thousand on a tobacco-plant. Dodart is said
to have counted five hundred and twenty-
nine thousand seeds on a single elm-tree, and
yet these plants are far from being the most
fecund. The number of spores produced by a
fern is almost incalculable.

A Monsieur Pouchet, Professor of Natural
History at Rouen, and a zealous defender of
the spontaneous generation theory (or, as it is
now called, "heterogenia"), was annoyed by
continually hearing statements and speculations
about what the air might carry; and
he resolved to find out what it did really
carry. Having procured with the greatest care
some dust from nooks and crannies on the
tops of the towers and steeples of ancient
Rouen, which, in all probability, no hand had
touched since the mason placed the stones,
M. Pouchet examined it with most scrupulous
attention. He found, amidst much inorganic
matter, more or less organic substances, and
among these were always found minute seeds
easily distinguishable by their microscopical
characteristics. Respecting the power of the air and
winds in transporting small bodies to enormous
distances, it is unquestionably proved that in a
great irruption of Vesuvius its ashes were
carried into Bohemia, and the great Pacific
Ocean; of course, then, the spores of fungi
might be carried all round the world.

                MY WILL

   SINCE I have no lands or houses,
        And no hoarded golden store,
   What can I leave those who love me
        When they see my face no more?
   Do not smile; I am not jesting,
        Though my words sound gay and light,
   Listen to me, dearest Alice,
         I will make my will to-night.

  First for Mabel, who will never
        Let the dust of future years
   Dim the thought of me, but keep it
        Brighter still—perhaps with tears;
   In whose eyes whate'er I glance at,
        Touch, or praise, will always shine,
   Through a strange and sacred radiance,
        By Love's charter, wholly mine;
   She will never lend another
        Slenderest link of thought I claim,
   I will therefore to her keeping,
        Leave my memory and my name.

  Bertha will do truer service
        To her kind than I have done,
   So I leave to her young spirit
        The long work I have begun.
   Well! the threads are tangled, broken,
        And the colours do not blend,
   She will lend her earnest striving,
        Both to finish and amend:
   And, when it is all completed,
        Strong with care and rich with skill,
   Just because my hands began it,
        She will love it better still.

  Ruth shall have my dearest token,
         The one link I dread to break,
  The one duty that I live for,
         She, when I am gone, will take.
  Sacred is the trust I leave her,
        Needing patience, prayer, and tears,
   I have striven to fulfil it,
        As she knows, these many years.
   Sometimes hopeless, faint, and weary,
        Yet a blessing shall remain
   With the task, and Ruth will prize it
        For my many hours of pain.

  What must I leave for my Alice?
        Nothing, love, to do or bear,
   Nothing that can dim your blue eyes
        With the slightest cloud of care;
   I will leave my heart to love you
        With the tender faith of old,
   Slill to comfort, warm, and light you,
        Should your life grow dark or cold:
   No one else, my child, can claim it;
        If you find old scars of pain,
   They were only wounds, my darling,
        There is not, I trust, one stain.

  Are my gifts indeed so worthless
        Now the slender sum is told?
   Well! I know not; years may bless them
        With a nobler price than gold.
   Am I poor? Ah, no, most wealthy!
        Not in these poor gifts you take,
   But in the true hearts that tell me
        You will keep them for my sake.

           UNIQUE PUBLISHING.

IN a shady corner of that incomprehensible
Palais Royal miscellany, where magazines of
sham jewellery are set out to view, and a
thriving business is done in that way, and where
Monsieur Lucullus is walking down eternally to
dine with Monsieur Lucullus at the sign of the
Three Provençal Brothers—where a many-headed
Heliogabalus rides rampant, and where bonnes,
or nursery-maids, do mostly congregate, lies the
modest tabernacle of M. Dentu, the famous
pamphlet publisher, whence flutters forth, daily,
clouds of Sybilline leaves, which shadow out
obscurely the changes political of the awful
Memnon of the Tuileries. Under strange titles
they fall rustling at the feet of astonished
Parisians, who pick them up, and try to spell out
what the oracle means to say. There is nothing
that outrages the fitness of things in this function
of M. Dentu's; and though one may whisper,
lightly, "What on earth does he in this
galley?" being thus awkwardly hedged in with
incompatible kitchen batteries and aluminium
ornaments, the locality is about the best in the
whole great Pandemonium on the Seine.

But some thirty or forty years back this
Arcadia, whose sylvan deities are the faun Soyer
and the satyr Carême, could scarcely boast so
innocent a worship. There was then sempiternal
bal masque, day and night; there was
then saturnalia in permanence; and those pretty
gardens, round which run the shopkeeping
arcades, were but the happy hunting-grounds of
vice and flaunting abomination. Overhead, at
those bright windows, au premier, where smug
restaurant sets you out the little table for the
dejeuner at "fixed price," where, too, mounts
soothingly the afternoon's music, discoursed by