States when it shall be understood that if a man is a success in the presidencysuch, for example, as John Bright was in Parliament, in England, or as Mr. Gladstone was as prime minister, the more we can have of him the better, even if it be to five or six terms instead of one or two. What this nation wants is to be administered in quietness and peace, and if men arise who promise in the presidency efective administration on that basis, the only question should be how long they can be kept on duty.

EXPERIENCE OF DEATH.-The wellknown writer, Gail Hamilton, has made the illness almost to death through which she passed at Washington not long since, the occasion of a chapter on "The Experience of Death." It is easily made impressive, not only by the recital of the nearly total failure of her vital energy and the condition of insensibility in which she lay for some time, but by the statement that, while in this state, she had easy converse with the spirits of relatiyes who had long since passed out of the present life.

It is to be expected that individual experiences, such as Gail Hamilton passed through, will find expression in literature as long as ignorance of the history of primitive culture and of the revelations of physiological psychology remain what they are. The history of primitive culture makes abundantly evident that of all human experiences at the lowest level of thought and faith, the commonest and most universal, and the most widely significant, is that which Gail Hamilton thinks worthy of putting on record here in the dawn of the full light of modern science. The savage, with his habits of excessive exertion, excessive gorging of animal food at certain times, excessive starvation at other times, and deliberate use of drugs and stimulants found to be of service in this direction, has never had any difficulty in passing almost at will over the boundary of ordinary experience into a great variety of most marvelous experiences of spirit-land.

It is probably an exact statement that for one such slight and meagre tale as Gail Hamilton has thought worth telling, every tribe of savages that has ever existed could in perfect good faith supply us with 10,000; not slight and meagre,

but full, elaborate and marvelously impressive tales of things seen and heard in the world of departed spirits. For her experience of death, the savage, accustomed to deliberately seek by exhaustion in the forest, by starvation and by other means, the state of complete insensibility, could give her thousands of records going much farther into the truth of the matter, whatever that truth may be.

But anything like a proper study of the facts brings out one supreme certainty; and that is that the mind, the soul, the spirit, the land of the spirit, the kingdom of the divine, as Christ said, do not come with observation, and give no sign. In the sense commonly understood there is no such thing as death. Assuming the truth of faith in continued existence, the continuously existing, living soul, simply leaves behind the conditions of mortality. It does so on its own part with experience of life only; life more abundantly than was known in the body; life victorious, happy, eternal. It is supremely absurd for any thoughtful mind to make. up a story of the soul swamped in the morasses of bodily insensibility and bodily decay. There is nothing of the kind; there can be nothing of the kind. The experiences which Gail Hamilton notes are the very commonest possibilities, not of death, but of the present bodily life. Had Gail Hamilton reached the gates which our ignorance conceives as the gates of death, it must have been by passing entirely beyond all such experiences as those of which she has made a record.

One general fact of our animal existence depending on the physical character of the brain can be especially brought out as throwing light upon this subject. There is every reason to believe that whatever impressions have ever been made upon the brain, have their record in it as long as even the faintest life continues; and that, under exceptional circumstances, the consciousness of these impressions may return, and may return not merely as mere impressions, but as initiating extended experiences; that is, extensive action of the brain. The general impression, for instance, left by a long-since-departed friend, may, if one is in a state of greatly depressed vitality, with greatly heightened nervous sensitiveness, set in motion endless activity of the now flighty brain, with the

result of what appears to be veritably prolonged intercourse with the departed; but what is, in fact, an endless play of the states of the brain, which may be compared with the play of electrical manifestation which we watch hour after hour on the face of an evening summercloud.

Immortality, it cannot be too strongly said, does not thus rest in mortality. All experiences of the class spoken of by Gail Hamilton are purely mortal experiences. The immortal live to tell their tale elsewhere, but not here.

GUIDE TO THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA.-A help to study of knowledge which will be appreciated by readers of every class is the "Guide to Systematic Readings in the Encyclopædia Britannica," prepared by James Baldwin, Baldwin, Ph. D., and published by The Werner Company. It is a volume of over 300 pages designed to tell inquirers of every class where to find information in the Britannica under the principal heads of knowledge. There are five chapters especially devoted to matters of interest to young people. Fourteen chapters cover readings which will especially attract "the student"in any of the great branches

INQUIRIES ANSWERED

I desire full information in regard to the new electrical developments at Niagara.

The story of brilliant engineering at Niagara, designed to turn the most magnificent and impressive of terrestrial natural objects into a source of power, transformed from the force of falling water into that of electricity, and transmitted to a distance for either electric lighting, or manufacturers employing electric motors, has already become one of the most marvelous in the history of applied science.

Nearly twenty years ago, one of the most eminent of German engineers, Sir William Siemens, while on a visit to the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, took occasion to see the Falls of Niagara, and with the natural impulse of a scientific mind he was especially struck with the inexhaustible manifestation of mechanical energy which the stupendous rush of waters presented. The dynamo electrical-machine had just then reached, partly through his genius applied to the problem, the perfection which

of knowledge. Thirty-five chapters take up matters of interest to as many different characters of the "busy world," such as the manufacturer, the merchant, the banker, the teacher, the railroad-man, the home-maker, the musician, the journalist, etc.

Dr. Baldwin has executed a difficult task with remarkable knowledge and judgment. His lucid and learned paragraphs, fortified with full and exact references to both articles and particular passages of importance, will afford the most valuable assistance to every one desiring to investigate any matter of knowledge in the pages of the Britannica. The mere reading of these chapters will of itself convey a great deal of interesting information. The botanist, for example, will find an outline of biographical history of botany and the general view of botanical topics. No branch of study or of practical interest has been neglected. The volume is one which no owner of the Britannica can afford to miss. one also which will easily induce very many who do not own this great work to become possessors of it and to give themselves to intelligent use of it. It will be sent postpaid by The Werner Company, Chicago, upon receipt of $2.00.

It is

made it available in the application of electric energy. The idea came to him that the power of the falls might be tapped for operating a colossal series of dynamos, whose conducting wires should transmit its energy to places miles away. He took occasion, in the spring of the next year, to present his idea in an address delivered by him as president of the Iron and Steel Institute.

Estimating the amount of water passing over the falls as 100,000,000 tons per hour, with a perpendicular descent of 150 feet, and a further fall of another 150 in the rapids, giving a total of 300 feet in the descent of the stream from the lake above to the lake below, Siemens calculated roughly that there was going to waste more than 16,000,000 horse-power; power which could be produced through the agency of steam by the expenditure of not less than 266,000,000 tons of coal per annum, or one might say, all the coal mined in the whole world. Siemens declared that electrical transmission of available parts of this immense energy was perfectly

practicable, whether to supply a city with electric light, or to run electro-magnetic engines, or to be used in the separation of metals from their ores.

Not a little incredulity met the prophetic suggestions of the great German engineer, but within less than twenty years the progress of applied science has overtaken Siemens's magnificent prophecies. The present exact estimates of energies assigned to the falls is a theoretical power of not less than 7,000,000 horsepower, and for practical use, without disturbing the grand rush of waters, or materially impairing their magnificent display, there can be taken from the current several hundreds of thousands of horse-power.

Something was done nearly fifty years ago to obtain a considerable supply of power from the river by means of a canal 35 feet wide, 8 feet deep, and 4,400 feet in length, by which the water of the upper Niagara was brought to a basin at the high bluff of the lower river, while upon the margin of this basin mills were constructed with a supply of water from the canal. There was thus in use, ten years ago, about 10,000 horse-power.

In 1886 plans were made for diverting, from a point more than a mile above the falls, something less than 4 per cent. of the total flow of the river, with the expectation of obtaining not less than 120,000 horse-power. A charter was obtained, March 21, 1886, from the Legislature of the State of New York, with a view to the carrying out of the scheme by the Niagara Falls Power Company. Mr. Edward Atkinson and some others strenuously objected to the proposal as neither practicable nor likely to be profitable. In the face of such objections it required three years to convince capitalists that the scheme was worthy of support. The conviction, however, came at last, and in the year 1889 a new corporation was formed, called the Cataract Construction Company, and representing not only abundant capital, but the best engineering ability of the country.

The plans adopted by this company involved a surface canal, beginning a mile and a quarter above the falls, 250 feet wide at its mouth, on the margin of the Niagara river, and extending away from the river a distance of 1,700 feet, with an average depth of 12 feet, and carrying water enongh to develop about 100,000 horsepower. The mouth of the canal is 600 feet out in the stream from the shore line, its side-walls and embankments having been carried out to that distance to give the canal a proper beginning in deep water. The side-walls of the canal are of solid masonry, 8 feet thick at the base, 3 feet thick at the top, and 17 feet high. These

walls are pierced at intervals with ten inlets for delivering water to a wheel-pit in a power-house at the side of the canal. This wheel-pit was planned for a depth of 178 feet, with a width of 18 feet and a length of 140 feet, and from the bottom of the pit there was provided an underground tunnel for conducting away the water to a point in the bank of the Niagara river below the falls. This underground tunnel is 7,000 feet in length, with an average slope of 6 feet in 1,000. Its maximum height is 21 feet and width 18 feet 10 inches. A chip thrown into the water of the wheel-pit travels through the tunnel to its mouth in three and a half minutes, showing that the water runs at a little less than twenty miles an hour. The tunnel was con. structed by the labor of over 1,000 men, engaged continuously for more than three years. It involved the removal of over 300,000 tons of rock, and the use of more than 16,000,000 bricks for lining it. The construction of the canal and the wheel-pit meant the removal of another 300,000 tons of material. There were at times employed on the work as many as 2,500 men ; 60,000 cubic yards of stone were used; 55,000 barrels of Giant American Portland cement; 12,000 barrels of natural cement; 26,000 cubic yards of sand; and 19,000,000 feet of timber and lumber. The wheel-pit, a long slot cut in the rock, 18 feet in length and 140 feet long, it is the intention to lengthen at some future time to 400 feet.

The conditions at Niagara would not permit the use of the turbine-wheel familiar in the United States. It was found necessary to procure from Swiss and other European wheelbuilders designs for a wheel quite unlike anything ever made, or that could be made in the United States-turbines with vertical shafts of 5,000 horse-power on about 144 feet of fall, and delivering the power at the top of the shaft. For the central power-station of the Niagara Falls Power Company, such wheels or rows of such wheels, set in a continuous slot directly over the tail-race, were adopted; and for the Niagara Falls Paper Company a group of such wheels, but of 1,100 horse-power each, in a square pit.

The paper company's wheels are of the Jonval type, designed and built by R. D. Wood & Co., of Philadelphia. The Niagara Falls Power Company's three wheels, set and completed, were designed by Faesch & Piccard, of Geneva, Switzerland, and were built by the I. P. Morris Co., of Philadelphia. These wheels, acting under 136 feet of fall, make 250 revolutions per minute, and at 75 per cent. efficiency, give 5,000 horse power.

Comparing the development of such manu

facturing centers as Lowell, Lawrence and Holyoke, in Massachusetts, it is estimated that the possibilities of power at Niagara Falls should make, within half a century, a city of a million inhabitants. The beginnings of this city have been made in an admirably planned village on a block of about eighty-four acres of the extensive tract of land owned by the Niagara Falls Power Company. And between Niagara Falls and Tonawanda, a distance of about ten miles, the open farming country is already being bought up for the purpose of cutting it up for manufacturing sites, while Tonawanda itself is near enough to come within the range of special changes tending to the development of an immense manufacturing center.

The electric power which comes from the Niagara electric generators is that known as an alternating two phase current of twenty-five cycles per second, or 3,000 alternations per minute, the electric motive force or electrical pressure being about 2,000 volts.

Two manufacturing establishments have already established their plants under contracts for a supply of power. One is the Pittsburg Reduction Company, manufacturers of aluminium, requiring 2,000-horse power. The other is the Carborundum Company, manufacturers of carborundum, a variety of emery. This requires 1,000-horse power.

The Reduction Company uses the electricity in smelting alumina, an oxide of aluminium. This is done in carbon-lined retorts, or crucibles, the mass being liquefied and the aluminium reduced by an electric current which passes from a series of carbon rods suspended over the top of the crucible to the carbon lining at the bottom, the rods and the liuing forming the two poles of the circuit. About sixty retorts are placed around the room in series with one another and the current carried through the entire series. It is a direct current, the pressure of which at the terminals in the reducing-room is maintained constant at 160 volts. To get this current, the two-phase current, alternating at 2,000 volts pressure, is reduced to 115 by passing through large "static transformers" built on the principle of the Rhumkorff coil. The current thus reduced is passed through a "rotary converter" which changes it from a two-phase alternating current at 115 volts to a direct, or continuous current at 160 volts. The plant has a capacity on the direct-current side of about 2,000 electrical horse-power.

For the Carborundum Company the electricity is taken in a different way. A large core of carbon about eight feet high and square foot in cross-section is placed vertically in a large smelting-furnace, and around this core is

packed the carborundum ore. An alternating electric current is then passed through the core from end to end, bringing the core gradually to an intense white heat. By keeping up this heat for about twelve hours, the carborundum is gradually reduced from the ore in crystaline form, which is then ground to a powder and pressed and molded in suitable forms for use as emery. The carborundum plant employs a 1,000-horse-power static transformer, by which the voltage or pressure is reduced from 2,000 to 100 and 200 volts. A special regulator of about the same size varies the voltage at the core of the furnace according as the resistance of the core changes with change of temperature.

Special devices are adopted in each of these plants for cooling the interior of the apparatus. A blast of air accomplishes this in the Pittsburgh reduction transformers, and oil forced through in the carborundum transformer.

I am desirous of taking up the French language as a study. Will you kindly recommend the best course to pursue for one who cannot have access to a teacher? What books are necessary, etc.?

You cannot make any very great success of studying the French language, as a language, without resorting to a good teacher at some stage of your study. It is better, if you can manage it, to get the help of a teacher almost at the beginning, and get a good start in learning to pronounce French. The work with the teacher will amount to most if you take a good example of French writing and learn how to pronounce and translate, with the teacher telling you both the pronunciation and the meaning of the words and phrases.

Suppose, for example, that you take a French text-book in science, choosing some subject of interest to you; or such a work as Ernest Renan's biography of his sister, Henriette. You start at once to read a page or two, with the aid of the teacher, who must act as your grammar and dictionary, as well as instructor in pronunciation. After going through with a page or two, you turn back and go through it again. Then take the lesson for private study with the dictionary, and see if you cannot thoroughly make out the translation. You can turn to the grammar for help toward finding such points as are needed to enable you to see the meaning of words, such as different forms of verbs, etc. Never mind about grammar any further than this. You may next return in a week to your teacher and review the lesson already gone over. Then go on for two or three pages more. Repeat with this lesson the course taken with the first; and so on indefinitely from week to week.

It will not be long before you have read through a small book like Renan's, or have fairly mastered the knowledge contained in a considerable text-book.

Don't on any account burden yourself with details of grammar and usage of words beyond what is necessary to get the meaning of what you undertake to read. Students of language, as Greek, Latin, or French, are commonly required to root out things which Demosthenes, Cicero, Montaigne could not have told about. If you wish to study philology, let it come much later. Your first object is to know the literature, and so much of the language and its grammar as is involved in knowing the lit

erature.

For a teacher, you can just as well have almost any one who has a thorough knowledge of the language, and who has intelligence enough to explain the pronunciation and meaning of words according to the methods which we have set forth. It is not at all necessary to take the lessons which are commonly given by teachers of French. A course of such lessons, however, may be very well worth while after considerable progress has been made in learning to read French.

In case you cannot have access to any one who can serve the purpose of a weekly teacher, you must content yourself with learning to read without the aid of a teacher. You can readily get a book designed to give a knowledge of French without a teacher. With such a book, with a good grammar for consultation and a good dictionary, you will, without much difficulty, get under way with reading whatever book, as we have explained above, you may choose for the purpose. There is nothing better for a grammar than Dr. Emil Otto's French Conversation-Grammar; the eleventh edition: published by Julius Groos. It is better to get one of the best dictionaries. You can get the English-French part of Tibbins and Fleming's thoroughly trustworthy dictionary for about $12, and it will be a much better investment than less money spent for an inferior work.

Which was the greater general, Grant or Lee? Was Grant's success due to his superiority as a general?

We know of no reason for denying to either Grant or Lee greatness of the first order. Both were men of superlative quality. The father of Lee was a favorite of President Washington. He was known as "Light-Horse Harry." He commanded the little army of 15,000 men which Washington ordered out for the suppression of an attempt in Western Pennsylvania to revolt against the authority of the Union.

In his descent, therefore, and not less in his personal character, Lee was the peer of any historical character which this country has produced. There is no reason to doubt that he acted as conscientiously as Washington himself did in leading the Revolution, or as Patrick Henry in Virginia, and Samuel Adams in Massachusetts, and others of the first patriots of the Revolution did, in their doubts about, or their opposition to the adoption of, the National Constitution, which made state rights subordinate, and which permitted the North in 1860 to insist on the paramount authority of the Union. In stainless honor, therefore, it seems impossible not to award equal rank to both of the consummate leaders on either side in the war of 1860 to 1865.

For comparison of their military genius and conduct the history hardly affords anything decisive. One great fact overshadows the whole field, and that is the greater weight of the legions of the Union, with unquestionably equally desperate heroism on both sides. We see not how any historian, at even the remotest distance of future time, can recall the colossal memories of Gettysburg without shrinking from the task of disparaging the generalship of Lee, pitted there against Meade instead of Grant; and if we follow Lee and his beaten army to their last stand, face to face with Grant, there seems to be no escape from the fact, that the awful frown of destiny and not the failure of Lee gave to Grant the final triumph of the Union. That both were giants in their places, and the strength of each, or the weakness, almost wholly the strength or weakness of his cause, seems to be the conclusion to which historical study will be shut up the more the subject is investigated.

Can you give me directions how to study Greek without a teacher?

For satisfactory study of Greek without a teacher there can be no better plan than the following: Procure a copy of "The Beginner's Greek Book," by Prof. J. W. White, of Harvard University. It is published by Ginn & Company, Boston and Chicago. It gives every possible assistance to learn to read Greek. The method and the knowledge of Greek which it represents are recognized as standing at the head of instruction in Greek for those whose own language is English. The pages are made, through the perfection of the present art of printing, a delight to the eye. It is not worth while to pay any attention to the exercises for translation from English into Greek. Attend only to reading the exercises in Greek; that is, to translating them into English.