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may swell the chorus of lamentation over the barrenness and the hardships and the wasted energies and the harsh discords of life which is always "steaming up" from the world, and to which it is one, though perhaps not the highest, of the poet's functions to make us duly sensible. Crabbe, like all realistic writers, must be studied at full length, and therefore quotations are necessarily unjust. It will be sufficient if I refer-pretty much at random - to the short stories of " Phoebe Dawson" in the "Parish Register," to the more elaborate stories of "Edward Shore and the "Parting Hour" in the "Tales," or to the story of "Ruth" in the "Tales of the Hall," where again the dreary pathos is strangely heightened by Crabbe's favorite seaport scenery, to prove that he might be called as truly as Goldsmith affectuum potens, though scarcely lenis domi

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It is time, however, to conclude by a word or two as to Crabbe's peculiar place in the history of English literature. I said that, unlike his contemporaries, Cowper and Burns, he adhered rigidly to the form of the earlier eighteenth century school, and partly for this reason excited the wayward admiration of Byron, who always chose to abuse the bridge which carried him to fame. But Crabbe's clumsiness of expression makes him a very inadequate successor of Pope or of Goldsmith, and his claims are really founded on the qualities which led Byron to call him "nature's sternest painter, yet her best." On this side he is connected with some tendencies of the school which supplanted his early models. So far as Wordsworth and his followers represented the reaction from an artificial to a love of unsophisticated nature, Crabbe is entirely at one with them. He did not share that unlucky taste for the namby-pamby by which Wordsworth annoyed his contemporaries, and spoilt some of his earlier poems. Its place was filled in Crabbe's mind by an even more unfortunate disposition for the simply humdrum and commonplace, which, it must be confessed, makes it almost as hard to read a good deal of his verses as to consume large quantities of suet pudding, and has probably destroyed his popularity with the present generation. Still, Crabbe's influence was powerful as against the old conventionality. He did not, like his predecessors, write upon the topics which interested " persons of quality," and never gives us the impression of having composed his rhymes in a full-bottomed wig or even in a Grub Street garret. He has gone out into country fields and village lanes, and paints directly from man and nature, with almost a cynical disregard of the accepted code of propriety. But the points on which he parts company with his more distinguished predecessors is equally obvious. Mr. Stopford Brooke has lately been telling us with great eloquence what is the theology which underlies the poetical tendencies of the last generation of poets. Of tha creed, a sufficiently vague one, it must be admitted, Crabbe was by no means an apostle. Rather, one would say, he was as indifferent as a good old-fashioned clergyman could very well be to the existence of any new order of ideas in the world. The infidels, whom he sometimes attacks, read Bolingbroke, and Chubb, and Mandeville, and have only heard by report even of the existence of Voltaire. The Dissenters, whom he so heartily detests, have listened to Whitefield and Wesley, or perhaps to Huntington, S. S.that is, as it may now be necessary to explain, Sinner Saved. Every newer development of thought was still far away from the quiet pews of Aldborough, and the only form of church restoration of which he has heard is the objectionable practice of painting a new wall to represent a growth of lichens. Crabbe appreciates the charm of the picturesque, but has never yet heard of our elaborate methods of creating modern antiques. Lapped in such ignorance, and with a mind little given to speculation, it is only in character that Crabbe should be totally insensible to the various moods of thought represented by Wordsworth's pantheistic conceptions of nature, or by Shelley's dreamy idealism, or Byron's fierce revolutionary impulses. Still less, if possible, could he sympathize with that love of beauty, pure and simple, of which Keats was the first prophet. He might, indeed, be briefly described by say

ing that he is at the very opposite pole from Keats. The more bigoted admirers of Keats for there are bigots in all matters of taste or poetry as well as in science or theology or politics would refuse the title of poet to Crabbe, altogether, on the strength of the absence of this element from his verses. Like his most obvious parallels in painting, he is too fond of hoors and pothouses to be allowed the quality of artistic perception. I will not argue the point, which is, perhaps, rather a question of classification than of intrinsic merit; but I will venture to suggest a test which will, I think, give Crabbe a very firm, though it may be, not a very lofty place. I should be unwilling to be reckoned as one of Macaulay's "rough and cynical readers." I admit that I can read the story of the convicted felon, or of Peter Grimes without indulging in downright blubbering. Most readers, I fear, can in these days get through pathetic poems and novels without absolutely using their pccket-handkerchiefs. But though Crabbe may not prompt such outward and visible signs of emotion, I think that he produces a more distinct titillation of the lachrymatory glands than almost any poet of his time. True, he does not appeal to emotions, accessible only through the finer intellectual perceptions, or to the thoughts which "lie too deep for tears." That prerogative belongs to men of more intense character, greater philosophical power, and more delicate instincts. But the power of touching readers by downright pictures of homespun griefs and sufferings is one which, to my mind, implies some poetical capacity, and which clearly belongs to Crabbe.

THE "PALL MALL" ON EVOLUTION.

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THERE is a certain writer in the Pall Mall Gazette who would compare well with the most powerful of the so-called "giants" of the old days, to use Macaulay's expression, in the vigor, fertility, and graphic character of his literary work, but with a bitterness, a naughtiness, a (so to speak) "invincible ignorance," all his own. No man with any true appreciation of 'iterary style can help being struck by the strength with which he hammers away year by year at impressing his very masculine and strongly-conceived, though narrow and, on many sides, positively obtuse creed, on the minds of a shallow-hearted generation, the effectiveness with which he is constantly drawing and drawing again for us the spectacle of a mind of strong, upright, and sombre conceptions as to the government of the universe by a probable God, as to the checkered destinies of man, and the worthlessness of the fatal subterfuges by which weak minded people try to escape from the disagreeable necessity of seeing facts as they are. The present writer, at least, may say that he so much enjoys the vigor of the ever-varying, yet ever-identical photograph, which this graphic writer paints of himself on the literature of the day, that he would gladly purchase it, even at the cost of being blundered against, thumped, and contemptuously shot into the gutter, by this not very accurate-sighted giant of the literary world, who is always reminding one of Matthew Arnold's Titan, "with deaf ears and labor-dimmed eyes, staggering on to his goal." This goal, as regards the ultimate intellectual creed of the writer we are referring to, seems certain to be a sort of Carlylian glorification of Force, physical, intellectual, and voluntary, as at once the source and upshot of things, though he betrays a much stronger respect for positive law, and a much clearer insight into the practical utility of government, when not representing an individual will but only a good system, than Mr. Carlyle has ever confessed. The writer we speak of, whom we suppose, at least, that we discern in the author of the paper in last Tuesday's Pall Mall on "Old and New Apologetics," which is, in fact, a supercilious attack on the article we published last week called "The Materialist's Stronghold," would certainly not be improved, but injured, as a literary force, by taking more pains to understand the positions he assails; for after one has once made a familiar acquaintance with him, he becomes the most unprofitable, though he remains the most interesting, of writers, his great power consisting

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in that figure of speech which, when it can be sufficiently varied not to weary, is, as Carlyle himself, we think, observed, the greatest of all rhetorical forces, repetition. Except when dealing with legal topics, no one seems less capable than this author of entering into an intellectual position somewhat removed from his own, or of even caring to discriminate one aim from another in the writers he buffets. It is hardly possible, for instance, that he can have cared to understand the sense of what we were writing about in our last number, for his criticism is just as wide of it as if he had really read no more than the fifteen lines he extracts. No doubt he read the whole, but apparently in that spirit of contemptuous indifference to the argument which would not give him a chance of distinguishing between one branch of it and another. As far as we can see, this writer has made up his mind that it is sorry work theorizing about the origin of things; that if you can believe in God at all, it is only by a happy leap from the conviction of your own personal identity to the analogical presumption that some infinitely mightier self underlies the government of the universe; and he evidently holds that all attempts to find any harmony between the facts of the universe and the moral peculiarities of man are more or less the futilities of weak minds, which cannot bear to confess either the inscrutability of the world, or the obvious inconsistency between their moral code and that which the said world embodies. Such indiscriminate contempt, however, for everything which at a superficial glance seems to belong to a given class of despised things, is not the best intellectual condition for discriminating between what does and what does not belong to that class. Assuredly we were never more amused, after the first vexation of so ridiculous a misunderstanding had passed, than by reading the Pall Mall's criticism on what, as it supposed, we had been saying. The fact is that the writer of the criticism shows in it no inkling at all either of the true meaning of the theory of evolution, or of the aim of our remarks upon it, and yet we do not think the fault lay with us.

We were not attempting in the least, as the writer seems to fancy, to vindicate the ways of God to the lower animals by accounting for their sufferings. Except parenthetically, there was not, and could not have been consistently with the subject on hand, any remark at all bearing on such a subject. As for trying to prove that this is the best of all possible worlds, we should say that no effort could be more futile, our imagination being entirely 'limited by the actual world we live in. Our point was very much narrower, and, as far as we can see, quite within the grasp of finite intellects. It was to consider whether the hypothesis of "evolution" is consistent with the intellectual character of the ultimate source of evolution. We may remind our readers that what we started from was the assertion of Professor Challis and the Guardian that mathematicians are less materialistic in their view of science than physicists and biologists. We observed that even if it were so, that was natural enough, because there is nothing but absolute and unvarying order discovered as yet in those regions of nature which are susceptible of mathematical treatment, while in the region of those sciences which have given rise to the hypothesis of evolution, you get the apparent signs both of groping or tentativeness, and in some sense also of failure. Our point, then, was not to discuss a difficuly which was just as great before the hypothesis of evolution had been advanced as it has been since, the difficulty of understanding animal suffering as proceeding from a Divine purpose, but solely to consider the new difficulty, if any, introduced by the hypothesis of evolution, and that only in relation to those phenomena which are supposed to indicate blindness and failure. Anything beyond that was beyond our purpose altogether, and what the Pall Mall imputes to us was not only not in our article, but could only have been there as a consequence of the grossest confusion between several very different subjects. Our sole points were these: Do the discoveries and hypotheses of Darwin justify the conception that there is, in any sense inconsistent with the purely intellectual origin of things, hesitation and failure in nature? Does nature grope and hesitate?

Does she improve only by dint of starving-out previous blunders, or rather by a process perfectly consistent, even to human minds, with deliberate prescience of, and intention to create, all the organic forms and phenomena which occur? What we ventured to point out was, first, that the apparent tentativeness of nature is a mere fiction of our disturbed imagination; that in the organic, no less than in the inorganic world, there is no hesitation, and that the appearance of it is due simply to the great varieties of form which arise in any complex structures under the influence of varying circumstances, all of which are equally traceable to fixed causes, so far as we can judge at all, though all are not equally perfect in structure. The appearance of hesitation, then, really is, in all probability, not hesitation at all, but due simply to the tendency in the forces at the sources of evolution, whatever they are, to produce among organic forms a variety which we do not find among the inorganic,- forms which, in relation to man's view of them are better and worse, more and less structurally perfect, — in other words, forms between which comparison and competition is possible, which is hardly the case as regards the inorganic world. We then went on to our second point, Does improvement in nature proceed by blundering and the correction of blunders? Is the phenomenon of organic degeneration one of preliminary blundering and subsequent correction of blunders, or not? And it was in discussing this question that we used the language which has led to our able contemporary's very uninformed criticism. The fact of deterioration of type, of course, we admitted, but we thought, and think, that fact perfectly consistent, considering the drift and final end of organic evolution, with intellectual prescience and specific intention: "Why," we said, "should variations of a degenerate character ever be admitted, if there be a Divine mind giving its law to natural change? Of course no complete answer can be given to such a question, but considering the world as the stage on which a moral freedom is to be disciplined, it is not inexplicable why that liability to degeneration which is the greatest danger in moral growth, is visible to man on every side, in natural things as well as moral, as one of the catastrophes to which, both naturally and supernaturally, he is liable. Without the constant sight of the tendency to degeneration in things natural, without being daily taught that it needs, in some sense, a physical struggle not merely for nature to keep on advancing, but to keep from falling back, the meaning and risk of the same liability in tuings moral and spiritual would not be half as vivid as it is. It is, after all, by no means a matter for surprise that nature should not merely reflect back, but even in a manner anticipate, the inertia, the indolence, the degeneracy, as well as the activity, the industry, and the refining transformations, of human trial." Now we should have thought the drift of this remark, - which might have been, no doubt, less succinctly and more elaborately explained, — in relation to a theory of evolution, intelligible enough. It is the very gist of that hypothesis, and of this the writer in the Pall Mall is either ignorant or forgetful, that the higher forms of life are moulded on the lines, and developed out of the experience, of the lower forms of life. Without the experience of high tension and conflict in things natural, the high tension and conflict in things moral would not and could not be what it is. When we spoke of what was "visible' to men on every side, we never imagined that any one could be so dull or so careless as to harp on that expression alone, to the exclusion of the much larger one used in the following sentence, as to our being "daily taught that it needs in some sense a physical struggle, not merely for nature to keep on advancing, but to keep from falling back." The whole context of course required the assumption that it is not merely what we see, but what we experience in every way, as the consequence of a nature moulded on the same lines with the animal creation out of which our organism is evolved, which is an essential condition of the moral experience to which we referred. Had there not been conflict and strife in nature, there would not have been the natural competitiveness and emulation out of which moral competitiveness and emula

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tion are subsequently developed. It is the end of the evolution, so far as we can see it, which makes it possible to judge how far the intermediate steps are to be attributed to an intellectual and not to a materialistic origin. And so anxious were we to mark this, that we went on at the close of our paper to point out what the critic in the Pall Mall takes not the slightest notice of, that though it is by the "natural development of the brain" that the highest organic forms are evolved, yet in the moral region something better and much higher than competitive selection grows out of the highest types formed by competitive selection itself, "pity," ," "reverence," and "sacrifice" being the moral ideals which more and more emerge out of the earlier and narrower moralities of emulation and conflict.

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The very sum and substance of all we were driving at was just this: When the long process of evolution comes to such an end, is it possible to regard the final outcome, so far as we see it, as otherwise than preconceived and provided for by the power which worked in the germinal forms out of which it grows? If it is not possible, then, in spite of the difficulty which deteriorated organic forms seem to interpose to an intellectual origin for evolution, we must assume that the phenomenon called "deterioration" is an essential of the whole process, since without it we could not have had a nature educated by the very principle of what seems to us often cruel struggle. Only when we remember that this cruelty of struggle ends in a type of excellence that rises above cruelty of struggle, into a competition not cruel, but the reverse of cruel, can intellectual foresight be attributed without inconsistency to the source of the evolution. Now, this being, as every careful and candid reader of our article will at once admit, our drift, what can be more ridiculously off the question than this exceedingly caustic, but very irrelevant attack?

"So, then, it seems that all this vast quantity of thoroughly literal misery is inflicted with an eye to a purely figurative application. Large batches of the lower animal world are told off for punishment in a variety of ways, in order that man may feel, twice as vividly' as before, something which his own sufferings and those of his fellows might, if physical suffering really con. veys this lesson, have taught him quite vividly enough before. Myriads of sentient beings are to be created for destruction in order that nature may not merely reflect back, but even in a manner anticipate, the inertia, the indolence, the degeneracy, as well as the activity, the industry, and the refining transformations of human trial.' Was ever the employment of such means means so childishly circuitous, so gratuitously inhuman, so wantonly disproportioned to their end-attributed to any human, not to say to any superhuman intelligence? But, again, if this be the lesson, and if the lesson were worth teaching at such cruel cost, what antecedent probability was there that it would be correctly learned? nay, how many have ever had the opportunity of learning it? How many of the races of mankind who are brought closest to this sad but, we are now told, edifying spectacle are likely to draw the same transcendental moral from it that is drawn by a super-subtle theologian in a London journal? And outside these races how much of all this suffering is witnessed or even known of? But the questions do not bear asking, nor does the answer bear stating. Freed from the haze of sentimental theology, the matter stands thus: that we are asked to believe that, for ages before man appeared on the earth, and in vast spaces where the foot of man has never penetrated and never can penetrate, - for what of the ocean, and the 'moral lesson' of the unwitnessed struggle among its innumerable inhabitants? - Nature has been engaged in creating and destroying countless creatures, in order that a few appreciative minds may derive benefit to their moral sensibilities, and deduce from it a lesson of which ninety-nine out of every hundred of

their fellow-creatures can find no trace whatever. But the return upon the old lines of defence is, we see, complete. After the lapse of a century we are landed once more in the philosophy of Pangloss. We still live in the best of all possible worlds only a little less stress is to be laid on the word best,' and a little more on the word 'possible.' The world is as good as it could possibly be consistently with supplying the necessary discipline to man's 'moral freedom' through countless forms of suffering."

That is smart writing, but what is the use of smashing what has not been asserted, — unless it be as an interesting

specimen of moral gymnastic? We hardly mentioned the word " suffering" at all, except to remark parenthetically, what we believe to be true, but what the writer of this criticism forgets to say, that there is no reason to believe that the individuals of a vanishing type suffer materially more than the individuals of a multiplying type. There are fewer and fewer of them, as time goes on, and the few that remain may have, on an average, shorter and probably more difficult lives; but none the less, when we talk of nature stamping out the inferior types, we deceive ourselves by a metaphor; the individuals of that type live the same sort of lives and come to the same sort of ends as the individuals of the improving types, though probably a little sooner, and, on an average, on terms a little harder. Still, the picture which we are apt to represent to ourselves under the phrase, "starving out the worse types," is an erroneous one, the process being in the main that fewer are produced, and that the few that are produced live shorter lives. But that remark was purely parenthetic. The notion of apologizing in our last week's article for the suffering of the world, except in relation to the appearance of blundering and want of foresight which the occurrence of suh suffering might seem to involve, -never entered the writer's head. His object was simply to bring out that the liability to degeneration of type is intelligible as a part of the physical evolution of organic forms, when one sees, and only when one sees, that it is the mould out of which ultimately our moral nature springs, just as liability to be hustled off the pathway by a blundering literary giant is an incident of newspaper criticism to which one becomes reconciled when one sees, and only when one sees, that it is one of the conditions out of which the congruity and efficacy of newspaper discussion evolve themselves.

FORMOSA.

FORMOSA has ever been as great an object of terror to the sailors of the China seas as was Scylla to the Romans of old. Lying in the direct line between the southern and northern ports of China, and in the stormiest part of that typhoon-tossed ocean, it would, under any circumstances, present dangers to navigators of no ordinary kind. But add to this that the distance between the island and the mainland leaves little or no sea-room in case of storm, but serves only as a funnel to collect and intensify the force of the wind, while the east coast outside which sailingvessels are compelled to pass is a series of rugged heights, without a single harbor of any kind, and is inhabited by savage and inhospitable natives, and we have a picture of perils scarcely to be surpassed. During certain seasons of the year, storms arise with such rapidity and violence, that the eastern shore is strewn with the wrecks of hapless junks and vessels whose crews and cargoes are left to contend with the fury of the waves, and the even more hostile natives. There is reason to fear that the sailors of more than one English vessel have fallen victims to the savagery of the aborigines, who have uniformly treated in the same merciless fashion the survivors from Chinese and Japanese junks. Constant representations on the subject have been made by the Mikado's government to the court of Peking, and the murder of fifty Japanese sailors, who were shipwrecked last year on the southeast coast of this island, was made an important point by the Embassy despatched last year to the Chinese capital. As is usual when complaints are made at Peking of the behavior of natives in outlying districts, the Tsungli-Yamun sheltered themselves behind the excuse that the native tribes in Formosa were virtually beyond their jurisdiction, and that therefore, though they abhorred the deed that had been committed, they were quite unable to inflict punishment for it. Somewhat to their surprise, the Mikado's government replied that, if that was so, they felt bound to take the law into their own hands; and, with that energy which has lately characterized Japanese movements, an expedition was fitted out, and has already landed

in the incriminated district. How the matter will end it is difficult to say; but at present the disposition shown by a majority of the native tribes, and by the Chinese settlers, has been decidedly favorable to the invaders. The fact of this expedition being the first trial of the new military system and weapons recently adopted by the Japanese has attracted considerable attention to it in Europe, and the result will be watched with curiosity. On this occasion we do not intend to concern ourselves with the present warlike aspect of affairs, but rather to take advantage of the interest thus excited in Formosa to give some idea of its position, its inhabitants, and its products.

Situated at a distance of about eighty or ninety miles from the mainland, its highest mountains can be easily recognized from the neighboring coast of the province of Fuhkeen. Its discovery, therefore, by the Chinese must have been contemporary with the first gaze directed seawards on a clear day by any of the early settlers in the districts about Amoy or Foochow. And so, when Chinese historians assert that its existence first became known o their ancestors in the year 1430, they probably mean that at that date emigrants from the mainland gained that footing on the island which they have never relinquished, and which has since developed into a system of constant encroachment, by which the level country has inch by inch passed from the ownership of the natives into the hands of the intruders. At all events, when the Japanese, two centuries later, attempted to establish a colony in the island, they found there a Chinese population sufficiently numerous to be formidable, and who, by the support they gave to the natives, succeeded in driving off these new bidders for the sulphur mines and camphor trees of Formosa. Against the Dutch, who arrived off the coast in 1634, they were not so successful; and, for a time, the European invaders were able to boast of a colony which threatened to compete with Macao for the carrying trade between China and the West. Dutch priests proselytized the natives, Dutch engineers built forts and entrenchments, and Dutch merchants exchanged the products of the island for the merchandise of Europe and of China. Then followed events of a nature which belongs peculiarly to the East. It chanced that near Amoy there lived a Chinese tailor, named Iquorn, who, being of an adventurous turn of mind, launched into commercial speculations at Macao, and, finding profit in the foreign trade, visited the Dutch in Formosa, and waxed fat on the result. Having in this way acquired considerable wealth, he settled in Japan for a time, and there increased in riches to such an extent that his fleet was said to number three thousand sail. With this force at his back the quondam tailor was seized with a desire for empire. He turned his ploughshares into swords, and converted his merchant fleet into a piratical flotilla. For a time he paralyzed the trade of Southern China, and subsequently by means of some subtle diplomacy accompanied by a display of force - gained possession of the province of Fuh-keen. But he was destined to fall into the net he had set for others. At an evil moment he determined to visit Peking, in the hope of gaining the recognition of the new Tartar dynasty for his independent kingdom; but scarcely had he set foot in the capital when he was seized and cast into prison as a rebel.

His son Koksinga, who on the forced retirement of Iquorn took possession of his goods, inherited a full share of his father's love of predatory adventure; and, having learnt by experience the extreme difficulty of gaining a secure footing on the mainland, sailed for Formosa and announced his intention of establishing a kingdom for himself on that island. The Dutch resisted his landing, but ineffectually; and, in 1661, they were driven out by the invader. In the course of the following year an expedition was sent out from Holland to recover the lost colony, but "the floating castles" were ignominiously defeated by the junks of the pirate, who died king of Formosa. His son and successor, however, failed to keep what his father had won; and, in 1683, the island finally fell again under Chinese rule. Although occupying an area nearly as large as that of Denmark, Formosa is reckoned only as a Prefec

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ture, and is placed under the jurisdiction of the Viceroy of Fuh-keen. The "Great Bay,' as the name Taiwan given by the Chinese to the island from its shape — signifies, has always been a thorn in the side to the vice-regal government. Though nominally under Chinese jurisdiction from north to south and from east to west, the mountain districts are still held by the native tribes, who administer their own laws, and who refuse to acknowledge fealty to the Tartar race. On the level country the Chinese emigrants have established themselves; the deputies of the Viceroy hold sway, but the limits of their jurisdiction are perfectly well understood, and are clearly defined, for the most part, by some natural boundary, such as a stream or a range of hills. Across this no Chinaman dare venture, unless he be provided with a pass from the neighboring native chieftain; and the mountaineers, having a wholesome dread of the encroaching tendencies of the colonists, seldom encourage them to cross the border. Roughly speaking, it may be said that the range of mountains which runs from north to south, dividing the island into two parts, forms the boundary between the possessions of the native tribes and of the Chinese Government; the latter holding sovereignty over the plains which stretch from the mountains westward to the sea, and the former maintaining their positions in the wild mountain tracts which separate the backbone of the island from the rocky shore of the eastern

coast.

From the days of Candidius and David Wright, in the seventeenth century, down to the present time, few foreigners have voluntarily visited the mountain fastnesses of the Formosan aborigines. The inducements to do so are very small, and the danger of venturing among them is considerable. Of trade there is none, and the jealousy with which they view the presence of foreigners serves to surround a sojourn among them with a considerable amount of risk. Who they are and whence they came is a disputed point; but it is plain that there is no affinity of race between them and the Chinese. Their features are more prominent, and they resemble much more nearly the Malays than their Tartar neighbors. Similarities have also been discovered between the dialects spoken among them and those employed in the Malay Peninsula. The probability is, therefore, that they are, equally with the Lolos of Burmah and the Miau-tsze of China, an offshoot from the Malay stock. At the present time they are divided into several tribes, each speaking a dialect of its own, and each maintaining a separate political system. They are almost absolute strangers to reading and writing, and the only manuscripts which they are known to possess are some scrawling European letters, which are preserved by a tribe professing to be descended from the early Dutch settlers on the island, as an irrefragable proof of the authenticity of the tradition. The religion they profess takes the form of the grossest materialism. They believe that the world is governed by a good and an evil spirit, each of whom is constantly striving for the mastery; and that both are to be propitiated by presents and sacrifice. The priesthood is monopolized by women, who combine fortune-telling with their sacerdotal duties, and who exercise supreme power over their votaries by trading on their superstitious fancies, at the same time that they retain their hold over their affections by encouraging them in names of their gods, to give full vent to their passions. These priestesses—or Inibs, as they are called — are consulted as oracles when any warlike expedition or undertaking of any magnitude is in contemplation, and a still further token from the gods is looked for in the movements of the bird Aidak. If troops meet an Aidak with a worm in its mouth, they go forward confident of victory; but should it cross their path, or fly from them, they consider it as a warning not to be disregarded, and they accordingly return every man to his dwelling.

Like the Miau-tsze, the Formosans delight in open-air feasts and merry-makings, and, during the nine great festivals of the year, all work is suspended and the people one and all sit down to dance and to play — and, it must be added, to drink. As the feasting proceeds the meetings become, especially at the Venus fêtes, scenes of the lowest

broad sulphur valley or chasm was everywhere a pale, sickly tint of yellow and red; and out of many of its numerous recesses hot steam gushed in jets with great noise and force, like the steam from the escape-pipe of a high-pressure engine; in other spots small pools of pure sulphur were bubbling. At the bottom of the barren ravine rippled a foul rivulet, carrying off the sulphurous oozings from the ground. Within and round about this hollow the earth under foot crumbled and groaned, and the air was so satutremely noisome, and destructive to insect life especially, of which we saw abundant proof in the numerous remains of beetles and butterflies scattered around." When taken from the mine the sulphur is boiled in iron boilers until the slate-like mineral assumes a treacle-like consistency. This is constantly stirred until every impurity is separated from the sulphur, which is then ladled out into wooden tubs shaped like sugar-loaves. In these it is left to cool, and the conical cake is freed from the tub by the simple process of knocking out the bottom thereof.

debaucheries; all decency is laid aside, and the people, led by their priestesses, give themselves up to every form of sensual enjoyment. The marriage tie is as loosely made as it is easily dissolved. The young swain, who, by an unwritten law, must have arrived at the age of twenty-one, having made a choice of a lady-love, serenades her; and she, if she favors his suit, allows herself to be enticed by his music into his company. He then sends certain presents, varying in value according to the resources at his command, to the lady's parents, a day is fixed for the wed-rated with the exhalations of sulphur as to have been exding, and the happy pair- having poured out libations to Heaven and Earth become man and wife. But, by a curious perversion of the laws of nature, from the day of his marriage until he reaches the age of forty the husband is not permitted openly to enjoy the society of his wife. Only by stealth and at night is he allowed to visit her, at her father's house; and daylight is the signal for his departure. During this or any future time the merest quarrel, however slight, is frequently made the excuse for a divorce and, if it should be proved that the wife is the provoking cause of the dispute, the husband has a right to claim from her parents the presents he gave them at his betrothal. This license of divorce is freely used, and it often happens that a man marries and divorces several wives in a single year. The evils arising from this free-and-easy state of things are somewhat mitigated by a law which provides that no child born before its mother has reached he age of thirty-seven shall be allowed to live.

In their style of dress the Formosans strongly resemble the Malays. In all but the cold weather the men wear only a cloth round their loins, and the women a short petticoat. The latter are fond of decking their hair with flowers, and their ears with rings. Both sexes appear to be proof against the extremes of temperature, and their habit of bathing in cold water all the year round is made the subject of remark and ridicule by Chinese writers. That they are a remarkably healthy people is certain; and possibly, the complete absence of doctors and the popular mode of treating the sick account for the disappearance of any stray weakly ones from among them. If a man is ill, his affectionate friends, instead of attempting at all hazards to save his life, adopt the kill-or-cure remedy of hanging him up by his neck to a beam-which measure, accompanied by the shock of being suddenly let down by the run, is believed to possess particular curative qualities for those who are strong enough to survive the dose. If the patient should die, his body is placed in the open air on a raised stretcher, and is there left to bleach in the sun until it becomes dried up and mummified, when it is buried in the house which had been his home when alive. From the time of the death until the burial, a wake is kept up round the body by the friends with the hired mourners and the Inibs. Dancing, singing, weeping, drinking, and eating form the programme of the ghastly entertainment; and if report speaks truly, no Venus feast witnesses more disgusting orgies than do these saturnalias.

Living from hand to mouth, as do the aborigines, it is certainly not due to their exertions that Formosa is known as the granary of China. But there, as elsewhere, the Chinese colonists display their instinctive industry. On every available piece of land within their borders fields of rice and sugar are carefully cultivated, and recompense the farmers by yielding them constant and abundant crops. These alone, in addition to such products as jute, grasscloth, fibre, rice-paper, and rattans, would make the island a valuable possessson; but far more precious, in the eyes of the Chinese chancellor of the exchequer, are the sulphur and the camphor which are obtained from the mines and the mountains of the island, and which are claimed by the government as crown monopolies. In the northwestern portion of the island sulphur mines are frequently met with presenting disfiguring blots in the otherwise beautiful scenery. Mr. Swinhoe, in his "Notes on Formosa" thus describes the aspect of one he visited: " "The sulphur mine," he says, "appeared at a distance like a canker on the side of the grass-covered hill, which was fresh and green everywhere except in the immediate vicinity of the mine. The

As the gigantic laurels from which the camphor is obtained are found only on the mountains in the possession of the aborigines, the acquisition of a constant supply is somewhat difficult. Only from those tribes which are on friendly terms with the Chinese can leave be obtained to cut down the trees. With such, a present given to the chief gains, as a rule, the required permission. The Chinese woodman then makes a choice of the trees which appear to be well supplied with sap, and, having felled them, he keeps the best parts for timber and reserves the remainder for the iron boiling pots, by means of which is evolved the sublimated vapor which yields the camphor. In the neighborhood of Tamsuy alone 800,000 lbs. of this valuable commodity are produced annually. Petroleum also adds to the riches of the island, which, both from its natural and artificial products, is well worthy a struggle on the part of the Japanese to obtain, and on the part of China to defend.

CYNICISM PAST AND PRESENT.

THERE is a certain phase of the cynical character which may be regarded as of modern date. The peculiar type of sentimental cynicism which grows out of the wounds of a weak nature belongs by right to our own time, and its exponents are to be found in sufficient numbers both in literature and in real life. Since the beginning of the century this form of tearful protest against the roughness and unamiability of existence has been more or less in fashion, and its origin may perhaps be referred ultimately to the false philosophies which underlay the French Revolution as well as to the eagerness with which these philosophies were seized and colored by the poets of the day. To conceive of a "state of nature" where the task of living should be a more gentle exercise than in this rough workaday world serves, as a matter of course, to arouse speedy discontent with the existing plan of the universe. The ideal vision calls into being delicate susceptibilities and tender affections which are apt to be bruised and blunted in our common social sphere; and hence, as a first stage in the growth of the cynical character, there comes a sense of bitter pain at the unfeeling conduct of humanity. This stage, however, is merely transitory. Delicate susceptibilities soon determine to steel themselves against the cruel coldness of their surroundings; a genteel despair takes the place of the former tearfulness. The youthful cynic makes up his mind to punish society for its neglect, and inasmuch as certain foolish aspirations and childlike desires have not met with the right enthusiastic response, the possessor of ideal thoughts decides that henceforth he will not believe in the possibility of any genuine emotion. This is the characteristic feature of modern cynicism. It seldom penetrates very deeply, but it takes many forms and appears under many disguises. Real life, as might be expected, offers a less favorable field for its exercise than is

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