material existence. Every one outside the Tuileries laughed at Edmond About, when he told the Romans of to-day that the only thing left for them was "to contemplate their ruins." I wish myself that they had contemplated their ruins a little longer, or had allowed us to contemplate them, instead of seeking to turn Rome into a third-rate Paris. But we shall be laughed at if we ever venture to tell the nineteenth century that it must contemplate its ruins.

The trust imposed on the century is not to contemplate its ruins, but to protect its ancient buildings. Now that will be done if the century can learn to feel the true sacredness of ancient buildings, if it will admit that the building stands on the same footing with picture, statue, and poem, that it is unique, inimitable, irreplaceable; and, above all, has its own consecration of place, continuity, and record. Admit this first, and then we will consider the claims of the present, their convenience, and their means. But the burden of proof ought always to be pressed imperiously against those whose claim is to destroy, to convert, or to extend. When every other means fail, when irresistible necessity is proved, it may be a sad duty to remove an ancient building, to add to it, or to incorporate it. But this can never justify what we now call "restoring,' a process which makes it as much like the original as Madame Tussaud's figures are like the statesman or general they represent. It can never justify redecoration-cutting out ancient art-work and replacing it by new work or machine work. It can never justify archæological exercises-I mean the patching on to old buildings new pieces of our own invention, which we deliberately present as fabrications of the antique. These things are mere Wardour Street spurious bric-a-brac, no more like ancient buildings than a schoolboy's iambics are like Eschylus. How often do committees, dean and chapter, public offices, and even Parliament itself, treat our great national possessions as if they were mere copy books, on the face of which our modern architects were free to practise the art of composing imitations of the ancients. Such buildings become much like a Palimpsest manuscript; whereon, over a lost tragedy of

Sophocles, some wretched monk has scribbled his barbarous prose. How often is the priceless original forever lost beneath the later stuff!

In these remarks I have strictly confined myself to general principles: first, because I do not pretend to any special or technical knowledge which would entitle me to criticise particular works, but mainly because I believe our true part to be the maintenance of general principles. If we fall into discussions of detail we may lose hold of our main strength. We have to raise the discussion into a higher atmosphere than that of architectural anachronism. We cannot pitch our tone too high. It is not architectural anachronism which we have to check it is the safety of our national records, our national self-respect, the spirit of religious reverence that we have to uphold. We have to do battle against forgery, irreverence, and desecration. Let us raise a voice against the idea that any work of art can ever, under any circumstances, be really "restored;" against the idea that any ancient art-work can usefully be "imitated;"' against the idea that ancient monuments are a corpus vile whereon to practise antiquarian exercises; against the habit of forging spurious monuments, as the monks in the Middle Ages forged spurious charters; finally, against the idea that the convenience of to day is always to outweigh the sacredness of the past.

Strangely enough, the foes of ancient buildings are too often those of their own household. Among the worst sinners of all are the public departments, corporations, and the clergy. The forgers, the destroyers, the mutilators, are too often the official guardians of our old monuments. One can see why. They are the people who use them, to whom they are a necessity and a convenience. Naturally they are constantly tempted to give them greater practical usefulness, to convert them to modern requirements, and above all to make them look smart. We, of the public, gaze at an old monument, and then we go home. We laymen enjoy an old thirteenth-century church just as it is; but to the official, to the priest, the old hall or the old church is the place where his official work is done.

And a dreadful temptation besets them both to make the seat of official work adequate for its office, and appear to be up to the level of our time. A natural sentiment; but one false and dangerous. Let us resist it in the name of the nation, of the past and of the future. These things are sacred by what they have seen and known, by what they teach, by what they record. The true solution is this. If the present age needs new public offices, bigger churches, new halls, bridges, gates, let them build new ones. If it needs to exercise itself in architectural Latin verses, let it do it with new bricks, new stones, and on a site of its own choosing. I am very far from thinking that this needs Acts of Parliament; that the sacredness of ancient buildings can be guaranteed by law. Pictures, statues, poems, are now safe from modern Vandals by the force of public opinion and true feeling for art and antiquity. The owner of a Raffaelle or a Titian, of a Greek statue, does not need to be restrained by an Act of Parliament or an injunction in Equity against the temptation to paint over his picture, or to add new limbs to his marble. We never hear the owner of some princely gallery say to his friends: "You remember what a dingy thing my Veronese used to be, how poor in color my Madonna was, and what a stick the Venus looked, with one arm and no nose. Well! I had Rubemup, R. A., down from the Academy, and you see the Veronese is as bright as an Etty; my Raffaelle might go into a new altar at the Oratory, and the Venus is fit for the Exhibition!" We never hear this; but we do hear a dean or a rector take a party with Ritualist leanings over the stored" cathedral and church, and point out how the whole of the stonework has been refaced, how new tracery has been added "from Scott's designs,' and how the Jacobean wood-carving has been carted away to Wardour Street. And now the old church looks like a new chapel-of-ease at a fashionable sea

re

side place. And the Bishop comes down in lawn and blesses the restored and reconsecrated building, and the rector gives a garden-party, and the county paper brags about the liberal subscription lists. What we have to do, is to make them all understand that the whole business is profanation, ignorance, and vulgarity.

Ancient buildings certainly cannot be treated as "exhibits," to be cased in glass, and displayed in a museum. All their powers, their vitality and solemnity would disappear. They have in most cases to be kept fit for use; and in some rare cases they may have to be completed, where the kind of work they need is within our modern resources. As to Palladian work, that may possibly be attempted; but as to true mediaval work of the best periods, it is absolutely impossible. No fine carving of this age can be remotely reproduced or imitated by us now in feeling and manner. The current of gradual growth for the best medieval work has been broken for centuries. And we cannot now recover the tradition. The archaic naïve grace of a thirteenth-century relief, the delicate spring of foliage round capital or spandrel, are utterly irrecoverable. There does not exist the hand or the eye which can do it. To cut out old artwork wholesale, and insert new machine carving, is exactly like cutting out a Madonna in an altar-piece, or inserting a new head on to a Greek torso. What we have to do is to uphold the fabric as best we may, and preserve the decoration as long as we can.

We have to educate the public, especially the official public, and above all the clergy, to understand all that is meant by the sacredness of ancient buildings. Our business is not so much to discuss solecisms in style and blunders in chronology, as to make men feel that our national monuments are dedicated by the past to the nation forever, and that each generation but holds them as a sacred trust for the future.-Contemporary Review.

We all know gold is filthy lucre; the root of all evil; a snare and a delusion; common dross; the invention of the evil one; the mammon of unrighteousness; and yet somehow, though we always admit that money doesn't secure any permanent advantage to us, we nevertheless feel with Sydney Smith that we are just on an average one guinea the happier for every extra guinea that falls into our pockets. The preacher moralizes glibly on the deceitfulness of riches; but when his bishop, moved by his eloquent discourse, immediately offers him a better living, does he humbly answer that increased wealth only brings with it increased responsibilities, and that three hundred pounds a year, paid quarterly, is more than enough for his slender services? I trow not: he rises from his breakfast-table with the episcopal letter gripped tight in his hand, kisses poor Mrs. Preacher tenderly on the forehead, and, a certain strange moisture dimming his eyes, remarks with touching inconsistency that Jim can now go to the Charterhouse, and that Polly may at once begin her lessons in music. And for my part, though it may be wicked to confess it, I sympathize with him far more at that perilous moment, when the image of the vile metal, coined into sovereigns, dazzles and obscures his moral vision, than when in dolorous tones of didactic exhortation he warns the Gileses and Hodges of his rustic congregation not to follow the pernicious example of backsliding Demas. Demas, however, according to that eminent commentator Mr. John Bunyan, had only a silver mine; and indeed a silver shilling is more likely to bribe poor Giles and Hodge, as things go nowadays, than the golden guinea against which the preacher hurls in vain the rusty ammunition of his perfunctory anathema.

Sad as it is to say so, that wicked metal still remains, in spite of all the preachers, an object of obvious interest and desire to the vast mass of civilized humanity. Dross though it be, it forms the chief incentive of art and industry; filthy though we think it, yet as the circulating medium, fresh and clean from

her Majesty's Mint, it really possesses to the outer eye a certain illusory external attractiveness and apparent beauty. And since everybody in his heart wishes to get and keep as much as possible of it, consistent with the strictest honor and probity (or even sometimes otherwise), it is not unnatural to conclude that some slight inquiry into its origin and value, both as a metal and a medium, may possess a certain amount of curiosity and interest for the greater number of her Majesty's lieges.

At this point of my exposition, however, I am met at the outset by a delicate question of individual modesty. Gold is by definition the subject of the present discourse; yet I have myself had so little to do personally with that particular precious metal that I naturally feel a certain graceful diffidence in attempting to deal scientifically with its origin and nature. If it were only copper, now, or even silver! With those I have a fair working acquaintance. But gold is to me so very rare and infrequent a metal that I shrink from speaking of it with too much show of familiar intimacy. However, I console myself with the reflection that Lord Rothschild has never yet attempted to write an article about a chemical element with which he must be far more intimately acquainted (in the concrete) than I am; and until that distinguished member of the Upper House is pleased to break his aristocratic silence on the subject, a humbler author may perhaps be permitted to discourse, so far as his limited opportunities permit him, on the sources and mainsprings of our universal gold supply.

Unlike most other metals, the root of all evil usually occurs in the world at large in the pure or native condition only. The reason for this peculiarity is to be found in the fact that gold, though morally so vile and common a substance, is chemically and technically a noble metal, that is to say, one which enters but sparingly into combination with metalloids. Iron, as we all know, if exposed to air, or still worse to water, soon rusts; or in other words, combines with oxygen. When found in mines,

therefore, it usually occurs more or less under the form of an oxide, with a greater or smaller proportion of the two chief ingredients variously commingled. Still more are minerals like aluminium, calcium, potassium, and sodium, invariably found in a high state of combination. But copper, though usually met with as a compound with the metalloids, occasionally occurs in the pure condition; silver most frequently does so; and gold hardly ever appears under any other form. It is this remarkable chemical inertness of gold, as we shall see hereafter, which gave it at first its value as an ornamental material, and so finally led up to its universal adoption as the medium of exchange, the enemy of virtue, and the chief standard of value in all civilized communities. And lest this last imprudent remark should rouse a passing qualm in the breast of the stoutest reader, I may hasten to reassure him by adding at once that I am not going to discourse upon the currency question, that I do not know (other than practically) "what is a pound," and that I have no settled views at all of my own upon the stupid and uninteresting bimetallic controversy. I pledge myself to avoid carats and processes, to ignore the very existence of decimal fractions, and to confine myself in this paper to such simple statements on the subject in hand as may conveniently be phrased in the Queen's English.

Gold, then, is a particularly inert and chemically stable substance, little given to entering into combination with other elements, and satisfied to remain in the virgin state without any violent elective hankering after a morganatic union with that all-pervading corruptor and demoralizer, oxygen. It is also, alas! as most of us know to our sorrow, a very rare and infrequent metal, being one of the elements which enter least in point of quantity into the composition of the earth's crust. So far as we can judge from the chemical examination of rocks exposed at the surface, the commonest metals in the shell of our planet are aluminium, calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sodium, which are largely present in the formation of granite, clay, limestone, chalk, dolomite, gneiss, and most of the other best-known deposits. It is a noteworthy fact, too, that these

are also the lightest of all metals-everybody has seen the common Mechanics' Institute experiment of making sodium swim on water-an observation whose true significance will shortly become somewhat more apparent. After them in frequency come iron, manganese, and barium, which are far heavier, and whose compounds do not form nearly such large masses of material at the earth's surface. Rarer still are copper,

tin, lead, and zinc, occurring only in a few scattered spots; and rarest of all are silver, mercury, gold, and platinum, which are among the heaviest of all the elements, and are never found anywhere except in extremely small quantities.

What are the obvious conclusions to which such facts and others like them seem to point? Clearly these. The heavier substances composing the mass of our planet are mostly to be found where one would naturally expect them

at the bottom, or, in other words, near the centre of the earth; while the lighter bodies are equally to be seen where a sensible man would look to discover them at the top, or, in other words, on or near the earth's surface. The outermost layer of all on our planet is composed of the extremely light gases which make up the atmosphere-oxygen, nitrogen, and carbonic acid; the next layer consists mainly of water, composing the ocean; within that comes a stratum of not very solid rock, principally built up of the lighter metals, aluminium, calcium, magnesium, and so forth, combined with the lighter metalloids, oxygen, silicon, and carbon, in more or less loose and spongy compounds; while at the bottom of all, as far as our ignorance of the earth's centre will permit us to guess, must lie first a layer of heavier materials, as Durocher originally suggested, represented by the dense and ponderous lavas and basalts occasionally brought up to the surface by volcanic agencies; and inside that again, a still heavier core, composed perhaps of the weightiest metals and metalloids in a very close state of aggregation.

However this may be, and it seems natural to suppose that the heaviest matter should sink to the bottom, it is at any rate certain that gold, silver, mercury, and platinum are heavy metals

The miserable and inconsiderable fraction of gold actually existing within workable distances at the present day in the crust of this planet is all dispersed in very tiny quantities over various parts of the earth's surface. A great deal of it is diffused in absolutely valueless amounts, mostly in the form of chloride, through the mass of other rocks, where it will never probably be worth the trouble of extraction. The remainder is chiefly obtained in larger but still very petty lumps, in veins of quartz or other rock, and in nuggets either on the beds of modern streams or in the alluvial deposits of ancient rivers. But where did the gold originally come from, and how did it get there? It can hardly be doubted nowadays that the ultimate source of all nuggets and alluvial gold is to be found in the veins of auriferous quartz. And how did the gold get into the quartz, again? Well, that question goes all of a piece with the question as to the origin of metallic veins generally, and must be answered by Mr. Phillips on the same broad principles. For metallic veins are now almost certainly known to be masses of rubble, or dripping, so to speak, filling up gaps and fissures in the natural rock that spreads around them. The material that composes them got filtered into the fissure by flowing water, which brought the metal and other rubble in solution with it. Thus, in the last resort, we must account for the presence of gold in quartz veins by supposing that both the quartz and the gold were carried to their present position by the agency of water, and were deposited in the sides and walls of the fissure until at last they filled it up entirely. If this view be correct, and it is the one held by Mr. Phillips and many other great

mining authorities, we must conclude that the final source of all our gold deposits, whether from pockets, placers, quartz veins, or gossans, is the minute quantity of gold diffused in the pure state, or as a chloride or other compound, through the mass of all the surrounding or underlying rocks.

Mr.

There must be very little gold in the laterally surrounding rocks, however, for there is not much to boast of even in the richest and most auriferous quartz. Probably whatever little of the precious metal exists at all dispersed through the granite and gneiss of the underlying crust must exist in extremely minute quantities, and perhaps in the form of diffuse chloride. This chloride might be dissolved out by percolating water, and so introduced together with the quartz into the gap or fissure. Daintree, indeed, found by experiment that if a speck of gold were placed in a solution of the chloride, the gold would gradually grow into a small grain on any piece of wood or cork introduced into the liquid. In other words, the metal contained in the chloride would come out from its combination as native gold, and unite with the tiny speck of pure metal which served it as a nucleus. It is not improbable that the gold in quartz got similarly deposited round a common centre, so that in the most literal sense it may perhaps be true (in spite of Aristotle's dogmatic statement to the contrary) that money grows, though very slowly.

It is a pleasant thought indeed, for the poor man, to know that gold is even now still growing. Mr. Brough Smyth has shown that it can be deposited nowadays in appreciable quantities within comparatively short periods. Bits of mineralized timber and beams from the galleries of the older workings in Australian mines have been found to exhibit, under the microscope, particles of gold, intermixed with crystals of iron pyrites, all through the central parts of the wood; and this gold must, of course, have gathered there from solution in water during the few years that have elapsed since the first discovery of the precious metal in Australia. Uhrich similarly notes that in the golddrifts auriferous pyrites is often found incrusting or replacing roots and twigs ;

Mr.