own time, and will recognize his friend's writing at a glance, as he recognizes his face; he has more difficulty in discriminating between the individual handwritings of a foreign country. Set before him specimens of the writing of the last century, and he will confuse the hands of different persons. Take him still further, and he will pronounce the writing of a whole school to be the writing of one man; and he will see no difference between the hands, for instance, of an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Fleming. Still further back the writing of one century is to him the same as the writing of another, and he may fail to name the locality where a manuscript was written by the breadth of a whole continent." In the ancient Greek texts, with which palæography has largely to do, however remote the date of the documents which we are studying, Mr. Thompson observes, the impression is produced that all sorts of men wrote as fluently then as they do now. If, then, we find such evenly distributed facility in writing so far back, we must infer that the art was developed among the Greeks, or picked up by them from some other people very far back. In the earliest Greek inscriptions the writing was in the Semitic style, from right to left. This was superseded by the boustrophedon style, which read from right to left and left to right, in alternate lines; and that gave way to the present style. Many valuable Greek codices have recently been found. The pasteboards of the coffins discovered by Mr. Petrie at Gurob, in the Fayouni, Egypt, have furnished many. They are composed of papyri pasted together, which, being carefully separated, have been found to contain manuscripts of the third century b. c., the oldest specimens of Greek writing we have. Thus have been recovered fragments of Plato's Phædo, the lost play Antiope of Euripides, and Aristotle's Constitution of Athens, which was written on the back of an account roll of a farm bailiff in Hermopolis, a. d. 78-79. These finds are encouraging to a more systematic search of the Egyptian depositories. Of mediæval styles, no school developed the purely ornamental side of calligraphy so thoroughly and rapidly as the Irish. The finest manuscript of the style is the Book of Kells, now at Trinity College, Dublin. England is chiefly indebted to Ireland for its style, while the styles of the Roman school of missionaries were "foreign," and never became fully naturalized. The round hand was chiefly used for books and charters, while the pointed hand, though also employed for books, was most frequent in documents. These hands gradually suffered changes and degeneration, were affected and partly displaced by the French minuscule, and hence gradually became differentiated into the multitude of nondescripts that now pass for English handwriting.
The Grand Falls of Labrador.—An account of his visit to the Grand Falls of Labrador has been-given by Henry G. Bryant, of Philadelphia, in the Century Magazine and in a Bulletin of the Geographical Club of Philadelphia. They are situated on the Grand or Hamilton River, which rises in the lakes of the upland region of the peninsula and flows in a general southeasterly direction into Hamilton Inlet—the great arm of the sea which, under various names, penetrates into the interior a distance of one hundred and fifty miles. No scientific explorer has advanced far into the country, and all that is known of it is derived from vague information furnished by Indians, a few missionaries, and the Hudson Bay Company's men. The first white man to visit and describe the falls was John McLean, of the Hudson Bay Company, in 1839. They were visited twenty years afterward by Joseph McPherson. These are the only white men who are known to have seen the Grand Falls till the summer of 1891, when Mr. Bryant and an expedition from Bowdoin College reached them independently of one another. Mr. Bryant, accompanied by Prof. C. A. Kenaston, of Washington, and a Scotch and an Indian assistant, left Northwest River Post, at the head of Hamilton Bay, on August 3d, to proceed up the stream by canoe. On the 27th they reached the point where the further navigation of the stream is obstructed by rapids, whence they proceeded overland and reached the falls September 2d. "A single glance showed that we had before us one of the greatest waterfalls in the world. . . . A mile above the main leap the river is a noble stream four hundred yards wide, already flowing at an accelerated speed. Four rapids, marking successive depressions in the river
