lam! On, true believers! He who first effects an entrance shall henceforth be the brother of Akbar." All night the Mahomedans were prodigal of life, energy, and stratagem, in their attempts to reduce the fortress. All night Akbar superintended the siege, with untiring vigilance, and excessive anxiety. Through the intervals of the clamors of war, he thought he heard, at times, on the mountain breeze, female voices, cries of lamentation. He thought he saw, at times, through the blaze of the musketry and artillery, a red, lurid light, like the flames of a suttee. voted themselves rather than fall alive into the hands of the victors. "Padmani! Padmani!" cried Akbar, in a mixture of grief and horror. "Seek her! oh! seek her among these corpses. Let me see her but once more, even though in death." They raised the bodies, brought them forth, and scanned their blackened features. There were all the women of the fortress, from the Majee to the humblest servant. There lay the old and the young, the noblest and the meanest.* The last corpse was removed; but where was Padmani? She was not found among Soon after sunrise, a loud, exulting her kindred and her subjects. Hope sprang shout, "Allah Hu!" rose among the be- up in Akbar's bosom. He mounted, and siegers. Part of the wall that was under- swam his horse back again across the lake. mined had fallen. The last sad relics of He hastened towards the Ranah's palace. the Indian garrison left after the murder- Beside the way, leaning against a fallen ous cannonade of the Moslems, stood in pillar, sat the ancient Brahmin, Madeo, his the breach. There they fought with un-head drooping to his knees. flinching resolution, sternly refusing quarter, and dropping where they stood, till all had perished, till the last man was cut down. Akbar, in a tremor of eagerness and apprehension, spurred his horse through the breach, and gallopped into the fortress, heedless of every thing but his desire to find Padmani alive. His guards dashed after him in full career. On they rushed through the depopulated streets, through a fearful scene of desolation and carnage. Yet Akbar scarcely glanced at the smoking ruins and the ghastly corpses all along his way. He reached the lake. The Island Palace was enveloped in smoke; yet it was not, apparently, on fire. With a choking sensation he plunged on horseback into the lake. His guards followed; their horses brought them safely across. At the landing-place they dismounted, gained the palace, and forced open the door. There was a dense and oppressive smoke rising from the lower apartments, which were evidently filled with some smouldering fuel. "Where is Padmani ?" cried Akbar, impatiently. The old man looked up; death was in his face, and delirium in his eye. He began to repeat incoherently verses from the sacred books of his religion. "There is no other way for a virtuous woman (he recited) but ascending the pile of her husband. There is no other duty whatever after the death of her husband. The woman who follows her husband expiates the sins of three races. A pigeon devoted to her husband, after his death, entered the flames, and ascending to heaven, she there found her husband."+ "the "He raves," said the Sultan ; hand of death is upon him." Akbar spurred on to the palace of the deceased Ranah. In front of the building he saw the charred fragments of a funeral pile, and perceived the fetid smell of burned flesh. Amid the embers was a shapeless mass; on the ground were the relics of some royal insignia, and a wreath of scorched mougrees. Beside the extinguished pile lay Lall Singh, the brother of Padmani, his life-blood welling from a mor "Burst open those windows! Fling water here! Force the door of that cham-tal wound. ber!" There was a hideous sight within: a multitude of female corpses lay stretched upon the floor in heaps, suffocated by the rising smoke, purposely admitted from below through perforations. This voluntary death was the self-sacrifice called 66 the Joar; to this all the rajpoot women had de *Historical. From this fatal Joar only two females escaped, young girls, who, when found by the conquerors, showed some signs of life, and were recov ered. They were humanely treated by Akbar, and subsequently given by him in marriage to two of his principal officers. From the translation of the Hindoo Vedas, by the Rajah Rammohun Roy. "Oh! what is this ?" groaned Akbar, | tells the tale of Sultan Akbar's baneful clasping his hands in an agony of appre- love." hension. "Oh! what is this ?" "The funeral pile of the Ranah of Mewar, and his devoted Rannee," replied Lall Singh, rallying his last energies. "Look, tyrant, at yon black mass! That is all that remains of Padmani-the beautiful, the faithful, the beloved. That is the prize of thy conquest. Was it well to sacrifice thousands of brave men merely to blight the innocent happiness of one loving and constant woman? Go, baffled conqueror! thy victim will not be unavenged. The flames of that fatal pile will be often re-kindled in thy own bosom by the hand of remorse, to sear all thy future pleasures; thy sons will descend to the grave before thee; thou wilt die blighted by useless sorrow; and the history of thy many glories will be marred by the black page that NOTE. The story of Padmani is related, with some little difference, by various his torians, who all, however, agree as to the tragical catastrophe. Todd's "Annals of Rajasthan" fix the date at A.D. 1290, and make Alla-o-din, the Patan Emperor, the suitor of the Rannee and the conqueror of Chittore. But that character is more commonly ascribed to the Great Mogul, Akbar, who lived three centuries after Allao-din. Akbar's closing years (after all his splendor and glories) were embittered by many sorrows, aggravated by the loss of his sons. The authority we have followed in the foregoing tale is the French author of "The History of the Mogul Emperors," Father Catrou. M. E. M. A REGULATION, which dates from 1666, imposed upon the Perpetual Secretaries of the French Institute the obligation to pay a tribute to the members who died. The Biographical notices of M. Arago chiefly consist of the essays which he addressed to the Academy of Sciences in his official capacity. The new title accords better with the contents of these volumes than the primitive appellation-Eloges-which usage has sanctioned; for they are not declamatory panegyrics, but sketches of the lives, characters, and works of the philosophers they celebrate. Fontenelle, who was the first upon whom the duty devolved, set the good example, Condorcet followed it; and though it did not require the authority of these great names to show that facts, whether personal or scientific, had a higher interest than fulsome verbiage, yet the skill with which they executed their task gave a reputation to the éloges of the French Academy which has stimulated succeeding secretaries to aspire to the excellence of the original masters. Such addresses nevertheless are in their very nature laudatory. When the grave has recently closed over a colleague, when his family has supplied the materials for his life, when his bosom friends are among the auditors, when the express intention of the performance is to do him honor, the portrait may be a likeness, but it must inevitably be a flattering one. Voltaire paid Condorcet the compliment of saying, that he wrote of his brother philosophers like a king writing the history of his subjects. He was a monarch, however, who assumed the lan guage of the courtier. M. Arago sometimes excuses himself for hinting a fault by the remark that he is composing a biography and not a panegyric. The apology, considering the slight occasions upon which he offers it, is itself a proof how small a latitude of censure was allowed. This amiable tenderness for the reputation of deceased academicians is excused by the circumstances. It is merely necessary that we should be on or guard against it. But M. Arago had partialities which had not the same justification. It is not to be supposed that he could do otherwise than feel the vast importance of mathematics as the handmaid, and, in many respects, the mistress of science. Yet as his own inclination was for practical philosophy, as all his discoveries were in this department, and as, though a good, he was not a great geometrician, his tendency was to undervalue mathematical studies. In spite of his eulogies on the Laplaces and Poissons, this can not escape the notice of any one who reads his works in their integrity. His bias shows itself plainly enough in his estimate of Newton; and here we come in contact with another of the propensities which disturbed his judgment. He was intensely national, eager to claim for his country, upon the most insignificant grounds, the credit of discoveries which did not belong to it; and if from time to time he did justice to individual foreigners, it never prevented his detracting from the merits of more, or even when he could venture upon it, his denying them altogether. To such an extent did he carry his patriotic mania- for patriotic he doubtless believed it to be-that he maintained that Lagrange was exclusively a Frenchman, because he had a mixture of French blood in his veins-Lagrange that was born in Italy, and his father and mother before him; who was entirely educated there, and had never set foot in France, except once as a visitor, until he was fifty years of age. M. Arago's treatment of Franklin in the éloge of Volta is a characteristic specimen of the kind of reasoning by which he endeavored to lower the fame of strangers and usurp it for his countrymen. The study of the phenomena of electricity in the 18th century led early to the conjecture that it was identical with lightning. Mr. Grey had expressed this opinion in 1735, and the Abbé Nollet with more precision in 1748. Franklin a year later showed the particulars in which the agencies agreed in far greater detail and with more philosophic exactness than any of his predecessors. Both, he remarked, gave light; both were conducted by metals; both were attended by noise; both were destructive of life. In the midst of these similarities he fixed his attention upon a single property of electricity which had never been shown to belong to lightning, and which would serve as an experimentum crucis to test the truth of the theory. When a pointed piece of metal was brought into the neighborhood of a body charged with electricity, the electric fluid was attracted to the point, giving out light in its passage. If, then, he could present such a point to a thunder-cloud, and the result ensued, it would for ever set the question at rest. He proposed that upon the top of a high tower a sentry-box should be placed, from which should rise an iron rod twenty or thirty feet long. This would attract the electricity from the cloud, and if the bottom of the rod was fastened in a non-conducting substance, which should prevent the fluid from getting away, the fire which the iron drew from the heavens might in turn be drawn from the iron by holding a piece of wire close to it. As no building existed at Philadelphia which was, in his opinion, sufficiently lofty for the purpose, he published the suggestion before he had tested it. His writings on the subject attracted considerable attention in France, and M. Dalibard resolved to try the experiment. He erected a rod of iron forty feet long upon some high ground at Marlay. Having occasion to leave home, he instructed an old dragoon in the course to be pursued if a thunder-clap occurred. It came on the 10th of May, 1752, and the soldier presenting the wire to the rod drew spark after spark. He sent in haste for the parish priest to witness the phenomenon; the priest, for fear of arriving too late, ran with all his might; the people beholding him rushing along at the top of his speed, imagined that the dragoon had been killed by the lightning, and followed close upon the heels of their pastor that they might gaze upon the tragedy. emotion excited among the ignorant villagers was not greater than that which was felt in the educated world when the intelligence was received. The Franklin, ignorant of what was passing in France, had a month later succeeded in obtaining the same results by a different method. To supply the want of an eminence, he with singular ingenuity made use of a kite with a sharp wire projecting from its upper end to attract the electricity, the string being the conductor to convey it downwards. As silk ribbon is a non-conductor, he had a short length of it next his hand to prevent the fluid from passing into his body, and at the point where the ribbon was joined to the string he fastened a key. Accompanied by his son, whom alone he had admitted into the secret, knowing that failure would expose him to ridicule, he went upon a common during a thunder-storm and flew his electrical kite. If there had chanced to have been spectators of the scene, they would have supposed that the man had gone out to amuse his boy, and would have wondered that he had chosen such weather for the sport. They would never have suspected that in the hands of Franklin the toy of the child was a grand instrument of philosophical experiment, and that he was about to draw down with it lightning from the clouds-so sublime are the purposes to which genius can turn the most insignificant objects! No result ensued at first, and he was beginning to despair, when he saw the loose fibres of the string moving towards an erect position. At this familiar sign that electricity was present, he put his knuckle towards the key and drew a spark. Collecting from his apparatus a quantity of the fluid, he tried with it all the usual electrical experiments. His case was complete, and in the ecstacy of his delight he must have felt, as he walked home with his kite, much as if he himself had taken its place in the heavens. The fame which his discovery obtained for him throughout the whole of Europe was exceedingly great. The applause which attends the first announcement is, in a case like this, the justest measure of the magnitude of the feat, for it is before men have grown familiarized with an idea that they are most sensible of the acuteness of the conception, which when the novelty has worn off appears an obvious deduction. The simplicity of the truth is no indication that it was easy to grasp. "Whenever," said Chladni, "you attempt to raise the least corner of the veil in which Nature envelopes herself, she invariably answers No! No! No!" Let us now see the color which M. Arago has given to the discovery. "The first views of Franklin on the analogy of electricity and lightning were, like the previous ideas of Nollet, only simple conjectures. The sole difference between the two philosophers was therefore reduced to a project of experiment, of which Nollet had not spoken, and which appeared to promise conclusive arguments for or against the hypothesis." This "sole difference," of which M. Arago makes so little account, was the grand difficulty to be overcome. The resemblances between lightning and electricity were too obvious to escape attention, and the idea had in fact occurred independently to three or four persons. "If any one," said Nollet, "would undertake to demonstrate the notion, it would, well supported, please me much." It was just here that he broke down. He could neither see what was the single link wanting to complete the chain, nor how to supply it.* Electricity was the rage of the day, and not one of its numerous students could hit upon the method any more than himself. The sole difference between Franklin and the rest resolved itself therefore into this-that he did that which nobody else could do. The famous experiment of Pascal was a kindred case. When the air was drawn by the piston from the pipe of a pump, and the water from the well rose up to take the place of the atmosphere, the cause assigned was, that nature abhorred a vacuum. As, however, the water would not rise above 34 feet, it was necessary to assume that the abhorrence of a vacuum only extended to that height. The question was in this state when Toricelli showed that the effect had nothing to do with height, and was solely regulated by the weight of the liquid. Thus mercury being 13 times heavier than water, its rise in a tube was less in the same proportion, or about 30 inches instead of 34 feet. Thence he inferred that it was the pressure of the atmosphere upon the fluid which forced it into the vacuum, and that the amount of this pressure was to be measured by the weight it supported. His conclusion was vehemently contested when Pascal devised his experi mentum crucis, and compelled conviction. Since the higher we ascend in the atmo *The Abbé Nollet was not even positive in the truth of his conjecture. With just philosophic caution he said, that the many points of analogy made him begin to believe in the identity of the agencies. sphere the less air we have above us, its pressure must diminish as we go upwards, and, if the explanation of Toricelli was true, would not support the same amount of water or mercury as at a lower level. At the request of Pascal, his brother-in-law M. Périer carried the instrument contrived by Toricelli, and which was a rude form of the present barometer, up the Puy-deDôme, à mountain in Auvergne, and the mercury, in exact accordance with the theory, continued to fall with the upward progress of the experimentalist. The thought was less recondite than the grand conception of Franklin, but experience has shown that these crowning ideas, which are the touchstone of great scientific truths and remove them from the region of plausible conjecture into that of indisputable fact, can only be reached by very superior minds, and no one has attempted to deprive Pascal of the credit which he gained by his discovery. That he was a Frenchman shields him from the disparaging comments of M. Arago, who has not found it requisite to remark that the "sole difference between him and Toricelli was reduced to a project of experiment." demonstration was not less necessary at the time, because anterior and overlooked facts have since been brought to light, which, if their significance had been understood, would have led to a similar conclusion. They take as little from the splendor as from the utility of Franklin's discovery. Infinite must be the familiar phenomena which, had we the cunning to apply them, would establish some mighty law of nature, and which require no more skill to observe than it required in the Roman soldiers of Africa or the sentinels of Frioul to see the sparks on their spears. Not the less, we may safely assert, will be the credit of the philosopher who shall demonstrate through their aid some lofty principle of science which has baffled every one besides himself to confirm. It is a curious circumstance that the entire system of lightning-conductors had been unconsciously applied to the Temple of Jerusalem. A line of sharp spikes ran the whole length of the gilded roof, which again communicated with the metal pipes that conveyed the rain-water into the cisterns in the court. Nothing could be better contrived for the protection of the building, which thus escaped being struck during a thousand years, in spite of its exposed situation, and the magnitude and frequency of the storms of Palestine. "Whether it was," M. Arago continues, after his mention of Castor and Pollux and the fire on the spears, "that several of these circumstances were unknown, or that they were not thought demonstrative, some direct trials appeared necessary, and it is to our countryman Dalibard that science is indebted for them. Franklin did not realize the same experiment by means of a kite till a month later. Lightning conductors were the immediate consequence. The illustrious American phi But M. Arago does not only speak slightingly of Franklin's device; he adds, that it was almost useless, because it had already been tried when, as Cæsar relates, the spears of the Roman soldiers in Africa appeared on fire after a storm; had been tried on numerous occasions when Castor and Pollux were seen by the sailors on the metallic points of the masts; had been tried, again, in certain countries, such as Frioul, where the sentinels, to determine when it was needful to ring the bells to advertise the people that a storm was approaching, held a halberd upright on the ramparts and observed if any sparks were produced. M. Arago introduces his comments with the phrase, "Sans porter at-losopher hastened to proclaim it." From teinte à la glorie de Franklin," but the spirit of his remarks belies the qualification, nor is it easy to understand how the most notable contribution which the celebrated American made to science can be proved to be almost useless without detracting from his fame. His French critic does not attempt to show that the circumstances he adduces were known to philosophers, or that the true interpretation had ever been put upon them. Had it been so, indeed, the experiment of Franklin would not have created a sensation throughout Europe and covered him with glory. The the statement of M. Arago that several of the circumstances were unknown, it might be inferred that all were not, and his narrative implies that the direct experiments were suggested by these preceding occurrences. Nothing of the kind was the case. The only hint received by Franklin was that which his own sagacity supplied. The next observation of M. Arago surpasses in disingenuousness all the rest. Who, on reading that science was indebted for the experiments to M. Dalibard, and that he outstripped Franklin by a month, would divine that the former merely followed |