Three years had passed since Mintrop worked his love into his art—throwing but a thin veil of grotesqueness over his real feelings; and Johanna returned from afar with her husband. They settled in Westphalia; and Johanna, moved by the memories of old days, proposed that Mintrop should be godfather to their infant daughter. Three years were gone, and Mintrop thought he had conquered his hopeless love; but yet the request startles him, and he requires to struggle for composure before he can determine whether he shall agree to it or not. He goes, finds the comfortable home where his lost love resides, meets her and her husband and the various guests present at the ceremony. The priest comes, and the little soft baby is placed in his arms. He looks at his sleeping god-daughter as he somewhat awkwardly receives her, and the child slowly opens her large eyes, so like her mother’s. A thrill runs through Mintrop’s veins; all the old feelings, the old hopes and fears, rush through his mind with a force too cruel to be borne. He hastily places the child in its mother’s arms, and hurries away from the scene.

Not long after, and Mintrop is dying. Some physical cause, the doctor assigns; but his friends know well what it is. His patient loving heart has borne too much. The intensity of his feelings has snapped the cord of life. As his breath leaves him, he thinks of his other love, his Art, and he sighs: ‘Would I might live long enough to finish my work; otherwise, I am ready to die!’ And thus the brave gentle spirit went forth to meet its Maker, regretting only that the promise of its youth was not fulfilled—the work not yet completed. Alas, alas, for human love, for human hopes and wishes! My eyes are wet as I trace these concluding lines; and the face in the photograph is hallowed by a strange sad interest.

Theodor Mintrop died at Düsseldorf in July 1870; and his sad story, as given above, speedily found its way into the German newspapers. In autumn 1871, a bronze bust erected to his memory was unveiled in the presence of thousands of spectators; and the poet Emil Rittershaus composed and recited a beautiful poem—a requiem to one who died of a broken heart.

THE MONTH:
SCIENCE AND ARTS.

The rumour mentioned in our last Month has been verified, and we now know that hydrogen and nitrogen have yielded to the power of the physicist, and that there is no longer, in our part of the universe, any such thing as a permanent gas. After Pictet in Geneva had led the way by liquefying oxygen, Cailletet followed in Paris with the other two; but Pictet has since gone farther, and has obtained liquid hydrogen in considerable quantity, and has produced solid particles of oxygen. In communicating these facts to a scientific body in Paris, Mr Dumas, the eminent chemist, stated to his hearers they might take it for granted that in swallowing a glass of water they were really drinking a metallic oxide.

Dr Angus Smith says in a paper ‘On the Examination of Air,’ read before the Royal Society, that there ought to be observatories for Chemical Climatology and Meteorology, in which the air should be systematically examined, ‘so as to obtain decidedly those bodies which have from the earliest times been supposed to exist in it, bringing with them, on certain occasions, the worst results.’ But the process of examination, as at present carried on, is slow and troublesome; when a sure and easy way is found, then its adoption may become general. Dr Angus Smith is perhaps the first who has taken the subject in hand from this point of view. ‘It is the more interesting,’ he remarks, ‘as he has sufficiently shewn that in the places examined, the organic ammonia has been in intimate relation with the gross death-rate.... It may be true that oxygen is the prime mover—producing in man animal life—a favourite idea for a chemist; but it may also be true that minute organisms cause a peculiar class of decomposition connected with mental or other activity, diseased or otherwise.’

Before the telephone has ceased to be a scientific novelty, America sends us news of another novelty called a phonograph. This instrument, the invention of Mr T. A. Edison, makes sound visible, and records it in a permanent form. You speak into a tube, and while doing so you work a handle which causes a cylinder to revolve; the sound of the voice causes a thin disk or diaphragm of metal to vibrate, as in the telephone; the vibrations actuate a steel point which, as it advances and recedes, makes impressions more or less deep in a band of tinfoil wound round the cylinder, and this band of tinfoil becomes the record of what has been spoken. Now comes the wonderful part of the process; for we are told that if the tinfoil so indented be applied to another instrument, called the ‘transmitter,’ consisting of a hollow tube with a paper diaphragm, then the original sounds will be reproduced, though with somewhat of a metallic tone. Turn the handle of the cylinder and you may have repetitions of the discourse until, in fact, the tinfoil is quite worn out. Casts of the indented tinfoil may, it is said, be taken in plaster of Paris, so that copies of spoken words could be sent to as many persons as may be desired.

This invention seems too questionable to allow of any one, even the inventor, forming an opinion as to its practical value. Fanciful conjectures may of course be made. A fugitive swindler, for example, may be arrested in a foreign city, and held fast until a foil of evidence spoken by one of his confederates might be sent out to convict him. Or a hardy young sheep-farmer in Australia might sing into his tube, puncturing his song on the sheet of foil, fold it neatly up, and send the graven song home to the girl he left behind him; and she, by applying the sheet to her own phonograph might, by proper manipulation, hear the tender ditty as often as she pleased.

While waiting for further developments, we venture to suggest that what is wanted by numbers of intellectual people who find the mechanical action of writing slow and irksome, is, some kind of ‘graphy’ which will enable them at once to print their thoughts on paper without aid from pen or fingers.