11 or

Here again is a phenomenon which we cannot realize two contemporary and coequal beings possessing, up to a certain point at least, a common psychical life. Let us for a moment suppose that the propagation of the higher animals took place in a similar manner. We should see, e.g., the mature man split up into two equal and similar men, each remembering, knowing, believ ing, and feeling, up to the day of fission, all that the other remembered, knew, believed, or felt; each, too, it might be contended by moralists, equally sharing the merits or demerits of the antecedent form, and each at a loss to say when his own personality took its rise.

From The Economist.

may, for the sake of popular intelligibility, such incidents have given rise.
call its equator. It assumes the form of
two nearly globular bodies, connected,
dumb-bell like, by a narrow neck. This
neck becomes narrower, and at last the
two globes are set free, and appear as two
individuals in place of one! What are
the relations of these two new beings to
the antecedent form and to each other?
We examine them with care; they are
equal in size, alike in complexity, or rather
simplicity, of structure. We cannot say
that either of them is more mature or
more rudimentary than the other. We
can find in their separation from each
other no analogy to the separation of the
young animal or the egg from its mother,
or to the liberation of a seed from a plant.
Neither of them is parent, and neither
offspring. Neither of them is older or
younger than the other. Or shall we try
to regard them as brothers sprung from
the same parent? If so, where is that
parent? If living, let it be shown; if dead,
where are its remains? No organic
indeed any other matter was separated
out when the two new beings took their
rise. All the substance of the body of
the original protozoon is included, and
equally included, in the body of the two
individuals before us. Thus we see that
the essential ideas of the life of the higher
animals — birth, growth, maturity, parent-
age, brotherhood, term of life, and suc-
cessive generations have, if applied to
these humble and minute beings, simply
no meaning. The process of reproduc-
tion, or rather of multiplication, must, as
far as we can see, be repeated in the same
manner forever. Accidents excepted,
they are immortal; and frequent as such
accidents must be, the individuals whom
they strike might, or rather would, like the
rest of their community, have gone on
living and splitting themselves up for
ever. It is strange, when examining cer-
tain infusoria under the microscope, to
consider that these frail and tiny beings
were living, not potentially in their ances-
tors, but really in their own persons, per-
haps in the Laurentian epoch! This
consideration opens up another question.
These beings are not wholly unconscious.
They experience and retain impressions,
however dimly and in however limited a
sphere. But when the splitting up of one
individual into two distinct personalities
takes place, as we have described above,
we have then the curious phenomenon of
two distinct and equal beings whose past
life is one, who will remember the same
incidents and the same reactions to which

IMMIGRATION INTO THE UNITED STATES.

THE immigration returns of the United States Bureau of Statistics for the fiscal year ending the 30th June last show an enormous increase in the influx of foreign emigrants. In each of the past ten years the number of arrivals has been :

No. of Immigrants. Year. 789,003 1877 669,431 1876 457,257 1875 177,826 138,469 1873

No. of Immigrants.

141.857

169,986

227.498

1874

313.339 459,803

Year.
1882
1881
1880
1879
1878.
Compared with the previous year, there

was in 1881-2 an increase in the arrivals of 119.572, or about eighteen per cent., and the sources whence this increase were derived are shown in the following table:

has not had the anticipated effect of in- | Incessantly encroaching, numberless
creasing wages; and it is no wonder,
therefore, that large numbers of the peo-
ple are finding life at home so little toler-
able that they are eager to flock else-
where. Whether the United States can
continue to absorb such large masses of
population is another question. So far
as the influx is made up of persons fol-
lowing agricultural pursuits, it probably
need excite no apprehension. For such
persons there is a practically unlimited
field. It is very different, however, with
the industrial portion of the immigrants.
The effect of the American tariff, it is to
be remembered, is to restrict home pro-
ducers to the home markets, and there are
already indications of those markets be.
coming overstocked. It may be doubted,
therefore, whether there is scope for an
expansion of industrial activity sufficient
to accommodate the great influx of new
workers, so long, at least, as the present
fiscal arrangements are maintained. This,
however, only time will show.

Beyond my water-drops, and buried them,
And all is silence, solitude and death,
Exanimate silence while the waste winds howl
Over the sad immeasurable waste.

Dusk memories haunt me of an infinite past,
Ages and cycles brood above my springs,
Though I remember not my primal birth.
So ancient is my being and august,
I know not anything more venerable;
Unless, perchance, the vaulting skies that hold
The sun and moon and stars that shine on me;
And Earth All-Mother, all-beneficent,
The air that breathes upon me with delight;
Who held her mountains forth like opulent

From The Fortnightly Review.

A VOICE FROM THE NILE.*

I COME from mountains under other stars Than those reflected in my waters, here;

breasts

To cradle me and feed me with their snows,
And hollowed out the great sea to receive
My overplus of flowing energy:
Blessèd forever be our Mother Earth.

Only, the mountains that must feed my
Year after year and every year with snows
springs
As they have fed innumerable years,
These mountains they are evermore the same,
Rooted and motionless; the solemn heavens
Are evermore the same in stable rest;
The sun and moon and stars that shine on me
Are evermore the same although they move:
I solely, moving ever without pause,
Am evermore the same and not the same;
Pouring myself away into the sea,

And self-renewing from the farthest heights;
Ever-fresh waters streaming down and down,

Athwart broad realms, beneath large skies, I The one old Nilus constant through their

flow,

Between the Libyan and Arabian hills,
And merge at last into the great Mid-Sea;
And make this land of Egypt. All is mine:
The palm-trees and the doves among the palms,
The corn-fields and the flowers among the corn,
The patient oxen and the crocodiles,
The ibis and the heron and the hawk,
The lotus and the thick papyrus reeds,
The slant-sailed boats that flit before the wind
Or up my.rapids ropes hale heavily;
Yea, even all the massive temple-fronts
With all their columns and huge effigies,
The pyramids and Memnon and the Sphinx,
This Cairo and the City of the Greek
As Memphis and the hundred-gated Thebes,
Sais and Denderah of Isis queen ;
Have grown because I fed them with full life,
And flourish only while I feed them still.
For if I stint my fertilizing flood,

Gaunt famine reaps among the sons of men
Who have not corn to reap for all they sowed,
And blight and languishment are everywhere;

And when I have withdrawn or turned aside
To other realms my ever-flowing streams,
The old realms withered from their old re-

nown,

The sands came over them, the desert-sands, The author of this poem died lamentably enough, and prematurely, in University College Hospital, shortly after correcting the proof, at the end of last month.

change.

The creatures also whom I breed and feed
Perpetually perish and dissolve,
To perish in their turn and be no more:
And other creatures like them take their place,
My profluent waters perish not from life,
Absorbed into the ever-living sea
Whose life is in their full replenishment.

Of all these creatures whom I breed and feed
One only with his works is strange to me,
Is strange and admirable and pitiable,
As homeless where all others are at home.
My crocodiles are happy in my slime,
And bask and seize their prey, each for itself,
And leave their eggs to hatch in the hot sun,
And die, their lives fulfilled, and are no more,
And others bask and prey and leave their eggs.
My doves they build their nests, each pair its

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