n see the great armies
of living beings led onward from victory to victory toward the higher
life of our own time. Each age sees some advance, though death
overtakes all its creatures. Those that escape their actual enemies or
accident, fall a prey to old age: volcanoes, earthquakes, glacial
periods, and a host of other violent accidents sweep away the life of
wide regions, yet the host moves on under a control that lies beyond
the knowledge of science. Man finds himself here as the crowning
victory of this long war. For him all this life appears to have
striven. In his hands lies the profit of all its toil and pain.
Surely this should make us feel that our duty to all these living
things, that have shared in the struggle that has given man his
elevation, is great, but above all, great is our duty to the powers
that have been placed in our bodies and our minds.

[Illustration: A GLACIER.]

THE PITCH LAKE IN THE WEST INDIES

(FROM AT LAST.)

BY C. KINGSLEY.

[Illustration: COOLIE AND NEGRO.]

The Pitch Lake, like most other things, owes its appearance on the
surface to no convulsion or vagary at all, but to a most slow,
orderly, and respectable process of nature, by which buried vegetable
matter, which would have become peat, and finally brown coal, in a
temperate climate, becomes, under the hot tropic soil, asphalt and
oil, continually oozing up beneath the pressure of the strata above
it....

* * * * *

As we neared the shore, we perceived that the beach was black with
pitch; and the breeze being off the land, the asphalt smell (not
unpleasant) came off to welcome us. We rowed in, and saw in front of a
little row of wooden houses a tall mulatto, in blue policeman's dress,
gesticulating and shouting to us. He was the ward policeman, and I
found him (as I did all the colored police) able and courteous, shrewd
and trusty. These police are excellent specimens of what can be made
of the negro, or half-negro, if he be but first drilled, and then
given a responsibility which calls out his self-respect. He was
warning our crew not to run aground on one or other of the pitch
reefs, which here take the place of rocks. A large one, a hundred
yards off on the left, has been almost all dug away, and carried to
New York or to Paris to make asphalt-pavement.

[Illustration: THE POLICE STATION.]

The boat was run ashore, under his directions, on a spit of sand
between the pitch; an