SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY. RECENT SCIENCE. ASTRONOMY. PRINCE KRdence in a paper in the current number of the RINCE KRAPOTKIN, summing up the recent achieve Nineteenth Century, gives his first attention to the planets Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, all of which during the past few months, stood in the most favorable position for being observed from the Earth. It has now, he tells us, been placed almost beyond question that all we can see of Venus are the clouds that envelop her, with a few protruding polar peaks, rising above the mist. The Mars phenomena have all been studied afresh without aiding in any way their interpretation. As to Jupiter, the efforts of the astronomers have been rewarded by the discovery of a fifth satellite which describes its immense orbit round the giant planet in the short space of seventeen hours. But when it comes to solving the mysteries of the physical constitution of Jupiter the great telescope reveals nothing. The current opinion has been that we see only the gaseous envelope of Jupiter, but Mr. E. E. Barnard, who has studied Jupiter for the last twelve years, inclines to the view that the surface is in a plastic, molten state, and that its immense spots are due to eruptions from from the interior. SOLAR PHYSICS. The chief progress has been achieved in solar physics,'in which research has been rewarded by quite an unexpected discovery. Something new has been learned about a most familiar body-hydrogen-which is commonly handled in our laboratories. For a long time it has been known that incandescent hydrogen gives a spectrum consisting of four bright lines, all situated in positions which correspond to the bright part of the solar spectrum. But W. Huggins discovered in the spectra of the stars which have a white light, and namely in the ultraviolet, darkest part of the spectrum, ten more brilliant lines which were proved by laboratory experiments to belong to hydrogen. As if to enhance the interest of these discoveries, Prof. Balmer soon found out the analogy which exists between the fourteen hydrogen lines and the upper harmonics of a sound; he has shown that the exact number of vibrations which produce each of these lines, increase in the same succession as the numbers of vibrations in the sound-harmonics; the growth of the numbers can be expressed by a simple formula analogous to that used for sound. Now, not only were these fourteen lines found in the spectra of the solar prominences, but five lines more were discovered, and their positions so well agree with the same law of vibration, that there is no doubt they also belong to the hydrogen spectrum. This discovery of the full spectrum of hydrogen is one of the most astonishing achievements of modern science. BIOLOGY. In biology, Weismann's theory of the continuity of the germ-plasm is rivaled and in part replaced by De Vries, who claims the same independent transmission of all constituent parts of the cells-vacuoles, chlorophyll-grains, starch-producing spots, etc., all of which are shown to multiply by division. The protoplasm of the cell is thus a compound organ, a colony. But discovery goes on very rapidly in this domain, and we are certainly not yet in possession of a theory of heredity which could have a serious bearing upon researches in evolution. PHYSIOLOGY. In physiology the chief feature of interest has been an attempt at reëstablishing the muscle-producing capacity of nitrogeneous foods. For some years past, the hydrocarbons have generally been deemed the sole source of muscular energy. Some physiologists (Benege, R. Oddi, and others). have shown that it cannot be the sole source, and some three years ago some new researches on the subject were undertaken at the Bonn Physiological Institute by Argutinsky. The Russian doctor experimented on himself, and came to a conclusion opposed to the current theory; discussion was provoked, and no less an authority than Pflüger (the chief of the Bonn Physiological Institute, and the editor of the well-known Archiv für Physiologie), came forward with a new array of facts in support of the same views. The question is, however, extremely complicated, and Pflüger's experiments not having been published in full, the final verdict of science cannot yet be fore seen. ARTIFICIAL IMMUNITY.-It was Professor Emmerich who first discovered (1886) that the blood of an animal which had recovered from an infectious disease, was capable, by subcutaneous injection, of imparting immunity to other animals. He had proved that the bacteria of disease are killed rapidly in the blood of an animal that had acquired immunity artificially, and assumed the formation of certain aibuminous bodies poisonous to bacteria. In concert with Professor Tsuboi he investigated the blood of rabbits on which immunity against hog-plague had been artificially conferred. The serum of this blood was (after separation of the globulin), concentrated at 42o C. in vacuo, whereby an albuminous body of pronouncedly curative properties was precipitated. The filtered liquid, moreover, upon precipitation with alcohol, gave also a substance of the same curative property. This substance was washed with alcohol and ether, and dried at a low temperature. This dry powder possessed all the curative properties of the blood itself against hog-plague. This production of the remedial agent in a dry state, although mixed with inert albuminous substance is a fact of immense importance in bacteriological science in its relation to medicine.-O. Loew, in Science, New York, Dec. 23. THE NEW STAR IN AURIGA.-The star which appeared suddenly during the month of December, 1891, in the constellation of Auriga has been watched by astronomers with the closest attention. After being a star of the fifth magnitude from the middle of December to the end of February, 1892, it became, in the course of March, a star of the fourteenth magnitude. Its spectrum has revealed to Mr. Huggins some very peculiar characteristics. While the brilliant lines of the hydrogen were in one sense displaced, rays of absorption of the same gas were moving in the opposite direction, indicating, according to the Doppler-Fizeau phenomenon, a difference in quickness of nearly 500 kilometres a second in the direction of the visual ray. Considering the enormous distance from the star, and its maximum brilliancy, it appears very probable that its total radiation was much greater than that of our Sun, and it is impossible to admit that a burning body of this nature could cool in so short a time. Mr. Huggins thinks that the star in question is composed of two stars which, reaching with great velocity each other's sphere of attraction, set to work to turn (probably with strong eccentricity) around their common centre of gravity. Their mutual action has produced changes of form analogous to tides, though much more considerable. Prodigious eruptions have taken place, accompanied, doubtless, by electric phenomena, and by a great rise of temperature on a portion of one of the bodies. The great difference between them during the phenomenon indicates that they were, before it occurred, in a very different state of formation.-La Nature, Paris, Dec. 10. SULFONAL. Among new drugs belonging to what is called the hypnotic group, sulfonal has grown most rapidly in favor. It is without any unpleasant effects, has proved especially bene ficial in cases of delirium tremens and asthma, and has also been recommended as the best preventive of sea-sickness. WH THE TRANSFORMATION OF ENERGY. JOULE'S DISCOVERY. V. E. JOHNSON, M.A. Condensed for THE LITERARY DIGEST from a Paper (11 pp.) in Westminster Review, London, December. HEN we say that anyone is full of energy, we mean, do we not, that they are full of the power of doing work? And when we say that a thing is full of energy, we mean that it is full of the power of doing work, and we estimate the energy which it possesses by the amount of work which it can do before it is utterly spent. Now, it is very easy to see that a moving body possesses energy, but we may also have energy in a quiescent state. Suppose, for example, I carry a stone weight to the top of a high tower, and place it on a ledge there, the stone would possess a certain amount of energy or power of work in virtue of its position, for if I were to push it over the edge it would at once fall to the ground beneath, and, by virtue of the motion acquired in falling, be made do a certain amount of work. The energy possessed by this stone weight in virtue of its position is called potential energy. The energy which I expended in carrying it to the top of the tower is actual or kinetic energy. I have said that in falling, the stone will perform a certain amount of work; now the amount of work which it will perform is exa ly equivalent to the work which I performed in carrying it to the top of the tower, and this stone weight while at the top of the tower possesses a "potential energy" or "energy of position" equal in amount to the actual or kinetic energy expended by myself in carrying up the weight. There is no creation of energy; neither the steam-engine, electro-dynamo, human muscle, nor any mechanical contrivance which can create force. All we can do is to transform one kind of energy into another more convenient to us, and similarly in all machines or combinations of machines the law is universally true that "what we gain in power we lose in space," or that the power multiplied into the distance it descends is always equal to the weight multiplied into the distance that it ascends-neglecting friction. It is chiefly due to the labors of Mr. James Prescott Joule, of Manchester, that these doctrines were transferred from the realm of speculation to the sure basis of experimental fact. To produce a certain amount of one kind of energy, the equivalent amount of another kind of energy is always necessary, and we are led to the great principle of the Conservation of Energy, than which no truth stands on a firmer scientific basis. "Work is a "For a cer Work is worship," says an old proverb. necessity," is the doctrine of modern science. tain amount of one kind of energy, I will give you," says Nature, so much of the other kind of energy, no more and no less." For a certain amount of work to be done (without injury or waste of the system), a certain quantity of food must be digested. It is the combustion of the food in our system that furnishes the energy of our bodies and any food capable of nourishing our bodies may, if well dried, be burned in the fire. In every case this food derives its energy from the SUN. Apart from organic energy, the other sources of energy in nature available to man for the production of mechanical effect, are rain, the tides, the air in motion, and fuel. Coal and wood are now the prime sources of available energy, and they are rapidly being exhausted. In ten or twelve generations, if not earlier, the coal fields of Great Britain will be exhausted. Similarly too with the forests, which are being wantonly destroyed. No fresh energy is being created by the earth. At her birth, she possessed a certain amount which is rapidly being radiated into space like that of the Sun. The death of the earth and the Sun must both come, and with their death, the end of all life on earth. But the human race of to-day is providing for its own extinction long before either of these events come to pass. No fallacy can be greater than to suppose that any scientific discovery can avert this disaster, because every such discovery only leads to a more rapid exhaustion of earth's garnered stores. The offspring of the people of the United States alone, at their present rate of increaee would, in four centuries, if all other races were to die out, cover the whole habitable globe, allowing each person only 27 square feet of surface. If, then, we continue to multiply, and to consume the earth's stores of life-supporting energy, as we are now doing, the human race cannot do otherwise than come to an untimely end. We should endeavor, also, when possible, to horrow, not to spend, that those same agencies in Nature which make exhausted land again become fertile, may come into play, and by their action maintain the fertility of the soil. The waste of combustible materials of which we are now guilty, is utterly inconsistant with our claim to be responsible beings-"Intel-lectual heirs of all the Ages"-holding the accumulated stores. of Nature in trust. DISCOVERY OF AN ANCIENT LAKE-VILLAGE IN SOMERSETSHIRE. ON R. MUNROE, M.A., M.D., F.R.S.E. * N my return home early in September, after a couple of months' absence on the Continent, I found among the letters awaiting my arrival one from Mr. John Morland, Glastonbury, Somersetshire, which begins thus: Mr. Arthur Bulleid, of this town, discovered in the spring of this year, and is now examining under the auspices of our local Antiquarian Society, a group of prehistoric remains which I think cannot fail to interest you. Mr. St. John Hope recommended your book on the lake-dwellings of Europe, and we have found in it very much that throws light on the 'find'; but nothing is described therein which exactly resembles these remains. I described the remains at the Somerset Archæological Society's meeting at Wellington, and Prof. Boyd Dawkins spoke of the communication as the most important he had heard made to a local association for many years. He has since been here, and is coming again. "The site is about a mile north of Glastonbury, on the road to the village of Godney. It is in the level moor, now grass-grown, which stretches to the British Channel. Before examination, the remains consisted of a number (sixty or seventy) of low mounds, rising one to two feet above the surrounding soil, and from twenty to thirty feet The writer then goes on to give a short description of the mounds then examined, and the relics collected, and concludes by expressing a hope that I would find the subject sufficiently interesting to induce me to visit the locality. Accordingly I did so as soon as I could get some other engagements disposed of. I arrived at Glastonbury on Sept. 20, and that same evening met Messrs. Morland and Bulleid, and arranged to accompany them to the sites of the discovery on the following day. Meantime they brought me to see the relics, which were located partly in Mr. Bulleid's residence, and partly in the Glastonbury Museum. I was quite astounded at the number and character of these objects. This is not the place to enter on a detailed description of them, but the following jottings will be sufficient to indicate their general character: Of bronze, four fibula of La Tène types, one small, penannular, horseshoe-headed brooch, and two massive spiral finger-rings. A few objects are of iron, but they are so much corroded as to make it difficult to determine what they were intended for. One resembles * Reprinted from the London Times, a spear-head, and others look as if they were large nails with broad heads. The objects of bone and horn are numerous. Among them I have noted four long combs used in weaving, two of which are ornamented with diamond-shaped patterns. Three neatly-formed needles, about three inches long. A novel object, curiously worked and highly polished, is supposed to have been a weaver's shuttle. One or two tines of deer-horn have a striking resemblance to the cheek-pieces of the peculiar bridle-bits found in the Swiss lake-dwellings and in the Terremare of Italy. One massive bead or ring of lustrous jet about an inch in diameter, and several fragments of bracelets made of coarse shale. Pottery is abundant, but much broken. The finer kind is of a dark color, and ornamented with a variety of linear and checked patterns -on rectangular and curvilinear spaces. One small fragment shows an incised circle, three-quarters of an inch in diameter, circumscribing two other circles, each of which has a diameter a little less than the radius of the former, and within these again are two other circles similarly arranged. One or two vases have been reconstructed, the largest of which is one foot in depth, and half a foot in width at the mouth. It has an elegant form, bulges slightly beneath the rim, and stands on a flat bottom. Two fragments show small perforations, as if they had been part of the base of a percolator. A group of objects of fire-baked clay was disinterred in circumstances which suggest that it was the debris of a bottler's factory. The objects, which were all found on one mound, and in the vicinity of what was probably a furnace, as they were associated with masses of highly-calcined clay flooring, are as follows: A few perforated clay weights; some balls of the size of a large marble, pierced, sometimes partially and sometimes completely, with a small round hole; about sixty ovate objects of the size of a pigeon's egg; a flat circular cake like a greatly-magnified spindle-whorl; three small crucibles, and the fragments of a massive funnel, such as might be used in the casting of metal. The upper stone of a quern mill, of unusual weight, and broken through the middle into two portions, is interesting as showing that an effort had been made to mend it. It is made of a hard, gritty stone, in the form of a thick cheese, and measures eighteen inches in diameter. The central aperture is four inches in width, and this size is uniformly retained through its entire depth. Other two querns were represented by mere fragments. Among other objects of stone I have noted several spindle-whorls and a few flakes and cores of flint. The organic remains include beans, wheat, rye, nutshells, etc., together with a large number of bones, presumably of domestic animals. The work already done at Glastonbury is sufficient to show that the settlement is rich in the handiwork remains of man, and worthy of being adequately explored, whatever period it may be ultimately assigned to. So far, however, as the excavations have yet disclosed the nature of its buried treasures, the result is of special interest, owing to the predominance among them of articles unquestionably belonging to the period known WINS GENIUS AND SUICIDE. CHARLES W. PILGRIM, M.D. Condensed for THE LITERARY DIGEST from a Paper (9 pp) in Popular Science Monthly, New York, January. INSLOW, in his Anatomy of Suicide, says, "A person who accustoms himself to live in a world created by his own fancy, who surrounds himself with flimsy idealities, will, in the course of time, cease to sympathize with the gross realities of life," and anyone who will take the trouble to read the biographies of men of genius will see that this statement is borne out to a remarkable degree. Perhaps the most striking example of this doctrine, as well as the most pathetic instance of suicide in the annals of literature, is found in the records of Chatterton's short life. From the beginning, shadows hovered over him. He was the posthumous child of a rough, drunken fellow, a singer and sub-chanter in the cathedral choir of Bristol who left his widow to support herself by dressmaking in one of the back streets of the old town, and the boy was able to gain only the rudiments of an education in the charity school. His biographer tells us that he was of a peculiar temper, sullen and silent. So much of his time was spent in solitude, and he seemed to have so few of the characteristics of children that many regarded him as weak in intellect. His after-life is well known. Failure met him at every hand, and by degrees he sank lower and lower into the depths of despair, until finally, with his last penny, he purchased sufficient arsenic to end his unhappy life. Another example of Winslow's doctrine is Hugh Miller, the self-taught Scottish genius who, as a boy, chose the calling of a stonemason that he might be unemployed during the hard frosts of winter, and thus have opportunity to educate himself. His career was successful, but the night following the completion of his greatest work, "The Testimony of the Rocks," he yielded to the strain to which his overworked brain had been subjected, and sent a bullet through his heart. ence Another similar case is that of Robert Tannahill, the Paisley weaver-poet who wrote "Jessie, the Flower of Dunblane." He was shy, sensitive, and awkward, and uncomfortable in the presof any but his humble friends. The one memorable day in all his life was that on which he received a visit from James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. The meeting was prolonged far into the night, and the parting was painful and pathetic. Tannahill, grasping the hand of his poet-brother, said, while tears suffused his eyes: "Farewell! We shall never meet again." Shortly afterward his body was found, stark and stiff, in a pool near the house. To come down to more recent times, we have a familiar example in Richard Realf, an English peasant, who became intimate with John Brown, and was with him at Harper's Ferry, and narrowly escaped lynching. The next we hear of him he was writing a remarkable series of poems for the Rochester Union. Domestic troubles oppressed him beyond endurance, and he committed suicide by poison. He made two attempts before success resulted, and between them composed the poem beginning “ De mortuis nil nisi bonum.' " Haydon, the celebrated historical painter and writer, overcome by debt, disappointment, and ingratitude, laid down the brush with which he was at work upon his last great effort, Alfred and the Trial by Jury," wrote with a steady hand, “Stretch me no longer upon this rough world," and then, with a pistol-shot, put an end to his unhappy existence. Richard Payne Knight, the poet, Greek scholar, and antiquary, was a victim of melancholia, and ended his life with poison. Burton, the vivacious author of the Anatomy of Melancholy," who had the reputation of being able to raise laughter in any company, was in reality constitutionally depressed, and finally ended his life in a fit of melancholy. Sir Samuel Romilly, a man of brilliant genius, by whose efforts the criminal laws of England were remodeled-a man loved for his sweet nature and upright manliness-while overcome by grief at the death of his wife, with his own hand sought rest beyond. Michael Angelo, after receiving a painful injury to his leg by a fall from a scaffold, while painting his "Last Judgment," became so melancholy that he shut himself in his own room and resolved to let himself die." Fortunately his intentions were frustrated by the celebrated physician Bacio Routini, who accidentally heard of his condition. Vittoria Alfieri, of whom it has been said that every event in his life is either a factor of disease or a symptom of mental alienation, attempted suicide in Holland, in the course of one of his restless trips through Europe in search of change. Kotzebue, who at last met a tragic death at the hand of an assassin, was at one time so melancholy that he mediated self-destruction. Cowper,when bowed down by religious melancholy, made two unsuccessful attempts on his life; and the list of distinguished men, who either attempted or admitted that they contemplated suicide, includes Chateaubriand, the brillant representative of French literature; Dupinghen, the distinguished anatomist and surgeon; Cavour, the regenerator of Italy; Lincoln, the martyr-President; George Sand; Goethe; Comte; Shelley, and Byron. Evidence is not lacking to warrant the assumption that genius is a special morbid condition. Centuries ago, Seneca taught that there was no great genius without a tincture of madness, and more than a century ago Diderot exclaimed: 'Oh how close the insane and men of genius touch!" Lamartine speaks of the mental disease called genius; Pascal says that extreme mind is akin to madness, and everybody is familiar with Dryden's couplet Great wits are sure to madness near allied,' And thin partitions do their bounds divide. But, be this as it may be, if we take into consideration the fact that the poet lives in an ideal world, surrounded by creatures of his own imagination, to whom he attributes the most exaggerated sentiments, it seems to me reasonable to believe that sooner or later, unhealthy introspection must be awakened, and followed, not infrequently, by the development of morbid tendencies. NEW EW TESTAMENT criticism is mostly made to begin with the Reformation age. I venture to say that so to begin it is wrong. While the great work of criticism has been done since the Reformation time, yet criticism was before the Reformation, before the Renaissance, before the days of Augustine and Jerome, before the golden age of the Alexandrian School. However faulty it may have been in its method and process of work, however lacking in its spirit, criticism of some kind was practised from the beginning of Bible-study in the Christian Church. It is a matter of interest to recall the fact that the critical work of the first two centuries was based on internal grounds, on evidence contained within the documents themselves. And this was not simply with reference to the Old Testament, concerning whose Mosaic and Prophetic origin there was then no suggestion of doubt, but with reference to the New Testament, whose separate books were acknowledged the historical documents we hold them to be to-day. This was true not only of the fathers who studied the New Testament inside the Church, but also of the heretics who studied it outside the Church. They never denied the historic origin of the New Testament books. As the Church grew away from Apostolic times, its own attitude and that of its opponents toward the Bible documents changed, so that by the end of the fourth century books were accepted or rejected, not on the internal basis of their teaching, but on the external basis of the ancient testimony regarding them; and the criticism of this period opened the way for the critical results of modern times, by bringing into consideration for the canonicity of the New Testament books the historic evidence of their Apostolic origin. And these results of modern criticism would have been forthcoming long before our day had not this fourth-century narrownesss of horizon and littleness of scholarly spirit increased, and by its increase brought upon the Church the darkness and death of the Middle Ages. Whatever science there had been in the Church's critical work died out, and the Church's knowledge of her own historic origin disappeared, and the Church's faith changed to superstition, and the Church's life became corrupt, and the world grew sick of everything that was called by her name. It was a dark picture, but we understand to-day how its darkness was, in the ordering of Providence, the best background for the light that was to come through the Renaissance and the Reformation. At first that light was but a glimmer, but this glimmer fell upon everything of the Church, and touched in its falling, the Church's criticism. It simply brought about another reaction. The argument from authority began to be questioned, then opposed, then given up, and the Reformers placed themselves squarely upon the argument from the internal character of the books themselves. Modern scholars are very fond of saying that, subjective as this attitude of the Reformation criticism was, it had behind it the beginning of that scientific spirit of real historic inquiry which has characterized the Church's criticism in these modern days; but our review of Patristic criticism has shown us that its beginnings were far back of this. The ignorance of the Middle Ages broke in upon these beginnings and swept them away. But the learning of the Renaissance brought them into life again, and under the new vitality of the Reformation they had before them the possibility of becoming a true and serviceable criticism for the Church. How was it that, instead of realizing that possibility, they sank away again out of sight, and in their place grew up the new scholasticism of Church-usage that determined the Canon according to custom, and relegated criticism to the universe of unknown things? The question is answered by remembering that purely subjective criticism can never give a standingground for the Church. Its tendency is inevitably toward the destruction of the Bible by shivering it into the thousand pieces of individual opinion. But the Reformation Church needed Bible standing-ground. As a natural consequence it came to abandon this subjective attitude toward the Scripture; but it allowed itself to drift into the opposite extreme of the attitude of external usage, so that, before the Reformation century was ever, the New Testament came to be formally accepted as a whole, without note or comment, and was thus. withdrawn from the field of historical inquiry as entirely as it had been in the Roman Catholic Church by the rulings of the Council of Trent. In such a condition of affairs as this, there was need of reconstruction in Biblical criticism-for the Reformation was making a mockery of itself. The Reformation Church had one mission-to preach the Bible; one aim-to study the Word of God, to understand it, to make it known to men. Her sacred business was to get at the Bible facts and tell them; to discover Bible truths and unlock them. And now here it was. with its Bible wrapped in a napkin and buried in the earth, a slothful, if not a wicked, servant. God punishes Churches as well as men. For this scholasticism, having reduced religion to an absurdity, a new apologetic was called for, and it was offered by Rationalism. The offer was accepted, and the eighteenth century opened with Reason established as the champion of the Bible. She began proving the Bible true, by showing it to be in harmony with herself. She ended by proving the Bible false by showing it was beyond herself, for everything in the Bible was subjected to the test of herself, and so she became authority in place of the Spirit of God. But all this while, since the eighteenth century began, there had been coming into the study of the Church a scientific criticism. But I want to make clear what scientific criticism is, and I cannot do that better than to point back to the Alexandrian School, and call your attention to the position which Origin, Dionysius, and the scholars of that famous period assumed. For it will be noticed that their merit lay, not in holding external evidence to the exclusion of internal evidence, but in addition to it. It is in this combination of the internal and external that the essence of scientific criticism consists. Scientific criticism is, on the one hand, the study of the books in their language, style, and thought, in their personal, historical, and geographical references. And, on the other hand, it is the study of all the historic testimony of every kind, in any way concerning them, in and out of the Church, back to the earliest times. But the combination of these results is made on the principle that the exegetic opinion must always stand subordinate to the historic facts. There is a puzzle in the history of the Biblical criticism of the eighteenth century. It has been a wonder how, if criticism during this time has been so scientific, it should have produced such false results. But in this element of the combination of the internal and external in true scientific criticism lies the explanation. For this so-called scientific criticism has produced these false results because it has laid a false emphasis on the one side or the other of the combination. In other words, it has not been truly scientific. (To be continued.) ULFILAS AND THE GOTHIC TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE. ERNST ECKSTEIN. Translated and Condensed for THE LITERARY DIGEST from a Paper (5 pp.) in Westermann's Monats-Hefte, Braunschweig, December. THE HE ancient Romans regarded the Germans, especially those with whom they came little in contact, very much in the light in which civilized people nowadays regard the Red Indians. They recognized, however, that the rule was subject to some notable and brilliant exceptions, as in the person of Hermann, the conqueror of the Teutoburger Forest, who had been a volunteer in the Roman service, and of his father-inlaw, Segest. Nevertheless, it is certain that the intellectual culture of the German tribes, even of those which had scarcely come into contact with Rome must have been immeasurably above that of the general body of Roman historians. A proof of this view,which renders all other evidence unnecessary, is the highly developed substance of the Gothic language, the oldest form of German of which any memorials have been preserved. Unquestionably the most important of these memorials is Ulfilas's incomparable translation of the Bible in the fourth century; but the language with which this master-work makes us acquainted, exhibits such wondrous perfection-as well in the coinage of its grammatical forms, as in its capacity for reflecting the finest shades of ideas, that one is bound by every philological analogy to conclude that this perfection, with some trifling exceptions, must have been already attained in the first century after Christ. Of course, the translator of the Bible found it necessary to adopt some Greek and Latin words for which the heathen Goths had no equivalents, as apostolos, angelus, etc. Apart from this the Gothic language, as presented in Ulfilas's translation of the Bible, is a pure, homogeneous, and highly developed language, with its laws of construction and pronunciation, such as could have been created only by a clear-thinking, intellectually cultivated nation-by a nation possessing a valuable artistic literature, although such literature may have been confined to lyric and epic poems in oral circulation only. This entire early Gothic literature is lost, but a glance at the work of the powerful translator permeates us with the sure conviction that such a literature existed. Ulfilas's translation of the Bible is for every cultivated German a work of the highest interest; it is the one surviving memorial of Gothic speech and intellectual life, and at the same time a monument of so great, strong, and palpable a personality, that we shall make no mistake if we ascribe to the author of this immortal work the title of "The Gothic Luther." Gothic was the common language of all the East-German tribes. This people originally occupied the broad region between the Caspian Sea and the Baltic, and later pushed forward upon the southeast provinces of the Roman Empire. It was the Goths, in the more restricted sense of the term, who first came into collision with the Romans. Even at that time they had divided into two principal stems, the Ostragoths and the Visigoths. It was among the latter, who were already in part Christians, that Ulfilas labored forty years as Aipiskaupus (Bishop). He was born 311 A.D., and it appears that his youth was spent in Byzantium where he was probably baptized. During the first six or seven years of his clerical activity he encountered no opposition from the Visigoth rulers, but at the close of this period, King Athanarich inaugurated a system of persecution of the Christians which occasioned the im migration of Ulfilas and his co-religionists across the Danube to Mosia near the site of the present Tirnova, the ruler of which, Constantius, was a Christian, and received them hospitably. In this province, now entirely occupied by Slavic people, originated the first great linguistic memorial of the German people, the Gothic translation of the Holy Scriptures. The respect with which Ulfilas was regarded by the whole Christian world may be inferred from the fact that the Emperor summoned him to Constantinople as his personal advisor in an important religious discussion. There, in the summer of 383, Ulfilas fell sick and died, seventy-two years old. The presumption is strong that Ulfilas's translation embraced the whole Scriptures. The statement that he omitted the Books of the Kings, lest they should fire the Visigoths with a still more warlike sentiment, may be relegated to the domain of fable. At present, however, we possess only the half, and this has been recovered within comparatively recent years. Copies existed down to the ninth century, when they entirely disappeared, leaving no trace until the world-renowned Codex Argenteus, the Silver Writing, now preserved in the library of Upsala in Sweden, was discovered in the sixteenth century and at once recognized as Ulfilas's translation. The history of this silver code" is the common property of all educated men. It was found at Werden on the Ruhr, and, in consequence of the troublous times, was transferred to Prague. On the conquest of that city by Königsmark, it fell into the hands of the Swedes, who removed it to Stockholm; from there it went to Holland, and was finally brought back by the Count De la Gardie, who caused the precious manuscript to be bound in silver, and presented it to the high-school of Upsala. The entire "Codex" is written on dark-red parchment with silver letters. In certain remarkable paragraphs the language is emphasized by the substitution of gold for silver letters. It is in fact a worthy, but by no means too pretentious a vesture for the first great literary memorial of young Germany. “CONVENTIONALITY,”—Have you never had a clerical friend, a boon companion, jolly good fellow, who after dinner on a Saturday night in the library or smoking-room, was the centre of conversation, the merriest man, the best raconteur of you all? See how, over the latest joke or story, his eye lights up, his face beams, voice, hands, body, features, all seem unconsciously to lend their aid to the interpretation. Delsarte could at this moment teach him nothing. The climax reached, the merry shouts of his companions attest the power of his effort; or it may be that in a tender and reflective mood he unfolds some touching tale of sad experience among his flock, to the picturesque and pathetic strength of which the sympathetic murmurs and moistened lids of his hearers bear ample testimony. But, oh, what a difierence in the morning." With |