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Jacky is almost always on good terms with his mother, but he has a tiresome aunt whom he has good reason for disliking. He was once unavoidably left in her charge while his mother was away from home, and her visit was not altogether a success. She had been obliged to punish him severely for some fault, and after the operation was over he was seen to get a pencil and, retiring into a corner of the nursery, laboriously write something upon a small piece of paper. The same spy who observed him do this watched him afterward from the window while he dug a hole with his little spade and buried the bit of paper in a corner of the garden. When Jacky was safely out of the way the spy exhumed his manuscript. It ran as follows: Dear Devill,-Pleas come and take Antie.'

"Jacky longed above all things for a bicyclelonged and prayed, too, that some one, his godmother for choice, would give him one. Every day he came downstairs hoping to find the machine of his prayers in the hall. At last something came, but it was a tricycle; and godmamma, lying in am bush to be a witness of the child's raptures, heard instead a heavy sigh, and ‘O God, I did think you would have known the difference between a bicycle and a triycle.' Once, when he had been so exceedingly naughty that his mother almost despaired of him, she told him he must pray to God to make him a better boy. Accordingly he began with the usual formula. Pray, God, make me a good boy,' adding, after a pause, and if at first you don't succeed, try. try, try again.'”

SOME ABYSSINIAN PERSONAGES.

N the United Service Magazine for August, Cap

In the Catenzio describes as follows the person

ages whom he saw in the Abyssinian camp during the time that he was a prisoner of King Menelik:

woman.

His

"I once saw the Empress Taitù riding at the head of the soldiers. She is an immensely corpulent I could not see her face, for she had a piece of white stuff over her head which hung down to her breast. Menelik is a very robust man. hair and beard are black and curly, his nose turns up. His eyes are very black and large. He dresses with great simplicity, and while on the march wears a large straw hat to protect him from the sun. Both he and Taitù are extremely feared. Mangascia, a handsome, strong man of about thirty years of age, is effeminate. He dresses very richly, has his long, black hair braided every day into a quantity of

little braids, which are then twisted at each side of his head over his ears, in which hang gold earrings. Ras Alula is about sixty years old. His long beard is gray. He generally rides on horseback. He is very rigid, and has sworn enmity to the Italians ever since they first set foot in Africa."

JAPANESE COMPETITION AGAIN.

LAST month we quoted at some length from two

articles in the Overland Monthly which dealt with the subject of Japanees industrial competition with the United States from radically different points of view. The North American Review for August has an article entitled "Is Japanese Competition a Myth?" by the Hon. Robert P. Porter, who has recently returned from an extended visit to Japan. Mr. Porter is convinced that Japan has already become a formidable competitor in many industries, and is rapidly forging to the front in others. The present commercial relations between the United States and Japan are thus summarized by Mr. Porter:

"We buy of Japan about $54,000,000 worth of goods; Japan buys of us $9,000,000, mostly staples; Japan takes our $54,000,000 and buys $56,000,000 of England, and England, not to be outdone by Japan in generosity, buys about $7,000,000 of that country. All this is sad, and discouraging and humiliating, I know, but it is true as the Gospel. That it is true would seem to me one reason why the people of the United States must look at the question of Japanese competition free from all sentimental considerations. In other words, we must protect our own industry and our own labor."

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THE SECRET OF JAPAN'S STRENGTH.

Japan has an industrial army that has gone into the conflict of nations with whatever implement it had at hand. It has not waited until every man was equipped with the latest modern appliances, but has begun making excellent articles with the tools within its reach. In Osaka, it is no exaggera tion to say, I saw the methods of a thousand years ago, side by side with the latest and most ingenious labor-saving devices. The quotations from the Rice Exchange were being waved by flags from peak to peak, within a stone's throw of the Post Office building, where could be heard the click of the telegraph instruments, and the 'hello' of the telephone girl in her kimono. In the magnificently equipped cotton-spinning and weaving factories, in paper mills, in some of the large silk factories, in the clock and watch factories, in the machine shops of Japan, I have seen the most modern English, German and American machinery, and forces of men and women as thoroughly organized and as fully equipped as any on earth.

"On the other hand, within the shadow of these immense establishments in the Osaka district, where tall chimneys remind one of Manchester, Philadel

phia and Chicago, thousands of human beings labor with tools so crude and implements so antique that you are taken back to the cities of the ancient world.

These tremendous contrasts, to my mind, show the courage of the Japanese. He simply throws away the old device when he can secure the new. Like all good workmen, however, he does not stand idly by waiting for the better implements. He pounds away at his rice, runs off beautiful silken threads from the ancient spinning wheel, plies the hand dexterously at all occupations, as he did a thousand years ago, wholly oblivious of the hum and rattle of the modern machinery in the surrounding factories. He cannot afford to stop, but he is none the less awaiting his turn to secure the newer machine. When Japan is fully equipped with the latest machinery, it will, in my opinion, be the most potent industrial force in the markets of the world."

M

THE NEEDLESS WASTE OF COAL.

R. JOSEPH D. WEEKS, writing in Cassier's for August, makes several important suggestions in regard to fuel problems. From his study of the subject he concludes that there has been a loss in mining of 70 per cent. of the coal in the veins, that not to exceed 10 per cent. of the possible energy in the coal now consumed is utilized, and that there is a constant waste of coal products other than heat.

"The loss of coal from miscalculations or bad engineering of the mine is enormous. Pillars may be too large and the coal wasted; or too small, and the pillars crush and shut off the coal beyond. It is not unusual to leave unmined a part of a vein that is either under or above a slate, and which may not be quite so pure as that mined. The waste from this source is enormous. There are mines in the Pittsburg region where, with seventy-one and one half inches of coal, but thirty-two inches of clean coal and the bearing-in coal of four inches are mined: thirty-six inches out of seventy-one and one-half inches are left untouched, a loss of thirty-five and one-half inches; practically, one half of the coal is left in the mine, besides the waste in mining. This custom is not at all uncommon. The miner may do his work very unskillfully in bringing down the coal, in loading and other ways to which I need but refer at this time. How can this waste be avoided?

"It cannot be entirely avoided, but it can be still further decreased by just the methods by which it has already been largely reduced. Mechanical means, instead of the coal itself, can be used for supporting the roof and surface; gobbing up will often give a much larger percentage of coal; better engineering of the collieries will give better methods and less waste. All of the vein can be mined, even if a portion of it is inferior, and many methods can be greatly improved."

WASTE IN USE.

As to the problems connected with the use of coal, Mr. Weeks suggests the following desiderata: "1. A more perfect combustion; that is, from the same amount of fuel more heat units must be developed.

"2. Improved appliances for saving this heat and transmuting it into energy. Not only must these increased heat units do more work, but each individual heat unit must directly develop more energy.

"3. Recuperation of so-called exhausted energy; that is, the heat must continue at work until the actual limit of exhaustion has been reached.

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Mr. Weeks makes a wonderful showing of the products locked up in coal which are now permitted to go to waste.

"In every ton of coal coked in the United States, it is fair to assume that from any of the by-product coke ovens there can be produced at least 3 per cent. of tar worth one-third of a cent per pound; 1 per cent. of sulphate of ammonia worth 3 cents a pound; one-half of 1 per cent. of benzole worth 2 cents a pound, and one pound cyanide of potassium worth 50 cents per pound. As in 1893. 14,916,147 tons of coal were coked in the United States, the possible production and value at present prices of these products would have been as follows:

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How many

"The above products, however, are only those from the 15,000,000 of tons of coal coked in one year. What about the value of the by-products of the 113,000,000 tons of coal not coked tons of tar and ammonia and benzole and cyanide could be saved from this amount of coal? The amount of ammonia would be something enormous, though the tar and benzole, if the coal was properly burned into gas before it was applied to heating purposes, as it should be, would not be so great as when the coal is coked. The Mond circular producer, which I saw at work a year ago in England on Yorkshire coal, gave 48 kilos (105 pounds) of sulphate of ammonia per ton of coal charged, and 80 to 90 pounds was the regular yield."

Estimating the value of these by products per ton of coal burned at 50 cents, the total loss on the coal mined in 1893 would have been $64,000,000.

IN

ELECTRICITY DIRECT FROM COAL.

N the Engineering Magazine for July, which is a good number, G. H. Stockbridge describes Dr. Jacques' promise of a revolution in power production by producing electricity directly from coal. E. H. Williams puts more concisely the same wonderful discovery of Dr. Jacques. By it "over eighty per cent. of the energy of the carbon can be obtained directly as electricity without the intervention of machinery, by a method as simple as wonderful. Dynamos will be sent to the attics, and it will be cheaper to heat and work by electricity than by fires. In a series of iron cells Dr. Jacques places caustic soda, which he fuses at 300 degrees F., and in the fused alkali he places rods of carbon. Air being forced through the bath, the combination of carbon and oxygen creates electricity in such quantities that arc lights can be run for hours with little or no consumption of carbon. If this is all that it is claimed to be,-and its sponsors are men who understand what they are saying, -the old culm banks contain reserve energy sufficient to furnish us with power for many generations, and the coal now in the ground will be so mined that culm banks will cease to be the most prominent objects in an old anthracite district."

"Culm banks" are better known in Great Britain as anthracite "pit heaps." At present, by the ordinary methods in use, only 10 or at most 18 per cent. of the energy of the carbon is turned into electric energy. R. Hering's paper in the same magazine, on the filtration of municipal water supplies, is an instructive commentary on the contrast between Altona, which had filtered water, and Hamburg, which had not. during the cholera visitation. uable and sensible remarks on the architecture of home-making are contributed by C. E. Benton.

WILLIAM BLACK AT HOME.

Val

HE Young Man for August publishes an ac

Tonton William Black, the popular novelist,

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as he is to be seen at Brighton. The writer says: "Mr. Black's home is-and has been for many years-Paston House, Paston Place, Brighton. But it is a home in which he never spends more than half the year—from September or October to March or April. At any other time you would have to find him in the Highlands, where he and his family take up their residence at a different spot every year. But it is at Paston House that the novelist does the greater part of his work."

The article is chiefly made up of notes on William Black's conversations upon his career. From these I extract the more interesting passages, as follows:

"I did not resign my position of assistant editor of the Daily News till 1875, and for some time after that I contributed articles to the paper. With my method of writing a novel I was only too glad to escape from journalism.

HOW HE WRITES HIS NOVELS.

"I felt that I could not do myself justice in novel writing until it was my only occupation." 666 And what is that method?'

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"A very slow and painful one, I am afraid. I am building up a book months before I write the first chapter; before I can put pen to paper I have to realize all the chief incidents and characters. I have to live with my characters, so to speak; other wise, I am afraid they would never appear living people to my readers. This is my work during the summer; the only time that I am really from the burden of the novel that-is-to be is when I am grouse shooting or salmon fishing. At other times I am haunted by the characters and the scenes in which they take part, so that for the sake of his peace of mind my method is not to be recommended to any young novelist. When I come to the writing I have to immure myself in perfect quietude; my study is at the top of the house, and on the two or three days a week that I am writing Mrs. Black guards me from interruption.

"Of course, now and again I have had to read a great deal, preparatory to writing. Before beginning Sunrise,' for instance, I went through the history of secret societies in Europe.''

A FRIEND OF JOHN BRIGHT.

The following items of information are not generally known:

"The novelist knew Mr. Bright very well, and at the Reform Club played many a game of billiards with the statesman. Their great love for salmon fishing was another bond of friendship between them.

"During his last illness,' Mr. Black tells me, 'Mr. Bright would often take a rod and pretend to throw a line in the effort to realize the pleasure of his favorite sport.'

"WAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE MORNING STAR.”

"Mr. Black was war correspondent for the Morning Star-John Bright's organ-in the conflict of 1866 between Austria and Prussia. Of his fighting experiences he gave some account in the first novel -Love or Marriage' -published in the following year. Of this book Mr. Black does not care to speak, and I believe that it is a matter of some regret to him that it can still be read in the British Museum. It certainly gives no indication of the 'line' which Mr. Black was so brilliantly to make his own; but, on the other hand, it does not deserve the oblivion to which the author is apparently anxious to consign it. In its frank treatment of the marriage question, and its realistic picture of some of the horrors of war, the novel anticipates in some degree several of the most successful works of fiction during the last few years. Mr. Black surveyed the field of Königgrätz just after the battle, and the picture he gives of the scene in the novel has some

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REMINISCENCES OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY.

[R. WARD made Mr. Huxley's acquaintance in 1890. He became a neighbor of his at Eastbourne, and afterward had many talks on every conceivable subject, and of these conversations, which are among the most intellectually stimulating that he had ever known, he gives us some notes in this article in the Nineteenth Century. He was delighted to find that instead of being a pugilist, a pedant and a scoffer, Huxley had a personality of singular charm, gentle, sympathetic and brilliant. The general impression left by his face was one of intellectual force and activity rather than of scorn; in his manner and appearance there was marked distinction and dignity; his conversation was singularly finished and clear cut. Instead of suggesting more than he said, as Tennyson and Cardinal Newman did, he finished his thoughts completely and expressed them with the utmost precision. In conversation he was tolerant as a listener, and always more brilliant, forcible, and definite than convincing, suggestive or entirely comprehensive in his replies.

DOOMED TO BE RESPECTABLE.

When made Privy Councilor in '92, he replied:

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Very many thanks [he wrote] for your kind congratulations. Morris has a poem somewhere about the man who was born to be a king, and became one in spite of probability. It is evident to me now that I was born to be respectable. I have done my level best to avoid that honor, but behold me indelibly stamped."

Mr. Ward reports a saying of his in 1892 which is worthy of note:

"Faulty and incorrect as is the Christian definition of Theism, it is nearer the truth than the creed of some agnostics who conceive of no unifying principle in the world.' He proceeded to defend eloquently the argument from design, referring me to his volume of Darwiniana, to show that he had admitted in print that it could not be disproved by the evolution theory. This position, which entirely tallies with his statement that only a 'very great fool' would deny in his heart a God conceived as Spinoza conceives Him, was distinctly short of the degree of agnosticism currently attributed to him by those who read him hastily and blended their own logic with his rhetoric.'

Huxley once said that he thought his own lecture on Descartes was the best exhibition of his religious attitude as a whole. Speaking of the value of qualities, Huxley once said, men of ability are common enough, but men of character and conviction are very rare. It is the grandest thing conceivable to see a man speaking out and acting out his convietions in the face of unpopularity. This led him to

have a great admiration for Gregory VII. as a man of strength and conviction. Of his Romanes lecture of 1893 he said that it was not a recantation of aggressive theological views, but he admitted that the main thesis is only the doctrine that from the scientific side Satan is the prince of this world. The following are some notes of Huxley's anecdotes and observations:

HIS VIEW OF STANLEY.

"So, too, Stanley's impressionable imaginative nature was brought out by him in an anecdote. Stanley, vividly impressed by the newest thought of the hour, liberal, and advanced by family and school tradition, had sympathized with Colenso's treatment of the Bible in some degree; yet his his. torical impressionableness told the other way. Huxley explained his position thus:

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Stanley could believe in anything of which he had seen the supposed site, but was skeptical where he had not seen. At a breakfast at Monckton Milnes', just at the time of the Colenso row, Milnes asked me my views on the Pentateuch, and I gave them. Stanley differed from me. The account of creation in Genesis he dismissed at once as unhistorical; but the call of Abraham and the historical narrative of the Pentateuch he accepted. This was because he had seen Palestine-but he wasn't present at the creation.'"

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Admirably did he once characterize Tennyson's conversation. Doric beauty is its characteristicperfect simplicity, without any ornament or anything artificial.' Of an eminent person whose great subtlety of mind was being discussed, he said that the constant overrefinement of distinctions in his case destroyed all distinctness. Anything could be explained away, and so one thing came to mean the same as its opposite. Some one asked, 'Do you mean that he is untruthful?' 'No,' replied Huxley, he is not clear headed enough to tell a lie.'"

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music than poets or men of letters. He told me of one long talk he had had with Tennyson, and added that immortality was the one dogma to which Tennyson was passionately devoted."

AND BROWNING.

"Of Browning, Huxley said: 'He really has music in him. Read his poem, "The Thrush," and you will see it. Tennyson said to me,' he added, 'that Browning had plenty of music in him, but he could not get it out.'

"A few more detached remarks illustrate the character and tastes of the man. He expressed once his delight in Switzerland and in the beauty of Monte Generoso. 'There is nothing like Switzerland,' he said. 'But I also delight in the simplest rural English scenery. A country field has before now entranced me.' 'One thing,' he added, ' which weighs with me against pessimism, and tells for a benevolent Author of the universe, is my enjoyment of scenery and music. I do not see how they can have helped in the struggle for existence. They are gratuitous gifts.''

MR.

SIR JOHN SEELEY.

R. HERBERT A. L. FISHER, in the Fortnightly Review for August, publishes a good article on Sir John Seeley, whose literary and religious teachings he describes in some detail. He says: "Twice he took the English reading world by storm, once by a book on religion, and again by a book on politics; and each book, in its own sphere, may be held to mark an epoch in the popular education of the Anglo-Saxon race.

"There is one idea which inspires every sentence which came from Seeley's pen. It is the idea of the state. For him the state is not only the proper matter of history, it is the noblest object of human contemplation, the most vital subject for human inquiry. And he derived this enthusiasm for history in the first place from the Bible. I may say, in one word,' he writes, that my ideas are Biblical, that they are drawn from the Bible at first hand, and that what fascinates me in the Bible is not a passage here and there, not something which only a scholar or antiquarian can detect in it, but the Bible as a whole, its great plan and unity, and principally the grand poetic anticipation I find in it of modern views concerning history."

HIS RELIGIOUS WORK.

Seeley's ideal, the influence of which is manifest, was that active enthusiasm was the noblest form of life, and essential to the preservation of a healthful society. This writer thinks his conception of the state he portrayed was due to his devotion to the Hebrew Scriptures. Mr. Fisher says of "Ecce Homo : "

"That book marks the appearance of the plain lay judgment upon a sphere which had been long monopolized either by the disciples of a pious ecclesi

astical tradition, or by professed biblical scholars. It raised questions which had not been so clearly put before, precisely because those for whom they were most interesting had never considered them from an exclusively human standpoint, and they were fundamental questions."

"Ecce Homo" was by no means the only service which Sir John Seeley rendered to the relgious life of his century. As long ago as 1868, addressing the Broad Church, he exhorted the ministers of religion to devote more attention to the history of their own country. He said:

"If the Christian Church is ever to recover influence, its ministers must make themselves acquainted with the social questions of their time; they must expel conventionalism and euphuism and vagueness from their sermons; and they must make their congregations familiar with the heroes of national history."

HIS CONTRIBUTION TO HISTORY.

Of his other books Mr. Fisher writes as follows: "In Natural Religion' we have the philosophy of Goethe subordinated to the strong practical interests of the English historian.

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Seeley wrote nothing which was not bold, and little which was not origina). The Growth of British Policy' is a conspicuous instance of his singular power of simplifying an extraordinary complex period of history and of presenting its main features in a salient and even startling outline. He delights in packing a century into a formula, a policy into a paradox, a career into a phrase. Whatever weight may be attached to these and similar criticisms, the book will remain a solid and original contribution to English history. The author has taken us over a familiar country by a new route. He has not, indeed, increased our knowledge of facts. That was not his ambition. His services rather consist in this, that in an age of innumerable fresh documents and monographs and periodicals, he has brought a fresh mind to reflect upon our acquisitions, and so to winnow and combine the material as to present the cardinal lessons of history, cleared of all trivial ard unessential detail."

THE chief elements of interest in Temple Bar for August are a sketch by Mr. John Macdonell of the late Lord Bramwell and a piece of good humored advice to literary ladies, whom the writer thinks have been too hardly dealt with in literature, but who might with advantage wear their learning and their new-found rights more lightly. There is also a ghastly account of Bicêtre, the old French criminal lunatic asylum.

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