with Hebrew speculation, the divine essence is unknowable-without form or attribute; but the interval between it and the world of sense is filled by intelligible entities, which are nothing but the familiar hypostatised abstractions of the realists. These have emanated, like immense waves of light, from the divine centre and, as ten consecutive zones of Sephiroth, form the universe. The farther away from the centre, the more the primitive light wanes, until the periphery ends in those mere negations, darkness and evil, which are the essence of matter. On this, the divine agency transmitted through the Sephiroth operates after the fashion of the Aristotelian forms and, at first, produces the lowest of a series of worlds. After a certain duration the primitive world is demolished and its fragments used up in making a better; and this process is repeated, until at length a final world, with man for its crown and finish, makes its appearance. It is needless to trace the process of retrogressive metamorphosis by which, through the agency of the Messiah, the steps of the process of evolution here sketched are retraced. Sufficient has been said to prove that the extremest realism current in the philosophy of the thirteenth century can be fully matched by the speculations of our own time.

T. H. HUXLEY.

NOTES ON NEW YORK.

I. ON SOME PHYSICAL CHANGES OF THE LAST TEN YEARS.

It was early on a gray October morning of 1886 that the 'Celtic,' her funnel well frosted with the salt of the Atlantic surge, steamed up New York harbour to the city. In the ten years that had passed since I had seen harbour or city, there had been many changes in both, some of them such as no one could miss. M. Bartholdi's singular statue of Liberty stood there on Bedloes Island, waiting to be dedicated to her mission of enlightening the world, not the least considering whether the world might not prefer its own darkness to the Frenchman's electric beams. Brooklyn Bridge spanned the East River; its two huge piers brought well into proportion with the two cities it unites; the delicate arch of the floor and the curves of its suspension cables a triumph of architectural design as well as of sound engineering. The lower end of New York City, which meets and parts wedgelike the waters that encompass it, seemed to have been lifted bodily upward. The new Produce Exchange stands a fortress in its four-square solid brick walls and square tower. The Washington Building, the Mills Building, and many others rise ten storeys from the ground. The domes of the Post Office, and the adjacent pinnacles and spires, crown the view. But the spires have ceased to be the most conspicuous features of this section of New York. I remembered the remark of a distinguished Englishman with whom ten years ago I had looked upon this scene from the deck of another White Star ship. Even then the spires were dwarfed by the towers of a telegraph office and a newspaper building. Nothing could be more striking,' said he. The first things you see as you approach America are centres of intelligence.' They are still there, but the centres of commerce, of business, of finance, rise, if not to an equal height, yet in a greater bulk, and press upon the vision of the incoming stranger. I will not dwell on the more familiar features of this entrance to New York; often described, never too much praised. It was natural that the autumn-clad shores of Staten Island should be more thickly covered with villas, and that Brooklyn streets should have stretched afield. Early as it was, all New York was awake, the innumerable ferry-boats were crowded; the smoke floated away

6

before the east winds from every visible chimney; not the smoke known to the Londoner, but that lighter product of anthracite combustion which goes its way skyward instead of clinging to earth, to poison the inhabitants thereof.

I wish I could say that the docks and wharves of New York have been rebuilt, but it is a matter of conscience to confess that the traveller still enters this city over a threshold which is a stumblingblock of rotting wood, and through sheds which are as shabby as they are spacious. The American finds that he can get ashore, and that there is room for the custom-house officers to do their work, and he asks no more. As nothing has been more abused than the New York Custom House-unless it be the Boston-let me say that the examination of luggage was done quickly and civilly. We were one hundred and fifty saloon passengers. Within ten minutes after the ship was at the dock, portmanteaus and boxes were ready for inspection, and I judge the business was over in an hour. Returning to Liverpool, the other day, the number of passengers was but thirty, yet it was an hour before the first package was opened, and every package was looked into rather more sharply than at New York, but not less civilly.

Nor is it possible to assert that the paving of the streets of New York is much better than of old. This queenly city is not careful to put her best foot foremost, or set what an American might call her front door-step in order. The traveller still emerges from the steamship warehouse upon a broad, neglected, squalid thoroughfare. He still drives through streets some of which are charming in their quaint suggestion of a Dutch antiquity, over roadways which are equally good tests of the springs of his carriage and of his power of refraining from profane language. On the busiest part of Fifth Avenue, which is not only the most fashionable street but one of the great arteries of travel, the pavement was up, the foundation of the road laid bare, and the sidewalks piled high with granite blocks. 'Sidewalks,' I know, is an Americanism, but I respectfully commend the word to the English public for convenience' sake. Pavement' has more than one meaning, and foot-path' belongs to the country. The Avenue-we now call it 'the' Avenue, just as you call Hyde Park 'the' Park-was impassable for a third of a mile. It remained so for a month; it had been so, I was told, for a month before, perhaps longer. The London vestries who yearly upturn Pall Mall and the Strand could hardly show a more serene indifference to the necessities of the community whose servants they are supposed to be. There had been a quarrel between the New York contractors and the authorities. An arbitration was proceeding, in the usual leisurely fashion of such things. The public meanwhile submitted to the obstruction with that patience which seems, I believe, to Englishmen one of the most puzzling characteristics of the American. On

our way from the dock to the house, my host took me through some of the worst and some of the best streets in New York. His brougham was well hung, and his coachman a good whip, but the worst pavements gave one the sense of being driven down the boulder-strewn bed of a mountain torrent, and the best were very like what Oxford Street was when it was paved with cubes of stone to which long wear had given a rounded surface.

The Macadam pavement, it is said, will not answer in New York, on account of the dust; wood is condemned; asphalte melts in the summer heat. A friend took me one day to Fleetwood Park—a private course for trotting. We drove along Seventh Avenue, by which Jerome Park also is approached, certainly one of the chief roads for pleasure-driving, crowded that afternoon with trotting waggons, and lying an inch or two deep with mud. Yet the macadamised roads in Central Park, and for nearly the whole length of the incomparable Riverside drive, are well made and in good condition.

It

This is a topic, I know, as well worn as the streets themselves, but it is one which cannot be left wholly untouched by anyone who deals with the physical aspect of New York city. And it is of course the physical aspect which first impresses itself on the newcomer. is certainly one which the New Yorker himself is determined nobody shall overlook. Said my host to me, 'You shall have your breakfast, then you must go down town and see New York at once. You have not the least idea what the New York of to-day is like.' I humbly admitted I had not. We went down by one of the elevated railroads. There are six of these, and they have altered some of the main conditions of life in New York. Before the first of them was built, in 1872, the New Yorker was wandering away to Brooklyn, or Williamsburgh, or Jersey City, in search of a home. The central part of the island was already crowded, and the distance to the upper part too great to be travelled twice a day by stage or street-car, or, as would be said here, by 'bus' or 'tram.' Now, it is possible to go in less than half an hour from Wall Street to Central Park. When the late Mr. Stewart built his white marble house at the corner of Thirtythird Street and Fifth Avenue it was thought to be too far up town. When the Vanderbilt houses, perhaps five years ago, were built a mile beyond, people said they were too far down. Central Park begins at Fifty-ninth Street-we reckon twenty blocks or streets to the mile and already it is difficult to get a good vacant lot for a house on its eastern side. From statistics of every kind I abstain, but it needs no statistics to show that the facility and rapidity of communication between the two great divisions of New York have greatly augmented the value of land up town, where men live; if not down town, where they do business. The value of business sites increases fast enough from other causes. I was shown a small estate on the corner of Wall

Street and Broad Street which had recently been sold at a price higher per square foot, said my friend, than had yet been given for land in the city of London. Whether he was accurate or not I cannot say, but there is a difference between superficial area and frontage which it is just possible he did not take into account.

The elevated railroads of New York have been compared before now with the underground in London, and not to the advantage of the latter. From the passenger's point of view, it is certainly pleasanter to journey through the upper air than through a hole in the earth. The privilege of staring into second-story windows as he rushes by adds but little to the interest. The pace is too great. I reckoned a mile in five minutes, stops included, to be the average. The cars are, of course, on the American plan, large and airy, wellfitted, and clean, but overcrowded morning and evening. There is no pretence of restricting the number of passengers. The seats once full, the centre aisle is packed, as it is in the cars on the surface roads, by people who do not object to travel perpendicularly, holding fast to straps which the company, ever considerate of the comfort of its patrons, provides without extra charge. This, however, is less inconvenient to the seated passenger than to make one of fourteen in an English compartment constructed to hold six. There is ventilation, partly the result of design, partly of open doors and the exit of passengers at each station. As the stations are not more than a minute and a half apart, the air-supply on the elevated roads at their worst is never so foul as on the underground at its best. Accidents are unknown. I do not expect this assertion to be received with entire confidence, but I will quote from an official statement covering the operations of all the elevated lines down to October 1, 1886. 'Since the opening of the roads, only one passenger has lost his life after being on board the cars, and that was due to his own carelessness. This fact is without an equal in the history of railways.' I should suppose it was.

The same page contains an array of figures which tempts me to depart for one moment from my self-denying ordinance in respect to

statistics.

The elevated system began with three and a half miles of road in 1872, and during nine months of that year ending September 30, the number of passengers was 137,446. In 1880 the mileage had increased to 32, where it remains, and the number of passengers to 60,831,757. In 1886 the number was 115,109,591, the daily average being 315,369. The whole number of passengers transported during fourteen years has been 692,929,878. If we take the population of New York at a million and a quarter, we may say that during these fourteen years every man, woman, and child in the city has been carried up or down the elevated roads more than 500 times. The number travelling on the surface roads last year was 195,165,035.