surpassed the powers of computation, and the desolation was widespread.

"The nimble legions passed to and fro over the land like an avalanche of destruction, consuming whatever came before them. The continent became checkered with the tracks of the roving scourge.

"The colonists again assembled themselves. Their condition was desperate, their future most unpromising. The rabbits had possession of the land, and bade fair to take charge of the country. The attempt to exterminate the furry hosts had been like an attempt to sweep back the waves of the ocean. The more the people exterminated, the faster the animals increased. Rabbits reproduce when four months of age. They have eight little ones in a litter. They breed seven times a year, and in a few years the offspring of one pair number millions.

HYDROPHOBIA AS A MEDICINE.

dred miles, and then continued one hundred and forty-four miles to the northwest corner of the colony. Queensland also thought it needed some fences. One was built along the southern line of that colony for two hundred and sixty miles, to connect with the northeast corner of New South Wales. Another fence, three hundred and forty miles in length, was projected in New South Wales from Albury to Tranzie.

"When these fences effect a connection with the other fences the rabbits will be surrounded, and their extermination can by military supervision be reduced to a system. Fences can be handled instead of troops. Raiders can move on the rabbits with wire in the place of arms. Fences can be used within fences. The screens can be advanced, shifted, and deployed to accomplish strategic ends and to achieve extraordinary slaughters. The wires have been put in training and moved on the animals with the most successful results."

HOW OUR ANCESTORS SPENT THEIR HOLIDAYS N instructive and amusing article is that in the

AN article is in

At last the colonial parliament had to take up the cudgels in the settlers' fight with the rabbits and a reward of $125,000 was offered to any one who would invent a way of relieving the colony of the pests. Thousands of people tried, companies and syndicates being formed to advance means for accomplishing the desirable end. Pasteur finally evolved the original theory that by inoculating certain of the rabbits and introducing hydrophobia into the systems of a few hundred bunnies, they would bite their comrades and their comrades would bite their comrades, and so on until madness would take off the whole tribe. The French scientist's experts had actually arrived in Australia with their hypodermic syringes when the Australians suddenly considered that this cure might be worse than the disease, since their dogs would bite the mad rabbits and there would be the pleasant prospect of having the whole continent go mad, so that that scheme was abandoned at the last moment.

HOW THE RABBITS WERE FINALLY EXTERMINATED.

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One hundred million acres of territory were overrun by the animals. Although the raiders killed 2,528,000 rabbits per year, and received a bounty from the government for each of the scalps, the rabbits remained in full force. But the great drought of 1888 excelled Pasteur's remedy and all the guns and canines in Australia. The lakes and watercourses were fenced in by wire screens, and the animals died by millions from thirst. Shutting out the water from the bunnies has been found the most successful weapon in all the arsenal of destruction.

"Wire fences were the final resort of the colonists. It was seen that the only way to protect adjacent districts from invasion was to fence in the territory occupied by the rabbits. A fence, two hundred and seven miles in length, was constructed from Narromine, on the Macquarie River, to Bourke, on the Darling River. It was then continued to Barringun, a distance of eighty-four miles. The cost of the fences was four hundred and ten dollars per mile. Other colonies concluded to follow this example. A fence was constructed along the South Australian border from the river Murray a distance of two hun

Middle Ages, by M. Fernand Engerand. Towns may come and towns may go, as war and commerce decide; but wherever curative springs, hot or cold, start unbidden from the earth, we usually find them frequented, from age to age, by an unending stream of visitors.

THE HEALTH RESORTS OF THE SAVOYARD VALLEY. The Romans have left traces of their thermal establishments all over France. The great arch in the market place of Aix-les-Bains, and the remains of conduits and baths underneath the flowery gardens of a neighboring villa, testify to the long record of the Savoyard valley; and the early Gauls adopted the habits of the Roman imperial colonists and bathed and feasted in like manner. But when Attila came down with his Huns they wrecked the complicated bathing arrangements, and that generation bathed no more. On the withdrawal of the barbarians into Germany, the natives, however, set to work to restore the conduits, and in 484 we find Prince Ambron, son of Clodion the Hairy, bathing at Plombières and at Luxeuil, where arose a legend of the seventh century, telling how St. Agile restored a dead man drowned in the bath. Aix in Provence was sought by invalids during three centuries, but Charlemange preferred Aix-la-Chapelle, and fixed there the abode of his later years for the express purpose of enjoying the hot springs; he liked bathing in company, and his courtiers disported with him in the water.

CAUTERETS AND SPA.

Then came the turn of Cauterets in the Pyrenees, and of Spa on the skirt of the Ardennes. We hardly realize that Spa was a popular watering place in the time of Willian the Conqueror, and that invalids camped out in tents because the little old town was too small to hold them. In the fourteenth century we find an ironmaster buying wood from the Bishop

of Liége and building “Young Spa," near the spring called the Pouhon.

THE MEDIEVAL BATHS OF SWITZERLAND.

But the strangest story of medieval baths is that told by Pogge, the Florentine Secretary at the Council of Constance in 1415. Not far from Zurich are sulphur springs still enjoying a mild reputation among the serious and decorous Swiss people. They had been discovered, named and used by the Romans, and may now be found in the then Gazetteer, under the head of Bade, near Aarnau. They were not of much importance in classic times and are not of much importance now, but in 1415 they were the height of fashion! From a radius of two hundred miles and farther, if the trouble and perils of the journey could be surmounted, came the bathers, not, generally speaking, on account of illness, but because they desired a complete holiday; and according to a long letter written by the Florentine to a friend they seem to have had a merry time indeed. Neither Bath in the last century, nor Nice, Vichy or Royat in the present day, can boast of such carnivalesque diversions. The bathers lunched in the water off floating trays made of cork; their hair was garlanded with flowers, tied up with ribbons. Men, women and children played games and indulged in the wildest gaiety. Pogge, the Florentine, seems to have enjoyed it all very much, but we may well be thankful that times are quieter now.

"THE MEN OF ACADIE" IN ANOTHER LIGHT.

DR.

R. T. BOWMAN STEPHENSON continues in the Sunday Magazine his chivalrous endeavor to vindicate the British name from the aspersions cast on it by Longfellow's" Evangeline." He quotes from French authorities to show that when peace was declared between France and England, French priests stirred up savages to massacre Englishmen, and French governors supplied the murderers with arms and ammunition. He tells how a French governor wrote: "In order that the savages may do their part courageously a few Acadians, dressed and painted in their way, could join them to strike the English." "NOT THE SIMPLE PEASANTS OF THE POETIC STORY." "The Acadians, then," rejoins Dr. Stephenson, were not the innocent, simple peasants of the poetic story." Abbé le Loutre, Vicar-General of Acadie, 'habitually employed the savages whom he had converted (!) to terrorize those Acadians who were disposed to dwell peaceably under English rule, and he was the contriver and patron of innumerable villainies.

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'The English colonists had abundant reason to fear the continued presence within their borders of a population belonging to an alien race under the complete control of a hostile and unscrupulous priesthood; who were not ashamed, at least at times, to assist savages in their murderous raids, and who declined to give, by oath or otherwise, any sufficient assurance of their having accepted in good faith the government

under which they were living in security and freedom.

"Yet many attempts were made to bring them to a better mind; and long forbearance was exercised towards them. They were absolutely free of all taxation. . . .”

On their instantly demanding the return of their weapons, of which their hostile actions had compelled the British authorities to deprive them, they were told that they must take the full oath of allegiance, and that if they refused "effectual measures ought to be taken to remove all such recusants out of the province." Their deputies point blank and twice over refused to take the oath. Deportation was thus the only alternative left to the British Government. "It should also be remembered that this was not the first deportation of Acadians. What the British did, after long years of forbearance and as a measure of self-protection, the French had for years been doing, with all the power of the sword and crosier, as a matter of policy."

THE STORY OF THE DEPORTATION.

"The deportation in Evangeline's' country was entrusted to Lieutenant-Colonel Winslow, a colonial officer, descended from the Winslows of "Mayflower" fame. He seems to have been a humane man, to whom his task was very obnoxious, and who strove to do it with as much consideration as was possible. The deportation was of necessity forcible. If no stratagem had been used, the men would have taken to the forests, and there, joined by the savages, would have maintained a fierce guerilla war and the pacification of the province would have been impossible for a generation. The men were therefore summoned to the church to hear a proclamation on a given day. The proclamation told them their fate and the reasons of it. They were detained in custody, but their families were allowed to bring them provisions, and to hold reasonable communication with them. Twenty each day were allowed to go home to settle their affairs, and every effort was made to secure not only that families should not be separated, but even that neighbors should go in the same ship. The whole deportation occupied, not a few hours, as the poem states, but many weeks, and the measure, stern, indeed, even though it was necessary, was carried out with as much consideration as in the nature of the case was possible.

"If this stern and lamentable deed had to be done, it was only done after long forbearance, after plain and repeated warning, and with such care as was possible to prevent needless aggravation of the suffering that was inevitable."

IN the Popular Science Monthly, Prof. Warren Upham, after reviewing the investigations and estimates of well known scientists such as Lord Kelvin, Darwin, Geikie, Dana, Davis and Wallace, concludes that not over one hundred billion years have ensued since the first crust was formed on what is now known as the earth.

CLIPPING THE LAURELS OF COLUMBUS.

FORESTALLED BY THE NORSEMEN.

Dr. Murray, of the "Challenger" expedition, tells, in the Scottish Geographical Magazine, of the Norsemen who discovered and colonized Iceland and Greenland in the ninth century, and went on to forestall Columbus by well nigh half a millennium. "In the year 1000 Leif Erikson and his companions discovered the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland (Helluland), Nova Scotia (Markland), and New England (Vinland), but the voyages of these bold mariners were wholly unknown to the nations who did not speak the ancient language of the North. The settlements formed by Thorfinn and others early in the eleventh century were soon abandoned, and in 1347 we have the last record of a voyage to America. . . It is doubtful if Columbus had ever heard of these voyages."

ANTICIPATED BY ANCIENT GREEKS.

The Renaissance, dispelling the geographical night of the Middle Ages, brought to light the ideas of the scientific Greeks. Aristotle had established the sphericity of the earth, and argued that India and the Pillars of Hercules were near to each other. Eratosthenes (third century B.C.) had estimated the circumference of the earth at 25,000 geographical miles. The Italian poet, Pulci, published in 1481 a poem in which he predicted" the discovery of a new hemisphere and the circumnavigation of the globe :'

The palm of "the most extraordinary voyage on record," Dr. Murray awards to Magellan, when for ninety-nine days he ploughed the waters of the Pacific-a voyage "far surpassing the exploit of Columbus in the Atlantic, both in boldness and in the effect it produced on geographical conceptions. Though he died at the Philippines, and though only one of his vessels ultimately reached Spain, Magellan had finally solved the problem of western navigatien, the sphericity of the earth, and the existence of the antipodes.

. . Fifty-seven years elapsed before Drake accomplished the second circumnavigation of the globe."

The whole review of geographical progress leading up to and beyond Columbus is masterly and replete with valuable information. The appended "maps of the world, according to early geographers,” constitute in themselves a liberal education in the evolution of geography.

"TH

THE BEGINNING OF MAN.

HE Beginning of Man and the Age of the Race" is the subject of an article in the Forum, by Dr. Daniel G. Brinton, one of the foremost anthropologists of the time. The very earliest deposit in which there may be said to be a general agreement that man's remains are found is that called the "Drift," a series of gravel beds in the valley of the Thames in England, Somme in France, and the Manzanares in Spain, and elsewhere in western Europe. In these beds his stone tools and weapons are found lying in undisturbed relations with bones of animals long since extinct, and which under the present conditions of the climate could not exist in that locality, these animals belonging to a tropical or subtropical fauna. From this one is led to believe that man lived there at an early date when the climate was much warmer than now, and that he had lived there for a long time, for thousands of his implements have been found in various strata and scattered over a wide area.

WHEN MAN FIRST APPEARED.

After this warm period, a period of extreme cold descended from the north over central and western Europe. Huge glaciers covered Scotland, Scandinavia and Switzerland, and the forests of France were the haunts of Arctic quadrupeds and birds, of muskox, reindeer and the white fox. Man, however, weathered this cold period and continued to roam the woods and fish the streams, transferring his habitations to natural caves, where evidence of his hunts and his battles are still to be found. This period of cold is what is called the "glacial period" and by some of our most learned geologists the length of this "icy age" has been placed from twenty to thirty thousand years. Adding this to the former calculation, and allowing a reasonable time for primeval man to develop and spread over the area in which he lived, we have as the approximate time since man has appeared in Europe - where, up to date, we have found the earliest trace of his existence-about fifty thousand years. This Mr. Brinton regards as the minimum allowance for him. Some writers of eminence have required two hundred thousand years to explain all these changes in climate, in organic life, and in geological deposition, but Mr. Brinton points out that the tendency of late years has been toward a reduction of these figures, especially by field geologists, who seem to be more impressed with the rapidity of natural actions than heretofore.

THEORIES OF MAN'S ORIGIN.

Coming next to the consideration of the origin of man, Dr. Brinton declares that "there is no trace anywhere of the missing link. No evidence that man developed out of some lower animal by long series of slow changes." Nor does he accept the doctrine of specific creation as a scientific explanation. There is a third possible theory of the origin of man which Dr. Brinton holds is as good as another, namely, that called "evolution per saltum," or with a jump. "It

is that process, whatever it may be, which produces 'sports' in plants and cranks' and 'geniuses' in respectable families. No doctrine of heredity' or 'atavism' or 'reversion' can explain these prodigies or monsters, as they happen to be. A family of we know not which of the higher mammals, perhaps the great tree ape which then lived in the warm regions of Central France, may have produced a few 'sports,' widely different physically and mentally from their parents, and these sports' were the ancestors of mankind. This is a theory which asks for its acceptance no blind faith in the dogmatic assertions either of science or religious tradition."

WHERE MAN FIRST APPEARED.

As to where man first appeared, Dr. Brinton says: "In fact, we are limited by a series of exclusions to the southern slope of that great mountain chain which begins in Western Europe and Africa with the Atlas Mountains, the Cantabrian Alps and the Pyrenees and continues to the Himalayas and their eastern extensions in Farther India. Somewhere along this line in Southern Asia, or in Southern Europe, or in Northern Africa, we may confidently say man first opened his eyes upon the world about him. Up to the present time his earliest vestiges have been exhumed in the extreme west of this region, but that may be because there search has been more diligently made, but the fact remains that speaking from present knowledge we know of man nowhere earlier than in England, France and the Iberian peninsula."

WE

ARE ATOMS ALIVE?

RITING "On the Nature of Electricity" in Merry England for November, Rev. J. A. Dewe argues that "there is in every material atom a principle of motion," that life is such a principle, and that "the more science advances, the more it discovers that life is bound up with the most elementary forms of matter. ... Numerous discoveries, moreover, uphold the theory that all material nature is thus animated; the tartar upon our teeth, the corpuscles in our blood, the liquids contained in plants and vegetables, are all living."

Electricity, magnetism, terrestrial attraction, Mr. Dewe holds to be "merely one and the same power acting with different forms and kinds of intensity. That power is generated by the action and reaction of material atoms one upon the other. It increases in intensity according as the superficies of the atoms are so placed that their centres can enter into the closest proximity, thus producing the three different grades of ordinary attraction, magnetism and electricity. The reason why the centres of the atomsor, to speak more correctly, the atoms themselvesare thus spontaneously drawn toward each other is to be found in the fact, which is being daily proved to be more and more universal, that each atom is animated by a principle of life and feeling. This alone in the whole range of nature is found to be a spontaneous cause of motion. A rudimentary life there must be attached to every atom,

THE LATE M. TSCHAIKOWSKY.

articles on the late Russian composer, the most interesting perhaps being that on his lyrical drama, Eugene Onegin," in the November number of the New Quarterly Musical Review.

RUBINSTEIN AND TSCHAIKOWSKY.

"Russian music (says the reviewer) is evidently on the ascendant, for the names of Rubinstein and Tschaikowsky are growing as familiar to our ears as those of Brahms, Dvorák and Gounod, not to speak of the host of new Russian composers, of whom our musical journals are constantly informing us. Both Rubinstein and Tschaikowsky, however, stand out far and away in advance of their native contemporaries, and on the Continent take rank among the greatest living composers.

"The works of the former are, to a certain extent, cast in the classic mold, and are characterized by rugged grandeur, bold conception and breadth of melody; while Tschaikowsky shows a stronger leaning toward the modern romantic school, relying for effect chiefly upon charm of melody, strongly marked rhythms, and the rich coloring of harmony with which his ideas are generally invested; his works, in fact, exhibit finesse in contrast to Rubinstein's force. Distinct as are the styles of these two masters, a

strong national element is visible in their compositions, tending to produce picturesque impressions on the mind."

JURISPRUDENCE AND MUSIC.

Peter Iltitsch Tschaikowsky was born in 1840, and was the son of a mining engineer. From his association with the peasantry the child early imbibed a strong love for music, particularly taking to the folk songs and antique church music; but his father intended him to study the law, and it was not till he was twenty-one that the youth entered himself as a student at the new Conservatoire at St. Petersburg. Among his teachers were Professor Zaremba and Anton Rubinstein, and when he left the Conservatoire in 1865 he took, besides his diploma as a musician, a prize medal for a cantata on Schiller's "Ode to Joy."

Proceeding next to Germany, he became an ardent advocate of the works and ideas of Schumann. In 1866 he accepted a professorship at the Moscow Conservatoire, and remained there till 1878. After this he seems to have devoted himself almost exclusively to the work of composition. It was in the spring of 1888 that he made his first appearance in London to conduct the performance of two of his works at a concert of the Philharmonic Society. Since then his works have frequently been heard in our concert rooms, and the composer himself has come over to conduct several of them. Only this last summer, when the musical society of Cambridge was celebrating its jubilee, Tschaikowsky was among the five foreign composers upon whom the degree of Mus. Doc., honoris causa, was bestowed. The Czar, who was a warm admirer of his work, granted him some years ago an annual pension of three thousand roubles, and now he has issued an order that three of the dead composer's latest operas shall be given in the native language at the St. Petersburg Imperial Opera House during the present winter season.

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"EUGENE ONEGIN."

"Eugene Onegin" was written over ten years ago, but was introduced into this country only in 1892. The text, which deals exclusively with Russian domestic and social life, was furnished by the celebrated Russian novelist, Pushkin. But the libretto is nevertheless a clumsy affair, and it is only by the continuous flow and wealth of melody, the judicious use of harmonies, and, above all, the exquisite workmanship visible on every page of the score, that the composer has succeeded in elevating the music far above the level of the libretto. Musically, the opera is a triumph.

"Originality of ideas and the methods of their developments (says the writer in conclusion) are not the common property of every musician, but with Tschaikowsky all seems to come naturally. Russia has evident reason to be proud of her Rubinstein and Tschaikowsky, considering how much they have, by their individual efforts, raised the musical art of their country to a pitch of excellence and prestige in the eyes of all Europe."

Mr. Cowen's first symphony was composed in 1869, and "The Rose Maiden," one of his most popular cantatas, was produced a year later, when he was only eighteen. A universal favorite is "The Language of Flowers," an orchestral suite. In 1888 Mr. Cowen was summoned to Melbourne to conduct the concerts and undertake the musical arrangements generally for the exhibition. He was fêted everywhere, and his visit will be long remembered in the Antipodes. After his return to England he composed the cantata "St. John's Eve" and the opera "Thorgrim." His new works, about which we have been hearing so much of late, are "The Water Lily," a