Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/669

it difficult to comprehend the barbarities of even one short generation ago. Their children will find the barbarities of to-day equally-incredible. The horrors of Siberia, of the Russian persecution of Israel, of the no less infamous sweat-shops in our own country, may relegate the latter third of the nineteenth century to the same limbo of infamy to which the ages of Nero and Simon Legree are condemned, notwithstanding the comparatively great ameliorations in the average condition of the human race. Still later generations will wonder at the possibility of inhumanity which in our day condemns the many to life-shortening and life-embittering toil that the few may consume in luxurious idleness the price of their sweat and suffering; at the travesty of justice which punishes the criminal who robs his one victim with his puny arm of flesh and bends the knee to the ruffian who despoils his thousands with his mightier brain; at the selfish greed of the titled idlers who partition the soil among themselves and take heavy toll of the multitude of Earth's children for presuming to live upon the bosom of their common mother; at the unspeakable cruelty of the sex which flatters and spoils with indulgence a portion of the other sex, and drives by its tyranny another portion to starvation, suicide, or infamy.

Thus the mists which becloud the moral perceptions of men and chill their nobler impulses will lift one after another, as generation succeeds generation. But not until the law of love shall have made civil laws with their penalties superfluous and obsolete, not until the universal enforcement of the golden rule, not by objective, but by subjective penalties, will the moral education of mankind be complete.

 

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In his later work, on Leonardo da Vinci and the Alps, Prof. Gustavo Uzielli treats of certain passages in the great artist's manuscripts containing references to the Alps. Telling of his ascent of Monboso or Monte Rosa in the middle of July, Leonardo incidentally remarks that snow rarely falls on the summit, but only hail in the summer, when the clouds are highest; also, that the extreme darkness of the sky and the luminosity of the sun are accounted for by the less extent of atmosphere between the spectator and the sun than if he stood on the lower plains at the foot of the mountain. The fruits of Leonardo's observations of the Alps are to be found in his works as an artist, and particularly in his portrait of the Mona Lisa, whom he placed amid their snows. But he studied them also with a practical eye, with a view to the utilization of the water that flows down their sides to the plains of Lombardy. Operations in connection with this purpose required the personal examination of the formation of the mountains; and while on his excursions he studied their geology, the density of matter, the action of light, and the composition of the atmosphere. His attention was also occupied with botanical studies and observations of the flight of birds. And there is evidence that he looked at the mountains also with the eye of a military engineer.