ing to the first class. Some are yellow, and even orange.

But there are stars still more advanced in their sidereal evolution. Their spectrum shows signs of fatal cooling. The color of such stars answers to the other conditions which are admitted as signs of their decrepitude. It has turned to deep orange, often passing to sombre red.

The color of the stars has thus been taken to indicate the age of those heavenly bodies. Another astronomer, M. A. Cornu, has endeavored, from the colors of the stars, to trace their motions; for stars are no longer supposed to be fixed; fixed stars are obsolete. Now, if a star is moving across our visual line — that is, across the straight line drawn from our eye to the star itself either perpendicularly or transversely the direction of its motion will be observable, although perhaps with difficulty, on account of the apparent minuteness of the measurable distance. But if the star is moving directly along our line of vision—that is, advancing directly towards us or receding from us - its motion will be hard to ascertain by the abovementioned means of measurement.

M. Cornu proposed to solve the problem by the color of the star and the spectral analysis of its light. He investigated the influence of the relative movement of a sonorous or a luminous body on the sound or the light heard or seen by a stationary observer. Both sound and light are produced and conveyed by waves or pulsations. But suppose the observer to be in motion, retreating, for instance, away from the source of sound or light, that is, travelling in the same direction as the propa gation of the pulsations or waves; such an observer will receive, in a unity of time, fewer pulsations than the source emits, because he is moving in the same direction as the undulations. He would not receive any if he were moving with the same velocity as theirs. Consequently, an observer, travelling away from a sonorous source, will hear a lower sound than that actually given out by the source itself; for the scale of sounds, from high to low, is characterized by the diminished number of vibrations in a given unity of time. In the case of a source of white light, the observer will behold a redder light, because the gamut of spectral colors, from violet to red, corresponds to the gamut of sounds from high to low.

Inversely, if the observer travels towards the source, that is, in a direction to meet the emitted waves, the number of pulsa tions received in a given unity of time will

be greater; the sounds will therefore appear sharper or the white light more violet. The source of vibration has been supposed in this statement to be stationary and the observer in motion; but the same reasoning would lead to analogous conclusions if the source were in motion, receding from or approaching an observer in repose; from which it evidently results that it is the relative movement alone which plays the decisive part, allowing us, to simplify the argument, to suppose the observer fixed and the source in motion.

Some of the conclusions (Doppler's, quoted by M. Cornu) are these: By the approach of a luminous object, the intensity of its light is continuously increasing. With an increasing velocity, its coloration passes from white to green, then to blue, and finally to violet. If the velocity of a star happens to change, its color as well as its intensity suffers variation; and it may well be that in the lapse of time a star may assume all the colors of the spectrum.

Stars, then, it is clear, have ceased to be fixed. Our own sun, planets, moons, and all, are fast rushing, we are told, in the direction of the constellation Hercules, where a well-known prodigious agglomeration of stars is to be found. We shall probably never get a nearer view of them, as Hercules will be on his travels too. But no matter whither we are going, provided we do not jostle by the way, an accident we need hardly apprehend, there being plenty of room for us in any direc tion.

From The Spectator. TALL GIRLS.

THE assertion that the fancy of the day flows towards tall girls, about which so many essays have already been written, and that girls are manifestly taller than they were, is, we think, true; but it requires limitations. Nobody knows much about any general changes in the height or girth of the population, the only data we have, the measurements of recruits applying for enlistment, being utterly deceptive. They are younger and weedier, because the wages of soldiers correspond less and less with the wages of powerful. unskilled men, because the dislike to long engagements increases - and three years is now a long engagement and because the poorest and pluckiest class is found more and more in overcrowded towns,

where brawniness develops, if at all, rather late in life. We think ourselves, as matter of observation, that English men and women have profited by the cheaper food of the last thirty years, and are decidedly bigger than when we were lads, but we freely admit that we are unaware of any scientific evidence to support that opinion. We are only sure that a certain limited class, the well-to-do section of the middle class, has become decidedly bigger, healthier, and, as regards its younger women apparently taller than was the case forty years ago. We cannot understand how there can be any doubt upon the subject, and would appeal with the utmost confidence to any jury of mothers accustomed to mix in general society. They would say, thereby correcting an omission in the popular view, that in seven out of ten families they knew, the sons were larger than the fathers, unless the latter were specially big men; and that the daughters not only were larger than the mothers, but that they at all events seemed to be taller too. Nor is there anything surprising in the statement. The first cause of bulk and stature is probably race we do not mean superior race, for the negroes of many districts are bigger than are the English, and the "barbarians" were all bigger than the Roman soldiers who enslaved them- but race, and the continuance alike of pedigree and conditions of life usually involved in that word; but the second cause is diet in infancy; and the third, training in childhood and early youth. Much milk, for example, makes good bones; and soldiers caught young visibly lengthen out under their food and drill. In both these latter conditions, the change within the last generation - we are speaking only of the well-to-do has been very great indeed. The world has grown unconsciously much wiser as to the management of children. Nothing improves physique like good milk that, and not porridge, is the cause of the tall Highlanders, Irishmen, and Sikhs and the little children of our day are nourished on cream-and-water, or milk procured from the great dairies, which is as good as milk can be, and as different from the milk of thirty years ago as Brand is different from old beef-tea. The very cows are of different breed, not to mention the improvement in their food and lodging. Then a prejudice of an extraordinarily injurious character we write these sentences on first-class medical evidence — has silently, no one knows why, entirely

disappeared. Nothing nourishes like good sugar, possessing as it does just the requisite heat-giving quality; but the mothers of 1830-50 dreaded sugar. They had an idea that it sickened babies, who always crave for it like horses for salt; that it spoilt the teeth of growing children; and that it swelled the tongues of children a little more advanced in years, the last a fancy based on the effect of sucking toffy. They therefore withheld sugar, thus leaving the children half-nourished, and permanently sensitive to a climate which for seven months in the year is always chilly. Nowadays, everybody among the cultivated knows that sugar is beneficial, and the children are left to their instincts, with the result that they make flesh, and are almost always warm. Then the matrons of 1830–50 had a fixed idea, incurable by the men, who never quite gave in to it, that children, if left alone, would invariably over-eat themselves, a theory true of about five per cent. The nurseries were dieted like prisons, with the result — all nurses exaggerating the popular ideasthat the children who longed for food were never fed enough, and the children who disliked much food - a peculiarity of many good constitutions - were gorged to indigestion. And finally, children are kept warm enough. The horrible old idea of those two decades, that children should be "hardened" by exposure, has died away; the nurseries, besides being properly ventilated, are kept warm, and the whole principle of children's clothing has been radically, and we hope finally, modified in the sense that the "body," as distinguished from the limbs, is thoroughly and warmly clad. The result is, that the child with a tendency to grow does grow, and that a greatly increased percentage of boys run towards five feet eleven inches, and of girls towards five feet eight inches, and five feet nine inches, than has ever been the case before. Moreover, as the boys and girls grow naturally, they keep their good looks, and, except for a year or two of life, it has become a positive rarity to see "gawky "lads and lasses, as great a rarity as to see the latter with the shining red elbows which forty years ago were at once the most dreaded and the most frequent of the minor deformities. The improvement, always, mind, in a strictly limited class which hardly considers the cost of food, is manifest at every turn, and is reported not only by every artist, but every caricaturist in the country. The undersized lads and skinny girls have

Food has been helped by training. It has become a custom to let girls live in the open air, to suffer them to play games which thirty years since would have been pronounced hoydenish"- then a most opprobrious adjective and even to train them through gymnastics with scientific attention and regularity. They may take as much exercise as they like, and owing to the partly accidental introduction of vigorous games in which both sexes can share, they like to take a good deal. "Ladies' cricket" and "ladies' golf" are imitative tricks, with nothing to recommend them but the open air; but lawn tennis is sharp, healthy work, a great deal better than the hay-making of the last century, which overtaxed the spine, and so are riding, as now practised, and the walk of eight or ten miles, even if it ends in a rather fatiguing trudge. Exercise of that kind, while it makes the boys lissom, sets the girls up, a change which is no doubt one cause of their apparent increase in height. They stand on their feet and stand up as their grandmothers, with all their drilling on backboards and injunctions to sit straight up against chair-backs, which were tortures, never did. The girls stand like soldiers, without their stiffness; and because they can do it, and know they can, they fall instinctively into a style of dress which displays their ability, which recognizes, for example, the place of the waist in the human figure. Girls do not "lollop " now, have, indeed, almost forgotten a word which forty years ago was incessantly in their seniors' mouths, and was the origin in thousands of cases of positive physical harm. A well-bred girl nowadays does not sit as if she were listening to a rebuke, and stiffening herself to disregard it; but she does not "lollop," any more than she ties her waist-belt about five inches too high.

We suppose, also, that there has been a positive change in taste, such as occurs at least once in every fifty years, and that tall men and maidens, being appreciated, are more noticed, and therefore seem to the observer's eye more numerous; but we wonder whether there is or is not another cause at work, whether, that is, the approval of a type positively produces that type in answer to the demand. This seems to be absurd, unless, indeed, we grant so many generations that any cause for selection would tell on the species;

theory have a great deal of evidence to produce in their favor. No one ever studies the history of a generation, carefully reviewing its portraits as well as its biographies, without being struck with the prevalence of a predominant type, especially among women. You cannot mistake Holbein's great ladies, whose faces have always character and seldom soul; or the ladies of the Puritan houses; or the women of Charles II.'s court; or the beauties of the early years of George III.; or the fire women" of Cruikshank's day, women who, whether it was his fault or not, now all appear to have positively unnatural cheeks. If they were all married women, the explanation would be simple, for the fact would merely mean this, that taste having taken a definite direction, those who pleased it succeeded in marriage, and were therefore the principal subjects of the portrait-painters; but the existence of a type extends to unmarried women too, and to well-born lads, and seems, we con. fess, quite beyond a perfect explanation. A little may be due to the varied education of each generation the graciously thoughtful type of to-day, with its careful modelling and tendency towards a Greek outline, either in ivory or fine flesh-tints, is, for example, a clear result of culture and a little more to positive effort, every girl and nearly every young man trying to realize in themselves the understood ideal

for example, completely altering in accordance with it the arrangement of the hair and much must be allowed for dress, but there is something else nevertheless. We suspect that the general concensus of a society as to the conditions of beauty does modify the kind of beauty prevalent in that society, and that we only exaggerate the degree in which the alteration occurs. That exaggeration is natural,

first, because we always find more or less what we look for; and secondly, because we judge much from pictures, and artists cannot help giving the type-influence which they so clearly perceive something more than its fair weight. For all that, there is a type specially acceptable to each generation, and it is difficult not to speculate, as one turns over a volume of sketches of society, what the next one will be. Imitation helps to settle the type of beauty, just as it helps to settle in Europe only the ever-changing type of dress? If the general tendency indicates the law, the next type should be slightly Oriental, for it is the East which is in the

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ascendant, and the East prefers the low, broad brow, rounded contours, and black eyes; but the fashion is just as likely to be set by a great actress, a great heroine, or a great queen. Were there any brunettes at all in Queen Elizabeth's court?

From The Spectator.

THE FOOD OF VANITY. CANON FOWLER, the head master of Lincoln Grammar School, in the paper which he has contributed to Physique on the excessive importance accorded to athletics in our public schools, seems to hold that there is no vanity, during schoollife at all events, like the vanity which is fostered by physical prowess. He speaks of "the deterioration of character which is inevitably caused in many boys who have come to the front in games, by the amount of flattery and general adulation which is bestowed upon them by their fellows, and by the notice and favor which is often shown them by certain of the masters. I have known boys who gave every promise of turning out thoroughly well, gradually, from pure conceit, losing their heads and becoming thoroughly spoilt. Sometimes the nonsense gets knocked out of them later on, but occasionally it sticks to them; but worse than this, I have seen the moral character deteriorate owing to the boundless influence they have gained by their position and have not known how to use aright." This is a striking testimony to the fact that physical qualities, -or at least qualities chiefly physical, for the pluck or courage which goes to make an athlete does, we suppose, involve some slight element of moral quality, though even that, we believe, is mainly due to the confidence which experience gives to athletes in their own physical alertness of eye, ear, and limb, do excite much more admiration, and also admiration much more frankly expressed, than any other qualities, whether intellectual or moral. And, indeed, in other aspects of life we all know that it is so. Beauty is far more universally admired and flattered than any quality of mind or character, chiefly, no doubt, because it is more conspicuous, attracts the attention much more easily, and is perceived by five or ten people for every person who perceives a keen intellect or a well-stored memory. The champion in

the great school games is known to every one wise or foolish; and his skill is envied by almost every one wise or foolish, just as a girl's beauty is known to every one wise or foolish, and is envied by every girl who has less beauty, whether she too be wise or foolish. That is one reason why high physical qualities provide more nourishing food for vanity than mental qualities however considerable. And another reason is this, that while great phys ical qualities carry with them no antidote to vanity, almost all considerable mental qualities do. Humor, for instance, if combined with any quickness of perception, is itself one of the most effective antidotes against vanity. Then, again, any really great power of memory or of acquisition is always bringing a man into comparison with those who had a far more powerful memory and far higher powers of acquisition, and that is an experience which insensibly neutralizes any tendency to vanity that the growing sense of capacity might otherwise inspire. And, as we have already said, a man cannot well be very vain of what attracts no pointed notice from the greater number of those with whom he lives. Yet the deeper and sounder mental and moral qualities are, the less perhaps do they attract any pointed notice from the mass of men. Vanity is fed chiefly by popularity and applause; and undoubtedly great physical qualities, and the self-confidence and presence of mind which great physical qualities produce, excite more notice and applause than any intellectual or moral quality, besides administering no antidote to vanity such as most intellectual and moral qualities do administer. That is the reason, we take it, why beauty in a girl is so much more likely to produce vanity than almost any kind of intellectual or moral capacity; and that, too, is evidently the reason why great athletic faculties in a boy much oftener turn the head than any gift for languages or mathematics, or any literary accomplishment.

That, too, may be the reason why vanity has the double meaning of conceit and emptiness. That which stimulates our conceit most, is really that which justifies it (if anything could justify it) least. "Vanity of vanities, says the preacher; all is vanity," meaning in the first instance, we suppose, "Emptiness of emptinesses, all is emptiness.' Still, the preacher no doubt included that emptiest of all emptinesses, pride in qualities on the score of which we have no more merit than we