and the irresistible claims of the law on the other. It is time that capitalists should recognize that laborers are men with rights to fair treatment and just wages; and that hard conditions imposed lead to popular discontent and class-prejudices which, in a popular government, must tend to limit the prerogatives, if not to weaken the securities, of all capital. And it is high time that both capital and labor should learn that the laws of the land limit the rights of both, that criminal conspiracy by capitalists is as punishable as the same offense by laborers, and that numbers can never excuse lawlessness. The people have too much interest in the railroads and great manufacturing plants of this country to allow any tradeguild or labor-union, however large, by violence to interrupt the running of either. A strike without lawlessness is useless and consequently rare. A strike with lawlessness is so common, and has such political influence, that the law is seldom vindicated, and thus ceases to be a terror to like evil-doers in future.

Let the discontented sons of toil remember that for all the injustice which they suffer the remedy is in their own hands. Capital cannot operate without labor, and the law may adjust differences by doing whatever the greatest good of the greatest numbers may require. The power of the State to regulate railway charges has been conceded. A like control over all private corporations which exercise functions delegated by public law would logically follow. When all laborers are intelligent as capitalists they will not be compelled to work for less than their just share of the profits of any business. Aggregations of capital, whether corporate or individual, may be reached by the taxingpower. A graduated income and inheritance-tax would be the most equitable and reasonable mode of distributing the public burden, and preventing great aggregations of capital."

ETHICS OF SOCIALISM.

The Hon. C. H. Reeve continues the discussion of the labor disputes in the same Magazine from the point of view of the Ethics of Strikes and Lockouts. In this connection he traces the evolution of the capitalist and laborer in the progress of social evolution down to the present, when:

"Strikes are inaugurated on one side, and lockouts on the other; capital is wasted on the one side, and starvation suffered on the other, in a vain war to compel natural forces to move in a direction they cannot operate in, and to substitute artificial force for the natural and irresistible forces arising out of the conditions human action has created by a false use of opportunities, under a false conception of the true relations between capital and labor."

The writer, then, after observing that capitalists have obtained control of the legislature and perverted it for their own ends, passes on to the discussion of the proposition that “a man may do as he likes with his own" as it presents itself in the social problem. This proposition he relegates to the same rank as the right of withdrawal from the Union enjoyed by the several States under the Constitution, and asserts that we have outgrown it: that under the changed conditions of modern life too many vital interests are affected by a strike or a lockout to render either admissible:

The great steel and iron works of the Carnegie Company, employing 20,000 men, feeding 100,000 women and children, involving perhaps 10,000 or more homes built on the Company's lands sold or leased to the laborers as an encouragement to stay as laborers for life and their sons after them, have created such conditions that they have no right arbitrarily to lock out these men ; nor have the men a right to strike arbitrarily. Strikes and lockouts are matters of public concern, and the law must provide means for averting them. Difficulties, as they arise, must be adjusted by a special tribunal, with power to investigate, adjudge, and enforce its decree. Either party resorting to a strike or lockout before resorting to the tribunal, should be deemed guilty of an offense equal to insurrection, and treated accordingly. Pending investigation, if the business ceases, and the interests of those affected demand its continuance, the affairs should be put in charge of a competent State official, to be operated until the adjudication is ended."

THE SOCIAL PROBLEM IN ENGLAND.

The Deutsche Revue for December publishes a letter from Mr. Jules Simon, the first of a series on important problems. This letter was given in THE LITERARY DIGEST for January 7. In the January Deutsche Revue Mr. John E. Gorst gives his views at some length on the Social Problem as it exists in England to-day. After asserting that the Liberals propose to meet the difficulty by their universal panacea of ballot-reform, and that the Conservatives regard any change as dangerous to social order, he first states the problem by attributing the

trouble to the disorganization of the farming-industry by the sharp competition of foreign food-supplies, and consequent migration of the country people to the great cities, where the oldest and least capable go to the wall.

He then suggests a remedial measure, designed to attract people from the city to the country. To this end all he asks is legislation to facilitate the transfer of land in small parcels. This secured, he is of opinion that the Englishman's longing for a piece of land which he can call his own, would encourage numbers of young people of both sexes to save money, with the design of marrying, and settling down on their own little farms.

He notes the proposals of the Social-Democratic party-the restricted labor-day, communal workshops, etc.-only to pronounce them inadequate to a solution of the vexed problem.

SOCIALISM FROM THE BIBLICAL POINT OF VIEW.

In the A. M. E. Church Review (January), the Rt. Reverend James Theodore Holly discusses the problem from the Biblical point of view. Only that Book, he tells us, can afford a clue to its solution, and the thread is to be found in the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount-" Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."

The Christian Church, and the Christian State, have violated the law and defied the repeated warnings of the Almighty, until they now stand on the edge of the abyss:

When Judaism had reached a similar fearful declivity, such as that now just ahead of Christendom, the tender-hearted Christ wept tears of sorrow over Jerusalem. But there will be no such Divine sorrowing over the fall of Christendom, the mystical Babylon of the Apocalypse; for it will have committed the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, the unpardonable sin of the ages, for which all past eternity has waited to witness its accomplishments."

LABOR: A REVOLUTION AND A PROBLEM.

Under this head Prof. M. H. Richards, D.D., takes up the subject in the Lutheran Quarterly for January, and discusses what might be done by the parties to the dispute, if they would all approach it in the right spirit, but pronounces any such hopes as vain. He consequently finds it necessary to enlist the good offices of some external agency, and says:

The one agency capable of performing the task is the Church of Christ. The mass must be leavened, spiritualized, for its own sake and ours. The only solution of all these conflicting claims is to be found in the general diffusion of Christian principle and the influence of the habitual recognition of Christian duty on the part of employer and employed. When men learn to be more solicitous about their duty than tenacious for their rights, society is safe, and its problems are solved in calm discussion and generous concession. The difficulties in the way are immense. We shall find employers and captains of industry just as hard to deal with, just as wordly-minded, just as wise in their own conceits as those whom they employ. But for all these things there is but one remedy-aggressive missionary work on the part of the Church."

GERMAN SOCIALISM.

Dr. Heinrich Geffcken, who became widely known several years ago because of his imprisonment and trial by Prince Bismarck, upon the charge of high treason for publishing the diary of the late Emperor Frederick, writing on "German Socialism and Literary Sterility" in the Forum for January, designates the German Social-Democrats as

Simply a people discontented with the present situation. If they read at all, it is party papers and cheap popular books or novels, cleverly compiled to excite the passions of the masses by incendiary diatribes against the existing order of society, and painting in glowing colors the material well-being which would await them with the victory of Socialism. In fact, Social-Democracy in Germany is not so much a party-doctrine as a creed. These ignorant masses do not discern that the very name of the party is in itself a contradiction, that in the Socialistic State there would be no democracy, but a despotism compared to which Russian autocracy would be liberty. The policy of the leaders is, above all, to excite hatred, to revile religion, and to preach materialism; to discourage thrift by attracting the workmen to frequent socialistic meetings, where they spend their wages in drink, and are intoxicated by the speeches of the agitators."

EDUCATION, LITERATURE, ART.

RECENT DANISH AND GERMAN LITERATURE. THE DANISH literary critic Vald-Vedel reviews recent Danish literature in the January number of the Tilskueren (Copenhagen), and starts by this general characterization:

D

ENMARK is not a country of parties and schools. The Danes do not swear fidelity to any colors. In that is their strength and their weakness. They escape the dangers attending the minor forms of civilization, but they miss the greatness of the larger, because they spread out and thus lose strength. Danish literary talents lie like glowing embers in ashes, each trying to keep up the fire, but never coming together to make one great fire.

He then reviews the works of the most prominent authors thus:

Like a faint, but never fully burnt-out ember is the authorship of Edv. Brandes. It never flames up. It never burns like a consuming fire, nor produces great effects. His plays are not satisfactory, they do not fascinate you, nor grow upon you like great art. Some of his books are like flowers, but their perfume is not strong and their colors are pale.

Peter Nansen is, like Edv. Brandes, a Copenhagener by nature, but arrayed in Parisian garb, particularly so in his little book Et Hjem. It is the story of a young wife who cares as much for the friend and lover as for the husband, a "domestic goddess, moving about gently and filling the cup of desire equally between the two." She is evidently. a Danish rival to Gervaises, who divides herself between Coupeau and Lantier, but because she is Danish, she is "moral," and not "beastly"; that is, the author throws a veil of mystic charm around her, through which he shows her to us as a good angel," who befriends "a homeless young man and thereby "redeems her Own existence."

Gustav Esman's latest book appears under a cover of Ernst Bojesen's fantastic and witty drawings, but is itself neither witty, nor instructive. His In Copenhagen pictures the snobs of the city, and, by an inevitable irony, represents the author as the greatest snob of all. His fear of laughter drives him into snobdom. He also describes the Copenhagen faubourgs, and its bal mabile, only to show, by contrast, that Copenhagen is not Paris. Its viveurs are mere schoolboys; its demi-monde too reserved; its beau monde eats but two courses for dinner. Though Copenhagen life is the life of a capital, it is provincial compared to that of Paris.

བ·

Einar Christiansen is more robust than the other two, and better educated. His Letizia shows an attempt to break through the bonds of immaturity. Many passages prove a strong personality and deep feeling. It is well said that joy is the life nerve" of existence. When Mori takes Letizia around the neck and looks upon her, saying: “Letizia, thy name is joy; it is bird-song; if breathed it is warm like a summer night, and rich like thousand caresses," then we feel a touch of romantic love.

Mr. Vedel next reviews the works of a number of less promiment writers, and expresses himself in severe language about Danish literature in general. He then proceeds with Karl Larsen, of whom he says:

To pass in review from Einar Christiansen's production to Karl Larsen's book, Den brogede Bog, is like seeing part of a play in one theatre and the balance, as opera, in another. From the direct and prosaic words we are translated to a sphere of symbolism and music. Larsen has fallen in love with some of the flowers of the Middle Ages. He has distilled their escence and made a modern bouquet of them. His book reproduces many old legends, with their heavy atmosphere, dark passions, and sweet-only too often sinful-loves. He

has sought this field because he is tired of the modern naturalism and analysis of details.

"DANSKEREN (No. 6; Vejen, Denmark) gives a review of Danish literature, and adds valuable notes on German writers. From the paper of S. K. Sörensen we extract the following: It is not very flattering to German pride, but a fact, nevertheless, that most of the recent German literature found its sources in the North, in Russia, and in France. It is pessimistic to the core. Gerhart Hauptmann's Vor Sonnenuntergang is only a larger and more terrible edition of Ibsen's Gengangere. In most novels we are satisfied with the exhibition of a few vices 1 and murders, but Hauptmann has outdone everybody and everything. He has gathered together all the vices of Zola's novels and Ibsen's dramas, and added to them Tolstoi's Powers of Darkness, and has painted all the faces so black that we hardly know whether we see real human beings or masks. His Einsame Menschen is rather trivial, but, as a matter of course, full of licentiousness, and ends in suicide. Hermann Bahr imitates Goncourt. The productions of Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf are expressions of the author's names; they are "woody" and sleepy," but entirely in the line of modern naturalism. Felix Hollander's Magdalene Dornis and Ola Hanson's Alltagsfrauen are brutal and reckless.

Where is the source of this literature? In Schopenhauer and the works of Eduard von Hartmann. Both of them agree with Marcus Aurelius that the true thing to do is "to leave the world as one goes out of a room filled with smoke." It is that spirit which has set all the younger men to "put every problem under discussion," and has ended in a descent to the slums, and a desire to "destroy the world."

Quite distinct from this sphere of thought lies that which roots in Rembrandt als Erzieher and of which Frederik Nietzsche was the apostle. In all its natural tendencies and logical consequences, it is best expressed in Paul Radiot's novel L'Elite, roman èpique moderne. (Paris, 1892.) It is a cynical production, which ridicules the old ideals. Its own ideal is this: The mass of the people is no better than mules for heavy work. The nobles, who represent the "beautiful" type of the rapacious animals, have the right to kill such mules when they please, and they ought to torture them before killing them. Cruelty and severity are the most desirable traits in a "lord," that he may inspire the people with fear. To create such traits young nobles should be diligent in the chase, for to hunt beasts teaches them to hunt down the rascals." The object

of this torture, so freely recommended is the "regeneration" of the "mules." All this is the Darwinian "struggle for existence," the nobles making the "selection." The author teaches thus in perfect earnest. Indeed, this "white" ghost puts the "red" of Socialism to shame. These ideas have gone abroad and found a fruitful soil in Germany, the land of oppression. And this book is not simply the ravings of a sick French brain, it expresses a tendency of the times, which strives for " a strong government."

TRAGEDIES AND COMEDIES OF SUPERSTITION. Translated for THE LITERARY DIGEST from

Die Gartenlaube, Leipzig, December. IN PREVIOUS numbers we have already furnished the readers of THE LITERARY DIGEST with translations of some of the very admirable series of papers under this head, collected by the Gartenlaube.

IN

The present paper-The Detection of the Offender by Means of a Balanced Sieve-is especially interesting from the fact that it is traceable to its source in an ancient figurative use of the process of sifting meal, as emblematic of Justice separating the false from the true.

N some parts of Germany the peasantry have a well-known and perfectly reliable means of recovering lost property, and detecting the thief; this is the family key. An old, valued house-key, which has been handed down as an heirloom, is placed in a similarly old gong-book or the family Bible, so that

the wards protrude upward; the book is then bound with thread, and suspended from a pack-stick, which is supported on the middle finger of the right hand, by two persons, one at each end. The names of all suspected persons are now called loudly in turn without exciting any movement until a particular name is uttered, when the staff slips from the supporting fingers of the two judges, and, with book and housekey, falls to the ground. It may be remarked here that the judges who hold the stick are professional detectives, and that, in this present material age, their denunciation of a person against whom there is no better evidence than the house-key is likely to bring them into trouble, as suspected persons, with the regularly constituted authorities.

They did not look through the sieve to detect the thief, but it was suspended and balanced on the fingers like the housekey, that its movements might be studied.

In the town of Billingen, the chief seat of the Black-Forest clock-industry, there lived, three hundred years ago, a celebrated physician and student of the black art, named Pictorius. who wrote concerning the sieve-oracle, and elucidated his subject by illustrations. According to his description, two persons stood opposite each other, holding between them, in the right hand, a sheepshears of the pattern universal in the Middle Ages. The sheepshears held the sieve suspended by the frame, much as the Bible and key were held; and the ceremony commenced with an incantation: DIES. MIES. JESCHET BENEDOFFET. DOWIMA. ENITEMANS., designed to compel the demons in the sieve to disclose the thief. The names of the suspected parties are now called in turn, and on the thief's name being called, the sieve trembles. By repeating the name, the sieve begins to revolve and is so violently agitated that the shears are wrenched out of the hands of the holders and fall, with the sieve, on the floor. Doctor Pictorius himself tested the magical power of the contrivance three times; once in a case of theft, once for a poacher who maliciously cut his bird-net, and again for the recovery of a lost dog; in all, he says, with a good result, but on the last occasion the demon rattled him so sorely that he was frightened, and never tried it again. Erasmus of Rotterdam, too, was familiar with sieve-divination; in Germany it has been swallowed up in the family-key superstition, but it survives in the original in France and England.

How men of all ages hit on the idea of the sieve is readily comprehensible-they wanted to sit in judgment, and the sieve appeared to them as the type of rigid judicial investigation, a contrivance for sifting the true from the false. The most celebrated of the numerous Italian academies, the Academia della Crusca, has a sieve for its coat-of-arms. This signifies that its sifts and bolts language, and separates the good words, as the fine meal is separated from the bran. To the Italians there is no more familiar figure than the comparison of an investigation to a sifting. They invariably speak of sifting a matter, not of proving it, and with the prudence so characteristic of their nation, they say, "You cannot trust a man until you have thoroughly sifted him." This idea runs through all languages. The term "criticise" means literally a sifting or separation, and we find in the Bible that God will sift the House of Israel among the nations, even as a man sifts with the sieve. The sieve, like the balance, is a sort of emblem of justice.

Hence the sieve is employed not merely for the detection of

theft, but for the discovery of secret sins and offenders of all sorts. Yea, the dim perception that, in some mysterious way, guilt and innocence lie concealed in the sieve, has led to the impossible demand that the sieve shall hold water. In the Roman Vatican, in the Chiaramonti museum, there is a marble statue of a vestal holding a sieve. On the frame of this sieve there is a Latin inscription, "Thus do I frustrate slander." It is the vestal Tuccia, who, being charged with the violation of her vows, cleared herself from the accusation by bringing water in a sieve from the Tiber to the Vestal temple—a miracle which is said to have been repeated in the 18th century by Saint Amalberga in Flanders. The secret power of the sieve renders it a revelation of Divine justice-an ordeal to which the helpless of all ages have appealed when no other mode of redress was open to them.

MADAME MÈRE. G. VALBERT.

Translated and Condensed for THE LITERARY DIGEST from a Paper (12 pp.) in Revue des Deux Mondes, Paris, December 1.

SO MUCH interest has this article excited that M. Victor Cherbuliez, one of the masters of French fiction, made a digest of the article for L'Independance Belge of Brussels in its issue of Dec. 16.

WH

HEN Napoleon the First was at the height of his glory, it was by the simple, but still noble and suggestive, title of Madame Mère that his mother was known. She was in some respects a singular woman, with original traits of character, which proved that she had a mind and will of her own. Many things have been written of her, but her career has never had so full justice done to it as in a book* just published by Baron Larrey of the Institute of France. When the mother of Napoleon was very old and blind, the Baron saw her at the Rinuccini Palace at Rome, and she made on him such an ineffaceable impression that he determined to write her life. She died in 1836, but Larrey has been at work ever since, consulting all the memoirs of her time, collecting anecdotes which related to her, searching for her letters, of which by dint of great labor he has got together one hundred and fifty, interrogating the members of the imperial family, until he has produced two large volumes of more than 500 pages each.

Napoleon said of his mother that she was made to govern a kingdom. It is quite likely that she would have been a very good and judicious queen, or condition that her kingdom was very small, for she had neither the taste nor the genius for great politics. Her true vocation was to govern a home, to manage a household, to keep order and peace in a family, to conciliate opposing interests, to stop quarrels, to soften wounds to self-love, to make everybody listen to reason. If Napoleon did not get from her his imagination, to her he owed his spirit of order, of discipline, and of government, which enabled him to put to rights a country disorganized by civil discord and anarchy, and to give it institutions which still exist.

In a moment of impatience and ill-humor, the Emperor said: "Madame Letizia is only a bourgeoise," and he understood her well. He would have liked her to change her manners, her language, and her sentiments in accordance with the change in her position. She, however, remained what she had always been; her fortunes had changed, but she changed not a whit. She preserved always her natural manner of speaking, she never modified her accent in the least. 'A propos of Mamma," said the First Consul to his brothers, "Joseph ought to coax her not to call me Napolione any more. Let her call me Bonaparte, not Buonaparte, that would be worse than Napolione. Let her say the First Consul or the Consul. I should prefer the latter. But Napolione, always Napolione, that vexes me.” *Madame Mère, essai historique par M. le Baron Larrey, de l'Institut de France. Paris, 1892.

She

All the same, Cæsar was for her always Napolione. admired him, but he did not impose on her. He had become the master of Europe, but in her eyes he was always such as he came into the world, with a big head, crying, restless, and sucking his thumb, while waiting for the time to come when he should suck the universe. Bourgeoise she was born, and bourgeoise she was all her life. Neither glory nor great prosperity was able to turn her head, to dazzle her good sense. She detested flatterers, and pomp, and ostentation. She always refused to hold a court.

During the six weeks which followed the birth of the King of Rome, Madame Mère and the queens of Spain and Holland were the only persons admitted to the room of Marie Louise, and for these visitors arm-chairs were provided around the bed of the Empress. When the day arrived for a grand reception by her, the Emperor ordered the arm-chairs to be replaced by tabourets. When they came to sit down, Madame Mère was about to withdraw. When the Empress wished to detain her she said: Madame. if the Emperor had wished me to be present, he would have provided an arm-chair for me." On another day in the same year, at a family gathering, Napoleon offered her his hand to kiss. She pushed it back, and it was he who kissed the hand of his mother. She said to him: "You know, Sire, in public I treat you with respect, because I am your subject; but, in private, I am your mother, and when you say: I will,'-I answer: I will not."

"

She was very parsimonious, almost avaricious. From her youth up, she had known the value of money. When a woman who is not rich, has eight children to bring up, she learns not to loosen the strings of her purse too easily.

Her piety was marked. She accepted without a murmur, whatever came to her from the Supreme Will which rules ..everything. Once she asked a Roman prelate if he thought Napoleon was in paradise. "Yes, Madame," he answered, "I think so, but I am not absolutely sure of it."

No trial was spared her. She had a fall and broke her thigh, and after that was attacked with increasing blindness. She forgot her misfortunes in thinking of the wonderful man she had given to the world.

Do not go with the current; follow the time

If thou wilt keep young and hold thine own. If the currents take thee,

They will engulf thee.

If Time leaves you behind,

It cannot use you.

Hostrup was true to his own words and progressed with the times until his death. But he was more than true to an ideal; he was thoroughly national. His poetry has, no doubt, sunk deeper into the heart of the Danish people than that of any older or younger poet, Holberg and Oehlenschläger not excepted. Hostrup was a northern type of Aladdin; the golden fruits of fortune and honor rained abundantly upon him, yet he never claimed recognition and never built the fairy castles of Oehlenschläger's Aladdin. He was a man of the real world and dealt with real men and in real virtues and vices. He was no dreamer." "Nordstjernen" then enumerates some of these 'eternal

Dramatic Form of Church-Service.-Mr. Carl Lange, in a publication which appeared in 1887, collected 224 dramatic forms of Church service prepared for Easter morning. He has shown that they may be divided into four groups, the first and simplest composed solely of an exchange of words between the holy women and the Angels, or rather the Angel, who was in the deserted tomb. Of the other two groups, one contains dialogues between the Peter and John, the other, a dialogue between the risen Jesus and the Madonna. These two forms are more recent developments of the first named; although the dialogues between the Disciples go back to the eleventh century, and those between Jesus and His mother are found in Germany alone. The group first herein mentioned comprises all the ancient monuments, among others a form of church-service observed in 967 in the Concordia of Saint Dunstan, and which already differs from the primitive form, for to the four phrases which constitute the original form there is added a fifth which lengthens and completes the action of the little drama. Minute comparison and investigation show that these dramatic forms of church-service, from which the modern theatre of Europe took its rise, were invented during the reign of Charlemagne, either in France or in Germany at a time when the German Church was but a dependency of the French Church.-Gaston Paris, in the November Journal des Savants of Paris.

element in them that makes those characters ever young and fresh."

Art in California.-A number of Loan Exhibitions in San Francisco show that there are owned on the West Coast a number of excellent canvases. One of these now hangs in the Directors' Room of the First National Bank of San Francisco. It is not accessible to the general public, but can be seen on who is at present absent from the State. On the canvas, perhaps three and a half by five feet in size, the painter, A. Graefle, a German, has depicted Beethoven playing at a piano for four of his "Friends," the title of the work. The Friends' are Reiner, a poet; Schindler, who wrote a Life of Beethoven; the Abbé Maximilian Stadler, a composer and organist, a friend of Haydn and Mozart also; and Doctor Von Swinton, Beethoven's physician. The figures are well-drawn and the grouping is good.-The Overland Monthly, San Francisco, January..

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY.

RECENT SCIENCE.

ARCHEOLOGY.

One of Pharaoh's Scythes.-An Egyptian scythe, dug up on the banks of the Nile in 1890, and said to be as old as Moses, is exhibited among the antiquities in the private museum of Flinders Petrie, London. The shaft of the instrument is wood, set with a row of fine flint saws, which are securely .cemented in a groove. This discovery answers the oft-asked question: How did the stone-age man harvest his crops?— Age of Steel, January.

ASTRONOMY.

The Aztec Calendar.—In the measurement of time the Aztecs adjusted their civil year by the solar year. They divided it into eighteen months of twenty days each. Both months and days were expressed by peculiar hieroglyphics. Five complementary days, as in Egypt, were added to make up the full number of 365. These belonged to no month, and were regarded as peculiarly unlucky. A month was divided into four weeks, of five days each, on the last of which was the public fair or market-day. As the year is composed of nearly six hours more than 365 days, there still remained an excess which, like other nations who have framed a calendar, they provided for by intercalation; not. indeed, every fourth year as the Europeans, but at longer intervals, like some of the Asiatics. They waited till the expiration of fifty-two vague years, when they interposed thirteen days, or rather, twelve and a half, this being the number which had fallen in arrear. Had they inserted thirteen it would have been too much, since the annual excess over 365 is about eleven minutes less than six hours. But as their calendar at the time of the Conquest was found to correspond with the European, making allowance for the subsequent Gregorian reform, they would seem to have adopted the shorter period of twelve days and a half, which brought them, within an almost inappreciable fraction, to the exact length of the tropical year, as established by the most accurate of observations. Indeed, the intercalation of twenty-five days in every 104 years shows a nicer adjustment of civil to solar time than is presented by any European calendar; since more than five centuries must elapse before the loss of an entire day. Such was the astonishing precision displayed by the Aztecs, or perhaps by their more polished Toltec predecessors, in these computations. Their chronological system was reckoned corresponding with the year 1091 of the Christian era. It was the period of the reform of their calendar, soon after their migration from Azatlan.

In addition to the solar calendar, as above described, the Aztec priests had another called a "lunar reckoning," though in nowise accommodated to the revolutions of the moon. It was formed also of two periodical series. By means of this calendar the priests kept their own records, regulated the festivals and seasons of sacrifice, and made all their astrological calculations. The astrological scheme of the Aztecs was founded less on the planetary influences than on those of the arbitrary signs they had adopted for the months and days. We know of no astronomical instruments used by them except the dial. The calendar-stone (as it is called) shows they had the means of settling the hours of the day with precision, the periods of the solstices and the equinoxes, and that of the transit of the Sun across the zenith of Mexico.

There have been propounded, from time to time, theories that the calendar-stone of the Aztecs is in reality a representation of the mariner's compass, and is to be accepted as proof that the Aztecs came from Asian coasts or Pacific islands. There does not seem as yet to be any valid reason for considering these theories seriously.-The Great Divide, January.

BACTERIOLOGY.

The Bacteria of Fermentation.-The fermentative changes which the leaves of the tobacco-plant are made to undergo before they are worked up and placed on the market are of the greatest importance in determining the quality of the tobacco. The changes in the properties of tobacco induced by the process of sweating were formerly supposed to be purely chemical, but some recent interesting investigations go to show that they are due to special micro-organisms. Sachsland recently read a paper before the German Botanical Society, in which he gave an account of some investigations which he has been conducting on the bacteria found in different kinds of tobacco. He has examined fermented tobacco from all parts of the world, and found large numbers of micro-organisms, although not generally more than two or three varieties in any particular brand. But what is of special interest is the discovery that pure cultures of bacteria obtained from one kind of tobacco, and inoculated unto another kind, generated in the latter a taste and aroma, recalling the taste and aroma of the tobacco from which the pure cultures are procured. Thus it may be possible to raise the quality of home-grown tobacco by inoculating it with cultures of the bacteria found in the finerflavored foreign tobacco.-Nature, December 29.

ELECTRICITY.

The Alternating Current Ampere.-The definition of the strength of an alternating current is made to depend on the square root of the time-average of the square of its strength at each instant of its period, which is not, it must be confessed, readily intelligible, but it may, perhaps, be put as follows: The amperage of an alternating current is equal to that of a constant current, when the heating effects of the two currents passing through equivalent resistances are the same, If the resistance is constant and non-inductive, the heating effect measures the whole energy expended, and is proportional to the square of the current, and when the latter is constant is very easily calculated. If the current is alternating we may divide its period into a convenient number of small parts and consider the current as having a constant but different value throughout each of these parts. If we add all these strengths together, and divide by the number of parts, we shall get a mean value of the current, which, however, will prove to be zero if taken through a complete period, as for each value of the current in one direction there will be an equal value of current in the opposite direction, and taking note of this difference in sign, the average current will be zero. If, however, we regard the heating effect, we shall obtain this by adding together the squares of all the values of the current throughout its period. Dividing this by the number of values, we shall have the mean value of the square of the current, and the square root of this will be equal to the strength of a constant current having the same heating effect. This process is, in short, that of finding the square root of the time-average of the square of its strength at each instant of its period."Engineering, December.

GEOLOGY.

No

Silicified Wood in Arkansas.-The occurrence of silicified wood in the sands and gravels of the Tertiary of the lower Mississippi Valley has long been known, but the mentions and studies of it have for the most part been only incidental. attempt has hitherto been made, according to Mr. R. Elisworth Call, to recognize the species and fix their value for classification. The fossil woods occur throughout the area covered by Tertiary sands and gravels in Arkansas. When in large masses, they are, apparently, rarely far removed from beds of Tertiary lignite; if in small masses or in small fragments, they occur in the gravels of nearly all the region and in the beds of the streams and brooks of the area covered by the Tertiary. Occasionally, whole trunks of trees are found, often partially buried in the sands or deeply imbedded in the gravels