Is it asked, Why, if this was the plan and law of Creation, do we not see it producing new species now ?-our reply is, that the reign of man is not exhausted, only. begun. He is now electricity and caloric to the world: is not his genius procreative? is not the telegraph a fine variety? is not the Great Eastern a fine specimen ? In and through the Human World alone Creation is now going on. But, observe: there are no chasms or leaps! The children of Civilization repeat the ignorance and vehemence of ancestral savages, even of animals. Each grade of civilization is developed from the last. There is no independent formation; Greece, and Palestine, and Rome survive. Religion begins far back in the spiritual fern-growths of Judea: Jesus is no independent origin- "the glory of my people Israel "- the flower of their nation and religion. All forms of Christianity are varieties, selected from past forms; the Passover, the Sabbath, the washing of proselytes in baptism, the worship of gods and goddesses, the Platonic and Brahminic Trinity, the vestal celibacy-these have passed only in name and form. It is our old Protean nature at last; the embryo of Limited Monarchy is quickened to Republicanism; the Mother Church conceived in some happier mood, and gave birth from her own womb to the Protestantism which superseded her. Creation never ceases: it is Eternal incubation. A god was cradled in the first germ-cell.

PASSIONS OF THE CURVES.

[From the French of Toussenel.]

DID I not say that it was impossible to touch one branch of the Tree of Science without shaking them all. I had promised myself not to say one word about passional geometry, but how avoid a misfortune when both logic and passion lead you into it! Since I have inadvertently fallen into the hornet's nest, let me try to draw myself out of the scrape by the theory of conic sections.

Q. Why are all the points of the circumference equally distant from the centre, in the circle, first section of the cone, first closed curve? Why are all the radii equal?

A. Because the circle is the figure of friendship, the cardinal passion of infancy, which admits no order, nor rank, nor hierarchy; and where the tone of equality and of familiarity prevails.

Here all individuals are equal, like the radii of the circle, and the form of the group tends fatally to the round. The little Viennese dancers, who had such success on the scene of the great opera of Paris, and who were, I think, thirty-two in number, were never more applauded than when they executed circular evolutions. The figures preferred by childhood invariably affect the round form, the ball, the hoop, the marble; also the fruits which it prefers: the cherry, the gooseberry, the apple, the preserve tart. I am again obliged to stop at the first word, because I feel myself in danger of engaging in the highest considerations of passional gastrosophy and gymnastics, two more new sciences; two notes of a scientific scale whose pivot is passional hygiene, a cardinal science, whose office is to purge the globe and humanity from all their physical and moral maladies.

But, without speaking of gymnastics, or rather, of passional gymnosophy, let us adduce those games of groups of children at the Tuilleries (or other free play-grounds). The analogist, who has observed these games with continued attention, has not failed to remark a characteristic difference in the choice of amusements, and the favorite exercises of the children of the two sexes. It is all natural; the major sex has its strength to develop, the other its grace; each does its best to exercise its muscles in the direction of its destinies. The boy learns to run and to wrestle, because he is destined for the race and the struggle. The girl not being under the same necessity, as she is not destined to contest and to run, but to be contested and run after, the young girl generally abstains from these violent exercises. She knows well that her little feet have not been formed for marching, but for dancing; for woman has this in common with the most charming types of the feline race, that she leaps and bounds with more ease and grace than she runs, and she does not try to force the vocation of her little feet. What, then, has our observer remarked in the character of the games of feminine infancy? He has remarked in the character of these games a decided proclivity toward the ellipse.

I observe among the favorite exercises of feminine infancy, the shuttlecock and the jumping-rope; the shuttlecock, a poor winged heart, that is tossed from one to the other, with all the artifices of coquetry; the rope, the high-school of suppleness, grace, and elasticity. Both the rope and the cord describe parabolic or elliptical curves. Why so? Why yet so young, this preference of

the minor sex for the elliptical curve, this manifest contempt for marbles, ball, and top? Because the ellipse is the curve of love, as the circle is that of friendship. The ellipse is the figure in which God with His artist hand has profiled the form of His favorite creatures, woman, the swan, the Arabian horse, the dove; the ellipse is the essentially attractive form. The ellipse has two foci! Two foci like love; two foci, in each of which all the rays proceeding from the other are fatally absorbed ; as in true love, where not a thought leaves the heart of one of the two lovers, which does not find its resting-place in the other. Is not this shut curve, whose foci mutually absorb their rays, the true image of that world of lovers, which is only peopled with two beings - her and him? Does not the definition of the ellipse answer well to this: Love is the selfhood of two!

Before this explanation, the astronomers were generally ignorant why the planets describe ellipses, and not circumferences, around their pivot of attraction; they now know as much of this mystery as I do. But let us pursue the course of the conic sections.

The ellipse is torn and opens; one of the foci has broken its confinement, and the radii of the other go to seek through the infinite the fugitive focus which they no longer meet. Then ill tongues say that the monotony of the conjugal tie has provoked separation, and, generalizing from the particular case, conclude that marriage is the tomb of love.

But the ellipse may disappear only to be transformed into the parabola; and in this the conscientious analogist finds nothing scandalous, but on the contrary quite natural, that the ellipse, curve of love, should engender the parabola, curve of familism, as love engenders the family. When children come, it is necessary that the exclusive mutual absorption of the parents should exhaust its ardor, and that the selfhood of the two should become that of three, four, or five. One of the foci has disappeared, it is very true, but the tenderness of the father and of the mother now radiates toward the infinite-toward future generations, to which the present generation is linked by children. This faculty of radiation in the parabolical curve explains to you why the parabolic mirror (reverberator) is the most reflecting of all mirrors, why the yellow ray, color of familism, is the most luminous of all the colors of the prism. Decamps, Eugene Delacroix, Diaz, Baron,

who are such great colorists, would perhaps, without my suggestion, be ignorant of this interesting peculiarity of the relation of the yellow ray to the reverberator and maternal love. The physician has his eye open, henceforth, over a new horizon, Passional Optics.

But see how the parabola, in turn, exaggerates and veers toward the hyperbole. After friendship, love; after love, paternity; after paternity, ambition. After the circle, the ellipse; after the ellipse, the parabola; after the parabola, the hyperbole.

The hyperbole is the curve of ambition; the fourth conic section symbolizes the fourth affection. Admire the determined persistence of the ardent asymptote pursuing the hyperbole in headlong eagerness it approaches, it always approaches the aim it desires to attain, but never attains it. Who does not recognize in this expressive image the aspiration of the human soul impelled toward the Infinite by an all-powerful force, always approaching and never attaining it happily never. This perpetual aspiration is evidently poetry; it is art, always dreaming a type of the perfect ideal, which still evades its grasp, yet still grows more beautiful also, and always recalls you more passionately to itself. The beautiful, spring of attraction; the ideal, utopia of to-day, but truth of to-morrow; art, or poetry, powers of incarnating the ideal, of predicting and of anticipating Time!

SPEAKING THE TRUTH.

[From Alger's Oriental Poetry.]

OTAYE from his earliest youth
Was consecrated unto Truth;
And if the universe must die
Unless Otaye told a lie,

He would defy the last fate's crash
And let all sink in one pale ash,
Or ere by any means was wrung
A drop of falsehood from his tongue.

THE CATHOLIC CHAPTER.

THE LAWS OF MENU.

Custom.

Immemorial custom is transcendent law.

*

The roots of the law are the whole Veda, the ordinances and moral practices of such as perfectly understand it, the immemorial customs of good men, and self-satisfaction.

Immemorial custom is a tradition among the four pure classes, in a country frequented by gods, and at length is not to be distinguished from revelation.

Temperance.

The resignation of all pleasures is far better than the attainment of them.

The organs, being strongly attached to sensual delights, can not so effectually be restrained by avoiding incentives to pleasure, as by a constant pursuit of divine knowledge.

But, when one among all his [the Brahmin's] organs fails, by that single failure his knowledge of God passes away, as water flows through one hole in a leathern bottle.

He must eat without distraction of mind.

Let him honor all his food, and eat it without contempt; when he sees it, let him rejoice and be calm, and pray, that he may always obtain it.

Vyasa, the son of Parasara, has decided that the Veda, with its Angas, or the six compositions deduced from it, the revealed system of medicine, the Puranas, or sacred historics, and the code of Menu, "were four works of supreme authority, which ought never to be shaken by arguments merely human." The last, which is in blank verse, and is one of the oldest compositions extant, has been translated by Sir William Jones. It is believed by the Hindoos "to have been promulged in the beginning of time, by Menu, son or grandson of Brahma," and "first of created beings." Brahma is said to have "taught his laws to Menu in a hundred thousand verses, which Menu explained to the primitive world i the very words of the book now translated." Others affirm that they have undergone successive abridgments for the convenience of mortals, "while the gods of the lower heaven, and the band of celestial musicians, are engaged in studying the primary code."

A number of glosses or comments on Menu were composed by the Munis, or old philosophers, whose treatises, together with that from which the subjoined extracts are made, constitute the Dherma Sastra, in a collective sense, or Body of Law. Culluca Bhatta was one of the more modern of these.