cent mammilated mass of cumulus cloud that, rising dome above dome into the serene azure, was cut off sharply below as by a scythe, to the sweet short turf beneath my feet (turf so dear to the breeder of the racehorse and the judge of good mutton), when my eye was averted by the appearance of an insignificant flower, which anyone but a very close observer would have passed unheeded. The botanist, proud of his little lore, would have named it the Herminium monorchis, but let us use a good English name, and speak of the ballfooted bedpost plant."

(Here will follow an inaccurate description of the flower, its mode of fertilisation, a few patronising remarks on Darwin, and a concluding paragraph calling attention to the wisdom of Dame Natureand of the writer.)

Very different is the style of the next author, who has a little knowledge of many sciences, and is hard on all. Listen to him crushing the geologist, as the most crawling of earthly worms:

"And of scientists, to use one of the words which have sprung up around the false prophets of Nature, surely the most ignoble is the geologist. Ignoble not in his calling, but in his methods. For thrown amongst scenes that should purify, and amidst surroundings that should elevate, he wilfully rejects the pearl of great price, and wallows in the mire of ignorance. Him, alone amongst men, have I tried to instruct in vain. He has turned aside from the mighty crystal of the Matterhorn, and the perfect pellucidity of the agate, and devoted his time to palaeontology, and so since the days of J. D. Forbes, no geologist has rightly delineated mountain form, and none has taken up my challenge, and accounted, as I the humblest of students have done, for the variations of crystal-architecture in a mass of silver. Therefore geology, which with anatomy should share in the glory of being the science of the study of beauty (for the curve of the mountain

slope and the curve of the girlish figure each contains the perfect embodiment of loveliness, that is of love), geology, I say, is of no account, and the geologist, who should be uplifted above his fellows, is abased; wit ness the words of the seer:

'Some drill and bore

The solid earth, and from the strata there
Extract a register, by which we learn

That He who made it and revealed its date

To Moses, was mistaken in its age.'

Notice the expression, "extract a register." Nothing of poetry, nothing of harmony, nothing of love,-naught is extracted save a meaningless collection of facts over which men cackle and dispute, as fowls on a dust-heap. Woe unto you geologists, who, for the sounding of hammer and tinkling of chisel, hear not the voice of Nature."

Many other ways of introducing science to the people might be noted, as for example that of the Extension Lecturer with his syllabus, lantern, and persuasive eloquence; but he deserves a paper to himself, I will end with one method of popularising science which has, I believe, a great future before it. It is the statement of scientific facts in doggerel rhyme. It has long been dear to us as an easy medium for conveying a requisite knowledge of Paley's Evidences, and has been otherwise utilised; but as a method of teaching science, it has not received the attention it deserves. As this is probably the most degrading mode of instructing the public in the truths of science, I need not apologise for quoting a short didactic effusion of my own, written for this purpose, and with this will bring my paper to a close.

PRE-HISTORIC PEEPS IN CAMBRIDGE.

When Camus did once quickly travel,
Instead of mud, he carried gravel,
(Whilst now, in times of fiercest flood
He carries nought but murky mud).

No gutter then through slimy flats
Did ooze surcharged with freight of cats;
A river flowing 'midst the hills
Received as tribute sparkling rills.
The hills resounded with the bellow
Of Urus challenging his fellow;
Aroused from slumber by the Bos,
Came forth the huge Rhinoceros;
The Mammoth with his gleaming tusk
Crashed through the foliage at dusk;
Whilst man, amongst this frightful horde
Was then, as now, Creation's lord;
Though some there are who would dispute
His claims as lord of fowl and brute.
'Tis true, the beasts on which he preyed
Received no thrust from metal blade-
Indeed man could not polish stone,
But splintered bits of flint and bone,
And, taking 'vantage of the cracks,
Made pre-historic spear and axe.
For details of his home and dress
(The latter scanty); evening mess
Of mammoth-pottage; love and hate;

His views concerning future state;

The ways in which his foes were smitten ; See Dawkins, Early Man in Britain.

X. TREME.

HAFIZ.

(Read at a meeting of "The Critics" on May 19, 1894.)

I.

Do not know if my readers share the difficulty with myself of transporting thoughts, mental notes of the proportion of history, at a

moment's notice, as Mr Anstey's theosophist said that he could his body, many thousand miles. I am alarmed to think with what untoward brevity all the most important cardinal-points of the world's ages fade into shocking indefiniteness, till one comes to believe that the story books with their 'in days of old' are really the best teachers of method for acquiring history, in preference to such painful masters of chronological exactitude, as, for example, the Welsh genealogists, who are proud to inscribe on the margin of their family-tree a remark that at this period the Flood happened.

And if history so plays the cheat, I confess that in geography I, for one, am no better. I do not mean that, with the subject well-prepared, it does not seem incredible not to know the number of miles from San Francisco to the Cape, but the merest divergence of interest will drive such knowledge away, and one feels inclined to reply to such enquiries with the Father of History that though one has been told, one would not willingly mention.

Things are worse when the subject so described can, in no human probability, become part of one's visual experiences. So that the laugh-to come to the matter

immediately in hand-is all with such men as Sir John Malcolm, or Professor Palmer, or Mr E. G. Browne of Pembroke, the first chapter of whose Year among the Persians is as good reading for a Cambridge man, whatever be his course of study, as, to my knowledge, can be found anywhere; or the Hon George Curzon, whose encyclopædic work on Persia does equal honour to a sister University. Listen to these travellers' tales,' to a page, and that an introductory one, taken at random from such writers as these:-"Resuming my journey at Teheran the opportunity will await us," it runs, "of seeing something of a Court whose splendour is said to have formerly rivalled that of the great Mogul, of a Government which is still, with the exception of China, the most oriental in the East, and of a city which unites the unswerving characteristics of an Asiatic capital with the borrowed trappings of Europe. Thence the high road-only ninety miles of which is a road in any known sense of the word-will lead us across the successive partitions of the great plateau, possessing a mean elevation of 4,000 to 5,000 feet above the sea, that occupies the heart of Persia; and whose manifold mountain ridges intervene, like the teeth of a saw, between the northern and southern seas. In the plains of greater or less extent lying at their base we shall find, in the shape of large but ruined cities, the visible records of faded magnificence, of unabashed misrule, and of internal decay. Kum, from behind its curtain of fanaticism and mystery, will reveal the glitter of the golden domes that overhang the resting place of saints and the sepulchre of kings. Isfahan, with its wreck of fallen palaces, its acres of wasted pleasaunce, its storeyed bridges, that once rang beneath the tread of a population numbered at 650,000, will tell a tale of deeper pathos, although in its shrill and jostling marts we may still observe evidence of mercantile activity and a prospering international trade. Shiraz, which once re-echoed the blithe anacreontics of Hafiz, and the more demure