startlingly reminded of one of Lady Gordon's early eccentricities:
"Once while painting, and quite absorbed in my work at Karnak, a man sat down close to me, and I said 'Good morning,' without looking up, till Hassan pulled my dress, and, oh horror! the man was holding a huge golden snake by the tail, a yard of shining, polished, slippery snake, quite straight and looking at me! I shouted and sprang away, and Hassan drove off the two wretched brutes. They take out the fangs of these tame snakes, but I hate even the sight of them now, though I used to like poor Lucie's pet when I was a child."
The justness of the following description of our heroine's first crocodiles will be recognized by those familiar with both terms of her comparison:
"One day we saw seven crocodiles, looking like rocks or shadows on the sand; we were disputing if they were really crocodiles, when the huge creatures curved their backs with a violent effort, raised themselves on what our Frenchman called their 'pattes,' and slid slowly into the water, as a fat lady descends from her carriage, with a certain waddle and air of importance."
Everything in Thebes appeared to Miss North "too stupendous," seeming, as she says,—
"To blunt my poor wits and pencil too, no cutting could get the wretched thing to draw straight; and then the flocks of Americans and 'backsheesh' people drove all peace away. The little women of eleven or twelve years old, who carried water jars on their heads, only supported by the palm of one hand, keeping up with our fast donkeys at a run, were very bewitching, with their bright eyes and easy graceful movements. They said they were all ladies, not girls, meaning they were married. 'You got wife?' they asked me. 'Oh yes, you have in house in England!'—as if I locked up my husband at home as they do their wives here."
Near the caves of Beni Hassan the writer encountered her first Egyptian "saint," who seems to have been, in some points, very like his historic prototypes:
"One morning we were surprised to see Achmet and the Reis go on shore amicably together, after incessant squabbling, for a walk, but a few minutes later a wild head with a mop of hair came suddenly out of the water and up the boat's side, and its owner seated himself on the edge and tied himself into a petticoat which he had brought on the top of the mop, and then proceeded to kiss all the sailors, who did not enjoy it, while we shrank closer into our cabin shell. The poor fellows all gave him some coppers, and after he had administered another hugging all round, he took off and folded up his petticoat, put it on his head, and dived and swam off to a boat full of corn near us, to levy the same tax. They said he was mad, and consequently a saint, and thus gained his own livelihood."
We shall close our extracts from Miss North's journals with the following description of the journalist herself, given by the Egyptian pilot who took the Norths up the river:
"This Bint was unlike most other English Bints, being, firstly, white and lively; secondly, she was gracious in her manner, and of kind disposition; thirdly, she attended continually to her father, whose days went in rejoicing that he had such a Bint; fourthly, she represented all things on paper, she drew all the temples of Nubia, all the Sakkiahs, and all the men and women and nearly all the palm trees; she was a valuable and remarkable Bint."
The portrait is certainly more complimentary to its subject than to English "Bints" (we confess to some uncertainty as to the meaning of this term) in general.
There are three illustrations, including portraits of the author and her father, and a pensketch, by a fellow-traveler, which is so absurdly bad that it is difficult to account for its inclusion.
An Evolutionist's Alarm.[1]
Professor Calderwood's work on "Evolution and Man's Place in Nature" belongs to a class of books that may not inaptly be designated as "buffers." Their service is to soften the shock between new scientific doctrine and the dogmas of popular religion. This work has been done for the science of geology, and is now rapidly doing for the new biology that dates from Darwin. Those who have never experienced the need of a reconciliation between religion and science, and those who prefer to devise their own systems of "accommodation," will take but a moderate interest in "buffers." Acute metaphysical minds will find, in some form of Berkeleian idealism, a way out from the disconsolate vision of a merely mechanical world, in which Darwinism, on a first hasty interpretation, seemed to issue. Crude literal materialism has been proved unthinkable, they will argue. Matter that contains in itself the power and potency of all forms of life and thought must be conceived as the manifestation of a power most nearly akin to what we know as mind. Belief in such a world-soul would seem mere pantheism. But it did not seem so to Berkeley; and Berkeley was right. With the Infinite and Unknowable, all things are possible. We cannot tell how far the roots of personality penetrate into the real nature of things; and since we have no right to dogmatize on either side, we may properly throw the weight of our moral and religious feelings into the scale of hope. Evolution explains the process, it does not explain away the fact, of creation. And, like other winds of scientific doctrine that terrified our fathers, Dar-
- ↑ Evolution and Man's Place in Nature. By Henry Calderwood, LL.D. New York: Macmillan & Co.
