became intelligible to him, he began to understand its desires and its life.

Whispered words of malice penetrated his ear-private conversations in which evil plottings were divulged-cries of pain and shame from out the seething slums of the city-the shoutings of reckless and ungoverned mobs. These sounds all mingled in his ears, and filled his mind with chaos. Utterances which were elegant in form and happy in expression-yet carried a sting of cruelty and unkindness within them-floated from out of drawing rooms and entered softly into his consciousness; and almost ere he had grasped their meaning they were succeeded by the inarticulate cries. of drunken quarrellers or the muffled complaints of prisoners.

And, most horrible of all to the sensitive soul of the author, there came to him now and then a halffamiliar voice. The man whom yesterday he had seen giving away the theatre ticket to-day revealed the hideousness of selfish deeds which he masked-to himself as well as to others-by small and showy acts of grace. The women he heard brawling in fierce and unwomanly fashion; the speculators he heard raise their voices in keen altercation or lower them in hypocritical amiability, or in the intensity of the passion of moneygetting-mingling with these came the harsh voice of the man who hid himself within the shadow; it rose above the others, and all the hatefulness of his crime was laid bare before the aghast and sickened listener. The foul story was interrupted by a shrill wail of momentary but vivid sorrow: the pretty child, whose voice should have no tones but those of sweetness and delight, lifted up the cry of babyish and passionate grief.

He cast himself upon his couch in a passion of horror, and his wish brought its fulfilment. A great silence fell upon him. The world was still. No longer did the voices from the houses and streets enter his chamber. The silence came but just in time.

"Another moment and I must have gone mad," he said to himself, rising and leaning from the window, that he might again feel the sweet air and reassure himself of the existence of the silent sky. But soon he started back and went to his table.

"I will write," he cried, "while the madness is still on me. Men shall behold the foulness of their own hearts if my pen is strong enough to show it to them."

Through the long night he wrote, words that might have been written in tears or blood for the deep sadness that was in them; for many another night he wrote until at length he had relieved his soul of its horror, and shaken from himself the fever of other men's lives.

He sent out his work to the world, while he himself remained shut in his solitary room.

was

But not for long. He visited, aroused, besieged. In a word, he was famous.

"This fanciful author," wrote the critics, "has at last given us something real, strong, and lifelike," and they went to see him, and found a man who smiled dimly

in answer to their words of congratulation.

No longer was the author lonely, unknown, or poor.

He had succeeded!

A SINGULAR speculation has been opened by a follower in the wake of the recorded observations-not the theories of Darwin and Carpenter. Knowing nothing, as he avers, of science, he has but allowed his "metaphysic wit" to fly over certain small facts of life; and the result is a cluster of plausible theories and deductions which have at least the merit, if it be in anywise a merit, of novelty.

as

We can only afford to give in a very sketchy and imperfect manner a chain of reasoning such the author of "Erewhon" presents to us in his present very bizarre work.*

The amoeba is about the simplest type of animal known, a minute mass of living jelly; yet the jelly speck can extemporise a stomach by wrapping its soft body round a nutritive particle, and a foot by the projection of its protoplasmic substance. Dr. Carpenter observes as cited in the work before us: "Suppose a human mason to be put down by the side of a pile of stones of various shapes and sizes, and to be told to build a dome of these, smooth on both surfaces, without using more than the least possible quantity of a very tenacious, but very costly, cement, in holding the stones together. If he accomplished this well, he would receive credit for great intelligence and skill. Yet this is exactly what these little jelly specks' do on a

most minute scale; the 'tests' they construct, when highly magnified, bearing comparison with the most skilful masonry of man. From the same sandy bottom one species picks up the coarser quartz grains, cements them together with phosphate of iron secreted from its own substance" [should not this rather be (says Mr. Butler), "which it has contrived in some way or other to manufacture"?) and thus constructs a flask-shaped 'test,' having a short neck and a large single orifice. Another picks up the finest grains, and puts them together, with the same cement, into perfectly spherical 'tests' of the most extraordinary finish, perforated with numerous small pores disposed at pretty regular intervals. Another selects the minutest sand grains and the terminal portions of sponge spicules, and works them up together-apparently with no cement at all, by the mere laying of the spicules-into perfect white spheres, like homoeopathic globules, each having a single-fissured orifice.

And another, which makes a straight, many-chambered 'test,' that resembles in form the chambered shell of an orthoceratitethe conical mouth of each chamber projecting into the cavity of the next-while forming the walls of its chambers of ordinary sand grains rather loosely held together, shapes the conical mouth of the successive chambers by firmly

cementing together grains of ferruginous quartz, which it must have picked out from the general

mass.

So much for the unconscious and yet wonderful action of this atomy. We human folk act with an apparent unconsciousness in many things-to wit, in those in which we have had most practice, and in which, as Mr. Butler would put it, we have by that means "got past thought.' A consummate player on the piano, for instance, in the quasi- unconsciousness of habit resulting from constant practice, will strike four or five thousand notes in four or five minutes. This he will do accurately, and yet think and talk at the same time, his attention being engaged upon thousands of minute points, in any one of which a mistake might be made.

That the faculty is so developed as to have passed into the domain of unconsciousness may be thus proved. If the player be made conscious by anyone's disturbing him and then desiring him to start again, he is put out, and may have to begin a difficult passage, which he was performing swimmingly in his unconsciousness of effort, over again in order to catch the rhythm from the first.

"In fact, it seems as though he knew the piece too well to be able to know that he knows it, and is only conscious of knowing those passages which he does not know so thoroughly."

When the performance is concluded any portion of it may be repeated; but it would require an effort indeed, would be almost an impossibility to recall, or rather produce a consciousness of the effort that resulted in the production of any given note.

In writing "the formation of each letter requires attention and volition, yet in a few minutes a practised

writer will form several hundred letters, and be able to think and talk of something else all the time he is doing so. He will not probably remember the formation of a single character in any page that he has written; nor will he be able to give more than the substance of his writing if asked to do so. He knows how to form each letter so well, and he knows so well each word that he is about to write, that he has ceased to be conscious of his knowledge or to notice his acts of volition, each one of which is, nevertheless, followed by a corresponding muscular action. Yet the uniformity of our handwriting, and the manner in which we almost invariably adhere to one method of forming the same character, would seem to suggest that during the momentary formation of each letter our memories must revert (with an intensity too rapid for our perception) to many if not to all the occasions on which we have ever written the same letter previously the memory of these occasions dwelling in our minds as what has been called a residuum -an unconsciously struck balance or average of them all-a fused mass of individual reminiscences of which no trace can be found in our consciousness, and of which the only effect would seem to lie in the gradual changes of handwriting which are perceptible in most people till they have reached middle age, and sometimes even later. So far are we from consciously remembering any one of the occasions on which we have written such and such a letter, that we are not even conscious of exercising our memory at all, any more than we are in health conscious of the action of our heart. But, if we are writing in some unfamiliar way, as when printing our letters instead of writing them in our usual running hand, our

memory is so far awakened that we become conscious of every character we form; sometimes it is even perceptible as memory to ourselves, as when we try to remember how to print some letter, for example a 'g,' and cannot call to mind on which side of the upper half of the letter we ought to put the link which connects it with the lower, and are successful in remembering; but if we become very conscious of remembering, it shows that we are on the brink of only trying to remember-that is to say, of not remembering at all.”

Other instances are to be found in reading, walking, swimming, talking, and also in calculation. In the last-named province we can support the theory from experience. Our first additions of long columns were laboriously made, with a consciousness of each figure. After some practice we learned to perform the same process with so little consciousness of it, and so little appreciation of each individual figure, that we could think pleasantly at the time the pencil and the eye were passing up and down the column in the process of addition. A friend whom we consulted as to the metaphysics of such a matter said that the thoughts slipped in between the interstices of the figures. Our own theory was that the practice had helped to form a mechanical part of the brain fit to have a matter like addition relegated to it.

Mr. Butler would have it that the instinctive or mechanical life is the attainment of an aristocratic unconscious ease which far transcends imperfect and conscious effort.

It being proved that constant practice leads to unconsciousness, how long indeed must not have been the practice of the creature of so-called instinct to enable it to perform its almost infallible pro

cesses, such as the dome building of the amoeba !

The little atomy presumably does its work with such marvellous perfection and unconsciousness of effort, because it knows so well how to do it.

When we do not know well that on which we are engaged, there arrives a painful consciousness of its details. When we are only a growing cell, we are untroubled by such consciousness of effort. "Birth is but the beginning of doubt, the first hankering after scepticism, the dreaming of a dawn of trouble, the end of certainty and of settled convictions. Not but what before birth there have been unsettled convictions (more's the pity) with not a few, and after birth we have still so made up our minds upon many points as to have no further need of reflection concerning them; nevertheless, in the main, birth is the end of that time when we really knew our business, and the beginning of the days wherein we know not what we would do, or do. It is therefore the beginning of consciousness, and infancy is as the dosing of one who turns in his bed on waking, and takes another short sleep before he rises."

Again, "A chicken is never so full of activity, reasoning faculty, and volition as when it is an embryo in the eggshell, making bones, and flesh, and feathers, and eyes, and claws, with nothing but a little warmth and white of egg to make them from. This is indeed to make bricks with but a small modicum of straw. There is no man in the whole world who knows consciously and articulately as much as a halfhatched hen's egg knows unconsciously."

How are we to account for the arrival at such unconsciousness? Where is the primeval repetition of effort? "The embryo chicken would