822 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



To go into further detail would be impossible ; limits of space 

 are already exhausted. Passing reference only can be made to 

 the fact that, while in Tennyson's works, upon the whole, we find 

 the fullest poetic interpretation as yet given to modern thought, 

 writers like Browning, Whitman, and Emerson, and among those 

 still living Robert Buchanan, William Watson, and Mathilde 

 Blind, have each of them revealed in different ways a healthy 

 tendency on the part of poetry to look at the facts of life from 

 the point of view of present thought rather than from the point 

 of view of past thought, and to recognize the supreme fact that 

 if we find cause to complain, with William Morris, of the empti- 

 ness of our own life, it is the fault of ourselves and not the fault 

 of our times. But here the subject must be left for the present ; 

 and the discussion of many important questions arising in connec- 

 tion with the above-outlined theory, held over till a more con- 

 venient season. Enough, perhaps, has been said to indicate the 

 view we have been trying to develop of the relations of poetry 

 to science, to show that there is no essential antagonism between 

 them, and to point out that recognition of the one as the supple- 

 ment of the other does not at all imply, as is so often thought, 

 any absurd confusion of their methods and aims. For myself I 

 read without fear the French critic's prediction that fifty years 

 hence no one will care to read poetry. " Of all forms of mistake, 

 prophecy is the most gratuitous," says George Eliot, and such a 

 statement may be quietly disregarded. On any large principle 

 of education, poetry has its secure place in the scheme of life ; but 

 our emotions must respond to our knowledge, not our knowledge 

 to our emotions. The business of the poet in his capacity of 

 spiritual teacher is to help us to clothe fact with the beauty of 

 fancy ; not to try to force fancy into the place of fact. Let us 

 understand what is scientifically true, socially right, and our feel- 

 ings will adjust themselves in due course. It is for science to 

 lead the way, and the highest mission of the poet is ever to fol- 

 low in the wake, and in the name of poetry and religion claim 

 each day's new thought as his own. 



THE locality of Florissant, Colorado, a lake deposit of the geological age called 

 Oligocene, is famous for the extraordinary abundance and variety and the excel- 

 lent condition of its insect remains. No group of insects perhaps, according to 

 Mr. Samuel H. Scudder, shows this more strikingly than the family of " crane 

 flies" or "daddy longlegs." Several hundred species have been collected there, 

 and in a very considerable number of them, representing many species, the ve- 

 nation of the wings is completely represented with all their most delicate mark- 

 ings, and also the slender and fragile legs with their clothing of hairs and spurs, 

 and, to some degree at least, the antennae and palpi. Even the facets of the com- 

 pound eye are often preserved as in life. 



