the heat relieves the faint chill which in this the breakfast, eggs are the commonest, climate a man who has not walked before prawns, sardines, pickled palates, omelettes, breakfast is at breakfast sure to feel for nine cresses, and caviare are perhaps the best, months in the year. An instinct has in this and a great deal more might be done with matter come to the aid of science, but then the roes of different fish, the sounds of cod, people who respect their stomachs should and fish pickled in oil, than has yet been. draw the obvious deduction from their in- attempted. People are so unenterprising stincts, and taking mild liquors hot, should that we doubt if dried mango fish, the Intake their solids cold. Fried bacon under dian delicacy, are procurable in London, that rule stands prohibited, and eggs are and American cranberries, the one "jam only allowed hot because no Englishman a man may consider it no disgrace to like, ever thinks of eating them cold — except never seem to pass through Liverpool. Hot when laid by plovers or has the faintest buttered toast, buttered rolls, and soft butidea of the kind of "confection" into tered biscuits are all mistakes, partly for which the cold yolk of a hard-boiled egg the reasons which should exclude hot meat, could by a little art be turned. Of solids and partly from the fact that half-baked meat and bread are of course the best, vege- flour heated and drowned in butter makes tables being forbidden, first, because they the eater heavy for the day. Fruit is inought to be eaten the moment they are comparably better at breakfast than at ready, and punctuality at breakfast is an any other time, though so rarely seen in abominable oppression; secondly, because England, where, having the best fruit in the smell of all vegetables haunts a house; the world, we studiously preserve it for the and thirdly, because, except the potato, exact moment when we do not want it, and they do not really strengthen, and break- when its flavour spoils that of the wine. fast is the doctor's meal. Every variety of We have seen human beings eat strawbercold meat, cold game, potted meat, potted ries and cream with Lafitte. A little fresh game, potted fish, and those things which fruit is at breakfast a perfect digester, but though meats, are not usually called meat, in truth it is useless writing about fruit. tongue, brawn, boar's head, pickled poultry Englishmen never will know anything a luxury absurdly neglected and ham, about it, except how to grow the best fruits are good for the higher objects of break- in the world. Nothing in the world comeş fast. The best are probably the potted near the brown greengage, but between the things, and meats which are not meat, be- perversity of public taste and the indiffercause they tempt men to eat bread, the best ence of the Duke of Bedford, who ought of all food, and for two reasons too much to be offered the alternative of quadrupavoided by the well-to-do. They learn to ling Covent Garden or attending the House like flavour, and bread by itself is very every night for a twelvemonth, a real dish flavourless, and it is the custom in England of greengages, a heaped dish, with six or to bake bread in the worst possible way, eight dozens of the fruit in it, costs as in such masses that the body of the loaf is much as half a dozen of champagne. Fruit a soft, spongy, white mass, very little more should not be eaten in ones, but in masses, edible than a bun. Very good wives will as the Americans eat it, and it would be, let their husbands "peel the loaf," but even did not London set the fashion, while lathey will not let anybody else, and so the bouring under a monopoly which absolutely poor men who would eat crust, i. e., good forbids even reasonable competition. The wheat flour properly baked, are forced idea of breakfast in fact should be cold either to eat flour half raw or abandon solids and bread flavoured with prepared the bread for solid meat. Puddings of all meat, and within these limits it is possible, kind are an abomination, and Mr. Bentley's as Mr. Bentley's book shows, to secure an editor ought to be ashamed of himself for almost infinite variety, and to compose a inserting them in his list. Indeed he is breakfast almost as carefully as a dinner. ashamed of them, for the chapter headed With three or four alternatives say ham, "Puddings" is filled with receipts for meat, cold chicken, potted fish, brawn, sardines, cheeses, and the peculiarly nasty agglomera- and perhaps mushrooms alone hot, the joint tion of chopped meat screwed in little bags cold, tea, coffee, and cocoa- -the last inof entrail called sausages. Cheese is ban- juriously neglected, owing chiefly to an idea ished from English breakfast-tables, though current among cooks that it can be made retained in Holland and some parts of Italy, with water, whereas water should never and its exclusion seems to be based upon go near it-even an Englishman may rise nothing more important than a passing to his opportunities, and perceive that fashion. Of lighter things the entrees of though the primary idea of breakfast must always be the vulgar one of food, still due dignity may by art be secured to its position among meals. If the alternatives seem too many, they can be reduced without injury to the great principle, and a slice of the joint, an egg, and a little potted meat or anchovy paste will yield a breakfast sufficient to secure the last of the requisites we intend to suggest. almost constantly ringing in my ears for the last fifteen months, for during the whole of this time I venture to say that they have not been hushed more than a fortnight together There is something horribly dismal in this boom and howl; sometimes it makes my flesh creep to hear them, although I am now so well used to it. Had the romantic admirers of this sort of thing been in This is the capacity for eating a consid- my place, I would have been thankful; and erable meal. There is no time at which they, I have no doubt, would have been the average Englishman really needs a good quite satisfied. I would not wish my greatsupply of food so much as at breakfast. At est enemy to have been similarly situated." dinner he is exhausted with the day, and But then it must be admitted that Captain wants succulent things and soups, and Musgrave's desert island was not quite of above all wine-food which gets into the the sort that we used to wish for. In the blood quickly, yet which will not destroy first place it was a very wet desert island, his evening by sending him to sleep. But where it rained almost all the year round, at breakfast he has not eaten for fourteen and there is something exceedingly damphours, and if he shares the antipathy we ing, not only to the skin, but to the heroic have expressed to lunch, will not eat again imagination, about getting wet through for nine more, and he has really to find habitually. In the next place, it was a fuel for the whole of his most active exist- very hungry desert island, where you could ence. He wants, or ought to want, a large gather nothing of importance to satisfy meal, and we believe great breakfast-eaters your hunger in the shape of fruits or roots, are invariably healthy men. Their frames and where seal-meat was the only nutriare never exhausted, or tempted to prey on themselves, and make the nerves do the duty of the tissues, like the bodies of those who considers it sound hygiene to fritter away an appetite on tea and toast. They are incurable, for at heart they regard gastronomy as Dr. Colenso regards the Pentateuch, and must be given up, as Archbishops give up that unfortunate prelate; but to the faithful we may still suggest that the hygienic meal of the daythe one to be based most strictly on scientific data, is the one which Englishmen hitherto have most neglected, and in which perhaps only Scotchmen and Anglo-Indians perfectly succeed. deed he speaks bitterly of it. When he had been trying it for some fifteen months, he writes, "The sea booms and the wind ment commonly procurable, and that by On From the Spectator. THE REALISM OF DESERT ISLANDS.* (the destination of the shipwrecked party CAPTAIN MUSGRAVE, who has tried it, is no admirer of desert-island romance. was known, and Captain Musgrave had exInpressly told his Australian friends, that he of the Auckland islands when he had reachfeared shipwreck much more on the coast ed them for sealing purposes, than he did mischance in the open sea)· and in short, all those terrible searchings of heart" which constitute to imaginative readers part of the romantic fascinations of Crusoe stories, though we do not suppose they are of the same nature to actual ad howls. These are sounds which have been *Castaway on the Auckland Isles. A Narrative of the Wreck of the Grafton, and of the Escape of the Crew after Twenty Months' Suffering; from the Private Journal of Captain Thomas Musgrave. Edited by John J. Shillinglaw, F. R. G. S. London Lockwood and Co. any 66 venturers. One of the romantic class of to pieces, but their moral superiority to the adventurers with whom Captain Musgrave others was fortunately not as shortlived as kindly wishes to exchange places would their legal authority. Both were good and probably have been a good deal disappoint- brave and ingenious men. The captain ed in not discovering more novelties on the directed amidst circumstances of great diffiisland. A genuine Crusoe ought undoubt-culty the whole party had to stand all edly to find some new source of wealth and day up to their middle in water, with the consolation every week or so; new varieties thermometer near to the freezing pointof food; new animals capable of being the hauling up of the old wreck on the tamed and used; perhaps now and then a beach, and the examination of her bottom trace of savages to inspire terror; and now to see if they could make her seaworthy. and then a distant sail to inspire hope. But When this was found impossible, they set none of these varieties of circumstance to work on the ship's boat to raise her sides, came to break the monotony of Captain and make her altogether more seaworthy. Musgrave's captivity. He found indeed The boat was only a dingy, and very ricketthat there were wild dogs in the island, ty. By hard and combined work they probably left there, or their progenitors left made her a little more fit for an open-sea there, by the crew of some former ship- voyage in a sea remarkable for the terrible wreck, and that there were also cats in the character of its gales. Mr. Raynal was island, one of which they half tamed, the something of a blacksmith, and made one cats of course being at internecine war with hundred and eighty clinch bolts and above the dogs. But these, except the seals and seven hundred nails out of the iron of the a few birds, called by the captain widgeons, old vessel. To do this he worked at his were nearly the only live creatures, and anvil often far into the night, and the three the vegetable products of the island seem men appear to have worked under his and to have been singularly few and poor. the captain's directions with praiseworthy Then the walking through the bushy assiduity. The captain also taught the men swamps was singularly exhausting, and the to read, which they were very eager to sailing on the gulfs and inland bays was so learn. The value of this moral authority precarious, owing to the constant and tre- was curiously illustrated by the inability of mendous gales, that locomotion was difficult, the two men, who were in the most adand life on the island was assuredly an em- mirable situation conceivable for illustrating barrassed existence. theories of liberty, fraternity, and equality, Captain Musgrave and his men bore to hold together when the attraction of their compulsory romance with a highly creditable fortitude. It was well for them that the captain and his mate, Mr. Raynal, retained sufficient moral authority over the Captain Musgrave himself is evidently three men, even after the wreck, to keep from his journal a man of very strong feelthe society, together. When the captain ings, both religious and domestic, which are and his mate and one of the men finally very simply and often well expressed from escaped in a boat, too small and unsafe to day to day. There is in him a touch of carry all five, leaving two alone together boyish admiration for sentiments not nearly on the island for five weeks to wait for as strong as his own, but expressed with a their return, the society (consisting of two) little more glow of fancy, a sort of adwas dissolved into its elements, and on Cap- miration far from uncommon in strong tain Musgrave's return he found that the practical men little conversant with literatwo men left together had quarrelled so ture. Take, for instance, this mention of much that they were on the point of separ-"the one consolation remaining to him" ating, to live absolutely alone for the re- when he had passed about half the term of mainder of their imprisonment. In spite of his imprisonment:the need of combination for the war against nature, they had been very near starving, -the selfish repulsions had developed so tremendously after the removal of the slight social authority of the captain and mate, that the two men had agreed to be really solitary rather than have only each other's society. The captain and Mr. Raynal (the mate) of course ceased to have any legal authority directly the vessel went cohesion provided by the presence of their superiors in intelligence and culture was removed. "I have still one consolation remaining, in those beautiful words of Thomas Moore: Let Fate do her worst, there are relics of joy, stroy; That come in the night-time of sorrow and care, And bring back the features that joy used to wear. Long, long may my heart with such mem'ries | water be filled Like a vase in which roses have once been distilled. You may break, you may ruin the vase as you will, But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.' the " romance The worthy sailor had set down at least fifty times in his journal feelings far deeper and consolations far stronger than this; but in spite of his contempt for those who liked "of Crusoeism, it is obvious that there was a romantic spot in his own mind, which clung to the idea of his heart being like a vase filled with rose-leaves, as a glorifying consideration amidst those rancid seal-meat dinners, and that generally weary, hopeless, laborious, and squalid existence. The most amusing part of the volume is the account of the seals and their habits. It is evident that there is an opportunity for an improvement in the instincts or habits of seals, which would give any variety of seal adopting it a very great advantage over the present species in "the conflict for existence." Captain Musgrave thus describes the certainly at present very ill-organized methods of physical and mental education pursued by the maternal seals towards their young: : "In the latter part of December, and during the whole of January, they are on shore a great deal, and go wandering separately through the bush (or woods), and into the long grass on the sides of the mountains above the bush, constantly bellowing out in a most dismal manner. They are undoubtedly looking for a place suitable for calving in; I have known them to go to a distance of more than a mile from the wa ter for this purpose. Their voice is exceedingly powerful, and in calm weather may be heard to the almost incredible distance of four and a half or five miles. Why they bellow so much before calving, I am scarcely able to judge; but after that event, which does not take place until after the first of February, it is undoubtedly to call their young, which they generally get into the water a few days after they are born, and assemble them in great numbers at some particular place, selecting such places as a small island or a neck of land with a narrow junction. This, no doubt, prevents them from getting straggled about and lost, as they do sometimes in the bush; while in these places they cannot very well get away without going into the water, to which, when very young, they have a great antipathy. The means employed by the cow of getting her young into the water for the first time, and taking it to a place of safety, is when witnessed highly amusing. It might be supposed that these animals, even when young, would readily go into the that being one of their natural instincts but strange to say such is not the case; it is only with the greatest difficulty, and a wonderful display of patience, that the mother succeeds in getting her young in for the first time. I have known a cow to be three days getting her calf down half a mile, and into the water; and what is most surprising of all, it cannot swim when it is in the water. This is the most amusing fact; the mother gets it on to her back, and swims along very gently on the top of the water; but the poor little thing is bleating all the time, and continually falling from its slippery position, when it will splutter about in the water precisely like a little boy who gets beyond his depth and cannot swim. Then the mother gets underneath it, and it again gets on to her back. Thus they go on, the mother frequently giving an angry bellow, the young one constantly bleating and crying, frequently falling off, spluttering, and getting on again; very often getting a slap from the flipper of the mother, and sometimes she gives it a very cruel bite. The poor little animals lacerated in the most frightful manner. are very often seen with their skins pierced and In this manner they go on until they have made their passage to whatever place she wishes to take the young one to; sometimes they are very numerous at these places, their numbers being daily augmented until the latter end of March. Here the young remain without going into the water again, for perhaps a month, when they will begin to go in of their own accord; but at first they will only play about the edge, venturmonths old, if surprised in the water, they will ing farther by degrees; and until they are three immediately run on shore and hide themselves; but they always keep their heads out, and their eyes fixed on the party who has surprised them, that can be communicated by these organs.” imploring mercy in the most eloquent language Now cows that go to calve so far from the sea, and that take the young ones back to the sea before they are any better inclined to swim than babies would be, must clearly be under a great disadvantage in the conflict for existence with a variety that should succeed in calving near the wapensities to swim, and not requiring so much ter, and have young ones with earlier prosevere chastising for falling off their mothers' backs. And should some (so-called) accidental variety spring up in which either of these two ill-advised habits should be wanting, we suppose their race would soon get a start over the decidedly clumsy race of seals with whom Captain Musgrave made acquaintance. Mothers of all species are apt to be guilty of works of supererogation towards their young, — supererogation both in tenderness and slaps, but we have seldom heard of mothers apparently more disposed to works of supererogation than Cap From the Spectator. THE SCENERY OF THE SKIES. tain Musgrave's cow seals. Perhaps, how-visible, are the subordinate stations, the staever, he would prefer the kind which he tions on planets being the only ones probably used for the purposes of shipwrecked mari- from which astronomy could be studied at all, ners. Disagreeable as the old seal-meat and the stations on planets' planets, that is always was, he speaks with a kind of rap-on satellites, being usually far superior in ture of the young calf seal-meat as quite the variety and splendour of their astronomequal to lamb. And no doubt they might ical phenomena to those on the planets have found it more difficult sometimes to themselves. Professor Whewell, as is well obtain such a delicacy, but for the painful known, made ingenious use of the peculiar and embarrassing etiquette which obliged characteristic of central suns, the probathe maternal seals to produce their calves ble intensity of light and also of heat in a long way from the sea, in order that they which they exist, and the certainty that if might have the difficulty of getting them they are habitable at all by any beings like down to it. those of earth, it can only be through the interposition of some very thick atmosphere or cloud-envelope between the external envelope of fire and the nucleus of the sun, which would of course be a veil through which sight could hardly penetrate, -to argue that the earth may be really the only inhabited body in the whole physical universe. For if all the glorious myriads of visible bodies, he argued, are clearly unfit for physical beings, it requires very much less effort to believe that the vast majority of secondary or planetary bodies are not so either, a conclusion which he tried to confirm with respect to the planetary bodies of our own system by first depopulating the moon on account of its no-atmosphere, and then finding fault with Venus and Mercury as being too hot, with Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the others as being too cold, and probably also too fluid, for the dwelling-place of creatures with bodies at all like our own. We confess the argument has always seemed to us at once arrogant and feeble. But we may adopt thus much of it pretty safely, that self-luminous bodies are not likely to be good stations for observing (with any eyes like our own) other self-luminous bodies, and that even of those which only reflect light, the attendants on greater bodies have special advantages over those greater bodies themselves, for nearly the same reason for which the disciple has a special happiness denied to his master, for which Boswell has a grander constant spectacle before him than Johnson, or Eckermann than Goethe. THE publication of Mr. Lockyer's admirable translation of M. Amédée Guillemin's splendidly illustrated handbook of popular astronomy, * is quite an era in the art of popularizing that most exciting of sciences. We have only to complain of the physical magnitude of this edition, which is so considerable that we are not quite sure whether it may not be a visible object, or what astronomers call a test-object, to lunarian astronomers. At all events, if the publisher had sent us an easel fitted with a reading-frame, by which to adapt it to the mechanical and optical conditions of humanity, he would certainly have put it more within the reach of invalids. Seriously speaking, in any new edition it should at least be broken up into two volumes. The mechanical fatigue of holding the book, certainly absorbs a considerable portion of the nervous energy needed to enter into the brilliant pictures summoned up by its contents. Nevertheless no book has ever been published calculated in an equal degree to realize the different astronomical spectacles of the Heavens to the mind of an ordinary reader. The most curious point which strikes us in considering the external scenery of the skies as it could be seen at least by human eyes, is that in all parts both of our own solar system and of other systems, so far as we can infer anything concerning them from telescopic observation, the grandest stations for obtaining knowledge of what is going on in the Heavens, and also for the multiplicity and gorgeousness of the spectacles there * Bentley. Thus even our own moon, in many respects very inferior in advantages to the satellites of the more distant planets, must, if she have astronomers at all, - astronomers without lungs they must be, at least on the hither side of the moon, - have far more splendid astronomical opportunities for them than we can get for the best of our astronomers, even on the Peak of Teneriffe. We do not insist upon the want of atmosphere, in itself an immense advantage for star-gazing, |