PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AS NATURALIST.

HIS KNOWLEDGE OF BIRD-LORE.

JOHN BURROUGHS, the well-known American naturalist, describes an aspect of President Roosevelt's versatile character that is comparatively unknown. The President's exploits as a sportsman have been told many times by himself and others, but Mr. Burroughs, in the New York Outlook, gives an interesting sketch of him as Nature-lover and observer of the ways of birds and beasts. "I cannot recall," he says, "that I have ever met a man with a keener and more comprehensive interest in the wild life about us-an interest that is at once scientific and thoroughly human." Describing a half day spent with the President at Sagamore Hill, he says:

The one passion of his life seemed natural history, and the new warbler that had appeared in his woods-new in the breeding season on Long Island-seemed an event that threw the affairs of state and of the Presidential succession quite into the background. Indeed, he fairly bubbled over with delight at the thought of his new birds and at the prospect of showing them to his visitors.

A BORN NATURE-LOVER.

Nor is it only when in the country that President Roosevelt finds keen delight in noting the ways of the birds of the air :

At luncheon he told us of some of his ornithological excursions in the White House grounds, how people would stare at him as he stood gazing up into the trees like one demented. "No doubt they thought me insane." "Yes," said Mrs. Roosevelt, "and as I was always with him, they no doubt thought I was the nurse that had him in charge."

President Roosevelt's mind, says Mr. Burroughs, acts with wonderful swiftness and completeness, and he has a most retentive memory. As they talked the conversation was continually interrupted by bird-notes, which the President at once identified, or by his sudden striding through the long grass or clover in search of a bird's nest :

The President is a born Nature-lover, and he has what does not always go with this passion-remarkable powers of observation. He sees quickly and surely, not less so with the corporeal eye than with the mental. His exceptional vitality, his awareness all around, gives the clue to his powers of seeing. The chief qualification of a born observer is an alert, sensitive, objective type of mind, and this he has in a pre-eminent degree.

The President's Nature-love is deep and abiding. Not every bird-student succeeds in making the birds a part of his life. Not till you have long and sympathetic intercourse with them-in fact, not till you have loved them for their own sake-do they enter into and become a part of your life. The President's interest in birds and in natural history generally dates from his youth. While yet in his teens he published a list of the birds of Franklin County, New York. He showed me a bird journal which he kept in Egypt when he was a lad of fourteen, and a case of three African plovers which he had set up at that time, and they were well done.

I see always, as soon as I am alone, another person, who is silent and reproduces my slightest actions, and is quite unlike me. I am fair, she is dark; I am thin, she is stout. No one sees her except me; but my photograph when taken shows a shadow which the photographer does not understand, and which he has much difficulty in getting rid of, because the shadow seems to be in some way a part of me. I suffer very much from this double person and do not venture to speak of it to anyone, for I am always afraid that I shall be considered mad; and I am very unhappy.

I have always lived with this double personage, whom I call Noula! When I was a child I did not see her, but always in my games I had the impression that I was not alone. I was constantly observed replying to questions which to others seemed to be made by my imagination. To whom did I reply? I do not know, and I have no recollection of these facts of which I speak; but my father, when I was placed under a doctor, recalled this distinctly. What I can affirm is that I did not care at all to play with other children, being quite happy alone; and, moreover, I was not alone.

She first saw this figure of Noula when she passed from childhood to girlhood. This is her description of how it occurred :

I usually rode a horse that was accustomed to be ridden by me and used to the saddle; that day, however, I took it into my head to mount a stallion which had never been ridden before. At first I was able to control him; then, by some caprice, he started off swiftly. What frightened him? I do not know; but suddenly he became quiet again, and, before my eyes, I saw Noula! and very distinctly! At first thought that someone, seeing me to be in danger, had stopped my horse, and I was about to thank her. My father then rejoined me and began scolding me gently about my fancy for riding this horse, when, looking at me, he saw me so changed that he was frightened, very frightened! (I felt just at that moment a strange sensation which is renewed sometimes still; the sensation of an immense emptiness as if I felt myself to be in the air.) He called me in vain, I did not reply. He could even take me in his arms, or lift me off the horse; I still kept the fixed gaze with dilated eyes which so alarmed him; this lasted perhaps for a minute, but it seemed so long. When I came out of this state my first word was: "Did you see her, say?"

We then returned to the house without any further accidents; I did my utmost to seem cheerful; nevertheless, I was frightened! When I came in my father took me to my room, for he felt I was suffering. He left for a few minutes to let me make my toilet. And lo! when I was alone she returned!!! My cries recalled my father, who sent for our doctor, for he himself saw nothing.

From that time Noula became an inseparable companion, seen by none except herself and her husband, who said that whenever he came into her room when she was not awake he saw a vague form disappear which he could not distinguish.

Of the story of Cinderella there are given by Marian Roalfe Cox in Folk-Lore no fewer than twenty additional variants, mostly Swedish and Danish.

99

"HOW I INVENTED THE TELEPHONE: "OUT OF MY IGNORANCE OF ELECTRICITY"! AN interview in Great Thoughts with Dr. Graham Bell derives from him the story of his great invention. Asked how he came to make this invention, the Professor answered :

Immediately preceding its invention I was carrying out two separate and independent lines of investigation: one related to the transmission of musical signals for the purpose of multiple telegraphy; the other experiments were concerned with the manometric capsule of Koenig and the phonautograph of Leon Scott, two well-known forms of scientific apparatus for describing in visible form the vibrations of speech.

My idea was to study the shapes of the vibrations produced by the different vowels and consonant sounds, in the hope that deaf children might be able to read speech from these vibrations, as they were unable to hear. While pursuing these experiments I made use of the suggestion of Dr. Clarence J. Blake, a distinguished aurist of Boston, of a human ear, taken from a dead subject, as a phonautograph, and obtained very beautiful tracings of speech vibrations upon smoked glass. And it was the consideration of this human ear phonautograph that led me to the idea of the first telephone. I had reached the conception, in fact, of what is now known as the undulatory current of electricity. I had arrived at the idea that an undulatory current could be produced by the vibrations of an armature in front of an electro-magnet, if the vibrations could be made to correspond to the air vibrations during the utterance of a sound.

In 1874, while at his father's house near Brantford, Ontario, he devised a means of causing vibrations of an iron armature by the voice by attaching the armature to the centre of a stretched membrane. This theoretical conception took practical shape next year. The invention was accepted in 1876, and put into commercial use twelve months later. The first successful experiments upon long distance lines were made in August, 1876. The same year the first actual conversation was carried on over telegraph lines between Boston and Cambridge Port, Mass.; then between Boston and New York. Only Lord Kelvin's authority overcame the incredulity with which the British public had heard of the invention. Now, Dr. Bell says, he has talked a distance of 1,500 miles, from Washington to Madison.

ONLY IN ITS INFANCY,

He maintains that the telephone is only in its infancy at present. Though in use for thirty years, the invention itself stands exactly to-day as when he first gave it to the world. The added inventions are not concerned with the essential instrument itself. The improvement will be in the direction of simplifying all this mass of superadded material. He thinks it very probable that we may have wireless telephony in the near future. Here is a singular paradox :

"People generally look upon me as an electrician," continued the Professor, with a quiet smile, "but as a matter of fact, I invented the telephone out of my ignorance of electricity. No electrician would ever have dreamed of trying the experiments I tried. The very idea of creating a useful current of electricity by the action of the human voice on a plate of metal would have appeared ridiculous to a practical electrician. No man who is merely an electrician could have invented the telephone. It required an expert knowledge of the nature of sound and the mechanism of speech; and this I had from my boyhood. My interest, in fact, may be said to have been hereditary, for my

father, Alexander Melville Bell, was a Professor of Elocution in Edinburgh and a corrector of defective speech. His father, Professor Alexander Bell, of London, was of the same profession, which was followed by three generations of the family. My father is very well known in Great Britain as the author of Bell's Standard Elocutionist,' which has passed through very many editions and is still used as a text-book."

Dr. Graham Bell confesses to having the honour of having passed through more litigation than any other man in the world, living or dead.

HOW PLAY DEVELOPS BRAIN.

IF we may believe Mr. John Arrowsmith, who writes in the Paidologist for July, the best way of developing the brain is by play. "Man is whole only when he plays," is a wise saying of an ancient philosopher which modern science, he says, has fully justified. There is constant interaction between the brain and the muscles. The use of the hand, for example, develops the speech centre:

The use of the muscles in the young develops brain centres as nothing else yet has been proved to do. Every muscle group which is allowed to become atrophied through disuse also causes the atrophy of the part of the brain which controls it. When the brain of an adult is examined who has suffered amputation of a limb in childhood, the part of the brain governing the muscle group of that particular limb is found to be undeveloped.

THE BEST GAMES TO DEVELOP BRAIN.

The zest, the enthusiasm, the complete abandon of children when playing games which they like, give to play its value. Ordered drill is of far less value. is too mechanical :

It

When a child shouts and yells, and hops and jumps boisterously and barbarically, he is enlarging his blood vessels, flushing his system and clearing his lungs of residual air. When the pleasurable excitement of play acts on the heart, the muscles are strengthened, but when children are compelled to go through exercises which they detest, the brain becomes depressed, the heart weakened and no good is obtained. Battledore, skipping, dore, skipping, running, romping, swimming, ball games, hockey, tennis, golf-all deep breathing exercises are better than any system of mechanical drill ever devised. Body movements, leg movements, arm movements-the big muscles first and in their natural order of development are those which are used in play. Regulation gymnastics can never bring forth from the child such complete and intense joy as ordinary play brings forth.

A DEFENCE OF DANCING.

The best forms of exercise are those which the child has inherited from its remote ancestors :

It is because the child brings out in play the actions of the cave man that these seem, to us, to be entirely purposeless. His play is a system of ideographic hieroglyphs. He rehearses in play actions which were vital to the existence of his species ages ago, when the ice sheet was slowly receding from the land. Throwing with precision in ball games; hitting with a club in cricket; dodging, running, holding and kicking in football are all echoes of the primitive fighting instinct when only those survived who were the most expert.

Mr. Arrowsmith holds that no girl's education should be considered complete until the muscles and nerve centres which come into play in proper dancing have been allowed their period of development. dance is the most universal form of play, and it is one of the oldest and purest forms of muscle culture.

The

NAPOLEON'S FIGHTING MEN.

THE MARSHALS OF FRANCE.

Or Napoleon literature there is no end, and the public demand for it appears insatiable. In the August Cornhill Mr. C. Stein writes, under the title of "Deaths of the Marshals," on the fighting quality of Napoleon's men.

THE MAKING OF A MARSHAL.

The Marshals of France were fighting men to the backbone, and they had no hesitation in placing themselves in extremity of danger whenever it was necessary to lead and show an example of resolution to the men under their command.. The following story, told of Marshal Lefebvre, Duke of Dantzic, illustrates his own consciousness of the qualities which made him what he was. Mr. Stein says:

Marshal Lefebvre was vexed at the tone of envy and unkindness with which a companion of his childhood, who met him in his prosperity, spoke of his riches, titles and luxury, and said in reply, "Well, now you shall have it all, but at the price which I have paid for it. We will go into the garden, and I will fire a musket at you sixty times, and then, if you are not killed, everything shall be yours." Indeed, the trial which Lefebvre proposed to his friend was not in the least an exaggeration of the circumstances which every Marshal had passed through in his early days, when he was a subaltern and was bringing himself to notice; circumstances, too, which might well again present themselves to him in any campaign, even after he had attained the highest rank.

DEMI-GODS.

Instances of great deeds accomplished on the part of the Marshals were so common that the writer refers to the warriors as demi-gods rather than as ordinary mortals. Such superabounding courage was absolutely necessary to a man who would dominate the national soldiery produced by the French Revolution. At Lützen, Bautzen, Dresden, Leipzig, it might almost. be said that it was the Marshals who fought, and if they had been absent, not all Napoleon's genius or the valour of the soldiers could have so long maintained the mighty efforts. On the fatal field of Waterloo how the services of the absent ones were missed!

DEATHS OF THE MARSHALS.

An extraordinary thing about the twenty-three Marshals of France is the small proportion who fell victims to shot and steel. Lannes and Bessières were the only ones killed in battle, and a third, Prince Poniatowski, was drowned. Fifteen Marshals died in their beds, most of them at an advanced age, while the remaining five came to their end under tragic circumstances in no way connected with the hazards of war. Naturally the writer has a good deal to say of the last hours spent on earth by the renowned Marshals Murat and Ney. When the firing party drew up to carry out the death sentence on Murat, the Marshal refused to have his eyes bandaged, and he himself gave the order to fire. That Marshal Ney suffered the last penalty, says Mr. Stein, has always been some

thing of a blot on the memory of the Duke of Wellington. The unseemly haste which characterised Ney's trial was equalled in iniquity by the precipitation with which execution followed the sentence. He refused

to kneel or to allow his eyes to be bandaged. He walked steadily to the spot where he was to stand, placed himself facing the firing party in a calm and dignified attitude without the least touch of bravado, and took off his hat.

IS MARS HABITABLE?

MR. E. VINCENT HEWARD, in the Fortnightly Review, makes hay of the many imaginative speculations that have been indulged in by astronomers as well as by laymen concerning the planet Mars. It seems that these structures of fancy, erected on the slenderest basis of fact, began in 1667 with Domenico Cassini, of Bologna, and his nephew, J. P. Maraldi. In certain lines the latter saw the boundaries of ocean and continent; in a white spot covering the South Pole he thought he discovered a Polar region of snow and ice. Sir W. Herschell found a corresponding white patch at the North Pole. These white patches dwindled and grew with alternations of summer and winter. Schiaparelli, a late Director of the Milan Observatory, discovered a number of narrow dark lines traversing the continental regions in almost every direction, and all terminating in the ocean. By the side of these was a second line in twenty instances. These lines he called Canale, a term which has been rendered " canals," but would be better translated "channels." The idea of canals on Mars set imagination to work. A whole scheme of irrigation during the summer by directing the melting snows of the Poles along these stupendous canals was devised.

WHAT WE ACTUALLY KNOW.

Mr. Heward then comes down to the bare facts that are known. All that has really been seen on Mars is "a vast number of threadlike lines which are thought to be on the planet's surface. To be visible at the distance of from 35 to 60 million miles means that each dusky line is thousands of miles long, with a uniform breadth of about two or more miles; while the second line, called the companion canal, must be distant not less than two to four hundred miles." It is argued that Mars is gravitationally incapable of permanently retaining the vapour of water. The air of Mars is extremely rarefied, the atmospheric pressure being 2 instead of, as with us, 15 lbs. per square inch. Mars can only receive half or a little less than half the quantity of solar light that the earth gets. The temperature on its surface must necessarily be far below ours. Some suggest a surface temperature at 34 degrees Centigrade below freezing point. "When all is summed up, the result is that, willy-nilly, Mars cannot be inhabited by organised living beings. in any way resembling denizens of earth. In short, it is not habitable."

THE

EDUCATION OF A KING.
PRINCE EDWARD OF WALES.

LAST May Prince Edward of Wales entered the Royal Naval College at Osborne, exactly thirty years after his father joined the Britannia as a naval cadet. So Mrs. Sarah A. Tooley writes in the Woman at Home for August.

THE THOUGHTFUL ELDER BROTHER.

Prince Edward, who is now thirteen, has a robust constitution, and few naval cadets have been more fitted to pass the examination for the Service in point of physical fitness. When very young he showed a sense of responsibility, especially with regard to "the children," as he called his younger brother and sister. At first he was highly incensed, we are told, at the arrival of a new boy when Prince Albert was born, and he steadily refused to kiss the baby. Later he became devoted to his brother, and each new arrival since has added to his pleasurable sense of responsibility.

When the royal children are photographed he assists in the posing. He is quite at home in nursing a baby. To Princess Mary, his sister, he plays the rôle of protector charmingly. He constitutes himself the mentor of his younger brother, and on one occasion when Prince Albert showed signs of weariness during a long story which the late Lord Iddesleigh was relating to the Princes, Prince Edward, then about four, turned to his small brother and said, "Smile." In the nursery he drilled his brothers and Princess Mary with the precision of a drill sergeant.

66 WHEN I AM KING."

When he was about nine years old, he said to his nurse one night before going to sleep:-"You know that some day I shall be King. Well, when I am, I shall do three things. First, I shall make a law that no one is to cut off puppy dogs' tails, for that is very cruel. Then I shall make a law that no one is to put bearing reins on horses, for that is another cruel thing.

And I shall try to do away with all sin."

A BOY AMONG OTHER BOYS.

Cricket is Prince Edward's favourite sport; he cycles well, but prefers riding; sleighing is a supreme delight to him; and he loves the mountain rides and the fishing in the river on Deeside. Next to his cadet's uniform he likes his Scottish dress, and the gathering of the clansmen at Braemar is the great event of his stay in Scotland.

Few naval cadets know more about a ship than Prince Edward. He can swim and dive and row, and climb the mast and set the rigging. At the College he shares a dormitory with other boys, and takes his meals with his companions like an ordinary boy. History is his favourite study. He is fond of singing, and has joined the cadets' choir at church.

Another article on Prince Edward, by Miss Mary Spencer Warren, appears in the Lady's Realm for August.

WHAT IS THE VALUE OF EVIDENCE?
AN INTERESTING INQUIRY.

PROFESSOR E. CLAPAREDE, Director of the Psychological Laboratory at the University of Geneva, has an interesting article on the Value of Evidence in the Strand Magazine for August.

The value of evidence, he says, is usually said to be proportionate to the value of the witness. Witnesses are classed in two groups-good witnesses, or loyal, impartial, and disinterested persons; and bad witnesses, who comprise all the various categories of liars. The Professor's inquiry is concerned with the evidence given by men of good faith. Everyone knows how much accounts of the same fact may differ, even when related by serious witnesses with a desire to keep to the truth. The writer refers to M. Binet's experiments with children, which showed what a number of mistakes the children made in answering simple questions about simple objects. Herr W. Stern, a German psychologist, has also taken up the question. His method is to put before persons for about thirty seconds a picture of some scene, and then ask them to describe it from memory. The results show that witnesses forget many details and falsify a number of others, and Stern has formulated a law which other experimenters have confirmed "Absolutely exact evidence is not the rule, but the exception."

The odd thing is that the subjects of the experiments relate incorrect facts with extraordinary precision and assurance. Mlle. Borst has tried to find out with what degree of accuracy answers relating to the pictures were made. The answer, she says, may be given with hesitation, with assurance, or it may be certified under oath. Out of a hundred replies given under oath, ninety-two were found to be correct; out of a hundred replies given with assurance, eighty-six; and out of a hundred uncertain replies, fifty-six.

But evidence given by laboratory experiments naturally shows better results than would be the case with ordinary evidence tendered in a court of justice. One day, during a lesson, Professor Claparede suddenly distributed pieces of white paper to the students and asked them to reply to a few questions relating to the University buildings. He obtained fifty-four answers, and the results were exceedingly bad, for not a single person gave evidence that was perfectly correct. For instance, every day the students pass a large window, and the existence of it was denied by forty-four out of the fifty-four. The reason why the window gave rise to such false testimony may be explained by the slight interest it offered, but the window is by no means a small one.

It is plain, therefore, that evidence given by a man who really desires to tell the truth is often very defective. The point on which it is necessary to insist the most is that in practice the danger of evidence is not due to what is forgotten, but to what is transformed.

"THE INNOCENTS ABROAD".

AND HOW MARK TWAIN CAME TO WRITE IT.

In his autobiography in the North American Review for July 5th, Mark Twain tells how he came to write "The Innocents Abroad." He says:

Early in '66 George Barnes invited me to resign my reportership on his paper, the San Francisco Morning Call, and for some months thereafter I was without money or work; then I had a pleasant turn of fortune. The proprietors of the Sacramento Union, a great and influential daily journal, sent me to the Sandwich Islands to write four letters a month at twenty dollars apiece. I was there four or five months, and returned to find myself about the best known honest man on the Pacific Coast. Thomas McGuire, proprietor of several theatres, said that now was the time to make my fortune-strike while the iron was hot!-break into the lecture field! I did it. I announced a lecture on the Sandwich Islands, closing the advertisement with the remark, "Admission one dollar; doors open at halfpast seven, the trouble begins at eight." A true prophecy. The trouble certainly did begin at eight, when I found myself in front of the only audience I had ever faced, for the fright which pervaded me from head to foot was paralysing. It lasted two minutes and was as bitter as death; the memory of it is indestructible, but it had its compensations, for it made me immune from timidity before audiences for all time to come. I lectured in all the principal Californian towns, and in Nevada, then lectured once or twice more in San Francisco, then retired from the field rich-for me-and laid out a plan to sail Westward from San Francisco, and go around the world. The proprietors of the Alta engaged me to write an account of the trip for that paper-fifty letters of a column and a half each, which would be about two thousand words per letter, and the pay to be twenty dollars per letter.

A LOST REPUTATION.

During his trip he sent the fifty letters :

Then I put together a lecture on the trip, and delivered it in San Francisco at great and satisfactory pecuniary profit; then I branched out into the country and was aghast at the result: I had been entirely forgotten, I never had people enough in my houses to sit as a jury of inquest on my lost reputation! I inquired into this curious condition of things, and found that the thrifty owners of that prodigiously rich Alta newspaper had copyrighted all those poor little twenty-dollar letters, and had threatened with prosecution any journal which should venture to copy a paragraph from them!

After much altercation he induced the proprietors to waive their copyright. Of the editor of the Alta he says he was a man of sterling character, equipped with a right heart; also a good historian where facts were not essential."

THE FOREMOST LIVING AMERICAN WRITER. In the same number Mr. W. Lyon Phelps eulogises Mark Twain as humorist and philosopher. He declares that he is "our foremost living American writer." He has not the subtlety of Henry James or the wonderful charm of Mr. Howells, but the natural endowment of Mark Twain is still greater :

Mr. Howells has made the most of himself; God has done it all for Mark Twain. If there be a living American writer touched with true genius, whose books glow with the divine fire, it is he. He has always been a conscientious artist; but no amount of industry could ever have produced a “ Huckleberry Finn."

In comparison with to-day, the age of chivalry seems dull and poor. Even in chivalry itself our author is more knightly than Lancelot ; for was there ever a more truly chivalrous performance than Mark Twain's essay on Harriet Shelley, or his literary

monument to Joan of Arc? In these earnest pages our national humorist appears as the true knight. Mark Twain's humour is purely American; it is not the humour of Washington Irving, which resembles that of Addison and Thackeray; it is not delicate and indirect. It is genial, sometimes outrageous, mirthlaughter holding both his sides.

MORE THAN A HUMORIST.

"Mark Twain's humour is boisterous, uproarious, colossal, overwhelming." Americans, he says, like Mark Twain not because they are frivolous, but because they are just the reverse. "I have never found a frivolous person who really enjoyed or appreciated Mark Twain." Mark Twain is, however, to his eulogist more than a humorist. He shows very high literary quality. He has so much dramatic power that were his career not closing he might write the great American play that we are still awaiting. He is through and through American. "He is our great

democrat."

MARK TWAIN SERIOUS.

In the August Blackwood the writer of "Musings Without Method" discourses on 66 Mark Twain and Humour." For the last month London, we are reminded, has suffered from a violent attack of hilarity owing to the presence in our midst of Mark Twain and his messages of mirth. But, says the writer, nothing stales so rapidly as the thing called "humour." Mark Twain, however, can be serious, for he has a talent which stands in need of no folly for its embellishment :

Had he never cut a joke, had he refrained always from grinning at grave and beautiful things, how brilliant a fame would have been his! When you are tired of his irreverence, when you have deplored his noisy jibes, when his funeral and his theft of the cup alike pall upon your spirit, take down his "Life on the Mississippi," and see what perfect sincerity and a fine sympathy can accomplish. Mark Twain writes of the noble river as one who knows its every change and chance. Yet he writes of it with an austere restraint and without any desire to humanise it out of its proper character. And there is humour, too, in his descriptions-not the tortured humour of a later day, but humour sufficient to play, like light upon shade, in the grave places of his history. As he says himself, he loved the pilot's profession far better than any he has followed since, and his love and understanding shine in every page of his masterpiece. As the river kept no secrets from him, so his quick memory enabled him to recover the impressions of his youth.

The Lady Domestic.

IN the Treasury for August Katharine Tynan records some of her experiences with Lady Domestics. Whether she had bad luck or not, it is evident her experiment was in no sense a success. She found the lady domestics less competent than any servants she had ever had, and she says that if the daughters of the poor gentry or the poor upper middle class are going to take up domestic service instead of the wretched avocations open to them as shopgirls and the like, they will have to leave a good deal of their usual baggage of conventions behind. She is convinced that lack of supervision is at the bottom of the whole servant difficulty.