earlier period whose originality of genius seems to defy comparison. That our fiction is not like that of Poe or Brockden Brown or Cooper is surely not to its discredit. For ourselves, we prefer Mrs. Deland's, Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman's, Mrs. Wharton's, or that of any one of half a dozen contemporary American women we might mention, to say nothing of James, Howells and Mark Twain."

The best of our literature, says Mr. Alden, is "sincere in the positive sense in its disclosures of living truth, without gloss or affectation," and this characteristic "has never so distinctly marked the literature of any former period." It is this, he continues," which gives Howells a place in our esthetic regard which Dickens could not fill, howmuchsoever the latter may still excite our admiration by his masterful drama and wonderful humor."

TH

A NOTABLE TRIBUTE TO BALZAC. `HE lecture, or, as it has been more accurately characterized, "the orally delivered essay on "The Lesson of Balzac " which Mr. Henry James has read from time to time during the year, semipublicly, in this country, now makes its first complete appearance in print in The Atlantic Monthly (August). This lecture, says Miss Olivia Howard Dunbar, a writer in The Critic, ́has served as an excuse whereby the most distinguished novelist America may be said, in a limited sense, to have produced,' may be stared at without rudeness." The fact, she goes on to say, demands neither concealment nor apology, since “it is the profitable gratification of an entirely legitimate curiosity, this hearing the voice and seeing the face of a man of genius." What Mr. James really talks about in this essay is the general subject of the novelist's art, an art of which he proclaims Balzac the greatest master. 'Literature," he writes, "is an objective, a projected result; it is life that is the unconscious, the agitated, the struggling, floundering cause." After brilliant characterizations of George Sand, Jane Austen, and the Brontés, Mr. James proceeds:

"These are but glimmering lanterns, however, you will say, to hang in the great dusky and deserted avenue that leads up to the seated statue of Balzac; and you are so far right, I am bound to admit, as that I place them there, no doubt, in a great measure, just to render the darkness visible. We do, collectively, with all our dimness of view, arrive at rough discriminations, and by one of the roughest of these the author of the Comédie Humaine' has in a manner profited; we have for many a year taken his greatness for granted; but in the graceless and nerveless fashion of those who edge away from a classic or a bore. Oh, yes, he is as great as you like--so let us not talk of him!' . . . I see no better proof that the great interesting art of which Balzac remains the greatest master is practically, round about us, a bankrupt and a discredited art (discredited, of course, I mean, for any directed and noticed attention), than this very fact that we are so ready to beg off from knowing anything about him. Perfunctory rites, even, at present, are seldom rendered; and amid the flood of verbiage for which the thousand new novels of the season find themselves a pretext in the newspapers, the name of the man who is really the father of us all, as we stand, is scarcely more mentioned than if he were not of the family."

The following passages are remarkable examples of suggestive and imaginative criticism:

"The lyrical element is not great, is in fact not present at all, in Balzac, in Scott (the Scott of the voluminous prose), nor in Thackeray, nor in Dickens-which is precisely why they are so essentially novelists, so almost exclusively lovers of the image of life. It is great, or it is at all events largely present, in such a writer as George Sand-which is doubtless why we take her for a novelist in a much looser sense than the others we have named. It is considerable in that bright particular genius of our own day, George Meredith, who so strikes us as hitching winged horses to the chariot of his prose - steeds who prance and dance and caracole, who strain the traces, attempt to quit the ground, and yearn for the upper air. Balzac, with huge feet fairly plowing the sand of our desert, is, on the other hand, the very type and model of the projector and creator; so that when I think, either with envy or with terror, of the nature and the effort of the novelist, I think of some

That is why

thing that reaches its highest expression in him. those of us who, as fellow craftsmen, have once caught a glimpse of this value in him, can never quite rest from hanging about him; that is why he seems to have all that the others have to tell us, with more, besides, that is all his own. He lived and breathed in his medium, and the fact that he was able to achieve in it, as man and as artist, so crowded a career, remains for us one of the most puzzling problems —I scarce know whether to say of literature or of life. He is himself a figure more extraordinary than any he drew, and the fascination may still be endless of all the questions he put to us and of the answers for which we feel ourselves helpless.

"He died, as we sufficiently remember, at fifty-worn out with work and thought and passion; the passion, I mean, that he had put into his mighty plan and that had ridden him like an infliction of the gods. He began, a friendless and penniless young provincial, to write early, and to write very badly, and it was not till well toward his thirtieth year, with the conception of the Comédie Humaine,' as we all again remember, that he found his right ground, found his feet and his voice. This huge distributed, divided, and subdivided picture of the life of France in his time, a picture bristling with imagination and information, with fancies and facts and figures, a world of special and general insight, a rank tropical forest of detail and specification, but with the strong breath of genius forever circulating through it and shaking the treetops to a mighty murmur, got itself hung before us in the space of twenty short years. The achievement remains one of the most inscrutable, one of the unfathomable, final facts in the history of art, and if, as I have said, the author himself has his own surpassing objectivity, it is just because of this challenge his figure constitutes for any other painter of life, inflamed with ingenuity, who should feel the temptation to represent or explain him."

“Out of what mines, by what innumerable tortuous channels, in what endless winding procession of laden chariots and tugging teams and marching elephants," asks Mr. James, "did the immense consignments required for his work reach him?" The lessons of Balzac, he goes on to say, are extremely various. Having to choose among them, he selects "the three or four that more or less include the others." To quote in part:

In reading him over, in opening him almost anywhere to-day, what immediately strikes us is the part assigned by him, in any picture, to the conditions of the creatures with whom he is concerned. Contrasted with him other prose painters of life scarce seem to see the conditions at all. He clearly held pretended portrayals as nothing, as less than nothing, as a most vain thing, unless it should be, in spirit and intention, the art of complete representation.

"There is no such thing in the world as an adventure pure and simple; there is only mine and yours, and his and hers-it being the greatest adventure of all, I verily think, just to be you or I, just to be he or she. To Balzac's imagination that was indeed in itself an immense adventure-and nothing appealed to him more than to show how we all are, and how we are placed and built-in for being What befalls us is but another name for the way our circumstances press upon us - so that an account of what befalls us is an account of our circumstances.

So.

"Add to this, then, that the fusion of all the elements of the picture, under his hand, is complete-of what people are with what they do, of what they do with what they are, of the action with the agents, of the medium with the action, of all the parts of the drama with each other. Such a production as Le Père Goriot,' for example, or as ' Eugénie Grandet,' or as ' Le Curé de Village,' has, in respect to this fusion, a kind of inscrutable perfection.

·

Many of us may stray, but he always remains—he is fixed by virtue of his weight. So far as we do move, we move round him; every road comes back to him; he sits there, in spite of us, so massively, for orientation. Heavy' therefore if we like, but heavy because weighted with his fortune; the extraordinary fortune that has survived all the extravagance of his career, his twenty years of royal intellectual spending, and that has done so by reason of the rare value of the original property-the high, prime genius so tied-up from him that that was safe. And ' that,' through all that has come and gone, has steadily, has enormously appreciated. Let us then also, if we see him, in the sacred grove, as our towering idol, see him as gilded thick, with so much goldplated and burnished and bright, in the manner of towering idols."

SCIENCE AND INVENTION.

OIL FUEL AS THE SALVATION OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.

TH

HERE seems little connection, at first sight, between the use of oil as fuel and the successful raising of fruit; yet in Southern California, we are told, the one has brought about the other, the success of the fruit crop being dependent on cheap irrigation from wells, which is furnished by pumps driven by the combustion of fuel-oil. The first thing that strikes one who is looking for significant industrial facts in the country west of Denver, writes an editorial correspondent of The American Machinist (New York, July 27), is the use of this new fuel. He goes on to say:

"Fuel-oil has been nothing less than the salvation of Southern California, even the great fruit-growing industry depending almost absolutely upon it, for the water with which the fruit lands of this section of the State are irrigated is almost wholly pumped from the ground by gasoline engines. In the north, through the San Joaquin Valley, this is true to a much less extent. Much of the water is there obtained by diversion of the streams which result from the melting snows of the Sierras, and much of it is also obtained from the ground by the use of pumps driven by electricity -current for driving these pumps being obtained, in large measure, from those long-distance transmission plants, of which many descriptions have appeared in the electrical papers. Still, even in this section, the gasoline engine is largely used.

rest.

"In the southern portion of the State, irrigation began by the use of the streams, the use of the water constantly increasing, until an unusually dry year came, and when this was repeated a number of times in succession, things began to look very much like blue ruin for the entire section. Then it was that some one with a little knowledge of geology reasoned that the lower strata ought to be water-bearing, and he sank a well to prove his theory. The water was found, and a gasoline engine and centrifugal pump did the Later on, the price of gasoline, under the influence of the demand for automobiles, began to soar, and things were again looking serious when a slight modification of the gasoline engine, by which it was adapted to the use of distillate, again saved the day. This term, distillate, was a new one to me when I first heard it in Los Angeles, and it may be new to many of the readers of these columns. It signifies a product obtained by the distillation of certain grades of California petroleum which lies between gasoline and kerosene. These petroleums contain but little gasoline or kerosene, but they do contain a fair percentage of distillate, which, fortunately for Southern California farmers, is not well adapted to the exacting demands of the automobile. It must, consequently, find its chief market in irrigation plants, and thus far its price has remained at a figure—about five cents a gallon— which makes it a very cheap source of power, and through it and the centrifugal pump which it drives, the reclamation of Southern California is due, for it must be remembered that the land which is now almost tropical in its luxuriance of verdure was formerly essentially a desert, and but for these agencies it would be a desert still."

In this part of the State, the writer goes on to say, rights over water pumped from the ground are limited by law. A farmer may pump from his own land such water as he needs, but he may neither sell nor waste it. The object is to prevent the formation of water companies, which, by draining the water from a section, could practically monopolize it. This law has been extremely beneficial. To quote further:

“The usual irrigation well of this section is 12 inches in diameter, and is sunk to a depth of from 200 to 400 feet. When the water-bearing stratum is reached, the water rises, however, to within about 40 feet of the surface, at about which point the pump is placed, the well being enlarged to about 7 feet square down to this depth.

"The demand for pumps and engines for irrigation purposes has led to a large development in the manufacture of these machines in California. It is claimed, indeed, that California is the birthplace

of both the gasoline engine and of the modern high-efficiency centrifugal pump."

A peculiarity of these Pacific-Coast oil engines is the introduction of water with the charge. Regarding the action of this water, the writer confesses ignorance, and probably it is not yet thoroughly understood, but its effect is to give a slower burning mixture and to permit a higher compression. The author re

sumes:

"The use of crude oil in these engines is by a device called a generator, which is entirely distinct from the vaporizer used with gasoline engines. The generator consists, generally, of a small enclosed wheel revolving on a horizontal shaft. The wheel carries upon its circumference a series of pockets into which the oil is fed, drop by drop. The wheel is heated by the exhaust gases and the gas distilled from it is used in the engine in the ordinary way, except that after passing the generator it is further heated by the exhaust. Meanwhile, as the wheel revolves, the residuum from the oil is dropped from the pockets and is periodically removed. The engine is started with gasoline or distillate.

"Particulars regarding the use of water in the charge and of the generator are very carefully guarded. The makers of these engines on the Pacific Coast consider that they are, and always have been, in advance of Eastern makers,with whom, however, they are in competition, and they decline as yet to publish the details of their practise."

THAT

THE AMERICAN BREED.

HAT there is an "American Breed" possessing distinct and definable characteristics, and that these are generally of high sociological value, is the opinion of Prof. Edward A. Ross, of the University of Nebraska, who includes a chapter on "The Value Rank of the American People" in his recent work on “The Foundations of Sociology." The formation of the American type, Professor Ross thinks, has been due, not to climate nor to interbreeding, but to true selection-only men and women of particularly hardy and independent character venturing to cross the ocean before the days of assisted immigration. This energy of our ancestors has been transmitted to their descendants and is now their most salient characteristic. Says the author:

"The energy and spirit of the original European element have been intensified by the innumerable internal migrations that have carried the white race entirely across the continent. It is the more ambitious and spirited that have gone West,' and since the younger and more flourishing communities have had the higher rate of natural increase, a large part of the American element in our population are descended from men who had the mettle and pluck to become pioneers. .

We see it [energy of will] in the saurian ferocity of business competition, in the whirl of activity that leaves neurasthenia, heart failure, and Bright's disease in its wake, in the reluctance to 'retire' betimes, in the killing pace of our working men, in the swift conquest of the wilderness, in our faith in efficiency as the only goal of education. No people pardons more to the successful man or holds the persistently poor in such pitying contempt as weaklings that can not get into the game.

64

In sport or in battle no one will stand more punishment than he. Body, appetites. inclinations-all are gripped in the iron vise of his will. Unsparing of himself, he is reckless in sacrificing others. His impulses are kindly, but wo to those whose rights or lives block his way!"

Anthropologically, Professor Ross believes that we have reached our zenith, or perhaps have passed it, for he fears that the killing-off of "the granite men who fell at Gettysburg and Cold Harbor," and the influx of foreigners subsequent to the Civil War, have not improved the breed. Still, the writer is by no means anti-foreign. Says The Inter Ocean (Chicago, July 21), in an editorial notice of his book:

"Regarding the flood of immigration, Professor Ross holds that

THE

HE usual explanation of a "natural bridge" is that it is the remainder of a cavern roof, most of which has caved in. In a paper contributed to The American Journal of Science (New Haven, Conn., August), H. F. Cleland gives his reasons for thinking that this mode of formation is exceptional and that different bridges have been formed in various ways, chiefly by the undermining action of a stream that has found its way through a deep fissure in the rock. The writer was led to this conclusion by studying the natural bridge spanning Hudson Brook at North Adams, Mass., which is shown in the accompanying picture. This bridge is forty-four feet high and eight feet thick, and is of a coarse marble of the Stockbridge formation. Says Mr. Cleland:

"The explanation of the formation of the North Adams Natural Bridge, as given by Hitchcock and accepted by Hovey, is that it is the section of the roof of a cavern, the ends of which have fallen

the width of the joints, and the fact that the stream has, for a portion of its course, followed the joint planes. In the upper part of the accompanying sketch the relation of the stream to the joint planes is indicated by the dotted lines A-A. The channel through which the stream flowed previous to the formation of the bridge is also well marked a few feet to the west at B. A pot-hole, situated near the edge of the gorge at B, is further evidence of the former position of the brook.

Dam

A

Bridge B

"The bridge was probably formed as follows: When the stream flowed into the gorge through the ancient channel, it plunged over a fall into the pre-glacial valley. Some of the water in the joint plane nearest the present bridge seeped through an approximately horizontal crack a short distance under the present arch of the bridge. The solvent power of the water containing carbon dioxide gradually increased the size of the crack until it was still further enlarged by the erosion of the stream. The stream was finally entirely diverted from its former channel at B to its present course. The gorge from the dam to the pre-glacial valley is a succession of broken pot-holes, varying in size up to six or eight feet in diameter, showing that after the tunnel was made the gorge was largely excavated in this way. The pre-glacial valley in which the Hudson Brook flows below the gorge is broad but to some extent choked with glacial drift."

Pre-glacial valley

Courtesy of "The American Journal of Scie..ce."

SKETCH MAP OF HUDSON BROOK, MASS. Showing the position of the natural bridge, the joint planes A-A, and the pre-glacial valley.

The origin of the famous Natural Bridge of Lexington, Va., as explained by Walcott, was similar, but on a larger scale, Mr. Cleland tells us. In this case the underground passage must have been longer than at present, but whether 100 feet or several hundred can not be said. The recently discovered Utah bridges, described some time ago in these columns, were formed in like manner, Mr. Cleland thinks, except that as the rock was sandstone the process could not have been entirely one of solution, except so far as the cementing agent of the stone was concerned. The loose remaining sand was probably simply washed down stream. In the case of these bridges, which are hundreds of feet high and correspondingly wide, any explanation requiring a tunnel of great extent would seem to be untenable. Finally, the writer describes a small but interesting bridge in the Yellowstone Park, cut in rhyolite, where the peculiar platy structure of this variety of lava has aided in the excavation. He goes on to say:

"The formation of lava bridges is usually explained as follows: The surface of a lava flow cools and hardens while the interior is still in a molten condition. As a result of this condition, if the molten rock beneath continues to flow, a tunnel will result. Such tunnels are of common occurrence on Mount Vesuvius, the volcanoes of the Western States, and in other volcanic regions. From such a tunnel a bridge might be formed by the caving in of the greater part of the roof. :. The structure of the lava of which the Yellowstone Natural Bridge is formed shows that such an explanation is untenable in this case at least, the rock being composed of approximately vertical plates of lava of different degrees of compact

as commonly supposed, it would be unusual to find that a surface stream had once been superimposed upon the cavern for its entire length. There is, for example, seldom any relation between the surface topography of a country and the underground passages of extensive caves.

'Occasionally a small natural bridge occurs near the opening of a cavern or where a spring flows from beneath a cliff. Such a bridge is the sandstone arch spanning a spring which emerges from beneath the sandstone capping of Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, Tenn. The bridge is formed by the widening of a transverse joint, first by weathering alone and later by the combined action of weathering and erosion, thus separating the bridge from the cliff. The breadth of the span was increased largely by weathering. "The conclusion to which one is led by this study of natural bridges from different parts of the United States and composed of various kinds of rocks-marble, limestone, sandstone, and lavais that, altho bridges may be formed, and undoubtedly have occasionally been formed, by the partial falling in of the roof of a long underground tunnel, the usual mode of formation is that described above. It should, however, be said that examples exist concerning which it is difficult to say which mode of formation was the more prominent."

Courtesy of "The American Inventor."

THE TRANSPLANTER LOADED WITH A LARGE OAK.
Ready to be planted into foreign soil.

transplanted one hundred coco-trees more than sixty feet tall, and over seventy years old, transporting them many miles on wagons, and by raft across two rivers. The trees bore fruit during the first year after being transplanted. In England, in 1880, two noted trees, a yew and a cedar of Lebanon, each 1,100 years old, and weighing about sixty tons, were successfully transplanted. Remarkable work in large tree transplanting has been done in Paris. The foreign method, Mr. Clegg says, has always been to dig a trench about the tree, then by undermining the earth and roots to place heavy timbers under them; the trees are then jacked up and put upon wagons or rollers to be hauled at great expense to their destination. In this country most early attempts in this line were failures. A transplanter was patented in 1887, but, according to Mr. Clegg, it has lacked success owing to the fact that it lifts or pulls the tree by its trunk, injuring the bark and generally resulting in its death. He goes on to say:

"Years of experience showed that the failures in large tree transplanting result mostly from injuries received by the bark on the trunk of the tree; either by severe bending of the trunk or the breaking of the bark where the tree comes in contact with the fulcrum over which the tree is forced from the ground.

"The bark is the most tender as well as the most vital part of

Courtesy of "The American Imventor."

AT WORK ON A LARGE TREE WITH THE TRANSPLANTER, SHOWING METHOD OF UPROOTING.