difficulty seems to be to find physical proofs
of such a phenomenon having once taken
place. Perhaps an argument in favour of a
very elevated temperature having once
prevailed in the environs of the Baltic, may be
drawn from the great quantities of amber
that are found there. The best naturalists
regard this fossil as a juice, which once
flowed from a tree, and which, buried in the
earth by some natural convulsion, would be
impregnated with mineral vapours, and
acquire a certain degree of consistency. As,
however, the copal, the only kind of known
gum which resembles amber, is brought to
us from Africa and the East Indies, it would
appear that the forests in which amber was
produced, could not have existed in the vicinity
of the Baltic, unless the temperature of
the atmosphere in that quarter had been very
elevated."

It is certainly not extravagant to suppose
that the neighbourhood of the Baltic was at
one time remarkable for excessive heat. We
believe it is allowed by all geologists that
Great Britain was a tropical country at
some remote age, and that at another period
it was arctic.

The world changes, but gradually; and
we have therefore no reason to fear a sudden
extinction by any collision with comet or
rival star. In the meanwhile, if we
particularly wish to make ourselves uncomfortable,
we can do so by thinking of the murrain,
the floods, the potato-rot, and the oidium.

We shall soon have to give up the Comet,
and those of us who must be menacing and
miserable, had better choose their black spot
and make their game while the terrestrial
ball rolls.

THE PAINTER'S PET.

CLAUDE LAFONT was a painter—an artist
in the fullest and completest sense of the
word; for he lived, as it were, in the centre
of a circle of art, and it was through this
medium that the perception of all outward
things came to him; it was under the
influence of this atmosphere that all thoughts
were presented to him.

He lived, therefore, in a world of his own:
realities were to him the things the most
unreal; he mixed as little as possible in the
society of other men, because he found their
presence and conversation disturbed the
beautiful phantoms that, when he was alone, held
him such sweet and genial company. He
cared nothing for the subjects that interested
them: they might barter and traffic, marry
and give in marriage, dupe and be duped—
all these things it only confused and unsettled
him to hear of; the relation of them conveyed
to him no clear or definite idea, while, at
the same time, it disturbed and troubled his
own thoughts and dreams. Alone, he was
never lonely; seated in his studio in an old
arm-chair, with his pipe, he saw through
his half- closed eyes the gracious company
that surrounded him: women lovelier than
angels—  now gorgeous, proud, queen-like—
now soft and holy as the Madonna; now
tearful as Niobe—now young and radiant as
Aurora. Cleopatra passed before him many
times as he sat there: Helen, Clytemnestra,
Guenevere, sad Å’none, frail Rosamond,
murdered Iphigenia, Jephtha's daughter, bending,
an unmurmuring sacrifice, to a mad oath;
Ruth and Griselda, Judith and Jael,—all
great, or good, or beauteous, or fated, or
terrible women named in Scripture, or
history, or fable, visited him at his call. So did
all heroes, all knights, all men of old renown
or later fame, and other visions, beings begot
by his own teeming brain, born of his own
bright fancy, grew into form and maturity,
to be later fixed on the canvas.

In summer-time, with a knapsack, a staff,
and a sketch-book, he would wander forth
wherever the fancy led him; now over the
mountains, now by the sea-shore, now through
woods and valleys, collecting everywhere
fresh ideas, fresh experiences of that nature
without which true art cannot exist; that
nature of which she is born, arid nursed, and
nourished, and inspired; that nature, that if
she seeks to let go its hand and walk alone,
her creations become monsters or pigmies,
which struggle through a weak and ridiculous
existence, and then fall away into an
ignoble tomb.

High up, on the eternal hills, he listened
to the voice of God in the winds that swept
around him. It seemed to him that it was
but the clouds which capped their summits
that veiled from him the glory of His
throne.

Lying on a cliff that overhung the ocean,
far and near were sights and sounds, costly,
and strange, and beautiful. The low immovable
horizon, over whose barrier no mortal
ken might reach; the water that might not
rest day or night, but dashed passionately, or
heaved in slow, unbroken undulations;
indented coves, with fringes of yellow sand;
cliffs with pale, stern, hard faces looking out
to sea, sometimes brightening into a faint
rosy smile, in answer to the sun's ardent
good-morning, or good-night; little valleys
in their laps, with trees, and white cottages,
and silver threads of streams, hurrying to
throw themselves into the bosom of the deep.
And there, about him, beneath him, within
reach of his hand, what minute miracles in
the tiny tangles of the close short grass and
mosses, leaves and stems, buds and blossoms,
roots and seed-vessels, of the unknown,
unnamed plants, hundreds of which went through
all the phases of their existences, completely
and perfectly, in the space of each inch of
ground; while hosts of as minute and as
perfect insects, gauze-winged, rainbow-tinted,
burnished, and speckled, roved through them
as through vast forests.

The woods—Ah, let us not open the