which he drank the health of the House. Then
somebody got up and proposed "glasses
round," and a third speaker rose to know if
this was a private or a general treat? Of
course, this all seems very shocking to gentlemen
of classical education, who merely crow like
cocks to silence obnoxious speakers.

"When the Prince of Wales was a "sensation,"
the American papers went into the most absurd
particulars of his wardrobe, wrote leaders on
what number of gloves he wore, and lamented
his too general use of "aërated drinks" (soda-
water is not common in America), and which
they described as so baleful to the English
aristocracy. The papers swarmed with this sort
of paragraph:

The rumour, circulated with very bad taste, that
the Prince danced at Cincinnati with Miss Susan
Denin, and waltzed at Boston with Mrs. Florence,
is a rosy fiction, as is the sequel of those ladies
having next day received a handsome present from
some mysterious hand.

There was a story in one of the comic papers,
of a rich New York merchant at the great city
ball pulling the Prince from a pretty nameless
girl and introducing him to his wife, a vulgar
Irish giantess, with these words: "Say, perhaps
your lordship would like to dance with Mrs.
S——; she's a most agreeable partner, and
she's got twenty thousand dollars' worth of
jewellery on her."

The Chicago Zouaves were the last "volunteer
sensation" in my time. The young men
met, talked of nothing but the elastic vigour of
the Zouaves, their endurance, their tiger-cat
leaps, their gymnastic courage, their steel and
leather limbs, and their powers of bearing
fatigue.

I do not know how long this "sensation"
would have lasted had not the "Blondin"
sensation suddenly cancelled and superseded it.
The papers had a new topic. They now daily
discussed Blondin's dress and diet, the birthplace
of his great-grandfather, the causes that
led him to mount the rope, and the various
vows and resolutions he had made as to future
feats.

                ON TAILS.

IN one form or another, the tail is a member
of universal, or almost universal, occurrence
throughout the whole range of animated existence.
If we leave out the lower families of
living forms embraced in the radiated and
molluscan types, and in the insects—for the thread-
like appendages resembling pine leaves which
some of the latter have are not true tails—we
find this protean member playing a most active
and conspicuous part in almost every animal, be
it mammal, bird, fish, or reptile. Nor is the
part it plays conspicuous and active only: it is
often highly ornamental, often highly useful,
often a feature of the first necessity. It has
great physiognomical expression, and seems to
have been considered an essential feature of the
animal frame; for in multitudes of instances we
find it preserved in animals, such as the tortoise
and pig, to which, as far as we can discern, it is
neither ornamental nor useful. Some
physiologists even recognise the rudiments of a tail
in the coccygeal vertebrae of the human race;
just as in the so-called wingless birds, the wing-
bones are found to exist in an undeveloped
state. Indeed, we are not without accounts of
the existence of tailed negroes in Eastern
Africa; but the wearers of these appendages
have not been produced as yet.

Some form of tail has existed through all the
ages with which geological investigation has
made us acquainted. The ancient trilobites had
often caudal spines and pointed appendages, as
has the modern limuli, which are among their
nearest analogues. The "old-fashioned fishes"
of the subcarboniferous rocks had tails, as well
as their modern representatives, though of a
somewhat peculiar type, the vertebral column
being prolonged into the upper lobe of the tail,
which was longer than the lower. This
"heterocercal" form was the prevailing style in
which tails were worn until after the period of
the Oolite, that misty mid-region of the geological
dark ages, after which tails of the
"homocercal," or equally-lobed, form came into vogue,
and are now almost the universal rule. Thus
we see that a peculiar form of this member
becomes a characteristic of geological time, and
has a significance not unworthy of the attention
bestowed on it by Agassiz.

But passing over for the present the scientific
value and practical use of the tail, let us
regard first its capacity and character for ornament
and physiognomical expression, taking, as
the example most familiar, the tail of the horse.

The grace and dignity of this form of the tail,
as well as the peculiar beauty of its material,
have procured for it a partial exemption from
the contempt which has fallen on most of its
family. From the remotest antiquity it has
been borne as a standard before armies, and
alike from the turban of the sheik and the
helmet of the cuirassier "has braved, a thousand
years, the battle and the breeze." The tail
of the ostrich has been no more universal ornament
for the head of the fair than the tail of
the horse has been for the head of the brave.
In this capacity it has flaunted from the pyramids
of Egypt to the minarets of Lucknow,
and at this day dangles beside the beards and
moustaches of tough troopers of every clime.
The Ottoman soldier hopes for no higher dignity
than the pachalic, which entitles him to be
preceded in ceremonious procession by three such
official emblems; and among the trophies which
hang high in the Invalides of Paris and the
arsenal of Venice, are horse-tail standards
captured in desperate battle with Turk or Algerine.

Somewhat disguised by artificial curlings, the
horse's tail has long covered the head of the
judge on the bench, and, in the wig of the
Chancellor, added dignity to the debates of the
most august of senates. From these high
callings it has to some extent fallen when its
material forms the covering of furniture