694 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



Apart, therefore, from the specific causes to which I have alluded, there 

 must be sought some larger, more national influence at work to account for this 

 complete Catholicism in kindliness. Nor somehow is it difficult, so I think, to 

 imagine the poets of a country with some distant horizons as America, so vast in 

 certainties, so infinite in possibilities, refusing to limit their sympathies to merely 

 continental boundaries, or to cramp their interests within the domains of any 

 single crown, or " hop about from perch to perch in paltry cages of dead men's 

 dead thoughts." Accustomed to such large maps, they may be easily supposed 

 to be intolerant of geographical prejudices, and priding themselves before every- 

 thing upon independence of thought, may have carried their sympathy with an 

 unconventional freedom into their treatment of natural objects. " Our country 

 hath a gospel of her own." For myself, I am content to believe this, and to at- 

 tribute their just recognition of the place of animal and insect life to the large- 

 hearted tone of American intellectual thought. And I would not know where to 

 go for a more adequate statement of the poet's means and ends in nature than 

 Emerson's "Wood Notes," or for thoughts more fully in sympathy with nature 

 than Longfellow's or Whittier's, with his ear "full of summer sounds." Lovers of 

 wild life will find it hard to outmatch Bret Harte's apostrophe to the coyote and 

 the grizzly, Emerson's to the humble-bee, Wendell Holmes' to the sea-fowl out- 

 side his study window, or Aldrich's delightfully appreciative touches of wild life. 

 Quadrupeds, birds, insects — everything that has life is looked^ at kindly and un- 

 selfishly apart from human interests, and this, too, with a respectful sympathy 

 that bespeaks something more sincere than Cowper's lip service or Pope's acidu- 

 lated praise. Our furred and feathered fellow-beings, seniors to ourselves in ex- 

 istence, though subjected to us, are not, as in the European poets, accepted as 

 mere accidents of the human economy, or as secondary properties of man. They 

 seem to remember — unless it be only my own whimsical interpretation of their 

 tenderness — that our earth is the other creatures' earth too, that they are a crea- 

 tion of themselves, that each had a day set' apart for itself, a morning and an 

 evening, at the first miracle of the world's making. — Phil Robinson, in Harper's 

 Magazine for February. 



GOLD IN ANCIENT TIMES. 



Gold was in excess in ancient times, and mostly taken from the rivers in 

 Asia. The fables of Pactolus, of the golden fleece of the Argonauts, of the gold 

 from Ophir, the history of King Midas, etc., all point to an Eastern origin of this 

 metal. According to Pliny, Cyrus returned with 34.000 Roman pounds of gold, 

 (about $10,000,000). The treasures exacted from Persia by Alexander the Great 

 amounted to 351,000 talents, or $400,000,000. Gold also came from Arabia, 

 and upon the Nile from the interior of Africa. Pliny calls Asturias the country 

 in which the most gold is found. A tablet bearing the following inscription was 



