On colour difficult of comprehension to the minds of our ancestors. blindness Dr. Carpenter's notions do not appear to me to be sound. He says "there may even be no power of distinguishing any colour whatever." Now, since the eye sees nothing but colour, a person who had "no power of distinguishing any colour whatever" would be practically blind. The man who could see nothing but black would be in exactly the position of the man utterly deprived of the organ of vision; and if the one colour perceived were any other than black the patient's condition would hardly be improved. All nature would be one level plane before the eyes. The tree could not be separated from the background of the sky. The line of the horizon would be imperceptible. Men and women would appear amalgamated into one unbroken surface, and neither motion nor distance would be discernible. The man to whom all hues resolved themselves into one or other of two colours might manage to guide himself by sight; but to perceive only one colour is equivalent to blindness. GREAT travellers seem to penetrate the divine mystery. They get closer to God than other men. We who live in London and take our horse exercise in the Row are apt to forget the country and Him that made it. There is too much of man's work about us. You come upon the Unmistakable Hand in forests and by mighty rivers. In an age of scepticism such as the present, when philosophers are found inveighing against the efficacy of prayer, and scientific men place themselves on an equality with the Apostles of old, it is consoling to hear Mr. Stanley, who discovered Livingstone, talk of our fellow countryman as one who "in his many wanderings had been touched by the hand of God." This was said in a speech the other day at the Garrick Club, a few of whose members entertained the famous press man at a little dinner in honour of himself, his mission, and his calling. IN my early days the stocks were regarded as a useful and wholesome mode of punishment for vagrancy and other offences. Some of the country justices are, I learn, reviving this old method for the benefit of drunkards. The effect, I hear, is good-even better than the press-pillory of Liverpool. There are other offences which deserve the public degradation of the stocks-one in particular, namely, the vending of diseased meat. Magistrates do now and then leave out of their judgments the option of a fine; they might, in special cases, take a lesson from the past, even so far back as Edward II. In the Latin records of that reign I find that on the 25th of July, 1320, William le Clerk, of Higham Ferrers, was brought before the Mayor's Court charged with selling flesh-meat unfit for human food. The award of the magistrates was that Clerk should be put upon the pillory and the meat burnt beneath him. SEEING that we do punish persons who sell diseased meat, no matter how lightly, justice is unfairly dealt when the other vendors of poisonous food escape. The manufacturers of sweetmeats, for example. It has been shown over and over again that, as a rule, cheap confectionery is poisonous. My young contemporary, the Pall Mall, even goes so far as to suggest that Christina Edmunds proved her insanity by taking the trouble to poison sweetmeats which were already openly sold artistically coated with metallic lead. In 1851 the Lancet commissioner exposed the whole system of British adulteration. Later on, Professor Gamgee, in the Milk Journal, has done good service; and now that gastronomy is represented by the Food Journal, the Knife and Fork, Fin-Bec's Year-book, and other publications, "the agony of adulteration" ought to be "piled up" to such a height as to compel rigorous Governmental interference. THE "fastest train in the world”—the 11.45 a.m. from Paddingtonwhich does the first seventy-eight miles every day with clock-like exactness in eighty-seven minutes, and reaches Plymouth in six hours and a quarter, carries the great body of political theorists, in the second week in the present month, to the first Social Science Congress ever held in the big Western town. Physical science and sociology work together in the production of such a result as that accomplished in this marvellous speed of traffic. My good friend Dr. Johnson would have put no faith in a band of theorists who should consent to allow themselves to be wafted over the land at the rate of more than fifty miles an hour, and Oliver Goldsmith would have been delighted at the idea of it. I do not think it would have been possible to induce the excellent but ponderous lexicographer to betake himself to Plymouth for the sake of discussing the question of international arbitration with these political economists, but the author of "The Citizen of the World" would have gloried in those advanced speculations, and would have been among the most amiable and popular of the guests of the hospitable natives-half-Devon and half-Cornish-on the borders of the Sound. The world has been wont to look on with a mixture of tolerance and derision at the apostles of arbitration and universal peace; but the time has perhaps come when the discussion of this subject will obtain for itself a hearing among even the most sceptical. While the gentlemen of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science are endeavouring to arrive at an answer to the question, "Can a Court of International Arbitration be formed with a view to avoid war? and, if so, in what way?" Count Sclopis will be revelling in the half realisation of this dream of political philanthropists. A glowing message, almost as full of sanguine and etherealised imagery as a letter from Garibaldi or an oration by the late Joseph Mazzini, will probably arrive from the President of the Court at Geneva to the Chairman of the Section of Municipal Law at Plymouth, and the Section will vote in reply a delightful resolution touching the proceedings of the Court of Arbitration and the history of that wonderful Treaty of Washington. Most sincerely do I hope that neither Count Sclopis nor the Section of Municipal Law of the Social Science Congress will be disappointed. I have lived long enough to mistrust the efficacy of war as the healer of wrongs or the final settler of quarrels, and if there is a streak to be seen in the sky-the token of a coming day of happier international relations—I shall be glad if these social philosophers will point it out to me. The remainder of the programme of the Plymouth Congress appears to me to be somewhat deficient in features of interest. I can look for not much benefit from a debate on the old question whether the punishment of crime should be deterrent or reformatory, and I do not believe the Section of Economy and Trade will throw any new light on the problem of direct and indirect taxation. From the Departments of Education and Health something useful in the shape of suggestions ought to come, which might render it desirable for the Chairmen of School Boards, of Boards of Guardians, and of Local Boards of Health to attend. If they have a weakness for the grandest and the most charming of English September scenery they will not regret a trip by the "fastest train in the world." CHARLES LAMB was constitutionally susceptible of noises; so are we all, more or less. "Elia" describes his fretfulness under the infliction of a carpenter's hammer and the "measured malice of music." Happily, Parliament has done something to rid us of the organ nuisance; but Londoners suffer more and more every day from the cries of street hawkers. My friend Mr. Mayhew has I hope proved a benefactor to his neighbourhood by braving the licensed pest and meeting it boldly at the police court; but we are not all so courageous as he. I am myself of a retiring disposition; I would rather growl and stamp about in my room under the infliction of "cats' meat," "scissors to grind,” “fresh gathered strawberries," "green peas eightpence per peck," than go outside and eject trespassers from my garden; but Oh, for a legal hand to fall upon these disturbers of suburban peace! Noise is the great bane of London life; it frets and worries many of us into premature graves. Asphalte pavements and tramway cars are modern blessings. May they go on increasing at forty times their present rate of development! The Metropolitan Railway directors ought to take a lesson from these advances in the march of quiet. I dare say thousands are influenced as I am against the Underground Railway. It is the noise, not the sulphur, that hurts me ;-not the noise of the train, but the fiendish banging of the doors and the impish yells of the newsboys. Imagine for a moment the fine tracery of the nervous structure, with its manifold tender fibres, being subject to a hundred shocks of door-banging on a short journey of half a dozen miles! Let the directors look to this. They will find it an important element in making or unmaking dividends. IF the day should ever come when this small island is found too narrow for agriculture, I trust that with that advanced economic condition of things will co-exist such marvellous and as yet unconceived facilities of communication between one country and another as will bring the great continents practically to our doors. For the Englishman's nature-strait and sea-bound as is his home-pines year by year for the sight of corn-fields. Never a harvest comes round but a hundred incidents convince me of the deep, unquenchable interest of my countrymen in the natural history, the characteristics and vicissitudes of the crops that are gathered in at this season. The Cockney who runs down into Kent or Surrey on a Sunday excursion in July or August will not report very much of pastures and trees, but he will be learned in the aspects of wheat and barley for the remainder of the summer, and will speak of the continuous acres of whitening corn, of the density of the growth, of the depth of stalk, of the long lines of sheaves, with an enthusiasm not usual with him. It is the same with all of us. We visit dockyards and foundries, giant factories, great exhibitions of machinery, picture galleries and industrial shows—but almost every man and woman of us will acknowledge when the time comes round that few sights satisfy us like that of the flourishing corn-field, and we must be very young indeed if we have not to-day the impulse to grieve because another "harvest is past" and another "summer is ended." |