April 7, 1866.] Ir is not given to all men to know their own tongue, in its old forms, says the Spectator, and the clever M. Paul Meyer, one of the editors of La Revue Critique, a French literary weekly, has just shown that he has something to learn of old French. Mr. Skeet, in his edition of Lancelot of the Laik, gave some extracts from the French romance, and in a note remarked, that "the word si often occurs with a great variety of meanings, viz. I, he; and, also; so, thus," &c., -a tolerably safe assertion, we should have thought. M. Meyer, however, was of a different opinion, and in his review of the "Lancelot" said of Mr. Skeet's statement, "C'est très-exagéré; jamais si, adverbe ou conjonction, n'a pu avoir le sens d'un pronom." Though it may seem impertinent to affect to teach a Frenchman French, yet the presumption may be excused when we only refer him to his own dictionaries; and if M. Meyer will look to Burgny or Roquefort, he will find plenty of instances of si in "le sens d'un pronom "! CHAUCER has been hardly treated by his editors. Since the first editions, which were all from faulty manuscripts, not one editor has taken the trouble to print the poet's works throughout from the best manuscripts. At last we are to have this done, and to get a text that we can trust. An experienced copier of manuscripts has gone to Glasgow to read The Romaunt of the Rose with the magnificent unique manuscript copy there. THE loyal town of Wareham, England, has a town-hall with a cupola in a tottering state, the estimated repairs of which will cost some £ 7 or £ 8. Wareham, if not a wealthy town, is a checky one. The Mayor sent a begging letter to the Prince of Wales to prevail upon him to incur the cost, and the Prince, as might have been expected, refers them to the good feeling of the inhabitants of Wareham to raise the paltry sum amongst themselves. provinces in this island where nobody ever employs the term in the sense of also. I question if it is used at all in that sense beyond the hearing of the Park guns or the midnight boom of Big Ben. Wherever it is not so used, of course, your employment of it must appear as a vulgar provincialism. Deleatur ! "And dear Mrs. Henry Wood, you who have such a power of fixing our attention to your narratives, why will you always use the word 'like' for as'? Why pepper your clever books with this deformed phrase, to the offence of all whose praise is worth having? "There is a respectable old phrase, 'What can Jack be doing in the stable?' which most modern London writers intensify into, 'Whatever can Jack be doing,' &c. No literary men belonging to other parts of the island as yet use this phrase. Possibly they will erelong be doing so, which will be a great pity, for the phrase is certainly not correct English. Let us rather hope to see it denounced and put down, as good taste demands that it ought to be. "There were ever so many people present,' Preach to me ever so much, it will be all in vain,' rather than a vulgarism, which has of late come are examples of what may be called a mistake much into vogue. The word to be employed instead of ever, and which was employed by all past generations, is of course never. The late Mr. Thackeray continually made this mistake, and living writers of his elevated grade are not exempt from it. "Another error which has lately become very prevalent is, It is no use,' the necessary particle of' being omitted. It looks petty-minded to economize in the use of particles, at the expense of a breach of grammar, and if it be a fault in common speech, it is thrice a fault in writing. Let of' be restored; let us say, 'It is of no use,' as our forefathers did, and as every classic writer continues to with. in the course of being formed, and devoid of classic "If the English language were a rude one, only models, it would be of little consequence that such errors as the above are committed by the writers of any particular province. As it is, viewing what an unloose such a watch-dog as we have upon them." illustrious position it has long attained, -we must Of all the wild theories which have been invent-do; and so will one of my complaints be done away ed respecting the nature of the sun, perhaps the most extravagant is contained in "A Treatise on the Sublime Science of Heliography, satisfactorily demonstrating our great Orb of Light, the Sun, to be absolutely no other than a Body of Ice!" by Charles Palmer, gent., London, 1798. The sun is a cold body, says the author, because the temperature decreases as we approach it. Further, a convex lens of glass has the property of collecting all the rays which fall upon it at the focus; a lens of ice has the same effect. For these reasons, he believes that the sun is a huge convex mass of ice, which receives the rays of light and heat proceeding from the Almighty himself, and brings them to a focus upon the earth. THE popular illustrated German paper, the Gartenlaube, announces the publication, in its columns, of a series of letters, containing "Recollections of my brother Heinrich Heine," by the Counsellor of State, Maximilian von Heine, of Vienna, of which it gives a sample, touching on the relations of the witty poet and his rich uncle. The sarcastic, unsparA WRITER in Chambers's Journal takes excep-ing, generous-hearted nephew was a thorough contion to certain phrases sometimes used by English authors: "Would that there were some functionary of the nature of a good watch-dog to prevent the intrusion of colloquial vulgarisms into the noble English language! He who pens these lines suffers a continual exasperation from this cause. Within the last few years, three or four malapert terms have made themselves particularly offensive, and, what could scarcely be expected, they show their ugly snouts as much in the works of men of the highest talents as in inferior productions. O my good, clever friend Wilkie Collins, why will you so continually express the sense of the respectable old word also by as well? Believe me, it is not as well to do so. There are whole 6 trast to his uncle, Salomon Heine, the richest man in the rich town of Hamburg, possessor of many millions, who, although by no means devoid of wit and humor, yet fancied that he had employed his time far better by amassing wealth than by wasting it upon making poetry. The nephew, in his turn, looked upon the money-makers with sovereign contempt, as thousands of anecdotes still circulating at Paris, in which the Rothschilds, Foulds, and other millionnaires play a prominent part, will testify. Yet uncle and nephew in the depths of their hearts respected each other, and acknowledged each other's merits; but as soon as they met the conflict was unavoidable, as may easily be imagined. Salomon Heine, having gained his colossal riches But his crime was not forgotten; on his return to Hamburg he had to encounter bitter reproaches for his extravagance, and threats that the uncle would never be reconciled to him again. After having listened in silence to this formidable sermon, Heine said, "The best thing in you, uncle, is, that you bear my name," and proudly left the room. In spite of this piece of impudence, as uncle Salomon would call it, a reconciliation soon took place; for, after all, the rich banker loved his famous nephew and was very proud of him. He settled a handsome annuity upon him. by admirable activity, industry, and intelligence, | always make sure would uncle have become so always lived in the simplest style, and never de- rich if he had not always made sure?" spised even the value of a penny, which did not prevent him from giving large sums for charitable purposes. Heine, the poet, never knew the value of money, and was always ready to live as if he were possessed of the millions which his uncle objected to use in paying the debts of his nephew. He had to do it often enough, however, on which occasions he never failed to give elaborate sermons into the bargain. Under these circumstances, Heinrich Heine was glad to leave Hamburg as often as he possibly could persuade his uncle to give him money for travelling. One morning, the poet, who had then finished his tragedy, "Radcliff," found his uncle at breakfast in pretty good humor, which happy constellation was made use of directly by his announcing to his uncle that he wished to see the country of his "Radcliff"; in short, that he intended to travel in England. "Travel, then,” replied the uncle. "Ay! but living is dear in England.” "You received money not long ago." "True, that will do for my expenses; but for the sake of representation I want a decent credit on Rothschild." The letter of credit (ten thousand francs) was given to him, with the strict injunction, however, that it was to be considered only as a matter of form, not to be made use of in reality, the poet's purse being otherwise well supplied, - mamma having put an extra present of one hundred louis-d'or into his pocket. The rich banker, however, had to pay dear for this little piece of ostentation, for his nephew had not been twenty-four hours in London before the letter was presented to Baron James von Rothschild, and the four hundred pounds cashed. But this was too much for poor, confiding Salomon. When he opened his letters at breakfast, and found one by Rothschild, informing him "that he had had the extreme pleasure of making the personal acquaintance of his celebrated, charming nephew, and that he had had the honor to pay the £ 400 to him,” the pipe dropped from his mouth, and he ran up and down the room, swearing at Rothschild and at his nephew, by turns. In his excitement he ran to Heinrich's mother, communicating to her the amount of wickedness in her son. The worthy matron wrote an epistle full of severity to the culprit, who, in the mean time, enjoyed himself in London amazingly. It would not seem as if this epistle, nor his uncle's wrath, made a deep impression upon the poet, for one passage in his answer was verbally as follows: "Old people have caprices; what my uncle gave in a fit of good-humor he might take back in ill-humor. I had to make sure. Who knows but in his next letter he might have written to Rothschild that the letter of credit was only a mere form; there are enough examples of the sort in the annals of rich bankers' offices. Indeed, dear mother, men must OLD LETTERS. THE rain was blowing in quick white gusts; The elms were roaring around the house Slowly as one at a sacrifice, Hopes and joys, they were dreams and air! VOL. I.] A Journal of Choice Reading, SELECTED FROM FOREIGN CURRENT LITERATURE. SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 1866. MIGHT AND MAGNITUDE. M. DU CHAILLU has announced his discovery of a whole nation of negro dwarfs. He has given us measurements of their stature, male and female. It is a pity he did not measure their strength. For want of a better dynamometer, he might have pitted a man against a camel, or a woman against a cow. Should his notes contain no information on this point, he will have to return to Africa to seek it. For, little by little the belief is gaining ground that fat is not force, nor size strength, nor plethora power. If we are to trust the most modern deduc- | tions of science, Goliath ought to have been a monster of weakness, while Samson, whose feats pro- | claim his prowess, can hardly have reached the middle height. Hercules, too, must have been quite a small man. "Long and lazy, little and loud," are proverbial expressions physically account ed for. The Pygmæri of Thrace, who went to war with the cranes, were indeed a valiant race, if only three inches high. To show how things may be so, and that strength and smallness are compatible, we will begin, not quite at the beginning of all, but with a few elementary considerations suggested by the perusal of M. Henri de Parville's scientific romance, Un Habitant de la Planète Mars," to which learned jeu desprit we do no more than allude on the present occasion. The bodily frame of any animal is as much a machine as a steam-engine is a machine. Now the more carbon a machine consumes, the more force it is capable of producing. We must be careful to avoid forgetting that, in strict fact, at the present epoch, not a single thing in nature is either create or annihilated. It is transformed, and that is all. Thus, you may burn a piece of paper; but you do not destroy it. You simply make it suffer a metamorphosis. If such be your desire you can find it again, and collect its substance, weight for weight. Instead of retaining its primitive shape, the greater portion has passed into a gaseous state. It has become partly gas, which mingles with the atmosphere, and partly ashes, which fall to the ground. [No. 15. rives it from the sun. And when, in the depth of winter, a bright sea-coal fire is blazing in the grate, all the light and heat it gives is bestowed at the expense of the solar heat. In truth, every vegetable substance has been actually built up, bit by bit, organ by organ, by rays of light and heat from the sun. The materials so grouped remain together; but only on one condition, namely, that the solar force, which originally assembled them, shall not quit them. To keep convicts in prison, you must have jailers and turnkeys, who will find quite enough work to occupy their leisure. But by setting your prisoners free, the staff of men, whose services are no longer required, can be employed upon some other task or duty. Exactly so in the present ease. By burning the vegetable, you destroy the quiescent state of its particles; you disturb their equilibrium; you give them the opportunity of breaking loose. The force which held them together in subjection is discharged from its functions, and employs its activity in other ways. For you, it becomes sensible as heat, and is ready as such to undertake some different employment.. Coal is a mass of vegetable matter, which has been buried in the earth for a considerable lapse of time. It is solar light and heat put into a savingsbank ages upon ages ago. It is power and action from the sun, imprisoned in the bowels of the earth. To us nineteenth centurians falls the lucky task of making it our slave, by setting it at liberty from its primeval trammels. Throw a piece of coal or wood into the fire; it is absolutely as if you took a small quantity of sun-heat in your hand, to manipulate it according to your requirements. And this is not a mere form of speech; it is a correct expression of the real fact. When an animal exerts his strength, do you also believe that he creates that strength? Not more than the coal creates the steam-engine's strength. Here again it is entirely derived from the sun. The animal eats. What does he consume to keep himself alive? Alimentary substances, composed, in few words, of carbon, oxygen, azote, and hydrogen. In an animal organism, those elements undergo a veritable transformation. Outside the animal, beForce, M. de Parville elsewhere reminds us, un- fore they were eaten, they were combined, aggredengas similar transformations. We do not gener-gated, united together, and in that state constituted de our own strength, as we are apt, in our pride, to food. Inside the animal, they are disunited, decomally we do. We receive it really generated, and posed; the force which hell them together quits fan we transform it or displace it. Charcoal, for them, allows them to separate, and so is free to do #r, in obe lience to our will, supplies us with other work. It causes the creature's body to grow ; 4', dant is, with force, Do you think that it real-; endows it with vital and maseular force; and, in 3 creates that forek In led it does not. It de-short, produces all the phenomena of life. Who created the aliment? The Sun,- himself created by the Great Maker of all things. Here again, therefore, the life and strength possessed by an animal are actually engendered by the sun. Throughout your whole existence you will find, by following up the same reasoning, that your most trifling act, your most thoughtless movement, has derived its origin from the sun. A blow with the fist, a breath, a sigh, can be exactly estimated in rays of sushine. Whether you trifle or whether you work, to make such an effort you have been obliged to expend so much strength; and that strength had already been stored in you by the sun, through the agency of a series of transformations. Your clothing is all borrowed from the sun. It is he who has spun every thread of your linen, and fed every fibre of your cloth and flannel. He either bleaches it snowy white, or dyes it purple and scarlet with indigo and madder. He furnishes leather for useful service, and furs and feathers for finery and parade. He gives you your bedding; whether you repose luxuriously between eider-down and wool, or stretch your weary limbs on straw, chaff, Indian corn-husks, seaweed, or even on a naked piank, as is the lot of not a few, it is the sun who gives both the one and the other. And what do we receive from regions where the sun, as it were, is not, from the immediate neighborhood of either pole? We receive just nothing. We cannot even get to them. The absence of the sun bars our progress with an impenetrable zone of ice and snow. In like manner, your fine cellars of hock, burgundy, and claret are nothing but bottled sunshine from the banks of the Rhine, the slopes of the Côte d'Or, and the pebbly plain of the Medoc. Your butter and cheese are merely solid forms of sunshine absorbed by the pastures of Holland or Cambridgeshire. Your sugar is crystallized sunshine from Jamaica. Your tea, quinine, coffee, and spice are embodiments of solar influences shed on the surfaces of China, Peru, and the Indian Archipelago. It is the sun's action which sends you to sleep in opium, poisons you in strychnine, and cures in decoctions of tonic herbs. You taste the sun in your sauces, eat him in your meats, and drink him even in your simplest beverage, water. Without the sun, no blood could flow in your veins; your whole corporeal vitality, your very bodily life, is the result of the overflowings of his bounty. pulse and the law. And, as to minor details, the Hand of God is visible throughout the universe. The sun, then, is God's material instrument o earth, as throughout the solar system. He is the dispenser to us of our share of the advantages a lotted to us by the Great Benefactor. Of all fo of worship, sun-worship is the most excusable in tions unenlightened by Revelation. Bending th knee to the god of day, in the belief that the throm of the Almighty is seated in the sun, is a far meelevated phase of mistaken adoration than prostra ing one's self before an ugly image carved out of t stump of a tree. With this much said about might, let us now l at the question of magnitude. From the fore statements, it may easily be conceived that the met an organized being is capable, in consequence d its physiological structure, of assimilating a g amount of aliment, the more effective force it wil set at liberty, or, in other words, the more stre it will have at its own disposal. Now, the solar forces, thus rendered active wit the frame of a living creature, have, by determin its growth, to construct the animal itself. T have to generate its own proper vitality, as wel the result of vitality, its muscular power. It therefore be asserted that the effective force at L disposal of every living creature will increase: proportion to its alimentation, and will diminist proportion to its weight. Otherwise expressing same idea: The more food an animal consumes a the less it weighs, the more muscular strength it possess. These deductions have lately been confirmed b curious experiments instituted by M. Felix Plates who has determined the value of the relative mus lar power of insects, power of pushing, power drawing, and the weight which the creature is a to fly away with. It had already been remarked that animak small stature are by no means proportionally th weakest. Pliny, in his Natural History, 8962 that, in strength, the ant is superior to all o creatures. The length and height of the flea's ex also appear quite out of proportion to its we No very definite conclusion, however, had hithe been arrived at. M. Plateau has settled the que by employing exact science as the test. Inserts i longing to different species, placed on a plane s face, have been made to draw gradually increas weights. A man of thirty, weighing on an average a h dred and thirty pounds, can drag, according to P nier, only a hundred and twenty pounds. The p portion of the weight drawn to the weight of body is no more than as twelve to thirteen. A draught-horse can exert, only for a few instants, effort equal to about two-thirds of his own pro weight. The man, therefore, is stronger than t horse. But how grand and beautiful is the theory that all material blessings here below come to us entirely and alone from the sun! Its simplicity and unity are completely consistent with the attributes of one But, according to M. Plateau, the smallest in. Supreme Omnipotent Being, the Maker of the uni- drags without difficulty five, six, ten, twenty verse. Given motion, and given matter, all the its own weight, and more. The cockchafer dra rest follows as an inevitable consequence. All na- fourteen times its own weight. Other coleopte ture, from the simplest fact to the most complex are able to put themselves into equilibrium with phenomenon, is nothing but a work of destruction force of traction reaching as high as forty-two time or reconstruction, a displacement of force from one their own weight. Insects, therefore, when as point to another, according to laws which are abso-pared with the vertebrata which we employ as ba lately general. Nor is there materialism lurking in of draught, have enormous muscular power. F the thought; for it is impossible to forget that, if horse had the same relative strength motion and matter form and transform organic be- the traction it could exercise would be equiv ings, there still needed a Creator to give the im- to some sixty thousand pounds. as a dons. T T but his old trade was discernible at times. The "That is my name, sir.” M. Plateau has also adduced evidence of the fact | Waitzen had deserted "the force" for some years, that, in the same group of insects, if you compare two insects notably differing in weight, the smaller and lighter will manifest the greater strength. To ascertain its pushing power, M. Plateau introduced the insect into a card-paper tube whose inner surface had been slightly roughened. The creature, perceiving the light at the end through a transparent plate which barred its passage, advanced by pushing the latter forward with all its might and main, especially if excited a little. The plate, pushed forward, acted on a lever connected with an apparatus for measuring the effort made. In this case also it turned out that the comparative power of pushing, like that of traction, is greater in proportion as the Not at all, sir. I have come to beg your assist-. size and weight of the insect are small. Experiance in a matter of business: may I reckon on your ments to determine the weight which a flying insect can carry were performed by means of a thread with a ball of putty at the end, whose mass could be augmented or reduced at will. The result is that, during flight, an insect cannot carry a weight sensibly greater than that of its own body. Consequently, man, less heavy than the horse, has a greater relative muscular power. The dog, less heavy than man, drags a comparatively heavier burden. Insects, as their weight grows less and less, are able to drag more and more. It would appear, therefore, that the muscular force of living creatures is in inverse proportion to their mass. But we must not forget that it ought to be in direct proportion to the quantity of carbon burnt in their system. To put the law completely out of doubt, it would be necessary to determine the exact weight of the food consumed, and the quantity of carbonic acid disengaged in the act of breathing. Some chemist will settle it for us one of these days. A PRIVATE INQUIRY. "To what to what fortunate occurrence, sir, am I indebted for this visit?" I asked, with a slight irony in my manner; for, to tell the truth, I did not feel very well disposed towards the race of "Private Inquirers." "May I ask whether I am the object of some delicate inquiry? 66 aid?" "That depends entirely on what you require. I must know first what is the assistance you desire, and for what purpose." "Of course, I should not for one moment think of asking you for any aid without giving you every assurance you could require that the information is sought for a proper purpose." He took a little notebook from his pocket. "You are skilful in reading ciphers?" he asked. Well," I said, "I've amused myself sometimes in that way; but how did you know it?" "Excuse me; it is my business to know everything by myself or through others. You sent to the Times last autumn a solution of an advertisement in cipher?" "I did; but "I made a note of the initials (you did not sign your name) and of the address: I thought it might be useful some day. Your letter was dated from C, a small watering-place in Dunshire. I intended, when I might be that way, to see whether you lived there (highly improbable), or if not, to get your address. I had no difficulty in finding the ONE evening, some months ago, I was seated be- house at which you had lodged; but they had forgotfore the fire waiting for my wife, whom I had prom-ten your place of abode in London. Very awkward! ised to take to the theatre, when the servant brought But you had had a check sent down to you, and that in a card, saying that a gentleman particularly de- check you changed. The bank had not kept the sired to see me. I looked at the card; it bore the name of the drawer, but the check was drawn on name of "Chr. Waitzen," with an address, and in Coutts's. I found the name of the drawer the corner, "Private Inquiry Office." The name My aunt," I interposed. was known to me merely from my having remarked it at the foot of mysterious advertisements; of the bearer of it I knew no more than the card told me. Did he say what he wanted, Jane? I'm just going out." "No, sir; but he wish to see you most particular. Missus won't be ready for a quarter of an hour," she added. "Show him in," I said. "What the deuce can he want with me?" I muttered to myself, as I looked at the clock. The servant returned in a few moments, ushering in a tall man, to whom I offered a seat. Mr. Waitzen, who, I afterwards learned, had formerly been in the force," had still about him marks of the policeman, in spite of his evident attempts to repress them. I have observed about detectives that they never appear quite at home in their clothes; I suppose that, from constantly assuming all kinds of garments as disguises, they never be come thoroughly used to one style of dress. From this cause, or from some other with which I am not acquainted, it results that a detective's dress never has the individuality which in some degree, how ever faint, marks that of the rest of men. Chr. Exactly," continued Waitzen: "got your address, and here I am.” "Well," I said, "this is a nice specimen of the way in which you look into people's private af fairs!" "What could I do, sir? If you had signed your name, I should have been saved a journey. And now, sir, before asking your assistance, you, a gentleman of honorable and delicate feeling, will, of course, insist on knowing the object for which that assistance is required. You're quite right, sir; this system of private inquiries is very low and dirty, but what can I do? It's my trade. Will you aid me, if I convince you that all is straightforward?” "Let me hear," I said. He again looked at his note-book. "Last settling-day on the Stock Exchange, J. C. disappeared, carrying with him, fraudulently, an immense number of bonds and other securities, which he can easily negotiate on any Bourse. The police are after him; but several members of the Stock Exchange, acting in concert, have, in addition, authorized me to make inquiry. I have reason to believe that he is in England, and I also believe, from the active pursuit set on foot immediately, and from |