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AFRICA AS A GAME-PRESERVE.

IN the National Geographic Magazine for No. vember, Mr. John B. Torbert writes briefly on "Africa, the Largest Game-Preserve in the World." It will be news to many of our readers, perhaps, that on May 19 of the present year a convention was signed in London by the diplomatic representatives of Great Britain, Germany, Spain, Belgium, France, Italy, and Portugal for the protection of the wild animals, birds, and fishes of Africa. This convention, after ratification by the several powers, is to remain in force fifteen years. The European nations having colonial possessions in Africa have thus formed

white-tailed gnus, elands, and the little Liberian hippopotamus is prohibited. The young of certain animals, including the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, zebra, antelope, gazelle, ibex, and chevrotain are protected, and also the same Parspecies when accompanied by their young. ticular emphasis is laid on the protection of young elephants, and all elephants' tusks weighing less than twenty pounds are to be confiscated by the government if the animal was killed after the convention went into effect. The eggs of the ostrich, among those of a large number of other birds, are to be protected; but those of the crocodile and of poisonous snakes and pythons are to be destroyed. A limited number of lions, leopards, hyenas, otters, baboons, and other harmful monkeys, large birds of prey, crocodiles, poisonous snakes, and pythons may be killed.

"The method of taking or killing game is regulated to the extent that the use of nets and pitfalls is forbidden, and dynamite and other explosives must not be used for taking fish. Only persons holding licenses issued by the local governments are allowed to hunt wild animals within the protective zone, and these are revocable where the provisions of the convention are in any way violated.

"Another provision of the convention is that the contracting parties shall, as far as possible in their respective territories, encourage the domestication of zebras, elephants, and ostriches."

M.

LIFE AROUND THE POLES.

DASTRE contributes to the first October number of the Revue des Deux Mondes one of his informing articles on life and all things. living in the vast regions which surround both the North and South poles.

THE GREAT ANTARCTIC GLACIER.

To M. Dastre's mind, the principal interest of arctic and antarctic exploration is not the solving. of certain scientific problems so much as the study of the animal and vegetable life of the polar zones. In both polar regions there are four different variations of the landscape-the main ice-floe, the inland seas, the mainland, and the ocean. In these four spheres is abundant room for the habitation of animals and plants. Of the two polar regions, the antarctic is the most simple; it is an immense expanse, perpetually frozen, of which the center is occupied by a vast continent, and the circumference is girdled with ice which forms the ice-floe. The main continent is covered with a mantle of snow, which drifts round the rocky summits and smooths the sharp angles of the configuration of the soil. The

spectacle is that of a colossal glacier which disgorges itself into the sea or on the ice-floe.

REMARKABLE FAUNA AND FLORA.

If this view of the antarctic continent is correct, the wonder is that any animal or vegetable life should be maintained in so uninhabitable a region. As a matter of fact, however, the icefloe, at any rate, presents remarkable fauna and flora. The geographical conditions of the arctic zone are quite different from those of the antarctic; it is regarded as certain that a deep sea occupies the center. A characteristic of the arctic is the continuity of the ice-floe with the lands which are not always frozen over; this is a matter of great importance from the point of view of the distribution of animals and plants. The ice-floe is a very poor substitute for the solid earth; it is continually breaking up into crevasses, grinding itself into chasms, and reuniting, apparently capriciously, but really in obedience to the forces of winds and submarine currents. It follows that the ice-floe can only furnish a very precarious habitation for terrestrial animals, and its fauna is therefore practically a marine one. It is the principal glory of Nansen to have realized the supremely important fact that the ice floe moves in obedience to definite laws, and that its direction can be pretty accurately foretold.

A FLOATING PRAIRIE.

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But it is time to pass on to the animals. riously enough, the ice-floe in the polar regions rests upon a relatively warm sea, the waters of which are favorable to various forms of submarine life. The depths of the arctic sea are actually a little warmer if anything than those of the oceans farther south. Even under the ice may be found a kind of green moss which exhibits the elementary vegetable life related to the most simple kinds of seaweed. Under the microscope the tiny atoms which make up the whole layer reveal the most beautiful cells and granulations. Light, which is an almost essential condition of vegetable existence, is obtained in summer when the impenetrable layers of frozen snow formed. during the winter disappear. Thanks to this curious kind of moss, the ice-floe, in place of a horrible desert, becomes an immense floating prairie, on which a prodigious quantity of little animals find nourishment; these creatures include jelly-fish, mollusks, and crustacea, which, in their turn, furnish food to animals of greater size, such as members of the seal tribe, whales, and various birds. We thus have a chain of organized life depending ultimately upon millions of tiny points of albuminous seaweed.

M.

THE MODERN FORTUNE-TELLER.

JULES BOIS, well known as a writer on witchcraft, satanism, and kindred subjects, contributes to the first September number of the Nouvelle Revue a striking article on for. tune-telling. He gives a rapid sketch of the greatest living fortune teller-the remarkable woman who, under the name of Madame de Thèbes, exercises her art in modern Paris. "Do not laugh," she once said to an interviewer; I touch the bedrock of human sorrow. Eight out of ten married women who consult me would fain be widows, and all about me the death of others is longed for, if not actually sought." Madame de Thèbes is a palmist; most of her rivals tell fortunes by cards, and from time immemorial Paris has been the center of somnambulism. The most famous "somnambule" of this century was Madame Auffinger; and M. Bois declares that on innumerable occasions she not only foretold the future, but gave the date on which notorious criminals and murderers would be brought to justice.

As to the great Frenchmen who frequently consulted fortune-tellers, the writer gives a long list, from Napoleon I. to Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, and Napoleon III. There is in the French code an act specially forbidding the fortune teller to practise his or her art; but the law is rarely, if ever, put in motion, and every Paris paper, including the Figaro, publishes the attractive advertisements of these dealers in hope;" and, what is more, French men and women, belonging to every class of society, consult regularly palmists, sorcerers, somnambulas, and tellers of cards. The late General Boulanger was a firm believer in occultism, and none of those who knew him can doubt that his pitiful end was partly brought about by the fact that he had clearly marked in his hand the "suicide's line "— a fact of which he unfortunately became aware early in his career. President Carnot was also

told by a fortune-teller that he would be assassinated, and so was the late President Faure, about whose death so many stories are current.

'Varsity men are very far from being well off. This great change in the social composition of the universities has had its effect on the unwrit ten law.

"One of the best features of Oxford is this, that a man's parentage is never discussed or inquired into. It is taken for granted that he is a gentleman, whatever his appearance may be, unless he proves himself to be the contrary. This is, of course, only a general rule, to which there are exceptions. Sometimes we may near a man express contempt for his neighbor because he is a nobody, and complain that the university is open to all sorts of bounders' nowadays. Such men are, happily, rare; in general, patrician and plebeian live on terms of amity with one another, and meet on terms of equality with one another to their common advantage."

THE TROUBLES OF THE FRESHMAN.

The unwritten law of the university includes an appalling series of rules respecting conduct. and dress, as Mr. Verdant Green" learned to

his cost. The undergraduate of to-day has quite as many details of etiquette to master.

A common mistake of freshmen, and one which never fails to arouse the laughter of the onlookers, is to go for a walk in cap and gown. The guileless youth in his first term has a vague idea that he is always liable to be proctorized if he appears without his academicals, and he consequently sets forth for a constitutional, a square mortar-board adorning his head, and thirty inches of black alpaca dangling gracefully from his shoulders. Occasionally one may see a wretched man on the top of Headington Hill, in cap and gown, the cynosure of every eye; even the dirty little ragamuffin of the Oxford streets has wit enough to see the jest, and points gibes at the unfortunate victim.

"To carry a stick while in cap and gown is This rule is, perhaps, a coruniversally barred. relative of the last. "It is probably the cap and gown which give most trouble to the freshman. He has been known to go down to the river in them, and has sat in a tub all the afternoon, gravely wondering what every one was laughing at.

The undergraduate is a hardy and cleanly animal; whatever he may have been at school, at Oxford he is the champion of soap and cold water-hence one of his unwritten laws. Every one is supposed to have a cold bath every morning. This is a law to which every one conforms at least outwardly. If one does not, the college may perhaps treat him to a cold bath in the college fountain, or duck pond, if it possesses one, some cold winter's night on the

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Of the ideals of the undergraduate, Mr. Brodrick says: "It is certainly true that very few undergraduates have any very clearly defined ideals. The average young Oxonian is quite content to live on quietly at Oxford; with good plain food, plenty of exercise, and sufficient reading to give him an appetite for amusing himself, he is perfectly happy. Oxford is such an ab. sorbing place that if the undergraduate is fond of idealizing, he will probably connect his ideal with alma mater. He thinks there is no place in the world like Oxford, no life like 'Varsity life. idealizes the Oxford Theater, the Union, or, maybe, one of the more or less exclusive undergraduate clubs, the Oxford cabs, the country round Oxford. The one thing that he grumbles at is the dinner in hall; all else, except, perhaps, the proctorial system, is perfection. If he has any thought beyond his 'Varsity career, he dreams of a snug little place under the government, an office where the clerks-like the fountains in Trafalgar Square-play frora ten to four. A charming littie wife, perhaps, as well, who will permit smoking in the drawing-room; but as a rule he is content to let his thoughts play freely over Oxford, and resigns himself, with what grace he may, to reading enough to get through the necessary examinations, spending his leisure joyously."

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A SUCCESSOR TO POE AND LANIER. N that excellent quarterly, Poet- Lore, of Boston, Miss Helena Knorr reviews the work of the young American poet, Richard Hovey, whose untimely death has cut short a career of unusual promise. Like Poe and Lanier, his acknowledged masters, Hovey left his work uncompleted, and, as Miss Knorr shows, the three poets had much in common.

They had the most exalted view of the office of the poet as a bringer of light. They believed in the divine mission of poetry to ennoble the life of man. Moreover, they were artists in verse as well as singers-searching for new effects in sound and rhythm, craftsmen tirelessly experi menting upon new forms. The technique of verse was a serious business to them. They held

poetry to be an art amenable to fundamental laws; theorized on it, and practised it diligently to that end. They made poetry their chief concern. The younger learned from the elder, and carried on the work of the predecessor to further perfection.

A COMPARISON OF POETIC GIFTS.

"Yet with all these formal resemblances there are decided points of difference that mark off Hovey's work from that of the two elder singers. Poe left a body of verse, small in volume, but of a texture so fine and faultless, of, a music so haunting, as to place him, in the opinion of many, at the head of our poets. More than any one of them he is distinctly a poet,- -a maker of beautiful verse, and nothing else.

Life touches him

little. His range is narrow, and remote from earthly interests. Even had he lived longer and produced more verse, it is doubtful if he could have written poems with warm, red, human blood pulsing through them. He limited himself to the creation of mere beauty. Lanier, like Poe,

an artist in verse, was also a musician; haunted by elfin music, and vainly striving to bind the elusive melodies into rhyme. A worshiper of the beautiful; a lofty spirit standing awestruck before the holiness of beauty. His genius was essentially lyric, with perhaps a leaning toward the epic. He would have given us, as best fruit of his endeavors, more splendid Hymns of the Marshes.' His work, less clearly articulated, is also more incomplete than Poe's; it may not be too hazardous to say that, like Poe, he gave us of the best he had, and that he would have proceeded along the lines on which he had begun. Richard Hovey not only left a larger body of verse than either of these two, but his range was also much wider, including both the lyric and the dramatic, and passing from the tinsel of Barney McGee' to the rapturous exaltation of Taliesin's Hymn of Joy.' We find in the lyrics not only Poe's passion for beauty and his delight in mere verbal ingenuity, together with Lanier's nature worship, but the note of human passion, absent in Poe and held in abeyance in Lanier, is distinctly struck in Hovey's dramas."

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THE VERDICT OF CRITICISM.

After a critical analysis of Hovey's poems and dramas, Miss Knorr concludes:

"What Richard Hovey would have done, had the full measure of a man's years been granted him, we do not know. What he intended to do does not concern us here. A man's intentions never count for much except to his intimate friends. Promissory notes are not a bid for immortality. But this we can say, even now, that

Richard Hovey was one of the most richly endowed poetic personalities this country has yet produced, combining lyric fervor with the dramatic instinct to a degree not found in any other of our poets, and adding to these the scholar's equipment with the artist's sense of form. The future smiled fair upon him. He gave to the world one fine drama and one splendid poem. Then he was called off, leaving his chief work a fragment. He must be named with poets like Lanier, whose work is incomplete, whose promise was greater than their achievement, and whose untimely loss American literature will mourn for many a day to come."

IN

THE PROCESS OF INFECTION.

N his article on "Infection," in the Centralblatt für Bakteriologie for August 22, Dr. Alexis Radzievsky describes the way in which microscopic organisms produce.disease and death. For the past fifty years bacteria have been kept very prominently before the public. Since their discovery the germ theory of disease has been developed, giving us a rational working basis for the prevention and cure of germ diseases; the antiseptic treatment of wounds has made a radical change in surgery, while the application of the same principles along lines of less vital importance has demonstrated much that is of interest as well as profit. The various flavors of wines are due to certain kinds of bacteria; butter, good or bad, owes its flavor to the bacteria that pervade it, and different kinds of cheeses may be made as desired by inoculating them with the right bacteria.

These organisms are so small that it is frequently necessary to study them by means of lenses magnifying 1,200 diameters. They live everywhere-floating about in the air, mingled with the dust that blows in the streets, in water, in milk, and in the earth. They are always ready to take advantage of favorable circumstances for growth, and their growth may mean death to the organism invaded. The chief sources of invasion are the mouth, the skin, and the lungs.

The question may be asked, Why do we not all die? Because skin or lung that is perfectly whole and healthy is bacteria-proof. Cuts and bruises, or any unhealthy tissues, are favorable for the invasion of bacteria. Sunshine and oxygen are antagonistic to them.

Under the term infection are brought together all the changes that are induced in animal organisms by microbes. It is believed that the most important changes depend upon the action of specific poisons in the infected animals.

ACTIVITIES OF MICROBES.

Having once gained entrance to the body, these organisms grow rapidly and divide, so that enormous numbers are formed; while, as a result of their natural life processes, various matters are thrown off which act upon us as poisons. The life history of the microbe is short, and they soon begin to die in constantly increasing numbers. We have to consider, then, three ways in which microbes produce the effects of disease: first, by invading the tissues in large numbers and feeding upon them; second, by throwing out poisonous matter; and, third, by the decomposition of their dead bodies. It is thought that the cholera germ is fatal because it dies between the cells that form the lining tissue of the intestines, through contact with the living tissue, or through the action of normal blood-serum which is intensely antagonistic to bacteria. This action is so intense that, even after death from cholera, the peritoneal fluids have still been found to be sterile.

The animal organism reacts in defense of itself, and under the influence of the infecting

microbes bactericidal substances are formed in the tissues, which gradually become stronger, as well as increase in quantity, and become diffused through the whole system, where they resist the attacks of the microbes, so that the mere presence of the microbes calls an opposing force into ac tion.

Dead microbes, which are found in quantities at certain stages of these diseases, are destroyed by the action of the normal fluids of the body. But in case the microbes overcome the natural resistance offered, they will ultimately die from the effects of the substances which they themselves excrete, and in that case the chances of recovery will depend upon the endurance of the individual infected.

THE NERVOUS STRAIN IN POLITICS.

Of course, the cause of the affection is to be found in the nervous strain to which politicians as a class are constantly subject the feverish hopes and expectations, the biting disappointments, the sense of being never wholly at ease. All these excitements and irritations produce "constant hyperæmia, which finally converts these unfortunate beings into neurasthenics, predisposing them to cerebral congestion. . . . In the measure that the politician advances in his career he offers to us more distinct characteristics of neurasthenia. Look at the minister who has hardly a moment at his disposal. . . . Without quiet meals, without restoring sleep, always on the go, at all hours the object of the bitterest criticisms; . . . maltreated, at times unjustly, by the press; mortified by caricature; separated from the caresses of his family; alienated from his best friends,—he lives isolated from the world in the midst of the throng that surrounds him; hated, in spite of their false protests, by his flatterers, who are the first to disparage him; and in this cruel and envenomed existence passes his days, always fearing to lose power, always disquieted by the threat of revolt, at every hour tortured by anxieties, ingrates, and enemies."

A situation, certainly, that is not favorable to good health-physical, mental, or moral. Three symptoms are mentioned by our moralist as conspicuously noticeable in subjects of this class:

1. The delirium of greatness-that is to say, a disturbance of the judgment, in which the patient thinks he is fit for anything if it is great enough, and is ready and eager to take any portfolio of state, though he has had no experience or training to qualify him for the post.

2. Failure of will-power-especially of courage. It is a strange association, but the lives of many public men have demonstrated the fact that bloated conceit and poverty of will are constantly hugging each other in public life.

3. Volubility everybody recognizes—at least, in the United States. And it seems that this symptom of cerebral degeneration is not peculiar to Americans. Even people of such grave dig nity as Spaniards of the upper class are subject to the infirmity when they are victims of neurasthenia.