P.S.—Since concluding the above dispatch, Professor Palmieri did me the honor of a special call, and, after some desultory conversation, approached the all-absorbing topic of the day, and cautiously expressed his opinion as follows: Explaining his theory, as announced at the Congress, he said that "Holland, Belgium, and Denmark, being all low countries, some portions of each lying below the sea-level, he would not be surprised if the present outflow of lava devastated them all, and covered the bottom of the North Sea for many square leagues with a bed of basalt." The reason given was this: "That lava must continue to flow until, by its own action, it builds up around the volcanic crater a rim or cone high enough to afford a counterpoise to the centrifugal tendency of axial energy; and that, as the earth's crust was demonstrated to be exceptionally thin in the north of Europe, the height required in this instance would be so great that an enormous lapse of time must ensue before the self-created cone could obtain the necessary altitude. Before Ætna attained its present secure height, it devastated an area as large as France; and Prof. Whitney has demonstrated that some center of volcanic action, now extinct, in the State of California, threw out a stream that covered a much greater surface, as the basaltic table mountains, vulgarly so called, extend north and south for a distance as great as from Moscow to Rome." In concluding his remarks, he ventured the prediction that "the North Sea would be completely filled up, and the British Islands again connected with the Continent."
J. F., U.S.C.
XIV.
WILDEY'S DREAM.
A blacksmith stood, at his anvil good,
Just fifty years ago,
And struck in his might, to the left and right,
The iron all aglow.
And fast and far, as each miniature star
Illumined the dusky air,
The sparks of his mind left a halo behind,
Like the aureola of prayer.
And the blacksmith thought, as he hammered and wrought,
Just fifty years ago,
Of the sins that start in the human heart
When its metal is all aglow;
And he breathed a prayer, on the evening air,
As he watched the fire-sparks roll,
That with hammer and tongs, he might right the wrongs
That environ the human soul!
When he leaned on his sledge, not like minion or drudge,
With center in self alone,
But with vision so grand, it embraced every land,
In the sweep of its mighty zone;
O'er mountain and main, o'er forest and plain,
He gazed from his swarthy home,
Till rafter and wall, grew up in a hall,
That covered the world with its dome!