with increased facility of communication. is a striking and by no means a common Villas are being built along the line of flower. The real treasure of the slacks is railway and at the edge of the sandhills. the Pyrola rotundifolia, or round-leafed A new people with very different tastes winter-green, which is rare everywhere, and opinions are invading the land, and but of which this particular variety, are bringing the ideas of a great town into naria, or the sand pyrola, is to be found this primitive corner. But it will be diffi- nowhere except among the slacks of the cult to change or spoil the sandhills them- Lancashire sandhills. It is, moreover, selves. They extend over many miles, only in certain slacks that it is to be and vary from half a mile to a mile in found, and there often only in particular depth before reaching down to the barren, nooks and corners. Our guide, however, monotonous shore, up which the sea has known where to find the particular scarcely cares to climb, and which is con- slack and the particular corner. The stantly gaining fresh ground. The great white stars of the grass of Parnassus are interest of the sandhills is the slacks. very abundant just here, and the dwarf They are more frequent in some parts willow is thickly tufting the soil; and than in others, for there are miles where right among the grass of Parnassus and the hollows are all sand and stargrass. the willow we saw for the first time this But every here and there the hills have rare pyrola. It grows straight up from receded and formed a little flat valley, the round leaves which surround the base where there is something like soil, and of the stalk. The stalk itself is a sort of where the rain lodges and mosses grow. chocolate red, and the creamy white blosThis is slack; and in the Lancashire soms standing out from it form the most slacks may be found some of the most delightful contrast. Then, too, they are beautiful, and certainly one of the rarest scented with a peculiar perfume, which -perhaps the very rarest of English perhaps is more like that of the Clethra flowers. But the slacks themselves are arborea, or lily of the valley tree, than curiously capricious in the wild flowers any other which I can recall. The pyrola that are to be found upon them. Some is here growing in profusion, and as it is of them are best in early summer, when both out of the way of the ordinary tourthe little yellow lotus, the birdsfoot trefoil ist, and by no means easy to find, we may is out, and there is a perfect field of cloth fairly hope that it will be long before it is of gold, which is brighter even than exterminated, as so many rare species celandine or buttercup. The early purple have been in other and more accessible orchis, Ophelia's "long purple," is very places. As we leave the sandhills for the generally distributed; but it is only here pasture land, we can see another rare and there that they grow so thickly as to flower, the wild Enothera, or evening give a color to the slack. Now they are primrose, which originally came from all but over. But we did not come for North America, and which, like the pothese, nor for the pink centaury, which is tato, is said to have owed its existence on just beginning to open its blossoms, nor these shores to the accident of a shipeven for the Chlora perfoliata, or yellow wreck. centaury as it is sometimes called, which HOT ICE.-A correspondent of Nature, after numerous experiments on the boiling points of substances under low pressures, came to the conclusion that it would be possible to have solid ice at temperatures far above the ordinary melting-point. He says: "After several unsuccessful attempts, I was so fortunate as to attain the most perfect success, and have obtained solid ice at temperatures so high that it was impossible to touch it without burning one's self. This result has been obtained many times and with the greatest ease, and not only so, but on one occasion a small quantity of water was frozen in a glass vessel which was so hot that it could not be touched by the hand without burning it. I have had ice a considerable length of time at temperatures far above the ordinary boiling-point, and even then it only sublimed away without any previous melting. These results were obtained by maintaining the superincumbent pressure below 46mm. of mercury; ie. the tension of aqueous vapor at the freezing-point of water. Other substances also exhibit these same phenomena, the most notable of which is mercuric chloride, for which latter the pressure need only be reduced to about 420mm. On letting in the pressure the substance at once liquefies. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. Is naught but silence; and the mystic hills Once on a time the silence of the place When his love-whispers echoed through my breast. THE MARBLE FAUN OF PRAXITELES. (ROME.) THOU link between the gods that move apart From all the ways of men, and youth that reels With the wild fulness of its life, that feels Each throb and quiver of the bounding heart. There is no care or shadow on that brow, Nor long slow-breathing year with dull sure tooth; Thou still remainest to us even as now The perfect type of ever-joyous youth. Are we the fools of that which still deceives Idolators of open-lidded dreams? I know not. But we gaze until we hear Pipings on reeds, and shady sounds of streams, Laughter as if of gods asleep, and clear TO A FRIEND RECENTLY LOST. T. T. WHEN I remember, friend, whom lost I call Like beams that throw the path on tossing seas, Can bid us feel we keep them in the ghost, IT flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands, Like some grave mighty thought 'threading a dream, And times and things, as in that vision, seem Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam, The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands. Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong, As of a world left empty of its throng, From The Quarterly Review. resume her place among the sustainers of the universe. In the leading features of this antique legend we may, without overtasking the imagination, see foreshadowed the recent history of Japan. Irritated and alarmed AMONG the most delightful of Japanese legends is the ancient myth of the wrath and appeasement of the sun-goddess, Amaterasu, in which we have, doubtless, the earliest Shintô essay toward some at the tendencies, real or fancied, of her explanation of that still wonder-striking intercourse during the sixteenth and sevphenomenon in the eyes of primitive enteenth centuries with the Namban or peoples no less awful than marvellous southern savages, as Europeans were an eclipse of the sun. Incensed at the then termed, from the fact that their ships rudeness of her younger brother, Susanoo, approached Japan from the south, she the god of the sea, who threw the reeking withdrew in high dudgeon, more than two hide (or carcass) of a piebald horse flayed hundred years ago, into an almost combackwards over her as she sat at her plete isolation from the rest of the world. loom, the from-heaven-shining-great-god- The emissaries of the West, from time to dess hid herself within a cave, the mouth time, endeavored, but in vain, to induce of which she closed by a huge rock, and her to abandon her seclusion; but it was left the universe in darkness and dis- not until past the middle of the present centress. To tempt her forth, the eight mil-tury that, half angrily, half inquisitively, lions of gods, after a great council held she partially yielded to the blandishments in the bed of the Stream of Heaven (Milky Way), hit upon the following device. One of their number, the goddess Udzumè, was set a-piping sweetly by the mouth of the cave, while hard by its rock-door the god Tajikara (Strong i' th' Arms) was placed in ambush. The strains of the pipe, mingled with the Homeric laughter of the gods, who had assembled without to await the result of their stratagem, pleased the sun-goddess mightily, and thus and otherwise tempted she pushed the rock-door ajar and ventured to peep out. Strong i' th' Arms alertly availed himself of the opportunity, and, drawing her out into the open, prevented her return by passing behind her the slight but effectual barrier of a rice-straw rope. We are not told that the goddess in any way resented this somewhat irreverent compulsion of her will, or that she was afterwards otherwise than well pleased to of an American commodore. The Strong i' th' Arms of Western civilization was on the watch; and inexorably, if not ruthlessly, drawn from her isolation, Japan found her retreat cut off by a paper barrier of cross-character treaties. Thus suddenly and only half willingly confronted with the light, she blinked, struggled, hesitated; but her natural instincts soon resumed their sway, and her rulers are now, apparently, not merely content but eager to run the race with the swiftest in the path of modern progress. The revolution, or restoration as the Japanese prefer to term it, of 1868 is an unique event in the history of the East, fraught with consequences of incalculable importance to the dense populations whom it has so long been the fashion to regard as obstinately unprogressive. It is not therefore to be wondered at that the nations of the West have during recent years displayed an extraordinary interest in the fortunes of their rejuvenescent and energetic sister. Her history, language, and antiquities, her arts, relig ions, philosophy, literature, and science, have been attentively, even enthusiastically, studied, and ample materials now exist in an accessible form, enabling us fairly to understand the past, judge the present, and, to some extent, forecast the future of the great island empire that are the same or but slightly modified," is the very reverse of the truth, as Miss Bird's account of the Yezo aborigines amply proves. The Ainos are, indeed, as unlike the Japanese, physically and morally, in habits, religion, and in language — so far as a linguistic comparison of the two peoples is at present possible -as any races of man well can be, and have adopted few of their conquerors' usages other than the love of fuddling divides the broad Pacific from the stormy | thor, that "in scores of striking instances waters of the China Sea. The three the very peculiar ideas, customs, and suworks of which the titles head this article, perstitions of the Japanese and Ainos if read together as they should be, will be found to present a far more just and accurate view both of old and of new Japan than can be gathered from the previous literature of the subject. Even the classical history of Kaempfer must yield the palm to the exhaustive and learned work of Sir E. Reed; whilst Miss Bird has given us the fullest as well as, let us say it at once, the most impartial account we have yet met with of the actual condition of the Japanese people, and Mr. Moun- themselves with saké, and the worship of sey's brilliant monograph resumes the causes and fortunes of the great rebellion in Satsuma that terminated in the happy completion of the unity of the empire. A distinguished politician, an experienced man of business, a scientist of repute, and a literary craftsman of no mean order, Sir E. Reed has shown no less industry and acumen in the selection of his materials than skill in their arrangement and presentation. But his conclusions do not always commend themselves to our judgment. On this point we shall have more to say presently; for the moment, we are concerned rather with the facts our author has gathered together than with the inferences he has deduced a single deified hero, Yoshitsuné, the famous brother of the first Japanese Shôgun. The problem is one that still awaits a solution, which we venture to think will not be arrived at until the anthropol ogy of the Polynesian and Malayo-Polynesian races shall have been satisfactorily worked out. Sir E. Reed found "in the villages and towns generally large men to be the rule, and small men the exception." Miss Bird's experience is of an opposite kind. She describes the men as "small, ugly, kindly-looking, shrivelled, bandy-legged, round-shouldered, concave-chested, poorlooking beings," and the description, though unflattering, is certainly true. from them. The expression of the Japanese counteAfter describing the land and its cli-nance, however, is generally very pleasmate, somewhat exaggerating, in our opin-ing, and the features light up wonderfully ion, the merits of the latter - about which with a smile. The women 66 are as a rule Miss Bird very truly remarks, "The trav- small and very small," and, adds our eller's opinion of the climate depends traveller, quoting Mr. Anderson, late of very much upon whether he goes to Japan Tôkiyô, "when young they are usually from the east or west: if from Singapore attractive, notwithstanding the unclassior China, he pronounces it bracing, cal outline of their features; the neck healthful, delicious; if from California, especially is nearly always beautifully damp, misty, and enervating" Sir E. modelled." Reed approaches the vexed and difficult | hand, states that the girls, though question of the origin of its inhabitants, laying considerable stress upon a new theory of Japanese descent broached by Mr. Hyde Clarke, who sees in them a Turano-African race, which we find very difficult of acceptance. Nor is it by any means certain that more than an inconsiderable proportion of Aino blood runs in the veins of the Japanese peasant. Mr. Griffis's assertion, quoted by our au Miss Bird, on the other appearing modest, gentle, and pleasing-look- |