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represent a snake biting a tortoise's head. The modern Mexican occasionally gives a Christian character to his guitar by decorating the face of it with a cross, a chalice, and a paten.

The drum and rattle figure equally prominently among the treasures of the Alaskan Indians, the rattles being generally carved to represent some animal, such as a frog, a kingfisher, an owl, or a dead man with protruding tongue. Some represent the "spirit of the drowned," which is a nondescript creature, something between man and an otter, who cannot sing but only whistles, and is always playing tricks on mortals.

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The Eskimos on the north coast of Alaska have no instrument except a drum, made of a circle of wood, over which is stretched a head of skin, lashed with braided

sinews. This is also the only instrument of the Laplanders and Greenlanders, who frequently make it of the skin of a whale's tongue, stretched over a circle of whalebone, and held by a whalebone handle, while the Greenlander sings of the seal-hunt, of the great deeds of his ancestors, or of the joy of welcoming the long- absent sun; and the bystanders croon a sort of running accompaniment in low undertones.

Of such a subject it is difficult to give any just idea without the numerous illustrations by which Mr Brown has made the subject so very clear, and which include drawings of many rare and curious musical instruments of EuropeFrance, Germany, Russia, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Madeira.

C. F. GORDON CUMMING.

CIVILISATION.

'Tis very commonly said (perhaps no assertion is less likely to be disputed) that the age of miracles is past; yet the statement will hardly bear analysis, unless the word "miracle" is used only in a secondary and special sense. Dr Johnson defines it as a wonder, an event contrary to the laws of nature"; but Professor Skeat, a later and stricter etymologist, only gives "a wonder, a prodigy"; and on turning to find his interpretation of "prodigy," lo! he can only explain it as "a portent, a wonder." Now, if a miracle is nothing more than something astonishing, something to excite wonder, surely the age of miracles is in full swing; surprises lie in wait for us round the corner of each new almanac. On the other hand, if we adopt Dr Johnson's alternative interpretation, the proposition is as unstable as ever, for the Doctor himself would assuredly have considered that to travel from London to Edinburgh in eight hours would be (6 contrary to the laws of nature." During the whole history of the world, up to his time, the fastest locomotion on land had been by means of horses yoked to wheeled vehicles; imagination failed to surmise anything beyond what could be accomplished by the fleetest animals harnessed to the most perfect chariot. Sir Walter Scott was not deficient in imagination, but one has only to turn to the opening paragraphs of the 'Heart of Mid-Lothian' to recognise the author's conviction that travelling had been brought to perfection. When he wrote, "Perhaps the echoes of Ben Nevis may soon be awakened by the bugle, not of a warlike chieftain, but of

the guard of a mail-coach," he evidently thought he was trespassing beyond the verge of probability; yet in a few months from now these echoes will resound to the clatter and roar of express trains, devouring the ground at the rate of fifty miles an hour. Could Sir Walter see this, what could he do but exclaim with one of his own creatures, "Prodigious"? To him it would appear a miracle.

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But, considered as а mere achievement of human ingenuity and perseverance applying natural forces, it would not be miraculous in the special sense of the term. A genuine miracle must be an act or process transcending and independent of all natural law impossibility, in fact. For instance, there never was a time when the Irishman's aspiration to be in two places at once, bird," could be fulfilled, for that would violate what we must recognise as a law which no sane person would spend a single hour in studying to evade, that no single body can simultaneously occupy more than one ubi. There are doubtless laws in nature of which we know nothing, and therefore have not yet recognised; feats performed by means of these laws may seem to us miracles, but we have no right to call them supernatural because we cannot trace the action of the law.

There is no irreverence to Scripture involved in this assertion. We see through a glass darkly; we know in part. The Lawgiver reveals Himself to us by the action of His own laws, by us imperfectly understood; that action has in past times transcended

or evaded the observation of those who witnessed certain events which we class as miracles, just as the possibility of travelling sixty miles an hour transcended the imagination of Sir Walter Scott, and just as the nature of the electric current has hitherto evaded definition by men of science: each of these phenomena are miracles in the sense that they justly excite our wonder, but not in the sense that they are supernatural. The firmer a man's faith in the unseen, the firmer must be his conviction that although there are many things superhuman, there is nothing supernatural. It is a redundant adjective; everything that exists is natural, for nature is omnipresent, and by its laws everything that is unnatural ceases to exist. The most striking miracle that can take place the restoration of the dead to life is not one whit more miraculous or beyond our powers than the origin of life itself or the circulation of the blood. So long, therefore, as there remain fathomed mysteries such as these, so long the age of miracles endures.

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Looking back along the road travelled by human beings in what we conceitedly call the March of Civilisation, what a blundering, crooked track it is! how much shorter the journey might have been made! How deeply the ground is trampled where frequent conflicts have taken place! how many mighty barriers thrown across it by lawgivers, ecclesiastics, warriors, may still be traced by their crumbling ruins. "That which we call progress," observes Mr Leslie Stephen, "is for the most part a process of finding the right path by tumbling into every ditch on each side of the way.' Can it be claimed that our course even now is less staggering and

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blindfold than heretofore? Consider, for instance, the precautions taken for the physical development of the human race. It is possible that in after-ages our posterity will look back with amazement to the nineteenth century, when people in the van of civilisation freely devoted mind and means to developing the most capable strains of domestic animals, and were content to leave the perpetuation of their own species to utterly random haphazard. The mighty Clydesdale dray - horse, the racer with lungs and legs enabling him to outstrip the hurricane, and the shaggy little Shetland, are members of identically the same species: in the two first, qualities latent in the original animal have been developed by thoughtful selection of parents, and in the last have had to manifest themselves only in the degree permitted by an inclement climate and scanty food. Were the same discretion and control exercised in the preliminaries of human matrimony, instead of leaving them all to the guidance of a proverbially blind little god or the calculations of mercenary prudence, what physical and intellectual miracles might not follow! Each succeeding generation might excel the last in symmetry, beauty of countenance, the use of all the senses duly balanced by intellectual qualities. Gentlemen there might then be - not classified as such on account of their balance at the banker's or the superficial trick of caste, but because they would be gentle in the strict sense-i.e., men of birthtill in time a mongrel would be as out of place in human society as it is now in a pack of fox-hounds. Disappointment, of course, might be expected in the earlier stages of the system. The offspring of an alliance carefully selected to

produce a race of coal-heavers might conceive an invincible desire to become a Court florist, or one destined to excel as a musician be possessed with an unreasonable impulse to be a member of Parliament; but firm and scientific administration might be relied on to eradicate these eccentricities in time. Some people may be disposed to think the present Government have allowed a great opportunity to go past when they constituted a Ministry of Agriculture by Act of Parliament, instead of setting up a Ministry of Matrimony. However, this is a hazardous subject it is rather of what Civilisation has done for us than of what it might have done, or may do, that it is intended to treat in this paper.

To resume the metaphor of a march (for which I am in no degree responsible)-one looking back over the line of it may descry in the distance certain races that seem hardly yet to have started, and he is perhaps puzzled to account for their laggardness. Arithmetic is the simplest of the three R's, as well as the most indispensable in anything like business, yet there are primitive races whose language fails to define any proportion beyond duality. Some of the Australasian tribes reckon up to two and no further-everything beyond that being comprised in a word meaning "plenty." ." The West Australians have advanced a little further, and by means of counting their fingers and toes, and (in the higher standards) other people's fingers and toes, may be considered quite ready reckoners. One of these, wishing to express "fifteen," would say, "Marh-jin-belli-belli-gudjir-jinabang-ga"-that is, a hand on

either side and half the feet." The Tonga Islanders are a long way further on, for they not only can count up to 100,000, but have given proof of a highly developed sense of humour. They got bored by the French explorer Labillardière, who "pressed them further, and obtained numerals up to 1000 billions, which were duly printed, but proved on later examination to be partly nonsense words and partly indelicate expressions; so that the supposed series of high numerals forms at once a little vocabulary of Tonga indecency, and a warning as to the probable results of taking down unchecked answers from question - worried savages."

Think what a vast interval of education a mind in this primitive state has to traverse before it can apprehend the bare existence of the legion numerals handled by mathematicians, let alone handling them himself. Talk of miracles! Herein is one far worthier of wonder than the Indian juggler's magic mango, that the dwarfish intellect whose reckoning power fails to apprehend definitely more than "we two"-everything over that being an unnumbered crowd-can be trained to grasp even the elementary measurements of science, such as that of the velocity of light, and, thus trained, comprehend the magnitude involved in the fact that the rays which left the star Aldebaran Beta 50,000 years ago are only just reaching the earth now, though they have been travelling hither through the intervening space at the rate of 180,000 miles a second ever since. To cause the warm blood to course again through dead veins, or to change water into wine, are more sudden, but scarcely more wonder

1 Primitive Culture, by Professor E. Tylor, vol. i. chap. vii.

stirring feats than wakening the dormant faculties of the mind or turning ignorance into knowledge. Ages ago a Phoenician merchant, ingenious beyond his fellows, and overwhelmed by the increasing multitude and complexity of his transactions, devised a series of symbols by means of which, scratched on tablets of baked clay, he was enabled to exchange information with traders at a distance. "Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth! What a blaze of illumination may be traced to that uncertain spark! A faculty took its birth therefrom, second only in importance to articulate speech. Hitherto in

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tercourse in absence had been as impossible as it is now for a man to be simultaneously in more than one place. Henceforth distance in space and time were alike set at naught; the wall of Pyramus was penetrated; the king's sign-manual commanded obeisance in the uttermost parts of his realm; lovers' flames were fanned even when their whispers were hushed by distance; and, marvel of marvels, men being dead yet spoke in their own words to countless unborn generations. A man must be in love a woman must be a mother —before either can realise the full value of letters. There are some who never find themselves in either of these conditions-to whom perhaps correspondence has been so watered down by frequency and by the added importunity of telegrams that they have come to look on the post-bag as an irksome incident, like shaving. And all of us (lovers and mothers excepted, bien entendu) have suffered indolence to interfere with intercourse by letter. Lord Byron wrote letters not amiss, yet even he willingly shirked putting pen to paper. "No letters to-day," he notes in his journal; so much the better

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-no answers. We are prone to assume that the age of correspondence, like that of miracles, has passed away; if that is so, it has happened through our own neglect. Letters are but written conversation: bright, natural conversation is the outward and visible sign of friendship; and bright, natural letters are as delightful and as highly valued as ever-only we are too lazy to write them. Yet what loads of leisure some people have! How few of the young men (young women must be credited with plenty of industry in correspondence) who loll away rainy hours in country houses over the pages of sporting and society papers ever think of taking up a pen to exchange thoughts with distant friends! Let us pry into the correspondence of a member of this enviable class, taking care to fix on one who is heart-whole, untrammelled by engagement with any fair-for, of course, the mind of the enamoured male is abnormally active, and drives the quill far and fast.

It is perhaps the afternoon of Sunday, often a period of self-reproach by reason of the seductions of luncheon all too generous. The golden youth rises from before the fire, yawns, stretches himself, and, asking his host what time the post goes out, straddles off to the smoking-room, observing that he has a lot of letters to write. This young gentleman has received an education costly beyond the wildest dreams of the medieval student: he is one on whom thousands of pounds have been lavished to give him the standing of a scholar; he has means enough to make him absolute disposer of his own time, and is of such station in life where a considerable degree of mental culture may be expected. Here are surely the head and the hand to bring the Phoenician's invention

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