thirst for revenge, have usurped the prerogatives of the courts of justice. From the Washington Sentinel. "EXCELSIOR." This is the motto of the United States of America: it signifies literally "Higher," and may be considered to denote the aspiring character of that nation. "Excelsior" is also the title of a sublime poem by Longfellow, whose meaning is thus interpreted by a classic friend: "Longfellow, in my mind, has a feeling in that beautiful poem not unlike the feeling of his psalm of life under every aspect. It is, I take it, an ideo-religion of Longfellow's own fine imagination and truly poetic art, and I read the effusion as his view of the interior career of man. EXCELSIOR, starting from that sublime point of departure wherein the human soul was placed by the Almighty, paulo minus ab angelis,' the individual who wishes to improve himself never finds a halting place on earth. His career is upward, in one sense, whatever it may appear to be. His very degradations are means of increased ennoblement, because of incessant compurgation and purity. And in one respect the human almost surpasses the angelic lot; because the one, being perfect in its kind, does not, perhaps, admit of progress, and the other does indefinitely. The yearning to fulfil this progressive lot engenders a noble discontent, and that discontent is expressed by the word Excelsior. Observe, it is not Excelsius; it is therefore entirely interior; whereas Excelsius would refer to the circumstances, rather than to him who was in them."-Miles Gerald Keon. The title of Filibusters is a mere corruption of the English word freebooters-a German term imported into England during the Low-Country wars of Elizabeth's reign. It has been erroneously traced to the Dutch word flyboat; but the Jesuit traveller Charlevoix asserts that, in fact, this species of craft derived its title from being first used by the Flibustiers, and not from its swiftness. This, however, is evidently a mistake, as Drayton and Hakluyt use the word; and it seems to be of even earlier standing in the French language. The derivation from the English word freebooter is at once seen when the s in Flibustier becomes lost in pronunciation.-C. W. Thornbury. NATIONAL FLAGS AND SIGNALS. Red, white, yellow, and blue, are found to be the most conspicuous colours. The present French red, white, and blue is a good example of conspicuous effect produced by the simplest possible combination of the three colours in the same flag. Our royal standard has a groundwork in some parts red and in others blue, with yellow or golden lions, and harps, and so forth. Our Admiralty flag has a yellow anchor on a red ground. Our Union flag has a blue ground, red rectangular stripes, and white diagonals. Our red and blue admiral's flags are plain. Many of the other English flags have a plain ground colour over five-sixths of the surface, but with a cross of stripes in one corner. So it is throughout most of the nations of Europe. The colours on the naval flags are generally red, white (or yellow), and blue. Even his Holiness the Pope has one flag with a white lamb and a white cross on a red ground; and another with a yellow St. Peter on a red ground. King Bomba (of Naples) has a yellow griffin on a white ground. Hamburgh has a white castle on a red ground. Venice has an amiable-looking yellow lion on a red ground, holding a yellow sword in one paw, and a white book in another. Bremen has a sort of red and white chess-board, with six times nine squares instead of eight times eight; and so on. Every where we find red, white, and blue, or red, yellow, and blue; and we may be certain that something better than mere freak determines the selection of such colours as signals.-Abridged from Dickens's Household Words. 66 THE UNION JACK. The British Flag consists of the crosses of St. George, St. Andrew, and St. Patrick, united; but the etymology of the term "Union Jack" has never, it is presumed, been explained, for it does not occur in any lexicon or glossary. The word "Union" obviously arose from the event to which the flag owes its origin (the Union of Ireland, in 1801); the only difficulty, therefore, is as to the expression "Jack." As the alteration in the banner of St. George occurred in the reign of James I., it may with great probability be supposed to be a corruption of Jacques." If, however, this hypothesis be rejected, the following is submitted. English soldiers were formerly accustomed to wear the cross of St. George on their upper garment; and as it appears from early writers that the upper dress of a horseman, and, according to others, a coat of mail, was called "a Jack," it admits of the inference that a small flag containing the cross in question was termed "a Jack," when used at sea; after the banner, which more properly speaking is confined to the field, fell into comparative disuse. The former of these conjectures appears, however, the more probable.-Sir Harris Nicolas,-Naval and Military Mag. 1827. DIEU ET MON DROIT." This was the parole of the day given by Richard I. of England to his army at the battle of Gisars in France. In this battle the French were defeated; and in remembrance of this signal victory he made it the motto of the royal arms of England, and it has ever since been retained. ISLE-OF-MAN ARMS. The arms of the Isle of Man are, gules, three legs conjoined in the fess-point, &c., or. The symbol of three legs conjoined no doubt denotes the triangular shapes of the Isle of Man, and Sicily or Trinacria. It is somewhat curious, that the earliest coinage of this island, A.D. 1709 (which, by the way, is cast, and not struck in the usual way: obverse, the crest of the Earls of Derby, the eagle and child, SANS CHANGER; reverse, the three legs), has the motto QvOCUNQUE GESSERIS STABIT. The coinage of 1723 is exactly similar, but struck; whereas that of 1733, and all the succeeding coinages, have QUOCUNQUE JECERIS STABIT, which is clearly the correct reading.--E. S. Taylor, the Numismatist. NAPOLEON'S "BEES." Napoleon I., wishing to have some regal emblem more ancient than the fleur-de-lys, is said to have adopted the Bee under the following circumstances. When the tomb of Childeric (the father of Clovis) was opened in 1653, there were found, besides the skeletons of his horse and page, his arms, crystal orb, &c.; there were also found more than 300 models of what the French heralds mistook for bees, "of the purest gold, their wings being inlaid with a red stone, like cornelian." These "bees" were accordingly sprinkled over the imperial robe, as emblematical of enterprise and activity. But these small ornaments, resembling bees, were only what in French are called fleurons, supposed to have been attached to the harness of the war-horse. Handfuls of them were found when the tomb was opened at Tournay, and sent to Louis XIV. They were deposited on a green ground at Versailles, which was adopted by Napoleon as the original Merovingian colour. This fact was related to Mr. W. Ewart, M.P., by Augustin Thierry, the celebrated historian. THE ZOLL-VEREIN, or Customs' Union, is a union of smaller states with Prussia for the purpose of customs' uniformity, first commenced in 1819, by the union of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, and which now includes Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Baden, Hesse-Cassel, Brunswick, and Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and all intermediate principalities. For the purposes of trade and customs these different kingdoms and principalities act as one empire. SOLDIER AND VOLUNTEER. The title of Soldier is derived from solidus, a piece of money. The Roman legions were paid. Hence the Volunteer, whose gallantry was gratuitous, was said to be "no soldier." A good solidus, weighing sixty-seven grains, having on the obverse a bust with full face, and on the reverse a cross within a wreath (from the Earl of Pembroke's celebrated collection of rare and unique coins), was sold by Sotheby and Co., in 1848, for 597. THE TITLE "ADMIRAL." Admiral (says Mr. J. Craufurd) is derived from the Arabic amir, a noble, a prince, a commander-in-chief; and bahar, the sea or a fleet, with the article al prefixed. Amir al bahar, therefore, means commander of the sea or of the fleet. The word has evidently come into French from Spanish, and from French into English. In Spanish the Arabic is corrupted into almirante to express the commander, and into almiraute to designate the flag-ship. The d was added in English, probably from some notion of euphony. But originally the word, whether to express the admiral himself or the ship he commanded, was written as both are at present in French. For the flag-ship Milton writes the word amiral, as in describing Satan's spear: "To equal which the tallest pine, Hewn on Norwegian hills to be the mast THE NABOB is derived from nawab, the plural of naib, a deputy or lieutenant; but in the popular language of India, from which the word is come to us, the plural is used for the singular. Sir T. Herbert, whose Travels were published in 1634, spells the word nabobb, and defines it, " a nobleman in the language of the Mogul's kingdom, which hath mixed up with it much of the Persian." The word, applied to a wealthy man returning from India, seventy-five years back was familiar enough, as may be judged by the following epigram on Sir Thomas Rumbold, ascribed to Charles James Fox. Sir Thomas began life as shoeblack at Arthur's Club, of which the head-waiter was one Robert M'Grath. He went afterwards to India, rose to be governor of Madras, and was dismissed from office in 1781. "When M'Grath reigned o'er Arthur's crew, Science, the Arts, and Manufactures. APPLICATIONS OF SCIENCE. DR. ARNOTT has adduced these interesting facts to show that the tasks of purely scientific research, and of the subsequent applications to art, have lain very much with different parties. It was not, for example, the chemist who first showed a jet of coal-gas burning in his laboratory, who also first conceived and accomplished the noble feat of lighting up with gas a whole city, so as almost to make night there appear the day. It was not the person who, ages ago, observed the expansive force of steam, and its sudden collapse again into water when cooled, who thought of turning steam-force to profitable use; for it was left to James Watt, almost in our own day, to devise the present steam-engine, which has quickly spread a newer and higher civilisation over the earth. Then, for many a day was the fact widely known, that a shock of electricity travelled along a wire with the speed of lightning, before Wheatstone and others who still live among us, had constructed the electric telegraph, which, with the speed of lightning, can deliver at any distance, and can even write down or print, the words of any message committed to it. ECONOMY OF CHEMISTRY. The Chemistry of Art, like a prudent housewife, economises every scrap. The horse-shoe nails dropped in the streets during the daily traffic are carefully collected by her, and re-appear in the form of swords and guns. The clippings of the travelling tinker are mixed with the parings of horses'-hoofs from the smithy, or the cast-off woollen garments of the poorest inhabitants of a sister isle, and soon afterwards, in the form of dyes of brightest blue, grace the dress of courtly dames. The main ingredient of writing-ink was, possibly, once part of the broken hoop of an old beer-barrel. The bones of dead animals yield the chief constituents of lucifer-matches. The dregs of portwine, carefully rejected by the port-wine drinker in decanting his favourite beverage, are taken by him in the morning in the form of Seidlitz powders, to remove the effects of his debauch. The offal of the streets and the washings of |