would be nothing to us but for our wise heads, for we have to begin two steps further back in our industrial labors than the meanest of the animals, who practice no such craft as that of toolmaking and serve no apprenticeship to any craft. 9. Two-thirds at least of our industrial doings are thus preliminary. Before two rags can be sewed together we require a needle, which embodies the inventiveness of a hundred ingenious brains, and a hand which only a hundred botchings and failures have in the lapse of years taught to use the instrument with skill. It is so with all the crafts, and they are inseparably dependent on each other. The mason waits on the carpenter for his mallet, and the carpenter on the smith for his saw; the smith on the smelter for his iron, and the smelter on the miner for his ore. Each, moreover, needs the help of all the others; the carpenter the smith as much as the smith the carpenter, and both the mason as much as the mason both. 10. This helplessness of the single craftsman is altogether peculiar to the human artist. The lower animals are all polyartists, and never heard of such a doctrine as that of the division of labor. The same bee, for example, markets, and bakes bee-bread, and manufactures sugar, and makes wax, and builds storehouses, and plans apartments, and nurses the royal infants, and waits upon the queen, and apprehends thieves, and smites to the death the enemies of the Amazons. The nightingale, though he is a poet, builds and furnishes his nest without any help from the raven, who despises the fine arts, and the lark does not excuse herself from her household duties because she is an excellent musician. 11. Nor are there degrees of skill among the animal artists. The beavers pay no consulting fees to eminent beaver engineers experienced in hydraulics; the coral insects do not offer higher wages to skilled workmen at reef-building; every nautilus is an equally good sailor; and the wasps, engaged in “just and necessary wars," offer no bounties to tempt veteran soldiers into their armies. The industrialness, then, of man is carried out in a way quite peculiar to himself and singularly illustra tive of his combined weakness and greatness. 12. The most helpless, physically, of animals, and yet the one with the greatest number of pressing appetites and desires, he has no working instincts to secure (at least after infancy) the gratification of his most pressing wants and no tools which such instincts can work by. He is compelled, therefore, to fall back upon the powers of his reason and understanding, and make his intellect serve him instead of a crowd of instinctive impulses, and his intellect-guided hand instead of an apparatus of tools. Before that hand, armed with the tools which it has fashioned, and that intellect which marks man as made in the image of God, the instincts and weapons of the entire animal creation are as nothing. He reigns, by right of conquest as indisputably as by right of inheritance, the king of this world. DR. GEORGE WILSON. ... ... SELECT ETYMOLOGIES.-Acanthus: Gr. akan'thos, the herb bear'sbreech; in architecture, an ornament resembling the foliage of the acanthus. . . . Amazon: a race of female warriors; fr. the Gr. a, without, maz'ōs, a breast; they were so named probably because of their masculine manners. . . . Ambidextrous: able to use either hand; fr. L. am'bo, both, dex'ter, right. . . . Arch (pronounced artsh when prefixed to Anglicised words, and ark, when prefixed to unchanged Greek words): chief, of the first class; fr. Gr. ar'chos, chief, arche, beginning, government, etc.; h., an-archy (without government), arch-angel (ark-), arch-bishop (artsh-), arch-duke (artsh-), arche-type (ar'ke-), archi-tect (ar'ki-), arch-ives (ark-), mon-arch, olig-archy (ol'igos, few), patri-arch, etc. Axe or Ax: Gr. ax'i-nē. . . Caparison: fr. the Spanish caparizon, carcass of a fowl, cover of a saddle. Catalogue: fr. Gr. kat'a, down, and log'õs, a word. Converge: fr. L. con, and ver'go, I bend, I incline; h., di-verge, verge. Coral: Gr. kõral'liðn. . . . Craft: A. S. craft, strength, skill. Currier: L. còr'ium, skin, hide, leather; h., curry, ex-coriate (to strip off the skin). ... Equip: primarily to fit out a ship with things needful; fr. F. esquif, a ship.... Foster: A. S. fostian, to nourish; fr. foder, food, fodder.... Gothic: of or belonging to the Goths, a tribe which took an important part in the overthrow of the Roman empire. . . . Hydraulic : relating to the conveyance of water through pipes; fr. Gr. hu'dōr, water, and au'lòs, a flute, a pipe; h. (fr. hu'dōr and phõb'õs, fear, dread), hydrophobia, etc. ... ... ... ... Nightingale : fr. A. S. niht, night, and galan, to sing. . . Paragon: F. parangon, a pattern or touchstone by which the goodness of things is tried; fr. the Spanish para con, in comparison with. . . . Pyrotechnic: fr. Gr. pur, fire, and tech'ne, art. . . . Sceptre L. scep'trum; fr. Gr. skěp'tron, a staff to lean upon; fr. skěp'tō, I lean.... Socket: dim, of sock; fr. L. soc'cus, a slipper, a sock. taber'na, a hut; h., tavern. S. thurh. Tabernacle: L. tabernaculum, a tent; fr. XCVIII.-ICELAND AND THE ICELANDERS. 1. ICELAND is an island somewhat larger than Ireland. It is situated in the Atlantic Ocean, on the confines of the Arctic Circle, amid regions of ice and snow, yet it gives abundant evidence of the volcanic fires which are slumbering beneath its surface. Dismal tracts of lava, whose gloom is barely relieved by the columns of smoke that are constantly ascending through apertures and fissures in various parts of their surface, traverse the island in almost every direction. 2. A deep valley, one hundred miles wide, covered with lava, sand and ashes, and studded with low volcanic cones, stretches across the island from sea to sea. This valley is a tremendous desert, never approached without dread even by the natives-a scene of perpetual conflict between the antagonist powers of fire and frost, without a drop of water or a blade of grass; no living creature is to be seen—not a bird, nor even an insect. The surface is a confused mass of hardened streams of lava rent by crevices; and rocks piled on rocks, and occasional glaciers, complete the scene of desolation. 3. At the southern end of this valley, which opens to the sea in a wide plain, stands the celebrated volcano, Mount Hecla, five thousand two hundred feet high, and covered with perpetual snow. There are many other volcanoes in the island, but Hecla, from its isolated position, its vicinity to the coast and its terrific eruptions, is the best known. Twentythree violent eruptions are recorded as having occurred between the years 1004 and 1766. One of these continued for six years, spreading devastation over a part of country once the abode of a thriving colony, now covered with lava and ashes. The latest eruption of Mount Hecla was in 1846. 4. The Skaptar Jokul is another of the volcanoes of Iceland. Its eruption in 1783 is one of the most dreadful on record. Before it broke out, the volcanic fire must have been in fearful commotion under Europe, for a tremendous earthquake occurred that year and ruined a large district of Calabria, and a submarine volcano at the same time burned for many weeks in the ocean, thirty miles south-west of Iceland Its fires suddenly ceased, but they burst out with terrific fury from the Skaptar Jokul. The sun was hid for several months by dense masses of vapor, which extended to England and Holland, and clouds of ashes were carried many hundreds of miles to sea. 5. The lava flowed in a stream from twenty to thirty miles broad, which filled the beds of rivers and poured into the sea nearly fifty miles from the place of its eruption. Some rivers at a distance from the stream of lava were heated to ebullition; others were dried up; the condensed vapor fell in snow and torrents of rain; the country was laid waste; famine and disease ensued; and in the course of the two succeeding years one thousand three hundred people and one hundred and fifty thousand sheep and horses perished. The scene of horror was closed by a dreadful earthquake. 6. The most favored portion of this desolate land is on the eastern shore. Here the soil is wonderfully good, and there is more vegetation than in any other part of Iceland. Willows and junipers adorn the valleys, and birch trees, a few feet high, are in one place abundant. The inhabitants are, however, dependent for fuel on the Gulf Stream, which brings driftwood in great quantities from Mexico and the coasts of America, and some, floated down the rivers of Asia, is drifted by currents from the northern shores of Siberia. Hurricanes are frequent and violent in Iceland; and although thunder is seldom heard in high latitudes, Iceland is an exception, for tremendous thunder-storms are not uncommon there-a circumstance attributed to the volcanic nature of the island, as lightning accompanies volcanic eruptions everywhere. The climate of Iceland ist much less rigorous than that of Greenland, and it would be still milder were not the air chilled by the immense fields of ice from the Polar Sea which beset its shores. 7. Among the remarkable features of the island are its hot springs, which in some places throw up a column of water to the height of a hundred feet. These springs abound in many parts of the coast as well as in the interior, and in some cases the waters of the ocean are sensibly heated by their action. The most celebrated springs are the Geysers, situated in the north of the island, where, within the space of a few acres, more than fifty of them may be seen. They are supposed to be caused by the heated vapors which collect in large cavities of the earth, and which at length acquire sufficient force to expel the waters subject to their pressure. The word Geyser signifies, in the Icelandic dialect, "fury." 8. The Great Geyser rises from a mound of flinty earth, deposited by the water, to the height of about thirty feet and extending about two hundred feet across. On the top of this mound is a basin sixty feet wide and seven feet deep, in the centre of which is the pipe or opening through which the water rises. Small eruptions of the Geyser take place every two or three hours, but the great eruption occurs only once in about forty hours. 9. The Icelanders have been noted for the almost unconquerable attachment which they feel to their native island. With all their privations, and exposed as they are to numerous dangers, they live under the practical influence of one of their common proverbs, "Iceland is the best land on which the sun shines." Their language, dress and mode of life have been invariably the same during a period of nine centuries, while those of other nations have been subject to constant change. 10. Accustomed from their earliest years to hear of the character of their ancestors, and of the asylum which their island afforded to science when the rest of Europe was immersed in ignorance and barbarism, the robust Icelanders are animated by a high degree of national feeling. Their early and successful application to the study of the sciences forms a marvel in the history of literature. At a period when the darkest gloom was spread over Europe, the inhabitants of this comparatively barren island were cultivating with success both poetry and history, were finding relaxation in study, while the copious stores of knowledge which they accumulated referred not only to their country, but to distant lands, and have |