MORAL EDUCABILITY. 649 



it diflficult to comprehend the barbarities of even one short genera- 

 tion ago. Their children will find the barbarities of to-day equally- 

 incredible. The horrors of Siberia, of the Russian persecution of 

 Israel, of the no less infamous sweat-shops in our own country, 

 may relegate the latter third of the nineteenth century to the 

 same limbo of infamy to which the ages of Nero and Simon 

 Legree are condemned, notwithstanding the comparatively great 

 ameliorations in the average condition of the human race. Still 

 later generations will wonder at the possibility of inhumanity 

 which in our day condemns the many to life-shortening and life- 

 embittering toil that the few may consume in luxurious idleness 

 the price of their sweat and suffering ; at the travesty of justice 

 which punishes the criminal who robs his one victim with his 

 puny arm of flesh and bends the knee to the ruffian who despoils 

 his thousands with his mightier brain ; at the selfish greed of the 

 titled idlers who partition the soil among themselves and take 

 heavy toll of the multitude of Earth's children for presuming to 

 live upon the bosom of their common mother ; at the unspeakable 

 cruelty of the sex which flatters and spoils with indulgence a por- 

 tion of the other sex, and drives by its tyranny another portion to 

 starvation, suicide, or infamy. 



Thus the mists which becloud the moral perceptions of men 

 and chill their nobler impulses will lift one after another, as gen- 

 eration succeeds generation. But not until the law of love shall 

 have made civil laws with their penalties suj^erfluous and obso- 

 lete, not until the universal enforcement of the golden rule, not 

 by objective, but by subjective penalties, will the moral education 

 of mankind be complete. 



In his later work, on Leonardo da Vinci and the Alps, Prof. Gustavo Uzielli 

 treats of certain passages in the great artist's manuscripts containing references 

 to the Alps. Telling of his ascent of Monboso or Monte Rosa in the middle of 

 July, Leonardo incidentally remarks that snow rarely falls on the summit, hut only 

 hail in the summer, when the clouds are highest ; also, that the extreme darkness 

 of the sky and the luminosity of the sun are accounted for by the less extent of 

 atmosphere between the spectator and the sun than if he stood on the lower 

 plains at the foot of the mountain. The fruits of Leonardo's observations of the 

 Alps are to be found in his works as an artist, and particularly in his portrait of the 

 Mona Lisa, whom he placed amid their snows. But he studied them also with a 

 practical eye, with a view to the utilization of the water that flows down their 

 sides to the plains of Lombardy. Operations in connection with this purpose re- 

 quired the personal examination of the formation of the mountains ; and while on 

 his excursions he studied their geology, the density of matter, the action of light, 

 and the composition of the atmosphere. His attention was also occupied with 

 botanical studies and observations of the flight of birds. And there is evidence 

 that he looked at the mountains also with the eye of a military engineer. 



