ditions involve peril, privation, and arduous toil. The outfit is provided by traders of a higher rank in civilisation. In the readiness to outreach one another there seems to be but little difference between the races. The method of obtaining the precious sap is by cutting a series of V-shaped notches up the stem of the tree. The tree is lofty, but it is hung with long pendent lianas out of which ladders are made for climbing it. The trees that have been tapped nearly always die, as an indirect if not a direct result of the tapping. Yet, as both Mr. Belt and Dr. Bovallius declare, the governments concerned pay not the slightest attention to the regulation of the forests, but allow young and old trees to be destroyed, and take no trouble to have new ones planted. The woodman who is reported to have sawn off the branch on which he was himself seated does not appear to have been by any means an exceptional fool. 6 From Mr. Millican's book we perceive that objects of luxurious taste are treated in the same way as those which have the more modest merit of simple utility. The popular orchid Odontoglossum crispum is found over a wide range of country, but a little town or village called Pacho, in Colombia, has always been the rendezvous for collectors of it. The 'plant collector who arrives here very naturally thinks he will find the coveted Odontoglossum in the streets of the town; but, as a rule, the ardour of most of them is somewhat damped when they learn that a journey of three days must be made to the mountains before they can find a plant if they 'would see it in its natural state.' It took Mr. Millican very much longer. When at length he had reached a place called El Ortiz, where, in a humid region between 7,000 and 8,000 feet above the level of the sea, he hoped to find his desired plant, he was informed by the natives that the Odontoglossum crispum had all been taken away, leaving only the Odontoglossum odoratum. He had, therefore, to prolong his journey for another three days. Part of his course, he says, was along a track which is too bad to describe.' However, at last he came to a forest rich in the orchids of his wishes, showing their magnificent spikes of flowers, some high up out of the reach of the native climbers, ' and others so low as to be easily pulled off by hand.' He engaged about thirty Indians and took provisions for a week to start the campaign. It extended in the end to about two months. During this time he secured some ten thousand plants, cutting down to obtain them some four thousand trees. He explains that in those immense forests a clearing of a few acres is considered a great benefit, and that cutting down a few thousand trees is no serious and no permanent injury. But from his own disappointment at El Ortiz it is quite obvious that the wholesale attack upon a particular plant, such as he describes himself to have executed, is likely to result in its extirpation. At Bucaramunga he was delighted to learn that the early botanists had found the gorgeous Cattleya Mendelii growing around the place in profusion. Where the occasion for delight came is not very easy to comprehend, since he is forced to add that now, through the immense exportation of these plants, not a single one is to be found within many days' journey from the place on mules. Elsewhere he says of another beautiful orchid, Cattleya Warscewiczii: Unhappily the magnificent varieties of Warscewiczii have been cleared away from the 'neighbourhood long ago, and now, as in other parts, the ' orchid collector must take a journey of at least two days in the heart of the forest to get his plants, or send some one ' and wait three weeks in idleness and suspense in a mono'tonous village.' Considering his own exploits, and the expression of delight before noticed, it is singular that Mr. Millican should speak of this condition of affairs as unhappy. It is no mishap or accident, but the plainest effect of the most evident cause. If those for whom the glorious flowers are obtained value them, not for their beauty or remarkable structure, but only or chiefly because they are rare and costly and out of the reach of ordinary purses, to them almost anything short of the complete extinction of these living jewels will be a gain. Devastation makes them more rare, worth more money, more to be envied by the gaping crowd. The real unhappiness is that things of beauty nearer home, well fitted to be the common delight, additions to the joy of life for people in general, are treated in the same ruthless manner. To illustrate the wise government of good King Alfred, and the peace and truth that prevailed in this realm a thousand years ago, a pleasant story is told that the king, by way of bravado, hung up golden bracelets near the highways and no man dared to touch them. In the present enlightened age it would be interesting to learn in what accessible nook or cranny of England an unguarded root of maidenhair fern would be allowed to flourish unmolested. The collecting of antiquities stands on a different footing from that of plants and animals. Antiquarian remains do not propagate their kind except by the undesirable method of giving rise to spurious imitations. By numerous accidents the strictly limited number of the genuine remains is being continually diminished. They are the pieces in a perpetual war game. Religion has played a great part both in the attack and the defence. It has ever been a delightful exercise of piety to demolish the temples and images of false gods and the symbols of any belief that the iconoclast does not believe in. The weaker side take refuge in concealment, and it is supposed that at the present day the Indians sometimes bury the statues of gods which they no longer worship, but have not altogether ceased to reverence. The lovers of art and science now and then promote the destruction which they are striving to prevent, as happened to Mr. Whymper when one of his sumpter mules fell down a precipice, and he found that the family soup tureens, the double and treble 'pots, and other relics of a past civilisation, bounding down 'the declivity, had been smashed into thousands of frag6 ments.' Dr. Bovallius was more fortunate, and he justifies his transfer of archaic memorials from Nicaragua to Sweden on the ground that in their original home they were becoming ever less and less decipherable through the ravages of time and human hands. Of the larger monumental statues which he could not attempt to carry away he has published figures and descriptions, not only in his Swedish book of travels, but on a more elaborate scale in a separate work written in the English language. From the travels one passage especially deserves to be quoted for the benefit of those who may not be able to read it in the original. After discussing the merits of the Panama and Nicaraguan canals and the probable effect that their completion will have upon the neighbouring country, with good wishes to both the undertakings but a strong preference for the second over the first, he says: The traveller who does not, under the influence of the white man's prejudices against the redskins of America, judge the Central American Indians merely after a cursory acquaintance from the deck of a comfortable steamer or the windows of a railway carriage, but lives with them in their narrow huts, shares their simple food, and accompanies them in their canoes and the overgrown paths of the forest, will, as I do, readily acknowledge that there are few of the noblest instincts which one is accustomed to commend in a people that are not represented among them. Hospitable, highminded, unselfish and intelligent, they only need rousing to a consciousness that they are free, independent men, who have at their disposal a noble fatherland to defend and to improve. Nothing in my opinion is likely sooner to call forth such an awakening than the opening up of their land to European and American civilisation by means of an interoceanic waterway.' The future of the human race in these glorious regions belongs to the domain of prophecy, which we shall leave to keener eyes and bolder pens than we ourselves pretend to possess. Upon this subject the experts are not entirely at one. Mr. Belt considers that the whip which kept the Indians of Nicaragua up to the mark in the old days was the continual warfare between the tribes, and the cessation of this he appears to lament. Mr. Whymper takes a discouraging view of investments in Ecuador, because there an unknown quantity of earthquakes and revolutions are to be taken into account, and his companion, Jean Antoine Carrel, considered that it would do the people of that country good to have a winter. Hence it seems that, whether nature be rough or mild, whether the nations remain at peace or keep on fighting, the future is dubious and obscure. Some writers consider that the tropical zone is fitted to be the paradise in which the race of man may some day attain its highest perfection. In this paradise, as at present arranged, there are plentiful wasps in the orange groves, there are stinging ants and biting spiders in the savannahs, on the river banks there is the insufferable torment of the mosquitos;' there is the chegoe, or jigger, on land, and in the water the little cannibal fish, which bites pieces of flesh out of bathers and swimmers. The yellow fever is everywhere lying in wait. Before clearance and cultivation, and the ways of highly civilised beings, these discomforts may diminish or retire. But there is the melancholy chance that with them may retire the choicest glories of the paradise. No longer will the vision be feasted by the wonderful variety of majestic palms, far surpassing, as Humboldt says, that date tree of the East which unfortu'nately has become to the painters of Europe the type of a 'group of palm trees.' The illustrations that copiously adorn these narratives of travel show scenes of beauty and magnificence in which population is sparse. They exhibit strange animals such as the nine-banded armadillo and the little ant bear. They portray bright orchid blossoms and bewitching humming birds and the fair-plumed egret crane. Among Mr. Whymper's many artistic drawings is the portrait of a young person of Guayaquil,' pleasingly costumed in the Indian fashion. It is to be feared that with the dress of Europe, with adequate drainage, with two or three hundred inhabitants to the square mile, much that is now so picturesque in the appearance of the people, much that is so entrancing in the existing richness of bird life and plant life, will be driven into the background. 6 ART. III.-Prolegomena to the History of Israel. By JULIUS 1885. CRITICISM of the Old Testament is not of modern origin; it is almost as old as the Scriptures themselves. The Book of Daniel was called in question by the heathen Porphyry (Λόγοι κατὰ Χριστιανῶν) in the third century A.D. The criticism of Isaiah to be found in works of Gesenius is the same which Trypho is represented as placing before Justin Martyr in the second century. Nay, even the early rabbis encountered similar difficulties, for we read in the Babylonian Talmud that 'Ezekiel would have been suppressed, because it contradicts the Law, but for Hananiah ben Hezekiah, who reconciled the discrepancies;'t while yet earlier, in the Mishna itself, we find that opinions as to the sacred character of the Song of Songs varied exceedingly. Such criticism was silenced as much as possible by the Church of Rome, but with the Reformation it naturally revived, and has become more outspoken as time advanced. Much that is now regarded as recent is, however, to be found in the works of Bayle and Voltaire, while the discovery of parallel passages in Genesis was made by Astruc as early as 1753. The English public was roused to the consideration of such questions nearly twenty years ago by Colenso; and the later works of Kuenen and Wellhausen have brought into the controversy nothing that is very new either as to method or as to materials. The present object is not to formulate a new theory or to predict the future tendency of such criticism, but merely to enquire whether the latest results of the old methods can claim to be better founded or more finally conclusive than those which have preceded them, and whether the materials daily increasing for such study have been fully utilised by the school which is for the moment dominant. It is a sure mark of the strong hold on the minds and affections of men which the Old Testament has acquired that unfailing interest continues to be felt in the repetition of such arguments. It appears to most men that the question of a few centuries in date, or of a more or less pure text, is of little interest when the subject is that of Persian or Indian literatures; but *Diol. ch. lxvii. Tab Bab, Sabbath,' 13, b. |