intimate but religious bond between the stage and the audience are lost. All this the English and the Greek had in common, but in Athens, in place of the doggerel, strung together by some unknown clerk, and still so charming in its naïvete, the audience listened to poetry issuing in perfection of form from the greatest intellects the world has produced. They watched the slow penalty dogging crime, even crime ordained by heaven; they saw noble spirits slowly entangled in the nets of destiny; they were shown the grandeur of the high-hearted rebel, even in the midst of his suffering; behind the blare of warlike triumph, they heard the wailings of human pity, to which even gods are deaf. Not a note of unhappy love, or passionate vengeance, or superb defiance, or the madness that waits on pride, remained untouched. Every vast and universal passion might there be seen depicted, and the words of that passionate utterance were framed in lines which the succeeding scholars of centuries have spent their lives in collecting or restoring as mankind's lasting possession.

But, as they sat, overwhelmed by the emotion of that tragic glory, the Athenian audience felt they wanted something to make them laugh. They called for the happy ending and jolly farce. They liked to be reminded of the old country at times of sunburnt mirth and bubbling vintage. Even in London it would be almost irreligious to drop the harlequinade. And so the great tra gedians of man's soul had to raise a laugh as best they could with bloated Silenus and his goat-footed rout. The comfortable belief that the best things in literature survive and the inferior things perish is, unhappily, false. If it were true, we should have no need of Lord Rosebery's warnings and lamentations, for all our libraries would be quite manageable, elegant in their slenderness. But still, it is, perhaps,

significant that only one of these tragedian jokes has hitherto been known to survive. Euripides wrote it, and he got his fun out of the merry old story of Ulysses and the Cyclops. Silenus plays a Caliban overcome with joy at the wineskin Ulysses has brought to the island. The satyrs are the chorus, slaves to the Cyclops, rejoicing at the chance of freedom, with lots to eat and drink. To them enters the monstrous giant, crying his "Fee, fi, fo, fum," and the farce continues like Jack-and-theBeanstalk, fine business being made out of Ulysses and his Nobody pun. It is all very jolly, and it must have been a great relief after three torturing tragedies. But when we think what those tragedies may have been-let us suppose them some play on the siege of Troy, followed by the "Trojan Women," and the "Hecuba," so as to make a fairly consecutive story reaching the extreme of fear and pity—when we try to imagine the mind of the poet who produced these tragedies, and of the audience who listened to them, and then think of Caliban Silenus, and the giant Cyclops rolling about on the selfsame boards-well, of course, it was just the right thing. Those people had a way of being right, and an audience must go away smiling.

If a tragedian had to do it at all, certainly also Euripides was just the right man. Even in tragedies like the "Baccha," he can hardly keep himself from brimming over into farce, and the "Alcestis," that tragi-comedy of the conformist conscience, already a screaming satire on marital relations. hardly wants a push to make it a glorious farce from end to end. One feels that Euripides would thoroughly enjoy the established joke of a satyrdrama, and make it enjoyable, too. But Sophocles, of whom all that we know from his boyhood, when for his perfection of shape he was chosen to dance naked at a triumphant festival,

up to his old age, when he gave his celebrated answer upon the advantages of an escape from physical passionand all that we know also from the poor relics of his hundred-and-thirty plays-reveals a nature reserved and self-restrained, clean, trim, fastidious of form, careful rather than exuberant, a little solemn perhaps, and given to the contemplation of eternal law and gloomy fate rather than to the pity of human errors and complex hearts. In what temper must we, imagine so exquisite and refined a poet to have complied with the tradition that demanded one drunken farce to every three tragedies? It is like expecting an annual joke from Milton, whose revelry, even when he tries it in "Comus," is not exactly rollicking.

But Dr. Hunt, who revealed the discovery of "The Trackers" last week, tells us it bears the unmistakable Sophoclean stamp. If that is so, we look forward to perusing the jest with some misgiving. The subject is the old story how the infant Hermes stole Apollo's cows and drove them off to a cave, turning their shoes wrong way round, so that their tracks might seem to lead in the opposite direction. the Homeric hymn which tells the tale, there is a good deal of fun, especially in the baby god's barefaced lying. There was nothing of little George Washington about that infant, and the solemn way in which he takes his immortal oath to lies that everyone knows to be lies, makes his father Zeus roar with laughter, and might be very ef

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fective on the stage. That is a fine passage, too, where he asks Apollo if he really looks like a cattle-lifter-—“I, who at present am entirely occupied with sheep and mother's milk and napkins and warm baths, for I was only born yesterday." One can imagine Sophocles making a lively scene out of drunken satyrs set on the trail to track the cattle down, sniffing about and barking human words. But when the solution comes, and little Hermes makes his peace with Apollo by presenting the lyre he had just constructed out of cowhide and a tortoise shell, we feel certain that the poet will shake off the farce like dirt, and rise on ethereal wings to hymn the music of the spheres.

At the end of the Banquet, when morning came, a waking guest found Socrates still sober and still talking. He was demonstrating that the poet who is best at Tragedy must be best at Comedy too. It is attractive to think the good brain can be good at almost anything, but we are not sure. For the moment, we can think of only one dramatist who was really first-rate at both. And as to that "unmistakable Sophoclean stamp"-when Horace is describing the same exploit of baby Hermes, he ends with the words, "Apollo smiled." We are afraid the smile was a little superior, and so we might find the Sophoclean stamp on the laughter of a farce. And the worst of a superior smile is that it cannot ever be infectious.

With the death of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker departs the last, with one exception, of the mid-Victorians who placed modern science upon its present footing. Alfred Russel Wallace is still

with us, but save for him all the other giants of science, whose work had already become classical when the men who are now in command were beginning to make their first acquaintance

with their subject, are not only dead but beginning to fade into the region of rare recollections and scanty reminis

cences.

Born in 1817, Hooker had been a Fellow of the Royal Society for sixty-four years, the stretch of an ordinary lifetime, and so early was his scientific activity that it received the unqualified admiration of Humboldt, a fact which seems to take us far down the scientific generations. In fact, to place him we have to remember that Hooker was a friend of Lyell, who made considerable use of Hooker's geological observations both in the Antarctic and Himalayas, and that with Lyell the modern views of geology practically began. These were the days before the antiquity of the human race had been recognized, when flint implements were still regarded as freaks of creation, and before de Perthés, Prestwich and Evans had established the existence of pre-historic man coeval with the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros. Hooker, though younger than Darwin, was more like a father confessor than a friend and critic; his advice was constantly sought and deferred to; indeed, led to the publication of the famous paper of 1858. Huxley belonged almost to a later generation, and the careers of many other great naturalists like Rolleston, Balfour, Moseley and Romanes have been wholly begun and ended within the period of Hooker's activity.

As the son of the leading botanist of his day, Joseph Hooker early found the opportunity of getting into the full tide of science. When he was only twenty-two, and had just obtained his degree, he became naturalist to the famous Antarctic expedition under Ross, and so began that series of scientific travels by which he earned his chief title to fame. The Antarctic was followed not many years after by the Himalayas, where he spent three years

in regions never before traversed by a European, which, indeed, have since remained almost equally unexplored because of the closing of Sikkin to all Europeans by the Indian Government. Another journey of exploration in the Atlas and a long journey in company with Asa Gray in the Rocky Mountains gave Hooker his unrivalled personal experience of the botany of the globe and led to that conception of the geographical distribution of plants and the survival of Arctic floras in mountain areas which has done so much to strengthen the foundation of the theory of descent.

Above all Hooker was a systematic botanist, almost the last of his race in England, for the trend of science has latterly been towards physiology and palæo-botany, so much have the world and its contents been explored and classified. The "Genera Plantarum" will long remain his monument in this direction, a permanent tidemark, as it were, to show what had been recorded at the close of the great modern expansion of the world's limits. At one time also Hooker worked at fossil botany, and in this subject, of which the possibilities have only of late years been fully realized, he retained his interest to the end. Indeed, Hooker was fortunate among men in possessing an active mind and a power of appreciating new trains of thought well into his tenth decade, and many of the younger generation of botanists can speak of his kindly interest in their work.

There were giants in the land in those days is the feeling one has towards the men with whom Hooker took station in the great fights which raged round the theory of descent in the early sixties, and it is nowadays rather the custom to deplore the fashion in which science has buried itself in technicalities and ceased, in consequence, to produce great men. Were they really giants or did they only push up

from the high plateau of their age? Will our own peaks stand out equally when the contemporary mists have cleared away? In science, at any rate, the early Victorians had an advantage that can never be recovered: they were the first explorers in an almost virgin country. The man who sails into an unknown sea, charts the new islands and makes the prime contact with the untouched inhabitants can never have his fame displaced. Others may follow, and even unlock the secrets he missed by bringing greater powers of mind or a more efficient method, but the discoverer remains the first down to the end of time. And when scientific method was applied to the whole field of positive knowledge in the early middle of the nineteenth century, quite ordinary men did get a chance of mapping out the first approximations of their science on a scale and with an effect that no successor can rival. Moreover man does rise to his opportunities; stimulus makes for greatness. To ask whether the man or the age was great is as though one were to ask how The Saturday Review.

much a man's quality is due to himself or his education-fate or free will; the answer will depend on the prepossessions of the individual. In Hooker's case we have the testimony of those best qualified to know that they were dealing with a master mind. But Hooker's work will not be displaced as are the labors of the physicist or the chemist. Botany is, after all, a common-sense sort of science, not subject to periodic revolutions as men penetrate more deeply into the obscurities that will always veil the nature of matter and force. No; the oblivion that waits on the scientific man comes from the fact that his work is not the expression of his personality but a step in the unveiling of a pre-existing universe. A Parthenon marble, even a coin by Cimon, is as fresh to-day as it was two thousand years ago, as unapproachable by the ordinary man and with as immediate an appeal to the emotions. The man of science may be a master builder, but the design upon which he works is that of a temple not builded with hands.

he may be pretty

Baker Street, January 1. Starting a diary in order to jot down a few useful incidents which will be of no use to Watson. Watson very often fails to see that an unsuccessful case is more interesting from a professional point of view than a successful case. Не means well.

January 6. Watson has gone to Brighton for a few days, for change of air. This morning quite an interesting little incident happened which I note as a useful example of how sometimes people who have no powers of deduction nevertheless stumble on the truth for the wrong reason. (This never

Les

happens to Watson, fortunately.) trade called from Scotland Yard with reference to the theft of a diamond and ruby ring from Lady Dorothy Smith's wedding presents. The facts of the case were briefly these: On Thursday evening such of the presents as were jewels had been brought down from Lady Dorothy's bedroom to the drawing-room to be shown to an admiring group of friends. The ring was amongst them. After they had been shown, the jewels were taken upstairs once more and locked in the safe. The next morning the ring was missing. Lestrade, after investigating the mat