Thus the four-toed western salamander passes his uneventful days and nights. His pleasures are few and simple and his sorrows correspondingly light. According to Theosophy, the inner Essence of every creature in this broad universe either is, was, or prepares to become, man; but the mind staggers in the attempt to conceive the enormous stretches of time before such dull, inert, insensitive beings will arrive at the human stage. But pain is a grand stimulant and spur to advance, and perchance when the salamander gets eaten by a snake or a stoat, he gains as compensation for the pangs of death some slight promotion to a higher order of batrachians in his next rebirth! So mote it be. THE REAL MAN: by H. Coryn, M. D., M. R. C. S. "Now we know the real man," is the usual comment when some heretofore respectable citizen is convicted of forgery and sent to jail: "_Now_ we know his real character." Do we? A fire breaks out in the prison and the forger reveals himself a hero, risking life without a second's hesitation for the rescue of his jailer or fellow-prisoners. Do we _now_ know his "real character"? Later on, his confinement, throwing him in upon himself, provides opportunity for the manifestation of a marked vein of poetry, and from his prison he issues a volume which at once takes high rank in the literature of the day. Some will now put away their _moral_ standard of measurement, produce another, and remark that the "real man" after all turns out to have been a poet. You can photograph half of a man's face, right or left, throw the picture over upon itself and get a whole face composed of two lefts, and another of two rights--often quite different. We judge character in that way, taking any one aspect of it upon which we choose to dwell or which alone we see, and of that one constructing a whole. Thus the same man viewed by various knowers of him is a philosopher, a sharp lawyer, a skilful amateur actor, or an ever-ready helper and friend in times of trouble or perplexity. To his cook he may be solely a grumbler, and to his son at school a supply-machine whose crank is not always easy to turn. To come back to the prisoner. The "respectable citizen" was evidently not the whole of him. Under stress he revealed the weakness and dishonesty which led to the forgery. Environment, the temptation, brought them to the surface. We need not say that his character changed. Nevertheless, as we all know, a change of character is possible--so thorough that after emergence from prison no stress of temptation and no assurance from discovery would provoke another theft. On the other hand we cannot conceive of his change from a hero into a coward, nor hardly of his loss of the poetic vein. Environment--the fire and the conditions of prison life--brought those traits out too. But, once out they are out.