oasis in a desert. It is at such a homestead as this that the sundowner arrives at nightfall and demands his dole of tea, flour, and sugar-and gets it, too, for the old custom dies hard in this land of long distances. This little group of station buildings, a lonely outpost on the river road, may direct and control half a million acres of sheep country stretching away for miles and gray miles into the shimmering mystery of the plains.

The only other habitation to be met with on the outer roads is the bush hotel-pub-shanty: call it what you will. This may be a little inn, well kept and clean, where decent food and liquor can be obtained and good lodging for man and beast; or it may be the veriest hovel, kept by drunkards and slatterns and thieves for the mere purpose of poisoning and robbing the public that passes its doors. It stands on some ridge of sandhill, convenient to the river, and facing the wheel-tracks of the river road. In front of it the half-mile stock route is generally fenced into a twochain lane, so that all traffic must pass through a narrow neck within sight of the swinging signboard, which blazons to the passers-by its name of pride or infamy The Shearer's Arms,''The Swagman's Rest,' 'The Mulga Hut,' 'Brumby Camp,' or 'The Traveler's Joy,' and so on. Here again are Kipling's 'thin, tin, crackling roofs' and the rough outhouses thatched with boughs, the inevitable herd of goats, the wind-blown yellow grasses, the flies, and the dust. And here, at almost any hour of the day, you may see one or more saddle horses tied to the horse-rail, a sundowner's swag flung down in the veranda, a team drawn up in the shade of the great kurrajong at the roadside, or the dust of a traveling mob drifting slowly over the buddah bushes, while within the

men to whom they belong quench a week-long thirst-the gift of the river road.

These roads are not entirely left to man. When the droning wagon wheels and clinking chains have died away in distance, and the shearer's song and the drover's shout and whip-crack have echoed away in the river timber, you may see, as the dusk gathers, the wild things of the bush come across the river road to water at the fast drying pools. Great, loping, deliberate kangaroos; emus with their slow, kingly tread; scrub wallabies, swift and alert; and maybe, if the spot is very remote and you yourself are silent as the trees about you, a lean brown shadow that glides ghostily from scrub to river banka dingo thirsty after long travel or grim in pursuit of prey; and down the trampled cattle tracks come the great half-wild, spear-horned bush bullocks, and the cows with their calves at foot, high-headed, suspicious; sheep padding in their thousands with a gray-blue veil of dust above them; station horses walking contentedly but with a purpose, glad at last to be rid of the flies, and reveling in the cool air that just stirs the gum leaves. Sometimes, perhaps, wild horses- brumbies bies snorting and shy, tossing long manes and tails as they rush past one another biting and playing, but always quick-eyed and quick-eared, and ready at the snap of a twig beneath your foot to dash back to the dark scrub and safety.

Then the camp fires; the full night glory of the river road when the stars burn white above the gum trees in that deep, intense blue that only southern skies can show! One by one the fires leap up in the river timber; here on a sandhill, there in a black-soil bend; camping places chosen only with a view to convenient water and adjacent firewood. The drover's twinkling

circle of watch fires, drawn round his footsore, coughing sheep; the teamster's fire showing up in relief the looming dark bulk of his wagon with its towering load of wool bales, and glinting on the piled chain-harness hung across his wagon shafts, while all round it clang and clash the team bells on his feeding horses. The swagman's small fire glows like a low red star against the dark line of the scrub. Beside it he has made his bed on a rare spring mattress of gathered pine plumes. On these he has spread one blanket, and, drawing another over him, has lain down on a couch fit for a king, sweet-scented and soft, under a glorious canopy of gold and blue; sung to sleep by the croon of the night wind in the river oaks and the far-off boom of the bullock bells on the sandhill.

The shearers' camp fire, fed generously by reckless and willing hands, flares up against the night in sheets of golden flame, lighting up the trodden sand for thirty yards on either side, and chasing the shadows high up into the gum boughs. It is a merry camp, and song and laughter drift across the river road and die away in the scrub. At last these merry light-hearts, too, will spread their blankets on the friendly sand, and lie down with spurred feet to the firelight, dreaming their dreams of soft-fleeced ewes and tallies of two hundred, and of fortunes to be won at euchre in the shearing huts. There is stress and cruelty and tragedy on the river roads. When the floods have come and gone, and left the swamps a bottomless quagmire, you can hear the ceaseless whips at work as the gallant horse teams strain and struggle to move their gigantic loads through the clinging black soil; and you can hear now and again the bellow of a team bullock as the heavy thong comes down and leaves its

crossed red ribbons on his tortured hide. And when the land has been scorched and riven by two years of constant drought, and the last tuft of withered bluegrass has shriveled up and disappeared from the trampled stock route; when the river is nothing but a chain of water holes, hoofchurned and muddy, then you can hear the moaning of the great mobs of thirsty cattle-a sound than which there is no sadder on God's earth as they move slowly forward down the river road, gaunt and thin and hungry, until fortune brings them to some deeper reach or pool where they may be safely taken down to drink.

The river road has become a haunt of horror through which stalk ceaselessly and mechanically scattered mobs of station sheep, which have traveled great distances across the plains to reach this, the last of the water; lean cattle; starving, hide-bound horses. The wild things share the suffering. Brumbies, mere skin and bone, with prominent eyes and shuffling feet, scarcely turn aside to avoid you as they plod stiffly toward the muddy pools, sniffing the blessed water with lifted nostrils. Kangaroos, grown gaunt and terrible in their leanness, hop painfully forward to the river timber; emus, suffering less than the others, searching for seeds on the parched ground as they go, nevertheless, hurry with the others toward the drying pools; rabbits, tucked up and wasted, run light-headedly to and fro vainly searching for food.

A sundowner, walking quickly and nervously, passes down among the dusty wagon tracks; his empty water bag dangles on his arm; the fear of death is in his eyes no water- no water-and where is the next? In every bend and in every clump of timber along the river road lie the skeletons of animals, grim toll of the

drought. Here a horse that has fallen in the chains, there a bullock that has died in the bow. Great heaps of bones; little heaps; skulls; ribs picked clean by the crows and eagle-hawks; sundried hides that rattle in the wind. A cemetery of the wild!

Rain comes, and the scene changes as though at the touch of a magic wand. A green shade covers the stock route, spreads, thickens into verdure, mantles the gray half-mile, and cloaks the red sandhill. The wild melon springs up through the whitened bones, and covers death with a glory of flower. Sandalwood scents the air, and the buddah bushes break into pinkwhite bloom. The emu-bush is starred with white, and the gray gums freshen into green. The long procession of starved creatures ceases as if by magic; there is feed on the outer plains and water in every clay-pan and gilgai hollow, and the river road knows them no more. The river itself rises steadily, joining water hole to water hole, mending its broken links, and running now in one continuous stream. And with the stream of the river returns the stream of traffic to the river road. Once more the broad-tired wagons The King's Highway

creak and swing across the flats, with fat horses and bullocks in good heart. Traveling mobs of sheep and cattle come gayly through, spreading wide over the lush green grass that decks both plain and sandhill.

No one who has ever traversed the outer highways can forget them. For him every heap of whitening bones, every circle of gray ashes, has a story. In his ears ring ceaselessly the threat of the whips, the gloating of the carrion birds, the welcome of the crackling gidya logs, the nightly comfort of the bells. Before him, like an open book, is spread the toil and tramp and laughter of the pioneers.

Time hurries on and brings with it the changes that keep step, and the river roads give way to progress like the rest. Motor cars and bicycles take the place of table-top wagons and shearers' hacks, and many a river road is now a kept and metaled highway, linking prosperous town to town and farm to farm. But always farther on and farther out are the roads that fascinate and charm-appealing in spite of their tragedy roads cut by crossing ruts and edged by bleaching skeletons, and lit by lonely fires.

VOL. 15-NO. 755

A RECENT, very excellent article on 'Education by the Humanities** showed the admirable results obtained at Drighlington (Elementary) School, Bradford, by a system of vernacular literary reading. It was demonstrated that by this plan 'children of twelve will have read many good books, and, when left at school till fourteen, will be far in advance of the children in other elementary schools and will have read a mass of good literature which will enable them to live clean, useful, and intelligent lives after leaving school.' They also, it appears, take pleasure in collecting little libraries of their own, and the child so trained 'starts life with a ready-made library of good books and a love of reading them which is like wearing chain armor against the vicissitudes of life.'

The Education Director's report on five schools in Gloucestershire, which began the method only last year, says that 'it was quite plain that the children had plunged into the wealth of books with a whole-hearted enjoyment,' and that 'girls of eleven had so gained in command of words and facility of expression that they were writing three or four times as much as they would have done before the change, and were using a vocabulary they never would have used at all.'

This is all to the good; it is a great advance, and can hardly be praised too highly in contrast with the old

*Printed in THE LIVING AGE of April 5.

system. But there is another side to the matter. If taken alone, it may be repeating the colossal mistake of the Educational Department in India, which, by its purely literary methods, trained a proletariat of the pen, scorning handwork, exalting glibness and sophistry into fine arts, and living by political agitation. Command of words and facility of expression is the curse of India, as it is of Ireland; and it may easily become the curse of England also. Moreover, if not balanced with exact knowledge, it tends to encourage in after years that glorification of mere opinion which is the source of so many of our present social conflicts.

The great difficulty which is experienced in any discussion (however friendly) to which some definite conclusion is desired, whether it be a trade dispute, a political argument, or a religious question, is to find a common ground of admitted fact. Each party starts from his own limited experiences as if they were the whole truth; and they do not argue to reach truth, but wrangle for victory. This is very largely the result of the purely literary training which gives a command of language, called by each disputant the 'prejudices' of the other; and, as a rule, they separate, each fortified in his own opinion, because each has heard 'views,' miscalled 'reasons.' They 'agree to differ'- which matters little when no practical conclusions are pending, but much when

lines of conduct are to be decided on. Hence comes the endless clash of conflicting opinions. The literary mind, like a boat with one oar, moves in a circle.

It is exact knowledge,- Science,and that alone, which can bring men to one mind as far as that process is possible, or, indeed, desirable. Science reconciles; we do not mind conceding to natural law what we will never concede to opinion, however 'expert.' In the modern world Science has been the great reconciler of fundamental differences. The old literary philosophy claimed to deal with final facts. Alike in religion and in politics, distinctions were treated as absolute and contended for as final. Intolerance, and even persecution, were but the logical outcome of this frame of mind. Its physical concepts were of like kind with its politics, assigning to each object its created and inherent properties or essence. Now, the old idea that flame tended upward by its affinity to the heavens, and a stone downward by affinity to the earth, has been superseded by the idea of Force as the one and only cause of motion. Movement, whensoever and wheresoever occurring, whether due to mechanical pressure or to chemical or vital change, is the result of forces whose magnitudes and directions are capable, or should be capable, of mathematical expression. The orderly results of such forces we can ascribe to Immanent Intelligence standing in much the same relation to those forces as that which those forces hold to inert Matter.

The ancient four elements' of Aristotle (still true as standing for the solid, liquid, gaseous, and ethereal states) were displaced by the discoveries of Lavoisier, Sir Humphry Davy, Faraday, Gay-Lussac, and a whole galaxy of pioneers in the new fields into which these have led the way. Some

seventy metals and non-metals replaced the primitive four, and the permutations of these under the forces of atomic attractions account for the myriad compounds of Nature.

Laplace, using Newton's epoch-making discoveries, had given to the world the brilliant 'nebular hypothesis'- as great a departure in celestial mechanics as Lavoisier's had been in chemistry when Grove, in The Correlation of the Physical Forces, made another splendid extension of the 'Principia,' showing that definite quantities of motion, heat, light, electricity, and the like are mutually interconvertible, and are essentially one thing- Energy: working force as contrasted with static force.

From the parent sciences, Geology and Chemistry, were born the sciences of the physical basis and development of life. Another great generalization arose from the labors of the biologists, whose work is most distinctively represented by Darwin and Wallace. The constant tendency to variation in living things (setting aside teleological speculation on the purpose, or experimental research into the origin of this tendency), and the agency whereby changes which make for suitability to environment and power over it are rendered permanent, and converse changes are obliterated, were summarized and coördinated into the Evolutionary Theory.

Slowly the old conceptions were dissolved. It has been well said that as the warm water fathoms deep washes the submerged ice, so slowly men's ideas change. Slowly the centre of gravity moved from theological postulates to Cartesian axioms, and from these to exact experiments on Matter and Force There was much commotion and tumult when the inevitable reversal took place; but when it had quieted down, scientific method had