the focus of an opposite ellipse hundreds of
yards away. Such a principle was
illustrated oddly in the great church of
Agrigentum in Sicily. The architect—perhaps
intentionally—built several confessionals of
an elliptic form, with corresponding opposite
ellipses, in which whoever stood heard all the
secrets whispered to the priest. A horrible
amount of scandal sprang up in the town;
nobody's sins were safe from getting into
unaccountable publicity. Intriguing ladies
changed their lovers and their priests. It
was in vain; their misdeeds still remained
town property. The church soon became
such a temple of truth that nothing was left
to be hidden in it, but at last by chance
a discovery was made of the character of the
tale-telling stones, and the walls had their
ears stopped.

From the sounds that travel through the
air, we will turn once more to the substances,
the birds, and say a word or two of them:
regarding them especially as travellers, by
whom oceans are crossed and countries
traversed. The migration of birds used to
be denied, or sometimes it was asserted that
they did not migrate but wintered with the
fishes at the bottom of lakes and rivers. Dr.
Mather taught that they flew to an
undiscovered satellite, a little moon that had
escaped observation but was at no very great
distance from the earth. The fact of their
migration is now not only established but so
very notorious in almost all its details that
little need be here said about it. Only we
must remark upon the marvellousness of the
fact that every bird knows when to go abroad,
and times its departure not to an exact date
but to the exact and fit time every season.
Birds arrive in their foreign haunts just when
the fruits are ripe on which they go to feed,
or which they are sent to protect by the
suppression of any too great ravages from
insects. How does the loriot resident near
Paris know every year precisely on what day
there will be the first ripe figs in islands of
the Southern Archipelago. He is never—no
migratory bird ever—is cheated of his dues
by a late season. If the season be late he
arrives late. How can a bird know, hundreds
of miles away, what sort of weather there will
be in Greece, in Egypt, or in England. Eastern
nations that observed this close agreement
between the movements of birds and the
appearance of insects or of fruits, observed or
invented sometimes a like concord between
birds and flowers. When the nightingales
appear, it is said, in certain parts of India,
the roses burst spontaneously into blossom.

Then there are other things that travel
through the air, of man's invention, simple
applications to use—or to no use—of the
powers of nature, balloons. There were
balloons before Mongolfier. The Father
Ménestrier, a historian of Lyons, relates that at
the end of the reign of Charlemagne there
fell in that town a balloon with several people.
The skymen were surrounded by the town's-
people, who took them for magicians sent to
devastate the land by Grimwald, Duke of
Benevento, and they were only saved from
destruction by the interference of the learned
and enlightened bishop Agoberd. Father
Kircher also tells how long ago some Jesuits
imprisoned among Indians tried in vain by
various ways to recover liberty, and at last
one of them, who was free, constructed a
big dragon of paper. He then went to the
barbarians and told them that they were
menaced by the wrath of Heaven with great
evils which they could avert only by the
liberation of his countrymen. The savages
laughed. The priest then went to his dragon,
and having suspended in the midst of it a
composition of pitch, wax, and sulphur,
fastened behind it a portentous tail and sent
the beast up into the clouds, where it
appeared to vomit fire. There was written on
it, in the language of the country, "The
wrath of God is about to fall on you!" The
barbarians in great terror ran to free the
Jesuits. Soon afterwards, the paper having
caught fire, the dragon fluttered, struggled,
and disappeared in flame, and the barbarians
took its withdrawal for a sign of the divine
approval of their conduct.

Let us turn our faces now to the great fire
dragon of the sky, the sun. Every one knows
that there are spots upon its face. Leibnitz,
writing in a courtly way for the edification of
an old-world Queen of Prussia, called them
beauty spots, giving them out for a sublime
justification of the use of patches. The sun
is a long way off, its light is eight minutes on
the road before it reaches us, although light
travels with amazing speed. A cannon-ball,
if it could be fired up at the sun, its speed
never diminishing, would about hit its mark
at the end of eighteen years. Yet, though
the sun is so distant, and light travels so fast
in eight minutes, there are other stars so
distant that their light is six years on the journey
to our eyes. Let such a star be now
annihilated, and for six years we shall still
see it. The light of other stars that make a
mist before our telescopes comes from so far
away that it has been travelling even for two
millions of years before it reached the point
in space that this our world (as we call it)
occupies.

We might see more or less with other
senses. The eagle has a telescopic eye, sunk
in its orbit as within a tube, and possibly the
eagle sees the moons of Saturn glittering,
has long since known that in our moon
there are mountains and valleys, and had at
a very remote period of our history discovered
more stars than Herschel, or Adams, or Hind.

There are stars upon earth apart from the
opera—fire-flies and luminous insects. An
old traveller tells a pretty story about them.
He says that on the coast of Guinea he used
to see the blacks preparing to go out to fish
soon after sunset. The young girls were the