

It was not so much that the sun was shining, in the morning, as that a ripple of fresh breeze came through the window. She discovered that she again longed to go on - keep going - see new places, conquer new roads. She didn't want all good road. She wanted something to struggle against. She'd try it for one more day. She was stiff as she crawled out of bed, but a rub with cold water left her feeling that she was stronger than she ever had been; that she was a woman, not a dependent girl. Already, in the beating prairie sun-glare, the wide main street of Gopher Prairie was drying; the mud ruts flattening out. Beyond the town hovered the note of a meadow lark - sunlight in sound.

"Oh, it's a sweet morning! Sweet!  We will go on!  I'm terribly excited!" she laughed.

She found her father dressed. He did not know whether or not he wanted to go on. "I seem to have lost my grip on things. I used to be rather decisive.  But we'll try it one more day, if you like," he said.

When she had gaily marched him downstairs, she suddenly and unhappily remembered the people she would have to face, the gibing questions she would have to answer.

The night clerk was still at the desk, as though he had slept standing. he hailed them. "Well, well! Up bright and early!  Hope you folks slept well.  Beds aren't so good as they might be, but we're kind of planning to get some new mattresses.  But you get pretty good air to sleep in.  Hope you have a fine hike today."

His voice was cordial; he was their old friend; faithful watcher of their progress. Claire found herself dimpling at him.

In the dining-room their inquisitional acquaintance, the waitress, fairly ran to them. "Sit down, folks. Waffles this morning.  You want to stock up for your drive.  My, ain't it an elegant morning!  I hope you have a swell drive today!"

"Why!" Claire gasped, "why, they aren't rude. They care - about people they never saw before.  That's why they ask questions!  I never thought - I never thought!  There's people in the world who want to know us without having looked us up in the Social Register!  I'm so ashamed!  Not that the sunshine changes my impression of this coffee.  It's frightful!  But that will improve.  And the people - they were being friendly, all the time.  Oh, Henry B., young Henry Boltwood, you and your godmother Claire have a lot to learn about the world!"

As they came into the garage, their surly acquaintance of the night before looked just as surly, but Claire tried a boisterous "Good morning!"

"Mornin'! Going north?" Better take the left-hand road at Wakamin. Easier going. Driver your car out for you?"

As the car stood outside taking on gas, a man flapped up, spelled out the New York license, looked at Claire and her father, and inquired, "Quite a ways from home, aren't you?"

This time Claire did not say "Yes!" She experimented with, "Yes, quite a ways."

"Well, hope you have a good trip. Good luck!"

Claire leaned her head on her hand, though hard. "It's I who wasn't friendly," she propounded to her father. "How much I've been losing. Though I still refuse to like that coffee!"

She noticed the sign on the air-hose of the garage - "Free Air."

"There's our motto for the pilgrimage!" she cried.

She knew the exaltation of starting out in the fresh morning for places she had never seen, without the bond of having to return at night.

Thus Claire's second voyage into democracy.

While she was starting the young man who had pulled her out of the mud and given her lunch was folding up the tarpaulin and blankets on which he had slept beside his Teal bug, in the woods three miles north of Gopher Prairie. To the high-well-born cat, Vere de Vere, Milt Daggett muse aloud, "Your ladyship, as Shakespeare says, the man that gets cold feet never wins the girl. And I'm scared, cat, clean scared."

title: Free Air/Chapter 4


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Canfield, Benedict

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Canicus


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, the stress of moral obligation; but in this transaction the author gives all, and the reader takes all (if he can) without thought of making returns, and without incurring the imputation of being a sponge or a parasite. If you are a free man, no intermediary stands between you and the author who draws you or repels you according to the subtle laws of affinity. Rarely, rarely among the living is that condition for ideal companionship realized.

Because of the unique terms which exist between author and reader, we associate with sinners not less than with saints, and are unburdened by a sense of responsibility for their acts. In daily life few of us, happily, come face to face with perverts and criminals; but through biography we can, if we will, measure the limits of human nature on its dark side in the careers of such colossal reprobates as Cæsar Borgia and his father; or monsters of cruelty like Ezzelino and Alva; or traitors, spies, and informers, from Judas to Benedict Arnold and Azeff; or of swindlers and more common scoundrels, George Law and Cagliostro and latter-day "promoters," and that peculiarly offensive brood—the pious impostors.

In the long run, however, we make our lasting friends among those who are normal but not commonplace, who seem to carry our own better traits to a degree of perfection which we have not attained, or who have qualities which we lack but envy. Unlikeness also is often a potent element of charm. I recall a frail little old lady, the embodiment of peace, so gentle that she could not bear to have a fly harmed, who devoured every book about Napoleon and seemed almost to gloat over the details of his campaigns. Conversely, more than one great captain has concentrated his reading in one or two books of religion.

Having entered the realm inhabited by those who live through the magic of biography, we cannot dwell there long without meeting friends for whom we have sought in vain among our actual associates. In finding them we often find our best selves. They comfort us in our distress, they clarify our doubts, they give fresh impetus and straight aim to our hopes, they whisper to us the mystic word which unfolds the meaning of life; above all—they


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Page:First Lessons in Geography (1856).djvu/6

 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHICAL SERIES.—NO. I.

FIRST LESSONS

IN

OR,

INTRODUCTION TO "YOUTH’S MANUAL OF GEOGRAPHY."

BY JAMES MONTEITH.

NEW YORK:

A. S. BARNES & CO., 51 JOHN-STREET.

ST. LOUIS: CARE & BUCHANAN.—CINCINNATI: H. W. DERBY.—CHICAGO: D. B. COOKE & CO.—NEW ORLEANS: J. B. STEEL.— BALTIMORE: J. W. BOND & CO.

1856


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No. 1.—MONTEITH'S FIRST LESSONS IN GEOGRAPHY, for Beginners.

No. 2.—MONTEITH'S YOUTH'S MANUAL OF GEOGRAPHY, for Junior and Intermediate Classes.

No. 3.—McNALLY’S SYSTEM OF GEOGRAPHY, for Advanced Classes in Schools, Academics, and Seminaries.

The above Books, which are written by Practical Teachers, constitute the most complete extant; and they are so adapted to each other, that the learner advances from one to the other with satisfaction and success. A. S. BARNES & CO.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1854, JAMES MONTEITH, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.


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is evident, that to secure a complete system of teaching Geography in our Schools, there should be at last three grades of Text-books; namely, and  As the necessity for a Geography more introductory in its character than those now in use has been long felt, the Author would respectfully solicit the notice of his fellow-teachers to this little work.

Its plan is such, that the subject is presented in the most simple form.

It treats of GENERAL FEATURES, such as the locality and description of Continents, Countries, States, Rivers, Mountains, &c., without dwelling prematurely upon the minute details that embarrass the learner in his first effort.

The are arranged in Question and Answer.

The are free from all meridians, parallels of latitude, and any superabundance of names; thereby giving a greater prominence to the general divisions of land and water.


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8


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 FIRST LESSONS

IN


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Author:Richard Chenevix Trench

Works

 * On the Study of Words (1851)
 * The Fitness of the Holy Scripture (1854)
 * English Past and Present (1855)
 * Select Glossary of English Words (1859)
 * Hulsean Lectures
 * Notes on the Parables (1841)
 * Notes on the Miracles (1846)
 * Calderon, his Life and Genius (1856)
 * Life's a dream. The great theatre of the world (1856)
 * On the Authorized Version of the New Testament (1858)
 * A Select Glossary of English Words used formerly in Senses Different from their Present (1860)
 * Sermons Preached in Westminster Abbey (1860)
 * Notes on the Parables of Our Lord (1861)
 * Afternoon Lectures on Literature and Art (1867)
 * Plutarch, his Life, and his Lives and his Morals (1873)
 * Proverbs and their Lessons (1861)
 * Studies in the Gospels (1874)
 * Synonyms of the New Testament (1880)
 * Brief Thoughts and Meditations on Some Passages in Holy Scripture (1884)
 * Lectures on Medieval Church History (1886)

Papers and Essays

 * On some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries (1857)

Poetry

 * Poems (1865)
 * A Household Book of English Poetry (1868)
 * Sacred Latin Poetry (1874)
 * Poems from Eastern Sources (1851)
 * The Story of Justin Martyr
 * Sabbation

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Rh a story by George Eliot or Mrs. Oliphant, her favourite (and mine) among women novelists, or if it be a Carlyle, and we move softly, she will read, entranced, for hours. Her delight in Carlyle was so well known that various good people would send her books that contained a page about him; she could place her finger on any passage wanted in the biography as promptly as though she were looking for some article in her own drawer, and given a date she was often able to tell you what they were doing in Cheyne Row that day. Carlyle, she decided, was not so much an ill man to live with as one who needed a deal of managing; but when I asked if she thought she could have managed him she only replied with a modest smile that meant "Oh, no!" but had the face of "Sal, I would have liked to try."

One lady lent her some scores of Carlyle letters that have never been published, and crabbed was the writing; but though my mother liked to have our letters read aloud to her, she read every one of these herself, and would quote from them in her talk. Side by side with the Carlyle letters, which show him in his most gracious light, were many from his wife to a friend, and in one of these a romantic adventure is described—I quote from memory, and it is a poor memory compared to my mother's, which registered everything by a method of her own: "What might be the age of Rh

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Rh Bell Tibbits? Well, she was born the week I bought the boiler, so she'll be one-and-fifty (no less!) come Martinmas." Mrs. Carlyle had got into the train at a London station and was feeling very lonely, for the journey to Scotland lay before her and no one had come to see her off. Then, just as the train was starting, a man jumped into the carriage: to her regret until she saw his face, when, behold, they were old friends, and the last time they met (I forget how many years before) he had asked her to be his wife. He was very nice, and, if I remember aright, saw her to her journey's end, though he had intended to alight at some half-way place. I call this an adventure, and I am sure it seemed to my mother to be the most touching and memorable adventure that can come into a woman's life. "You see he hadna forgot," she would say proudly, as if this was a compliment in which all her sex could share, and on her old tender face shone some of the elation with which Mrs. Carlyle wrote that letter.

But there were times, she held, when Carlyle must have made his wife a glorious woman. "As when?" I might inquire.

"When she keeked in at his study door and said to herself, 'The whole world is ringing with his fame, and he is my man!'"

"And then," I might point out, "he would roar to her to shut the door." Rh

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Rh "Pooh," said my mother, "a man's roar is neither here nor there." But her verdict as a whole was, " I would rather have been his mother than his wife."

So we have got her into her chair with the Carlyles, and all is well. Furthermore, "to mak siccar," my father has taken the opposite side of the fireplace and is deep in the latest five columns of Gladstone, who is his Carlyle. He is to see that she does not slip away fired by a conviction, which suddenly over-rides her pages, that the kitchen is going to rack and ruin for want of her, and she is to recall him to himself should he put his foot in the fire and keep it there, forgetful of all save his hero's eloquence. (We were a family who needed a deal of watching.) She is not interested in what Mr. Gladstone has to say; indeed she could never be brought to look upon politics as of serious concern for grown folk (a class in which she scarcely included man), and she gratefully gave up reading "leaders" the day I ceased to write them. But like want of reasonableness, a love for having the last word, want of humour and the like, politics were in her opinion a mannish attribute to be tolerated, and Gladstone was the name of the something which makes all our sex such queer characters. She had a profound faith in him as an aid to conversation, and if there were silent men in the company would give him to them to talk Rh

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Very Reverend Arthur Penrhyn Stanley is the son of a clergyman who was at one time in the navy, and who, though he was made Bishop of Norwich, was always a good deal more remarkable for his knowledge of natural history than for his theological learning.

He was educated at Rugby School, under Arnold, afterwards proceeding to Balliol, where he won a scholarship. The Broad-Church leader's University course was distinguished by a series of successes, ending, in 1837, in his taking a First Class in Classics. He was elected to a fellowship at University; and for many years, and with signal success and popularity, Dean Stanley discharged the duties of tutor of his college.

He was afterwards Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, and Canon of Christ Church.

Nearly thirty years ago, Dean Stanley first became known to the world of letters outside the limits of his University by the publication, in 1844, of his admirably written 'Life of Arnold.'

He is also the author of many volumes of sermons and lectures, and has contributed largely to periodical literature. He travelled in the East with the Prince of Wales, and was, no doubt, a most suitable chaplain, and appreciated by his Royal Highness at his true worth. When in the East, Dr. Stanley let his beard grow long, which gave him a patriarchal appearance he does not wear in London, where many are familiar with the figure of the small, thin, spiritual-looking man who is Dean of Westminster. Dr. Stanley's views in Church matters are well known. He is a leader of the Broad-Church party, is always for the fullest amount of religious liberty for everybody, is a friend of Dr. Colenso's, and was a subscriber to the Voysey Defence Fund.

Dr. Stanley succeeded the present Archbishop Trench in the Deanery of Westminster. His official position at the abbey church has placed


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Rh about, precisely as she divided a cake among children. And then, with a motherly smile, she would leave them to gorge on him. But in the idolising of Gladstone she recognised, nevertheless, a certain inevitability, and would no more have tried to contend with it than to sweep a shadow off the floor. Gladstone was, and there was an end of it in her practical philosophy. Nor did she accept him coldly; like a true woman she sympathised with those who suffered severely, and they knew it and took counsel of her in the hour of need. I remember one ardent Gladstonian who, as a general election drew near, was in sore straits indeed, for he disbelieved in Home Rule, and yet how could he vote against "Gladstone's man"? His distress was so real that it gave him a hang-dog appearance. He put his case gloomily before her, and until the day of the election she riddled him with sarcasm; I think he only went to her because he found a mournful enjoyment in seeing a false Gladstonian tortured.

It was all such plain sailing for him, she pointed out; he did not like this Home Rule, and therefore he must vote against it.

She put it pitiful clear, he replied with a groan.

But she was like another woman to him when he appeared before her on his way to the polling-booth.

"This is a watery Sabbath to you, I'm  Rh

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 upon him the duty of preaching a funeral sermon over the mortal remains of several very great men. Dean Stanley has preached, after their burial in the national mausoleum, the funeral sermons of Charles Dickens, Grote, and other eminent men. Such a painful task could not have fallen into abler or more friendly hands.

The Dean's prominent figure among the ecclesiastical reformers has subjected him to much severe criticism. In that pretty Church speech at Oxford, in the month of November 1864, when Mr. Disraeli told the world that he espoused the side of the angels, he alluded thus to the labours of Stanley, Jowett, and Maurice:

'I do perfect justice to the great talent, the great energy, and the considerable information which the new party command; but I believe that this new party in the Church will fail, for two reasons. In the first place, having examined all their writings, I believe without an exception—whether they consist of fascinating eloquence, diversified learning, and picturesque sensibility—I speak seriously what I feel—all these exercised, too, by one honoured in this great University, and whom to know is to admire and regard—or whether I find them in the cruder conclusions of prelates, who appear to me to have commenced their theological studies after they grasped the crozier, and who introduced to society their obsolete discoveries … or whether I read the lucubrations of nebulous professors, who appear in their style to have revived chaos … or, lastly, whether it be the provincial arrogance and precipitate self-complacency which flash and glare in an essay or review—I find this common characteristic of all their writings, that their learning is always second-hand.'

Notwithstanding such criticism, the 'new school' still lives, and very likely now Mr. Disraeli himself would be prepared to treat it with more respect.


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Rh ," she said sympathetically, but without dropping her wires—for, Home Rule or no Home Rule, that stocking-foot must be turned before twelve o'clock.

A watery Sabbath means a doleful day, and "A watery Sabbath it is," he replied with feeling. A silence followed, broken only by the click of the wires. Now and again he would mutter, "Ay, well, I'll be going to vote—little did I think the day would come," and so on; but if he rose it was only to sit down again, and at last she crossed over to him and said softly (no sarcasm in her voice now), "Away with you, and vote for Gladstone's man!" He jumped up and made off without a word, but from the east window we watched him strutting down the brae. I laughed, but she said, "I'm no sure that it's a laughing matter," and afterwards, "I would have liked fine to be that Gladstone's mother."

It is nine o'clock now, a quarter past nine, half-past nine—all the same moment to me, for I am at a sentence that will not write. I know, though I can't hear, what my sister has gone upstairs to say to my mother:

"I was in at him at nine, and he said, 'In five minutes,' so I put the steak on the brander, but I've been in thrice since then, and every time he says, 'In five minutes' and when I try to take the table-cover off, he presses his elbows hard on Rh

title: Page:Peter and Wendy.djvu/318


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great apostle to the Philistines of this later age, and the preacher of sweetness and light, Matthew Arnold, is the eldest son of one of the most remarkable and noblest Englishmen who have flourished in the nineteenth century—Dr. Thomas Arnold, some time head-master of Rugby School.

Matthew Arnold was born December 24th, 1822, at Laleham, near Staines, county Middlesex. He was the eldest son of nine children of his distinguished father, of whom he is as good a representative as the present Lord Derby is of the illustrious Tory chief.

The Arnolds came originally from Lowestoft, in Suffolk, but the grandfather of the poet and critic was a collector of customs dues at Cowes, in the Isle of Wight.

Matthew Arnold was educated first at Winchester and Rugby. From school he went to Oxford, where he was entered at Balliol, having gained a scholarship. This was in 1840.

During his university career he gained the Newdigate prize for English verse, the subject of his prize poem being Oliver Cromwell. At the end of his term in statu pupillari he graduated in honours, and was elected a fellow of Oriel; and in 1847 was appointed private secretary to the late Marquis of Lansdowne, which post he held for four years. He married, in 1851, the daughter of the late Mr. Justice Wightmann, and received from Government the appointment of lay inspector of schools, a post he was particularly well qualified to fill with advantage to the cause of education.

The first volume of his poems was published in 1849, as the work of 'A.;' and only a limited circle of friends knew the name of the author of 'The Strayed Reveller,' and other poems. Three years afterwards 'Empedocles on Etna' appeared, and shortly after that the 'A.' was dropped, and Messrs. Longmans issued a volume of poems, the authorship of which was avowed.


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66 THIRTY-SIX DRAMATIC SITUATIONS not knowing her for his mother; in Act II she demands, and is granted, the death of her unrecognized son, then finds she has no recourse but to kill him herself, then is again insulted by him; finally, in Act III, she poisons him, and, still unknown, is insulted, threatened and slain by him.

Be it noted that Shakespeare has not in a single instance employed this Nineteenth Situation, an altogether accidental one, having no bearing upon his powerful studies of the will.


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 Matthew Arnold's poems are full of original thoughts, expressed in the purest English. They are models of style; but, from their subject-matter and treatment, are never likely to be popular, in a wide sense of the word. To these published books of verse he owed his selection for the post of Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford; an important office he held for ten years, from 1857 to 1867. His most remarkable lectures in this time are on the subject of translating Homer, in which he advocates, in very strong language, the adoption of the English hexameter, in preference to any other metre, for effectively rendering the great Greek poet in English verses.

Mr. Arnold is chiefly remarkable in prose as an essayist. Perhaps his best-known book is that entitled 'Essays on Criticism,' which consists of a collection of papers previously published in various magazines and reviews.


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, whose novels were very popular only few years ago, and who is still a contributor to Mr. Mudie's bookshelves, was born at Manchester, in the year 1805. He was educated at the Free Grammar School of his native city, and, the son of a solicitor, was bred to the law. But at a very early age Mr. Ainsworth showed a taste for literature; before he left school he was a contributor to the pages of 'The Iris,' a journal then published in Manchester. He married the daughter of Mr. Ebers, a publisher in Bond-street, and at that time manager of the Operahouse. Ainsworth's first novel was 'Sir John Chiverton;' and of this, his first essay in fiction, no less an authority than Sir Walter Scott spoke in terms of high praise.

At Mr. Ebers's suggestion, Ainsworth appears to have tried his hand as a publisher; but he soon abandoned this, and devoted himself to literary pursuits. In 1834, 'Rookwood' appeared, and at once established his reputation as a writer of fiction. 'Rookwood' was followed, in 1837, by 'Crichton,' which was as successful as its immediate predecessor, and added to the author's fame. In the month of March 1839, Charles Dickens retired from the editorship of 'Bentley's Miscellany,' and wrote his successor in, in his humorous style, talking of the old and new coachman—'Bentley's' being the coach. 'The new whip' we quote the writer of a short biography of Ainsworth—'having mounted the box, drove straight to Newgate.' By the bye, Dickens had driven 'Bentley's' there before him; but the great humorist's thieves' story had a fine moral to it. 'He there took in Jack Sheppard and Cruikshank the artist; and, aided by that very vulgar but wonderful draughtsman, he made an efficient story of the burglar's or housebreaker's life.'

In such works of fiction as 'Jack Sheppard,' it soon became plain that Ainsworth's forte lay. He followed up his latest success with 'Guy Fawkes'


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 and 'The Tower of London.' In 1842 his connection with 'Bentley's' terminated, and in a magazine of his own he produced successively 'The Miser's Daughter,' 'Windsor Castle,' and 'St. James's.' In the above list the best of the author's novels are contained, but it by no means exhausts the catalogue of his works. It is as the biographer of such gentlemen as Mr. Jack Sheppard, of bad fame, that our author must lay claim to immortality; and it is in this field of labour that he is most at home. He has himself placed on record the state of his feelings after he had disposed of Mr. Turpin's apocryphal steed 'Black Bess.' 'Well do I remember,' says the author, 'the fever into which I was thrown during the time of composition. My pen literally scoured over the pages. So thoroughly did I identify myself with the flying highwayman that, once started, I found it impossible to halt. … In his (Turpin's) company I mounted the hillside, dashed through the bustling village, swept over the desolate heath, threaded the silent street, plunged into the eddying stream. … With him I shouted, sang, laughed, exulted, wept; nor did I retire to rest till in imagination I heard the bell of York Minster toll forth the knell of poor Black Bess.'

This is poetic frenzy with a vengeance; and nobody will be disposed to deny that, whatever else the novelist lacked, it certainly was not sympathy with his creations.

The moral tendency of his writings, and the effect they were likely to produce on the youthful or untrained mind, have often been the subject of criticism. Of these, we think there can be no doubt the effect must be bad. While we wish Mr. Ainsworth no harm, we wish the cause of morality in fiction well; and we cannot help thinking that, if the 'fever into which he was thrown,' by the recital of the lawless adventures of a highwayman, had carried off his passion for writing novels, English literature would have been the gainer.


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 4 here in 1689 for Dr. George Hickes, and afterwards included in his magnificent Thesaurus.

The history of Iceland often reads like a contradiction and refutation of a number of historical prejudices. It would require only a very slight touch of fancy or of travesty to make it into a kind of Utopian romance, with ideas something like those of William Godwin, or of Shelley. The Norwegian gentry who went out and settled in Iceland were driven there by their love of freedom, their objection to the new monarchy of Harald Fairhair. They did not want any government; they took an entirely new land and made their homes there, and a commonwealth of their own. No man had lived before in Iceland except the few Irish hermits who had wandered there after the fashion of St. Brandan; they soon disappeared, and their presence does nothing to impair the solitude, the utterly natural condition of Iceland when the Norwegians first took it. The colony of Iceland, further, was almost as free from institutions and constraint, in its early days, as any revolutionary philosopher could desire. The king had been left behind in the old country; there was no tribal system, no priestly order, nothing to complicate the business of life. No abstract thinking, no political platforms, no very troublesome religion interfered with the plain positive facts. The Icelanders at first had little to think about except their houses and families; they were not afraid of their gods, and had no exacting ceremonies. It is one kind of an ideal. It is true that this Godwinian republic began rather early to fall away from simplicity; perfect pure anarchy is too good for this world, and is soon corrupted. The Icelanders, before long, began to play the social contract, first of all by the voluntary agreement of neighbours under the presidency of the

title: Page:Sturla the Historian.djvu/4


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( function ( mw, $ ) { 'use strict'; function initializeRefTools {	if( !mw.user.options.get( 'showtoolbar' ) || window.refToolbarInstalled || $( '#wpTextbox1[readonly]' ).length ){		return;	}	if ( mw.user.options.get( 'usebetatoolbar' ) ) {		// Enhanced editing toolbar is on. Going to load RefToolbar 2.0a or 2.0b.		if ( mw.user.options.get( 'usebetatoolbar-cgd' ) ) {			// Dialogs are on. Loading 2.0b. (standard)			$.getScript( '//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-refToolbarBase.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript', function { mw.loader.using( [ 'ext.wikiEditor' ], function {					mw.loader.load( '//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:RefToolbar.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript' );				} ); } );		} else {			// Dialogs are off. Loading 2.0a.			mw.loader.using( 'ext.wikiEditor', function { mw.loader.load( '//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:RefToolbarNoDialogs.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript' ); } );		}	} else {		// Enhanced editing toolbar is off. Loading RefToolbar 1.0. (legacy)		mw.loader.load( '//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:RefToolbarLegacy.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript' );	}	window.refToolbarInstalled = true; }

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title: MediaWiki:Gadget-refToolbar.js


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to an oft-told story, a parliamentary reporter being asked if a certain M.P. had not been in the gallery, replied, 'Yes; but he was not up to our mark, so we pitched him into the House!' The said M.P. might have been a clever politician and statesman, though he failed in reporting, which requires a special and natural aptitude. The same remark is applicable to other departments of journalism. The leader-writer, the essayist, and the critic need extensive reading, minute observation, quickness of apprehension, and to wield an ever-ready pen. The journalist must also have the faculty of writing in a style that is both easy and instructive; for the newspaper reader expects to be spared the trouble of thinking, and to be regaled with completely digested thought. The adage that tells us the poet is born and the orator made is a rhetorical error; because the poet needs mental culture, and no man can be an orator unless he has the special talent. So with the journalist, who must be both born and made.

Mr. John Baker Hopkins was born in London, on the 10th of April 1830. He is maternally descended from a Staffordshire family, the Bakers, who have been closely allied with the Jennings family, and he is named after his great grandfather, a Wedgbury worthy, whose physical prowess, was celebrated in local song.

In April 1862, Mr. Henry Hotze, the commercial agent of the Confederate States, called on Mr. Hopkins, and discussed the expediency of buying the 'Atlas,' and making it the Confederate organ in Europe. Mr. Hopkins suggested that it would be better to start a new paper as the avowed organ of the Confederacy; and this was agreed to. In ten days after this interview—that is, on the 1st May 1862—the first number of the 'Index' appeared, under the joint editorship and management of Messrs. Hotze and Hopkins. At the 1862 meeting of the Social Science Congress, at the London


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refTools, adds a "cite" button to the editing toolbar for quick and easy addition of commonly used citation templates.

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text: Author talk:John Baker Hopkins

title: Author talk:John Baker Hopkins


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title: Portal:Benedict Canfield


text: Author:John Baker Hopkins

title: Author:John Baker Hopkins


text:
User talk:Falastur2

— billinghurst  sDrewth  01:50, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

title: User talk:Falastur2


text:
User talk:Digee

— billinghurst  sDrewth  02:32, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

title: User talk:Digee


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62


text: Folk-Lore/Volume 2/An Early Irish Version of the Jealous Stepmother and the Exposed Child


text: Cartoon portraits and biographical sketches of men of the day/J. B. Hopkins


text: Cartoon portraits and biographical sketches of men of the day/George Macdonald


text:
Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/432

 V. DARWIN'S VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE

AD Charles Darwin never published more than "The Voyage of the Beagle," his reputation as a naturalist of the first rank would have been fully assured. Even before the close of that eventful circumnavigation of the globe, the English geologist Sedgwick, who had probably seen some of the letters sent by the young naturalist to friends in England, predicted to Dr. Darwin, Charles Darwin's father, that his son would take a place among the leading scientific men of the day. As it afterward proved, the voyage of the Beagle was the foundation stone on which rested that monument of work and industry which, as a matter of fact, made Charles Darwin one of the distinguished scientists not only of his generation but of all time.

The conventional school and university training had very little attraction for Darwin. From boyhood his real interests were to be found in collecting natural objects; minerals, plants, insects, and birds were the materials that excited his mind to full activity. But it was not till his Cambridge days, when he was supposedly studying for the clergy, that the encouragement of Henslow changed this pastime into a serious occupation.

THE OCCASION OF THE VOYAGE

About 1831 the British Admiralty decided to fit out the Beagle, a ten-gun brig, to complete the survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego begun some years before, to survey the shores of Chili, Peru, and some of the islands of the Pacific, and to carry a chain of chronometrical measurements round the world. It seemed important to all concerned that a naturalist should accompany this expedition; and Captain Fitz-Roy, through the mediation of Professor Henslow, Rh


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Rh eventually induced Charles Darwin to become his cabin companion and naturalist for the voyage. Henslow recommended Darwin not as a finished naturalist but as one amply qualified for collecting, observing, and noting anything worthy to be noted in natural history.

The Beagle, after two unsuccessful attempts to get away, finally set sail from Devonport, England, December 27, 1831; and, after a cruise of almost five years, she returned to Falmouth, England, October 2, 1836. Her course had lain across the Atlantic to the Brazilian coast, thence southward along the east coast of South America to Tierra del Fuego, whence she turned northward skirting the seaboard of Chili and Peru. Near the equator a westerly course was taken and she then crossed the Pacific to Australia whence she traversed the Indian Ocean, and, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, headed across the South Atlantic for Brazil. Here she completed the circumnavigation of the globe and, picking up her former course, she retraced her way to England.

When Darwin left England on the Beagle, he was twenty-two years old. The five-year voyage, therefore, occupied in his life the period of maturing manhood. What it was to mean to him he only partly saw. Before leaving England he declared that the day of sailing would mark the beginning of his second life, a new birthday to him. All through his boyhood he had dreamed of seeing the tropics; and now his dream was to be realized. His letters and his account of the voyage are full of the exuberance of youth. To his friend Fox he wrote from Brazil: "My mind has been, since leaving England, in a perfect hurricane of delight and astonishment." To Henslow he sent word from Rio as follows: "Here I first saw a tropical forest in all its sublime grandeur—nothing but the reality can give you any idea how wonderful, how magnificent the scene is." And to another correspondent he wrote: "When I first entered on and beheld the luxuriant vegetation of Brazil, it was realizing the visions in the 'Arabian Nights.' The brilliancy of the scenery throws one into a delirium of delight, and a beetle hunter is not likely soon to awaken from it when, whichever way he turns, fresh treasures meet his eye." Such expressions could spring only from the enthusiasm of the born naturalist.


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424 THE TRAINING OF A NATURALIST

But the voyage of the Beagle meant more to Darwin than the mere opportunity to see the world; it trained him to be a naturalist. During his five years at sea he learned to work, and to work under conditions that were often almost intolerable. The Beagle was small and cramped, and the collections of a naturalist were not always easily cared for. The first lieutenant, who is described by Darwin in terms of the highest admiration, was responsible for the appearance of the ship, and strongly objected to having such a litter on deck as Darwin often made. To this man specimens were "d—d beastly devilment," and he is said to have added, "If I were skipper, I would soon have you and all your d—d mess out of the place." Darwin is quoted as saying that the absolute necessity of tidiness in the cramped space of the Beagle gave him his methodical habits of work. On the Beagle, too, he learned what he considered the golden rule for saving time, i. e., take care of the minutes, a rule that gives significance to an expression he has somewhere used, that all life is made of a succession of five-minute periods.

Darwin, however, not only learned on the Beagle how to work against time and under conditions of material inconvenience, but he also acquired the habit of carrying on his occupations under considerable physical discomfort. Although he was probably not seriously ill after the first three weeks of the voyage, he was constantly uncomfortable when the vessel pitched at all heavily, and his sensitiveness to this trouble is well shown in a letter dated June 3, 1836, from the Cape of Good Hope, in which he said: "It is lucky for me that the voyage is drawing to a close, for I positively suffer more from seasickness now than three years ago." Yet he always kept busily at work, and notwithstanding the more or less continuous nature of this discomfort, he was not inclined to attribute the digestive disturbances of his later life to these early experiences.

The return voyage found his spirits somewhat subdued. Writing to his sister from Bahia in Brazil where the Beagle crossed her outward course, he said: "It has been almost painful to find how much good enthusiasm has been evaporated in the last four years. I can now walk soberly through a Brazilian forest." Yet years after in


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Rh rehearsing the voyage in his autobiography he declared: "The glories of the vegetation of the Tropics rise before my mind at the present time more vividly than anything else."

PRACTICAL RESULTS OF THE VOYAGE

Darwin's opinion of the value of the voyage to him can scarcely be expressed better than in his own words. In his later years he wrote: "The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event of my life," and again: "I have always felt that I owe to the voyage the first real training or education of my mind; I was led to attend closely to several branches of natural history, and thus my powers of observation were improved, though they were always fairly developed." And finally in a letter to Captain Fitz-Roy he said: "However others may look back on the Beagle's voyage, now that the small disagreeable parts are well nigh forgotten, I think it far the most fortunate circumstance in my life that the chance afforded by your offer of taking a naturalist fell on me. I often have the most vivid and delightful pictures of what I saw on board the Beagle pass before my eyes. These recollections, and what I learned on natural history, I would not exchange for twice ten thousand a year."

But the voyage of the Beagle was not only training for Darwin, it was the means of gathering together a large and valuable collection of specimens that kept naturalists busy for some years to come, and added greatly to our knowledge of these distant lands and seas. In the work of arranging and describing these collections, Darwin was finally obliged to take an active part himself, for, to quote from his "Life and Letters," it seemed "only gradually to have occurred to him that he would ever be more than a collector of specimens and facts, of which the great men were to make use. And even of the value of his collections he seems to have had much doubt, for he wrote to Henslow in 1834: 'I really began to think that my collections were so poor that you were puzzled what to say; the case is now quite on the opposite tack, for you are guilty of exciting all my vain feelings to a most comfortable pitch; if hard work will atone for these thoughts I vow it shall not be spared.'" Thus the collections made on the Beagle served to confirm Darwin in the occupation of a


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426 naturalist and brought him into contact with many of the working scientists of his day.

SPECULATIVE RESULTS OF THE VOYAGE

Darwin, however, not only brought back, as a result of his work on the Beagle, large collections of interesting specimens, but he came home with a mind richly stored with new ideas, and one of these he put into shape so rapidly that it forms no small part of "The Voyage of the Beagle." During much of the latter part of the journey he was occupied with a study of coral islands and his theory of the method of formation of these remarkable deposits was the first to gain general acceptance in the scientific world. In fact, his views gained so firm a foothold that they are to-day more generally accepted than those of any other naturalist. But coral islands were not the only objects of his speculations. Without doubt he spent much time reflecting on that problem of problems, the origin of species, for, though there is not much reference to this subject either in the "Voyage" itself or in his letters of that period, he states in his autobiography that in July, 1837, less than a year after his return, he opened his first notebook for facts in relation to the origin of species about which, as he remarks, he had long reflected. Thus the years spent on the Beagle were years rich in speculation as well as in observation and field work.

Doubtless the direct results of the voyage of the Beagle were acceptable to the British Admiralty and justified in their eyes the necessary expenditure of money and energy. But the great accomplishment of that voyage was not the charting of distant shore lines nor the carrying of a chain of chronometrical measurements round the world; it was the training and education of Charles Darwin as a naturalist, and no greater tribute can be paid to the voyage than what Darwin himself has said: "I feel sure that it was this training which has enabled me to do whatever I have done in science."


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Rh were too precious to destroy; some for their fruits, others for their shade. We resolved to search at a distance for trees fit for our purpose, taking in our road a survey of our plantations and fields. Our garden at Tent House produced abundantly continual successions of vegetables in that virgin soil, and in a climate which recognized no change of season. The peas, beans, lentils, and lettuces were flourishing, and only required water, and our channels from the river brought this plentifully to us. We had delicious cucumbers and melons; the maize was already a foot high, the sugar-canes were prospering, and the pine-apples on the high ground promised us a rich treat.

We hoped our distant plantations were going on as well, and all set out one fine morning to Falcon's Nest, to examine the state of things there. We found my wife's corn-fields were luxuriant in appearance, and for the most part ready of cutting. There were barley, wheat, oats, beans, millet, and lentils. We cut such of these as were ready, sufficient to give us seeds for another year. The richest crop was the maize, which suited the soil. But there were a quantity of gatherers more eager to taste these new productions than we were; these were birds of every kind, from the bustard to the quail, and from the various establishments they had formed round, it might be presumed they would not leave much for us.

After our first shock at the sight of these robbers, we used some measures to lessen the number of them. Fritz unhooded his eagle, and pointed out the dispersing bustards. The well-trained bird immediately soared, and pounced on a superb bustard, and laid it at the feet of its master. The


text: Folk-Lore/Volume 2/Bhuridatta

title: Folk-Lore/Volume 2/Bhuridatta


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22 safety razor would become a necessity. The truth is, however, that anyone who has a good keen smooth-cutting razor, lathers the face thoroughly, and will learn—if he does not already know—how to handle the razor properly, will run almost no danger. Such a man will seldom cut himself.

On the other hand, most of the safety razors are difficult to keep clean and dry, and therefore free from rust; and owing to the difficulty of stropping them, it is almost, if not quite impossible to keep them sharp. It is also difficult to make the correct stroke with them. Probably a hundred thousand safety razors have been sold in the United States within the past few years and it is extremely doubtful if ten per cent. of them are now in use.

title: Page:Shaving Made Easy 1905.djvu/26


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Page:Shaving Made Easy 1905.djvu/27

 The edge of a razor, when viewed under a powerful microscope, presents an appearance very different from that seen by the unaided eye. Unmagnified, the edge appears to be a continuous unbroken line. Such actually is not the case, for the microscope reveals the fact that, instead of being straight and unbroken, the edge is in reality composed of a great number of minute points much resembling the teeth of a saw.

These points or teeth follow each other throughout the entire length of the blade, and by their extreme minuteness

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24 EDGE OF THE RAZOR AS IT APPEARS UNDER THE MICROSCOPE.

and unbroken regularity give the edge its exceeding keenness. Now if the razor becomes dull, these teeth will be less even and regular and their edges will be rounded and worn away. To sharpen the razor, therefore, it is necessary—by making the edge as thin as possible—to restore these little teeth to their original condition. This cannot be done by stropping, but is accomplished only by the process known as honing.

title: Page:Shaving Made Easy 1905.djvu/28


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 Rh It has been asserted by some, that when once the razor has been ground and set, the strop alone without further honing or grinding is sufficient to keep it in order. This opinion has eminated from certain makers of razor-strops, who wish to induce the public to purchase their goods. They represent their strops as having been "metalized," or otherwise treated with some kind of preparation that makes honing unnecessary. As a rule, we would advise the reader to beware of these "wonder-working-strops." Such preparations may, and sometimes do, improve the strop, just as lather when applied to a strop will improve it, but that they will do more than this, we deny. When the special offices of the hone and of the strop are fully understood, it will at once become apparent that no strop can possibly take the place of a hone.

The object of honing a razor is to make its edge as thin and flat as a proper attention to the degree of firmness

title: Page:Shaving Made Easy 1905.djvu/29


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26 will permit. This is accomplished by the hard fine grit of the hone cutting and wearing away the steel. The strop cannot do this. On the contrary, stropping a razor, instead of giving it a thin and flat edge, always has a tendency to produce a rounded one. This results from the very nature of the strop, which always gives or sags more or less during the process of stropping, and the more the strop is permitted to sag, the sooner will such an edge be produced, and in proportion as the edge assumes this rounded form, it losses its keenness. The flattest and thinnest edge is always the sharpest, and the only way to impart such an edge to a razor is by means of the hone.

Before explaining the process of honing, it may be well to say a word about the different kinds of hones, so that should the reader wish to purchase one, he may do it intelligently.

There are two distinct classes of hones in general use,—one known as the rock

title: Page:Shaving Made Easy 1905.djvu/30


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Rh hone, on account of its being cut from the natural rock, and the other manufactured. A great number of hones are produced in different parts of the United States, but few that are really suitable for sharpening razors. A razor hone must

be of the very finest quality. The natural stones are usually composed principally of silica, which is one of the sharpest cutting minerals known. It easily cuts the hardest steel and the fine grit imparts a very smooth edge to a razor. The "Arkansas," found near the famous Hot Springs, is one of this variety, but owing to the difficulty of obtaining this stone, and the great waste in cutting it, the supply is limited and the price high.

Most of the razor hones used in the

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28 United States are imported. The most noted are the German water hones, the oil hones from Belgium, and the Swaty hones from Austria. The last named are very reasonable in price and quite a favorite among barbers. They are a manufactured hone, and in some respects the manufactured hones are superior to the natural stones, in that they are free from scams and uneven spots and perfectly uniform in texture.

Most men have the idea that honing is a difficult operation and should be undertaken only by expert cutlers or barbers. Very few seem to think that they can hone there own razors. How this impression became current, it is difficult to say. We venture to assert, however, that honing a razor is at least as easy as stropping it. In this case as in many others, the difficulty arises from supposing there is a difficulty.

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150

HE Rand and Western Australia are powerful competitors for the prizes which English capitalists offer. Neither has had an easy lot, nor is embowered in a country where vine and fig tree and honeycomb abound. Each has demanded the very choicest of enterprise and hardihood to develop it, and herculean labours to make it profitable. These two goldfields of the last decades of the nineteenth century promise great things.

South Africa has to everlastingly thank the unresting enterprise of her leading colonists. Cecil Rhodes is as a mountain of strength at which the world gazes, and he is not alone in the work of development, extension, and aggrandisement. Many brave names—men who willingly staked their lives in their daring ventures—are associated with his, and among them Western Australia at the present moment holds one, Mr. William Griffith, who, engaged in superintending extensive mining interests in Western Australia, passed a brilliant career in South Africa. His reputation was won by deeds of bravery and skilful pioneering discoveries. His life teems with romantic exploits of human interest.

William Griffith was born in Wales in 1853, and educated at the Carnarvon High School, North Wales. On completing his education he became partner in a slate quarry. Bent on amassing a cumulative knowledge of mining, he took a rotatory course of study and practice in each of its departments. In the offices, mines, and mechanical branch of this extensive property he served with vigour, and by diligence realised for himself extensive knowledge in a short time. He soon embarked for Victoria. In the Ovens and Beechworth districts, in that colony, he pursued mining with unabated eagerness. From these historic scenes he repaired to the Burra Burra copper mines in South Australia, where for some considerable time he was engrossed in the various methods of mining operations. Having learnt his lesson in Australia he returned to Wales, and immediately took up some Welsh gold mines. He was largely interested in them for several years, and altered the general management. Then he sailed for South Africa, and attached himself to the diamond industry in Kimberley. He travelled over considerable portions of the fields, and gathered experience.

Again he went to the homeland to spend another period in the slate mines of Wales. His interests at home were altogether too wealthy to admit of protracted absence from them. His stay was short, and he returned to South Africa, after receiving certain commissions from various London companies to report on mines and to invest money. These responsible duties were performed with great satisfaction, and his newly-acquired trust necessitated extensive and exhaustive acquaintance with every quarter of the fields.

From this period he played a conspicuous part in the history of South Africa. His energetic capabilities, and his mental resources, soon attracted the vigilant attention of men of prominence like Mr. Rhodes, whose eagle eye is ever open in its watch for men of enterprise and ability. Mr. Griffith had been gradually winning favourable notice for his adventurous exploits, which drove him into the secret haunts of marauding foes far beyond the ken of civilisation.

Acts of bravery proved him a bulwark of stout unyielding stanchions. Mr. Rhodes knew his worth, and appointed him the leader of an expedition sent out to prospect and report. This pioneering band of explorers plunged into the great dark, then unknown, territory of Southern Central Africa to open it up to the clear daylight of civilisation. The commander's orders were obeyed, and over trackless wastes, through treacherous thickets and ravines, from which might spring the poisoned darts of lurking ambuscades, the men pushed their way amid fatiguing toils and labours. The records of their brilliant achievements shall never be effaced. To-day Britain possesses Mashonoland, Matabeland, and a stretch of country northwards to the Zambesi, for which wealthy, extensive territory she must actually, gratefully, and graciously thank the heroic courage of Mr. Griffith and his gallant comrades. Their pains and cruel sufferings were engulfed in the glories of their exploits. Feats like these cannot often illumine the pages even of a world's history.

On his return from his great expedition he did not repose on the laurels of his success, but, after taking a brief respite, once more proceeded into the interior in charge of the De Beer Mining Company Expedition. This extensive prospecting tour was one of incalculable success. Several wealthy areas were pegged out as highly auriferous, and time alone, that great anticipatory truth-revealer, confirmed the verdict as to their productivity. Now the wealth of the De Beer's mines is

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 Rh us find many contacts in their biographies. Often we are surprised by a thought or feeling or experience such as we have had and scarcely heeded, but which at once takes on dignity from being shared with the illustrious man. Still, the touchstone of biography is not merely greatness, but interest and significance; and herein it coincides with its twin art, portraiture. The finest portraits, assuming equal skill in the technique of their painting, are not of kings and grandees, but those which embody or suggest character. Queen Victoria's face, though a Leonardo had painted it, could never rivet the world's attention or pique the world's curiosity as Monna Lisa's has done. In ten minutes one has revealed the uncomplex and uninspired nature behind it; while after four hundred years the other still fascinates us by its suggestive and perpetually elusive expression.

So the lives of persons who were inconspicuous, measured on the scale of international or enduring fame, are sometimes packed with the charm of individuality. Such, for instance, is "The Story of My Heart," by Richard Jeffries. You may not like it—one friend to whom I recommended it told me he found it so exasperating that he threw it into the fire—but you cannot deny, if you are reasonably sympathetic, that it is the genuine utterance of a genuine man. Solomon Maimon's biography is another of this sort, in which we see an unusual personality shackled by the cruelty of caste. John Sterling had talent, but he died too young to achieve any work of lasting note; and yet, thanks to Carlyle's exuberantly vital memoir of him—which reminds me of one of Rembrandt's portraits—Sterling will live on for years.

These examples will suffice to prove that a great biography does not require a great man for its original; but it does require a great biographer. For biography is an art, a very high art; and, if we judge by the comparatively small number of its masterpieces, we must conclude that the consummate biographer is rarer than the poet, the novelist, or the historian of similar worth. The belief that anybody can write a life is one of the widespread fallacies. As if anybody could paint a portrait or compose a sonata!


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 168 When some notable person dies, it is ten to one that his wife or sister, son or daughter, sets to work to compile his memoir. The result, at its best, must present a partial, family point of view, hardly more to be trusted than the official biographies of kings and queens. It was the public relations of the gentleman that warranted writing about him at all; but from his wife—doting, perhaps—or from his child—spoiled, possibly—we shall hear of him chiefly in his role as husband or as father. Personal affection, devotion even, may be and usually is a handicap, which the family biographer cannot overcome. The wise surgeon does not trust himself to perform an operation on his dearest; neither should a biographer.

Knowledge, sympathy, and imagination the biographer must possess; these, and that detachment of the artist which is partly intuition and partly a sort of conscience, against which personal considerations plead in vain. Thus, although Boswell, the master biographer among all those who have written in English, felt toward Johnson admiration little short of idolatry, yet, when he came to write, he was the artist striving to make a perfect picture, and not the worshiper hiding his idol in clouds of incense. Sir George Trevelyan was Macaulay's nephew, and therefore likely to be hampered by family reserves; but in him the quality of biographer so far surpassed the accident of nephew that he, too, was able to produce a biography which portrays Macaulay as adequately as Boswell's portrays Johnson. Such exceptions simply prove the rule: detachment—which ensures fairness—and knowledge, sympathy, and imagination—uniting in a faculty which we may call divination—are indispensable.

The taste for biography, if it be not born in you, is quickly acquired. Many and many a person has had it first aroused in boyhood by Franklin's "Autobiography," that astonishing book, which enchants you when you are young by its simplicity and its teeming incidents, and holds you when you are old by its shrewdness, its


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 Rh tonic optimism, its candor, its wisdom, its humor. Franklin has done for himself what Defoe did for the fictitious Robinson Crusoe; but his sphere was as wide as Crusoe's was confined. Follow his fortunes and you will soon be swept into the main currents of history, not in Philadelphia or the Colonies only, but in Europe. And after you have digested the information which Franklin provides so naturally, you will recall again and again the human touches in which his book abounds: his remarks on his marriage: his confession that, when he began to take an account of stock of his moral condition he found himself much fuller of faults than he imagined; his admission that he acquired the appearance of humility though he lacked the reality; the irony of his report of Braddock's conversation;—but to mention its characteristic passages would be to epitomize the book. Each reader will have his favorites and when he reaches the end of the fragment, with its unfinished sentence, he will regret to part from such a mellow companion. What a treat the world missed because Franklin died before he had narrated his experiences between 1775 and 1785, that decade when, we may truly say that, if Washington was the Father, Franklin was the Godfather of his country. Perhaps, however, you were led into biography through other channels. The life of Napoleon or of Cæsar, of some painter, poet, man of letters, inventor, or explorer, may have been the first to attract you; but the outcome will be the same. You will feel that you have gained a new companion, as real as your flesh-and-blood intimates, but wittier, wiser, or more picturesque than they; a friend whose latchstring is always out for you to pull; a crony who will gossip when you desire, who will never desert you nor grow cold nor yawn at your dulness, nor resent your indifference. For the relation between you is wholly one-sided. His spirit is distilled in a book, like some rare cordial in a flask, to be enjoyed or not according to your mood. He bestows his all—himself: but only on condition that you supply the perfect sympathy requisite for understanding him. This relationship between the reader and the dead and gone who have perpetuated themselves in literature is absolutely unique. In all other affairs there must be reciprocity, the interplay of


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 Rh teach us by example how to live. Then we feel that our gratitude is barren and unworthy unless it spurs us to emulation. Unenviable indeed is he whose heart never

No matter what his creed may be, no man is so self-sufficient and original as not to be under the sway, whether he acknowledges it or not, of dead but sceptered kings; and biography brings them nearer to us and humanizes them, and thereby adds to the pertinence of their teaching. These are the supreme benefits conferred by biography; but as no healthy soul lives continuously in a state of ecstasy, so there are many moods in which we turn to other companions than the prophets. We require relaxation. Our intellect not less than our spirit craves its repast. Honest amusement is its own justification. Biography offers the widest possible choice for any fancy.

One of the surest ways to secure unfailing pleasure is to naturalize yourself as a member of some significant group. Take, for instance, Dr. Johnson and his circle. Having disclosed to you the imperishable Doctor, Boswell will whet your curiosity as to the scores of persons, great and small, who figure in the biography. You will go in pursuit of Sir Joshua Reynolds and of Garrick, of Goldsmith and of Burke: and you will soon discover that a mere bowing acquaintance with any of these will not satisfy you. When Gibbon enters the scene, you will be drawn to his autobiography. Chatham and Fox, North and Sheridan, must all be investigated. You will wonder why the other members of the Club unite in declaring Beauclerk the peer of the best of them in wit; and after much digging, you will conclude that, for lack of other evidence, you must accept Beauclerk on the strength of their commendation. As your circle widens, it will take in Fanny Burney—whose memoirs are so much more readable now than her "Evelina"; Mrs. Thrale—that type of the eternal feminine, whose mission it is to cheer Genius


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 172 by appreciating the man in whom it dwells; Mrs. Montague, the autocratic blue-stocking, who made and unmade literary reputations; and many others, from Paoli the vanquished patriot of Corsica to Oglethorpe the colonizer of Georgia. The material for knowing Johnson's group is extraordinarily rich. It consists not only of formal biographies and histories, but of letters, recollections, diaries, anecdotes, and table talk which are often the very marrow of both history and biography. You cannot exhaust it in many seasons. Horace Walpole alone will outlast any fashion. Little by little you will come to know the chief personages in youth and in age, from every point of view. You can watch them develop, or trace the interactions of one upon the other. The minor folk also will become real to you—Lovett, the trusty servant, and the old ladies with whom the Doctor drank tea, the chance frequenters of the coffeehouses where he thundered his verdicts on books and politics, the pathetic derelicts whose old age he solaced with a pension. You will experience the pleasure of filling gaps in the dramatis personæ and the stage setting, or in discovering a missing link of evidence. And so at last you can mix with that company at will. No matter what the cares and torments of your day, at evening you can enter their magic city, forget your present, and follow in imagination those careers which closed in time so long ago, but live on with undimmed luster in the timeless domain of the imagination. And during all this delightful exploration, you have been learning more and more about human nature, the mysterious primal element in which you yourself have your being. Instead of the province over which Dr. Johnson rules, you can choose from among many others. Take up the Lake School of poets—Byron, Shelley, and Keats—the mid-Victorian statesmen and men of letters—the founders of our Republic—Emerson and his contemporaries—and by the same method you will find your interest wonderfully enhanced. It is not the surface of life, but its depth and height that it behooves us to know; and we can get this knowledge vicariously from those who have soared highest or dropped their plummet farthest into the unfathomable deeps.


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 Rh THE VALUE OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY Autobiography is an important and often very precious product of biography. The common prejudice, that because it is egotistical it must be tedious, does not hold water. The impulse toward self-expression exceeds all others save the instinct of self-preservation. The artist blessed with great talent expresses himself through that talent, whether it be painting or sculpture, literature or eloquence. Let him strive never so hard to be impersonal, the tinge of his mind will color it; the work is his work. Men of pure science discover abstract laws by experimenting with material sterilized as far as possible from any taint due to a personal equation; but this does not lessen our interest in them as human beings. Far from it. We are all the more curious to learn how men, subject to our passions, contradictions and disabilities, have succeeded in exploring the passionless vastitudes of astronomy and the incomputably minute worlds of atoms and electrons. We rejoice to find Darwin worthy of being the prophet of a new dispensation—Darwin, the strong, quiet, modest man, harassed hourly by a depressing ailment, but patient under suffering, and preferring truth to the triumph of his own opinions or to any other reward. If self-conceit, or egotism, be rather too obtrusive in some autobiographies, you will learn to bear it if you regard it as a secretion apparently as necessary to the growth of certain talents as is the secretion which produces the pearl in the oyster. If a pearl results, the pearl compensates. And, after all, such conceit, like the make-believe of little children, is too patent to deceive us. It is the thought that they are trying to humbug us into supposing them greater than we know them to be that irritates us in the conceit of little men. But since conceited men have been great, even very great, although this blemish in them offends us, it ought not to blind us to their other positive accomplishments! And how much harmless amusement we owe to such unconscious humorists! When Victor Hugo grandly announces: "France is the head of civilization; Paris is the head of France; I am the brains of Paris," are we seized with a desire to refute him? Hardly. We smile an inward smile,


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 174 too deeply permeating and satisfactory for outward laughter. So Ruskin's inordinate vanity in "Præterita" cannot detract from the iridescent beauties of that marvelous book; it seems rather to be the guarantee of truthfulness.

Whatever may be your prepossessions, you cannot travel far in the field of biography without recognizing the value, even if you do not feel the fascination, of autobiographies, of which in English we have a particularly rich collection. I have spoken of Franklin's, to which Gibbon's may serve as a pendant. It discloses the eighteenth-century cosmopolite, placid, rational, industrious, a consummate genius in one direction, but of tepid emotion; who immortalized in a single line his betrothal which he docilely broke at his father's bidding: "I sighed as a lover," he writes, "but I obeyed as a son."

Halfway between the man of pure intellect, like Franklin and Gibbon, and the man of sentiment, comes John Stuart Mill, in whom the precocious development of a very remarkable mind did not succeed in crushing out the religious craving or the life of the feelings. Newman's "Apologia," largely occupied in the vain endeavor to transfuse the warm blood of the emotions into the hardened arteries of theological dogmas, stands at the other extreme in this class of confessions.

Contrast with it John Woolman's "Journal," the austerely sincere record of a soul that does not spend its time in casuistical interpretations of the quibbles propounded by mediæval theologians, but dwells consciously in the immediate presence of the living God.

Our only quarrel with Woolman is that, owing to his complete other-worldiness, he disdains to tell us facts about himself and about his time that we would gladly hear.

In other fields there is equal abundance. Many soldiers have written memoirs; enough to cite General Grant's, to parallel which we must go back to Cæsar's "Commentaries." Authors, poets, men of affairs, the obscure and the conspicuous, have voluntarily opened a window for us. From Queen Victoria's "Leaves from a Journal," to Booker T. Washington's "Up from Slavery," what contrasts, what richness, what range!


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 Rh And in other lands also many of the pithiest examples of human faculty are to be sought in autobiographies. To Benvenuto Cellini's life I have already referred. Alfieri, Pellico, Massimo d'Azeglio, Mazzini, Garibaldi are other Italians whose self-revelations endure. The French, each of whom seems to be more conscious than men of other races that he is an actor in a drama, have produced a libraryful of autobiographies. At their head stands Rousseau's "Confessions," in style a masterpiece, in substance absorbing, by one of the most despicable of men.

In the larger classification of literature, biography comes midway between history and fiction. One school of historians, indeed, unwilling to cramp their imaginations into so mean a space as a generation or a century, reckon by millenniums and lose sight of mere individuals. They are intent on discovering and formulating general laws of cosmic progress; on tracing the collective action of multitudes through long periods of time; on watching institutions evolve. In their eyes, even Napoleon is a "negligible quantity."

I would not for a moment disparage the efforts of these investigators. Most of us have felt the fascination of moving to and fro over vast reaches of time, as imperially as the astronomer moves through space. Such flights are exhilarating. They involve us in no peril; we begin and end them in our armchair; they attach to us no responsibility. The power of generalizing, which even the humblest and most ignorant exercise daily, sheds upon us a peculiar satisfaction; but we must not value the generalizations we arrive at by the pleasurableness of the process. Counting by the hundred thousand years, individual man dwindles beyond the recall of the most powerful microscope. So we may well disregard an aeon or two in speculating on the rate of progress between oligocene and neolithic conditions. But after mankind have plodded out of geology into history there is nothing more certain than that the masses have been pioneered by individuals. You can prove it wherever two or more persons meet—one inevitably leads.

As the race emerged from barbarism, the number and variety of individuals increased. Men in the mass are plastic; or, to change


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.

 * On the absence of intermediate varieties at the present day — On the nature of extinct intermediate varieties; on their number — On the lapse of time, as inferred from the rate of denudation and of deposition — On the lapse of time as estimated in years — On the poorness of our palæontological collections — On the intermittence of geological formations — On the denudation of granitic areas — On the absence of intermediate varieties in any one formation — On the sudden appearance of groups of species — On their sudden appearance in the lowest known fossiliferous strata — Antiquity of the habitable earth.

the sixth chapter I enumerated the chief objections which might be justly urged against the views maintained in this volume. Most of them have now been discussed. One, namely, the distinctness of specific forms and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty. I assigned reasons why such links do not commonly occur at the present day under the circumstances apparently most favourable for their presence, namely, on an extensive and continuous area with graduated physical conditions. I endeavoured to show, that the life of each species depends in a more important manner on the presence of other already defined organic forms, than on climate, and, therefore, that the really governing conditions of life do not graduate away quite insensibly like heat or moisture. I endeavoured, also, to show that intermediate varieties, from existing in lesser numbers than the forms which they connect, will generally be beaten out and exterminated during the course of further modification and improvement. The main cause, however, of innumerable intermediate links not now occurring everywhere throughout nature depends, on the very process of natural selection, through which new varieties continually take the places of and supplant their parent-forms. But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of

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 such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.

In the first place, it should always be borne in mind what sort of intermediate forms must, on the theory, have formerly existed. I have found it difficult, when looking at any two species, to avoid picturing to myself forms directly intermediate between them. But this is a wholly false view; we should always look for forms intermediate between each species and a common but unknown progenitor; and the progenitor will generally have differed in some respects from all its modified descendants. To give a simple illustration: the fantail and pouter pigeons are both descended from the rock-pigeon; if we possessed all the intermediate varieties which have ever existed, we should have an extremely close series between both and the rock-pigeon; but we should have no varieties directly intermediate between the fantail and pouter; none, for instance, combining a tail somewhat expanded with a crop somewhat enlarged, the characteristic features of these two breeds. These two breeds, moreover, have become so much modified, that, if we had no historical or indirect evidence regarding their origin, it would not have been possible to have determined from a mere comparison of their structure with that of the rock-pigeon, C. livia, whether they had descended from this species or from some other allied species, such as C. oenas.

So with natural species, if we look to forms very distinct, for instance to the horse and tapir, we have no reason to suppose that links directly intermediate between them ever existed, but between each and an unknown common parent. The common parent will have had in its whole organisation much general resemblance to the tapir and to the horse; but in some points of structure may have differed considerably from both, even perhaps more than they differ from each other. Hence, in all such cases, we should be unable to recognise the parent-form of any two or more species, even if we closely compared the structure of the parent with that of its modified descendants, unless at the same time we had a nearly perfect chain of the intermediate links.

It is just possible, by the theory, that one of two living forms might have descended from the other; for instance, a horse from a tapir; and in this case direct intermediate links will have existed between them. But such a case would imply that one form had remained for a very long period unaltered, whilst its descendants

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 had undergone a vast amount of change; and the principle of competition between organism and organism, between child and parent, will render this a very rare event; for in all cases the new and improved forms of life tend to supplant the old and unimproved forms.

By the theory of natural selection all living species have been connected with the parent-species of each genus, by differences not greater than we see between the natural and domestic varieties of the same species at the present day; and these parent-species, now generally extinct, have in their turn been similarly connected with more ancient forms; and so on backwards, always converging to the common ancestor of each great class. So that the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great. But assuredly, if this theory be true, such have lived upon the earth.

On the Lapse of Time, as inferred from the rate of Deposition and extent of Denudatym.

Independently of our not finding fossil remains of such infinitely numerous connecting links, it may be objected that time cannot have sufficed for so great an amount of organic change, all changes having been effected slowly. It is hardly possible for me to recall to the reader who is not a practical geologist, the facts leading the mind feebly to comprehend the lapse of time. He who can read Sir Charles Lyell's grand work on the Principles of Geology, which the future historian will recognise as having produced a revolution in natural science, and yet does not admit how vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume. Not that it suffices to study the Principles of Geology, or to read special treatises by different observers on separate formations, and to mark how each author attempts to give an inadequate idea of the duration of each formation, or even of each stratum. We can best gain some idea of past time by knowing the agencies at work; and learning how deeply the surface of the land has been denuded, and how much sediment has been deposited. As Lyell has well remarked, the extent and thickness of our sedimentary formations are the result and the measure of the denudation which the earth's crust has elsewhere undergone. Therefore a man should examine for himself the great piles of superimposed strata, and watch the rivulets bringing down mud, and the waves wearing away the sea-cliffs, in order to comprehend something about the duration of past time, the monuments of which we see all around us.

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 It is good to wander along the coast, when formed of moderately hard rocks, and mark the process of degradation. The tides in most cases reach the cliffs only for a short time twice a day, and the waves eat into them only when they are charged with sand or pebbles; for there is good evidence that pure water effects nothing in wearing away rock. At last the base of the cliff is undermined, huge fragments fall down, and these remaining fixed, have to be worn away atom by atom, until after being reduced in size they can be rolled about by the waves, and then they are more quickly ground into pebbles, sand, or mud. But how often do we see along the bases of retreating cliffs rounded boulders, all thickly clothed by marine productions, showing how little they are abraded and how seldom they are rolled about! Moreover, if we follow for a few miles any line of rocky cliff, which is undergoing degradation, we find that it is only here and there, along a short length or round a promontory, that the cliffs are at the present time suffering. The appearance of the surface and the vegetation show that elsewhere years have elapsed since the waters washed their base.

We have, however, recently learned from the observations of Ramsay, in the van of many excellent observers — of Jukes, Geikie, Croll and others, that subaerial degradation is a much more important agency than coast-action, or the power of the waves. The whole surface of the land is exposed to the chemical action of the air and of the rainwater, with its dissolved carbonic acid, and in colder countries to frost; the disintegrated matter is carried down even gentle slopes during heavy rain, and to a greater extent than might be supposed, especially in arid districts, by the wind; it is then transported by the streams and rivers, which, when rapid deepen their channels, and triturate the fragments. On a rainy day, even in a gently undulating country, we see the effects of subaerial degradation in the muddy rills which flow down every slope. Messrs. Ramsay and Whitaker have shown, and the observation is a most striking one, that the great lines of escarpment in the Wealden district and those ranging across England, which formerly were looked at as ancient sea-coasts, cannot have been thus formed, for each line is composed of one and the same formation, while our sea-cliffs are everywhere formed by the intersection of various formations. This being the case, we are compelled to admit that the escarpments owe their origin in chief part to the rocks of which they are composed, having resisted subaerial denudation better than the surrounding surface; this surface consequently has been gradually lowered, with the lines of harder rock

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