disturbances, and to turn them out fat into the
world, temptation, and social degradation, are
the last things provided against.

* Volume viii., page 31.

What we want is a thorough revision of the
whole code of penal sentences, substituting task
for time sentences, so that the time of detention
shall be elastic, and determined by the prisoner's
own conduct and sincerity of desire—intermediate
stages of freedom, as in the Irish system,
by which a man can be tested before trusted—a
strict surveillance after liberation, that there
may be help in the hour of need, and a friend or
a judge as the man's path leads to good or to ill
—and an organisation which shall leave a man
free to prove his moral progress, not only set
him as so much wax run into a mould, marked
"a good prisoner" on the one side, and "an
unreformed criminal" on the other.

As a matter of self-defence, society should
insist on the reformation of its criminals, for
they are costly diseases—excrescences on the
body politic which are nourished at the
expense of every other member. One young
woman thief whose history is narrated by Miss
Carpenter, made five hundred a year by pocket
picking and other forms of petty larceny; of
thirty boys and thirty girls, taken at random,
the cost of prosecutions and maintenance in
jail are computed at one thousand eight
hundred and seventy-seven pounds, and the amount
of property ascertained to have been stolen by
them—leaving a large margin for the unknown
quantity—was two hundred and fifty-five pounds
seventeen shillings and twopence. One young
woman had six times set up her mother in a
decent way of living, out of the proceeds of her
own crimes and vices, the mother having
previously gone to much expense in having had her
sister trained to pick pockets, by a first-rate
London thief; the five years' gains of a youth
of twenty, were one thousand eight hundred
pounds; sixteen pickpockets, the eldest of
whom was thirty and the youngest fifteen, cost
the public by their depredations thirty-two
thousand pounds, and the ratepayers for their
maintenance and prosecution one thousand five
hundred pounds; a youth of fourteen used to
get nine or ten pounds a week as his share in
the gains of his gang; another does badly at a
fair if he gets only two or three pounds, but
tolerably well if he rises to twenty or twenty-
five pounds; a family of five have from August,
1846, to September, 1849, a hundred and twelve
months' imprisonment among them, representing
fifteen prosecutions, with the longest sentence
eighteen months, and the shortest, one; a little
fellow of fifteen had been free only four days in
twelve months, that time of detention
representing three several commitments; while of
three lads, aged fourteen, fourteen, and nine,
two had been twice convicted before the last
offence spoken of, and one no less than seven
times. Surely then any system which would
prevent either the first commission of crime, or
put a stop to its recurrence, would be a gain to
the country now so heavily taxed for the
maintenance, prosecution, and detention of criminals,
not to speak of their depredations which represent
an immense sum in the aggregate of simple
loss to the public.

PHOTOLOGICAL FACTS.

IN TWO CHAPTERS. CHAPTER II.

LIGHT was once supposed to be instantaneous;
that is to say, self-existent, generally diffused,
filling all illuminated places, as water fills the bed
of the sea, without being in any way related to
motion, or without having any proper motion of
its own. It was supposed that bodies were
brought into the light, rather than that the light
came to them.

According to Aristotle—as far as his
explanation is intelligible—light was a  presence.
It was not fire, nor any bodily thing radiating
from the luminous body, but it was the simple
presence of a fire, or of some other luminous
matter of unknown nature.

Descartes compared the impression of light
upon our eye to that which distant objects, felt
or discovered by means of a stick, make upon a
blind man's hand. The Cartesians, his disciples,
held that light was a power or faculty possessed by
every luminous body; the faculty being to excite
in us, and in all creatures gifted with sight,
certain clear and vivid sensations. They added,
that what is required for the perception of light,
is, that we be so formed as to be capable of those
sensations; which is exactly tantamount to
stating that, if you can, do a thing, you can, and
if you can't, you can't.

Father Mallebranche, with clearer intuition,
explained the nature of light by supposing it
analogous to sound, which is produced by the
vibrations of sonorous bodies. Strong vibrations
produce loud sounds; feeble vibrations, feeble
sounds. By quick vibrations, high and shrill
notes are produced; by slower vibrations, the
deeper and lower notes. So he supposed it to
be with light and colours. All the parts of a
luminous body, he believed, are in rapid motion,
which, by extremely quick pulses, is constantly
compressing the subtle matter that exists
between the luminous body and the eye, thereby
exciting vibrations of pressure. In proportion
as these vibrations are greater, the body appears
the more luminous, the light more intense; and,
as they are more quick or slow, the body appears
of this or that colour. Huyghens also attributed
the propagation of light to vibrations or waves
in a fluid medium.

Sir Isaac Newton advanced a theory the very
reverse of Mallebranche's. His hypothesis was,
that luminous bodies throw off certain very
small particles, which are shot out in all
directions with immense force. Light, therefore,
consists not in a conatus—an effort or inclination
of the materia subtilis to recede from the centre
of the luminous body—a vibration, in short—but,
in a real motion of those particles, darting away
from the luminous body, in right lines, with
incredible velocity.

And then the Newtonians, taking these
particles for granted, went on to remark that