stamp patterns everywhere as easily as a man can stamp his footprint on the sand. The peasant, when he carves wood or paints earthenware, has a desire to make his pattern neat and symmetrical mixed with his desire to express himself; indeed, he cannot express himself in ornament without some neatness and symmetry. But machine-made ornament is so superior in these qualities to anything he can do that he is over-awed by it, and fails to see that it is also entirely inexpressive. So he would rather have the factory product than his own handiwork, and buys where he used to make. Often, no doubt, there are economic reasons for the change. It is cheaper to buy than to make. But if the peasant knew the vast superiority of what he makes to what he buys, if he could understand what pleasure, what interest in life, and what exercise of his higher faculties he forgoes when he ceases to be an artist, then we may be sure that he would not be the slave of cheapness. It is because the factory product seems to him better than his own work that he gives up his own work for it.

So peasant art is vanishing wherever commerce spreads; and meanwhile the rich and powerful, whose taste has produced all that mechanical art which is killing peasant art, are undergoing a change of taste. Mr. Levetus says that now the work of the peasant is taken seriously and we are learning from it "that art is not to be desired at any price, but only when it is prompted by a vital motive or some special occasion." That is the æsthetic principle which underlies our change of taste, and the best hope for art in the future lies in the clear understanding and resolute application of it. Art is dying because we all want too much of it; and in trying to cope with our demand it ceases to be art. We have learnt to expect ornament everywhere, and we have forgotten that, since its aim is

expression, machine-made ornament is a contradiction in terms. The peasant, making his own things, only ornaments them when he has something to express through his ornament; it is like a song which a man sings over his work. But machine-made ornament, stamped on a thousand articles made all on the same pattern for the market, is like music ground out on a barrelorgan, and as silence is better than the one so plainness is better than the other. The high finish of machinery often has a real beauty of its own so long as it makes no pretence to be what it is not. In Bond-street one may see silver cigarette cases, watches, dressing bags, which, being quite plain, please the eye and satisfy the mind because of their perfect fitness for their purpose, to which their finish contributes. But directly they are ornamented they cease to please the eye or satisfy the mind; for ornament is as irrelevant to this mechanical perfection as poetic imagery is irrelevant to precise statements of prosaic fact. Ornament is the expression of a mood; and in these mechanical masterpieces there is no mood to be expressed. They can express nothing but their uses, and when they do that they have a virtue of their own. Peasant art, through its very imperfection and the pleasure we are learning to take in that imperfection, may teach us that ornament is by nature incompatible with mechanical perfection of finish. Where there is living ornament there must be in the workmanship some of the imperfection of life. Therefore when we want mechanical perfection we should not demand ornament. If we do we are sure to get something as ugly and irrelevant as the architecture of the Tower Bridge. It is because we have tried to combine the two that this mechanical art has spread all over Europe and is killing the real art of the peasants everywhere. Real art can revive only

when we have learnt to renounce the sham, when we have as much disgust of inexpressive ornament as of poetical

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claptrap. That is the lesson of peasant art, which it seems to be teaching by means of its own death.

The way in which this world came to be what it is has been the subject of speculation, to some extent philosophical, and of divination garnished with the mysterious, and devoid of any solid foundation of scientific knowledge, almost from the time when men became capable of expressing thought in speech. It was not, however, until Laplace formulated the details of his famous Nebular Hypothesis in 1796 that any scientific account of the way planets originated was put forward. Laplace started by assuming the existence of a huge, hot, gaseous nebula with a central and more condensed portion, or nucleus, which was to become the sun. This vast nebula extended beyond the orbit of our farthest planet, Neptune, and was possessed of a motion of rotation, or spinning, about an axis through its centre. It is sometimes said that Laplace assumed this rotatory motion, and that the assumption is a drawback to his system. The truth is that if Laplace's nebula came -as it almost certainly did-from the collision of two great suns rushing through space, shattering each other to atoms, it would be almost miraculous if the nebula to which they gave rise had no such motion of rotation. According to a great principle of dynamics, if two suns, neither of which was spinning about its axis, met each other "full tilt," like two railway trains on the same straight road, the nebula into which they would be converted would be quite devoid of rotation; but it is only in such very restricted conditions that rotation would be absent; so that this objection to Laplace's hypothesis

is quite groundless. There are, however, some serious objections-and of a few of them Laplace himself was aware. Without going into technical details, which would be unsuitable to the general reader, we may say simply that Laplace's hypothesis does not account successfully for the formation of the moons which revolve round planets, or for the directions in which these moons revolve round their own axes.

Several years after the hypothesis was started, it received a most striking confirmation from a simple experiment devised by a blind physicist, M. Plateau. Let us take a glass vessel, filled with a mixture of alcohol and water, and let a straight vertical wire, or thin rod, which can be spun very rapidly about its axis, be passed down through the liquid. If, before causing the wire to spin, we cause a fairly large drop, or sphere, of oil (which will just float) to attach itself to the wire so that the wire passes through the centre of the oil sphere and forms an axis round which the oil can rotate, we shall find that, on gradually spinning the wire, the drop of oil will gradually flatten, becoming orange-shaped; and that when the rotation is rapid, the oil will throw off a complete ring from itself, this ring and the remaining nucleus of oil forming an exact picture of Saturn and his rings. Ring after ring can be thrown off by increasing the rotation of the wire. Now Laplace's rotating nebula would gradually cool, contract, and approach a liquid form; so that it might be expected to throw off rings, as M. Plateau's oil does, which would (or might) concentrate them

selves into planets-provided that each such ring had somewhere in it a large lump towards which the whole ring could draw itself, very much as a snail draws in its horns. The assumption of such an overwhelming lump or knot in each ring involves great difficulty; and it must be admitted, we fear, in spite of M. Plateau's striking construction of a miniature Saturn that our planets did not originate in this way. In a recent work, "The Growth of a Planet," 99 1 by Mr. E. S. Grew, one of the conductors of our scientific contemporary, "Knowledge," the life-history of this world of ours is set forth from another and, we are bound to say, apparently more satisfactory-point of view. Not by any means that Laplace's hypothesis is to be dismissed in its entirety, but that it is to be accepted with a notable modification. Our sun and his planets come from a nebula; but it was not Laplace's nebula: it was never a huge sphere of hot rotating gas which gradually cooled, threw off rings which became planets, themselves very hot and surrounded by gaseous atmospheres, and in their turn throwing off moons. According to Laplace, this earth, for example, was in its earliest stage of separate existence a molten nucleus surrounded by a vast atmosphere, which gradually cooled and formed the water of the oceans. ACcording to the newer hypothesis, the earth started as a solid, and not excessively hot, nucleus surrounded by no atmosphere, but evolving an atmosphere out of its own interior-very much after the manner of the web-spinning spider. Most of our readers are probably fairly well acquainted with the main features of Laplace's Nebular Hypothesis, which has been the subject of discussion and severe examination for the last hundred years; but its newer form or modification is

1 "The Growth of a Planet," by Edwin Sharpe Grew, M.A. (Methuen, 6s.)

far too recent to be well known, and we propose to indicate its principal features with no mathematical technicalities.

If we were permitted to summarize the nature of Laplace's nebula in somewhat undignified language, we should call it a "full-tilt" nebula. Our sun is moving through space, and carrying his planets with him, with a speed of about eleven miles per second-a mere snail's pace compared with that of other suns which are known to be rushing along at the rate of about 200 miles per second. Now, if we imagine two equal suns to meet each other "full-tilt," with the moderate speed of twenty miles per second each, a very simple calculation shows that the heat generated by their collision would raise their combined mass to a temperature of something like two million degrees Centigrade; and it will be readily admitted that such a prodigious temperature would convert the combined mass into a gaseous fiery nebula, such as Laplace postulated. But astronomers, from the time of the famous Lord Rosse, have, by means of photography, established the remarkable fact that most of the nebulæ which actually exist are very different from Laplace's; they are not spheres, but spirals, coiled after the manner of a watch-spring. How did these come into existence? The answer is-by the tearing to pieces of two suns which tried to shoot past each other at a short distance, or, at the most, grazed each other. The phenomena of our own tides, raised by the actions of the sun and moon, show us that the body of each of the grazing suns would be torn into particles (small, but still solid) by tremendous tidal action; and a closer consideration of the details shows that the matter of the bodies is spread out into spiral coils; while spectroscopic observation proves that the spiral nebulæ thus resulting are not in a gaseous but in a finely-divided solid form.

Now, from the way in which such a spiral is formed, it is evident that the formation of lumps or nuclei here and there along it is extremely probable; and, in fact, such nuclei can be seen in the photographs of all spiral nebulæ. We can see the condensation of matter round these lumps, and its thinning out to almost invisible fineness in the spaces between the successive ones along the spiral. Such lumps are obviously the future planets, which are gradually gathering to themselves the smaller pieces of matter from the portions of the spiral in their neighborhood. They are solid matter from start to finish-not gas. But here a question will naturally present itself to the reader: if these solid nuclei are not surrounded by gaseous atmospheres, how came planets to possess atmospheres such as we know to exist on all the planets of the solar system? Laplace gave them atmospheres at once before they began to condense into habitable worlds, but our new hypothesis of development from spiral nebulæ does not do so. It must therefore be that the atmospheres came out of the interiors of the planets themselves; and the possibility of such an origin can be justified as follows: The lump or nucleus which is to become the planet is building itself up with the pieces of solid matter which it is perpetually drawing in from the adjacent parts of the spiral. After some time great condensation, due to gravitation, takes place in the nucleus, and this produces a great development of heat in the interior, and consequent melting of the mass. Thus the planet becomes actually very hot, and volcanic outbursts of hot matter from the centre towards the surface take place. The heated matter, which contains imprisoned gases, will liberate these at the surface; and if the planet has already grown sufficiently large, its attraction will be able to keep these gases round

about it, while any gases thus liberated before the planet had reached a sufficient size, escaped out into space, leaving the neighborhood of the body completely.

In this way, then, after the planet had reached a size comparable with that of the earth, its expelled gases go to form a gaseous envelope, or atmosphere, surrounding it. In the same way the water of the planet comes from the gases expelled from the interior, and condensed near its cooled surface, bubbling up in time through the crust and filling up the cavities and basins at the surface; and thus the ocean was formed.

Such, in main outline, is the new nebular hypothesis, which actually reverses the order of events belonging to that of Laplace. This new theory, called the Planetismal Hypothesis, is mainly the work of the American geologists and physicists, Chamberlain and Salisbury, with developments by Dr. See. It does not deny the possibility of such a nebula as Laplace's, which, doubtless, exists somewhere in the universe and forms a solar system notably different from our own. The extreme regularity of the rings thrown off by such a nebula-like Plateau's oil ring -would lead to extreme regularity of motion in the solar system to which it would give rise, even if its rings could ever aggregate into planets at all; and, as M. Faye pointed out, the resulting rotations of moons and planets on their axes would actually be in a direction the reverse of that which obtains in our solar system.

Into the subsequent, or domestic, history of the earth we cannot enter here; the story is well told by Mr. Grew, whose book is a most valuable store of all the results of recent scientific research on the development of the earth and its living beings.

We would point out just one correction in the book, because the error involved may mislead some of its read

ers. After stating correctly that the mass of the moon is about the oneeightieth of that of the earth, the author twice subsequently (pp. 35, 36)

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writes it "one-eighth"; but no other slip from accuracy occurs in the work. G. M. Minchin.

Lear's "Later Letters" (1864-85) is a delightful book and an intimate book. It takes us into the inner circle of the friendships of the eccentric and lovable man whose name it bears, and reveals the hopes and opinions and troubles of the "dirty Landscape painter," as it amused the author of "The Book of Nonsense" to call himself.

A letter of 1866, in which Lear narrates how he put a traveller out of countenance who was informing his companions in the train that "The Book of Nonsense" was written by Lord Derby, reminds us of the date at which that immortal work was published. That was ten years before "The Hunting of the Snark," at a time when Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, and Disraeli were at the zenith of their powers; when George Eliot was at the height of her fame, and Meredith had crossed the threshold of his. The coincidence of such events in literature is not without interest, and the philosophic historian may find some significance therein. A deliberate indulgence in nonsensical frivolity is a not unnatural tendency, it may be thought, in an age of social, religious, and intellectual questioning and unrest. Lear was certainly no stranger to the disease of his century. He was still less a stranger to that poverty which Theocritus declares is the sole awak

Later Letters of Edward Lear to Chichester Fortescue, Lord Carlingford, Frances, Countess Waldegrave, and others. Edited by Lady Strachey of Sutton Court. With 83 illustrations. (Fisher Unwin.)

Queery Leary Nonsense: a Lear Nonsense Book. Edited by Lady Strachey. With an introduction by the Earl of Cromer. (Mills & Boon.)

ener of the arts, and it is to that "chill penury against which Lear's life was one continuous and arduous struggle" that Lord Cromer, in his Preface to the "Queery Leary" book, is inclined to think we owe the poems which still delight children of all ages. (Lord Cromer's quotation from Theocritus, by the way, appears in an odd form.) However this may be, it is pleasant to learn that Lear was prouder of his "Book of Nonsense" than of his paintings. It is more usual for the authors of humorous masterpieces, such, for instance, as "The Jumping Frog," to prefer their more serious and less classic achievements. Lord Cromer, alas! suggests that this was, indeed, the case with the author of "Dumbledownderry."

The "Later Letters" is mainly a continuation of Lear's correspondence with his lifelong friends Chichester Fortescue (Lord Carlingford)—"40scue," as he calls him, with that delight in original spelling which is one of the bubbling humors of this book-and Frances, Lady Waldegrave. This volume, like that published in 1907, is edited by their niece, Lady Strachey, and includes a charming Memoir by Mr. Hubert Congreve, a close friend of Lear's at San Remo. He describes vividly his remembrances of his old friend and would-be master in art. The editing is capably and conscientiously done. Lady Strachey adds to the ease and enjoyment of the reader by elucidating in foot-notes Lear's varied references to the political and social celebrities of his day. She is no doubt wise