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From Punch.
GIRLS OF THE PERIOD.

LETTER I.

seems to have had a life of considerable interest. This person obtained quite a number of diamonds, with the assistance of a huge bird called a roc. Then he had

(From Miss Mary Logic to Miss Rosa much to say about a dwarf who defeated

Blackbord.)

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I fancy I told you that my Uncle Jack was coming home from sea. I had not seen him for six years-in fact he left England when I was a child of four or so. As you know, I am now ten. I naturally was rather curious to meet him. Well he is here, and I am fairly puzzled. He is rather a nice fellow-partly educated. He is distinctly shaky with his classics, and has evidently forgotten half his mathematics. However we got on pretty well. He seemed to be interested in my lecture upon astronomy, and said "I seemed to be a hand at chemistry." Well so I am. As you know, when I was a mere child I was always fond of experiments of an analytical character. He asked me if I had a doll, and I suppose he referred to the old lay-figure that I was wont to sketch before I took to studying from the nude. And now you will ask, why I am writing to you, when both you and I are so busy - when we are both preparing for matriculation? When we have so little spare time at our disposal?

(in really gallant style) several men of abnormally large stature. He laughed when I had to confess that I had never heard of these people before. He gave me their names. The wife-slaughterer was called Bluebeard; the lady who slumbered for a hundred years the Sleeping Beauty (I suppose she preferred to keep her anonymity); the traveller's name was Sindbad, and the dwarf was Jack the GiantKiller. Have you heard of any of these people?

Your affectionate cousin,

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As you are many weeks my junior (to be precise, exactly two months), I hasten to answer your letter. I have searched all my biographical dictionaries, but cannot find the people of whom you are in search. As for myself, I have never heard of Bluebeard, know nothing of the Sleeping Beauty, and am sceptical of the

I will tell you. The fact is, he accuses me of ignorance in the biographical sec-existence of Sindbad and Jack the Gianttion of my studies. He gave me the history of a gentleman who used a blue dye for his moustache and murdered his wives with impunity. Then he related the adventures of a lady who slept for a hundred years from the wound of a spinning needle. I had to confess (although a constant reader of the Lancet) I had never heard of the case before. Then he recounted the adventures of a traveller who

Killer. Like Mrs. Prig, who doubted the existence of Mrs. Harris, “I don't believe there were no such persons." By the way, you ought to read Dickens. He is · distinctly funny, and I can quite understand his amusing our grandmothers. I generally turn to his works after a long day with Homer or Euripides.

Your affectionate cousin,

ROSA.

THE theft of electricity is a new crime which the progress of science has called into existence. A case recently came before a certain law-court in the United States in which a man with some knowledge of electricity caused the meter which registered the amount which he used for illuminating purposes to record less than he had consumed. The lawyer who defended him ingeniously argued that as electricity was an intangible something of which no one could really state the exact nature, and that as at common law it

was actually unknown, his client could not be convicted of stealing it. But the lawyer met with his match on the other side in one who showed that gas was also unknown at common law, but was recognized as a thing that could be stolen. In the sequel the judge took advantage of a certain statute which makes fraud committed with a view to theft, a felony, and the man who stole the electricity is there. fore likely to meet with the reward of his misdeed.

Chambers' Journal.

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We drove along the lonely ridge

Last night, towards the edge of dark. A single star in tranquil skies

Shone white above the dreaming park;

And over all the shadowy plain

Of empty fields and fading trees
The darkness slowly crept and filled
The dewy hollows of the leas,

From the pale gold of dying elms
And auburn of the beeches drew
The radiant tints, and gently hid

The unknown woods of misty blue.

Then, as we journeyed in the dusk,

And heard the wild owls hoot and cry From moss-grown barns and haggard trees, Our talk was all of things gone by;

Until we almost seemed to see
Lord Essex lead his troops again,
And hear the thund'ring crash and thud
Of Rupert's horsemen on the plain.
C. FELLOWES.
Speaker.

"IF I WERE FAIR."
["Then she looked into her mirror."]
IF I were fair!

If I had little hands and slender feet;
If to my cheeks the color rich and sweet
Came at a word, and faded at a frown;
If I had clinging curls of burnish'd brown;
If I had dreamy eyes aglow with smiles,
And graceful limbs, and pretty girlish wiles;
If I were fair, Love would not turn aside;
Life's paths, so narrow, would be broad and
wide,

If I were fair!

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If I were fair,

Oh! just a little fair, with some soft touch
About my face to glorify it much!

If no one shunn'd my presence, or my kiss, My heart would almost break beneath its bliss.

'Tis said, each pilgrim shall attain his goal, And perfect light shall flood each blinded soul,

When day's flush merges into sunset's bars, And night is here. And then beyond the stars I shall be fair!

Spectator.

EDITH RUTTER.

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THE FOLK-MOTE BY THE RIVER.
1T was up in the morn we rose betimes
From the hall floor hard by the row of limes.
It was but John the Red and I,
And we were the brethren of Gregory.

And Gregory the Wright was one
Of the valiant men beneath the sun,

And what he bade us that we did,
For ne'er he kept his counsel hid.

So out we went, and the clattering latch
Woke up the swallows under the thatch.

It was dark in the porch, but our scythes w felt,

And thrust the whetstone under the belt.
Through the cold garden boughs we went
Where the tumbling roses shed their scent.

Then out a-gates and away we strode
O'er the dewy straws on the dusty road.
WILLIAM Morris.

From The Contemporary Review. THE MIGRATIONS OF THE RACES OF MEN

CONSIDERED HISTORICALLY.

BY JAMES BRYCE.

THERE are two senses in which we may claim for geography that it is a meetingpoint of the sciences. All the departments of research which deal with external nature touch one another in and through it-geology, botany, zoölogy, meteorology, as well as, though less directly, the various branches of physics. There is no one of these whose data are not, to a greater or less extent, also within the province of geography; none whose conclusions have not a material bearing on geographical problems. And geography is also the point of contact between the sciences of nature, taken all together, and the branches of inquiry which deal with man and his institutions. Geography gathers up, so to speak, the results which the geologist, the botanist, the zoologist, and the meteorologist have obtained, and presents them to the student of history, of economics, of politics - we might, perhaps, add of law, of philology, and of architecture as an important part of the data from which he must start, and of the materials to which he will have to refer at many points in the progress of his researches. It is with this second point of contact, this aspect of geography as the basis for history, that we are to occupy ourselves to-night. Understanding that the Scottish Geographical Society desires to bring into prominence what may be called the human side of the science, and to inculcate its significance for those who devote themselves to the presently urgent problems of civilized society, I have chosen, as not unsuitable to an inaugural address, a subject which belongs almost equally to physical and descriptive geology on the one side, to history and economics on the other. The movements of the races and tribes of mankind over the surface of our planet are in the first instance determined mainly by the physical conditions of its surface and its atmosphere; but they become themselves

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a part, and indeed a great part, of history; they create nations and build up states; they determine the extension of languages and laws; they bring wealth to some regions and leave others neglected; they mark out the routes of commerce and affect the economic relations of different countries.

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No line of historical inquiry sets before us more clearly at every stage the connection between man as an associative being toiling, trading, warring, ruling, legislating-and that physical environment whose influence over his development is none the less potent and constant because he has learnt in obeying it to rule it and to make it yield to him constantly increasing benefits. The topic is so large and branches off into so many other cognate inquiries, that you will not expect me, within the narrow limits of an address, to do more than draw its outlines, enumerate the principal causes whose action it sets before us, touch upon its history, and refer to a few out of the many problems its consideration raises. The migrations of peoples have been among the most potent factors in making the world of to-day different from the world of thirty centuries ago. If they continue they will be scarcely less potent in their influence on the future of the race; if they cease, that cessation will itself be a fact of the highest economic and social significance.

At the outset it is convenient to distinguish the different forms which movements of population have taken. These forms may be grouped under three heads, which I propose to call by the names of transference, dispersion, and permeation names which need a few words of illustration.

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By transference I mean that form of migration in which the whole, or a large majority of a race or tribe quits its ancient seats in a body and moves into some other region. Such migrations seldom occur except in the case of nomad peoples who are little attached to any particular piece of soil; but we may almost class among the nomads tribes who, like our own remote Teutonic ancestors, although they • An inaugural address delivered at the first meeting of the London branch of the Scottish Geographical cultivate the soil, put no capital into it in Society. the way of permanent improvements, and

migrating population becomes fused with that which it finds, depends chiefly on the difference between the level of civilization of the two races. Between the English settlers in North America and the

mixture of blood; between the French in Canada and the Indians there was a little more; between the Spaniards and the less barbarous inhabitants of Mexico there has been so much that the present Mexican nation is a mixed one, the native blood

build no dwellings of brick or stone. The prehistoric migrations usually belonged to this form, and so did that great series of movements which brought the northern races into the Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries of our era. In mod-native Indians there has been hardly any ern times we find few instances, because such nomad races as remain are now shut up within narrow limits by the settled states that surround them, which have possessed, since the invention of gunpowder and of standing armies, enormously superior defensive strength. We doubtless predominating. Something, should, however, have had an interesting case to point to had the Dutch, when pressed by the power of Philip II., embraced the offer that came to them from England to migrate in a body and establish themselves, their dairying, their flax culture, and their linen manufacture in the rich pastures and humid air of Ireland.

Under the head of migrations by dispersion, I include those cases in which a tribe or race, while retaining its ancient seats, overflows into new lands, whether vacant or already occupied; in the latter event sometimes ejecting the original inhabitants, sometimes fusing with them, sometimes dwelling among them, but remaining distinct.

however, also depends on the relative numbers of the two races; and some. times religion keeps a dispersed people from commingling with those among whom it dwells, as has happened in the case of the Jews, the Armenians, and the stance of an extremely small nation-for Parsees. These last are a remarkable inthere are not eighty thousand of them all told-who, without any political organization, have by virtue of their religion preserved their identity for more than a thousand years. Dispersion has been the most widely operative form of migration in modern times, owing to those improvements in navigation which have enabled remote parts of our large world, separated by broad and stormy seas, to be colonized more easily than in the tiny world of ancient or medieval times was possible even by land.

Examples are furnished by the case of the Norsemen, who found Iceland prac tically vacant, while in England they became easily, in Ireland and Gaul more The third form, which we may call slowly, mingled with the previous inhabi- permeation or assimilation, is not in tants. When our own ancestors came from strictness a form of migration at all, bethe Frisian coast they slew or drove out cause it may exist where the number of the bulk of the Celtic population; when persons changing their dwelling-place is the Franks entered Gaul they became extremely small; but it deserves to be commingled with it. It is by such a proc- reckoned with the other two forms because ess of dispersion that the British race it produces effects closely resembling has spread itself out over North America theirs in altering the character of a popu and Australasia. In much smaller num-lation. I use the term permeation to cover bers, the Spaniards diffused themselves over southern North America, and the northern and western parts of South America; and by a similar process the Russians have for two centuries been very slowly filling the better parts of Siberia. Whether in each case of dispersion the

* In 1771 a great Kalmuk horde moved en masse from the steppes of the Caspian to the frontiers of China, losing more than half its numbers on the way.

those instances, both numerous and important, in which one race or nation so spreads over another race or nation its language, its literature, its religion, its institutions, its customs, or some one or more of these sources of influence, as to impart its own character to the nation so influenced, and thus to supersede the original type by its Own. In such a process the infusion of new blood from the stronger people to the

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