and another clergyman, surely not less so, who composed 500 sermons and preached more than 5,000 times! Here, too, is a couple who in death were not divided

"She first departed, he for one day try'd,

To live without her; lik'd it not, and dy'd,"

and a cheerful if arbitrary assumption on behalf of a "very wicked man" killed by a fall from a horse

"Between the stirrup and the ground,

I mercy ask'd, I mercy found.”

And here are babies, many and various; an "incomparable boy," who died at birth; another who, having lived two years, tells us both why he came and why he left:

"The railing world turn'd poet, made a play,

I came to see it, dislik'd and went away";

and yet another infant, less easily persuaded of its good luck in dying, yet who, after some demur, allows itself to be convinced.

And then here and there among the rest, commonplace or jesting or trite, is struck some note, weird or discordant, like the verse in the Cornish churchyard:

"Here I lie without the walls,

Because there is no room within,

They kept such brawls;

Here I lie and have no rent to pay,

And yet I lie as warm as they."

Was it at the dead Lords of the Manor, arrogating to themselves sole right of burial within the sacred precincts, that the thrust was made, with its allusion to Death, the Leveller? However that may be, over respect for the dead was no invariable rule. Once leave behind the classes and places where decorum and grandiloquence reigned and a marked change is observable with regard to the sins and follies of those who are gone; and there is no lack of mention of them, whether in a spirit of coarse buffoonery or of deprecating apology. Thus we are told, in negative terms of condemnation, that under the stone at Cheshunt, "Lies the body of Richard Hind,

Who was neither ingenious, sober nor kind;"

and at Great Cornard, in Suffolk, that,

"Here lies the body of Joe Sewell,

Who to his wife was very cruel,
And likewise to his brother Tom

As any man in Christendom.
This is all I'll say of Joe,
There he lies and let him go."

One wonders why, since nothing better could be said of poor Joe, the survivors, doubtless wife and brother, should have been at the trouble and expense of raising a monument to commemorate his shortcomings, but they were not singular in the course they took, nor are other records of unhappy marriages wanting. "Cy gist ma femme, fort bien

Pour son repose ce pour le mien"

is a couplet at Old Greyfriars, Edinburgh, as trenchant, though more laconic than the verse at Midhurst which records that"Beneath this stone

Lies my wife Joan,

To H-ll she's gone, no doubt;

For if she be not,

If Heaven's her lot,

I must (God wot) turn out."

An elaborate play upon words was a favorite form of memorial when the name of the dead invited such punning; and there is in Lincoln Cathedral a cheerful forecast as to the future lot of a divine named Cole. "Cole now raked up in ashes then shall glow," and a more sinister quatrain elsewhere in memory of one Sullen :

"Here lies John Sullen, and it is God's will

He that was Sullen, will be Sullen still.

He still is Sullen: if the truth you seek,

Knock until Doomsday, Sullen will not speak."

In Horace Walpole's manuscript there is a copy of an epitaph of the kind to be found near Salisbury, on a person named Button:

A joke based upon the profession practised by the dead was also a popular form of memorial. A blacksmith was thus said to have been "hotly employed in the service of his country. He made a great noise in the world till . . . death put out his fire, and here are laid his dust and ashes ; the reader is reminded, in lines commemorative of a huntsman, that

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"The leap though high, from earth to sky,

The huntsman, we must follow;"

and a billiard marker was said to be gone "for the long rest."

Nor were inscriptions of the kind confined to country places. The epitaph of Havard the comedian ends with the lines,

"The noblest character he acted well,

And Heaven applauded-when the curtain fell.”

The fashion of the world changes, and the trade of the epitaph-maker grows slack. Here and there, it is true, some one is still honored after the old custom, but for the most part a text, appropriate or the reverse, a brief record of birth and death, a word or two of vague and general significance, with possibly a simple expression of regret, have replaced in our modern cemeteries those shorthand histories of the dead, tragic or humorous, tender or severe,

"Some stained as with wine, and made bloody,

And some as with tears,"

which formerly marked their resting places.

It is not that in these later years men have lost that craving for remembrance which, as old as life itself, is so vain, in the case at least of the commonality of the race, that it might well be a subject for laughter were it not that what, seen from without is purely grotesque, assumes quite another complexion when it is touched by our own personality. It is not that the desire to be remembered is gone, and it is likely enough that in some fashion or another we should all still be epitaph-makers, for ourselves or other people, if we had not lost faith in the permanency of the work. But time brings involuntary wisdom. "Our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors." "While I live," promises a lover, with melancholy truthfulness, in a Roman epitaph quoted by Mr. Pater" while I live you will receive this homage: after my death, who can tell?" And so it comes to pass that, submitting to the inevitable, men learn to limit their aspirations, and to content themselves, by way of epitaph, with the "two narrow words, Hic jacet," with which, says Sir Walter Raleigh, "eloquent Death" covers all. I. A. TAYLOR.

THE ANIMAL AS A MACHINE.

BY ROBERT H. THURSTON, DIRECTOR OF SIBLEY COLLEGE, CORNELL UNIVERSITY.

THE vital system, in spite of the study bestowed upon it from the days of Plato and of Aristotle, and by the most acute of modern men of science, remains to-day the most mysterious of all the wonders of creation. It embodies the representative energies of all the realms of nature. The chemist, the physicist, the engineer, the biologist, the sociologist, the student of mental philosophy, and the moralist,-all thinkers and investigators in all departments of science-find here problems as yet absolutely defying solution, enigmas of sphinx-like obscurity and of infinitely more than sphinx-like antiquity. They stand perpetually before us, challenging and tantalizing us by their familiar externals, by their always mysterious internal operations. All that we really know is that every animal, human or other, from the greatest of scientific men or the most famous statesman down to the most insignificant worm or almost protoplasmic organism, is a machine of marvellous intricacy and astonishing perfection; self-perpetuating; self-repairing; capable of performing tasks of the utmost difficulty as a "prime motor," and as a vehicle for the contained and directing soul; automatic in its essential internal movements; competent to conduct all those unseen and mysterious operations often for years, for decades, sometimes for a century and more, without the slightest knowledge on the part of the imprisoned mind, of their character, of their method or of their mutual relations.

The mind of the individual thus confined in the organism, however lofty and intelligent, is usually unaware, by any sensation, whether these internal transfers and transformations of energy are going on at all or not, and, as a rule, the more perfect

their action, the less the consciousness of their operation. In most cases, the very existence of an organ is unknown to the possessor until its action is, by some derangement, rendered imperfect. Physical, chemical, vital, and intellectual forces and powers are all utilized and illustrated in the movements and accomplishments of this miracle among miracles; and the mind resident in the very midst of its marvels, after unnumbered centuries and millenniums, has learned almost nothing of the modes of action of any one of its internal energies. It even still puzzles itself with the question: Is the vital machine thermo-dynamic, thermoelectric, chemico-dynamic, chemico-electric, or a linked chain of chemical, physical, and dynamic powers, united with vital energies having as yet undiscovered characteristics?

There is little, if any, doubt that there exist in the vital organism forces and energies which scientific research has not yet touched; but it may be that, aside from the initial vital powers and those of the soul and the intellect, the animal machine may illustrate simply the transformation of only well-known forms of energy through processes wholly or in part unfamiliar. But, whatever may be the fact in this regard, it may probably be safely asserted that in this machine, as in any and every other, "nothing is produced from nothing," and every manifestation of energy comes of the transfer or transformation of some antecedent energy of equivalent amount. Whatever the outgo of the system, there must be an equivalent income of energy in that or other and transformable kind. This is the first of the laws of the science of "energetics," a science which underlies every phenomenon in the organic world and every department of nature in which motion occurs. It is a fundamental law to which no exceptions are known and to which no exceptions are believed to exist. But it is supposed-though by no means proven or certain that we know just what enters this "prime mover" and vital machine, and as exactly what is rejected from it or produced by it.

This is certainly true, so far as the familiar forms of matter and force are concerned. What as yet unknown forms of matter and what still undiscovered forces and energies affect it or are affected by it, no one can say. Possibly there may be none; very possibly there may be many. We certainly do not yet know what are the exact compositions of some of the organic compounds pro.