St. Francis, too, he called the birds his brothers. Whether he was correct, either theologically or zoologically, he was plainly free from that fear of being mistaken for an ape, which haunts so many in these modern times. Perfectly sure that he himself was a spiritual being, he thought it at least possible that birds might be spiritual beings likewise, incarnate like himself in mortal flesh; and saw no degradation to the dignity of human nature in claiming kindred lovingly with creatures so beautiful, so wonderful, who (as he fancied in his old-fashioned way) praised God in the forest, even as angels did in heaven. In a word, the saint, though he was an ascetic, and certainly no man of science, was yet a poet, and somewhat of a philosopher; and would have possibly SO do extremes meet-have hailed as orthodox, while we hail as truly scientific, Wordsworth's great saying —

From the London Review. FALSE FACES.

We find in "Adam Bede" what to us seems a part explanation of a very difficult social problem. Speaking of Hetty, Miss Evans says that "her face had a language that transcended her feelings." And then she goes on to say that "there are faces which nature charges with a meaning and a pathos not belonging to the single human soul that flutters beneath them but speaking the joys and sorrows of foregone generations; eyes that tell of deep love which doubtless has been, and is somewhere, but not paired with these eyes, perhaps paired with pale eyes that can say nothing-just as a national language may be instinct with poetry unfelt by the lips that use it." We often meet people with a plain story enough written in their faces, but when we have studied their natures, we find our reckoning completely falsified by our acquaintance with them. This, unfortunately for men, occurs most frequently with

women. It is the greatest mistake to suppose that, except in a very unsophisticated time of life indeed, a woman allows her countenance to tell anything upon her; but, apart from her power and instinct of deception, there is again that-if we may so term it physiological advantage which she derives from her ancestors, and which enables her without effort to wear an expression which may be eminently more attractive than that which she could claim in her own right. If a man is first brought to love a woman for her face he is pretty certain to continue to set the tune of his thoughts about her to that keynote. He expects certain qualities are dormant in her mind which he alone has been clever enough to perceive. He wonders how her own family circle do not appear to believe her capable of all he is satisfied she can do and think. It would startle him a little if he were to learn that the pensive nose and thoughtful forehead came to Louisa from her great-grandmother, and that the mental attributes bestowed by him upon those features have been completely eliminated during the transition. This is the danger of studying physiognomy-one danger at least of studying a lady's face. The odds are all against our being right. The fiftieth part of an inch may put us out, and bring around calamitous eventualities. And yet it is assuredly the case that there are men and women who believe in faces long after the owners of the faces have given the most distant lie and contradiction to their own countenances. Love, or whatever the feeling may be termed, does blind Titania to Nick Bottom's ears. Men will cling to their ideal of a woman's face for years after the woman has utterly negatived every expectation to which it gave a prompting. They will watch as patiently and as perseveringly sometimes for the due sentiment to come to its surface, and play upon it as the angler watches his trout-flies on the surface of the stream. This very anxiety and interest often renders matrimony more endurable. One reason why brothers and sisters so usually quarrel when living together is, that they are thoroughly up in every move and thought in their own circle. Faces tell no untruths to them. They make no allowances on the score of expression, and sisters who would be amiable before strangers will not care to rehearse in private. They wear a look for the guest, and a look for the family dinner. This is a danger to which a guest is exposed. He has his ideal face, if he be romantic, from which he expects all that can

make him happy. The lady who sits opposite may either have this as an inheritance, or put on something like it when she dresses. If her attractiveness be from the first source she deserves no credit for it, and her character may utterly belie it; if she accomplishes it by the second plan, her admirers may be assured that she will no more take the trouble of keeping it up to please him, once the necessity for pleasing him seems to depart with marriage, than she will take the trouble of being sentimental about him two years after that event. A plain or an ugly woman, if she cannot make herself handsome, can always make herself desirable to some one, and that one is the man whose ideal expression corresponds with the mask for society with which nature has provided the sex. This is what is meant by the saying, that a woman is seldom unmarried save through her own fault. Every woman gets many chances if she but knew them; not every woman, however, will recognise the lover whose infatuation is sufficiently profound and desperate to bring him to the point. Unreasoning admirers, if ladies but knew it, admirers who are caught with eyes, or "tangled in Nærea's golden hair," make as good husbands as the most sensible and speculating of admirers. A man who has plunged hopelessly into a sentimental attachment, accepts the situation after a while with a steady and enduring pertinacity, if only fairly encouraged; and nothing will bring him more swiftly or more assuredly to this state than the sight of a type and manner of face on which some subtle emotion is stirred within him whenever he sees it.

To turn for a moment from the more sentimental aspect of false faces, it is curious to notice what complete changes in the character of a countenance is effected by age, and above all how great is the change when death lays its hand upon it. Apart from the alteration due to physical reasons, there is unquestionably an unaccountable relapse into phases of expression which we have seemingly dropped years ago. One of the most touching incidents of the deathbed is the recognition by parents and relatives of a youth and freshness on the face of the departed, and of an expression associated with school-time, boyhood, and the spring of life. Harsh and hard-featured men and women when lying at rest, have

little of the ruggedness and the ungraciousness which they carried with them through the world. Even old age-old age sinking out in decay takes a strange beauty at the close, and a score of years, with the furrows and the lines of years, disappear, to permit, as it were, a trace of the beautiful child-time to return again. Or is it that all our other faces were "false faces" except this? Perhaps so. Death is very sincere and very truthful. It would be pleasant at least to think that when passion was spent, the socket burned down, and thought and brain asleep, nature herself comes to vindicate whatever is good in us by a distinct and final manifestation. The brother of Death, as the poet calls Slumber, does not treat us so. In dreams our faces often seem worn and weary, and even convulsive to those who look on us in that state. We do not cast away the false face at night. We bear it as our thoughts have formed it, and our working existences, but at the finish we are done with it. The face of a dead wife will seem far more familiar to those who have known her in girlhood, than to the man who has known her as husband for more years than they have seen her.

With all faces we should be tolerant. Men and women hide themselves from each other by face as well as by words, and after a while the effort costs them nothing; the expression is set. Your physiognomist is as great a fool as your lover, and just as likely to be mistaken. No one except a born idiot who is sealed on the forehead with idiotcy, would carry his true inner character into the market world; and no woman ever does. But what we cannot perceive may not be so bad, and may be better than that which we think we can detect. Many persons play a game of brag with those whom they meet in this respect, by assuming what is called an impenetrable countenance. There is a necessity for this, as there is for reserve of every other kind. We can no more with social decency express our hatred, contempt, love, horror, rage, or impatience on our countenances, than we can the corresponding sentiments in language. Motley in faces is our only wear during life; in death we shall be fixed and consistent, smiling and placid generally, until the worm has his turn at us where no one sees in the dark.

nobody could protect from the smash it was made to invite, which nobody dared abandon, and which always had to be replaced after a day's journey, is extinct, as extinct as those marvellous contrivances made in the posting days, and called imperials, and in which only lady novelists nowadays believe. Their aristocratic heroines always carry them on railway journeys, and somehow or other get them under the seat. There is not a woman in Western Europe who is not the prettier for the bonnet of to-day, and we would wish it an eternity of duration, but that, in the first place, the natural man has a capacity of being bored by sameness; and in the second, there is a possibility of a still better change.. Suppose the bonnet glides into the hood, we mean the hood, and not the mantilla. We have doubts about the mantilla. The milliner countesses who write on fashions say it is coming in for all but walking costumes, but that will not do. So are emeralds instead of opals, but the people will buy neither, nor mantillas either. The point for the philosopher in dress is the bonnet, or rather head covering which the majority of cultivated Western women are likely to wear in the street, and we see hopeful signs that it may by possibility be the hood, the only head-dress ever worn by women which really covers the head, which can be made of any thickness or any material, which allows of any arrangement of the hair, which requires no separate packing or carriage, and which enables its wearers to be covered or uncovered without tedions processes of preparation. With the hood five seconds will fit a lady for the streets, a saving of at least ten per cent of the available time of half the human race. Healthy, convenient, and cheap, or costly at discretion, the hood has every artistic recommendation. It frames the picture to perfection, with a frame of any fitting breadth or colour, and it preserves as no bonnet except the poke has ever done, that distinction between indoor and outdoor costume, that reserve in display which, above all things, keeps up the charm of feminine variety. It suits all complexions and all ages, being in fact itself of every age, the very same hood which looks piquante on a girl looking grave and quiet on the matron of forty-five. No bonnet has that quality, and the grand reason why bonnets are so often condemned by artists is that Fashion requires them to be all alike, while Nature insists on as many shades of meaning in them as there are years in a woman's life.

From The Economist.

ON SOME POLITICAL EFFECTS OF THE

SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS OF LATER TIMES. (COMMUNICATED.)

THE progress which has been made dur ing the last two generations in searching out the secrets of Nature, and in subjecting her latent forces to the service of man, has never been equalled or even approached during any period of similar duration in the history of the world.

We will enumerate, in somewhat like chronological order, the most important of the discoveries thus alluded to:

The improvement of the steam engine. Gas illumination. Steam navigation Railways. Photography. The electric tele

graph.

Let the reader figure to himself, if he can, what a step backward for mankind the sudden removal of even one of these would be. How the well-being of the world would be prejudiced. How the comforts of almost every person in all civilised countries would be interfered with. It would seem to most of us that the march of human events would be arrested, if we were suddenly replaced in the same condition as that of our forefathers 70 or 80 years ago.

No one indeed can doubt that the material condition of mankind has been vastly improved in consequence of the recent changes, and the same thing may be said in many respects as to his moral condition. Still, there are matters falling chiefly and primarily under the domain of politics, where it appears to the writer that the line of movement has been rather retrograde than progressive, and to some of these the attention of the reader is now called.

The independence of all but the larger European States is completely destroyed. None but the five great Powers can any longer exert self-action. The minor States - such as Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, the Scandinavian Monarchies, Greece, Turkey, and Portugal-exist only upon sufferance, and are mainly supported by the mutual jealousies of the great Monarchies, aided by a respect for law and justice, which, however feeble, is more forcibly felt by mankind at large than in former times.

Italy and Spain occupy what may be considered an intermediate position. The first, indeed, may hereafter, if wisely governed, rise above that state of feebleness which now characterises her. Spain, owing to the nature of her territories and the peculiar qualities

of her people, possesses powers of resistance which might intimidate or weary out the most powerful invader.

Let us now cast our eyes backwards, and regard the state of Europe, as respects the independence of nations in former times.

Three hundred years ago took place the revolt of the Seven United Provinces. For nearly eighty years they contended against Spain, which for a great part of the time had the largest fleets, the best trained armies, and the greatest generals in the world at her disposition; yet the Dutch finally and completely succeeded; and two centuries ago they struggled against the combined efforts of France and England, and came safely out of the conflict. During the great war, which ended in the overthrow of the attempt of Louis XIV. to establish his supremacy in Europe, they were one of the most important members of the Grand Alliancé.

The resistance of Venice to the league of Cambray may be cited as another instance of the power of resistance in small States in the early part of the 16th century.

Again, early in the 17th century, Gustavus Adolphus, landing in Pomerania with 15,000 men, gave a check to the supremacy of the House of Austria and the Papal authority, from which neither has ever recovered.

We may here, too, allude to the effectual resistance of Frederick of Prussia to the combined attacks of France, Austria, and Russia, during the seven years' war.

But how, it will be asked, are these changes to be connected with recent scientific discoveries?

The answer is, that the improvements in the art of administration now enable the great powers to put forth all their strength, and that this improvement in the art of administration owes a great part of its efficiency to railroals, good ordinary roads, the electric telegraph, &c., &c.

Time and space have ever been great obstacles to the full exertion of military power on the part of Governments ruling over extensive territories. The first is now annihilated; the second reduced to a fraction of its former condition.

It is probable that the various States which owned Philip II. as their sovereign contained as large a population as that of Prussia before the Bohemian campaign, yet Philip II. never brought upon one field of battle, unless at St. Quentin, which was just beyond the frontier of his richest and most populous provinces, so many as 50,000 men, while Prussia, out of half a million of

men under arms, displayed, on the field of Sadowa, more than 200,000. In fact, the overthrow of Austria was closely connected with her defective administration, and this again with the want of railroads, &c., &c.

It is, of course, much easier to administer well, and, indeed, to govern well, a small country than a large one. Thus Holland could, two or three centuries ago, really exert all her strength, while Spain could only call forth a very small portion of her latent power.

Of course it need hardly be remarked that the general quality of the system of rule in the two countries, leading in the one to a rapid increase of population, wealth, and knowledge, while her enemy was sinking rapidly into poverty and ignorance, had much to do with the result of the struggle between them.

Other examples might readily be cited from the page of history, calculated to show how the influence of defective administration on large States in former times, protected the smaller States in the enjoyment of independence.

But then it will be said: Is it on the whole better for mankind that they should be divided into many States of moderate size, than into a few large States? There are many reasons for saying that it is so.

Small States differing in race, language, and form of government, exhibit a greater variety in the moral and intellectual condition of their inhabitants, than can be expected were they to be united in one great State.

In the former condition of things too, there will be far more scope for the exhibition of much of the highest order of talent. There will be more ministers, more chief judges, &c., &c.

In a country like France, within a few years, there will be no variety. The Gascon, the Picard, and the Norman will blend together, until the whole population will appear as if cast in the same mould.

Now surely the existence of variety among mankind is a good. One set of men possess what another want, and the result is advantageous on the whole.

Who can doubt that there exists far more mental power and varied knowledge in the two millions of Swiss than in an equal population forming four or five French Departments, or that the Swiss would go backwards after a few generations, if conquered by France and governed on the French system?

Or who, again, can doubt that the union of Belgium with France, or of Holland