How gro

is investigating. He says very justly that "if there be an intuitive truth in the hope and conviction of a future realization of lofty ideals, it does not follow that the realization will take place on earth." But then he goes on: "It is, perchance, a cosmic instinct of the matter of which we are constituted. In the countless millions of space-pervading orbs, it may have been, and may be again, the functions of many to take up the tale of organic evolution, and to carry the process to higher and higher levels-even to organizations that are utterly inconceivable to us, constituted as we are. For us men and for our salvation, the earth and its sun are all in all; but in the universe and its evolution, new heavens and new earths may be natural incidents, and the whole solar system to which the earth belongs of no greater moment than the life of the meanest insect is in the history of that system, of no greater proportion than a moment in its duration. tesquely ludicrous, then, the absurdity of man's vainly attempted conceptions of a great first cause or purpose of things." In other words, Dr. Maudsley scorns to attach any value to what he calls elsewhere the "evolutional nisus," inspiring idealism, when it happens to be found-where alone, indeed, it ever is found-in the mind of man, but is not disinclined to regard it, as appertaining intrinsically to the nature of "cosmic matter," as matter. Verily, those who ignore the paradoxes of freedom and faith are condemned by a sort of Nemesis to believe in paradoxes of their own even more astounding. What evidence is there of an "evolutional nisus tending toward idealism in iron or carbon? Is "the evolutional nisus" which astronomers suppose to be already exhausted in the moon, only successfully imprisoned there? And why does "cosmic matter" retain idealistic aspirations in one place, and lose them in another Can anything be plainer than that the materialist who recognizes the idealistic faith in man-as he cannot but recognize it, if he is to open his mind to facts at all-and yet ascribes this idealistic faith to cosmic matter' as such, does so solely and absolutely because, on his theory, there is nothing better left to ascribe it to?. The truth

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is, however, that of idealism proper there is not a trace in the physical universe, and that if there be any "cosmic instinct" of idealism at all, it must be due to an inspiring mind in the universe, and not to cosmic matter."

Now, take a third instance of the curious and rash arrogance of the spirit bred by the physical sciences. In last week's Academy, in a review of Mr. Douglas Galton's recent book by a very able student of physical science, Mr. Grant Allen, to whom we owe many original and ingenious speculations on vegetable physiology-for example, one on the origin of the strawberry-we find the following passage: "The other point" [dealt with by Mr. Galton] "is the investigations into the efficacy of prayer. These are narrated with a quaint, scientific naïveté, which is not intended, doubtless, to be ironical, but which is as perfect a specimen of irony, in the pure Greek sense of the word, as we ever remember to have seen. The transparent candor, reverence, and scientific precision of Mr. Galton's reasoning will prove (quite unintentionally) a thousand times more annoying to dogmatism than any other tone that could possibly have been adopted. Abuse the dogmatists can stand, but gentle persuasion and clear logic are really too trying. When Mr. Galton remarks that he has not yet examined into the truth of Father Clarke's statement that 'substantial curative effects are often produced by pilgrimages to Lourdes,' or notes the absence of any marked answer to the daily prayer that the nobility may be endued with grace, wisdom, and understanding,' or cites the history of English ducal houses in opposition to the belief of the Psalmist that the descendants of the righteous shall continue, while those of the wicked shall fail, he is only honestly applying the methods. with which he is familiar elsewhere to the particular subject under dispute ; but it is almost impossible for unscientific readers not to suspect him of intentional satire." intentional satire." Is it possible to imagine a subliner tone of arrogant assumption that prayer never receives any answer, than we find here, or one which is less becoming in a writer whose mind has been educated by the study of physics and physiology? The inner

world is a sealed book, as it would seem, to the student of the modern physical sciences, who does not even know so much as this, that all Christian prayer at all events, is cast in St. Chrysostom's form, "Fulfil now, O Lord, the desires and petitions of thy servants, as may be most expedient for them," and that far more and far better answers to prayer come in the shape of purified desires than of granted wishes. And yet he dogmatizes on prayer with this sublime scorn for all the story of the ages. Even Mr. Matthew Arnold-whom men of science have claimed as their champion on questions of this kind-has asserted the truth of the paradox which is the very key to the efficacy of prayer-"He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal," and has called it the sublime "secret of Jesus,' the secret by which emphatically his Gospel brought life and immortality to light." Even Mr. Arnold has declared that there is a secret life which is full of paradoxes to the man who looks only at the outward world, or even at the world of physical science, a secret life in which

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the paradoxes of self-abnegation, and all that the Christian includes in the life of prayer, are not only true, but the only living truth; and yet because they do not fall in with the methods of physical science, we find the whole life of prayer laughed to scorn by the successful student of the physical sciences.

Science has had a great and glorious career. But great and glorious as that career has been, we do not hesitate to say that all its achievements put together are of infinitely less value to man than the secret which Mr. Matthew Arnold calls "the secret of Jesus"-a secret the true interpretation of which involves doubtless a great deal of theology which Mr. Arnold himself rejects, and a great deal of psychology against which both Mr. Grant Allen and Dr. Maudsley would hardly think it worth while, in their sublime arrogance, even to protest. But the study of insanity, and investigations into plant-life, even though they include the origin of the strawberry, hardly furnish a sufficient basis for the science of spiritual life.—London Spectator.

NOTHING can be more unsatisfying than the poets' treatment of the splendid family of the cats. Excepting the lion, to to which they do conspicuous justice, the poets have apparently no appreciation whatever of the grand parable of the carnivora. They say the tiger is very fierce, and the leopard and the panther very beautiful: but there they end. Their powerful compeers the jagua, puma, and cheetah, which complete the heptarchythe lion state enjoying the "hegemony' of the confederacy-are not utilized, so that, virtually, the noble Beasts of Prey afford the poets no more than two similes --one of excessive cruelty, and one of personal elegance. Here and there, of course, tradition, or heraldic association, or Biblical mistranslation, tempts the poet into some oblique injustice to the proud vassals of the beast paramount-"lonely lords of empty wilds and woods"-but these aberrations do not affect their treat

ment materially. They do not recognize apparently the nobility of this family of courageous and beautiful beasts in nature's wild-life scheme, nor appreciate the purpose they serve as the ministers of state.

Individually the tiger, leopard, and panther are each of them largely utilized, but, as will be seen, with very meagre aims and results, considering the possibilities of such a subject.

With regard, however, to this class of beautiful and dangerous beasts, it is due to the poets to point out that antiquity used "pard" for the cheetah; that tradition made the leopard" a hybrid between pards and lions: that the “panther," a mythical beast, was imagined somewhere in the Dark Ages, and has survived as the panther of modern times; that when heraldry first commenced in earnest, the leopard was merely the lion in certain attitudes; that early writers

mixed up tigers with leopards and panthers as part of the entourage of the Greek gods; that modern zoologists are still divided as to the identity or variety of the leopard and panther; that America calls the puma a "panther" and also a mountain "lion"; that in Ceylon the panther is called the "tiger"; that in the South African Colonies the leopard is called "tiger" also; and that all over India the same native names are hopelessly bewildered among not only panthers, leopards, and cheetahs, but also extended to hyænas.

The tiger especially is a favorite image with the poets, whether "holding its solitude in desert dark and rude," "crouching to await its helpless prey," "darting fierce injections on the prey his glance has doomed," or "returning to its den before the sun may see it. But it has nevertheless only one aspect, namely, of ruthless voracity. To this every feature is made to contribute. The tiger's plunge," from its impetuos ity, is used as if denoting a malignity of purpose greater than when the royal lion does the same thing; and when it lies in ambush a particularly leonine trickthe stratagem is condemned as savoring of treachery, though lions do it by right divine.

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The tiger" formed to cruel meals," in fact, stands in the poets for the symbol of bloodthirstiness-with fell clawes full of fierce gourmandize, and greedy mouth wide-gaping like hell-gate"

As when some tiger, to his haunt from day Returns, blood-foaming, with his slaughtered prey, Grim-pleased that there with undisturbed roar, He'll glut and revel o'er the reeking gore; Glances in wild fury o'er the gloomy waste, And growls terrific o'er its mangled beast.

this animal never commences its meal either at the heart, or, as other poets say, at the throat, but at the buttocks of the prey.

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The tigress in her whelpless ire," 'The cubless tigress in her jungle raving" (Byron), "The tiger dam with red fangs" (Cook)-is a very favorite simile for supreme ferocity, carried in Maxwell even to the point of suicide

So from Euphrates' bank, a tigress fell
After her robbers for her whelps doth yell,
But sees enraged the river flow between,
Frustrate revenge, and love by loss more keen,
At her own breast her useless claws does arm-
She tears herself.

Arcité in the "Knight's Tale' is a "felle tigre.'

There was no tigre in the Vale of Galagher When that hire whelpe is stole

So cruel an the heart is this Arcité.

But after all, where shall we give the palm of maternal fondness? The love of offspring's nature's general law,

From tigresses and cubs to ducks and ducklings;

There's nothing whets the beak, or arms the claw,

Like an invasion of their babes and sucklings ;

And all who have seen a human nursery, saw How mothers love their children's squalls and chucklings.-Byron.

Now, as a matter of fact, the tiger is not as pecially ferocious animal. As the greatest authority on Indian natural history says, it is "a harmless, timid animal.' It feeds on animals that are prodigiously injurious to crops, and there are on record in India the complaints of villagers on the increase of deer and wild pigs in consequence of the destruction of the tigers in their neighborhood. When it gets too feeble to catch wild ani

And stains the forest with a bloody trail,"

is characteristic of a hundred other passages which are equally untrue to nature, for the tiger is not by many fathoms such a fool as to drag his prey to "his haunt," "and stain the forest with a bloody trail" (which would inevitably lead to his destruction), nor does he roar at his meals. Another popular poets' error is preserved in Montgomery, where he speaks of the tiger dragging the buffalo to his lair and "crashing through the ribs at once unto the heart,'

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victims still, the men or women who are in charge of the cattle. It then becomes, as a "man-eater," a criminal against humanity-and death cannot overtake it too soon. But it is only those who know the Hindoo thoroughly who can credit the amazing apathy of these men, even when in imminent danger. So long as it is not actually visible they refuse to take precaution against peril, and I remember during the Afghan War assisting to thrash some lazy followers in order to arouse them to a proper sense of the

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necessity of saving their lives. They had squatted down to smoke by the roadside in the Khyber Pass, though they knew the enemy was lurking in the rocks above them, and in the jungle behind them, though they had with their own eyes seen the corpses of camp followers lying where they had been murdered, when they sat down to smoke. In the very same way, the herdsman comes loafing home in the twilight, singing a song of the country as he goes (to let the tiger know that he is coming probably), and suddenly out of the sugar-canes flashes the tiger and there is an end of that herdsman. But the next man will probably do the very same thing. He will take another road of course on his way home, but he will lag behind his cattle and sing to himself in the same ridiculous way, and out from under the bair-tree springs the same old tiger. Indeed, it is one of the problems of Indian administration how to keep the natives from suicide. They prefer to have half the village down with small-pox and then to carry a dead chicken round the stricken hamlet on the end of a pole, than be vaccinated. They prefer to lose a prodigious number of their acquaintances by drowning than to protect their wells. They prefer to have tens of thousands of men and women bitten by snakes in the toes and thumbs, and die therefrom, than let enough light into a hut to see the difference between fire-wood and cobras.

Not that I wish to extenuate the immorality of the tiger in eating human beings, even when it finds them lying about, so to speak, as if they were worth nothing. It is a practice that should be discouraged even more forcibly than it is. But on the other hand, it is unfair, even to tigers, to speak of them as if they were forever going about mangling. They are ferocious enough-indeed, they set the lion a very splendid example--when they are attacked and have to fight. But such ferocity is not to be spoken ill of. It is sublime heroism. The historian can give our handful of soldiers in the Indian Mutiny of '57 and '58 no further praise when he has said "they fought like tigers." The poet, therefore, who calls Bertram a tiger, because he has all the will but not half the courage to show fight against odds, does the noble beast an injustice.

Nor, in the poets, does any majesty appertain to the tiger, "that doth live by slaughter." It is "tameless" (which of course tigers are not, seeing that they have very frequently been tamed), and affords frequent similes for irresistible ferocity. But there is no dignity attaching to the beast apart from his pre-eminence in criminal fury. It is, in fact, described as rather a mean animal, toying with the kids when caught, "whetting his appetite by long restraint,' and (in Spenser):

When he by chance doth find

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A feeble beast, doth felly him oppress. They worry sheepfolds, and stalk gentle fawns at play," and kill for killing's sake, roams all abroad and grimly slays."

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And to the last, devouring on his way, Bloodies the stream he has no power to stay.

Moore's zoology, however, is often of the wildest kind; but it is strange that the notorious fact-notorious at any rate from the days of the Ramayana and Homer that in presence of a common danger tigers and sheep lay aside their mutual antipathies, should not have made his metaphor move more cautiously. I have myself seen a tiger and a herd of cattle on the same half-acre of ground during a flood, and the tiger seemed the most ill at ease of all the company; and one poet at any rate bears me out :

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