the incomparable mastery of the migrant. There is indeed no place for comparisons here: a full appreciation of the nightingale will only make us love the humbler minstrels the more. The morning and evening hymn of thrush and blackbird, the ringing challenge of the mişsel in a frosty twilight of February, the noon-tide din of the finches and warblers in a green wood, the lark in the clouds and the yellowhammer flitting before the wayfarer along the dusty hedge, have every one its own unquestioned place in the concert of the year; but anyone who takes the trouble to give a proper hearing to the nightingale in its brief season will probably come to wonder very heartily-spite of all proverbial warnings about tastes at the people who insist on making material comparisons, and are even found to maintain the blackcap's pretty warble as rivalling the other's tragic strain. There is no ground for argument in such a case; we cannot send a man out in the moonlight with his head full of Heine to listen to the blackcap; every one must hold to his own without reasons given. It is difficult to judge of the actual number of distinct phrases in nightingale music used by a fine exponent. (It is worth observing that there is a certain range of gifts between individual birds, and that the same singer seems to vary in inspiration from time to time.) There is, of course, a number of recognizable and commonly repeated figures; but it is possible to listen for a quarter of an hour without hearing a whole stanza more than twice over. Even in a long audience, when the ear begins to classify the tunes that come so thick with their one-second breathing-pause, and to recognize some element of choice and favorite turns, there will come at any moment wholly new arrangements which the singer, as though pleased with the happy impro visation, will try over again with absolute accuracy of repetition, but not more than twice together. As regards mere technique, it is in this invention and creative power that the nightingale most easily surpasses its competitors. The song of the finches and warblers (as distinct from the various call-notes which vary with the season) is in almost every case a monotonous and quite regular trill or roulade: the songthrush has a great deal of individuality in his clear, strenuous strain which somehow always sounds a little excited. The blackbird in his leisurely meditative warble, dropping out his airs as if they were maxims of a ripe philosopher, has still more personality, so that anyone who takes the trouble may easily learn to distinguish the five or six performers who may have their pitches round a house or about a garden, and if he cares to write down their favorite flourishes, can make a very pretty collection of cadences and tunes. But the nightingale's strophes are in another world of sound; the semi-quavers which ripple like liquid crystal, the intense ringing brilliancy of the upturned note which ends a rich descant, the gutturals with a resonance in them like a harp-chord, or like the pizzicato note of a bass string, the reiterated pealing cry, gathering volume and speed at every breathless pause, the mysterious thin shrillings and grasshopper-whisperings on the very verge of audibility, the percussive ascent, like the clink of silver hammers; these are the nightingale's alone. All these and more, which some have ponderously tried to represent by phonetic spellings of imitative human noisesTereu, szquo-szquo, or the homely jugjug1-are, with one or two exceptions, of extreme beauty; but lovely as they are as pure sound, they do not come into the reckoning of the night 1 The tio-tio-tio-tio-tio-tinx in "The Birds" is a close attempt at a familar phrase ending on a high note. ingale's true power. make the song which They do not dying fall; a wild ascent through shrill accidentals to the height of passion, lost in sudden silence; an exquisitely tender, long-drawn, stealing note, perhaps the loveliest and the mournfullest sound the world has ever heard. Oft times hath Charmed magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn; that is found in the intense pathetic appeal, the impression of grief which has moved all ages to think of the strain as a passionate lament, a "high requiem." There is no need for us to consider how the modulations of a voice producing deliberately ordered notes can stir the sense of elemental pain: that question touches human song as well as wood-notes wild. It is better to forget our science, as we very well may, and listen to the poignant modes which come among the lighter airs; a low dwelling utterance with a The Saturday Review. To go to nature and follow the singer through her actual scales and intervals, instead of resting idly in the literary tradition, will in the end show the tradition itself, beneath the mists of habit and convention, to contain all the facts, spiritual and bodily. Listening to the bird on soft summer nights will not desecrate the song; rather it will make a man say with Izaak Walton's Auceps: "the Nightingale, another of my airy creatures, breathes such loud music out of her little instrumental throat, that it might make mankind to think miracles are not ceased." BIBLE NATURAL HISTORY. No more interesting collection of its kind has been shown in London than the Bible Natural History Exhibition now to be seen at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. The originators are to be congratulated on having successfully carried out an admirable idea. In a recess on the right of the large central hall they have brought together specimens of the various animals, birds, plants, minerals, precious stones, and so on, which are mentioned in the Bible. All are carefully labelled, and explanations are provided as to the different translations and uses of the Hebrew and Greek words. The authors of the scheme must be gratified to notice the interest and attention with which these labels and explanations are read by visitors; indeed, the time which many seem disposed to spend over the cases makes it occasionally difficult for the less lei are shown the narcissus, which is probably the "rose" of the Song of Solomon and Isaiah xxxv. 1, which the Revised Version suggests should be the autumn crocus. Another case in which the Revised differs from the Authorized Version and the notes at the Exhibition occurs in II Sam. v. 23-24. Here the Revised Version suggests that "mulberry trees" should be balsams, whereas the note given us at the Exhibition describes them as "aspenlike poplars." Certainly the words, "when thou hearest the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees" (becâîm) seem to suggest that poplars should be the correct version, for in no tree does sonous. We the wind make a more distinct and sep- of other birds-the hawks and owls, arate sound than in the lightly-hung, for example. The word tachmâs was long-stalked leaves of the poplar. possibly translated "nighthawk" owing see, next, "the husks which the swine to the similarity of the word "nightdid eat" in the Parable of the Prodigal jar," though the nightjar's nearest relaSon: they are the bean-like fruits of the tive among British birds is the swift; locust or carob tree, which blossoms at but by tachmâs is probably meant one the end of February and is covered of the larger owls, perhaps the barn with pods in April. Then there owl. But different words have been are specimens showing the growth translated "owl" even in the same chapof tares, the darnel (Lolium temul- ter; for instance, in Isaiah xxxiv. 11 entum), which is a common weed and 13, côs in the latter verse is probain the countries of the Mediterranean. bly the Southern little owl, Athene The parable gains point from the fact glaux; and in the former verse "owl" that the young plant is indistinguish- ought to be "ibis." There are other able from wheat, but its seeds are poi- passages where the bird intended seems to be the ostrich. Equally difficult to identify with certainty are the hawks. The word nesher in Leviticus xi. 13, rendered as eagle, seems to be equivalent to the Arabic nissr, the griffon vulture: this is Nisroch, the vulture god of the Assyrian sculptures. By "ospray" we should perhaps understand the short-toed eagle, and peres, the "ossifrage," is undoubtedly the lammergeier; in verse 19 of the same chapter "lapwing" should be the hoopoe. The word "sparrow" is used for any small perching bird, but in Psalm cii. 7, "I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house-top," the bird referred to seems to be the blue rock-thrush. In Isaiah XXXviii. 14, "Like a crane, or a swallow, so did I chatter," "crane" is the translation of the Hebrew sis, but sis is the swift. Then, again, there are generic words, such as 'ôreb translated raven, whereas it should stand for the whole crow family. The suggestion has been made that the ravens which fed Elijah by the brook Cherith were Orêbim, the people of Orlo, a small town of the Cherith valley. Other problems in identification are not so easy. The sycamine of Luke xvii. 6 is probably the black mulberry, which is still known in Greece as sycaminea. But there is more doubt as to the gopher tree which is mentioned only once, in Genesis vi. 14. Gopher wood, of which the Ark was made, seems most likely to be cypress, which is copher in Arabic, and is abundant in Chaldea and Armenia. Another disputed identification is the manna of the wilderness. But it answers well enough to a certain lichen, Lecanora esculenta, found in Northern and Eastern African deserts. This lichen is caught up by the wind and laid in drifts; the lumps are whitishbrown, varying in size from a pea to a hazel-nut, and are still regarded by the natives as food from heaven. The identification of the birds of the Bible must necessarily be uncertain in many cases, not only because the meaning of the word originally used seems sometimes to be lost altogether, but because the naming of birds, not only in Biblical times, but in days when the translation was made from the Hebrew was uncertain and irregular. Some are plain enough-tor, the turtledove, for instance, whose voice names him at once: he is turtur in Latin. But there is much confusion in the naming In some ways the animals have been even more oddly misnamed than the birds. In the collection in South Kensington there is not sufficient space to exhibit stuffed specimens of all the creatures mentioned-indeed, to do so would be unnecessary. But of the larger animals we get photographs and drawings, or references to the animals in other parts of the museum. One, at least, cannot be exhibited; the aurochs, or wild ox, has long been extinct though we know from Assyrian sculptures that it was living in Biblical times in Asia Minor. The aurochs appears to be rêm, the "unicorn." Some odd mistranslations occur in Leviticus xi. 29-30, where we read, among creeping things declared unclean, of "the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind, and the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole." There are no moles of our British species in Palestine, and probably by "weasel" is meant the mole rat, Spalax typhlus, of Eastern Europe and Egypt, a curious creature with a flattened snout and eyes completely hidden; but the mole rat, as a fact, eats roots and not insects. "Ferret" is a quaint mistake; the unclean creature is more likely the gecko, either the fan-footed or the common kind. "Tortoise" is possibly another kind of lizard, the large spiny-tailed species named in the Revised Version the "great" lizard. It appears, too, that the "spider" mentioned with the cockatrice and viper in Isaiah lix. 5 should be one of the lizards, most likely the gecko. Vague names, such as behemoth and leviathan, have naturally provoked different theories. Behemoth, the waterox, is pretty certainly the hippopotamus; but leviathan cannot be one animal only. The description in Job evidently refers to the Nile crocodile, timsa, but in Psalm civ. 26 the leviathan of the sea cannot be a crocodile; he is more probably the whale, and possibly the large sperm whale which belongs to the Mediterranean. In the exhibition there is a case containing a stuffed baby sperm whale, and stuffed speciThe Spectator. mens of crocodiles, of course, are to be found in the reptile room, only a few paces away. Perhaps the most generally accepted Biblical mistranslation is the familiar "conies" of the 104th Psalm. Cony is the old English name for the rabbit, and though the word only survives now in legal documents and old law phrasing, and has lost its place in the ordinary language of the country, it keeps its meaning in the Bible, and the meaning, unfortunately, is wrong. "Conies" should be "hyraxes," and the hyrax, as anyone may see by looking at the stuffed specimen in the museum or the live animals in the Zoological Gardens, is a very different creature from the rabbit. Yet without doubt this is a case where correct translation would transmute and damage the spirit of the passage in which it occurs. The word "cony" is well known to Bible readers as the name of a "feeble folk," whereas the word "hyrax" is not; a hyrax, indeed, sounds a formidable creature, and cannot easily be explained to a child who has never seen one. But there is one mistranslation which ought to be entered into all teachers' note-books, and that is the reference in the description of the gilding of the Temple to "badgerskins." The word thus translated is the Hebrew tachash, which is probably equivalent to the Arabic tuchash, and denotes the porpoise, dolphin, and dugong of the Red Sea. For "badgerskins" undoubtedly ought to be substituted the skin of the dugong-a tough leather fitted for the purpose to which it is described as being put. In the Revised Version the translation is seal skins, but the seal is, of course, a different animal from the dugong, which is the strangely shaped creature from whose odd appearance in the water we get the legendary merman and mermaid. THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT AND THE NEW LITERATURE. Individualism was brought into Japan, in truth, at the same time with the Western Constitution and freedom. It is the work of superficial observers to see only the uniform of Japan's patriotism in the Russia-Japan War; it is quite right to say that it only overshadowed, with its astonishing glitter of ancient sword, the elements of Western individualism which at the time of that war had begun to make their existence clear. The new Japanese even attempted to qualify the meaning of patriotism from another standpoint. Ketoku, who was hanged recently as the leader of the now famous treason case, and many others raised the antiwar cry; we have many an unpublished story of deserters who were at once court-martialled. Some critics even deny the Japanese bravery which the Western mind associates with the war. (It would surprise the Western readers if we told our own story, to be sure.) Was it strange that, while we cursed Russia and even called her barbarous and acted as if we were ourselves the "defenders of civilization," we, at least the intellectual Japanese, on the other hand, burned incense right before Turgenieff, Tolstoy, and even Gorky? It was the time when we smuggled in Western individualism while singing aloud the most patriotic song ever there was. The war lessened the distance between Japan and Europe a hundred-fold. The Western civilization which we had only understood through the eyes of Oriental idealism became suddenly real, more from its Own faults, without the perception of which the interesting part of Western civilization would never be understood. And those faults appeared beautiful, even grand, when the war made us see life naked, and its brutal exposure of reality broke down our old idealism. Politically Socialism took root; in literature the so-called naturalism, of course with Japanese modifications, grew imminent, driving out the old literature which always hid from us the real meaning of life under polite phraseology. The Japanese writers, I may say nearly all of them, went to Ibsen and Maupassant to make a student's obeisance. Since the war, particularly in the last three years, the Japanese Government has had two objects-namely, to stamp out Socialism and "naturalism," which, both of them, insist on perfect individualism. It seems to me that she used every possible power of the police and Press law toward her end; many writers were supposed, in fact, to be as dangerous morally and so. cially as anarchists. The Government set the police on them. The writers seemed rather pleased, since they could turn out inore stories at her expense; "Kiken Jinbutsu," or the Dangerous Man. by Hakucho Masamine, is the story of how the author was followed secretly or openly by de. tectives on his way home. It is almost impossible to believe how many stories, magazines, and books have been suppressed by law in the last year; we can count more than sixty cases. Is there any other country among the countries called civilized where you see such an astonishing phenomenon as that? The question is: "Will the Government be able to stamp out the bad literature" as she wishes? And another question is: What is that "bad literature"? I can say that the so-called bad literature will gain more strength as the reaction to the Government's act; it is true that when it is known that a certain story or book |