remnant, Russia has aggrandized herself, Belgium has been created, Italy has had a new birth, and that "Holy Roman Empire" which was neither holy nor Roman, nor yet an empire, has vanished to give place to the new German Empire. Greece has arisen in new life, and upon the wrecks of Turkdom the great kingdom of Rumania and the lesser realms of Servia and Bulgaria have been securely founded. Japan has been opened to the world and has taken place among the great civilized Powers. China is opening her doors to all the world. Indo-China has been seized by France and all of India by Great Britain. Practically the whole of the African continent has been partitioned among the Powers, and great civilized States are there being developed. Upon the islands of the sea the flags of Holland, Germany, Great Britain and the United States have been planted, and civilized States are growing there, led by the fine commonwealth of Australia. Bonapartism was succeeded by the Holy Alliance, which in turn was checked by the Monroe Doctrine. Revolution and reaction alternated in the midcentury, the former finally winning and leading, through many tribulations, to the ordered popular sovereignty which is to-day prevailing more and more in all truly enlightened lands. The nineteenth century has seen no one feat of adventure quite equal in importance to the discovery of America. It has, however, seen more blank space on the world's map filled up than any other in all our annals. It has seen the American continents fully surveyed, the islands of the sea discovered and colonized, the recesses of Asia penetrated, the Dark Continent of Africa illuminated, the mystery of untold ages-the sources of the Nile-solved and discovered, the Northwest and Northeast passages explored, and the Arctic and Antarctic regions invaded to an extent that before would have been deemed impossible. Even the stellar realms have yielded to nineteenth century enterprise, revealing planets and stars almost innumerable which were unknown before. If from adventure and exploration we turn to invention and engineering achievements, we see at a glance the pre-eminence of the nineteenth century over all others. The steam engine was known before, but the railroad, the steamship, the screw propeller and the vast bulk of useful applications of steam power are dated since 1801. Something was known of electricity in Franklin's time, but the telegraph, the telephone, the electric light, the electric motor, electric heating, the X rays, the use of electricity in medicine and surgery, and indeed practically all the useful applications of the mysterious force belong to the nineteenth century. Light had long been studied by men of science, but to the last hundred years were reserved the inventions of spectrum analysis, measurement of the velocity of light, photography, the kinetoscope and all the invaluable processes of photo-engraving and that inestimable boon the ophthalmoscope. Nothing has been known longer than air, but not until the closing years of the nineteenth century was that fluid liquefied and its constituent argon discovered. Since long before the time of Icarus men had dreamed of flying through the air, but the practical development of the balloon waited until within these hundred years. Bu The printing press dates away back to the fifteenth century. the genius of the nineteenth has so transformed and glorified it as t make it wellnigh a new thing, while the adjuncts of stereotyping an the linotype have made the "art preservative of arts" seem more lik magic than any of the dreams of Dr. Faustus. Gunpowder was i use centuries ago, and was used in firearms, but within a hundre years the invention of smokeless powder and other high explosives, th rifle, the breechloader, the revolver and the magazine and machin guns have surpassed the primitive matchlock further than it did th crossbow. Between the ships of Nelson and those of Drake the differ ence was only of degree, but the steel navies of the end of the nine teenth century mark a radical departure in kind. In the nineteent] century the oceans ceased to be barriers and were changed into high ways, connecting instead of separating nations. Continents wer spanned by railroads, isthmuses were cut by canals, mountain range were pierced with tunnels. When the century began men still depende upon flint and steel, candles, torches and some costly oils for light These hundred years have witnessed the incoming of lucifer matches kerosene oil, illuminating gas and the electric light. To these thing we may add without exhausting the list of nineteenth century wonder: the phonograph, the cotton gin, the power loom, the reaping machine the sewing machine, the elevator, the electrotype, the lithograph, th bicycle, the automobile carriage and the whole manufactory systen which has so revolutionized the industrial world. The great world': fairs are a product of the nineteenth century, and the discriminating observer will have witnessed that the vast bulk of the objects dis played in them have been characteristic fruits of the same period o time. The science of chemistry was founded on its present basis in th eighteenth century, but in the nineteenth it has had nearly all its de velopment, including analytical and synthetical chemistry and th chemical laws of definite proportions. In medicine and surgery th century's work has been so great as quite to overshadow all previou time. The advance in chemistry has wondrously amplified the materia medica and increased its effectiveness beyond all reckoning. The in vention of anæsthetics has not only largely banished pain, but ha made possible and easy innumerable surgical processes that wer simply impossible without them. Antiseptic surgery has enormousl decreased the mortality in hospitals, and the mention of this latte: suggests another still greater triumph, of which indeed antisepsis wa a mere outgrowth. This was the establishment of the germ theory o disease by the immortal Pasteur. From that sprang on the one han a refutation of the old delusion of spontaneous generation, and on th other the whole beneficent science of bacteriology, with its department of antisepsis, disinfection, filtration, quarantine, therapeutic and pro phylactic inoculation, our knowledge of the leucocytes and their func tions, and the auspicious promise, now hastening toward fulfilment, that one day all germ diseases-which comprise the worst scourges of the race-will be banished from the world. A few other salient items from the record will serve as landmarks of scientific progress in the hundred years just behind us. The conservation of energy, the molecular theory of gases, the uses of dust, the theory of meteors, the glacial theory, the theory of evolution, the theory of cells and embryology-these are among the intellectual fruits of the nineteenth century. The progress of the world in literature, art, music and the drama in the last hundred years is simply not to be measured. The century began with the opening of such an era of literary activity as the world had probably never seen before. With comparatively few exceptions the glories of European literature and practically all of American literature and art belong to the nineteenth century. A mere rollcall of names will amply indicate in this brief space the character of such achievements. Kant and Schiller, Klopstock and Alfieri, were just passing off the stage when the century began. Hegel was doing his best work, Scott was writing his poems with his romances still in future, Washington Irving and Abiel Holmes were laying the foundations of American literature, and "The Edinburgh Review" was beginning its career. The early part of the century saw the crowning labors of Haydn, Wieland, Delille, Koerner, Lagrange, Fichte and Count Rumford, and the best work of Byron and Niebuhr. Trumbull blazed the way in American art, Cuvier set the animal kingdom in array, Oersted founded practical electrical science, Saint Simon opened the way for Socialism, Shelley sang his immortal lyrics, Herschel explored the universe, and Canova produced his sculptured masterpieces. Richter, Laplace, Beethoven, Goethe, Bentham, Lafayette, Coleridge, Lamb, Schlegel, Davy, Lamarck -these are names that glorified the first quarter of the century. The reign of Queen Victoria is the longest in British history, yet before it began Dickens, who still seems to have been with us yesterday, published the first of his immortal works. Carlyle and Pushkin, Morse and Henry, Greenough and Powers, Southey, St. Hilaire, Sue, Thorwaldsen, Humboldt, Thackeray, Hood, Sydney Smith, Mendelssohn, Macaulay, Donizetti, Chateaubriand, Stephenson, Wordsworth, Balzac, Audubon, Cooper, Turner, Moore and Heine are other nineteenth century names, each one suggestive of works of worldwide renown. The roll continues with Musset, Hugo, Comte, Beranger, Hallam, Prescott, De Tocqueville, Humboldt, De Quincey, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Helmholtz, Grimm, Hawthorne, Landor, Faraday, Cousin, Rossini, Poe, Brougham, Meyerbeer, Chopin, Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve, Dumas, Auber, Grote, Bulwer, Mill, Manzoni, Livingstone, Agassiz, Guizot, Lyell, George Sand, Motley, Thiers, Leverrier, Bryant, Greeley, George Eliot, Littré, Draper, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Trollope, Doré, Wagner, Marx, Tourgeneff, Charles Reade, Mignet, Liszt, Rubinstein, Beecher, Asa Gray, Matthew Arnold, Herbert Spencer, J. S. Mill, Huxley, Tyndall, Pasteur, Ericsson, Chevreul, Joule, Augier, Tennyson, Browning, New man, Schliemann, Kinglake, Bancroft, Meissonier, Moltke, Lytton, Arago, Freeman, Whitman, Renan, Siemens, Taine, Jowett, Gounod, Parkman, Merivale, Layard, Froude, Rawlinson, Leighton, Hughes, Mrs. Stowe, Millais, William Morris, Ruskin, Brahms, Daudet, Max Muller and others of a glorious galaxy, departed or still with us. In this random list we have not mentioned statesmen, such as Hamilton, Jefferson, Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Lincoln, Pitt, Canning, Peel, Gladstone, Disraeli, Salisbury, Bismarck, Cavour and Deak, nor generals and admirals such as Bonaparte, Wellington, Nelson, Dundonald, Grant, Lee, Roberts, Decatur, Farragut, Dewey and their compeers. The great names of science we have also left largely unmentioned, to be suggested by the mention of the works that have been done. The material changes of the world in a hundred years are great beyond appreciation. The increase in population of the globe may be partially estimated from the increase of the United States from less than 6,000,000 to more than 76,000,000; the United Kingdom from 16,000,000 to 39,000,000; and corresponding if not equal increases in other civilized lands. With such swelling of numbers, industrial potency, wealth and the general standard of life have likewise been enormously advanced. The arable and productive area of the earth has been increased, and its productivity, by means of improved methods of culture and varieties of grain and fruit, has shown a comparable gain. The great coal, iron, copper, gold, silver and diamond fields, with their almost inconceivable riches, are practically all things of nineteenth century development. That there has been any perceptible change in nature itself, in climate and the "precession of the equinoxes," may be disputed, but that man has in these hundred years made himself far more the master of his environment than ever before is beyond all question. It would be grateful to review also the moral and spiritual advancement of the world. Slavery has been abolished, prison reform has been effected, education has made immeasurable strides, law and justice have been more surely established upon their thrones, religion has been more imbued with light and charity and love, and there has been on every hand such a forward moving toward a realization of the universal brotherhood of man as a dozen centuries before had scarcely dreamed of or hoped to see. The full story of all such progress must be reserved for ampler treatment than these constricted pages will permit. The largest encyclopædia would not be too large for it. In the present case the duty is rather to suggest the vastness of the theme than to enlarge upon its multitudinous intricacies and its all but limitless expanses. The pages which follow reflect the light of the whole past century in the brilliance of its closing year, and look with steadfast hope into the opening year of the opening century, marking the transition from era to era, and the sure progress of the world toward that day when "comes the nobler Eden back to man" and when "springs the crowning race of humankind." ASTRONOMICAL CALCULATIONS. ASTRONOMICAL CALCULATIONS. 9 (Prepared expressly for The Tribune Almanac by Berlin H. Wright, Penn Yan, N. Y.) ECLIPSES. In the year 1901 there will be two eclipses of the sun, one of the moon and a Lunar Appulse, as follows: I. A Lunar Appulse May 3. At this time the moon will pass within 51."9 of the earth's shadow, or only one-seventeenth of the apparent diameter of the moon; the moon passing south of the shadow. Inasmuch as the moon will pass through a section of the earth's penumbra a perceptible diminution in the moon's light will be noticed at European points where the time of nearest approach falls after sundown. II. A total eclipse of the sun May 18. visible in the Philippine Islands, Southern Pacific and Indian oceans, Southern Asia and Africa, the line of totality passing through the islands of New-Guinea, Borneo and Sumatra. III. A partial eclipse of the moon October 27, invisible in the United States, except in Alaska and Pacific possessions. Visible generally throughout the eastern portions of Europe in Asia and the Pacific Ocean; the end visible generally throughout Europe and Eastern Africa. IV. An annular eclipse of the sun November 11, invisible in the United States, except in our Southern Pacific possessions; visible throughout most of Asia, Europe, Africa and Indian Ocean. The annular phase will be visible at Cairo, Ceylon and Manila, SUPERIOR PLANETS EAST OR WEST OF THE SUN. East.-Mars, after February 22; Jupiter, after June 30; Saturn, after July 5; Uranus, June 6 to December 4. West.-Mars, until February 22; Jupiter, until June 30; Saturn, until July 5; Uranus, until June 6 and after December 4. MORNING STARS (INFERIOR PLANETS). Mercury, until January 21 and from March 7 to May 14, July 13 to August 27 and after November 4. Venus, until April 30. EVENING STARS (INFERIOR PLANETS). Mercury, from January 21 to March 7, May 14 to July 13, and August 27 to November 4. Venus, after April 30. PLANETS BRIGHTEST OR BEST SEEN. Mercury, February 14-18 and October 14-18, setting shortly after the sun; also November 18-22, rising shortly before the sun. Venus, not this year, but will be bright at close of year. Mars, February 22. Jupiter, June 30. Saturn, July 5. Uranus, June 6. Neptune, December 22. First Fast of Tebeth, Tebeth 10, Tuesday, January 1. Fast of Esther, Adar 13, Monday, March 4. Purim, Adar 14-15, Tuesday and Wednesday, March 5 and 6. First day of Passover, Nisan 15, Thursday, April 4. Lag B'Omer, Yiar 18, Tuesday, May 7. day of Pentecost, Sivan 6, Friday, May 24. Fast of Tamuz, Tamuz 17, Thursday, July 4. Fast of Av, Av or Ab 9, Thursday, July 25. First day of New Year, Tishri 1, Saturday, September 14, or at sunset of 13th. Fast of Gedaliah, Tishri 3, Monday, September 16. Yom Kippur, Tishri 10, Monday, September 23. First day of Tabernacles, Tishri 15, Saturday, September 28. Hoshannah-Rabbath, Tishri 21, Friday, October 4. Sh'mini-Atseres, Tishri 22, Saturday, October 5. Simchas-Torah, Tishri 23, Sunday, October 6. First day of Chanukah, Kislev 25, Friday, December 6. Fast of Tebeth, Tebeth 10, Friday, December 20. When two days are given as the beginning of a month, the last one is celebrated as the first of the month, except Tishri, which is always recorded from the first. |