SOME OF THE MAGAZINES.

BY far the most interesting paper in the magazines of this month is Mr. Gladstone's singular essay upon the Colour-sense, in the Nineteenth Century. Mr. Gladstone is under the impression that the sense of colour among the early races was very imperfect and confused, that 'they recognised rather gradations of blackness or lightness than of colour, and that even so late as the time of Homer the full colour-sense had not been developed. It is only gradually that the retina has become susceptive of colour, a susceptibility now of course become hereditary. To take a violent example, the perception of blue comes very late, and is even now not reached universally, the confusion between blue and green in Burrnah seeming to be as common as in artificial light it is among ourselves. Red is the first colour which emerges dis- tinctly, and Mr. Gladstone seems to think that even Ezekiel took the rainbow to be all red or predominantly red, while Homer took it to be dark, the indigo or violet to his eye being most manifest. In defence of this theory Mr. Gladstone pours out all his wealtli of Homeric learning, and certainly proves that Homer used his colour-words in the most vague and uncertain fashion, though he frequently, we think, rather strains his fancy in illustrating his case. For example Passing now to the rose, we find it supply the staple epithet for -morning; rhododoetuloe, rose-fingered. There is no direct point of contact between Homer's expressions taken from the rose, and 87 U thrOS ;.as they are never applied to the same objects. A very pale reddish pink, fur removed from ruddiness, seems to be indicated in this epithet; and its application, we should remember, is to the dawn, not the day. It is doubtful whether the whiteness, or the redness, which are here com- bined, contributed most to fashion the poet's perception. Probably the -whiteness, as I judge from the only other indication he has afforded as to his notion of the rose. It is in the curious phrase 4rosy oil,' rhodoen elaion, which was used to anoint the body of Hector, //. 186. Here we can trace no greater resemblanee to the roe than the glossy shine of oil ; again an instance of the dominance of the light- -sense, of the rudeness and feebleness of the colour-sense."

'Surely the idea that " rosy-fingered dawn" refers to the white-

ness of dawn is far-fetched, while the remark about the oil is almost unintelligible. Why should not rhodoen elaion be rose- -oil, oil either made from roses, as it still is in districts which Homer knew, or oil impregnated with the rose-odour ? Is it not more probable that Homer's indistinctness in the use of colour-words arose from indifference to scientific accuracy—he probably was, be it remembered, blind—rather than absence of perception? English doctors still speak of " black " blood, though blood is not black ;

and the people of India, who can combine colours so perfectly, have the greatest recklessness in describing them. They call them- selves, for example, " kala lok," that is, "black folk," though they are none of them black, and though—this is really curious- -they are singularly sensitive as to the fairness of their com- plexions, and resent with comic indignation the dark shade a photograph is apt to represent. We believe we are right in saying there is no Bengalee word for "brown," and no absolute and, as it were, self-existent word for any colour, except black, white, and red. The word for blue is "indigo," and for yellow, 4, saffron." It is quite possible, and indeed probable, that the

sense of colour is late developed, but the difficulty of exact ex- pression long survives the development of perception. Joseph, 'with his "coat of many colours," was long before Homer, and

Deborah sings of the spoil, in language which showed that many- coloured materials were greatly valued. The Sanscrit and Homeric epithet for the sea, "black," is certainly very vague, but is it quite certain that it is not intended to convey a sensation of fear, as when an Englishman speaks of a " black prospect "before him ? 'The whole subject needs more study, with especial relation to the possibility that races, as well as families, may inherit colour- 'blindness. The Burmese illustration quoted above looks like

that. There is no other very striking contribution in this num- ber, though we have read Professor Colvin's protest against the

restoration" of ecclesiastical buildings with a good deal of plea- sure,—he forgets, we think, too much bow bad our new buildings -mostly are ;—and the "Symposium" on the "Soul and Future Life" has ended. We hope, if this idea is continued, that it will be modified, and that either the debate will be general, or that the debaters will be allowed a subject. At present they criticise the original paper too much. Mr. Harrison is exposed to a sort of literary platoon-firing which he must put down with a single rifle ; and the subject of controversy is not the future life, but Mr. Harrison's views about it. The total effect, therefore, is a display of literary gladiatorship, rather than a serious discussion • on a lofty subject. Lord Blachford,—formerly it will be remem- bered, Permanent Under-Secretary for the Colonies—sends a Tory exhaustive argument against that Federation of the Empire -which Sir Julius Vogel proposes, saying, among other things, that

had we kept America, New York must have been the seat of the Imperial Government. He evidently prefers strong temporary alliances, but advocates the maintenance of the connection with the colonies in its present form as long as possible. We prefer Mr. Forster's dream, a permanent alliance of the English-speaking peoples, to either of the other two.

The Contemporary for this month is, perhaps, a little too ex- -elusively theological, the ablest and most interesting papers being -entirely on matters connected with theology. Dr. Take's paper

-on "Legislation for the Insane," Mr. Freeman's denunciation of England's pretended neutrality in the Turkish affair, and Mr. Proctor's essay on "Oxygen in the Sun," are all readable, but ^two of the contributions are of unusual interest. In one, Pro- fessor Beyschlag commences a most able defence of the Gospel of St. John, based mainly on this idea :—The author of that Gospel displays throughout an intense faith not only in the Christ-idea, but the Christ-fact, in the historical existence and teaching of the Messiah, and cannot, therefore, be suspected of having constructed, as the critics suspect him, a religio-philosophical romance. This is further shown by the Evangelist's obviously minute knowledge of the facts of the biography he writes, a knowledge especially displayed in his

account of the final tragedy, which is historically comprehensible only in John's account,—a remark incidentally repeated by Mr.

Taylor A. lnnes, in the completion of his really brilliant analysis of "The Trial of Jesus Christ," which he examines not as a divine, but as a lawyer and antiquarian. He points out that it is only in the Fourth Gospel that Pilate's decision as to the innocence of Christ is made intelligible at all. "All the narratives bear that Pilate put the same question to Jesus, in the same words, 'Art thou the King of the Jews ? ' but that on his answering in the affirmative, the Roman came to the paradoxical conclusion that there ' was no fault in him.' The fourth Gospel contains the explanatory conversation which these facts almost necessarily imply." The Roman Governor naturally would have held the accusation most grave, but St. John reports the intermediate conversation, which in- duced Pilate to believe the kingship a spiritual phrase, not

affecting the Roman majestas. Mr..Taylor. Innes concludes from

his analysis, which, especially as regards the legal necessity for the double trial, strikes us as most masterly, that "it was a double trial, and that both parts of it wore conducted with a certain regard to the forms of the two most famous jurisprudences of the world. In both the judges were unjust, and the trial was unfair, yet in both the right issue was substantially raised. And in both, that issue was the same. Jesus Christ was truly con- demned on a double charge of treason. He died because in the ecclesiastical council He claimed to be the Son of God and the Messiah of Israel, and because before the world-wide tribunal He claimed to be Christ a King."

The Fortnightly, besides Mr. Hutton's condensed biography of the late Mr. Bagehot, contains a strong paper by Mr.

Lowe on electoral reform ; a remarkable account of the " depression " of 1873-76, by Mr. R. Giffen ; and the narrative of M. Thiene conversations with Mr. Senior, which we have noted elsewhere. Mr. Lowe, of course, objects

to any reduction of the suffrage, holding that a low suffrage injures the character of the elected Assembly—e.g., the present

House appears incapable of attending to the higher questions of politics at all—but he makes this time a new complaint, that Parliament, upon every other question so patient of exhaustive and even tedious debate, upon this, the most important of all, always acts in a hurry. It will scarcely hear the opposing argu- ments, and never attends to them, but surrenders itself to a sort of blind fatalism. He attacks also the argument that great improvements are produced by lowering the suffrage, contending that in the only instance in which great ameliorations followed a Reform Bill, the suffrage was not really lowered ;—

"The aim of the Reform Bill of 1832 was not a lowering of the franchise. Its main object was a great disfranchisement of small pro-

prietary boroughs. Another object was the rescuing the boroughs been usurped by self-elected corpora- whose municipal privileges had tions from this usurpation, as far as parliamentary elections go; and another wee the giving to every borough an uniform franchise of ton

pounds. This was in some places—Preston, for instance—a raising of

the franchise. Another feature of the measure was the transferring the right of returning Members to Parliament from the disfranchised boroughs to the largo boroughs, which till then were unrepresented.

In all this there was rather a conferring than a lowering of the fran- chise. Some sum load to be named, and £10 seemed at the time a

moderate proposal. The principal move in the direction of lowering the franchise was made by the Tory Lord Mendes, the present Duke of Buckingham, who carried the admission of the X50 tenants-at-will, and thus enabled the landed interest to offer so serious an opposition to the Repeal of the Corn Laws. The first Reform Bill was a measure for resuming powers which had been usurped, for redistributing seats, and for making the franchise in boroughs uniform, but it cannot, we think, be fairly described as a measure for lowering the franchise."

That is specious, but it is only specious. As a matter of bare fact, the power of appointing a majority of Members of the House of Commons was taken by the Reform Bill from about 850 families and given to about half-a-million electors. The electors nominally in possession of the franchise under the old Bill did not really appoint the majority, but only seemed to wield a power which was actually exercised by certain aristocratic families and wealthy men. Mr. Lowe says :—" The question that Parliament has to ask itself, when a new Reform Bill is proposed for its adoption, is,—How will this measure improve the present House of Commons,—how will it make it more fit to discharge the duties which we require from it ? That is the simple question when a change in . the organisation of power—legislative, judicial, or administrative—is proposed." That question ignores entirely and finally the representative character of the House. The specialty of Mr. Robert Giffen's writing on his own subjects is cenvincingness, and it does not fail him in his paper on "The Liquidations of 1878-76." It is difficult to read it without agreeing with him that

the cause of the recent depression was the failure of a single industry, or rather method of investment, that of using capital for the " exploitation " of half-civilised or unsettled countries ; that it has been unusually light, the bulk of the people not having felt it at all ; and that it will pass like other depres- sions, to be followed by a new period of prosperous activity, and possibly a now form of speculation, against which Mr. Giffen warns quiet investors in these suggestive words :—

" Probably promoters will now go into a totally different field, which I am disposed to think may bathe creation of trusts or trust companies to ' amalgamate' securities, and so distribute tho risks. The principle seems fascinating: more than one of the numerous trusts now in exist- ence have boon feirly successful: we may accordingly expect an exten- sion of the principle by which investors will he once more encouraged in the impossible experiment of making a high interest safely. But trust companies are really as dangerous as limited companies with much uncalled capital, or foreign ]oans, though in a different way. They amalgamate securities and distribute risks, it is true, but they add the great risk of a now set of intermediaries between the investor and his investment. In addition to his former risks, the latter, when he belongs to a trust, runs the risk of employing an adventurer or a thief to select and keep the securities. The danger is manifest."

Mr. Gladstone has another paper yet, one in Macmillan, on the geography of the "Odyssey," but it is interesting chiefly to stu- dents or devotees of Homer. He makes, however, a very shrewd suggestion, when he asks commentators not to trust their maps too much when discussing Homeric geography. Homer had no map, but only his own eyes, at the time when he saw, and the reports of mariners, and might easily snake mistakes, as we know the early European navigators did. The best paper by far in this number, though we have been interested In the account of the University of Upsala, with its 1,451 students and 550 bursaries, and in Lady Augusta Cadogan's sketch of the grand° dame of the ancien regime, is Mr. Wallace's, on the colours of plants, in which he lays it down as a principle that the first cause of bright colour in plants is attractiveness. The bright colour attracts the insect which scatters the seeds, and the plants which survive are those which attract :— "The seeds of plants require to be dispersed so as to reach places favourable for germination and growth. Some are very minute and are carried abroad by the wind, or they are violently expelled and scattered by the bursting of the containing capsules. Others are downy or winged, and are carried long distances by the gentlest breeze. But there is a large class of seeds which cannot be dispersed in either of these ways, and are mostly contained in eatable fruits. These fruits are devoured by birds or beasts, and the hard seeds pass through their stomachs undigested, and owing probably to the gentle heat and moisture to which they have boon subjected, in a condition highly favourable for germination. The dry fruits or capsules containing the first two classes of seeds are rarely if over conspicuously coloured, whereas the eatable fruits almost invariably acquire a bright colour as they ripen, while at the same time they become soft and often full of agreeable juices. Our red haws and hips, our black elderberries, our blue sloes and whortleberrios, our white mistletoe and snowberry, and our orange sea-buokthorn, are examples of the colour-sign of edibility, and in every part of the world the same phenomenon is found. The fruits of large forest-trees, such as the pines, oaks, and beeches, are not coloured, perhaps because their size and abundance render them sufficiently conspicuous, and also because they provide such a quantity of food to such a number of different animals that there is no danger of their being unnoticed."

It is the same with flowers which require cross-fertilisation through the dispersion of the pollen, and which are usually attrac- tive in colour in proportion to their need for this process. There is, however, one remarkable exception to this law, and this one is the best evidence of the rule. Sweet flowers, whose scent strongly attracts insects, often remain white, or inconspicuous for colour; —" Thus, many inconspicuous flowers, like the mignonette and the sweet-violet, can be distinguished by their odours before they attract the eye, and this may often prevent their being passed unnoticed ; while very showy flowers, and especially those with variegated or spotted petals, are seldom sweet. White, or very pale flowers, on the other hand, are often excessively sweet, as exemplified by the jasmine and clematis ; and many of these arc only scented at night, as is strikingly the case with the night- smelling stock, our butterfly orchis (Wabenaria chlorantha), the greenish-yellow Daphne pontica, and many others." Sweet flowers are not likely to be passed over by the insects, and therefore their brighter varieties do not alone fend to survive. The entire paper is most charming, even when the writer becomes almost fanciful, as in his supposition that the pleasure or relief given to the eye by the colour green is a survival from the time when greenness marked the most suitable dwelling-places for man. Mr. Wallace, we note, like Mr. Gladstone, suspects, though he does not affirm, that the colour-sense was slowly developed, and quotes German testimony to show the very late recognition of the fact that green was a colour at all. In the Cornhill, "For Percival" advances, suggesting to us, we know not why, a curious resemblance between the author's powers and those of Miss Pickering, a very clever but now for- gotten novelist, whose forte was the brightest dialogue ; and there is a curious sketch of a Swiss Bath in the seventeenth century ; but the paper of the month is a criticism on Massinger, whom the critic defines as a dramatist who would have been a better novelist. He is the poet of the half-unreal world, whose person- ages are not those of the old romance or of the now reality, but of a half-world between them. His characters are full of noble sentiments, in which to modern ears there is a flavour of insin- cerity, or rather, perhaps, of artificiality. The boundless vigour of the earlier stage basin Massinger disappeared :— "The tyrant no longer forces us to admiration by the fullness of his vitality, and the magnificence of his contempt for law. Whether for good or bad, he is comparatively a poor creature. He has developed an uneasy conscience, and even whilst affecting to defy the law, trembles at the thought of an approaching retribution. His boasts have a shrill, querulous note in them. His creator does not fully sympathise with his passion, Messinger cannot throw himself into the situation ; and is anxious to dwell upon the obvious moral considerations which prove such characters to be decidedly inconvenient members of society for their tamer neighbours. He is of course the more in accordance with a correct code of morality, but fails correspondingly in dramatic force and brilliance of colour."

In the single exception, Sir Giles Overreach, in a New Way to Pay Old Debts, the rant of the old miser, though very fine, is not in the least real, but is a forcible expression, not of what he would think, but of what other peopk would think of him. That strikes us as sound criticism, and accounts, together with a certain tedious- ness for the oblivion into which Massinger has fallen. It is usually attributed to his excessive dirtiness, which appears to have been adopted to cover his lack of humour by which to attract the gallery, but it is pointed out that this could in most of his playa be easily removed. The truth is, Messinger lacks, first of all, human interest.

Blackwood, apart from the novels, which are good—" Pauline" especially—is very poor. The attack on Mr. E. Schuyler, for exposing the abuses of Turkish government, is well written, but veryfeeble, nobody denying that American diplomatists care less for forms than those of Europe, and the writer himself admitting that Mr. Schuyler in Constantinople only broke through a form. Ile should have sent his report to Washington, instead of the newspapers, but being a man with a heart in him, did not. To say that he was actuated by a mere passion for notoriety, ie simply to impute bad motives for a good action gratuitously. The man who saves a neighbour from being murdered may do it in order to figure well in police reports, but it is not the good or the judicious who will assume that motive. The author of the "Storm in the East" holds that the temporary cheek of Russia in Bulgaria gives reason for hope that, at last, "poetical justice is to be triumphant in real life ;" that "right is to triumph over might," and "the device of the destroyer recoil on his own head." That is, as far as we know, the extreme expression of the craze for the Turks just now prevalent in English society, and is exactly as justifiable as a similar 'man would be if Malay pirates had evaded the shot of an English steamer. Mr. Theodore Martin's attempt to translate some of Heine's songs into Scotch is, at least as re- gards "Mein Kind, wir waren Kinder," singularly successful, though he may be open to the reproach of wasting strength on such a barren tour de force :— "My bairn, we aince were bairnies, Wee gamesome bairnies twa; We ereepit into the hen-house, Au' jookit under the straw.

We craw'd like the cock-a-doodles- An' to hoar us the passing folk At ilk kickericoo ' wad fancy, It just was the bantam cock.

Whiles, like auld caries we sat, too, And oh I what gran' sense we talked then, An' bemoaned us, how things wore a' better In times when wings wore young mom How love, an' leal hearts, an' devout aims Had flown free the wand clean awe' ; How the price coffee stood at was awl a', An' gowd no to come by eve'.

They are gene, thee ploys o' my childhood, An' a' things are ganging, guid Booth! The gowd, time itsel, and the world, Love, faith, and leal-hearted truth."

There are good papers in Fraser, a very good sketch of the late William Longman, in which, however, a little more credit might have been given him as 1We:taloa ; and another excellent paper on "Russian Literature ;" but we have been most amused by the discussion " On the Comparative Stupidity of Politicians," full of remarks that are at least original. The writer thinks there is a tradition of bad speaking in the House of Commons, sur- viving from the time when the young noble brought there his family influence and his boroughs, and the adventurer, like Burke, his oratory. Moreover, the finest mind in the House of Commons lives habitually in the company of inferiors—the statesman having to take county Members as Mr. Justice Maule took beer—while the most successful politician is he who presents fewest points for attack. A career in which character may be a substitute for capacity must, from the nature of the case, be pursued on a lower intellectual level than those in which intel- ligence, and cultivation, and general or special knowledge are absolutely essential." The writer is apparently quite serious, and thinks politics the profession developing least brain, and he signs himself "II." We suppose it is not Sir William Harcourt delivering his opinion of those who are sometimes bored and 4onastimes diverted with the oratory of '4 Historicus."

The New Quarterly 11fagazine has an instructive sketch of Giacomo Leopardi, by Miss Zimmern ; and a story by Mrs. Lynn Linton ; but the most readable paper is an account of the Lord Chancellors and Lord Justices since Lord Campbell, full of anecdotes, among which not the least remarkable is that the late Mr. Justice Slice, counsel for Palmer, remained to the last day of his life convinced of his client's innocence.