The Irish cavalry under young O'Neill, as well as the French under the Duke of Berwick, performed feats of valor that day unsurpassed by any troops in the world. Ten times they Ten times they charged the English cavalry under Hamilton, and prevented that general from effecting what William had entrusted him with doing-cutting King James' army in two. James' forces drew off in the evening, William not daring to pursue. Portion of the army went after James, in a leisurely fashion, to Dublin, and another moiety, under the Duke of Tyrconnell, to Limerick.

James' irresolution all through this campaign in Ireland was lamentable. It was so marked that one of his commanders, General Rose, is reported as having said to him, in his bitterness of heart: "Sire, if you had a hundred kingdoms, you would lose them." He could have had the important city of Derry, which, with its famous walls, was then a great fortress, had he agreed to the terms of capitulation offered by General Hamilton; and at Dundalk his aversion to bloodshed prevented him from ordering an attack on the English garrison, who were then completely at his mercy. This was the mistaken humanity which elicited the bitter exclamation from General Rose. And this is the monarch whom Macaulay depicts as a monster of cruelty, delighting in the torture of his Covenanter prisoners in the jail or courthouse of Edinburgh!

It is extremely difficult to account for Macaulay's inconsistencies as to King James' character and the causes that led to his final departure from the British islands. It can hardly be doubted that Shakespeare wrote his plays of "King Richard III" and "King Henry VIII" with a view to the fact that a descendant of Henry, Earl of Richmond, then occu

in painting the character of King James, did not overlook the fact that the occupant of that throne, when he was writing, was collaterally a member of the House of Brunswick, which in turn claimed succession from the House of Hanover, which was the house to which William of Orange belonged. Moreover, King James, despite his "cowardice," had the courage to return to the religion of his ancestors a very terrible crime in the eyes of great historians who look to Protestant royal favors as a means of acquiring wealth and distinction. This may seem to be an ungenerous way of looking at the matter, but really there is no other explanation that can be offered, so it would be folly to reject it until a Letter reason be forthcoming.

"To few characters," observes Blackwood's Magazine, "has history been so consistently unjust." There is one, at least his beautiful and ill-fated progenitor, Mary Stuart; and that other Mary, whom historians more fanatical than Macaulay have red-daubed with a sanguinary fame, was perhaps even more unfairly treated still. "A sincerely religious man, he refused to forswear his faith even for a crown," Blackwood proceeds. How different a man from Henry of Navarre, whom the same Macaulay glorifies as a sort of demigod in his "Ballads of the League!"

King James was accused of bigotry, says Mr. Lang, when his only fault was honesty. He had no petty intolerance, and he gave Prince Charles a Protestant governor, with the result that the Prince's religion became a negligible. quantity. Thackeray has drawn him as a wild, brilliant, amorous being, when in reality he was "a sober, diligent, reasonable, sad young man, affectionate, depressed, true to creed and honor." Of his loyalty to his friends his heartbroken correspondence in 1716 bears. witness. Few men have had a sadder

has rehabilitated the lovely and unfortunate Queen Mary Stuart; he has, moreover, shown Cardinal Beaton to have Leen a great and saintly Scottish statesman, most foully murdered by Knox's bloodthirsty crew; and he has held up that rampant reformer to the execration and contempt he certainly merited.

To do all these things required not only great courage, but wonderful pa

tience and years of scholarly research. But the reward is great. The consciousness of having undone some great and glaring wrongs is a proud thing; and so Mr. Lang's satisfaction must be incomparably greater than that which Gibbon tells us he felt when he had completed his lifelong task of writing the story of the downfall of the Roman Empire.

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HERE are some branches of natural science which man has to some extent neglected, and one of these is the study of seaweeds. Only to be seen when the receding tide has left them on the rocks in a collapsed condition, their beauty is not obvious at a casual glance. Moreover, they do not produce brilliant flowers and edible fruits.

Early references to seaweeds are of a contemptuous character. Horace, for example, describes them as "inutilis alga" and "vilior alga." Couched in

the same spirit, though in recent times, was the remark of a botanist of repute of whom the story is told that upon being shown a collection of seaweeds in the hope that the trouble taken in their preservation and classification would earn a word of commendation from the great man, he dismissed the subject as beneath his notice, with the words: "That's only a lot of seaweeds."

No botanist of today, great or humble, would assume such an attitude toward a branch of study of which he was ignorant, and the term "useless" cannot be applied to seaweeds without exposing the ignorance of the speaker. Seaweeds are useful in a very high degree, although they may not be market

able, like cabbage and carnations. They perform in the ocean similar offices in purifying the medium in which they grow, as do the tall trees, the grass and lowly herbs of the dry lands. That is, of course, they absorb carbon dioxide and give off abundance of oxygen. They provide shelter and food for at vast number of forms of animal life, for within the submarine jungles and forests many creatures find protection, and their myriads of floating spores are eaten by small animals, which in turn become the food of fish. The diatoms upon which oysters feed largely are a class of minute seaweeds. Again, the larger weeds have value as manure, and they may be used in the manufacture of soda, as formerly they were largely employed. From seaweeds the chemist extracts the medicinally valuable iodine; but perhaps their greatest value to the dwellers of some countries, especially small islands, consists in their constituting a natural breakwater. Were it not for the leatherlike meshes of the "Fuci," which grow from the rocks between tide-marks, the inroads of the sea upon the shores of many lands would be much greater than they are. A reef of weed-covered rocks is far more effective than most of the breakwaters which man constructs. The

breaker, coming in with full force to strike against the cliff, is entangled among the innumerable branches of the seaweed, and its force being split up, is dissipated.

There is really little excuse for ignorance concerning seaweeds on the part of any person who has access to the coast. In most cases specimens may be obtained in abundance; they are easily preserved; they present considerable variation in structure, as well as in form and habit, and their general appearance is pleasant to the aesthetic sense. In size they range from species which individually can be seen only with the aid of the miscroscope to the opposite extreme, some of them being of immense size, with branches hundreds of feet long. It will be easily understood that between these limits there must be a very large number of species, and yet, to show how they were formerly neglected, in the days of the great Linnaeus, there were only seventy species known to exist in the entire world.

The diatom specialist who draws his specimens from all parts of the globe has the comparatively unrestricted field afforded by no less than ten thousand species. The possibility of using figures like these shows that there have been at least a few students to whom seaweeds have not been absolutely uninteresting.

A noteworthy fact about the "Algae," no matter how large and tree-like they may be, is the absence of vessels. "Algae" consist of a mere aggregation of cells, which, though they form simple tissues, are never differentiated into wood, bark, etc. Their hard parts, so far as they have any, are more of the consistence of cartilage than wood. They have no roots, but merely attachment discs, and those once separated from the rocks, do not adhere again. The larger kinds grow from the solid face of the rock, no matter how hard, and not from fissures. Roots, therefore, would be of little use to them, and, indeed, the fact

that the whole surface of the plant absorbs its nutriment from the surrounding waters renders the possession of true roots unnecessary. The more minute species lead a free roving life in the water, especially near the surface, and may easily be mistaken for animals by those who regard the power of movement as an attribute peculiar to animal life. There are, indeed, a few forms, such as the luminous "Ceratium tripos," which are claimed as subjects by both botanists and zoologists. The spores, or reproductive bodies, also move freely through the water, numbers of them being propelled by the lashing of two or more "cilia," until they fix themselves upon a firm surface and develop into new plants.

Some kinds of seaweed are colored with beautiful and delicate tints; other kinds excrete coats of chalk or flint, and when they die these hard coats drop to the sea-bottom and contribute to the chalk-beds of the future, which are known to be in process of formation. Among the seaweeds are masses which look very much like coral from their solid "stoniness," and we learn that they actually play a part in the construction of coral islands, helping to bind the work of the coral-polyps together. Seaweeds of this class in some cases do considerable injury to fish-nets that come in contact with their short, hooked branches, and there are beaches where the fine yellow gravel is composed almost entirely of the broken pieces of these stony weeds.

As these plants produce no flowers, it is quite clear that they are not propagated by means of seeds, which are always the product of flowers of some kind. Seaweeds are reproduced by means of spores which may be roughly and unscientifically described as detached cells having the power to give rise under suitable conditions to plants similar to those by which they were produced. These spores are of several

kinds and of different characters, some being the product of a sexual process, others the product of one sex without fertilization.

The vast number of seaweeds now known has been arranged in four great groups, which have been divided into cohorts, orders, tribes and genera. Had this method not been adopted, their classification would be unmanageable. It is not desirable to go through the mazes of this system, but it may be interesting to glance at a few of the more striking representatives of the four principal groups. The first of the four, known to science as the "Cyanophyceae," consists of plants of low order, usually characterized by their bluishgreen color. All these are not very distantly allied to "Bacteria," and they are either single cells or single rows of cells, Many of them abound in the warm surface waters of the ocean, and some of them bore holes in shells on the bottom. Others, when they occur in waters strongly charged with lime, cause a precipitate of this substance around them by the absorption of carbon dioxide from the water.

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A red-colored form "Trichodesmium"-occurs at times in such vast quantity in warm waters that it has earned the name of Red Sea for that arm of the Indian Ocean which separates Arabia from Egypt and Ethiopia.

The second group, the "Chlorophyceae," are usually bright green and chiefly fresh-water forms, although there is a considerable minority of marine representatives. These are not found in deep water, and consist either of one cell, branched, or simple rows of cells, or thin layers. Among these single-celled forms are some of the most remarkable specimens of plant structure, for, upon slight acquaintance, they appear to be of the most complex character. One of these, named "Caulerpa," resembles nothing so much as a cluster of very intricately divided fern fronds of great

beauty. Yet all this lace-like division. is found to be compatible with the unicellular type of structure. Astonishing as it may appear, the entire plant of "Caulerpa" is but a single cell drawn out into a cylindrical tube with many branches. The danger of any of these collapsing is insured against by the presence of minute beams and girders thrown across at intervals from wall to wall to keep them apart. "Caulerpa" is found in tropical waters growing from the submarine rock-walls, much as some creepers climb the terrestrial walls and trees around us. It is said to be a favorite food of the turtle.

A similar species, "Bryopsis plumosa," resembles a miniature clump of delicate ferns and again the whole plant consists of one cell. This seaweed is seldom found in profusion, but may be seen in fairly warm seas growing from the wall of a pool, or from a shell, or stone, at the bottom.

"Codium" is not unlike "Bryopsis," though the outward form is very different. In the case of the former, the frond forks again and again into erect, somewhat cylindrical, woolly branches, slightly slimy to the touch-all merely divisions of one cell.

In the second great group ("Chlorophyceae"), we find the plant popularly known as sea lettuce ("Ulva latissima"), from the frond being a thin, broad, crinkled expansion, very similar to a lettuce-leaf in consistence and coloring, but lacking in midrib and veins.. In the genus "Monostroma," the frond, although composed of a great number of cells, is only one cell thick, while in the better-known "Ulva," which which grows abundantly on stones in shallow places, there is a similar kind of frond, but it is two cells thick. The still more plentiful "Enteromorpha," with which some. of the higher-lying pools are filled, is first shaped like long, slender ribbons, two cells thick, but after a little while so much oxygen is given off between