overwhelming. Watling Island answers | which his reckoning must have been kept, to every requirement and every test, and of his consummate skill as a naviwhether based on the admiral's description gator. of the island itself, on the courses and distances thence to Cuba, or on the evidence of early maps. We have thus reached a final and satisfactory conclusion, and we can look back on that momentous event in the world's history with the certainty that we know the exact spot on which it occurred on which Columbus touched the land when he sprang from his boat with the standard waving over his head.

The discoveries of Columbus, during his first voyage, as recorded in his journal, included part of the north coast of Cuba, and the whole of the north coast of Española. The journal shows the care with which the navigation was conducted, how observations for latitude were taken, how the coasts were laid down-every prom ontory and bay receiving a name — and with what diligence each new feature of the land and its inhabitants was examined and recorded. The genius of Columbus would not have been of the same service to mankind if it had not been combined with great capacity for taking trouble, and with habits of order and accuracy.

In criticising the Cantino map showing Cortoreal's coast-lines, Mr. Markham showed that absurd mistakes had been made, not by the voyager or his pilots, but by the cartographer, and subsequent commentators. Vespucci's description of his "first voyage" in 1797, was subjected to very thorough criticism, and shown, in spite of the arguments of authors who have tried to support the veracity of that ingenious romancer, to have been a pure fabrication. Little or no credit could be given to Vespucci in any case, as he was forty-eight years old on first going to sea, and in those days apprenticeship from boyhood was indispensable for a knowledge of seamanship.

From The Saturday Review. THE EXTERMINATION OF SPECIES. THE extermination of species is a subject which has great and growing interest for many people. It concerns British landlords, and the farmers who have been Columbus regularly observed for lati- fighting with hard times, even more than tude with Martin Behaim's astrolabe or zoologists, and sportsmen, and amateurs the earlier quadrant, when the weather of the picturesque in nature. The wild rendered it possible, and he occasionally places of the earth have been losing sadly attempted to find the longitudes by ob- in romance of late. Look at North Amerserving eclipses of the moon with the aid ica. No doubt the buffaloes, or rather of tables calculated by old Regiomonta- the bison, were inevitably doomed when nus, whose declination tables also enabled civilization began to stretch across the the admiral to work out his meridian alti-continent. But the destruction of those tudes. But the explorer's main reliance countless herds that used to range from was on the skill and care with which he calculated his dead reckoning, watching every sign offered by sea and sky by day and night, allowing for currents, for leeway, for every cause that could affect the movement of his ship, noting with infinite pains the bearings and the variation of his compass, and constantly recording all phenomena on his card and in his journal. Columbus was the true father of what we call proper pilotage.

On his return his spirit of investigation led him to try the possibility of making a passage in the teeth of the trade wind. It was a long voyage, and his people were reduced to the last extremity, even threatening to eat the Indians who were on board. One night, to the surprise of all the company, the admiral gave the order to shorten sail. Next morning at dawn, Cape St. Vincent was in sight. This is a most remarkable proof of the care with

the Saskatchewan to the Rio del Norte, destroying everything in their course, like the lemmings or the locusts, was something wholly unexpected. The bull bison, like the war-horse of Job, seemed the very image of strength and ferocity; and the red men, with their lances and puny bows, though they did fill the larders of their lodges with the jerked meat, scarcely troubled the droves more than the mosquitoes or the sandflies. Yet, thanks to firearms and the prices of buffalo-robes in the American markets, the only traces that are left of the buffalo now are the bones and skulls that still whiten the prairies, and the remains of their "wallows " and favorite fording places.

Many of the small fur-bearing animals are going the same way, or are being driven back to the inhospitable regions, where the hardy pine-trees are dwarfed by the Arctic cold; and the once famous

Fur Company of Hudson Bay is reduced | zambique and Zanzibar, or gets entangled to eking out its dividends by land sales. among the missionary settlements on the The seals, as Nansen told us in his recent Shiré and the Lake Nyassa. His convolumes, which used to swarm on the frères on the Upper Nile and its Abysalmost inaccessible coasts of East Green- sinian tributaries have fared little better; land are leaving the Arctic ice-floes for and were Sir Samuel Baker to revisit his the inland ice, and thither they are al- old forest-lodge on the precipitous banks ready being followed up in specially con- of the Atbara, he could no longer enjoy structed steamers. Should the seals be from the windows of his morning-room the ever thinned down towards the vanishing delectable spectacle of the daily parade of point, the Polar bears, to say nothing of stately tuskers and graceful camelopards. the roving Esquimaux, will necessarily The greed of the ivory dealers and ivory be starved out of existence. One sub-hunters has been killing the geese that Arctic resident has disappeared already, in the shape of the great auk; the last of the race is supposed to have been seen off Iceland about the beginning of the century; and zoologists pay a questionable tribute to the memory of the mighty departed by offering fabulous prices for even a cracked eggshell.

laid the golden eggs, and we shall scon have to put up with vegetable substitutes for the handles of dinner-knives and the backs of our hair-brushes. Talking of Sir Samuel Baker, we may turn to Ceylon. When he wrote "The Rifle and the Hound," nearly forty years ago, the island, as he says, and especially in the malarious and sandy south-eastern districts, positively swarmed with big game. The great tanks in the lonely forests of the interior were infested by solitary rogue elephants, who were the terror of the unfortunate villagers. The buffaloes ranged about in herds by the hundred; the number of the elks and the spotted deer was legion. Though he had seldom scruples as to holding his sanguinary hand, he was often disgusted and satiated with slaughter. He thought little of knocking over half-a-dozen elephants of a morning, with two or three savage buffaloes thrown in; and, although he had a train of some fifty coolies and servants in his camp, the spare venison turned bad in that burning climate before

The changes in Africa have been even more general since tourists, commercial adventurers, and enthusiastic explorers have taken to traversing it in all directions. The dominions of the truculent potentate Moselekatse, where Cornwallis Harris found a perfect paradise of sport, are now given over to the gold-seekers of the Transvaal, and the quiet pools in the limpid streams of the Limpopo, where the "mighty hippopotamus wallowed at will," are troubled now by the rocking of the gold-cradles. The elephant, who is as shy and modest as he is bulky, has been driven northward beyond the Zambesi, mile by mile, before the deadly inroads of professional hunters, till he is headed back by the Portuguese and the Arabs from Mo-it could be cut up to be sun-dried.

JEWS AND THE ELECTRIC LIGHT. — A | question has been asked in the Jewish Chron icle concerning the subject of Sabbath observance in relation to the use of the electric light, and Professor Crookes, the well-known electrician, has replied: "It is a rule of the Jewish religion that, on the Sabbath day, no fire may be kindled. The observant Jews obey this law very strictly, and abstain from any act which directly or indirectly can cause the production of fire or the consumption of anything by fire. The following acts, for instance, are abstained from: Touching fire, lighting or extinguishing fires; striking matches or smoking; lighting or extinguishing gas lamps, oil lamps, or candles; moving or turning up or down gas lamps, oil lamps, or candles when alight; putting anything into the fire or taking anything out." The question was, "Would a man be transgressing these

rules of conduct by switching off or on electric glow lamps?" Professor Crookes replies:

The words 'fire' and 'flame' have in all ages and countries been associated with the idea of what we now term combustion.' That is, the rapid union of the atmospheric oxygen with combustible material, which, in the majority of cases, would be compounds of carbon and hydrogen. The carbon burns to carbonic acid and the hydrogen to water, both going off into the atmosphere in an invisible form. Historical research shows that the sacredness' of fire and flame in the old Eastern religions was intimately connected with combustion, and consequent purification. All the instances of acts to be abstained from given above involve combustion and flame. The modern glow lamp has no connection, direct or indirect, with fire,' 'flame,' or combustion.'''

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TO THE GOLD CREST BUILDING IN MY 'Twas like a vernal morn, yet overhead