It would be impossible fairly to estimate the position of the Emperor or the policy of the empire without taking note of the privileges of the nobles, and of the social prestige they continue to enjoy. The revolution of 1848, with the new constitutional arrangements, have emancipated the bourgeoisie from many of their disabilities. Not a few of the nobles, as we said, have been ruined, or at all events crippled. But from the great princely houses downwards, some of whom until days comparatively recent exercised the right of life and death in their territories, they still assert much of their former ascendancy. When they can afford it, they mount their establishments on a scale of magnificent luxury. As peers of the Emperor and nobles of the empire, they attend all the Court festivities as a matter of course. When residing in their country schlosses, they are little kings to all intents and purposes. Employing whole hosts of laborers and shepherds, they exploitent themselves their minerals and forests. Then their salons in the city are the most exclusive in Europe, and there is no such thing as intermarrying with the rich roturiers and new made millionaires. Consequently they continue to be divided by impassable barriers from the wealthy commercial class, in place of blending into it by almost imperceptible gradations, as with

us.

Consequently, too, the commercial classes in Austria do not enjoy the same social and political consideration as in the West of Europe, while relatively they are far less numerous. It is but lately that a free course has been cleared for them, and the antecedents of not a few of their most conspicuous members will scarcely bear investigation.

The wealth and business that have accumulated in the hands of the Jews are no doubt gratifying proofs of religious toleration. Still it is significant, that in a capital which beyond any other is the city of castes, there were only 255 Christians, with 250 Jews, at the school of commerce when M. Tissot visited it. No doubt we shall see extraordinary changes as the nobles are impoverished and the traders are enriched; but in the meantime we must take the situation as we find it.

One word before we have done, as to that growing weight of the press, which

begins to temper the power of the Emperor and his ministers, and the predominating influence of the nobles. M. Tissot, according to his invariable habit, devotes to it an interesting and instructive chapter. tive chapter. Before 1848, but a single journal appeared in Vienna, and that was the Official Gazette.' Ah! we were very stupid then," an old Viennese remarked to M. Tissot; "but we were very happy." Now there is an infinity of journals, of all kinds and of every shade of opinion. The Viennese has become as dependent on his newspaper as on his pipe and his glass of beer; and when great events are stirring, the offices in the journalistic quarter are beset. Two hundred and seventeen newspapers were established in a single year. Then came a brief régime of sharp repression, to be followed by an extremely liberal reaction. M. Zang, the director of the

Presse,' originally a baker in Paris, and celebrated for his Viennese bread, "saw his cabinet besieged by personages who humbly solicited the honor of passing into his portfolio the contents of their own." The Neue Freie Presse' had its origin in a misunderstanding between Herr Zang and Herr Etienne, who was one of his leading contributors. Herr Etienne launched out with English enterprise, and obtained from the first a brilliant success. He went strongly against the French in the Franco-German War; but M. Tissot scouts the idea of his having been bribed, at a time when half the Viennese press was in Prussian pay, while the refuse was being liberally subsidised by the French Empire. "I believe it more likely that it was M. Etienne who might have offered, had it been needful, a million of thalers to M. Bismarck that he might push on to Sedan." The Presse' is moderately liberal; the Neue Presse' rather more radical. "It is a journal written by men of passion. Foreign correspondence abounds in it, serious and to the point. Its literary feuilletons have real merit." The Fremdenblatt,' which is the most lucrative of all, passes for being an organ of the Government; while the Politische Correspondenz,' which is avowedly official, is inspired from Berlin by a certain M. Schneider, the private reader of the Emperor William, who supplies it with confidential intelligence

from Berlin and St. Petersburg. The leading journals publish two editions in the day. In the opinion of M. Tissot, they are thoroughly independent; and the relations of the Government with the press in general are frank and honorable. The press representatives have free access to Herr Hoffman, the Minister of Finance, who receives them without distinction of opinion, and communicates what information he is at liberty to impart. Nor can there be a more hopeful sign of the political vitality of the empire than the talent and the honorable independence of the leading organs of opin

ion. What Austria needs and desires above all things is the peace which would assure her prosperity-which would enable her to persevere in a policy of conciliation, and give her leisure to arrange her internal affairs. To us in England it may seem clear that a more decided attitude would be best calculated to spare her the struggle or the calamities she shrinks from; but even if we are inclined to blame her for short-sighted vacillation, we are bound to give her the benefit of extenuating circumstances.— Blackwood's Magazine.

No. II.

AMONG the points referred to in the last paper there are one or two which, on the principle of reculer pour mieux sauter, it will be well to consider in somewhat greater detail before we proceed further. I shall first deal with the chemical constitution of the earth, on which I shall have a good deal to say in the sequel.

In the first place we know that we have sixty-four so-called chemical elements; and altogether separating ourselves from the physical foundation, we know that some of them, under terrestrial conditions, are solids, some of them are liquids, and some of them are gases. I say terrestrial conditions, because there is nothing absolute about these states; they depend merely upon pressure and temperature, which may vary from world to world. One of the experimental results obtained last year, and which will make it ever memorable in the annals of science, was to solidify hydrogen and make it hail and crackle on the floor of the laboratory in which the glorious work was done. I have next to point out with regard to the chemical behavior of these elements that they are divided into two great groups; some of them, those like iron, gold, and silver, are called metals;

and others, such as carbon, oxygen, sulphur and so forth, are called metalloids.

It is a very significant fact that of the very small number of gases, two of them exist mechanically mixed in the air, and two also exist chemically combined in water, one gas, oxygen, being common to both. So that before reaching, as it were, the earth's crust at all, we become acquainted with the majority of the socalled " permanent gases" which are known to chemists.

We may also conveniently, if artificially, divide the metals into two classes -I do not mean to say very sharp classes; namely, those which form stable compounds with one of the gases-oxygen, and those again which do not form such stable compounds. Some may ask, what do I mean by forming stable compounds with oxygen? I will answer that question by another. Why do we have our coins made of gold and silver? Because gold and silver are unaltered by the atmosphere, or rather by the oxygen, one of the component gases of that atmosphere. If we were to leave gold and silver in the air, they would not come to any harm, that is to say, they would not rust to any great extent; but if we take some of the finest steel or the finest iron and thus expose it, we shall find that it will rust. This rust simply means that

the oxygen in the air has attacked the iron and combined with it, although it does not attack or combine with gold and silver, and hence it is that those metals are chosen for our coins. There are some metals then, like iron, which are more readily acted upon by oxygen; and others, such as gold and silver, which are less rapidly acted upon by oxygen. To render this more clear we can put some potassium into water; we find that potassium is so eager to get hold of oxygen that we instantly get an apparent combustion, with light and heat. The heat developed by the combination of the potassium with the oxygen of the water, is strong enough to drive the potassium into incandescent vapor. Potassium therefore is an instance of a metal which forms a stable compound with oxygen, that is to say, a metal which has a great affinity for, or a great desire to get at, oxygen, however and whenever it can, and gold and silver are just the opposite.

I will also ask you to bear in mind this curious fact, that although we have oxygen and nitrogen mechanically mixed in our air, and although we have oxygen and hydrogen chemically combined in our water, yet there is no free hydrogen present in the earth's atmosphere; and again, that there are no pure metals that have ever been found in the earth which at all approach potassium in this very strong desire to get at oxygen. No doubt you will see the reason of that at once, namely, that in the rocks with which we are acquainted, the metals which have a great affinity for oxygen have had an opportunity of getting at it some time or other.

Such compounds as the oxides to which we have called attention are called binary compounds, because they are made up of two different substances; in the case of oxide of iron, or ferric oxide, as it is now called, for instance, we have a combination of iron and oxygen. As a rule the higher the temperature of chemical substances the simpler are they. We know, for instance, that the earth might be so hot that all the compound bodies in it would be driven into vapor first, and split up into their constituent elements or dissociated afterwards. I have said as a rule, because some compounds require high temperatures for their for

mation, as there is molecular work to be done before the chemical change called combination can take place; and here we have a very distinct proof, on chemical grounds, that the earth must once have been much hotter than it is now.

These are the very few chemical facts the bearings of which will be discussed when we come to consider the chemistry of the other heavenly bodies. It will be seen in the sequel that with regard to a large number of these bodies their chemistry is the only subject on which a large number of facts have at present been accumulated.

With regard to the geological facts, geology, as I said before, reveals to us the past actions on the face of the globe; and I may sum up those actions almost in one word. The history of our planet up to the present moment has been the history of a cooling world, a world which, as it has got colder, has passed from the state of vapor first into a liquid and then into a solid form. Owing to the contraction of all bodies as they get colder (the change from steam to water will be a familiar example), our planet as it has got cooler has got smaller.

You will find that that somewhat long definition will carry a great deal with it when examined minutely. The earth may have been as hot as you choose to imagine it to have been, for there is little fear that your imagination will carry you beyond the fact in this case-we do not know how hot. But with this hypothesis of a globe which has been gradually getting colder-we do not know for how long, and we do not know at what rate-geologists account for most of the phenomena with which their science brings them more especially into contact.

There is much of course connected with this cooling of an originally vaporous globe about which we shall never know. It is even still a moot point whether the solidification began at the centre in consequence of high pressure, or at the circumference by virtue of the reduced temperature there, or at both together. But, however this may have been-and we shall have to return to the point when we come to consider the present condition of the sun-we may

remark that, on the supposition that the earth cooled from the exterior, one school of geologists account for the formation of our present mountain chains, by supposing that the various pieces of crust, so to speak, after they began to consolidate, slowly fell in consequence of the gradual cooling and therefore lessening of the volume of the interior liquid. It is thus to what geologists call "tangential pressure" that the origin of our mountain chains may be due ; for it is, I believe, now a heresy to suppose, as once was supposed, that a mountain is a mountain because it has been pushed up. A mountain is an elevation due to the depression of all the surrounding areas by the earth's contraction, and the various folds of strata are thus explained in a very satisfactory manner.

A word may here be said in connection with this contraction with reference to another matter touched upon in the last paper.

Those among us who have seen a smith at work in his smithy-and who has not?-making the iron glow again by his hard blows, will understand that with all this enormous crushing and rushing towards the centre, so to speak, the various rocks of which the earth's surface is composed would get at all events very hot; so that in that way the interior heat of the earth which has been referred to before, the phenomena of earthquakes and of volcanoes, would be at once explained, either in part or entirely. The eruptions from the craters of Vesuvius, Etna, or of Hecla, indicate to the modern geologist that there has been an enormous temperature produced somehow-possibly by this mechanical action-and that water has been present, which by the thus increased temperature has been driven into steam. So that we have, as it were, a natural steam-engine at work which is driven by the impact and downrush of water upon the rock rendered hot by friction, in the same way that the iron in the blacksmith's forge is rendered hotter by hammering.

We see then that the great variations from a true spherical surface brought home to us on our planet by high mountains and abyssal depths in the ocean, have had their origin when the surface temperature was very much higher than

it is now; and it is remarkable that the voyage of the Challenger has demonstrated that the greatest depressions in the ocean lie near elevated land areas, as if one compensated the other. The greatest ocean depth certainly observed is five miles and a quarter. This, taken in conjunction with the height of the Himalayas, Andes and Alps, will give us an idea of the true roughness of the earth's surface.

But this is not all; the same cause has been at work in deforming our little world as a whole.

Our planet indeed is not a true globe, because of its former plastic condition before the formation and cooling of the surface. When the globe was soft it was more or less yielding, and then the rotation of the earth to which I have referred tended to drive off, as it were, the matter in the equatorial regions; so that the distance through the centre of the earth between the two surfaces as far as possible removed from the poles of rotation, or those parts of the earth which the imaginary axis comes through, is rather greater than the distance between the two points where the axis comes to the surface. The reason of that fact, and that it must have been so, has been beautifully established by several experi

ments.

That the earth was once hotter than it is now is therefore proved, both by the irregularities of its surface, and by its shape as a whole. We must not imagine, however, that there has been but one change. The minor irregularities are all gradually changing by inner energies and the action of air and water, and it may be that even the largest ones are young, compared with the age of the planet's surface. Nor does the change end here; the equatorial protuberance itself may but after all mark a point in a great cycle of change, which has compelled the earth to rotate now about one axis and now about another. Mathematicians consider it highly probable that the axis of the earth may have been in ancient times very differently situated to what it is at present, and, indeed, that "it might have gradually shifted through 10, 20, 30, 40, or more degrees, without at any time any perceptible sudden disturbance of either land or wa

ter." *

Thus it appears that nature prevents catastrophes by the very hugeness of the scale on which she works.

I need not remind you of the various beautiful facts which have been established with regard to the long-enduring sequences of change, and even of forms of life, upon our planet, and the exquisite order which has everywhere reigned, as now one large class of rocks, or animals or of plants has given rise to another equally large, and if anything, a more beautiful class which has followed it. All these things I take for granted that you know, and I only just refer to them now in closing what I have to say with regard to geology, to point out that whether we study the succession of earth changes or of life changes, time, to be reckoned by tens of millions of years, is required to account for them, unless we suppose that the uniformity of nature's actions has been rudely interfered with. The more our knowledge of the wondrous works with which we are surrounded is increased, the less likely do we find it that any such interference is possible, and the more do our units of time and space sink into nothingness.

If, then, we must be so lavish of our puny time in trying to imagine the period since the surface of our planet has been solid, how many countless ages must have elapsed since that surface first began to consolidate and to separate out, as it were, its compounds from the vaporous elemental globe!

In this particular, however, the earth's place in nature will never be known; the animal and vegetable conditions of distant worlds are just those conditions about which we know least at present, and about which it is scarcely probable that we shall ever know anything certain at all.

The condensed statement which I have now given relating to the chemistry and geology of the earth, enables me to return to some of the items in my inventory, if I may so term it, of the facts relating to the earth which we shall subsequently use as standards of comparison, with a view of expanding them somewhat in the light of modern earth studies before we proceed further.

The earth is round. It is not a fragment. The former high temperature to which both its chemistry and geology, as we have seen, point, indicates in the clearest manner that this figure has resulted from the cooling of a mass of incandescent vapors under the influence of gravity. The earth is of a certain diameter which we know, and therefore we can compare the earth with all the other bodies in the universe which we can measure, so far as visible diameter is concerned; but we must not forget its much larger diameter in past times, and the difficulty in all cases of distinguishing atmosphere from surface in certain stages of a planet's life. The physics of the globe show us that now there are parts of it liquid and parts gaseous at the present moment, the liquid and the gaseous condition depending upon temperature and pressure. This could not have been the case in past times if the earth has been hotter in past times, and it need not be the case in the future, supposing that the earth shall be colder in future times.

Then geologically the story seems to run in this way that there was a time when the earth was larger than it is now; that it was very much hotter, and that in getting colder it has got smaller; that in getting smaller and getting colder not only a surface has formed such as we see it now, but the atmosphere has become simpler and much reduced in volume. In short, in past times, though the mass of the earth cannot have varied to any great extent (the fall of meteorites must have increased it somewhat), its apparent dimensions may have been subject to a gradual reduction.

Similarly the terrestrial poles may have changed their places, as we saw the magnetic poles changing their places in the last paper; and the ratio of the equatorial and polar diameters may have also changed as the new protuberance was gradually formed out of less plastic material.

We must not forget, then, that in all these data the various comparisons we shall make with the sister planets refer only to a point of time. Nature never rests-moulding, perfecting, changing are ever going on, not only in the innermost recesses of her realms, but in even the masses of matter such as our own