similarly endowed; yet the disappearance of Jupiter's satellites, when thrown upon the dazzling screen of his surface, goes a long way toward proving that they, too, owe their vividness to their cloud-coverings.

They do not, however, always disappear. The third and fourth satellites especially have often, from their jetty aspect in mid-transit, been mistaken for their own shadows. So long age as September 2, 1665, Domenico Cassini observed one of these “black transits," which until lately were regarded as events of extreme rarity. Since they have been attentively looked for, however, they are found to present themselves pretty freely, though with the utmost irregularity. They seem to be entirely capricious in their occurrence. And for this reason, if for no other, the attempt to explain the varied phenomena of transits on a bare principle of contrast can scarcely be deemed successful. For, if the quality of a transit depended merely upon the duskiness or brilliancy of the part of the disc traversed, it could be determined beforehand. Observers would be prepared for the peculiar appearances, which, nevertheless, always take them by surprise.

Besides, the satellites themselves display significant peculiarities. They are very far from presenting the stereotyped immobility of the "wan face" with which our moon "climbs the sky." Galileo was struck from the outset with the inconstancy of their light. Herschel attributed their obscurations to the spotted condition of their globes, which, indeed, have often appeared deformed from the unreflective nature of large sections of their surfaces. But it is improbable that these markings are permanent, like the dim lunar maria, or the gray-green seas of Mars. They are rather, it must be supposed, of atmospheric origin, like the belts and spots of Jupiter himself. Effects in transit must then depend mainly upon the state of the visible surface of the projected body.

Careful and continuous observations of the third satellite by Messrs. Schaeberle and Campbell with the Lick thirty-six inch refractor, leave little or no doubt that its surface-reduced by distance though it be, to the apparent size of a glove-button nearly half a mile away-is diversified with approximately parallel, streaky shad

ings, fading off toward each limb in a manner suggestive of atmospheric action. Rotation on an axis perpendicular to the line of the markings could be inferred, and there were strong indications that it was executed, as Herschel had supposed, in an identical period with that of the satellite's revolution round Jupiter-that is, in seven days and four hours.

The first satellite certainly conforins to this rule, obeyed wherever tidal friction is strong enough to enforce it. In September 1890, during one of its dark transits, Professor Barnard of Lick saw No. 1 (Io) apparently double, as the effect, it would seem, of a bright belt cutting in two, so to speak, an egg-shaped body. He made, at any rate, quite sure of its elongation, August 8, 1891; a fact promptly confirmed by Messrs. Schaeberle and Campbell. They further ascertained that the longer axis of the oval points toward Jupiter's centre, as theory requires that it should. The elongation, indeed, represents neither more nor less than a permanent tidal wave, by the frictional power of which the rotation of the satellite relative to its primary was, ages ago, brought to a standstill. The probability is great that the same law of isochronous rotation and revolution governs the movements of the second and fourth, as well as of the first and third satellites.

The surmised habitability of the Jovian moons is thus rendered highly problematical. Their primary, it has often been suggested, might be efficient enough as a heat-source to make up for the scantiness of sun-given warmth, and so to promote the flourishing of a fauna and flora on each of these subordinate worlds. But if, in consequence of their mode of rotation, this genial influence be poured upon one hemisphere only, it can be of little or no use for the purpose in question. Besides, it is far from certain that any one of the satellites is sufficiently advanced in solidification to be the seat of even the lowliest forms of life. Their small mean density, their fluctuations of aspect, their high reflective power, and the indications of cloud-markings on their surfaces, hint rather at a chaotic stage of existence, not far removed from that ascribed to their imposing primary. This intimation is one of the most curious and unexpected results of their scrutiny with the great telescopes of modern times.

One other has now to be recorded. Jupiter shines just now with remarkable brilliancy. In the absence of the moon, he completely dominates the nocturnal sky. He is visible in strong twilight be fore he has cleared the mists of the eastern horizon. The perspective effects of the earth's motion keep him lingering in the northern sign of Pisces, so that he attains a fine altitude. Moreover, at his approaching opposition, or midnight culmination, on October 12, his distance from the earth, though not small-367 millions of miles will be very nearly the least possible. All which advantages, diligently reckoned up and calculated, have caused the opposition of 1892 to be anticipated as a harvest-time for students of the "Mundus Jovialis." Yet the first sheaf gathered, early in September, was certainly of a nature to create surprise.

Jupiter and his four moons form a system so complete in itself, so symmetrical, and bound together by such peculiar dy namical relations, that the presence of an extra member seems positively intrusive. It has, nevertheless, been certified by Professor Barnard, whose skill and acuteness as an observer, to say nothing of the unequalled qualities of the instrument at his disposal, leave no reasonable doubt as to the genuineness of the discovery. It was so difficult to make, that one cannot wonder that it has been so long postponed. The fifth moon appears as a very minute point of light, of the thirteenth stellar magnitude, circulating in seventeen and a half hours quite close to the big body of

Jupiter. Its distance from his centre of 112,000 miles leaves an interval of only 26,000 to his surface, and the new satellite must accordingly spend most of its time either on or behind the splendid disc, from under cover of which it peeps out for a brief space once in about nine hours. The disparity of seven magnitudes between it and its next neighbor, Io, means that it sends us six to seven hundred times less light. Its reflecting surface, accordingly, if equally brilliant, must be smaller in the same proportion, which would give it a diameter one twenty-fifth of that of the larger body, or of about one hundred miles. If, however, as seems probable, its surface be more absorptive of light than the changing cloud-envelopes of the larger satellites, then this estimate of its dimensions should be proportionately augmented. At any rate, it is an insignificant body-a mere grain of dust beside a majestic cannon-ball. And its insignificance suggests that it may not be solitary. It may have hundreds of companions defying, by their sinallness, the possibility of detection. Conceivably, it may be nothing more than a specimen of the pulverulent materials of an abortive full-sized satellite. Its presence and situation, however they may be interpreted, are of unmistakable significance as regards the genesis of systems, and afford one more instance of that growth in the visible complexity of their structure which steadily accompanies the progress of research.-Saturday Re

view.

ONE of the commonest forms of male conceit is its utter disbelief in the existence of any female capacity for the care of property. "A woman, says this bland superiority, "is essentially unbusinesslike. She cannot calculate, and is incapable of the simplest addition. She habitually confounds interest with principal, and is ignorant of the commonest terms that relate to the handling of money. So careless is she of that latter commodity, that she can hardly be trusted even with the custody of her own purse. Sooner or later she is sure to lose it, with all its con

tents." The reproach is a very old one, so old that it has come to be accepted even by women themselves without question or demur. But is it a well-founded one? We should doubt it very much. Indeed, we believe that, in the matter of thrift, if it were possible to weigh the rival claims of men and women, the latter would be found to be the more saving and the more careful. careful. Still, legend will have them. otherwise, and in support of that legend man triumphantly points to the fact that women lose their purses. They do lose their purses, the fact must be admitted;

but it is just possible that, did man carry his own money after so perilous a fashion, he might lose it also. These reflections are suggested to us by a story that found its way into the columns of a daily paper a few days ago. A lady, it was said, went to Scotland Yard to recover an umbrella which she had lost, or, rather, which she had left behind her in a cab. The umbrella was duly identified and presented to her, and she departed with it, but left behind her another umbrella with which she had arrived, and a brown-paper parcel which she had been carrying."So like a woman, was the general comment; but why was it any more like a woman than a man? Even the wisest of men are subject to an occasional absence of mind, which blots out from their memory their immediate surroundings and purposes. No doubt the good lady who left more property behind her than she had recovered, was deeply engaged in debating some ques tion relative to the comfort of an unworthy husband, who had allowed her to go by herself to Scotland Yard in search of her lost property. However that might have been, the story was immediately followed up by several similar tales from other correspondents, who all averred that a woman and her purse, her umbrella, her parcels, and everything that is hers, are continually being parted through want of common care on the part of the former. Indeed, one gentleman went so far as to assert that he himself had picked up in the streets of London five feminine purses in the course of as many years, some of them containing quite considerable sums sure ly a very exceptional run of luck, for this witness says nothing of having returned the treasure-trove to its original owners.

Well, it would be useless to deny that women lose their purses, for probably there has hardly lived a woman who has not lost at least two or three in the course of her life-time; but these small losses are occasioned, as a rule, not by want of care, but by excess of care. A man does not lose his purse, because he rarely carries one. He prefers to have his money loose in his waistcoat-pockets, where he can get at it with less trouble, and where, he will assure you, it is infinitely more safe than in any separate receptacle. Notwithstanding this assurance, he does lose it-perhaps not unfrequently; but when

he loses it, he wisely holds his tongue, and no one but himself knows of his own carelessness. Hence it is that even though men lost the contents of their pockets as frequently as women did, they would still appear, by reason of their silence, more fortunate. Still, as we have already said, we must confess the women do lose their money in this way more frequently than men do, and the reason is not far to seek. Consider the case of a fashionably dressed lady of the day. She has no waistcoatpockets such as her husband delights in; the fit of her dress does not admit of them. Even if she had such pockets, she would still cling to the use of a purse, for she considers the loose carriage of gold and silver to be almost criminally careless. She will not be satisfied until she has put it in a purse-which already contains, perhaps, her latch-key, sundry postage-stamps, and some tightly-folded letters-and when she has put it in her purse, she has nowhere to put the purse itself. The exigencies of her dress and her own prudence cause her to carry it in her hand, so that her sense of touch may always assure or remind her of its possession. Unfortunately, she cannot always devote a hand entirely to that service, and the moment must come, sooner or later, when she is obliged to ease it of its burden while she turns it to some other use. Then it is that forgetfulness comes between, and causes her to leave her charge behind her, or that dishonesty steps in and carries off the unguarded treasure. While engaged in shopping, for instance, and intent upon examining with both hands the goods submitted to her inspection, she is obliged to lay all her belongings on the counter-her umbrella, her purse, her card case, and her parcels and it can hardly be wondered at that she sometimes leaves some of them behind her. Hence has arisen the theory that woman is a pocketless creature, destined by Nature to carry her purse in her hand, and only sometimes to remember it. And as one theory attracts others, there have arisen about her quite a host of beliefs in her innate imprudence and negligence of her belongings. as she loses her purse, so she is supposed to lose her fortune, and to be absolutely incapable, by herself, of devising any safeguard for it. And yet we should still be disposed to say that the average woman

Even

can be better trusted with the care of property than can the average man,-always excepting such cases as those in which she is betrayed into throwing it away through goodness of heart. A woman's affection is, of course, her weakest point, and when attacked upon that side, it is not difficult to rob her; attacked upon any other side, she may be trusted to make as good a defence as the man who finds it so easy to laugh at her. In the first place, she is naturally more cautious than her male critic; her very timidity adds to her prudence, and she is far more likely to err on the side of caution than of temerity, being painfully anxious-minded and long-sighted in the matter of possible consequences. Left to herself, she would rather invest all her money in Consols, and live a pinched life of security, than enjoy an interest of 6 per cent., with precarious luxury. She is quick to imagine disaster, and slow to recognize any mean between absolute safety and reckless speculation. And if she can be trusted to be more careful than man in the guardianship of her capital, she is infinitely more careful in the expenditure of her income. It may be true that she is weak in arithmetic, and rarely can add up a line of figures three times without bringing out three different results; still, for all that, she will keep a careful account of ber expenditure long after her husband has given up his own private account in despair. Really, when one comes to consider the question, the ingratitude of man in this matter is almost insolent. In nine cases out of ten, he leaves the whole expenditure of his household in his wife's hands; it is the who has the responsibility of spending or saving, and whom he delegates as sole guardian of the fortune which he has made, or is making; and yet he has the calm pretension to sneer at her want of businesslike qualities. He eats his dinner, without the least idea of its cost; is waited upon by servants, whose wages are unknown to him; and lights his candle without caring to ask himself whether that illumination will cost him twopence or a shilling. If he has to save money, he is dependent upon a woman to tell him where it can best be saved, for the simple reason that he knows nothing of the details of his expenditure, and she does. One would not find fault with this arrange

ment, which, after all, is but a very fair division of labor; one would only wish to remind the man that it is unfair to put all the responsibility upon the woman's shoulders, and then ignore the weight. A man's account of his domestic exchequer is generally to this effect: "I make all the money, my wife spends it all; if it were not for me, she would probably spend more than all; but then, poor thing, she is so unbusinesslike. And with this view of the case he is quite content, and-what is more curious-his wife seems to be quite content too. Really, the magnanimity of woman is sometimes as great as it is unexpected.

In the mere matter of thrift, there is not a shadow of doubt as to which of the two sexes is the more saving and more anxious to get a fair value for expenditure. It is the women who are the chief supporters of co-operative stores and other wholesale institutions, and the most resolute opponents of the middleman." They will travel from one end of London to the other in order to get some article at a cheaper rate than that at which it is sold in their neighborhood; and will sternly deny to the cabman the extra sixpence which weak man so easily bestows upon him. All to no purpose; for though a woman may save him hundreds a year in the strict management of his household, and render to him the most exact and faithful account of her stewardship, it counts for nothing in the sight of man beside the one fact-that she loses her purse. She loses her purse; she cannot add up a column of figures without inking her fingers and giving herself a headache; and the jargon of the Stock Exchange is simply Greek to her. From the height of his superiority man contemplates these weaknesses with scorn; scorn which is very often accentuated by the uncomfortable suspicion that he is not very much better versed in such matters than she is. Is it not almost time that man should abandon this attitude of patronizing contempt, and seek for some other and more certain basis upon which to found his claim to superiority? In the narrow sphere of domestic economy it is only too obvious upon which side the business-like qualities lie; even in the wider field of commercial enterprise, woman has, before now, been known to hold her own. It is certain that she occa

sionally loses her purse and drops her parcels, it is possible that she may sometimes be so ignorant of finance as to imagine a balance at her banker's as long as there are blank checks in her check-book; but with

all that, we would take the light and constant hold of a woman's fingers as a better guard upon the money-bags than the tight, but easily relaxed, grasp of a man's fist. Spectator.

THE question of the irrigation of Lower Egypt is now, owing to the high Nile, at tracting increasing attention. Under these circumstances it can hardly fail to interest our readers to have recalled to their minds the theory connected with the name of Mr. Cope Whitehouse as to the locality of Lake Moris. Briefly, this was described by Herodotus, who wrote, moreover, of what he had himself seen, as a lake not far from Memphis (Cairo), some 450 miles in circumference, and fifty fathoms deep, full of fish of twenty-two species, used as a receptacle for the surplus waters of the Nile in flood, whence, when the Nile was low, sufficient water could be drawn to raise the river level again to the height required for the continued supply of Lower Egypt. Of this marvel of human ingenuity and industry Herodotus could find no words adequate to express his admiration, excelling, as it did, in his opinion, the Labyrinth, which again excelled all the Pyramids together, though any one of these was a match for the greatest works of Greece. Diodorus Siculus described the lake in almost similar terms, and Strabo, Pliny, and Mutianus all testified to its existence, while the Ptolemaic map gives a representation of it, not, indeed, indicating such enormous dimensions, but still indicating a vast body of water to the south and west of the Fayoum. Careful collation of all the old accounts enabled Mr. Whitehouse, as he thought, to fix the latitude and longitude of this abyss before he ever set foot in Egypt, and whether or not what he found was the site of the ancient Lake Moris, this much is incontestable-namely, that he found a vast depression in the hills toward the Libyan desert, the depth and extent of which had never been suspected even by those who had tracked across it. This depression is known as the Wady Raiyan, and lies to the south and west of the mod

ern province known as the Fayoum, from which it is separated by a narrow ridge. Herodotus described Lake Moris as having its greatest length from north to south. This would be true of either the Fayoum or the Wady Raiyan separately (this latter having a singular prong of great length, called the Wady Muellah, stretching away toward the south-east), and it would be equally true if, as is probable from the dimensions given, the lake covered both the Fayoum and Wady Raiyan together. If the entrance from the Nile Valley at El Lahun is not altogether artificial, the whole double basin was probably originally a great natural backwater for the water of the Nile in high flood. Mr. Whitehouse considers that the Fayoum was in great measure reclaimed when the Bahr Jusuf was made and dams erected at El Lahun, presumably between B. c. 1500 and 1800, and certainly not later than the Hyksos period; and in the name Bahr Jusuf, or Canal of Joseph, and the persistent Mahommedan tradition that the canal was made by the patriarch Joseph, he sees evidence that these great reclamation works were carried on during Joseph's premiership, and very likely in the main by the Israelites. There can be little doubt that Goshen, where they dwelt, was this district. It would be nothing strange if Herodotus, a thousand years later, saw the Fayoum as again a sheet of water, though no longer a useless one, but used as a reservoir, with regulating gates and canals. It might have been flooded again as the result of neglect, of accident, or of design; this last either from the inhabitants of Upper Egypt desiring to relieve their lands of inundation water, or, as was proposed to Mehemet Ali in recent times, as a deliberate sacrifice of the Fayoum for the benefit of Egypt generally. Be this as it may, the Fayoum, if it ever had been re-flooded, must have been again reclaimed