stitution, but assisted accidentally by the nature and action of their environments, converted them first into gastrula, next into jelly-fishes, and then into vertebrates. In this state they probably migrated im mense distances from one another along the shores of their natal sea, feeding on minute infusoria, &c., and subjecting themselves to different environments whereby different organic functions developed, until, on entering other inlets or rivers, they metamorphosed into amphibia, and browsed on herbs as well as algæ. Forsaking the water-their natural element-and in some stress of circumstances adopting a life on the land, they would next change into small mammals, develop a coat of hair, legs, and a tail, and vegetate on grass and herbs. Another meta

morphosis converted them into the apeform, in which state trees would be their home, and fruits and roots their diet. Lastly, on a final moult, they would discard their coat of hair, emerge as fullydeveloped men and women, with perfect sexual organs, and capable, for the first time during their long series of metamorphoses, of sexual union and the reproduction of their kind.

From this time multiplication would result by sexual intercourse, aided more or less by natural, sexual, physiological, and color selections, use and disuse, &c., until the highly-differentiated European of to-day has now appeared upon the scene, the perfected product, so far, of all this progress and change.-Westminster Review.

"WHAT an easy matter it is to stem the current of our imagination, to discharge a troublesome or improper thought, and at once return to a state of calm !"' So wrote and thought the great Roman emperor and philosopher, Marcus Aurelius.

Alas for these degenerate days, how few men and women can coincide with this opinion! Great have been the inventions of this present century-railways, electricity, and telephones-but in direct ratio to the importance of these inventions has the spirit of meditation, the enjoined repose of the philosopher, disappeared from our world. These conditions of mind are as much out of date and as rare to meet with as the spinning-wheels of our grandmothers or the stage coaches that our forefathers travelled in.

If this state of unrest, the constant journeyings to and fro, and the continual mental excitement, have told heavily upon this generation of men, still greater is the burden that now rests upon the shoulders of women.

Silent

The "old order changeth." revolutions are being daily performed under our eyes; and it is only because these changes are gradual in their development that men in general pay them so little heed. No one will deny that the education of women has increased and

grown enormously during the last few years. A different standard of perfection has been raised, and, above all, strange and new requirements have been added to the old code.

Woman is still to retain her charm; all that art can do in dress, grace, and refinement, and seduction of manner are as keenly appreciated as ever.

But, besides these light and airy graces of the old school, it is now felt that the more grave and serious parts of education must not be found wanting in a woman. She must do more, from a literary point of view, than superficially glance down the columns of a newspaper; while the susceptibilities of her friends require greater artistic excellence than was evinced by her mother (when she took the Captain's heart by storm some thirty years ago by singing a few popular airs of the day); and as to her water-colors, they must be better than her aunt's roses entwined with auriculas, which were considered such works of art at that time.

If she is to exercise artistic faculties, it is only powers of the first order that her acquaintance will greet with favor.

The old-world indulgence with which elderly people of a former generation hailed the very mediocre attempts of their young friends to amuse them after dinner

by a solo or duet, partly in but often mostly out of tune, that kindly feeling of acceptance is as much an emotion of the past as the Pyramids or armor of the middle ages are relics of past civilizations. In old days people laid to heart the old saying of "You must not look a gift horse in the mouth," and there was a general feeling prevalent that what you did not pay for you had no right to criticise.

Beyond all this, it is now found indispensable that every woman should take a part in charitable and even in political organizations.

To obtain proficiency in these objects, it is requisite that she should acquire business-like habits, and be able to write, and even to speak in public, if not brilliantly, at least with fluency and to the point. Added to these new tests of education, a woman is still expected to be a good linguist. It is thought absolutely necessary that she should be able to read and to express herself with ease in several languages. It does not excite astonishment that a man should have spent most of his early life at a public school, and then at one of the Universities, nominally learning Latin and Greek, and at the end of what he is pleased to call his education be guilt less of being able to translate a stanza of Horace or a line of Homer intelligibly.

The old fiction that the equivalent to a Latin or Greek quotation is not to be found in the English language is a fable that has been repeated so often that it is hardly to be supposed that women will lose faith in their interpreters at

once.

On the other hand, it would be considered extraordinary that a woman in society, who had travelled in France, or who had had the advantages of a French governess as a child, should not be able to express herself in French with ease, talk if necessary to a French attaché at a London dinner party, or write correctly to her modiste in Paris. Added to all this, the athletic developments of a woman's education must not be forgotten to be mentioned here. The same critical faculty is brought to bear upon her ability as a lawn-tennis and a cricket player; and if she does not shoot, at least she is expected to show the same endurance as a man, when she walks over miles of heather, or through fields of turnips. To all these graces, accomplishments, and physical ex

ercises are added her old duties of wife, mother, housekeeper, and hostess.

In all these departments much more is required of a woman than formerly. Not only in every branch is everything to be done personally, but done better, and more fully. A woman now aspires not only to be the nurse of her children, and the protectress of their infancy, but desires when they grow up to form and guide their minds, and to influence them long after the time when her authority shall have ceased.

A larger capacity and a broader understanding are demanded on all sides from women. Even the type of a woman's woman is changing. A figure-head of inane incapacity, very mediocre mental attainments, veneered by refinement of manner, and clothed in French millinery, is no longer an ideal to women; while men are no more contented to find in a woman merely a recipient of their thoughts and ideas, a worshipper who places them upon a pedestal, and who, by means of her own limitations and ignorances, clothes them in the giant's robe. Women are daily opening more and more their souls and minds; they are beginning to learn the secret of how to make the divine fire

not only to boil the domestic pot, but also as a delight and pleasure to themselves.

As the managers of households much more now is demanded of them. People no longer live all the year round in one place. In one country house one thing is often found to be good, in another bad. Little customs vary and change, and every woman who looks at housekeeping from an artistic point of view, and not merely as a daily drudgery, will always be anxious to effect constant reforms; to take valuable hints wherever she can find them, and to add fresh graces to her table and to her rooms. Take alone the arrangement of flowers on a dinner-table-a completely modern art, almost unknown, except in its simplest rudiments, to the last generation. Many a social aspirant believes it to be de rigueur that her table should be arranged in one kind of flower, and in one color. To obtain a sufficient quantity of blossoms Covent Garden has to be ransacked, and such skill is demanded that little short of a floral education is necessary for a woman to be the decorator herself. Then all the accessories of hospitality are much more

complicated now than formerly. Breakfasts, dinners, shooting luncheons, picnics, and five o'clock teas are all pushed to such a pitch of perfection and luxury, that they would have seemed to our grandmothers feasts only to be found in the Arabian Nights.

But perhaps the hardest burden of all is the vast number and constant change of subjects and occupations that a woman has to get through in a day. There are so many little things that must be done little things that seem so trivial in themselves that they are not worth mentioning or particularizing, but which, if left undone, would place a household in chaos, and make every member of it uncomfortable. Every one knows by comparison the difference between a house where a woman of education and refinement gives some of her thought and personal care to the comfort of her guests, and one where all is left to the servants. We can all recall in certain houses the sheets scented with lavender, the enticing quill pens and the dainty bunch of flowers, the cosey fire on a cold day, that all-whispered welcome to us as we entered our bedroom, and compare them favorably with the scrubby and torn blotting-book, the black and incapable pens, and sullen grate, that have been our fate in other places. In one house we have felt instinctively that the hostess has looked upon no details as too small or beneath her dignity; that no guest can come too late or go away too early.

Men generally laugh at what they term fussing' on the part of a woman, or, in other words, any mention before them or discussion of household duties. And yet all is to be perfection, particularly the "cuisine;" the "Julienne soup" is to be worthy of a French café, the "côtelettes à la soubise" irreproachable. It is true that they retain their privilege-as Englishmen of grumbling; but that is, as a rule, all the help they are willing to give a woman in domestic matters. Till people have done a thing themselves, they always underrate the labor that it requires to do it efficiently. "It looks so easy, it cannot take long," is said as often by men and women as by children. The next time that Lady Clara Vere de Vere goes to Ascot, it might add to her experiences of life if she were on one occasion to pack her own boxes. She

would, perhaps, by means of that experience, better understand the look given her by her maid (of indignant mortification) when she decides at the last moment to change her travelling dress for one that is reposing at the bottom of her trunk. The law of the Medes and Persians will not suit an English household-a system that works well for a few months is not necessarily good for all time. A change of household often involves to the woman as much trouble and annoyance as a change of ministry to a country. Nor must it be believed that because a household is numerous, and a woman has many servants under her command, she can, to quote the vulgar phrase," be quite a lady, loll on a sofa all day, and read a novel.

"Too many cooks spoil the broth," and often, with their discussions, recriminations and quarrels, much more time is lost and wasted by the cooks than was required for the actual making of the soup. John Stuart Mill, in his Subjection of Women, speaks of the many and various duties of a woman, and compares her life "to an interrupted sentence." Many women sink beneath the fretting burden of daily commonplaces and trivial duties. Lord Lytton, in one of his novels, writes, "How many Hampdens and Miltons are killed by the atmosphere of a drawingroom !'' How many more Brontës and "George Eliots" are destroyed by the load of conventional life! Nobody looks on a woman's time as sacred. Who ever heard of a woman's study in any country house? A man may be the most bucolic of mortals, or only happy in the company of his dogs and gamekeeper, yet courtesy confers upon his private apartment the epithet of" study," and his leisure is always considered sacred. Insufficiency is no longer considered a mark of ladylike refinement. Even princesses in these days would not be considered musicians if they could not play better than the Princess of Hans Andersen's story. The knowledge of what is really good in art or music no longer belongs to a coterie. The kindly amateur whose small attempts were greeted by his friends with enthusiasm in the last century is becoming extinct. "Unless you can do a thing well do not do it at all," is not only said in public but in family life, and nobody wants accomplishments unless they are of so superior an order that they can command respect any

where. This keen state of criticism makes it very hard for women who cannot give up an immense amount of time to the culture of one art or accomplishment to gain any credit for their performances. Every one who has at all dabbled in an art or accomplishment knows the work and labor required to attain a high standard. How little time a woman who is married and has children can give, we will beg wives and mothers to decide.

In the last thirty years, three strongly marked but different types of womanhood have been the objects of admiration and ridicule of the English world. John Leech laughed with kindly admiration at the Di Vernons of his day who would join the hounds, and vie with their brothers in equestrian exercises. Some ten years ago, a girl with a brown skin, green eyes, and a profusion of red hair, thought by decorating herself with sunflowers, attiring herself in sage green, and by interlarding her conversation with such adjectives as "æsthetic" that she was posing before the world as a poetical creation of Rossetti's, and was ensuring the sympathy and affection of all cultivated beings.

And now the type has changed again. A pot-pourri of all known types is the demand of the day. The woman of the present day is to be little short of an Admirable Crichton in petticoats. Mothers impress upon their daughters that they are to be all things to all men. "If you do not like hunting, you are to affect to,' says mamma. You must listen to Captain Breakneck's stories at dinner, laugh in the right places, and ask intelligent questions about his steeplechasers." "Tomorrow you will sit by Professor Dryasdust; do not forget to look through his three volumes on the Evolution of Thought, so that you may impress him as an educated being. Next week you will meet the Bishop of Middlesex, and remember to talk to him about his mission in the East-End. This afternoon we are going to Madame Le Jour's party, where we shall meet artistes and foreigners, and I shall expect you to be able to talk to all if The age has gone by when weakness, physical or mental, passed for an attraction in women. Heroines, in bygone days, screamed, indulged in fainting fits, and showed " proper feeling,' by losing all control over their emotions. We are no longer taught that too much

necessary.

courage is unfeminine, and "Don't be a muff" is applied as much to girls as to boys. The old division of virtues, the old creed that what is good in man is not good in woman, is quite out of date. It is no longer impossible for women to meet each other with pleasure, and to talk on matters of general interest. After a London dinner it is often possible, before the men come upstairs, to hear bright and lively discussions on literature, art, and politics. Women, when they are with women exclusively, have ceased to confine themselves entirely to discussing their children's maladies, or going over the domestic troubles occasioned by their servants. Another change has come over the spirit of women. of women. In gatherings or meetings of their own, it is no longer indispensable for them to have a male pope to perform the rites of the meeting, and to dictate for each her mental and moral attitude. grandmothers, when they read theology, read it under the auspices of some priest or doctor of divinity, by whose side morally they trotted along in the gutter, thinking themselves blessed if they received every now and then a little of the mud from the holy man's shoes. This moral phase of exaggerated intellectual veneration has almost disappeared. Men and women are beginning to meet in literature and thought on equal terms, while women are beginning to be able to be interested in lines of thought, and creeds free from personal considerations and influences. In a former generation, a woman, like a fly in a spider's web, fell under one influence, never to get free from it again. She had one spiritual revelation, or one imagined one, and as she spent her life in one place, year by year, with the same people, in the same moral atmosphere, in the same leading strings, she was never likely to question the views or the beliefs of her own set or her own guide, and indulge in new thoughts, new principles, and new aspirations. But in these days neither man nor woman can hedge himself or herself round and say, "So much will I believe, and nothing more or less." Ideas, beliefs, and politics are always changing, developing, or being modified. We are living so fast now that we can almost see the mustard seed growing as we gaze. We have only to take up a paper or book of some fifteen or twenty years ago, and a social or polit

ical idea which was qualified then as impossible, revolutionary, almost incendiary in its tendencies, elicts from us, in the present day, only a good-humored smile, and the remark, "Well, that has come, but the world is going on still very much the same. "" The idol of to-day is often destined to find its place in the rubbishheap of the future, and such a change of opinion indicates on the part of men and women neither insincerity nor a voluntary desire to deceive. Women's minds are growing broader, and they are beginning to be capable of realizing that no creed can contain the whole of truth, that each mental development leads to another; and, after all, that the growth of the mind is like the growth of the body-each must do it for herself. Every one in society knows Lady Fanny Cleremont, a typical woman of her time. She was once asked what she did in a day. Her answer was, "I try and get through some fourteen hours of work, and endeavor to cram in as much play as possible. Above all, I aim at growing a soul in spite of being a wife, a mother, and a hostess. I am always trying to read and improve myself, and I am always being called back to the petty things of life, by incessant interruptions; leisure is like my pocket money, exceedingly scarce. There are so many objects for both; every one comes to me for advice, orders, sympathy, and information. I am supposed to have the qualities of a thoroughbred, combined with the patient endurance of the garden donkey. I constantly feel as overworked as a bishop or a Scotch station-master in August. I speak in public, open bazaars, address political clubs and associations, write for several magazines, have a numerous correspondence with my own family and with friends, literary and political, preside over and superintend several political and charitable organizations, while all the time I have my children to educate and see after, my husband to play lady-in-waiting to, my household matters to superintend and regulate, my parish in sickness to provide and care for, and the county neighbors to call on and entertain.

"The great pull that men have over us is, that they are supposed to do only one thing at a time. Now Jack" (alluding to Now Jack" (alluding to her husband)," when he is going to make a speech, shuts himself up in his study, and during those sacred times denies him

self to men and angels, allows no interruption, devotes his mind entirely to the subject he has in view, and is able by custom and general consent to remain absolutely undisturbed as long as he considers necessary; the children at those times must make no noise in the house-our bishop or the local political agent may call under these solemn circumstances, but both are sent empty away, and even the stud-groom cannot always gain admittance. Now I as a woman have no recognized leisure. When I write, it is with the children all round me, racing about, bear-fighting and tumbling over one another. As to the old theory that the cook and the different members of the housetold can receive their orders once and for all finally, and in the early part of the morning, and be done with for the rest of the day, that comfortable old view is thoroughly exploded. Like the poor, household duties are ever with you. Something in a large household has always to be ordered, and counter ordered. Telegrams arrive at all hours. Fresh guests come, or friends that were expected write to say that they are detained at the last moment. Nothing is too small, nothing is too trivial, for a woman's ears. Yesterday, for instance, I thought in the morning I had a little leisure, and I hoped to grow a little soul -just a shoot, by trying to renew quaintance with one of Herbert Spencer's books. I cannot tell you how refreshing a chapter of deeper thought than I can usually afford time for is to me-I feel as much invigorated by it as by a gallop over some breezy downs. I had just taken up my book and was reading to myself' How to Live? That is the essential question for us. Not how to live in the mere material sense only, but in the widest sense. The general problem which comprehends every special problem is, the right ruling of conduct in all directions and under all circumstances '-when my cook came in with an apology to inquire had I forgotten the truffles; but they were absolutely necessary for her entrée to. night?

ac

"Hardly had the door closed, and I had tried to give up my mind entirely to my book, when the butler entered and asked me whether it was my wish that he should take orders from the gardener. I closed my book in despair, and listened to a long but fiery monologue of that func