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1102 to the retirement of that general; and it was his account of Thomas's skill and courage which led to Thomas's appointment to the head of the Army of the Cumberland. In company with Grant, Dana saw Admiral Porter's fleet run the Vicksburg batteries. At Grant's headquarters he saw the siege of Vicksburg, and at Grant's side he rode into the capitulated city. He was swept from the field of Chickamauga, and was present at the midnight council of war at the Widow Glenn's after the first day's battle.

Beside Grant, Thomas, and Granger, Mr. Dana beheld the battle of Missionary Ridge. At the special request of President Lincoln, he accompanied Grant throughout the second Peninsular campaign. Sheridan received his commission as Brigadier-General from Dana's hands. When Richmond surrendered, Dana went, at Stanton's request, to report the condition of the city and to secure Confederate documents. His last interview with Lincoln was on April 13th, the day before the President's assassination. He spent the night at Lincoln's death-bed, writing dispatches at Stanton's dictation. He was an important witness at the trial of the conspirators.

There will be embodied in Mr. Dana's papers numerous hitherto

including unpublished letters to Mr. Dana from Edward M. Stanton, Secretary of War: Stanton's confidential orders to Mr. Dana in regard to the treatment of Jefferson Davis at Fortress Monroe — now first made public; many confidential letters written at the request of the Secretary of War, and giving Mr. Dana's opinion of all the leading officers in Grant's army; unpublished letters to Mr. Dana from Generals Sherman and Grant; a long confidential dispatch to Mr. Stanton, now first published, relating what Mr. Dana saw of the transfer of Jefferson Davis to Fortress Monroe.

For the illustration of these reminiscences we are permitted to draw on the collection of

made and arranged for the government under the painstaking and invaluable direction of General A. W. Greely. In its great store of negatives and original historical documents it stands quite alone. Under the permission of the War Department we shall give our readers many of its priceless portraits of the great personages of the war. It seemed to us that the dignity and straightforwardness of these absolutely authentic human documents made them the only fitting illustrations of a text so close to real facts, so ruddy with real life, as Mr. Dana's reminiscences.

We are glad to announce to our readers that Miss Tarbell has been making considerable progress in her work upon the last four years of Lincoln's life. Although these years cover the war period, the work is written entirely from the personal standpoint; it has to do with Lincoln, and it follows closely his footsteps, only dealing with the war and its events so far as he personally was concerned in molding them. It is our belief that these articles will make Lincoln the man, the great War President, more real, and the dramatic story of those last four years of his life more absorbing, than they have ever before been made.

Always seeking for the significant discoveries or speculations which touch the edge of the future, the magazine has been the first to give authoritative and attractive accounts of many new scientific achievements. Every volume of the magazine furnishes illustrations of this policy. McClure's published the first full description of Professor Langley's "flying-machine," by the inventor himself. We had the first authoritative paper on the discovery and application of the X-rays, written from material furnished by Professor Roentgen; the first magazine account of Nansen's wonderful voyage to the Far North, of Professor Dewar's experiments in liquefying oxygen, of the discovery of the new element argon, etc. We shall soon publish an important paper,

Lord Kelvin is the foremost living authority on physical science. While in America, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at Toronto, he gave Dr. Henry Smith Williams, with full permission to publish it in McClure's Magazine, an interview of real scientific interest. Their talk dwelt particularly upon the vortex theory of matter, of which Lord Kelvin is the author, and which is one of the few great scientific speculations of our century. The conversation also dealt with the upper limits of heat, and the suggested speculation in regard to the age of the sun; also with recent experiments in seeking for the absolute zero the lowest possible temperature. A character sketch of the personality of Lord Kelvin and an account of his achievements form the framework of this interview.

Mr. W. H. Preece, Engineer-in-Chief of the Telegraph Department of the English Postal System, who has helped Marconi in developing the invention described in this magazine last March, has for many years been experimenting with methods for telegraphing without the use of wires. He is unmistakably the greatest expert of the world on this subject. The latest results of the experiments of the English postal authorities are of far-reaching importance, and the authoritative account which Mr. Preece gives of them in an article for McClure's forms a wonderful chapter in recent scientific history.

An illustrated account of Dr. Sven Hedin's adventures in the great desert of Chinese Turkestan, one of the most remarkable feats of exploration of the past year, will soon appear. The article is not only a contribution to knowledge, but contains a story of great human interest.

We have maintained from the foundation of the magazine, as one of its special features, the presentation of the great personalities of our own time. By series of portraits, conversations, and character studies, we have exhibited to our readers, in his