ld hear of something to his advantage--

"Sometimes," says Hearn, "the fairy of science touches my ears and eyes
with her wand; and then, for a little time, I am able to hear things
inaudible and perceive things imperceptible."

After pages of minute description of the biology of ants, leading to a
still larger significance concerning the relation of ethics to cosmic
law, he thus ends his essay:--

"Apparently the highest evolution will not be permitted to creatures
capable of what human moral experience has in all eras condemned.

"The greatest strength is the strength of unselfishness; and power
supreme never will be accorded to cruelty or to lust. There may be no
gods; but the forces that shape and dissolve all forms of being would
seem to be much more exacting than gods. To prove a 'dramatic tendency'
in the ways of the stars is not possible; but the cosmic process seems
nevertheless to affirm the worth of every human system of ethics
fundamentally opposed to human egoism."

In "Exotics and Retrospectives" Hearn has written an Essay on "Insect
Musicians" that reveals his erudite and minute care in the study of
"things Japanese." He describes the first beginning of the custom of
keeping musical insects, tracing it down from ancient Japanese records
to a certain Chuzo who lived in the Kwansei era in 1789. From the time
of this Chuzo began the custom of breeding insect musicians, and
improving the quality of their song from generation to generation. Every
detail of how they are kept in jars, or other earthen vessels
half-filled with moistened clay and are supplied every day with fresh
food is recounted. The essay ends: "Does not the shrilling booth of the
insect-seller at a night festival proclaim a popular and universal
comprehension of things divined in the West only by our rarest
poets;--the pleasure-pain of autumn's beauty, the weird sweetness of the
voices of the night, the magical quickening of remembrance by echoes of
forest and field? Surely we have something to learn from the people in
whose mind the simple chant of a cricket can awaken whole fairy swarms
of tender and delicate fancies. We may boast of being their masters in
the mechanical,--their teachers of the artificial in all its varieties
of ugliness;--but in the knowledge of the natural,--in the feeling of
the joy and beauty of earth,--they exceed us like the Greeks of old. Yet
perhaps it will be only when our blind aggressive industrialism has
was