year, whose produce was scarce an eighth of that of its predecessor. The masses of grapes that load the vines in an abundant season are a marvel to Northern eyes. The whole country is garlanded and festooned as if for a triumph of Bacchus, and one no longer wonders that the Tuscan's favorite oath should be by the divinity who treats him so handsomely. In very productive seasons, however, the quality of the wine is generally below the average, as the grapes do not ripen simultaneously, and the peasants are impatient to gather them prematurely for fear of thieves. Indeed the wine is always poor, though the grapes are large and well flavored, and the system practised in Tuscany, called il governo del vino, which consists in adding a portion of the grapes, reserved for that purpose, after the first fermentation has set in, does not recommend itself by its results. The American vine, as it is called, has been introduced among the mountains, and produces a wonderful fruit, like a grape filled with the quintessence of strawberries or pineapples. The epicure who has not tasted uva fragola has still a new sensation in store for his palate. The wine made from them does not keep at all, so they are only grown for the fruit market.

From the mountain slopes the eye is sometimes caught by a belt of white poplars, fringing the bed of a stream, and conspicuous amid the luxuriant verdure of the valley by their silvery bark and foliage. From their close pithy fibre is made the finest quality of paper turned out by Cini's great factory at San Marcello, the capital of the Apennine of Pistoia; and carts laden with the trunks, sawn into equal lengths, are often to be met on their way up the Val di Lima. The Lima itself is studded with a series of ruder mills for making the roughest sort of brown paper, from maize straw a manufacture which has existed in this valley from the sixteenth century, and is the only one carried on there.

Farms let on the mezzeria system are to be found in the lower ground, even up to the foot of the hills; but slope and mountain, with their mantle of fruitful forest, are the peasant's sole property, where he is absolute lord of

the soil he tills. Nor can he be reproached here with unthrifty husbandry, for on the southern declivities the ground has been laboriously and painfully terraced up to render possible the cultivation of vines and olives; and if the chestnut, which requires little tendance, has usurped the rest of the soil, it may be said in its defence, that it is Nature's save-all, and grows where no other plant would find footing. Short of the absolutely vertical, no steep seems too abrupt for it to clothe, no hanging ravine too rugged, no rocky shelf too narrow, for it to grow and prosper there. As hardy as the mountain pine, as fruitful as the sun-pampered olive, it braves the bleakest gales of the wind-swept Apennine; and where the scanty earth seems to grudge a sustenance to man, it bears aloft a harvest on its branches. The most long-suffering of trees, it will, if cut down, send forth anew fruitful suckers, and will still bring forth its prickly clusters when its stem is all scooped away by age and nothing but a shell of bark remains to carry the sap up to its crown.

The boughs

The chestnut harvest, which takes place in October, is the great event of the year in the Apennines, and furnishes a recreation, rather than a task, to all classes of the population. The schools have their annual vacation in that month, that the children may assist in it; and it is difficult to find hands for any extra household work while a pleasant gipsy life goes on under the trees. The steep woods are then alive with merry parties picking the mahogany-brown nuts from among the fallen leaves and dropping them into long canvas pouches slung at the waist for the purpose. are never shaken to detach them, and the burrs fall singly as they ripen, rustling through the leaves, and breaking the forest silence with a heavy thud, as they strike the ground. They lie till picked up from day to day, during the appointed time for gathering them, which lasts a month, and is fixed by municipal proclamation-commonly from Michaelmas Day, September 29th, to the feast of Saints Simon and Jude, October 28th, but sometimes extended by special request, if the season be unusually late, for ten days longer. for ten days longer. Any one wandering off the recognized paths through the

woods during that period is liable to be shot by the proprietor, as in the Swiss vineyards in vintage time, but this sanguinary law seems to remain a dead letter. After the legal term has expired, the woods are free to the whole world, and are invaded by troops of beggars, gleaning any chance belated chestnuts, which, falling now, are the prize of the first comer. Those which drop at any time on a road passable for wheeled vehicles are also public property, and as the highway runs through chestnut woods the poor have a little harvest by the roadside.

The proprietors of woods too extensive for the gathering to be done by the members of their own household, engage a number of girls to assist, giving them food and lodging for forty days, and to each two sacks of chestnut flour on her departure. After their day's work in the woods they are expected to spin or weave in the evening for the benefit of the housewife, who thus gets her winter supply of yarn or linen pretty well advanced in this month. The poorer girls look forward to being employed in this way as a great treat, and will often throw up other occupations rather than lose it. In a fine season it is indeed sufficiently pleasant, for the lovely weather of a dry October among these Tuscan highlands makes open-air life unalloyed pleasure; but, on the other hand, one can hardly conjure up a more dismal picture than that presented by the dripping chestnut woods if the autumn rains have chosen that month for their own, when the sheeting floods of heaven thresh down the withered leaves as they fall, and the soaked burrs have to be fished out of the swirling yellow torrents that furrow the ground in all directions.

Wet or dry, however, October, unless the yield be exceptionally scanty, is a season of abundance and rejoicing through the country, while the peasants consume the fresh chestnuts by the sackful, not roasted, as they are eaten in the cities, but plainly boiled and eaten hot from the husk. The great mass are spread on the floors of the drying-houses--blind, deserted-looking buildings, scattered through the woods for this purpose, and which in the autumn seem to smoulder internally, as

the smoke of the fire lit to extract the moisture from the fresh chestnuts escapes through all the interstices of the roof and walls. From the drying-house they are taken to the mill and ground into farina dolce, a fine meal, of pinkish color and sickly sweet flavor, which forms the staple food of the population. From this they make polenta or porridge, in other districts made from Indian meal, and necci, round cakes baked between chestnut-leaves, which are kept and dried for the purpose, with the result of imparting a slightly pungent flavor of smoke that the stranger will hardly find an improvement. delicacies, too, are made from the chestnut flour, such as cakes covered with chocolate and sugar, but none are likely to commend themselves to Northern palates.

Other

But to the simple taste of the mountaineer his homely fare seems sweeter than all rare foreign viands, as his native crag is dearer than the great capitals of the modern world. He asks nothing from civilization, and renounces the present and the future to live alone with the past, which he clings to, without knowing it. For the force of association cannot count for much in a community whose history, as we have seen, is limited by the memory of the living. Yet the dweller in the Tuscan Apennine, and in the mountain regions throughout Italy, remains immovably fixed, of his own free choice, to the crag platform, whither his ancestors were driven for refuge by the exigencies of their time, and accepts the necessity of a thousand years ago as the unchangeable condition of to-day. The inhabitants of other countries have gradually abandoned the strong places originally built on by their forefathers, as increased security made self-defence unnecessary, and increased intercourse made accessibility desirable and profitable. Not so the Italian, in whom the tenacity of tradition and long-inherited usage is stronger than the love of convenience, of gain, or even of safety. The towns at the base of Vesuvius, buried beneath the devastating lava, rise from their ruins ere yet the fiery flood is cold above them; and while for Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabia there was in the Roman time no resurrection, Resina,

Torre del Greco, and San Sebastiano are by the modern Italians rebuilt as often as destroyed. Luzzano in the Apennines, carried down the mountainside by a landslip, which buried or swept into the Lima sixty-three houses and three churches, was re-erected on its former site, though not of its former size, by the inhabitants, as soon as they began to recover from the first stupefaction of the calamity. There is much to be said for the mountaineer's attachment to his lofty dwelling, and apart from the abstract question involved in weighing the pains against the penalties of progress, it is at least open to doubt whether he would not lose more than he would gain by descending to the valley, and whether the exhilarating breadth of light and air, the glorious amplitude of hanging panorama which reward his as cent, do not more than compensate for its fatigue. Modern fashion at least seems to say so, as it goes higher and higher in search of oxygen and scenery, and requires its summer haunts as many thousand feet above the level of the sea as is compatible with a due regard to creature comforts. The most enthusiastic advocate of mountain air might, however, shudder at the prospect before the Apennine villager, when the winter settles down on his home; when the chestnuts have been gathered and dried, the new wine made and tasted; when the younger men are gone to the metropolis or the Maremma, leaving the old, the helpless, and the feeble to await their return; and the snow, with gradual and noiseless footsteps, steals down from the higher peaks on the lonely village, wrapping it in a shroud of stillness and isolation. Perched then in aerial solitude on its unapproachable pinnacle, it looks down on the valley over a thousand feet of steep, bristling with leafless forest, while no sound

reaches it save the hoarse roar of the tawny torrents below, or the shrill whistle of the tramontana sweeping on it from some frigid zone of space. Then the water must be drawn across the snow, or up streets slippery with icy mud, and footing is difficult in the steep woods, where firewood, fortunately not scarce, must be gathered for the long, cold nights. But the winter, though sharp, is brief, and once Christmas has come and gone, spring is not far off; when the snow melts, the flowers break from the ground, the corn shoots fast, the chestnuts are green with promise, and summer is close at hand to bring life and animation once more to the highlands of the Apennines.

The

I shall not easily forget my last glimpse of one of these villages, and only wish I could make the reader see the picture of it impressed on my memory. It was early on an October morning, and a damp river fog had settled thickly on the valley, completely shutting out the mountains at either side. Overhead, however, the sky was clear, and suddenly, as the heavy swathes of mist floated aside, there gleamed out, like a rosy crown of morning glory, sole in that upper blue, a fairy city, with battlements and towers all flushed as they faced the newly risen sun. Fata Morgana never reared for herself an air-built castle of more visionary aspect, yet it was but La Rocca, the dwelling of a few hundred poor mountaineers, that thus showed for a moment, isolated above the clouds, transfigured by the sunrise, and hung, like a glowing carcanet, on the very brow of heaven. For a moment only: the next, a fresh surge of the mist rose at it, swept past it, first blotted, then extinguished the vision, the dun vapors usurped its place in the sky, and the aerial city was seen no more. Cornhill Magazine.

OUR portrait this month is of one of the most eminent and honored of American scientists, whose reputation is as great in Europe as in his own country, and who is acknowledged as an authority and original discoverer in the three important departments of mineralogy, geology, and zoology.

JAMES DWIGHT DANA was born on the 12th of February, 1813, at Utica, New York, and passed there the first years of his life. He seems to have had an early inclination to the natural sciences, as at the age of seventeen he entered Yale College, attracted by the fame of Professor Silliman (Sr.), the distinguished pioneer of American science. While there he evinced a special aptitude for mathematics as well as the natural sciences, and shortly after his graduation in 1833, he received the appointment of teacher of mathematics to midshipmen in the Navy of the United States. In that capacity he sailed to the Mediterranean in the ship-of-the-line Delaware, returning in 1835. During the two years following he acted at Yale College as as

sistant to Professor Silliman, whose successor he afterward became.

In December, 1836, Mr. Dana was appointed mineralogist and geologist of the United States exploring expedition, then about to be sent by the Government to the Southern and Pacific Oceans. The squadron, under command of Lieutenant (afterward Commodore) Wilkes, sailed in August, 1838, and returned in 1842. During the thirteen years following, Professor Dana was chiefly occupied in preparing for publication the various reports of this expedition committed to his charge. The results of his labors were given in his "Report on Zoophytes" (4to, with an atlas of 61 folio plates, 1846), in which he proposes a new classification and describes 230 new species; the "Report on the Geology of the Pacific" (with an atlas of 21 plates, 1849); and the " Report on Crustacea" (4to, with an atlas of 96 folio plates, 1852-54). In this last named work 680 species are described, of which 658 were new. These Reports were published by the United States Govern

ment, and contributed greatly to that high reputation which our official scientific publications have achieved. With few exceptions, the drawings in the atlases were made by Mr. Dana himself.

In 1850 Mr. Dana was elected to the office of Silliman Professor of Natural History and Geology in Yale College, but did not enter upon its duties until 1855, soon after Professor Silliman's resignation of the chair of chemistry and geology. This position he still retains. In 1854 he was elected President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, having been for many years one of the standing committee of that body, and in August, 1855, he delivered the annual address before that association at its meeting in Providence. He has been elected a member of many learned societies in Europe, including the Royal Academies of Sciences in Munich and Berlin, the Geological and Linnæan societies in London, the Philomathic Society in Paris, and others. In 1872, the Wollaston gold medal, in charge of the Geological Society of London, was conferred upon him.

66

Besides the works already mentioned, Professor Dana has published "Science and the Bible," a series of four articles which appeared in the Bibliotheca Sacra in 1856-57, called forth by a work of Professor Taylor Lewis on the "Six Days of Creation;" A System of Mineralogy,' ogy," a work of high repute in Europe and America (1837, 5th edition, revised and enlarged, 1870); "On Coral Reefs and Islands" (1853); a "Manual of Geology" (1862, revised edition, 1869); a "Text Book of Geology for Schools and Academies" (1864); and Corals and Coral Islands" (1872). For many years he has been associated with his brother-in-law, Professor Benjamin Silliman, Jr., as editor and publisher of the American Journal of Science and Arts, founded in 1819 by the elder Silliman. To this journal, as well as to the proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston, the Lyceum of Natural History in New York, and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, he has contributed numerous important scientific memoirs, the mere titles of which would fill a column.

THE EVOLUTION OF MAN: A Popular Exposition of the Principal Points of Human Ontogeny and Phylogeny. From the German of Ernest Haeckel, Professor in the University of Jena. In two volumes. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

In a somwhat extended review of this remarkable work contributed to the London Academy, Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace says: "Professor Haeckel is well known as one of the most energetic workers and advanced thinkers among German biologists. For more than thirty years he has devoted himself to the study of the animal kingdom with especial reference to the theory of development, and he has perhaps done as much to extend and popularize that theory as Darwin himself. Besides a long series of publications in various depart ments of biology, he has written two great popular works-The History of Creation, in which the development of the whole animal and vegetable kingdom is systematically traced out, and the present volumes, which treat in more detail the entire history of man's evolution, both as an individual from the parental germ and as an animal species from the most rudimentary form of individualized animal life

through a progressive series of more and more specialized animal types."

The present work, he continues, "is intended to render the facts of human germ history and development accessible to the educated public. It is founded on the researches of the most eminent modern anatomists and embryologists-Baer, Kölliker, Schwann, Huxley, Weissmann, and Gegenbaur, together with Haeckel's own discoveries in the history and development of many of the lower animals. We can, therefore, hardly do otherwise than accept the facts as presented to us by our author, and though we may not always agree with the inferences he deduces from them, we can but feel that they are of the very highest importance, and that a careful study of them is absolutely essential before venturing to form definite conclusions as to man's nature, origin, or destiny."

When he comes to discuss the work in detail Mr. Wallace finds several points of radical importance upon which he differs in toto from Professor Haeckel; but he concludes by saying that no restricted notice of The Evolution of Man can afford an adequate conception of the wonderful variety and complexity, or of