to a nation than sweeping off the best of
the population by wholesale conscriptions. A
people does not soon recover such a terrible
drain; it is just the case of a man who has had
a wasting fever. They tell us that, in some
parts of Germany, the people are still feeling
the effects of the Thirty Years' War.

But things are changing rapidly. We no
longer have it all our own way in the manufacturing
world. Fifty years of something more
like peace than the fifty which preceded them,
are giving other nations a chance.

France moves less than some of the rest,
because France keeps up such a vast army. But
even France is now a very different rival in the
walks of trade from the France of half a century
ago. The excessive caution of French traders
used to be proverbial; nearly all their largest
transactions were merely retail compared with
those of our houses. Now, everything in France
is wholesale. "Retail business," says M.
About, in his Le Progrès, "cannot keep its
ground: even the little village shops must soon
be branches of some company. The small
dealer is doomed to disappear altogether."

As steam has lessened the difference between
our own and other navies, so it has gone far to
equalise the manufacturing power of nations.
Italy with no coal, but with abundant metallic
ores, can now get seaborne coal cheaply, and
will surely turn her energies in more hopeful
directions, when the enervating crotchets of
pope and cardinals have gone the way of the
miserable political system which so long
paralysed the country.

The island of Elba is full of iron, not
deposited in regular beds as it so generally is
with us, but rather (as in Cornwall) thrown
up by volcanic agency, the molten metal having
turned the stratified rocks near it, into
metamorphic. Like Cornwall, the greater part of
the island is of granite or serpentine, mingled,
however, with such a variety of crystalline forms
as to make it a very paradise of mineralogists:
aqua-marine, tourmaline, rock crystals of all
kinds, aspar, agate, &c. Some of these are very
rare. A silicate of aluminium and of lithium,
which M. Simonin* calls "Castor," is found
only here and in Sweden; and a silicate of
aluminium and cœsium, which he calls "Pollux,"
is peculiar to the island; a small crystal of this,
half as big as one's thumb, was sold to the
Paris Mineralogical Museum for twelve pounds
sterling. Ilvaïte is another mineral only found
here. It is a silicate containing much iron.
Lelièvre discovered it in 1800, and called it
iénite, in honour of the victory of Jena. This
put all the German savans in a furious rage;
iénite they would not hear of; Liévrite they re-
christened it, intending, thereby, to honour the
discoverer. So that, as M. Simonin and others
call it ilvaïte (from "Ilva," the Latin name of
the island), the luckless mineral has at present
three names.

* Writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes for
15th of September last.

Other "curiosities" are the beautiful
arrangements of golden-yellow pyrites crystal,
which the miners sell to visitors. There is
also loadstone in several forms. The business
of specimen hunting has long been well understood;
indeed, more than one of the better
cicerones have made important mineralogical
discoveries. But the iron is the great thing, and
it is found everywhere. The island is as full of
it as the "Paris Mountain," in Anglesea, was of
copper. A good deal of it occurs in the form
of sand, like that on the beach at Taranaki, the
richness of which helped to make the unhappy
New Plymouth people so eager to keep their
allotments. Now, how is the iron worked? Why,
very inefficiently. Most of the mines are mere
surface scratchings. In many places nothing
else is needed. At Rio Marina, for instance,
where you land from the Tuscan Piombino, the
very mud is black and metallic, and the sea is,
for a great distance, coloured dark red by the
waters of the little stream which comes down
from the "iron hills." The mode of bringing
down the ore is primitive enough. You see a
long string of donkeys carrying it in their
panniers. Gangs of porters are then employed to
haul it (still in baskets) on ship-board. The
wheelbarrow is an unknown institution.
Possibly the Elbans have the same prejudice against
it which the Scotchman at Oporto found the
Portuguese had; when he had imported a barrow
at considerable cost, his gardener at once gave
warning, indignantly asking, "Would you set
a man to do the work of a beast?" Mechanical
science is at a low ebb in Elba. There is not a
crane in the whole island, nor a "slide" up which
loaded waggons might, as they came down, pull
up those which had been emptied at the bottom.
When something of this kind, with tramway to
match, was proposed to the Grand-Duke Leopold,
"It's very clever; but what is to be done with all
my donkeys?" he replied. Still, in spite of the
grand-duke, the quantity of iron exported has
greatly increased—from some fifteen thousand
tons a year to an average of fifty-six thousand tons
between 1851 and 1861. The year ending last
June gave a total of one hundred thousand tons.
At present no more can be exported with roads
and means of shipment so imperfect as they are,
and an open roadstead instead of a safe harbour.
But the demand must go on increasing
rapidly; and the supply is unlimited. M.
Simonin compares it to the guano in the Chincha
Isles, which, in the same way, is concentrated
in a small space; but, in the guano isles, the
wealth is only on the surface; in Elba the
deposits of ore are so thick that they can supply
a million tons a year for two thousand years
without being exhausted. M. Simonin, who
writes in the Revue des Deux Mondes, an
advanced and somewhat "Anglophile" publication,
traces the great backwardness of the mining art
in Elba and on the opposite mainland, chiefly to
the fact that the state has worked its own
mines. This concession to English views is very
remarkable in one of a nation who are so fond
of expecting government to do everything for