Montreal, August 26th, 1884.

The Allan steamship Parisian-by which I have sailed from Liverpool-is four hundred and fifty feet long and something under six thousand tons burden, and yet, though I am sitting at a window at Montreal looking over wooded hills, a thousand miles from the Straits of Belleisle, where we left the ocean, she is lying alongside the quay close by. The water way by the River St. Lawrence into the heart of British North America is so wonderful that it is taken for granted. But the appearance of this huge steamer among the cornfields of an inland region is not so strange as that of the surroundings will be when I go farther westward into the very centre of the American continent. I shall then long lose sight of land and feel as though ocean-tossed, though it will be only by the waves of fresh-water lakes. Their presence in the middle of this great country, too, is not merely remarkable in itself. It also indicates endless and manifold channels which supply them, or which they use in dispatching their surplus water to the great salt sea.

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We have had an unusually rough passage from Liverpool, since we dropped into a "depression as it was "crossing the Atlantic" on its way to "develop energy on the coasts of Great Britain and Norway." It is very interesting to note how the barometer dips down while a ship crosses a cyclone. It is well named a "depression." Our captain said that ours was the roughest voyage he had had this season. But we carried the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and many of its members, and so sailed with a reserve of human energy which, wholly rose above that of the ocean. The "mechanical section" should have taken a few barrels of oil wherewith to lay the waves. However, as it was, I never saw such a parcel of boys in my life. We had "tugs of war"-made possible by ropes which grinning sailors brought-between "Chemistry and Geology" and other "sections," between married and unmarried, between smokers and non-smokers (in which the latter and the bachelors were heavily beaten), and many other portions of our company. Besides these were hopping matches, races, auctions, mock lectures, concerts, to say nothing of incessant shovel-board and seaquoits. There were, however, graver phases of life to be found among us. We had services on the two Sundays which we spent at sea; and our philosophers, in company with a number of steerage emigrants, sang away like a Sunday school. It was a jubilant voyage. I never saw so large a proportion of passengers present themselves (though sometimes with much exercise of moral courage) at every meal, however much the ship might roll and pitch. And she did pitch. Heavy masses (not sprinklings or splashes) of spray flew over her funnels, which were some hundred yards distant from the bows; and when we tried

to photograph waves three of us had to hold the legs of the camera-stand while others steadied those of the artist. Then too we found ourselves for a while in the region of ice. The thermometer went down to 42°, from the 93° in the shade which it had just reached at Greenwich, and we saw "bergs." They were the first I had ever seen. One tall white jagged island, steady as an inland rock, which we passed close by, was bombarded by our photographers as long as it remained within range. We had, moreover, an experience of fog much about the same time, and as we were going fast enough to smash the Parisian up if we had run into heavy ice, we were not sorry when the screams of the fog-horn ceased and we slipped out once more into a clear sea. Altogether we had a unique voyage, and the way in which mind triumphed over matter speaks well for British science.

The run up the St. Lawrence is very striking. Hills with marked outline, and mostly wooded, are fringed at the water's edge by a succession of white and red villages. Churches and lighthouses (which might be convertible terms) occur frequently, the former at every seven miles. The hill of Quebec struck me as less than I expected. I will not dwell on the antique quaintness of the town and its population. It is curious to be met by the British flag and the French tongue on landing from a voyage across the Atlantic, and to have the first impressions of America, whi some associate too exclusively with the last supposed products of religious freedom, traversed by nuns and priests, acutely suggestive of mediavalism.

We came here, to Montreal, by a slow express, burning the most bituminous coal that ever was dug up. The region we traversed expresses the condition of Quebec. A very large portion of the country is still primeval forest. Some of this bordered the Grand Trunk Railway by which we travelled, while other parts were thickly studded with the stumps of trees about three feet high, and a little larger than telegraph posts. But there are many thousand homesteads scattered over the land, and marked by rectangular white wooden houses and barns. We passed occasional villages made up by a loose congregation of the same unpicturesque buildings, and each clustered around its church, carrying a bright tin spire. The farming is very rough, and the crops look thin. I saw few sheep or pigs, and no roots whatever. There was a good number of shorthorn cattle. I was surprised at not being able to perceive more barn-door fowls about many of the small farms which we passed, especially as there were many small patches of buckwheat and maize, which are their approved food. I was assured, however, that poultry are reared in large quantities in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario. The reaping-machine was busy in the fields, and the whole view suggested local sufficiency and ugly comfort more than any command of distant markets or large apprehension of agricultural influence. But in fact this last impression would be deceptive, since there are many buyers of small quantities of corn to be found

scattered over Canada as well as over England, and it is the confluence of the product of the small holdings which flows into Europe more than any one originally big stream of wheat which comes, like the water of the Nile, from great central reservoirs. The American farmer has mostly no market proper, but is often met by the buyer, at the station or on the road, who asks how much he wants for his load of corn. This suits those, and they are many, who do not grow corn on a large scale. Indeed, the smallness of the holding marks very much of the common American agricultural position. Some take up land in “sections," ie., farms of 640 acres, but more content themselves with less than the half or quarter of this amount. The average size of Canadian holdings is stated by Professor Brown, of the Guelph Agricultural College, to be about 150 acres. It is this which makes many parts (of the United States especially) to appear more thickly or at least more generally inhabited than portions of

the "old country," where the tillers of the soil are gathered (often far too closely) in villages. On the American continent there is little distinction between the occupier and real worker of the soil. The "farmer" there is the man who works with his own hands; and though he may hire helpers, the "labourer," representing such a class as the English "peasant," who toils continuously on the farm, and sometimes on the same farm for years, or for a life, can hardly be said to exist. The rural population thus in Canada and the United States is as a rule sprinkled evenly over the face of the land. Each owner of a half or quarter section, or less, lives on his own plot, and, with his homestead, including several buildings, spots the view with frequent roofs. These are the more numerous, as in many instances the produce of the land is not stacked, but stored in barns which, being white and of wood, might easily be taken for dwelling-houses at a little distance.

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S an engine must be supplied with coal, a lamp with oil, so must a living organism be supplied with food to live.

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The entrance of food into the human body is evident enough, but the entrance within the body is a profound biological mystery, the solution of which has occupied generations of investigators, and still in certain points remains obscure. whole length of the food canal, beginning at the gullet right away to its termination, is without evident channels of absorption. Food in the stomach, paradoxical as the statement may seem, is outside the body. It is not the food or poison which after death may be there found, but that which has disappeared, in the one case has been subservient to nutrition, in the other case destructive of function.

Something of the way in which food penetrates from the great channel into the smaller has been made known from the chemical purely physical experiments of Professor Graham, and something also has been learnt from a microscopical study of minute transparent forms living in water.

Graham showed that perfectly fluid-tight animal membranes yet allowed diffusion through them; that if you took a piece of intestine, filled it with a solution of salt, and properly securing the cut ends, placed the intestine in distilled water, the salt dialysed through the walls into the distilled water, and could there be recognised by chemical

tests.

A study of certain little living jellies in water, especially of a very common form to be found in most ponds, the amoeba, shows that it takes its food by flowing round it, by embedding it in its jelly, and thus at once digesting and swallowing, while portions for which it has no use, or from which it has exhausted nourishment, are ejected. The phenomena of diffusion through membranes, and the manner by which the amoeba takes its food, fairly explain and elucidate the otherwise incomprehensible problem of how nourishment gets within the tissues of the body. The food comminuted by the teeth, moistened and to some degree changed by the saliva, is further digested in the stomach, and is ultimately reduced to a more or less homogeneous pulpy semi-fluid mass; the liquid portion diffuses directly through the thin-walled blood-vessels, while particles of fat and even of other solid matters become embedded in the amoeba like living cells of the body, and pass into the circulation; for be it noted that the tissues of the body have an individual as well as a collective life, and that the higher animals, including man, the highest of all, are but a crowd of little units of living matter. Take as an example the white corpuscles of the blood-under suitable conditions, even out of the body, they

are in shape, structure, and automatism like the amoeba, and like it flow round and absorb little solid particles, and are even able to work their way through the walls of the minute blood-vessels either out or in. The greatest number of the amœbæ of the body have lost power of moving from place to place, but rooted to one spot have acquired special functions. The amoeba of bone develop, secrete, or maintain from the nourishment brought to them, bone; those of muscle, muscle; those of cartilage, cartilage. The stationary life units are nourished by those that are moving.

The purely physical methods of dialysis or diffusion give no explanation of the entry of solid particles of very minute albuminous and fatty particles into the blood, yet it is certain this entry takes place, and the curious manner of the thing is this-covering the velvet pile of the stomach and intestine there are loads of cells; these, in true amoeba fashion, become loaded with "fat and other matters, and they then work their way into the blood stream through the walls of the bowels, becoming white corpuscles, and bearing with them their tiny burdens; nor does the great stream of wandering cells alone bear solid nutriment, but also gases-the red corpuscles of the blood, each bring a tiny load of oxygen from the lungs, deliver the oxygen up to the tissues, go back to the lungs again to take another load, and so on for ever. Looking at these processes as a whole, I have elsewhere perhaps rather fancifully described physiological human life as follows:— Hence each human unit is in himself a small cosmos, a peripatetic city; at the gates of sight, odour, feeling, and hearsay, stand sentinels; along the fluid highways float with the stream oxygen-laden boats, discharge their cargoes and return; and along the same channels flow the food of the inhabitants. In every day and night there are many births and many deaths. Each citizen has his appointed place and avocation; those in the liver manufacture the bile and glycogen; those in the brain store up as in a Faurebattery the nervous force; high up in the tower beneath a thatch of hair sit two rulers, the one a geist or intelligence, the other a sleepless automaton; the office of the higher is the direction of what are called voluntary acts, the office of the lower is to see to the tick-tick of life, the ebbing and flowing of the tides of secretion."

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Not with the foreseeing intelligence of the farmer who garners up corn in the years of plenty for the time of need, but rather with the blind instinct of the bee, does this city of human Bios furnish its stores. The stores are mainly two, a sugar-store, a fat-store.

The sugar-store is for the most part hoarded