have saved a man's life, and I have no idea how I did it." Something has been done to lessen the hereditary evil, but the cure has yet to come. It behoves the Sicilians of a near future to stamp out this plague spot on the face of their beautiful island, and thus allow it to garner the full harvest of prosperity lying in its mineral wealth and in the incomparable fertility of its soil. That it is only too probable that the people will lose their lyre in proportion as they learn their letters is a poor reason for us to bid them stand still while the world moves on; human progress is rarely achieved without some sacrifices--the one sacrifice we may not make, whatever be the apparent gain, is that of truth and the pursuit of it. [Footnote 1: So Virgil: "Alba ligustra cadunt, vaccinia nigra leguntur." ] GREEK SONGS OF CALABRIA. That the connecting link between Calabria and Greece was at one time completely cut in two, is an assumption which is commonly made, but it is scarcely a proved fact. What happened to the Italian Greeks on their surrender to Rome? In a few instances they certainly disappeared with extreme rapidity. Aristoxenus, the peripatetic musician, relates of the Poseidonians--"whose fate it was, having been originally Greek, to be barbarised, becoming Tuscans or Romans," that they still met to keep one annual festival, at which, after commemorating their ancient customs, they wept together over their lost nationality. This is the pathetic record of men who could not hope. In a little while, Poseidonia was an obscure Roman town famous only for its beautiful roses. But the process of "barbarisation" was not everywhere so swift. Along the coast-line from Rhegium to Tarentum, Magna Graecia, in the strict use of the term, the people are known to have clung so long to their old language and their old conditions of life that it is at least open to doubt if they were not clinging to them still when it came to be again a habit with Greeks to seek an Italian home. In the ninth and tenth centuries the tide of Byzantine supremacy swept into Calabria from Constantinople, only, however, to subside almost as suddenly as it advanced. Once more history well-nigh loses sight of the Greeks of Italy. Yet at a moment of critical importance to modern learning their existence was honourably felt. Petrarch's friend and master, Barlaam, who carried the forgotten knowledge of Homer across the Alps, was by birth a Calabrian. In Barlaam's day there were large communities of Greeks both in Calabria and in Terra d'Otranto. A steady decrease from then till now has brought their numbers down to about 22,800 souls in all. These few survivors speak a language which is substantially the same as modern Greek, with the exceptions that it is naturally affected by the surrounding Italic dialects and that it contains hardly a Turkish or a Sclavonic word. Their precise origin is still a subject of conjecture. Soon after Niebuhr had hailed them as