but with the hind-feet, folding the front paws alongside its body. An observer has noticed that the water-voles (water rats) do the same. This agrees with the progress of human swimmers, who usually begin by making too much use of the arms and too little of the legs, but discover later on that the latter are the main aids in swimming either on or below the surface.

The otters are so far modified from the polecat tribe that they have webbed toes; the water-voles have not even this advantage over their land relations. It ought to follow from this that the latter could with a little trouble become aquatic. There is a great deal of evidence to show that there is no hard-and-fast line between land mammals and water mammals so far as this distinction rests on the ability to use both elements. Stoats, for instance, are excellent swimmers, and if put to it for food, would probably learn to catch fish just as the polecat is known to catch eels.

Cats, which have an intense dislike of being wet, swim well, carrying the head high. Their distaste for aquatics does not extend to the larger cats. Tigers are fond of bathing, swim fast, and, in the case of the "river tigers" of the Sunderbunds, and the tigers near the coast of the Straits of Malacca, are constantly noticed in the water.

Whether the trained Egyptian cats, which were used to take waterfowl in the reed-beds by the Nile, ever swam when stalking them does not appear from the ancient pictures; but the extent to which the dog voluntarily becomes aquatic entitles some breeds to be considered amphibious. A dog belonging to a waterman living near one of the London ferries has been known to continue swimming out in the Thames for an hour without coming to land. It did this for amusement on a fine Sunday morning. Another riverside dog was taught to dive, and fetch up stones thrown in which sank to the bottom. This dog would pick out stones from the bottom of a bucket of water, selecting one which it had been shown before from a number of others. It had so far become amphibious that it could use its eyes under water.

In France otter-hound puppies are introduced to their aquatic life by setting their kettle of soup in a pond or stream, so that they must go in deep to feed. Soon they become as fast swimmers on

the surface as the otter itself, though the physical advantages of submarine motion give the otter the advantage when it is below the surface.

As the land-rats and water-voles can swim and run below water, there is no reason to suppose that the various tribes of mice cannot do the same. The housemouse swims on the surface as well as the rat; but it has apparently not yet learnt to dive. All the pachyderms can swim, and very many are as much at home in the water as on land. The story that pigs cut their own throats when swimming is a myth. To prove it, a whole family of pink pigs were chased into a fine muddy pond and made to swim across. They swam well, and the

contour line" of mud along their sides showed that their backs were above water as well as their heads. Elephants are almost as clever in the water as the polar bears. They can swim and walk under water without coming to the surface, keeping the trunk out of the water like a diver's tube. There is plenty of flexibility in an elephant's legs, enough to use in swimming; but the properly aquatic hippopotamus can scarcely be said to swim. It rises and sinks at will, but it habitually walks or runs on the ground at the bottom of the river.

Two South American river creatures seem quite arbitrarily aquatic, the coypu, which might just as well be a land-rat, but is a water-rat "in the process of becoming" a beaver, and the capybara, which is a gigantic water guinea-pig. Each is quite at home in the rivers, and as the capybara is aquatic, there seems no reason why the guineapigs, or the Patagonian cavies, should not learn to swim and dive, if circumstances made it useful. Even man himself becomes almost amphibious in certain regions. Temperature permitting, he swims as well, and dives better, than many of the animals mentioned above, — better, for instance, than any dog. The Greek sponge-fishers and the Arab divers must have sight almost as keen below water as that of the sea-otter. They have even learnt, by practice, to control the consumption of the air-supply in their lungs. The usual time for a hippopotamus to remain below water is five minutes. The pearl-fisher can remain below for two and a half minutes. In a tank a diver has remained under water

four minutes. But temperature marks the limits of man's amphibious habits. Its effects seem less potent on other mammals in the water.

The amphibious beasts of the tropics - hippos, tapirs, elephants, and manatees need warm waters to swim in. But in temperate Europe, or even in the Arctic seas, certain animals seem indifferent to constant wet, and the intense discomfort of "wet clothes" when out of the water. A polar bear is wet, literally, to the skin. The otters, though they have an inner coat, look thoroughly drabbled when out of the water. The land-rat's coat also becomes wet through. The latter avoids water in cold weather; but the otters sit cheerfully on the bank in winter frosts, or even in wind. So do beavers in a Zoo, but their lower fur is probably impervious to water. A piece of beaver fur, with the long coat taken off, was dry at the roots after soaking for two and a half hours in a basin. If the temperature of aquatic animals were naturally low, like that of a fish, their indifference might be explained. A hibernating dormouse is as cold as death; a

tame rat, tested by a clinical thermometer, showed a temperature of 100°, and a live otter can scarcely be of lower temperature than a live cat or a Cape ratel. The caution, "These animals bite," seen posted up in Zoological gardens, precludes any effort at taking their normal heat. But that of a rat, which takes to the water freely when the March winds are blowing, is normal, and there is no reason to suppose that that of the otter is different.

As chill to the surface tissues is always dangerous to warm-blooded creatures, in the absence of an inner layer of fat, which the whale, and in some degree the polar bear, possesses, the fur must be the non-conductor which protects them. Water, unless in movement, is not a quick conductor of heat. The fur, aided by the outer and longer hairs which keep it in place, holds the water-jacket motionless, even if it reaches to the skin; and this "water compress" saves the animal from a chill. If the cold winds extract the warmth from it when standing wet through on land it takes to the water as the relatively warmer element.

NDIA-RUBBER is in a fair way to become one of the prime necessities of civilization. Numberless human beings, in the class which could not afford wet-nurses, owe their lives to the feeding-bottle. Everybody knows that in the last five years the use of pneumatic tires for cycles and solid rubber tires for horse-vehicles has enormously increased our consumption of this article; but, quite apart from that more obvious fact, india-rubber is daily being introduced more and more into all sorts of machinery. Highly competent judges say that if the output could be doubled within a year, so many new applications of the material would instantly arise, that the price would not fall appreciably. As a matter of fact, the export of Para rubber, says an English journal, has increased within the last twenty-five years from 5,600 tons to 20,000 tons; and the price fetched by the

* See the article on India-Rubber or Caoutchouc, in the Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. xii, page $35.

best quality has risen in England from 50c. to 75c. a pound. It is the one jungle product which society finds indispensable. Hundreds of men have racked their brains to produce a substitute, but none has in the least degree succeeded; and such attempts must be permanently discouraged by the knowledge that indiarubber exists in limitless profusion upon known spots of the world's surface which may at any time be made accessible.

In any of the swampy equatorial regions, where vegetation grows rank and sappy, so that a knife will slash through branches as if they were made of cheese, there is pretty certain to occur some one or two of the score of trees which produce rubber. Whole forests of them are known to exist in Central Africa, only waiting to be tapped. But the regions which produce them are precisely the regions most deadly to the white man; and when the rubber is made it has to come to the coast on the heads of negroes, and will not pay the cost of transport. When an accessible forest is discovered it pays like a gold-mine. A tree was discov

ered near Lagos, a British settlement on the west coast of Africa, which was believed to produce rubber; specimens of bark and foliage went home to Kew Botanical Gardens, London, and the authorities pronounced it the right thing. In 1895 the export began, and amounted in the year to 2,263 tons, with a value of $1,350,000 in round figures.

India rubber would seem to be the one certain source of wealth now locked up in Central Africa, and perhaps the most valuable thing that the region produces or can produce. Ivory is only a fancy article, and palm-oil has many substitutes. Gold no doubt exists there, but, in the first place, it is doubtful whether the pure negro can be made into a miner; and, in the second, gold is to be got in regions where white men can live.

It seems, therefore, as if the special function of the tropics just now was to produce India-rubber, which is wanted everywhere and cannot be grown elsewhere. No cultivation is needed; Nature requires of man very little skill, scarcely any exertion, and only a reasonable avoidance of waste. Yet this is asking more than the African negro is at present able to give.

The great rubber-producing region of the world is the basin of the Amazon, which yields about two-thirds of the entire annual output. The quality of this rubber is immensely superior to all others; the best Para will fetch in England as much as 88 cents a pound; the worst African goes for under 25 cents. Brazil has, of courses an immense advantage in its great waterway; ocean-going steamers run twelve hundred miles up the Amazon, whereas every African river, except the Congo, has a bar at its mouth, and cataracts not far distant from the coast-line. On the other hand, the forests in Brazil seem even more impenetrable than in Africa. Not even such roadways as the African man-paths can be maintained against the encroachment of the jungle. But the native Brazilian race is incomparably more intelligent than the negro. Their caoutchouc is better prepared, and, what is far more important, they farm the trees as carefully as the Red Indians used to farm the beaver.

In Africa the rubber is generally produced not from a forest tree, as in Brazil, but from the Landolphia, which is a climbing shrub. The negroes deal dras

tically with this, and simply cut it down, and then get what milk they can out of it. So year by year the rubber trees are destroyed, and year by year the negroes have to go further afield to seek them. If they are left to themselves they simply cease to produce India-rubber, and there is an end of it. If they have the fortune to live in the happy Congo State a certain amount of the stuff is exacted annually from each village; when trees within reach are exhausted, the collector comes round, finds no rubber, and goes home with a string of ears and noses instead. No doubt the West Coast negro is a trying person to deal with, but these methods have been so long employed unsuccessfully that civilization, we hope, may discover a better way, and educate the black man instead of torturing him. One is sorry, therefore, to hear that at Lagos, where the rubber is being produced from a forest tree, the Kicksia, the natives have been allowed to overdrain the trees of their milky sap and stop its production.

The supply of rubber-producing plants in Central Africa is practically inexhaustible; but the number of places where they exist within easy distance of some export station is small; so far as our present knowledge goes. Yet, for the present, speculators will probably hasten to be rich, and if they hit upon a forest, will treat it like a mine, anxious simply to take out the maximum at the minimum of cost.

Whether England or any other nation, will ever make this a great branch of its tropical forestry remains to be seen. The Germans, with their usual thoroughness, have a strong scientific staff at the Cameroons. The English, in their usual make-shift way, content themselves with sending home to English botanical authorities for suggestions. But the Government of India have at last tried an experiment upon a great scale. No private firm, however wealthy, would embark upon the cultivation of indiarubber; the trees take a matter of twenty years before they can produce a dollar's worth. In addition to that, cultivation must occupy a huge extent of ground of such a nature that no European can enter it during the rainy season, and where the growth is so thick that twenty men might be tapping trees within a mile of the ranger, and he none the wiser.

appeared in his editor's brilliant compilation. The new matter affords a good many characteristic touches, hitherto suppressed by editorial prudence or prudery, and the whole opens out an interesting problem to the curious: but that interest centres round the personality of the editor rather than that of the author, and the large public who care more for Gibbon than for the Holroyds, decidedly prefer the short to the long, and dislike repetition, will prefer the single old autobiography to the seven new. To talk of that incomparable production would be, it may be hoped, to talk of what everyone knows more than very well-everyone at least who cares at all for literature

- for the "Memoirs of my Life and Writings" are, and deserve to be, almost the Bible of all sorts and conditions of students.

The case is different, however, with the letters. Here the new matter is much more extensive than the old, and even the old was never well known as the "Memoirs" were. It is true that Lord Sheffield printed the best of the letters, and that the new ones do not materially alter our conception of Gibbon. But it is also true that Lord Sheffield subjected the letters which he published to a very rude and merciless pruning; that they are consequently full of irritating blanks and asterisks, and that they are awkwardly arranged, in two batches, as he published them. There can, therefore, be no doubt that if the public keeps to the old "Memoirs," it will prefer the new letters. In Mr. Prothero's two volumes we have most of the old letters, printed for the first time in full as Gibbon wrote them, and about four hundred new ones. They are of every kind, but the largest division of them are Gibbon's business letters to his father, his unbroken correspondence with his stepmother after she settled at Bath, the business portions of his letters to Lord Sheffield, hitherto omitted, and Lord Sheffield's replies. The whole forms The whole forms a most interesting and delightful collection.

Gibbon's mind and the style which is the reflection of it are more at home in the atmosphere of a work which must and should be deliberate, formal and, in the best sense, artificial, than in the lighter, more familiar and occasional, epistolary world. Not that art has not a

great deal to do with the making of a good letter, but it is an art whose principal characteristics are ease, grace, delicacy, variety, lightness of touch, and these are not the things we look for from Gibbon. But, if his style is not everything the critical heart might desire, its merits must not be forgotten. It is formal, and even pompous, no doubt. But there are two classes of pompous writers. The more common is that which prefers high-sounding phrases, because they are the best protection of those who have nothing to say. The other is that which, having something, and something of weight and importance to say, is determined to give it all the advantages of a stately and splendid presentation; and so runs the risk, in its dread of vulgarity, of being betrayed into the opposite

extreme.

It was to the latter class that Gibbon belonged. belonged. He set a very high value upon style. Even when he receives Lord Sheffield's political publications, we find him more than once hinting his regret that his friend is "above the trifling decorations of style and order." And for himself we know that he would take several turns round his table before he could settle a period to his satisfaction. The stately structure of his sentences remains for ever in just and immortal association with the stateliness of his theme; and if the preference, which had become a habit, occasionally degenerated into an abuse, who that loves dignity in a slipshod age will care to condemn very severely a fault that came of loving it too well? Language that is over-formal is easily forgiven, so long as there is sense and meaning behind it; and few indeed are the authors who have surpassed Gibbon in his strict observance of the rule that every sentence ought to contribute something, great or small, to the argument or theme of its author. There is besides a special excuse for his elaborate formality as it appears in the letters. It was a habit, no doubt, which he could not easily have broken, but it is clear that he often used it deliberately and consciously for the sake of the humorous effect it produces.

Gibbon always looks on the bright side of things, regrets nothing that he has given up, wants nothing that he cannot have. He has a right to laugh at the hysterical lamentations of men of letters,