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our faculty of comprehension, and indicates nothing to our mind; there would be trillions, and millions of millions. But we will not interrupt our flight. Carried on without stopping by this same rapidity of 186,000 miles each second, let us penetrate the expanse in a straight line for whole years, fifty years, even a century. Where are we? For a long time we have gone far beyond the last starry regions which are seen from the earth the last that the telescope has visited. No mind is capable of following the road passed over; thousands of millions joined to thousands of millions express nothing. At the sight of this prodigious expanse the imagination is arrested, humbled. Well! this is the wonderful point of the problem: we have not advanced a single step in space. We are no nearer a limit than if we had remained in the same place. We should be able again to begin the same course starting from the point where we are, and add to our voyage a voyage of the same extent; we should be able to join centuries on centuries in the same itinerary, with the same velocity, to continue the voyage without end and without rest, and when, after centuries employed in this giddy course, we should stop ourselves, fascinated, or in despair before the immensity eternally open, eternally renewed, we should again understand that our secular flights had not measured for us the smallest part of space, and that we were not more advanced than at our starting-point. In truth it is the infinite which surrounds us, as we before expressed it, or the infinite number of worlds.

Hence it follows that all our ideas on space have but a purely relative value. When we say, for instance, to ascend to the sky, to descend under the earth, these expressions are false in themselves, for being situated in the bosom of the infinite, we can neither ascend nor descend; there is no above or below; these words have only an acceptation relative to the terrestrial surface on which we live. The universe must, therefore, be represented as an expanse without limits. Neither dome nor vaults, nor limits of any kind; void in every direction, and in this void an immense number of worlds, which we will soon describe.- Wonders of the Heavens.

FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE, French novelist, born at Rouen, December 12, 1821; died at Croisset, near Rouen, May 8, 1880. His father was Chief Surgeon of the Hôtel Dieu in Rouen. His brother also was a physician, and he himself studied medicine, which he relinquished for literature. In 1849 he set out on a journey through Northern Africa, Asia Minor, Syria, and Southern Europe. During his travels he studied enthusiastically all that related to the past in the countries he visited. On his return to France he engaged in authorship. His first publication was a novel, Madame Bovary, which appeared in the Revue de Paris, in 1857. Legal proceedings instituted against him on account of its alleged immorality fell to the ground. The next year he went to Tunis, and then to the ruins of Carthage, where he remained for a long time. This journey resulted in the production of the author's greatest work, Salammbô, published in 1862, and which has been called the "resurrection of Carthage." It is founded upon the revolt, under Spendius, of the Barbarian followers of Hamilcar Barca, after the first Punic war, their siege of Carthage, and their terrible punishment. The heroine of the tale is Salammbô, the daughter of Hamilcar, whose story has been grafted by the author on the historical foundation. Among Flaubert's other works are Sentimental Education

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(1869); The Temptation of St. Anthony (1874); Herodias; St. Julian the Hospitaller and A Simple Heart (1877), and Bouvard et Pécuchet (1880), completed a few weeks before the author's death.

UNDER THE WALLS OF CARTHAGE.

From the surrounding country the people, mounted on asses, or running on foot, pale, breathless, wild with fear, came rushing into the city. They were flying before the Barbarian army, which, within three days, had traversed the road from Sicca, bent on falling upon and exterminating Carthage. Almost as soon as the citizens closed the gates, the Barbarians were descried, but they halted in the middle of the isthmus on the lake shore. At first they made no sign whatever of hostility. Many approached with palms in their hands, only to be repulsed by the arrows of the Carthaginians, so intense was the terror prevailing throughout the city. During the early morning and at nightfall stragglers prowled along the walls. A small man carefully enveloped in a mantle, with his face concealed under a very low visor, was specially noticeable. He tarried for hours looking at the aqueduct, and with such persistence, that he undoubtedly desired to mislead the Carthaginians as to his actual designs., He was accompanied by another man, of giant-like stature, who walked about bareheaded.

Carthage was defended throughout the entire width. of the isthmus; first by a moat, succeeded by a rampart of turf; finally by a double-storied wall, thirty cubits. high, built of hewn stones. It contained stables for three hundred elephants, with magazines for their caparisons, shackles, and provisions, as well as other stables for a thousand horses with their harness and fodder; also casernes for twenty thousand soldiers, arsenals for their armor, and all the materials and necessaries for war. Towers were erected on the second story, furnished with battlements, clad on the exterior with bronze bucklers, suspended from cramp-irons.

The first line of walls immediately sheltered Malqua, the quarter inhabited by seafaring people and dyers of

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