advocate of the rights of the toiling masses, he shows a noble contempt for mere deinagogic, self-seeking flatterers of an ignorant and unstable multitude. "It is a downright proof of a mean and infamous way of thinking to shape one's sentiments and thoughts in accordance with those of the multitude merely because it is the multitude." He himself always preserved a proud and straightforward independence. Even when he went much astray in his theoretical views as to a particular point of our social organization, he spoke out as fearlessly as any classic philosopher of old. Pure in life, wickedly maligned by his pupil, the wretch Mocenigo, who betrayed him into the hands of the Venetian authorities and the Inquisition, Giordano Bruno is a noble martyr's figure. In person he is described as small of stature, of slight delicate build; with thin and pallid face, and meditative physiognomy; the glance both eager and melancholy; the hair and the beard between black and chestnut; in his speech ready, rapid, imaginative, and of lively gestures; in manner urbane and gentle. Sociable, amiable, and gladsome in conversation, as is the character of southern Italians, he easily yielded to the tastes and habits of others. Of open frankness among friends and foes, he was as quickly moved to anger as he was far from rancor and revenge.

Deeper investigation, such as is now to be expected after the great Roman commemoration, will probably result in showing that the leaven of Bruno's mastermind has operated more powerfully even than had been hitherto known. This much is already clear, that not upon Spinoza and Leibniz only has he had a stirring effect, but that in some of Goethe's profoundest poems also are his vestiges strongly traceable. The great German poet himself mentions that his own intellect had been uplifted by the writings of "Jordanus Brunous of Nola." He adds, however, that it requires almost superhuman efforts to extract the pure gold and silver from the unequal lodes, and that every one born with a similar bent of mind had better turn to Nature itself than fatigue himself among gangues, perhaps among heaps of dross and slag, of bygone centuries." This scarcely does proper just ice to Bruno. The truth is that Goethe, who personally felt magnetically attracted toward the secrets of nature, and who in

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the susurration of a sea of bulrushes heard the stirring motion of growing worlds, owed to the Italian poet-philosopher more than appears from this passage. Some of the loftiest ideas in "Faust" have their manifest prototype in Bruno. In the same way Goethe's famousWas wär' ein Gott, der nur von Aussen stiesse, Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse? Ihm ziemt's, die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, Natur in sich, sich in Natur zu hegen, Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen Geist vergisstSo dass, was in ihm lebt und webt und ist,

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has its almost literal counterpart in Bruno's Non est Deus vel intelligentia exterior circumrotans et circumducens; dignius enim illi debet esse internum principium motus, quod est natura propria, species propria, anima propria, " and so forth. It is within the last few years only that Dr. L. Jacoby, Hermann Brunnhofer, and others have given the full evidence of this influence of Bruno upon Goethe. Well, therefore, may be said of the Italian poetphilosopher what Goethe makes Faust say, that "the trace of his earthly days will not perish for ages to come.

V.

Both moderate Church reformers and independent thinkers were subjected to the fiery doom. It has been brought to recollection, during the Bruno commemoration, that another progressive theologian and philosophical thinker, a native of Nola, like himself, Pomponio Algieri, was burned, at the age of twenty-five, at Rome, in a caldron of boiling oil, pitch, and turpentine, his head and hands standing out in the midst of the flames, and his torments lasting a quarter of an hour. Few know that in Luther's days, even in Germany-at Köln, at Passau, and at Munich, wherever the Papal power still was strong-Adolf Klarenbach and Peter Flystedt, Leonhard Kaiser and Georg Wagner were burned at the stake.

To the memory of the two first-named, Luther dedicated a hymn of praise. The martyrdom of Leonhard Kaiser also he sang, by way of alluding to the meaning of his names, as the death of "a strong and fearless lion, who bore his family name, too, with good right as the first and foremost of his race." But can we compare these with a philosophical genius like Bruno, a knight of intellect, of tower

ing greatness, the ardor of whose poetical vein has its counterpart in the mighty grasp of his intuition and the profundity of his reason?

What were his sufferings in the darkness of the dungeon in which the Inquisition kept him? What ferocious attempts were made to bend and break the energy of the highly cultured, unfrocked friar whose mind was nourished with the love of antiquity? If, as a prisoner, he had a moment of faltering, the answer has been given in the words: "How can you expect that torture, even though applied for hours, should prevail against a whole life of study and inquiry?" Campanella, who after Bruno was kept in prison for twentyseven years, said of his own sufferings :"The last time I was tortured, it was for forty hours. I was fettered with cords which cut to the very bones; I was hung up with hands tied back, a most sharp piece of wood being used, which cut out large parts of my desh and produced a vast loss of blood." Perhaps some day, when the archives of the Vatican become fully accessible, we shall learn a little more of Bruno's last years of torment.

On being informed of his doom, he, in the face of a horrible death, heroically said to his inhuman judges:-"Perhaps you pronounce your sentence with greater fear than that with which I receive it!" Among those who formed the tribunal was Cardinal Bellarmin, the same who later on forced Galilei to an apparent recantation, and Cardinal Sanseverina, who had called the massacre of the night of St. Bartholomew "a splendid day, most pleasant to Catholics. The sentence against Bruno was, as usual, to be carried out "without the spilling of blood." In the bandit-language of the Inquisition, as Hermann Brunnhofer expresses it, this signified burning at the stake. Before the victim of priestcraft was sacrificed, his tongue was torn with pincers. But it still speaks to posterity in powerful accents.

More

and more it is seen that a great deal of that which, in this country, Darwin, Hux

ley, Tyndall, Lyell, Lubbock, and others, have by their masterly and successful researches made the common intellectual property of all educated people, had been divined, in some measure, by the prescient genius of Bruno. Unaided by exact science, he anticipated in a general way the scientific results of ages to come.

The struggle against Obscurantism has still to be carried on. While I am writing this, numerous voices of the ultramontane Press come in from abroad which speak in tones of inquisitorial fury of the "Bruno scandal," urging a crusade for the restoration of the temporal power of the Papacy. Some of these papers go the length of justifying the burning of the Italian thinker by the necessity of guarding the Church against dangerous heresies.' The Salzburger Chronik says: "He that will not listen and obey, must be made to feel. In order to save the good, the evil must be annihilated. This doctrine is the very basis of the penal law and of the divine command, which punish murder, and which therefore must all the more punish the murder of souls. This is in accordance with human conscience and with justice."

Bruno himself foresaw an age of enlightenment, a coming century of progress, when the powers of darkness would sink down to the nether world, and the hearts of men be filled with truth and justice. To this prediction refers the proud inscription on his monument: "To Giordano Bruno this memorial has been raised by the century prophesied by him, on the very spot where his pile burned." It may be open to doubt whether this nineteenth century has fulfilled yet all that which Bruno foretold. But whether Galilei's often-quoted word was spoken or not on the famous occasion when the Papal Church fancied it could stop the rotation of the world by bringing him down on his knees, the truth of his saying, in more than one sense, becomes ever apparent: Eppur si muove !'' And yet it moves !"-Nineteenth Century.

A NEAR member of my family, too much addicted, I regret to say, to levity of thought and freedom of expression, on

perceiving the title I have given to this Philosophical Discourse, has unkindly suggested to me, as I sit, pen in hand, await

ing inspiration, that the potato's only proper place in history is surely in a vegetable dish. I mention this shallow and ungenerous domestic criticism at the very outset merely in order to demonstrate the obvious unfitness of the feminine mind for the Higher Culture, and the crosses to which authors are frequently subject in quarters where sympathy might be most confidently expected. The remark itself I treat as beneath rejoinder. I answer not a lady according to her foolishness.

d

For it must be obvious at once to Thinking Minds, like yours and mine, most proverbially candid and intelligent reader, that the potato has really played a very large part in the world's history-a part far larger than Marlborough's or Napoleon's ; that it has more than once saved France and famished Ireland; that it has changed the whole face of smiling plains, and spread cultivation up the arid slopes of barren mountains. For a single plant-and in all probability a single individual weed -to have done so much is at least something. And now that we stand within measurable distance of a great social revolution-the extinction of the potato-now that our horticultural and medical pastors and masters are even beginning to discuss among themselves what we shall do for an antiscorbutic when we have to go without potatoes altogether the time is surely come when those lowly tubers should no longer languish in unsung obscurity, carent quia vate sacro. The Last of the Mohicans, the Last of the Barons, and the Last Minstrel have all been celebrated in fitting lays. I will fling myself into the breach like Marcus Curtius; I will constitute myself, pro tem., the vates sacer of the moribund race; I will pose as the Laureate of the Last of the Potatoes.

For the potato is really going to pot or, if the expression be deemed too personal to the subject, to Bath, Putney, Jericho, Halifax, or any other familiar refuge of the destitute in such case made and provided. The soul of Kew, indeed, is disturbed about the potato. Consultants are debating on its probable lease of life.

Constitutional disease and the Colorado beetle have preyed too long upon its delicate organism. It is yielding at last to old age and infirmities, and botanical authorities refuse to insure its enfeebled frame at average rates for the next fifty years. Why it has thus fallen a prey to

premature senility will appear further on; but, in order to understand to the very bottom the Decline and Fall of the Potato's Empire, it will be necessary to glance a little more closely than usual at the causes which led to the rise and progress of the potato generally. of the potato generally. It will then become evident-paradoxical as it sounds at first hearing-that almost all the potatoes in the world may be regarded with high probability as parts of a single potato plant; and that it is the gradual growing old of this one worn-out herb which now threatens the world with the approaching potato famine.

Who is the potato, and where does he come from?

There

All over the earth, in tropical, subtropical, and temperate climates, there grow various members of an uncanny and highly suspected family known to botanists as the solanaceæ or nightshades. A more unpromising group than these doubtful herbs in which to look for a human foodstuff could hardly be imagined. are families, like the grasses, which supply mankind with endless useful plantswheat, rye, Indian corn, barley, millet, oats, rice, and sugar-cane. There are others, like the pea tribe, almost every one of which has some economic value, either directly for human food, as in the case of peas, beans, and lentils, or indirectly for fodder, as in the case of clover, vetch, lucerne, and sainfoin. But the nightshades are just one of those illomened families which bear on their very faces the obvious marks of an evil disposition, and which are regarded with a certain shrinking instinctive disfavor even by those who have no first-hand knowledge of their objectionable character. One of them is the well-known belladonna or deadly nightshade, which haunts old ruins or monastic buildings, and contains a powerful acrid narcotic poison, famous for its stupefying and relaxing action on the retina. Its flowers are a lurid brown in color, and look as deadly to the sight as they really are. Its berry is black, shining, and uncanny; and the whole plant has a distinctly murderous air, which its popular name exactly expresses. potato, in fact, is a solitary well behaved and respectable member of a peculiarly abandoned and dissolute family-a family in which poisoning and witchcraft and all evil practices run riot as commonly as

The

crime and murder in a Mediæval Italian princely house.

For almost all the other nightshades bear out in their way the evil repute of belladonna. One of them is mandrakethe mysterious mandrake-that plant with forked roots, gathered by moonlight under the gallows shade for purposes of enchantment and of unholy rites, and incidentally known to scientific medicine as an almost equally dangerous and virulent narcotic. A second is that curious halfmythical plant, the Apple of Sodom or Dead Sea Fruit, whose leaves are thickly covered with bristling needles, and whose tawny berries are filled within with the ashes that overwhelmed the Cities of the Plain, though modern botany unpoetically describes it as a common shrub of Corsica, Sicily, and the eastern Mediterranean. Then there is the bittersweet or climbing nightshade of our English hedgerows, whose wicked lilac flowers of uncertain hue ought to be enough to warn anybody of its evil intent, but whose treacherous red berries, filled with a poisonous narcotic principle, are answerable every year for the deaths of a good many village children. And more terrible still is the common black nightshade of our waste places, known in French as herbe des magiciens, whose juice is powerful enough, when externally applied, to get rid of warts, and, when internally administered, to get rid of one's enemies. Even the potato itself is not wholly above suspicion in this particular; for, though the tubers are wholesome enough (when decently cooked), the berries or potato-apples are said sometimes to have proved highly undesirable food for those bold spirits who ventured to experiment upon them, and, in the concise language of a medical authority, "to have determined headache, nausea, and advanced symptoms of atropine poison

ing."

Unpromising as the nightshades usually show themselves, however, with their lurid flowers and their round, shining fruits, there are a few plants even in this wicked tribe which ingenious man has pressed somehow into his exacting service. The capsicum, to be sure, with its near relation, the delicious little West Indian bird-peppers, one can hardly count as a genuine exception; for, though a small quantity of red pepper is pleasant enough as a flavoring to soup, a diet of cayenne

would doubtless prove unduly pungent and exciting; and a single drop of the essential oil of capsicum is sufficient, as our medical friend would gracefully phrase it, "to determine death in great torment.' But the tomato, that gentle and harmless vegetable, so unexceptionable in its character that early writers knew it as the love-apple, is a true nightshade-a solanum of the solanums; and though both flower and fruit have, in outer bearing, all the distinctive poisonous type of the entire tribe, I have never yet heard a whisper of reproach against the unassailable character of the mild tomato. Even Sergeant Buzfuz himself, if I recollect aright, when denouncing the insidious way in which Mr. Pickwick employed "tomato sauce" to undermine the sacredest feelings of Mrs. Bardell's nature, had not a word to say against the intrinsic wholesomeness of that excellent preparation in its proper place. I believe, also, nobody has ever complained of the luscious egg-fruit; while the winter-cherry or Cape gooseberrythat curious fruit wrapped up in a blanket that doesn't fit it is only dangerous to the excesses of youth, which its insipid character prevents it from inspiring to any dangerous degree in adult maturity.

Nevertheless, in spite of some few redeeming members (like Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius among the middle Cæsars, or Giovanni delle Bande Nere among the later Medici), the nightshades as a group must be distinctly regarded as a doubtful, unwholesome, and ill-conditioned family. That from such a stock should have sprung the harmless, necessary potato-the pride of the New World and the joy of the Old, the support and stay of the sister island, and the confident boast of the maître d'hôtel (in connection with broiled steaks and chops at the Criterion)-is one of those profound mysteries of heredity which, in the words of a once famous metaphysical inquirer, no fellow can understand.

Viewed merely as an esculent tuber, however, this is apparently how the potato first came to be. In some unknown region of the New World, probably somewhere about the Highlands of Peru-for the origin of the potato, like that of Mr. Jeames de la Pluche and other important personages, is "wrop in mystery"-there grew, at that precise period of history known to chronologers as once upon a

time," a Solanaceous Plant peculiarly persecuted in the struggle for life by the persistent attentions of too many hungry and herbivorous admirers. In such a case the common resource of any ordinary unscrupulous member of the solanum family would doubtless have been to adopt the usual solanaceous tactics of poisoning these its obtrusive friends and actual enemies. Any other solanum would have filled its stem and leaves with narcotic juices, and made itself exceedingly bitter to the taste, so that the beasts and birds, disgusted at the first bite, would have desisted from the vain attempt to devour it. Not so the father of all potatoes. That honest and straightforward plant declined to have recourse to such mean strategy. Hard pressed by herbivores in the struggle for existence, it struck out a new line for itself and for Ireland. It invented the tuber.

And what is the tuber, which natural selection, thus acting upon the necessities of the primeval potato, succeeded in producing for a hungry world? Essentially and fundamentally it is not, as most people imagine, a root, but an underground branch, bearing buds and undeveloped leaves on its surface, which we know as eyes, and capable of doing all the work of a branch in producing foliage, flowers, and berries. All that is peculiar to the tuber, viewed as a branch, sums itself up in two cardinal points. First, it happens to develop underground (an accident which, as we all know in the familiar cases of layers and suckers, may occur with any ordinary branch any day); and secondly, it is large, swollen, and soft, because it contains large reserves of material, laid up by the plant in this safe retreat to aid the future growth of its stems and leaves in a second season.

A tuber, in fact, must be regarded merely as one of the many plans adopted by plants in order to secure for themselves continuity of existence. In woody shrubs and trees the material laid up by the individual to provide for next year's leaves and flowers is stored in the inner bark, which does not die; and this accounts for the way in which such trees as almonds, mezereon, and pyrus japonica are enabled to blossom in early spring before the foliage itself begins to come out. But soft and succulent plants, which die down to the ground with every winter, cannot act in

this way. They adopt, perforce, a different plan they bury their treasure deep in the ground to keep it safe from the teeth of greedy herbivores. It is true, rabbits and other burrowing animals get at it even so; but, at any rate, the chances of destruction are greatly lessened, and so the plant gains a point in the struggle for existence which often enables it to hold its own in the battle of species against all competitors.

This was the case with our primitive potato. A juicy and fleshy weed in its native form, much liable, as we all know, to the attacks of insects, and affording a juicy pabulum for the browsing ruminant, the aboriginal potato provided against a rainy day by storing up starch in its underground branches or tubers, to set up the life of the plant afresh in the succeeding season. When winter came, the part above ground withered and died—a single frost will turn a whole fieldful black to this day with surprising rapidity-but the underground branches, safe alike from cold and from animal foes, kept up their vitality in a dormant state beneath the hard clay through the long winter. In short, while man exploits the potato for his own use and benefit alone, the primitive ancestor intended to exploit it for its own growth and the continuance of the species.

Of course the potato has seeds too, about which I shall have more to say further on; but, in addition to the seeds, which make new plants, the potato vine desired, so to speak, a personal immortality, not a mere vicarious and secondhand vitality, in the life of its offspring. It would have nothing to say to any foolish Comtist verbal juggle. It wanted to go on living as long as it possibly could itself, not merely to produce seedlings which would live and flourish after it had itself assumed the inorganic condition. This not unnatural desire of the old Adam the potato tubers enabled it at once to attain; and to the formation of tubers, accordingly, it devoted from the first by far the greater part of its redundant vital energy.

In order to understand precisely what the potato is driving at, we must consider the case of a potato-shoot sprouting in the dark, which clearly exhibits to the meanest intelligence (no offence meant, and let none be taken!) the actual use of these