672 



The Review of Reviews. 



drooped, curled upon itself and shrank. The far- 

 piercing eyes were growing discriminating, receptive : 

 the brain behind them enlarged in response to novel 

 needs. Fresh impressions had to be stored : the cranium 

 rose leaving the ears below it. The fore limbs, liberated 

 by the new erect attitude, armed themselves with staff 

 and stone. The teeth ceased to be weapons, and dimin- 

 ished in size. The jaw shortened and weakened, its en- 

 feebled muscles relaxed their pressure upon the cranium, 

 permitting the brain to broaden. The mouth no longer 

 went to its food, the food was brought to the mouth, and 

 the head, released from sordid duties, was held con- 

 tinually erect, and became more and more the watch- 

 tower of the sentinel eyes. 



Step by step, with long pauses and periods of almost 

 imperceptible progression, the transition was effected 

 from a nocturnal, purblind, wide-eared, spider-armed, 

 snuffling, timorous, quadrumanous tree-dweller to the 

 up-standing Pithecanthropus erectus, the lowest form 

 of humanity of which we have any fossil evidence at 

 present. This way, at least, the phenomena seem to 

 point. 



But, the writer points out, an arboreal animal 

 would never have left the trees while there was 

 forest to home him, and goes on to surmise that 

 physical changes in the surface of the land had 

 broken up the continuous forest area. The next 

 ascent registered by fossils is the Nuremberg 

 man, hulking and heavy-jawed, with limited 

 powers of speech if the jaw is rightly inter- 

 preted : — 



For some purpose inscrutable, the Master of Life 

 seems to have singled out from His brute children (and 

 among them were beasts stately and huge and terrible to 

 see) one that was meanly aspected, skulking, blinking, 

 and small. " Behold your future master. ... Do 

 your worst ! " Since then has not the Lord God in very 

 sooth pushed His creature across the waste places of His 

 world? Stern-faced angels, Hunger and Fear, paced 

 behind the wanderer, warning him on from this and 

 from that green resting-place along dwindling vistas of 

 little centuries, while unnamed constellations changed 

 above him and unsailed oceans deepened and dried. 



. . The head of the column pushed on, touched its 

 goal — Manhood ; the beast has become human. 



person buried was engaged to be married. Usually, also, 

 a guard of men of the kind who were called ' bullies 

 walked on either side of the women, to prevent— so it 

 was said— any hooting or stone-throwing on the part of 

 the virtuous matrons of the neighbourhood through which 

 the procession passed. 



PUBLIC EXECUTIONS. 



Mr. Rogers also gives his recollections of a 

 public execution. He says : — 



The shouting, half -drunken crowd, the great black 

 structure in its midst, the solemn notes of the death-bell, 

 the roar of execration that greeted the wretched creature 

 who came out to die, the quivering, struggling thing 

 that a moment later was swinging in the air, and, but 

 for the twitching limbs and the working in and out of 

 the hands, bearing little semblance to anything human, 

 all combined to form a picture horrible and degrading 

 to all who witnessed it. The Evangelical preacher was 

 there to improve the occasion and to distribute tracts, 

 and at one hanging — not that of Mullins — I saw General 

 Booth (then the Rev. William Booth, and not then the 

 head of the Salvation Army) holding a prayer meeting 

 under the scaffold. 



Mr. Rogers adds that he was under the gal- 

 lows of the last man hanged at the Old Bailey in 

 public, and there was no great crowd at that 

 hanging. The law for making executions 

 private came at the right moment of public feel- 

 ing. The reminiscences promise to be as 

 valuable as they are readable. 



QUAINT MEMORIES OF OLD 

 LONDON. 



In the Treasury Mr. Frederick Rogers, the 

 well-known organiser of the Old Age Pensions 

 movement, begins his reminiscences of sixty 

 years. Born in Whitechapel, starting work at 

 ten years of age, serv'ing as a sandwich-boy, Mr. 

 Rogers had in early life a first-hand acquaint- 

 ance with the streets of London. 



A prostitute's funer.al. 



One pathetic custom of East London recalls 

 the time when even the outcast had her public 

 recognition. He says : — 



When one of the sisterhood of Rahab died it was not 

 unusual for her comrades to give her a funeral similar to 

 that given to one whom death prevented from becoming 

 a bride. A hearse surmounted with white feathers bore 

 the coffin, and as many of her sisters as cared followed 

 it in couples to the grave. They were clad in the old 

 hideous black hoods and scarves, but white ribbons 

 ornamented them, as wouJfj hay? been the case if the 



THE BIOGRAPHIC ELECT. 



Sir Sidney Lee, in the Nineteenth Century, 

 writes of the completion of the second supple- 

 ment of the Dictionary of National Biography. 

 He says that he is the sole survivor of the band 

 of active organisers who set the Dictionary on 

 its road nearly thirty years ago. None has 

 shared the whole of that experience with him. 



ONE IN FOUR THOUSAND ! 



Of the proportion of selection he says : — 



The new volumes maintain the former statistical pro- 

 portions between the persons commemorated and the 

 general population. The number of new names amounts 

 to 1,635, bringing the tale of memoirs in the whole work 

 to 31,755. Each of the last eleven years yields 150 

 recruits, and they come as before from all parts of the 

 United Kingdom and of the British Empire. The tables 

 of the aggregate annual mortality for the prescribed 

 period show that, of every 4,000 persons who died at 

 adult age, one finds a place in the national biographic 

 record. The same ratio of distinction (i : 4,000) pre- 

 vailed through the nineteenth century according to the 

 Dictionary's previous standards. 



THEIR LONGEVITY. 



A curious relation between celebrity • and 

 longevity is pointed out. Sir Sidney savs : — 



Of the 1,635 nien and women commemorated there, 

 almost all of whom have given proof of mental exertion 

 and were fairly successful in the affairs of the world, 

 the average length of life approaches seventy years. 

 Nearly four hundred, indeed, died after their eightieth 

 birthday, and of these four were centenarians. It cannot 

 be unfair to conclude that sustained intellectual effort is 

 no bar either to longevity or to a reasonable measure of 

 happiness in the course of life's pilgrimage. 



