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to a life of thoughtfulness and thankfulness. How many curse in their despair the GOD who made them! How many curse the day that gave them life, because they have no knowledge of GOD, no feeling, and no knowledge of any life beyond the present ! But the man possessing a fair share of knowledge, has a power of enjoyment which his uneducated neighbour knows nothing of. He can beguile weary hours by reading. He can read and learn and judge for himself God's Word; he can read works which tell him of the wonders of the world he is living in; he can read to his less-favoured neighbours, thanks to education. Lady Pigot then went on to state that in that parish there were 840 souls, and no school, no resident clergyman, no library, nowhere for a young man on leaving work to go but the public-house. They were in a deplorable condition. Their children were sent to schools far from home, and inferior to what their own might be if they undertook to have one, and, by GoD's blessing to keep it as it ought to be. The want of education led man, in the sullen ignorance of his poor neglected intellect, away from the peace and comfort of his home, to the beershop and the society of men equally ignorant and weak in moral and religious character. Such men too often went from bad to worse, till they became convicted thieves, poachers, burglars, or incendiaries. I want (continued Lady Pigot) to give to the poor man an education suited to his wants, and thereby to give him also an interest in his daily occupations. I want to tighten the bonds of fellowship and friendship between the rich and the poor, between the labourer and his master. We can do nothing without each other; one labours with his hands, and the others should labour with their heads for him. We must strive to better his state, to make him feel that he is not a mere beast of burden, worth so many shillings a-week to his employer, but a fellow-creature with ourselves, with a soul to be saved, with feelings to be considered, and with an intellect given to him by GOD to be turned to account.

THE BLACKBIRD.

H! BLACKBIRD, sing me something well! While all the neighbours shoot thee round, I keep smooth plats of fruitful ground, Where thou may'st warble, eat, and dwell.

The espaliers and the standards all

Are thine; the range of lawn and park; The unnetted black-hearts ripen dark, All thine, against the garden wall.

Yet, tho' I spared thee all the spring,
Thy sole delight is sitting still,
With that gold dagger of thy bill,
To fret the summer jenneting.

A golden bill ! the silver tongue,
Cold February loved, is dry;
Plenty corrupts the melody

That made thee famous once, when young.

And, in the sultry garden-squares,

Now thy flute-notes are changed to coarse;
I hear thee not at all, or hoarse,
As when a hawker hawks his wares.

Take warning!-he that will not sing
While yon sun prospers in the blue,
Shall sing for want, ere leaves are new,
Caught in the frozen palms of Spring.

TENNYSON.

London: FRED. PITMAN, 20, Paternoster Row, E.C.

Printed by J. WARD, Dewsbury.

Popular Lecturer and Reader.

Edited by HENRY PITMAN, Manchester.

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BY THE

REV. PROFESSOR GRIFFITH,
President of the Liverpool Geological Society.

HE LECTURER began by apologising for the fiction-like title of the lecture. It was meant, not as a license for capricious invention, but strictly as a help to the picturing of literal truth. In the year 1820, the late Dr. Mantell picked up in Tilgate Forest an immense tooth, very unlike anything that had ever before come under his notice. He afterwards showed it to Baron Cuvier, who pronounced it to be constructed on a type unknown to science, belonging as he suspected to an extinct monstrous herb-eating reptile, bearing similar relations to the crocodile as an elephant does to the lion or tiger. One day, while puzzling over this hint, he was asked to look at the skeleton of a little Iguana, when, to his unspeakable delight, he found that its teeth looked like a miniature edition of his celebrated fossil. This gave him a foundation fact on which to proceed. The unknown was a colossus with a tooth like the modern Iguana. To emphasize the discovery, he appended the Greek termination for tooth. Hence the easily remembered Iguan-odon, no longer "a gentle meeting of lights without a name," but the definite hero of a thousand songs! The next move was to search the world for Iguanas, and learn everything possible about their structure, varieties, and habits. About 150 different species are known in the West Indies, most of them strongly remind

18.-JUNE.

ing us in outline of the common water newt, and averaging from four to five feet in length. Closely allied to them is the Amblyrhyncus Cristanus, the only existing reptile that can be strictly styled marine. Its food is deep-water seaweed, hunting for which it is often seen far out at sea. Yet, strange to say, though possessed of the most perfect powers for swimming or diving, if frightened, nothing can induce it to enter or stay in the water. Darwin tells us of catching one and throwing it as far as he could into the sea. It instantly returned in a direct line. This was done repeatedly, and always with the same result. The lecturer supposed that as the land is comparatively free from enemies, while the sea abounds in sharks, and kindred desperadoes, Mama has often told him the shore is the safest place; so he always runs to it, whatever the emergency. The principle is good, but he applies it wrongly. Interesting, to watch the effect of a better acquaintance with persecuting man, on the logical instincts of his descendants!

Carrying these pictures with them, the audience were now prepared for a closer introduction to their hero. In the British Museum was a bone 22 inches in girth in the smallest part, more than twenty times that of the corres ponding bone of the Iguana, indicating a length upwards of 100 feet. Much larger ones may be seen elsewhere. It has been hotly disputed of late, whether a "horn” found in the same quarry, belonged to his nose or to his foot. Probably the foot had the best of the argument, though the inference shocked popular notions little less than if we robbed Queen Bess of her frills and ruffles, or summarily transferred them to her ankles! The main controversy was about the shape of the after part of the body, of which no specimen had yet been produced. Professor Owen makes him a kind of Manx cat, with only the ghost of a rearguard; whilst Dr. Mantell paints him as a reputable tabby, with an appendage nearly as long as the trunk, growing less by degrees and beautifully fine. The speaker would not pretend to adjudicate between such authorities. For himself he could do "admirably with either, were but the other dear charmer away." Many of them had seen a model of the animal at Sydenham, in the stomach of which 22 gentlemen dined together in December, 1853. As compared with any existing reptile, he stood remarkably high above ground, and far exceeded in bulk our largest herb

iverous mammalia. There is a well-known thigh bone, which, if covered with suitable integuments, would form a limb seven feet in circumference. The toes were armed with claws more than five inches long, and three inches wide at the roots. No wonder Dr. Buckland irreverently but admiringly dubbed him "Old Scratch!" Pretty sight, a troop of them weeding turnips, or digging for earth nuts! What they charged per diem is not in the record. These remains, however plentiful in museums, are not to be picked up at random. They belong to what our maps call the Wealden, seen a little south of London, stretching thence to the English Channel, passing under the sea and reappearing at the surface in Germany. The whole of this was simply a mud-bank thrown up at the mouth of a tremendous river, which once poured into the ocean in these latitudes. Of that they were as certain as of any fact in the world's history. A beautiful section is to be seen at Brook Point, Isle of Wight, where at low water are exposed hundreds of tons of enormous petrified pine trees, with a perfect network of snags and brushwood, the remains of a raft floated thither in the days of the Iguanodon. In not a few of them, the annular lines of growth are quite distinet, showing a variation of climate of which they are the crystalised outcome and memorial,-Nature's imperishable self-registering barometers!

The lecturer now told an amusing story of his being there with a party of geologists on a hot day in 1855, when they found what somebody jocularly called the egg of an Iguanodon, adding that if the patent incubator would but hatch it into life, their fortunes were made for ever. Alas! it proved to be a 68-pounder cannon ball! Truth is sure to show herself ultimately, however for a time she may seem to play with us at bo-peep. He next passed on to inquire about the darling's birth-place. Who welcomed the little stranger into life? In what circumstances did his young ideas first shoot into definite shape? It was clear from the condition in which the relics are found, that they must have been floated and rolled by currents over immense distances, before they became finally imbedded. very beautiful map was here presented, of the supposed geography of the globe at the time. Like the Mississippi or the Amazon, the mighty stream which flowed through Iguanada, had its source thousands of miles off from its

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