shown, neither food nor place would soon be
found for our people; and a great impetus being given to emigration,
our colonies benefited. But despite such alarms, articles of luxury
were in greater demand than ever, the tobacco duty reaching in 1892
the sum of L10,135,666, half a million, more than in the previous
year; and the consumption of tea and spirits increased in due
proportion. The same year saw great improvements in sanitation put
into practice as the result of an alarm of cholera, that plague
ravaging Hamburg.

[Illustration: Dr. Fridtjof Nansen.]

[Illustration: Miss Kingsley.]

Vast engineering works, of which the Manchester Ship Canal is the
most familiar instance, have been carried on. This great waterway,
thirty-five miles long, and placing an inland town in touch with the
sea, was begun in 1887 and finished in 1894. Numerous exhibitions, at
home and abroad, have stimulated industrial and aesthetic progress;
and science has continued to advance with bewildering rapidity,
developing chiefly in practical directions. The bacteriologist has
unveiled much of the mystery of disease, showing that seed-germs
produce it; the photographer comes in aid of surgery, for the
discovery of the X or Roentgen rays, by the German professor whose
name is associated with them, now enables the surgeon to discover
foreign bodies lodged within the human frame, and to decide with
authority their position and the means of removing them. Burial
reforms, in the interests of health and economy, have been
introduced, and nursing, elevated into a science, has become an
honourable profession for cultured women. In 1894 that eminent
_savant_ Lord Rayleigh brought before the British Association his
discovery of a hitherto unknown constituent in the atmosphere. The
use of steam as a motive power, almost contemporaneous with the
Queen's reign, has bound our land in a network of railways: now it is
electricity which is being utilised in the same sense, and to the
telephone and the telegraph as means of verbal communication is added
the motorcar as a means of rapid progression, 1896 seeing its use in
streets sanctioned by Parliament. It may not yet supersede the
bicycle, which in ten years has greatly increased in favour. Electric
lighting, in the same period, has become very general; and further
adaptations of this mysterious force to man's service are in the air.

[Illustration: J. M. Barrie.]

[Illustration: Richard Jefferies.]

T