Some, torn from Canada, have been carried five the detritus which it hurried along with it, rollhundred miles away, as far as Ohio, in the thirty-ing in its waves the immense alluviums which eighth degree of latitude; others, stripped from constitute the soil of grand valleys, and lastly Labrador, have been cast on the southern coast transporting enormous blocks by the aid of iceof the Gulf of St. Lawrence; red sandstone, bergs. The Baltic annually offers a similar plucked from Prince Edward's Island, now lies spectacle, when the ice breaks up in spring; in Nova Scotia. Innumerable fragments, twenty masses of granite embedded in the ice are carried or thirty feet thick, have made shipwreck in by the currents to great distances. Dr. Scoresby, fifty degrees, at an altitude of a hundred yards. during his voyage to Greenland, saw icebergs, a New England can show blocks of considerable hundred feet high, so laden with stones and size that are situated four hundred yards higher rocks, that the ice itself was almost invisible. than the rocks from which they come. In Europe, enormous masses, detached from the mountains of Sweden and Finland, are dispersed in prodigious numbers over Germany, Poland, it? Why did that motion set out from the and Russia. On the south side of Lake Onega blocks are seen which form part of the opposite coast. Erratic boulders are found as far to the south as the forest of Fontainebleau-whence a few have been retransported northwards, by human agency, to decorate the Bois de Boulogne and other Parisian promenades. Immense tracts of transported materials, consisting of sand, gravel, shingle, clay, mud, and all sorts of sweepings off the face of the earth, and incrusted with erratic boulders, cover vast regions to a depth which attains as much as three hundred yards, forming sometimes grand horizontal plains, sometimes lines of hills stretching along from north to south. The steppes of Russia, the sands of Gascony, and the stratum of sand and clay, more than two hundred yards thick, which covers Holland, belong to this deposit. In England we have examples of diluvium on a tolerably extensive scale. A celebrated living professor said, truly, that Norfolk is nothing but a heap of rubbish. Mysterious marks, stripes, furrows, and flutings, sometimes two feet deep, have been scooped out by an irresistible chisel in the granite flanks of mountains that have been ground down, smoothed and polished, by the agency of an anonymous workman. The constant direction of these marks is north and south. The phenomenon is especially remarkable in Finland, in Sweden, in Norway, and the British Islands. Such is the collection of facts which constitute the diluvium. The explanations hitherto given of these facts have only contained a portion of the truth. That they are the effect of Agassiz's grand polar glacier is scarcely admissible; because, although glaciers do slide down valleys in the Alps, this glacier would not have stirred on a vast horizontal plain. What was wanted, was a theory which should explain and account for the whole of the phenomena observed. A step towards it was recently made. In a report by M. Elie de Beaumont on an able Mémoire from M. Durocher, it is proved that the force which produced the diluvium proceeded from the regions in the neighbourhood of the North Pole; that an immense mass of waters, accompanied by ice, and rushing from north to south, inundated the northern countries of the globe, from Greenland to the Ural Mountains, stripping the highlands, polishing and channelling the rocks by means of What is the cause of the extreme cold which once reigned in our hemisphere? What force set in motion the torrents which have ravaged polar regions, proceeding in a southern direction? M. Adhemar replies: During ten thousand five hundred years, the sum of the hours of night in our hemisphere preponderating over the sum of the hours of day, an immense cupola of ice was formed over and around the North Pole. It reached lower than the seventieth degree of latitude. It gave to the arctic rocks their peculiar aspect as we now behold them. The attraction of this grand glacier had drawn to this side of the equator, almost the totality of the seas, whose level stood much higher than it now does. Our continents were for the most part under water, whilst those of the southern hemisphere were high and dry, and perhaps were inhabited by the human race which was destroyed at the last deluge. Seven thousand years before that deluge, the arctic glacier had attained its greatest development. From that date, the sum of night hours in our hemisphere diminishing, and the sum of day hours increasing, our hemisphere became warmer, the extent of the great glacier was gradually decreased, while an opposite effect was taking place at the South Pole. After the lapse of seven thousand years, the continued action of the sun's heat having sufficiently softened the North-Polar ice, the grand break-up occurred; the northern seas and the fragments of the glacier, obeying the sudden displacement of the centre of gravity, rushed in a body towards the south. from his bed, Ocean carried with him his mud, with which he formed the extensive lands of transport which constitute the diluvium. Gigantic streams of water, mingled with earth, sand, and pebbles, formed the alluviums of the great valleys; finally, erratic boulders, sustained by the ice and by the boiling up of the arctic waters to the altitudes which they now occupy, remained shelved on the sides of mountains whose tops they were unable to scale. Thus was produced the last deluge, four thousand two hundred years ago. Torn But this is not all. Suppose a traveller journeying from the North Pole to the South Pole, along any one given meridian. He will tell you that, in proportion as he gets further and further from the pole, his starting-place, erratic boulders become less and less numerous in our hemisphere; that they are already scarce about the thirty-fifth degree of latitude, and that from that point to the equator they are almost completely wanting, and that they are equally absent from the equator up to the thirty-fifth degree of south latitude; but that there they begin to reappear, and that their number goes on increasing in proportion as he draws near to the South Pole. Thus the southern hemisphere, like the northern, has also its diluvium. The diluvium, therefore, is a phenomenon which is common to the earth's two poles. This, which might prove a perplexing circumstance for other geological theories, is a triumph for M. Adhémar's. His theory informs us that ten thousand five hundred years before Noah's deluge, there must have been a previous deluge produced by the disruption of the antarctic glacier. The diluvium of the south, then, is the witness of the last-but-one general cataclysm; it occurred when the mass of the seas (which were then, as now, in the southern hemisphere) and the ruins of the glacier were rapidly borne towards the north; and the erratic blocks (whose train extends from Cape Horn to the forty-first degree, where they were arrested by the mountains of Brazil and Bolivia) date, like the clay of the Pampas, from fourteen thousand seven hundred years ago. From this same cataclysm dates another phenomenon, one of the most remarkable in the history of the world. Every one has heard of the extraordinary object found in the last century on the banks of the Lena. The ice in melting exposed the body of an elephant in such perfect preservation, that dogs ate its flesh. Buffon mentions six elephants preserved in the ice near the Ohio, in America. Sarytschew discovered another on the banks of the Alaseia, a river which empties itself into the Icy Sea. In short, there is scarcely a canton in Siberia which does not contain the bones of elephants; the islands in the Icy Sea furnish enormous quantities. How is the presence of these great pachyderms in such a rigorous latitude to be explained? Cuvier supposes a sudden cooling of the countries which they inhabited; an arbitrary supposition, which throws no light upon the subject. Adhémar's theory shows the elephants fleeing before the last deluge but one, as far as the sixtieth parallel, which then formed the limit of the northern glacier, and there, falling exhausted by hunger, fatigue, and cold, they were soon covered by masses of snow, afterwards transformed to masses of ice, which have preserved them to the present day. Thus, under Adhémar's guidance (to which we yield ourselves, for the understanding of his Journey), we start from a grand law of the system of the world, the precession of the equinoxes, and we arrive at the conclusion that grand deluges are periodical, and alternately occur from south to north and from north to south: and we find, on inspection, that the earth has actually been ravaged by a succession of general cataclysms separated from each other by long intervals of time; and that, of the two last deluges, one, the most ancient, came from the South Pole; and that the other, the most recent, was let loose from the North Pole. Not only has the sea its minor regular oscillations every six hours, alternately flooding and leaving bare, narrow, but far-spreading strips of shore, gradually undermining islands and continents, and producing important changes on the surface of our planet, but the ocean has also its grand secular tides, which have punctually recurred every ten thousand five hundred years, when it is high water over one whole hemisphere and low water throughout another, accompanied by such awful devastation by sea and land, such terrific convulsions in the sky overhead-for the equilibrium of the atmosphere would be displaced at the same time with that of the seas, both would rush wildly in one direction, accelerating each other's velocity and force-that if human eye could witness that dread day, no human tongue could adequately describe it. Adhémar's deluge will happen-if it happen at all-six thousand three hundred years hence. It will be produced by the breaking up of the antarctic glacier coinciding with the increase of the arctic glacier. The waters will rush down upon our hemisphere, which will be submerged, whilst in the other hemisphere unknown continents will appear. Vegetable and animal life will in great measure be destroyed; and the same must happen to the human race, unless- A few tribes, families, or individuals, escaping to the highest table-lands and mountain ranges, should survive-to fall back almost immediately into a state of barbarism. This is what must happen, unless some force be interposed to counteract the effects of the precession of the equinoxes, supposing it proved that one of those effects is to disturb the centre of gravity of the world by causing an overgrowth of the glacier at one pole, while the glacier at the other pole is melted down to fragility and dissolution. If such be not the case, Adhémar's deluge is a chimera. M. Victor Meunier (who has been mainly instrumental in bringing this bold theory before the general public, and to whom the present paper is indebted for its simplification of the author's calculations) appears to be sincerely persuaded that the predicted catastrophe will really come, unless- The warning which Noah received through supernatural means, is now given by science to the whole human race. But, all our science is of yesterday. Our industry, which derives all its grandeur from it, is still nothing but an industry of pigmies. We do not know, and consequently we do not employ, more than an imperceptible fraction of the forces which nature will yield to us as soon as we are able to clutch them. We are slaves to the majority of meteoric influences; the central fire is, for us, what flashes of atmospherical electricity are for savages, a source of disasters and a subject of terror. Our deepest mines do not penetrate the epidermis of the globe. We are profoundly ignorant respecting terrestrial magnetism, aurora boreales, and telluric electricity. What strength would be acquired by hands which could wield such powerful levers as those! And, without going so far as that, what might not be the influence on climate, of general and integral cultivation throughout the world? A volcano keeps open a never-frozen gulf in the midst of the antarctic ice; multiply, in thought, these outlets of fire at either pole, and the development of either glacier would cease. WHICH IS THE PLAGUE? DID it ever occur to a child's mind that grown people are plagues? Probably. Plagued with children, indeed! Look at any poor little Dulcissimus, and see how he is plagued with adults. Heavy fathers, light mothers, blundering teachers, patronising ignorance in attendant servants, contemptuous patronage of all the big Dulcissimuses between eighteen and twenty-two, lie in a lump over the child world. A little schoolboy on the public road, sucking the nectaries of the white nettle blossoms, is a fair type of the child: a brisk little being, that knows how to get the sugar out of nettles. If children had but a tenth part of our own skill in finding fault, they might get up a great many judicious talks among themselves about us all. But they accept us for their guides. The brutal drunken mother who will beat her starved child with a poker, is looked up to by her victim with a shrinking love. The thoughtless woman who sends out into the frost, poor little Dulcissimus, half-clad in costly raiment that the world may see his legs, is never asked by him for skirt or stocking. At school, master and ushers are acknowledged plagues, and many flowers of satiric fancy bud about the rod. There is little malice in the mockery, and such as it is in childhood, it afterwards remains. Tusser wrote, as a man, just as he might have written as a boy, about the floggings he got from that great flogger of boys, Nicholas Udall, who produced the first of our English comedies, but was not appreciated as a popular comedian among his boys. From Paul's I went, to Eton sent, To learn straightways the Latin phrase, For faults but small, or not at all, Coleridge, who had many a thrashing-and, as he thought, only one that was just-from the belaborous Doctor Asterisks at the Bluecoat School, always talked pleasantly about that scholar's unsparing use of the rod. "I'll flog you," became so habitual an exclamation with him, that one day, when a lady committed the high misdemeanour of looking in at his classroom door, to ask a holiday for her Master Dulcissimus, whose cousin had come to town, and when, failing of her errand, she lingered in the doorway, the doctor shouted, "Bring that woman to me! I'll flog her!" Boys laugh at all this, and, by tumbling about among each other get, early in life, at a rough critical sense of the absurdities of adults. They acquire a keen Let us endeavour to look at the two sides of a To be sure it is a worry to hear children cry; but their crying is generally a sign of their being afflicted by the plague of adults. They may well cry. The child wishes to decorate with sport every labour of its life. Ignorant adult servants, stimulating the quick fancy with tales of superstitious terror, are as fanciful as the child may desire, but hardly joyous. Think of their stupid adult tempers, giving tongue to the popular cry about the fretfulness of children. No child is fretful except when it is sickly or ill managed. Bottle and spoon are the first plagues that the child suffers, from adult stupidity or selfishness. Nursing mothers commonly yield their places, once a day, to spoon and bottle, because society says, to them, every evening, Won't you come out to-night? and because they have not courage to answer always, No. Society can do without them very well, but they are not aware of that. Society, in as far as it means friends, can find them out in their own homes; why should they become plagues to their children, for society, in as far as it means fashion? And then bottle and spoon are made into double plagues by the ignorance of nurses who, looking upon milk as a thin fluid, although even cow's milk is really so heavy as to need dilution, do terrific things with gruel. The plague of an adult nurse will even pour into the mouth of a week-old infant, gruel, which is to the child's stomach what gravel might be to her own. Then rhubarb follows to correct the gruel, as one might correct a meal of gravel with a dose of pepper; and the dill-water stands upon the " shelf, and the grey powder - always in half mourning for the little ones it has killed. is on this period of young life also. Again and But when the children first begin to think and talk, how the adults plague them! Judgment and experience have yet to come. That they may come the faster in the first years, there is given to the young child by Nature a vivid sense of all present impressions, a strong curiosity to roam from one inquiry to another, and an impartial readiness to pass from impression to impression, fastening with a like eagerness on each. In our profound wisdom, as adults, when we see This is the time, also, when the schoolmaster that an impression has struck painfully upon a and tutor rule. The wise schoolmaster-and he child, we beat incessantly upon the hurt. The is not now so rare a being, as he was, a quarter child shrinks, cries; it is temper, it is nonsense; of a century ago-knows very well that sound we must conquer this. We must not let a baby teaching depends on a right method of turning get the better of us. The vivid thought, already to account this argumentative period in the more painful than our duller sensibilities can un-mind's growth, which includes the years between derstand, would be dropped in a minute or two fourteen and twenty-one. He accompanies and if we presented to the grasp of the busy and encourages the reasoner, selects carefully the tender little mind, another and more pleasant fresh material for thought, and lays worthily subject of attention; but no, that won't do before the busy mind, fruits of the wide experifor us. The thorn has thrust only a tiny point ence of others. He does not discountenance into the sensitive little creature, and it should with a rude dogmatism the exercises by which not cry for anything so small: therefore we will intellect is to attain healthy and vigorous manot pick it out at once but hammer it in to the turity. He acquires from his pupils a trust head, by reasoning, and scolding, and long more implicit than man ever yet has beaten into dwelling on the topic of which a mere touch youth; and the appreciable service he thus was painful. There is hardly anything upon renders is remembered gratefully till death. But earth, so wretchedly common as this kind there are still teachers alive, who plague the of dealing with the quick imaginations of young with dogmatism, who protect their own the young. A minute's cry is tortured into ignorance as teachers by discouragement of queshalf a day's affliction by defiance-often enough tions, who reason little for themselves, and who, through the "naughty temper" of adults-of the while they expect boys or girls to learn by rote, simple rule that when a little child is hurt by reckon as insubordination every outbreak of questhe two intense dwelling of its imagination upon tion or argument. Young people who are denied some distressing thought, especially if it be one outward expression of this active force within that ought not to distress it, we must not allow them, reason on, nevertheless. Denied fair opporsuch an impression to be deepened. tunity of bringing their conclusions to the open test of comparison with thoughts and experiences wider than their own, it is hard for them to contrive that they shall be reasonably sound. They weave error on error into their long chain of secret thought, because they are not allowed to produce their work as it is done, and get all people who will, to pull at one end of it while they pull at the other, and so test its strength. All those interminable boys' arguments over the family breakfast, or the family dinner, or the nursery tea-table, are they a source of plague ? If so, it is of the plague of dulness in adults, who do not see what is a-building; who do not understand the wisdom of young builders, whom a sacred instinct has impelled to try freely and vigorously every brick they are setting in a structure mightier than any temple on earth. We can plague a young child, only through its fancy, its affections, and its passions: which are all the material its mind has to begin with. Reasoning powers do not act upon experience until it is abundant enough to have yielded general truths out of the incidents of life. But when reasoning begins to come into the young mind, what heavy plagues we are! Thousands and thousands of times when we ought to guide and support, we enter into conflict with the little thinker, and run full tilt at him with our great mental carcases. A delightful period of childhood, in which fancy and reasoning hold equal sway, is followed in most children, by a period in which the early uses of the fancy have been served, and, a dozen or more years of experience having been gained, the exercise of reason becomes vigorous. The stores of memory then begin to be eagerly grouped and fashioned into argument, and, as the growing muscles impel boys and girls to leap, run, tumble, spin, and skip, the growth of reasoning power impels to a keen relish of all manner of argument. But the plague of adults Now ready, price 5s. 6d., bound in cloth, THE SECOND VOLUME, Including Nos. 27 to 50, and the Christmas Double Number, of ALL THE YEAR ROUND. The right of Translating Articles from ALL THE YEAR ROUND is reserved by the Authors. Published at the Office, No. 26, Wellington Street, Strand. Printed by C. WHITING, Beaufort House, Strand. ALL THE YEAR ROUND. No. 53.] A WEEKLY JOURNAL. CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS. WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED HOUSEHOLD WORDS. SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 1860. THE WOMAN IN WHITE. MR. FAIRLIE'S NARRATIVE CONCLUDED. Is it necessary to say what my first impression was, when I looked at my visitor's card? Surely not? My sister having married a foreigner, there was but one impression that any man in his senses could possibly feel. Of course the Count had come to borrow money of me. 66 Louis," I said, "do you think he would go away, if you gave him five shillings ?" Louis looked quite shocked. He surprised me inexpressibly, by declaring that my sister's foreign husband was dressed superbly, and looked the picture of prosperity. Under these circumstances, my first impression altered to a certain extent. now took it for granted, that the Count had matrimonial difficulties of his own to contend with, and that he had come, like the rest of the family, to cast them all on my shoulders. "Did he mention his business ?" I asked. "Count Fosco said he had come here, sir, because Miss Halcombe was unable to leave Blackwater Park." Fresh troubles, apparently. Not exactly his own, as I had supposed, but dear Marian's. It made very little difference. Troubles, any way. Oh dear! 66 Show him in," I said, resignedly. The Count's first appearance really startled me. He was such an alarmingly large person, that I quite trembled. I felt certain that he would shake the floor, and knock down my arttreasures. He did neither the one nor the other. He was refreshingly dressed in summer costume; his manner was delightfully self-possessed and quiet-he had a charming smile. My first impression of him was highly favourable. It is not creditable to my penetration-as the sequel will show-to acknowledge this; but I am a naturally candid man, and I do acknowledge it, notwithstanding. "Allow me to present myself, Mr. Fairlie," he said. "I come from Blackwater Park, and I have the honour and the happiness of being Madame Fosco's husband. Let me take my first, and last, advantage of that circumstance, by entreating you not to make a stranger of me. I beg you will not disturb yourself—Ï beg you will not move.” "You are very good," I replied. "I wish I [PRICE 2d. "As usual," I said. "I am nothing but a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man.' "I have studied many subjects in my time," remarked this sympathetic person. Among others, the inexhaustible subject of nerves. May I make a suggestion, at once the simplest and the most profound? Will you let me alter the light in your room ?" Certainly-if you will be so very kind as not to let any of it in on me." He walked to the window. Such a contrast to dear Marian! so extremely considerate in all his movements! "Light," he said, in that delightfully confidential tone which is so soothing to an invalid, "is the first essential. Light stimulates, nourishes, preserves. You can no more do without it, Mr. Fairlie, than if you were a flower. Observe. Here, where you sit, I close the shutters, to compose you. There, where you do not sit, I draw up the blind and let in the invigorating sun. Admit the light into your room, if you cannot bear it on yourself. Light, sir, is the grand decree of Providence. You accept Providence with your own restrictions. Accept Light-on the same terms." I thought this very convincing and attentive. He had taken me in-up to that point about the light, he had certainly taken me in. You see me confused," he said, returning to his place-" on my word of honour, Mr. Fairlie, you see me confused in your presence." "Shocked to hear it, I am sure. May I inquire why ?" Sir, can I enter this room (where you sit a sufferer), and see you surrounded by these admirable objects of Art, without discovering that you are a man whose feelings are acutely impressionable, whose sympathies are perpetually alive? Tell me, can I do this ?" If I had been strong enough to sit up in my chair, I should of course have bowed. Not being strong enough, I smiled my acknowledgments instead. It did just as well; we both understood one another. "Pray follow my train of thought," continued the Count. "I sit here, a man of refined sympathies myself, in the presence of refined sympathies also. I am conscious of a of another man VOL. III. 53 |