losing its intensity. Gracious Heaven! What if
the globe, like everything upon it, should be
mortal! What if it has only an allotted span of
life, and is getting past its prime! Suppose,
century after century, it should get colder and
colder, and weaker and yet more weak. Suppose
its inhabitants should do the same, their
passions gradually dying out, the race declining
first in energy and ultimately in numbers, until
at last there is an end of all; the people extinct,
the world dead, but still lingering in the firmament,
the pale spectre of its former self —  like
the moon, which surely looks, on careful
inspection, like the ghost of a dead world, depopulated,
and icy cold. Its very lustre is cadaverous, and
its light is not its own, but borrowed.

The earth certainly seems to have some of
the characteristics of mortality. It has its
ague-fits, which make it quake. If you overwork
it, or tax it too much, it breaks down,
as a man or an animal does —  witness the
failure of certain wine-crops, and the exhaustion
of certain portions of the over-taxed
soil. What do we know of the earth? It is
terrible to know so little. Between us and the
antipodes what is there? There are strata of
rocks of different orders, there are metal, coal,
water, fire —  of the last we want more news.
What is the exact nature and extent of that
great furnace? How many thousands of square
miles of the glowing mass? How is the fuel
supplied to it? If there be fire it must consume,
one would think; or, if there be nothing for
it to consume, it must go out. Where does
the draught come from to keep it alive?

Perhaps it will be said that there is heat in
the central portion of the earth, without fire:
just as there is heat, but no fire in the human
body; and this again is suggestive of life in the
earth, seeing that heat in the bodies of animals
is there, only while life is there. The heat and
the vitality go together; and if this be so with
the earth, and if it should be true that its
warmth is slowly declining, the natural inference
would be that its life is ebbing gradually away,
and that the warmth  —  as in the old or dying
animal —  is declining first, at the extremities. Is
there no possibility of making experiments in
connexion with this interesting question. Could
we not bore more deeply into the globe we
live in, than we have ever done yet? Could we
not test the temperature at a certain depth, and
then ten years afterwards try it again at exactly
the same distance from the external surface?

Every addition to our knowledge gives us
an added idea of the amount of life and
movement that there is in the world. We always
find there is less of inertness and more of
sensitiveness and vitality in all things than we
expected. To the ignorant, a tooth is a piece of
bone; to the initiated, it is a living, sensitive
organ. There is less of torpid existence than
we imagine: more, much more, of life. How
wonderful is that life of plants, of which we
know so much. We can breed them of different
kinds, as we can animals. We almost
get to believe them conscious.

It is a theory which I have heard put forward
by one of our greatest scientific authorities,
that there is NOTHING STILL IN THE
WORLD. Every object, according to this system,
be it what it may, is compounded of infinitesimal
atoms, cohering with a greater or less
degree of density and closeness; and those
atoms are all, and at all times, in motion. Even
an iron crowbar will not be like what it looks
like now, a thousand years hence; the changes
which are to make it that different thing at the
end of that period, are in operation at this
moment, and will be in operation through all the
intervening moments. Life and movement
everywhere. Everywhere progression —  except in the
mind of an obstinate and prejudiced man, which
is almost the only stationary thing under the
sun.

But whither is all this movement tending?
One tendency, at any rate, induced by all
that we have learned, and all that we have
speculated on, is a tendency to inquire further,
and to beat at the gate of the temple of knowledge
with eager hands and importunate cries.
We must not be impatient, however. Geology
is but a young science. We know not what it
may reveal to us, as it advances towards
maturity. We are finding our way through the
Mont Cenis; who knows but that our research
may, ere long, take a downward direction, so
that we may get something more than a mere
surface knowledge of this great round mass on
which it is our lot to dwell?

A CHEAP PASSAGE HOME.

"THIRTY-EIGHT, I think you said, with extras,
and the steward's fee two guineas more?" I
asked. My tone of voice was despondent enough,
for I saw something like a lazy scorn come over
the clerk's face as he replied,

"That's correct. Two guineas at least."

"Those, then, are the lowest terms for cabin
passengers."

"The lowest, by the James Watt," returned
the shipping clerk, with every sign of being
bored at my pertinacity, and rustling the leaves
of his ledger to and fro.

"You may, of course, get berthed much more
cheaply among the Dutch or Spanish vessels in
harbour, but in that case we can do nothing to
further your views."

I sighed and turned away. Poverty, no doubt,
often causes a man to take a jaundiced view of
the conduct and motives of those around him;
but I could not help fancying that the persons
lounging about the office where this brief
dialogue had taken place, and who had looked up
from their newspapers, or suspended their chat
to listen to my request, were regarding me with
contemptuous wonder. A foreigner, fairly well
dressed, in that city of palaces, and unable or
unwilling to pay some forty-four pounds for a
luxurious passage to England!

I hurried away, but when out of sight of the
office windows, I sat down upon a stone post on