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purse is now tumbling about the world | for a share of the blame that belongs really waiting for the lucky finder to put into only to the eater's own folly—or, it may his pocket and draw from to any extent be, worse than folly. he likes without diminution of its contents. The sole representative of that inexhaustible cruse, that self-replenishing purse, known to us in these latter days, is capitalized property, on the interest of which we live, with care not to go beyond our income. This is a cake at which we can eat for the natural term of our lives, and be satisfied with our meal. But if we devour it all at a sitting; if, instead of capitalizing we scatter, and live on our gross sum as if it were income what then? Is not this ruling the lines whereon we shall have to write the text: "We cannot eat our cake and have it?" When we have sold out hundred by hundred, and lived on the fat of the land when we ought only to have afforded ourselves the lean; when we have flourished in the sun like butterflies for whom life has no serious work, and honeymaking is a degrading occupation to be left only to those dull creatures the bees; when we have furnished our house, and bought our pictures, set up our carriage, and splashed into the glittering sea of fashion and luxury, then we have to fall down from our pleasant| place of pride when our cake is all gone, and confess sorrowfully that we cannot eat and still have.

We eat our cakes too fast in other things beside money. We cannot eat them and have them, say, when we spend our intellect on that terrible temptation, "good paying work" for the immediate moment, but though good and paying for the immediate moment, work that exhausts our wits and does not allow of renovation - work that degrades our better selves, and that loses in the long run, however well it seems to pay in the short, because it destroys our reputation and staying-power alike. But we cannot eat our cake and have it any more in brains than in guineas. If we spend all and harvest nothing we shall come to the bare bones before long; and if we sacrifice the future to the present, and prefer the success of the moment to the stability of after-time, we shall find that we have eaten to excess, and that our indigestion of today will end in vacuity to-morrow. We have to husband our working-powers and the brain-power whence they spring, as we have to husband everything else that we possess; and to eat up in a short time what ought to last for all our life is bad management, and the end will prove its evil.

We all know people of this kind, to whom their cakes are as if they were everlasting; as if the slice taken off to-day were able to renew itself by some mysterious manner for to-morrow; people who never give an onlook to the future, but go on from hour to hour and day to day, as if life were eternal and circumstance unchangeable, and there were no such things as consumption, destruction, and decay. But we see them fall to the ground. It has to come, and it is inevitable. After having squandered in a few years what should have lasted them for life, they have to cast about mournfully for bread, which they are glad to accept stale and insufficient, in place of the richer cake which they devoured with so much uncalculating greed. Then there are regrets, self-reproaches, despair; and "How could I have been such a fool!" is the burden of a sad song of sorrow that has to be chanted forever after, in place of the mad chorus that once rang through the air. Sometimes, indeed, the burden is exchanged for another of futile reproaches against this and that, him or her, who helped to eat the cake that should have been preserved, and who thus comes in

We may do the same thing with friendship. We can eat up a friendship, as we can eat up everything else, and leave ourselves no crumbs to go on with out of all that large cake that once was ours. If we throw too much on our friends - make too many demands on their sympathy, their patience, their good-nature, their allowance, their generosity - we shall end by eating up in a short time the cake of love that should have lasted us to the end. Many a friendship has been squandered in this manner by excess of demands, and many a love has followed suit. By the folly of jealousy, which, once a stimulant, becomes at last a poison; by the folly of display which, once a delicious kind of enchantment, becomes at last an oppressive nightmare; by the folly of that uneasy need of perpetual assurance, which, once gladly responded to as the sign of delightful vitality, becomes at last a tyranny too onerous to be borne; by all these absurdities and extravagances is the food of love devoured and destroyed, and the cake which should have lasted for a lifetime eaten and done with before half the journey has been gone through. We eat our cake too greedily, too inconsiderately. When it is gone we sit down and cry, and

wonder how it has come about that we | for the future. We have spent all our have nothing left to go on with. If we health and strength in the morning, and had husbanded our resources, they would the evening finds us as weak and failing, have lasted; it was our excess which left us poor so soon, as many broken-hearted people find out when too late.

crippled and laid aside. It is all a question of degree, of moderation. We may use our youth and enjoy it to the utmost limit of good sense, without eating up our capital on insane pleasures, that carry poison with them and leave destruction behind them. We need not be cowards nor ascetics, yet we need not exceed; and to devour all our cake of health and

So with our health, our strength. If we eat it all up in youth by imprudence, by vicious courses, by foolish ignorance of the best laws of life, we have none to last us through maturity and old age. We eat it up in a few years, and have to go short for a time hereafter. We overtax our-strength in the few years of early youth, selves by long walks, by heavy strains, by tremendous exertion of our powers somehow; and we are struck down by paralysis or some obscure form of spinal complaint. We live fast; and the grand vitality of youth which "pulled us through" at the time gives way before long, and we are wrecked forever on the shoals of dyspepsia or liver-disease. We have eaten our cake at a sitting, and we have none left

leaving none for the future, is the act of a madman, and brings its own punishment with it. We must, if we are wise, make some kind of calculation in our life, and say what we shall spend now, and what we shall keep for the future. The rash say so much, which is all, and leaves them nothing; the cooler, and those able to forecast with judgment, say so much, which leaves them a sufficiency.

SOME NEW PLANTS FROM THE NICOBAR and harsh grasses could vegetate; but an exAND ANDAMAN ISLANDS. - Herr S. Kurtz has amination of the greater part of Kamorta has a very interesting paper on this subject in the taught me that luxuriant tropical forests, with Journal of Botany for November, 1875, from an average height of about eighty feet, not which, however, we only abstract some of the only cover the seaside, but the same forests physical facts recorded. The most remark- form belts of considerable breadth over the able one is the nature of the clay. Herr island itself, while the inner hill plateau is Kurtz says that the interest, which attaches to covered by those peculiar park-like grasslands the Nicobar vegetation rests chiefly in the which Dr. Diedrichsen has called grass-heaths. peculiar polycistine clay, which looks some- The next rocks botanically influential are what like meerschaum, and is also nearly as calcareous sea sand, raised coral banks, limelight and porous. This clay covers large stone and calcareous sandstones, which beareas on those islands which form the so-long to the so-called southern group, in which, called northern group. It contains, according to Dr. Rink's analysis

Silica

Oxide of iron
Alumina

Magnesia

Water.

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however, Katchall (an entirely calcareous island) is enumerated. Then come the plutonic rocks and their detritus, which, however, were only little developed in those parts which I visited. All islands consisting of the above rocks are characterized by the absence of grass-heaths, and are covered with forests Here the total absence of alkalies is very re- from the bottom to the top. The four prinmarkable. In places it becomes red from cipal aspects of vegetation in these islands abundance of oxide of iron, and in this case it are 1, mangrove swamps; 2, beach forests; is usually literally filled with fossil seaweeds. 3, tropical forests, which fall under three A microscopical examination of the rock re- groups, those growing on polycistine clay, veals abundance of silica, fragments of poly-those on calcareous or coralline strata, and cistines, and diatoms. One would say that on those growing on plutonic formations; 4, such substrata nothing but wretched scrub grass-heaths.

END OF VOLUME CXXIX.

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