WE are sure of nothing in this life, the wise man saith, except death and taxes; but nothing is less sure than justice in the incidence of taxation and especially of the tax on personalty. We make stringent laws, and a Vanderbilt dies with a personalty of forty million, having paid in his lifetime a tax on oneeightieth of the sum. Legislatures have instituted commission after commission charged with the duty of inquiring into the question of taxation and of suggesting remedies for the evils of present tax-systems. If we ask how far these commissions have furthered the solution of the problems which press upon our legislatures, it must be confessed that the result is out of proportion to the effort. It is made clear by Mr. J. W. Chapman's recent book on the subject that they have formulated in more precise terms the evils which they were designed to cure, but beyond a better diagnosis of the disease, they have progressed but little in its treatment. The magic formula which shall teach us how to make personal property bear its share of the burden of taxation as compared with real estate has not yet been discovered. If we may applaud the rigor with which grievances are set forth by these commissions, we cannot admire the hopeless and inconsequential flounderings of the commissions when the chapter of recommendations is reached. A real leader out of these perplexities has not yet arisen.

UNIVERSITY EXTENSION has passed its experimental stage and has become both in Great Britain and the United States an integral, recognized factor in national education. Its maintenance in specific localities, however, is by no means assured, and the beneficent philanthropy of individuals alone affords in many cases the guarantee of its permanence. The needs of the organization with which we are most nearly concerned, the American Society for the Extension of University Teaching, have, in a recently published report, been presented with reason and strength. It will be a surprise to many to learn that the varied activity of this organization entails an annual expenditure for executive purposes of only eight thousand dollars, of which about six thousand dollars are contributed by individual supporters of extension work. The explanation of the smallness of this sum lies in the fact that the work of the Society, as an organization, is devoted to the calling forth of local effort, and this effort is voluntary, a striving on the part of widely distributed bodies of people to gain for themselves and others some of the advantages of higher academic instruction. The actual expenditure of the Society

is answered four-fold in the expenditure of the various centres of university extension embraced in its system. It will be clear, therefore, that if the resources of the Society can be increased, its influence will be increased fourfold in proportion to the increase of its income. The chief objects for which the Society needs funds are for maintenance, for endowment, for traveling libraries, for publications, for weak centres. Aid to any of these objects insures still greater extension of the benefits of higher education to the many whom the struggle of life has not blessed with other opportunity than the means offered by this Society. Already a slight beginning has been made with its endowment fund, and the opportunity awaits men interested in the welfare of their fellows to found lectureships or to join in the less striking but equally valuable work of maintaining a Society whose activity has been an important factor in the higher life of Philadelphia and the states that neighbor it.

THE question of the water supply of Philadelphia, in spite of prolonged agitation and effort and of the clearly expressed will of the citizens, remains still unsettled, and the deathrate rises with the victims of delay. The need of action is urgent, the main issues are clear, nothing but criminal incapacity will excuse the new Councils for paltering further with the question. The city's water, as at present supplied, is bad. The water received from the Delaware, at Lardner's Point, is bad-contaminated by sewage from the House of Correction situated just above the intake. Higher up, at Torresdale, Delaware water is equal to Schuylkill. Schuylkill water varies in impurity, being at its worst after heavy rains. The city water, whether from Delaware or Schuylkill, contains sewage almost the entire year, and examination of it constantly reveals the presence of bacteria normally found in the bowels of man and beast. It is needless to say that sewage-contaminated water is extremely dangerous in domestic

1898.]

any use. If the company sells more than it now does, its charter lapses with the stoppage of navigation. Its right is one of easement only; it has no water to sell; it asks three million dollars for a virtually worthless property. The Schuylkill Valley Water Company is a more insidious enemy of the public. It offers to deliver filtered water taken from the Schuylkill at the city pumping stations, if the city will cleanse the filters and give it an amount equivalent during the fifty years of its proposed contract to seventy-three and a half million dollars. This company has no water to sell that is not already in the city's right; its offer is one of storage and filtration only, the filtration largely at the expense of the city and without guarantee of the purity of the water delivered. Expert testimony shows that the net gain to this company, if it can buy its way through Councils, would be fifty million dollars. The entertainment of its proposal by Councils can be attributed only to corrupt influences now in process of investigation. Other plans are in the air. The Cramps are said to favor a steel conduit bringing down the water of the upper Delaware from above Trenton-a distance of fifty miles. The Mayor of Philadelphia, in conjunction with the Chief of the Water Bureau and the Citizens' Advisory Committee, has in hand a plan of filtration under civic control.

Sand filtration is undoubtedly the remedy for the evil quality of the water. Properly conducted, it will remove ninety-eight per cent. of the bacteria and change bad water into water of first quality. The Delaware, because of its low banks and slower current, is better adapted than the Schuylkill water for filtration purposes. There is no need, no advantage, it would indeed be great loss, to entrust this filtration to any private company whatsoever. It must remain under civic control, and under the control of officers, including an expert chemist and bacteriologist, whose sole duty it should be to supply an abundance of carefully tested, pure water. Philadelphia is in various respects in the power of corporations, companies, and combinations, commercial and political, which are bringing the name of the city into disrepute and dangerously threatening its progress in the future. Its greatness cannot further be jeopardized by surrendering one chief requisite of civic existence-pure water-into the control of a monopoly. Councils must carry out the will of the citizens to construct filtration plants, and that without delay. Meanwhile"We're too materialistic,-eating clay

... clay by handfuls, clay by lumps, Until we're fill'd up to the throat with clay."

About Miss Wilkins.

There is a certain sort of critic whose mission chiefly consists in wandering about like Diogenes with the lantern, to look before and after and pine for what is not, and the great American novel is his fetish. He is on the alert the moment a short-story writer ventures into a broader field, prophesying all things, hoping all things, not seldom encouraging the luckless scribbler into temptings of fortune, and considering these little habits of his it is rather remarkable that only of late has he been propounding his sacramental question apropos of Miss Mary Wilkins. Is she the destined wearer of laurels? Are we to expect from her that long-looked-for lusus nature the one American novel of all time?

On the very face of it such an idea is absurd. To begin with, Miss Wilkins has never so much as glanced out of her quiet Massachusetts home over the vast composite country considered by fiction as America. Her own little corner of it she knows, and she has chronicled the homely tragedies and comedies of the remote New England village with a delicacy and fidelity of touch which hardly have their equal in the literature of the day. Eheu fugaces! A decade has gone by since her first stories began to creep into the magazines, filling their readers with the excitement of

"A watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken," and still they have lost none of their fresh charm.

A singular fascination lies in this style of hers, which is after all rather the absence of style-direct, simple, without a superfluous word. The slight incidents seem to relate themselves. An atmosphere invests them like a spell; the village street appears; the fields and woodlands stretch about the faded farm-houses, the New England skies bend over, blue with spring-time, gray in the autumn; and pitilessly clear against this background stand out the cramped and stunted lives of men and women who never get beyond the threshold of the world.

It is a phase of Americanism, and there is none more interesting, especially in this epoch of ancestor-worship. The pathetic people Miss Wilkins understands and draws with such rare sympathy are hampered by heredity and evolved in the natural course of human events. They represent a type of decadent Puritanism. In the men, the lofty determination of the band of exiles, who moored their bark to Plymouth Rock, has degenerated into mere dogged obstinacy, conscientiousness has become selfishness, independence false pride, and those who inherit the meeker virtues turn into henpecked husbands. The women are still more unfortunate. Patience and endurance, which

in the struggling days of the colonies two centuries ago were noble qualities, reappear again and again in forlorn old maids and long-suffering wives, while the few to whom a more masculine energy has been handed down take it out in ruling their families with iron rods, and in a frenzied activity of housekeeping.

Of this fibre were the 'Old-Town Folks', of whom Mrs. Beecher Stowe gave amusing glimpses, and of such are the delightful tales Miss Sarah Orne Jewett has been telling for years with her own graceful humor lighting up the shadows of the scene with gleams of sunshine. She is an optimist and looks on the bright side. But Miss Wilkins is a truer descendant of Pilgrim forefathers, as well as a realist. She observes and records with absolute faithfulness and her mood is apt to be full of melancholy. The tragedies that rise in such communities are the collision of characters rather than of emotions and they are the only tragedies she knows. Ascetic natures made up of repressed feeling and stern self-denial she comprehends, but those richer, fuller natures, stirred and swayed by intense passions, are sealed mysteries to her. When she tried her hand at them she failed signally, as in that strange hybrid volume, 'Madelon', which is like nothing else she has done or, let us hope, will do.

In her other novels she is thoroughly at home and sure of her ground. Jane Field' is far and away the best of them, perhaps because it is nothing more than an expanded short story, perhaps because its grim picture of the mother doing a deliberate wrong for the sake of her child and suffering in consequence all the agonies that a hard-working New England conscience can inflict, is the sort of thing which appeals very strongly to her own temperament and imagination. Besides, the actors in it are principally women, and Miss Wilkins knows her own sex best. There are only two varieties of the genus man for her he of the headstrong, stubborn will, like Barnabas and Jerome, of whom she makes her heroes, and t'e mild, down-trodden, brow-beaten spouse, who is invariably brought in to play a secondary rôle. The pages of Pembroke' and 'Jerome' exasperate and provoke. Of course such men exist, but the New Woman is rapidly helping them to become extinct, getting round the one by diplomacy and imparting to the other some of her own vigorous spirit. We have sometimes been inclined to deplore her entrance on the scene, but after a course of these depressing village experiences no one can doubt that her mission is heaven-born. To the remotest nook of farthest Vermont and New Hampshire she will penetrate with her clubs and her fashion-books and her scientific housekeeping. There will be no more old maids in many-times turned

gowns, living alone with a cat and a poor little memory of some faithless swain, dining on greens and cold potatoes and supping on apple sauce, but a busy, cheerful set of women, welldressed, well-fed, and perfectly happy though single. It would be less quaint, less picturesque, less to her taste, but most interesting if Miss Wilkins would take us back amongst some of her plain-song people after they have been stirred by the broad and vivifying influences of the time.

Will she write more novels? Possiblyprobably. But never one which will be classed among the strong and lasting literature of the period and certainly never one to tarnish the brightness of the fame she won with the collection of her exquisite short stories. Those are and will be unique. A chapter here and there out of the more ambitious work has all the perfection of their predecessors, and the close of 'Pembroke' gives such a capital idea of her style that it would be a pity not to quote it as a specimen-simple, strong, with a breath of description as delicate as a wind of May:

"Barnabas went on up the hill to Charlotte Barnard's. The spring was advancing. All the trees were full of that green nebula of life which comes before the blossom. Little wings, bearing birds and songs, cut the air. A bluebird shone on a glistening fence-rail, like a jewel on a turned hand. Over across the fields red oxen were moving down plough-ridges, the green grass was springing, the air was full of that strange fragrance which is more than fragrance, since it strikes the thoughts, which comes in the spring alone, being the very odor thrown off by the growing motion of life and

the resurrection.

Barney Thayer went slowly up the hill with a curious gait and strange gestures, as if his own angel were wrestling with himself, casting bim off with strong motions as of wings.

He fought, as it were, his way, step by step. He reached the top of the hill and went into the yard of the Barnard house. Sarah Barnard saw him coming and shrieked out. There's Barney. There's Barney Thayer comia'! He's walkin', he's walkin' straight as anybody"

When Barney reached the door, they all stood there Cephas and Sarah and Charlotte. Barney stood before them all with that noble bearing which comes from humility itself when it has fairly triumphed.

Charlotte came forward and he put his arm around her. Then he looked over her head at her father.

'I've come back,' said he.

'Come in,' said Cephas.

And Barney entered the house with his old sweetheart and his old self."

MARY E. WARDWELL.

The Book of the Dead.

SECOND ARTICLE.

The so-called 'Book of the Dead' is composed of a number of sacred compositions-or series of compositions-which were deposited by the ancient Egyptians with their dead. Their knowledge was supposed to insure man's safety and welfare in the hereafter. The name by which it is now commonly known was adopted by its European translators and is far from representing the title given to it by its authors or original compilers.

By these it was known, at least during the Theban period, as "The Book of going out by (or into the) day'-and another title occasionally found (see Naville, 'Einleitung', p. 24) probably explains the principal drift of the work: Chapter of the making strong the Khu',' i. e. the "luminous" or "sacred" spark. In other words, in its various parts, the sacred formulæ were intended not only to secure for the defunct the preservation of his remainsthis being regarded as indispensable to the survival of his spirit-not only to assure to him the commodities necessary to his welfare during his passage to the realm of Osiris-not only to insure the safety of his "Ka" in the tomb, but also to strengthen the luminous portion of his personality in its identification with the life-giving God of Light. With Rê, the Sun God, it must issue forth each morning from the East in the Solar Bark on its daily journey across the heavenly abyss. With Rê, it must disappear at sunset behind the Western horizon, struggle in the hours of the night against the terrors of the underworld.

As far back as we can penetrate into the darkness of early Egyptian history we find the dead identified with Osiris and the Egyptian Pantheon substantially the same as it appears in later times. But, notwithstanding this, ample evidence may be traced of a gradual development in the Egyptian conceptions concerning the nature of man and his destiny in the after-life.

The Egyptians regarded man as a complex being composed of a body (Khat) liable to corruption; a Sahu or body which had put on incorruption, which could germinate and consort with the Sahus of the Gods; a heart (Ab), regarded as the seat of good and evil impulses (a belief which survives in our common expression "good" or "bad-hearted"); a "Ka", an evidently very primitive conception now variously described by scholars,-"personality". This "Ka", however, generally lived in the sepulchre; it was fed and provided for in the most material way, although, as art developed, representations of every substantial comfort

were regarded as sufficient to supply the wants. of such intangible beings. Hence scenes of offerings multiply on the walls of the tombs, repeating in weary monotony long enumerations of products intended for the defunct's consumption.

The shadow (Khabaï) formed also a necessary and integral part of the individual, which must be restored to him after death in order that he might live and become what in the Pyramid texts is termed the "living dead" (le vivant Mort). The name (Reu) must likewise be preserved; and the soul (Bai), represented as a human-headed bird, flew in and out at will, and was represented refreshing itself under the shade of the sycamores, drinking of the waters of life whilst the sacred luminous spark of which it was, as it were, the outer shell seems to have been conceived as traveling in the Solar Bark.

The chapters of which the book is formed obviously vary as to age and origin. Some, which belong to the Heliopolitan School of Theology, seem to go back to very early times. Versions of certain selected passages especially traceable to the great religious centre of the Egyptians, Annu (Heliopolis), are found among the "Pyramid Texts", which were discovered in the royal tombs of Saqqarah (Vth and VIth dynasties) in 1881, afterward published by Mr. Maspéro in the 'Recueil de Travaux', etc. (vols. III, XIV, 1882--1893). How long before this they had been in use it is difficult to tell, but there is satisfactory internal evidence in support of the belief that they were in existence at least in the early days of the first United Empire, i. e. some 5000 B. C., and possibly earlier. Some of the texts were already revised and altered in the time of the Pyramid builders and it is even probable that their meaning was then no longer quite clear to the scribes who transcribed them upon the walls of the tombs of Kings Teta, Pepi I, Merenra, and Pepi II.'

Certain important chapters, such as LXIV, XXX, and CXLVIII, were regarded by the later Egyptians as belonging to the early reigns of the Empire. The fact that the funeral ritual and prayers for certain commodities for the defunct were as far back as funeral stelae permit us to judge, i. e. the second dynasty, reign of King Senta-the same as in the time when the above mentioned texts were inscribed on the walls of the Pyramids, goes to prove, as Mr. Budge has pointed out, that the same form was in force then.

'See Maspéro, 'Rec. de Travaux', IV, p. 62; also Revue de l'histoire des Religions, XIX, p. 12, and Erman, Das Verhältniss des Egyptischen zu den Semitischen Sprachen, in Z. D. M. G. Bd. XLVI., p. 94.