away; but long ere the allotted time elapsed, the necromantic order was duly obeyed. Two cannonading knocks came to the door, of a kind not to be mistaken. The women shrank together from mere habit, while John only laughed heartily. 'Now,' said he, 'see that the parlour-door is shut; for I am going to make the real and genuine ghost come to the back of it, and play Old Scratch in good earnest.' Here again he was not disappointed. The scratching came as predicted; and John, rising and opening the door, re-introduced to the parlour the household cat of the Windyknowe family.

'Here is the identical ghost,' he began, good folks all, which has bothered us so long. This four-footed gentleman having a taste for wandering abroad at e'en, has found the doors closed on him since the nights grew langer and chilly; and has accordingly found out for himsel a pass of entrance of the most ingenious kind. By one spring he reaches the knocker; that is knock the first of the ghost. By a second clever and instantaneous jump, he lands in the shot-hole above the door; and, in leaving the knocker, he performs knock the second of the ghost. From the shot-hole he leaps with ease into the passage on the middle storey. I was in the garden watching, and saw the whole proceeding; but I honestly own to you, that it wasna till I cam into this room, and heard you tell of the cat's scratching and entrance just before-and till I found his back quite wet besides—that the truth broke in on me like a flash o' lightning. The cat had been out in the very shower that damped mysel! He had come inI wasna lang in conceiving how. I took him to the kitchen; and after first convincing mysel more fully by a visit to the knocker, I put him out o' doors, and confident of what would happen, I conjured him in again, as you saw. Now, good people all, what do I deserve for unmasking the fearfu ghost of Windyknowe?'

The well-pleased father called him a sharp and spunky chield;' the equally delighted mother said 'he was a guid lad, and a credit to a' connected wi' him;' while the now smiling sisters gave him a reward that many a dashing bachelor would have envied. The younger brother, a manly fellow, shook his senior by the hand, and said, 'Jock, I'll never be your match at onything. I think I'll e'en

stick by the stilts, and be content wi' being your ploughman.' 'Hout, lad,' said the other, returning the friendly grasp, 'you've ten times mair gumption than me about a farm. Nae fears of you.'

From the time alluded to in our story, no one at Windyknowe ever troubled himself or herself more with the solution of such a question as that long afterwards introduced by the Pseudo-Ethiops, 'Who's dat knocking at de door?'

CHINESE APHORISMS.

The following curious aphorisms throw some light on the controverted question of Chinese civilisation. They are extracted from a book called 'The Book of the Way and the Truth,' by Lao-tseu, a philosopher who lived 600 years before Christ. It is translated by M. Stanislaus Julien, Professor of the Chinese Language at Paris. As yet, we are far from having reached even the moral height of the Chinese philosopher; and while waiting for the diffusion of his morality among his own countrymen, we may as well examine whether we have nothing to learn from him; and whether the vices of ambition, vanity, presumption, arrogance, covetousness, and inhumanity, which he denounces, have entirely disappeared from among us:

Men of superior virtue are ignorant of their virtue; men of inferior virtue do not forget their virtue. Men of superior virtue practise it without thinking of it; men of inferior virtue practise it with intention. :

I possess three precious things; I hold and possess them as a treasure:-the first is called affection (love of mankind); the second, economy; the third, humility. I have affection, therefore I can be courageous. I have economy, therefore I can expend largely. I dare not be the first, and therefore I may become (I am fitted to become) the chief of all men. But now men leave affection to abandon themselves to courage; they leave economy to give themselves up to profusion; they leave the lowest place to seek the highest. These things lead to death.

When heaven desires to save a man, it gives him affection to protect him.

Great passions necessarily expose their possessor to great sacrifices.

He who knows how to suffice to himself, is safe from dishonour. He who knows when to stop, never stumbles or falls.

There is no greater misfortune than not to be able to suffice to one's-self. There is no greater calamity than the desire of acquiring.

The sage relishes what is without savour. He avenges the injuries he receives by benefits. He begins by easy things when he meditates difficult things; by small things when he meditates great.

The saint seeks not to do great things; for that reason he can accomplish great things. He who thinks many things easy, is sure to encounter numerous difficulties. Hence it happens that the saint who esteems everything difficult, encounters no difficulty to the end of his life.

A tree of large circumference sprang from a root as delicate as a hair; a tower of nine storeys arose out of a handful of earth; a journey of a thousand lis began by a step.

Be attentive to the end as well as to the beginning, and then you will not fail.

To know, and to think that we know not, is the highest pitch of merit. Not to know, and to think that we know, is the common malady of men. If you are afflicted at this malady, you will not be infected with it.

The saint clothes himself in coarse raiment, and hides precious gems in his breast.

Beware of thinking your dwelling too small for you; beware of becoming disgusted with your lot.

The net of heaven is immense; its meshes are wide, yet nobody escapes.

The sage fears glory as much as ignominy. Glory is something low. When a man has it, he is filled with fear; when he has lost it, he is filled with fear.

You may trust the government of the empire to the man who fears to undertake to govern the empire.

The most excellent arms are instruments of the sage. He uses them only when he cannot dispense with them, and places above all things calm and repose.

If he triumphs, he does not rejoice. To rejoice at victory, is to love to kill men. He who has killed a multitude of men ought to lament over them with tears and sobs.-Athenæum.

Extinguish vanity in the mind, and you naturally retrench the little superfluities of garniture and equipage. The blossoms will fall of themselves when the root that nourishes them is destroyed.-Steele.

NATURE IN MOTION.

GRAINS AND GRASSES.

Most important for the life of man, and therefore his most faithful companions in his own great journeys, are the grasses. It is these which mainly feed him and domestic animals. Tropical regions certainly produce the bread-fruit, cocoa-nut and date, which support man spontaneously all the year round; but they are bound to and confined within small districts, and cannot be transplanted. Providence, therefore, has endowed some grasses-and these the most essential to man-with greater flexibility of structure, so that he may carry them with him wherever he wanders. He is, after all, not the master of creation; he cannot at will alter the natural distribution of vegetables, to suit his pleasure or to satisfy his wants. Hence he has been compelled to choose, all over the world, among the 4000 varieties of grasses which adorn our generous earth, some twenty kinds only, which will in one summer, in a few months, produce rich food, independent of the dry heat of the tropics and the rigid cold of the north. It is they which mark the periods in man's history; with them came everywhere civilisation in the change from a wandering, pastoral life, to the higher grade of permanent agriculture. Thus, the great phases of man's history are written also on the green pages of the vegetable world.

Their

At a very early period, already these cerealia must have come from the Eden of God into the fields of man. subsequent path may be distinctly traced from nation to nation; but the unfathomable antiquity of their first culture is clearly seen in the fact that, in spite of the most careful researches, the genuine natural home of the more important varieties has never been discovered. Their original source is wrapped in the same mystery which hides the first history of those domestic animals that have accompanied man all over the globe since his earliest migrations. They are, in truth, homeless. After tracing them up through a few centuries, we reach traditions and myths only, which invariably point to the gods themselves as the first givers of these rich blessings. In India Brahma descended from heaven for that purpose, in Egypt Isis; Greece owned the gift to her Demeter, Rome to Ceres. The ancient Peruvians even had

similar legends about the origin of maize, which the bold Spaniards, who invaded their ancient kingdom, found cultivated on sacred ground around the Incas' Temple of the Sun, at an elevation of 12,000 feet above the sea. The ripened grain was solemnly sacrificed to their god, or distributed among the people, who ascribed to it miraculous powers. But, setting these fables aside, both tradition and history point invariably to the East as the land from which these grasses first came. Myths even lose them on the high table-lands of Asia, where, it has been conjectured, a late and last rise of the land in distant ages, and a sudden elevation of mountains, may have scattered them, so that they can no longer be found even in their original fatherland. Now they are met with only cultivated or run wild, and even ancient Sanscrit has no proper word for them, but calls wheat already food of barbarians, thus indicating its north-western origin.

Not all nations, however, can lay equal claim to the distribution of these noble gifts of nature. It is the Caucasian races alone who have caused the migrations of the most important plants from their original home, wherever that may be, to the four quarters of the globe. Europeans have, by degrees, transplanted to their own land all the characteristic plants of other races. They have fetched the finer fruits, the almond, apricot, and peach, from Persia and Asia Minor; they have brought the orange from China, transplanted rice and cotton to the shores of the Mediterranean, and carried maize and potatoes from America to Europe. But the influence of these races, in changing the natural distribution of plants, is even more evident in the colonies which they have established abroad. These they have endowed not only with their own vegetables, but also with those which would not flourish in Europe, but might thrive in more favoured regions. Thus we find all European corn-plants in every part of America; the vine has been carried to Madeira and the Canaries, to the southern parts of Africa and America; rice and cotton are raised in vast quantities in the United States and in Brazil; nutmeg and clove have found their way to Mauritius, Bourbon, and the West India Islands, and tea is now cultivated in Brazil, India, and Java. Other races have done but little: the Arabs

helped to diffuse cotton-which the ancients already knew in India, and later in Egypt-coffee, sugar, and the datepalm; the Chinese have imported cotton from Hindostan, and the Japanese tea from China.

The earliest grains known in Europe were undoubtedly wheat and barley, although even the oldest authors are at variance as to their first home. Charred grains of both are found in Pompeii, and pictures on the walls of the silent city show quails picking grains out of a spike of barley. The Bible, Homer, and Herodotus, already mention them as widely diffused, and Diodorus Siculus even speaks of the belief entertained by many, that wheat grew wild in the Leontine fields and several other places in Sicily. So certain it is that antiquity itself was at a loss where to fix the original abode of these grasses; all references, however, point to India; and yet Humboldt tells us, that the varieties there found in our day bear unmistakeable evidence that they were once cultivated, and have but recently become outcasts. The Spaniards carried wheat to North America; a negro slave of the great Cortes was the first who cultivated it in New Spain, beginning with three grains which he had accidentally found among the rice brought out as provisions for the army. At Quito, they show to this day, in a Franciscan convent, the earthen vessel which had contained the first wheat sown there by a monk, a native of Flanders, in front of his convent, after cutting down the original forest. The great Humboldt says justly, in connection with this fact, would that the names had been preserved, not of those who made the earth desolate by bloody conquests, but of those who intrusted to it first these its fruits, so early associated with the civilisation of mankind. Barley, which Homer mentions as the food of his heroes' horses, has at least this merit, that it is the most widely-spread of all the nutritious grasses. It is known from the utmost boundary of culture in Lapland, down to the elevated plains near the equator.

At a much later period, rye was brought to Europe; at the time of Galenus it found its way through Thracia into Greece, and Pliny speaks of it as having been brought from Tauria by Massilian merchants; in his day it was occasionally met with in the neighbour

hood of Turin. Serbian Wendes brought it in the seventh century to Germany, where Charlemagne at once distinguished its great importance, and wisely encouraged its culture, so that it soon spread over the Continent, and now sustains at least one-third of its inhabitants. This grass also was apparently found growing wild in the Caucasus; but more careful observations have since shown that the presumed originals were a different species: their stems were so brittle, that they could not be thrashed. More recently still, oats were brought to Europe from the East, and whilst in Greece they were only used as green fodder, Pliny already represents the Germans as living upon oat groats, a dainty which they have by no means abandoned since.

Rice seems at a very early period of European history to have acquired no small importance among the more widelydiffused grasses. Hence we can more easily follow its gradual migrations from its home in India, to which even the Sanscrit name Vri points, and where the Danish missionary, Klein, believes that he found it growing wild, to various parts of the world. In the East, we know, it was from the times of antiquity the principal article of food; at the time of Alexander the Great, it was cultivated as far as the lower Euphrates, and from thence it was carried to Egypt. The Romans do not seem to have known it. The Arabs, however, brought it, after their great conquests in Africa, Sicily, and Spain, to southern Europe. North America knows it only since the beginning of the last century, but produces now a large proportion of all the rice consumed in the Old World.

The New World claims maîze alone as its own indigenous product among the nutritious grasses. But even this is not allowed without some opposition. Theophrastus speaks of a certain peculiar wheat, with grains of the size of an olive kernel, which came from India; and many believe that this cannot have been anything else but maize. They try to strengthen their position by the fact, that not one of the many carefullysearching travellers in America has ever yet found maize growing otherwise than cultivated, or evidently run wild. Its names in European languages certainly refer to the East. Germany and Italy call it Turkish wheat,' and the Greeks

also point with their 'Arabic wheat' to an oriental home.

The American continent has long had the merit of being, at least, the original home of the potato. It was said to grow wild in Peru, Chili, and Mexico, but learned botanists and careful observers have since ascertained that the tuber there found is not the common parent, but only a different species of the numerous genus to which the potato belongs. Another curious evidence is, that in Mexico itself, only quite recently, attempts have been made along the coast to raise potatoes, mainly for the purpose of giving to Europeans, in the so-called home of that most useful plant, the favourite vegetable of their own mother country. But alas! they have stoutly refused to grow any longer in the presumed land of their fathers, and every effort has so far signally failed.

As every great good has its necessary evil, and as every army of brave soldiers is almost inevitably followed by crowds of stragglers and robbers, so man also has been compelled to take along with these eminently useful grasses their inseparable companions, a whole rabble of weeds, thorns, and thistles. Most of these, as now found in our fields, came, without doubt, with the cerealia. In still larger numbers, however, and without the agency of man, certain other plants attach themselves to the lord of creation, and follow him wherever he goes, and builds himself huts. These seem not to be bound to their kinsfolk, the grains and grasses, but to man's own immediate home; they settle with never-failing punctuality around his house, near to his stable, or luxuriate on his dunghill. Travellers can thus trace, as the celebrated Augustin St Hilaire did in Brazil, by the mere presence of weeds, even in the midst of a desert, the place of abandoned and utterly destroyed settlements. Stranger still is it, that the different races of men have different kinds of weeds following in their wake, so that a careful observer can in travelling see at once, by merely noticing the prevailing weeds, whether Europeans or Asiatics, Germans or slaves, Negroes or Indians, have dwelt at certain places. It was not without good reason, then, that some of our Indian tribes called the common plantain in their language 'the white rian's footsteps;' a simple but distinct vetch marks in like manner even now, long after the entire

abandonment of the land, the former dwelling-places of Norwegian colonists in Greenland. Historians, also, may thus learn yet many a lesson, even from weeds, as to the direction and length of the great migrations of the human race. One of the most remarkable instances of the kind is perhaps the almost universal dispersion of the so-called Jamestown weed. It came at first from India, whence gipsies carried it over the wide world, making constant use of its medicinal virtues and vices. They always kept it on hand, and even raised it around their encampments, and thus it followed their trace from the far East to the far West.

One peculiar effect of this migration in masses is, that certain plants, first introduced by man, have subsequently become so generally diffused, independent of his agency, as to displace in some instances the whole original flora of a country. The rich pampas of South America have thus been overrun with the artichoke and peach-tree of another continent; immense tracts are now covered with these intruders from abroad. and rendered useless as pastures. Even islands have not escaped this fate. In St Helena, original plants have almost entirely disappeared, and made room for those which have been brought there from Europe and Asia. In eastern China the population is so dense, and the culture of the soil so high, that, with the exception of a few water-plants in skilfully-flooded rice fields, all the plants which originally grew wild there have been driven out. The whole land is now exclusively covered with grains raised by the hand of man, and the botanist finds, in the low lands at least, not a single plant which is not artificially cultivated.

Some plants thus literally conquer a country, and banish the native inhabitants; others disappear, not before enemies of their own race, but emigrate because of climatic changes. Palestine, which was once a land flowing with milk and honey, where the grape and the date abounded, is now utterly sterile. The spoiler is fallen upon her summerfruit and her vintage; joy and gladness are taken from the plentiful field, and her plants are gone over the sea. Our common clover has distinctly marked its travelling-stations; requiring much moisture, it left Greece when her plains were scorched and withered; Italy could not hold it, after repeated devastations, when

it made its way into southern Germany; from thence it is even now gradually wandering towards the moister regions of the north. No Pythagoras need forbid his disciples now the use of the bean, for Egypt is no longer able to produce it. The wine of Mareotis also, that inspired the guests of Cleopatra, and whose praises Horace has sung in such graceful verses, grows no more. The conscience-stricken murderer would find no shelter, in our day, in the pine forest of Poseidon, where to lie in wait for the guests that wandered joyfully to the great festivals of Greece; the pines have long since left the plain, with its hot, dry climate, and moved up to the cooler mountains.

It need hardly be added, that all the finer fruits also have come to us from the East. The precious grape, the cooling cherry, the pomegranate and the peach, in fine, all the luscious gifts of autumn, we owe to the Orient. Italy is not originally

The land where the lemon-tree blows, In darker leaves bower'd the gold orange glows,'

for Seville oranges and lemons came to Europe only through the Arabs. The latter are not even found on the walls of Pompeii, and the common orange, which is a Chinese by birth, was brought to Europe first by bold Portuguese sailors.

In Europe, these fruits lingered for a time, were remodelled from their first rough shape, developed and refined, and then sent, ennobled in shape and quality, across the broad Atlantic. There they have rapidly spread from state to state, and are even now on their way, through California, back to their original home. Strange it is, that as Europe has never returned any similar gifts for the many presents it has received from the East, so America also has given to Europe nothing in return for her many kindnesses. For even tobacco is not accepted as a western gift by all botanists. Although it is said that the Spaniards found it used in Mexico medicinally, especially in the treatment of wounds, and saw it smoked there, as the English did in Virginia, still it was certainly known as early as 1601 in Java and China, and there is good reason to believe at an even earlier date in China. Now, as tobacco did not reach Europe before 1559, when it was first used in Portugal—and, consequently, in Europe-as medicine, it may at least have been known in eastern Asia long before the discovery of Ame