ENTERTAINING VARIETIES. 399 



she flew away through the air; and then the Lord created Eve from his rih, 

 brought her to Adam in the most beautiful dress, and angels descending from 

 heaven played on heavenly instruments ; sun, moon, and stars dancing. lie 

 blessed the pair and gave them a feast upon a table of precious stones. Angels 

 prepared the most costly viands. But Adam's glory was envied by the angels, 

 and the seraph Sammael succeeded in seducing him. The pair were driven out 

 of paradise into the place of darkness, and wandered through the earth." 



Jerome de Guise, the " champion lady-Tciller " of the eighteenth 



century, left among his trophies eight billets-doux, framed like pictures, and 

 displaying eight different signatures under as many different petitions for 

 immediate elopement. Yet the triumphs of that charmer are far eclipsed 

 by the record of Abdallah-ben-Abdol, the father of the Prophet Moham- 

 med. On the eve of his nuptials, says the chronicle of Abulfeda, not less 

 than two hundred virgins attested the poignancy of their chagrin by commit- 

 ting suicide. 



Anaxagoras, the Rhodian, held that Earthquakes are nothing but a sort 



of cosmic flatulence winds which have strayed into caverns, where they can not 

 find an outlet. Aristotle ascribes them to vapors generated by the infiltration of 

 water through the fissures of a rocky sea-bottom ; and Pliny, to the pressure of 

 air confined in deep caves, and reacting against the collapse of superincumbent 

 rock-strata. But the most ingenious explanation is offered by St. Thomas of 

 Aquinas. Earthquakes, he suggests, may be caused by the struggles of defunct 

 misbelievers trying (by a simultaneous stampede, perhaps) to escape from the 

 pit of torment. 



An Accomplished Vandal. Some of the " truculent and turbaned 



Turks" of the fifteenth century were very far from being barbarians. Mo- 

 hammed II, the destroyer of Constantinople, spoke fluently five Asiatic and 

 two classic languages, had mastered the Arabian system of astronomy, the 

 philosophy of Aristotle, and the theogony of the Sufist mystics, and achieved 

 distinction as a poet and a national historian. 



A Vegetable Monument. The oldest tree on earth is probably the 



cypress of Santa Maria del Tule, in the Mexican State of Oaxaca. It is still 

 growing, and, when Humboldt saw it, in 1851, it measured 42 feet in diameter, 

 146 in circumference, and 282 feet between the extremities of two opposite 

 branches. 



And so Mr. Darwin has given us a new philosophy of angle -worms. 



"We had supposed that this " humble creature " was created chiefly for the use 

 of country-boys as bait when they go a-fishing, and so were always to be con- 

 veniently found in the garden ; but our indefatigable naturalist says that this 

 despised earth-worm is nothing less than an ameliorator on the surface of the 

 globe a forerunner and coadjutor of the agriculturist in promoting the condi- 

 tions of life. This is another revolution of ideas that is making our age so un- 

 comfortable. " Worms of the dust " seems to be, after all, not so bad a thing. The 

 sluggard is bidden to go to the ant and learn wisdom ; but, while he is about it, he 

 can profitably call also upon the worm. We give some poetry from " Punch " on 

 this subject, and also " Punch's " portrait of the great Darwinian in his last role. 

 He has not the elated expression of a triumphant discoverer. It was said of 

 Agassiz that when he had found some new and long-sought marking or feature 

 in a fish he waxed hilarious, and would dance about the room, but Mr. Darwin 



