S

THE SENSES.

CROOM ROBERTSON, Manchester Science Lectures, V.

UPPOSE, by a wild stretch of the imagination, some mechanism that will make a rod turn round one of its ends, quite slowly at first, but then faster and faster, till it will revolve any number of times in a second; which is, of course, perfectly imaginable, though you could not find such a rod or put together such a mechanism. Let the whirling go on in a dark room, and suppose a man there knowing nothing of the rod; how will he be affected by it? So long as it turns a few times in a second, he will not be affected at all unless he is near enough to receive a blow on the skin. But as soon as it begins to spin from sixteen to twenty times a second, a deep growling note will break in upon him through his ear; and as the rate then grows swifter, the tone will go on becoming less and less grave, and soon more and more acute, till it reach a pitch of shrillness hardly to be borne, when the speed has to be counted by tens of thousands. At length, about the stage of forty thousand revolutions a second, more or less, the shrillness will pass into stillness; silence will again reign as at first, nor any more be broken. The rod might now plunge on in mad fury for a very long time without making any difference to the man; but let it suddenly come to whirl some million times a second, and then through intervening space faint rays of heat will begin to steal towards him, setting up a feeling of warmth in the skin; which again will grow more and more intense, as now through tens and hundreds and thousands of millions the rate of revolution is supposed to rise. Why not billions? The heat at first will only be so much the greater. But lo! about the stage of four hundred billions there is more,—a dim red light becomes visible in the gloom; and now, while the rate still mounts up, the heat in its turn dies away,

till it vanishes as the sound vanished; but the red light will have passed for the eye into a yellow, a green, a blue, and, last of all, a violet. And to the violet, the revolutions being now about eight hundred billions a second, then will succeed darkness, night, as in the beginning. This darkness too, like the stillness, will never more be broken. Let the rod whirl on as it may, its doings cannot come within the ken of that man's senses.

THE end of novelty in art might well be dreaded, did we not find that nature at least has placed no attainable limit, and that the deficiency will lie in our inventive faculties. It would be a cheerless time indeed when all possible varieties of melody were exhausted, but it is readily shown that if a peal of twenty four bells had been rung continuously from the so-called beginning of the world to the present day, no approach could have been. made to the completion of the possible changes. Nay, had every single minute been prolonged to ten thousand years, still the task would have been unaccomplished. As regards ordinary melodies, the eight

notes of a single octave give more than forty thousand permutations, and two octaves more than a million millions. If we were to take into account the semitones, it would become apparent that it is impossible to exhaust the variety of music. When the late Mr. J. S. Mill, in a depressed state of mind, feared the approaching exhaustion of musical melodies, he had certainly not bestowed sufficient study on the subject of permutations.

REVERIE AS REST.

AMIEL, Journal Intime.

WE must know how to put occupation aside, which does not mean that we must be idle. In an inaction which is meditative and attentive, the wrinkles of the soul are smoothed away, and the soul itself spreads, unfolds, and springs afresh, and like the trodden grass of the road side, or the bruised leaf of a plant, repairs its injuries, becomes new, spontaneous, true, and original. Reverie, like the rain of night, restores colour and force to thoughts which have been blanched and wearied by the heat of to-day. With gentle, fertilising power it awakens within us a thousand sleeping germs, and, as though in play, gathers around us material for the future, and the images in which talent must clothe itself. Reverie is the Sunday of thought, and who knows which is the more important and fruitful for man, the laborious tension of the week or the life giving repose of the Sabbath?

FREE WILL.

G. A. SIMCOX, In Mind.

PEOPLE who seem in some way weak or irresolute, like Johnson who was incurably indolent, or like Coleridge who in the literal etymological sense was incurably "dissolute," or Maine de Biran who was at the mercy of distractions, are remarkable for their confidence in their consciousness of free will, while great men of action like Cæsar and Napolean are often fatalists, even though they might be dilatory like Wallenstein or irresolute like Cromwell.

There are people naturally dreamy who have taught themselves to be practical,

people naturally inattentive who have conquered application, as there are people naturally irritable who have conquered gentleness. The more closely we analyse the process of the improvement or deterioration of charater through a steady/c direction of the intention and attention, the harder it is to think away the central self which, as far as we can trace the process back, seems always active.

After all free will is not the highest freedom; it decides perplexities, it determines hesitations, it surmounts hindrances; things and people, the world and the flesh are against us, and yet to some extent we get our way in spite of them; we struggle to keep our place in the ranks, to keep our ground against the torrent; we are above and apart from nature, even our own nature, which we strive to subdue as its pressure almost overpowers us. the action of the perfect, so far as they are perfect, is as natural as the play of a kitten, as the blossoming of a rose. Only it proceeds from a higher nature in which experience has passed through reason into insight, in which impulse and desire have passed through free will into love.

REMEMBERED!

BABBAGE,

But

Ninth Bridgewater Treatise.

THE track of every canoe,-of every vessel that has yet disturbed the surface of the ocean, whether impelled by manual force or elemental power,-remains for ever registered in the future movement of all succeeding particles which may occupy its place. The furrow which it left is, indeed, instantly filled up by the closing waters; but they draw after them other and larger portions of the surrounding element, and these again, once moved, communicate motion to each other in endless succession. The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or even whispered. There, in their mutable but their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand, for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle the testimony of man's changeful will.

I

SUPPOSE that something like instinct prompts us Welsh people to write about our travels; for though we are not great travellers, we are a peculiarly literary people. At any rate, I should like to offer some notes of a Welsh girl's visit to the south-west corner of France and the Pyrenees, with a glance over the Bay of Biscay and a peep into Spain.

To a native of "hen Gymru fynyddig," -one brought up at the foot of Snowdon, and who has spent the last few years at delightful Dolgellau, in daily view of Cader Idris, who had then lived for six months at Saumur, on the rich, but monotonous, plain of France,-what could be more welcome that the prospect prospect of visiting the Pyrenees? The reader will then imagine with what lively anticipation I started, although it was at the uncanny hour of half-past two in the morning, on the long journey southward. It was strange to walk through the silent, electric-lighted streets of Saumur at that hour, on a morning in early August; and as the train carried us across the open country, the dim, moonlit, wide-spread landscape was sweet and peaceful. nine we reached Bordeaux, crossed the muddy-looking Garonne, Garonne, and passed through miles and miles of vineyards. Then for four hours our journey lay through the Landes, that tract of blank, awful desolation, of endless pine forests, and again of monotonous heather, where the only signs of habitation are a few wretched-looking huts.

At

At last, at half-past four in the afternoon, we reached our destination, the little town of Salies, in the province of Béarn, and drove to the lovely old house, Lagouardère, our headquarters for the next six weeks. Next morning, from my bedroom window, I saw, with joy, mountains at last the grand Pyrenees, with some gleaming snowy summits. Here, in the gardens of the house, grew figs, peaches, and other delicious fruits of the sunny south; yonder, the eternal snow.

Salies

is about the size of Dolgellau, and is now becoming noted, and much resorted to, for its mineral baths. There is a magnificent bathing establishment, and the Casino is resplendent with gilded pagodas. In the beautiful grounds of the establishment we see visitors from every country in Europe, and hear a Babel of tongues spoken by those who idly walk about, or sit fanning themselves under the palms, listening to the music. Among these, the most observed just now is the beautiful Signorina Rosita Môra, the première danseuse of the Paris Opera. In the country around, many things have a very Spanish aspect,-carts drawn by oxen; beautiful dark peasant women, very erect and graceful.

From Salies we made long excursions, one of which occupied nine days, during which we visited many of the towns nestling among the Pyrenees. The first stage in this excursion was to Laruns, thence to Eaux-Chaudes, which, like most of the towns of the Pyrenees, has its warm mineral springs. mineral springs. From here we proceeded to Eaux-Bonnes, which also, as its name implies, is noted for its healing waters. It is a favourite and fast-increasing health resort, with "grand" hotels and pleasure parks. It stands at the confluence of two mountain streams,-the Valentin and the Sourde,-and at the entrance of an exceedingly picturesque pass between high mountains. From the terrace of the Casino one gets a fine view of the great mountains, including the Pic de Ger. At the different hotels in the town were some distinguished visitors, one of whom was the Russian ambassador. From here we one day made the ascent of the Pic de Gourzy, a mountain about half as high again as Snowdon, from which we had a view of the magnificent panorama of the north of north of Spain, with the range of mountains like sentinels guarding it, high above which towered the majestic Pic du Midi. Next day, some of the most enterprising of us made the more ambitious ascent of the Pic de Ger (about 7,300 feet