necessary altitude. Before _AEtna_ attained
its present secure height, it devastated an area as large as
France; and Prof. Whitney has demonstrated that some center of
volcanic action, now extinct, in the State of California, threw
out a stream that covered a much greater surface, as the basaltic
table mountains, vulgarly so called, extend north and south for a
distance as great as from Moscow to Rome." In concluding his
remarks, he ventured the prediction that "the North Sea would be
completely filled up, and the British Islands again connected
with the Continent."

J. F., U.S.C.

[Decoration]

XIV.

_WILDEY'S DREAM._

A blacksmith stood, at his anvil good,
Just fifty years ago,
And struck in his might, to the left and right,
The iron all aglow.
And fast and far, as each miniature star
Illumined the dusky air,
The sparks of his mind left a halo behind,
Like the aureola of prayer.

And the blacksmith thought, as he hammered and wrought,
Just fifty years ago,
Of the sins that start in the human heart
When _its_ metal is all aglow;
And he breathed a prayer, on the evening air,
As he watched the fire-sparks roll,
That with hammer and tongs, _he_ might right the wrongs
That environ the human soul!

When he leaned on his sledge, not like minion or drudge,
With center in self alone,
But with vision so grand, it embraced every land,
In the sweep of its mighty zone;
O'er mountain and main, o'er forest and plain,
He gazed from his swarthy home,
Till rafter and wall, grew up in a hall,
That covered the world with its dome!

'Neath that bending arch, with a tottering march
All peoples went wailing by,
To the music of groan, of sob, and of moan,
To the grave that was yawning nigh,
When the blacksmith rose and redoubled his blows
On the iron that was aglow,
Till his senses did seem to dissolve in a dream,
Just fifty years ago.

He thought that he stood upon a mountain chain,
And gazed across an almost boundless plain;
Men of all nations, and of every clime,
Of ancient epochs, and of modern time,
Rose in thick ranks before his wandering eye,
And passed, like waves, in quick successi