the issue of the suit; and I was delighted to get the guinea, for other wise I should have had no money either for the cab or for my railway fare.

How well I remember taking my ticket! It was the afternoon of some great race-day, and the office was crowded with sporting men and others returning to the country. I was obliged to travel third class; and just after I had paid my fare, a lively gentleman by my side called out to the clerk,

"Third class to Cambridge! How much?"

"Five shillings," said the clerk.

"Five shillings! It must be very nasty. Will you be kind enough to write 'Ratstail' on the ticket?"

"Did 'Ratstail' win the race, sir?" asked the clerk.

"No, indeed," answered the unfortunate gentleman condemned to third-rate travelling. "If he had, I should have taken two first-class carriages for myself and friends."

The speculator, who had laid out all his money on "Ratstail," was my fellow-passenger as far as Cambridge, and, though by his own account quite penniless, he was very cheerful and even facetious over his poverty; and had plenty of excellent cigars, which I helped him to smoke.

I will not introduce the reader to my father, whom I met punctually at the time fixed by himself; nor will I say more about the lawsuit than that we won it, and that soon after my arrival in London I found myself the possessor of a good many thousand pounds.

Of course I wrote to Risbec, and lent him a little money, which I hope, but do not expect, he will turn to some useful purpose,—such as paying his fees at the Ecole de Droit, when he has passed his examination, and buying a library of law-books. To the faithful charbonnier I sent a pipe and tobacco-pouch, a case of razors, and a large clasp-knife of superfine manufacture, with which I know he will not kill his creditors, and which will be useful to him for cutting his bread and cheese, his garlic, and his fire-wood. All I am afraid of is, that, encouraged by my gratitude, the poor fellow will accord credit on sentimental grounds. rather too freely, and that some swindler will rob him. However, he has moved from the Rue St. Jacques, and I shall not give either his name or his address.

Honest old charbonnier! The only creditor I ever loved! If ever I am ruined and driven myself into the coal-trade, for thy sake I will give trust to some customer with worse prospects even than mine were on that memorable third day of purgatory in the Rue St. Jacques.

S. E.

Light.

WHAT is light? Light may be defined as that ethereal imponderable medium, emanation, or effect, by means of which objects are rendered evident to our sense of vision. St. John, in his first epistle, says, "God is light." God said, "Let there be light; and there was light." It is nowhere stated in Scripture that God created light. Light, not being a material substance, cannot be regarded as an objective creation: it is the effect of some unknown cause, and not the cause itself.

ness.

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth; and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep." Now science proves to us that light may exist and yet be darkTwo strong lights may be made to interfere with and neutralise or destroy each other, as will be shown in the sequel. Modern geology has proved, beyond the possibility of doubt, that plants and animals existed ages before the creation of man, and when the earth was not in a fit state for his reception. When God saw that, by his previous creations, the earth was prepared for the reception of man, by the deposition of the remains of countless myriads of these creatures, then man was created; and Scripture, the revealed word of God, begins with the history of man.

It appears probable that long prior to the six days' labour all animals and vegetables, with the exception, perhaps, of those in the deep waters, had ceased to exist; during that period those convulsions and upheavings took place by which the granite and other strata necessary for the use of man were brought to the surface, and thus was the "dry land" still further prepared. After these convulsions had ceased, the vapours and exhalations, mingling with the smoke from the craters of volcanoes, arose to such an extent, that "darkness was upon the face of the deep," and continued until the first Mosaic day, when "the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," thus clearing away the impenetrable mist. Then God said, "Let there be light; and there was light."

Light, or the cause of light, might have been in existence “in the beginning," when God created the heavens and the earth; but He had not yet called it into action, until He said, "Let there be light." When I light a candle or ask for one, I do not create light; I only avail myself of what already exists, and simply requires my will to bring it into action. It has often been remarked that light is mentioned in Scripture on the first day (or period of time), and the "lights" in the firmament, which we call the sun and the moon, on the fourth day; therefore it would appear that light was, or existed, before the sun, which we consider the source of light; but this arises from our preconceived ideas on the subject, and ignorance of the phenomena of light. It was on the fourth day that God said, "Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven, to divide the

day from the night; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also." But it is not said that He created them on the fourth day. In the beginning He created the heavens and the earth, which included the sun and moon and other heavenly bodies; but on the fourth day He commanded them to rule the day and the night, and to be " for signs and for seasons, and for days and for years."

The Bible was never intended to teach us physical science, as we are expressly told in Ecclesiastes, chap. i. 13: “And I gave my heart to seek and search out, by wisdom, concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of men to be exercised therewith." If God had revealed to us all the wonders of the creation, there would have been nothing left for man to do or to discover. Methuselah could not have read, during his whole life, one-thousandth part of the volumes that must have been written. Again: Scripture speaks in language which was intelligible to men at the period when it was written, and in accordance with their ideas. God taught us all that was necessary for our salvation and for the moral government of the world. He willed that knowledge should be progressive, and that the gradual unfolding of his marvellous works should maintain a perpetual stimulus to our exertions.. Had scientific language been employed in Scripture, it would have been perfectly unintelligible: men were not prepared to receive it then, any more than some men are even at the present day; and with all our science, we still employ figures of speech that would have served equally well in the time of Adam. We say, "the sun rises and the sun sets," because such expressions are concise, universally understood, and apparently in accordance with the evidence of our senses; but we know that the sun neither rises nor sets. Are not these expressions analogous to that used in Scripture, where we are told that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still (Joshua x. 12)?

With regard to the relative position of the planets in our solar system, the sun does, and always did, stand still; but if such an effect had taken place, the earth must have ceased to revolve on its axis, and also ceased to revolve round the sun; every thing on the earth's surface must have been projected into space by centrifugal force, and total destruction of the earth ensued. It is the opinion of eminent theologians that this is an interpolation of some transcriber, and never written by Moses: indeed, it is stated, "This is written in the book of Jasher." Has any one ever

seen the book of Jasher?

Who was Jasher? Nowhere else mentioned in Scripture, and perfectly apocryphal.

Light, life, and death must have been in the world myriads of ages before the creation of man. The numerous pre-Adamite animals that have been discovered had eyes which would have been perfectly useless without light; and these animals lived and died. Vast rocks, and hundreds of miles of mountains, are composed almost wholly of the shells or coatings of extinct animals that once had life. These facts are supposed by some persons to be at variance with Scripture, and that such investi

gations lead to infidelity; but the contrary is the case when the subject is carefully and impartially studied. Scripture relates to man, and not to animals. Much error and misconception arise from inattention to this circumstance, as well as from the confusion of our ideas with regard to the difference between the true meaning of the words "creating," "making," and "commanding." The Psalmist says (Psalm xcv.): "The sea is His and He made it, and His hands prepared the dry land." This expression deserves particular attention, for it was the extinct races of animals which actually served to prepare the earth for the reception of man, and for those animals that were created for his use, and which could not have existed "in the beginning," when " the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep." Neither could those extinct species of animals have existed while the earth was in that state, which further proves the infinity of ages that must have preceded the creation of man. But the more we investigate, the more we become lost in astonishment at the wonderful works of the Almighty: the finite cannot comprehend the infinite; we see effects, but we are unable to arrive at causes.

Light is one of the wonderful effects of some unknown cause; and instead of being a simple or elementary existence, is a very compound one, capable of separation and analysis. The affinity between light and life is great, and the offices it performs in the economy of nature render the study of it highly interesting and instructive. The Newtonian, or corpuscular, theory of light imagines that it is caused by inconceivably minute particles of matter emanating from the luminous body in straight lines, and moving with a velocity which Newton calculated (from repeated observations on the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites and the aberrations of the fixed stars) at about 192,500 miles in one second, or in round numbers, twelve millions of miles in a minute. He objected to the theory of undulations, because light would not pass through bent tubes; and his opinion (called the corpuscular theory) was universally adopted, until modern science, within the last fifty years, has accepted the undulatory theory, which not only explains all the facts and phenomena of light at present known, but is more in accordance with the laws of sound and with the theory of waves; therefore more universal as a law of nature. For it is well known that a certain number of vibrations, or pulsations, of the air is necessary to produce each articulate note of music; and in the same manner a certain number of undulations is required to produce each colour: and what is very remarkable, Newton assigned to each colour the actual size of its corpuscules by calculation; a number which exactly corresponds with the length of half a wave, according to the modern theory of undulations.

A theory is only good and tenable so long as it will explain all the known facts; and the Newtonian theory will not explain all the phenomena of light in the present state of science. Newton's objection to the theory that light is propagated by undulations in planes at right angles

to each other has been proved to be incorrect; he was not aware of the curious property of the polarisation of light, as accidentally discovered by M. Malus in 1808, which can only be explained by the undulatory theory. Newton calculated the size of his imaginary corpuscles; now, in the undulatory theory, the length of each wave necessary to produce its respective colour is based upon his calculations, which have a real existence, by whatever name they may be called: for example, the largest waves are those which produce red light, being two hundred and sixty-six tenmillionths of an inch; the smallest are those producing violet light, which are one hundred and sixty-seven ten-millionths; and, as before stated, these numbers are in each case exactly double those assigned by Newton as the size of his corpuscules.

Returning to the first cause, may not these vibrations have been communicated to matter as the principle of light, and the sun be a secondary power to regulate and keep these undulations perpetually in motion, and thus to rule the day, as the moon rules the night, by reflecting the light of the sun towards the earth?

In light we have a most remarkable illustration of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which is an article of faith with many, of doubt with some, and of disbelief with others; but if we can prove by ocular demonstration that there exists in nature a trinity in unity and an unity in trinity quite as marvellous, it ought to confirm the faithful, convince the doubtful, and overthrow the sophistry of the unbeliever. An investigation into the laws and properties of light will enable us to do so. Light is easily separated into its component colours, by transmitting it through a glass prism, where it is resolved into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, which constitute when combined white or ordinary light. This band of colours is called the prismatic spectrum. Now it will be perceived that red, yellow, and blue are its primary or essential colours, the others being merely produced by the admixture or overlapping of two adjoining primary colours: thus, orange is found between the red and yellow, green between the yellow and blue; so that, in fact, we have only the three primary colours to deal with, each of which has its peculiar properties and attributes distinct from the others: thus, the red is the calorific or heating principle; the yellow is the luminous or light-giving principle; while it is in the blue ray that the power of actinism, or chemical action, is found.

which constitutes, when When separated, this Although one and the

Now it is this trinity of red, yellow, and blue combined, the unity of ordinary or white light. unity of light is divided into the trinity of colours. same, neither can exist without the other: the three are one, the one is three. Thus we have a unity in trinity, and a trinity in unity, exemplified in light itself; and "GOD IS LIGHT." Plants will live and grow luxuriantly under the influence of the red and yellow rays; but, however promising the appearance, the blossom dies, and no fruit can be produced without the enlivening power of the blue rays. When this invisible action is