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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
worthy portion of the work is that which refers to the probability of success 
attending the next effort to lay the cable. The cable of 1865, though capable 
of bearing a strain of seven tons, did not experience more than 14 cwt. in 
being paid out into the deepest water of the Atlantic. Owing to the im- 
provements introduced into the manufacture of gutta-percha, it insulated a 
hundred times better than cables made in 1858, and still working. The im- 
provements, too, effected since the beginning of 1851 in the conducting 
power of the copper wire, by selecting it, have increased the rate of signalling 
through long submarine cables by more than 33 per cent. Now, if a steam- 
engine be attached to the paying-out machinery, so as to permit of hauling 
in the cable immediately a fault is discovered, and a slight modification made 
in the construction of the external sheath, the cause of the faults which have 
yet presented themselves will be entirely done away with, and even should 
a fault occur, it can be picked up before it has reached the bottom of the 
Atlantic. All these things should make us hopeful of the success of the 
effort which is soon about to be made, and for which the Gh'eat Eastern is 
undergoing the necessary alterations. “Remembering,” says Dr. Russell, 
“ all that has occurred, — how well-grounded hopes were deceived, just ex- 
pectations frustrated, — there are still grounds for confidence, absolute as far 
as the nature of human affairs permits them in any calculation of future 
events to be, that the year 1866 will witness the consummation of the greatest 
work of civilized man, and the grandest exposition of the development of the 
faculties bestowed on him to overcome material difficulties. The last word 
transmitted through the old telegraph from Europe to America was ‘Forward,’ 
and 4 Forward’ is the motto of the enterprise still !” 
ALEXANDER YON HUMBOLDT. 
H ERO-WORSHIP is a commendable species of idolatry when the 
devotee is content with a moderate degreee of adoration. It is very 
different, however, when the particular hero is exalted into a demigod, and 
his worshipper becomes fanatical. This condition, for all save the enthusiast 
himself, is a very terrible and trying one. There is no adjective limit to the 
eulogium which a profound hero-worshipper passes upon his fetish. When he 
speaks of it, it is in terms of the superlative class, and when he writes of it, 
it is in a gushing style which is lovingly laudatory, but a small quantity of 
which goes a very great way. We are sorry to find that the author of the 
present biography is a hero-worshipper of the worst type. The cleverly 
mitten life of Humboldt which he gives us is eminently Boswellian, at least 
in some respects ; still, it is a book which we have read with the greatest 
interest, and although it touches but lightly on some of the incidents of the 
German savant 1 s history, and here and there betrays the author’s ignorance of 
science, it is a pretty biographical sketch. Humboldt was a very great man, 
* “ Alexander von Humboldt ; or, What may be Accomplished in a 
Life-time.” By F. A. Schwarzenberg. London : Hardwicke. 1866. 
