THE

BAYARD TAYLOR.

HE life of Bayard Taylor was so varied and so busy that a mere catalog of his industry would fill a small volume, yet Prof. Albert H. Smyth has managed to get into a small and handy book a great deal more than catalogic information. Professor Smyth says in his introduction that Pennsylvania has not been well treated by the historians of American literature. He notes the fact that only twelve of the one hundred and sixty poets recorded in "Griswold's Cemetery," as Dr. Holmes called "The Poets and Poetry of America," are Pennsylvanians. But passing over Professor Smyth's exceedingly interesting introductory remarks, we take up the thread of his narrative. Bayard Taylor's father, Joseph, was a direct descendant in the sixth generation of Robert Taylor, of Little Leigh, Cheshire, England, who came over with William Penn, and settled in Chester county, Pennsylvania. We are

child of this marriage. Through his mother he was related to the ancient family of the Mendenhalls. Professor Smyth says: "Altho Joseph Taylor was not a member of the Society of Friends, his children were instructed in Quaker manners and beliefs, and upon Quaker principles the steadfast faith and simple morals of Bayard Taylor rested. His mother's earnest teaching of non-resistance and the sin of swearing had its legitimate fruit in 'the chastity of temperate blood' and 'the settled faith that nothing shakes.' Once, after a homily upon swearing, the lad was seized with such a desire to swear that he went forth alone into a field, and there 'snatched a fearful joy' by cleansing his stuffed bosom of all the perilous oaths he had ever heard. The childish mutiny was a portent of his future rebellion against the 'pious Quaker repression' of which he speaks in 'Home Pastorals':

men.

'Weary am I with all this preaching the force of example, Painful duty to self, and painfuller still to one's neighbor, Moral shibboleths, dinned in one's ears with slavering unction, Till, for the sake of a change, profanity loses its terrors.'"

says

Bayard Taylor had among his literary contemporaries many detractors. Malicious falsehoods concerning him, Professor Smyth, were invented and circulated. One epigrammatic fiction more ingenious than the rest was widely repeated. To quote : "It has become one of the best-known anecdotes of literary The bare mention of the name of Bayard Taylor is sufficient to recall the statement that Humboldt once said that of all men he had ever known Taylor had traveled the farthest and had seen the least. The story was witty, and it had an air of verisimilitude. It was such a thing as Humboldt might have said, for Taylor made no pretensions to scientific knowledge; he did not assume to know scientifically the geology and the sociology of the countries he visited. The things over which the author of

'Cosmos' would have paused in delighted surprise Taylor does not see or at least says nothing about. He sketches the gay, the bizarre, the exterior life of the countries that he visits. The story nevertheless was entirely without foundation and was invented by Park Benjamin, who, upon his death-bed, acknowledged having originated it."

As samples of the nuggets of this delving into the life of Taylor we gather the following:

"Grace Greenwood tells of an interesting, afternoon in the Old Corner Bookstore in Boston, when Taylor, in a weary and a somewhat petulant mood, dissuaded her from lecturing, saying that it was an occupation full of misery, that he himself detested it, and that an audience seemed to him no other thing than a collection of cabbage-heads. A few minutes later Mr. Emerson congratulated her upon the thought of lecturing, saying that there was recompense for all the hardships of the work in the kind words and the smiling faces and the bright eyes of the audience. "T. Buchanan Read took him to Hammersmith to call on Leigh Hunt, then seventy-three years old. Hunt showed him his curious collection of locks of hair of the poets. 'That thin tuft of brown silky fibers,' writes Taylor, describing his visit, 'could it really have been shorn from Milton's head? I asked myself. "Touch it," said Leigh Hunt, "and then you will have touched Milton's self." "There is a love in hair, tho it be dead," said I, as I did so, repeating a line from Hunt's own sonnet on this lock.

"At the Piræus Taylor saw Mrs. Black, 'the Maid of Athens' to whom Byron sang in impossible and ungrammatical Greek. Mavrocordatos, old and blind, the friend and ally of Byron, was still living. Dr. Schöll, in whose arms Otfried Müller died, and who was one of the physicians who attended upon Byron at Missolonghi, recounted the closing scene of the poet's life to Taylor, while Mr. Finlay, the historian of Medieval Greece, told him the circumstances under which Byron contracted his fatal illness."

Professor Smyth observes that Taylor's education came largely from travel; that "he picked his knowledge from the living bush." "He was not sure of the correctness of the Latin title of his poem, 'Notus Ignoto.' He was fifty before he took up the study of Greek." Dipping further into the book, we make another ex

tract:

Bayard Taylor was never more delighted than when in Iceland he was called 'the American Skald.' Nothing kindled his pride and his pleasure like praise of his poetry. His fame as a traveler and a journalist, however wide and secure, was slightly weighed by him; and the superficial repute that came with lecturing and with editing brought him regret rather than satisfac tion. The laurels he coveted were far other than these. In his inmost heart, nourishing his wonderful vitality, burned a sacred and unquenchable ambition to bear the name of poet, and to be reckoned with those great singers who have flashed the torch of spiritual life above the throngs of men. All other efforts and aspirations were subordinated to this absorbing passion. No praise of his miscellaneous achievements, when he was winning and wearing proud distinction in statecraft, in scholarship, and in letters, could reconcile him to the slightest sense of failure in his poetic endeavor. He toiled terribly, he exhausted himself with the multitude of his tasks, 'he wore himself out and perished prematurely of hard and sometimes bitter work.' The recom pense was in the sweet silent hours-'the holy hours,' as Klopstock called them-dedicated to poetry. He was saved from the cyni cism and hardness that are often the consequence of such companionship and such toil as were sometimes his in New York, not only by the sweetness and gentleness of his disposition but by the refreshing and purifying influence of his single-hearted devotion to the highest poetry.

childlike purity and joyousness of heart he owed to the worship George Henry Boker well says: 'His

. . He be

of an art for which his reverence was boundless. lieved himself to be a poet-of what stature and quality it is now for the world to decide-and in that faith he wrought at his voca tion with an assiduity and a careful husbanding of his time and opportunities for mental and for written poetical composition, that was wonderful as an exhibition of human industry, and in its many and varied results, when we take into consideration his wandering life and his diversified and exacting employments. "The passion to be remembered with those who in song have

One more quotation:

"His early life had been warped by sentimentality and cribbed by repression. Two centuries of Quaker ancestry had condemned him to slow development. From the first there was a purely literary strain in his blood, but the nice sense of proportion and of harmony was slowly arrived at. He was, he said, ten years behind every other American author; but when those who had the start of him flowered and ceased, he was stepping on with quick impatience to more novel experiments and to more conspicuous results. The really great things of which he was capable were still before him when he died, with more unfulfilled renown and unaccomplished growth within him than any other man in American letters."

AN

STEVENSON'S ECCENTRIC DRESS.

N opposite neighbor of Stevenson's in Edinburgh-Eva Blantyre Simpson-but one who never met him "till the century had left middle age behind it and was well over its threescore and ten," writes entertainingly about him in The Independent. Among other things she gives this fine little insight of his spirit of fun :

"Louis was brought up on the Shorter Catechism, and that 'Sabbath observance which makes a series of grim and perhaps serviceable pauses in the tenor of Scotch boyhood,' of which he wrote. He was astonished and puzzled to find we younger members of a 'long' family had eluded the catechism, and only knew a few meter psalms and paraphrases to prate if reviewed. He once persisted he heard us wrangling as to whether there were eleven or twelve Commandments. Finding we denied, and were offended by this statement, he was profuse in his apologies, tho he stuck to his doubts as to the knowledge thereof of the Scotch heathen, as he dubbed us.

It is well known that Stevenson evaded as far as possible every conventional demand concerning dress. How he had to be managed may be gathered from the following recital:

"He was very sensitive to ridicule, which made him merciful on the tender points in the feelings of others. We used to amalgamate to heckle him on his shabbiness and peculiarities of dress, which drew adverse remarks upon him. With many vehement gesticulations he would protest they did not arise from affectation. I verily believe that he stuck to his long hair, his velveteen jacket, from the 'accent of his mind' that abhorred conventionality and social fetters. One evening the grime of town was on his white flannel shirt. He was called on to note how his friends' orthodox starched linen had withstood the November fog. He appeared joyously a few evenings after in a black flannel one. When it was suggested he should number the collars of his new garments so as to allow the world to know when he put one on afresh, the triumphant light faded from his face and he fell in a dismayed heap into his corner of the sofa, burying his face in his slender, invalidy hands, while his long hair fell in lank locks over them. The black flannels turned rusty in the tub and were shortly abandoned. When the friend whose voice 'rang in the empty vestibules of youth "On an Islet, was going to be married, Stevenson had to officiate as groomsman. He allowed himself to be led to the tailor's and had his clothes ordered for him. Their rigidity terrified him. He begged for a velvet collar to a frock coat, a gayer waistcoat; but his tailor, backed by his two companions, remonstrated: 'On this occasion you must allow me to use my judgment; you can order what eccentricities you like when you have only yourself to please.' This quelled him, but these clothes were a source of childish interest to him. He dressed at our house, as his people were at their cottage under the shadow of the Pentlands. He felt so unique in orthodox attire

we had difficulty in persuading him we were not chaffing, when we did not laugh when he appeared. Just as we thought he had started, he rushed back and stood on a chair to see himself once more in the sideboard mirror, and with a smile of incredulous amusement he sallied forth, apprehensively fearing jeers from an astonished people. He came in one Sunday evening, saying he had gone to church with his parents in these 'marriage garments.' He was quite chagrined they were so pleased at his appearance, and he kept marveling that what to him was a singular garb had drawn no wondering notice down on his tall-hatted head.

Another suit of ordinary clothes, some one had cajoled him into buying, cost him an evil quart d'heure. They were very light-colored tweeds, and he wore them one day when he joined us in London. He called on us constantly for admiration, and we flattered him nobly, for he was full of the guileless transparent vanity of a child. Walking up the pathway by Holland House some smut fell, and Stevenson fled-a light-robed, thin form scudding along the alley-till breathless he stopped and turned a terrified look back, asking, 'Have any blacks fallen on my angel clothes?' The question suggested a means to chastise his overweening pride. We pretended to remove the offending body from the angelic coat-abused the clumsiness of an assisting brother for smudging a smut on to the anxious victim's shoulder. He walked on, sadly ill at ease. We were possessed by demons of chaff-we rubbed in that imaginary smudge, condoling and suggesting remedies, while Louis tried to see it himself in plate-glass windows. We were hard-hearted. His pained, nearly weeping expression only urged us on to further flights of fancy, till he tore off his angel coat in the High Street, Kensington. Seeing it still immaculate, the weight of anxiety passed off his face. Then he cast a reproachful glance at us; but with a smile in eyes and lips said, pathetically: 'Eh-you two brutes, to misquote a well-known author.' After deliberating if it were warm enough to allow him to continue his walk in his shirt sleeves, he very leisurely resumed his coat, and the crowd which was gathering dispersed."

NOTES.

IN a critical notice of "New Poems by Christina Rossetti, hitherto unpublished or uncollected, edited by W. M. Rossetti," Mr. Edmund Gosse says, in The St. James's Gazette: "These 'New Poems' are, to a very large extent, not finished compositions at all; they are studies or fragments, they are canvases smudged in and turned with their face to the wall. They are often variations on a theme which the artist treated elsewhere with complete success. Mr. Rossetti, in his conscientious way, prints them all with their dates, so that we can see what were rejected from 'Goblin Market'in 1862, what from the volume of 1866, what from the 'Poems' of 1875; they are the very chips from Miss Christina's workshop. The moral is, of course, that carpenters should burn their chips. If authors wish to be remembered only by their best they should guard against conscientious executors, and the only perfect protection is the fireplace. In short, by leaving out all the unfinished poems, all the trivial domestic pieces, all the verses in Italian, all the 'Juvenile' section, and all the experiments and repetitions, Mr. Rossetti might have prepared for us a little book of 100 pages, largely leaded, in which the life-work of his celebrated sister might have closed in dignity. As it is, he has given occasion to the indifferent to blaspheme, and has forgotten the warning of Bacon, that 'the majesty of good things is such that the confines of them should be revered.'"

IN a New York letter to The Literary World, Boston, Mr. John D. Barry says: "We have been hearing of late so much about the enormous prices paid to popular authors that one might fancy that literature had changed from one of the least remunerative to one of the most lucrative of the professions. Such, however, is far from being the truth. I have sometimes wondered if the mass of writers who live by their pens do not severely suffer from the high payment which the few who are on the top wave of public favor are able to command. At any rate, I frequently hear in New York of the very low rates paid by certain periodicals, which are, nevertheless, overstocked with available material of good quality. A few months ago the editor of a publication with many thousands of readers announced to his contributors that in future his rate of payment would be reduced by fifty per cent. ; yet he seems to be able to retain nearly all of his former writers! What a commentary this is on the state of the literary market of the present time!"

THE opinions of Sarah Grand on Mr. Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" and Mr. Grant Allen's "The Woman Who Did" are interesting. To an interviewer of The Humanitarian she said: I have a great respect for Mr. Hardy's genius, but I can not make out whether he intended to teach anything by 'Jude the Obscure.' The work is colossal in strength, but ethically it is amorphous. I perceive no special teaching in it." Her reply to the question, "What do you think of 'The Woman Who Did"?" was more pointed. "It seems to me," she said, "that Mr. Grant Allen wants us to return to the customs of the poultry-yard."

ARTIFICIAL WHIRLWINDS AND WATER

STUDY

SPOUTS.

TUDY of great atmospheric movements, which is very difficult, owing to their complexity, is in some ways best carried on by experiment. How this is possible is described by M. A. Cornu. This well-known French physicist, in a récent lecture, parts of which we translate from the Revue Scientifique (Paris, February 15), says:

"The phenomena produced by the rapid rotation of the atmosphere are altogether unique by reason of the singularity of the forces brought into action. The ordinary laws of mechanics, to which daily experience has accustomed us, appear entirely different from those that cyclonic movements seem to obey, but this ought not to surprise us. We have reduced mechanics to its simplest elements-the material point, the constant force, the rectilinear motion; thanks to these simplifications we have been able to treat very well of the motion of spherical projectiles, that of a pendulum, the rotation of a top, etc. But as soon as the solid body becomes of complex form, when the motion that it can assume includes both translation and rotation, our imagination represents it with difficulty, and if to this complication of form is added the resistance of a surrounding medium, then we can have

no longer any idea of the probable resultant effect; witness the boomerang. As to the movements of fluids, they are so difficult for us to predict that we are always surprised when we handle a vessel full of water; when the mass of liquid is considerable, the turbulent motions that we cause involuntarily in it are always likely to make us do some careless thing.

"It may, then, be imagined how impossible we find it to foresee the movements of the atmosphere, whose mass is immense, for each cubic meter [yard] weighs1,300 grams [11⁄2 pounds]; the energy exerted to set such masses in motion is considerable, and, inversely, the stability of the system is enormous, since this energy must be dissipated by passive resistances, chiefly friction on the earth's surface."

Instead, then, of learning FIG. 1.-Artificial Reproduction of about atmospheric motions from Natural Gyratory Phenomena. calculation, the easiest way is to illustrate them by experiment. A number of such illustrations have been devised by Charles Weyher and they are illustrated here. In one, a sphere composed of ten circular pieces (see Fig. 2) is put in rapid rotation and is found to draw in air at the poles and throw it out again at the equator. That the force of the former movement predominates is shown by the fact that a light balloon, as in the illustration, is attracted to the whirling sphere and circles around it as a satellite. If a basin of warm water be placed below the sphere a miniature waterspout will be produced, a phenomenon shown in a more striking manner by a modification of the apparatus, illustrated above (Fig. 1). Its action is described by the author as follows:

"The rotary fan is placed at the top of a box six feet high, with a glass side; the water slightly heated and having a little soap dissolved in it, is placed in a basin at the bottom. I set the fan

going; you soon see the agitation produced in the water, the soap bubbles falling around the foot of a column of vapor; soon the column takes the . . aspect of a natural waterspout; at the bottom, a fountain of bubbles and drops; above, the drawn-out form of a tube of vapor. A light balloon placed at the surface of the water is at first drawn to the center and held captive there; by accelerating the rotation, which increases the power of the

FIG. 2.-Artificial Reproduction of Natural Gyratory Phenomena. ascending, the other descending; it is a perpetual up-and-down movement between the fan above and the surface of the water. As all the currents turn in the same direction, if those that ascend describe right-handed spirals, those that descend describe lefthanded spirals. The failure to recognize this double movement of ascent and descent has caused an eternal misunderstanding between the partizans of ascending currents in whirlwinds and those who maintain that there are only descending ones.

"The ascensional movement of light balloons carried up by the vortex shows the ascending current very well; it is more difficult to put in evidence the descending region (referred to in certain theories as the only

one that exists) because it occupies an extremely small space; it is confined to the interior of the nebulous column, which by its dark shade denotes a central void; I can nevertheless show it to you by the aid of a very simple artifice. If we hold at the top of the spout a smoke-emitting body we shall see this smoke sucked into the interior of the column, assume the form of an inverted cone, and descend toward the surface of the wat

er. This is exactly what we see in nature when, in that waterspout, the clouds descend in

a spindle - shaped Pu

FIG. 3.-Double Direction of the Currents in a Waterspout.

It

massthat meets the center of the column formed by the water at the surface of the foaming sea. is possible to form this waterspout in conditions identical with those met with in nature, and the experiment has been made; it is sufficient to place in a corner of the hall a small boiler whose vapor is conducted by a tube to the upper part of the apparatus represented in the illustration. The aerial whirl seizes this ar

tificial cloud and forms it into an inverted cone whose point is drawn out and descends into the interior of the spout. . . . This is the inoffensive part of the waterspout, so to speak; the terrible part is invisible, it is formed by the air that whirls around this In the experiment just performed the inverse is true; the outer whirl is visible, thanks to the vapor that has been furnished to it; the interior spindle remains dark. Only the introduction of the smoke shows its existence and form."-Translated for THE LITERARY DIGEST.

core.

I

THE BEST KIND OF BREAD.

T has been recognized for some time that the modern processes for making fine wheat flour are lessening the value of the grain as a food by removing some of its most necessary constituents. By some it has been thought that the bran contained these constituents, and they have sought to remedy the matter by adding it to bolted flour. That this does not go far enough in some respects, altho it goes too far in others, is shown by a review of the subject in the Paris edition of the New York Herald (February 9), parts of which we quote below:

"We have only to consider the composition of the wheat-berry, and to know what portions of it are used for the bread we eat, to realize the amount of material that is wasted in the present system of panification.

"Proceeding from the outside to the inside of the wheat-berry is composed of the following portions: 1. An external wrapping, or episperm, containing only fibers, fatty and aromatic substances, and salts, representing 14.36 per cent. of the total weight of the berry. 2. A farinaceous portion, "equal to 84.21 of the total weight, and whose richness in starch increases from the periphery to the center, whereas the amount of gluten and phosphates increases from the center to the periphery. 3. The germ, or embryo, which is only equal to 1.43 of the weight of the berry, but is very rich in phosphates and in nitrogenous and fatty substances.

"The mineral substances are composed largely of very assimilable phosphates; they are chiefly to be found in the germ, or embryo, which is usually thrown away with the other unused parts, especially now that milling-stones have been replaced by metallic cylinders, and their richness in nitrogenous and fatty matter is relatively considerable. The layer of starch that sticks to the inner layer of the episperm, and is hard to separate from it, remains with the gray meal that is not mixed with the fine white flour, or white meal, for fear of altering the color of the bread.

"In this way is produced a flour of good quality, containing only six grams of mineral substances, whereas the kilogram of wheat that furnished it contains ten. The difference is so marked that the time seems to have come to use every possible effort to find some way of remedying it."

That this is a state of things that really requires a remedy is shown by the fact that these mineral substances-the phosphates -are absolutely necessary for the development of bone and muscle, so much so that phosphates are now administered medicinally in many cases where iron was formerly given. We are thus removing from our food and throwing away the substances that we are forced to take later in the shape of expensive medicinal preparations. To resume the quotation:

"From what we have said it will have been seen that as regards introducing phosphates into our daily food it would be very advantageous to use not only the germs, but the most peripheral gray and red portions of the grain. Bread will only be entire when it contains all the truly alimentary portions of the wheatberry. "This, however, is very different from what is meant by persons who consider entire bread as ordinary bread to which the bran has been added. Once more let it be said that the only bread worthy of such a denomination is that made with flour containing all the assimilable elements of the wheat by being sent a number of times through the grinding surfaces. The difficulty is to separate by bolting the coarse bran which is of no use from the starchy portions that adhere so closely to the fine bran that lines the coarse wrapping of the berry..

"There is evidently a happy medium to be found between bread that is too white and the too entire bread that certain enthusiasts wish to impose upon us as the ideal of bakery, and which by containing a great deal of bran is useful to persons whose intestinal functions are not what they should be, but is of no advantage to healthy persons. The country bread, pain de ménage, which was formerly so extensively used, is both nourishing and agreeable to the taste, and we regret very much that this bread has gradually disappeared from use in large cities as being an inferior article. "Majendie demonstrated a long time ago that dogs fed exclusively on white bread die in fifty days, whereas they live, and without signs of falling off, on coarse bread. These experiments, which were made many years back, should not have been forgotten, and amply warrant the campaign that has been undertaken in favor of entire bread."

THIS

WHAT IS A POISON?

HIS question is propounded to the editor of The National Druggist by a correspondent who criticizes the definition of the word "poison" as given by many of the dictionaries. Says this correspondent:

"Webster says a poison is 'any agent which, when introduced into the animal organism, is capable of producing a morbid, noxious, or deadly effect.' Now, should there not be a limitation in regards quantity of the substance? It seems so to me; because there is scarcely a substance known which, if taken too freely, will not produce morbid, noxious, and even deadly effects."

To this query The Druggist replies editorially as follows: "Your criticism of the definition given by Webster is entirely justifiable. The définition of the word given in Dunglison's Medical Dictionary is almost identical with that of Webster, and so is that of Dr. Billings in his great National Medical Dictionary. An English authority, whose name escapes us, defines a poison as 'a drug that kills rapidly when administered in small quantity,' which, while it gives the element missing (the limitation referred to by the querist), is far more liable to criticism than those quoted. All poisons are by no means drugs-as witness the poison of typhus, of malaria, etc. A celebrated English toxicologist, recently deceased, we believe, Dr. Melmott Tidey, defined a poison as 'any substance which, otherwise than by the agency of heat or electricity, is capable of destroying life by chemical action or its physiological effects upon the system.' This, too, is not entirely satisfactory, as admitted by the author who confessed the difficulty of giving a true and comprehensive definition. If it were true, there is scarcely a substance in the whole armamentarium of medicine that would not fall under the term. Nobody, for instance, thinks or speaks of quinin as a poison, and yet there are numerous instances recorded wherein it has caused death, to say nothing of the 'morbid' and 'noxious' effects of which we have ample evidence every day. Glycerin, too, merely a feeble laxative when taken into the stomach through the mouth, when introduced into the animal organism' by direct injection into the blood causes extreme nervous perturbation, and, in the lower animals, death.

"It would seem to us, therefore, that the following definition would be more nearly correct and comprehensive:

Any substance which, if introduced into a living organism in small amount, or quantities beyond and over a certain definite limit, which latter is variable in each substance and for each class of organism, is capable of destroying life, either by chemical action or by its physiological effects. Like Dr. Tidey, we believe that if a substance is a poison it is deadly-if it is not deadly it is not a poison. Substances which do not kill are merely noxious or hurtful."

or 350.

M. Richet has

The Breathing of Dogs.—In the normal state a dog executes 20 to 30 respiratory movements a minute, but while he is excited or is running in the heat of the sun this increases to 300 M. Charles Richet, says L'Eleveur, who has investigated the causes of this acceleration, has reached the conclusion that it favors pulmonary evaporation and the cooling of the body. It is thus a sort of pulmonary perspiration. proved by weighing that a dog whose respiration is thus quickened by tenfold loses in one hour 13 grams [about 200 grains] of water vapor to every kilogram [.6 pound] of weight of his body. representing a loss of heat of 6,000 calories-that is, the heat necessary to raise six quarts of water one degree in temperature. The acceleration of breathing is a means of cooling, making up. the dog's lack of perspiration. Dogs thus perspire through the tongue, as the popular saying has it." Translated for THE LITERARY DIGEST.

1

for