W. S. Bainbridge of the New York Skin and Cancer Hospital. The tests were carried out on one hundred patients, and Dr Bainbridge was in close touch with Dr Beard throughout; the best materials were used, and all the conditions were most favourable. The results were entirely unfavourable; the process was not checked, and its spread to distant parts of the body was not inhibited. In a few cases there was a slight degree of improvement in the general condition, but, on the other hand, the remedy proved to be by no means harmless. It is sad to think that a method of treatment apparently based on such logical lines must be relegated to obscurity.

Lastly, a word with regard to the quack cancer-curers. They fall into two classes. In the first, the so-called remedy is one which is obviously inert, and is both harmless and useless; there is apparently nothing to prevent any one from selling tap-water at a high price and vaunting it as a cure for any disease he may care to select. The second group make use of strong caustic substances, such as chloride of zinc or arsenious acid. Materials of this nature eat into and destroy all tissues, whether healthy or diseased, and were much used in the treatment of cancer before the discovery of antiseptics had rendered surgical operations so safe and satisfactory. In skilled hands they may perhaps have had some slight value, but as used by the ignorant impostor (often with the accompaniment of a nauseating religious element) they are dangerous in the highest degree, being atrociously painful, filthily dirty, and liable to cause death from sepsis, or from hæmorrhage from the erosion of a large vessel. They are never successful in curing the disease. In some cases the destruction of the main mass of the tumour may lead to an apparent cure, but it is of short duration, and occasionally the action of these caustics even appears to aid the dissemination of the disease. They only effect a real cure in innocent tumours and other lesions which might be cured more safely, quickly, and pleasantly by other methods. It is amazing that the law should be powerless to deal with such a source of danger and suffering to the community.

'Scientific Report of the Committee on Scientific Research of the New York Skin and Cancer Hospital,' 1909.

Art. 4.-THE GENIUS OF THE RIVER.

1. Rivers and Streams of England. By A. G. Bradley. London: Black, 1909.

2. The Hudson River. By Edgar Mayhew Bacon. London: Putnam, 1902.

3. The St. Lawrence River. By George Waldo Browne. London: Putnam, 1905.

4. The Columbia River. By William Denison Lyman. London: Putnam, 1909.

5. The Historic Thames. By Hilaire Belloc. London: Dent, 1909.

6. The Story of the Thames. By J. E. Vincent. London: Smith, Elder, 1909.

7. The Story of the Tweed. By the Rt Hon. Sir Herbert Maxwell, Bt. London: Nisbet, 1909.

'What a number of things a river does, simply by following gravity in the innocence of its heart.'-R. L. Stevenson.

AT the close of the great Ice Age, when the last mer de glace had drawn back towards the poles, and the glaciers to their alpine strongholds, a living element was awakened in the still landscape, and for the first time, though there were few to hear them, the voices of rivers sang loudly as they hurried down from the hills to trace a winding colophon to the pleistocene chapter of earth's story. These symbols of the renascence of thawed Nature were henceforth to enliven scenes once dead and frozen, and they made the landscape as they went, wearing down the hills, carving their way through such obstacles as lay between them and the sea, and then, before losing themselves in its embrace, piling up island deltas to mark the union. We talk lightly of the faith which moves mountains. Nay, we regard even the hills themselves as everlasting. Do we realise what the rivers are doing for all time, year in year out, day and night, deterred only by the frost which deadens their activities and reverts to the conditions of the glacial epoch? They are levelling the proudest summits with the plain, grinding them to dust, and carrying them as mud to the ocean. The process is a slow one, invisible to the uninformed eye patent only to the geologist, who looks beneath the

surface, but it is none the less inexorable and unremitting. Rivers are Nature's architects; and what monument is there to Wren or Inigo Jones like unto the Grand Canyon of Colorado! Burnaby, in his famous Ride to Khiva,' has a passage which admirably describes this function of rivers:

'Many streaks down the rugged sides of the heights around us showed where the rain, pouring down on their crests in the early spring, diverged in foaming torrents. Here, dashing with irresistible force through the narrow pass, they would furrow a road before them; there, emerging from the gradually widening defile, they would rush in a hundred different channels to swell the volumes of the mighty Oxus.'

For ages, then, before it figured in the history of nations as the highway and the frontier, before it carried adventurous pioneers into the heart of the forest, or made possible the crushing of remote inland autocracies, like that of the Dervishes, by civilised powers, the river played a great part in moulding the earth.

The river, running, as Stevenson has it, 'from among reeds and lilies' to the sea, is the very emblem of our life. First a joyous stripling rushing out of darkness, then a weary creature passing into the unknown, with a gleam of sunshine between. It is surely the most sympathetic water in all nature. The sea is too boisterous, the lake too lethargic. The river alone suits every mood in which we seek its companionship. Its rapids wake the Wanderlust, for they sing of hurry, change and an ocean goal. The backwaters bring sweet content.

The river is the daughter of the rains and mountains. Always this is true: of the Jordan, though it seems to flow from an underground spring; of the Rhone, though we see it descend spaciously from melting snows; of the St Lawrence, which looks merely the overflow of a mighty lake. It is the rains which are at the root of every river, great or small. The Psalmist had this in mind when, grateful in a thirsty land, he sang of rain as the 'river of God.' In the Holy Land, it is true, more than elsewhere, rivers have a way of leaping up suddenly from some hidden underground source, so that the eye of man has never beheld their tender beginnings. This phenomenon it was, no doubt, which inspired the prophet Isaiah with Vol. 213.-No. 424.

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his vision: In the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. . . . And the parched ground shall become a pool.'

To the careless eye the river seems to run its course through ready-made channels. This is not the case. On the contrary, the river, having made its bed, must lie in it. Some streams take longer than others in arriving at their journey's end. These twist, turn, and double on their track for miles where the lowlands stretch to far horizons. The others, which arrive sooner, are either stronger, or have fewer obstacles to surmount. The river sings most loudly near its sources. I have known the Merced rush out of the Yosemite valley after two days of rains with a clamour which made conversation in the little train impossible, and the voice of the Fraser, where for miles it accompanies the Canadian Pacific Railroad to the gates of Vancouver, is nothing short of deafening. The majority of rivers lose heart and voice as they near the sea. Of the few exceptions, the merry Lyn, in North Devon, deserves mention; but the normal mood of a river in sight of its goal is sadness. It seems to realise that it is running to the sea because it cannot help itself, not, as Meredith preferred to think, because, like a strong man, it knows its own desire. It stands rather for discipline, enjoying only in flood-time an occasional frolic over the banks that keep it in the narrow way. Child of the mountains, which it is for ever destroying, it ends its days in low haunts, but always it carries the stamp of the high places in which it had its birth.

There are some, it is true, who read only merriment in the babble of Tennyson's brook :

'And out again I curve and flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.'

Yet is this wholly the triumph of immortality, or is there not beneath the glad surface an undercurrent of sadness, a longing to linger amid the haunts of coot and hern, a sigh of regret for the futility of such eternal movement? Do not all great rivers moderate their pace and spread themselves lovingly over the land, even, as a last protest, throwing up sand-bars ere they creep reluc

tantly down many paths to the sea which lies in wait for them? Do they not carry muddy memories far out into the ocean? Does not their delta mark the hesitation of their doubts in a hundred oozy islands worn and fretted by every spate? Festina lente is the river's motto as it nears the end; here, also, a curiously human touch in its character.

The poets do not uniformly interpret the feelings with which it greets its goal. Coleridge sees the Thames 'toiling to the main,' weighed down, no doubt, by the burden of its traffic below bridges. On the other side, however, see Tasso :

'Su la marina dove 'l Po discende
Per aver pace,'

though why the river should find more peace in the turbulent Adriatic than among the mountain pastures of the Cottian Alps is a mystery. Something of the same inspiration may have prompted Swinburne when he gave thanks that

For all that, it is the headwaters that show their joy. The middle reaches betray reluctance, the tidal portions hesitation, standstill, even reaction.

Rivers have here and there 'played Ercles rarely' before their original sin was tamed and their strength harnessed by modern engineering to the service of man. Fortunately, rebellious rivers like the Colorado are few and far between on the map. Since all three spring from the same hills, it is kinsman to the Columbia and Missouri, but its record is one of uninterrupted fury, and the appalling canyons which, in its headlong course to the Gulf of California, it has sculptured out of the rock are evidence of its fierce character. By such works shall a river be judged. As a rule the engineer is able to triumph over its frowardness. Time was when, in turn, idolaters, Jews, Copts, and Mohammedans hung on the smiles and frowns of the Nile. Even to-day, though dam and barrage have in great measure curtailed its power for evil, a 'bad Nile' may ruin millions. In other days it was Egypt's tyrant. It figured in two of the Plagues, first turning