performance. The surprising and exceptional nature of this phenomenon, and in some measure also the difficulty of accepting the explanation usually given of the origin of the instinct in the young bird, must be held to account for the disposition shown to accept accounts of it with reserve. One of the most graphic sketches of the occurrence by an eyewitness is that in Mr. Gould's "Birds of Great Britain." The account by Mrs. Blackburn, who watched the movements of the young cuckoo, is full of interest. The nest under observation was that of the common meadow pipet, and it had at first two eggs in it besides that of the cuckoo. "At one visit," continues Mrs. Blackburn, "the pipets were found to be hatched, but not the cuckoo. At the next visit, which was after an interval of forty-eight hours, we found the young cuckoo alone in the nest, and both the young pipets lying down the bank, about ten inches from the margin of the nest, but quite lively after being warmed in the hand. They were replaced in the nest beside the cuckoo, which struggled about until it got its back under one of them, when it climbed backward directly up the open side of the nest, and hitched the pipet from its back on to the edge. It then stood quite upright on its legs, which were straddled wide apart, with the claws firmly fixed half-way down the inside of the nest, among the interlacing fibres of which the nest was woven, and, stretching its legs apart and backward, it elbowed the pipet fairly over the margin so far that its struggles took it down the bank instead of back into the nest. After this the cuckoo stood a minute or two, feeling back with its wings, as if to make sure that the pipet was fairly overboard, and then subsided into the bottom of the nest." The ejected bird was replaced, but on again visit. ing the nest on the following morning both pipets were found dead out of the nest. Mrs. Blackburn continues: "The cuckoo was perfectly naked, without the vestige of a feather, ar even a hint of future feathers; its eyes were not yet opened, and its neck seemed too weak to support the weight of its head. . . . The most singular thing of all was the direct purpose with which the blind little monster made for the open side of the nest, the only part where it could throw its burden down the bank. I think all the spectators felt the sort of horror and awe at the apparent inadequacy of the creature's intelligence to its acts that one might have felt at seeing a tothless hag raise a ghost by an incantation. It was horribly uncanny and gruesome." IRISH BULLS." Tim, do you snore when you are asleep?" said an American. "No, never, for I lay awake one whole night on purpose to see." The analogue to this occurred to Porson once at a dinner-party where Captain Cook became the topic of the moment. "An ignorant person," as Timbs tells the story, wishing to contribute his mite, said to the Professor, "Pray, was Cook killed on his first voyage?" "I believe he was," said Porson, "but he did not mind it much, but immediately entered on a second." Commercial advertisements are not free from bulls. A new washing-machine was advertised with the heading of Every man his own Washerwoman. Beecham cannot advertise his pills without a bull. He says that if "Beecham's Pills, St. Helens" are not on the Government stamp, they are a forgery. Imagine a charge of forgery for not having copied a signature. The advertisement writer next time should be put through a course of the pills to clear his head before he sits down to address the public. " The Spectator in 1886 gave some striking illustrations of Irish humor and the use of the 46 66 English language. The master was giving to a laborer a glass of whiskey, and doing so, said, You'll remember, Corney, that every glass you take is a nail in your coffin." Well, your honor," says Corney, may be, as you have the hammer in your hand, you'd just drive another home." It would appear from the following interesting anecdote that an extraordinary surprise or a startling personal experience may throw the mind into a condition to ejaculate naturally something very much resembling a bull. Charles II., out hunting one day, got separated from the hunt and entered the cottage of a cobbler for refreshment. The man gave him bread and cheese and began to talk about the king, expressing much anxiety to see him. Mount behind me," said his guest, "and I will show him to you." "But how shall I know him?" 'Why, the king will be the only one covered."' By this time they had come up with the nobles, and the cobbler looked about for the king. He found soon that he alone and the king had their hats on; so rising to the occasion, he tapped the king on the shoulder, and said, "I think it must be either you or I, sir." This happy confusion of the cobbler about his own identity suggests the story of the individual who accosted his friend with-" At a distance I was unable to recognize who you were; as you came nearer I thought it was you, but now I see it is your brother." Grose relates that Caulfield, meeting Mr. Thomas Sandby, said, "My dear Sandby, I'm glad to see you. Pray is it you or your brother?" It was a Spaniard who remarked ingeniously, that an author should always write his own index, let who will write the book. Edgeworth relates the story of an English shopkeeper who did pretty well in the direction of the bull proper when, to recommend the durability of some fabric for a lady's dress, he said, "Madam, it will wear forever, and make you a petticoat afterward." This is quite equal to the Irishman's rope which had only one end, because the other had been cut away. When a friend condoled with Pat in tribulation, telling him to bear up, for that life was only a dream," Ah," said Pat," that's very good of your honor to comfort me, and it would only that I'm so often thrubbled with waking to the uncomfortable facts." There was an old commentator, whose works are forgotten now, who praised the divine goodness for always making the largest rivers flow hard by the most populous cities. There was a Frenchman, we find from the Longueruana (122), who said angrily, when told that the king had sent to Rome to buy antiques, "Why can't we make them here for ourselves?" A contributor to Notes and Queries said that Peter Cunningham's "Letters of Walpole" was the only complete edition, "though by no means what that gentleman might have made it." One of the funniest absurdities of expression seems to have been elicited from the superfine politeness of a foreign correspondent of our Royal Society. In writing to them, he speaks of the earthquake that had the honor to be noticed by them. How gratifying to the earthquake, say of Lisbon, to find its efforts and great exertions thus appreciated by science. Guizot, in his French synonyms, repeats the neat distinction drawn by Girard : "On est âne par disposition d'esprit, et ignorant pas défaut d'instruction." Hearing the Sphinx mentioned in company, an Irishman whispered into his friend's ear, " The Sphinx! Who is that?" "A monster, man." 'Och, a Munster man: I had no idea he was of Connaught." Was it not the grand mot of Napoleon by which he expressed his pettitesse that he had banished the word impossible from the French one. dictionary-much as he cut England out of his map of Europe? But both the word and our island remain unexpunged in every other edi. tion. The islanders, too, performed the quite impossible feat of overcoming his Invincibles. Dumont tells us that Mirabeau esteemed the word impossible to be foolish. "Never use," he said to his secretary, "that foolish word again in my presence." Like Mirabeau him. self, Napoleon appropriated ideas whenever they suited him. In this case he only plagiarized a plagiarist: you cannot wrong such a Lord Chatham, in a fit of the gout, received one of the admirals in his sick room only to be told that to get the required expedition afloat was impossible." "It must sail, sir, this day week," was the eagle-eyed man's fire-flashing reply. As he rose from his chair, the beaded perspiration bursting from his forehead with the agony caused him as he firmly planted the gouty foot upon the floor, and suiting the action to the word, added, “I trample on impossibilities." He fell back fainting, but he conveyed his lesson, and the fleet sailed. If all orators could follow up words with actions so intense as this, their art would grow respectable. Chatham in this, and in much else done by him and said, is the only perfect orator, perhaps, that men have ever known. Demosthenes may have surpassed him in words, and Cicero in wit, but in action, which the old men set such store by, Chatham is first and alone. A SYSTEM OF OPTICAL TELEGRAPHY.-A novel system of optical telegraphy owes its origin to Mr. La Cour, a French optician. Instead of availing himself of interrupted rays of light, the inventor sends a signal which can be read at the receiving station like an ordinary letter. The transmission is effected by means of a luminous beam, refracted through prisms, and deprived at its departure of certain colored rays. The spectrum obtained on the arrival of the signal is interrupted by one or more black bands, which correspond to the rays absorbed at its departure. The luminous beam may be made to assume the form of the letters of the Morse alphabet, and a special contrivance serves to modify the light emitted after each signal. The transmission of the signals is accomplished with considerable rapidity. Four or five signals can be despatched simultaneously from the same lamp, which will allow signalling to be carried on at night in a corresponding manner to that of the flag signalling by day.-Optician. Ir does not often occur to the home. keeping English citizen, who dwells securely behind his inviolable unchanging sea barriers, that the British Empire, in its largest sense, is largely surrounded by frontiers that are more movable, more debatable, and often no less exposed, than those of any other civilized State in the world. He knows the British Islands to be the citadel and treasury of a vast dominion; he does not always consider that this dominion has every kind of border, runs through almost every kind of country and climate, is confronted across its boundaries by neighbors of every sort and condition. Although on each Ash Wednesday the Anglican Church pronounces its annual curse upon the man who removes his neighbor's landmark, the Englishman has long been in the habit of pushing forward his own. Now the landmarks of the national property are, of course, its frontiers; and I doubt whether many of us duly appreciate the continual widening of them that goes on, the processes by which the movement operates, its character and its consequences. The object of this paper is, first, to examine briefly that system of protectorates to which the incessant expansion of our territorial responsibilities is mainly due; secondly, to take a rapid survey of the frontiers of the British Empire on the Asiatic mainland; and, lastly, to make some remarks upon the general working and probable consequences of the system in other parts of the uncivilized world. The system of protectorates has been practised from time immemorial as a method whereby the great conquering and commercial peoples masked, so to speak, their irresistible advance, and have regulated the centripetal attraction of a greater 28 over lesser masses of territory. It was much used by the Romans, whose earlier relations with Asia and Africa were not unlike our own. The motives have been different-sometimes political, sometimes military, sometimes commercial; the consequences have been invariably the same. It is used politically as a convenient method of extending various degrees of power, of appropriating certain attributes of sovereignty, without affirming full jurisdiction. It has become the particular device whereby one powerful State forestalls another in the occupation of some position, or scientific frontier line, or intermediate tract that has a strategical and particularly a defensive value. It is employed to secure conmand of routes, coaling stations, or trading posts whenever one nation desires to be beforehand with an enterprising competitor. Under this system, applied in these various manners, the extra-territorial liabilities of England all over the world are rapidly increasing, and our frontiers are rapidly expanding. Now, the origin and extension of our protectorates on the Asiatic mainland (I am at present speaking of these only) follow a clear and almost uniform process of development. Just as a fortress or a line of entrenchments requires an open space around or in front of it, so it is manifestly advantageous for the security of an outlying frontier province to keep the foreign territory adjoining it free from the intrusion or occupation of powerful neighbors. There is no great objection to neighbors who are merely troublesome, such as tribes who may be turbulent and predatory, or even petty States that may be occasionally unfriendly, if they are not strong enough to be seriously dangerous. It is always a question whether the most unruly barbarian is not, on the whole, a much better neighbor than a highly civilized but heavily armed State of equal calibre with your In the case of the free tribe or the petty disaffected ruler, the tranquillity of your border may suffer, but it is possible to bring them gradually into pacific habits and closer subordination. In the case of the civilized State, you will undoubtedly obtain a well-defined and properly controlled frontier on both sides of it; but it will be also a frontier that needs a vigilant patrol, that will probably require fortifications, garrisons, and constant watching of all movements, diplomatic and military, own. beyond the exact line of one's own possessions. It is probably due to our insular traditions that the English are very susceptible about the distrust and danger inseparable from a frontier that is a mere geographical line across which a man may step. They have no such border-line in Europe, except perhaps at Gibraltar; and they have always been naturally reluctant to come to these close quarters with any formidable rival in Asia. Upon this principle it has long been our custom in Asia to bring under our protective influence, whether or not they desired it, the native States, or chiefships, or tribes, whose territory has marched with our own boundaries; the reciprocal understanding being that we undertake to safeguard them from foreign aggression on the condition that they shall have no dealings with any foreign Power other than England. We surround ourselves, in this manner, with a zone of land, sometimes narrow, sometimes very broad, which is placed under political taboo so far as concerns rival Powers whose hostility may be serious; and thus our political influence radiates out beyond the line of our actual possession, spreading its skirts widely and loosely over the adjacent country. The particular point, therefore, that I wish at the beginning to set out distinctly is, that the true frontier of the British dominion in Asia, the line which we are more or less pledged to guard, from which we have warned off trespassers, does not by any means tally with the outer edge of the immense territory over which we exercise administrative jurisdiction, in which all the people are British subjects for whom our governments make laws. The true frontier, according to my view, includes not only this territory, but also large regions over which the English Crown has established protectorates of different kinds and grades, varying according to circumstance and specific conditions. This protectorate may involve the maintenance of internal order, or it may amount only to a vague sovereignty, or it may rest on a bare promise to ward off unprovoked foreign aggression. But, whatever may be the particular class to which the protectorate belongs, however faint may be the shadow of authority that we choose to throw over the land, its object is to affirm the right of excluding a rival influence, and the right of exclusion carries with it the duty of defence. The outer limits of the country which we are prepared to defend is what I call our frontier. In order to apply this principle to our Asiatic frontiers, and to explain why they have been so movable, I will now run rapidly along the line which demarcates them at this moment. Passing over Egypt, which presents a very complicated case to which I will refer later, we may begin our Asiatic protectorates with Aden, at the bottom of the Red Sea. From time im memorial the movement of the sea-borne trade between India and Egypt has pivoted, so to speak, upon Aden. It is now the first stepping-stone across the Asiatic waters toward our Indian Empire; the westernmost point of English occupation on the Asiatic mainland; and it furnishes a good example in miniature of the manner in which protectorates are formed. We have taken and fortified Aden for the command of the water-passage into the Red Sea; but our actual possession is only a projecting rock like Gibraltar, and so we have established all round it a protective border, within which the Arab tribes are bound by engagements to accept our political ascendency and to admit no other. Not far from Aden lies protected the island of Socotra, a name in which one can barely recognize the old Greek Dioscorides; and from Aden eastward, right round Arabia by Oman to Muscat and the Persian Gulf, the whole coast-line is under British protectorate; the police of these waters is done by British vessels, and the Arab chiefships along the seaboard defer to our arbitration in their disputes and acquiesce in our external supremacy. But these scattered protectorates in Western Asia are merely isolated points of vantage or long strips of sea-shore; they depend entirely on our naval superiority in those waters; they are all subordinate and supplementary to our main position in Asia, by which of course I mean India. It is there that we can study with the greatest diversity of illustration, and on the largest scale, the curious political situations presented by the system of maintaining a double line of frontiers; the inner line marking the limits of British territory, the outer line marking the extent of the foreign territory that we undertake to protect, to the exclusion, at any rate, of foreign aggression. To the long maritime frontiers of India I need not refer, unless indeed it be to point out a kind of analogy between the principle upon which a sea-shore is defended and the system of protectorates as applied to the defence of a land frontier. În both cases the main object is to keep clear an open space beyond and in front of the actual border-line. We do this for the land frontier by a belt of protected land which we throw forward in front of a weak border; and our assertion of exclusive jurisdiction over the belt of waters immediately surrounding our sea-coasts is founded upon the same principle. We English are accustomed to consider ourselves secure under the guardianship of the sea. Coleridge says And Ocean mid his uproar wild although in fact the safety comes not from the broad girdle of blue water but from the strength and skill of the English navy that rides upon it. And for a nation that has not learned the noble art of seamanship, no frontier is more exposed to attack, or harder to defend, than the seashore. The principle of defence, therefore, for both land and sea frontiers, is to stave off an enemy's advance by interposing a protected zone. If a stranger enters that zone he is at once challenged. If he persists, it is a hostile demonstration. It would thus be a mistake to suppose that our Asiatic land frontier is conterminous with our Asiatic possessions, with the limits of the territory which we administer, and which is within the range of our Acts of Parliament. It is not, like our Canadian border, or the boundary between France and Germany, a mere geographical line over which an Englishman can step at once out of his own country into the jurisdiction of another sovereign State. What I call, for the purpose of this paper, a frontier, is the outmost political boundary projected, as one might say, beyond the administrative border; and I desire it to be particularly observed that I say the outmost boundary, because British India-the territory under the government of Indiahas interior as well as exterior boundaries. In such countries as France or Spain, and indeed in almost all modern kingdoms, the government exercises a level and consolidated rulership over a compact national estate, with a frontier surrounding it like |