are rarely found in the public service lie upon the surface. There is no principle of political economy more universal in its application than that the supply of every thing will be proportioned to the demand. This is as true of statesmen as it is of seamen or soldiers, or wheat or cotton. It is the tendency of the representative system constantly to circumscribe the sphere of government, and to limit its function to the simple duty of keeping one man's hand off of another and off from his property. This duty does not require the first order of men; it is a sort of upper constable's work at the best, for which certain qualities that are not rare are most important. Of course the supply will correspond to the demand. The public will not pay for a better grade of ability than the service requires, and if it does, the competition with the multitudes who are supposed competent for it is such that the chances of success are not sufficient to induce those who are good for any thing else to incur its risks. If republican institutions did not have this tendency, they would not deserve the encomiums which have been passed upon as will only be properly appreciated in another generation. Without speaking of such as are political in their character and still more or less the subject of controversy, it is but just to say that he has done more for the State of Massachusetts, as the simple custodian of her property, than any person who ever occupied his seat before him. To his indefatigable exertions Massachusetts owes a reduction of her state taxes of nearly $900,000 in two years; a reduction of town taxes to the amount of nearly $800,000, and an increase in the valuation of her property in eight years of $814,000,000. While he has been doing all this, with the co-operation of the excellent men which superior administrative talent is sure to bring about it, Mr. Banks himself has prospered only in honors; he is still one of the very poorest men in all New England. And of all his distinctions which the future biographers of Mr. Banks will have to record, this deserves to occupy the very highest rank. He who possesses the ability to bring himself within the reach of the greatest temptations, and the virtue to withstand them, lacks nothing but the crown of them. poverty to prove him to be of the genuine Hence it is that, with honors literally rain-blood-royal and a ruler by Divine right. ing upon him from every quarter, Mr. Banks Without affirming that Mr. Banks leaves has not seen the day since he entered politi- political life for a position in which he can cal life when he would not gladly have ex- be more useful, we may with propriety say changed the pleasure which any of them that he leaves it for a position in which such conferred, for an assurance that the very talents as his are more needed, and theremoderate expenses of. his family from week to week could be conveniently and surely met. He knew too well the value of his own self-respect to exchange it for affluence, as he readily might have done at any time in the various exalted positions he has held. With his views of statesmanship it was impossible for him to work for any but the state, and the consequence is that he finds himself to-day, after ten years of most honorable public service, and with every temptation to continue in it that political life can offer, a poorer man than he was when earning daily wages in a New England factory. And yet Mr. Banks has no expensive habits, and has lived with all the frugality which the positions he has occupied have permitted. While doing so little for himself, Mr. Banks' services to his country have been such | fore are much better remunerated. He will be the local or resident manager of the largest railway property on this continent, representing a capital of more than thirty millions, covering a territory larger than the State of Connecticut, or even than many of the states of the German Confederation, and furnishing daily employment to between three and four thousand men. For the management of such a property no one has too much capacity or character, and the direction of the Illinois Central Railway Company has never exhibited more sagacity and forecast, and they certainly were never in better luck than when they enlisted in their service the proved and distinguished administrative talents of the Governor of Massachusetts. HOLDING UP THE HAND.-The form of administering an oath in the French courts of police involves the holding up the hand,-a custom probably to be traced, together with other forms, to the usages of the old Roman law. The man to be sworn listens to the oath, which an officer of the court recites, and then holding up his right hand exclaims, Je jure !—Notes and Queries. W. C. From Once a Week. You must frequently have watched the It is probable, however, that while you were perfectly familiar with the idea of the atmosphere carrying clouds of dust, on occasions, you never thought of the atmosphere being constantly loaded with dust, which is constantly being deposited, and constantly renewed. This sunbeam has made the fact visible. It has lighted up the tiny cloud of dust, which we see to be restlessly whirling. or linen, or silk; whether a particle of dust is of flint, chalk, or brick; and we do this with the same precision as if we were distinguishing one animal from another, or one substance from another. If the characters are not sufficiently marked to the eye, we call in the aid of chemical tests. Equipped thus with a knowledge of marks by which to distinguish the separate particles, let us place a layer of dust, large enough to cover the surface of a fourpenny piece, under the microscope, and begin the examination. The composition of this dust will always be of two kinds-inorganic and organic, that is to say, mineral particles, and the skeletons of animalcules, or the skeletons and seeds of plants. The mineral particles will of course depend on the nature of the soil, and position of the spot whence the dust was derived. It may be swept in from the gravel walks of a garden, from the highroad, or from the busy street. The grinding of vehicles, the wear of busy feet, the disintegration everywhere going on, keeps up a constant supply of dust. The smoke of a chimney and factory, steamship and railway, blackens the air with coal-dust. If the rocky coast is not a great way off, we shall find abundance of particles of silica, with sharp angles, sometimes transparent, sometimes yellow, and sometimes black. this silica will occasionally be in so fine a powdered condition that the granules will look like very minute eggs--for which indeed many microscopists have mistaken them. In this doubt, we have recourse to chemistry, and its tests assure us that we have silica, not eggs, before us. Besides the silica, we may see chalk in great abundance; and if near a foundry, we shall certainly detect the grains of oxide of iron (rust), and not a little coaldust. And Our houses, our public buildings, and our pavements, are silently being worn away by the wind and weather, and the particles that are thus torn off are carried into the dustclouds of the air, to settle where the wind listeth and the housemaid neglecteth. The very rocks which buttress our island are subSuppose we examine this dust, and see of ject to incessant waste and change. The what it is composed? Restrain your sur- waters wash and scrub them, the air eats into prise the thing is perfectly feasible. The them, the mollusc and the polype rasp away dust was invisible and unsuspected till the their substance; and by this silent, but inevrevealing sunbeam made us aware of its pres-itable destruction, dust is furnished. Curious ence; and now the microscope, which deals it is to trace the history of a single particle. with the invisible, shall reveal its nature. For, in consequence of the united labors of hundreds of patient workers, we can now distinguish with unerring certainty whether a tiny blood-stain is the blood of man, a pig, a bird, a frog, or a fish; whether a single fragment of hair is the hair of a mole or of a mouse, of a rabbit, or of a cat, of a Celt or of a Saxon; whether a minute fibre is of cotton, Ages ago it was rock. The impatient waves From mollusc was dredged and dissected; his shell flung aside, trampled on, powdered, and dispersed by the wind, which has brought this particle under our microscope, serving us for a text on which to preach "sermons in stones." Equally curious is the history of this tiny particle of silk thread. A silkworm feeding tranquilly under the burning sun of India converts some of its digested plant-food into a cocoon of silk, in which it comfortably houses itself for a prolonged siesta. The silk is unwound, is carried to England or France, is there woven into a beautiful fabric, and after passing through many hands, enriching all, it forms part of the dress of some lovely woman, or the neck-tie of some gentlemanly scoundrel. Contact with a rough world, or a stiff shirt-collar, rubs off a minute fibre; the wind carries it away; and, after more wanderings than Ulysses, it comes to the stage of our microscope. Beside it is a cotton-thread, brilliant in color, of which a similar history might be told; and perhaps, also, there will be the hair of a dog, or of a plant; a fibre of wood, or the scale of a human epidermis; the fragment of an insect's claw, or the shell of an animalcule. Very probably we shall find the spore of some plant which only awaits a proper resting-place, with the necessary damp, to develop into a plant. You must not expect to find all these things in one pinch of dust; but you may find them all, if you examine dust from various places. There is one thing which will perhaps be found in every place, and in every pinch of dust, and you will be not a little surprised to learn what that is. It is starch. No object is more familiar to the microscopist than the grain of starch. It is sometimes oval, sometimes spherical, and varies in size. The addition of a little iodine gives it a blue color, which disappears under the influence of light. There seems to be no difference between the starch grains found in the dust of Egytian tombs and Roman temples, and that found in the breakfast-parlor of to-day. They both respond to chemical and physical tests in the same way. But there is one curious fact which has been observed by M. Pouchet of Rouen, namely, that in examining the dust of many centuries he has sometimes found the starch grains of a clear blue color; and he asks whether this may not be due to the action of idoine in the air, traces of which M. Chatin says always exist in the air. The objection to this explanation is, that if iodine is always present in sufficient quantities to color starch, the grains of starch should often be colored, whereas no one but M. Pouchet has observed colored grains, and he but rarely. M. Pouchet tells us that, amazed at the abundance of starch grains which he found in dust, he set about examining the dust of all ages and all kinds of localities the monuments and buildings of great cities, the tombs of Egyptian monarchs, the palaces of the age of Pharaoh; nay, he even examined some dust which had penetrated the skulls of embalmed animals. In all these places starch was found. But a moment's reflection dispels the marvellousness of this fact. Starch must necessarily abound, because the wheat, barley, rice, potatoes, etc., which form every where the staple of man's food, are abundant in starch; the grains are rubbed off, and scattered by the winds in all directions. So widely are these grains distributed that a careful examination of our clothes always detects them. Nay, they are constantly found on our hands, though unsuspected until their presence on the glass slide under the microscope calls attention to them. It is only necessary to take a clean glass slide, and press a moistened finger gently on its surface, to bring several starch grains into view. Nay, this will be the case after repeated washing of the hands; but if you wash your hands in a concentrated solution of potash, no grains will then be found on pressing the moistened finger on the glass. This persistent presence of starch on our hands is not astonishing when we consider the enormous amount of starch which must be rubbed from our food, and our linen, every instant of the day; and when we consider, on the one hand, the specific lightness of these grains, which enables them to be so easily transported by the air, and, on the other hand the powerful resistance they offer to all the ordinary causes of destruction, one may safely affirm that in every town or village a cloud of starch is always in the air. And hereby hangs a tale. Starch is a vegetable substance, and, until a very few years ago, it was believed to have no existence in the animal tissues. But the great pathologist Virchow discovered that in various tissues a substance closely resembling starch was formed, which he considered to be a morbid product. The discovery made a great sensation, and many were the ingenious theories started to account for the fact. At last it came to be maintained that starch was a normal constituent of animal tissues; and there is no doubt that investigators might easily find starch in every bit of tissue they handled, since their fingers, as we have seen, are plentifully covered with grains. If, however, proper precautions be taken not to touch the tissue with the fingers, nor the glass slide on which it is placed, no starch will be found. It is because of the starch-clouds in our atmosphere that grains are found on our persons and on almost every microscopical preparation. But are the starch-clouds all that the sun I've not been dead at all, says Jack Robinson. beam reveals? By no means. Some ani- our Rotifer has fourteen times shaken off the mals will be found there; not always, indeed, cerements of death. Dead. Not he: nor very numerously, but enough to create astonishment. And these animals are not insects disporting themselves, they are either Such are some of the things found in the dead or in a state of suspended animation. dust of a sunbeam, and you will probably A few skeletons of the infusoria, scales of the have been too much astonished at some of the wings of moths and butterflies, and fragments facts to have made the reflection that among of insect-armor, may be reckoned as so much all these objects not a single egg has been dust; but there is also dust that is alive, or named. A few spores of plants are, indeed, capable of living. You want to know what frequently found. Knowing that many plants that dust is? It is always to be found in dry are fertilized by the agency of the wind, one gutters on the housetops, or in dry moss expects to find pollen grains abundant. Ingrowing on an old wall; and Spallanzani, deed, when we consider how rapidly bread, the admirable naturalist to whom we owe so cheese, jam, ink, and the very walls of the much, amazed the world with announcing room, if damp, are covered with mould, which what old Leeuwenhoek had before announced, is a plant; when we consider how impossible namely, that these grains of dust, when mois-it is to keep decaying organic substance free tened, suddenly exhibited themselves as from plants and animalcules, which start into highly-organized little animals the Rotifers existence as by magic, and in millions, we Tardigrades. Water is necessary to their have no difficulty in accepting the hypothesis activity. When the gutter is dried up, they of an universal diffusion of germs-eggs or roll themselves into balls, and patiently await seeds-through the atmosphere. No matter the next shower. If, in this dried condition where you place organic substance in decay, the wind sweeps them away with much other if the air in never so small a quantity can get dust, they are quite contented; let them be at it, mould and animalcules will be produced. blown into a pond, they will suddenly revive Close it in a phial, seal the cork down, take to energetic life; let them be blown into every precaution against admitting more air dusty corners, and they will patiently await than is contained between the cork and the better times. It may happen that the wind surface of the water; and although you may will sweep them into your study, and there have ascertained that no plants or animalthey will settle on the gilt edges of Rollin's cules, no seeds, or eggs, were present when Ancient History, or some other classical you corked the bottle, in the course of a little work which every gentleman's library should while, say three weeks, on opening the bottle be without; and in this position it has a you will find it abundantly peopled. fair chance of remaining undisturbed throughout the long years of your active career. But you die. Your widow has probably but an imperfect provision, and a very imperfect sympathy with Rollin and Co.; your books are sold by auction; the dust is shaken from them, and is blown into the street-from the street into the gutter, or the river, and there the dried Rotifers suddenly revive, to fight, feed, and propagate as of old. It is said that the Rotifer may be dried and revived fifteen times in succession. And if this be so, you may imagine what a history would be that of a single Rotifer under a fortunate juncture of circumstances. It might have seen life in a gutter at Memphis, or a pond at Thebes; been blown as dust to Carthage, and carried From all this you see how naturally the as dust to Rome; from thence to Constantino-idea of universal diffusion of germs has be ple; and, after being shaken from the robe come an accepted fact. If it is a fact, we of Theodora, or the code of Justinian, it must feel not a little astonished at finding the might have accompanied the Crusaders to dust we examine so very abundant in starch, Jerusalem; from which place Mrs. B., after coal, silica, chalk, rust, hair, scales, and even a two months' Eastern scamper, might have live animals, and so strangely deficient in brought it back to London, where a chance this germ-dust! The germs are said to be breeze wafted it into the room which the very everywhere; millions upon millions must be sunbeam I am discoursing about illuminates. diffused through the air; every inch of surface From Memphis to my microscope, what a must be crowded with them. Do we find course! And during this adventurous course them? We find occasional pollen grains and To explain this, and numerous other facts, the hypothesis of an universal diffusion of germs through the air has been adopted; and the known fecundity of plants and animalcules suffices to warrant the belief that millions of millions of germs may be constantly floating through the air. Ehrenberg computes the rate of possible increase of a single infusory, Paramecium, at two hundred and sixtyeight millions a month. And it is calculated that the plant named Bovista giganteum will produce four thousand million of cells in one hour. As the mould plants are single cells, and as they multiply by spontaneous division, the rapidity with which they multiply is incalculable. THE DUST IN A SUNBEAM. 753 not believe in the hypothesis of universal difIt will be seen from these remarks that I do fusion of germs through the air. I believe that almost all the eggs of animalcules are too easily destroyed to resist desiccation; and that in the air they would become dust and cease to be eggs. At any rate we find no trace of eggs in the air. seeds. But we find no animalcule eggs, and when the parent is before us, or when we no animals, except the Rotifers and Tardig- have crushed them out of her body, it will be rades. We find almost every thing but eggs. difficult to suppose that we could not distin"Oh!" you will perhaps remark," that is by guish them among the other objects in a pinch no means surprising; if they are diffused in of dust, when a drop of water has been addsuch enormous quantities through the air, it ed. stands to reason that they must be excessively minute, otherwise they would darken the air; and if they are excessively minute, they escape your detective microscope-that's all." Your remark has great plausibility; indeed, it would have overwhelming force, were there not one fatal objection to the assumption on which it proceeds. If the eggs of animalcules were so excessively minute, as you imagine them to be, there would be no chance of our detecting them. But it happens that the size of the eggs of those animalcules which are known (and of many we are utterly ignorant) is, comparatively speaking, considerable; at any rate, the eggs, both from size and aspect, are perfectly recognizable inside the animalcule; and if we can distinguish these eggs up is a various and varying cloud of inorganic and organic matters-a symbol of the wear The dust which our sunbeam has lighted and tear of life—a token of the incessant silent destruction to which the hardest or the most fragile substances are exposed. The sunbeam has not only lighted up that but many other obscurities, and shown us in what a world of mystery we move. L. FAIRMAIDS AND ALEWIVES.-These singular | to our correspondent's mind ?]—Notes and Queterms are used in the trade for certain kinds of ries. dried fish. Fairmaids are explained by Halliwell as dried pilchards, and the term is probably a corruption of the Spanish fumado, a smoked have prevailed even after the act for its suppresSPIRITING AWAY.-This practice appears to herring. We might thus expect alewives to be a corruption of the corresponding name in Span-lustrate the integrity and good talents of Sir sion was passed. The Beauties of England (Oxon. ish; and the query I would propose is, What is John Holt as Lord Chief Justice of the Court p. 300), quotes an anecdote on the subject, to ilthe real technical signification of the words in of King's Bench, to which he was appointed in question? and what is the Spanish or Portuguese the first year of William III. :— designation of alewives? H. W. [We cannot suggest any Spanish or Portu- by the practice of decoying young persons to the guese equivalent for the term "alewives;" but plantations, who were confined at a house in "There happened in his time a riot occasioned perhaps our correspondent will like to see an Holborn [Query which, and to whom did it beAmerican explanation, as given by J. R. Bart- long? till they could be shipped off. Notice of lett in his valuable and interesting Dictionary of the riot being sent to Whitehall, a party of mil Americanisms. The "alewife," according to this itary were ordered out, but before they marched riter, is "a fish of the herring kind, abounding an officer was sent to the chief justice to desire in the waters of New England" (Alosa vernalis, him to send some of his people with the soldiers. Storer). Mr. Bartlett is disposed to derive "ale- Holt asked the officer what he intended to do wife" from the Indian aloof. says, "appears to be an Indian one. . . "The name," he if the mob refused to disperse? My lord (reformer times the Indians made use of these fish you so? (said Holt;) then observe what I say: to manure their lands. Mr. Winthrop says, if one man is killed I will take care that you In plied he) we have orders to fire on them.' 'Have "Where the ground is bad or worn out, they put and every soldier of your party shall be hanged. two or three of the fishes called aloofes under or Sir, acquaint those who sent you, that no officer adjacent to each corn-hill." Vse of Maiz, Phil. Trans., 1678.) We think the likewise, that the laws of this land are not to be (See a paper on the of mine shall attend soldiers; and let them know Portuguese term applied to a smoked herring executed by the sword. These things belong to would be defumado and the Spanish ahumadeo. the civil power, and you have nothing to do with But perhaps our correspondent has met with them.' So saying he dismissed the officer, profumado in the sense he indicates. Under "Har-ceeded to the spot with his tipstaves, and preengs," in the Index to Buffon, mention is made vailed on the populace to disperse, on a promise of the herring fumela ("le hareng fumela"). that justice should be done, and the abuse remCan fumela be the etymology which has occurred edied."-Notes and Queries. THIRD SERIES. LIVING AGE. 551 S. M. S. |