garded with repugnance by many of those who have not familiarized themselves with its wonderfully delicate structure. He writes: "The silk of our spiders is always of a dirty gray, but in tropical regions the color varies to a certain extent. Some of these insects produce different colored threads which they interlace with admirable skill. Some are red, others yellow, others again black, and with all these they form a three-colored fabric. Industrial art has vainly attempted to utilize the silk of the spider. With us its little power of resistance has never allowed us to use it to any profit. Entomologists however relate that Louis XIV. had a dress made of it for himself, but the want of strength in this newly invented cloth soon disgusted him with his phantasy. But it appears that the web of some American species possesses a sufficient power of resistance to admit of being employed for this purpose. Al. d'Orbigny had a pair of trousers made of spider webs which lasted a very long time." more than the mysterious filaments called by the vulgar threads of the Virgin. In fact, the flakes seen falling from the air on fine autumn days, after having been looked upon as a simple atmospheric product, condensed by some special agent, have been made out by Latreille to be only the handiwork of different kinds of spiders, and particularly of garden spiders, transported to a distance by the agitation of the winds." There is a strong temptation to linger among these charming and attractive descriptions of the peculiarities of insects, but we must follow our author as he describes animals of other classes. Among birds there are the "infinitely great and the infinitely little." At least the contrast between different species is so great that it hardly seems doing violence to language to contrast them in this way. "Often in the tropical regions," remarks M. Pouchet, "we may see flitting over the flowers brilliant birds which sweep rapidly past like a spark of topaz or ruby; there are the humming-birds, living diaAnd from this matter-of-fact statement monds, slighter than some insects, and M. Pouchet passes to this bit of poetic which often become the prey of huge description: "Some years ago on a magnificent autumn morning I was walking in the vast meadows which border the Seine; the sky was azure and the sun was shining splendidly. What was my astonishment at seeing that the entire surface of the freshly mown grass was covered with a network of fabulous delicacy! The rays of light gleaming obliquely upon this immense white veil, made the whole surface of it iridescent, and the harmonions regularity of this sheet of silk, extended farther than the eye could see, was only interrupted by the rents made by the grazing cattle, the limbs of which, covered with silky flakes, bore witness.to their theft. Finally, here and there, some of these white filaments, borne by the breeze over the surface of the meadows, floated in the atmosphere and fell upon our dresses. I had come by accident upon a phenomenon in all its phases, the mystery of which our savants have long been unable to penetrate. This silky tissue spread over all the herbage was only the work of myriads of little spiders assisted by the beauty of the heavens. And these flakes wandering in the air only represented the débris of it, being nothing spiders. The giant of this group scarcely attains the bigness of a sparrow, and the smallest does not surpass in size the tip of a fair lady's finger. Hence to the humming-birds, as they are commonly called, each speck of creation is a world. A simple leaf suffices for the gambols of a whole family; a flower is the perfumed throne on which the nuptials are accomplished, and the petals of its corolla spread out to form a velvet dais which hides their chaste loves." In contrast with this exquisitely beautiful little creature we have the ostrich, which would actually outweigh some millions of hummingbirds; the gigantic Dinornis of New Zealand, which was at least eighteen feet high, and the bone of whose leg is as a weaver's beam to a slender spindle when compared with that of a man. M. Pouchet assures us by the way that this Dinornis disappeared from New Zealand at no very distant epoch. The earlier inhabitants of that region were perfectly acquainted with it. The ancient legends of the island tell us that it was inhabited are by birds of enormous size, the killing of which was signalized by impressive ceremonies. There was feasting on the flesh and eggs of these birds, and the feathers served to adorn the arms of their vanquishers. Indeed some of the New Zealand hills are yet strewn with the bones of the Dinornis, the remains of these great feasts of the hunters. Another colossal bird, the Epiornis, formerly a native of Madagascar, must have been of still greater size. One of its eggs now in the museum at Paris is six times as large as that of the ostrich, and it has been calculated that to fill the cavity would require no less than 12,000 humming-birds' eggs. Its shell, which was over three-quarters of an inch thick, could only be broken by the blow of a hammer. Then, exclaims M. Pouchet, "What differences found in birds! When fleeing before the hunter, whose Arab steed presses it closer and closer, the alarmed and furious ostrich tears the soil of the desert, clinging to it and leaving deep marks beneath each footstep, while it launches afar a cloud of sand and pebbles. When, on the contrary, a flock of humming-birds, attracted by the expanded and floating flowers of the Royal Victoria, play and gleam around them like a casket of topaz and rubies struck by the rays of the sun, neither the smooth surface of the lake nor the beautiful flowers are in the least degree disturbed. And when one of those winged diamonds perches itself upon a petal of their virgin corolla, it does not even stir it. Again: when the fragile bird takes flight, its tiny claw has not injured the velvet softness of the flower. It might have lighted upon one of the twigs of the modest sensitive plant without this taking any alarm." The contrasts between the great and little in the bird kingdom are almost endless, The different chapters under which they are discussed are-Giants and Pigmies, Mountain-Builders and Gleaners, Work and the Family, Idlers and Assassins, Architecture intended for Enjoyment, Naval Architecture, Miners and Masons, and Weavers. The Migration of Animals is the subject of the seventh and last book under the grand division of the Animal Kingdom; and then M. Pouchet passes to the Vegetable Kingdom. The anatomy of plants; their physiology; their seed and germination; the extremes in the Vegetable Kingdom and the migrations of plants are all treated of with that minuteness of knowledge,that perfect accuracy, easy familiarity, and charming grace, which thorough acquaintance with their natural history alone could give. While writing of the texture of stems of different trees, M. Pouchet alludes to the Egyptian papyrus. The inner layers of the bark of this famous plant are close and compact enough to form a kind of paper, and on these layers the Egyptians wrote, preserving for us records which go back to the days of the Pharaohs. The paper cypress, a most extraordinary-looking plant, which grows on the banks of the Nile, has long been understood to furnish this precious' object. The wood is composed of concentric zones, lying one within the other, and formed of vessels and fibres. the centre of the stem is found the pith, composed almost exclusively of cellular tissue. It is with very thin sheets of this structure, cut by means of a sharp knife, that the Chinese make the beautiful paper on which they paint, and which is commonly, but incorrectly, called rice paper. Vegetable sensibility, the movements of plants, their nuptials, and the physiology of flowers, are among the topics discussed most charmingly, and to which we can only allude as we follow M. Pouchet into the domain of Geology, where with wonderful genius he again contrasts the infinitely great things with the infinitely little. This section of the Universe reads like a romance; but to demonstrate that it is written in that devout spirit which characterizes the whole of this remarkable volume, we need only quote the following paragraph from Figuier's great work on Geology, which M. Pouchet cites to endorse. M. Figuier writes: In "It is not impossible that man may be a step in the ascending and progressive scale of animated beings. The divine power L which strewed on earth life, sensation, and thought; which gave to the plant organization; to the animal movement, sensation, intelligence; to man, besides these manifold gifts, the faculty of reason, doubled by the power of aiming at the ideal, perhaps proposes to itself to create one day, along with man, or after him, a still superior being. This new creature, which modern religion and poetry appear to have foreseen in the ethereal and radiant type of the Christian angel, would be provided with moral faculties, the nature and essence of which elude our understanding. We ought to satisfy ourselves with laying down this problem without attempting to resolve it. This great mystery, to use the beautiful expression of Pliny, is concealed in the majesty of nature: latet in majestate na turæ, or, better, in the thoughts and omnipotence of the Creator of worlds." "During this period the whole surface of the globe was covered with strange and dense forests, where proudly reigned a host of plants, the representatives of which at the present day play but a very humble part. Here were palms and bamboos, there gigantic Lycopodia, which, now humble creeping herbaceous plants, at that time bore straight stems towering to a height of eighty to a hundred feet. Then came the Lepidodendra, the stem of which reminds one of a reptile's scaly cuirass. Lastly came trees of the family of our Coniferæ, their boughs laden with fruit. These vast pri meval forests, which the course of ages was to annihilate, sprang up on a heated and marshy soil, which surrounded the lofty trees with thick compact masses of herbaceous aquatic plants, intended to play a great part in the formation of coal. The luxuriant vegetation of the coal period was certainly of foliage covered the globe, everything wore a strange, gloomy aspect Everywhere rose gigantic Equiseta aud ferns, drawing up an exuberance of life from the fertile and virgin soil. The latter in their aspect resembled palms, and at the least breath of wind waved their crowns of finely cut leaves like flexible plumes of feathers. A sky ever sombre and veiled, oppressed with heavy clouds the domes of these forests; a wan and dubious light scarcely made visible the dark and naked trunks, shedding on all sides a shadowy and indescribable hue of horror. This rich covering of vegetation, which extended from pole to pole, was sad and utterly silent as well as strangely monotonous. Not a single flower enlivened the foliage, not one edible fruit loaded its branches. The echoes remained absolutely mute, and the branches without a sign of life; for no air-breathing animal had as yet appeared amid these savage scenes of the ancient world. One might say, in fact, that there was then no animal life to be seen, for amid so many remains of the coal flora, which geologists have so admirably reconstructed, they have only met with a few rare vestiges of one small reptile, the Archegosaurus. This great contrast between the richness of the vegetable and penury of the animal kingdom is explained by the great quantity of carbonic acid at that time mixed with the able to the life of plants, must have been atmosphere, which, though particularly favor fatal to all animals endowed with active respiration. But though the atmosphere was poisonous, the seas, on the contrary, uniting together all conditions most favorable to life, were peopled with shelled molluscs and fish. After having lent life to the primitive ages of the globe, these strange forests completely disappeared in the lapse of ages, and they have now become almost impossible to recognize, owing to the transformations they have undergone in Nature's immense subterranean storehouses." In this section of The Universe the With representations of forests as they illustrations are exceedingly attractive. favored by the enormous heat which the scarcely chilled terrestrial crust still prewere supposed to exist in the Coal Period served, as also by the dampness of the we have exquisite engravings of numeratmosphere, and very probably by the great ous localities famous for their beauty and abundance of carbonic acid which it then sublimity, which might in many instances contained. be regarded as more fanciful than those Although a thick and magnificent mantle pictures which are acknowledged to be |