obnoxious banner were not laid aside. But many persons of station, and well-known humanity, defended the practice of bull-running, alleging that it was an old-fashioned, manly, English sport; inspiring courage, agility, and presence of mind under danger; and, as regards inhumanity, it was not by any means so cruel to the brute creation, nor so perilous to the life and limb of man, as foxhunting.

In 1833, the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals made its first public appearance as an opponent of the practice. One of its officers was sent to Stamford on bull-running day, and, being more bold than prudent, was roughly hustled by the crowd. This interference of the society, however well-meant, had a very different effect to that desired; instead of discountenancing the practice, the people of Stamford were thereby stimulated to support it. Who or what is this London Society,' they asked, 'that, usurping the place of constituted authorities, presumes to interfere with our ancient amusement?'

In 1836, the society sent several of its officers and agents to Stamford. The 13th falling that year on Sunday, the bull was run on the following day; in the evening, the populace resented the interference of the society's officers, by assaulting them, and breaking some windows. At the following Lent Assizes for Lincolnshire, the society preferred bills of indictment before the Grand Jury, against eight persons, for conspiring to disturb the peace by riotously assembling to run and torment a bull' at Stamford, on the 14th of November previous. True bills being found against the men, bench-warrants were obtained, and they were arrested to take their trials at the ensuing midsummer assizes. As is well known, this mode of proceeding behind a man's back, as it were, which deprives the accused of the fair advantage allowed by law, in giving him a copy of the depositions of the witnesses against him, is looked upon with deserved disfavour by both the judges and people of England. Moreover, the conduct of the society in putting the expensive machinery of the higher courts of law in operation against poor labouringmen, for a trumpery street squabble, created a strong feeling in Stamford and its neighbourhood. A subscription was immediately opened, to raise a defence-fund for the prisoners, many subscribing who utterly detested bull-running, but considered the society's proceedings to be over-officious, unjust, and arbitrary. The manager of Stamford theatre, to his immense popularity, gave a benefit in aid of the defence-fund, the piece selected being Colman's comedy of John Bull; and altogether, a considerable sum was collected. At the trial, Sergeant Goulbourn, and the leading barristers on the circuit, were retained for the prosecution. The council for the defence could not deny the riot, but pleaded use and custom, and the ignorance of the prisoners, who believed that valuable common rights were preserved to the town by the act of bull-running. Judge Park, when summing up, told the jury that no use or custom could justify a riot. Five of the prisoners were acquitted, three only being found guilty; these last were discharged on giving bail to appear to receive judgment, at the Court of Queen's Bench, when called upon.

The bullards, accepting the result of the trial as a victory, determined to have a grand run in 1837.

THE STAMFORD BULL-RUNNING.

run

Influence, however, had been brought to bear on the Home Secretary, who wrote to the mayor of Stamford, impressing upon him the necessity of taking active measures to prevent a proceeding so illegal and disgraceful as bull-running. The mayor, accordingly, swore in more than two hundred special constables to his assistance; but their opposition being lukewarm, the bull was with greater éclat than ever. In 1838, the Home Secretary determined to put down the custom. Several days before the 13th, a troop of the 14th Dragoons, and a strong force of metropolitan police, were sent to Stamford, and a considerable body of special constables were sworn in. The commanders of the military and police, having viewed the field of action, consulted with the mayor. As prevention was better than cure, and there could be no bull-run without a bull, measures were taken accordingly. The town was strictly searched, and two bulls being found, the animals were taken and confined in an inn-yard, under a picket of dragoons. Sentries were then placed on all the outlets of the town, and parties patrolled the roads night and day, to prevent a bull from being brought in. The eventful 13th arrived, and though the streets were crowded with bullards, the authorities were perfectly at their ease. They even heard with complacency the bell of St Mary's toll the timehonoured bull-warning. But at the last stroke of the bell, their fancied security was rudely dissipated by the well-known shouts of 'Hoy! bull! hoy!' from a thousand voices; a noble bull having appeared, as if by magic, in the principal street. There never was such a run! The wild excitement of the scene was enhanced by the bewildered dragoons galloping thither and hither, in vain attempts to secure the animal. The metropolitan police, with greater valour than discretion, formed in a compact phalanx on the bridge; but the bull, followed by the bullards, dashed through them as an eagle might through a cobweb. After a run of some hours, the bull came to bay in the river, and was then captured by the authorities. An attempt was then made to rescue one of the bulls confined in the inn-yard. This led to a collision between the military and the people, stones and brickbats were thrown, and sabre cuts returned in exchange; but, on the dragoons being ordered to load with ball-cartridge, the mob dispersed. Where did the strange bull, a very valuable animal, so miraculously spring from? This enigma was soon solved by its being claimed by a certain noble lord. had been sending it, in a covered wagon, from one of his estates to another, and, by a curious coincidence,' it happened to pass through Stamford on the very day and hour its presence was required by the bullards, who, seizing the wagon, released the animal. Whether the coincidence were accidental or designed, the preceding explanation, if not quite satisfactory, produced a great deal of good-humoured laughter.

He

In 1839, a stronger force of military and police was sent to Stamford; every precaution was taken, yet some treacherous special constables smuggled a bull into the town, and the bullards had their last run. The animal, however, being young and docile, did not afford much sport, being soon captured by the authorities. In the following year, as bullrunning day drew near, the people of Stamford began to count the cost of their amusement.

The

reason of its universal sympathies. To be remembered for ever by some work requires that the whole energy, at least for a time, be given to one work. Even great parts,' says Locke, writing of Leibnitz in 1697, will not master any subject without great thinking.'

Leibnitz was the son of a professor of jurisprudence in the university of Leipsic, in which city he was born in 1646. He was a precocious child, and from his boyhood displayed that love of

Born.-Benjamin Hoadly, bishop of Bangor, eminent Whig prelate, 1676, Westerham, Kent; Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger, Danish poet, 1779, Copenhagen, Sir Charles Lyell, geologist, 1797, Kinnordy, Forfarshire. Died.-Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, mathematician and moral philosopher, 1716, Hanover; George William Frederick Hegel, German philosopher, 1831, Berlin; Dr John Abercrombie, physician and moral writer, 1844, Edinburgh.

through life. He gives an amusing account of his efforts when a youth of fifteen, during long solitary walks in the wood of Rosenthal, near Leipsic, to adjust the claims of the Ancients and Moderns-of Aristotle and Descartes, and the reluctance with which, when conciliation was impossible, he was compelled to make an election. His talents, as manifested at the university, and his publications, early brought him into notice, and found him patrons among the princes of Germany. He travelled over the continent, visited England, and everywhere made the acquaintance of men of science and letters. An amusing anecdote is told of him when at sea in a tempest off the Italian coast. The sage captain attributed the storm to the ignorant of the Italian language, began to deliberate presence of the heretical German, and presuming him with the crew on the propriety of throwing the presence of mind, got hold of a rosary and began Lutheran Jonah overboard. Leibnitz, with much to tell his beads with vehement devotion. The of alchemists who were prosecuting a search for ruse saved him. At Nürnberg, he heard of a society the philosopher's stone. He wished to join them, and compiled a letter from the writings of the most celebrated alchemists and sent it to them. The latter consisted of the most obscure terms he could find, and of which, he says, he did not understand

a syllable. The illuminati, afraid to be thought ignorant, invited him to their meetings and made him their secretary. Though Leibnitz could thus quiz the alchemists, he believed, to the end of his life, in the reality of the object of their labours.

He

In the leisure which various pensions secured him, he followed his versatile inclinations with incessant assiduity. Metaphysics, physics, mathematics, jurisprudence, theology, philology, history, antiquities, the classics, all shared his attention, and in all of these branches of knowledge the world heard his voice with respect. The ancient languages he knew well, and was tolerably acquainted with more than half-a-dozen of the modern. had notions about calculating machines, about improved watches, about a universal alphabet, about hydraulic engines, about swift carriages, by which the journey of one hundred and fifty miles, between Amsterdam and Hanover, might be done in twenty-four hours; and about a hundred other things. He dabbled in medicine, in everything; there was nothing, in fact, in which he could not be interested. In his Protogena, he throws out thoughts, which, Dean Buckland observes, contain the germ of some of the most enlightened speculations in geology. His memory was quick and tenacious; he made notes as he read, but he had seldom to refer to them, for he seemed to forget nothing. George I. used to call him his living dictionary. At the age of seventy, he could recite hundreds of lines of Virgil without an error.

In mathematics, if anywhere, his genius shewed itself supreme, and between him and Sir Isaac Newton a bitter controversy broke out as to the credit of the invention of the differential calculus. The question has been thoroughly and tediously debated, but the following points are now considered as tolerably clear: 1st, That the system of fluxions invented by Newton is essentially the

same

as the differential calculus invented by Leibnitz, differing only in notation; 2d, That Newton possessed the secret of fluxions as early as 1663, nineteen years before Leibnitz published his method, and eleven years before he communicated it to Newton; 3d, That both Leibnitz and Newton discovered their methods independently of each other, but that Newton had priority; and 4th, That although the honour belongs to both, yet, as in every other great invention, they were but the individuals who combined the scattered rays of their predecessors, and gave a method, a notation, and a name to the doctrine of infinitesimal quan

tities.

As a theologian and metaphysician, Leibnitz was eclectic rather than original. His temper was truly catholic; he differed from others with reluctance; and it seemed to be one of his keenest delights to reconcile apparent contraries. Hence one of his schemes was the incorporation of the various sects of Protestantism, preparatory, if possible, to the inclusion of Rome, with concessions, in one grand Christian community. In philosophy, he had a doctrine called Pre-established Harmony, by which he professed to explain the relations between Deity, the Human Mind, and Nature. It met with wide discussion and some acceptance in the lifetime of Leibnitz, but Pre-established Harmony has long passed out of memory except in histories of philosophy.

One of the warmest admirers of Leibnitz was

THE SOURCES OF THE NILE.

Sophia Charlotte, wife of Frederick, the first king of Prussia, a great lover of show and ceremony, for which his consort had a quiet contempt. Leibnitz called her one of the most accomplished princesses of earth,' and by the world she was known as the republican and philosophic queen. To Leibnitz, le grand Leibnitz,' as she styled him, she resorted for counsel in all her theological and philosophical difficulties, and not seldom to his perplexity, wanting to know, he said: 'le pourquoi du pour quoi' (the why of the why). Wearied with the emptiness of courtiers, she wrote on one occasion: 'Leibnitz talked to me about the infinitely little; mon Dieu, as if I did not know enough of that!' This bright soul died at thirty-six, to the great grief of Leibnitz. On her death-bed she said she was very happy; that the king would have a fine opportunity for display at her funeral; and, above all, that now she was going to satisfy her curiosity about a great many things of which Leibnitz could tell her nothing. With many other crowned heads Leibnitz held intercourse more or less intimate. Peter the Great consulted him as to the best means for the civilisation of Russia, and rewarded his suggestions with the title of Councillor of State, and a pension of a thousand roubles.

Leibnitz was only able to get through his multiform business by persistent assiduity. He carried on a most extensive correspondence, and wrote his letters with great care, sometimes three or four times over, and made them the repositories of his most valued ideas and conjectures. His life was sedentary almost beyond example. Sometimes for weeks together he would not go to bed, but sat at his desk till a late hour, then took two or three hours of sleep in his chair, and resumed work at early dawn. He was a bachelor, and had no fixed hours for his meals; but sent to a tavern for food, when hungry and at leisure. His head was large and bald, his hair fine and brown, his face pale, his sight short, his shoulders broad, and his legs crooked and ungainly. He was spare and of middle height, but in walking, he threw his head so far forward as to look from behind like a hunchback. His neglect of exercise told severely on him as he advanced in life. He became plagued with rheumatic gout, his legs ulcerated, and he aggra vated his ailment by compressing afflicted parts with wooden vices to stop the circulation of the blood, and dull the sense of pain. He died in Hanover in 1716, in his seventieth year, from the effects, it is said, of an untried medicine of his own concoction. He was buried on the esplanade of his native city of Leipsic, where a monument, in the form of a temple, with the simple inscription, 'Ossa Leibnitii,' marks the spot.

DISCOVERY OF THE SOURCES OF THE NILE.

It is curious to look back to the days when Bruce the traveller published his celebrated work on Africa, and claimed to have discovered the true sources of the mysterious river which flows so many hundreds of miles through that continent. Comparing that narrative with one which has appeared in 1863, we see that Bruce was in the wrong; that he may have discovered a source but not the source; and that a long series of intermediate investigations was needed to arrive at a true solution of the interesting problem. No blame to James Bruce