Nor was the foodful grass in fle, is secure.

Strange death! for when the this sty fire had drunk
Their vital blood, and the dry nees were shrunk;
When the contracted limbs were c、 imped, e'en then
A waterish humor swelled and oozed again,
Converting into bane the kindly juice
Ordained by nature for a better use,

The victim ox, that was for altars prest,

Trimmed with white ribbons, and with garlands drest,
Sunk of himself without the god's command,
Preventing the slow sacrificer's hand."

This calls to mind the cattle plague which prevailed in England a year or two ago. Virgil, however, proceeds to say that the plague of which he speaks attacked dogs, horses, pigs, and even wild beasts. His description of a horse dying of this mysterious malady is exceedingly vigorous. I copy again from Dryden's translation:

"The victor horse, forgetful of his food,

The palm renounces and abhors the flood.
He paws the ground; and on his hanging ears
A doubtful sweat in clammy drops appears;
Parched is his hide, and rugged are his hairs.
Such are the symptoms of the young disease;
But, in time's process, when his pains increase,
He rolls his mournful eyes; he deeply groans,
With patient sobbing and with manly moans.
He heaves for breath, which, from his lungs supplied,
And fetched from far, distends his laboring side.
To his rough palate his dry tongue succeeds,
And very gore he from his nostrils bleeds.

A drench of wine has with success been used,
And through a horn the generous juice infused;
Which, timely taken, ope'd his closing jaws,
But if too late, the patient's death did cause;
For the too vigorous dose too fiercely wrought,
And added fury to the strength it brought.
Recruited into rage, he grinds his teeth

In his own flesh, and feels approaching death."

The poet proceeds to relate with equal power the dying agonies of an ox, seized with the same disease. He says, too, that the mighty fish of the sea drifted dead upon the shore, and that venomous snakes died in their holes.

Seven years the poet is said to have expended in the composi tion of the Georgics, and they could all be printed in about sever columns of an ordinary newspaper. Tradition reports that he was in the habit of composing a few lines in the morning, and spending the rest of the day in polishing them. Campbell used to say that if a poet made one good line a week, he did very well; but Moore thought that if a poet did his duty he could get a line done every day. Virgil seems to have accomplished about four lines a week, but then they have lasted eighteen hundred years, and will last eighteen hundred years more.

These poems having raised the reputation of the poet to the highest point, he next undertook to relate in verse the fabled founding of Rome by Eneas, which is the work by which Virgil is chiefly known. It is a noble poem, the product of an exquisite genius and a sublime patience. There is in many of the lines such a happy blending of picturesque meaning and melodious words, that they remain fixed in the mind forever.

Before he had put the last touches to this great work, and while he was travelling in Greece for the purpose of sceing the localities described in it, he was seized with mortal illness, of which he died before he reached home. His journey threw so much new light upon his subject that, in his distress at not being able to use it in perfecting his poem, he left orders for its destruction. Happily, these orders were not obeyed, and the poem was preserved to animate and instruct a hundred generations of men. Virgil died in his fifty-first year.

His works, surviving the loss of almost everything pleasant and good in the dark ages, were among the causes of that revival of literature and science to which we owe the progress which the world has made since. I know not what would have become of the human mind in those dreary centuries of superstition but for the antidote, always secretly working, of Virgil's romantic grandeur and pleasing pictures of happy life, and Horace's chatty and amusing worldliness.

JAMES WATT.

How much more marvellous is truth than fiction! The story of Aladdin and his wonderful lamp is as extravagant a tale as the fancy of man has contrived; but it is a tame and probable narrative compared with some of the facts of science and invention.

Early in the spring of 1765, one hundred and three years ago, on a certain Sunday afternoon, a poor, sickly mechanic was taking a walk in one of the public grounds of Glasgow. He was a mathematical instrument-maker, who kept a very small shop within the grounds of the Glasgow University, and derived & great part of his little income from repairing the philosophical apparatus of that famous institution. His brother mechanics were not very friendly toward him, because he had set up in business without having served a regular apprenticeship. In fact, but for the special favor of the professors of the University, who let to him his little shop in its grounds, he could not have carried on his trade in Glasgow at all. Being thus a kind of interloper, his business was so limited that he could only draw from it, for his own maintenance, fourteen shillings a week, which is, in our currency, about three dollars and a half.

He was in a brown study as he walked in Glasgow Green that Sunday afternoon. Ingenious mechanics will understand his case when we tell them that he had on hand at his shop a puzzling job, and he was thinking how to overcome the difficulties which it presented. All at once, at a point in the road which the people of Glasgow still point out to travellers, the solution of the puzzle occurred to his mind. It flashed on him like lightning, and he walked home relieved and happy.

All this seems very simple and ordinary. The job was of no great consequence in a pecuniary point of view. It was merely the repairing of a working model of the steam-engine belonging to the University; for doing which our mechanic received five pounds eleven shillings sterling. But in the very simplicity of the thing lies the marvel; as in the case of Aladdin, who only had to rub his lamp a little, and lo! a palace rose from the earth like an exhalation. The idea that occurred to that poor Scotch mechanic on Glasgow Green one hundred years ago is to-day, in Great Britain and Ireland alone, doing the work of four hundred millions of men! That is to say, it enables the fifteen millions of adults residing in England, Ireland, and Scotland to do more work, to produce more commodities, than the entire adult population of the globe could do without it. Is there anything in the Arabian Nights more marvellous than that? The name of this modern Aladdin was James Watt. The lamp he rubbed was his own canny Scotch noddle. Ten thousand palaces have sprung from the ground in consequence, and more will spring, until every honest man on earth will inhabit one! That magic thought has clothed the feet of Scotch lassies with stockings, which before were bare, and enabled the poor of many lands to go comfortably dressed who before were clad in

rags.

It is said to require three generations to make a gentleman. We sometimes find that it has taken three generations to produce a genius. The grandfather of James Watt was a teacher of navigation, well skilled in mathematics, and a very ingenious, worthy man. The father of the great inventor was a shipwright, noted for his skill and enterprise. His illustrious son, James, was a feeble, sickly child, and, therefore, much indulged, and not pressed to learn. But, from boyhood, he showed an aptitude for mechanics and natural philosophy which we always observe in the early life of inventors. His father's shops and ship-yards afforded the best school for such a youth, who soon had his own little chest of tools, his own work-bench and his own store of materials. It is recorded of him that, while still a child, he was fond of observing the action of steam from his mother's tea-kettle, wondering at the invisible force that lifted

its lid. As he approached manhood, his father fell into misfortune, which obliged the youth to think of earning his own livelihood. He made his way to London, where he worked a year in the shop of a mathematical-instrument-maker, and then, returning to Scotland, he established himself in business under the protection of the Glasgow University. The learned professors of that institution expected to find in him a competent workman only. They discovered, to their great surprise, that he was an accomplished and profound natural philosopher; willing, indeed, to learn from them, but able, also, to teach them. Such was his ardor in the pursuit of knowledge, that he learned the German language in order to be able to read one book upon mechanics; and, a few years after, he learned the Italian for a similar object. He could turn his hand to anything. Without previously knowing anything about music or musical instruments, he made a very good church organ, and several guitars, violins and violoncellos, some of which are still preserved in Scotland as curiosities.

The model of a steam-engine which was brought to his shop to repair, was a copy of the engines then used in pumping water out of mines, which had been invented about a century before. Steam-engines were then employed for no other purpose. They were cumbrous, clumsy machines, and were run at such an enormous expense for fuel, that they could not be applied to the ordinary purposes of manufacturing. A century before the Christian era the mighty power of steam had been observed, and some attempts had been made to turn it to account. But a great invention, as we have before remarked, is the growth of ages. Many ingenious men had labored to perfect this one, the greatest of all, and they had brought it on so far, that a single improvement alone was wanting to make it available. It was just so with Sir Isaac Newton's sublime discovery of the attraction of gravitation. Previous philosophers had made discoverics that only needed combining to produce the final truth, which, in a happy hour, flashed upon the mind of Newton.

Day after day James Watt sat in his shop pondering his engine. He could not make it work to his satisfaction. It would make a few revolutions and then stop. If he blew the fire to a