We sum up the warning we desire to convey, in saying that the law that work consumes heat is as true for mind as for matter. A sensible amount of heat, Mr. Tyndall tells us, is consumed by a cup of tea in dissolving a lump of sugar, and an intense amount of cold may be produced if the chemical work we require is proportionally great. In the moral world, unhappily, the coldness may be produced, and the work not done. He who makes the thinker's claim without doing the thinker's work well deserves the condemnation which he generally receives; but do not judge severely one who overrates his work, or at least, remember in judging him that for a second-rate intellect to discern clearly the limits inexorably set to its achievements, would sometimes be to abandon them altogether.

of the self but one so colored by condem- | round-topped hills, covered with splendid nation as selfish. A great thinker-or grass. The road to Lithang was a suc rather, a true thinker of any calibre is cession of mountainous valleys, huge pine doing far more for his kind when he takes forests, and open glades. Capt. Gill found anxious care of his health, than if he were Lithang a cheerless place, some twelve to injure it in exertions for somebody else; thousand five hundred feet above the seaand indeed, you should call no one selfish level. The natives told him that Ta-so, the for reserving his energies, till you know last mountain-pass before reaching Bahow he is going to expend them. At the thang, was a very bad "medicine-mounsame time, we think it is extremely dan- tain," the inconvenience caused by the gerous for any one to have to make this rarefaction of the air at these great altisort of claim on his own behalf; and the tudes being attributed by them to subtle temptation to do this must, we fear, be exhalations. On the road thither Capt. reckoned as the one great danger which is Gill passed the magnificent mountain Nenfully compensated for, but not annihilated, da, twenty-two thousand feet high, and by the many and enduring blessings of the near the the top of Ta-so he entered a little intellectual life. circular basin, surrounded on all sides but one by ragged precipices, with a pond of clear water at the bottom. On crossing the crest of the pass, he entered a large basin two miles in diameter, where a wild and savage scene presented itself to his sight: great masses of bare rock rising all round, torn into every conceivable shape by the rigor of the climate. The bottom of the basin was covered with the débris that had fallen from them, and some small pools of water in the hollows formed the sources of the stream, which eventually became a roaring torrent among the pine forests in the valleys below. Bathang, Capt. Gill found, had been recently rebuilt, after its destruction, a few years ago, in a frightful series of earthquakes, which, lasting for several weeks, devastated the whole neighborhood. The town, he says, is chiefly remarkable for its immorality and its lamasery. Besides his description of the country Capt. Gill gave some interesting information respecting the habits of the Thibetans, contrasting them with those of the Chinese. Owing to their originally nomad mode of living they have no idea of inn accommodation, and the owner of a good house even will, as often as not, be found sleeping on the flat roof, whilst the hardy people in winter can sleep with their clothes half off and their bare shoulders in the snow; tables, chairs, and bedsteads are unknown in their houses. Thibet is a land flowing with milk and butter, the enormous quantity of the latter consumed by a Thibetan being very startling-butter in his oatmeal porridge, and huge lumps of butter in his tea. As a rule he does not drink much milk, which is mostly made into butter, but he is fond of sour cream, curds, and cheese; and this brings a Thibetan bill of fare to an end.

THIBET.

From Nature.

IN the course of the address which he recently delivered before the Geographical Society upon the subject of his travels on the western frontier of China, Capt. W. J. Gill, R. E., gave an interesting account of his experiences on the borders of Thibet. He entered that land of mystery at Tachien-lu, whence the road at once ascends to the great plateau through a valley amongst granite rocks, capped at the summit with bare crags of limestone. Standing on the summit of the pass, by which the great upland country was reached, the traveller saw stretched below a fine valley closed in on both sides by gently sloping,

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66

From The Quarterly Review.
CATHERINE OF RUSSIA.*

those visions

the European public by Dohm, a clerk in the Prussian Foreign Office under Freder"You know," said the czar Nicholas ick the Great and Frederick William II., - speaking of the moribund Ottoman Em- whose access to papers and persons enapire to Sir Hamilton Seymour in 1853bled him to produce an account which may you know the dreams and plans in which still perhaps be quoted as the best general the empress Catherine was in the habit of sketch of the subject. His picture of Catherine's plans was completely justified indulging these were handed down to our time; but while I inherited immense by the reports, subsequently published, of territorial possessions, I did not inherit Sir James Harris, afterwards Lord Malmesthose intentions, if you bury, and by the documents discovered in like to call them so." Not long afterwards, the public and royal archives of Berlin by the publication of Catherine's correspond- Herrmann and Zinkeisen, who also partly ence with the emperor Joseph revealed lifted the veil which had obscured the nethe details of these plans, of which, judg-gotiations known to have been carried on ing from his own overtures to the British between the czarina and the emperor Joenvoy, her grandson had made himself master. After the lapse of a generation, another British envoy was solemnly assured by the emperor Alexander II., that the current story of Catherine's Oriental aspirations was a mere fable, which ascribed to his ancestor ideas altogether foreign to her mind. One czar having thus categorically denied that which another czar had distinctly affirmed, and the chief depositary of the traditions of the Romanofs having rejected the evidence of authentic texts, a statement of the designs in question may not be out of place.

The works named below furnish ample materials for a narrative of Catherine's Eastern policy, and of the wars and transactions in which her ambition involved herself, her rivals, and her allies. Her socalled Dacian and Greek projects were first fully and authentically made known to

1. Denkwürdigkeiten meiner Zeit, oder Beiträge zur Geschichte des letzten Viertels des 18. und des Anfangs des 19. Jahrhunderts. Von C. W. v. Dohm. Lemgo und Hannover, 1814-19.

2. Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches in Europa. Von J. W. Zinkeisen. Gotha, 1857.

3. Geschichte des russischen Staates. Von Dr. Ernst Herrmann. Gotha, 1860.

4. Joseph und Katharina von Russland. Ihr Briefwechsel. Herausgegeben von Alfred Ritter von Arneth. Wien, 1869.

5. Maria Theresa's letzte Regierungszeit. Alfred Ritter von Arneth. Wien, 1876-77.

Von

6. Die deutschen Mächte und der Fürstenbund. Von Leopold von Ranke. Leipzig, 1871. 7. Aus der Zeit Friedrichs des Grossen und Friedrich Wilhelms III. Von Max Duncker. Leipzig, 1876.

8. Friedrich der Grosse. Friedrich Wilhelm der Vierte. Zwei Biographien. Von Leopold von Ranke. Leipzig, 1878.

seph for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. The curiosity felt in respect to that dark business was completely gratified when Herr von Arneth published the text of the imperial letters in question. The diplomatic moves of Austria, Prussia, and France, at the date which concerns us, may be tolerably well gathered from the works of Zinkeisen and Herrmann, taken in connection with Arneth's admirably impartial book on Maria Theresa, and Duncker's useful though incomplete essay

on Frederick's seizure of West-Preussen. None of these writers are Dryasdusts. Zinkeisen does not disdain personal descriptions and incidents, and he is not unobservant of the decencies of style and arrangement incumbent on the historic artist. The philosophical illustration of the topic was reserved for Ranke, whose terse and selective manner of handling facts, and his fresco-like method of broad generalization, always open up fresh points of view.

It is now beyond dispute that, at an early period of her reign, the "Semiramis of the North" began to revolve in her capacious mind schemes of European domination, Ottoman conquest, and Byzantine reconstruction, which for their grandeur her fabulous Babylonian namesake need not have disdained. Plans of partition were in that age no new schemes. Cromwell had replied to Charles Gustavus of Sweden, the greatest of all proficients in that line, who proposed to the Protector to cut up Denmark, that the days when it was allowable to destroy entire monarchies

tries and his Italian possessions, and to compensate himself by the seizure of the Porte's territory in Europe up to the Black

were gone. Yet both in his time, and in | The kaiser was to surrender the Low Counthe following century, the pigeon-holes of half the foreign offices in Europe were full of plots for national annihilation, drawn up by adventurers, diplomatists, and min-Sea and the Balkans. The duke of Gotisters of state. Next to Poland, the de- torp was to be king of Roumelia, Macetails of whose partition had been written donia, Greece, and Albania, and to have on paper more than a hundred years be- his capital in Constantinople. The Turk fore the final catastrophe occurred, Tur- was to be beguiled of Cyprus, as Brabankey had always been a favorite patient tio would have said, in favor of the duke with the Patkuls, Alberonis, and Choiseuls. of Savoy, who was to be a member of a The origin of most of the earlier projects new Italian confederation. England would of the sort, especially of those which came | take Smyrna and Crete. Prussia was to from Vienna and Rome, is of course to be annex Euboea, while Tunis, Tripoli, and found in that genuine terror of the Turks, Algiers fell respectively to Spain, Portuwhich was felt in Europe up to the conclu- gal, and France. Russia was to be satission of the "Holy War," and of which fied with Azov and the Crimea. Holland some shadows still seem to survive in Ger- was to receive Aleppo and Rhodes, where man popular sayings and traditions. Other her energies might be less wasted than, as schemes were inspired by the mere passion theretofore, on Java and the Cape. Comof spoliation; as, for instance, one con- pletely anticipating the bag-and-baggage cocted in the reign of Louis XIII. by the theory propounded a century and a half Sieur de Breves, who passed twenty-two later, the pamphlet insisted on a compreyears in French diplomatic employment at hensive measure of Ottoman deportation. Constantinople, and printed “ A Short Dis- The Turks were to be carried bodily out course of Sure Means for Destroying and of Europe and landed elsewhere. CardiRuining the Ottoman Monarchy." It seems nal Alberoni, or the bold projector who that the famous Père Joseph tried to make assumed his name, was very sensible that Richelieu take the Turks seriously in hand, these beneficent territorial rectifications an attempt frustrated by the cardinal's loy- would be toughly resisted by the victims, alty to the system of Francis I. and Henry who were accordingly to be overpowered IV., for whom a close friendship with the by a general European crusade. Porte was always a fundamental diplomatic armament of the new Godfrey de Bouillon axiom. The same drift appears in the or Dandolo was accurately set by him at correspondence of Sir Thomas Roe, whose three hundred and seventy thousand men "delenda est Carthago" recurs, in a of all arms and one hundred ships of war, scarcely veiled form, almost with the regu- to be furnished by the powers, including larity of the “præterea censeo of old the grand master of St. John of Jerusalem, Cato. His meaning is clear, when he la- who was to come off with barren honor, ments the disunion that hinders the accord and the Swiss cantons, whose troops were of the princes of Christendom, although to receive double pay. "thirty thousand soldiours would march unfought with to the gates of Constantinople."

In Catherine's time, any bookseller's shop in Germany could supply an admirable plan for abolishing the Turks, signed, on the title-page at least, by a leading European statesman. Some years before her accession, there appeared in Frankfort and Leipzig a pamphlet on the solution of European difficulties, purporting to be "the famous Cardinal Alberoni's proposals" for a partition of the Ottoman Empire.

The

The cardinal's way of spoiling the Ottomans would scarcely have suited Catherine, who is said by our Prussian authority, Dohm, to have received her inspirations in this matter from a German source. Her husband, Peter III., had recalled from banishment the venerable Marshal Münnich, who, after winning for the empress Anna Ivanovna a series of splendid victories over the Turks, had finally, in the course of the revolutions of the empire, been sent to Siberia for twenty years of that old age which he had hoped, in reward