of the rock, begun to fail them; and they were forced, will they nill they, to struggle down over the cliffs to the river itself, and fight with the tangled jungle on its brink for very life's sake, sooner than keep the high open leading ranges where walking was so much easier, and where the blessed cool south wind from the pole could fan their foreheads, and tell them that the whole of God's earth was not like this blazing, beautiful, cruel, forest land through which they fought their way.

Similar causes will produce similar effects; and they, starting with just the same knowledge or ignorance of the route to Beechworth as those who had preceded them, found after a little time that they, driven by the same necessities, had too surely followed on their track.

"The bodies and the bones of those

That strove in other days to pass,
Are withered in the thorny close

Or scattered blanching on the grass.
He gazes on the silent dead-

Those who try to prove that Shakespeare was an attorney, had better try to prove that Mr. Tennyson brought up the rear of the great Omeo retreat. There is more evidence for Tennyson than for Shakespeare.

One day-who can say which out of so many weary days?-they came upon the bodies of two young men, brothers, whom they had known on the Omeo, lying locked in one another's arms, on a shelf of limestone by the river. They could not go near them, but they recognised them by their clothes. Erne spoke very little after this, and soon after went mad.

He was not morose or troublesome in his madness. He got first incoherent in his talk, and was apt to astonish Tom Williams by tacking one sentence on to another without the slightest notion of cause and effect. But after this his madness began to get really pretty. He began to be really delirious-that is to say, he began to dream without going to sleep, and to tell his dreams as fast as they came a very great advantage; for we sane idiots forget half ours as

soon as we wake. In short, Erne was talking his dreams as quick as they appeared, and, had there only been a shorthand writer present, we might have had the most wonderful results.

Every

In spite of his madness, though, he walked stoutly onwards. The country through which they walked was one of the richest and most beautiful in the world, but it was not ready for human habitation. It was still in its cruel, pitiless phase. It was only in the state of preparation a state which it requires generally a great sacrifice of human life to alter into a state of readiness for what we choose to call a state of civilization. It was exceedingly rich, and it looked wonderfully beautiful. morning, great inexorable Mother Nature looked over the eastern hill tops, passing through phases of crimson glory into orange glory, until she had done her day's work, and laid all the magnificent landscape to sleep, under a haze of crystalline blue. And then she would sleep herself; and say dreamily, "Children! children! here is room for millions of you. Come." And then in the evening she would wake up once more, into new glories of crimson and purple, and once more fall asleep into dark night, sighing sometimes, in dry wandering winds, which rustled through the grass upon the thirsty wolds, "Children! children! you have come too soon, and you must die."

The owner of a solitary tent, in one of the furthest and loneliest gulleys at Snake Valley, was lying reading in bed, when he was startled by a shout, to which he answered by another, and an invitation to enter. In a moment a young man stood in the doorway, looking so wan and so wild that the man was startled, and cried out, "Good God, mate, what's the matter?"

"Omeo! water!" was all that Tom Williams could get out. The man was out of bed in a moment, and instantly was making towards the water bucket with a pannikin; but, as Tom's wolfish eyes followed him, and saw where the water was, he dashed past him, and,

with his head in the bucket, drank with long draughts like a horse.

After a fit of giddiness and sickness, he found his voice. "My mate is not three hundred yards back on the track, and I am not sure that he is dead. I carried him the last mile, and laid him down when I saw your light; come, and-" But the man was gone, and, when Tom came up, he found him trying to pour water between the lips of the unfortunate Erne, who lay beneath the tree where Tom had left him-to all appearance dead.

Dead he was not, though, thanks to Tom Williams. Some may say that death is better than life, on the terms on which Erne enjoyed it for a long time after. But life is life, with all its troubles, and death is practically considered by all parties, creeds, and ages, to be a change for the worse; so I suppose that, "humanly speaking," we ought to congratulate ourselves on the fact that Erne Hillyar wasn't dead, and is not dead yet. He had only succeeded in utterly destroying his constitution. To be continued.

MUCH has been said about the impotence of the Pope's Encyclical Letter. No doubt it is the defiance of forces which have proved themselves mightier than the Papal force when it was mightiest; no doubt it is like the nightmare cry of a worn-out giant, dreaming of the serpents which he strangled in his cradle. But we may repeat these obvious remarks till we lose sight of the immense significance of this document; we may despise what is one of the most striking and critical facts in modern history.

There is apt to be a hard and cruel feeling in the minds of most of us who have been bred in a stern Protestantism, and in whom each year's experience has strengthened and deepened it, towards those who exalt obedience to the Holy See above all the convictions of their reason. It seems to us a form of atheism-a denial that there is an eternal truth before which all creatures must bow. Yet if we examine any special instances of this devotion-such, to take the one nearest our own time, as that of Lacordaire, in surrendering all his strongest political and moral persuasions to the decrees of Gregory

a beauty and a grandeur in the submission. However incomprehensible it may seem to us, we are obliged to ask ourselves what it meant, and how it was compatible with a disposition, in many aspects of it so heroic, as that of the French Dominican. The still more recent utterances of a countryman of Lacordaire, but a statesman and a Protestant, unlike him in all his traditions and all the habits of his intellect, threw a light upon this question which we cannot afford to lose. M. Guizot, the Genevan, sees in the Pope the bond who holds together the fragments of Christendom, who prevents the loose elements of which its faith is composed from absolutely starting asunder. Such a theory from such a man looks like the reductio ad absurdum of the doctrinaire philosophy. A fiction-to him nothing more-is necessary to keep God's universe from falling to pieces. But it must be accepted also as a confession from a Protestant of what he has seen to be the feebleness and incoherency of Protestant sects. And it may surely offer the best possible apology for a man educated from infancy to consider the Papacy as the centre of unity to the

being infallible, that he can only curse, she lets him curse over the length and breadth of the land.

It is not, therefore, only with the science, or civilization, or toleration, of this age that the Pope has proclaimed war. He has proclaimed a more deadly war with its longings for unitythat sense of an actual, eternal unity, holding us together in spite of our differences and our hatreds, which has been the great support of his throne when it has been most tottering. It is with the hope of this time, with the deepest, firmest belief, of this timewith the hope and belief of the Roman Catholic, even in one sense more characteristically than of the Protestant countries-that the Pope is at strife. The fiction of M. Guizot is scattered to the winds-that is a reason for almost unmixed joy. The ground for the obedience of such men as Lacordaire was is cut from under them; that change one cannot think of without a mixture of dread. But the true unity will be revealed to these men as the false disappears it is only a natural cowardice that makes one shrink from the thought of the anguish which they must suffer in the process.

And we should turn from any lessons which the letter has for them-lessons that we cannot bring home to them, that we may only weaken by enforcing to those very pregnant ones which it contains for ourselves. One is surely this :-We have talked of the Pope's temporal, or rather local, sovereignty as if that were the great calamity under which Italy, and the nations of Christendom, were groaning. It may be a contradiction, but it is a contradiction which has done, and is doing, more to expose the pretence of ecclesiastics to

govern the world-the blasphemy which confounds their kingdom with God's kingdom-than any other. We cannot wish it to disappear till the doctrine which it teaches has been thoroughly laid to heart by every Church in every land. But in this letter it is not the local sovereign who speaks, it is the spiritual dogmatist; it is the man who identifies his decrees, which he considers to be the decrees of all ages, with the truth. It is this identification-this confusion of that which is thought or decreed by any man or any body of men, with that which is that makes the letter so fierce an attack upon the faith and unity of Christendom, as well as upon science. If its creeds set forth Him who is, and was, and is to come —as we suppose they do-any attempt to put decrees and dogmas for truth must be a subversion of them. If the Sacraments of the Church assert the unity of man in a living and immortal Head, they must be the great antagonists of him who wishes to cut men off for not accepting his opinions. But that assertion is two-edged. It strikes as sharply against all Protestant, all English dogmatism, as against all Romish. The Pope's Encyclical Letter should be framed and glazed, and hung up in the house of every English clergyman, that he may understand what he is aiming at. If it is to do on a small scale what is here done on the largest scale, in the greatest perfection-let him read his sentence in this document. We can but play with tools that have been sharpened to the utmost, and have proved ineffectual. Success would be our greatest calamity; for is it not a calamity to prevail for a little while in fighting against the unity of Christendom, against humanity, against God?

QUEEN'S COLLEGE, Cork, has lost a most distinguished professor, at a time when his genius was in its highest development. Of his early life we know nothing, except that he was not educated at a university, and that, about thirty years ago, a schoolmaster at Lincoln attracted the attention of the mathematical world by some mathematical speculations of unusual originality. By the year 1849 he had gained a name which procured him the professorship of mathematics at Cork, where he died on the 9th of December last, at some age, we suppose, between fifty and sixty. Of the private life of a person in his pursuits there is usually little to say: of Dr. Boole's the most important circumstance is that for thirteen years out of fifteen he worked at a very small salary, and, owing to the circumstances of the Queen's College, with a small number of pupils. Two years ago the proper feeling of the Government augmented the first source of income, and the growth of the College improved the second. But death has prevented his availing himself of the sunshine; and he leaves a widow and five children unprovided for.

Dr. Boole obtained some share of the honorary rewards which fall to men of .science. He received a gold medal from the Royal Society, of which body he was afterwards a Fellow. He had a doctor's diploma from Oxford, and another from Dublin, and he had a prospect, cut short by his death, of admission to the French Institute. The character of his researches was beginning to be widely known.

There is a story which we believe to be perfectly true, and which shows that fortune has something to do in science as well as in war. The mathematical

many branches that there is not perhaps a man alive who is a competent judge of combined merit and originality in all. Dr. Boole's first communication to the Royal Society was submitted to a gentleman whose eminence lay in quite another line: he could see nothing in it worthy of note, and recommended its rejection. Casualty threw it under the eye of another person, who was better able to judge; it was accordingly printed, and it was the paper for which the gold medal was given. There is nothing in human affairs, we fully believe, more confidently to be expected than that a true and honest judgment will be formed and acted on as to all communications which get into the right hands. But there is a point which seems to bring the matter to a dead lock: before it can be known who is competent to examine a paper, the paper itself must be examined by a competent person! As to a well-known author there is no difficulty: his line is notorious, and his colleagues in that line. But a new man is liable to such a mischance as had nearly extinguished Dr. Boole, so far as the Royal Society is concerned. The story became public property at the time, and excited some remark: the warning which it gives is wanted, and should be occasionally revived.

This is not the place for a detailed account of Dr. Boole's scientific merits. The point which is most prominent is his power of development of algebraic language. The higher parts of the differential calculus-a name which now includes a great part of the higher mathematics have of late years received accessions of power of quite a new kind; one of them has gained a distinctive name, the calculus of operations. Dr. Boole was one of the first and foremost