not an indication of its being more modern, for it resembles too closely the hair of the Venus of the Capitol and that of the Venus Callipygos of the Naples Museum. But the treatment of the base on which the statue rests is more suspicious. This may be described as rough-tooled, but the tooling is so regularly done as to suggest an imitation of methods no longer in vogue. Since seeing

the statue I have observed in the British Museum, and in the Louvre, the bases of a number of statues of the period to which the Venus de' Medici is usually assigned. These are sometimes dressed to a smooth finish and sometimes tooled roughly, but less regularly than in the case of the present statue.

When in the British Museum I consulted with Mr. Murray and Mr. Smith, curators of ancient sculpture, with regard to the motif of our statue. I had no photograph to show then, but the motif struck them as modern. But to me it seems not necessarily modern. Other Venuses with the dolphin exist, in which the goddess holds something in her hand. Clarac (Musée de Sculpture, Pl. 615) publishes three such statues from the Giustiniani Collection, in which Venus holds a flower, a sea-shell, or a vase. What is more natural than that a sculptor, when executing one of a series of statues in which an armlet is worn, should vary the theme by making the goddess carry the armlet, instead of a shell or a vase?

When I examined the armlet I must confess that suggestions of Byzantine, rather than Greek design, were aroused by the rectangles containing globules and nail-heads. It seemed as if the sculptor had drawn his inspiration from the bronze doors of a Mediaval cathedral or from the ornamentation of a Mediæval book-cover. But here again I am not so sure that the design in question may not date as early as the Alexandrian epoch.

The Greek and Roman jewelry of the British Museum and the Louvre, and the bracelet of the Venus of Cnidus at Munich seem to show that the bracelet of our Venus is not an impossibility in antiquity.

A well-known sculptor and a painter, who have seen the statue, have been so charmed with its beauty as to care little whether it be ancient or not. Nor are we ready to answer positively or negatively the question raised in regard to its antiquity. We can only say, at the present time, that if ancient this statue is the most important of the series to which it belongs, and that if modern, the cleverness of the forger is of an unusually high order.

Since writing the above, I have visited the National Museum of Florence, and was impressed by the fact that a number of busts and reliefs were disfigured by similar brown stains. A well known expert, Signor Bardini, suggested that these were caused by the effort of Renaissance sculptors to tone the whiteness of the marble by applying heated wax mixed with other ingredients. These brown stains do not appear on ancient marbles in the rest of Italy, and, even in Florence, seem to be limited to works of the Renaissance period. It seems strange that the Romanesque sculptors, who executed the choir screen and pulpit at San Miniato, should have been able to tone marble to a beautiful ivory finish, and that the accomplished Renaissance sculptors should have made such blundering mistakes. It is more probable that these stains date from the sixteenth century, when classical methods were more systematically imitated. They represent, then, an unsuccessful attempt to reproduce the classic ganosis. tion still remains: Are the brown stains in the present instance Renaissance stains, or those of an accomplished modern forger?

The ques

VOL. XXII-56

A

KLONDIKE GOLD DIS COVERIES

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LL the good old signs of gold times and a big boom out West are with us again. The Pigwacket Post, of Pigwacket Centre, Mass., announces that “Jonas Mead has sold his cow and his furniture and is going to the Klondike to prospect for gold. Good luck, Jonas." The more accessible newspapers have gaudy displays of companies that will dig out this Alaskan gold, and of a great many millions of stock shares for sale at the small price of one dollar each. Away off under the Arctic circle, 8,000 miles from New York by the usual route, where the ground is frozen all the year round and the sternest winter lasts for eight months, Dawson City has sprung up as if by magic. Last autumn the junction of the Klondike and the Yukon was in the Arctic wilderness-a good place to hunt for the bones of mammoths, perhaps, but so extremely difficult of access that such a motive was ineffectual. Now there is a city there, with thousands of inhabitants-the experienced say there will soon be 20,000-newspaper offices, stores, faro banks, and all the other necessaries of a mining civilization. The little band of hardened adventurers who returned from the wilderness carrying gold dust and nuggets in deerskin sacks, tomato-cans, milk-cans—anything that wouldn't leak-brought back the tangible evidences that there is a great deal of gold in the small gulches of the Klondike-a creek

flowing into the Yukon 1,850 miles from the mouth-and its tributaries. Some of these men had panned out fortunes of $200,000 in a short time and considered their claims worth millions. Their appearance has begun what is well called, in popular parlance, a fever. It is all the better named a fever, because there is no rationality in it at all-a rule to which there are exceptions, but in a very small ratio. The people like Mr. Mulhall, who deal with great masses of figures, have shown the extraordinary fact that the gold mined from the earth in modern times actually has not paid for the work put in the mining; in other words, the race of miners are unconsciously a sort of martyrs, who give up their lives and efforts to furnish the rest of the world with a useful and ornamental commodity-another truth which admits of some very distinguished exceptions. Further, the mining adventurers who went to California in '49, counting in the bonanza kings, the Lucky Baldwin class and all, earned an average of $300 a year, which, with boots at $20 per pair, and flour at fifty cents a pound, is scarcely worth calling an income.

And although California may have seemed a rough land and far away to the roving Yankee of '49, it was vastly more comfortable than this Upper Yukon country, There were things to be done other than mining, and a sunny land of fruit and flowers lay around the mountains for the use of the disheartened prospectors. The Klondike district is 4.500 miles from San Francisco by the water - route across the Pacific to the mouth of the Yukon, and then up that mightiest of rivers; and navigation is impossible for eight months, and unsafe for another month, out of the year. The more direct route is 2,000 miles shorter-by the Pacific to Juneau in southeastern Alaska-across the moun

tains by one of three difficult and even dangerous passes, then by a chain of lakes and the Lewis River to the Yukon, and down the Yukon to Dawson City. The difficulties of the Chilkoot Pass route were graphically described in SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE for November, 1896. The authorities are becoming alarmed at the blockade of men and luggage on the hither side of the mountain passes. Even the earlier or more fortunate adventurers who get to the Klondike this fall, will have to be well equipped to stand the Arctic winter, and they can do no mining until next summer. The summer sun, indeed, melts only a few inches of the soil, and great bonfires must be built to thaw out the ground, in the middle of July, before the paying gravel can be dug up for the pan. All the mining of this region is of the placer variety, in which the gravel is mixed with water and whirled in a pan until the few grains of gold settle on the bottom. No huge nuggets are found to be compared with the bonanza strikes of the Californian and Australian gold fields, but a remarkably large percentage of the claims shows paying results.

The experienced say that no one with less than $750 in hand can hope to get through without trouble. Hundreds of others have insisted on beginning the journey too late in the year. None have succeeded in persuading the life insurance companies to share the risk.

I

N these days the layman is apt to protect himself in a cloak of blasé acquiescence from the ever-fresh demands upon his mental powers made by mechanical wonders. But the most fatigued and agnostic intelligence will scarcely fail to respond to the proposal of the electrical “ wizards to telegraph from one part of the earth's surface to another without the use of wires. In Europe, a young electrician named Marconi has actually succeeded in transmitting and receiving messages through a distance of nine miles, with no connection between the sending and receiving instruments save that furnished by the circumambient ether. Marconi has found that when a transmitting instrument-which is so simple in its elements that one is tempted to describe it in detail is made to utter electrical

TELEGRAPHING WITHOUT

WIRES

vibrations on the Herz radiator principle, with a rapidity of 225,000,000 vibrations per second, these waves seem to be carried through the ether, if unobstructed by material obstacles, equally in all directions, and his delicate receiver has no difficulty in receiving and recording them across the Bristol Channel. The feat is possible only in places where an unobstructed expanse of ether interposes between the transmitting and receiving instruments.

The idea of wireless telegraphy is no new

one.

Men have been thinking of it almost ever since the Morse inventions came to the world. The astonishing Mr. Edison had his try, and abandoned the attempt for more immediately promising work. Aside from the young Italian, Marconi, Nikola Tesla has the most ambitious projects in this direction and, indeed, Mr. Tesla contemplates the possibility of an even vaster feat, for he believes he can transmit electrical power without wires. Should he accomplish such a thing, the bounds of electrical utility will be extended more radically than by any other discovery the world has seen. Mr. Tesla is not yet ready to publish the details of his experiments, but he has explained to interviewers that it is the static electricity of the earth which he will exploit in furnishing the power necessary for his wireless transmission. He has already sent signals via the earth current to and fro through a distance of twenty miles, and announces unhesitatingly that he shall in time be able to telegraph without wires to any part of the earth's surface.

Tesla used a striking and simple simile in explaining how he intended to disturb and capture the earth's electricity. He said to his interviewer: "Suppose the whole earth to be like a hollow rubber ball filled with water, and at one place I have a tube attached to this, with a plunger in the tube. If I press upon the plunger the water in the tube will be driven into the rubber ball, and as the water is practically incompressible, every part of the surface of the ball will be expanded. If I withdraw the plunger, the water follows it and every part of the ball will contract. Now, if I pierce the surface of the ball several times and set tubes and plungers at each place, the plungers in these will vibrate up and down in answer to every movement which I may produce in the plunger of the first tube. If I were to produce an explosion in the centre of the body of water in the ball, this would set up a

series of vibrations in the whole body. If I could then set the plunger in one of the tubes to vibrating in consonance with the vibrations of the water, in a little while and with the use of a very little energy, I could burst the whole thing asunder."

In the same way, Mr. Tesla proposes, with a comparatively small power uttered in vibrations of marvellous rapidity, to urge into action the terrestrial current. The inventor thinks it possible that his machine when perfected may be set up, one in each great centre of civilization, to flash the news of the day's or hour's history immediately to all the other cities of the world; and stepping for a sentence out of the realms of the workaday world, he offers a prophecy that any communication we may have with other stars will certainly be by such a method- -a prophecy which has all the picturesque and imaginative charm to be desired, together with an unusual quality of prudence and safety.

to make the demonstration without subtracting one unit from her fleets in foreign waters at a juncture when continental editors were raising a hue and cry over the " rotten British navy." This review at Spithead was remarkable in showing undoubtedly the most powerful fleet that ever has been concentrated at one point. Of the one hundred and sixty-five pennants that swung at Spithead no less than one hundred and thirty-three were fitted for immediate active service-to fight an enemy within a few hours. So strongly are the English convinced of the importance of sea-going qualities, that practically the whole of this fleet could reach Gibraltar in four days, and the Channel Squadron could be at Halifax in nine days after sailing orders had been received. When it is remembered that England's naval resources in foreign and colonial waters, amounting to one hundred and twenty-five effective fighting vessels, were not touched in showing this unprecedented strength, one understands the bubbling selffelicitation which has made the Times's account of the event almost incoherently joyful.

Aside from its effect in impressing the Powers, such an occasion as the Spithead review has its instructive phase in the comparison furnished with earlier periods of naval construction. The progress which has been made during the reign of the Queen is of course fairly revolutionary. In the first fleet reviewed by the Queen there was not even a screw propeller, and every vessel was built of wood. In the first steam-vessels the Queen saw, the engineers got along with three pounds of steam pressure, and for every horse-power about half a ton of machinery was required, while at present the crack vessels use one hundred and fifty-five pounds of steam, and one and three-quarter hundredweight suffices for one horse-power. The fuel burnt per horse-power has been reduced from seven pounds to two pounds-indeed one might continue almost indefinitely to enumerate the remarkable changes which illustrate the curiously rapid progress of naval architecture.