cannot help sending out our armies occasionally to slaughter and be slaughtered; but we might more than compensate for the mortality of war if we would send out that other redeeming force which contends in the field of disease, and rescues its captives from the threshold of the prison-house. When a nurse died in the East there was great mourning; and it was openly said that the best soldier could have been better spared — the object then being to save soldiers. A good soldier’s place may be filled, though at great waste of safety, of feeling, of convenience, and of money; but the place of a good nurse cannot be filled at all. Every existing one is excessively wanted, and cannot be spared from her post. There are women enough in England — working women enough — devoted women enough, if the training and the encouragement were provided. It is not the fatigue, nor the disagreeableness, nor the anxiety, nor the low and doubtful position of nurses, which keeps us so bare of them while other departments of female industry overflow. It is that no woman who would be a nurse knows where to go and what to do to qualify herself. Open schools to women, and provide a new department in children’s schools, and the sick of the next generation will not die by tens of thousands for want of good nursing. Disease will be checked on its first approach, and the mortality of our day will be a theme which will take its place in history and speculation with the Great Plague and the Black Death. The doctors permitting and aiding, the women will achieve this victory.
Harriet Martineau.
THE RECENT VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS IN HAWAII.
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The Crater in Kilauea.
The group of Hawaiian, or Sandwich, Islands lies like a cluster of emeralds on the gently-heaving bosom of the North Pacific. So central is their situation, that a line having one end fastened in Honolulu, the capital, would with the other sweep in succession the coasts of New Zealand, Eastern Australia, New Guinea, Japan, Manchouria, Kamtschatka, and part of Central America.
To Englishmen these islands possess the great and enduring interest of being the scene of Captain Cook’s death; a fate incontestably shown, by a review of the circumstances, to have been mainly due to the great circumnavigator’s own conduct on his last return to Hawaii.
The origin of the islands is jointly volcanic and coralline. From the submerged flanks of the mountains rises the coral -insect’s architecture, which, proceeding perpendicularly, emerges from the ocean as a reef, a little distant from the shore,
on which the billows love to dash themselves,