to the industrial school, by less technical requirements for entering, insisting only upon this one essential qualification, that every man entering shall be fitted in all respects, in age, in learning, in manly qualities, in practical knowledge, in judgment and spirit, to profit where students are simply aided, but not driven. Let the college be the place where young men shall really enter upon the investigation of subjects as they will be compelled to investigate them in after life, but with the aid of competent teachers, which they cannot have at hand through life.

Is it said that a young man fitted to enter upon such a course of study is already fitted to make his way in the world? Certainly he ought to be. Does he think it would be a waste of time for him to enter upon such a course? Then let him not do it. Let him enter the busy world at once, doing all the good he can, and getting all the enjoyment he can from it. We wish all would do as well. The college of which we speak is not for those who think their time would be thrown away in it, so that they must be kept there, as many boys are now kept in college. It is for those who hunger for something better in education, than they can now find except in scattered fragments. We have no sympathy with those who undervalue the work already done by our colleges, or who would abolish them, if they cannot at once be moulded to suit the demands of those who claim to have new light. We believe that the leading idea in our best colleges is the true one for them. They have been compelled to do many things which they had no desire to do, from lack of funds, from the low grade of preparatory schools, and from an honest attempt to meet a demand of the times, which they are not fitted to meet, and never can be. We now have our public schools of all grades, so that the masses cannot lack for learning. We have schools for science, so that every material interest will be cared for. We have schools of Law, of Medicine, and of Theology, of almost every shade of

belief, and we have the simple college, which of late years has been losing its definite character. Its true work has been a matter of angry debate, the institution appearing in a multitude of characters to satisfy all parties. Now it has been merely a higher academy with all its petty rules for boys, but often without its efficient instruction; and again it has donned the working garb of the Miner and Chemist in its futile attempts to teach practical science. So far as it has succeeded in doing this, it has withdrawn students from its legitimate work.

All this time, to the honor of the college be it said, it has been struggling amid all this din, and clamor, and false show, to give something of that higher education of which we speak. It has done much. The time has now come when the best colleges can be true to themselves. No longer compelled to divide their energies, let them be concentrated on this one grand effort, to give the best conditions for mental culture to the best minds in the world, who choose to seek culture for its own sake, or for that higher good to the race than material wealth alone can give. All wealth, all practical science, and all production are but the conditions of the highest mental and moral culture, as the physical system of man is but the condition for his intellectual and moral nature. We are not arguing in favor of breaking down all small colleges. We would make our largest colleges better by making them smaller, through a higher standard. There are undoubted advantages in having colleges united to form a university; but whether collected in one place or separated, we believe in small colleges, if they are rich enough, to do their work as they ought. The more the student comes in contact with a real educator the better. He will gain more strength by coming into real intellectual conflict with a great man, than he will to be shot at from the ablest lecturers for months.

We have too many colleges now only because they are too poor, and thus

have too strong inducements to give a low type of education. As schools preparatory for professional study, most of them may still continue to do excellent work without extending their course of study, and perhaps better by striking out a portion which has lately been added in the attempt to give such an education as can be given only in scientific schools. We need but a small number of colleges for such students as desire to give to literature and general science the time which others devote to industrial education or professional study. But such students are as much needed for the elevation of our literary standing in the world, and for their influence even upon the lowest forms of education, as engineers and miners are needed to develop our national wealth.

Many of the smaller colleges cannot essentially change until there is a great advance in the public schools, and a greater demand for a higher education than they are now giving. We would not on this account abolish them if we could, as so many seem eager to do. But we think they are bound in justice to themselves and the community to cease attempting to combine in one course of study what belongs to two or three distinct schools. They have had little money, but that has not always been judiciously expended. They have spent money for things which the fashion seemed to demand. If one college had a cabinet, the rival college must have another of the same kind, if possi

ble, costing time and money, though oftentimes of no more educational value than a stone wall, or the specimens in a grocery store.

Some of the colleges will hold out for a time attempting to teach every thing, but the thoroughness of the industrial schools in science will soon show the weakness of the others. We feel sure that the present demands of education will soon sharply define these three classes of institutions, whatever names they may claim--High Preparatory Schools, Industrial Schools, and true colleges. The professional schools are well defined now. Their aim is definite. The high preparatory schools may call themselves colleges, and the true colleges may be the outgrowth of what is now called the post graduate course. All these grades of schools are really needed, and their elements are mingled in our present schools. These elements need to be separated and so re-combined, that the character and work of each class of institutions shall be clearly defined and have a definite relation to other classes. What is really needed is sure soon to come, in some form. Such schools may be joined together, and with professional schools give us the American University. But what we especially call for in the interest of sound learning, is a saving of educational funds and labor by a better division of labor, or greater definiteness in the aim of our institutions, and for an advance to a higher grade on the part of the best colleges.

THERE is no mistake about it; our mother Earth is in serious trouble, and her wisest children are at a loss how to account for her sudden restlessness. There are all the signs of feverish excitement-great heat, strange utterances, and violent convulsions. A summer so hot as to become unusually destructive to human life has been followed by an unnaturally mild winter all through the temperate zone of the globe, and even the instincts of the brute creation seem to have been at fault for once. Terrific upheavings have terrified man, now breaking forth through the craters of active volcanoes, and now raising huge portions of firm land by fearful earthquakes. Is it a wonder that when our mother Earth is so evidently in trouble, her children also should be sorely troubled, and thoughtful minds should look once more for the speedy coming of the end of all things? When the Apostles themselves expected to witness the coming of the Lord, and a Luther could firmly believe in the near approach of the Last Judgment, we may well bear patiently with credulous Millerites, sitting in their white robes high up on broad branching trees to ascend the more promptly to heaven, and with all the sorrowful minds who in our day yearn, with the whole groaning creation, for speedy redemption!

Nor can we withold our sympathy from those who describe, with feelings of indelible awe, what they suffered at the time of their first experience of an earthquake. While a bright sky and brilliant sunshine are flooding the exuberant beauty of a tropical landscape with gorgeous lights, and all Nature seems to enjoy in perfect peace the luxury of happy existence, they suddenly felt rather than heard a low, rumbling noise, which seems to rise from the very lowest depths of the earth. And all

living beings, men as well as animals, are of a sudden filled with a strange anticipation of evil coming, vague, but sickening, and unconquerable by any effort of will. Before the mind can well judge of the strange and unwonted sensation, there comes long, subterranean thundering, clap upon clap, rolling nearer and nearer, and at each successive shock the heavens and the earth seem alike to shudder at the fearful approach of an unknown power. Every thing is shaken to the foundation; glasses and crockery-ware sound as if frolicking spirits were playing with them; bells are set ringing by invisible hands, doors open by themselves, and no one enters, the houses begin to groan and to crack in all their joints, and lean, like drunken men, first to one, and then to the other side. Tall steeples sway giddily to and fro, and lofty arches in cathedrals and churches press out the keystone and come crashing down, burying thousands of terrified men, who had come to the sacred building to invoke help from on high, when all upon earth had left them helpless. All who can escape rush forth from beneath treacherous roofs, but out there it feels as if even "heaven's vault should crack;" the danger is not over, for the very soil beneath their feet swells and sinks like the waves of the sea, huge chasms open here and there, and dark abysses swallow old and young, rich and poor, without distinction and without mercy.

At last the soil begins to subside into the wonted quiet, and at the same moment, a tall, conical mountain-sometimes in sight of the panic-struck multitude, and sometimes at a distance of hundreds of miles-opens a wide, gaping mouth near the summit, and a power, which human ingenuity has as yet found no standard to measure, sends forth a magnificent bunch of bright

flames, mingled in strange anomaly, with streaming vapors, rocks ground to atoms till they resemble ashes, and vast masses of a glowing substance, which are flung, jet after jet, till they seem to reach the welkin. And, high up in the air, the fiery bouquet, grandly beautiful in spite of its terrific nature, spreads out into an immense canopy, an ocean of clouds dark above, but shining in incomparable splendor below, where the fire from the crater illumines it in richest glory, while flashes of lightning play unceasingly to and fro, and the half molten rocks rain down upon the carth, bursting and breaking like masses of brittle dusky glass. At the same time a torrent of ashes falls like a burning rain of withering fire upon the wretched landscape, and in an instant the whole region, for miles and miles all around, is covered with a weird shroud and sinks for ages into deathlike stillness !

But troubled Nature has not exhausted the efforts yet, by which she seeks relief from the mysterious suffering which she seems to undergo in the dark recesses of the earth. From the crater's brink, or from a sudden opening in the sides of the mountain, there comes gushing forth a broad stream of fiery lava, and hurries, as in furious madness, down the steep sides, carrying the torch of destruction to the forests, which in a moment flare up in a bright blaze, to fertile fields, changing them instantly from lovely pictures of peace and promise into desolate deserts, to lofty walls and solid mansions, which crumble and fall at the magic touch, never to rise again, and finally to the silent sea, into which it rolls its fiery waves with a fearful hissing and screeching, bringing even here death and destruction to all that lives and moves in the life-teeming

waters.

And, as if the measure of horrors was not full yet, and overburdened Nature must give vent in new forms to its unbearable burden, the heavens darken, till night covers the earth, and a deluge of waters descends in vast sheets, flooding the fields that had barely begun to

breathe once more freely, and mingling in horrible friendship with the masses of black ashes, so that the dark, hideous slime rolls in slow, but irresistible waves, over town and village, and fills cellars and rooms and streets and the very temples of the gods with its death-bringing horror. And not unfrequently the sea rushes up to meet in fatal embrace the waters from the clouds; trembling under the weird excitement and coming up in fierce, spasmodic jerks as the convulsions of the volcano near by shake it with sympathetic violence, it breaks down the ancient landmarks that have held it in bounds for countless ages, and retreating after a while with overwhelming violence, it bears the few survivors from the fury of fire into the fatal abyss of the ocean.

Amid such horrors the bravest of men loses heart, and with all his heaven-appointed powers he feels like a helpless infant. The brutes of the forest, the lion and the panther, forget their nature, and come from their dark dens to join in strange, new-born friendship, the flocks of peaceful cattle, and to seek with them, driven by an irresistible instinct, the shelter of human habitations and the protection of man. Eagles and vultures come down from their unseen paths in the clouds and their lofty eyries, and sit, marvelling and trembling, by the side of pigeons and common fowls in paradisaical peace.

It is this unique and uncontrollable sensation, felt when the material world makes for a moment its full dominion known and claims our earth-born nature as its own, which has, no doubt, led, from of old, to the almost unvarying creed of men, that the world will come to an end by fire. The Chaldæans, it is true, coupled the power of water with that of the burning element, and believed that the world would be destroyed by fire, when all the stars should meet in the constellation of Cancer, and once more by water when they meet in the constellation of Capricorn. The Parsees, worshippers of fire, have a similar doctrine, according to which the

world will last twelve thousand years, after which Ahriman, the Evil Spirit, will set it on fire by means of a comet, and, after a thorough purification, recreate it with Ormuzd, the Spirit of Good.

Even the Orphic poems, of which nothing is left beyond a few quotations and allusions, are said to have sung of the end of winter in a great deluge, and of the end of the world's summer in a great conflagration. It is well known, on the other hand, that the Mosaic Genesis, based, perhaps, largely upon the impression produced by the annual inundations of the Nile, admits of only one creative principle, that of water, which "brought forth" all things living but man, and hence laid the foundation of that system which is still warmly defended by the Neptunists of our day.

It is interesting to observe how, in a similar manner, the Greek Heraclitus drew his views from his observation of volcanic symptoms, and based upon them his theory, that the world not only owed its origin to fire, but was to be periodically purified and renewed by vast conflagrations. Fire was, to him, the only unchanging and everlasting element, and to its benign influences he was disposed to ascribe all that befalls our globe under the direction of relentless Fate.

Nor can it be doubted that the same impressions led originally to the almost sublime conceptions of the lower regions, which we find in Hellenic legends. It is well known, that they placed their Tartarus far down in the bowels of the earth, and represented it as an enormous abyss filled with eternal fire; the very position of the entrance to this lower world, in Southern Italy, points to that connection, as the active volcanoes of that region had, no doubt, originally suggested the whole conception. down, below those favored plains, they imagined the realm of Pluto, and looked upon Mount Vesuvius and Mount Etna as the colossal chimneys, giving vent to the smoke of the fire at which the Cyclops were forever busy forging the lightnings of Jupiter. How deeply VOL. IV-70

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rooted these fantastic and yet beautiful notions were in the minds of nations, we may judge from the fact that two hundred years after the rise of our faith the Roman historian, Dion Cassius, could still soberly speak of enormous giants rising from Mount Vesuvius, and scattering, amid the appalling sound of infernal trumpets, ashes and rocks over the blooming fields of Campania and the fair cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum! Our own Christian faith, finally, teaches us of the final destruction of our globe by the same terrible agent, when "the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; the earth also, and all the works therein, shall be burned up."

If it is strange to see how universal this fire worship is, which ascribes to this element, above all others, the power to create and to destroy our world, it is not less striking to observe to what eccentric views the same conviction has led both ancient and modern inquirers. Thus Aristotle even was fond of imagining that the earth might be a living being, which changed like man, on the surface, only at much longer intervals. He knew perfectly well, that certain portions of land would gradually be covered with water, while parts of the sea would be laid bare and change into fertile lands; he knew equally well the origin of volcanic islands, and describes correctly the sudden rise of Hiera, in the Pontus, which was born amid a fearful upheaving of the earth, its bursting open in the shape of a great crater, and the subsequent lifting up of a high mountain. All these phenomena were, to him, evidence of the inner life of the earth, which, he thought, manifested itself mainly by fire. Strabo went even beyond him, and while ascribing, with his illustrious predecessor, all earthquakes to the efforts made by masses of heated air within to break through the crust of the earth, he discerned the correct origin of great changes on the surface, and, for instance, saw in Sicily only a portion of the mainland, which had been detached from it by a violent volcanic upheaving.