affairs were managed. Thus, when the day of
trial came, the country people, carefully secured
against oppression, were content; the land-
holders also knew that they paid their allegiance
to a thoughtful government, which, in its
revenue department, had made firm stand against
the alienation of landed property, and had even
watched jealously all private alienations as sources
of certain discontent and symptoms of either
some distress capable of remedy, or some pressure
of the revenue, or some sinister influence at
work.

To another feature in the good administration
of the Punjab we owe much. Before the critical
day came a large part of its revenue had been
spent on laying open the whole region and its
resources by the active pushing on of public
works. Three-quarters of a million have been
already spent on the Baree Doab canal, for
which the Sikhs will have good reason to be
grateful to the government. The works on the
great Trunk Road from the Delhi frontier to
Peshawur had opened the way by which could
be despatched, in a rainy season, troops, stores,
and siege trains, the vast materials and
munitions of war, to the siege of Delhi. But for
that road Delhi might have held out for at least
another season. It is questionable whether the
fidelity of the Punjab would have held out also
for so long a time. A million and a quarter has
been spent on Punjab roads; there is an enormous
mass of work yet to be done and bridges
to be built by thousands. Also there is the
railway from Umritsur to Mooltan, which the
Sindh Railway Company now sets about
constructing.

The Punjab during the Indian crisis
supplied England, not with men only, but with
money. It had to pay its own disarmed Sepoys,
new levies and provincial battalions; but there
was so little money to be raised out of the Delhi
territory that the army of besiegers must depend
also in no small measure upon the Punjab
treasuries. By two or three wise financial arrangements,
none of them illiberal, and which consisted
not in any levying of fresh taxes or forced
contributions, but in some short dated anticipation
of receipts and postponement of payments,
means were found to despatch the army before
Delhi, in several sums, not less than two hundred
thousand pounds. Contingents of men were
also sent in aid of the besiegers by chiefs whom
a steady course of generous and friendly treatment
had secured as faithful feudatories. The
Cis-Sutlej chiefs and the Maharajah Goolab
Sing sent their contingents; English foot
regiments, the Guide Corps, Punjab infantry and
cavalry were sent by Sir John Lawrence; waggon
trains were organised from Mooltan to Lahore,
and on to Delhi, to convey men, stores, and
material for the besieging force. At last, the
day came when a last effort had to be made for
the supply of reinforcements. British Power,
even in the Punjab, was balanced on a hair.
Fierce tribes were round about, waiting the
hour to spring, a population, faithful to the
strong, was watching with a strained attention
the course of a siege that would determine for
it whether mastery remained with us. There
were six thousand armed and twelve thousand
disarmed Hindoostanees, and there remained in
the Punjab only a few English troops employed
in guard over the disarmed Sepoys, and
about three thousand men locked up in the
Peshawur valley, who were suffering from fever,
with no other disposable force than the remainder
of her Majesty's 8th and 61st at Jullundur and
Ferozepore, and her Majesty's 52nd at Umritsur.
If these should go, there would be left no
European reserve whatever. There would not be
five thousand Europeans, sick included, left to
hold the country. Nevertheless, these men
were urgently required at Delhi. Upon the
event at Delhi all depended, and these soldiers
also were sent forward with all despatch. And
then, says the official report, again passing
beyond the reserve of official language, the die was
finally cast; the supreme effort had been made;
the cup had been drained to its last drop; the
chord had been strained almost to breaking. If
Delhi were taken, the successful course of the
Punjab administration would remain uninterrupted.
If with the last aid Delhi were not
taken, and that speedily, there would then be
a struggle, not only for European dominon, but
even for European existence, within the Punjab
itself. We know the result. By the twentieth
of September in the same year Delhi was finally
recaptured by the British, and the Punjabees,
who had a private grudge of their own against
the city, are proud of the part they took in its
reduction.

OUR NEAREST RELATION.

MEN cannot help feeling a little ashamed of
their cousin-german the Ape. His close yet
grotesque and clumsy semblance of the human
form is accompanied by no gleams of higher
instinct. Our humble friend the dog, our
patient fellow-labourer the horse, are nearer to us
in this respect. The magnanimous and sagacious
elephant, doomed though he be to all-fours, is
godlike compared with this spitefully ferocious
creature. Strangely enough, too, the most
repulsive and ferocious of all apekind—the
recently discovered Gorilla—is, the comparative
anatomist assures us, nearest to us of all: the
most closely allied in structure to the human
form.

Recently discovered to science, we should
have said, for rumours of the existence of such
a creature reach us from the lips of more than
one observant Old Traveller, but were regarded
by Cuvier as confused versions of species already
known. A very interesting probable allusion has
been disinterred from the Voyage of Hanno, the
early Carthaginian navigator:

    On the third day, having sailed from thence,
passing the streams of fire, we came to a bay called
the Horn of the South. In the recess there was an
island like the first, having a lake, and in this there
was another island full of wild men. But much the
greater part of them were women with hairy bodies,