be fastened on his name-and all without redress! You may shoot the editor of a paper in which your wife or daughter has been traduced, and a jury will acquit you of murder; but if you bring an action against him for libel you will never obtain a conviction, or if you do, the penalty imposed will be a mockery. And whose fault is this? It is yours, gentlemen-yours, who do not resolve to put down with a strong hand this crying infamy, this disgrace to your country. In no other land would such outrages upon private individuals be tolerated. We boast of being a free people. I tell you that the Czar of all the Russias is not so great a tyrant as this Press of ours. No man's house is safe from its intrusion, no man's character secure from its attacks. Until we resolve to cut out this plague-spot upon our civilisation, which is eating into the heart of the nation, corrupting what is purest in the young, poisoning the daily draught of those who have lived and suffered, until we do this, the best citizens among us will stand aloof. Only those who have 'squared' the newspapers, or are callous to obloquy, will get into the pillory to be pelted with rotten eggs.

In some such words as these the speaker inveighed against a public scandal of which, indeed, there can be but one opinion. As a rule the press is absolutely indifferent to the truth or falsehood of a statement. It is so much 'copy,' which will furnish matter for a denial, it may be for a controversy. The personal cruelty inflicted by gross slanders concerning private individuals, who have never come before the public, is not to be healed by contradiction, and is but a small part of the injury to the community at large. Every small town has its paper (price 21 d.), and there are many who read nothing but that paper every day. Habituating the mind thus to its morning mess of nastiness is a great national misfortune. It lowers the tone alike of moral appreciation and literary taste.

The interviewer has been sufficiently belaboured by Mr. Rudyard Kipling for me to pass him by on the other side, like the Pharisee and the Levite. I cannot bind up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine,' like the Samaritan, for I think, as a rule, he richly deserves the castigation he receives; but this, in justice, I must say: With a much larger experience than Mr. Kipling's (we visited ninetyone towns) we did not find all the race equally bad. Many were unscrupulous liars. They came, they listened, and they went away, to write down whatsoever seemed good in their eyes, however far removed it might be from that which they had heard. But there were modest, intelligent men among them, anxious to tell the truth, with only so much amplification as the exigencies of their calling demanded. And of some the worst that could be said was that they came curiously ill-equipped to interrogate upon the special subject it would be supposed they would have been at the pains to get up. One of them asked Mr. Stanley in my presence whether any European Power besides England had any direct interest in the civilisation of Central Africa. Still, ignorance is not a crime; and for the sake of the five just men' I am willing to believe that even an interviewer may be saved.

And now, with this charitable sentiment, I say 'Farewell' to

the young giant through whose veins the generous blood courses more quickly every year; who is stretching his limbs as he learns the resources of his growing strength: a youthful Samson, justly charged with many of the faults of a passionate immaturity, but full of promise and of interest to those who are watching the development of his thews and sinews. The unprejudiced foreigner who visits the United States cannot but wish this young athlete 'God-speed' upon his course. It is not an easy one; but if his judgment and his .courage be equal to his strength, the difficulties that beset him will .all in time be overcome.

HAMILTON AÏDÉ.

HASISADRA'S ADVENTURE.

SOME thousands of years ago, there was a city in Mesopotamia called Surippak. One night a strange dream came to a dweller therein, whose name, if rightly reported, was Hasisadra. The dream foretold the speedy coming of a great flood; and it warned Hasisadra to lose no time in building a ship, in which, when notice was given, he, his family and friends, with their domestic animals and a collection of the wild creatures and seed of plants of the land, might take refuge and be rescued from destruction. Hasisadra awoke, and at once acted upon the warning. A strong decked ship was built and her sides were paid, inside and out, with the mineral pitch, or bitumen, with which the country abounded; the vessel's seaworthiness was tested, the cargo was stowed away, and a trusty pilot or steersman appointed.

The promised signal arrived. Wife and friends embarked; Hasi sadra, following, prudently shut the door,' or, as we should say, put on the hatches; and Nes-Hea, the pilot, was left alone on deck to do his best for the ship. Thereupon a hurricane began to rage; rain fell in torrents; the subterranean waters burst forth; a deluge swept over the land, and the wind lashed it into waves sky high; heaven and earth became mingled in chaotic gloom. For six days and seven nights the gale raged, but the good ship held out until, on the seventh day, the storm lulled. Hasisadra ventured on deck; and, seeing nothing but a waste of waters strewed with floating corpses and wreck, wept over the destruction of his land and people. Far away, the mountains of Nizir were visible; the ship was steered for them and ran aground upon the higher land. Yet another seven days passed by. On the seventh, Hasisadra sent forth a dove, which found no resting place and returned; then he liberated a swallow, which also came back; finally, a raven was let loose, and that sagacious bird, when it found that the waters had abated, came near the ship, but refused to return to it. Upon this, Hasisadra liberated the rest of the wild animals, which immediately dispersed in all directions, while he, with his family and friends, ascending a mountain hard by, offered sacrifices upon its summit to the gods.

The story thus given in summary abstract, told in an ancient Semitic dialect, is inscribed in cuneiform characters upon a tablet of

burnt clay. Many thousands of such tablets, collected by Assurbanipal, King of Assyria in the middle of the seventh century B.C., were stored in the library of his palace at Nineveh; and, though in a sadly broken and mutilated condition, they have yielded a marvellous amount of information to the patient and sagacious labour which modern scholars have bestowed upon them. Among the multitude of documents of various kinds, this narrative of Hasisadra's adventure has been found in a tolerably complete state. But Assyriologists agree that it is only a copy of a much more ancient work; and there are weighty reasons for believing that the story of Hasisadra's flood was well known in Mesopotamia before the year 2000 B.C.

No doubt, then, we are in presence of a narrative which has all the authority which antiquity can confer; and it is proper to deal respectfully with it, even though it is quite as proper, and indeed necessary, to act no less respectfully towards ourselves; and, before professing to put implicit faith in it, to inquire what claim it has to be regarded as a serious account of an historical event.

It is of no use to appeal to contemporary history, although the annals of Babylonia, no less than those of Egypt, go much further back than 2000 B.C. All that can be said is, that the former are hardly consistent with the supposition that any catastrophe, competent to destroy all the population, has befallen the land since civilisation began, and that the latter are notoriously silent about deluges. In such a case as this, however, the silence of history does not leave the inquirer wholly at fault. Natural science has something to say when the phenomena of nature are in question. Natural science may be able to show, from the nature of the country, either that such an event as that described in the story is impossible, or at any rate highly improbable; or, on the other hand, that it is consonant with probability. In the former case the narrative must be suspected or rejected; in the latter, no such summary verdict can be given: on the contrary, it must be admitted that the story may be true. And then, if certain strangely prevalent canons of criticism are accepted, and if the evidence that an event might have happened is to be accepted as proof that it did happen, Assyriologists will be at liberty to congratulate one another on the 'confirmation by modern science' of the authority of their ancient books.

It will be interesting, therefore, to inquire how far the physical structure and the other conditions of the region in which Surippak was situated are compatible with such a flood as is described in the Assyrian record.

The scene of Hasisadra's adventure is laid in the broad valley, six or seven hundred miles long, and hardly anywhere less than a hundred miles in width, which is traversed by the lower courses of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, and which is commonly known as the 'Euphrates valley.' Rising, at the one end, into a hill country, which gradually

passes into the Alpine heights of Armenia; and, at the other, dipping beneath the shallow waters of the head of the Persian Gulf, which continues in the same direction, from north-west to south-east, for some eight hundred miles further, the floor of the valley presents a gradual slope, from eight hundred feet above the sea level to the depths of the southern end of the Persian Gulf. The boundary between sea and land, formed by the extremest mudflats of the delta of the two rivers, is but vaguely defined; and, year by year, it advances seaward. On the north-eastern side, the western frontier ranges of Persia rise abruptly to great heights; on the south-western side, a more gradual ascent leads to a table-land of less elevation, which, very broad in the south, where it is occupied by the deserts of Arabia and of Southern Syria, narrows, northwards, into the highlands of Palestine, and is continued by the ranges of the Lebanon, the Antilebanon, and the Taurus, into the highlands of Armenia.

The wide and gently inclined plain, thus enclosed between the gulf and the highlands, on each side and at its upper extremity, is distinguishable into two regions of very different character, one of which lies north, and the other south of the parallel of Hit on the Euphrates. Except in the immediate vicinity of the river, the northern division is stony and scantily covered with vegetation, except in spring. Over the southern division, on the contrary, spreads a deep alluvial soil, in which even a pebble is rare; and which, though, under the existing misrule, mainly a waste of marsh and wilderness, needs only intelligent attention to become, as it was of old, the granary of western Asia. Except in the extreme south, the rainfall is small and the air dry. The heat in summer is intense, while bitterly cold northern blasts sweep the plain in winter. Whirlwinds are not uncommon; and, in the intervals of the periodical inundations, the fine, dry, powdery soil is swept even by moderate breezes into stifling clouds, or rather fogs, of dust. Low inequalities, elevations here and depressions there, diversify the surface of the alluvial region. The latter are occupied by enormous marshes, while the former support the permanent dwellings of the present scanty and miserable population.

In antiquity, so long as the canalisation of the country was properly carried out, the fertility of the alluvial plain enabled great and prosperous nations to have their home in the Euphrates valley. Its abundant clay furnished the materials for the masses of sun-dried and burnt bricks, the remains of which, in the shape of huge artificial mounds, still testify to both the magnitude and the industry of the population thousands of years ago. Good cement is plentiful, while the bitumen which wells from the rocks at Hit and elsewhere, not only answers the same purpose, but is used to this day, as it was in Hasisadra's time, to pay the inside and the outside of boats.

In the broad lower course of the Euphrates the stream rarely acquires a velocity of more than three miles an hour, while the