ability to do. The rewards of excellence in schools and colleges are, as a rule, meted out to those who have demonstrated their capacity for acquiring and cramming. The practical world has ceased to expect much of its valedictorians and its prize-medal bearers. Those whose growth of power is slow, and whose vitality has been unimpaired by excessive study during the years of physical development, are the men who do, and who always have done, the work of the world. Thousands of educated men go through life with feeble health, and power impaired, and limited usefulness, in direct consequence of their early triumphs, or, rather, of the sacrifices by which those triumphs

were won.

We cannot but believe that prizes do more harm than good, and that it would be a blessing to the nation if they could be abolished in every school and college in the country. They are won invariably by those who need rather to be restrained than stimulated, and are rarely contended for by those whose sluggish natures alone require an extraordinary motive to exertion and industry. Their award is based upon the narrowest grounds. Their tendency is to convey a false idea of manly excellence, and to discourage the development of the stronger and healthier forms of physical and mental life. The young man who goes to the work of his life with a firm and healthy frame, a pure heart, and the ability to use such knowledge as he possesses, is worth to himself, his friends, and the world, a thousand times more than the emaciated scholar whose stomach is the abode of dyspepsia and whose brain is a lumber-house of unused learning. If we have any prizes to give, let us give them to those young men of delicate organizations and the power of easy acquisition who restrain their ambition to excel in scholarshin, and build up for themselves a body fit to give their minds a comfortable dwellingplace and forcible and facile service. These would be prizes worth securing, and they would point to the highest form of manhood as their, aim and end.

The tendency in all these educational matters is to extremes. It is quite as much so in England as here. We have no sympathy with the aim which is fostered in some institutions of making athletes of the students. Base-ball matches, and rowing matches, and acrobatic feats are well enough for those who have no brains to

cultivate, or who are not engaged in educating and storing them; but they are not the things for studious young men. The awful strain that they inflict upor the body draws all the nervous energy to the support of the muscular system, and kills the ability to study More than all, they wound the vitality of every man who engages in them. We once heard an Englis clergyman say that every noted athlete of his (the clergyman's) class in the university was either deal or worse. Moderate play every day in the open air. limited hours of study in the day-time, pleasant social intercourse, unlimited sleep, good food, the education of power by its use in writing, speaking, and debating -these are what make men of symmetry, health, and usefulness. The forcing process, in whatever way applied, and to whatever set of powers, is a dangerous process. We make a great stir over the flogging of a refractory boy by a teacher. Whole communities are sometimes convulsed by what is regarded as a case of physical cruelty in a school, but the truth is that the ferule and the rawhide are the mildest instruments of cruelty in the hands of more teachers than can be counted. The boy who is crowded to do more than he ought to do in study, and so crowded that he is enfeebled, or takes on disease of the brain and nervous system at the first onset of sickness, is the victim of the subtlest cruelty that can be practiced upon him.

We write strongly of these things because we feel strongly. We believe that there is a wrong practiced upon the children and young men of the country that ought to be righted. We believe, too, that not only teachers but parents are blameworthy in this matter. It all comes of a false idea of education. To acquire what is written in books-in the quickest way and in the greatest quantity-this is education in the popular opinion. The enormous mistakes and fatal policies of which we complain all grow out of this error. Half of the schooling which we give those children who go to school would be better than the whole; while the poor third, who do not go to school at all, would give employment to the unused energies of those teachers whose time would be released to them by such a reduction of school hours. Six hours of daily imprisonment for a child is cruelty, without any reference to the tasks to which he is held during that period.

THE Fire-Tender charges the Poet of the Breakfast Table with an uncontrollable penchant for saying the things you would like to say yourself; but he seems never to suspect that he lays himself open to the very same serious accusation. If the Fire-Tender had kept quiet on that subject I could mention one person at least who would have preceded him in the matter of those nice people whom not to know makes one homesick in this world.

Albeit that shall not preclude what I was going to say about the number of nice places. There, for isstance, is the place where I was born. I shall not attempt to describe it, but I can assure you it is a very beautiful place indeed-an old-fashioned farmhouse hovering on the verge of French-roof civilizati -overshadowed by buttonwoods and immemoria black-heart cherry-trees; a house of breezy pians, and big fireplaces, and ghostsome garrets, and secret

closets, and moss-green roofs (with wooden pails and tin basins set a-row under the leaks), and at the rear the loveliest little brook-fretted meadow in the world; every corner and fence and frog-pond full of blessed memories, and-but, save your soul, there is the place where you were born, just as beautiful and romantic in its way.

banks of the Delaware, where the big canal debouches, and water-melon boats take Venetian shapes in the glimmering twilight. How vague now and shadowy the suggestions of these once potent passwords-scraps of that delicious nonsense-language talked by groups of summer friends in years that are gone!

You cannot scare me with your myriads of worlds,

You walk aboard the boat at Newport on your way home from your summer vacation with a new world in your Russia-leather valise: Hillton by the Sea, let us call it. There is a secret consciousness that nowhere else this season have fish so blithely bitten; breakers come in so bravely; that no woods have held such secrets of lilies, such fairy graces of ferns, such glooms of pools and greenery; that sunset skies have nowhere else so gloriously flamed and tenderly darkened, or huckle-berries grown so many on a bush. And the Hillton nights, with the Pocomoke light throbbing down the coast, and the moon peeping over the Catamaxy Cliffs, and the waves tinkling among the shells and sands at your feet-O ensemble; O quelquechose !

No wonder that you pity these poor people-crowding the forward deck, and dozing on the sofas-who could not spend their vacations at Hillton by the Sea.

But Henry, Richard, and Thomas have come across the same gang-plank, each with his own separate new world in his own Russia-leather valise, with the same secret consciousness concerning the Isles of Shoals, Plymouth Bay, or Narragansett Pier; and with the same sweet pity at his heart. And last year you yourself trudged aboard the Hudson River steamer from your summer in the Catskills, with very similar sentiments in regard to that charming resort.

Perhaps you can tell me what is the subtle significance of "BULRUSHES!"-No?-Ah, my friend, there was a time when that simple word held a library of meaning for you. I saw you start and flush at the Smigley reception, three winters ago, when "Bulrushes" glanced to your ear across the gleam of kid and glisten of sherbet. In an instant gas-light, clatter of tongues and plate, flounces and flummery hushed and vanished, and you sat in a dream, not all alone, on the moonlit shore of Buzzard's Bay.

"What, no SOAP!" That stood once (did it not?) for a fortnight of bliss at Lake Hopatcong. "Your kindness I never shall forget!" meant a mad week at Newport. "I never nursed a dear gazelle!" once brought back that summer of summers on the

every star be a bigger sun, and each the center of a system. This is what perplexes and affrays methe multitude of living human beings, each one of whom is the center of a system not merely, but, in some real sense, the center of the universe. Every one of the wise little red salamanders the poet found in the woods wore a crownlet,--and every one was firmly convinced that he was absolute monarch.

Earth and sky wear peculiar liveries and minister in special ways to each separate human soul. This blade of grass is not the same to you and me. If you could exchange worlds with your twin brother you would be lost almost as hopelessly as if you had made the transfer with a chimpanzee. Born of the same love, reared beneath the same roof-a rustle of dead leaves on a sunny day, a tragedy read in an old applewoman's face, the little Mexican air you heard whistled once on a ferry-boat, a black flash from a blue eye, the sound of wind in the trees after an evening with Robert Falconer, the crushing of a spider,-these and a thousand other influences have shaped your different life.

And when you go away from your own hearth and home how rapidly the differences multiply. Suppose you could see Broadway through the eyes of that yellow-haired, dirty-faced five-year-old rolling on the side-walk over there. "Poor Brown!" says Robinson; "Poor Robinson!" says Brown.

I knew an insanely adventurous young fellow who started a morning paper in one of our interior towns. He did not do all the work himself; he simply wrote editorials and locals, solicited advertisements, set.a little type occasionally, helped make up the form, wheeled it down the street to the press-room, and before going home to bed in the morning superintended the sale of the paper by the newsboys. He would take his stand in front of the office and watch the procession of laborers and shop-people as they streamed by the bulletin board. He has described to mewith infinite appreciation of the pathetic drollery of the thing-his sudden and violent formation of opinion regarding these utterly unknown people. A young man smoothly dressed, and with a brisk business-like step, passed without even a glance toward the board. He was an incipient Gradgrind; bent upon growing rich for the mere sordid love of money; couldn't tell an oil-painting from a colored lithograph; or the Apollo Belvidere from a tobacco-sign. Next-a respectable graybeard, with spectacles on nose and market-basket on arm, who read the bulletin from top to bottom and walked off without buying

a paper. A perfect old skinflint-wouldn't trust him with a one-cent postage stamp; he'll come to the penitentiary yet for defalcation. But oh, how the young editor's heart went out toward the red-headed, pitted-faced little Irishman with a dinner-can, who fished two coppers from the depths of his trowsers pocket and went off reading the Morning Magnifier upside down!

Did you ever think what a figure you made of yourself in the eyes of the gentlemanly agent whose patent magnetic, non-combustible clothes-wringer you utterly refused to buy?

So you see everybody looks at everybody else and at the rest of creation through his own spectacles and from his own "stand-point "-and there are a great many millions of spectacles, metaphorically speaking, and a great many millions of stand-points.

WHICH brings me to Mr. Walter Hutcheson, and his article in St. Paul's Magazine on "Criticism as one of the Fine Arts." Mr. Hutcheson holds that scientific criticism is as sheer fudge as scientific poetry, or scientific painting; that criticism belongs to the Fine Arts; that as a creative form of composition, wherein we have the representation of certain known products on certain competent or incompetent natures, so-called criticism is as valuable in its way as lyrical poetry or autobiography. In order to get anything like a fair insight into the truth, however, we must take care to ascertain a few preliminaries. He therefore suggests five or six questions, which should be answered, regarding the age, education, history, and honesty of the critic. Mr. Hutcheson's points are capitally put, and with beautiful irony; but he is very lenient with his questions, it seems to me. Why not ask, for instance, if the subject of criticism is an art exhibition

6. Had the fact that Mr. Jones's notices are full and faithful up to No. 277, and curt and careless after that number, anything to do with the fact that Mrs. Jones made a remark to Mr. Jones in front of No. 278, entirely disconnected with Art, but not so entirely disconnected with Dinner?

7. On the day that Mr. Jones wrote his famous slasher on Parson's "Lungs of the Cordilleras," did or did not a heavy gentleman step on Mr. Jones's corns ?

For you see it is not merely necessary to know Mr. Jones's antecedents, his prejudices, his morals, and the like; we must know his moods, his wife, his great-grandfather if possible-because sometimes one comes quite unexpectedly into certain temperamental inheritances.

One ought to be exceeding grateful to Mr. Hutcheson for his Fine Art theory. It helps you to keep cool this warm weather. When you pick up your paper and find, for example, that a famous statue, which you could not help admiring, in your ignorant, enthusiastic way, is suddenly found out to be a terrible botch, miserably destitute not only of those noble

qualities that had stirred your very soul, but lacking the ordinary technical proprieties-you are either excited with self-shame, or righteous indignation. But if you are able to apply Mr. Hutcheson's tests to the personality of the anonymous critic, it is a different matter-calmness comes again-you rejoice that, after all, the world is not stuffed with sawdust.

FOR it is not to be supposed that small critics can compass great artists. Next time will you hammer this into them, Mr. Hutcheson-that no man has a right to be regarded in his criticism of a work which he is not constituted to comprehend; and that it is not enough for a critic to be able to point out defects One would think that might go without the saying. But that it does not, no one will dispute who looks over any publisher's book of newspaper clippings. The aggregate thus presented of error and assumption is something melancholy to contemplate. If the men, women, and children who write the reviews would only say: "I have now shown my readers what seem to me to be the artistic faults of this poem; but for indication of its excellencies I beg leave to refer them to other writers better fitted by education and sympathy for that delicate task."

The opinion seems to be prevalent that recognition of defects is more important than recognition of artistic merits. Let us take a case. Here is an artist of real and original power. The scribblers whose business it is to notice his paintings, find it not at all difficult to perceive and proclaim certain obvious faults and inconsistencies. Their criticisms sound knowing and seem just. But though every point they make is correctly made, they are blind leaders of the blind. For they fail to see that what appears 'crudity and extravagance of color,' comes from a scorn of conventionality, a tendency to experiment, a striving after new but not less true combinations and effects, an eye sensitive to every delicate shade and meaning of color; that his 'vagaries of form and composition,' his 'crowding and confusion,' are owing to the wealth of his imagination, his marvelous knowledge of detail and command of methods. By and by-encouraged by the few who believe in him through all-he passes the experimental age and gets at his life's work. Then come the pictures that win the world, and make the little critics wonder while they snarl.

'ENCOURAGED by the few who believe in him through all!' Blessed be faith! I know I have been believed into every good thing I have ever done or been in this world. I have such faith in faith that I am almost persuaded a politician might be believed into the kingdom of Heaven, or a mediocre poet into a genius. I am sure many a good man has been suspected into a rascal.

Did not a dear and gentle friend of mine confess that if he had remained much longer in the employ of a certain Christian person (God save the

A fig for the man who has never been deceived;' and the woman who knows from the beginning the

New Experiments on the Heat of the Spectrum. DR. J. W. DRAPER, of the University of New York -to whom are due some of the fundamental facts in Spectrum Analyses, such as that the spectra of ignited solids contain no fixed lines; that all solids and liquids begin to shine at the same thermometric degree, 1,000° Fahrenheit, and that the refrangibility of the light emitted by a hot substance increases as its temperature is raised-has recently published some very important experiments on the distribution of heat in the spectrum.

It has until now been supposed that the red rays are the hottest of the visible ones, and that the violet can scarcely affect the thermometer. Dr. Draper shows that this inequality depends altogether on a peculiarity of the prismatic spectrum, in which the less refrangible rays are compressed into a narrow space, and the more refrangible exceedingly dilated. By a very beautiful apparatus he collects all the less refrangible rays into one focus, and all the more into another focus, and measures the heat of each. Now on the currently-received view the former of these foci should possess all the heat, the latter little or none. But, as the result of more than three hundred experiments, Dr. Draper shows that the heat in each is the

same.

From this some very important conclusions follow: Ist. That the heating power of every ray is the same, no matter what its color may be. 2d. That the heat does not pre-exist in the sunbeam, but is generated by its impact on the surface on which it falls. For though a wave of red light is twice the length of one of violet, the latter vibrates twice as quickly, and therefore the mechanical effect of both is the same. The production of heat by light is thus a pure instance of the conversion of motion into heat-an instance of the transmutation and conservation of force.

Sterility and Depletion.

REGARDING this subject Mr. Howorth remarks: The gardener who desires his plants to blossom and bear fruit takes care that they shall avoid a vigorous growth. He knows that this will inevitably make them sterile; that either his trees will only bear distorted flowers, that fail to produce seed, or that they will bear no blossoms at all. In order to procure flowers and fruit he checks the growth and vigor of the plant by pruning its roots or branches, depriving it of food, and, if he have a stubborn pear or peach tree which has long refused to bear fruit, he adopts the hazardous but often most successful plan of ringing its bark.

Turning to the animal kingdom, the rule is no less true. "Fat hens won't lay" is an old fragment of philosophy. The breeder of sheep, pigs, and cattle knows very well that if his ewes and sows and cows are not kept lean they will not breed; and as a startling example it is stated that to induce Alderney cows, which are bad breeders, to be fertile, they are actually bled, and so sufficiently reduced in condition.

In like manner generous diet and good living produce their effect on human beings. In countries where flesh and strong food is the ordinary diet, the population is thin and the increase small; while where fish, vegetables, and weak food are used, the population is large and the increase rapid. Everywhere the rich, luxurious, well-fed classes are diminishing in numbers or are stationary; while the poor, badly-fed, hard-worked are very prolific. As with the plant, the animal, and the man, so is it with the nation. was luxury and not the barbarians that sapped the power and wrought the destruction of the Roman Empire; and as plants, animals, and even human beings are stimulated by a course of depletion to increased fertility, so, according to some authorities, great wars have a similar effect on nations, and by their deplet ing action stimulate them to increased activity and renewed vigor.

Evolution of Mind.

It

OF the evolution of higher from lower forms of mind Herbert Spencer says: Even apart from the evidence derived from the ascending grades of animals up from Zoophytes, as they are significantly named, it needs only to observe the evolution of a single animal, to see that there does not exist any break or chasm between the life which shows no mind and the life which shows mind. The yolk of an egg which the cook has just broken not only yields no sign of mind, but yields no sign of life. It does not respond to a stimulus as much even as many plants do. Had the egg, instead of being broken by the cook, been left under the hen for a certain time, the yolk would have passed by infinitesimal gradations through a series of forms ending in a chick; and by similarly infinitesimal gradations would have arisen those functions which end in the chick breaking its shell, and which, when it gets out, show themselves in running about, distinguishing and picking up food, and squeaking if hurt. When did the feeling begin? and how did there come into existence that power of perception which the chick's actions show? Should it be objected that the chick's actions are mainly automatic, I will not dwell on the fact that though they are largely so