more for every 1,000l. bill on England, and | London, and in the end this loss will be this extra cost destroys or diminishes his equal to the other gain. profit. Secondly, the same state of the exchanges is a direct premium on sending goods from India to England. 1,000l. received for those goods here, will go further in buying bills on India than it used to do; in plain English, it will lay down more rupees at Calcutta, in the same time, than formerly, and this increase is so much extra profit. By this combination, therefore, exports from India increasing cn one hand, and imports into India diminishing on the other hand, before long a large debt will be created, which this silver, set free from Germany, will have to fill. The process will take time, but the effect is inevitable. The tendency of this great import of silver into India will be of course to raise prices, but the degree in which it will have that effect will depend on the degree in which it is counteracted by the causes which have intercepted its effects before-the hoarding habits of the people; the use of silver in ornaments (the ornaments being a sort of reserve fund to be sold in difficulty); the greater extension of silver in rude districts, where barter is still much used; and the general increase of trade, which rising prices always tend to quicken and develop. When this rise of prices has taken place the encouragement to exports from and discouragement of imports into India will manifestly cease. The value of the rupee at Calcutta, as against bills on England, may remain as it is 'now; but the diminution of that value as compared with former times will be compensated by the greater number of rupees which the English exporter to India obtains for the goods which he sells there. The value of the 1,000l. in London in purchasing bills payable on India in rupees may be as unusually great as now, if we compare it with the past, but there will be a corresponding difficulty in obtaining the 1,000l. in London. The merchant in India will have to pay more for the goods which he sends to If new silver should still continue to come into the market the same process must go on. The first step must be incessantly repeated. The value of the rupee must fall as against sterling money; instead of being Is. 9d. it may fall to 1s. 6d. And then, mutatis mutandis, what we have just described as happening will happen again. The effects, therefore, of the fall in the value of silver on the trade of India will be temporary only, but its effect on the financial position of the Indian government will continue as long as the fall lasts. The Indian revenue is received in silver, and, therefore, the less far silver goes in buying, the poorer will the Indian government be. And this is of more instant importance to the Indian government than almost any other, because its foreign payments exceed those of most governments, and those payments are made in gold. It has to pay interest in gold on a very large debt in England, to pay home salaries, maintain home dépôts, and buy English goods and stores all in gold; and the less valuable silver is in comparison with gold, the less effectual for these necessary purposes will the Indian revenue be. On one species of its debt the Indian government will, indeed, not lose. The interest upon rupee paper is payable in rupees in Calcutta, and therefore the diminution in the value of the rupee is a loss to the creditor who receives, and not to the government which pays. How long the fall in the value of silver will continue no one can say. In the last resort, and taking great intervals of time into the reckoning, the relative value of gold and silver will be determined by their cost of production; but in the case of articles so durable, and so liable to be affected by political events like changes in coinage, it is difficult to say how long an average must be taken in order to exhibit distinctly this final result. A MOST valuable MS. has been discovered | chado states that it was lost during the great in the Azores. It refers to the colonization, earthquake of Lisbon in 1755. This most imin the year 1500, of the northern part of Amer-portant document is about to be published by ica, by emigrants from Oporto, Aveiro, and an erudite Azorian gentleman, and will throw the Island of Terceira. It was written by great light on the disputed question of the Francisca de Souza, in 1570. Barboza Ma-early discovery of America. Athenæum. CHANGING GUIDES. ALONG the road the travellers go, At midnight, 'midst fast-falling snow, And great and small, and one and all, The journey's done, the stage is run, The guide must say farewell. (Hark! down the wind the travellers deem They hear a passing-bell.) A stage behind, when wailed the wind Across a snowy wold, They halted, and they halt this night, Till this same guide, who stands beside If he were glad, if he were sad, His veil he lifted slow. If he were sad, if he were glad, If he brought good or ill, They did not know; but, day by day, At midnight thus the cavalcade When midnight's past, to meet the morn MARY A. M. HOPPUS. UNDER THE APPLE-TREE. A DOME of blossom rises overhead, Piled like the snows upon some Alpine height, And blushing with such tints of pink and red As summer clouds may wear in vesper light. Dew-spangled-pierced with sudden shafts of gold That slide between the latticed boughs below; A little world of bloom, that seems to fold Birds, bees, and sunbeams in a tender glow. Life is so sweet beneath this fairy bower That the full heart must tremble in its bliss, And fear lest wanton breeze or hasty shower Should harm one petal by a careless kiss. Under the apple-tree I stand alone, In the strange stillness of an autumn day: Where have the swallows and the brown bees flown? What cruel hand hath snatched my blooms away? The sullen, silver-rifted sky looks down Between grey branches, not a golden gleam Some called it sad, some said 'twas glad Falls on the scanty leaves, grown sere and So wondrous was the tale. Each saw him as none other saw, Who looked behind his veil. The stage is run, the tale is done, And on the wind there comes the sound, Now he must go; the winds wail low He takes each traveller by the hand- Of one and all, both great and small, They plead in vain, for, loth or fain, And when he goes none ever knows; Ere they can say, "Farewell for aye!" brown; ON THE BORDER TERRITORY BETWEEN KINGDOMS. From Macmillan's Magazine. to undergo, before it can be converted into substances fitted for absorption; while the atmosphere and the earth supply plants with juices ready prepared, and which can be absorbed immediately. BY T. H. HUXLEY. IN the whole history of science there is As the animal body required to be indenothing more remarkable than the rapid-pendent of heat and of the atmosphere, ity of the growth of biological knowledge there were no means by which the motion within the last half-century, and the extent of its fluids could be produced by internal of the modification which has thereby causes. Hence arose the second great been effected in some of the fundamental distinctive character of animals, or the conceptions of the naturalist. circulatory system, which is less important than the digestive, since it was unnecessary, and therefore is absent, in the more simple animals. Animals further needed muscles for locomotion and nerves for sensibility. Hence, says Cuvier, it was necessary that In the second edition of the "Règne Animal," published in 1828, Cuvier devotes a special section to the "Division of Organized Beings into Animals and Vegetables," in which the question is treated with that comprehensiveness of knowledge and clear critical judgment the chemical composition of the animal which characterize his writings, and justify us in regarding them as representative expressions of the most extensive, if not the profoundest, knowledge of his time. He tells us that living beings have been sub-divided from, the earliest times into animated beings, which possess sense and motion, and inanimated beings, which are devoid of these functions, and simply vegetate. Although the roots of plants direct themselves towards moisture, and their leaves towards air and light; although the parts of some plants exhibit oscillating movements without any perceptible cause, and the leaves of others retract when touched, yet none of these movements justify the ascription to plants of perception or of will. body should be more complicated than that of the plant; and it is so, inasmuch as an additional substance, nitrogen, enters into it as an essential element, while in plants nitrogen is only accidentally joined with the three other fundamental constituents of organic beings-carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Indeed, he afterwards affirms that nitrogen is peculiar to animals; and herein he places the third distinction between the animal and the plant. The soil and the atmosphere supply plants with water, composed of hydrogen and oxygen; air, consisting of nitrogen and oxygen; and carbonic acid, containing carbon and oxygen. They retain the hydrogen and the carbon, exhale the superfluous oxygen, and absorb little or no From the mobility of animals, Cuvier, nitrogen. The essential character of vegwith his characteristic partiality for teleo-etable life is the exhalation of oxygen, logical reasoning, deduces the necessity of which is effected through the agency of the existence in them of an alimentary cavity or reservoir of food, whence their nutrition may be drawn by the vessels, which are a sort of internal roots; and in the presence of this alimentary cavity he naturally sees the primary and the most important distinction between animals and plants. Following out his teleological argument, Cuvier remarks that the organization of this cavity and its appurtenances must needs vary according to the nature of the aliment, and the operations which it has light. Animals, on the contrary, derive their nourishment either directly or indirectly from plants. They get rid of the superfluous hydrogen and carbon, and accumu late nitrogen. The relations of plants and animals to the atmosphere are therefore inverse. The plant withdraws water and carbonic acid from the atmosphere, the animal contributes both to it. Respiration — that is, the absorption of oxygen and the exhalation of carbonic acid — is the specially animal function of animals, and constitutes | animals; and, while in this condition, their their fourth distinctive character. movements are, to all appearance, as Thus wrote Cuvier in 1828. But in the spontaneous as much the product of fourth and fifth decades of this century, volition - as those of such animals. the greatest and most rapid revolution Hence the teleological argument for which biological science has ever under- Cuvier's first diagnostic character-the gone was effected by the application of presence in animals of an alimentary cavthe modern microscope to the investiga- ity, or internal pocket, in which they can tion of organic structure; by the introduc- carry about their nutriment, has broken tion of exact and easily manageable meth-down-so far, at least, as his mode of ods of conducting the chemical analysis of organic compounds; and finally, by the employment of instruments of precision for the physical measurement of the forces which are at work in the living economy. That the semi-fluid contents (which we now term protoplasm) of the cells of certain plants, such as the Chara, are in constant and regular motion, was made out by Bonaventura Corti a century ago; but the fact, important as it was, fell into oblivion, and had to be rediscovered by Treviranus in 1807. Robert Brown noted the more complex motions of the protoplasm in the cells of Tradescuntia in 1831; and now such movements of the living substance of plants are well-known to be some of the most widely prevalent phenomena of vegetable life. stating it goes. And with the advance of microscopic anatomy the universality of the fact itself among animals has ceased to be predicable. Many animals of even complex structure, which live parasitically within others, are wholly devoid of an alimentary cavity. Their food is provided for them, not only ready cooked but ready digested, and the alimentary canal, become superfluous, has disappeared. Again, the males of most rotifers have no digestive apparatus; as a German naturalist has remarked, they devote themselves entirely to the Minnedienst, and are to be reckoned among the few realizations of the Byronic ideal of a lover. Finally, amidst the lowest forms of animal life, the speck of gelatinous protoplasm, which constitutes the whole body, has no permanent digestive cavity or mouth, but takes in its food anywhere; and digests, so to speak, all over its body. Agardh, and other of the botanists of Cuvier's generation, who occupied themselves with the lower plants, had observed that, under particular circumstances, the But although Cuvier's leading diagnosis contents of the cells of certain water-weeds of the animal from the plant will not stand were set free and moved about with consid- a strict test, it remains one of the most erable velocity, and with all the appear-constant of the distinctive characters of ances of spontaneity, as locomotive bodies, animals. And if we substitute for the which, from their similarity to animals of simple organization, were called zoospores." 66 possession of an alimentary cavity, the power of taking solid nutriment into the body and there digesting it, the definition so changed will cover all animals, except certain parasites, and the few and exceptional cases of non-parasitic animals which do not feed at all. On the other hand, the definition thus amended will exclude Even as late as 1845, however, a botanist of Schleiden's eminence deals very sceptically with these statements; and his scepticism was the more justified, since Ehrenberg, in his elaborate and comprehensive work on the infusoria, had de-all ordinary vegetable organisms. clared the greater number of what are now recognized as locomotive plants to be animals. Cuvier himself practically gives up his second distinctive mark when he admits that it is wanting in the simpler animals. At the present day, innumerable plants The third distinction is based on a comand free plant-cells are known to pass the pletely erroneous conception of the chemwhole or part of their lives in an actively ical differences and resemblances between locomotive condition, in no wise distin- the constituents of animal and vegetable guishable from that of one of the simpler | organisms, for which Cuvier is not re |