tling vexed questions; and that other and perhaps radical failure in not yet having learned how to take care of and rear our children, not to have learned the great secrets of education. It may be, it probably is, reserved for a higher period of our development, a possible Utopia which we may expect several yearssay centuries-hence, this knowledge of how to keep the peace among nations, and how to educate our young, so that there shall be no failures. which should tempt an appetite which needed an impetus. The hungry Goth could eat raw meat, or at least endure it after smoking it over his camp-fire, with his spear for a spit. The softer Italian or Frenchman whom he conquered needed the refinements of the pâté de foie gras, or the filet de bœuf aux champignons, or the choux-fleurs au parmesan, to tempt his less Gothic digestion. Those gods of the north, Thor with his hammer, or even the Norse maiden, would have failed to appreciate these nicer distinctions. Cookery improves as it gets nearer the sun. Finally and lastly, a Utopia remains to be dreamed of in which there will not be too much thumping on piano-fortes by inexperienced hands, not too much tooting on trombones or blowing of flutes by those who are achieving those instruments. Oh, the suffer That would be a desirable Utopia where good cookery prevailed. Imagine a journey through America, and a possibility of stopping always at a Massasoit House! A lovely Utopian beefsteak, with all its natural juices preserved by being broiled over a wood-fire, pitchers of genuine cream, bread which has the lightness and whiteness of a summer cloud, and coffee of the clearness of wine-ings of the slave Fine Ear in this world of such should be your inevitable good fortune. The frying pan, that dreadful underminer of our national good temper, should be sent to Nuremberg to be hung up with the instruments of torture used in the dark ages; and we should afterward travel through a landscape in which there were no rough spots, on railroad-cars which never met with an accident or admitted any dust, to reach one of these hotels in Utopia, where there were never any indifferent beds or any bad cookery. Such, and really better than all this imagina-gabalus, and will only sniff when it pleases, tion, are the hotels in Switzerland; beautifully ornamented with flowers in the court-yards, well conducted, and with admirable service, they are as well worth going to visit for a longsuffering American as are the picturesque views-the dashing water-falls, the snowy mountains, and the silent glaciers. Such hotels are to be found in England; and the beautiful Lake Derwentwater, in the lake district, where Wordsworth, and Southey, and De Quincey, made Nature doubly famous, is blessed with such a one. It is at Keswick, and has, besides good cookery, a pretty and well-mannered landlady, who helps you out of your carriage with her own neat hand. France is the land of good cookery. It is astonishing why the dark-eyed Celts should be such good cooks, and the blue-eyed Saxons not. The Italians, too, are admirable cooks. In all the world there is not such a nest of gifted mortals who can cook as those peasants about the little lake of Orta, near Maggiore, in Northern Italy. They go all over Europe, and are highly prized even in the cafés of Paris. The successful family of the Delmonicos come from some place near Orta, on the Italian side of the Alps. They have contributed not a little to our possible Utopia by their faultless cooking and the admirably-managed restaurants which bear their name. Nor must the colored race be forgotten. They are great natural cooks. A sense of flavor seems to exist in them which is like a talent for music. Perhaps it exists with color. While the blue-eyed Goths were engaged in conquering the world, and by their feats of arms gaining an appetite, the softer and darker children of the sun (that great cooking-stove for the fruits and grains) were calmly getting dinner and were creating dishes discord! What a ceaseless vigil he keeps up! He never rests, even in sleep. The eye is closed, the busy brain sleeps, but this warder on the watch-tower is always awake. He hears the stealthy step of the burglar, he hears the hand trifling with the key, he hears the watch tick. He never rests; and, in a crowded city, what a suffering martyrdom is his! Every hand-organ, every rattling cart, every dismal church-bell, adds to his trouble. The nose is as great a tyrant as Helio but the delicate ear works all the time. Even in the country the birds begin at four o'clock to twitter for his edification, and there, too, he must attend to that practising upon unknown horns and pipes which forms the recreation of rustic Strephons and Philanders. The bagpipe, dreadful creation of Scotch solitudes, miserable successor of Pan's pipes, imprisoned zephyrs protesting against their homely dungeon-this is added to the suffering of Fine Ear in the country. Only in Venice, sweetest daughter of quiet and silence, can he rest. There, on soft waters, does the noiseless gondola convey you to your destination without a sound save the musical dip of an oar. There can Fine Ear take a short and delightful rest. This practising on musical instruments in colleges and boarding-houses, and in hotels, should be put a stop to. The sufferings of a patient student in a close college-room, with a trombone over his head, are fearful. He is tempted to paraphrase Madame Roland and say: "O Music, what crimes are committed in thy name!" One can almost imagine that Collins thought of this side of human misery when he wrote his "Ode to the Passions." The possible Utopia, then, is a place inhabited by people of infinite wit, good temper, and a disposition to agree with the last speaker, supposing that person to be yourself. The Utopian House must be large and well ventilated, furnished with simplicity and excellent taste; your income must be just a little more than you can spend, and no one must, on any account, practise on musical instruments in your hearing. You must travel until you find a perfect climate, one where RUNNING over the July numbers of Ar PLETONS' JOURNAL recently, I fell upon certain editorial comments on an article of mine entitled "The Strangest Things in Life," and then turned back and read the article itself, by way of coming to some conclusion as to their justice. Through an error of my own, overlooked in reading and correcting the manuscript, and again overlooked in reading the proof-sheets, I find that the final sentence of the article is a little misleading as to the actual position I intended to take, and as to my real opinions on the important question discussed. The sentence, commencing, “The day has come to stop babbling about nervous centres," and going on to urge a more thorough study of the internal culture and forces of nervous tissue, is defective in this that the word exclusively should have followed the word babbling. What I intended to urge was that study of the nervous centres was only competent to the explanation of the modes under which nervous influence operates, and constitutes merely the analytic part of psychology; while, on the other hand, for a rational explanation of the phenomena called spiritual the laws and constitution of the nervous life must be carefully investigated. With this correction I will let the article stand as it is. But I should be very sorry to put myself on the record as depreciating the value of studies in nervous anatomy and structure, within their legitimate province. This one remark, however, I must be permitted, and I think most anatomists will concede its justice—namely, that, the more thorough one's mastery of nervous anatomy and function, the less the inclination to materialistic views of mental action, and the more absolute the conviction that life is associated with a series of unknown and possibly unknowable forces, and that in its relation to these forces it presents a series of problems that physiological formularies are incompetent to solve. The phenomena of spiritualism, so far from dipping into this higher series of relations, seem to me to be purely morbid nervous phenomena, always associated with the epileptic predisposition, and having no value whatever except as curious facts appertaining to that department of psychology designated as medical. How strikingly this view is illustrated the biographies of acting spiritual medium and how minutely and invariably the facts verify it, are points that can only be appre mental impressions that had previously passed Now for the sequel. On careful inquiry, in some of their aspects, but to be viewed with apprehension and corrected by medical treatment, if possible, not exhibited to gratify the morbid curiosity of such as are always hunting for miracles and mysteries.* One or two points in reference to both these cases should be noted, in order that their bearing may be fairly appreciated. In each family the elder brother, who may be fairly presumed to have been the product of the highest physical vigor of the parents, partially escapes the taint, which appears in the elder Eddy only as intellectual predisposition, and in the elder H— — as a tendency to vertigo. Again, of the two Eddy boys, who are mediums, the elder and stronger, a man of vital temperament, and about thirty years of age, produces the materializing phenomena, while the younger and punier of them is a trance-medium. I speak conventionally when I talk of the phenomena produced by these mediums; for, having made it a rule not to trouble myself with investigating public séances where the probabilities are that all the necessary facilities for optical deception have been prearranged, I did not apply any tests whatever, and limited my inquiries to the detection and description of the epileptic predisposition. And if any reader should say that it is impossible for a ment, has been for several years under treat- hended in their full force by those who have The case of the Eddy brothers, whose séances were noticed in my recent article, furnishes another illustration of the same state of facts. The father was a Methodist exhorter of the most emotional type. The mother was a compound of religious enthusiast and fortune-teller. The maternal ancestry was actively concerned in the ancient manifestations at Salem. The two younger brothers, mediums, have always been subject to what the neighbors style "queer spells," and the father had fits. The elder brother is a Swedenborgian minister — that is to say, holds tenets peculiarly akin to the doctrines of spiritualism. I investigated the case in October last, some weeks after the work on spiritualism had been submitted, and consequently was not able to include the data in the forthcoming work-a thing to be the more regretted because the facts are typically illustrative of the correlation that subsists between epilepsy and the paroxysms of the spiritual medium. Into the laws that *What is styled credulity has its physiological basis, in the majority of instances, so far as I have observed, either in the existence of peculiar nervous experiences or in a predisposition that renders them possible. In the course of my intimacies with students, and with highly-cultivated persons, who were incapable of credulity in the ordinary acceptation of the term, I have frequently observed the phenomenon of an inherited predisposition battling for existence with the rational intellect, on occasions when the nervous system was laboring under excessive exhaustion. At such times, or in periods of great nervous tension, inherited superstitions very frequently assert themselves spontaneously, with something of their original force, even with persons of the highest intellectual culture. A man who has had trance-experiences at a period of nervous debility, or under the influence of an anesthetic agent, knows experientially that such experiences are real, and that they bring with them a train of very singular and inexplicable psychical impressions. In good health he may have no interest in such things, except to say truthfully that they may occur, and to concede their existence as strange psychological facts-morbid but real products. On the other hand, in a very large class quire, as I have had my opportunity on that of persons, who, owing to favorable conditions in question. Physiologists cannot tell why it is life, know nothing of these phenomena experienthat a tomcat with blue eyes is always deaf, tially, the predisposition exists, and shows itself in what is generally termed credulity-that is to say, nor why gout is correlated with psoriasis. in a tendency to accept and dwell lovingly upon The facts are matters of observation, for the marvelous. In resolving this problem, it is which, in the present state of physiological worth the while to remember that all our psychiscience, no rational explanation can be ascal possibilities are potential in the nervous system, and that, comparatively speaking, these possigned; but they are none the less facts of sibilities vary exceedingly in different individuals, frequent occurrence, and of unquestionable are partly hereditary, partly acquired, and result validity. Again, in the phenomena of spirit- in that variety of intellectual biases that contact ualism, whoever will take the trouble to in- with men continually illustrates. The point I wish vestigate the nervous states and hereditary to impress particularly, however, is that the tendency to believe in strange psychic phenomena is predisposition of one medium after another, generally the intellectual representative of an inuntil he has exhausted the list of available herent but often latent possibility of experiencing candidates, will find that the phenomena are them. Dr. Maudsley styles this latent neurosis. so constantly associated with the epileptic premonitory dream must exist in the nervous orFor example: the possibility of experiencing a neurosis as to be justly classifiable with the symptoms of that special type of nervous degeneration. Such being the case, clairvoyance and trance must be considered simply as the psychical exponents of certain morbid states of the tissues of the brain-very strange ganism before a person can concede the reality of such a phenomenon. In other words, strange beliefs are the exponents of exceptional nervous susceptibilities. Good physical conditions, not rational analysis, have been mainly instrumental in diminishing the popular interest in exceptional psychic facts. star person to be indifferent as to the question whether the phenomena produced by the elder Eddy are genuine or spurious, I have simply to answer that I had previously witnessed similar phenomena in my own room, under conditions of test prescribed by myself, and that the important point with me was to verify the epileptic predisposition in as many instances of spiritual mediums as I could possibly or conveniently observe. Thus, having verified the materializing phenomena in several instances, and knowing, as a scientific verity, that they may occur, although I have an exceeding interest in the nervous traits and predispositions of a medium who can produce them, I am neither startled nor curious as to the feats themselves. From the scientific aspect, they are the least important phenomena of spiritualism tling, astonishing, adapted to captivate the popular imagination, and to the production of sensational reports in the newspapers; but mere nervous tours de force that no man cares to witness after he has once decided whether they are real occurrences or not. Of course, after witnessing phenomena of this type, and while reviewing one's mental memoranda of them, the question always comes up whether they may not have been mere phantasms, optical illusions, reflex spectra, or something of such nature. For myself, I will say that I have lived in the world thirty-five years, and that, both as respects vision and hearing, I have always been noted for accuracy and delicacy of perception, and for mathematical distinctness of impression as to objects cognizable by the senses. A delusive sensation is something unknown to me. I have been, at various periods, subject to presentimental dreams and to waking premonitions, but, except in nervous fever, or under anesthesia, the nervous state known as clairvoyance is not within the circle of my experiences. As to impunity from what is generally styled nervousness, I could, I think, shake hands with a ghost at midnight without the slight est tremor, the fact being that I am so indifferent and unsympathetic in these matters that I am often ashamed of my own apathy when in conversation with persons of more enthusiastic temperament. The source of this indifference lies, no doubt, in the fact that I have an abiding and unfashionable sympathy with those higher spiritual forces and those higher aspects of spiritual culture that give religion its vitality and its historical value and significance, and that, in view of the latter, with their deep but silent influence in redeeming human life to the higher good and the higher beautiful, the phenomena of spiritualism seem to me but morbid and fantastic mockeries of the really spiritualizing and ennobling. I have, hence, a peculiar immunity as respects illusion in regard to these phenomena, because of a thorough contempt for the moral and intellectual attitude of persons who can pass their lives in practising them. The investigation of them, indeed, has been with me but one of the minor aspects of a comprehensive series, with a view to unfold and demonstrate the scientific basis of religion. But I must frankly own, nevertheless, that the phenomena are in many cases real and genuine, and that, as such, psychological science cannot properly hair growing on the frontal part of the head. disregard them. The ball lay under fragments of the skull just above the right eye. I extracted it without relief to the symptoms, which were as follows: This one warning let me give to amateur investigators: unless you are thoroughly trained to habits of exact scientific investigation, and have passed patient years in the practical study of the anatomy, histology, functions, and forces of the nervous system, relegate this field of inquiry to men who make a specialty of neurological studies. If you have had such a training, and can unravel the details of a nervous organism, centre by centre, then, as a preliminary step, visit insane asylums and hospitals and prisons, and make yourself familiar from life with all the shades and varieties of morbid nervous phenomena. As an initial memorandum, you will find that, in insane asylums, along with every species of hallucination and delusion, the vision of spirits of the dead and the periodical paroxysm of clairvoyance are of constant occurrence. I have seldom observed an insane patient carefully through any number of paroxysms without finding that the fit was either preceded or followed-generally the former-by a period of clairvoyance, during which the intelligence exhibited participated in the same preternatural aspects that are common with trance-mediums. Next, on comparing the physical symptoms that accompany the trances of spiritual mediums with the more pronounced series observed in settled insanity, the investigator will find that they are substantially identical- the exponents of what may be styled a progressive nervous dissolution. The conclusion will thus be forced upon him that the phenomena of spiritualism are symptoms of nervous perversion and degeneracy, and that the singular forces illustrated in these phenomena are the results of rapid molecular transformations of the intimate structure of the nervous centres. Lastly, in order to verify this conclusion, he will direct his inquiries especially to the nervous states and hereditary tendencies of the mediums themselves. I have no hesitation in predicting the result of such a method of investigation; for, in all the mediums that I have examined as to these points, in not a single instance have minute observation and careful inquiry failed to detect and verify the existence of the epileptic neurosis; so that, strange as the phenomena appear, when superficially examined and regarded without reference to their etiology, the moment the inquiry is directed to their causes, they resolve themselves into morbid products of nervous disturbance. On the other hand, they differ in many respects from phenomena generally classed with the products of unconscious cerebration. I will give an instance of the latter which has just been contributed to my portfolio by Dr. S. J. Parker, of Ithaca, New York, formerly a surgeon in the United States Army. "In the great Grant advance of 1864," writes Dr. Parker, a soldier came to me while acting as surgeon at the White House on York River, with a grape-shot of two ounces in weight imbedded in his forehead. The wound and laceration were frightful. The whole forehead - skull was crushed from the hair over the right ear to the hair over the left, and from just above the eyes to and into the "Although the man had walked sixteen miles after he was shot, in a military attitude, with his musket on his shoulder, he was determined to keep on walking, and I was compelled to have him thrown down and his musket taken away by force, to prevent him from continuing his monotonous military tramp. He would stop an instant, answer feebly any question put to him, then walk on. Being turned about by force, he would walk on in the new direction until he was stopped and turned again; yet taking notice of ob stacles in his way, avoiding trees, fording streams of water with his usual care, and so on. When compelled to lie still he evinced no disposition to get up, or even to alter his position. When I compelled him to eat, he went on with the motions of eating after the food was exhausted and until I stopped him forcibly. But walking without the power to stop was the symptom that supervened whenever he was excited. He slowly and feebly answered all my questions; stated that he had no pain, did not think he was in any danger, and was not badly hurt; expressed a wish to have his wound dressed and to return to the field, but did not care particularly whether I dressed it or not; showed great muscular strength, so that it required considerable force to compel him to obey surgical orders. After he had been held fast by me and my assistants for a few minutes, he was ordered to stand and present arms. He did so very promptly, and would have died, I think, rather than stir out of his tracks, unless by some jar or concussion of the brain he was set to walking again, when off he would tramp in military style, avoiding obstacles in his way with the usual care of a conscious man." In this instance, with the ideo-motor centres of the brain completely contused, the inquirer has a case that offers a tolerably satisfactory illustration of the kind of actions which occur in unconscious cerebration. The temporal lobes of the brain, the cerebellum or locomotive centre, the vital and spinal centres, and the centres and organs of sensation, were still intact, with the possible exception of the olfactory organism. The whole sensory and instincto-motor man was still uninjured; but his movements were purely automatic, so far as could be gathered from the symptoms. This dramatic case (Huxley describes at length a very similar one in bis 1874-paper before the British Association) indicates very minutely and distinctly the relative limits and traits of unconscious nervous action, as compared with voluntary movements. In the phenomena of spiritualism, on the other hand, the physiologist has to deal, not with extirpation of the anterior lobes (ideo-motor centres), but with the morbid function of those lobes, which are the great centres of perception, of volition, and of ideation, and in which the multifarious activities of other ganglia of the nervous system become subjects of cognition and consciousness. Clair voyance is thus one of the results of morbid function of the perceptive centres of the human brain, while hallucination and illusion accompany morbid function of the sensory centres, and are by no means symptoms of such weighty import as their more quiet correlative. The latter often coexist with unimpaired intellectual faculties; the former, particularly in its settled stages, engenders an intellectual bias (aura), which is fatal to mental soundness, and invariably predisposes its victim to accept such tenets as the literature of spiritualism illustrates. In all my conversations with avowed spiritualists, during the last ten years, I have never committed the blunder of imagining that argument could be of any avail. To the few who were drifting in that direction, and who have expressed the fear that they should become spiritualists unless certain phenomena they had witnessed could be resolved, I have latterly ventured to suggest that the predisposition to accept these doctrines is in itself something that calls for medical treatment rather than for argument, and to the eradication of which tonics are better adapted than talking. In the sad case of Robert Dale Owen, for example, an inherited predisposition existed in the first instance. The intellectual bias that rendered him a life-long spiritualist, and partly vitiated the work of a brilliant mind, was but the natural result of this predisposition; and the insanity that has at last overtaken him can be justly viewed in no other light than as the final stage of the disorder. I had an hour's interview with Mr. Owen in the winter of 1873-74, intending to discuss his case in connection with that of the late Judge Edmonds, and shall never forget the vivid impression I then had that the shadow of madness was already over him. It suffices to say that the impression led me to omit his name in the list of cases, and merely to allude to it elsewhere, lest some word of mine might hasten the impending destiny, and that the sad finale bas justified that omission. A more terrible warning to enthusiastic spiritualists than the fate of this apostle of their doctrines could *Two days after the above was written, the following note, on Mr. Owen's case, from the Superintendent of the Indiana State Hospital for the Insane, was placed in my hands. The practised alienist says: "Referring to an article in which, inferentially, the insanity of Robert Dale Owen, now in my care, is connected with the celebrated Katie King impostures, I beg leave to state, for the benefit of the many persons interested, that, while I believe the merest assumption of personal sensuous communication with spirit beings is evidence of insanity, Mr. Owen's present condition is clearly attributable to other predisposing or exciting causes than spiritualism, in any of its phases, theoretical or experimental. The whole subject of spiritualism seems, indeed, to have dropped out of Mr. Owen's thought." I have put in italics a statement of opinion as to the symptomatic value of the vision of spirits, which is almost word for word coincident with the view I have expressed in the work on spiritualism. The mere fact that spiritualism is not even alluded to in his ravings, however, by no means demonstrates the doctor's view that his speculations and investigations have had no influence in inducing them. The predisposing cause of the break-down of the nervous ystem was very certainly hereditary taint, and pronounced spiritualism was simply one of the stages of the disorder, but assisted to bring on the risis. not possibly have occurred to give point to what physiology has to say on the subject. The result is, however, by no means an isolated or even an uncommon one. The last days of many a medium have been passed in the insane hospital or in slowly-progressive idiocy. What, then, is the last word that physiology has to say as to the phenomena and literature of spiritualism? Simply this: that the phenomena are invariably associated with the epileptic neurosis, either hereditary or acquired; that the apparently occult forces and the strange sources of intelligence often illustrated at séances are the exponents of an environing nervous influence, consequent upon degeneration of the nervous centres, and engendered in a manner analogous to the production of electricity by the decomposition of zinc in solution of nitric acid; that, finally, the predisposition to accept the doctrines and tenets of spiritualism is one of the consequences of such nervous disturbance, and should be treated as a symptom of nervous disorder, not argued with after the manner that one man argues with another on scientific questions.* These are not statements of a theory intended to explain the phenomena—that is, to tell how they are produced, as one explains the swinging of a pendulum. They are facts of observation that lay bare the causes, not of the phenomena only, but of the mental predisposition also, that has eventuated in giving spiritualism a distinctive and peculiar literature. However genuine the phenomena, and however real the superhuman intelligence exhibited by medi *The citation from Mr. Lecky, page 20 of ArPLETONS' JOURNAL, July 3d, illustrates the defects of the so-called philosophical (generalizing) manner of treating these questions. It is very true, perhaps, that the phenomena of sorcery have never been disproved, but it is quite untrue that they have ceased to exist as the rationalizing process has made progress, or by specific rational action. As respects name, these phenomena have suffered many transformations from age to age, appearing now under the designation of magic, now as sorcery, now in the practices of the mystics and illuminati, now as mesmerism, finally as spiritualism. But they have been substantially the same under all their designations. The fakirs (mystics) of Hindostan and Arabia have depended upon them for ages for their influence with their respective races, and there is ground to believe that they formed the basis of the very ancient Egyptian mysteries. Salverte's history of the occult sciences shows this, I think, beyond a doubt, although he holds a different theory. The apparent death of the fakirs of the Orient has, indeed, never been equaled in the phenomena of modern spiritualism. The truth is, when the history of the Aryan races is carefully examined, it is clear that this series of phenomena has descended from the remotest ages, and that among the Greeks the mysteries unquestionably consisted mainly in their practice. It was thus, on account of the singular phenomena associated with it, that the ancients styled epilepsy the sacred madness, and it is now quite well authenticated that candidates for priests were accepted or rejected on this basis alone. That is to say, the epileptic predisposition was essential to the office, and no candidate was admitted to the study of the mysteries who was not susceptible of the paroxysm. As the conditions of living have become improved, the percentage of epileptics has diminished. This is the manner in which the progress of rationalism affects the issue and extirpates the tendency to accept marvels. Men believe in their own experiences, whether morbid or healthy, and cease to believe when the experiences cease to oc cur. ums, these facts are fatal to the system; for, if spiritualism means any thing to the great problems that trouble human life, it means that the persons who produce these phenomena and have this faculty of clairvoyance are persons of higher organization than their fellows, and that, in the course of progressive ages, the century will come when the development of this faculty will be general. If, then, it is a morbid product, and if mediums are persons of inferior rather than of superior organization, the system has no real basis, and its phenomena are of no interest except as data in scientific psychology. It is not incumbent on physiologists to construct a clock-work theory as to the manner in which nervous influence acts on environing objects. That will come by-and-by, perhaps, when the laws and properties of nervous influence have been more thoroughly investigated. At present it would be premature, although it might be ingenious, to attempt such an explanation in detail, and physiology has more premature theorizing to answer for already than is consistent with scientific exactness. FRANCIS GERRY FAIRFIELD. FLIRTATION. A ROSE-BUD in its first green coat, You wrapped your shawl about your throat, And crossed the lawn, when we went boating; I touched the fragrance of your hand; The fog came down and hid the land, As white as snow, and we were floating. Its dew envelope shut us in A brand-new world, where never sin Flash four ways, like the angel's sabro. And as my dreamy fancy sketched Far drifting on the clouds of even, I touched the shy, reluctant glove; And be between the earth and heaven? Soft fiction of the fickle mist! Flashed venom at my disappointment; But ever in this world of ours S EDITOR'S TABLE. HOULD the present insurrection in Herzegovina prove to be an organized resistance to the Turkish tax-collectors, Montenegro would, in all probability, swiftly join in the fray. Late visitors to the latter community unite in declaring that the whole population is burning with impatience for war with the Turk. Indeed, it is not at all unlikely that the Montenegrins have excited this new rebellion in Herzegovina in the same way that they fomented and brought about the one which took place in 1860; expecting to take part, as they did then, in the conflict, and hoping to be more successful than they were at that time. And, as Montenegro is the especial protégée of Russia, it would not be very strange if this little confederation of mountain - villages should, in this way, precipitate that great war between the European powers which the most skillful diplomacy has of late been barely able to prevent. Montenegro-or, as its inhabitants call it, Tzernagora, that is, "Black Mountain "—has rather more than eighteen hundred square miles of territory, and a population of about one hundred and thirty thousand souls. It is a mere cluster of mountains, covered in most places by thick, dark forests. There are no towns really worthy the name: Cettigne, or Zettinje, the capital; Rjeka, a port on Lake Scutari, and the other most important places, being actually nothing more than large villages. The dwellings of the poorer people are miserable huts, and there is no truly wealthy class in the country. Cut off from the Adriatic by the Austrian province of Dalmatia, they have very little commerce; their densely-wooded or bare and rocky mountains are not suitable for grazing, and the system of agriculture they pursue in the little plateaus and valleys interspersed through their land is, even to-day, too primitive in character to afford them much more than a subsistence. Game does not abound; and only one stream, flowing into Lake Scutari (or Skadar, as they call it), offers any advantages for fishing. Being thus restricted in the most usual modes of supporting existence, and, in a measure, besieged in their mountain refuge, they long ago fell into the habit of acquiring the good things of this life by taking them away from their neighbors, especially the Turks. In fact, they may be said to have lived for a number of centuries mainly by war, and their history consists chiefly of one long struggle against the armies of the Ottoman Empire. When the great Slavonic kingdom of Servia was at the height of its power, Montenegro formed part of it, and then comprised, in intense. They had then just gotten news of the outrage at Podgoritza, in Albania, where two Montenegrins, flying from the rabble of the town, had sought refuge in the barracks, but had been thrust out by the soldiers, and butchered before the eyes of the Turkish officers. Their countrymen were nearly wild with excitement at this report. Every man was armed to the teeth, and the strenuous efforts of their rulers were hardly competent to prevent their instantly seeking revenge at the scene of the outrage. But the influence of Russia helped to preserve peace, and satisfaction was afforded by the Turkish Government. It was evident, however, that the Montenegrins were greatly disappointed at losing this opportunity for war, and it is not probable that they will allow another one to escape them. That these hardy mountaineers are good addition to the Black Mountain of the pres- But it is very evident that these irrepressible Tzernagorzes are now on the point of another warlike movement. A German traveler, who has more than once sojourned among them and recently published an account of his last visit to their country, in the summer of 1874, states that the war-feeling was at that time universal, deep-seated, and successful resistance for nearly five centuries to the armies which were for a great part of that time the terror of Christendom. Something is due, of course, to the natural defenses of their country, through which they have not, until very lately, allowed any roads to be made. But the people themselves have been its main defense. The German traveler before mentioned describes a band he saw in Rjeka during the Podgoritza excitement, which may be taken as a good | specimen of their best fighting material. They were splendidly-formed young men, apparently as strong and active as wild mountain-stags. None were less than six feet in height, and their leader was a giant of at least seven. Each man carried a breechloading rifle, and had two revolvers and a yataghan in the red scarf around his waist. All were full of impatience to be over the border, and away into Albania. D But these people are really fit for better things than war and plunder. They are intelligent, hospitable, ardent lovers of freedom, and, like the Slavonic race generally, devoted to music and lyric poetry. Their piesmas, or war-ballads, are often full of true poetic fervor, and the Vladika Pietro II., who succeeded to the sovereignty in 1880, was a poet of no mean capacity. He was in also the originator of many of those improve ments in the state which have very lately been carried to a much greater degree of perfection. These are the formation of a senate, the introduction of schools, the discourage ment of vendettas and forays into neighbor ing districts, and the encouragement of home enterprise and peaceful industry. The im provements in these respects that have take place within the last few years are now very marked. The capital has some respectabl public buildings, and is the seat of a good fo male seminary, in which the two daughters |