362 SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATIONS [Tra 



small hook enveloped with paste, and attached to an exceedingly 

 fine line, is dropped noiselessly. When the bait is swallowed, 

 dexterity is required to withdraw the hooked fish without dis- 

 turbing the others. Their confidence having been obtained, 

 they will not easily suspect unless some great blunder is made. 

 Like shareholders in a fraudulent company managed by clever 

 knaves, they will only remember what they have had, and, in 

 their trustfulness, imagine no evil of those who are looking on, 

 and who have given only that they may get. siu. 



Moral Truth. 



Moral truth is, in its universality, like the pine-tree. Societies 

 have claimed it as being especially their own, as some naturalists 

 have claimed the pine-tree as a feature of northern climes. But 

 both are wrong. As to the pine, it is represented in all zones, 

 from the cedars of Lebanon to the juniper-tree and fir-bushes 

 of the Scandinavian mountain-tops. To use Oken's significant 

 expression, they form "the mountains' roof." They stretch up- 

 wards from the wide plains and steppes of sand, leaving the 

 foliage-covered trees below them. Where, says Dr. Masius, the 

 granite builds its towers to the clouds, and the waters leap 

 thundering from the rocky hollows, there this array of lances 

 is planted, and the black banners wave. They climb to the 

 highest summits, and when all other vegetation is extinct, the 

 dwarf-pine (Pinus pumilio\ laid level with the ground, still 

 creeps on. The blast rages amid its hair and shaggy beard of 

 moss, and makes rough work with its grotesquely outward- 

 stretched arms, closed pressed to the earth ; but the gnome does 

 but twine its branches in a yet closer embrace, and fasten with 

 iron strength on the stones of the moor, in which it has planted 

 deep a hundred roots which nothing can tear out. Thus it is 

 with moral truth. It is not merely indigenous. It is universal. 

 There are particular trees, as there are certain forms of specu- 

 lative and political truth, which can survive only in a limited 

 region ; the one being fitted only for a peculiar atmosphere as the 

 other is adapted only to circumscribed types of mind. But 

 moral truth flourishes amongst all the mental productions of 

 man, as the pine amongst the vegetation of the world. You 



