Sea. Immediately on reaching Trinkitat the men were ordered to land, which they at once did, with only their arms and the clothes on their backs. As they did not expect to be employed on service, but only to take off the women and children to Suez, they were wholly unprovided for a campaign. But, as soon as they disembarked, they each man received a hundred rounds of ammunition and a waterbottle. We were then at Fort Baker, and had been wondering anxiously for the battle was to come off to-morrow, our force was small, and we knew the Arabs would fight desperately-whether the 65th would come in time. They started from Trinkitat long after dusk, and for hours went splashing and plunging through one of the most abominable morasses (as it then was) in the universe: this was the three-mile expanse of sand and slush which separates the Trinkitat peninsula from the portion of the mainland on which stands Fort Baker. In some places the men waded half way up to their waists; many of them lost their boots; all were drenched with sea-water, and covered with mud. About ten, as we sat round our blazing watch-fires, the 65th straggled into camp, cold and hungry. They were heartily cheered and, what was more to the purpose, treated to a dram of good rum. Like the rest of us, they slept without any covering through the rain, which fell heavily all that night; and a few hours after they were having the brunt of the battle. They were in the front line of the advance upon Tokar; and during the whole of the arduous march-thirty-four miles, most of it under a fierce sun-not a man fell out. Landing at Suakin, they bivouacked for some days sub Jove fervido: how and where they got their tents I do not know. Having come without their kits, change of raiment was naturally out of the question. But in the intervals of rest the men might wash their clothes piecemeal-go about in their trousers, for example, while their tunics were drying. At Suakin there were seven washing-days in the week; along a mile of sea-beach, and in the crystal-clear water, beneath which the corals spread out, minutely visible, their delicate branch-work, hundreds of men bathed at all hours of the day, or, with nothing on but their ungainly pith-hats, scrubbed their clothes, and wrung the sea-water out of them with the knowing air of practised laundresses. The nude Highlanders used on those occasions to present an oddly piebald appearance-the brown tan on the knees and calves, where kilt and hose left them exposed to the sun, contrasting sharply with the white of their bodies. The 65th officers were no better off than the rank and file. As they were homeward bound, they too had come without their kits, or furniture of any sort. The first time I saw the colonel he was sitting crosslegged on the sand, quietly consuming, with the help of a clasp knife and an iron saucer, his luncheon of 'bully beef' and whisky. After a time the colonel and officers contrived to beg, borrow, or steal a few knives and forks, and deal boxes to sit, sleep, and eat

upon. Of course they had come on shore without their horses-they had sold them in India or at Aden-and they did all or most of their campaigning in the Soudan on foot. The reader must not imagine from the above details that there was any grumbling among the men, or scarcity of provisions, or administrative bungling. On the contrary, the men were from first to last in the best of spirits; the rations were always abundant and of excellent quality; never were the commissariat and transport better managed than on General Graham's expedition. Here is a little incident well worth mentioning in connection with the subject of rations and the rare luxuries of campaigning. One night before a march-out some champagne was produced at a certain mess. An officer remarked that the pop of champagne corks might sound rather selfish where the men had only their allowance of plain water. Hear, hear!' was the all-round response, and the champagne was stowed away for another season.

And now that General Graham's magnificent little army-too little, it seems, to deserve the thanks of the English Parliament, though it has received the thanks and compelled the admiration of the English people-now that this army has finished its task, shall we think that the Arabs consider themselves beaten? Most of us thought that they retired from El Teb and Tamai too sourly and too sulkily for people who might be supposed to have been subdued as well as defeated. Certainly they never faced us again after Tamai. Only a few of them were visible a long way off when, the day after that fight, the force marched across the ravines and set fire to Osman Digna's encampment and stores, where the red flames, springing up in a score of localities all over the level green plain, mounted a hundred feet high, and the exploding ammunition maintained for half an hour a continuous roar like that of a pitched battle. Nor did they appear when, in the end of March, General Graham, rather expecting a third battle, marched for the last time with his force to the Tamanieb stream, and along its banks by the pine trees, the feathery palms, and the foaming cascade, to the narrow gorges in the hills. But it is not certain that the Arabs think Osman Digna's power has vanished in smoke; and we have not heard the last of the insurrection in the Eastern Soudan.

JOHN MACDONald.

FORGOTTEN BIBLES.

THE first series of Translations of the Sacred Books of the East, consisting of twenty-four volumes, is nearly finished, and a second series which is to comprise as many volumes again, is fairly started. Even when that second series is finished, there will be enough material left for a third and fourth series, and though I shall then long have ceased from my labours as editor, I rejoice to think that the reins when they drop out of my hands will be taken up and held by younger, stronger, and abler conductors.

I ought indeed to be deeply grateful to all who have helped me in this arduous, and, as it seemed at first, almost hopeless undertaking. Where will you get the Oriental scholars, I was asked, willing to give up their time to what is considered the most tedious and the most ungrateful task, translating difficult texts from beginning to end, and not being allowed to display one scrap of recondite learning in long notes and essays, or to skip one single passage, however corrupt or unintelligible?

And if you should succeed in assembling such a noble army of martyrs, where in these days will you find the publisher to publish twenty-four or forty-eight portly volumes, volumes which are meant to be studied, not to be skimmed, which will never be ordered by Mudie or Smith, and which conscientious reviewers will prefer to cut up rather than to cut open?

It was no easy matter, as I well knew, to find either enthusiastic scholars or enthusiastic publishers, but I did not despair, because I felt convinced that sooner or later such a collection of translations of the Fathers of the Universal Church would become an absolute necessity. My hope was at first that some very rich men who are tired of investing their money, would come forward to help in this undertaking, but though they seem willing to help in digging up mummies in Egypt or oyster-shells in Denmark, they evidently did not think that much good could come from digging up the forgotten Bibles of Buddhists or Fire-worshippers. I applied to learned Societies and Academies, but, of course, they had no disposable funds. At last the Imperial Academy of Vienna-all honour be to it—was found willing

to lend a helping hand. But in 1875, just when I had struck my tent at Oxford to settle in Austria, the then Secretary of State for India, Lord Salisbury, and the Dean of Christ Church, Dr. Liddell, brought their combined influence and power of persuasion to bear on the Indian Council and the University Press at Oxford. The sinews of war were found for at least twenty-four volumes. In October 1876 the undertaking was started, and, if all goes well, in October 1884, the first series of twenty-four volumes will stand on the shelves of every great library in Europe, America, and India. And more than that. Such has been the interest taken in this undertaking by the students of ancient language, religion, and philosophy, that even the unexpected withdrawal of the patronage of the India Office under Lord Salisbury's successor could not endanger the successful continuation of this enterprise, at least during the few years that I may still be able to conduct it.

But while personally I rejoice that all obstacles which were placed in our way, sometimes from a quarter where we least expected it, have been removed, and that with the generous assistance of some of the best Oriental scholars of our age, some at least of the most important works illustrating the ancient religions of the East have been permanently rescued from oblivion and rendered accessible to every man who understands English, some of my friends, men whose judgment I value far higher than my own, wonder what ground there is for rejoicing. Some, more honest than the rest, told me that they had been great admirers of ancient Oriental wisdom till they came to read the translations of the Sacred Books of the East. They had evidently expected to hear the tongues of angels, and not the babbling of babes. But others took higher ground. What, they asked, could the philosophers of the nineteenth century expect to learn from the thoughts and utterances of men who had lived one, two, three, or four thousand years ago? When I humbly suggested that these books had a purely historical interest, and that the history of religion could be studied from no other documents, I was told that it was perfectly known how religion arose, and through how many stages it had to pass in its development from fetishism to positivism, and that whatever facts might be found in the Sacred Books of the East, they must all vanish before theories which are infallible and incontrovertible. If anything more was to be discovered about the origin and nature of religion, it was not from dusty historical documents, but from pyschophysiological experiments, or possibly from the creeds of living savages.

I was not surprised at these remarks. I had heard similar remarks many years ago, and they only convinced me that the old antagonism between the historical and theoretical schools of thought was as strong to-day as ever. This antagonism applies not only to the study of religion, but likewise to the study of language, mythology, and philosophy, in fact of all the subjects to which my own labours have more

specially been directed for many years, and I therefore gladly seize this opportunity of clearly defining once for all the position which I have deliberately chosen from the day that I was a young recruit to the time when I have become a veteran in the noble army of research.

There have been, and there probably always will be, two schools of thought, the Historical and the Theoretical. Whether by accident or by conviction I have been through life a follower of the Historical School, a school which in the study of every branch of human knowledge has but one and the same principle, namely, Learn to understand what is by learning to understand what has been.'

That school was in the ascendant when I began life. It was then represented in Germany by such names as Niebuhr for history, Savigny for law, Bopp for language, Grimm for mythology; or, to mention more familiar names, in France by Cuvier for natural history; in England by a whole school of students of history and nature, who took pride in calling themselves the only legitimate representatives of the Baconian school of thought.

What a wonderful change has come over us during the last thirty or forty years! The Historical School which, in the beginning of our century, was in the possession of nearly all professorial chairs, and wielding the sceptre of all the great Academies, has dwindled away, and its place has been taken by the Theoretical School, best known in England by its eloquent advocacy of the principles of evolution. This Theoretical School is sometimes called the synthetic, in opposition to the Historical School, which is analytic. It is also characterised as constructive, or as reasoning a priori. In order to appreciate fully the fundamental difference between the two schools, it will be best to see how their principles have been applied to such subjects as the science of language, religion, or antiquities.

The Historical School, in trying to solve the problem of the origin and growth of language, takes language as it finds it. It takes the living language in its various dialects, and traces each word back from century to century, until from the English now spoken in the streets, we arrive at the Saxon of Alfred, the Old Saxon of the Continent, and the Gothic of Ulfilas, as spoken on the Danube in the fifth century. Even here we do not stop. For finding that Gothic is but a dialect of the great Teutonic stem of language, that Teutonic again is but a dialect of the great Aryan family of speech, we trace Teutonic and its collateral branches, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Slavonic, Persian, and Sanskrit, back to that Proto-Aryan form of speech which contained the seeds of all we now see before us, as germs, plants, flowers, fruits, in the languages of the Aryan race.

After having settled this historical outline of the growth of our family of speech, the Aryan, we take any word, or a hundred, or a thousand words, and analyse them, or take them to pieces. That words can be taken to pieces, every grammar teaches us, though the