ment of a particular floe is but slight during one season. For there is no sufficient outlet, apparently, for the ice of this sea. The age of the ice is a sufficient proof of this. Sherard Osborn describes the sea of ancient ice as "a vast floating glacierlike mass, surging to and fro in an enclosed area of the Arctic region." It is bounded on the south by the shores of North Amer physical geography than had ever been afforded to previous explorers, and their observations on this point form not the least valuable part of the results of the expedition. The ice was from eighty to one hundred and fifty feet in thickness, judging from the height of the portion above water; and the surface was rugged in the extreme. Apart from the masses of hummocks thrown up during disrup-ica; on the east by Banks and Prince tions, the surfaces of some of these an- Patrick Islands, Grant Land, and the cient floes were broken into hills and north coast of Greenland; and on the dales, the hills varying from ten to fifty west by Kellett Land and other unknown feet in height. This, of course, must be obstacles north of the Siberian coast; so the result of ages of drift, and of alternate that it has an area of about one thousand frost and thaw. The floes far out to sea two hundred miles both from south to north, were infinitely heavier than those nearer and from east to west. Its movement is the coast. The formation of this palaeo- slight, and the "Enterprise" and "Invescrystic sea is analogous to the well-known tigator" observed that it never moved off course of formation of glaciers. Year by from the shore more than a mile or two, year layer after layer is added to the upper and then surged back again. The known surface, the lower layers becoming harder, outlets to the sea of ancient ice are very owing to the superincumbent weight, until narrow. Fragments, forming great icethey are converted into snow-ice. The streams, pour through Banks Strait into method of this formation was studied by Melville Sound, but they never get west of means of the huge masses, well-termed Griffith Island, and are never seen in floe-bergs, which were cast upon the beach. Barrow Strait. They appear to fill up Some of these were split by the frost, McClintock Channel, which can never be offering complete sections, which were navigable. Here Osborn saw them in carefully drawn. In some instances they May, 1851, and he describes the floe as of showed lines of darker color, at distances great antiquity, and as like a heavy cross of many feet from the existing surface, indi- sea suddenly frozen solid, the height of cating sections of the pools of water and the solid waves being twenty-five feet. intermediate rises which, during some far- Allen Young reached Osborn's point of distant summer, had been on the surface.observation, and formed the same concluSuch a sea as this is never navigable, but there was the clearest evidence of frequent, if not annual, disruptions. The vast masses of hummocks, thirty to fifty feet high, and sometimes a quarter of a mile wide, which occur at frequent intervals and divide the ancient floes, are evidence of very violent encounters between the floes; and mud found on the ice some miles from the shore is also a proof of movement. The ice traversed by Captain Markham consisted of ancient floes of small extent and very uneven surface, separated by lofty ranges of rugged hummocks, and there were occasionally narrow streams of this year's ice, that is about five feet four inches thick, connecting the floes. The drift-wood which was found on Prince Patrick and Banks Island, and also on the scene of Captain Nares's discoveries, is likewise a proof that the palaeocrystic sea is subjected to movements the exact nature of which is uncertain; for this drift-wood must have come from the banks of Siberian, rivers. At the same time the periodical disruption is clearly only partial, and the move sion. He actually attempted, like Collinson, to travel across this palaeocrystic floe, but found it quite impracticable owing to the rugged nature of the ice. name Thus two explorers had attempted to tackle the ancient ice before the memora ble journey of Captain Markham ly, Sir Richard Collinson and Captain Állen Young, and they can well appreciate Captain Markham's difficulties, and the severity of the struggle he entered upon. There is another outlet for the sea of ancient ice by Robeson Channel, but it is very narrow, and the ancient and heavy floes do not get much further south than Lincoln's Bay in 82° N. Lat., or thereabouts, according to the season. The "Polaris" did not encounter them; but the "Alert" was at one time actually beset in ancient floes off Cape Lincoln, before rounding Cape Union, and was in great danger. Their size and position in the strait would vary according to the season. Fragments of the ancient ice, no doubt, stream down the south coast of Greenland and round Cape Farewell; and it would be a matter of great interest to explore the east coast from Cape Bismarck to Beaumont's furthest, in order to ascertain the limit of the sea of ancient ice in that direction, and the causes which obstruct a freer flow of the ice which now, from want of an adequate outlet, continues to grow in thickness and ruggedness. It was over this sea that Markham and Parr attempted to force their way; and by dint of perseverance they and their gallant followers, in spite of such difficulties as no other advancing sledge-party (except those of Collinson and Allen Young) ever before encountered, achieved a position which will make their journey memorable forever. Considering the character of the ice, the distance they made good was, as Captain Nares truly says, marvellous. They advanced the Union Jack and their own standards to a point north of which no human being has ever put his foot. CLEMENTS R. MARKHAM. taire, who knew the Annuaire by heart, and could name all the colonels of all the regiments in France, and tell their depots, and where the regiments were stationed. Such was the singular atmosphere, one may almost call it absolutely unique, in which Emile Erckmann was born. His father, a small bookseller, who combined the selling of a few groceries with his book-selling, was neither rich nor poor. He sent his son to the college, and made him study law. Chatrian, like Erckmann, is a native of Lorraine, but like him, and like me, alas! he is a native of the annexed portion. His native village is called Soldatenthal, the valley of the soldier, because it was founded, if the legend is to be trusted, by a Swedish soldier settled in France after the Thirty Years' War. The collaborator of Erckmann is a gentilhomme, by the same title as MM. Granier de . Cassagnac, father and son. He is descended from a family of glass-blowers, and himself blew glass in his youth. But that trade not being to his liking, he preferred to re-enter, as maître d'études, the little college of Phalsbourg, where he had been THE singular personage, whom the educated, and there formed his friendworld knows under the name of Erckmann-ship with Erckmann. Chatrian, is composed of two men, robust, sound in body, and vigorous in mind. They are, neither of them, Alsacians, although they have together created an Alsacian literature. From The Athenæum. ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN. Their beginnings in literature were far from successful. In 1848 they started at Strasbourg a republican journal called the Patriote du Rhin; and they brought out at the Strasbourg Theatre a grand drama, Emile Erckmann was born four and fifty" L'Alsace en 1814," but at the second years ago, in the little Lorraine town of Phalsbourg. To have an exact idea of what Phalsbourg was ten years back, picture to yourself a statue of Marshal Comte de Lobau, round the statue a place planted with old trees, round the place a row of very modest houses, round the houses a cluster of barracks and casemated magazines, round the barracks a rampart, round the rampart ditches, and round the ditches a plain, high, bare, and dry. An old legend asserts that every house in Phalsbourg has produced, on an average, a sixth of a general, a colonel, two majors, ten captains, and lieutenants in proportion. In short it is a veritable cradle of soldiers, the look of which was dear to my old chauvinisme, and which I never saw without pleasure; I lived a long time near it. The little warlike town which the Germans dismantled in 1872 is five English miles from Schlittenbach, that dear house where four of the six children that I have the happiness to possess were born. Everything at Phalsbourg is military, and I once was acquainted with a lawyer, a simple no performance the piece was prohibited by the censorship, and the journal died for want of subscribers. They came to Paris and knocked, without success, at the doors of the publishers. Their first novel, "Les Brigands des Vosges," appeared in the Journal des Faits of the Abbé Migne, but it was not paid for; and the two friends might have died of starvation had not the one had some little means of his own, and the other a humble occupation. Chatrian earned one thousand five hundred francs in the office of the Chemin de Fer de l'Est. As far as I can remember, the first book of theirs that I read was a fantastic tale translated from Erckmann by Chatrian. Some periodicals more or less read, L'Artiste, La Revue de Paris, Le Constitutionel, opened their columns to them, not without difficulty, and for five or six years they found it much more difficult to get a single novel published than to write two. Now they are almost rich. The journals compete for the privilege of printing their stories, and Hetzel, an excellent and honest publisher, sells them by the hundred thousand. However, Chatrian has never left the railway, and has risen to a very honorable post. He is caissier des titres, and his salary must be some ten or twelve thousand francs a year. He is married, and has three children. He has a pretty house at Raincy, in the banlieue, and he possesses great influence in his neighborhood. It was to him that the brave Colonel Langlois owed his success at the elections of last February. Erckmann, who is not married, is an exile, without near relations. He had a grand-niece at Strasbourg, who has married a German. Broken down by this sorrow, he wandered for a long time on the borders of our dear native land, the door of which is shut to him as to so many others. Before the war he had settled in the pretty valley of the Zinzel, to live after the fashion of the Ami Fritz. He is the best liver in the world; he adores the good wine of Alsace, sauerkraut, ham, the crayfish of the Zorn, the beer of Strasbourg, and he gladly loses himself in the clouds that rise from his pipe. What he loves, perhaps, still better, is shooting in the woods, long expeditions in the mountains, and discussions without end with a small group of friends. A most worthy man, in truth, this Erckmann, and a droll fellow, too. He had decayed teeth, which gave him pain from time to time. So he had them all taken out at one sitting, and now with a set of gums, as fresh and rosy as an infant of six months old, he munches the most solid of food and the softest of crusts. With his cheeks a little hollow, his fat chin, his long moustaches, and his bourgeois country dress, he looks like a colonel on half pay. After having long wandered like a tormented spirit near the lost paradise of Alsace-Lorraine, he has settled in the neighborhood of Saint Dié, in the Vosges, with worthy friends who are connections of his. I went to see him there two years ago, and mechanically, in spite of ourselves, across the mountain paths we penetrated into Alsace. I learned on this occasion the secret of his joint work with the good Chatrian. The two friends see one another very rarely, whether at Paris or in the Vosges. When they do meet, they elaborate together the scheme of a work. Then Erckmann writes it, Chatrian corrects it, and sometimes puts it into the fire. I can quote as an example, a certain story conceived in an anti-clerical spirit, and intended for the XIXme Siècle. Erckmann is at this moment writing it for the third time. We have few writers so conscientious, and I do not suppose that you have many. We have none more sincere, more upright, more humane, more zealous in defending the true against the untrue, right against might. We have no better patriots, if patriotism consists in denouncing the follies of ambition, decrying false glory, not seeking a quarrel with any one, but wishing that a people unjustly invaded should defend itself to the last. Such is the meaning and morality of all these national tales which the authors of our ruin denounce to the public with signal hypocrisy. EDMOND ABOUT. From The Liberal Review. ON THE SHELF. MEN often pray that they may live to what they call a good old age. Yet it is to be feared that a great portion of humanity never appears to so little advantage as it does in the evening of life. Nor is this to be wondered at. People's dispositions depend largely upon the state of their constitutions. If a man is strong and robust, there is small credit due to him for being cheery and sweet-tempered. On the other hand, if a man is troubled with many aches and pains there is little blame owing to him if he is discontented and querulous. Now, there can be no doubt that a large number of old people are discontented and querulous, and it is equally clear that their failings have their origin in the frailties of their flesh and blood rather than any serious defect in their mental composition. At the same time it must also be said that in addition to their physical weaknesses and the contemplation of their failing powers old people have much to aggravate them. In the first place, the young are apt to display no consideration for their feelings. Many young men assume that old men have had their day and that it is time for them to make way for those who are pressing on their heels. If the old men can be thrust aside, well and good; if they decline to be removed from their places before death takes them, the chances are that they are regarded as nuisances, and their transmutation is spoken of as a thing to be desired. Indeed, it often happens that they are shown that it is difficult to tolerate their presence, and that the same would not be tolerated if it were not for the fact that blood is thicker than water. At many a fireside does the old grandfather sit, a sort of chilling influence on the gay striplings who have life before them, and can barely be patient with the poor old man who has left life behind him. Who cares to talk with him? Who sympathizes with his hopes and aspirations? Hopes and aspirations, forsooth! What business has he with such things? At any rate, it is supposed that he ought not to have any which pertain immediately to this world, though, after all, this world, wicked though it is, is the world in which the loves and joys of most of us are wrapped up. Whatever property he possesses it is felt that he is in duty bound to give to some one else, and very few of those who have constituted themselves his protégés feel any compunction in attempting to wheedle whatever they can from him. He has the sense to perceive all this. He has the discrimination to detect that he is laughed at, sneered at, regarded | as a being of the past, put upon one side as if he were nothing, petted as if he were a child or a person of weak intellect, and in other ways, possibly unintentionally, mortified and insulted. Can it be wondered at that he often makes peevish attempts to resent the treatment which he receives; that he is induced to take misanthropical views of life and his condition? Verily a man must have a wonderful mental and physical constitution if he can remain cheerful, hearty, frank, and good-natured during the period in which he awaits the writing of finis to the chapter of his life. Some manage to do this, of course; but they are brave souls, who are largely favored by exceptional circum stances. with all the bitterness of his nature. It may be that age is disposed to monopolize certain privileges and to presume upon its rights, but every excuse can be made for this by reasonable minds. It would be strange if an old man did not display irritation when he sees youngsters whose heads he has patted when they have been children, whom he has, perhaps, nursed upon his knee, acting flippantly and arrogantly towards him. It would be still more singular if he failed to feel dismayed when he perceives one, whom he has considered barely worth his notice, suddenly rushing to the front and making the running at a tremendous pace. He could, perhaps, bear with equanimity being beaten by a person who has been buffeted about by time like he himself has, but the case is almost intolerable when he suffers defeat and has the bread taken out of his mouth by an individual who is just entering upon the serious business of life. Old men are displaced daily by youthful rivals. At any time you may hear their murmurs and perceive their unhappy condition. They have not the philosophy to accept their discomfiture as one which has been decreed by fate, and they have not the strength to grasp the prizes which lie before them and are secured by bolder hands than theirs. So they fall back, in their trouble, upon the stale device of abusing youth, of expressing contempt for youth's works, and railing against society for its patronage and toleration of youngsters. As they are being put upon the shelf they derive such solace as they can from pouring into compassionate ears the story of their wrongs; a proceeding which often excites as much contempt as pity. Youth may learn one lesson from all this. It must be remembered that age natu- It should see that it must make its position rally expects to receive a certain amount of before it gets old if it wishes to retain redeference from youth. We are sorry to spect. It should perceive that age to be have to say that it does not always even happy needs an established status, and command respect. A young man is in- that if it has not laurels to repose upon it clined to be particularly resentful when he will meet with scanty consideration. The sees a would-be rival in the shape of an despised senility of dotage is simply the old man, and he is apt to indicate his re- apotheosis of a life of failure. It will sentment in unpleasant ways. He seems ever be so; and, however much lovers of unable to see that he ought gracefully to the traditional past may bewail the fact, allow his elders to take the initiative ex-age will not command respect on account cept when his own abilities are of an undeniably superior order. Indeed, he does not hesitate to regard that weight which is occasionally permitted to attach to age as a personal affront to himself, as a grievance which he is bound to fight against of its white hairs and tottering limbs. Indeed, we fear that white hairs and tottering limbs, when they are all that an old man has to rely upon, will mostly excite contempt and give rise to an opinion that he is cumbering the earth too long. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. 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