necessarily a jolly row; and even in the
vague generality of the term I see an attention
to the fitness of things that should, if we
all got our deserts, have caused an augmentation
of the unlucky actor's salary, rather
than his dismissal from his situation. Now
Monsieur Huzar, the latter-day prophet, seems
inclined to be as great a generaliser as the
country actor. He does not know exactly of
what nature the great catastrophe on which he
is continually dwelling is to be; he seems but
to have a vague idea of it altogether, and to
participate in the actor's opinion that there
will be a jolly row. There will be one,
probably.

"Where are we going?" asks the latter-day
prophet. Where indeed! What is life, then?
"It is the eternal struggle of liberty against
fatality, and the definitive triumph of the brute
force of nature over human liberty. It is the
myth of Brahma devouring his ankles and
the serpent devouring his tail."

Among the numerous faults which
Monsieur Huzar modestly admits may be found in
his book (which might be called The Science
of the Future by a man one hundred years
before his age), the gravest, in his opinion, is
its being totally incomprehensible to the vast
majority of his readers. But this, he adds,
with increasing confidence, is a defect to be
found in all prophecies, which, written in one
epoch, are only realised long afterwards.
Thus the latter-day prophet describes himself
as being quite resigned to not being either
understood or believed in this age—certain
as he is, that his formulas will, one day,
become the creed of the whole world. Who,
if the second French empire had been
predicted in eighteen hundred and forty-seven,
would have believed in the prediction?—the
prophetess would have been scouted as a mad
woman. When Joan of Arc prophesied the
raising of the siege of Orleans, the coronation
of the king at Rheims, and the expulsion
of the English from France: what difficulty
had she to make herself understood? and yet
events turned out exactly as she predicted
them.

When Christopher Columbus prophesied
the New World, the kings, the savans, the
practical men of the epoch, looked upon him
as a lunatic; he had infinite trouble in
order to obtain the means of starting on an
expedition which was to enrich Spain, and
give a new world to that already known.
Thus, Monsieur Huzar tells us, the vulgar will
neither understand nor believe when the
organic destruction of the world by means of
science is announced to them.

When Monsieur Huzar sees a man running
about in the vast storehouses of science,
carrying with him the lighted torch of investigation,
he is mortally terrified and alarmed.
For, did not Pliny fall a victim to his curiosity?
Was not the learned physician,
Reichtmann, who renewed the experiments
on the electric kite after Franklin, struck
down dead in his study? Was not Pilâtre
de Rosier, one of the successors of
Montgolfier, precipitated from his balloon, and
dashed to pieces? Did not Dulong lose an
arm and an eye in preparing chlorine of
azote? When for the first time the
solidification of carbonic acid was attempted, did
not the apparatus burst, and was not the
demonstrator torn into a thousand pieces?
Have not chloroform and ether produced
numerous accidents? Does not every man
know that engineers and stokers can never
pursue their infernal callings for more than
six years? Does not everybody know,
likewise, that aeronauts always fall victims to
their temerity after their fortieth or fiftieth
ascent? Everybody does not know these
facts, though the latter-day prophet does.
Some people are foolish enough to imagine
that the accidents detailed above have not
been by any means the result of exaggerated
science, but have occurred because the
persons making the experiments did not know
enough, instead of knowing too much. Some
people would be bold enough to aver that
the average mortality among aëronauts, by
accident, is not by any means greater than
in any other calling of an unusually perilous
nature, pursued by a very small body of
men. There are many aëronauts now alive
who have made their sixty, eighty, one
hundred, aërial flights; and our own British
aëronaut, Mr. Green, completed, we believe,
his five hundredth ascent three or four years
since.

This, then, is the end of our march of
intellect, our civilisation, our arts and
sciences and manufactures, our steam-engines,
steam-guns, thrashing and sawing-machines.
This is what we have come to with our
electric telegraph, our electro-biology, our
Royal Institution in Albermarle Street, and
our Museum of Economic Geology. Exaggeration
of Science! Cataclysm! Collapse! It
is all up with everything!

        ATTRACTION AND REPULSION.

THE French head of the Arab Bureau,
Monsieur Charles Richard, was sitting in his official
seat, administering justice in open court,
surrounded by more or less friendly chiefs,
the leaders of more or less barbarous tribes.
Djilali, the accomplished chaouch, had
disappeared, to take part in the miraculous affair
of the donkeys and the sacks of wheat, which
we have already recorded, and the makrezani,
or courier, his worthy substitute, introduced
to the court a female plaintiff. She was a
girl of from eighteen to twenty years, lovely
both in face and figure, a charming model of
the Arab type in all its purity, with brilliant
eyes, alert mien, and clad as simply but also
as neatly as a woman of the middle ranks
could possibly be.

Unlike the majority of the plaintiffs of the
opposite sex, she seemed to have a perfect