and you cannot get a man condemned without proof.' 'Proof! And what do you call proof? He does not even dare to deny his guilt; he actually says with utter shamelessness in one of his letters that " I may draw what inferences I please": and if a man will not plead, the court must necessarily conclude him guilty.' 'Nay, he might dispute the jurisdiction of the court,' observed the parson slily. 'A public man, sir, like the challenger at a tournament, is bound to enter the lists whoever touches his shield,' answered Jabez. And even if these visits are innocent, which I do not think, Hawtrey is now well aware in what light they are viewed, and by obstinately refusing to discontinue them is responsible for all the injurious effects they may have. A man in office must give up even his most harmless amusement if it clashes in the popular belief with his duties. Mr. Hawtrey will not do this, and I must again press on you the imperative necessity of excommunicating him.' 'On me, Mr. Oliphant !—why, bless my soul, you don't mean that I am the man to excommunicate him ?" 'Certainly you are the proper person, Mr. Truman,' replied Jabez, with a winning smile, and the only person, if, as I could wish, the censure is to be pronounced quickly and without a great deal of trouble in the present state of the law without citing him before the bishop, in fact. Mr. Hawtrey is one of your own parishioners, and excommunication seems to me to be quite within the province of either a rural dean or a surrogate-both which offices I need not say we have all much pleasure in seeing combined in yourself, my dear sir. Do help yourself to another glass of port.' 'But surrogate rural dean Good gracious, I never dreamed of anything of this kind: I always thought a surrogate had nothing to do but with wills and so on; and as to a rural dean-why, bless me, I didn't know that he had anything in the world to do!' 'Oh, but you must not underestimate your own powers and prerogatives, Mr. Truman. If you will be kind enough to turn to the 382nd page there' (Jabez blandly gave him the open volume), 'you will find that a rural dean is a deputy of the bishop and, having to inspect the conduct of the clergy around, is armed with an inferior degree of judicial and coercive authority, which would surely extend so far as the mere pronouncing a decree of excommunication. So a surrogate, as you will see herefrom his being the substitute of a bishop or a bishop's chancellor.' The parson gave a long whistle of despair. Knowing happily nothing about ecclesiastical censures himself, he took for granted what was thus boldly asserted, namely, that as rural dean or surrogate he had a right to excommunicate notorious offenders in his parish. No doubt he thought it very odd indeed that, if he had such a power, he should never have heard of its existence before; and he felt certain it could only be based on some obsolete but unrepealed enactment which Jabez had fished out of the abyss of forgotten laws. Still it did not even occur to him to doubt the accuracy of a statement of Mr. Oliphant, whose truthfulness and high sense of honour he knew.. The fact was, however, that Jabez, having begun his researches with the profound conviction that excommunication by the incumbent was the only proper punishment for Hawtrey, and must be found to be legal, had so bewildered himself by hunting this ecclesiastical prerogative through the forests and jungles of the Statutes at Large and a wilderness of folios-tracking it out 'Well, but really, Mr. Oliphant, I don't know anything whatever about the process of excommunication-never did such a thing in my life-never dreamed of it, bless you!' 'I anticipated that objection, Mr. Truman,' said Jabez with pitiless courtesy, and have taken the trouble to look out the proper form from the authorities on the subject. You will find it in these volumes which I will lend you; if you peruse them, never fear but you will do your duty admirably.' through labyrinths of 'whereas-es,' occasion calls, our property, our 'furthermores' and 'notwithstand- friendships, nay, our lives themings,' through canons and conven- selves.' tions and decretals, and after all only to find it alternately a spiritual will-o'-the wisp and a contumacious beast with claws, catch sight of it here in the plain charge of a bluff bishop and lose it there behind the mailed glove of a king, or run it down as he thought in a precedent and then, presto! see it bolt under an Act of Parliament just as he laid his hands on it-he was so bewildered, I say, with all this that he had failed to perceive how decently and completely the middleage hobgoblin he was in search of had been laid to rest for ever by modern statutes. Or perhaps in these statutes he saw loop-holes which ordinary minds do not see; one cannot tell; one can only be sure that the judgment at which he arrived was honest, however much mistaken it might be. But poor Truman did not even know that Mr. Oliphant was probably mistaken, and he felt cold drops of perspiration on his forehead, so great was the dilemma in which he conceived himself placed; for he had quite made up his mind already that it was impossible to do what Mr. Oliphant wished, and yet that gentleman, who had been so munificent to him, would be mortally offended if he declined to comply. 'But John Hawtrey is a very intimate friend of mine, Mr. Oliphant,' said Joseph at last, with the air of a drowning man catching at a straw. 'Yes, my dear sir, that will certainly make it more painful,' replied Jabez, plucking the straw away. 'He was a friend of mine also, and I can sympathise with your feelings. But you remember the philosopher's magnificent dictum that his friend was dear but truth dearer still? Justice is an inexorable goddess; to her we must sacrifice, if The parson groaned. 'I must have time to think the thing over,' he said: 'one can't decide in such a hurry what to do.' : 'Certainly it will do if you let me know your decision in a few days, though to my own mind the case appears as clear as possible.— I hope, Sir George, you will join me in urging our friend here to do his duty strenuously, however unpleasant it may be. I am sure from your long silence that you thoroughly agree with me this course is the only one left us.' 'No, no, by Gad, no!' exclaimed the baronet, as if waking from a dream. John Hawtrey's good fellow-went to school to him: so did you, Oliphant. Mustn't be excommunicated—oh, no!' 'I am much surprised, Sir George, that you should allow your private feelings to influence you on such an important matter; and you a magistrate!' said Mr. Oliphant. 'Ah, very well: but he mustn't be excommunicated. Has good blood in his veins, has Hawtrey, though his father was poor.' 'I do not see,' answered Jabez, in considerable wrath at this Balaam who had been brought to curse and had blessed instead, why good blood, as you call it, should give a man a privilege to commit any of fence he pleases.' 'Mustn't be excommunicated,' repeated the baronet, more positively. 'Highsides stand by him.' "Then you must allow me to tell you that in spite of all the Highsides he shall be excommunicated, as justice requires,' cried Mr. Oliphant in flaming anger. Sir George was not so intoxicated as not to be still touchy about his dignity when it was assailed. He jumped up and rang the bell to order his carriage, muttering, 'impudent fellow-son of a cobblertea-dealer!' all which expressions Mr. Oliphant unluckily overheard and never forgave. Not forgetting however that the baronet was a guest, he bowed him out to his car riage with even more than ordinary courtesy; but they did not shake hands on parting, and Jabez returned to the dining-room if possible more exasperated against the representative of the Highsides than against the schoolmaster. Truman did not stay long after this explosion, but all he would say in answer to Mr. Oliphant's pressing him again to excommunicate Hawtrey, was that he would think of it.' Soon afterwards Lord Stainmore arrived, and he was cosily sipping his tea by the drawing-room fire with Mr. and Mrs. Oliphant, when the door was rather hastily opened and Kate, followed by Holden, swept into the apartment. THE THE ROSSE TELESCOPE SET TO NEW WORK. HE great Rosse telescope, with its monster tube, down which a tall man can walk upright, and with a light-gathering power so enormous, that even by day the stars seen through it shine like miniature suns, has not remained idle since the lamented death of the astronomer who constructed it. Not only has the work to which Earl Rosse devoted it-the delineation of those strange stellar cloudlets that fleck the dark vault of the heavens-been continued with unremitting assiduity, but its unrivalled powers have been devoted to aid the progress of those new and subtle modes of research which have recently been invented. The task was no simple one. The gigantic tube, with its ponderous six-feet mirror, had been poised so skilfully that a child could guide its movements. But for the new work which it was to be called on to perform much more was wanted. A new power had to De given to the telescope-a power of self-motion so exactly regulated that the gigantic eye of the telescope might remain steadily fixed on any given star or planet, notwithstanding the swift rotation of the earth, by which in the ordinary condition of the tube, the celestial objects were carried in a few moments across its field of view. This power has now been given to the great reflector, and thereby the value of the instrument as an aid to scientific research has undoubtedly been more than doubled. Already it has solved a question which had been found to lie far beyond the powers of inferior instruments; and what it has done is, we believe, the merest foretaste of what it is likely to do in coming years.. Let us briefly consider a few of the qualities of this wonderful telescope, so that we may be able to appreciate its unequalled adaptability to the subtle modes of research which our physicists are now ap plying to the celestial bodies. As a light-gatherer the Rosse reflector is facile princeps among telescopes. Sir William Herschel's great four-feet reflector and Lassell's If the other qualities of the great We the inquiry is rendered so much the less unpleasing by the consideration that in some of the new modes of research to which the telescope is to be applied, the faults which are inseparable from a reflector of such enormous dimensions are of comparatively small moment. The fault, then, of the Rosse reflector, as of all the very large reflectors hitherto constructed, is that it does not present objects in a perfectly distinct manner. It used to be remarked of the great fourfeet reflector of Sir William Herschel, that it 'bunched a star into a cocked hat;' and it is whispered that Lassell's great mirror once exhibited an occultation of one of Saturn's satellites when no such phenomenon had in reality taken. place. The fact seems to be that in the present state of mechanical science, it is impossible to construct a reflector of such enormous dimensions as these, with that perfect truth of figure which Mr. De la Rue has given to his 13-inch reflector, and which Mr. With seems able to give, in every instance, to the mirrors he constructs for the Browning reflectors. The very weight of a large mirror tends to change the figure of its surface; and though the change may seem insignificant yet the defining power of the telescope is seriously affected. The reader may judge of the effect of a slight change of figure, from the fact that a single hair between the mirror of a nine-inch reflector and the sustaining-bed suffices to cause the most annoying distortion in observed objects. It is on this account that we hear so little of any discoveries effected within the range of our own system by means of the great Parsonstown reflector. Far better views of the planets have been obtained by much smaller telescopes. The late Mr. Dawes obtained singularly distinct views of the planet Mars with a refracting telescope only eight inches in aperture, whereas the views of this planet obtained by means of the Rosse telescope are perfectly wretched. We have before us, as we write, eight such views, and it is impossible to say what they mean. The planet Saturn, again, the most beautiful and interesting object in the whole heavens, has exhibited all its most charming features in the 13-inch reflector of Mr. De la Rue, F.R.S. In the Rosse telescope,-well; all that we shall say is that a distinguishing foreign astronomer was once invited to look at the planet by its aid, and his account of what he saw was thus worded: They showed me something and they told me it was Saturn, and I believed them.' But great reflectors are not constructed for that sort of work. Their object is to bring into view those outlying regions of space which are hidden in the twilight of vast distance. The tiny cloudlets which shine from beyond the great depths of space are changed under the eye of the giant reflector of Parsonstown into glorious galaxies of stars, blazing with a splendour which cannot be conceived by those who have not themselves looked upon the magic scene. To span the vast abysms of space, to bring into view galaxies as yet unknown, and to exhibit the strange figures, the outreaching arms, and the fantastic convolutions of those which are but barely visible in other telescopes, such is the work which was looked for from the great reflector, and such is the work which in the energetic hands of the late Lord Rosse it successfully achieved. But now a new and wonderful mode of inquiry has been devised, and has rapidly taken its place as the most important of all the means of discovery which science has as yet placed in the hands of her servants. We refer to spectroscopic analysis, or the analysis of light by means of the prism. This mode of |