Perhaps he is unwilling a second time to | UEL was to be the Head of Christ's Church undertake what he conceives to be a fruit- and whether a Royal supremacy should be less task. Though the Italian Government substituted for the supremacy of the Vatiis ready, if report speaks truly, to make can in matters of religion. Another speakample and honourable concessions, it cannot er, with equal solemnity "asked " whether guarantee to the Papacy all the political the POPE was "to be the domestic chaprights in the North and South of Italy which lain" of the King of ITALY, and dwelt on it demands, and, in the lifetime of the pres- the "benignity" of the Pontifical Governent PONTIFF, the Catholic Church will ment at Rome. If the Italian Executive continue, we fear, to insist upon impossible were to accept one twentieth part of the conditions. But no small end will be propositions put into their mouths by Ulachieved if it is made plain that the fault of tramontanists, there would be slight hope a rupture does not rest with the Cabinet or of anything but perpetual ill-feeling bepowers. the Parliament of Florence. tween the civil and religious Whether, after all attempts on the part of the Italian and French Cabinets, a violent rupture with the Vatican is now about to take place, must depend on the present occupant of St. Peter's Chair. Though old, obstinate, and infatuated, PIO NONO is a good and a kindly man. Whatever step he takes will doubtless be taken in sincerity. But it is a pity that, at so serious a crisis, the Vatican is not under the guidance either of a statesman or a man of common Councillor TONELLO's expedition is in one way a good omen, as tending to prove that the POPE has not as yet made up his mind to any desperate and perhaps irremediable measure. sense. From the Spectaotr. SIR JOHH HERSCHEL'S LECTURES. Meanwhile the POPE has composed, and is on the eve of launching, another thundering Encyclical. As Sir GEORGE BOWYER has explained, HIS HOLINESS never curses anybody; nor are his Encyclicals to be taken as amounting to more than a strong religious manifesto. Nature, as ANACREON says, has given horns to bulls, and she has in the same way given Encyclicals to Popes. The Italians will not resent his using the one weapon which is most natural to him, nor will they, if they are wise, regard the coming thunderbolt as an interruption to the harmony of the proposed negotiations. No Bull, indeed, ever issues from the quiver of the Vatican which is not aimed, inter alia, at some part of the established law of France, Italy, or other European kingdoms; nor does Rome shrink from denouncing the legal restrictions which statesmen everywhere have found it necessary to impose upon her ambition. But, except when interference is imperatively demanded to protect the majesty of the law, Italian politicians will probably follow the example of the French, and treat lightly and pleasantly what amounts to very little more than a very angry and abusive sermon. Rumour, indeed, in spite of the promised Encyclical, goes so far as to predict an approaching interview between the POPE and VICTOR EMMANUEL; not at Rome itself, but somewhere upon the Roman frontier, and possibly at Civita Vecchia. A meeting of the sort would be of advantage, as a sign of growing friendliness between the two Courts; but the King of ITALY, with all his virtues, is scarcely fitted to play a shining part either in a highly religious or in a highly diplomatic conversation. That no acrimonious feeling has been exhibited by the Florence Cabinet, from first to last, is tolerably clear. Archbishop MANNING, with more than Ultramontane casuistry, represented to his indulgent audience on Thursday last that the question in Italy virtually *Familiar Lectures on Scientific Subjects. By was, whether the POPE or VICTOR EMMAN- Sir John F. W. Herschel, K. H. London Strahan. THIS is a book which, popular as it is, few men could review, in the sense of criticizing it from the point of view of larger knowledge. From us, at all events, such criticism is impossible; but the appreciation of the learner is perhaps more useful with regard to books of this nature, than exact estimation by the learned; for while there are thousands who will be glad to know what they can learn from Sir John Her schel, there are but a few who could judge of the truth of any criticism passed upon him by any one who had any pretence to rank on a level with him in knowledge of the physical sciences. There are but few scientific men who translate the knowledge of their understanding into the language of the imagination with so much ease and simplicity as Sir John Herschel. Without any strain of manner, with that facility which seems to imply that he never ascertains any scientific fact without attempting, so far as it is possible, to realize what it actually means in some simple, practical illustration, he paints picture after picture from the wonderful discoveries made known to us by the study of the physical forces at work on the earth and in the heavens, and of the laws of light and heat, and yet it is never mere pictorial physics; the motive of every picture is never to astonish, but only to help the learner to realize at once the truth, and also the method of reasoning by which the knowledge of the truth has been attained. Sir John Herschel's whole type of thought is opposed to the dominant school of philosophy, which seeks to get rid of 'cause' altogether, and to speak of nothing but 'sequences.' In one of these lectures or essays he avows his absolute disbelief that 'force, can anyhow be got rid of and resolved into mere motion; and this assumption is really at the bottom of the charm of his philosophical style. He is always trying to show actual phenomena in their causes, to give us such a grasp of the scientific facts of the universe as only a man can have who believes that real forces exist behind the changes we see. There is nothing of what is ordinarily called picturesque science in his essays; though he makes us realize all he tells, it is for the sake of more clearly understanding the operative powers, and not for the sake of dazzling the imagination, that he describes. A purely intellectual kind of vividness marks the style of all these lectures. The first and one of the most interesting is on earthquakes and volcanos as a restorative and conservative force in nature. Sir John Herschel shows that the sea by constant friction wears away the land and carries off a great deal of its soil to the ocean bed, thus thickening the superincumbent weight over one part of the crust of the earth and thining it over another. This increasing inequality of pressure, this added pressure in one part and diminished pressure in another neighbouring part, produces a tendency to crack somewhere near the sea-coast. Whenever such a crack takes place "down goes the land on the heavy side and up on the light side," and by virtue of the interior gaseous pressure the land regains in elevation above the sea what the bottom of the ocean sinks, and wherever there is a volcano or open chimney, quantities of solid matter are vomited forth as if to make up for what falls into the chasm elsewhere. Here is the destructive process: "What the sea is doing the rivers are helping it to do. Look at the sand-banks at the mouth of the Thames. What are they but the materials of our island carried out to sea by the of India, and delivers into the sea, twice as much stream The Ganges carries away from the soil solid substance weekly as is contained in the Great Pyramid of Egypt. The Irawaddy sweeps off from Burmah 62 cubic feet of earth in every second of time on an average, and there are 86,400 seconds in every day, and 365 days in every year; and so on for the other rivers. What has become of all that great bed of chalk which once covered all the weald of Kent, and formed a continuous mass from Ramsgate and Dover to Beechy Head, running inland to Madamscourt Hill and Seven Oaks? All clean gone, and swept out into the bosom of the Atlantic, and there forming other chalkbeds. Now, geology assures us, on the most conclusive and undeniable evidence, that ALL our present land, all our continents and islands, have been formed in this way out of the ruins of former ones. The old ones which existed at the beginning of things have all perished, and been, at one time or other, perhaps many times, what we now stand upon has most assuredly the bottom of the sea." And then Sir John Herschel describes the restorative process, how the whole coast line of Chili for 100 miles, with the Andes that border it, were hoisted at one effort from two to seven feet above its former level on the 19th November, 1822; how in 1819 in India the territory of Cutch, for fifty miles long and sixteen broad, was hoisted up ten feet above its former level; and in 1538 the whole coast of feet, and remains at that height to this day. Pozzuoli, near Naples, was reared twenty In some cases Sir John Herschel shows that the process goes on not by fits and starts, but by gradual and very slow upheaval, as in the case of the floor of the Baltic sea, which is rising up out of the sea at the rate of two feet per hundred years. Active volin the case of great cracks in the soil of the canos, which are the chimneys by which, earth, the imprisoned gases escape, bringing with them quantities of fused solid substances, are almost always, says Sir John the sea is the power which thins away one Herschel, near the sea-coast, -just because part of the crust of the earth and thickens another, so as to tend to produce a crack:— "Well, now, it is a remarkable fact in the history of volcanos, that there is hardly an instance of an active volcano at any considerable distance from the sea-coast. All the great volcanic chain of the Andes is close to the western coast line of America. Etna is close to the sea; so is Vesuvius; Teneriffe is very near the African coast; Mount Erebus is on the edge of the great Antarctic continent. Out of 225 volcanos which are known to have been in actual eruption over the whole earth within the last 150 years, I remember only a single instance of one more than 320 miles from the sea, and even that is on the edge of the Caspian, the largest of all the inland seas-I mean Mount Demawend, in Persia." To think of earthquakes and volcanos as a conservative and restoring force is a new conception to some of us; but unquestionably Sir John Herschel does show that they retard the destructive forces of the sea in grinding away the land into fine sand and dust on its own bottom, and does much to thrust out of the sea at one place what has been washed into it at another. The lectures on the sun, and the comets, and celestial weighings and measurings are full of still more striking and graphic description. Not, indeed, that they tell us anything that has not often been told before, but that they realize in so simple and forcible a way much that had before been rather abstract figures and general statements, than conceptions representable to the mind's eye. Take this, for instance, as realizing the actual brightness of the sun : the sun. - "Let me say something now of the light of The means we have of measuring the intensity of light are not nearly so exact as in the case of heat-but this at least we know that the most intense lights we can produce artificially, are as nothing compared surface for surface with the sun. The most brilliant and beautiful light which can be artificially produced is that of a ball of quicklime kept violently hot by a flame of mixed ignited oxygen and hydrogen gases playing on its surface. Such a ball, if brought near enough to appear of the same size as the sun does, can no more be looked at without hurt than the sun but if it be held between the eye and the sun, and both so enfeebled by a dark glass as to allow of their being looked at together it appears as a black spot on the sun or as the black outline of the moon in an eclipse, seen thrown upon it. It has been ascertained by experiments which I cannot now describe, that the brightness, the intrinsic splendour, of the surface of such a lime-ball is only 146th part of that of the sun's surface. That is to say, that the sun gives out as much light as 146 balls of quicklime each the size of the sun, and each heated all over its surface in the way I have described, which is the most intense heat we can raise, and in which platina melts like lead." and then in a further section Sir John Herschel tells us that the nucleus or kernel of the sun itself, at an immeasureable depth beneath its intensely luminous photosphere, emits so little light as to appear, in the comparison, quite black, "though that does not prevent its being in as vivid a state of fiery glare as a white-hot iron; when we remember what has been said of the lime light appearing black against the light of the sun's surface. And it is a fact, that when Venus and Mercury pass across the sun, and are seen as round spots on it, they do really appear sensibly blacker than the blacker parts of the spots;" so that even the kernel of the sun is probably a luminous body, though so much less luminous than its outer envelopes as to seem quite dark in the comparison. The chapter on comets is perhaps the most interesting and romantic in the book. The vivid description which Sir John Herschel gives of the adventures of the different comets, of the sad way they get misled and thrown out of their own individual career by the immense bulk of the planet Jupiter whenever they come too near him, - projected sometimes towards the sun and sometimes away from him, as it may happen, acted upon without apparent reaction, lution to comets of a very different period, changed from comets of one period of revo-is much more interesting than most novels; and the speculation as to the probable constitution of comets with which he concludes, is a dream of quite new philosophical possibilities. But take, first, this exquisite little bit of cometary biography: "On the 27th February, 1826, Professor Biela, an Austrian astronomer of Josephstadt, discovered a small comet. When its motions were carefully studied it was found by M. Clausen, another of those indefatigable German computists, that it revolved in an elliptic orbit in a period of six years and 8 months. On looking back into the list of comets, it proves to be identical with comets that had been observed in 1772, 1805, and perhaps in 1818. Its return was accordingly predicted, and the prediction verified with the most striking exactness. And this went on regularly till its appearance (also predicted) in 1846. In that year it was observed as usual, and all seemed to be going on quietly and comfortably, when, behold! suddenly on the 13th of January it split into two distinct comets! each with a head and coma and a little nucleus of its own. There is some little contradiction about the exact date. Lieutenant Maury, of the United States' Observatory of Washington reported officially on the 15th having seen it double on the 13th, but Profesavers that he had a good view of it on the 14th, sor Wichmann, who saw it double on the 15th, and remarked nothing particular in its appearance. Be that as it may, the comet from a single became a double one. What domestic troubles caused the secession it is impossible to fluence is not attractive, but repulsive, and conjecture, but the two receded farther and which recedes further and further into space farther from each other up to a certain moder- as the head of the comet approaches the ate distance, with some degree of mutual comsun. Sir John Herschel suggests that, just munication and a very odd interchange of light as St. Clair Deville has shown that the -one day one head being brighter, and chemical affinity between the oxygen and another the other-till they seem to have agreed finally to part company. The oddest hydrogen of which water consists is so much part of the story, however, is yet to come. The weakened by a very high temperature, that year 1852 brought round the time for their re-"the mere difference of difficulty in traversappearance, and behold! there they both were, ing an earthenware tube suffices to set them at about the same distance from each other, free of one another," so the action of the and both visible in one telescope. The orbit of sun's heat might weaken sufficiently the this comet very nearly indeed intersects that of atomic bond of union between that portion the earth on the place which the earth occupies of the cometary matter which the sun aton the 30th of November. If ever the earth is tracts and that portion which it repels, that to be swallowed up by a comet, or to swallow up one, it will be on or about that day of the at every return to the neighbourhood of the year. In the year 1832 we missed it by a sun a good deal of the matter liable to repulmonth. The head of the comet enveloped that sion by the sun should be cast off into space, point of our orbit, but this happened on the 29th and the rest more and more contracted till of October, so that we escaped that time. Had it settles down into the comparatively hard a meeting taken place, from what we know of nucleus of a planet. The plausibility of comets, it is most probable that no harm would this theory is that those comets which have have happened, and that nobody would have very little or no tails, like Encke's comet, known anything about it. It would appear that we are happily relieved from the dread of always contract after passing round the sun snch a collision. It is now (February, 1866) (passing through perihelion), and expand overdue! Its orbit has been recomputed and again as they get to a distance. Sir John and an ephemeris calculated. Astronomers Herschel suggests that at each visit this have been eagerly looking out for its reappear- temporary evaporation, as it were, of a porance for the last two months, when, according tion of their bulk, weakens its bond of union to all former experience, it ought to have been with the nucleus of the comet, till at last it conspicuously visible, but without success, giv- is cast off wholly into space. What a train ing rise to the strangest theories. At all events, of speculation the mere existence of elements it seems to have fairly disappeared, and that in cometary matter liable to repulsion from without any such excuse as in the case of the sun, instead of attraction to it, suggests! Lexell's, the preponderant attraction of some If any such elements of matter linger bound great planet. Can it have come into contact or exceedingly close approach to some asteroid as up in ordinary planetary or (say) terresyet undiscovered; or peradventure, plunged trial matter, they might be set free by some into and got bewildered among the ring of me- future change, and if the bodies of rational teorolites, which astronomers more than sus- beings could ever be made of such matter, pect?" they would, instead of being confined, as all bodies we know are, to the earth and solar system by the law of gravitation, be, by the very force of repulsion, projected into universes beyond the solar universe to which we belong. At present the highest idea we have of physical impossibility is of corporeal frames getting beyond the attraction of the earth, and still more, of the solar central force; but if there be a sort of matter imprisonable in gravitating matter, and yet also separable from it, which, when separate, is simply repelled by the sun, then there is a kind of material frame which might (conceivably) be made in this system, and yet made by the law of its nature to travel out of it. Here is a comet dividing, as, it is said, worms cut in two will do, into two quite independent comets, which sail as consorts for a few years in the sky, return at the right moment still in company, and then, when they are expected back once again, plunge into invisibility as if they had both gone down to gether in a squall of the celestial firmament. Singular and most fascinating in its suggestion of philosophic vistas is Sir John Herschel's final speculation as to the sun's probable analysis of the matter of which comets are composed into two components, -one, matter on which the sun exercises an attractive force as it does on the material of all our planets, and the other, matter composing a great part of what is called the tail of the comets, on which the sun's in We have noted but one or two points in a book of a most profound and romantic scientific charm. We leave our readers to find out innumerable others for themselves. From the Examiner. ton, he set forth again with his army refreshed and rejoicing that the hour had at length come when the haughty spirits of South Carolina should themselves experience some of the miseries they were so ready to bring upon others: and yet on through the dreary swamps and pinebarrens of North Carolina, till his victorious progress was crowned by the surrender, at Goldsborough, on the 26th of April, of General Joe Johnston, his old antagonist -a foeman 'worthy of his steel;" and it only remained to his army to receive at Washington, on the 23rd of May, the applause of a grateful country, as they marched up Pennsylvania Avenue the he roes of the day-though the army of Richmond by the unanimous tribute of respect paid by the and distinguished above all others President, and the party of all nations occupying the stand in front of the White House, who, with one consent, rose to their feet as they passed, and welcomed the veterans home. was there Full of admiration for the conqueror, Mr. Kennaway travelled south, with the inten tion of making special study of his tactics and their successful working. That gives his book a particular interest. It is chiefly interesting, however, as a gossiping account of the condition of society as he found it in the United States. He says much - though little that is cheering about the negro question. The place of the negroes among the white men he considers to have been fairly defined by one of themselves, who said, "If, when I was a slave, I had tumbled overboard the steamer, the boat would have been stopped; and I should have been picked up, put by the fire to dry, because I was property, and then given a thousand lashes for falling overboard. Now, if I fall over On Sherman's track; or, the South after, the War. By John H. Kennaway, M. A., Balliol College, Oxford. With Illustrations. Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday. PLESANTLY and impartially, Mr. Kennaway here relates his experiences of travel during last autumn through the Southern and Northern States. His first visit was to Canada. Thence he proceeded to Chicago, intending to see New York and the other great cities. But at Chicago he met with General Sherman, who advised a journey to the South. The advice was taken, and this book is the result. The following sketch of Sherman himself is a sort of preface to it: The General's career is curiously illustrative of the versatility or restlessness of the American character, as also of the great variety of occupation which offers to a man of energy in that country. Born in Ohio in 1820, he graduated at the age of twenty at the Military Academy of West Point, after the usual four years' course; and having been engaged in active service in Florida and California, he gave up his commission in 1853, and entered a bank at St. Louis, where he quickly amassed, and as quickly lost, a large fortune. We next hear of him as a farmer, then as a lawyer in Kansas, till, just before the war, he is filling the office of President of a Military Academy in Louisiana, with a good salary: this he resigned on the passing by that State of the ordinance of secession, and returned to St. Louis to become superintendent of a street railway, the last stage in his career before re-entering the armies of the United States. There his course has been marked with signal success. His brigade was the only one which retired in order from the rout at Bull's Run. To him Grant avowedly Oh, it's only a cursed nigger! Go a attributes the success of the affair at Pittsburg head!' and I never should have got picked landing. At Shiloh, and in the operations at up at all." That it is not always so, howthe siege of Vicksburg, he displayed the great- ever, appears from this letter written by est vigour, and showed signs of talent of the a planter of Louisiana, during the war “a highest order. Promoted to the command of the army of Tennessee, he took part in the bat-persistent, bitter, and uncompromising Setle of Mission Ridge; and finally was placed at the head of the division of the Mississippi on the appointment of General Grant, in March, 1864, to the rank of lieutenant-general, with command of all the armies of the United States. With a force under him numbering nearly one hundred thousand men full of confidence in their leader, Sherman set forth from Chattanooga on the 6th of May, 1864, on a march which was to lead him, for hundreds of miles, into the very heart of the Confederacy; through States which had never had the war brought home to them, or even seen the blue uniform of their Yankee foes; by the forges of Atlanta and Marietta; through the cotton-fields and the pine-forests of Georgia to the rice-swamps of Savannah: where, after a pause, but as it were to gain breath and to take counsel with the authorities at Washing cessionist: " Last season I worked my hands by means of an overseer, and all the trouble and tumult common among the other negroes and upon the other plantations ensued. I made up my mind that it was all the fault of the overseer, a good enough man in his way. - better than the average; but, like the rest, he persisted in ignoring the change that had taken place in affairs, and worked on the old system. So this season I resolved to go into the field myself. I told my hands at the commencement of the season just what I would do for them, just what I expected them to do for me. They raised sweet potatoes, eggs, and chickens on their own account. I fed and clothed them, and paid them so much. I have not had the least trouble. They have |