738 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



oftenest breathing perfume from Paradise, grand, large, free, flowing, flexible, 

 unconscious, and incapable of formality : Bacon, precise and reserved in expres- 

 sion; Shakespeare, a player and quibbler with words, and swept away by his 

 own verbal conceits into intellectual paradox, and almost into moral obliquity:' 

 Bacon, without humor; Shakespeare's smiling lips the mouthpiece of humor for 

 all human kind : Bacon, looking at the world before him and at the teaching of 

 past ages with a single eye to his theories and his individual purposes : Shakes- 

 peare, finding in the wisdom and the folly, the woes and the pleasures of the 

 past and the present only the means of giving pleasure to others and getting 

 money for himself, and rising to his height as a poet and a moral teacher only by 

 his sensitive intellectual sympathy with all the needs and joys and sorrows of hu- 

 manity : Bacon, shrinking from a generalization even in morals: Shakespeare, 

 ever moralizing, and dealing even with individual men and particular things in 

 their general relations: both worldly-wise, both men of the world, and both these 

 master intellects of the Christian era were worldly-minded men in the thorough 

 Bunyan sense of the term : but the one using his knowledge of men and things 

 critically in philosophy and in affairs : the other, his synthetically, as a creative 

 artist: Bacon, a highly trained mind, and showing his training at every step of 

 his cautious, steady march: Shakespeare wholly untrained, and showing his want 

 of training even in the highest reach of his soaring flight ; Bacon, utterly without the 

 poetic faculty even in a secondary degree, as is most apparent when he desires to 

 show the contrary : Shakespeare, rising with unconscious effort to the highest 

 heaven of poetry ever reached by the human mind. To suppose that one of 

 these men did his own work and also the work of the other is to assume two mir- 

 acles for the sake of proving one absurdity. — Aila?itic Monthly for April. 



THE TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE OF MAY 6TH. 



A total eclipse, of the Sun occurs on the 6th of May. The Sun and Moon, 

 the chief actors in the grand display, regardless of the convenience of terrestrial 

 observers, have located the scene of operations in the Southern Pacific Ocean. 

 The line of totality sweeps over a vast extent of watery waste, including in its 

 passage only two small islands, where the eclipse can be seen to advantage. 

 These two islands are Caroline Island and Flint Island. The former is about ten 

 miles in circumference, and is inhabited by thirty natives of the Malay race and 

 one white man. The latter is five or six miles in circumference, and is, we be- 

 lieve, uninhabited. Both islands are out of the beaten track of those who go 

 down to the sea in ships. But small as the islands are, and difficult as they are 

 to reach, the wise men who wish to study the eclipse, and all others who desire 

 to witness the most glorious celestial phenomenon that ever takes place, will have 

 to congregate on these two little islands. Thousands of miles of ocean must be 

 traversed, and all manner of privations and hardships must be endured, in order 

 to behold the awe-inspiring spectacle. But never yet in the history of the human 



