3 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



quently gravitated toward it. About their work in shop or field, 

 the daily bread of their minds was to think and talk of crime in 

 every shape that diseased minds and perverted natures can con- 

 jure it up. One would entertain his companions by detailing to 

 them the story of some crime committed by himself, or of which 

 he had knowledge, while every one listened attentively, like so 

 many experts. The story ended, criticism began, and each one 

 would indicate what he considered the weak points in the plan 

 and its execution, and would suggest improvements here and there. 

 One story always led to another, and, as might be expected, minds 

 accustomed to this highly seasoned food soon rejected all other. 



The total population of the island at the time of my visit was 

 2,562, about seven hundred of whom were not criminals, but the 

 wives and children of convicts who were, by necessity or choice, 

 accompanying husbands or parents in their exile and imprison- 

 ment. As already stated, the great majority of the convicts had 

 been sent here for murder, and belonged to a low, brutal type of 

 men. The general tendency of this intermingling of the innocent 

 with the criminal, and of the less depraved of the convicts with 

 the worst, is to reduce all to a common level, and that level the 

 lowest. 



In the ordinary experience of life a man seldom or never sinks 

 so low that there is no hope for him, hope both subjective and ob- 

 jective, but of the worst of these convicts this is not true. The only 

 priest of the island, after years of labor, went through his sacred 

 duties in a perfunctory manner, for, as he gave me to understand, 

 he had long since come to realize that the seed he sowed fell into 

 the fire. Speaking to him one day regarding the peculiar charm 

 of the place, he replied : " Ah me ! I can't see these things now, 

 for though it is, externally, all that you see and say of it, this 

 quiet, this seclusion, this beautiful and bountiful nature are 

 turned by man into a stifling, suffocating hole — a stench in the 

 nostrils of God." 



But fortunately the attractiveness, the beauty and grandeur of 

 nature as seen in the delightful landscapes, the tropical vegetation, 

 the peculiar fauna and flora, the majesty of the ocean, the violence 

 of the tempests, the charming caprice of clouds and sunshine, pre- 

 vent one from brooding too long over these dark pictures of hu- 

 man depravity, while the convicts themselves not infrequently 

 come like quaint figures in the foregrounds of beautiful pictures. 

 But to see this beauty one must look through the eyes of a lover 

 of nature. 



For the true-hearted naturalist there is no such thing as soli- 

 tude, but to those who see but little or nothing companionable or 

 intelligible in landscapes, in forests and fields and oceans, and 

 above all to the ignorant, Fernando de Noronha doubtless seems 



