Tux papers now to hand are extremely dull. With exception of an article on Corea in the Spectator, which is about as erroneous sud misleading an utterance as we have ever read upon that subject, there is little else that commends itself to the interest of the general public. But this article is really quite unique.
The writer i is still under the firm conviction that both the King and Queen of Corea were murdered, though we should have thought that illusion had been dispelled, as regards the King at least, weeks before. He talks of China gradually piling up a heavy account of insults received from Japan, and thinks that now the day of reckoning has come between them. The Formosa and Liuchin affairs were both insults to China, and now there is an open injury" in Corea which has rendered host betive en China and Japan a very likely event in the immediate future. This idea of an jury is delightful. The writer ent to be under the impression that it was the Japanese who murdered the King and Queen. But it isa vain and fruitless task to attempt to make London editors see plain facts, as long as those facts are connected with the politics of the Far, East. Rubbish they write and rubbish they will write on such subjects to the end of time. A far more satisfactory article is that dealing with some of the features of deep-tea life, under the heading "The Vegetarian Sea.' Professor giving a lecture in which he describes certain remarkable little protozoa which carry their kitchen-pardons about incorporated in their own persons, and contrive, as it were, to foed, out of their own waste tis. sues, the plants on which they themselves food in return." The Spectator calls the arrangements a sort of benefit-society between the plants and animals, with a continuous division of the profits always going on, Certain animals," says the Professor, "have embodied in their tissues numbers of unicellular algo, which are not to be regarded as parasites, but which thrive in the waste products of the animal, while the animal feeds upon the products elaborated by the algo." This, remarks the Spectator, in an unusual flight of fancy, Is as though a cow were furnished with strips of verdant meadow on her own hide, 20 com ly arranged that could yet graze off porting cow would be wy by the dairyman, and it ow, on the theory of natural imaloules thus dolightfally to which they and which was necessary to the direction of With meal and future meal, it would seem farther could done in th way of ce-ordinating the organisation with the enviroument"—which 18, we believe, thi best-approved philosophical way of expr ing the adaptation of wants to the external objects which satisfy the wants, and of the qualities of external objects to the wants which they supply. And yet it seems to be obvious that these remarkable protozos, though amongst the best fed and best provided of Nature's vegetarians, are also amongst the least advanced forms of animal life, It seems that those who prefer to talk of Nature rather than of Mind as the ultimate cause of things, mast confess that Nature is dissatisfied with one the Kiteleu. arden and the owner of the this very ingenious device of combining i
then-garden, and takes a great deal more pains to develop those forms of life which to go in search of their food and to ran kk of failing to find it, than she takes to develope the form of life in which she had made most careful provision for indolence and ease.
Rather an amusing letter is published further on about the continued imprisonment of the Rev. S. L. Green. The Spectator had drawn a parallel between the action of the Attorney-General and that of King Darius when he passed the famous Public Worship Act which resulted in the imprison. ment of Daniel in the lions' den. Trevor writes You do a great injustice to King Darius, 1g him to the Attorney-General ented of saw what he of his repentance, he mittee to the lions, and. arturo meu for their religious opinions, the Inquisition that Lord Penzance has and the Attorney-General defends, If Mr. Green were a Quaker, or an Irish rebel," concludes the writer, " would ho be left to lie in prison thirteen months without a public outcry? It is a national sin. "—Mr, Wilfred Scawen Blunt comes in for some hard hitting this week. The Saturday says he has dono an immense amount of mischief—an amount as yet in the literal senso immense, and, indeed, unmeasurable, by the meddling folly of his amateur diplomacy in Egypt.—" His solfassertion, his ludicrous miscalculation of his own importance in the scale of creation, ceases to be simply dull and disgusting, as it would be ina stupider man, and becomes joke of no ordinary flavour." But this is graceful flattery compared with the letter of 'Kosmos' in the World Some apology is due to the gentlemen whom Ihave previously addresseed, as well as to the public, for giving you the same prominence that lias more or less deservedly boon accorded. to them. You are rather an excrescence than an eminence; and you stand in the same relation to true greatness as a wart does to a mountain. But you faithfully reflect, in however grotesque and exaggerated a form, some of the most marked of the You area trae d ago of advertisement, puffery, illusion, and coucolt. Without pen, ink, and paper, the press, and the whole of the machinery which constitutes the opportunity of the professional notan hunter, you could not exist, The leading journal sainisters to your vanity; Mr. Koowles, with hie mouthly miscellany, flame of your morbid desire to be in the li of men, Even diplomacy itself pi your lands. Had Mr. Gladstone our epistolary impertinences iand Calvin and d deaf to your officious been treated by those in power as ical intermoddior, fond of playing with rash, prying, self-seeking, and mated, you would ha en con demned to that obscurity from which you have struggled successfully to escape. A few persons, indeed, might have associated your hame with the authorship of " voluaie of by those whose taste is tickled. by erotic subtleties, is held to be fine poetry. But the reputation of a coterie was not enough for you, Your aspiring soul soared. above and beyond the narrow limits of the social clique which professed to recognise in you a half-fledged Apollo, A gentleman who has a good presence, considerable social posi tion, an ample fortune; who, as he never us, married a granddaughter of the true and original Lord Byron, and who is credited with the gift and faculty divine, may reasonably hope to create some stir in the world, A biting but clever and no doubt to a certain extent true article in the Saturday deals with 'Literary Husbands,' who are represented of course as great curses to their wives and children, "What literary wives are to their husbands and children is a far more pointed question. Among the reviews in this week's Saturday that of Dr. Ebers's work on Egypt: Descriptive, Historical, and Picturesque' is perhaps the most important, As another critic says somewhere, Dr, Ebers's learning in this direction is portentous, He is an
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.