Various - Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 102, June, 1876

Religion and philanthropy find the field inviting, and their representatives, individual and associated, are busy in preparing to till it. The enthusiasm of the leading religious societies took the concrete shape of statuary. Hence the Catholic Fountain, heretofore noticed; the Hebrew statue to Religious Liberty, as established in a land that never had a Ghetto or a Judenstrasse; the Presbyterian figure of Witherspoon; an Episcopalian of Bishop White; and others under way or proposed. The temperance movement, too, embodies itself in a fountain that runs ice-water instead of claret. The less tangible but perhaps more fruitful form of reunions and discussions must in a greater or less degree enhance the power for good of these organizations. They are led by men of mind and energy, seldom averse to enlightenment, and all professing to seek nothing else. When men of these qualities, aiming at the same or a like object, meet to compare their respective admeasurements of its parallax made from as many different points, they cannot fail to approach accuracy. Faith is a first element in all great undertakings. It removes mountains at Mont Cenis, as it walked the waves with Columbus. In our century even faith is progressive, and does not shrink from elbowing its way through what Bunyan would have styled Vanity Fair.

Modestly in the rear of the moral reformers, yet not wholly and uniformly unaggressive, nor guiltless altogether of isms and schisms, step forward the literary men. As a rule, they do not affect expositions, or exhibitions of any kind. But one general meeting, with some minor and informal ones, is on the programme for them. This is well. The world and the fullness thereof belongs to them, and they may care to come forward to scan this schedule of their inheritance. We do not hear of their having combined to put up a pavilion of their own, like the dairymen and the brewers, "to show the different processes of manufacture." The pen will be at work here, nevertheless, and has been from the beginning, before the foundations of the Corliss engine were laid or the granite of Memorial Hall left the quarry. Without this first of implements none of the other machinery would ever have moved. The pen is mightier than the piston. It is the invisible steam that impels all.

FRENCH RESTAURANT LA FAYETTE.

In a visible form also it is here. The publishers of the London Punch have selected as the most comprehensive motto for the case in which they exhibit copies of their various publications a sentence from Shakspeare: "Come and take choice of all my library, and so beguile thy sorrow." We do not know that to dull his sorrows is all that can be done for man. Literature assumes to do more than make him forget. The lotos-eater is not its one hero. School-books, piled aloft "in numbers without number numberless," may to the man be suggestive of hours without thought and void of grief, but they certainly are not to the boy. Blue books, ground out in a thousand bureaus, and contributed in like profusion, may be pronounced a weariness to the adult flesh, however sweet their ultimate uses. Unhappy those who wade through them for increasing the happiness of others! These humble but portly representatives of political literature are the log-books of the ship of state. They chart and chronicle the currents and winds along its course, so that from the mass of chaff a grain of guidance may be painfully winnowed out for the benefit of its next voyage, or for the voyages of other craft floundering on the same perilous and baffling sea. Everything comes pat to a log-book. As endless is the medley of memoranda in blue-books. They deal, like government itself, with everything. They take up the citizen on his entry into the cradle, and do not quite drop him at the grave. How to educate, clothe, feed and doctor him; how to keep him out of jail, and how, once there, to get him out again with the least possible moral detriment; how to adjust as lightly as possible to his shoulders the burden of taxation; how to economize him as food for powder; and how to free him from the miasm of crowded cities,—are but a small part of their contents. And the index is growing, if possible, larger, as the apparatus of government becomes more and more intricate. With such contributions and credentials do the rulers of the nations enroll themselves in the guild of authorship. They are proud of them, and exhibit them in profusion, in whole libraries, rich with gold and the primary colors.

THE MAMMOTH RODMAN GUN.

Expositions, as we have before remarked, come into the same worshipful guild by right of a special literature they have brought into being. They come, moreover, into the blue-book range by their bearing upon certain topics generally assigned to it. It is found, for example, that, like other great gatherings, they are apt to be followed by a temporary local increase of crime. The police-records of London show that the arrests in 1851 outnumbered those of the previous year by 1570, and that in 1862 the aggregate exceeded by 5043 that of 1861. It will at once occur that the population of the city was greatly increased on each occasion, and that the influx of thieves and lawbreakers generally must have thinned out that class elsewhere, and in that way very probably reduced, rather than added to, the sum-total of crime, the preventive arrangements in London having been exceptionally thorough. The drawback that would consist in an increase of crime is therefore only an apparent result. An opposite effect cannot but result, if only from the evidence that so vast and heterogeneous an assemblage can be held without marked disorder. The police as well as the criminals and the savants of all nations come together, compare notes and enjoy a common improvement.

This is the first opportunity the physicians of Europe have had to become fully acquainted with the advances in surgery and pathology their American brethren have the credit of having made within the past few years. They will find it illustrated in the government buildings and elsewhere; and they have an ample quid pro quo to offer from their own researches. The balancing of opinions at the proposed medical congress and in private intercourse must tend to free medical science from what remnants of empiricism still disfigure it, to perfect diagnosis and to trace with precision the operation of all remedial agents. Means remain to be found of administering the coup de grâce to the few epidemics which have not yet been extirpated, but linger in a crippled condition. This will be aided by the illustrations afforded of processes of draining, ventilation, etc.

Man's health rests in that of his stomach. The food question is a concern of the physician as well as of the publicist. The race began life on a vegetable diet, and to that it reverts when compelled by enfeebled digestion or by the increasing difficulty of providing animal food for a dense population. But it likes flesh when able to assimilate it or to procure it, and demands at least the compromise of fish. Hence, the revived attention to fish-breeding, an art wellnigh forgotten since the Reformation emptied the carp-ponds of the monks. Maryland, New York and other States illustrate this device for enhancing the food-supply, and the aquaria at Agricultural Hall, containing twelve or fifteen thousand gallons of salt and fresh water, present a congress of the leaders, gastronomically speaking, of the finny people. The shad remains not only to be naturalized in Europe, but to be reintroduced to the water-side dwellers above tide, who once met him regularly at table. He is joined by delegates from the mountain, the great lakes and the Pacific coast in the trout, the salmon and the whitefish, and by that quiet, silent and slow-going cousin of the fraternity, the oyster, most valuable of all, as possessors of those qualities not unfrequently are. Europe does not dream, and we ourselves do not realize until we come carefully to think of it, what the oyster does for us. He sustains the hardiest part of our coasting marine, paves our best roads, fertilizes our sands, enlivens all our festivities, and supports an army of packers, can-makers, etc., cased in whose panoply of tin he traverses the globe like a mail-clad knight-errant in the cause of commerce and good eating. Yet he needs protection. All this burden is greater than he can bear, and it is growing. System and science are invoked to his rescue ere he go the way of the inland shad and the salmon that became a drug to the Pilgrim Fathers. It is not easy to frame a medal or diploma for the fostering of the oyster. More effective is a consideration of the impending penalty for neglecting to do so. Ostrea edulis is one of the grand things before which prizes sink into nothingness.