Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/720

700 crimson stone wall of Fredericksburg, the deadly swamps of the Chickahominy, the thickets of the Wilderness, the purple waters of Antietam, and the bloody angle at Gettysburg. I appeal to the hundred fields now billowed with Irish graves to prove that never man fought more devotedly or more heroically for the inviolability of the Stars and Stripes and the indissolubility of the Union than did the men who cherished in their hearts the memories and love of their native land.

Their fame will live as long as the Great Republic herself—yea, while mountains raise their summits to the sky and rivers journey onward to the sea—

 While Fame her record keeps, Or Honor points the hallowed spot Where Valor proudly sleeps."

Editor Popular Science Monthly:

In the Sketch of Carl Vogt in the last November number of the Popular Science Monthly, Prof. Charles Follen, of Harvard University (1825-1835), was referred to as "implicated in the assassination of Kotzebue." This statement, unexplained, is misleading and unjust. Two months after the assassination Carl Follenius, at the time teaching in Jena, was brought to trial by a hostile government as an accomplice, but was fully acquitted. In those disturbed times—1819—this vague charge was easily made, but should not now be allowed to pursue unchallenged the memory of so estimable a man as Dr. Follen, with whose entire life it was inconsistent.

Will you be so kind as to insert this statement in an early number of your magazine?

space permitted, the writer of the sketch of Carl Vogt would have more fully set forth the real nature of the incident referred to, which the Vogt family evidently considered anything but a discredit. He did not regard it as derogatory to Professor Follen's character, and mentioned it simply as tending to establish a bond between Carl Vogt and the United States, and as showing that Vogt's revolutionary sympathies were an affair of the blood. We are glad to publish President Eliot's letter, and the fact that Follenius was acquitted on his trial, which is not mentioned in William Vogt's life of his father, La Vie d'un Homme—Carl Vogt, whence the material for the sketch was derived. That work opens with a pen picture of two young students—Carl Sand and Carl Follenius—casting dice, at an inn between Erfurt and Jena, as to which should slay Kotzebue. The lot fell to Sand. William Vogt further records that Follenius, "they say," when Sand confided his purpose to him, abhorring murder, tried to dissuade him from carrying it out, as he did, too, after the casting; but, finding Sand was immovable, he "demanded for himself, Follenius, the perilous honor of striking down the monster" (réclama pour lui, Follenius, le périlleux honneur d'abattre le monstre); also that Follenius attended the execution of Sand, and embraced him on the scaffold. He was afterward banished from Germany and took refuge in Switzerland, where he was professor of civil law at Basle, till the monarchs of the Holy Alliance demanded his extradition. He then went to Paris on the invitation of Lafayette, and thence came to America.—



PROFESSOR of biology in one of our leading universities has lately been discussing the question how far an acceptance of the doctrine of evolution is compatible with religious orthodoxy of the evangelical type. The answer he gives is on the whole comforting to those who desire to recognize new truth without breaking entirely away from old and cherished opinions. He acknowledges that science has rectified our understanding of the word "create," and so far thrown new light upon the interpretation of a Hebrew term. We are ready to admit that a term in present use in our own language may undergo a change of meaning, for this is a process which we see in constant operation; but it seems a little arbitrary to say that a word in a virtually extinct language must be taken in a new sense simply because