tuous pleasures of Xerxes, Cleopatra, or the later Caesars; and yet it is certain that unless the subjects of monarchs like these had pursued their private business successfully, amassed for tunes of their own, brought up families, and increased in numbers, the monarch could not have been arrayed with such luxury; for royal revenues come from taxation, and the richest kings and nobles take but a percentage from the general wealth. The customs of one nation are borrowed by others; Moses, Lycurgus, Solon, among the great lawgivers, framed codes each for his own people after observing the institutions of other and older countries, and considering how best to adapt them. Government has rightly been likened to a coat which is cut differently to fit each figure, each nation; and, more than this, the garb itself may differ in pattern, since the object is to clothe different communities appropriately to the tastes and habits of each. We shall continue to regret, then, that the ancient writers have left us so little real illustration concerning the habits of these carlier peoples-how they worked and sported, and what was their intercourse and mode of life. Research in archæology may yet supply such information in a measure; and of the institutions, the embodied customs, we have, fortunately, some important remains. No contribution survives, more valuable to this end, than the books of Roman jurispru· dence which were compiled under Justinian. Though one of the lesser rulers of that once illustrious empire, he has left a fame for modern times more conspicuous than that of Julius or Augustus Cæsar; aud this is because he brought into permanent and enduring form for the guidance and instruction of all succeeding ages the wisest laws, the best epi tome of human experience, the broadest embodiment of customs, which ever regulated ancient society in the mutual dealings of man and man,

As for the progress of our modern society which emerges from the mediæval age succeeding the Roman collapse, its advance in knowledge and the arts, in the successive changes of manners and pursuits, there is much yet to be gathered and exposed to view for illustration; though with respect to England we owe much to Macaulay for setting an example of investigation upon that broader line which Niebuhr and others of his school had initiated for Roman history. And Macaulay achieved the additional triumph of making such investigation attractive. Statutes and judicial reports (to quote Daniel Webster) are overflowing fountains of knowledge respecting S. Mis. 170--4

the progress of Anglo-Saxon society, from feudalism down to the full splendor of the commercial age. And from the modern invention of printing, let us add, and particularly since the growth and development of the modern press, we find (with all the faults of fecundity and fallibility which are peculiar to journalism) a picture of the world's daily life set forth which far surpasses in its vivid and continuous delineation any collection of ancient records. Our modern newspaper may pander for the sake of gain; it may avow no higher aim in affairs than to please a paying constituency; and yet, for better or worse, it wields and will continue to wield an immense power. The reporter may be brazen-faced, inclined to scandalous gossip and ribaldry; the news may be spread forth disjointed, founded on false rumor, requiring correction; editorial comments may be willfully partisan, or thundered from the Olympus height of a safe circulation; but, even at its worst, so long as it is duly curbed by the laws of libel so essential for the citizen's protection, what with advertisements, business news, the discussion of current topics, the description of passing events and the transient impression made by them, our newspaper holds the mirror up to modern society; while at its best, journalism sits in her chariot, pencil in hand, like that marble muse herself in our national capitol, over the timepiece of the age. The newspaper's truest revelation is that unconscious one of the passions and prejudice of the times, and of that cast of popular thought under which events were born; it preserves imperishable the fashion prevailing, for posterity to look upon with reverence or a smile. But in the present age the journalist should beware how he presents his columns to bear the double weight of universal advertiser and universal purveyor of knowledge, lest he make a chaos of the whole. As in the former centuries records were scanty, so in the century to come they will be found superabundant, unless fire or delugo diminish them. Pregnant facts, such as in the past we search for in vain, lie buried under prevalent methods, in bushel-heaps of worthless assertion. To know the old era, you must search with a lantern; to know the new era, you must winnow.

Research is a fitting word to apply in historical studies; for by this word we import that one is not content to skim the surface of past events, but prefers to probe, to investigate, to turn the soil for himself. It is original exploration which makes such studies attractive and stimulating. We walk the

streets of buried cities and roam through the deserted houses, once instinct with life, piercing the lava crust of careless centuries; we place our hearts and minds, richer by accumulated experience, close to the passions and intellects of an earlier age; and we listen to the heart beat of a race of mankind who reached forward, as our own race is reaching and as all races reach in turn, to catch the omens of a far off destiny. The grand results and the grand lessons of human life are ours in the retrospect, and in the retrospect alone. And while retrac ing thus the foot-prints of the past, we shall do well if we deduce the right moral; if we judge of human actions dispassionately and as befits scholars of riper times and a broader revelation; if we keep under due constraint that laudable but dangerous passion for new discovery, so as neither to revive buried calumnies nor to weigh evidence with a perverted bias to novelty. Let our judgment give full force to the presumption that the long-settled opinion is the true one, and let our spirit of research be imbued at all times with the fearless purpose to know and to promulgate the truth.

THE ORIGIN OF THE NATIONAL SCIENTIFIC AND EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS OF THE UNITED STATES.*

By G. BROWN GOODE, Ph.D., LL.D., Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, in charge of the U. S. National Museum.

"Early in the seventeenth century," we are told, "the great Mr. Boyle, Bishop Wilkins, and several other learned men, proposed to leave England and establish a society for promot ing knowledge in the new Colony [of Connecticut], of which Mr. Winthrop, their intimate friend and associate, was ap pointed Governor."

"Such men," wrote the historian, "were too valuable to lose from Great Britain, and Charles the Second having taken them under his protection in 1661, the society was there established, and received the title of The Royal Society of London.' ”‡

For more than a hundred years this society was for our country what it still is for the British colonies throughout the world-a central and national scientific organization. All Americans eminent in science were on its list of Fellows, among them Cotton Mather, the three Winthrops, Bowdoin, and Paul Dudley in New England; Franklin, Rittenhouse, and Morgan in Pennsylvania; Banister, Clayton, Mitchell, and Byrd in Virginia, and Garden and Williamson in the Carolinas, while in its "Philosophical Transactions" were published the only records of American research.§

*Revised and corrected to July 15, 1890.

John Winthrop, F. R. S. [1606-'76], elected Governor of Connecticut in 1657.

¦ Eliot, John, Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Characters in New England. Salom, 1809.

The first meetings of the body of men afterwards organized as the Royal Society appear to have taken place during the Revolution and in the time of Cromwell, and as early as 1645, we are told by Wallace, weekly meetings were held of “diverse worthy persons inquisitive into natural philosophy and other parts of human learning, and particularly of what has been called the New Philosophy, or Experimental Philosophy," and it is more than