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woman, a girl of Aix, whose father had come to the conclusion that young Thiers, then a student, ought to marry her. The irate parent followed the future senator to Paris, and gave him the option of an immediate marriage or an immediate meeting. Thiers' account of the affair is amusing enough. "I deemed it wiser," he says, "to spend a few minutes with a weapon about which I knew nothing than to spend a lifetime with a woman about whom I knew a great deal too much." And so the meeting came off, the opponents standing at twenty paces. Thiers' bullet went nobody knew where; that of the irate parent passed through his hat, an inch above his head. Referring to the circumstance, "Cham" in the Petite Presse, afterwards remarked: "If Thiers had not been so little, he would never have become so great."

Duels between women have been by no means rare. Chassé, one of the singers of the old French Academy was greatly admired by the ladies; and among other triumphs of the kind, he had the distinction of causing a duel between a Polish and a French lady, who fought with pistols in the Bois de Boulogne. The French lady was wounded rather seriously, and on her recovery was confined in a convent. while her adversary was ordered, to quit the country. Among other instances of duels among women may be cited a combat with daggers, which took place between the abbess of a convent at Venice and a lady who claimed the admiration of a certain abbé; a combat with swords between Marotte Beaupré and Catherine de Urlis, actresses at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, where the duel took place on the stage and a combat on horseback, with pistols, about a greyhound, between two ladies named Mélinte and Prélanie-in which Mélinte was wounded.

The terrible wars of Napoleon put an end, for a time, to duelling in France, but the Restoration brought it forward again with renewed vigor. "What with social quarrels," we read, "and the political rancor between the Buonapart ists and the Legitimists, and the inter

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national feud between Frenchmen and the troops occupying France, there was seldom so fine a field for the man who wished to pick a quarrel. On the other hand, the old officers of Napoleon were driven to frenzy by the sight of the officers of the allied armies in their capital, and endeavored to avenge their defeat in the battle-field by their prowess in the Bois de Boulogne. On the other, the young Bourbonist courtiers were ready to answer with rapier stab and pistol bullet to the reproach that, for the sake of a dynasty, they had sacrificed their country." By and by the thing became quite ridiculous, owing to its adoption by the lower orders during the twenty years which followed Waterloo. What the edicts of kings had failed to abolish ran a great risk of dying of ridicule when rival grocers took to calling each other out, and a bath-keeper sent a challenge to a crockery-man for having sold him a damaged stove! Disputes of every kind were reduced to the same foolish arbitrament. We read of critics firing four shots at each other to decide the relative merits of the classical and the romantic schools of fiction. Dumas fights Gaillardet, the playwright, and in endeavoring to decide the authorship of one drama runs the risk of being an actor in another. Finally, at Bordeaux, we have the case of a captain of dragoons going out with an old-clothes man, and narrowly escaping lynching at the hands of the infuriated Israelites!

There was a duel fought in Ireland as lately as 1851, between the mayor of Sligo and a lawyer, but no blood was drawn on the occasion. In the same year two Frenchmen fought a duel at Egham, in Surrey, which was equally harmless. The last duel fought in England between British subjects took place on May 20, 1845, at Southsea, between Captain Seton, of the 11th Hussars, and Lieutenant Hawkey, of the Royal Marines, arising out of attentions paid by the former to the wife of the latter. They fired at fifteen paces, and in the second round Captain Seton fell mortally wounded. On July 16, 1846,

Lieutenant Hawkey, surrendering to take his trial, was arraigned before Mr. Baron Platt for the wilful murder of Captain Seton. The jury returned a verdict of "Not Guilty," and Lieutenant Hawkey was afterwards restored to his commission in the army. The last duel on record fought by a British subject took place on October 22, 1862, at St. Germain, between Mr. Dillon, editor of Le Sport, and the Duc de Grammont Cadérousse, in which the former was mortally wounded.

Duelling on bicycles is reported to be a new diversion in Spain. Two members of the bicycle club of Granada recently met in a knife duel, which is probably the first encounter of the kind ever fought upon wheels. Accompanied by their ceconds, they wheeled out some distance on the road to Malaga, to a secluded spot. There, posted seven hundred feet apart, at a sign they wheeled towards each other, each directing his machine with the left hand, and brandishing in the right that terrible knife of Spain, the navaja. At the first clash Perez pierced the left arm of Moreno, but at the third encounter Moreno thrust his knife into Perez's right breast. In a few minutes the latter died of internal hæmorrhage.

J. CUTHBERT HADDEN.

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How little snails or periwinkles rely upon the water, and how duckweed is bred, some light may be received from this experiment. In April we took out of the water little herbs of crowfoot and the like, whereon hung long cods of jelly. posed to the sun, many young periwinkles This put in water, and so into a vessel exwere bred sticking to the side of the glass, some aselli or sows, which flew from the water, and much duckweed grew over, which, cleared once or twice, now hath grown again.

It is, of course, quite impossible to say from reading this how much or how little Sir Thomas Browne knew about the breeding habits of water-snails; but it is at least fair to infer that when he saw the "long cods of jelly”—evidently the egg-sacs of some species of Limnæa-lying flaccid in the water, and the "young perriwinkles sticking to the side of the glass," he must have come to the conclusion that the former contained eggs from which the latter developed.

The philosophy of Thales, which made water the prima materia-the Beginning of all things-seems to have had some charms for him. He dallies with it, but wisely refrains from committing himself thereto. "Even rainwater, which seemeth simple," he tells us, "contains the seminals of animals. This we observed, that rain-water in cisterns growing green, there ariseth out of it red maggots, swimming in a laboring and contortile motion, which, after leaving a . . . case behind them, turn into gnats and ascend." One may profitably turn to Miall's "Aquatic Insects" for fuller information; but no one who has seen a Chironomus larva can fail to understand what Browne meant by "red maggots swimming by a laboring and contortile motion." He seems also to have made some observations on Tubifex rivulorum, the common riverworm. He says that "little red worms and less than threads are found in great numbers in ditches and muddy places where the water is almost forsaken; whereof having taken a large number included in a glass, they would stir and move continually in fair weather like

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eels, pulling some part of their bodies above the mud, and upon the least touch of the glass would all disappear and contract into the mud. They lived that remaining part of summer, and, after hard winter, showed themselves again in the succeeding summer." Whence it may be gathered that Sir Thomas Browne knew something about | the principles on which an aquarium should be carried on; for it will be conceded by those who have had practical experience that it is by no means easy to keep these worms in a healthy condition.

In his list of "Fishes" he mentions worms of the genus Gordius, under the name of "hair-worms," and furnishes negative evidence that they were not, as was then believed, animated horsehairs, for he "could never convert horsehairs into them by laying them in the water." Mention is made of "the plenty of crevises in these rivers;" and "notonecton, an insect that swimmeth on his back," was observed by him. But he seems to have worked the shore better than the fresh waters. He knew "Bernard the hermit of Rondeletius," the sea-urchin, the acorn-shell and the barnacle, though naturally in the lastnamed he did not recognize as modified legs "the many shoots or streams which prepossessed spectators fancy to be the rudiment of the tail of some goose or duck to be produced from it." Seastars-the common "five-fingers"-he also knew; and fancied, wrongly, some relationship between them and the jelly-fishes, "which in the middle seem to have some lines or first draughts not unlike." The sun-star he had not seen, though he had heard they were found at Hunstanton and Burnham, as they still are at Sheringham and Cromer.

Browne's right to be considered the first naturalist who used the aquarium for practical purposes seems incontestable. Some few observations on the breeding of pond snails and the growth of duckweed; the metamorphosis of "red maggots" into gnats; and the proof that horse-hairs when laid in water did not turn into worms, are all the results of his work in this direction that have

come down to us. But when we consider his turn for experiment, it is impossible to believe that this represents the whole of his observations. Of the aquatic flora he has very little to say. Crowfoot and duckweed were certainly not the only water plants he knew. He must have seen frogbit, with its delicate white blossoms, the water-soldier with its sword-shaped leaves, the bladderwort with its golden flowers, and he may have grown in his aquarium the star-bearing chara, none the more beautiful for being called Tolypellopsis stelligera.

Any naturalist who studies a map of the district-or, still better, travels over the ground-must see what good times the collector would be sure to have on the Broads whether he be seeking material for research work or for the study of what Ray Lankester calls "bionomics" and Miall "live natural history." One may sail over and dredge the rivers, with their two hundred miles of navigable water; or there are some five thousand acres of lakes and broads to choose from, to say nothing of the dykes and cuts, which are sure to yield good return for the working. And the inflow of the sea at Yarmouth, making both Yare and Bure tidal rivers for a great distance, gives a variety to the fauna. Dr. Robertson, the "naturalist of Cumbrae," visited the Broads in 1869 with Dr. G. S. Brady, when these two naturalists were working on minute crustacea. Their object was to procure specimens, and they were so far successful that they found "a few new species and others that were rare.” Two years later Robertson visited the Broads alone, and there made the acquaintance of the Rev. Mr. Gunn, the Norfolk geologist, who was of considerable assistance to him in his search. He returned home carrying with him ample materials.

For twenty years little or nothing was done, except by entomologists. In the early summer of 1891 a party of naturalists spending a holiday on the Broads discovered near Potter Heigham a branched hydroid zoophyte (Cordylophora lacustris), closely allied to the

"freshwater polyp"-the subject of Trembley's charming book. It was found in such abundance that one of the party wrote "I might have got a boatload in a few hours." It is no exaggeration to say that in quanting from Potter Heigham Bridge to Hickling Broad, <one might easily load a punt with it. It lives on the submerged stems of reeds; and these, when cut to clear the channel, float up and drift to each side of the waterway. This hydroid is extremely interesting, for it was originally marine and estuarine, but seems to be gradually accommodating itself to living in fresh water, though its stems and branches are thickly studded with microscopic forms of animal life which are often supposed to be confined to salt or brackish water. And quite recently there has been discovered, nesting among the branches of this hydroid, a strange little amphipod (Corophium crassicorne)—a small shrimp-like crea

ture, with eyes set in its head, not borne on stalks. According to Spence Bate this creature is only recorded in Britain from off the Shetland Islands and Outer Skerries Harbor. It was first found on the coast of Norway where it is rare. How did it come into the Bure and the Thurne, where it is by no means rare?

The recital of the little that has been done shows how much there remains to do. The Broads are a good place for a holiday, and every naturalist who goes thither may do somewhat. There is an admirable Natural History Society at Norwich. Two of its members have completed Browne's "List of Norfolk Birds" in excellent fashion; another has added to his "List of Fishes." Who will take up and carry on Browne's work on the invertebrate fauna, giving us not only lists but life-histories, supplementing bookwork with observation and experiment?

The Long Arctic Night. - Constantin Nossiloff in his work "Le Tour du Monde," says: "During scientific researches in Nova Zemble I had the sensations and experiences of the long Arctic night. It began November 3, and ended January 20. September was pretty comfortable. Then suddenly snow covered the mountains. The Samoyedes, my only com panions, put on their winter clothing, the fishing boats set sail for Archangel, the ground froze, the sun lost its warmth and heavy snows fell. Winter had come in earnest. On the day when the sun showed itself for the last time all hands went out of doors to bid it farewell. It remained in sight for half an hour only. For a few days longer there was a morn ing twilight. Then this faded and gave place to black night. The stars shone the whole twenty-four hours. The huts of the colony were buried under the snow, of which thick whirlwinds filled the air. The wind shook the huts to their foundations. Sometimes for days together the inmates of the different huts could hold no communication with each other, though

the huts were side by side. If any one went out he was seized by the wind, and had to be dragged back by means of ropes. In this darkness and desolation the aurora borealis did much to entertain and cheer them. It lasted sometimes for five days in succession, with splendors of color it seems impossible to describe. To enjoy the spectacle I used to remain for hours in a hole in the snow, sheltered from the wind. I have never seen anything more terrible than a tempest during the Polar night. Man feels himself overwhelmed in immensity. When there came a lull in the storm the men ventured out, to breathe the air and purge their lungs of the exhalations of the smoking lamps fed with seal oil. Twilight appeared again in the middle of January, and on the twentieth the sun rose above the horizon, while the members of the little colony stood in line facing it and fired a salute. No one had died or been seriously ill, but all had the look of corpses, and were feeble as convalescents after a long sickness. Health returned with the appearance of the sun."

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I. THE LETTERS OF EDWARD FITZGERALD, Quarterly Review,
II. THE BONDAGE OF GEORGE BERKLEY.
By Harriet W. Daly,

III. THE CHANNEL ISLANDS. By Charles
Edwardes,

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Temple Bar,

Gentleman's Magazine,

Cornhill Magazine,
Temple Bar,

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Good Words,

A MASTERLESS MAID,

NATURA MEDICATRIX,

POETRY.

770

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770

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