the Mediterranean, and of which the waters are slightly brackish, appears to have been undergoing a gradual process of freshening since the comparatively recent period when it began to discharge its waters into the Dead Sea. In the hope of discovering a fauna and flora showing signs of adaptation to these altered conditions, M. Lortet 22 has carefully dredged the lake, which he finds to have a depth of 250 metres, with a bottom of fine volcanic mud mixed with diatoms and foraminifera. Save for the diatoms, there is an entire and unaccountable absence of vegetable life. He finds, however, twelve species of fishes, of which four are new. The majority belong to the genus Chromis, with which the lake is swarming, and which has the curious habit of hatching its eggs and sheltering its young within the cavity of the mouth. There are also ten species of molluscs, of which three are of thoroughly marine type, thus confirming the hypothesis of the freshening of the lake derived from geological considerations.

While all these searchings after new forms of life at great depths or in distant seas have been in progress, an animal no less remarkable than any thus found has been discovered without going so far afield, indeed in the most unexpected of places-the very heart of London. At the beginning of summer, Mr. Sowerby, of the Regent's Park Botanic Garden, was surprised to find the Victoria regia tank swarming with a beautiful little jellyfish. He supplied specimens to Professors Allman 23 and Lankester," who have succeeded in making out the structure and affinities of the medusoid, which they term Limnocodium Sowerbii, and place among the Trachymedusa, which develope directly from the egg instead of budding off from a fixed zoophyte. Its main interest lies in the fact that it is the only known fresh-water medusoid, the two other fresh-water Coelenterates, Hydra and Cordylophora, being fixed forms, not producing swimming bells. It is supposed to have been introduced from the West Indies.

22 Comptes Rendus, September 13, 1880.

21 Journ. Linn. Soc., July, 1880.

24 Nature, June 24, 1880, and Quart. Journ. Micro. Sci., July 1880.

THE

NINETEENTH

CENTURY.

No. XLVI.-DECEMBER 1880.

IRELAND IN '48 AND IRELAND NOW.

SIR CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY's book appears at an appropriate time. 'Young Ireland,' the confederate movement of 1848, deserves to have its history written. Even if all the leaders of that movement were still living, there would probably be none as well qualified to tell its whole story as the author of the work which has just been published. As it is, the men of that time are nearly all dead. So far as I can recollect, only three of the really prominent Young Irelanders, Sir Charles Duffy, Mr. Richard O'Gorman of New York, and Mr. P. J. Smyth, M.P., are still alive. Thomas Davis, John Dillon, Smith O'Brien, Meagher, Mitchel, McGee, Doheny, Devin Reilly, John Martin-these and many others are gone. The movement was one of more than political importance to Ireland. It was a healthy influence upon the young men of that time. It began with something in the nature of a protest against the kind of policy into which O'Connell, was, allowing the national movement to drift. Young men were. naturally growing impatient of O'Connell's more recent policy. They had for a long time firmly believed that his intention was to rouse the spirit and organise the manhood of the country into such a condition that he would be able to make a demand upon the English Government, and if the demand were refused, to launch a rebellion at England's head. O'Connell probably at no time had any such purpose:: At the most, he only intended to get together a force with which he. VOL. VIII.-No. 46.

3 N

might threaten England, and which, if the English Government gave way, would answer all his ends. But he had apparently not prepared himself for the crisis, certain to arise at some time, when the English Government would refuse to draw back, and when, therefore, he must decide between going into rebellion or practically dissolving his organisation. The time came, and O'Connell drew back. From that moment his power over the young men was gone. Besides, there had been during most of these later years something undecided, unsatisfactory, and, as many of the younger and more ardent Irishmen thought, ignoble about his policy. Sir Charles Duffy has, on the whole, given a fair and faithful picture of O'Connell. He has not underrated his merits and his great powers, and, on the other hand, he has with cool unsparing touch shown his weakness, his want of steady purpose, and his occasional preference for a circuitous to a straight course. At one time O'Connell's movement seemed as if it had no other object than to help into place a number of rising young Irish lawyers. It was natural enough, as Sir Charles Duffy points out, that people should begin to ask what good was done for the farmer's holding, and the peasant's cabin, by the elevation of a few enterprising young men to office under Government. O'Connell often denounced the Whigs in terms more fierce than the controversy of our, day would admit, but he nevertheless on so many occasions acted with the Whigs, justly sometimes, weakly at other times, that he produced in Ireland a revulsion against Whig and even Liberal principles, which exists in full force to this day. At present the term "Whig' is used in Ireland without the slightest reference to its historic meaning. The present Government is called in anger a Whig Government. Mr. Gladstone is commonly spoken of as a Whig. Mr. Bright, Mr. Chamberlain, and Sir Charles Dilke would all be termed Whigs. Whig' really in this sense means nothing but a party opposed to the claims of Ireland, and at the same time always professing, when out of office, to be in sympathy with those claims. Irishmen of the popular party detest the Tories indeed, but then they expect nothing from them. They have a profound distrust of Liberal administrations, because they fear that public speakers and members of Parliament are likely to be enticed away from their fidelity to the national cause by the promises and the persuasiveness of Liberals, or, as they would term them, Whigs. This distrust and dislike of the Whigs undoubtedly dates from O'Connell's time, and is to be ascribed to much of O'Connell's policy. There were many occasions when O'Connell was right and just in holding with the Whigs. He held with all Liberal principles all the world over. Perhaps Sir Charles Gavan Duffy has not done him full justice in this respect. He was as earnest an abolitionist and opponent of slavery as Joseph Sturge or Zachary Macaulay. He was the friend of liberty and of order at once wherever these two could be combined. He dis

liked revolution and detested communism, socialism, and the like. But, on the other hand, he undoubtedly went with the Whigs out of weakness or mistaken generosity, on many occasions when to take such a course was distinctly to sacrifice the interests of his own party, and therefore of his own country, to the temporary convenience of a Whig administration.

Against all this policy the Young Ireland movement was a protest. It was also a deliberate and a generous attempt to make Ireland independent in the matter of intelligence and of literary culture; to make her understand her own history and foster her own rising talent, and to seek for her ultimate regeneration and prosperity through the noble path of self-education. The Nation newspaper was started in 1842 by Mr. Duffy, as he then was, Mr. John Dillon, and Mr. Thomas Davis. Sir C. Duffy finds in Davis almost every quality of a good and of a great man. Most of us, who had not the opportunity of knowing Davis, have to take on trust his early friend's estimate of what he might have been. Davis died too young to give the world more than a suggestion of what he might have come to. There can be no doubt of his earnestness, of his purity, and of his thoroughly sincere and patriotic purpose; and those who read his poems with anything of an impartial mind, will say at once that the true spirit of song is in them along with that generous passion which alone can succeed in making song the instrument of high political purpose. No doubt the Young Ireland movement contributed greatly, as Sir Charles Duffy contends, to purify and ennoble the national agitation. It substituted for the crafty and often vacillating plans of O'Connell's later years, an open, direct, and generous national policy. As a revolutionary movement it was a failure. It had not got to the heart of the peasantry. The influence it has since had upon the Irish people has sunk gradually with time into their minds and their feelings. In that way it is more powerful to-day than it was in its own time. But as a movement towards revolution in 1848, it had no strength, and indeed was drawn into the rebellion with little deliberate purpose. Sir Charles Duffy has observed that O'Connell was singularly unhappy in the names he chose for his various political organisations. He was not always fortunate in the invention of new organisations. He changed front too often. He never made it clear whether he wanted to begin or to end with Repeal. He was at one time merely proclaiming himself in favour of perfect equality of laws between England and Ireland, and only holding up Repeal as an alternative if that equality could not be obtained. At another stage of his career he was pointing to self-government as the one great blessing without which national prosperity and progress are impossible. At another time again he was contending for the reform of the land laws as the one thing needed by the condition of Ireland. Thus each agitation

had its ebb and flow, and its perplexing sudden cross-currents. People never quite knew towards what shore they were moving. Hardly had they time to be roused heart and soul to a land-reform movement when they were borne away into an agitation for Repeal of the Union. With many splendid qualities of a popular leader, with some which probably no popular leader at any time has quite equalled, O'Connell wanted one humble but most useful endowment for the political agitator, the quality of tenacity of purpose. Since his day there has never been a great orator in Irish political life, but subsequent Irish movements have shown how without oratory, sometimes without even a recognised leader, the Irish populations can be stirred up to movements more formidable, perhaps, in themselves than any which O'Connell originated. The Fenian movement of some few years ago was altogether without any recognised leader in the oldfashioned sense, the parliamentary tribune, the man whose name is in the play-bill.' The movement of to-day has its leaders, but it does not profess to have its orators. It is to some extent the offspring of the Young Ireland movement of 1848 and of the influence of the American Irish population on their countrymen at home.

Sir Charles Duffy's first volume is one that Englishmen would do well to read just now, if only for the clearness with which it shows that time and delay increase instead of abating the necessity and the vehemence of the demand for land reform in Ireland. The story of Irish land agitation is not a cheerful study. It is now, however, an easy study, for, in addition to Young Ireland, we have, among recent publications, Mr. Barry O'Brien's very useful and interesting little book, The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question. Mr. Sharman Crawford was about the first man who, in our time, seriously took up the question of Irish land tenure, and identified himself with it. He had not much encouragement at one period from O'Connell. Sir Charles Duffy describes the rude kind of manner in which O'Connell interrupted and chaffed him on one occasion at a Dublin meeting. Sharman Crawford was not a man of great ability. He was not a good speaker. He had not a persuasive manner, and indeed he had little or nothing to recommend him as the leader of a movement except sincerity and great firmness of purpose. The first really important event in the history of the agitation was the formation of the famous Devon Commission. The Devon Commission was appointed in the year 1843. Its appointment was due to the urgency of Mr. Sharman Crawford, who at last succeeded in making an impression on Sir Robert Peel. Peel consented to appoint a Commission to inquire into the question of the occupation of land in Ireland. The Commissioners, as Sir Charles Duffy observes, were landed proprietors, who had no sympathy or interest in popular agitation.' But, half unconsciously,' they became the means of revealing to the world outside Munster and