ulace, while affectionate ties were formed with the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, Charles Kingsley, Lady Byron, John Ruskin, George Eliot, the Brownings, and many more. Throughout her wanderings, and in her contact with all classes in her own country, Mrs. Stowe remained what she always was-the simple, unpretending American woman, who regarded her gift as a trust from God, and was weighed down with a sense of its responsibility. Naturally of a retiring, even shrinking, disposition, she steadily preferred the quiet of the home-circle to all else the world could offer. A letter in which she describes her personal appearance is an index of her modest estimate of herself in

general: «I am a little bit of a woman, rather more than forty, as withered and dry as a pinch of snuff; never very well worth looking at in my best days, and now a decidedly used-up article.» For many years her work in the United States was not only that of a littérateur, but of lecturer and propagandist as well, until the war with its wiping off of the blot of slavery gave her liberty to rest from her labors in that hard-fought field. The long crescendo of work in this kind found its climax in the publication in the «Atlantic,» in 1863, of the reply which she wrote in response to the address to the women of America by the sister-women of Great Britain and Ireland, signed, it will be

remembered, by a shining list of great names. In her own person in that pronunciamento she stood for and summed up the womanhood of her nation.

«Dred,» intended by the writer to be in some sort a complement to the earlier novel, appeared in 1856, and one hundred thousand copies were sold in England within four weeks. Harriet Martineau thought it superior to «Uncle Tom,» and the work certainly contains some vivid scenes, and, moreover, has the merit of depicting the normal social conditions in the South during slavery days. Then two years later came «The Minister's Wooing," which most critics will agree with Mr. Lowell in considering her best work, technically viewed. «The Minister's Wooing,» «The Pearl of Orr's Island,» and «Old Town Folks,» produced during the fourteen years between 1855 and 1869, although by no means on a level of workmanship, constitute pioneer fiction in an important field, fruitfully developed in later days by Mrs. Cooke, Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkins, and others. These tales are no slight part of the author's literary creation, and historically are of significance in the evolution of American story-making. Half a dozen books were written by Mrs. Stowe after 1869, the last so late as 1881. But it is best to regard her major activity as closed with the year 1870.

In 1863 the family moved from Andover, Mass., with whose seminary Professor Stowe had long been connected, to Hartford, Conn. It was natural that Mrs. Stowe should come to the Connecticut city where she had studied as a school-girl, and where her sister

Isabella Beecher Hooker was living. In the course of a decade the growth of manufacturing interests had so encroached upon her property that the place was disposed of, and the Stowes moved a short distance to Forest street, and bought a cottage, the houses of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner being hard by. Here she lived for more than twenty-two years. In the old days active with her pen, and often seen in the society of the little city, for the last dozen years she had been in entire seclusion from social duties and pleasures, and incapacitated from literary labor. Her last public appearance as a woman of letters was on June 14, 1882, on the occasion of a garden party, given by her publishers at Newtonville, Mass., in honor of her seventieth birthday. In 1865 Mrs. Stowe purchased and fitted up an attractive Southern home in Mandarin, Fla., and thither she repaired for twenty years, giving up the wonted south-faring in 1885 because of her husband's failing health.

Mrs. Stowe's experiences were exceptional, her achievements conspicuous. The ethical was dominant in her career-the world of spirits, ideas, ideals, and aspirations was the world of her chief interest. In the making of her mightiest book she regarded herself as a mediumin the noble sense of that much misused word. «Are you not thankful, Mrs. Stowe,» said a neighbor of late, «that you wrote

Uncle Tom's Cabin?>» With a flash of the old fire she replied, «I did not write that book: God put a pen into my hand; he wrote it.»> Richard Burton.

IN

N the American Museum of Natural History, and in the office of THE CENTURY, the writer has been exhorted somewhat as follows: «We appreciate all that is said of life in the great West a million or so years ago, and understand your enthusiasm; but will you not tell us about these animals in every-day language, avoiding Loxolophodon, Titanotherium, and other polysyllabled words, and calling them by their familiar names?»

1 Several months have been given by Mr. Knight to the water-colors from which these pictures have been made, under the direction of the writer and Dr. Wortman of the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park, New York City. They are designed to give VOL. LII.-89.

Full of this well-meant advice, we look over the nine ancient beasts which have been so cleverly pictured by Charles Knight under our direction, and observe that death. has played havoc in their noble families. Only one has survived the wrecks of time: the four-toed horse, by far the smallest of the nine. Two others have been dead, say, a million years each, about three miles of rock lying vertically over their graves; but happily

an idea of the living forms of the remarkable extinct animals which are being collected for the museum, to be exhibited to the public in October. The watercolors are a gift to the museum from Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan.

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for the reader, a distant strain of rhinoceros blood coursed in their veins, and we may speak of one as the aquatic or swimming rhinoceros» (Metamynodon), and of the other as the cursorial or running rhinoceros » (Hyracodon). A fourth animal, the Elothere, might be described as the « giant two-toed pig-if the reader will remember that the animal is emphatically not a pig. Here the possibilities of familiarity come to a sudden stop, for the remaining brutes are absolutely without the most remote living kinship, and the use of such terms as elephant, wolf, deer, or others which may be suggested by the illustrations, would violate one of the first canons of popular science-namely, never to seek clearness at the expense of truth. So we must Anglicize the Greek terms, which are, fortunately, euphonious and intelligible, and recognize the Uintathere (Uintah beast) as the great quadruped whose bones are found buried about the base of the Uintah Mountains of southern Wyoming, and the Titanothere (giant beast) as the largest inhabitant of the great lakes east of the Rockies. Before describing the animals themselves,

we may stop to note what our present knowledge of them has cost in human skill and endurance. Every one of these pictures is drawn from a complete skeleton hewn out of the solid rock, and each of these skeletons represents years and years of arduous exploration in which Wortman, Hatcher, Peterson, and others sent out by the American Museum, by Princeton, or by Yale, have become famous. Our party found the Titanothere in a broiling alkali cañon of South Dakota. Its head was protruding from a hard sandstone cliff, and the chest, limbs, and trunk were chiseled out by the men under a rude shelter which lowered the noon temperature to 106°. They were encouraged to think that the whole beast had been mired in a standing position. This was probably the case originally but suddenly they came across a fault: it appeared that the hind limbs had been swept away; and it required two years' more searching before bones of an animal of a corresponding size were secured. Every other skeleton has its own story of determination, disappointment, and surprise.

The old lake-basins, once on sea-level, and

enriched by the moist, balmy winds of the Pacific, are now elevated from four to five thousand feet. The only redeeming feature of their present aspect of absolute barrenness is that the absence of vegetation leaves the old graves and burying-grounds bare. Fossil bones and skeletons are not plentiful-far from it; but a trained eye sees a great distance along the bare gullies, cliffs, and cañons, and your daily scramble of fifteen to twenty miles enables you to prospect over a vast stretch. You are off in the morning, stiffened by a frosty night. You know by sad experience that the ice in the basins does not promise a cool day. Your backbone is still freezing while the sun begins to broil and blister your skin, and you are the living embodiment of the famous dessert served by the Japanese-a hot crust without, an ice within. Your trail begins on the upland, which may be the actual level of the old lake-bottom; and as if walking through a graveyard, you never look for bones until the land breaks away by erosion. When you reach the edge of this upland, you look off into a sea of rock, sometimes wild beyond

description, and you plunge down the slope to a certain level. Then you follow this level round and round and in and out. Here you are on a seam which bears fossils. Above and below it are other similar fossiliferous seams, and between them are barren seams where you will not find a bone if you search till doomsday. This level, perhaps, represents the delta of a great mountain river which swept the animals out with coarse sand, pebbles, and debris. Sometimes you walk miles and miles, up and down, day after day, and see nothing but common turtle bones, which are so deceptive and tempting at a distance that the fossil-hunter profanely kicks them aside. Turtles are found everywhere because they swam out, basked in the sunshine of the midlakes, and occasionally sank to the bottom, while the carcasses of land animals were buried in the deltas or nearer shore. In such a fossil-barren land the heat seems twice as torrid, on the buttes your muscles and back ache doubly, your tongue lies parched from the last gulp of alkali water, your soul abhors a fossil, and longs for the green shade of the East, and the watermelon,