alone which has won the praise of world's gaiety. Then, again, there is France. Our art, our London, our the spectacle of M. Faguet writing of sport, our life even, have aroused a the British drama, as though it were sympathetic enthusiasm, and one still a serious pursuit, and taking a writer is found bold enough to chant stern account of those trivialities a hymn in praise of an English Sun- which intelligence declines to separate. day! Nor is this all; Mr. John Morley (or Sir John Morlay, if he prefers it), has come forth in the glory of a French dress and of a prefatory trapping contrived by M. Filon. Emerson, also, has his votaries, but the strangest freak of all is the French admiration of Carlyle. "Sartor Resartus" is at this very moment passing through the pages of a review, and one is aghast at the spectacle of Teufelsdröckh thus transformed. Surely it is enough to make the Seer turn in his grave,-a public tribute from a nation, for which he neither felt nor professed the smallest sympathy!

In truth, if you avert your eyes from politics, you will detect everywhere the influence of England. The decoration, which was forgotten twenty years ago with the timely death of a false æstheticism, is the last fashion of that Paris which was wont to be our dictator. The Pre-Raphaelites, who for a generation have been sunk deep in respectable Philistinism, are hailed at the Champ de Mars as newborn Messiahs; and Sir Edward BurneJones (or Lord Jones as the newspapers prefer to style him) has ousted the Impressionists from their throne. To be in the mode, the Frenchman must buy his furniture in Tottenham Court Road, forget the elegance of Louis the Sixteenth, and pay a yearly visit to the City of Fog. Even the sentiment and methodism of the strange town must engross him, and M. Gabriel Mourey, whose "Passé le Detroit" is in a sense the Anglomaniac's Bible, finds it not too late to rhapsodize of Oxford Street and "the little Ann." Thus De Quincey has become, in the translation of M. Barbey d'Aurevilly, a part of French literature, and Mr. George Meredith, if he prove not too craggy for the interpreter, will take his place at Hugo's side. Thomson and Wordsworth, Burns and Shelley have one and all joined the Parnassus of France, and it is impossible to pick up a single magazine wherein some courageous critic does not prove at once the Columbus and the panegyrist of an unknown Briton. One writer, indeed, has been bold enough to discover Mr. Ruskin, and you tremble to think how far this curiosity will carry its victims. Moreover from an intelligent understanding of Mark Twain there has developed a fresh school of French humor, and not even the churl will deny that MM. Alphonse Allais and Georges Auriol have added to the

This honorable research has carried us far indeed from the acrimony of the journalists. Yet the appreciation of our literature is at once more sincere and profound than the enmity of edi. tors. At least the finer intellect is ranged upon our side; for in Paris a stern line is drawn between journalism and literature, and while the man of letters constantly condescends to the newspaper, the journalist is never allowed to scale the loftier table-land. Thus there is a constant opposition between literature and the newspapers, an opposition which explains the existence in the same city of admiration and contempt. Nor is it precisely sympathy which induces the writers of France to make trial of English literature. They cannot profess a genuine love of Emerson or a true understanding of the Lake School; the ruggedness of Carlyle must always appear repulsive to the apostles of pure form; and if it had not been for the lawlessness of Belgium, Walt Whitman would never have surprised the heirs of Racine. No, this Anglomania is rather the curiosity of a tired palate. In Paris all things have been adventured: no corner of life is secret from the prying eyes of realism; and so for the sake of novelty literature must per

whispers under the Atlantic, with absolute disbelief. Indeed, nobody does disbelieve that a Hungarian professor has discovered, or thinks he has discovered, a way to secure the lastnamed result, and is about to test it at Valentia.

produce results, or show us conclu- of metals, or a plan for conveying sively that results are not to be obtained by humån ingenuity. It is difficult to believe, when we remember what has been done in other fields of observation, that telescopes have yet been perfected, or to doubt that there are methods, to be discovered by endless perseverance and expenditure, of either increasing farther the range of human eyes, or of superseding them by photographic "eyes" of far superior delicacy and power of vision. The suggestion which the agents of Mr. Yerkes, the Tramway King, are said to be endeavoring to work out, of constructing object-glasses of unprece dented magnitude in pieces, opens a long vista of possibilities, while there is no proof that we are finally confined to glass, a heavy material full of flaws, for the necessary crystals. A lifetime and, say, five millions would not be wasted if their devotion resulted in a great improvement in telescopes such as would confer on all future observers of the heavens powers as new as those which the earlier astronomers derived from the invention of the telescope itself. And one can discern no final reason why such an improvement is impossible,-certainly no reason SO convincing as those which only two years ago would have induced even sanguine men to declare that the hope of seeing through a wooden box or into the human frame was not only unreasonable but positively silly. Those were not unintelligent persons who only last year received the first telegrams announcing Dr. Röntgen's discovery with a stare of amused surprise at the popular ignorance of the limits of investigation, and who believed, as we know many believed, that Professor Röntgen's name had been taken in vain, and that some clever rascal was availing himself for his own amusement of the disposition towards credulity which recent discoveries in science have undoubtedly generated in educated mankind. Nobody now would receive a telegram announcing that Mr. Edison had discovered the law for the transmutation

Nor can we perceive, in spite of all the ridicule to which it has been subjected, that the declared object of Mr. Lowell's investigations, and, we may add, of many investigations more privately carried on, is in any way unworthy of the devotion of years and millions. The discovery of the Philosopher's Stone, supposing that phrase to imply a working scheme for transmuting an inferior metal into gold, would probably produce nothing beyond a period of terrible economic confusion, or perhaps a vast and disastrous, because over-rapid, transfer of property; but the attainments of certainty that sentient beings with corporeal encasements, acting by effort and not by pure volition, existed in any one other planet, would only enlarge the range of human thought and the force of the human imagination. Such a certainty would either. increase to an extraordinary degree the reverence for the Creator-for we are all so limited that we reverence powers which we see exerted more than powers which we know in theory must exist or would compel materialists to revise and widen their whole theory of the relation of matter to mind, it being evident that sentience could exist under conditions hitherto deemed impossible. There are certainly millions, and possibly billions, of worlds of which no two are the same, and if sentient beings were found past question in one other world than ours, the presumption that they existed under a variety of conditions, and probably, therefore, in a variety of forms practically unlimited, would become so violent that to reject the theory would soon be regarded as an evidence of a foolish popular habit of disbelief in the unseen. Man has some internal dislike to believe that limited

tions can be finally declared to be hopelessly inconsistent with it, the only certainty in the event of such a discovery being that our "necessary" or "inevitable" conditions are not universally either inevitable or necessary. in fact, whatever the direction taken after such a discovery by human thought, it must necessarily be widened-not widened as it might be by a new revelation, but widened-and to attain that end a generation of millionaires or a mountain of gold might worthily and rightfully be expended. What are they worth compared with a great expansion of the human intellect?

beings with sentience can exist under conditions other than his own, and habitually assumes-as, for instance, is assumed in this very review-that a world without air is a dead world, or at all events an empty world; yet there is no proof that the ether, which we know to be everywhere, cannot support life, or that circumstances of which we know nothing may not modify either its intolerable cold or the effect of that cold. In Mars itself there is some potency at work which, to the despair for the moment of terrestrial science, produces warmth where cold ought to reign permanently supreme. It is as certain as any deduction from analogy can be that air It remains to state, though it is in Mars, though it exists, is as rarefied hardly needful, that as yet inquiry is as it would be at the top of a moun- in its embryonic stage, and may of tain twice as high as Mount Everest, course encounter natural barriers and that consequently the normal and which will forever prove impassable. permanent degree of cold ought to be All that we actually know hitherto terrible. "The thermal income of may be summed up in a very few Mars is less than half that of the earth, lines. One planet, Mars, is habitable and its theoretical mean temperature by corporeal beings but slightly differis consequently-taking into account ing from ourselves. There is warmth, its low "albedo," or reflective power there is water, there are seasons in a per unit of area-thirty degrees Centi- sequence like those of earth, there is grade below freezing." Yet the act- a strong probability, though not yet a ual climate of Mars is mild, snow certainty, of recurrent vegetation-incertainly melts rapidly-that is patent dicated to the observer by otherwise to the telescope-vapor certainly rises inexplicable changes of color-and -that is clear from the spectrum- there is some reason to believe in the analysis-water flows, and there are existence of great public works inindications, if not proofs, that a sud- tended to store and distribute the den vegetation follows the sudden otherwise insufficient supply of water. thawing of the snow. What warms the The proof of this latter hypothesis, air is unknown, but it is warmed past though it convinced Professor Schiaall question or doubt, and all argu- parelli, is as yet wholly insufficient, ments, therefore, as to the inevitable- resting as it does on the assumption ness of cold in other worlds must be that nature never makes perfectly pronounced imperfect, as also are straight lines; but it is sufficient to those which show the impossibility of justify years of patient observation, sustaining corporeal life. All we can and the expenditure if needful of milsay with certainty is that if sentient lions, in the effort to increase our telbeings with corporeal frames exist in escopic powers. The reviewer says: Mars, the relation of the lungs to the "A new epoch in the investigation of body cannot be identical with their Mars was opened by Signor Schiaparelation in man, which, as we are relli's discovery of the 'canals' of aware of fishes, is not an impossible Mars during the memorable opposition exercise of the imagination. If condi- of 1877. He may be called a miracutions fatal to human life on this little lous observer. Everything, so far, seen globe are compatible in any one other by him with conviction has had only world with corporeal life, no condi- to wait for full ratification.

The