What shall we say of "Volpone" of the brain which dreamt the hideous dream, and of the hand that penned it, with all its entourage of dwarfs, eunuchs, and worse and worse?

In the prologue he tells us that it was written in five weeks; for it appears that some of his enemies had condemned some of his previous plays because he had "been a year about them." A singular reason for condemnation, indeed! Volpone is the worst wretch ever depicted on the stage: he is handsome, has much wealth, and pretends to more. In his private life among his favorites he revels in luxurious vice, is a Domitian or a De Retz, but gives out to the world that he is dying. As he is childless, every parasite in Venice hopes to be his heir, and overwhelms him with favors. Mosca, his favorite rogue, assures each in turn that he is the fortunate one, and never hesitates at anything; the gulls are quite as unprincipled as the cheat, and at last the jealously honorable merchant, Corvino, is led to consent to a piece of rascality which cannot be hinted at here. At length Volpone goes, for his own purposes, to the length of shamming dead, and making Mosca, his creature, the heir: Volpone erjoying, concealed, with fiendish delight, the disappointment of his parasites, and the way in which Mosca taunts and insults them with the sight of their own presents to his supposed late master. But Volpone cannot now come to life again, and having made over his property to Mosca, is utterly in that rogue's power. In the last scene, when Volpone, disguised, has by his very extravagance of useless mischief got himself in danger, Mosca can serve him by recognizing him, but refuses in a whisper to do so under one half of the property, then under three fourths, then refuses altogether. Voipone, seeing himself ruined, discovers himself, confesses, and drags the false Mosca down into a ruin ten times more hideous than his own Mosca to the galleys for life, the luxuriously soft-living Volpone to end his life heavily ironed in the filthy dungeons of the Incurables.

66

The Alchemist" is the best known of Jonson's plays, and is to a certain extent on the same plan. A gentleman, frightened at the plague, goes away and leaves his house in town; his servant left in charge, assisted by the Alchemist, Subtle, a charlatan, uses it for every kind of chicanery and swindling. Everything goes well until their schemes are sent to the wind by the arrival of their master. It is very fine when Lovewit, the owner of the house, arrives. His neighbors tell him that his house has been the resort of hundreds of people, and, on knocking at it, it is opened by his own butler, who swears that not a soul has been near it, but that he has shut it up for the plague. By degrees matters are explained with great fun, and of the two rogues the butler is forgiven and the Alchemist

escapes.

66

"Bar

It would be difficult for us to follow Jonson's plays much further, in the space which is allotted to us. tholomew Fair" is not only witty, but tolerably well constructed; it is, however, infinitely coarser than the coarsest thing which Smollett ever wrote, which is going pretty far. It was written in 1614, and soon followed by The Devil is an Ass," in which a young, inexperienced devil gets leave from Satan to go to London to try his tricks upon Christians. He, however, finds them not only more wideawake, but rather worse than himself. It is not a very dull play; we read it through without any great difficulty for a second time the other day; whereas we honestly confess that we stuck fast in the Staple of News," after two attempts with a long interval between them. The last

play we shall notice is "The Tale of a Tub," the last piece which Jonson ever brought on the stage. It is, in our opinion, by no means his worst, but very readable. Oddly enough, the scene is in the country, between what is now King's Cross, the end of Tottenham Court road, and Kentish Town. The priest is Vicar of St. Pancras; the various characters come from Kilburn, Belsize, and Hampstead. The Kentish Town mentioned so often in Ben Jonson is probably that part called now the Grove, which must have overlooked the Fleet stream, as one gathers from the local names- "Angler's Lane" and Fleet Road." The upper parts of Kentish Town, towards Kenwood and Dartmouth Park, must have been very beautiful; indeed, Millfield Lane, on the upper borders of it, is one of the most beautiful spots within many miles of London at the present day.

46

To return to Jonson's life shortly. Shakespeare died in 1616, at the age of fifty-two; and we know when all is sifted, not much of Jonson's relations with him. He told Drummond little or nothing apparently; if he did, Drummond kept it carefully to himself. But we have no intention of entering into the exasperating Drummond-Jonson squabble: Professor Masson, who possesses the singular talent a talent, nowadays, which seems to belong only to him. of being at one time exhaustive and amusing in his treatment of a subject, has told us all we shall ever find out about the celebrated Hawthornden visit. He excuses. Drummond as far as he can. We are rather inclined to side with Gifford and Barry Cornwall. At all events, Jonson exhibited no malignity against Shakespeare, and we doubt if he felt any. We suspect that the truth about Jonson's enemies lies in a nutshell. He was ill-tempered, coarse, and rude, as great a bully in conversation as his namesake Samuel, and though many people hated him there is no proof whatever that he hated any body. He thought certain people fools, and he told Drummond so, not to mention many other people quite as indiscreet as Drummond; he thought himself a far greater man than he was, as far as regards dramatic writing, for, like most geniuses, he was most tender on his weakest point. If he had claimed to be a great lyric poet, no one would have denied it, but he insisted on being what he never was, a great writer of plays; he vilipended other play-writers, but there is no proof that he hated them. Honest to a fault, be would certainly have shown his hatred of Shakespeare had it existed.

We are coming to the things which no one reads now, but by which Jonson should stand or fall, his poems, containing exquisite snatches, but sadly unequal. Among these, is any more exquisite than this?"

"This figure that thou here seest put
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut.
Wherein the graver had a strife
With Nature, to outdo the life:
Oh could he but have drawn his wit
As well in brass as he hath hit

The face, the print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass :
But since he cannot, reader, look
Not on his picture but his book.”

We asked the question just now whether there was any more beautiful poem of Ben Jonson's than this. The answer is, Dozens. It simply shows, however, what has been shown a dozen times before, that Jonson not only had no envy of Shakespeare, but was proud of him. We have quoted it in preference to the other ole on Shakespeare, as it does not happen to be known to every schoolboy. The longer ode, for fulsome flattery, overtops everything which we could say of the greatest man of all time, or that Addison could say of the Duke of Marlborough, which is going a long way.

Jonson's life after Shakespeare's death is singularly uninteresting. Ile had the usual ups and downs of a literary man somewhat given to pleasure, probably more of the downs than the ups, but the world did not treat him so very badly after all. He was "careless either to gain or keep," as Drummond remarks with his Scotch shrewdness,

but in spite of wretched health, and writing against time on a steadily falling reputation, he seems to have kept a house over his head, and, according to Howell, "a year before his death, had good company, excellent cheer, choice wines, and a jovial welcome" to a solemn supper to which Howell was invited. Ben Jonson went to his grave with no great case against the world.

He was great as a tavern bully: not by any means a Bobadil, a Hilting, a Cutting, or any other of his favorite cut-throat cowards, but an interminable talker to a circle of admirers. We read the other day in a certain review on clubs, "that the authors had gone to the palatial halls of the Garrick, but that where the wits were gone no one could tell." We are only too happy to hear it. We never met a wit ourselves, though we have been in company with a few clever men too, but we have met those who have seen and heard wits, and have come to the conclusion that they must have been ghastly bores.

The worst of it is that wits transfer the original boredom at second-hand; no doubt that there were splendid times at the "Mermaid," but we are rather glad that we were not there after Shakespeare had left; because we are very much afraid that Ben Jonson, without Shakespeare to keep him in order, would have been a sad bore, and it seems that no one ever contradicted him. Unless he could talk twenty times more brilliantly than he ever wrote, he must have been dull at all times-save and except always in the case of the slang of the day. There we, who cannot follow half his allusions, can see that he was even Shakespeare's master. For instance, Shakespeare gives us an exquisite little crystal of the combined wit and slang of Miss Tearsheet, when she calls Falstaff" a tidy little Bartholomew boar pig" (that, by the way, is one of the wittiest things ever said; it is exactly what Falstaff was not, and there are inner lights in it which we could not analyze), Jonson takes the Bartholomew pig and writes a play upon it, containing all the slang of the day; at least there cannot be much more than is contained in "Bartholomew Fair." Half a dozen words of Shakespeare's were worth fifty of Jonson's. Nay more: a very clever and not badlyconstructed play is written by Jonson on Bartholomew pigs; and yet there is not one line or passage in it which makes one laugh like the one saying of Miss Tearsheet, a tidy little Bartholomew boar pig." Jonson knew more of the low London life than Shakespeare, but he revels in it, and is so diffuse that he misses his aim; Shakespeare knew enough of it, and crystallized it. "I got him in Paul's, he is gone to buy me a horse in Smithfield: now if I could get me a wife in the Stews, I were manned, horsed, and wived!"

66

Ben Jonson, then, was a second-rate comic writer and a third-class tragic writer. He had no idea of guiding his life, such as he would have got from a good father; he had none of those indescribable graces, thoughts, sensations, which almost always come from the babitual company of a good mother, at the time when the mind is most plastic for good or evil. He was quarrelsome, vain, and disparaging of others; with ten times the classical learning of Shakespeare he made not half the use of it in any thing that has lived. Amiable? yes, to those who would flatter him. Generous? we have no record of it- he was too profuse to be generous. Only a bear with genius. So we come to the end of Ben Jonson's character, according to Malone, Decker, Aubrey, Whalley, and the host of writers who so infuriate Mr. Gifford. But we always read his memoir of Ben Jonson with the impression that he (Mr. Gifford) was tearing the hair out of his head in handfuls while he wrote. Mr. Gifford and Barry Cornwall make little better of him, after all. Shall we end, then, by saying that Ben Jonson was all this and no more?

What, then, makes one's face redden and one's eyes glisten when his name is mentioned? Why, a certain fact which his biographers all omit to state and leave it for us.

The fact is this: turn from the general view of his plays to particular passages in his masques and poems, and you find that Ben Jonson was occasionally very seldom, we

allow

one of the most exquisite poets who ever wrote in our or any other language. To read his poems is like walking in an English meadow in May time: here a cowslip, there a fading primrose, now a bold oxlip, now a purple orchid; you find a dull-colored, half-toned green at one time, at another a tall, flaunting spike of loose-strife or a golden caltha. Above and over this natural garden fly thoughts and fancies, some like heavy-laden bees, some like vague, gaudy butterflies. To prove it, in conclusion we must say, in the exquisite words of another, "I bring you here a nosegay of a few culled flowers, with nothing of my own but the string which binds them." He was a brute, O Drummond! But can you match this?

"Have you seen but a bright lily grow
Before rude hands have touched it?)
Have you marked but the fall of the snow
Before the soil hath smutched it?

Have you felt the wool of the beaver?!
Or swan's-down ever?

Or have you smelt the bud of the brier?
Or the nard on the fire?

Or have tasted the bag of the bee?

Oh so white, oh so soft, oh so sweet is she!'

The Duchess of Edinburgh had no better welcome, if as good, as this to his Queen :

"What charming peals are these,

That while they bind the senses, do so please?
They are the marriage rites,

Of two the choicest pair of man's delights,

Music and poesy.

French art and English verse here wedded be.
Who did the knot compose,

Again hath brought the lily to the rose,
And with their charmèd dance
Re-celebrates the joyful match with France.
They are a school to win

The fair French daughter to learn English in ;

And graced with her song

To make the language sweet upon her tongue."

Many other beautiful passages might be added, but we only give one or two which are least familiar. To sum up all, Jonson sinks immeasurably beside Shakespeare, and was as incapable of writing "Lycidas" or the "Christmas Hymn" as we are. He has got a reputation infinitely beyond his merits, and that on wrong grounds; at one time one praises him, at another time one puts down one's pen in disgust.

On the whole, the best thing we can liken him to is an English meadow, with a flower here and there; when you do get a flower, however, it is a real gem. He is a most unsatisfactory person; he ought to have done so very much better. One of the most amusing things in this not very amusing life is to hear people taking him as a matter of course (and raving about him), who have obviously never read a line of his works. We happen to have done so on more than one occasion, and the older we get the more profoundly disappointed we are. What are the facts of the case? Nobody ever reads his works except the young gentlemen who are examined for certain public offices, and who are required to do so, for the improvement of their morals and because those works cannot possibly be of the least use. If any one desire to form a judgment different to our own, let him read Ben Jonson for himself as diligently as we have: we only hope that he will not be so terribly bored as we have been; but to save him the danger of that, he may get an excellent idea of Ben Jonson's plays in his four styles by reading Every Man in his Humor," "Volpone," The Tale of a Tub," and "Bartholomew Fair;" only we should recommend that the last play be not left about among servants or children; it is by no means meat for babes. In fact, Ben Jonson's works are decidedly topshelf books, and although vice is always punished, it is exhibited with such startling detail that the punishment is rather lost sight of in the curiosity excited by the narration of the crime. We have observed that, however, in other authors.

99.66

ON THE PERCEPTION OF THE INVISIBLE.

BY G. F. RODWELL.

Α

As a rule, a man puts absolute faith in his senses. large proportion - perhaps ninety-nine out of a hundred of the human race recognize in all that belongs to the natural world those things only which can be handled or seen; the two most common attributes of that which we call matter. Tell a half-educated man that the piece of chalk in his hand is principally composed of the remains of some millions of creatures which once lived; that the glass of clear water before him contains some thousands of animalcules, and he answers that he will believe it when he sees it." Am I not to believe the evidence of my senses?" is a common enough expression. The world existed for centuries before its rotundity was recognized; it appeared flat to the senses, the sun seemed to move across the heavens, while the earth was at rest. We know with what opposition the fact that the earth moves around the sun was received by all classes. How many fully realize it even now? In the sixteenth century, there were but ten Copernicans in the world. The early ideas of all races relative to things beyond their ken indicate that the tendency has ever been to identify the unknown and the unknowable with those things which are more familiar to the senses. Thus, savages see the storm-demon rushing wildly over the skies; to them the sun is endowed with life, and climbing the solid vault of heaven; while lightning becomes fire generated by the collision of clouds, after the manner of a flint and steel.

The thinking and observing man is, however, perpetually reminded of the fact that his senses are limited in their capabilities of perception. Their operations are finite; and the limit, as regards the observation and examination of externals, is reached much sooner than we generally imagine. The existence of such instruments as the microscope, telescope, and spectroscope, in itself indicates the limited action of the unassisted senses. The stardepths cannot be penetrated, the structure of the diatomaceanay, often the diatom itself cannot be perceived by the unaided eye; while the dark lines of the spectrum, and the wonderful system of celestial analysis resulting therefrom, would have remained undiscovered had it not been for the prism, the substitution of the thin slice for the circular beam of light employed by Newton, and the tutored eye of Wollaston.

But it is not our intention to discredit the senses because their faculty of perception is limited. The senses are specially devoted to the composite organism of which they form a part. In all that directly concerns that organism they are perfect; but when we endeavor to press them into some special service apart from the welfare of the organism, when we require our senses to discern and investigate certain phenomena of the external world, we find at once that their capabilities are finite. Now, the special functions of the senses are to guard and protect our bodies, to give warning of impending dangers from both internal and external sources; to enable us to repel the adverse assaults of the forces of nature; to benefit by all that Nature offers us-bright sunlight, pure air, beautiful scenery. Gravity would drag us over the edge of a precipice; the senses give warning, and we are safe: accumulated snow would numb us into the long sleep, but so long as the senses remain sentinel over the organism, we resist the adverse influence. When the senses cease to give warning we perish; the sense-bereft madman dashes out his brains. The senses enable us to comply with all the conditions requisite for the maintenance of life, and they transmute for us various actions of the external world, such as certain movements of the molecules of air, and of the luminiferous ether, into actions capable of being recognized in a definite form, by the centre of perception - the brain. To these various sensations we give such names as Light, Heat, and Sound.

A horse runs away with a carriage a hundred yards

behind us; the ear catches the sound, and conveys the impression" quick as thought," not "quick as lightning" to the brain; the latter issues its orders, the body turns round, the eye sees the horse, and communicates this new impression to the brain, which puts in action the muscles of the legs, and thus we jump aside and avoid being run over; the whole set of actions having occupied a remarkably small portion of a minute. As in the story of the belly and the members, each organ works with, and for, the entire composite organism, the senses are faithful and loyal servants of the kingdom of the whole body. But when we ask that same faithful eye which so recently helped to save us from destruction, to see the nature of the motion we call Heat, or to distinguish a molecule of oxygen gas, it can no longer serve us. These unwonted tasks bear the same relation to it as did the roc's egg in the palace of Aladdin to the Genius of the Lamp; but the eye does not reply to us as the Genius replied to Aladdin: "What, wretch! is it not enough that I and my companions have done everything thou hast chosen to command, but that thou repayest our services by an ingratitude that is unequalled?" It rather replies: "I cannot indeed see a molecule of oxygen gas, or discern the nature of the motion of Heat; but I will do my best to distinguish them if you will help me." And thus we are led to augment the action of the senses by using them in conjunction with suitable instruments of observation.

Ten

Let us be more precise as to this matter of the limited capacities of our senses. About us and around us, at all times and in all places, float myriads of harmonies which we hear not, myriads of images of things unseen. The idea is very old: the Pythagoreans asserted that the music of the spheres is not heard by man because the narrow portals of the ears cannot admit so great a sound. The peopling of the air with spirits, the existence of the idea of Djin, Kobold, and Fairy, all point to the prevalence of the idea that unseen agencies are forever about us. thousand motions sweep by, bathing us in their current, and we cannot recognize them. There are, if we may so express it, sounds which the ear cannot hear; light which the eye cannot see; heat which does not affect the sensory nerves. We mean simply that there are actions precisely similar in kind to those which constitute ordinary sound, light, and heat, which do not affect our senses. The difference is one of degree, not of form or kind. In fact, the difference is no more than this: let us suppose that a railway train passes us with a velocity which allows us clearly to distinguish the face of a friend in one of the carriages; next let us suppose the volocity to be increased until we can no longer distinguish him. These are differences of degree, not of kind; for the motion of the train is the same in kind and in direction, but of another degree, and this just makes the difference between recognizing our friend and not doing so. In the one instance the observation falls within the possible powers of the eye; in the other the augmented velocity of the train passes the limit of observation. Thus also with the motions of light, heat, and sound. Let them pass certain well-defined limits, and the unaided senses cease to recognize them. Our ears are deaf to sounds produced by more than 38,000 vibrations in a second; our eyes are blind to light produced by more than 699,000,000,000,000 vibrations in a second. Each organ singles out a certain limited range of vibrations, sharply bounded in both directions, beyond which the organ ceases to recognize vibrations similarly generated, and differing from the recognized vibrations only in rate of motion. This limited range is amply sufficient for the wants of the organism; but the vibrations beyond the range in both directions, although they may not influence

1 The velocity of a sensory impulse travelling to the brain has been determined to be about 44 metres (144 32 feet) a second in man, while the velocity of a motor impulse travelling from the brain is believed to be 33 metres (108.24 feet) a second. The motion is slowest in the case of sight, less low in hearing, least Flow in touch. According to Donders it takes about one twenty-sixth part of a second to think (Nature, vol. fi. p. 2). The duration of a flash of lightning has been calculated by Sir Charles Wheatstone to be less than a thousandth part of a second. The velocity of electricity through short lengths of copper wire is, according to the same observer, 288,000 miles a second.

us, often influence matter external to ourselves, as profoundly as those which we recognize by our unaided senses. Hence, once more, the necessity of exalting the action of the senses when we investigate external

matter.

Admitting therefore the limited capabilities of the senses, let us now go one step further. When applied to the investigation of Nature, the unaided senses may not only fail us, but they may positively deceive us by conveying false impressions. A point of light (say the glowing end of a lighted stick) if held at rest appears as a point of light; if moved rapidly in a line, as a line of light; if whirled in a circle, as a circle of light; yet we know that the point of light can only be in one place at one and the same instant of time. Or take the less evident case of the motion of heat. We have before us a mass, say a cubic foot, of iron. It appears to be as solid and as motionless as anything we can well imagine. Yet all the observations of science point to the conclusion that its small particles or atoms are not in contact with each other; and that they are all moving with great relative velocity, not directly forward with motion of translation, but vibrating about a position of rest. If we cool our mass of iron we observe that it occupies less bulk than before; hence clearly the atoms could not have been in contact before cooling, for they have approached each other, and matter is impenetrable: two things cannot be in the same place at the same time. If we continue to cool the mass of iron, it continues to get smaller, the atoms approach closer and closer, and we have never been able to cool a body until it contracts no longer; in fact, we do not Yet know of any substance whose atoms are in contact. our senses of sight and of touch assure us that the iron consists of continuous matter. Now if the atoms are not in contact, and if they are perpetually moving, why, we may ask, is it not possible to thrust our hand into the midst of them, to see them moving, or at least at the bounding surfaces of the mass to feel the movement? Only because our senses are not sufficiently acute for this. The atoms move with excessive velocity, so that, as in the case of the whirled stick, they are, as far as the sense of sight is concerned apparently in two places at the same time; so also the nerves of touch are not sufficiently delicate to recognize the minute moment of time required by an atom to complete a vibration. For aught we can tell to the contrary, that which to our senses is a cubic foot of iron may be generated by the rapid vibration of a thin plate of iron one foot square within the limits of a foot in length. One more example — a very familiar one of the fallacy of the senses, and we may pass on to the more immediate subject of our discussion. Place three basins in a row: pour cold water into the left-hand basin, hot water into that on the right, and a mixture of equal parts of the hot and cold water, into the central basin. If we now dip our left hand into the cold water, and our right hand into the warm water, simultaneously remove them, and place them in the central basin, the lukewarm water in it will feel warm to the left hand, and cold to the right. Here, then, we have two absolutely antithetical sensations communicated to the brain by similar sets of nerves, and originated by the same medium. Are we to believe the evidence of the right hand or of the left, or are we to disbelieve both? The old story of the man who cooled his porridge and warmed his hands with the same breath is equally to the point. We must recognize the fact that numberless actions of the external world, as conveyed and interpreted to us by the senses, are relative rather than absolute. We call a thing hot or cold according as it happens to affect our senses at any particular time. A traveller descending Chimborazo complains at a certain elevation of the heat; a traveller who is ascending, and who meets him at the same place, complains of the cold. "Change of impression," says Professor Bain, is necessary to our being conscious. . . . The sensation of light supposes a transition from darkness or shade, or from a less degree of illumination to a greater. . . . The principle of Relativity, or the necessity of change in order to our

being conscious, is the groundwork of Thought, Intellect, or Knowledge, as well as of Feeling.... Our knowledge begins, as it were, with Difference." The interpretation of an external action by any particular sense, and the transmutation of an external impression into an impression capable of being recognized by the brain, involves this principle of Relativity. The process of sifting the relatively absolute from the absolutely relative, or of stating the relative in terms of the absolute, should be diligently attempted in the investigations of nature.

Although, as we have attempted to show, we are surrounded by numberless unseen actions, we can, to some extent, faintly and dimly indeed, - visualize them in our mind's eye; and whenever this can be done without hypothesizing too wildly, without going too far out of the world of real existences, we think it behooves us to do so. There can be no doubt that those impressions are best realized which are seen by the eye of the body, or, if invisible to it, are by mental action wrought into the similitude of things seen. Throughout the history of Natural Philosophy-no matter how subtle the entity—this attempt to visualize the invisible has always been apparent the motion-giving ai np of Aristotle, the pooμépeiat of Anaxagoras, the materia cælestis of Descartes, the igneous motion, “gyratorius seu verticillaris," of Stahl, the "glutinous effluvium" of the old electricians, the "invisible threads" by which, according to Father Linus, the mercury is held suspended in the barometer, have not the authors of one and all of these pushed imagination to its furthest limit in the attempt to visualize the unseen? And have not the proposers of "subtle effluvia," attractive and repulsive fluids," "polarized media" for the conveyance of forces, striven to do the same? They have wisely endeavored to save their conceptions from being dry metaphysical dogmas, unrecognized and unremembered save by abstract mental means, and to fix them in our memories by images, however crude they may be, drawn from the more obvious and material world about us. In regard to those actions of light, heat, and sound, of which we have spoken above, do we not try, and ought we not to try yet more, to realize each phase of their existence under any particular condition their generation by the vibrating body, their transference by the elastic medium, their final rest in the brain?

-

Let us endeavor to visualize some of the invisible actions which are perpetually taking place around us, such as the assumption of heat by a mass of metal, and the reception of sound and light by the brain. Having recognized from the foregoing remarks the fact that the senses are limited in their capabilities of observation, and otherwise may often give fallacious results, we must at the outset provide ourselves with a suitable organ of observation. And here we must beg the reader to grant us a few important concessions; we must divest ourselves of this "muddy vesture of decay," if we wish to hear the music of the spheres; our bodies will be in the way if we wish to glide amongst ultimate atoms. We will therefore dispossess ourselves of the material part of us, retaining only the eye and the ear, associated with our normal intellectual powers. But the eye can only be directed towards one point at once, and if a rapidly moving body passes it, the moving body (like the whirled stick) will appear to be drawn out on account of the persistence of its image on the retina; hence we must have a more complete instrument of vision. Let us then imagine a sphere whose entire surface is studded with eyes, and let us call this organ of vision, for the avoidance of repetition, the oculus. We must grant it, moreover, the power of contracting to the size of an atom, and of penetrating where the luminiferous ether can penetrate; the faculty of seeing in the dark; infinite velocity in any direction, or across any position of rest; power of clearly distinguishing the most rapid motion, and of seeing the imagined but ordinarily unseen; and lastly, power of resisting any extremes of temperature. These gifts being conceded, we have an instrument of vision well suited to our purpose, an all-powerful eye; potent as the winged eye which hovers over the head of Osiris in the

occur.

The oculus now leaves the interior of the mass, and having reached the outside, notices a vast greenish cloud of silver gas floating above it. Presently the rectilinear motion slackens; the gas is cooling; the atoms approach each other until at length they come within the range of their cohesion, which compounds its own rectilinear attractive force with the motion of the atoms into the former circular motion: they abandon their rectilinear for angular velocity. The cloud of silver vapor conden-es; a gigantic rain of molten silver falls; the drops are spheroidal and ellipsoidal masses as large as the dome of St. Paul's; they solidify into a lengthened ridge of silver mountains. Again the oculus enters the mass, and finds the atoms still actuated by their ceaseless circular motion of heat. But on looking towards one end of the ridge, the inception of a new kind of motion is perceived; the particles are assimilating an elliptical motion, which travels rapidly from end to end the mass is conveying an electric current. The atoms of silver, still retaining their elliptical motion, now assume a peculiar helicoidal motion in varying planes: the mass is under the influence of a magnet. The oculus then goes out. side again and stations itself near the base of one of the shining silver mountains; it looks up at the bright lustrous sides, and sees the ether-waves dashing down upon them from infinite space; it notices also that the motion of the waves differs from that of the atoms- they cannot assimilate it. Consequently the ether-waves are dashed back, like great sea-waves dashing on a rock-bound coast; in a word, they are reflected, and to some extent scattered, as ether-foam.

Once again, the ingot of silver is placed in a Cyclopæan melting pot, together with some sulphur: the oculus places itself at the bottom of the mass, and diligently watches. The melting-pot is placed in a furnace; motion is rapidly assimilated by the atoms, more quickly by the sulphur than by the silver; at length a white atom of sulphur and two black atoms of silver are seen to coalesce, separate from the rest of the mass, and sink to the bottom as a molecule

of sulphide of silver. The molecule continues the motion of heat which the individual atoms had before possessed, but the three coalesced atoms now act as one. The motion is observed to differ altogether, both in kind and velocity, from that of the single atoms; and the oculus no longer recognizes ei her the sulphur or the silver as separate bodies: the compound molecule now forms indeed a new substance. The individual atoms of the molecule also move relatively to each other. The combination of the two atoms of silver with one atom of sulphur continues until the whole mass of silver has become a new substance. A few million atoms of sulphur remain in the melting pot in excess; they move more and more rapidly as the heating continues, and ultimately float away and are seen no

more.

Here ends our first voyage with the oculus. We have seen some actions which are fairly familiar to many of us. We have endeavored to visualize the assumption of heat by a mass of melted metal; the continued assumption resulting in fusion and vaporization; the subsequent condensation of the vapor; the conveyance of an electric current by the metallic mass; the action of a magnet upon it; the reflection of light from its polished surface; and finally, its union with sulphur under the influence of the force of chemical affinity.

Whither shall we travel now? To the fiery maelstroms of the sun? To the zone of Saturn? To a cloud of planetary matter condensing into new worlds? Or shall we float with the light of Arcturus and a Lyræ into the spectroscope of Mr. Huggins? Since we have attempted to visualize the infinitely little, let us now transport the oculus to the infinitely great, and place it in the midst of a new solar system about to be formed.

The oculus speeds through space; it sees an earth lit moon; it reaches Mars during mid-winter, it examines the belt of Saturn with interest, and it gains some entirely new ideas about space of four dimensions. It passes the region

"where eldest Night

And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise

Of endless wars, and by confusion stand." At length, far out of sight of our solar system, it comes to a firmamental desert, and sees beneath it an extended nebulous mass, some ten trillion miles in extent; the mass is hazy and cloud-like, and is gradually contracting its limits, until at length it condenses into a semi-solid spherical mass, intensely radiant, in fact still white-hot. The sphere assumes rotatory motion, and as the motion augments it bulges out more and more in the direction of its motion; then some dozens of masses of molten matter of different sizes are given off from the circumference of the rotating mass. These fly out in orbits more or less eccentric, and revolve around the great central bo ly, the remains of the original parent mass, and still far larger than any of its offspring. These new worlds possess rotatory motion o their own; one has a girdle; one is accompanied by little moons; some follow a very elliptical path; some rush off into infinite space in hyperbolic curves. The great central mass, now the sun of a vast system, keeps his attendant worlds in order; the greater number revolve about him with regularity. But one of the worlds, a few times larger than our moon, has by the velocity of its impulse been projected into a large and very elliptical orbit, which brings it within the sphere of attraction of a distant but enormous sun. Then, as a ship is drawn into a whirlpool, is the errant world drawn to its destruction. It circulates about the greater body, not in a curved path which returns into itself, but in an ever-narrowing spiral. At last comes the final crash it rushes into the sun with a velocity of more than a million miles a second, and the heat generated by the collision volatilizes the destroyed planet. A thin fiery cloud is now all that remains of what had a short time before been a world. All this, and much more, the oculus perceives, and then returns to earth.

With our organ of observation we might now visit those profound depths of the ocean, of which the Challenger is