Various

“ In a country where the fish for your evening’s dinner must all have been swimming about merrily in the depths of the sea at eight o’clock the same morning, where your leg of mutton must have been careering joyously in guileless innocence across the grassy plain, and your chicken cutlets must have borne their part in investigating the merits of the juicy caterpillar while you were still loitering over late breakfast, the question of commissariat is of course a far less simple one than in our own well-supplied and market-stocked England. ”

“ The history of some other countries reaches further into the gloom of the past. But even Greece and Egypt have their dim dawn of history, beyond which the voice of massive ancient Sphinx and temple-ruins of the one are silent, and the beautiful myths of the other have no further record. When, however, tradition fails us, we have not by any means reached the farthest point in the history of the race. ”

“ The magnificent Irish deer—not then extinct, and than which no deer of modern age has antlers half so large, or has half so noble an appearance—galloped with bounding, graceful step across the plains of Ireland. Bears hibernated through the greater part of the severe, almost endless winter; and when the climate became suitable, cunning beavers followed their life’s work by the side of broad shallow rivers that drained continents, part of which are now no more. ”

“ That we can find a market for an increased production of pork and bacon is certain. Last year, we paid the foreigner—and chiefly the Yankee—some three millions sterling for dead pig-meat, sent to us in the shape of hams, bacon, and pork. There is no reason why we should not this season increase our breeding-herds of swine and make some attempt to wrest from the foreigner this market. It lies at our doors; and the pig himself is perhaps the most profitable of all the meat-making machinery of the farm. The fecundity of the pig is such that the breeding-stock may be increased almost at will. ”

“ It is not our present purpose to attempt to criticise or to vindicate the laws in question; we simply explain how the law stands, and leave to others to reconcile the principles of legislation in the interests of morality, which appear to place art upon a pedestal outside the sphere of moral considerations. ”

“ A popular lecturer in one of his discourses had occasion to speak on noses, and he himself, ‘defective only in his Roman nose,’ declared, had he the choice of noses, his face should be ornamented by a ‘regular weather-cutter.’ The desire was commendable and worthy attention, for strangers are instinctively judged by their noses. The nose indeed proclaims the man, and is the outward and visible symbol of inward mental calibre and intellectual character. ”

“ Third was a time reaching still further into the uncertainty of the prehistoric era, when the graceful form of the Pinus silvestris grew about the sites of the present peat-mosses, and man, with rude uncultured notions on everything, and devoid of the broader lights that have cheered and helped him on in later days, with a kind of superior cunning instinct, shaped his early implements rudely out of the flints that came readily to his hand. ”

“ At the present time, firs and oaks are not found in the country; but beeches attain a perfect growth in very large numbers. During the time of the Roman empire, Denmark was famous for its growth of beeches; in all probability, all through the historic period the characteristic tree-growth of this locality has been beeches. It is certain that oaks have never been predominant in Denmark during any period of the historic epoch. The prehistoric period of man’s life upon the globe is divided into three divisions—the Stone age, the Bronze age, and the Iron age. ”

“ Among this variety of animal life, and in the excitement of a hunter’s existence, during the latter part of the great Glacial age, lived these Palæolithic men, clothing themselves from the bitter cold with the warm furs of the animals their superior intelligence enabled them to trap, or that came within reach of their curiously flint-barbed arrows, and living almost entirely on the game they were able to ‘bag.’
The question that should most concern us is not who and what were the ancestors of the human race, but what men are to-day, and what they may well become. ”

“ The presence of the mammoth, one of the mammals of the Tertiary epoch, long ages ago quite extinct, known to have been clothed with a warm coat of shaggy hair and wool, is evidence at once of the great antiquity of the age in whose broken monuments we are able to read fragments of a witching history, and of the prevalence of a far more severe climate at that period than that which the southern countries of Europe enjoy now. ”

“ As the climate became warmer when the age of boulder-drift was past, ferocious tigers prowled around man’s rude hut in search of sweet morsels—veritable ancestors of modern ‘man-eaters’—and in the vicinity of the rivers, the huge hippopotamus and scale-covered crocodile sought their livelihood. ”

“ Harry half sighed. He misunderstood entirely the train of thought that was passing that moment through Nora’s mind. He believed she saw in it a certain rapprochement between them two, a natural fitness of things to bring them together. ‘Yes,’ he said, with more tenderness in his tone than was often his wont, ‘my mother’s a Barbadian, Miss Dupuy: such a grand, noble-looking, commanding woman—not old yet; she never will be old, in fact; she’s too handsome for that ”

“ The peat-mosses of Denmark supply important data for the early history of man in that country. In these peats are imbedded many relics of a people who dwelt in that region long before the present race had migrated thither. These relics consist chiefly of curiously formed implements and weapons in stone and bronze—hammer, arrow, and spear heads, hatchets and knives, &c. Now, peat is formed slowly. It is the result of the annual growth and decay of numerous marsh-plants—each year’s mass of dead rushes, reeds, and grasses being overgrown by the vegetation of the succeeding year. ”

“ It is said that ‘history repeats itself;’ probably it is partially true. The chief business of man in relation to the question of evolution, which the consideration of this subject may tend to lead back to, is to see that that part of history which tells of an early crude barbarism in the ancestry of men does not repeat itself. ”

“ Before the earliest immigrants of the rude tribes of the Neolithic age had made their homes among the prehistoric firs of Denmark, there had roamed over vast tracts of country, not very far removed from that locality, a race of men, if possible more simple in their modes of life and workmanship—the men of the Palæolithic age. But, between this age and the Neolithic of the Danish peats a subdivision has been defined. In the caves in the south of France occur ‘vast quantities of the bones and horns of the reindeer. ”

“ So, too, the season of 1885 proved a good one, as the lepidopterist would say, for the larvæ of the Death’s-head Moth, in fact, it is doubtful if it had ever been so abundant. It is a grand species—the largest of our native Sphingidæ, or Hawk Moths, and interesting in all stages of its existence. It is the only lepidopteron that we possess capable of making any cry; but the caterpillar, pupa, and moth of Atropos can all squeak. ”

“ A Yorkshire manufacturer whose good living had given him ‘a nose as red as a comet,’ was{429} told by a wealthy friend very bluntly, ‘I couldn’t afford to keep that nose of thine.’ Another friend assured him he had no cause for fear of not living comfortably, for should all other means of subsistence fail, he could easily hire himself out as a railway danger-signal. ”

“ Musical sand is easily deprived of its acoustic qualities. Besides wetting it, friction between the dry hands also accomplishes the result. The quickest way of ‘killing’ the sand—except by water—is to shake a small quantity in a tin box. When first agitated, a peculiar sound is heard, which entirely ceases after twenty to twenty-five slow up-and-down movements of the box. Attempts to restore to ‘killed’ sand its sonorous properties have met with indifferent success. Sonorous and mute sand occur in the beach closely adjoining, but they cannot be distinguished by the eye ”

“ The air comes so delightfully fresh through the open spaces of the creeper-covered trellis-work, and the humming-birds buzz about so merrily among the crimson passion-flowers under your very eyes, and the banana bushes whisper so gently before the delicate fanning of the cool sea-breezes in the leafy courtyard, that you lie back dreamily in your folding-chair and half believe yourself, for once in your life, in the poet’s Paradise. On such a veranda, Harry Noel and Nora Dupuy sat together that Tuesday morning ”

“ For example, in Wales, especially in South Wales, and to a smaller extent in some counties of England, it is generally believed that a common raffle can be made quite legal by advertising it as being conducted upon art-union principles; although—as we shall presently show—there is no connection between the two, and therefore no ground for the supposition that the pretence implied in the words quoted has any real existence.
The pernicious effects of lotteries appear to have early been a subject of careful attention on the part of the legislature. ”

“ As a proof of the existence of man at a time when the reindeer and several other animals, now confined to far higher latitudes, roamed as far towards the equator as the south of France, perhaps farther, it is to be noticed that not only are his implements found side by side with the remains of the reindeer in such a manner as to show that they were deposited at the same time, but many of the antlers of that animal are cut and rudely carved, bearing ample evidence of the work of a more or less intelligent race of men. ”

“ It is somewhat remarkable that many of the enactments against lotteries have been contained in Acts of Parliament by which government lotteries were authorised, thus leading to the inference that the raising of money for the service of the state, which must necessarily lead to the same evils of gambling, &c., as the lotteries set up by the ‘evil-disposed persons’ against whom the former legislation was aimed, was of more importance than the cause of morality which had been sought to be served by the imposition of penalties so heavy. ”

“ Yet, long time as this requires, man has, in Denmark and in several other countries, been coexistent with the history of these changes.
In peats of the Bronze age, scarcely any human bones have been discovered, though they occur in peats of the Iron and Stone ages, and the other relics of man are about equal in all the three epochs. Scientists seem to agree in referring this to the probability that the people of this epoch always burned their dead. ”

“ That may oftentimes be a good answer, but not in a season when all kinds of corn can be bought cheap, and when farmers oftentimes are unable to sell their cereals except at a figure at which it is far more profitable to manufacture it into pork, and send it in that form—fifteen bushels in a three-bushel measure—to market. This is a matter well worthy the attention of farmers at the present moment, and a thought that ought to lead to a large increase in the pig-stock of the country. ”

“ Seldom is Christmas allowed to pass over without some prosecutions under the Vagrants’ Act for raffles or some other forms of lotteries in some part of the kingdom or other; and the effect of this has been to render almost unknown in some towns and cities the drawings which were so numerous in the days of our youth. One form of petty lottery which has engaged the attention of the police at all times of the year is the insertion of small sums of money in packets of sweets and other articles principally sold to children, for which there have been several convictions within the last few years. ”

“ In England and Scotland, smoking in religious edifices was practised more or less during the greater portion of last century, if not the whole of it, and down into the present century. In Dutch and South American churches, smoking has been indulged in down to a very recent period. Snuff-taking in churches is a practice which is common throughout the European continent. It has also prevailed in the churches of both England and Scotland for a long period ”

“ Imbedded in peat are often found the trunks of trees; indeed, in some instances part of a forest growing in the hollow in which peat was being formed, has been choked by the rank growth of marsh-plants, and the soil becoming too moist for the favourable growth of the trees, they, robbed of their strength from these two causes, have fallen a prey to storms, and become overgrown with peat. Thus single trees or clusters of trees, or even whole forests, may be part of a peat-moss.
In these Danish peats occur, at different depths, the remains of three kinds of trees. ”

“ The second branch of our subject—the punishment of keepers of lotteries as common rogues and vagabonds—had its origin in the year first mentioned, and has now become an ordinary part of the law applicable to the punishment of vagrancy, although it must be noted that there is no necessary connection between vagrancy as universally understood and this statutory definition. A man who is convicted of an offence against a certain law is held to be a rogue and vagabond, and is thereby rendered liable to imprisonment with hard labour for three calendar months ”

“ We have thus evidence of what, for the sake of clearness, we may term three distinct ages, though there is no real distinction, because one period glided into another as imperceptibly as our old year is followed by the new. ”

“ It is interesting to remember that the ‘more modern’ ancients procured their tin chiefly from the mines of Cornwall, and it may have been that the people of this Bronze age found their way in their rude canoes to the coasts of Cornwall, or, at anyrate, obtained their tin from other tribes who had done business with the earliest of the Cornish miners. ”