THROUGH an inexplicable error in our last number we referred to our editions of 1910 in trifling terms. As a matter of fact they numbered fifty thousand copies, just one third of the present figure.

Cutting through a hill in Palestine, an expeditionary force from the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania has laid bare the layers of history as exactly as if sawing through a giant sequoia.Irwin L. Gordon describes this discovery, which has in three years exposed civilizations of thirty-two centuries. Fifty feet more of legible earth remain before bed rock is reached. The Hill at Beisan is probably the only spot on earth where peoples have builded continuously since the dawn of history. William L. Chenery, long editor of the New York Telegram, brings the tariff home to the family breakfast-table anti clothes-chest. ¶In contemplating his round of study and his students, ‘ Old P——,’ a teacher of mellow experience, wonders whether his nickname is a sign of undergraduate respect or of outworn authority. ¶Surely nothing mournful is told in these numbers of A. S. Eve, Macdonald Professor of Physics at McGill University. They talk with such swift and shocking imagination as to leave one dizzy.

As a frontier journalist, William O. Stoddard wrote the first editorial advocating Lincoln for President. Later he went to Washington as one of Mr. Lincoln’s secretaries, and served from 1861 to 1804. We are happy to publish his reminiscences in this and a succeeding number. Small portions of this material appeared in earlier accounts by Mr. Stoddard, which were of negligible circulation and have long been out of print. The undoubted freshness and vigor of this Lincolnalia shows that, often as has the field been gleaned, the full harvest is not yet gathered. ¶The story of Rudolph Fisher represents a flight into a field of bitter prejudice and intense conviction. This new Negro author has considered the difficulties and perplexities of his race with uncompromising knowledge and fidelity. He was an honor man at Brown University, and is, we believe, the single X-ray expert of his race. ¶A sensitive discoverer of England’s beauty, and one who has traveled early and late along her secret paths, Morley Dobson has had occasion for composing this charming verse. ¶No mind is better qualified to analyze the religious convictions of to-day, from which the faith of to-morrow must grow, than that of the very learned and Very Reverend Dean of St. Paul’s, W. R. Inge. ¶Moved by the growing thanklessness of our people and by the sadness of Kirsopp Lake’s paper on Prayer, G. A. Johnston Ross of the Union Theological Seminary urges upon us the glory of thanksgiving.

A. R. Orage, for fifteen years the editor of the English New Age, suggests the source of a new Renaissance. Professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker of Yale is a humorist and humanist for whom all students have cause to be thankful. ¶The tragedy of birds, beasts, and men animates the verse of Lew Sarett. His poem, ‘To a Wild Goose over Decoys, ‘ appeared in the Atlantic for September 1923. An active-minded Professor in a famous college for women defends the young person’s life and manners against elderly and invidious rumor. ¶The writer’s long familiarity with Eastern thought adds remarkable import to this mysterious story of L. Adams Beck. This author is gifted alike with mystical and historical imagination. Rusticus has appreciated a sensitive and most endearing friendship in terms of Biblical simplicity.

Ian Colvin is the accomplished leaderwriter of the London Morning Post, a paper which, in spite of prejudices, crotchets, and perversities, is, in our judgment, the bestwritten in the English-speaking world. ¶Wide and observant travel has familiarized H. H. Powers with imperial domains and their besetting responsibilities. Sisley Huddleston, long of the London Times and now of the Christian Science Monitor, describes the European reception of that American proposal for peace which is to be resolved by our present Congress. ¶An acute comparison pleasantly turned is this of Wendell Brooks Phillips, a Southerner now studying in the Graduate School of Harvard.

Every bit of authenticated information relating to Abraham Lincoln is a matter of importance, and it seems extraordinary that so considerable a fragment should have eluded the thousand and one investigators. The letters which we append to the ballad by way of footnote establish its authenticity beyond cavil. Of its waggish quality we can only think that it gives a truer picture of Lincoln’s early years than many a more solemn portrait.

A fair, far voice in argument.

OÑA (BURGOS), SPAIN

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
In searching for reasons for the lack of success in the attempts at democracy in the Latin-American republics, the writer of ‘Self-Government in Mexico ‘ in your November issue seems to have overlooked, nay, to have stated the opposite of what I consider the most potent cause of all their troubles. While it is true that the Latin-American republics were led by our example in cutting loose from their mother countries, still they did not do so in the spirit that we did. Our ‘revolutionary’ principles were based on Magna Charta and the best political philosophy of the English Whigs, as the writer points out. But this was not true of the Latin Americans. Their source of inspiration has been and is Rousseau’s Du contrat social and the Bolshevistic methods of the French Revolution, which, as Burke and our own Webster pointed out, are poles apart from our idea of democracy.
As for remedies, too, the writer, while he says rightly that the United States should do something, does not come down to particulars. In my mind, the best thing that the American people can do to help Latin America is to stop one of the chief sources of their trouble — namely, the hatching of their revolutions in the United States and the carrying of them out with the aid of American capital. President Coolidge and Secretary Hughes started a good tradition in this direction in their attitude toward the latest outbreak in Mexico.
P. H. Y.

From one mother to another.

AUBUHNDALE, MASS.

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
The Journal of Mr. and Mrs. Ruggles, printed in the November number of the Atlantic, told of the kindness with which they were received by the ‘King’ and ‘Queen’ of one of the Sandwich Islands. You may be interested in a letter sent by the latter to the mother of Mrs. Ruggles. It ‘was dictated by the Queen, interpreted in broken English, written down verbatim, and copied by herself in a plain, legible manner.’

ATOOI, July 28, 1820

DEAR FRIEND,
I am glad your daughter come here. I shall be her mother now, and she be my daughter. I be good to her; give her tappa [cloth made from the bark of a tree]; give her mat; give her plenty eat. By and by your daughter speak Owhyhee; then she learn me how to read and write and sew; and talk of that Great Akooah, which the good people in America love. I begin spell little: read come very hard, like stone. You very good, send your daughter great way to teach the heathen. I am very glad I can write you a short letter and tell you that I be good to your daughter. I send you my aloha and tell you I am
Your Friend,
CHARLOTTE TAPOOLEE,
QUEEN OF ATOOI

This letter was printed in the Missionary Herald of April 1821.
Sincerely yours,
OTIS CARY

With provident wives as patrons, a new era of artistic production may be forthcoming.

CLEVELAND, OHIO

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Jane Littell’s ‘ Meditations of a Wage-Earning Wife’ came so close to home!
Just about a year ago a series of circumstances opened up an opportune time for me to try my wings as a free-lance writer, breaking away from a weekly — and weakly — newspaper pay-check. My wife and I discussed it for several weeks before — frankly — I could reach the decision to ‘live on her.’ But I salved my conscience with the reflection that the microscopic earnings of which I was sure would make enough of a contribution to our ménage to prevent me from losing all pride of sex.
It has been an interesting experiment; although we live on a very narrow margin we have accustomed ourselves to the situation even better than we had anticipated would be possible. We are by no means out of the woods yet, as my stuff has not been wildly sought after by editors, but we have had enough encouragement to stiffen our backbones.
I think our case is just a trifle different from Mrs. Littell’s in that I have assumed a share of the house management. As I am at home all day and my wife is not, this seemed logical. Years of ‘batching’ it gave me enough experience to do it.
Very sincerely yours,
L.G.H.

Visions and ‘audisions’ such as may have stirred Saint Joan.

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I wonder if I can offer any ‘ease to the puzzlement’ of Nora Connolly O’Brien, author of ‘ Visions’ in the December Atlantic, by presenting a little vision of my own and suggesting an explanation, fantastic or plausible, according to the point of view.
Mine was not an ocular or pageantic vision, like Nora O’Brien’s, but an illusion of sound or, to coin a word, an ‘audision.’ I am not psychic, and have never had a similar experience. I had been walking up the slopes of Fiesole, toward the first great panoramic glimpse of Florence. All the way I had been saying to myself: ‘You are about to see one of the most beautiful, history-richened views that this world affords. Prepare your eyes. Lose not one detail of roof, tower, dome, pathways, river, hills. Make ready to take and keep these images forever.’
Then, silently, in the brown and turquoise stillness of an October afternoon, we came out upon our summit. But was it stillness ? Strangely my eyes, which I had expected to use so eagerly, became insubservient. It was my ears that were aware of Florence. It was the past I heard. It suddenly seemed as if, in that throbbing stillness.
I caught all the sounds that had ever come up out of that motionless, romantic valley to strike upon the hill of Fiesole. With a wild, leaping heart, I was aware of a cry by the Ponte Vecchio, and I knew that it was Buondelmonte’s cry as he was stricken from his horse, so long ago. Then, sound after sound of death unidentified I heard in dark lanes and alleys, here and there. Again came the larger clash of swords, swords of Arezzo and Pisa and Siena and far swords of Rome, and the murmurous roar of the multitude, now riotous, now grieving, now triumphant. I could hear faintly the murmur around Savonarola’s fire, under the Palazzo Vecchio. Then, when I thought I could bear no more of tragedy, I heard a sound of gallant laughter in the long-deserted Boboli Gardens, and then faint trumpets and songs in some Medicean pageant near Santa Croce. All this I heard, poignantly, vibrantly, beyond and below the little accents of the day, the thrumming of crickets, the barking of dogs, and the songs of living peasants in the valley below. It was not a conscious, labored projection of the imagination, but an overwhelming, astonishing, reverberant tide from the outside, rising, rising irresistibly from the Valley of Flowers.
Can it be that the hill of Fiesole, against which all these sounds of a splendid past have echoed and reverberated, keeps them as substantially as grains of sand and soil blown thither by the wind
— for those who will to find? May it not be that the visions which Nora O’Brien sees are the auræ — the hovering, immortal souls, as it were

— of authentic, past events?

Faithfully yours,

JULIA COOLEY ALTROCCHI

We would be chameleons to truth in all its aspects.

DELAWARE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA DEAR ATLANTIC, —

What color are you, anyway? It is a noble thing that you should be what you are — one color, one type indivisible, perennial, down the ages — when other publications vacillate, experiment, make of variability precisely what you make of consistency.

Yours is a color that is constantly — to you it must seem even tediously — referred to as the passport and open sesame to intellectual aristocracy, the badge of fellowship in the inner circle of the bookishly elect, the sine qua non — and so forth, and so forth. As a matter of fact, I personally often find in this color a source of self-consciousness and annoyance. With an Atlantic protruding from his pocket, one feels as though he were labeled ‘I am an idealist.’ One never knows when or where he may be challenged.

But the above references are as marked by discrepancies among themselves as you are with unity. In this December number before me you are spoken of, once, as brown, the writer being possibly conscious of griddlecakes, brown bread and — oh — a legume properly baked with molasses; while another calls you — save us — yellow! To my mind — and none glories more than I in your continuance as an ideal, a wall twice or thrice essayed but not scaled — you are salmon-pink. My wife stands out for puce; a dear sister insists on apricot; a cousin holds to orange, another to tan; Harry, here, has it the iris of the cod.

Can it be that we are all powerless to judge the evasive tint on its intrinsic merit, but must in some manner be biased by complexes resulting from our several readings of the text; as one, taking you at a disadvantage for your recent affliction of limericks, will find you light, one, reading you on divorce and religion, dark, or a third, imagining your political hue to be faintly incarnadined?

My speculations are vain— perhaps idle; yet I should be happy to have the matter settled. Possibly the master of the vat whence your cover takes its tint — a very Methuselah of a mixer and a model of conservatism he should be — will tell what color the Atlantic will have itself.

Yours truly,
C. P. CRUMB

The soil replies.

STURGEON BAT, WISCONSIN DEAR ATLANTIC, —

May another Wisconsin farmer ‘speak out’? Like Mr. Birkett, whose article in the December Atlantic leads me to protest, I live on a farm from which I must make a subsistence for myself and family. In consequence, I suppose that I might be styled a ‘dirt farmer.’

Mr. Birkett seems to feel that county agents have added, through their effect on the tax burdens, materially to our woes. I cannot see it. I have been acquainted with the work of perhaps a score of county agents, and with the achievements of as many more men from the Experiment Station at the University of Wisconsin. I am going to be specific in mentioning the effect that they have had on my work, and on the work of other farmers in my Wisconsin county.

Our county agent, Mr. E. G. Bailey, has stimulated some of the very overproduction which Mr. Birkett in some instances justly condemns, but in so doing has fairly revolutionized farm economy in this county. Four years ago this dairy county was raising little alfalfa. Stimulated by the strenuous arguments of the Experiment Station, the county agent spent thirtyseven days on a ‘Plant More Alfalfa’ campaign during 1922. The new acreage in the county jumped from 300 the year before to 2200 for 1922. In 1924 he spent sixty-four well-selected days upon it, and brought the spring seeded acreage up to 5450. What this increase is going to mean to the feeders who formerly used the poor mixture of clover and timothy hay, no one not a stockman can fully appreciate.

We also have a County Demonstration Farm. For the past ten or twelve years a portion of the north end of our county has been so overrun with grasshoppers that the farmers had come to their wits’ ends. Spasmodic and local attempts at control were nearly futile because of the large infestations in timbered and cut-over lands adjacent to the cultivated farms. This year the county agent, acting jointly with the local Experiment Station, put on a campaign that involved more than 600 farms. At the correct lime a united drive was carried out along military lines, and with military precision, so that every previously determined grasshopper breeding-place was thoroughly covered with the poison. The result was an almost unheard-of freedom from grasshoppers, and a saving to the farmers affected, estimated by some of their own number, who were members of the County Board, at more than $200,000.

It has been in the field of fruit-tree pruning, however, and particularly with cherries, that the station has perhaps done itsmost monumental work for our fruit-growers. Here the influence of the studies of one quiet man, Mr. Roberts, have been such that the cherry trees of this entire district have a sturdiness and a vitality not equaled in any large plantings elsewhere in the United States. What a tribute it is to one man that he has been able to shape the practices of an entire agricultural area so that he who runs may read the story!

Where Mr. Birkett pleads against the blind propaganda for increased production, I agree with him. But when his arraignment reflects on the rank and file of these agencies as they exist in his and my state, I object. I believe that this type of public endeavor is at the present time, in Wisconsin, not a dollar-eater, but a dollar-producer. If in a given locality the activities are not so well applied to the farmers’ problems as in the instances I have mentioned, it is not a fundamental fault of the agencies themselves, but rather of the measure of coöperation and support they receive from the farmers who are the beneficiaries.

MOULTON B. GOFF

Puzzle-hunters this way! The list of Test Questions for the Educated printed on page 4 of the front advertising section will give you something substantial to bite on.